Transcript 7 Wonders-class 8

CLAS 1120Q / ARCH 1707
THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
MWF 12 – 12:50 p.m.
Rhode Island Hall 108
Prof. John Cherry
Class 8
September 25, 2015
Herodotus
Greeks and Non-Greeks
This Old Pyramid
The Khufu ship
• 143 ft long x 19.5 ft wide
• Sealed in a bedrock pit at the
south edge of the Khufu pyramid.
Discovered only in 1954.
• Found disassembled in 1,223
cedarwood pieces (75’ to 4” in size)
• A “solar barge” (a ritual vessel
designed to carry the resurrected
king with the sun-god Ra)
• May have carried the king’s
embalmed body from Memphis
to Giza — i.e., a boat used in a
real funeral voyage that
afterwards had to be ritually
buried
Khufu’s second boat pit
• investigated by Boston University, 1987
• contained another disassembled boat
Herodotus
Born ca. 484 BC, in Halicarnassus (Bodrum, SW coast of Turkey)
Died ca. 425 BC
The Histories (earliest surviving Greek prose of any length)
“The father of history” — but also of ethnography, and travel-writing
“The father of lies” (claimed he was reporting only what he had
seen for himself or what he had been told)
A record of his historia (Greek: “inquiry”), an investigation in to
the origins of the Persian War with the Greek world, ca. 490-479 BC.
Includes a wealth of geographical and ethnographic information
Herodotus’s travels…
… took place mostly within the Persian Empire ( seen here ca. 500 BC)
Herodotus’s purpose in writing
The opening of Book I:
• Herodotus of Halicarnassus: his Researches are here set down to
preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing
achievements both of our own and of other peoples; and more
particularly, to show how they came into conflict.
“We Greeks” compared to “other people”
“Digressions are part of my plan” (Book IV, 30)
“Astonishing achievements” — the start of wonder?
“Monuments which beggar description” (Book II, 35)
Hellenes (Greeks) — occupants of Hellas
vs
Barbaroi (non-Greeks)
Barbarophonoi, a word first used by Homer,
refers to those peoples who do not speak Greek,
but unintelligible “bar-bar-blah-blah…” sounds
Greeks felt themselves linked by features which served
to distinguish them from all other people…
A common language,
Greek — although
many dialects
Shared religious
outlook: many
deities in common,
and a shared body
of myths
Zeus
Herakles
Shared culture in
art, architecture,
literature
Institutional
embodiments of
Greek unity
(e.g., Delphic oracle,
Panhellenic [“All-Greek”]
Games, such as those
at Olympia)
Greeks and “others”
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To be fully Greek meant being: male, adult, free, a citizen of a polis
Greeks typically defined themselves in terms of negative, polar, binary
opposition to a whole series of non-Greek “others” — e.g.:
Slaves
Children
Females
Non-citizens (e.g. resident aliens)
Non-Greek speakers
Members of other ethnic groups (e.g. Macedonians)
Non-mortals (the superhuman gods)
Semi-human monsters (e.g. Amazons, Centaurs, Giants)
Alterity (otherness)
Fundamental pairings that become confused as categories:
US :: THEM
GREEK :: BARBARIAN
MEN :: WOMEN
CITIZEN :: ALIEN
FREE :: SLAVE
MORTALS :: GODS
Herodotus says: a barbarian is a person who does not share
To Hellenikon (“the Greek thing”, “Greekness”) — common
blood, language, religion, customs
Herodotus, Histories Book II, 35-40
(= pp. 115-117 in the pdf extracts on the class Canvas site)
About Egypt itself I shall have a great deal more to relate because of the number
of remarkable things which the country contains, and because of the fact that more
monuments that beggar description are to be found there than anywhere else…
Not only is the Egyptian climate peculiar to that country, and the Nile different in its
behavior from other rivers elsewhere, but the Egyptians themselves in their manners
and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind. For instance…
standing
men
Greek
women
Egyptian
sitting
Egyptian
Greek
The Greek
“othering”
of non-Greeks
Herodotus’s reaction to Egyptian art:
Not interested!
Herodotus 2.106.2-5
Describes rock-cut “engravings” in
a pass between Sardis and Smyrna
in western Turkey.
He claims it represented a pharaoh
Sesostris who (he was told by
Egyptian priests) led an
expedition into parts of Europe.
The hieroglyphic inscription, he
thought, read: “I myself won this
land with the strength of my
shoulders.”
What he saw was probably the
13th-century rock-cut Hittite
reliefs in the Karabel Pass.
Luwian inscription describes the
figure as “Tarkasnawa, king of the
Land of Mira”
Herodotus’s reaction to the pyramids — mainly as feats of engineering
• the ramp from the river to the pyramid and up its sides (“just about as
big a piece of work as the pyramid”
• work gangs and how they operated in shifts
• size of the hewn blocks and how they were raised and set in place
• how the monument was finished off (from the top down)
• how much time it all took (10 years for ramp, 20 for pyramid)
• how much it cost (radishes, onions, and garlic for the workmen)
— His measurements are quite accurate (800’ rather than 760’) — paced out?
— No sense at all of what the monument meant in ideological terms
— But this is the first narrative, eye-witness account of a Wonder