Earth and Water: the Foundations of Sovereignty in Ancient Thought

PART TWO WATER AND THE FORMATION OF IDENTITY AND POLICY EARTH AND WATER: THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOVEREIGNTY IN ANCIENT THOUGHT Mark Munn Earth and water are vital to life. As a simple observation, this fact is so self-evident as to require no comment. On the other hand, when a fact of obvious significance is used as a political emblem, it assumes a new level of meaning. When Herodotus names earth and water as tokens of submission demanded by the Persians from their intended subjects,1 these elements invite analysis from the perspective of their historical context. They appear to signify human life, especially the life and livelihood of orderly human communities dependent on agriculture, an order that the Greeks called the oikoumenē, ‘the settled [world]’.2 In this historical context, these tokens are linked to a notion of sovereignty as it was claimed by Persian kings. Outside of the pages of Herodotus, however, scholars have not been able to discover a tradition, Iranian or otherwise, that explicitly identifies earth and water as tokens of submission to sovereign authority.3 Here I propose to explore the background to this political emblem, and to suggest that in demanding earth and water from the Greeks and from other peoples on the western fringe of their empire, the Persians were drawing upon traditions developed especially in Anatolia, the western bastion of their empire, where lifegiving water and the nurturing earth had long been associated with the ideals of sovereignty. These Anatolian traditions were associated with deities and reflected in the cult and myth. As an emblem of submission, ‘earth and water’ is devoid of any explicit association with deities or 1 Herodotus, Historiae 4.126–27, ed. Heinrich Stein, vol. 2, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1877), pp. 111–12; 5.18, 73, 6.48–49, 94, Stein vol. 3, 4th ed. (Berlin, 1882), pp. 17–18, 76–77, 154–55; 7.32, 131–33, Stein vol. 4, 4th ed. (Berlin, 1881), pp. 43–44, 119–21. 2 F. Gisinger, “Oikumene,” in Realencyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft, vol. 17 (Stuttgart, 1937), cols. 2123–74. For an analysis of the uses of the term, oikoumenē, in the wider context of the issues addressed in this paper, see Mark Munn, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: A Study of Sovereignty in Ancient Religion (Berkeley, 2006), pp. 188–220. 3 See A. Kuhrt, “Earth and Water,” in Achaemenid History, vol. 3, Method and Theory: Proceedings of the London 1985 Achaemenid History Workshop, ed. A. Kuhrt and H. SancisiWeerdenburg (Leiden, 1988), pp. 87–99. 192 mark munn with cult. The separation of natural elements from any overt notion of divine agency probably reflects the tendency toward abstraction that characterizes Ionian cosmological thought in the period in which the Persian empire was setting down its roots in Anatolia, in the second half of the sixth century. Divine paradigms were closely connected to these abstract emblems, however, and were familiar to the Greeks and to the other peoples of Anatolia, and must have come to mind whenever the implications of this act of submission were contemplated. Earth and water are fundamental elements in the cosmologies of the ancient Near East and in the cosmogonic thought derived by the Greeks from the Near East. Placing these elements in their proper relationship was the essential task of sovereign creator gods according to various myths of creation. So, the division of cosmic water into an upper realm above the vault of heaven and a lower realm below the earth is second only to the division of light from darkness in the biblical account of Yahweh’s creation.4 The Babylonian creation epic features a similar separation of cosmic waters, personified as Apsu and Tiamat, with the establishment of the vault of heaven and the fundament of the earth by Marduk out of the body of Tiamat.5 Hesiod’s Theogony does not describe a sovereign creator and does not so clearly describe the parting of cosmic waters. Nonetheless, the separation of Gaia, earth, and Ouranos, heaven, lead to the formation of a world conceptually similar to that of the biblical and Babylonian accounts, where springs and rivers that emerge and flow on earth are described as the children of remote and watery Tethys and Okeanos.6 The separation of earth and water in the process of creation appears more explicitly within the Greek tradition in Ionian cosmogony. Thales, according to Aristotle, held that water was the first principle (archē ) of all things, and that earth rests on water.7 Such notions are evidently akin to the concepts 4 Genesis 1:6–8, The Oxford Study Bible, ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller (New York, 1992), p. 11. 