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I'm your host Alex and welcome to the Levantine Podcast, a show about Near Eastern history, language, and culture.
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To learn more about the show and get in touch, you can visit our website at LeventinePod.com.
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Carolina Lopez-Ruiz is a professor at Ohio State University in the classics department, and her research focuses on understanding Greek culture in its broader ancient Mediterranean context.
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She has authored a number of books on the Phoenician civilization, and in this episode, we discussed her book When the Gods Were Born, which examines the links between ancient Greek civilization and the Northwest Semitic peoples and how the cultural exchange between the two influenced Greek origin myths.
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I had a great time speaking with her, and I hope you enjoy the show.
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Okay, we're live.
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Thanks for being here.
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Thank you.
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So it seems that the majority of your career has been spent investigating the Phoenician civilization and the links of Levantine peoples to the Greek world, the Mediterranean world.
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What drew you to this area of research?
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Thank you for that question, Alex.
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There is probably a very long version, and uh but I'll try to give a medium-sized version.
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I started off as a classicist by training, let's say, in classical philology in Europe, which is fairly traditional, a lot of Greek and Latin in every possible aspect of it, very linguistic-oriented and so on.
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But at the same time, I was kind of more drawn to a broader Mediterranean context.
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So I did not start out as a Near Eastern scholar, but as a classicist.
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But I started studying Hebrew and Arabic in my free time because I was just very interested in these other Mediterranean cultures.
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So for quite a while, I wasn't sure how I was gonna connect those two or more than two disciplines, right?
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And um and one way we ended up connecting them was going to Chicago to do my PhD because they have this wonderful program on the Mediterranean world.
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And somehow, through Greek text and archaic Greek literature, and reading about connections and possible influences in this type of poetry, like Hyssio and Homer, that's where I found the wedge.
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So I was studying Hebrew then in Chicago more formally and Eucharitic and all that.
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So I got more into that.
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So that kind of led me to the Phoenicians in some way, in part because I was studying Northwest Semitic languages as well.
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So I was more familiar with that world.
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But also the Phoenicians kind of provided a historically grounded link for me to connect the Near Eastern world and the classical world because they were so actively connected with the Greek world, right?
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We know from archaeology, from literature, and so on.
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So it's kind of a meandering path that kind of trying to connect these separate areas of my training.
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And the third leg of that is that having grown up in Spain, and also I ended up looking at the same time, I was looking at what are the Phoenicians doing in southern Spain, right?
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And there's all this archaeology, you know, mostly just archaeology more than text or anything.
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So that was another part of this puzzle that I was curious about, which has come more into play in my later research about colonization and cultural contact and so on.
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But in a sense, I kept finding the Phoenicians everywhere in areas where that I was interested in.
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So yeah, and that's what led me to end up doing this sort of work.
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So for people who aren't familiar with the Phoenicians, who were the Phoenicians and what are the highlights of their major contributions to world civilization?
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Oh my god.
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So the Phoenicians is how we call, we uh meaning the Western world, beginning with the Greeks, it's the name that has been given since the ancient Greeks, to you know, the group of peoples and city-states in the Levant, in the say northern Leban, north of Israel, into you know the coast of North Syria, let's say.
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Mainly what is today's uh Lebanon coast with a little bit of northern Israel and a little bit of northern Syria and coast, right?
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So that strip of land is where these city-states emerged at the turn of the millennium.
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Well, they existed before, but they kind of became a salient culture of their own, let's say, through the with a particular language and a particular alphabet and so on.
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So the Greeks earlier on, as soon as we have Greek texts, they identify people from this area as Phoenicians.
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We don't know how they call themselves.
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Some people think they call themselves canonized, the evidence is kind of very slim.
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But however they call themselves, it doesn't matter.
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It's a culture that emerges from the background of the Canaanite cultures.
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So one way of thinking about them is the Phoenicians are the coastal canonite cities of that area.
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From Accol, let's say, in northern Israel, to Aruad, almost Ugari, that is south of Ugari, and including Biblos also in the north and Tyre towards the south, right?
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So those cities, and they do have a distinct culture once we can trace it not only in the Levant, but also they extend colonies abroad from southern Spain to Sicily, North Africa, like Carthage, and so on, around the ninth century, let's say.
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And at that point, you start having inscriptions with the same language and the fairly uniform, homogeneous language and script through the Mediterranean wherever they are, types of pottery, types of art, types of, you know.
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So basically, like the Greeks, they didn't have a unified, say, country-nation state, rather, they were city-states, just like the Greeks, very similar setup, but they had a coherent, mutually recognizable and externally recognizable culture, which is why the Greeks gave a name that was very consistently used through antiquity.
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They're most famous for the alphabet that they spread.
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They didn't necessarily invent it, it was an alphabetic writing system that ultimately derived from the Canonite writing system.
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So it's a Northwest Semitic alphabet, but they standardized it and they exported it, right?
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And the Greeks adopted it, and the etrus comes from them, and then the Latins and so on.
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So the alphabet, the Greeks associated definitions with the alphabet and with a lot of cultural advancements of different sorts.
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And they were very well known as well as settlers everywhere, and merchants and uh naval experts, right?
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So they were the fleet of the Persian Empire, for instance, and so on.
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So industries, metallurgy, exploitation of metals and working of metals, purple dye and textiles and other specialized industries.
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I think that's where the name comes from, right?
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The Greek word for the Phoenicians is we think, yeah, we think it can mean that.
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It can also phoenix can also mean palm tree, which is also uh something that is associated with Phoenicians, but it's probably from the purple that they were famous for, even though, again, they may not have invented it.
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It may have been first done in Crete in the Bronze Age, in fact, now that people think, but they definitely became experts on it.
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So they were associated with particular crafts and technical expertises that they spread through the Mediterranean and that they were trading with and so on.
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And how long did the civilization last?
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What's the most ancient references we see to what either is explicitly referring to the Phoenicians or to what we think may be the Phoenicians till the end?
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When did they kind of peter out?
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Well, there is a point where the Eastern and the Western Mediterranean kind of diverge.
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So in the Eastern Mediterranean, you can say that once the Phoenician cities are conquered by Alexander the Great in the, you know, at the end of the fourth century BC, it's not that the Phoenician culture disappears, but by that point it's also pretty heavily Hellenized, and then it kind of gets absorbed, like it happens with other cultures of the in the area.
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But still in Roman times, you have authors talking about Phoenician stuff like Phil of Biblos or talking or writing as Phoenicians in some way, but by that point we think it's more of a kind of an intellectual identity, or we think that the language disappeared by early Roman times, you know, there.
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Now in North Africa, so in the Western Mediterranean, especially in North Africa, the area of Carthage and Algeria, and the language continued even into late antiquity, right?
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So we have inscriptions in Punic and in Latin and Punic, like bilinguals, and in Latino-Punic, like Latin letters, in the whole range until 30th century AD or something like that.
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But also we have testimonies like St.
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Augustine in the 5th century, maybe talking about how the countryside people still spoke Phoenician.
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I mean, Punic is how the Romans called it, which is the same.
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So it lasted longer in the West, the culture, the language, than in the East, in a sense.
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And how close was that language to ancient Hebrew or ancient Aramaic?
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It's very close.
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It's less well attested because it's attested only in inscriptions pretty much.
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So there are more gaps.
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But if you know Hebrew or Aramaic, you can read Phoenician inscriptions with some difficulties, maybe, but they belong to the same broader family, but still it's clearly distinct in enough ways, perhaps even more than Hebrew from Aramaic.
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It's distinct enough, but similar enough.
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They're cousins, they're like Italian and Spanish or something.
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So, how rich or limiting is the archaeological record when it comes to the Phoenicians?
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So if we're looking at architecture, monumental architecture, any other archaeological remains that were found concerning them, what is that like versus textually?
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What did they leave behind?
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There is much more archaeological evidence than textual, because the textual evidence, the literature that they had, we were pretty sure they must have had, is pretty much lost due to historical circumstances, right?
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Nobody took care of it like the Romans did with Greek literature or the Jewish people with their texts, right?
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So basically we lost their literature, and when we have our inscriptions and then references by classical authors to Phoenician authors, and sometimes they quote or they paraphrase something.
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So it's very fragmentary.
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Whereas archaeologically, actually there is quite a lot growing like every day, and especially in the Western Mediterranean, probably just because of geopolitical and geographical circumstances, there is more archaeology coming out.
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So the challenge is how to interpret it, how to build a kind of more holistic view of the Phoenician world because it's so expansive from the east to the west.
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But even in Lebanon and especially in northern Israel lately, there are sites there that are fully excavated, like Accor, Teldor, and others that are providing incredible amounts of evidence for Iron Age Phoenicians, whereas in Lebanon itself, because it's so built up and it's very difficult to excavate those levels, but still there are good some movement there.
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Yeah, so it's kind of one of the biggest challenges is that the textual evidence, which is why when I want to compare Greek cosmogonists with Northwest Semitic cosmogonies, or you end up looking at other periods, other corpora, right?
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Like Eucharitic or Hebrew or very late testimonies of Phoenician stuff, because we lack the equivalent contemporary to Hesiod or to classical authors, right?
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So you mentioned that you're from Spain and obviously the the Phoenicians made it all the way to Spain at one point.
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When archaeologists are excavating what they think are Phoenician sites in areas as far as Spain, how do you identify it as Phoenician?
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That's a good question.
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Well, archaeologists become very, very specialized.
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They have their typologies, especially of pottery.
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So there's a lot of debate, obviously, about how pots are not the same as people.
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And if you have Greek pots in one place, it doesn't mean that Greeks took them there or wise or whatever.
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There is, you know, a whole theoretical question about the relationship between pottery and culture.
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But in the end, pottery is the most common remain, archaeological remain in the ancient Mediterranean, and it does follow typologies.
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So basically, the main marker is, I think, pottery, especially for these early levels.
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So you have pottery that is classified as tire type pottery from the 9th century and the 8th century, and you have that appearing in a level in Huelva or in Cadiz that by other measures maybe belong to that, more or less that period.
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So you date it by the pottery mainly.
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And then if you find other stuff like inscriptions, is that you know that would be the best, which they do find, even just small graphities or any remains of any sign of Phoenician writing.
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So if you have some materials that are typical of Phoenician culture, as much as we can tell, and writing, that's ideal.
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Then you have construction types that are levantine.
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So in the earliest stages of these places, you have a type of construction that is exactly the same type of construction that you have in Iron Age, Levant, right?
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The measures of those constructions that they use.
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So what forces were at play in it'd probably be around the Iron Age or the earth of the Bronze Age, the Bronze Age collapse that that spurred Greek civilizations to head east, and whether that was the Sea Peoples or others, and then the same thing with regards to the Phoenicians, what elements were at play in their world that motivated them to travel and settle west?
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I think we're still learning and evolving in how we think this happened or why we think these movements happened, because things are changing constantly, like archaeologically.
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So, for instance, without getting into the sea people after the collapse of the Bronze Age, there is a sort of vacuum of powers of the great empires, right?
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The Egyptians, the Hittites, and the Assyrians are not yet dominant.
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So it seems like the Phoenician cities were not particularly affected by this, especially the southern Phoenician cities like Tyre and Sylon, who become the most prominent ones in the Iron Age.
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So they seem to have kind of benefited, if anything, from this vacuum of power and have grown at that point.
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Like after the 10th century, they start expanding.
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And in the 9th century is when they set up colonies.
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So in the middle of that, the CPP post had also made it to the Levant.
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But in the case of the Phoenicians, the general idea is that they are seeking resources to expand their trading network.
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And they start in Cyprus looking for metals, probably tin, silver.
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Tin is really rare, but in Cyprus mostly copper.
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But in the far west, what they're looking for maybe is resources of tin and silver.
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And tin maybe coming from the Atlantic.
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So they are trying to establish networks that will allow them to bring in those resources.
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Now, the idea until not too long ago, and you might still read it in some places, was that they start doing this in the 8th century because the Assyrian expansion is pressuring them to find raw materials to feed the empire, let's say, and to match the demands of the empire.
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But then archaeologists found this evidence of the earliest point of expansion to earlier on to the 9th century.
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And this is coming from Spain, also from new dates from Carthage and Utica, but especially from Huelva and Cádiz.
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So that is kind of changing the picture because that's too early for the Assyrians to have been the reason, right?
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Then what you have, the new picture, I think, is rather that these guys, especially Tyre, and then kind of matching with what the written sources say is that Tyre is actually growing as a commercial empire and is doing this by its own initiative and with its own plan, right?
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And that that is actually why the Assyrians do not really mistreat Tyre much until very late.
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They give it a special treatment because it becomes their outlet to this whole network, right?
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So that's why I said that the picture is evolving.
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And in the case of the Phoenicians, I think we're gearing towards a picture of something of an enterprise that was much more deliberately driven by probably a state, the state of Tyre.
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But you know, some people will disagree.
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But I think that's where evidence is going.
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As for the Greeks, that's the broader colonization movement in the eighth century, maybe driven by just search for new land, for new resources.
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They are also kind of piggybagging and tapping onto the network that the Phoenicians have begun to establish earlier on, and that allows for that connectivity and that degree of communication, right?
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That shortens the distances that opened networks with local peoples in different areas.
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So the Greeks kind of benefited from that too and profited from that.
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Right.
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That's really interesting.
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So in your book, When the Gods Were Born, you noted that as these cultures settled amongst each other and traded with each other, it can be assumed that intermarriage occurred and bilingualism occurred.
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In your opinion, who were the major transmitters of religious myths and beliefs and traditions?
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That's a hard question.
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Kind of my intuition when I was writing this and still when talking about mythology and cultural contact is that yeah, that we need to think of these areas of communication in a more complex way, in a more open way.
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So to think about the context of bilingualism and families and groups of people who are kind of caught in between the two cultures, or two or more cultures, and that, as I kind of argued in the book, that they may or may not be aware that they are adapting a foreign theme, that we see it that way because we dissect this text as, oh, this seems Near Eastern and this seems Greek.
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But if we think of these mixed communities or contexts where people are exposed to a different language and a different mythology, then those distinctions are not so relevant, right?
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Because they are that's their culture.
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Their culture is a mixed culture.
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So I think that some of these stories came through those channels of kind of family channels, also traveling people, you know, people who did travel for their profession, merchants or whatever, but also within families that may have had that element.
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And the same for the alphabet.
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And that, you know, a lot of people have said that the alphabet was probably adopted by Greeks in some such way, by somebody who knew both languages, right?
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And then one of the languages had a writing system and the other didn't.
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So, well, I'm just gonna use that writing system to write the other language, Greek, right?
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I don't know that that's the only context, the family context as a channel for this transmission.
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I think there is the whole idea of the religious specialists, I think that's an important concept as well.
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And at some point, perhaps specialized poets that were deliberately listening or even reading at one point other poetry at some point.
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I don't know.
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Right.
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When.
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So before we get into the specifics of the different cosmogonies that you lay out, whether it's the Greek or or the Phoenician, I think it'd be helpful for you to lay out what the central hypothesis that you proposed in your book when the gods were born.
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So yeah, basically I was looking at Greek cosmogonies.
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And explain what a what a cosmogony is as well.
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Ah, let's start with what a cosmogony is.
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Yes, good idea.
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So basically, stories about the beginnings of the universe, right?
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What was first, how was the universe formed, but broadly speaking, also theogonies, which is basically the same, but instead of just the origins of the cosmos, it will be the origins of the gods.
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So stories of origins, of divine origins, and so on.
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So what I was doing in Age was to try to look specifically at how much of particularly the tradition from the Levant, the Northwest Semitic cultures, we could see in these Near Eastern elements that people have been pointing out that existed in Greek cosmogonies.
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So let's say in Hesiodony.
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And I did this because, well, we have uh a better knowledge and obviously more text from Mesopotamia, even from the heated culture, right?
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We have cuneiform tablets, so we have complete or semi-complete, fragmentary, maybe, but you know, more complete texts and myths that come directly from those cultures, even from Egypt, though Egypt is kind of a separate thing.
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So my main thesis was that, well, because we have those texts, people have been drawn, scholars have been drawn to looking at these parallels and find Near Eastern themes like the castration theme or whatever, to these other cultures that we have bigger, more impressive corpora, literary corpora from.
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Because we have that gap in the sources that I mentioned before about the Phoenicians, right?
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So my whole effort was to find some traces of more or less clear, I think, Northwest Semitic connections and influence, and argue that, well, that these are the people, the Phoenicians and other Levantines were the ones who were in closest contact with the Greeks, and we know that because of archaeology and even literary testimonies, right, and historical circumstances and all that.
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So my argument was that, well, we have this gap, but with a little bit of fine coming, right, we can see that there is that influence too.
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And we can argue, or in my argument, was that even some of the other themes that seem to be coming from the Hittite culture or Mesopotamian or Egyptian actually may have been part of that Levantine Northwest Semitic legacy, that we don't have the direct intermediary, right?
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It's more of a reconstruction.
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Let's start with the Greek cosmogony then, or theogony, whichever one you think is the best to start with, gets a little confusing, but I want to start by examining the Greek cosmogony and deity succession myths that are there.
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And that you talk about in the book.
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And then let's move on to the 11 Northwest Semitic ones to see the similarities that you call out.
00:22:08.400 --> 00:22:09.839
I'm gonna cheat.
00:22:09.920 --> 00:22:24.400
I have this nice chart that I have on page 88 in front of me, where I lay out some of the main features of the theogony of Hesiod, which is the earliest cosmogony we have.
00:22:24.640 --> 00:22:27.759
The poem is called Theogony, it means the birth of the gods, right?
00:22:27.839 --> 00:22:28.960
So same thing.
00:22:29.279 --> 00:22:34.000
Kind of the creation story that became the canonical creation story for the Greeks, right?
00:22:34.160 --> 00:22:42.240
Now there were other variants or other creation stories that were kind of similar but a little bit different, like the Orphic poems and all that.
00:22:42.400 --> 00:22:44.319
And I also discussed those.
00:22:44.400 --> 00:22:45.759
And those are also interesting.
00:22:45.920 --> 00:22:54.319
But to take the theogony, which is the mainstream one, let's say, you have this kind of clear scheme of a succession of gods, right?
00:22:54.400 --> 00:22:56.559
And that's what we call the succession myth.
00:22:56.799 --> 00:23:06.160
And this, in fact, just this by itself follows a pattern that is fairly common across these other Near Eastern cultures, the idea of a succession of gods.
00:23:06.319 --> 00:23:15.279
All of these cosmogonies, I will I can go through this a little bit in the Hebrew Bible or in the Hittite myths or whatever, they all begin with some in some other way.
00:23:15.440 --> 00:23:19.759
Before the succession of gods, they have some kind of primordial elements, right?
00:23:19.920 --> 00:23:33.920
So in Hesiod, you have chaos as a sort of opening element, and then you have the earth, underworld, and love, who is there as a sort of reproductive force that will allow the universe to go on.
00:23:34.160 --> 00:23:39.920
And then you have, here's where it becomes more structured, you have these generations of gods, right?
00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:44.799
And the first generation is the earth and the sky, Gaia and Uranus, right?
00:23:45.039 --> 00:23:57.200
And then they have these children who are the Titans, and one of them is Kronos, and then Kronos castrates the sky, which is this very famous theme and very strange, right?
00:23:57.519 --> 00:24:04.319
Because the sky is oppressing the earth and somehow not allowing her children to come out.
00:24:04.480 --> 00:24:08.319
It's hard to kind of conceptualize, but there's something oppressive going on.
00:24:08.480 --> 00:24:19.200
So the youngest of the children, Kronos, with a sickle, castrates the father figure, and by doing that act, the earth and the sky separate, right?
00:24:19.359 --> 00:24:24.400
And that allows for the titans to be born as well as other entities.
00:24:24.640 --> 00:24:35.200
So then two of the titans, Kronos and Rea, are the parents of the Olympian gods, Zeus and Hera and Demeter and Poseidon, right?
00:24:35.279 --> 00:24:37.119
And Hades and that crowd.
00:24:37.279 --> 00:24:38.720
So that's the third generation.
00:24:38.799 --> 00:24:44.559
So you have the Earth and the skies, say the first couple, then the Titans, then the Olympians, right?
00:24:44.720 --> 00:24:47.440
And in the middle, there is this castration theme.
00:24:47.599 --> 00:24:49.279
So this is the succession myth.
00:24:49.440 --> 00:24:51.920
Now, how does Zeus overcome Kronos?
00:24:52.079 --> 00:24:53.119
That's the third episode.
00:24:53.279 --> 00:24:59.119
He basically, there's some kind of fight and he sends him to the underworld, and simplifying a lot, obviously.
00:24:59.279 --> 00:25:01.279
So that's kind of the Greek succession myth.
00:25:02.240 --> 00:25:07.359
So the most striking Near Eastern theme here was the castration of the sky.
00:25:07.839 --> 00:25:19.920
So when scholars discovered the Hittite myths from Anatolia, from the Labron's age, when they decipher the language, eventually they read this myth, the myth of Kumarbi, or the Kumarbi cycle.
00:25:20.079 --> 00:25:23.359
And in this myth, there is a very similar succession myth.
00:25:23.440 --> 00:25:32.319
So you have some kind of first god called Alalu, then you have a sky god called Anu, which is a Semitic word for like above, right?
00:25:32.559 --> 00:25:44.000
And then you have Kumarbi, who is a sort of um crooked-minded god or a grain god who seemed to be then in the position of Kronos, right?
00:25:44.160 --> 00:25:54.079
As the next one after the sky, and he castrates the sky, and the sky then flies above, and he castrates the sky by swallowing his genitals.
00:25:54.720 --> 00:25:56.480
So grosser version.
00:25:57.359 --> 00:26:02.480
When I teach this to my students, they're like, what is wrong with this mythology?
00:26:02.799 --> 00:26:09.440
So then by doing that, he actually becomes pregnant of the next god who is the storm god, the equivalent of Zeus.
00:26:09.839 --> 00:26:21.119
So this is all very interesting, and you know, people talk about how this is not a linear succession because Kumarbi is not the son of Anu, the father of Teshub, the storm god, but not really.
00:26:21.279 --> 00:26:25.440
I mean, really, the Anu is because he comes from his genitals, it's very messed up.
00:26:25.599 --> 00:26:32.960
So whether that means that there are several, this reflects the conflict between two lines, two royal lines, or something like that.
00:26:33.200 --> 00:26:37.119
In any case, when they read this text, there was an aha moment, right?
00:26:37.200 --> 00:26:40.640
Like, aha, the castration of the sky.
00:26:40.799 --> 00:26:45.839
I mean, this is clearly what has been adapted here in Hesiod somehow.
00:26:46.000 --> 00:26:57.440
We have no idea how, if in the Bronze Age, it's coming through oral tradition from the Bronze Age, or is this a theme that has been told in the Levant after the Hittites disappear, right?
00:26:57.519 --> 00:27:00.240
And then at some point it passes to the Greeks.
00:27:00.480 --> 00:27:04.720
Hesiod says that his father is from Asia Minor, for instance, from Kumai, right?
00:27:05.039 --> 00:27:07.200
Is that where this is coming from?
00:27:07.440 --> 00:27:08.400
Who knows, right?
00:27:08.480 --> 00:27:10.079
So that's a striking similarity.
00:27:10.240 --> 00:27:22.480
Then, for instance, if we look at the Hebrew Bible, of course, we have a monotheistic system, so you're not going to have a succession myth, but you still have some echoes of Near Eastern cosmogonies.
00:27:22.720 --> 00:27:34.400
For instance, the idea of a top of the Tohuva Bohu at the beginning of the Bible is this kind of void that people have compared to chaos, like this opening or this formless void.
00:27:34.720 --> 00:27:46.960
Then you have the naming of the earth and the heavens, when God created the heavens and the earth, Shamayim Aetz, there, up there in the first place, kind of like the earth and the sky in the Greek tradition.
00:27:47.200 --> 00:27:56.160
And then you have Yahweh having these battles with Leviathan and overcoming the sea as a force that is kind of an enemy.
00:27:56.319 --> 00:28:00.480
So that has been compared with the fights between Zeus and Typhon and so on.
00:28:00.720 --> 00:28:10.319
But especially you can see kind of the Canaanite background, because you have Canaanite texts, then moving on on my chart in the Ugaritic text.
00:28:10.480 --> 00:28:25.920
So the Ugaritic texts come from North Syria, from this city called Ugarit, that was very important in the late Bronze Age, and we have the archives and tons of texts of a language that is Northwest Semitic, so kind of an old ancestor of Hebrew as well, right?
00:28:26.079 --> 00:28:39.839
So there is the Baal cycle, this poem, epic poem to the God Baal, that sings or elaborates a story of competition between the storm god and the sea god and the death god, right?
00:28:40.000 --> 00:28:45.920
And they're all overseen by this primordial kind of father figure called El or Ilu, right?
00:28:46.079 --> 00:28:47.359
He's above them.
00:28:47.519 --> 00:28:48.640
And there are these fights.
00:28:48.720 --> 00:28:52.160
So there's the fight between the storm god and the sea, the storm god and death.
00:28:52.319 --> 00:28:58.799
So that theme of the storm god fighting and a sort of struggle for power, it's kind of all across.
