Thoughts on Antiquity

It was reported by Dave Meadows that a bust of Caesar was found:

A BUST of Julius Caesar, believed to be the oldest representation of the Roman emperor yet known, has been found at the bottom of the River Rhone.

The life-sized bust showing the Roman ruler as a balding and ageing man with wrinkles and hollows in his face is tentatively dated to 46 BC.

Divers trained in archaeology uncovered the marble bust and a collection of other finds in the Rhone River near the town of Arles in the south of France.

Among other items in the treasure trove of ancient objects found in the bed of the river was a 1.8m marble statue of Neptune, dated to the first decade of the third century after Christ.

When I first saw the photo, though, I was thinking to myself, no, this cannot be Caesar. It doesn’t look anything like him! Dave Meadows himself questioned what evidence the discoverers came to that conclusion. For comparison, I’ll show you the old bust of Caesar and this new one:

Traditionally the bust of Caesar, which looks similar to coins found of him

The new bust of Caesar

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me these busts look totally different. For the guy on the bottom, his nose is rounder, eyes closer together, widow’s peak longer, and lips thinner. Who claimed this was Caesar? Well, they said, perhaps it was an aging Caesar, but as Mary Beard pointed out, there’s just no circumstantial evidence for Caesar at all, and all their reasoning is unhistorical. Caesar’s statues didn’t go into the river after his assassination, especially in Gaul - why would they? It’s all ludicrous.

Regular readers will know that I have commissioned a gentleman whom I refer to as Mr. A to translate all the remains of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Quaestiones ad Stephanum et Marinum.  This work contains a series of ‘problems’ – differences between the gospels — and Eusebius’ ’solutions’ to them.  The problems ‘for Stephanus’ all come from either the start of the gospels, and usually deal with the geneaologies of Jesus.  The remainder deal with differences between the endings of the gospels, including the multiple endings of Mark, found even then in the manuscripts.  The work is lost, but an epitome survives, plus lots of fragments in Greek and Syriac catena-commentaries.

Today is a great day.  Mr. A has today completed the first translation of the entire epitome into English, and intends to revise it all by the end of this week.  After this, we start in on the fragments of the catenae.  This week I went to Cambridge and found yet more fragments in various 17th century printed extracts, themselves taken from catenae. 

So far the cost of translation has reached $1,800, which is quite a sum to pay out of my own pocket!  But I hope that if I make the text available in a print-on-demand version online, that enough copies can be sold to recover this.  I also invite donations; after all, the subject of the work should be of interest to an awful lot of people, whether Christian, atheist, or whatever.

(I want to thank those who sent me certain articles for the preparation of the original paper, and especially Mark Munn, whose article I used will be read by him in the upcoming conference on Anatolian studies in September. Nota Bene: The names of authors in the in-text citations are left out if the author is named in the text first.)

I recently finished some research (in the form of a nearly 20 page paper) on the mother goddess Cybele. One thing I came across which is still very controversial is the relationship between the Greek Κυβελη, the Phrygian Matar, and Kubaba, Goddess Queen of Carchemish and of other Anatolian cities, and also how far back does this goddess go?

As expected when dealing with such a popular topic as the Mother Goddess, there are several theories about her origins. I still see popular the theory that the Mother Goddess was worshiped before the “patriarchy”, often citing the female figurines at Çatalhöyük.

Lynn Roller in her In Search of the Mother Goddess deals fairly in my opinion with the problems associated with assigning a Mother Goddess to Çatalhöyük and even trying to tie her in with the Mother Goddess in Anatolia 4000 years later. And by reading Roller, the evidence against such a reading of the figurines as indicative of the Mother Goddess is certainly incorrect. Unlike some clearly fertility figurines, the female statues at Çatalhöyük do not overtly point towards the sexual organs, even if they are exaggerated (Roller, 30). Also found were male figurines and animal motifs dominate. Roller points out figurines where these “women fertility” figurines are intertwined or somehow connected with leopards or other animals. There are certainly many other options available to explain the many representations, and certain the mother goddess theory does not adequately explain it all. Roller put it succinctly:

