#hdt has been assimilated

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Does anyone else still have their Flip video camera?

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Herodotus, the “father of the ethnological studies in the Western tradition”-II

The Gökçeler relief, an example of Greco-Persian art in 5th century BCE Anatolia. Source:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Persian_art

“Herodotus is so familiar to us as an innovative figure – Cicero’s dictum on his status as the “father of History” so well known a catchphrase (Laws 1.1.5) –that we still tend to underestimate the brilliance of his achievement. He was not only the first analyst of mere cultural difference, but he also portrayed for his audience the first realizations in our intellectual tradition of the processes of dif -ferentiation. However, it is important for us to qualify the nature of his Histories on two essential points before proceeding. First, Herodotus’ dependence on oral sources and his apparent naivety during his collection of source material over the scale to which his work would aspire meant that an extraordinary stratifica-tion and mosaic-effect of Greek observers is manifested throughout his work as transmitted to us. These interactors with the non-Greek world severally grappled with issues of translation (see Brandwood’s contribution in this volume), varia-tions of evidentiary standards (e.g., regarding necessity for and nature of autopsy), and distortions of transmission among each other. Herodotus’ interlocutors were themselves also fundamentally conditioned by the processes of assimilation, hybridity, and biculturalism that lie at the heart of the histor ’s own impetus to confront the ‘other’. Any imputation to Herodotus – or even to his mainly anony-mous interlocutors – of any motivation whatsoever, and especially of animus, is thus greatly complicated.22 Second, Herodotus and his contemporaries did not have the advantage of their modern scholars in their assurance over canonicity of classical Greek culture. Much that may now strike us as hostilely prejudicial may rather betray defensive posturing in the face of the antiquity, physical scale, and, in the case of the Persians, astounding wealth and power of non-Greek cultures (see Gregory Nagy in this volume [pp. 109–42] on alternative paths of evolution for Hellenicity). As is discernible even in the contemporary world, a degree of ethno-chauvinism can be anticipated from those living in the shadow of populous, wealthy, technologically advanced, and media-dominant societies. Is this not animplicit justification for multiculturalism in modern discourse?

For Herodotus, nomoi or mores could differ from people to people simply as a manifestation of variation, but at other times perhaps owing to various environmental factors, with substantial effects in the aggregate both for mere subsistence and for affluence (as the Portuguese of the age of discovery recognized, as is shown by Carmen Soares in this volume [pp. 296–325]). In varied settings, humans acted under the influence of nomoi directing their existence, as was summed upin his reflection on the adage of Pindar that nomos ‘law’ was basileus ‘king’ (Hdt.3.38.3–4). This is applied when Dareios, an astonishing and instructive choice for our teacher in the variety of human behaviour, brings the Indian Kalliatai, who ritually eat their dead, into confrontation with the Greeks, who cremate. Yet Herodotus was also a universalist in his own terms, as his reflections on Egyptian religion indicate especially: people tapped the same transcendent order, even if their rituals varied, their awareness of it was imperfect, and their ability to adhere to its dictates may have fallen short or lapsed to a lesser or greater extent. Moreover, Herodotus is not what would now be called an ‘essentialist’, as he readily conceives that one people may borrow from another – his insistence on the Egyptian origin of Greek cultural motifs has long been emphasized23 – and, although he lacked a fully explicit concept of hybridity, his willingness to recognize a considerable degree of diffusion or admixture is notable, as is also well illustrated by the Phoenician influence on the Greeks (e.g., Hdt. 5.58–59) and the existence of assorted medial groups. As Alexandre Agnolon’s chapter in this volume will show (pp. 159–77), the Scythian Hellenizers dramatize the challenges faced by cultural hybrids (for Skyles, note 4.78–80). There Herodotus’ sympathy with the Scythian perspective on Hellenization is conspicuous. Moreover, as I note later, if the Athenians are to be viewed as aboriginally Pelasgians who had traversed a set of self-identifications, originalist biases for Herodotus must be considered to have been significantly muted. And it is important to indicate that, whenever one says “Herodotus” in statements about the content of his accounts of non-Greek societies, they are using a shorthand reference for a unique and perhaps virtually non-duplicable stratigraphy of witnessing on any specific matter.

