by Oswyn Murray
fights with Kronos (son of Gaia) who cuts off his genitals and throws them away: from them are born various deities. Kronos swallows his own children as they are born;
swallows a stone (?) and finally brings forth the Weather-god chief deity of Hurrians and Hittites,
by a trick instead of Zeus he swallows a stone. He vomits up his offspring. Zeus (lord of thunderbolts) chief deity of the Greeks
who overthrows Kumarbi. Kumarbi plots against the
overthrows Kronos. Kronos uses his brothers the
Weather-god by means of a giant which he begets on a stone.
Titans to wage war on Zeus.
An exact correspondence between such myths is not to be expected; between these two written texts we must suppose a chain of oral transmission of unknown extent in time and space, involving an unknown number of intermediary versions, and conducted across a series of language barriers by men who belonged to wholly different cultures, and who were probably not professional priests interested in the details of ritual and belief. Still the similarity in general structure and the common use of specific (and bizarre) motifs are obvious. The parallelism indeed goes deeper: Kumarbi and Kronos are both curiously amorphous deities, and each is identified elsewhere with the Phoenician god El; in both cases it is only the last god in the succession myth who has any importance in cult. This reflects the similar function of each myth, which is to create relationships between existing divinities, both internally, and externally to other systems of belief such as the Babylonian; this is achieved by specific connections and equivalences (the Babylonian Anu as the first god = Ouranos), and by more general similarities. The relation between Hesiod and the Hurrian myth cannot be explained by the transmission of a series of folk-tale motifs, for it is the conceptual framework central to both religious systems which is the same.
Eastern influence on the basic structure of Hesiod’s theogonic system is clear; but the date at which this influence entered Greek myth is controversial, and concerns ultimately the extent to which Hesiod can be seen as an original and independent thinker. A number of scholars, for instance G. S. Kirk, would hold that the Greek succession myth is considerably older than Hesiod, and must therefore go back to the period of Mycenean contact with the east; it survived the Dark Age within or alongside the Homeric epic tradition. But there are problems in this view. There is no evidence for a specific vocabulary in Hesiod independent of Homeric epic, such as we might expect if there had been a well-established theogonic tradition with its own formulaic language. Moreover there is no sign in the Homeric poems of the eastern elements so prominent in Hesiod; it seems likely that these stories were unknown to the epic tradition. A number of eastern elements undoubtedly came early into Greek religion, largely from Asia Minor: Apollo, Artemis, Hephaistos and Aphrodite all have eastern analogues or connections. But these general relationships are quite different from the detailed and specific connections between Hesiod and Hurrian mythology: the discontinuity in the Dark Age makes it very unlikely that such correspondences could survive in the absence of a specific linguistic context or a specific priesthood and ritual.
The alternative is to accept Hesiod as the originator of theogonic poetry in Greece: such an innovation helps greatly to explain both his dependence on Homeric vocabulary and techniques, and his awkwardness in deploying them – he is stretching the traditional epic style beyond its limits. It would not be surprising if versions of eastern myth, prevalent in the Hurrian area around Al Mina and known to the Phoenicians, should appear in Greece first in central Boeotia, scarcely a day’s journey from the cities of Euboea; and Hesiod, as an immigrant from an area of epic tradition, was ideally suited to hear the call of the Muses, and undertake the task of relating the old disorder of the Greek gods to the newly discovered divine systems of the east, with all the zeal of an Ezra establishing the canon of the Pentateuch. The figure of Hesiod is in fact more at home in the thought world of the near east; it is not surprising that he describes his call to poetry in terms very similar to those used by the Hebrew prophet Amos about a century earlier (Amos 7, 14–16).
