Sabratha's Long History

Today's US airstrike against ISIS at Sabratha in Libya offers an opportunity to note the deep history of this Libyan town. The attack, the US  says, was aimed at an ISIS training camp and particularly targeted Noureddine Chouchane, a Tunisian terrorist accused of plotting the attacks on the Bardo Museum and the beach at Sousse last year.

Roman theater, Sabratha

Sabratha, in northwestern Libya not far from Tunisia, is  a mid-sized city on the coast. But near the town are the ruins of ancient Sabratha, originally founded by the Phoenicians, later a major Roman city flourishing under the Severan Emperors, who were of Libyan origin.

Founded around 500 BC by the Phoenicians, later under Numidian rule, Sabratha with the arrival of Rome began a rise to become one of the "three cities" (Tripolis) from which Tripolitania would take its name: from west to east Sabratha, Oea (the modern Tripoli), and Leptis Magna.

Wikipedia

The Emperor Septimius Severus was from Leptis Magna, and the Tripolis reached its golden age under the ensuing Severan Emperors. In the Byzantine era, Justinian built a basilica there, but after the Arab conquest, trade shifted in favor of Oea, to which the broader name Tripolis (Tarabulus in Arabic), became applied exclusively, and Sabratha to its west and Leptis Magna to its east declined. One result is that the Roman ruins at Sabratha and (especially) at Leptis were better preserved.

The Ironies of ISIS at Palmyra: What would Zenobia Say?

Zenobia

As I have said many times, expressions of concern over ISIS' destruction of antiquities in no way is intended to underplay or undervalue their toll in human lives; on the contrary, the concerns over their destruction of heritage sites help generate attention to the human toll.

A denarius of Zenobia

There is an irony in the Islamic State's latest conquest: that a movement not known for its respect for women finds itself in possession of a site associated with one of the strongest female figures of antiquity. Second in fame only to Cleopatra (but unlike her, not in the shadow of a Caesar or an Antony), Queen Zenobia of Palmyra challenged Rome, ruled both the Levant and Egypt until he Emperor Aurelian brought her to heel.

The Palmyrene Empire

When her husband King Odenathus died in AD 267, she became Queen Regent for her minor son. She then proceeded to expel Rome from Egypt and invade Anatolia, ruling over a short-lived but extensive empire until defeated by Aurelian and carried off to Rome in 273.

Renaissance interpretation by Michele Tosini

She seems to have fascinated the Romans, and in subsequent centuries would inspire paintings, sculpture, novels, operas,and much romanticization of her story. In Arab tradition she is Zaynab and remembered in folklore. I thought the Renaissance Italian portrait by Michele Tosini at right, believed to be of Zenobia, would be particularly upsetting to ISIS, so I chose it.
.
She was the last queen of Palmyra and ruled the city at the moment of its greatest splendor. She saw the very ruins ISIS threatens today before the city's fall. What, indeed, would she think of ISIS?

Personal photos from a trip to Palmyra in 1972, over 40 years ago. I haven't been back since, having assumed it would always be there:

An Egyptian Soldier Writes Home from a Roman Legion in Europe

For a little Classical interlude, here's a piece about a surviving letter home from a Roman Legionary from Egypt writing home to his family in the Egyptian town of Tebtunis in the Fayyum. The writer, Aurelius Polion, was stationed with Legio II Adiutrix and was stationed in Pannonia in southeastern Europe. No exact date but it sounds like 2nd/3rd century AD.

What Did Cleopatra Really Look Like? Her Image (and "Infinite Variety") Through the Ages

I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on current developments as required.

"Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed."

Blaise Pascal, Pensées 180

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
 

For two millennia, artists have been fascinated by the last Pharaoh of Egypt, the last of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra VII Philopater, or as she is known to most people, just Cleopatra. She has been portrayed in coins, statuary, paintings, and film in many different ways, usually glamorously; she captivated two of the greatest figures in Roman history, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, bearing a child to one and bringing disaster to the other.

A month or so back I ran across this piece, which raises the question of Cleopatra's real looks, and is better than most such pieces. Far too many start from the assumption that Cleopatra is much overrated for her beauty. Many begin with an illustration of one of her coins, such as the one at left, which shows a woman with a beaked nose that does not conform to modern standards of beauty nor, based on what we know of Roman statuary, to Roman standards either (though they did have a higher appreciation of aquiline noses than many today). But is this coin a representation of what Cleopatra really looked like, or some sort of standardization in numismatic art, making her look rather masculine, or even just a die-maker with poor artistic skills? Let's look at a selection of Cleo's other coinage:

Do these even look like the same woman? Certainly they do not give us a consistent image,let alone explain how this woman won both Caesar and Antony. The gentlemanly verdict would seem to be that the Ptolemies had not mastered the numismatic arts.

