Definition
Ionia is the name given during ancient times to the central region of Anatolia’s Aegean shore in Asia Minor, present-day Turkey, one of the most important centres of the Greek world. Here the Greeks founded a dozen mini-states, two of them on the offshore islands of Chios and Samos, the rest of them stretching along the strip of mountainous coastland. During the 6th century BCE, Ionia became the focus of the intellectual life of Greece, a period known as the “Ionian awakening”, a name for the initial phase of classical Greek civilization.
Using the sea as a highway, which was much cheaper, faster, and more efficient than transport by land, the Greeks expanded and developed in a such a way that conflict with a major power became inevitable. The Greco-Italian-Sicilian trading route that the Greeks controlled competed more and more with the Oriental Indo-Persian-Phoenician and this commercial rivalry set the stage for war. Ionia was the initial setting of the Greco-Persian wars.
Origin of Ionia
Ionia was colonized by Greeks from the Athens region around 1000 BCE. The commercial activity in Ionia was in competition with the Phoenicians, who were the leaders of sea-trade at that time. However, some important changes took place on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean during the 8th century BCE: Assyria renewed their strength like never before, and the Phoenician city-states were conquered. The Phoenician sea-trade withered, and the Greek city-states took advantage of the Phoenician subjection to Assyria and gradually turned into the leading sea-traders and navigators. Some Phoenician colonies in the west remained independent, and the only serious competition the Greeks came across was from the expanding power of Carthage.
Ionian intellectuals were not heavily influenced by religion nor limited by ancient books claiming truth or divine revelation.
During the following centuries, Ionian cities underwent important changes. Political and economic power, which used to be concentrated in the hands of the landowning aristocracy, gradually moved to the merchant class. Ionian merchants established colonies as trading posts in Egypt, Italy, and along the Black Sea. Miletus alone, the southernmost Ionian city, had about 80 colonies and became the richest city in the Greek world. The wealth and luxury of the city was proverbial throughout Greece. Milesian merchants had such levels of profits that they lent money to a number of enterprises and even to the municipality itself.
IONIAN Intellectual Life
To the east of the Ionian city-states lay the Kingdom of Lydia. Ionians and Lydians remained on peaceful terms, with very tight cultural and commercial relations. The city of Sardis, Lydia’s capital, was an important centre for the traffic of goods and ideas between Mesopotamia and the Greek Ionian settlements. Beliefs, customs, and knowledge, in addition to commercial goods, were constantly circulating in Sardis.
Thales of Miletus By the time when Ionian cities became the intellectual leaders of Greece in the 6th century BCE, the city of Miletus became the focus of an intellectual revolution. In this city the power was in the hands of merchants and the priesthood had no significant social impact. Ionian intellectuals were not heavily influenced by religion nor limited by ancient books claiming truth or divine revelation. Even Homeric poems had hardly taken any definite form yet. Milesians were used to travelling to distant regions and received the input of the civilizations of Lydia, Babylon, Phoenicia, and Egypt. Mathematical knowledge, foreign commerce and geography, astronomy, navigational techniques, all these notions helped to enrich Miletus. Meanwhile, wealth had created leisure, and freedom of thought was widely accepted. All these factors can help to understand how a number of Ionian minds developed the idea that the world could be understood in terms of physical phenomena, without reference to myths or superstitions. The revolutionary idea of replacing supernatural explanations with the concept of a universe that is governed by laws of nature began in Miletus, with a man named Thales.
Thales of Miletus is credited as the author of a revolutionary hypothesis concerning the fundamental structure of the universe by claiming that water was the original substance of the universe. He is famous for his astronomical knowledge that allowed him to predict a total eclipse of the sun and also for his knowledge on geometry, which he brought from his visit in Egypt. This new rational insight influenced other Ionians thinkers such as Anaximander and Anaximenes, who also continued this rationalistic tradition. In many cases their ideas led to conclusions surprisingly similar to what our more sophisticated methods have led us to believe today. In Ionia we find the roots of the Western scientific tradition.
Miletos Electrum Stater
Persian Control & Revolt
The political map of this region started to change around 612 BCE. The Assyrian Empire came to an end as a result of the destruction of Nineveh, its capital, the most powerful city in the world at that time. An allied army of Persians, Medes, Chaldeans, and Babylonians besieged and sacked the centre of Assyrian power. This left Babylon as the imperial centre of Mesopotamia and Lydia was now free to turn its attention to the West. The Ionian cities were now dominated by Lydia, but Lydian rulers admired the Greeks and treated the Ionian cities leniently. Croesus, the last Lydian king, even paid for the construction of the Temple of Artemis, which became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Soon after, Persia became the dominant power of Mesopotamia, putting an end to the Babylonian supremacy. In 546 BCE, the Persian king Cyrus II defeated Croesus and Lydia, which along with the Ionian cities, became controlled by the Persians.
About 500 BCE, the Ionian cities under Persian control dismissed the Persian authorities and declared their independence, triggering the Ionian revolt, the first of the many military conflicts between Greeks and Persians. Miletus was the leading state and Athens sent a fleet of 20 ships to support the revolt. Each Ionian rebel state raised its own troops but kept them under separate command. The army of Miletus marched upon Sardis and burned it to the ground.
In 494 BCE, the Ionian cities organized a united fleet that engaged the Persian navy at Lade in one of the most important sea battles of history. Just before the battle began, about 50 ships belonging to the navy of the Ionian city of Samos sailed away due to a secret arrangement they had with the Persians. Many other contingents following their disloyal example. The Ionian defeat was complete and Ionian civilization never managed to fully recover from this disaster.
The Persians captured Miletus, all the males were killed, the women and children enslaved, and from that day the city became a minor town. Persian control was re-established throughout Ionia until the decisive Greek victory at the Battle of Salamis (480 BCE), when the Ionian cities regained their independence and helped to form the Delian League with Athens.
Celsus Library, Ephesos
Hellenistic Period, Seleucid Control, & Roman Control
Around 334 BCE, Alexander the Great marched down into Ionia, offering the Greek cities democratic self-governance under his protectorate. Most cities opened their gates without resistance and enjoyed a new era of prosperity during the Hellenistic period, but none of them restored their previous splendour. Miletus refused Alexander’s offer and was finally levelled after a long siege and was never restored to its previous status as a leading city. The region then became part of the Seleucid, and later of the Attalid, Kingdom.
About 130 BCE Ionia came under Roman control and became part of the Roman province of Asia. This new period allowed many of the Ionian cities to recover some of their lost success. The archaeological record in Miletus suggests that the population reached a new peak, which is hard to estimate, although some scholars suggest a figure of 7000 or 8000. Smyrna and Chios were also considered important cities. Major monuments were expensively refurbished in the city of Ephesus during the 4th century CE, including the stadium, the theatre and the harbour baths. Today, the site of Ephesus is considered a very valuable example of classical urbanism.
By Evan Andrews
The Spartans may have built one of the finest militaries of the ancient world, but their culture was so harsh that the word “spartan” has become synonymous with an austere way of life. Spartan society was carefully constructed around a strict moral code and sense of duty, and its people underwent extreme hardships and deprivation on their way to becoming accepted as full citizens. From adolescent military training to state-sponsored hazing, explore eight reasons why these ancient Greek warriors had a rough go of it.
De Agostini/Getty Images
1. Spartans had to prove their fitness even as infants.
Infanticide was a disturbingly common act in the ancient world, but in Sparta this practice was organized and managed by the state. All Spartan infants were brought before a council of inspectors and examined for physical defects, and those who weren’t up to standards were left to die. The ancient historian Plutarch claimed these “ill-born” Spartan babies were tossed into a chasm at the foot of Mount Taygetus, but most historians now dismiss this as a myth. If a Spartan baby was judged to be unfit for its future duty as a soldier, it was most likely abandoned on a nearby hillside. Left alone, the child would either die of exposure or be rescued and adopted by strangers.
Babies who passed inspection still didn’t have it easy. To test their constitutions, Spartan infants were often bathed in wine instead of water. They were also frequently ignored when they cried and commanded never to fear darkness or solitude. According to Plutarch, these “tough love” parenting techniques were so admired by foreigners that Spartan women were widely sought after for their skill as nurses and nannies.
2. Spartan children were placed in a military-style education program.
At the age of 7, Spartan boys were removed from their parents’ homes and began the “agoge,” a state-sponsored training regimen designed to mold them into skilled warriors and moral citizens. Separated from their families and housed in communal barracks, the young soldiers-in-waiting were instructed in scholastics, warfare, stealth, hunting and athletics. At age 12, initiates were deprived of all clothing save for a red cloak and forced to sleep outside and make their own beds from reeds. To ready them for a life in the field, the boy soldiers were also encouraged to scavenge and even steal their food, though if detected they were punished with floggings.
Just as all Spartan men were expected to be fighters, all women were expected to bear children. Spartan girls were allowed to remain with their parents, but they were also subjected to a rigorous education and training program. While boys were readied for a life on campaign, girls practiced dance, gymnastics and javelin and discus throwing, which were thought to make them physically strong for motherhood.
