Conceptions of the Watery World in Greco-Roman Antiquity

Georgia L. Irby

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350136465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

This book explores ancient efforts to explain the scientific, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of water. From the ancient point of view, we investigate many questions including: How does water help shape the world? What is the nature of the ocean? What causes watery weather, including superstorms and snow? How does water affect health, as a vector of disease or of healing? What is the nature of deep-sea-creatures (including sea monsters)? What spiritual forces can protect those who must travel on water? This first complete study of water in the ancient imagination makes a major contribution to classics, geography, hydrology and the history of science alike. Water is an essential resource that affects every aspect of human life, and its metamorphic properties gave license to the ancient imagination to perceive watery phenomena as the product of visible and invisible forces. As such, it was a source of great curiosity for the Greeks and Romans who sought to control the natural world by understanding it, and who, despite technological limitations, asked interesting questions about the origins and characteristics of water and its influences on land, weather, and living creatures, both real and imagined.

Part One

Interpreting the Watery Framework: Philosophy, Cosmogony, and Physics

1

Water and the Creation of the World

Introduction

The Greek mainland is mountainous and dry, with an average annual rainfall of 20–50 inches (51–130 cm), increasing with latitude. Rivers tend to be small, drying out in the summer and filling up in the wetter, colder months. Observed throughout the Mediterranean Basin, this cycle between the parched, hot summer and the cooler, damp winter provides context for the development of ancient theories about the creation of the world, firmly rooted within a watery framework. Cosmogonies penned by poets and philosophers relied on a paradigm where opposite properties were kept in balance, vacillating between arid and moist, warm and cool. The earliest recorded Greek hypotheses of cosmogony, expressed most fully by Hesiod in the seventh century BCE (Theogony 116–138), share striking resemblances with the earlier Mesopotamian tradition where the world was created by the separation of discrete elements from a primal quagmire, nor is it unreasonable to surmise that the Akkadian account traveled westward, influencing subsequent versions.¹

Mesopotamian Origins

Let us begin “between the rivers” where the rhythms of the waterways were recognized as guaranteeing and regulating both human life and the land’s fertility. Water, the “life of the land,” is essential to life, ensuring fertility of the crops, which in turn sustains human and animal populations. But even more, water is the generative principle that initiates and shapes the Mesopotamian world as we see in the Enuma Elish (dating from as early as the nineteenth century BCE), where creation began with the intermingling of pre-existing fresh and salt water (1.1–8). A watery chaos existed before creation, held in check by the power of other deities.² From this primeval, thoroughly mixed watery state, the physical world emerged, envisioned as a human family whose progenitors were associated with two types of waters: salt (the wild and destructive, “chaotic” Tiamat) and fresh (Apsu/Abzu).³ This blending of fresh and salt waters naturally occurs where bodies of water meet, as in the Persian Gulf where fresh waters from aquifers mix with the salt water of the Arabian sea.⁴ Such hydrological effects are especially noticeable at Dilmum, the island nation where the Sumerians believed creation began and whose modern Arabic name, Bahrain, means “two seas.”⁵ The myth thus articulates an observable hydrological phenomenon.

The mingled waters were anthropomorphized. The Akkadian Abzu (“deep water”) represented the fresh waters flowing in subterranean aquifers, which—so the Sumerians and Akkadians believed—fed the lakes, rivers, springs, wells, and other waterways that guaranteed life in their harsh, desiccated climate. Abzu, as a building block of Mesopotamian life and as a character in the cosmogonic account, was consequently envisioned as a primeval freshwater sea that lay below the realm of the human world (earth and underworld). Tiamat, likewise, embodied water both linguistically and physically: her name derives from the Akkadian tiamtu/tâmtu, “the normal word for sea.”⁶ Burkert additionally connects “Tiamat” to Tethys, the wife of the Greek Okeanos (below), strongly suggesting the Akkadian influence on early Greek mythology. Burkert further links Tiamat/Tethys to thalassa, a Greek word for sea whose origins are not Greek.⁷

From the brackish mingling of salt- and freshwater deities came the younger generation of gods, a genealogical structure repeated in the Iliad, where Okeanos (salt water) and Tethys (fresh water) were identified as the source of the gods in Homer⁸ and Plato (Timaeus 40e). In turn, the younger Mesopotamian generation colluded to murder their father, Apsu, in order to usurp his authority (a motif of generational conflict repeated in Hesiod’s Theogony, below). In revenge, Tiamat generated terrifying, hybrid creatures to wreak her revenge: sharp-toothed monster-serpents, “merciless of fang,” whose bodies were filled with poison instead of blood, terrifyingly huge “fierce monster-vipers”:

And hurricanes and raging hounds, and scorpion-men,

And mighty tempests, and fish-men and rams;

They bear cruel weapons, without fear of the fight.⁹

Tiamat was a goddess of water, and her parthenogenic children—including hurricanes, tempests, and fish-men—were naturally aqueous. In revenge, the salt-water goddess created monsters to reclaim her authority, hybrids that anticipate the composite, serpentine Typhon, the son of Gaia and Tartarus, and other sea monsters (Hesiod, Theogony 823–835; cf., Chapter 7).

