The Fall of Troy, Part 1

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The Fall of Troy, Part 1

• ART/CNE 430
• 11/18/04

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Lecture Topics

• Near Eastern influences on Greek art and
  literature, focusing on traditions of the fall of
  Troy (Ilioupersis)
• Homer and the Iron Age (again, what society do we
  see reflected in Homeric epic?)
• City destructions in the Late Bronze Age

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Near Eastern Influences

• In both her articles read for this week, Sarah
  Morris explores the influence of Near Eastern art
  and religions on Greek culture, especially on
  Homer and representations of the Fall of Troy in
  art and literature.

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Ilioupersis

• Morris points out that the capture of a city
  occurs in the earliest (Bronze Age) images in
  Greek art and poetry.
• Near Eastern songs mourning the fall of cities
  began in Sumer and Ur 1,000 years before that.

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Near Eastern City-Sacking in Greek Literature

• Aristotle, Herodotus, pseudo-Hesiod all speak of
  the fate of Assyrian Nineveh Alkaios fr.
  48.10-11 references the Greeks helping the
  Babylonians capture Ashkelon.
• NE traditions of city-sacking shape the ways the
  Greeks portray this theme.

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The Sack of Troy

• This was a story which became, in art and
  poetry, an encyclopedia of human experience
  refracted through Greek values.
• Morris concentrates especially on the story of
  Astyanax.

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Astyanax Two Different Deaths

• In poetry the child is thrown from the walls of
  Troy.
• In art the child is shown about to be, being, or
  having been killed by a warrior with a weapon,
  usually on an altar. Astyanaxs death is
  incorporated into Priams.
• Morris thinks NE traditions may have helped shape
  the story.

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Early Artistic Representations

• Show a warrior seizing or slaying a young child,
  sometimes near a brick or ashlar (dressed,
  coursed rectangular blocks)structure.
• Examples bronze shield-strap panels and tripod
  legs
• The scenes are in a setting that implies
  sacrifice - the presence of altars, weapons
  brandished more like knives than swords.

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The Death of Priam

• She argues that, according to the tradition of
  the assassination of royalty, Priam should die on
  his throne.
• She asks How did the altar become the seat of
  the king and the locale of his death?
• Her answers
• 1) visual confusion (Greeks unfamiliar with
  thrones until Persian exposure)
• 2) influence of mythology, put the altar in to
  justify divine involvement in heroic deaths
  (Achilles, Neoptolemus, etc.)

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550 BCE, Attic Black-Figure
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550 BC, Attic Black Figure
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Astyanax Death in Art

• The strange looking representations of
  Neoptolemus about to hit Priam with the body of a
  child are the result of a mixing of traditions.
• The hurling of bodies/body parts belongs to
  siege/fall of city narratives but the child
  wielded here has bleeding, weapon wounds, not the
  wounds from a fall.

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Locating the Tradition

• Astyanax death belongs to a widespread tradition
  - the representation of the slaughter of enemy
  children in the sack of cities.
• The earliest Greek artistic representation of
  this is the Mykonos pithos.

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Near Eastern City Sack Traditions

• These include practices that the Greeks dont
  experience, such as impaling enemy heads, such as
  we see in this Assyrian relief (8th c. BCE).

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Near Eastern Siege Machines

• The most formidable weapon of the period.
• Leather and wood wheeled devices which shield
  battering rams, manned by warriors within.
• Widely used in 9th-7th c., first appeared in
  Greek warfare in 5th c.

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Trojan Horse

• Morris argues that such a siege device was
  transformed in Homeric times to the story of the
  Trojan Horse, which entered the walls of Troy,
  disgorged men, and enabled the citys sack.
• The earliest representations, like the Mykonos
  pithos, could perhaps derive from a single
  prototype by an artist or poet who turned a NE
  military machine into a Greek invention.

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Near Eastern Influence

• Other Greek stories that may have borrowed
  elements from the Near East
• legends of Egyptian pharaohs strong enough to
  pierce bronze with arrows Odysseus contest of
  the bow and axes.
• The odd, un-Hellenic representation of Zeus
  birthing Athena from his head.

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City-Sacking Imagery

• Near Eastern Bronze Age imagery of city-sacking
  may have influenced Greek imagery as well.
• Reliefs at Karnak, Luxor, Medinet Habu and Abu
  Simbel all show the triumphs of Egyptian kings
  over Syrian and Canaanite cities.

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Merenptahs Campaign

• His campaign against Canaanite cities such as
  Ashkelon is depicted in four temple reliefs in
  Karnak in Egypt.
• Images include
• men defending walls
• women atop towers
• despairing acts by the besieged people with
  arms upraised, people holding the limp bodies of
  children from the walls, as if about to drop them.

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Influence of Semitic Religion

• Infant sacrifice was required for specific
  occasions and rituals.
• Hebrew Bible in 2 episodes, fathers vow and
  offer children in exchange for military victory.
• Punic topet cemeteries the rite of molek
  (regular infant sacrifice) attested in Phoenician
  Punic inscriptions as well as Semitic
  literature.
• The Greeks transformed this alien ritual into
  native myth - lots of stories of young people
  willingly offering themselves as sacrifices to
  save cities.

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Transformation into Greek Culture

• By having these children willingly die, the
  Greeks clear the cities of violating the taboo of
  human sacrifice, while ennobling and Hellenizing
  a Semitic rite.
• Myth often blames foreigners for human sacrifice
  (Medea, etc.)
• The story of Astyanax transforms an alien rite
  into a narrative device in art and literature.

