Helen of Troy

by Jack Lindsay

  So far the analysis of the rhyton went before the recent discovery of a related fresco on the island of Thera. This miniature work seems certainly related to the rhyton and reveals that the event depicted was the siege and sack of a North African city about 1500 BC by an Aegean fleet. The painting, found in fragments, ran along three walls of a room in what has been called the Western House. The room measured some 13 by 12 feet, and about 21 feet of the fresco have been saved. The scenes have been interpreted as telling the tale of two Libyan cities, allied or subject to the Aegean folk, who are threatened by a third Libyan city. They call for aid and the Aegean fleet arrives, destroys the enemy ships, sacks the city, loots its cattle, then visits the two allied cities to announce the victory. It has been estimated that over 90 persons are depicted, and at least 12 warships (of which we have only six, one of them intact). The room was entered from the east, with the fresco running from the northern wall. We see six or seven figures in impressive robes on an egg-shaped hill, praying or perhaps commanding the battle. Below, the bodies of drowned enemy warriors sink in the sea. To the right we see the walled city that has been besieged and sacked. Beautiful women of the city throw themselves off the walls to die; one has already jumped and another follows. The northern frieze shows the Mykenean victors leading away the enemy’s oxen, sheep, and goats.[68]

  Just below this section is one of the room’s two full-size paintings, which shows a fisherman with his catch in his two hands; on the south wall was another fisherman. The eastern frieze is narrower. We see a long winding river, with windswept palm trees along its banks; and high above flies a griffin, half-lion, half-eagle. At the end of the river is a second walled city (covering the south-eastern corner of the room). We see the citadel with its high walls and some single houses on the left. Two figures clad in furs are on the banks of a small river; and rolling hills on the city’s outskirts have trees where a lion chases two stags. Five men stand on the top of the tower, watching the Aegean fleet that heads to the right, while a small boat in the harbour below gets ready to escort the warships. On the south frieze seven ships can be made out, with one well-preserved. Everything aboard is ordered by strict discipline. The oarsmen work with energetic precision; the coxswain at the stern keeps time with his hands or some instrument, while beside him towers the master with the helm in his hands. Behind them is the decorated captain’s-cabin. Men sit under a sort of tent amidships: Mykenean warriors or Libyan mercenaries. Of another ship we see the lionhead sternpost and the bearded master seated in his cabin. The cabins differ from ship to ship in their ornaments — which perhaps represent some sort of coat-of-arms. On the southern frieze the ships move to the right, where stands another walled city. Libyan women and children on the walls of the citadel wave in welcome.

  The owner of the house, who commissioned the painting, may have been the captain in the ship with lionhead sternpost; for in another room is depicted a ship’s cabin with the same distinctive ornaments. The frieze as a whole suggests in its conception the almost contemporary relief of Queen Hatshepsut’s tomb in Egyptian Thebes which represents her Red Sea expedition to Punt for incense. The identification of the setting with Libya is based on several points: the maned sheep, which are still to be found wild in southern Libya; the type of buildings, which suits what is known of Libya at this time; and the crewcut brushlike hair styles, which suggest the small head-symbol on the Phaistos disk from Crete with its yet-undeciphered script. Even if details of the interpretation of the fresco are challenged, the overall meaning is clear. We have here the sort of epical narrative which we surmised from the rhyton. But there is no sign of any Helen-motif.

  There are a few further hints of epical themes in Mykenean art. On another silver vase we see attackers with body-shields and boar’s-tusk helmets in a hilly situation. A vase fragment from Knossos shows a Mykenean archer getting out of a boat and shooting upwards — apparently at men on a wall. Fragments from frescoes of the fourteenth century in the megaron at Mykenai show a warrior falling off a wall while ladies look on from palace windows; and fighting of warriors on foot and in chariots seems to be going on outside a besieged town. On an early Mykenean vase from Cypros ladies in windows frame a chariot, while another vase from Enkomi may depict a naval expedition. At Pylos the palace had a scene of killings that seem connected with the siege of a hill town.[69] On a vase fragment from Tiryns a chariot is preceded by two warriors with raised spears and followed by two marching warriors. Another vase (late thirteenth or early fourteenth century) shows six Mykenean warriors marching out with provision bags on their spears; on the other side the enemy advances with lifted spears to the encounter. Behind the Mykeneans a woman raises her arms in lamentation. There may be here a story of some prophetess or foreboding wife, someone like Kassandra, Eriphyle or Kleopatra (Meleagros’ wife) in later Greek legend. Though such a conjecture cannot be proved, it seems better than the suggestion that the mourner is a captive. Certainly the females with hands to their heads on Mykenean larnakes (funerary vessels) are making a gesture of lamentation of the dead; and the gesture carries on this significance till Geometric times. To mourn thus as men marched out to battle would be surely ill-omened; and so the scene has been taken as a funeral one, with the men going to take part in a processional cortege or in funeral games. On a Geometric vase we see two men peaceably boarding a ship, followed by four men and then by two women who are making the mourning gesture. Again, unless we see here the representation of ship burial, it is hard to link the lamentations with the departure. But in view of the difficulties of interpretation we cannot press for a narrative basis in the scene.[70]