5 “The Creation Epic,” tablet iv, lines 128–46, trans. E.A. Speiser, in James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (Princeton 1969), p. 67. See also Bendt Alster, “Tiamat,” in Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst, ed., Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1999), pp. 867–69. 6 Hesiod, Theogonia 336–70, ed. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1914; reprint Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 102–106. 7 Aristotle, de Caelo 2.13, 294a, ed. Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 1, 6th ed. (1951; reprint Zurich 1996), p. 77; Metaphysica 1.3, 983b, ed. Diels and Kranz, p. 76. the foundations of sovereignty in ancient thought 193 attributed to Thales’ pupil, Anaximander, who is reported to have said that earth emerged from primordial water in a process of drying.8 As in Hesiod, no divine creator is described as the agent of this process, although the concept of a first principle (archē ) might be seen as the abstraction of the role of such a divinity. It is notable that Plutarch compares the cosmogonic thought of Anaximander to that of those who, like the Syrians, sacrifice to ancestral Poseidon (a reference to El, ‘father of the gods’ and god of primordial waters as he is attested in Ugaritic myth).9 The strongest models of sovereign creators were provided to the Greeks by their eastern neighbors, where institutions of actual sovereign kingship were more highly developed. Turning from cosmologies to the symbols and practices of cult, we find that living kings among the eastern neighbors of the Greeks played active roles, as intercessors between humanity and the gods, in maintaining the orderly and beneficial relationship between earth and water. This was especially true in Anatolia, where the Hittites, in the final century of their Late Bronze Age empire, built impressive monuments that demonstrated the close connection between their notion of kingship and the deities of heaven and of the underworld especially in connection with sources of water. These monuments include two artificial caves constructed at the edge of a set of large artificial reservoirs inside the walls of their capital city, Hattusa. The cultic function of these subterranean chambers is demonstrated by the presence of royal reliefs and a lengthy hieroglyphic Luwian inscription referring to the way to the underworld within one of them.10 Elsewhere in Hittite territory natural springs were embellished by royal inscriptions and cult monuments. The spring at Eflatun Pınar features an imposing sculpted platform with images of the Storm God and his divine consort surrounded by lesser deities supporting winged sun disks (symbols of divinity and of royalty among the Hittites), all supported by the figures of mountain gods with spouts built into their chests from which water once flowed into the pool 8 Aëtius, Placita 3.16.1, ed. Diels and Kranz, vol. 1, p. 88. Plutarch Quaestionum convivalium 8.8.4 (Moralia 730e), ed. Diels and Kranz, vol. 1, p. 88. El is “of the Sources [of the Floods], in the midst of the Headwaters of the Two Oceans” in “Poems about Baal and Anath,” trans. H.L. Ginsberg, in Pritchard (above, note 5), p. 129. See also Fritz Stolz, “Sea,” in van der Toorn et al. (above, note 5), p. 739. 10 J. David Hawkins, The Hieroglyphic Inscription of the Sacred Pool Complex at Hattusa (Südburg). Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten, Beiheft 3 (Wiesbaden, 1995). 