A Hittite Version of the Trojan War?! [1:03:07]

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0:00 · Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are really, really old. And in the almost 3 000 years since they were first composed they've had a tremendous influence on western literature.
0:09 · Homer is often thought of as the O.G. of epic storytelling. But is it possible that the Iliad and Odyssey were in turn deeply influenced by the stories
0:17 · of other civilizations to the east of Greece? That's what we're going to find out today.
0:28 · Hi, I’m lantern jack and you're listening to another episode of Ancient Greece Declassified.
0:35 · For thousands of years, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were the oldest epic narratives that Europeans knew of. But since the mid-1800s, archaeology has enabled us to peer through the depths of time
0:45 · and given us access to the amazing and colorful world of the late Bronze Age (we're talking
0:50 · roughly 1600 to 1200 BC). During that time period, one of the greatest empires around
0:57 · was that of the Hittites, who controlled most of Anatolia (namely, what's now the territory
1:02 · of turkey). If there ever was a Trojan War, the Hittites would have almost certainly been involved
1:09 · as adversaries of the Greeks, sinceTroy is part of the region they lay claim to. Now, one recent
1:14 · scholar who is an expert on both ancient Greek epic and Bronze Age Hittite texts has gathered
1:20 · evidence that suggests that the Mycenaeans (i.e the Bronze Age Greeks) and the Hittites not only
1:26 · vied for control over parts of western Anatolia, but they also exchanged cultural information.
1:31 · In fact, she claims that many of the features and plot elements in Homer's epics aboutTroy
1:37 · were borrowed from the Hittite tradition. Joining us now to discuss the Hittites and their connection with the Greeks is that scholar. Mary Bachvarova is professor of classics at
1:46 · Willamette University. She's the author of "From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of
1:52 · Ancient Greek Epic" as well as other books and articles on the oral traditions of the late
1:57 · bronze and early Iron Ages. Mary Bachvarova, welcome to Ancient Greece Declassified!
2:04 · Thanks for having me. So, I’m curious first off on how you got into Hittite. Because, you know, my high school had Latin. My college had Latin and ancient Greek.
2:14 · But no university I’ve ever been involved in or visited had a Hittite department or
2:22 · even a course on Hittite. So, how did you learn this obscure Bronze Age script and language?
2:30 · No, you're exactly right, this is the problem with Hittite. It's not widely taught. And I happen to
2:35 · go to the uh college and grad school at two of the places in the US where you can study Hittite.
2:43 · Even worse than that, I went—so I went to Harvard for undergrad – Harvard-Radcliffe for
2:48 · undergrad – and I went to university of Chicago in the now defunct Committee on the History of
2:54 · Culture. Those are the two universities where people believed that you could use Hittite texts
3:01 · to understand the prehistory of Greek culture. And elsewhere that also was not taught. So,
3:09 · I was very lucky to have the opportunity to know that Hittite existed and that it was important
3:15 · and have a chance to study it. But I was shocked to realize when I came to writing my dissertation that most people did not believe it was appropriate to use texts from the Hittite
3:25 · capital to discuss Greek pre-history. So, what was it about exploring these
3:35 · Hittite texts that made you start to see a connection with Homer's epics and, you know,
3:42 · the ancient Greek epic tradition? So, when I started studying Hittite
3:48 · at University of Chicago under Harry Hoffner. That was 1996 and what had just been published were the
3:58 · hand copies of a newly found epic from Hattusa. And we read that text in my first year Hittite
4:07 · class in the second half of it. And that just blew my mind and so that text, which is presented kind
4:16 · of like a Loeb edition – it's presented with the Hittite on one side and the Hurrian original or a
4:22 · Hurrian version (Hurrian being a language that is a language unrelated to Hittite). And the
4:28 · Hurrians were a group of people that were one of the main intermediaries for Mesopotamia culture,
4:36 · bringing it to Anatolia. And so this text has – it's a cuneiform set of cuneiform tablets with the
4:42 · Hurian version of this epic on one side and then a Hittite version on the other. And it's a story
4:47 · about the destruction of a historical city called Ebla in north Syria because its assembly refuses
4:55 · to release certain captives. And that is one of the plots – one of the subplots – of the Iliad.
5:02 · Wow. Right, so there's, I mean, many things I want to ask you about this now.
5:08 · First about the Hurrians. So the Hurrians are— What role did they play in Hattusa (the capital of the Hittites)?
5:18 · So, the Hurrians are a group of people that we know less about than we'd like to because they didn't really like to write down stuff in their own language.
5:26 · But they seem to—they have one known relative, which are the Urartians, who are up in Armenia in
5:31 · the Iron Age. And they seem to have come down from the Caucasus in the third millennium (we think)
5:37 · and come into northern Mesopotamia and there begin to absorb Mesopotamia culture. So, they're
5:42 · speaking a language that's radically different from Sumerian or Akkadian or Hittite. But they
5:48 · create an empire or they have fairly strong political and military control over a large
5:58 · part of Mesopotamia – northern Mesopotamia going into northern Syria and then eastern Anatolia
6:06 · – at the beginning of the late Bronze Age. And so the Hittites at first come into contact with them as adversaries on the eastern border of the Hittite world.
6:17 · And eventually they start— first of all they crush the so-called Mitanni Empire
6:22 · (the Hittites do) and then they start to absorb Hurrian elements, particularly first in part
6:29 · through dynastic marriages and in part through a cultural adaptation from the Hurrian-Luwian
6:37 · symbiosis that's going on in southeast Anatolia. So, is it kind of like the Austrians and
6:44 · Hungarians that started off as enemies and became the Austro-Hungarian empire?
6:49 · Well, the Hurrians lose all political power. They only have let's say cultural power. Maybe
6:55 · that makes sense. Through their performers and um even from the very beginning that our earliest
7:01 · attestation of Hurrians and Hurrian is in magical spells. So they seem to be great
7:07 · performers of verbal art and maybe that's one of the reasons they choose not to write down stuff,
7:12 · because they're very invested in their language being used for performance rather than administrative purposes.  So the country of the Hurrians is Mitanni, is that correct?
