Ancient Peoples

What is a people?

Names are handy labels, but what exactly is under them? You can draw endless maps showing the "Dorians" sweeping into Greece, the "Mycenae" sailing out to Anatolia and engaging the Hittites...but what is this actually telling you?

Take Crete in the late bronze age. The written language was derived from a Minoan script, the patterns of pottery and fabrics are clearly adapted from Minoan, and most of the people have been there for generations, going back well before the Thera eruption. Yet we call them Mycenaean.

(Yes; there's a lot of debate about whether there was truly a Mycenaean empire, or if it is better characterized as loosely associated kingdoms or city-states...as was the case in Classical times. But it is still, in the Helladic Age, and recognizing their unique culture -- yet no more unique than, say, the Lacedaemons -- called "Mycenaean Crete.")

Or the Hittites, who seemed to be outsiders imposing themselves with what sometimes seems remarkable grace on the existing Hattian and Hurrian and others -- so much so they kept the original name of their capital.

This goes right back to the "pots, not people" cry. When the forms of the art and technology change, is it because ideas moved, or because people moved? We label phases of the culture in an area by these identified changes (often as not, when the patterns on pottery change...or for earlier ages, when the techniques of tool-making change. This is what defines a Clovis Culture from a Folsom Culture.) It is like speciation in paleontology; it's roughly the same fur-bearing mammal it was a thousand generations ago, but to analyze and understand we have to draw artificial lines across the continuum of change, calling it by different names on either side of the divide.

It gets much, much worse when you hit the crux of the late bronze age, the confusing changes in LHIIIB/C. Ramses III identifies the Peleset among Egypt's attackers and indicates he may have settled them in the Levant where they plausibly became the Philistines and gave their name to Palestine, but they brought so much Mycenae pottery and other cultural indicators with them it is hard not to think they may have originated among the Mycenaeans.

But even if they had the same name through this journey, how does this help? How does this connection help us to understand what drove them in desperation at Egypt's shores, and what guided their interactions with their later neighbors, and most importantly how this culture changed and evolved?




I've been thinking about this for a couple weeks now. And today, just randomly, I ran into some rather frightening stuff concerning race and identity in the classical world.

Or, more specifically, how race/ethnicity/cultural identity (not even slightly the same thing, but also three hairy terms that need to be defined carefully within every context they get used in) is of concern to some people today and how their concerns are projected back into the classical world out of a troubled but more recent history.

A lot to unpack. First, the classical world -- and the Bronze Age -- does recognize peoples as distinct, but it is unclear if this extends beyond geography. I mean; an immigrant from Lacedaemon to Athens is recognized as foreign and indeed there are the usual denigrations. But the evidence is that the Athenians thought of this in primarily cultural terms; their children, properly brought up in Athenian society, were as Athenian as any other.

And they recognized that there were people that looked different...but take the Egyptian habit of choosing different colors to illustrate some of their neighbors. They painted the Nubians dark brown in their artwork. But they also painted their own men red (and the women white). There is obviously just as much symbolism as naturalism going on here.

By the Classical age, one can certainly say there is recognition of different skin colors and facial features and body types as characteristic of different peoples. Some Greek writers express their opinions on the relative aesthetics. So you could say there is something that looks like our modern conception of race.

The thing you can't say is that this is sorted in anywhere similar to how we sort it. The Greeks did not have a concept of "white" or "european" (to a Greek, you were either Greek or something foreign and lesser, and the writing doesn't seem to indicate skin color was of primary importance. At best, they'd recognize "white" as being a sick person. They did not resemble and would not recognize what a modern American would call "white.")

But due to lots of complicated history I don't have the slightest interest in getting into now, a whole towering edifice of identity politics has been built around the idea of the idea of the superior, white, Greek culture leading directly to the superior, white, people and culture who built the free world and who are being unfairly kicked out of their position of supremacy in it.

So many, many things get caught up in this whirlpool. Whether Cleopatra was "black" (kind of missing the point there -- no matter what the so-called "sub-Saharan" genetics of Egypt, Cleo herself was basically Greek), whether it is right to take any time away from Plato and Socrates to teach a little Confucius, whether it is an affront to art to allow paint on marble statuary, and whether there ever were those damned Dorians.

Yeah, those terribly suspect and nearly-invisible Dorians (why one writer describes them as the invasion of the cloak pins). Yes, there was a change in culture across the span of the Greek Dark Ages, moving from the Mycenaean culture to the pre-Classical Greeks. Language changed, a new writing system was adopted, and of course the pots changed. The pots always change. Classics scholars hung on to the idea of a mysterious people suddenly sweeping into the Greek mainland at around the end of the Bronze Age bringing this new set of pots with them, hung on to this idea far longer than was warranted by any evidence.

Until you looked at the underbelly of that picture. The Dorians, according to one view, came from Western Europe. Germany, even. Because somehow the people that Homer wrote about were not sufficiently heroic to be the ancestors of the modern western world. Something had to bring the spark of civilization to them and make them into the democracy-inventing carvers of tall, square-jawed, clean-limbed figures in pure white marble.

This ridiculousness is all over the Atlantis myth, of course. And shows up in such bizarre places as the identity of Kennewick Man. And although it makes absolutely no sense projected back to the retreat of the glaciers (as the lighter skin tones don't show up much earlier than ten thousand years ago) the alt-right are all over the Solutrean hypothesis, spinning this poorly thought-out theory in ways bloody bloody Andrew Jackson would find familiar.

Plus you have fools like "23 and Me" sowing even more confusion with their ludicrous attempts at genomic identification.

But this isn't just modern, and it isn't just red stater's with MAGA hats. From the first moments I started reading about the Sea Peoples I started running into weird rambling justifications for how Estonians or Sicilians or whatever were the true font of all civilization ever and deserved to rule the modern world. There's nationalistic identity all over this stuff. Manifest Destiny is alive and well (seriously, half the conflicts out in the world today are about who really truly has the ancestral claim to a bit of land.)




And thus I've discovered Classics scholars are finding themselves uncomfortably in the front lines of a culture war. Some see their subject as being attacked. Others see it as necessary criticism if it is to remain a live study and not a fossilized remnant. And this latter cohort is particularly distressed to see themselves being drafted as supporters of some fantasy world of civilization under attack by barbarians.

This distress is not without basis. It seems the attacks from the alt-right are most vitriolic on those they believe should be their natural allies. What a strange world we live in, when writing about Socrates can get you called an ivory-tower reactionary, and simultaneously called a race traitor. Probably not for the same article, or by the same people, but still...it's enough to drive one to hemlock.

It is also yet one more thing to give a writer of fiction set in this period pause. I was already quite aware of a certain expectation hanging around certain flavors of Bronze Age fiction; red-blooded action with the only context being military and the only people of import being warriors (social justice warriors, however, are to be avoided at all costs).

I was already suspecting I was going into deep waters when I saw my own spin on the Trojan War and the Mycenaean Kings going in the direction of deconstruction...but, yes, once again Homer has gotten there before us. Anyone who thinks the Illiad is all action-adventure without consequences hasn't read the damn thing.