Re: [TIED] Dennis on Glen (was Hebrew and Arabic)

 

From: John Croft <jdcroft@...>

Date: Mon May 22, 2000 6:48am

Subject: Re: [TIED] Dennis on Glen (was Hebrew and Arabic)

> Dennis, influences can go two ways. A West Semitic influence in
>

Greek

> can equally be a Greek influence upon West Semitic. Thus we

find

> that
> Iapetos/Japeth - one Greek and one Hebrew can be

assumed to be either

> a West Semitic influence upon Greek or a Greek

influence upon West

> Semitic. The same goes for the ddn - Dardanoi links

we have been

> speaking of in the two languages.

> When

talking about which way the influence goes we need to take into

> account

two sets of factors.

> 1. In which language group does the etymology

have the deepest roots,

> and

Quick interjection here. The Semitic/Egyptian etymologies I have proposed have been for words and names that have no known IE etymology.

> 2. On the basis of the archaeology, which of the two areas was the
> dominant culture of the time.

John, what we are comparing here is, on the one side, the very recently established independent city-statelets of Mycenean Greece, and on the other, the ancient civilisation (already almost 2000 years old at this time) of Egypt at the height of its power and wealth. Tuthmosis III established an empire stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. On the basis of the archaeology of the two areas, there is no contest. In fact, I doubt that in any other situation, such as China/Japan or India/Thailand, this question would even be asked.

<snip>

I've snipped the part about dan/deden etc.

What follows now is so breathtaking in its disregard for common sense and plausibility, I can only put it down to the "Eurocentric" viewpoint I complained of in my post of 22/5, and best summarised in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt :

"We fail entirely to recognise our relationship to them [the Greeks] if we dare to apply the standards to them which we apply to the rest of world history."

At the risk of boring you all with a long long letter, I would like to nail this once and for all.

> Now what about the dominant cultures? It is true that Ugarit and
> Alalakh were trading depots of importance in this period.

They were more than "trading depots". They were ancient and major cities, with palaces, libraries, and extensive trading networks right across the Middle East and the Aegean. The merchant class was an extremely important element, and advised the king on policy.

Detailed records were also kept of the activities of foreign merchants in the city. Anita Yannai (Studies on Trade Between the Levant and the Aegean in the 14^th to the 12^th Centuries BC, Oxford University) writes :

"…the fact remains that although Canaanites, Assyrians, Hurrians, Egyptians, Alasiotes and inhabitants of virtually every city up and down the Syro-Palestinian coast are mentioned in the abundant archives, these have not yielded any ethnic, geographic or personal names that are indisputably Greek, nor any Linear B texts."

> Gubla
> (Byblos) had been trading cyprus timbers to Egypt from

late

> pre-Dynastic times. But it is unlikely that this timber trading

went

> to Greece, which was heavily timbered itself at the time.

But it has given the Greeks their words for papyrus and book. The form of the name also shows it was well known to the Greeks before the elimination of labio-velars : gW > b before /i/.

> From
> 1600-1100 BCE the dominant maritime power of the

Eastern

> Mediterranean
> was not Levantine, but Minoan and then

Mycenaean.

Leaving aside the very real possibility that the Minoans were Semitic speaking, the only evidence you have for this is the distribution of pottery. I don't think that this gives any indication of the relationship between producer and consumer, or the transporter. But let's discuss Mycenean pottery and LBA trade.

It has been noted that the plentiful Mycenean pots found in the Near East and Egypt are always accompanied by larger numbers of Cypriot ware (Hankey, Yannai), and that this trade increased dramatically after 1470 - during the reign of Tuthmosis III. These pots are fine ceramic ware, not the coarse domestic variety, and restricted as to type.

Could this indicate that the Myceneans only traded as far as Cyprus?

It should also be noted that, in the Near East and North Africa, this pottery is to be found strictly within the sphere of Tuthmosis' empire. It seems reasonable then to surmise that Mycenae was a part of this empire, and it was under these circumstances that their ceramics were traded throughout the region.

