For Week III
Cultures Grown by the Great Rivers: Egypt and Mesopotamia
[21 M NO CLASS JEWISH NEW YEAR]
23 W Egypt: monuments for gods and
kings
**25 F Sumer and Assyria: Visual language and urban civilization;
art and the theology of power
Sources: J. Pritchard The Ancient Near East Vol. I An Anthology of Texts
and Pictures (Princeton 1958)
The Story of Sinuhe [after Pritchard 5f]
As P. notes, this is one of the classics of Egyptian literature;
the many extant papyri and ostraca (inscribed potsherds) come from
a period of some 800 years, from ca. 1800 BCE to 1000 BCE.
The story: An Egyptian official of the Middle Kingdom goes
into the Middle East, in voluntary exile in a time of civil unrest (ca.
1960 BCE, death of Amenemhet I). There he prospered and was made
head of his own nomad tribe of "Bedu", "Asiatics",
but he longed for home. Finally he received an invitation from court and
was able to leave behind the tribe he had come to govern and the children
he sired there in Asia. He came home in the reign of SenUsert I, ca. 1971-1928
BCE, with an entourage of his Asian followers.
This excerpt [P., 9f] describes his final return, coming
down the Nile from the garrisoned frontier, his formal reception at the
royal palace and the happy end of his mortal journey. Taken into
the court, intimate of the royal household, living again in the material
style of a noble Egyptian. Cultural identity is equated with specific forms
of material and visual culture: Sinuhe's good fortune and return
to civilization from the nomads' sandy wastes is mapped out as a
list of his new house and his honorific statue and tomb given as royal
gift , looking forward to his ultimate journey to the harbor of paradise.
Note how important it seems to the narrator, not simply to list these possessions
and their materials, but to make a narrative sequence of the process of
making them and to visualize the different specialists at their work; both
Sinuhe's house and his tomb, note well, have exemplary figural decoration
(painted house walls, carved (and painted) tomb walls.
******
"Then this servant [Sinuhe] came south [from Syria]. I stopped
at the [frontier station] "The Ways of Horus". Its commander,
who was responsible for the border patrol, sent a message to the Royal
Residence to make the news known. Then His Majesty sent an able Overseer
of Peasants at the Palace, with loaded ships in his train, carrying gifts
from the royal presence for the Asiatics who had followed me as escort
to The Ways of Horus, and I called each of them by name [to introduce
the two embassies]. Every butler was busy at his duties, and when I
embarked and set sail, the kneading and straining of beer was carried on
beside me until I got to the town of Lisht.
When dawn had broken, very early, they came and summoned me, ten
men coming and ten men going, to escort me to the Palace. Between the Sphinxes,
I put my forehead to the ground, as the Royal Children waited in an exedra
to meet me. The courtiers who are Ushers into the Audience Hall sent me
on to the Private Chambers, where I found his Majesty on the Great
Throne in an exedra of fine gold. When I stretched out on my belly, in
his presence I did not know myself, though this God greeeted me pleasantly
- I was like a man caught in the dark, my sould departed, my body was powerless,
my heart was not in my body to tell me life from death.
Then His Majesty said to one of these [Usher] Courtiers: "Lift
him up, let him speak to me", and then His Majesty said: "Behold,
thou art come. ... [Pharaoh invites Sinuhe to speak, and he throws himself
at Pharaoh's mercy.]
Then, the Royal Childrren were ushered in, and His Majesty said
to the Queen, "Here is Sinuhe, come as Bedu, in the costume
of the Asiatics". She gave a very great cry, and the Royal Children
clamored altogether. Then they said to His Majesty, "O Sovereign,
my lord, it is not really him!" - then His Majesty said "It really
is him!". Now when they had brought with them their bead-necklaces,
their rattles, and their sistra [sistrum=ritual noise-maker], then they
presented them to His Majesty. [and they ask Pharaoh to have mercy on Sinuhe,
saluting their king as an archer with his bow ready to shoot].
Then His Majesty said: "He shall not fear, he has no cause to
be in terror. He shall be a Courtier among the nobles, and be enrolled
in the ranks of the Courtiers. Go you to the Inner Chambers of the Morning
[‘s dressing ceremony], to make his position".
So I went forth from the midst of the Inner Chambers, with the Royal
Children giving me their hands. After, we went to the Great Double Door.
I was put into the house of a Royal Son, in which were splendid things
- in it was a "cool room", and [painted] images of the
horizon. Costly things of the Treasury were in it; in every room were clothing
of royal linen, myrrh and prime oil of the King and the nobles whom he
loves, and every attendant was busy at his duties. The years were made
to pass away from my body - I was plucked, my hair was combed, a load [of
dirt] was given to the desert, and my clothes to the "Sand-Crossers".
I was dressed in fine linen, anointed with prime oil. I slept on a bed.
