From: owner-ane@ (ANE Digest) To: ane-digest Subject: ANE Digest V2001 #35 Reply-To: Sender: owner-ane@ Errors-To: owner-ane@ Precedence: bulk ANE Digest Monday, February 5 2001 Volume 2001 : Number 035 ane About Tabnit (etc) of Sidon ane The Ancient World on Television (February 2001) ane Ge`ez and Kharosthi PPS Re: ane About Tabnit (etc) of Sidon ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 20:28:09 +0100 From: "A.K. Eyma" Subject: ane About Tabnit (etc) of Sidon The following news story about Tabnit of Sidon reminded me of the thread of 21st Jan., in which I stated that for Herodotus, Phoenicia included the Palestine/Israeli coast up till Filistea, something I deduced from Herodotus' text (I,105). Now I notice that record in ANET 662 which says that Eshmun'azar of Sidon, son of Tabnit (apparantly early 5th c. BC) received "Dor and Joppa...in the Plains of Sharon" of the Lord of Kings, "we added them to the borders of our country, so that they would belong to Sidon forever". This seems to me to nicely confirm my literary deduction? And it makes Herodotus' use of the toponym, around 450 BC, quite logical. kind regards, Aayko Eyma ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 04 Feb 2001 18:17:27 -0500 From: David Meadows Subject: ane The Ancient World on Television (February 2001) ]|[======================================]|[ ]|[ ]|[ The Ancient World on Television ]|[ (North America) ]|[ Compiled by David Meadows ]|[ February 2001 ]|[======================================]|[ We're back on the web (finally!): http://atrium-media.com/awotv.html A pretty sparse month ... Monday, February 5 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology The series continues ... Tuesday, February 6 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) 10.00 p.m. DISCC Cleopatra's Palace Excellent program narrated by Omar Sharif . Wednesday, February 7 9.00 p.m. DISCU Ancient Earthquakes: Sunken Cities Why bits of Alexandria and other cities are at the bottom of Abukir Bay. 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) Thursday, February 8 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) Friday, February 9 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) Sunday, February 11 2.00 p.m. DISCC Cleopatra's Palace Repeat of Tuesday's program ... Monday, February 12 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) Tuesday, February 13 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) 9.00 p.m. HISTC Ancient History Tuesdays There should be some ancient programming in this time slot (two hours' worth, although sometimes it doesn't seem so 'ancient') 9.00 p.m. PBS Lost King of the Maya The discovery of the tomb of the founder of Copan's dynasty (as always with PBS, check local listings ... it's a NOVA program) 10.00 p.m. DISCC Cave of the Glowing Skulls Hikers discover a major burial in a cave in the Honduran rainforest. Wednesday, February 14 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) Thursday, February 15 6.30. p.m. HISTC Archaeology Friday, February 16 7.00 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) Saturday, February 17 6.00 p.m. PBS Lost King of the Maya Repeat of Tuesday's NOVA episode (maybe) Sunday, February 18 2.00 p.m. DISCC Cave of the Glowing Skulls Ditto ... Monday, February 19 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) Tuesday, February 20 7.00 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) 9.00 p.m. HISTC TBA There should be some ancient programming in this time slot (two hours) Wednesday, February 21 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) 8.00 p.m. DISCC Tomb of the Warrior Prince A decent look at the horse burial (and others) from Mt. Altai in Kazakhstan Thursday, February 22 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) Repeat of Sunday's programme. 9.00 p.m. TLC Pyramid of Doom 70 bodies found during the excavation of a Peruvian pyramid raise some questions ... 10.00 p.m. DISCU Ancient Puzzles Assorted ancient mysteries, including (of course) the pyramids. Friday, February 23 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) Saturday, February 24 2.00 p.m. DISCU Age of Gold Oft-repeated look at the suggestion that tombs of pharaohs were systematically plundered to provide gold for the burials of other pharaohs. Sunday, February 25 2.00 p.m. DISCC Tomb of the Warrior Prince Repeat of Tuesday's program Monday, February 26 6.00 a.m. HISTU Roman War Machine I The army of Rome, prior to the nastiness of the late Republic. Tuesday, February 27 6.00 a.m. HISTU Roman War Machine II The army of Rome, during the nastiness of the late Republic 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) 9.00 p.m. HISTC Ancient History Tuesdays (TBA) Wednesday, February 28 6.00 a.m. HISTU Roman War Machine III Roman military seige technology 6.30 p.m. HISTC Archaeology (TBA) ]|[======================================]|[ Copyright (c) 2001 David Meadows. Feel