I have already cited the work of George Bass, of Texas A&M University, a marine archaeologist who has reported on his findings in two LBA shipwrecks off Cape Gelidonya and Ulun Burun. In brief, he shows that the main trade items in this period were metals, cloth, ivory and cereals, not ceramics. The metals ingots, "oxhides", show from their quality/authenticity markings that the trade in metals was almost exclusively in the hands of the Phoenicians. Large quantities of these "oxhides" (i.e. unworked metal) have been found in Greece bearing these marks. Further the equipment of the vessels, anchors etc., standard weights used, all show that LBA trade was fundamentally controlled and regulated by the Canaanites, who, at this period, were subjects of Egypt. Bass goes on to state :

"The distribution of Syrian cylinder seals, therefore, may be stronger evidence for Near Eastern trading ventures than the distribution of Mycenean pottery for a monopoly of Mycenean shipping."

> Language changes
> through bilingualism. Culture contact between

a dominant power and a

> less dominant one leads to the less domionant

one becoming bilingual

> in the tongue of those who are technologically

or culturally superior

> at the time. Then what happens is either the

substrate language

> reasserts itself (as what happened to English as

against Norman

> French), or else the substrate gets more and more

confined until it

> disappears altogether (as happened with Gaullish

against Latin).

I don't really agree with what you say here.

Firstly, we're not talking about language change here, but linguistic borrowings. The adaptation of foreign forms to native speech patterns indicates, though, a high degree of familiarity with the borrowings in question.

I would say that it is the minority, whether culturally superior or not, that becomes bilingual. Thus, in England, it was the Normans/French who became bilingual, not the English. As for Gaulish, there are mitigating circumstances, such as a standard Latin competing with a dialectically diverse Gaulish, better communications leading to the use of Latin as a lingua franca, the length of time involved (400+ years), education, the church, the military etc.

In the case of Greek, I think the English pattern is a good analogy, with a kind of Semitic/Egyptian Hyksos lingua franca taking the role of Norman (and French). The appearance of the (modified) Greek was faster than in the case of English, since, unlike the Normans and French who remained in communication with France, the Hyksos in Greece seem to have been isolated from their brethren from Egypt. It was not until the time of Thutmosis III, some 200 years after the colonisation of Greece, that Egyptian contact with the Aegean was re-established.

> I
> have no doubt that from 1,000 BCE until 700 BCE Phoenician

was

> technologically and culturally dominant to Greek in the Eastern
> Mediterranean. This was the period of orientalising influences in
> Greek Art, the period of the adoption of the Greek Alphabet.

There is a growing body of opinion that the Greek alphabet dates from well before 1000BCE. The argument is that the Greek letters can only be derived from the precursor of the 22-letter Phoenician alphabet, and that a considerable time span is required to explain the distance between the earliest Greek scripts and any point in the sequence of the proto-Canaanite and the Linear Phoenician script types. It has been shown, from late Ugaritic writing, that a Phoenician alphabet of the 22-letter type was in use in the Levant in the 14^th century. Inscriptions from the 14^th century at Kamid el-Loz in a South Semitic alphabet seems to provide a source for the "new" letters - phi, chi, psi and omega - which cannot be traced back to Canaanite. So perhaps we're going back to 1500BCE and the arrival of Kadmos.

Whatever the truth of it, it seems that the introduction of the alphabet is not related to an orientalising influence on Greek art.

> But
> from
> 1600-1100 the strength went the other way.

Bilingual Minoan-Egyptian

> speakers would have been found in the ports

of the Nile delta, and

> along the Levantine coast. We find

representatives of Monoans and

> Mycenaeans in Egyptian Art. We find no

Levantines or Egyptians

> portrayed in Minoan or Mycenaean art. As the

spread of Late Helladic

> IIIC pottery shows, the cultural influences of

the period all came

> out
> of the Aegean.

As I showed above, in the abundant archives of the Levantine cities, which detailed the activities of foreign merchants, the Greeks are conspicuous by their absence. Just as absent are traders from the Linear B inscriptions. They appear to have no place in the hierarchy of Mycenean society.