7:23 · The Mitanni Empire or Federation is a group of cities that's gathered together or form alliances
7:32 · and did a pretty good job of conquering a fair part of northern Syria and eastern Anatolia.
7:39 · Now, my knowledge of this is a little hazy, but I remember reading that the Mitanni language, which I guess is Hurrian, is closest to Indic languages of india. Is that
7:50 · the current understanding or no? Wow, you do, you really want to open this can of worms? Well I hope it'll be a very small can of worms but yeah.
8:02 · They borrow – the Mitanni Hurrians – when they're in northern Mesopotamia in the beginning of the
8:10 · second millennium, are borrowing or are influenced by some elements of Indic culture, particularly
8:17 · the spoke-wheeled horse-drawn war chariot and the related technology of the laminated compound bow.
8:26 · And there seems to be incorporation at the very upper echelons of a group of these Indic speaking
8:34 · or old Indic speaking peoples who bring other cultural features with them – I would argue,
8:40 · but that's a whole other can of worms. So, Mitanni Hurrian is kind of more to the east and maybe a
8:47 · little bit more recent version of Hurrian and mainly attested in a few letters from Amarna
8:53 · in Egypt and Bogazkoy Hurrian or the Hurrian that's recorded among the Hittites is a little
8:58 · bit of a different dialect, a little bit older. Okay so I guess the upshot of all this that's
9:03 · relevant for our conversation is that the Hittite empire, the Hittite capital Hattusa, is a kind of
9:09 · melting pot. It's a cosmopolitan center. There's a lot of different languages. There's at least one other—well, I mean, I think you mentioned in your book that there's seven languages that
9:18 · have been found in the archives of Hattusa. So, the Hurrians are another Indo-European
9:23 · distant relative. No? They're not? Okay… Hurrian has only one known relative.
9:29 · Oh wow. Oh it's the… They have a small amount of cultural admixing at the very upper echelons of society but that's it, particularly centered around horse training
9:38 · and other activities like that. There's some other possibilities, like they might bring truce—
9:44 · customs around treaties and other things like that. It's a couple of gods. But the Hurrians that are coming into contact with the Hittites are sort of north Syrian with some
9:54 · mixture of Caucasian culture and an admixture – also a big admixture – of Mesopotamian culture.
10:02 · So, the Hurrians themselves are a melting pot too. Okay so you have the Hurrians as one major
10:09 · linguistic group besides the native Hittite speakers – the speakers of Neshili I guess is what
10:15 · they call their own language. And you have also Akkadian influences from Babylonia in the south.
10:21 · Yeah. So, how would you characterize the main cultures and cultural mixtures happening in
10:27 · Hattusa at this time of you know 1500 BC or so? So, the Hittites are the dominant group of people
10:33 · there, but even Hittite as far as we can tell is mostly being used as an administrative language.
10:38 · And the closely related language of Luwian is what normal people would have spoken. So there are at
10:44 · least two Indo-European languages being spoken and used there. But we also have evidence for
10:51 · the original indigenous language called Hattic or Hattian – a language isolate used by scribes who
10:58 · don't actually always understand what they're writing, for magical incantations and prayers.
11:04 · And we also have a couple of other languages closely related – oh, well, one closely related
11:10 · to Hittite called Palaic, which comes from the northern regions. Hittites are also, so the Hittites are very interested in collecting local cultural features, particularly around
11:22 · efficacious verbal art, because they suffer from famine and disease and other things like that. So they cultivate the habit of recording texts in all these different languages by prestigious
11:35 · performers (or texts presenting themselves as by prestigious regional performers) and that's one
11:41 · of the reasons why we have so many different languages attested there. They also absorb the standard scribal culture of Mesopotamia with Akkadian and a little bit of Sumerian as the basic
11:51 · original language that you practice writing in. And then comes in the Hurrian admixture, which is both— which itself is a mixture of stuff that's coming down from the Caucasus. So
12:02 · Hurrian mythology has elements of mythology that are still found in the Caucasus today
12:07 · and a big admixture of Mesopotamian material. So the Hittites are actually getting Mesopotamian material directly from scribes that are imported from Babylon and
12:18 · from north Syria. And they're getting it indirectly through the Hurrians. So it's quite an interesting and complex cultural mixture. And because the Hittites choose to write
12:29 · down things that other groups don't (because they don't seem to be quite so invested in scribes as the secret holders of knowledge) it's the only place we get for example the
12:39 · voices of women in these magical incantations. So it's really a unique site that gives us a window into the oral culture of Anatolia and the Near East that we don't get elsewhere.
12:50 · Oh that's amazing, especially when you think about how nobody knew about the Hittites until
12:56 · 150 years ago. The fact that like this entire civilization came to light and there's enough
13:01 · textual evidence that survives to give us such a colorful picture is really incredible. It is. And it seems that the Hittite empire, when it fell, no one wanted to remember it.
13:10 · Or very few people were interested in remembering it. And to some degree there seems to be an almost deliberate erasing of the memory of the Hittites from legendary history.
13:20 · It probably also helps that their capital was in the mountains, because coastal areas tend to get rebuilt a lot more often, whereas the kind of… The Phrygians do end up settling there, but yeah.
13:32 · So you mentioned this bilingual epic that you read I guess at university of Chicago
13:40 · that has a similar plot element as the one that is the kind of framing
13:46 · element of the Trojan War story as preserved in the Iliad – the idea of a city that's destroyed because they won't give back some hostages or something like that. Is there any other
13:56 · plot element or story that you can give us as an example of a striking parallel between the Hittite material and the more familiar ancient Greek stuff?
14:06 · Yeah or maybe we should rephrase it: stuff that is found in the Hittite capital because the Hittites
14:12 · had a penchant for writing down oral traditions that other groups of people didn't, yeah? Okay.
