Ionia and the East : six lectures delivered before the University of London

Front matter

NIA AND THE EAST

DAVID G. HOGARTH

EM

Introduction To The Problem

The purpose of these lectures is generally to consider the circumstances under which Hellenic civilization, properly so called, came into being, and in particular, the origin of that brilliant Ionian society which a French writer has named le printemps de la Grece. Some fresh light and, it must be admitted, not a little fresh darkness have been shed upon the matter by recent archaeological discoveries. Some of these I can describe at first hand : others I am in some position to appreciate from having borne a part in similar research, and having gained experience during the last twenty years of wellnigh all the eastern Mediterranean lands whose divers civilizations had relat'ons with the Ionian.

On the great interest of this question of Ionian origins to all students of antiquity, nay, to all students of civilization, I need not waste many words. Even in the face of recent discoveries at Sparta, it may be said without hesitation that the Greeks of western Asia Minor produced the first full bloom of what we call pure Hellenism, that is, a Greek civilization come to full consciousness of itself, and destined to attain the highest possibilities of the Hellenic genius. Whatever its claim to absolute priority in culture, however, the Ionian section of the Hellenic race, • from the accident of geographical position, served more than any other for a vital link between East and West, and imposed its individual name on Oriental terminology as the designation of the whole Greek people. All who follow the development of free social institutions must regard with peculiar interest the land where the City State of Hellenic type first grew to adolescence. Students not only of literature, but of all the means of communication between man and man, know that it was in Ionia that the

8 IONIA AN© THE EAST I

alphabet took the final shape in which the Greeks were to carry it about the civilized world. And who, that belongs to, or cares for, the republic of art, would ignore that ' bel elan de genie duquel est nee la statuaire attique ' ?

Two theories have been propounded to account for the sudden appearance of a very high civilization in Ionia at the opening of the historic age. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and neither is necessarily false. But both were advanced rather as hypotheses to explain subsequent historic phenomena than as deductions from prehistoric evidence ; and though both have found large acceptance, the statement of them has always been vague. The first was that associated with the name of Ernst Curtius, who postulated the existence of a prehistoric Indo-European population in western Anatolia. This he held to be not aboriginal, but an earlier migratory wave of the same great stock which was to throw off the European Hellenes. The proto-Ionians, as he called them, who had branched off and entered Asia Minor by way of the north-western corner, had already established there a culture of Hellenic type ere the historic Ionian Migration from mainland Greece reached Asia. It was out of the amalgamation of this culture of theirs with that of their kindred, who subsequently joined them, stimulated further by Mesopotamian influences, that the historic Ionian civilization sprang with amazing rapidity to full growth. This theory, at the time it was propounded, was probable enough, but incapable of proof. Practically nothing could be adduced to illustrate the supposed culture of either of those Indo- European stocks before their fusion. From the little known of the Lydian language, from the Greek tradition of the origin of the Phrygians, from probable inference as to the racial character of certain pre-Ionian racial elements in Ionia, for example, the Lelegian and the Carian, Curtius could claim some justification for his pre-Ionian Indo- European in Asia Minor. But all further deduction remained ' in the air '.

The second theory was the outcome of the subsequent revelation of prehistoric Aegean civilization. It has taken the form of a general asseveration that Ionian civilization was essentially a survival of the Aegean, a Nachleben mykenischer Cultur. There were, however, no documents of early Ionian culture sufficient to prove or disprove this view, which was, perhaps, in the main an inference from Homer. The Epos, supposed by many to have taken shape at Ionian courts, was argued to reflect a sub-Mycenean civilization. Ergo, there was such a civilization in Ionia.

This theory, as I have said, is not necessarily exclusive of the first. It might, on the contrary, be held complementary and explanatory, determining the nature of the original culture shared by the two contributory kindred stocks of Curtius's creed. But so far as I know, no one who propounded the theory, ever explained precisely whether it was both, or only one of those stocks, which had formerly shared the full Aegean civilization ; whether this civilization had been domiciled of old on the west Anatolian coast, or only been introduced by the Ionian Migration ; or whether the proto-Ionian shared it at all. Those who held the view, most recently expounded in substance by Professor Ridgeway, that the Lelegian stock of western Asia Minor was of close kin to the European Pelasgic, and that the latter was the author of things Mycenean, inclined to regard Aegean culture as having been shared from an early period by the Anatolian coastlands. But they could not adduce sufficient archaeological evidence to raise their theory out of the region of hypothesis. Except at Hissarlik in the extreme north-west and at one or two points on Carian and Rhodian territory in the extreme south, the eastern shore of the Aegean had yielded nothing whatever pertaining to Aegean culture.