free to distribute these listings via email to your pals, students, teachers, etc., but please include the title and this copyright notice. These listings are not to be posted to any website other than my own at: http://atrium-media.com/awotv.html Thanks! ]|[======================================]|[ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 04 Feb 2001 23:22:42 -0500 From: nyokabi@kingcon.com Subject: ane Ge`ez and Kharosthi PPS The other day I downloaded S. Munro-Hay's Axum, an African Civilisation of Late Antiquity, 1991, from off the internet - apparently it has some post-1991 revisions, though the Bibliog. hasn't been added to the site yet. Here I found some more interesting clues to the problem of the possible link between the vocalized Ge'ez script and the 'arrival' of Christianity on the plateau, all of which point to the fact that Peter Daniels was not too far off the mark when he speculated: [P T D on Jan. 10] > My hypothesis requires only that a Christian proselytizer of some >sort ( a deliberate missionary? or just an enthusiastic believer?) >from, say, the Martomite community on the west coast of India, crew >or passenger on one of the ships, knew something, but not the >details , of how Indian writing worked. But he was off the mark a little on this one: >It's pretty hard to deny that Christianity and vowel notation came > to Ethiopia simultaneously. The latter can't have come with Syrian >missionaries(usually considered the founders of the Ethiopian >church) because they didn't have such a thing yet. Here is the crux. Frumentius arrived in Ethiopia as a youth, not straight from Syria, knowing only the Syriac script, but ON THE WAY HOME FROM a visit to Further India with his teacher and master, Meropius of Tyre, who brought him on the trip precisely to have him learn about India. Here is the story as I downloaded it from Munro Hays (op cit, ch 10.2). "This 'official' conversion of the king is confirmed by Rufinus (ed. Migne 1849: 478-80), a contemporary Latin writer, who derived his information from Aedesius of Tyre, who had been a prisoner and servant in the royal household at Aksum with Frumentius, the future bishop. Since Rufinus' account is so important for the history of Christianity in Ethiopia, it is given here in full in translation: "One Metrodorus, a philosopher, is said to have penetrated to further India, in order to view places and see the world. Inspired by his example, one Meropius , a philosopher of Tyre, wished to visit India with a similar object, taking with him two small boys who were related to him and whom he was educating in humane studies. The younger of these was called Aedesius, the other Frumentius. When, having seen and taken note of what his soul fed upon, the philosopher had begun to return, the ship on which he travelled put in for water or some other necessary at a certain port. It is the custom of the barbarians of these parts that, if ever the neighboring tribes should report that their treaty with the Romans is broken, all Romans found among them should be massacred. The philosopher's ship was boarded; all with himself were put to the sword. The boys were found studying under a tree preparing their lessons, and , preserved by the mercy of the barbarians, were taken to the king. He made one of them, Aedesius, his cupbearer. Frumentius, whom he had perceived to be sagacious and prudent, he made his treasurer and secretary. Therefore they were held in great honor and affection by the king. "The king died, leaving his wife with an infant son as heir of the bereaved kingdom. He gave the young men liberty to do what they pleased but the queeen besought them with tears, since she had no more faithful subjects in the whole kingdom, to share with her the cares of governing the kingdom until her son should grow up, especially Frumentius, whose ability was equal to guiding the kingdom, for the other, though loyal and honest of heart, was simple. "While they lived there and Frumentius held the reins of government in his hands, God stirred up his heart...." Soooo--- Frumentius , who was studying lessons and had presumably been exposed to some script(s) and writings of India, was given the job of secretary and treasurer. Thus he was in charge of WRITING, both the records and the accounts. This time period antedates the reign of Ezanas, since he served under the latter's father, Ella Amida/Ousanas and then the widowed Queen Mother ( a Kandake!