Why Pearse’s Mithras Pages Are Important

Mithras relief from Dormagen

When, in 2040, the departments of humanities will be closed, an elderly historian will perhaps wonder what caused the demise of scholarship. Probably, he will answer that the humanities no longer wanted to live. Somewhere between 1995 and 2005, the will to survive vanished. The ancient, venerable scholarly disciplines no longer wanted to add something meaningful to the shared heritage of mankind.

The turning point, our historian will find out, had been the invention of the internet. Until then, scholars and scientists had communicated their results to the larger audience in a way that can be described as transmitter and receiver: researchers sent out information – books, journals, TV – and the people listened. But at the turn of the millennium, communication became more interactive. People could talk back and could shape the nature of the discourse. Our historian will gladly quote from Time Magazine, which had chosen “you” as the person of the year 2006. The transmitter-receiver metaphor no longer applied; the best metaphor to describe the way in which scientists and scholars explained themselves to the people, became the dialog.

A fine example, our historian will conclude, is Wikipedia, which was a kind of meeting place of good and bad information. Our historian will concede that the designers of the encyclopedia had realized the importance of debate from the very beginning: if someone had a question about someone else’s contribution, they could discuss these issues. It was good that in these debates, people immediately started to refer to their sources, and our historian will recognize that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, everybody recognized the importance of at least looking scientific or scholarly. Compared to the beginning of the twentieth century, that was a leap forward. The greatest achievement of western civilization in the twentieth century was that one-third of the population had had access to higher education.

Unfortunately, our historian will notice, this was not a guarantee of quality. He will discover that the online debates were easily hijacked by activists, because in the debate between good and bad information, between good and poor scholarship, bad information drove out good. Our historian will find it incredible, but he will establish that reliable information was, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, deliberately kept away from the larger public by pay walls. In the fight against activists, bona fide scholars and scientists fought with their arms tied, and by 2005, the damage was done.

This being the nature of the game, one would have expected that philologists, historians, archaeologists, theologians, philosophers, and other scholars would have fought back, but our future historian will discover that this rarely happened. If something was done at all, it was just presenting the facts, which were often correct indeed, but they were offered without any further explanation.

Still, there were professional researchers who investigated how to explain science and scholarship to the people successfully. They recommended scientists and scholars to explain methods and theories, but few scholars bothered to take care. Where was the book, our historian will be wondering, that explained the Lachmann method or the hermeneutic cycle to the larger audience?

Slowly, he will start to understand why so many people could, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, claim to be scholars, and were never contradicted: the scholars never explained how they achieved their results, giving the impression that scholarship was not a real, professional discipline, but a kind of amateurish hobby to which anyone might contribute. Precisely when information was transferred less by transmitter-receiver and more as a dialog, and when a highly educated audience demanded more information than just facts, the scholars retreated from the debate, not explaining what mattered most.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, our historian will think, three things ought to have been the top priorities if the humanities were to survive:

1. online encyclopedias, written by professional scholars – and of course for free, because the people had already paid taxes and the information was already theirs;
2. a sound explanation of methods and theories;
3. an active policy to refute errors and mistakes.

Our future historian will notice that scholars refused to live up to the expectations. Of course, there were exceptions. There were some websites on which something was explained, but they were rare, they were created after the damage had been done, and they covered only the first of the three requirements. Too little, too late, too incomplete. There will be a wry smile at the historian’s face when he writes about the self-pity of the early twenty-first century scholars: they were never tired of complaining that nobody seemed to understand why the humanities mattered, but they rarely explained.

The historian will conclude that the humanities had committed suicide. Still, there had been people, inside and outside the universities, who had done their best. People who had refused to join the academic rat race, who had not been interested in the length of their publication list, who were really interested in the dialog with the larger audience.

***

One of these is Roger Pearse, the webmaster of Tertullian.org and a tireless fighter against quack history. In December, he has started a website on the Roman god Mithras. It offers a basic account of the Mithraic mysteries, it offers the sources, and most of all: it offers the arguments to refute theories that present Mithraism as an essentially Persian cult (it isn’t) and that it heavily influenced Christianity (it didn’t).

