Re: The Odyssey - question for all!
Again, from Trevor Bryce's "Life and Society in the Hittite World". Keep in mind that he is operating on the assumption that Troy was a Mediterranean thing...
CHAPTER 14
Links across the Wine-Dark Sea
Greeks and Trojans confront each other on the plains of Troy. In the space in between, two warriors meet—Diomedes, son of Tydeus, from Argos in Greece, and Glaukos, son of Hippolochos, from Lycia in the remote south-western corner of Anatolia. As they prepare to do battle, Diomedes calls upon Glaukos to identify himself, to state his lineage and place of origin. He learns that Glaukos too has ancestral origins in Argos, that there have been close bonds between their families, bonds extending back several generations. Enmity between the two is set aside. They exchange weapons and armour, and pledge to renew their families' traditional links.'
From the Bronze Age onwards, there have been many meetings, many links between the peoples of the ancient Greek and Near Eastern worlds—all contributing in greater or lesser measure to the ongoing process of cultural transmission and cultural exchange between east and west. The process involved two-way traffic, sometimes predominantly in one direction, sometimes predominantly in the other. During the middle centuries of the first millennium BC, the Greek world had a profound influence on a number of its Near Eastern neighbours; the remains of the Hellenized cities of the Anatolian littoral are amongst the tangible witnesses of this. In the early centuries of the millennium and in the preceding millennium, the Greeks in their turn derived much from their contacts with their neighbours across the wine-dark sea.
{Major assumption here!}
Mainland and island Greece lay towards the western end of a cultural continuum which began with the earliest historical societies of Mesopotamia. Customs, traditions, and institutions which first appeared in these societies passed ever westwards, from one generation to another, from one civilization to another, and from one region to another over a period of several thousand years, sometimes undergoing substantial changes and modifications along the way.
{Is that so?}
The Hittites were participants in the process, as they absorbed within the fabric of their own civilization cultural elements drawn from the wide range of civilizations with which they came into contact, either directly or through cultural intermediaries. In their turn they may well have played an important role in the transmission of elements of Near Eastern culture further westwards to the Greek world.
In recent years scholars have been giving renewed attention to the nature and extent of the role played by the Near East in shaping Greek culture in its early developmental stages. With this has come an increasing conviction that Near Eastern poetic and mythological traditions exercised a direct and pervasive influence on early Greek literature, most notably the poems of Homer and Hesiod. We have already noted the parallels between the Kumarbi epic cycle, preserved in a fragmentary Hittite version in the archives of Hattusa, and the works of Hesiod. We shall now turn to some of the parallels and possible links between Near Eastern traditions, particularly those that surface in the Land of Hatti, and the traditions used by Hesiod's near contemporary Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Parallels abound between the cultures of the Near Eastern and Greek worlds and have already been dealt with in a range of publications.2 But no matter how striking some of these parallels may appear to be, they are not in themselves demonstrative of actual east-west contacts. If we are to argue that they are more than mere coincidences, that there are actual links between them, we need first to demonstrate in historical or archaeological terms at least the likelihood of cultural transmission between the different regions where they made their appearance. Some steps have already been taken in this direction, by Professor Martin West and others. And some of the mechanisms of cultural interaction between the Near Eastern and early Greek worlds are already becoming clear. What is still to be determined is whether this interaction was primarily a feature of early Iron Age contacts, or whether it was already in play at least several centuries before, in the Bronze Age.
There is no doubt that in the Late Bronze Age commercial and cultural links were well established between the Mycenaean world and western Anatolia and the Syro-Palestine region, and indirectly extended further east into Mesopotamia. The Ulu Burun shipwreck (see Chapter 5) provides some indication of how these links were maintained. The ship's cargo of copper and tin ingots and luxury items is indicative of the commercial contacts between Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean lands, and Greece in the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries, and the nature of the trade between these regions. But there may have been other cargo as well, not identifiable in the archaeological record—what has been referred to as 'human talent'.
Westward Population Movements
In recent years a number of scholars have postulated a westward diaspora of Levantine craftsmen and merchants in the Late Bronze Age, including entrepreneurs in search of new resources and markets, and travelling along the established trade routes. From our Hittite sources we know that by the middle of the thirteenth century a substantial number of western Anatolians were living in Mycenaean Greece, called Ahhiyawa in Hittite texts. In a letter to one of the kings of Ahhiyawa Hattusili III complains of the resettlement of some 7,000 of his western Anatolian subjects from the Lukka Lands in Ahhiyawan territory.3 Complementing this information, the Mycenaean Linear B tablets indicate that western Anatolia was one of the regions from which labour was obtained for the Mycenaean palace's workforces, for textile-making and the like. The same region may also have served as a recruiting ground, through raids and other means, for supplementing the substantial workforces required for building the massive fortifications at sites like Mycenae and Tiryns. This would fit neatly with an admittedly late attested tradition recorded by the first-century Greek writer Strabo, crediting the building of the walls of Tiryns to the Cyclopes, giants from Lycia.' The Lycians, as the Greeks and Romans called them, were first-millennium descendants of the Late Bronze Age Lukka people, who lived in parts of southern and western Anatolia. Many of these people were resettled in the Mycenaean world around the middle of the thirteenth century, in the period when the Mycenaean citadels were being extensively refortified.5
The new arrivals in Greece, whether from western Anatolia or regions further east, no doubt included many who were skilled in manual crafts, as well as healers, seers, and singers or poets—indeed, just as they are listed by Odysseus' swineherd Eumaeus amongst the categories of demioergoi, craftsmen who can always be assured of a welcome wherever they travel: 'No man of his own accord goes out to bring in a stranger from elsewhere, unless that stranger be master of some craft, a prophet or one who cures diseases, a worker in wood, or again an inspired bard, delighting men with his song. The wide world over, men such as these are welcome guests.'6 Through the resettlement of foreign demioergoi and their fellow immigrants from the Near East, customs and traditions of the societies to which they had originally belonged would have become known in the Greek world. Indeed these foreign settlers were very likely the most important agents of east-west cultural transmission.