“It is not at all certain that any of the artifacts proposed as evidence of mother godess worship are even religious objects, in the conventional sense of objects intended primarily or exclusively for a religious function, such as cult statues of deities and votive objects and shrines dedicated to deities. We cannot even be certain that the inhabitants of Neolithic communities in central Anatolia conceptualized their spiritual world as one of populated by discrete anthropomorphic entitites called gods, and it is therefore even less certain that they would have envisioned the need fora mother goddess, in the sense of a single female deity who monitored human reproduction.” (p. 36)

All this is not to say that it is impossible that Neolithic Anatolians worshiped the Mother Goddess, but that theory neither explains all the evidence, nor do the evidence point strongly towards the theory.

Another theory which is a bit of a stretch is the connexion between Cybele and Kubaba Queen of Kish. In Latin texts, we see Cybebe and Cybele used almost interchangeably for the same Goddess (Magna Mater). Before I get to the problem of Kubaba the Goddess Queen of Carchemish and Cybele, I’d like to look at whatever connexion may exist between them and the Queen of Kish.

Queen of Kish is also a problem nomenclature, since she was not a queen in the sense of the wife of a king, but rather the ruler of the city herself. Kubaba of Kish was originally a tavern keeper who overthrew the king, refounded Kish (Glassner, 39) and apparently led a rather peaceful reign.

The theory goes that Kubaba of Kish became deified either during or after her reign. While she indeed develop a mythological status, there is no other indication that she was worshiped as a goddess in Babylonia. On the other hand, the name Kubaba itself is divine, being composed of KÙ(G) (ellum in Akkadian) and ^dBABA, apparently derived from Bau, a goddess.

How does this translate to Kubaba of Carchemish? I’d almost be willing to write it off as coincidence, but it is possible, I suppose, that the cult quietly survived long enough until trading routes sent it to Carchemish, where it then flourished.

The goddess Kubaba at Carchemish and other cities, Sardis, Ugarit, and Boğazköy to name a few, is clearly represented. Herodotus identifies Κυβηβη with Sardis (and of course Croesus, the Lydian King) (Histories 5.102.1). At Carchemish in particular, she is known as the goddess “Queen of Carchemish”, and she’s easily the central goddess worshiped (Güterbock, 110).

There is also another Goddess in Phrygia, called simply Matar, whose epithet is either kubileya or kubeleya (she was called both). W. F. Albright first suggested that the name was connected with Kubaba (p. 229), and Laroche expanded on that suggestion (Roller, p. 96). The connection was first made obvious by the use of both Cybebe and Cybele in Roman literature, like Catullus (Carmina 64).

Brixhe proposed a mountain origin for the name, since Strabo connected it with Kybelon, a mountain in Phrygia. Lynn E. Roller points out that Ovid also indicates that Cybele is topographical by nature, and Vergil says that Cybele is a mountain. Later lexicographers agreed with the etymology that kubileya refers to mountains. There is even Greek evidence to support the connection, as one of Meter’s epithets in Greek was Μητηρ ορεια (Vassileva, 53). Roller states it clearly when she says that the names only appear to be related, and it is quite possible that instead of a direct relationship from one to the other, mere influence and conflation can account for the similarities.

More recently, Mark Munn revived the theory, positing that kubeleya is an adjectival form of Kubaba from the Lydo-Lycian languages. According to Munn, in Lycian, Kubaba, or Kuvav*, would become an adjective similar to Ertemi (Artemis), by adding –li*, thus ertemeli from Ertemi and kuvavli* from Kuvav-. This would explain the adjectival use of kubeleya in Phrygian texts and also the interchangeable usage of Kybebe and Kybele in later Greek and Roman sources. (par. 7)

