Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Appearances
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So the animals are, in order, we have the rat, the ox, the tiger, the rabbit, the dragon, which is the year we're just finishing, the snake, the horse, The goat, the monkey, the rooster, the dog, and the pig. The pig comes last. The pig comes last because supposedly in the story he stopped to eat on the way in the middle of the race and fell asleep after eating.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Well, again, according to the myth, or one version of the myth, it's because the dragons are sometimes at least good in China. And so he'd stopped off on the way to help a village by doing whatever dragons do. His kindly nature meant he got delayed. Yeah.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
That's another big question that's not easy to answer. You can draw a comparison with the Western zodiac because they do have meaning for ritual in China. So again, from quite early, from the Han Dynasty onwards, we have representations of these animals involved in New Year's rituals and things like that, in festivals, you know, as puppets or as masks and things like that.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
But they also carry what we could loosely call astrology. You have, just like in the Western zodiac, where people talk about whether certain people are compatible because they're a whatever and a whatever, an Aquarius and a Leo or something. You have the same idea in the Chinese zodiac that
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
People who are born in certain years, because of the animals, that they will either get on or not get on, or that it's good to do some things. Some of these animals will be good for doing certain things on a certain day. So it's fed into various astrological predictions about the life of individuals and their compatibility with other and their suitabilities to do various tasks.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Is there any link to astrological constellations like in the Western Zodiac at all? With the 12 animals? No, there doesn't seem to be any link with the constellations. I mean, one reason that there might be 12, why indeed there's 12 branches that's been suggested is because there's 12 months in the year in the usual calendar.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
And also because the planet Jupiter takes 12 years to go around the Earth. So Jupiter moves basically 30 degrees around us every year as we see it. And so that takes 12 years approximately. And so there's this idea in Chinese astronomy of this division of the sky into 12 parts based upon Jupiter's location. And so that also gets associated with these animals at a certain point.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
I don't think it's the origin of the animals or the division. But again, it's one of these things that it's the coincidence of the number 12 gets brought in there. So we get these associations made.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Yeah, that's a very good question and a difficult question to answer. I think one of the reasons it's difficult to answer is we're not really sure where this comes from in terms of whether this is a folk tradition that was already in existence that then becomes part of courtly practice and sort of bubbles up from below.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
or whether this is something that is invented, if you like, by the state scholars and ritual experts and so forth. That's something we don't know. And I think that these are all animals that people will be familiar with. These are not animals that are, I mean, except for a dragon, of course, but dragons have such a huge place in Chinese mythology anyway that people know them from mythology.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So it's not like there's some weird animal here that no one's ever seen before. So these are fairly everyday animals for the most part. But yeah, why these ones particularly were chosen and why they were chosen in this order and why these associations were made, no, we don't know.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
As I say, there are suggestions people, even several hundred years ago, were suggesting that some of these associations are because of similarities between the shape of the Chinese characters. But that only really explains one or two. And then people said, well, then it's extrapolated from there. Well, it's possible, but we really don't know.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
I think that the way they're conceived in China is that each has strengths and weaknesses. So they're different. I don't think there's a hierarchy. There's not a, you know, you're lucky if you're born in this year because you're going to be a snake or whatever.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
I think it's more that the idea that these people, that people might be suited to different things and these different characteristics might be useful in certain ways. And so it's not a hierarchy. It's a way of thinking about people or thinking about things in different ways and having different perspectives. aptitudes or different suitabilities for different tasks.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Yeah, so the Chinese New Year Festival, what's now in China called the Spring Festival, is very ancient. I mean, we have references to festivals going back to what's called the spring and autumn periods, so in the middle of the first millennium BC. Again, it's one of these things that becomes more and more codified as time goes on.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Standard practices seem to develop probably again in the Han Dynasty and in the early first few centuries AD. where we have these traditions of the association with the colour red and cleaning and things like that, and also ritual performances.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So the Chinese calendar is what we would call a Ludi solar calendar. That means that the months follow the cycle of the moon. But in order to keep the calendar in line with the seasons, because a lunar month will only have 29 or 30 days, so if you have 12 of them, you're short of the length of a solar year, which is 365 and a quarter days long.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So what that means is you have to add in an extra month roughly every three years. So this is what we know they did in China from very early. So most years have 12 months, but some years have 13 months. And in China, the tradition was that the first month of the year began on the second new moon after the winter solstice.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So you have the winter solstice towards the end of December in our calendar, and then you have one new moon. And then you have the second new moon, which is the one that's going to come up towards the end of January this year, that would be the beginning of the Chinese New Year. How people found that out is twofold.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So probably in the countryside and most regular people would just know, you know, you keep track of what month it was and you would know when the equinox was roughly because it's the middle of winter effectively, when the days are shortest and you can realise when things are starting to pass that. And then the new moon is just something you can look for.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So you wait until the moon disappears, and then that's when the new moon is going to appear. So that's something you could get. You could just look out and see. And you might be wrong by one day, but you're going to be more or less correct as to when the year begins.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Exactly. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think this is, you know, people often say that farmers need calendars, but I think that's wrong. I think farmers intuitively know the calendar. They know what the cycle of the seasons is, the cycle of the crops are. So they know when the shortest time of the shortest days are, when the equinox are, you know, to a good estimate.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Before the days of streetlights, before the days of televisions, the night sky was part of everybody's existence and environment. They saw it all the time and they were very familiar what was going on in the night sky. They were very familiar with the cycle of the moon.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So I think in agricultural societies in China in the past, everybody knew kind of what time of year it was roughly and whereabouts in the month you were. That was just a given. But for the sort of upper levels of society in the court and the official and the bureaucracy and the government, you have a very well-defined mathematically calculated calendar.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So the Chinese calendar, the official Chinese calendar, again, stretching back at least to the Han dynasty, I mean, it must have had predecessors, but our earliest predecessors, Real evidence for it is in the Han dynasty, was a calendar that was calculated. So they were not observing the moon. They were not observing the solstice. It was all done by calculation.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
And what they did is they calculated when every new moon was. So actually, the new moon is something you can't see. The official new moon is in between the time you last see the moon and the time you first see the new moon crescent. So somewhere in the middle is the official point of conjunction of the sun and moon. So they calculated that every month.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Yeah, I mean, it's not a silly question. It's actually not a simple question either, because it's kind of a misnamed concept. I mean, the zodiac in its technical meaning is a division of the path of the sun into 12 equal parts. So as we think of the Earth in the centre of the universe, as we view it, we have the sun moving around us and the moon and the planets moving around us.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
And they produced almanacs distributed throughout the country that contained the calendar for the coming year. with all the calculated dates of when each month began, whether there was an intercalary month, and all the festival dates and everything that were embedded within this.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Well, yes. I mean, just the calculations. I mean, there was a whole bureau of astronomers who were tasked with producing this calendar. Well, the calendar, by the way, is not just the count of days for the Chinese. It was also included things like when there were going to be eclipses or when there were planets would pass by certain other planets or so forth.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So it's like an astronomical guidebook every year of every astronomical event that's going to happen. So there was a huge bureaucracy and part of the government, these were state employees who had to pass civil service exams to become astronomers employed by the court. And they were tasked with producing these almanacs every year.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
And these almanacs were then presented to the emperor because one of the emperor's duties was to ensure that there was a calendar. This was one of the fundamental things the emperor had to do every year to prove that he was the right person to be emperor, that he was following justly. It was to show that he could harmonize heaven and earth.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
And one way to harmonize heaven and earth was to have it written down on a calendar. was to show that you knew exactly what was going on when. And so this was not just a sort of a practical administered matter, but a real ideological matter for the Chinese state that the emperor had to produce a calendar and had to distribute it. And there's huge ceremonies around the distribution.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So in later times, it's not only to China, the Chinese calendar would then be sent off to Korea and elsewhere in official convoys with presentations of the calendar that these vassal states were expected to follow. So it was both a huge administrative task.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
but also of huge ideological importance to the Chinese state, both to produce a calendar and to produce a calendar that was actually quite accurate. Because if people were observing things that they hadn't predicted, that was a real bad omen. That was a shame that the emperor was not doing his job right.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Yes, so the Chinese zodiac and many aspects of Chinese philosophy and ritual and the Chinese calendar effectively were taken up throughout East Asia. So in Japan, in Vietnam, all areas around China's borders effectively follow the Chinese calendar. They placed their own interpretations upon it, of course, so they have interpretations.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
and they trace out this path that we call the zodiac, and we can divide that into 12 equal parts. That's what the zodiac is in terms of astronomy. But the Chinese zodiac is actually something quite different. The Chinese zodiac is basically just a cycle of 12 that are associated with animals,
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
You know, you get different animals, for example, in some different countries. You get some regional variation. They become localized to make them applicable to their local surroundings. I mean, this goes part and parcel along with many other aspects.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So many of these cultures in medieval times were also adopted things like the Chinese script and the Chinese language for writing, even if it's not what they were speaking. And often at times they were, if not part of China, they were heavily influenced by Chinese culture and Chinese government.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So yes, they did bring in their own animals. Many of them are common across East Asia, of course, because they're common animals. But you did get local variations, local traditions coming along with new animals substituted for different ones from the Chinese system.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
It's a good question. It's an interesting question. Not in terms of origin. So the Chinese and the Babylonian zodiacs are completely independent when they're created. And the Babylonian zodiac, we can trace the development of that quite well. And it comes across, it's developed sometime in the 5th century BC.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
And it becomes pretty stabilised in terms of the names of the signs of the zodiac by around 300 BC. And that Babylonian zodiac is then taken up outside of Babylonia. So it goes to Egypt, it goes to Greece. It goes from Greece to India. So we have the Babylonian zodiac in India in the first centuries A.D. And then eventually it comes from India into China.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So with Buddhism coming to China, particularly in the fourth, fifth centuries A.D., Along with Buddhism, we get Buddhist astrology. There was a big tradition in India of astrology in the Buddhist tradition. And we get that coming into China along with Buddhism. And along with that comes the Babylonian zodiac. So we get these two systems interacting in China.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
And because it's a cycle of 12 with 12 animals, people have just called it a zodiac because we have 12 animals in the Western Zodiac. So it's actually just a coincidence of the fact that there's 12 and they're named after animals or associated with animals that people call it the Chinese Zodiac. But it's really a misnamed concept.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
When the Western zodiac, the Babylonian zodiac, first enters China, There's a lot of debate as to how it should be interpreted, how we name these things. So we get the same names attributed. So they just take across the Chinese names from the 12 branches and use those to name the zodiac. Sometimes they translate the Sanskrit name all the science that came from the Babylonian.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Other times they associate them with the animals from the Chinese zodiac. So they're trying to sort of harmonise these two systems.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Exactly, yeah. So they're quite comfortable taking on the system of it being a mathematical division of the band of the moon and the planets into 12 equal parts. So they take on that system, but then what they have to do is come up with their own way of naming each sign. And the Babylonian names had already been kind of transformed by the time they got to India.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So the Indians have slightly different names for them. And then by the time it gets to China, they're again renaming, partly because some of these things are not applicable to a Chinese context. You know, some of the names... are maybe not necessarily understandable because they're named after gods and things like that.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So we have what we call Sagittarius as the archer, the half-man, half-horse archer. For the Babylonians, there's a god called Pabelsag who looks like this, who's himself a half-man, half-horse archer. What would you call that in China? There's nothing you could call that.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So they either have a choice of just translating the name as it's a meaningless name, or else you have to re-identify it to something else. So what they do is they're searching around and trying out different ways of naming the 12 signs. And often they just kind of portal across from the 12 branches, the names of the branches, across to the 12 signs.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
I mean, it does endure certainly for quite a while. And I think they just view it as another tool. It's another system, particularly within astrology and divination. It's just another set of things you can correlate with the cycle of 12. So it doesn't replace the so-called Chinese zodiac animals. It's just yet another system.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
As I said, this 12 is associated with so many different things, with directions, with time of day, with year, with the animals and so forth. This is just one more thing you can associate it with. This is what astrology does all over the world. It wants more and more things you can make associations between. This is how astrology is developed. In China, it's no different.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
This is just another thing you can make associations with. It gives you more flexibility, more things you can make connections between.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
We can trace it a little bit in terms of, at least into the Islamic world. So in China, in probably the late Tang, so late first millennium AD, Muslim people then become prevalent in China to a certain extent. And Muslim astronomy becomes established in China. So even to the extent that sometimes the emperors would
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
establish a second Bureau of Astronomy staffed by Muslim astronomers to kind of give an alternative set of calculations that could be cross-checked with the Chinese native astronomy.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So through this, because we have this interaction between the Chinese and the Islamic astronomers, we can see some of the aspects of the Chinese zodiac coming back into China, to the West, into Persia and so forth, particularly in terms of the iconography.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So in terms of the visualisation of this, the depictions of animals, rather than the concepts so much, but more, as I say, the way that things were visualised in artistic works or in diagrams and things like that.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Yeah. So we have from China various different cycles based on different numbers. So we have a cycle of 12, which is this thing that gets associated with the zodiac, which is a cycle that's actually officially called the 12 earthly branches. And it cycles through from 1 to 12 on a repeating cycle. We have another cycle of 10 called the 10 heavenly stems.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Yes, I think it is. I think that religion in China, again, is a very complicated thing to talk about because it's not a uniform thing. And these things we kind of call religions, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and things like that are not exclusive. People could be more than one and take ideas from one and mix them with others and so forth.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
It's not that you necessarily just confined to one way of doing things. But I think that That religious background informs so much of the ritual practice that's behind all of this. So all of this New Year's festival is all so heavily connected to religious practices, religious rituals, religious myths, worship, and so forth.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So that I think we just have to see the Chinese Zodiac and the New Year Festival as actually largely just part of this bigger picture of Chinese ritual and cult and so forth.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Absolutely. This is what we see. These simple concepts have a very long life. The cycle of the seven days of the week The same as many simple religious activities or simple bits of scientific knowledge. The fact that we have 360 degrees in a circle, that goes back to the ancient Babylonians. The fact that we have 24 hours in the day, that goes back to ancient Egypt.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
these things, they're very simple, but they're so core to what we are and what we know that they've endured for so long and they're not going to disappear. Scientific ideas are developed all the time and become replaced because they become outdated and we improve on them and people forget about them.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
But these sort of core ideas of the zodiac, the Chinese zodiac, the days of the week, these are never going to go away. These are so simple that everybody understands them. They're so core to us that I think that they will endure for a long, long time.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
And you can put those two cycles together when they run side by side. And if you go through the whole cycle, then it takes 60 to go around in the whole cycle. So we have the cycle of 60 that keeps repeating, made up of a cycle of 12 and a cycle of 10. And that cycle is applied to all different aspects of Chinese life and society. So you have a cycle of the 60 years.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
You also have a cycle of 60 days. So just like our days of the week, the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday is a cycle of seven. In China, you have a cycle of 60 days. And so the cycle of 12 is kind of one aspect of that cycle. So it's like a sub-cycle, if you like, of that 60. It's this repeating cycle of 12 that just keeps going round and round.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So you have a cycle of 12 days. and you have a cycle of 12 years, all of which have the same name. So there are 12 names for each individual entry in this 12 cycle. This cycle is applied to all sorts of things. So the Chinese day is divided into 12, what we call double hours, so 12 two-hour long intervals. And they're also named after these 12 different earthly branches.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So this cycle of 12 is used all throughout different aspects of Chinese life and Chinese concepts of the earth and the world around us. And then one aspect of this is they get associated with different things. And one of the associations is with the animals. And so that's why we get this cycle of 12 animals that have been associated with the 12 years. And this is quite aged.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
I mean, this goes back almost 2000 years or so that we have this cycle of 12 going on and on. And this being associated with these animals that then the year, then we have the year, you know, we're just ending the year of the dragon and we're going into the year of the snake now.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Yeah, that's true. It is. I mean, I think the onion analogy is a nice analogy. It's like it is all these different layers of meaning that all these different cycles have. And we have to think of these cycles almost like gears going on together. They're all interlocking and changing. They complement each other, do they? Exactly. They complement and combine to give you various different...
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
associations that can be used and I mean I think for us it is you know coming as outsiders this is takes a while to get your head around but of course for the ancient Chinese this was so familiar to them that it's it's trivial because they've grown up with it it's just what they what they know so this cycle of 12 and all these associations are so part of everyday life that they're just familiar with it in the same way that we're familiar with the you know the 12 signs of the western zodiac or the 24 hours of the day or something.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
It's absolutely the same. We really don't know the origin of the Chinese zodiac or even the original cycle of 12 before it gets associated with the animals. I mean, there are various different myths about this. So there are myths about the association between the 12 earthly branches and the animals. So there's a very famous myth about the Jade Emperor holding a race. This is the race, isn't it?
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Yes, the great race. The great race where the animals run and have to cross a river. And this gives you the order of the 12 signs of the zodiac. So what happens in the race? I mean, there's different versions of this myth. But in the sort of the prevailing version, the rat wins the race because it convinces the ox to let it stand on its back and cross the river along with a cat.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
And then when it gets to the bank of the river, the rat pushes the cat off into the river and jumps ahead of the ox. So it wins the race and becomes the first of the sequence. And of course, the poor cat is then lost in the river. So it doesn't become an animal in the sequence at all. Oh, it doesn't become an animal at all? Oh, the poor cat. That's why there's no cat in the Chinese zodiac.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So you have this myth of, as I say, the Jade Emperor. So going back to really ancient times of this great race that gives you the order of the 12. But you also have other explanations that people have made over the years, including many centuries ago, people pointed out that, for example, the Chinese sign for the earthly branch is
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
that is associated with a snake, which is the sign for the Z, actually looks, if you draw it in the Chinese character, it looks a bit like a snake. And that can be done for a couple of the other characters as well. So people said, well, maybe the origin is actually in the graphical drawing of the signs. And people said, oh, well, this looks a bit like the animal. So we'll make that association.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So there's all sorts of possible reasons or explanations for why the animals were chosen. But as I say, we don't know truthfully what the answer is.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
The 12 branches and the 10 stems, we can trace back very ancient. We can see this already in the Sharon Dynasty oracle bones, which date from 15,000 BC or so. So they're very ancient. The application of these to the cycle of 60 that's made up from the combination of these two, the stems and the branches, We can trace back, as I say, to the Shang Dynasty.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
When it was applied to years seems to be later, sometime in the first millennium BC, but we don't know quite when. And then the association with the animals seems to be there at least in the Han Dynasty, so sometime around the beginning of the Christian era, that sort of time period, so just over 2,000 years ago.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So the 12 branches and the 10 stems each run through every sequence. So every day or every year, we go on one in each of those two cycles. So for example, this is entering the year of the snake, which means that this is the sixth one of the 12 branches. Next year, so in January 2026, we'll enter the year of the horse, which is the seventh one of the 12 branches.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So we'll go through and go through the whole 12, and then that will repeat again. Now, at the same time, there's another cycle going around, which is the cycle of the 10 stems, the 10 heavenly stems. That will again increase one in that cycle of 10 each year. So what we have every year then is a combination of these two different parts.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
We have one from the 10 heavenly stems and one from the 12 earthly branches. Each of those are increasing by one each time. So we'll go through 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, all the way up until we get to 10, 10. The next one will be on 1 again for the 10 stems and 11 for the branches. 2, 12, and then 3, 1, and so forth.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
And we can go around this whole sequence, and then we eventually will get back to 1, 1 again after 60 times through the sequence.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Exactly, yes. So the animals are just one of the associations that are then imposed upon this cycle of 12.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Yeah, this is going back to, you know, 1500 BC or so. So this is very ancient, you know, three and a half thousand years ago. And it's run, as far as we can tell, it's run continuously since then with no interruption. You know, we don't have any evidence that people's missed a year or skipped anything here and there. It has run continuously since then.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
That's right. Yes, yes. I mean, I think that there were other associations earlier on. We know that in the Shang Dynasty, in very early times, These branches and stems were connected with various forms of astrology and divination and fortune-telling and rituals. There already existed a sort of an infrastructure of divinatory practices and rituals surrounding these that then the animals get...
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Lots and lots. So the 12 branches, as I say, are associated with all sorts of things, including the animals, but also directions, the hours of the day, and so forth. So they're used in many different aspects. Similarly, the 10 stems have all sorts of associations.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So they're associated with the five phases of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water that are, again, very fundamental within Chinese philosophy, worldview, astrology, whatever you want to call it, all of these things, ritual practice, religion, everything.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
And the tense terms are also associated with the yin and yang, which I think everybody's heard of, but probably doesn't really quite understand what it is. Yeah, what exactly is the yin and yang? It's... I don't know how to explain it. I mean, I don't fully understand it myself, to be honest. I guess it's too complimentary, but opposing ideas, forces, however you want.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
I don't quite know how to explain it. It's one of these things that I think, unless you're really deeply immersed in Chinese culture, it's not necessarily possible to understand these things. It's so fundamental. It's not something you can easily explain. And I don't claim to understand it myself. So the twelve stems were associated with yin and yang in alternating patterns.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
So, you know, yin-yang, yin-yang, yin-yang, and so forth. So you have all of these different types of philosophical, cosmological, astrological, divinatory rituals. structure surrounding these stems and branches that are all interconnected. And it's not that these are the source of these other things. They all percolate and develop independently and become linked and intertwined.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
It's not that the five phases come out of the ten stems. It's not that the ten stems come out of the five phases. It's that they are developed and become enmeshed and associated with one another.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
Yeah, so people used to translate the term into English as elements because of the tradition in Greek philosophy of the four elements and the idea from ancient Greek philosophy that you had fire and water, that everything was composed of.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
that everything could be, all matter was composed of these parts of these four elements, different combinations, and that these elements had different characteristics on earth. Fire went up and earth goes down and so forth. So the Chinese, because they are referring to some of the same things, so fire, earth, water, metal and wood. People tended to translate them and think of the same thing.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
But actually they're quite different in concept because they're not elements in the sense that they're not things that are put together to make matter. It's not that everything is made up of combinations of these five things. Rather these are... Again, it's difficult to explain, but they're more like phases of being. So they're more something you can transform between.
The Ancients
The Chinese Zodiac
You have a sort of a phase of being like water and a phase of being like air and that these things can interact. So it's a different concept. It's not an element that you build things out of, but rather a state of being. So that's why I think this idea of phases is a... Maybe a slightly better translation, although it's still a complicated concept to render in one word.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But he has an ambitious cousin called Mardonius, who immediately says, no, you should absolutely do this and it's going to be easy and it's going to be great. And we're going to just take, you know, conquer the place and take all its riches and it's going to be fantastic.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And in that scene, it's made very clear, both by what Mardonius says and by what Artabanus, the uncle, says in response, that we are supposed to think that Mardonius is wrong. Like he's lying about how easy this would be. He's just telling, he's spinning fables that are going to be favorable to Xerxes. They're going to sound tempting to him. This is the archetype of the bad advisor.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
He is basically trying to seduce him into bad decisions, presumably because of his own ambitions. In this story, he wants to become satrap of Greece. And so he says, okay, that's what we got to do. And this is all very literary. This is all very schematic, right? We don't need to take this seriously as historians.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But the arguments that are brought up are essentially just the idea that it is a Persian tradition to conquer. We have to go conquer something. As Lloyd has explained, Xerxes has this imperative to try and achieve military victories and conquests in order to legitimize himself. And the argument in Rhodes is it's going to be easy. The Greeks are an obvious and easy target.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
You owe it to them, to the memory of your father, to avenge the kind of things that they have done, supporting the Ionian revolt, beating the Persians at Marathon. And it's a great opportunity to establish yourself as king. And so those are the kind of motivations that are being put to the fore.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Yeah, absolutely. And in that sense, I mean, one of the most fantastical elements of that scene is that he presents it as if the Persians have no choice, because if they don't attack, then the Athenians will attack them. Magnificent. It literally has a phrase like we should either do or suffer, like we should expect that the Athenians will crush us if we don't crush them first.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Yes, specifically what we have to bear in mind is this is being written in a time when the Persians had already been defeated, and in the aftermath the Athenians had developed their own empire, so they had seized control of the Aegean. So for Herodotus it's natural to assume that this was either always on the cards or that in some way prescience of this, premonitions about this,
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
informed decision-making at the time. This is a very standard way for Greeks to think about things. Teleologically, you already know what's going to happen, so let's plant that seed before it ever did.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
We're told that he spent years gathering this. So essentially, as soon as the revolt in Egypt is crushed, he starts gathering this army and it takes him about four years before it's ready.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
On the one hand, it's plausible to imagine that if he's really drawing in all these different contingents from all parts of the empire, that it would take a considerable amount of time for them to just get there.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
I mean, if you're drawing in Bactrians and Indians, which are supposedly involved in this, according to Herodotus, and someone must have seen them because he describes them, and Ethiopians as well, I mean, they might have taken six months to get there just if they keep on marching all day long. And so it would have taken time, absolutely.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
The other problem there, though, is that if you're gathering an army like that, you are forced to upkeep it. You are forced to essentially supply it while it's gathering, and for years and years, apparently. So that would have been an astonishing logistical operation.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So we could also imagine that the forces that have come from far away are fairly token, and that the actual organization of this army happens on site primarily with... So the core force that's described by Socrates in some ways of the army that moves with the king. So this is a small group of elite Persians who are sort of the core of the army.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And then whatever levies they can be, they can sort of bring along on the way. So as they go through the various satrapies, as they move west, there will be, you know, places where they will say, okay, this is the mustering part for this part of the empire here. We will gather the troops from Babylon, from Mesopotamia, from Cilicia, from other parts. And they sort of pick them up as they go.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Yeah, so there's the beautiful piece on the base to an inscription, like the relief there has Skunkar, the subjected Saka King, who has this beautiful pointed hat, which almost doesn't fit the image. So they had to move the text around because he got added in later. But those hats are apparently characteristic.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Well, I just want to sort of circle back to what we were talking about earlier with the causes of this war, because there is to some extent, although indirectly, there is a Persian version of this, which has to do with what Lloyd's just described, the Bistun inscription in which it's very explicitly stated that the Persian king is essentially the king of all things.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Like he is the bringer of order to the world and the agent of the gods, the agent of Aramazda in particular in achieving this. And anybody who defies him is a rebel against the truth, right? There's a rebel against the natural order of the world and all that is good in it. And so there is an understanding of the Persians as being essentially, you know, the legitimate rulers of the entire world.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And the existence of any autonomous state outside of that system just cannot be allowed to continue because that is a falsehood, right? If you say Darius is not my king or later Xerxes is not my king, you are lying, right? That is essentially a violation of the truth. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Yeah.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So ideologically for Xerxes, the war against the Greeks could very easily be justified by simply pointing at them and saying, they don't pay me tribute. That is all the justification in royal ideology that they need.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And that is also why it's important for them to bring all these people in, at least symbolically, to try and show to both the rest of the world, but also to their own subjects, we rule all of you, right? Like all of this is our domain. This is our sovereignty. And of course, anybody else who exists outside of that, I mean, it's just a matter of time. They have to be included in this.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
That is the way of things. And that is how everything is better.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
It's different from that island hopping campaign. I mean, he decides to take this army over land instead of shipping it amphibiously. He also has a massive fleet, but they decide to move along the coast while the fleet sort of shadows them. But this isn't necessarily a new idea.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
I mean, crossing the Hellespont and moving the army over land is also what Darius did when he invaded a few decades before then, invaded Thrace and then moved north. So he moved into Scythia. Xerxes now is going to move west. Sorry, my apologies. What is the Hellespont? Is that kind of Gallipoli, Dardanelles area? Exactly, yeah.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So the Hellespont is the narrow strip sort of at the south end of the sea of the Propontis, so the Sea of Marmors. So this is the bit where Gallipoli is now, so perhaps more notorious for that. But it's a strip of land where the Athenians have long had interest, but it's also the narrowest point where you can cross from Asia into Europe. And so it's about two kilometers across.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Darius and now again Xerxes build a pontoon bridge across. So that's how they transport the army. And for Herodotus, I think this is very much one of those examples of Xerxes trying to prove that he can achieve things that no other human has achieved before. Like he's subjecting nature and geography to his will. He's saying, there's a sea here. No, there isn't. Now there's a bridge.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
I can walk here. I can walk wherever I want. And similarly later on, when they get to the peninsula at Athos, which is now Mount Athos where there were the monasteries on it, On a previous occasion, his cousin Mardonius had tried to lead an army there, but his fleet had suffered shipwreck around the Cape of Athos. And so this time Xerxes doesn't want his fleet to take the same route.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So he decides to dig a canal through the route of this peninsula, which is quite narrow. So again, for Herodotus, this is a moment to prove firstly, I mean, obviously that the Persians are fantastic engineers, both for the pontoon bridge and for the canal, in which they rely on a lot of Phoenician advice. But fundamentally, they're doing amazing logistical things.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
but also because Xerxes at this point has turned sea into land and land into sea. So he is saying to geography, he's staring the world in the face and saying, I'm better than you, essentially, which is a sensibility that I think modern people, especially me as a Dutch person, I mean, it has something of this modern idea of technology overcoming nature that resonates with us.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Whether the Persians saw it that way, we have no idea. This is only in Greek sources and the traces that still exist. So the canal through Mount Athos, you can still see it as a swampy strip that runs through the neck of the peninsula. But otherwise, we have no idea how they would have seen it or specifically why they would have done it other than to display their power.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Yeah, so we're told that Darius has already sent out these messengers to demand earth and water, which is the ritual that we talked about earlier. This is when the Athenians and the Spartans, we're told, sort of commit to this idea they reject that offer. So both of them essentially kill their messengers. So the Spartans kick them into a pit and the Athenians kick them into a well. Oh, okay.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
This is Sparta kind of thing. It literally is that story, except that in Herodotus, obviously, this is recognized as a tremendous sacrilege for which both of these communities are said to pay dearly because no one accepts this, right?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
The Spartans later send a couple of messengers to Xerxes to atone for this because they know they've committed a terrible sin in the eyes of everyone, like the whole Mediterranean world, everyone they know. And so they send a couple of messengers to Xerxes saying, please kill these men so that we're even.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And Xerxes, according to Herodotus, essentially laughs at them and says, no one is as evil as you. I would never do that. So in this sense, absolutely, the Spartans commit a horrible faux pas. But the idea there is that they are committing so strongly to that position, we will not bow down to the Persians, that they even reject the idea of communicating with them.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
That's essentially what they're saying. And the Athenians likewise. Now, exactly why they do this is kind of obscure. I mean, it's not really motivated, except that obviously the Greeks, they want autonomy, etc. For the Athenians, more likely is that they didn't expect any mercy.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
They didn't want to bow down to someone who might reinstate the tyrant Hippias or in some other way, overthrow the Athenian democracy or endanger their interests. For the Spartans, most likely they can't tolerate another hegemon on the block. The Spartans are the most powerful Greek state in this period. They are used to ruling essentially the Peloponnese. That's their backyard.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
They want to be top dog. They don't like the idea of anybody else coming in, telling them what to do. And that is very much more of a rivalry than an ideological resistance. And so in this period, the Greeks, those two states are essentially heading the resistance. And they are the ones who are saying, OK, we will not bow down.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
The states that are subject to Sparta are kind of necessarily involved in that. They have no choice. The Spartans tell them who their friends and enemies are. That is the terms of the treaty they have with Sparta. So most of the Peloponnese is on the side of the anti-Persian alliance, arguably not by choice, but they are part of it at least.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But they reach out to a bunch of other states and most of them essentially say, we'll see what happens. We'll wait it out. So the Arga have stayed neutral. They plead that they've suffered losses that are too horrible in their war against the Spartans to face further conflict. So they decide to stay neutral. They're later accused of being pro-Persian, actually.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
They go to Sicily, to those powerful Greek states there, but they're also turned down. Other states like Corsaira, which is now the island of Corfu, also more or less decides to stay neutral. So they try to find more Greeks who are willing to help them in their resistance, but most of them just kind of say like, no. You know, it doesn't look good.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And so they mostly just don't want to, you know, they don't want to put their chips down on the side of anti-Persian sentiment in case there might be reprisals.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So most of these states try and stay out of it, with the exception of a couple of states that do try, that do maintain a sort of principled opposition, most of the time because they fear that their own position within the Greek network of states will suffer.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So what we're told is they initially sent an army up north to Tempe, which is a pass in the shadow of Mount Olympus, north of Thessaly. But then they hear, and this is a story, so we don't actually know if this all happened or if it's just sort of Herodotus foreshadowing what's going to happen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
They're told that they're going to defend a pass against the army of Xerxes, but they're told there's a way around it. And so they abandon the position. And so they retreat and they think about what they should do next. There is an obvious geographical point where historically you stop an army moving south into Greece.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
That point is Thermopylae and it continues to be, I mean, it is important here and it continues to be important right down into the Second World War. The last battle of Thermopylae that we know of is 1941. This is a continuous thing throughout history that if you want to stop that army marching into central Greece, Thermopylae, a narrow strip of land along the coast, is where you do it.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
It's your last hope, isn't it, really? Yeah, exactly. So at that point, you're on the threshold of Boeotia. So you're really going into like the area of Greece that most urbanized, most highly developed, where all of the famous states essentially are. If Thermopylae falls, central Greece falls, there's no other position where you can hold an army. So that is where you send your force.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And helpfully, the sea alongside Thermopylae, there's a sort of inlet between the mainland and the island of Euboea, which is also quite narrow and also for a fleet quite defensible. So what the Greeks agreed to do is send an army to Thermopylae and send a fleet to Artemision, which is where this sort of dual defense on land and sea is supposed to take place.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But the army that they send to Thermopylae is, compared to the later army that they would send out in the following year to Plataea, it's tiny. It's very, very small. There's a small force of Spartans, a thousand strong, and then similarly sized contingents of the Spartan allies. So they're really, really quite small forces, maybe about a tenth of their available strength.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Maybe as much as a third in some cases, but they're very, very small pieces of their levies. There's always been a question of why did they send so few troops? Why are these armies so small? The traditional argument has been, and is already there in Herodotus, that this is because the Spartans expected to lose, and they knew it was a suicide mission, and so they'd only send a small force.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But then the big question is why did they send so many, essentially?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
They sent their king, Leonidas, with an army. Right, yeah. It seems like a very official move, but the later explanation is, oh, they needed to lose a king to meet a prophecy to save the rest of Greece. That's the argument. But it's very hard to explain why they would send so large an army in that case. I mean, send three guys, for God's sake. Send Leonidas himself alone. It doesn't matter.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Because this is something that happens with later Romans, right? They have a particular ritual where the general sacrifices himself, and that's supposed to be a good omen for victory. So let him do that by himself. I don't know why they would send a thousand guys to go and die with him. In any case, that's the story.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
What seems to be happening really is that Sparta continues before and after this to be very reluctant to send troops north of the Peloponnese. That is not their traditional territory. They're not their traditional area of influence. And they seem very uncommitted to defending that against the Persians. So they mostly want the local population to handle that. And they don't want to get too into it.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