9 194 mark munn (see figure 1).11 At Ivriz, overlooking a powerful spring on the western side of the Taurus Mountains, an eighth-century relief shows the local king, Warpalawa, supplicating the Storm God, Tarhunza, who holds emblems of the fertility of vines and grain along with flowing water in his hands (see figure 2).12 By associating themselves with such potent sources of life, the kings who built these monuments sought to identify their kingship with nature’s beneficence itself. Nature’s beneficence, in turn, was seen as the source of true kingship. The classical Greeks, who generally spurned strong kingship as a form of political sovereignty, nevertheless observed the relationship between sources of water and the true kingship of Zeus. As an infant, Zeus was nurtured in a cave identified with a mountain, Dikte or Ida, and was tended by nymphs.13 These spirits of springs and sources of water are characterized by Hesiod as the “three thousand neat-ankled daughters of Ocean who are dispersed far and wide, and in every place alike serve the earth and the deep waters, children who are glorious among goddesses.”14 Nymphs, archetypal ‘brides’, personified the nurture and well-being associated with nature’s gift of water. They conjoined the pleasure and goodness of fresh water welling from the earth with the pristine beauty of marriageable maidens, so that life-giving waters were conjoined in meaning with life-generating powers of human fecundity. The conjunction of water sources and the blessing bestowed by divine nymphs formed a rich nexus in Greek art and cult. Beginning at the end of the fifth century, Greek votive reliefs often depict caves where springs rise as places where women could appeal to divine nymphs for 11 See Martin Bachman and Sırrı Özenir, “Das Quellheiligtum Eflatun Pınar,” Archäologischer Anzeiger 2004/1, 85–122, where Hittite ritual springs and water installations elsewhere are also discussed, pp. 118–21. 12 See J. David Hawkins, ed., Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions, vol. 1, part 2 (Berlin, 2000), pp. 516–18, for discussion of the Ivriz relief and inscriptions, with bibliography. What Hawkins refers to as the long stems of the ears of wheat held by Tarhunza is here taken to be a stream of water, as it reaches all the way from his upraised hand to the ground at his feet. Illustrations of this relief are also given by Ekrem Akurgal, The Art of the Hittites (New York, 1962), figure 140 and pl. XXIV. 13 Hesiod, Theogonia 477–84, ed. Evelyn-White, p. 114; Apollonius, Argonautica 3.132–34, ed. Robert C. Seaton (1912; reprint Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 202–203; Apollodorus, Biblioteca 1.1.6–7, ed. James G. Frazer (1921; reprint Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 6–9; Strabo, Geographica 10.3.19, ed. Augustus Meineke (Leipzig, 1877), vol. 2, p. 663. 14 Hesiod, Theogony 364–66, transl. Evelyn-White, pp. 105–107: τρἶ γἆρ ξιιλιαιι ειρσι τανυισφυροι Ωκεανι⌋ναι, αις· ρ∏α πολυσπερειἐ γαι⌋αν καἶ βεινθε α λιιμνἠ πᾳντη ο∏μὠ⌋ ερφειπουσι, θεᾳων αςγλαἆ τιεκνα. the foundations of sovereignty in ancient thought Figure 1. Hittite cult monument and spring basin at Eflatun Pınar, thirteenth century B.C.E. (photo: M. Munn). 195 196 mark munn Figure 2. Neo-Hittite relief of the god, Tarhunza, and the ruler, Warpalawa, at Ivriz, eighth century B.C.E. (photo: M. Munn). help in marriage, in conception and childbirth, and for the health of their children (see figure 3).15 In some examples, Zeus himself is present, as an archetype of the strong child for whom every mother prayed.16 The example of Zeus and his nurture as an infant in a cave serves also as an archetype for the generation of sovereign authority, divine and human. Legitimate kingship, in this manner of thinking, springs from the earth in the same manner, and same place, as pure water. As the opening chapters of Herodotus’ Histories demonstrate, the kings of Anatolia provided the most impressive models of kingship to generations of Greeks. King Midas of Phrygia, the first foreign king to send gifts to Delphi according to Herodotus, marks the historical horizon of this tradition, according to later Greek memory. 17 Midas ruled at 15 Jennifer Larson, Greek Nymphs (Oxford, 2001), 226–67. Zeus oversees the gathering of deities and nymphs attending the birth of Dionysus in a cave in a fourth-century relief from the Athenian Agora, inv. no. I 7154. Zeus is shown with Heracles in a smaller gathering at a water source, signified by a head of the river god, Achelous, in a Hellenistic relief in the National Museum at Athens, inv. no. 1778. 