Sean Mathews’s The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East (Hurst) argues that Greece is best understood as a Near Eastern nation, and that its Byzantine and Ottoman past, not its classical-European self-image, is central for its survival in our modern environment .
My first mistake, when I first visited Greece as a child, was to think that I came from there. I am a Lebanese Greek Orthodox, a “Roum,” from an entirely Roum region bearing the Greek name Koura (χώρα), from a village with a possible etymology “am yawan” (“the Greek tribe” in Aramaic), and I felt strangely at home in Greece. Until the First World War, our “Roum” nationality put us in the same group, millet, of the Greek-Orthodox world. Everything resembled my Lebanese Christian surroundings, with a few minor differences: the Greeks of Athens appeared to be slightly more disciplined but less smooth in conversation between strangers. My erudite father, a medical doctor who wrote on the side a doctoral thesis in anthropology had found that the Koura region shared genetic blood diseases (such as Thalassemia) with parts of Cyprus and the Greek seaboard.
This was before the Lebanese war and before Greece joined what is now called the European Union, when suddenly a cultural and identitarian wall was erected. But the biggest “Westernization” took place with the Athens Olympics of 2004. Before that, Greeks went to “Evfropi,” and the border between “East” and “West” was somewhere in the Balkans, where people were Catholic on one side of the demarcation and Orthodox or Muslim on the other. The French Marguerite Yourcenar, writing in the middle of the Twentieth Century, sneeringly described Cavafy as looking like “un courtier levantin” with the Gibbonian stereotype of the Levantine as solely interested in lowly commerce and the soft life. That “Levant” in question has been shrinking progressively as the Greeks, then the Turks, started self-identifying as “Europeans,” whatever that meant.
I soon realized I had made a mistake of origination when I remembered that Europa was the daughter of a Phoenician king (something drilled into every Lebanese schoolchild), so it could be the other way around. Lebanese and Syrian Muslims (from Western Syria) were also indistinguishable from Greeks, down to body language, except, as I said, smoother in conversations between strangers.
This turned out to be closer to the truth, but not quite: simply, Greeks and Northern Canaanites both largely came from around Anatolia. The linguistic difference, that wedge between “Semitic” and “Indo-European,” is arbitrary and rather recent-and it is only linguistic. And for a long time (actually, even now) self-respecting scholars have believed that there were two distinct races-something convenient to isolate the Christian West from these “Semites.” During the Bronze Age, the Indo-European-speaking Hittites, in Anatolia, ran the area all the way down to what is now North Lebanon.
What is not commonly known on both sides of the European visa demarcation line is that the Levant spent about one thousand years under Hellenic and “Greco-Roman” cultural influence, from Alexander until the Arab conquest, and another four hundred years in the same ensemble, the Ottoman Empire (furthermore, Hellenism didn’t die immediately with the Arab conquest but centuries later). Also note that the Ottoman Empire, at its beginning, branded itself as a Byzantium 2.0, that is, the continuation of the Roman Empire: the Seljuks before them had called their Anatolian state the Sultanate of Rum, and Mehmed II, after taking Constantinople in 1453, styled himself Kayser-i Rum, “Caesar of (East) Rome.” This helps explain the degradation of Russo-Ottoman relations after the Muscovite princes started styling themselves tsars, that is, Caesars.
Families of Body Language
To appreciate the strangeness of identitarianism, consider that there is currently this curious ensemble of post-Ottoman people speaking not just three languages but three distinct families of languages (Indo-European, Turkic, and Semitic) though with the same looks, same food, same coffee, same traditional clothing (serval), and the same music but sung with different words. They say yes, no, maybe, give me the check, she is beautiful, what’s going on, I am fed up, with the exact same gestures: from Athens to Gaza, “no” is a backward toss of the head with raised eyebrows and a tongue click, “yes” is a short downward nod or tilt, and a side-to-side shake means “what?” rather than “no.” This code goes back to Homer’s ananeuō and kataneuō, older than any of the three language families now spoken over it. The kinesic substrate survived the linguistic changes.
And, naturally, each of the communities thinks of itself as the most sophisticated one. There is a Lebanese saying that Greek food is Lebanese cooked by children -and in turn the same is said about Lebanese food by people from Aleppo.