The thousands of Anatolian settlers in Mycenaean Greece very likely included some who had been trained as scribes, and continued to serve as scribes and interpreters in the Mycenaean courts. Their services would presumably have been called upon for communications between their new overlord and his subjects or agents in western Anatolia. They could also have served as channels of communication between the Ahhiyawan king and their former overlord, the king of Hatti. And they may well have brought to their new land something else in addition to their scribal skills. We have earlier remarked that scribes educated in the Near Eastern scribal school tradition would in the process of their education have learnt the 'classics' of Mesopotamia, notably literary compositions emanating from the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Hurrian peoples which found their way into the Hittite world—compositions like the Gilgamesh epic and the Kumarbi Song Cycle. Further to the west, in another world that was clearly receptive to stories of heroes and great achievements from the past as well as the present, it is very probable that narrative traditions from the Near East also became known in Mycenaean court circles—at least partly through the agency of Anatolian scribes who had become familiar with them in the course of their scribal training.
Yet there must have been others too who conveyed stories originating in a Near Eastern context westwards to the Greek world. Episodes from the Gilgamesh epic were probably in wide circulation, especially among travellers. The epic is by and large a traveller's tale. And as we have already remarked, the tales of the Kumarbi cycle with their themes of sex and violence would almost certainly have had widespread appeal at all levels of society. Immigrant craftsmen and artists, itinerant merchants, sailors from vessels which plied their trade throughout the ports of the Mediterranean, indeed any traveller capable of spinning a good yarn, may all-have been agents in the process of east-west cultural transmission, in the course of which episodes from the Mesopotamian and Hurrian epics made their first appearance in the Greek world. If so, they may well have exercised, already in the Late Bronze Age, a significant influence on the development and shaping of the traditions which provided the genesis of Homeric epic as well as basic material for the poems of Hesiod.
Gilgamesh and the Homeric Epics
We can readily identify a number of features which the Gilgamesh epic has in common with the Iliad and the Odyssey. The introductory passage of the Gilgamesh epic which depicts Gilgamesh as a restless hero—the far-journeying wanderer who endures many hardships and gathers much wisdom—reminds us of Odysseus in the opening lines of the Odyssey. The very notion of a long journey in which the hero is beset by many obstacles and temptations is as fundamental to the Gilgamesh epic as it is to the Odyssey. The alewife-temptress Siduri in the former calls to mind Calypso and Circe in the latter. The divine intervention motif is constantly in evidence in both the Gilgamesh and the Homeric compositions—there are those deities who support and assist the hero, and those who are implacably hostile to him and seek his downfall—for an insult he has committed against them, for an injury done to them or to other members of their family.
The Mesopotamian and Greek epics all have a greater or lesser preoccupation with death and the Underworld, and there is much in common between Mesopotamian and Greek concepts of the afterlife.7 Achilles' meeting with Patroklos' ghost in Book 23 of the Iliad recalls Gilgamesh's meeting with Enkidu's ghost in the twelfth tablet of the Gilgamesh epic. Gilgamesh's summoning-up of the spirit of Enkidu has its counterpart in Odysseus' summoning-up of the ghost ofTeiresias in the Odyssey. This is of course a common literary topos—in which the living seek advice from the dead, as we see also in Aeneas' consultation with the ghost of his father Anchises, or in a biblical context Saul's consultation with the ghost of the prophet Samuel.*
What do such parallels really signify? Direct influence of one tradition upon the other? Mere coincidence? Or was there an original common source from which common elements have been independently retained in two divergent cultures?
The most sceptical view would have it that the broad similarity in themes observable in the Gilgamesh and the Homeric compositions indicate similar but quite unrelated responses, encapsulated in literary form, to similar problems, questions, hopes, aspirations, and fears raised by the different environments in which human societies evolved and developed. Things like the preoccupation with the theme of death and what lies beyond, and a yearning for some form of immortality which will transcend death; or the tension or conflict between the ephemeral, hedonistic delights of this world, and a desire for nobler, more lasting achievement, whatever hardships and dangers that may entail. Are the themes of the epics essentially independent reflections of what is inherent in human nature?
This view would become less tenable if we had conclusive proof that Near Eastern literary or mythological traditions, like those reflected in the Akkadian epics, were already known in thirteenth- century Greece. Such proof has yet to be found. We can, however, be sure that many people from the regions where the epics were read, copied, recited, and performed in the Late Bronze Age either resettled in the Greek world, or visited it in the course of trading enterprises. If they carried their traditions and folk tales with them, and if at this time the poetic and historical traditions on which Homer drew were already taking shape, it would be perverse to argue that they did so in complete isolation from Near Eastern traditions with which they shared a number of similar features and which were then known in the Greek world.
