The Origin of Philosophy: The Attributes of Mythic/ Mythopoeic Thought

History of Philosophy, Greek Philosophy

The 33 Gods of the Vedas

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

The Origin of Philosophy:
The Attributes of Mythic/Mythopoeic Thought, Note 1

A related problem to the identity of the sun is where it goes at night. Ancient cosmology, of course, universally saw the earth as flat, extending down indefinitely, and the sky as a solid structure (a "firmament") overhead. This gives rise to a case within a case of a multiplicity of expalanations, since the Egyptians had two different answers (if not more) for where the sun goes at night. Since Atum sails in a boat, , one answer is that he goes down into the Underworld at sunset, sails through twelve caverns under the earth (one for each hour of the night), killing demons along the way, and then rises into the sky again at dawn.

A stranger explanation involves the goddess of the sky, Nut. As in the image, she stretches across the sky from West to East, held up by her son, the god of the air, Shu. At sunset, she eats the sungod, boat and all. He passes through her body during the night, and she gives birth to him at dawn.

The ceiling of the burial chamber of the tomb of Ramesses VI, showng the goddess with the sun passing through her body, 1969

Some images of Nut, as on the burial chamber of the tomb of Ramesses VI, show small red images of the sun within Nut's body, one for each hour of the night. This tomb also answers a question we might have. Did the Egyptians tend to believe one or the other of these explanations? No, for both are represented in the same tomb. The subterranean halls of the tomb itself represent the journey through the Underworld, which is described by texts on the walls. So the Egyptians had no difficulty, in this case as in others, believing different, logically exclusive explanations of the same thing.


The ceiling of the burial chamber of the tomb of Ramesses VI, showng the goddess with the sun passing through her body, 1969

The need for an explanation of where the sun goes at night disappears with Anaximander of Miletus (c.550 BC), who first conceived of the earth as a finite body floating in space. There is "sky" below the earth as well as above it -- a notion that would have struck most ancient people as very bizarre. With that leap of imagination, however, we then conceive of the sun as simply remaining in the sky. It doesn't need to do anything else.

In the solar barque we see at right, the sungod has the head of a ram, which is borrowed from the god Amon, the wind god of Thebes who became politically important with the Theban dynasties XII and XVIII. As such, he is often called "Amon-Rē," a form of the god increasingly seen from the XVIII Dynasty onward.

The Origin of Philosophy:
The Attributes of Mythic/Mythopoeic Thought, Note 2

Another interesting version of the sun god is the "Two-lion-god," Rwty, . This is a solar god, who can be portrayed as a human body with a lion's head, but more characeristically as two lions that face away from a solar disk or from the hieroglyph for "horizon," which is a solar disk between two mountains (as seen in the image above). Indeed, 'ḫty, , "belonging to the horizon," which is abbreviated as the two horizontal ("of the horizon"!) lines in the name of Rē-Horakhtī (), shows this hieroglyph twice. This may represent the Eastern and Western horizons, as the two lions apparently do also, facing sunrise and sunset. It is a curious god, however, who is manifest in two beings. This is a multiplicity, not just of explanations, but of a single divine being.

The Origin of Philosophy:
The Attributes of Mythic/Mythopoeic Thought, Note 3

Once upon a time there was a magazine called Horizon. This was published by American Heritage between 1958 and 1978, in a hard cover format, and dealt in international scope with art, history, literature, and other curious topics. In 1978, the magazine was sold, went to soft cover, quickly lost its distinctive character, and limped along until 1989. The original series is still remembered fondly by its subscribers, and apparently also by recent collectors. Copies of the magazines, or even the whole series, are available for purchase.

The Winter, 1969 issue (Volume XI, Number 1), featured an article on the Vermeer painting shown here, identified as "An Artist in His Studio." A detail of the painting, with the face of the model, was on the cover of the issue. The reviewer, Owen Rachleff, apparently thought his was Vermeer's greatest painting, even as it may have been his last.

I was a subscriber of Horizon in 1969. I knew nothing about Johannes Vermeer, but I was transfixed by the vivid images of this painting. Fifty years later, walking around in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I came upon the painting, not realizing it was there -- although the Horizon article did mention where it was kept. It was a magical moment, as it is a magical painting.

Since there are no Muses of plastic arts, it is not entirely clear who the figure is represented in the painting. If the Muse chosen by Vermeer is Clio, the implication may be that art endures through history. There was no prospect of that in Vermeer's lifetime, when his wife had to declare bankruptcy after his premature death, but it is certainly the case now.

The contents of this painting are familiar. The room, with its chandelier and light coming from a window on the left, is something we see in other Vermeer paintings. Also, the map on the wall is a prop that turns up elsewhere. The painter doesn't turn up in other paintings; and as a portrait of the painter this is a very unusual piece, since the face of the painter is not visible. We cannot say this is a "self-portrait" of Vermeer. It gives us no idea what the man looks like. It is the figure being painted that stands out. She is nothing like the figure we see in other Vermeer paintings, and her expression is extraordinary.

While I'm at it, I might mention that the Kunsthistorisches Museum provides couches for visitors in the galleries. These have cushions and backs, with more than one, so that they face all the walls. This seems rare in modern museums. At the Metropolitan Museum in New York, all we get are hard benches, with no backs. And often not even that. I suppose they want you to keep moving. For those of us who get tired standing around in museums, this does not seem friendly.

Unlike the Phoenician cities, which had been engaged in commerce for centuries, and where the kings were merchants themselves, the creation of wealth by trade in the Greeks cities seems to have undermined traditional authority. Whoever jumped into the game first would become, perhaps for the first time in history, a nouveau riches class that chaffed at hereditary privilege and had the means, by bribery and hire, to marshal forces against it. Since wealth by trade could be made away from home, it would be entirely outside the control of a hometown ruler. Returning home with a new sense of power and independence, a merchant could well have lost much of his awe and respect for authority by birth [note].

The Origin of Philosophy:
Why the Greeks?

In Greece it was of course chiefly the Spartans, the people who resisted the commercial revolution most strongly, who did not recognize individual property but allowed and even encouraged theft. To our time they have remained the prototype of savages who rejected civilization... Yet already in Plato and Aristotle, however, we find a nostalgic longing for return to Spartan practice, and this longing persists to the present. It is a craving for a micro-order determined by the overview of omniscient authority.
F.A. Hayek (1899-1992), The Fatal Conceit, The Errors of Socialism [University of Chicago Press, 1988, 1991, p.32]

Had the Athenians followed Aristotle's counsel -- counsel blind both to economics and to evolution -- their city would rapidly have shrunk into a village, for his view of human ordering led him to an ethics appropriate to, if anywhere at all, a stationary state. Nonetheless his doctrines came to dominate philosophical and religious thinking for the next two thousand years -- despite the fact that much of that same philosophical and religious thinking took place within a highly dynamic, rapidly expanding, order.
F.A. Hayek [ibid., p.46]

Πολυμαθίη νόον ἔχειν οὐ διδάσκει·
Ἡσίοδον γὰρ ἂν ἐδίδαξε καὶ Πυθαγόρην αὖτίς τε
Ξενοφάνεά τε καὶ Ἑκαταῖον.
Learning of many things does not teach intelligence;
Or it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras,
And again Xenophanes and Hecataeus.
Heraclitus of Ephesus, Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφεσίος, according to Diogenes Laertius, "Heraclitus of Ephesus," The Presocratic Philosophers, G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven, Cambrige University Press, 1964, Fragment 193, p.182, translation modified.

If Greek philosophy was different from what came before, as previously considered, the next question would be, "Why the Greeks?" What was different about the Greeks that led to the origin of philosophy with them? Years ago, the simple answer might have been that the Greeks were "different," they just had some kind of special "genius" that enabled them to think about things in new and different ways. That kind of answer is unsatisfactory, not only because it doesn't really explain anything, not only because it sounds disturbingly like some kind of racism (the Greeks just must have been genetically different), but because it cannot then in turn explain why philosophy only occurred among some Greeks (e.g. Milesians, Athenians, etc.) and not among others (e.g. Spartans) [note].

An explanation that is actually going to explain something about the origin of Greek philosophy must identify something that was different about what was happening to, or what was being done by, the particular Greeks who were responsible for that origin. Such an explanation may suggest, but cannot be, a kind of Marxist economic determinism argument, since it is unlikely that everything can be explained by social or economic circumstances. There is certainly a random factor in nature and in human affairs, and the possibility for a lone individual genius to make a difference cannot be dismissed. On the other hand, there are also certainly regularities, and the association of certain kinds of activities with each other. If something unique about Greek cities like Miletus and Athens can be identified, that may reveal unique regularities associated with Greek philosophy.

As it happens, there was something conspicuously different about the culture, the society, and the livelihood of Greek cities like Miletus and Athens in comparison to the dominant forms in traditional Middle Eastern civilizations, like Egypt and Babylonia, and in other Greeks cities, like Sparta, that were never venues of Greek philosophy. For one thing, those Greeks cities were wealthy, like Egypt and Babylon (and unlike Sparta), but they could not have been wealthy in the same way that Egypt and Babylon were wealthy. The strength of the ancient states rested mainly on agriculture. The Bible does not speak of the "flesh pots" of Egypt, "when we did eat bread to the full" (Exodus 16:3), for nothing.

As in most traditional cultures, over 90% of Egyptians would have lived on the land and engaged in basic agricultural labor (85% of people in Tanzania, after decades of socialist government, still do). In Egypt, with the annual flood of the Nile and the uniform warmth, large and reliable harvests were the norm, as in other areas farmers might apprehensively await the rain, endure frosts, etc. Greek cities were not going to be wealthy in the same way, since Greece could not possibly be as agriculturally productive as Egypt or Mesopotamia.

For one thing there was the climate. The average annual rainfall in Athens is only 15.9 inches, not much more than in Los Angeles. Indeed, like much of California, Greece has a "Mediterranean" climate: hot dry summers, and cool rainy winters [note].

Some areas get considerably more rain than Athens, but that is because of local mountains, which gets us to the next problem: the land itself. Greece is very mountainous. This does not make for good agriculture either. Some areas contain famous plains, e.g. Arcadia, Thessaly; but the agricultural value of the plains is then compromised by the weather. Some years, Thessaly gets less than 2 inches of rain. Large parts of California are agriculturally productive despite the climate because of water from nearby (the Sierra Nevada) or distant (the Rocky) mountains; but there are few rivers in Greece, and most of the country is broken up into islands and peninsulas that cannot receive the runoff of wetter mountains, however near or far.

Cities like Miletus and Athens were thus wealthy off of something else: Trade. To engage in trade, all anyone needed was enough to get started, and Greek agriculture could provide a couple of starter products. Olive trees are hardy and drought resistant and grow well enough in either Greece or California (they are conspicuous right in the center of Los Angeles Valley College). Olives themselves must be soaked in brine to be edible, but more importantly they can be pressed to obtain olive oil. The oil is not very perishable, and so could be stored and shipped (in the up to six foot tall jars that the Greeks made) quite easily, to be sold at distant locations for food, fuel oil, hair grooming, or other purposes. Similarly, the Greek climate (like California, again) is good for growing grapes. Grapes can be pressed and fermented to produce wine, another product that is not very perishable and can be similarly stored and shipped. Even apart from any other products, these would get a city like Miletus started in the exchange of products all over the Mediterranean.

We might think that trade as a way of life already could explain much. It would involve and foster considerable independence, being far away from all authority at home, and it would involve dealing with all sorts of novel peoples, cultures, practices, and ideas. If we look for a way of life to get people thinking, that might be it [note].

How this contrasts with ordinary life back in Egypt is explained for us by the Egyptians themselves: A favorite text for scribal students to copy in Ancient Egypt recounted how much better the life of a scribe was to all other ways of life. This was the so-called "Satire of the Trades," which was really no kind of "satire," and it actually begins,

I have seen many beatings --
Set your heart on books!
I watched those seized for labor --
There's nothing better than books! [note]

Here the "beatings," besides the ordinary encouragement of overseers, , to which scribes might not always be witness, can easily refer to the business of collecting taxes in Egypt. Every year, when the Nile flooded, the height of the river was read off the wall of a stairway, later called the "Nilometer," cut down into the granite of Elephantine Island, , at Aswan, , at the natural southern boundary of Ancient Egypt. The height of the river then could be converted into the area of the country covered by the flood that year, and the area could be converted

Elephantine Island at Aswan; the form of the rock may have suggested the body of an elephant; 1969

into the estimated yield of virtually every bit of farmland.


Elephantine Island at Aswan; the form of the rock may have suggested the body of an elephant; 1969

Thus, at the harvest, the tax collectors showed up to seize, since there was no money, the State's share of the harvest. Peasants who, for one reason or another, did not have the crop to deliver, would simply be knocked down and beaten, with the tax collectors' attendant scribes calmly observing and recording the transaction.

Similarly, the reference of the text to "those seized for labor" is probably to the ancient system of the corvée, , by which local peasants could be pressed into labor for public works projects, like the pyramids, especially during the season of the Flood, when work in the fields would have been impossible anyway. The building of new cities and palaces in the Delta initiated by Ramesses II (c. 1290-1224), depended on drafts of the local population, many of whom were not ethnic Egyptians, for labor.

This is remembered in the Bible, of course, as "slavery," from which the Israelites fled back into Asia. The miseries of brickmaking do not seem to be remembered there with fondness. Indeed, the scribes give us the picture:

I'll describe to you also the mason:
His loins give him pain;
Though he is out in the wind,
He works without a cloak;
His loincloth is a twisted rope
And a string in the rear.
His arms are spent from exertion,
Having mixed all kinds of dirt;
When he eats bread [with] his fingers,
[He has washed at the same time]. [p. 187]

The idea in the last lines seems to be that the "mason" (now obviously not a stone mason), having been mixing dirt all day, cannot eat without the dirt worked into his fingers getting into his bread. The work is probably performed naked but for a rope thong because no one would want to expose good cloth to the mud in which the workers inevitably stand and stoop. Of another professional concerned with earth, the potter, the scribes say, "He grubs in the mud more than a pig" [p. 186]. While the peasant, well, "A peasant is not called a man" [p. 190]. The life of a merchant or trader, on the other hand, is not even mentioned.

If delivery from such labor in Ancient Egypt meant becoming a scribe, it is now hard to imagine the life of a bureaucrat fostering very much more in the way of independence of mind or creativity. Indeed, nothing was valued more highly in Egypt than conformity, which is no less than what we would expect.

However stark the contrast of this with a life of travel, business, discovery, and independence, trade alone will not explain the uniqueness of the Greek situation, for the Greeks were neither alone nor the first in their commercial profession.

View South along the Lebanese coast from the promintory of the city of Byblos, 1969

They had learned the basics, and much else (including their alphabet), from some of the most ancient traders: the Phoenicians [note].


View South along the Lebanese coast from the promintory of the city of Byblos, 1969

Ancient Phoenicia was rather smaller than the modern Lebanon; it was just Mount Lebanon, whose steep slopes often come right down to the Mediterranean, as we see at left. This put the Phoenicians in much the same situation economically as the Greeks. Rainfall was certainly less of a problem, but the Mountain, very steep and rocky, was otherwise most unsuited for agriculture [note].

But, like the Greeks, the Phoenicians also had available a couple of basic local products to get started in trade. Mount Lebanon, although difficult for agriculture, was nevertheless forested: with the famous and evocative Cedars of Lebanon. This was a valuable resource when the surrounding semi-arid and desert areas were short of trees. Especially when the Egyptians began their great building projects, good lumber was essential. One cannot imagine 100 ton granite obelisks, quarried at Aswan, being floated down the Nile in boats made of bundled reeds.

Evidence of how early the Phoenicians were supplying wood to Egypt can still be

Ancient beams of Lebanese cedar, preserved by the desert, shoring up a chamber in the Bent Pyramid; photo from I.E.S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, Penguin Books, 1961, plate 9a.

seen in the Bent Pyramid of Seneferu (c. 2610 BC) at Dahshur, where the dry climate has preserved cedar beams (shown at right) that were used to shore up the upper chamber against the cracking caused by errors in the construction and siting of the pyramid [note].


Ancient beams of Lebanese cedar, preserved by the desert, shoring up a chamber in the Bent Pyramid; photo from I.E.S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, Penguin Books, 1961, plate 9a.

Whole cedar boats have been found in pits next to the Great Pyramid. At first it was not believed that they were real boats, since the remains just looked like piles of lumber. They were just "symbolic" boats. It was also confusing that there were no nails. The planks had actually been tied together with rope, and then caulked for waterproofing. The reconstructed boats are impressive examples. Nothing else like this survives from the 3rd Millennium BC; and known later boats are generally from shipwrecks, whose sinking makes recovery and reconstruction that much more difficult. The Viking boats used in burials come the closest to the quality of the Egyptian ships.

Another product the Phoenicians eventually traded in was a purple dye produced at Tyre from local marine snails, Murex brandaris and Murex trunculus (now gratuitously[?] renamed Haustellum brandaris and Hexaplex trunculus). Quite the opposite of lumber in terms of bulk, "Tyrian Purple," porphýra, πορφύρα, became the most famous product of Phoenicia; and it was so valuable that eventually a purple robe was taken as symbolic of the office of Roman Emperor. "Putting on the purple" came to mean becoming Roman Emperor.

Depending on how it was processed -- it was only discovered in the 1980's that this could be accomplished merely with exposure to sunlight -- the dye could also be a blue color, which thus is likely the dye specified in the Bible for the blue on Jewish prayer shawls and other applications -- blue is still used, also on the flag of Israel. If so, this use would antedate the familiarity of the Greeks with the purple dye. The Septuagint translates "blue" from Hebrew as hyákinthos, ὑάκινθος, i.e. "hyacinth" [cf. 2 Chronicles 3:14, for the veil of Solomon's Temple]. For the colors "purple" or "red" in Greek the word phoînix, φοῖνιξ, the word for "Phoenician," could be used.

The most famous statement about "the Purple" is certainly that of the Empress Theodora, who, rather than flee the Nika Revolt of 532, is supposed to have said, "the Purple makes the noblest shroud." The Emperor Justinian, thus encouraged, or shamed, put down the revolt. Unfortunately, like many other famous quotes in history, this is not quite right. According to Procopius, Theodora said, "Royalty [Βασιλεία, basileía] is a beautiful shroud" [Procopius, History of the Wars, I, Book I, xxiv 37-38, translated by H.B. Dewing, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard U. Press, 1914, 2001, p.232-233]. In the same speech however, she did say, "I will not be separated from this Purple" -- halourgís, ἁλουργίς, specifically a purple robe [p.230-231]. The traditional misquotation thus deftly combines two actual quotations. See "The Grammar of Theodora's Statement."

Both the Greeks and the Phoenicians, in the course of their trade, founded colonies all over the Mediterranean. The map below illustrates this activity and its implied competition. Greek colonies came to ring the Aegean and Black Seas, the southern coast of Italy, eastern Sicily, Cyrenaica in Libya, and in places on the coast of Gaul (modern France) and northeastern Spain. The largest modern cities derived from Greek colonies are probably Marseille in France (Massalia, Μασσαλία), Naples in Italy (Neapolis, Νεάπολις, the "New City" -- remembered in the name of "Neapolitan" icecream), and Istanbul (originally Byzantium, Βυζάντιον, later Constantinopolis -- Constantinople).

Phoenician colonies coexisted with Greek cities in Cyprus and Sicily, but excluded Greeks on Sardinia and Corsica, in the south of Spain, and especially along North Africa. Noteworthy is modern Cádiz, Gadir or Agadir in Phoenician ( in the Hebrew alphabet), Gades in Latin, and Γάδειρα or Γήδειρα, originally read as a neuter plural, because the original meaning of the word seems to have been "walls," i.e. fortification. Phoenician colonial power was particularly concentrated at Carthage -- Qart Ḥadasht, the "New City" ( in the Hebrew equivalent, writing the "t" in the adjective that is latent in what is ordinarily written and pronounced as an "h" in Hebrew and Arabic), Greek Καρχηδών, Karkhēdón, Latin Carthago -- eventually seen by Rome as her greatest rival. In the south of Spain Cadiz (Gades) was a Phoenician city. The, by then, Carthaginian domain in Spain was much expanded by Hamilcar Barca, the father of the great Hannibal (247-183 BC), in the time between the First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars with Rome. In the course of that expansion, the city later known in Latin as Carthago Nova, "New Carthage" (Cartagena), was founded.

From Spain, the Phoenicians did something the Greeks did not -- venture out into the Atlantic. They probably went as far as Britain (from which tin was obtained), and certainly went well down the coast of Africa -- how far is unclear, since the Phoenicians kept their doings as secret as possible. One story repeated by the Greek historian Herodotus is that the Phoenicians sailed entirely around Africa on commission from King Neko II of Egypt. The best evidence that this was accomplished (there is no other) is the very idea that it was possible: later Greek and Roman geographers thought that Africa was connected to a Southern Continent and could not be circumnavigated. Phoenician trading posts in Greece itself, reflected even in Greek mythology with stories like the foundation of Thebes by the Phoenician Cadmus, initiated Greek trading in the years after about 800 BC.