The adherents of both theories held also, in somewhat indefinite language, that much of the impulse to develop a culture higher than that prevailing previously either in the region from which the colonists had come, or among the littoral peoples of Asia Minor itself, resulted from Ionian contact with certain older civilizations of the East, notably the Mesopotamian. With this last region, however, the early Ionians, it was thought, had no direct communication, but only secondary relations through intermediary societies. These communicated Eastern influences both by V 0 land and by sea, and among them the Syro-Cappadocian or ' Hittite ' society radiating its influence through Phrygia and Lydia, and the Phoenician, which had been pushing its trade in a westerly direction during the post-Aegean Dark Age, were the chief. Thanks to such relations, the Ionians received the model of commercial society and certain things indispensable to its progress, notably alphabetic writing and a coined medium of exchange, and at the same time became cognizant of processes of manufacture and art already well developed elsewhere. Thus encouraged, the natural genius of the Ionian race developed with remarkable rapidity. It soon outgrew its instructors and became, to some extent, their teacher, partly through a further colonial effort by which Ionia planted Ionians far outside the cradle of their original civilization. In particular it reacted on the land from which the first colonists had come, the easternmost part of the Greek peninsula, and was largely responsible for the rise of Attic culture.

What was held thus about the origin of Ionian civilization was held also in some degree about the origin of all that earliest civilization in Asia Minor, which the later Greeks ascribed to colonization from Europe, but differentiated as Dorian or Aeolic. But it was believed that the Ionian settlers had had the fortune to fall among a race more nearly kin to the Hellenic than were the Carian tribes of the south-western littoral, or the Mysians of the north. Hence the Ionian development proved the more peaceful and rapid, and attained to a higher plane of culture.

This is, I think, a fair summary of the most generally received opinion based on the researches and arguments of many authorities who wrote in the latter half of the last century. Opinion, and nothing more, however, it had to remain. The origin of any particular ancient culture is necessarily an archaeological question. Some other culture, contemporary with its beginnings, may have already developed a literature, and this may chance to make allusion to it. But such allusion can hardly be expected to throw any but dim and uncertain light, since, ex hypothesi, we are inquiring about a remote age, prior to the development of lively human curiosity about alien peoples. In this particular case, as it happens, the origin of what was actually the earliest civilization, which developed any extant literature inspired by such curiosity, is under discussion. Literary evidence concerning the origin of Ionian civilization is to be derived from authorities of which the earliest were necessarily posterior by some centuries. Their references are seldom to be understood, and never safely to be applied, without the help of archaeology. Such are the Greek records of local tradition, Greek archaeological statements of long bygone fact, and Greek archaeological ratiocination, expressed by writers earlier than the establishment of any objective standards for appraising archaeological evidence. As examples of such literature, bearing conscious and unconscious reference to the early story of Hellenic civilization, we have, on the one hand, the body of lays, which form the basis, at any rate, of the Homeric Iliad and of most of the Cyclic fragments which have survived ; and, on the other, an historical work, written by an Asiatic Greek of great perspicacity and learning not much more than half-way through the first millennium B.C.

Herodotus recorded not only much antecedent fact, but also local traditions of his day in regard to this very matter. To these authorities I shall often refer later, and I only pause at this stage to enforce my point about the comparative difficulty of understanding and the danger of applying the evidence of early literature to such a question as the origin of a civilization without invoking the help of archaeological evidence, by reminding you of two facts. Firstly, the most close study of the Homeric Epos in no way enabled scholars to assign to the culture, there reflected, its just relative position in the development of Aegean man, but, on the contrary, caused a settled predisposition to mistake the times and places of his highest development. Secondly, Herodotus alone among extant Greek authors made any certain allusion to that remarkable early society of eastern Asia Minor, the Syro- Cappadocian or Hatti ; but his allusion excited little or no curiosity, and the society in question was not held of any account whatever, until hardly a generation ago. In fact, the measure of its necessary relation to the origins of that very Greek civilization, about which the Halicarnassian showed himself so curious, has yet to be appraised.