This Herodotean ‘othering’ can be viewed as ‘mirroring’, as Hartog stressed,24  but we have already recognized that the mirror at issue is not a simple glass for contemplation. Rather, viewing is staged in a hall of mirrors with glasses of various degrees of trueness or distortion. Sometimes the reflections are truly inverted, in which the lives of non-Greeks embody the converse of Greek nomoi, although this opposition as in the case of the Egyptians could be to all mankind (Hdt.2.35.1–4).25 Such obversions could even continue to the point of perversity, such as general promiscuity,26 and ritual prostitution,27 where the negativity of judgment is noteworthy.28 This phenomenon draws on an archaic propensity for think ing in polarities. Yet, we can also see in mirroring the possibility in which the Greeks can be situated medially between two converses, such as between cultures where clothing is absent or minimal and Asian societies where any nakedness at all is prohibited (cf. Hdt. 1.8.2–4, 11.3–5). Sometimes when this normative deviation has seductive power, our mirror ought to be rendered as a wishing well of fantasy, as in the cases where unproblematic sexual promiscuity is foregrounded (the casual liaisons of the Massagetai or Nasamones: Hdt. 1.216.1; 4.172.2). Herodotus notes this variation of sexual behaviour without titillation or prurient embellishment. It becomes then an open question whether the prominent portrayal of inversions in sexuality do not also serve as a mechanism for coping with the shock elicited by confrontation with the primitive. In some cases, especially regarding Egyptian culture, the image in the Herodotean mirror assumes the authority of a prototype or archetype. Moreover, our Herodotean mirrors possess persistent reflections, so that a succession of interpreters, local guides, non-Greek authorities, Greek sophoi ‘sages’, and logioi ‘experts’, standing in mediation with the‘others’, have left their traces in what must be thoroughly composite images.” 

Scythian Tribute Bearers on the Apadana Staircase, Persepolis, Iran. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scythian_Tribute_Bearers_on_the_Apadana_Staircase_12_(Best_Viewed_Size_%22Large%22)_(4688092455).jpg

Text from the Introduction of Thomas Figueira to Thomas Figueira, Carmen Soares (editors)  Ethnicity and Identity in Herodotus, Routledge 2020

On line source: https://www.academia.edu/42297881/A_Goddess_for_the_Greeks_Demeter_as_Identity_Factor_in_Herodotus

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Herodotus, Ethnicity, and Identity

“Ethnicity and Identity in Herodotus

Edited By Thomas Figueira, Carmen Soares

Edition 1st Edition 

First Published 2020

eBook Published 31 January 2020 

Pub. Location London 

Imprint  Routledge

ABSTRACT

Herodotus is the epochal authority who inaugurated the European and Western consciousness of collective identity, whether in an awareness of other societies and of the nature of cultural variation itself or in the fashioning of Greek self-awareness – and necessarily that of later civilizations influenced by the ancient Greeks – which was perpetually in dialogue and tension with other ways of living in groups.

In this book, 14 contributors explore ethnicity – the very self-understanding of belonging to a separate body of human beings – and how it evolves and consolidates (or ethnogenesis). This inquiry is focussed through the lens of Herodotus as our earliest master of ethnography, in this instance not only as the stylized portrayal of other societies, but also as an exegesis on how ethnocultural differentiation may affect the lives, and even the very existence, of one’s own people.

Ethnicity and Identity in Herodotus is one facet of a project that intends to bring Portuguese and English-speaking scholars of antiquity into closer cooperation. It has united a cross-section of North American classicists with a distinguished cohort of Portuguese and Brazilian experts on Greek literature and history writing in English.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter|12 pages

Introduction 

By Thomas Figueira

Abstract

Herodotus shows himself to have been acutely sensitive to the ethnic ramifications of Greek colonization, as his catalogue of forces before Salamis is careful to trace such lines of filiation of settlement and potential contemporary affiliation. Herodotus’ interlocutors were themselves also fundamentally conditioned by the processes of assimilation, hybridity, and biculturalism that lie at the heart of the histor’s own impetus to confront the ‘other’. Yet Herodotus was also a universalist in his own terms, as his reflections on Egyptian religion indicate especially: people tapped the same transcendent order, even if their rituals varied, their awareness of it was imperfect, and their ability to adhere to its dictates may have fallen short or lapsed to a lesser or greater extent. In some cases, especially regarding Egyptian culture, the image in the Herodotean mirror assumes the authority of a prototype or archetype.

Part I

Chapter 1|28 pages

Herodotus' Hermēneus and the translation of culture in the Histories

By Steven Brandwood

Abstract

Linguistic interpreters feature only rarely within the Histories’ narrative, despite their implicit importance to Herodotus’ ethnographic project. This chapter analyzes their subsequently marked appearances in Persia (Hdt. 3.38; 3.140), Egypt (2.154; 2.164), and Scythia (4.24) before considering more closely the role of interpreters in the interview between Cyrus and Croesus (1.85-90), the Ethiopian embassy of the Ichthyophagoi (3.18-23), and Herodotus’ interactions with his own translator in Egypt (2.125). These episodes demonstrate the limited ethnographic value of the linguistic information offered by interpreters and the superiority of the kind of careful cultural positioning offered only by Herodotus himself, the Histories’ arch-interpreter.

