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Textual Evidence of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Interactions with Anatolian Inscriptions, Statues, and Reliefs Compiled By

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Textual Evidence of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Interactions with Anatolian Inscriptions, Statues, and Reliefs Compiled By Textual Evidence of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Interactions with Anatolian Inscriptions, Statues, and Reliefs Compiled by Valeria Sergueenkova (University of Cincinnati) and Felipe Rojas (Brown University) (Please DO NOT reproduce or cite without our authorization) Major Greek and Roman authors mention Bronze and Iron Age reliefs and inscriptions in Anatolia. Several of the relevant passages are well-known and have received scholarly attention; however, no one has attempted to compile and analyze them simultaneously, or to place them in their wider archaeological context beyond suggesting a possible identification with a known monument. Classical historians and philologists in particular have seemed more interested in gauging the veracity of an ancient interpretation (asking, for example, was Herodotus wrong about the Karabel relief and inscription?), than in analyzing what those passages tells us about how people in the Greek and Roman periods went about explaining inscribed antiquities in their midst. Hittitologists have generally tended to ignore the so-called “afterlives” of these monuments. And yet, especially in conjunction with the archaeological evidence, these ancient texts illuminate a number of fascinating topics related to ancient conceptions of the past in the past, the role of realia in the articulation of local and universal history, and about the relationship between the human and the natural world. Below is a brief review of the relevant literary sources known to us arranged chronologically. Sipylus (Homer, Iliad 24.602-617) (8th c. BCE?) Relevant text available here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hom.+Il.+24.596&redirect=true Images and brief description of “Niobe” available here: http://www.hittitemonuments.com/akpinar/ It is likely that Homer refers to an Anatolian Bronze Age monument when he locates the petrified Niobe “somewhere among the rocks” on Mt Sipylus (614). Homer’s Niobe may tentatively be identified with the Akpınar monument known as Taş Suret, although it is also possible that the poem refers to a natural rock formation on Mt. Sipylus, described by Pausanias and Quintus of Smyrna (see below). It is likely that a conflation between these two landmarks, one anthropogenic, the other natural, or rather between the stories attached to them, was taking place already in the archaic period. This idea finds support in the scholiast’s interpretation of the phrase “beds of the goddesses” (l. 615), used to describe the location of the petrified Niobe. The scholia (ancient Homeric commentators) define the “goddesses” in question as the daughters of Rhea (frequently identified with the Mother of the Gods, Cybele); they refer to a story according to which Rhea and her daughters hid from Kronos on Mt. Sipylus and they also mention a temple dedicated to them also located there. What is certain, is that the scholia to this Homeric passage attest to the fact that many ancient readers took the Iliad to refer to a specific landmark, and not simply to a famous, but loosely defined mythological landscape. Sardis environs (Hipponax, West F42=Degani 7) (6th century BCE) “… follow the road to Smyrna, go on through Lydia past the tomb of Attales, the barrow of Gyges and Sesostris’ stele, and the µνῆµατ’ ὤτος, lord at Mutalis, turning your belly towards the setting sun” (Translated by Alexander Dale) † τέαρε [ . ] δεύειε † τὴν ἐπὶ Σµύρνης ἴθι διὰ Λυδῶν παρὰ τὸν Ἀττάλεω τύµβον καὶ σῆµα Γύγεω, καὶ Σεσώστριος στήλην καὶ † µνῆµατ’ ὤτος† Μυτάλιδι πάλµυδος, πρὸς ἥλιον δύνοντα γαστέρα τρέψας Images and brief description of Karabel, available here: http://www.hittitemonuments.com/karabel/ In the late sixth century BCE, the poet Hipponax of Ephesus listed noteworthy landmarks along a road leading from an indeterminate point (perhaps the city of Sardis or somewhere east of it) to Smyrna. Although the passage is fragmentary and full of textual problems (the daggers mark corrupt passages), the names associated with landmarks (a tomb, a barrow, a stele) in this ‘itinerary’ make it clear that the monuments are almost certainly pre-Greek, dating possibly to as far back as the Bronze Age, perhaps earlier. One of the monuments may be the relief identified by Herodotus as a representation of the Egypitan pharaoh Sesostris which is almost unanimously identified with Karabel. Even if Hipponax did not associate the pharaoh’s name with this landmark, it is still conceivable and even likely that he might have had a Bronze Age rock relief in mind. Furthermore, it is possible that a different monument in the following line, a mnema, is also a rock relief. (Note: cf. Sardanapallus’ mnema, probably a relief, discussed below). Since there were originally at least three reliefs at Karabel, it is possible that the poet was familiar with more than one of them. Karabel (Herodotus 2.102-103, 106) (5th century BCE) Text available here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hh/hh2100.htm Images and brief description of Karabel, available here: http://www.hittitemonuments.com/karabel/ The most familiar of all ancient literary passages dealing with a Bronze Age Anatolian landscape monument is Herodotus’s discussion of Sesostris’ “engravings” in Ionia. Since the late 19th century most scholars have thought that Herodotus is referring to a Hittite landscape monument, specifically, the 13th century BCE rock-cut reliefs in Karabel. Three Hittite reliefs of different quality and size are known to have existed at Karabel on a pass between Sardis and Smyrna. Only one of them survives in situ; the other two were largely obliterated by dynamite in the process of road construction. Curiously, given how much scholarly attention Herodotus’ mention of the Karabel relief has attracted, there is no obvious archaeological evidence of Greek and Roman period interventions at Karabel. In fact, other than Herodotus and arguably Hipponax (see above), there is no earlier or later mention of this relief. Herodotus’ confident pronouncement concerning the identity of the figure is motivated primarily by his notion that the Egyptian Sesostris had once conquered Asia and Europe, leaving in his wake inscribed monuments celebrating his victories. It is notoriously unclear whether Herodotus saw the object himself or received detailed information from someone else who had. It is also possible that the identification with Sesostris might not be an original contribution by Herodotus as he is usually eager to highlight the independence of his conclusions. Anchiale (Aristoboulus FGrH139 F9 and Callisthenes FGrH124 F34) (4th century BCE?) Images and brief description of Sirkeli, available here: http://www.hittitemonuments.com/sirkeli/ Aristobulus, one of the historians who accompanied Alexander the Great to Asia, mentions a landmark that the Macedonian army encountered at Anchiale, near Tarsus, in Cilicia. Aristobolus describes it as a funerary monument belonging to the Assyrian king the Greeks called Sardanapallus (a conflation of several neo-Assyrian rulers). Alexander’s men would have known Sardanapallus as a proverbially decadent king, who committed suicide in a great conflagration of luxury goods, concubines and eunuchs, when Nineveh and the Assyrian empire fell to the Medians. Aristobolus said that the monument depicted the king snapping the fingers of his right hand, and that it was accompanied by an inscription in “Assyrian letters”. He provided a translation of the inscription identifying the honorand as the builder of Anchiale and Tarsus. He also recorded a verse epitaph, which became a popular object of imitation and elaboration for later Greek and Latin authors. Although the actual monument has not been identified, scholars have long speculated that the Greeks misunderstood a relief depicting the ubna tarasu (‘stretching of the finger’) gesture typical of Assyrian representations of kings in the presence of divinities. Ever since Weißbach’s RE article, a connection with an inscribed monument mentioned by Berossus in his account of Sennacherib’s activities in the region in the 9th c. BCE has been entertained (FGrH680 F7c; cf. FGrH685 F5)., encouraged by Sennacherib’s own record of his Cilician campaigns and mention of the erection of an alabaster stele. The word “typos” unambiguously points to a relief, but there remains the question of whether the monument was Assyrian, as nearly everyone has assumed, or Hittite. If it was not an Assyrian monument, it would surely have been a rock-cut relief or an engraved stele. It is possible that Alexander’s men came face-to- face with a Hittite or Neo-Hittite carving, such as the one at Sirkeli or the engraved stelae found at Çiftlik or Bor. Regardless of the specific monument, the literary evidence shows that in the Hellenistic period discordant memories (see below, section 3.3.3) were attached to an Early Iron Age or possibly Bronze Age monument. Aia (Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 4.257-293) (3rd century BCE) Text available here: http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus- cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=GreekFeb2011&getid=1&query=Ap.%20Rhod.%204.257 For a Luwian hieroglyphic inscription, that could ***very speculatively*** be argued to have been mistaken for a map, see: http://www.hittitemonuments.com/topada/topada10.jpg or http://www.hittitemonuments.com/malpinari/ The Argonautica mentions “Egyptian” stelai in a land called Aia, identified with Colchis (modern Gerogia) in the poem, but notoriously difficult to pin down geographically. These objects triggered speculation in the scholia, which recognized a connection with Herodotus’
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