There are, furthermore, a number of specific points of comparison between Homeric and Near Eastern tradition which seem to go beyond mere superficial or commonplace parallels. In Book 5 of the Iliad Diomedes maltreats the goddess Aphrodite, and the goddess complains of this to her parents Zeus and Dione. But her father is not at all sympathetic, and in fact gently rebukes her for making the complaint. We are reminded of Gilgamesh's maltreatment of the goddess Ishtar (Aphrodite's Near Eastern equivalent). Just as Aphrodite had done, Ishtar complains to her parents Anu and Antu of Gilgamesh's behaviour. For doing so she too is rebuked by her father. Professor Burkert comments that the two episodes parallel each other in structure, narrative form, and ethos to a remarkable degree.1'
In Book 4 of the Odyssey, Penelope learns of her son Telemachos' journey to find news of Odysseus, and the suitors' plot to kill him on his return. In great anxiety, she prays to Athene to keep him safe. In the Gilgamesh epic, the goddess Ninsun learns of her son's dangerous journey to fight the giant Humbaba, and she too prays for his safety. Of course there is nothing surprising about a mother praying for a son, especially when she perceives him to be in great danger. But a comparison of the two episodes takes us beyond this mere commonplace. After lamenting her son's plight, Penelope bathes and puts on clean linen, then filling a basket with sacred barley, she goes to the upper storey of the palace, and makes supplication to Athene to keep her son safe. When Gilgamesh goes off to fight Humbaba, his mother Ninsun enters her chamber, she puts on a garment and other adornments, then taking a special herb, she goes upstairs to the roof of the palace, and makes supplication to the Sun God Shamash for her son's safety.10 Burkert remarks that what elevates this comparison from the commonplace is the fact that here narrative content, structure, and sequence are virtually identical.
We might also take a little further the comparison between Homer's Circe and Siduri of the Gilgamesh epic. Each attempts to persuade the hero to abandon his mission—in Gilgamesh's case the quest for Utnapishtim, in Odysseus' the completion of his journey home—and neither succeeds. Yet there are dual, apparently contrasting aspects of the roles which the temptresses play. Gilgamesh prevails on Siduri, who lives on the edge of the sea and knows its ways, to give him directions which will lead him across the waters to Utnapishtim. Odysseus too entreats Circe to provide directions for his homeward journey; she advises him that to reach his final destination he must first visit the house of Persephone and Hades, and there seek counsel from the spirit of the seer Teiresias, In both cases the dangers of the journey ahead are highlighted. Gilgamesh is warned thus: 'There has never been a ferry of any kind, Gilgamesh, and nobody from time immemorial has crossed the sea (to the realm of Utnapishtim).'" Odysseus has similar apprehensions: 'O Circe, who will be the guide for this journey? Never yet has anyone reached by black ship the realm of Hades.'12 But Circe reassures him. Like Siduri, she is knowledgeable in the ways of the sea. In both cases, the temptresses are not merely obstacles put in the hero's way. They play essential roles in the forward movement of the journey. For the directions they give are critical to the attainment of the hero's goal. In this case too Mesopotamian and Homeric tradition closely parallel each other in concept, structure, and detail.
Cultural Transmission
Near Eastern influence on Homer was by no means confined to the sphere of literary tradition. On a broader level, elements of Hittite and other Near Eastern ritual practices occasionally surface in the Homeric epics. We have already referred to the close parallel between the procedures followed by Odysseus in summoning up the dead at the beginning of Book 11 of the Odyssey and the Hittite chthonic ritual in which the deities of the netherworld were summoned from their infernal abode (Chapter 10). One further example may suffice. In Book 23 of the Iliad (233-61), Homer describes the funeral rites of the Greek hero Patroklos. His body is disposed of by cremation. This has occasioned some surprise, since inhumation was the regular Greek practice in the Bronze Age, the period in which the Trojan War is set.13 What Patroklos' burial rites do recall are the procedures laid down for the disposal of the remains of Hittite kings, as described in Chapter 10. In both cases the deceased's body is consumed upon a funeral pyre; the pyre's smouldering embers are quenched with wine before sifting through them for the bones of the deceased; the bones are immersed in a vessel of oil and then wrapped in fine linen. To be sure, there are also differences between the Hittite and Homeric burial procedures. But the features which they share strongly suggest that they are in some way connected.14 The nature of this connection, and how it came about, remains a matter for speculation. We can but note how remarkable it is that a peculiarly Hittite royal burial practice which as far as we know did not outlive the Bronze Age and was unlikely to have been otherwise preserved in a Greek context should strike such a familiar chord in Homeric epic centuries after its last attestation in the Hittite texts.
Scholars like Walter Burkert and Martin West present at considerable length the case for strong Near Eastern influence on Greek culture. But they tend to focus on a later period of cultural transmission, during the so-called orientalizing period (mid-eighth to mid- seventh century) when itinerant craftsmen and artists from the Near East may once again have brought to the Greek world a range of manual and intellectual skills, including the Semitic art of writing, and a range of literary and religious traditions. On the other hand West concedes that the orientalizing period seems to fall too late to be connected with any major reshaping of Homeric epic. It may well be that much of what Homeric tradition may have owed to Near Eastern influence was already known and was being used in the Mycenaean period when the traditions incorporated in Homeric epic were beginning to evolve. So too elements of the Kumarbi epic cycle may already have been known in the Greek world some centuries before their reappearance in Hesiod, though a number of scholars have long seen their transmission to the Greek world as a later phenomenon, perhaps due to Phoenician contact with this world.15
This is not to deny that later Near Eastern influences also contributed significantly to the final version of the Homeric poems. There are many features or elements of the poems which are clearly of Iron Age origin. And in many respects they reflect the world of the late eighth or early seventh century, as is clear from archaeological material and from numerous allusions contained within them. Above all the introduction of the alphabet into the Greek world must not merely have brought with it the technology of writing. It also drew the Greeks into the whole world of contemporary Near Eastern written culture. Within this culture the Gilgamesh tradition was still very much alive and being freshly recorded in Assyria, in much the same period as the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In any case, the Homeric poems are now being seen much less as a product of an essentially monocultural environment and much more as the result of complex interactions of a number of factors, many of non-Greek origin.