If we want to avoid that a historian, writing in 2040, will conclude that our generation is the one that killed scholarship, we desperately need more websites like these. But I am not optimistic. As long as our academics are more interested in the length of their publication list than in their duty to the larger audience, the humanities are doomed.

Additions to Livius.org (very minor)

The entrance of the Hellespont

I visited Turkey and returned with some new photos. You can find them on the pages dedicated Tenedos, Abydus, to Adana (a nice photo of Hadrian), the Hellespont, Alexandria in the Troad, Alexandria near Issus, the river Scamander (I like this page because it combines photos from four places), and the funeral mound of Caracalla’s favorite Festus at Üvecik Tepe (scroll down a bit). It’s mostly from museums I visited, and not really important.

There’s also a photo of the battlefield at Aigospotamoi, but the steep shoreline on the site made me wonder whether the identification was right.

Book Reviews

For those interesting in my opinion about the good, the bad, and the irrelevant, I have added a new page to this blog, with links to my book reviews. Nothing new, in fact, but perhaps useful.

Manzikert

I’ve been to eastern Turkey several times, but never was able to visit Manzikert. But last October, I finally made it. Shortly before sunset, I was on the site where, in August 1071, a famous battle was fought. From Tatvan, it’s a drive of about an hour and a half; the road had been perfect until Ahlat, but had become worse and worse and worse,but in the end, after a chaotic ride through the mountains, the first view of the snow-covered mountain Süphan and the first view of the plain, were unforgettable.

Why did I go there? Because the battle near Manzikert is one of the few really important ones in world history. On the one hand were the Turks, recently converted to Islam and commanded by their sultan Alp Arslan: the most powerful man in the Sunnite world, who wanted to convert the Shi’ites to the right beliefs. His aim was, therefore, the conquest of Egypt, where the Fatimid dynasty claimed the caliphate. For Alp Arslan, it was unacceptable that a heretic could be commander of the faithful.

He was, therefore, on his way from Iran/Iraq to Egypt and had already reached Syria, when he heard that the Byzantine Emperor, Romanus IV Diogenes, was marching to Armenia, with an army of no less than 70,000 men. Had the army been smaller, Alp would not have felt threatened and would have continued to Egypt. He had no quarrel with Byzantium. But an army of this size, in his rear? This was dangerous. The Byzantines might attack his lines of communication.

Romanus had just become emperor. He was a brave and capable ruler, but had to cope with the opposition from Byzantine aristocrats. Therefore, he sought some military success, and Armenia was the perfect target. There are no indications that he wanted to continue his attack to Iraq or Iran, but Alp Arslan decided to return to the north. And so, in August 1071, the armies met at Manzikert.

From the very beginning, Romanus’ position was bad. His most important colonel, one of the aristocrats, was absent – perhaps betraying his emperor. Nevertheless, with a weakened army, Romanus marched out of Manzikert, advancing towards the Seljuk Turks, who retreated slowly. They marched for several kilometers on a very hot day. The soldiers, with their heavy panoplies, were already tired when the Seljuks unexpectedly turned back and attacked. A couple of Byzantine aristocrats fled, and the remaining troops panicked, and although there had been no real fight, the battle was already over. Many Byzantine soldiers were killed.

As a battle, the fight at Manzikert was not very important. Romanus was captured, but Alp Arslan almost immediately released him. The sultan wanted Egypt. His peace proposal was comparatively easy to accept. After all, if he asked more, he would be forced to leave garrisons to occupy the newly conquered cities, or soldiers to collect the money. So, it was better to send back the humiliated Romanus, who would be grateful, and would never again be a problem.

However, Romanus was dethroned and killed by the aristocrats, who refused to obey the new treaty. This was a real blunder. Now, Alp Arslan was mad as hell, and he decided to invade Anatolia, which a boy-emperor of twenty-one was supposed to defend. Within a couple of years, the most important provinces of the Byzantine Empire were lost, and became part of what is now called Turkey.

Few battles have had such conseques. In the first place for the world if Islam. In Egypt, the Shi’ite caliph remained on the throne, and the Islam remained divided between Sunnites and Shi’ites. In the second place, for Byzantium. The emperor was forced to hire mercenaries to replace his lost army. It was impossible to stop the advancing Seljuks. After some twenty years, the emperor decided to ask for reinforcements in the West. These reinforcements arrived in great numbers in Constantinople, swore allegiance to the emperor, reconquered part of Anatolia, and captured Antioch. After some diplomatic troubles, they refused to continue the struggle against the Seljuks, and went south, to Jerusalem: the First Crusade.

