Early Ukraine History: Of Scythians, Thracians and Greeks

Hello Readers,

My continued read about the Scythians, especially the Scythians in the west, has lead to a fascinating period of time in early history, overlapping with the Hellenistic Period called the Kingdom of the Bosporus. The Kingdom of the Bosporus, later part of the Kingdom of the Pontus, survived in one form or another from the 5th century BC to the late Roman Imperial period in the year 370 AD (roughly 800 years). As you can see from the map, it started very small, just a collection of Greek colonies bound by mutual defense, and grew in size into a much larger kingdom that included the Crimean peninsula and parts of modern-day Ukraine.

The Bosporan Kingdom at various points in history, File:Bosporan Kingdom growth map-pt.svg: Sémhur (talk · contribs)derivative work: Morningstar1814 (talk · contribs), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Later growing into a much later kingdom that went to war with Rome:

Javierfv1212, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What makes the Kingdom of the Bosporus / Pontus fascinating is the convergence of Greek, Thracian, Scythian and other cultures, and the exchanges between them. Let’s take a brief look at each…

The Greek Colonies

The humble beginnings of the Kingdom of the Bosporus began as a hodge-podge of Greek colonies in the Black Sea. The ancient Greeks were prolific colonizers in the Mediterranean because the lands of Greece have low agricultural output, and as populations grew, they needed places to grow and stretch. Famous colonies include Syracuse on the island of Sicily (home of Archimedes!), southern Italy a.k.a. Magna Graecia, Cyrene in modern-day Libya, as well as countless colonies in Spain, southern France, Asia Minor and so on.

Colonies in the Black Sea, including the modern Ukrainian city of Odessa,¹ mostly originated from the Greek city-state of Miletos which had been aggressively colonizing all around the Black Sea. Even now, old Greeks relics can be found. The Greeks were colonizing hostile territory, so they tended to build fortresses on off-shore islands, or just inland from a river. From the inland communities, the Greeks would get raw materials, grain and other foodstuffs to ship back to the Greek metropolises back home. In turn, they would bring wine (much prized by the Scythians), crafted luxury goods and spread Greek culture.

From the perspective of the Greek world, the Black Sea and colonies around the Crimean peninsula were the very edge of civilization. This was the frontier, where only the bravest, or the punished would go.

The Native Thracians

The Thracians are an influential people who lived north and east of Greece proper, but are not well-attested in history. Thracian culture shows considerable Greek influence, but they spoke a different language (now lost), and had a more loose, more tribal political structure than the classic Greek polis.

But the Thracians weren’t slouches either. They frequently combated with the northern Greeks, especially Phillip II of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, and the Odryzian Kingdom was a serious attempt by the Thracians to unify and challenge their Greek neighbors.

The Kingdom of the Bosporus, the subject of this post, was perhaps their most important contribution, though, because the founder of that kingdom was a man named Spartacus. No, not this Spartacus:

The name “Spartacus” is a distinctly Thracian name, and the founder of the ruling dynasty of the Bosporan Kingdom was a Thracian man named Spartokos I, first as the strongman or “tyrant” of the Greek colony of Panticapaeum (modern Kerch), and then gradually uniting the nearby colonies in a system of mutual protection.

The Steppe Warriors

Starting with the Cimmerians, steppe nomads would often encroach into the steppe lands of modern Ukraine and Hungary, the westernmost extent (as well as the most hospitable) of the Eurasian steppes. Having driven out the Cimmerians, they settled and lead a confederation of tribes that dominated the lands for centuries, until they were eventually defeated by the Sarmatians.

The nomadic Scythians were at first largely hostile to the settled Greco-Thracian cities along the coast, and there is evidence of war and violence at some places, hence the colonies banded together for mutual defence. Gradually, though, the different cultures learned to get along and began mutually beneficial trade. The Scythians liked Greek commodities and helped ship raw resources from other cultures further north down to the Greek settlements.

The kurgan tombs of Scythian warriors also began to show more Greek architectural influence, such as the great kurgan at Kul-oba, and a tomb at Bliznitsa near the colony of Phanagoria that depicted the goddess Demeter, hinting at the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Further, a number of famous Greeks have (often dubious) claim to Scythian ancestry such as the Athenian orator, Demosthenes, so intermarriage did occur between the colonists and steppe nomads. Herodotus’s historical accounts of his travels in these lands also provide invaluable information about the people of the Bosporan Kingdom, the Scythians beyond it, and more.

The Wider World

How the Bosporan Kingdom fit into the wider Hellenistic and Roman world is interesting too. Because of its location, it was luckily not involved much in the power struggles between Alexander the Great’s successors, nor did it tangle with the Roman Republic until much later during the Mithridatic Wars. All three of them.

Further, the mixed ethnic composition of the Bosporan Kingdom meant that it was an unusually cosmopolitan place, and held a certain mystique among the more urban residents of the Greeks and later Roman empire. When Ovid was banished there, though, he often whined about how hard and rustic the life was, but he would, wouldn’t he?

Anyhow, even when we watch the news about events in Ukraine, especially southern Ukraine, it’s helpful to remember that these lands have a long and fascinating, multicultural history, and we haven’t even gotten to Kievan Rus’ yet.

¹ Which, as of writing, remains free thankfully. Слава Україні! 🇺🇦

The Elephant In The Room

Recently, I had to attend a mandatory HR meeting at work to discuss our return to the office,¹ and not surprisingly, it was awkward and grueling.²

A depiction of the Buddha taming a belligerent elephant,

One interesting thing that came from this meeting is an analogy of handling change using an analogy of an elephant and a rider. The rider represents the logical, rational part of the mind, and the elephant represents feelings and emotions. When they are in accord, things move along well enough, but if the elephant doesn’t want to go, it’s really hard to it go.³

We often take that elephant for granted when things are moving along nicely, but when the elephant is being stubborn or rampaging, the rider is tempted to lash out, give up, or punish it further. This may end up being counter-productive though.