To what extent, then, are we able to identify the actual building- blocks of the Homeric poems? What can we say is distinctively Greek about them? What is distinctively non-Greek? And where are Greek and non-Greek elements so tightly interwoven that they simply cannot be disentangled? These questions open up very large areas of investigation which we can do no more than touch upon here. And we should do so with some degree of caution.
With regard to the Homeric pantheon Martin West, one of the most vigorous proponents of extensive Near Eastern influence on Greek culture, writes thus; 'It is hardly going too far to say that the whole picture of the gods in the Iliad is oriental.' He argues that 'The Homeric and Hesiodic picture of the gods' organization, and of the past struggles by which they achieved it, has so much in common with the picture presented in Babylonian and Ugaritic poetry that it must have been formed under eastern influence. The gods are conceived as a corporation that regularly assembles on Mt Olvmpos, feasts and discusses human affairs. They have a chief Zeus to whom they make representations, and he makes decisions and gives permissions, sends messengers, and tries to control events. But the other gods are often wilful; they argue vigorously with one another, and Zeus on occasion has to threaten or exert physical violence in order to subdue them. This lively poetic scenario does not correspond with actual Greek beliefs about the gods, who were worshipped and invoked at appropriate places and times; two gods might be associated in a cult, but there was no sense of their being members of a larger assembly, nor of gods squabbling and jostling among themselves.'16
There is no doubt that Homer's gods, if not substantially derived from a Near Eastern context, would at least have been fully at home in a Near Eastern environment. But the assumption that they were actually taken over holus-bolus from the Near East may be going too far. In general, we should be cautious about using a line of reasoning which reduced to its simplest proportions seems to work along these lines: Here we have elements which were apparently alien to later Greek society. These elements were a feature of Near Eastern Bronze Age and early Iron Age societies. Therefore their appearance in Homer must be due to Near Eastern influence. To maintain this, we would first have to demonstrate that they were not also some sort of residual feature of pre-Homeric Greek society which survived in Homeric tradition but otherwise disappeared. Homer's divine society may well be a reflection of a widespread set of concepts about how the gods behaved and interacted, as much a part of early Greek and more generally Indo-European tradition as it was of Mesopotamian tradition.
In general terms closer attention to Near Eastern-Homeric text parallels may well give us a good deal more insight than we presently have into the actual processes involved in the composition of the Homeric poems, and a greater understanding of how the poet's compositional skills operated. We could take the view that an eighth- century epic poet was merely the last in a succession of 'Homers' extending back over a number of generations, each of whom contributed to the culling,shaping, and refining of the material, with the last in the series adding the final touches, or bringing the compositions to what West calls their astonishing acme in the eighth and seventh centuries. And Burkert and others may well be right in their claim that this was a period of much more intensive east-west connections and cultural transmission than was the case in the Bronze Age. But this is in no way incompatible with the notion of an earlier stratum of cultural transmission as well.
In any case, the epics drew on a wide range of sources and reflect a wide range of influences over a period extending back well before they reached their final form. The tradition of a Trojan War very possibly has a basis in historical fact. But if so it almost certainly represents a conflation of events, beginning perhaps a century or more before the alleged dates of the war in Greek literature and continuing beyond the end of the Bronze Age. Throughout this period, there was regular commercial and political contact between the Greek and Near Eastern worlds (allowing perhaps for a hiatus of 100 years or so in the eleventh century BC), and undoubtedly a considerable degree of cultural interaction between these worlds.
It has been suggested above that primarily through the agency of large groups of immigrants and traders in Bronze Age Greece, Near Eastern intellectual and cultural traditions became known in this world. It would be remarkable if Near Eastern contacts with and a significant Near Eastern presence in the early Greek world, as attested by both archaeological and written evidence, failed to make any major or lasting impression on Greek civilization. Given that the development of the Homeric epics was a long evolutionary process which incorporated a wide range of historical, social, and cultural elements, we can hardly accept that it could have developed in isolation of social and cultural forces from the East which were impacting on the Greek world during the developmental period of Homeric tradition. Speaking in relation to the impact of the Near East on the development of Greek mythological tradition,Professor Kirk comments thus: 'That Greek myths were infected by Near Eastern themes is of very great importance. Not only because it casts a faint glimmer of light on the development of Greek culture and ideas in their formative stage, but also because it makes it easier to isolate the specifically Hellenic contribution, the particular intellectual and imaginative ingredients that made Greek civilization such a very different phenomenon from those of western Asia and Egypt.'17
As yet we are only imperfectly aware of the specific ways in which social and cultural forces helped shape Homeric tradition. But greater attention to the links across the wine-dark sea may well contribute significantly to Homeric scholarship in the future—as we see increasingly how the poet adapted, moulded, and transformed a vast range of disparate material into a coherent, compelling narrative, giving it a character and status which led to its position as one of the great masterpieces of Greek artistic achievement.
