The Cambyses Logos
E-Book, Englisch, Band 55, 429 Seiten
Reihe: Classica Monacensia
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0391-6
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Alexander Schütze and Andreas Schwab: Herodotean Soundings. The Cambyses Logos
Close readings: Linguistic, narratological and philosophical perspectives
Elizabeth Irwin: Just Who is Cambyses? Imperial Identities and Egyptian Campaigns
Anna Bonifazi: Herodotus' verbal strategies to depict Cambyses' abnormality
Anthony Ellis: Relativism in Herodotus. Foreign Crimes and Divinities in the Inquiry
The Cambyses logos and other sources on the conquest of Egypt
Melanie Wasmuth: Perception and Reception of Cambyses as Conqueror and King of Egypt. Some Fundamentals
Alexander Schütze: Cambyses the Egyptian? Remembering Cambyses and Amasis in Persian Period Egypt
Reinhold Bichler: A comparative look at the post-Herodotean Cambyses
Geopolitical dimensions of the Cambyses logos
Gunnar Sperveslage: On the historical and archaeological background of Cambyses' alliance with Arab tribes (Hdt. 3.4-9)
Damien Agut-Labordère: An "Ammonian Tale". Cambyses in the Egyptian Western Desert
Olaf E. Kaper: The revolt of Petubastis IV during the reigns of Cambyses and Darius
Andreas Schwab: Pindaric 'arrows' in Herodotus: Psámmos (Hdt. 3.26). Just a sandstorm or also a rebel(lion)?
Cambyses and the Egyptian Temples
Dan'el Kahn: Cambyses' Attitude towards Egyptian Temples in Contemporary Texts and Later Sources. A Reevaluation of the Persian Conquest of Egypt
Fabian Wespi: Cambyses' Decree and the destruction of Egyptian temples
Joachim Friedrich Quack: Cambyses and the sanctuary of Ptah
List of Contributors
Index nominum, rerum et locorum
Index fontium
Herodotean Soundings
The Cambyses Logos Alexander Schütze and Andreas Schwab In the present volume, researchers from different disciplines of Ancient Studies examine Herodotus’ famous narrative about the Persian king Cambyses and his conquest of Egypt. The papers here represent new and original research by an international group of both renowned scholars and young academics presented and discussed in an interdisciplinary circle in Heidelberg in June 2017. An important incentive for choosing the theme of the conference was the effort of one of the editors to understand the Cambyses logos in the context of his habilitation thesis focusing on encounters with foreign religions in the Histories of Herodotus. However, the Cambyses logos is not only of special interest for Herodotus’ account of foreign religion. Herodotus’ work offers the only comprehensive narrative of the conquest of Egypt under the Great King. At the same time, Cambyses and his misdeeds represent the first pinnacle of Herodotus’ characterization of a whole series of despots, beginning with the Lydian and Persian kings Croesus and Cyrus. In the logos on Cambyses, Herodotus demonstrates his understanding of the relativistic, and culturally relativistic, nature of history in a particularly condensed form as he contrasts Persian, Egyptian, and Greek views of the events he narrates. Last but not least, beginning with the opening of Book 2, the Cambyses logos in fact also frames the extensive Egyptian logos of Book two which in turn can be understood as a prelude to the narrative on Cambyses at the beginning of Book three. This central narrative from Herodotus’ Histories has been studied from the perspectives of Ancient Greek language and literature, Egyptology, and ancient history. However, these perspectives and also the experts in each of the fields are rarely brought together. The idea of the conference goes back to the desire to create an opportunity for scholars from these disciplines to meet and focus intensely on a discrete and seminal section of Herodotus’ work. The present volume attests to the benefit of such a multi-?disciplinary approach to Herodotus that arises from intense focus on a small, but important section of his work. Its contributors not only arrive at new conclusions to challenging aspects of Herodotus’ account, but at the same time have opened up further perspectives for future research. In the last twenty years, a number of collected volumes dealing with different aspects of Herodotus’ Histories have been published which illustrate the complexity of this multifaceted text. One may roughly discern two tendencies: on the one hand, studies that deal with the text of the Histories itself through various modes of literary analysis, and on the other hand, works that juxtapose the narratives handed down in the Histories with indigenous sources belonging to the cultures his work describes. A number of volumes deal with Herodotus’ worldview and his portrayal of the other. Other works focus on the narrative strategies of the ancient author, illuminate the Histories in the context of contemporary historiography, or relate them to myth. In addition, there are volumes that juxtapose the Histories with contemporary sources of the cultures described by Herodotus or deal with how Herodotus portrays the Persians and incorporates ancient Near Eastern motifs into his narrative. Of some relevance for this volume is the conference volume Hérodote et l’Égypte. Regards croisés sur le livre II de l’Enquête d’Hérodote edited by Laurent Coulon in 2013, in which the second book of Herodotus’ Histories was subjected to a revision building on the current state