I gave the sand to them who are in it, and the wood oil to him who is anointed
with it. I was given a house which had a garden, that had belonged to a
Courtier; many craftsmen worked on it, and all its wood[-wprk] was
newly restored. Meals were brought me from the Palace three or four times
a day, besides that which the Royal Children gave me, never ceasing a moment.
There was built for me a pyramid tomb of stone in the midst
of the pyramid tombs. Those stone masons who hew a pyramid tomb took over
its ground plot, the outline-draftsmen designed in it, the chief sculptors
carved in it, and the Overseers of Works for the Necropolis made it their
concern. Its necessary materials were made from all the outfittings
which are placed at a tomb shaft. Mortuary priests were given to me, and
there was made for me a necropolis garden, with fields in it that
had reached all the way to the city, like that which is done for a chief
Courtier. My statue was overlaid with gold, and its skirt was of fine gold
- it was His Majesty who had it made; there is no poor man, for whom the
like has been done! So I was under the favor of the king's presence until
the Day of Mooring [= death] had come."
Sources: Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps that once .... Sumerian Poetry in Translation (New Haven 1987)
The Cylinders of Gudea: [F & R reserve pamphlet]
Around 2125 BCE, a trilogy of cuneiform cylinders was written
to celebrate thow Gudea, ruler of Girsu in the region of Lagash (Telloh,
exc. 1877 CE) built a new version of the temple called Eninnu for the
water god Ningirsu; its title was "the House of Ningirsu Having Been
Built ...". The new temple replaced one made by Gudea's father.
The opening is lost; we have the second (Cylinder A) and third (Cylinder
B) sections of the trilogy. This is a very early version of a standard
genre of ruler panegyric, the celebration of temple building (like the
Biblical account's about Solomon and the great temple in Jerusalem). As
in the Sumerian and Hebrew account's of the ark of the great flood, God
tells Gudea in a dream how to build this place, and describes the rewards
of benevolent weather that will ultimately follow - rain river floods,
and clear skies in their season. The last part describes the god and his
consort entering their new home and setting the pantheon they govern to
the tasks of a palace bureaucracy, mapping the roles of the temple priests.
Gudea gives a series of gifts and furniture and a dedication festival,
then a "housewarming party" for Ningirsu and his guests, all
the great gods of Sumer [ie from the other cities of Sumer - like visiting
rulers], and the gods bless the temple and Gudea.
The building sequence is a fascinatingly detailed account
of architectural practice and Sumerian forms, where Gudea himself plays
every role (like casting mud-brick) performed in actuality by a horde of
slaves and specialists; and he works to blueprints drawn up for him in
his dream by a warrior god writing a plan on a tablet of the precious
deep-blue stone lapis lazuli, as a goddess with a silver pen consults in
a treatise of astronomy and astrology - [not just for good omens, but to
set the cardinal axes for the temple]. The long account of ceremonial
appointments and fittings further maps out the artifacts and activities
of sanctuary, and also of palace - since the gods live as a human ruler
would. (In the Sumerian mind, of course, the gods set the ruler's protocol!).
Jacobsen's superb translation is set out to preserve the trilogy's
poetic format; here the poetic diction is condensed into running phrases
to make prose paragraphs, but keep in mind that the text was originally
thus itself an artifact of stylized, entrancing word patterns.
IV Empires of Land and Sea The Bronze Age Aegean - Minoan and Mycenean Culture. Art for house, palace and tomb in Crete, Thera, Mycenae.
V "Greece" Begins: City-States, Tyrants and Colonies
5 M Patterning the World I: The Archaic Greek Image. Art for contest & memory.
Texts: The City and Palace of Alcinous - Homer's Odyssey The Shield of Achilles - Homer's Iliad
******
What we call Bronze Age archaeology was set off by Homer's late 19th c. readers - Heinrich Schliemann, who belived so much that the Ilion/Troy of the Iliad existed, that he went looking for it - and found it. In this century, archaeologists, historians, and literary historians have reached this consensus:
As Milman Parry showed, Homer's 2 verse epics, the Iliad and (probably composed afterwards) the Odyssey, represent the work of an archaic poet who was heir to a long tradition of oral composition , practiced before the Greeks learned to write (again) in the "Dark Age" centuries before the 7th c. BCE. As with sophisticated improvisational musics like jazz where musicians actively create from a stylized language, these oral poets worked with a rich formulaic vocabulary of compositional structures, story situations, and words and phrases. The single author from Ionia whom the Greeks called Homer made his epics from this tradition but fixed them in what he intended to be an unalterable form, sometime between the 8th and the 6th c. BCE; we know that in the 6th c. BCE in Athens, its tyrants Peisistratos and his sons sponsored some kind of project to get Homer written down in a "pure", "reference library" version, at the same time that they sponsored at their city's annual festival a formal competition event where "rhapsodes" tried to recite all of Home from memory. (These "rhapsodes" represent the kind of performers who must have been transmitting Homer's work from very close to its grand moment of composition; the idea of repeating a masterpiece without changing it, is like our classical music repertoire where gifted musicians and conductors work with a fixed music script.) Though scholars fight over just which elements do so, it is very clear that many myths, themes, motifs and names in the two epics derive from earlier centuries, back into the late Bronze Age; and we've come to understand too (thanks especially to Walter Burkert) just how much very early Greek poetry (Homer & Hesiod) and religion has close links to Near Eastern and Anatolian cultures. (It has links too to the great Near Eastern literatures, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, to non-Greek Anatolian poetry, like the fragments of an epic in Luvian that start, "When we came to the towers of high Wilusa [- ?Ilion]"). Many formal terms in Homer can be connected also, to words wriiten in the Mycenean scripts we call "Linear B" [like king = anax = Mycenean wanasa].
