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Neglected Factors in the Greek Intellectual Revolution
Author(s): William F. Albright Source: Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, Vol. 116, No. 3 (Jun. 9, 1972), pp. 225
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NEGLECTED FACTORS IN THE GREEK INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION
WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT
Late Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages, Johns Hopkins
University (Read November 11, 1965)1
THE Greek intellectual revolution is a unique phenomenon in the
history of the human intellect.2 The shift in ways of thinking
which took place among the Hellenes between the late seventh
century and the middle of the fourth century B.C. was far more
drastic than the Renaissance; it did not involve the recovery of a
lost civilization, but consisted essentially in an introduction of
gen- eralized modes of thought as well as of reasoning with the
tools of formal logic. Thanks to Alex- ander's conquest of the
East, the effects of this revolution were disseminated over the
civilized world almost as rapidly as was true of the Renais- sance.
Another comparison, in some ways more cogent, would be with the
scientific revolution of the past three centuries.
It is a great mistake to assume that men did not think logically
before the Greek intellectual revolution. It is an equal mistake to
suppose that formal logic is for practical purposes as old as the
human spirit.3 In the first place, there are no- where in the whole
mass of written documents recovered from the ancient East during
the past 150 years any indications of generalized abstract
reasoning or formal logic. Twenty years ago a well-known European
historian of mathematics and astronomy used to discuss this
question with me; he was sure that he could find an example
somewhere of a syllogism in ancient Eastern
1 The paper as read was a condensation of a longer essay which
appears here in revised form. [The text was completed by Dr.
Albright before his death on September 19, 1971. The footnotes,
however, were in draft form only, and have been assembled and
arranged by Professor David N. Freedman of the University of
Michigan.]
2 The research leading to this paper was begun at Harvard
University in July, 1960. It was directly stimulated by an article
by my old friend Otto Eissfeldt, "Phonikische und griechische
Kosmogonie," rle'ments orientaux dans la religion grecque ancienne,
Travaux du centre d'etudes . . . de Strasbourg 3 (1960): pp.
1-15.
3 For an evaluation of the contrasting views of Levy- Bruhl and
Levi-Strauss, see the Preface to the 5th ed. of my Archaeology and
the Religion of Israel (Anchor Books ed., New York, 1969), pp.
xiv-xvi. Cf. n. 7 below.
literature. After months of poring over transla- tions of
ancient texts, he had to admit that he had not found a single case.
To be sure, there are many latent syllogisms, but there is no
indication whatever that the principle of the syllogism as such was
recognized anywhere. Nor do we have any systematic classification
along abstract lines. On the other hand, ancient law, no less than
modern customary law, does show the practical use of the syllogism,
even though it was not recognized as such and there was no
generalization of this method visible anywhere in ancient Eastern
litera- ture or in modern customary law as collected by
ethnologists.
Empirical logic-the logic born of experience4 -tends to lead to
results which are quite as true as corresponding inferences drawn
by methods of formal logic, and has one advantage over formal
reasoning. In formal reasoning it is necessary to start with
postulates which are taken for granted, since basic postulates can
seldom be demonstrated to be true. Empirical logic reflects the
accumu- lated skill and knowledge of many generations; it also
reflects the considered reactions of exceptional personalities to
environment. The Hebrew Bible is probably the most remarkable
example of a work characterized almost throughout by empirical
logic that has survived from antiquity. Com- parable with it in
some ways, though nearly all later in date, is the empirical logic
embedded in the Analects of Confucius.5
4See my From the Stone Age to Christianity (Anchor Books ed.,
New York, 1957), pp. 122-123, 168-169, and the French translation,
De L'Age de la pierre a la chre'tiente' (Paris, 1951), pp. 86-87,
122-123; also Arch- aeology and the Religion of Israel, pp. 25-33,
and the German translation, Die Religion Israels im Lichte der
archiiologischen Ausgrabungen (revised and enlarged ed., Munich,
1956), pp. 37-48; and my History, Archaeology and Christian
Humanism (New York, 1964), pp. 66-73.
5 Note Confucius's great reliance on traditional wis- dom, his
stress on practical morality, and his empirical approach to
"heaven," after abandoning traditional poly- theism. Cf. the
discussion by H. H. Rowley in his Prophecy and Religion in Ancienit
China and Israel (London, 1956).
PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 116, NO.
3, JUNE 1972 225
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226 WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.
Primitive customary law of the recent past and today is
concerned with actual situations which occur, and can therefore in
its simpler forms be handled legally without producing
contradictions. It is thus possible to interpret primitive law as
though there were postulates (environmental and other special
conditions of life and society), syllogisms (which can always be
worked out to cover any legal case),6 and corollaries (which
naturally arise from given situations). Intelligent ancient
Orientals as well as modern primitives and savages 7 could
perfectly well reason logically, but they would not be conscious of
reasoning in any such way, and if one were to analyze the processes
involved in abstract terms, they would be com- pletely
mystified.
Empirical logic must therefore be distinguished from formal
logic, because it deals with specific cases, tends to generalize
implicitly, and prefers concrete to abstract terms. On the other
side, empirical logic must be contrasted with proto- logical
thinking because it has little or no myth- ology, or magic and
divination. This does not mean, however, that one can never see two
or all three of these basic forms of thinking present in the same
cultural circle or the same individual mind more or less
simultaneously.8
The phenomenon of the Greek intellectual revo- lution was,
therefore, unique; not only was there a true revolution, but it
began with Thales- possibly standing on the shoulders of some un-
known genius who preceded him (cf. Newton and Hooke). But when we
try to account for the Greek intellectual revolution-or at least to
estab- lish some dominant cause-historians have been baffled. Let
us briefly survey some of the explana- tions-total or partial-which
have been advanced to account for this extraordinary
phenomenon.
1. Was it Greek genius? There is nothing to prove that the
Hellenes were intrinsically superior to their neighbors as human
beings. Soon after Alexander's conquest of Asia the great period of
philosophical innovation was over, and after the second century
B.C. there were only a few out- standing intellectual geniuses in
the Greek world- scarcely more than two or three to a century. A
hundred years ago there was nothing to show that the Japanese were
potentially more likely to
6 Cf. E. Adamson Hoebel, The Law of Primitive Man: a Study in
Comparative Legal Dynamics (Cambridge, 1954), and my discussion in
History, Archaeology and Christian Humanism, p. 98.
7Cf. n. 3 above. 8 Cf. n. 4 above.
succeed in the modern world than their neighbors, but now that
the Japanese are leading in business and are gaining ground with
unexampled speed in research and technology, we may even think of
them as some kind of supermen. Had the Greeks' environment not been
favorable, it is very doubt- ful that they would have produced
anything out- standing between 600 and 300 B.C., as they most
assuredly did.
2. Or we may turn to the explanation advanced by F. M. Cornford
9-that there was something in Greek mythology that tended directly
toward metaphysics, which in turn passed into philosophy. But this
is a sequence, not an explanation, and the discovery by Guterbock
of the Eastern antecedents of Hesiod's cosmogony has spoiled
Cornford's neat picture.10 The greatness of Homer as a poet is
almost universally recognized, but there is no hint in Homer of any
form of speculative philos- ophy. Yet Hesiod, who followed him
within a century or two,1" combines in his own work both
proto-logic (the Theogony) and empirical logic (Works and
Days).
3. According to 0. Gigon 12 Greek philosophy is primarily a
linguistic development in Greek. He thinks that the structure of
the Greek language is admirably suited to development of
philosophical thinking. It must be admitted that the Greek language
is one of the most melodious and flexible languages ever developed
by man. It must also be said that an elaborate system of prefixes
and suffixes made it easy to distinguish between rela- tively fine
shades of meaning. But this idea is far too much like Max Muller's
famous dictum, "Mythology is a disease of language." A good
language does help in the development of specific ideas; it also
has a directive function in making it possible for a philosophical
genius to combine a host of contradictory ideas under one head
by
9 Cf. F. M. Cornford, Fromt Religion to Philosophy, (Harper
Torchbooks, New York, 1957), Preface and pp. 6, 39; and Principium
Sapientiae (Cambridge, 1952), pp. vii-viii, 159 ff.
10 H. S. Guterbock, Kumarbi, Istanbuler Schriften 16 (1946): pp.
100-115, and Uvo H6lscher, "Anaximander und die Anfange der
Philosophie," Hermes 81 (1953): pp. 257-277, 385-418.
11 Martin L. West, Hesiod: Theogony (Oxford, 1966), chap. 3,
dates it about 730-700 B.C., but he puts the Iliad and the Odyssey
later.
12 0. Gigon, Der Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie (2nd ed.,
Basel, 1968), pp. 62 f.; cf. his Grundprobleme der antiken
Philosophie (Bern, 1959), and "Die Theo- logie der Vorsokratiker,"
Entretiens 1 (1952) : pp. 127- 155.