17 Herodotus, Historiae 1.14, ed. Stein, p. 19. On the historical Midas, attested in 16 the foundations of sovereignty in ancient thought 197 Figure 3. Votive relief showing family of worshippers, left, approaching rock altar and three nymphs, right, in a cave setting overseen by Pan, above, fourth century B.C.E. Athens, National Museum (photo: M. Munn). the end of the eighth century, and after him came the Lydian kings of Sardis, from Gyges to Croesus. The Lydian kings gave the Greeks the term, tyrannis, for their absolute form of kingship, and inspired Greek tyrants to emulate their model. By the time Croesus was overthrown by Cyrus the Persian in the mid-sixth century, the Greeks were generally on their way to rejecting tyranny as an acceptable form of sovereignty. As Herodotus famously narrates, the Persians eventually demanded the submission of the Greeks to their claims of universal sovereignty. When they did so, I suggest that they did so using symbols of the beneficence of earth and water that were associated with once-admired kingship among the Phrygians and Lydians. Among the Phrygians and Lydians we find cults that celebrated the close bond between fertility and sources of water and the divine forces that sustained rightful kingship. These concepts converge in the Anatolian deity who sometimes appears as a marriageable maiden, related to the nymphs of Greek cult, and who more often appears Assyrian records, see J. David Hawkins, “Mita,” in Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 8 (Berlin, 1994), pp. 271–73. For later Greek memories of Midas, see Lynn Roller, “The Legend of Midas,” Classical antiquity 2 (1983), 299–313; Margaret Miller, “Midas as the Great King in Attic Fifth-Century Vase Painting,” Antike Kunst 31 (1988), 79–89; Oscar W. Muscarella, “King Midas of Phrygia and the Greeks,” in Anatolia and the Ancient Near East: Studies in Honor of Tahsin Özgüç, ed. K. Emre, B. Hrouda, M. Mellink and N. Özgüç (Ankara, 1989), pp. 333–44; Munn (above, note 2), pp. 66–95. 198 mark munn in her maternal guise, when she was invoked simply as the Mother. She came to be known to the Greeks as the Mother of the Gods, or Cybele, known to the Phrygians as the Kybeleyan Mother, and to the Lydians as Kybebe.18 The earliest Greek source to comment on the Mother of the Gods is the sixth-century Homeric Hymn to this goddess. The short hymn sings of her love of drums, cymbals, and auloi, as well as the calls of wolves and lions, and the echoing sounds of woodlands. These characteristics are reflected in her iconography in Phrygian, Lydian, and Greek monuments of the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries, and in the attributes she displays in the classical cult statue of the Mother of the Gods at Athens, where she regularly holds a drum and is accompanied by a lion (see figures 4–5). The boisterous music of her cult is thus associated with the burgeoning of life in nature, and in particular with the most powerful beasts of nature. The presence of water in this woodland setting is indicated in Greek iconography by the phiale, or libation dish, that the Mother also regularly holds and from which she pours (figure 5). In the Anatolian iconography of the Mother, she also regularly holds a water vessel, either a bowl or a pitcher (figure 4). The importance of natural sources of water to the imagery of the Mother in her Anatolian setting is even more strongly indicated by the locations of her cult monuments. In the seventh and sixth centuries, during the heyday of the Lydian empire, numerous small reliefs and large carved facades depicting the Mother standing in a doorway were carved on rock faces in the open countryside, almost always in the vicinity of springs and natural sources of water (see figures 4 and 6). The greatest concentration of such monuments is found in the region known as the Phrygian Highlands, where the sources and tributaries of several western Anatolian rivers are found.19 The setting of these Phrygian and Lydian monuments confirms Greek accounts of her cult, and also explains why the Mother of the Gods was frequently referred to as the Mountain Mother. 18 Lynn Roller, In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele (Berkeley, 1999), provides an excellent survey of the cult of the Mother of the Gods. On her name, Cybele, and its derivation from the older Anatolian cult of Kubaba, see Munn (above, note 2), pp. 120–25. 