But after all this, we may then ask, that if trade is to be associated with the origin of philosophy, why did not philosophy start with the Phoenicians? After a fashion, perhaps it did. The man credited with being the first Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus, Θαλῆς ὁ Μιλήσιος (c.585 BC), was said to have been of Phoenician ancestry. However, he was living in a Greek city; and even later philosophers who were certainly ethnic Phoenicians, like Zeno of Citium, moved to Greek cities to learn and practice philosophy.

The clue to what happened in the Greek cities may be found in something else that seems to be a unique characteristic of Greek history: By the time we know much about events, traditional kings in Greeks cities are mostly gone. This had never happened before. When ancient kings were overthrown, which happened often enough, they were simply replaced by other kings. The Phoenician cities all had traditional kings. But in Greece, the institution of kingship lost its traction. At Athens, the office of ἄρχων, árchōn, "ruler" or "regent," pushed aside the authority of the king (who eventually became another elected árchōn). It was filled at first by hereditary nobles, then by elected nobles with life tenure, then by elected nobles with ten year tenure (starting in 753), then with elected nobles by annual tenure (starting in 683), and then with the office opened (by Solon, c. 593) to qualification by wealth, rather than by noble birth. After some conflict and the rule of tyrants (especially Pisitratus), overthrown in 510, Cleisthenes led Athens into essentially pure democracy [note].

Seeing Greece of the Dark Ages (c. 1200-800 BC) as the kind of feudal society pictured in the Iliad, it not hard to imagine the new world of merchants and commerce with the same kind of dynamic that the Italian trading cities of the Renaissance exhibited in starting the process that undermined European Mediaeval aristocracy.

Also, we can say that for the first time in history these transformations could have been accomplished by money: Money, meaning coined precious metals, was invented soon after 640 in the Kingdom of Lydia. The Lydians were not Greeks, but the Lydian kings, after the Phoenician manner, were businessmen; and they worked closely with the adjacent Greek cities of Ionia. Money thus facilitated the rise of a city like Thales's Miletus; and since coinage enhances the manner in which wealth can be concentrated and transferred, we can also imagine that it enhanced the process of social mobility and political conflict [note].

What happened in Greek cities politically and socially was extraordinary enough, but it is also our clue about the origin of philosophy. Although we can only imagine the nature of the causal connection, the correlation between philosophy and the cities of commercial wealth and political transformation is obvious. Greek philosophy began in Ἰωνία, Ionia (today on the west coast of Turkey), in the wealthiest and most active cities of their time in Greece. For some years Greek philosophy then seemed to circulate around the Greek colonial periphery, from Ionia (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximines, Heralcitus, Xenophanes), to Italy (Pythagoras, Parmenides, Zeno), Sicily (Empedocles), and the northern Aegean (Democritus, Protagoras), to Ionia again (Melissos). Then philosophy migrated from every direction to Athens itself, at the center, the wealthiest commercial power and the most famous democracy of the time [note].

Socrates, although uninterested in wealth himself, and with followers, like Plato, who condemned or rejected commercial culture, nevertheless was a creature of the marketplace, where there were always people to meet and where he could, in effect, bargain over definitions rather than over prices. Similarly, although Socrates avoided participation in democratic politics, it is hard to imagine his idiosyncratic individualism, and the uncompromising self-assertion of his defense speech, without either wealth or birth to justify his privileges, occurring in any other political context. The Athenians let him get away with it for decades, before, for various reasons, running out of patience.

If a commercial democracy like Athens provided the social and intellectual context that fostered the development of philosophy, we might expect that philosophy would not occur in the kind of Greek city that was neither commercial nor democratic. As it happens, the great rival of Athens, Sparta, was just such a city. Sparta had a peculiar, oligarchic constitution, with two kings and a small number of enfranchised citizens. Most of the subjects of the Spartan state had little or no political power, and many of them were εἵλωτες, helots (singular, εἵλως), who were essentially held as slaves and could be killed by a Spartan citizen at any time for any reason -- annual war was formally declared on the helots for just that purpose. The whole business of the Spartan citizenry was war -- although they were reluctant to go to war, lest the helots revolt behind them, as they sometimes did.

Unlike Athens, Sparta had no nearby seaport. It was not engaged in or interested in commerce. It had no resident alien population like Athens -- there was no reason for foreigners of any sort to come to Sparta. Spartan citizens were allowed to possess little money, and Spartan men were expected, officially, to eat all their meals at a common mess, where the food was legendarily bad -- all to toughen them up. Spartans had so little to say that the term "Laconic," from Λακωνία, Laconia, the environs of Sparta, is still used to mean "of few words" -- as "Spartan" itself is still used to mean simple and ascetic.

While this gave Sparta the best army in Greece, regarded by all as next to invincible, and helped Sparta defeat Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431-404), we do not find at Sparta any of the accoutrements otherwise normally associated with Classical Greek civilization: no historians, no playwrights, no great architecture, and, especially, no philosophers. Socrates would have found few takers for his conversation at Sparta -- and it is hard to imagine the city tolerating his questions for anything like the thirty or more years that Athens did.

Next to nothing remains at the site of Sparta to attract tourists (the nearby Mediaeval complex at Mistra is of much greater interest) -- it may have all the charm of Mojave, California -- while Athens is one of the major tourist destinations of the world. Indeed, we basically wouldn't even know about Sparta were it not for the historians (e.g. Thucydides) and philosophers (e.g. Plato and Aristotle) at Athens who write about her. In the end, philosophy made the fortune of Athens, which essentially became the University Town of the Roman Empire (only Alexandria came close as a center of learning).

But even Sparta's army eventually failed her, as Spartan hegemony was destroyed at the battle of Leuctra in 371 by the brilliant Theban general Epaminondas, Ἐπαμεινώνδας, who killed a Spartan king, Cleombrotus, for the first time since King Leonidas was killed by the Persians at Thermopylae in 480. Most of the Spartan helots were freed by Epaminondas when he invaded the Peloponnesus in 370 BC.

A story about Thales throws a curious light on the polarization between commercial culture and its opposition. It was said that Thales was not a practical person, sometimes didn't watch where he was walking, fell into a well, or ditch (according to Plato), was laughed at, and in general was reproached for not taking money seriously like everyone else. Finally, he was sufficiently irked by the derision and criticisms that he decided to teach everyone a lesson. By studying the stars (according to Aristotle), he determined that there was to be an exceptionally large olive harvest that year. Borrowing some money, he secured all the olive presses (used to get the oil, of course) in Miletus, and when the harvest came in, he took advantage of his monopoly to charge everyone dearly. After making this big financial killing, Thales announced that he could do this anytime and so, if he otherwise didn't do so and seemed impractical, it was because he simply did not value the money in the first place.

This story curiously contains internal evidence of its own falsehood. One cannot determine the nature of the harvest by studying the stars; otherwise astrologers would make their fortunes on the commodities markets, not by selling their analyses to the public [note].

So if Thales did not monopolize the olive presses with the help of astrology, and is unlikely to have done what this story relates, we might ask if he was the kind of impractical person portrayed in the story in the first place. It would not seem so from all the other accounts we have about him. The tendency of this evidence goes in two directions:

First, Thales seems to engage in activities that would be consistent with any other Milesian engaged in business. The story about him going to Egypt, although later assimilated to fabulous stories about Greeks learning the mysteries of the Egyptians (who don't seem to have had any such mysteries, and would not have been teaching them to Greeks anyway), is perfectly conformable to what many Greeks actually were doing in Egypt, i.e. engaging in trade or working for the King of Egypt as mercenary soldiers.
Indeed, the Greeks had another basic export besides olive oil and wine, and that was warriors. Since the Greek cities fought among themselves all the time, the occasional peace left many of them seeking to continue the wars by other means. The Egyptian kings of the XXVI Dynasty found plenty for them to do there. Indeed, the kings relied so heavily on Greek mercenaries, and there were so many Greek traders swarming over Egypt, that considerable tensions arose.
The Egyptians basically didn't like foreigners, and the Greeks, although awed by Egypt, also found the Egyptians more than a little strange and ridiculous. Their references to things Egyptian were sometimes mocking: "Pyramid" (πυραμίς, pyramís, genitive πυραμίδος, pyramídos) may be from πυραμοῦς, pyramoūs, a wheat and honey cake; and "obelisk" (ὀβελίσκος, obelískos) means a "little spit." But they may have found circumcision the most disturbing -- there are still questions about "female circumcision" among the Egyptians.

King Aḥmose II, (570-526) defused the tensions by directing that Greek trading activities be concentrated at Naucratis, Ναύκρατις, which was then founded as a Greek colony, not far from the Egyptian capital of Sais, Σάις. This worked well. As a colony, Naucratis was a little unusual, existing under the sovereignty of Egypt, and also because several Greek cities joined in the founding. Usually a colony had one "mother city" (μητρόπολις, metrópolis), from which a charter and colonists were derived.
As it happened, Miletus was one of the founders of Naucratis. The degree of involvement with Miletus in Egypt thus makes it more than probable that Thales, engaged in the ordinary business of his fellow citizens, would have found himself there, probably more than once. This is then consistent with the story of Thales discovering how to measure the height of the pyramids -- and also with the story of Thales learning navigational techniques from the Phoenicians. Since the Phoenicians were secretive about their affairs, especially to rivals, this is consistent with the report, mentioned already, that Thales was of Phoenician derivation [note].
Aḥmose II had another significant connection to the Greeks. He became an ally of Polycrates, Πολυκράτης, the tyrant of Samos, so that Polycrates would use his fleet to help out Egypt. By 530 BC, the combined Egyptian and Samian fleet was powerful enough that the Persians began to feel threatened, which may have been a motive for their conquest of Egypt in 525. Polycrates was tricked and murdered by the Persian Satrap at Sardis in 522; and the Persians captured Samos in 517 -- it no longer had a fleet, which apparently had been financed by the Egyptians.
While Herodotus said that Polycrates was the first to try and "rule the sea," θαλασσοκρατέειν, a Greek city would not be able to do that from its own resources until Athens become wealthy enough to do so. That such a thing would be a real threat to Persia was demonstated by the Persian defeat at Salamis in 480. Later, when the Spartans built a fleet and defeated Athens (in 405), it was the Persians who had paid for it.
One of the works of Polycrates, with money from Egypt or from his own conquests, was a mile long tunnel and aqueduct, the Tunnel of Euphalinos, right through the center of Samos, under Mt. Kastro, to bring water to the capital, and to conceal this from any enemies -- like a similar, much earlier, water tunnel in Jerusalem, the Siloam Tunnel or Hezekiah's Tunnel, named after Hezeqiah, King of Judah (716-687). The need for the aqueduct should remind us that obtaining water was a problem in Greece, especially on the islands.
The second insight into Thales's activities comes from the account of his work for King Alyattes of Lydia. A dreamer who goes around falling into wells does not sound like someone to hire for military engineering projects; but that is the account (from Herodotus) that we have of Thales, who is supposed to have actually diverted a river around behind the Lydian army so that it could avoid too deep a ford. The war between the Medes and the Lydians, during which Thales accompanied the Lydian king, also provides us with the one solid date that we have for Thales's life. That is because the climactic battle between the Medes and Lydians, at which Thales would have been present, was stopped by a total eclipse of the sun.
The date of the eclipse can now be calculated precisely: 28 May 585 BC. The path of the eclipse can even be inspected using computer software on home computers. The eclipse, indeed, was later said to have been predicted by Thales. That is clearly impossible. To predict an eclipse, one must know what an eclipse is -- the moon getting in the way of the sun -- and no Greek knew that for some time to come; and one must have records of eclipses for some centuries to understand the relationship of the moon's orbit to the ecliptic (the apparent path of the sun in the sky) -- the Greeks had no such records perhaps until the Pythagoreans.
Although Thales could not have predicted the eclipse, it could have been predicted at the time -- by the Babylonians. We know that the Babylonians had the understanding and the records, not just because the priest Bḗrōssos transferred records back to 747 BC into his treatise on astronomy (in the Hellenistic Period), but because original astronomical and mathematical records and treatises survive, especially from the libraries of the Kings of Assyria [note].
Consequently, if the story about Thales was not made up out of whole cloth, the only explanation is that he heard, perhaps on his travels, that there was going to be an eclipse. The Babylonian priests were in the habit of publicly announcing astronomical events, as the priests in Jerusalem also announced things like the beginning of the month and occurrence of Passover; but, in the absence of newspapers, radio, wire services, CNN, etc., these announcements may only have travelled by word of mouth. If Thales heard of the prediction, and then reported it back home, it may not have been remembered that he merely reported, rather than originated, the story.

The overall impression of Thales then is more of a man of affairs, sometimes very serious affairs (e.g. war), and not of an abstracted, impractical dreamer who disdains money and doesn't watch where he's walking. But if that was the case, why would the story about Thales and the olive presses have been told in the first place? Because, indeed, such disdain for money would be characteristic of later Greek philosophy. Where Socrates was simply unconcerned with the ordinary commercial life of Athens, while he flourished right in the middle of it, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had become actively hostile to it and removed their own activities to closed schools outside the walls of Athens.

Only one great school of philosophy, Stoicism, remained in the marketplace, taking its name from the characteristic open-faced building, often called a "porch," a στοά, stoa, that was to be found there, and in one of which Zeno of Citium, himself of Phoenician and merchant origin, established himself. We even get some hint that Zeno continued in "trade" even after engaging in philosophy. Victorian English society would have been shocked.

Plato distrusted commerce, detested democracy, and also came to believe that teaching philosophy to just anyone was dangerous. A tradition of ethical argument arose that questioned whether engaging in trade was even moral, since merchants did not produce their commodities and so did not contribute to their intrinsic value. Some philosophers, indeed, perceived that the value of products also depended on their location, so that trade was useful in moving things to where they were needed or wanted; but then someone like Plato was also distrustful of that service, since a lot of superfluous trade goods could engender "unnecessary desires" and distract people from their duties and more sober pursuits. But as late as the 5th century, St. Augustine was still advising that trade was not a profession that could be practiced without moral harm.

Comparing Athens and Sparta, a philosopher like Plato was unmistakably a Spartan sympathizer. Yet even he realized there was a problem: the Spartans not only were uninterested in thought and speech, but they were violent and brutal. Plato realized that philosophy had no place there, and he was concerned lest the rulers in his ideal Republic exhibit those characteristics. So Plato never tried to sell his thought at Sparta. He did entertain a hope, however, that if a tyrant could be "converted" to philosophy, then his ideas would be implemented.

One of his efforts to do so involved the tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse (367-357 & 346-344). During one trip there, however, in 361, Plato so infuriated Dionysius, evidently, that he was sold into slavery and had to be redeemed by his friends and family. Naturally, he gave up on tyrants after that experience. So, although Plato had no love for the democracy at Athens, he "voted with his feet," as they say, in its favor.

The attitudes in Greek philosophy towards Athens and Sparta, as well as sympathies and actions comparable to those of Plato, can also be seen in the Twentieth Century. Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's foreign policy adviser and later Secretary of State, is supposed to have remarked once, privately, that the United States was liable to lose the Cold War to the Soviet Union in the same way and for the same reasons that Athens lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta. While America, presumably, was enervated by the political squabbling characteristic of democracy and by the crass materialism of capitalistic consumerism, the Soviet Union was lean, disciplined (i.e. Spartan), morally upright (no pornography or gay rights demonstrations there), unified, and remorselessly purposful [note].

At the same time, it was not uncommon in the United States for leftist academics and intellectuals to harbor much admiration for the Soviet Union, or later for Communist China, Cuba, Vietnam, or Nicaragua, despite widespread knowledge of the police state apparatus of those regimes, of the mass murders, slave labor camps, torture, brainwashing, false confessions, etc. -- Josef Stalin can be credited with as many as 50 million civilian deaths, as opposed to "only" 20 million for Adolf Hitler. Nevertheless, like Plato, most sympathizers voted with their feet to stay in the United States [note].

Despite the Fall of Communism, much disdain for commercial democracy remains. As Greek philosophy never came to appreciate the social, political, and economic context in which it originated, grew, and thrived, many modern intellectuals continue to despise the very kind of society in which they are uniquely to be found -- uniquely in great measure because the kind of society they evidently want would actually not allow them to express their own opinions, or to subsidize such expression so lavishly, either at state expense (e.g. at state universities) or by guilty philanthropists (e.g. Ted Turner). So, although the Soviet Union is gone, like Sparta, and its vast experiment in common ownership and economic planning failed utterly, as well as being drenched in the blood of its victims, one would hardly know this listening to contemporary leftists and Marxists. The planning of a command economy still sounds like the wave of the future to them.

Ironically, Marx himself may provide the best key to this phenomenon: Intellectuals may like the idea of command and control for a society and for an economy because they see themselves in control. Not surprisingly, Plato thinks that the problem of politics is that the wrong people are in charge, and the rulers in his ideal Republic are people like him. Intellectuals have a "class interest" (which means a self-interest -- for people who otherwise say they detest "self-interest") in promoting this idea. They see their own lofty achievements as entitling them to the rule of others -- a self-interest now described by the theory of rent-seeking. In this way, the crypto-socialist economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) fulminated against advertising as producing, just as Plato would have said, "unnecessary desires." And, since people can be so easily manipulated by advertising into buying things that they don't need or that are bad for them, we clearly need people like him in charge to protect us. This kind of arrogance will soon probably produce the prohibition of tobacco, as it disastrously produced Prohibition of alcohol in the 20's (even while the legalization of marijuana is creating a whole new smoking culture).

But one of the clearest lessons of the Twentieth Century is that this self-serving fantasy of rule by Academia is the most bitter folly: Absolute power, once unleashed, slips from the hands of timid professors and is seized by ruthless monsters like Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, etc. The intellectuals get silenced, killed, or, almost worse, become fawning mouthpieces for tyranny. Too many intellectuals were already mouthpieces for tyranny, even when they didn't need to be, as when the New York Times reporter, Walter Duranty, received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Stalinist Russia, even while he was helping to suppress the truth about Stalin's terror famine in the Ukraine -- the starving to death of millions of peasants (perhaps 5 million) just because they had been too successful on their private farms. Success made them class enemies, "Kulaks."

Thus, the question of the origin of Greek philosophy, to which Athens itself, with its commercial democracy, is the answer, remains relevant to the politics of the Twentieth and, evidently, the Twenty-First Centuries. Indeed, it is a distressing and sobering new truth of history, little suspected before our time, that a vast educated class may, by its very nature, be hostile to freedom, democracy, and the creation of wealth for everyone -- though China was similarly ill served by the scholar Mandarins. The truth is not enough. As Thomas Jefferson said, "All know the influence of interest on the mind of man, and how unconsciously his judgment is warped by that influence." Indeed, what we find today is that many academics deny there is truth, revel in the irrationality and incoherence of their own assertions, and nakedly assert that power is the end of all discourse. It should be no surprise to then see the educated promoting ignorance and the free promoting tyranny, all in the hope that power will fall to them. They will, indeed, derive no benefit should their ambitions be realized, but by then it will be too late for benefit to anyone else.

Parmenides of Elea and the Way of Truth

An Open Letter to David W. Tandy on Warriors into Traders, The Power of the Market in Early Greece, University of California Press, 1997

Capitalism, the Free Market, and the Duties of Property and Contract

History of Philosophy, Greek Philosophy

Copyright (c) 1998, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 1;
What the Greeks are Called

ὑμεῖς οὐχὶ Ῥωμαῖοι, ἀλλὰ Λαγούβαρδοι ἐστέ.
Vos non Romani, sed Longobardi estis!
You are not Romans, but Lombards!
The Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas to Liutprand of Cremona (c.920-972), who represents the "Roman" Emperor Otto I, 968 AD; "Embassy," XII, The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona, translated by Paolo Squatriti [The Catholic Press of America, 2007, p.246]; Latin text, "Liudprandi Legatio," Die Werke Liudprands von Cremona, herausgeben von Joseph Becker [Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover und Leipzig, 1915, p.182; Reprint, University of Michigan Libraries, 2012]. While Liutprand wrote in Latin; this is not what Nicephorus spoke, and the Greek version here is a speculative back-translation from Latin to Greek.
Liutprand, of course, was himself the Lombard, not the Saxon Otto; and Nicephorus was also infuriated that Liutprand carried a letter, not only presenting Otto as a "Roman," but that addressed Nicephorus himself as a "Greek."

The Greeks have been known by many names, depending on who was referring to them and when. In Homer, they are called, "Achaeans," Ἀχαιοί, "Danaäns," Δαναοί, and other things. "Danaäns" sounds like the Israelite Tribe of Dan, which, as it happens, may actually have been Mycenaean Greeks. In the Classical period, a Greek is a Ἕλλην, Héllēn, the Greeks are the Ἕλληνες, Héllēnes, and the country is Ἑλλάς, Hellás.

