Greek Magi Learn to Read the Heavenly Writing
How did ancient Greek scholars come to recognize punning in the cuneiform constellation titles as the basis for the astronomical and mythical origins of Aries as the golden-fleeced Ram, Pegasusâ birth near the springs of Ocean, Perseus as the embodiment of the Bull-slayer constellation, who was also âruler of the universe,â and Argo as the bow-less Ship that plied the celestial sea backwards past the Clashing-Rocks?
Over the past six decades scholars have shown that monumental Mesopotamian literary works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish strongly influenced the leitmotifs of the earliest Greek poets. Bona fide clues can be found in the writings of Homerâs younger contemporary, Hesiod, who wrote Theogony (âGenealogy of the Godsâ) at the end of the eighth century BC. The Oxford Classical Dictionary states that Theogony âhas striking parallels in Akkadian and Hittite texts, and seems originally to have come from the Near East.â In his analysis of Near Eastern influences on Hesiodâs Theogony, Peter Walcot comments:
Its closest companions in Greek literature are the Homeric Hymns, but even closer is the picture of Zeus in the Theogony and that of Marduk in Enuma Elish, and it is to Babylonian tradition and the eighth century BC that we should resort if we wish to assess Hesiodâs debt to the Near East. (1966, 129)
The archaeological record supports the possibility for such intellectual contact and indicates that by the second half of the eighth century BCâcontemporaneous with Homer and HesiodâGreeks had established amicable trading communities on the coastal Syrian sites of Al-Mina, Al-Basit, and Tell Sukas. Of particular interest is Al-Mina, where Greeks from the Aegean isle of Euboea had established a thriving two-way trade. Mercantile exchange between Al-Mina and Euboea is intriguing because it indicates friendly relations between coastal Syria, a territory under the political control of Assyria and a place that afforded Hesiod one of the most memorable experiences of his life. It was in Euboea that Hesiod won a handled tripod as a prize for a song he performed at the âgames of wise [king] Amphidamas.â Walcot notes that Euboean Greeks âseem to have been extremely active here [at Al-Mina] during the eighth century [BC], for part of which time the Assyrians were in control of the region. Al-Mina is an obvious place for the Greeks to have acquired a knowledge of Enuma Elish or any other work of Babylonian literature.â
The influence of The Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish on Homer and Hesiod was pertinent to my research because both of these Mesopotamian texts provide numerous instances in which wisdom was conveyed through wordplay and both are standard reference manuals for the elite magi (ummânu) of the Mesopotamian world.
Greek alphabetic writing first appeared in the early eighth century BC, when it was adopted from the seafaring Phoenicians who inhabited the Syrian coast. The Phoenicians had had extensive, intimate contacts with the Greeks since the second millennium BC, with the Old Testament referring to Phoenicia as a âsonâ of Greece (Genesis 10:4; 1 Chronicles 1:7), which may explain why the Greeks came to adopt the Phoenician alphabet. Proof of the Greeksâ keen awareness of Semitic vocabularies is evident in a mere glance at the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, A (Alpha) and B (Beta). Walter Burkert points out that both letters (and the twenty-two subsequent ones) have no meaning in Greek and are instead based on the Phoenician letter A, called âAleph, which means âBull,â and the Phoenician letter B, named Bet, which means âHouse.â Burkert stresses that, âThese are Semitic wordsâbull, house, and so onâwhich have no sense at all in Greek. They were preserved for one particular reason: All teaching of reading and writing began with learning this sequence by heart.⌠Thus, it is clear that the adoption of the Phoenician script by the Greeks was more than the copying of letter forms; it included the transmission of the technique of teaching and learning how to read and write. This presupposes a certain intimacy of contacts.â
Burkert adds:
Akkadian cuneiform side by side with Aramaic, Phoenician, and Greek alphabetic script produces a continuum of written culture in the eighth century BC which stretches from the Euphrates to Italy. Cuneiform tablets are found not only as far as Syria but also on Cyprus and Tarsos, where the Greeks were definitely presentâŚ, which proves that Greek literary practice is ultimately dependent upon Mesopotamia. It is necessary to postulate that Aramaic leather scrolls [which have since rotted from the archaeological record] formed the connecting link. (1992, 29â32)
In other words, ancient Greek poets studied and understood cuneiform and the literary tradition in which it was embedded. If accurate, then it implies that the earliest Greek authors were also privy to the Mesopotamian precepts that accepted the starry sky as a hallowed script that imparted epiphanies via wordplay.