In the Archaic age and ever after, for the Greeks of the whole Mediterranean (Italy & Sicily, mainland Greece, the islands and Ionia) Homer set the paradigm for every aspect of culture, not just literature, and was taken as a "true" source for religion, myth, and history, founding Greek culture as the ancient world knew it in a lost age of "heroes". So, what I've given you has two lives, as it were: poetic set-pieces which mirror dimly the common culture of the Late Bronze and Eraly Iron Age Aegean world; and paradigm texts taken as inspiration by the Greeks of the Archaic Age,. Ironically, they would take 200 to 300 years to achieve anything like the magnificent images and architecture their poetry told them that their "ancestors" had achieved, as they believed too, from seeing the ruins of Mycenae.
Below are two excerpts from Homer. One is from the Odyssey, which tells about the wanderings on his way home, of a Western Greek king from Ithaca who had fought at Troy; here, the shipwrecked Odysseus has come to an ideal community on an island called Scheria, where its princess Nausicaa takes him to her royal father's palace in the city of Phaecia. The other is from the Iliad; it describes an elaborate shield made for the Greek hero Achilles by the smith-god of the Olympian pantheon, Hephaistos. Note his status in both excerpts, as the supreme maker, and his ability to make statues that look and also act like living beings; in Greek myth, the first female human was commissioned from Hephaistos, a statue into which Athena and the gods breathed life - the famous Pandora [all-gifts]. To the youths in the palace of Alcinous and the girls in H/'s own smithy compare the kouroi and korai of Archaic Greece; the (wheeled) tripods for cauldrons he is making for his own house are archaeologically known from the Archaic period, and used as votives for gods long after, also.
************************************************** [I've made you a running commentary here, for part I, to show you how we can use ancient texts to enlighten us about actual art - and vice-versa!
Notice the emphases, *, on looking at art, and on its capacity to make us feel wonder, and on the skill of the maker. Note too how the desire that representation be life-like comes out in descriptions of images that act like living beings, and the attribution of this quality to something divine in the artist's skill (here, the maker is literally a god, Hephaistos - which is also to say, note how Greek religion includes a maker of things and of art in its standard pantheon.]
I. Odyssey [from W. Shewring trans., Homer. The Odyssey (Oxford, 1980)]
The City and Palace of Alcinous
Book VI: [see, how the beginning and end of this Book of the epic are // to one another - it maes a kind of "map" frame for its story, not unlike the Shield's supposed images.]
*Note - you will see that ancient texts in our editions are conventionally divided into "book" sections. Within these "books", we have conventional numbers for finding smaller sections shared by every edition - for poetry, this is ordinarily by line number. The prose Odyssey I used only had inclusive line headers at the tops of the pages - next year, I'll run it against the Greek. Because I turned the Lattimore Iliad into prose, I left out again most line numbers. Both translations are slightly altered here.
1ff: There then the much-tried hero lay, overcome with labor, and now, with sleep. But [the goddess] Athene went to the land and polis of the Phaecians; these were a people that in times past had inhabited spacious Hypereia near the masterful Cyclops race, who were stronger than they and plundered them continually. So King Nausithous the Phaecian transplanted his people from Hypereia and settled them in Scheria, far removed from toiling mankind. He ringed the city with a wall, built houses, gave the gods temples, apportioned land for tillage.
[Compare: The colonization age of the late Mycenean period and "Dark Ages", trading and refugee colonies from Italy to Ionia and the Levant, and later Archaic colonization age of the 8th-6th c. BCE, transplanted cities (from one mother city, or several) in Southern France, Southern Italy, Sicily and N. Africa, and the approaches to and coasts of the Black Sea]
[The palace and its inhabitants; the arrangements , situations, poses and attributes in these tableaux of persons, and of persons in architecture, are interesting to our images]
.... The king now was Alcinous .. and to his palace Athene went, planning return for bold Odysseus. She made her way to the sumptuous bedroom where slept a girl who in form and feature was like the immortal goddesses - Nausicaa, daughter of Alcinous. Near her, on either side of the double doors there slept two handmaids whose loveliness was the Graces' gift, and the gleaming doors were shut.