19 On the monuments of the Phrygian highlands, see R.D. Barnett, “The Phrygian Rock Façades and the Hittite Monuments,” Bibliotheca Orientalis 10 (1953), 78–82; C.H. Emily Haspels, the Highlands of Phrygia, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1971); Susanne Berndt-Ersöz, Phrygian Rock-Cut Shrines: Structure, Function, and Cult Practice (Leiden, 2006). the foundations of sovereignty in ancient thought 199 Figure 4. Phrygian Cult relief showing Matar (the Phrygian Mother) in an architectural façade, holding a water pitcher and a bird of prey, seventh or sixth century B.C.E., from Ankara (drawing: M. Munn). 200 mark munn Figure 5. Mother of the Gods enthroned in a naiskos (architectural façade), holding a libation dish and a tympanon (drum), with a lion on her lap and at her side, attended by worshippers, fourth century B.C.E. Athens, National Museum (photo: M. Munn). the foundations of sovereignty in ancient thought 201 Figure 6. The Midas Monument, and architectural façade dedicated to Midas, named in an inscription above the façade, with a central niche to accommodate a movable statue of the Phrygian Mother, who is named in inscriptions within the niche, first half of the sixth century B.C.E. (photo: M. Munn). 202 mark munn Figure 7. Map of western Anatolia, showing mountains associated with the Mother of the Gods (map: M. Munn). Greek authors attest that the Mother of the Gods was regularly identified with particular mountains, all of them in western Anatolia (see figure 7). She is called the Idaean Mother after Mount Ida in the Troad,20 a mountain “of many springs,” according to Homer, and “the mother of wild beasts”.21 She is invoked on Mount Tmolus above Sardis, the source of the gold-bearing Pactolus river.22 She is called the Mother Sipylene after Mount Sipylus above Smyrna, where she was identified with the eroded image of an enthroned goddess overlooking a spring, 20 Euripides, Orestes 1453, ed. Arthur S. Way (London, 1912), p. 250; Apollonius, Argonautica 1.1128, ed. Seaton, pp. 80–81. 21 Iliad 8.47, 14.283, 15.151, ed. David B. Monro and Thomas W. Allen, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (1920; reprint Oxford, 1969); Homeric Hymn 5, To Aphrodite 68, ed. EvelynWhite, p. 411. 22 Sophocles, Philoctetes 391–402, ed. A.C. Pearson (1924; reprint Oxford, 1967); Euripides, Bacchae 55–65, ed. Arthur S. Way (London, 1919), pp. 8–10. the foundations of sovereignty in ancient thought 203 an image that was carved in the late Bronze Age (figure 8).23 And she is called the Dindymene Mother after several mountains named Dindymus from central Phrygia to the Hellespont, the most significant being the mountain identified with the Mother by Herodotus as the source of the Hermus river that flows across Lydia past Sardis.24 The flood plain of the Hermus river in front of Sardis included a great lake, the Gygaean lake (figure 9), which Herodotus mentions as one of the wonders of Lydia for the fact that it never dries up.25 Its waters, by implication, were believed to have been there since time immemorial, a quality that can explain why the Lydians especially revered this lake. A distinctive cult of Lydian Artemis was connected with the Gygaean lake (we will see shortly that Artemis has a special role in Anatolia as an avatar of the Mother of the Gods).26 Homer mentions the Gygaean lake below Mount Tmolus as a distinctive feature of the land of the Maeonian warriors (that is, the Lydians) who fought with the Trojans. In the Homeric catalog, in book 2 of the Iliad, the leaders of the Maeonians are said to have been born from the lake itself.27 Belief in the life-generating qualities of these primeval waters might also explain why the greatest burial ground of the Lydians, the area known today as Bin Tepe, ‘the Thousand Mounds’, was located by the shore of this lake. Conspicuous among these burial mounds are the royal tumuli of the Lydian kings, including the tumulus of Alyattes, also noticed by Herodotus (figure 9).28 The Lydians evidently believed that, after life, their kings and heroes should be interred beside the waters that originally gave them life. Thales of Miletus, a contemporary and subject of the greatest Lydian kings, Alyattes and Croesus, believed that burial (as opposed to cremation) of a body was the appropriate 23 Strabo, Geographica 10.3.12, ed. Meineke, vol. 2, p. 659; cf. Pausanias, Periegesis Graeciae 3.22.4, 5.13.7, ed. W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod (1926; reprint Cambridge, Mass., 1966), vol. 2, pp. 138–39, 452–55. The original identity of this enthroned figure is uncertain, but it has been compared with the divinities accompanying other Hittite spring shrines as noted above; see Hans G. Güterbock, “Notes on Some Hittite Monuments,” Anatolian Studies 6 (1956), pp. 53–54. 