There in lies the challenge.

The image I posted above depicts a famous episode from the Buddha’s life where his cousin Devadatta, out of spite, sent a rampaging elephant out to trample the Buddha but the Buddha was ultimately able to calm the elephant through compassion and keeping a clear head.

In the Buddhist sutras (scriptures), the Buddha often used the analogy of a charioteer driving his horses. In the Dhammapada, the Buddha says:

222. He who checks rising anger as a charioteer checks a rolling chariot, him I call a true charioteer. Others only hold the reins.
Translation by Acharya Buddharakkhita

at the same time, the Buddha also uses the analogy of a vīṇā (lute) and how to keep the strings not too taut, nor too slack:

“And what do you think? When the strings of your vīṇā were neither too taut nor too loose, but tuned [literally: established] to be right on pitch, was your vīṇā in tune & playable?”
“Yes, lord.”
“In the same way, Soṇa, over-aroused persistence leads to restlessness, overly slack persistence leads to laziness. Thus you should determine the right pitch for your persistence, attune [‘penetrate,’ ‘ferret out’] the pitch of the (five) faculties (to that), and there pick up your theme.”
Translation by Thannisaro Bhikkhu, the Soṇa Sutta (AN 6:55)

Just as managing horses in a chariot, or tuning one’s lute, managing the “elephant” of emotions is learning how and when to hold the reins, and when to loosen them. If the elephant is rampant, then one has to soothe it using calm goodwill, rather than fighting it, or punishing it.

Elephants are great creatures, and the elephant of one’s own emotions similarly needs to be treated with goodwill, even if you need to get it to move somewhere. 🐘❤️

P.S. On a side note, I highly recommend this podcast episode from the Hellenistic Age Podcast about elephants in warfare at the time. It has lots of interesting zoological details about elephants as well.

¹ I am part of a department that wont’ be coming back until probably next year, so I am pretty lucky in that regard. I know a number of folks who refuse to work in an office and have looked for jobs elsewhere rather than come back. It’s a good company, but I think they’re in for a surprise when they realize how few want to actually return to the office.

² Friendly reminder that HR departments answer, ultimately, to the company and not to employees even when they have the best of intentions.

Ukrainian Language: a Link To The Past

Lately, I started taking up the Ukrainian language, which is something very outside my comfort zone. In my younger years, I’ve studied Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese for 2 years in college, and of course Japanese, so Asian languages tend to be familiar even if I am not fluent. I have also dabbled in Latin, Sanskrit and Ancient Greek over the years, but I am not particularly good at either one.¹ Even so, I have zero experience with Slavic languages, so it’s been a totally new experience for me, and yet, to my surprise an oddly familiar one.

Having spent weeks on DuoLingo practicing basic, basic Ukrainian I started to notice some patterns.

For example, the phrase моя мати (moya matih) and мій кіт (miy kit). The first means “my mother” and the second means “my cat”. After a bit of sleuthing, I figured out that “my” will conjugate depending on the gramamtical gender of the noun. In this case мати is a feminine gender word, and кіт is masculine. There are “neuter” gender nouns as well.

Side note: the Ukrainian word for “samurai” is самураї (samurayi)

Grammatical gender? Ancient Greek,² Latin, and Sanskrit all had masculine, feminine and neuter genders for nouns. Modern Western languages tended to drop the neuter gender (e.g. modern Spanish or French), but it’s fascinating to see that Ukrainian, and Russian evidentially, retain all three. You can also see grammatical gender with words like студент (“student”, male student) vs. студентка (“student”, feminine student).

But even more fascinating is that Ukrainian nouns have seven grammatical declensions:

nominative (“the student”)
genitive (“of the student”)
dative (“to or for the student”?)
accusative (“verb the student”)
instrumental (“with or by means of the student”)
locative (“on the student”?)
vocative (“hey, student!”)

Seven declensions? The only language I know that had that many was ancient Sanskrit (eight total, including ablative)! Latin had five, and Ancient Greek only had four. Adjectives also behave like Latin, Greek and Sanskrit in that they agree with the noun in case, number and gender.

I haven’t really gotten into verbs much yet, but I do notice that they inflect too, depending on who speaks it (I eat vs. you eat), so I wouldn’t be surprised if it fits a similar pattern to other European languages.

All this is to say is that Ukrainian language, and much of the eastern European Slavic language family represents a linguistic “cousin”, with fascinating relics from much earlier Indo-European languages, and yet full of innovations and adaptations as well.

¹ I confess I dabble in language study a lot, but not very good at follow-through. Japanese is the only language I’ve really committed too long enough to develop any skill, but since I married into the culture, it’s been a worthwhile experience. I suppose that’s what really keeps one going: personal value in learning a language more so than just idle intellectual curiosity. On the other hand, even learning another language a little bit is a worthwhile experience. I dabbled in Korean at one point due to the KPop craze at the time, and it’s nice to still be able to real Hangeul, and to encounter the only other language I know that has any grammatical similarity to Japanese (through convergence, not genetic origin). Similarly, my time spent learning Vietnamese, which I don’t get to use much anymore, was a fascinating time when I got to study abroad in Hanoi, Vietnam. Plus it was fascinating to see how Chinese influenced Vietnamese in the same way that Chinese influenced Korean and Japanese even though they were all unrelated languages! In that sense, any foreign language study is a worthwhile investment.

