Princeton (2016) h/b 797pp £37.95 (ISBN 9780691159799)
Imagine an authoritative, up-to-date, fact-packed encyclopaedia covering the prehistory and history of Asia Minor (Anatolia or Turkey to us) from c. 20,000 BC to AD 330. Now envisage it as a continuous narrative. That, in brief, summarises the nature and quality of this ‘first historical overview of Anatolia as a bridge and a melting-pot, of the changing orientations, mixtures, and transmissions, from prehistory to the heyday of the Roman provinces’. Some statistics will give a sense of the weight of the enterprise: main text (a rough calculation) 270,000 words, with 109 b/w photographs and illustrations and 24 maps; a 75-page appendix listing all the rulers of the region over that period; 60 pages of notes; a 34-page bibliography; a 5-page list of cited authors and editors; a 13-page index locorum; and a 50-page index. And all in a smallish fount. Light bed-time reading it is not; definitive it surely is.
Translated and further revised, corrected and updated from the first edition published in German in 2010—and at what is by any standards an absolute bargain price—the story is shaped round the various empires that controlled the area from the Hittites to the Romans. The ten chapters cover an introduction (‘Anatolia between East and West’); the history of fieldwork in the region from the 14th C AD; from prehistory to the oldest written culture (Sumerian-Akkadian); the rise and fall of the Hittite empire; the Persian empire and Greeks in the region (547-333 BC); from Alexander to Rome (331-31 BC); the Roman empire to Aurelian; imperial administration under the principate; economic, socio-political and cultural conditions in the provinces during the empire; and a brief epilogue taking the story on to the first Crusade.
Since most classicists will be aware of the general picture from Cyrus of Persia to Constantine, it may be worth illustrating M.’s range with a brief summary of his account of the Hittites and the ensuing ‘dark age’. The only time when Asia Minor was a power centre in its own right was when it was ruled by the Hittites; otherwise it was dominated by external powers, first from the East (Persia) and then the West (Greece and Rome). But at all times its population and gods were exceedingly diverse (seven different language spoken over the Hittite period), encouraged by its location as a bridge between East and West, Eastern routes into and out of Anatolia carefully picked to avoid the freezing North and the boiling South. Here ideas, skills, and commodities made their crossings: for example, from the East to West, agriculture (wine!), domesticated sheep, goats, cattle, and horses, ceramics, metallurgy, mathematics, music, myth, metals, cosmology, alphabets, and from the West to East Greek and Latin, the political systems (the polis), baths, streets, architecture, theatre, technology. During the Hittite period, surviving letters document a form of international relations springing up across the region between Hittites, Egyptian, Babylonians, Assyrians and so on. In 1259 BC the first known treaty, a non-aggression pact, was signed between the Egyptians and Hittites (a copy is held in the UN in New York). Further, the Hittites started to write something approaching what we would call history.
M. is duly cautious about the historicity of Homer’s Trojan War, stressing that Greeks and Hittites had little intensive interaction anyway; and he assigns the collapse in the c. 12th C BC to general political and economic degeneration and invasions from the Balkans. He notes that while the Hittites appeared in the Bible, they were never mentioned in Greek or Roman literature, and our knowledge of them began to emerge only with excavations in the 20th C.
In the period c. 1000-c. 500 BC he offers sections on Urartians, Lycians and Carians, Phrygians, the Cimmerian invasions, the Lydian empire, and then the arrival of the Greeks, with the Aeolians, Ionians and Dorians, settlements in Pamphylia and Cilicia, developments of the polis and tyrannies, colonization, the Greek alphabet and finally the emergence of the first Greek literature and philosophy on the west coast. He emphasises that the wealth of Asia Minor made its courts highly attractive to Greeks. Throughout M. is alert to questions of language, alphabets, inscriptions, architecture, sculpture, culture, religion, trade, administration and so on. In particular, he is on top of all the academic issues and admirably open about summarising the current state of play without committing himself to one interpretation or another when he feels the subject is too complex for detailed discussion. These are features of the whole book.
In so vast an enterprise there are inevitable niggles. Does phrygio mean ‘goldsmith’ or should it be (as OLD proposes) ‘embroiderer’? The index confuses Termessos and Telmessos; there are small misprints (‘Philipp’, ‘Asia minor’); and the otherwise excellent translation produces terms like ‘cadastre’ and ‘neocorate’ and occasional oddities such as death in ‘childbed’.
Enough already: this is a masterful work composed by a scholar at the top of his form, drawing on the full range of international scholarship, and opening up Asia Minor in all its importance and kaleidoscopic fascination as never before. Without doubt one for the university libraries.
Peter Jones