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K TITLE: In the Land of a Thousand Gods
WORK NOTES: trans by Steven Rendall
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/25/1950
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10702.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 25, 1950.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, and writer. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, professor emeritus of ancient history.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
A professor of ancient history, Christian Marek studies the ancient cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, from archaic Greece to early Byzantium. He also studies Greek inscriptions or epigraphs as writing. The author of books focusing on his areas of study, Marek provides a comprehensive history of Asia Minor in his book titled In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World, his first work to be translated into English. Overall, Marek covers Asia Minor from prehistory and the Stone Age to the Roman Empire, which is about from circa 20,000 BC to AD 330. “Steven Rendall’s translation . . . makes accessible to the English-speaking world a truly ambitious and remarkable book,” wrote Jeremy LaBuff in a review for H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, adding:”I can think of few people more qualified to write such a work than Marek, who along with his now deceased collaborator Peter Frei has been instrumental in bringing to light vast quantities of new evidence from Greco-Roman Asia Minor.”
Drawing from a variety of disciplines, including the classics, Oriental studies, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, political theory, theater, mathematics, and military tactics, Marek provides a 270,000-word narrative bolstered by twenty-four maps, an extensive appendix listing the region’s rulers, and sixty pages of notes. It also includes a thirty-four–page bibliography and a fifty-page index. “Light bedtime reading it is not; definitive it surely is,” wrote Classics for All Web site contributor Peter Jones.
In the Land of a Thousand Gods contains ten chapters that follow the region’s history chronologically. “The book views the geographic area as a land bridge connecting the Occident to the Orient, its history a melting pot of various cultures and waxing/waning cities,” wrote Foreword Reviews Online contributor Scott Neuffer. The book begins with an introductory chapter titled “Anatolia between East and West” and then goes on to a chapter that examines the history of archaeological fieldwork in the region, which began around the fourteenth century. He discusses the major excavations that developed in the area and the advance of survey work, which makes up much of the modern research in Turkey. Marek next turns his attention to the prehistoric time period on through to the written culture of the Sumerian-Akkadian empires. The next chapter focuses on the Hittite empire and its rise and fall, followed by a chapter that looks at the Persian empire and the Greeks, covering from 547-333 BC.
Marek next focuses on Alexander’s empire until the arrival of the Roman empire, which is discussed in the next chapter and ends with a discussion of the Roman Emperor Aurelian, who ruled from AD 270 to 275, when he was assassinated. The book then turns its attention to the imperial administration of the region under the principate, or early Roman emperors, which kept some of the features of republican government. Marek then discusses the sociopolitical, cultural, and economic conditions of the region under the Roman Empire. The book ends with an epilogue that provides a further history up to the first Crusade.
“This is a masterful work composed by a scholar at the top of his form, drawing on the full range of international scholarship, and opening up Asia Minor in all its importance and kaleidoscopic fascination as never before,” wrote Classics for All Web site contributor Peter Jones. Commenting on “Marek’s thematic focus,” H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online contributor LaBuff wrote: “I heartily endorse his portrayal of Asia Minor as a cultural crossroads and ‘mixing bowl’ (my phrase). Indeed, such an emphasis had the potential to weave a common thread across the thousands of years covered by the book, revealing significant patterns of continuity and change in a way that only a chronologically ambitious survey can.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 2, 2016, review of In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World, p. 41.
ONLINE
Classics for All, http://classicsforall.org.uk/ (August 20, 2016), Peter Jones, review of In the Land of a Thousand Gods.
Foreword Reviews Online, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (May 27, 2016), Scott Neuffer, review of In the Land of a Thousand Gods.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org/ (February 28, 2017), Jeremy LaBuff, review of In the Land of a Thousand Gods.
Spectrum Culture, http://spectrumculture.com/ (November 10, 2016), John L. Murphy, review of In the Land of a Thousand Gods.
Universität Zürich, Historisches Seminar Web site, http://www.hist.uzh.ch/de.html (March 13, 2017), author faculty profile.
(In German)
Christian Marek is professor emeritus of ancient history at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. His fields of research are the ancient cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, from Archaic Greece to early Byzantium, and Greek epigraphy. He specializes in Asia Minor and has been conducting epigraphical and archaeological fieldwork in Turkey for more than thirty years.