They don't want to risk their troops in this sort of very advanced forward position. And it's very informative to compare the Spartan commitment of 1,000 men to Thermopylae to the Athenian commitment of almost 200 triremes, which is 40,000 men to the Battle of Artemision.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
I mean, this is an enormous fleet, which would have emptied Athens, that is being sent to take part of the naval leg of this strategy. Whereas on land, the Spartans are half-hearted at best. It's interesting that we haven't actually mentioned the number 300 there at all, Ruud. You said it's a thousand Spartans. Yeah, it's the alternative tradition that I'm going with.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Essentially, there are two different source traditions. One says 300, the other says a thousand. The best way to reconcile them is to assume that there were 300 full Spartan citizens, and then 700 other Spartans who are not citizens, but who are freeborn and fight as hoplites. That's very common in later Spartan armies, that they rely quite heavily on these
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
other sort of Lacedaemonians who are not Spartan citizens. And that seems to be an easy way to reconcile the numbers. But that means there's a thousand because everywhere else, if you count the number of Spartans, quote unquote Spartans in battle, you're always counting both Spartan citizens and perioikoi and other classes within Spartan society that fight in a similar way.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
I mean, the story is essentially that Xerxes tries to find a way to break through this position, which is very difficult. Geographically, it's very strong, right? So any army could hold this against any other army indefinitely, unless there is some way to get around the position, essentially to outflank it.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And so I'm very tempted by Geoffrey Robb's theory that essentially Xerxes understood this very early on. He has Thessalians in his army by this point who have recently fought the Phocians on the other side of the pass. So they have had to cross this position, which had been fortified by the Phocians, and so they had found the ways around it.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So they knew this, and they were in his army, so there's no reason why he wouldn't have talked to them and said, like, look, how do you solve this issue?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
That's right. So the Phocians are the people who actually have Thermopylae the Pass in their territory, essentially. So that is part of their territory. It is the boundary of their territory, which they have defended against the Thessalians in the recent conflict. And so the Thessalians got around it, and they would be in a position to inform Xerxes about this.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
At the same time, he's doing the same thing with his fleet. He's sending a chunk of his fleet, 200 ships, around Euboea to try and outflank the allied fleet, which is in the Straits. So that's quite a long journey. It takes several days. And so the land army isn't attacking while they're waiting for that chunk of the fleet to get into position. So for four days, they do nothing.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
According to Herodotus, they're kind of waiting for the Spartans to just kind of melt away in fear. That doesn't happen. So on the fifth day, they actually do have to attack. But that is... And in the story that we get, it's sort of this very huge sort of land battle, that utter carnage when they try to dislodge the Spartans from the past by throwing everything in the kitchen sink at them.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And it just doesn't get anywhere. And everybody's getting sort of destroyed by their thousands by this immovable Spartan line. But we have to bear in mind that we just got told by Herodotus that this is a fortified pass.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So they're defending a wall, which makes it on the one hand very easy to defend, but it also, on the other hand, makes it very easy for the attacker to avoid casualties by just keeping their distance and just sort of probing that defense of seeing how close they can get, seeing how far they can get with missiles before they actually commit to an all-out assault.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
It's also a narrow path, so you can't really commit that many. You can't really lose that many. It's really hard to actually... get much out of the Persian numbers, which is exactly why the Greeks decide to defend that position.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But it also means that Xerxes can afford to essentially keep those Spartans and their allies locked in position while he's figuring out how to deal with this strategic problem. What supposedly happens is the first day the Medes attack, they don't get anywhere. This is one of the larger Iranian peoples that the Persians rule over.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Then the Persians themselves have a go in the form of the immortals they attack. They also don't get anywhere against the pass. Obviously, the Greeks at this point are like, yeah, we're winning. The Persians are probably thinking, you know, you're still there. Okay, good. That means we still have an opportunity to defeat you.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
They're not committing in any sense an all-out attack by their army because firstly, the they are still trying to figure out how to get around this, right? How to dislodge the Greeks rather than just sort of trying to frontally bash their heads against the wall.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And they find it eventually when somebody tells them, or so we're told, the traitor Ephialtes tells them that there is a path that leads up the mountain and around the position in the path. Geoffrey Robb's argument has been that they knew this all along. They heard it from the Thessalians. And so they were just waiting
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
for their fleet to get into position so that they could outflank both forces simultaneously.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Exactly. And so this is basically how this path has always been turned in every occasion in history since. That path is always the way that you do that. And that's what the Romans did against the Seleucids and many other peoples later. You always go around through the mountain and that always wins. Yeah. That always sort of succeeds.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
The problem is that that fleet that's been trying to encircle the Greeks at Artemision, it was lost in a storm. So those ships just never arrive. And that is what drives the Persians to finally try and attack both at Thermopylae and at Artemision, is that it didn't work. So they have to try and find a different way.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But by that point, they figured out that there is a pathway that leads them around the Thermopylae Pass. So in the night, they march the immortals over that path. The Phocians, who are themselves set to guard the path, don't act for reasons we don't quite understand, possibly just fear, possibly because they've made a deal with the Persians.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And so they let them through and the immortals come down behind the pass. And at that point, the allied position has become untenable, essentially. So then the big question is what the Allies do. It's often been argued that the Spartans are staying behind to kind of keep the Persians in a fight so that the rest of the Allies can get away as a sort of rearguard defense.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But the problem with that argument is that the Spartans hear in the night that the Persians are coming. They have long advance warning that the Persians are over the pass and they're coming in behind. And all of the other Allies already leaving at that point, they know that they can't hold this position, so they're just gone.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But Leonidas waits until the morning to make any kind of decision on what to do. So it's not until well into the day that he actually decides when he hears from a messenger again, like they're really coming down the mountain now, we should probably do something, that he decides, no, actually, we're going to stay. So he's already wasted all of his opportunities to extract his force safely.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
At that point, essentially, he's just doing it for the kudos. I mean, he's just staying behind because he thinks it's the right thing to do. It doesn't have any strategic merit. It doesn't have any strategic motivation even. Even in Herodotus, it has no strategic motivation. This is not done for good reasons.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
He is just doing that because he thinks it's right for a Spartan to not leave the position that he is assigned. And that is something that comes back again and again in narratives of Spartan warfare. If somebody tells you to stand somewhere, you don't move from that place. And Leonidas is thinking very much in those terms. He's saying, like, I was told to defend the Passa Thermopylae.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
I'm just going to do it, even if it's hopeless, even if there's no point. And so that's what he does, which is why he makes his final stand together with a couple of other Greek communities who decide also to hold that line.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Yeah, I mean, the Spartans essentially threw away their lives for no good purpose and gave him this huge propaganda coup, right? They gave him this opportunity to say, oh, I killed their king, I destroyed their army, rather than just sort of chasing it off to fight another day.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Yeah. And the excuse has always been twofold. I think the justification in modern scholarship and modern ways of telling this story, firstly, that they inflicted a lot of losses on the Persians.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But there is a very difficult bit of evidence behind that, which is the story in Herodotus that he got people from the fleet to come and look at all the dead on the battlefield, to kind of survey the battlefield. Again, this idea of coming to see it for yourself and look at all the dead that are scattered here, all these dead Spartans.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But in order to make that a proper story and something that would work for him in terms of motivating his troops, he hid most of his own dead. So supposedly he left 1,000 Persian dead as a credible figure and then hid the other 19,000 in a mass grave. We can imagine that this is true. This is something that Xerxes wants to do.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Or we can imagine that Herodotus got this story from the Ionians in the fleet who came to see this.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And that they only saw 1,000 Persian dead because there were only 1,000 Persian dead against 4,000 Greek dead, right?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
It's not a wood chipper, right? It's not like you can just keep feeding things into it. I mean, if you take some losses at the front line, you're going to pull back and reassess. And especially the Persians, whose initial move in a battle is always to use missiles first and to see if they can soften up the enemy to break them easily.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
That's right. So what's happened to them? You know, what's happened to the arrows? And obviously arrows have been found in significant numbers on the battle site, the Kolonos Hill at Thermopylae, although many of them actually don't date to the Persian Wars, but they do have them on display in the museum in Athens. I mean, archers would have been a very significant asset to the Persians in this.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So we mustn't imagine them just sort of rushing into close combat to their deaths in huge droves.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, more than that, I think a lot of Greeks recognize that the Persians had a lot to offer them, you know, in terms of employment, in terms of rewards, there was absolutely an understanding. If you did the king a solid, then he would repay you in kind.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And that's something that, you know, is very much propagated by the Persians themselves, their generosity, their reciprocity, their understanding that, you know, good deeds earn rewards and bad deeds earn punishment.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Absolutely. And so, you know, these local people obviously wanted that army gone, no doubt. They don't want to be a battlefield. Nobody wants to be a battlefield in the ancient times. But also, you know, it just makes obvious sense not to kind of try and see if the Phocians will help you in any way, like see if local populations might be able to offer you something similar.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
You just go to the richest person near you and say, like, how can I help? But so somebody died for this, right? The story that we're told is that the Spartans invested some money to have this Ephialtes assassinated. So there was apparently someone who was accused of giving away the tale to the Persians.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But to my mind, it's completely unnecessary, this story, because as I said, you know, they could have asked any local population they had already subjected who is now serving in their army for the information that they needed.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Yeah, so the story that we get from Herodotus is that this was really quite horrific, like what happened to the peoples who were directly behind the pass, who had resisted. So he marches into Boeotia, he marches into Phocis at the same time. He sacks some of these places. He really mistreats the populations because they resisted him, which is usually the carrot and stick of Persian conquest.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
If you don't resist, it's all good. You get to keep your structures and positions of power, and usually nothing will happen to you. But if you resist, then all bets are off. And so several of the communities of focus are really extremely roughly handled and get some very horrible anecdotes.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And also some of the towns in Boeotia that were there at Thermopylae, so the Thespians and the Plataeans who were there at Marathon, are just razed to the ground. So their entire city is destroyed. The Athenians hope that they can gather the entire army of the alliance to try and stop them before they get to Athens.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So they're waiting, they pull the fleet back from Artemisia and they're waiting to see what the Spartans are going to do. But in very characteristic fashion, the Spartans are doing absolutely nothing. And as a result of that, the Athenians have to abandon Attica as well. So the Persians then just march straight on down into Attica. the Athenian territory and take the city because there is no one.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
All of the Athenians have been evacuated almost and there's no one resisting them because they knew that alone they would not be able to stop this force.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Although, notably, he then also went up to the Acropolis and sacrificed to Athena.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Well, it does fit this, what you've explained before about the way the Persians rule other places, right? I mean, they're perfectly happy to integrate in or assimilate into sort of local religious customs if it means that it makes them more acceptable.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Well, so there's a very interesting story there where, according to Herodotus, obviously, when they approached Delphi, the gods themselves, you know, Athena stood up and various heroes made an appearance. There's these epiphanies of... divine figures who are coming to the defense and there's landslides and things to stop them.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Most likely that's covering a story where the Persians never actually wanted to sack Delphi because they understand the value of local sanctuaries. When they captured Delos during the marathon campaign, they also made huge sacrifices there. and try to reassure the local population which had fled to another island. Like, we don't mean you any harm. We actually want to make sure that you understand.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
We respect your customs because that is how they knew they could be palatable as new overlords. So they left Delphi well alone. I mean, they would have understood its value.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
I mean, the Battle of Salamis is extremely messy. It's very hard to say anything about it just because it is described to us in every source as just a mess of boats slamming into each other. And no one really knew what they were doing, except that the Persians have been dragged into a narrow strait, which was the plan of the Athenian commander Themistocles.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But it's not an Athenian victory so much as an allied victory, which the Athenians had about two thirds of the, or about half actually in Salamis, of the ships. But the overall commander is Eurybiades, who is a Spartan. It's always sort of important to stress that Themistocles never commanded any allied fleet at any point in Greek history.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Yeah, I think it's worth stressing that Xerxes really presents himself as a continuity candidate, which has a lot of sort of grounding in the fact that Darius was a usurper, but we don't have time to get into that particular story. We've done an episode with Lloyd all about Darius the Great. Oh, perfect. So I refer you back to Lloyd.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
He never did because he was always under a Spartan supreme commander. But the idea of that fight is essentially that the Spartans want to retreat to the Peloponnese. They want to get out of there. They don't care about anything. It's already lost. So they just want to go back, fortify the Isthmus, the connection of land between Athens and Corinth.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And they want to pull the fleet back to guard those works, so the fortification of the Peloponnese. And the Athenians point out to them that that means defending the Peloponnese in open waters against the superior Persian fleet, which would go badly. And so everything will go to pieces if they do that.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And they even threaten to leave the alliance and sail off to Italy, essentially leaving them all in the lurch because they just aren't finding that the allies are willing to help them to take back their own land. And so they threaten to leave, which finally pulls the other allies over the line to say, okay, well, fine, we'll make a stand at Salamis.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But he still has to trick the Persians into accepting that fight. So he draws them into this narrow strait where the superior seamanship of the Phoenicians in the Persian fleet isn't going to come to their advantage.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
That's right. So they may or may not have invented the trireme. It's a little bit obscure, but the Greeks wouldn't believe that if they didn't credit the Corinthians. So you have this fleet being drawn into the narrows, and then it just becomes a really sort of messy bun fight.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Essentially, because there's no room to maneuver, you're really just going at whatever you can target, whatever you can see. And it's very messy, but the Greeks managed to, or the Greek allies, I should stress here, because many of the ships in the Persian fleet were Greek.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
They were the Greeks of Asia Minor, the Greeks of Western Turkey, who had been subjected and forced to commit to naval service for the king. So many of the allied Greeks actually managed to prevail over individual ships, and this is how they end up winning this sort of attritional battle in the Straits of Salamis.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But fundamentally, Xerxes then has all these royal inscriptions put up where he's essentially saying, you know, my dad was great and I am doing the same things that he's doing. I'm continuing the work. I'm finishing the jobs that he left unfinished. That is how he presents himself. And that obviously both cements his legitimacy by saying, you know, you like to rise? Well, I am more of the same.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Yeah, so the narrative is that one of the commanders of the fleet that Xerxes has drafted from his subjects in Asia Minor is the Queen Artemisia, who is Queen of Halicarnassus, which is actually Herodotus' hometown. And so she leads a small contingent like five ships. I mean, many of these other states have dozens, if not more. And so she has a very small contingent.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But for Herodotus, she is massively interesting because he's interested in exceptions. He's interested in exceptional things. And so when a woman commands a military force, you know, that is something that he wants to talk about. That is something that he's fascinated by. And he's, he's very explicit about this. He doesn't sort of want to give the impression that he's doing so unfairly.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
It's just like, this is great. You know, look at this, who could have imagined because in the, in the Greek mind, which is very patriarchal, very sort of set in gender roles, this is something that could never happen. You know, women aren't in their, in their view, cut out for that kind of work. They just don't have that in their nature.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And so for them, this is something that is spectacular and worth talking about in detail. And so he casts her as one of Xerxes' close advisors from the Salamis narrative and even before that, as somebody who really has the ear of Xerxes and also always has the right advice, even if he sometimes ignores it.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And so she is sort of inflated in that narrative as somebody who actually has her wits about her. And for Herodotus, she becomes sort of one of the voices of reason within Xerxes' entourage.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And also it implies that Greece is going to feel this at some point.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So initially, actually, the Greeks don't think it's significant. We are told in Herodotus that they are essentially backing away to Salamis, expecting that the next day the Persians will just fight again. They don't think that the losses they've inflicted are serious enough to knock the Persian fleet out of the war.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But it turns out that they have actually, that the Persian fleet is no longer willing to keep its advanced station. So they retreat back to Asia Minor. So at that point, they more or less just abandoned the attempt to try and have a simultaneous land and naval campaign and instead just sort of keep the land army where it is to mop up.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
At which point, obviously, the Greeks have, in a sense, reclaimed control of the sea, which gives them a lot of strategic options.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And one of the main ones that immediately becomes relevant in the narrative is, what if they sail up to Hellespont and destroy this pontoon bridge that Xerxes had built in order to essentially cut off the Persian army and strand it in mainland Greece, for all the good it will do, but fundamentally saying, like, oh, we are now actually free to operate in your rear areas, which...
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
you know, animates a lot of modern strategic minds because this is very much the kind of operation that, you know, Blitzkrieg, it's the kind of operation that we would like to imagine as being disproportionately effective because it affects logistics, supply, communications, rather than confronting the strength of an army.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Well, so I mean, it could arguably be seen as the start of the Athenian Empire in the sense that at that point, there is no rival to Athens in the Aegean. So before that, obviously, Persia was, you know, an enormous rival to Athenian naval power, and they would never be able to claim that they control the Aegean Sea in general.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
They just had a lot of naval interest and they were building up their naval power and they were expanding their reach across the Aegean. But certainly from that point onwards, they are increasingly able to push the advantage that they have because they just have more ships than anyone else and they have more commitment to those naval investments than anyone else.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
The Spartans who are still in charge of the navy, even in the following campaign seasons, 479, eventually just withdraw from it. They essentially leave that leadership to the Athenians, or maybe there are different versions of this, the other allies elect the Athenians as their new leaders, essentially.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But fundamentally, the Athenians get to take over that alliance, which then ends up being the bedrock of the Athenian Empire. So it starts here in the sense that these are the forces that eventually form the Athenian Empire, but it takes a few steps to get the Spartans out of the way and for the Athenians to actually take over.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
Very little, actually. So that decade is really underreported, even in Herodotus, which is very frustrating. We'd love to know what was going on. And he's our main source, just to highlight, he's our main source again, isn't he, Herodotus? there's very few events that we can place within that period.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
One of them possibly is this really devastating war between Phocis and Thessaly, which will become relevant later. But otherwise, there isn't really that much. I mean, the big events of this period, Athens' war with Aegina in the 490s, actually before Marathon, Sparta's final defeat of Argos at Cepheia in 494, again before Marathon.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
These are some of the really big seismic shifts that are happening in the Greek world in this period. So I think the main event that we place in the 480s that is actually going to affect things meaningfully is the expansion of the Athenian navy. So this is something that happens in 483, around that time when the Athenians, essentially, they have a mine at Lauryon, a silver mine in their territory.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
in which they suddenly find a highly productive vein. So they suddenly find a ton of silver, essentially. And then there's a decision of what are we going to do with it? And the story that's told is that initially the idea was that they were just going to distribute it among the whole population. So they were going to take that windfall and just sort of hand it out.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
But Themistocles, who is a new man, he's literally the son of a man named Neocles. It's just sort of emphasizing the idea. The son of a man called New Glory.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
We are assuming that he is not from one of the traditional sort of well-established families in Athens, but he is one of these people who get the opportunity to rise because of the democracy, you know, because there's a more sort of open access to power. He convinces the assembly instead to invest it in building more ships. So warships.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And the argument there, according to Herodotus, is to fight Aegina. So this is an island that is across the bay from them, so another Greek state, which has traditionally been very prominent in naval power as well as a rival to Athens in naval power. And so they build more ships to try and defeat that.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
One story in Herodotus is that they build 200 triremes, which is a state-of-the-art warship of the period. But another source, the Athenaeum Politeia, which dates to a later period but preserves some good alternative information, says they already had 100 ships and they built 100 more.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
So that's an important difference because in one of those stories, Athens has no navy and suddenly decides, let's become a naval power, which sounds very convenient when they then end up sort of fighting the Persians at sea. The other story is that the Athenians already have strong naval interests and just decide to double down on them.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And that actually makes a lot more sense when you see that Athenians in this period have already been meddling in the Chersonese, in the Hellespont, and they have overseas interests. They have had them for a very long time.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And there are several recent studies that have emphasized that Athenian imperial designs, especially in the North Aegean, especially in the Hellespont, so the passage between the Aegean and the Black Sea, are very, very long established by this point. So the Athenians already have huge interest in trade and naval power.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And Themistocles convinces them to say, OK, well, let's double down on that and become the greatest naval power in the Greek world. That's what happens around 4832, just in time, essentially, for that fleet to become an important factor in their resistance to Persia.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
For Herodotus, this is a huge thing, right? Because one of the main impulses of his writing, as he says at the beginning, is to figure out why the Greeks and barbarians went to war with each other. That is how he phrases it. That is why he wrote this.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
And so when Xerxes decides to put the full might of the Persian Empire across and try and subdue the Greek mainland, that is for him this big moment where he has to try and sketch the causality. So he puts out this huge imagined council scene in which Xerxes consults with his closest ones, mostly relatives, essentially, uncles and cousins and brothers-in-law and whatnot.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and Salamis
to ask them, okay, should I evade Greece? And in that scene, essentially, there is a very sort of schematic thing where he has an uncle, Artabanus, who says, no, you shouldn't. This will end badly. You've already attacked the Scythians and it didn't go well. And so there's definitely motivation for him to say, maybe stop it with the adventures and just consolidate.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
this huge Greco-Roman city of Caesarea on the sea, which is located today between Haifa and Tel Aviv, where Herod built not only a palace for himself, but actually he built a whole new city there in a Greco-Roman style with the largest artificial harbor that had ever been created until that time, a huge harbor going out into the Mediterranean Sea, and basically a from-scratch city on land
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
modeled after a Greco-Roman city with a temple dedicated to Augustus in Rome overlooking the harbor with a theater and an amphitheater and just an enormous project. And a lot of that survives today, and you can still see it there. And then, of course, he built other palaces around the country.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
He built a series of fortified desert palaces on the eastern frontier of his kingdom, the most famous of which is Masada. But there's a whole bunch of other ones along that same line. So, yeah, he built all over the place. And he had a big palace complex at Jericho, which we have the remains of. The list just goes on and on.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So a lot of things about Herodium. So first of all, the name. Herodium is the Latin version of the name. Sometimes you see it spelled Herodion with O-N at the end, and that's the Greek version of the name, but they're both the same thing. Herodium is located to the south of Jerusalem, very close to Bethlehem, about five kilometers from Bethlehem. So that's about three miles from Bethlehem.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So very close to Jerusalem, but really directly overlooking Bethlehem. And it's actually one in the line of fortified desert palaces that Herod built on the eastern frontier of his kingdom. So it actually belongs to that same group of fortified palaces as Masada, for example. But in contrast to all of the others, so Masada, Machairus, Alexandria and Sartaba, Horkania.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
In contrast to all the others, Herodium is a de novo foundation, meaning it was built from scratch. It was not built on the site of a pre-existing Hasmonean fortress. All the others had been fortresses built by the Hasmoneans, which Herod then comes along and rebuilds and expands. Herodium is the only one that was not a Hasmonean fortress previously. And what Herod does at Herodium is...
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
he basically creates a mountain. There was some sort of a preexisting hill there, but Herod built on top of it to create what we call a massive tumulus, so a massive sort of artificial mountain or hill. And this mountain or hill had several different focal points. At the base of it was a large palatial complex with an enormous pool
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
that was used both for swimming and boating and also storing water that was supplied by aqueduct brought in from a great distance. The palace complex at the foot of the mountain also included a hippodrome, which is sort of a horse racing course. It included gardens. It was used as an administrative center. And then at the top of the mountain, there's another palace.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So inside the top of the mountain, which kind of looks like the crater of a volcano when you look at it from the top, inside there, Herod also had palatial buildings. And the bottom of the mountain, which we call lower Herodium, and the top, which we call upper Herodium, were connected by a staircase that went up the side of the mountain between them and originally was vaulted over.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So it wouldn't have been open to the sky. It would have been sort of covered over. Now, we know from Josephus that Herod died in the year 4 BCE in his palace at Jericho. And Josephus says that when Herod died, his body was then brought by procession for burial at Herodium. But Josephus doesn't tell us where at Herodium Herod was buried.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
And it's this huge complex, right, with this basically a mountain. So where was Herod's tomb at Herodium? And for many years, the Israeli archaeologist Ehud Neser, who started digging at Herodium in the early 1980s, he literally spent decades looking. looking for Herod's tomb at Herodium.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
Many scholars had thought that maybe Herod was buried inside the top of the mountain, sort of like the idea of a pyramid kind of a thing. Ehud Netzer also speculated that maybe Herod was built in the complex at the base of the mountain. And then lo and behold, in 2007, Netzer found the tomb of Herod, the mausoleum, about halfway up the slope of the facing Jerusalem.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So it's basically if you walk up the staircase about halfway up, it's up there. So that was a spectacular discovery. In my opinion, by the way, the discovery of Herod's tomb at Herodium by Ehud Nesser is the most important discovery in the region since the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the reason is because Herod's tomb at Herodium gives us direct information about Herod the man.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
It's basically Herod telling us how he wanted to be memorialized and how he wanted to be remembered for posterity. So it's almost like we're hearing from Herod first person. And in light of the problems with the other sources of information we have about Herod, I think that this is an extremely important discovery.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So I think we should actually defer that for a minute, but I will say that this is one of the things that had always puzzled me. So Josephus says that Herod established Herodium at that spot. And by the way, going back to this from before, Herodium not only is a de novo foundation, it is the only site, apparently, that Herod named after himself.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
And he named all his other sites after someone else. Caesarea, he named in honor of Augustus. Samaria Sebaste, he named in honor of Augustus. He built buildings around Jerusalem, these three towers that protected his palace. which he named in honor of friends and relatives.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
And likewise, he named the wings of his palace in Jerusalem after Augustus and after Marcus Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus. So Herod generally named his buildings and his building projects in honor of other people. Herodium is the only one that he named after himself. And it's apparently because he planned it to be his everlasting memorial, right?
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So again, it gives us an indication of how important it is. But one of the things that was always so puzzling to me about Herodium was that Josephus tells us that Herod established it on that spot because it was the site of a place where he won a battle. It was a military victory against the Hasmoneans.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So very early in his reign, the first three years of his reign after he had been appointed Herod, king of Judea by the Romans, Herod spent fighting one of the Hasmonean claimants to the throne. And Josephus says that Herod defeated one of these, you know, had a big victory or something, a victory against, you know, these Hasmoneans at this spot, you know, during that period of three years.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
But otherwise, we don't really have much information about the battle. It doesn't seem to have been a huge deal. It wasn't the end of, you know, Herod's problems with the Hasmoneans. It wasn't until 37 that the siege of Jerusalem ended and that then, you know, eliminated the Hasmonean threat, direct threat, at least to the throne. So it was always sort of puzzling to me.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
It doesn't really explain why he established such an important place on this particular spot, right? And that comes back to, I think, the location with Bethlehem, which is something that I had thought about for a very long time.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
Right. Let me just describe the mausoleum a bit. So the mausoleum, which is the tomb itself. Right. So basically, you could call the whole mountain a mausoleum. Right. Because the whole tomb is a memorial. I mean, the whole mountain is a memorial to Herod. Right. And it's named after him.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
but but when i say mausoleum i mean the actual tomb the spot where herod was buried at herodium and that's this monument that's located halfway up the slope you know facing jerusalem so the mausoleum is basically kind of this tall structure that consisted of a square podium and it's all constructed of stone a square podium with a circular building on top of the square podium the circular building was surrounded by columns
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
And then on top, you had kind of this conical shaped roof. right? So after Netser's discovery, it became clear that Herod's mausoleum at Herodium was modeled after Hellenistic models. Hellenistic meaning the kinds of tombs that you would find in the period after the conquests of Alexander the Great.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
And this kind of tomb model, what we call a mausoleum, really goes back to a little bit before the time of Alexander. So Alexander conquered the area of Syria-Palestine in 332 BC. But a couple of decades before Alexander's conquest, a monumental tomb was constructed in what is today southwest Turkey, southwest Asia Minor, at a site today called Bodrum, but in antiquity called Halicarnassus.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
Yeah, I would actually agree with that assessment. He's definitely interesting. He's probably, I guess you could say, infamous because of the report in the Gospel of Matthew about the massacre of the innocents. That's basically how he's become known. That's the association and sort of the popular imagination. Among archaeologists who work in Israel, he is...
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
Now, in the middle of the 4th century BCE, which is where we are right now, That area was part of a kingdom ruled by a local king, not a Greek king, a local king, whose name was Mausolus. When Mausolus died around, you know, in the middle of the fourth century BCE, he was interred in a monumental stone tomb monument that became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
And it consisted of a giant square podium. with not a circular building, but a Greek temple-like building on top, surrounded by columns and a pyramidal roof, and it had a lot of sculpture decorating it.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
And that monument, the tomb of Mausolus, became so famous that it not only became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but gave its name ever after to all monumental tombs, which we call mausolea. A mausoleum takes its name from the tomb of Mausolus, and the plural is mausolea. And so after the tomb of Mausolus was built, it sparked a fashion.
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Tomb of King Herod
And rich and famous people around the Mediterranean began designing their own family tombs to look like the mausoleum at Halicarnassus. And so in the centuries after the conquest of Alexander, we find a lot of these kind of tombs all around the Mediterranean world that are inspired directly or indirectly by the mausoleum at Halicarnassus and have many of the same elements.
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Tomb of King Herod
So we can see in Herod's mausoleum at Rhodium elements of the mausoleum at Halicarnassus, right? It has this big square podium and then this monument on top, which is circular rather than square. And so then you have the conquest of Alexander the Great. And Alexander dies in 323 BCE.
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Tomb of King Herod
And eventually, Alexander's remains were brought for burial to Alexandria in Egypt, which was a city that Alexander had founded and named after himself. And his remains were interred in a tomb in Alexandria, which became known as the Sema, S-E-M-A, or the Soma, S-O-M-A. which are Greek words basically meaning monument or body. The body, yeah. That's right.
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Tomb of King Herod
And this sema or soma of Alexander at Alexandria was a very well-known monument. It was visited by Augustus and almost certainly by Herod during their lifetimes, and people like that would come and pay homage to Alexander's remains. Augustus reportedly put a gold wreath on the remains when he visited the tomb. The problem is we have no archaeological remains of the Sema at Alexandria.
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Tomb of King Herod
It's never been found. We don't know. It was destroyed at some point in the 3rd century CE. The remains have never been located, and we don't have any good descriptions of it. We don't have any artistic depictions of it. We don't have any good literary descriptions of it. So exactly what it looked like is unknown.
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Tomb of King Herod
But it almost certainly contained the major elements that we would expect of a monumental tomb at that time, meaning it likely had some sort of a mausoleum-type structure, probably a pyramidal or conical roof over it. And
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Tomb of King Herod
Probably some sort of a tumulus, meaning a big burial mound of earth, which is the kind of tomb that was kept monument that was characteristic of royalty in Alexander's native Macedonia, which is in northeastern Greece. That's about as much as we can say. There was probably some sort of tomb chamber inside, but we don't really know. So we can only speculate.
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Tomb of King Herod
known as the greatest single builder in the history of the country. He left more of a lasting imprint on the landscape of the country than any other single person in history. And that's how, as an archaeologist, we know him.
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Tomb of King Herod
So then what happens is that in the first century BCE, Augustus visited the Sema at Alexandria accompanied by Herod. And although we don't have direct information that Herod actually went into the Sema at that time with Augustus, Herod certainly would have been familiar with the monument. So when Augustus
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Tomb of King Herod
builds his own monumental family tomb in Rome, the Mausoleum of Augustus, which is called the Mausoleum of Augustus. He certainly was inspired by these traditions, that is the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the Sema at Alexandria. And like pretty much everyone from Alexander on, Augustus would have sought to portray himself as one of the successors of the tradition of Alexander the Great, right?
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Tomb of King Herod
Basically, every ruler in the Mediterranean world, and especially the Eastern Mediterranean, after the time of Alexander, connected themselves somehow to Alexander and sort of sought to portray themselves in an Alexander-like way. So it's not surprising when we look at the mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, that what we have is a kind of
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mausoleum-type structure in that you have these tiers of stone building, right? But it's circular. It's not square. It's circular because it had a tumulus of earth over it, which might have been inspired by the Sema at Alexandria if it had a tumulus, a big mound of earth, but also probably was inspired by the native Italian Etruscan, Tuscany,
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tradition of having tombs that were covered by mounds of earth. So when we look at the mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, it's incorporating elements that were common in the Hellenistic world and also from sort of the native area of Italy, you know, around Rome. And in fact, in calling it a mausoleum, you know, Augustus is actually connecting himself directly to this existing Hellenistic tradition.
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Tomb of King Herod
So then it's interesting to think about, well, then how does Herod attempt to portray himself, right, when he designs his tomb? And it's very interesting that Herod's tomb, again, incorporates a lot of these elements, right? You have the square podium, you have the circular structure on top of it with the tholos on top, and the whole mountain of Herodium is a tumulus, right?
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Tomb of King Herod
It's basically a gigantic mound of earth. So we can see Herod situating himself. in this tradition, visually connecting himself to figures like Alexander the Great and Augustus, right? And Augustus, of course, was Herod's patron. Now, there's more to it, however.
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Tomb of King Herod
Right. Thank you for mentioning that. So I wasn't going to get to the Philippians, but before I get to the Philippians. So the Mausoleum of Augustus at Rome and the Sema of Alexandria were more than just tombs. They were royal dynastic monuments that were also the focus of imperial cult, ruler cults.
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And what they did is they presented these figures, not just as deceased, but specifically as divinized. And they were focal points for the worship of these figures, both Alexander in the case of the Sema at Alexandria and the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome. So it's all part of the representation of these figures as divinized.
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Tomb of King Herod
And by the way, if you represent yourself in the manner of somebody like that, then by way of extension, you are also presenting yourself as a divinized ruler who's a dynastic king like that, right? So that brings us back to Aaron. Now, you did correctly mention the Philippian at Olympia, which this is my contribution to the, this is something that I noticed that had not been noticed previously.
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Tomb of King Herod
Right. So in order to understand who Herod was, you have to understand first a little bit of what happened before his time. And so basically, in sort of the couple of centuries before Herod was born, the land of Israel or Palestine, whatever you want to call that territory, had come under the rule of Alexander the Great and his successors.
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So Herod clearly was situating himself in this tradition of Hellenistic and then Roman tomb architecture when he builds his mausoleum at Herodium and connecting himself by way of extension to Alexander and Augustus.
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Tomb of King Herod
But one of the things that nobody had ever explained is why the structure on top of the square podium in his mausoleum is circular rather than square, which is odd because generally those kinds of structures, when you have them on top of like that square podium, they're generally not circular. And that's odd.
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But even more interesting is that that circular structure at Herodium, the tholos, is surrounded by 18 ionic columns. Ionic is the kind of capital that has the little curly Qs at the top. And there are 18 of them. And that's what struck me because at Olympia, which is this ancient sanctuary of Zeus in the Peloponnese, at Olympia in Greece,
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You have a sacred precinct dedicated to Zeus, and inside the sacred precinct is a circular structure called the Philippian. It's named after Philip II, who was the father of Alexander the Great. In the year 338 BCE, Philip II defeated the other Greek city-states in battle, and by way of extension, then became ruler of Greece. And he built the Philippian to celebrate that victory.
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The Philippian is a really interesting monument because, first of all, it's constructed inside the sacred precinct, which automatically suggests a connection with the divine. So it's important to remember that up until the time of Alexander, Greek kings... were not considered divine. They weren't worshipped as gods.
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That's different from the tradition in the ancient Near East, where, for example, pharaohs and so on. So in Greece, before the time of Alexander, there was no tradition of worshipping a mortal ruler as a god, even after their death. So in placing the Philippian inside the sacred precinct, Philip II was making a statement that
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And inside that Philippian building were statues of himself and his family, including Alexander. And in doing that, then also making a statement about connecting them to divinities, to gods. Now, the Philippian, and we know that it was the Philippian was then visited in Alexander's lifetime and afterwards and viewed in that way.
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The Philippian at Alexandria is a circular structure that is surrounded by 18 ionic columns. Now, what's even more interesting, though, is that in the year 12 BCE, Herod went to Rome, visited Rome, and on his way during his trip, he also made a visit to Olympia, where he made a huge donation of money, so much money that the locals voted him president for life of the Olympic Games.
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And then after his trip, he returns to his kingdom. And so I... And it's all around this time that, according to Afenetzer's excavations, that the mausoleum is built. And I think that the mausoleum is inspired not only by the mausoleum of Augustus at Rome and also by the lost Sema of Alexander at Alexandria, but also by the Philippian because of the circular structure with 18 ionic columns.