  That epical tales of a simple kind, still entangled with ritual elements, circulated in the Mykenean world is proved by the texts from Ugarit (Ras Shamra) on the coast of North Syria. Here in 1928 was found a site revealing strong links between the Aegean world and Canaan; the heyday was about 1400-1200 BC. At Ugarit there was a meeting point of sea trade with Mesopotamia, bringing together Hittites, Egyptians and the sea people to its west. That from this area a certain penetration into the Aegean also went on is suggested by a place name near Epidauros, Sapyselaton, which seems clearly Ugaritic: Sapys was the Ugaritic sun-goddess (elat); the form of the name with p (instead of the m as in the Akkadian Shamash) is Northwest Semitic, as is also the gender (feminine, whereas Shamash is masculine).[71] The Ugarites had a Mountain of the Gods, Saphon, which, like Olympos or Ida, would be set in various localities; in the Old Testament it is at times identified with Jerusalem. (Among the Israelites the heavenly mountain moved from Sinai to Ebal or Gerizim according to the period and the region of Yahweh’s worshippers.) Another link of the Minoan-Mykenean cultures and the West Semites appears in the Greek and Latin taur- for bull; it is linked with Thor, the name given to El, the head of the Ugaritic pantheon. In Ugaritic mythology Baal mated with a heifer, who bore him a bull calf; the ritual basis was doubtless the copulation of a priest with a heifer (see Leviticus xviii 23-4). The Ugaritic craft-god Kothar was called a Cretan, a tribute to the high level of Minoan craftsmanship.[72]

  We have much of the text of a Ugaritic poem, Keret. Keret of Hbr, like Danel (Daniel) in the Ugaritic epic Aqhat and like Abraham in Genesis, is blessed with a special offspring after incubation, sacrifices and the receipt of divine promises. The story told of him has affinities both with that of Helen and Menelaos, and with that of Sarah and Abraham or that of David and Michel. His name, we may note, appears in the Old Testament attached to a brook and again to the eponymous ancestor of the Philistines (Cretans) in Zephaniah; it appears often among the names in Minoan tablets from Hagia Triada. Keret deals mainly with the loss of a wife and the quest of the same woman (or another princess), leading to an expedition and siege.[73]

  It opens with a brief account of how the destined wife has been taken from Keret before she has borne an heir. He reaches El through incubation and begs the god for help in regaining her (or getting another wife who will be fruitful). In the dream El appears
and tells him to carry out a large-scale expedition.

  Let Keret go down from the roof. Prepare food for the city, wheat for the House of Hbr. Bake bread of the fifth, provisions of the sixth month. The host is noble and the army goes forth, a noble army, and there goes forth the host of [the rank-and-file], your army, a great multitude; three hundred myriads, troops without number, soldiers without reckoning.

  Even the solitary man is to close his house and the sick man to take up his bed. ‘Let the newly-wed groom come out to drive his wife to another, his well-beloved to a stranger.’ The host is to gather ‘like locusts taking over the field; like grasshoppers, the corners of the desert’. They are to march off and on the seventh day reach Great Odom, where they will occupy the towns, ‘invest the cities, capture the man gathering wood in the fields, the woman picking straw on the threshing-floor, capture the woman drawing at the well, filling at the spring’. For six days, ‘don’t send your arrows towards the city nor the slingshot of your hands’. At sunrise on the seventh day king Pbl will send messengers to ask Keret: ‘Take silver, even gold, a share of the estate and a permanent slave, a team of three horses, a chariot from the yard of a handmaid’s son. Keret, take peace-offerings in peace. Do not besiege Great Odom and Little Odom. Odom is a gift of El, a present of the Father of Man [the Ugaritic is Adam]. Be distant, King, from my house, go away, Keret, from my court.’ Keret is then to send a message that he wants none of those things: ‘Give my Lady Hurrai, the fairest of your first-born’s family.’

  If this reading is correct, we may conjecture that Pbl’s eldest son has carried off Keret’s wife, whom he is to demand back. However, the line could simply mean that Hurrai is the king’s first-born child, and we are left without any clue as to the reason for Keret marching on Odom. Perhaps, however, El, favouring him, has directed him to the place where a particularly beautiful wife is to be gained. This interpretation is helped by the account of Hurrai which follows: Hurrai ‘whose charm is like Anath’s charm, whose beauty is like Astarte’s beauty, whose brows are lapis lazuli, whose eyes are bows of alabaster. Let her gird me...that I may repose in the view of her whom El granted in my dream, in my vision the Father of Man, that a man may be born to Keret, yes, a lad to the Servant of El.’