² The term “Ancient Greek” is kind of vague and nebulous. There’s Homeric Greek (e.g. the Greek of the Iliad), Classical Greek (e.g. Attic dialect), Koine Greek (e.g. the Hellenistic Period and the New Testament), Byzantine-era Greek and so on. There’s even Archaic Greek, which is poorly attested due to lack of sources. So, when people talk about “ancient Greek” it’s important to be clear which one. Greek as a language is a fascinating continuum from the archaic period all the way to modern times. One of my co-workers is Greek American and she loves to swap tips with me as she is also learning both ancient and modern Greek.

War, Buddhism and Language

We are now almost two weeks into the invasion of Ukraine and now the long, ugly grind of war has reared its ugly head. The invasion has consumed many of us. The initial fervor has given away to the reality that even if Ukraine totally routs the Russian military, Ukraine will still have been destroyed, and many lives with it, including many Russian families whose sons and husbands will not be coming home. All becomes of the ambitions and arrogance of one man.

For my part, I’ve been dealing with the war (as a passive observer watching this horror unfold) in a few ways.

First, I decided to take up learning the Ukrainian language. While the Mrs and I did contribute to humanitarian organizations to help the people of Ukraine, I really wanted to use the chance to learn more about Ukraine and not just as “part of the Russian cultural sphere”.

Having grown up in the Cold War, I still know almost nothing about that part of the world, so for me it is a way to better appreciate the culture. Ukraine is a country and culture in its own right, going all the way back to the Hellenistic period and the Kingdom of the Bosporus, through Mongol invasions, the period of Kievan Rus, and through modern times.

I dabbled in both Ukranian and Russian on Duolingo, but soon committed to Ukranian. Having started both at the same time, it’s pretty interesting how they’re similar and yet different. Clearly they are two linguistic “cousins” rather one being a dialect of the other.

Second, the Mrs and I also wanted to show our support at our local Ukrainian-owned European-goods store. Among other things we tried a delicious beets and herring salad plus some nice pastries.

The war has also, needless to say, brought out less-than-Buddhist sentiments in me toward the Russian military and its leadership. It’s easy to get caught up in the war rhetoric, and even harder to mentally drag oneself out of it.

This has forced me to conclude an uncomfortable truth: being pious is easy when times are good, but a heck of a lot harder when times are harsh. The latter really brings out the worst in people, including myself. I suppose this is part of being human.

But it also reminds me that in really hard times, this is the best time to practice the Buddhist path, starting with self-reflection. It’s one thing to have ill-will towards others, it is another to pause and realize it. And so, as the Japanese proverb goes: nana korobi, ya oki (七転び八起き, “seven times falling down, eight times getting up”).

Namu Amida Butsu
Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu

P.S. As I wrote this, I remembered an old poem from the Hyakunin Isshu anthology, poem 95:

Japanese	Romanization	English
おほけなく	Ōkenaku	Inadequate, but
うき世の民に	Ukiyo no tami ni	they must shelter the folk
おほふかな	Ōu kana	of this wretched world—
わがたつそまに	Waga tatsu soma ni	my ink-black sleeves [of a monk], having begun to live
墨染の袖	Sumizome no sode	“in this timber forest that I enter”.

Translation by Joshua Mostow

Many people in this world are suffering, and even small efforts can light one corner of the world.

Tyche: Goddess of Fortune

Recently, I finished a fascinating book about the Parthian Empire called The Parthians: The Forgotten Empire, which covered almost every aspect of the Empire and its eclectic culture including religion. The Parthians, originally a nomadic people, inherited a logistical mess from the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, but somehow made it all work for 400 years until the Sasanian Empire of the Persians defeated them. The Parthians, and their practical, flexible approach allowed them to rule over a very diverse land of many cultures, languages and so on. But that’s a story for another day.

One example cited in the book was the adoption of a goddess from Greek mythology named Tyche. In ancient Greek, her name was Τύχη, which sounds like Tö-hay with a throaty “h” (i.e. like Arabic language). For most of us growing up in Western culture, it’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of Tyche, but her influence eventually eclipsed even the Olympian gods for a long period of human history.

Istanbul Archaeological Museum – Goddess Tyche holding in her arms Plutus (god of wealth) as a child. Hellenistic art, Roman period, 2nd century AD. Picture by : Giovanni Dall’Orto, courtesy of Wikipedia

In the Classical period, including the Archaic period (i.e. the Iliad), Tyche was a minor figure, who would present herself when someone received a boon from the gods. So, at this time, Tyche personified good fortune, especially granted from the gods.

But with the chaos following Alexander the Great’s conquests, and the tremendous upheaval as Alexander’s generals turned on one another during the famous Wars of the Diadochoi,¹ people increasingly believed that their lives were at the will of fate and that the gods were either aloof, or didn’t really help. Tyche at this time came to represent the whims of fortune, both good and bad. Tyche could change her mind at any moment, and a person’s fortune could take a turn for the worse, or for the better. Tyche wasn’t really worshiped in the sense of state religion at the time, but was venerated and respected, with the hope that Tyche will rain good fortune down upon a person, a city or a state. Tyche was conflated with the Roman equivalent, Fortuna, as well.

Tyche’s shadow was everywhere in the Hellenistic Period and the Roman Empire (and subsequent European medieval culture), but surprisingly Tyche also shows up in the neighboring Parthian Empire. The Parthians were first and foremost Zoroastrians, and Zoroastrianism flourished during the Parthians, but they were also very tolerant of other local religions, including the Greek colonists who had previously lived in the Alexandrian Seleucid Empire. The Parthians depended on the Greeks in the early years, and adopted Greek language in their coinage, and Greek gods were featured. This flexibility toward the Greeks, the Babylonians and other peoples allowed them the flourish and grow the empire bit by bit, even when the Romans or nomadic tribes tried to defeat them.

However, by the second half of the Parthian Empire, the Parthian rulers were probably more confident in their own culture and began using their own language (which by now had a writing system based on Aramaic), and Greek gods faded from coinage,² except one: Tyche.