3. Hazing and fighting were encouraged among Spartan children.
Much of the Spartan agoge involved typical school subjects like reading, writing, rhetoric and poetry, but the training regimen also had a vicious side. To toughen the young warriors and encourage their development as soldiers, instructors and older men would often instigate fights and arguments between trainees. The agoge was partially designed to help make the youths resistant to hardships like cold, hunger and pain, and boys who showed signs of cowardice or timidity were subject to teasing and violence by peers and superiors alike.
Even Spartan girls were known to participate in this ritualized hazing. During certain religious and state ceremonies, girls would stand before Spartan dignitaries and sing choral songs about the young men of the agoge, often singling out specific trainees for ridicule in order to shame them into stepping up their performance.
4. All Spartan men were expected to be lifelong soldiers.
As grueling as Sparta’s martial education system could be, the soldier’s life was the only option for young men who wished to become equal citizens, or “Homoioi.” According to the edicts of the Spartan lawmaker and reformer Lycurgus, male citizens were legally prevented from choosing any occupation other than the military. This commitment could last for decades, as warriors were required to remain on reserve duty until the age of 60.
Because of their preoccupation with the study of warfare, Sparta’s manufacturing and agriculture were left entirely to the lower classes. Skilled laborers, traders and craftsmen were part of the “Perioeci,” a class of free non-citizens who lived in the surrounding region of Laconia. Meanwhile, agriculture and food production fell to the enslaved Helots, a servile class that made up the majority of Sparta’s population. Ironically, constant fear of Helot revolts and uprisings was a major reason why the Spartan elite became so devoted to building a strong military in the first place.
5. Spartan youths were ritualistically beaten and flogged.
One of Sparta’s most brutal practices involved a so-called “contest of endurance” in which adolescents were flogged—sometimes to the death—in front of an altar at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. Known as the “diamastigosis,” this annual practice was originally used as both a religious ritual and a test of the boys’ bravery and resistance to pain. It later devolved into an outright blood sport after Sparta went into decline and fell under control of the Roman Empire. By the third century A.D. there was even an amphitheater constructed so that scores of tourists could cheer on the grisly ordeal.
6. Food was intentionally kept scarce, and poor fitness was cause for ridicule.
When a Spartan man completed the main phase of the agoge at around age 21, he was elected to a “syssitia”—a military-style mess where citizens gathered for public meals. To prepare soldiers for the strain of war and discourage poor fitness, the rations doled out at these communal dining halls were always bland and slightly insufficient. Spartans were renowned for their devotion to physical fitness and proper diet, and they reserved a special loathing for overweight citizens, who were publicly ridiculed and risked being banished from the city-state.
Wine was a staple of the Spartan diet, but they rarely drank to excess and often cautioned their children against drunkenness. In some cases, they would even force Helot slaves to get wildly inebriated as a way of showing young Spartans the negative effects of alcohol.
7. Spartan men were not allowed to live with their wives until age 30.
Spartan society didn’t discourage romantic love, but marriage and childrearing were both subject to some peculiar cultural and governmental constraints. The state counseled that men should marry at age 30 and women at 20. Since all men were required to live in a military barracks until 30, couples who married earlier were forced to live separately until the husband completed his active duty military service.
The Spartans saw marriage primarily as a means for conceiving new soldiers, and citizens were encouraged to consider the health and fitness of their mate before tying the knot. In fact, husbands who were unable to have children were expected to seek out virile substitutes to impregnate their wives. Likewise, bachelors were seen as neglecting their duty and were often publically mocked and humiliated at religious festivals.
8. Surrender in battle was the ultimate disgrace.
Spartan soldiers were expected to fight without fear and to the last man. Surrender was viewed as the epitome of cowardice, and warriors who voluntarily laid down their arms were so shamed that they often resorted to suicide. According to the ancient historian Herodotus, two Spartan soldiers who missed out on the famous Battle of Thermopylae returned to their homeland disgraced. One later hanged himself, and the other was only redeemed after he died fighting in a later engagement.
Even Spartan mothers were known for their do-or-die approach to military campaigns. Spartan women are said to have sent their sons off to war with a chilling reminder: “Return with your shield or on it.” If a Spartan trooper died in battle, he was viewed as having completed his duty as a citizen. In fact, the law mandated that only two classes of people could have their names inscribed on their tombstones: women who died in childbirth and men who fell in combat.
Did You Know?
- Spartan kings were subject to many of the same laws and social conventions as their subjects.
- Monarchs could be punished for their military leadership during times of war, but they were also sometimes censured for seemingly trivial misdeeds.
- According to the ancient historian Theophrastus, King Archidamus was fined for marrying a petite woman because the Spartans believed she would give birth to “kinglets” instead of kings.
Charlotte Higgins The Guardian, Friday 12 July 2013 01.27 AEST
The ancient Greek world is being recast from an isolated entity to one of many hybrid cultures in Africa and in the East
Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt led to the cult of Isis spreading to Italy and even as far as York, England. Photograph: De Agostini/Getty Images
If you walk through the entrance hall of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, you come to a large display case devoted to the ancient world. Here, alongside each other, lie an Iraqi ceramic model of a river boat from around 2900 BC; a model of a covered wagon from Syria from about 2300 BC, collected by Lawrence of Arabia; Cretan jars wreathed with sinuous, octopus designs from about a millennium later; and a sixth-century BC Attic vase from Sicily, decorated with an image of a chariot. The display is designed to illustrate ancient trade routes; but what if it told a deeper story, too?
As Tim Whitmarsh, professor of ancient literatures at the University of Oxford says: "What if what we think of as the classical world has been falsely invented as European, for reasons serving the cause of 19th-century imperialism? Should the Greek and Roman worlds, albeit in different ways, be seen rather as part of the Iraqi-Syrian-Palestinian-Egyptian complex? If so, what would that mean for ideas about European identity today?"
It's not new to think in terms of Greece borrowing from the east and south in the period before its fifth-century BC efflorescence: Greek statuary and temple-building have long been known to have had their origins in Egypt, for example, and it is well-rehearsed that there is, say, a relationship between Homer's Iliad and the much earlier Babylonian epic Gilgamesh.
Detail from Babylon's Ishtar Gate, now at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Photograph: Michele Falzone/JAI/Corbis
In a controversial three-volume book, Black Athena (1989), the late author Martin Bernal also sought to place the origins of Greece in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, which in turn was a riposte to the 19th century racist view – what Whitmarsh calls the "massive cultural deception" – that the Greeks owed their brilliance to Aryan origins in central Europe.
But there is a fresh urgency, according to Whitmarsh and like-minded scholars, to the study of the classical world's relationships with what is now the Middle East, and the new approaches are significantly different from those offered in the past. Access to newly discovered or newly available texts is allowing classicists to reframe the terms of engagement between cultures: less a one-way importation, followed by transformation and "perfection" of the original influences, and more a dialogue, or an "intertwining" as Johannes Haubold, professor of Greek at Durham University, puts it.
So, instead of the study of ancient Greece being predicated on its uniqueness – its isolated, exceptional and untouchable brilliance – some scholars are recasting the Greek world (and, in different ways, the Roman world) as part of a series of networked cultures in multivoiced conversation with the lands lying east and south of the Mediterranean.
This is not a universally applauded approach to the study of classics. On the right, Bruce Thornton, professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno, has written slightingly about "multiculturalist attempts to denigrate the Greeks' achievements" (he has also described their victory against Persian conquest in the 480s BC as a liberation "from the shadows of superstition and bondage to the irrational").
From a less political perspective, other scholars suggest caution, too: Greg Woolf, professor of ancient history at the University of St Andrews, warns against taking the notion of a happy ancient multiculturalism too far. The ancient Greeks, he says, "were in the business of creating an autonomous civilisation. There were cultural conflicts, and separateness, and limits to transferability. We don't have a Greek version of Gilgamesh, or Babylonian versions of Homer".
The Babylonian world map. © The Trustees of the British Museum Photograph: British Museum
Woolf talks in terms of deliberate moments of hybridisation – such as the creation of the cult of Isis in Egypt after Alexander the Great's conquest. That was, he argues, an official fusing of Greek, Egyptian and Macedonian elements as a practical and locally contingent act (though the cult later spread widely through the Roman world, even as far as York). "Someone has to think of a chicken tikka pizza," he says. "It doesn't just happen."
Whitmarsh concedes: "In a way, what we are saying is modish, it's multicultural, it's a model almost resembling the internet projected back on to the ancient world." But, he says: "It does in fact make sense of the archaeological data."
He adds: "There is a strongly political dimension to the kind of claim I am making, and you would probably find that most people who were pushing for a very hybridised vision of the Greek world would … be naturally more left-leaning and have their own idealised view of the ancient world as a place of opportunity and hybridisation.
"There's obviously a political parallel in the present – yet at the same time I wouldn't want to reduce the argument, because there is new data available that shows that the ancient world was rather different from the way it was even recently understood to be. Let's say the implications of the view are political, rather than the motivations behind it."
So what are these implications? Barbara Graziosi, professor of classics at Durham University, says: "It is getting classics out of its splendid isolation, finding intellectual common ground in antiquity. And it means working more closely with colleagues in places such as Egypt and Iraq – something that is of course made more difficult by political dichotomies."
As Haubold argues in his new book Greece and Mesopotamia: Dialogues in Literature, it is an approach that can beckon towards the "cultivation of multilingualism, polyglossia, the arts of cultural mediation, deep intercultural understanding, and genuinely global consciousness. It can develop these things both as scholarly endeavours and as new forms of citizenship in a globalised world".
