A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean

By Jeremy McInerney

A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean presents a comprehensive collection of essays contributed by Classical Studies scholars that explore questions relating to ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean world.

• Covers topics of ethnicity in civilizations ranging from ancient Egypt and Israel, to Greece and Rome, and into Late Antiquity
• Features cutting-edge research on ethnicity relating to Philistine, Etruscan, and Phoenician identities
• Reveals the explicit relationships between ancient and modern ethnicities
• Introduces an interpretation of ethnicity as an active component of social identity
• Represents a fundamental questioning of formally accepted and fixed categories in the field

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jun 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118834381

Jeremy McInerney

Jeremy McInerney is the Davidson Kennedy Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Folds of Parnassos.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Ethnicity

An Introduction

Jeremy McInerney

Unfortunately for us, the last 200 years have been the most mismanaged in the history of our race.

—Eve Mungwa D. Fesl

Large Gallic Ladies

The preceding epigraph comes from a short essay written by an Australian land rights activist addressing the sorry history of relations between the white settlers and Koori (indigenous) peoples. It may seem odd to begin a collection of chapters dealing with the question of ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean with a reference to political conditions far removed in space and time, but Fesl's comments provide a number of vectors into the subject of ethnicity. To begin with, in many countries, discussions of ethnicity are a way of talking about a deeply unpopular and discredited concept—race—while for the most part avoiding that charged term. (On changes in the use of race as a category, see Brunsma and Rockquemore 2004 and McCoskey 2012.) Few white academics wish to write about race, preferring to observe that the term refers to a social construct, not a biological fact (Fields and Fields 2012). This is especially true in classical scholarship, where for many years there existed a broad consensus that racism was an anachronistic idea and that race was not a useful category in the analysis of ancient Mediterranean cultures, or, more simply, that Greek and Roman society was not racist (Snowden 1970, 1983; Hannaford 1996, but, more recently against this view, Isaac 2004; McCoskey 2006, 2012). Ironically, those who have suffered the most from the abuses masked by the term race have become those most likely to adopt it, either as part of formal critical discourse or, as in the preceding quote, more loosely. It is also worth noting that race, in its hortatory sense—our race—can conceal deeper complexities. At the time of first contact, indigenous Australians were not a single people, and if the term koori represents the emergence of a common identity, it is a commonality born of shared experience, primarily suffering, rather than a pre-existing sense of peoplehood. In this respect, we are reminded of two key features of ethnicity: the first is that there is a fuzziness at the heart of the concept. Can we say that ethnic identity is anything more than a sense of peoplehood? It may include an attachment to a territory, a common history, including its fictive and fictional elements; it may find expression in a shared language and customs; and it may be activated in response to oppression, but almost all of these elements are malleable. The one constant seems to be that some combination of these will result in a group identifying itself as a people.

The point worth remembering is that, as the subject of academic discourse, ethnicity is a concept with its own history, subject to the changing patterns—critics will say fads—that direct the flow of academic investigation. Without the cultural turn of the 1960s and 1970s and the move away from the positivism of earlier historical studies, it is hard to imagine an entire volume dedicated to the study of ethnic identities in the ancient world. However, in pursuing ethnicity as a way into the ancient world, we find ourselves in an uncomfortable place: at the point where externally generated studies of other people and communities intersect with their own, equally complicated views of themselves. Two cases, one ancient, one modern, will make the point: the first is an example of the ethnographic gaze, reflecting what anthropologists like to call the etic perspective. In the fourth century ad, Ammianus Marcellinus produced this gem of cultural observation (15.12.1):

Virtually all the Gauls are tall and fair. They have ruddy complexions, and a ferocious and terrible look in their eye. They love to quarrel, and are insufferably insolent. Indeed not even a whole band of foreigners could overcome one of them in a fight, if his wife were to join in, so much stronger than the man is she and with her glaring eyes, and most of all especially when, with her neck puffed out and her huge white arms at the ready she lets loose a hail of punches mixed with kicks, like bolts discharged by the twisted cords of a catapult.

Ammianus' description follows in a long line of Greek and Roman ethnographic treatises devoted to the strange, pale inhabitants of the north. Writers such as Posidonius, Timagenes, Strabo, and, of course, Julius Caesar, had produced works that explained the Celts to Mediterranean readers (Klotz 1910; Nash D. 1976; Malitz 1983). Certain features recur. The Gauls are afraid that the sky will fall on their heads, they are prone to drink ("vini avidum genus, Amm. Marc. 15.12.4), and they are redoubtable warriors (ad militandum omnis aetas aptissima, Amm. Marc. 15.12.3). The tropes of ethnographic writing, endlessly repeated, produced a satisfyingly coherent picture of these noble savages. Whether it bore much relationship to reality hardly mattered. From Herodotus to Margaret Mead, the anthropologist distils the clumsy, inchoate phenomenon of the Other into a satisfactory, categorically distinct singularity: a tribe, preferably remarkable for its exotic physique, sexual habits, or food practices. In such a discursive engagement through description, ethnicity" is not just legitimate but necessary, since it is no less than the observer's tool for describing to his audience what we no longer are. Thus, Herodotus describes the murderous Scythians who lived on the edges of the Black Sea, killing shipwrecked Greeks and adorning their houses with the skulls of their unlucky victims. Their savagery was thrilling to Athenian audiences, who took great satisfaction in watching Euripides' depiction of the difference between Barbarians and Greeks in his Iphigenia in Tauris.