The Romans, however, ended up with their own words. "Greek" is Graecus, the Greeks are Graeci, and Greece is Graecia. The names in English clearly derive from Latin, but it is not clear where the Latin words have come from. In Mediaeval Greek we see Γραικοί, Graikoí (singular Γραικός, Graikós), which one might easily think has been borrowed from Latin.

However, according to Smyth's Greek Grammar [Herbert Weir Smyth, Harvard University Press, 1966], this word already occurs in Aristotle [p.1] -- but Smyth gives no citation and doesn't tell us what the context is in Aristotle. While Smyth says that this "is borrowed from Latin," it is not clear why Aristotle would know about a Latin word, or even the Latin language, or have any reason to borrow it.

On the other hand, Smyth also says that the word in Latin may derive from Γραῖοι, Graîoi, "a Boeotian tribe that took part in the colonization of Cyme in Italy, or from the Γραῖοι, a larger tribe of the same stock that lived in Eprius" [ibid.]. Smyth says these were "the first Hellenes of whom the Romans had knowledge." However, if the Graîoi were a "tribe... that lived in Epirus," it is not clear that they were really even Greeks -- ethnically Epirus was probably Illyrian, whose modern descendants are the Albanians -- and if the "same stock" turned up in Boeotia, where Greek "tribes" had really become artificial political divisions, it is not clear that they were really Greeks there either.

There has been a recent move to claim that the Epirotes were actually Greek. This looks suspiciously motivated by modern Greek nationalism. In the 19th century ethnographic map at right, we see an Albanian population, not just in modern Albania, but extending into Kosovo and down well into what is now Greece. There were pockets of Albanians as far south as Athens. If the population of Epirus was not Albanian in Ancient times, it is not clear where the Albanians could possibly have come from to occupy the area now. They are clearly autochthonous from any historical evidence; and their language was never written until very late Mediaeval or Modern times. But there are few Albanians left in Greece. They were deported, mainly for being Muslims. This process has perhaps now been retrospectively applied to Epirus, as it also has been to Ancient Macedonia.

Now it looks like the Boeotian Γραῖοι derives from a Boeotian city, Γραῖα, which means they were certainly Greek, and that the colonists of Cyme, Κύμη, or Cumae, the first Greek colony in Italy, contributed their own endonym, Γραικοί, as the Roman word for "Greeks." Whether the Mediaeval Greeks knew they were using an old Greek word, or if they thought they were borrowing it from Latin, I couldn't say.

South or east of Greece, we find names that derive from Ἰωνία, Ionia, where Greek philosophy began. In Egyptian, we find . The Egyptians normally didn't write vowels, but we have Demotic writings of this name with the group, which looks like it is used for the long vowel "i," especially when this often at the end of words, making adjectives, just as Arabic does with ي. This is confirmed when we get a version later in Coptic, Ⲟⲩⲉⲓⲛⲓⲛ, Weinin, which fits the consonsants and that vowel [note].

In Modern Arabic "Greek" or "a Greek" is Yūnānī, , and "the Greeks" is ʾal-Yūnān, . And, far off in India, in Sanskrit "Greek" was Yavana, . Yavanapura, , the "City of the Greeks," seems to have been the name for Alexandria, Egypt. Curiously, would later be used even for Muslims, after they invaded India in 644 -- the way the Chinese initially called Europeans, coming by sea, "Turks," 回回, Huíhui, like Muslims or Christians or Jews coming from Central Asia.

The modern 回, Huí, in China, the 回族, Huízú, "Hui People," are simply ethnic Chinese, the Han People, who have converted to Islam, the 回教, Huíjiāo. While the Hui are not currently subject to genocide by the Chinese government, as are the Uighurs, their religion, customs, and mosques are increasingly under assault.

Ionic is one of the basic dialects of Greek, and the name is also associated with one of the canonical styles of architecture, the Ionic Order, which is more delicate than the Doric but still less elaborate than the Corinthian. Ionia is also the source of what later became the standard Greek alphabet, with distinctive letters like "H" used for a long /e/, the η, ēta, and a new ligature, the ω, ōmega ("big O"), for a long /o/. The consonant "h" had simply been lost in Ionic, as it is in Modern Greek.

On the map we see the ten original cities of Ionia, plus Smyrna, an Aeolic city that later joined them. The names of early Greek philosophers can be associated with several of these cities. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes are all from Miletus; Pythagoras and Melissos from Samos; Heraclitus from Ephesus; Xenophanes from Colophon; and Anaxagoras from Clazomenae. Smyrna, İzmir in Turkish, is now the principal city of the area, as Ephesus had been through most of Late Antiquity (the site of the Third Ecumenical Council) and the early Middle Ages.

By the Middle Ages, the Greeks were no longer calling themselves Héllēnes. They were Ῥωμαῖοι, Rhōmaîoi, i.e. Romans (singular Rhōmaîos, Ῥωμαῖος). This now may seem odd, but the Roman Empire had been divided between East and West in 395 AD. The Western Empire ended in 476 AD; but the remaining Empire in the East survived until Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 AD. The Mediaeval Greeks were thus, to themselves and to others, Romans.

Historians may mention this, but -- except for Anthony Kaldellis -- they never follow the usage and appear not to take it seriously -- Julius Caesar, now that's a Roman, not people like Justinian (who codified Roman Law) or Nicephorus Phocas (see epigraph). Also, Héllēn had come to mean "pagan," as the word is used in the New Testament, while "Roman," Ῥωμαῖος, meant "Christian." If reference was needed to Romans as speakers of the Greek language, Γραικός was used. The Empire was itself Romania, in Latin, or Ῥωμανία, in Greek, names used since at least the 4th century but generally not mentioned by historians, not even Byzantinists (except Kaldellis).

It is natural now to say that people who speak Greek are Greeks, people who speak Arabic are Arabs, people who speak Japanese are Japanese, etc. However, Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and many in India who speak English are not "English." Mexicans, Peruvians, Cubans, Chileans, Panamanians, etc. speak Spanish, but they are not "Spanish." People who live in the homeland of the languages are indeed the English, or Spanish, but the English speakers are also "British," both because they live on the Island of Britain and because the United Kingdom includes all the constituent domains of Britain, namely England, Wales, and Scotland. Even if the UK broke up, the English could still be British by virtue of the geography. And the Portuguese were once "Spanish," because the Kingdom of Spain only came into existence in 1580 when Philip II combined Portugal with Castille, Aragón, and Navarre. That lasted until the Portuguese revolted in 1640.

The unique situation of Mediaeval Romania was that the homeland of Greek speakers was part of a larger state, as England is of the United Kingdom, but was not itself a distinct jurisdiction. So "Greeks" were not Greeks the way the English are "English." There was no "Greekland" (except Grikland in Old Norse) the way there is an "England." But the Greeks as Greek speakers were Γραικοί.

How the Greeks then again become Ἕλληνες is a story in its own right. We already get that with Laonicus Chalcocondyles, Λαόνικος Χαλκοκονδύλης [Laonikos Chalkokondyles, The Histories, translated by Anthony Kaldellis, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Harvard University Press, 2014] -- the historian's name extraordinarily means "brass knuckles" -- who writes about the Fall of Constantinople as a retelling of Herodotus, where the Greeks this time, as Héllēnes, are defeated by the Persians, in this case the Turks.

We do not get full "Hellenes," however, until the birth of the modern Kingdom of Greece, even while Greek speakers living in Turkey continued to be Ῥωμαῖοι. This was the source of some small confusion, or at least humor, during the Balkan Wars, when Greek soldiers found that Greek speakers previously under the Turks were calling themselves Ῥωμαῖοι and were curious what these new Ἕλληνες were going to look like.

Once there were German Emperors, beginning with Charlemagne, in the West, legitimized by the Pope, they began to think of themselves as "Romans" (as in the Sanctum Imperium Romanum, the "Holy Roman Empire") and to dismiss the Emperors in Constantinople as "Greeks" or even insultingly as Graeculi, "Greeklings" or "Little Greeks" (singular Graeculus). When they felt like being more diplomatic, however, they might use a name transcribed from Ῥωμαῖοι back into Latin, as Romaei (singular Romaeus) or Romei (singular Romeus).

The Emperor of the Romans could not really object to being called the Imperator Romaeorum. But this was rare, and Romeus curiously ending up meaning a pilgrim who had been to Rome; and it could even be used as a proper name for such a pilgrim (like , Ḥajjī, a Muslim who has performed the , Ḥajj, the Pilgrimage to Mecca). This became Romée in French and Romeo in Italian. Yes, Romeo, as in Romeo and Juliet. Had Romeo been to Rome? Or had his name already become detached from this usage? Because of the play, "Romeo" now usually means a kind of lover.

We see another suggestion mentioned in Jame Bryce's The Holy Roman Empire [1904, 1923, Schocken Books, 1961]:

Isaac Angelus, more insolently, styled Frederick the First 'chief prince of Alemannia.' The great Hohenstaufen, half resentful, half contemptuous, told the Eastern envoys that he was Romanorum Imperator, and bade their master call himself 'Romaniorum,' from the Thracian province of Romania. [p.343]

While it is not surprising that Frederick I, insolent himself, should have been resentful and contemptuous of the "Greeks," his suggestion is certainly less insulting and more sensible than the language used by most "Franks." If the Empire is Romania, then a citizen thereof might reasonable be a Romanius, and this avoids the confusion with the City of Rome that the adjective Romanus does not. Such a distinction was available in Greek, with Ῥωμανός for the City and Ῥωμαῖος for the Empire.

If Frederick didn't like the term "Alemannia," he would be in trouble now, where that is the word for "Germany" in the Romance languages -- like Alemagne in French -- all derived from the tribe of the Alemanni. And Frederick actually was the King of Germania. The "Empire" to him was of "the Romans."

The real confusion here is in James Bryce, since there never was a "Thracian Province of Romania"; and Byrce, apparently ignorant of the Mediaeval meaning of "Romania," is thinking of his contemporary Turkish province of Rumelia, , as the descendant of "Romania." From this, we might question the depth of Byrce's scholarship, whether in Latin or Greek -- as this is all too typical of much of modern scholarship about "Romania." Bryce seems to think that Frederick is insulting Issac by using "Romania" in the way that Isaac has used "Alemannia," when that would not have been the case. Frederick may have been confused himself.

Modern Greece, of course, has gone back to using Hellēnes and the other Classical names; but Rhōmaîoi, like , ʾar-Rūm, in Arabic, was still being used for Greeks in the 20th century. In the Ottoman Empire, the Christian community under the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople was the , Millet-ı-Rūm, the "community of Rome" -- with a grammatical construction borrowed by Ottoman Turkish from Persian. Now this all comes to be forgotten, even as modern historians, Classicists, and even "Byzantinists" never wanted to call the Ῥωμαῖοι "Romans" anyway.

Note on "Romania"

Rome and Romania Index

The Pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 1.1;
What the Greeks are Called, Continued

E.A. Wallis Budge gives us two hieroglypic and two Coptic writings of "Greek." The two hieroglyphic writings are and , and the two Coptic writings are Ⲟⲩⲉⲓⲛⲓⲛ, Weinin, and Ⲟⲩⲉⲉⲓⲉⲛⲓⲛ, Weeienin [An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, Volume II, John Murray, London, 1920, Dover Publications, 1978, p.960]. Other Egyptian dictionaries I have available, such as those Alan Gardiner [1927, 1964], Raymond O. Faulker [1962], and Bill Petty [2012], do not have a word for "Greek," probably because it is from Late Egyptian.

The phonetic value of the "eye" glyph, , is with some kind of semi-vowel (no one is quite sure what the value of the phoneme is) and an "r." Because of this, Budge vocalizes the word with an extra syllable, as Aruna or Auna; but if the Coptic writings are any guide, this is a mistake, and the eye is only ideographic, although of obscure import. The first hieroglyphic writing ends with determinatives for "foreign" and "land." In the second writing, we find a glottal stop, , added.

The Coptic writings both clarify and obscure matters. The first one, Ⲟⲩⲉⲓⲛⲓⲛ, is clear enough. The "ou" digraph, as with Greek ου (or the French "ou" in the same position), is read as a "w." This followed by "ei," which, like the contemporary Greek ει is certain to be read as a long "i." This confirms the reading of Demotic mentioned above. Our last clue here is that the double "n" in the hieroglyphic writing does indeed mean a double "n," separated by the vowel "i." So we get a reading of Wīnin for "Greek."

The other Coptic writing, Ⲟⲩⲉⲉⲓⲉⲛⲓⲛ, is what raises questions. We have two extra vowels here. What is going on? If they meaning anything, it must mean that we have more than one vowel, with a separation by a glottal stop, glide, or something. And the "eei" may have a diphthong value that ει originally had in Greek but then lost. The third "e," in turn, may suggest the role of the glottal stop in the second hieroglyphic writing. I am tempted to suggest a new, combined hieroglyphic writing, as ; but, really, the matter must remain obscure.

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 2

Although widely distributed around the Mediterranean basin, Mediterranean climates are actually rather rare in the world. The most extensive area is the south coast of Australia. Otherwise, there is only California, a small part of Chile in South American, and the tip of South Africa right around Cape Town. None of these places ended up with the other geographical and cultural attributes that put Greece and the Mediterranean in such historically important roles.

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 3

The circumstances of a life of trade curiously fit the four conditions for success recommended by the actor/comedian Sinbad to Dan Aykroyd in the Coneheads movie of 1993:

Look good.
Be your own boss.
Don't get stuck behind a desk.
Only take cash.

We don't know how good Greek traders would have looked (olive oil in the hair is not fashionable at the moment), but everything else certainly fits, and success did follow.

Beldar Conehead takes Sinbad's advice. He is self-employed as a driving instructor, where he is not behind a desk, and he only takes cash. It is not clear whether this is a legitimate, licensed business which pays taxes. Beldar's attempt at aquiring a stolden identity earlier in the movie has fallen through, and we see no attempt to duplicate its advantages. The INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service, which has since been renamed) is after him, but the IRS doesn't put in an appearance.

"Sinbad" is a name adopted by the comedian David Adkins. This derives from "Sindbad the Sailor" of the Thousand and One Nights.

Return to Political Economy Index

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 4

Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms, University of California Press, 1973, p. 183.

Lichtheim argues rather awkwardly that the text is intended as a "satire" because the "scribal profession" never would have harbored "a contempt for manual labor so profound as to be unrelieved by humor." Instead, the Egyptians are supposed to have uniformly taken "joy and pride in the accomplishments of labor" and have taught "respect for all labor" (p. 184). However, one does not have to have either contempt or respect to recognize that manual labor in an ancient society, with nothing in the way of modern medicine and when the average life-span was only about 35 years, was hard, merciless, and ravaging. A text that begins "I have seen many beatings" must be expected to be offering a sober caution, if indeed there were "many beatings," which, as it happens, is undeniable. Why there is any particular dignity in getting beaten by tax collectors, or why a scribal writer would want to satirize it, is more than a little mysterious. No, the concern for the dignity of labor here is modern and editorial, if not Marxist, and the intention of the author of the text is clearly the very serious recommendation of scribal life, attended with reading, writing, and authority, over the hard labor and social subordination of other professions.

The Shihābī Amīrs of Lebanon, 1697-1842 AD

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 5

The origin of the word "Phoenician" is a matter of interest. "Phoenicia" in Phoenician was Pūt and both the Phoenician people and the Phoenician language were Pōnnīm [A Phoenician-Punic Grammar,

Umbrella Pine near Ras al-Matn,
Mount Lebanon, 1969

by Charles R. Krahmalkov, Brill, Leiden, 2001, p.1]. Latin Poeni for Cathaginians and the adjective Punicus look like they come directly from the Phoenician words.


Umbrella Pine near Ras al-Matn, Mount Lebanon, 1969

The Greek word from which we actually get the words "Phoenicia" and "Phoenician," Phoiníke, Φοινίκη, however, looks a little different. Phoinix, Φοῖνίξ (i.e. Phoenix), in Greek is the noun, "Phoenician." The root here is Phoinik-, and this has an extra consonant in it in comparison to the Phoenician root. The word could be seen as having a Greek adjectival ending, -ik-, and we might think the way to analyze it is as coming from an adjective Phoin-ik-os. But this will not do. Phoinix is a Third Declension noun, and we must analyze it as Phoinik-s, in the nominative, as it is Phoinik-os in the genitive. A Greek adjective of Phoinix is actually Phoinikikos, Φοινικικός, where the adjectival ending -ik-os goes onto the root Phoinik-. And we already see po-ni-ke in Mycenaean Greek. We thus must account for the extra consonant in the root.

Phoinix may actually be a borrowing from Egyptian. Fnḫw, , in Egyptian meant "Syrians" [Egyptian Grammar, Sir Alan Gardiner, Oxford University Press, 1927, 1964, p.566], and if the Greeks, who had extensive involvement with the Egyptians, borrowed this word, that would account for the extra consonant.

The Fn portion of the root, of course, looks like it would correspond to the word in Phoenician, which may leave us wondering: If the Egyptian word was originally borrowed from Phoenician, where did the Egyptians get the third consonant? As it happens, Phoenician phonology originally had a consonant ḫ (kh, χ), which was subsequently lost [Krahmalkov, p.19]. It is possible that an earlier stage of the Phoenician language had that consonant in its root -- three consonsant roots are the norm in Semitic Languages -- which is where the Egyptians got it. It is also possible, of course, that the Greeks got to the Phoenicians early enough that they also got their third consonant directly from the Phoenician word; but since the consonant is not attested in written Phoenician, and the Egyptians were dealing with the Phoenicians two thousand years before the Greeks were (when Phoenician was not written), they would have been in a better position to pick up long lost consonants.

While Φοῖνίξ is puzzling for the extra consonant in the root, it is also used to mean "purple, purple-red, crimson," i.e. the color of the dye Tyrian Purple. In those terms we also have phoinós, φοινός, which means "blood-red, blood-stained, murderous." If these meanings are comparable, and φοινός looks like the Phoenician word for "Phoenician," then perhaps Greek has directly borrowed the Phoenician word after all, but is only using it for the color and not the people [cf. Carolina López-Ruiz, When the Gods Were Born, Greek Cosmologies and the Near East, Harvard, 2010, p.24 -- suggesting that phoīnix derives from phoinós, without addressing the morphological question of the extra -k-]. On the other hand, the Liddell and Scott Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon [Oxford, Clarendon, 1889, 1964] derives phoinós from phónos, φόνος, "murder, slaughter" [p.869]. However, I don't understand the morphology of this alteration either. An infixed "i" may be part of some regular word formation, but I am unfamiliar with it. Semantically, phoinós does seem to go with phónos, which would leave it unrelated to the word for "Phoenician" in Phoenician. There are problems either way.

The geographic backbone of Phoenicia, Mount Lebanon, had the same name then as now: Lebanon (Lbnn) -- rendered by the Egyptians as Rmnn, . It is Lubnān, , in Arabic.

The Egyptian Phoenix

The Pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 6

The Walls of Byblos, 1969

From "mountain," the root GBL (, jabal in Arabic), came the name of one of the principal Phoenician cities, Gubla, rendered by the Greeks as Byblos, Βύβλος.


The Walls of Byblos, 1969

This also became a Greek word for Egyptian papyrus, otherwise πάπυρος, probably traded by Byblos, and so, more commonly as biblos, a word for "book," or biblion, βιβλίον. Indeed, no papyrus grew in Phoenicia, so the Greeks, at least initially, certainly knew about the material as it was provided by Phoenician traders. Later, the Greeks went to Egypt and could buy their own papyrus, but the words of Phoenician original persisted.

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 7

The initial slope of the pyramid was not really too steep, at 54^o27'44", even though the pyramid was finished at 43^o22'. The angle of the Great Pyramid of Khufu would soon be 51^o50'40"; and the pyramid of Khafre would have an angle of 53^o10'. Instead the Bent Pyramid suffered from problems with the developing technology:

It was this combination of a lack of good mortar, carelessly laid blocks, and, most importantly, the unstable desert surface, that caused the structural problems. [Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids,Thames and Hudson, 1997, p. 102]

If the pyramid had been continued as planned, the weight of stone above, due to the foundation and structural problems, would have crushed the chambers within or caused a collapse of the sides. This was solved by flattening off the slope, resulting in the famous "bent" shape of the pyramid. Seneferu seems to have been displeased enough to order a complete new pyramid built, which was subsequently finished as the first true pyramid, the "Northern" or "Red" pyramid at Dahshur.

Laying the courses to slope inward was a technique that the Egyptians subsequently abandoned. However, we see a dramatical effect of this in the Bent Pyramid. Much of the outer casing, held on by gravity, remains. No other pyramid looks remotely like this, the most like a finished pyramid of any pyramid in Egypt. We can even see the lighter color, after more than 4000 years, of the quality casing stone.

Although the individualistic message of this episode, as of much of the original Star Trek, is unmistakable, note later tendencies of the series, as discussed in "The Fascist Ideology of Star Trek."