LC control no.: n 84804754
Personal name heading:
Marek, Christian, 1950-
Found in: His Die Proxenie, c1984: t.p. (Christian Marek) p. 4 of
cover (b. 1950 in Kassel; since 1983 "Hochschulassistent
am Seminar für Alte Geschichte in Marburg")
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In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World
Publishers Weekly. 263.18 (May 2, 2016): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World
Christian Marek, with Peter Frei, trans. from the German by Steven Rendall. Princeton Univ., $49.50 (808p) ISBN 978-0-691-15979-9
Informed by decades of archaeological fieldwork in Turkey, Marek, professor of ancient history at the University of Zurich, uses a sensitive, high-resolution perspective to examine Asia Minor (as the Romans called the Anatolian peninsula, the geographic region that makes up most of modern Turkey) in antiquity. Encompassing fields as diverse as political theory, theater, mathematics, and military tactics, this is an expansive, formidable work of scholarship that should prove indispensable to students of the Near East, though it can be impenetrable for nonspecialists. Whether he's unravelling the particularities of Roman tax assessment or unpacking passages of classical literature, Marek demonstrates a deep and nuanced knowledge that can be thrilling to witness even when it obfuscates (as when he casually uses ancient Greek, Latin, and Syriac). As various forms of centralized administration take root, a "cacophony of war and chaos" in the early chapters gives way to lighter subjects in the book's second half. For example, inhabitants of the region spent eye-watering sums on spectacula--including athletic contests, impromptu declamations of rhetoric, and gladiatorial battles--and Marek observes that this phenomenon was embedded in a "deeply rooted culture of pleasure" that "was almost unparalleled until the advent of the American Way of Life." It's a dense work, but patient readers will be richly rewarded. Maps & illus. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World." Publishers Weekly, 2 May 2016, p. 41. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452884016&it=r&asid=818f4d097faf7f12b06aceb6d47ae6dc. Accessed 25 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452884016
LaBuff on Marek and Frei, 'In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World'
Author:
Christian Marek, Peter Frei
Reviewer:
Jeremy LaBuff
Christian Marek, Peter Frei. In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World. Trans. Steven Rendall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 824 pp. $49.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-15979-9.
Reviewed by Jeremy LaBuff (Northern Arizona University, Dept. of History)
Published on H-Teach (December, 2016)
Commissioned by Camarin M. Porter
Steven Rendall's translation of Christian Marek's Geschichte Kleinasiens in der Antike makes accessible to the English-speaking world a truly ambitious and remarkable book. I can think of few people more qualified to write such a work than Marek, who along with his now deceased collaborator Peter Frei has been instrumental in bringing to light vast quantities of new evidence from Greco-Roman Asia Minor. The task is an enormous one: to recount the past of a region that was home not only to "a thousand gods," as the English title declares, but to dozens of indigenous and migrant peoples over the course of many thousands of years. The rich archaeological record of Asia Minor also ensures that short shrift cannot be given to "pre-historic" periods, while the plethora of material and written evidenc from the Hellenistic and Roman periods in particular demands a breadth of knowledge and an organizational skill that fortunately Marek possesses in great measure.
What does it mean to write a history of Asia Minor in antiquity? For Marek it rests on four parameters. He defines Asia Minor as the ancient equivalent of the Asian territory of Turkey (pp. xiii, 714), while the ancient world stretches from the earliest human habitation to the reformation of the Roman imperial system under the emperor Diocletian (284 CE). He justifies this chronological endpoint by referencing the fundamentally different nature of the evidence after 300 CE, and the marked if gradual transition to the Byzantine world (pp. 550-551). Alongside these spatiotemporal parameters, Marek provides a thematic and methodological focus to the book. The significanceof Asia Minor is for him its intermediary position "between East and West" (the subtitle of chapter 1), which causes it to act as both a site for the mixing of peoples and as a bridge transmitting culture and commercial goods internally and externally. As a result, the region is neither "eastern" nor "western." Methodologically, Marek finds it "appropriate to eschew theorizing as much as possible" in favor of remaining "as close as I can to the sources," since his aim is to represent the position of the current state of scholarship (p. xiv). I will further discuss these parameters below, but for now it will suffice to observe that the consequence of his methodology is a structural emphasis on political narrative and state institutions as reflected by written sources that reproduces a pro-imperial, elite perspective that is often external to Asia Minor.
