First Minoan Olympic Race

"I hereby proclaim the opening of the Minoan Olympic Games at Knossos."

Or words to that effect, as spoken by King Minos ca 1500 B.C.E.

The 'Runner's Ring' from Kato Syme, Crete (Late Minoan I) shows a nude man running in double-float (both feet off the ground) above a stone pavement.  On the left is a priestess or goddess dressed in a flounced skirt; a priest wearing a ceremonial hide skirt awaits the victor on the right.  The priest holds out what looks like a set of stylized bull's horns (?) which I imagine to be the runner's prize.

In the beginning, the ancient Olympics had only a single footrace, one stade in length, a sprint down the length of the stadium (approx. 192 meters long).  With the discovery of the Minoan Runner's Ring, it is conceivable that the glory won by these first Olympic victors had its origin in far earlier times.*

For the rest of his life the victor enjoys a honey-sweet calm, Pindar writes.  And adds wisely, so much as games can provide it. (Ol. I 97-100)




* An ancestral sport?  The term dromeus, 'runner,' was applied to Cretan adult males when they came of age, which implies that footracing played an important part in every citizen's social and education tradition at least in the archaic period (Willetts, Ancient Crete, 115-16, 118, 121-22).  A possible mythological forerunner of the Cretan 'runner' might be Talos, the giant man of bronze, who ran around the island three times daily (Apollon 4.1638ff)).

Ring dimensions: D. bezel 1.8 x 0.9 cm; D hoop 1.25; Wt 2.07 gr

Illustration credit (NB: I have photographically reversed the image in order to illustrate the direction of action as would be seen on the ring's impression).  The ring was excavated at the Minoan rural sanctuary of Kato Syme on the southern slopes of Mt Dikte in central Crete.  The excavators identify the ring as the personal dedication of a victor in a footrace:

Photograph via Ioannis Georganas's blog, Mediterranean Archaeology, 26 April 2006.
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Lost in the Dust of the Marathon

Olympic history with a twist of lemon.

The first Olympic Games of the modern era -- as you've probably heard again and again as the PR machine shifts into overdrive for London 2012 -- took place in Athens in April 1896 with the participation of 245 athletes from 14 western nations.*  What was then a shiny new International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to include a marathon event in the games in honour of ancient Greece's greatest military moment -- its victory over the Persian invaders in 490 BCE.

νικωμεν’ (We've won!)

The Olympic marathon was inspired by the improbable feat of Philippides, the dispatch-runner who carried news of the Greek victory from the battlefield near Marathon to Athens over 37-38 km (23 miles) of rocky mountainous terrain. "Joy to you, we've won!" he gasped as he reached the city gates, and died then and there, his last word being a sighing "Joy"; and off he went, a hero, to the Elysian Fields.

On April 10 (March 29 according to the  calendar then used in Greece), thirteen Greek and four foreign runners set out from Marathon to match this legendary run.  Only nine of the seventeen men completed the distance, the others  collapsed one after another along the brutal course.  The winner was a Greek named Spiridon Loues, a poor water-carrier by trade, whose commanding officer in military service had convinced him to join the race.  Thousands of rapturous spectators watched him cross the finish line:

 When Loues finally arrived in a stadium erupting with joy, two Greek princes – Crown Prince Constantine and Prince George – rushed to meet him and accompanied him on his final lap for a finishing time of 2:58:50, fuelled along the way by wine, milk, beer, an Easter egg, and some orange juice.

When Life Gives You Lemons instead... 

The first modern Olympics, needless to say, did not have any women athletes.  The founder of the IOC, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, always said that a "female Olympiad would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect." In this, he received the full support of Pope Pius XI, who seriously condemned the playing of sport by women.**  Quite right too.  A woman’s natural sporting achievement was to encourage her sons to be distinguished in sports and to applaud a man’s effort. So, the lovely lady holding the victor's wreath in the Olympic poster (top left) was meant to be the limit of female activity at the Games.

In spite of Coubertin’s efforts to keep out the gentler sex, an unofficial female competitor ran in the 1896 marathon, a poor Greek woman who became known as ‘Melpomene’, the Muse of Tragedy, whose real name was Stamati Revithi.

The supplement Les Jeux Olympiques of the Messager d’Athenes between 8 February and 18 April 1896 contained many references to the preparations and to the Olympic Games themselves. On 14 March under the heading, "A woman in the Marathon," it reads:

There was talk of a woman who had enrolled as a participant in the Marathon race. In the test run which she completed on her own on Thursday, she took 4½ hours to run the distance of 42 kilometres which separates Marathon from Athens. She stopped for about ten minutes half-way only to suck a few oranges. She is a woman of the people with marked features, of a tough and lively temperament. 

 She was not allowed to compete in the men’s race (registration was closed, they said), but would run by herself the next day. 

The Estia newspaper of Saturday, 23 March 1896, also refers to "the runner Mrs Revithi, the strange woman. who, having run a few days ago in the Marathon as a try-out intends to compete the day after tomorrow. Today she came to our offices and said ‘Should my shoes hinder me, I will remove them on the way and continue barefoot.'"  

Revithi arrived at the the small village of Marathon on Thursday, 9 April [28 March], where the athletes had already assembled for the following day's race. She attracted the attention of the reporters and was warmly greeted by Marathon's mayor, who sheltered her in his house. She answered the reporters' questions and was quick-witted when a male runner teased her, predicting that when she entered the Stadium, there would be no crowds left.  Revithi retorted that he should not insult women, since male Greek athletes had already been humiliated by the Americans.  In fact, Americans had won gold medals in nine of the twelve athletics events during the previous days.

On the morning of Friday, 29 March 1896, Stamata Revithi asked the old priest of Marathon to read a prayer for her so that she would quickly reach the Stadium.  The priest replied that he would be saying a prayer in the Church of Saint John, but only for the 'official athletes'.  The organizing committee backed him up, having refused her permission to enter the race and thus, presumably, not having a prayer. 

Nonetheless, on Saturday, 30 March 1896 at 8:00 a.m., Stamata Revithi was ready to run the marathon alone. Before setting off, she recorded the time at which she started and this document was signed by the school master, the mayor and the magistrate of Marathon. When the starter's gun sounded, she began to run along the side of the course.  Eventually she fell behind the men, but as she continued on, she passed runners who dropped out of the race in exhaustion. Having run the entire route at a brisk pace she arrived at the stadium, perspiring and covered in dust, about an hour and a half after Spiridon Loues won the race. Barred from entry into the now empty stadium, she ran her final lap around the outside of the building, finishing in either 4½ or 5½ hours (reports differ).

After her marathon run, athletics officials could not remember her name so they labeled her ‘Melpomene’, who is the Greek muse of Tragedy.  Looking at Stamata Revithi, they could see only tragedy, not her extraordinary feat.  She had finished approximately two hours after the winner and had beaten some of her male competitors.

There is no account of Revithi's life following the marathon.  The poor woman who hoped to get some fame or money from her run disappeared entirely.  She was truly "lost in the dust of history."