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VOL. 116, NO. 3, 1972] THE GREEK INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION 227
using words with a wide spectrum of meaning, such as Hegel's
Geist and Herbert Spencer's "force." But the history of German
philosophy shows that the proliferation of shades of meaning by use
of nominal and prepositional compounds is a rich source of
metaphysical ideas but a fatal obstacle to clarity of thinking. No
such com- pound ever has a meaning limited to the sum of the
meanings of its elements; it always contains overtones which
interfere seriously with logical rigor of thought.13
4. Another major explanation of the sudden explosion of Greek
thought at Miletus in Anato- lian Ionia is that the Greeks took
over their ma- terial ready-made from the East and developed it
further. This point of view was normal in the early nineteenth
century, but it was displaced by Salomon Reinach 14 and his
followers; in recent years there have been revivals of this
approach along new lines.'5 Against it is the fact that there is no
trace of any such development in the Syro- Palestinian literature
which has come down to us from antiquity. It is impossible to
derive Greek logic and philosophy from Egypt, Babylonia, or
Phoenicia. As we shall see, our knowledge of Phoenician literature
from this period has ex- panded greatly in recent years, yet there
is still no trace of any such development. On the other hand it is
quite true that there is, as we shall also see, important evidence
from the East which does throw light on the emergence of the new
age on Greek soil. Note moreover that there is no trace in any
Mesopotamian or Egyptian source of any theoretical treatise on
mathematics, astronomy, medicine, or other sciences; there are only
practical manuals covering individual cases and problems. It is
strange that many historians of science still believe that
theoretical treatises will come to light in the ancient East. We
may rest assured that they never will, because such theoretical
structures could only be based on the use of explicit postu- lates,
syllogistic reasoning, and systematic logical classification. We
shall see, however, that we do have in the Hebrew Bible, which is
the most pertinent body of Eastern written material from the period
between the tenth and the fifth centuries
13 Cf. History, Archaeology and Christian Humanism, pp.
86-92.
14 "Le Mirage oriental," L'Anthropologie 4 (1893): pp. 539-578,
699-732 (also reprinted and separately num- bered, pp. 1-74).
15 E.g., Eissfeldt, "Ph6nikische und griechische Kosmo- gonie."
Cf. also H6lscher's balanced judgment, "Anaxi- mander und die
Anfange der Philosophie."
B.C., occasional rare approaches to systematic classification
and to formalized propositions. It must, however, be noted that
there is extra- ordinarily little relevant Iron Age material in the
entire ancient East outside of Israel. Almost all the now recovered
literature, outside royal in- scriptions, letters, economic texts,
etc., had been handed down from the Bronze Age.
A rapid survey of the cultural and political situation in the
Eastern Mediterranean, in the period immediately preceding and
contemporary with the floruit of the Milesian school, throws
completely new light on the complex origins of the Greek
intellectual revolution. For several centuries there had been
exceedingly active movements of traders, mercenaries, invading
armies and migrat- ing peoples, between southern Anatolia, Syria,
Palestine, and northern Egypt on the one hand, and the Aegean and
western Anatolia, on the other. We know from Egyptian and Israelite
sources that various Sea Peoples settled in the eastern
Mediterranean in the late thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C.
Best known among these groups were the Philistines.16 After the
late thirteenth century B.C., Cyprus was partly occupied by new
Greek (Danaan) fugitives and colonists from Greece and the islands,
as well as by Greek- influenced Teucrians from Western Asia Minor.
By the eighth century B.C., Cyprus was largely "Danaan" and there
were old settlements estab- lished in Cilicia. While the problem of
the Danaans is not completely settled, it is highly probable that
the term (Egyptian Tanaya) re- ferred originally to mainland
Greeks.'7
In the tenth century, David's bodyguard was made up of Cretan
mercenaries. In the ninth to the sixth centuries we find many
Aegean and Carian mercenaries in Israel.18 Recent excava- tion at a
small fortress near Jamnia on the coast of southern Palestine,
dated by a Hebrew ostracon to about 625 B.C., in the reign of King
Josiah, has yielded East-Greek (Carian) painted pottery in
considerable quantities, proving the location there of a Carian
garrison. In the seventh and
16 See my discussion in "The Amarna Letters from Palestine;
Syria, the Philistines and Phoenicia," Cam- bridge Ancient History
Fasc. 51 (Cambridge, 1966): pp. 24-33.
17 "The Amarna Letters . . . ," pp. 25 ff. 18 See II Kings 11:4
from the late ninth century B.C.,
and note that the numerous references to Kittiyim in the Arad
ostraca from the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., probably signify
the Carians. In any case, the word Kittiyfm does not mean
"Phoenicians from Citium in Cyprus," but is a generic name for
"Aegeans."
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228 WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.
sixth centuries we also find Carians and other Aegean
mercenaries in Egypt. Hellenic trading settlements ("factories")
began to appear along the coast of Syria and Palestine in the
eighth century, and they became common in the sixth century, when
Greek commerce reached its height.
Meanwhile the Phoenicians were exerting in- creasingly strong
influence on all parts of the Mediterranean.19 As we can now say on
the basis of palaeography and pottery chronology as well as
improved reckoning of genealogies, the Phoenician expansion in the
Mediterranean began in the tenth century and reached its climax in
the eighth, just before the beginning of Greek coloniza- tion in
the western Mediterranean. The extent of Phoenician influence in
Asia Minor is illustrated by the bilingual inscriptions from
Karatepe in eastern Cilicia, which are in Phoenician and Hittite
hieroglyphs.20 They must be dated about the third quarter of the
eighth century B.C., not long after the Greeks adopted the
Phoenician alphabet.21
19 Cf. "The Amarna Letters . .. ," pp. 33-43. For my discussion
of new material on the Phoenician ex- pansion, see Yahweh and the
Gods of Canaan (New York, 1968), pp. 219 ff.
20 Cf. "The Amarna Letters ...," p. 46. For the date of the
inscriptions I return to the third quarter of the eighth century,
but R. D. Barnett is right about the reliefs. He has seen that the
orthostates are definitely ninth century, and has proposed dating
the inscriptions in the same period (oral communication in October,
1964). But the inscriptions actually are later than most of the
orthostates, as is clear from their script and their position when
found. Cf. M. Weippert's recent paper, "Elemente ph6nikischer und
kilikischer Religion in den Inschriften vom Karatepe," Zeitschrift
der deutschent .Morgenldndischen Geselischaft, Supplementa 1, 1
(1969): pp. 191-217. F. M. Cross confirms the dating of the
inscriptions (private correspondence).
21 The minimum date (in the late eighth century) for the
borrowing of the Phoenician alphabet by the Greeks, which has been
popular recently, must be raised in any case, because the Phrygian
inscriptions discovered in a royal tomb from the end of the eighth
century, recently excavated by Rodney Young, exhibit a script
clearly derived from the Greek. Young has suggested that the script
may have been takeni over from the Phoenicians by the Phrygians and
passed on to the Greeks by the latter; cf. "Gordion on the Royal
Road," Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc. 107, 4 (1963): pp. 348-364, esp.
349 ff. and 356. The Phrygian art may be dated to the second half,
perhaps the last third of the eighth century B.C. With respect to
'the script, the forms of the letters do not support Young's view.
Besides, it is geographically and historically much more likely
that the Phoenician script reached the Phrygians through the Greeks
than the reverse. The most probable paleographic date for the
borrowing of the alphabet is about 800 B.C.
Beginning with the tenth century and reaching its climax in the
seventh, Phoenician art and architecture spread all over the
Mediterranean. Painted, orientalizing pottery came into use be-
fore the end of the eighth century, and Phoenician architecture was
probably introduced about the same time, judging from the
proto-Aeolic pilaster capitals found in Cyprus and Lesbos. The
latter presupposes such sixth-century Phoenician temple plans as
those of Selinus in Sicily.
Ionia itself, on the southwest coast of Asia Minor, situated
between Lydia, Caria, and the Aegean, had been settled by Greeks no
later than the tentlh and probably in the eleventh century B.c., as
is now becoming increasingly clear from numerous excavations
undertaken in this area in recent years.22 Before the latest
excavations in this area, there was a tendency to belittle the
Ionians and even to doubt whether they had really led at all in the
development of science and the arts.23 The late history of
Phoenicia and Attica should be sufficient warning that a small,
mountainous country on the seacoast, seemingly fit only for goats,
is quite capable of achieving the highest level of progress in
commerce and culture. It is now certain, too, that neighboring
Caria, the home of Herodotus had been a civilized country from the
Bronze Age on. Unstratified clay tablets in the local Carian script
derived from Minoan A have quite recently been found at Labraunda
in Caria. Miletus itself was occupied by Greeks and Anatolians in
the Bronze Age and is mentioned in the Hittite inscriptions of the
Late Bronze Age. The early emergence of Greek colonies in Ionia as
great centers of trade is best illustrated by the fact that
"Ionian" became the name by which the Greeks were known in Hebrew,
Assyro-Baby- lonian, Old Persian, and Sanskrit.24
A good illustration of the extraordinary mixture of racial
elements in Miletus during the seventh
22 "The Amarna Letters . , p. 30. Cf. West, Hesiod: Theogony,
chap. 3.
23 Cf. Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiq- uity
(Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1962), pp. 143 and 147 ff. Cf. my
History, Archaeology and Christian Humanism, pp. 269-270;
"Northeast-Mediterranean Dark Ages and the Early Iron Age Art of
Syria," The Aegean and the Near East (New York, 1956), pp. 144-164,
esp. p. 163 and n. 68. See also G. M. A. Hanfmann, "Arch- aeology
in Homeric Asia Minor," Amer. Jour. Arch- aeology 52 (1948) : pp.
135-155, and "Ionia, Leader or Follower?" Harvard Stud. Class.
Philology 61 (1953): pp. 1-37.
24 See my article, "Some Oriental Glosses on the Homeric
Problem," Amer. Jouir. Archaeology 54 (1950): pp. 171-172, and n.
39.
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VOL. 116, NO. 3, 1972] THE GREEK INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION 229
to sixth centuries B.C. is provided by the family background of
Thales, founder of the Milesian school.25 Thales's father had the
good Carian name of Hexamyes.26 His mother was a Greek woman from a
family said to have been Phoenician in origin. For our purposes it
is quite irrelevant whether this family tradition was correct or
not, but since it was already reported by Herodotus (I, 170), it
gives an excellent illustration of the heterogeneous background of
the Ionians and lack of the superior attitude that characterized
later Hellenes. In those days the Greeks still greatly admired the
more advanced people of the eastern Mediterranean and were
perfectly willing to be associated with them and to learn whatever
was possible from them, as we shall see later.
