Revolt in Athens in the late Seventh Century BCE (A letter to SemprePhi)

At 19:12 29/11/2020, Thomas Yaeger wrote:

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Hi. I didn't mean to do any work on the DoP [Death of Pan] today, but it was a quiet Sunday, and I decided in the morning to explore expanding the content headings into sections. This is a much more abstract discussion than in the earlier books, but that is how imagined it would be. So I need a lot of references to existing articles and chapters, enabling readers to have access to real detail. The article 'An Appetite for Knowledge' will be the basis of this, but much expanded.

So far I've argued that a great deal of intellectual and philosophical input to Greek civilization comes from Mesopotamia and Egypt, which is the case. But I've been arguing in terms of a sixth century BCE input, via Pythagoras, just to open the door to an acceptance of the possibility of an east-west transmission. Plato's determination to get hold of the three volumes concerning Pythagorean doctrine offered for sale by Philolaus, tells us that he understood that they contained information useful for the understanding of cult doctrine in Greece.Something had been lost along the way.

Martin Bernal argued, on the basis of comparisons of Egyptian and Greek words, that the Greek vocabulary was heavily indebted to Egyptian, and that the borrowings probably dated back to the mid-2nd millennium, when there were major population movements from Egypt and North Africa. Some of those ended up in the Peloponnese and in Anatolia. I think that he is right about that line of transmission.

But there is a third route of transmission. After the second millennium, but before Pythagoras. I mentioned it in a chapter which didn't make it into SHB for one reason and another, but which has since been published. There is an obscure quote preserved in Eusebius, which says that the Assyrian king Sennacherib captured Athens. This would have been around 701-700 BCE. Any classicist reading that will find it deeply shocking. Generally I try not to mention it.

[……………] This story is [likely to be] true because it explains a peculiarity in Sennacherib's campaign records - half of them are missing from the archives in Assyria. The quotation goes on to mention that Sennacherib built a temple in Athens, which he filled with brazen statues, and that his exploits were recorded in cuneiform on the statues. Now we know why they were missing.

It takes a while to build a temple, and to fill it with brazen statues, so Sennacherib and his troops were there for a while.

I sent the completed chapter to Simo Parpola, and asked if he had anything else to add to the pot. He replied *the same day* with an article he'd contributed to a volume of conference proceedings in 2004, in which he was able to trace the westward expansion of the Assyrians across Anatolia, from their records, all the way to Ionia, which of course was part of greater Greece at this time. They were always aiming for Greece. He didn't know they made the mainland. But they did.

How long were the Assyrians in Athens, and in Attica? I guessed five years or so. But I started to look for some kind of end point to  the Assyrian occupation. I could find nothing.  Parpola had pointed out in his article that a number of features of Greek political and social organisation looked like borrowings from Assyrian organisation, such as naming eponyms for each year, and the institution of Archons. So I looked further, and found an interesting account of a tyrants revolt in 632 BCE (revolt of Cilon). The Greeks recorded tyrants often with very little detail. They were tyrants if they opposed the established authorities. The detail we have is that conspirators were hunted down by the Archons and killed (their grave site has been excavated, and it isn't pretty - the skeletons are in manacles and their mouths have been stopped up with stones).

The date is significant. The last important king of Assyria was Ashurbanipal, who disappears entirely from the record in 632-1 BCE (the empire staggered on till about 609). Possibly as the result of a palace revolt. We don't know. But this would be the right time to rise up  against a hated occupying force.

If the revolt and the collapse of the Assyrian empire are connected, this would mean that the Assyrians were in Athens  for  nearly *seventy  years.*

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I'll deal with the Assyrian occupation in a couple of papers further down the line.
 
Best, Thomas

Orientalism and the Post-Enlightenment Agenda (Writing to Katherine Blouin)

[In 2018 I had some brief conversation with Dr. Katherine Blouin via Twitter. Which prompted the following email]. 

 I thought I should tell you about my work, since I am part of the largely disorganised cohort working for a radical change in our understanding of the role of ancient Greece in the development of western civilization.

My initial background is in classics and philosophy. At UCL I also studied Mesopotamia (languages and culture). This study was across three departments - UCL ancient history (text corpus, with Amelie Kuhrt), UCL department of Hebrew (Sumerian, with Mark Geller), and SOAS for Akkadian language (mainly with Andrew George). As a result I left college with a view of the relationship between Greece and Mesopotamia which was quite different from what I was led to believe while I was there.

 I graduated in 1992. I've been writing on the relationship between Mesopotamia and Greece since then. I arrived late to Said's work, since I was initially in thrall to Martin Bernal's thesis in Black Athena (though I did attend Said's series of lectures at UCL in the fall of 1993).

My main interest is in the history of philosophy. The conventional history of philosophy is pretty much a fabrication, The evidence doesn't support what is said about it, and it isn't actually that difficult to detect the fraud. Which led me to consider why the fraud was easily accepted. The answer turned out to be, as Bernal suggested, the post-Enlightenment agenda. The Enlightenment sought to understand everything in terms of common sense explanations, and not much in ancient philosophy conformed to common sense ideas.

So I've been researching and writing, off and on since 1993, about the origins of philosophy, Greek philosophical writing, and the cultural history of the west.

I was also interested in the role of anthropology in our understanding of past modes of thought. In 1993 I wrote a study of Frazer's essay on Plato, in which he argued that the idea of 'Being' was a barren notion, and nothing useful could be said of it. That is not what they thought in antiquity. So his later work was essentially a reframing of the past with one of its most important concepts entirely written out (formally published in 2016).

Hence I wrote The Sacred History of Being, which was finally published in November 2015. The point of this book was to show two things (amongst others): that the concept of Being was of immense importance before Plato, and that modern arguments about the nature of the Divine did not at all resemble ancient arguments, and so we could not easily understand what the ancients were talking about.

So we have a real problem. I've published a couple of volumes since The Sacred History of Being, which largely serve to illuminate how the ancients understood both physical reality and the Divine. Without a grasp of their radically different way of understanding, much of the ancient world is just unintelligible (oracles, omens, sacrifice, extispicy, etc).

These extra volumes serve as the basis for understanding that most ancient divine cult was transcendentalist in nature. Meaning that religious thought already embraced ideas and abstractions which surface in the writings of Plato and others. In Mesopotamia, in Israel, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, etc.

Which brings me to where I am now. I showed in The Sacred History of Being that the Assyrians and Babylonians were capable of abstract thought, and conceived of the Divine as a pure abstraction. They understood the basis of dialectical thought (collection and division) which the Greeks are credited with. They embraced the idea of excellence as the Greeks did, and the concept informed the education of their kings. They understood morality to emerge from the logic of excellence, as the Greeks did. They also conducted public debates on the relative merits of this or that good thing, as the Greeks also did.

 I intend next year to publish a concluding volume in the series which provides the evidence for these Assyrian and Babylonian parallels.

 After that, the jig will be up for the classicists. But I have no expectation that they will take notice of what has happened.

 One of the [key] things they have taken on board from their subject is the pursuit of excellence. They pursue this through what they understand as the rigourousness of the study of their source materials. The context of these materials, and the rest of the world, have relatively no importance for them. So why should they change their views?

Thomas Yaeger, October 18, 2018. [Reply received]