[Athene stands at the bed, and appears, disguised as a friend to Nausicaa in her dreams, to suggest to her to go wash her clothes and palace furnishings at the shore - where Athena plans for her to find and rescue Odysseus. N. wakes up at dawn:]
The girl .. went her way through the palace halls to tell her tale to her dear parents, her father and mother. Her mother was seated at the hearth with her waiting women, spinning yarn of sea-purple color; her father she overtook on his way out to meet the Phaecian lords at a council for which they asked his presence ...
["Megaron": Homer often calls a royal hall a "megaron", and we think we see the plan of what he means in Bronze Age Mycenean palaces as at Pylos and (see citadel plan on web) Mycenae, and also from the 9th. c. or so onwards in a very early type of Greek temple; many think this the ancestor of the standard Greek temple core with its fore-porch and main room (cella) in habited by its god (statue). The type = a longish rectangular room with a central round hearth (helps pick it out on plans!) with several pillars around it to hold up a roofpole, and a front porch with projecting side walls and/or corner columns, again to support the ends of a rooff. The very ancient cult-site of Apollo at Delphi kept a hearth in its cella through rebuildings and renovations up to the 3rd c. CE. , with an iron chair next to it.)
[most of the Book is Nausicaa's encounter with the heroic stranger. At the end she sends him on his way to the city behind her, thus giving him instructions:]
[Itinerary: 1. a sacred grove and stream sanctuary just outisde the city, one typical kind of sanctuary site (vs. up on the high city central hill, acropolis. 2. Next to this the ruler's estates 3. The city, full of houses within which the king's is evidently bigger and taller, and more splendid 4. palace complex: one seems to enter a walled forecourt, with the facade of the royal hall dominating it; down at the end of this long hall [compare the very long "hundred-footer" shrines of Dark Age or very early Archaic Greece and the "heroon" at Lefkandi]. Now it has not only a hearth but also a central *column, of symbolic as well as structural importance - compare the column sign for "great house" in the Lion Gate at Mycenae - it is not accidental that the rulers' chairs are placed by it.. Note how this axial movement down a long hall to pay homage is // to Greek temple&cult statue formats;. Compare how on the Ayia Irini sarcophagus, some important person sits in the porch of a hall at far right, to watch the ceremony in the main part of the picture. We see such audience scenes (supplicant before enthroned king and queen) in Archaic myth scenes, like the 6th c. pediment from a little hall on Athens' acropolis where Hercules comes before Zeus and Hera in their palace on Mt. Olympos, the court of the gods, all seated around their ruler Zeus, is shown on many Greek sacred buildings - like the front of the Siphnian Treasury, and the front of the "hall" core of the Parthenon.]
Near the road you will find a stately grove of poplars; it is dedicated to Athene. Inside it there is a running stream, and there is a meadow stretching round it. My father's estate with its fruitful orchards begins just there, within hailing distance of the city. .. When you think we are at the palace, then walk further on into the city of the Phaecians, and ask for my father Alcinous' house. *It is easy to tell from the rest, and the smallest child could take you to it; among all the buildings of our people there is none to compare with the king's palace When courtyard and house have closed around you, walk without pausing down the great hall, until you find my mother - she sits in the firelight by the hearth .. she has her back to the great column ... near her chair is my father's chair; he sits in it and drinks his wine as a god might do. ...
[A Near Eastern and Minoan kind of palace location, note, on flat ground; even in the Bronze Age, Greeks tried to make cities centered around a high citadel acropolis, where rulers would live and/or principal temples were located, as at Mycenae and at Athens. The "House of Erechtheus" that Athena goes back to at Athens in this section was on the Acropolis, where myth put the house of the legendary kings and where classical Athenians built the Erechtheion.]
Book VII: [Palace: walls, courtyard or forecourt, hall]
1.f While patient Odysseus was praying thus, the sturdy mules went on to the town with the princess. Having reached her father's noble palace, she halted the wagon at the forecourt, and her brothers, looking like immortals, gathered round her, unyoked the mules and carried the clothes indoors. She herself went up into her own room ...
[Archaic Greek vases often depict such unyoking/yoking scenes, which recur in many palace visits told in the Odyssey, with females helping males, human or gods - the implied situation is an affectionate, domestic one as here, in the house court.]
Odysseus meanwhile was setting out on his walk to the town. Athene poured a thick mist around him ... [and Athene acts his guide, disguised as a young girl gone to fetch water , that is, from a fountain. As he passes through the streets, ..]
[This must be the city fountain described below, as issuing from Alcinous' house by his arrangement to help his people. Archaic tyrants started to build formal fountain houses for their cities in the 6th c.; the first or one of the first was built by Peisistratos in Athens, the ruler who oversaw (see Intro. notes) a great project to edit and celebrate Homer's epics.]