On archaeology, therefore, fell, and falls, the burden of proof in this inquiry. But archaeology, whatever its competence nowadays, was certainly in a very poor position to offer evidence up to the end of the nineteenth century. In the first place, it should have been able to take cognizance of a large and various body of material documents, illustrative not only of Ionian culture itself in its earliest stages, but also of the precedent condition in which the aboriginal populations of western Asia Minor and the future settlers from Europe were for some time before the latter passed across the Aegean Sea. In the second place, if it could claim adequate knowledge of the greater Eastern societies, by which Ionian culture was supposed to have been stimulated, it needed to have equal knowledge of the intermediary societies occupying the routes, whether by land or sea, over which the Mesopotamian and Nilotic influences had to travel westwards. What, however, was the case ? Without necessarily implying that it is in many respects different now, let me state it briefly as it stood at the close of the nineteenth century.

As regards Ionia itself, the tale of local documents relating to early stages of its cultural development was miserably short. Excavators have spent as much time and money on sites of west Asia Minor during the past generation as on any others round the Mediterranean. Prior to 1900 the exploration of Pergamum had been prosecuted on a large scale for nearly a quarter of a century. Before that the British excavations at Halicarnassus and Cnidus began and the superficial examinations of certain sites in the lower valley of the Maeander had been concluded. Ephesus, both town and temple, had been searched by Wood and abandoned ; but the town had already been reopened and been in process of re-examination for some years by the Austrian Archaeological Institute. Magnesia-on-Maeander was considered to have yielded up its secrets and all spoils, worth removal, to Humann and his colleagues. Priene had been finished by Wiegand and Miletus begun.

But of all these explorations — several of them most considerable enterprises — one thing can be said alike. They never served to expose any stratum of remains which could be referred to the early morning, still less to the dawn, of Hellenic civilization in western Asia. The nearest approaches to primitive strata were made by British explorers. At Branchidae Newton had the fortune to find certain relics of Ionian art of the seventh and sixth centuries on the surface of the soil, and at Ephesus Wood penetrated downwards to the remains of the Artemisium of the latter century, but there stopped short. Almost all the other great excavations were conducted without apparent intention to explore early strata. At Pergamum, Magnesia, and Priene the object of the explorers was to recover Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman evidence, mainly of an architectural nature, and the sites chosen were not such as offered good hope of anything of earlier date. The Roman city of Ephesus must have been built at one point or another over strata resultant from inhabitation since the earliest Ionian days ; but, during ten years of excavation, the Austrian explorers of the city have not touched those strata, and have been content to lay bare pavements and structures of Imperial times.

There is one notable exception, however, to be taken to this rule, that excavations conducted on any considerable scale in Hellenic Asia had so far not been directed to the earlier strata : that is, of course, the exploration of Hissarlik by Schliemann and Dorpfeld. Here you do not need to be reminded that an early site was probed to the bottom, and that successive layers were examined, which contained documents going far behind the earliest stage of Hellenic culture in Asia Minor. Apart, however, from the general prejudice, which long prevailed, against recognizing a causative relation between the prehistoric and the historic cultures of the Hellenic area, the particular circumstances of Hissarlik served to make scholars slow to admit a connexion between its remains and the Ionian question. The site lies comparatively remote from that part of the Anatolian coast where the higher Hellenic culture first developed. The remains of the earlier, and by far the most considerable, periods at Hissarlik attach themselves to a class distinct in certain respects from the general culture of prehistoric Greece, and not observed at all in Ionia. The remains, which were actually referred to the opening of the historic period, were scanty and illustrative of local decadence ; while others, which might also have been so referred, were confused with strata of earlier periods, and their significance was mistaken. The upshot was that from first to last the exploration of Hissarlik failed materially to affect the discussion of the Ionian problem.