Graziosi offers a resonant event from her life: attending a conference on classics at Cairo University following the 2011 revolution against Hosni Mubarak. She recalls European and American colleagues' shock that Cairo even had a classics department; in fact, it was established in 1925. To her surprise, she found a cadre of eager, revolutionary students hungry to engage with classics and to find a way of thinking about Egypt's classical past (it was drawn into Alexander the Great's empire and then became part of the Roman empire) that might help them develop ideas about their present.
Mummy case and portrait of Artemidorus. Courtesy of the British Museum Photograph: British Museum
"The students were saying that the revolution does not mean a clean break with the past, but a search for different pasts," she recalls. "Classics offers a way of looking at an Egyptian multilingual, multicultural past, when Greeks, Romans, Egyptians lived alongside each other." More broadly, she says, the approach is a reminder that "it is a fiction that once upon a time cultures were pure and are now mixed".
Graziosi also points out the diffusion of classical texts into the medieval Islamic world. With the emphasis on Greece and Rome as "the foundation of western civilisation", it is easy to forget how important the classical world has been in the east, she argues: we owe the survival of many classical scientific and medical texts, for example, to their translation into Arabic during the golden age of Islam in Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries. Indeed, argues Whitmarsh, the Roman empire was "the facilitating grid that produced Islam, in dialogue with Persia". Woolf talks too of Latin translations of the Qu'ran circulating in 12th-century Europe.
In this story of interconnectedness and hybridity, rather than isolation and exceptionalism, there lie enormous intellectual and humanist opportunities, Whitmarsh says. "What is the implication," he asks, "for a utopian, post-imperial education system? There are three million Muslims in Britain, many of them learning an ancient language already. There's no reason why, in 50 years' time, undergraduate courses shouldn't be packed with people studying Arabic and Greek culture side by side. Of course, this already exists in a limited way, but it's not a cultural phenomenon at the moment and these worlds mostly exist entirely separately, but it seems to me there's nothing natural in that."
Bust of Herodotus of Halicarnassus (circa 484-425 BC). Photograph: DEA/G NIMATALLAH/De Agostini/Getty Images
How does this new approach to the classical world manifest itself? For a start, it means looking at already familiar texts with fresh eyes. Take, for example, approaches to Herodotus, the "father of history" who provided The Histories, the great account of the causes and events of the Persian wars of the 480s BC. A decade or so ago, a postcolonial approach to his work might have looked at the way he wrote about non-Greeks – Egyptians, Persians, Scythians and others – and concluded that his responses to the "other" tell us more about his own projections than what his, say, Persian characters actually thought or did.
Recent scholarship, though, might emphasise Herodotus's own culturally hybrid origins in Asia Minor: he was raised in Halicarnassus, on the Carian coast of modern Turkey – a city that during the Persian wars was part of the Persian Achaemenid empire, ruled by Queen Artemisia, herself half Halicarnassian and half Cretan. Whitmarsh says: "Halicarnassus was a bilingual Greek and Carian city that had been under Persian occupation. It's not inherently implausible that he had a much more informed sense of the world than we have previously given him credit for. It comes down to networks. If you see Herodotus as occupying a single point from which Greek culture is 'beamed out', that's a less interesting way of thinking of him than as a kind of nodal point between multiple different traditions and cultures. Herodotus's The Histories is a predominantly Greek-voiced text, but that doesn't mean that we should quieten all the other voices that can be detected within it."
Into this story of cultural cross-currents also falls the study of the Greek-language novel – a Roman-empire era prose fiction genre originating in Asia Minor and revived in medieval Byzantium in Persia. Iambilichus, author of the fragmentary work Babylonian Affairs, was writing in his second language, after that of Syriac, and he may have known Akkadian too.
Alexander being lowered from a ship in a glass barrel to view the wonders of the sea. From the Old French prose Alexander Romance manuscript, Rouen, 1445. Copyright © The British Library Board Photograph: The British Library
Another culturally hybrid work is the Alexander Romance, a story that recasts the Macedonian conqueror as secretly Egyptian, so the story of his annexation of Egypt becomes one not of conquest but of the return of pharaonic rule. Whitmarsh says the story reflects a Demotic Egyptian literary forebear. "It is forged in a very distinctive culture in which there are Greeks and Egyptians working together. And it tells the story of Alexander the Great in Egyptian-friendly terms. The interesting thing about this text is that, other than the Bible, it's the biggest seller in antiquity – it goes into 26 languages in antiquity alone, and eventually into [the ancient Iranian language of] Pahlavi, French, Armenian, Bulgarian, Old English." (It is also mentioned in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales). Whitmarsh adds: "It is a world away from the model of Greek culture as continuous, organic, hermetically sealed from outside influence."
The other corollary of this approach is, Graziosi says, to "learn other languages – which is of course hard work, but often the only way". "Traditional" classicists such as Haubold, trained in Latin and Greek, have learned Akkadian: he passes on his linguistic skills to about 20 undergraduates a year. Whitmarsh's ventures into Semitic languages have enabled him to read works by, for example, Bardaisan, the second-century AD scholar who inhabited the fringes of the Roman empire and whose works fuse Hellenic, Babylonian and Christian influences.
There is, says Graziosi, "an inequality of availability in source texts: cuneiform [the script in which most Mesopotamian texts are written] was not even deciphered until the 1850s. The first fully scholarly edition of even a text as central as Gilgamesh is only 10 years old. New texts are continually being found – and indeed destroyed – in Iraq and elsewhere."
She adds: "We need to have a sense of shared ownership and care for these traditions: it's crucial both in terms of scholarship and politics."
Although there may be far-reaching implications for this fresh angle of scholarship, Whitmarsh says that the approach is squarely in the tradition of a supple discipline which has always had "expansiveness and courage and ranginess … Everything we are talking about comes out of an intellectual tradition that has been devoted to self-analysis. You analyse the thing you are looking at, but you also analyse your own motivations for looking at it in that particular way. That's our version of scientific empiricism. Classics is a progressive discipline, constantly confronting its own demons, and coming out better and fresher for it."
Two views of the ancient world
From the introduction to Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization by Bruce Thornton, published by Encounter, 2002
One multiculturalist tactic for diminishing the Greeks is to deny their originality, asserting that they begged, borrowed or stole their ideas from other cultures. We need not dwell on Afrocentrism, the idea that the Greeks stole everything good they knew from black Egyptians; the incoherence and historical ignorance of this theory have been amply and repeatedly demonstrated. But even scholars who should know better indulge the current fashion for Greek-bashing by attributing their achievements to a vaguely defined East ... That the Greeks borrowed from their Mediterranean neighbours is obvious: no human society lives in a vacuum, untouched by the customs of other peoples ... More important, however, is what the Greeks made of their borrowings. Consider the Greek alphabet, the elements of which were adapted from the Phoenician around the 9th century. The Greek changes ... made possible in just a few centuries the language of Homer's epics and Sappho's lyrics, a literary speech unrivalled in expressive power ... by anything found among the few remnants of Phoenician writing.
From Tim Whitmarsh's introduction to The Romance Between Greece and the East, edited by Tim Whitmarsh and Stuart Thomson, to be published in September 2013.
Classicists are used to thinking of "Greek culture" as solid and self-evident, perpetuated through the ages by repetition of certain forms of social praxis (religion, education, athletics, etc.). But such a "traditional" conception was only one aspect of Greekness. Collective identities, as Stuart Hall reminds us, have many different modalities: they can be defensive, conservative and resistant to hybridity, but they need not be. In Ptolemaic Egypt, for example, where ethnic groups were taxed differently, those classed as "Greeks" included ethnic Egyptians working in the administration, and some Jews. In this context, Greekness was defined in a much more capacious (but no less rigorous) way than most scholars would be prepared to admit. Scholars of classical literature (even the phrase betrays exclusionary instincts) have, by contrast, typically cleaved to the most conservative definitions of Greekness possible. The reasons for this lie deep in the history of the formation of the discipline, which has shaped its practitioners into guardians of cultural and aesthetic value. This is not the occasion to explore those reasons, but it is certainly time to dispense with the prejudices that have followed from them.
Ancient Greece, the Middle East and an ancient cultural internet | Education | The Guardian
By Margalit Fox 6:20AM BST 11 Jul 2013
Linear B, the mysterious language discovered on Bronze Age tablets unearthed in 1900, had baffled linguists for decades. Then along came a 21-year-old graduate named Alice Kober... Margalit Fox tells the remarkable story.
Linguistic puzzler: One of the clay tablets excavated at Knossos, inscribed with the mysterious 'Linear B' Photo: Alamy
It was one of the most captivating mysteries of the modern age, requiring three detectives and 52 years to solve. Along the way, there was magnificent obsession, bitter disappointment, world-shaking triumph and swift, unexplained death.
At the centre of the mystery lay a set of clay tablets from the ancient Aegean, inscribed more than 3,000 years ago and discovered at the dawn of the 20th century amid the ruins of a lavish Bronze Age palace.
Written by royal scribes, the tablets teemed with writing like none ever seen: tiny pictograms in the shapes of swords, horses’ heads, pots and pans, plus a set of far more cryptic characters whose meaning is still debated today.
