Tartessos has often been equated with the metal-rich land of Tarshish mentioned again and again in the Hebrew Bible. Jonah, fleeing from God, set out from Jaffa for Tarshish, which the author of this story clearly understood to be somewhere extremely remote, the furthest one could go across the seas. And Isaiah delivered a fearful prophecy concerning Tyre in which ships coming from Tarshish by way of Kittim (Kition in Cyprus) learn of the destruction of their home city: ‘howl, ye ships of Tarshish, for it is laid waste, so that there is no house, no entering in’.48
IV
To make this system of trade work, the Phoenicians did not, as has been seen, have much use for coins. Far more important to them was their ability to record what they were doing. The merchants were literate and employed a simple, linear script that was easy to learn and rapid to write, the ancestor of most modern alphabets (in the strict sense of the term: a script with approximately one letter for each sound).49 The art of reading and writing had mainly been a priestly craft, for the complex sound combinations in the three Egyptian scripts could be read only by the well-trained; even the syllabic scripts such as Linear B were clumsy, all the more so when imposed on a language like Greek which was not easily divided into simple consonant plus vowel syllables. In Phoenician script, a sign for a house represents ‘b’ because the word for house, bet, begins with a ‘b’. Many, though not all, of the twenty-two Phoenician letters, beginning with ’aleph, the ‘ox’, originated in the same way. The secret of success lay in the total exclusion of vowels, which were introduced only by the Greeks. Mlk could thus represent the word for ‘he rules’ or ‘he ruled’, depending on the vowels, which the attentive reader would have to supply from context. The first known example of this script survives on the coffin of King Ahiram of Byblos, from the tenth century. The important point is not whether the Phoenicians invented the alphabet from scratch (an earlier script used in Sinai may have provided some letters), but the fact that they diffused the alphabet across the Mediterranean, not merely to their settlements in the west, as the Nora stele proves, but to neighbours, the Greeks of Ionia, who converted letters they considered superfluous, such as the guttural stops absent from Greek, into vowel sounds, and subtly redesigned most of the signs.50
What the Phoenicians possessed in the way of literature is a mystery. The Canaanites of Ugarit produced impressive religious poetry not dissimilar to the psalms, and the Carthaginians wrote tracts on agronomy. There is a dismissive tendency to see much that the Phoenicians produced as derivative, and in the fine arts their dependence on Egyptian and Assyrian models is plain, as, for example, in their ivory carvings. This, of course, was what consumers across the Near East and the Mediterranean wanted: wares which carried the stamp not of the profit-hungry Canaanite towns, but of the great imperial civilizations of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates; and the Phoenicians knew how to satisfy that demand for clients as far west as Tartessos and Tuscany. The spread of Phoenician culture across the Mediterranean, as far as southern Spain, effected both through settlements and through trade with indigenous peoples, is important not just because it brought eastern styles so far to the West; this was also the first time that mariners from the East had reached so very far across the sea, ranging a long way beyond the Mycenaean navigators who had crept round from western Greece to southern Italy and Sicily.
