The Greek mainland is naturally focused towards the east. The mountain ranges run from west to east and the mountains continue as the Aegean islands, stepping-stones for eastern traders. All the best Greek harbours are on the east coast. The east offered a glittering lure to the Greeks, whose lives were always frugal and where a surplus had to be painfully won from the land. So as trade revived and the Greeks recovered their confidence, it was natural that there would be interaction and collaboration and that this would have its own impact on the developing culture of the Greeks.
Yet it took time for scholars to spot this impact. In the nineteenth century the Greeks were assumed to have a racial and cultural purity and so the influence of eastern civilizations was ignored, but the Danish scholar Frederik Poulsen recognized the eastern contributions to Greek art as far back as 1912, and the theme was developed in the 1960s by John Boardman in his The Greeks Overseas (latest edition, London and New York, 1999). Oswyn Murray first used the term ‘The Orientalizing Period’ in 1980 to describe not just a revolution in art but a development in Greek society as a whole, and Walter Burkert’s The Orientalising Revolution appeared in its German original in 1984.
‘Orientalizing’ was the result of a complex and varied set of relationships between the Greeks and the peoples of the east that lasted over centuries. Eastern motifs appear in Cretan pottery as early as the ninth century while Egypt was an important influence on Greek architecture and sculpture as late as 600 BC. Some influences came as the result of eastern craftsmen who came to the west as refugees, others from goods, among them now vanished textiles, that were taken west by traders and copied by local craftsmen, while the Greeks themselves may have learned directly from contacts in the east. Disentangling the various influences is made harder by the response of the Greeks themselves. In Egypt the kings had created and enforced an easily recognizable palace style. In Greece, with no single dominant state, each area could develop its own response to the east, and it took time for a more uniform Greek culture to emerge from what was absorbed. Nor were Oriental cultures stable, with successive civilizations following on from each other in the Near East, so it is impossible to trace many of the contacts between the shifting cultures.
Without doubt the most important immediate influence on the Greeks were the Phoenicians, a people the Greeks viewed with a mixture of awe and suspicion, ‘famous as seamen, tricksters, bringing tens of thousands of trinkets in their ships, as Homer put it. By the ninth century they were well established in their cities along the Levantine coast and had begun to reach out into the Mediterranean itself. Their first recorded colony at Kition on the south-eastern coast of Cyprus was founded in the late ninth century. They were more mature and confident than the Greeks at this stage and probably ventured to the west, with its tricky crossing between the Pelo-ponnese and the coast of Italy, some generations before the Greeks. The traditional founding date of their most important overseas colony, Carthage, on the coast of north Africa, is 814 and large numbers of trading-posts were established on the southern coast of Spain in the eighth century. They were also expert shipbuilders, and the pentekonter, the fifty-oar warship, and the trireme may have been Phoenician in origin, although the evidence for this remains fragmentary.
It was traders from the island of Euboea, at first from Lefkandi (see Chapter 9) and its successor, the city of Eretria, and Chalcis who seem to have made the first tentative steps at mingling with the Phoenicians and infiltrating the east. Their story has been told by Robin Lane Fox in his Travelling Heroes (London and New York, 2008) in which he gives the Euboeans the defining role in opening up the Mediterranean. Lane Fox’s critics have questioned whether they deserve this accolade and question, in particular, why they are not given a more prominent role in Homer where travel westwards is a major theme of the Odyssey. Despite this, his book provides a wealth of material on the period and an acute feel for the geography of the sites. What the Euboeans had to offer in return for the luxury goods and metals they craved is not clear. There is some Euboean pottery of about 925 Bc found in northern Syria, but slaves were the most likely export, one that would have left no trace in the archaeological record. By 825 the Euboeans appear to have had a foothold at al-Mina on the Orontes river, a trading-post where Greek influence survives alongside that of Phoenicians, Cypriots, and possibly other traders. Al-Mina offered the shortest caravan route to Mesopotamia via the towns of northern Syria. It was possibly here that the Greeks first picked up the Phoenician alphabet.
If the Greeks were probing east, there was perhaps a greater flow of peoples to the west. From the ninth century onwards the Phoenicians and the other peoples of the Near East were increasingly under pressure from the expanding power of Assyria (see p. 93). Assyrians stood on the shore of the Mediterranean for the first time in 877. Al-Mina was overrun by about 720. One of the major Phoenician cities, Sidon, was totally destroyed in 677. The Assyrian invasions of Egypt (see p. 103) followed in the seventh century. In Assyrian sources there are some records of retaliatory Greek raids, possibly by Greek pirates based in Cilicia (southern Turkey). One result of all these upheavals was the fleeing of eastern craftsmen as refugees to Greece.