But Cleopatra ruled Egypt as the last Pharaoh, either as co-ruler or sole ruler, for 21 years from 51 BC to 30 BC, beginning at the age of 18. There was plenty of time for contemporary depiction (even the Rosetta Stone was a decree from her era). But the stylistic conventions of Egyptian art intrude. She is portrayed as a goddess, with a voluptuous body but also because Pharaoh was traditionally male, sometimes but not always with masculine facial features.

Roman depictions are somewhat more consistent. but may not be done by artists who had ever seen her. And they, too, may be conventionalized.

Egyptian and Roman artists, and even Ptolemaic coin designers, may have actually seen, or spoken to those who had seen, the Egyptian Queen. Later artists faced no such constraints. She could be blonde or brunette as they preferred (either is possible; her ancestry was almost entirely Macedonian, despite some modern Afrocentrist efforts to claim her as African). And there were also preferences for how to portray her, usually either her first meeting with Caesar (according to legend arriving wrapped in a carpet) or her suicide (supposedly by a poisonous asp). The latter was a particularly popular theme, since she is said to have held the asp to her breast, allowing the artist to portray her naked or nearly so.

In the Renaissance, Piero di Cosimo painted Simonetta Vespucci, allegedly the most beautiful woman in Florence (married to a cousin of Amerigo Vespucci and also believed by many to have been the model for Botticelli's Venus). as Cleopatra, with the asp around her neck. The asp became a standard part of artistic representation.

Guido Cagnacci, 1658

The Renaissance and later painters soon standardized on a Cleopatra who was frequently blonde and usually rather underdressed. The death scene, with or without the asp, soon became a standard part of the iconography.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1866

Needless to say, later artists continued the tradition, including 19th-century artists in the Orientalist tradition like Jean-Léon Gérôme, known for his harem scenes, who in 1866 depicted Cleopatra's meeting with Caesar, looking a bit like a harem girl.

Mose Biamce, 1865

Jean-Andre Rixens, 1874

Other romantic artists followed suit. The Orientalist era seems to have been particularly rich in these themes, with an emphasis on nudity.

Theda Bara, Cleopatra,  1917

And then came the movies. Cleopatra has been a major theme of cinema from its very beginnings. In fact, the first film about the Egyptian queen, 1917's silent Cleopatra starring Theda Bara, may have been the most daring of all; unfortunately, only stills and a few brief clips survive, since after the introduction of the Hays Code in 1930 it was banned as obscene, and the only surviving copies were destroyed in a fire. Stills like the one at left suggest it was more suggestive than its more modern successors, at least until recently.

Claudette Colbert, Cleopatra,, 1934

Claudette Colbert's  1934 interpretation in Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra (right) was a lot less daring than Theda Bara's,

Liz Taylor, 1963

Lindsey Marshal, HBO's Rome, 2005-2007

The definitive Cleopatra for those of us of the Baby Boomer generation was 1963's Joseph Mankiewicz's Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton; it was hugely expensive for its era and remembered for that and for the beginning of the Taylor-Burton romance.

Vivien Leigh

UPDATE: A commenter notes  that I left out Vivien Leigh, who played Cleopatra in 1945's Caesar and Cleopatra. I hadn't realized she'd played the role. Either she didn't come up in a Google image search, or else I didn't recognize her because she wasn't dressed like Scarlett O'Hara. So for the sake of completeness, I add her.

These are just the Anglo-American film interpretations, of course; other cultures have filmed the queen, and the story continues to be told. The queen remains a fascinating character, and each country and generation interprets her in its own way and through its own eyes. Cleopatra remains a popular brand in Egypt as well, where it has been applied to cigarettes, wine, hotels and much besides.

It would appear that Shakespeare, as usual, got it right:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies ...

Did Punic Survive Until the Advent of Arabic? Part 4: The Post-Augustine Evidence

 I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on current developments as required.