Elysium

The French athlete, Marie-Louise Ledru is credited with being the first woman to race the modern marathon distance of 42.195 km (25 miles): on September 29, 1918, Ledru reportedly completed the Tour de Paris Marathon with a time of 5 hours and 40 minutes. Violet Piercy of the United Kingdom was the first woman to complete an official marathon: on 3 October 1926, she clocked a time of 3:40 hours in a British race.  Women were finally allowed to run the Olympic marathon at the 1984 Summer Games, when American Joan Benoit won the inaugural race in a time of 2:24.52 hours.***

The women's marathon at London 2012 begins at 11 AM on Sunday, 5 August.  If you're watching, spare a thought for Stamata Revithi. 

Did she ever really exist?  I don't know.  The stories and witnesses cited seem rather dodgy and contradictory.  But she should have had her run and I hope she did.




* This week, to give it epic scale, over 10,000 athletes from 205 countries will be competing at the London Olympics.

** Pius XI finds a like-minded contemporary in Sheikh Abdulrahman Al Shathri, Saudi cleric and author of Girls' Sports and Scouting in Schools and Universities (2010), who warns that athletics "orient women toward a masculine physique, as their pelvis shrinks into the size of a male pelvis and their shoulders broaden." Despite this evident danger, Saudi Arabia is fielding two female athletes at London 2012 who will run, fully wrapped up and veiled.  See 'Two Steps Forward...'

*** Paula Radcliffe of Great Britain holds the current women's world record for the marathon which she set during the 2003 London Marathon with a time of 2:15:25.

Sources include L.P. DaCosta, Olympic Studies: Current Intellectual Crossroads, Ch. 15;  'Stamata Revithi ran the marathon in 1896 Olympics' at the The pink elephant; Charlie Lovett, 'The Fight to Establish the Women's Race' at Marathan Guide.com; Athanasios Tarasouleas, 'The Female Spiridon Loues' Karl Lennartz, 'Two Women Ran the Marathon in 1896'; Stamata Revithi at Wikipedia; V.J.Matthews, 'The "Hemerodromoi": Ultra Long-Distance Running in Antiquity', CW 1974, 161-69, who notes that the modern marathon distance of 26 miles 385 yards was set at the 1908 Olympics in order to finish the race in front of the royal box; for no better reason, this is the distance that has become standard for the race.

Illustrations

Top left: Official poster of the Athens Olympics, 1896.

Upper left: Spiridon Loues entering the Panathinaiko Stadium at the end of the marathon. Photo via The pink elephant online magazine

Lower left: Entirely fanciful drawing of Stamata Revithi by Athanasios Tarasouleas at STAMATA REVITHI, ALIAS “MELPOMENI"

Lower left: Watch marathon 2012 Olympics. 
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Zenobia on the Big Screen

  Did you know that over 60 films have been made about the life and loves of Cleopatra -- and who will ever forget Elizabeth Taylor playing the role of the Egyptian queen, although that was filmed almost 50 years ago (1963)?

Fair enough, she was unforgettable, but what about Zenobia?  Where is she in the stardom stakes?

Lonely as a cloud, it seems.  The scorecard:  Cleopatra 60, Zenobia 1.

The Syrian queen has appeared just once on the big screen.  And that was long ago, too (1959).  Admit it, you not only don't remember the film but, in truth, you've never heard of it.  

Now, Dr Maria Teresa Grassi of the University of Milan and Director of the Italian-Syrian Archaeological Mission at Palmyra, comes to your rescue ....

In an article aptly titled 'Zenobia: the Missing Myth', she pulls the film out of total neglect, a revival, you might say, of The Sign of Rome ('Nel Segno di Roma'); it was an Italian-French-German co-production, one of the earliest shared Euro-disasters.*   According to her -- and to everyone else who even noticed -- The Sign of Rome was a terrible film, and of no historical value whatsoever.  Who cares? For Zenobia was played by the hugely buxom Anita Ekberg (just a year before her sensational role in Fellini's La Dolce Vita).

Here's Ekberg as Zenobia:

Pretty luscious, you have to agree.  And her mountainous mammaries are put to best effect in a series of low-cut gowns, which prompted one reviewer to remark: actually, her huge bosom should have gotten a billing of their own. Filled with romance and subterfuge (everyone seems to have a secret agenda) and -- did I mention it? -- a strong smell of sex, it's a 'sword and sandal' film that manages to find time for two bump and grind belly-dances by hot Cuban starlet Chelo Alonso (seen sizzling below) . 

Belly-dances?  Hey, that's Turkish, isn't it?

Besides those erotic Turkish belly-dances, as Dr Grassi points out, with what I hope sounds like a laugh, The Sign of Rome is a total mismash of Orientalism: pseudo-Egyptian (as in the scene above) rubs shoulders with borrowings from Mesopotamia, Persia, and even India, along with a bit -- if only a little bit -- of Palmyra.

So, thank heavens, I do have something serious to say about The Sign of Rome. 

In one scene at least, the jewellery is spot-on.  According to Dr Grassi's report card, somebody did their homework. Ekberg (above) wears a gold diadem with two locks of hair combed up on either side.  Compare the lovely female figurine now in the Hermitage Museum (late-second, early third century CE; below left). And check out the star's gold hanging earrings: they look very much like those worn by Aththaia, daughter of Malchos (third century CE; below right) whose bust is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

For the rest, we have villains: Semantio, a double-dealer plotting with the Persian king to sell out Zenobia -- and he looks the wicked part as he leers and all but curls his mustache.  Needless to say, we also have heroes: Marco Valerio, a handsome Roman consul; and, yes, Zenobia does fall in love with him; and, yes, she will marry him in the end and live happily ever after.

But, really, what it's all about is best summed by a picture, which isn't worth nearly a thousand words.

I bet you knew this would happen in the end.

But I promised you an erotic belly-dance, didn't I?  Here's Chelo Alonso wearing a frothy confection and in eye-opening competition with Anita Ekberg for the most enormous chest. 

Sorry, that's all for today.  I'm off to Crete later this morning ... and some real work, I suppose.  

Have a great summer.  I'll see you again in August.



*  Directed by Guido Brignone. Assistant directors Michele Lupo and Riccardo Freda. Sergio Leone is one of the script writers. The score is by noted composer Angelo Francesco Lavagnino.

Sources for this post: M. T. Grassi, 'Zenobia, 'un mito assente', in LANX 7 (2010) 299-314.  Brian Bankston, reviewing 'The Sign of Rome' on his blog, AliveNotDead, 16 September 2011.

Illustrations 

All from Brian Bankston's review with the exception of close-up of Anita Ekberg (second down, centre) which is from Dr Grassi's article and Aththaia, daughter of Malchos from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
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Rare new head of Nefertiti (Four Updates)

Tiny but choice!

Just breaking news: a new head of  Nefertiti has been identified (left).

This, we now must acknowledge, is a head of the famous Queen Nefertiti, wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten (1353-1336 BCE). After some serious detective work, Dr Christian E. Loeben, Egyptologist at the August Kestner Museum in Hanover, Germany, has established its true and fascinating identity. It had been thought, wrongly as it now turns out, that this fragment of a face depicted the unisex pharaoh himself.