Again, from Trevor Bryce's "Life and Society in the Hittite World". Keep in mind that he is operating on the assumption that Troy was a Mediterranean thing...
CHAPTER 14
Links across the Wine-Dark Sea
Greeks and Trojans confront each other on the plains of Troy. In the space in between, two warriors meet—Diomedes, son of Tydeus, from Argos in Greece, and Glaukos, son of Hippolochos, from Lycia in the remote south-western corner of Anatolia. As they prepare to do battle, Diomedes calls upon Glaukos to identify himself, to state his lineage and place of origin. He learns that Glaukos too has ancestral origins in Argos, that there have been close bonds between their families, bonds extending back several generations. Enmity between the two is set aside. They exchange weapons and armour, and pledge to renew their families' traditional links.'
From the Bronze Age onwards, there have been many meetings, many links between the peoples of the ancient Greek and Near Eastern worlds—all contributing in greater or lesser measure to the ongoing process of cultural transmission and cultural exchange between east and west. The process involved two-way traffic, sometimes predominantly in one direction, sometimes predominantly in the other. During the middle centuries of the first millennium BC, the Greek world had a profound influence on a number of its Near Eastern neighbours; the remains of the Hellenized cities of the Anatolian littoral are amongst the tangible witnesses of this. In the early centuries of the millennium and in the preceding millennium, the Greeks in their turn derived much from their contacts with their neighbours across the wine-dark sea.
{Major assumption here!}
Mainland and island Greece lay towards the western end of a cultural continuum which began with the earliest historical societies of Mesopotamia. Customs, traditions, and institutions which first appeared in these societies passed ever westwards, from one generation to another, from one civilization to another, and from one region to another over a period of several thousand years, sometimes undergoing substantial changes and modifications along the way.
{Is that so?}
The Hittites were participants in the process, as they absorbed within the fabric of their own civilization cultural elements drawn from the wide range of civilizations with which they came into contact, either directly or through cultural intermediaries. In their turn they may well have played an important role in the transmission of elements of Near Eastern culture further westwards to the Greek world.
In recent years scholars have been giving renewed attention to the nature and extent of the role played by the Near East in shaping Greek culture in its early developmental stages. With this has come an increasing conviction that Near Eastern poetic and mythological traditions exercised a direct and pervasive influence on early Greek literature, most notably the poems of Homer and Hesiod. We have already noted the parallels between the Kumarbi epic cycle, preserved in a fragmentary Hittite version in the archives of Hattusa, and the works of Hesiod. We shall now turn to some of the parallels and possible links between Near Eastern traditions, particularly those that surface in the Land of Hatti, and the traditions used by Hesiod's near contemporary Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Parallels abound between the cultures of the Near Eastern and Greek worlds and have already been dealt with in a range of publications.2 But no matter how striking some of these parallels may appear to be, they are not in themselves demonstrative of actual east-west contacts. If we are to argue that they are more than mere coincidences, that there are actual links between them, we need first to demonstrate in historical or archaeological terms at least the likelihood of cultural transmission between the different regions where they made their appearance. Some steps have already been taken in this direction, by Professor Martin West and others. And some of the mechanisms of cultural interaction between the Near Eastern and early Greek worlds are already becoming clear. What is still to be determined is whether this interaction was primarily a feature of early Iron Age contacts, or whether it was already in play at least several centuries before, in the Bronze Age.
There is no doubt that in the Late Bronze Age commercial and cultural links were well established between the Mycenaean world and western Anatolia and the Syro-Palestine region, and indirectly extended further east into Mesopotamia. The Ulu Burun shipwreck (see Chapter 5) provides some indication of how these links were maintained. The ship's cargo of copper and tin ingots and luxury items is indicative of the commercial contacts between Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean lands, and Greece in the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries, and the nature of the trade between these regions. But there may have been other cargo as well, not identifiable in the archaeological record—what has been referred to as 'human talent'.
Westward Population Movements
In recent years a number of scholars have postulated a westward diaspora of Levantine craftsmen and merchants in the Late Bronze Age, including entrepreneurs in search of new resources and markets, and travelling along the established trade routes. From our Hittite sources we know that by the middle of the thirteenth century a substantial number of western Anatolians were living in Mycenaean Greece, called Ahhiyawa in Hittite texts. In a letter to one of the kings of Ahhiyawa Hattusili III complains of the resettlement of some 7,000 of his western Anatolian subjects from the Lukka Lands in Ahhiyawan territory.3 Complementing this information, the Mycenaean Linear B tablets indicate that western Anatolia was one of the regions from which labour was obtained for the Mycenaean palace's workforces, for textile-making and the like. The same region may also have served as a recruiting ground, through raids and other means, for supplementing the substantial workforces required for building the massive fortifications at sites like Mycenae and Tiryns. This would fit neatly with an admittedly late attested tradition recorded by the first-century Greek writer Strabo, crediting the building of the walls of Tiryns to the Cyclopes, giants from Lycia.' The Lycians, as the Greeks and Romans called them, were first-millennium descendants of the Late Bronze Age Lukka people, who lived in parts of southern and western Anatolia. Many of these people were resettled in the Mycenaean world around the middle of the thirteenth century, in the period when the Mycenaean citadels were being extensively refortified.5
The new arrivals in Greece, whether from western Anatolia or regions further east, no doubt included many who were skilled in manual crafts, as well as healers, seers, and singers or poets—indeed, just as they are listed by Odysseus' swineherd Eumaeus amongst the categories of demioergoi, craftsmen who can always be assured of a welcome wherever they travel: 'No man of his own accord goes out to bring in a stranger from elsewhere, unless that stranger be master of some craft, a prophet or one who cures diseases, a worker in wood, or again an inspired bard, delighting men with his song. The wide world over, men such as these are welcome guests.'6 Through the resettlement of foreign demioergoi and their fellow immigrants from the Near East, customs and traditions of the societies to which they had originally belonged would have become known in the Greek world. Indeed these foreign settlers were very likely the most important agents of east-west cultural transmission.