* (see PS below) alleged to be the founder of the Cathedral of St. Mary at Axum. In another version it is Frumentius who calls together all the Christian merchants of the kingdom to donate resources to build the first Christian church. There need be no contradiction between these two versions. ) During the period of Ezana's minority, when Frumentius administered the kingdom he may have become interested in the problem of translating the Greek [or Syriac?] gospels into Ge`ez. Although there has been much debate on this question over the last century, Ullendorff, in Ethiopia and the Bible, does not rule out the possibility that the earliest efforts to translate the NT began with Frumentius. (p 50): "Loefgren is inclined 'to trust in the indigenous tradition that Frumentius, alias Abba Salama senior, was the first translator'. It seems to him 'utterly improbable' that the ordinary Christian in the Aksumite kingdom could have been content (or indeed able) to use Greek texts in the divine service for well over a century." Ullendorff mentions Rahlf and Polotsky as also holding to, or not ruling out, this view. Ullendorff himself concludes with the idea of teams of translators, p 56: " On the face of it, work on one single linguistic Vorlage was, perhaps, the exception rather than the rule in the peculiar circumstances that obtained in the Axumite kingdom of the fourth-sixth centuries." Perhaps these "peculiar circumstances", which were at the very least multi-lingual, and the difficulties of scholars of different linguistic backgrounds working together on the texts, are the ferment which gave rise to the idea of borrowing from the Indians the device of vowel appendages. Since Frumentius was clearly brilliant and had been exposed to Indian writing in his youth, it would seem logical that he, or someone commissioned by him to work on the project (since he may have been too burdened with governmental responsibilities to devote enough time to it) is the hypothetical person whom Peter Daniels envisaged. The first actual moment that we can detect the introduction of the vocalized script in Ezana's inscriptions is somewhat before he abandons his pagan habit of referring to himself as Son of the Invincible (god) Mahrem. DAE #9 was written in the vocalized script, describing a campaign against the Agwezat and their king Aba'alkeo. It is presumed to belong to Ezana because of the vocalized script, altho the name and first part of titulature are missing. It still concludes with "son of the invincible Mahrem." DAE # 10, also in the vocalized script, describes a campaign against the "Tsarane, whose country is Afan" (Ifan in the east?). This one is clearly by Ezana, son of the god Mahrem. Thus the first vocalized inscription in which he does NOT refer to Mahrem or any pagan god is DAE #11, the one recording his campaign against the rebellious Noba and the Kasu, a land presumably already with a thriving Christian community. He doesn't mention Christ in the vocalized Ge`ez version, but goes on at great length about Him in the Greek version of this same campaign to the land of the Kasu. Now Ezana was surely exposed to Frumentius' Christian faith for years before he undertook his famous campaign to the Nile. But perhaps he did not dare to come out of the closet as a Christian in his official inscriptions until Frumentius returned from Alexandria as Abu Salama, the new abuna, and officially baptised him. Thus the period in which he already uses the new vocalized script but still calls himself son of Mahrem, the period of his wars in the East, with the Agezyat and the Tsarane. Put another way, perhaps he did not believe in the efficacy of the protection and power of his New God until the proper rituals (baptism) had been performed. Till then he clung to the tried and proven powers from Mahrem to get him through his battles -- he was, after all, presumably, still quite a young man, one who had to reconquer many of his father's vassal territories which had defected under the rule of his mother and her ex-slave treasurer/vizier (eunuch?) Frumentius! E. Adams * PS As treasurer for a Kandake -supposedly the Meroitic term for Queen Mother- one cannot help wondering whether Frumentius and Aedesius had been made into eunuchs, in spite of the fact that we are in the wrong century! It is ONLY the word Kandake which locates this story (Acts 8:27)in Upper Nubia, as the Periplus at the same time - the mid 1st c AD, uses the term Aithiopes to refer to the inhabitants of the plateau, modern Ethiopia. Do we have evidence of eunuchs in upper Nubia? Castrated youth of the Habashat on the other hand were a staple of the slave trade to India! Doesn't a eunuch studying the book of Isaiah on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem suggests a Semitic-speaking Ethiopian as easily as a Meroite? The Ethiopians of course claim both Kandake and the eunuch (Ullendorff, p 135, legends that "Axum was the capital of the Christian Queen Candace").From the few Meroitic words we know, it would seem difficult to be certain that ktke/kandake is not indeed a loanword. The closest thing to it that I know of (1000 years earlier!) is Hattic: kattakhe/queen, a feminine -khe suffix on a masculine katte/king. But in Meroe the king is called the kore, not the kate, no true? PPS Why did the regime at Axum use the language of the Agwezat, Ge`ez, if these people had a king of their own and were constantly