Though the Phoenicians intermarried with native peoples, they did not lose their distinctive eastern Mediterranean culture, their identity and identification as ‘Tyrians’ or ‘Canaanites’; nothing demonstrated this more forcibly than the practice of human sacrifice, which they carried with them from the land of Canaan. It was a practice that gave rise to deep abhorrence among biblical and classical authors: the story of the failed sacrifice of Isaac is one among many biblical invectives against child sacrifice. If anything this practice increased in intensity in the new settlements, especially Carthage, Sulcis and Motya. In the tophet at Carthage, which lay to the south of the city and can be visited today, children were offered to Baal for 600 years; in the last 200 years of the city, 20,000 urns were filled with the bones of children (and, occasionally, small animals), making an average of 100 urns a year, bearing in mind that one urn might contain the bones of several children. The tophets were special places of reverence. Very many urns contained the remains of what seem to have been stillborn, premature and naturally aborted infants, and in a society where infant mortality must have been high, many other remains must be those of children who died naturally. The tophets were thus graveyards for children who died prematurely; once adulthood was achieved, burial replaced cremation.51 So, while human sacrifice did occur, as biblical and classical sources insist, it was less common than the vast number of jars containing infants’ charred bones at first sight suggests, increasing in scale when great emergencies threatened, as the supreme way of appeasing the gods. Two Greek historians report that when Carthage was besieged by the tyrant of Syracuse in 310, the city fathers decided that they needed to appease Baal, whose displeasure noble families had incurred by sacrificing child slaves in place of their own firstborn; 500 noble children were then offered to their angry god. A fourth-century stele from the tophet at Carthage portrays a priest in a flat, fez-like headdress and a transparent robe, carrying a child to the place of sacrifice. The practice, described by classical and biblical texts, was to place the living child on the extended arms of the statue of Baal; sacrificial victims then would drop, alive, from the arms down into the burning fiery furnace that raged beneath.52 Child sacrifice was a way of affirming their identity as servants of Baal, Melqart and the Phoenician pantheon and as Tyrians hundreds of years after their forefathers had migrated from Lebanon to North Africa, Sicily and Sardinia. So, while the artistic output of the Phoenicians – and particularly of the Carthaginians – may appear lacking in originality, these were people with an overpowering sense of their identity.
2
The Heirs of Odysseus,
800 BC–550 BC
I
Whether the early Greeks possessed as powerful a sense of identity as the Phoenicians is far from clear. Only when a massive Persian threat appeared to loom from the east, in the sixth century, did the diverse Greek-speakers of the Peloponnese, Attika and the Aegean begin to lay a heavy emphasis on what they had in common; the sense of a Hellenic identity was further strengthened by bitter conflicts with Etruscan and Carthaginian navies in the west.1 They knew themselves as distinct groups of Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians and Arcadians, rather than as Hellenes. There were the Spartans, proud inheritors of the Dorian name, who saw themselves as recent immigrants from the north. There were the Athenians, who insisted they were the unconquered descendants of more ancient Greeks. There were the Ionians, thriving in the new settlements across the Aegean, in Chios, Lesbos and on the Asian coast. The ‘Greeks’ cannot be identified simply as those who took delight in tales of the Greek gods and heroes, which were common currency elsewhere, especially among the Etruscans; nor would the Greeks have wished to recognize as fellow-Greeks all inhabitants of what we now call Greece, since they identified among the population of the islands and coasts strange remnants of earlier peoples, generically called ‘Pelasgians’ or ‘Tyrsenians’; besides, the Greek-speakers were themselves moving outwards from the Aegean and Peloponnese towards Asia Minor, where they would remain for over two and a half millennia, and towards Sicily, Italy and North Africa.
How, when and why this great diaspora was created remains one of the big puzzles about the early Iron Age Mediterranean. What is certain is that it transformed the area, bringing goods and gods, styles and ideas, as well as people, as far west as Spain and as far east as Syria. The Greeks remembered these movements of people and things by way of often complex and contradictory tales of ancient ancestors who spread their seed across the Mediterranean: whole peoples at times reportedly boarded ships to be carried across distances of many hundreds of miles. The legends say more about the time when they were told and diffused than they do about a re
mote past in which these heroes supposedly lived.2 There developed an obsession with identifying distant ancestors, and with linking the names of places and peoples to those ancestors, whose own movements could thus be mapped out by a series of what are now known to be false etymologies and fantastic facts.