Seen against the fact of Thales's well-attested ethnic mixture,
together with his family claim to Phoenician forebears, the
recorded facts of his own life become highly reasonable. In the
first place, he is known from the emphatic statement of Herodotus
(I, 170) to have been highly regarded for his legal knowledge and
to have been, in fact, selected as author of the much praised but
not adopted constitution of the Ionian confederation. In the second
place, he is said to have been called upon for practical and
technical advice in engineer- ing and navigation, and also to have
engaged in trade. In the field of navigation he pointed out that
Ursa Minor was a better guide to the true north than Ursa Major.
The Greeks are known to have used Ursa Major for this purpose, just
as was done by mariners who employed this constel- lation as a
guide to the north star, which itself came closest of all bright
heavenly bodies to true north. Furthermore, Thales is said by early
Greek writers to have taken over the use of Ursa Minor for this
purpose from the Phoenicians, as the result of which the Greeks
often called Ursa Minor by the term Phoinikj.27 Thales is said by
H-erodotus (I, 74) to have predicted a total eclipse
25 Cf. Hermann Diels, Doxographi Graeci (3rd ed., Berlin, 1958);
Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (3 v., 6th ed.,
Berlin, 1951-1952); W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy
(2 v., Cambridge, 1962 and 1965) 1: pp. 45-71; G. S. Kirk and J. E.
Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1957), pp.
74-98.
28 Herodotus, to whom we owe most of our best information about
Thales, had a father with a Carian name and was related to a
prominent man with a Carian name, Panyassis.
27 I strongly suspect that Phoinike is a haplography or more
likely haplology for Phoinikike (naus) (?), "Pho- enician
(bark)."
of the sun in eastern Asia Minor, which is usually identified
with the eclipse of May 28, 585 B.C. However, I greatly prefer
identifying it with the eclipse of July 29, 588 B.C.28 There has
been confusion about this eclipse, and Otto Neugebauer, the
foremost authority in the world on this subject, has concluded that
"the story about Thales' pre- dicting a solar eclipse is no more
reliable than the other stories about his predicting the fall of
meteors." 29 This is going too far, because the battle between the
Medes and the Lydians, during which the eclipse is said to have
taken place, was decisive in its day and it is difficult to doubt
the basic tradition. The astronomical date is also very
satisfactory. There can be no appeal from Neugebauer's statement
that the Babylonians had not yet learned how to predict solar
eclipses (as against lunar) and that the Saros period for pre-
diction of eclipses is a modern myth.30 Neverthe- less as B. L. van
der Waerden 31 has pointed out, it was perfectly possible for
Thales and his best informed contemporaries to follow in the wake
of the extraordinary development of empirical astronomy by the
Babylonians and Assyrians, xvhich must have been known to the
Phoenicians,
28 My preference is based upon historical and military
considerations on the one hand (e.g., a date in July for the battle
is far more likely than a date in May), and detailed calculations
of the paths of the eclipses in ques- tion, on the other. For the
latter I am indebted to Dr. Robert R. Newton of the Applied Physics
Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University (private correspondence
from February 9 to May 28, 1969).
With respect to Thales's own dates, I follow Diogenes Laertius
who states that Thales was born in Olympiad 35.1 = ca. 640 B.C.,
and died at the age of seventy-eight (ca. 562 B.C.). Guthrie (A
History of Greek Philosophy 1: p. 50), taking a different approach,
accepts Diogenes's date for the death of Thales in Olympiad 58, and
then recalculates his birth, placing it in Olym. 39.1 (ca,. 624
B.C.). This conforms with his view that Thales's age at the time of
the eclipse was arbitrarily fixed at forty years, and his life span
calculated from that chronological point (assuming that the eclipse
was in 585 B.C.). According to my calculations, Thales would have
been about fifty-two in the year of the eclipse (588 B.C.). He
would have been just past sixty when he was awarded the title of
sophos at Athens during the archonship of Damasias (582/1 B.C.). He
would have died some two years before the accession of Croesus in
560 B.C. His career would have been remarkably parallel in many
ways to that of Benj amin Franklin, who suddenly became famous for
his epochal experiments with electricity when he was forty-five,
and who was a man of affairs, statesman, diplomat, etc., dying at
eighty-four.
29 The Exact Scientces in Antiquity, p. 142. 30 Ibid., pp.
118-119, and 141-142. 31 Science Awakening (Groningen, 1954), pp.
86 ff.
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230 WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.
and to draw on his own experience and that of his predecessors
in order to make informed conjectures about the future appearance
of an eclipse of the sun. As Van der Waerden observes there are a
number of ways in which this can be done, though an infallible
prediction was naturally impossible in those days-and was not to be
possible for many centuries to come. In other words, it is
hypercritical to reject the story because we are not told how
Thales accomplished his feat and because modern authors have woven
impossible hypotheses about how it was done.
In recent years there has been much controversy about what is
meant by the ancient and reliably transmitted tradition of Thales's
discovery of mathematical theorems. According to Greek writers,
most of whose information goes back to Eudemus in the fourth
century B.C., a number of geometric theorems were formulated by
Thales.32 But how were they established? This is un- fortunately
not stated by any of our ancient authors, and modern students have
been divided mostly among three points of view: (1) they had been
developed empirically by the Greeks and were first set down by
Thales; (2) the intui- tionist approach, which consists essentially
in tracing the history of the beginning of a science to
preconceived ideas and "intuitions" of in- dividuals, which may be
confirmed, modified, or refuted by empirical observation or
experience. According to this point of view, Thales may have
written a geometric treatise beginning with very simple statements
and then have proceeded logi- cally toward more complex theorems.
(3) They were taken over, substantially in the form he pre- sented
them, from nations of the East, such as Babylonia, Egypt, or
Phoenicia.
With regard to (1), the objections of Van der Waerden make good
sense.33 It is highly improb- able that even such a naturally
gifted people as the Greeks would proceed laboriously by adding
observations, generation after generation. After
32 Cf. Van der Waerden, "La Demonstration dans les sciences
exactes de I'antiquite," Bulletin de la societi mathematique de
Belgique 9, 1 (1957): pp. 10-13. Ac- cording to Van der Waerden
this was possible because Babylonian goemetry already existed. He
supposes that someone who knew a little Babylonian geometry com-
municated to Thales methods of calculation without demonstrations,
such as are found in cuneiform texts; for example, the correct
formula for the area of an isosceles triangle, etc. Beginning with
some obvious or nearly obvious statements, he arranged the whole in
logical order, ibid., p. 12.
331Ibid., p. 11.
all, a man like the brother of the lyric poet Alcaeus had been
in Babylon and took part in the siege of Ascalon, which was
captured by the army of Nebuchadnezzar in December, 604 B.C.; later
he returned to Lesbos to describe his adventures, some of which
were then celebrated by his brother in matchless verse.34 Men were
visiting all parts of the Near East. Some of these Greek travelers,
greatly impressed as they were by the reputed wisdom of the East,
must have brought home all sorts of reports, stimulating other
Greeks to find out more about their legendary knowledge. It is
therefore a priori incredible that they should have continued this
laborious and wholly undocumented process of empirical development
instead of going directly to the sources, as the Japanese did 2,500
years later.
Against (2) it must be said that such "intui- tions" which
underlie every new development in science themselves appear only
after years of accumulating knowledge. As is well known, after one
has reached a point where one controls all or most available
information about any subject, one does acquire a certain
"intuitive" approach, which means simply that there has been-in
mechanistic terms-some sort of short-circuiting or setting up of
cross-currents in one's still little-known neuro- physiological
system which gives one an immediate grasp of the relevance of new
data without having to go laboriously through the process of
checking already known data of the same general type, whether such
data be stores of accumulated experi- ence or a stock of acquired
"book-learning."
With reference to (3), we may repeat what was said above, that
there is absolutely no indication of the existence of any such
theoretical treatises or oral traditions anywhere in the Near
East.
Turning now to tentative reconstructions of what may actually
have happened in the case of Thales's formulation of geometrical
propositions, we fortunately have a modern analogy which has
hitherto been overlooked. In the early seven- teenth century,
beginning with Francis Bacon and fully developed by Descartes, we
have for the first time a clear concept of "law of nature" or lex
naturalis (lex naturae, not jus naturale, "natu- ral law," which is
an entirely different concept). Successive stages in the
development of the con- cept of physical law and its final
flowering in Cartesian and Newtonian thinking have been
34Cf. Jerome D. Quinn, "Alcaeus 48 (B 16) and the Fall of
Ascalon (604 B.C.)," Bull. Amer. Schools Orient. Research No. 164
(1961): pp. 19-20.
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VOL. 116, NO. 3, 1972] THE GREEK INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION 231
documented by the late Edgar Zilsel.35 Zilsel emphasizes the
fact that Francis Bacon, at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, introduced the term "law" for "regularity of nature."