14:19 · So the other one I would bring up is a well-known Mesopotamian story. It's attached to the
14:26 · son/grandson of Sargon the Great (the Akkadian conqueror who was the first to unify northern
14:34 · and southern Mesopotamia) And so this is a story about the destruction of Akkad – their legendary city founded by Sargon
14:42 · (an event that by the way did not happen, right). So it's not a historical telling. And it involves
14:47 · Naram-Sin being attacked – the city of Akkad being attacked – by a group of invaders from afar, and
14:56 · Naram-Sin refusing the omens that the gods give him to retreat inside the walls of Akkad and hole
15:02 · up there until they go away. And he in fact, like Hector, says "I repudiate the omens. I will go
15:08 · like a wolf on my own." right, so the Hector story is the Naram-Sin plotline. The larger frame of the
15:19 · Iliad is the destruction of Ebla plotline. And of course the anger of Achilles is another plotline
15:27 · that is merged into the larger complex of stories that are told in the Iliad.
15:35 · And this character in the Hittite story, like Hector, is presented with certain omens
15:42 · but he says, "No, I gotta keep doing what I’m doing because that's the way to go." And then there's a punish— or a consequence to that action that's a terrible consequence, so…
15:51 · Well, I should say it's an Akkadian story. We have no… oh yeah we do
15:59 · this story does exist in a Hittite version – a variant Hittite version at the Hittite capital.
16:07 · What we don't have good evidence for is that there was a Hurrian version for it. But there is
16:13 · a Hurrian fragment that names— an epic fragment that names his grandfather
16:19 · Sargon. So by a series of inferences I argue that the Hurrian tradition also had
16:28 · a story about Naram-Sin as it had a story about Sargon. So again the Hittites provide us with
16:35 · examples of versions of these Mesopotamian scribal works of art that indicate to us that
16:43 · there was an oral stratum that told these stories too and also that they had variant versions that
16:50 · were changed to meet the expectations and interests of local populations and so that's
16:55 · one of the reasons why the Hittite material is so important they show you how you can take these traditional stories and how they're reworked to fit into local traditions fascinating so
17:09 · when you see these similarities between the Mesopotamian and Hittite material on the one hand
17:15 · and the Greek material on the other um there are a few potential explanations one could come up with
17:23 · and you know you know some some of our viewers who might be fans of Joseph Campbell's "monomyth" or
17:30 · of Jungian psychology that posits a "collective unconscious," where similar symbols and story
17:37 · elements kind of bubble up from human nature in the same way in Japan as in
17:43 · South America, all these places. So how do you rule out the possibility that maybe these are just
17:49 · manifestations of human nature human experience coming out in similar ways in different places
17:59 · so I i am not super enthusiastic about um focusing on parallels because of exactly
18:05 · this problem how weird does a parallel have to be before you can insist that it's a cogent parallel
18:12 · um that's why I’m much more focused on means of transmission and reasons for transmission because
18:17 · even if a parallel is completely um uh bland it still could be important if you can prove
18:24 · how or if you can show how it could have been transmitted so I’ve really moved away
18:31 · from the st the listing of parallels and I’m much more focused on how
18:37 · interaction happened in order to understand the pre uh pre-history of uh how the Greeks understood
18:46 · themselves like why they would want to absorb these stories when and where and also as a way
18:51 · of getting a window into um earlier versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we can use
18:57 · to understand how the audience would have reacted to Homer's version right and I want to get to the
19:03 · mode of transition in more detail in in a moment but just another preliminary question about this
19:09 · something that uh striking is interesting from your book as well as other books of scholars
19:17 · in earlier decades trying to see the parallels between Greek and uh and near eastern cultures
19:22 · such as martin west or Walter Burkert it seems that whenever a parallel is discerned the default
19:30 · position is to say oh it came from east to west so why is that the default view and not
19:39 · and it seems that the possibility that maybe the Greeks of that period even if they didn't write down as much stuff or hardly anything at all you know they could have still been
19:47 · transmitting oral stories as they were conducting shipping routes you know to the near east and so
19:55 · forth so why is it the default assumption that the transmission happened from east to west
20:03 · well the two specific motifs or storylines that I mentioned to you they are very much attached to those two specific cities thus uh Akkad and Ebla
20:14 · so they start from those cities and get attached to other get attached toTroy from there now you
20:21 · can I’m happy to agree with you that Greeks already had stories about the sieging and
20:26 · destroying cities because we have images on Mycenaean vases for example of exactly that
20:32 · but I will make my second point which I usually bring up in these situations which is that when we
20:38 · have broad parallels and storylines that makes it easier to borrow interesting details one performer
20:45 · to be like yeah I get that and I like that little thing that you're doing there with this standard storyline so I think it's actually important to acknowledge that the broad similarities
20:57 · in story types then permits the barring of specific versions of those story types yeah
21:05 · so what I mean can you just help us get into your method and and mode of investigating these
21:13 · things so what specific characteristics or features of the Hittite Hurrian or um
21:21 · Hittito-Akkadian stories. Hurro-Hittite. Akkadian Hittite stories like what are the features there that you think,
21:32 · when you find similar things in the Greek material, that they bear the kind of watermark of the Anatolian version?