Despite the plausible connection, the absence of the name Kubaba in place of Matar and the low occurrence kubeleya makes the identification much more difficult to accept. The portrait of the goddess differs as well. Kubaba of Carchemish is Queen of the City, and thus has no relation to Bau the Sumerian Goddess, who is a generative goddess–healing, life, irrigation, etc. (Prince, p. 62-64). And one has to seriously wonder how Kubaba of Kish became the prominent goddess of Carchemish, especially since no other deified kings had their cult survive in such a way. It would certainly be quite the anomaly. Possible? Yes. But plausible? I’m not so sure. And it differs even with Kubaba of Carchemish and Matar kubeleya/Μητηρ (Κυβελη)/Magna Mater (Cybele), Mother Cybele in Phrygian, Greek, and Latin respectively. The Mother Goddess of these cultures was a wild natural goddess who inhabits caves and mountains. The actual motherly duties seem to the modern person to have been clearer with Bau, rather than the actual Mother Magna Mater, whose motherly tendencies (as we think of them) are non-existent. But that’s not how the ancients thought.

Works Cited

Albright, W. F. “The Anatolian Goddess Kubaba.” Archiv für Orientforschung 5 (1929): 229-231.

Glassner, Jean-Jacques. Mesopotamian Chronicles. tr. by Benjamin R. Foster. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004.

Güterbock, H. G. “Carchemish.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 13.2 (1954): 102-114.

(Forthcoming) Munn, Mark. “Kybele as Kubaba in a Lydo-Phrygian Context.” in Anatolian Interfaces: Hittites, Greeks and Their Neighbors: Proceedings of an International Conference on Cross-Cultural Interaction.

Prince, J. Dyneley. “A Hymn to the Goddess Bau.” The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, 24.1 (1907): 62-75.

Roller, Lynn E. In Search of God the Mother. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Vassileva, Maya. “Further Considerations on the Cult of Kybele.” Anatolian Studies 51 (2001): 51-63.

From Augustine, ‘De genesi ad litteram’ (The literal meaning of Genesis), book 2, chapter 9 (tr. J.H.Taylor, 1982):

“It is frequently asked what our belief must be about the form and shape of heaven according to Sacred Scripture. Many scholars engaged in lengthy discussions on these matter, but the sacred writers with their deeper wisdom have omitted them. Such subjects are of no profit for those who seek beatitude, and, what is worse, they take up precious time that ought to be given to what is spiritually beneficial. What concern is it of mine whether heaven is a sphere and the earth is enclosed by it and suspended in the middle of the universe, or whether heaven like a disk above the earth covers it on one side?

“But the credibility of Scripture is at stake, and as I have indicated more than once, there is danger that a man uninstructed in divine revelation, discovering something in Scripture or hearing from it something that seems to be at variance with the knowledge that he has acquired, may resolutely withhold his assent in other matters where Scripture presents useful admonitions, narratives, or declarations. Hence, I must say briefly that in the matter of the shape of heaven the sacred writers knew the truth, but that the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, did not wish to teach men these facts that would be of no avail to their salvation.”

In the Guardian online today is a piece on this eccentric English book-collector of the last century, whose collection of manuscripts was a wonder and which is still being sold off even today.  References to manuscripts once in his collection are common in editions.  Most of them are now in Berlin.

From the BBC article here:

Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term “lesbian”.

The islanders say that if they are successful they may then start to fight the word lesbian internationally.

What I found curious was this:

The term lesbian originated from a mythological goddess and poet called Sappho, who was a native of Lesbos.

Sappho expressed her love of other women in poetry written during the 7th Century BC.

But according to Mr Lambrou, new historical research has discovered that Sappho had a family, and committed suicide for the love of a man.

It’s true indeed that Sappho was worshiped as a goddess, but she was a poet first. Farnell in his Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality, he notes that Lesbia Sappho was apparently worshiped in Lesbos, pointing to the coins of her seated on a shrine.

Also, when did this new historical research of Mr. Lambrou come out and what is it based upon? I don’t remember hearing anything about it…

EDIT: Mischa Hooker notes in the comments legends about Sappho’s suicide over a lost lover, and I’d also like to point out his suggestion found on his blog:

Ok, really finally: I think I have a compromise suggestion. Since LesVos is the modern Greek pronunciation of the place name, let’s just all say that LesVian will be toponymic designation, and LesBian (to be spelled Λέσμπιος, etc., in Greek) will be the sexual orientation.