Zilsel was, however, probably wrong in stressing the supposed
"theological roots of the concept of physical law." 36 Bacon was an
eminent jurist, long-time rival of Sir Richard Coke, becoming both
Attorney General and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Like Thales,
Bacon was noted as a constitutional lawyer; he was also a court
prose- cutor and judge. Like Thales also Bacon was tremendously
interested in putting natural science on a solid empirical and
rational basis; he was the first to emphasize the inductive method
and to point to the almost limitless benefits which science could
bestow on mankind. It is not, however, generally known that Bacon
planned to follow up his Novum organum scientiarum by a systematic
classification and rationalization of the common law of
England-still one of the proudest heritages of the English-speaking
world.37 Since the com- mon law is actually an unorganized body of
cus- tomary case law-quite different in structure from the late
Roman Corpus juris-this was a far more sophisticated attempt to
replace unclassified case law by formulating and classifying
individual items. This happened in Mesopotamia and Israel well
before the seventh century B.C., and in Greece and Rome somewhat
later. Of course, in all three areas early case law,38 like common
law in English-speaking lands, continued in use for centuries after
statutory law had partly supplanted it. Similarly, Thales may
easily have drawn an analogy between the tendency to organize case
law and the generalized classification of geometrical
35 "The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law," Philos. Rev. 51
(1942): pp. 245-279.
36 Ibid., p. 261. 37 G. Bullough, in a series of lectures at the
Johns
Hopkins University in March, 1966, entitled "Ideas of Law: Human
and Divine," stated that he had no doubt that it was Bacon's
tremendous interest and efforts in organizing and collecting common
law that developed his interest in, generalization and formulation
in the form of general principles (which he called "maxims") and
led ultimately to his great system of induction.
38 See Albrecht Alt, "Die Urspriinge des israelitischen Rechts,"
Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel 1 (Munich, 1953):
pp. 278-332, esp. 285-302; in English translation, "The Origins of
Israelite Law," Essays on Old Testament History and Religion
(Anchor Books ed., New York, 1967): pp. 101-171, esp. pp. 112-132.
Cf. also From the Stone Age to Christianity, pp. 267-269, and p. 2;
Yahweh and the Gods of Cazaamn, pp. 101-109.
theorems. There had already been irregular pro- gress for at
least 1,500 years from collections of miscellaneous legal cases
with often quite trivial differences, to systematic codes of more
sophisti- cated case law like the Code of Hammurapi. Later, in
Egypt and the Hebrew Bible we find generalized statements,
sometimes with emphasis on latent principles (such as the lex
talionis), and sometimes with classifications of pre-scientific
type. It must be noted that these precursors of systematic logic
are couched in negative form, as prohibitions, or go back to
denials of misdeeds, such as the Egyptian negative confession of
the deceased in the Hereafter, none of which can be traced back to
before the sixteenth century B.C. at the earliest, and are
generally later.39
In the seventh century B.C. there was an extra- ordinary
proliferation of state constitutions and law codes all over the
Hellenic world.40 Later Greek authors have transmitted to us the
names of many lawgivers who flourished in the Greek states and
especially in the colonies during the seventh and sixth centuries.
Some of them are said to have traveled all over the civilized
world, studying the constitutions and legal institutions of
different countries in order to get suggestions for their own legal
structures; others limited them- selves to a few Greek cities and
states in their search for models. No other data handed down from
antiquity yield such a clear picture of the interest taken by the
early Greeks in all fields of higher culture, as well as in
practical matters of all kinds. This curiosity undoubtedly helps
ex- plain the general burst of intellectual activity among the
Greeks of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., but it does not
tell us what evolu- tionary tendency to expect in tracing the
develop- ment of law. We now have juristic material of all
kinds-law codes, records of court cases, and tablets involving
legal questions in great abund- ance and extraordinary variety,
from many dif- ferent parts of the ancient East. Egypt has given us
two particularly famous law cases, which are described in not much
less detail than we find in the extant court proceedings of
fifteenth-century England. From Egypt we also have a detailed
account of a drastic reform of the courts carried out by Harmais in
the third quarter of the four-
39From the Stone Age to Christianity, pp. 224-230, 268-269.
40R. J. Bonner and G. Smith, The Administration of Justice from
Homer to Aristotle (2 v., Chicago, 1938) 1: pp. 67-82.
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232 WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.
teenth century B.C.4" If we read what is left of the dozen or so
southwest-Asiatic law codes now known, extending from the end of
the third millennium B.C. down to the early centuries of the first
millennium B.C., we find many highly instruc- tive evolutionary
developments. Some day we may have a Mycenaean code to compare with
the contemporary Hittite code.
The late mathematician and physicist, Hermann Weyl, stated, "In
our survey of the formation of concepts and theories by science . .
. we saw how causal analysis proper is preceded by ordering and
classification." 42 Both as lawyer and as mathe- matician, Thales
had to begin any analysis by classifying pertinent cases.43 Since
in all our early written codes from the ancient East, individual
laws appear in case form,44 and since all algebraic and geometric
"handbooks" from Mesopotamia and Egypt contain only cases and
problems, but never propositions, we repeat that there is ab-
solutely no basis for the often-heard assertion that the ancient
Near Easterners also had theoretical treatises on science which
have been lost. The conditional formulation was still used
exclusively in the Assyrian law code, dating in its excavated form
from ca. 1100 B.C. In the fragmentary Neo- Babylonian code from the
seventh to sixth century B.C. it is stated apodictically, like the
apodictic law of Israel and later Greek and Roman law. Furthermore,
the conditional case-law formula- tion was adopted by the early
Greeks and appears in both our oldest monuments of Hellenic law,
the Code of Gortyn (Crete) with earlier elements embedded in it,
and the laws of homicide attributed to Draco ca. 621 B.C. but
extant only partially in a late fifth-century stone copy found on a
stone from Athens.*5 No Phoenician law code has yet been found,
though fragments of decrees and cultic legislation have been
preserved. In neither case is there any evidence of conditional
(case) formula- tion. Nearly all of our original codified legal
41 No Egyptian law code is known except for the still
unpublished Demotic code. Nevertheless, it proves that there was a
tradition of law codes in Egypt. The purpose of the forty law
scrolls of the vizier Rekhmire (early fifteenth century B.C.) is
still hotly debated. Royal decrees are also well known.
42 Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (rev. and aug.
English ed., Princeton, 1949), p. 286.
48 See references above in n. 25. 44 In Israel the basic
conditional form was: "If . . .
provided that . . . then. . . ." Cf. Alt, "Die Urspriinge des
israelitischen Rechts," pp. 287 ff.
45 Cf. Bonner and Smith, The Administration of Justice from
Homer to Aristotle 1: pp. 112 ff.
material dates from between 2100 and 1300 B.C.; very little is
later and virtually none of it can be closely dated. The Sumerian
Ur-Nammu Code from the twenty-first century B.C. mentions, among
other fragmentary laws, a series of cases involving homicide with
different weapons of different materials.46 While some of this
proliferation of cases may seem trivial, it may be based on some
such good basic reason as our distinction between homicide with a
hand gun or with an iron tool or other hard object. In the Eshnunna
Code from the eighteenth century B.C., there is almost com- plete
lack of systematic classification. The extant tablet of the Code
starts out with a list of fixed prices, rentals, and wages, and the
legal part proper sometimes lists completely heterogeneous laws one
after the other. The Code of Hammurapi is much better organized, as
was to be expected from the high respect in which it was held for
many centuries after its publication. It is only when we come to
the so-called apodictic law of the Old Testament47 that we begin to
find clear and terse generalizations. The Ten Commandments are the
first known example of a series of general negative commands, all
of which are condensed from what must originally have been a whole
series of in- dividual prohibitions, and instead of having a long
list of prohibitions of different kinds of homicide, we have only
the one succinct statement, "Thou shalt not commit murder" (in
Elizabethan Eng- lish "Thou shalt not kill").
Unfortunately we do not know the exact date of the Decalogue,
and we have various slightly dif- ferent recensions of it which
indicate that there was an earlier form which we cannot safely
recon- struct but which may go back to Moses and must in any case
go back to early Israel, since the two most divergent recensions
can be traced back to not later than the ninth and the seventh
centuries B.C., respectively. In this connection it is im- portant
to note that we lack logical classifications in the ancient East.
The Babylonians gradually developed elaborate vocabularies which
were grad- ually expanded during the middle centuries of the second
millennium B.C. until they included collec- tions of words in a
great many different areas. For instance, we have lists of
quadrupeds, lists of
46 Cf. S. N. Kramer and A. Falkenstein, "Ur-Nammu Law Code,"
Orientalia 23 (1954): pp. 40-51, esp. 48; also M. Q. Lupinetti, "II
diritto penale dei Sumeri, La scuola positiva 4 (1968): pp. 83-114,
esp. 87 ff. and 99 ff.
47 Alt, "Die Urspriinge des israelitischen Rechts," pp. 302
ff
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VOL. 116, NO. 3, 1972] THE GREEK INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION 233
fish, lists of insects, etc. These lists remain unique in the
ancient East, but the classifications are simple and require no
effort at systematic thinking, since they are basically arranged
according to Sumerian ideograms for animal names.48
In Leviticus and Deuteronomy (both edited about the seventh
century, on the basis of much older material), we have some very
striking lists of clean and unclean animals in which the begin-
nings of systematic classification are to be found, with empirical
criteria, even though the criteria themselves may not always be
acceptable to a scientific age. Here we read, for instance, that
quadrupeds which parted the hoof and chewed the cud (or made
superficially similar oral move- ments after eating) might be eaten
by Israelites, while quadrupeds with only one of these character-
istics and not the other, were not to be eaten. For example, the
pig could not be eaten because, though it parts the hoof, it does
not chew the cud. The hare and the hyrax were prohibited, because,
though they move the mouth, they do not have a parted hoof. The
camel could not be eaten be- cause, though it chews the cud, it
does not have a bifurcated "hoof." It must be confessed that, while
not infallible, this method of telling clean and unclean animals
apart was extremely practical, especially since most unclean
animals are carriers of dangerous infections such as trichinosis
and tularemia.49
In Egypt in the so-called Negative Confession, which purports to
contain the words of the de- ceased when he denies having committed
any sin or having violated any taboo, in the court of Osiris after
death, we have a most extraordinary collection of crimes against
commonly accepted law everywhere, and sometimes quite trivial in-
fringements of taboos. Much the same situation is found in the
Babylonian Shurpu Tablets, where we have long lists of unrecognized
sins committed and taboos violated by a man who is suffering from
illness, the cause of which he does not know.