My second example is more simple: one of the largest Hispanic advocacy groups in the United States is called La Raza (the Race), despite the fact that the one thing that the Spanish-speaking communities of the United States do not have in common is a single racial background. The Hispanic community has roots in Spain, and in Central and South America. It amalgamates populations from Africa, Europe, and from indigenous people. It is anything but a race, in the sense of a neatly bounded, biologically distinct entity. In fact, in scholarly explorations of the Hispanic community (notice the easy use of the singular community, since academic discourse opts for simple categories), a key component of investigation has been the phenomenon of mestizaje (the mixing of races, especially through intermarriage; compare French métissage). Yet, this notion of mixing has always had to wrestle with a stronger opponent, racial absolutism, which has a more powerful hold on the Anglo-American imagination. As a result, more recognizable are the utilitarian and all-encompassing terms Latino and Hispanic. Behind this is what Gary Nash (1995) has called the hidden history of Mestizo America, a rich cultural heritage that was largely written into oblivion. It has taken a president with an African father and a white mother to return the issue to the fore.

Ironically, it is the confidence of the dispossessed and the oppressed that has led to the appropriation of these labels to express cultural pride; yet even more ironic is the almost inevitable attraction of biological models of race to those for whom ethnicity demands expression. This is not to deny the legitimacy of La Raza, but rather to demonstrate that even the language of ethnicity can mean many different things, depending on your point of view. These complexities are nicely summed up by Attwood (1989: 149), discussing the psychological confrontation that occurred in 1788 on the shores of Botany Bay, and the mental categories used to frame those events for later audiences:

The concept the Aborigines has generally been used as though such a self-consciously identified group had existed at first contact with the Europeans, but this is to prescribe, retrospectively, a definition to the aboriginal peoples at a period when they had no such sense of themselves. Before 1788 or even much later, they did not conceive of themselves as Aborigines any more than European invaders thought of themselves as Australians.

One could add that it is unlikely that many of those who arrived, either as officers, soldiers, sailors, or convicts, thought of themselves as Europeans either. The labels and categories of ethnic identity are neither fixed nor unchanging, precisely because the identities and relationships to which ethnic labels apply are in constant flux. They fold recursively back on themselves, by turns ascribed, resisted, rejected, misunderstood, and (mis)appropriated. Ethnicity makes no sense outside a continuous dynamic of inclusion and exclusion. It is always inflected by power.

What ethnicity is emphatically not is a fixed biological entity based on primordial ties of kinship. Rejecting this, recent scholarship has been concerned with identifying the dynamic forces that shaped the emergence of ethnic identities in Mediterranean societies. Looming large over this work has been the scholarship of Jonathan Hall, whose 1997 study, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, powerfully made the case for ethnic identity as a contingent phenomenon, shaped in response to current needs but relying on fairly identifiable maneuvers. Hall emphasized territoriality and genealogy as the twin supports on which ethnic identities rested, but since his work first appeared other scholars have wished to deepen and extend the debate. Demetriou (2012), for example, in a study of five important emporia, or trade ports where Greeks were present in significant numbers—Emporion, Gravisca, Naukratis, Pisitiros, and Piraeus—concludes that in diaspora and, we might say, cosmopolitan communities, cultural phenomena like law, political institutions, and religion were more significant than mythical genealogies or claims to a common territory (Demetriou 2012: 239). In part, this is because territorial claims expressed through genealogies were the mechanisms whereby Greeks on their mainland establish relations with each other, while in colonial and mercantile contexts abroad a different set of players determined how the game was played (on kinship, see Jones 1999.) As Adolfo Domínguez (2004: 451) puts it, …relations with the natives are an essential part of the life of all the Greek colonies.

What's Bred in the Bone

So far, approaches to ethnicity outlined in the preceding text, and for the most part explored in this volume, have tended to emphasize the contingent quality of an ethnic identity. Fungible and protean, such identities are in continuous flux, depending on the social relations to which they give shape and expression. Jonathan Hall's definition is useful and now widely known: ethnic identity is the operation of socially dynamic relationships which are constructed on the basis of a putative shared ancestral heritage. However, just as the use of La Raza shows that there is a persistent substratum of race in discussions of ethnicity, so too there has been an unusual development in the hard sciences, giving biological approaches to ethnicity a new lease of life. This is the tracking of mitochondrial DNA and the mapping of human migrations using DNA markers. An excellent example of this comes from the South Pacific, where the relatively small number of haplotypes in sequences among the Maori population of New Zealand has allowed researchers to estimate the number of females in the founding population (Murray-McIntosh et al. 1998). The number of women (70, which actually represents a more general figure between 50 and 100) is small enough to correlate with Maori oral history. Here, biology and oral culture serve to reinforce each other, combining to anchor ethnic identities to the firmer foundations of hard science. However, this approach is not without its dangers. The same type of analysis has been applied to castes in India, pointing toward racial distinctions within the population, distinctions that historically have been expressed in a system that perpetuated social inequality. The scientific analysis of caste fits all too comfortably into a narrative of conquest, remarkably enough, from Europe: Our analysis of 40 autosomal markers indicates clearly that the upper castes have a higher affinity to Europeans than to Asians. The high affinity of caste Y chromosomes with those of Europeans suggests that the majority of immigrating West Eurasians may have been males (Bamshad et al. 2001). So, even as scholars in the humanities want to treat race as a constructed category, scientists are reviving biological approaches that threaten to reify older, discredited categories.

The disjunction between a scientific search for ethnicity encoded in DNA, on the one hand, and a distrust of ethnicity as anything other than a constructed, social identity, on the other, is particularly illuminated by contrasting the work of the so-called Genographic Project, which since 2005 has been mapping historical migrations by sampling DNA from populations across the globe, with two chapters in this volume, those by Corinne Bonnet and Nancy de Grummond. In their study of modern Lebanese and ancient Phoenician populations, Zalloua et al. (2008) express the confidence of the scientific approach:

The Phoenicians were the dominant traders in the Mediterranean Sea two thousand to three thousand years ago and expanded from their homeland in the Levant to establish colonies and trading posts throughout the Mediterranean, but then they disappeared from history. We wished to identify their male genetic traces in modern populations. Therefore, we chose Phoenician-influenced sites on the basis of well-documented historical records and collected new Y-chromosomal data from 1330 men from six such sites, as well as comparative data from the literature. We then developed an analytical strategy to distinguish between lineages specifically associated with the Phoenicians and those spread by geographically similar but historically distinct events, such as the Neolithic, Greek, and Jewish expansions. This involved comparing historically documented Phoenician sites with neighbouring non-Phoenician sites for the identification of weak but systematic signatures shared by the Phoenician sites that could not readily be explained by chance or by other expansions. From these comparisons, we found that haplogroup J2, in general, and six Y-STR haplotypes, in particular, exhibited a Phoenician signature that contributed >6% to the modern Phoenician-influenced populations examined. Our methodology can be applied to any historically documented expansion in which contact and noncontact sites can be identified.

It is salutary to juxtapose this with remarks from Bonnet's chapter: A consensus has emerged over the last decade or so to avoid using the term ‘Phoenico-Punic’, an expression that only serves to mask the difficulty experienced by specialists trying to establish a line of demarcation between what may be ‘Phoenician’ and what ‘Punic’, whether in purely chronological or geographic terms, or in cultural and linguistic terms. The differences could not be more apparent. The scientist takes historical events and processes as fixed points from which to begin an analysis of measurable, hard data, resulting in a study that finds a clear genetic link between past and present groups. Other studies, building on this, have further refined the genetic profile of the Lebanese population, finding two groups, one associated with Europeans and Central Asians, the other with Africans and other Middle Eastern populations. The distinction is then equated with religious differences, giving us a genetic map according to which the arrival of Islam and the Crusades are supposed to have left an imprint on the contemporary population (Haber et al. 2013). However, as de Grummond notes, tying DNA to historical events is highly problematic. In the case of the Etruscans, the genetic correspondence between Tuscan and Turkish cattle (!) has been cited in support of ancient literary traditions that the Etruscans were descended from the Lydians, whose territory lay in what is now Turkey. Hence, the discussion of ethnicity is at a peculiar juncture: the people who deal primarily with historical processes and events, namely professional historians, are increasingly uncomfortable using the very labels the scientists take for granted. Science identifies Phoenician DNA, while historians grow uncomfortable even speaking of Phoenicians.

Clearly then, ethnicity remains a problematic issue, pitting observer against observed, and observers against each other. The very search for ethnicity implicates scholarship in a discourse whose categories and trajectories are bound up with the construction of power and identity in our own world as much as that of the ancient Mediterranean (Benn Michaels 1992). The recent abuse of the term in such bloody conflicts as the Rwandan and Bosnian wars, with their bouts of ethnic cleansing, is a sobering reminder that ethnicity is a term to be used cautiously, and that in many settings it cannot be divorced from deep-seated political and religious antagonisms. If ethnicity is a mode of human discourse, characterized as a response to political forces that require group cohesion, it can equally serve as the vector along which social breakdown occurs. That aspect of ethnicity is explored in this volume by Nino Luraghi, who once again emphasizes boundaries and power as essential ingredients of the matrix in which ethnicity functions. Given the fraught history of ethnicity, one obvious tactic would be to dismiss the notion of ethnicity as hopelessly compromised. If it is nothing more than race repackaged, then that may not be such a bad idea. It may be possible, however, to exploit the term usefully as a way not only of gauging what ancient peoples thought about themselves but also as a way of addressing a series of related issues: the conditions under which ethnic identities were formulated, the ways in which these found expression, and the means by which such dynamic processes have been understood (and misunderstood) by writers from antiquity to the present. The chapters in this book have been written with these issues in mind, and the variety of the approaches on display here is a fair indication of the many possible ways into the matter of ethnicity. No single approach is completely definitive and no single example is wholly paradigmatic, but taken together they demonstrate that, by drawing on the rich smorgasbord of modern theories and methodologies, the study of the ancient Mediterranean is capable of generating compelling and provocative ways of understanding those complex cultures.

Theorizing Ethnicity

A number of the contributions pose big questions that situate the study of the ancient Mediterranean within a broader set of issues and avenues for investigation. Harald Haarmann, for example, adopts a phenomenological approach, locating ethnic identity on a continuum that moves from intentionality to language and which proceeds by an ever-increasing process of differentiation that distinguishes groups, such as Paleo-Europeans and Proto-Indo-Europeans, from one another. Citing a series of test cases from Greece and early Italy, he focuses on writing and language as indicators of ethnicity, not a simple phenomenon but a process he describes as a continuum negotiated by different actors. However, such an approach almost immediately raises questions of the material record on which many reconstructions of early societies depend, an issue central to Bernard Knapp's contribution. Using Cyprus and the Philistines as his test cases, Knapp finds the material evidence for the large-scale migration of clearly bounded ethnic groups to be problematic at best. His chapter notes the competing and divergent approaches to ethnicity taken by historians and archaeologists. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's notion of third space, Knapp once again emphasizes the negotiated quality of ethnic identities. A third contribution that places ethnicity within a broader conceptual framework is Thomas Hall's chapter on World-System Analysis (WSA). Based on the theoretical work of Immanuel Wallerstein, WSA is an attempt to explain the processes that sustain the functioning of self-contained systems. Hall argues that all forms of identification occur within a world-systemic context, and are part and parcel of the dialectic between local social groups in the complex relations of production and exchange within the overall system. Adding to Haarmann and Knapp's fundamental notion of negotiated identities, Hall uses WSA to identify the key components in that negotiation as the players' positions in relation to core, peripheral, or semi-peripheral parts of the world-system. A chapter that rounds out the portion of the volume devoted to broad approaches is Johannes Siapkas' concise overview of modern interpretive models of ethnicity. Siapkas distinguishes between essentializing models, which take ethnicity as fixed, and dynamic models, which emphasize change. Particularly helpful are his suggestions for further work, notably in the area of the subjective internalization of ethnic identity and the challenges of interpreting material culture. In this respect, Siapkas is reflecting an awareness of the criticisms that have been leveled, fairly, against those who either exploit historical linguistics uncritically to support archaeology or cite archaeology naively to bolster claims based on linguistics (Anthony 1995). In this respect, his work is in line with a newer trend in archaeology toward avoiding essentializing readings of material culture and ethnic identity (e.g., see Gómez Peña 2012).

Some chapters take up the challenge of material culture more or less explicitly. Kristian Kristiansen, for example, offers an analysis of ethnicity in the European Bronze Age, focusing on the non-literate societies of northern Europe, and argues that cairns and rock-art, taken in conjunction with other distinctive articles of material culture such as swords, permit the identification of distinct ethnic groups, at least at regional if not international levels. Kristiansen sees the sea as constituting the setting for a maritime network, a notion that has recently been applied by other Bronze Age scholars to the Aegean world as well (Broodbank 2000; Tartaron 2013). The idea of the network has, in fact, recently emerged as a useful way of approaching the ancient world in which wide-ranging domination from a single, centralized power was the exception and not the norm. In a recent volume, Irad Malkin, Christy Constantakopoulou, and Katerina Panagopoulou (2009) used this approach to show how the Greek and Roman worlds could be read as networks, and in this volume Anna Collar both explains the methodology behind network theory and offers three test cases to demonstrate its applicability: archaic Greece, the network of the Jewish diaspora in the early Roman period, and the development of a German ethnic identity in Late Antiquity. Each of these is a promising line of inquiry, and, indeed, other chapters in this book, by Munson, Kemezis and Pohl in particular, can be read in tandem with Collar's.

If Collar's examples point toward the construction of connections through networks of similarity and common interest, Gary Reger's chapter on hybridity demonstrates that ethnicity was also shaped by other dynamic processes. Borderlands and boundaries are especially fertile areas for ethnogenesis, yet even here the trajectories are not straightforward or predictable. Ethnic identity is rarely characterized by a simple oppositional dynamic, and since such identities must finally be expressed by an individual as well as a community, the phenomenon is complicated by the availability of different social identities for individual actors. Amalgamation, layering, and multiplicity are more true of ethnic identities than fixity.

With ethnicity displaying such polyvalence, the question of how one narrates the political history of a region characterized by different ethnic groups becomes more pressing. In this respect, it is worth juxtaposing a group of chapters that deal with the region loosely defined as the eastern Mediterranean, but in different periods. Trevor Bryce presents Late Bronze Age Anatolia as a patchwork of states and kingdoms in which different ethnic groups vied for power, some indigenous and others exogenous. However, unlike older treatments that would have treated each of the boundaries between these units as impermeable, Bryce recognizes different tools being employed to reach different audiences: Hittites using the language of the Luwian subjects, for example, on their monuments. In the history of Israel during the same period, recent archaeological work has shed some light on the Philistines but has also generated a heated debate over the very emergence of a coherent Israelite ethnic identity. Ann Killebrew synthesizes the debate on this, both recognizing the particular episodes of fragmentation that occurred and yet placing the emergence of Israel within a broader eastern Mediterranean context in which its history was not unique. Geoff Emberling treats another of the great powers of the eastern Mediterranean, the Assyrians, and employs ethnic diversity as a lens through which to see the imperial state. He finds an imperial state so willing to adopt Babylonian literary culture and Hittite architectural style that, as he notes, the final result of Assyrian hegemony was the dissolution of Assyrian identity itself. In studies of the Greek and Roman worlds, where acculturation has often been presented simplistically as a one-way street (Hellenizing or Romanization being the preferred terms), Emberling's work is a reminder that ethnicity and imperial power are by no means interchangeable.

Two other chapters outside the orbit of the Greek and Roman worlds also demonstrate the wide variety of ways in which ethnicity actively functioned in the Mediterranean world. One is Stuart Tyson's chapter on Egypt and Nubia; the other is Jennifer Gates-Foster's treatment of the Achaemenid Empire. Both offer rich, if very different, insights into the place of ethnic discourse in imperial settings. For example, in the Persian Empire, Gates-Foster sees ethnic diversity as an ideological claim used to reinforce the power of the center. As she says, it is a message…formulated and dispersed through textual and visual media,…closely and programmatically controlled. However, the practice is characterized by an unusual degree of fluidity. Persian tribes are mentioned near the heartland, but farther afield ethnic terms are employed that may point to identification by language or geography. Here, ethnicity resides on a continuum in which variations occur depending on whether one self-ascribes an ethnic identity or has it ascribed by others. This complexity—my label or yours—mirrors the problems identified by Bernard Knapp in imputing ethnic characteristics or meaning to objects that may represent trade but not necessarily ethnicity: taste is not identity.

In almost a complete inverse of the claim of diversity central to Achaemenid ideology, Smith finds a fundamental assertion of self and other in the Egyptian portrayal of the Libyan as other. However, to complicate an otherwise overly simple dichotomy, individual players within the political realm, men such as the Nubian pharaoh Piankhi, might blend elements of traditional Egyptian dress and practice while also asserting Nubian custom. Appropriately, the term used to convey that this quality of ethnic identity is entanglement.

The Greeks and their Neighbors

The chapters dealing with the Greek world also reflect some of the diversity of approaches that characterize the study of ethnicity. Indeed, the decision to present these chapters in a section devoted to the Greeks reflects only a weak organizational principle: readers will, I hope, find many of the methods and analytical approaches employed in these chapters equally applicable to other societies and times. We have already noted Nino Luraghi's explicit use of modern ethnic conflicts to illuminate the ways that social breakdown could exploit ethnic division, often manufactured, in both modern and ancient settings. In a similar way, one could apply many of the results of Angela Ganter's discussion of local myth in Boiotia to understand the importance of storytelling in shaping not only ethnic identity but the political drama that finds expression in the stories we tell ourselves and others regarding our supposed ethnic origins. Ganter's treatment of the role of myth and genealogy in the forging of Boiotian identities reminds us of Homi Bhabha's understanding of the nation as an exercise in narration (Bhabha 1990). As Jim Roy shows, an integral part of that storytelling involves the claim of autochthony, the notion that we have always been in our land. Both chapters address the question of how such stories were circulated, and the rich traditions of storytelling and the recording myths by writers such as Pausanias emerge as powerful components in the fashioning and circulating of ethnic identities. An especially important venue for this exploration of shared traditions was the stage, but Efi Papadodima's contribution goes well beyond the familiar opposition of Greek and Barbarian (see Hall 1989) and explores both intra-Hellenic rivalries as well as the intersection of ethnic identity discourse with other vectors of identity, such as sex and social class.

Two other features of the Greek experience demand our attention if we are to grasp the nuances of the discourse on ethnicity. One is that the Greeks experienced not only the development of ethic identities in the close confines of the Greek mainland but also as part of a complex diasporic experience that included the founding of colonies, the establishment of trade emporia, and service as foreign mercenaries. The former of these conditions, which resulted in the formulation of ethnic identities within the close proximity of small, closely connected regions, is the subject of Emily Mackil's detailed study. Mackil investigates three test cases, the Boiotians, Phokians, and Achaeans, and demonstrates how claims of a shared ethnic identity supported the establishment of political federations. At the same time, however, Mackil also shows how such claims were not enough on their own to guarantee the survival of such koina. In a similar test case, Alex Thein examines the well-known case of the Messenians, neighbors of the Spartans. Thein argues that the Messenians, who, as helots, asserted their independence from their Spartan masters at the time of the Great Revolt in about 460 bc, following the earthquake that rocked Sparta, asserted a Messenian identity. It was, in Thein's words, a rebel identity. A better illustration of the importance of power and boundaries could not be found. The opposite of such tight, regionally bounded federations were those Greek communities located away from the mainland and usually living in close proximity to an indigenous, non-Greek population. These dispersed communities are treated in Phil Kaplan's study, in which he finds that the ties to the land from which and to which they came were subject to broad manipulation. Just as autochthony took different shapes, so too mobility and charter myths could be adapted quite easily in the traditions the Greeks told themselves. To return to the Australian experience with which we began this overview, one generation's convict stain is another generation's badge of honor.

Mackil, Thein, and Kaplan's chapters can be usefully read in conjunction with Gocha Tsetskhladze and Corinne Bonnet's contributions, dealing respectively with the Black Sea and the western Mediterranean. Tsetskhladze, whose chapter synthesizes much of the archaeological research of a region only recently becoming known to a wider audience, is wary of the systems created by Greek writers in antiquity and draws attention to the limits of our knowledge and the dangers of beginning with labels and categories created by the ancient literary tradition. Pointedly, he asks the question, How do we excavate ethnicity? There are no easy answers, although Tsetskhladze cautiously offers evidence to see collaboration rather than antagonism as the basic tendency of the indigenous populations' relations with the Greeks. Bonnet's contribution is similarly cautious. We have already noted Bonnet's comments on the labeling of Punic–Phoenician culture. In her investigation of Greek, Phoenician, and indigenous relations in the western Mediterranean, she consistently finds evidence that each of these collectives in fact contains a myriad of different groups, and that trade, prestige, appropriation, and cultural exchange are all phenomena that percolate continuously through the relationships of different groups, while ruptures, confrontations, and violence are, if anything, the aberrations, and not the norm. A further feature that distinguishes the Greeks from other, earlier cultures of the Mediterranean is that they are the first to produce a self-conscious discourse on the question of ethnicity, not only on the stage, as Papadodima explores in her chapter, but in a rich tradition of ethnographic writing, at the head of which stands Herodotus. Treatments of Herodotean ethnography have added to our appreciation of his subtlety, notably those of Hartog (1988) and Thomas (2000), but have tended to focus on his choices as a narrator. In her chapter, Rosaria Munson goes much further and reveals a thinker skeptical of mythical traditions and ancestral claims, the very stuff of ethnic identity. Grappling with relativism, her Herodotus faces the same dilemma as we moderns: a respect for cultural difference often at odds with universal values. When Herodotus, who famously proclaimed that custom is king, reports that Babylonian women must serve once in their lives as temple prostitutes, he is not merely reporting on ethic differences between Greeks and Babylonians; he is offering a considered judgment. The practice is aischistos (most shameful).

Three chapters that also treat Greek material but from very different perspectives complete this section of the volume. Becky Martin's chapter concerns representation, but does not simply treat graphic depictions of ethnicity. As with Gates-Foster and Papadodima, she finds that cultural representations of ethnicity actually convey deeply complex meanings. In fact, representation is an area of cultural production in which meaning is as fluid as in ethnicity. This she demonstrates through a series of examples, the notorious Slipper Slapper being perhaps the starkest. Aphrodite or Astarte? Model of assimilation or assertion of difference? Are we even capable of recovering an emic understanding of one of the most famous pieces of Hellenistic statuary? From this aporetic stance, Martin offers an eloquent comparison between representation and ethnicity that bears repeating: In this way ethnicity, too, is not about discovery and isolation of objective models (i.e., true ethnicities). Ethnicity's value as a fluid theory is that it deepens our understanding of the basic question of who—who is represented by an image, text, or built environment—with the potential to challenge monolithic, normative identities.