For the ancient Greeks, the fall of Troy did not simply result in the collapse of the heroic world of Mycenae and Pylos. It was also remembered as the moment when Greeks set out to wander the Mediterranean and beyond; it was a time when sailors grappled with the dangers of the open seas – animate dangers, in the form of the singing Sirens, the witch Circe, the one-eyed Cyclops. The storm-tossed seas recorded in Homer’s Odyssey and in other tales of heroes returning from Troy (a group of men known as the Nostoi, or ‘returners’) remained places of great uncertainty, whose physical limits were only vaguely described. Poseidon, god of the waves, conceived a great dislike for Odysseus, and constantly sought to dash his frail vessel to pieces in the open sea: ‘all the gods pitied him apart from Poseidon, who was unrelentingly angry’, all the more so when Odysseus killed his monstrous son Polyphemos the Cyclops.3 The aim of the wanderers, whether Odysseus in the west, or Menelaos of Sparta in Libya and Egypt, was, ultimately, to return home. The world beyond was full of lures, islands of lotus-eaters and the cave of Calypso; but there was no substitute for the hearth by which Queen Penelope sat spinning, awaiting her lost husband and fending off her carousing suitors. Classical Greek commentators on Homer had no doubt that they could identify many of the places mentioned in the Odyssey, particularly in the waters around southern Italy and Sicily: the treacherous waters of Scylla and Charybdis eventually became identified with the fast-running Straits of Messina, while the island of Lotus-Eaters seemed to resemble Jerba, off the coast of what is now Tunisia. Kerkyra (Corfu) was assumed to be the realm of King Alkinoös, to whom Odysseus narrated his adventures after he was shipwrecked on the island’s coasts, and was given succour by the king’s beautiful daughter Nausikaä, who saw his nobility through his wretched nakedness.4 Whoever he was, and whenever he lived (perhaps around 700 BC), Homer was never specific in his geography. It would be tempting to treat the Odyssey as a Baedeker’s guide to the Mediterranean for early Greek sailors, and earnest scholars and sailors have tried to retrace Odysseus’ route, on the assumption that the tale of his adventures conceals historical reality.5 But Homer’s seas are conjured out of reports of both the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, possibly with Atlantic waters stirred into the cocktail. For example, the island of Aiaia, on which Circe lived, appears from its name to lie somewhere in the east, towards the dawn. Homer’s near-contemporary, the poet Hesiod, decided instead that Circe must have lived close to Italy. The map of the Mediterranean was infinitely malleable in the hands of the poets.6
The Greeks and their neighbours were aware of the convulsions that had set peoples on the move in the centuries after the fall of Troy, and they personalized the story of the migrations by identifying single persons whose progeny they were. It was a tale that was repeated time and again, culminating in the certain belief of the Romans that they were descended from the Trojan traveller Aeneas, whose own adventures were padded out with experiences copied from the life of Odysseus, most notably a visit to the Underworld. But there were also Etruscans who were convinced they were descended from Odysseus (known as Uliśe, hence the Latin form ‘Ulysses’), or from Aeneas. The Greek and Trojan heroes became part of a Mediterranean body of legend, to which the Greeks lost exclusive copyright. Homer, after all, had told only a small part of the story: a few days during the siege of Troy, in the Iliad; the lengthy travels of a single hero, and those of his son in search of his father, in the Odyssey. There was plenty of opportunity to fill in the gaps, and plenty of oral tradition that could be exploited by Greek writers, from Hesiod in the seventh century to the great dramatists of Athens, with their poignant accounts of the struggle for power in Mycenae following the return home of Agamemnon and his murder in the bath. The clearest evidence of the rapid spread of the Trojan cycle can be found in vase paintings, engraved mirrors and other items that illustrate not just the stories recorded by Homer but other aspects of the Trojan War and its aftermath – these appear as early as the seventh century BC, and scenes specifically from the Odyssey can be identified on Greek pottery from about 600 onwards, including the story of the Sirens and, a little later, the tale of the enchantress Circe.7