Silver Tetradrachm of Vologases I Enthroned king Vologases I facing left, receiving diadem from Tyche, standing with sceptre. AD 55-56. Photo by akhenatenator, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Because the Parthians were primarily Zoroastrian, Tyche took on a more Zoroastrian tone in the form of Khvarenah, the divine power bestowed upon righteous kings. Further, as with the other Greek gods, the Parthians conflated them with Persian/Zoroastrian deities such as Anahita or Ashi.

Given Tyche’s outsized influence both in Classical, medieval European and Persian culture, it’s a small wonder that she far outlasted the original Olympian gods, and became deeply woven into many cultures across the world. Then again, across time, people have often felt the sting of fortune or misfortune, so it’s a small wonder that people would anthropomorphize this as a deity. Unlike the seven luck gods, Tyche didn’t just grant luck, she embodied it. Even now when we talk about “Lady Luck” the shadow of Tyche still looms over us.

¹ The Hellenstic Age Podcast is a great overview of the Wars of the Diadochoi and the subsequent kingdoms that arose. The Wars of the Diadochoi make Game of Thrones look wimpy by comparison. It’s an underrated, but compelling period in Western and Near-Eastern world history.

² According to the book, the Parthians still used Greek letters on their coinage sometimes, but it these were corrupted inscriptions, copies that no one really understood anymore.

Polytheism in Dungeons and Dragons

Religion has always been a fascinating subject to me, and when I play Dungeons and Dragons (or build adventures for my kids), I spend a lot of time thinking about it.

By default, religion in Dungeons and Dragons is polytheistic, and mostly just a vehicle for clerical players. As a teenager, I remember way back in 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons reading the Deities and Demigods in my local gaming store, and thinking how cool it was that so many different deities from world cultures were represented, including Lao Tzu and such. The idea, I believe, was to allow characters plenty of options to choose which deity to follow, but this also tends to increase breadth while reducing depth.

For most players, this probably isn’t a big deal, but as someone who’s always been interested in religion, I often think about how to improve the depth and flavor of D&D religions so that players can delve more if they want to. Much of what you see in D&D represents a somewhat shallow understanding of ancient, polytheistic religions as seen through the lens of Western-Christian culture.

Coincidentally, I recently picked up another course from the Great Courses on pagan religion in ancient Rome and Greece (mostly Rome)¹ for my birthday. The course is pretty dense, and Professor Muller really gets into some deep details about Greco-Roman pagan religion, which taught me a lot, and also deflated some false assumptions I had about such religions. Needless to say, religion, culture and politics are very complex subjects, but some fascinating things that I’ve learned so far:

First, contrary to modern understandings of the ancient Greek gods, ancient Greek deities were not represented consistently across the ancient world. For example, Apollo had many epithets, not just in the Iliad, but across each of the different city-states and cult centers. Each epithet represented a specific Apollo for that place and time, and something he did there. The same could be said of Artemis, Athena, etc. For the Roman god Jupiter, he had a ton of epithets, including (source Wikipedia):

Jupiter Fulgur (“Lightning Jupiter”), Fulgurator or Fulgens
Jupiter Lucetius (“of the light”), an epithet almost certainly related to the light or flame of lightning bolts and not to daylight.
Jupiter Optimus Maximus (“the best and greatest”). This was the Jupiter venerated in Rome’s most sacred temple.
Jupiter Pluvius, “sender of rain”.

…and by location:

Jupiter Laterius or Latiaris, the god of Latium, a region of central Italy.
Jupiter Parthinus or Partinus, under this name was worshiped on the borders of northeast Dalmatia and Upper Moesia, perhaps associated with the local tribe known as the Partheni.
Jupiter Poeninus, under this name worshiped in the Alps, around the Great St Bernard Pass, where he had a sanctuary.
Jupiter Solutorius, a local version of Jupiter worshiped in Spain; he was conflated with the local Iberian god Eacus.
Jupiter Taranis, Jupiter equated with the Celtic god Taranis.

While there was one commonly-understood and venerated deity, each cult center worshiped that deity somewhat differently, with different rites, epithets, etc. As there was no central religious authority for a given deity, the variation was startling, yet no cause for concern. This may also help to explain why Greeks and Romans were not adverse to linking their deities to similar deities from other cultures (Egyptian, Roman, Anatolian, etc). In the context of D&D, this would mean that a popular deity like Lathander, for example, might have many cult centers across Faerun, but each place would worship him in a very region-specific way, might call him different epithets, and hold different festivals, etc. Obviously, from a game-design standpoint, this would be hard to encapsulate in a reference guide, but DMs might be able to lean into this in their world-building.

Second, both the Romans and the Greeks (among others) had the notion of “state religion” and “family religion”. The particular city-state worked hard to maintain a healthy relationship with its deities and there was a lot of focus on both cultivating this relationship for success of the state, but also averting disaster if the gods were thought to be displeased (plagues, earthquakes, defeat in war, etc). Anything that could be perceived as a threat to this relationship, such as “renegade cults” (Bacchanalia, Christianity, etc) were also seen as a threat to the state. Obviously, when building settings in Dungeons and Dragons, a similar tension might apply.

Similarly, each family traditionally maintained their own family deities, rituals, etc. The head of the household (usually the father or oldest son) was the “chief priest” of the household religion, and each household might have slightly different rituals, deities, etc, from each other household. For the household deities, one might often see the same gods as the public, state religion, but their role/epithets were for mundane issues: Zeus of the storage grain, Zeus guarding the doorway, etc. It seems odd that the king of the gods also served as a “mini household deity” for all kinds of mundane needs. Again, depending on the role, time and place a deity may take on many aspects, both big and small. The state only cared about the macro-religion vs. the micro-religion. In the case of D&D, characters could similarly adopt a background or “flavor” in character’s daily religious rituals, family obligations, etc.