For the earliest material documents of Ionian history, therefore, scholars had to look in the main to a small number of comparatively late Ionian architectural and sculptura remains, of which very few had been found in Ionia itself, and the exiguous majority came from Carian territory or Aegean isles, notably Delos ; to coins, of which the earliest were not dated before the seventh century ; and to a very few archaic inscriptions, whereof the very earliest again were not ascribed to quite so early a period. There had, indeed, been discovered a few local relics of human handiwork which were acknowledged to be more ancient. Such were the famous - Sesostris ' figures on the cliffs of the Kara Bel near Nymphi ; the ' Niobe ' and some other primitive remains in Mount Sipylus ; and also the ruined * Tantalus Tomb ' of Aeolic Smyrna and certain traces of a neighbouring settlement, and of shrines, forts, and look-out places in the hills behind. But the ' Sesostris ' figures and the ' Niobe '

were put out of court as Syro-Cappadocian memorials of a foreign and brief invasion from far inland ; and the scanty 1 Tantalus ' remains had to bear witness alone in Ionia to proto-Ionian civilization.

If one turned to the lands marching with Ionia on the continental side, the case of archaeology appeared little better. Lydia was (and for that matter still is) the least productive district of Asia Minor from an archaeological point of view, despite the commerce, culture, and power with which history credits it while Ionian civilization was in the making. There had been no scientific digging in Lydian soil. There was no local monument of any importance recognized as Lydian. No inscriptions, certainly Lydian, had been found in Lydia. That is enough to say for my present purpose. To state more fully how Lydia should be related to the Ionian problem, I shall return to it in a subsequent lecture.

And what of the bordering lands on south and north ? The partial excavation of Assarlik had taught us, before 1900, that Aegean influence, or perhaps a few Aegean settlers, had come to Caria towards the close of the Bronze Age and there promoted a derivative culture of an insignificant kind. More than this, indeed, was to be inferred from Greek tradition ; but there was no archaeological proof. A little better knowledge had been obtained about the great neighbouring island of Rhodes. There, too, the earliest local documents, the contents of certain graves at Ialysus, showed participation in the latest development of Aegean civilization ; and the story could be brought down across the dark gap between the Aegean and the Hellenic epochs. The discoveries made by the brothers Biliotti at Camirus illustrated a productive culture, active in the seventh century B.C. and obviously related to that of the earlier Hellenic period in western Greek lands, including southern Italy, and in Etruria. But beside this relation, scholars saw another to non-Greek culture, particularly to that of contemporary Egypt. To account for it they called in Phoenician intermediaries, reminding us how handily Rhodes lies in relation to the westward sea-ways of the Semitic folk. It was the Camirus graves more than anything else, except perhaps certain discoveries in Cyprus with which I shall deal later, that led archaeologists to endorse the common belief in a heavy and various Greek debt to Phoenicia.

North of the Ionian belt the curious temple-reliefs of Assos had created the impression that Aeolic Hellenism had come early into close relation with, and been powerfully influenced by, non-Hellenic influences ; and certain other discoveries in Mysia, notably the Neandrian volute-capital and an early Neandrian building, supposed to be a temple, had strengthened that belief. The extensive spoil of the Myrina graves fell almost entirely in an epoch too late to be instructive as to Ionian origins : but stray objects from Aeolic coast cemeteries at Cyme, Aegae, and Pitane seemed to confirm the evidence of Assos. Whence and how these Eastern influences, however, came to the Greek settlers, and how much antecedent culture the latter themselves had brought over sea, no one pretended to determine.