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And then in the middle of the second century BCE, and I'll just use BCE instead of BC and CE instead of AD, but whatever. So in the middle of the second century BCE, thanks to a Jewish revolt, the Jews gained independence from Alexander's Greek successors.
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And again, we know that Herod visited Olympia. So certainly what Herod is trying to do here is make a connection between between himself and Alexander, situating himself in the tradition of Alexander, and not just as sort of an Alexander-type figure, but as a heroic, divinized ruler figure in the Hellenistic tradition, right?
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And that's the same tradition that Augustus was seeking to situate himself in as well. Even though Augustus tried to be a little bit more, you know, Augustus tried to have it both ways. He also tried to present himself as one among, you know, equals and Right. Primus Inter pares and all of that. But anyway, so that kind of fiction that the Republic was continuing, you know, and all of that. So.
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Tomb of King Herod
The visual connections, I think, are clear, right? The architectural and visual connections are clear to me, right? And I think that they would have been clear to people who visited Herodium in, you know, the first century B.C. and first century C. This is Herod making a claim, right, that like Augustus, like Alexander, he too is, you know, a dynastic hero.
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ruler, but also alluding to a divinized status, right? Now, here's the problem. And this goes back to Bethlehem. So the problem is that that would have been probably pretty obvious and fine to non-Jewish subjects of Herod. But Jews would not have accepted Herod as a divinized ruler, right? They're not worshiping a king as a ruler. That's right. Okay.
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So if Herod is going to make a claim that is analogous to that among his Jewish population, it can't be quite that, right? Situating himself in the tradition of Alexander isn't going to work. He has to do something else. Now, Herod's problem with his Jewish population is that he wasn't descended from the Hasmoneans, and he wasn't even fully Jewish, right?
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Tomb of King Herod
He's Jewish on his father's side of the family through forced conversion. To be a legitimate Jewish king, if you really want to be a legitimate Jewish king in that period, what you would want to do is situate yourself as a descendant of David, right? Because nobody is going to be able to deny that you're legitimate if you connect yourself to David.
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So for the Greek and Roman tradition, you're going to connect yourself to Alexander. For the Jewish tradition, however, you're going to connect yourself to David. And David's birthplace, of course, was Bethlehem, right? And the gospel authors... clearly take for granted that the Messiah, who is going to be a king descended from David, right, will be born in Bethlehem, just as David was.
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This revolt, by the way, is celebrated by the modern Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, which at the moment, now we're taping, we're right in the middle of Hanukkah. So that revolt is celebrated by this holiday of Hanukkah. And as a result of that revolt, an independent Jewish kingdom was created in the land of Israel, which was ruled by the leaders of that revolt and their successors.
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And that's why two of the gospel authors, Matthew and Luke, go to such pains to insert birth narratives at the beginning of their accounts, right, connecting Jesus to David. And we also saw in Matthew the connection to Bethlehem. Right. So if Herod wants to present himself as a legitimate king in the eyes of his Jewish subjects, the best thing to do is connect yourself to David. Right now.
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Tomb of King Herod
But how does Herod do that? Right. I mean, because everybody knows he's I mean, everybody knows he's like this half Idumean Jew, you know, kind of. So he does a number of things, in my opinion. So one thing that he does is he establishes his royal dynastic tomb monument overlooking Bethlehem. He puts it as close to Bethlehem as he can get, right?
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Tomb of King Herod
So you're sitting at Bethlehem, it's overlooking Bethlehem. So he's making, in my opinion, a visual connection to the birthplace of David. He's putting himself right there. And it's actually the location of Herodium. It's just inside the boundary between Bethlehem and Idumea. So it's in Idumea, which is Herod's native territory. but overlooking Bethlehem.
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Tomb of King Herod
So there also, he kind of has it both ways. And then he does a number of other things. He rebuilds the second temple. And actually, you know, even in Josephus, we have references to Herod rebuilding the temple and sort of claiming to be like, you know, he's basically carrying out what Solomon did, right?
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Tomb of King Herod
He's situating himself as like, well, a successor to David and Solomon building the temple or rebuilding the temple on an even larger scale than the temple was before. So the rebuilding of the temple is also connecting Herod, right? I'm a legitimate Jewish king. I'm rebuilding the temple of David and Solomon, so to speak.
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It wasn't the temple of David and Solomon, same spot, the temple to the God of Israel. And therefore, you know, in this way, legitimizing myself as a successor, right, to David and Solomon.
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And then there was a scholar a number of years ago named Abraham Shalit who published a book on Herod, King Herod, which is an amazing book, but unfortunately is not read by a lot of English speaking readers because it was never translated into English. It was published in German and translated into Hebrew, but a very important book. And Shalit has this substantial section about
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And in this section, he talks about how Herod portrays himself as a Messiah, a Messiah in the Davidic tradition, a Davidic Messiah, by claiming to have fulfilled the will of the God of Israel by rebuilding the temple and by ushering in a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
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And so basically, if you take all of this evidence together, right, what Herod is doing then is saying, I am a legitimate Jewish king. I have fulfilled the expectations associated with a Davidic messiah. And you only need a little bit of leap of imagination then for people to then think to themselves, well, he must be the Davidic Messiah, right?
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Tomb of King Herod
And that family is called the Hasmonean family. The leaders of the revolt were called the Maccabees. But the family is the Hasmonean family and the kingdom is the Hasmonean kingdom. So basically, you have this independent Jewish kingdom in the land of Israel from about the middle of the second century BCE for about 100 years.
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Because he's fulfilled the expectations associated with a Davidic Messiah. Shalit and other scholars have also speculated that these messianic claims by Herod might have been bolstered by his claims that he had some Babylonian Jewish blood in him, that part of his family came from Babylonia, which is where the Jews had been exiled after the destruction of the first temple.
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And in doing that, Herod is basically trying to say, yes, I do have, I am in fact, or I could be, right, descended from David by way of the Babylonian Jewish part of my family. There's no substantiation for that kind of a claim, but Herod could have been making those claims, right, in order to help legitimize his position. So I think that all of this goes along with what we see at Herodium.
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Tomb of King Herod
In other words, when you look at Herodium, you have two aspects to it. You have the Hellenistic Roman aspect with the tradition of Alexander and Augustus and the divinized dynastic rulers. And then on the other hand, what you have are the Messianic Davidic Jewish claims. And this then actually helps explain the story of the massacre of the innocents in Matthew, right?
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Because if we come back to that, I think that what this story is doing is responding to that claim by Herod by saying that, first of all, the true Messiah actually was born in Bethlehem. And that's not true of Herod. Herod's claim is false, right? And not only is Herod not the true Messiah, but he actually tried to have the true Messiah put to death, right?
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So I think that episode in the Gospel of Matthew is responding to the claims made by Herod, including the very big visual statement of his tomb looming over Bethlehem.
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Tomb of King Herod
Yeah. Well, that's really one of the very interesting questions. And there is an afterlife of Herodium, but it's clear that around the time of the Jewish revolt against the Romans, and maybe also afterwards, there was a lot of vandalism to Herod's tomb. And the sarcophagi, there were three sarcophagi, stone sarcophagi, which are big stone coffins that were found at the site of the mausoleum.
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And they had been smashed into little bits. And The excavators hypothesize that this vandalism and damage was carried out by Jews in the decades after Herod's death and around the time of the First Revolt and maybe afterwards because Herod was so unpopular and his claim was so unpopular. So it's sort of hard to say. On the other hand, it could have remained a family dynastic monument.
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Tomb of King Herod
We have some hints that Herod's son and grandson... Maybe it had some connection to the site of Herodium. It's kind of hard to know for sure. And there is also a long tradition of literary sources referring to a group called the Herodians. So there's actually a group in the Gospel accounts.
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And then in 63 BCE, it was annexed, taken over by the Romans, and it becomes sort of absorbed into the territories that are ruled by Rome. And the Romans had to decide how to administer this territory once they absorbed it.
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If you go through the different canonical Gospel accounts where they refer to groups like the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes, but they also, in the Gospel authors, refer to a group called the Herodians. And most scholars have assumed that the Herodians were sort of a group of elite Jews who were sort of in the entourage of Herod, right? They were associated with Herod.
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Tomb of King Herod
But there are then later Christian sources from about 200 CE on that also refer to the Herodians, a group called the Herodians, who they explicitly say are a Jewish sect who considered Herod to be Christ, who considered Herod to be the Messiah.
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Tomb of King Herod
And so apparently there were Jews and probably there were groups among the elites, right, who were in the circle of Herod and after his death, who did consider Herod to be the Messiah, who considered his claims to be legitimate. And in my opinion, these people are the people who are called the Herodians.
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Tomb of King Herod
Now, whether the Herodians in the gospel accounts are the same as the Herodians mentioned in the later sources, we don't know for sure. I think it's actually quite possible, but we don't know that for sure.
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Tomb of King Herod
So again, there were three sarcophagi. One is of this beautiful, it's an exquisite sarcophagus, even though it's smashed, made of this very hard redstone, local redstone that was basically not used otherwise in this period. It becomes common in later periods, but not in this period. And then there are two white sarcophagi.
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Tomb of King Herod
And the excavators speculate, and I think this is a reasonable speculation, they speculate that the red sarcophagus was Herod's sarcophagus. And it's the one that actually had the most damage. It's smashed into teeny little bits. The two white sarcophagi were in bigger pieces. And they speculate that maybe those were, you know, among Herod's wives. Herod had...
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Tomb of King Herod
And, you know, like flying past lots of historical detail here, eventually what happens is that the Romans appoint Herod to be client king of this territory, Judea, this is called Judea, on their behalf. And Herod then rules this kingdom, this client kingdom, on behalf of the Romans from 40 BCE until his death in the year 4 BCE.
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nine or 10 wives, depending on how you read Josephus. He had one wife who he divorced and then he remarried later. But anyway, so they speculate that maybe those two sarcophagi were, you know, Herod's wives. And if we don't know, it's not unreasonable. One of the problems with this is that there are no inscriptions on the sarcophagi.
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Tomb of King Herod
So it would be nice if we had an inscription that says, this is Herod's sarcophagus. We don't have that. But, you know, it's an amazing sarcophagus. The red one is, you know, extraordinary. And in my opinion, there's no reason to doubt that it's Herod's, even though there are scholars who doubt it because there is no inscription. But I don't see a good reason to doubt that.
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Tomb of King Herod
Now, also very interesting. So you asked about the afterlife of Herod, and I mentioned the Herodians. By the years after Herod's death, some of the elite Jewish families in Jerusalem began to build their own family tombs in Jerusalem in imitation of the mausoleum of Herod at Herodium.
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And the best example is this monument called the Tomb of Absalom, which is misnamed, which is in the Kidron Valley at the foot of the Temple Mount. Basically, it's at the foot of the slope of Mount of Olives. And it's still standing today. You can see it. And it's clearly... An imitation of the mausoleum at Herodium.
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Tomb of King Herod
And that, by the way, is very interesting, too, because it's not just a fashion thing. I mean, there's no doubt that these Jewish families were aware of the symbolic significance of, you know, Herod's mausoleum and what it represented. And so by imitating that image, It's by way of extension sort of saying, yeah, well, fine with us, you know, and let's build a tomb like this for ourselves.
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Tomb of King Herod
You know, so I do think that there were portions of the Jewish population and probably particularly among some of the elites who were in Herod's circle who would have accepted his claims as legitimate.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
Yes, and actually, thank you for pointing that out, because we know that gardens were an important feature of many of these ancient tombs, particularly the monumental ones, right? So, you know, poorer people or simpler tombs didn't necessarily have gardens, but the big And even in the biblical tradition, there are gardens associated with tombs.
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Tomb of King Herod
So we know, for example, that there were gardens associated with the Sema of Alexander at Alexandria. And the Mausoleum of Augustus at Rome was in the middle of a giant garden complex. So the Mausoleum of Herod at Herodium also was in a precinct that had gardens around it. So this is very typical.
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Tomb of King Herod
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that this is one of these cases which highlights the value of archaeology in shedding light on the past. Right. So and it's also a case where, again, one of the things that is important to me as an archaeologist is combining all of the information that we have about the past, both from literary sources and from archaeology.
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And here we can do that very productively to understand this figure of Herod.
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Tomb of King Herod
And one of the things that's important to remember or understand is why the Romans appointed Herod to be client king. In other words, who was Herod? So Herod was a sort of, I hate to use this term, but he was kind of half Jewish. He was a man whose mother was not Jewish. His mother was an Abatean woman, meaning she was an Arab woman.
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Tomb of King Herod
Yeah, well, again, we only have Josephus' account describing how Herod died. So Herod died in the year 4 BCE. And according to Josephus, he died of some illness. Josephus describes it in extremely grotesque terms. He had worms coming out of his privy parts. And I mean, he was in great agony. It was a horrible death. And scholars have speculated about what exactly happened.
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Tomb of King Herod
The illness was there have been all kinds of suggestions syphilis and I don't know all sorts of different things. We don't actually know. We also don't know how accurate that is. I mean, I think it's reasonable to assume that Herod died of some illness and maybe it was kind of an agonizing illness. Was it as grotesque as the way Josephus describes or did Josephus embellish it? We don't know.
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Tomb of King Herod
Again, Josephus presented Herod in a negative light, a very negative light. And the point of describing the illness so grotesquely is to show that a horrible man was punished at the end of his life by dying a horrible death. And By the way, Josephus nowhere mentions anything about Herod being Messiah. I think Josephus did not accept that tradition and may have actually been actively opposed to it.
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And so part of the point of this horrible death description could be to show he couldn't be the Messiah because he died this horrible death and was punished by God at the end of his life, right? So it could be another element of Josephus's spin on presentation, right?
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I know a lot of scholars who'd be like, they'd be extremely excited if that was discovered.
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His father was an Idumean Jew, meaning his father was from a territory just south of Judea and Jerusalem called Idumea in antiquity, kind of the area of the modern northern Negev desert. This area had been Judaized by the Hasmoneans before Herod's time. So when the Hasmoneans had ruled this territory, they had foretold. forcibly converted the inhabitants of Idumea to Judaism.
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And Herod's grandfather was one of those forcibly converted Jews. So Herod was Jewish on his father's side of the family, the Idumean side, through forced conversion. So Herod's grandfather and father had worked, or well, more accurately, his father had worked in the Roman administration before Herod's time. And so Herod was kind of a good choice for the
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that had experience in dealing with the local administration, the native administration. He was sort of Jewish, right, on his father's side of the family, but he wasn't fully Jewish and he wasn't Hasmonean. From the Roman point of view, this was important because they feared that the Hasmoneans would not be loyal to them, that the Hasmoneans would want to regain their independence.
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So they didn't want to choose somebody who was a Hasmonean. So Herod kind of fit the bill nicely for the Romans. But on the other hand, this also made him very unpopular among a lot of the Jewish population, which considered him a usurper to the throne because he was not Hasmonean and he was not fully Jewish.
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So one of the factors that Herod had to deal with throughout his lifetime was sort of a perceived threat among at least part of his Jewish population because of his unpopularity that he would be killed or assassinated in some kind of a revolt. And this was not helped by the fact that Herod was also a very cruel person who did have a lot of people put to death when he thought they were a threat.
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Tomb of King Herod
Yes, that's partly true that, you know, a lot of the threat or perceived threat to Herod was from within his kingdom and especially from the Jewish part of his kingdom. You know, there were parts of Herod's kingdom that were not Jewish or Judaized, but the core part, sort of the central part, was Jewish.
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But also there were external threats to Herod, and that was especially in the first part of his reign before the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, when Herod faced a serious threat from Cleopatra down in Egypt, who was, of course, romantically involved with Herod's patron, Mark Antony.
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And Cleopatra viewed the territory that Herod had been given to rule as her birthright because she was a successor of the Ptolemies down in Egypt, who back in the third century BCE had ruled over the same territory. And so she, over the course of, you know, the time she was involved with Mark Antony, sort of whittled away at Herod's kingdom by persuading Antony to give her birthright.
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pieces of land to rule over. And there was nothing that Herod could do about that. So there was this sort of serious external threat to Herod, especially in the early part of his reign. And that was kind of resolved by the Battle of Actium, after which, you know, Mark Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide. And that removes the Cleopatra threat.
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Tomb of King Herod
Yeah. So, you know, that part of the problem with learning about Herod is, in fact, what source of sources we have, which are pretty limited. Our main source is Josephus, Flavius Josephus, who was a Jewish historian. who lived in the first century CE. He was born in Jerusalem in the year 37 CE, and he died somewhere around 100 in Rome as a diaspora Jew after the revolt.
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And after the first Jewish revolt against the Romans ended in the year 70 CE, and Jerusalem was destroyed, and the Second Temple was destroyed, Josephus went to live in Rome, and he spent the last 30 years of his life or so in Rome in writing histories of the Jewish people. And we have two major works that he wrote.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
One is The Jewish War, which is his story of the first Jewish revolt against the Romans, and then Jewish Antiquities, which is a sort of history of the Jewish people from the time of creation on. And so the great majority of our information about Herod comes from Josephus. Now, Josephus was born long after Herod had died, right? Herod died in 4 BCE, and Josephus is born in the year 37 CE.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So, you know, Josephus is born about four decades after Herod's death. So he never actually met Herod. So the question is, where is he getting... this information from that he gives us. And so one of the things about ancient writers like Josephus, this is in general ancient writers, is that they plagiarized freely. You know, they didn't have footnotes and notes indicating their sources.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
Sometimes, incidentally, they would indicate what the source of information was, but they didn't worry about it the way that we do today. So we don't always know where Josephus got his information, but it's clear that at least a large part of his information came from Herod's court biographer, who was a man named Nicolaus of Damascus.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
Nicolaus of Damascus wrote a biography of Herod, but that has not survived. So what we basically have is whatever information Josephus drew on from that source and maybe from other sources, right, to talk about Herod. Now, the problem is, of course, we have no way to know how accurately Josephus reproduced the information in Nicolaus of Damascus.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
And it's also very clear that Josephus presents Herod in a negative light. and there are reasons for this. So the presentation that we have of Herod, and Herod, I'm not saying that Herod was a good guy or anything like that, but the presentation that we have is skewed by the way that Josephus presents Herod. So there's that.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
Then, of course, we have the little incidental reference in, you know, the story of the massacre of the innocents in Matthew, which, by the way, occurs only in the Gospel of Matthew and not in the other canonical Gospels. And then the other major source that we have about Herod is archaeology.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
You know, we have sites all over Israel that Herod built or fortified, and that gives us a lot of information about him.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
Right. So I actually, in anticipation of your question, I have the relevant passage in front of me. Fantastic. You know me too well, Jodie. It's great. So, again, this is from the Gospel of Matthew. So, right, Matthew is the only one of the canonical gospel authors who includes this story in his book. gospel account, right?
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So this is from Matthew chapter 2, when Herod, and this is Herod the Great, and well, more on that in a minute, when Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under. So
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
This is basically an episode where Herod orders all of these boys in the area of Bethlehem who are two years old or younger to be put to death after being informed that the Messiah had been born and fearing that one of these children was the Messiah. And so that's basically the story. There's a little bit of a continuation afterwards. In Matthew, when Herod heard this, he was frightened.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
This is when he hears about this report that the Messiah had been born in Bethlehem. He inquired of them, the wise men, where the Messiah was to be born. They told him in Bethlehem of Judea. So for so it has been written by the prophet. Right. So basically, there's this report that the Messiah had been born in Bethlehem. And Herod orders all of these boys put to death, right? That's the account.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
And so I think that Herod's notoriety throughout history in many ways has been connected to this story, right? The ironic thing is that we have no evidence that this actually happened, that Herod actually did this. I guess it's possible, but many scholars believe that it's not an historical account. Herod had a reputation for having his own sons put to death.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
He had several of his own sons put to death because he thought they were trying to usurp the throne while he was still alive. And so there are scholars who think that this story basically is influenced by Herod's reputation for having young children and even his own sons put to death. So the problem is, of course, that there's no independent confirmation of this story.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So it only occurs in the Gospel of Matthew. There's no other literary or historical source that tells it. And so we have no way to independently verify whether it actually ever occurred or not.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
Yeah, that's a little bit more obscure. But yeah, it's more or less the same kind of a thing. You know, there are scattered references to Herod in other places. I don't have the reference to it. But anyway, yes, there are scattered references, but they don't really give us a lot of information about, you know, Herod the person.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
Yeah. And so, as I said at the beginning, you know, More than any other individual in the history of the land of Israel, Herod left a lasting impression on the landscape because he built so much and his buildings were so monumental. Probably the one building project that most people would be familiar with is Herod's reconstruction of the second temple in Jerusalem.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
So the Temple Mount, as you see it today, that big open plaza, is a product of Herod's reconstruction. He vastly expanded the area of the Temple Mount, and he also rebuilt the temple building, which stood in the middle of the Temple Mount, probably more or less in the same location as the Dome of the Rock today. And he built other buildings on top of the Temple Mount.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
He also built other buildings around Jerusalem. He built a new palace for himself. He may have built new fortifications around the city. That's not clear. There apparently was a new aqueduct built during his lifetime that brought water to Jerusalem. So he did a lot of construction in and around Jerusalem.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
He built a big fortress overlooking the Temple Mount called the Antonio Fortress, which becomes associated in Christian tradition much later with Antioch. episodes in The Passion of Jesus. So he built all over Jerusalem. And then around the country, he built, again, tons of stuff. So he built himself palaces all over the country.
The Ancients
Tomb of King Herod
One of the major projects was at Caesarea Maritima, or what we call Caesarea Maritima in
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Es ist eigentlich wirklich schwer zu wissen. Das ist eine der klassischen Essay-Fragen. Was ist hier los? Also die Ionianischen Städte, also die Städte der Griechen in Asia Minor, sie haben initialerweise gedacht, dass der persischen Konkurs eine Möglichkeit war, ihnen diese Art von fremden Regeln auszulassen. Also rebellierten sie, aber die Persen verabschiedeten sie.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und sie mussten das anscheinend zweimal machen. Aber an diesem Punkt, für mehrere Generationen, sind sie nur Teil des persischen Empires. Und das scheint gut zu gehen, bis sie sehr plötzlich in 499 entscheiden, eine generelle Rebellion zu starten. Und das sind nicht nur die Städte von Ionia. Caria verbindet sie. Teile der Norden, also weiter nach Norden, die Küste von Asia Minor, verbindet sie.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Zyprus verbindet sie. Also gibt es wirklich einen ganz extensiven Streit auf der westlichen Fringe des persischen Empires, der zusammenhängt, in der Rebellion gegen die Persinnen. Für Gründe, die wir nicht erreichen können. Denn das Einzige, was wir haben, ist Herodotus.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und Herodotus ist besessen mit der Idee, dass das nur Aristagoras von Miletus ist, der besagt, dass wir eine Rebellion haben sollten. Und jeder denkt, es ist eine tolle Idee. Für grundsätzlich keine Motivation. Und deshalb ist es sehr schwierig für uns zu verstehen, warum das an dieser Zeit passiert ist. Aber der wichtige Punkt historisch ist, dass
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aristagoras geht dann nach Griechenland und sagt, ich mache das hier. Willst du mir helfen? Weil dann können wir die Persier zerstören oder zumindest ihre Kontrolle zurückheben. Er geht zu den Spartanern, die ihn zerstören. Dann geht er nach Athen und sie sagen, ja, okay, wir helfen dir. Er geht auch nach Eretria und ein paar anderen Orten.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Er bekommt Hilfe aus Eretria und Athen, diesen zwei Städten, die in der Aegeanen anyway eine sehr starke navige Interesse haben. Und sie sind diejenigen, die einen Unterstützung senden, um diesen Revolt zu beherrschen, oder zumindest ihre initialen Kampagnen. Sie machen also ein bisschen Lötung. Sie brennen Sardis oder zumindest die Außenkirche der Stadt.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und dann sind die Athenier und die Eretterin so wie, das ist großartig. Wir haben unsere Lötung, wir gehen nach Hause. Aber natürlich haben sie an diesem Punkt bereits involviert und die Perser wissen das.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und das ist so, wie die Griechen, laut dieser Geschichte, in die Objekte des persischen Empires involviert werden, weil an diesem Punkt die Perser im Grunde genommen die Revolte über mehrere Jahre zerstört haben. Und danach haben sie diesen Sinn, dass es klar ist, dass diese Griechen auf dieser See, der Aegean, die potenziell ein Grund für die De-Stabilisierung unserer westlichen Frontiere sind.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich meine, das ist im Grunde genommen, was sie getan haben. Sie haben gesagt, oh, wir können in diesem Bereich meddeln. Wir können versuchen, etwas zu tun, um den Persischen Kontrolle in dieser Region zu verhindern. Und offensichtlich ist das etwas, das sie nicht lassen werden können.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ja, ich denke, was wir dort wachsen sehen, ist dieser Gedanke, dass Griechenland auf den westlichen Osten eingefroren wird. Und wenn man sich überlegt, wie weit weg der westliche Osten von Asien ist, von dem Zentrum von Iran, wo der große König und seine Quarte sind, dann wird es etwas von einem Problem werden. Und natürlich, wie es in der Geschichte passiert, die mehr ein Empire wächst,
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und je mehr entfernt seine Grenzen von dem Epizentrum sind, desto schwieriger werden sie. Was wir nicht verstehen, ist das Verständnis, was in den oberen Grenzen des Persischen Empires passiert. Aber ich habe das Gefühl, dass Grenzzonen immer problematisch sind.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und ich denke, dass, weißt du, ein weiterer einer der Art von Mythen, die wir dazu bekommen haben, über diese großen griechisch-persischen Kriege, ist, dass die Persier all ihre Gedanken in diese Griechen über die Seen bewegen. Ich denke nicht, dass das jemals der Fall gewesen wäre, weil sie viel größere Fische zu frieren hatten.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Babylon war in einem konstanten Zustand von Rebellion und war einfach viel zu wichtig, um zu verlieren. Und so, so viele... So much of the king's time and the troops were actually stationed in and around there, Egypt as well. And I really do think way, way off in Bactria, modern day Pakistan, Afghanistan, which was a huge satrapy as well, that was probably equally as problematic.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
And we see that because the satraps who were installed in Bactria are usually king's brothers or king's uncles or something. They send major members of the royal family to look after these places. So I think if we put... all of the border zones into perspective, then Greece is just one more irritating zone of contact, but not this grand narrative that we have.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Although I think you're right to say like borders are always a problem, but then borders are also to the imperial center sometimes so usefully unruly, right?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Oh yes, absolutely, absolutely. And a little blurring of a border, it never does anybody any harm, right?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
And in fact, the Greeks themselves are already aware of the idea that although they see later Persian military actions against the Greeks as revenge, I mean, primarily they think of it as motivated by this avenging what the Greeks had done.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Sie erinnern sich auch daran als Prätext. Selbst Aeschylus, der in den 470er Jahren geschrieben hat, denkt bereits, dass es eigentlich alles um Konquests geht und dass sie es nur als Entschuldigung verwenden. Es gibt also bereits dieses Verständnis, dass es für ein Empire nützlich ist, wenn jemand sie an die Grenze provoziert, wie es im Grunde die Konquests von Lydia in erster Linie geschah. Ja.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich denke nicht, dass das wirklich an dieser Stelle auf den Kopf kommt. Ich denke nicht, dass sie sagen, oh, die Invasion ist immanent. Es ist nicht das. Aber es ist einfach so, dass der Name Sardis so evokativ für sie gewesen sein muss. Und es hat einfach das Ende von etwas evokiert. dass etwas zerstört wurde und wieder nicht mehr sein konnte. Ich denke, das ist das Gefühl, das wir bekommen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Nein, ich würde nicht behaupten, dass plötzlich auf der griechischen Hauptstadt dieses Flurri war, um die Arme zusammenzuhalten und sicherzustellen, dass sie sich verteidigen können. Es gibt keinen Sinn dafür. Es ist wie das Ende der Tage, ist es, was der Fall von Sardis für sie betrifft. Und das ist, weshalb es in diesem Art und Weise verabschiedet wird, Dinge wie populärer Poesie,
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
und in Sagen, wie alt war man, als die Persier kamen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Wir haben darüber geredet, aber es gibt grundsätzlich mehrere verschiedene Gründe, weshalb das passiert. Und auch in griechischen Ressourcen, auf die wir uns basieren, haben wir keine guten Persischen Ressourcen für das. Im Allgemeinen verstehen wir, wie die Perser es selbst gesehen haben, aber wir wissen nicht wirklich, warum sie solche spezifischen Aktionen gemacht haben.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Wir verlangen also auf griechische Ressourcen, aber die griechischen Ressourcen überdeterminen die Invasion von Griechenland in dem Sinne, dass sie mehr Gründe geben, als wir brauchen. Sie haben also diesen Revenge-Motiv, weil einige Griechen den Ionianischen Revolt unterstützten. Sie haben den Motiv der Erweiterung. Sie denken, dass die Perser mehr wollen und dass es nie endet.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Sie haben den Motiv der Legitimierung, welches bedeutet, dass jeder neue persische König sich zu justifizieren und seine Regeln zu legitimisieren, indem er sich militärisch gut performt, also um irgendeine Art von Kampagne zu eröffnen. Sie sind auch von den Fäden geführt.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Sie werden in der griechischen Meinung von der Idee geführt, dass sie den Krimi verursachen müssen, der sie verhindern wird, welches ein sehr tragedischer Pattern in Herodotus existiert. Wo Xerxes, als er seine Kampagne planiert, so prophetische Träume und solche Dinge darüber bekommt. Es gibt also verschiedene Wege, in denen sie versuchen, dies zu erstellen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich denke, moderne Historiker sind viel mehr dazu eingeladen, dies zu denken, v.a. in Bezug auf diese strategische Motivation, die ich erwähnt habe. Die Griechen sind ein Problem. Sie destabilisieren die westliche Frontier. Wenn man diese Situation lösen möchte, kann man entweder stark garrisonieren und die westlichen Frontiere fortführen, was sie später tun,
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Oder du kannst dich entscheiden, dich selbst über die See zu überwinden und den Geschäft zu besetzen. Und das ist, scheint es zu sein, was sie tun. Und es gibt, wie du weißt, einen Grund, dass Ressourcen etwas damit zu tun haben. Ich meine, besonders die Nordbalkaner sind sehr reich an Zimber, sehr reich an Minen. Das ist alles großartig.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Die Griechenland, die Griechenland selbst, hat in diesem Sinne nicht viel zu bieten. Aber diese Dinge sind offensichtlich sehr wertvoll. Und du hast auch die Obwohl die Griechen selbst sehr klein sind und nicht ein treibender Threat für das Persische Empire sind, gibt es den Fakt, dass z.B. lokal, regionell, Orte wie Athen einen sehr langen strategischen Interesse auf den Hellespont haben.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und so sind sie möglicherweise weiterhin in Persischen Verhandlungen in dieser Region zu meddeln, was eines der Dinge ist, das die Persischen über die See rüberbringt. Und das ist das, was sie anfangen zu planen, fast sofort, sobald sich die Ionianische Revolt zerstört.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
And it's not just in warships and things as well. I mean, there's also diplomacy that goes on across the Aegean as well. And I really do find that of interest. And I think more and more attention is being paid to that in scholarship now. So, for instance, the strategy that the Persians took in Macedon is very interesting. And, you know, Macedon essentially became a kind of unbeauftragte Satrapie.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich meine, die Persianisierung von Macedonien war wirklich ziemlich substanziell. Ich bin immer sicher, dass wir, wenn wir auf Alexander der Große und seine Leben schauen, er wuchs in einer Kirche, die sehr persianisiert war, mit persischen Rednern dort und mit persischen Verständnissen und allem. Und das war schon seit fast 200 Jahren so.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Die Leidenschaft, die die Mazedonier zu Persien gezeigt haben während der Bekämpfung von Xerxes, war wirklich bemerkenswert. So war es auch bei Boeotien, als wir in Zentralgriechenland gedreht wurden. Die Boeotier waren mehr als glücklich, ihre Begegnung auch den Persiern zu geben.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Die Perser haben die Schwierigkeiten des griechischen Weltraums in diversen Wegen behandelt. Ein Teil davon war durch die Diplomatie gesprochen und sie ins Empire gebracht.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber der Punkt über Diplomatie ist auch ein weiterer Grund, weshalb die Griechen sehr bewusst sind, dass es viele Griechen gibt, die die Persischen Empire als eine Möglichkeit sehen. Sie wollen die Art und Weise, wie Dinge in ihren eigenen Staaten funktionieren, verändern und sie sehen Persien als den stärksten Verein, den sie finden können, um das zu erreichen, was sie erreichen wollen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Regimeveränderung oder das Überlassen ihrer Feinde oder etwas ähnliches. viele Griechen, deren erste Rückkehr, wenn sie aus ihrem eigenen Staat entfernt werden oder wenn sie einen politischen Kampf verlieren oder so etwas, ist, zu fliehen zur persischen Empire, zu der Gerichtshofung zu gehen und zu sagen, kannst du mir helfen, das zu lösen?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