Thirdly, another thing I learned about ancient pagan religions was the myriad of ways that people employed divination. For example, augury, interpreting the flight patterns of birds, was a particularly popular form of divination among both Romans and Greeks. This would seem silly to modern audiences, but it was taken very seriously back then, and one could not start a senate meeting, or march the army without having consulted such things first. Oracles, such as the Pythia, among other places were also highly revered, but not always feasible to ask on short-notice.

Finally, the relationship to the gods was much more transactional than what modern audiences would be used to. This means that notions like theology, or deeper moral meanings weren’t clearly defined as they would be in modern religions. It’s not that people didn’t have any concept of morality, but the gods were part of this, not necessarily the source. So, for example, Isis was an extremely popular goddess across the Mediterranean during the Hellenistic period, but Isis’s cult didn’t necessary have a strong theological component, and as she was adapted by different cultures, the teachings varied somewhat to fit the parent culture where a particular cult center existed.

But what this means is that people would revere and petition a particular deity to address their needs: illness, success, warding off misfortune, etc. And, if the deity hears their petition, and provides the aid request, the person making a petition vows to repay the deity with a special offering of gratitude, or some other vow. This means that the typical relationship with a deity was, in order:

petitioning the deity
a vow if the deity meets their end of things, and
offerings and veneration if they do

This “transactional” approach might seem strange to us, but also presumably had the affect of building a deeper relationship with such-and-such deity as the cycle repeats over and over.

Also, though we might not want to admit it, modern people still do this. We might pray to God if we want our football team to win, for comfort if we’re in a jam, etc. It’s just that for ancient pagan religions,² this was a perfectly normal thing to do, and not subject to embarrassment or shame as might be the case now.

Thus, when determining how to flesh out your typical polytheistic religions in a Dungeons and Dragons setting it helps to use ancient pagan religions as a source of inspiration and consider how relationships with a deity were more transactional in nature, varied considerably by locale, the importance of divination, and how it was often tightly-knit with state power (to say nothing about family religion).

None of this is required for the typical D&D player or DM. However, for any DM who likes to integrate more authentic polytheistic religions, or for player characters who (like myself) like to flesh out their character’s religions more, check out the awesome Great Courses class above, and spend some time learning about Roman and Greek religion from historians. There’s a lot of genuine interesting stuff, and much of it not obvious to modern audiences today.

¹ The Great Courses often has flash sales and other deals, so if you can’t afford it now, keep an eye on it. 😉

² Even some modern religions still tend to be transactional in nature, such as Japanese Shinto.

Kandahar and the Greco-Buddhists

Long long ago, before Afghanistan was a battleground for Soviet and then American forces, the famed Buddhist Emperor, Ashoka, instituted a series of pious inscriptions across his vast empire. One of these inscriptions exists in the city of Kandahar, the same city known these days as the birthplace of the Taliban.

source: Kandahar Bilingual Rock Inscription on Wikipedia

Afghanistan has been a point of fascination for me since 2001, when all eyes turned to it after September 11th. I knew nothing about the country, and then found a fascinating book (which I’ve long since lost) about its history and realized there was a lot more there than most Westerners were aware of. Afghanistan has a rich history of cultural interchange that stretches very far back in human history as the above inscription hints at.

The Macedonian-Greeks under Alexander the Great were among a long line of conquerors who came to northwest India, but after Alexander abruptly died at the age of 33, his bodyguards and generals strove to carry on his legacy, first as satraps, nominally loyal to the throne in Macedon, and later outright kings of their own better known as the Diadochoi, next as the Seleucid Empire, and finally as a local, independent kingdom called Bactria.

Beginning with Seleukos I Nikator who took over Mesopotamia and the Persian lands, founding the Seleucid Empire, the Greeks had a lively cultural interchange with the new Mauryan Dynasty, first as adversaries, then as allies. and later forged a lasting treaty with the Mauryan emperors. The Seleucids benefited from this exchange in the form of war elephants, and an influx of Buddhist missionaries propagated by Emperor Ashoka, Chandragupta’s grandson. You can see in the inscription above, the inscription has Greek at the top and Aramaic, the other major language in the region (also the same language that Jesus spoke natively).

A second inscription, written in particularly sophisticated Greek, and possibly containing the Edicts of Emperor Ashoka has also been found in Kandahar, though it’s whereabouts are unknown now:

Source: Kandahar Greek Edicts of Ashoka on Wikipedia

But the Indian-Buddhist-Greek interaction wasn’t limited to inscriptions. For example, there exists a Buddhist text called the Questions of King Milinda (example text hosted here) represents a detailed dialogue between King Menander I of Bactria and a Buddhist monk named Nagasena that was recorded around the first century CE. It includes some excellent dialogue on various Buddhist topics. A great example is King Menander asking Nagasena about the Buddhist notion of rebirth, and its rejection of reincarnation (transmigration):

The king asked: “Venerable Nagasena, is it so that one does not transmigrate and one is reborn?”
“Yes, your majesty, one does not transmigrate and one is reborn.”
“How, venerable Nagasena, is it that one does not transmigrate and one is reborn? Give me an analogy.”
“Just as, your majesty, if someone kindled one lamp from another, is it indeed so, your majesty, that the lamp would transmigrate from the other lamp?”
“Certainly not, venerable sir.”
“Indeed just so, your majesty, one does not transmigrate and one is reborn.”
“Give me another analogy.”
“Do you remember, your majesty, when you were a boy learning some verse from a teacher?”
“Yes, venerable sir.”
“Your majesty, did this verse transmigrate from the teacher?”
“Certainly not, venerable sir.”
“Indeed just so, your majesty, one does not transmigrate and one is reborn.”
“You are clever, venerable Nagasena.”
Miln III.5.5: Transmigration and Rebirth {Miln 71}, translation by John Kelly

Tokyo National Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Next, we should talk about Greco-Buddhist artwork. Long after, Bactria as a Greco-political entity gave way to the Kushan Empire, Greek culture was still cultivated and applied to the Buddhist culture at the time. This confluence of Greek artwork, Indian Buddhist teachings and Kushan patronage led to a flowering of Buddhist art in the region of Gandhara that we still benefit from today.