The tablets were unearthed in the spring of 1900 by the great English archaeologist Arthur Evans. Digging at Knossos, Crete, he discovered a sprawling palace larger than Buckingham Palace, comprising grand staircases, artisans' workshops, once-bubbling fountains and hundreds of rooms linked by a network of twisting passages.
Evans named the vast edifice the Palace of Minos, for surely, he reasoned, it was the historic basis of the Classical Greek myth of the labyrinth, built for King Minos by the architect Daedalus and housing at its centre the fearful Minotaur - half-man, half-bull.
From the ruins, Evans unearthed crumbling murals in still vivid hues, exquisitely worked gold jewellery and a massive alabaster throne, the oldest throne in Europe.
But these treasures paled beside the tablets, which first came to light on the excavation's eighth day. Set down in wet clay in about 1450BC, they were, when Evans found them, Europe’s oldest written records. As he was painfully aware, there was no swift way of telling what the strange inscriptions said or which language they recorded. Evans named the curious writing Linear Script Class B – Linear B for short. (At Knossos, he would later unearth tablets bearing a somewhat older script, still un-deciphered, which he called Linear A.)
Evans had uncovered the first European bureaucracy, and the tablets, he knew, were the palace’s account books. If they could be deciphered, they would illuminate a thriving, wealthy and literate civilisation that had flourished in the Aegean a full millennium before the glories of classical Athens.
Buried treasures: The archaeologist Arthur Evans led the 1900 dig that uncovered the vast Bronze Age palace of Knossos, Crete, above (Press Association Images)
Oxford educated, vastly wealthy and used to getting his way, Evans vowed to solve the riddle of the script. But though his work at Knossos - which, restored under his direction, is today a bustling tourist attraction - earned him a knighthood in 1911, he proved no match for Linear B.
Though Evans tried ferociously to decipher the tablets, he was unable to do so – or even to determine what language the tablets recorded – before he died in 1941, at 90. As a result, Linear B gained a reputation as one of the most intractable puzzles in history, a locked-room mystery with almost no possibility of procuring a key.
Then along came Alice Kober. The story of Linear B has long been a British masculine triumphal narrative, bracketed by two remarkable Englishmen: Evans and Michael Ventris, the dashing young amateur who, against all odds, deciphered the script in 1952.
But at the narrative’s centre there stands an equally remarkable American woman: Kober, an overworked, underpaid classics professor at Brooklyn College in New York City. For it was she, sitting night after night at her dining table, who hunted down the hidden patterns within the script that would furnish the long-sought key.
Though the full extent of her work remained unknown for decades (Kober’s private writings became available only recently), scholars of the decipherment now believe that without her painstaking analysis, Linear B would never have been deciphered when it was, if ever.
The daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Alice Elizabeth Kober was born in Manhattan in 1906. Her childhood had none of Evans's privilege or even Ventris's middle-class certainties: Her father was an upholsterer and in later years an apartment-building superintendent.
As an undergraduate at Hunter College, part of the city's public university system, Kober took a course in early Greek life, and it appears to have been there that she encountered Linear B. On her graduation in 1928, the 21 year-old confidently announced that she would one day decipher the script. No one believed her, but she very nearly kept her word.
Hunting the script: Alice Kober spent 20 years searching for hidden patterns in Linear B (Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection)
At Evans’s death, only a few facts about Linear B had been established. It was written from left to right and employed about about 85 basic characters. The number of characters revealed Linear B to be a syllabic script, in which each character stood for a distinct syllable of the ancient language, like ma or pa, bo or do, tam or kam.
Many of the tablets were inventories, counting everything in the palace storehouses from chariot wheels (broken and unbroken) to cattle to litres of wine. The Linear B numerical system was easily understood. A base-10 system like ours, it was notated by means of five characters (denoting 1, 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000), which could be used in combination. The tablets also contained pictograms, which stood for whole words and showed the objects inventoried. Many were understandable, including these, the last two of which would be at home today on any lavatory door in the world:
And yet, when it came to the non-pictographic signs that littered Linear B, which appeared in small strings called “sign-groups”, Evans was flummoxed. When he died, the meaning of only a single Linear B word was known. The word was “total”, revealed by the fact that it appeared regularly at the bottom of inventories, just before the tally. All in all, one word was not much to show for 40 years’ work.
For the decipherment to advance, as Kober declared in a 1948 lecture, it would be necessary “to develop a science of graphics”. It was just such a science that she, working uncompensated and largely unheralded, set out to construct.
Alice Kober never married, nor is there evidence she ever had a romantic partner. Her life was her work, and what a great deal of work there was. Night after night, after her classes were taught and her papers graded, she sat at the table in the house in Brooklyn she shared with her widowed mother and pored over the strange Cretan inscriptions.
Her first order of business was frequency analysis: the creation of statistics “of the kind so successfully used in the deciphering and decoding of secret messages,” as she wrote, for every character of the script. Anyone who has solved a Sunday paper cryptogram has met frequency analysis head-on. At its simplest, it entails pure counting, with the decipherer tabulating the number of times a particular character appears in a particular text. If the text is long enough, the frequency count for each letter should mirror its statistical frequency in the language as a whole. Kober compiled statistics on each character, tabulating its incidence at the beginnings of words, the middles, the ends, in combination with every other character and much else.
When she began her work in the early Thirties, Kober kept her statistics in a series of notebooks. But during the Second World War and for years afterwards, paper was scarce, and she could no longer get notebooks. Undaunted, she scissored by hand an immense set of “index cards” from any spare paper she could find - the backs of church circulars and greeting cards and a great many checkout slips she discreetly pinched from the Brooklyn College library.
Her dedication almost defies belief. In a letter to a colleague in 1947, Kober itemised the time it took to compile a single statistic: “You can figure out for yourself how long it will take to compare each of 78 signs with 78 other signs, at 15 minutes (with luck) for each comparison. Let’s see, 78 times 77 times 15 minutes – that’s about 1,500 hours.”
Over the years, Kober cut and annotated 180,000 cards, storing them in empty cigarette cartons, the one paper product of which, sadly, she seemed to have no shortage. Even now, to open one of her ersatz file boxes is to be met with the faint whiff of midcentury tobacco.
Heroic efforts: Alice Kober annotated 180,000 index cards in her quest to uncover Linear B, storing them in empty cigarette cartons, above
From the start, Kober approached the decipherment differently than other investigators. To her great disgust, most scholars persisted in looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope, seeking first to identify the language the Minoans spoke and only afterwards to unravel the script. Everyone, or so it seemed, had a theory about what language the tablets recorded. Ventris was convinced it was the lost Etruscan tongue, and clung steadfastly to the idea until weeks before the decipherment. Others held even stranger notions. “It is possible to prove, quite logically, that the Cretans spoke any language whatever known to have existed at that time – provided only that one disregards the fact that half a dozen other possibilities are equally logical and equally likely,” Kober said in a 1948 lecture. “One of my correspondents maintains that they were Celts, on their way to Ireland and England, and another insists that they are related to the Polynesians of the Pacific.”
Rather than speculating on the language of the script, or on how to pronounce its symbols, Kober analysed those symbols as abstract objects of pure form. She was willing to inhabit, as she evocatively wrote, a world of “form without meaning” for however long it took.
A haunting riddle from my childhood gives a taste of what it's like to dwell in that world. And, by coincidence, its solution is all too relevant to Alice Kober's life:
A crossbar, and a circle complete,
An upright where two half-circles meet,
A triangle standing on its own two feet,
Two half-circles,
And a circle complete.
The riddle describes written symbols. To solve it, think of each line as invoking one or more of those symbols as objects of pure form, with neither sound nor meaning attached. The answer is this: T O B A C C O.
Inhabiting the world of form without meaning let Kober make vital discoveries. Her first, in the mid-1940s, was that the language of Linear B was inflected: that is, it relied on word endings, or suffixes, to give its sentences grammar, much as Latin, German or Spanish does.
The discovery was born of her relentless search for patterns. Among those she identified were three-word sets sharing similar suffixes, which Ventris would waggishly name “Kober’s triplets”. These “triplets” let Kober pinpoint critical relationships among the characters of Linear B - relationships that come to the fore, as she discovered, whenever an inflected language is written with syllabic script.
Kober next drew up a 5-by-2 grid of these related characters. As she knew, if the phonetic values of even a few characters could be determined, the interdependencies she plotted would let the whole grid fill itself in, in a domino reaction. And it was precisely these relationships that let Ventris, after reading her published articles in the late Forties, make a crucial intuitive leap and then, using the web of interdependencies she had set up, unlock the mystery of Linear B.
It could so easily have been Kober who solved the 50-year riddle. But on May 16 1950, Alice Kober died, aged 43. No one knows what she died from, but it seems probable, given her heavy smoking, that she had some form of cancer.
In June 1952, Ventris, just shy of his 30th birthday, solved the riddle of Linear B. Ventris was an architect who had never been to university. But he had a prodigy’s gift for languages and an obsession with the tablets that dated to his youth. Everyone knew that the tablets were the municipal documents of a Bronze Age Cretan kingdom. What if, Ventris wondered, some of the related words in Kober’s “triplets” were actually related forms of Cretan place names – forms analogous to English words such as “Britain/Briton/British”?