The renowned classical scholar M. L. West is more direct in defining how Mesopotamian literary practices came to appear in the Hellenic world:
But how was this influence transmitted from one poetic tradition to another across the language barrier? ⌠I see no alternative to the assumption of a certain number of bilingual poets, probably easterners who had settled in Greece and learned to compose epics in the Greek manner.
In other instances we seem to detect close relationships between Homeric or Hesiodic passages and other âclassicâ Babylonian texts such as Atraḍasis [i.e., the oldest Flood story] and Enuma Elish. To account for them we must surely postulate poets educated in the Levant who subsequently became Hellenized and practiced in Greece. (2011, 1, 71)
This comment left me astonished. Here was one of the most respected classical scholars of our day saying that Babylonian or Assyrian magi must have had direct contact with their Greek counterparts, learned their language, and disclosed their literary traditions to them.
I mentally sifted through the remarkable implications. If Homer and Hesiod were recycling themes from Enuma Elish into Greek epic poetry, then they were likely to be familiar with the Babylonian-Assyrian conception of the starry sky as Heavenly-Text that revealed their stories through constellation-writing wordplay. Bilingual Hellenic scholars familiar with the style of punning found in Enuma Elish tablet VII and other works of literature could begin to make their own discoveries about numinous incidents that had once taken place on earth. A Hellenic interpretation of this celestial code could have produced accounts of a flying, golden-fleeced Ram; a Flying-Horse constellation named Pegasus that simultaneously sprang forth from Medusaâs severed head near the streams of the god Ocean; and a Ship constellation that sailed through the sky backwards, had its bow cut off, and passed through the terrifying Clashing-Rocks on its journey through the celestial Sea.
But just how did Mesopotamian scholars come into intimate contact with their counterparts from Greece? Amazingly, that answer can be found enciphered in the name of the father of Greek epic poetry himself: Homer.
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Soon after grad school I had become fascinated by a phenomenon practiced throughout the ancient world, one that would have led to extended contact between Greek and Mesopotamian scholars. Highly literate Mesopotamian magi (ummânus) were often sent as ambassadors to political allies; and such magi were also conscripted into the service of foreign monarchies that had seized political control of their nationâwhere they served as hostaged magi.
Some of the best examples of this custom are found in the Bible. One scholar with astrological skills who went willingly to serve a foreign ally is seen in the Book of Numbers, Chapters 22â24. In that passage the Babylonian diviner Balaam heeds the call of the king of Moab. We can assume that at least one of Balaamâs skillsets was astrology, as he reports of a portentous star in verse 24:17: âa star will come out of Jacobâ to crush the enemies encountered by the Israelites.
The Old Testamentâs Book of Daniel (1:1â6) tells how this young Jewish prophet and three of his countrymen were forced to serve the conquering Chaldean king, Nebuchadnezzar II (604â562 BC). The passage reports that Nebuchadnezzar ordered his chief court official to
bring in some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobilityâyoung men ⌠showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the kingâs palace. He was to teach them the language and literature of the Chaldeans [i.e., Babylonians]. ⌠They were to be trained for three years, and after that they were to enter the kingâs service.