The archaeological evidence of this contact with the east is widespread. As a result of the custom that victors in the Olympic Games dedicated cauldrons to the sanctuary, more eastern bronzes have been found at Olympia than any other site yet
Discovered in the eastern world. These great cauldrons, with their cast animal-head attachments, originate from Assyria, northern Syria, or the state of Urartu, east of the Euphrates. There are jewellery and gems, seals in Syrian and Egyptian styles (as has been suggested earlier, Egyptian goods were probably traded in the Mediterranean through Phoenician middlemen), shells from the Red Sea, and Phoenician silver bowls. The round shield of the Greek hoplite (p. 163 below) and the horsehair crest of his helmet are similar to those of the Assyrian infantry. A large proportion of the trade must have been in fabrics, but they have perished.
These fine goods were decorated with a whole world of eastern images that were soon copied. In many cases the derivation is obvious: for instance, there are ‘royal’ figures on cauldrons very similar to those found in the stone reliefs in the Assyrian capitals. The later Greek portrayals of Zeus and his thunderbolt and Poseidon and his trident appear to derive from models of warrior gods from the Syro-Hittite region who are depicted brandishing weapons in their right hands. There are no lions in Greece, but they appear now in Greek art. The chimaera, a composite of lion, she-goat, and serpent, is linked to Hittite representations, while the Triton, a merman, seems to come straight from Mesopotamia. There is a wealth of foliage, including lotus leaves and friezes of palms. By the late eighth century these influences are transforming the art on Greek pottery into a new exoticism—‘boars, wild goats, dogs, chickens, lions, sphinxes and griffins endlessly parade around countless seventh-century vases’, in the graphic words of Jeffrey Hurwit (whose The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 Bc, Ithaca, NY, 1987, provides an excellent introduction). (See also Ann Gunter, Greek Art and the Orient, Cambridge and New York, 2009, that stresses the links with Assyria.)
With the goods and their craftsmen came new skills. Whatever they made of the deviousness of the Phoenicians, the Greeks had to accept the supremacy of their craft skills. Polydaidaloi, ‘of many skills’, is how Homer describes the Phoenician makers of a large silver bowl awarded as first prize at the funeral games of Patroclus. The Phoenician metalworkers were clever at hammering and fashioning bronze and silver. From the east and Egypt came the technique of casting with the ‘lost wax’ method, in which a core of wax is surrounded by clay and then melted out leaving a mould into which molten bronze is poured. There was also ivory-working. Ivory was always regarded as a mysterious substance by the Greeks (any description of elephants and their tusks must have bordered on the fabulous), and, with faience work, was prominent among imported luxury goods.
The influence from the east was not confined to its art. The skill of writing, perhaps the most important gift from the east to the Greeks, has already been discussed. The habit of reclining at a couch for a meal or a drinking party replaced the traditional custom of sitting upright in the eighth century. It probably originated in Palestine. The cult of Adonis, the young man, beloved by Aphrodite, who was killed by a boar while hunting, has its origins in the annual death of a vegetation god celebrated in the Phoenician city of Byblos (from where it seems to have travelled first to Cyprus, the island of Aphrodite, and thence to Greece). Mount Kasios, on the Levantine coast near al-Mina and just visible from Cyprus, appears as the setting
For a battle between Zeus and a hundred-headed monster, Typhoeus. It is only part of a rich mythology, seen in the works of Hesiod, for instance, which has its roots in the east. Hades, the Greek underworld, has parallels with the realm of mud and darkness described in the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh. The idea of a foundation deposit of precious metals and stones placed under new buildings is found in Assyria, and the Khaniale Tekke tomb in Crete of about 800 bc appears to have had a similar deposit of gold left there by migrant Syrian goldsmiths. The custom spread in the Greek world, and later temples at Delos and Ephesus had similar deposits.
With these movements came the language of trade, a series of Semitic words some of which have made a further transfer into English. Goods would be contained in a sakkos and among them might be found krokas (crocus), kannabis, and kinnamomon (cinnamon). The Greek unit of weight, mina, comes from the Akkadian mana. Plinthos, a clay brick, originates in Mesopotamia, makes its way into Greek architecture as the base of a column, and is still used in English. The Assyrian maskanu, a booth or tent, reappears in Greek theatre as skena, the backdrop of the stage, and hence ‘scene.
In the enthusiasm to dig out the influences of the east on the Greeks, some have gone so far as to suggest that the Greeks were simply an appendage to the eastern world during this period. Certainly the Greeks may have been diffident in the face of the opulence of the eastern civilizations and the seafaring skills of the Phoenicians, but in almost every sphere they ended up transforming what they had learned for their own ends. Greek art, literature, religion, and mythology may contain eastern influences, but ultimately they are Greek. The alphabet is borrowed, then transformed with the use of vowels into something infinitely more flexible. Homer may have absorbed elements of epic style from Mesopotamia, but the Iliad and Odyssey stand as works of literature in their own right set in an unmistakably Greek world. The Dipylon master might have borrowed eastern images for his goats and deer, but they are fitted into his own geometric design. In the art of pottery-making itself the Greeks had nothing to learn from the east. Here are a people confident enough to borrow and transform and so provide a distinct culture of their own.
World History