The thousands of Anatolian settlers in Mycenaean Greece very likely included some who had been trained as scribes, and continued to serve as scribes and interpreters in the Mycenaean courts. Their services would presumably have been called upon for communications between their new overlord and his subjects or agents in western Anatolia. They could also have served as channels of communication between the Ahhiyawan king and their former overlord, the king of Hatti. And they may well have brought to their new land something else in addition to their scribal skills. We have earlier remarked that scribes educated in the Near Eastern scribal school tradition would in the process of their education have learnt the 'classics' of Mesopotamia, notably literary compositions emanating from the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Hurrian peoples which found their way into the Hittite world—compositions like the Gilgamesh epic and the Kumarbi Song Cycle. Further to the west, in another world that was clearly receptive to stories of heroes and great achievements from the past as well as the present, it is very probable that narrative traditions from the Near East also became known in Mycenaean court circles—at least partly through the agency of Anatolian scribes who had become familiar with them in the course of their scribal training.
Yet there must have been others too who conveyed stories originating in a Near Eastern context westwards to the Greek world. Episodes from the Gilgamesh epic were probably in wide circulation, especially among travellers. The epic is by and large a traveller's tale. And as we have already remarked, the tales of the Kumarbi cycle with their themes of sex and violence would almost certainly have had widespread appeal at all levels of society. Immigrant craftsmen and artists, itinerant merchants, sailors from vessels which plied their trade throughout the ports of the Mediterranean, indeed any traveller capable of spinning a good yarn, may all-have been agents in the process of east-west cultural transmission, in the course of which episodes from the Mesopotamian and Hurrian epics made their first appearance in the Greek world. If so, they may well have exercised, already in the Late Bronze Age, a significant influence on the development and shaping of the traditions which provided the genesis of Homeric epic as well as basic material for the poems of Hesiod.
Gilgamesh and the Homeric Epics
We can readily identify a number of features which the Gilgamesh epic has in common with the Iliad and the Odyssey. The introductory passage of the Gilgamesh epic which depicts Gilgamesh as a restless hero—the far-journeying wanderer who endures many hardships and gathers much wisdom—reminds us of Odysseus in the opening lines of the Odyssey. The very notion of a long journey in which the hero is beset by many obstacles and temptations is as fundamental to the Gilgamesh epic as it is to the Odyssey. The alewife-temptress Siduri in the former calls to mind Calypso and Circe in the latter. The divine intervention motif is constantly in evidence in both the Gilgamesh and the Homeric compositions—there are those deities who support and assist the hero, and those who are implacably hostile to him and seek his downfall—for an insult he has committed against them, for an injury done to them or to other members of their family.
The Mesopotamian and Greek epics all have a greater or lesser preoccupation with death and the Underworld, and there is much in common between Mesopotamian and Greek concepts of the afterlife.7 Achilles' meeting with Patroklos' ghost in Book 23 of the Iliad recalls Gilgamesh's meeting with Enkidu's ghost in the twelfth tablet of the Gilgamesh epic. Gilgamesh's summoning-up of the spirit of Enkidu has its counterpart in Odysseus' summoning-up of the ghost ofTeiresias in the Odyssey. This is of course a common literary topos—in which the living seek advice from the dead, as we see also in Aeneas' consultation with the ghost of his father Anchises, or in a biblical context Saul's consultation with the ghost of the prophet Samuel.*
What do such parallels really signify? Direct influence of one tradition upon the other? Mere coincidence? Or was there an original common source from which common elements have been independently retained in two divergent cultures?
The most sceptical view would have it that the broad similarity in themes observable in the Gilgamesh and the Homeric compositions indicate similar but quite unrelated responses, encapsulated in literary form, to similar problems, questions, hopes, aspirations, and fears raised by the different environments in which human societies evolved and developed. Things like the preoccupation with the theme of death and what lies beyond, and a yearning for some form of immortality which will transcend death; or the tension or conflict between the ephemeral, hedonistic delights of this world, and a desire for nobler, more lasting achievement, whatever hardships and dangers that may entail. Are the themes of the epics essentially independent reflections of what is inherent in human nature?
This view would become less tenable if we had conclusive proof that Near Eastern literary or mythological traditions, like those reflected in the Akkadian epics, were already known in thirteenth- century Greece. Such proof has yet to be found. We can, however, be sure that many people from the regions where the epics were read, copied, recited, and performed in the Late Bronze Age either resettled in the Greek world, or visited it in the course of trading enterprises. If they carried their traditions and folk tales with them, and if at this time the poetic and historical traditions on which Homer drew were already taking shape, it would be perverse to argue that they did so in complete isolation from Near Eastern traditions with which they shared a number of similar features and which were then known in the Greek world.