Dr Loeben has been able to demonstrate convincingly that it is in fact the illustrious queen, whose most famous portrait is the polychrome bust kept in the Berlin Museum (below left).

It measures barely 5.5 cm (2.2") in height, but the red-brown quartzite* head is a tiny masterpiece of Egyptian art.

"Until now, no Egyptologist had noticed that at the time of Pharaoh Akhenaten, only women's portraits were done in quartzite. Nefertiti is the only possible option for this remarkably fine miniature portrait," says Loeben.

"This is a truly sensational discovery," chimes in Dr Christian Bayer,  Egyptologist at the University of Munster and specialist in Nefertiti: "It is very exciting to be able to add this extraordinary piece to the relatively limited collection of statues of Nefertiti."

The fact that this discovery has taken place this year is all the more remarkable given that it is exactly one hundred years since the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt found the world-famous bust of Nefertiti (left) in 1912, during his excavations at Tell el-Amarna, the new capital city founded by Akhenaten: 

Suddenly we had the most alive Egyptian artwork in our hands, Ludwig Borchardt wrote in his diary for 1912. You cannot describe it with words. You can only see it.

That "most beautiful woman in the world" now reigns over the Neues Museum in Berlin, enthroned alone in a domed room that overlooks the length of the Museum (see Zenobia's low-down on her contentious discovery and possessive tug-of-war between Germany and Egypt in Two-Timing Nefertiti II). 

The small quartzite head, on the contrary, is secluded in a private collection in Europe and is therefore not normally accessible to the public.

Queen Bee at BAAF

For the 10th jubilee edition of the Brussels Ancient Art Fair (BAAF), the organizers have arranged a large Egyptian art exhibition, entitled Ancient Egypt: Masterpieces from Collectors and Collections (June 6th to 10th). For the first time, the visitors will have the possibility to see mostly unknown Egyptian pieces, a majority of them coming from private collections. 

The new Nefertiti will undoubtedly be the Queen Bee among those 120 exhibits.  Dr Loeben describes his research in the limited-edition catalogue which will be sold during the BAAF exhibition (a snip at € 49).  It's worth more than a peek as, after 10 June, the head returns to its private quarters ... and who knows when it will be seen again.




I am most grateful to Dr Stephanie Budin for the first report of this new identification on Pandora's blog (Pandorastudies@yahoogroups.com).  There will surely be many updates.

* Quartzite is a hard (7 Mohs) metamorphic rock of nearly pure silica, coloured by a small amount of iron oxide.

Updated 4 June 2012

Well, I did say there would be many updates, but I hadn't reckoned on their coming so thick and fast.   

First, a new argument for the identification of the head as Nefertiti's:

SwissInfo.CH reports that details around the ear indicate that the head was wearing a certain crown, which would suggest it was the queen, and not Akhenaten (Details am Ohr wiesen darauf hin, dass die Figur eine bestimmte Krone trage und es sich um Nofretete handeln müsse.)

But, now, the opposition is massing as well.

An Egyptologist on the EEF-list  argues that the piece is a shabtis or funerary figurine and thus should not be judged by the rules for statuary.  Prof. Anneke Bart of St. Louis University points to three quartzite shabtis in the Metropolitan Museum of Art depicting Akhenaten and remarks that "the argument that it has to be the queen because it is made of quarzite is not really valid." And, for good measure, citing a shabti of the king in this collection: "With the size of the head being 5.5 cm, it is identical to the size of this head of a shabti."   

And, further, Lise Manniche (Copenhagen) notes "the prominent feature of what has been termed 'sfumato eyes', a detail that seems to be characteristic of, and perhaps even unique for, shabti figures of Akhenaten."

I wouldn't call it "Game, set, and match" but the argument is certainly heating up. 


Updated again 6 June 2012

Back to the EEF-list where a number of Egyptologists have plunged into the debate.  There are a few new arguments.

Does a shabti of Akhenaten always wear a beard?  If it does, this head must be female; if not, it still could be Akhenaten.  Right?

Martin Wolff (from France) says: "...all the known specimens for this pharaoh wear a beard and usually have no neck." 

But, rebuts Anneke Bart (see above), "There are however plenty of examples of [shabtis] of men without a beard." And she cites examples dating to before and after Akhenaten of kings without a beard.

So the question of whether or not shabtis of Akhenaten himself could be beardless is still open. 

The stone 

Maria Sansalone (Egittophilia Forum Admin) points to a large use of quartzite in the Amarna period, citing Relief n° 171, showing Akhenaten offering to the Aten, from the  Great Temple -- Copenhagen, Carlsberg Glyptotek (AEIN 1718) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/10647023@N04/3901689668/ 

The choice of red-brown quartzite, she suggests, alludes to the colour of the Sun.

It should be said, however, that Christian Loeben said that almost 100% of quartzite portraits were of women, which leaves some wiggle room for the head to be, exceptionally, of a male ruler.

The crown

Ah, the crown.  This, as Lutz Franke (from Germany) stresses, depends on whether or not the details above the ear of the head refer to the specific Blue Crown of Queen Nefertiti.  That's what she's wearing as the "most beautiful woman in the world" portrait in Berlin Museum.  

The argument may well hinge on such traces of her crown -- but that's not something we can determine from the published photograph (top left).  There's clearly tabs and things above the ear ... but what?. 

So, Nefertiti ... or not?  We'll probably have to wait until Christian Loeben comes out with his full case for identifying this head as a portrait of the queen.

A third update on 8 June 2012

Martin Wolff, who is quoted above on Akhenaten's beard, returns to the EEF-list to report on his re-examining many of the known shabtis of the pharaoh.  Yes!  There is one example that is -- and always was -- beardless: It's a shabti head in the Brooklyn Museum (left).  It's made of grey quartzite or, more likely (to my eyes, at least) of sandstone and its dimensions are very close to those of our rare new head. 

Eureka!  Or not?

Does one shabti make a summer?

But now Christian Loeben speaks for himself (his text and photographs are in the Ancient Egypt catalogue [link via Martin Wolff]), so you can read Dr Loeben's full case for the prosecution.  He discusses the stone and the crown but the crux of the matter is in the ear:

I've made the ear-plug clearer by circling in red

The clearest indication that the facial fragment exhibited here originated from a statuette featuring Queen Nefertiti comes from close examination of the left ear. The entirely preserved lower part of the ear (if indeed this is meant to be the earlobe) is disproportionately large. This is likely to be the circular disk of a mushroom-shaped ear-plug often displayed on such statuettes, as shown on both of Nefertiti's ears on a famous limestone exhibit (Berlin 21263 ). 

So, if Egyptologists agree that Akhenaten was never represented with ear-plugs, then it's more than likely that Dr Loeben is right in identifying the subject of the statuette as Queen Nefertiti. 

But will the Egyptologists agree? Stay tuned for more updates as they get their teeth in Christian Loeben's text.  I wouldn't bet good money yet on 'Game, set and match'. 

A fourth update on 12 June 2012

A consensus seemed to be forming, but it's not what you think!

Ear-plugs (or earrings)

Will it all come down to the ear-plugs --  and not the crown, as I previously thought?