So we are talking of a total of at least fifteen centuries of cohabitation between the Levant and what is now Greece -though what is now mainland Greece was the backwaters before the rediscovery of Europe; Constantinople, Smyrna, and Alexandria was where the action was, even after the Greek independence and Athens was what André Malraux, almost unfairly, called “un village albanais”.
And, what is also counterintuitive, Syro-Palestine was not a colony of Greece, but a dominant part of it –it was, simply, the richest area of the Hellenistic world and proved progressively to be the most intellectually productive one. What is now under the Hellenic Republic became a poor cousin both economically and intellectually — as we will see, at least five heads of the successors of Plato’s Academy (or what was left of them) were ethnic Syrians. But we are under the illusion that these intellectual productions were done by “Greeks”.
From Heliodoros to Winston Fu
To understand the issue let me first explain diglossia or multiglossia. I just received a text message in English from someone located in my village in Lebanon. The person has never addressed me in English in the physical world, only in text messages. Why? Because the habit is to speak in Levantine Arabic, but to write in some Western language, French or English, on two separate registers. And this is not new. We live under the illusion that people spoke in the languages in which they wrote: for a long stretch of time, writing and speaking were separate, because reading and writing were limited to professionals. Aramaic became the official language of the entire Fertile Crescent after the Persian invasion -simply, it was the language in which the Persians wrote, while speaking their own separate language, because that was what their scribes knew.
Secundo, another component is the external naming. Many East Asians adopt an Anglo-Saxon name when interacting with English speakers, but retain their home one when using their own language; “James Ma” “Winston Fu”, or “Bob Hong” is something we are used to.
Now the same applies to the Levant. “Greek” Syria is not a bunch of Greeks who settled in Syria, but, mostly, Syrians using Greek in the scholarly domain just as I am now writing in English without having a single ancestor originating in the rainy island. And (Exhibit I) they had external Greco-Roman names just like Bob Hong. For instance on a 4 thC. B.C., pre-Alexander and pre-Hellenization, on a bilingual funeral stelle in Athens, the Sidonian Abd-Shemesh became Heliodoros and his son Abd-Tanit became Artemidoros. The gods carry over by equivalence (Shemesh-Helios, Tanit-Artemis), but abd, “servant of”, becomes “gift of”: a cultural adaptation, not a translation.
Consider the roster of Levantine Hellenophone authors: Zeno of Citium, Zeno of Sidon, Antiochus of Ascalon, Marinus of Neapolis, Damascius, Isidore of Gaza, Hermias and Diogenes of Phoenicia, Menippus, Philodemus, and Oenomaus of Gadara, Boethus of Sidon, Posidonius, Numenius, and Sopater of Apamea, Antipater of Tyre, Maximus of Tyre, Porphyry of Tyre, Iamblichus of Chalcis, Aeneas of Gaza, Apollonius of Citium, Dorotheus of Sidon, Nicomachus of Gerasa, Marinus of Tyre, Apollodorus of Damascus, Vindonius Anatolius of Berytus, Domninus of Larissa, Nicolaus of Damascus, Josephus, Philo of Byblos, Procopius of Caesarea, John Malalas, Evagrius Scholasticus, Antipater of Sidon, Meleager of Gadara, Archias of Antioch, Lucian of Samosata, Heliodorus of Emesa, Romanos the Melodist, Hadrian of Tyre, Libanius, Procopius of Gaza, Zacharias Scholasticus, Timotheus of Gaza, Choricius of Gaza, Papinian, Ulpian, Julius Paulus, Dorotheus and Anatolius of Berytus, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Eusebius of Caesarea, Nemesius of Emesa, John Chrysostom, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Sophronius, Andrew of Crete, and John of Damascus, and, writing in Latin, Publilius Syrus, Valerius Probus, and Ammianus Marcellinus.
Roman law, the backbone of the European legal tradition, was largely Levantine. Papinian was from Emesa and Ulpian was from Tyre, and Ulpian alone accounts for at least one third of Justinian’s Digest. The Digest was compiled with jurists from Berytus, which Justinian called legum nutrix, “the nurse of the laws.”
The New Testament was largely written in Antioch, the then-capital of Syria, in the Syro-Palestinian variety of Koiné.