in rebellion? -(remember the unknown author of the Adulis inscription also had to fight and subdue the Agwezat, presumably at a period prior to this time). Who were the kings of Axum anyway if not themselves Agwezat? Were they Habashat, a term which they translate by the term Ethiopians in their bilingual inscriptions? Were the Agwezat(= "the emancipated" in Ge`ez) originally the inhabitants of Adulis on the coast, a place which Pliny claimed was founded by escaped Egyptian slaves? Were they then former Hyksos/ Heqa Khasw, as Therese Ghembaze inquired some weeks ago? The Tigre language of the coastal and lowland areas, the language of the nomads, is still called Khasa, and is considered to be one of the most archaic of the daughter languages of Ge`ez. Were some Hyksos refugees remembered as the people of King Apophis of Avaris, thus giving rise to the legends that an evil Serpent king [Egyptian Apepy/ giant serpent] had enslaved the people of Sheba/Ethiopia until they were liberated by Angabo, a South Arabian whose daughter Makeda inherited the kingdom? (Note that Ethiopian tradition remembers the serpent as Arwe Meder, the serpent/(beast?) of the Earth. In Agew, the pre-Semitic language of the plateau, arwe means "animal, beast," while in Ge`ez it means serpent. [cf. Dravidian (#2359) Tamil and Malayalam: aravu, aravam, ara/ snake. This root seems to have been shared with some Troglodytes of the coast and survives in S. Nilotic Nandi, Tugen, Kamasia, and Dorobo: erenet (sing) erenik (pl) snake. In Nubian: Mahas arbitti is a species of snake, which sounds like a LW with an E. Cushitic singulative suffix in - icci/-itti.] OR, is it possible that Pliny, writing in the lst c AD, was not familiar with the detailed contents of the Holy Book of this new religion which was only starting to spread outward from Palestine? Had he never heard of King Solomon of Israel, or the Queen of Sheba? When he asked who were these "Syrian"- speakers of Adulis living in the midst of Trogodytis, was he told, "a bunch of descendants of former Egyptian slaves"? - i.e. the Israelite colony imported by Menelik I may not have settled in Axum at first, but on the coast at Adulis? (cf the town of Sabea slightly N. up the coast from Adulis/Gabaz? ) In either case it bears considering whether proto-Ethiopic might not have been a form of Amelekite? Midianite? the lip of the Hyksos? and never in fact derived from a South Arabian language at all. As Stuart Munro-Hays admits in a welcome burst of honesty, when discussing Jacqueline Pirenne's 1987 idea that the proto-South Semitic language(s) spread from Ethiopia to South Arabia and not vice versa, "it is expressive of the highly theoretical nature of our conclusions about pre-Axumite Ethiopia that so complete a reversal of previous ideas can even be proposed." ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2001 15:55:49 +1100 From: Joseph Azize Subject: Re: ane About Tabnit (etc) of Sidon I think there may be different issues here. Herodotos', and indeed most ancient terms for general regions were rather rubbery. Eshmunazar may have been propagandistic. As has commonly been noted, "Phoenicia", at least originally, appears to be a Greek term. The natives of the key cities seem to have preferred to referr to themselves by reference to the cities e.g. Sdnm, or perhaps as Canaanites, and in this respect, it is de rigeur to cite Augustine.We really seem to have precious little information from 5th C BCE Lebanon and Israel. Later on the picture is even murkier e.g. with Heliodorus claiming to be Phoenician and some scholars saying, no, he means that he was a citizen of the Roman province of Syria Phoenicia (which I am not convinced of). There is also a controversy about how long the "Phoenicians" kept their Phoenician tongue in addition to Koine Greek. I don't know the answers, but I do think it is hazardous to argue a consonance in terminology between Herodotos and a Sidonian. Regards, Joseph Azize A.K. Eyma wrote: > The following news story about Tabnit of Sidon > > reminded me of the thread of 21st Jan., in which > I stated that for Herodotus, Phoenicia included the > Palestine/Israeli coast up till Filistea, something I deduced > from Herodotus' text (I,105). Now I notice that record in > ANET 662 which says that Eshmun'azar of Sidon, son of Tabnit > (apparantly early 5th c. BC) received "Dor and Joppa...in > the Plains of Sharon" of the Lord of Kings, "we added them > to the borders of our country, so that they would belong to > Sidon forever". This seems to me to nicely confirm my literary > deduction? And it makes Herodotus' use of the toponym, > around 450 BC, quite logical. > > kind regards, > Aayko Eyma ------------------------------ End of ANE Digest V2001 #35 *************************** Back issues are available on the Oriental Institute World-Wide Web (WWW) site at: http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/OI_ANE.html