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 8

Fans of Star Trek may recognize the word "archon" from the classic Star Trek episode "The Return of the Archons," #22 in the original series, which aired February 9, 1967. The "archons" referred to were the crew of the starship Archon, which had been captured and the crew "absorbed" by the mind-controlling, totalitarian regime of a planet ruled by a computer impersonating an ancient legislator named "Landru" (rather like Sparta's Lycurgus). The episode ends with Captain Kirk in one of his classic moments arguing the computer into a nervous breakdown, freeing the planet.

βασιλέως μέν ἐστι τρόπος ὁ νομός, τυράννου δὲ ὁ τρόπος νομός.
The law is the habit of a king; the habit of a tyrant is the law.
Synesius of Balagrae (c.373-c.414), On Kingship, Ed. N. Terzaghi, Synesii Cyrenensis opuscula, Rome, 1944.

A tyrant, τύραννος, týrannos, in Greek history basically meant an autocratic ruler who was simply not a traditional king, a βασιλεύς, basileús. The kings were part of a tradition, usually hereditary, and had significant religious duties. A tyrant, on the other hand, came to power through secular political means, often by force, and they maintained their position by force, popularity, or both. Thus, "tyrant" did not originally mean a criminal; but the behavior of tyrants rapidly began to give the word the meaning it would have today, commiting crimes that often were also seen as offenses against religion; and philosophers like Plato analyzed the tyrant as possessing an immoral sort of personality type.

The difference between traditional kings and the tyrants was nicely expressed by Fustel de Coulanges:

When the kings had been everywhere overthrown, and the aristocracy had become supreme, the people did not content themselves with regretting the monarchy; they aspired to restore it under a new form. In Greece, during the sixth century, they succeeded generally in procuring leaders; not wishing to call them kings, because this title implied the idea of religious functions, and could only be borne by sacerdotal families, they called them tyrants. [Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, translated by Willard Small, 1874, Doubleday & Company, 1955, Dover Publications, 2006, p.270-271; La cité antique, 1865]

The sort of conduct characteristic of tyrants was illustrated by Aristotle with an anecdote:

Hence comes the advice of Periander to Thrasybulus, his docking of the prominent cornstalks, meaning that the prominent citizens [τοὺς ὑπερέχοντας] must always be made away with. [Politics, V, viii, 7, translated by H. Rackham, 1932, 1998, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, p.442-443]

Periander, the tyrant of Corinth (d.585 BC), asked Thrasybulus, who was the tyrant of Miletus (d.600 BC), how to govern. Silently, walking through the fields outside Miletus with Periander's representative, Thryasybulus demonstrated his technique by cutting off the tops of the grainstalks that stood up higher than the others. Thus, anyone who might become a focus for opposition to a tyrant should be eliminated. Aristotle has turned around who gave the advice to whom. Of course, it didn't much matter. Periander was also famous for murdering his wife and other crimes.

There is a Japanese saying comparable to Thrasybulus's silent advice: 出る釘は打たれる, Deru kugi wa, utareru, "The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down." This is not advice for tyrants, but a description of the enforcement of conformity in Japanese society.

Greek tyrants didn't always kill their opposition, both because exile was easy and effective,

The exiled Emperor Go-Toba forging a sword with which to kill the Hōjō Regent Yoshitoki.

and in ancient religion one always worried about venegeful spirits causing trouble -- a motif familiar in Japanese history -- the reason why deposed Emperors, like Go-Toba, were exiled rather than killed -- and that recently has spawned popular horror novels and movies.


The exiled Emperor Go-Toba forging a sword with which to kill the Hōjō Regent Yoshitoki.

The most striking case may have involved Polycrates, Πολυκράτης, the tyrant of Samos (ὁ Σάμιος, d.522), of whom we will see more in the main text above. He had to deal with one of the most prominent citizens of Samos, and also one of the most prominent persons of the age, the philosopher Pythagoras (Πυθαγόρας). The result, of course, was that around 531 Pythagoras fled, or was exiled, all the way to Croton in Italy. There, his danger as a political leader was revealed when his followers took over the city and he became a tyrant himself.

Since the Pythagorean community banned beans (because they thought that they contained souls?!), Bertrand Russell joked (all that he is really good for in the history of philosophy) that Pythagoras was soon overthrown because the masses hungered after beans. So Pythagoras had to flee again, to nearby Metapontum, where he lived out his life. There are also reports that at one point some of his followers were massacred -- whether for political or religious reasons, I don't know.

While tyrants were never called kings, we sometimes find people we would consider kings called tyrants. Thus, perhaps the most famous play by Sophocles is usually called, in Latin, Oedipus Rex, or "Oedipus the King." However, a more accurate translation would be Oedipus Tyrannus, because Sophocles does call him a tyrant, not a king. Why this is so may be evident from the story. Oedipus does not inherit the throne of Thebes but obtains it by passing the test of answering the riddle of the sphinx -- although he happens to be the one who killed the previous king, not realizing that this was actually his father. Trouble continues as he unknowingly marries the king's widow, his own mother, fathering four children on her -- making them, at once, his brothers, sisters, and children, which gave the Greeks a chill. The breaches of religion involved -- the blood pollution of murder, patricide, and incest -- soon resulted in ill fortune, sent by the gods, afflicting the city. Thus, in many ways Oedipus did not enjoy the sanction of religion as a ruler, making him more tyrant than king.

"Tyrant" ceased to be a title and became only a term of abuse during the Hellenistic Age. A proper monarchy, that of Macedonia, came to rule Greece and the Middle East through Alexander the Great. After the death of Alexander, his generals soon claimed kingship themselves, as the "Successors," Διάδοχοι, the Diadochi. This did not have the same religious sanction as traditional kings, but the precedent of Alexander himself created a new form of this, that the Hellenistic Kings are themselves gods. For instance, the official name of Cleopatra (VII) herself included θεά, théa, "goddess." Something like this the Greeks previously would have considered a religious offensive, a case of hybris, ὕβρις; but from Alexander on these monarchs often did seem larger than life -- still the case with Cleopatra.

The Byzantine Republic, People and Power in New Rome, by Anthony Kaldellis

Feudal Hierarchy

Varieties of Kingship

The Eponymous Archons of Athens

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 9

Although very many ships were lost at sea in the pre-modern period, taking crew, cargo, and profit with them, the returns on a successful voyage could be astounding. An good example of how astounding we can gather from the 4700% profit that Queen Elizabeth I made off of her shares in the round-the-world voyage -- from 1577 to 1580, including a famous stop in California in 1579 -- of Sir Francis Drake in the Golden Hind [cf. T.O. Lloyd, The British Empire, 1558-1995, The Short Oxford History of the Modern World, general editor J.M. Roberts, Oxford, 1996, p. 9]. The profit seems to have come largely from a single cargo of cloves.

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 10;
"Money's Murky Origins"

Recent arguments about the origin of money have been discussed in "Money's Murky Origins," by Bruce Bower, in Science News [Volume 194, No. 3, August 4, 2018, pp.16-21]. A key statement in the article runs thus:

Coins stamped with images of animals or rulers, guaranteeing the metal's value, first appeared in the kingdom of Lydia, in what's now Turkey, around 2,600 years ago. Soon after, cities and states in Greece, Persia, India and China began to strike their own coins. From the start, coins funded armies and wars of conquest. In the process, coins became legal tender for all sorts of transactions. Marketplaces were a result of the system, not its cause, revisionists argue. [p.17]

Unfortunately for the "revisionists," who see money as an instrument of state, not initially of trade and markets, the Lydians and the Greek cities associated with them, like Miletus and Ephesus (i.e. Ionia), were traders, not conquerors, and their coins were not introduced to fund, and did not "from the start" fund, "armies and wars of conquest." There were no such things -- although Lydia eventually made a couple of abortive efforts in that direction. And the Persian Empire, let alone earlier states, like Assyria, was created before this innovation had any chance to have an effect on its practices. The coinage, for instance, of Darius (522-486), postdates the creation of the Empire by Cyrus (640-600) and Cambyses (600-559), who were more or less contemporaneous with the introduction of coinage. So the expression above, "soon after," conceals the lack of actual connection, and the mismatched dates, between the two phenomena. So, indeed, markets came first, not state funding of armies and wars.

This is especially noteworthy with China, which has been incautiously included in the list of conquerors. Traditional China never used more than one kind of coin, the small brass "cash" coin with a square hole in the center. This was never worth much, and it was intentionally made that way, as a convenience, not for merchants or businesses, but for the daily, small transactions of ordinary people. The cash coins were worth so little that later, when the Spanish silver dollar was introduced, it was rated as worth 1000 cash. This all was because Confucians did not trust merchants or businessmen, who were left to provide their own appropriate medium of exchange in silver ingots. Gold was a state monopoly, precisely to fund "armies and wars of conquest," although Confucians actually didn't care much for those activities either, which left China relatively helpless in the face of conquest by Manchuria. And there never were gold coins, even when the Manchu Qing Dynasty began adopting Western coinage. Republican China adopted a "Silver Standard" for money. The hole in the coins was conveniently used to string together 50, 100, or whatever at a time.

So, whether it is Mr. Bower or the "revisionists" -- with only David Graeber [Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House, 2011], actually given with a reference in the article -- they seem to be seriously out of their reckoning when it comes to the history of money, or even just history. We might wonder why. Does David Graeber have some kind of agenda?

Well, the "revisionists" seem to reject a basic principle of liberal democracy, which is that "governments are instituted among men to secure these rights," i.e. the natural rights of the State of Nature. After all, when the Phoenicians landed on a distant shore and set about trading with the natives, they were operating in a State of Nature. When markets were later governed by laws, this was to prevent the abuses that might occur in such situations, i.e. violence, theft, fraud, etc.

But if money derives from functions of state, and not from the natural conditions of markets, then the State has ontological priority. The "revisionists" may believe this because they are Hegelians and statists, for whom government and the state are more real than individuals, have natural authority over them, and which condescend to dispense rights to citizens, for its benefit, not for theirs. This is the paradigm of leftist politics from the 20th century into the 21st -- which coincidentally always accrues benefits to those in power, the "rulng class" of rent-seekers, etc. -- whose shallow self-righteous anti-Americanism has now earned them a contemptuous epithet in Chinse, the Báizuǒ, , the "White Left" (Wade Giles Pai Tso). It is not clear from this one article if that is what is going on, but suspicion is warranted in the increasingly totalitarian modern academy -- where full anti-Semitism has now broken out, in support for the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, against Israel.

Another Treatment of "Money's Murky Origins"

Reviews

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 11

Some people like to think that the wealth of Athens derived from the Laurion silver mines. But this is to make a fundamental mistake about the nature of wealth -- an instance of "Cargo Cult" economics. Money is worthless without something to buy. Even gold, without commerce, may as well be used, as the Egyptians did, to make or cover coffins. If goods are produced, then it doesn't matter who has the gold or silver, it will run, like water, to the producers.

A prime example of that is the great flood of metal from the silver mines of Mexico and Peru, starting in the 16th century, which all went to Spain. Since Spain was not a commercial or manufacturing power, it simply spent the money. That helped make it a predominant power for over a century, but the money, when spent, then went to the commercial states, like the Netherlands and England. The Netherlands, small as it was, then demonstrated a new order of economic strength by successfully revolting against Spain. All that all of the silver had done to the Spanish economy was to produce a raging inflation -- always the result of too much money chasing too few goods. Athens suffered no such embarrassments. It could absorb its own silver, and much, much more, like the "tribute" from the League of Delos, because of the strength of its own economy.

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 12

This is rather like when the "Psychic Friends Network," which dispensed paranormal advice by phone, filed for bankruptcy early in 1998, the news stories asked "Didn't they see it coming?"

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 13

The Greek historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertius, refers to a lost work, that of Hieronymus of Rhodes, crediting Thales with "measuring the pyramids by their shadow, having observed the time when our own shadow is equal to our height" (G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge, 1964, p. 83). This would be a little awkward, since one's own height would have to be ascertained and the shadow measured by it. Since the gnomon -- a stick in the ground -- was in use at the time to observe the path of the sun, using one would be considerably easier and just as simple.

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 14

The virtue of cuneiform writing, incised on clay tablets, which otherwise would seem messy and cumbersome, is that it will not decay or burn. When the Assyrian cities were burned and looted (c. 614-612), the library tablets were simply baked into bricks, leaving to posterity a vast body of Assyro-Babylonian literature and documents. Since Mesopotamia civilization is less photogenic and less popular and romantic than Egyptian, this vast literature is relatively neglected, and language material relatively less available. People with degrees in Akkadian, Sumerian, and cuneiform, an intellectual achievement of staggering impressiveness, sometimes cannot even find jobs.

Egyptian papyrus, although far more convenient as a writing material, decays and burns easily, leaving us with a pitiful fragment of Egyptian literature. Surviving papyri are largely from tombs in the desert, preserved by the dry conditions; but Egyptian libraries were not built in the desert. Much Egyptian literature, indeed, has not survived on papyrus at all but on the ostraca (ὄστρακα, singular ὄστρακον, "ostracon"), the fragments of pots and chips of stone, that were used by boys (no girls, by the way) in scribal schools -- they were denied valuable papyrus for the humble task of copying their lessons.

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 15

Kissinger should have known better than to have so underestimated the strength of America, since he certainly would have known how Napoleon had foolishly dismissed England as "a nation of shopkeepers" -- where the shopkeepers built a navy that sank Napoleon's, and then carried him to exile on St. Helena.

The Origin of Philosophy: Why the Greeks? Note 16

The case of the playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898�1956) is revealing. Brecht, a life-long Marxist and Communist, was called before the House Un-American Activies Committee (HUAAC) in 1947 when the Committee was investigating people in Hollywood with Communist connections -- including the "Hollysood Ten," now celebtrated as Martyrs by Marxists at all American universities and among the bien pensants of American letters and politics. Brecht, one of the Ten, nevertheless testified freely and impressed the Committee as a "friendly witness." Falsely denying all knowledge of Communists, Brecht avoided citation for Contempt of Congress, and probable jail time, by leaving the country the next day and never returning. He defected to East Germany, where he retained a residence the rest of his life.

This counter-example to the western intellectuals who "voted with their feet" by staying in Capitalist countries is countered in turn by the deal that Brecht made with the East Germans. He kept an Austrian passport, which enabled him to leave East Germany and travel, as few other East Germans could. He kept his money in Swiss bank accounts, where no Communist regime had access to it. And he kept a West German publisher, who paid the considerable royalties from his works into his Swiss bank accounts. It also now appears that some of his works had been plagiarized from younger, especially female, associates.

The hypocrisy and cynicism of Brecht's behavior and arrangements is almost charming, but it certainly explodes the notion that he defected to East Germany so that he could enjoy the benefits of living under actual Communism. He managed to avoid all the disabilities that would have applied to real East Germans, who would be safely imprisoned by the Berlin Wall in 1961. Brecht, we might say, added insult to injury by congratulating the East German government when it put down the 1953 uprising (by "the workers," as it happened). Brecht was thus the perfect leftist intellectual, enjoying the freedom himself that he was happy to see denied to others.

Parmenides of Elea
and the Way of Truth

नासतोविद्यतेभावो नाभावोविद्यतेसतः
Nāsato vidyáte bhāvo, nābhāvo vidyáte sataḥ
The unreal never is; the Real never is not.
The Bhagavad Gita, 2:16, Juan Mascar� translation [Penguin Books, 1962, p.49];
the Parmenidean principle of the Bhagavad Gita.

Parmenides of Elea, Παρμενίδης ὁ Ἐλεάτης (born c. 515; note), is one of the most important Presocratic philosophers and represents a major turning point in the development of Greek thought. We can credit Parmenides with two major innovations:

Dialectic, ἡ Διαλεκτική:
To the Greeks, this simply meant logical argumentation. This represents a break with a characteristic of mythpoeic thought that had persisted through the first Greek philosophers, namely the fourth characteristic, that myth is self-justifying. As handed down to us, earlier philosophers, like Anaximander and Heracltius, simply assert what is true. They do not, to our knowledge, offer arguments. Where they begin to notice their own disagreements, there is not much they can say about each other except that they are right and the others are wrong. Heraclitus is supposed to have said:
Much learning [πολυμαθίη, "polymathy," in the Ionic dialect] does not teach intelligence [or "mind," Ionic νοός, noós, Attic νοῦς, noūs], or it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus. [Diogenes Laertius]

Although Parmenides's poem, the Way of Truth, begins with the invocation of an unnamed goddess, in standard mythic form, the goddess provides arguments, rendering her own authority superfluous.
The meaning of the word "dialectic" (from which is derived "dialogue") now has drifted far from its original sense, because of special technical meanings attributed to it by philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Also, the etymology of the word is commonly misunderstood, as when people say that a "dialogue" involves two people because di- means "two." Well di- can mean two (from dis, "double"), but it does not in "dialectic" or "dialogue" since the element is dia- rather than di-. Dia, διά, is a Greek preposition that means "through." "Discourse," from Latin (discursus), would be the most appropriate translation of the Greek meaning.
Metaphysics, Μετὰ τὰ Φυσικά:
The meaning of the word "metaphysics" is also commonly misconstrued. On television or in New Age literature (one thinks of Shirley MacLaine and her books like Out on a Limb -- made into a TV movie in 1987), one is liable to hear that the word "metaphysics" means "beyond" (μετά, meta) the "physical" (φυσικά, physics). Thus "metaphysics" would be about spiritual things, God, the soul, ghosts, etc. Unfortunately, the Greek preposition meta does not mean "beyond"; it means "after." This might be thought to amount to the same thing, but it doesn't, because of the actual origin of the word. Metaphysics was originally the title of a book, by Aristotle. It got that name by accident.
When Aristotle died (in 322), none of his mature thought had been published. All that remained of his teachings at his school, the Lyceum, were his lecture notes, sometimes even his students' lecture notes. Before long, his family and students decided that something should be done about that, and the material was gradually organized, divided, and published. The appropriate names for many of the books were obvious (On the Heavens, On the Soul, The Parts of Animals, etc.). After the Physics (physika, "natural things," from physis, "nature") was published, however, it was not obvious what to call the next book, since it had material about God and a number of other things in it. Rather than picking one topic, the book simply began to be called the "After the Physics" (Μετὰ τὰ Φυσικά, Meta ta Physika). The name stuck. So the word "metaphysics" really doesn't mean anything etymologically. It would basically mean whatever was in Aristotle's Metaphysics.
What was basic in the Metaphysics was something for which a word did not exist in Greek philosophy. A modern word has been coined from Greek, however: "Ontology", for the philosophical discipline that is the first and principle part of metaphysics. "Ontology" (ὀντολογία, ontologia) means "talking" (-logia) about "being" (ōn / onto-). This is literally what Parmenides did, as will be seen below -- to talk about Being. More generally, "ontology" is the theory about what is real. It is often said to be the study of "Being qua Being," or of what Aristotle called the ὀντῶς ὄντα, ontôs ónta, the "beingly beings," or most real things. This is why the popular meaning of "metaphysics" is incorrect. Any theory that is an answer to the question, "What is real?" is an ontological, and so metaphysical, theory. That is true whether one answers "spirits" or even "matter." Materialism is just as much metaphysics as its denial. Indeed, in a Physics class, little attention is going to paid to the question, "What is real?"
Talking about Being, Parmenides founds abstract metaphysics. There are other disciplines that later (as in Aristotle) fall into metaphysics: especially cosmology, the theory of the structure and history of the universe, natural theology, theories about God based on reason rather than revelation, and rational psychology, the rational metaphysics of the soul. The modern equivalent of the latter would be philosophy of mind. Cosmology has now largely been absorbed by astronomy and physics, but some residual metaphysical issues remain, such as the nature of space and time.

These two innovations of Parmenides are presented in the form of an epic poem, the Way of Truth. Fragments of it survive in quotations by later writers, some of them much later: Proclus lived in the 5th century AD, Simplicius in the 6th. So, a thousand years after Parmenides, Simplicius supplies us with extensive quotations, because he himself had difficulty finding complete texts of Parmenides. Those are now lost, but Simplicius remains.

The argument of Parmenides against Not Being was a challenge left to subsequent philosophy. What is to be made of it? Parmenides seems to rule out the reality of the "real" world. In the subsequent history of philosophy, roughly three things were done to make sense of the theory:

Fragments of the Way of Truth
by Parmenides of Elea

translation based on G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven (1957) and Scott Austin (1986)

[Fragment 1, from Sextus Empiricus and Simplicius]
The steeds that carried me took me as far as my heart could desire, when once they had brought me and set me on the renowned way of the goddess, who leads the man who knows through every town.

Parmenides may be the first Greek philosopher to offer a careful argument, derived from and based on reason, for his views. Nevertheless, he wrote a traditional poetic invocation of a Muse-like goddess for his philosophical poem. Thus we look back to the inspiration that the poets, and perhaps the first philosophers, claimed as the authority for their statements, even as we look forward to the appeal to logic made by all later philosophers. The goddess remains unnamed, as happens in Homer, quite commonly in ancient religion, and even in the case of Socrates in the Apology.