With this in mind, he began plugging phonetic values into the triplets. One word in particular reared up seductively. Ventris’s analysis suggested that the first character stood for the syllable “ko”, the next for “no”, and the third for “so”. “Ko-no-so” recalled a particular place – and not just any place, but Knossos, the chief city of Cretan antiquity.
On the strength of this word, Ventris started plugging sound values into other words on the tablets. They too yielded Cretan place names, spelled syllabically, including “a-mi-ni-so” (Amnisos) and “tu-ri-so” (Tulissos). As predicted, each correct sound value generated new ones in a chain reaction. As Ventris was able to read more and more words on the tablets, the solution massed before his eyes.
Cracking the code: The architect Michael Ventris, above, made the leap that would finally decipher Linear B in 1952 (Getty Images)
On June 1 1952, Ventris took the microphone at BBC Radio to announce his discovery: Linear B recorded a very early Greek dialect – spoken long before Hellenic peoples were known to have existed, 500 years before Homer and seven centuries before the advent of the Greek alphabet.
His great triumph would end in tragedy. Beset by self-doubt as he was invited to speak before the world’s greatest learned bodies, Ventris died four years later, at 34, in a swift, strange car crash that some observers believe was suicide.
“I don’t like the idea of getting paid for scholarly writing,” Alice Kober had said in 1948, two years before her own untimely death. “If I wanted to make money writing, I’d write detective stories.” That, as it turns out, is precisely what she was writing: read today, her work is a forensic playbook for archaeological decipherment. And it is something even more valuable besides: the story of an unsung heroine that can, at last, be properly told.
Riddle of the script: how the world's most difficult puzzle was solved - Telegraph
(Thutmose III 1479 - 1425 BC)
King of Upper & Lower Egypt Menkheper Ra Son of Ra Thetmess
During Hatshepsut's reign there were no wars. Egypt’s neighbouring countries regularly paid tribute but as is often the case when a new king comes to the throne subject nations are inclined to test his resolve.
Thutmose found himself faced with a coalition of the princes of Kadesh and Megiddo, who had mobilised a large army. Also the Mesopotamians and their kinsmen living in Syria refused to pay tribute and declared themselves free of Egypt. Not daunted, Thutmose immediately set out with his army and crossing the Sinai desert he marched to the city of Gaza, which had remained loyal to Egypt. The events of the campaign are well documented because Thutmose's private secretary, Tjaneni, kept a record which was later copied and engraved onto the walls of the temple of Karnak.
This first campaign revealed Thutmose to be the military genius of his time. He understood the value of logistics and lines of supply, the necessity of rapid movement and sudden surprise attack. He lead by example and was also probably the first person in history to really utilise sea-power to support his campaigns.Megiddo was his first objective because it was a key point and had to be taken at all costs. When he reached Aaruna Thutmose held a council with all his generals. There were two routes to Megiddo a long, easy and level road around the hills, which the enemy expected Thutmose to take, and a route which was narrow, difficult and cut through the hills. His generals advised him to take the easy road through the hills, saying "horse must follow behind horse and man behind man also, and our vanguard will be engaged while our rearguard is at Aaruna without fighting" But Thutmose's reply to this was "As I live, as I am the beloved of Ra and praised by my father Amon, I will go on the narrow road. Let those who will, go on the roads you have mentioned; and let anyone who will, follow my Majesty" Now, when the soldiers heard this bold speech they shouted with one accord We follow thy Majesty whithersoever thy Majesty goes".
Thutmose led his men on foot through the hills "horse behind horse and man behind man, his Majesty showing the way by his own footsteps". It took about twelve hours for the vanguard to reach the valley on the other side and another seven hours before the last troops emerged. Thutmose himself waited at the head of the pass till the last man was safely through.
The sudden and unexpected appearance of Egyptians in their rear forced the allies to make a hasty re-deployment of their troops. There are said to have been over 300 allied kings, each with his own army, an immense force. However, Thutmose was determined and when the allies saw him at the head of his men leading them forward, they lost heart for the fight and fled for the city of Megiddo "As if terrified by spirits: they left their horse and chariots of silver and gold"
The Egyptian army, being young and inexperienced fell upon the plunder of the battlefield and lost the opportunity of taking the city immediately. Thutmose was very angry, he said to them "If only the troops of his Majesty had not given their hearts to spoiling the things of the enemy, they would have taken Megiddo at that moment. For the ruler of every northern country is in Megiddo and it's capture is as the capture of a thousand cities."Megiddo was besieged. A moat was dug around the city walls and this was completed by a strong wooden palisade. The king gave orders to let nobody through except those who signalled at the gate that they wished to give themselves up.
The siege lasted some seven months but eventually the vanquished kings sent out their sons and daughters to sue for peace. "All those things with which they had come to fight against my Majesty, now they brought them as tribute to my Majesty, while they themselves stood upon their walls giving praise to my Majesty, and begging that the Breath of Life be given to their nostrils"
They received good terms for surrender. An oath of allegiance was imposed upon them "We will not again do evil against Menkheper Ra our good Lord, in our lifetime, for we have seen his might, and he has deigned to give us breath."
Thutmose III is compared with Napoleon but unlike Napoleon he never lost a battle. He conducted sixteen campaigns in Palestine, Syria and Nubia and his treatment of the conquered was always humane. He established a sort of Pax Egyptiaca over his empire. Syria and Palestine were obliged to keep the peace and the region as a whole experience an unprecedented degree of prosperity.
Thutmose III's impact upon Egyptian culture was profound. He was a national hero who was revered long after his time. Indeed his name was held in awe even to the last days of Egyptian history. Besides his military achievements he carried out many building works at Karnak. He also set up a number of obelisks in Egypt. One of which, mistakenly called Cleopatra's Needle, now stands on the Embankment in London. It's brother is in Central Park in New York. Another is near the Lateran in Rome and there is also one of his obelisks in Istanbul. Therefore, he has had an unwitting presence in some of the most powerful nations of the last two thousand years.
Thutmose III - The Napoleon of Ancient Egypt and the battle of Megiddo
At the time of his death, Alexander the Great had created a vast empire across the eastern world. He established 33 Greek settlements and he was brilliant at fusing local culture with that of the Hellenes. However, only Alexander the Great would have been capable of maintaining such an empire and upon his death, his generals, the Diadochi, which meant successors in Greek, divided the empire between themselves. After a series of wars over the next few decades, the spoils went to the following victors: Ptolemy took Egypt founding the Ptolemaic dynasty ruling from Alexandria (305BC), Antigonus established the Antogonid dynasty in Greece from Macedonia (306BC), Seleucus established the Seleucid dynasty in Syria and Mesopotamia (305BC), Philetaerus established the Attalid dynasty in Pergamon, in Asia Minor (282BC).
Each of these Kingdoms perpetuated the Hellenistic culture and language of Greece. It is interesting to note, that whilst these territories were not all in Greece proper, Hellenic culture flourished, more so than in the “homeland.” Significantly, the rulers of these kingdoms were Greek and generally struggled to learn native languages. For example, the only ruler to fluently speak the native dialect of Egypt was Cleopatra, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Before the reader says, “wasn’t Cleopatra an Egyptian,” it is worth noting that that at no stage did the Ptolemies marry outside of their clan and all of them spoke Greek as their language.
The Ptolemies are arguably the most famous of all the Hellenistic dynasties. Ptolemy charged himself with the responsibility of looking after Alexander’s body as well as strengthening the newly established Greek cities of Egypt. Ptolemy ensured that the military only contained Greek troops and he increased his empire to include Palestine and Cyprus whilst his successors ventured into Asia Minor and also took control of the Greek cities of the Cyrene in Libya. The Ptolemies were patrons of the arts and sciences, which flourished throughout the empire. All the male rulers of the dynasty were named Ptolemy and the women were generally called Arsinoe, Berenice and Cleopatra. The seventh and last Cleopatra in the dynasty, which is a Greek Macedonian name, committed suicide resulting in the formal annexation of Egypt as a Roman province in 30BC. The language of the Greeks continued to be widely spoken and was greatly strengthened by the conquest of the Greeks of the Byzantine Empire in the 500’s until the late 600’s. Today, there are many Greeks who still live in Egypt, especially in Alexandria and an estimated 7% of the population is Coptic Orthodox, a result of the Byzantine Empire’s 150 year reign in the country.
Antigonus was another general and he initially obtained only a few regions in Asia Minor before being defeated in a battle for Alexander’s kingdoms by the other Diadochi in the Battle of Ipsus in 301BC. However, his successors eventually gained control of Greece and the dynasty would survive until 146BC. A number of wars with city-states such as Sparta and against Pyrhus of Epirus weakened the kingdom. Thus by the time the Roman Empire came into conflict with the Antigonid dynasty they were easily subdued and became the Roman province of Macedonia. The Roman Empire absorbed the Greek culture and unlike their other provinces, afforded Greece its due respect. Interestingly, Sparta was never officially occupied by the Romans.
The Attalid dynasty based in Pergamon in Asia Minor sprang to life after the death of the general Lysimachus in 281BC. Lysimachus held territory in that region after Alexander the Great’s death, but eventually met his death in a war with the Greeks of Seleucus. An interesting story emerged from his defeat, whereby the dog of Lysimachus watched over his master’s body for many days, not letting anyone claim it. Philetarus, an officer in Lysimachus’ military had earlier taken control of Pergamon in 282BC. The Attalids then expanded their empire in Asia Minor and claimed to be descendents of Telephos, the son of Herakles. Pergamon was a great city in its time and is worth a visit in today’s modern Turkey. The Kingdom was bequeathed to Rome in 133BC by Attalus.