21:43 · So those two specific storylines I told you which uh the destruction of a city because its assembly
21:51 · refuses to release captives that is very specific right so in book three
21:56 · of the Iliad when one of the sons of one of the Trojan assemblymen is caught and is about to be murdered we realize oh there's this backstory that everyone knows in which
22:07 · uh some Greek heroes went toTroy and tried to negotiate the release of her helen but they
22:14 · were brought the uh the the uh Trojans uh council of elders was bribed by Paris to not release her
22:21 · right that's a weird detail that's not just like cities are destroyed when that parallel I think
22:27 · that's a striking parallel that's worth noting also the the example with from the naram sin
22:34 · story where he says I refuse the omens of the gods I will go like a wolf on my own like that whole
22:41 · complex of words right that's a very specific parallel to what Hector does and even weirder
22:48 · Hector has to have come up with some lame reason to be outside of his city and refuse to go in
22:54 · right he decides I’m going to erect a camp outside the city for this one night and it makes no sense at all right so to get that motif into the Iliad you have to come up
23:04 · with this cockamamie reason for Hector to be outside of his walls and then refuse the omen
23:15 · these similarities you have a transmission from the Hittites to the Greeks might be some
23:22 · intermediate stages there I want to get your view on that and presumably you know as we've discussed
23:28 · in earlier conversations with for example Greg Nagy, who is a Homer scholar, these oral poems of
23:35 · the Greeks like the Iliad and the Odyssey they're performed many many times often in small chunks
23:41 · they're always evolving over time what we have is like one crystallized version but there were centuries of them evolving over time and so am I getting it right that your model posits
23:51 · various different performers over the centuries hearing stories from the east saying oh I like
23:56 · that element how can I work it in to this story about Hector that didn't have that before and then
24:03 · you get this uh you know growing narrative that incorporates eastern elements is that the model?
24:11 · Yes I would say that the Hittites happen to record this stuff that is available to us but there there's no direct connection I don't think there's a direct connection between
24:19 · Hittite material and Greek material it would have come via groups in other groups of people who are
24:25 · also adopting these stories in their oral traditions and the Hittites just happened to write them down so the train of transmission to the Greeks does not involve the Hittites at all
24:34 · in my opinion you can get people who will argue differently I also think the milieu is very key
24:40 · where do performers hear each other perform and why would they be interested in borrowing a detail
24:47 · uh and so though competitive scenarios where different performers from different locations
24:53 · would hear each other perform are a key part of the way I think about transmission so festivals
24:59 · is a rather obvious one and so the question is what god would you be celebrating and I would
25:05 · argue that Apollo is probably one of the chief gods um festivals that are celebrating him where
25:13 · you would have groups of people from different backgrounds coming together and performing their
25:18 · own traditions and therefore having a chance to see what the other people's traditions look like
25:25 · well before we get into the festivals um to your earlier point about how there might have
25:30 · been several stages between the Hittites and the Mycenaeans. So lay that out for us. Like, what are the stops on the train as it goes from Hattusa to Ionia? so I don't I you can find people
25:45 · who argue that there is borrowing by Mycenaeans of these near eastern ideas at that point but I don't
25:53 · think that's what's going on I think it happens it survives in Anatolia and passes down across
25:59 · centuries until the Iron Age in which Greeks come into contact with it in Aeolis and in Ionia there
26:08 · are other locations for other important nodes of contact Cyprus is a very important one for example
26:16 · but I think that the contact with Greek speakers is happening in the early Iron Age and that these stories are preserved until then so we're talking after the Bronze Age
26:26 · collapse which again we discussed in an earlier conversation with Eric Klein episode two on the podcast for those who want to check it out so um okay but you have the Mycenaeans and
26:37 · the Hittites and they are in contact we have letters in the Hittite archives in Hattusa
26:42 · uh mainly to the Mycenaeans but one even from the Mycenaeans and then both civilizations collapse
26:52 · and then you have the model you're talking about where you have the Greeks kind of re-establish
27:00 · settlements on the Anatolian coast and then they find these stories that have kind of drifted out
27:07 · of the abandoned Hittite strongholds why did the transmission start then and not earlier
27:13 · when they were sending envoys to each other it's possible it's not impossible I would agree with
27:20 · that but what you're do you have to have a bard who performs that makes his way there um so I’m
27:28 · very much against the idea that scribes were the um uh purveyors of the traditions and that would
27:34 · be one of the ways in which I differ very strongly from uh Walter Burkert and and many other people
27:40 · who do uh comparisons between Greek and near eastern stuff they look at the scribal stuff and they compared to the Greek stuff and they basically the the model that they seem
27:49 · to come up with is somehow Greeks are they don't write in their own language but they're learning
27:55 · cuneiform which takes multiple years and no one actually speaks Akkadian anymore and they're
28:02 · immersed in this scribal world and then they bring it home and they start performing orally it just doesn't make any sense right so it's possible that they're trading bards around that we have
28:14 · no evidence for that but that doesn't mean that it's not happening um I would argue I have argued
28:21 · that um the transfer of the storm god of Aleppo is one of the main reasons for the transfer of this
28:29 · story the song of releases I like to call it about the destruction of Ebla that it actually was imported with that god and performers that would have performed in the custom and
28:39 · the way that god is accustomed to so that would be a possible means of transmission
28:47 · yeah if that's important to you sure and just to kind of fill in some some of these gaps for
28:55 · our listeners. People should keep in mind that when we're talking about the late Bronze Age
29:01 · we're playing a different ball game than we talk about classical Greece. For classical Greece we
29:06 · have so many texts that are so clear and lengthy that we can actually see downtown Athens and we
29:13 · can see people what they're wearing what they're saying etc etc in the 1000 years earlier era of
29:19 · the late Bronze Age we have tiny little clues here and there we do have texts as you say I mean and you're the expert I’m just an amateur in that era of of ancient history uh but a lot of what people
29:32 · uh have to do scholars such as yourself when they examine this period is to sort through tons of
29:39 · incomplete evidence and make a lot of leaps and that's just part of the process and I am totally convinced by your preference for oral transmission over written transmission I think
29:50 · oral transmission is something that's um more natural to humans and it's happening all the time
29:57 · uh so let's let's explore this period of the early Iron Age so after the Bronze Age collapse
30:07 · uh this is the time when you really don't have text that one of the problems is trying to
30:12 · reconstruct what was going on between the collapse of the Hittite empire where we have this very
30:17 · unusual collection of texts that um are oral derived um as john miles foley would say right
30:26 · we don't know the exact relationship between these written texts and the oral tradition but they show the traces of an oral tradition so between the texts that we find in the late Bronze Age from
30:36 · the Hittite empire and Homer how do you fill in that gap and try to get out the scenarios