An welchem Punkt mehrere dieser Anwesenden oder Gerichtsleute, oder Hänger, die die Persien in den griechischen Welt zu drücken haben.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ja, das ist der zweite Versuch, den sie über den Ägäischen fliegen. Der erste mit Mardonius geht nicht sehr weit. Es wird in Thrace zerstört und durch einen Sturm um Mount Athos. Das wird später wichtig sein. Aber im Grunde genommen... Der erste Versuch in 492 funktioniert nicht, aber in 490 versuchen sie es wieder. Sie sammeln eine große Armee in Cilicia und dann fliegen sie in die Ägypten.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Sie gehen also bergab und nehmen Naxos und Delos. Und der Grund, weshalb die Athener an diesem Thema nervös sind, ist, dass in dieser Flotte der Tyrant Hippias ist, der 22 Jahre zuvor von den Spartanern ausgeworfen wurde. Also haben sie ihre Tyranne ein bisschen vor einiger Zeit mit fremdem Hilfe entfernt.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber dieser Kerl ist noch lebendig und er ist einer von diesen Leuten, die einfach nach Asia Minor gingen und zu den lokalen Kräften, die dort sind, gesprochen haben. und versucht, Unterstützung zu erhalten.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Für die Perser wäre das eine gute Chance, weil wenn du einen Mann hast, der dich zahlt, und der auf deine Unterstützung basiert, dann hast du einen beliebten Agent in der griechischen Hauptstadt. Sie wollen also den Tyrant Hippias, den Athenier, wiederentwickeln. Und die Athenier sind natürlich nicht zu glücklich.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das ist einer dieser Beispiele, wo die Perser in Griechenland geführt werden werden, durch einen Agent, der griechisch ist und der die Perser helfen will, sich in Griechenland zu erneuern.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber für die persischen Könige und Satraps in dieser Weise zu arbeiten, war absolut der persische System. Das ist es, womit sie sich immer gemütlich fühlten. Und im Grunde genommen, als sie die Teile ihres Empires besiegt haben, wo auch immer es war, Ägypten, Akria oder wo auch immer, war ihr Ziel immer, mit den lokalen Regierungen zu arbeiten, sie niemals zu entlasten.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Also, was in vielen dieser Stadt-Städte in Griechenland zu dem Zeitpunkt eigentlich sehr wahr war, es machte viel Sinn, dass das eigentlich der richtige Weg ist, einen Fußabdruck in diesem Bereich zu haben. Ich bin mir nicht sicher, wie oft die Griechen selbst das erkannt haben, dass sie tatsächlich in den Händen der Persinnen spielen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber sicherlich, aus der persischen Sicht, macht das Sinn für sie.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Von diesem Punkt her denke ich, dass es mit Diplomaten zu tun hat. Die Achaemenid hatten eine Tendenz, die hohen Ranking-Mitglieder der royalen Familie zu nutzen, oder sonst diejenigen, die am Thron anwesend waren, also die Nobler von Persien. Ich kann nicht sehen, dass der große König sich gerade mit diesem Thema involviert hat. Es ist ein bisschen zu früh für das.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
So certainly sending out satraps or diplomats, you know, the people that we hear called the great king's eyes or the great king's ears. That's the kind of people that went over, the kind of individuals that later get lampooned in the plays of Aristophanes and so forth. I was speaking kind of pigeon Greek and all of this sort of thing.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Du hast recht, dass sie immer sehr nahe sind. Ich weiß nicht, ob es du, Lloyd, oder jemand anderes war, der das Persische Empire zu einem Familienunternehmen bezeichnet hat. Ja, absolut. Es war ein Familienunternehmen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Der erste Expedition 492 wurde von Mardonius geführt.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Er war natürlich Cousin von Darius oder Cousin von Xerxes. Cousin von Xerxes, ja. Er wird später zurückkommen, wird er nicht?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ja, und dann die Kampagne, die den Marathon beendet hat, wurde von Artefrenes und Datis geführt. Datis weiß ich nicht so sehr, aber Artefrenes war auch ein Bruder des Königs oder so.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das stimmt, das stimmt. Absolut. Sie benutzten die gestellte Familie besonders gut. Also, wenn ein König bereit war, ein guter Nobel oder jemand, der eine gute Reputation in der Kriege hatte, oder eine gute Reputation in der Diplomatie, dann war eine Begegnung zu einer der reichen Frauen eine wirklich gute Art, sie in die Orbit der Achaemenid-Familie zu bringen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Also ja, ich denke, je mehr wir uns an die Empire als eine Familienfirma denken, desto besser wird es wirklich. Das Schwabbeln, natürlich, geht in der Familie selbst, aber es kommt nicht aus der Firma weg. Also ich denke, das ist einer der Gründe, warum die Empire so lange gedauert hat, wirklich.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ja, ich meine, die Zahlen für die persischen Seite sind nie bekannt. Ich meine, das ist wirklich nur ein großer Fragezeichen, weil die Griechen die einzige Suche dafür haben und die Griechen nicht ehrlich darüber sind. Sie wollen jede persische Armee als eine Art weltkriegender Horde darstellen. Es ist sehr stereotypisch, es wird in der Literatur frühzeitig ein Tropen und es geht nie weg.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich meine, auch die meisten soberen Historiker, diejenigen, die wir denken, als die guten Historiker von Alexander, zum Beispiel Arian, er gibt die größte Zahl für die persische Armee von Gaugamela. Also du hast... Sie wünschen sich, dass sie Hunderten von Tausenden oder sogar Millionen haben. Wir kaufen das nicht, aber wir haben nichts damit zu verändern.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Unser Problem ist also, dass wir nur Zahlen haben, die wir nicht glauben können, und wir haben nichts Gutes, um sie in ihren Ort zu stellen. Für die Perser haben wir keine Zahlen. Wir wissen, dass sie auf diesem flächendeckigen Plan auf dem Marathon landeten, weil Hippias sie dort begleitet hat.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Teilweise, weil es ein altes Heimatland war, also hatten sie viel lokalen Unterstützung, oder sie hofften, dass sie einige bekommen. Teilweise war es ein guter Raum für die Kavallerie. Vieles von Attica ist steil und unabhängig, aber dieses Flugzeug würde den Persiern die Kavallerie zu ihrem Vorteil nutzen. Das war also ein zweiter Vorteil dieses Spaces.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Die Persier landen dort, sie sind im Kampf dort und die Athener fliegen in voller Macht, um sie zu stoppen. Sie haben also ihre Plataean-Alliier mit ihnen, das ist eine kleine Stadt von Boeotia nahe Thebes. Es gibt ca. 1.000 von ihnen und später ca. 9.000 athenische Hoplites, also eine große Armee von 10.000, plus jeder andere, der in diese Forst eingestiegen wäre.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Wenn eine Erkrankung groß genug ist, ist die gesamte männliche Bevölkerung im Wesentlichen unter Militärschutz, was bedeutet, dass sehr viele Menschen, die nicht unbedingt gute Armut und Waffen bezahlen können, immer noch benötigt werden, um zu kommen und das zu tun, was sie können.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
So this is potentially a much larger army, but it's the 10,000 number that is the only one that we can say reasonably fits what we know of other moments in this period when the Athenians go to war.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Well, they know it now because it's been the most integral part of Greek myth-making, really. I mean, as Roll says, as to the size of armies, as to the tactics, as to the events, we're really pretty much at a loss. I mean, there is a narrative provided, but whether this is a true narrative, we just can't get close to at all. But in a way, we know the result, right?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Or at least we know something of the result. We know more about the myth that grew around it. In a way, I'm far more interested in the myth than I am in what we can piece together of the battle itself. For instance, in 330 BCE, a vase was painted or created or shipped to southern Italy, where it was unearthed in the 1830s.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und es zeigt, es ist ein riesiger roter Figur-Vase, wir nennen es den Darius-Vase. Und es zeigt den persischen großen König, von einem Messenger zu hören, über den Verlust des Marathons. Und wir wissen das, weil es Götter gibt, die im Register drüben sind. Zeus ist da, zum Beispiel. Und Athena, die sich natürlich für
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Athen ist dort und die Figur von Hellas, selbst Griechenland, wird von der Personifikation von Retribution mit einer flammenden Torch und so weiter überholt. Und unterhalb der Szene, unterhalb von Darius und seinem Gericht, haben wir eine Gruppe von Persiern, die klar verärgert sind von den Nachrichten, die sie bekommen haben.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Dieser Vase ist fast 150 bis 200 Jahre nach den Ereignissen des Marathons, aber er wird immer noch aktiviert in der griechischen Gedächtnis, in der griechischen populären Bewusstsein. Es ist keine Überraschung, dass dieser Vase über den Überbruch von Persien geschaffen wurde, als Alexander selbst auch in Persien ging. Das ist Geschichte, die genutzt wird, wieder einmal überwacht.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ja, ich denke, dass diese Art von einfachen Narrativ in den Lehrern verschwunden ist. Es wurde so gespielt, es war wirklich so. Und ich denke, dass das besonders schmerzhaft war, auch für die Art, wie wir diese Kriege nennen, die griechisch-persischen Kriege. Ja, das ist ein bisschen eine Strecke in sich selbst, würde ich sagen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Wird hier ein zweites Marathon geben? Also, du weißt, ich bin nie, ich habe nie gesagt, dass ich ein Wettbewerbshistoriker bin, aber ich bin viel interessiert in den Einfluss des Mythos des Marathons, als ich der echten Sache bin. Roel, du weißt ein bisschen mehr über die Events und so.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das ist meine Chance, ein bisschen müde zu sein. Nicht müde, nicht müde, wir lieben es. I completely agree with Lloyd. I mean, it is a very tainted narrative. It's very propagandistic and it only survives from a source that was interviewing people two generations after the fact, when it had already become this huge thing in the mind of the Athenians in particular.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
I mean... Sorry, Rod, just to make that point, which is a really good point. We wouldn't take a Second World War narrative of, say, what happened on Dunkirk from one side only, So why are we prepared to do this with the Battle of Marathon or any other of the Greek Wars, which we've been so kind of tuned in to do? It's just not right.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Let's treat it for what we can, as a light, constructive, propagandistic narrative with a big myth that went behind it. Sorry, Rob.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Nein, nein, nein, du bist völlig richtig, um diesen Punkt zu machen. Ich denke, historisch, auch wenn du ein Kriegshistoriker bist, Marathon, es ist so unerheblich, was wirklich passiert ist, dass es wirklich nicht so interessant ist. Was interessant ist, ist, dass es der erste Krieg in der griechischen Literatur ist, der erste historische Krieg.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Also haben wir keine Ereignisse von echten Events. Wir haben Ereignisse von Kämpfen in der Poesie, in Homer, natürlich auch in Tritaeus, aber wir haben keine Ereignisse eines echten Kampfes, der stattgefunden hat.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und in diesem Sinne ist es wirklich interessant, weil Herodotus etwas macht, was kein anderer Grieche noch gemacht hat, nämlich versucht, uns zu beschreiben, wie ein Kampf gewonnen wurde. Und selbst wenn die Wege, in denen das geschehen ist, sehr schwierig zu glauben sind, sind wir immer noch mit etwas beschäftigt, das aus einer literarischen und historischen Perspektive interessant ist.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
In vielen Fällen ist das der Anfang dessen, was ich als Historiker mache. Es gibt offensichtlich vorherige Erkennungen von Kriegen im Nahen Osten. Ich meine, der Krieg von Kadesh ist bekanntlich der erste, der in irgendeinem Sinne beschrieben wird. Aber an diesem Punkt beginnen die Griechen, etwas zu tun, was andere Traditionen noch nicht getan haben, nämlich zu versuchen zu sagen,
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Nicht für die weitere Gnade eines Königs und die Beschreibung, wie viele Menschen er persönlich getötet hat, sondern um zu sagen, okay, wir verstehen, dass wir alle als Gruppe in den Kampf gegangen sind, aber wie haben wir das ausgeschlossen?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich habe das nie gedacht. Ist Herodotus also eine Sprache der Kampfnarrative in diesem Fall?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Absolut, ja. Das passt natürlich zu einer erneuerbaren Tradition im späteren fünften Jahrhundert, als die Menschen angefangen haben, Manuels und philosophische Verträge zu schreiben und solche Dinge. Also begannen die Menschen zu versuchen, eine Art von kausaler Analyse in allen verschiedenen Bereichen zu schreiben. Und er trägt das klar dar.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber er ist der Pionier der Idee eines Kampfbeschreibungs. Und die Leute blöden ihn oft dafür, dass er nicht sehr präzise ist. Aber man muss ihm kritisieren, dass er es in erster Linie versucht hat.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Wenn man sich das in der Leistung anschaut, also wenn das in einer Gruppe von Leuten gelesen wird, dann muss es sich in dieser Art und Weise bewegen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das traditionelle Ideal, dass das ein Klatsch von Zivilisationen ist oder ein Replay von etwas, das durch die Geschichte weitergeht, ist wirklich nicht die Art, wie Historiker diese Events anschauen. Ich meine, sie sind viel mehr kontingent, sie sind viel mehr komplex. Sie haben all diese verschiedenen Läufe. Wir würden wirklich nicht darüber sprechen wollen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Die Narrative von Marathon ist mehr als andere Battle Accounts und sicherlich mehr als die späteren Standard-Battle Accounts, die man von Thucydides und Xenophon und Polybius und allen anderen bekommt. Es ist sehr verblüfft mit diesen coolen Anekdoten von Dingen, die erstaunlich, blutig und seltsam sind.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Er hat also die Geschichte von Epizelos, der im Kampf geblieben war, als er dieses riesige Hoplite gesehen hat. Oder wir haben die Geschichte von Callimachus, dem Polymark, der so voll mit Javelinen gestanden war, dass er nicht fallen konnte, als er gestorben ist. Und so Sachen wie das. Wir sind einfach so, das ist eine Filmszene, oder?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Der Bruder von Aeschylus, glaube ich. Der Schauspieler?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Es ist ein anderer berühmter, er wäre ein prominenter Atheniker gewesen. Das ist, weshalb die Geschichte überlebt, vermutlich. Weil vielleicht Escalus oder jemand anderes diese Geschichte erzählte, dass sein Bruder seine Hand ausgeschlossen hatte, als er versucht hat, sich auf sein Schiff zu holen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Also diese Art von Geschichten und die Glorifikation von Miltiades, dem Kommandeur. Aber einige davon sind natürlich sehr homerisch. Das ist der Modell, mit dem sie arbeiten. Wenn du über einen Kampf sprichst, sprichst du über Helden. Du sprichst über Szenen, in denen etwas Erstaunliches passiert, dass du eine Geschichte erzählen kannst, dass du eine Anekdote erzählen kannst.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber gleichzeitig versucht er auch, herauszufinden, was diese Basel aus dem Augenblick aussehen wird, was man in den früheren griechischen Schriften nicht wirklich findet.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Well, the center breaks actually.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Okay. The Persians crush the center, but the wings overwhelm the Persian wings and they sort of fold inwards and then crush the remains of the victorious part of the Persian army. That is what we are told. And then the big question for a military historian is, was that the plan or did that just kind of happen?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und ich bin sehr gezwungen zu denken, auch wenn die Protesten der Athener, die natürlich damit geplant waren, das Ding ist, dass sie nie wieder so etwas wie das machen. Es gibt keinen anderen Kampfplan in der griechischen Geschichte, der so etwas wie das sieht. Und auch wenn es etwas war, was passiert ist, weil sie dachten, dass sie es so versuchen könnten, Ich finde das sehr unvergleichbar.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich denke, es ist sehr möglich, dass sie als Gruppe voran rannten. Herodotus ist sehr ehrgeizig, dass sie rannten. Und das ist etwas, was in Aristophanes und anderen Traditionen auch zurückkommt. Eine sehr wichtige Teil der Marathon ist, dass sie in den Bassel rannten. Für einen langen Streit, eine lange Distanz.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Vielleicht füllen sie die Pläne ab, damit die Leute auf der Seite fliegen können, damit sie nicht ausgelenkt werden können. Und sobald sie das tun, werden mehr Leute auf der Seite fliegen als in der Mitte. Und die Armee wird in zwei große Blöcke, die sich etwas entfernt von einander bewegen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber vielleicht sogar weniger bescheuert als du vorgesehen hast. Vielleicht nur hauptsächlich zusammengeknallt. Absolut.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich bin immer ein großer Anbieter des griechischen Krieges, besonders in dieser sehr ersten Phase, als viel primitiver zu sein, als wir es wahrgenommen haben. Um es sehr einfach zu sein, hat niemand eine sehr klare Richtung in dem, was sie tun.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Herodotus kann uns die Anzahl der Räume in dieser Formation erzählen, wahrscheinlich, weil es keine gewünschte Ordnung hatte, bis später, als die Griechen tatsächlich ernsthaft darüber nachdenken. Wir müssen uns also vorstellen, dass es sich um Möbel handelt, die von der hessischen Armee überwältigt werden.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und hier ist auch die Frustration, nicht wahr? Ich meine, wir haben keine persischen Perspektiven darüber. Nichts. Nichts. Das persische Militär ist eines der am wenigsten verstandenen und am wenigsten studierten Aspekte der persischen Geschichte, was eine große Schande ist. Ich meine, mehr Arbeit wird jetzt gemacht, von Sean Manning und deinem guten Selbst, als jemals vorher.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber wir sind weit hinterher.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das Hauptwichtigste, was wir in Erinnerung nehmen müssen, ist, dass die Ionianische Revolte gezeigt hat, dass die Perser keine Probleme haben, griechische Arme zu zerstören. Im Prinzip können sie das. Sie haben es viele Male getan. Das ist also nicht eine vorgegangene Schlussfolgerung, die auf Technologie oder Taktiken basiert oder so etwas. Die Griechen können verlieren, und sie wissen das.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Herodotus prahlt die Athenier, dass sie nur auf ihrem Boden stehen, dass sie sich bereit sind zu kämpfen, als jeder andere Armee, der die Persier vorgelegt hatte, furchtbar war und wegflieg, weil die Persier den Welt bekämpften. Wie kannst du den Hubris des Denkens haben, dass du sie bekämpfst?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Herodotus sagt auch, dass die Athenier die ersten Griechen waren, die die Sicht der persischen Schuhe beobachten, Ja, genau. Das ist das größte Ding. Das war das größte Ding des Tages. Das ist, wie hart sie waren. Mit diesen Trousern, Mann. Das ist das echte Andrea. Das ist das echte Mannlichkeit. Das ist es.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
But you're absolutely right in saying that the Persian Empire so far had encountered a myriad of different fighting styles and a myriad of different kinds of armies and had coped brilliantly with all of them to great success, obviously. The Egyptians went against them by sea and by land, no problem whatsoever. Cambyses basically marches in unopposed. So you're absolutely right.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
In Bezug auf die österreichische Mediterrane, ich meine, der große Faktor ist der Wachstum des persischen Empires, richtig? Also das ist ziemlich neu passiert. Das ist zwei Generationen zuvor, als dieses Empire plötzlich erhielt wurde, innerhalb einer sehr kurzen Zeit das gesamte Mittleren Osten besiegt. Bis jetzt haben sie Cyprus und Ägypten auch schon besiegt.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
The Greeks shouldn't be seen as anything more difficult than any other army they encountered.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und in diesem Sinne, ich meine, seit wir keine persischen Ressourcen haben, sind wir wirklich auf die Zähne geraten. Aber eines der Dinge, das wirklich ein starkes Thema ist, sind sehr kleine Teile der persischen Iconographie. Also du hast ein paar dieser Turmpaintings, sowie Seelen, also Seelen-Impfungen aus dem persischen Empire, die zeigen, dass persische Krieger Hoplite töten.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das ist ein gemeinsames Motiv. Und obwohl das nicht eine Geschichte erzählt, ist es nicht wirklich etwas, das wir zu Kämpfen oder etwas ausdrücken können. Aber am wenigsten wissen wir, dass die griechischen Gründer, die sich vorstellen, die Griechen zu zerstören, als eine bestimmte Art von Ausdruck von dem, was sie mächtig gemacht hat. Sie lieben es, das zu visualisieren.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ganz definitiv. Und in der Tat können wir jetzt den ganzen Korpus dieser Seelen erinnern. von der Mitte des vierten Jahrhunderts. Also Erinnerungen und all diese Sachen kommen raus. Und du hast recht.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich meine, manchmal sehen wir persische Nobler, die Präsenzweige Nomaden kämpfen, aber sehr oft sehen wir sie gegen griechische Hopliten kämpfen, was das komplette Antithesis ist, was wir sehen, natürlich, auf so vielen Vase-Bildern aus Griechenland, nicht wahr? Mit den befehlten Persen, die sich in die Kante des Brotstabels schlagen. Aber hier sehen wir die Rolle ziemlich klar umgekehrt.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ja, also Phidippides ist... also es gibt die Geschichte des Rundens vom Marathon-Battelfeld nach Athen, was nur in späteren Gründen ist. Und es gibt auch die Geschichte in Herodotus von diesem Messanger, Phidippides, der von Athen nach Sparta fuhr, um Hilfe zu bekommen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und diese beiden Dinge werden oft zusammengefasst, weil wir glauben, dass Herodotus uns die Geschichte erzählt hätte, die wir kennen, aber er erzählt uns tatsächlich eine andere Geschichte über einen langen Rund. Natürlich ist die Distanz von Athen bis Sparta etwa 250 Kilometer, also ist es deutlich weiter, weshalb das jetzt ein Supermarathon ist oder so etwas. Ich weiß es nicht genau.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ein Ironman oder sogar mehr als das. Ja, ja, ja. Aber der Punkt ist, dass das separate Geschichten sind von Leuten, die unglaubliche Feats von Erweiterung machen. Dieser Mann, Pheidippides, wird auch von Herodes beschrieben, als ein Hemerodromos, er ist ein Tagrunner. Also gibt es offensichtlich eine Funktion in der griechischen Gesellschaft von Leuten, die sehr weit rennen können.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Die gesamte oberste Hälfte des Mediterraneums wird von einer einzigen neuen politischen Entität dominiert, die von Darius dem Großen regiert wird. Und das ist natürlich das Persische Empire.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Wahrscheinlich ist es so, dass man über scharfe Umgebung, über lange Distanz, ohne eine Reihe von organisierten Wegstationen, schneller als ein Pferd ist. Ein Mensch wird schneller reisen als ein Pferd über diese Art von Umgebung, ohne dass eine Art Infrastruktur vorhanden ist, um ein Messenger-System zu unterstützen, wie es die Persier hatten.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das ist also eine andere Geschichte, wo er versucht hat, die Spartaner zu rufen, um ihnen zu helfen, weil sie dachten, sie würden es alleine hacken können. Und dann, nach dem Kampf, Denn sie kämpften auf dem Marathon, ein Marathon von 42 Kilometern von Athen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Nach dem Kampf waren sie fürchtet, dass die restlichen Persen, die auf ihren Schiffen fliegen und wegfliegen würden, über den Kap Sunion fliegen und Athen am Meer besiegen, während die Armee weg war. Und so musste die Armee so schnell wie möglich von dem Kampffeld zurück nach Athen, um die Stadt zu garrisonieren. Und deshalb gibt es auch die Geschichte des Rutsches zurück nach Hause.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber später gibt es eine andere Geschichte, in der ein Messenger von der Marathon-Battelfeldung nach der Stadt fliegt, um ihnen zu erläutern, dass sie gewonnen haben, aber dass die Persen von der See kommen, um sie bemerken zu können. Und das ist die Geschichte der Marathon, die berühmter ist und die Marathon als Rennstrecke genannt wird.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und hier sieht man das Legitimum des Kampfes, nicht wahr? Es ist der Myth-Making-Prozess, den wir in der Operation sehen. Offensichtlich ist Herodotus' Version nicht die einzige Version. Und es waren wahrscheinlich viele Dutzende kleiner Versionen dieses Rundens, die auch mit mehr lokalisierten Helden, lokalisierter Aktion, all dem vorliegen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Alle anderen Gesellschaften in dieser Region haben sie natürlich in irgendeinem Fall mitgearbeitet, weil sie Konquests und andere Formen von Gewalt beherrscht haben, aber auch, weil das nur der neue große Spieler ist. Es gibt eine Superkraft in der Welt, und natürlich muss jeder sich darauf verabschieden. Währenddessen ist der griechische Welt nicht in irgendeinem Sinne politische Einheit.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und was wir in der zweiten Erklärung des Rundens nach Athen sehen, ist eine Erklärung, eine Konternarrative zu Herodotus' Original.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ja, ich meine, das ist die Geschichte. Ich erinnere mich nicht, welcher Ort das ist. Ist das auch einer der Dinge, die in Lucien oder so sind?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das ist etwas, von dem ich die Geschichte kenne. Das ist viel später, definitiv. Ja.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich meine, einige dieser Geschichten, ich meine, die Achilleshülle, ich meine, das ist nur in den romänischen Versionen der Trojan-Wars-Geschichte. Und wir nehmen es einfach komplett für gewohnt, dass das immer Teil der Geschichte war. Aber es kommt sehr, sehr spät und es ist einfach nur eine Art von Erweckung, was gut ist.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Du weißt, natürlich, dass jeder das immer macht mit all den Geschichten, die sie kennen. Aber wir müssen erkennen, dass für die Griechen, wenn sie die Geschichte des Marathons erzählten, das nicht gefeiert werden würde.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Yeah, they send an army out, but of course, I mean, Sparta is not next door, as we've said, 250 kilometers. I mean, with a couple of thousand men marching along with their baggage train and their support, it's not going to be, you know, five minutes, we're there. So they just, they do show up, but they've been delayed by a religious festival.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
They're celebrating the Karneia, which is in the middle of the campaign season, very practical for the Spartans. So they can't go out and fight during that period. They leave as soon as they can afterwards, or so we're told, but they arrive like two or three days late.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und dann überprüfen sie den Battlefield, sie gehen ihn sehen, was ein weiterer Tag ist, also fair use to them, aber sie gehen ihn sehen und sie sind sehr überrascht, wir sind gesagt, und dann gehen sie nach Hause. Und das ist es essentiell.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber wenn es in diesem generellen, ich denke, Herodotien-Pattern, wenn Leute gehen und Dinge sehen, weil sie wollen, dass sie die wunderschönen Feats von anderen sehen und die wunderschönen Erfolge der Welt.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Absolut. Ich denke, an diesem Punkt geht es in etwas, was wir Thauma-Literatur nennen, nicht wahr? Amazement-Literatur, weißt du? Das Sehen ist das Glauben, kind of thing, which is how Rodotus is all about. After all, you know, I have seen with my own eyes. This is what he likes to say. So I think it's part of that motif.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Wir können kurz über die Persen sprechen. Ich meine, sie hätten gedacht, dass diese Kampagne ein erstaunlicher Erfolg war. Ich meine, sie haben alle Inseln genommen, sie haben Euboea genommen. Das Einzige, was sie verfehlt haben, war, Attica zu subjectieren, was bereits vielleicht zu weit ist für die Kräfte, die sie verpflichtet haben.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Es ist eine unglaublich zerstörte Kollektion kleiner Stadtstädte und regionalen Föderationen und Gruppen, die nicht nur in Griechenland und den Inseln, sondern auch auf der ganzen Welt der Mediterranen verbreitet sind. Denn sie haben sich seit Jahrhunderten überall besiedelt.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Oh, sie könnten es als Sieg machen, sie könnten es als Erfolg machen. Oh, ohne Zweifel, ohne Zweifel. Absolut. Ich stimme zu, Roald. Ich glaube, das Einzige, was den großen König ausgedrückt hätte, wäre, dass er viel von seiner Macht nach Westen senden musste, wenn er es viel teurer verwenden könnte, Indien zu zerstören. Also musste die indianische Kampagne stoppen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Sie hatten noch Nordindien, aber ich glaube, das war das Einzige, was Matt Darius wirklich verärgert. Aber sonst, ja, das ist ein Erfolg. Das ist eine tolle Sache.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und in der Tat, ich meine, wenn wir erkennen, dass die Ionianer-Revolution begann, weil die Perser unter, mit dem Hinweis von Aristagoras, die Insel von Naxos, die damals sehr reich war, verloren, Sie haben es dieses Mal gemacht. Sie haben es einfach gemacht. In vielen Fällen haben sie sich für die vorherigen Verletzungen entschieden. Sie sind sehr glücklich damit.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Für die Griechen ist das ein radikales Zeitpunkt für Selbstwahrnehmung. Vor allem für die Athener ist das ein Zeitpunkt, in dem sie sagen können, dass sie sie befreien können. Sie können gewinnen. Das ist ein riesiges Problem für sie. Es gibt eine Variation der Wörter. Kindernäherin, was Risiken betrifft, ist eine Wörter, die sie für Kampfzeuge benutzen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Sie machen speziell eine Adaptation dieser Wörter pro Kindernäherin, um vor Risiken vor anderen vorzugehen. die die Athener ausüben, um zu erklären, was sie in den Persischen Kriegen gemacht haben. Sie hatten das gemacht, bevor jeder anderen, sie hatten es tatsächlich geschafft, eine Sieg zu erreichen, bevor die anderen sogar involviert waren.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Sie waren bereits da, kämpfen und gewinnen gegen die Perser. Sie revisieren also komplett, was es bedeutet, in einem Weltraum mit Persern zu existieren, was nicht mehr nur die Geschichte von Schreck und Verabschiedung ist, Oder sogar, dass die Perser die Griechen in Bezug auf die Griechen in Bezug auf die Favore, die sie dir tun könnten, unabhängig sind.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber stattdessen sieht man die Idee, dass, oh, wenn wir zusammenkommen und sie resistieren, könnte das eigentlich funktionieren.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
auf diese Frage selbst reflektiert und sie in einem sehr well-known Passage in Buch 3 integriert, in dem wir Darius und seine Vorsitzenden zusammen sitzen und denken, was für eine Regierung wir möglicherweise sein könnten. Können wir ein Oligarchen sein? Können wir eine Demokratie sein? Nein, nicht für uns, aber eine schöne Idee. Oder können wir ein absoluter Monarch sein?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Es gibt griechische Städte in Ägypten, es gibt griechische Städte in Libyen, aber auch, besonders in Süditalien, Sizilien, in Spanien, Frankreich. Natürlich, du hast von Owen Rees gehört, dass griechische Städte im Norden der Black Sea sind. Also, die Griechen sind überall, aber sie sind nicht verbunden. Sie sind alle ganz kleine Staaten.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ja, das klingt wie unsere Sache. Also denke ich, wenn... If at the time democracy was not really being upheld as part of the marathon experience, as the marathon myth, I think it starts to be built up in that way.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Yeah, I mean, it is in some ways, it's also one of the first occasions where we actually see some of the institutions of the democracy in action. So you see the Board of Generals, for instance, acting for the first time at marathons. So some of these institutions are new and the Athenians have clearly attached them to the marathon story. They're very prominently involved in that.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
and the tribal arrangement of the army. So the reorganization of the state that followed from democracy is integral to the marathon story. But I wouldn't necessarily think that they are saying, oh, it's because democracy we managed to do this. I don't think there is any source that specifically says that. It's just a broad association with
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Äthens ist deutlich effektiver bei der Organisation ihrer Ressourcen für den Krieg, was Herodotus nicht nur in der konstitutionellen Debatte sagt, sondern vor allem in Buch 5, als er über den Wachstum der Demokratie spricht. Er sagt, plötzlich hat jeder eine Rolle in diesem Thema. Und deshalb sind sie viel mehr bereit, ihr Bestes zu tun.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Yeah, it's one of those great Herodotian set pieces, isn't it? You know, every night before Darius dines, one of his right-hand men will come in and say, Sire, remember the Athelians. And of course, Darius then nearly chokes on his piece of sweetened, honeyed lamb. Hahaha. Und er sagt, verdammt ihnen, ich werde sie nächstes Mal bekommen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Natürlich, nur ein Athenier, nur Herodotus hätte so etwas geschrieben. Ich denke nicht, dass die Athenier viel auf der Meinung von Darius oder jedem anderen Persischen nach dem Thema waren.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich denke, das hat sehr viel mit dem, was ich vorhin erwähnt habe, mit der Idee, dass für den griechischen Geist all das Revenge ist. Das ist, wie sie es bezeichnen. Und so müssen sie diese Art von Narrativ haben, dass es wirklich zu den Persiern geholfen hat. Es war ein großer Thorn an ihrer Seite.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich meine, wenn du das zu Darius gemacht hättest, hättest du wahrscheinlich gesagt, erstens, wer sind die Athenier? Und zweitens, warum bist du so nahe zu mir? Ich glaube nicht, dass ich dir die Möglichkeit gegeben habe.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und das Haupte, was ich glaube, zu wissen in diesem Zeitpunkt, ist, dass sie in relativ kurzer Erinnerung geworden sind. Ja, genau. Sie reisen überall, handeln überall, gehen überall. Ihre Bevölkerung wächst, ihre Städte werden mehr anerkennbar, wie alte Städte, wie wir sie vorstellen. Mehr und mehr von ihnen haben Stadtwälder, Dinge wie das. Große Tempels, öffentliche Späte, öffentliche Gebäude.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Absolutely. You're very welcome.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das ist alles ziemlich recent in der griechischen Welt. Ich denke, dass viel davon noch wächst. Aber es ist eine andere griechische Welt als die, die da war, sogar 50 Jahre ago, nicht 100, 200 Jahre ago.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich denke, in der griechischen Meinung ist es etwas, das sehr neu ist und etwas, das mitgearbeitet werden muss. Es gibt einen wirklich interessanten kleinen Fragment eines Poems. Es muss ungefähr 490 oder 480 geschrieben haben. Er schaut zurück auf die formativen Jahre des persischen Empires.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Im Fragment steht, dass ein junger Mann, ein älterer Kriegsveteran, dort sitzt und ein Besucher kommt, um ihn zu sehen. Die Fragen, die man dem Besucher stellen muss, sind, woher man kommt und wie alt man war, als die Perser kamen. Es gibt also etwas in der griechischen Erinnerung über dieses neue Onslaught.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich denke, für sie war der Fall von Sardis, was natürlich ein großartiges griechischsprachiges Zentrum in Asia Minor war, wahrscheinlich ihre Art von 9-11, wirklich. Es war ein riesiger Wachstum, dass etwas Drastisches auf den Grenzen ihres Weltraums stattfand. Und es ist wirklich interessant, um etwa 520-500 in Athen Wir haben die ersten Versuche, die Perser zu visualisieren.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Nicht viele Menschen hatten in der Zeit in Griechenland Perser gesehen. Und so haben wir einen schwarzen Figur von etwa 525 B.C. welches eine Art kompositiver Persisch zeigt, der von einem athenischen Künstler hergestellt wurde. Und das Besondere daran ist, dass sie ziemlich griechisch aussehen, abgesehen von dem Fakt, dass sie Trousern tragen. Es sind die Trousern, sind sie nicht?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Es ist immer in den Trousern, richtig? Es ist das Ding, dass die Griechen wirklich nicht mehr ihre Hände umgehen können. Und von da an, wirklich, stoppen die Persier nicht, zu sein. das Thema für die Griechen zu beachten. Rund 500 B.C. bekommen wir unseren ersten Versuch, eine Persika zu schreiben, eine Art Persische Dinge, eine Art Manual für das, was die Persinnen sind.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich meine, es ist voller Fantasie. Aber dort sehen wir eine Gruppe von Menschen, die versuchen, zu verstehen, was es ist, was sie gegen uns kommen. Was wir leider nicht haben, ist etwas aus der persischen Sicht zu denken. Ich wundere, wer diese Inseln und die Menschen in dieser weit entfernten Teil der Welt sind. Wir haben keine Spekulationen darüber.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich bin sicher, dass diese Spekulationen gemacht wurden, aber nichts überlebt.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Wir haben nur die drei Unterschiede in den persischen Ruheständen. Es gibt die Jaunas, die Ionien, die Griechen sind, wie wir sie kennen. Aber sie classifizieren sie nur als diejenigen, die über dem Meer leben und diejenigen, die über dem Meer leben.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das ist richtig. Und manchmal werden sie ein bisschen mehr spezifisch als diejenigen, die Sonnenhats tragen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Well, at this point, you know, 500 into the late 6th century into the early 5th century, Persia is still sort of cranking up, okay, and it's taking advantage of the places it's conquered or the places who have, you know, sort of, you know, come over to them. Also glaube ich nicht, dass es noch einen Sinn gibt, direkt mit dem Empire zu handeln, wie es war.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Aber der Handel mit den beschlossenen Menschen geht ohne Zweifel noch weiter. Das ist alles da. Und ich glaube wirklich, dass es die Anwendung dieser Mittelmenschen als Handelner ist, die beide die Perser und die Griechen im Wissen eines anderen gegründet haben. Es muss von ihnen durchgepasst worden sein.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich denke, es ist schwierig, an dieser bestimmten Stelle zu sagen, oh, es gibt einen spezifischen persischen Ausblick oder einen persischen Artifakt, der in Griechenland vorhanden ist. Das entwickelt sich in der Mitte des 5. Jahrhunderts definitiv. Silberware und all diese Art von Dingen werden entweder direkt importiert oder kopiert, in günstigen Materialien, Knock-offs.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und gleichzeitig mit persischen Textilien und all diesem auch. Aber vielleicht am Anfang dieser Zeit weniger so.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich meine, ich denke, es ist wichtig, auch wenn ich gerade gesagt habe, dass es eine große politische Entität ist, die die gesamte Isar-Mediterranen betrifft, dass wir das nicht als eine Art Monolith denken. Nein, überhaupt nicht.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich meine, das ist eine sehr leichte administrative Struktur, die aufgrund vieler vorhandener Menschen befasst ist, die natürlich bereits mit den Griechen in allen Art und Weise interagieren. Und wir sind wahrscheinlich viel mehr integriert in den griechischen Welt. als in das Empire, das sie regierte.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Also gibt es Leute wie Lycians und Karians und Lydians und Phrygians, die die Griechen seit Jahrhunderten kennen und natürlich mit ihnen handeln, mit ihnen interagieren, mit ihnen verbinden, mit ihnen Sprachen teilen und Orte leben. Und die Perser sind einfach die Neugierden in dieser Bildung.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Also stoppen die Griechen nicht plötzlich mit diesen Bereichen oder bewegen sich zu diesen Bereichen, nur weil die Perser jetzt schuld sind. Auf dem Grunde muss man sich auf diese Idee zurückziehen, dass wir uns vorstellen, dass, oh, wenn du die Karte ausmachst, diese Region seine Natur verändert. Es ist eigentlich immer noch das gleiche Ort, außer dass sie jetzt einen Jungen in Iran bezahlen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das ist ein wichtiges Begrüßungswort, ist es nicht?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Absolut. Nein, das ist absolut richtig. Und ich denke, dass, du weißt, eine Sache, die wir sagen können, ist, dass die Persier, im Allgemeinen, eine sehr schlechte Attitüde hatten. zu den Konkord-Mitgliedern. Wenn es nicht kaputt war, versuchten sie es nicht zu lösen.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und sie haben sicherlich nie etwas von den Konkord-Mitgliedern vorgelegt, was wir als einen gewaltigen Imperialismus sehen, wie wir es in der römischen oder britischen Empire sehen. So, you know, local languages just continued, local cults continued. There was no attempt ever to force a Persian identity on other peoples. If they could merge, so much the better.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
If they didn't and didn't cause any trouble, well, that was fine by the great kings as well.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ja, also Herodotus ist unser Hauptvertreter für das, richtig? Und er ist sehr straightforward darüber. Ich meine, es gibt griechische Städte in Asia Minor, also in westlicher Türkei, die Teil des Lydian-Kreises sind.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Also sie haben von Sardis gewählt, für eine Zeit, von einem König, der nicht griechisch ist, aber natürlich Teil dieser Art von Kluster von interagierenden Menschen für eine sehr lange Zeit. Sie bezahlten die Lydiener und die Persiener kamen einfach hinein und nahmen das Königreich voll, was bedeutet, dass diese griechischen Städte jetzt von den Persienern abhängig sind.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Das ist richtig, ja. Das ist ein Königreich, das die westliche Hälfte des Anatolien-Peninsulas beinhaltet. Es ist also ein ziemlich großes Königreich, ein ziemlich mächtiges Königreich, wie man es so ausdrückt, der griechischste König Chrysos ist, weil er der reichste König war.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Die Griechen wussten, dass das der größte König war, mit dem sie direkt Kontakt hatten, außer einem Ort wie Ägypten vielleicht. Und die Perser haben das sozusagen als Teil eines viel, viel größeren territorialen Empires aufgebaut. Und für die Griechen ist das plötzlich das Ankommen eines noch größeren, reicheren, stärkeren als alles, was sie jemals erlebt haben.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Und das ist ein großer Wandel in ihrer Vorstellung dessen, wo sie in der Welt sind.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Well, again, I mean, our main source is Herodotus. And as you know, I am always a little suspect about just using him. Because I think, you know, if we were to look at, you know, Rolls-Royce, I mean, the way that Herodotus creates this, you know, we have this kind of Greek interest in Anatolia, right?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
But I'm not sure that Cyrus the Great, when he invades Anatolia in that way, when he invades Lydia, would have seen that at all. I don't think he was going for, you know, a Greek... Stadt überhaupt. Anatolia war Teil des ehemaligen Nahen Osten und ich denke, Cyrus hätte es gerade gesehen als den nächsten Schritt in den nahen ostenlichen Konquests.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Wir können Chrysos sehen, wenn wir ihn sehen wollen, als einen griechisch inspirierten König, der in diesem Weltraum des Mediterraniens arbeitet, Messer zu Delphi und so weiter. Aber auch natürlich Er war absolut intimitär eingeschränkt in die Nahen Osten-Traditionen der Kindheit. Er war nach allem der Bruder-in-Lau von Nebuchadnezzar aus Babylon und so weiter.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich denke also nicht, dass Cyrus sich dazu eingelassen hat, dass er jetzt einige Griechen bekommen wird, dass er sich einige Westenern bekommen wird. Ich denke nur, dass es sich wirklich um eine logische Weiterentwicklung meiner Politik handelt, von anderen oberen Königsländern in das, was ich hier bilde.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ich habe gerade von den Geschichten in Herodotus gedacht, in denen er darstellt, dass die Persier nicht wissen, wer die Griechen sind.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ja, genau. Entschuldigung, wer?
