Ajax pulling at the threads of war, by George Wallace
I was like the others, I was just a man among men, I listened at the little temple, I felt the snake lick at my ear, there were generals to follow and battle lines to be formed, and the sky above us furious and the rage set in, the full gospel trim of it . . .
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I am a scribe who writes letters, and my writing gives me power: variations on a theme in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East
2020.01.24 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. There is a story about a scribe who succeeded in seizing political power, at least for a while, precisely because he was a scribe. And this scribe could not have had even such a limited degree of success if he had not been a scribe. His name was Maiandrios son of Maiandrios, and his story is told by Herodotus, so-called father of history. According to Herodotus (3.120–128, 140–149), Maiandrios was a scribe working for a powerful tyrant named Polycrates, who once ruled over the Greek island-state of Samos, politically configured as one single colossal polis or city-state. In the era of this tyrant, as Herodotus remarks (3.139.1), Samos was the greatest of all the great cities of the Greek-speaking and non-Greek-speaking worlds combined. But all this greatness came to a violent end after Polycrates was treacherously captured and executed in 522 BCE by order of a Persian official named Oroites, satrap of Sardis, who at that point in time ruled over most of mainland Asia Minor in the name of the Persian Empire. At some later point in time, however, probably soon thereafter, the rule of this satrap likewise came to a violent end: Oroites was assassinated by order of Darius, new king of the entire Persian Empire. And then, soon after the deaths of Polycrates tyrant of Samos and of Oroites satrap of Sardis, Darius forcibly annexed Samos, making it part of his Persian Empire and installing Syloson, brother of Polycrates, as the new ruler of the island. It is in this context that Herodotus makes his remark (again, 3.139.1) describing Samos as the greatest of all cities—the greatest, that is, until the annexation of this Ionic Greek island-state by the Persian Empire. But there was a brief interlude, as Herodotus also remarks (3.142.1), of lingering greatness after the death of the tyrant Polycrates and before the Persian annexation of Samos by Darius. For a short time—it is not clear how short a time—the kratos ‘power’ that had once been held by the tyrant Polycrates, whose very name Polu-krátēs means ‘the man who has much power’, was now being held by Maiandrios, the scribe of the tyrant. I highlight the Greek word that Herodotus actually uses in this context (again, 3.142.1), kratos, when he refers to the ‘power’ held by a scribe in this era, around the middle of the first millennium BCE. Such power is comparable to some far earlier examples of scribal power, dating from the second millennium BCE and attested in a wide variety of locales throughout the Mediterranean and the Near East. And a symbol of such power, as I will argue briefly, is to be found in a related story, also told by Herodotus (3.41–43), about the sphrēgīs or ‘signet-ring’ of Polycrates.
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Some missing links in my efforts to trace continuities as well as discontinuities in Minoan-Mycenaean scribal practices
2020.01.17 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. The picture I show here, which is a photograph of a legal document composed in the Aramaic language and written on papyrus, illustrates a point I hope to make on the occasion of an event planned for the future. The event, organized by Giulia Sissa, will take place in the spring of 2020 at the Johns Hopkins University. Papers written in honor of Marcel Detienne will be presented—papers meant to be relevant to his lasting intellectual legacy. The paper I plan to present will address part of that legacy, centering on insights achieved by my friend Marcel in his investigations of ancient Greek alphabetic writing as it evolved in the first millennium BCE. And the point that I hope to make is specifically relevant to Marcel’s insights as elaborated in an essay he wrote for a book that he edited, Detienne 1988, about the diversity of scribal practices involved in ancient Greek uses of alphabetic writing. My point is, such diversity is due in part to continuities as well as discontinuities in scribal practices stemming from the Minoan-Mycenaean world of the second millennium BCE. To make this point, I will need to focus on non-Greek as well as Greek examples showing continuities in scribal practices attested throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond—not only in the second millennium BCE but also in the later first millennium. A case in point is the picture I show for this posting: the papyrus here, found in Elephantine, Egypt, and dating back to the fifth century BCE, is a folded and sealed document that is addressed, in a way, “to whom it may concern,” that is, to any authorized person who may need to unseal and unfold the authorized document and then read its content, written by or on behalf of those who originated this content.
