Erich S. Gruen. Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005. 314 S. (cloth), ISBN 978-3-515-08735-3.

Reviewed by Ted Kaizer
Published on H-Soz-u-Kult (December, 2009)

E. S. Gruen (Hrsg.): Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations

This is a collection of fourteen very interesting papers, all but one in English and nearly all originating at a conference held in a Bavarian castle in 2003. Despite the strength of most of the individual contributions, it is hard to escape the feeling that their coherence depends too much on the attempts by each author to bring either ‚cultural borrowings‘ or ‚ethnic appropriations‘ (or indeed both) into their text. The volume is preceded by only the briefest of introductions, and there are no indices.

The first three papers deal with the Ancient Near East. Stephanie Dalley argues that legends of the Assyrian queen Semiramis are based on some degree of actual historicity and that the supposedly ‚euhemeristic‘ elements found in many of the stories are, in fact, very much part of the Assyrian literature. Ronald Hendel shows in what way the ancient Israelites dealt with the fact that the Mesopotamian civilization was much older than their own, namely by introducing – during the production of the first of the Hebrew scriptures – „a revision of the traditional prestige of origins, which should go to the first civilization, but must now be reapportioned to the latecomer“ (p. 24). In his case-study of Genesis 1–11, Hendel shows how the narrative adopted „several related strategies to achieve this end, including what we may call appropriation, mimicry, and inversion“ (p. 24). Jan Assmann investigates Egyptian attitudes to Greek curiosity (periergia), which can be seen solely through what the classical authors reveal about them (or should that be ‚construct‘?).

The next nine papers are various case studies of the way in which Greek, and later Graeco-Roman, cultural elements interact with non-Classical cultures, and vice versa. Hans-Joachim Gehrke views the Greek mythological hero, such as Heracles and Perseus, as a figure who bridges the world of the Greeks with that of the barbarian ‚other‘, while Margaret C. Miller points out a „lack of iconographic consistency“ (p. 69) in the way that the culture heroes Pelops, Panaos and Kadmos are depicted in classical art, in contrast to their „uniform Orientalization“ (p. 69) in literature. Erich S. Gruen argues that the rosy image on the part of the Jews of the Persian empire, based in a large part on the debt of gratitude owed to king Cyrus, was „not quite so flattering as we customarily think“ (p. 91): the Persian victories were sanctioned by the Jewish god, and Persian protagonists in Jewish stories were continuously manipulated by the clever Jews. Josef Wiesehöfer focuses on the role played by Alexander the Great and the emperors of ‚Rūm‘ (the table of contents gets this wrong) in the creation of the Iranian view throughout history of its western neighbour. Andrew Erskine then contrasts the way in which indigenous, non-Greek communities accepted Greek interpretations of their own local mythologies, as „a means of joining them“ (p. 128), with the Greek attitude of rejecting the outsiders’ history, while including these same outsiders into their own myths. Ann Kuttner, in what is by far the longest paper in the volume, draws attention to the „Asianizing mask“ (p. 144) worn by the Attalid dynasty of Pergamon in addition to that of the Hellenism more commonly emphasized, with due attention both to the Great Altar and its Telephos frieze (unfortunately some of the illustrations to her article are of poor quality).

Gideon Bohak, in a survey of the ‚ethnic portrait‘ – i.e. „the overall image that emerges when we combine the different stereotypes associated with any single ethnic group in Greco-Roman literature“ (p. 209) – of Paphlagonians, Scythians and Phoenicians, points out that there is „a definite sense in ancient literature of the individual characteristics of at least some nations within the barbarian crowd“ (p. 231). The respective stereotypes, „pervasive, repetitive and often remarkably durable“ (p. 231), are relevant not only as literary constructs, but also as a „tool for assessing inter-ethnic and inter-cultural relations“ (p. 233) in antiquity. Irad Malkin uses the identification of the Greek Heracles with the Phoenician Melqart to show how a „middle ground“ (p. 238ff) between different peoples, in this case in the western Mediterranean, could be made acceptable only with the help of a flexible mythology, „as a convincing package of logical contradictions“ (p. 253). And Jonathan M. Hall questions, among other things, the „passive, receptive role“ (p. 264) that the indigenous populations of Italy are traditionally believed to have fulfilled with regard to the creation of Greek stories about their own origins.

The final two papers focus on the Near East in the Roman and late Roman period. Michael Sommer analyses the „extremely precarious“ (p. 292) balance between on the one hand the populations at Palmyra and Hatra, two very different cities in the Oriental steppe zone, and on the other hand the nomads dwelling in these cities’ respective territories, applying Rowton’s model of ‚dimorphic societies‘ (applicable more to Hatra than to Palmyra though), and criticizes the assumptions that come with the traditional notions of ‚civic‘ and ‚tribal‘ societies. Last but not least, Fergus Millar studies part of the complicated socio-linguistic processes leading up to the relatively sudden appearance of Islam, and in particular the application of the labels ‘Saracens’ and ‘Ishmaelites’, „two essentially unconnected modes of ethnic designation“ (p. 313) in the first half of the fifth century.

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Citation: Ted Kaizer. Review of Gruen, Erich S., Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity. H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews. December, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=26371

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