In the third part of this survey of the survival of Punic yesterday, we examined the rather extensive evidence provided by St. Augustine of Hippo of the survival of Punic as a spoken language in his day (d. 430). But the argument that Punic was still a living language when Arabic arrived two centuries and more later requires the assumption that Punic did not die out in the interim. Skeptics have gradually yielded ground as evidence has been assembled, and many scholars accept that Punic may indeed have survived in a few places. But the evidence trail thins out considerably after Augustine. Today we will look at the evidence for the fifth to the 11th centuries; tomorrow this series will conclude with a discussion of some of the interpretations scholars have put forward about the legacy of Punic in North Africa in the Arab period.

Roughly contemporary with Augustine we also have epigraphic evidence of the survival of Punic in the trilingual funerary inscriptions in Sirte, Libya from the fourth and perhaps fifth centuries. I have not seen a standard study of these, Jongeling. Karel; & Kerr, Robert M. (2005). Late Punic epigraphy: an introduction to the study of Neo-Punic and Latino-Punic inscriptions. In part two of this series I did quote excerpts from Kerr's doctoral dissertation on Late Punic. And keep Sirte in mind when we come to the evidence of Al-Bakri below.

There is no incontestable literary evidence for Punic after Augustine, but there is a very intriguing, though in a bizarre context, account in the historian Procopius' De Bello Vandalico, "Of the Vandal Wars," from the sixth century. In last month's post about the Nika Riots we talked about Justinian and his efforts to reclaim Italy and North Africa for the Eastern Roman Empire; Procopius is the great historian of the era of Justinian. He actually accompanied Justinian's great General Belisarius on some of his campaigns. In discussing the reconquest of North Africa from the Vandals, Procopius drops an intriguing aside into a story about the legendary settlement of North Africa by the Phoenicians. I take my quote from H. B. Dewing's older translation of Procopius' History of the Wars, because it is available online even on vacation in the Georgia mountains and is free of copyright:

And finding there no place sufficient for them to dwell in, since there has been a great population in Aegypt from ancient times, they proceeded to Libya. And they established numerous cities and took possession of the whole of Libya as far as the Pillars of Heracles, and there they have  lived even up to my time, using the Phoenician tongue. They also built a fortress in Numidia, where now is the city called Tigisis. In that place are two columns made of white stone near by the great spring, having Phoenician letters cut in them which say in the Phoenician tongue: "We are they who fled from before the face of Joshua, the robber, the son of Nun."

Hardly surprising that this passage has often been dismissed; the columns near Tigisis mentioning Joshua of the Bible seem clearly a figment of legend.  But it is not the incredible tale itself but the aside that matters: "and there they have lived even up to my time, using the Phoenician tongue." Again quoting Fergus Millar on this text:

The passage of Procopius is set in the very dubious context of a legend about the settlement of N. Africa, supposedly referred to in an inscription of Phoenician language and lettering at Tigisis; Courtois has argued that the inscription could not have had its supposed contents, and consequently that the people did not understand it (and therefore that in this sentence Procopius refers to Berber). But the argument makes Procopius use 'φοινικικός' in two different senses in the same passage, and proceeds too strictly from what we might presume but cannot know. The sentence is an addition by Procopius himself, who had been in Africa with Belisarius, and (especially when combined with Augustine's evidence) should be taken to mean what it says.

The problem is that the legendary story in which the aside occurs tends to make one dismiss Procopius' possible firsthand testimony that Phoenician (Punic) was still spoken in North Africa "even up to my time, using the Phoenician tongue." Millar is right that in conjunction with Augustine's testimony, this could make a lot of sense.

Procopius, if we accept the testimony, brings us down to just a century before the Arab conquests. There is no mention of Punic, at least as such, in the early Arab histories of the conquest of the Maghreb. In fact there is only one other piece of evidence sometimes adduced to suggest a longer survival of Punic, and this is, intriguingly, quite late: the 11th century AD.

The Arab traveler and geographer Al-Bakri (Abu ʿUbayd Abu ʿAbdullah ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Bakri (c.1014-1094) was born in Islamic Spain (Al-Andalus) and wrote several works of which the most important is his Kitab al-Masalik wa'l-Mamalik (Book of the Roads and the Kingdoms), a general geography and description of key routes of the Muslim world. As an Andalusian, Bakri knew North Africa well and his work is particularly valuable as a description of it.