The statue of Shakyamuni Buddha to the right shows strong similarities to Greek artwork revering various heroes, gods and goddesses, but the subject matter is obviously Indian-Buddhist. Note that prior to this, Buddhist artwork tended to avoid depicting images of people, instead using symbols such as the Buddha’s footprints, the eight-spoked wheel, etc. So, depicting Buddhist figures as lifelike statues was a new innovation, and was gradually proliferated to East Asia where such images continued, but using a more “asian” style. Those “garden buddhas” you see at your local store are descendants of this artistic style. 😉

Finally, let me touch upon one last topic: Greek philosophy. The Hellenistic Period of Greek history was a flowering many different schools of philosophy, but one of them, Pyrrhonism. I highly recommend the podcast episode by the Hellenistic Age Podcast on the Skeptic philosophies at the time, including Pyrrhonism. One interesting theory is that Pyrrho had spent some time in India, and that Pyrrhonist philosophy has notable similarities to the Madhyamika school of Indian-buddhist philosophy. The relationship between the two is unclear, and it’s not even clear if the story of Pyrrho traveling to India with Alexander the Great is even true. It is a frequent trope in biographies at the time for great minds to “travel to India”, though that could mean anywhere east of the Greco-Roman world, so the evidence for Pyrrho’s travels to India are sketchy, but intriguing.

However, if there is indeed a link, Pyrrhonism would probably represent the closest analogy in Western culture to Buddhism.

Anyhow, all this is to say that places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and such have a long and rich history, far more than can easily be understood at a glance. Its interactions from both West and East, the confluence of cultures, and so on mean that there is a lot of fascinating stuff under the surface. I personally regret that I will probably not be able to travel to Afghanistan in my lifetime, but I hope that in more peaceful times further research can be done once more and shed light into this often misunderstood history.

Also, it’s important to recognize that while Greco-Buddhist culture existed for a short time and had only limited influence on subsequent Buddhism, it still made its mark, and was a shining example of cultural exchange and flourishing.

P.S. More examples of Greek literature found in Kandahar.

All Well And Good

Lately, I have been following a fascinating history podcast called the Hellenistic Age Podcast, a detailed look at a very fascinating and often overlooked period of world history. In particular, I am listening to the set of episodes regarding Hellenistic-era philosophy:

It’s a great show, and lots of fun to delve into so many different, fascinating schools of thought. But, then inevitably, you have to come down. Enjoying ancient philosophy is great until you realize that sooner or later, you need put it down in order to eat, shit, sleep, work, deal with getting sick, etc.

Much of this applies to many other aspects of life. Sooner or later, we have to come down and deal with mundane hassles of life, no matter how much we try to escape from them. This applies to any kind of escape we do.

I think this is why the Zen tradition in Buddhism adopted such a strongly anti-intellectual streak, a reaction to the high-minded Buddhist-philosophical traditions from India: the Madhyamika, the Yogacara, and the native Chinese traditions of Hua-yan and Tian-Tai.

For example, a famous story attributed to a Chinese Zen master named Baizhang (百丈, 720–814, pronounced bye-jong):

When asked what the secret of Zen was, he told one disciple, “When hungry, eat – when tired, sleep.”

The anti-intellectual streak in Zen, especially modern Zen (and in some strains of Pure Land Buddhism), tends to rub me the wrong way. Maybe it’s just the nerd in me. But at the same time, I can’t deny that as much fun as philosophy is, including Buddhist religion, it is all just mental games compared with the reality of life itself. Life intrudes on us, and keeps us grounded, for better or for worse. 🤷🏽‍♂️

It also illustrates that the mind isn’t entirely reliable either. High-minded ideals will go right out the window when we are tired, hungry, etc.

All the more reason to stay grounded, and keep a watchful eye on one’s own mind.

Akkadian, We Hardly Knew You!

Many years ago, when I was studying abroad in Hanoi, Vietnam for a summer as part of an ill-fated effort to get into graduate school (tl;dr I dropped out and went into IT), I was at a museum dedicated to Ho Chi Minh, when I was approach by a Vietnamese man about my age. He really wanted to practice his English, and desperately wanted me to sit and practice with him. I felt weirded out at the time, and lied saying we could meet after I got out of the museum. We never met after that and chances are, the guards hussled him away after making a big scene, or he gave up.

Looking back many years later, I feel bad about it now. Knowing English in today’s world can really make or break someone’s career outside of the Anglophone world, and since English speakers were so rare in Hanoi at the time, unlike the more cosmopolitan Ho Chi Minh City, it might have been a rare opportunity for him to actually learn it from a native speaker, and not from rote memorization.

Long, long before English became the international language to learn by countless hopeful students, though, there was another widely spoken language that could make or break people’s careers: Akkadian.

(Disclaimer: A lot of information in this blog post is based on information contained in the Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler. If you like ancient languages, definitely get the book.)