....And the axle [of the chariot], blazing in the socket, was making the holes in the naves sing -- for it was urged round by well-turned wheels at each end -- while the daughters of the Sun, hasting to convey me into the light, threw back the veils from off their faces and left the abode of night. There are the gates of the ways of Night and Day, fitted above with a lintel and below with a threshold of stone. They themselves, high in the air, are closed by mighty doors, and avenging Justice controls the double bolts. Her did the maidens entreat with gentle words and cunningly persuade to unfasten without demur the bolted bar from the gates. Then, when the doors were thrown back, they disclosed a wide opening, when their brazen posts, fitted with rivets and nails, swung in turn on their hinges. Straight through them, on the broad way, did the maidens guide the horses and the car. And the goddess greeted me kindly, and took my right hand in hers, and spoke to me these words:
"Welcome, O youth, who comes to my abode in the car that bears you, tended by immortal charioteers. It is no ill chance, but right and justice, that has sent you forth to travel on this way. Far indeed does it lie from the beaten track of men. Now it is that you should learn all things, both the unshaken heart of well rounded truth and the opinion of mortals in which is no true belief at all. Yet none the less shall you learn these things also -- how the things that seem, as they all pass through everything, must gain the semblance of being.
[Fragments 2 & 3, from Proclus]
"Come now and I will tell you -- and do hearken and carry my word away -- the only ways of enquiry that can be thought of [that exist for thinking]: the one way, that it is and cannot not be, is the path of Persuasion, for it attends upon Truth;

This is the way in which we only talk about Being. Notice that the entire rest of the poem is a quotation from the goddess.

"the other, that it is not and cannot be, that I tell you is a path altogether unthinkable.

The way in which we only talk about Not Being. This turns out not to be a real way of inquiry, because to think about something implies that it is, in some way, while Not Being is not, by definition, in any way. Hence such a way is "unthinkable." This is the essence of Parmenides' argument.

"For you could not know that which is not (that is impossible) nor utter it; for the same thing can be thought as can be [τὸ γὰρ ἀυτὸ νοεῖν ἔστιν τε καὶ εἶναι -- the same thing exists for thinking as for being].
[Fragment 6, from Simplicius]
"That which can be spoken and thought must be; for it is possible for it, but not for nothing, to be; that is what I bid you ponder. This [i.e. Not Being] is the first way of enquiry from which I hold you back, and then from that way also on which mortals wander knowing nothing, two-headed;

The way in which we talk about both Being and Not Being, i.e. the way in which we talk about the visible world, where one and the same thing may exist at one time and not exist at another. This need of ours to talk that way about this world invalidates it for Parmenides.

"for helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts; they are carried along, deaf and blind at once, altogether dazed -- hordes devoid of judgment, who are persuaded that to be and to be not are the same, yet not the same, and for whom the path of all things is backward turning.

The traditional critique of Parmenides, starting with Plato, is that he was confusing the "existential" use of "is," as in "This thing is" (meaning "This thing exists"), with the "predicative" use of "is," as in "This thing is blue." Thus, it is said, Parmenides' rejection of "it is not" discourse is based on a confusion, applying principles that may be appropriate to the existential use of "is" to "is" that has a different meaning -- many languages have "nominal sentences" where a verb is not even used for predication. However, Parmenides never uses any predications with "it is not." When Parmenides accuses the "hordes devoid of judgment" of believing that "to be and to be not are the same, yet not the same," there is no indication or necessity that he is talking about predication. Instead, he is reasonably and consistently to be interpreted as accusing people of believing that "to exist and not to exist are the same, yet not the same," for this is actually how we do speak of the objects of experience, which are said to exist at one time and not to exist at another. We also talk about "fictional objects," like Sherlock Holmes or Obi-wan Kenobi, which exist in some way but not really in "reality." And there are mathematical objects, which seem rather basic to "reality" but are not things we find lying around in ordinary experience, or cannot exist in ordinary experience, e.g. geometrical points. This is now called the problem of "non-existent objects," famously explored by the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong (1853-1921). There are various ways to solve it, but it is not based on the kind of confusion of which Parmenides is commonly accused.

[Fragment 7, from Plato]
"For never shall this be proved, that things that are not are; but do hold back your thought from this way of enquiry, nor let custom, born of much experience, force you to let wander along this road your aimless eye, your echoing ear or your tongue; but do judge by reason (lógos) the strife encompassed proof that I have spoken.
[Fragment 8, from Simplicius]
"One way only is left to be spoken of, that it is; and on this way are full many signs that what is is uncreated and imperishable; for it is entire, immovable and without end. It was not in the past, nor shall it be, since it is now, all at once, One,

The "One" became the common name for Being as it was described by Parmenides.

"continuous; for what creation will you seek for it? How and whence did it grow? Nor shall I allow you to say or to think, "from that which is not"; for it is not be said or thought that it is not. And what need would have driven it on to grow, starting from nothing, at a later time rather than an earlier?

This is called an argument from "sufficient reason," because in an empty eternity there would be no reason why Being would come into being at one time rather than another. This argument is now especially associated with the German philosopher Leibniz.

"Thus it must either completely be or be not. Nor will the force of true belief allow that, beside what is, there could also arise anything from what is not. Because of this Justice

What is the force of logic? Parmenides, who is here appealing to logic for perhaps the first time in history, nevertheless thinks of its sanction as one of divine justice enforced by a goddess.

"does not loosen her fetters to allow it to come into being or perish, but holds it fast; and the decision on these matters rests here: it is or it is not (ἔστιν ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν, éstin ē ouk éstin).

A key phrase in Parmenides. What the principle would rule out is the idea of degrees of existence such as is found in the Neoplatonists or Descartes. It also sounds a bit like the phrase in Hamlet, "To be, or not to be," ἔστιν ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν, which begins Hamlet's consideration whether to commit suicide. Hamlet rejects suicide, since he cannot be sure it will really deliver him from his existence and his troubles. Parmenides, of course, would say that non-existence is impossible. This echoes the similar argument of the Bhagavad Gita [2:16]. While the principle is otherwise rarely used in the history of philosophy to establish personal immortality, it nevertheless survives even in physics as the principle of the conservation of mass, that mass cannot be created or destroyed -- now combined by Einstein with the principle of the conservation of energy, so that mass and energy can turn into each other, but cannot be absolutely created or destroyed.

"But it has surely been decided, as it must be, to leave alone the one way as unthinkable and nameless (for it is no true way), and that the other is real and true. How could what is thereafter perish? and how could it come into being? For if it comes to be, it is not, and likewise if it is going to be. So coming into being is extinguished and perishing unimaginable.

It is often thought, reasonably enough (e.g. by Hegel) that "becoming" splits the difference between Being and Not Being, since something that is becoming already participates in what it is to be. Parmenides, however, rejects this utterly, since whatever something is supposed to be becoming, it isn't that thing yet, an especially harsh difficulty when we are talking about non-existence becoming existence.

"Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike; nor is there more here and less there, which would prevent it from cleaving together, but it is all full (ἔμπλεον, émpleon)

Being is a plenum (the Latin translation of the Greek word), i.e. it is full of Being, since any emptiness or any lack of density could only be due to the disallowed Not Being.

"of what is. So it is all continuous; for what is clings close to what is. But, motionless within the limits of mighty bonds, it is without beginning or end, since coming into being and perishing have been driven far away, cast out by true belief. Abiding the same in the same place it rests by itself, and so abides firm where it is;

It cannot go anywhere, since only Not Being could be there before Being arrived, and only Not Being could be left after Being had gone elsewhere.

"for strong Necessity holds it firm within the bonds of the limit that keeps it back on every side, because it is not lawful that what is should be unlimited; for it is not lacking -- what is not would lack everything. But since there is a furthest limit, it is bounded on every side, like the bulk of a well rounded sphere, from the center equally balanced in every direction;

Being is not infinite, and this seems to be the only point that does not really follow from Parmenides's argument -- he can only say it is not "lawful." He is just more comfortable with a limited One, like a big beach ball. A follower of Parmenides, Melissos of Samos, more consistently argued that Being was infinite.

"for it cannot be somewhat more here or somewhat less there. For neither is there that which is not, which might stop it from meeting its like, nor can what is be more here and less there than what is, since it is all inviolable; for being equal to itself on every side, it rests uniformly within its limits."

The Way of Truth poem is then followed by the Way of Seeming, in which Parmenides describes the world as though there really was dualism. This concession, however, posed no radical challenge to the received tradition of Greek philosophy.

The One was interpreted to be matter. This was the approach of the "Atomists," like Democritus, and of Empedocles. The Atomists allowed that Not Being existed as much as Being, which allowed fragements of Being, i.e. "atoms," to move around in empty space and be different shapes and sizes. This accounted for the character and interactions of matter -- and for the motto, "Atoms and the Void," to account for all of reality. "Atom" itself, ἄτομος, átomos (plural ἄτομοι, átomoi), means "uncut, indivisible" (from τέμνω, témnō, "to cut" -- as in ὑστερεκτομία, hysterektomía, "hysterectomy," to cut out [ἐκ, ek] the ὑστέρα, hystera, uterus -- something Greek surgery never dared to do), because the Atomists thought they were the smallest things, each like a little One of Parmenides. This was not modern atomic theory, although the atoms of modern chemical elements cannot be divided without losing their elemental identity. Cutting atoms results in subatomic particles. Empedocles, in turn, proposed that there were four elements, which is what became popular and dominant through the Middle Ages. This interpretation of Being as matter came first and the most easily "saved" the world of perception.
The One was generally later interpreted to be God -- a theistic interpretation. Because of this Parmenides tended to be associated with the earlier philosopher Xenophanes, who seems to have been a monotheist. The Neoplatonists simply called God "the One," and in mediaeval theology, when the question arose why God was uncreated and indestructible, arguments much like those of Parmenides could be used. As an interpretation of Parmenides, however, this doesn't look very good, since the One is without life or personality -- it is inert. And finally,
Plato replaced the One with his theory of Forms -- eídē, εἴδη (singular eîdos, εἶδος -- a term appropriated by Aristotle and translated species in Latin) or idéai, ἰδέαι (singular idéa, ἰδέα -- which Aristotle used exclusively to characterize Plato's theory). The Forms (most philosophers said "Ideas" until recently) are like the One in being eternal and unchanging, but unlike the One in being many. Although Parmenides would have had a real problem with this, Plato of all subsequent Western philosophers took the most seriously Parmenides' rejection of the existence of the world of appearances. Although unpopular in the West, however, this world-denying view is quite common in Indian philosophy.

History of Philosophy, Greek Philosophy

Terms for "worldly" in Greek, Chinese, and Arabic

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

Note on Parmenides,
On Patronymics

It is noteworthy that the name Παρμενίδης, "Parmenides," has two parts, "Parmen" and "-ides." "-Ides" is a suffix which makes a patronymic, that is, it marks the name of a son's father. "Parmenides" thus means "son of Parmen." This is common in many languages, but is especially famous in Russian. "Son of Parmen" in Russian would be "Parmenevich," Парменьевич. "Daughter of Parmen" in Russian would be "Parmenovna," Парменовна. Other languages, however, do the same thing. "Son of Parmen" in Persian would be "Parmenzādeh," . There are now many Persian surnames with the "-zādeh" suffix, which literally means "born."

In Russian, we find the name "Basil," Василий, "Vasilii," derived from Greek Βασίλειος, "Basileios." The Patronymic is then Васильевич, "Vasilevich." "Daughter of Basil" is Васильевна, Vasilevna," or Василовна, "Vasilovna." In the Middle Ages, the Greek letter beta came to be pronounced "v," which carries over into Russian, which is why "Vasilii" looks like it is written with a "b."

Variations in Greek patronymics can be examined with the Christian name "John," Ἰωάννης (see discussion of "John" here). We expect that patronymic to be Ἰωαννίδης, "Iōannídēs," which does occur. In Modern Greek, we also see this as Ιωαννίδις, "Iōannídis." But in Modern Greek, we also see something very different, namely Γιαννόπουλος, "Yiannópoulos," with some variations. In this we have an entirely new patronymic ending, "-opoulos," which occurs in the Middle Ages but is really of unknown derivation. The actual "John" part of this name looks a lot like "John" in Italian, the variant "Gianni" of "Giovanni." "Gianni" is pronounced a whole lot like "Johnny" in English. In Greek, however, the letter gamma in this position has become a "y," as I have transcribed it.

Šāhzādeh, , "Son of the King," was a Persian term (Turkish Şehzade) used in India as the title, Šāhzāda, , of the son and heir apparent of the Moghul Emperors (who did write it in the Arabic alphabet). It was thus used like "Prince of Wales" in Britain or "Dauphin" in France. We also see the name Šahrāzād, -- Scheherazade from the Thousand and One Nights, whose name at first looks like it means "city born" -- although Šahr in Middle Persian originally meant "country" or "realm." Her sister was Dunyāzād, , which looks like "world born."

This makes me suspicious, since "world," , here doesn't make much sense. We might expect "Dunyāzād" to contrast with "Šahrāzād" as meaning "country born" as against "city born." The root does look to be Arabic, where I see no senses of "country" in it, although the basic meanings are "near, close, lowly, mean, earth, temporal, secular," etc. It is conceivable that "country" or "rural" could have been in that mix, especially when we consider that "rural" in Latin, paganus, has certain negative implications, consistent with "lowly" or "mean." On the other hand, perhaps the problem is back with "Shahrāzād." Šahr, , is "city" in Persian; but we also get the same word in Arabic, where Šahr, , actually means "new moon" or "month." But the root, šahara, , is the beginning of a variety of meanings, "to make well-known, famous, renowned, notorious." Wikipedia says that "Shahrāzād" means "noble born," which isn't quite the same thing, but it would contrast nicely with "Dunyāzād" as "lowly" or "meanly born." Since the women are sisters, we could account for the difference between "noble" or "renowed" and "lowly" in terms of their mothers. But the status of children at this time generally derives from their fathers. So this business remains more than a little puzzling; but it could mean something as simple as that Šahrāzād was born in the city while Dunyāzād was born in the country -- their father, the Wazīr, could have a city house and a country house -- like the British upper class.

Another problem is that Šahrāzād, , seems to have an extra vowel. The word can be parsed into šahr, , and āzād, , where the latter in Modern Persian means "free" or "noble" -- āzādi, , is "freedom, liberty" (not a meaningful word for the "Islamic Republic"). However, the name is also attested (often) as Šahrazād, ; and it is possible to wonder if the length of the "a" was adjusted to fit an etymology with āzād, .

I any case, what the name is going to mean may then go back to these words in Middle Persian, about which there seems to be much uncertainty and considerable speculation -- sometimes presented as fact, even though the name is not attested in any Middle Persian texts. I have seen ideas that šahr originally was "kingdom" rather than "city" (or "lineage"), which is possible, but "kingdom" would come from šāh, , "king." However, if we overlooked a vowel in Šahrāzād, this would involve overlooking the "r" in šahr, even if we dismiss the loss of the long vowel in šāh.

I have not yet seen attempts to tackle Dunyāzād, , which could also be parsed with āzād, , although that would then share a vowel with dunyā, . That's possible, but it still leaves us to explain dunyā, something I have not seen.

The King of the Thousand and One Nights is Šahryār, . The problem there is what follows šahr, i.e. yār. The only explanation I've seen for this is that in Middle Persian it was dār, , which in Modern Persian means "house" or "country." So if šahr is some derivative of šāh, the name could mean "royal country" or "royal house." This doesn't sound a whole lot like a personal name. Richard Burton glosses the name as "City-friend," but does not explain the basis of his interpretation [The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night, Volumes I & II, The Heritage Press, 1934, 1962, p.25].

While we see the Persian patronymic ending used in Turkish as in Şehzade, Turkish has its own patronimic ending, -oğlu, from oğul, "son." Strangely enough, this turns up in Greek names, like that of the great Hollywood director, Elia Kazan, who was born Ἠλίας Καζαντζόγλου, where we would transcribe the surname "Kazantzoglou." As it happens, this does not just have a Turkish suffix. It is entirely Turkish. Thus, kazan is "pot, kettle, boiler"; kazancı is "boiler maker"; and Kazancıoğlu is an attested Turkish surname, "son of boiler maker." Elia Kazan's birth name looks like the Greek version of this.

We also find Turkish elements in the name of Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), to whom we owe Zorba the Greek [1964] and The Last Temptation of Christ [1988]. In Greek, his name is Νίκος Καζαντζάκης. Here we seem to have the same kazancı element, with perhaps a Greek adjectival ending in place of the Turkish patronymic -- a suffix that seems to be particularly associated with Crete, where Kazantzakis was born. This may have been a modification of a name more like Elia Kazan's, since many Greeks, especially those who fled or were expelled from Turkey after World War I, wanted to eliminate obvious Turkish elements from their names.

The Persian patronymic ending also turns up in Hindi, with Arabic ḥarām, , "forbidden," we get harāmzāda, , "son of the forbidden," i.e. "bastard." Note the diacritic on Sanskrit "j" for "z," which is a sound imported from Persian.

Even English and Spanish have patronymics, though now, as in Persian, they have simply become surnames. Thus, "son of John" was "Johnson," now a very common surname (including two Presidents of the United States). In Spanish, patronymics are marked by "-ez" (Portuguese, or sometimes in Spanish, "-es"). "Iñiguez" is "son of Iñigo." "Velasquez" (or "Vasquez") is "son of Velasco," a name, like Iñigo, of Basque origin -- also like the names Sancho and Sánchez, Garcia and Garcés, all of which figure as names of the Basque Kings of Navarra and Dukes of Gascony.

So English and Spanish patryonymic equivalents of "Parmenides" would be "Parmenson" and "Parmeñez," respectively. "Son of John" in Spanish is actually Ibañez, using a form of "John" that looks like that name, Иван, Ivan, in Russian (which gets us the patronymics "Ivanovich" and "Ivanovna"). A melancholy instance of this Spanish name can be found with Father Florencio Ibañez, who is buried in the floor of the ruined church of the isolated and wind-swept Mission Soledad in the Salinas Valley of California. In Iceland, patronymics are used instead of surnames, with "-son" and "-dottir" suffixes used for sons and daughters, respectively.

Patronymics (or "filiations") in Latin use the word filius, "son," following the name of the father. Julius Caesar was thus also Gaii filius, "son of Gaius." In daughter languages of Latin the derivative of filius may come first. Thus we see the name of the mathematician Fibonacci, short for Filius Bonacci, "son of Bonaccus." From Norman French we get names in English like Fitzroy, i.e. filius regis, the "son of the king," of used for illegitimate sons of a king, as with a natural son of King Charles II, Henry Fitzroy.

Matronymics, where people are named after their mothers also occur. We see this a lot in the Mahābhārata. The heroic elder, Bishma, , is the son of the goddess of the Ganges River and so is Gangāputra, , where "son," putra, , is added as a suffix, as in English. Otherwise, we get a dedicated form. Thus, each of the three eldest Pāndavas, known as such as a son of Pandu, was also a Kaunteya, , or a son of their mother Kuntī, -- where we get a suffix and an Ablaut of the internal vowel (similarly, the two sons of Mādrī were each a Mādreya). It turned out that the tragic figure Karna was also a .

While not exactly matronymics, Spanish names have traditionally consisted of two surnames, one from the father, the other from the mother. This is unlikely to have derived from Arab or Islāmic sources, or from elsewhere in Europe. At the same time, surnames were an innovation in the Middle Ages, so it is possible that the Spanish custom was autochthonous. We might also wonder if this, like some other features of Spanish tradition, derived from the Basques. In any case, it can be very confusing for people not familiar with the Spanish usage.

Philosophy of Science, Linguistics

Historical Background to Greek Philosophy

Mesopotamian Index
Kings of Assyria
- The Sargonids
Kings of Babylon, Neo-Babylonian Period
Kings of the Medes
Kings of Lydia
Kings of Phrygia
Kings of Egypt, Late Period
Great Kings of Persia, Achaemenids
Kings of Macedonia
Eponymous Archons of Athens
What the Greeks are Called
Dialects of Greek
- The Pronunciation of Greek
Kings of Sparta
Tyrants and Kings of Syracuse
Consuls of the Roman Republic
The Bosporan Kingdom

Note on the Modern Assyrians

Middle Eastern Political Events During the Course of Greek Philosophy

The political event that still cast its shadow in the early days of Greek philosophy was the fall of the Assyrian Empire. Reduced to a small heartland by the Aramaean migrations in the 11th century, Assyria suddenly had reasserted itself under Adadnirāri II and Ashurnasirpal II. With most of the Levant and Mesopotamia taken up with small states, there was little to stand in the way of an organized, energized, and aggressive Assyria; and in short order it became the dominant power in the Middle East.