00:28:59.039 --> 00:29:06.319
So there are parallels between Hesiod and the Canaanite tradition in terms that you have the storm god as the victorious god.
00:29:06.720 --> 00:29:13.440
That is also the case in the Mesopotamian text where you have Marduk coming up at the end as the victorious god.
00:29:13.599 --> 00:29:24.160
So there's this whole common theme of the storm god and of a sort of succession and the fights with sea monsters or sea-like monsters in the different cultures.
00:29:24.319 --> 00:29:26.000
So, what do you make of all of this?
00:29:26.240 --> 00:29:31.119
There are similarities all across, but the similarities are slightly different in cultures, right?
00:29:31.359 --> 00:29:38.319
What we don't have is a Phoenician myth, except in Philo Biblos, who is a Roman author.
00:29:38.480 --> 00:29:53.759
And so in my book, I got a lot into kind of comparing, kind of triangulating, let's say, the Greek tradition with the Ugaritic and Hebrew Bible tradition, and then Philo, at two very opposite ends of the chronological spectrum, right?
00:29:53.839 --> 00:29:56.640
Like Late Bronze Age, and the other one is Roman times.
00:29:56.880 --> 00:30:01.359
Philo is from the kind of like Josephus, you know, turn of the second century.
00:30:01.680 --> 00:30:03.279
So that's what we have, right?
00:30:03.359 --> 00:30:08.640
And the Hebrew Bible in the middle comes in handy also for some part of the reconstruction.
00:30:08.799 --> 00:30:23.839
So what you have in Philo is, first of all, you have an author who is saying that he's reporting Phoenician cosmogony, and he's doing it in this rationalizing way, saying, these are not really gods, this is a history, right?
00:30:24.000 --> 00:30:25.279
And these were real people.
00:30:25.359 --> 00:30:32.480
This is what we call Euhemirism, a trend of doing that kind of rationalizing version of mythology.
00:30:32.640 --> 00:30:35.920
And he writes about that as the beginning of a Phoenician history.
00:30:36.079 --> 00:30:46.799
So his work was called Phoenician history, just like in the Hebrew Bible, let's say you have the creation, and then you move into the judges and then kings and so on, into historical times, right?
00:30:46.880 --> 00:30:49.759
So he's doing sort of the same, but we don't have the rest.
00:30:49.839 --> 00:30:55.839
We only have the creation part, because that's what the later scholars were interested in, which is a different story.
00:30:56.079 --> 00:31:07.599
So what we have in this account, even if it's rationalized, he's transmitting elements that are some of them are clearly old kind of canonite, but probably the Miphoenician mythological elements.
00:31:07.839 --> 00:31:18.640
So he says at the beginning to compare with chaos, we have a dark and windy air and chaos, and then Eliun, who is this highest god, sort of like El.
00:31:19.920 --> 00:31:22.079
He's using uh Elion, exactly.
00:31:22.319 --> 00:31:24.240
In the Hebrew Bible, you have Elion, right?
00:31:24.400 --> 00:31:27.279
So he's using Semitic words in Greek.
00:31:27.519 --> 00:31:32.880
Forgot to say he was writing in Greek, as a good Roman of the Nearist, right?
00:31:33.039 --> 00:31:41.519
He writes, he's a scholar, he writes in Greek, but he's using uh Semitic words often, just transliterating them and sometimes translating them.
00:31:41.599 --> 00:31:49.440
Like he says, Elion, who is heaps also called hypsistos, which is in Greek most high, and it's exactly right.
00:31:49.599 --> 00:32:01.200
Or sometimes he says, There are the sophasham, so fashimim, which are the creatures that first looked up to the heavens, and that they use in Hebrew Sophes, right?
00:32:01.279 --> 00:32:02.559
The ones who look at the sky.
00:32:02.640 --> 00:32:23.440
So he knows the Semitic language, he uses Semitic names, sometimes translates them so clearly, even though he's very late and he's also by that point influenced by all sorts of Hellenistic, let's say, you know, or trends, and possibly even has incorporated some Greek mythology as well, he's also transmitting some Semitic tradition somehow.
00:32:23.599 --> 00:32:27.519
So then he has gay and uranos, earth and heaven, just like Hesiod.
00:32:27.839 --> 00:32:33.440
Then Elos is, he says, Elos, like El is Kronos.
00:32:33.599 --> 00:32:35.680
So Elos is the same as Kronos.
00:32:36.000 --> 00:32:39.839
So he himself is doing this exercise of kind of comparison, right?
00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:44.079
And then he puts in eventually the theme of the castration.
00:32:44.240 --> 00:32:47.359
Now, maybe he did say copy that from Hesiod, right?
00:32:47.440 --> 00:32:49.279
Maybe he's kind of going back in a circle.
00:32:49.359 --> 00:32:57.680
Maybe Hesiod has some Near Eastern stuff in his tradition, but maybe now his influencing this account of Phoenician tradition as well.
00:32:57.839 --> 00:32:59.039
It's hard to tell, right?
00:32:59.200 --> 00:33:14.000
But then he has some features that seem straight from Ugaritic mythology, like the seven daughters of El, this god called Dagon, like a green god that appears in Ugaritic texts, names for Zeus, the storm god like Demarus.
00:33:14.400 --> 00:33:17.599
So just weird stuff that are nowhere else.
00:33:17.920 --> 00:33:51.440
So what I'm doing is trying to see what these traditions, like in Philo and in the Hebrew Bible and Ugarit, tell us about what we have in Hesiod, and then I compare that to the Orphic poems as well, so all the Greek cosmogonists, and kind of try to see or point out uh kind of unique points in common that and then arguing from there that, well, since we have lost quite a bit of the intermediary stages, but it is very likely that the Phoenicians were also transmitting themes that we see in Mesopotamian or Egyptian or Hittite text.
00:33:51.920 --> 00:33:57.519
You're arguing that that the Phoenicians were the medium that transmitted these myths to the Greeks, and also vice versa.
00:33:57.599 --> 00:33:58.559
It wasn't one way, right?
00:33:58.880 --> 00:33:59.119
Right.
00:33:59.279 --> 00:34:00.079
Yeah, exactly.
00:34:00.160 --> 00:34:20.880
Because it has such a strong and constant relationship that as scholars who study the Hellenistic period, like Corinne Bonnet, she, for instance, would say that there is a certain point where even talking about Hellenization of Phoenicia or Phoenicianization of the Greeks is kind of a null point because they have formed some of these traditions kind of together.
00:34:21.119 --> 00:34:27.119
There is a point where Phoenician culture itself is, yeah, highly Hellenized in a way, but that is what it is.
00:34:27.280 --> 00:34:29.119
And this is a very long relationship.
00:34:29.199 --> 00:34:46.079
It's not something that happens like for other areas in the Hellenistic period, like for Persia or for other parts of the Levant, where there is a sudden wave of Greek culture that that is not the case in Phoenicia, in that area, because that had been going on earlier on for centuries.
00:34:47.119 --> 00:34:52.800
Can you touch on some more parallels between Zeus and the storm god El or Baal?
00:34:53.039 --> 00:34:53.840
It'd be Baal, right?
00:34:53.920 --> 00:34:54.880
Baal is a storm god.
00:34:55.280 --> 00:35:02.960
For instance, Zeus is called the cloud rider, and that's exactly how he's called in Eugalithic text, Baal is called the Cloud Rider.
00:35:03.440 --> 00:35:12.960
Zeus is an interesting character because as cloud rider, and as he's characterized in the Greek tradition, he does have these features that seem to be like the Near Eastern storm god.
00:35:13.039 --> 00:35:23.599
Like he produces rain and he fights similar enemies, but also he genealogically, let's say, he is also the Indo-European god of the day, right?
00:35:23.679 --> 00:35:29.840
That's where his name comes from, from day and brightness, not of the clouds, right?
00:35:30.320 --> 00:35:42.559
But also something interesting about this comparison is, for instance, in Homer, not in Hesiod, but in Homer, he says that Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades distributed their realms by lot.
00:35:42.800 --> 00:35:50.000
So that is Zeus, the god of the sea and the god of death, right, distributed equally these realms.
00:35:50.159 --> 00:35:54.320
And that is not exactly what we have in Hesiod, where it's more of a tiered thing.
00:35:54.480 --> 00:36:04.239
But it is what we have in the Eugaritic poems, where you have Baal and Yam and Moth, Death and the Sea, as equal and rivals, right?
00:36:04.480 --> 00:36:16.000
So that scheme, for instance, is similar in the Eugaritic texts and mythology, and in this passing reference in Homer that seems to be kind of different from the standard cosmogony.
00:36:16.159 --> 00:36:18.079
So there are just interesting things like that.
00:36:18.239 --> 00:36:36.480
And then there are interesting things about Kronos as well, and parallels between Kronos and El, how Kronos, the Greek god and Saturn, where actually that character was equated or assimilated or identified with El, or in the Western Mediterranean with Baal Hamon as a main deity.
00:36:36.719 --> 00:36:45.280
So the Phoenicians themselves engaged in the same exercise of identifying their own deities with the Greek deities.
00:36:45.440 --> 00:36:46.880
It's not that we are just making it up.
00:36:47.039 --> 00:36:49.519
They actually made that association, right?
00:36:49.920 --> 00:36:56.960
Which in turn facilitates stories to be transferred, the stories about the one to be transferred to the stories about the other, right?
00:36:57.360 --> 00:37:09.280
So there's really clear parallels between Greek and Levantine gods that you just pointed out, but there are also a number of more subtle motifs that you highlight in your book that are found in the Greek origin myths and also those of Levantine peoples.
00:37:09.440 --> 00:37:12.400
And I want to touch on a couple of those that I found pretty interesting.
00:37:12.639 --> 00:37:22.000
So can you start by explaining the motif of inspiration through mystic experiences or dreams that's common to both Greek and Levantine and biblical traditions?
00:37:22.480 --> 00:37:25.840
Yeah, through dreams or through encounters, right?
00:37:26.000 --> 00:37:32.639
Like the theme of Hesiod as a poet that is presenting himself as a shepherd that is in the mountains, right?
00:37:32.719 --> 00:37:35.440
And he gets this inspiration from the muses.
00:37:35.920 --> 00:37:43.840
That seems to fit into this pattern of revelation, really, of that we have in the Hebrew Bible with the prophets or even with Moses.
00:37:44.239 --> 00:37:48.400
And that is kind of common to the Greek tradition and to the Israelite tradition.
00:37:48.639 --> 00:37:53.039
I would say that that is probably something that belonged in a broader Levant.
00:37:53.199 --> 00:37:56.159
In other traditions, we don't have, but we have it in the Hebrew Bible.
00:37:56.239 --> 00:38:08.079
So that is striking because it makes you look at the theogony of Hesiod a little bit more seriously, kind of as a sort of revelation that he's saying, whether it's true, obviously, or not, that's not the point.
00:38:08.239 --> 00:38:16.239
Whether he's a shepherd or not also is not the point, but he's presenting his account as given through this revelation, right?
00:38:16.480 --> 00:38:17.760
That is prophetic.
00:38:17.840 --> 00:38:25.599
And he says that the muses give him this laurel branch, and the laurel is the plant of Apollo, who is associated with prophecy.
00:38:25.760 --> 00:38:34.239
And he says that they give him the chart to sing about the past and the present and the future, even though he never really talks about the future, right?
00:38:34.400 --> 00:38:36.400
But I mean, not explicitly.
00:38:36.559 --> 00:38:37.360
But maybe he does.
00:38:37.519 --> 00:38:39.760
Maybe for him the future means eternal things.
00:38:39.840 --> 00:38:43.440
I'm talking about the gods who existed then and will exist later on.
00:38:43.679 --> 00:38:45.440
I think that's what he's saying in a sense.
00:38:45.599 --> 00:39:02.079
But in any case, that that is being presented as a sort of revelation that we see in these other traditions with uh amos and other figures who speak in similar ways about being inspired, like even the divine voice in their breath, literally.
00:39:02.480 --> 00:39:09.760
And touch on you mentioned a little bit, but go back to the motif of a holy mountain in Levant cultures and in Greek cultures.
00:39:10.079 --> 00:39:11.519
Yeah, that's another shared motif.
00:39:11.599 --> 00:39:14.719
And maybe it's because there are a lot of mountains in Greece.
00:39:14.880 --> 00:39:16.960
And there are mountains in the Levant.
00:39:17.119 --> 00:39:19.119
Not so much in Mesopotamia or in Egypt.
00:39:19.199 --> 00:39:21.920
There may be something, but depending on how far you go.
00:39:22.239 --> 00:39:33.599
This I would say is also a shared theme at the divine level, and in this theme of the revelation, at the divine level, because you have the mountain where the gods live, and that is pretty particular, right?
