The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  Each Phoenician city had its own gods, though some of these were commQn to several cities. But it is difficult to be specific about the names of these gods. El, Baal, Adonis and Melkart are in a sense generic terms: El means God; Baal and Adonis mean Lord, and Melkart, king of the city. So Melkart, the ‘king of Tyre’, can easily be called Baal Melkart. The gods are thus enveloped in vague names which do not correspond to any easily recognizable divine function.

  Generally speaking, the Phoenician pantheon is dominated by three figures whose names vary from town to town: a god-king, a mother-goddess or fertility goddess, and a young god who every year must be born, die and be reborn, like vegetation as the seasons change. InSidon, the trinity consisted of Baal, Astarte and Eshmun (assimilated by the Greeks to Asclepios-Aesculapius in Latin); at Byblos it was El, Baalat (a feminine version of Baal) and Adonis, whose myth we know via the Greeks. Adonis was also the name of the river which descended from Lebanon and ran close by the city; a sanctuary marked its source in the mountains. Every year, as the dust-laden winds reached it, its waters suddenly turned red like human blood; this was the signal for Byblos to go into mourning for Adonis. In Tyre, it seems that the functions of the young god who dies and is reborn were assumed by Melkart, the ‘Baal’ of the city, and there was a festival to mark his resurrection.

  Every city probably adapted myths explaining the world and its creation and the destiny of man to suit its own local gods. In the texts of Ugarit, for example, Moth figures at once as death, as the terrible heat of summer, and as the ripening corn. He must be put to death every year, so that nature and humanity may live. Different functions clearly gave birth to different gods: Baal Lebanon was the god of Lebanon; Baal Shamin the lord of heaven; Reshef the god of fire and lightning; Dagon the very ancient god of wheat; Chusor the god who invented iron, and so on.

  This religion was rooted in the ancient world of the Semitic imagination, close to the earth, the mountains and the waters; its simple, cruel rituals were those which a nomadic people had long ago celebrated in the open air. Sacred woods and hills near to the cities served as sanctuaries, though of course there were indoor temples too. The altar was simple, with very little if anything in the way of anthropomorphic images; a pillar, column or raised stone might represent the deity. Silius Italicus has left us a description of a religious service still conducted in the ancient Phoenician manner in Gades during the Roman period: barefoot, shaven-headed priests, dressed in linen, officiated in a bare sanctuary devoid of sacred images, where a perpetual fire burned.

  The religious life of Carthage was at first modelled more or less on that of Tyre. The dominant god was Baal Hamon; the mother-goddess, sister of Astarte or of the Ishtar of Mesopotamia, was soon to become Tanit, whose name, unknown elsewhere, remains a mystery; the young deity, god of the sun or of vegetation, was either Melkart, the Tyrian god, or Eshmun, the healer god, confused with both Apollo and Asclepios, as Melkart was to be confused with Heracles. Fierce competition between the two cults did not result in the elimination of either. Melkart was to be the favourite god of the great Barcidae family, in which the recurring names of Bomilcar and Hamilcar were related to that of the god. The temple of Eshmun on the acropolis of Byrsa, the most beautiful temple in Carthage, was to be the last bastion of the defenders of the city in 146.

  Apart from these dominant gods there were dozens more, Phoenician, Egyptian or Greek. The pantheon of Carthage seems to have been as welcoming as that of Etruria, which is saying something. Later, during the period of difficulties and cultural assimilation, Baal Hamon could easily become Cronos or Saturn, and Tanit Hera or Juno.

  The distinguishing feature of the religion of Carthage was the sensational growth of the cult of Tanit, which took on the appearance of a spiritual revolution. From the fifth century, the goddess came to dominate all other divinities, supplanting the old god, Baal Hamon. Carthage lived now under the ‘sign of Tanit’, which like the goddess was almost entirely confined to the west.7 It consisted of a disc on top of a triangle, with a horizontal line between the two. The whole sign readily suggests a human figure, especially when the horizontal line bends upward at each end like two raised arms. Other symbols associated with Tanit came from the east, in particular the ‘bottle’ and the open hand, the crescent moon joining with the solar disc, which is perhaps a representation of Baal. These are all doubtless allusions to myths which remain a mystery to us.