O. *looked wonderingly at the landing-places, the trim ships, the assembly place of the noble townsmen, and the long high palisaded walls that *astonished all beholders. ...
[The city: this is a harbor town, like many of the Ionian cities and Mycenean Pylos in Greece. The wonderful walls are a city sign from the earliest times we know (cf. the wall perimeter city symbols on the Palette of Narmer, and the city-wall crowns of the Hellenistic and Roman city personifications like the Tyche of Antioch); the idea of a civic meeting place for a town council, separate from a palace quarter, is mirrored in the Archaic Greek urban and social topography of acropolis above and agora with meeting placees) below, as at Athens' Agora. ]
[Athene leaves, for ] Marathon and wide-wayed Athens, and entered Erechtheus' mighty house. [E., king of Athens, is her son.]
[As above, where Odysseus wanders the streets, we see a conception of a city that means thinking of its street-network, and admiring, as here, fine main roads. Ancient readers knew she visited Erechtheus on the Acropolis of Athens. Her journey is an implied itinerary too - from the coastal plain of Marathon to Athens, taking the roads of the lower city up to the palace, // to Odysseus' own visit route in this section.]
Meanwhile O. went on his way to Alcinous' noble palace, and *thoughts came crowding to his mind as he halted here, and again there, before he arrived at the bronze threshold. A radiance, like that of the sun or moon, played over the king's high palace.
[outside facade and great gate]
[Compare the shining effects of Gudea's temple in his Hymn. Alcinous' palace is magical in how its ordinary fittings of stone or wood are all in precious metals. Some Greek shrines that had a very long prehistory were (or imagined to originally be in metal), like the "Bronze House" of Artemis in Sparta, and one of the mythical phases of Apollo's famous Temple at Delphi.]
Bronze walls ran this way and that, from the entrance to the farthest end, and they were topped with a frieze of kyanos. [dark blue enamel/ glass paste].
[Odysseus must be going through the court to the megaron facade.]
Gold doors closed the palace in, and silver posts rose above the threshhold. The lintel was silver, the door-handle was gold. Each side of the door were gold and silver watchdogs, deathless forever and unaging, which Hephaistos *with his wit and cunning had fashioned as guardians for the great house.
[This is a palace of Near Eastern type, in this section; it has its own high walls with a colored frieze above; just as ordinary materials turn to metal, the faience strip here transforms NE glazed brick, like the blue tiles of the Ishtar Gate. Note the guardian statues, like the Egyptian sphinx pairs at Sinuhe's palace of Pharaoh, sanctuary sphinxes (as at Giza, Great Sphinx) and sphinx entrance avenues at Karnak and Deir el Bahari, and the entrance lamassu of the Assyrian and Achaemenid palaces. But, making them watch-dogs is a Greek touch; in myth the entrance to the Kingdom of the Dead was guarded by a three-headed dog monster, and at Odysseus' own house at the end of the Odyssey, we meet his dog Argos watching out at the threshhold.]
[the great banquet hall of the megaron]
Inside, to left and right from the entrance to the very end, chairs were ranged along the wall; and over these hung tapestries on which women had spent their skill, finely spun and closely woven. Here the leaders of the Phaecians would often sit as they are and drank, for they always had abundance. Standing upon shapely pedestals were statues of boys made of gold - they had flaming torches in their hands and gave their light, all evening through, to the banqueters in the hall ...
[The king feasts with his men before him. Macedonian and Hellenistic kings had similar banquet halls. similarly, a major feature of every Greek house would be the "mens' room", andron. Most of the portable and privately owned art, and later, mosaic floor picturesc and wallpainting we study is to ornament such banquet rooms, like the tapestries and statues here. Note the reference to fine textile decorations for architecture, another practice we know for the Hellenistic kings' buildings; for many of your ancient cultures, we often wonder if wall decorations were influenced by such hangings.]
[The statues here have no parallels in Bronze Age Greece; what they are most like is the "young men", kouroi, of Archaic sculpture, just as in the Iliad passage below Hephaistos' metal girls, korai make his servant entourage. But we don't know any life-size statues like this turned into "furniture", living servants. On the other hand, Archaic Greeks did tend to make supports for objects (mirror-stand handles, chair pieces, incense burner shaft supports, basin supports) into human figures who seemed thus to "carry" the useful object, here a torch; these support figures would inspire the human columns, caryatids, that start in Archaic architecture (like the Siphnian Treasury and later, the Classical Erechtheion - where they do carry baskets, and jugs and offering bowls!). This passage may be what inspired Romans in the 1st c. BCE and CE, who did like to put in their houses - as we know from houses at Pompeii - a class of bronze boys holding out elaborate lamp-holders ("lampadarii)!]