Here we have four Jewish neophytes being conscripted into the services of the Babylonian king. The language they were to learn was Akkadian (i.e., Babylonian and Assyrian) cuneiform, and surely consisted of the lexical commentaries that listed equivalences between Sumerian words, their logograms, and their Akkadian meaning, as well as the âliteratureâ (sÄper) that included works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish. In verse 5:11 the Babylonian queen confirms that Daniel had become an expert in the Babylonian magical arts: âKing Nebuchadnezzar your fatherâyour father the king, I sayâappointed him [Daniel] chief of the magicians, enchanters, astrologers, and diviners.â
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Itâs clear there were abundant instances of direct amicable contact between Assyrians and Greeksâespecially at the Syrian site of Al-Mina, which was under Assyrian control during the advent of Greek writing. Yet adversarial encounters between them are also recorded. The historic record indicates that around 743 BC Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III forcibly gained control of Syria and Cyprus. Shortly thereafter, an Assyrian officer reports a maritime raid by Ionians (Greeks) off the Phoenician coast. Bradley Parker writes:
The text does not actually tell us very much about the Ionians themselves except that they were evidently a small band of pirates who conducted raids, not with the explicit intention of annexing any part of the Phoenician coast, but rather for plunder. They had conducted a series of raids on the coast of what is today Lebanon, and seem to have had a substantial enough force to successfully attack and loot coastal towns. But they had neither the political will nor the military force to take on the Assyrian army when it arrived. The knowledge of exactly who these raiders were, and the fact that this relatively minor incident was being reported directly to the king, implies that this was not the first time [the Assyrian governing official] Qurdi-AĹĄĹĄur-lamur had had trouble with Ionian pirates.
One valuable form of plunder was the taking of slaves as booty, a common practice in ancient Greece, and one attested in the writings of Homer and Hesiod in the noun dmĹs (âslave taken in warâ). The Jewish prophet Ezekiel 27:13 bemoans the slave-trade between Greece and Phoenicia, and Joel 4:4â8 recounts how Phoenicians had taken Jewish slaves and sold them to Greeks. Homer twice describes sea-going Phoenician slave traders interacting with Greeks in his Odyssey. Moreover, the Homeric Hymns recount how the god Dionysus, while walking the beach in human form, was taken by pirates as booty to be sold for a handsome ransom.
While reflecting on Parkerâs description of Greek pirates seeking booty in Assyrian-ruled territory alongside the lucrative Phoenician-Greek slave trade reported in the Bible, the pieces of this riddle suddenly seemed to fit together.
âHomer,â I whispered to myself.
It is not known if there was a single epic poet named Homer. West summarizes one viewpoint held by a consensus of Classical scholars: âThere was no original Homer, the Homeridai were not named after a person, but not knowing any better, they invented a Homer as their ancestor or founder.â
In the second century BC, Zenodotus of Mallos contended that Homer was a Chaldean (i.e., Babylonian). Three-hundred years later, in A True Story, the second-century Syrian satirist Lucian (circa AD 125â180) holds a mock interview with Homer, asking the father of Greek poetry where he came from. Homerâs jaw-dropping retort follows:
As a matter of fact, I am a Babylonian, and among my fellow-countrymen my name was not HomÄr but Tigranes. Later on, when I was a hostage (homÄr) among the Greeks, I changed my name.
Whether Homer was an actual person or not, here Lucian revealed his awareness that the name HomÄr is the Greek word, hostage, and that the legendary poet acquired that name because he had been a Babylonian magos that was taken as a hostage by the Greeks.
If âHomerâ referred to a Babylonian astrologer-magician, then he would have known that the starry sky depicted Heavenly Writing of the astral gods and that puns encrypted in the hallowed text were a source of revelation. Moreover, if his experiences resembled those of Daniel, then the first thing a Babylonian hostage would have had to learn was the Greek language and script. Once fluent in Greek, HomÄr (Hostage) would then be able to transcribe cuneiform constellation-writing puns into stories that we today know as Greek mythology.
The comments of classical scholar George Dimock suggest this was so:
The sixth-century [BC] Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo and the scholiast on Pindar Nemeans 2.1 on the Homeridae provide attractive evidence that Homer founded a clan or guild on the island of Chios which possessed written texts and continued to foster their honored ancestorâs reputation after his death.