  Keret awakens. ‘And it was a dream, the Servant of El awakens, and it was a theophany.’ So he does all he was told to do in the vision, which was both command and prophecy. The phrases are all duly repeated. He arrives at Odom and rejects the king’s offer. After a fragmentary passage, we rind that he has won Hurrai and the marriage is being celebrated in the palace, attended by ‘the assembly of the gods’. El takes a cup of wine and blesses Keret, saying that his wife will bear him seven sons and an eighth child, a daughter. ‘She will bear you the lad Yassib, one who sucks the milk of Asherah, who suckles the breasts of the Virgin [Anath], the wet-nurses [of the Good and Fair Gods].’

  Hurrai bears the children, but Keret fails in some promise to Asherah. He falls ill and is near death; the family mourns, perplexed that a man regarded as El’s son could die. He asks Ilhu, a devoted son, to call the girl Eighth; she apparently tries to cure him but fails. Keret’s weakness has brought dearth and famine on the land. El asks the gods to provide a volunteer who will cure him. None offers. El himself takes charge and cures Keret by magic. Keret returns to his throne, but Yassib bids him vacate it since he neglected his kingly duties through illness. Keret heaps a mighty curse upon him.

  Hurrai does not seem identical with the wife who left Keret; but there are several links with Greek legends. Keret’s grief at the outset may be compared with the account of Menelaos’ desolation in Aischylos’ Agamemnon. The attempt to buy Keret off has its parallel in the Iliad with regard to both Paris and Achilles. The presence of the gods at the marriage reminds us of the bridals of Peleus and Thetis, of Kadmos and Harmonia. It has been suggested that Menelaos was the hero of an early epic on the loss of Helen; he would then be in much the same position as Keret. An early Attic pedestal (before 650 BC) shows him, designated by an inscription, assembling the Achaian princes. The heroes are not differentiated, but Menelaos has more space around him and holds his head at a slightly higher angle than the others. However, in the last resort what is important to us here is not the various analogies we can draw between tales of Hurrai and Helen, of Keret and Menelaos, but the proof that such semi-secular epical narratives did exist within the orbit of the Mykenean world. We noted how the tablets showed Semitic borrowings; and the Mykeneans at Ugarit must have had contacts with all aspects of the cult there.

  Keret is semi-secular; the hero is presented as an earthly king. But he is the son of El, who gives him instructions; and the action of the tale seems to show the stages of the rite of the sacred marriage. Ritual elements appear as the initial Devastation and Massacre in the temple, the wailing of the king-god, the sham fight, and in particular the rage and ecstasy that mark such festivals, eg the Feast of the Tabernacles. Pabil-Malik can be identified with Reshef, the adversary of the divine king; and the symbolic actions would include a procession and a mock combat, which is begun by a palaver, at the entry of the temple. The role of Pabil would no doubt be acted by a priest and that of Hurrai by a priestess. But even if all that is correct, the poem is well on the way to becoming quite secular, with divine intervention but with human action.

  We may note indeed that Ugaritic history in the thirteenth century shows that the kings could have difficulties with their wives, with political repercussions. Thus, King Ammistamru managed to obtain a divorce from his wife, an Amurru princess. (Hittite kings and their agents regulated the marriages and divorces of vassals such as this king.) He had a furious quarrel with another Amurru princess who committed some ‘great sin’ against him and fled to her native land; finally by paying the king of Amurri 1400 shekels he got her back and executed her.

  That siege tales were told is also shown by an Egyptian text of the New Kingdom which concerns a general, Djehuty, of Thutmosis III (of the first half of the fifteenth century). Djehuty knocks out the prince of Joppa with a club. (The prince has come and asked to see some famous club of the pharaoh.) Djehuty gets into the city by a stratagem which seems to include putting a large number of fettered soldiers into baskets, which are carried by other soldiers on poles. The prince’s charioteer is then told to ride into the city and inform the prince’s wife that Djehuty has been captured with his wife and children. ‘Lo, here is their tribute.’ The tribute is the soldiers pretending to be captives. So the gates are opened; and when the carriers are inside they let their comrades loose and the city is taken. This tale then we may rank with that of the Wooden Horse at Troy as showing the motif of a crafty trick for the penetration of a strong city.[74]

  *

  There is yet one more series of documents able to give us hints as to the sort of tales told in the Minoan-Mykenean world which have some bearing on the Helen theme. These are art representations which seem to deal with the abduction of a woman, goddess or heroine; it is however probable that the origin of the theme lies in ritual. A ring from Tiryns, which has been dated late sixteenth or early fifteenth century, shows a scene of departure by boat. On the right is a couple conversing in a sort of rectangular frame (? door); the two vertical lines on the extreme right indicate that they are inside, or in front of, a building. In the centre is a man with right arm lifted, left arm lowered; he faces a woman on a slightly lower level making a similar gesture. They stand to the left of a pair of angled lines, which probably represents the doorway of the building on the extreme right. Finally, on the left is a large boat with mast and sail, and apparently with four oars, and a fish to their left, another fish on the right between two oars. In a small cabin of the boat two persons sit facing one another, making what seem animated gestures; only the upper parts of their bodies are visible. On the right a man turns to the cabin; by him, more to the right, stands a much taller man facing the high pointed prow. The women all wear flounced skirts, while the first man wears a lo
incloth.[75]