It was, therefore, a tremendous advance when systematic
classification of any material was intro- duced by the Greeks, and
this principle of classi- fication must have been rapidly extended
to other areas. Among the areas to which systematic classification
was extended, law obviously held priority. Once the transformation
of separate
48 Cf. B. Landsberger, Materialen zum sumerischen Lexikon 1 ana
ittisu (Rome, 1937); 8 The Fauna of Ancient Mesopotamia 1 (Rome,
1960), 2 (Rome, 1962); etc.
49 Cf. Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, pp. 176-179.
cases into single generalized propositions had been made, it
would have been easy for a man of Thales's breadth and ingenuity to
extend the principle to geometry. This was to be his greatest
accomplishment. It is perfectly clear from the five preserved
theorems said expressly to have been first pointed out by him, that
he was not content simply to classify and to generalize numbers of
cases,50 but was also a trained geom- eter and a man profoundly
interested in order and symmetry. It is wholly unnecessary to
assume, as has been done most recently by B. L. van der Waerden,51
that he also demonstrated these theorems by reasoning in much the
same way that Euclid did later. This is going too far; it is highly
improbable that complex syllogistic rea- soning with the aid of
postulates, theorems, and corollaries had been worked out that
early. The probability still remains that the discovery of
dialectic reasoning took place in the fifth century B.C. under the
influence of the schools of debate organized by the Sophists in
order to teach the art of winning court cases to young Athenians,
who were forbidden by law to hire lawyers and had to learn to be
their own lawyers in order to win their cases before the court of
the Agora.52 The confusion has arisen in part owing to the fact
that both the words deiknymi and apodeiknymi, which are used by
Proclus and other Greek writers in connection with the theorems
which Thales is said to have discovered, can mean either "state,
point out," "bring to light, show forth, represent," or "make
known," "demonstrate." 53
The achievement of Thales is no less epoch- making because it
consisted in systematic classifica- tion and formulation of
generalized mathematical propositions rather than in the
concomitant dis- covery of how to demonstrate theorems in the
manner later made famous by Euclid. It is simply incredible that a
process which would normally be expected to stretch over a span of
centuries can
50 Cf. T. L. Heath, A History of Greek Mlathematics (2 v.,
Oxford, 1921) 1: pp. 130-137.
51 "La Demonstration dans les sciences exactes de l'antiquite,"
pp. 11-12.
52 Cf. Bonner and Smith, The Administration of Justice from
Homer to Aristotle 2: pp. 7-38.
53 Cf. Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, pp. 130-137, where
he discussed Thales's theorems but failed to realize that deiknymi
and apodeiknymi have essentially the same meanings, "to state" and
"to demonstrate." So it is quite impossible to tell from the
language which is meant in a given case. In other words, this is
not a question of taking the Greek words too literally but of
failing to analyze their respective ranges of meaning.
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234 WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.
have taken place in a single lifetime; yet if we assunme that
there were great mathematicians and speculative thinkers, before
Thales, we flout unan- imous Greek tradition as well as a host of
analogies in more recent times.
Thales's successor as the head of the Milesian sclhool was
Anaximander, who is said to have been his kinsman and companion as
well as his foremost disciple.54 Where Thales excelled as a
classifier and formulator of abstract propositions, as well as a
practical lawyer, engineer, and navigator, Anaxi- mander was the
first speculative philosopher kn-own to posterity. Prelogical
metaphysicians there undoubtedly were in Egypt and other parts of
the ancient East just as in pre-Hellenic India,55 but with
Anaximander we have an original thinker who learned all that Thales
had to teach and went on to new conquests of his own. It must, how-
ever, be said that Anaximander's originality was not so great as
has often been supposed. What he did was to expand the horizon of
investigation to new dimensions, utilizing the ideas which had come
down to the Mediterranean world of his day from Easterni
sources.
Like Thales, Anaximander was a practical man as well as a
speculative thinker. He is said to have introduced the gnonion from
the East and also to have prepared the first map known in Greece.
His principal contributions to speculative phi- losophy were his
simplified cosmology, as stated in the famous fragment attributed
to him, as well as in tlhe system of opposites.
I propose tlhe following new rendering of the so-called
"Fragnment." 56 In defense of this trans- lation I shall include
only a few remarks:
Anaximander . . . declared the indefinite (apei- ront) 57 to be
the origin and "basic principle" (stoicheion) of existing things,
having been the first to introduce this designation for "origin"
(archer). He says that it is neither water nor any other of the
so-called elements, but something different by (kata) nature-the
indefinite, from which all the (planetary) heavens come into
existence and the (prototypic) patterns (kosmzoi) 58 in them, from
which all things- that-are come into existence and cease to
exist
54Cf. Charles H. Kahn, Anaxinander and the Origins of Greek
Cosmology (New York, 1960) ; and Holscher, "Anaximander und die
Anfange der Philosophie."
55 As shown by the Upanishads and the earliest Buddhist
traditions, cf. History, Archaeology and Christ- ian Humanism, pp.
92, 145 n. 28.
56 Cf. Kahn, Anaximander anid the Origins of Greek Cosmology,
pp. 28-71, 166-196.
57 Cf. Eissfeldt, "Ph6nikische und griechische Kosmo- gonie,"
pp. 5, 8.
58 See discussion below and n. 65.
according to their debit (rating)59; for they (must) pay one
another (the) rightful obligation60 and compensation for (their)
span of life (helikia !)61 according to the order set by time.
It will be noted that my interpretation of the term kosmoi in
Anaximander is new, and that my replacement of the unintelligible
adikia "injustice" by helikia "span of life" alters the whole
picture. This is very important, because ever since the beginnings
of philosophical speculation about the origin of the Greek tragedy,
there has been a strong tendency to attribute to the Milesian phi-
losopher a profound pessimism for which there is no conceivable
justification otherwise. It is almost incredible that a man like
Anaxi- mander, who was at the height of his ex- traordinary powers
shortly after the floruit of Thales and who was contributing to so
many dif- ferent phases of Greek intellectual and practical life,
could have a profoundly pessimistic attitude toward the world which
he was helping to trans- form. Neither Thales nor Anaximander was
in any sense a pedant limited to his books and desks. On the
contrary, these men were extremely prac- tical, alive to all that
was going on in their day. Their closest parallels are perhaps to
be found in Benjamin Franklin and Leibnitz, respectively.
This idea undoubtedly came to me because of a collocation of the
element of time and opposites in a passage in Ecclesiastes which I
had long attribu- ted to Phoenician sources. The proof of it came,
however, later, when I noticed that St. Augustine in his City of
God (viii.2) stated:
Anaximander . . . did not, indeed, think that every- thing came
from one thing, (from water) as Thales thought, but each from its
own basic principles. . .. These basic principles of individual
things he be- lieved to be indefinite and to bring into existence
innulmlerable "worlds' 62 with whatever things origi-
59 There seems to be a definite confusion between Attic chre7on
and Ionic chreon; to chrei6n; to chreos (Attic chreos) and
chreToslon. See Liddell and Scott, A Greek- English Lexicon
(reprint of the 9th ed., Oxford, 1968), s. vv.
60 The translation "obligation," agrees with Diels's
"Schuldigkeit." The rendering "what is necessary" or "what needs
be" is wholly unnecessary.
61 St. Augustine (discussion below) confirms the pro- posed
reading. I wish to thank Professor James Oliver of the J ohns
Hopkins University for his assistance in the analysis of this
passage.
62 The term used is mundus, which curiously enough was taken
into Latin from a probable Etruscan source in the two most
important meanings of Greek kosmos: "world, earth, cosmos," and
"female ornaments." The adjective mundus means "clean, neat,
elegant," etc.
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VOL. 116, NO. 3, 19721 THE GREEK INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION 235
nate in them; and he thought that these "worlds" some- times
come to an end and sometimes come again into existence with
whatever life-span (aetas) each is able to achieve. But he himself
did not give any credit to the divine mind for the way in which
these things work.
Since Augustine is otherwise so accurate63 in his description of
the essential content of the "fragment," and since aetas
"life-time, age" makes such good sense in this connection, it
stands to reason that the text tradition he followed still had the
correct helikia and not the corrupt adikia. We muist remember that
the usual meaning of helikia is precisely that of aetas, which is
used to translate it in the older Greek-Latin dictionaries, such as
that of Stephanu s.64
The translation of kosmos as "prototypic pat- tern-" from the
early Greek usage of "pattern, plan, the way things are done, the
proper way to do something"-stems from a basic meaning such as
"orderly arrangement." Exactly what the original meaning was we
cannot, of course, tell, since the word does not have any good
Indo-European etymology and may therefore be pre-Hellenic. The
notion of orderly patterns in the planetary heavens is extremely
ancient in Babylonian as- tronomy; it is, in fact, the basis of
Babylonian astrology. In MIesopotamia we have a term which appears
in Sumerian as GIS-HIUR and in Ac- cadian as usurtiu, both of which
mean "outline, plan, configuration, plan of a building, immutable
destiny." The great importance of this cluster of i(leas for
Babylonian thinking has been almost comipletely overlooked, though
first pointed out in 1922.65 It was considered as heresy at the
time
63 Of course he was only as accurate as his own sources, not
necessarily with respect to the original meanings of
Anaximander.