24 Herodotus, Historiae 1.80, ed. Stein, vol. 1, p. 97; Arrian, Anabasis 5.6.4, ed. C. Abicht (Leipzig, 1899), p. 208; cf. Apollonius, Argonautica 1.1125, ed. Seaton, pp. 80–81; Strabo 12.5.3, ed. Meineke, vol. 2, p. 797. 25 Herodotus, Historiae 1.93, ed. Stein, vol. 1, p. 115. 26 Strabo, Geographica 13.4.5–7, ed. Meineke, vol. 3, pp. 875–77. 27 Iliad 2.865, cf. 20.391, ed. Monro Allen. 28 Herodotus 1.93, ed. Stein, vol. 1, p. 114. 204 mark munn Figure 8. Hittite enthroned deity overlooking spring on Mount Sipylus, thirteenth century B.C.E., later identified as the Mother of the Gods (photo: R. Munn). the foundations of sovereignty in ancient thought 205 Figure 9. View from the Acropolis of Sardis north across the Hermus river to the tumulus of Alyattes, in the area of Bin Tepe, and the Gygaean lake beyond (photo courtesy of Crawford H. Greenewalt, Jr.). 206 mark munn way to resolve it back to its watery origins.29 The tumulus field beside the Gygaean lake is a place where the regenerative cycles of water and life might have seemed evident to Thales. In fact, Lydian ideology may well underlie the famous notion of Thales that water was the first principle (archē ), source of generation (sperma), and nourishment (trophē ) for all things.30 A generation after Thales, another Ionian philosopher, Xenophanes of Colophon, is quoted as saying that “all things that come into existence and grow are earth and water.”31 The same concept of elemental creation is reflected in the myth that Prometheus had formed mankind out of “water and earth.” Prometheus, according to Greek sources, was either the husband or the son of the eponym of Asia, so it is clear that Prometheus was commonly understood to have performed his act of creation on Asian soil; and Lydia was the heart of what the Greeks traditionally called Asia.32 The cultic and ideological traditions of Mermnad Lydia evidently had a strong impact on the formation of archaic Greek theogonic myth and Ionian science. Among Greeks, belief in the power of the Mountain Mother to generate kingship is demonstrated by her common identification with Rhea, the mother of Zeus.33 But the Mother of the Gods was also identified as the mother of worldly sovereignty through a tradition that identified her as the mother of the Phrygian king Midas.34 Although the surviving literary sources that refer to the Mother of the Gods as the mother of Midas are no earlier than Plutarch, the antiquity of the tradition seems to be confirmed by the Old Phrygian inscriptions on the Midas Monument, the most famous of the rock cut facades in the Phrygian highlands (figure 6). The inscription at the top of the façade 29 Servius ad Aen. 11.186, ed. Diels and Kranz, vol. 1, p. 77. Aristotle Metaphysics 1.3, 983b, ed. Diels and Kranz, vol. 1, pp. 76–77; Plutarch de Iside et Orsiride 34 (Moralia 364d), ed. Diels and Kranz, p. 76. 31 Simplicius In Aristotelis Physica commentaria 188.32, ed. Diels Kranz, vol. 1, p. 136. 32 Herodotus 4.45, ed. Stein, vol. 2, pp. 46–47; cf. Apollodorus Biblioteca 1.7.1, ed. James G. Frazer, vol. 1, pp. 50–53. 33 Euripides Bacchae 59–128, ed. Way, pp. 10–15; Apollonius Argonautica 1.1125–51, ed. Seaton, pp. 80–81; Strabo 10.3.19–20, ed. Meineke, vol. 2, pp. 663–664; cf. Sophocles Philoctetes 391–92, ed. Pearson. 34 Plutarch Caesar 9.3, ed. Bernadotte Perrin, Plutarch’s Lives vol. 7 (1919; reprint Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 462–63; Hesychius s.v. Mi/da qeo/j, ed. M. Schmidt (1861; repre. Amsterdam, 1965), vol. 3, p. 108; Suda s.v. eÓlegoj qrhÍnoj, ed. Ada Adler (Stuttgart, 1967), vol. 1, part 2, p. 241. 