Posts Tagged by Herodotus
I am a scribe who writes letters, and my writing gives me power: variations on a theme in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East
| January 24, 2020 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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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.
[Essay continues here…]Echoes of a Minoan-Mycenaean scribal legacy in a story told by Herodotus
| January 10, 2020 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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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.
[Essay continues here…]About writings and rewritings by scribes: an e-dialogue with Hana Navratilova
| December 12, 2019 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy, In medias res |
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2019.12.12 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. In the second illustration for my posting in Classical Inquiries 2019.11.22, I showed a picture of the ancient Egyptian divinity Thoth, who is the god of scribes and, more generally, of writing and wisdom. The picture shows him in the act of writing. This picture is a photograph of a three-dimensional model created in modern times as a re-enactment of a two-dimensional picture painted within the text of an ancient papyrus. In the cover illustration for the posting here for 2019.12.12, I show the same picture of the modern three-dimensional Thoth, but, this time, I place it to the left of another picture of the same god Thoth. And this other picture on the right is a photograph of a two-dimensional painting —a picture painted within the text of another ancient papyrus, the Papyrus of Ani, housed in the British Museum. What I hope to argue here is that the two pictures of the ibis-headed god Thoth as originally painted in the two ancient Egyptian papyri (and in many other papyri) show him in the act of producing a text that is directly relevant to the texts of the papyri. In the course of planning my argumentation, I initiated a dialogue, by way of e-mail, with a noted Egyptologist, Hana Navratilova, about questions of writing and rewriting by scribes. In the course of our e-dialogue, I had in mind one underlying question in particular: is the idea of Thoth as the divine model of scribes parallel to the idea of an authorized “fair copy”? By implication, the writing of a notionally perfect text by the divine model as scribe requires perfectionism on the part of imperfect mortal scribes who must copy the original text, perfect as it is. And the assurance of perfection would have to come from Thoth, that otherworldly scribe who is seen in the act of producing his own otherworldly text.
[Essay continues here…]About what kinds of things we may learn about mythology by reading about rituals recorded by bureaucratic scribes
| November 22, 2019 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2019.11.22 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. This essay centers on a scribe working in the Mycenaean palace at Pylos who wrote a Greek-language text about protocols involving rituals. The scribe’s text, written on a tablet of clay in a form of writing known as Linear B, was accidentally preserved because this tablet, along with hundreds of other such tablets, was baked solid by a great fire that destroyed the palace at Pylos around 1200 BCE. Mycenologists know the approximate date of the scribe’s writing for a simple reason: they know the dating of the fire. The text of this particular tablet, which is classified by Mycenologists as Tn 316, is about rituals honoring divinities whom the scribe actually mentions by name, and these divinities include Zeus, Hērā, Poseidon, Hermes—names familiar to anyone today who studies Classical Greek mythology as it evolved in the course of the first millennium BCE. But what about these same gods as we see them named in the rituals recorded by our scribe, who is writing in the second millennium BCE? In the brief essay I present here, I argue that such rituals have something to tell us about the myths that went with the rituals. The scribe himself may have been an ordinary person—just as the ancient Egyptian scribe whom we see in my first illustration for this essay seems ordinary enough. Still, what the scribe writes might seem extraordinary even for such an ordinary bureaucratic mortal—if he is put in charge of writing up various protocols for various prescribed ways of caring for divinities and for things that are sacred to those divinities. Even a worldly bureaucrat, if he is to care about protocols for taking care of gods, could then be thinking otherworldly thoughts that are worthy of those gods. Beyond the Greek-speaking world, a model for such otherworldly thinking is the ancient Egyptian divinity Thoth, god of all scribes. We get a glimpse of this divinity, pictured with the head of an ibis, in my second illustration. There he is, otherworldly scribe, in the act of writing on his own otherworldly tablet.
[Essay continues here…]Can we think of Centaurs as a species?
| May 3, 2019 | By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy |
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2019.05.03 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. Ιn three previous essays posted in Classical Inquiries, 2019.04.26, 2019.04.19 and 2019.03.22, I analyzed myths about Centaurs. Since they were pictured as half-man and half-horse, we could nowadays think of them as monsters. And, in terms of what we see in pre-classical and classical representations of Centaurs, such monsters were exclusively male, exhibiting the shaggy hormonal characteristics of exaggerated human maleness. Accordingly, Centaurs could hardly be viewed as a species of animals—or, let us say, of half-animals. In post-classical representations, however, as noted by Jan Bremmer (2012:26, 29) in the course of his detailed survey of relevant testimonia about such monsters, we start seeing female Centaurs as well. So, maybe Centaurs were eventually perceived as a species after all? Such a perception persists into modernity, culminating almost absurdly in the image of the “Centaurettes” featured in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940). A closer look at the theriomorphism or beastly form of the Centaurs, however, reveals that even in pre-classical times there existed representations of female monsters who were half-woman and half-horse. My favorite example is a Boeotian incised decoration, dated to the seventh century BCE, picturing Medusa the monstrous Gorgon as half-woman and half-horse. But is this female monster really a Centaur? In formulating an answer to this question, I will need to reassess my understanding of the relationship between myth and ritual in Greek traditions.
[Essay continues here…]Notes on Xerxes and His Persian Empire
| August 3, 2017 | By Olga Davidson listed under Guest Post |
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2017.08.03 | By Olga M. Davidson
Adapted from notes written by Olga Davidson and originally published in The Glimmerglass Festival’s 2017 Program Book. The 2017 Glimmerglass production of Handel’s XERXES, directed by Tazewell Thompson, runs through August 18.
[Essay continues here…]