So, after Manzikert, the Byzantine Empire was in decline. Anatolia, its most important source of manpower and income, was lost. The Crusaders became increasingly hostile, capturing Constantinople in 1204. The Seljuks recovered their positions, and although the Crusaders were eventually expelled from Constantinople, things went from bad to worse.

Without Manzikert, it is likely that Islam would have been united under one, Turkish ruler, without conflict with Byzantium. There would have been no Crusades, western Europe would not have learned much from the Arabs, the Italian Renaissance would have been a satellite of the cultural innovations in the Byzantine Empire. Perhaps Byzantium would have expanded its power after the Mongol campaigns against the Seljuk.

Of course, this is all speculation. But it’s certain that Manzikert changed the world. The modern visitor can, perhaps, feel that if Romanus had not been betrayed, his own life would have been different too. Mea res agitur. This experience, which is sometimes called “the historical sensation”, is what makes history so nice.

I love to travel over badly paved roads to experience the past in this way. Even when there is nothing to be seen. To make you share in it, below is a nice photo: the plain, the mountain Süphan, and a view on a site that changed your life too. That is enough.

The photo (3,5 MB) is here. It is a composite; the photos were taken by Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier, and were matched by Robert Vermaat. Thanks!

New in the Antiquary’s Shoebox

Just a quick note: Bill has made available several articles in the Antiquaries’ Shoebox, his collection of older articles from scholarly journals.

• W.H. Schoff, Some Aspects of the Overland Oriental Trade at the Christian Era (1915)
• W.H. Schoff, The Eastern Iron Trade of the Roman Empire (1915)
• W.H. Schoff, Navigation to the Far East under the Roman Empire (1917)
• G.F. Hourani, Did Roman Commercial Competition Ruin South Arabia? (1952)
• F.J. Haverfield, Ancient Rome and Ireland (1913)
• D. Daly, The Legend of St. Brendan (1904; I loved this one)

And, not about trade or travel:

• D. Pingree, Astronomy and Astrology in India and Iran (1963)

Finally, some fragments from Sallust’s Histories:

• Speech of the Consul Lepidus to the Roman People (Latin and English)
• The Speech of Philippus in the Senate (Latin and English)

2300 Ancient Sites on Google Earth

Kampyr Tepe (Uzbekistan)

On several occasions I have blogged on the possibilities of Google Earth and its online spin-off, Google Maps. My last blog on this topic was a bit over half a year ago, when I had some 1700 items available. In the meantime, I have added more than 550 ancient sites to my list, from all quarters of the ancient world. The grand total now is 2366.

The online version is here and the masterfile can be downloaded here. If you use the latter, do not forget the directory NEW/OFF-TOPIC, which contains many others, still unqualified markers.

The Byzantine Empire

The eagle of the Byzantine Empire

Some pages ought to have been added to the Livius website long, long time ago, but were never written, usually because I didn’t have sufficient time. I am glad that Mrs. Karin de Leeuw wrote a nice page on the Byzantine Empire, the successor state of the Roman Empire.

I also added a little page on the river Elbe. Not terribly important, to be honest. Read the page on Byzantium first, because it’s more interesting.

Göbekli Tepe

Göbekli Tepe; two oval enclosures visible

If someone would have asked me which excavations I would have liked to visit, I would have answered, without a monent´s thought, that my favorites would be Jiroft en Göbekli Tepe. Jiroft I will visit, inch’Allah, within a couple of months, but I no longer have to wait for Göbekli Tepe.

It is, to exaggerate a bit, the place where we can see the rise of mankind as a civilized being. Some 12,000 years ago, when the latest Ice Age was over, a process started that is known as the Neolithic Revolution: the rise of agriculture.

Göbekli Tepe proves that, when this process had only just started and mankind still consisted mainly of hunters and gatherers, monumental architecture was already possible. Hundreds of people must have been working on this site, so there must have been some kind of efficient leadership. We can even speak, very tentatively of course, about their beliefs, because Göbekli Tepe is a sanctuary and some of the statues may represent deities or ancestors. We will never be completely sure, of course, but it remains a fascinating thought.