There are, furthermore, a number of specific points of comparison between Homeric and Near Eastern tradition which seem to go beyond mere superficial or commonplace parallels. In Book 5 of the Iliad Diomedes maltreats the goddess Aphrodite, and the goddess complains of this to her parents Zeus and Dione. But her father is not at all sympathetic, and in fact gently rebukes her for making the complaint. We are reminded of Gilgamesh's maltreatment of the goddess Ishtar (Aphrodite's Near Eastern equivalent). Just as Aphrodite had done, Ishtar complains to her parents Anu and Antu of Gilgamesh's behaviour. For doing so she too is rebuked by her father. Professor Burkert comments that the two episodes parallel each other in structure, narrative form, and ethos to a remarkable degree.1'
In Book 4 of the Odyssey, Penelope learns of her son Telemachos' journey to find news of Odysseus, and the suitors' plot to kill him on his return. In great anxiety, she prays to Athene to keep him safe. In the Gilgamesh epic, the goddess Ninsun learns of her son's dangerous journey to fight the giant Humbaba, and she too prays for his safety. Of course there is nothing surprising about a mother praying for a son, especially when she perceives him to be in great danger. But a comparison of the two episodes takes us beyond this mere commonplace. After lamenting her son's plight, Penelope bathes and puts on clean linen, then filling a basket with sacred barley, she goes to the upper storey of the palace, and makes supplication to Athene to keep her son safe. When Gilgamesh goes off to fight Humbaba, his mother Ninsun enters her chamber, she puts on a garment and other adornments, then taking a special herb, she goes upstairs to the roof of the palace, and makes supplication to the Sun God Shamash for her son's safety.10 Burkert remarks that what elevates this comparison from the commonplace is the fact that here narrative content, structure, and sequence are virtually identical.
We might also take a little further the comparison between Homer's Circe and Siduri of the Gilgamesh epic. Each attempts to persuade the hero to abandon his mission—in Gilgamesh's case the quest for Utnapishtim, in Odysseus' the completion of his journey home—and neither succeeds. Yet there are dual, apparently contrasting aspects of the roles which the temptresses play. Gilgamesh prevails on Siduri, who lives on the edge of the sea and knows its ways, to give him directions which will lead him across the waters to Utnapishtim. Odysseus too entreats Circe to provide directions for his homeward journey; she advises him that to reach his final destination he must first visit the house of Persephone and Hades, and there seek counsel from the spirit of the seer Teiresias, In both cases the dangers of the journey ahead are highlighted. Gilgamesh is warned thus: 'There has never been a ferry of any kind, Gilgamesh, and nobody from time immemorial has crossed the sea (to the realm of Utnapishtim).'" Odysseus has similar apprehensions: 'O Circe, who will be the guide for this journey? Never yet has anyone reached by black ship the realm of Hades.'12 But Circe reassures him. Like Siduri, she is knowledgeable in the ways of the sea. In both cases, the temptresses are not merely obstacles put in the hero's way. They play essential roles in the forward movement of the journey. For the directions they give are critical to the attainment of the hero's goal. In this case too Mesopotamian and Homeric tradition closely parallel each other in concept, structure, and detail.
Cultural Transmission
Near Eastern influence on Homer was by no means confined to the sphere of literary tradition. On a broader level, elements of Hittite and other Near Eastern ritual practices occasionally surface in the Homeric epics. We have already referred to the close parallel between the procedures followed by Odysseus in summoning up the dead at the beginning of Book 11 of the Odyssey and the Hittite chthonic ritual in which the deities of the netherworld were summoned from their infernal abode (Chapter 10). One further example may suffice. In Book 23 of the Iliad (233-61), Homer describes the funeral rites of the Greek hero Patroklos. His body is disposed of by cremation. This has occasioned some surprise, since inhumation was the regular Greek practice in the Bronze Age, the period in which the Trojan War is set.13 What Patroklos' burial rites do recall are the procedures laid down for the disposal of the remains of Hittite kings, as described in Chapter 10. In both cases the deceased's body is consumed upon a funeral pyre; the pyre's smouldering embers are quenched with wine before sifting through them for the bones of the deceased; the bones are immersed in a vessel of oil and then wrapped in fine linen. To be sure, there are also differences between the Hittite and Homeric burial procedures. But the features which they share strongly suggest that they are in some way connected.14 The nature of this connection, and how it came about, remains a matter for speculation. We can but note how remarkable it is that a peculiarly Hittite royal burial practice which as far as we know did not outlive the Bronze Age and was unlikely to have been otherwise preserved in a Greek context should strike such a familiar chord in Homeric epic centuries after its last attestation in the Hittite texts.
Scholars like Walter Burkert and Martin West present at considerable length the case for strong Near Eastern influence on Greek culture. But they tend to focus on a later period of cultural transmission, during the so-called orientalizing period (mid-eighth to mid- seventh century) when itinerant craftsmen and artists from the Near East may once again have brought to the Greek world a range of manual and intellectual skills, including the Semitic art of writing, and a range of literary and religious traditions. On the other hand West concedes that the orientalizing period seems to fall too late to be connected with any major reshaping of Homeric epic. It may well be that much of what Homeric tradition may have owed to Near Eastern influence was already known and was being used in the Mycenaean period when the traditions incorporated in Homeric epic were beginning to evolve. So too elements of the Kumarbi epic cycle may already have been known in the Greek world some centuries before their reappearance in Hesiod, though a number of scholars have long seen their transmission to the Greek world as a later phenomenon, perhaps due to Phoenician contact with this world.15
This is not to deny that later Near Eastern influences also contributed significantly to the final version of the Homeric poems. There are many features or elements of the poems which are clearly of Iron Age origin. And in many respects they reflect the world of the late eighth or early seventh century, as is clear from archaeological material and from numerous allusions contained within them. Above all the introduction of the alphabet into the Greek world must not merely have brought with it the technology of writing. It also drew the Greeks into the whole world of contemporary Near Eastern written culture. Within this culture the Gilgamesh tradition was still very much alive and being freshly recorded in Assyria, in much the same period as the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In any case, the Homeric poems are now being seen much less as a product of an essentially monocultural environment and much more as the result of complex interactions of a number of factors, many of non-Greek origin.