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Echoes of a Minoan-Mycenaean scribal legacy in a story told by Herodotus
2020.01.10 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. This posting for 2020.01.10 picks up from where I left off in the posting for 2020.01.03, where I analyzed some aspects of ongoing research by experts who study the practices of scribes using the Linear A and Linear B scripts in the Minoan and Mycenaean worlds of the second millennium BCE. There I focused on a scribal practice, as reconstructed by these experts, of writing on perishable material, either parchment or papyrus, and then attaching a clay sealing to such a piece of writing, which may now be read only by an intended reader who is authorized to undo the sealing. The mentality of sealing a document meant to be read only by an authorized recipient is of course well attested cross-culturally, over vast stretches of time and space, and I show in the introductory illustration for my essay here a most familiar example. It comes from the bureaucratic traditions of postal service in modern Europe, and I show here just one picture from among the thousands of other such pictures I could have picked. It is a photograph of what is called in German a Päckchen and in French a petit paquet, a ‘little packet’. Here you see it—a Russian example of a packet containing materials all safely sealed and tied with string. And my point is, experts have found Minoan-Mycenaean versions of such a bureaucratic practice. But I also have another point to make: the same kind of practice can be traced forward in time, from the Minoan-Mycenaean world of the second millennium BCE, all the way into the post-Mycenaean world of the first millennium BCE. A case in point comes from a story told in the fifth century BCE by the historian Herodotus about something that happened a century or so earlier, 522 BCE, at Sardis, nerve center of the western reaches of the Persian Empire. The story involves Persians, not Greeks, but the wording used by Herodotus in telling this story involves a special use of a Greek word that we can translate as ‘scribe’, grammatistēs. This special use, as I will argue, resounds as an “echo” of Minoan-Mycenaean scribal practice—where a sender seals a special text, written on perishable material, which is meant to be read only by (or to) the recipient.
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A Minoan-Mycenaean scribal legacy for converting rough copies into fair copies
2020.01.03 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. In an earlier work, Nagy 2011 (in the Bibliography), where I studied traces of dialectal variation in the Greek language as spoken in the Mycenaean era and as written by way of the so-called Linear B script, I argued that the scribes who used this script in that era could write their texts not only on sunbaked clay tablets but also on parchment, that is, on leather specially prepared to serve as a surface for writing. Since the production of parchment was and always has been quite “labor-intensive” and therefore very costly, the medium of baked clay would have been far more economical for the writing of rough drafts—or let me call them “rough copies.” By contrast, however, as I went on to argue, at least some “fair copies” of texts could have been written on rolls made of parchment. There is an irony built into this argument, since the same fires that destroyed the Mycenaean palaces toward the end of the second millennium BCE accidentally preserved the “rough copies,” written on clay, by way of fire-baking the clay. Thus the “rough copies” were accidentally converted into permanent records for us today, while whatever “fair copies” existed in the past would have gone up in flames, lost forever. But we may well ask: is there really any evidence for saying that Mycenaean texts written on parchment ever even existed? In the paper I already cited, I did in fact argue for the existence of such evidence, but now I will try to deepen my argument, and I will start by taking a closer look at a word attributed to speakers of Greek on the island of Cyprus—a word attested only in the post-Mycenaean era, dating only as far back as sometime around the middle of the first millennium BCE. This word, as I will show in more depth here, referred to a class of scribes who prided themselves on their practice of writing texts on rolls of parchment. In the illustration that introduces my posting here, I show a photograph of a Cypriote statue that I think represents such a scribe.
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Minoan and Mycenaean fig trees: some retrospective and prospective comments
2019.12.27 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. The photograph I have chosen to illustrate my all-too-brief comments for this posting shows a fig tree. My first impression when I look at any adult fig tree in general is that its branches seem to crisscross each other, as we can see in the photograph I show here. And this visual pattern of crisscrossing reminds me of the ideogram representing this tree in the scripts used by Minoan and Mycenaean scribes in the second half of the second millennium BCE. In both scripts, Minoan Linear A and Mycenaean Linear B, the ideogram is shaped like the capital letter Y, but each one of the two branches of this Y is crisscrossed by one counter-branch, so that the vertical stem of the tree, shaped like a capital I, gets crowned by two sets of branches, and each set is shaped like a capital X. In this posting, I will show what I think are two examples of this ideogram, written in Linear A. The writing is on the surface of two clay sealings found at the site of the Minoan palace at Hagia Triada in Crete, dating back to the fifteenth century BCE. These sealings, technically “roundels,” were receipts for commodities. (I have corrected my original wording here, following the advice of John G. Younger about the function of “roundels.”) At the center of both these sealings, in terms of my argument, is the Linear A ideogram for {FIG TREE}, and, at each side of the ideogram, are two signs for two syllables that spell, if you put them together, a word that means ‘figs’ in Greek as spoken in the post-Minoan-Mycenaean era of the first millennium BCE.
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