Pylon 12

The first thing we saw was a couple of dromedaries and the caravan in which the German excavator, professor Klaus Schmidt, has his office. We saw Enclosure E (“the rock temple”, but essentially a wide, rocky plain) and Enclosures A, B, C, and D, where tall, T-shaped pylons used to stand in a circle or oval. The satellite photo above shows two of these ovals. They date back to the age that archaeologists call “Preceramic Neolithic A”, or the period between 9500 and 8300 BC.

Several pylons are decorated with arms and must resemble humans. The sides often show animals, like snakes, foxes, and ostriches. These statues are very primitive, but radiate a kind of power that I find hard to describe. This is art, and these pylons show that humans are cultural beings. To quote Schmidt: it is like a theater, and although we can no longer see the play itself and can only see the set, we know that the actors have put on the scene a truly grand play.

The visitor of the world’s oldest known sanctuary will be accompanied by a guard, who will, at the end of the tour, sell a book, Sie bauten die ersten Tempel, written by professor Schmidt. I have now read about half of it and am very enthusiastic about the way he explains everything: very seriously and without unnecessary hypotheses. The guard offered me to ask Schmidt’s autograph; the scholar made it clear that he was actually a bit too busy, which I liked. Academics who waste time giving autographs, are to be treated with some distrust.

Getting there

From Sanli Urfa, where some of the beautiful finds are shown in the museum, it is easy to reach the excavation. Leaving the city center, you take the road in the direction of the suburb of Kara Köprü. At the great roundabout on the city’s northern edge, you take road D400 to the east, to Mardin. You will already have seen the brown signs to Göbekli Tepe. After 13 kilometers, you turn to the left and continue, even when the road is, for a short distance, unpaved. If this doesn’t work, ask directions for Örencik.

Zeugma Mosaic Museum, Gazi Antep

Theonoe

Zeugma, “bridge”, was the Greek name of a Hellenistic town on the banks of the Euphrates. When a dam was built in the river, about 30% of the archaeological site was submerged. There were excavations, and the archaeologists found beautiful mosaics, which were brought to the museum of Gazi Antep.

Now, they have a museum of their own, which was opened last week. You can still smell the paint.

The Zeugma Mosaic Museum is splendid. It consists of two wings; the left one is finished, the right one still has to be completed, although we found the door open and were able to admire the collection as well.

A visit to the left wing starts with a little movie in which Zeugma is explained. The voice-over is a bit overenthusiastic and the music is at times bombastic, but it’s nicely done. Unfortunately, there’s similar music in the museum itself; not too loud, but still sufficiently annoying to distract.

You can see the mosaics from two levels: on ground level, you can see them as they must have been experienced by the people of Zeugma themselves, from the first floor, you have a better view. On this floor, you can also see some other mosaics, including a 20 meter wide one from a church near Zeugma.

One of the finest displays is a mosaic of which a part was stolen. In the old museum, there was a large question mark; now, they project a slide of the missing part.

Explanations are Turkish and English, and very interesting. The catalog costs no less than 245 lira, or 110 euro, which was more than I was willing to pay.

The comparison with Athens’ Acropolis Museum was inevitable. In the museum in Gazi Antep, some improvements are possible – the music and an affordable catalog for instance. Yet, photography is allowed, which makes the Zeugma Mosaic Museum, from the point of view of the student who wants to recall what he has seen and share it with others, a better museum.

1700 Ancient Sites on Google Earth

Hakemi Use (Turkey)

What you are looking for, is here.

The Rise of Islam (2)

Cover

As I already indicated, I was under the impression that the quest for the historical Muhammad was a cul-de-sac. On the one hand, much criticism of the rationalized legend was fair: the lateness of the sources is indeed a problem and the presence of Christian soldiers in Islamic armies demands an explanation. However, it was obvious, at least to me, that the alternatives were worse, and I did not believe that we would ever come closer to what really happened in Mecca and Medina at the beginning of the seventh century.

But I was too pessimistic. I just read Fred Donner’s recent book Muhammad and the Believers, which may be the equivalent of E.P. Sanders’ book on the historical Jesus, The Historical Figure of Jesus: a common-sense book on a religious innovator that, although not every scholar will agree with every aspect, will be well-respected and will dominate the field for quite some time. I am very impressed. This may be the new synthesis.