If Martin moves the inquiry into a world in which Greek culture (and ethnicity) finds itself no longer dominant or unchallenged, the first centuries of the Common Era would see fresh developments attesting to the vitality of ethnic discourse as a mode for expressing cultural relations and identities. One of these occurred with the growth of Christianity, which, as Aaron Johnson demonstrates, positioned itself as a radically new ethnos. Concentrating on the polemic between Celsus and Origen, Johnson shows that conversion was not conceived as a movement from ethnicity to a transcendent non-ethnicity, as some have imagined, but as a movement from one ethnicity to another. Triangulating between Greeks and Jews, early Christians created a new genos (tribe) and politeia (commonwealth). Here, we find ethnicity as more than a deliberately fashioned and self-ascribed identity. It becomes a basic mode of argument in which history and religion are polemically blended. Similarly turbulent conditions of cultural reformation took place once Greece came under the political domination of Rome. However, Greece was neither a new ethnicity, nor one seeking a way of expressing legitimacy. Instead, as Adam Kemezis, demonstrates, the literary movement labeled the Second Sophistic drew on the traditions of a high literary culture and afforded the elites of the Greek world an opportunity to reformulate Greek ethnicity largely in terms of a cultural inheritance. Once again, this fluid and dynamic process was driven by considerations of power and its pale twin, status.

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Map 1.1 The Mediterranean.

Urbis et Orbis

The remaining contributions to this volume deal with the Roman world, although, once again, overlaps and continuities between these chapters and those that come before are to be expected. Nancy de Grummond's chapter on the Etruscans uses a familiar set of criteria to help identify a group whose self-representation was subject to ruthless distortion and manipulation by others. Exploring language, religion, and appearance, de Grummond contrasts the self-representation of the Etruscans with the conflicting traditions surrounding them in Greek and Roman sources, neither of which was disinterested. How exactly does one distinguish between a culture of deep religious temperament and a Roman description of Etruria as the mother of superstition? Similar jibes were directed at the Jews in the Roman period, but, as Erich Gruen demonstrates, such remarks do not amount to a coherent dichotomy, with Jews and Romans standing implacably on opposite sides of the divide. As in other places and instances, entanglement complicates the picture: Godfearers, gentiles drawn to Jewish practices, and manumitted Jewish slaves bequeathing Roman citizenship to their children are examples of the nuance and complexity that was at the heart of the relationship between Jews and Romans.

Even closer to home, in the Italy of the late Republic, the contingent quality of ethnicity—not a fixed category but a mode of negotiation between communities—emerges very clearly in both Gary Farney and Parshia Lee-Stecum's treatments of Italian and Roman identities. The Roman identity of the Republic involved the positioning of different elite elements constantly adjusting their positions in relation to each other and in relation to a hortatory fiction: Rome. Sometimes even double and triple identities coexisted, at one time emphasizing the place of origin and at other times emphasizing a kind of bifocality involving the Etruscans or the Sabines. Farney charts the transformation of the latter's credentials among the Romans: The central Apennine people, and ultimately the elite of the rest of Italy, managed to change their reputation from untrustworthy savages, to marginal figures put to Rome's use, and finally to paragons of old-fashioned rusticity and virtue. Lee-Stecum examines the same phenomenon from the point of view of the Italian people and finds that, even as Romans and Italians fought each other in the Social War, ethnicity provided less a line of demarcation than a shared set of assumptions and aspirations. He notes: The Romans represented their own identity as encompassing multiple, largely Italian, genealogies and traditions. The Italian allies might aspire to full incorporation within Rome, and even to identify themselves as Romans, without compromising their ethnocultural distinctiveness. Yet, even these two chapters, approaching Romans and Italians but from different points of view, barely scratch the surface. (See Roselaar [2012] for other essays on the same period.) Jörg Rüpke, for example, also juxtaposes the Romans with their neighbors (Greek, Sabine, and especially Etruscan), but primarily from the point of view of the Roman understanding of what we would call religion. Ethnicity, or more accurately a Roman awareness of ethnic diversity, emerges in Rüpke's analysis, not, as we might expect, as a reaffirmation of Roman superiority but as an unusual means toward asserting a set of universal ideas and assumptions about our relations to the gods. In the setting of empire, such a tendency helped bridge the gap between separate elite families and between widely disparate subject groups. Ethnic diversity was a useful backdrop against which to set the emergence of a universal Roman power, culminating in the figure of the emperor. Reading these three chapters in tandem reveals the range of cultural work that thinking about ethnicity made possible. It provided often unexpected ways of reconciling similarity and difference.

If the chapters on Republican Rome alert us to the fact that the valence of an ethnic association can undergo a complete reversal from denigration to proud assertion, Kathryn Lomas' contribution, an examination of the intersection of ethnicity and gender, is a powerful reminder than regional variation undercuts many easy generalizations. Contrasting both Archaic Italy with the Empire, and northern and southern Italy, Lomas recognizes a strong correlation between ethnic distinctions, dress, and the position of women in north Italian communities, a correlation that cannot be attested in the south and which was largely effaced by the spread of Roman power. Regional variation is also a key theme in Ursula Rothe's chapter, in which she looks at the response of four different tribal groups in the provinces to the domination of Rome. As she notes, Empires produce complex ethnic configurations. However, the trajectories of ethnically oriented changes stimulated by the pressure to assimilate were not predictable or uniform. Armies, cities, and trade may have made their appearance in all Roman provinces, but the responses of the Batavi, the Treveri, and the Ubii, on the one hand, and the inhabitants of Pannonia, on the other, were entirely different.

In many of these chapters, ethnicity proves to be a fluid mode of discourse between spreading Roman power and local responses (whether characterized by confrontation, hybridity, entanglement, or negotiation in the middle ground). Yet, this fluidity is often masked by a tendency in ancient literary sources to prefer broad ethnic categories, a mistake frequently repeated by modern scholars. John Wonder, for example, surveys the uses of the ethnonym Lucanian used of the inhabitants of southern Italy, and finds that the label was largely an ascription of Greek and Roman writers, that the people so named primarily identified with smaller local groups, and that it was only in the wake of the Second Punic War that the term was adopted by the people of southern Italy to express a collective identity. To speak, then, of the Lucanians as a monolithic group and ignore the complex history of the various subgroups that were eventually subsumed under the broader descriptor is to make precisely the mistake that Richard White (1978: 343) warned against a generation ago, when discussing the tribes of the American southwest: Without an understanding of tribal and intertribal histories, and an appreciation that, like all history, they are dynamic, not static, the actions of Indians when they come into conflict with whites can be easily and fatally distorted. This is not to say that recuperating the details of local communities and their response to change is easy. Here, as elsewhere, we remain prey to the paucity of evidence from the ancient world, but, as Brent Shaw's chapter demonstrates, it is occasionally possible to turn prevailing narratives of the ancient world on their head. His chapter on the inhabitants of the Maghrib in Roman times uses approaches drawn from Ibn Khaldûn and, later, Soviet ethnography to suggest that the development of ethnic identities should be interpreted as the response of small local communities to external pressures by asserting group solidarity. Shaw asks: Was there any generally shared identity among the indigenous populations of Roman Africa? His answer: Probably. But it is rather difficult to unearth. The answer may seem overly cautious, but in the process he has restored to the Afri, Masaesyli, Zegrenses, and others some, at least, of their own agency and identity.