Chapter 2|29 pages

Language as a marker of ethnicity in Herodotus and contemporaries

By Thomas Figueira

Abstract

Thomas Figueira: Language as a Marker of Ethnicity in Herodotus & Contemporaries. A consideration of ethnicity in Herodotus starts from the formulation of the Athenian envoys at Sparta in 479 where quality of being ‘same-blooded’ is juxtaposed with being ‘of the same language’. Recent scholarship has failed to recognize the primary role of language and dialect in distinguishing ethnic identity, such as Greek versus non-Greek, in the contrast between Ionians and Dorians, and among Greek ethnē. Differentiation between folkways and ritual behavior worked synergistically with linguistic variation. Wrong-headed perspectives on Greek ethnicity can reduces ethnogenesis to mere arbitrariness and mistake the significance of a fundamental cultural distinction dividing Greeks and non-Greeks.

Chapter 3|12 pages

Protocols of ethnic specification in Herodotus

By Brian Hill

Abstract

The word ethnos or an inflected form appears some 138 times in Herodotus’ Histories. But what qualifies a community as an ethnos in Herodotus’ eyes? And how does that definition affect our reading of the Histories? This paper undertakes to examine precisely these questions, beginning with the analysis of several famous features common throughout Herodotus’ various cultural excurses. This paper examines the factors that qualify one group as merely a subset of a population to Herodotus, but marks another as a distinct and separate ethnos unto itself, especially as these criteria pertain to Herodotus’ preferred behavioral headings. The oscillations in Herodotean ethnic descriptors parallel tensions in his historiography over the coherence of cultural groups as biological and as cultural constructs. This is particularly important because biological homogeneity is not cultural determinism.

Chapter 4|22 pages

Emotion and ethnicity in Herodotus' Histories

By Emily Allen-Hornblower

Abstract

This paper considers the portrayal of different historical actors’ responses to others’ display of emotions in Herodotus’ Histories, which is used as a starting point to explore certain scenes in which Herodotus depicts representatives of one culture (e.g., Cambyses, a Persian) observing another and seeking to understand the motivations and nature of their foreign counterparts’ emotional displays (e.g., Psammenitus, an Egyptian). Such reactions, often apparently operating on an almost visceral level, allow insights into Herodotean and contemporary appreciations of human universalism and differentiation between cultural and ethnic responses to emotional display.

Part Part II|91 pages

Ethnicity among the Greeks

Chapter 5|34 pages

Mages and Ionians revisited

By Gregory Nagy

Abstract

The identity of the Iōnes or ‘Ionians’ of Asia Minor, it is argued, would have been extended by a would-be expanded Persian Empire to include the territory of Athens — if the invasion by Xerxes in 480–479 BCE against what we now know as Greece had succeeded. The Ionians of Asia Minor, which was part of the Persian Empire, were a linguistic and ethnic sub-grouping of Greeks that had close affinities with the Greeks populating the territory of Athens. By contrast, a rival self-definition of the Greeks as Hellēnes or ‘Hellenes’ would have been eliminated under an expanded Persian Empire.

Chapter 6|16 pages

Freedom and culture in Herodotus

By Rosaria Vignolo Munson

Abstract

Fifth century Greeks regarded freedom as a defining mark of their ethnic identity, but Herodotus attributes love of freedom also to foreign peoples. This paper examines this historian's understanding of what freedom means to both Greeks and non-Greeks. It reconciles Herodotus’ cultural relativism, expressed in the statement ‘nomos (custom/law/culture) is king of all’), with his rejection of autocratic monarchy among non-Greek peoples and particularly the Persians, whom he regards as the Greeks’ most prestigious and admirable ideological opponents.

Chapter 7|19 pages

Cosmopolitanism and contingency in Herodotus

Myth and tragedy in the Book IV of the Histories

By Alexandre Agnolon

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the episodes of Anacharsis and Skyles in the fourth book of the Histories (4. 76. 1- 80. 5) in order to demonstrate how Herodotus culturally translates the practices and customs of the Scythian people. Our hypothesis is that Herodotus, in order to make comprehensible the identity characteristics of the Scythians, makes a pervasive use of symbolic structures known to the Greeks, particularly originating from tragedy and myth. Therefore, these structures must be understood in Herodotus as devices of translation and representation of Scythian identity.

Chapter 8|20 pages

A goddess for the Greeks

Demeter as identity factor in Herodotus 

By Nuno Simões Rodrigues

Abstract

Within the Persian Wars narrative, Herodotus makes allusions to Demeter. One reference is presented in the context of the Persian occupation of Attica. In other passages, Herodotus writes that the battle of Plataia was near the sanctuary of Demeter, just as was the battle of Mykale. The Historian considers this was just a coincidence. But he also says that among the Greek forces were soldiers from Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Megara. Therefore, Demeter emerges as a protective goddess of the Greeks and Herodotus represents the Goddess of Eleusis as well as the cults associated with her as panhellenic identity factors.