KINGS OF ASSYRIA,

Neo-Assyrian Empire

Adad-nirāri II 911-891

Tukulti-Ninurta II 891-883

Ashurnasirpal II 883-859

Shalmaneser III 858-824

Shamshiadad V 823-811

Adadnirāri III 810-783

Shalmaneser IV 783-772

Ashurdān III 772-755

Ashurnirāri V 754-745

Tiglathpilesser III 744-727

Shalmaneser V 726-722

Sargonids

Sargon (Sharru-kīn) II 722-705

Sennacherib
(Sin-ahhē-eriba) 705-681

army bought off at Jerusalem, retires from Pelusium in Egypt, 701; sack of Babylon, 689

Esarhaddon
(Ashur-aha-iddin) 681-669

Invasion of Egypt,
, 671

Ashurbanipal
(Ashur-ban-aplu) 669-631

conquest of Egypt, 669, 663; destroys Elam, 639

Ashur-etil-ilāni 631-629

Sin-shar-ishkun 629-612

Asshur falls, 614; Nineveh falls, 612; retreat to Harran

Ashur-uballiṭ II 612-609

Harran falls to Medes, 609

KINGS OF ASSYRIA, Neo-Assyrian Empire
Adad-nirāri II	911-891
Tukulti-Ninurta II	891-883
Ashurnasirpal II	883-859
Shalmaneser III	858-824
Shamshiadad V	823-811
Adadnirāri III	810-783
Shalmaneser IV	783-772
Ashurdān III	772-755
Ashurnirāri V	754-745
Tiglathpilesser III	744-727
Shalmaneser V	726-722
Sargonids
Sargon (Sharru-kīn) II	722-705
Sennacherib (Sin-ahhē-eriba)	705-681
army bought off at Jerusalem, retires from Pelusium in Egypt, 701; sack of Babylon, 689
Esarhaddon (Ashur-aha-iddin)	681-669
Invasion of Egypt, , 671
Ashurbanipal (Ashur-ban-aplu)	669-631
conquest of Egypt, 669, 663; destroys Elam, 639
Ashur-etil-ilāni	631-629
Sin-shar-ishkun	629-612
Asshur falls, 614; Nineveh falls, 612; retreat to Harran
Ashur-uballiṭ II	612-609
Harran falls to Medes, 609

This dominance lasted slightly less than 300 years, going into overdrive under the Sargonids in the last century. The kings used the title Shār-shārrim -- , "king," shār in Akkadian, lugal in Sumerian -- "King of Kings," which we have seen since the days of Akkad; but their aspirations to universal rule, well served by the unprecedented extent of their conquests, foundered on the scale of the brutality and terror of their methods.

Assyrian policy was to deal with rebellion by exemplary executions and forced relocations. By some estimates, over four million people were deported. The removal of the Cherokee Nation to Oklahoma in American history, called the "Trail of Tears," not to mention the deportation of Armenians from Turkey, may give some sense of what this would have been like.

The deportation of the Ten Tribes of Israel (by Shalmaneser V or Sargon II after the fall of Samaria in 722) is recounted with striking specificity in the Bible:

[2 Kings 18:11] The king of Assyria carried the Israelites away to Assyria, and put them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

The "Habor" is certainly the Habur River, which arises between the Tigris and Eurphrates and flows south into the Euphrates. This was an area otherwise demographically overwhelmed by the Aramaeans. Despite this information about where the Tribes had gone, they nevertheless disappear from history. However, the Assyrians returned some Israelites to their former home, and these became the "Samaritans." Never accepted by Judaea as properly Jewish, the Samaritians, of course, come in for some favorable comment by Jesus; and, extraordinarily, they still exist today.

The Bible has Sennacherib saying, "Behold, you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, destroying them utterly" [2 Kings 19:11], and King Hezekiah of Judah says to God, "the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands" [19:17]. The Bible makes is sound like Jerusalem was only saved by an "angel of the Lord," perhaps the plague, slaying "a hundred and eighy-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians" [19:35].

However, Jerusalem had already been spared by the payment of tribute; and other sources, including Herodotus, place the deaths in the Assyrian army at Pelusium, obviously staging to invade Egypt. The Assyrian army retreated, for the time being. This did not stop Sennacherib from later showing the Jews the army had captured at Lachish executed by impalement in the art of his palace.

Such policies culminated in Ashurbanipal's assault on and massacre of the Elamites. This sounds like a genocide, since the Elamites shortly thereafter disappeared from history altogether. However, although Ashurbanipal himself boasted that no Elamites were left, we know from Babylonian records that there actually were. And while Susa and its environs may have been depopulated, Elam stretched out to the East beyond the reach of Assyria. There the Elamites seem to have been assimilated with the Persians, who styled themselves rulers of an Elamite kingdom, Anshan, who used the Elamite language in inscriptions and some records, and who then make Susa one of their capitals. All remaning Elamites thus, presumably, became peacefully assimilated to the Persian state.

Thus, while these sorts of actions by the Assyrians sustained a vast empire for more than a century, subject peoples were never reconciled to Assyrian rule, and the constant campaigns of defense and punishment ultimately exhausted the Assyrians, even though they had tried to assimilate conquered and imported Aramaeans (and Israelites?) into their own population and army. The fall of the Assyrian empire came with surprising suddenness. The Medes and the Babylonians, who cooperated in defeating Assyria, divided the Asiatic domain of the Assyrians between them. Egypt had meanwhile liberated itself. Nineveh disappeared in ruins, the remaining Assyrian populace was lost among the Aramaean population, and the works and literature of Assyrian civilization ceased -- to be reborn in the 19th century when the buried libraries of the Assyrian Kings were excavated.

Ἐπὶ τῶν ποταμῶν Βαβυλῶνος ἐκεῖ ἐκαθίσαμεν καὶ ἐκλαύσαμεν
ἐν τῷ μνησθῆναι ἡμᾶς τῆς Σιών.
Super flumina Babylonis ibi sedimus, et flevimus
cum recordaremur Sion.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and we wept
when we remembered Zion.
Psalm 137 (Septuagint & Vulgate 136); cf. tears.

KINGS OF BABYLON,

Dynasty XI (or X)
of Babylon; the Chaldean
Aramaean Dynasty;
Neo-Babylonian Period

Nabopolassar,
Nabū-apla-uṣur 625-605

overthrows Assyria, 614-609

Nebuchadnezzar II,
Nabū-kudurri-uṣur 605-562

Battle of Carchemish, Egyptians expelled from Syria, 605; Judah subjugated, 587

Amēl Marduk 562-560

Nergal-šaru-ṣur 560-556

Labāshi Marduk 556

Nabonidus,
Nabū-naʾid 556-539

מְנֵא מְנֵא תְּקֵל וּפַרְסִין׃
Daniel 5:25

Belshazzar,
Bēl-šar-uṣur heir,
regent,
556-539

Overthrown by
the Persians, 539

The days of the last Dynasty of Babylon leave a melancholy impression. This is the last flourishing of the great Mesopotamian civilization founded by Sumer and Akkad. And it is an impressive effort, as we can see from the still substantial ruins of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon -- ruins that unfortunately already existed as such to make a similarly melancholy impression on the Roman Emperor Trajan, who examined them on the march in 117 AD.

KINGS OF BABYLON, Dynasty XI (or X) of Babylon; the Chaldean Aramaean Dynasty; Neo-Babylonian Period
Nabopolassar, Nabū-apla-uṣur	625-605
overthrows Assyria, 614-609
Nebuchadnezzar II, Nabū-kudurri-uṣur	605-562
Battle of Carchemish, Egyptians expelled from Syria, 605; Judah subjugated, 587
Amēl Marduk	562-560
Nergal-šaru-ṣur	560-556
Labāshi Marduk	556
Nabonidus, Nabū-naʾid	556-539
מְנֵא מְנֵא תְּקֵל וּפַרְסִין׃ Daniel 5:25
Belshazzar, Bēl-šar-uṣur	heir, regent, 556-539
Overthrown by the Persians, 539

The rulers of this Neo-Babylonian Kingdom, however, don't seem to be from the original Babylonian population. They are said to be "Chaldeans," and this has traditionally been interpreted to mean one of the Aramaean groups that had been present in Mesopotamia for some time and whose language was already replacing the ancient Akkadian languages of Assyria and Babylon. The evidence for this Aramaean identification is thin, and some scholars now doubt it; but it is not at all clear who the Chaldeans would otherwise have been. There is not some other large demographic presence that we are aware of after the Aramaeans -- until, some centuries later, the Arabs.

The daughter of the Median king Cyaxares was married to Nebuchadnezzar, the son of King Nabopolassar. We hear that the famous result of this were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built to assuage the homesickness of the bride for the mountains of Iran. Later this was identified as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

However, nothing that looks like the Gardens, or their necessary foundations, has been found by archaeologists at Babylon. And questions have been raised how plants could have been placed on terraces that were necessarily built of mud-brick, when water and roots would have destroyed them -- even with the waterproofing that we know the Babylonians did using bitumen. So some scholars have wondered whether the Gardens even existed. Nevertheless, Greek travelers, like Antipater of Sidon, Ἀντίπατρος ὁ Σιδώνιος, report seeing them (Antipater claimed to have seen all the Wonders), unfortunately without any information on their precise location, construction, or layout. So we are left with a bit of a mystery.

Nebuchadnezzar perpetuated one Assyrian practice by deporting subjects to populate the city of Babylon. The Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, after he took Jerusalem in 587, is the most famous example of that. However, the Babylonian attitude was a bit different from the Assyrian, and the Jews in Exile did not lose their identity and disappear from history, as had the Ten Tribes deported by the Assyrians. Nebuchadnezzar had no "Babylonizaton" policy and did not use the exiles in the Army (which had little to do after the Kingdom was established).

Far from it. Babylon became a center of Jewish life, and it continued to be one even after Cyrus allowed the Jews who wished to return to Palestine and rebuild the Temple. Indeed, the Babylonian Jewish community, although subsequently shifting to later capitals like Ctesiphon and Baghdad, continued to flourish well into the Middle Ages. It looks like the original Hebrew text of the Bible was first set to paper in Babylon, and the classic form of the Jewish Calendar was formulated (much later) by the Babylonian community in Baghdad. Also, the entire "Babylonian" version of the Talmud was then written there.

KINGS OF
THE MEDES (MEDIA)

Deioces c.728-675

Phraortes 675-653

Cyaxares 653-585

overthrows Assyria, 614-609; conquers Urarṭu, 585; Battle of the Eclipse, 585

Astyages 585-550

Overthrown by the
Persians, 550

With the Medes, we have the first appearance of an Iranian state in the full light of history. Previously, the evidence of Iranian presence on the plateau behind the Zagros Mountains has been indirect and ambiguous. The expectation is that Iranians may have been there shortly after 2000 BC, but we don't have anything definite until we find the horse culture and Vedic gods of the Kingdom of the Mitanni (c.1530-c.1330).

KINGS OF THE MEDES (MEDIA)
Deioces	c.728-675
Phraortes	675-653
Cyaxares	653-585
overthrows Assyria, 614-609; conquers Urarṭu, 585; Battle of the Eclipse, 585
Astyages	585-550
Overthrown by the Persians, 550

The appearance of the Mitanni is roughly simultaneous with the intrusion of Indo-Aryan invaders in the Indus Valley. In both cases, we see the introduction of the horse, which had been missing from the earlier civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, and Egypt. Thus, to the Sumerians, the horse was the , anshe-kur-ra, the "ass of [foreign] countries."

However, the demographic basis of the Mitanni was not Iranians, but Hurrians, one of the non-Semitic and non-Indo-European peoples of the ancient Middle East. The theory for long was that Iranians represented a small warrior aristocracy among the Hurrians, as they also did among the Kassites. It is now questioned whether there were such warrior aristocracies at all, but the Iranian influence, whatever its form, is still obvious. What is curious is that we must then wait another 600 some years before an organized Iranian state appears.

The Medes expanded their domain at the expense of Anatolian kingdoms, culminating in the Battle of the Eclipse on 28 May 585 BC with the Lydians. The eclipse (first contact, 18h 10m local time; maximum eclipse, 90% total, 19h 02m, just before sunset; last contact 19h 52m, after sunset), supposedly predicted by the philosopher Thales, ended the battle and the war. The balance of power between Media, Babylonian, Lydia, and Egypt was generally maintained until a new king came to the throne of Persia, a vassal of Media, in 559.

Iranian Index

Notice the Kingdom of Napata on the map. This continues the Kings of the XV Dynasty and, although not indicated on subsequent maps here, will endure until 355 AD. This is what the Greeks would be calling "Ethiopia," Αἰθιοπία, the land of the Αἰθίοψ, Aithíops, or "burnt face." This is, of course, very different from the Abyssinian Kingdom that is now called Ethiopia.

KINGS OF LYDIA

Sandonids/Tilonids

Ardys I c.800?

Alyattes I

Myrsus (Meles)

Candaules

Mermnadae

Gyges 685-644

Ardys II 644-615

Sadyattes 615-610

Alyattes II 610-560

Battle of the Eclipse, 585

Croesus 560-547

Overthrown by
the Persians, 547

Lydia entering the scene of Great Power conflict brings Western Anatolia back on the stage of history, for the first time since the fall of the Hittites. Lydia itself has a long legendary history, supposedly dating back to Heracles, but it is not dateable until the time of Gyges.

KINGS OF LYDIA
Sandonids/Tilonids
Ardys I	c.800?
Alyattes I
Myrsus (Meles)
Candaules
Mermnadae
Gyges	685-644
Ardys II	644-615
Sadyattes	615-610
Alyattes II	610-560
Battle of the Eclipse, 585
Croesus	560-547
Overthrown by the Persians, 547

Lydia holds a place of importance in world history second to none simply for having invented the coinage of money. This will be good or bad depending on one's estimation of the benefits of such a medium of exchange. There is no true reason for doubt of its essential contribution to the growth of wealth and material human progress, but it is not difficult to find both ancient and modern idealogy that is hostile to commercial culture, economic freedom, and the general abundance that attend them. The proximity of Lydia probably made the distinctive culture of Greek Ionia possible, and with it the origin of Greek philosophy.

One other Anatolian kingdom, although its history is poorly known and hardly dateable and it is overrun early by the Cimmerians (who would perform the same service for Urarṭu), is Phrygia, which is noteworthy, not only because its identity survives into the Roman period (having originated back in the 11th century, at least), but because two noteworthy legends were associated with it.

KINGS OF PHRYGIA

Gordios I 10th cent.

Midas I

Gordios II

Midas II

Gordios III

Midas III 738-695

Gordios IV 695

Overrun by Cimmerians, annexed by Lydia, 695-626

KINGS OF PHRYGIA
Gordios I	10th cent.
Midas I
Gordios II
Midas II
Gordios III
Midas III	738-695
Gordios IV	695
Overrun by Cimmerians, annexed by Lydia, 695-626

All of its reported kings are named Midas and Gordios. Which is which in the legends is a good question. With one Midas, however, we get the story of the "Midas Touch," that the king wished for, and received, the power to turn anything to gold by touching it. Unfortunately, this was an unconditional power, and there was no way he could touch anything, even food or family, without turning them to gold. So it was a power that would grieve and then starve him. The basis of this legend may be the Phrygian practice of covering burials with a yellow powder, to make them look like gold.

With some Gordios we have a more historical account. The king is supposed to have woven an gigantic knot, attended with the prophecy that the man who could undo it would conquer the world. When Alexander the Great arrived, beheld the knot, and was told of the prophecy, he simply drew his sword and cut the knot. Alexander did, more or less, conquer the world, and we are left with an expression, "cutting the knot," which is probably used most often without awareness of its origin. The knot, however, may not be named after an eponymous king, but after the capital of Phrygia, Gordion (Gordium). This was not far west of Angora, the capital of Galatia. Galatia was founded by Celts who invaded Greece in 279 and entered Anatolia by 278. Most of Phrygia was overrun in this invasion/migration and so came to be overlain by Galatia.

Egyptian Kings continued: Persian Kings, XXVII Dynasty

KINGS OF EGYPT

The Late Period

XXVI DYNASTY,
of Sais,

Neko I
672-664

Killed by Tanutamon of Napata

Psamtik I
664-610

expels Assyrians, 655

Neko II
610-595

Battle of Carchemish, expelled from Syria by Babylonians, 605

Psamtik II
595-589

Waḥibre, ,

or , Apriēs 589-570

Aḥmose II
570-526

Donates value of 1000 talents to rebuilding of Delphi, after fire in 548; Greeks in Egypt only contribute 20 minas; founds Naucratis, alliance with Polycrates of Samos

Psamtik III
526-525

Persian Conquest, 525

The system of Thirty Dynasties for the history of Ancient Egypt was formulated by the Egyptian priest Manethô of Sebennytus, writing in Greek under the Ptolemies. The Persians, who overthrew the XXVI Dynasty in 525, were reckoned by Manethô as the XXVII Dynasty. Sometimes the last Persian rulers of Egypt (Artaxerxes III, etc.) are called the "XXXI Dynasty" (lasting only thirteen years). This proposal is an ancient one, handed down by the Christian Chronographer Julius Africanus.

KINGS OF EGYPT
The Late Period
XXVI DYNASTY, of Sais,
Neko I	672-664
Killed by Tanutamon of Napata
Psamtik I	664-610
expels Assyrians, 655
Neko II	610-595
Battle of Carchemish, expelled from Syria by Babylonians, 605
Psamtik II	595-589
Waḥibre, , or , Apriēs	589-570
Aḥmose II	570-526
Donates value of 1000 talents to rebuilding of Delphi, after fire in 548; Greeks in Egypt only contribute 20 minas; founds Naucratis, alliance with Polycrates of Samos
Psamtik III	526-525
Persian Conquest, 525

Sometimes the Ptolemies are now called the "XXXII Dynasty," or the Macedonians the "XXXII" and the Ptolemies the "XXXIII," but these are modern, indeed quite recent, suggestions. Following along, the Roman Emperors who ruled Egypt, starting with Augustus, can be the "XXXIV" Dynasty, something I have just seen. Since many of those Emperors wrote their names in Egyptian on Egyptian temples, the device is reasonable enough. The practice, however, fades away; and no attempt has been made to continue Egyptian dynastic numbering through Roman ruling houses or periods.

The XXVI Dynasty, of , Sais (Σάις), represents the greatest flowering of the Egyptian state and civilization since the New Kingdom. Sadly, it was also the last hurrah of Ancient Egypt. The Saite Kings, who largely feature the names and , almost seem aware of that themselves. They carried out probably the first official exploration of the pyramids, copying the Old Kingdom art they discovered and introducing their own burials into tombs that were already two thousand years old or more, including that of Djoser at Saqqara, whose deep gallaries must have been both frightening and fascinating.

In March 2017, the remains of a colossal statue of Psamtik I were discovered in Cairo, at the site of what was known as a temple of Ramesses II in Heliopolis. This was an impressive product from any period, standing some 36 feet tall and consisting of quartzite, an immensely hard stone that was never used by the Egyptians more than sparingly. At first this was assumed to be an image of Ramesses II, but Psamtik's name was then discovered clearly, and originally, incised on the back. This rather stunned Egyptologists, since it seemed to bespeak power, wealth, and technical mastery such as previously had not been associated with the XXVI Dynasty. It was the largest royal statue since at least the XX Dynasty. There was no reason not to believe that Egypt was wealthy and powerful at this time, but few were not surprised that the Saite Kings could exercise their power in this way.

Indeed, it is not clear that Egypt was ever, despite the conquests of the XVIII Dynasty, the kind of military power that we see elsewhere. As I say when considering the Egypt word for "virtue," the Egyptians seem to have preferred to make stuff, not war. So perhaps the reliance of the Saiites on Greek mercenaries is not too surprising. Before long, the dominance of empires -- Persian, Greek, Roman, and Arab -- swamps the Egyptian state and ultimately the very language and culture of the Egyptian people. But the Egyptians made so much stuff, that there seems to be an inexhaustible source of material for interest in Egypt. The XXVI Dynasty itself already felt this attraction.

The antiquarian project of the XXVI Dynasty, and its other works, are then found together with the first hints of the Hellenistic Age, since the reliance of the Saite Kings on Greek mercenary soldiers and the significant presence of Greek traders in Egypt launches a Greek presence that soon enough becomes dominant, contributing much of the terminology, and many of the names, that we use for Ancient Egypt. This may have been a factor in the overthrow of Apriēs, (Herodotus, Ἀπρίης; Hebrew ; Manethô, Οὔαφρις; Septuagint Οὐαφρῆς), by Aḥmose II, . Apriēs became unpopular, first by, as Herodotus says [II:161], sending Egyptian troups deliberately to be slaughtered against Cyrene, to increase his power in Egypt, which can only mean that people suspected a plot to give greater prominence for his Greek mercenaries. This may mean that he was seen as being too closely associated with the Greeks -- the Egyptians didn't like foreigners very much, and the Greeks were often contemptuous of the Egyptians.

Apies sent Aḥmose to quell the rebellion, but, of course, he joined the rebels. Then Aḥmose dealt with the problem of the Greeks by directing the foundation of Naucratis, Ναύκρατις, opposite Sais on the Canopic Branch of the Nile, as the emporium and colony for all the Greeks in Egypt. That succeeds admirably, and Egypt continued to draw on Greek help all through the history of the Persian empire. Aḥmose, in practical terms, was no more anti-Greek than any earlier Kings.