There is a passage in Bakri that raises eyebrows: remember, we are talking here about the 11th century AD, some 650 years after Augustine. Let me quote Lameen Souag on Bakri's text:

The twist in this tale is that Phoenician may have survived into the 11th century AD! Al-Bakri (whom I've mentioned before) enigmatically says of the inhabitants of Sirt in Libya that:

لهم كلام يراطنون به ليس بعربي ولا عجمي ولا بربري ولا قبطي ولا يعرفه غيرهم
‍They have a speech in which they jabber which is neither Arabic nor Ajami (by which he probably means Latin but might mean Persian) nor Berber nor Coptic, which no one but them knows.

The location (in eastern Tripolitania) is about right for it to be Punic, and if it were Greek you would expect him to know, considering he cites (more or less correctly) the Greek etymology of طرابلس (Tripoli) in the next page. So was Punic still spoken in the 11th century? Your guess is as good as mine, but it looks plausible.

Now for a couple of points: the latest epigraphic evidence of Punic we have is in triliteral Greek-Latin-Punic Christian catacombs in Sirte (Sirt), so we know Punic was still known there in the 4th century and maybe the 5th. So it's interesting Bakri found an unusual language in Sirt in the 11the century; he specifically says it isn't Berber or Coptic or ʿAjami. One reason Lameen has crossed out "Persian" is that in Spain and North Africa, ʿAjami, which in the East usually means Persian, was commonly used to refer to Latin or local Romance dialects or the Mediterranean lingua franca. As Millar notes, Bakri seems to have been able to recognize Greek as well, so what was this language?

It may have been Punic. It isn't clear if Bakri had any familiarity with Hebrew, from the Jewish communities in Spain and North Africa; if he had, he should have noted the kinship if the language were indeed Punic.  At best, the Bakri quote tantalizes and perhaps teases a bit.

The Procopius and Bakri references both raise questions and I suspect the best we can do here is render a Scots verdict of "not proven."

But if indeed Punic did survive, what are the historical and linguistic implications?

Tune in tomorrow ...

Why is Palmyra Where it Is?

Though the mission of this blog is "Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context" (it says so right up there under the banner), this week's posts have been dominated by current developments in Egypt. So it's time to change the pace a bit, By, oh, 18 centuries or so.

Ruins of Ancient Palmyra

If you've ever visited the ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra in the Syrian desert, one of the things you are likely to remember from the trip is, well, the Syrian desert. Lots and lots of Syrian desert. It lies out in the desert between the major cities of Syria to the west and the Euphrates to the east. Yet Palmyra (Tadmur in Arabic and other Semitic languages; Palmyra is the Greek name) was a major city, a key post on the desert trading route, a link between the Mediterranean world and the Euphrates and therefore Mesopotamia. But Palmyra seems at best a small oasis to have supported a major city and a local kingdom that, under its Queen Zenobia, even established a short-lived Middle Eastern empire that challenged Rome. How did a major city sustain itself so far from abundant water supplies?

Well, according to this piece at Archaeology News Network,  (Hat Tip: Diana Buja) Norwegian researchers led by Jørgen Christian Meyer think they have discovered some of the answers as to how the ancient Palmyrenes stored water and supported a major city deep in the desert.

Read the story, but here are some of the key points:

Professor Meyer and his colleagues came to realise that what they were studying was not a desert, but rather an arid steppe, with underground grass roots that keep rain from sinking into the soil. Rainwater collects in intermittent creeks and rivers called wadi by the Arabs.

The archaeologists gathered evidence that residents of ancient Palmyra and the nearby villages collected the rainwater using dams and cisterns. This gave the surrounding villages water for crops and enabled them to provide the city with food; the collection system ensured a stable supply of agricultural products and averted catastrophe during droughts.

Local farmers also cooperated with Bedouin tribes, who drove their flocks of sheep and goats into the area to graze during the hot season, fertilising the farmers’ fields in the process.

To return to the contemporary scene, Tadmur, the modern town adjacent to the ancient ruins, has reportedly suffered considerably during the current Syrian troubles. It is not only surrounded by desert but also by Syrian military bases.

Rome's Severan Emperors: Libyan Founder, Two Emperors from Homs in Syria

We talked about Libya much of last year, and have been horrified by Homs much of this. This post is about both places. But not in this millennium, or even the last one.

Two aspects of the way history is usually taught in the West militate against our understanding the real flavor and fabric of the Classical world. One is the tendency to see some sort of sharp division between the Late Roman Empire and the "Middle Ages"; a division that was real enough in Western Europe but much less sharply demarcated in the Mediterranean. The other is the tendency to equate the Roman Empire with Italy, and assume all the Emperors thought like Italians.