According to Donner, Muhammad did not set out to create a new religion. He was a radical monotheist, who accepted in his band of followers all Jews, Christians, and Arabs who believed in one God. To these ecumenical ideas, the Believers added some doctrines of their own, but the main point was that at the end of times, which they believed to be near, only monotheists would be saved. They wanted to prepare the world for this Judgment, cooperating closely with other righteous monotheists.

It was much later, in the early eighth century, that the Muslims became a new, self-consciously different monotheistic religion. Among the factors that contributed to this development was the fact that the Believers and other monotheists recognized that the ideas about God’s uniqueness and oneness, as maintained by the Jews and Muslims, could never be reconciled with the Trinitarian theologies of the Christian churches. Another factor, equally important, was a growing awareness that not all people would accept the Quran as the most important revelation or Muhammad as the seal of the prophets. The end of Islamic expansion may have contributed to this awareness: the conquest of Uzbekistan was extremely difficult and a crisis in Andalusia made it impossible to subject the Frankish kingdom – but this is a point that Donner does not digress upon.

He tells his story well. I really liked his book, not only because of the general thesis, but also because along the road, Donner makes a lot of extremely illuminating remarks. When we discuss the great conquests, he says, we must assume that diplomacy was more important than we can deduce from our sources. He may be right: perhaps, the battles were just violent interruptions of a mostly peaceful process of conversion to ecumenism. The main destructions, at least, seem to belong to the terrible Byzantine-Sassanian War (602-628), and appear to be unrelated to the wars of the Righteous Caliphs.

Donner does not stress it, but people may indeed have become Believers because they were sick of Byzantine and Sassanian violence. They may have regarded the conflict as one of the tribulations of the end time. Apocalyptic ideas, Donner correctly observes, were still very much alive at the end of the seventh century, and he is probably right when he proposes that the Dome of the Rock was meant to be “the locale in which [Caliph] ‘Abd al-Malik (or one of his successors), as leaders of the righteous and God-fearing empire of the Believers, would hand over to God the symbols of sovereignty at the moment the Judgment was to begin”.

The idea that the Believers were originally ecumenical monotheists is simple. Reading the book, I found myself wondering why nobody thought of this before. But now that Muhammad and the Believers has been written, it is hard to think differently. It explains why Christian soldiers joined Arab armies and why, as late as 800, a Zoroastrian could be tax collector in northern Mesopotamia. We need new questions to proceed beyond Donner’s fine book.

Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers at the Origins of Islam (2010)

The Rise of Islam (1)

The Byzantine-Sassanian War: Heraclius defeating Khusrau II (Louvre)

What happened when Antiquity came to an end? What marks the beginning of the Middle Ages? It will be hard to enumerate all aspects, but at least it’s certain that the imperial institutions disappeared from western Europe: no Roman state, no Roman taxes, no Roman armies. In the East, the transition was less abrupt. The Byzantine Empire continued to demand taxes, continued to build armies, continued to exist. Yet, it had to give up territories: the Arabs conquered Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. There was also a mental change: for the ancients, ‘us’ and ‘them’ had been identical to ‘Graeco-Roman civilization’ and ‘barbarians’, but after the transition, the basic opposition was ‘Christianity’ versus ‘Islam’.

This makes Muhammad one of the most influential people of Late Antiquity, or the Early Middle Ages. Without him, no Islam and no loss of eastern provinces for the Byzantine Empire. The prophet, his message, and his followers are extremely important subjects to any student of Antiquity, but they are very hard to understand. Our main sources are the Quran, which is not a work of historiography, and the traditions (hadith), which were written down many years after Islam had come into being. Even worse, many traditions have been regarded with suspicion from the outset. Using what he believed to be reliable traditions, Ibn Ishaq wrote the extremely influential Life of the Prophet in the 750s, more than a century after the death of Muhammad.

