Self-reflection, Egyptian Beliefs, Scythians and “Greek Ideas”: Reconsidering Greeks and Barbarians in Herodotus1

1. An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper entitled “Egyptian Piety, Scythian Nomadism, and Greek Politics: The Relation between Greeks and Barbarians in Herodotus’ Histories,” at the 9th Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, “The Narrative of Modernity: Co-Existences of Differences,” Pamplona, Spain, 3 August 2004.

Abstract

This article addresses the debate between Afrocentrists like Martin Bernal and classical scholars such as Mary Lefkowitz and Robert Palter concerning the origins of ancient Greek civilization. Focusing on the first half of Herodotus’ Histories, I argue that, although Greek cultural developments can be attributed to the Greeks themselves, Herodotus indicates that the conditions that made these developments possible were due to the prior Greek absorption of important aspects of Egyptian religion. Herodotus shows that the Greeks learned from the Egyptians to individualize their gods and to appreciate the humanity of women. This Egyptian influence, Herodotus suggests, is what allowed the Greeks, in contrast to the Scythians, to become an object to themselves within the context of stable city life. I conclude that this habit of self-reflection is the source of the uniquely Greek contribution to the art, philosophy, science and politics of the West.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper entitled “Egyptian Piety, Scythian Nomadism, and Greek Politics: The Relation between Greeks and Barbarians in Herodotus’ Histories,” at the 9th Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, “The Narrative of Modernity: Co-Existences of Differences,” Pamplona, Spain, 3 August 2004.

2. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. 1 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 1, 2, 31.

3. Ibid., 1, 33, 76, 79, 98–101.

4. Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 22–3.

5. Lefkowitz also treats the controversial issue of race and refutes the claims of the most extreme Afrocentrists that both Socrates and Cleopatra were black. Ibid., 27–52.

6. See Ibid., 124–5, 134–5, 137, 161.

7. See Robert Palter, “Black Athena, Afro-Centrism, and the History of Science,” History of Science 31(93) (1993): 227–8, 233, 252, 273.

8. Ibid., 231, 233, 235, 258, 268, 273–4.

9. Lefkowitz argues that there is no archeological evidence to support the notion that Greek religious practices originated in Egypt (Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, 157). Although not disagreeing with Lefkowitz, my argument does not address the claims of archeology but rather the claims of Herodotus, who does believe that many Greek religious practices were derived from Egypt.

10. Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), II.49; all subsequent references are to this edition.

11. Ibid., I.57–8, represents the Pelasgians as a single, “barbarian” or non-Dorian ethnic group with their own language, some of whom became “Greek”—the Ionians and Athenians—when they adopted the Greek language brought by the Dorians when the latter migrated from the north into the Peloponnese. Sourvinou-Inwood argues that Herodotus constructs the Pelasgians as a single ethnic group over against the Dorians in order to construct the Dorians as a single ethnic group, thereby establishing an antithesis between “Greeks” and “barbarians” which he nonetheless quickly moves to deconstruct by claiming, “though the (Dorians/‘Greek stock’) was weak when it split off from the Pelasgians, it has grown from something small to be a multitude of peoples by the accretion chiefly of the Pelasgians but of many other barbarian peoples as well.” Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, “Herodotos (and others) on Pelasgians: Some Perceptions of Ethnicity,” in Herodotus and His World: Essays from a Conference in Memory of George Forrest, ed. Peter Derow and Robert Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 122–3, 131.

12. My translation. Harrison and Sourvinou-Inwood point out that Herodotus gives a Greek etymology for the word “theous” despite having claimed in The History, II.57 that the Pelasgians spoke a non-Greek language. Thomas Harrison, Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 252; and Sourvinou-Inwood, “Herodotos (and others) on Pelasgians,” 139–40. Sourvinou-Inwood interprets this apparent contradiction to mean that Herodotus uses the word “Pelasgian” to mean two different things: those Pelasgians who became Ionian and Athenian when they adopted the Greek language—implying that it is this group whom Herodotus is talking about in the passage concerned—and those Pelasgians who remained “barbarians” with their own “barbarian” language.

13. The only names that did not come from Egypt, according to Herodotus, were those for Poseidon, the Dioscuri, Hera, Themis, and the Graces and Nereids (The History, II.50).