With these parameters in mind, which include extensive discussion of the geographical limits and topography of the region, Marek embarks inchapter 2 on an illuminating history of the study of Asia Minor, starting from the origins of fieldwork that emerged among various Europeans who visited the Ottoman Empire, recounting the major excavations that developed, and concluding with the rise of survey work that dominates much of the current research in Turkey today. Marek is laudably critical of the "European tunnel-vision" (p. 36) that favors certain areas over others, leading to an imbalanced understanding of the peninsula, but seems less attuned to the roles played by imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism in motivating the exploration and "discovery" of antiquities from the eighteenth century to today. For example, the desire by German travelers to colonize parts of northern and southern Asia Minor is mentioned as a brief and "curious" aside (p. 22). As a result, the story of this chapter ultimately, if tacitly, has the effect of legitimizing and even praising the Western appropriation of Asia Minor's ancient past, except where such appropriation conflicted with the agenda of the Republic of Turkey.
The subsequent five chapters, more than three hundred pages, take the reader through the long but fascinating chronological history of Asia Minor. Marek divides this narrative at first without reference to tradition: the Bronze Age is divided between chapters 3 ("From Prehistory to the Oldest Written Culture") and 4 ("The Late Bronze Age and Iron Age"). In the first of these, Marek displays his ability to incorporate less well-known and/or recently discovered information into his narrative while still featuring the "heavy hitters" of early Anatolian history.
Thus, alongside his careful consideration of Göbekli Tepe and Çatal Höyük in chapter 3, the detailed discussion of the important sites of NevaliÇori and Çayönü adds to and provides context for examples of early settlements that are often presented in isolation. His subsequent coverage of Hittites, "Trojans," Phrygians, and Greeks (among others) in a single chapter allows him to underline important continuities between Bronze Age Asia Minor and the world that emerges during the "Dark Ages" of the early first millenium BC, although these could have been made more explicit given the length of the chapter (seventy pages).
More conventional is the organization of the following three chapters, roughly corresponding to the Classical-Hellenistic-Roman periodization model. "The Western Persian Empire and the World of the Greeks," chapter 5's title, perfectly indicates Marek's focus here, although he is careful to also note indigenous contributions to and adaptations of foreign influence and interference. With the Hellenistic and Romanperiods Marek is clearly at his most comfortable. The narrative is vigorous and relishes in giving the unfamiliar but entertaining anecdote its due. I particularly enjoyed chapter 6's more balanced treatment of the Gallic/Galatian settlement of central Asia Minor, which is often portrayed only from the perspective of Macedonian kings attempting to bolster their political position through opposition to a "barbarian" other. Readers will also be taken with the palace intrigues of the many kingdoms that dominated north and central Asia Minor in the century or so before the Roman conquest. What was most impressive in both chapters was Marek's knack for weaving the abundant epigraphical material into his political narrative. These often locally produced texts provide a much needed corrective to literary histories that privilege the viewpoint of elites from the Greek mainland or Rome, and often represent our only real evidence for an important development. For example, documents complaining of soldierly abuses in the Asia Minor countryside suggest the weakening of legal protections and a growing "military anarchy" (p. 355). This chapter (the seventh) concludes with Galerius' defeat of the Sasanid Narseh in 297, but in essence sees as its endpoint the accession of Diocletian.
The final two chapters treat the "Imperial Administration under the Principate" in the region and the economic, social, and cultural history of Asia Minor in this same period. Both chapters provide useful insight into an especially well attested regional experience of the Roman Empire. Asia Minor is of course by no means typical of provincial life elsewhere, but nevertheless well illustrates the constant negotiation and renegotiation between the imperial government (and its cultural influence) and the native structures and traditions of the peninsula, such that by the end of the ninth chapter the reader is left with the enduring impression that the inhabitants of Asia Minor shaped their lives and what the empire was in the region as much if not more than the central administration. This impression is a product of Marek's keen attention to the voluminous epigraphical, archaeological, and numismatic evidence that he has helped to publish.
The book concludes with a brief epilogue discussing the legacy of Roman Asia Minor in the subsequent Byzantine and Ottoman periods, followed by a seventy-five-page appendix providing a chronological list of all the rulers of any part of the region. After the endnotes comes a bibliography, helpfully organized according to chapter sections, and three indices organized by scholarly author, primary source text, and topic.
One could hardly hope to write a more coherent, entertaining, and informative account of the ancient history of Asia Minor. The book will indeed be of great interest "not only to the specialist but also to the general reader interested in history" (p. xiii). There is an important qualification here, however: Marek often assumes a general knowledge of Greek or Roman history in mentioning terms, names of rulers, or places outside Asia Minor. The nonspecialist will be confused, for example, by the casual use of the terms "Diadochus"/"Diadochi" (referring to the generals who fought over Alexander's mpire), which is nowhere explained. Moreover, the book's maps provide uneven assistance to the general reader. In contrast to the seven maps portraying the various stages of provincial organization in Roman Asia Minor, the only maps in the chapters that cover the Persian and Hellenistic empires do not display political boundaries at all, despite a major focus on such political entities. So perhaps it would be better to say that the book will be useful to specialists, other scholars of classical antiquity, and amateur historians who know the basic outline, terminology, and geography of the ancient Mediterranean.