64 H. Stephanus, Thesauruts graece linguae (8 v., Lon- don,
1816-1818), s.v. helikia.
65 W. F. Albright, "The Supposed Babylonian Deriva- tion of the
Logos," Jour. Bibl. Lit. 39 (1922) : pp. 143- 151, esp. 150-151;
cf. From the Stone Age to Christi- aonity, pp. 176-177, 195-196. On
usurtiu as the word for "building and estate plans," see most
recently W. W. Hallo, "The Road to Emar," Jour. Cuneiform Stud. 18
(1964): p. 61, ? 2. Note the very important material in W. von
Soden, Akkadisches Handzuirterbuch (Wies- baden, 1960) 3: pp.
254-256, and The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Inistitute of
the University of Chicago (Chicago, 1958 -) 4: pp. 352-363, s.v.
eseru. An in- teresting additional item is provided by Cuneiform
Texts fromn Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum 44 (London,
1963): No. 49, lines 3-5, as transcribed by W. R6llig in
Bibliotheca Orientalis 22 (1965): p. 34b.
by some Assyriologists and the point was for- gotten. Now our
evidence is overwhelming, since the gods are explicitly stated to
have fixed at Creation the "plans" (usurati) of things that were to
be. Mircea Eliade has stressed the celestial archetypes of
territories, temples, and cities, as well as of rituals and
ordinary human activities.66 WVe are, however, dealing here more
specifically with a Mesopotamian cultural continuum, which in the
second millennium B.C. included most of southwestern Asia,
including especially Syria and Anatolia. The beginnings of
astrology undoubt- edly came through the Sumerian concept of
GIS-HUR, where plans and configurations in the heavens were
considered to be the prototypes of what is found on earth.
Recognition of this fact does not imply acceptance of any of the
so- called Pan-Babylonian vagaries of over half a century ago,
since what may be called modern astrology first arose in late
Babylonia and Hellen- istic Egypt during the latter centuries of
the first millennium B.C.6 Just how far and how early ideas of this
nature may have spread over the Mediterranean world proper, we do
not know, but it is safe to suppose that they were more or less
familiar to educated and traveled people at least as early as the
seventh century B.C. I am not for a moment attributing knowledge of
esoteric Babylonian lore to Anaximander, but am only
[k]u ! -um-mi-su-un su-te-su-ra-a[m !?] [ge] -es-hu-ri-su-nu
ma-su-tim [tu-] ur-ra as-ri-su-nu ka-a-sum iz-za-ak-ru
It is part of a hymnal-epic hymn to a king whose name was Cost
(?).
"Their shrines* to bring into order, Their forgotten 'Baupline'
to bring back
to their places, they (the gods) have com- manded thee."
This confirms the early phonetic form of GI-JJUR- us.urtu. For
gighur(r)u, especially in the sense of "Vorzeichnung" and
"himmlischer Vortenworf," see Von Soden, op. cit. 1: p. 292b, and
the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary 5 (G): pp. 101 f. ("model,
archetype"). There is a very important article by A. Heidel, "The
Meaning of MUMMU in Akkadian Literature," Jour. Near East. Stud. 7
(1948): pp. 98-105 on the derivation of MUMMU from Mudmud. See
especially p. 102 on the planning of temples and idols. * KAMMU =
shrine (Von Soden, Akkadisches Hand- zwirterbuch 1: s.v.
66 In his Cosmos and History (New York, 1959), pp. 6 ff., he
states that this concept appears more or less all over Asia, though
he was not aware of the most striking Sumero-Babylonian examples of
it.
67 F. Cumont, L',8gypte des astrologues (Brussels, 1937), pp.
13-23, esp. 17.
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236 WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.
insisting that as an educated and much-traveled man of his time
he was familiar with archaic astrol- ogy. Nor am I suggesting that
the kosmnoi of Anaximander are the Platonic ideas-which would be
patent nonsense-but merely that they prefigure them to some extent,
and that the principle was by no means as original in Plato as
sometimes claimed.68
As far as we can tell in the light of present knowledge, the
details of this cosmology are certainly not Oriental in the form
given them by Anaximander. There is, however, reason to be- lieve
that the apeiron is an abstract modification of the formless,
quasi-gaseous original element described in the Taauth cosmology of
Sanchunia- thon, and that the listing of opposites which com-
pensate for one another is Phoenician in origin, as we shall see.
In the accounts of Anaximander's teachings given by the
doxographers, we have only the pairs of opposites which actually
appear in our sources, namely, heat and cold, and dryness and
wetness.69 Besides these two pairs, we have the pair of opposites
included in his Fragment: coming into being (genesis) and
extinction (phthora). At the end of the sixth century B.C. we find
lists of opposites in the fragments of Heraclitus of Ephesus. Among
the opposites, he lists male and female, white and black, yellow
and red, high an.d low, long and short, vowels and consonants,
whole and not-whole, the concordant and the discordant, harmonious
and disharmonious, unification of totality (ta panta) and
totalization of unity-all concepts which tend to be
complementary.70 Prob-
68 Eliade has seen this clearly (Cosmos and History, pp. 120
ff.).
69 Cf. G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of
Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cam- bridge, 1966; cf. also
G. L. Huxley, The Early Ionians (London, 1966), pp. 98-103, and
Michael Stokes, "Hesi- odic and Milesian Cosmogonies," Phronesis 7
(1962): pp. 1-45; and 8 (1963) : pp. 1-34.
70 Heraclitus, in the late sixth century, analyzed the theory
and functions of opposites with marked success (though little
appreciated in his time). Cf. Kirk and Raven, The Presocratic
Philosophers, pp. 189-196. Hera- clitus's views were adopted by C.
G. Jung: "Old Hera- clitus, who was indeed a very great sage,
discovered the most marvelous of all psychological laws: the
regulative function of opposites. He called it enantiodromia, a
running contrariwise, by which he meant that sooner or later
everything runs into its opposite" (quoted from The Collected Works
of C. G. Jung [New York, 1953 -] 1: p. 71, by A. Moreni, O.P., in
"Jung's Ideas on Religion," The Thomist 31 [1967]: pp. 282 f.).
Moreni goes on to explain that tension between opposites is the
source of energy, and thus, for Jung, "the opposites are the key to
the dynamics of human personality."
ably one of the earliest of the lists of opposites are the ten
pairs attributed to Pythagoras by Aristotle, which is extremely odd
and must be older than the truncated but logical list of
Anaximander. Any- way, Anaximander was far too good a meta-
physician to have left such a heterogeneous list.
boundary and endless even odd one plurality right left male
female at rest " in motion straight " curved light darkness good
evil square not square71
It will be noticed that this list is thoroughly heterogeneous in
origin, with contrasting pairs which are as old as humanity, such
as light and darkness, good and evil, male and female, and
opposites which are almost entirely mathematical or mechanical. To
the latter group belong no fewer than seven of the number. This
hetero- geneity suggests a date before Anaximander, which makes an
attribution either to Pythagoras himself or an early disciple
equally unreasonable. But this curious list makes partial
Phoenician origin plausible, as we shall see.
Light on the origin of these early lists of opposites comes from
an unexpected source-the Hebrew Bible. During the past few years it
has been possible to add substantially to our knowl- edge of
Phoenician literature through renewed study of the Biblical books
of Ecclesiastes and Job, which had been erroneously referred to a
totallv imaginary North Arabic milieu and dated too late. Both
books are written in Hebrew, but in a Hebrew which is full of
Phoenician words and expressions, as we know from the steadily
increas- ing stock of Canaanite (Ugaritic) and later Phoe- nician
inscriptions.72 Job also contains many
71 Not the arithmetical meaning; cf. Liddell and Scott, s.v. The
list is given in Diels and Kranz, Die Fragniente der Vorsokratiker
1: p. 452. See Aristotle Metaphysics A5, 986a 22 f. (Ross
translation); also Kirk and Raven, '1he Presocratic Philosophers,
pp. 240 ff.
72 For the Ugaritic texts, cf. A. Herdner, Corpus des tablettes
en cuneiformes alphabHtiques (2 v., Paris, 1963) 1 (texts) & 2
(plates). C. F. A. Schaeffer, Ugaritica (5 v., Paris, 1939-1968),
and Le Palais royal d'Ugarit (5 v., Paris, 1955-1965); C. H.
Gordon, Ugaritic Text- book (Rome, 1965). For the Phoenician
inscriptions, see H. Donner and W. Rollig, Kanaana'ische und
aramijische Inschriften (3 v., Wiesbaden, 1962-1964; rev. ed. of 1:
1966). Cf. Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, chaps. 1 and 5.
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VOL. 116, NO. 3, 1972] THE GREEK INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION 237
Phoenician cosmological and mythological allu- sions. It
mentions Phoenician hierophants (see below) and takes an often
oddly non-Israelite ap- proach to the problems of theodicy with
which it deals. In Job-or Ecclesiastes-there are no quotations from
older books now included in the Hebrew canon of the Old Testament.
Since Job, despite its aura of skepticism and its deviation from
later Jewish orthodoxy, was composed in a classical Hebrew six-beat
line with a caesura, it is highly improbable that it dates after
the beginning of the formation of our Hebrew Biblical canon in the
Exilic period (sixth to fifth centuries).78 Suggested late
dates-even in the Hellenistic period-are rendered impossible by the
fact that its Hebrew has nothing in common with Hebrew verse
composed between the late third century B.C. (Sirach) and the
Christian era, such as has recently been recovered from Qumran and
Masada, etc. The Hellenistic dating sometimes proposed for Job is
completely excluded by the fact that the vocabulary of the book was
apparently just as obscure to the Greek translators of the
Septuagint in the second century B.C.74 as it was to Jerome and the
medieval Hebrew commentators. Yet during the past few years a great
many passages have been cleared up, thanks especially to the rich
new poetic vocabulary of Canaanite found in the alphabetic texts of
Ugarit.75 For this archaic vocabulary to have been forgotten so
completely before the second century B.C., several intervening
centuries and catastrophes such as the Assyrian and Babylonian
Exiles are required. Job's point of view is that of an Israelite
monotheist who was greatly troubled by the sufferings of his people
as a whole as well as by the concomitant increase
73Cf. D. N. Freedman, "The Law and the Prophets," Supplements to
Vetus Testamentum 9 (Leiden, 1963): pp. 250-265. Note that only the
Pentateuch and Job, among the Biblical documents from Qumran,
appear in the paleo-Hebrew script, cf. F. M. Cross, The Ancient
Library of Qumran (Anchor Books ed., New York, 1961), pp. 34, 43,
etc.
74 Cf. H. M. Orlinsky, "Studies in the Septuagint of the Book of
Job," Hebrew Union College Annual 28 (1957): pp. 53-74; 29 (1958):
pp. 229-271; 30 (1959): pp. 153-167.
75 Cf. Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, Index under "Job," pp.
293-294. A principal contributor to the elucidation of such
problems in Job has been M. J. Dahood; see his Psalms I (Anchor
Bible, New York, 1966), Psalms II (1968), and Psalms III (1970),
Indices 1: pp. 315-316; 2: p. 379; 3: pp. 464-465; also E. R.
Martinez, Hebrew-Ugaritic Index to the Writings of Mitchell J.
Dahood (Rome, 1967), the listings under "Job," pp. 38-41.
in suffering of individuals-quite without regard to their
morality or their piety. There is evidence of re-editing in the
different recensions of the book which we now have-presumably in
order to give the book a more orthodox approach to the problem of
suffering.76 From all indications, the book was composed by a
gifted North Israelite living either in Phoenicia or in a
neighboring district of Syria-Palestine. The date of the book,
judging from the historical allusions in the Prologue as well as
from the content of the poem, is almost certainly the seventh
century B.C., with the early sixth century not entirely
excluded.77
Ecclesiastes is not only a book showing a thoroughly
non-Israelite skepticism about the role of divine Providence; it is
also written in an otherwise unique Hebrew, full of locutions not
found in any other classical or post-classical com- position.
Neither language nor ideas are similar to what we find in the
latest books of the Hebrew Bible, in the Hebrew literature from
Qumran and Masada, or in the Mishnah and other Hebrew writings of
about the second century A.D. A sub- stantial fragment from Qumran
exhibits Jewish script of the second century B.C., and is probably
earlier than the Greek translation. That it was composed about the
second half of the fifth century is now probable. There are three
Iranian words in it, and the thought patterns are closer to sixth-
century Greek skepticism (Theognis, Anaxi- mander) than to early
Hellenistic Epicureans and Stoics.
Furthermore, our increased knowledge of North-Israelite and
Canaanite-Phoenician has cleared up many difficulties in
interpreting this enigmatic book. Here again difficult passages
have been cleared up by the discovery of much older Canaanite
literature from Ugarit, which could not be explained either by the
Greek trans- lators or later Jewish tradition.78 As of now it may
be stated with confidence that the most suit- able time for the
book is about the second half of the fifth century B.C. There are
many reasons for dating Ecclesiastes in the fifth century B.C.;
among them is the fact that the expression "under the sun," meaning
"under heaven, on the earth,"
76 Cf. Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan. p. 258 and n. 145.
77 Ibid. See also my observations quoted by D. N. Freedman in
"Orthographic Peculiarities in the Book of Job," Eretz Israel 9
(1969): pp. 43-44.
78 Cf. Dahood, Canaanite-Phoenician Influence in Qoheleth (Rome,
1952); cf. Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, p. 261 and n. 151.
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238 WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.
found at least twenty-nine times in Ecclesiastes,79 appears
elsewhere only in two long Phoenician royal inscriptions from the
early fifth century B.C.80 as well as in Sanchuniathon (dating, as
we shall see, from the middle decades of the sixth century B.C.).
In Greek it appears in the same sense only in Euripides and
Thucydides (both in the second half of the fifth century B.C. ) .
Ec- clesiastes 3:1 ff. has fourteen pairs of opposites: a time8' to
bear ........ to die
plant. uproot kill. " heal break down. . " build weep. . '.'. .
laugh mourn .. . " dance throw stones. gather stones embrace.. "
abstain from embracing search for.... " lose keep ........ " throw
away tear.... . " sew up be silent.... . " speak
I I I love........ " hate 1 I for war ........ for peace
Inspection of the Greek and Phoenician lists of opposites
illustrates the theme which we have stressed in connection with
Thales: the importance of the shift from empirical to logical
reasoning which became acute in the work of the Milesian school.
There is nothing abstract about the Phoenician-Hebrew list, which
consists exclusively of familiar everyday comparisons having to do
exclusively with the activities of man. Naturally, complementary
pairs are occasionally found coupled in ancient literature of the
highest an- tiquity. This is true of day and night, light and
darkness, good and evil, etc., but formal lists never appear. It is
significant that all of these
79The correspondin, expression "under heaven" occurs only three
times: Eccles. 1: 13, 2: 3, and 3: 1. In the two former instances
there is textual and versional evi- dence in favor of the reading
has-semes in place of has- .(antayini. With respect to 3: 1 the
Hebrew text has tahat has'-samayim, but since this locution is only
one- tenth as frequent in Qoheleth as the similar expression tahat
has-semes, it is probable that we should read the latter instead of
the former, with most recent commenta- tors.
80 The Phoenician inscriptions in question used to be dated
later, but now, thanks to new paleographic evidence from datable
inscriptions, we must date the inscriptions of Tabnit and
Eshmunazor in the early fifth century B.C. The script is almost
identical with the funerary text recently discovered in an
Etruscan-Phoenician bilingual from Caere (Cerveteri) dating from
about 500 B.C. Cf. J. B. Peckham, The Developmnent of the Late
Phoenician Scripts (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 71-101, esp. p. 87.
81 See discussion below on zecnan and n. 83. Elsewhere ill the
list the reading is 'it.
Phoenician-Hebrew pairs of opposites are oriented toward man and
his personal life. This alone shows that the usual interpretation
of Ecclesiastes 3 :1 is wrong and that we must turn to an alter-
native explanation which has apparently been overlooked in the
past, but is well attested in Ugaritic and Hebrew itself,
"everyone" instead of "everything." Since this list does not
include even such time-honored cosmic opposites as day and night,
light and darkness, heaven and earth, sea and dry land, etc., it is
curiously "existential" in tone. It may go back in substantially
its He- brew form to an earlier Phoenician list. If we had only the
opposites of Anaximander which, as far as they are preserved, deal
only with abstrac- tions from natural phenomena, there would be no
reason to compare the lists at all; but the mixture of different
types of opposites which we have in the so-called Pythagorean
list-to say nothing of the still later opposites of
Heraclitus-makes some relation probable. Any doubt should be re-
moved by the stress on time which precedes it and which corresponds
very closely to the emphasis on time found in Anaximander's
"Fragment." Ecclesiastes 3 :1 may be rendered: "Everyone (lak-kol)
has his (allotted) time (zeman) and there is a (propitious) time
('et) for every busi- ness (activity) under the sun."
Both in Hebrew and Phoenician 'et there is often a clear
connection with the idea of destiny, as in the Eshmunazor
inscription from the early fifth century B.C.82 In Accadian the
cognate ettu has the primary meaning "sign, omen," which was
certainly also true originally in Northwest Semitic. The Iranian
loanword zeman 83 and the native Northwest-Semitic 'et are used in
paral- lelism in such a way that the connection of busi- ness
activity with a propitious time is obvious. Both in Phoenician and
in Egyptian we find a very definite connection between the length
of human
82 On the date of this inscription, see above, n. 80. A
translation is provided by F. Rosenthal in Ancient Near Eastern
Texts (2nd ed., Princeton, 1955), p. 505. Cf. Donner and Rollig,
Kanaanaische und aramiische In- schrif ten 1: p. 3 (No. 14) ; 2:
pp. 19-23.
83 It is derived from zrvan (cf. the Aramaic form zevan/zavna) =
"time" which is also referred to as "destiny"; cf. the deified
Zrvan Akarma, "Endless Time," as progenitor of the gods. R. C.
Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (New York, 1961),
p. 129, has proved that the lion-headed god of Mithraism was
Ahriman the evil god = Gnostic Yaldabaoth, and had nothing to do
with Endless Time.
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VOL. 116, NO. 3, 1972] THE GREEK INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION 239
life and predestined Fate, which may, however, be escaped in
both cultures.84
This double association between the opposites and the notion of
compensatory destiny does not, however, mean that there was any
direct borrow- ing from Phoenician sources on the part of Anaxi-
mander. It rather suggests that there was a com- mon reservoir of
ideas and "literary" devices in the northeastern Mediterranean
area, which made it possible for cultural features to be
transmitted orally from the Phoenician colonies to the Greek
cultural centers in the Mediterranean. There is no reason to doubt
that there was a similar move- ment of ideas from the Aegean region
just as was true of art in the Late Bronze Age as well as from the
late sixth century B.C. on. Here, however, the shift from concrete
empiricism to abstract specula- tion seems to make it certain that
the Phoenician came first. But it must be emphasized again that
there is no evidence for a movement of abstract ideas as such from
Syria-Palestine to the Aegean.