Slain by her son, Marduk (himself a god of waters and storms), Tiamat provided the generative materials for the physical world, graphically forged by Marduk:

He (Marduk) split her up like a flat fish into two halves;

One half of her he established as a covering for heaven.

He fixed a bolt, he stationed a watchman,

And bade them not to let her waters come forth.

4.137–140

The imagery here draws on the watery nature of both mother and son, as the child vanquishes and controls his parent. Marduk has dammed his mother’s waters, a clear reference to the importance of hydraulic infrastructure in the Mesopotamian world, described with admiration by Herodotus (1.185–186), and foregrounded in the Akkadian cosmogony, the Atrahasis, where the gods dig watercourses (Tigris, Euphrates, springs) and canals (21–8). The creation of the world as we know it thus speaks to the importance of water—and of controlling it—in the dry Mediterranean littoral. Tiamat became the bounding principle of the physical world. Marduk employed the body of Tiamat, both the benign source of life and a corporealization of raw nature, to delimit the Mesopotamian lands. Tiamat’s waters were restrained—dammed—by her very body, a physical barrier between creation and the contemporary world of human beings.

Hesiod

A millennium later, the motifs of Mesopotamian creation tales would be distilled by Greek poets. In his Theogony, Hesiod (from Askra, an inland town near Mt. Helicon) provided a vision of the creation of the Greek cosmos that replicates the separation motif expressed in the Babylonian cosmogony.¹⁰ As in the Near Eastern tradition, mythology transitioned into physics in early Greek cosmogony, and the gods became the building blocks of the cosmos. In short, the physical infrastructure was constructed, literally, by pulling substance after substance from the primeval chaos (χάος: a yawning gape, as close to nothingness as possible): Gaia (earth), the solid foundation; then Tartarus, the primordial edge of creation beneath Gaia; and Eros, the cosmic principle of Love, necessary to bring together male and female. From Gaia were drawn the physical components of the orderly universe: Ouranos (Sky), Mountains, and Pontus (Sea). From the sexual union of Gaia and Ouranos were born the first generation of anthropomorphic deities, the Titans, who included Okeanos (Theogony 133) and Tethys (Theogony 136), deities of salt- and fresh water whose fertility was so enhanced that their offspring numbered 6,000—3,000 daughters and 3,000 sons—in order that each body of water might have its own discrete divine patron (Theogony 346–370). Like Tiamat, the de-anthropomorphized Okeanos framed the human world in Hesiod and Homer. Water is thus both a bounding principle and a generative one. Sharing in their father’s fecundity, Okeanos’ children, Nereus (“the old man of the sea”) and Doris, together were the parents of a prodigious fifty nymphs.¹¹

Whether the early poets, including Homer and Hesiod, viewed these “elemental” gods as the folkloric sources of agricultural prosperity, or as the theoretical, scientific framework of the cosmos, we cannot know. Herington argues for the former, but in Hesiod it is clear that elemental gods (Gaia, Ouranos, and Okeanos) serve a dual role.¹² Gaia is both the anthropomorphized mother of creation and the solid foundation of the human world. Ouranos is both the consort of Gaia and the physical vault of heaven, separated from the earthly realm by his son, Atlas (Theogony 517–518). Okeanos is the father of lesser waterways as well as the river that limits the earth.

From Myth to Reason

These charming tales were quickly rationalized, and a new field of human knowledge (Natural Philosophy) was created. The Greeks were hardly the first to make “scientific” advances. The Babylonian achievements in mathematics and astronomy were remarkable, including a place-value number system (like the system ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Conceptions of the Watery World
• Part One Interpreting the Watery Framework: Philosophy, Cosmogony, and Physics
• 1 Water and the Creation of the World
• 2 Seas and Lakes
• 3 The Interplay Between Water and Land: Land, Rivers, and Springs
• Part Two Explaining Watery Phenomena
• 4 Watery Weather
• 5 Water, Health, and Disease
• Part Three Imagining the Watery World
• 6 Biological Creatures of the Sea
• 7 Mythical Creatures of the Sea: Sea Monsters and Sea Gods
• 8 Water and the Divine: Unseen and Magical Forces of the Spiritual World
• 9 Sailor Cults and Cults of Sea Gods
• 10 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Places Cited
• Index of Authors and Sources
• General Index
• Copyright