Hall - Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

Introducing the

ANCIENT GREEKS

From Bronze Age Seafarers to

Navigators of the Western Mind

EDITH HALL

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York London

A boy musician riding a dolphin. Detail of a red-figure Etruscan vase of the mid-fourth century BC in the National Archaeological Museum of Spain, Madrid. ( Photograph: Alberto Rivas Rodrguez. Museo Arqueolgico Nacional, Spain N.I. 1999/127/3 .)

To My Family

As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-haird creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the Aegean isles;
And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green bursting figs, and tunnies steepd in brine;
And knew the intruders on his ancient home,
The young light-hearted Masters of the waves...

MATTHEW ARNOLD, The Scholar Gypsy , 23140

Contents

Between 800 and 300 BC, people who spoke Greek made a rapid series of intellectual discoveries that propelled the Mediterranean world to a new level of civilization. This process of self-education was much admired by the Greeks and Romans of the centuries that followed. As this book explains, however, the history of the ancient Greeks began eight hundred years before this period of accelerated progress, and survived for at least seven centuries afterward. When the texts and artworks of classical Greece were rediscovered in the European Renaissance, they changed the world for a second time.

The phenomenon has been called the Greek miracle, as well as the glory or wonder that was Greece. Many books have been entitled The Greek Genius , The Greek Triumph , The Greek Enlightenment , The Greek Experiment , The Greek Idea , and even The Greek Ideal . But over the last two decades the notion that the Greeks were exceptional has been questioned. It has been stressed that the Greeks were, after all, just one of many ethnic and linguistic groups in the ancient Mediterranean world. Long before the Greeks appeared in the historical record, several complicated civilizations had arisenthe Mesopotamians and Egyptians, the Hattians and Hittites. Other peoples provided the Greeks with crucial technological advances; they learned the phonetic alphabet from the Phoenicians and how to mint coins from the Lydians. They may have learned how to compose elaborate cult hymns from the Luwians. During the period when the Greeks invented rational philosophy and science, after 600 BC, their horizons were opened up by the expansion of the Persian Empire.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, our understanding of the other cultures of the ancient Near East advanced rapidly. We know far more about the minds of the Greeks predecessors and neighbors than we did before the landmark discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh on clay tablets in the Tigris Valley in 1853. There has been a constant stream of newly published writings in the languages of the successive peoples who dominated the fertile plains of Mesopotamia (Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians). The words of Hittites on the tablets found at Hattua in central Turkey and the phrases inscribed on clay tablets at Ugarit in northern Syria have been deciphered. New texts as well as fresh interpretations of writings by the ancient Egyptians continue to appear, requiring, for example, a reassessment of the importance of the Nubians to North African history.

Many of these exciting advances have revealed how much the Greeks shared with their predecessors and neighbors. Painstaking comparative studies have been published that reveal the Greek miracle to have been one constituent of a continuous process of intercultural exchange. The Greeks were innovators, but they could never have made the progress they did without adopting many of their skills, ideas, and practices from their non-Greek neighbors. It has become a new orthodoxy that the Greeks were very similar to their ancient Near Eastern neighbors in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Persia, and Asia Minor. Some scholars have gone so far as to ask whether the Greeks came up with anything new at all, or whether they merely acted as a conduit through which the combined wisdom of all the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean was disseminated across the territories conquered by Alexander the Great, before arriving at Rome and posterity. Others have seen sinister racist motives at work, and accused classicists of creating in their own image the Oldest Dead White European Males; some have even claimed that classicists have systematically distorted and concealed the evidence showing how much the ancient Greeks owed to Semitic and African peoples rather than to Indo-European traditions.

The question has thus become painfully politicized. Critics of colonialism and racism tend to play down the specialness of the ancient Greeks. Those who still maintain that there was something identifiably different and even superior about the Greeks, on the other hand, are usually conservatives who have a vested interest in proving the superiority of Western ideals and in making evaluative judgments of culture. My problem is that I fit into neither camp. I am certainly opposed to colonialism and racism, and have investigated reactionary abuses of the classical tradition. But my constant engagement with the ancient Greeks and their culture has made me more, rather than less, convinced that they evinced a cluster of brilliant qualities that are difficult to identify in combination and in such concentration elsewhere in Mediterranean or ancient Near Eastern antiquity. After an outline of these qualities in the introduction, the ten chapters of the book take us on a chronological journey through important points in Greek history. These also involve a geographical journey, since the center of Greek activity and achievement shifted over time from the peninsula and islands that constitute the Greek nation today to significant communities in Italy, Asia, Egypt, Libya, and the Black Sea worlds. But most of the ancient Greeks, however scattered across time and space, shared most of these qualities most of the time. In this book I try to explain what I understand these qualities to be.

Taken singly, most Greek achievements can be paralleled in the culture of at least one of their neighbors. The Babylonians had known about Pythagorass theorem centuries before Pythagoras was born. The tribes of the Caucasus had brought mining and metallurgy to unprecedented levels. The Hittites had made advances in chariot technology, but they were also highly literate. They recorded the polished and emotive orations delivered on formal occasions in their royal court, and their carefully argued legal speeches. One Hittite king adumbrated Greek historiography when he chronicled in detail his frustration at the incompetence of some of his military officers during the siege of a Hurrian city. The Phoenicians were just as great seafarers as any Greeks. The Egyptians told Odyssey -like stories about sailors who went missing and returned after adventures overseas. Pithy fables similar to those of Aesop were composed in an archaic Aramaic dialect of Syria and housed in Jewish temples. Architectural design concepts and technical know-how came from the Persians to the Greek world via the many Ionian Greek workmen, named Yauna in Persian texts, who helped build Persepolis, Susa, and Pasargadae. But none of these peoples produced anything quite equivalent to Athenian democracy, comic theater, philosophical logic, or Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics .