Lady Sattjeni V of Elephantine, Once More.

The October-November special issue of NILE Magazine: Discover Ancient Egypt Today has just appeared. Its main feature story is on  'THE GOVERNORS OF ELEPHANTINE'. These were the princes who are buried in the tombs of Qubbet el-Hawa (on the Nile opposite modern Aswan).  This was a whole dynasty of governors, their mothers, wives, and their very extended family -- an elite just below the pharaohs in rank -- who ruled this southernmost province of Egypt during the Twelfth Dynasty (ca. 1960-1780 BCE).  

I was asked to write an essay for this special issue, and I very much enjoyed doing it. Not just to write about the governors (though, surely, backstabbing and political machinations are always fascinating), but because I really wanted to think again about the life of Lady Sattjeni V -- daughter,  wife, and mother of a pride of governors.  We have found out a remarkable amount about this lady who lived in the late Middle Kingdom. She was a key figure in the dynasty, and we are lucky enough to know about her suprising role in keeping power in the hands of her family. Nile Magazine now updates my earlier blog posts on Sattjeni V (A Leading Lady in Elephantine on the Nile, Part I and Part II).  

This is the true story of an Egyptian Dynasty, as it happened some 3,800 years ago -- fresh from the pages of the NILE:

This post was written for the Getty Research Institute’s blog, The Iris, in conjunction with their online exhibition The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra, stories and perspectives that complement their virtual exhibition.

I am honoured to participate in their research program.

Zenobia, Visionary Queen of Ancient Palmyra

In the 200s A.D. the Empress of the East turned her armies on Rome, and almost won

Judith Weingarten | May 3, 2017 | 5 min read

Queen Zenobia Addressing Her Soldiers, 1725-1730, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Oil on canvas, 102 15/16 x 144 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1961.9.42, Samuel H. Kress Collection. Image Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Now all shame is exhausted…for in the weakened state of the [Roman] commonwealth things came to such a pass that…a foreigner, Zenobia by name, proceeded to cast about her shoulders the imperial mantle, [and was] ruling longer than could be endured from one of the female sex.

Thus begins the biography of Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, in the Historia Augusta (History of the Emperors), written near the end of the fourth century A.D. And what we read there is almost all we know about the queen.

Sometimes, I think if it were not for her coins Queen Zenobia would be taken as a legendary figure. There could be a kernel of truth in the story, but it is a tale so fantastical, so gendered, with sources so unreliable, that it simply could not have historical value. Yet Zenobia did exist, and she did go to war against the Romans. And, as Empress of the East, she came within a hair’s breadth of victory.

Antoninianus, Antioch mint, March–May 272. Obverse: S ZЄNOBIA AVG, diademed, draped, resting on crescent. Reverse: IVNO RЄGINA, Juno holding plate and scepter, peacock at feet. Image used with the kind permission of wildwinds.com

What do we really know about her?

Zenobia lived, strutted the stage, and battled in mid-third-century A.D., surely the worst documented period in the history of the Roman Empire. Every bit of information about her is contentious, fragmentary, or biased.

And anyway, when ancient authors wrote about the past, they rarely had in mind what we think is the aim of history (“things as they really were”), but rather mixed in generous dollops of myth and legend, gossip, hearsay, moralizing, ethnic stereotypes, political propaganda, and plain wishful thinking (“the way things should have been”).

A bit like television news, really.

In any case, it can’t have been much fun being ruler of an eastern outpost of Rome just when the Romans were reeling from defeat after defeat delivered by the new Persian Empire across the Euphrates River. In 253 A.D., the Persians attacked Syria and looted Antioch, the greatest city of the East. Three years later, Dura Europos fell, the river stronghold garrisoned by Roman and Palmyran troops. Now nothing but empty steppe stood between the enemy and Palmyra itself, the richest surviving city of Syria.

Rock relief at Bishapur, Iran, commemorating the victories of Shapur I over three Roman emperors: Gordian III (trampled by Shapur’s horse) killed in battle in A.D. 244; Gordian’s successor, Philip the Arab (kneeling before Shapur), who paid a huge ransom to escape Persia later that year; and Valerian (behind the emperor’s horse), captured in A.D. 260. Photograph via“Farr(ah) II. Iconography of Farr(ah)/Xᵛarǝnah,” Figure 6, detail of Shapur I’s victory relief, Bišāpur. Photo: A. Soudavar. Source: Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, 2010

Finally, in 260 A.D., Emperor Valerian marched with an army of 70,000 men against the Persians. His army was destroyed and Valerian himself was captured in the worst defeat the Romans had suffered in three hundred years.

In the chaos that followed, Zenobia’s husband, Odenathus — one of the great warrior princes of history—led his Palmyran troops in a counterattack. They chased the invaders out of Syria and harassed them all the way back to their own capital at Cteisiphon (near modern Baghdad). The Historia Augusta tells us that Zenobia was with him on this campaign:

For of a surety, he, with his wife Zenobia, would have restored not only the East . . . but also all parts of the whole world everywhere, since he was fierce in warfare. . . . His wife, too, was inured to hardship and in the opinion of many was held to be more brave than her husband, being, indeed, the noblest of all the women of the East, and . . . the most beautiful.

Mosaic (detail) from house north of the Great Colonnade: Odenathus as mounted archer, in traditional Palmyran dress, destroying Persian tigers; an eagle bears wreath of victory in its beak. After M. Gawlikowski, “Der Neufund eines Mosaiks in Palmyra,” in A. Schmidt-Colinet (ed.) Palmyra: Kulturbegegnung im Grenzbereich (Mainz 2005) 29–31. Digital image: Attar-Aram syria, licensed via a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Source: Wikimedia Commons

Odenathus probably would have been able to restore the whole world, if, after his victorious campaign, he had not stopped in Emesa (modern Homs) on his way home, where a cousin poured poison into his wine. He and his son by a previous marriage were dead.

Antoninianus, Antioch mint, November/December 270–March 272. Obverse: VABALATHVS V C R IM D R, diademed, laurel wreath, draped and cuirassed. Reverse: IMP C AVRELIANVS AVG, radiate crown, cuirassed. Image used with the kind permission of wildwinds.com

On hearing the news, Zenobia seized the regency on behalf of her own son, Waballath, who was still a child. At the same time, in Italy, a deadly series of coups and counter-coups played out until, eventually, a tough Illyrian cavalry general, Claudius, emerged victorious.

Zenobia saw her chance. In 269, she sent her army into Egypt, seizing Alexandria. Nothing could have been more provocative, for the port was vital to Rome’s grain supply. Without Egyptian grain, Rome would starve. By March 270, Palmyra ruled all Egypt. During the course of that year, another Palmyran general extended Palmyran control through Syria and most of Anatolia, settling on Ankara as their border. Claudius meanwhile died of plague and another Illyrian cavalry general became emperor. That was Aurelian.

Almost simultaneously, the mints of Alexandria and Antioch began producing coins with, on the one side, Aurelian’s image, and, on the other, Zenobia’s son Waballath. Although the coinage reserved the most important imperial title of Augustus for Aurelian, there could be no clearer statement that Zenobia had set herself up as equal to Rome… and meant to rule an eastern empire.

View of the Temple of Bel and the Gate (the Bab) into the temple courtyard, taken from the terrace of the archaeological dig house in the southeastern corner of the courtyard. Photo: Judith Weingarten

Why Did Zenobia Do It?

In every book about her, one word is always used: She was “ambitious” — as if male aspirants to the Empire were not ambitious — suggesting, too, that she was scheming and foolish or imprudent. Yet why did so many men take the huge risk of rebellion on her behalf? Surely not to satisfy a woman’s frivolous dreams. No one even considers that she might have been right: the Romans could no longer defend the East.

Rome was corrupt. They had debased the currency; inflation was rampant; taxes had reached confiscatory levels. Emperor after emperor was murdered, unleashing civil wars as ambitious generals fought against each other, rather than against the common Persian enemy. Aurelian, who defeated her in 272 A.D., leaving a ruined Palmyra in his wake, cobbled the Empire back together, but none of the underlying problems were solved (and three years later, he too was murdered). Twenty years later, the Empire was being ruled by four Emperors; sixty years later, Constantine established his capital at Byzantium and it split into East and West.

So, rather than “ambitious,” she seems to me visionary.

_______

For background information on Palmyra, its trade with India, and its language and monuments, see the Getty Research Institute’s online exhibition The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra. And for everything known or imagined about Zenobia, visit Zenobia: Empress of the East.

This post is part of the series Ancient Palmyra, presenting stories and perspectives that complement the online exhibition The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra.
See all posts in this series »

The Invisible City of Zenobia

Last week, the Peruvian architect Karina Puente sent me her brand-new drawing of the "Invisible city of Zenobia", one of the fifty-five Invisible Cities that Italo Calvino created in his novel (more a prose poem, really) of the same name.  

As she says, "I Dare! I dare because it is an experiment."

The cities in Italo Calvino’s novel are metaphors for cities. And for our experiences, alone and together, within the walls we construct around ourselves, walls being metaphors themselves. And are metaphors for other metaphors. And for much else our walls cannot contain, what escapes our most rigorous designs, what exists within, beneath, and above the surface of our intentions. 

In Calvino's Invisible Cities,* the traveller Marco Polo tells tales of impossible cities -- for example, a cobweb-city suspended over the abyss, or a microscopic city which gradually spreads out until we realize that it is made up of concentric cities which are all expanding.

If you choose to believe me, good.

For each city, after a precise description in words, Marco followed with a mute commentary, holding up his hands, palms out, or backs, or sideways, in straight or oblique movements, spasmodic or slow.  A new kind of dialogue is established. The cities he thus evokes are assigned to different themes such as Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs, Trading Cities, Continuous Cities, Thin Cities. Thin Cities are those rather abstract and airy creations like the city of Zenobia.**

Invisible City of Zenobia by Architect Karina Puente

Now I shall tell of the city of Zenobia, which is wonderful in this fashion: though set on dry terrain it stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging sidewalks, surmounted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes, jutting pulleys, and fish poles, and cranes.

Zenobia by Colleen Corradi Brannigan

And, here, in fact, we are.

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo -- Tartar emperor and Venetian explorer. The mood is sunset. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire, of his cities, of himself. 

Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales of cities that he has seen within the empire and Kublai Khan listens, searching for a pattern in Marco Polo's cities.  Here are all the cities ever dreamed of, strange magical invisible cities that nobody else ever saw. All are named after women (as they must be, since cities are feminine in Italian) -- Raissa, Irene, Phyillis, Olinda, Armilla, Chloe, Valdrada ... and, of course, Zenobia.

No one remembers what need or command or desire drove Zenobia’s founders to give their city this form, and so there is no telling whether it was satisfied by the city as we see it today, which has perhaps grown through successive superimpositions from the first, now undecipherable plan. But what is certain is that if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines, with its pilings and its suspended stairways, a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model.

Zenobia by Sakerinox

The emperor soon determines that each of these fantastic places is really the same place. 

Marco Polo agrees: "Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased...." 

This said, it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.

Kublai muses, "Perhaps, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms." 

And Marco replies, "Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

For Calvino, one question was: What is the city today, for us?

Zenobia by Cargo Collective

"...I believe that I have written something like a last love poem addressed to the city, at a time  when it is becoming increasingly difficult to live there. It looks, indeed, as if we are approaching a period of crisis in urban life; and Invisible Cities is like a dream born out of the heart of the unlivable cities we know...." 

Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging garden of the Great Khan's palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.

"The desire of my Marco Polo," continued Calvino, "is to find the hidden reasons which bring men to live in cities: reasons which remain valid over and  above any crisis. A city is a combination of many things: memory,  desires, signs of a language; it is a place of exchange ... Only, these exchanges are  not just trade in goods, they also involve words, desires, and memories. My book opens and closes with images of happy cities which constantly take shape and then fade away, in the midst of unhappy cities."

Zenobia by David Fleck

All these cities may have been invisible to the sedentary emperor, but as the tireless Marco Polo made him see the most remote places, so Calvino recreates them for us, and --- no matter how distant -- they are eminently, unforgettably visible.***

The Great Khan owns an atlas where all the cities of the empire and the neighbouring realms are drawn, building by building and street by street, with walls, rivers, bridges, harbours, cliffs.

And, in fact, isn't that what we yearn for?  A drawing, or map, or sketch, to make the invisible cities visible?  Artists, architects and urbanists have been tempted, teasing out the hidden mathematics behind the construction and design of the cities; one might almost say, a playful invisible mathematics of surprises and few rules. And, of all the cities, Zenobia is one of the most suggestive and surreal of images.

Zenobia by Pedro Cano, "miradores cubiertos de techos cónicos"

Sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place.

RIP City of Zenobia, Palmyra 2017




* Almost seven years ago (8 August 2010), this blog first succumbed to the fascination of Calvino's Invisible Cities, taking in hand a real-life impossible project to build the city of Zenobia: Building An Invisible City.

** Text of Zenobia from Le Città Invisibili by Italo Calvino (1972); translation William Weaver (1974).

*** William Weaver on Calvino and His Cities.  Also 'Italo Calvino on Invisible Cities', a lecture given to the students of the Graduate Writing Division at Columbia University on March 29, 1983.
 

The Artists of the Invisible city of Zenobia:

Karina Puente - Calvino's Invisible Cities Made Visible: The Drawings of Karina Puente; I Dare! I dare because it is an experiment. My especial thanks to her for sending me her very recent 'Zenobia'.

Colleen Corradi Brannigan - The Invisible Cities Become Visible; The Invisible Cities; But Does it Float.  I am most grateful for her permission to reproduce her watercolour of 'Zenobia'.

Sakerinox - The world is a parody of itself and I want to draw

Cargo Collective - Faculty of Architecture/Istanbul Bilgi University

David Fleck - Zenobia

Pedro Cano - En las ciudades invisibles X

WHERE ARE THE *REAL* WOMEN OF THE ANCIENT WORLD?

So many books about Women in Antiquity really tell 'just so'  stories about fictional females -- and very much less about real women of the distant past.

Achilles and the princesses of Skyros, Late Roman mosaic

They might, for example, kick off with tales of goddesses and heroines, perhaps followed by fanciful Amazons, and then go on to describe famous female characters from the classics, harking back to Homer, Hesiod, or Virgil -- just as if those ladies had actually existed. But, no, they never existed: they were stories created by men and meant for the pleasure of other men. At best, they might also instruct us ('us' being the real women) in how we should behave, or, more often than not, how we should not behave.

So that, even now, our picture of ancient women is very much slanted towards imaginary figures, and not based on women who had actually once lived and breathed.

Dr Stephanie Budin thought about this one morning when she woke up at 3 a.m., grumpily dissatisfied with the latest book to  have appeared with 'Ancient Women' in its title.  Why oh why, she wondered, did the best parts go to the fictional females of myth and literature? Somewhere along the line, they almost lost track of the real women of the past -- those with bodies, names, occupations, interests, sex lives, religious duties, and passions. Shouldn't we learn about them instead? Adding insult to injury, she grumbled, their 'ancient world' consisted primarily of Greece and Rome. What about the generations of women who had lived and died in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria, Cyprus, Etruria, and even, at a stretch, in the Germanic and Celtic fringes of Europe?  Going back to sleep, she dreamed of that kind of book.  

And  now, along with co-editor Dr Jean Turfa, she has it: a brand-new, hefty volume (tipping the scales at 2 kg/4.5 lb),  WOMEN IN ANTIQUITY: Real Women Across the Ancient World.  For Budin + Turfa, the 'Ancient World' takes off in the east in Mesopotamia, runs around both shores of the Mediterranean, and ends in  Iberia in the west.  In a sense, it covers the areas reached, ruled, or influenced by the Roman Empire (with the puzzling exception of Brexit-land). What we have are 74 (!) crisp chapters, each written by a specialist, many of whom are sharing with us the results of their own latest research and excavations.  

For those who need to know, 58 authors are female, 16 are male.

How long is Antiquity?

Lapis lazuli seal of Queen Puabi, Royal Cemetery of Ur, First Dynasty or earlier

Well, that depends.  Pride of place goes to Mesopotamia (which will elicit howls of protest from Egyptologists), with the first of its eleven chapters starting ca. 3000 BCE, when the first cities appeared and cuneiform writing began. It ends three millennia later, with the fall of the Persian Empire before the onslaught of Alexander the Great in 331 BCE.  What were the real women who lived between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers doing during all that time? Stephanie Budin minces no words: her lead chapter examines 'Female sexuality in Mesopotamia'.  Chapter 2 examines its consequences: 'Being mothers or acting (like) mothers?'.  Then, a chapter takes a look at high life: 'Images of queens, high priestesses, and other elite women' (Ch. 3) -- women like Queen Puabi, one of whose precious lapis lazui seals is illustrated above: no man's name is mentioned, which probably means that she was a queen in her own right. Coming down the social ladder with a bump, we find 'The female tavern-keeper in Mesopotamia' (Ch. 8). Though prominent in myth (the 'beer-tapster' Siduri in the Epic of Gilgamesh) this chapter keeps rigorously to the written sources where we learn about the taxes she might pay, and where she ran her taverns (near a city gate) or the barley and beer she might lend out just like any merchant giving goods on credit. Both trades were notorious for fraud, so laws tried to control their shady dealings: "Neither a merchant nor a tapstress will accept silver, grain, wood, oil, or anything else from a male or female slave."

You get the idea.

A magical birth brick from Late Middle Kingdom Abydos

Eternal Egypt boasts nine chapters, starting quite as early but ending with the end of the Bronze Age (ca. 1080 BCE), when the last of the native Egyptian dynasties came to grief and foreign dynasties took over.  Sadly, this excludes one of my favourite times, Dynasty 22 in the Third Intermediate Period, when Egypt was under Libyan rule, and the highest of high-priestesses, the God's Wife of Amun ran the top temple in Thebes.  Even Budin + Turfa can't cover everything. Rather, the lead chapter fully exploits CT-scans of the extraordinarily well-preserved bones and mummies of Egypt to create a vivid picture of women's bodies, health, medical treatment, and even their hairdos. Other chapters explore the amazing Egyptian written record, for example, examining the lives of women who lived in the New Kingdom "Harem Town" of Gurob in the Fayoum oasis.  These were elite, even royal women active in cults within temples, shrines, and palaces; some left behind  wooden statues of themselves, a few with their names inscribed: meet the ladies Tuty, Mi, Maya, and Nebetia, whose statues prove their roles in life.

Panel on the Gundestrup silver cauldron, Danish Jutland, 1-2 C BCE

Naturally, some sections of Women in Antiquity are much briefer, a mere handful of centuries.  Particularly at the peripheries (as the Celtic lands, Iberia, and bogs of pre-Viking Scandinavia or, at the other end of the world, Nubia), the study of women is still in its early stages.  In such places, written records hardly exist and excavators have only recently begun to differentiate male from female burials in a scientific manner (past burials were generally gendered by  weapons or jewellery, categories that are surprisingly often misleading).  Details on the periphery are still scarce -- though much more is known than I ever knew. 

Etruscan statue from Pietrera tomb (ca 625 BCE)

Needless to say, the more familiar Greeks (7 chapters) , Etruscans and early Italic women (11), and Romans (11) are in no way slighted.  Equally, the Bronze Age Minoans and Mycenaeans receive their due (7 chapters), though fantasies of matriarchy are quickly put out to pasture.  

Summing up Women in Antiquity, I don't care how familiar you think you are with any of these cultures, there will be plenty new to learn. But, of course, no one can possibly be familiar with them all.  To keep us within our comfort zone, each section starts with a useful general introduction, a brief historical summary, and explanation of the chronology of the time and place.  So there you have it: 74 chapters, some written by senior scholars, others by freshly-minted PhDs, on subjects ranging from a woman's daily life to her place in the economy, from princesses to prostitutes, on motherhood, beauty and health,  religious festivals and black magic, from the care of children to (inevitably) death.

In short, the ups and downs and doings of half the human race over many thousands of years in a vast geographical area.  

To 'Look inside', click here.


Illustrations

Top left: Achilles being adored by princesses of Skyros (Iliad) where Odysseus finds him dressed as a woman, hiding at the royal court of Skyros. Late Roman marble and tiled glass mosaic, 2.20 by 2.50 m, from La Olmeda, Spain, 4th-5th centuries AD.  Photo credit: Wikimedia

Second left: Dama de Baza, funerary statues from Iberian necropolis of Cerro del Santuario de Baza (Grenada) Spain, courtesy of Museo Arqueologico Nacional. From the front cover of WOMEN IN ANTIQUITY: Real Women Across the Ancient World, Routledge 2016

Top centre: Personal seal of Queen Puabi, First Dynasty of Ur or earlier. Forensic examination suggests that the queen was 40 years old when she died and just under five feet (152 cm) tall. Her name and title are known from the inscription on one of three cylinder seals found on her person.  Photo credit: British Museum via Sanjeetartist.blogspot

Mid centre: Painted reconstruction of baked clay birth brick, showing the mother and newborn, with attendants and Hathor standards on either side.  Photo credit: Josef Wegner, "The Magical Birth Brick" Expedition Magazine 48.2 (July 2006): n. pag. Expedition Magazine. Penn Museum, July 2006 Web. 04 Jan 2017.

Third left: Gilded silver Gundestrup cauldron, composed of thirteen embossed panels (each 42 cm. high and  69 cm. diameter [16"x 27"]), manufactured ca. 100 BCE, found dismantled in a peat-bog in Danish Jutland.  This scene from an outer plate shows a large central female figure having her hair braided by a diminutive servant.  Photo credit: via LabyrinthDesigners + the Art of Fire blog.

Lower left: Almost life-size Etruscan limestone statue of 'princess' found in the Pietrera tomb at Vetulonia (ca. 625 BCE) --  one of four free-standing husband-wife couples from within the tomb and among the oldest examples of stone sculpture in Etruria. Photo credit: Fernando Guerrini and Mauro del Sarto. Soprintendenza Archeologica della Toscana; via Zenobia: Empress of the East