This last item in the Problem, the cultural equipment possessed by the early Hellenic colonists at the moment of their departure from Europe, was the least known of all the factors. But before we consider it, let us finish for the time with Asia by taking summary stock of the knowledge possessed before 1900, concerning the channels through which influences of Mesopotamia and Egypt must have passed to Ionia. It was recognized that, if these influences came overland, they must have filtered through the area of a lately rediscovered society of eastern Asia Minor and northern Syria, which students called the ' Syro-Cappadocian ' or the ' Hittite '. Links in a possible chain of westward connexion had been suggested by the observations of Perrot and Ramsay regarding Syro-Cappadocian features in the earlier monumental art of Phrygia, and by Sayce's brilliant inference, based on the rock sculptures of western Lydia and other monumental and traditional evidence, that Lydia had once been a ' Hittite satrapy '. For various reasons, however, this chain was not regarded as of much importance. Scholars were more inclined to think that Eastern influences reached the coast, if overland at all, through an early north-westward extension of the Phrygian people than through Lydia, which was held to have been comparatively barbarian and insignificant before the establishment of the Mermnad dynasty, early in the seventh century B.C., and to have owed most of its higher culture to reflex influences of Ionia itself. Even Phrygia was regarded as, in her turn, largely indebted to similar reflex influences for the culture which has left us the magnificent rock monuments of the Sangarius basin, and in particular for her alphabetic system of writing ; while a connexion between her early society and the Syro-Cappadocian, though assumed, could not be presented as a certain or momentous factor in the evolution of Western culture, so long as scarce half a dozen widely spaced monuments of Cappadocian character had been detected this side of the Halys and none of Phrygian character on the other side. In fact the whole area of Syro-Cappadocian civilization remained too little known, and its monuments north of the Taurus too few and sporadic, for much weight to be assigned to its influence by those who were speculating on the origin of Western culture. In spite of the repeatedly expressed views of Ramsay, Sayce, Perrot, and others, the ' Hittite ' continued to be envisaged largely as a Syrian civilization which had spread north of Taurus only partially and temporarily, and was more likely to have transmitted its influence by sea through the Phoenicians of Syria than over continental ways of Asia Minor.

To the Phoenicians, indeed, scholars continued to credit the vast bulk of such education as the Greek races were believed to have owed to the East. The advent of their effective influence into the Aegean area was still dated by many far back in the pre-Hellenic period, on the strength of several of the finer objects among Mycenean remains, particularly those which seemed to have reference to cult. Main stations on the westward sea-way of the Semites were

HOOABTH B found in Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete. As for Cyprus, after the remarkable treasure of Salaminian graves at Enkomi had come to light, it was seen that the usual assumption of a Phoenician origin for Cypriote art needed serious revision. But the continued ascription of many of the finer objects in that treasure to Eastern sources and a dispute about the dating of the whole obscured the bearing of its evidence, although Messrs. Myres and Richter, in their Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum issued in 1899, showed a just appreciation of the facts. Rhodian archaic civilization was held in debt to Phoenicia chiefly on the strength of the objects found at Camirus, which have already been mentioned, and the Cretan on the strength of the early bronzes extracted from the Idaean cave. Add to these archaeological observations the strong presumption in favour of Phoenician influence having formed primitive Hellenic art and commerce, which was derived from allusions in Homer, and statements made by Greek archaeological historians ; from the early legends of Thebes ; from philological explanations of the names of those Greek places and divinities which seemed not to be Indo-European ; and last, but not least, from the yet unquestioned Phoenician origin of the Ionian alphabet — add all this and it will not appear wonderful that such protests as were made by M. Salomon Reinach in his Mirage Oriental, and by Mr. Arthur Evans in his first articles on the Cretan script, did not materially weaken the Semitic position. Scholars remained content to allow a margin for Mesopotamian influences transmitted overland through the Syro-Cappadocian area, and for Egyptian influences exercised on Greek soldiers and merchants who went from western Asia Minor to the Nile Valley under the New Empire and thence returned. But they continued to credit ' the grave Tyrian trader ' with transmitting at least nine-tenths of the Oriental stimulus which acted on the nascent culture of archaic Hellas.

Finally, let us look to the views held about the Ionian colonists themselves, and the equipment of civilization with which they were believed to have set sail. There is the less to say on this head, because there was no very definite view held. Too little, in fact, was known of primitive Greece. There were those, indeed, who argued that the colonization did not all come from Greek ports, but in part from inner Thrace across the straits. Such a possibility, however, threw no light on the precedent culture of the colonists ; for even less was known of primitive Thrace than of primitive Greece. A few archaeologists called attention to the early mid-European culture of the latest Bronze Age and earliest Age of Iron, of which remains had been found in abundance, especially in the upper and middle sections of the Danube basin. Here, they suggested, was evidence that the northern tribes did not descend on Greece from a wholly barbarous area. This fruitful observation however, failed of its full effect, thanks to the rooted prejudice in favour of deriving the Hellenes directly from an original Asiatic home by way of easternmost Europe, without contamination with mid-European 'barbarians'.