30:42 · in which stories are performed and the plot lines and that's where of course archaeology comes in particularly things vessels used for drinking wine are one of the things I’ve really focused on and
30:54 · what kinds of story lines you can infer from them that would have been performed while that wine
30:59 · would have was being drunk so trying to and again we see some evidence for stories about wars long
31:07 · voyages um we can infer that Greeks had their own traditions about destructions of cities absolutely
31:16 · and um during that early Iron Age when we have this sudden darkness and lack of information
31:26 · it seems that there were some Greek warrior tri bands or whatever uh migrants refugees
31:34 · that ended up all the way in uh like southeastern Anatolia with with mopsis or moxo as the tablets
31:44 · suppose so there's a lot of mobility right in this whole area during that period
31:49 · yes yes I suffer from mopsymania so thank you for bringing hume up um so uh
32:00 · the the mopsys example is an important one that the the texts that uh mention mopsys um in and
32:10 · in southeastern Anatolia date from about the time of Homer around 705 or so we would say um and they
32:18 · show that uh Greeks and uh local Anatolians are are Greek speakers they show ultimately that Greek
32:27 · speakers and Anatolians share heroes let's put it that way wow and that they are one might suggest
32:35 · that they are interested that Greeks and the Anatolians they're coming into contact with are negotiating a shared yet contested legendary past which would involve personages heroes if we
32:49 · want to use that word in the technical sense people that are honored as fictional ancestors
32:55 · and that there might be some interest in claiming specific heroes by each side so for example we
33:03 · know in that we think that in the triad there were Greeks dynasties that considered themselves
33:08 · to be descended from the house ofTroy they would be perhaps interested in a version of the Iliad
33:14 · that was more pro-Trojan or emphasized more the suffering and heroism of the Trojans while the
33:21 · Greeks might be more interested in highlighting how badass they were in destroyingTroy right so
33:27 · then we well i'll let you ask the question I mean this this opens up a can of worms aboutTroy which
33:34 · is a can of worms I do want to open because I think that would be a great way to kind of that'll be a great thing to explore for the remainder of this conversation is you know the
33:41 · Trojan war the Iliad let's do a kind of reverse engineering how was it constructed what's at the
33:46 · heart of it now we now know that the um from the Hittite archives that the Hittites
33:54 · were struggling with the Greeks whom they called the ahiawa over control overTroy or welusa
34:02 · Ilion in Greek Wilusa in the Hittite language um so there was at least one war or conflict between
34:11 · either the Hittites or a vassal state of them and no you don't you don't buy that uh from the
34:18 · um I think the mille wanda letter or one of the letters that mentions uh we lose over which we went to war isn't that evidence of a war aboutTroy no
34:34 · I mean if you want to believe in a Trojan war have at it well it's not that I want to I’m just trying
34:41 · to establish some uh starting points for our discussion so like right so I mean yeahTroy six
34:48 · was destroyed in 1300 maybe but that probably was um an earthquakeTroy 7a was destroyed seemingly in
34:56 · in some kind of war in 1180 that would be too late for the Hittites I meanTroy gets destroyed
35:02 · a lot of times um so and I’m not trying to by saying what I said I’m not trying to uh find the
35:10 · historical route of the Trojan war I’m just okay just based on the Hittite archives about welusa
35:17 · and the ahiawa aboutTroy and the Greeks just want to establish that there was the city that wasTroy
35:23 · and and the Hittites were aware of the Greeks and the Greeks were aware of the Hittites and they had
35:30 · conflicting interests in that region is that fair to say that is true and the Hittites tried to tell
35:36 · us that they had complete control over everything except for they have to keep establishing complete control over everything over and over again so one might feel that perhaps the Hittites did not have
35:44 · so much control as they fantasized about but we do know that Hittite uh the Hittite royal dynasty
35:51 · is intermarrying with the notables of the other of Miletus and Ephesus and
35:58 · probablyTroy um so that we do see that there are dynastic relationships going on there we do know
36:05 · aboutTroy from the um so-called Alexander treaty the treaty between Alexander of walusa and king
36:12 · muatali ii which is about 1275. well first of all we see that the king has a Greek name so we can
36:19 · see that there's intermarriage at the highest echelons among Greeks and the local population
36:25 · what language was that language ofTroy you know we can argue about it I like Alwin Kloekhorst
36:32 · suggesting that it's Etruscan it could be also a ver on early version of Lydian
36:38 · we're not absolutely sure they would have written in Hittite as their and possibly Luwian as their
36:44 · administrative language so they would have taken on the trappings of Hittite empire to um in their
36:50 · written world right we also know from that treaty that their the hit the Trojan city god is named
36:58 · apollyounas now this is something that people have fought over for a long time because the hand
37:03 · copy of the text is misdrawn and it looks like there's a character before the app
37:09 · that is not there so for a long time that was used to dispute that claim that there is a memory
37:16 · about Bronze AgeTroy that their god was Apollo but anyone can any schmuck can access the photo
37:24 · of this tablet now online and see that the the the hand copy is mis-strong yeah so that's very
37:32 · important when is this mention of Apoliyunas dated to so about 1275. okay so this is obviously um
37:42 · it's hard not to think that this is a god that is syncretized to some degree with the Greek Apollo
37:51 · they have the name Apollo it looks like it's been Greekified with an own ending and then
37:57 · it's been hittitified with an ass ending so it's been this god has had his name um re-um
38:07 · achieved different rebranded at least twice got it and we have a tiny little fragment from
38:14 · the Hittite archives which involves through a series of extrapolations we don't have to
38:19 · get into here but it seems to be an auger's ritual for the purification
38:26 · for purification that calls on a god named Apollo so this god before he's Greekified and before he's
38:33 · hittitified and so that so this god seems to have some of the characteristics of the Apollo
38:39 · in the Iliad who is called upon by the local auger um the local priest and the auger Calchas
38:45 · is the one who realizes why their the Apollo is punishing with plague the Achaean army so
38:54 · this Apollo god looks like he is equated with or is um a very typical southwest Anatolian deity the
39:09 · call deity the tutelary deity who's a hunter with a bow who's involved in um purification rituals
39:17 · okay wow so the Hittite testimony of Apolyunas being the patron god of Wilusa of Ilion or Troy
39:27 · matches Homer's claim that Apollo is one of the main gods on the side of the Trojans
39:32 · and then you have all these other coincidences like Alexander is very very it must be Alexander and that's one of the names of Paris the alternative name of Paris
39:43 · so now setting aside whether the events as described by Homer ever happened whether there
39:49 · was ever a Trojan horse whether there was ever big walls whether there was ever a 10-year war right
39:54 · there was a city there it had a lot of features that Homer describes it had some names mentioned
40:00 · in Homer um and at some point in the you know centuries later in the Iron Age people on the
40:09 · Greek side and Anatolia started telling stories about this city right so walk us through that
40:18 · process and maybe this might be a place to bring in the festivals that you mentioned earlier what are the contexts where people are telling stories about this city why are they telling these stories
40:30 · and you know why are festivals important for these venues where these stories are generated?