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Ja, nein, literally. Ich meine, die Spartaner senden ihnen eine Embassy, wenn sie die Städte von Asia Minor nehmen. Und sie sagen, du solltest diese Menschen frei lassen, oder wir kommen für dich. Und Cyrus' Antwort ist wahrscheinlich nur so, Sorry, who dis? Lost number.
The Ancients
The Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of Marathon
Yeah, no idea. If you think about it in so many ways for the Persians who are building an empire and building vast wealth, the next thing they do is Babylon, for goodness sake. That's what they take. Not the western shores of Greece. What has Greece got to offer? Stones and olives. That's all it's got. And that's of no interest whatsoever to the Persians.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
It's a Middle Ages thing, and we can virtually put it down to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa who allegedly found the bones of the wise men and installed them in Cologne Cathedral, where you can still see them and honor them today in a beautiful gilded shrine in the middle of Cologne Cathedral. And he began to call them the three kings.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And I think that's really interesting because it's part of that whole medieval ideology, isn't it, of kingship, where Christ bestows kingship on those who are worthy kings. So I think Frederick Barbarossa is using that kind of theology to engrandize himself as well. So that's where we get that the Magi is kings for the first time.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, you know, astronomy and astrology had always played an enormously important part in Near Eastern traditions and indeed in Greco-Roman traditions as well. And people looked to the heavens for omens, for confirmation of things. And there was a very, very long tradition of this, especially in Babylonia.
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The Wise Men
where we have preserved, even today, hundreds and hundreds of astronomical diaries. So these are observations of the stars and the movements of the planets, which are recorded by professional astrologers who then write down their findings and are used to predict events. It was a very serious business in antiquity. Now, when it comes to the star of Bethlehem,
The Ancients
The Wise Men
tomes and tomes have been written about trying to identify what this star might have been. It might have been an early showing of Halley's Comet. And of course, we can pin down times and places. And we do know around about 4 BCE, there was a comet which made an enormous impact. It wasn't the only one in the period. But certainly there's nothing unusual in Matthew's gospel about star searching.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
It goes on a lot. But I think it's there in Matthew for two purposes. First of all, Matthew is drawing on Old Testament Hebrew Bible precedents. And in the book of Numbers, there is a prophecy which predicts this gleaming star will herald the coming of the Messiah. So he's keen to draw his readers or his listeners into this Old Testament prophecy.
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The Wise Men
But I also think, you see, we should read the New Testament, including the four gospels, on different levels. And one, of course, can be a faith journey, but the other one can be, I think, a subtle attack on the world in which Christianity was born, and that is the Roman world. Now, Matthew, I think, in his gospel, throughout the gospel, very subtly has a go at the Romans.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Now, he can't do this conspicuously. But with any text, you can do alternative readings. And if you go into a gospel, including Matthew, with an alternative view, then you can begin to see, actually, there is a critique of the secular world. The world cannot accept or will not accept Christ as its king. And we really see that, I think, in the nativity story.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
First of all, of course, we've got the rejection of Herod. Herod comes over as this terrible king, but also, of course, a collaborator with Rome. That's what he was famous for by the Jews. But the use of the star is something I think that Matthew uses often. to downplay or even contradict the use of a star that had appeared in Rome.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Tristan, hello. And hello all to your listeners as well. Great to be back with you all.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So we know that the Emperor Augustus, when he first comes to power after the death of his uncle Julius Caesar, he witnesses a comet in the skies over Rome. And he says, this comet is Julius Caesar being deified. So for Roman astrologers, they saw this blazing star and they said, oh, this is clear evidence that Caesar has become a god.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And Augustus, who is pretty adept at propaganda, I think we can all agree, cashes in on this and says, yes, indeed, that is what it is. And he begins to issue coins. with his head on one side and on the other side, this blazing star. And of course, that coin gets circulated around the whole empire. Of course, a couple of them must have fallen into Judea as well.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So this is an image that people would have been familiar with. He also issues a coin showing the deified Julius Caesar with a star and a tail, a comet's tail, above his head as well. And even poets like Ovid in his Metamorphoses talk about this star heralding the coming of this new son of God. And that's the title that Augustus now begins to use for himself.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
He is the divus filius, so he is the son of God. And that, of course, is the principal title that Matthew uses throughout his gospel for Jesus as well. So can you see how basically he is taking the political situation of Rome and saying, do not apply these things to the Roman emperor because that is a dead end. There is no kingdom here.
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The Wise Men
The real empire is the empire of Christ who was heralded with a star. That's the star that we need to look at.
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The Wise Men
with a kind of anti-Roman lens. But they have to do it carefully, because this is a world of real Christian persecution, don't forget. But they do it. And if you know the code, then you can crack it.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Yes, absolutely, because these gifts, which in a way look kind of innocuous, these are the theological linchpins of the story of Jesus according to Matthew, his glorification as a king. his glorification as a god, and his ultimate suffering and death. So basically, these three gifts span the whole biography of Jesus, according to the Matthew gospel, that is to say.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So they are of intense importance really to Matthew's method of kind of predicting what Christ's story is going to be for his early listeners and readers.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Well, remarkably, it doesn't take too long at all. This is a story that really holds, it really grips people. So the first ever image I've discovered, and I don't think there are earlier ones, is in the catacombs of Rome, and that is the catacomb of Priscilla. And that dates to the early 2nd century CE, we think.
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The Wise Men
Highly likely, probably one of these kind of noble women that use their homes for church meetings and this kind of thing. So she's obviously a woman of influence to have her own catacomb to begin with. But there's a very now very fading fresco painted on the wall there, which shows the Virgin Mary seated with the Christ child on her lap. So there's that first image, a powerful image resonating.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Yes, yes, they are. And of course, they come to us in kind of different guises in a way, don't they? Because, you know, they are the three wise men. They're the three kings. So, you know, we approach them differently. But they are part of our sort of Christmas consciousness, really, through a myriad of Christmas carols or Christmas cards. You know, it's a popular image to see.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And then we have these three wise men coming before her, one depicted in a kind of green, one red, and another sort of in a brown, which is very faded indeed. We can't quite see details of their faces, but we can see that they're offering something. What is really fascinating, however, is that they are all in Parthian dress. They are all depicted as Easterners, as Parthians. And I think...
The Ancients
The Wise Men
That tradition of depicting them as Parthians obviously is drawing from Matthew's gospel, but also is another one of those nudges against Rome as well. Because during the Julio-Claudian period and into the second century, it became a standard practice to use the image of the Parthian, Parthian captives, war captives, subdued Parthians, to show the grandeur of Rome.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So what we often have is Togartate Romans being shown homage by kneeling Parthians in their long-sleeved tunics and their baggy trousers, this ultimate mark of the Orient dress. And I think that what Matthew does is obviously plays up on this idea of these Parthians are coming to pay homage to the infant Jesus.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
But it enters into the visual repertoire very early on in early Christianity in that case. And they are distinctly Parthian. I mean, we have another adoration scene. for another female tomb, actually, of a woman called Severa at the beginning of probably the 3rd century. And there is no doubt here that the three wise men are in their Parthian outfits. They're wearing those Phrygian caps.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
They have little cloaks on, and they're all proffering their gifts before a seated Virgin Mary. And from there on in, on a series of early Christian sarcophagi, on ivories, carved ivories, of various standards of craftsmanship, we have this repeated motif of a seated virgin and child and these three oriental magi bringing their gifts, always wearing Parthian clothing.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
The camels are there by the early fourth century, certainly. And they're kind of interestingly distributed amongst the wise men. They very often look over the wise men's shoulders. And that's when you then get also the buildup of a menagerie in these scenes. So you get the ox and the ass and all of that kind of stuff building up at this time too. But we also have...
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Oh, I mean, exquisite mosaics from the late fourth into the fifth century. And, you know, a wander around Rome is really worth it for this, you know, spot your wise men. In Santa Maria Maggiore, for instance, there are some very early fifth century statues. stunning, colorful mosaics of the three wise men in their very, very distinctive Parthian outfits.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
I suppose the finest example of them all is if you go to Ravenna in East Italy, of course. There, they are represented in the Basilica of Santa Polinaro Novo, and it's probably the most beautiful representation we have of them.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
As I always say, you know, I think the Bible is an ancient source which is ripe for plowing. So I refuse to treat it any differently than I would, you know, a work by Plato or a cuneiform tablet. You know, these are all valid ancient sources. Of course, what the Bible has beyond that is another level which people engage in, of course, and that is a text of faith as well.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Absolutely. After Constantine and the conversion of the empire, I mean, they become conspicuous. And I think why the wise men become so much more important than, say, the shepherds of Luke's gospel is because of the idea of paying homage to Christ. as you would pay homage to the emperor, and also the universality of the experience as well.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
These wise men come from afar, and I think that really appeals to the sensitivity of Christian Roman emperors as well, of course. So you see them in abundance, and the Ravenna mosaics are absolutely stunning. The three of them are shown very distinctly as well. One of them with a grey beard, and for the first time, they are named as well.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So we get, in this particular lineup, we get Balthazar, we get Melchior, and we get Gaspar in this particular lot. But in fact, over the centuries, the names... change quite a lot. So there's variations on the theme. So we have Gaspar, Jasper, Jaspas, Gatshpa, Balsha, Berturza, variations on these three names, essentially.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
In another one of the Ravenna reliefs, actually, this is the very famous depiction of the Empress Theodora, oh yes with justinian and belisarius yes beautiful she is wearing a magnificent purple robe and embroidered into the hem of that robe uh the scene of the three wise men again
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Yes and no. So I mean, we can go to Dura Europa, which is in modern day Syria, and there in some early churches, but also depicted in a synagogue, are scenes of Parthian dressed biblical characters. So Xerxes in the book of Esther, for instance. But we can't be specific. Obviously, in a synagogue, you're not going to get representations of gospel characters.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So we don't get a holistic representation of the three wise men as far as we can see. But what we can tell from the Dura Europus images is that the Western images of these Parthians really are very true to the source materials, I suppose. They are definitely meant to be Parthians. Now, does Matthew actually say three? Never. Never, never, never. He never says three wise men.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
He never says three magi. He simply says magi from the east came to Jerusalem bearing gifts. They're three gifts. That is kind of defined, as we can see from the early church, the number of magi that are supposed to be around.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
But in fact, there's nothing to stop us believing that there weren't two magi and they brought an extra gift, or there were 20 magi and they just shared the cost between them. So Matthew is not specific about that whatsoever.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And so that leaves big gaps in the imagination for other people to get involved with, because we have to remember that in early Christianity, there were other traditions, including nativity stories, which didn't make the final cut of the New Testaments.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Yeah, apocryphal gospels, exactly. So one of the best known is the Pseudo-Matthew. So as the title suggests, you know, based on the original gospel of Matthew, in which there are, again, not a number specified, but they take their three gifts and they give them to Mary. And in this gospel, we're given something of their feelings. They are filled with joy at seeing the Christ child.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So whenever we enter into any kind of historical debate about the Bible, obviously we always have to take into account that there are people who read this on multiple levels. And I think that's what's really interesting about the process of biblical scholarship. is the dealing with the idea of history and faith together.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So that's something that's extra to Matthew. But then we have an amazing 6th century text which was found in Egypt, and we call this the Arabic infancy narrative, which is really quite remarkable because there, after the wise men, numberless again, give their gifts, Mary unwraps the swaddling bands of the infant Jesus, and she gives them to the wise men as a gift to take back home with them.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And when they get home, they take these swaddling bands and they burn them in the sacred fire. So there's a step back to Zoroastrianism again. But when the fire dies, the swaddling bands are untouched. And so the wise men recognize that these are relics of a holy child. And so they begin to convert the East to Christianity. And they are joined a couple of decades later by St.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Thomas, one of the disciples, who begins to also work with them as well. So that's an elaboration on the original story from Matthew.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Yeah, yeah, what happens when they got home. But we also have, I think, the most magnificent retelling of all comes from a very strong Syriac tradition. And don't forget, the Syrian church in antiquity was the main contender, really. It was huge. And if history had just gone a little bit differently, we could all today be Syriac Christians. That was such a powerful tradition there.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
We have a text which dates to the 5th century, but clearly was several hundred years old before. So we can date it, I think, to the 2nd century, in which we have, brace yourself, not three wise men, but 12 wise men.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
They are the heirs of families of wise men. Their names are all given to us. They're all Persianate names. And the names of their fathers are all given to us. So we've got 24 wise men all together in this particular story. And they, the 12 of them, travel to Jerusalem. They find the baby in Bethlehem. They pay homage to him with their three gifts.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
But the difference is that each one of the wise men, each of the 12, gives Mary a coin of gold as well. So she's got 12 coins plus the incense plus the myrrh in that tradition as well. And it's a great shame, really, that that story isn't so well known. But because it was a real contender for many, many centuries, it's now preserved in a text which scholars call the Revelation of the Magi.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So it's that moment when they see the Christ child. And they too are tasked with converting the East to Christianity.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
I think it's very important, and I think it's the synergy between what we can call Zoroastrianism and Judaism and Christianity had been simmering away for centuries. And I think we can see Zoroastrian influences in Judaism by the Second Temple period, and certainly in early Christianity. So I think Matthew is picking up on something which is genuine.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And I think it also allows his audience into a more universal picture of what Christ is all about. Because if you think of how Matthew presents the infant Jesus, what he's essentially doing is he's retelling the story of Moses.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
for a Christian Jewish audience because, of course, what happens after the wise men go home, according to Matthew, is that we have this terrible slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem, which, of course, would immediately have reminded listeners of the slaughter of the boys in Egypt under the Pharaoh as well. So Jesus is presented as a second Moses in Matthew's Gospel.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And so the inclusion of the wise men into that story says to the Jewish listeners, readers of that story, look, there's also a bigger framework in which this new Messiah can be placed as well. Yes, he's here for the Jews as the new Moses, but also there is the epiphany that he has come for the Gentiles as well.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
I think that's what's really fascinating about biblical materials, you know, because they've had such an important afterlife. Really, you know, the biblical characters themselves as they appear in scriptures are simply the tip of the iceberg, aren't they?
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Because it's what we've done with them over the centuries, which really gives them their cogency and makes them such persuasive characters, really. It's the reception history, which I find really fascinating.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
I would recommend for a real alternative, you know, sort of Christmas, if you wanted to do that, read The Revelation of the Magi, which is now available in a really good English translation by Brent Blandow. And it's available in hardback and paperback. Google that and you'll find copies of it. It's a really fascinating read.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Yes and no. The yes part is that we're entering into a Greco-Roman world in which Judaism sits. But the no part is we have to take all of that Hebrew Bible scholarship with us into this world as well, because there is no disconnect suddenly between an Old and a New Testament in the Jewish mind of the first century.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And of course, the Gospel writers, Paul and his epistles, are all rooted not only in the world of Greece and Rome, but also in the world of the ancient Near Eastern and the Hebrew Bible as well. So you've got to carry all of those things with you simultaneously.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So I suppose you do need sort of different training or coming from it from a different angle, but you also have to maintain all of that Old Testament background too.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Well, they only occur in the Gospel of Matthew. And this is maybe a surprise to some people, you know, because when we receive those Christmas cards and we put up our Christmas crash, then, of course, what we do, we amalgamate the story of the shepherds with the wise men very often. Now, the shepherds are only mentioned in St. Luke's Gospel. They are particular to that.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And the wise men only enter into Matthew's Gospel. So never together. Wow. Never the twain will meet. Absolutely not. The idea of bringing these together in what we call a gospel harmony has been something which has been around since the medieval period. Really, it was St. Francis who created the first kind of Christmas creche where all of those figures get together.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
But really, by the 19th century, popular family Bibles and children's Bibles were beginning to amalgamate, to harmonize these two Gospel accounts. But the truth is that Matthew's Gospel, in almost every way, contradicts Luke's Gospel account of the Nativity. They were written with very different agendas for a very different audience. So St. Luke's gospel is very much written for the Gentiles.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Sorry, Lloyd, who are the Gentiles? The Gentiles are the non-Jews. So these are the Greeks and the Romans in the wider world out there. And he's trying to proclaim the gospel to non-Jews. Whereas Matthew's gospel is absolutely focused on Jewish identity, the Jewish past, Jewish traditions. And so the agendas for these two things are very different. St. Luke is all about making the unvoiced voiced.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So shepherds, the very poor people, Mary herself, of course, singing the Magnificat, my soul magnifies the Lord. God has cast down the mighty and are raising up the poor. This is Luke's agenda. Matthew's agenda is completely different. And the other thing to note is that of the Gospels, it is only Matthew and Luke who have a birth story for Jesus.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Mark, our earliest Gospel, doesn't have one at all. It was of no interest to Mark, and he's our first Gospel, probably about 60 AD, so 30 years after the crucifixion. And John completely goes his own way. And of course, the opening of John's gospel is in the beginning was the word. So, you know, it's a far more kind of philosophic idea of the birth of Christ.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So it's only that the nativity that our whole Christmas is built around is only based on two of the gospels. They say completely different things.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Okay, so what we have in Matthew chapter 2, and it's just verses 1 to 12, so it's only 12 verses of the Bible that these guys appear in. is that we are told that Jesus is born in Bethlehem in the days of Herod. This has to be, we presume, Herod the Great. And then Matthew says that, Behold, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he who is born the king of the Judeans?
The Ancients
The Wise Men
For we've seen his star in the east, and we've come to honor him, literally to prostrate themselves in front of him. And Herod, one of the great paranoids of history, suddenly starts pressing them for information about, you know, who is this kid who's supposed to be born, who's going to be a king? And they say, well, we don't know yet. We're on our way to find him.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And Herod presses them and says, well, once you've found him, please come back and let me know all about him so, you know, I can offer him my homage too. So the magi kind of pay lip service to that, and off they go, guided by this star.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
until it leads them to the little town of Bethlehem, and there they see Mary and the infant in her arms, and they go into what is actually called a cave in this point, and they pay homage to the child, and they offer gifts of gold, of incense, not frankincense, incense is what it says, so it could be any kind of resin, and also of myrrh.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And then they have a collective dream, and dreams play a very significant role in Matthew's gospel, in which they're told, don't go back to Herod's court, say nothing about this. And we're told that they return home to the east, another route. And that's it. That's all we get.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
But it's a very important moment because in the Christian tradition, this takes place on the 6th of January on a feast which the Christian church from at least the 4th century has named Epiphany. So Epiphany, of course, is a Greek word, and it means a revelation or a manifestation. So if you think about it, in Matthew there is no other kind of presentation of this Christ child to anybody else.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
This is the first time that the world sees the newborn Messiah, essentially. It's an important one in Matthew because the child is seen by non-Jews. The news of this child now can spread to the Roman world, essentially, and beyond the confines of the Roman world. So
The Ancients
The Wise Men
That's the importance of it, together with the three gifts that are presented, because of course they are highly symbolic gifts in themselves. So we have gold, which obviously is the great signifier of kingship itself. So this heralds the kingship of the infant Jesus. Then we have incense, and incense emphasizes Matthew's use of Christ, obviously, as the Son of God.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So as a kind of living God, he receives incense, which any God in the Greco-Roman pantheon would get, clouds of incense. And then myrrh, of course, is highly significant because myrrh was an embalming resin. So it was used in particular for the preparation of bodies after death.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And of course, this heralds the idea that the child is born for one purpose, and that is to die to save the sins of mankind. So in a way, Christ's Christology is emphasized through those three gifts themselves. And that's why, actually, the gifts are more important than the givers, in a way. That's what Matthew seems to be saying in that.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Well, it is the specific word that Matthew uses. And he's taking here a word which has been around in the Greek world for at least 400 years. And it refers to a priestly caste from Iran, so ancient Persia. The Magi were already around in the Achaemenid period. These were, according to Herodotus, the kind of living repositories of ancient Persian religious traditions.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
So they knew the hymns to the Persian gods. They knew the rituals. They kept the scriptures of what we might call the Zoroastrian faith. Now, by Matthew's time, we're into a period called the Parthian era in Persian history. And the Parthians were certainly what we might call proto-Zoroastrians. And so they continued using these magi in their religious rituals.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
They were a kind of caste of their own. So you couldn't apparently train to be a magi. You were born into families of magi who kind of then ran the show. They used the ritual paraphernalia. One of the things that they were instructed with doing was looking after the sacred fire, flame. So they are there to keep the flame burning.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And of course, Zoroastrianism also believes in the purification of water, of earth, of air, and therefore the rituals all operate around this. And also with the formula which the Zoroastrians have, which is about always speaking the truth, always aiming to do good deeds, and always aiming to say good thoughts as well, to have good thoughts and to speak good thoughts.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And so they're part of this very, very long tradition of Iranian priestly caste. Now, Matthew doesn't say essentially where they're from. He just says Magi from the East. But I think we can read into that. Basically, it is Magi from Parthia. That's really what he's thinking. So when Matthew thinks about the East, his readers, his listeners would automatically think of Parthia.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Because Parthia, don't forget, was the great superpower of the East in this period. It was the continual thorn in the side of the burgeoning Roman Empire.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
The Parthians at one point had penetrated into Judea, and Herod and his family had to run for safety from them. So they were a huge military machine. But also, their culture was spreading and taking hold in this period, including ideas from Zoroastrianism. For instance, the creator god, the invisible god.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
All of this was really influencing what we might call Second Temple Judaism and had been doing so really since the return from the exile. So I think Matthew is drawing very clearly on this idea of the Parthian magi. Now, of course, magi is related to our word magic. And I think there was a sense of these magi being magicians in the Greco-Roman world too.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
They didn't know everything about these men. So they thought, oh, there must be kind of magical practices involved. that they do out there in the East as well. That's always been a kind of Orientalist trope that Western writers and Westerners generally have had. And so I think they aligned the practice of religion with concepts of magic.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And in fact, that's not uncomfortable in a historical sense. You would be hard-pressed to put a hair between what is defined as religion, what is defined as magical practice. And so there's this element that they are not just priests but also magicians.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And then beyond that, of course, they're also drawing on another ancient Near Eastern tradition of wisdom, these magi being the repositories of wisdom as well, of long traditions of things. And I think what happens in Matthew's Gospel is that it also collapses into that the idea of things like astronomy and astrology, of course, which, you know, the ancient Chaldeans, Babylonians.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
Precisely. And don't forget, Babylon now is part of the Parthian Empire at this stage as well. And with the link, of course, to the star in the story, then you can see how this whole thing about priests, Wise men, magicians, all of it becomes mashed together, really. And it's very, very hard to disassociate any of that.
The Ancients
The Wise Men
And then the final element we've got in all of that, of course, which Matthew doesn't say himself, as we've said in the beginning, we call them we three kings, right? Yes, that seems quite a jump to go from magicians and wise men to kings. But in fact, the use of the kingly title for them does not come in until the 12th century.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Das ist wirklich einer der ersten Arten seines Reiches. Und wir sehen es in späteren Panegyriks. Es wird in westlichen Erinnerungen an Konstantins Leben aufgenommen. Das ist ein großer Moment. Das ist, wo er seinen Stempel auf den Regime setzt. Ich bin verantwortlich. Und ich habe einen Lion.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Wir haben keine echten Beweise, dass Konstantin mit der christlichen Kirche Kontakt hatte. Up until the campaign against Maxentius in 312. At that point he certainly did have contact with the church, because he has a group of bishops with him on campaign. In 310 he advertised a personal meeting with the god Apollo. So certainly he is very much in the traditional range of things.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
But he also has a great deal of, as it seems his father may have done, In einer Version des Sonnengottes, der sogenannte Unvergessliche Sonne. Und das war eine wiederentwickelte und redesignte Gnade, die mit der Stadt Emesa in Syrien verbunden war. Original war El-Gabal, der Name dieses Gottes, ein Meteorit und der Name bedeutet Gott-Mountain. Im 3.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Jahrhundert wurde er bereits als Sonnengott genannt. Und er wird von dem König Elagabalus nach Rom gebracht und dann zurückgeschickt. Aber dann scheint Aurelian eine Vision von ihm zu haben, bevor er gegen die Palmyrenen kämpft, die den oberen Teil des Königs für mehr als eine Dekade gehalten haben. Und Constantius war auf der Staffe von Aurelian.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und das unerwartete Sohn wird sehr wichtig bleiben. Für Konstantin, nach seiner Konversion, und man fühlt es mit Konstantin, weil Christen die solare Bildung mit der Versöhnung verbinden würden.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und für Konstantin, der christliche Gott, der erwachsene Sohn, etc., seemed to sort of meld together until finally, I suspect, some bishop sat him down ten years after the fact and said, you really got to stop this.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Genau. Der unerwartete Sohn bleibt auf der Koinage bis in die 320er. Und dann, wenn du heute in Istanbul gehst, You can go and see the burnt column, which is this great black column, which would have been in the form of Constantine. And on top of it in antiquity would have been a statue of Constantine as the sun god in heroic nudity. Das ist eine Sache, die wir nicht wirklich verpasst haben.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Aber wir haben ein Bild davon. Auch nach der Foundation von Konstantinopel können wir sehen, dass die Solar-Imagerie ein wichtiges Ding für Konstantin bleibt. Und wir wissen, dass er christlichen Audienzern sagen wird, dass er der christliche Gott ist. Er führt mich zur Gewinnung. Und deshalb gewinne ich.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Aber er sagt allen seinen Subjekten, dass er den großen und hohen Gott bittet, der ihm Gewinn bringt. Er ist sehr subtil darüber. Und ich denke, was er wirklich gelernt hat, als er Diakletien beobachtet hat, ist, dass Verbrechen grundsätzlich nicht funktionieren kann. Was er nie tun wird, ist, eine breite Verbrechung von Pagänen zu versuchen.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Constantine recognized that there was a limit to what the emperor could compel people to do. And I'm sure that in 303, watching the persecution of Diocletian, he would have been there in Nicomedia when it happened. He realized it was just a dreadful mess.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Well, Constantine and Maxentius were brothers-in-law. And while Galerius was alive, Maxentius was very nervous about Galerius, because Galerius had already tried once to invade Italy and unseat him. In one of the more astonishing moments in this period, in 307, Galerius was beaten by Maxentius. And this was the great soldier of the age, and Maxentius... Seine Armee führte ihn aus Rom.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Es war eine logistische Verletzung, wie bei Galerius. Sobald Galerius dort war, standen Konstantin und Maxentius auf seinem Schulterkopf. Sobald Galerius tot war, wurde er von Licinius besiegt. Licinius hatte eine schlechte Beziehung mit dem anderen jüngeren König im Osten. Eine der Probleme dieser Zeit war, dass jeder den gleichen Namen hatte.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
So this is Maximian, Maximinus, not to be confused with Maximian or Maxentius. And Maximinus and Licinius don't like each other. So Maxentius and Maximinus seem to be making an alliance. And there's Licinius caught in the middle between the two of them. So he now makes an alliance with Constantine and says, I'll deal with Maximinus if you could take care of Maxentius.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
The relationship between Maxentius and Amid, you might want to sort of look to the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, Constantine had executed Maxentius' father, Maximian. But Maximian was in the court of Constantine because Maxentius had driven him out of Rome. And Constantine is still married to the very much younger sister of Maxentius, Fausta, at this point. So I think it really is...
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Das ist die Ambition, die das in den Beginn führt. Er hat eine Verbindung mit Licinius gemacht. Er wird Maxentius attackieren. Und es wird eine sehr schwierige Kampagne sein. Niemand hat Rom genommen, egal, wie ihre Superiorität aussieht. Wenn man zurückgeht zu 238, hat ein anderer Maximinus Italien attackiert und nicht weiter als in Aquileia gegangen, bevor er von seinen Männern ermordet wurde.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Galerius hat gefehlt, Severus hat gefehlt, Rom zu nehmen, als Maxentius die Macht besiegt hat. Es ist eine sehr schwierige Operation. Und dann haben Sie auch die Armee, die Maxentius in Norditalien hat. Also wie kämpft man sich über die Peninsula? Und ich denke, an diesem Punkt, und Konstantin scheint sich zu fühlen, dass er und der Gnade viel zusammen haben.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
And who is the god who is most unlike any divinity that Galerius would ever have had anything to do with? Oh, that happens to be the Christian god. And he's not unlike the sun. And so, these nice bishops here seem to be quite willing to tell me whatever I want to hear.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und so bekommen wir eine Beleuchtung, dass Konstantin veröffentlicht hat, dass er einen neuen Gott an seinem Seite hat, bevor er den Alps übernimmt. Nun, die berühmteste Geschichte, natürlich, ist die, die Eusebius später ergibt, die vor dem Kampf über den Milvian-Brief, Konstantin sah eine Krosse im Himmel und dieses Zeichen, »Konquere«. Das ist totaler Nonsens.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Konstantin hat niemals so etwas erwähnt. Niemand im Westen wusste die Geschichte überhaupt, weil es in Eusebius' Leben von Konstantin war, als es in die Existenz kam. Aber was Konstantin später zu einem Gruppe von Bischöfen schrieb, ist, dass er bemerkt hat, dass es einige Dinge in sich gab, die er sich verbessern konnte.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und als er darüber nachgedacht hat, hat er dann gedacht und den Gott getroffen, der in der großen Wachttür des Himmels sitzt, der ihm gezeigt hat, wie man eine bessere Person sein kann. Und das ist die Art, wie Emperoren Dinge machen. Sie sprechen mit Gott in ihrem privaten Zeitraum.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und das ist, was in der Panegyrik von 313 gesagt wurde, dass der Emperor eine Erfahrung mit Gott hatte, in diesem Fall mit der Heiligen Geist. Aber was er sagt, ist, dass ich jemanden brauche, einen neuen Gott, um mich nach Süden zu führen, unter diesen außergewöhnlichen Umständen. Es wird eine schwierige Kampagne sein.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und diesen neuen Gott, denke ich, fühlt er sich mit ihm, als er die Alpen überschreitet, als er in Norditalien bewegt, als er nach Süden nach Rom bewegt. But this conversion of Constantine may not be as dramatic a story as the one that Eusebius makes up. But in many ways, it is an incredibly dramatic story of an emperor. And you can feel him wondering, how am I going to pull this off?