[ordered paradise orchard and herbal, vineyard]
Outside the courtyard, near the entrance, is a great garden of 4 acres with a fence running round, this way and that. Here are planted tall thriving trees - pears, pomegranates, apples with glistening fruit, sweet figs, rich olives. The fruit of all these never flags or fails the whole year round, winter or summer. Here the west wind is always breathing - some fruits it brings to birtth, some to ripeness. Pear upon pear matures to fullness, apple on apple, grape-cluster on grape-cluster, fig on fig. There too the king has his fruitful vineyard planted. Behind is a warm and level spot, dried by the sun, where the grapes are being gatherd and others trodden. In front there are unripe grapes that have scarcely shed their blossom, and others already faintly darkening. There too, bordering the last row of vines, are trim plots of all kinds of herbs that keep fresh all year round.
[Near East and Egypt again - though added out of topographic sequence, and hard to see just how to map it too - but here is the ever-fertile garden surround for the royal house. The dream of a garden always in bloom, with fruit out of season, goes back to old Near Eastern myths about a paradise of immortality, often outisde the edges of our usual world (like Phaecia itself), like the island in the epic of Gilgamesh, or the Bible's garden of Eden. This dream acts powerdully on funerary art , tomb garden layouts, and rulers' art (like the Garden Room of Livia and the Ara Pacis of her husband Augustus) in the Roman world.]
[As a description, note the detailed picture of a functional as well as beautiful garden with fruit, herb and vine sections with reference to people working in the vineyard- very like the Egyptian painting sequences you know from the Tomb of Nebamun, see web. It is interesting to see how the houses at Thera like to show a painted fertile landscape with people or animals gathering its fruits, like the room of the Saffron Gatherer, or even of the Fisher-Boy; and you can compare too the fine luxury objects for banqueting with rustic labor in landscape like the Harvester Vase and the Vapheio Bull-capture cups.]
[fountains: garden channels, and city fountain before palace]
Last there are two springs of water, and one of these is channelled out over the whole space of the gardens; the other, facing it, flows under the entrance of the courtyard to issue in front of the lofty palace, and from this the townspeople drew their water.
[Near Eastern again - think of the garden waters, and water-pouring divine protectors, in the palace paintings at Mari (web comparanda) and in Assyria, as at Khorsabad. The Bible talks about the 4 rivers of paradise that flow out from its center to water the world, which becomes a beloved image depicted in Christian sacred art].
[The idea of the civic fountain-house and the city nourished by its ruler, see above.]
*Such were the god's sumptuous gifts in the king's demesne. Much-tried Odysseus stood there and *gazed; then, having gazed his fill, steeped quickly over the threshold of the house.
*************
II. Iliad Book 18 [from R. Lattimore transl., The Iliad of Homer (Chicago 1951)] [I've run the lines often together]
[The epic's protagonist is Achilles, the son of the mortal Peleus and the sea-nymph/ goddess Thetis. Achilles has lost his armor and weapons, when his dear companion Patroklos borrows them and then is killed and has his arms plundered by the Trojans. His goddess mother goes to her friend Hephaistos, smith of the gods, to get a new set to cheer Achilles' black grief (shield, helmet, shin guards [greaves] and a helmet, and a cuirass [torso protector]).
ll. 369ff: Thetis of the silver feet came to the house of Hephaistos, imperishable, starry, and shining among the immortals, built in bronze for himself by the [lame] god of the dragging footsteps. She found him sweating as he turned here and there to his bellows busily, since he was working on 20 tripods to stand against the wall of his strong-founded dwelling. And under each base he had set gold wheels, so that of their own motion they could wheel into the immortal gathering, and come back to his house - a wonder to look at! So far these were finished, but the elaborate ear-handles were not yet on. he was forging these, and beating out their chains. As he was at work on this in his craftsmanship and his cunning, Thetis of the silver feet meanwhile drew near him. Charis (Grace; H's companion) of the shining veil saw her, .... and made thetis sit down in a chair that was wrought elaborately and splendid with silver nails, and under it a footstool. ...
[Thetis and H. converse, because she had been so kind to him in his own past distress. he packs up his tools and cleans himself, leaving his forge and coming to where Thetis sits, limping as he goes..]
417 And supporting their master moved his attendants. These are gold, and in appearance like living young women. There is intelligence in their hearts, and there is speech in them and strength, and from the immortal gods they have learned how to do things. These nimbly stirred in support of their master ...
[Thetis begs her friend's help, weeping over her son's fated early death, asking for H. to make somehing that will lift her son's grief at his friend's death. H. consoles her, with a movin gstatement that contrasts the permanence of art with the ephemerality of mortal flesh - but also sets the wonder we gain looking at art, as a consolation against those sorowful thoughts.]
462 hearing her, the famous smith of the strong arms answered her: Do not fear. Let not these things be a thought in your mind. And I wish that I could hide him away, from death and its sorrow, at that time when his hard fate comes on him, as surely as there will be fine armor for him suchas another man out of many men shall wonder at, when he looks on it.