Mycenean art has been characterised as formulaic and extremely conservative, to the point where no sequence or development can be discerned through the entire Mycenean period. The themes remained constant, and in the main are derived from Minoan art.

Nevertheless, the symbols of royalty, lions and gryphons, are attested and have parallels throughout the Hyksos Middle East.

Egyptians and Phoenicians are however present in Linear B. In fact, both the Semitic form "misirajo" and Greek form "aikupitijo" for Egyptian are attested, along with "aitiokwijo" "Ethiopian", and "turijo" "Tyrian, Phoenician".

As for Minoan art, there are certainly Egyptian motifs to be found : blue monkeys, the "Nile" scene of the cat stalking the duck, the use of different skin colours for men and women, and lions,sphinxes and gryphons.

The murals of Akrotiri definitely show Levantine people dressed in typical Middle Eastern garb, as well as Pygmy boxers, and Ethiopians, and a naval scene that may well be a "Heb Sed" festival.

As I try to show above, the distribution of pottery is no indication of the direction of cultural influence. If it were, then we should be looking for Chinese cultural influence on 18/19^th century Europe.

> True, the culture of a yonger, dominant power can be captured by the
> sophistication of an older less dominant power (like the Romans were
> captured by Hellenic culture, or the Manchu were captured by the
> Chinese), but then there is clear evidence of this in the artistic
> iconography of the periods and places concerned. In the period from
> 1600-1100 BCE we see no evidence of this in the Aegean

vis-à-vis

> Egypt
> or the Levant.

Obviously not, since we haven't got a "younger dominating power" or an "older less dominant power".

> In the Levant we have clear evidence that an
> Egyptianising

elite were captivated by Egyptian culture. The horns

> of
> Hathor,

Syro-Phoenician sphinx, and even ultimately the Sinaitic

> script show a

cultural influence out of Egypt into Syria.

> The final piece of

evidence is the fact that Peoples of the Sea

> travelled through the

length of the West Semitic zone at the close of

> the late Bronze Age. We

find no equivalent West Semitic or

> Egyptian migration up into the

Aegean.

I don't understand what this is supposed to be evidence of. Why should the movements of the Sea Peoples be paralleled by a migration of Egyptians or West Semites into the Aegean? I don't follow.

The Sea Peoples did what the Sea Peoples did - end of story.

To conclude :.

The data available has always supported the case for massive Egyptian and Semitic influence on Greece, especially during it's formative Mycenean period. Recent discoveries have only lent further weight to this position. It takes the most convoluted hypotheses and twists of logic to maintain the opposite. I'll give an example, from Prof. Muhly, a Mediterranean archaeologist with a background in Akkadian. He takes it as axiomatic that Mycenean pots were transported on Mycenean ships, whereby cultural borrowings from the Levant were brought back to Greece. He has this to say about the Ugaritic texts :

[in rebuttal of Jack Sasson's remarks in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 86 about the lack of any Aegean proper, ethnic or geographical names and that Linear A and B documents record names that greatly resemble those that were current in Northern Syria at the same epoch, and concluding that "Mycenean trade, at least with Syria, was either maintained by Canaanites, or more likely conducted in places such as Rhodes or Cyprus"]

he says :

" Yet, assuming that the above observations are valid, does it not logically follow that the trade was controlled by the Myceneans? The Near Eastern texts betray no knowledge of the Aegean world. The Mycenean texts demonstrate a knowledge of Near Eastern languages and perhaps even of Near Eastern place names. This makes Greece the active participant, the Near East the passive partner in the trade relations of the Late Bronze Age."

By this logic, that makes us in Malaysia the active participant, and Europe and the US the passive partners, in our current trade relations.

I apologise for the length of this, but this needed rebutting in detail. We need to get beyond this and see if Egyptian and Semitic really can clarify the obscurities of much of the ancient Greek corpus.

Cheers

Dennis.