For specialists in ancient Asia Minor, the book will inevitably elicit rumination about how such a history should be written. My own critical focus alights upon the book's parameters outlined above. I have no quibble with the chronological limits decided by Marek—the work is long enough and someone else can write the sequel. On the other hand, it is somewhat problematic and anachronistic to define Asia Minor as geographically equivalent to modern Turkey. This is to assume a territorial integrity whose historicity legitimates nationalistic claims at the expense of minorities, most obviously Armenians (although Marek gives due attention to the ancient Armenian homeland in chapter 7). Marek's failure to clearly delineate the eastern limits of Asia Minor in chapter 1 is symptomatic of the impossibility of finding historically based reasons for equating modern nation-state with ancient region. Instead, the region should be defined as closely as possible according to ancient usage and perceptions.
Turning to Marek's thematic focus, I heartily endorse his portrayal of Asia Minor as a cultural crossroads and "mixing bowl" (my phrase). Indeed, such an emphasis had the potential to weave a common thread across the thousands of years covered by the book, revealing significant patterns of continuity and change in a way that only a chronologically ambitious survey can. Unfortunately, this theme suffers from neglect in the rest of the book, referenced occasionally but never determining what to cover or how to situate the overarching narrative. As a result, the general purpose of the work remains poorly defined, apart from sating antiquarian interest and serving as a starting point for engaging in scholarly controversies.
One particular reason to hope for more consistent attention to Asia Minor as a bridge and site of congruence between "East and West" is the desire for a more nuanced understanding of distinctions between cultural zones that the study of liminal spaces can bring. Many ancient historians, myself included, doubt the validity of seeing the Greek world and the Near East in such polarizing terms, so a history of Asia Minor as part of both and therefore neither could serve as a test case for the utility of these categories. Such a project is of course impossible without a clearly defined conceptual apparatus that Marek methodologically rejects as "theorizing." The result is not the rejection of "abstract concepts and models" (p. xiii), however, but the application of them without allowing the reader any awareness of their appropriateness. Ethnic and cultural labels that generalize similarities often noted only by modern observers become historical realities: "Greeks" settle in western Asia Minor beginning in the eleventh century, almost five hundred years before the word is used in a pan-ethnic sense; the "Hellenization" of the region is recounted in multiple chapters despite the abandonment of this term as unhelpful in describing what cultural adaptations meant to those implicated; peoples are "indigenous" if they arrived before a certain period, but groups who miss the cutoff are forever seen as foreign no matter how many centuries they inhabit the peninsula. In other words, rather than clarifying "East" and "West" through Asia Minor's intermediary position, Marek simply assumes their fixed nature as a prerequisite to tracking cultural developments in the peninsula.
Other critiques are possible, such as the imbalance between the Roman period (covered in three chapters) and what precedes it, which is not just a product of disproportionate evidence. Yet these remarks should not detract from the book's value as a unique source of information on a region whose history is underappreciated by nonspecialists. The translation is smooth with only occasional erros and oddities—unlike German, English does not consider history and philology "sciences" (p. 15). In any case, my criticisms only further speak to Marek's ability to push our thinking about why such a history should be written and how it can shape our broader understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world. It will find a home on many a shelf in the Anglophone world, and I hope it will increase the possibility of graduate courses being taught on this subject as a means of de- and/or recentering the discipline's lines of sight. It will certainly become the inspiration for many future dissertations, articles, and books, and that is really the main purpose of any publication worth its salt.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=47140
Citation: Jeremy LaBuff. Review of Marek, Christian; Frei, Peter, In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World. H-Teach, H-Net Reviews. December, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=47140
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
In the Land of a Thousand Gods: by Christian Marek
John L. Murphy John L. Murphy
November 10, 2016
The legacy of early Greece continues to fascinate scholars and tourists.
4 / 5
After two millennia, the legacy of early Greece continues to fascinate scholars and tourists. Less appreciated may be its neighboring realm, which spawned both rivals to and recipients of Hellenic control. Asia Minor, its very name standing for the exotic beyond the ethnocentric Mediterranean, bridges the East and the West. As events from today’s headlines verify, the tension between the Asian and European, the Middle East and the great sea over which so many powers have battled for power, exerts itself upon this heartland, where from prehistory on, many forces emanate from an epicenter.