  But it is not so much these mysteries that create a problem as the obsessive weight of the Carthaginian religion, an enduring, terrifying and imperious religion springing from the depths of a prehistoric past. The human sacrifices of which the Romans often accused their enemies were only too real: the tophet of Salammbd has yielded up thousands of vessels containing the charred bones of children. When Carthage wanted to avert a danger, it sacrificed to its gods the sons of its most notable citizens. This is what happened when Agathocles, in the service of Syracuse, invaded the territory of the city. Certain distinguished citizens having committed the sacrilege of buying children as a substitute for their own, a sacrifice of two hundred children was ordered by way of expiation. Religious fervour increased the number to threehundred. Prisoners of war were sacrificed too, often in their thousands.

  Does the blood of these victims sully the name of Carthage? In fact, all primitive religions have had similar practices. In this respect Carthage was following the Canaanites of Byblos or the Semites of Israel; was not Abraham on the point of sacrificing Isaac? The astonishing thing is that while the Carthaginian economy was so forward-looking, its religious life remained centuries behind, and even its ‘revolutions’ – the cult of Tanit in the fifth century – did not free it in the least from this inhuman and fearsome piety. It is a striking contrast with the openness of the Greeks, who sought harmony between man and the natural world. In Carthage, an intense economic life, which a historian would not hesitate to describe as ‘capitalist’, was not incompatible with a backward-looking religious mentality. What would Max Weber have thought?8

  II The Etruscans: an unsolved mystery

  The Etruscans, the original creators of Italy, were not colonizers in the normal sense of the word. Were they indeed colonizers at all? They pose a fascinating problem, which remains unanswered. In spite of the progress of knowledge we cannot be sure that the mystery will ever be cleared up.

  An unknown language

  The first mystery is the Etruscan language itself, a non-Indo-European language. It can be deciphered – since it uses the Greek alphabet – but it remains incomprehensible. Perhaps one day a bilingual inscription will be found that explains everything. But for this to happen, we should need an inscription with the right kind of text, for such a find has already been made and has proved of no help. On three strips of gold found in 1964 at Pyrgi, the port of the Etruscan city of Caere (present-day Cerveteri) three inscriptions were indeed discovered: one of them, in Punic, corresponded to one of the other two, which were in Etruscan. But the Punic text itself was hard to interpret. It concerned the dedication of a temple to Astarte by the king of Caere in around 500, proving yet again the close relations between the Carthaginians and the Etruscans, and the willingness of the latter to accept foreign gods, Astarte being in this case assimilated to Uni (Juno), one of the Etruscan deities. But as far as the language was concerned, the comparison of these two short inscriptions produced no definite results.

  For the time being, Etruscan has to be deciphered on its own terms, by the juxtaposition of known fragments, using what is called the ‘combinatory’ method – better described as ‘divinatory’ according to Albert Grenier. Nevertheless, the vocabulary of Etruscan is growing year by year: clan (son), sec (daughter), puia (woman), ati (mother), lupu, lupuce (he died), svalce (he lived), avil (years). Zi7, meaning ‘to govern’, gives zile or zilath (magistrate); purth, the chief zilath of a city, corresponds to the Roman praetor; lucumon is the king of a city… About zoo words have been recognized, but they do not yet explain a great
deal. And even if the language were completely deciphered, it is not certain that the historian would be any better off.

  Indeed, the Etruscan texts we possess (almost entirely funerary inscriptions) are too short, too devoid of what one might call serious historical content, for us to able to arrive at any reliable reconstruction of the early history of Tuscany. The only long text known so far is one in the museum of Zagreb; it is written on the twelve wrappings of an Egyptian mummy of the Graeco-Roman period found in Alexandria. There are 1500 words in all. It seems to be a religious calendar, but so far it has defied interpretation. The same is true of two inscriptions of over 100 words, known as the ‘Capua tile’ and the ‘Perugia cippus’. And in any case, even if all these texts could be interpreted, would they give us more than a few vague clues to rituals and beliefs?

