The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXIII: Buttons

 

The Heraion of Argive Hera at Prosymna

Like many other cities of Classical Greece, Argos was a synoecism of nearby towns, overshadowed by the older sites of Mycenae and Tiryns. The construction of a temple of Hera on a massive artificial terrace, deliberately built in the "Cyclopean" style of the Before Times, and convenient to the earlier cities, amidst a group of "Mycenaean" monumental graves, may be seen as a way of appropriating the prestige of the earlier foundations. I talked about it very briefly as an example of a sanctuary of a city (polis) goddess that wasn't Athena. What did not appear last time was a gruesome story out of Herodotus, which I embed in about as much of the Father of Lies as the reader is likely to tolerate since the whole thing is so evocative:

This is the Athenian story of the matter; but the Aeginetans say that the Athenians came not in one ship only; "for," they say, "even if we had had no ships of our own, we could right easily have defended ourselves against one ship, or a few more; but the truth is that they descended upon our coasts with many ships, and we yielded to them and made no fight of it at sea." But they can never show with exact plainness whether it was because they confessed themselves to be the weaker at sea‑fighting that they yielded, or because they purposed to do somewhat such as in the event they did. The Athenians then (say the Aeginetans), when no man came out to fight with them, disembarked from their ships and set about dealing with the images; and not being able to drag them from the bases they did there and then fasten them about with cords and drag them, till as they were dragged both the images together (and this I myself do not believe, yet others may) fell with the selfsame motion on their knees, and have remained so from that day. Thus, then, did the Athenians; but as for themselves, the Aeginetans say that they learnt that the Athenians  p97 were about to make war upon them, and therefore they assured themselves of help from the Argives. So when the Athenians disembarked on the land of Aegina, the Argives came to aid the Aeginetans, crossing over from Epidaurus to the island privily, and then falling upon the Athenians unawares and cutting them off from their ships; and it was at this moment that the thunderstorm came upon them, and the earthquake withal.

 87 This, then, is the story told by the Argives and Aeginetans, and the Athenians too acknowledge that it was only one man of them who came safe back to Attica; but the Argives say that it was they, and the Athenians say that it was divine power, that destroyed the Attic army when this one man was saved alive; albeit even this one (say the Athenians) was not saved alive but perished as here related. It would seem that he made his way to Athens and told of the mishap; and when this was known (it is said) to the wives of the men who had gone to attack Aegina, they were very wroth that he alone should be safe out of all, and they gathered round him and stabbed him with the brooch-pins of their garments, each asking him "where her man was."

 88 Rawlinson p294Thus was this man done to death; and this deed of their women seemed to the Athenians to be yet more dreadful than their misfortune. They could find, it is said, no other way to punish the women; but they changed their dress to the Ionian fashion; for till then the Athenian women had worn Dorian dress, very like to the Corinthian; it was changed, therefore, to the linen tunic, that so they might have no brooch-pins to use. But if the truth be told, this dress is not in its origin  p99 Ionian, but Carian; for in Hellas itself all the women's dress in ancient times was the same as that which we now call Dorian. As for the Argives and Aeginetans, this was the reason of their even making a law for each of their nations that their brooch pins should be made half as long again as the measure then customary, and that brooch-pins in especial should be dedicated by their women in the temple of those goddesses; and that neither aught else Attic should be brought to the temple, nor earthenware, but that it be the law to drink there from vessels of the country.

 89 H & WSo then the women of Argolis and Aegina ever since that day wore brooch-pins longer than before, by reason of the feud with the Athenians, and so they did even to my time; and the enmity of the Athenians against the Aeginetans began as I have told. And now at the Thebans' call the Aeginetans came readily to the aid of the Boeotians, remembering the business of the images. The Aeginetans laying waste the seaboard of Attica, the Athenians were setting out to march against them; but there came to them an oracle from Delphi bidding them to hold their hands for thirty years after the wrong-doing of the Aeginetans, and in the thirty-first to mark out a precinct for Aeacus and begin the war with Aegina; thus should their purpose prosper; but if they sent an army against their enemies forthwith, they should indeed subdue them at the last, but in the meanwhile many should be their sufferings and many too their doings. When the Athenians heard this reported to them, they marked out for Aeacus that precinct which is  p101 now set in their market-place; but they could not stomach the message that they must hold their hand for thirty years, after the foul blow dealt them by the Aeginetans.