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Contact

• The Greeks came into contact with Near Eastern
  art and stories via trade and contact with Near
  Easterners themselves living in places like Crete
  (Kommos).

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The Context of Bronze Age Epic

• Many scholars argue that the presence of
  narrative in palatial art, and of lyre players in
  banquet contexts, proves the presence of a verbal
  epic narrative tradition.

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Thera Arrival Town Fresco
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S. Morris Conclusion (NCH)

• It may be a greater challenge to isolate and
  appreciate what is Greek in Homeric poetry than
  to enumerate its foreign sources. Exploring the
  many treasures common to Homeric and NE epic,
  including the Hebrew Bible, enables modern
  readers to join archaeologists and recover the
  lost unity of ancient Mediterranean literature
  and life.

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7th c. BCE
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Homer and the Iron Age

• Is Homeric epic just bad history? What does Ian
  Morris say?

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I. Morris, p. 558-559

• In the rituals which produced the archaeological
  record, Iron Age Greeks manipulated material
  culture as a nonverbal language through which
  they debated who they were and where they stood
  relative to each other, the larger east
  Mediterranean world, and the lost heroic past.
  The ritualized performance of epic poetry . . .
  was also a key part in this process. . .

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I. Morris, cont.

• Homer uses objects - some contemporaneous, some
  ancient, some invented - to evoke the past in the
  present, creating an epic distance. Objects
  were as manipulable as language, religion, and
  the laws of physics, and there is no point in
  trying to pull Homers picture apart,
  reassembling it in layers which can then be
  correlated with the artifacts found in discrete
  archaeological strata. We should rather think of
  the epics themselves as artifacts . . . Generated
  in the great upheavals of the 8th c.

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I. Morris, cont.

• The poems and the archaeological record can only
  be properly understood when read alongside one
  another and woven together, as remnants of
  competing 8th c. efforts at self-fashioning, out
  of which classical Greek civilization was
  created.

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Late Bronze Age Disruptions

• We can see evidence for destructions in the
  archaeological record - how to interpret them is
  the question.
• This is the heart of the controversy over
  archaeological proof of the Homeric Trojan War.

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Evidence for Calamity

• There were destructions on Crete at different
  times during the MBA - LBA.
• Sanctuary at Arkhanes, Crete, found in 1979. Four
  room shrine on Mt. Iouchtas, near Knossos. In the
  west room, 3 skeletons were found who had all
  died violently. Time MBA (MMII) Remains
  undisturbed since destruction.

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Human Sacrifice?

• 18 year-old male, skeleton so tightly
  contracted that he must have been trussed like
  the bull on this sarcophagus. Lying on side, on
  platform in center of the room. Among his bones
  was a bronze dagger. Close by, a trough for
  collecting blood from the sacrifice. His bones
  were discolored showing that he died of blood
  loss.

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Priestess?

• 28 year old female, spread-eagled in SW corner of
  the room.

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Priest

• Male in his late 30s, 6 feet tall, found on his
  back near the sacrificial platform with his hands
  raised as if to protect his face, legs broken by
  falling debris.
• In corridor, poorly preserved skeleton, with
  shattered remains of clay vessel with bull on it.

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Interpretation

• The sanctuary was destroyed by fire, probably as
  a result of earthquake, perhaps the one that
  destroyed the Old Palaces.
• The collapsing roof killed the three young male
  was already dead.
• Human sacrifice to avoid destruction? Influence
  of Near Eastern religion?

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Destruction of Minoan New Palaces (c. 1450 BCE)

• Happen at the same time archaeologically, when
  the same style of pottery was in use at all
  sites. So, the destructions could have happened
  within a generation of each other, or all in the
  same year. Archaeology cant narrow it down more
  than that.
• Destructions occur over the entire island.

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Causes

• At same time Major natural disaster
  (earthquake)?
• 25 years apart
• 1) internal conflict palaces fighting each
  other
• 2) external conflict Mycenaeans swept in and
  plundered.
• Knossos was destroyed c. 1450, immediately
  rebuilt with new pottery styles, new tomb styles,
  new styles of fresco painting, and Linear B
  tablets.
• Only Knossos was rebuilt.

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Signs of Stress

• At Knossos, c. 1450 - evidence for child
  sacrifice. Off the royal road, 327 childrens
  bones were found in a burnt deposit in the
  basement of a building called North House -
  remains of 4 children between 8-12 years old.
• Bones show fine knife marks, comparable to
  butchery marks on animal bones, from the removal
  of meat. Cannibalism is indicated.

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Knossos Cannibalism

• In a nearby room, there were some finger and toe
  bones from children, a human vertebra with a
  knife cut, some marine shells, some edible snail
  shells, and burnt earth were found in a pithos,
  suggesting that portions of children were cooked
  together with a variety of other foodstuffs.

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Mycenaean Invasion?

• Is this evidence for Minoan response to a
  Mycenaean invasion? Was this a drastic ritual by
  Knossians trying to please their gods?
• We cant tell. We have archaeological evidence of
  action, but interpreting it is difficult.
• Since Phoenicians lived at places like Kommos,
  one would not be surprised to see the influence
  of Levantine religion on the locals.

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Aegean-wide Destructions

• LBA Aegean civilizations were multicultural and
  interconnected. It is not surprising that we see
  LBA destructions affecting areas from Greece, to
  Anatolia, to Egypt.
• Next week the fall of Troy, the fall of
  Mycenaean palaces