  The origins of the Etruscans

  Where did the Etruscans come from? When did they arrive in Italy? These two questions of time and place remain unanswered. Consequently, every historian rises to the challenge, turning advocate or even detective. It would no doubt be wiser to steer clear of such fruitless controversies, but wisdom is not such fun.

  There are moreover three or four undisputed facts:

  i) The language, religion and social life of the Etruscans insistently remind one of the east.

  z) The incontrovertible evidence of the tomb furnishings shows no sign of the brilliant civilization of the Etruscans before the seventh century BC.

  3) Since the Greeks settled as early as 750 in the bay of Naples, it is difficult to envisage Etruscans arriving after them from the south, as they would surely have been stopped in their tracks by the Greeks.

  4) There thus seem to be two chronological limits to the arrival of the Etruscans: the earliest as early as the twelfth century, the latest as late as the sixth.9

  The problem in presenting the conflicting theories is that the discussion has been going on for so long that neither party is willing to do battle any longer. The two basic theories – the eastern and the autochthonous – are thus tending to converge, but still without providing any definite solution to the essential mystery.

  No one today doubts seriously that the Etruscans were of eastern origin, as was claimed by all the Ancients except Diodorus of Sicily. In 1886, two sixth-century funerary inscriptions were found at Kaminia on the island of Lemnos to the south of the Dardanelles; they are written in a non-Greek language (the Athenians only having conquered the island in 510). According to Raymond Bloch, they show ‘word endings, word formations, and even terms’ found in the Tuscan texts. If the language is not Etruscan, it is, as Jacques Heurgon says, ‘at least the language most closely resembling Etruscan to have been found outside Italy’ – in other words, a related language. In addition, objects resembling those in the tombs of Etruria have been unearthed in a necropolis of the eighth or seventh century not far from Kaminia. Etruscan jewellery, which is unusually beautiful and original, displays certain details comparable to Lydian jewels.

  And finally, what we know of Etruscan religion suggests the east. Thus the Etruscans in Italy were always considered experts in divination, including the interpretation of portents and the art of reading the future in the entrails of sacrificial victims. A bronze model of a liver found in Piacenza in 1877 is a kind of teaching aid, with some forty divisions each corresponding to the different zones of the sky and the deities in control of them. Similar models made of terracotta have been discovered in excavations in Mesopotamia or the Hittite Empire. And there are other analogies, though less conclusive ones, since they might be explained by the influence of orientalizing art via the Mediterranean and Greece in the seventh century.

  All this being so, why not simply go back to the well-known text of Herodotus (I, 94)? According to him, the Etruscans were emigrants from Lydia, who had been driven out of their country by persistent famine in the thirteenth century. This grain shortage in Asia Minor recalls the beginnings of the stormy episode of the Peoples of the Sea and the desperate complaints of the Hittite king in c.izoo. These emigrants, goes on Herodotus, ‘made their way down to Smyrna, where they built ships for themselves. They put on board all the equipment they might need and sailed away in search of land and livelihood. Their journey took them past a number of peoples, but eventually they reached the Ombricians [people of Umbria], where they founded settlements and still live to this day.’ This text gives such a strange description of what we take to have been the lamentable adventure of the Peoples of the Sea that one is tempted to complete it as follows: in the course of this interminable exodus, the Etruscans might even have attempted to enter the rich territory of Egypt. They could have been the Tursha whom the pharaoh claimed to have driven out of the Delta, together with other invaders. It seems straightforward enough to move from this name to the names Tyrrhenes or Tyrsenes given them by the Greeks, and Tusci or Etrusci given them by the Romans. But if they set off so early, how and when did they eventually arrive on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea to which they gave their name? Did they stop in other places? No one knows the answer.