There's general agreement that wearing ear-plugs or earrings in this period does point to a female.  Have a look at this plaster head (left), another artist's model from the same sculptor's workshop in Amarna as the Berlin Museum's Nefertiti ('most beautiful woman in the world').  It's thought to be a study of Kiya, a secondary wife to the pharaoh Akhenaten.  She, too, wears prominent ear-plugs or earrings.   And so do other models of the royal ladies.

Which is pretty good evidence, one would think, that the quartzite head does at least represent a royal Amarna female, even if not necessarily Nefertiti.  It could as well be Tiye, Meritaten, or any other female member of the family.  On the basis of this feature alone, it really can't be assigned to any particular individual lady.

But at least it's firmly female.  That's the consensus.

Or so I thought.

And lo and behold, Philip Arrhidaeus (of Flanders) has snatched away this simple certainty.  There's been a long discussion of the new head, too, on the Egypte forum Pr Kmt (in Dutch). 

The starting point is that Akhenaten was often depicted with pierced ears.

As Martin Wolff (on the EEF-list) had asked quite reasonably: "Why would Akhenaten have pierced ears if not to wear earrings?  The fact that to date we have never found a statue of him with earrings does not mean it never existed." 

In Ancient Egypt, indeed, never say 'never'.

Philip Arrhidaeus showed this relief on the Egypte forum (left).  The pharaoh is wearing an earring.  He also pointed to a drawing on an ostracon that was found at Amarna: the king is again depicted with an earring.

Neither image is of a statue, it is true.  So we haven't come full circle with our identification of the quartzite head.

Not yet.


Illustrations

Upper left:  photograph from the EEF BBS website (submitted by Raymond Betz).  Photo credit: Alain Speltdoorn.

Below left: Welt Online.

Illustrations added in third update

Above: Statue Head of Amenophis IV. Quartzite or sandstone, 2 3/16 x 2 1/16 in. (5.5 x 5.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.514. Creative Commons-BY-NC.

Below: Face of Queen Nefertiti.  Ancient Egypt, Masterpieces from Collections and Collectors.





Illustrations added in fourth update

Above: plaster face from the Amarna workshop of the sculptor Thutmose.  Photo credit: Keith Schengili-Roberts (via Wikipedia).

Below: relief of Pharaoh Akhenaten, Royal Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.

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Zenobia Drives Along the Appian Way

The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen of Roads

My review of The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen of Roads appeared this week in the Times Higher Education. 
 
Here's what I wrote:
 

24 May 2012

This delightful, literally lightweight book takes you on a brief journey from Brindisi in the heel of Italy's boot to Rome; but what an engaging journey! Robert Kaster and his wife travelled the length of the Appian Way, the first great Roman road, known far and wide in its time as regina viarum, "the Queen of Roads". Eventually, the Romans went road-wild and built a 75,000-mile network criss-crossing the Empire: compare the US' measly 46,000 miles of interstate highway.  That's the kind of nugget that Kaster, professor of Classics and Latin at Princeton University, uncovers at every stop along the Way. This little book fully punches above its weight.

The Via Appia was begun in 312BC by Appius Claudius Caecus, whose name still adorns it. He also happens to be "the first Roman we can fairly claim to know as an authentic historical person", says Kaster. His family was Sabine (as in "the rape of the Sabine women") and given land in Rome, where the Claudii clan flourished ever after: the Emperor Tiberius was a direct descendant. As censor, Appius excelled in firsts, building Rome's first aqueduct (the Aqua Appia) as well as the Via Appia. When completed, the Appia covered 353 miles, crossing marshes and half a dozen rivers, up and down hills and the sometimes precipitous Apennine Mountains -- all, of course, dug by hand, presumably the work of slaves and criminals. Kaster's back-of-the-envelope calculation tots up their shifting 180 million cu ft of earth and stone; and, yes, this does dwarf the 91,600,000 cu ft moved for the Great Pyramid at Giza.

A journey from one end of the Appia to the other would have taken two weeks on muleback. In contrast, the wheels of a rental Fiat took the Kasters to Rome in five leisurely days. Alas, truth to tell, with the exception of a mile-and-a-half stretch in the remote Monti Aurunci park, the original paved road is nowhere to be seen: you know that the road itself must have been some 100 yards to your left or right, but it is usually hard to establish where exactly. For most of the way, you're more or less on the real track, which probably lies 6ft under the modern road. What truly seizes the imagination, however, are the layers of time visible above the ground, all the monuments of conquering peoples who left their mark on Southern Italy - Byzantines, Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese - as one era rubs up against another. On the Appia, to give just one example, you can leave Taranto on the coast (founded by Sparta in the 8th century BC) in the morning, pass Castellaneta (birthplace of Rudolph Valentino), and arrive that afternoon at ancient Venosa, where the poet Horace was born in 65BC. The ruins of his Roman town and later Jewish catacombs are overlooked by a Romanesque church - with two 11th-century tombs of Norman dukes - built from the stones of the amphitheatre on the site of an earlier church that had itself been built over a Roman temple. The upper town is dominated by the massive bastions and towers of a 15th-century castle built by the Roman Orsini family. Nearby, a Counter-Reformation Purgatory church, decorated with skeletons and death's heads, warns you Memento mori (correctly translated: "Remember that you are dying!").

This kind of history throws off sparks. You put down The Appian Way and think of taking out your bike. A friend of mine rode it in four days. I asked him if the mountains were difficult to climb, and he replied: "No, hardly. After the Alps, the Apennines were comparatively easy." I might rent a Fiat instead.

The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen of Roads

By Robert A. Kaster

University of Chicago Press 124pp, £14.50

ISBN 9780226425719

Published 8 May 2012

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Roman Women Invented Microcredit

Or something very much like that.

Of course, Roman woman could not become bankers or money-lenders: they were officially banned from such professions.  (Callistratus, Dig. 2.13.12).  That restriction was merely icing on the cake of their general legal disabilities: 'on account of their lightness of the mind,’ as the second century jurist Gaius put it, Roman woman could not deal with financial activities independently at all.  Just like children, their male guardians - most commonly either their father or husband - would act on their behalf.  Although women could own property, they required their guardian’s consent if they wished to dispose of it.  

So, in theory, they couldn't buy or sell anything of any significance on their own.  They could neither undertake financial obligations nor release others from such obligations.

But now we know they did.

Some women in ancient Rome seem to have developed the concept of microcredit, that is, a loan of small amounts of money that allows people without independent resources to borrow money for business purposes.  A new study conducted by Carmen Lázaro, professor of Roman Law at the Universitat Jaume I, Valencia (Spain), shows that women managed to get around the legal rules that excluded them from activities related to banking and money-lending.  They created credit contracts for small amounts of money made by and for women and guaranteed repayment by accepting pledges of personal property as collateral.*

And, if the female creditors weren't paid back on time, you may be sure they demanded their pound of flesh; sometimes literally:

Two wax tablets found together with some silver vessels near the Palaestra Baths at Pompeii relate to a business deal between two women dating to 61 CE. A freedwoman, Poppaea Note, had borrowed money -- 1,450 sestertii (small brass coins) -- from the well-off woman Dicidia Margaris. As security she temporarily transferred ownership of two of her own male slaves to her creditor: 

Poppaea Note, freedwoman of Priscus, has sworn that the slaves Simplex and Petrinus, or by whatever names they are known, are hers and that she owns them and that these slaves are not pledged to anyone, nor does she share them with anyone else…

If Poppaea doesn't repay the loan by the next year, Dicidia Margaris has the right to sell Simplex and Petrinus at the slave auction held "at the Forum in Pompeii in broad daylight" and collect the debt that way.  As simple as that! 