The Afterlife of Ethnicity

To encounter a monolithic Roman identity, we must wait until we come upon the Roman-ness (romanitas) (re)activated under Mussolini, the subject of Valentina Follo's chapter. Follo charts the stages by which Mussolini moved from an early disparaging of Roman culture to a wholehearted embracing of the Roman model. She situates this in the context of the formation of an Italian nation from the late nineteenth century on, and demonstrates how both the education system and archaeology contributed to the creation of a collective memory, especially serviceable for a nation late to join the imperial program of the European states. The role of ancient ethnicities in the (continuing) development of the modern nation-state is a subject of interesting recent investigation (see, e.g., Dietler 1994 and 1998 on the Celtic past and Tai 2001 on Nora's work on lieux de mémoire), and Follo's chapter points toward the possibility of fruitful collaboration between ancient and modern historians. And if the monuments of Rome provided fixed points in the creation of cultural memory and ethnic identity for modern Italians, the same process was clearly at work in the ancient world, as Emily Baragwanath (2012) has demonstrated with regard to the speeches, histories, and monuments of fifth-century Athens, which fashioned a shared identity out of the Greek victory in the Persian Wars.

The bridge between ancient ethnicities and their modern reassertions may be provided by an analytical approach to ethnicity, as discussed in Walter Pohl's contribution on the Goths and Huns. Pohl deals with the concept of the Traditionskerne (kernels of tradition), a well-established principle of German scholarship according to which essential, traditional features of an ethnic group remained intact and were passed on by small elites within larger ethnic groups. In many respects, the debate about this crucial notion is at the heart of contemporary discussions of ethnicity. Is an ethnic identity chiefly characterized by continuities with the past, an essentializing view, or by the changes that occur as new situations arise, an instrumentalist approach? Even if scholarly opinion has swung toward the latter view, the hold of ethnicity in the stories that communities continue to tell themselves about themselves, their past, and their place in the world suggests that our fascination with ethnicity remains a powerful response to the emergence of globalism as the dominant feature of contemporary life. In a recent contribution on Asian ethnicities in the contemporary world, Kolig, Wong, and Angeles (2009) refer to bricolage identities, while a similar volume on the ancient world refers to the role of power and tradition (Dirks and Roymans 2009). These seem mutually exclusive tendencies, and yet it is the ability of ethnicity to link these apparent polarities that makes it so marked a feature of both the ancient world and the modern.

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Further Reading

Fesl, Eve Mungwa D. 1989. White Manoeuvres and Koori Oppression. Social Justice, 16: 30–4.

Chapter 2

Ethnicity and Language in the Ancient Mediterranean

Harald Haarmann

Introduction

The relationship of ethnicity and language and their significance for the understanding of historical processes in antiquity have long been underestimated or marginalized. Historians still speak about the Greeks, the Romans, and the Scythians—a projection of nineteenth-century conceptualizations—and identify them as ancient peoples, as if these concepts represented homogeneous entities, such as the labels that were given to the peoples of Europe in the era of nationalism. Already in antiquity, people were aware of ethnic distinctions between local tribes and within language communities (e.g., Athenians versus Spartans, Scythian nomads versus Hellenes Skuthai, the bilingual offspring of Scythians and Greeks living in the Greek colonies on the shores of the Black Sea). Recent research on the complex issue of identity and ethnicity calls for a fresh study of the relationship of language to ethnic identity in antiquity.

From earliest times, people have been aware of language and cultural traditions as markers of ethnicity (Haarmann 1986). The marking of a collective ethnic identity has always been linked to a name for the group (i.e., an ethnonym) and to the language of its members (Smith 1986). Paradoxically, the best proof of the validity of language as a marker of ethnicity in antiquity is the Greek, specifically Athenian, concept of the barbarian, a designation that equated the inferiority of others with their inability to speak comprehensible Greek. The prestige of Greek culture was thus tied to mastery of the Greek language. The relationship of language to ethnicity has always been of significance for classical studies, but until recently was rarely studied systematically. It seems that, during the past decade, ethnicity-related research has been attracting ever-growing attention (see Graves-Brown, Jones, and Gamble 1996; Hall 1997, 2002; Insoll 2007; Derks and Roymans 2009; Lape 2010).

Language as a Marker of Ethnic Identity

As a major marker of ethnicity, language occupies a crucial role in the formation of ancient civilizations and in the relations between the various populations in the Mediterranean. We should begin, however, by considering the dynamic role of language in processes of ethnic identification. Humans have been labeled man the toolmaker (Oakley 1961). For a long time, this reflected a prevailing view among scholars with an interest in human evolution. Much later, the image of woman the gatherer was added to complete the picture (Cashdan 1989: 28 ff.). And yet, there is still another essential characteristic of the human capacity for culture: symbol-making. The symbol-making function is one of man's primary activities, like eating, looking, or moving about. It is the fundamental process of his mind, and goes on all the time (Langer 1942: 32).