To what extent, then, are we able to identify the actual building- blocks of the Homeric poems? What can we say is distinctively Greek about them? What is distinctively non-Greek? And where are Greek and non-Greek elements so tightly interwoven that they simply cannot be disentangled? These questions open up very large areas of investigation which we can do no more than touch upon here. And we should do so with some degree of caution.
With regard to the Homeric pantheon Martin West, one of the most vigorous proponents of extensive Near Eastern influence on Greek culture, writes thus; 'It is hardly going too far to say that the whole picture of the gods in the Iliad is oriental.' He argues that 'The Homeric and Hesiodic picture of the gods' organization, and of the past struggles by which they achieved it, has so much in common with the picture presented in Babylonian and Ugaritic poetry that it must have been formed under eastern influence. The gods are conceived as a corporation that regularly assembles on Mt Olvmpos, feasts and discusses human affairs. They have a chief Zeus to whom they make representations, and he makes decisions and gives permissions, sends messengers, and tries to control events. But the other gods are often wilful; they argue vigorously with one another, and Zeus on occasion has to threaten or exert physical violence in order to subdue them. This lively poetic scenario does not correspond with actual Greek beliefs about the gods, who were worshipped and invoked at appropriate places and times; two gods might be associated in a cult, but there was no sense of their being members of a larger assembly, nor of gods squabbling and jostling among themselves.'16
There is no doubt that Homer's gods, if not substantially derived from a Near Eastern context, would at least have been fully at home in a Near Eastern environment. But the assumption that they were actually taken over holus-bolus from the Near East may be going too far. In general, we should be cautious about using a line of reasoning which reduced to its simplest proportions seems to work along these lines: Here we have elements which were apparently alien to later Greek society. These elements were a feature of Near Eastern Bronze Age and early Iron Age societies. Therefore their appearance in Homer must be due to Near Eastern influence. To maintain this, we would first have to demonstrate that they were not also some sort of residual feature of pre-Homeric Greek society which survived in Homeric tradition but otherwise disappeared. Homer's divine society may well be a reflection of a widespread set of concepts about how the gods behaved and interacted, as much a part of early Greek and more generally Indo-European tradition as it was of Mesopotamian tradition.
In general terms closer attention to Near Eastern-Homeric text parallels may well give us a good deal more insight than we presently have into the actual processes involved in the composition of the Homeric poems, and a greater understanding of how the poet's compositional skills operated. We could take the view that an eighth- century epic poet was merely the last in a succession of 'Homers' extending back over a number of generations, each of whom contributed to the culling,shaping, and refining of the material, with the last in the series adding the final touches, or bringing the compositions to what West calls their astonishing acme in the eighth and seventh centuries. And Burkert and others may well be right in their claim that this was a period of much more intensive east-west connections and cultural transmission than was the case in the Bronze Age. But this is in no way incompatible with the notion of an earlier stratum of cultural transmission as well.
In any case, the epics drew on a wide range of sources and reflect a wide range of influences over a period extending back well before they reached their final form. The tradition of a Trojan War very possibly has a basis in historical fact. But if so it almost certainly represents a conflation of events, beginning perhaps a century or more before the alleged dates of the war in Greek literature and continuing beyond the end of the Bronze Age. Throughout this period, there was regular commercial and political contact between the Greek and Near Eastern worlds (allowing perhaps for a hiatus of 100 years or so in the eleventh century BC), and undoubtedly a considerable degree of cultural interaction between these worlds.
It has been suggested above that primarily through the agency of large groups of immigrants and traders in Bronze Age Greece, Near Eastern intellectual and cultural traditions became known in this world. It would be remarkable if Near Eastern contacts with and a significant Near Eastern presence in the early Greek world, as attested by both archaeological and written evidence, failed to make any major or lasting impression on Greek civilization. Given that the development of the Homeric epics was a long evolutionary process which incorporated a wide range of historical, social, and cultural elements, we can hardly accept that it could have developed in isolation of social and cultural forces from the East which were impacting on the Greek world during the developmental period of Homeric tradition. Speaking in relation to the impact of the Near East on the development of Greek mythological tradition,Professor Kirk comments thus: 'That Greek myths were infected by Near Eastern themes is of very great importance. Not only because it casts a faint glimmer of light on the development of Greek culture and ideas in their formative stage, but also because it makes it easier to isolate the specifically Hellenic contribution, the particular intellectual and imaginative ingredients that made Greek civilization such a very different phenomenon from those of western Asia and Egypt.'17
As yet we are only imperfectly aware of the specific ways in which social and cultural forces helped shape Homeric tradition. But greater attention to the links across the wine-dark sea may well contribute significantly to Homeric scholarship in the future—as we see increasingly how the poet adapted, moulded, and transformed a vast range of disparate material into a coherent, compelling narrative, giving it a character and status which led to its position as one of the great masterpieces of Greek artistic achievement.
