At 19:12 29/11/2020, Thomas Yaeger wrote:
[.......]
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.*
[..........................................................]
I'll deal with the Assyrian occupation in a couple of papers further down the
line.
Best, Thomas
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