There were others, again, who began to look tentatively to the Mycenean and sub-Mycenean remains of Attica and neighbouring coasts for a solution of this factor in the problem. But even those who held very reasonably that the contents of the early graves at Menidi and Spata, the ' Mycenean ' sherds found in the lowest stratum on the Athenian Acropolis, and the constituent parts of the Aeginetan Treasure, covered the whole period usually assigned to the Ionian colonization, and bore witness to a culture which could not have been without great effect on the colonists ere their departure — even these scholars hesitated to regard Mycenean or sub-Mycenean objects as products of a culture which could have been itself in any part Ionic. To many varieties of creed touching the query, ' Who made the objects called Mycenean ? ' — to quote it in Professor Ridge way's terms — certain articles of belief long remained common, with hardly an exception ; namely, that the makers of those objects and the Ionians were wholly distinct peoples : that the latter came from the north at the end of the Bronze Age ; and that their earliest

b 2 efforts in art were represented by the geometric ' Dipylon * style which was not in any sense Aegean.

Objections to various articles in this accepted creed concerning the origins of Ionian civilization were obvious and already expressed. The most obvious, perhaps, touched the last article with which I have dealt — the postulate that this civilization owed its inception in large part to colonists of a race which had produced nothing truly artistic in any previous stage of its migrations — no thing r at least, of which actual evidence had been found, despite the fact that in their penultimate stage the colonists had passed across the well-searched soil of Attica. Even if the ' Dipylon ' objects could be accepted as witnesses to nascent Ionic art, they seemed to fall in a period subsequent to the colonization. It was generally supposed that the colonists passed on after none but the shortest stay in western Greece and equipped with nothing more than an exceptional ' innate instinct for humanism \ This instinct, encountering on the further shore the fresh and mighty breath of Asia, would be fecundated with a wholly new embryon of civilization.

There is, of course, a measure of truth in this long-accepted theory of the Ionian migration. But a scientific sense trained in the school of evolution cannot but check at the lack of causation and the abruptness of development implied in the explanation as it stood. In particular, one may fairly hesitate to accept ' an innate instinct for humanism ' as the sole or even the main asset of a migratory race destined within a very few generations to develop the highest artistic and social culture of the age — a culture, moreover, which was strongly individual. To credit it is, in fact, to be imbued with the spirit of Ottfried Muller and his school of Hellenists — that school which so long denied any alien parentage to Greek culture. Even, nowadays, its prejudice against including the origin of Hellenic civilization among things capable of a scientific evolutionary explanation is not quite extinct. Both in this country and in Germany Hellenism has so far become a cult, that it seems to have votaries still who are slow to admit its obligation to anything but revealed light. The fathering of the Greek on the pre-existing profane cultures has been scouted by perfervid Hellenists in terms which imply that they hold it little else than impiety. Allowing no causation more earthly than vague local influences of air and light, mountain and sea, they would have Hellenism born into the world by a miracle of generation, like its own Athena from the head of Zeus.

Objection was also taken to that article in the accepted creed, which was mainly due to Ernst Curtius, namely, that on the other side of the Aegean the Ionic colonists found a proto-Ionian people, whose near kinship and cultural sympathy went for much in the rapid evolution of the subsequent local civilization. This objection could not, however, be pressed from sheer inability to prove a negative, or even to show much cause in favour of one. To the obvious question, Where were the archaeological remains of these proto-Ionians ? was returned the equally obvious and, for the time, sufficient answer that western Asia Minor was most imperfectly surveyed, and its earlier sites had hardly been excavated at all. What material documents of Ionic civilization had we which did not imply a certain degree of adolescence ? in particular, for example, what inscriptions which showed forms marking the transition from the parent Phoenician ? If documents of infant Ionian culture had not yet been discovered, who doubted that such existed ? And if these had yet to be found, so too had the proto-Ionian documents. This answer could not be gainsaid then. It cannot be altogether gainsaid now.