Having brought order to the world of the gods, in the Works and Days Hesiod attempted to do the same for men; here too, although the detailed advice is wholly Greek, the general scheme of the poem recalls the collections of wisdom literature known in the east, and some of the central myths have eastern analogues. In explaining the reasons for man’s hard life on earth, Hesiod tells two stories. The first is also found in a slightly different form in the Theogony. Zeus, angry with Prometheus for stealing fire and giving it to man, had the gods create another gift, a woman of great beauty and evil, from whom womankind is descended. In the Theogony she is herself enough to explain man’s woeful lot; but in the second version (where she is called Pandora – ‘all-gift’) she opens a jar from which pains and evils escape, leaving only hope caught within the lid (Theogony 570–593; Works and Days 53–105). The myth contains a number of elements which are not easy to explain – for instance, why the double motif of evil woman and jar of evils, and what is hope doing in the jar? But the general meaning of the story is clear: it attributes the origin of evils in the world to woman, a claim which may relate to a particular folktale motif, whose most famous example is the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden: like the Hebrew version, Hesiod laid emphasis on the relation between knowledge and the coming of evil, through the role of the brothers Prometheus (foreknowledge) and Epimetheus (after-knowledge).
Hesiod’s second myth describes how five races of men have inhabited the earth, the ages of gold, silver, bronze, heroes, and iron. The general conception is of deterioration until the present age of iron, though not all elements fit this pattern completely, and only the first age and the last two are constructed with any great care. This account of the early history of mankind contains one major oddity – the inclusion of a non-metallic age, which is clearly designed to accommodate the specifically Greek concept of the heroic past portrayed in epic. Without this addition, the myth has interesting eastern analogues. The great Sanskrit religious epic, the Mahābhārata, operates with a conception of four ages (yuga) symbolized by the four throws of the dice, which are both numerically and ethically in descending order; and there is a middle Persian Avestan story of the dream of Zoroaster in which the four ages are characterized by the four metals, gold, silver, steel and iron, but neither of these texts is easy to date, and in their present form they are at least a millennium later than Hesiod; however the book of Daniel of the second century BC contains in the dream of Nebuchadnezzar a similar succession of kingdoms symbolized by gold, silver, bronze, and iron. In all these different versions the theme of degeneration is central; Hesiod’s story seems to be the earliest witness of a tradition which has influenced a number of different cultures as well as entering Christian thought, and which is again probably Mesopotamian in origin.
Despite its debt to external models, Hesiod’s thought has its own coherence and in a Greek context its own momentum. We have seen how his social preoccupations led him to relate the divine world to the world of man by creating genealogies deriving abstract political concepts from the gods; this mode of thought has no parallel in the east and heralds a new stage in civic consciousness. In two other respects the example of Hesiod had important implications for the development of Greek thought. The unusual separation of myth from ritual in the Greek world cannot be wholly attributed to him, for it is also present in Homer; but the foreign origins of so much of his theogonic system must have created a deep split between myth and ritual which goes far to explaining their subsequent independent development. Secondly Hesiod founded a Greek tradition of theogonic speculation concerning the place of the gods in the universe, and in particular their role in the creation of the world; again his ideas have eastern parallels in the Babylonian creation myth and in the book of Genesis (see especially Theogony 116–133 and 736–745). This tradition had a wide influence: it is reflected for instance in the Spartan poet Alkman, in the belief
s of the mystical Orphic sect (who traced their origins to the legendary singer Orpheus) and in the prose work on the origin of the world by Pherekydes of Syros (perhaps sixth century BC). Such cosmological speculation provided the base from which arose the Ionian theories about the ultimate physical composition of the universe, which were the origins of scientific thought. It was in this context that F. M. Cornford once quoted the Hebrew proverb, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge’.
