Rituals of Triumph in the Mediterranean World Culture and History of the Ancient Near East

Rituals of Triumph in the Mediterranean World Culture and History of the Ancient Near East Founding Editor M.H.E. Weippert Editor-in-Chief Thomas Schneider Editors Eckart Frahm W. Randall Garr B. Halpern Theo P.J. van den Hout Irene J. Winter VOLUME 63 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/chan Presentation Scene—Seti I Karnak War Relief (Exterior Northern Wall of Hypostyle Hall; East Side) Photograph Courtesy of Prof. Peter Brand. Rituals of Triumph in the Mediterranean World Edited by Anthony Spalinger and Jeremy Armstrong LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 Cover illustration: Details from a relief sculpture from Praeneste (Palestrina) showing the triumph of Trajan. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rituals of triumph in the Mediterranean world / edited by Anthony Spalinger and Jeremy Armstrong. pages cm. — (Culture and history of the ancient Near East, ISSN 1566-2055 ; volume 63) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-25100-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-25117-5 (e-book) 1. Mediterranean Region—History, Military—To 1500. 2. Triumph. 3. Rituals—Mediterranean Region—History—To 1500. 4. Rites and ceremonies—Mediterranean Region—History—To 1500. 5. Processions—Mediterranean Region—History—To 1500. I. Spalinger, Anthony John author, editor of compilation. II. Armstrong, Jeremy, author, editor of compilation. DE84.R57 2013 394.2—dc23 2013009549 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1566-2055 ISBN 978-90-04-25100-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25117-5 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Rituals of Triumph: A Brief Introduction ................................................. 1 Jeremy Armstrong and Anthony Spalinger Claiming Victory: The Early Roman Triumph ........................................ 7 Jeremy Armstrong Ramesses III’s Wars and Triumphs at Medinet Habu: Between Narration, History and Identity ............................................ 23 Giacomo Cavillier Hellenistic Parades and Roman Triumphs .............................................. 37 Andrew Erskine Nothing to Celebrate? The Lack or Disparagement of Victory Celebrations in the Greek Historians ................................................... 57 Lisa Irene Hau Outcomes of Battle: Triumphal Celebrations in Assyria ..................... 75 Davide Nadali Egyptian New Kingdom Triumphs: A First Blush .................................. 95 Anthony Spalinger Commemorating Victory in Classical Greece: Why Greek Tropaia? ......................................................................................................... 123 Matthew Trundle Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 139 Index .................................................................................................................... 155 RITUALS OF TRIUMPH: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION Jeremy Armstrong and Anthony Spalinger This volume stems from a two-day conference devoted to “Rituals of Tri- umph in the Mediterranean World from Antiquity to the Middle Ages” held 21–22 November 2008 at Swansea University, Wales. The editors of this volume would therefore like to begin by thanking the organizers of the conference, Dr. Kasia Szpakowska and Prof. Mark Humphries from the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Egyptology at Swansea, for their gracious assistance in laying the groundwork for this project. The conference was inspired by a recent revival in interest in ancient triumphs, and most notably by Mary Beard’s book The Roman Triumph (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press; 2007). However, this renais- sance seemed to have initially confined itself solely to the Roman world, and particularly Rome’s late republican and imperial periods, despite the myriad rituals of triumph which were present throughout the ancient Mediterranean. The theme of the conference was therefore defined as follows: Societies have frequently felt the necessity of proclaiming their military victories through overt public demonstration. Such events have mainly relied upon visual stimuli as well as oral performance. By and large, however, outside of the most famous examples from the Roman Empire, those from other cultures—such as Egypt, Greece, and the Near East—have not been explored. The aim of this conference is to examine a series of cultural reactions to successful military public proclamations at the capital by various peoples not only of the Ancient World, but through the Middle Ages as well. As a consequence of this wide focus, the results at the conference (which are reflected in this volume) were varied and painted a picture which con- trasted strikingly with existing scholarship. The greater scope, with regard to geographical latitude as well as temporal density, and the changes in emphasis, which moved through the various communal aspects of triumphs, demonstrated how in differing cultures, different methods of reconstituting the society’s collective memory were enacted. Ultimately, despite the various orientations which each contributor came to the project with, a key outcome of this event was not merely that various peoples’ means of collective solidarity after war were traced, but the surprisingly 2 jeremy armstrong and anthony spalinger universal presence of a sophisticated cross-cultural approach to analyzing these acts in modern scholarship in which the basic structures of military processions were explained and their links with the social basis of these archaic societies made clearer. Upon further analysis, all of us who have written these chapters came to the realization that the dynamics, if not solely the logistics, of triumphs were a matter of careful study. Triumphs, just like as modern parades, contained aspects of “flag-waving,” explosive adulation, music and song. But more was at stake than a simple purga- tion of tension, a cathartic release of emotions. In each culture ‘triumphs’ represented a nexus point between civilian and military ideologies and as such offer unique insight into the cultures involved. The two editors of this volume therefore hope that readers will appreciate both the diversity of content and the intriguing areas of symmetry and synergy in these studies and become engrossed in what on first sight appears to be a straight- forward topic of investigation. Moving through the various studies in order, Jeremy Armstrong’s study concentrates not upon the later ‘classical’ aspects of Roman triumphs— those of the Caesars with their huge crowds, pomp, and circumstance— but rather the triumph as it existed in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, when Rome herself merely existed as part of a larger Latin context instead of dominating the Italian peninsula. In this chapter he properly stresses the failure of many scholars, ancient as well as modern, to grasp one simple yet fundamental theme: that early Rome was not like the Rome of the late Republic and Empire, and her institutions and rituals need to be interpreted in their appropriate context. Moreover, the warfare practiced at that time was considerably different than that practiced in later periods. This study argues that when the Roman triumph is viewed in the absence of the anachronistic social and military contexts which are so often foisted upon it a very different interpretation is possible. His study therefore combines the twin aspects of warfare and ‘triumph,’ the latter as a subtle method of solidifying communal unity in a city which had yet to fully coalesce. This chapter also provides a neat, but nonetheless detailed, survey of previous scholarship on this issue. It furthers the recent scholarly emphasis on the importance of clans within early Rome whilst providing the core argument that it was the liminal nature of the army in the archaic Roman state that should be considered seriously when analyzing any aspect of Roman warfare. Furthermore, Armstrong provides cau- tionary words with regard to any concept of ‘state controlled warfare,’ be it under the kings or in the times succeeding that phase of Latin history. Indeed, his consideration of the roman rex bears careful reading as he rituals of triumph: a brief introduction 3 connects the ‘outsider’ nature of the leader with the endemic nature of warfare during the period. One must concur with his analysis that the function of the early triumph was not simply a ‘purification rite,’ but something more complex. He regards the triumph as the culmination of an agreed-upon pact—something which contains a myriad of religious, legal, and political associations—between

Load more