  Those who argue for an early date thus find themselves faced with a sizeable problem, since the Etruscans, having supposedly set off in the twelfth century, only reappear five centuries later with the first sumptuous tombs dating from around 650. Perhaps the starting date is impossible, then? Perhaps the Etruscans left Asia Minor as late as the seventh century, as A. Piganiol suggests, and were driven out, not by famine, but by the Cimmerians. That is possible, but does not a priori rule out an earlier exodus. Although Carthage was founded inthe eighth century, refugees from Tyre had been arriving there over the previous two centuries. What is clear is that there was no sudden disruption of life in the Italian peninsula in the seventh century which might signify the abrupt arrival of an alien civilization already at the height of its powers and immediately capable of draining the plains and building the cities of Tuscany.

  In any case, whatever the date of their migration, we can be sure that the oriental origin of the Etruscans connected the first ‘Tuscans’ to an ancient eastern civilization, but that this mingled with an ‘Italic’ civilization which was itself archaic in character. It seems to me impossible that the cultural influence of the east, however strong it was in the seventh century, could have been the sole source of the language, religion and customs which continued to make Etruria so distinctive a presence in Italy.

  This is what has prompted a modified version of the so-called autochthonous theory. According to this view of things, the Etruscans came to Italy at a very ancient date, in the second millennium, as part of a conquering wave of oriental civilization. They were then conquered in their turn by the incoming Indo-European ‘urn people’ of Villanova. Thus for centuries a very deep layer of Mediterranean civilization lay beneath the surface, submerged but not destroyed. At the end of the eighth century, this layer came to the surface again, kindled into life by Greek and Phoenician influence and by the general level of prosperity. Is this narrative any closer to reality than the one just outlined? I wouldn’t bank on it. Not that such revivals are impossible, far from it – and this theory has the advantage of taking on board the oriental origin of the Etruscans, while situating their adventure firmly on the home ground of Italian soil, the only place where it can be properly explained and given its true meaning. For if they came by sea from the east in very ancient times, the Etruscans would at best have been a handful of pirates and adventurers (like the Vikings in the Middle Ages), who forced themselves on the residents as an aristocratic minority.

  But here too there is a snag. Recent excavations have gone down beneath the Villanovan level to find an earlier culture known as the Apennine (it seems to have developed all along the mountainous axis of the Italian peninsula). And this new world is vast but undistinguished, with no suggestion of the wonders of the east.

  In the end, there is no way of deciding one way or the other. All we can safely say is that an old civilization of oriental character suddenly a
ppears in all its glory at the beginning of the seventh century. The metals of Tuscany – copper, tin, iron – allowed it grow rich quickly. Even more importantly, it gained new splendour from the increasing proximity of the Greek cities. Etruria remained permanently ‘colonized’ by this civilization, which it absorbed with unflagging enthusiasm. Even those achievements of Etruscan art which once seemed the most original (because we used to know very little about Greek painting beyond what was reported in the literature of the time), that is to say the tomb paintings, may be called into question. The discovery of the painted sarcophagus of Paestum known as the Tomb of the Diver, which seemed to herald a rich programme of excavations,10 was the signal for fierce disputes about who came first, since this Greek painting is contemporary with the Etruscan frescoes. But if we accept that there was Greek influence in Etruria, that will raise once more the question of the relation between Greece and the east. The few fragments discovered in the east and analysed by Smith suggested to him the existence of an oriental tradition of wall-painting, going back almost uninterruptedly to the Assyrians. What if tomorrow the cities on the Tigris or Euphrates, or in Cyprus, had surprises like that of Paestum in store for us?

  The original Tuscany

  Etruria corresponds to Tuscany in the broad sense, from the Arno to the Tiber, from the Apennines to the Tyrrhenian Sea, whose very name recalls the Etruscans. This original Tuscany contained a part of what is today Umbria and Lazio [Latium]. To the west, bordering on the sea, it included low-lying stony plains, in parts marshy, the Sienese Maremma and the Pisan Maremma with their sandy watercourses and thorn-bushes; to the east, as one approached the blue line of the Apennines, their summits picked out in snow, was a land of hills and narrow plains. This was the essential Etruria felix, with its rich harvests and its orchards, still today the most beautiful rural landscape in the world. Pliny the Younger later built here his charming country residence of Tifernum Tiberinum.