An unusual feature of the Odyssey is not just the misty location of the hero’s landfalls, but the off-centre location of his home. Ithaka was on the furthest edges of the Mycenaean world, a jumping-off point, no doubt, for those early Mycenaean traders who ventured into southern Italy. Beyond Ithaka and the other Ionian isles stood Kerkyra; from there a short sea crossing carried ships to southern Italy, giving access to the Spartan colony at Taras, founded in 706 BC very close to the site at Scoglio del Tonno where native south Italians had acquired large quantities of Mycenaean pottery in earlier centuries. After 800, pottery from Corinth and Euboia in the western Aegean began to arrive in Ithaka, and the little town of Aetos, where many Corinthian pots have been found, was apparently a Corinthian staging-post; there was a shrine there at which sailors dedicated items such as amber beads, bronze amulets and golden ornaments from Crete.8 Little survives to prove the presence of a flourishing Mycenaean centre on Ithaka, although Schliemann made every effort to find the palace of Odysseus. But the island was not rocked by revolution at the end of the Bronze Age; old cult centres continued to flourish, and the persistence of the old population and its habits may explain the survival of a richer fund of stories about this returning hero than exist for the other Nostoi. A shrine dedicated to Odysseus at Polis originated in the middle of the eighth century, and in later centuries the Greeks believed this site commemorated the dedication of bronze tripods by Odysseus on that spot when at last he returned to the island; his devotees left their own tripods there, which have been recovered from the soil.9
Homer was aware that the seas beyond the Aegean were being opened up by traders. He praised the daring of pirates and despised the mercenary methods of merchants; he described a Phoenician merchant as ‘a man of deceitful mind, a weasel, who had done a lot of harm to people’, for this was a ‘very devious’ nation of ‘petty criminals’.10 Homer nostalgically recalled days when the ideal form of exchange was not trade between merchants but gifts among noble warriors: ‘he had given Menelaos two silver baths, a pair of tripods, and ten talents of gold’. Homer’s image of a heroic society regulated by traditional codes of conduct led Moses Finley to conjure up a ‘world of Odysseus’ which preceded the commercialized world of the Greek traders.11 But Homer himself was ambivalent. Princes could also be traders. Gods might even pose as merchants. At the start of the Odyssey Athena appeared before Odysseus’ son Telemachos, posing as a princely trader: ‘I call myself Mentes, son of the clever Anchialos, and I rule over the Taphians who are fond of rowing, and I have come here now with a ship and comrades, sailing over the sea that sparkles like wine, to foreign men, to Temese, to get bronze: I am bringing flashing iron.’12 Temese is generally agreed to be a place in southern Italy; but, frankly, it could be anywhere. For the truth is that the Homeric radar barely extended to Italy. Homer occasionally mentioned Sicilians, though most of the references appear in the twenty-fourth book of the Odyssey, which is either a late, spurious, conclusion to the work, or a massively corrupted version of whatever came before.
In one of the most famous passages in the Odyssey, Homer described the encounter between Odysseus’ crew and the Cyclopes. This can be read as an account of the deep fear that the Greeks, for all their veneer of culture, felt when they came into contact with strange and primitive peoples. Homer has no difficulty distinguishing the qualities of civilization from those of wildness. The Cyclopes are ‘arrogant and lawless’, they do not bother to sow the soil but gather what they need; ‘they have no meetings for discussion and no code of law’, living an unsociable life in caves, and pay
ing no attention to their neighbours.13 They are man-eaters, and they have no respect for the gods.14 Above all, they do not know the benefits of commerce: ‘the Cyclopes have not got crimson-cheeked ships, nor are there shipwrights among them, who could work on well-constructed ships, which could accomplish, in reaching every city of men, the many sorts of things for which men cross the sea to each other in ships’.15 By contrast, Athena advised Telemachos to search for news of his father and to ‘equip a ship with twenty rowers, the best one that you can’, characterizing his island as a place where the craft of seamanship was at everyone’s fingertips.16 This was a society in which movement by sea was natural and easy. It was a mobile society which was beginning to make contact with societies elsewhere in the Mediterranean; in combination or competition, the Greeks and the Phoenicians were beginning to generate not just a Renaissance in their own lands of origin, but vibrant city-based societies far from home; and, beyond the lands they themselves settled, their influence on the other peoples of the Mediterranean was profound.
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Page 12