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
How am I going to outdo my former boss, who we know was a great soldier himself? And it's this confidence he gets from believing that he has a God on his side that I think helps him As he's planning the campaign and leading his people across the Alps in the spring to take on the army of Maxentius. Then when he gets down to Rome, it's rather interesting.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
There seems to be a rather good fifth column operating in the city. Und man würde denken, dass Maxentius sich nur so festgehalten hätte, wie er es wirklich gegen Severus und Galerius gemacht hat, weil Rom ein großer Ort ist. Es hat einige wundervolle neue Wälder. Wie Sie sehen, gehen Sie heute nach Rom herum, die Wälder, die Aurelien um die Stadt gebaut haben.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Es war sehr mächtig, gut besiegt, sehr schwer zu besiegen. Und wenn Konstantin in Besiegsoperationen gefordert wurde, wäre er wahrscheinlich nicht mehr erfolgreich gewesen als jemand anderes. But somehow he forces Maxentius, creates a situation where Maxentius has to leave the city.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
And on October the 28th, the day that Maxentius had taken the throne himself, Maxentius comes out to fight Constantine of the Milvian Bridge. Constantine is ready for him and destroys his army. You wonder what kind of general Maxentius is anyway. He draws his army up with a Tiber at the rear.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Ja, absolut. Und ich denke, dass er, dass er Oracles in Rom konsultiert hat und gesagt hat, du sollst, du sollst das machen. Du weißt, das ist dein großer Tag. Aber auch ich denke, er hat seine Armeen gesehen, die von Konstantinus kämpfen, als Konstantinus nach Süden kam.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und ich denke, dass es eine echte Frage zwischen seinen eigenen Unterstützern gibt, ob er jemanden ist, den sie weiterhin vertrauen können. Also muss Maxentius sich seiner eigenen Leute beweisen, weshalb er die Armee auslöst, um Konstantin zu kämpfen.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
The story about the Cairo comes from Lactantius, who wrote a book on the deaths of the persecutors. And Lactantius, he wrote the book before he had come west, but he was using official information to describe the campaign and the battle. So this has to have been part of whatever the messaging that was sent out.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
It is not mentioned in the Panegyric of 313, which is our most contemporary description of the account, but Es muss geschehen sein, aber das Kairo-Signal kann auch Glück bedeuten. Also ist es ein christliches Symbol, es wird ein christliches Symbol, aber es ist auch ein gemeinsames Symbol, also gute Glück.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Nun, ich denke, es ist ein typischer konstantinischer Moment, es ist beides und. It's a symbol of Christ for Constantine and anybody who wants to see it that way. And it's a symbol of good luck for everybody who doesn't. And with invincible son slash Christ standing behind you, there's a remarkable consistency to the ambiguity that we see here.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Genau, und das ist es, was Konstantin bemerkt hat, dass der Job des Königs ist, die Menschen zusammenzubringen. Und er sah die Versuchung als gewalttätig.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
There may not have been a whole lot of Christians in the Empire, but the notion that the imperial government is persecuting people for what they believe, rather than what they do, is something that Constantine, I think, felt was completely wrong. And in doing it, Diocletian failed.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Diocletian himself revoked the persecution edict, that Diocletian had previously sold himself to the world as a man who restored the unity of the Roman Empire. Und ich denke, dass Konstantin von Diocletian entfernt wird, den Eindruck, dass der Job des Kanzlers die Einheit des Kanzlers ist. Und man kann das nicht tun, wenn man den Leuten sagt, was sie denken.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Konstantin hat eine große Menge Schwierigkeiten, wenn es darum geht, die Bereiche, die von Maxentius regiert wurden, zu übernehmen. in the regime. And one of the things that we see him doing is actually using a lot of Maxentius' own people in government. Instead of exiling everybody, this is part of the unity of the empire. I have jobs for everybody, but maybe the top five under Maxentius.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Governors of North Africa, for instance, which is critical, because that's where a lot of the grain for Rome Das kommt von unseren ehemaligen Offizieren von Maxentius. Er hat eine Art und Weise gefunden, seine Staffel und Maxentius' Staffel zu verbinden.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Denn er erinnert sich auch daran, dass eine der Tensoren, die seine Erwachsenen-Empereurin bewegte, die Partei von Maxentius' Staffel und den Menschen von Severus nach Süden war. Und in der Tat, die Menschen von Maximian, als sie Maxentius auf den Thron gelegt haben, Again, they've been sort of cut out by Severus.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
And so Constantine knows what doesn't work and works to build a unity government, as it were.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Yes, it does. Of course, a lot of later record was written by Christians and very heavily influenced by especially the work of Eusebius of Caesarea, a man who was not actually very close to Constantine at any point in his life and wrote his biography of Constantine after the emperor was dead.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Yes, keeping your enemies close is the best way of keeping them from staying your enemies. Und die Leute, die den Show für Maximilian und Maxentius runten, sind wirklich die jüngere Aristokratie von Italien und Nordafrika. Also, wenn du diese Teil der Empire runten willst, brauchst du ihren Kauf.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
The Edict of Milan is a document that was composed by Constantine and Licinius when they met in Milan in the autumn of 312 for the wedding of Constantine's half-sister and Licinius. The Edict was never posted in the West. Calling it the Edict of Milan is something of a misnomer. weil es ein Edikt von Toleranz war, das von Licinius publiziert wurde, sobald er Max Minus und 313 befehlte.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Es ist tatsächlich ein Brief vom Imperator an alle Gouverneure des Osten, die die Verabschiedung der christlichen Rechte an die Kirche beurteilen. Und er erklärte sehr klar die Freiheit der Bewusstsein. Und ich denke, dass Konstantin wahrscheinlich eine signifikante Einfluss auf den Text hatte.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Aber der Text, als er veröffentlicht wurde, wurde tatsächlich von Licinius in den östlichen Provinzen veröffentlicht. Aber es ist eine andere Weise, zu sagen, dass der neue Regime nicht wie der alte ist, weil Maximinus die Christen verurteilt hat. Galerius hat die Christen verabschiedet.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Also wiederum, was Sie tun, ist eine Linie zwischen dem Weltraum von Konstantin und Licinius, welches ein Weltraum der Toleranz ist, und dem Weltraum der Verabschiedung, welches Maximinus sicherlich Teil davon war.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
I think it is absolutely an important aspect of this because on the one hand we look back to the great figure of Diocletian and the reunification of the empire and on the other hand we've just fought a couple of civil wars. We have to point out that these are the people who are not really living up to the standards that we expect of an emperor.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
But now that the two of us, brothers in law, happily, will rule this empire together, I think it's a way of showing, and with a very important statement in this edict, that one of the policies most easily associated with Galerius and Maximinus was that of persecution. And we are undoing the mistakes of the past.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
It really only takes three years for the relationship between the two of them to break down. And I think the facts that we have indicate it worked out. It was Constantine who decided that, you know, really one emperor is better than two. But Licinius himself is a pretty good soldier. And in the first campaign in 317... Konstantin ist sicherlich der Aggressor.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
The other records for Constantine, which are primarily the record of his legislation, gives us, I think, a much better take on his personality and on what drove him. There's a particularly notable letter to the Prefect of Rome after the palace had been struck by lightning. And this is well after Constantine became a Christian, saying, okay, and remember to consult the horospiques as well.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Licinius ist auch nach Westen gekommen. Ich meine, es ist nicht überraschend. Es ist klar, dass die Beziehung in den letzten Jahren zerbrochen wurde. Konstantin hat Licinius verurteilt, um seine Verabschiedung zu instigieren. Konstantin attackiert. Licinius wird verletzt. Er zurückkehrt nach Byzantien.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
and then actually manages to outmaneuver Constantine, and even though he doesn't win a battle, when he withdraws, he places himself over Constantine's lines of communication, which forces Constantine to negotiate.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
And so a peace treaty is made, whereby Constantine and Licinius will remain co-emperors, their eldest sons will be their deputy emperors, and Constantine will get one quarter of the empire of Licinius. So if you think about the Empire really being divided up into 12, well really 16 parts, Constantine is now going to be Emperor of 9 parts and Licinius of 7 parts.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Nein, das ist es sicher nicht. Ich meine, der gefährlichste Job, den man haben kann, ist, mit Konstantin zu sprechen. Bis jetzt hat er einen Bruder, einen Vater und war in Krieg mit dem anderen Bruder.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
I think that what Constantine exploits in Licinius is that Licinius moves a little bit more slowly than he does. Wenn wir schauen, wo der erste Kampf bei Kibblei stattfand, ist Konstantinus weit über der Grenze zu Lysinius als Teil des Empires.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Lysinius hatte viel Warnung, aber wie es mit Maximinus in der vorherigen Zivilwahl war, hatte Maximinus seine Armee in Lysinius als Teil des Empires, bevor Lysinius reagierte. Und ich denke, Konstantinus schaut sich da hin und sagt, er ist ein wenig langsam auf dem Abzug. We can move a bit faster than he does.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
The descriptions of the battles, and it's a little hard to know how accurate these are, but there are some fairly extensive descriptions of the campaign. And we can see Constantine launching some quite daring attacks with his cavalry around the flanks of Licinius' army. He tries to be far more mobile than Licinius is.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Well, the situation settles down for a while, seven years, until 324, when Constantine will attack again. And at this point, it's a very heavily prepared campaign. He has greater resources than Licinius does at this point, and he exploits them.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
But again, it's interesting that what he does initially is he gets Licinius to fight on the European side of the Bosphorus, where Constantine has the advantage. Und dann, wenn er ihn zurückführt und Konstantin jetzt die Bosporus übernimmt, hat Konstantin eine gut vorbereitete Fliege, die er nutzen kann. Er wird von seinem Sohn, von seinem eigenen ersten Verheirat, Christus, übernommen.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Wiederum, es ist eine Familienaffäre mit Konstantin hier. And he seems to be, again, able to land the army where Licinius isn't expecting him. And it's not an easy matter. Any kind of amphibious operation is going to be complicated, and antiquity is now.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
But again, there's a lot of very good intelligence work that's going on, seeing where Licinius is, and I think being able to count on the fact that Licinius is going to react more slowly than would be advisable. So... Konstantin schlägt dann den letzten Krieg auf, Lysinius, an Krasopolis, auf seiner Seite der Strahlen.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und dann geht Lysinius zurück nach Nicomedia, das Kapitol von Diocletian, und dort negotiert seine Frau seinen Verabschiedung zu Konstantin.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Ich meine, Konstantin war ein Mann, der wusste, wie man seine heiligen Betten hängen kann, was nicht etwas ist, was man in Eusebius' Biografie finden würde.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Genau, genau. Was er von Diocletian gelernt hat, glaube ich, war, wie man regieren kann, wie man sich als König bewegen kann. Was er nicht tun würde, und wir sehen das in seiner Beziehung zu seinen Senior-Subordinaten, ist, dass er ein Mann ist, der nicht viel Aufmerksamkeit hat. Und wobei Diocletian von der Kommitee regiert, sieht Konstantin sich als Chef-Exekutiv.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und er wird den Mitgliedern der Kommitee sagen, was sie tun sollen. Aber ich glaube, was Diocletian gesehen hat, ist, dass die Art und Weise, um den Imperialsitz zu schützen, Co-Verteidigte zu erschaffen. Denn der Imperium wurde seit Jahrzehnten entdeckt und verbreitet, bevor er den Thron erhielt. Und um sich selbst zu schützen, braucht er Deputat-Empereure, die er vertrauen kann.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Constantine conversely sees that the empire was reunited by Diocletian and that Constantine's style of government is to tell people what to do. And he is very happy to sit on top of a college of efficient, experienced senior administrators who serve as Praetorian Prefects for a very long period of time in many cases. But it is a much more top-down approach than Diocletian's.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
This is the city of Diocletian. It's the city of Maximinus, the city of Licinius. It is not the city of Constantine. The palace is full of statues. We've now discovered the imperial palace at Nicomedia. It's one of the great new discoveries of the last decade. And there we have sculptures of Diocletian and Maximian hugging each other. This is really not Constantine's kind of place.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
And he's come to appreciate Byzantium as a very strong city. Es hat sich gegen seine Armeen gehalten. Er wusste, dass es sich seit einem langen Zeitpunkt in einer vorherigen Zivilwahl vor mehr als einem Jahrhundert gehalten hat. Es hatte einige der Abenteuer einer imperialen Stadt. Und so hat er einfach gesagt, nein, das wird meine Stadt sein.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Yes, the basic pagan sources come from the Imperial Palace. These are a series of speeches in praise of Constantine. And we can trace the way that he wanted to be seen by his subjects through the way the story of his life is changed in these speeches. This especially, of course, has to deal with his relationship with his father-in-law, who he hung for rebellion in 310.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und es wird Konstantinopel genannt, weil es die Stadt ist, die meinen Sieg, denke ich, so viel wie alles andere feiert. Other people might be more tempted to give a city the name like Nicopolis, which is Victory City or something like that, but for Constantin, it's Constantinople.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
It takes a long time to build the city, but it is very much seen as a capital on a par with the other capital cities of the empire. At this point you have Trier, you have Milan, you have Rome, you have Sirmium, you have Nicomedia, you have Antioch. All these places have imperial palaces. So Constantine City is going to have that.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Es wird, wie Sie heute sehen, wenn Sie in Istanbul gehen, den großen Hippodrom, der vor dem Palast läuft, der blaue Moskau ist jetzt auf dem Topf des Imperialen Palastes, und es wird einen Zirkus haben. Und dann, an dem anderen hohen Punkt in der Stadt, wenn Sie aus dem Palast schauen, werden Sie den großen Mausoleum von Konstantin selbst haben.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und das ist visuell, wenn man sich die Stadt von einer Seite auf die andere schaut, dann hat man den Imperialen Palast zu dem Imperialen Mausoleum. Also wenn man in die Bosphorus kommt, dann sieht man Konstantin literally von einem Ende auf den anderen.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Absolut. Es gibt Tempel in Konstantinopel und sie sind offen, wenn er stirbt. Unter seinen Führenden werden sie in Kirchen transformiert und so weiter. Aber sie sind immer noch offen, wenn er stirbt. Aber das allerwichtigste Dokument ist wirklich aus dem letzten Jahr des Lebens von Konstantin, das ist ein Brief von der Stadt Spello in Italien. Ein absolut wunderschöner Ort.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Wenn Sie da heute gehen, können Sie die Räume eines kleinen Amphitheaters sehen, sowie die Beschreibung dieses langen Briefes, And what the people of Spello, or Hispelum as it was named in the past, wanted was to set up a temple of the imperial cult. and to have their own festival so they don't have to go over to their neighbors and celebrate a festival every year somewhere else.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
And in this case, the Victorian Prefect for Constantine writes back, says, sure, yeah, he's writing in Constantine's name. Absolutely, we're delighted to have a temple erected. Just no sacrifice. And this would be, I mean, it's clear that Constantine would not allow public sacrifice to himself. It seems, depending on how you read Eusebius, that he
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
So it's his successors which, as I say, takes the more, I guess, non-tolerant step of going further with the embracing of Christian as the prime religion. Genau. Und ich denke, einige der Botschaften hier sind tatsächlich in Eusebius' Leben von Konstantin, der Konstantin als viel mehr christlicher als Konstantin war.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Aber Konstantins Sohn, Konstantius II., ist ein sehr gewaltiger Christ und ist sehr glücklich, Er ist der Vater, den Eusebius ihm gesagt hat, dass er Konstantin war. Und die Söhne von Konstantin justifizieren ihre schärfere Politik gegenüber den Pagänen, indem sie sagen, dass es wirklich ihre Vaters Politik ist.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Okay, well, there are ultimately four sons of Constantine. The oldest is Crispus.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Who is the son of Constantine's first wife, Minervina, and who was clearly a little baby when Constantine became emperor. And he is raised very much to be the heir apparent. And in 326 things go really, really badly wrong. Here's another case. You don't want to be too close to Constantine. Now, there was a very nasty story told later by pagan sources about the conversion of Constantine.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Because nobody really knew when he converted, you see. So everybody makes up their own story. And according to this story, Fausta tried to seduce Crispus. This is a very old story going back to the Hippolytus. Und Crispus sagt, nein, nein, ich werde nicht mit dir schlafen. Und er geht nach Konstantinus und sagt, Crispus hat versucht, mich zu töten. Konstantinus verurteilt ihn.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
And so, you know, we've got to be very careful around that one. Other people, he doesn't mention the previous emperors, Diocletian at all. Then in the latter panegyric, there's some, the last of them, there's some very negative commentary on his deceased brother-in-law, who, of course, he killed at the Battle of the Million Bridge. You basically don't want to be
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und dann findet er die Wahrheit. Durch Helena, seine Mutter, sagt er, es ist wirklich, es ist alles Faustas Schuld. Und so schlägt er sie in ein überheatetes Badhaus und sie sterben. Also in einem Sommer verurteilt er seine Frau und seinen ältesten Sohn. Im Punkt der Fakten ist es immer noch sehr dramatisch, aber ein bisschen weniger dramatisch als das. Crispus wird in 326 verurteilt.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Crispus had been in command in the West. And there are other suggestions that a number of Western officials could see where things are going. I can see that Constantine is moving the center of government to the east. And there is some suggestion that maybe we need to reestablish a stronger center in the west.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
The interesting thing is that this is also the 20th anniversary of Constantine's accession. So it's hard to say whether or not people have a lot of discussion. Is there a change in structure? Maybe Crispus should become co-Augustus or something is happening. Because another source tells us that senior officials were executed at this time.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Wir werden von einer weniger geistigen Suche erzählt, dass Crispus tatsächlich versucht und in den Balkanern erzeugt wurde. Und dass Ammianus Marcellinus, wenn er die Geschichte erzählt, keine Beweise hat, dass Fausta damit nichts zu tun hat. Wir werden auch davon erzählt, dass Fausta dieses Event seit ein paar Jahren auslöste.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Aber ihre Gesichter wurden von der Koinage ab dem Ende von 326 entfernt. Und klar ist, dass sie und Konstantin an diesem Punkt am Anfang sind. Eine andere Sache in dieser Beziehung ist, dass Fausta immer mit Konstantin vertreten war. Es gibt also keinen Weg, dass die Geschichte von Weihnachten wahr sein könnte, weil er in Trier ist und sie mit Konstantin.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Sie ist sicherlich nicht in Rom, wenn das passiert. Ein offensichtlicher Effekt davon ist der Fakt, dass sie sehr viele Kinder hat. in diesen Jahren, und es ist klar eine sehr passionierte Beziehung zwischen den beiden. Aber Fausta war sehr jung, als sie Constantine verheiratet hat. Sie war acht Jahre alt. Es war eine politische Verheiratung.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Sie war ungefähr der gleiche Art wie Crispus, denke ich. Und ich habe den Eindruck, dass die beiden in einer Art und Weise zusammengewachsen sind im Imperialen Palast. Und ich habe ein starkes Gefühl, dass sie Constantine genau wusste, was sie über die Exekution ihres nahen Freundes gedacht hat. Und es gab einen Splitt dort, der nie geheilt wurde und sie starb ein paar Jahre später.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Es gibt eine interessante Geschichte über Konstantins Sarcophagus. Und die Geschichte ist, dass nachdem er starb, die Beine von Fausta nach Konstantinopel gebracht wurden und mit ihm vermischt wurden. Auch sehr beeindruckend ist, dass Konstantin nie wieder verheiratet wurde. Und es gibt viel Beweise, dass er sehr viel den matrimonialen Zustand genossen hat.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und so kriegst du den Sinn von jemandem, der bemerkt hat, dass er seine Angst besser bekommen hat. Es ist eine sehr schwierige Geschichte. Es gibt klar keine romänischen Tabellen, die uns das erzählen. Aber die Beweise zeigen, dass es eine große Menge von Rethinkungen gab, glaube ich, an Konstantins Part.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Married, you know, related to constantly by marriage at all. But he paints his then other brother-in-law, Licinius, in this speech very much as a sort of suggestion that brothers-in-law need to know how to behave. Und die Botschaft da über Licinius ist, glaube ich, sehr klar. Und dann haben wir einen außerordentlichen Legislaturperiode.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Constantine would want to have been remembered as, in fact, he described himself. The greatest. Victor in war God's representative on earth. This was not a man given to modesty. He saw himself competing with all of the emperors in the past and he wanted to be seen as the one who'd done the best job.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
I think that Constantine's vision probably fairly limited to other emperors. Though you've mentioned Alexander the Great to him. He said, oh yeah, him too. And there's Julius Caesar before that. I'm better than him.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Das ist richtig. Konstantin, der König. Wobei der Titel zeigt, was ich tun möchte, ist, Konstantin zu zeigen, wie er war. Als König zuerst, der dann einen enormen Einfluss hatte auf die Geschichte von Europa, die ihn folgte.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und wir können wirklich einen Sinn für Konstantins Persönlichkeit bekommen. Nicht nur, wie ich gerade gesagt habe, den heiligen Betten zu hegen. Aber auch, es gibt Momente, in denen er klar sehr unabhängig ist mit seinen Senior-Subordinaten. And he basically said, why didn't you do this? Get on with it. And so we do get this sense of the real personality coming through some of this legislation.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
And we know that there's some question, did the emperor really write this? Did he know this? Was it his secretary? But when we concentrate on the documents which are written to the most senior officials in the empire, you can be pretty sure that the emperor is sitting there dictating this. And you can sort of see him pacing back and forth
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
They very much are in the case of these letters to the senior officials. And they all tell a story because somebody's got a problem and they've written to the emperor and the emperor is responding to the problem. And you can get a sort of sense of consistency in his approach here. I mean, he was a man who valued efficiency enormously. And we can see him coming back to these points again and again.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und dann, wenn wir das zu dem Rekord, den wir haben, von Konstantin in der Militärsphäre, wenn wir das zu dem Rekord, den wir haben, von Konstantin in der Militärsphäre, Und das würde ihm eine gewisse Anzahl von Schwierigkeiten in seinem Leben verursachen.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Konstantin wurde in eine Welt von unglaublich schnellen Veränderungen geboren. His father was a senior official, married his mother, Helena, who was probably a fairly well-off woman from what we would now think of as Western Turkey. Her home city was later renamed Helenopolis in her honor. There are later stories, of course, that Helena was a barmaid.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und dass Konstantinus sie auf die Seite gekriegt hat. Und das ist einfach nicht wahr. Konstantinus war der legitime Sohn von Konstantinus durch eine legitime Beziehung. Und das ist, warum er von Konstantinus in 305 zurückgekriegt und in die Linie der Verbindung gelegt wurde.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
But Constantius himself, a very, very able general, was promoted to be deputy emperor by Maximian, who would later also become Constantine's father-in-law. And at that point he had to divorce Helena and marry a daughter of Maximian. And at that point, Constantine and Helena are sort of making their way in the world. Constantine is sent to the court of Diocletian.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
That's in Nicomedia, get him away from his father. He grows up there, has a career as a sort of military officer, mid-level military officer. He tells us at various times that he accompanied Diocletian to Egypt. He served with Galerius in the great campaign against the Persians, where the Romans... Er hat einen riesigen Desaster verursacht, den sie in 260 Jahren verursacht haben.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Er hat die Balance der Macht auf der Frontier verändert. Ich glaube, die Einfluss auf sein Leben kam von Diocletian und Galerius, weil das die Leute waren, die er in seinen Teenages beobachtete. Und Diocletian ist eine enorm starke Persönlichkeit selbst. Ich meine, hier ist ein Mann, der wiederum ein mittlerer Officer war.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Er wird auf dem Thron des Generalstaffes gelegt, weil wer den Imperator will, ist eine Todessentenz an diesem Punkt. Wenn man zurückgeht zu 238, hat man den Imperator Maximilian, der von seinen Männern getötet wurde. Seine zwei immediate Erfolgspersonen, Pupianus und Balbinus, wurden von ihren Männern getötet. Gordion III wurde von seinen Männern getötet. Philip the Arab, murdered in a revolt.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Decius dies in battle. Valerian is captured by the Persians. Aurelian, the most successful of these people, murdered by his men. So Diocletian takes off and says, how am I going to fix this? How am I going to survive? And he manages it. Und dann, you know, this astonishing ceremony in May of 305. One of the things that Diocletian established is that emperors wear purple cloaks.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Nobody else wears the purple cloak. And he established an imperial image, a very square bearded chap, you know. But he gets up on the platform outside of his capital at Nicomedia. He takes off the purple cloak, drapes it over the shoulders of the new Caesar, walks down off the platform and far better than the President of the United States recently, gets into a cart and drives off into retirement.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
And it's an extraordinary thing to think, if you're Constantine, this is what you're watching. How did this man reshape the Roman Empire? What did he do right? What did he do wrong? And a lot of what we see Constantine doing is a dialogue with Diocletian.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
I think it absolutely does, because he really knew the imperial system from the bottom up, from the inside out. He also, I think, recognized the personalities he was dealing with. When he takes the throne in 305... Er befindet sich direkt mit Galerius, auf dem er geholfen hat. Aber ich denke, er weiß genug über Galerius, dass er damit wegkommen kann.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und die Mitarbeiter, die er treffen kann, wenn er in 305 wiederkommt, He is able to establish himself as somebody they're going to trust. It is their necks that are going to be on the line if they don't do what Galerius expects them to do, which is allow the deputy that Constantius didn't want, Severus, to become the senior emperor. They don't want that.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
But Constantine has really taught them that they can trust him to be a good manager and a good leader. And I think he also realized that Galerius is somewhat risk-averse. And so that if they do it right, they're going to get away with it.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Well, he'd never been there, probably. I mean, we wouldn't know if he had been a little boy. But he's in York, on the staff of his father, and they're on the campaign against tribes north of the Wall. I mean, this is something that happens from time to time. As the Wall fails, the Emperor's got to go up there and do something about it.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Most likely he would have served as a liaison between his father and other senior officials at that point. But it's also, I think, important to him that the whole organization is up there at this time and they make this radical decision when Constantius dies, which I think Constantius, he knew that he wasn't in good health when he insisted that his son come back to him.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
God knows, maybe he got report cards from the guys in the East saying, yeah, the kid's doing well, you can trust him. But it's that sort of moment of having everybody together in York that means that this coup can work.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
The immediate challenge he faces is to control the passes over the Alps so that Severus can't get at him. And so he has to move with extraordinary speed, really getting his people in position. Bevor eine Art von Response aus dem Süden kommt, weil Severus, wie wir wissen, war in Norditalien, rund um Milan. Er hatte die Armee, die unter Maximilian arbeitete, um ihn herum.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Er könnte potenziell ziemlich schnell in Südfranz gehen, wenn das der Fall war. Also musste er auch ziemlich sicher sein. dass Constantius seine eigenen Offiziere, die von Nordfranz nach Südfranz gehen, loyal zu dem Regime sein würden. Und er beginnt als eine Art Negotiation. Ich werde nur Caesar sein, ich werde nicht der Senior Augustus sein.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Wir lassen dich Augustus Galerius sein, du musst nur dieses Verhältnis hier akzeptieren. Das Interessante hier ist, dass Severus mit diesem Problem verlassen ist. Kann er sich im Sommer über die Alpen bringen, um Konstantin anzunehmen? Denn es dauert ein paar Wochen, bis die Nachrichten kommen, Ende Juli. Wir kommen in den August.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und wenn du die Armee zusammenbringst, wird es Oktober, November sein. Und du willst nicht über die Alpen wandern, an dem Zeitpunkt. Also wird Konstantin die Möglichkeit nehmen,
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Genau, das ist es, was er tun will, sobald er Emporer wird, seine Position zu konsolidieren. Er wird von Britannien nach Trier zurückgehen, was sein Hauptkapital bleibt, bis, naja, sogar nachdem er Rom in 312 nimmt, geht er zurück nach Trier.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
It's also there where he will, as a way of consolidating his power, lead campaigns across the Rhine to prove to his generals that he really is the right person to have here. Constantine was never afraid of exemplary brutality. I mean, this is another thing that he learned from Diocletian.
The Ancients
Emperor Constantine
Und er fängt ein paar Könige der Franken an, die man normalerweise lassen würde, um sie zu bezahlen, um ihre Leute zu beheben. Stattdessen zieht er sie an die Läufer und Schreier. Das ist brutal, nass. Ja, das ist der andere Seite von Konstantin, der extrem brutal ist, wenn er sieht, dass es einen Grund dafür gibt. Und die Erinnerung an seine Erzeugung der Frankischen Könige wird durchgebracht.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And it suffered so much under the Assyrians that this new dynasty, who we call ruling over the Neo-Babylonian world, an empire which stretched to Iran and out into north of Egypt and also the whole of the Levant, they started to beautify it. They had no worries about money because it was flooding in from the conquered territories and also from the spoils of war.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Well, we're talking right the way up to the top of Syria, right the way down to the north of Egypt and across all of the Middle East to Iran as well. Perhaps the most significant... series of conquests, where the conquests that took place in the Levant, in what is now Israel-Palestine.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So the destruction of Jerusalem, for instance, the plundering of the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem, and the goods that poured into Babylon from that alone, you know, helped pay for these huge, huge building works, not only ziggurats, but also new royal palaces, new gates, the famous Ishtar Gate is created at this period, all in this very distinctive blue glazed brick.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Yeah, absolutely. The walls themselves are about 11 miles around, for instance. You could drive two sets of chariots at the top of the walls. I mean, this was huge. It was a metropolis, a true great city, long before Rome, before Alexandria. there was Babylon. And right in the heart of this is the religious
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
the religious pulse of the whole thing, sits in the city center with these two temples belonging to the god Marduk. Marduk was the Babylonian god par excellence. There had been other gods who'd come and gone, but Marduk, he was considered to be the great wind god. He defeated the demons at the dawn of time, Tiamat and her evil band. He was wise.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
He was considered to have umpteen eyes and many ears. So he saw everything. He heard everything. And he was believed to reside in his temples there. So he has two temples, one of which is called the Entem Anuki. biggest temple in Babylon. The name means the foundations of the heaven and the earth. So that really gives us a good example of Babylonian thinking on this ziggurat.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
It was the connecting points between our mortal existence and the existence of the gods up there. And this is where the cult of Marduk was continued every day. A myriad of priests would be going in there to placate the god. And ancient Babylonian religion worked in that kind of way. You kind of almost made sacrifice. You made your prayers. You incensed and clothed the statues.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
You fed the statues with food, almost as a preemptive strike. Don't do anything bad to us because we do all these really good things for you. So it was a very important ritual. role that the priests of Babylon had to maintain this. So what we know of this great ziggurat, well, first of all, we can see it in the ground. We can still see the outline of the ziggurat today.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So if you go on Google Maps, you zoom in, you can still see very clearly the outline of the ziggurat. And when archaeologists discovered this, essentially now, of course, it's all gone apart from the kind of bitter brickwork at the bottom. But we can measure it. And it measures 96 by 96 meters around, huge. And it's said to have... built up 96 metres as well.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
This is the mother load, it really is. And it's one thing that both Nebuchadnezzar and his father were building on top of a pile of rubble that had been left by the Assyrians. So there had always been a site for worship of Marduk there, but they decided to renew their efforts with it. And the Babylonians were known throughout antiquity as the master brick bakers. And they used two forms of brick.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
They used simple baked brick in the sun to do the foundation work, most of the stuff. But then they had a skill at doing glazed brickwork as well. So beautiful. And of course, they opt for this beautiful sort of lapis lazuli blue as an outer coating. So this ziggurat must have just shone. You must have seen it for miles and miles and miles around.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And coming down from this ziggurat, there was a processional way, again, of blue brickwork with other raised brickwork of lions lining the whole thing up. And then that went to the Ishtar Gate. So this was a monumental processional way which led to this huge ziggurat, one scene never forgotten without any doubt.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Not everybody thinks that, but I am one of those who does think that. And I think it's because we've got to stretch our timeline a little bit to understand this.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Yeah, so 700 BC, and by 600 BC, it's complete, it's finished, it's there.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
How can it possibly be the ziggurat when we're talking a book set in 3000 BC, but now we're at 700 BC? Well, the truth of the matter is this, of course. The book of Genesis, like many of the early Pentateuch in the Bible, so Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, these were all very late compositions of the Hebrew Bible.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
The order in which we get the books of the Hebrew Bible is not the order in which they were written. The books of Genesis, the book of Genesis and the others, the Exodus story of Moses and so forth, These were all written by Jews in exile in Babylon. In the middle of the sixth century, Jerusalem fell and the Babylonians were taken en masse into captivity.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Certainly when I say en masse, all of the elites, the elite Jews, so the king, his family, the priests, the scribes, those who had the knowledge of Hebrew history and Hebrew ritual were suddenly taken to this new city. And in fact, we know more now about the Jewish settlement in Babylon than we ever did. So back in the 1990s, we discovered a big hoard of cuneiform documents written in Akkadian.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And they are all from Jewish families who have settled in Babylonia. And in fact, they all come from one particular area just outside Babylon, which is called Al Yehud, Jew town, Jewish town. It was like a ghetto for Jewish settlers there. And while many of them seem to have maintained something of the Hebrew faith, whatever that was at the time, many of them became completely Babylonianized.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
They marry Babylonian women, they take Babylonian names, or at least they take Babylonian and Hebrew names. So we see a lot of assimilation going on. So this is giving us a new picture of this exile in Babylon because otherwise what we're dealing with is things like the books of Jeremiah, the books of Ezekiel, the prophets who talk about the Babylonian exile of the Jews and how traumatic it was.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's all too easy to kind of skirt over the relationship between the text of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and the history and archaeology of ancient Iraq. But I think with the Tower of Babel, the two do begin to align themselves.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And indeed it was traumatic for them. ripped away from their homeland, ripped away from their God, but they actually, it seems now, that some people coped a lot better than others. So some people assimilated, some people couldn't quite assimilate very easily. So if we were to just look at, say, the evidence that we find in the book of Psalms, very famously, Psalm 119,
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
37, by the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept, and our tormentors, the Babylonians, said to us, sing us some songs of Zion. How can we sing these songs when we are in a foreign land? It's a Babylonian period psalm. It was written during the exile. It's all about how can we talk about God when we are no longer in his presence? Because
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
When the Jerusalem temple was destroyed, as far as the Jews believed, God had disappeared. God was absent from their lives. So they were in this foreign place without their God anymore. So if we only had the Psalms and the Hebrew Bible to go on, we would think this is a whole people in trauma.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
But also now we've got the Jewish text from Babylonia saying, well, actually, some of them were all right. But it comes down to this, doesn't it? When we're far away from home and we want to remember who we are as a people, we need to start thinking about our histories. And there wasn't a written history of the Jews at this period at all.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So the scribes of that period start writing a national history for themselves. So they write the story of Moses and the Exodus in the hope, of course, that they'll go home one day from Babylon and have a second Exodus from captivity as well. They start writing the stories of Jacob, of Isaac, of Joseph. even of, of course, the Garden of Eden, paradisos, that's a Persian word.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Absolutely, a huge, huge thing. Atahasis, the story of the flood in Babylon. So essentially, this kind of formative, what we might call prehistory of the Israelites is formulated and set down in now what we would think of as the Holy Scriptures in the period of the Jewish exile in Babylon.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So all around them, the Jewish scribes who are writing this world is also incorporating, of course, their current experiences too. So, for instance, this is why God in this section of Genesis comes down from the ziggurat, because that's what Babylonian gods did. So they're picking up on these things. The idea of God's omnipotence,
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And omniscience is something which is inherited from the god Marduk, for instance. The Hebrew god had never had those attributes before. This is all something that's been put together by these scribes who are trying to deal with both their exile, but also what's around them. And certainly, the story of the Tower of Babel, the Tower of Babylon, gets written into that narrative importantly there.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And in fact, when archaeologists first started to go to the Middle East, to Iraq, part of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, they kind of went with a Bible in one hand and a shovel in the other, you know, and they were determined that whatever they dug up was going to map on to the Bible. And so when early archaeologists in the late 1840s, 1850s to the 70s were wandering around,
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Because what the Jews want, of course, is for the time to come when they will be freed from this place. And the whole essence of that text in Genesis 10 is that there will be a time when they will be scattered again. People will go back to their original homes. There will be a time. And this is written, though, as a proto-history.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
as a myth, essentially, which is written into a canonical history of the Jews of that period. So I think it's important that whenever We try to read the Bible. I'm a man of faith. I'm a priest. So I have had to train myself over the years to read this as a religious text with meaning and substance for me.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
But also as a historian, I have to look at it in also a cold kind of way and come to terms with it in those ways. Actually, when I do that, my faith is only increased. In fact, it's turned out that way, I'm glad to say. Yeah, so we have to remember that the Hebrew Bible in itself is a construction. And the Bible as we have it now, the Old Testament as we have it now, doesn't really get fixed.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
It doesn't stop moving around until about the first century B.C., It's a very new text when it comes to antiquity.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Absolutely. I think you've hit the nail on the head. And it's certainly my belief that's what's going on there. They are trying to deal, you know, they're dealing with a real life, what's around them.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And I think that there's hostilities between the two groups of Jews who are living there, those who have assimilated well into Babylon and those who are yearning for home and don't want anything to do with Babylon. And I think part of the reaction that we have in the story of the Tower of Babel is against those who are too content to be here as well. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So it's interesting because we have two big prophetic books written at this time as well. One of them in Israel, still remains in Israel, people who were still there. And the other in Babylon itself. The book of Jeremiah is written in Jerusalem. The book of Ezekiel is written in Babylon. And in the book of Ezekiel, the prophet says all the time,
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
relax, enjoy it, enjoy it, marry a Babylonian woman, you know, do well, make well for yourself. And he actually prophesied and said, God says, make businesses, settle down here, enjoy. Back in Jerusalem, at the same period, Jeremiah is saying, woe to Babylon, may she burn, may she fall. And I think what the Hebrew scribes are doing, basically these are Jeremiah followers,
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
that they are anticipating the fall of this wicked city after all. Whereas the reality now we know is a lot more laissez-faire than that.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Iraq, obviously they could see these remains of these enormous mud brick structures that are still surviving. So almost immediately archaeologists began to say, ah, we have discovered the Tower of Babel. And there were many contenders. in fact, in the first sort of hundred years of archaeology in that part of the world for the actual tower.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And I think that's the real joy of dealing with cuneiform evidence in particular, because we're not necessarily getting literary masterworks all the time, but what we do get are personal letters from dad to the eldest son, or we get tax returns, as dull as it Sounds, they are actually fabulous.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
The study of Mesopotamia is alive and vital and it's adding to our knowledge of antiquity and how to be human all the time as well. But what's fascinating about Babylon in the biblical tradition, because I suppose that's how most of us then have inherited Babylon. And as I said, the first archaeologists went out there with their spades and Bibles.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
I suppose that the story of Babylon doesn't just stop when the Jews go home from exile. First of all, it's important to say that many thousands of Jewish families stayed in Babylon. And the great Babylonian scholarship that developed in the late antique period all comes from Babylon. So Babylon always was a huge Jewish center and remained so until the 1940s and 1950s.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
In fact, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when many of the Jews of Babylon left. But the Jewish presence in Babylon has always been enormous. And so all of the great rabbinic scholarship on the Hebrew Bible was written in Babylon. over the centuries after its demise as a great centre.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Huge in Babylon. Massive. Got a goddess for beer. You've also got a goddess for hangovers as well, which is great.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And that must have been the Jewish experience in Babylon. So do you think that's, is Babylon cosmopolitan? So cosmopolitan. So, you know, the Jews who came there and, you know, only had their bit of Hebrew to go with, suddenly we're hearing, you know, Akkadian, bits of Hittite, Hurrian, Greek, Persian, all of this mix was going on in Babylon as multicultural as London is today, essentially.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
That's what we need to try to get into our minds. And I think that was kind of unnerving the Jewish elite, the scribes and so forth as well, they didn't feel comfortable with any of that. And I think that gets filtered into this story as well.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
I guess so. I mean, we don't really know the process by which the scribes created the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible. But certainly the story of the Tower of Babylon is found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. So, you know, it's canonical by the first century BCE, certainly.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
I don't think it's ever really, we know what it was, but I don't think it doesn't exist any longer. So what we've got now, of course, is just the text really to go with. And I've luckily have it here by my side.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
But it has a life well beyond even that, because Babylon rears its head again in the Greek New Testament as well. And this is where it begins to perhaps have more relevance to the modern world, you know, because this is how we kind of know it more. So, you know, the book of Revelation.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So sometime, imagine Ephesus, 90 CE. So about 90 CE, first at the end of the first century in Ephesus, there's a man called John, probably not the author of the Gospel of John, but possibly from the school of thought of John. He's living on an island of Patmos. He's been exiled there, a little Greek island today. But he...