This explained how and why Greek scholars transfigured the Mesopotamian Hired-Worker into the Greek flying, golden-fleeced Ram; how the Mesopotamian Field morphed into a Flying-Horse named Pegasus, born near the streams of the god Ocean; how Ocean came to be conceptualized as a River that circled the earth; and how the truncated Argo came to simultaneously lose its bow in astronomy and its stern-ornament in religious mythology while passing through the Clashing-Rocks.
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One final piece of data illuminated how cuneiform wordplays encrypted in the Mesopotamian constellations could come to be recorded as history in Greek mythological literature. Walter Burkert, an expert in tracing aspects of Near Eastern culture into the Hellenic world, has remarked on the frustrating phenomenon that occurs whenever Akkadian words are adopted into the Greek language:
Greek language ⌠absolutely rejects the use of unadapted foreign words; they are accepted only in perfectly assimilated form as to phonetics and inflexion. Thus there can be no method to discover borrowed words: They imitate and go into hiding, adapting themselves to the roots and suffixes of native Greek. (1992, 35)
What Burkert was getting at is that when Semitic (Akkadian, Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, Arabic, etc.) words were borrowed into Greek, they typically retained their consonantal root but were then altered to suit the phonetic rules of the Greek language, thereby losing their original Semitic appearance. As an example, he cites the Greek unit of weight, mina. The Akkadian form of this word, manĂť, appears in Greek as mnea or mna. Thus, the Akkadian consonantal root m-n-â was refitted with Hellenic vowels to suit the Greek language: mnea, mna.
As I perused Burkertâs published work (he is a friend of BYU professor Paul Hoskisson, who taught me Akkadian), I noticed another crucial cuneiform word that had possibly reemerged in the Greek language. The cuneiform logogram that preceded every star, constellation, and planet in Mesopotamian astronomical annals was MUL (star). And cuneiform grammatical textsâwhich were studied by both Mesopotamian magi and their Greek neophytesâunequivocally state that MUL also stood for the word ĹĄiášru (âtext, document, inscriptionâ). I found this remarkable because ĹĄiášru renders the consonantal root spelling, s-t-r, which after being reoutfitted with vowels to suit the grammatical rules of Greek, renders historia (âhistoryâ)âimplying that this Hellenic word may have been a Mesopotamian loanword. Thus, one form of historia/history could be MUL (star, constellation)âwhich included lumÄĹĄi-writing wordplays embedded in the constellation images and titles. This would explain why characters, props, and fantastical incidents encrypted in the Heavenly Writing of the Greek stars were reported as factual events.
This elucidated another perplexing fact from Mesopotamian history, one that had always baffled me. In the year 281 BC a Babylonian magos named Berossus wrote a work, called Babyloniaca in the Greek language, that had provided a history of Babylonian origins since the beginning of timeâa history that even included a rendition of the Mesopotamian Flood story. I had wondered why a Babylonian astrologer would be selected to write an anthology of mythical events that were regarded as âhistoryâ by his countrymen. The answer was now obvious. Because he was a magos, Berossus would know how to decode and chronicle the immortal events that had taken place in Babylonia because they were encapsulated as pictures and puns in the constellation-godsâ images and titles.
Berossusâ idea of history was the product of the Babylonian mental map. I suddenly realized that because the astral sky was conceptualized as divine âwriting,â a Babylonian astrologer would be the perfect chronicler of the stories encoded in this pun-based text, which were then translated into writing as history. This, I presumed, was the template for Greek and Mesopotamian religious mythology.
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Once a cadre of elite, bilingual (cuneiform-Greek) Hellenic magi had been indoctrinated with the belief that the starry sky was a sacred scripture imbued with divine wisdom encrypted as wordplay, it was possible for them to decipher and compose their own independent record of the past. The stellar images and concealed puns that comprised each tableau were then woven into a storyline that was transcribed as a written history of the deities, their divine accessories, and magical feats we today regard as classical Greek mythology.
What Iâve exposed and presented thus far was, in truth, not all that difficult to discover. So how did the remarkable linguists and archaeologists of the modern era come to overlook this cipher?
I found the answer to that question in a debate that raged a century ago.