In the Land of a Thousand Gods tells the story of this cultural and political hub, from the Stone Age to the Roman Empire. A massive work, it began with the research into cuneiform and hieroglyphics provided by Peter Frei, who taught ancient history at the University of Zurich. His student and successor, Christian Marek, completes this survey. Steven Rendell translates the 2010 German edition and incorporates a few updates to a compilation encompassing classics, Oriental Studies, linguistics, archaeology, prehistory and anthropology. Supplemented by necessary genealogies, maps, documentation and black-and-white illustrations, these appendices total over 170 pages. The text itself, while densely printed and closely argued, nevertheless aims at the general, if diligent, reader.
Details linger within the academic exploits recorded by Marek on every page, as excavators and discoverers vied to leave their mark upon the ruins opened up to acquisition by those in the vanguard of European colonial expansion. Inscriptions upon stone drove Philippe Le Bas, as the 19th century closed, to boast of his triumph. “I left Mylasa, having squeezed every drop of juice from the lemon. In future, travelers can dispense with going there. I have not left them the slightest kernel to find.”
This eagerness to claim and conquer spurred many in centuries previous, too. The region rests on its rubble. Buildings were often destroyed to excavate even older sites. Dams flood nowadays more and more of Anatolia, hastening current archaeological digs. In the past, of course, conquerors eradicated peoples and razed cities, only to have their inhabitants, returning or replacing those victims of war, raise up new edifices, streets rising to shove living levels higher. These striated remnants challenge scholars who delve beneath the surfaces, over thousands of years of occupation. From coinage to economics, religion to poetry, science and strategy, Marek allows patient students a comprehensive guide to this evolution from the Bronze and Iron Ages to the incursions of the Persians and then their bitter enemies, the Greeks. The Hellenistic polity in the wake of Alexander the Great gives way to the enforced Pax Romana. Then, the Roman republic capitulating to the imperial imposition of order, the provinces of Asia Minor emerge. Administration and sociopolitical considerations are then covered.
The results in this hefty volume will overwhelm any casual inquirer, but this book stands as a reference for anyone needing information about nearly any aspect of this period and this landmass. While in-depth as a whole, the chapters, needing to span so much, can race by. The reader will find that the sudden conclusion, as the Byzantine Christian establishment supplants and soon attempts to eliminate its pagan Roman forebears, comes as hastily as the onset of the new faith must have appeared to many who had long lived in Anatolia and its environs, worshiping a thousand gods.
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Pages:
824
IN THE LAND OF A THOUSAND GODS: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World
Posted on 20 August 2016
Christian Marek, in collaboration with Peter Frei and tr. by Steven Rendall
Princeton (2016) h/b 797pp £37.95 (ISBN 9780691159799)
Imagine an authoritative, up-to-date, fact-packed encyclopaedia covering the prehistory and history of Asia Minor (Anatolia or Turkey to us) from c. 20,000 BC to AD 330. Now envisage it as a continuous narrative. That, in brief, summarises the nature and quality of this ‘first historical overview of Anatolia as a bridge and a melting-pot, of the changing orientations, mixtures, and transmissions, from prehistory to the heyday of the Roman provinces’. Some statistics will give a sense of the weight of the enterprise: main text (a rough calculation) 270,000 words, with 109 b/w photographs and illustrations and 24 maps; a 75-page appendix listing all the rulers of the region over that period; 60 pages of notes; a 34-page bibliography; a 5-page list of cited authors and editors; a 13-page index locorum; and a 50-page index. And all in a smallish fount. Light bed-time reading it is not; definitive it surely is.
Translated and further revised, corrected and updated from the first edition published in German in 2010—and at what is by any standards an absolute bargain price—the story is shaped round the various empires that controlled the area from the Hittites to the Romans. The ten chapters cover an introduction (‘Anatolia between East and West’); the history of fieldwork in the region from the 14th C AD; from prehistory to the oldest written culture (Sumerian-Akkadian); the rise and fall of the Hittite empire; the Persian empire and Greeks in the region (547-333 BC); from Alexander to Rome (331-31 BC); the Roman empire to Aurelian; imperial administration under the principate; economic, socio-political and cultural conditions in the provinces during the empire; and a brief epilogue taking the story on to the first Crusade.