Lesvian sounds like a pompous way to say lesbian, I doubt it’ll catch on, but it is a good suggestion. He also points out the rather sexual nature of the ancient Greek λεσβιάζω, correlating to the Latin fellare. Do have a look at Mischa’s blog!

I’m not sure when they did it, but the journal Oral Tradition is now completely online with open-access. In case you don’t know what Oral Tradition is:

OT was founded in 1986 to serve as an international and interdisciplinary forum for discussion of worldwide oral traditions and related forms. Since that time, and through the end of 2006, it has been published by Slavica Publishers, with an additional online edition through Project Muse from 2003 onward.

Here’s the release information for the new (and exciting!) open access:

With the advent of eOT, the free, open-access electronic version of the journal based here, we aspire to remove many of the natural barriers created by print-based and subscription media. Since we believe that academic contributions should be as democratically available as possible, we are from this point onward offering the journal as a pro bono, gratis contribution to the field. Anyone with a connection to the internet will be able to read and redistribute its contents – not only the current issue, but also the entire 22 years and 10,000 pages of back issues.

In addition to reaching a much larger and more diverse readership, we hope that eOT will encourage submissions from scholars whose voices are not customarily heard in western print media because of the difficulties involved with currency exchange and distribution networks. Let me take this opportunity to offer a special invitation to non-western scholars to join the discussion by sending contributions for possible publication in this newly expanded forum for scholarly exchange. All materials should be transmitted electronically to John Miles Foley, Editor.

You can visit the site here: http://journal.oraltradition.org/. It’s great news that yet another journal is entirely free and online. My guess is that more journals will eventually follow suit.

Right now, anyone who sees this should be going…WHAT!? No, no, I’m not proposing that the Amarna texts are written in Old Doric. In fact, that has already been proposed by George Hempl in “The Old Doric of the Tell el Amarna Texts” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association vol. 44 (1913): pp. 185-214.

Well, can we really fault those who ventured into new territory without adequate knowledge? Truly it has never been truer the old adage: a little Greek is a dangerous thing. However, when looking at the larger picture, Bedřich Hrozný correctly deciphered Hittite and published it 1915.

Hempl was no stranger to strange linguistics. He “deciphered” the Phaistos disk as Old Ionic Greek (though, to be fair, a number of people have tried to decipher the Phaistos disk using some form of Greek or another), “translated” the Old Latin Duenos Inscription, “discovered” the origin of G and Z (rebutted later by J. P. Postgate), and published numerously on unconventional and no longer used etymologies.

Hey, even seasoned scholars make mistakes, and he was no different, especially considering that the Amarna letters were somewhat recent discoveries and historical linguistics was still a largely undeveloped field (Julius Pokorny didn’t publish the Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch until 1959, thirty-eight years after Hempl already died). Even I myself look back when I was still very young, shaking my head thinking what was I thinking?

Still, one has to pause - as a professor at Michigan and Stanford, he ideally should have been aware of the current trends his field was going. It’s almost tragic to see his work laughed at now compared to his contemporaries. Perhaps I would be a bit more sympathetic if he didn’t come across so arrogant (in one note to the editor he lauded one of his own etymological unravellings as “a most welcome discovery”), but he only appears that way to me without reading his whole corpus in depth. Perhaps if I would read more, I’d find something positive to say, and that’s a fault I truly own.

Not really his fault, but just hilarious to us in the future is Hempl’s decision to write article on Old Doric/Amarna in simplified English. Yes, that’s right - simplified English. Thus far this is the only article that I can remember seeing written in this way. I actually found the article by pure chance, searching for “Anatolian goddes” having accidentally hit enter before my ring finger hit the second s. Lucky for me, right? I saw the title, gave a chuckle, and immediately noticed the article riddled with misspelings:

I shal limit myself…This wil suffice to giv an idea of the nature and importans of these erly Greek documents…there ar two that ar not ritten in Assyrian, but in a language hitherto unred and generally supposed to be Hittite. I had found…that Hittite pictografic texts were ritten as the pictografic texts of Minoan Crete… Later I observd that the inscription on one of the stones found at Malatia, on the upper Euphrates, tho in hittite pictografs, was Doric. And soon other Doric texts appeard, one after another.