Until quite recently, modern western scholars have accepted the events mentioned by Ibn Ishaq as essentially historical. Although the miracle stories were ignored, the other anecdotes were considered to be reliable. The result was a more or less rationalized legend; an example is the book by Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad (1960). This approach was not unlike the way Thomas Jefferson dealt with the gospels. Rodinson’s view has become more or less canonical – Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad. A Prophet for Our Time is an example – but we might have expected something more critical than “believing everything in the sources except that which presupposes a suspension of the laws of nature”. Accepting sources in this way, without asking why they were written down in the first place, is called “naïve positivism”.

Because rationalized legends became untenable, there have been new quests for the “historical Muhammad”. There is, for example, the Luxenberg thesis, which implies that the Quran is not written in Arabic, but in a mix of Syriac and Arabic. This is not as far-fetched as it seems, because Syria was certainly important in early Islam and the Quran is written in a “defective script” without vowels and with possible confusion of several consonants (e.g. b, t, and th). The Luxenberg thesis indeed helps to expel some minor problems, but also creates one big problem: we have to assume that the Quran was not recited for a sufficiently long time to forget its original language. This seems extremely implausible (more…).

Yet, the Luxenberg thesis is not the worst new idea. There are also a couple of nonsensical theories. Although it is certain that Nestorian and Monophysite Christians left the Byzantine Empire and settled in the Syrian and Arabian Deserts, and although it is certain that many warriors in the early Islamic armies were Christians, it is ridiculous to assume that Islam was created when people no longer understood the Monophysite hymns and prayers. Granted, the name “Muhammad” means “the blessed one”, but it is unlikely that people, after singing a Syriac or Arabic version of “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord” asked “who is that Mr Blessed?” and started to invent both the anecdotes about and the person of the Prophet.

I was under the impression that the quest for the historical Muhammad was a cul-de-sac. But I was wrong, as I will show in my next posting.

1600 Ancient Sites on Google Earth

The center of Alexandria

What you are looking for, is here.

Paris, Louvre

Persian soldier from Susa

It is hard to write a review of the Louvre in Paris, because it is one of the world’s largest museums. There are many departments, and each one of them might, in its field, have been a museum of the first order. For example, it is hard to find another Egyptological museum in Europa that equals the Louvre.

The museum also has a reputation for interesting expositions – one on Meroe and one on the archaeology of Saudi Arabia during my latest visit – and one ought to visit the Louvre twice a year to keep in touch. The people of Paris are unusually blessed.

Echnaton

If you visit the museum for the first time, you will be surprised by the pyramid-shaped entrance. Use the time you lose to pass the bomb check and buy a ticket to look at it, because it is a monument of the first order.

I already mentioned the Egyptian department, where you can easily spend a full day. There are portraits of the Egyptian kings and objects from daily life, and what is even better: the full history is dealth with, so you will also find objects from the first millennium BCE. The Greek, Roman, and Coptic age are not ignored either, although you need to go to Greek department for the royal portraits of the Ptolemies.

An Arabian warrior

The Egyptian department is deservedly famous, and attracts many visitors, who are usually exhausted when they are half-way their tour. Usually, they will take the shortest route to the exit, which brings them through the departments of Cypriote, Arabian, Palmyrene, and Phoenician art – which are, as a consequence, full of people who are not interested in the objects. That is pity, because these rooms alone justify a trip to Paris. Still, if you manage to ignore the crowd of tired visitors to the Egyptian department, you will certainly enjoy coffins from Sidon, Byblus, and Carthage, Nabataean inscriptions, and statues from Cyprus. One of my favorites is a relief of one of the divine triad of Palmyra. You will need half a day to study it well.

The Code of Hammurabi

Next to it is the Oriental department. The most famous object is, of course, the Code of Hammurabi. Don’t concentrate on the diorite monolith only, but also look in the small display in the same room, because there you will see cuneiform tablets with the same text – one of them written more than a millennium later and proving that these laws had become some kind of Mesopotamian classic, and it is probably no coincidence that the division of these Old Babylonian laws returns in the Ten Commandments.

Early Sumerian mask

The Code of Hammurabi was found in Susa, which is a prominent part of the oriental collection. You will also see a wall decorated with Achaemenid soldiers and cuneiform tablets from this Iranian town. Other important excavations are Mari and Khorsabad, but there is a lot more to see. There are also rooms devoted to Jordan and western Syria; they are not adjacent to the eastern Syria and the other Levantine rooms, which is a bit impractical – but the Mesha stela is worth the detour. You need a full day to study the entire oriental department.

