1HARBOUR MINDS
THE BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN, 1200–650 BC
It is a story of the margins, the product of deep political and cultural changes in the eastern Mediterranean between about 1200 and 800 BC. Nothing about the new way of thinking came from centrality or long-instituted authority; every one of its qualities derived from conditions found on the edges of power, where fusion, manoeuvrability, thievery, deceit, eclecticism and openness were aspects of a vitalized, at times anxious and often predatory life.
To imagine large geopolitical change as human experience is difficult, partly because it occurs on a far from personal scale and over time spans that stretch beyond the individual life. And we cannot think of ourselves as epiphenomena, bubbles on the surface of a much larger stream. But the sources of philosophy were not merely brilliant individuals nor chance happenings. It can be seen in retrospect to have emerged from the intersection of three culture-worlds in the eastern Mediterranean about 3,000 years ago. The meeting of the western limits of Asia, the northern shore of Africa in Egypt and the braided and tasselled fringe of southern Europe gave rise to what we now see as the beginnings of western thought.
The change had been a long time coming. For the centuries after 3000 BC, the great river-based empires of Egypt on the Nile and Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq had been the power centres of the most civilized and enriched region of the world. Vast authoritarian structures, both physical and administrative, had been established by which the dominion of priests and kings ruled for generation after generation. Fat with the nutrients their alluvial valleys could give them, cities, palaces, temples, writing, literature, sculpture, historical records, libraries, accounting systems, mathematics and astronomy had all been developed to serve the purposes of an overwhelming divine and regal authority. All the goods of the world, wines and ivories, spices and scents, fine timbers, precious metals and exquisite goods were drawn in towards them.
Different forms of a palace economy ruled this core of the Bronze Age world. In Anatolia, the Hittite empire played its part as one of these near-eastern power blocs. In Crete, the palace-temples of the Minoans drew on Egyptian and Mesopotamian models, commanding a sea-based empire stretching up into the Aegean and west towards Italy. The warrior-kings at Mycenae in mainland Greece were first the acolytes and then imitators of the Cretans, and after about 1450 BC their conquerors. Where the rest of Europe and most of western Asia remained divided into low-tech, small-scale chiefdoms, these sophisticated literate empires looked as if they could last for eternity.
Almost without exception, this civilization was concentrated in great capital cities, hived around a royal or priestly ideology and arranged in rigid hierarchies. The empires competed with one another, but each was founded on that same centralizing principle. All thought was bound either to the temples or to the great autocratic monarchs. Thinkers were the servants of order; their highly conservative scribal world was singular and fixed for centuries at a time. Precise repetition, not inventiveness, was its virtue. The thousands of texts that survive from them, as the Assyriologist Leo Oppenheim said, are ‘stereotyped, self-centered, and repetitious’. No dialogue, no setting out of opposing views and no multilayering of perspectives is ever encountered. This was, as Oppenheim wrote, a ‘curiously inhibiting and ultimately falsifying [set of] constraints’. Palace and temple ordained a long-lasting imperial reality and the intellectuals were tied to it. The atmosphere was in its way not unlike those of the giant quasi-autocracies of the twentieth century and of China now.
The Mediterranean, a compendium of complementary niches, connected by a sea that extends east and west through similar if ever-varying environments. Any voyage of sufficient length would be sure of a landfall.
With many vicissitudes, the river empires persisted until about 1300 BC, when for reasons that remain opaque the long-fixed pattern of power started to fray and erode. The authority of the pharaohs began to shrink and Egypt’s Mediterranean presence and command faded. Monument-building came to an end. The Mesopotamian cities went into decline. To the north, in Anatolia, the empire of the Hittites collapsed. On the edges of this palace-world, Mycenaean power in Crete, in mainland Greece and on the Aegean shore of what is now western Turkey splintered and crumbled. Settlements returned to poverty and insignificance. Instead of grand bureaucratic dynasties, minor warlords came to control small and parochial territories. The population of the islands in the Aegean and its peripheries fell by three-quarters. Houses became small, poor and simple, filled with basic equipment. The knowledge of writing and metalwork disappeared from the Greek world.
It was the end of the Bronze Age. The causes of this general catastrophe, which unfolded over some 200 years, reaching a nadir in about 1050 BC, are not known. There is no sign of any great climatic change. It may simply have been that the administrative and political systems of the empires had become etiquette-bound, rigidified and overloaded, unable to keep up with the demands and challenges of imperial rule.
The key factor may have been what the Cambridge prehistorian Cyprian Broodbank, borrowing a term from modern economics, has called ‘the advantage of backwardness’. When old and deeply established institutions or empires grow to the point where their systems start to inhibit them, and their actions become sclerotic and cumbersome, the advantage moves to the agile and impoverished outsiders who can exploit the opportunities that old and elephantine systems cannot use.