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
lived for a long time and knows Christians who are based in Ephesus, big, big city in Asia Minor. And the Ephesian Christians are, like many of the churches of Asia Minor, are
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
surreptitiously pushing against the roman empire and its domination because essentially what the book of revelation is about you know revelation literally um it means the unveiling so it's the unveiling of a truth and the truth is for john is that there is only room for one empire And that's the empire of Jesus Christ, not the empire of the Romans.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And certainly not, exactly. Certainly not the Roman Emperor, who at this point was Domitian, who was pretty mad on self-aggrandizement and being called a god and so forth. So very subtly in the New Testament, we find a
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
push back against Roman imperialism essentially they have to do it subtly because of course there's every chance of persecution and we've already seen under Nero what you know persecution of Christians can do so what John and other writers like him do at the time is that they use the image of Babylon it's re-utilized from the Old Testament now and it's used as a metaphor for Rome
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So in the book of Revelation, when we learn about the whore of Babylon, for instance, riding upon the back of the great beast, what we're dealing with there, of course, is the emperor of Rome riding the empire, the Roman empire itself. So Babylon becomes the shorthand for Rome all the way through the book of Revelation. If you read it with that code in mind constantly, so the beast itself,
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Rome has seven heads, so the seven hills of Rome and so forth. And the more you read Revelation with this anti-Roman imperialist thought, the more apparent it becomes. So Babylon is kind of reactivated In the Christian mind, that old Jewish paradigm of the wickedness of Babylon and everything that the tower represented is brought back into play again with Rome.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And of course, Rome is therefore cast as a second Babylon. And what happens to Babylon? Well, it falls eventually. It disappears to dust. And this is what the Christians are saying in this unveiling of a new truth. This is what is going to happen to Rome in its turn. It's going to follow the way of Babylon too.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So it's a very brief account. It's only nine verses in the 10th chapter of the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. I'll read it to you. If you know it, please join in. Now, the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
They use it constantly. Absolutely. Then, of course, there's another afterlife to this, too. Because by the time we get into the late Middle Ages and into the early 16th century... Renaissance time. Yeah, yeah. And especially during the European Reformation. The image of Babylon is once more reactivated by the Protestant reformers.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So now the second Rome, papal Rome, is also cast as another Babylon as well. So the papal throne is the throne of Satan, for instance. The great whore is now the pope and so forth. And this all comes to a head in two particular ways, this kind of utilization of Babylon in this way, in Christian understanding. In the Sermon of Martin Luther, but also in Northern European art of this period.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Because from about the 1540s up until the 1580s, there is a plethora of images, paintings and also prints, of what else but the Tower of Babel. It becomes one of the most important art subjects in Northern European painting. And many of you will probably know that Bruegel the Elder, Peter Bruegel the Elder in particular, created three versions of the Tower of Babel.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
The best known today is a large painting that he created in 1567, which is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Yeah, which comes up straight away. And it's really fascinating, you know, because Bruegel himself trained as an artist in Rome. So when he returns home and he wants to paint this antique scene of the Tower of Babel, he has Rome in his mind straight away. So his Tower of Babel is round. It's not a square ziggurat. It's round, but on seven layers, like a kind of wedding cake, really.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And it's kind of unfinished. It's got a big split in it. It's full of arches that go around. And of course, what's that based on? Well, it's based on the Colosseum. So he sees the ruins of the Colosseum, and he thinks, OK, this must be the Roman Babel. And this is what he paints.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And it's really fascinating the way he does it as well, because first of all, just as in Genesis, it's a work of hubris by humans, because the scale of it is enormous. When you look at the painting, the city of Babylon around, which is his Antwerp, it's tiny, tiny diminutive little figures, vast. And it's unfinished.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And even the bits that have been finished have been finished so long ago that they've started to crumble and they're being patched up while they haven't even started the beginning of the end of the top of the tower yet. So it's constant work in progress as a way, man laboring away with his own vanities to build this project.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And in the front of it is a figure of a king with his crown on, the king of Babylon, the king of Rome, the pope. So all of this comes together perfectly in this visualization of what a corrupt monarchy, a corrupt state, a defunct religion, and a wicked urban center is all about. So that image that we have of Babylon and the tower just keeps on going, keeps on going.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Yeah, of course. So Adam Douglas, in his genius, when he thought about this idea that how can we communicate together, because we're all living in a Babel world, unless you put the hours in and learn another language. But he came up with the idea of the Babelfish. So it's a little silver fish which you can just insert in your ear, and that will give you the power to understand anybody.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And said one to the other, come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. And let us make a name for ourselves. Otherwise, we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So it's the reverse of the Tower of Babel effect, and he calls it the Babel fish, of course. And it's no coincidence, isn't it, that language learning sites and stuff are still called Babel or Babel today. So that kind of legacy is absolutely still with us today.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Align or you can look to alongside Archaeology to make in my opinion make it more available to more and more people most definitely and I think it's a real sad fact that we've created this very artificial divide between ancient history and biblical studies because the Bible the Hebrew Bible the New Testament it is another source of It's an ancient historical source.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
I teach it as easily and as readily as I teach Gilgamesh or as I teach Homer. You know, it's just part of the package that I teach to my students because it's important to see this as a holistic one. And the Hebrew Bible doesn't come out of a vacuum. It is part of a Mesopotamian, Persian, Egyptian and later on Greco-Roman world. All of it is being influenced by that.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And all of the books of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, have their agendas which draw on current situations of the author's course.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So the most relevant, I suppose, is one that's forthcoming. So it's one I've just finished writing, and it's called Babylon, the Great City. And that's a history of Babylon from the year Dot until the fall of the Roman Empire. So it's a long durée history. More generally in the area, I've written on Persians, the age of the great kings.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Persia, of course, was part of, dominated Babylon for 300 years. And then more generally, lots of stuff for Asians.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
But the Lord came down, that's an interesting one, the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which mortals had built. And the Lord said, look, they are one people and they have one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose now will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there.
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Tower of Babel
so that they will not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel because the Lord confused the language of the earth and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the earth. There ends the first lesson.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So essentially it's a text which recounts a kind of divide between God and humans. God and let us come down, God and the others who are in heaven, are afraid that these mortals, are going to gain power over him so he's very scared that these human beings have got the nonce to build cities to communicate ideas to one another So will he be redundant in the long run? That's essentially the story.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So he confuses them with multiple languages so that they can no longer communicate and therefore none of these plans will ever come to fruition.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
We're just ten chapters in. Ten chapters. Two of those chapters are on the Adam and Eve story. We've got the chapters about the flood just before this, and then we're into the Tower of Babel. So this is very early on in the structure of the Hebrew Bible.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So, a couple of contenders then, as I say. I think it is real. I think whatever the tower was, there's no doubt that the Jewish, Hebrew scribes were recording the presence of ziggurats, okay? And they are dotted all across. Yeah, so what is this? So a ziggurat is essentially, it's a step pyramid, okay?
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So a very broad base, and another broad base on top, slightly smaller, up, up, up, up, to about maybe six or seven levels. The internal structure of a ziggurat is not like a pyramid. It's dense. It's just packed with rubble. So it's just an outside kind of staircase, really. And the whole purpose was to have a shrine at the very top of the apex. This is where the god was thought to reside.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And essentially what the Mesopotamians, whether the Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, they all believed the same thing. That's These artificial mountains, because Iraq is flat.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
By and large, and also southwestern Iran as well. By and large, it's flat. And so these are artificial mountains. Mountains always played important roles in mythology, of course. And if you haven't got mountains around you, then you're going to build them. So it's just something in human nature, isn't it, to build up, to get closer to the heavens.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So the Babylonians believed that the ziggurat was the place where heaven and earth meets. And in fact, it was the point where a god could step out of the heavens and down onto earth. So it was a divine staircase, essentially, for the gods to come down. And this is exactly what Yahweh, the Hebrew god, does in this reading as well. But woe betide...
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Anybody any mortal who tried to reach up to heaven that way, you know, so it's one-way traffic Only decidedly so but these were the great cult centers of the gods throughout the the Mesopotamian world every every city every town almost had its own ziggurat which was usually dedicated to one or sometimes more gods and
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
In Babylon, for instance, in the great city of Babylon itself, the biggest metropolis on earth by the seventh century BCE, there were two enormous temples, great ziggurats there. One was the place where the god Marduk, who was the supreme god of the Babylonians, he took his rest and his comfort. It was like his own house, if you like.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
But the other one, which was built opposite that, was his state temple. It's like his office, if you like. And it was, without a doubt, one of the biggest structures that the world had ever seen.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
In fact, there's a wonderful Babylonian text which says that when they offer, sacrifice that like that, the gods buzz around like flies. They're really that keen. That's what they believe. That's exactly it. So it's this stairway to God. And you have to build on the high place. And if you think about the Hebrew Bible itself, where does God get seen or spoken to?
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Moses goes up to Mount Horeb or up to Mount Sinai or whatever. So if you're in an environment which doesn't have that natural rock formation, then you've got to build that.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Yeah, the one that caught their eye was at a place called Dur-Kaligalzu, the fortress of King Kaligalzu, which was built in the Kassite period, so about the 12th century BCE. And it's located about 50 miles north of Babylon. Deu Caligalsu was a Babylonian new build. It was like a Milton Keynes of its day. They built it from scratch as a kind of like, you know, an offshoot of the capital.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
Some people have decided it's like, you know, the way in which Paris and Versailles operated. So it was a getaway for the king. And there, there was a huge... ziggurat built and by the end of the 19th century much of its inner core still remains and it towers about even in the 19th century about 30 meters high out of what was possibly 60 meters high I think So it was a biggie.
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Tower of Babel
In the 1980s, under Saddam Hussein, Saddam rebuilt the first platform of it, in fact, with two staircases that go up. And now it's a must-have venue for local weddings. There are lots of brides and grooms have their pictures there. So that, for a long, long time, was a contender. The other one was in Iran, Chogha Zambil, which is still the best preserved ziggurat in the world today.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
I mean, you can still, I mean, if they'd allow you to climb up right to the top of it, it's incredible. But as archaeologists went deeper into Iraq and also as the archaeology itself got more sophisticated, they realized that Babylon itself has more than enough evidence for these ziggurats.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
And don't forget, you know, the Bible is very succinct and very precise in saying this is the tower in Babel. So Babel is just the Hebrew word for Babylon, Babel. Okay, so Hebrew word for Babylon. And Babylon itself, Bilbil or Bilbol in Akkadian means the gate of the gods. So there's an etymological precision in that. It's not a Hebrew scribe just thinking, oh, this could be anywhere.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
The work on language was only slowly developing. So we didn't know what the Babylonians called Babylon. So we have to wait certain generations until all the pieces get put together. There's an interesting thing as well, isn't it? Because for us, the story of the separation of languages and the kind of gobbledygook that comes out of it.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
We're scattered across the face of the earth and no longer can we understand each other. For us in English, babble, babble, works really well, doesn't it? Because you're babbling on about something. It means we're incoherent, we don't know. But actually, that has nothing to do with the naming at all. But it is a deliberate play on an ancient Hebrew word, bilbel, which means to babble. in fact.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
So it's all built into the Hebrew already. So they were playing with Babylon and Babylon as well, which luckily in English we've inherited.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
I've reached out here for an inscription from the reign of King Nabopolassar. So who is Nabopolassar? Nabopolassar is the king who restores power to Babylon at the beginning of the 7th century BC. Babylon was razed to the ground by the Assyrians. Nasty, wicked Assyrians. The Assyrians came down like a wolf from the fold and all of that. They really lay waste to Babylon.
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
In a kind of new nationalist movement at the beginning of the 17th century, Nabalapalasa, Babylonian born and bred king, establishes a new dynasty, and he begins a revitalization campaign for the city of Babylon, and he begins to glorify it. You'll probably know his son better. His son was Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar II. And between them, Nabalapalasa and Nebuchadnezzar
The Ancients
Tower of Babel
This is the golden age of Babylon. Yeah. And one of the reasons why the Assyrians hated it so much, because culturally it was the center of the world. Everything came out of Babylon. Mathematics, astronomy, astrology, literature, music, mythology, you name it. Babylon was the great epicenter, the great almost factory of all of these great cultural movements.
The Ancients
Druids
Druids reappear, but this time they're mostly female and they're prophetesses. Usually they're to prophecy that some oik in a pub is going to become an emperor, and he always does later on. So they're ladies with the second sight, like many a spay wife in Norse and in Highland Scots tradition later. Now, the solution to all this could be that Druid is a word. It's a term.
The Ancients
Druids
And we wouldn't make a fuss about them if the Romans had simply used the Roman term for priest or magician or soothsayer for them. But they use this standalone, unique term. technical term. It seems to be just the regular word in Celtic languages, those of the peoples who had druids, for anybody with an expertise in religion, magic, or spirituality.
The Ancients
Druids
At one end of the spectrum, you have Caesar's college of super sages who get together and basically run the culture. to these alewives and wandering prophetesses who turn up in later Roman literature. And they're all druids because they all have a relationship with magic or with religion. When you look at the medieval Irish literature, overwhelmingly a druid is anybody who works magic.
The Ancients
Druids
Not dealing with religion, it's magic. And indeed, the word for magic in medieval Irish, drídacht, or dreidecht, there are two versions, just means druidcraft.
The Ancients
Druids
You're spot on, Tristan. Europeans, later Europeans, don't always need druids. Medieval Europeans didn't need them at all, apart from the medieval Irish, who made them heroic national figures or demonic national figures. They suddenly come back into the frame in the 16th century. when Northern Europeans start forming nation-states with their particular histories and traditions.
The Ancients
Druids
The whole thing about being Northern European is if you look back into the remote past, the very first charismatic figures you encounter are the Druids. And so they can do a lot of work for you if you're a Christian and emphasize the religious side, their demonic figures. But if you're a nationalist looking for your roots, they can be heroic figures. And there's a kind of domino effect.
The Ancients
Druids
The Germans start this. The French then follow. Scots follow. And last of all, the English come in about 100 years after the others. But Once the English invent Britain, in other words, they conquer Ireland and they unite with Scotland and Wales, there is a need for a common past for the new British super state.
The Ancients
Druids
Most of the national heroes of the component peoples have become heroes by killing other component peoples of the new British state. So William Wallace, Robert the Bruce killed the English. King Arthur kills the English. Owen Glyndwr and Llywelyn Griffith of Wales kill the English. And the Irish heroes like Finn McCool kill everybody else. So you have a desperate need for bonding figures.
The Ancients
Druids
The great common denominator is the Druids because they're behind everybody there and can be claimed by everybody. They become cement holding together a new national history.
The Ancients
Druids
You can look exactly like that and you'd be right. If you airbrush away the nastier accusations of the Romans, then you have a whole bundle of charming characteristics. The Druids are resistance leaders to imperial oppression and conquest. And the other side of them is that they are great leaders. They're supposed to be wise. They're supposed to be powerful. They're supposed to be green, right?
The Ancients
Druids
Because some of the later Roman writers said they particularly hung out in wild natural places like woods and caves. They might actually have done that, hiding from Roman persecution. They're associated with oak trees in particular, especially if they have mistletoe growing on them.
The Ancients
Druids
So they can be made into the ideal Georgian, English, or British patriotic hero because they revere oak trees and the Royal Navy is made of oak. They can be even made the patrons and founders of the Royal Navy.
The Ancients
Druids
It absolutely has, but it has its origins in a few lines in one Roman writer. I say there's quite a lot of Greek and Roman testimony about druids, but you could watch the whole lot of it together, in fact, in about five to eight pages. This guy is Pliny, the elder, great naturalist. He's discussing trees and he discusses mistletoe.
The Ancients
Druids
and says that the tribes of southern France, well, he called it Gaul, were particularly excited about this when it appears on an oak tree. We assume that these tribes had Druids because they're in a Celtic-speaking area. Pliny doesn't speak of Druids here.
The Ancients
Druids
But he says when they find a mistletoe on an oak tree, they go wild because, as anybody who knows the countryside knows, mistletoe hardly ever grows on an oak tree. It's very rare. So when you find a mistletoe in ancient southern Gaul, you then cut the mistletoe on the sixth day after the next new moon. Nothing here about midwinter, nothing about Christmas that it is to be.
The Ancients
Druids
And the priests – he doesn't call them druids – Turn up with some white cattle for sacrifice, a golden sickle to cut the mistletoe. Cut the mistletoe and it drops into a cloth to stop it hitting the ground. And the mistletoe can then be made into a very powerful medicine which heals anything.
The Ancients
Druids
Entirely because of Pliny. Pliny is the only person to describe what priests of the Celtic peoples would have looked like. Although, admittedly, he's only describing their gear for one ceremony, and he doesn't call them druids. But if you ignore all that, then we have a person in a white robe with a golden sickle and a bunch of mistletoe.
The Ancients
Druids
We can say with perfect confidence that the Druids were the main experts in religion, magic, and all modes of spirituality for the peoples of northwestern Europe at the time they emerged into history a couple of thousand years ago. And that's all we can say about them with absolute confidence.
The Ancients
Druids
It's a few sentences in one paragraph, in one book by one writer. I said we don't have much to go on. He is the greatest single Roman historian, at least of the imperial era. He's Tacitus. And he's writing about something that happened in Britain, allegedly, when he was a boy. It's a generation before.
The Ancients
Druids
But his father-in-law was the great Roman general Agricola who ruled Britain and might have been an eyewitness of what he's describing or might not. He's talking about when a Roman army conquering westwards across Britain reaches the end of Wales and faces the island of Anglesey, Mon to Welsh, across a narrow but rather dangerous strait of water, the Menai.
The Ancients
Druids
And what the Roman army sees is a native British army drawn up to fight them on the Anglesey shore. And among them, things they've never seen before. That's the Roman soldiers. That is tall druids shouting curses and black-robed women with flaming torches like furies. The fact that the Romans have never seen druids before doing this is kind of interesting.
The Ancients
Druids
It seems to indicate they're not that ubiquitous. And of course, a druid here might just be the handy term for a priest or a magician. And the soldiers are terrified by this. But up steps their square-jawed, clean-cut hero, Suetonius Paulinus, the Roman general and governor. And he says, what are you? You're supposed to be Romans and you're scared of a bunch of silly women. So go for it, lads.
The Ancients
Druids
And the lads go for it. They cross the water. They defeat the enemy army, and then they find that this is justified because they find that the native groves and shrines are full of evidence for horrific human sacrifice. So it was all worth it anyway. So what's the problem?
The Ancients
Druids
Well, the problem is that it's now accepted that Tacitus invented entire episodes in his histories and possibly entire characters. They're there to liven things up when the narrative's getting a bit dry and make points about the superiority of Roman civilization. and eulogize certain heroes. And actually, the narrative has been getting a bit dry at this point.
The Ancients
Druids
And suddenly, this stunning image comes in. So you have three points on a spectrum again, and the choice is up to you. One is that Tacitus made the entire thing up because he knew his readership would love it. Second, that he got the story from a superannuated legionary in a wine bar in Rome. And And we don't know how reliable it was.
The Ancients
Druids
Third, that this is an eyewitness account from Agricola himself or somebody else, a mate of Agricola, who'd seen service with Suetonius Paulinus, so every word is objectively true.
The Ancients
Druids
Yeah, welcome to a historical quagmire. And it might be said that Tacitus never says that Anglesey was a particularly Druidic island or a holy island. Instead, because it's offshore, it's the ideal place for resistance base. Because the Romans have to struggle across a dangerous bit of water to get at you. So you can kind of hit them when they're drenched and seasick on the beach.
The Ancients
Druids
No kidding, both. It becomes the Druidic isle par excellence in modern British culture.
The Ancients
Druids
It is, and it's a neat package because it's got absolutely terrific prehistoric monuments from every age of prehistory back to the Neolithic. It has indeed the finest prehistoric monuments in Wales. And so when you couple these with Druids, it makes for a very charismatic package. It's also relatively accessible down the A55 and the Britannia Bridge.
The Ancients
Druids
We have quite a lot of comments by people who didn't have Druids. We have absolutely nothing from the Druids themselves. They never committed anything to writing, or if they did, none of it survived. We actually have two different bodies of testimony instead. One is from Greek and Roman writers, some of whom lived at the time of Druids, but only one of whom might actually have met them.
The Ancients
Druids
They don't elaborate as they go on. They elaborate near the beginning because a couple of our earliest writers, later than Caesar but before Tacitus and Pliny, called Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, have sentences about the Druids. Now, both of these are working in the Mediterranean area, Strabo and the Near East, so they never go near Druids. And both of them
The Ancients
Druids
are also quite good at citing their sources. And unusually, neither of them cite the source material they use about Druids. So again, we have no idea where they got it from. Pliny is somebody who always footnotes his texts. But with the case of Druids, rather shiftily, he says, Ut dicitur. It is said, but it's pretty lurid.
The Ancients
Druids
The modes of human sacrifice detailed in Strabo and Diodorus Siculus between them, and indeed echoing something from Caesar or Pseudo-Caesar. are that you burn people alive in big wickerwork figures. This is where we get the wicker man from. That was it, right. Walk on Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward. But also, don't try this at home, folks.
The Ancients
Druids
You divine the future by stabbing a human victim in the stomach so they die slowly, and then observing the movements their body makes like a kind of semaphore as they're writhing to death.
The Ancients
Druids
No, you're not sugarcoating it. Things are still pretty grim. The answer is the same for any archaeological evidence connected to the Druids, that we have masses or we have none, depending on how you read it. We get huge quantities of human bones around pre-Roman French and British sites. But they could be the remains of human sacrifices kept as trophies.
The Ancients
Druids
They could be the remains of enemies killed in war and kept as trophies. Or they could be the remains of your own revered ancestors who are kept near you so that their spirits will linger and bless you, and their bones retain something of their personalities in life.
The Ancients
Druids
In the north of France, there are enormous open-air sanctuaries of the kind you don't get in Britain, which have the bodies of large numbers of young men that were fixed up around the precincts or put into piles of bones. And again, it seems quite likely that these are enemy warriors.
The Ancients
Druids
And having slaughtered them, you then bring them back as trophies and you keep them around to reassure you've trashed the other side before and you can do it again. Or it's just possible that they are your heroic dead that are brought to the sanctuaries as to war graves or cenotaphs and displayed there to encourage their successors. We have no testimony that can take us to one side or the other.
The Ancients
Druids
Well, it's worse than that. It's that we may have no evidence of human sacrifice from archaeology because it's all so equivocal. And if it is human sacrifice, it could be connected to the druids or not. We're still waist deep in mud at this point, struggling to make a path through.
The Ancients
Druids
And we have stories about Druids from the medieval Christian Irish, but writing at a time long after Druids had ceased to exist. So the problem with the first lot is that most of them are hostile. They're serving the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire depended on having an empire by pleading that they conquered people for their own good, to civilize them.
The Ancients
Druids
There's no transition. The two are not connected. The Irish, when they became Christian and to their huge delight, read the Roman pagan literature, which was to become an inheritance of Western civilization in general, thought, hey, we can match this and began working up a tremendous native literature of their own featuring heroes in the same way as the Greek and the Roman mythology.
The Ancients
Druids
Druids are a big part of that. The Welsh may or may not have any references to Druids in their medieval literature. There are no clear references to Druids as such in most of their medieval stories. There are a few passing references to a class of person called the Daerwython, who may be Druids or they may not. It may be a word for a kind of ecstatic prophet. So we aren't sure this is disputed.
The Ancients
Druids
Whether there's any echo of ancient paganism in medieval Welsh literature is something that's now endlessly controversial. Once again, the truth is we can't be sure. Either way could be right. The Irish literature, nobody doubts there's a lot of paganism in it. But
The Ancients
Druids
Here too, there's a big controversy over whether the paganism represented is a genuine memory or it's made up by medieval Christian writers.
The Ancients
Druids
Yes, like the Romans and Greeks, medieval Christian Irish writers found two different uses for Druids. Most of the time, they are evil pagan priests, and their whole function in the stories is to get trashed by Christian saints.
The Ancients
Druids
There we go. He is chronologically the first of the saints to take on druids, at least in the mythology, hagiography. Yes, he takes on the evil druids of King Leary, the king of Ireland. And, of course, he defeats them and destroys some of them.
The Ancients
Druids
This could be an actual memory of how Christianity came into Ireland, but there's a suspicious resemblance to the account of the contest of Moses and Aaron and the wicked priests of Pharaoh in the Old Testament.
The Ancients
Druids
And they accused the Druids, most of them, of being the worst sort of barbaric priest, founded on fear, ignorance, tyranny, with a particularly tacky sideline and human sacrifice.
The Ancients
Druids
The Druids have an immense legacy and have had since the 17th century in that they're so good to think with because of these incredibly vivid and yet contrasting images provided by the ancient writers and the Irish. So if you want heroic ancestors, the Druids are tailor-made, being patriotic, brave, green, and wise.
The Ancients
Druids
If you want to condemn the ancient world, or at least the non-civilized, non-Christian bits of it, as the kind of thing we grew out of, then they are the epitome of the nastiest kind of pagan priest. And so at the present day, they still do the same thing.
The Ancients
Druids
I still read novels or even missionary work by evangelical Christians holding up the Druids as exemplars of what paganism does if you allow it to survive or revive. But also, we have a pagan revival in this nation, and Druidry plays a very important part in that, representing a nature-based, very green spirituality, and a pacifist one, as well as one that celebrates the land on which we live.
The Ancients
Druids
You can take the Druids almost anywhere, but because they're such charismatic figures in the world and national imagination, they're wonderful figures with whom to work.
The Ancients
Druids
The association of the Druids with Stonehenge and prehistoric monuments begins in Scotland in the 16th century and becomes universal in the 18th century. And it's simply because In that period, the peoples of Europe realized they have this tremendous heritage of prehistoric monuments. They haven't really considered them before.
The Ancients
Druids
And now they start mapping and drawing and investigating them on a big scale. The Druids are the priests that you encounter at the beginning of history. So it's a natural assumption that the Druids built these monuments. The guy who really nails this and makes Druids national stars for the next 200 years is the founder of field archaeology.
The Ancients
Druids
The problem with the Irish is, of course, that they were writing long after Druid ceased to exist, even though they were in their own people, and again, provided a range of views, some deeply Christian and hostile, others favorable, but we have no idea which of these are fantasies. They may all be.
The Ancients
Druids
He's William Stukely, an 18th century doctor who becomes a clergyman. And he makes us a very big service. because by a mixture of superb fieldwork and some excavation, he proves that monuments like Stonehenge were not built by the Romans, by the wizard Merlin, by the Vikings or the Anglo-Saxons, but by the prehistoric British, and he's spot on. Whether or not the Druids built them
The Ancients
Druids
is forever wide open because we now realize that prehistory went on for thousands of years longer than Stukely and his contemporaries did. And there were lots of big changes in the nature of monuments and religion in that time. So the Druids may simply have been the latest, the Iron Age version of that. On the other hand, they could have been around since the Old Stone Age. We just don't know.
The Ancients
Druids
The link to the Winter Solstice is through Pliny. Right. The British don't start using mistletoe as a common decoration at Christmas until the 18th century. And we don't start kissing under it until the late 18th century. But once we start doing that and don't do any research... The impulse to think this must be an ancient fertility rite, it begins in London kitchens in the late 18th century.
The Ancients
Druids
But once you get to the Victorian period, that's forgotten. And to look up your pliny and pin it on the Druids is irresistible. But the good news here is... is there's absolutely no doubt that the Druids will have celebrated midwinter, because the solstices, midwinter, midsummer, are enormous festivals all over Europe, especially northern Europe, as soon as you come to history.
The Ancients
Druids
So since everybody else celebrated midwinter big time, the Druids would definitely have done it.
The Ancients
Druids
The Druids, unimaginatively. And more imaginatively, the bigger one is Blood and Mistletoe. The Druids was a pop book for people who wanted a quick hit. Blood and Mistletoe has the full story with all the source references.
The Ancients
Druids
Yeah, that's absolutely right. They don't become an epitome of barbarian life in general because the Romans have been epitomizing barbarians for centuries beforehand. And the Romans also epitomize as savages. people within their own society whom they don't like. For example, they accuse the Jews and the Christians who weren't conformed to their religion of sexual malpractices and human sacrifice.
The Ancients
Druids
This common theme that you pin human sacrifice on people you don't like is universally Roman. The double standard until recently is because there are plenty of Christians and Druids around in the modern world, and they've preserved writings that prove the hostile Romans wrong. We don't believe the Romans who accuse them of these horrors, but the Druids have left nobody to speak for them.
The Ancients
Druids
So a lot of people have accepted what the Romans say about them on face value, which is a bit dangerous considering the bigger picture.
The Ancients
Druids
Specifically, they're identified by ancient and medieval writers in what's now France and Belgium and what's now the British Isles.
The Ancients
Druids
It's certainly possible to use archaeology to identify druids. And so far, it's got everywhere or nowhere, depending on how you view the evidence. Because we have enormous quantities of material evidence of the religious lives of the Iron Age peoples who had druids. What we've not got so far is one single scrap of it, which can be certainly identified with druids.
The Ancients
Druids
In other words, the lack of writing means we don't have, you know, this belonged to Chidonax, the druid, written upon a piece of equipment. And we don't even have particular artifacts from places and exact sites that the Romans identified as druidic because the Romans were not that specific. So you have your choices on a spectrum on which a lot of different scholars sit.
The Ancients
Druids
of either saying everything you find that refers to Northwestern European high-age religion must be druidic, or to say that none of it can be associated. And since there's absolutely no agreement on this, I'm not sure how far we're ever going to get anywhere with it, unless we come across this all-important inscriptional evidence.
The Ancients
Druids
That's exactly right. The equipment found in the grave at Colchester is definitely that of the doctor. These are medical instruments. If Druids were experts in medicine as well as spirituality, then it could be a Druid's grave as well, but it might not be.
The Ancients
Druids
There are various metal crowns, quite ornate, found in places like Deal and elsewhere, Deal and Kent, which have been claimed to be those of druids. They could be. They could also be those of chieftains. So you see where I'm going here. We're on thin ice wherever we tread.
The Ancients
Druids
The earliest of all is the big one, the one that we rely on most, and it's Julius Caesar, who is not only one of the best-known Roman generals and politicians, but also one of the best-known Roman authors. A hundred years of English schoolchildren studying classics had to make their way through Caesar's prose as part of their education.
The Ancients
Druids
So he's a familiar and beloved figure to modern Brits, or at least those who went through a traditional Victorian-style education. But here's the problem, that Caesar only mentions Druids once in his long and detailed account of his conquest of Gaul, which is now France and Belgium. which is definitely a place that had druids. And the passage concerned is a standalone.
The Ancients
Druids
It isn't in Caesar's usual style, and it actually contradicts some of what he says in the rest of his book. Now, we know the book, which is his account of the Gallic War, was unfinished when Caesar died, and it was finished some years later by another author.
The Ancients
Druids
And so we aren't sure whether this passage is Caesar's work or it was stuck in by the other author because he felt that the narrative needed breaking up at that point. The reader needed a stock-taking rest in order to hear about the society of the Gauls in general. If it's Caesar giving the testimony, he was there, he'd have seen it. It's really important.