Pompey

The Roman department is surprisingly small. Yet, there is a lot of fine sculpture, including a nice series of portraits of Roman rulers – including the emperor Inconnus about whom I already blogged. Next to it is a comparatively small Etruscan department. A galery of rather mediocre statues brings you to the room devoted to Roman art that was later restored, which is great fun: usually, you can immediately see which part is ancient and which is an addition. (Here, you will also find Canova’s famous Amor and Psyche.) You need about half a day to see it all, read the explanatory signs, and take your photos.

Alexander: the Azara herm

The Greek department is larger – you again need a full day to study it all. The two most famous pieces are the expressive Nike of Samothrake and the famous Venus of Milo. The latter is more or less the museum’s raison d’être. Napoleon had looted the Italian museums, but after he had found his Waterloo, all those works of art had to be returned. In an age in which it was believed that inspiration by great art created great minds, and that Greek art was the most inspirational, the emptying of the Louvre was believed to be a national disaster, but fortunately, the Venus of Milo was found. Now, France could compete again with the British, who had the Elgin Marbles. That the armless deity was a Hellenistic and not a Classical statue, was ignored – the inscription which proves it, is now conveniently lost.

Croesus

The Greek department also has some fine temple remains (from a/o Assos), the Tanagra statuettes that I increasingly love, and lots of pottery. Unfortunately, the rooms with Greek ceramics have rcently been closed. I haven’t seen the Croesus to the left for quite some time: last time, the room was closed to install better protection; before that, it was on loan to another museum.

The crowds are very large, and you may count yourself lucky that I did not bring you to the paintings. This makes a visit to the Louvre a bit difficult, and you must prepare yourself well; fortunately, the museum’s website is excellent. Four days is the minimum for the ancient departments.

Demetrius Poliorcetes

Finally, I must mention one little gem that is often ignored and where you can, consequently, quietly look at the objects: the room with metal objects. There is some fine silver work, but you will also see the helmet of a gladiator, a nice statuette of the Tyche of Antioch, the head of Demetrius Poliorcetes, a hoplite’s panoply, a curse tablet from the Crimea, Roman military diploma’s, and so on.

But unfortunately, that’s the only part of the museum where you will not meet many other people. In fact, the museum is too big, and I think that it would be wiser to split it into smaller museums.

Berlin, Pergamonmuseum

The Pergamon Altar, when it’s not too crowded

The Pergamonmuseum is probably Berlin’s most famous cultural institution. It contains three major collections which, each in itself, might have been fine museums: a classical department, a department of ancient Near Eastern art, and a department of Islamic art. What they have in common is their connection to the former Ottoman Empire. In each of these departments, you will see splendid works of art.

Ishtar Gate

The museum is named after the city of Pergamon, where German archaeologists found the famous altar that now stands in the central room of the museum. (In fact, the museum was built around the altar.) The north wing is devoted to Greek and Roman art, and you will find archaic sphinxes, classical reliefs, and so on.

The south wing contains the department of ancient Near Eastern art, which includes the famous Ištar Gate from Babylon and the ancient procession road, which appears to date back to the Seleucid age. Among the other objects are orthostats from Tell Halaf, prehistoric finds from Uruk, the royal tombs of Assur, bronzes from Luristan, objects from Nineveh, and of course lots of cuneiform tablets. Among the most fascinating documents is a tablet that mentions the Judaean king Jehoiachin.

A late-Sasanian/early Islamic boar from Ctesiphon

If you go upstairs, you will find yourself in the department of Islamic art. Again, a complete building has been moved from its original location to the German capital: this time, a substantial part of the wall of the early Islamic Mshatta, one of Jordan’s desert castles. But there’s a lot more to see. I must have been gazing at a splendid manuscript of Saadi‘s Rose Garden for at least half an hour.

It is easy to spend a day in the Pergamonmuseum, and that is also a problem: it can be extremely crowded. When I was there last June, I could easily enter the building, but last week, early August, there was a long queue. When I entered the museum, it felt muggy, and I wondered whether the humidity wasn’t dangerous for the objects.

