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’ discussion of Sesostris’ stelai and reliefs in Asia and Europe. Apollonius describes stelai engraved with maps. It is conceivable that hieroglyphic inscriptions such as those in Luwian could have been misunderstood as pictures of places or perhaps illustrated itineraries. Aia is an imprecise toponym, used variously for lands in modern Georgia, Armenia and Eastern Turkey, where there are, in fact, rock-cut inscriptions of different sorts.

Akpinar (Pausanias 3.22.4) (2nd century CE) Text available here: http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus- cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=GreekFeb2011&getid=1&query=Paus.%203.22.4 Images and brief description of “the Statue of Broteas”, available here: http://www.hittitemonuments.com/akpinar/

Pausanias’ familiarity with and eagerness to mention monuments from Lydia, especially the region around Mt. Sipylus, is well known. From our perspective, the most important item is the Taş Suret at Akpinar which Pausanias considers the oldest statue of the Mother of the gods and whose maker he identifies as Broteas, a son of Tantalus and thus a brother of Niobe. This detail is significant because Pausanias clearly distinguishes this monument from a natural rock formation on Mt Sipylus known as “the Niobe”, which, from a certain angle, resembles a woman crying (1.21.3). As we have noted above, several stories referring to Niobe, the Mother of the gods, and their indigenous counterparts, seem to have been conflated by Greek sources already in the Archaic period. The conflation likely started even earlier, when the gender of the Taş Suret effigy seems to have been switched from male to female. In addition, a sort of hesitancy around the anthropogenic or natural origin of significant landmarks in the area seems to have contributed to the confusion in our sources (see also Quintus’ description of the petrified Niobe, below). Beyond the Mother of the Gods statue and the Niobe rock formation, Pausanias also mentions a number of “Tantalid” landscape monuments on Mt Sipylus (5.13.7).

Temenothyrae (Pausanias 1.35.7) (2nd century CE) Text available here: http://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias1C.html Images and brief description of “the Statue of Broteas” (same as statue of Niobe), available here: http://www.hittitemonuments.com/akpinar/

Pausanias also mentions a landmark near the Lydian town of Temenothyrae on the border with Phrygia. He describes “a man’s throne carved on a rocky outcropping of the mountain” and considers it a monument to Hyllus. The local antiquarian specialists and the inhabitants of Temenothyrae who have a different mythical honorand in mind, associate it with a set of giant bones that become exposed when a hill is eroded after a storm. Although it is possible that no monument was involved, Pausanais and his interlocutors deem the landmarks anthropogenic. Indeed, the story and the description bring to mind the situation of the relief of the enthroned king at Kizildag, where the outcropping upon which the image is carved, known ever since Ramsay as “the Throne” is natural. In any case, the passage highlights not only the existence of debate about the origin of what are taken to be ancient monuments, but also the intensity of “history-making” surrounding them.

Sipylus (Quintus of Smyrna 1.291-306) (4th century CE) Quintus, perhaps a native of Smyrna and quite certainly a reader of Pausanias, provides a careful re-working of the Homeric passage discussed above concerning the Sipylus Niobe. His version contains a description of a landmark that resembles both Akpinar as well as the natural rock formation Pausanias mentions.

Van (Moses Khorentasi 2.8) (5th-9th century CE) The enigmatic historian Moses of Khorene, credited with writing the first history of Armenia, some time between the 5th and the 9th c. CE, recorded pre-Christian songs popular in the region around Lake Van. These songs celebrate “the king of the west” in very remote times, a giant named Tork, “deformed, tall, monstrous, with a squashed nose, deep-sunk sockets and cross eyes.” He ruled the house of Angl, which Korenatsi etymologizes as “hideous”. He goes on to say:

“They sang that [Tork] took in his fist hard stones in which there was no crack, and that he would crunch them into large and small pieces at will, and alter them with his nails, and form them into tablet shapes, and, also with his nails, that we would inscribe eagles and other such designs on them.”

Scholars noted long ago that Tork is probably an Armenian reflex of the old Hittite storm- god Tarhuntas, whose name one could freely translate as “Victor”. If so, the divinity celebrated on Hittite and Luwian monuments seems to have been transformed from god to giant, from object of inscription to inscriber. In any case, the local traditions Moses reports seem to have been prompted by familiarity with rock-cut inscriptions. The mention of eagles calls to mind the bicephalous birds found in certain Hittite and even pre-Hittite Anatolian reliefs, and it is hard not to picture cuneiform scripts, whether Urartian or otherwise, when one pictures the giant Tork incising the stones with his fingernails.