As the authority of the empires began to fall apart, fleets of sailing ships from the north, filled with crews of freebooters, raiders-cum-traders, with Greeks among them and often equipped with a new kind of European slashing sword, began to roam the eastern Mediterranean, terrorizing its inhabitants. In Crete the populations of hundreds of villages deserted their seaside locations and built high, hidden refuges up in the hills. In Egypt, a pharaonic inscription records the bafflement of the authorities when faced with these new and unpredictable enemies:
The unruly Shardana [their identity has never been established] whom no one had ever known how to fight, came boldly sailing in their warships from the midst of the sea, none being able to withstand them.
These sea raiders were a pan-Mediterranean phenomenon, led by private individuals unencumbered and unburdened by any priority except immediate gain. You could portray them either as pirates or as seaborne entrepreneurs, independent, resourceful and inventive. Unlike the armies of the great river empires, these maritime nomads had no need to attend to centralized control. They could go where they wanted, take what they wanted, sell where they wanted and focus their interest on short-term benefits. They could both service and prey on a world in transition, acting in effect as both symptoms and agents of flux. It is the phenomenon that emerges at the end of empire, whether in post-Roman Europe, the post-Ottoman Balkans or post-Soviet Asia. Overarching control diminishes and everywhere comes a surge of local vitality and demand.
The first beneficiaries of this shift and dispersal of authority were the trading cities on what is now the coast of Israel and Lebanon. Collectively these people were known to the Greeks as the Phoenicians, meaning the ‘red ones’, perhaps because of the purple-dyed cloth they made and wore. It was a name unknown to themselves, and they were called after the cities from which they came: the men of Tyre, of Sidon, of Byblos. These were the dynamic coastal entrepôts of the years after 1000 BC, providing goods and treasure to the remaining markets to the south and east, intensified by the imperial demands of the newly energized and expansive Assyrian empire, and so developing into multicultural exchange hubs for information, beliefs and goods.
Their reach was long, and by about 900 BC the whole of the Mediterranean was starting to become a single maritime space. Goods travelled its length. A Phoenician hoard deposited then and recently dug out of the river muds at Huelva in the Gulf of Cadiz contained a helmet from Mesopotamia, swords from Ireland and Atlantic France, African ivory and ostrich shell, brooches from the eastern Mediterranean and pottery in patterns that originated in Tyre and Sidon but made of local Spanish clay. The Phoenician merchant oligarchs who had gathered and transported these treasures straddled the entire sea and its connections, founding new towns (for which the Phoenician word was Qārtḥadāšt, later heard by the Romans as ‘Carthage’), and building port installations. In Tyre itself, a city of 20,000 inhabitants in 900 BC, where the water was piped to fountains within its walls, they made a 15-acre harbour basin, protected against all winds and raiders, next to a marketplace and with a channel that led to an inner harbour for extra safety.
The Phoenicians in many ways were the proto-Greeks – rich, adventurous, enterprising, living on the edges of the great Egyptian and Mesopotamian inheritances, aggressive, urban, ruled by nominal doge-like kings but with the real power resting with the merchant oligarchy in city councils. They remain a puzzling phenomenon. They were literate, adopting and developing the alphabet that in the eighth century the Greeks would borrow and adapt from them in their turn, but the Phoenicians left nearly no record of themselves: no poetry, no epic tales, no literature, no history, no drama, no philosophy. The so-called Annals of Tyre were kept in that city and much later were sent by Alexander the Great for safekeeping to Tyre’s colony of Carthage in north Africa, but the papyri were lost there and next to nothing beyond a few brief Phoenician inscriptions remains. The silence of the Phoenicians is one of the great absences of this story. Did they begin to develop the kind of thought that later emerged and was recorded among the Greeks? Did equivalent conditions in the Phoenician cities not generate an equivalent frame of mind? In several of the early thinkers, there is an explicit Phoenician connection, usually a parent, often a journey. If the texts in which they recorded their thoughts had not disappeared, would this book have been about them? Would the Phoenicians, Semitic and Asian as they were, now be recognized as the progenitors of our world?
From about 900 BC onwards, the Greeks began to insinuate themselves into this Phoenician network, trading to what is now the coast of Syria and to the Italian peninsula (leaving their ceramics as evidence), where the Etruscans were also playing their part in a vortex of change and rivalry. Animated by the ambitions of these seaborne remakers of the world, the Mediterranean was driving itself out of the post-Bronze Age slump. The population of the sea as a whole had reached about 20 million by 800 BC, and was still growing. It was now that the terraces, the identifying mark of Mediterranean ambition and enterprise, were first built on island hillsides. Vines and then cuttings from olive trees were exported from one end of the sea to the other. The house mouse, originally a near-eastern species, gradually spread west and north in the holds and cargoes of the pioneer traders. By about 800 BC, the Mediterranean was in touch with itself, a spinning, fractalizing and hybridizing whirlpool of expanding and interacting cultures in which every voyage could be certain of finding a known destination on a distant shore.
This brief history is the soil in which the seed of early philosophy began to grow: the fraying of ancient, imperial control; the eruption of an unregulated stimulus in the sea-based freebooters; the development by them of trading networks which ran the length of the Mediterranean; and, as a product of those networks, the growth of merchant cities, first among the Phoenicians and then, after about 800 when Phoenician autonomy began to shrink under renewed pressure from the neo-Babylonian empire to the east, the emergence of the Greek cities into their own years of potency.
