I've always been fascinated by the intersection of
mythology and history—the transition from fables having little relationship
with reality to narratives having some reasonable foundation in fact. The crossover from one regime to the
other seems to be related to the technology of writing. Primitive cuneiform writing on clay and
stone goes back more than 5000 years.
From its remnants we have gained insight into very ancient
civilizations, particularly their gods and monarchs, but not into many
historical events. I believe that
true historicity, at least in the West, came about during a blurry era spanning
the year 1000 BCE, as alphabetic writing on scrolls gained currency. At the beginning of that era, folk lore
and bardic tales, still largely mythic, were mostly passed down orally, but
soon were being committed to scrolls.
By the era's end, contemporaneous historical accounts began to appear in
scroll writing, and the proportion of myth dropped to an acceptable level. Two epic stories illustrate the
transition: one from 12th-century BCE Greece, the other from 10th
century BCE Israel.
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The Trojan War
The early part of the transition period encompassed the
Trojan War of Greek lore. You may
remember the story: Eris, the goddess of strife, brought a golden apple to a
banquet of the gods, inscribed "to the fairest." It was claimed by the goddesses Athena,
Hera and Aphrodite. Zeus, married
to Hera, wisely recused himself from deciding among them, asking Paris, Prince
of Troy, to do so. Each offered
Paris a bribe; he accepted Aphrodite's, who offered him the love of the most
beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta, wife of Menelaus and a daughter
of Zeus. Paris claimed his prize
by abducting Helen, whom Aphrodite had arranged to be struck with an arrow from
Eros just before seeing him, so that she would fall in love with him. Paris brought Helen to Troy.
Menelaus enlisted his brother, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae,
to retrieve Helen. Agamemnon
gathered a fleet of 1200 ships from all over Greece to invade Troy. In order to overcome being becalmed by
an angry goddess, he had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. The flotilla's army subsequently laid
siege to Troy and a ten-year war ensued, ending with the complete destruction
of the city.
Most of the story is pure myth. Still, ancient Greeks believed that the war actually
happened, dating it to around 1200 BCE.
A place in northwestern Turkey that archaeologists have explored for
over a century has been shown to be the site of a large city destroyed by fire
around 1190 BCE; it is conjectured to be Troy.
Homer's epic poem, the Iliad, pivots on the final weeks of the war. It was composed by him in the eighth century BCE from bardic
tradition and soon thereafter committed to writing. So here is an epic in Western lore that is enmeshed early in
the transition from mythology to history, containing more of the former than
the latter.
I was forcefully reminded of this particular intersection of
the mythic with reality when I was driving in the Peleponnesus in 1962. Quite unexpectedly, I came across the
remains of the palace of Agamemnon, his queen Clytemnestra, and their children Iphigenia, Electra, Orestes
and Chrysothemis—all characters in ancient Greek drama whom I had theretofore
taken to be purely mythological.
The immediacy of being in the presence of such a mélange of myth and
history took my breath away.
King David
At about the same time, Israel's folk lore also passed from
the mist of myth to something like fact-based fiction. The segue occurs gradually in the Old
Testament. By the end of the
Pentateuch, when Moses has delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt to
within sight of the Promised Land, the mythical tales of the Creation and the
Patriarchs have been succeeded by something resembling history. Moses probably lived around 1300 BCE,
not more than a century or so before the Trojan War. The setting down of the Pentateuch into an early written
Hebrew might have begun a century or two afterwards, but it was redacted into
its present form by the so-called Deuteronomists in the late 7th
century BCE.
Later in the Bible, we come across King David, who purportedly
lived in the late 11th and early 10th century BCE. (Some scholars deny that he was a real
figure, likening him more to King Arthur.
No contemporary remnants of his reign, like Agamemnon's palace,
exist.) His story is such a
compelling example of early historical fiction that Robert Alter—a
professor at the University of California (Berkeley)—has published a heavily-annotated,
beautiful new translation of it from the Hebrew, representing it as an early
novel. Called simply The
David Story, it starts at I Samuel with
the birth of Samuel and ends with the death of David at the beginning of I
Kings. The original text was
probably written during the late 10th century BCE and was later
edited by the Deuteronomists, who inserted "theologically correct"
detritus into it.
The David Story
grippingly follows the arc of David's life from the musically talented youth
who slew Goliath; through his rise to the command of King Saul's armies,
succession to Saul's throne, unification of Judah with Israel, and
establishment of its united capital in Jerusalem; to his gradual deterioration
from a hero of the people to a Machiavellian figure; and finally to his
embittered death after giving his son Solomon what Alter calls a "last
will and testament worthy of a dying Mafia capo." While the story is still replete with
mythology—mostly conversations with and edicts from God—it indeed has all the
hallmarks of a good novel, a book centered on a single character who is
transformed by life's vicissitudes from an admirable youth to a flawed, even
contemptible old man. Here is a
late transition-era chronicle, mostly history with an overlay of myth.
***
Why have I called this posting "The Cusp of History"? After all, a cusp is normally a discrete point separating
two very different regimes, not a blurry, many-centuries-long transition. I have taken a very long view. During the 200,000-year epoch of Homo
sapiens, the period in which
anything like civilization existed is only 10,000 years, and the transition to
historicity took only a few hundred of them. That's a mere blip in time, a cusp of amazingly short
duration. It was coincident with
the burgeoning use of writing using the then-new technology of sheepskin or
papyrus scrolls. In that sense, it
was akin to the decades-long cusp of the digital-writing explosion of our own
Information Age.