Something similar, I speculate, took place in Egypt. Alexandria was formally a Greek city, but the Egyptian countryside gave us Manetho of Sebennytos, who wrote Egypt’s history in Greek, Plotinus of Lycopolis, the poets of Panopolis, Nonnus foremost, and Horapollo, who explained his ancestors’ hieroglyphs in Greek. And many Alexandrian scholars, whose ancestry is simply unknown, may well have been Egyptians or Levantine migrants partaking of the lingua franca of the day.
My Friend Mohammed Kolavakis
Let me add another dimension. I’ve noticed many Semitic and Arabic names that appear to be specifically Levantine, and tend to be more often used by Christians, while being absent or rare in the Medieval Arabian Peninsula -Atallah (Theodosios), Habib (Agapetos), Said (Makarios), Naim (Eutychios), Nour (Photios), Jamil (Kalistos), Mansour and Fawzi (Niketas), Nasri (Nikephoros), Malek (Basileios), Saliba (Stavros), Naja, Najat (Soterios, Soteria), Abd-al-Masih (Christodoulos), Anis (Philemon), Amin (Pistos), Hakim (Sophronios), Farah (Chara), Najib (between Gregorios and Eugenios), Nabil (Eugenios), Ghosn (Thales)-and hence may reflect, at least in part, the long Graeco-Roman cultural and linguistic osmosis of the Levant. Purely Arabic names sound like Sharahil, Huddan, Saddam, Shuahil, Jashm, Hashed, Amru, Zahran, Hajar, Khanjar, Kaab, Hadruj, Shammar and tend to be more descriptive, rather than reflect human qualities.
Finally, there are port towns in Lebanon that were Greek-speaking until recently, particularly Mina in North Lebanon now incorporated into Tripolis (itself a Greek name) -I was actually born there in the clinic of one Dr. Wahib Nini, whose family originates from somewhere Greek. Tripolis, along with another few villages on the North-Syrian coast, are the rare places where one could find Greek-speaking Muslims -in addition to Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox Lebanese of Greek origin. For during the displacements of 1898, Greek-speaking Cretans of the Muslim faith were stranded. Greece and the about to become Turkey had then binarized along religious lines: although Greece considered Turkish speaking Christians as full Greeks (sort of), Turkey did not have a mirror rule so they came to Lebanon and Syria bearing such names as Ibrahim Bakrakis, Ahmad Terzlakis -so we now commonly find unusual discordances between first names such as Mohammed and Abdelrahman and family names such as Joulamakis, Kolavakis, Soufarakis, Afantakis, Kapslakis, and Mazakis.
Saint Nicholas, a New York Diner
To conclude, consider cultures that accumulate in a community as separate floors in one single museum building. Nationalism, an exclusionary identitarian idea born in the 19 thcentury, is based on a crisp narrative, and limits itself on one single floor. Given that identities are not rigid designations, the narratives can change abruptly. Greek “identity” prior to the middle of the Nineteenth Century was such that an immigrant to New York opening a diner would have named it “Saint Nicholas” or “Saint Demetrius”, confining his identity to, say, the fourth floor. But an earlier immigrant showing up in the late Twentieth Century would have picked the third floor, and named the restaurant “Acropolis” or “Hercules”. So what we now recognize as Greek revival imagery currently illustrating the coffee cups carried about by hangover-prone take-out diners is almost purely an English and German re-import (by such Third-Floor-Hellenophile figures as Lord Byron or the more recent Patrick Leigh Fermor). In a similar way, French orientalists made the Lebanese discover their “Phoenician” identity, something that was foreign to all residents -though the Francophone Lebanese poet Charles Corm refused to consider it an exclusive identity; for him one could be both Arab and Phoenician. Thanks to the Greek Orthodox Church, Greeks are reminded from holiday to holiday of the existence of other floors in the building.
I end with the following thought on some properties of nationalism. Most forms of nationalism, alas, tend to actively brainwash the subjects and blot out everything outside their designated floor and, what is worse, tend to change floors randomly through time. Hopefully, we could put people through a special orientation program to help them understand the value of staircases and elevators -as well as the notion of entropy, given that higher floors, those closer to the present time, embed elements from the lower ones. There is such a thing as an non-exclusive identity: it was actually born in the Eastern Mediterranean.
1 Alberto Moravia, 1959: In realtà, come nota più avanti la Yourcenar, Cavafis non aveva un aspetto poetico ; aveva l’aria di un signore qualsiasi, di un uomo d’affari levantino.