The Early Iron Age Revival of the State,, XXXIII: Fish, Tyrrhenian Pirates, and Mainstream Scholarship

 

Source: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/1064/bronze-coin-of-byzantium/

This is not the post that I wanted to write today, the first day of my last vacation week of 2025. (No more paid vacations, not including statutory holidays and paid time off, until the first week of February!) To speak frankly and autobiographically about my process and the University of British Columbia Library, the Library now loans bound periodicals on a two week, indefinitely renewable basis, the same as all other loans to alumni members such as myself. Fines are no longer levied, but replacement fees are. Loans overdue, or perhaps just held over term end (I keep missing the renewal because there aren't any consequences except in May and September) are automatically deemed lost, and the replacement fee exceeds the borrower block. That was my position last week. It was my intention to return my loans last Saturday, but I missed a volume, and because of work I didn't return it until Tuesday. I put in a borrower request for the six second-half-of-1955 volumes in my postblogging series before opening on Thursday morning. These are split between a remote storage facility (PARC), with slow but operational machinery, and the on-campus ASRS facility, which, it seems increasingly clear, will never work again quickly and efficiently. It may be that holdings that were in storage before ASRS are principally affected by this, which is bad news, since both Aviation Week are, very luckily, in that category. (Otherwise they would have been lost to pilfering engineering students generations ago, like Toronto's holdings of early aviation technical journals.) Neither facility was able to meet my peremptory demands yesterday, and here we are. Fortunately, I have something to say, and not just about the bonito of Byzantium. 

On the bright side, vacations are for doing nothing, at least to a point. Playing video games, watching Slow Horses, visiting my Mom, walking the dog. 

A screenshot from Baldur's Gate 4. Paladin. Basic. 

About video games: A very long time ago, TSR decided, as part of its gradual separation from Gary Gygax, to license Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms. In that setting the Sword Coast is fringed by an coastal mountain range through which the Chionthar River, among others, penetrates to reach the sea. The city of Baldur's Gate, at the mouth of the Chionthar, is thus well-positioned as a trading hub, but its origins, in Greenwood's imaginarium, are as a fishing village. By the time the fourth iteration of the game rolled around, combining classic CRPG tropes with turn-based play to make it accessible to persons with the eye hand coordination and speed of a clam, such as myself, the City of Baldur's Gate had become a very convincing fishing-village-turned-into-a-city indeed. Larian is an English studio, and I fondly imagine that their vision of Baldur's Gate reflects some coastal town of Yorkshire or Devon. I particularly like the ubiquitous smoking shelters and drying racks! This is how fish were done in the old days! 

Wiki maps lose their indicators and I can't be bothered to put it back in. 

We are dipping into the mainstreamiest of mainstream scholarship today. The first strand is the Lemnos stele, found in 1885, built into a church in the hamlet of Kaminia on the 477 square kilometer island of Lemnos in the far north of the Aegean, approximately in the mouth of the system of  straits through which the Black Sea communicates with the Mediterranean (Bosphorus, then Sea of Marmara, then Dardanelles). The stele is 198 characters in 33 to 40 words and a low relief portrait of the dedicatee. Ancient scholarship was of the opinion that Lemnos was the island of Hephaestus and the Kaberoi, and that its inhabitants at the time of its conquest by Athens in 510 were the Sinties, a term that in some contexts means pirates and raiders, and in others the Thracian people who inhabited the Sintice region of mainland Thrace and also Lemnos and perhaps nearby Samothrace. They are described in the Odyssey as of "wild speech," and from these clues Antique antiquarians deduced that they might be the Pelasgians, Leleges, or Carians said to have inhabited various parts of the Aegean before undergoing ethnogenesis as Greeks --a phenomena that the Ancients were much more ready to believe in than moderns. This was because the Ancients had bigger things to worry about, such as deriving the name "Athena" from a Greek root, and the cult of Athena from whatever goddess might be the "original." (Hence the "Black Athena" foofaraw of the last generation that was so concerned with the possibility of Athena being Neith.) History of cult is obviously important. 

Historical linguistics having supplanted cult in modern times, we have been taking up the question from a slightly different direction (just how different I am not sure, being no Classicist) over the last century or more. We now ask how the names of gods, and of cities like "Athens," and many other noticeably non-Greek place names in the Aegean, came about, and what they tell us about "the pre-Greek substrate," which surely existed in Greece over the longest time span, and quite recently too, depending on when we want our "Indo-European invasion." The "Carian" option above offers us an obvious way out, in that Carian is one of the Anatolian Indo-European languages, and perhaps different enough from Greek to encompass place names like Athens, so that the "pre-Greek substrate" need no longer predate the Indo-European invasion.   H have a feeling, however, that inferring contact between Greek and Indo-Anatolian on the Greek peninsula is going far beyond what current scholarship will stomach. (Here's what seems like a dispassionate summary and discussion currently available online for fellow dilettantes.)  

The Lemnos Stele raised an exciting alternative. Given the Ancient testimony for a non-Greek language, was this the smoking gun, indicating that the Sinties spoke (and wrote) a non-Greek language in 510BC? 

It is probably inevitable that in these cases the language will be compared with Basque, assorted Caucasian languages, Na-Dene, Turkish (and Sumerian, to round out that particular heavily-armed and reclusive compound of crackpots) --and Etruscan. For apart from being an alluringly mysterious language of Europe, Some Ancient testimony points to the Etruscans emigrating from the Aegean area to Tuscany, although other Ancient authorities are more skeptical. The modern skeptics now face a more difficult problem, because, as work with Etruscan has proceeded, it has become ever more likely that Lemnian is a related language. And as I suggested last week, if Lemnian does share areal features with Indo-Anatolian and Afro-Asiatic languages spoken locally, then the migration story has some legs. 