The Battle of Sagalassus (333 BCE)

The battle site

The capture of the Pisidian town of Sagalassus is not the best-known or most important of Alexander the Great‘s battles, but at least we know exactly where it happened and the site has not changed. It is one of the few places where you can have an idea of the quality of the Macedonian soldiers, who had to fight an uphill battle. These men were strong, really strong.

I put online one photo and a brief explanatory note. Not terribly important, but if you’re interested, it’s here.

Midas: Fiction and Fact

The so-called Tomb of Midas in Gordium

King Midas of Phrygia is best known from Greek legend: the story about the drunken Silenus, the story about “the Midas touch”, the story about the donkey ears, and several others, including a nice parallel to the Roman story about the Lacus Curtius.

Yet, the Greeks also remembered him as a real king, the first to send presents to Delphi. This Midas had fought against the Cimmerians, had been defeated, and had committed suicide. He is almost certainly identical to the Mit-ta-a of Muški mentioned in the Annals of the Assyrian king Sargon II.

I’ve made a new page, which you can find here.

Gordium

A man and a bul on an ivory inlay

I am still moving all kinds of pages that are in the wrong directories if I want to migrate Livius.org to a CMS, and this time, it’s Gordium‘s turn. We’ve visited the capital of Phrygia twice, in 2003 and 2008, and it remains one of the most impressive sites I know. Imagine a vast plain, with dozens of funeral mounds. The largest of these is called “tomb of Midas“.

Opposite this tumulus is a museum, where you can also see the mosaics from the Phrygian citadel and a Galatian tomb; other objects can be seen in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara – like the finds from the Tomb of Midas. I’ve put it all together on this page, and I added a note on the river Sangarius.

Only thirty pages to go…

Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara

A Phrygian rhyton from Gordium, inspired by Urartean art

National archaeological museums tell a lot about the way a nation looks at its own history. A comparison of the museums in Ankara and Cairo is illuminating. The latter focuses on the third and second millennium BCE; the first millennium is almost ignored, even though it is the period in which Egypt, ruled by foreign dynasties, had a very great impact on other civilizations, and the other way round. But somehow, those Libyan, Nubian, Assyrian, and Persian dynasties are treated as if irrelevant. What we see is a “pure” Egyptian culture, not the more cosmopolitan Egypt.

The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara has made the oppositie choice. The plural “civilizations” tells a lot about the way Turkey looks at its past: plural, varied, multicolored. The first rooms are devoted to the Neolithicum, the Chalcolithicum, and the Early Bronze. Here you will see the finds from Çatalhöyük, one of the oldest agricultural sites in the world. And then: Kanesh – an Assyrian trade post in Central Anatolia. A meeting of cultures.

A rare Persian object: a Magian.

And this remains a crucial theme. There’s the Early Hittite period, followed by the age of the Hittite Empire, both with a lot of attention to foreign influences. I loved the letter from an Egyptian to a Hittite queen. The Neo-Hittite states are dealt with, and Aramaic influences are duly noted. Most impressive is the set of reliefs from Karchemiš, which include a powerful Gilgameš: the hero of a Babylonian epic.

When we reach the Phrygians and see the finds from the great tumulus of Gordium, the “tomb of Midas“, we again meet the Assyrians, because their texts seem to mention king Midas. (Perhaps this is incorrect, but that’s not my point.) Urartu is also dealt with in relation to its powerful southern neighbor. The Lydians are presented with their relations to the Greeks, and finally, you will see Greek and Roman objects in the basement.

The Persian age is almost neglected – which I sincerely regret, but you will get my point: Turkey’s past is pluriform. It is one of the nicest museums I know.

Didyma

Part of the decoration

About three weeks ago, I revisited Didyma, one of the oracles of Apollo. From my first visit, in 2003, I remember that I was disappointed. It was big, just big, and some parts of the sculpture were nice, but there was nothing really interesting. To be honest, that remains my opinion – even though I am well aware that only the dead and the mad never change their mind. It’s big, yes; the sculpture – see picture to the right – is nice, indeed; but the site is not nearly as interesting as, for example, the oracles of Delphi or Siwa.

Still, I took some photos, and today, I renewed the Didyma webpage. One of the improvements is that I could ask photos from the Louvre and the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. Nothing spectacular, but at least the webpage is now a bit more complete.