The existence of this microcredit system has been winkled out from various written sources.  Inscriptions found in the Granio House at Pompeii, for example, reflect such financial transactions made between women.  A tough old bird named Faustilla was a money-lender and a kind of pawnbroker.  Three graffiti record sums that some female clients borrowed from her -- typically between 15 and 20 denarii (silver coins, each worth 4 sestertii) -- and the whopping interest rate they paid in return: from 3% per month and up to 45% annually.  Worse than credit cards!  Faustilla and other female money-lenders took personal items, such as jewellery or cloths or coats, as collateral.

Since money and jewellery were freely exchangeable, as Prof. Lázaro points out, these loans avoided the need to be approved by the guardians and therefore were not subject to legal formalities.  The capital of the money-lender would only generate obligations to the borrower so that the lender, too, could also avoid the legal intervention of her own guardian.  

As Carmen Lázaro says, it is "a business model that has the characteristics of what we know today as microcredit and allowed women to enjoy some freedom of action and avoid the prohibition in the rule of law."

The Sulpicii Archives

In 1959, about 170 waxed wooden tablets were discovered at Murecine, near Pompeii.  Most of the tablets date from the period 35-55 CE and are records from a consortium of bankers/moneylenders, the Sulpicii, and their clients.  There is no doubt that the loans that they made were of a commercial nature so it is all the more interesting that fourteen of the tablets mention women, both as debtors and as creditors, carrying out business in much the same way as men. 

The question is: how much control had these women over their transactions? 

Three tablets concern loans made to a woman called Euplia, a Greek from  the island of Melos, between March 42 and July 43 CE.  Euplia gives guarantees of repayment for loans made by another woman, Titinia Anthracis.  One tablet reads:

The accounts of Titinia Anthracis. Paid out to Euplia daughter of Theodorus from Melos, 1,600 sesterces on the authority of her [guardian], Epichares son of Aphrodisius from Athens.  She asked for and received counted out from the cash-box at home. Received: From the cashbox 1,600 sesterces.

This is not the only case where both debtor and creditor are women.  On another tablet, a man, N. Castricius Agathopus, guarantees the repayment of the debt on behalf of a woman, Faecia Prima (the debtor).  The male guarantor may or may not have also been Faecia's guardian.  Those roles are legally distinct.  The authority of a guardian was necessary for a woman to take on any obligation such as a debt but it was not part of his role to be a guarantor.  His function was not to protect the creditors but to protect the light-minded woman's property.  So, presumably, Faecia had to provide a guarantor for a loan that was otherwise unsecured, not because she was a woman but because her credit was not good enough for whatever sum she was borrowing.

The Merry Widow 

Thanks to Emperor Augustus, however, Faecia might have escaped the need for a male guardian entirely.  As one of this emperor's efforts to increase the Roman birthrate, he promulgated the jus trium liberorum (Latin for "the right of three children").  This meant that a freeborn woman who had three children and an ex-slavewoman with four children were freed from the guardianship to which women were otherwise always subject. The women’s jus liberorum was applied even when the children were no longer alive.  Thus, it is possible that Faecia Prima had this privilege and did not need a guardian's authority to contract a debt.  If the privileged woman was no longer under the power of her father or her husband, she could now act independently. 

“This freedom of women in the field of business despite the prohibitions was in part due to the high possibility of widowhood and the need to continue business” as Prof. Lázaro emphasizes. 

Given that widowhood at a relatively early age was a reality for the majority of Roman women, a surprising number of women  would have been able to buy or sell property such as real estate and slaves quite on their own.  In Roman Egypt (where we have the best demographic records) fully 60% of women no longer had a husband by the time they reached their late forties.  So it could turn out that a woman with jus liberorum inherited, owned, and independently operated her husband’s estate upon his death. 

So, family businesses could be left to women by their husbands in their absence or after their death.  Whereupon, some women ended up as heads of shipping, textile manufacturing, and footwear companies, or traded luxury goods and food products, or managed rental accommodations.  And more.  These opportunities allowed women to amass significant financial resources that they could use to advance the political and social position of their family. Some backed their sons in political careers and arranged advantageous marriages for their daughters; others increased the family's landholdings or expanded or decorated the family residence; still others funded their own manumission from slavery.  By the end of the first century CE, the legal restrictions on women had been so relaxed as to be, in practical terms, non existent. 

Even so, Roman society was always grounded in masculine values as is apparent in the choice of virtues deemed proper to women — chastity, fertility, beauty, and so on — qualities that defined these women's lives in a man's world.  A funerary inscription of the 2nd century BCE evokes those values:

Friend, I have not much to say, stop and read it.
This tomb, which is not fair, is for a fair woman.
Her parents gave her the name Claudia.
She loved her husband in her heart.
She bore two sons, one of whom she left on earth, the other beneath it.
She was pleasant to talk with. She walked with grace. She kept the house. She worked in wool.
That is all. You may go.

And that, I think, never changed.



* For understanding microcredit as it works nowadays, see the excellent program of KIVA, About Microfinance and Loans That Change Lives.

I am grateful to the blogs Rogueclassicist and Past Horizons for headlining the new study by Carmen Lázaro.  

Sources used for this post, in addition to Prof. Lázaro's research report, "Women of ancient Rome prompted a similar system of microcredits to overcome legal exclusion", include J. Andreau, Banking and Business in the Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 1999; E.A. Meyer, Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World, Cambridge Univ. Press. 2004; and especially J.F. Gardner, Women in Business Life: Some Evidence from Puteoli, in P. Setälä, L. Savunen, Female Networks and the Public Sphere in Roman Society. Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae, 22, Rome (1999) 11-27.

Illustrations

Top left: Marble bust of Claudia Olympias (first quarter 2nd century CE). Her name is a mixture of Roman and Greek names, a result perhaps of her citizen family's migration to Rome from the eastern Mediterranean or of her father's status as a freedman. This memorial, carved by a talented sculptor, was no doubt costly. Photo credit: VRoma Project's Image Archive.

Middle left: Marble monument of Petronia Hedone and her son (first quarter 2nd century CE). Her name suggests that she is a freedwoman of the Petronius family. Judging from the quality and decoration of the stone which she ordered, Hedone was wealthy. There is no mention of a husband (he may have pre-deceased her) or of a patron. Photo credit: VRoma Project's Image Archive.

Bottom left: Relief funéraire de L. Vibius, Vecilia Hila et leur fils (13BCE-15 CE).  Photo credit:ULB-Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres-Histoire de l'Art et Archéologie-Cécile Evers. Via Icononum.
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A Million MI-(A)W Mummies

The ancient Egyptians didn't just make mummies of dead people but went hog-wild mummifying all sorts of non-human species too: reptiles, birds, dogs, baboons, bulls, rams, crocodiles, and even an occasional hippopotamus. However, one of the most common animal mummies in Egypt was the cat (left).  