The discovery of the statue of Psamtik I also reminded Egyptologists of the similarities of early Greek art to that of Egypt. It has long been noted that the early Greek κοῦρος, "Kouros," male figures and the κόρη, "Kore," female figures look very Egyptian. Now, the statue of Psamtik highlights its own similarity to the κοῦρος, leading to speculation that it was this statue, or perhaps similar (undiscovered) ones elsewhere, that became the model for the corresponding Greek products. Without the testimony of a Greek sculptor, this must remain speculation; but there is no doubt that Egyptian models must have existed, and been seen by Greeks, for the transmission of the style to have occurred.

A curious feature of the names of the Kings in Greek is that, rather than simple numbering for the same names, Manethô gives us distinct names for Psamtik I, Ψαμμήτιχος, Psamtik II, Ψάμμουθις, and Psamtik III, Ψαμμεχερίτης. On the other hand, with Neko, we actually get a word for "second," i.e. Neko I, Νεχαώ, and Neko II, Νεχαώ δεύτερος. I've never seen any discussion or explanation for this. However, Kings often insert extra formulae into their names, like , "Loved of Amon," which was as true for the Saite Kings as any, and so Manethô may have been using some of those for his transcriptions, to distinguish the Kings. This is not unusual in the rest of his history.

Egyptian Kings continued: XXVIII, XXIX, & XXX Dynasties

Index of Egyptian History

Cyrus the Great overthrew, in turn, the Medes, Lydians, and Babylonians, suddenly creating an empire far larger than even the Assyrian. Cyrus was better able, through more benign policies, to reconcile his subjects to Persian rule; and the longevity of his empire was one result. The Persian king, like the Assyrian, was also "king of kings," xšayathiya xšayathiyānām (shāhanshāh in modern Persian) -- "great king," Μέγας Βασιλεύς, megas basileus, as known by the Greeks. Alexander the Great, after he ultimately overthrew the Persians, deliberately assumed the universal pretensions of the Achaemenid kings, but the division of his empire after his early death eliminates any real universality until the Roman Empire.

Cambyses rounds out the Empire by conquering Egypt, overthrowing the XXVI Dynasty. Since Cambyses became ill and died before, or while, leaving Egypt, stories developed, as related by Hertodus, that he was struck down for impiety against the Egyptian gods.

GREAT KINGS OF PERSIA
ACHAEMENIDS

Achaemenes

Teispes 675-640

Cyrus I 640-600

Cambyses I 600-559

Cyrus (Kuruš) II, the Great 559-530

overthrows Medes, 550;
conquers Lydia, 547;
conquers Babylon, 539

Cambyses (Kambujiya) II 530-522

conquers Egypt, 525;
XXVII DYNASTY
of Egypt

Bardiya, Smerdis, or Gaumata 522

Darius (Darayavahuš) I 522-486

invades Greece, defeated at the
battle of Marathon, 490

Xerxes (Xšayarša) I 486-465

invades Greece, defeated at the battles
of Salamis and Platea, 480, 479

Artaxerxes (Artaxšassa) I
Longimanus 465-424

Xerxes II 424

Sogdianus 424-423

Darius II 423-404

Revolt of Cyrus the Younger, with the "Ten Thousand" of Xenophon, 401; Egypt breaks away, 404

Artaxerxes II Mnemon 404-359

Artaxerxes III Ochus 359-338

reconquers Egypt, 343;
"XXXI" DYNASTY

Arses (Arša) 338-336

Revolt of Khabash in Egypt, 338-335

Darius III Codomannus 336-330

Macedonian Conquest

Be that as it may, it led to a bit of a succession crisis. The winner, Darius, based his claim on membership in a collateral line of the Achaemenid Dynasty.

GREAT KINGS OF PERSIA ACHAEMENIDS
Achaemenes
Teispes	675-640
Cyrus I	640-600
Cambyses I	600-559
Cyrus (Kuruš) II, the Great	559-530
overthrows Medes, 550; conquers Lydia, 547; conquers Babylon, 539
Cambyses (Kambujiya) II	530-522
conquers Egypt, 525; XXVII DYNASTY of Egypt
Bardiya, Smerdis, or Gaumata	522
Darius (Darayavahuš) I	522-486
invades Greece, defeated at the battle of Marathon, 490
Xerxes (Xšayarša) I	486-465
invades Greece, defeated at the battles of Salamis and Platea, 480, 479
Artaxerxes (Artaxšassa) I Longimanus	465-424
Xerxes II	424
Sogdianus	424-423
Darius II	423-404
Revolt of Cyrus the Younger, with the "Ten Thousand" of Xenophon, 401; Egypt breaks away, 404
Artaxerxes II Mnemon	404-359
Artaxerxes III Ochus	359-338
reconquers Egypt, 343; "XXXI" DYNASTY
Arses (Arša)	338-336
Revolt of Khabash in Egypt, 338-335
Darius III Codomannus	336-330
Macedonian Conquest

Zoroastrianism

There is not really any evidence for the validity of this claim by Darius, but one alternative is even more intriguing. Darius gives the name of his father as "Vishtāspa." Now, the patron and protector of the Prophet Zoroaster (c.628-551 BC) was named "Vishtāspa," leaving us to wonder if these are in fact the same individual. It may be impossible to ever say for certain, but a good indication may be that it was Darius who introduces Zoroaster's religion, or some version of it, into the Persian State.

Darius invokes the One God of Zoroaster, Ahura Mazdāh, the "Wise Lord," in his trilingual inscription at Behistun, which describes how he came to the Throne. His very name, Darayavahuš, although of obscure etymology, may be a Zoroastrian one, "Sustainer of Good [Thought]," invoking one of the "Archangels" or "Bounteous Immorals" (Amǝša Spǝntas) of Zoroastrianism [note].

The teaching of Zoroaster contained some unique features. It was a monotheism but also posited a dualism of Good and Evil, with an entity representing evil, Angra Mainyu, or "Evil Mind," who was the cosmic Enemy of God, or at least of Spǝnta Mainyu, "Holy Spirit." This introduced a supernatural and apocalyptic conflict of Good and Evil into religion, with Angra Mainyu marking the perhaps the first appearance of a Satan-like figure who eternally opposes God and the Good.

Human beings must choose between Good and Evil. Zoroastrianism itself is the "Good Religion." This is why Nietzsche uses Zoroaster in his Also Sprach Zarathustra, giving him the chance to go "beyond" good and evil and renounce the conflict that he initiated.

It is possible that the Zoroastrian moralization of religion, which may for the first time overcome the moral ambivalence of myth, is what produced a similar revolution in Judaism and in Greek philosophy. Greek philosophers, beginning with Xenophanes, who express a moral critique of Greek religion, are certainly subsequent to the nearby presence of Persian religion, while with Judaism, the Babylonian Captivity and then the liberation of the exiles by Cyrus, opens the possibility of major Persian influence, certainly in the Jewish community that remained in Babylon after the Persian conquest -- the very place, apparently, where the Bible was compiled and committed to writing. This has long been a matter of speculation, but at this point there probably will never be a way of definitively settling the question of such Zoroastrian influence.

In later Zoroastrianism, monotheism seems to be compromised by making Ahura Mazdāh (Ohrmazd in Middle Persian) and Angra Mainyu (Ahriman) co-eternal, but this was only true a parte ante, i.e. into the past, and never a parte post, i.e. into the future. In the Zoroastrian Apocalypse -- which may be the first such conception in religion -- only Good survives. Hell and Angra Mainyu are destroyed, and all damned souls purified.

Another area where Zoroastrian influence is possible or likely on Judaism concerns the system of the Amǝša Spǝntas, the "Bounteous Immortals." There is considerable debate about exactly what these are, or what their relationship is to Ahura Mazdāh, but they have long been recognized as perhaps the archetypes of the angels we then see in Judaism, and later Christianity and Islam: Hebrew , malʾākh, "messenger," as is ἄγγελος, angelos, in Greek, and , malak, or , malʾak, in Arabic -- plural , malāʾikah -- which now gets confused with the root for "king," , malik, which is quite different. They certainly represent various salient attributes of God, but they are created and function as independent beings apart from God. They almost approach being independent deities, and compromising Zoroastrian monotheism; but then the other monotheisms have no difficulty conceiving of angelic entities functioning apart from God.

In Achaemenid Zoroastrianism, however, the monotheism is certainly compromised by the survival or revival of traditional deities, such as the god Miθra and the goddess Anahita. The history of some of these is striking, particularly in the case of Miθra, who certainly corresponds to the Mitra of the Vedas. His future career in the West, however, will be the most remarkable.

Thus, we find Miθra's name as an element in the names of native kings in Anatolia during the Hellenistic Age, most notably with multiple Kings of Pontus named Μιθριδάτης, Mithridates, "given by Miθra" (, Mehrdād in Modern Persian). Mithridates VI fought three wars with Rome. But then the cult of Mithras enters Rome itself, to join the group of Mystery Religions that transform the Roman religious landscape. Eventually, soon before the triumph of Christianity, Mithras was identified with Sol Invictus, the "Unconquered Sun" which had become the center of the Roman State Cult. The birthday of Mithras, December 25th, was taken over by the new religion.

On the genealogical diagram, we see that Alexander the Great's illegitimate son, Heracles, who was murdered in 309, was actually a descendant of Artaxerxes II. We see Greek mercenaries, like Mentor and Memnon, married to Barsine, great granddaughter of Artaxerxes, and Alexander's admiral, Nearchus, married to her daughter. Heracles was the only claimant to Alexander's throne who had Persian royal blood, which, with his illegitimacy, may have told against him.

A noteworthy feature of the system of the Zoroastrian Immortals is their association with particular natural elements. Thus, we see Fire, Earth, and Water, which look like the original Indian elements of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. However, unlike subsequent development in India, we do not get Air or Aether (). Instead, first of all we get Metal and Plants. This looks parallel to the Metal and Wood which are traditional Chinese elements in addition to Fire, Earth, and Water. Since influence from distance China seems unlikely in this period, Zoroastrian Metal and Plants would seem to be an original and autochthonous, albeit parallel, version of a theory of elements.

The sixth element, however, associated with Good Thought, is different in kind. "Cattle" are not "elements" in the sense we get otherwise of the common constituents of matter. It is an "element" of things in a different sense. As such, it curiously parallels something we get in the movie The Fifth Element [1997, Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich], where the "fifth element" to the familiar Greek Earth, Air, Fire, and Water is actually an entity, a being (played by Jovovich), who focuses the other four. This is not unlike the role of Cattle in Zoroastrianism (albeit passive rather than active), which form the focus of innocent life that must be protected by Righteousness.

The Amǝša Spǝntas

Vohu Manah Good Mind Cattle

Aša Truth,
Righteousness Fire

Xšaθra Dominion Metal

Ârmaiti Devotion Earth

Haurvatat Wholeness Water

Amǝrǝtāt Immortality Plants

The name of the Immortal Xšaθra, "Dominion," is a cognate to the word for the warrior class in the Hindu Caste System, the Kshatriyas, . It also looks like an element in the Persian names of the Achaemenid Kings named "Xerxes" and "Artaxerxes," making them names, like "Darius," probably inspired by Zoroastrianism.

The Amǝša Spǝntas
Vohu Manah	Good Mind	Cattle
Aša	Truth, Righteousness	Fire
Xšaθra	Dominion	Metal
Ârmaiti	Devotion	Earth
Haurvatat	Wholeness	Water
Amǝrǝtāt	Immortality	Plants

"Zoroaster," of course, is the Prophet's name from Greek, Ζωροάστρης. The language used in the Avesta or Zend Avesta, the sacred book of Zoroastrianism, is now called "Avestan." The Avesta first appeared in a European language in a French translation by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Du Perron (1731-1805), who, with some difficulty (war and personal conflicts complicating things) obtained a copy in India and, with the help of local Parsis, mediated a translation by way of their Persian, published in 1771.

Avestan is a dialect, cognate, or older version of Old Persian, and it is the Iranian language the closest to Sanskrit. William Jones, at first disbelieving the text that Du Perron had published, later realized, after learning Sanskrit, that it was for real. Du Perron's 1801/02 Latin translation (with Greek articles!) of selected Upanishads was the book that alerted Schopenhauer to the value of Indian philosophy. The oldest part of the Avesta, in the oldest version of Avestan, are the Gāθās, the texts which seem to be Zoroaster's own revelations.

Zoroaster's name in the Avesta, transcribed phonetically, was Zaraθuštra, with the /z/ as in English, the θ in as English "thin," and š as English "sh." Nietzsche's German form Zarathustra would actually get the /sh/ right (in the "st" combination = /sht/), but it would have German /ts/ for "z" and /t/ for the "th."

After the Achaeminids, Zoroastrianism would be eclipsed during the Hellenistic Age, as Greek kingdoms and then the Hellenophile Parthians ruled Irān. The religion reemerged, in a deliberate and militant form, under the Sassanids.

Genealogy of the Achaemenids

The Parthian Arsacids, 248 BC-227 AD

Sassanid Shāhs (Great Kings), 224-651 AD

Iranian Index

Macedonian Kings continued

KINGS OF MACEDONIA

Argeads

Peridiccas I 7th Cent.

Aeropus I

Alcetas I d.500

Amyntas I 500-498

Alexander I
Philhellene
() 498-454

Philip I d.c.430

Alcetas II d.c.411

Perdiccas II 454-413

Archelaus
Philhellene 413-399

Orest 399-c.397

Aeropus II c.397-c.392

Amyntas II c.392-c.390

Amyntas III c.390-370

Alexander II 370-368

Perdiccas III 368-360

Amyntas IV 360-359

Philip II 359-336

Conquest of Greece
at Chaeronea, 338

Alexander III
the Great 336-323

Macedonia quietly grew into a power that, under Philip II, would dominate Greece and, in short order, turn against Persia. It is a little odd to think of all these monarchs, so important in Greek history, as not actually being Greek; but, probably like neighboring Epirus, they were not. This is now disputed by some. Perhaps because the only attested language in Macedonia is Greek. On the other hand, such recent revisionism raises suspicion that it is motivated by modern Greek nationalism, which has territorial claims and complaints about the, now Slavic, Macedonians.

KINGS OF MACEDONIA Argeads
Peridiccas I	7th Cent.
Aeropus I
Alcetas I	d.500
Amyntas I	500-498
Alexander I Philhellene ()	498-454
Philip I	d.c.430
Alcetas II	d.c.411
Perdiccas II	454-413
Archelaus Philhellene	413-399
Orest	399-c.397
Aeropus II	c.397-c.392
Amyntas II	c.392-c.390
Amyntas III	c.390-370
Alexander II	370-368
Perdiccas III	368-360
Amyntas IV	360-359
Philip II	359-336
Conquest of Greece at Chaeronea, 338
Alexander III the Great	336-323

But the presence of the ancient Greek language is not surprising. There were languages in the Balkans of the Illyrian and Thracian groups that would not be attested for centuries, if ever. The modern survivor is Albanian, which does not emerge into history until the end of the Middle Ages (mentioned, 1284; attested, 1464), yet which cannot have been anywhere else all that time, while bearing the influence of surrounding languages on it. As in Anatolia, the speakers of unattested indigenous languages become literate by learning Greek. But the matter is largely speculative.

A revealing point in this respect is the epithet Φιλέλλην, "Philhellene," of Alexander I. No Greek needs to be called "loving the Greeks." And there is defensiveness to it. Since the Greeks thought that the Macedonians were not Greek, and they were there, their testimony should be given some weight. Also, this matter goes both ways. The Macedonians did not view the Greeks as Macedonian.

This was a problem for Eumenes, Εὐμένης, the lone Greek among the Diadochi. Eumenes had trouble enforcing his authority, other Diadochi betrayed him, and in the end he was betrayed by his own troops. It was all because he was a Greek. The irony, as we will see elsewhere, is that Eumenes alone was genuinely loyal to the Royal House of Alexander the Great, the "last faithful Successor."

Whatever the Macedonians were, the Philhellenism of the Kings soon created a layer of Greek culture that made them seem proper Greeks to everyone except, of course, the actual Greeks, and to themselves. The Macedonian monarchy itself also struck the Greeks as rather un-Greek -- real monarchies were all gone in Greece and its colonies. The idiosyncratic monarchy of Sparta is rather the exception that proves the rule.

When Philip added his own statue to a procession of the Twelve Olympians, his assassination shortly thereafter suggested that the gods had been offended. If so, his son, Alexander III, was untroubled, initiating Hellenistic practice by assuming divine attributes -- something else to scandalize the Greeks, if by then anyone actually cared.

The modern Macedonians, as noted, are actually Slavic speakers, but nearly everything about both the ancient and modern peoples is disputed by them and by Modern Greeks.

Egypt, which was added to the Persian empire by Cyrus's son Cambyses, frequently revolted against the Persians. The Persian invasion of Greece in 490 was in part to be punishment of the Greeks for helping the Egyptians in these revolts. Since the invasion of 480 was then in revenge for the failure of the invasion of 490, we could say that the consequences of Greek interference in Egypt were persistent. But the Egyptians and the Greeks kept at it, and eventually....

KINGS OF EGYPT

XXVIII DYNASTY,
of Sais,

Amyrtaeus
404-399

XXIX DYNASTY,
of Mendes,

Nepheritēs I
399-393

Psammūthis
393

Achōris
393-380

Nepheritēs II 380

XXX DYNASTY,
of Sebennytus,

Nekhtnebef,
Nectanebēs,
Nectanebos I
380-363

Takhōs
362-361

Nekhtḥareḥbe,
Nectanebos II
360-343

Persian Reconquest, 343

A revolt succeeded, and Egypt was independent for sixty years late in the empire. This was the last time Egypt was actually ruled by Egyptians until King Farūk (who was descended from the Albanian Muhammad Ali) was overthrown in 1952.

KINGS OF EGYPT
XXVIII DYNASTY, of Sais,
Amyrtaeus	404-399
XXIX DYNASTY, of Mendes,
Nepheritēs I	399-393
Psammūthis	393
Achōris	393-380
Nepheritēs II	380
XXX DYNASTY, of Sebennytus,
Nekhtnebef, Nectanebēs, Nectanebos I	380-363
Takhōs	362-361
Nekhtḥareḥbe, Nectanebos II	360-343
Persian Reconquest, 343

Little is known about this entire period apart from the names given by Manethô and references by Greek historians. The name of the only ruler of the XXVIII Dynasty is not even known from any Egyptian inscriptions. Only the XXX Dynasty, with two substantial reigns, did any kind of building in the old royal manner. After the brief restoration of Persian rule, the next established dynastic government in Egypt was the Ptolemies.

Sebennytus

The XXX Dynasty was based at Sebennytus, Σεβέννυτος, the only time that city became the capital of Egypt, although it would then otherwise be distinguished as the birthplace of the historian Manethô, who was himself responsible for the systematization of Egyptian history into thirty dynasties. So it is suitable that the system should culminate in his own hometown.

The Egyptian name of Sebennytus is intriguing. Written phonetically, we find . The first element, read second, is the ideogram of the Egyptian word for "god," , which, oddly enough, stands behind the modern word for the chemical element nitrogen. The phonetic first element, tb, is a root that curiously does not occur in any form in the vocabulary of Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar. There are several forms of it, however, in A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, by Raymond O. Faulkner [Oxford, Griffith Institute, 1962, 1964 -- which surprisingly is hand written and does not use the beautiful hieroglyphic font developed for the Oxford editions of Gardiner's Grammar] and now in the Hieroglyphic Dictionary, A Middle Egyptian Vocabulary, by Bill Petty, PhD [Museum Tours Press, Littleton, Colorado, 2012, 2013, p.175 -- in the modern font].

There are two semantic fields involved, one for "vase," , and the other in which we find words for "sandal," , "to be shod," , and others (e.g. "sole [of the foot], "sandal maker"). So Tb-ntr could mean the "vase of the god," or the "sandal of the god," or something else beyond our reckoning. "Sandal" may be our best bet, although the name of the city, like "vase," lacks any indication of the weak third consonant (a semi-vowel) in the root, such as we see in all the words related to "sandal" (tbw).

Other writings of Sebennytus, according to E.A. Wallis Budge, are and [An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, Volume II, John Murray, London, 1920, Dover Publications, 1978, p.1059]. These include an ideogram for a kid or newborn calf, which is phonetically unrelated to the name ('iw or 'ib), and is semantically very different from the tb roots. These forms are unexplained.

The later pronunciation of Sebennytus (the Latin form) is then interesting in its own right. The Egyptian phoneme /t/ is reconstructed as the ch in English. Strikingly, the Coptic name of the city is Ϫⲉⲙⲛⲟⲩ_ϯ, Djemnouti, where the initial consonant is simply the voiced form of t, i.e. the Modern English j, written for Egyptian as d or dj. This consonant, whatever its voicing, would have defeated the Greeks, which probably is why we see Σεβέννυτος, with it reduced to an s. The presence of b, n and t, however, secure this as a form of the Egyptian name. We also see the s in the modern Arabic name, which is , Samannūd, where the b, rendered as a labial, as in Coptic, and n (doubled as in Greek) survive, with the t now voiced.