I swear Herodotus privately identified as Carian. Anyway, we hear about Athens' long and strange conflict with Aegina, about the obsession with symbolic acts of war like the seizure of images leading to real human tragedies; another intimation that the Athenian identification with Ionia was deliberate self-fashioning; and some mythical references. 

 The fundamental fact of the Early Iron Age was the proliferation of city from its homeland in the Middle Eastern Fertile Crescent into the Mediterranean basin and the Doab. We can speak of the intensification of settlement in the same period in meridionale Europe and in the Congo basin,  but we do not here find cities in new locations. The Chinese case is more complicated, but I think the case can be made that the takeoff there was less abrupt. Why do cities suddenly make sense at Cyrene, Carthage, Syracuse, Rome, at Marseilles, to single out the clearest and earliest cases? 

The most obvious explanation is that forest clearance was easier and more pressing with iron tools, and that it was most rewarding in lagoon settings due to their biotic productivity, symbolised by purple dye. 

I have deliberately added Cyrene here as a counter-example. It might still be a lagoon state given the particular geography of Cyrenaica, which has numerous coastal lagoons easily accessed from the interior but too small to support communities. Or Cyrene's status as an "early" city state might have more to do with its upland situation and proximity to Egypt, which might justify a comparison with Jerusalem. 

All of this takes a deterministic approach to the social institution of the "city." One of the triumphs of processual archaeology was the borrowing of central place theory from urban geography and its various selling-stuff offshoots to place the prehistoric city within a matrix of settlements.  There cannot not be a city once the population density of a bounded area of settled locations reaches a certain point. Causality is pushed back to the "settlement" level to be sure, but on a naive reading the existence of agriculture explains settlements. A more sophisticated reading asks whether a "settlement" is still a "settlement" if it is only inhabited seasonally, but cities still empty out today during vacation season, so lets not embarrass ourselves any more than necessary.

We can also take an economically rational approach, in which cities are sites of industrial work that benefits from the division of labour, from which perspective an ideological approach falls out of the conversation. One could wish that what falls out was a neat little black box, but a look at the current state of the Wikipedia article on the "Polis" is something closer to a half done knitwork group project by a group that doesn't believe in group projects. That is, unless you accept the Marxian definition of ideology as a con job excusing the appropriation  of surplus value.

Why is the fact that the oldest brick buildings in Pittsburgh predate "Pittsburgh" 
so challenging? Because the controverted fact that no such thing is
possible allows us to presuppose white supremacism. 

 The Marxian definition surely does not capture the whole of the behavioural effect of the ideological superstructure, so it isn't a black box .  More interestingly, Martin Byers offers us an interpretation of Cahokia as a hetereopolis, a central location and locus of industrial production in which there are multiple incommensurable  ideological projects going on. After all, if the ideological project is emergent rather than constitutive, there doesn't have to be universal consent to a particular ideological explanation of the existence of a given city. 

Byers offers "heterarchy" as a model for urban civilisation in the New World, but the more one explores the urban geography and cult calendar of, say, Rome, the more universally applicable the concept of "heterarchy" is. I mean, I guess Jerusalem isn't a heterarchy, but a helluva lot of work went into that, it says right here in Holy Writ. 

In the Early Iron Age revival of the state, I am going to take it for granted that the ideological project is bound up in the urban sanctuary, which are the closest thing to a unifying definition of the Greek and Greek-adjacent  polis, and which are not all, obviously, "urban," and equally obviously are not entirely differentiated from urban temple complexes, which are as old as cities. The praxis of the urban sanctuary is mass animal sacrifice and festival consumption, but it seems as though the cult practice that accompanies cult is chosen and behaviourally significant. At the very least, cult authors text, and text informs speech acts.

So, yes, this is a language post, and one about gender. 