Fully domesticated cats probably became companions to humans in Egypt somewhere around 2000 BCE.  At first, they were captured from the wild as kittens to be domesticated. But they soon became home bodies and bred as pets.  By 1350 BCE, cats were occasionally buried with their owners.  The female cat, especially, was noted for her fecundity and  was associated with fertility and female sexuality. Around 900 BCE., a striking change took place in the Egyptians' religious beliefs: many animals were now thought to be the incarnation of certain gods and goddesses.  Female cats were believed to be the earthly representation of the goddess Bastet who was pictured as a woman with the head of a cat (below left). Consequently, cats were raised in and around temples devoted to Bastet, especially in the city of Bubastis, on the Nile in Lower Egypt.  At least 20 of her cult centres are known and all of them, presumably, were once filled with felines.  When the cats died, they were mummified.

Feline mummification had 6 steps:

1. Remove internal organs.
2. Stuff body with sand or other packing material.
3. Place in sitting position.
4. Wrap tightly.
5. Faces painted on wrappings with black ink.
6. Natural dehydration.*

The cat mummies were buried in huge cemeteries, often in large communal graves.  Cat cemeteries lined the Nile River, while the goddess' main temple at Bubastis alone contained an estimated 300,000 cat mummies.  So many cat mummies were discovered in Egypt that it's a good guess that there had once been millions of them.

That's an awful lot of dead MI-(A)W's. 

In 1888 an Egyptian farmer digging in the sand near the village of Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt uncovered a mass grave. The bodies weren't human. They were feline — ancient cats that had been mummified and buried in pits in staggering numbers.

Bastet (Late Period)

"The plundering of the cemetery was a sight to see, but one had to stand well windward. The village children came [...] and provided themselves with the most attractive mummies they could find. These they took down the river bank to sell for the smallest coin to passing travellers. The path became strewn with mummy cloth and bits of cats' skulls and bones and fur in horrid positions, and the wind blew the fragments about and carried the stink afar"

Two years later, about nine tons of cat mummies from the cemetery were shipped into the port of Liverpool. They were sold off by the ton: bidding started at £3 per ton and gradually advanced to £5 17s 6p.  One company bought 38,000 pounds of cat mummies to pulverize and sell as fertilizer in England; this shipment alone was said to contain 180,000 mummified cats:

Some contractor came along and offered so much a pound for their bones to make into something - soap, or tooth-powder, I dare say, or even paint. So men went systematically to work, peeled cat after cat of its wrappings, stripped off the brittle fur, and piled the bones in black heaps, a yard or more high, looking from the distance like a kind of rotting haycocks scattered on the sandy plain.  The rags and other refuse, it appears, make excellent manure, and donkey loads of them were carried off to the fields to serve that useful, if unromantic, purpose.

This was not the result of people mummifying their beloved pussy pets. The cat mummification industry was big business.

And therein lies the rub. 

From about 332 B.C. to 30 B.C., cats began to be raised for the specific purpose of being turned into mummies. The mummies were sold to people on their way to worship Bastet and left at her temples as offerings. Scientists have uncovered a gruesome fact: many cats died quite premature and unnatural deaths. Two- to four-month-old kittens seemed to have been sacrificed in huge numbers because they were more suited to the mummification process.

Within the elongated oval shape of the cat mummy, the squeezed skeletal body of the cat embedded in wrappings is visible. The thin white arrows indicate the squeezed thorax; white arrow: fractured vertebra of the tail; arrowhead: fracture/hole in the occipital region of the skull. 

Look at what happened to the mummified cat (above) from the National Archaeological Museum of Parma, Italy.  As reported in the April issue of The Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, this mummy has just been examined radiographically in order to evaluate and describe how cats were wrapped and mummified in ancient Egypt. 

Wrappings of Cat Mummy, Parma Museum

Radiographs made by Giacomo Gnudi, veterinary radiologist at the University of Parma, show that the cat was bound and wrapped tightly to take up as little space as possible, with the ribs compressed and the front legs placed very close to the chest which forced the skeleton into the 'sitting position'.  A coccygeal vertebra at the bottom of the spine was fractured in order to reposition the tail as close as possible to the body.  A hole in the skull (white arrowhead) also seems to confirm the hypothesis of a very unnatural death.  In other words, the cat was murdered, probably by a spike driven into its head.  Or rather, we can say that this was kitten murder: the long bones and vertebrae of the skeleton and the eruption of definitive canine teeth suggest a cat ranging in age from 4–5 months.  The fact that the cat was so young suggests that it was one of those bred specifically for mummification.  It is likely that it was an offering to the goddess Bastet.**

Owing to the huge demand for mummified cats throughout the Late Period (ca. 1069-30 BCE), different qualities of cat mummies were sold with better or worse  features according to the clients' budget.  It was possible to find 'cheap' cat mummies with just a few bones inside or even an empty 'shell' or to spend much more and get a complete mummified cat body embedded in decorated wrappings. The cat mummy from the museum of Parma is one of the most valuable types.  The cat's skeleton is complete and the arrangement of the mummy’s wrappings, too (above left) is intricate, with painted geometrical patterns.  The eyes are depicted in black ink on small round pieces of linen bandage. 

If This Be Love

How do we square the Egyptians reputation for loving, protecting, and even worshipping cats with the mass slaughter of temple-raised kittens?  Cats were protected by a kind of common law: Diodorus Siculus (writing between 60-30 BCE) is quite explicit:

Whoever kills a cat in Egypt is condemned to death, whether he committed this crime deliberately or not. The people gather and kill him. An unfortunate Roman, who accidentally killed a cat, could not be saved, either by King Ptolemy of Egypt or by the fear which Rome inspired.

And the Greek historian Herodotus (5th C. BCE) tells us that, when a cat died, the household would go into mourning as if for a human relative, and would often shave their eyebrows to signify their loss.

So who was buying dead-kitten mummies in the millions?

Everyone, it seems: 

On the day of her festival, [Bubastis] is said to have attracted some 700,000 visitors  "both men and women who arrived in numerous crowded ships.  The women engaged in music, song and dance on their way to the place, great sacrifices were made and prodigious amounts of wine were drunk, more than was the case throughout the year. [Herodotus 2.60]

Is it fair to complain (as A Thinking Person's Blog does) that, "There is nothing that is cat loving or cat caring about this process. It is all about the human and his insecurities and superstitions. It is simply cat use and abuse."

I'd say like to say MI-(A)W to that but, of course, we cannot impose our contemporary western ideas upon the distant past.  Imagine that you were about to approach Bastet to offer a sacrifice.  After all, you had to take care to placate the goddess.  True, in her docile moods, Bastet gives life, and joy, and protects the household, but she also had an agressive side if provoked!  And that would worry you while you wanted to have a good time at her festival.  Better to offer a pre-wrapped mummy... and relax.  Doesn't it make sense to give her what she most loves?  Perhaps, even in ancient Egypt, each man, each woman, and each mummifying priest kills the thing he loves:
                                 The coward does it with a kiss,
                                 The brave man with a sword!

