Dennis wrote
> The problem of deriving Athena from Hanahana is to my mind not so
much that of the origin of the Greek theta, but that of the final
syllable. The earlier Greek forms, in inscriptions before 4c, and
attested in Homer, Aeschylus, Aristophanes and others, has this as
/-naie:/, /naia/, or /naa/. This would suggest that Neit is a more
plausible source than (Ha)-na. Further, after a somewhat cursory
check, I cannot find "a great number of Greek divine and semi-divine
names" (John) that begin with At-, other than Atlas and all his
derivatives, and that cannot be analysed as a-, e.g. A-tropos,
A-talanta. There is however a possible Egyptian source in /Ht/
"temple
or abode of a god", or "tomb", which, although not attested for Neit,
has been transcribed elsewhere in Greek and Coptic as /At-/ or
/Ath-/.
There is of course the statement by Charax of Pergamon in the 2c AD
that "the Saitians called their city Athe:nai".
I think we have an acute danger with such Hellenistic sources as
Charax, Dennis. I would refer you to Thomas L. Thompson's recent
(1999) book on "The Mythic Past" for part of what I have to say.
From the mid 800's, under the great Assyrian monarchs, there was a
great deal of ethnic mixing in the Middle East. The imperial
monarchs
henceforth, be they Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Persian or Macedonian
Greek, and even Roman all tended to respond to internal problems
using
the same method. It was as follows.
Step 1: After invasion, place an annual tribute upon the local
rulers,
but keep them in place (i.e. indirect rule). Such tribute was quite
often huge and would result in Step 2
Step 2: After a local insurrection, replace the local king with
another member of the royal family more amenable to the empire, and
increase the tribute to pay for the cost of putting the insurrenction
down. This would lead to step 3.
Step 3: Another insurrection. Then remove the entire elite, exile
them to some other part of the empire, where the risk of insurrection
was growing. And appoint an (Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian,
Hellenistic, or Roman) governor to take their place.
Step 4: Now put into gear the Imperial propaganda macine. The
monarch
would claim in exiling people to the new city he was reforming the
religion and culture of the place to which the exiles were sent,
returning it to the way it was before it had been corrupted.
To top it all was the presence of Greek and Aegean mercenaries
throughout the Eastern Mediterranean from the late Bronze Age,
Lycians
and Etruscans for instance served in Egypt, Jewish soldiers had a
garrison at Aswan during Persian times, Scythians were settled just
outside Palestine (Scythopolis) and Greeks appeared at Alexandrias
from Egypt to the Indus. The result was huge amounts of syncretism,
mixing and sorting religious elements. This was the age of comparing
and harmonising flood myths between Deucaleon, Noah, the Sumerians
and
others. And there was much attempt at henotheism, reforming
religions, and justifing your own by claiming it to be just an aspect
of another, somewhere else.
The results, was a huge mixing of traditions in the Middle East, and
self-conscious attempts by those suffering most from the enormous
social changes that resulted, to put together new "systems of
meaning"
for such problems as "who are we?"; "Who am I?"; "What is our
relation
with the divine?". The hebrew Bible was one result of this mixing.
Greek rationalism was another. Manetho and Berossus were both
motivated by a third tradition, how to winnow the records of the deap
past to make them relevant to the present. And there was a lot of
transcultural folk etymologies around too - like Herodotus, Charax,
etc who have significantly muddied the waters. Thus the atempts by
Josephus to claim that the Hyksos was the time of the coming of
Joseph's family to Egypt - a complete fabrication using Manetho's
uncritical acceptance of the 18th Dynasty's successful propaganda
campaign to successfully darken the very Egyptian reign of the Delta
kings by calling them Asiatics and branding them as foreigners and
Hyksos (at this time Asiatics seemed to apply to all that were
further
north than Memphis - or who were not under direct Theban control - an
attempt to assume the mantle as national saviours. Generations of
Egyptologists have used Manetho, Josephus and the propaganda of the
18th dynasty monarchs uncritically, not accepting the evidence of
their own eyes in the excavations of the Hyksos period.
This was the period of the identificaion of the Canaanite Yamm with
Poseidon (because they were both gods of the Sea), of Ishtar with
Aphrodite, of Aphrodite with Venus, of Athena with Neith, of Hermes
with Thoth, of Baal with Zeus, of Poseidon with Neptune. Thus
Neptune
got a trident to match Zeus's thunderbolt, which was copied into the
iconography of half a dozen other sea divinities from Helenic to
Roman
times. Persians gave Ahura Mazda wings and a halo, and so angels in
Christian iconography have been portrayed ever since.
So the result of this. I would caution all here to work very
carefully with ancient sources claiming etymological connections here
or there, or with modern reconstructions based upon identifications
of
such as Neith and Athene, based upon the Saite-Greek realisation that
they both had warrior Goddesses in which shields were important. It
was part of the Zeitgeist to make such judgements. It doesn't mean
that they were real in any way. Everyone was amazed at the
historical depth of the traditions of Egypt and Sumer. Everyone
wanted traditions of their own of equivalent depth. Hesiod and Homer
were refashioned to give Greek myths that depth, and the stories of
Adam and Eve were self-consciously fashioned out of Adapa and Nintu.
Naramsin of Akkad became Nimrod the mighty hunter, and I believe,
Mopsus of Colophon was pressed from Philistine use into Hebrew mythos
as Moses, who lead his people from captivity in Egypt to the Promised
Land.
Regards
John