Uruk is a city site in southern Iraq that was  abandoned at some point after the Euphrates shifted its bed. I'll throw a few qualifiers around that as the experts do, but one way or the other, people didn't give up on Uruk until the early Islamic period,  which is why we have been calling this region  "Iraq" for more than five thousand years. Uruk might have been the capital of the earliest archaeologically recoverable empire or simply the most prominent and identifiable typesite of climax Neolithic civilisation in Eurasia. It is certainly the site of the earliest recovered written texts, although unfortunately, as with Mayan, Pre-Dynastic, and Shang dynasty texts, we are looking at pioneering efforts with a limited ability to express abstract ideas. Assyriologists have been known to link the mass-produced bevel bowls typical of Uruk sites with the "ration lists" of bowls of grain issued to each listed employment category as an ideological project. To begin with the lists instantiate  hierarchy, but when the centre of power shifts to the semi-mythical city (buried under Baghdad?) of Agade and bilingual lists appear, social hierarchy comes to be bound up in translation. 

Archaeologists argue that Uruk emerged in the 3300s as another synoecism, of two neighbouring towns, one centred on the ziggurat of Anu, the other on the sanctuary of Inanna. Anu's towering mud-brick ziggurat was crowned with a whitewashed building that would have been visible for vast distances across the southern Iraqi plain, while the Inanna precinct was a walled (fortified?) complex of buildings, some architecturally impressive, but private and enclosed. There is no particular reason that the two sites have to be in any way complementary; Uruk could just as well be a heterarchy as any other candidate early city. 

As we try to understand the evolution of writing and literature in ancient Iraq we do well not to naively attribute texts to earlier dates than their final reproduction, but also not to doubt their primordial context. These qualifications are in aid of several royal epics about Enmerkar, the legendary first (second?) king of Uruk and of Inanna herself. From the stories of Enmerkar's epic struggle with Aratta, the mountain city of gems, metals, and semiprecious stones, we learn that Inanna is the goddess of both cities, but favours Uruk and her beloved Enmerkar, and that to facilitate the replacement of conflict with trade, Inanna ordains that the regions of the world are to speak the same language. From Inanna's legendarium, we learn that Inanna overthrew her fahter Anu to become the goddess of the Inanna precinct, and that her god-lover, Dumuzid is a shepherd (and perhaps specifically Cain) as well as a dying and reviving god and the model of Adonis, yet another handsome young man of Greek mythology who runs into fatal trouble in the wilderness and somewhat recalls the fate of the survivor of the expedition to Aegina. In an extended discussion of the Herodotean anecdote, Ian Jenkins points out Polymestor and Orpheus as further examples, and of Orestes (who barely escapes the Furies) and Oedipus (who blinds himself with the pins of his mother's dress) as parallels. Ian explains the Greek stories in terms of the Classical Greek male's desire to disarm the female, perhaps a consciousness that the overt male supremacy of Classical Greek civilisation is being undermined by the feminine. 

When carried over to Akkad (and again we are hardly sure just how much of this package had been formulated by the time of the Akkadian empire), Inanna becomes Ishtar. It turns, and I am once again reading Wikipedia for this, that the practice of syncretising Inanna to the city god of Agade wasn't accidental. "God lists" were an early literary form, and "Ishtar lists" an entire subgenre of that. Tablet IV (of 7) of the An=Anum is the most comprehensive of these, and was probably a Late Bronze Age (late Kassite) epitome of the genre, which was subsequently simply recopied, although the rival An = Anu ša amēli appears to be an Iron Age text. The syncretic nature of the project may be accidental, since in the mental universe of the scribes the task was to clarify the family relationships of the gods, which obviously required nailing down the individual behind various nicknames and epithets. Elamite, Hurrian and Gutian city goddesses are Inanna/Ishtar if they answer to her characteristics and family relations.

Inanna/Ishtar's place on the fourth tablet places her below Anu, Enlil, and Sin in the divine hierarchy, but her entry is the longest of all. This is the same problem we have with the Parthenon, Heraion, or the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Hurrian Šauška is the westernmost syncretism of Inanna/Ishtar recognised by Iraqi scholars. Greek mythographers identified her with Aphrodite, and, as we've seen, Aphrodite can be a city goddess, and was that of Corinth. Šauška can be, like Inanna of Uruk (via her lover, Dumuzid), the goddess of the wild steppe, as well as of the city, war, and conjugal love, particularly in Hittite texts, and seems to have been a form of Puduhepa's Queen of the Night. We also get a bit closer to carrying the "sacred marriage" of Enmerkar and Inanna from east to west. The drift of modern scholarship is to make the sacred marriage something referenced in cult, as opposed to actual, sweaty sex acts , and as much as we lose something here, we get a bit closer to the Great Mother of the Gods and the Tyranny of Asia, and erasing the distance between Classical Greek legitimations of political power, and the way that political power was created (in Greek eyes) in the foreign land of Asia.  