That shuld be enuf to get a glimps uv wut he wuz duing, both fonetikli and also of his thesis, that Hittite pictographs were actually Doric. Do note that he knew of the Hittite connexion, he was led however to Greek. (Who isn’t led to Greek in some way?)

I found the culprit, though, of his odd spelling usage, the first footnote thus:

In this paper I hav aimd to use the spelling recommended by the Simplified Spelling Board ( I Madison Av., New York ), but I hav not hesitated to employ a few other simplifications. As these deviations from nomic spelling usually affect the end of words, they rarely interfere with redy recognition. But, for the sake of those foreners who know English chiefly by eye, I may call attention to the following matters. Final -nce is usually changed to -ns: influence / influens, province / provins, prince, prins, whence / whens. When short e is speld ea, the a is dropt: re(a)lm, de(a)th, also e(a)rly, etc. When short u is speld ou, the o is dropt: c(o)untry, d(o)uble, enough / enuf, rough / ruf, numer(o)us, etc., and similarly would / wuld, should / shuld, and y(o)u, y(o)ur. When r is speld wr, the w is omitted: (w)rite, (w)rack, (w)reck, etc. Silent e is omitted after a short vowel, provided this does not disgise the word: hav(e), giv(e), genitiv(e), collectiv(e), masculin(e), deserv(e), solv(e), etc.; but one, done, some, above, etc., ar not changed as they involv other matters too. Observe also ar(e), du(e), valu(e), fo(e), etc., and g(u)ard, disg(u)ise, dau(gh)ter, nei(gh)bor, shal(l), los(s), unles(s), etc.

I may ad that I hav ventured to employ telemetathesis, telemimesis, teleterosis, in the sens of German Fernmetathese, Fernassimilation, Ferndissimilation. For the use of Javonian, see I-ia-u-e-ni, page 207.

I just love the inconsistency, especially when he says he uses deserv, and in the next sentence uses observe. For a linguist, I’m surprised he was unfamiliar with the phenomenon of short vowels before double-consonants in English, especially since in some places you see ruff for rough, ruf not as often, and enuff for enough, enuf not as often. Likewise you see tuff more often than tuf.

One thing I found particularly annoying with the article, and something which still bothers me, is his overuse of parallelomania. Good parallels lead to paradigms, but bad parallels, especially inconsistent ones, or inapplicable ones, are pockmarks on any academic scholarship. I do not know how many times I’ve seen or heard recommended Sandmel’s seminal article Parallelomania in JBL 81 (1962), but here is yet another one.

Mr. A, who is translating this work of Eusebius on the differences between the gospels and their solutions, writes to tell me that the 16th and final question to Stephanus is now done.  This is gratifying news; the first complete translation into English is progressing nicely.  We’re now trying to decide whether to press on into the four questions to Marinus; or pause and do a revision process on all of Stephanus.

I’ve also been trying to determine whether a critical edition exists of the Catena on Luke of Nicetas, which contains fragments of this work.  No luck so far.

Over on XTalk, Jim West passes along the following:

Via Robert Kraft

It is with immense sadness, but also with immense thankfulness for a singular life wonderfully well-lived, that I write to inform you that Krister Stendahl, our beloved friend, teacher, colleague, and former Dean, died this morning. A funeral service is planned for Friday morning at University Lutheran Church, and a memorial service to be held at Harvard’s Memorial Church is being planned for sometime in May. Details on that University event and on other chances to recall, celebrate, and honor Krister will be communicated as soon as we know them, by email as well as on the HDS website. Please keep all of the Stendahl family in your thoughts and prayers.

Stendahl was well known for his influential essay, The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West, which is to be credited with laying the foundation for the so-called New Perspective on Paul, though that article only scratches the surface of his contribution to biblical studies.

Requiescat in pace.