Schwab / Schütze Herodotean Soundings

The Cambyses Logos
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0391-6
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 55, 429 Seiten

Reihe: Classica Monacensia

This volume is dedicated to the logos of Cambyses at the beginning of Book 3 in Herodotus' Histories, one of the few sources on the Persian conquest of Egypt that has not yet been exhaustively explored in its complexity. The contributions of this volume deal with the motivations and narrative strategies behind Herodotus' characterization of the Persian king but also with the geopolitical background of Cambyses' conquest of Egypt as well as the reception of the Cambyses logos by later ancient authors. 'Herodotean Soundings: The Cambyses Logos' exemplifies how a multidisciplinary approach can contribute significantly to a better understanding of a complex work such as Herodotus' Histories.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Schwab ist W3-Professor für Klassische Philologie, insbesondere Gräzistik, und DFG-Heisenberg-Professor am Institut für Klassische Altertumskunde an der Universität Kiel. Dr. Alexander Schütze ist akademischer Rat auf Zeit am Institut für Ägyptologie und Koptologie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schwab, Andreas

Schütze, Alexander

Leseproben

Herodotean Soundings

The Cambyses

Alexander Schütze and Andreas Schwab

In the present volume, researchers from different disciplines of Ancient Studies examine Herodotus’ famous narrative about the Persian king Cambyses and his conquest of Egypt. The papers here represent new and original research by an international group of both renowned scholars and young academics presented and discussed in an interdisciplinary circle in Heidelberg in June 2017.

An important incentive for choosing the theme of the conference was the effort of one of the editors to understand the Cambyses in the context of his habilitation thesis focusing on encounters with foreign religions in the of Herodotus. However, the Cambyses is not only of special interest for Herodotus’ account of foreign religion. Herodotus’ work offers the only comprehensive narrative of the conquest of Egypt under the Great King. At the same time, Cambyses and his misdeeds represent the first pinnacle of Herodotus’ characterization of a whole series of despots, beginning with the Lydian and Persian kings Croesus and Cyrus. In the on Cambyses, Herodotus demonstrates his understanding of the relativistic, and culturally relativistic, nature of history in a particularly condensed form as he contrasts Persian, Egyptian, and Greek views of the events he narrates. Last but not least, beginning with the opening of Book 2, the Cambyses in fact also frames the extensive Egyptian of Book two which in turn can be understood as a prelude to the narrative on Cambyses at the beginning of Book three.

This central narrative from Herodotus’ has been studied from the perspectives of Ancient Greek language and literature, Egyptology, and ancient history. However, these perspectives and also the experts in each of the fields are rarely brought together. The idea of the conference goes back to the desire to create an opportunity for scholars from these disciplines to meet and focus intensely on a discrete and seminal section of Herodotus’ work. The present volume attests to the benefit of such a multi-disciplinary approach to Herodotus that arises from intense focus on a small, but important section of his work. Its contributors not only arrive at new conclusions to challenging aspects of Herodotus’ account, but at the same time have opened up further perspectives for future research.

In the last twenty years, a number of collected volumes dealing with different aspects of Herodotus’ have been published which illustrate the complexity of this multifaceted text. One may roughly discern two tendencies: on the one hand, studies that deal with the text of the itself through various modes of literary analysis, and on the other hand, works that juxtapose the narratives handed down in the with indigenous sources belonging to the cultures his work describes. A number of volumes deal with Herodotus’ worldview and his portrayal of the other. Other works focus on the narrative strategies of the ancient author, illuminate the in the context of contemporary historiography, or relate them to myth. In addition, there are volumes that juxtapose the with contemporary sources of the cultures described by Herodotus or deal with how Herodotus portrays the Persians and incorporates ancient Near Eastern motifs into his narrative.