Since most classicists will be aware of the general picture from Cyrus of Persia to Constantine, it may be worth illustrating M.’s range with a brief summary of his account of the Hittites and the ensuing ‘dark age’. The only time when Asia Minor was a power centre in its own right was when it was ruled by the Hittites; otherwise it was dominated by external powers, first from the East (Persia) and then the West (Greece and Rome). But at all times its population and gods were exceedingly diverse (seven different language spoken over the Hittite period), encouraged by its location as a bridge between East and West, Eastern routes into and out of Anatolia carefully picked to avoid the freezing North and the boiling South. Here ideas, skills, and commodities made their crossings: for example, from the East to West, agriculture (wine!), domesticated sheep, goats, cattle, and horses, ceramics, metallurgy, mathematics, music, myth, metals, cosmology, alphabets, and from the West to East Greek and Latin, the political systems (the polis), baths, streets, architecture, theatre, technology. During the Hittite period, surviving letters document a form of international relations springing up across the region between Hittites, Egyptian, Babylonians, Assyrians and so on. In 1259 BC the first known treaty, a non-aggression pact, was signed between the Egyptians and Hittites (a copy is held in the UN in New York). Further, the Hittites started to write something approaching what we would call history.
M. is duly cautious about the historicity of Homer’s Trojan War, stressing that Greeks and Hittites had little intensive interaction anyway; and he assigns the collapse in the c. 12th C BC to general political and economic degeneration and invasions from the Balkans. He notes that while the Hittites appeared in the Bible, they were never mentioned in Greek or Roman literature, and our knowledge of them began to emerge only with excavations in the 20th C.
In the period c. 1000-c. 500 BC he offers sections on Urartians, Lycians and Carians, Phrygians, the Cimmerian invasions, the Lydian empire, and then the arrival of the Greeks, with the Aeolians, Ionians and Dorians, settlements in Pamphylia and Cilicia, developments of the polis and tyrannies, colonization, the Greek alphabet and finally the emergence of the first Greek literature and philosophy on the west coast. He emphasises that the wealth of Asia Minor made its courts highly attractive to Greeks. Throughout M. is alert to questions of language, alphabets, inscriptions, architecture, sculpture, culture, religion, trade, administration and so on. In particular, he is on top of all the academic issues and admirably open about summarising the current state of play without committing himself to one interpretation or another when he feels the subject is too complex for detailed discussion. These are features of the whole book.
In so vast an enterprise there are inevitable niggles. Does phrygio mean ‘goldsmith’ or should it be (as OLD proposes) ‘embroiderer’? The index confuses Termessos and Telmessos; there are small misprints (‘Philipp’, ‘Asia minor’); and the otherwise excellent translation produces terms like ‘cadastre’ and ‘neocorate’ and occasional oddities such as death in ‘childbed’.
Enough already: this is a masterful work composed by a scholar at the top of his form, drawing on the full range of international scholarship, and opening up Asia Minor in all its importance and kaleidoscopic fascination as never before. Without doubt one for the university libraries.
Peter Jones
In the Land of a Thousand Gods
A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World
Reviewed by Scott Neuffer
May 27, 2016
In the introduction to this new English translation of In the Land of a Thousand Gods, ancient history expert Christian Marek teases that because of its largeness and cultural diversity, ancient Asia Minor could never be comprehensively covered in one volume—ironic, because Marek gets close. This is a humongous, wide-ranging, yet thoughtfully organized and amply illustrated handbook on ancient Asia Minor, that peninsular land that is now modern-day Turkey.
The book views the geographic area as a land bridge connecting the Occident to the Orient, its history a melting pot of various cultures and waxing/waning cities. The lush chapters begin with prehistoric times and proceed through the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Persian Empire, Hellenization, and finally the establishment of Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) under imperial Rome. The best passages explore famous mysteries, like the legendary city of Troy, and illuminate the Anatolian roots of classical art, literature, and science. For example, Herodotus, “the Homer of history,” was born in Asia Minor to a Carian-Greek family, his work representing the synthesis of Greek and Middle Eastern cultures.
The book’s title is especially fitting; prominently examined are manifold cosmologies and deities that guided and differentiated Anatolia’s melting-pot civilizations. Readers interested in the spiritual will be pleased with a heady mélange of sun gods and wine gods and temples and altars. The chronological chapters reveal how the mysterious cults and iconography of vanishing peoples were integrated into larger empires and emergent monotheistic theologies like Christianity. In the Land of a Thousand Gods limns these mythic-religious transformations in glorious detail, both with fastidious prose and resplendent pictures. It is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in Asia Minor and in the broader cultural exchange between East and West.