The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXV: Company's Calling

 The rhythms of an industry devoted to hospitality are a bit at odds with a society that treats hospitality as, not unreasonably, a social thing. I have worked very hard for the last three months and skipped holiday travelling. It is time for a well-earned vacation, which started this Thursday, and in which in a world where everyone lived my life, I would have rested on Thursday and Friday and postblogged on the weekend. This is not that world, and I write from my mother's kitchen on Sunday morning,  bound for Campbell River later today. (I also have a dog poking her nose in my leg, undeterred by the fact that it is still pitch black out.)

So let's talk about visitors, instead. I'm working my wage through the Cambridge Early Iron Age volume right now. Archaeology is great, and, impressively, is getting close to being able to tell stories about a very select group of Early Iron Age individuals --vase painters. There is, however, a larger argument about visitors in archaeology, namely, were there any? We have stories about Early Iron Ag visitors, and an argument that they were central to the phenomena by virtue of sharing important technologies (like vase painting). On the other hand, there is a robust counter-argument to the effect of "Show me!" Which is fair, because our stories about visitors are, just that, stories (except we can now hope, for vase painters). Stories are for poets, and, well, you know, poets. 

So lets make up a story: Assur-uballit II and Thales are the same person. Just to be clear here, this is 200% unmotivated, a Robert E. Howard-level historical fiction that, if presented seriously by someone who wasn't me, I could tear apart in a million different ways. (Just to start, he was at least a generation too old.) But it sure does invent one heck of a dinner guest, and a wanderer and a rambler, as someone's poking nose reminds me I should be, too. 

(For the lack of proper diacriticals I make no apologies. I'm on a laptop and a deadline here.)

You know what would have been nice here? A picture of the well burial (as archaeologically reconstructed) at Nineveh that illustrates that its 612 BC fall to Median and Babylonian forces was precisely as catastrophic as a million romantic painters have portrayed it as being, but Google isn't turning it up, and, who knows, maybe the dig has been overinterpreted, anyway. 

It's a weird thing, taken together. The Neo-Assyrians and Babylonians were having a thing, as from 614. Things were looking sticky for the Assyrians, but then they had before. Crown Prince Assur-uballit II was hopefully named for a previous restorer of Assyrian royal power, at least as it was understood at the time. But then the "Medes" fell on Assur and destroyed it in a whirlwind sack. Two years later, the great capital of Nineveh followed, and by three years after that, the last remnant of royal Assyrian power was extinguished in the fall of Carchemish. Whether the Crown Prince was still a factor at that point is unknown. If I were Pharaoh, the actual commander of the allied troops defending that city, I would have been tempted to set him aside after his failure before Harran, the first alternate Assyrian capital, the year before.  Real history not being a came of Civilization, it is strange that "Assyria" was a political entity at all after being forced out of multiple capitals and relegated to a far-western extremity that had only been part of the empire for a century by this time. But, then, the collapse of an empire in just two years, whatever the very ominous signs of decline now going back thirty years there might have been in the form of a sudden cessation of inscriptions in the latter part of Assurbanipal's reign. 

I have, too, the scatter of notes on a conference in Rome, held now a generation ago under the auspices of Mario Liverani, that very firmly raises doubts about the very existence of the alleged perpetrators of this catastrophe. Who were the Medes? Where were they? Why do they dissolve into Phyrgians on inspection? This goes back to Pierre Briant's questions about the reality of "Persians" in the "Persian Empire." Maybe this whole thing about a ruling Indo-Iranian elite is the ideological construct of a more typically Mesopotamian empire, an Assyrian successor, simply shifted south. There's an elaborate argument about the shifting of trans-Middle Eastern trade routes southwards with the domestication of the camel that accounts for the Assyrian heartland's sudden loss of geopolitical salience. I associate i t, perhaps incorrectly, with Baruch Halpern, who at the height of his powers, offered a profound analysis of the ideological level of the change. According to Halpern, if I do not out of mistaken recollection misrepresent him, the new ideology of cosmology and power is rooted in the "discovery" that the Earth was round, and either the centre of the cosmos or another planet orbiting the Sun. Dispensing with the flat Earth meant dispensing with the Solar god's return voyage through the Underworld. The god who, ultimately, is just the ideological inversion of the King, ceases to be a chthonic figure implicated in local death cults, and becomes the removed and all-powerful celestial supervisor. Hence Assurbanipal's desecration of the Elamite royal tombs and Josiah's destruction of the "high places."   

And also too, hence Thales' celebrated prediction of an eclipse in 585 that led to the Lydians and Medes abandoning a battle over the fate of the Median capital of Pteria, leading to the Kizilmark (ancient Halys) being fixed as the border between the two kingdoms, raising ever since the question of what the Medes were doing so far west, and in a town that looks, archaeologically, very Phrygian, and which, incidentally, is a vey Hattusa-like location very near Hattusa, raising, as I have suggested before, questions about the history of proto-Indo-European that I will give a rest today in favour of the not entirely incidental question of who Thales was, and how he could be predicting an eclipse in 585?

 
 Halpern, in effect, says that it is no big deal, there are cyclic patterns that allow the prediction of some, but not all, eclipses provided you have access to a few centuries of astronomical observations such as existed in the cuneiform. The real issue is that eclipses are circular shadows, revealing the sphericity of celestial bodies, including the Earth in lunar eclipses, and of the Moon in solar ones (and the Moon god was the patron of Harran, dunh-dunh-dunh!) In fact, reviewing the Wikipedia article, I  believe that Halpern goes with an alternate explanation, in which Thales predicted a lunar eclipse, dramatically demonstrated said Earth-sphericity 

and perhaps moving the date, and, among other things, Thales' flourit, to 609BC. 

Thales, is, to take it back, the original "Visitors? Prove it!" guy. Our sources for his life, which are, to put it gently, not too good, are clear that Thales was a member of a Phoenician royal family in exile in his home city of Miletus, who travelled extensively in Babylon and Egypt in his early life before travelling equally widely in the Greek world in later life, earning membership amongst the "Seven Sages of Greece." To this it has been objected since the Nineteenth Century, "Nuh-unh," and, predictably in recent years this has evolved into an argument over whether this is just racism or not, as illustrated by the Warner Brothers' writers, above. (Is!)

The "visitor" story, if I were to write a novel about it, has its smallest stretch in just taking Assur-uballit to Miletus. The Egyptian armies of the era employed numerous Carian mercenaries, and, if the (former) crown prince were given his walking papers, where better to go than to the homes of comrades-in-arms now dismissed from service in light of the expulsion of the Egyptians from their brief Levantine hegemony by the Neo-Babylonians? The question is how Thales, or "Thales," became one of the Seven Sages? The straightforward explanation is that he was a great mantic, and it is a symptom of the chronic derangement of "Plato to Nato" thinking that we demand that he be a "natural philosopher," rather than a "divine seer." A deeper cut is this whole cosmology-as-ideology thing, and the central role of spherical geometry in validating new political orders. 

'Cuz you know who needs spherical geometry? Vase painters! Now, if you'll excuse me, I've a dog to walk.