Or a bloody spike.



* This is unsure.  Possibly chemicals were used, similar to the dehydration treatment of humans: natron, a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate mixed with small quantities of salt and sodium sulphate, and particular herbs to improve artificial dehydration.

**The National Museum of Parma bought this cat mummy in the 18th century from an antiquarian; there is no documentation about which part of the Egypt it came from, but it is certain that it was an offering to the goddess Bastet, possibly from the temple of Bubastis. Sources for this post, in addition to "Radiological investigation of an over 2000-year-old Egyptian mummy of a cat", JFMS, include The Role of Cats in Ancient Egypt, by M.E.; Cats in Ancient Egypt, Wikipedia; News on t he Mummy Cat at Archaeology Museum Parma, Think Archaeology; and A Wuthering Expectations Investigative Report - Were mummified cats actually shipped to England for use as fertilizer?

Illustrations

Above left: Cat mummy in folded shroud, National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden, NL; AMM 16c.  Photo credit: Animal Mummies Online. A list of cat mummies found in various museums, with links to photographs, is available at The Animal Mummy Database.

Upper Centre: The Mi-W  Hieroglyphs (uploaded to YouTube) by jakobfrandsen90210 on 6 Mar 2010.

Middle left: Bronze Bastet statue, Louvre Museum N 3857. She wears ankle bracelets and a tight, mid calf-length dress with a V-neck and sleeves that cover her shoulders. Photo credit: © 2009 Musée du Louvre/Christian Décamps.

Lower Centre:Giacomo Gnudi et al., "Radiological investigation of an over 2000-year-old Egyptian mummy of a cat", JFMS, Fig. 1.

Lower Left: Outer wrappings of the cat mummy from the National Archaeological Museum at Parma; via Think Archaeology. 

Bottom left: Cat Mummy wrapped in Meander pattern shroud.  British Museum EA 37348. From Abydos, Roman Period, Acquired 1902 from Egypt Exploration Fund.
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Questions On the Queen of Sheba's Gold

The Golden Girl

You may have heard that the Queen of Sheba's gold mines have (or have not) been found in Ethiopia.*  Those who are following the story might object that, regardless of the news report, the gold mines -- if they ever existed -- would not have been in Ethiopia. You'd be right.  If ever there were a Queen of Sheba, she most probably came from the spice lands of Yemen.

Not that it really matters.

Rather, I'm thinking of two other things....

The first is that Sheba is forever linked in our minds with King Solomon, the wisest of kings.  It is the queen's arrival at his court in Jerusalem that is the beating heart of her story. 

An Ethiopian fresco of the Queen of Sheba travelling to King Solomon

As the Good Book says [Kings 10.1-13]:

 When the queen of Sheba heard about the fame of Solomon and his relationship to the LORD, she came to test Solomon with hard questions [or riddles].  Arriving at Jerusalem with a very great caravan—with camels carrying spices, large quantities of gold, and precious stones—she came to Solomon and talked with him about all that she had on her mind.  Solomon answered all her questions; nothing was too hard for the king to explain to her....

She said to the king, “The report I heard in my own country about your achievements and your wisdom is true.  Indeed, not even half was told me; in wisdom and wealth you have far exceeded the report I heard...."

And she gave the king 120 talents of gold [= ca. 4.5 tons/9,000 pounds], large quantities of spices, and precious stones. Never again were so many spices brought in as those the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.... 

Then she left and returned with her retinue to her own country. 

And that, in fact, is all we really know about her.  Which, of course, has never stopped speculation.  Storytellers from different times and places, and different ethnic and religious traditions, have imagined and embellished details according to the interests of their own communities.

So, read on (while listening, I suggest, to this wonderful recording of Georg Friedrich Händel's 'Arrival of the Queen of Sheba').



The Queen's Gold Mines

Now, four-and-a-half tons of gold is quite a lot of yellow metal by any standards.  At today's price, it's roughly $213,500,000 (£ 135,000,000) worth of the stuff. What did Sheba get in return for this whopping gift?

Wisdom.  Or, more precisely, answers to her 'hard questions'.

The Bible doesn't actually tell us what 'hard questions' she put to Solomon.  Nor does it report any of the answers that she so much admired. They must have been real brain teasers to impress Sheba, who was reputed to be a pretty smart queen.  If the authors of Kings did know what it was all about, that chapter-and-verse was lost long ago.  More likely, they didn't have any more clues about it than we do.

Later rabbis were keen to fill the void.  In the Targum Sheni Esther (dated 500-1000 CE), the Midrash Misle (9th century CE) and The Alphabet of Ben Sira (ca. 11th century CE), we finally come upon some riddles. These purport to quote the very words of Solomon and Sheba, including some questions that are serious and some seemingly bizarre. A few samples:

Queen of Sheba enthroned, surrounded by attendants and animals

“What are the seven that issue and nine that enter, the two that offer drink, and the one that drinks?” Solomon answered: “The seven that issue are the seven days of menstrual impurity. The nine that enter are the nine months of pregnancy. The two that offer drink are the breasts, and the child is the one who drinks.” 

Smart!  But Sheba had many more such riddles in her quiver.

“How can a woman say to her son: ‘Your father is my father; your grandfather, my husband; you are my son, and I am your sister?’” Solomon replied: “The two daughters of Lot.” 

Correct!  The rabbis didn't ever wonder how this queen from a far-away land knew about Lot's intimate incestuous history, telling how his two daughters became pregnant by their father and bore sons!  This didn't seem to bother Solomon either.  And so the riddling went on, just so:

"What is like unto a wooden well, the contents of which are drawn up, as it were, by a bucket of iron; that thing taken up no more than stones, which forthwith are irrigated by water?"

Solomon answered: "The reed container which carries the black antimony known as stibium, which stone when crushed is used by women in painting their eyelids, and by men as a remedy in eye ailments, and which they apply to themselves by wetting the iron pin with their spittle." If you are missing a little Iron Age lore, it's said that stibium clings to the spittle on the iron pin.  Get it?

When he had solved all these riddles and many more, Sheba changed tack.  She required the king to explain such tricky business as how to perforate a pearl and to string a crooked shell.  Then, she brought before him some children who were of the same height and identically dressed, and asked of the king:

“Distinguish between the males and the females.” He made a sign to his eunuchs, who brought him nuts and roasted ears of corn, which they scattered before the children. The males, who were not bashful, collected them and tied them within the hems of their garments. The girls, however, were bashful (since their bodies would be revealed if they were to tie their undergarments) and therefore tied them within their outer garments. Solomon told the queen: “These are the males, and these are the females.”

Clever, you have to admit.  And the queen was duly impressed.

Which brings me to my second point:  Was there a method in this madness?

Early Christian Riddling

The Jewish Women's Encyclopaedia thinks there is.  But, before we get to that, I'd like to tell you about a brand new document that also purports to record Sheba's riddling with Solomon.  This early-Christian text, preserved only in Armenian and Syriac (recently translated from the latter by the eminent Oxford scholar, Sebastian Brock**), mixes serious and peculiar questions, too -- with some leaning towards the completely loopy.