00:39:33.679 --> 00:39:36.960
You don't really have that in Mesopotamia or, or let alone in Egypt.
00:39:37.679 --> 00:39:43.440
But in the Hittite tradition, there are some stories that involve monstery mountains, but it's not the same.
00:39:43.519 --> 00:40:00.880
But the idea that the gods live on a palace on a mountain in the north is shared by the Greek tradition with Mount Olympos, and in the Eucharist tradition with uh Mount Safon or Sapan, which is this mountain in North Syria next to the coast.
00:40:01.119 --> 00:40:02.480
So that's very interesting.
00:40:02.639 --> 00:40:04.960
And the poetry engages with the mountain a lot.
00:40:05.039 --> 00:40:16.320
Like the music are coming down from the mountain, and the gods are up there, and Baal is complaining that he doesn't have a palace like the other gods, so they built him a palace on the mountain and so on.
00:40:16.559 --> 00:40:35.440
And then the fact is that yeah, Hesiod starts his poetry by evoking this mountain landscape where he receives this revelation, and he starts mentioning the mountain of his area in Mount Helicon, which is in the area of Boeotia where he says he's from, and then moves on to Mount Olympus, right?
00:40:35.599 --> 00:40:39.360
Like a kind of like the local mountain and the Panhellenic mountain.
00:40:39.519 --> 00:40:40.719
So that's interesting too.
00:40:41.119 --> 00:40:58.800
So do you see a connection there between Levantine religious beliefs and culture being transmitted to the Greek world, or is that more just a universal human thing that mountains and high places are holy, just like in the Near East, in ancient times, caves were seen as some kind of a gateway to another world or dimension.
00:40:58.880 --> 00:41:03.039
And you also have that in South and North America, but there's obviously no connection between the two.
00:41:03.280 --> 00:41:07.920
Do you see a connection culturally, or is it just a normal human thing to connect?
00:41:08.320 --> 00:41:08.800
I don't know.
00:41:08.880 --> 00:41:10.159
That's always the question.
00:41:10.320 --> 00:41:19.119
I think there are themes that if they appear in several very faraway cultures that have not been historically in contact, then you will say they are universal themes.
00:41:19.440 --> 00:41:33.440
So the line is okay, when you see a similar theme attached to a broader scheme within a type of poem about the storm god and about origins and attached to a particular type of God and a particular type of revelation.
00:41:33.679 --> 00:41:46.960
When there are more elements kind of attached to the theme, providing more of a structure and the whole structure is similar, then it's easier to argue for transmission, especially when the cultures are known to have been in contact.
00:41:47.039 --> 00:41:49.840
So in this case, it could have been shared.
00:41:50.000 --> 00:41:57.360
Again, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's from east to west, from west to east, we don't know or at what point, but shared themes among cultures that are in contact.
00:41:57.519 --> 00:42:07.519
I think in this case, possibly, because they come with within a package about creation stories or about this sort of revelation, you know, that is fairly similar.
00:42:08.000 --> 00:42:11.519
And the last one I wanted to ask you about was that of the tree and the stone.
00:42:11.679 --> 00:42:16.960
So what role does the theme of a tree and a stone play in the Levantine tradition?
00:42:17.039 --> 00:42:19.280
And how do we see it amongst the Greek traditions?
00:42:19.760 --> 00:42:32.000
Oof, I this was the first like case study, and I thought it was gonna be just this brief thing I wanted to look into because there were these parallels and possible parallels, but nobody had really expanded on that.
00:42:32.239 --> 00:42:35.119
And I ended up going down the rabbit hole.
00:42:35.599 --> 00:42:36.880
But it was very cool.
00:42:36.960 --> 00:42:40.880
And actually, a lot of people have told me that they enjoyed that case study.
00:42:41.119 --> 00:42:47.920
So I think it was just weird that he throws in this tree and the stone question, like, what do I care?
00:42:48.079 --> 00:42:49.840
Why am I talking about the tree and the stone?
00:42:49.920 --> 00:42:55.039
And in the middle of this introductory part where he's talking about revelations and all that.
00:42:55.280 --> 00:43:01.039
And then this is just like an interjection or a maybe a proverb of some sort, right?
00:43:01.199 --> 00:43:04.400
And then he goes right into his narrative.
00:43:04.719 --> 00:43:12.079
So scholars like Martin West and others have pointed out that, well, the tree and the stone are such a Semitic thing, right?
00:43:12.159 --> 00:43:16.159
You have the Asherah and the Matzeba, like the sacred tree and secret stone.
00:43:16.320 --> 00:43:23.039
You have mentions of tree and the stone, like coupled like that in other sort of proverbs in Greek tradition, from Homer to Plato.
00:43:23.199 --> 00:43:25.440
And it always has some connotation.
00:43:25.599 --> 00:43:34.320
It varies, but within the range of origins, either origins of humans or origins of things or mysterious things, or yeah.
00:43:34.400 --> 00:43:37.519
So looking at it, then it turns out it disappears in Yugari.
00:43:37.840 --> 00:43:39.679
This is in the Bada cycle.
00:43:39.840 --> 00:43:52.079
Again, there is this also sort of cryptic mention of the tree and the stone, like uh whispering, whisperings of the tree and words of stone to refer to kind of divine messages.
00:43:52.320 --> 00:43:56.639
So it's hard to put your finger on it, even though I wrote like 60 pages about it.
00:43:56.800 --> 00:43:59.760
But there is something going on where tree and stone, you know, are.
00:44:00.159 --> 00:44:08.320
This shortcut for something that has to do with creation stories, with revelation, with some kind of religious realm.
00:44:08.480 --> 00:44:14.400
And I'm not saying necessarily that there was a cult of Asherah and Matzebah in Archaic Greece.
00:44:14.800 --> 00:44:16.239
Some people have argued that there was.
00:44:16.320 --> 00:44:17.039
I mean, who knows?
00:44:17.199 --> 00:44:24.719
But not exactly, you know, it doesn't have to be that, but more as a literary trope, it seems to be shared by these traditions in particular.
00:44:24.880 --> 00:44:30.960
Because I haven't seen it in the other ones, in Mesopotamia or Hittite, or, you know, not so similar.
00:44:31.360 --> 00:44:32.000
It's interesting.
00:44:32.239 --> 00:44:38.960
So could you tell me more about the current book that you're working on and how it builds off your previous research, including the book When the Gods Were Born?
00:44:39.360 --> 00:44:40.000
Sure.
00:44:40.239 --> 00:44:44.400
So I was looking again a little bit of my introductory chapter in When the Gods Were Born.
00:44:44.480 --> 00:44:59.679
And when I've been doing since I wrote this first monograph, has been to research more, get more and more into what kind of cultural contact was happening between the Phoenicians and the Greeks, and to look more at the historical context and archaeology.
00:44:59.760 --> 00:45:05.920
And it all started by writing about cosmogonies and creation stories and these literary and mythological themes.
00:45:06.079 --> 00:45:17.440
But in order to give that some historical framework and argue for a transmission, I had to write this introductory chapter saying, well, I think this is the cultural context that explains this.
00:45:17.679 --> 00:45:22.159
Then what I've done is like, okay, now I have to actually get more into that.
00:45:22.719 --> 00:45:50.239
So my next project basically, I've been is the product of all these years gathering, you know, knowledge and thoughts about this issue of what's going on in the say eight century, eight, seventh centuries, when we have the earliest Greek texts, what we call orientalizing art, the earliest sculptures that look so kind of Near Eastern y, and all the sphinxes and all these motifs, the borrowing of the Phoenician alphabet.
00:45:50.320 --> 00:45:51.920
I mean, all these other things, right?
00:45:52.239 --> 00:45:55.119
That we classify as orientalizing.
00:45:55.199 --> 00:45:56.320
But what does that mean?
00:45:56.480 --> 00:46:28.400
So expanding my arguments from the mythology to a more broad cultural argument, I've been building an argument about the role of the Phoenicians as cultural agents that who are very important in that sense, not just as merchants and traders and coloners, but they carry with them, you know, their own version of Eastern culture, and that that from the Aegean to southern Spain and North Africa, that is what these local groups encountered and were in contact with.
00:46:28.639 --> 00:46:33.039
Doesn't mean they never encountered a Mesopotamian or an Egyptian or whatnot, right?
00:46:33.360 --> 00:46:39.920
But that the close, sustained contact was mostly with these Levantines that we call Phoenicians.
00:46:40.239 --> 00:46:43.679
So my book is called Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean.
00:46:43.840 --> 00:47:12.159
So arguing that this wave, a sort of kind of globalizing cultural koine that we call orientalizing, that is really the product of this interaction between Phoenicians and locals, mostly that they are the main conveyors of these versions of Neo Eastern culture, that every local people, every local group adapt or not by their own choice, and depending on their own needs or priorities or whatever is useful for them.
00:47:12.320 --> 00:47:13.599
It's not obligatory.
00:47:13.760 --> 00:47:21.280
And that we see this from Spain to the Levant when Israelites and Cilicians and others are also using the Phoenician alphabet.
00:47:21.360 --> 00:47:28.400
You know, it's really a movement that radiates from Phoenicia, from these cities into all the areas where they are active.
00:47:28.559 --> 00:47:46.639
So that is a study of that and a study of a little bit of a kind of critical historiography of how this phenomenon has been dealt with from different disciplines, whether it's classics or Western Mediterranean archaeology or Levantine archaeology or in different countries, right?
00:47:46.880 --> 00:47:50.719
How do scholars and disciplines deal with this in different ways?
00:47:50.800 --> 00:47:56.880
And what does that tell us about our view of the Greeks and others and classics and all that?
00:47:57.280 --> 00:47:58.000
When's the book?
00:47:58.559 --> 00:48:02.639
If everything goes well, I'll send it out off in a couple of weeks into production.
00:48:02.800 --> 00:48:09.760
So and then whatever it takes, you know, it might take a year, hopefully less than a year, maybe the end of 2021.
00:48:09.920 --> 00:48:10.480
We'll see.
00:48:10.880 --> 00:48:11.199
Cool.
00:48:11.440 --> 00:48:19.119
Well, the name is still pretty epic, and I know it's hard to top the original book, book name that you came up with when the gods were born, but the new one sounds good too.
00:48:19.760 --> 00:48:20.639
Thank you.
00:48:21.039 --> 00:48:22.719
So I think I'm very excited about it.
00:48:23.280 --> 00:48:23.840
Yeah.
00:48:24.079 --> 00:48:27.039
I can't wait to check it out and have you back on to discuss it.
00:48:27.199 --> 00:48:30.960
So thanks again for taking the time to be with us and look forward to talking soon.
00:48:31.360 --> 00:48:33.679
Always my pleasure, and it would be my pleasure to come back.
00:48:33.760 --> 00:48:35.199
Thank you so much, Alex.
00:00:03.919 --> 00:00:09.199
I'm your host Alex and welcome to the Levantine Podcast, a show about Near Eastern history, language, and culture.
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To learn more about the show and get in touch, you can visit our website at LeventinePod.com.
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Carolina Lopez-Ruiz is a professor at Ohio State University in the classics department, and her research focuses on understanding Greek culture in its broader ancient Mediterranean context.
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She has authored a number of books on the Phoenician civilization, and in this episode, we discussed her book When the Gods Were Born, which examines the links between ancient Greek civilization and the Northwest Semitic peoples and how the cultural exchange between the two influenced Greek origin myths.
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I had a great time speaking with her, and I hope you enjoy the show.
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Okay, we're live.
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Thanks for being here.
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Thank you.
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So it seems that the majority of your career has been spent investigating the Phoenician civilization and the links of Levantine peoples to the Greek world, the Mediterranean world.
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What drew you to this area of research?
00:01:02.320 --> 00:01:03.759
Thank you for that question, Alex.
00:01:03.920 --> 00:01:10.400
There is probably a very long version, and uh but I'll try to give a medium-sized version.
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I started off as a classicist by training, let's say, in classical philology in Europe, which is fairly traditional, a lot of Greek and Latin in every possible aspect of it, very linguistic-oriented and so on.
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But at the same time, I was kind of more drawn to a broader Mediterranean context.
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So I did not start out as a Near Eastern scholar, but as a classicist.
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But I started studying Hebrew and Arabic in my free time because I was just very interested in these other Mediterranean cultures.
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So for quite a while, I wasn't sure how I was gonna connect those two or more than two disciplines, right?
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And um and one way we ended up connecting them was going to Chicago to do my PhD because they have this wonderful program on the Mediterranean world.
00:02:00.640 --> 00:02:13.919
And somehow, through Greek text and archaic Greek literature, and reading about connections and possible influences in this type of poetry, like Hyssio and Homer, that's where I found the wedge.
00:02:14.080 --> 00:02:18.879
So I was studying Hebrew then in Chicago more formally and Eucharitic and all that.
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So I got more into that.
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So that kind of led me to the Phoenicians in some way, in part because I was studying Northwest Semitic languages as well.
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So I was more familiar with that world.
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But also the Phoenicians kind of provided a historically grounded link for me to connect the Near Eastern world and the classical world because they were so actively connected with the Greek world, right?
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We know from archaeology, from literature, and so on.
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So it's kind of a meandering path that kind of trying to connect these separate areas of my training.
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And the third leg of that is that having grown up in Spain, and also I ended up looking at the same time, I was looking at what are the Phoenicians doing in southern Spain, right?
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And there's all this archaeology, you know, mostly just archaeology more than text or anything.
00:03:04.719 --> 00:03:16.000
So that was another part of this puzzle that I was curious about, which has come more into play in my later research about colonization and cultural contact and so on.
00:03:16.080 --> 00:03:20.719
But in a sense, I kept finding the Phoenicians everywhere in areas where that I was interested in.
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So yeah, and that's what led me to end up doing this sort of work.
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So for people who aren't familiar with the Phoenicians, who were the Phoenicians and what are the highlights of their major contributions to world civilization?
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Oh my god.
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So the Phoenicians is how we call, we uh meaning the Western world, beginning with the Greeks, it's the name that has been given since the ancient Greeks, to you know, the group of peoples and city-states in the Levant, in the say northern Leban, north of Israel, into you know the coast of North Syria, let's say.
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Mainly what is today's uh Lebanon coast with a little bit of northern Israel and a little bit of northern Syria and coast, right?
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So that strip of land is where these city-states emerged at the turn of the millennium.
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Well, they existed before, but they kind of became a salient culture of their own, let's say, through the with a particular language and a particular alphabet and so on.
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So the Greeks earlier on, as soon as we have Greek texts, they identify people from this area as Phoenicians.
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We don't know how they call themselves.
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Some people think they call themselves canonized, the evidence is kind of very slim.
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But however they call themselves, it doesn't matter.
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It's a culture that emerges from the background of the Canaanite cultures.
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So one way of thinking about them is the Phoenicians are the coastal canonite cities of that area.
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From Accol, let's say, in northern Israel, to Aruad, almost Ugari, that is south of Ugari, and including Biblos also in the north and Tyre towards the south, right?
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So those cities, and they do have a distinct culture once we can trace it not only in the Levant, but also they extend colonies abroad from southern Spain to Sicily, North Africa, like Carthage, and so on, around the ninth century, let's say.
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And at that point, you start having inscriptions with the same language and the fairly uniform, homogeneous language and script through the Mediterranean wherever they are, types of pottery, types of art, types of, you know.
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So basically, like the Greeks, they didn't have a unified, say, country-nation state, rather, they were city-states, just like the Greeks, very similar setup, but they had a coherent, mutually recognizable and externally recognizable culture, which is why the Greeks gave a name that was very consistently used through antiquity.
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They're most famous for the alphabet that they spread.
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They didn't necessarily invent it, it was an alphabetic writing system that ultimately derived from the Canonite writing system.
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So it's a Northwest Semitic alphabet, but they standardized it and they exported it, right?
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And the Greeks adopted it, and the etrus comes from them, and then the Latins and so on.
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So the alphabet, the Greeks associated definitions with the alphabet and with a lot of cultural advancements of different sorts.
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And they were very well known as well as settlers everywhere, and merchants and uh naval experts, right?
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So they were the fleet of the Persian Empire, for instance, and so on.
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So industries, metallurgy, exploitation of metals and working of metals, purple dye and textiles and other specialized industries.
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I think that's where the name comes from, right?
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The Greek word for the Phoenicians is we think, yeah, we think it can mean that.
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It can also phoenix can also mean palm tree, which is also uh something that is associated with Phoenicians, but it's probably from the purple that they were famous for, even though, again, they may not have invented it.
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It may have been first done in Crete in the Bronze Age, in fact, now that people think, but they definitely became experts on it.
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So they were associated with particular crafts and technical expertises that they spread through the Mediterranean and that they were trading with and so on.
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And how long did the civilization last?
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What's the most ancient references we see to what either is explicitly referring to the Phoenicians or to what we think may be the Phoenicians till the end?
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When did they kind of peter out?
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Well, there is a point where the Eastern and the Western Mediterranean kind of diverge.
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So in the Eastern Mediterranean, you can say that once the Phoenician cities are conquered by Alexander the Great in the, you know, at the end of the fourth century BC, it's not that the Phoenician culture disappears, but by that point it's also pretty heavily Hellenized, and then it kind of gets absorbed, like it happens with other cultures of the in the area.
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But still in Roman times, you have authors talking about Phoenician stuff like Phil of Biblos or talking or writing as Phoenicians in some way, but by that point we think it's more of a kind of an intellectual identity, or we think that the language disappeared by early Roman times, you know, there.
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Now in North Africa, so in the Western Mediterranean, especially in North Africa, the area of Carthage and Algeria, and the language continued even into late antiquity, right?
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So we have inscriptions in Punic and in Latin and Punic, like bilinguals, and in Latino-Punic, like Latin letters, in the whole range until 30th century AD or something like that.
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But also we have testimonies like St.
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Augustine in the 5th century, maybe talking about how the countryside people still spoke Phoenician.
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I mean, Punic is how the Romans called it, which is the same.
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So it lasted longer in the West, the culture, the language, than in the East, in a sense.
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And how close was that language to ancient Hebrew or ancient Aramaic?
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It's very close.
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It's less well attested because it's attested only in inscriptions pretty much.
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So there are more gaps.
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But if you know Hebrew or Aramaic, you can read Phoenician inscriptions with some difficulties, maybe, but they belong to the same broader family, but still it's clearly distinct in enough ways, perhaps even more than Hebrew from Aramaic.
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It's distinct enough, but similar enough.
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They're cousins, they're like Italian and Spanish or something.
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So, how rich or limiting is the archaeological record when it comes to the Phoenicians?
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So if we're looking at architecture, monumental architecture, any other archaeological remains that were found concerning them, what is that like versus textually?
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What did they leave behind?
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There is much more archaeological evidence than textual, because the textual evidence, the literature that they had, we were pretty sure they must have had, is pretty much lost due to historical circumstances, right?
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Nobody took care of it like the Romans did with Greek literature or the Jewish people with their texts, right?
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So basically we lost their literature, and when we have our inscriptions and then references by classical authors to Phoenician authors, and sometimes they quote or they paraphrase something.
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So it's very fragmentary.
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Whereas archaeologically, actually there is quite a lot growing like every day, and especially in the Western Mediterranean, probably just because of geopolitical and geographical circumstances, there is more archaeology coming out.
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So the challenge is how to interpret it, how to build a kind of more holistic view of the Phoenician world because it's so expansive from the east to the west.
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But even in Lebanon and especially in northern Israel lately, there are sites there that are fully excavated, like Accor, Teldor, and others that are providing incredible amounts of evidence for Iron Age Phoenicians, whereas in Lebanon itself, because it's so built up and it's very difficult to excavate those levels, but still there are good some movement there.
00:11:00.639 --> 00:11:15.679
Yeah, so it's kind of one of the biggest challenges is that the textual evidence, which is why when I want to compare Greek cosmogonists with Northwest Semitic cosmogonies, or you end up looking at other periods, other corpora, right?
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Like Eucharitic or Hebrew or very late testimonies of Phoenician stuff, because we lack the equivalent contemporary to Hesiod or to classical authors, right?
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So you mentioned that you're from Spain and obviously the the Phoenicians made it all the way to Spain at one point.
00:11:34.639 --> 00:11:42.399
When archaeologists are excavating what they think are Phoenician sites in areas as far as Spain, how do you identify it as Phoenician?
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That's a good question.
00:11:45.440 --> 00:11:48.480
Well, archaeologists become very, very specialized.
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They have their typologies, especially of pottery.
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So there's a lot of debate, obviously, about how pots are not the same as people.
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And if you have Greek pots in one place, it doesn't mean that Greeks took them there or wise or whatever.
00:12:02.080 --> 00:12:06.720
There is, you know, a whole theoretical question about the relationship between pottery and culture.
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But in the end, pottery is the most common remain, archaeological remain in the ancient Mediterranean, and it does follow typologies.
00:12:15.600 --> 00:12:21.519
So basically, the main marker is, I think, pottery, especially for these early levels.
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So you have pottery that is classified as tire type pottery from the 9th century and the 8th century, and you have that appearing in a level in Huelva or in Cadiz that by other measures maybe belong to that, more or less that period.
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So you date it by the pottery mainly.
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And then if you find other stuff like inscriptions, is that you know that would be the best, which they do find, even just small graphities or any remains of any sign of Phoenician writing.
00:12:50.000 --> 00:12:56.720
So if you have some materials that are typical of Phoenician culture, as much as we can tell, and writing, that's ideal.
00:12:56.799 --> 00:13:00.080
Then you have construction types that are levantine.
00:13:00.240 --> 00:13:08.960
So in the earliest stages of these places, you have a type of construction that is exactly the same type of construction that you have in Iron Age, Levant, right?
00:13:09.200 --> 00:13:12.559
The measures of those constructions that they use.
00:13:13.200 --> 00:13:34.080
So what forces were at play in it'd probably be around the Iron Age or the earth of the Bronze Age, the Bronze Age collapse that that spurred Greek civilizations to head east, and whether that was the Sea Peoples or others, and then the same thing with regards to the Phoenicians, what elements were at play in their world that motivated them to travel and settle west?
00:13:34.480 --> 00:13:44.960
I think we're still learning and evolving in how we think this happened or why we think these movements happened, because things are changing constantly, like archaeologically.
00:13:45.120 --> 00:13:54.240
So, for instance, without getting into the sea people after the collapse of the Bronze Age, there is a sort of vacuum of powers of the great empires, right?
00:13:54.320 --> 00:13:58.720
The Egyptians, the Hittites, and the Assyrians are not yet dominant.
00:13:58.879 --> 00:14:10.159
So it seems like the Phoenician cities were not particularly affected by this, especially the southern Phoenician cities like Tyre and Sylon, who become the most prominent ones in the Iron Age.
00:14:10.320 --> 00:14:16.399
So they seem to have kind of benefited, if anything, from this vacuum of power and have grown at that point.
00:14:16.559 --> 00:14:18.720
Like after the 10th century, they start expanding.
00:14:18.799 --> 00:14:21.200
And in the 9th century is when they set up colonies.
00:14:21.360 --> 00:14:24.879
So in the middle of that, the CPP post had also made it to the Levant.
00:14:25.039 --> 00:14:31.679
But in the case of the Phoenicians, the general idea is that they are seeking resources to expand their trading network.
00:14:31.840 --> 00:14:36.799
And they start in Cyprus looking for metals, probably tin, silver.
00:14:37.039 --> 00:14:40.399
Tin is really rare, but in Cyprus mostly copper.
00:14:40.559 --> 00:14:45.440
But in the far west, what they're looking for maybe is resources of tin and silver.
00:14:45.600 --> 00:14:47.600
And tin maybe coming from the Atlantic.
00:14:47.679 --> 00:14:53.440
So they are trying to establish networks that will allow them to bring in those resources.
00:14:53.679 --> 00:15:10.559
Now, the idea until not too long ago, and you might still read it in some places, was that they start doing this in the 8th century because the Assyrian expansion is pressuring them to find raw materials to feed the empire, let's say, and to match the demands of the empire.
00:15:10.799 --> 00:15:16.879
But then archaeologists found this evidence of the earliest point of expansion to earlier on to the 9th century.
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And this is coming from Spain, also from new dates from Carthage and Utica, but especially from Huelva and Cádiz.
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So that is kind of changing the picture because that's too early for the Assyrians to have been the reason, right?
00:15:31.600 --> 00:15:52.159
Then what you have, the new picture, I think, is rather that these guys, especially Tyre, and then kind of matching with what the written sources say is that Tyre is actually growing as a commercial empire and is doing this by its own initiative and with its own plan, right?
00:15:52.320 --> 00:15:58.639
And that that is actually why the Assyrians do not really mistreat Tyre much until very late.
00:15:58.799 --> 00:16:04.240
They give it a special treatment because it becomes their outlet to this whole network, right?
00:16:04.399 --> 00:16:06.559
So that's why I said that the picture is evolving.
00:16:06.639 --> 00:16:18.240
And in the case of the Phoenicians, I think we're gearing towards a picture of something of an enterprise that was much more deliberately driven by probably a state, the state of Tyre.
00:16:18.480 --> 00:16:20.399
But you know, some people will disagree.