The Seleucid Empire was certainly one of the greatest in history. At its peak the territory included Asia Minor, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Turkmenistan and the Indus Valley. The contribution of the Seleucids to history can not be underestimated for they truly implemented Alexander’s multi-cultural policy and encouraged trade from as far a field as India through to Greece. Seleucus and his successors established a number of Greek settlements in Asia with former Greek soldiers and traders, the greatest of these cities was Antioch. In fact, more settlements were established in the East than Alexander could ever have imagined and like the other Greek kingdoms, the Greek language was dominant, out lasting the Empire by hundreds of years. As to be expected by typical Greeks, the Seleucids were involved in many wars with fellow Greeks and by 60BC the Empire was finally defeated by the Romans. There are various places in former Seleucid territory where Greek speakers can still be found.
Other Hellenic Kingdoms that emerged well after the death of Alexander the Great, include the Pontians and the Greeks of India (yes, you heard me, the Greeks of INDIA). Pontian history is one of the great stories of Greek history. The richness and depth of their culture is still evident today and I always find it amazing that in Athens there as so many jokes about the Pontians, yet it was the brave Pontians who have maintained their culture and connection with ancient Greece much better that the Athenians could ever aspire to (this is a criticism and a story for another day). The Pontian Kingdom was founded in 301BC in Asia Minor on the Black Sea by Mithradates. Its greatest king was another Mithradates who ruled from 120BC expanding his territory across the Black Sea. After defeating the Greeks of Bithynia he fought a series of wars with the greatest of Roman generals, including Sulla, Marius and Pompey. Had he lived longer he would certainly have met Caesar in battle, alas he was defeated by Pompey in 63BC and his kingdom was absorbed by the Roman province of Cappodocia. The Pontians were later prominent in the Byzantine military and the last independent Greek Kingdom, the Empire of Trebizond which fell to the Ottomans in 1461 AD. Today, it is estimated that there are 1 million Pontians living in Black Sea countries and in Greece.
The Indo-Greek kingdom in the far east is arguably the most fascinating and interesting of all the Hellenistic Kingdoms. The kingdom emerged from the Greek Bactrian kingdom in Afghanistan. The Greeks of Bactria fought each other until the kingdom finally ceased to exist. However in India by about 100BC a Greek kingdom emerged whilst the most important Indo-Greek king was Menander, known as Milinda by the locals. He converted to Buddhism and encouraged the arts and sciences, resulting in a very unique style that is still evident in India today. The Indo-Greek kingdom survived until 20AD and there is a town of 4000 that believe themselves to be their descendents. This town has been the subject of documentaries and receives support from Athens. The Indo-Greek Kingdom was the last of the Hellenistic Kingdoms and a testament to Alexander the Great’s vision to bring the Greek culture to the world.
by Preston Chesser
The loss of the ancient world's single greatest archive of knowledge, the Library of Alexandria, has been lamented for ages. But how and why it was lost is still a mystery. The mystery exists not for lack of suspects but from an excess of them.
Alexandria was
founded in Egypt by Alexander the Great. His successor as Pharaoh, Ptolomy II Soter, founded the Museum or Royal Library of Alexandria in 283 BC. The Museum was a shrine of the Muses modeled after the Lyceum of Aristotle in Athens. The Museum was a place of study which included lecture areas, gardens, a zoo, and shrines for each of the nine muses as well as the Library itself. It has been estimated that at one time the Library of Alexandria held over half a million documents from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, India and many other nations. Over 100 scholars lived at the Museum full time to perform research, write, lecture or translate and copy documents. The library was so large it actually had another branch or "daughter" library at the Temple of Serapis.
The first person blamed for the destruction of the Library is none other than Julius Caesar himself. In 48 BC, Caesar was pursuing Pompey into Egypt when he was suddenly cut off by an Egyptian fleet at Alexandria. Greatly outnumbered and in enemy territory, Caesar ordered the ships in the harbor to be set on fire. The fire spread and destroyed the Egyptian fleet. Unfortunately, it also burned down part of the city - the area where the great Library stood. Caesar wrote of starting the fire in the harbor but neglected to mention the burning of the Library. Such an omission proves little since he was not in the habit of including unflattering facts while writing his own history. But Caesar was not without public detractors. If he was solely to blame for the disappearance of the Library it is very likely significant documentation on the affair would exist today.
The second story of the Library's destruction is more popular, thanks primarily to Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". But the story is also a tad more complex. Theophilus was Patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412 AD. During his reign the Temple of Serapis was converted into a Christian Church (probably around 391 AD) and it is likely that many documents were destroyed then. The Temple of Serapis was estimated to hold about ten percent of the overall Library of Alexandria's holdings. After his death, his nephew Cyril became Patriarch. Shortly after that, riots broke out when Hierax, a Christian monk, was publicly killed by order of Orestes the city Prefect. Orestes was said to be under the influence of Hypatia, a female philosopher and daughter of the "last member of the Library of Alexandria". Although it should be noted that some count Hypatia herself as the last Head Librarian.
Alexandria had long been known for its violent and volatile politics. Christians, Jews and Pagans all lived together in the city. One ancient writer claimed that there was no people who loved a fight more than those of Alexandria. Immediately after the death of Hierax a group of Jews who had helped instigate his killing lured more Christians into the street at night by proclaiming that the Church was on fire. When the Christians rushed out the largely Jewish mob slew many of them. After this there was mass havoc as Christians retaliated against both the Jews and the Pagans - one of which was Hypatia. The story varies slightly depending upon who tells it but she was taken by the Christians, dragged through the streets and murdered.
Some regard the death of Hypatia as the final destruction of the Library. Others blame Theophilus for destroying the last of the scrolls when he razed the Temple of Serapis prior to making it a Christian church. Still others have confused both incidents and blamed Theophilus for simultaneously murdering Hypatia and destroying the Library though it is obvious Theophilus died sometime prior to Hypatia.
The final individual to get blamed for the destruction is the Moslem Caliph Omar. In 640 AD the Moslems took the city of Alexandria. Upon learning of "a great library containing all the knowledge of the world" the conquering general supposedly asked Caliph Omar for instructions. The Caliph has been quoted as saying of the Library's holdings, "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous." So, allegedly, all the texts were destroyed by using them as tinder for the bathhouses of the city. Even then it was said to have taken six months to burn all the documents. But these details, from the Caliph's quote to the incredulous six months it supposedly took to burn all the books, weren't written down until 300 years after the fact. These facts condemning Omar were written by Bishop Gregory Bar Hebræus, a Christian who spent a great deal of time writing about Moslem atrocities without much historical documentation.
So who did burn the Library of Alexandria? Unfortunately most of the writers from Plutarch (who apparently blamed Caesar) to Edward Gibbons (a staunch atheist or deist who liked very much to blame Christians and blamed Theophilus) to Bishop Gregory (who was particularly anti-Moslem, blamed Omar) all had an axe to grind and consequently must be seen as biased. Probably everyone mentioned above had some hand in destroying some part of the Library's holdings. The collection may have ebbed and flowed as some documents were destroyed and others were added. For instance, Mark Antony was supposed to have given Cleopatra over 200,000 scrolls for the Library long after Julius Caesar is accused of burning it.
It is also quite likely that even if the Museum was destroyed with the main library the outlying "daughter" library at the Temple of Serapis continued on. Many writers seem to equate the Library of Alexandria with the Library of Serapis although technically they were in two different parts of the city.
The real tragedy of course is not the uncertainty of knowing who to blame for the Library's destruction but that so much of ancient history, literature and learning was lost forever.
Selected sources:
"The Vanished Library" by Luciano Canfora
"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbons
By Raoul McLaughlin | Published in History Today Volume: 61 Issue: 9 2011
The discovery of a letter written by the great physician sheds new light on one of the most dramatic events in Roman history, as Raoul McLaughlin explains.
A detail from a relief on the Arch of Titus, built in AD 81 in honour of Titus' victory over the Jews in AD70. It shows a triumphal procession, carrying the Menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum of the Temple of Solomon. Photo / AKG Images/Erich Lessing
In 2005 Antoine Pietrobelli, a student from the Sorbonne in Paris, was looking at microfilm copies of old manuscripts from the Vlatadon monastery in Thessalonica, modern Greece, when he made an extraordinary discovery. Among a collection of medieval texts he found a copy of a letter written by the ancient Greek physician Galen. ‘On the Avoidance of Grief’, thought to have been destroyed during the Middle Ages, provides remarkable new insights into the global trade of the Roman Empire at the height of its power. It also reveals how ordinary people dealt with crisis and despair, for the events it refers to foreshadowed an era of unparalleled political and economic decline in the ancient world; and this previously lost account tells the story of a great disaster that befell the city of Rome in the late second century AD.
Claudius Galenus (AD 129-c. 217) has been revered for centuries as the most important ancient authority on anatomical theory and medical practice. He was a renowned collector of written medical remedies, inventor of specialist surgical methods and the originator of many therapeutic procedures. It was known that Galen had written a letter to a friend in his home town of Pergamum in Asia Minor about the nature of grief, but only fragments of the document had survived in Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts. The rediscovered document carries the full text in which Galen offers advice on coping with misfortune by recalling the greatest loss he ever experienced in his professional career, when a vast fire devastated the centre of Rome in the spring of AD 192.