Question:  How does this [earthly] sphere revolve, to the right or to the left?  And when the whole of it revolves, does it all revolve equally, in the same direction, or part of it one way, part of it another?
  Solution:  The sphere has a double revolution: its firm part revolves westwards, to the right, and turns rapidly, each night and day completing the movement of its course.  But the planets, which ride above it, revolve eastwards, to the left, and each of them completes the revolution of its journey in accordance with the measure of its altitude, ranging from every thirty years to every thirty days

Having briefly dabbled with the cosmos, Sheba again displays astonishing familiarity with the patriarchs of Israel, so much so that Solomon gets a bit tetchy:

Question: A foreign mother of native sons, a murderess who brought up lawless men;  the theft prospered, and in cunning bore as fruit a king.
    Solution:  Solomon said to her: You insult my ancestors with your questions, for Phares son of Judah, by the cunning and the theft of Tamar, who was considered to be the murderer of her husbands, produced the king David in his line. 

I am quite puzzled by this riddle: Sheba must be referring to Genesis 38 but I can make no sense of it.  Happily, she gets right back to basics.  The next two questions are set in the 'land of the Indians':

Question:  How is it possible that a woman who eats pomegranates in the land of the Indians does not become pregnant?
Answer:  Pomegranates are cold and moist, while India is hot and dry, and so, they are eaten there as opposites, women who eat them do not become pregnant because they are of the same composition as a woman.

 Opposites, it seems, do not attract.  This is a late (but far, far from the latest) survival of the ancient Greek theory of the sexes, pitting chilly wet women against superior hot-and-dry men.  As Aristotle argued in the Generation of Animals, the male is characterised by an abundance of the superior element, fire, and the qualities hot and dry, while the female has an abundance of water and is therefore cold and wet.  Rather soggy, in fact.  Since women are cold and moist, eating a cold, moist fruit in a hot, dry climate doubles down the negatives, so to speak, and prevents the happy event.  If there were any doubt, the next questions rubs it in.

Question:  When a man drinks wine in the land of the Indians, how is it that his intercourse does not result in conception?
Answer:  The wine in the land of the Indians induces a heavy sleep, and because it is hot and dry by nature ... it prevents cohabitation, being of the same composition as intercourse, and it causes desire to become confused in a disrupting manner, not allowing nature to flow in accordance with the norm of procreation.

Thus, the hot dry (!?!) wine + the hot dry man = no baby either. According to Aristotle's theory of the sexes, the hotness of the male and the coldness of the female determine their roles in reproduction.  The extra heat that characterises the male lets him turn his food intake into the ultimate residue, namely spurts of white semen.  The female, lacking heat, can achieve only an imperfect concoction, which dribbles out as red menstrual blood.  However unlikely this appears, that may explain the next riddle:

Question: An unclean thing that brings up kings and that is softened; it is honoured in clouds, and is sprinkled with change, and is sent like excrement on the paths of the fields.
Answer: Solomon says:  In the menstruation which becomes milk, in the excretion (‘clouds’) on the breast, are kings and lowly nourished.  This is what you are saying, set out in a delightful way.

Enough!  While I'm glad he was delighted, much more of this will drive me quite mad.

Sheba the Riddler

As the Jewish Women's Encyclopaedia rightly argues, the main shared element in all of Sheba's rabbinic riddles is that they are concerned with gender. The first riddle pertains to the female’s birth cycle: menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and nursing.  The second turns upside down the generational hierarchy within the family, by interchanging father and grandfather, husband and father, mother and sister. Solomon's solution restores the normal order, since it reveals that this is an exceptional case, which held good only for the daughters of Lot. The answer to the third riddle is a tube of eye makeup used differently by men and women.  The fourth indicates the differences between males and females that supposedly are already noticeable in young children, and is connected to the shame felt by girls at publicly exposing parts of their bodies. That, QED, is the 'natural' order of things, a stance obviously endorsed by the Christian riddles, too.

Solomon as riddlee is determined to restore the natural order by winning over this foreign queen of fabulous wealth and wisdom, who is also a dangerous (that is, out of place) female of power in a world ruled by men.  Here we have a monster in the making, a woman who has usurped male prerogatives (on Sheba as demonic monster, see The Zenobia Romance).  How could the queen ever have believed that she could outwit the wisest of kings?  How, indeed, could a woman challenge a man with any expectation of winning?

She must be made 'natural' and put in her place.  Solomon answers all of her riddles quickly and somewhat derisively, thinking them mere child's play.  But Sheba's ability to make riddles out of Solomon's heritage (Lot's daughters, Phares and Tamar, among others) marks her for the boundary-crossing female that she is.  Perhaps that's why Kings 10 doesn't sample her riddles: too aggressive? or too close to the bone? Though Solomon can answer these and all of the others, she has presented herself as a ruler equal in status and wisdom, one capable of keeping her place in her own world.

Then she left and returned with her retinue to her own country.

Wherever that was.


* Shared thanks for the first reports of the new claims to PaleoJudaica and to Past Horizons.  You can read the press releases on those sites or at the Guardian's website: 'Archaeologists strike gold in quest to find Queen of Sheba's wealth.  A British excavation has struck archaeological gold with a discovery that may solve the mystery of where the Queen of Sheba derived her fabled treasures. Louise Schofield, an archaeologist and former British Museum curator, who headed the excavation on the high Gheralta plateau in northern Ethiopia, said: "One of the things I've always loved about archaeology is the way it can tie up with legends and myths. The fact that we might have the Queen of Sheba's mines is extraordinary."'  Personally, I wouldn't count on it.

** I am immensely grateful to Prof. Brock for sending me a pre-publication translation of these early-Christian riddles and granting permission to use them on my blog.  The whole will appear in the first volume of texts edited for the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project at the University of St Andrews. More information on the manuscript: Date and origin unknown; survives in this form only in Syriac and Armenian, but completely different questions are known from Jewish tradition; they could not be any earlier than c.6th century, and must be earlier than the earliest textual witness, in fact in Armenian, ca.13th century CE.

Sources include 'The Queen of Sheba' on Viewzone (translated and annotated by David Ben-Abraham); 'King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba' at King Solomon Legend;  Tamar Kadari, 'Queen of Sheba: Midrash and Aggadah' at Jewish Women Encyclopaedia; and (especially) Carole Fontaine, Smooth Words: Women, Proverbs And Performance In Biblical Wisdom, Continuum Press, 2009 (partly available via Google Books).

Illustrations

Top: Mural from Lalibela, now in the National Museum at Addis Ababa. Supposedly the Queen of Sheba, but more likely to be St George heading for the dragon. Photo credit: unknown, via Wikipedia.

Youtube credit: Susan Hammond's Classical Kids

Middle: 14th century Persian manuscript frontispiece depicting Queen Sheba (Bilqīs) enthroned. She is surrounded by attendants and animals, both real and fantastic. Above her is a flying mythical bird (sīmurgh).  Photo Credit: The Walters Art Museum.  Licensed for use under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.

Below:  Betty Blythe in the title role of the Queen of Sheba, December 1921. Reproduced by permission of © The Trustees of the British Museum.  Middle East: Registration number: EPH-ME.471.
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