30 the foundations of sovereignty in ancient thought 207 records the dedication of this monument to Midas, who is given the title Wanax, or Lord. Fragmentary inscriptions within the doorway of the façade, where a statue of the Mother once stood, name both the Mother and Midas.35 The divine Mother, as she was known to the Phrygians and the Lydians (during whose heyday these monuments were created), was therefore she who nourished the earth with life-giving waters, and she who engendered kings. The symbols that she holds in her better preserved reliefs represent both of these gifts together (see figure 4). She holds the water vessel in one hand, as we have already noticed, and in the other hand she holds a bird of prey, an eagle or a hawk, either of which were a common symbol of sovereignty. A particular type of hawk, in fact, was sacred to the Mother of the Gods, according to Aelian in his De Natura Animalium. It was called mermnos, he reports, and this is certainly related to the dynastic name of the Lydian kings, the Mermnads.36 When the Lydian kingdom was conquered by Cyrus the Persian, in the mid-sixth century, sovereignty over these lands and the symbols of that sovereignty passed into the custody of the Persians. There are several indications that the Persians took a serious interest in the cultic ideology of sovereignty in Anatolia. The clearest evidence is the testimony by Herodotus that the Persians, in their reaction to the Ionian Revolt at the beginning of the fifth century, justified their burning of the sanctuaries of the Greeks specifically because the Ionians, led by the Athenians, had burned the sanctuary of the Mother of the Gods at Sardis (whom Herodotus identifies by her Lydian name, Kybebe).37 Evidence that Anatolian ideology was capable of influencing even the henotheistic theology of Persian Zoroastrianism is found in the development of the cult of the goddess Anahita. Anahita, whose name means ‘Pure’ or ‘Untainted’, was most often identified by the Greeks as Artemis. But she was also identified as Aphrodite, a combination of identifications that she shared with the Mother of the Gods, and that demonstrates the role of this divinity as the archetype of divine nymphs: a pure virgin and most desirable bride. Her cult became widely 35 On the Midas Monument, see Susanne Berndt-Ersöz (above, note 19), 232–34. On the inscriptions on this monument, see Claude Brixhe and Michel Lejeune, Corpus des inscriptions paléo-phrygiennes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1984), M-01. 36 Aelian De Natura Animalium 12.4, ed. A.F. Schofield (1959; reprint Cambridge, Mass., 1972), vol. 3, pp. 12–13. 37 Herodotus 5.102, ed. Stein, vol. 3, p. 108. On the identity of Kybebe with the Mother of the Gods, see Munn (above, note 2), pp. 120–125. 208 mark munn established across the Persian empire in the time of Artaxerxes II, but Anahita was best known to the Greeks from her worship at Sardis.38 Unlike the Anatolian Mother, whose cult is known to us second-hand through Greek sources, Anahita is known to us through Avestan hymns that describe her as her devotees saw her. Here I quote from the opening of one of these hymns that addresses the goddess by the full form of her names, Aredwi Sura Anahita (Moist, Strong, Untainted), and praises her in the words understood as spoken by the supreme god, Ahuramazda, to his prophet, Zoroaster:39 On my account, O Zarathustra, worship her, Aredwi Sura Anahita who spreads abroad, [who] is healing [. . .] who is worthy to be worshipped by the material world [and] worthy to be praised by the material world, who is a crop-increasing ashawan [manifestation of truth], a herd-increasing ashawan, and ashawan who makes the country prosper, who purifies the semen of all males, who purifies for conception the womb of all females, who gives easy delivery to all females, who gives milk to all females regularly and at the proper time; [worship her,] the vast, famed from afar, who is as great as all these waters which flow forth upon the earth, who forcefully flows forth from Mount Hukairya [the cosmic mountain] to the Wouru kasha sea [the cosmic sea]. [. . . She is] strong, regal, tall, beautiful, in whom flow down by day and by night as many falling waters as all the waters which flow forth on the earth. She who is strong flows forth! On account of her rayi [opulence, or might] and glory, I shall worship her with audible prayer, I shall worship her with well-recited prayer, Aredwi Sura Anahita, with libations. Thus may you be directed by [this] invocation, thus may you