At Athens, sacred marriage is conducted between the wife of the "Archon King," the sacred king who, it is explained, replaces the old Athenian kings in religious rite, and Dionysus at the spring vintage festival, the Anthesteria. The vase above, which celebrates the festival, shows Eros pulling a cart, a cart being another attribute of Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, as well as of royal power. Two centuries of Classical scholarship have focussed on all the sex in this sex, which, fair enough, but there's plenty of room for the sacred marriage to be about legitimating political authority. 

I doubt that, without going all Jungian about it, we're going to get very far insisting that the emergence of the city state, even one legitimated by an urban sanctuary and its cult, requires a city goddess. (Who, we will perhaps allow for the case of Jerusalem, can be excised from the ideological account with enough effort.) The idea that the city was carried west in the skirts of the city goddess is persuasive in the sense that such goddesses were, at this historical juncture, good to think with. Again, I find this persuasive as  a context in which elite language use could make space for a special, feminine realm, mistaking the prestige of Afro-Asiatic-speaking urban civilisation with its  more contingent manifestations. Or is it so contingent when out-of-control social change seems to require new accommodations. Perhaps the spread of city goddesses was the best answer contemporaries could find to managing the technological disruptions brought by the age of horse-riding, iron and ash?

And as soon as I wrote that, I asked myself, "Who is the goddess of equestrianship, anyway?"

Ponygirl, that's who. Epona is, possibly, the Gallo-Roman version of Rhiannon, in which case she's also the goddess of the Wild Hunt. Hunh. She's late, but there's also an archaic Demeter Erinys to consider, a state goddess in Arcadia, and her daughter, Despoina. Mostly late and Roman imperial, but Despoina has been argued to be a form of the Mistress of Animals and so the object of a Bronze Age if not Neolithic cult, although just to complicated things, she is an unnameable goddess in the Arcadian national mystery cult. 

  At this point we can o n try to put ourselves in the position of a Late Bronze Age scribe tasked with writing a trade contract, one of the central dilemmas in the Enmerkar epics. The starting point is a non-phonetic script for writing an extinct language; the end point is rendering speech acts intelligibly in a way that can be sounded in currently spoken languages. This would all be fine, except:

--The literary genres in which the Sumerian language comes down to them are limited to word lists, scripts of cult incantations, and inscriptions on statues and monuments, which are by definition only accessible to people who can go and visit them at what are often isolated and sacred sites. Rendering a "Sumerogram" into a spoken word may or may not be possible given archaeological investigation. The names of gods and goddesses are a particularly important field of investigation because they can be recognised in these ancient texts and provide clues to other words where they or the roots in them might be used for their phonetic values. 

--Innovators cannot be constrained from creating new literary genres. Cult incantations would seem to require commentaries. How is the celebrant to dress, stand, and move? What emotions should inform a reading? Given that, however, there is plenty of room for meta-commentary, which we can see proliferating by the Iron Age at least, explaining the meaning of the cult, and perhaps even critiquing other interpretations. From here there seems to be a very short step to the chorus of sacred plays. Royal and theological inscriptions are the first step to rendering oral historical and mythological narratives in text, but require rendering all the tricks of oral communication into written form. Again, all cultic script ought to be capable of being read. Apart from hiring specialists already fluent in the language in which the script is written, some guide to pronunciation seems vital.

--Lyric poetry offers a key to pronunciation. Cult utterances call for song, and song calls for poetry. But apart from extremely stilted phrasing, there must be some way of indicating grammatical features,  in inflected languages. The end point solution to this is an alphabetic script. It seems reasonable that cuneiform specialists would resist obsolescence, but their field is not the only one in which "writing" occurs. Musical scores might end up telling us a great deal about the evolution of a multilingual world system in which goods and ideas can be exchanged throughout the Eurasian oecumene. Writing, singing, and reading? You might as well kill the aristocratic scribe with a dress pin. 

I am going to bring this speculation to a halt here, as no doubt I am re-inventing the wheel as far as historical linguistics studies go. I assume that the field has been attentive to work on "Babylonian" scholarship --at least as much as I have been.