469 So he spoke, and left her there, and went to his bellows. He turned these towards the fire and gave them their orders for working. And the bellows, all 20 of them, blew on the crucibles, from all directions blasting out wind to blow the flames high, now, as he scurried to be at this place, and now at another, wherever Hephaistos might wish them to blow, and the work went forward.
He cast on the fire bronze which is weariless, and with it tin, and precious gold, and silver, and next put out upon its standard the great anvil, and gripped in one hand the ponderous hammer, while he grasped the pincers with the other.
478 First of all, he forged a shield that was huge and heavy, elaborating it about, and threw around it a shining triple rim that glittered, and the shield strap was cast of silver.
There were five folds making the shield itself, and upon it he pattrened out many things, in his skill and his craftsmanship.
He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea's water, and the tirless sun, and the moon wxing into her fullness, and on it all the constellations that garland the heavens, the Pleiades and the Hyades and the strength of Orion, and the Bear, whom men also call the Wagon, who tunrs about in a fixed place and looks at Orion, and she alone is nevcer plunged in the wash of the Ocean.
On it he wrought in all their beauty two cities of mortal men.
[The city at its normal affairs]
And in one, there were marriages and festivals. They were leading the brides along the city from their maiden chambers under the flaring of torches, and the loud bride song was rising up. The young men folloed the circles of a dance, and among them, the flutes and lyres kept up their clamor, as in the meantime, the women standing each at the door of her own courtyard admired them. The people were assembled in the market place, where a quarrel had srpung up, and two men were arguing the blood price for a man who had been killed. One promised full restitution in a public statement, but the other refused, and would accept no compensation. Then both made for an arbitrator, to have a decision, and people were calling out on either side, to help both men. But the heralds kept the people in hand, as meanwhile, the elders were in session in the scared circle, on benches of polished stone, and held in their hands the staffs of heralds who lif their voices. the two men rushed before these, and took turns speaking hteir cases, and on the gorund between them lay 2 talents [a vary large standard amount] of gold, to be given to that judge who spoke the straightest opinion in this case.
[The city at war - just like the setting of the Iliad itself!]
But aorund the other city were lying two forces of armed men, shining in their war gear. For one side, counsel was divided - whether to storm and sack, or whether to share nbetween both sides the propert and all the possessions the lovely citadel held hard within it. But the city's people were not giving way, and they armed for an ambush. Their beloved wives and little children stood up on the rampart to hold it, and ith them the men with age upon them, but meanwhile the others went out, and Ares and Pallas Athena led them [god and goddess of war]. These were gold, nboth, and gold clothing was on them, and being gods, they were beautiful and huge in their armour, and conspicuous from afar, but the people around them were smaller. [*hierarchic scale!] These, when they got to the place that was set for their ambush, in a river where there was a watering place for all animals, there they sat down in place, shrouding themselves in the bright bronze. But apart from these sat 2 men, to watch for the rest of them, and waiting until they could see the herds and the shambling cattle, who presently appeared, and 2 herdsmen went along with them playing happily on pipes, and took no thought of treachery. Those others saw them and made a rush, and wuickly after cut off on both sides the herds of cattle and the beautiful flocks of shining sheep, and killed their shoeherds uon them. But as soon as they heard the roar rising up from the cattle, the other army, sitting at council, suddenly mounted up behind their light-foot horses [on chariots], and went after and soon caught up with them. These stood their ground, and fought a battle by the banks of the river, and thew were making casts at one another with their long-headed spears. And among them was Hate, with Confusion, and Death the destroyer - she was holding a live man with a new wound, and another one unhurt, and she dragged a dead man by his feet through the carnage. The clothing on her shoulders showed strong red with the mens' blood. Like living men*, all closed together and fought with eachother, and dragged away from eachother the corpses of those who had fallen.
[the agricultural and pastoral landscape]
He made upon it a soft field, the pride of the tilled land, wide and triple-ploughed, upon it many ploughmen, who at the turn wheeled their teams and drove them in either direction. And as these making their turn would reach the end of the field strip, here a man would come up to them and hand them a jug of honey-sweet wine, and they would turn again to the furrows in their haste to come again to the field strip's end. the earth darkened behind them, and looked like earth that has been plowed even though it was gold - such was the wonder of the shield's forging.
He made on it the estate of a king, where the laborers were reaping with the sharp hooks in their hands. Of the cut swathes, some fell along the lines of reaping, one after another, while the sheaf-0binders caugth up others and tied them with bind ropes. There were 3 sheaf-binder who stodd by, and behind them were children pciking up the cut swathes, and filled their arms and carried and passed them on continually - and by them, in silence, the King holding his staff stood happily near the line of reapers. And apart and under the trees the heralds made ready a feast, and trimmed a great ox they had slaughtered. Meanwhile, for the workmen to eat, the women scattered abundant white barley.