40:41 · so it's Troy's an important city. It's located in an important place it controls the access to the
40:48 · black sea winds blow in the wrong direction and keep people trapped at Troy for long periods of time so Troy is at you know in the middle Bronze Age it was one of the most important cities in the
40:59 · Mediterranean so Troy like academy like Ebla is a city of legendary status and it sucks up
41:08 · plot lines attached to other cities let's put it that way um it looks like from the excavations
41:15 · that were done under Manfred Korfmann although he himself was not very excited about the evidence that he actually unearthed um it looks like uh the iron the Bronze Age ruins of the walls of Troy are
41:27 · being treated as an object veneration very early on in the Iron Age so we have the remains of a
41:36 · temple of a structure and ins that faces the walls of Troy so the leftovers of a Bronze Age structure
41:43 · and in it there are is evidence of cult worship of a god whose statue would have been placed so that
41:49 · behind the god statue would be the destroyed walls of Troy and then starting in the 8th century maybe
41:57 · 9th century 8th century we start seeing these the evidence for what we would call ancestor
42:04 · veneration so these stone circles that you could have a fire on and cook a feast on and they're
42:09 · multiple stone circles so we start to get a sense that there are clans meeting at the walls of
42:15 · choice so these stone circles which end up being about 20 of them superimposed and laid out you know so not all 20 being used at once but they're pressed up against the ruined walls of Troy
42:26 · so we're seeing that Troy is a locust of memory right for people um and the question is for Greeks
42:35 · well that is an interesting question yeah so who are these people who are um you
42:41 · know making these circles and putting their idols before the walls of Troy
42:46 · well the stone circles are very much associated with Greeks so we find them in the mainland we do find them in other Greek occupied cities like the Miletus so when you get the stone circles by the
42:56 · eighth century you're saying those are Greeks yeah but who are the people who are treating the walls
43:02 · of Troy originally as a locus of veneration well we don't know and it would be absurd to deny that
43:10 · it could have been local non-Greek inhabitants got it so if you fast forward a few hundred years
43:18 · to my area of concentration with the classical period uh a lot of the Greek authors of the time
43:25 · claim that the Egyptians and the Persians you know that they have their own memories of the
43:30 · Trojan war and that they dispute what the Greeks say and they say no well actually according to our history this is what happened so do you think that uh in the early Iron Age in that
43:41 · dark age period do you think there were Anatolian groups that had their own versions of a Trojan war
43:50 · yes and I will say the main evidence for that is the near eastern derived storylines about destruction of city they it would it it's the most parsimonious to assume to theorize that those
44:03 · stories arrive to the Homeric tradition via local Anatolians did you see the destruction of a city
44:11 · or of a particular city well that these so the story about the destruction of Akkad supposedly
44:18 · under Naram-Sin which didn't happen and the destruction of Ebla at the hands of the storm god
44:24 · because they refused to release certain captives those storylines hop from the original cities to
44:32 · Troy in the same way that stories about Mount Casius and Zeus of Casius hop to for example
44:38 · Mount Aetna in Italy. I see so you're kind of you're kind of doing what physicists do
44:46 · when they say we can't see this particle but it has to be there based on the other particles and the other equations we know of so you are kind of positing an intermediary
44:57 · tradition that doesn't we don't have direct access to but you think that there's enough evidence that there must have been Anatolian versions of perhaps a Trojan war or some other city sacking story that
45:09 · incorporated these older Hittite narratives and Akkadian narratives and then that was picked up
45:14 · on by the Greek performers who then used it to embellish their narratives is that the process yes
45:22 · um and the thing we need is an audience of mixed allegiances right some members of the
45:32 · audience being like yay Greeks and other members of the audience being like no yay I’m on team Troy
45:37 · right and so that is where we can get the interaction between these different versions so it's very interesting about the destruction of academy there are actually two
45:48 · different versions of that story one in Sumerian which makes Naram-Sin look like a total jerk
45:54 · and then one in Akkadian which is the language that Naram-Sin and the Sargonic dynasty you know
46:00 · pushed as the new administrative language that one is very sympathetic to Naram-Sin so around Akkad
46:08 · we get in two different languages two different versions of the destruction or near destruction of
46:13 · Akkad sympathetic or not sympathetic depending on the allegiances of the scribes right
46:19 · so that already exists right that idea that you can tell the story of a destruction of a city from multiple points of view with different agendas right so similarly with the Ramayana the
46:30 · ancient Indian epic well everyone knows there's a Sanskrit version in which Rama the hero is made
46:35 · to look really great as he's getting back his wife who's kidnapped Sita who's kidnapped by the demon
46:42 · right Ravana right but there's a version in Tamil so in a non-Indic language of India in
46:49 · which Ravana is the tragic hero. yeah wow and we also get versions told by women in which
46:55 · it's all about Sita and her sufferings and not about how awesome Rama is so that was very important for me realizing that you could this understanding starting with the Ramayana that
47:05 · you could actually tell a story from different points of view that would be um complementary and
47:11 · competing for attention similarly you can see this with the Odyssey right like there's versions that seem to be more centered on the women characters that then get incorporated into Homer's version
47:21 · one might suggest yes that's super cool so if we're looking for these um
47:28 · venues of exchange between different groups that all have a memory or an imagination about
47:35 · Troy right and it's uh you know fallen walls is that where Apollo comes in like
47:41 · is he is this so Apollo is this cross-cultural deity whose festivals bring together perhaps
47:50 · Luwians and Greeks and Carians and Lycians right is that is that the venue?