be better worshipped, O Aredwi Sura Anahita. The attributes of Anahita in this hymn present an exemplary description of the features of the Mother of the Gods as she was known at Sardis, as she was worshipped according to what Greek sources describe as Phrygian and Lydian custom. In response to appropriate veneration, she makes crops and herds prosper, and she promotes human fertility. She is even worshipped by the supreme god himself, thereby showing 38 Plutarch Artaxerxes 27.3, ed. Bernadotte Perrin, Plutarch’s Lives vol. 11 (1926; reprint Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 192–93; Xenophon Anabasis 1.6.7, ed. E.C. Marchant (Oxford, 1904); Pausanias 3.16.8, ed. Jones and Ormerod, vol. 2, pp. 100–101; 7.6.6, vol. 3, pp. 202–203; Berossus, FGrHist 680 F 11, ed. Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, vol. 1, part 3 (Leiden, 1958), p. 394. 39 Yasht 5, to Aredwi Sura Anahita, stanzas 1–3 and 15, modified translation of William Malandra, An Introduction to Ancient Iranian Religion: Readings from the Avesta and the Achaemenid Inscriptions (Minneapolis, 1983), p. 120. the foundations of sovereignty in ancient thought 209 the king on earth the role that he too must play. Like the Mother of the Gods, who was associated with rivers and whose cult was observed at rock-cut shrines near springs in the Phrygian highlands, the beneficence of Anahita is closely linked with the flow of life-sustaining water from the earth. These were the ideological underpinnings of the Persian rhetoric of sovereignty which they announced to the Greeks, in the time of Darius I, in their demand for the submission of tokens of earth and water. This symbolism was specific to Lydia and Phrygia, whence evidently it was adopted by the Persians. For no Avestan text describes earth and water in such a way, nor does any Old Persian text. This symbolism was familiar to the Greeks, both through their familiarity with the cults practiced under the sovereign sway of the Lydians, and through the rationalizations of Ionian cosmologists like Thales and Xenophanes, who speculated on the essential qualities of earth and water. Significantly, Herodotus attests that this demand was made by Darius, and later by Xerxes, only of peoples who lived across the waters from the shores of Asia. Darius first makes this demand of the Scythians, later of the Macedonians, and finally of the Greeks on the islands and the European mainland.40 The very time in which these tokens were being demanded was the time in which the great world map of Hecataeus of Miletus was being displayed. This was a map that showed to the Greeks and to the people of Hecataeus’ Anatolian homeland that the world was divided into two great continents, Europe and Asia.41 After the Ionian Revolt was crushed, Persian rulership over Asia was unquestioned as far as the Greeks were concerned. But whether Persian sovereignty rightfully extended over the entire earth, as Persian rhetoric claimed, or whether it was properly limited to the soil of Asia, was an open question. By their demand that all peoples across the sea bring them tokens of earth and water, the Persians, under Darius and Xerxes, were asserting the unity of the earth and of their sovereignty over it. They were also making this demand, I believe, in the name of the deity who personified the life-giving forces of earth and water, the goddess known to the Greeks as the Mother of the Gods. The Greeks, or at least the Spartans and the Athenians among the Greeks, were prepared 40 See note 1, above. Herodotus 5.49, ed. Stein, vol. 3, p. 44. For further discussion of Hecataeus’ map, see Munn (above, note 2), 213–20. 41 210 mark munn to reject the Persian demands and were vindicated through their victory over Xerxes. In rejecting the Persian demands, the Greeks were also rejecting the deity in whose name it was being made—the Mother of the Gods, probably invoked by her Lydian name, Kybebe.42 Although in the later fifth century the Greeks and Persians were reconciled in political terms, the gap between them in religious ideology remained an awkward one. Although the Greeks honored her, the Mother of the Gods was always treated as in some sense a foreign deity, at home in the mountains of Anatolia, the land of kingship and tyranny. 42 See Herodotus 5.102, ed. Stein, vol. 3, p. 108.