He made on it a graet vineyard heavy with clusters, lovely and in gold, but the grapes upon it were darkened, and the vines themselves stood out, through silver poles.* About them he made a field ditch of dark metal, and all around this he drove a fence of tin. There was only one path to the vineyard, and along it ran the grape-bearers for the vineyard's stripping. Young men and young women, in all their light-heaarted innocence, carried off in their woven baskets the kind, sweet fruit, and in their midst a youth with a singing lyre played on it for them charmingly, and sang in a light voice the beautiful song for Linos [a Dionysos chant], and they folloed him, and kept time to the music with singing and whistling, and light dance=steps of their feet.
He made upon it a herd of horn-straight oxen. The cattle were wrought of gold and tin, and in speed and with lowing they thronged in speed out of the dung of the farmyard to a pasturing place by a sounding river, and beside the moving field of a reed-bed. The herdsmen who went along with the cattle were of gold, 4 of them, and 9 dogs shifting their feet followed them.
But among the foremost of the cattle two formidable lions had caugth hold of a bellowing bull, and he with loud lowings was dragged away, as the dogs and the young men chased after. But the 2 lions, breaking open the great ox's hide, gulped the black blood and the inward guts, while the herdsmen meanwhile were in the act of setting and urging the quick dogs at them. But they runed back from the lions before they could get their quick teeth in, but would come and take their stand very close, and bayed, and kept clear.
And the renowned smith of the strong arms made on it, for the glimmering sheepflocks, a meadow large and in a lovely valley, with dwelling places on it, and covered shelters, and sheepfolds.
And the renowned smith of of the strong arms made elaborate on it a dancing floor, like that which once in the wide spaces of [Cretan] Knossos Daidalos built for Ariadne of the lovely tresses. And on it were young men, and young girls sought for their beauty with gifts of oxen, dancing and holding hands at the wrist. These wore, the maidens long light robes, but the men wore tunics of finespun work and shiningsoftly, touched with olive oil. And their heads the girls wore fair garlands, while the young men carried gold knives that hung from silver belts. Sometimes, on their knowing feet, they would run very lightly, just as when a potter crouching makes trial of his wheel to see if it will run smooth. Another time, they would from rows, and run, rows crossing one another. And around the lovely dancers, a great crowd stood happily watching, while among the dancers, 2 acrobats revolving among them led the measures of song and dance.
He made on it the great strength of the Ocean River, which ran round the uttermost rim of the shield's strong structure.
Then after he had wrought this shield, which was huge and heavy, he made for him a cuirass brighter than fire in its shining, and a helmet, massive and fitting close to his temples, lovely and intricate work, and laid a gold top-ridge along it, and made him leg-armor from pliable tin. Therafter when the renowned smith of the long arms had finished the armor, he lifted it, and laid it befoe Achilles' mother. And she like a hawk came sweeping down from the snows of Olympos [to Troy], and carried with her the shinign armor, the gift of Hephaistos.
[here Book 18 ends: Book 19 opens with Thetis flying in to her son's camp, grasping his hand and laying the armor before him - he is lying in his dead friend's arms, to keep the flies from rotting his body. Thetis says, embrace these arms instead:]
9: "My child - now though we grieve for him, me must let this man lie dead, in the way he was killed first, through the gods' planning. Instead, accept from me the glorious arms of Haphaistos, so splendid, and such as no man has ever worn on his shoulders!" So spoke the goddess, and set the armor down on the ground before Achilles, and all its elaboration clashed loudly.
Trembling seized hold of the Myrmidons [A.'s warriors],- none had the courage to look straight at it. They were afraid of it.
Only Achilles looked; and as he looked, the anger came harder upon him, and his eyes glittered terribly under his eyelids like sunflare. He was glad, holding in his hands the shining gifts of Hephaistos.
But when he satisfied his heart with looking at the intricate armor, he spoke to his mother and addressed her in winged words:
"My mother, the god has given me these weapons - they are such as are the work of immortals, no mortal man could ahve made them! Therefore, now, I shall arm myself in them. Yet - I am so afraid, during this time, for the warlike son of Menoitios [his dead friend] - that flies might get into the wounds, beaten by brinze in his body, and breed maggots in them, and these will make foul the body, seeing that the life is killed in him - and that all his flesh may be rotted -"
In turn, the goddess Thetis the silver-footed answered him: "My child, no longer let these things be a care to your mind. I will endeavour to drive from him the swarming and fierce things, those flies which feed on the bodies of men who have perished. And though he lie here til a year has gone to fulfillment, still his body shall be as it was, or firmer than ever. Go then and summon into assembly the fighting Achaians, unsay your anger against [your king] Agamemnon, shepherd of the people - and arm at once for the fighting, and put your war strength upon you." She spoke so, and drove the strength of great courage into him, and meanwhile, through the nostrils of Patroklos she distilled ambrosia and red nectar, so his flesh would not spoil.
[*NOTE: this is how in Egypt mummies' heads were cleaned and filled - the contents of the skull drawn out through the nostrils, and preservatives pushed back up and in!]