47:55 · yes exactly exactly I would say that it is an important that Apollo festivals were on
48:03 · important stage for performances of the Iliad at an early um an early stage of the development
48:11 · of the tradition yeah and so it starts out with Apollo festivals that are associated in the Troad
48:18 · right in the Aeolian Dodecapolis the alliance among 12 Aeolic cities that are in the Troad at
48:27 · that were centered around uh the worship of Apollo and then the question is that how does it hop to
48:32 · the Ionians right that is uh that's an interesting problem and how does it help to the Ionians so
48:40 · the version we have is mainly Ionian in its language that's right yeah right um two things
48:46 · are going on there everyone wants the Troad and so everyone is inventing legendary or attaching
48:53 · themselves to legendary history that then gives them an excuse to have control over the Troad and
48:59 · the Ionians are getting into it in a later period too particularly backed by Athens yeah but also um
49:08 · the uh here we have to bring in the city of Miletus another very important city in Anatolia
49:14 · which was uh contested and shared among Greeks and Anatolians starting from the middle Bronze
49:20 · Age and forward and so the main city god of my leaders is also Apollo and so that would have been
49:29 · the venue that allowed it to move out of the Troad to an area that was Ionian um
49:37 · that particular festival and so I agree with Douglas Frame who thinks that the original venue for the panionic festival was in Miletus and moved in a later period to a different location
49:48 · and there are traces in the Iliad of this Milesian stage in terms of interest in specific characters
49:55 · that Milesians that the Miletus considered to be part of their legendary past specifically
50:00 · the Lycians like Sarpedon and Bellerophon. So, if your theory is correct that this was the – what we
50:08 · just outlined – was the mode of cultural exchange and that the Apollo festivals were meeting places
50:14 · of Greeks and Anatolians who could go back and forth and uh you know offer different versions
50:21 · of a Trojan war and promote their heroes challenge the other heroes rewrite the script in their favor
50:28 · etc do we have any remaining evidence of the of any of the Anatolian versions of that story
50:37 · well the famous um uh little tidbit which comes from Calvert Watkins is of a Luwian song that's
50:44 · attested in a description of a festival that comes from northwest Anatolia in the Hittite archives
50:50 · so the Hittites collect descriptions of festivals they're crazy about festivals yeah zillions and
50:57 · zillions of festivals are written round down and described and they're insanely boring these in descriptions yeah however they're the only people that are basically doing this in the Bronze Age
51:07 · so we get this venue into this cultural milieu again a place of performance so this particular
51:14 · festival which the Hittites have collected from the northwest edge of their territory from a city
51:19 · called Ishtanua um mentions one of the songs that is to be performed in it just its incipit which is
51:27 · "They came from steep Wilusa." This is in Luwian so it's a formula "steep Wilusa" that shows up
51:34 · also in Homeric and it suggests that there was a song tradition already on the Anatolian side of
51:43 · Troy that it is a city worthy of song. meanwhile on the Greek side there seems to be evidence I
51:51 · would argue that there's linguistic evidence in Homeric formulas that the Greeks also had their
51:56 · own story about Troy that predates the Iron Age or it's right around the cusp of the Iron Age.
52:03 · Wow, so that that tiny fragment of that festival that mentions "steep Wilusa" or "steep
52:10 · Ilion" in the Greek version (that's what the equivalent would be) uh when is that dated too?
52:15 · that's about 1250. yeah okay and it comes from the northwest edge so it's at least kind of close to
52:21 · Troy right that's even earlier than the you know most agreed upon date of the Trojan war it doesn't
52:29 · need to be about a war we don't know what it was about it just mentions that they come from this place which is they want to name check this place got it and that's striking that the epithet is
52:40 · shared in Homer as well so when do you think uh when do you think the earliest Greek versions
52:47 · of a Trojan war were circulating well I don't know if it's a Trojan war but stories about Troy yeah
52:55 · and so this is kind of a technical explanation but uh there's one important formula um
53:02 · it's written, "Iliou proparoithen" so "in front of ilion." But that word "Iliou" has to be,
53:09 · has to be pronounced "Ilio-o." So instead of one long syllable two short syllables ah that's the
53:16 · genitive ending the of in in front of or this is a phrase that we find in Homer right that's
53:23 · a phrase we find in Homer and we to pronounce it correctly we have to pronounce it in its
53:28 · in an older form than it has in Homer okay so so in order for it to to fit the meter of Homer
53:35 · we have to say it in a in a form that it would not have been said in Homer's day it could
53:42 · it must have been centuries before Homer that that phrase was coined otherwise it wouldn't fit the
53:48 · meter and you think that with linguistic tools you can actually figure out what that date was
53:55 · roughly yeah somewhere between 1150 and 1050 BC. so it has to be at the point where contraction is
54:01 · the contraction between like vowels and adjacent syllables is starting to happen in the Greek language and we're not absolutely sure what it is but for that particular group ah plus ah seems to
54:13 · be about then seems to be happening right around them because uh Attic which is the close relative
54:20 · of Ionic has a slightly different outcome of that contraction it gets ooh and Ionic gets er
54:26 · right wow so so it has to be yeah that's so fascinating that to think that after the Bronze
54:32 · Age collapse when there are still presumably some people alive who remember the collapse
54:37 · there were already songs being sung about Troy that's pretty tantalizing to think about
54:45 · yes and even more interesting that they're not inside Troy they're outside Troy yeah and so William Merritt Sale is the person who made the argument that the
54:55 · sections of the Iliad that may have present the Trojans in a sympathetic light and go inside Troy
55:03 · that they're a later addition to the tradition and so this would be an example of like the
55:09 · melding of the pro-Greek version and the pro-Trojan version happening at some point
55:14 · and I would argue because you have audiences with differing allegiances to different heroes