Historians have long been fascinated by the first ‘Great Fire’ of Rome, which occurred in AD 64 during the reign of Emperor Nero (r. AD 54-68). In the aftermath of this disaster there was popular resentment of the emperor and even rumours that he had been complicit in starting, or spreading, the blaze. But until now little attention has been given to the inferno that swept through Rome in ad 192 during the reign of another notorious Roman ruler, Emperor Commodus (r. AD 180-192).
Galen was personal physician to Commodus, who became emperor following the death of his father, the stoic Marcus Aurelius (r. AD 161-180), regarded by many as the last of the ‘Five Good Emperors’. Commodus proved to be very different from his philosopher father and a rumour circulated that he was probably the son of a gladiator with whom his mother Faustina was said to have had an affair. Certainly Commodus’ remarkable exploits in the Roman arena dressed as Hercules did nothing to dispel the gossip or quell the concerns of conservative public opinion.
Rome during the time of Commodus was a wealthy city, full of bustling commercial activity. After the first great fire Nero began to build a vast pleasure palace with luxurious private grounds in the space cleared by the conflagration. Plans for this monumental ‘Golden House’ were abandoned when the Roman commander Vespasian became emperor in AD 69. Vespasian gave orders that grounds leading up to the west side of the Palatine Hill were to be restored to the city and enhanced with monumental public buildings.
The most famous of these was the Colosseum. Known in ancient times as the Flavian Amphitheatre, this giant stone arena could accommodate up to 50,000 spectators. At the upper end of the Sacred Way, at the edge of the main Roman Forum, Vespasian also constructed an impressive new civic complex that became known as the Temple of Peace. This temple commemorated the end of the Jewish War (AD 66–70), when Vespasian and his son Titus had crushed a major revolt in Judea. The edifice had further symbolism, for Vespasian became emperor as the victor in a vicious civil war. By these means he had ended a period of brief but serious political turmoil known as the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’.
The Temple of Peace was set on high ground above the Colosseum and resembled a vast enclosed piazza, with a central garden area filled with pools and statues. The sacred precinct had the features of a public park and surrounding buildings contained an extensive library. One of the many chambers in the complex displayed the Jewish Menorah, the seven-branched candlestick taken as a war trophy when the Temple of Jerusalem fell to Roman forces. Josephus reports in The Jewish War (c. AD 75):
The Temple of Peace surpassed all human imagination, for Vespasian had vast wealth at his disposal and he embellished this place with old masterpieces of painting and sculpture. Into one sacred precinct he gathered all the individual artworks that people had been willing to travel across the known world to see. He also placed therein gold artefacts taken from the Temple of the Jews.
The Temple of Peace therefore symbolised the power and stability of the restored Roman state. It also held an important position near the sacred centre of ancient Rome and the site of shrines that had been preserved since the earliest periods of Roman history. Close by was the Temple of Vesta, just below the ancient Palatine Hill where Romulus was said to have founded the city. This small circular temple was dedicated to the Roman goddess of hearth and home. Here a sacred fire was tended by six Vestal Virgins, chosen from the wealthiest and most important families in the city. The flame symbolised the spirit and fortunes of Rome and it was seen as a portent of imminent disaster for the Roman state if its flames were ever extinguished. The Temple of Vesta also housed the Palladium, a sacred wooden image of Athena supposedly rescued from the devastation of Troy by Aeneas. It was believed that the continued success of Rome depended upon the safe preservation of this ancient artefact.
Vespasian’s son Domitian (r. AD 81-96) oversaw the completion of further monumental buildings along the Sacred Way which led from the Temple of Peace down to the Colosseum. A large imperial warehouse called the Horrea Piperataria was constructed next to this busy thoroughfare. The complex was so large that its side elevation on the Sacred Way was only slightly smaller than the façade of Buckingham Palace. Although it was called the ‘Pepper Warehouse’, the facility stocked all manner of incense from Arabia and Somalia, along with spices from India and the Far East.
This store of valuable international commodities proclaimed the extent of Roman power. Every year Roman ships set sail from Red Sea ports in Egypt on voyages into the Indian Ocean. They visited trade centres in Somalia, Arabia and India, returning with thousands of tons of eastern cargo to supply Roman markets. Writing about the early stages of this international commerce the Greek geographer Strabo (c. 64 BC-c. AD 24) reveals that 120 Roman ships sailed to India every year.
The Roman government imposed a quarter-value import tax on eastern merchandise entering the empire, but instead of cash payments, merchants could surrender a quarter of their goods to custom officials in Egypt. As many merchants had most of their capital invested in their unsold cargo, they therefore took this option. The Roman government thereby came to possess great quantities of eastern commodities. A legal document from this era confirms the revenues raised by this trade. The second-century ‘Muziris Papyrus’ records that a single Indian cargo carried aboard the Roman merchant ship Hermapollon was valued at almost nine million sesterces. The Hermapollon was only one of many ships and the tax in kind accumulated from this income of spices and incense explains how Nero was able to burn such a large quantity of Arabian fragrances at his wife’s funeral. Pliny, in his Natural History (c. AD 77-79), reports:
Those who are most knowledgeable in this matter assert that Arabia does not produce in a whole year the quantity of incense that was burnt by the Emperor Nero at the funeral observances of his consort Poppaea.
The Horrea Piperataria served as a vast commercial centre where the state sold rare eastern products to the population of Rome at carefully managed prices. Indian and Arabian products were crucial ingredients in Roman remedies and many doctors bought their medical supplies from this place because the quality and quantity of stock was assured. The regular presence of these physicians at the Horrea Piperataria encouraged medical supply retailers to set up business in the vicinity. For example Galen in his Method of Healing describes how a shop ‘off the Sacred Way’ sold a special type of thin cord that was imported from Gaul and used for ligatures.
The interior of the Horrea Piperataria was divided into a maze of store rooms and high enclosed courtyards. There were numerous water troughs throughout the complex to dampen the oppressive atmosphere created by the dry and heavy aroma of the spice stocks. Comparing the dimensions of the Horrea Piperataria with other large warehouses, the complex probably held over 5,000 tons of spice when fully stocked. Such a quantity of spice, even if it were composed of simple black pepper, could fetch a market price of over 200 million sesterces, a figure close to a quarter of the entire Roman state income.
Information about people who worked in the Horrea Piperataria is revealed by a second-century funerary inscription commissioned by a man named Publius Veracius Firmus to honour his two brothers Proculus and Marcellus, who were employed in the complex. The brothers are referred to as Piperarii, which could be translated as ‘Pepper Workers’.
Special private store rooms were available to rent in the outer edifice of the Horrea Piperataria. An inscription from an imperial warehouse commissioned by Emperor Nerva (r. AD 96-98) reveals how these arrangements worked in practice. Rent was paid in advance and items kept in the storage units would be seized if the rental fees were not forthcoming. Rent at the Horrea Piperataria was high, but goods stored there for safekeeping were considered to be extremely secure. A military guard was employed at the facility to prevent theft or damage to the stored items. It was also believed that there was very little risk of fire breaking out at the complex, because the building was constructed mostly of stone and fitted with numerous cooling water cisterns. For these reasons professionals with an interest in eastern medical
ingredients, religious incense or perfume manufacture chose it as a safe storeroom for their most important business stocks.By AD 192 the Horrea Piperataria had stood secure for almost a century, so Galen rented one of the units to store the valuable eastern materials he required for his medical practice. In ‘On the Avoidance of Grief’ he explains the situation.
People deposited their most precious treasures in these store rooms because they trusted that the warehouses along the Sacred Way would never be affected by fire. People were confident because there was no wood in these buildings other than the doors, and these warehouses were not close to any substantial private homes. What is more, the facilities were watched over by a military guard.
But Galen was proved wrong about the safety of the spice complex.
Until now our best surviving account of the great fire of AD 192 was provided by the Roman Consul and historian Dio Cassius (c. AD 165-c. 229), who lived through these events. He writes:
There were ill omens before the death of Commodus: for many eagles soared above the Capitol and uttered screams that boded nothing peaceful. An owl was heard to screech in the night moments before a fire began in some dwelling and leapt into the Temple of Peace. From there it swept through the storehouses of Egyptian and Arabian products.
The eagle was symbolic of Roman authority and the owl sacred to Athena; their cries of alarm in the skies above Rome foretold great misfortune for the empire. Dio attests that the flames that engulfed the Temple of Peace were carried aloft as far as the Palatine Hill where the blaze reached the imperial palace known as the Domus Tiberiana. It destroyed extensive portions of the building and incinerated nearly all the state records.
A bust of Commodus, second century AD. Photo: AKG Images/Dagli Orti
Galen’s letter offers a new account of the fire and a different insight into its origins as it spread through the sacred heart of Rome. In Galen’s version of events the blaze reached the Horrea Piperataria first, then swept along the Sacred Way up to the Temple of Peace. From there the flames spread to the Palatine Hill and the imperial palace.