I am not a big fan of migration stories. But you know who is? Sociologists who do migration studies, because they are definitely a thing that  happens! And it turns out that they, or at least scholars influenced by them, turned out for a conference on "Fishing and Greek Colonisation in the Black Sea during Antiquity," an international conference held at Aix-Marseilles University in 2021. For where I am flailing about like a tinfoil-hatted lunatic talking about Early Iron Age fisheries on the Straits of Gibraltar, it is an orthodoxy of Black Sea studies that, given that Ancient testimony has (preserved) fish as the third most important export from the Black Sea after wheat and slaves, that it is a key subject of study. Fish are to be recovered taphonomically from the digs, containers are to be  identified, sites and harbours studied.  And Byzantine issues of bronze coins with bonito fish on the tail are to be pointed to as we are reminded of the importance of the city's fishery in its early economic history. 

Downloaded to ResearchGate by Nicholas Ray: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicolas-Ray?_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7ImZpcnN0UGFnZSI6Il9kaXJlY3QiLCJwYWdlIjoiX2RpcmVjdCJ9fQ

And how could it be otherwise? For if the Mediterranean's watershed is small for its size, so that the basin loses water to evaporation on net, the Black Sea enjoys an overwhelming flush of fresh water and sediment carried in from much of Europe. The only problem for historical theorists is that abundant evidence of fishing from the earliest Iron Age isn't matched by abundant storage vessels. As Tonnes Bekker-Nielsen points out, given historic trends, this isn't that surprising. The Black Sea might have abundant inshore fisheries, but it is, compared with the Aegean, cooler and the water less saline, essentially meaning that more firewood is needed to dry the fish. Pontic exporters (and here there is probably an analogy with Roman North Africa in the later Empire) sent fish to the Aegean because they needed the imports they would pay for, not because the industry was competitive with the other place that Black Sea nutrients were turned into fish biomass in great quantities --the waters from Byzantium to Lemnos. 

Indigenous women working at at the Claxton cannery along the 
Skeena, 1892: Royal BC Museum / BC Archives, A-08198 Photographer unknown:
Source:  https://bcanuntoldhistory.knowledge.ca/1890/indigenous-women-in-canneries

The exception to this, Mustafa Zengin, Owen Doonan, and Vural Huseyin point out in two separate papers, is the bonito fishery. Bonitos migrate around and across the Black Sea seeking favourable feeding grounds, band are fished from the Sea of Marmara and terminating to the Dardanelles. At Sinope at the mouth of the Kizilirmark (the ancient Halys), Doonan and Huseyin find evidence of itinerant fishing camps, testifying to a population of transient fishers following the migration, and trading with indigenous communities inland as they moved. These authors ask us to understand these mobile fishing communities in the light of other regions and eras, while John Brendan Knight points us explicitly in the direction of migration studies, asking about drivers and "migration capital." In this light I return to Bekker-Nielsen's inference that fish were bought at the production site by Aegean fish packers rather than being exported by Pontic merchants, in a model similar to the one observed historically in the Nineteenth Century. If accurate, we have a model of fishing communities moving from site to site, presumably paying some kind of rent (which must be lower than in the Aegean for this to make sense) and then selling to entrepreneurs who moved the fish to market in the Mediterranean. 

Now, one doesn't ordinarily think of Tuscany and littoral fisheries out in the lagoons and the salt water, but . . . 

By Lorena Torres Angelini from Santiago, Chile - OrbetelloUploaded by Ronhjones, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12132585

And this is news to me, the Lagoon of Orbetello is a place that exists and an Etruscan site. Coastal Maremma, which is the regional name, is historically the portion of the Etruscan homeland occupied only by "charcoal burners, shepherds, and cowboys." Wikipedia isn't particularly interested in this, or its hydrography, either, but the Etruscan angle is inescapable thanks to the well-preserved city walls of Orbetello of the Etruscan period, apparently since incorporated into more modern fortifications. The wetlands of the Maremma are apparently historically extensive, as I learned all of five minutes before I typed this! 

So, yes: The Etruscan heartlands are exactly the kind of place that migrant fishers would show up in. DNA evidence does not support substantial, long-lasting population changes in the Western Mediterranean during the Iron Age associated with the language change that we know happened there --the spread of West Semitic in the Maghreb, of Greek in Italy, and now Etruscan in Tuscany. The people who lived there were, by and large, the descendants of the people who have always lived there. For those who want Neolithic and Early Bronze Age breaks, and associate the latter with language change, the Etruscans were an emergent problem. If they picked up Etruscan/Lemnian, perhaps  only as an elite language, then that problem is nipped in the bud. 

A final question: Can we get Italic (Italoc-Celtic?) out of Greek, and Amazigh/Berber out of Egyptian by the same mechanisms of elite adoption as a process of lingua francas replacing a more diverse language landscape at the onset of the Iron Age? I bring up the Amazigh (a perhaps artificial modern construct embracing the various "Moors" and "Berbers" of the Maghreb) because, while wandering the library chagrined at my misadventures yesterday, I came across the intended capstone of Garrett Mattingly's research career, and was struck in particular by the precocity with which, he wants to argue, the Iron Age technological package was picked up throughout the Maghreb. Horses? (Horse-riding, I should say.) It's got nothing to do with fish or Lemnos, but it is something that I wanted to get out there today, as an alternative to postblogging July 1955. Anyone else looking forward to Eisenhower's heart attack in two months?