00:16:20.559 --> 00:16:23.039
But I think that's where evidence is going.
00:16:23.279 --> 00:16:31.919
As for the Greeks, that's the broader colonization movement in the eighth century, maybe driven by just search for new land, for new resources.
00:16:32.080 --> 00:16:43.200
They are also kind of piggybagging and tapping onto the network that the Phoenicians have begun to establish earlier on, and that allows for that connectivity and that degree of communication, right?
00:16:43.279 --> 00:16:48.720
That shortens the distances that opened networks with local peoples in different areas.
00:16:48.960 --> 00:16:54.240
So the Greeks kind of benefited from that too and profited from that.
00:16:54.639 --> 00:16:54.960
Right.
00:16:55.120 --> 00:16:56.240
That's really interesting.
00:16:56.480 --> 00:17:06.079
So in your book, When the Gods Were Born, you noted that as these cultures settled amongst each other and traded with each other, it can be assumed that intermarriage occurred and bilingualism occurred.
00:17:06.240 --> 00:17:11.440
In your opinion, who were the major transmitters of religious myths and beliefs and traditions?
00:17:11.920 --> 00:17:13.119
That's a hard question.
00:17:13.359 --> 00:17:26.000
Kind of my intuition when I was writing this and still when talking about mythology and cultural contact is that yeah, that we need to think of these areas of communication in a more complex way, in a more open way.
00:17:26.160 --> 00:17:50.640
So to think about the context of bilingualism and families and groups of people who are kind of caught in between the two cultures, or two or more cultures, and that, as I kind of argued in the book, that they may or may not be aware that they are adapting a foreign theme, that we see it that way because we dissect this text as, oh, this seems Near Eastern and this seems Greek.
00:17:50.799 --> 00:18:01.599
But if we think of these mixed communities or contexts where people are exposed to a different language and a different mythology, then those distinctions are not so relevant, right?
00:18:01.839 --> 00:18:03.680
Because they are that's their culture.
00:18:03.759 --> 00:18:05.039
Their culture is a mixed culture.
00:18:05.119 --> 00:18:18.160
So I think that some of these stories came through those channels of kind of family channels, also traveling people, you know, people who did travel for their profession, merchants or whatever, but also within families that may have had that element.
00:18:18.319 --> 00:18:19.839
And the same for the alphabet.
00:18:19.920 --> 00:18:30.640
And that, you know, a lot of people have said that the alphabet was probably adopted by Greeks in some such way, by somebody who knew both languages, right?
00:18:30.880 --> 00:18:34.480
And then one of the languages had a writing system and the other didn't.
00:18:34.640 --> 00:18:39.359
So, well, I'm just gonna use that writing system to write the other language, Greek, right?
00:18:39.839 --> 00:18:45.039
I don't know that that's the only context, the family context as a channel for this transmission.
00:18:45.119 --> 00:18:51.359
I think there is the whole idea of the religious specialists, I think that's an important concept as well.
00:18:51.599 --> 00:19:02.400
And at some point, perhaps specialized poets that were deliberately listening or even reading at one point other poetry at some point.
00:19:02.480 --> 00:19:02.880
I don't know.
00:19:03.039 --> 00:19:03.200
Right.
00:19:03.359 --> 00:19:03.680
When.
00:19:04.400 --> 00:19:17.119
So before we get into the specifics of the different cosmogonies that you lay out, whether it's the Greek or or the Phoenician, I think it'd be helpful for you to lay out what the central hypothesis that you proposed in your book when the gods were born.
00:19:17.599 --> 00:19:20.799
So yeah, basically I was looking at Greek cosmogonies.
00:19:21.119 --> 00:19:23.279
And explain what a what a cosmogony is as well.
00:19:23.519 --> 00:19:25.680
Ah, let's start with what a cosmogony is.
00:19:25.759 --> 00:19:26.799
Yes, good idea.
00:19:27.039 --> 00:19:30.720
So basically, stories about the beginnings of the universe, right?
00:19:30.880 --> 00:19:42.000
What was first, how was the universe formed, but broadly speaking, also theogonies, which is basically the same, but instead of just the origins of the cosmos, it will be the origins of the gods.
00:19:42.160 --> 00:19:46.400
So stories of origins, of divine origins, and so on.
00:19:46.799 --> 00:20:04.720
So what I was doing in Age was to try to look specifically at how much of particularly the tradition from the Levant, the Northwest Semitic cultures, we could see in these Near Eastern elements that people have been pointing out that existed in Greek cosmogonies.
00:20:04.799 --> 00:20:06.720
So let's say in Hesiodony.
00:20:07.039 --> 00:20:15.759
And I did this because, well, we have uh a better knowledge and obviously more text from Mesopotamia, even from the heated culture, right?
00:20:15.920 --> 00:20:29.599
We have cuneiform tablets, so we have complete or semi-complete, fragmentary, maybe, but you know, more complete texts and myths that come directly from those cultures, even from Egypt, though Egypt is kind of a separate thing.
00:20:29.920 --> 00:20:49.200
So my main thesis was that, well, because we have those texts, people have been drawn, scholars have been drawn to looking at these parallels and find Near Eastern themes like the castration theme or whatever, to these other cultures that we have bigger, more impressive corpora, literary corpora from.
00:20:49.440 --> 00:20:53.599
Because we have that gap in the sources that I mentioned before about the Phoenicians, right?
00:20:53.839 --> 00:21:17.519
So my whole effort was to find some traces of more or less clear, I think, Northwest Semitic connections and influence, and argue that, well, that these are the people, the Phoenicians and other Levantines were the ones who were in closest contact with the Greeks, and we know that because of archaeology and even literary testimonies, right, and historical circumstances and all that.
00:21:17.759 --> 00:21:27.039
So my argument was that, well, we have this gap, but with a little bit of fine coming, right, we can see that there is that influence too.
00:21:27.200 --> 00:21:46.480
And we can argue, or in my argument, was that even some of the other themes that seem to be coming from the Hittite culture or Mesopotamian or Egyptian actually may have been part of that Levantine Northwest Semitic legacy, that we don't have the direct intermediary, right?
00:21:46.640 --> 00:21:48.240
It's more of a reconstruction.
00:21:48.799 --> 00:21:59.759
Let's start with the Greek cosmogony then, or theogony, whichever one you think is the best to start with, gets a little confusing, but I want to start by examining the Greek cosmogony and deity succession myths that are there.
00:22:00.079 --> 00:22:01.359
And that you talk about in the book.
00:22:01.519 --> 00:22:07.920
And then let's move on to the 11 Northwest Semitic ones to see the similarities that you call out.
00:22:08.400 --> 00:22:09.839
I'm gonna cheat.
00:22:09.920 --> 00:22:24.400
I have this nice chart that I have on page 88 in front of me, where I lay out some of the main features of the theogony of Hesiod, which is the earliest cosmogony we have.
00:22:24.640 --> 00:22:27.759
The poem is called Theogony, it means the birth of the gods, right?
00:22:27.839 --> 00:22:28.960
So same thing.
00:22:29.279 --> 00:22:34.000
Kind of the creation story that became the canonical creation story for the Greeks, right?
00:22:34.160 --> 00:22:42.240
Now there were other variants or other creation stories that were kind of similar but a little bit different, like the Orphic poems and all that.
00:22:42.400 --> 00:22:44.319
And I also discussed those.
00:22:44.400 --> 00:22:45.759
And those are also interesting.
00:22:45.920 --> 00:22:54.319
But to take the theogony, which is the mainstream one, let's say, you have this kind of clear scheme of a succession of gods, right?
00:22:54.400 --> 00:22:56.559
And that's what we call the succession myth.
00:22:56.799 --> 00:23:06.160
And this, in fact, just this by itself follows a pattern that is fairly common across these other Near Eastern cultures, the idea of a succession of gods.
00:23:06.319 --> 00:23:15.279
All of these cosmogonies, I will I can go through this a little bit in the Hebrew Bible or in the Hittite myths or whatever, they all begin with some in some other way.
00:23:15.440 --> 00:23:19.759
Before the succession of gods, they have some kind of primordial elements, right?
00:23:19.920 --> 00:23:33.920
So in Hesiod, you have chaos as a sort of opening element, and then you have the earth, underworld, and love, who is there as a sort of reproductive force that will allow the universe to go on.
00:23:34.160 --> 00:23:39.920
And then you have, here's where it becomes more structured, you have these generations of gods, right?
00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:44.799
And the first generation is the earth and the sky, Gaia and Uranus, right?
00:23:45.039 --> 00:23:57.200
And then they have these children who are the Titans, and one of them is Kronos, and then Kronos castrates the sky, which is this very famous theme and very strange, right?
00:23:57.519 --> 00:24:04.319
Because the sky is oppressing the earth and somehow not allowing her children to come out.
00:24:04.480 --> 00:24:08.319
It's hard to kind of conceptualize, but there's something oppressive going on.
00:24:08.480 --> 00:24:19.200
So the youngest of the children, Kronos, with a sickle, castrates the father figure, and by doing that act, the earth and the sky separate, right?
00:24:19.359 --> 00:24:24.400
And that allows for the titans to be born as well as other entities.
00:24:24.640 --> 00:24:35.200
So then two of the titans, Kronos and Rea, are the parents of the Olympian gods, Zeus and Hera and Demeter and Poseidon, right?
00:24:35.279 --> 00:24:37.119
And Hades and that crowd.
00:24:37.279 --> 00:24:38.720
So that's the third generation.
00:24:38.799 --> 00:24:44.559
So you have the Earth and the skies, say the first couple, then the Titans, then the Olympians, right?
00:24:44.720 --> 00:24:47.440
And in the middle, there is this castration theme.
00:24:47.599 --> 00:24:49.279
So this is the succession myth.
00:24:49.440 --> 00:24:51.920
Now, how does Zeus overcome Kronos?
00:24:52.079 --> 00:24:53.119
That's the third episode.
00:24:53.279 --> 00:24:59.119
He basically, there's some kind of fight and he sends him to the underworld, and simplifying a lot, obviously.
00:24:59.279 --> 00:25:01.279
So that's kind of the Greek succession myth.
00:25:02.240 --> 00:25:07.359
So the most striking Near Eastern theme here was the castration of the sky.
00:25:07.839 --> 00:25:19.920
So when scholars discovered the Hittite myths from Anatolia, from the Labron's age, when they decipher the language, eventually they read this myth, the myth of Kumarbi, or the Kumarbi cycle.
00:25:20.079 --> 00:25:23.359
And in this myth, there is a very similar succession myth.
00:25:23.440 --> 00:25:32.319
So you have some kind of first god called Alalu, then you have a sky god called Anu, which is a Semitic word for like above, right?
00:25:32.559 --> 00:25:44.000
And then you have Kumarbi, who is a sort of um crooked-minded god or a grain god who seemed to be then in the position of Kronos, right?
00:25:44.160 --> 00:25:54.079
As the next one after the sky, and he castrates the sky, and the sky then flies above, and he castrates the sky by swallowing his genitals.
00:25:54.720 --> 00:25:56.480
So grosser version.
00:25:57.359 --> 00:26:02.480
When I teach this to my students, they're like, what is wrong with this mythology?
00:26:02.799 --> 00:26:09.440
So then by doing that, he actually becomes pregnant of the next god who is the storm god, the equivalent of Zeus.
00:26:09.839 --> 00:26:21.119
So this is all very interesting, and you know, people talk about how this is not a linear succession because Kumarbi is not the son of Anu, the father of Teshub, the storm god, but not really.
00:26:21.279 --> 00:26:25.440
I mean, really, the Anu is because he comes from his genitals, it's very messed up.
00:26:25.599 --> 00:26:32.960
So whether that means that there are several, this reflects the conflict between two lines, two royal lines, or something like that.
00:26:33.200 --> 00:26:37.119
In any case, when they read this text, there was an aha moment, right?
00:26:37.200 --> 00:26:40.640
Like, aha, the castration of the sky.
00:26:40.799 --> 00:26:45.839
I mean, this is clearly what has been adapted here in Hesiod somehow.
00:26:46.000 --> 00:26:57.440
We have no idea how, if in the Bronze Age, it's coming through oral tradition from the Bronze Age, or is this a theme that has been told in the Levant after the Hittites disappear, right?
00:26:57.519 --> 00:27:00.240
And then at some point it passes to the Greeks.
00:27:00.480 --> 00:27:04.720
Hesiod says that his father is from Asia Minor, for instance, from Kumai, right?
00:27:05.039 --> 00:27:07.200
Is that where this is coming from?
00:27:07.440 --> 00:27:08.400
Who knows, right?
00:27:08.480 --> 00:27:10.079
So that's a striking similarity.