55:22 · why wouldn't they go into Troy in the first version? because they're busy fighting it from the
55:27 · outside they don't want to explore the suffering of Andromache and Hector's you know the fact that
55:32 · Hector is this guy who's going to let his city be destroyed for his loser younger brother right
55:38 · and all those kinds of things which are we love about the Iliad book six for example um to get
55:44 · into the hearts of the Trojans and understand how what a terrible thing is going to happen to these
55:50 · noble people right the original version wouldn't have cared less about that they're like kill those suckers yeah I see so the kind of domestic scenes that are from a fictional literary standpoint are
56:03 · amazing I mean in the detail and the ordinary life of the city and the tension that's built with the
56:12 · armies threatening at the gates et cetera that would have been a later addition. Now… Or more appropriately it would have been a pro-Trojan version
56:25 · right and that that there's a merging of these two storylines that occurs
56:31 · not very late but is what makes the genius for us of the Iliad where you see these two points of
56:36 · view and neither is completely right and neither is completely wrong yeah got it so um you know
56:42 · just to explain a few things for our listeners here the Iliad is a very large complex and rich
56:52 · text seemingly of many different elements that might have been put together in different ways and
56:58 · one thing that linguists like to do is to try to imagine how it came together right
57:04 · and say oh this part seems to be inserted here it therefore must have been a later edition instead of and don't get me wrong I’m a sucker for these theories I love them but
57:14 · they're really risky right I mean there's so many ways you could go wrong in these speculations
57:20 · but you know in your book you um which by the way let me just say is an absolute beast of
57:28 · scholarship I mean a lot of books in our field contain a lot of you know theory a lot of blah
57:33 · blah but this is just packed with archaeological evidence with textual analysis with you know it's
57:40 · just really an impressive assemblage of evidence but still as you point out in your intro your goal
57:49 · here was to get the conversation rolling nobody had done this before nobody had tried to connect the Hittite stories with the Greek stories and you put together all this evidence to establish a link
58:02 · but our evidence is fragmentary it's incomplete there's still new discoveries happening all the
58:07 · time and you are hopeful in your book that you know more discoveries will come in the future so what do you see as the future of this field and what do you I guess what do you hope to see
58:18 · in terms of the methods and approaches and what might we see in terms of the findings
58:24 · well as I mentioned earlier I am I mean I find the listing of parallels not that useful anymore
58:33 · I think once I mean Martin West I think in his mountainous book if you want to talk about a book
58:38 · of just a huge amount of scholarship it just lists so many parallels that even if you can discount a few here and a few there you're left with just yes there is a lot of debt of Greek
58:49 · literature to near eastern literature and so for me I’ve been much more focused on the differences
58:54 · how these stories are changed and in particular how the original audience the putative original
59:01 · audience when the story gets pulled into the Homeric tradition or the precursor of the
59:06 · Homeric tradition would have appreciated the change right so for example in book five when uh
59:13 · there is a scene in which diameters wounds Aphrodite and she scuttles up to heaven crying and she sits in diony's lap who's magically now her mother in this episode and everyone says
59:25 · oh it's not for you to go fight in war you're the goddess of love right we uh modern scholars
59:32 · know that that scene is a type scene that was assigned first to Ishtar in the Gilgamesh epic
59:38 · and then to anat in the eucharistic cycle of the ball of of the kingship of ball so it's a story
59:47 · that the original audience would have realized um is a story attached to a goddess with near eastern
59:54 · elements Aphrodite seems to be emerging local Hellenic, Indo-European Don goddess, and Ishtar,
1:00:01 · right. But the joke is that Aphrodite is not an ass-kicking war goddess like Ishtar so
1:00:08 · when Artemis and Athena kind of chuckle together and are like "not for you the tools of war," what
1:00:15 · they're saying is "sorry, in our tradition your persona doesn't get to have the kind of
1:00:21 · fun Ishtar did." and the original audience would have been like oh I get that joke yeah now as he's
1:00:27 · adapting this story to our Greek goddess you know she is she changes the storyline right and in the
1:00:33 · storyline herself she doesn't understand like that her character has lost the kick-ass side of Ishtar
1:00:41 · so I i really enjoy looking for those kinds of jokes ways in which we can argue for the moment
1:00:49 · where the audience would have had an aha this poet is introducing a change and really
1:00:55 · understanding how that audience would have appreciated it so not about parallels but what we can do with them to understand earlier versions or competing versions of the Iliad that the original
1:01:07 · audience who would have heard it in festival would have known right and would have been comparing
1:01:12 · the version we have against and would have been appreciating how the story has changed so that's
1:01:19 · what I’ve been very much focused on in my more recent work that's fascinating because it's like
1:01:27 · it's like the difference between seeing a Humphrey Bogart movie and a modern movie that uses
1:01:35 · a line from like Casablanca right like uh we often think of the Iliad as like the Humphrey
1:01:42 · Bogart version like the original version that had no antecedents and then when you bring in all this
1:01:48 · context from other civilizations then you see it more as the 21st century director who is
1:01:55 · dropping all these illusions to earlier movies that those audiences would have known about but we don't know so thank you very much for coming on the show and for you
1:02:05 · know giving us that background information. Mary Bachvarova, it's been a pleasure. Thanks a lot
1:02:20 · Thanks for listening to this episode of ancient Greece declassified obviously if you like this conversation and want to hear more explorations of the ancient world hit that subscribe button
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1:02:44 · and historians about various aspects of the ancient Mediterranean. Thanks again.

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