Albright - Greek Intellectual Revolution

American Philosophical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.

http://www.jstor.org

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

-242Published by: American Philosophical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/986117Accessed: 29-07-2015 10:09 UTC

REFERENCESLinked references are available on JSTOR for this article:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/986117?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 147.142.225.52 on Wed, 29 Jul 2015 10:09:27 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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 generalized 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 literature 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 accumulated 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 wisdom, 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


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 completely 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 mythology, 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 revolution 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 philosophy. 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.


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 material 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 expanded 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 postulates, 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 inscriptions, 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 established in Cilicia. While the problem of the Danaans is not completely settled, it is highly probable that the term (Egyptian Tanaya) referred 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."



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 increasingly 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 expansion, 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 before 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.



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' predicting 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 prediction 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 question, 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.



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 unfortunately 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 individuals, 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 logically 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 improbable 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 "intuitions" 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 experience 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 seventeenth 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, "natural law," which is an entirely different concept). Successive stages in the development of the concept 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.



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 common law is actually an unorganized body of customary 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 progress for at least 1,500 years from collections of miscellaneous legal cases with often quite trivial differences, to systematic codes of more sophisticated 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 extraordinary 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 themselves 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 explain the general burst of intellectual activity among the Greeks of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., but it does not tell us what evolutionary tendency to expect in tracing the development 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 different 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.



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 mathematician, 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 absolutely 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 formulation 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) formulation. 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 individual 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 different 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 important to note that we lack logical classifications in the ancient East. The Babylonians gradually developed elaborate vocabularies which were gradually expanded during the middle centuries of the second millennium B.C. until they included collections 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



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 beginnings 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 movements 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 because, 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 deceased 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 introduced by the Greeks, and this principle of classification 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 reasoning 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 classification and formulation of generalized mathematical propositions rather than in the concomitant discovery 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.



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, however, 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 philosophy 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 translation 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 philosopher 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 extraordinary powers shortly after the floruit of Thales and who was contributing to so many different 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 practical, 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 attributed 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 everything 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 proposed 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.


VOL. 116, NO. 3, 19721 THE GREEK INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION 235

nate in them; and he thought that these "worlds" sometimes 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 pattern-" 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 astronomy; 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 forgotten. 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 undoubtedly 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.



insisting that as an educated and much-traveled man of his time he was familiar with archaic astrology. 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 believe 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 knowledge 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.



Phoenician cosmological and mythological allusions. It mentions Phoenician hierophants (see below) and takes an often oddly non-Israelite approach 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 translators 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.



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 antiquity. 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 evidence 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 commentators.

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 alternative 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 business (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 business 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.



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 borrowing from Phoenician sources on the part of Anaxi- mander. It rather suggests that there was a common 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 movement 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 speculation 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 important phase of Anaximander's activity-cosmogony. According to the doxographers, Anaxi- mander said that when the world came into existence, 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 sometimes 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 contemporary of Nero, was the source of nearly all Eusebius's information about Phoenician religion. Besides, it has now become clear, thanks to increased 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 cosmogony 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 millennium 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 phenomena, 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.



Later Greek tradition placed Sanchuniathon somewhere 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 addition 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 destruction 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 mentions Berytus as "a city and northerly port." In my opinion there is not a single datum in the extremely 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 reputed 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



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

Albright - Greek Intellectual Revolution

Documents

Transcript of Albright - Greek Intellectual Revolution