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HARVARD HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN SOCIETIES WORKSHOP
Kurt A. Raaflaub
Prof. emer. of Classics, Brown University
THE ‘GREAT LEAP’ IN EARLY GREEK POLITICS AND POLITICAL THOUGHT THE END OF AN EAST-WEST KOINĒ
Wednesday, October 25th, 2017, at 5:15 p.m.
Semitic Museum, Room 201, 6 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA
Scholars find increasing evidence that a “cultural koine” existed in the eastern Mediterranean world in the early Iron Age, just as it had in the Late Bronze Age. As far as political thought and practice are concerned, however, such a koine ended in the seventh century BCE. This paper argues that patterns visible in these areas and widely shared by Greeks and Near Eastern societies, are still visible in the early seventh century. Soon thereafter, though, the Greeks diverged from that common tradition; they embarked on a path of radical innovation that has no parallels in the Ancient Near East, took their fledgling political life and thinking in a decidedly new direction that enabled them to discover ideas, values, institutions, and procedures that had a profound and long-lasting impact on the development of western political thought and action. The first—and for the present occasion most important—part of the paper reconstructs the early Iron Age east-west koine in political thought and practice, based on close analogies in two areas. One is the way in which Greek, Assyrian, and Hebrew (Biblical) political thinking deals with the issue of injustice, committed by leaders, rulers, or the elite, that harms the entire community and is punished by divine intervention. The other concerns, in the same societies, the role and function of assemblies and councils and relations between these two institutions. The second part of the paper discusses, more briefly, the Greek “break-away” from the traditional koine and its historical significance. The final part tries to explain this “great leap” and to place it in its historical context.