Finally we shall deal briefly with another im- portant phase of
Anaximander's activity-cos- mogony. According to the doxographers,
Anaxi- mander said that when the world came into exist- ence, a
"kind of ball of fire" grew around the air enveloping the earth
like the bark of a tree. After this had been cut into circular
sections, the sun, moon, and stars came into existence. This is un-
mistakably related somehow to the cosmogony of Taauth described by
Sanchuniathon, the Phoeni- cian author translated by Philo of
Byblos in the late first century A.D., and excerpted by the
Christian historian, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, in the early
fourth century A.D.
There has been much debate with respect to the date of
Sanchuniathon. Since the discovery of the Ugaritic mythological
epics, it has become certain that the work attributed to him is a
rich source of authentic Phoenician data and is not a forgery of
early Roman times, as thought by most critical
84 H. Goedicke points out that the "span of man's life" is
clearly set by God, "Early References to Fatalistic Concepts in
Egypt," Jour. Near Eastern Stud. 22 (1963): pp. 189-190. A similar
notion (but more skeptical) is found in Phoenician. In the
Eshmunazor inscription, lines 2-3 we read: ngzlt . bl . 'ty I was
snatched away (by
death) before my (fated) time;*
bn . msk . ymm . 'zrm I was swept away (by the wa- ters of
death) while still young,
ytm . bn . 'limt An orphan, son of a widow. * See Eccles. 7: 17;
Job 15: 32.
scholars until recently.85 At the same time, Karl Mras has
demonstrated the extraordinary faith- fulness to his sources shown
by Eusebius in re- producing material which is accepted or cited in
his works.86 Whenever we can check Eusebius's quotations with
independent Greek sources, we find excellent agreement, and his
text is some- times more correct than theirs. Furthermore, the
accuracy shown by Eusebius naturally affects our impression of
Philo Byblius, the translator of Sanchuniathon, since Philo, who
was a contem- porary of Nero, was the source of nearly all
Eusebius's information about Phoenician religion. Besides, it has
now become clear, thanks to in- creased linguistic knowledge, that
Philo accurately transcribed and translated Phoenician words and
names into Greek. In addition to these sources of information, it
can now be shown that the cos- mogony of Taauth,87 which is
embedded in San- chuniathon's work, is a skeptical
re-interpretation of the Hermopolite cosmogony developed by the
Egyptian priests of Thoth during the third millen- nium B.C. and
preserved in the Coffin Texts from the end of that millennium (see
below).
The cosmogony of Taauth as preserved in San- chuniathon has
eliminated all divine names and has reduced the gods and goddesses
to natural phenom- ena, a development which horrified Eusebius, the
pious Christian bishop of Caesarea, to such an extent that he
exclaimed: "But this leads directly to atheism !" 88 In much the
same way, Augustine, bishop of Hippo, was to be shocked nearly a
century later by the atheism he thought he found in Anaximander.89
These Church Fathers were actually more horrified by such
skepticism than by the superstition of their pagan contemporaries.
Belief they could understand, even if it was mis- guided; but they
failed to see how one could refuse to believe in anything
supernatural. The question still remains: When did Sanchuniathon
and the earlier author of the cosmogony of Taauth live?
85 Cf. Yahwek and the Gods of Canaan, pp. 223-226. 86 "Die
Stellung der Praeparatio Evangelica des
Eusebius im antiken Schrifttum," Vienna Academy: An2eiger,
Philo.-Hist. Klasse 93, 17 (1956): pp. 209- 217. Cf. Yahweh and the
Gods of Canaan, p. 224 and n. 40.
87 On the name and date see Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, pp.
244-248.
88 Cf. Eissfeldt, "Phonikische und griechische Kosmo- gonie,"
pp. 9-10; Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, p. 259.
89 St. Augustine City of God viii.2. The passage reads as
follows: ". . . nec ipse aliquid divinae menti in his rerum
operibus tribuens." Cf. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek
Cosmology, p. 48.
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240 WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.
Later Greek tradition placed Sanchuniathon some- where about the
time of the Trojan War-which simply meant at the beginning of
history as far as the Greeks were concerned. This view has been
accepted by some modern scholars, from F. C. Movers to 0.
Eissfeldt, but it can now be shown to be wrong, thanks to our
vastly increased information. In the first place, as we have
pointed out above, Phoenician culture reached a very high level of
development by the Iron Age, especially in the tenth to the sixth
centuries B.C. Now that we can date nearly all written Israelite
prose and verse to the same period, it becomes incredible that a
high standard of literacy should not have existed in the far richer
and more highly cultured cities of Phoenicia. We may therefore
accept the statements of the Greek encyclopedists of later times
with regard to the traditional literary activity of Sanchuniathon.
The Suda (Suidas) is not very clear, but apparently intended to
give the titles of three particular works, in addition to others
not mentioned but also attributed to San- chuniathon. These three
books seem to be named: "On the 'Physiology' of Hermes," "The
Ancestral Insti'tutions of the Tyrians," and "Egyptian Theology."
The second of these three works is expressly said to have been
written in Phoenician; the first and third were presumably
forgeries of the Hermetics. These three works were in addi- tion to
his work on Phoenician history, said to have been published in nine
books, the first of which was devoted to mythology. Both the Suda
and Athenaeus say he was a Tyrian who dedicated his work to
Abedbalos, king of Berytus.90 This must mean that he was a Tyrian
refugee in Berytus, where he lived long enough to be called by
Eusebius "a man of Berytus." There has been much debate about all
these points, but there is no reason to look for improbable
solutions when the situation is so clear. It is often said that it
was Ierombalus, priest of Ieu,91 whose information formed the basis
for Sanchuniathon's "History of the Jews," dedicated to Abedbalos,
king of Berytus, but as Mras has pointed out, it is quite certain
that the text of Eusebius can be explained in only one sense, that
it was Sanchuniathon and not Ierom- balus who dedicated his work to
Abedbalos.92 If he was originally a native of Tyre, presumably
a
90 See below; cf. Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, p. 262, n.
154.
91 Cf. Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, p. 263, n. 155. 92 Ibid.,
p. 262, n. 154. I had independently come to the
same conclusion but had not published it.
refugee at the court of Abedbalos, there is only one reasonable
inference, that he had escaped from Tyre before, during, or after
the long siege (585- 572 B.C.)93 and final capture of Tyre by
Nebuchad- nezzar. We must be content with a floruit at Berytus
between ca. 585 and ca. 550, which would incidentally coincide
pretty closely with the floruit of Anaximander. Many fugitives from
Tyre settled north of Berytus and Byblos, at Tripolis, the "triple
city" founded by men from Aradus, Tyre, and Sidon. Since it is now
certain that the Periplus was written before Alexander's destruc-
tion of Tyre, this new settlement cannot be con- nected with the
latter event. Sidon was destroyed in 345 B.C. by Artaxerxes Ochus
and its inhabit- ants were scattered over Syria-Palestine,94 but
there was no destruction of Tyre at that time. The only remaining
alternative is the destruction of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar in 572
B.C. We may suppose that Sidon and Aradus fell to Nebuchad- nezzar
before or during the siege of Tyre.
Berytus was an important Canaanite city in the Late Bronze Age
but is never mentioned in any source of the Early Iron Age, and
actually re- appears for the first time in the Periplus of Syria
and Palestine.95 It was probably made the seat of a king by the
Babylonians. The Periplus men- tions Berytus as "a city and
northerly port." In my opinion there is not a single datum in the
ex- tremely laconic Periplus of Syria and Palestine which would
justify the term "Pseudo"-Skylax regularly applied to it. The
original Skylax was a native of Caryanda in Caria, who
circumnavigated Arabia in the time of Darius I and was the re-
puted author of numerous mariners' treatises, each called by the
term Periplus. I fail to see a single valid argument for refusing
to attribute this particular Periplus to the original Skylax,
though not necessarily in precisely the extant form. It is quite
certain that there were at least two treatises on the coastal
geography of the western Mediterranean which were composed in the
late sixth or early fifth centuries B.C.,96 and
93 Eissfeldt, "Ras Schamra und Sanchuniathon," Kleine Schriften
(3 v., Tiubingen, 1962-1966) 2: pp. 4-8.
94 D. Barag, "The Effects of the Tennes Rebellion on Palestine,"
Bull. Amer. Schools Orient. Research No. 183 (1966): pp. 1-9.
95 Cf. F. Gisinger, "Periplus" in Pauly-Wissowa,
Realencyclopddie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart)
19, 1 (1937): cols. 848 f.; and 2nd ser. 5 (1927): cols. 635
ff.
96 J. J. Tierney, "The Map of Agrippa," Proc. Roy. Irish Acad.
63 C 4 (April, 1963): p. 154, refers to "the
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VOL. 116, NO. 3, 1972] THE GREEK INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION 241
there seems to be no adequate reason to attribute this simple,
factual account of the ports along the coast of Syria and Palestine
to any later period.
Both the Phoenician names Sanchuniathon and Abedbalos are well
attested in the Persian period, and were doubtless in use in the
Neo-Babylonian period as well; the former means "the god Sakkun (or
Sanchun) has given," the latter means "Servant of Baal."
In translation the pertinent passage of the Cosmogony of Taauth
97 runs as follows:
The beginning of all things was . . . a dark windy smog or a
wind of dark smog 98 and a muddy chaos, like the dark Nether World.
This was boundless and through ages did not come to an end. When
the wind fell in love with its own beginnings, there was a
blending. . . . This (interweaving) was the beginning of the
creation of ever