Homer describes a society without writing: it is referred to obscurely and only once, when Proetus sent Bellerophon to the king of Lycia, ‘with bitter tokens, scratching in a folded tablet many deadly things; …. when he received this evil token’, the king sought to kill Bellerophon (Iliad 6.166ff). The poet’s use here of various words which were later connected with writing suggests that he may well have known the technique himself, but regarded it as ‘unheroic’. The Greeks were clear that their own system in fact derived from Phoenicia: the old word for letters was ‘Phoenician objects’ (phoinikeia), and an inscription from Crete has produced also a verb poinikazein ‘to write’, and a title poinikastas for a hereditary scribe. Herodotus indeed tells how the Phoenicians under Kadmos settled in Thebes, and ‘introduced skills into Greece, in particular writing, which I believe did not exist before among the Greeks’ (5.58ff).
Two main principles can be seen behind the writing systems which had evolved in the near east and Egypt. The first is the pictographic principle, in which objects are represented by pictures, which develop through simplification and extension into ideograms capable also of standing for particular concepts and even sounds; the second, more abstract principle involves the systematic representation of syllables rather than words by signs. In practice most early scripts combine these two principles in varying degrees. The Semitic scripts which evolved during the second millennium BC must to some extent derive from these earlier methods, though quite how is not yet clear. But essentially the writing system which was perfected in Phoenicia is a simplification of the syllabic principle, in which, instead of recording all consonant-vowel combinations, the vowel-changes (and therefore most of the vowels) are ignored; the result is a system of writing which records primarily consonants except for initial ‘a’: this has the disadvantage of being considerably more ambiguous than syllabic scripts, but the advantage of requiring only a very small number of signs. Thus the Phoenician alphabet has 22 letters, whereas the Accadian syllabary for instance used 285 signs, Mycenean Linear ? over eighty, and even the later Cypriot Greek syllabary had 56. The elimination of vowels is not in fact a serious drawback in Semitic languages, where they serve mainly to modify consonantal stems; and the consequences of the enormous gain in simplicity are brought out by the Jewish writer Josephus, who says ‘among the nations in touch with the Greeks it was the Phoenicians who made the largest use of writing, both for the ordinary business of life and for the recording of public affairs’ (Against Apion 1.28). But though literacy was probably more widespread in Phoenicia than in earlier cultures, it is not in fact clear whether writing had emerged fully from the status of a craft or skill possessed by a class of scribes. The biblical evidence of course refers to a culture more backward than the cities of the coast, but it suggests the continued use of professional scribes alongside a literate aristocracy.
The relationship between the Greek and Phoenician writing systems is very close. The Greek letter shapes are adapted from Phoenician; the order of the two alphabets is essentially the same; and even the names of most of the Greek letters, which have no significance beyond their initial sound (alpha, beta, gamma …), are taken from Phoenician words which have meanings in themselves: aleph means ‘ox’, beth ‘house’, gimel ‘throwing stick’, and so on. The adaptation of Phoenician to Greek is almost mechanical, except in one essential respect: the invention of vowels transformed what can in a certain sense be seen as a simplified syllabic script, into a genuinely alphabetic script, in which all the main speech sounds (vowels and consonants) were for the first time isolated and represented individually. The resulting system has proved so flexible that it is still in use for most modern languages, and can in fact represent adequately all languages which are ‘spoken’ in the normal sense.
The particular modification introduced by the Greeks was thus revolutionary in its consequences, but it shows the same meticulous study of the Phoenician script. For the forms of most of the Greek vowels are derived from Phoenician consonantal or semi-consonantal letters for which Greek had no use, and even their position within the Greek alphabet is the same as in Phoenician. Indeed many of the early names are those of the original Phoenician consonants, and show how the vowels were arrived at by ‘creative misunderstanding’ of their prototypes: the aspirate he in Phoenician becomes short ‘e’ in Greek, with the same name; the second aspirate het becomes in some dialects ‘h’, but in others long ‘e’, or eta; the semi-consonantal yod becomes ‘i’, or iota. It is only the later vowel names which show a clear awareness of the difference between the nature of consonants and vowels: ‘light e’, ‘little o’, ‘big o’, ‘light u’.