There are many symbolic systems that have served human beings in their need to perceive and conceptualize the world and their living conditions. Humans have devised many sign systems for constructing their cultural environment and for facilitating interactions in a network of social relations. These sign systems may be related to language, or they may function independently without the participation of language (Haarmann 2007: 88–89). Examples of the latter category range from the very elementary, such as communicating with gestures and poses forming a gestural code, to the very specialized, such as the digital processing of information in computers. Language appears in two major manifestations, as a system of auditive signs (spoken language) and as a system of visual signs (written language). These manifestations are perhaps the most effective and powerful symbolic system that human beings have created for themselves to construct culture, this being the most essential manifestation of human agency. In human history, language has assumed an extraordinary variety of functions.

The evolutionary leap that occurred with the elaboration of cultural and linguistic skills in modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) cannot be explained by the working of a simple adaptation mechanism. It is inconceivable that the necessity for modern humans to adapt, some 45,000 years ago, to the harsh climatic conditions in Ice Age Europe could be solely responsible for the triggering of the creative outburst that has been termed the Upper Paleolithic revolution, the explosion of figurative art, both fixed (as in the paintings and carvings in the caves) and mobile (in the form of sculptures and decorated artifacts), and the advancement of the lithic industry, when the Mousterian gave way to the Aurignacian horizon between 37,000 and 35,000 BP (Gamble 1999: 272 ff.).

Modern humans are capable of constructing complex cultures, whereas other primates (and earlier hominid species such as Homo sapiens Neanderthalensis or Homo erectus) only reached the level of elementary culture. Knowledge construction is a prerequisite for the organization of any culture. The acquisition of knowledge in the human mind relies on cognitive capacities that are innate in hominid species. There is a mental force in human beings that made the evolutionary leap from elementary to complex culture possible, and this is identity, to be understood as a continuously evolving process. The process of identification in its broadest sense is equal to the mental construction of the Self in contrast or relation to the Other(s). The extent to which the Others share with the individual Self patterns of social interaction, common systems of communication, and the motivation to act as a group enhances the elaboration of an overarching frame for group activities: culture.

Modern humans' adaptation to their environment is not the result of a plan laid down by some individuals in the remote past. Rather, it results from identity as an inner force, promoting the entire cultural enterprise. Identity is a complex mechanism that provides an individual with the capacity to make choices in decision-making. It is not a phenomenon that, once achieved, continues unchanged. Rather, identity has the character of a dynamic process that is reactivated in everyday interactions, and it is subject to potential changes (Haarmann 1996). Human beings may adopt many social and cultural roles during their lifetimes, and the values as well as the priorities of cultural activities change from childhood to an older age. This dynamic property of identity—arising from the constant accretion of mental responses to the pressures of keeping a balance with the natural environment—is responsible for the manifold impulses that have led, throughout the cultural history of modern humans, to the elaboration of ever new technologies and symbolic systems, designed for a wide variety of purposes. Identity, the mental strategy of distinguishing the Self from the Other, is so elementary as to function as a motor for all kinds of interaction and cultural activities. Identity works in modern humans in a way that it did not work in other hominid species. Individuality and self-awareness were much less developed in archaic humans (Neanderthals). Identity enhances intentionality (Lyons 1995). Intentionality is fairly weak in primates, although it is present on a rudimentary level. A vestige of this rudimentary stage of intentionality is still discernible in modern humans, namely in the somewhat diffuse, prelinguistic intentionality in infants.

The mechanism by which this force called identity could crystallize was language. Without complex language (Carstairs-McCarthy 1999), culture-construction among modern humans would have remained an endeavor in nuce. Complex language originated out of the dynamics of the process of identification among human beings when confronted with the challenges of reconciling their cultural activities with the conditions of their natural habitat. Complex language made the construction of complex culture possible. In discussions of cultural evolution, however, identity has been largely overlooked. Here, an attempt is made to highlight its significance.

The crucial issue in culture evolution is not the mental capacity to manipulate symbols but rather the incentive that drives one species to elaborate and use sophisticated symbol systems, and others not. Chimpanzees do not need language in their natural environment. Therefore, they have not activated their brain capacities for this end. On the other hand, modern humans would not be able to construct their cultural environment without the verbal skills they possess. Modern humans' need for language is intrinsically associated with the challenges of their identification process. The recent discovery of a so-called architect gene that is responsible for cerebral asymmetry and language (Crow 2002) may contribute to the understanding of the dynamics inherent in the identification process. If identity is central to the culture process, then the theory of identity has to be regarded as the basic theory of all the humanities, on which the more specialized ethnological and other anthropological disciplines…would have to be based and elaborated (Müller 1987: 391). If the identification process and the driving force of intentionality are much stronger in modern humans than in early hominids, then one must also expect that the most important vehicle for articulating intentionality, language, is much more elaborate in modern humans than in their predecessors.

In the dynamic process of identification, the relationships between the major constitutive components may be specified in the following way:

Symbol making proliferates in a such a way that microsystems of signs, such as language, play the role of instruments in constructing macrosystems of symbols, such as culture at its most extensive.

If the process of identification is always a matter of finding a balance between consciousness both of the Self as an individual and of the role played by the individual in group relations, then constructing one's identity is naturally related to a person's kinship relations (identifying with one's descent), to specific local conditions of community life (identifying with cultural traditions), to a related worldview, and to a culturally specific value system (identifying with a local group's phenomenology) (Haarmann 1996, 1999). Consequently, such processes are subject to cultural diversity and ethnic boundary-marking, and ethnic categories are reproduced and transformed in the ongoing processes of social life (Jones 1997: 84).

Human social existence is characterized by manifold group memberships. The first of these are in-groups such as the family and kinship clusters. Networks of such in-groups, at the most elementary level, have boundaries marked ethnically, labeled in various ways, often rendered in English by terms such as tribes (in historical accounts) or ethnic groups (in contemporary treatments of social breakdown; see Luraghi in this volume). Ethnicity can be regarded as the