Part Part III|70 pages

Ethnic identity among the Barbaroi

Chapter 9|19 pages

Herodotus' Memphite sources

By Rogério Sousa

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the accounts in Book 2 so as to access Herodotus effective knowledge of Egyptian temples. Although presenting an accurate portrait of the land and the people, Herodotus’ texts betray an insufficient understanding of the local priestly traditions which probably resulted from an unwelcoming reception by the Egyptian priests. Memphis, stands out as an exception in this panorama, providing Herodotus with a direct contact with the historical sources which later on would be brilliantly used by Manetho to write his History of Egypt.

Chapter 10|17 pages

The Greeks as seen from the east

Xerxes'  European enemy 

By Maria de Fátima Silva

Abstract

When planning his attack against Greece Herodotus’ Xerxes made a mistake, focusing on his own forces and fighting conditions. About his enemy, he had shallow knowledge, evaluating the Greeks in accordance with a Near Eastern value system. In this refraction of ethnic identity and differentiation, Greek premises are projected onto Persians in a phenomenon of mirroring. Examining how Herodotus understood the Persian conceptualizations of Greekness thus uncovers self-awareness and also reveals Herodotean and Ionian interaction with Persians who spoke Greek and may have claimed authority both as Greek “experts” in the administration of the Persian empire and as cultural mediators.

Chapter 11|21 pages

Mirages of ethnicity and the distant north in Book IV of the Histories

Hyperboreans, Arimaspians, and Issedones

By Renaud Gagné 

Abstract

Herodotus’ investigation of the ‘most distant populations’ of the north at the edge of the oikoumenē in 4.5-36 is woven over the rival legacy of the Ionian traveler and mystic Aristeas of Prokonnesos into a very deep web of contestations and appropriations. After looking at the specificities of Herodotus’ engagement with Aristeas in 4.5-36, the paper proceeds to discuss the roles played by this staging of opposition in the text’s construction of ethnic authority.

Chapter 12|11 pages

Ethnicity in Herodotus

The story of Helen through the Egyptians' eyes

By Maria do Céu Fialho

Abstract

Herodotus’ Book Two references an Egyptian, rationalizing version of the myth of Helen revealing motifs already attested in Stesichorus, but diverging from Cyclic epic (Cypria). Here is another Trojan War, different from that in epic or Attic tragedy. Euripides’ Helen revives this ‘Egyptian version’. Such coincidences and divergences testify to early recirculation of mythos between Egypt and Greece and raises questions about the Egyptian milieu in which myths circulated so fluidly undergoing transformations in light of local myth, cult, and folkways. Ethno-cultural boundaries are established in Herodotus only to be subjected to complication or even subversion.

Part Part IV|57 pages

Reflections of Herodotean ethnic historiography

Chapter 13|25 pages

Barbarians, Greekness, and wisdom

The afterlife of Croesus' debate with Solon 

By Delfim F. Leão

Abstract

Herodotus provides a particularly impressive report of the meeting between Solon and Croesus, which will become a conventional model for the way in which a dialogue involving a Greek sage and an “Eastern” monarch might have unfolded, thus paving the way to combine ethnicity and wisdom in the shaping of a sophos. It is the aim of this paper to study the afterlife of the debate between Croesus and Solon, and the way it evolved from an almost neutral approach in Herodotus (in terms of ethnic tension) to a vividly marked portrait of Hellenicity combined with ethnicity in Plutarch.

Chapter 14|30 pages

Scientific discourse in Herodotus Book II and its reflection in the age of New World discovery*

By Carmen Soares

Abstract

Herodotus’ work is the product of a milieu where different areas of knowledge developed within a holistic approach toward an unknown, non-Greek world. Geography, ethnography, dietetics, botany, and zoology belonged to historiographical research. And this conception of History and this historiographical model revived in the early Modern Era, when New World discoveries restored confidence in Herodotus (hitherto considered mendax and fabulosus). My analysis aims to demonstrate how Book 2 highlights these scientific methodologies throughout his logos on Egypt. My second goal is to illustrate the tenacity of these conceptualizations in the travel literature surrounding the Portuguese exploration of Brazil.”

Source: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315209081/ethnicity-identity-herodotus-thomas-figueira-carmen-soares

In older posts of mine I have presented experts from this very interesting book and more particularly of the papers of Thomas Figueira ( https://aboutanancientenquiry.tumblr.com/post/677114822750568448/herodotus-the-father-of-the-ethnological-studies,  https://aboutanancientenquiry.tumblr.com/post/677164547084255232/herodotus-the-father-of-the-ethnological-studies) and Rogerio Susa ( https://aboutanancientenquiry.tumblr.com/post/670420364974833664/the-portuguese-egyptologist-r-sousa-on-the ).