The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXII: Tophets, Himera, Weird Digressions

Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein visits Vancouver Technical High School in 1954 because one of his nephews went there and the Field-Marshal was actually a fairly normal person with a life and stuff like that.  

Major General Wilfred George Fryer, RE (1900--1993)

 There's some fairly weird shit going on about Monty that doesn't speak well of WWII nerds, and one of the heights of this weirdness is the claim that he "held back" Eighth Army after Alamein because he knew that if Commonwealth forces cornered Rommel's Afrika Korps (what, there were Italians there, too? Get out of town!), the Germans would turn around and go all "Nazi supermen are our superiors" on their pasty Limey (now with bonus Antipodean content) asses. If you've a mind to refute that "thesis" with facts, you will explore the fighting after Alamein, and in particular the attempt to encircle the retreating Axis forces via an inland hook around the town of Sirte. To do that you will have to resort to the official histories, if not the archives, as no-one but an official historian could possibly care about the New Zealand Division's travails in the crusty saline bogs south of Sirte that very nearly exposed the isolated force to the Axis counterattack that didn't happen and which would have led to someone actually knowing that Eighth Army was fighting in December of 1942. If you go to Wikipedia you will learn that no less a figure than Milton has something to say about "a boggy Sirte, neither sea/Nor good dry land."  And if you go to Civil Engineers in War, the special series of The Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, you will get, via W. F. Fryer's "The Military Water Problem in the Western Egyptian Desert, 1940--43," a deep hydrological explanation of the roadbuilding problems discussed at some length by the official history, and otherwise apparently of interest only to the local historians of Sirte, and certainly not to the grand theorists of Classical Antiquity, which is why this post comes to tophets via a weird digression through Wilfrid Fryer's discussion of the problem of watering the Western Desert Force. 

 

Somewhat to my disappointment, I couldn't find any of the glorious watercolour illustrated plates of Old Testament
shenanigans that I remember from my childhood by searching for "Moloch," so here's the prettiest "Jezebel" that Image Search yielded in the time that I gave it. instead.

"Tophet" is a Biblical term for the location in the Valley of Gehenna (which is a real place) where, Jeremiah says, wicked people of his day passed their sons and daughters through fire, a practice that, he said, made God most irate, and would be punished in some way, some day soon, preferably by God's chosen King, Josiah, and a big oops on that, what can I say, divine punishment-wise? Jeremiah, however, arrives towards what seems to be a long historical discussion, albeit only "seems," because we're a long way from sorting out the diachronic from the synchronic in the composition of the Old Testament. But if we take the naive view, child sacrifice has been by his time a practice amongst the Jews since their earliest history as a people. The traditional pietist explanation of this is that instances of child sacrifice break down into the True God just kidding around; Early superstition; And the intrusive foreign, Canaanite cult of "Moloch." The modern explanation is pretty much the second clause, getting rid of the xenophobic scapegoating and carrying "early" further forward to implicate as cruel and superstitious barbarians, people we'd rather see as morally upstanding mothers and fathers of modern religion. 

So that's a fun modern controversy to have, because who doesn't enjoy arguing about who is, or isn't a child abuser? But for the prehistorian of the Punic Mediterranean, there is a problem, which is that the practice is amply archaeologically attested by special cult places established near contemporaneously with the urban foundation (800--600BC) at Carthage, Sulci, Mozia, Tharros, and possibly Bitia, and at some remove from the foundation at Sousse, Nora, Cagliari, and Monte Sirte. (Paulo Xerra, "'Tophet:' An Overall Interpretation," Studi Epigrafica e Linguistici 29--30 (2012--2013): 259--281; 261)  Malta has the ambiguous status here that I so butchered in my previous post in this series because, while "tophet-" style funerary dedications have been found there, no tophet has been identified, which is a problem for those wishing to argue that the phenomena was propagated westward from the Levant, although not nearly as big a problem as the failure to identify a tophet anywhere in the Levant. This, after a century or so of looking, begins to look fairly dispositive, and takes us back to the Biblical Studies problem of determining just how bad those ancient religious guys and gals actually might have been, which seems like a bit of a misdirect given our long and continuing history of cruel and inhuman behaviour in the name of religion and ideology, but what do I know? (Sirte, in spite of being identified as the site of a "Phoenician" city named Macomedes-Euphranta, has no tophet.) 