The Manishtusu obelisk in the Louvre Museum, photo courtesy of Wikipedia

Akkadian was one of several languages that existed in the ancient Middle East:

Sumerian – the language of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) and such great cities as Ur, Babylon, Assur and Nineveh. Sumerian, is an isolate, meaning it was no known “genetic” relation to any other language we know of. Sumerian is also the oldest written language in the world. This is important as we’ll see.
Akkadian – the language of the Akkadian Empire (remember Sargon of Akkad?) that eventually supplanted Sumerian city-states. It is also the oldest of the Semitic languages which include modern Hebrew and Arabic.
Elamite – spoken by the Elamite people in south-western Iran. The Elamites were frequent rivals of the Sumerians among other peoples.
Hurrian – spoken by various peoples north of Mesopotamia, the most famous being the Mitanni.
Urartian – spoken by the kingdom of Urartu in eastern Turkey, and ultimately replaced Hurrian.
Luwian – spoken in south-west Turkey, this important language is pretty obscure now but once dominated a large region, and may have been spoken by the ancient Trojans.
Hittite – spoken by the Hittite Empire in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) and the Levant. Interestingly, the Hittites called themselves the Hatti (after their capitol Hattusa), but the term “Hittite” has been mis-applied by modern-day scholars who conflated them with another group.

Because Sumerian developed a sophisticated writing system called Cuneiform, and because of their central place in middle-eastern culture, the other languages above all adopted cuneiform with varying degrees of success despite being totally unrelated languages. This is important as we’ll see shortly.

Anyhow, back in the 24th century BCE Sargon of Akkad conquered Mesopotamia and setup what was probably the first empire in history: the Akkadian Empire. But he didn’t wipe out the Sumerians, and in fact Sumerian urban culture was highly revered by the Akkadians, who did their best to import things like the writing system, literature, religion and so on.

However, because Akkadian language and Sumerian were so different, this import wasn’t an easy one. Cuneiform uses a mix of ideograms (similar to Chinese characters) mixed with phonetic letters that only made sense in Sumerian. For example, 𒅅 could mean a “door” (e.g. an ideogram), but phonetically it could be pronounced like ig in Sumerian. In Akkadian, this would become ig, ik, or iq. Elsewhere, sounds that could be distinguished in Sumerian could not be distinguished in Akkadian, and vice-versa.

Thus, the poor Akkadian scribes needed dictionaries to map Akkadian words to Sumerian Cuneiform text, like the one shown here.

Other languages in the list above had similar challenges, but cuneiform eventually became the writing system of choice for many centuries. Thus, in spite of the fact that these languages had no real relation to one another, they all used cuneiform based off of Sumerian.

Meanwhile, as the Akkadian Empire continued, Sumerian as a language gradually faded from conversation, and by 1600 BC it wasn’t spoke anymore, but was preserved as a sacred language and a language of literature. Meanwhile, Akkadian became more and more widely used, not just within the Empire, but among it’s neighbors. Even after the Empire fell, and newer empires such as the Babylonians and Assyrians briefly conquered,¹ Akkadian was still widely used because it was already well-known by the populace and just easier than trying to supplant with yet another language.

The use of Akkadian as an internal language extended as far away as Egypt, where the Pharoah Akhenaten wrote a series of letters in Akkadian to subjects far away in Canaan (think modern Israel). Note that these “Amarna Letters” were written in the 14th century BCE, already 1000 years after Sargon of Akkad.

Even 1000 after that, Akkadian was still used, this time by the Hellenistic Greeks. Antiochus I Soter one of Alexander the Great’s generals who founded the Seleucid dynasty had this inscription made using Akkadian:

The Cylinder of Antiochus with translation, courtesy of Wikipedia

So…. what happened to Akkadian then? In short, it was replaced starting in the 8th century BCE by a rural language, first spoken by Aramean people around modern-day Damascus, called Aramaic. Aramaic, by the way, was the same language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth. The brutal Assyrian Empire had a policy of subjugating people by forcibly uprooting them and moving them to other areas of the Empire, where they would serve the Empire as soldiers or some other capacity. This had the unintended effect of spreading Aramaic among the population, and because Aramaic had an easier writing system the path of least-resistance was for people to use Aramaic more.

Small side note: once Akkadian became replaced as a spoken language, even Sumerian which had been closely tied to it as a literary language, disappeared with it.

Just as Sumerian withdrew more and more as a language of literature and religious ceremony, Akkadian similarly became less and less common except for official roles. By the time of Antiochus I Soter, it had largely disappeared from day to day usage, but still had a lot of cultural weight, hence the Cylinder of Antiochus. The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II, also used it a few centuries earlier in his bronze steles and proclamations. Writings in Akkadian still appeared as late as the 1st century AD (not BC, AD) but by this point the language had been in active use for 2,500 years!

Anyhow, looking back Akkadian was an amazing language in its own right. Here is an inscription from the Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi, a poem composed in 14th century BCE by a priest about the misfortunes of a wealthy, powerful man at the time. This version is provided by the University of Yale in their Cuneiform Commentaries Project, though I have removed the priest’s commentary lines in between for easier readability:

Line	Akkadian	Translation
24′	za-pur-tu₄ ú-ta-aṣ-ṣa-pa ⸢i-šar-tu₄⸣ ul ⸢ut⸣-[tu]	My bad luck was increasing, I could not find prosperity.
26′	i-na maš-šak-ki ^lú⸢ENSI⸣ ul ú^!(I-)šá-pi ⸢di-ni⸣	The dream interpreter did not clarify my case with his incense.
28′	^lúMAŠ.MAŠ ina KÌD.KÌD^ṭè–^e ki-mil-ti ul ip-ṭur	The exorcist with his ritual did not release the divine anger against me.
30′	a-mur-ma ár-ka-⸢tu₄⸣ ri-⸢da⸣-a-⸢tu₄⸣ ip-pe-e-ri	I looked behind me, harassment and trouble.