The Ancients
Druids
If it's not Caesar giving the testimony, then it's lifted from a different source, which may be much less reliable. And actually, even if it's Caesar, he's not that reliable himself because he is a spin doctor politician and his contemporaries noted that you couldn't rely on a thing he said because it was all propaganda.
The Ancients
Druids
You're right about the writer. And the account is what you might call a balanced one, in that it depicts the Druids as both admirable and scary. It depicts them as admirable in being very learned, especially in the movements of the stars and the nature of the earth. Highly organized in that they meet from all over Gaul with a common agenda or a common assembly right in the center of the country.
The Ancients
Druids
So they're international in terms of the tribes, and they exert enormous authority over the tribes, including deciding whether they should fight wars or not. But on the other hand, unlike decent Romans, they do commit human sacrifice. Although Caesar says that they do so only in emergencies,
The Ancients
Druids
They tend to sacrifice condemned criminals, although he puts in a sting by saying, if none of these are available, then they'll find anybody who's expendable. Again, we have no idea how reliable this is, because what he's doing is showing the Druids to be a formidable force, not a force for good, which justifies the Roman takeover of the area.
The Ancients
Druids
But when you look at the rest of Caesar's really detailed account of the fighting, the Druids are not there. They're completely invisible, whereas they should be taking crucial military and political decisions, and they're not. There's a guy mentioned by Caesar who is a tribal chief, a secular leader, and he's also mentioned by another politician, a very famous one, of Caesar's time called Cicero.
The Ancients
Druids
And Cicero mentions that this Gallic chieftain comes to Rome and he has long chats with him. And he's a druid. But in Caesar's account, he's not a druid. He's a regular tribal chief. And according to this standalone account of druids in Caesar's work, druids are not regular tribal chiefs. So we have a mess here.
The Ancients
Druids
What should have been and looks like at first sight, really clear, helpful eyewitness testimony, turns out maybe to be nothing of the kind.
The Ancients
Druids
Yes. And thereafter, the Druids become bogeymen to the Romans. As each generation of Roman writers comes in, they make Druids nastier. So by the time you get to 100, 150 years after Caesar's time, by which time Druids have disappeared from the Roman provinces of the empire. They are accused of all manner of worse things like cannibalism.
The Ancients
Druids
And now human sacrifice has not become a rare event like it was in the accountant seasons. It's actually central to their type of religion. So they get demonized more and more as they disappear until by the time they're gone, they are at their worst. And then there's another change as you go later in the Roman Empire and the propaganda of the evil druid is no longer needed.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Now, in the Ice Age, the mammoth was forced to eat mostly grass, which is much tougher to chew. It's also lower in nutrients, so you have to eat more of it. We think mammoths are probably eating for maybe 18, 20 hours a day to get enough food.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yeah, they would have had to eat about 400 kilos of this relatively low-nutrient food. to feed their large bodies. And so part of the adaptation to that was they developed teeth with very high crowns so that they could last through the animal's life, even though they would be wearing down gradually with this very tough food that the animal was eating.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
This is another reason why the head looks quite long and short, because it had to house these very tall teeth. So you would have noticed that difference immediately on looking at a mammoth compared to an elephant.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yes, we do. We have many complete skeletons, also the carcasses. And the other really interesting line of evidence that we have is actually the cave art, because the drawings of mammoths in caves, mostly in France, we've got, I think, about 200 artistic reproductions of representations of mammoths by Ice Age artists.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yes, exactly, yes. And Although, obviously, you have to allow for artistic license. But there are certain features of the animal that are repeated again and again in the art. One in particular that I would mention is that they're always shown with a very sloping back. So the mammoth had a sort of high shoulder hump, and then the back sloped down gradually towards the tail end.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And that's actually quite difficult to figure, even from looking at the vertebral column, which I have done, piecing all the bones together. It's quite hard to twig that that was the case, but it's shown in all the cave paintings. And so I guess it was the case.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Again, compare with an Asian, living Asian elephant where the back is kind of arched shape, an African elephant where the back is described as saddle shape, hollow in the middle. So the mammoth was quite different in its overall body form, if you were to look at it from the side. High domed skull, big shoulder hump, sloping back down to the back end.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Very thick, yeah. I mean, we've got a lot of hair preserved from the permafrost. And the main sort of outer coat, the longest hairs are about a metre long. A metre long, wow. On the back and hanging down from the belly like a bit of a curtain. And I've measured the width of those hairs under the microscope. They're about six times the thickness of an average human hair. So...
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Living elephants, although they sort of appear naked from a distance, you know, close up, they do have a sparse covering of hair. So the hair was there to evolve into the thicker coat of the mammoth, you know, through that period of time that we were talking about. So they had this very thick outer coat. And then closer to the skin, there was a much finer hair, a sort of underwall.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
It's a bit like cotton wool, actually. as a second kind of insulating layer. Then there was a fat layer underneath the skin. So they were well protected against the cold. What do we know about mammoth feet? Yeah, I mean, they did have fur on, but it wasn't specially long fur.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And I think probably like arctic animals today that we can study in real time, like reindeer, for example, they actually keep their feet very cold, relatively cold, and they have antifreeze substances, you know, in their blood that stop them from freezing up.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
But actually, this does lead me to a really fantastic bit of research that's been done on woolly mammoths right down to the molecular level, because... A study was made a few years ago by Canadian scientists of mammoth hemoglobin. Now, hemoglobin, of course, is the molecule in our blood that transports oxygen from the lungs to all the tissues of our body.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And what they did was, you know, we're now managing to extract DNA from mammoth tissues, and we're learning a lot more about their anatomy and their physiology from the DNA. So these people actually found the gene from the mammoth DNA that codes for hemoglobin.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
They then in the lab, in the test tube effectively, created mammoth hemoglobin and then just ran it through tests just like you would in a medical lab. And what they found was that the mammoth hemoglobin had certain differences from elephant hemoglobin. that enabled it to work at lower temperatures.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
When I say work, they took the mammoth haemoglobin now to five degrees C and it was still able to pick up oxygen and then release the oxygen because that's how haemoglobin works. It picks up oxygen in our lungs and it releases it to the tissues like muscle tissues. The modern elephant haemoglobin stopped working before you got down to those low temperatures.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
In other words, going back to your question about the feet, if you've got pretty cold feet, as the mammoth would have done standing in the snow and ice and so on, you still need to be able to get oxygen to the tissues of the feet, the muscles and all the rest of it. And so the hemoglobin of the mammoth was adapted to be able to do that even in virtually zero temperatures.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So what we're learning about these animals now goes beyond what traditional study of bones and even soft tissues. to the molecular level.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yes. Another nice outcome actually, we're talking about the mammoth's coat, is about the color because many popular illustrations of mammoths show them with a kind of orangey colored coat. And the reason for that is that much of the hair that comes out of the permafrost with the carcasses is that orange kind of colour.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
But I've suspected for a long time that this is not natural and that it's because pigment has actually leached out of the hair, you know, through the thousands of years of burial. And actually, recent DNA work has tended to confirm that.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And we now think based on some hair samples, which are a much darker, sort of a chocolatey brown colour, the DNA actually confirms that because we can get some of the genes which code for hair colour. And we know from living animals, you know, which variants of those genes code for brown hair, blonde hair, ginger hair.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And sure enough, all those orange pictures of mammoths need to be redone with kind of a chocolatey brown color, which was probably the original color.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Almost certainly, yes. The answer is yes, especially because all elephants, and that would have included mammoths, have actually a relatively inefficient digestion, unlike something like a deer or a cow, which has got a much more complicated stomach, and you know they chew the cud and so on, so they're getting the absolute max out of the food. So there's less left to come out of the rear end.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
The mammoth probably, like living elephants, probably only got about 30, 40% of the nutrients out of its food, partly because that sort of grassy food is not terribly nutritious. There's an awful lot of bulk that is not going to be digested that would have come out of the rare red. So answer your question is, yeah. And, you know, fertilizing the ground, very important.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
part of the ecosystem, actually, to be fertilising the ground in that way. And so more plants grow up and then they eat more plants and so on.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Well, first of all, we make a kind of analogy with living elephants, you know, where 60 or 70 is really the top duration. Secondly, we do have a kind of a record in the tusks. because the tusks have annual growth rings. You know, the tusks grew each year. They kind of pushed out of the skull and they grew longer each year. They also wore down at the tip, you know, through use.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
But we can count the rings. We can count the growth rings. Now, in a very old animal, the sort of earliest part of the tusk, which is at the tip, would have worn away. So we never get the complete lifespan. But the longest that we've counted is, I think, 47 years. So in other words, there was one mammoth tusk where 47 annual rings were counted.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And the fact that we haven't got any up to 60 or 70, which is the kind of expectation, is because the old ones have worn away at the tip. So you never get the total lifespan. But it kind of fits. You know, we've got 47 preserved. So my guess is it's probably similar to a living elephant at about 60 or 70 if they were doing well. So this is the mammoth equivalent of tree rings, is it?
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Well, the woolly mammoth had an enormous range. I mean, it was bigger than either of the living species. You could start in the West in Ireland, if you like.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
through Britain, across Britain, through almost all of Europe, down to a kind of latitude of northern Spain, let's say the northern Mediterranean, right the way across Asia, right up to the Arctic Ocean, all the way across to northern China, northern Japan. And then we tend to, in paleontology, we think of the Americas as actually to the east,
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
of Asia, because although in this country, at least, we're used to seeing a map of the world with America on the left and the Atlantic Ocean in the middle. But the way that animals actually spread was eastward across the Bering Strait, which is the sea that now separates Siberia from Alaska, was dry land.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And so the mammoths and other species, including people, by the way, spread from Siberia into North America. So continuing my... geographical story, we ended up in Eastern Asia, the mammoth spread right across into Alaska, and then all the way to the Atlantic seaboard of North America, and roughly down to the level of the Great Lakes in the United States.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So I don't know how many square kilometers that is, but it's absolutely vast. And it's been estimated that at their peak, there were At least 10 million mammoths living in that area.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
You know, there's a label for these large, now extinct animals. They call them charismatic fauna. And it's not because they had really pleasing personalities. It's just that you can't stop thinking about the damn things. They're so big, they're so interesting, and they're so gone. It's just a really, it's a fun topic to think about.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
It may not have been fun to be a woolly mammoth because they are gone, but it's something that has intrigued scientists and the lay public for quite literally centuries.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Unlike dinosaurs, people did once see them. People were on the landscape with them. It must have really been something to come around the corner and see one of these aircraft carriers of the animal kingdom lumbering by. What a sight.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
We actually have a number of species of mammoths. The woolly mammoths are occupants, denizens of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. But as you get further south, there's other mammoth species, and in fact, other proboscidean species, that is to say, other elephants. These are all distant animal relatives of African elephants and Asian elephants, which, of course, are still surviving today.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And these are animals that, oh, golly, some of the largest ones would be 14, 16 feet at the shoulder. They'd weigh six, eight tons. Wow. And they're found, well, pretty much across Europe, Eurasia. the far north of the Americas, but even into temperate regions as well, not just Arctic regions. And they've been around for a very long time.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Certainly, mammoths were in Eurasia well before humans got up into that region, far northeastern Eurasia. They were in the Americas before humans got here. So they lay claim to these landscapes more so than we have a claim to these landscapes. And humans interacted with them over time. Now, of course, there's been lots of discussion about what the nature of that relationship was.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Was it strictly platonic? Did humans admire them from a distance or did humans want them for dinner? We certainly know that they did from time to time. But a lot of the question sort of revolves around the intensity of use of these animals.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
the risk involved in going after these animals, their role in the diet, but it's also important to come back to something you mentioned earlier, their impact on the landscape. These are animals that are what are known as keystone species. And what we mean by that is that these are animals that have a really profound effect on the ecosystem around there.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
They sneeze and everybody else gets a cold, as it were, because these are animals that play a role in species interactions, ecosystem connectivity, changing patterns of nitrogen cycling, dispersal of plant remains, disrupting or creating succession sequences, you pull them out of a landscape and things go to hell because their influence is so profound.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yes, the mammoth is a kind of iconic animal of the Ice Age, definitely. You know, these animals of the Ice Age were way more recent than dinosaurs, you know, dinosaurs are the other kind of iconic prehistoric beast, but much closer to us in time and indeed coexisting with humans.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So these are important animals, not just from sort of a human history, but also in terms of ecological history and environmental history.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
I will quickly clarify what I mean by that, because I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea. These are animals that are constantly shedding DNA, whether through poo or urinating on the landscape. And that becomes a really interesting source of information about where these animals were, when these animals were, and when they went extinct.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So it's important to recognize, and by the way, I should just add too, it ain't just bones. We have freeze-dried mammoth carcasses. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. These things started to get dug up and discovered in the, I think, late 1800s in Siberia. Because what would happen is that these animals would, on occasion, fall into a pond. The pond would freeze.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
The area would become glaciated, frozen, permafrost, tundra. And when they would melt out 30,000 years later, you would have a perfectly preserved mammoth. And evidently, the story I heard from a one-time...
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Professor of mine, Dave Hopkins, the sort of giant of Beringian studies, said that Siberian fur trappers would feed mammoth meat to their dogs just because it was a handy source of protein for their animals. Would I want a mammoth steak that had been sort of freeze-dried for 30,000 years? I'd try it. Whether I like it is a different issue.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So we have this really remarkable record of these animals, and the DNA part is especially important. Because all of that stuff that they're shedding on the landscape, as I mentioned, does really give us a good sense of populations, their population dynamics, the tailing off of their numbers over time. It essentially gives us a window into their extinction.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
maybe not the richest, but certainly an area that was occupied by mammoth. You know, you have mammoth across pretty much a large chunk of North America, Eurasian real estate, and Beringia was simply one part of it.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Mammoth is, you know, the best known of what was, though, a very diverse Ice Age fauna with lots of other species alongside the mammoth, like the woolly rhino and cave bears and so on.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
We think of the land bridge as a sort of separate entity, but in reality, it was a continuous element of the so-called Beringian mammoth steppe, this vast grassland that stretched from essentially western Alaska to, well, basically across most of northern Eurasia. They call it the mammoth steppe, do they? Exactly right, because it was the most prominent animal in the landscape.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
But it wasn't just them. Woolly rhinos, horses, giant bison were out there as well, because these are all grazers. These are all animals that, well, rhino to a lesser extent, but certainly horse, bison, and mammoth are animals that love large grasslands. And they're there in abundance, large, relatively dry underfoot grasslands.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Mammoths have been in North America, south of the Arctic, starting around 1.35 million years ago. Oh, wow. So they've been here for a very long time. Now, what species of mammoth that was is not altogether clear because there are two species of mammoths in the Americas. It's sort of difficult.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
When we go that far back, we tend to work at the genus level in the Linnaean hierarchy for those listeners who remember Linnaeus and all that other stuff that you had to memorize in eighth grade biology. What's that? Sorry, for someone who was terrible at grading biology. Oh, kingdom, phylum, order, family, class, genus, species, right?
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
We know that actually from isotopic evidence in their bones that they would graze over vast areas. They were not at the top of the food chain insofar as predators are going to be hovering above herbivores. So your carnivores are going to be up there at the top. But they were certainly the large herbivore on that landscape. That's why they had that role as a keystone species.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
They could be very destructive on a landscape too. Knock down trees as they're moving around, chewing up the landscape as they're grazing, that kind of thing.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
I've seen mammoth footprints, okay? I can't tell by their sneakers whether it was a mammoth or a Colombian, a woolly mammoth or a Colombian mammoth. There's actually a science of footprints. And for the life of me, I can't remember what the ology, the particular ology is of studying footprints. But yeah, there's mammoth tracks that have been found in a number of areas.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And I've seen them out on the White Sands Missile Range, which is actually quite close to the White Sands Archaeological Site, which I think we've talked about, where we have these human footprints. There's mammoth footprints all over the place. Yeah. I had to have them point it out to me that these are mammoth footprints.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
I mean, to me, they look, well, they look like large round patterns on the landscape. Okay, I'll buy it that those are mammoth footprints. They look like other kinds of geological features to me, but smarter people than me assured me that they were footprints and I was happy to go along with that.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
whether they were mammoths of, well, they were probably Colombian mammoths, just given the range and where they were found.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yes, the woolly mammoth's the one we know far the best. It was the one that was spread right across the northern hemisphere throughout the last ice age and probably the ice age before that. But prior to that, we know our whole sequence of fossil species that form a really interesting evolutionary sequence
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And there's been a certain amount of arguing about the number of taxa of mammoths, but generally at the moment, we're going with just those two.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
That's the big question, isn't it? There's been a debate for over a century as to whether humans were responsible for their extinction. And the challenge and the complication here is that we actually have very little evidence that humans were actively preying upon these species. We do know that they did.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
We have, you know, a dozen or more sites where we have evidence of human artifacts, mammoth bones, suggesting that there was some sort of activity going on there. But in some of those cases, it looks like humans were simply scavenging already dead animals. We can actually see primarchs where they were sort of pulling apart bones to sort of gnaw on them, I suppose.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So yeah, humans had an effect, but was it consequential or not? And it's also important to note, and we perhaps mentioned this in our past conversations, that mammoths were simply one of over three dozen animals that will go extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. And what makes this challenging, of course, is that it was the end of the Pleistocene.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So we have this confluence of animals disappearing, humans arriving, and all the massive changes that are taking place in the climate and the environment as the Ice Age comes to an end. So it's not entirely clear which way are the causal arrows pointing. Are they pointing at humans being responsible for all of these changes? Or in my view, more likely, are we looking at
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Going after an aircraft carrier with a stick with a sharp rock, so let's just make it even more frightening than it might have been. Well, look, the evidence that we have in terms of these sort of activities that might have taken place, one of the things that's kind of striking is that a lot of these sites, again, there's not that many of them, a dozen or so, make it 16.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
That's the actual number that we're comfortable with, are sometimes found near water. So one of the things that happens with large mammals like this, these have water-cooled engines. When body temperature goes up, when they're ill, when they're dying, head to a pond and head to a lake, that makes them vulnerable. So it may well be that human hunting was sort of along the lines of ambush hunting.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
leading up to the woolly mammoth as the kind of final species of the group and the most specialized species of the group.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
The problem is, is you don't want to take down an elephant when it's in the water, because if it sinks into the water, what are the odds of getting a waterlogged mammoth weighing six tons, now probably 10 tons, I'm exaggerating to make a point, out of that muck and the mud of the pond?
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So, you know, one senses and suspects that if in fact these animals were near death or dying, that it would have been easier just to wait. Let them die, and then just scavenge. Cut off a couple of mammoth steaks, put them on the barbecue. There, you're done. Low-risk hunting, by the way.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yeah, I mean, some of them may just be scavenging. We know that hunter-gatherers, you know, there's two things they like to do in terms of reducing risk. One is reducing the risk of coming home empty-handed, and the other is reducing the risk of coming home dead. And so having an elephant die for you, very convenient.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Well, exactly right. That site that you mentioned is called Mammoth Hot Springs, and it's basically a sinkhole. And it goes back, I think the current estimates of its age are around 65,000, which puts it pre-humans in the Americas. And natural death assemblages, you know, animals had to die, and they had to die even before humans showed up.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And so we do have these localities where there are, in some cases... natural disasters from the point of view of a mammoth. And we have an accumulation of skeletons in one spot. And it's really striking when you go to that site, and it's actually a really cool site to visit, is they have a museum that they built over this big pit.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And you can actually see where a mom mammoth, a mammoth mom, was trying to push its calf out of the hole. It's a wonderful and tragic moment in mammoth history where this poor, presumably nursing mammoth mother was trying to save her baby.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Well, I mean, you've only got to look at a mammoth to realize it's a kind of elephant. In fact, mammoths were elephants. They were part of the elephant family. And the elephant family arose in Africa, just like the human family, actually. The first elephant fossils were about 7 billion years old, found in East Africa and Southern Africa.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Well, in fact, some of those freeze-dried mammoths are babies. Wow. And there's one that came out of Siberia, dates to, I think, around 38,000, 40,000 years ago. Don't quote me on it. And it had clearly not been weaned, and it didn't know how to feed itself.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And so when they opened up its stomach contents, the poor thing had been grabbing rocks and twigs in an effort to feed itself, not knowing what was food. So yeah, this poor thing was just incapable of caring for itself and died because of it.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Well, six tons of meat, that's an awful lot to eat. And you remind me of a famous quote about the meatpacking plants in Chicago at the turn of the century, where they used everything from the squeal to the tail on an animal. Look, there's only so much that pedestrian hunter-gatherers can carry. And so my suspicion is, well, let me use a bison kill as an example and a potential analog.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Bison are huge at the end of the ice age, 3,000, 4,000 pounds, not a problem. And what we see in bison kills is that humans would butcher the animals and they take all the high utility bones. And by that, I mean the bones that had good meat on them. They would dry the meat, they'd get it ready for transport, and then they'd go and they'd probably end up leaving behind a lot of the carcass.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
You're not going to haul around a skull with you. These are highly mobile people, right? And so as highly mobile people and as highly mobile people without wheeled vehicles or, you know, you have dogs, they can help you drag stuff. But if you kill a six ton animal, you'll get what you need. You'll dry the meat. You'll take as much as you can carry and you'll move on.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And so we suspect that you could cash it. And let me explain that. There's a site in Wyoming called the Colby site. And it looks for all the world as though a number of immature animals were dispatched by human hunters. Again, low risk, right? Go after a baby mammoth that's wandered away from the herd. Yeah. A lot less scary. And there was stacking of the bones when the site was found.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And quite soon after the origin of the family, it split into three. One was the African elephant line, which obviously stayed in Africa. One was the line which eventually left Africa and moved east into Asia and became the living Asian elephant. And the third line was the mammoth line. And the earliest fossils we've got are about 5 million years ago in South Africa.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And it looks as though in Wyoming, and this is an interpretation by the eminent archaeologist George Frizen, wonderful fellow, recently passed away. And George interpreted this site as... Winter's coming. It's Wyoming. It's really cold. You kill a couple of or more immature mammoths, and then you sort of stack up the meat over the course of the winter. It's going to freeze. It'll stay just fine.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
It's your Pleistocene refrigerator. And over the course of the winter and into the spring, as it warms up, you've got a ready source of meat for a long time.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Oh, absolutely. In fact, there's two caches at Colby, and one of them appears to have been reopened. So the other one was just, okay, fine, we got all we need. And then, of course, over the next summer, it's probably going to spoil and you're not going to come back to it again. But that was certainly a handy way to exploit and take advantage of all the meat such a kill would provide.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
the mainland continents on let's say America but also in Asia yeah so getting back to the issue of the Pleistocene is coming to an end environments are changing they're changing dramatically and one of the things that's important to stress is that the changes are not sort of uniform across time and space second each species is responding individually to those changes.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So it's not a sort of one-size-fits-all. Climate changes, therefore everybody goes extinct. Thirdly, extinction is not synchronous across all these taxa. So some animals are disappearing earlier, some are disappearing later. It all depends on their individual ecological tolerances, the thresholds that they can handle. of climate change and ecological change.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And so as a consequence, mammoth will survive really late perhaps as late as maybe 4,000 years ago. It's really quite astonishing. In certain areas, areas that, for all intents and purposes, the Pleistocene hasn't come to an end in terms of the environment.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So, for example, far northern Siberia on the Timur Peninsula, we have a record, and this is work that was led by my colleague Eski Willerslev at the Center for Geogenetics in Copenhagen, which showed that the vegetation in this far northern portion of Siberia essentially retained that mammoth steppe look up until around 4,000 years ago. Not surprisingly, mammoths hung on up until 4,000 years ago.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
In North America, south of the ice sheets, they're gone by 10,000, okay? So they're disappearing a lot earlier. but also in sync with significant changes in the environment and the climate of North America, which of course are not sort of carrying over that nice Pleistocene setting that they loved so much.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
But no, they're just one of 38 different genera that will disappear. And those genera will range from these six, seven, eight-ton animals down to a bunny. The Astellan rabbit disappears at the same time. And presumably, there's a tree that goes extinct. There's a bunch of birds that go extinct, some reptiles, some tortoises.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Extinctions, and this is one of the important things to stress, people always think about the end of the Pleistocene and all these big animals disappearing, and that's true. But that's only one end of a continuum of changes, of a continuum, a spectrum of extinctions that are taking place in all these different animals. And some are surviving, but are undergoing intense selective pressure.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So mammoths started off in Africa as a tropical species. At that stage, they wouldn't have had the hairy coat that we're familiar with. But about three and a half million years ago, mammoths moved north out of Africa because that's when we first pick up their fossils in Europe. And they very quickly spread across Asia. And there are fossils of similar age about three million years ago from China.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Okay, so they're not going extinct, but they're getting hammered in other ways. So bison, giant bison of the Pleistocene within a few thousand years are basically shrinking, right? Because the environment is changing, they're having to adjust, they're having to respond, and it's causing significant evolutionary change within the species.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So there's a whole lot of things that are happening that, to be honest, we don't fully understand and we cannot fully link cause to effect. We know extinctions are occurring. We know they're occurring across a wide range of animals. We know they're a part of evolution.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
a spectrum of changes that are taking place in the environment but getting all of that disentangled and figuring out cause is is challenging and it's been challenging in part because for so many years we didn't have the tools all we had was the fossil record we got some bones here we got some bones here we have some proxies that tell us something about the climate
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
But with ancient DNA, which I know we've talked about before, it's so very important because with ancient DNA, we can actually see species start to decline in number. We can see their genetic diversity being reduced over time. We can see changes in their diet, changes in their ability to cope with their environment.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So literally now, and for just really the last 10 years or so, we're finally in a position to get past the impasse that has prevented us from really getting a good handle on the why question.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yeah. So extinctions is a global phenomenon. You see it in Australia, but much earlier. You see it in New Zealand, but much later. Not all of these cases are alike. In fact, none of these cases are alike. You've got different sets of animals, you've got different sets of environmental, ecological, and climatic contexts. And yeah, people are around for all of those things, but so is climate.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And so it's really important to take each of these cases individually and try and understand what's going on and why.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yeah, so this is something that could only be done with ancient DNA, because with ancient environmental DNA, I should clarify, because we have a record, not just of mammoth DNA, but we have a detailed record of the vegetation.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
When you take a sample of environmental DNA from a core that you drive into the ground, you're getting not just the DNA fragments of the mammoth, but you're getting all of the DNA from all of the plants that were growing in that environment. So we've got a nice direct relationship. between plant and animal.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And what we see is that prior to the last glacial maximum, that is to say the depths of the most recent episode of glaciation, 25,000, 20,000 years ago, we've got mammoths all around the sort of high Arctic. So if you're looking from straight down on the North Pole, you would see a circle of mammoths Getting into the LGM, the last glacial maximum, they're still all around.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
But as the climate is warming and as environments are changing, mammoth are starting to disappear. And the reason they're disappearing, and we see this in the vegetation record, is that the vegetation itself, that wonderful complex of that mammoth step that they loved so much, is becoming fragmented. It's disappearing.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So at that point, they were still relatively warm-adapted, forest-living, elephant-like species, although we can tell from particular features of their skulls and teeth that they were actually on the mammoth line. So you've got this sort of early mammoth ancestor right across Eurasia about 3 million years ago. And soon after that is when the Ice Ages started to clock in.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And so what's happening is that we know that there were actually multiple lineages, multiple genetic lineages of mammoths that were scattered from far Western Europe all the way around to far Northeast Asia into the Americas. Those different and widely scattered lineages of mammoth are just disappearing one by one as the environment is changing.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And the last mammoths standing are the ones who are in that far northern enclave where the vegetation is hanging on. And what makes this remarkable is that we've known for a number of years that mammoth actually survived on offshore islands in the Siberian and Beringian seas and ultimately would go extinct later there. And the argument there was, well, they're on these small islands.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
They run out of food. They run out of good water. Of course, they're going to go extinct without humans. But on the northern Timur Peninsula, They're going extinct, and humans clearly could have walked out there and seen them. But they're still there, and they hang on until 4,000 years ago, which of course is well after humans have reached into this portion of northern Siberia.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So we have evidence of humans on that landscape. at a time when, well, the pyramids are being built. I mean, it just kind of blows your mind to think about this. There was a terrible, terrible movie about mammoths building the pyramids that came out some years ago, 10,000 BC or something like that.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
In every terrible movie, maybe there's just a little grain, a little nugget of truth that mammoths were around at the time the pyramids were being built.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
That's it, that's it. There's absolutely no evidence of humans hunting these animals. They died of their own free will, as it were.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
No, what you'll get is an Asian elephant with a bit of hair. No, I mean, we don't have living cells. We can't clone them. You can insert some mammoth DNA into a modern day elephant, but that's about all you're going to do. Sorry to disappoint your listeners, but they're not coming back. They're gone and they ain't coming back.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yeah, thanks. The book is First Peoples in a New World, Populating Ice Age America, and it takes the reader through the whole peopling process, what the environment was like, who the people were, when they showed up, what they encountered, how they dealt with it, and the role, if any, of large mammals like mammoths in their subsistence strategies as they dispersed out across the continent.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
We recognise the beginning of the Ice Ages at about 2.6 million years ago. And what we see in the mammoth fossils, when we trace them up through time, starting at about 3 million years ago, right up to the last ice age, up to 10,000 years ago, getting on towards their final extinction, through that period, we can see a change of adaptation. Look at these fossils.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
They're gradually becoming adapted to the cold, open environments of the ice ages, culminating in the familiar woolly mammoth with its hairy coat and all the rest of it.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yes, it was a step by step process, but it wasn't just a single line because we ended up with quite a few different mammoth species, actually. So, for example, I think the most important step in that process happened about two million years ago. when we still have this relatively original type, you know, warm adapted mammoth, early mammoth, right across Eurasia.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And then in one area of Eastern Asia, probably in Northern China, we pick up the next stage. There's been what we call in the jargon of speciation. In other words, one species is split into two. So In the Far East, because the environment had become colder and more open and grassy in that part of the world, and those are the things that the more advanced mammoths had to become adapted to.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So there was a split. So for a while, there were two different species, and then the more advanced one kind of took over. So all through these three million years, it's quite a complex process like that. So it is a stepwise change, but it's quite a complex one.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
The story of what we've understood about mammoths is very similar to, as you say, the human story, where the idea of a single lineage, which I'm afraid a lot of people may still have in their mind that that's how evolution works. It is more like a branching bush. With, you know, less successful species dying out, you know, so they only get like halfway up the bush and then others arise.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And then, you know, you end up with the most strongly adapted species kind of at the top.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Well, it was the one that was the best adapted to the Ice Age environments. As the Ice Age environments, which saw much of the Northern Hemisphere cold, obviously, also forests gave way to grasslands.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And so the earlier mammoth species that were adapted more to living in forests and eating that kind of vegetation got restricted in their distribution to small areas and then eventually died out, while the mammoth species you know, became, had to become adapted to this different kind of environment.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
So we would tend not to say that one is like better than the other, but it, you know, it's the survivor of the fittest thing. It means it fits that environment, you know, and that's why it survived and the other species died out.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Yeah, I think it's quite useful to compare the woolly mammoth with a living elephant because we know what an elephant looks like. We know that it's adapted to a tropical environment. And the early mammoths were adapted to that environment as well. So if we take the tail, for instance, the living elephant has a very long tail.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
It comes all the way down to sort of ankle with hairs at the end, which it uses as a kind of fly swat. The woolly mammoth had a much shorter tail. And I think the reason for that is avoiding frostbite.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
You've got a very sort of thin organ like that hanging loose out of the back end of your body in a very cold environment where it would have been way below freezing in the winter, you know, different from anything that a living elephant in its natural habitat would encounter. then, you know, you've got to protect it from frostbite.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And I'm going to switch to the other far end of the animal, actually, and destroy your idea of going from back to front. Because I think the ear of the mammoth actually tells the same story. Because obviously, as we all learn as children, elephants have great big ears that they flap.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
and they flap them to lose heat because elephants living in India or Africa are living in a very hot environment and their ears are full of blood vessels and they flap these very big ears to actually lose heat because they don't want to overheat. Now the mammoth living in an arctic climate had the exact opposite problem. It wanted to conserve heat And so the mammoth ear is much smaller.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
They're about 10% of the area of that of a living elephant. We know this from the frozen carcasses, by the way. One should interject, you know, that for most fossil species, all we have is bones and teeth, because that's normally all that survives, right? But the mammoth is very special in this regard. Because we have these complete carcasses that have been found under the ground in Siberia.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
They've basically been in a deep freeze in the permafrost since the Ice Age. That's how we know about things like the tail length, the ear, other soft tissue features that we otherwise wouldn't know about because they didn't have bones in them. I think the ear and the tail are part of the same story of reducing the area of small, thin organs outside the body.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
In a cold environment, you don't want to lose heat through them, and you don't want them to get frostbite. So that's that.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Well, it's basically like a living elephant in that you've got two great big tusks sticking out of the front end. And the tusks are essentially modified incisor teeth. That's what elephant tusks are. That's what mammoth tusks were. They're equivalent to our side incisors. So not the center two teeth at the front, but the ones right next to them. Obviously, massively overgrown.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And they're made of solid dentine. which is they have no enamel around the outside, our teeth enamel on the outside, but the sort of more creamy colored dentine on the inside. Ivory, which is what tusks are, is solid dentine. And the mammoth tusks differed from those of living elephants in that they don't just go sort of straight forward with a gentle curve like those of living elephants.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
mammoth tusks have a kind of spiral shape and in some individuals you know with very large tusks they could even cross in the middle because they came down out of the skull round to the side and then spiral inwards and could even kind of cross in the middle which leads to interesting questions of how they were actually used i was going to say so do we know how they use these these great tusks because i don't think they'll be used for digging up roots or anything like that
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Well, I mean, mainly these kinds of organs, whether it's tusks, horns, and so on, are for fighting. I mean, that is their original use. Exactly how that worked in the cases where the tusks ended up, you know, crossing over each other in the middle, because the points normally should point forward if you're going to be fighting with them. With most individuals, it was like that.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
And I think that was still the main function, but also for a sort of intimidating display.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Well, the head of the mammoth is different from that of living elephants. It's got a very high dome, very high single dome at the top. It's got sort of a high skull. And I think the reason for that is because the muscles and tendons that hold up the head originate on the back of the head and go back and attach to the top of the back. And with that enormous weight of tusks,
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
At the front, you think about it, so actually the animal's got to be able to raise and lower its head with these huge things sticking out of the front. And so it needed enormous power of muscle and tendon, very, very strong, and lots of them attaching to the back of the head. So I think partly that's why the head is actually very high, because it's giving more area at the back for that purpose.
The Ancients
Woolly Mammoths
Also, the mammoth had very high crowned teeth. Now, this was something that developed in the evolution that we talked about earlier, because the mammoth's ancestors lived mostly on the leaves of trees and shrubs, which if you are a herbivorous mammal, those are relatively soft to chew. They don't wear down your teeth very quickly.
The Ancients
Pompeii: The Buried City
I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And on not just the Tudors from History Hit, we do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors. From the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry VIII. From Anne Boleyn to her daughter, Elizabeth I. But we also do lots that's not Tudors. Murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches. Clues in the title, really.
The Ancients
Pompeii: The Buried City
So follow not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
The Ancients
Pompeii: The Buried City
I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on not just the Tudors from History Hit, we do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors, from the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry VIII, from Anne Boleyn to her daughter Elizabeth I, but we also do lots that's not Tudors, murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches, clues in the title really.
The Ancients
Pompeii: The Buried City
So follow not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.