of Egyptological research on Egypt in the 1st millennium BC. Thanks to the numerous religious texts and archaeological findings from Late Period Egypt that have been published in recent decades, the facts that Herodotus knows to report about the Egypt of his time can be evaluated much better than Alan B. Lloyd was able to do in his commentary on Book two. In fact, it is possible to identify a real historical background for many of Herodotus’ descriptions, some of which seem strange to the modern reader. A whole series of contributions in the present volume continue these in-?depth soundings against the background of the current state of research. With regard to method and approach, two volumes in particular influenced our perspective. While in the above-?mentioned volumes a variety of text passages is discussed, the following collected volume takes a different approach: In Reading Herodotus. A Study of the Logoi in Book 5 of Herodotus, the contributing authors discuss the logoi of an entire book in terms of structure, language, and place in the overall structure of the Histories as well as the significance for the overall interpretation of Herodotus’ monumental work. This approach of a discussion of a coherent, continuous section from the Histories is followed here on a small scale using the example of the Cambyses logos, because only in this way do repeating motifs, figures or rhetorical strategies become visible for a discussion from different angles. A multidisciplinary approach with a focus on the text of a particular episode from Herodotus seems suitable and promising for examining the ‘multivocality of his text’ in a multidisciplinary environment. In the volume Interpreting Herodotus, the editors examine anew Charles W. Fornara’s thesis that Herodotus’ Histories are to be read against the background of the Atheno-?Peloponnesian War and that Herodotus’ criticism of Athenian expansionist policies, which ultimately led to Athens’ downfall, is inherent in the work. This question can also be applied to Herodotus’ Cambyses logos (and the preceding Saite History), as the contributions by Elizabeth Irwin and Alexander Schütze in this volume show. Seen in this light, the volume also represents a continuation of this important contribution to the understanding of the Histories. A narrative such as the Cambyses logos provides numerous challenges and welcomes, if not also demands, a discussion from multiple disciplinary angles. It deals with a concrete historical event, the conquest of Egypt by the Persian Great King, but is composed of a whole series of peculiar shorter narratives inviting critical examination of Herodotus’ account, whether the presumed reasons for Egypt’s conquest, descriptions of his failed campaigns, or the characterization of Cambyses as a mad king. At the same time, the logos alludes to and exploits in its telling a variety of Egyptian realia, such as the famous Apis bull, the oracle of Buto or the tomb of Amasis, that can be correlated with sources in the Egyptian tradition. We therefore see this logos as a perfect opportunity to conduct an interdisciplinary experiment that examined how all these aspects of the text might be dealt with together on one occasion and in one volume. With its multidisciplinary structure, this volume addresses two research desiderata. On the one hand, for Egyptology and Ancient History, Herodotus’ narrative about the Persian king in Egypt is, along with the Egyptian inscription of Udjahorresnet, the only narrative source on a seminal event in Egyptian history: the conquest of Egypt by the Persians brought the Saite period to an abrupt end, a period that had brought Egypt a late-?flourishing cultural ‘renaissance’. And yet despite this extraordinarily central importance of Herodotus’ Histories for the Egyptological study of this historical and political caesura, it must be noted that Egyptologists have often engaged with the Histories with a particular interest in Book two mostly concentrating on what discrete facts might yield without a view of the overall work and composition of the Histories. But such focus on the historicity of Herodotus’ account in Egyptology and ancient history—which is often difficult to verify due to the lack of relevant sources—can sometimes cause one to lose sight of the fact that Herodotus’ multi-?layered text is more than a mere ‘factual account’. Rather it is a highly complex and well-?composed narrative of an author who pursued an agenda with regard to his Greek readership in a highly sophisticated age. On the other hand, Classicists find themselves all too often in want of the expertise of Egyptologists if they are to understand what might be distinctive about Herodotus’ handling of this material. Recent research in Demotic studies and discoveries in Egyptian archaeology (especially in the oases of the Western Desert, e.g. in the oases of Dakhla or Kharga), illuminates Herodotus’ text and often vindicates him. In doing so, such research can open up hitherto unimagined perspectives on the Greek text as well as on its meaning and interpretation, whether, for instance, by placing Herodotus’ disparate narratives about the failed campaigns of Cambyses in relation to the geopolitical conditions in the areas bordering Egypt in the late 6th century BC or by making rather peculiar descriptions of Egyptian cult images plausible on the basis of archaeological...