These are tangled beginnings, more a meshwork than a network, one lattice of interactivity laid over another in a rösti of connectedness, but a pattern can be made out within them: the Greeks would draw on the ancient, inherited learning of Egypt and Mesopotamia; set it in the frame of an adventurous and disruptive approach to life; and then look for a third term, neither wedded to autocratic power nor merely interested in a piratical free-for-all, but seeking what might be called the inventively civic, forms of life and understanding that depended neither on arbitrary authority nor on anarchic violence but were forever in search of the middle ground of social and personal justice, looking for, if perhaps never quite finding, the shared understanding of the three connected realms of soul, city and cosmos that would come to define them.
Absolutely fundamental to it is a sense of justice. For the Greeks, justice was ‘the indicated way’, the way of things that the arrangement of the universe suggests. If the universe can be seen to have a certain structure, then the self and the city should adopt that structure. The three realms of self, city and cosmos are the points of a triangle within which a coherent understanding can be found.
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A microcosm of the interaction between the Greek merchant harbour cities and the world in which they found themselves can be heard in a traditional story told by the second-century AD Greek traveller Pausanias about the harbour city of Erythrae, now on the coast of Turkey, out to the west of Izmir. It was strategically placed to use and benefit from the sea roads that crossed the Aegean and led north towards Thrace and the Black Sea and south towards Egypt and the Levant. As one of the cities that had been founded by the Greeks on the Aegean shores of Ionia in the centuries after 1100 BC it had begun to thrive along with its Greek neighbours on this maritime crossroads.
At some point, at the height of Phoenician success and expansion, before the Greeks had begun their own wide-scale Mediterranean career, perhaps in about 900 BC, a statue of Hercules, whose origins as a demi-god were partly in Greece, partly in the Near East, set out on a wooden raft from the port of Tyre in the land of the Phoenicians. When the raft arrived off the coast of Ionia, it bumped ashore on a headland exactly halfway between the harbour of the Erythraeans and its great rival the Greek island city of Chios.
Hercules floats from the great Phoenician city of Tyre to a point halfway between the young Greek settlements of Chios and Erythrae in Ionia.
The modern frontier between Greece and Turkey now divides these two places – at night you can look out across the channel from Erythrae in Turkey to the lights of Chios on the Greek side, the red pinpoints of its wind turbines on the ridge above them, and the lanterns of the fishing boats catching squid and mullet in the channel between. It is one of the narrow crossings between Asia and the European Union which in the twenty-first century has seen thousands of refugees from Asian wars attempt to find a new life in Europe, and where many have died.
Some 2,900 years ago the two were merely rivals in a contested sea. Citizens from both urgently wanted to bring home the enormous Hercules. For a while neither succeeded, until a fisherman from Erythrae called Phormion, who had lost his sight through disease, had a vision in a dream: the women of Erythrae must cut off their hair and weave a rope with it, and by using it the men of the city would be able to tow Hercules into their harbour.
The women of Erythrae refused to shave their heads for such a crazed scheme from a poor, blind fisherman, but the non-Greek Thracian women in the city – Thrace is roughly equivalent to Bulgaria today – some of whom were slaves and some now freed, offered up their hair. A rope was made and with it the men towed the statue home. Phormion the fisherman recovered his sight and a marvellous temple was erected to enshrine their prize. Hercules became the half-human deity of Erythrae (as of many other places in the Mediterranean), but no women except Thracians were allowed within his sanctuary. Statue and temple were still there more than a thousand years later, in the second century AD, when the image of the god was described as ‘absolutely Egyptian’ by Pausanias, who was also shown the hair rope, still kept as a holy relic.
The heavy-featured Hercules, fat-lipped, boxer-nosed, brutal-browed, wearing on his head the mane and pelt of the lion he had strangled to death at Nemea in the Peloponnese, came to embody the spirit of this port city, with its acropolis high over the harbour, its cornlands and olive groves stretching into the shallow valleys of the hinterland, and with a scatter of low, sheltering islands across the sea between it and Chios. It is the head that would appear forever stamped on Erythrae’s silver coins.
The coins of Erythrae showed on one side Hercules wearing his lion pelt and on the reverse his club, quiver and bow.
What to make of the tale? There seems little doubt that there was a statue of Hercules in Erythrae, one that was not to be recognized as particularly Greek. It had somehow come in from elsewhere, and why not from the city of Tyre in the Levant, where the patron god of the city Melqart was merely Hercules by another name? Hercules was the embodiment of masculine strength, a tough, god-defying, god-becoming man, who had adventured down to Hades to wound the king of the underworld and returned unharmed, who was an ex-slave himself but with club and bow had dominated creation. All animals shrank before him; mice on the Black Sea coast would refuse to eat the grapes from a vine that grew around his statue, or even to be on the same island when it fruited, for fear of his vengeance.
A gigantic stone head from Old Smyrna, perhaps the kind of statue Pausanias saw in Erythrae and described as ‘absolutely Egyptian’.
Copyright © 2023 by Adam Nicolson