00:27:10.240 --> 00:27:22.480
Then, for instance, if we look at the Hebrew Bible, of course, we have a monotheistic system, so you're not going to have a succession myth, but you still have some echoes of Near Eastern cosmogonies.
00:27:22.720 --> 00:27:34.400
For instance, the idea of a top of the Tohuva Bohu at the beginning of the Bible is this kind of void that people have compared to chaos, like this opening or this formless void.
00:27:34.720 --> 00:27:46.960
Then you have the naming of the earth and the heavens, when God created the heavens and the earth, Shamayim Aetz, there, up there in the first place, kind of like the earth and the sky in the Greek tradition.
00:27:47.200 --> 00:27:56.160
And then you have Yahweh having these battles with Leviathan and overcoming the sea as a force that is kind of an enemy.
00:27:56.319 --> 00:28:00.480
So that has been compared with the fights between Zeus and Typhon and so on.
00:28:00.720 --> 00:28:10.319
But especially you can see kind of the Canaanite background, because you have Canaanite texts, then moving on on my chart in the Ugaritic text.
00:28:10.480 --> 00:28:25.920
So the Ugaritic texts come from North Syria, from this city called Ugarit, that was very important in the late Bronze Age, and we have the archives and tons of texts of a language that is Northwest Semitic, so kind of an old ancestor of Hebrew as well, right?
00:28:26.079 --> 00:28:39.839
So there is the Baal cycle, this poem, epic poem to the God Baal, that sings or elaborates a story of competition between the storm god and the sea god and the death god, right?
00:28:40.000 --> 00:28:45.920
And they're all overseen by this primordial kind of father figure called El or Ilu, right?
00:28:46.079 --> 00:28:47.359
He's above them.
00:28:47.519 --> 00:28:48.640
And there are these fights.
00:28:48.720 --> 00:28:52.160
So there's the fight between the storm god and the sea, the storm god and death.
00:28:52.319 --> 00:28:58.799
So that theme of the storm god fighting and a sort of struggle for power, it's kind of all across.
00:28:59.039 --> 00:29:06.319
So there are parallels between Hesiod and the Canaanite tradition in terms that you have the storm god as the victorious god.
00:29:06.720 --> 00:29:13.440
That is also the case in the Mesopotamian text where you have Marduk coming up at the end as the victorious god.
00:29:13.599 --> 00:29:24.160
So there's this whole common theme of the storm god and of a sort of succession and the fights with sea monsters or sea-like monsters in the different cultures.
00:29:24.319 --> 00:29:26.000
So, what do you make of all of this?
00:29:26.240 --> 00:29:31.119
There are similarities all across, but the similarities are slightly different in cultures, right?
00:29:31.359 --> 00:29:38.319
What we don't have is a Phoenician myth, except in Philo Biblos, who is a Roman author.
00:29:38.480 --> 00:29:53.759
And so in my book, I got a lot into kind of comparing, kind of triangulating, let's say, the Greek tradition with the Ugaritic and Hebrew Bible tradition, and then Philo, at two very opposite ends of the chronological spectrum, right?
00:29:53.839 --> 00:29:56.640
Like Late Bronze Age, and the other one is Roman times.
00:29:56.880 --> 00:30:01.359
Philo is from the kind of like Josephus, you know, turn of the second century.
00:30:01.680 --> 00:30:03.279
So that's what we have, right?
00:30:03.359 --> 00:30:08.640
And the Hebrew Bible in the middle comes in handy also for some part of the reconstruction.
00:30:08.799 --> 00:30:23.839
So what you have in Philo is, first of all, you have an author who is saying that he's reporting Phoenician cosmogony, and he's doing it in this rationalizing way, saying, these are not really gods, this is a history, right?
00:30:24.000 --> 00:30:25.279
And these were real people.
00:30:25.359 --> 00:30:32.480
This is what we call Euhemirism, a trend of doing that kind of rationalizing version of mythology.
00:30:32.640 --> 00:30:35.920
And he writes about that as the beginning of a Phoenician history.
00:30:36.079 --> 00:30:46.799
So his work was called Phoenician history, just like in the Hebrew Bible, let's say you have the creation, and then you move into the judges and then kings and so on, into historical times, right?
00:30:46.880 --> 00:30:49.759
So he's doing sort of the same, but we don't have the rest.
00:30:49.839 --> 00:30:55.839
We only have the creation part, because that's what the later scholars were interested in, which is a different story.
00:30:56.079 --> 00:31:07.599
So what we have in this account, even if it's rationalized, he's transmitting elements that are some of them are clearly old kind of canonite, but probably the Miphoenician mythological elements.
00:31:07.839 --> 00:31:18.640
So he says at the beginning to compare with chaos, we have a dark and windy air and chaos, and then Eliun, who is this highest god, sort of like El.
00:31:19.920 --> 00:31:22.079
He's using uh Elion, exactly.
00:31:22.319 --> 00:31:24.240
In the Hebrew Bible, you have Elion, right?
00:31:24.400 --> 00:31:27.279
So he's using Semitic words in Greek.
00:31:27.519 --> 00:31:32.880
Forgot to say he was writing in Greek, as a good Roman of the Nearist, right?
00:31:33.039 --> 00:31:41.519
He writes, he's a scholar, he writes in Greek, but he's using uh Semitic words often, just transliterating them and sometimes translating them.
00:31:41.599 --> 00:31:49.440
Like he says, Elion, who is heaps also called hypsistos, which is in Greek most high, and it's exactly right.
00:31:49.599 --> 00:32:01.200
Or sometimes he says, There are the sophasham, so fashimim, which are the creatures that first looked up to the heavens, and that they use in Hebrew Sophes, right?
00:32:01.279 --> 00:32:02.559
The ones who look at the sky.
00:32:02.640 --> 00:32:23.440
So he knows the Semitic language, he uses Semitic names, sometimes translates them so clearly, even though he's very late and he's also by that point influenced by all sorts of Hellenistic, let's say, you know, or trends, and possibly even has incorporated some Greek mythology as well, he's also transmitting some Semitic tradition somehow.
00:32:23.599 --> 00:32:27.519
So then he has gay and uranos, earth and heaven, just like Hesiod.
00:32:27.839 --> 00:32:33.440
Then Elos is, he says, Elos, like El is Kronos.
00:32:33.599 --> 00:32:35.680
So Elos is the same as Kronos.
00:32:36.000 --> 00:32:39.839
So he himself is doing this exercise of kind of comparison, right?
00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:44.079
And then he puts in eventually the theme of the castration.
00:32:44.240 --> 00:32:47.359
Now, maybe he did say copy that from Hesiod, right?
00:32:47.440 --> 00:32:49.279
Maybe he's kind of going back in a circle.
00:32:49.359 --> 00:32:57.680
Maybe Hesiod has some Near Eastern stuff in his tradition, but maybe now his influencing this account of Phoenician tradition as well.
00:32:57.839 --> 00:32:59.039
It's hard to tell, right?
00:32:59.200 --> 00:33:14.000
But then he has some features that seem straight from Ugaritic mythology, like the seven daughters of El, this god called Dagon, like a green god that appears in Ugaritic texts, names for Zeus, the storm god like Demarus.
00:33:14.400 --> 00:33:17.599
So just weird stuff that are nowhere else.
00:33:17.920 --> 00:33:51.440
So what I'm doing is trying to see what these traditions, like in Philo and in the Hebrew Bible and Ugarit, tell us about what we have in Hesiod, and then I compare that to the Orphic poems as well, so all the Greek cosmogonists, and kind of try to see or point out uh kind of unique points in common that and then arguing from there that, well, since we have lost quite a bit of the intermediary stages, but it is very likely that the Phoenicians were also transmitting themes that we see in Mesopotamian or Egyptian or Hittite text.
00:33:51.920 --> 00:33:57.519
You're arguing that that the Phoenicians were the medium that transmitted these myths to the Greeks, and also vice versa.
00:33:57.599 --> 00:33:58.559
It wasn't one way, right?
00:33:58.880 --> 00:33:59.119
Right.
00:33:59.279 --> 00:34:00.079
Yeah, exactly.
00:34:00.160 --> 00:34:20.880
Because it has such a strong and constant relationship that as scholars who study the Hellenistic period, like Corinne Bonnet, she, for instance, would say that there is a certain point where even talking about Hellenization of Phoenicia or Phoenicianization of the Greeks is kind of a null point because they have formed some of these traditions kind of together.
00:34:21.119 --> 00:34:27.119
There is a point where Phoenician culture itself is, yeah, highly Hellenized in a way, but that is what it is.
00:34:27.280 --> 00:34:29.119
And this is a very long relationship.
00:34:29.199 --> 00:34:46.079
It's not something that happens like for other areas in the Hellenistic period, like for Persia or for other parts of the Levant, where there is a sudden wave of Greek culture that that is not the case in Phoenicia, in that area, because that had been going on earlier on for centuries.
00:34:47.119 --> 00:34:52.800
Can you touch on some more parallels between Zeus and the storm god El or Baal?
00:34:53.039 --> 00:34:53.840
It'd be Baal, right?
00:34:53.920 --> 00:34:54.880
Baal is a storm god.
00:34:55.280 --> 00:35:02.960
For instance, Zeus is called the cloud rider, and that's exactly how he's called in Eugalithic text, Baal is called the Cloud Rider.
00:35:03.440 --> 00:35:12.960
Zeus is an interesting character because as cloud rider, and as he's characterized in the Greek tradition, he does have these features that seem to be like the Near Eastern storm god.
00:35:13.039 --> 00:35:23.599
Like he produces rain and he fights similar enemies, but also he genealogically, let's say, he is also the Indo-European god of the day, right?
00:35:23.679 --> 00:35:29.840
That's where his name comes from, from day and brightness, not of the clouds, right?
00:35:30.320 --> 00:35:42.559
But also something interesting about this comparison is, for instance, in Homer, not in Hesiod, but in Homer, he says that Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades distributed their realms by lot.
00:35:42.800 --> 00:35:50.000
So that is Zeus, the god of the sea and the god of death, right, distributed equally these realms.
00:35:50.159 --> 00:35:54.320
And that is not exactly what we have in Hesiod, where it's more of a tiered thing.
00:35:54.480 --> 00:36:04.239
But it is what we have in the Eugaritic poems, where you have Baal and Yam and Moth, Death and the Sea, as equal and rivals, right?
00:36:04.480 --> 00:36:16.000
So that scheme, for instance, is similar in the Eugaritic texts and mythology, and in this passing reference in Homer that seems to be kind of different from the standard cosmogony.
00:36:16.159 --> 00:36:18.079
So there are just interesting things like that.
00:36:18.239 --> 00:36:36.480
And then there are interesting things about Kronos as well, and parallels between Kronos and El, how Kronos, the Greek god and Saturn, where actually that character was equated or assimilated or identified with El, or in the Western Mediterranean with Baal Hamon as a main deity.
00:36:36.719 --> 00:36:45.280
So the Phoenicians themselves engaged in the same exercise of identifying their own deities with the Greek deities.
00:36:45.440 --> 00:36:46.880
It's not that we are just making it up.
00:36:47.039 --> 00:36:49.519
They actually made that association, right?
00:36:49.920 --> 00:36:56.960
Which in turn facilitates stories to be transferred, the stories about the one to be transferred to the stories about the other, right?
00:36:57.360 --> 00:37:09.280
So there's really clear parallels between Greek and Levantine gods that you just pointed out, but there are also a number of more subtle motifs that you highlight in your book that are found in the Greek origin myths and also those of Levantine peoples.
00:37:09.440 --> 00:37:12.400
And I want to touch on a couple of those that I found pretty interesting.
00:37:12.639 --> 00:37:22.000
So can you start by explaining the motif of inspiration through mystic experiences or dreams that's common to both Greek and Levantine and biblical traditions?
00:37:22.480 --> 00:37:25.840
Yeah, through dreams or through encounters, right?
00:37:26.000 --> 00:37:32.639
Like the theme of Hesiod as a poet that is presenting himself as a shepherd that is in the mountains, right?
00:37:32.719 --> 00:37:35.440
And he gets this inspiration from the muses.
00:37:35.920 --> 00:37:43.840
That seems to fit into this pattern of revelation, really, of that we have in the Hebrew Bible with the prophets or even with Moses.
00:37:44.239 --> 00:37:48.400
And that is kind of common to the Greek tradition and to the Israelite tradition.
00:37:48.639 --> 00:37:53.039
I would say that that is probably something that belonged in a broader Levant.
00:37:53.199 --> 00:37:56.159
In other traditions, we don't have, but we have it in the Hebrew Bible.
00:37:56.239 --> 00:38:08.079
So that is striking because it makes you look at the theogony of Hesiod a little bit more seriously, kind of as a sort of revelation that he's saying, whether it's true, obviously, or not, that's not the point.