14. Lefkowitz appears to deny that for Herodotus even the god Heracles in the Greek pantheon comes from Egypt. According to Lefkowitz, Herodotus asserts that Heracles was descended not from the country of Aigyptos, but from the man named Aigyptos who was Greek. Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, 25.

15. Plutarch maintains that Apis is Osiris, thus the Egyptian Dionysus. Plutarch, “Of Isis and Osiris, or of the Ancient Religion and Philosophy of Egypt,” in Plutarch's Essays and Miscellanies: Volume Four, ed. A.H. Clough and W.W. Goodwin (New York: The Colonial Company, 1905), 95.

16. See Ivan M. Linforth, “Greek and Egyptian Gods (Herodotus II. 50 and 52),” Classical Philology 35(3) (1940): 301; and Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 277–9. For an alternative argument, see Harrison who suggests that Herodotus, aware that language can change, means that the Egyptians gave the Pelasgians the actual Greek names now in use in Greece, but, “having imparted these to the Greeks, and the names having fallen out of use in Egypt, [the Egyptians] had begun to use different names.” Harrison, Divinity and History, 252, 256.

17. Norma Thompson makes an interesting connection between Psammetichus’ attempt “to discover the natural language,” and the impulse behind the state of nature theories in such modern political philosophers as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Norma Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community: Arion's Leap (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 47–8.

18. See Ibid., 33.

19. See Seth Benardete, Herodotean Inquiries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 35. Also, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham for Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), 327, 333.

20. See Benardete, Herodotean Inquiries, 58–9.

21. Not only do the Spartans share the reverence for age with the Egyptians, but also the holding of artisans or tradesmen in the lowest contempt, yet holding men solely dedicated to the art of war in the highest honor. Herodotus indicates that this opinion originated in Egypt, coming to Sparta from there (The History, II.167).

22. Benardete argues that the previous story of Psammetichus’ experiment was a discussion of the divine, because looking for the first language is looking for the language of the gods. Benardete, Herodotean Inquiries, 34, 35.

23. The verb Herodotus uses here to indicate that the Nile floods the fields, “arse,” can also mean “come upon,” and that which he uses to indicate that it makes the land fertile, “apoupas,” can also be used as a metaphor for a woman giving birth.

24. Having noted the fact that the land in the Delta region is produced by the constant motion of the Nile, therefore indicating that some land can actually move, Herodotus seems to be suggesting that much of what initially looks to be at rest in nature, is actually in motion, and that what is really at rest, the unchanging and universal, may be more difficult to find than at first appears.

25. The principles of rest and motion, represented in Book II by the earth and the Nile, are referred to by Thomas as the categories of “the wet and the dry” that are also found in the early medical writings and the speculations of the natural philosophers. Thomas, Herodotus in Context, 42–3. Leo Strauss uses the categories of rest and motion to analyze Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian war. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 140, 156–7, 159, 160.

26. Sidney Keith connects the Egyptian belief that their sexuality is determined by something outside themselves, leading to a moderation that makes possible a decent social life, to the Egyptian doctrine of the soul (The History, II.123). Keith calls this “the myth of the soul,” which is the Egyptian contribution to the world, the soul being that form which a human being takes when our inner beings are understood as dependent on something external to the human which has created it. Sidney Keith, Herodotus: The First Political Scientist, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1989, 119. Although Keith's discussion is very insightful, he perhaps de-emphasizes the fact that Herodotus does not say that the Egyptians invented the doctrine of the soul, but rather the immortality of the soul.

27. See The History, II.156 as an example of Egyptian belief that the gods are generators, and II.42 which reveals that Egyptian priests believe the sexual nature of the gods cannot be looked at directly. Hegel holds a similar view about the relation of Egyptian gods to the Egyptian people. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 210.

28. Plutarch, “Of Isis and Osiris,” 92. Also note that Herodotus and Plutarch have a minor disagreement, Herodotus not admitting that even the belief that Osiris is an allegory for the Nile is taught publicly in Egypt.

29. Ibid., 94, 95. Plutarch also says that the Greeks call Dionysus, who comes from Egypt and is called Osiris, “hues,” meaning “the wetter,” and “a son” they call “huios,” from “hudor,” meaning water. See also Phiroze Vasunia, who maintains that for Greek authors in antiquity the Nile was often associated with male fertility as represented not by Dionysus (Osiris) but by Zeus (Ammon). Phiroze Vasunia, The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 43, 45.

30. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 209–10.

31. See Keith who persuasively argues that at their religious festivals, the Egyptians enact their gods, or for brief moments “merge their identity with the gods.” Keith argues that the whole principle of Egyptian religion is an alternation between moderating human distance from the gods and shameless ecstatic union with them for brief moments. Keith, Herodotus, 113–6. For further examples see The History, II.42, II.46, II.48, II.61, and II.63.

32. Thomas claims that Herodotus’ discussion of the flooding of the Nile is within the intellectual milieu of the natural philosophers of the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE. Thomas, Herodotus in Context, 135–9.

33. See Benardete, Herodotean Inquiries, 39.

34. Rosario Vignolo Munson argues that in this passage the Scythians are associated with an “Athenian” type of wisdom, whereas Stanley Rosen maintains that the motion of the Scythians “is a crude imitation of the wisdom and motion of Herodotus … that surpasses the wisdom of the civilized Greeks.” Rosario Vignolo Munson, Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 117; and Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry (New York: Routledge, 1988), 36–8. For an alternative argument, see Benardete, Herodotean Inquiries, 114.

35. With respect to the complexity of Herodotus’ representation of the Scythians as nomads, see Francois Hartog who argues that the nomadism of the Scythians, which allows them to defeat Persian king Darius’ invasion, is a metaphor for the ships of the Athenians, which allows them to defeat Persian king Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, tying Book IV of the Histories together with Books VI–IX. Hartog goes on to say that the Athenian navy, of which nomadism is a metaphor, is itself a metaphor for “insularity” or being like an “island-dweller.” As such, not only is Scythian nomadism a model for the Athenian strategy in the Persian wars, but it also prefigures the Periclean strategy during the Peloponnesian wars, as reported by Thucydides. Hartog's position is that Herodotus distorts the reality (the Scythians were both nomads and cultivators) and calls them nomads for the sake of making the metaphor with the Athenians. Francois Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkley: University of California Press, 1978), 203.

36. The Dnieper. This reminds us of the first part of Socrates’ noble lie in Book III of Plato's Republic, in which the citizens of the city are told that they are all born from the earth, with the exception that the Scythians, or at least Targitaus, are born from a river. Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 414d–e. In both cases it denies origins or generation from a human female.

37. In contrast, the pile of 700,000 stones, which Darius has his army construct at the river Artescus, is a memorial to Darius’ army as individual men (The History, IV.92). This is unlike Ariantas’ great bronze cauldron, which, in destroying the individual arrowheads, destroys the individual identity of the Scythians who brought them.

38. See Benardete, Herodotean Inquiries, 104.

39. Although the Pontine Greek story is fantastic or poetic, they can use these images to represent the natural or the real. The Scythian story is also fantastic or poetic, but in no way leads them back to nature or reality.

40. It is true that the Scythians, who are nomads, worship Hestia, a feminine goddess of the hearth and therefore of fixed abodes. See Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus, 121. Perhaps this paradox can be illuminated by what Herodotus says of the Pelasgians and their gods in History, II.52. The Pelasgians believed the gods existed, and therefore that there was a type of being different from and higher than the human. As I have argued, the Pelasgians associated this type of divine being with the feminine and thus with that which they believed to be at rest. Accordingly, they associated the human with the masculine and thus with that which they believed to be in motion. The Scythians, in seeing the highest god as feminine and related to domesticity and fixity, would see the human being, that which is not divine, as masculine and in motion.

41. In The History, II.57, Herodotus suggests that the Pelasgians became “Greek” when they adopted the Greek language. Sourvinou-Inwood argues that for Herodotus Greek ethnic identity was determined by perceived ancestry, language and religious practices, and, moreover, the fact that blood ancestry was not the only prerequisite for being considered Greek blurred the distinction or destabilized the dichotomy “barbarian versus Greek.” Sourvinou-Inwood, “Herodotos (and others) on Pelasgians,” 141, 144.

42. Munson gives an alternative interpretation, suggesting that the worship of Dionysus as described in the story of Scyles is “un-Greek,” and that rather than sympathizing with Scyles Herodotus intends his Greek readers to sympathize with the Scythians because the latter, not Scyles, are actually more “Greek” in this instance. Munson, Telling Wonders, 120–1.