The blaze was fuelled by hundreds of tons of spice and incense stored in the Horrea Piperataria. These precious substances were closely connected with divine offerings and the acrid smoke that curled high into the night air would have been fragrant with all the perfumes of Arabia. This encouraged a belief that the fire had a supernatural origin and an unearthly purpose. Onlookers might well have thought that the entire Horrea Piperataria was offering itself up to the gods in a colossal and terrifying blaze.
Dio Cassius certainly believed that the fire had a supernatural aspect, a portent from the gods of the death of Commodus and the ruin of the empire. The historian Herodian (c. AD 170-240), who was a young man in Rome at the time of the fire, also believed that the blaze was no accident. He mentions other strange omens before the fire, including stars that remained visible throughout the day. Drawing upon popular reports he described the fire thus:
There was no massing of dark clouds, but a preliminary earth tremor was felt. There was no thunderstorm present when either a bolt of lightning struck, or a fire broke out as a result of the tremor. The entire Temple of Peace, the largest and most beautiful of all the buildings in the city, was burnt to the ground.
As if directed by some divine power, the blaze spread to the Temple of Vesta, the sacred hearth of ancient Rome. Herodian describes the terrifying scene.
When the Temple of Vesta went up in flames, the image of Pallas Athena was exposed to public view – that statue which the Romans worship and keep hidden, the one brought from Troy. Now, for the first time, the statue has been seen by men of our time. The Vestal Virgins snatched up the image and fled with it along the Sacred Way to the imperial palace.
But the all-consuming conflagration followed their flight into the palace. The Romans must have watched in horror as the destructive fire merged with the sacred vestal flames as it consumed the city.
The fire burned for days and it seemed that no human agency could extinguish the blaze. Dio Cassius describes the frantic efforts made by vast numbers of civilians and soldiers. They carried water to hurl upon the ground in front of the approaching fire and to dampen the walls of burning buildings. Even Commodus came to encourage the crowds but to no avail. Suddenly the weather changed and heavy rain showers fell upon the city. Herodian writes:
For this reason it was known that the disaster was indeed of divine origin. For people now believed that the fire was started, and stopped, by the will and power of the gods.
Only when the blaze was extinguished did people begin to understand their loss.
Dio Cassius describes the Temple of Peace as the richest of all the sacred buildings in Rome, containing a vast treasure trove of gold and silver artefacts. This precinct was thought to be the most secure location in the city and it had therefore functioned as an important depository where people could safely store their private funds. Many people had their most valuable possessions held at the temple for safekeeping when the blaze struck. They lost their savings and some lost entire fortunes in this single calamity. Dio Cassius reports that:
Everyone used the Temple as a deposit for their best possessions. In a single night, the fire sent rich men into poverty. Everyone joined together in mourning the destruction of a public edifice, but each person was also lamenting their own personal ruin.
People speculated that the destruction of the Temple of Peace was a harbinger of war. The smell of the conflagration resembled a vast funeral offering and Dio Cassius ominously adds that the burning of the warehouses full of foreign goods signalled that the coming evil would encompass the entire world. Herodian says that people no longer supported Commodus and attributed their misfortunes directly to the emperor. Galen’s experience, recorded in his letter home to Pergamum, typifies the distress felt by many people after the Great Fire.
Galen was already at his new country residence in Campania when he heard about the disaster. The fire was a personal tragedy, for Galen had temporarily placed many of his most precious possessions in his storeroom in the Horrea Piperataria for safekeeping while he moved house. This included valuable financial assets such as gold coins, expensive silverware and acknowledgements of debts owed to him. But the real loss felt by Galen was the destruction of his research materials, including a great number of books, specialist remedies and a diverse range of unique medical instruments. Galen was planning to collect these possessions from the store room at the start of summer and, if the fire had only occurred two months later, then his research would have arrived safely at his new home. Galen observes:
Thus fate laid a trap for me, depriving me of many of my medical books. I also suffered a further significant loss, the study of vocabulary that I had collected from ancient Athenian comedy.
Galen’s letter also reveals how medical professionals used the outer rooms of the Horrea Piperataria. He describes how he carefully stockpiled a unique collection of rare ingredients and exceptional medicinal preparations in his personal storeroom. Some of these substances were from the imperial palace and had been acquired by Galen when he prepared medicines for Marcus Aurelius. This included a large quantity of high-quality medical cinnamon that Galen thought he would never be able to replace. Galen considered these expensive medical supplies to be fundamental to his profession and irreplaceable through dealings with private merchants.
The research that Galen lost in the fire included original copies of the first two books of his medical study On Composition of Drugs According to Kind. Other research destroyed in the blaze included many notes and investigations. In a further work, called On My Books, Galen writes:
I was still engaged in research on some topics and I wrote a lot in connection with those studies. I was training myself in the solution of all sorts of medical and philosophical problems, but I lost most of this material in the Great Fire.
In his letter Galen offers additional details about this research and its significance to his early career. He explains how, as a young doctor, he inherited important medical papers collected by eminent physicians from his home city. One of these compendiums included specialist formulas that had been purchased for more than 100 gold pieces each. A further personal collection from a senior doctor named Teuthras contained medical remedies ‘gathered from all over the world’ and ‘owned by no other person’. When Teuthras died from the Antonine plague of ad 165-180 Galen became sole benefactor of this knowledge.
As a young doctor, Galen had built-up his medical practice using these studies. He recalls in his letter:
If someone owned an important remedy, I was able to acquire it without much difficulty. I just exchanged it for two or three comparable remedies from these collections.
But after the fire Galen was left with only the small number of remedies he had brought to Campania and formulas he had freely entrusted to other doctors. The flames that engulfed the store rooms of the Horrea Piperataria had therefore destroyed an irreplaceable wealth of professional knowledge.
Galen had also placed his medical equipment in the storeroom before he moved house and this included unique instruments that he had carefully designed and crafted himself to perform specific operations. These items were destroyed and Galen recalled that every day afterwards he felt the need of a book, or an ingredient, or some remedy, only to realise that it was gone. Yet this personal loss was part of a greater tragedy as Galen explains in his letter:
Yet I have not mentioned the most terrible thing. For there was no hope of replacing my lost collection of books, for all the libraries on the Palatine Hill were burnt on that same day.
Many other professionals must have suffered similar losses in this great fire. In grounds close to the Horrea Piperataria was the Horrea Vespasiana. This was a colossal warehouse built to store merchandise taxed from Egyptian estates. It too burned as the fire swept along the Sacred Way, incinerating great stockpiles of linen and papyri. Scholars had chosen to keep their research in store rooms near this facility and these works were also consumed in the blaze. Some academics lost a lifetime of research, knowledge and inquiry. Galen speaks of Philippides the grammarian, who died soon after his precious books were destroyed in the fire. Some said that he had been overwhelmed with despair and pain from his loss. In fact everyone affected by the destruction wandered around for a long time dressed in black cloaks, some appearing thin and pale and all looking like people in mourning.
The fire heralded a new era of insecurity and hardship for the people of Rome. In the aftermath Commodus declared himself to be a new Romulus and vowed to rebuild the sacred heart of the city. But his actions bounded on megalomania and he planned to re-name the great institutions of state in his own honour, with Rome itself becoming known as Colonia Commodiana. Within a year conspirators had persuaded Commodus’ personal wrestling trainer to strangle him. The Praetorian Guard appointed a man named Pertinax as their new emperor and the Senate declared Commodus damnatio memoriae to erase him from popular memory. Pertinax struggled to pay the gifts of money that the praetorians expected and within a matter of months he, too, was murdered. In AD 193, after a century of stability, civil war again erupted across the empire and regional armies battled for the sole rule of Rome. So began the ‘Year of the Five Emperors’.
The following century was an era of increasing political upheaval for the Roman Empire. Civil wars became more frequent, revenues were interrupted and the empire entered an era of serious economic decline. The prosperity that Roman merchant fleets had brought back from distant India withered in a world of increased crisis and uncertainty. By AD 227 the Roman tax on international trade was reduced to one eighth (the octava) and the state never again received vast amounts of costly spices and incense. The income that the Flavian emperors had used to build colossal commercial warehouses in the centre of Rome was no more.
Thanks to the keen observation of Antoine Pietrobelli a unique personal account from the ancient world has been restored to modern scholars and physicians. In ‘On the Avoidance of Grief’ Galen tells his friend how he experienced great loss during his life, but never over-indulged in misery. He explains that after the fire: ‘I alone, demonstrating the strong love for work I have felt throughout my life, did not feel overcome with grief.’ Rather than lament his fate, Galen decided to direct his attentions towards the future and regain the materials he needed to continue his medical work. Galen is believed to have died in AD 217, aged 87. By the time of his death he had devoted almost 70 years to the study of philosophy and medicine, but had suffered no greater loss than in the Great Fire of AD 192.
Raoul McLaughlin is a tutor at Queen’s University, Belfast. His academic interests include Roman commerce and the ancient economy.
Further reading:
- Raoul McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes to the Distant Lands of Arabia, India and China (Continuum, 2010)
- Véronique Boudon-Millot, Galien: Tome 1, Introduction générale (Belles Lettres, 2007);
- Martin Winkler, Gladiator: Film and History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004)
- Martin Winkler, The Fall of the Roman Empire: Film and History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
- John E. Hill, Through the Jade Gate to Rome (BookSurge Publishing, 2009)