There's a funny little layer of extra antiquity that comes from reading the stiff-turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century diction of Wikipedia articles about places like Sulci that show that the text is lifted from either the Ninth Edition of the Britannica or the Catholic Encyclopedia, which are both fine sources that we're lucky to have at our finger tips, but, oh boy, is that a wicked cold burn for modern Sulci or Tharros or such! These are small and obscure places now, which makes it all the more interesting that they were some of the earliest cities in the Western Mediterranean basin. Why there?

Francesco Conti, Death of Josiah

To return to the Levant for a second, Josiah (640--609) is one of the Bible's favourite righteous kings, largely because of his aggressive attempt to suppress local worship practices and centralise the public cult of Judah at his temple in Jerusalem and its holy literature around the Torah, although that bit seems to be made up. The repression of child sacrifice at the Tophet of Jerusalem is presumably a part of that. Josiah also had the very good luck of dying young when he got in the way of the army that Pharaoh Necho was leading north into Syria in a quixotic attempt to save the rump of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, thereby assuring that no-one would ever have the misfortune of meeting their hero. Baruch Halpern paints a very loose picture of the Middle East at the fall of the Neo-Assyrian state as being locked in a massive ideological battle in which ideas about geocentrism, ideal monarchy, cult centralisation, and child sacrifice were in play, and in which the Neo-Assyrians clinging to a foothold around the city of the Moon God were making an ideological play as much as anything, lunar eclipses being one of the best arguments for a spherical Earth. In which case Josiah was on the wrong side of history, although I'll be damned if I can slot child sacrifice into a place in this narrative. Also, that's a bit more history of science and a bit less history of technology than we like around here, and we're going to have to come back to all of that "ideas" airy-fairiness that in a minute, damn it.  
 

So, why are the old travel writers so down on Sirte? The WWII civil engineers*  provides a cogent explanation when he describes the coastal road between Tripoli and Benghazi as it confronted WWII-era engineers: a continuous narrow causeway between shallow inshore waters to the north and a bog consisting of a layer of salt-encrusted dry soil over foundationless mud to the south.  Fresh water is available only from cisterns  maintained by locals and from wells with an intrinsically limited draw capacity, because, as Fryer points out, they drew not from aquifers, but from underground streams reaching the Mediterranean just offshore, and thus drawing sea water if the well's flow limit were exceeded.

The idea that the Saharan massif receives large amounts of precipitation overall in spite of having an arid climate, and that this groundwater does not simply disappear in the fact of the fact of "desert," but rather flows underground north and east towards the Mediterranean, is logical enough once one confronts it, and I have referred to it on this blog before in connection with the oases of the Saharan desert and loosely alluded to it in connection with the conditions of the coastal plain, such as it is. For lack of tidal scouring, the North African littoral is shallow, sandy, and treacherous, and fertilised by runoff, but the lack of potable water makes the shore of the Gulf of Sirte a bad place for cities. There are ample resources here, but no room for permanent human society with a legible political history.  This begins to change as we round the corner and enter the southern lowlands of Tripolitana and, above all, Tunisia. 

This, too, is old news, of course. If one were to seek to exploit marine resources like murex snails along the Gulf of Sirte, one would need a place for the workers to live in the summer, and if they were drawn from a self-reproducing society, one would look beyond the sea off the shores of the Gulf of Sirte to Sicily, Malta, southern Italy, the Peloponnese, and Crete, and, per the genetic historian, an undifferentiated "Aegean" genomic identity. Modern prehistorians working with such evidence as we have about early "Phoenicians" find no reason to exclude their presence in this area in 800BC, even in regions marked as Greek-speaking in  Classical Antiquity. Were these poorly known communities transient work camps of Levantine artisans, or pockets of Afroasiatic speakers in the kind of complex linguistic landscape illustrated by Greece in 1820? In the interest of making the occasional gesture in the direction of rigour without the bother of going through my notes (gasp!), I stabbed Google Search with this theme and came up with a recent literature survey by Giorgos Bourogiannis that you will have to download to read, possibly leading to not being able to play the Civilisation franchise on your tablet for lack of free memory, and so I would like to give the citation, but it has been stripped from the document.** The familiar argument is that we have evidence of Phoenician praxis sliding into "Orientalising" praxis and becoming eventually Greek praxis, but of Phoenician settlement only in the early periods. Leaving aside the question of what evidence might satisfy a Greek archaeologist, the picture is one of shiploads of "Phoenicians" arriving, making various "Phoenician" objects on site, practicing alphabetic writing, and then going home without leaving a detectable genetic legacy. 

The Cup of Nestor is the earliest attested fragment of Greek
alphabetic script, and is a really strange bit of writing
and could be  a literary reference or identifying the cup's owner. 