The Kings of the XXX Dynasty did a fair amount of building. Nekhtnebef (Nectanebos I) began the temple of Philae, at Aswan, that later was enlarged by Ptolemies and the Romans, and which many centuries later was the last place where hieroglyphics were still being inscribed. We see below how Nekhtḥareḥbe (Nectanebos II) came to the Throne with the help of Agesilaus II of Sparta. Later he fled before the Persians into Kush. We do not know how long he then lived, but King Nastasen of Kush may have made an attempt to restore him. The Kushite must have had no hard feelings over the way that the XXVI Dynasty Kings (perhaps because of racism, in Egyptians!) had attempted to erase from Egypt the names of all the XXV Dynasty Kings. Forgive and forget.

The practice of Manethô in the XXVI Dynasty of giving different names in Greek to Kings who have the same names in Egyptian, is curiously reversed in the XXX Dynasty. Thus, Manethô gives Νεκτανέβης as the first King of Dynasty. This is in Egyptian, according to Kevin L. Johnson and Bill Petty [The Names of the Kings of Egypt, Museum Tours Press, 2012, p.75], although E.A. Wallis Budge gives this as the name of the last King. Then for the last King, Manethô has Νεκτανεβός, which differs from the first name only by the vowel in the nominative ending. For this, Johnson and Petty have , which differs in particulars from what Budge has for the first King. Part of the difference involves a prefixed formula about the love of a goddess, whose identity seems to vary with each attestation (here I show Hathor). Otherwise, there is a common "nkht" element, but the rest of the names are different. Why Manethô then makes the names so similar is a good question. The names also seem to both be attested in Greek as Nektanebō, Νεκτανέβων(?), so we also see the Kings listed as "Nectanebo I" and "Nectanebo II." So the names of the last native Egyptian Kings of Egypt seems to end with some obscurity.

There is a curious afterlife to the story of Nectanebo II. Part of it is a mere fantasy. In the Mediaeval Alexander Romance, the Egyptian King does not flee Egypt to Kush, but to Macedonia. There he tells Queen Olympias that she will be visited by the god Zeus Ammon and conceive a son by him. Nectanebo then himself visits the Queen, and Alexander the Great is conceived. Later, visiting the Oracle at the Siwa Oasis, Alexander is told of his divine parentage.

One wonders if such a story may have originated among the Egyptians themselves, positing a continuity between the XXX Dynasty and later Macedonian rule. If so, the dates don't quite match. Alexander was born in 365, but Nectanebo was still King of Egypt in 343, thirteen years too late to conceive Alexander.

Then we get another connection, with a substantial artifact involved, that links Nectanebo II with Alexander. European travelers, at least as early as the 16th century, who visited the Attarine Mosque -- , masjid al-ʿAṭṭārīn -- in Alexandria, which had originally been founded as a church to St. Athanasius, reported that it was reputed to contain the tomb of Alexander the Great. This was later clarified to mean a chapel in the courtyard of the mosque. This was then said not to be an actual tomb containing a body, but a sort of "bath," further clarified to mean a large traditional Egyptian sarcophagus.

When the French arrived in Egypt with Napoleon in 1798, they visited the mosque and looted the sarcophagus. When the British defeated the French, they required that all artifacts be surrendered to them, which included the Rosetta Stone and this sarcophagus. Thus, both items ended up in the British Museum, where they still reside.

When hieroglyphics were deciphered, inscriptions on the sarcophagus could be read. It was made, as it happens, for Nectanebo II.

So how did the sarcophagus of Nectanebo II end up as the purported tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria? Well, it probably was never used for Nectanebo, who must have been buried in exile in Kush. From there on, we have nothing but speculation. And the speculation is that when Alexander's body was brought to Egypt by Ptolemy I, this new, available, impressive, and appropriate sarcophagus was used for him [Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt, by Chris Naunton, Thames & Hudson, 2018, cf. pp.208-209].

This would initially have been at Memphis, since Alexandria, and certainly the tomb of Alexander there, had not yet been built. So if the sarcophagus ends up in Alexandria, it may be that it actually arrived there with Alexander's body. Whether it continued to be used -- and we have various differing reports about how Alexander was buried -- we cannot say. But, one way or another, it certainly was left lying around; and any connection it had to Alexander may have suggested its later veneration. After all, Alexander is regarded as a prophet in ʾIslām.

Now there is more. It looks like, besides the sarcophagus, there was a tomb prepared at Saqqara for Nectanebo, which stands to reason. If this tomb has been properly identified, it has the peculiarity that in front of it there is a circle of statues of Greek philosophers and poets. The reasonable inference then is that, not only was the sarcophagus of Nectanebo II used for Alexander, but that Alexander was temporarily buried in Nectanebo's own tomb, with a feature -- the statues -- more appropriate for a Greek monarch than an Egyptian one.

This would add considerably to our lore of the Odyssey of Alexander's burial. The continuation of the story can be examined here.

Egyptian Kings continued: Persian "XXXI" Dynasty

Egyptian Kings continued: Macedonians, "XXXII" Dynasty

Egyptian Kings continued: Ptolemies, "XXXIII" Dynasty

Index of Egyptian History

Eponymous Archons of Athens

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

Sparta

Sparta, Σπάρτα (in its Doric dialect; otherwise Σπάρτη in Attic Greek), along with all the other strange and horrible characteristics of its constitution, had a peculiar dual monarchy. Key moments in Greek history are marked by the death of Spartan kings. Either King could wage war, but the most dramatic events seem to be associated with the dynasty of the Agiads. The fall of Λεωνίδας, Leonidas, to the Persians at Thermopylae, Θερμοπύλαι (480), with 300 Spartans, is one of the classic moments of world history (his name, in the Doric dialect, is a patronymic, "Son of Leon," and would be Λεωνίδης, Leonídēs, in Attic Greek).

The death of Cleombrotus at Leuctra (371), surprised by the tactics of the great Theban general Epaminondas, Ἐπαμεινώνδας, is nearly as significant, signaling both the end of Spartan hegemony over Greece and a military revolution. At Leuctra, Epaminondas used an oblique line, with a reinforced left, opposite the Spartans. There he placed his best Theban troups in a formation fifty men deep, against which the Spartans only had twelve. We could call this formation the φάλαγξ, phalanx. This was the word for any Greek line of battle, but it tends to be used more for the later line of Philip of Macedon, sixteen men deep. Nevertheless, it was Epaminondas who is going to use this reinforced phalanx to win the battle. The Theban right and the Spartan left, with unenthuastic allies, hung back and never even engaged. Epaminondas drove directly at the Spartans and crushed them, with a great slaughter of Spartan citizens, who could not be replaced.

KINGS OF SPARTA

Agiads Euryponids

Anaxandridas c.560-520 Ariston c.550-515

Cleomenes I c.520-490 Demaratus c.515-491

Leonidas I 490-480 Leotychidas II 491-469

killed at Thermopylae, 480

Pleistarchus 480-459 Archidamus II 469-427

Pleistoanax 459-409 Agis II 427-400

Pausanias 409-395 Agesilaus II 399-360

Agesipolis I 395-380

Cleombrotus I 380-371

earthquake at Helike,
distrupts gasses at Delphi,
373; killed at Leuctra, 371

Agesipolis II 371-370 Archidamus III 360-338

Cleomones II 370-309 Agis III 338-331

killed at Megalopolis, 331

Eudamidas I 331-c.305

Areus I 309-265 Archidamus IV c.305-275

silver coinage;
killed in Chremonidean
War, 265

Acrotatus 265-262 Eudamidas II c.275-244

Areus II 262-254

Leonidas II 254-235 Agis IV c.244-241

Eudamidas III 241-c.228

Cleomenes III 235-222 Archidamus V 228-227

tries reforms, defeated
by Arcadians, 222;
flees to Egypt Eucleidas 227-221

Agesipolis III 219-215 Lycurgus 219-c.212

Pelops c.212-c.200

Nabis c.206-192

assassinated; Sparta annexed to Achaean League, 192-191, 191-189, 188-182, 182-148

KINGS OF SPARTA
Agiads	Euryponids
Anaxandridas	c.560-520	Ariston	c.550-515
Cleomenes I	c.520-490	Demaratus	c.515-491
Leonidas I	490-480	Leotychidas II	491-469
killed at Thermopylae, 480
Pleistarchus	480-459	Archidamus II	469-427
Pleistoanax	459-409	Agis II	427-400
Pausanias	409-395	Agesilaus II	399-360
Agesipolis I	395-380
Cleombrotus I	380-371
earthquake at Helike, distrupts gasses at Delphi, 373; killed at Leuctra, 371
Agesipolis II	371-370	Archidamus III	360-338
Cleomones II	370-309	Agis III	338-331
killed at Megalopolis, 331
Eudamidas I	331-c.305
Areus I	309-265	Archidamus IV	c.305-275
silver coinage; killed in Chremonidean War, 265
Acrotatus	265-262	Eudamidas II	c.275-244
Areus II	262-254
Leonidas II	254-235	Agis IV	c.244-241
Eudamidas III	241-c.228
Cleomenes III	235-222	Archidamus V	228-227
tries reforms, defeated by Arcadians, 222; flees to Egypt	Eucleidas	227-221
Agesipolis III	219-215	Lycurgus	219-c.212
Pelops	c.212-c.200
Nabis	c.206-192
assassinated; Sparta annexed to Achaean League, 192-191, 191-189, 188-182, 182-148

Epaminondas went on to liberate Messinia, which Sparta had long enslaved, and Sparta was reduced to Laconia, in the southeast corner of the Peloponnesus. This permanently restricted Spartan power. Epaminondas then died at the Battle of Mantinea (362), ending a career that we might compare to the great Gustavus Adolphus, who fell at Lützen (1632) in the Thirty Years War.

The third Spartan King to die in battle, Agis at Megalopolis (331), in an attack on the allies of Macedonia, and an attempt to raise a rebellion against Macedonian hegemony, showed that the Greek states would henceforth be unable to resist the power of the Hellenistic monarchies. In this case, it was a move against Alexander the Great himself, put down by Antipater, the Regent of Macedon. Sparta had not acknowledged Macedonian supremacy previously, but as the result of the battle surrendered hostages to Alexander.

I have discussed elsewhere the favorable attitude towards Sparta of Athenian philosophers like Plato. We see a complacent regard for Sparta continuing in a contemporary treatment such as the 2007 movie 300. As in other fictionalized treatments of the battle at Thermopylae, this movie overlooks the fact the 300 Spartans did not go alone to the battle. Spartan citizens fought as heavily armed and armored -- not nearly naked, as in the movie -- hoplites, like Mediaeval knights; and as with such knights, they were accompanied by more lightly armed troops whose presence is often overlooked. These would have been from among the perioikoi ("dwellers around") and the serf-like Helots, i.e. the non-Spartan residents of Lacedaemonia.

The presence of the terrorized and oppressed non-citizen subjects of Sparta might have made glowing statements about freedom and justice ring a little hollow. Also, when Leonidas sends most of his force away, the 300 Spartans were not without other company. The allied Thespian and Theban contingents remained with him -- the latter because he didn't trust them not to go over to the Persians, which is what they did once the Spartans and Thespians were evidently defeated. The Spartans were not, as it happens, killed with flights of arrows -- which is something that I believe comes from an earlier movie -- but simply fought to the death.

The movie then leaves unmentioned the naval Battle of Salamis, where the Persian fleet was defeated and their army left in Greece less able to supply itself -- thereby overlooking the role of the Athenians in the defeat of the Persians. This postponed further action until the next year, when the Spartans with hosts of Greek allies defeated the Persians on land at the Battle of Plataea. Indeed, the Spartans never could have made a stand at Thermopylae in the first place without the Athenian fleet. The movie showed Persian ships sunk in a storm, but not all of them were; and the Persians could easily have sailed troops around Thermopylae if Themistocles had not kept their navy out of the Gulf of Euboea with attacks north of Euboea at Artemisium. The Athenians were fighting at sea even while the Spartans were fighting on land. This is a bit like what happened at Guadalcanal, where the fighting on land draws attention from popular books and movies, while the naval battles, upon which the fate of the campaign turned, are largely ignored.

Such distortions coninued in 2012 on cable television historical documentaries. One show curiously ignored Thermopylae and jumped directly to the Battle of Plataea, which nevertheless was never actually named. In this treatment, the Spartans were the ones all eager for battle, and it was the Athenians whose participation was uncertain, until a vote was taken. This was used to illustrat the existence of the democracy at Athens, but at the same time it served to gloss over and obscure the continuing difficulties of getting the Spartans to fight with their allies against the Persians.

But then the documentary also ignored one of the supreme moments of Spartan piety and fortitude. As Persian arrows fell among them, the Spartans did not even raise their shields, because the auspicies were not favorable. The priests sacrificed one animal after another, to examine the entrails, until finally the signs were auspicious. This illustrates a number of things worth noting. If the priests had been cynical frauds, as we all know from Protestant and Enlightenment anti-clericalism, it is unlikely that they would have allowed their fellows to be killed and perhaps endangered the whole army and the contest of the day by continually judging the signs to be inauspicious. The slightest suspicion that the priests were insincere would have drawn considerable wrath. Instead, we also see how seriously the Greeks took their religion, that the Spartans were willing to endanger their fortunes and lives in the battle rather than fight, or even defend themselves, before the gods indicated the right time. Since the battle was then a great and decisive victory, no one was going to be disillusioned of their benighted pagan superstitions.

The fallen Spartans were buried at Thermopylae, and their epitaph, attributed (doubtfully) to Simonides of Ceos, Σιμωνίδης ὁ Κεῖος,
has remained famous but is now typically mistranslated: "O Stranger, go tell the Lacedaemonians that here we lie, obedient to their words." Not only in the fictionalized movie, but with the academic talking heads in a documentary I saw on the History Channel, the last word (second to the last in Greek) has been translated "laws" rather than "words." This is really a grotesquely false rendering.

The word in Greek, ῥήμασι, rhḗmasi, is the dative plural of ῥῆμα, rhêma, which means, according to the authoritative Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon [Oxford, 1889, 1964], "word" or "phrase." My Greek grammar book, A New Introduction to Greek by Chase and Phillips [Harvard, 1965], gives the meaning as "word" or "command"; but "command," like "laws," seems to be more an interpretation than a translation. Indeed, although the verb behind rhêma -- ἐρῶ, erô -- can mean "to order" as well as "to say" or "tell," a less ambiguous word for "command" would be more like κέλευμα, kéleuma. But "laws" (νομοί, nomoí) is really off the semantic map there. From the same root as rhêma we get ῥήτωρ, rhḗtōr, "speaker," ῥητορεία, rhētoreía, "public speaking," and the modern word "rhetoric." The associations of that even now are not good, as in "empty rhetoric."

The "laws" translation may be particularly inappropriate in that rhḗmasi can have a bit of a bitter edge that is missed in the understanding of many scholars -- i.e. obedience to your words (i.e. empty rhetoric), when your actions have fallen short. The Spartans were always reluctant to campaign outside the Peloponnesus. They tended to fear revolts by the Helots as much as any external enemies. Thus, while Leonidas took some troops far from Sparta, excuses were made that kept most of the army closer to home. A year later, with the Persians pouring into Central Greece, it was nearly impossible to get the Spartans to send their army as far as Plataea in Boeotia. The Spartans were content to sit behind the wall they had built at the Isthmus of Corinth. It wasn't until the Athenians threatened to go over to the Persians and use their fleet to land the Persian army behind the wall that the Spartans decided to honor their obligations to the allies.

I now think I may have found the origin of this "laws" translation.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of The Greek Anthology looks like one of the original texts with the Simonides quote [Volume II, Books 7-8, Harvard University Press, 1917, pp.138-139] -- I doubt that most historians were reading the inscription off the stone at Thermopylae, if it is still even legible, or still there (I don't know). The 1917 translation by W.R. Paton runs, "Stranger, bear this message to the Spartans, that we lie here obedient to their laws." I expect that some scholars may look at this and proceed without any doubts.

As it happens, the Loeb edition of Herodotus [The Persian Wars, Volume III, Books V-VII, Harvard, 1928, 2006, pp.544-545] translates the inscription as, "Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by,/ That here obedient to their words we lie." Oh. The translator, A.D. Godley, has rendered rhḗmasi as "words." Good work there.

There is a curious difference in the Greek text between the Greek Anthology quote and the text the way I originally saw it in Chase and Phillips. They quote the inscription from Herodotus (as shown above), which has ἀγγέλλειν, while the Anthology text is ἄγγειλον. Angéllein is the infinitive of the verb "to announce, proclaim, report" [Liddell and Scott, p.4], while ángeilon is a noun, "messenger, envoy," apparently in the accusative case. I don't quite understand the grammar of either of these constructions. The word should be a verb, but I would expect the imperative, or a more polite hortative, rather than the infinitive. If it is the noun, there is no verb in the main sentence, outside the dependent clause, and the case really should agree with "stranger," which is in the vocative. So I find both versions a little perplexing. Perhaps someone whose Greek is better can enlighten me.

Less epochal than Thermopylae but of particular interest is an event of 361. King Agesilaus II was given a banquet by the King of Egypt -- this was Takhōs of the XXX Dynasty. As customary at Egyptian celebrations, the Egyptians wore cones of fat and perfume on their heads. Agesilaus was so offended by the perfume -- prohibited at Sparta -- that he walked out. As it happens, Agesilaus was in Egypt with 1000 Spartans as mercenaries for Takhōs. Sparta needed the money, and so they did what Greeks had been doing for three hundred years, working for the King of Egypt. While Agesilaus and Takhōs were off fighting the Persians in Phoenicia, a cousin of Takhōs revolted back in Egypt. Since Agesilaus hadn't been getting along with Takhōs, he supported the cousin, who consequently became King Nectanebos II (360), the last Egyptian King of Egypt. Nectanebos showed his gratitude with a payment of 230 talents to Agesilaus. The aging Spartan King died before returning to Sparta, after a long reign that saw his city go from the hegemon of Greece, triumphant over Athens, to a second rate power that couldn't even stop Thebes from freeing Messinia.

Sparta maintained its independence into the Hellenistic Period, but it began to lose its distinctive cultural and political character. Areus I introduced silver coinage, and wealth eroded the old communal and military traditions of the city. Indeed, wealth and poverty grew together, and the number of Spartan citizens was gravely reduced as many fell below the property qualification. King Agis IV tried to reverse all this with a program to forgive debts, redistribute land, and recruit new citizens from the perioikoi, the non-citizens who had always lived around Sparta. Agis forced his royal colleague, Leonidas II, into exile; but then Leonidas returned and killed Agis. Nevertheless, the son of Leonidas, Cleomenes III, put all of Agis's reforms into effect. Cleomenes even allowed many Helots, the virtual slaves at the bottom of Spartan society, to buy their freedom. All this attracted the attention and support of the many of the poor elsewhere in Greece, and Spartan affairs took on larger overtones. Cleomenes himself was tempted to expand against the Achaean League, but he was defeated and driven into exile by the Achaeans and Macedonians (222). The last Spartan King, Nabis, tried his own version of Cleomenes' social revolution; but Sparta was annexed by Achaea when Nabis was assassinated.

This list is from E.J. Bickerman, Chronology of the Ancient World [Cornell Univesity Press, 1968-1982], p. 126. Bickerman mentions that "the earliest datable kings are Polydoris and Theopompus (first half of the seventh century). A reliable list of kings begins with" those shown.

Dialects of Greek

History Continued, Hellenistic Monarchs

Historical Background to Greek Philosophy, Note

The ahura in "Ahura Mazdāh" is cognate to asura in Sanskrit. The Sanskrit term was originally for a class of deities, such as Varuna, that were somewhat more remote and fearsome than the devas, who were the gods, like Indra, that were closer to human affairs. In time, the asuras came to be regarded as enemies of gods and men, i.e. demons, and a great deal of Hindu mythology comes to be concerned with devas or greater deities, such as the devotionalistic Gods, fighting demons.

In Zoroastrianism, the fate of the terms is very different. The ahuras, originally a class of deities also, shake down to just one: Ahura Mazdāh. On the other hand, the Iranian equivalent of the devas, the daēvas, they are the ones that Zoroaster now regards as demonic. They are the ones that demand blood sacrifice and other practices that Zoroaster condemns as unclean and evil.

It is noteworthy that the word "demon" itself was similarly innocent in origin. The daimones in Greek were just "spirits." In the Apology, Socrates takes it as unproblematic that "spirits" are "gods or the children of gods." It was Christians who decided that the old pagan spirits were evil.

There is a curious sequel to the "demonization" of the asuras in India. The late, Tantric forms of Hinduism and Buddhism develop "Wrathful" forms of devotionalistic deities, such as the goddess Kālī. These beings are terrifying and violent, bloody and dressed with skulls, but they represent positive divinities and are still fighting asuras. Also, sometimes kinds of demons play positive roles, as when the hero Bhīma of the Mahābhārata fathers a son, Ghatotkacha, by a Rākshasī, a kind of female demon -- albeit after killing her brother, who wanted to eat Bhīma and his brothers.