We tend to assume that the "Roman Empire" fell, as far too many schoolchildren have had to learn, in 476 AD, when the Emperor Romulus Augustulus, the last Western Roman Emperor, died. In some legalistic sense that may be true. But there was still a Roman Emperor in Constantinople, and would be until 1453; there had been periods when there was no Emperor in the West, so authority simply devolved on the East, and in 476 nobody knew there wouldn't be another Western Emperor after a few years of vacancy, as had happened before. And Romulus Augustulus didn't have much power, anyway. But we can argue the periodization another time.

I want to address the other point, and emphasize a dynasty of Emperors which was largely Punic/Libyan and Arab/Syrian in its ancestry, the Severans. A dynasty who dominated the imperial title from 193 to 235 AD, the Severans had personal roots in what today we would call the Middle East, and also waged several of their campaigns there. One even brought the worship of his Syrian god to Rome itself.

The founder of the dynasty, Lucius Septimius Severus (145-211; Emperor 193-211), was born at Leptis Magna in the province of Africa Proconsularis, which embraced what is today Tunisia and the Tripoli region of Libya. Leptis Magna remains one of the best preserved Roman ruins anywhere,. in what is now Libya. His mother is said to have been from Italy, his father a local of either Punic (Carthaginian) or local Libyan ("Berber," Amazigh) extraction. Severus' first wife was also from the region, but died without leaving sons. His second wife, Julia Domna, was to be a power in her own right. She was a Syrian from Homs, known as Emesa in Greek and Latin, and said to be of Arab descent. Her ancestors were hereditary priests of Baal in Homs, and she was educated and a devotee of philosophy, and commissioned the biography of Appolonius of Tyana by Philostratus. She seems to have been one of those formidable and politically powerful wives often encountered in Roman (and later, Byzantine) history, and familiar to viewers of I, Claudius or Rome.

Severus campaigned against Parthia and also in his native North Africa, and he and his Syrian Empress left two sons, Caracalla and Geta, who were to share the imperial throne. They fell out (of course) and Geta was killed, leaving Caracalla as sole emperor.

When Caracalla died a non-Severan, Macrinus, took the throne, but while preparing to fight Persia his Syrian troops, the Legio III Gallica, revolted and declared support gor Bassianus, a young relative of the Severans. Though Bassianus would officially reign as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, he is remembered in history as Elagabalus (or in Greek, Helioganbalus), for the Syrian god he imposed on Rome.

He and his successor are listed among the Severan emperors, though their blood link is not to Severus but to Julia Domna. Elagabalus was a grandson of her sister, Julia Maesa. He was raised in Homs as a priest of the god known to the Romans as Elagabalus (Aramaic El Gabal, the El of the Mountain). His grandmother's wealth reportedly won the IIIrd Legion over to him, as well as a story he was a son of Caracalla, and he replaced Macrinus.

He also displaced Jupiter. His god Elagabalus was assimilated with the Roman Sol Invictus (the unconquered Sun) and declared to be above Jupiter in the Pantheon. A black meteoritic stone worshipped in the temple in Homs was brought to Rome and installed in a temple on the Palatine Hill. Nor was that all. Elagabalus rejected many Roman traditions, married several wives (one of them a Vestal Virgin), and soon lost popularity with the Army. He also had himself publicly circumcised. He allegedly conducted homosexual affairs and may have engaged in other public behavior that violated what Rome expected of its Emperors, at least in public.

His grandmother, Julia Maesa, had had two daughters. One, Julia Soaemias, was the mother of Elagabalus. The other, Julia Avita, had a son, Severus Alexander. Julia Maesa persuaded the Emperor to make his young cousin Caesar, the position next in line to the imperial title. He did, and the troops soon killed Elagabalus and his mother and installed Severus Alexander as Emperor. The grandmother, however, remained the imperial grandmother. Elagabalus reigned only four years and Severus Alexander would reign 13, but he's less remembered, being more effective much less miniseries-worthy. Born in what is now Lebanon and raised at least partially in Homs, he was another Syrian emperor, and ruled for 13 years, proving far more popular than his notorious cousin.

With his assassination, the period of the semi-dynastic Roman Principate dissolved into a crisis of civil war, ended only by Diocletian late in the century. The Severan or Syrian emperors, though founded by a Libyan, left a mixed reputation behind, from fairly solid (Severus) to downright scandalous (Elagabalus).

This Wikipedia image (Creative Commons license) may clarify things (with pictures!), though you'll probably need to click on it to enlarge it enough to read.