Rough pronunciation guide: š is like English “sh”

Another example, from Wikipedia, is an excerpt from Hammurabi’s Code, which was written in Akkadian:

Akkadian	Translation
šumma awīl-um lū kasp-am lū ḫurāṣ-am lū ward-am lū amt-am lū alp-am lū immer-am lū imēr-am ū lū mimma šumšu ina qāt mār awīl-im ū lū warad awīl-im balum šīb-ī u riks-ātim i-štām-Ø ū lū ana maṣṣārūt-im i-mḫur-Ø awīl-um šū šarrāq i-ddāk	If a man has bought silver or gold, a male or a female slave, an ox, a sheep, or a donkey—or anything for that matter— from another man or from another man’s slave without witnesses or contract, or if he accepted something for safekeeping without same, then this man is a thief and hence to be killed.

Rough pronunciation guide: š is like English “sh”

But who knows, maybe Akkadian will be cool again someday. 😎

¹ Much of ancient Mesopotamian history can be summed up by one empire conquering after another, holding territory for 100-200 years, and then being conquered by someone else. They may eventually come back as a newer, stronger, but the general pattern repeated itself. As an amateur history nerd, I think a lot of this had to do with a combination of terrain (flat, open, hard to defend) and unstable governments patterned off of personal charisma. Good leaders conquered, lousy leaders got conquered.

Sarapis: The Manufactured God

Bust of Serapis. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek original from the 4th century BC, stored in the Serapaeum of Alexandria. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Hellenistic Period of history was marked by a number of Greek kingdoms that vied for power after the death of Alexander the Great, with Egypt being among the most powerful. Egypt under the Ptolemy Dynasty, descendants of Ptolemy the First, Soter¹, one of Alexander’s generals, was a very tightly-regulated society. The Greek minority ruled over a much larger Egyptian population, but apart from the coastal areas, they rarely intermingled. Instead, they carefully engineered Egyptian society for maximum agricultural output in order to fund their wars with other Hellenistic kingdoms, particularly the Seleucids.

The coastal regions of Egypt had a comparatively larger Greek population and the Ptolemies invested a lot in developing these communities, particularly at the city of Alexandria, in order to develop a uniquely “Ptolemaic” culture that was essentially Greek but enhanced with Egyptian “exoticness”.

For example, the Ptolemies heavily proselytized the Egyptian deity Isis, who was already beloved by the Egyptian people, and soon Isis had a major cult following throughout the Hellenistic world. Followers across the Mediterranean viewed her as a kind of mother-savior goddess, master of magic and secret knowledge, etc. Increasingly she took on characteristics that made her something of an “uber-goddess” among an already crowded field of goddesses across the Hellenistic world.

But the Ptolemies decided that Isis needed a partner, so they basically made up one named Serapis or Sarapis. Sarapis was a god created during the reign of the first Ptolemy, Ptolemy I Soter. Greeks living in Ptolemaic Egypt already worshipped a syncretic Egyptian deity that combined Osiris (Isis’s original consort) and the bull Apis based in the city of Memphis. As the Greeks already worshipped Zeus in the form of a bull, this probably wasn’t so far-fetched, and syncretic deities were a common religious pattern in Egypt. So for example Re-Horakhty, an alternate form of the God Horus. The name of this deity also evolved over time from Osor-Hapi, then Oserapis, and finally Sarapis.

What made the deity “Ptolemaic” was that the Ptolemies adopted this syncretic deity as the patron deity of their dynasty. The intended audience wasn’t so much Egyptian, since they already had a pretty venerable religious tradition, and weren’t overly enthusiastic in adopting the culture of their Hellenistic overlords, but rather Greeks living in Egypt, and abroad.² Alexandria, which was a major center of the new Greco-Egyptian culture of Ptolemaic Egypt, was the new center of worship and an elaborate temple was built called the Sarapeum.

Greek engineers were hired to build and design strange wonders at the Sarapeum. According to Michael Grant in From Alexander to Cleopatra: The Hellenistic World, the temple included sites such as an iron statue of the god of war, Ares, launching toward a lodestone (read: magnetic) statue of the goddess of love, Aphrodite, with hidden wires and everything in a passionate embrace. Hydraulics caused trumpets to blare, altar fires to burst “miraculously” and even an image of Sarapis to fly out and greet audiences. It was straight out of a 1940’s B-movie, but was designed in the 4th century BCE!

In time Sarapeum temples sprang up in other parts of Hellenistic world too, such as Italy and Asia Minor, and writers of the time spoke of miraculous cures, oracles, etc. Isis and Sarapis were the “Brangelina” of the Hellenistic religious world for a time.

But, like all things, worship of Sarapis and Isis faded into history. Few people now have even heard of Sarapis, let alone know anything about the wave of religious devotion to Sarapis that swept the Hellenistic world at the time. Still, it’s amazing to think that one man could for a time dream up a syncretic deity like this, and not only establish a cult in his home territory, but even gain the mass-marketing appeal necessary to establish temples abroad too.

The parallels to modern cults, both religious and cults of personality, and how easy it is to manufacture a deity and convince many people to pin their hopes on it is striking, and a good lesson for us all perhaps.

¹ The Ptolemies had an unusual naming scheme for their monarchs since every monarch had the name Ptolemy or Ptolemaios (Πτολεμαῖος .. the “P” was pronounced”). What distinguished one Ptolemy king from another was their nicknames. Ptolemy I was named “Soter” (savior), Ptolemy II was nicknamed “Philadelphus” (who loves his sister) … an allusion to marrying his sister Arsinoe II. Inter-marriage was very common between the Ptolemies in keeping with Egyptian tradition, apparently. Ptolemy III was named “Euergetes” (benefactor) and so on. Historia Civilis pokes fun at this naming scheme a few times in this video.

² Michael Grant also points out that this was a way for the Ptolemies to counterbalance the religious power of cult centers at Memphis among other places in Egypt.

The Greek Colonies

The Native Thracians

The Steppe Warriors

The Wider World

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