From these facts it is already clear that the invention of the Greek alphabet must have taken place under particular conditions. It is a coherent system, embodying one important new development; it must either be the work of a small group, or more probably of a single ‘unknown benefactor of mankind’ (as the German scholar Wilamowitz said). The adaptation from Phoenician is likely to have taken place in a mixed Phoenician-Greek community, or at least in an environment where contact between the two groups was close. And finally, since the same principles lie behind all known local variants of the Greek alphabet, it seems likely that the invention took place in a centre from which diffusion was rapid and easy. It scarcely seems possible to allow that the Greeks were right in thinking that Phoenicians brought the alphabet to a settlement on the mainland of Greece; of other likely areas, Cyprus had its own syllabic system of writing, and is therefore ruled out; Crete satisfies all criteria, except that of diffusion, for it was somewhat isolated from the rest of Greece. The most likely hypothesis is that Greek merchants adopted the skill of writing from Phoenician merchants in a trading post such as Al Mina.
The question of the exact circumstances of transmission is related to other problems. The first datable evidence for the existence of the Greek alphabet comes from pottery of the period 750–700, for instance a Geometric vase from the Athenian potters’ quarter on which has been scratched a hexameter line, and the less regular metrical inscription in the Chalcidian alphabet on an east Greek cup found in a child’s grave on Ischia:
[I am?] the famous drinking cup of Nestor. Whoever drinks from this cup, straightway the desire of Aphrodite of the beautiful garland will seize him.
(Greek Historical Inscriptions no. 1)
This incidentally is a play on a Homeric story, for Nestor’s cup was the legendary cup which ‘another man could scarcely have lifted from the table when it was full, but the old man Nestor raised it easily’ (Iliad 11.636ff). It was probably from these Euboeans on the bay of Naples that the alphabet passed in the early seventh century to the Etruscans, whose letter shapes are related to Chalcidian; under Etruscan and Greek influence writing quickly spread to other parts of Italy – in particular to Rome, and hence to modern Europe.
Other evidence suggests that in the period 750–650 writing became widespread in Greece; the earliest poets whose work was recorded in writing may well have been Hesiod and Archilochos, if not Homer. Lists of magistrates and victors go back to the same period: the Olympic victor list began in 776, the list of Athenian magistrates in 683, and the exact dates of foundation of the Sicilian colonies were apparently recorded from 734 onwards. Written laws were known in the seventh century, for instance those of Zaleukos of Locri (perhaps about 675) and Drakon of Athens (about 625); and there is an extant law from Dreros on Crete from the second half of the century. The comparative study of Phoenician and Greek letter forms also points to the
period 850–700, though with less certainty, because so few Phoenician inscriptions survive.
Despite this agreement in the evidence, there has been some controversy over whether we in fact possess examples of the earliest writing in Greece: for it could be that chance or the use of perishable materials has obscured the existence of a period when literacy was perhaps less widespread. The most serious argument in favour of this hypothesis is the fact that the earliest writing shows a number of different local scripts apparently fully developed: if we suppose (as we must) a common original, this might suggest a subsequent period of independent development before our first evidence. Such a period might also explain more easily the widespread diffusion of writing as soon as it appears, with examples from places as far separated as Athens and Ischia.
Such problems reflect back on the original circumstances of the adoption of writing, for they cease to exist provided we accept the hypothesis of invention and diffusion in a merchant community. Literacy will follow the same trade routes as other eastern artefacts in the mid eighth century, from Al Mina through the islands and mainland Greece, to the far west and the graves on Ischia; its speed of progress, in a world where long distance communication was becoming a problem for the first time, will be measured in decades rather than generations. Moreover the existence of variant local alphabets may well not be evidence for a long period of independent development, but rather a consequence of the fact that the initial transmission from a particular centre was the result of the unskilled initiative of local merchants, who would have quickly introduced a misleading variety into the original invention: this variety will have become fixed in the educational tradition of each area, as soon as writing ceased to be the private notation of an individual and began to be taught formally to a wider group.