The evidence for early alphabetic literacy in "Phoenician" seems to demand Afro-Asiatic speakers in situ from roughly 1000--700BC. It is difficult to understand the different ways in which the alphabet was then taken up in coastal Anatolia, Greece, Etruria, and southwestern Iberia and it seems as though no convincing utilitarian case for its adoption has been advanced for any of these areas, much less one that would cover all four. 

In contrast, the case for the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet in the Punic world seems obvious. They were Phoenician colonists, after all! It is odd that the dogmatic certainty that colony implies colonists has broken down in the case of the Greek colonies, where genomic evidence is not dispositive. While I see that Sicilian archaeologists are now  having a bun fight with Greek over the matter, Thapsos, the Mycenean site refounded as Syracuse, seems like an argument for the long duree infiltration of "Greek" genes into the Greek settlements of the Strait area. In contrast we have now a genetic study of remains in a mass grave of war heroes from Himera's 480BC struggle with Carthage showing the presence of "paid soldiers from Europe and Central Asia." Given the desperate struggles of military recruiters to locate skilled equestrians in all ages, it would hardly be surprising if a putative cavalry arm of the army of Himera recruited from so far afield! However, the historic tradition is that Himera was defended by local Greeks, and if we are not dismissing that tradition, than the "founders" of Himera might have been the very eclectic kind of community of "exiles, criminals, and runaway slaves" that, Vergil tells us, Romulus  gathered around himself when he founded Rome. 

So if the context of founding Himera,perhaps in 680BC, was different from the one in which Carthage was  founded three-quarters of a century ago, the question for your economic/geographical determinist is whether we can pick out differences on that score. I'd like to be a bit more knowledgeable on the subject, but Himera differs from Carthage in that it is on the mouth of the Imera Settentrionale, which river drains a basin of 342 square kilometers, although it is one of the Wikipedia river articles that doesn't give a flow rate to gauge its significance. Sage fearlessly tells me the flow rate of the water main serving Palermo in lieu, but it turns out that the Imera Settentrionale region is humid, as these things go [55], and a total estimated available groundwater resource of 50.6 million cubic metres of water per year is given for the Imera Settentionale basin, one of the highest in Sicily, although that is not saying as muchas it could, as the island as a whole has 2109 million cubic meters of available ground water. This is in 45 delineated regions, however, of which three have in excess of three figures, and fully a fifth (440) is associated with the Simeto, the river of Syracuse. So I'm not saying that Himera was the best real estate in Sicily, but it was a good location. As for the possibility of equine (and equestrian) production at Himera, that's just a speculative flyer I'm taking based on those anomalous genetic findings, and taking the tradition of "native" defenders seriously. 

  The tophet at Carthage will differ from Jeremiah's tophet in one crucial respect, which is that it was at sea level. For, unlike the Greeks at Cyrene and, really, like everyone else in the city-founding business in the Western Mediterranean Iron Age, the founders of Carthage selected a seaside site. The argument here is that, rather, a specific seaside site chose Carthaginians, as opposed to some other identity. If so, is there something besides the debatably widespread practice of child sacrifice that determines the special character of the Carthaginian tophet? I cannot help noticing that, besides newborn infants, lamb remains are common in the tophet dedications in the Punic zone. This is a weird and gauche fact that recalls the "Paschal lamb," with overtones of ritual cannibalism to go with the baby-killing, but let's get deterministic here and point out that seasonal lamb culling takes place in the spring because that is when the sheep are taken from their winter folds to the summer outpasture, wherever that might be, the temptation to say "the mountains" being mitigated by the thought of all those salt flats. Sheep, and wool, I have said before, and will no doubt say again, are the missing dimension of all of that coastal marine resource exploitation. Murex snails are being harvested and their secretions fixed specifically to dye wool, and the chemical process of cleaning wool uses the same littoral natural resources (alum, potassium and sodium salts) used to produce the lye with which murex is fixed. 

So: Different setting, different economy, different vector of ethnogenesis? It is perhaps permissible to note that the people of coastal Tunisia have undergone ethnogenesis as speakers of a Levantine Afro-Asiatic language at least twice now. Maybe there is something in the water!

_____

*I'm working from memory and am not going to go to the trouble of digging out the relevant volumes of CEW and Playfair et al, so chances are that I am remembering comes from the official history and not Fryer.

**Giorgos Bourogiannis, "The Phoenician Presence in the Aegean During the Early iron Age: Trade, Settlement and Cultural Interaction"