00:38:08.239 --> 00:38:16.239
Whether he's a shepherd or not also is not the point, but he's presenting his account as given through this revelation, right?
00:38:16.480 --> 00:38:17.760
That is prophetic.
00:38:17.840 --> 00:38:25.599
And he says that the muses give him this laurel branch, and the laurel is the plant of Apollo, who is associated with prophecy.
00:38:25.760 --> 00:38:34.239
And he says that they give him the chart to sing about the past and the present and the future, even though he never really talks about the future, right?
00:38:34.400 --> 00:38:36.400
But I mean, not explicitly.
00:38:36.559 --> 00:38:37.360
But maybe he does.
00:38:37.519 --> 00:38:39.760
Maybe for him the future means eternal things.
00:38:39.840 --> 00:38:43.440
I'm talking about the gods who existed then and will exist later on.
00:38:43.679 --> 00:38:45.440
I think that's what he's saying in a sense.
00:38:45.599 --> 00:39:02.079
But in any case, that that is being presented as a sort of revelation that we see in these other traditions with uh amos and other figures who speak in similar ways about being inspired, like even the divine voice in their breath, literally.
00:39:02.480 --> 00:39:09.760
And touch on you mentioned a little bit, but go back to the motif of a holy mountain in Levant cultures and in Greek cultures.
00:39:10.079 --> 00:39:11.519
Yeah, that's another shared motif.
00:39:11.599 --> 00:39:14.719
And maybe it's because there are a lot of mountains in Greece.
00:39:14.880 --> 00:39:16.960
And there are mountains in the Levant.
00:39:17.119 --> 00:39:19.119
Not so much in Mesopotamia or in Egypt.
00:39:19.199 --> 00:39:21.920
There may be something, but depending on how far you go.
00:39:22.239 --> 00:39:33.599
This I would say is also a shared theme at the divine level, and in this theme of the revelation, at the divine level, because you have the mountain where the gods live, and that is pretty particular, right?
00:39:33.679 --> 00:39:36.960
You don't really have that in Mesopotamia or, or let alone in Egypt.
00:39:37.679 --> 00:39:43.440
But in the Hittite tradition, there are some stories that involve monstery mountains, but it's not the same.
00:39:43.519 --> 00:40:00.880
But the idea that the gods live on a palace on a mountain in the north is shared by the Greek tradition with Mount Olympos, and in the Eucharist tradition with uh Mount Safon or Sapan, which is this mountain in North Syria next to the coast.
00:40:01.119 --> 00:40:02.480
So that's very interesting.
00:40:02.639 --> 00:40:04.960
And the poetry engages with the mountain a lot.
00:40:05.039 --> 00:40:16.320
Like the music are coming down from the mountain, and the gods are up there, and Baal is complaining that he doesn't have a palace like the other gods, so they built him a palace on the mountain and so on.
00:40:16.559 --> 00:40:35.440
And then the fact is that yeah, Hesiod starts his poetry by evoking this mountain landscape where he receives this revelation, and he starts mentioning the mountain of his area in Mount Helicon, which is in the area of Boeotia where he says he's from, and then moves on to Mount Olympus, right?
00:40:35.599 --> 00:40:39.360
Like a kind of like the local mountain and the Panhellenic mountain.
00:40:39.519 --> 00:40:40.719
So that's interesting too.
00:40:41.119 --> 00:40:58.800
So do you see a connection there between Levantine religious beliefs and culture being transmitted to the Greek world, or is that more just a universal human thing that mountains and high places are holy, just like in the Near East, in ancient times, caves were seen as some kind of a gateway to another world or dimension.
00:40:58.880 --> 00:41:03.039
And you also have that in South and North America, but there's obviously no connection between the two.
00:41:03.280 --> 00:41:07.920
Do you see a connection culturally, or is it just a normal human thing to connect?
00:41:08.320 --> 00:41:08.800
I don't know.
00:41:08.880 --> 00:41:10.159
That's always the question.
00:41:10.320 --> 00:41:19.119
I think there are themes that if they appear in several very faraway cultures that have not been historically in contact, then you will say they are universal themes.
00:41:19.440 --> 00:41:33.440
So the line is okay, when you see a similar theme attached to a broader scheme within a type of poem about the storm god and about origins and attached to a particular type of God and a particular type of revelation.
00:41:33.679 --> 00:41:46.960
When there are more elements kind of attached to the theme, providing more of a structure and the whole structure is similar, then it's easier to argue for transmission, especially when the cultures are known to have been in contact.
00:41:47.039 --> 00:41:49.840
So in this case, it could have been shared.
00:41:50.000 --> 00:41:57.360
Again, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's from east to west, from west to east, we don't know or at what point, but shared themes among cultures that are in contact.
00:41:57.519 --> 00:42:07.519
I think in this case, possibly, because they come with within a package about creation stories or about this sort of revelation, you know, that is fairly similar.
00:42:08.000 --> 00:42:11.519
And the last one I wanted to ask you about was that of the tree and the stone.
00:42:11.679 --> 00:42:16.960
So what role does the theme of a tree and a stone play in the Levantine tradition?
00:42:17.039 --> 00:42:19.280
And how do we see it amongst the Greek traditions?
00:42:19.760 --> 00:42:32.000
Oof, I this was the first like case study, and I thought it was gonna be just this brief thing I wanted to look into because there were these parallels and possible parallels, but nobody had really expanded on that.
00:42:32.239 --> 00:42:35.119
And I ended up going down the rabbit hole.
00:42:35.599 --> 00:42:36.880
But it was very cool.
00:42:36.960 --> 00:42:40.880
And actually, a lot of people have told me that they enjoyed that case study.
00:42:41.119 --> 00:42:47.920
So I think it was just weird that he throws in this tree and the stone question, like, what do I care?
00:42:48.079 --> 00:42:49.840
Why am I talking about the tree and the stone?
00:42:49.920 --> 00:42:55.039
And in the middle of this introductory part where he's talking about revelations and all that.
00:42:55.280 --> 00:43:01.039
And then this is just like an interjection or a maybe a proverb of some sort, right?
00:43:01.199 --> 00:43:04.400
And then he goes right into his narrative.
00:43:04.719 --> 00:43:12.079
So scholars like Martin West and others have pointed out that, well, the tree and the stone are such a Semitic thing, right?
00:43:12.159 --> 00:43:16.159
You have the Asherah and the Matzeba, like the sacred tree and secret stone.
00:43:16.320 --> 00:43:23.039
You have mentions of tree and the stone, like coupled like that in other sort of proverbs in Greek tradition, from Homer to Plato.
00:43:23.199 --> 00:43:25.440
And it always has some connotation.
00:43:25.599 --> 00:43:34.320
It varies, but within the range of origins, either origins of humans or origins of things or mysterious things, or yeah.
00:43:34.400 --> 00:43:37.519
So looking at it, then it turns out it disappears in Yugari.
00:43:37.840 --> 00:43:39.679
This is in the Bada cycle.
00:43:39.840 --> 00:43:52.079
Again, there is this also sort of cryptic mention of the tree and the stone, like uh whispering, whisperings of the tree and words of stone to refer to kind of divine messages.
00:43:52.320 --> 00:43:56.639
So it's hard to put your finger on it, even though I wrote like 60 pages about it.
00:43:56.800 --> 00:43:59.760
But there is something going on where tree and stone, you know, are.
00:44:00.159 --> 00:44:08.320
This shortcut for something that has to do with creation stories, with revelation, with some kind of religious realm.
00:44:08.480 --> 00:44:14.400
And I'm not saying necessarily that there was a cult of Asherah and Matzebah in Archaic Greece.
00:44:14.800 --> 00:44:16.239
Some people have argued that there was.
00:44:16.320 --> 00:44:17.039
I mean, who knows?
00:44:17.199 --> 00:44:24.719
But not exactly, you know, it doesn't have to be that, but more as a literary trope, it seems to be shared by these traditions in particular.
00:44:24.880 --> 00:44:30.960
Because I haven't seen it in the other ones, in Mesopotamia or Hittite, or, you know, not so similar.
00:44:31.360 --> 00:44:32.000
It's interesting.
00:44:32.239 --> 00:44:38.960
So could you tell me more about the current book that you're working on and how it builds off your previous research, including the book When the Gods Were Born?
00:44:39.360 --> 00:44:40.000
Sure.
00:44:40.239 --> 00:44:44.400
So I was looking again a little bit of my introductory chapter in When the Gods Were Born.
00:44:44.480 --> 00:44:59.679
And when I've been doing since I wrote this first monograph, has been to research more, get more and more into what kind of cultural contact was happening between the Phoenicians and the Greeks, and to look more at the historical context and archaeology.
00:44:59.760 --> 00:45:05.920
And it all started by writing about cosmogonies and creation stories and these literary and mythological themes.
00:45:06.079 --> 00:45:17.440
But in order to give that some historical framework and argue for a transmission, I had to write this introductory chapter saying, well, I think this is the cultural context that explains this.
00:45:17.679 --> 00:45:22.159
Then what I've done is like, okay, now I have to actually get more into that.
00:45:22.719 --> 00:45:50.239
So my next project basically, I've been is the product of all these years gathering, you know, knowledge and thoughts about this issue of what's going on in the say eight century, eight, seventh centuries, when we have the earliest Greek texts, what we call orientalizing art, the earliest sculptures that look so kind of Near Eastern y, and all the sphinxes and all these motifs, the borrowing of the Phoenician alphabet.
00:45:50.320 --> 00:45:51.920
I mean, all these other things, right?
00:45:52.239 --> 00:45:55.119
That we classify as orientalizing.
00:45:55.199 --> 00:45:56.320
But what does that mean?
00:45:56.480 --> 00:46:28.400
So expanding my arguments from the mythology to a more broad cultural argument, I've been building an argument about the role of the Phoenicians as cultural agents that who are very important in that sense, not just as merchants and traders and coloners, but they carry with them, you know, their own version of Eastern culture, and that that from the Aegean to southern Spain and North Africa, that is what these local groups encountered and were in contact with.
00:46:28.639 --> 00:46:33.039
Doesn't mean they never encountered a Mesopotamian or an Egyptian or whatnot, right?
00:46:33.360 --> 00:46:39.920
But that the close, sustained contact was mostly with these Levantines that we call Phoenicians.
00:46:40.239 --> 00:46:43.679
So my book is called Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean.
00:46:43.840 --> 00:47:12.159
So arguing that this wave, a sort of kind of globalizing cultural koine that we call orientalizing, that is really the product of this interaction between Phoenicians and locals, mostly that they are the main conveyors of these versions of Neo Eastern culture, that every local people, every local group adapt or not by their own choice, and depending on their own needs or priorities or whatever is useful for them.
00:47:12.320 --> 00:47:13.599
It's not obligatory.
00:47:13.760 --> 00:47:21.280
And that we see this from Spain to the Levant when Israelites and Cilicians and others are also using the Phoenician alphabet.
00:47:21.360 --> 00:47:28.400
You know, it's really a movement that radiates from Phoenicia, from these cities into all the areas where they are active.
00:47:28.559 --> 00:47:46.639
So that is a study of that and a study of a little bit of a kind of critical historiography of how this phenomenon has been dealt with from different disciplines, whether it's classics or Western Mediterranean archaeology or Levantine archaeology or in different countries, right?
00:47:46.880 --> 00:47:50.719
How do scholars and disciplines deal with this in different ways?
00:47:50.800 --> 00:47:56.880
And what does that tell us about our view of the Greeks and others and classics and all that?
00:47:57.280 --> 00:47:58.000
When's the book?
00:47:58.559 --> 00:48:02.639
If everything goes well, I'll send it out off in a couple of weeks into production.
00:48:02.800 --> 00:48:09.760
So and then whatever it takes, you know, it might take a year, hopefully less than a year, maybe the end of 2021.
00:48:09.920 --> 00:48:10.480
We'll see.
00:48:10.880 --> 00:48:11.199
Cool.
00:48:11.440 --> 00:48:19.119
Well, the name is still pretty epic, and I know it's hard to top the original book, book name that you came up with when the gods were born, but the new one sounds good too.
00:48:19.760 --> 00:48:20.639
Thank you.
00:48:21.039 --> 00:48:22.719
So I think I'm very excited about it.
00:48:23.280 --> 00:48:23.840
Yeah.
00:48:24.079 --> 00:48:27.039
I can't wait to check it out and have you back on to discuss it.
00:48:27.199 --> 00:48:30.960
So thanks again for taking the time to be with us and look forward to talking soon.
00:48:31.360 --> 00:48:33.679
Always my pleasure, and it would be my pleasure to come back.
00:48:33.760 --> 00:48:35.199
Thank you so much, Alex.