Of some relevance for this volume is the conference volume edited by Laurent Coulon in 2013, in which the second book of Herodotus’ Histories was subjected to a revision building on the current state of Egyptological research on Egypt in the 1st millennium BC. Thanks to the numerous religious texts and archaeological findings from Late Period Egypt that have been published in recent decades, the facts that Herodotus knows to report about the Egypt of his time can be evaluated much better than Alan B. Lloyd was able to do in his commentary on Book two. In fact, it is possible to identify a real historical background for many of Herodotus’ descriptions, some of which seem strange to the modern reader. A whole series of contributions in the present volume continue these in-depth soundings against the background of the current state of research.

With regard to method and approach, two volumes in particular influenced our perspective. While in the above-mentioned volumes a variety of text passages is discussed, the following collected volume takes a different approach: In , the contributing authors discuss the of an entire book in terms of structure, language, and place in the overall structure of the as well as the significance for the overall interpretation of Herodotus’ monumental work. This approach of a discussion of a coherent, continuous section from the is followed here on a small scale using the example of the Cambyses , because only in this way do repeating motifs, figures or rhetorical strategies become visible for a discussion from different angles.

A multidisciplinary approach with a focus on the text of a particular episode from Herodotus seems suitable and promising for examining the ‘multivocality of his text’ in a multidisciplinary environment. In the volume , the editors examine anew Charles W. Fornara’s thesis that Herodotus’ are to be read against the background of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War and that Herodotus’ criticism of Athenian expansionist policies, which ultimately led to Athens’ downfall, is inherent in the work. This question can also be applied to Herodotus’ Cambyses (and the preceding Saite History), as the contributions by Elizabeth Irwin and Alexander Schütze in this volume show. Seen in this light, the volume also represents a continuation of this important contribution to the understanding of the .

A narrative such as the Cambyses provides numerous challenges and welcomes, if not also demands, a discussion from multiple disciplinary angles. It deals with a concrete historical event, the conquest of Egypt by the Persian Great King, but is composed of a whole series of peculiar shorter narratives inviting critical examination of Herodotus’ account, whether the presumed reasons for Egypt’s conquest, descriptions of his failed campaigns, or the characterization of Cambyses as a mad king. At the same time, the alludes to and exploits in its telling a variety of Egyptian , such as the famous Apis bull, the oracle of Buto or the tomb of Amasis, that can be correlated with sources in the Egyptian tradition. We therefore see this as a perfect opportunity to conduct an interdisciplinary experiment that examined how all these aspects of the text might be dealt with together on one occasion and in one volume.

With its multidisciplinary structure, this volume addresses two research . On the one hand, for Egyptology and Ancient History, Herodotus’ narrative about the Persian king in Egypt is, along with the Egyptian inscription of Udjahorresnet, the only narrative source on a seminal event in Egyptian history: the conquest of Egypt by the Persians brought the Saite period to an abrupt end, a period that had brought Egypt a late-flourishing cultural ‘renaissance’. And yet despite this extraordinarily central importance of Herodotus’ for the Egyptological study of this historical and political , it must be noted that Egyptologists have often engaged with the with a particular interest in Book two mostly concentrating on what discrete facts might yield without a view of the overall work and composition of the . But such focus on the historicity of Herodotus’ account in Egyptology and ancient history—which is often difficult to verify due to the lack of relevant sources—can sometimes cause one to lose sight of the fact that Herodotus’ multi-layered text is more than a mere ‘factual account’. Rather it is a highly complex and well-composed narrative of an author who pursued an agenda with regard to his Greek readership in a highly sophisticated age. On the other hand, Classicists find themselves all too often in want of the expertise of Egyptologists if they are to understand what might be distinctive about Herodotus’ handling of this material. Recent research in Demotic studies and discoveries in Egyptian archaeology (especially in the oases of the Western Desert, e.g. in the oases of Dakhla or Kharga), illuminates Herodotus’ text and often vindicates him. In doing so, such research can open up hitherto unimagined perspectives on the Greek text as well as on its meaning and interpretation, whether, for instance, by placing Herodotus’ disparate narratives about the failed campaigns of Cambyses in relation to the geopolitical conditions in the areas bordering Egypt in the late 6th century BC or by making rather peculiar descriptions of Egyptian cult images plausible on the basis of archaeological...