Looking For a Prehistory of the Presocratics

I recently published a post on this blog in which I stated that I didn't believe that philosophy began with the Pre-Socratics -- not because I actually knew anything about cultures previous to the Pre-Socratics, but because the notion that the pre-Socratics could've invented philosophy on their own struck me as prima facie absurd. A century or two after the Pre-Socratics, the author of Ecclesiastes stated that there was nothing new under the sun, and this matched the impression I had that cultures borrowed things from other cultures which had borrowed them other cultures, with many modifications, to be sure, but rarely with anything completely new. There was certainly nothing new, or unique to the ancient Greeks, in a reluctance for one culture to acknowledge its debts to another.

The wrong way around, after publishing the blog post instead of before, I attempted to track down some confirmation of its thesis.

And I'm still looking. Martin L West, in his book The East Face of Helicon, Oxford, 2003 edition, says on p vii: "I am not concerned with Oriental contributions to science and philosophy," and I also could not deduce any from among the huge number of Mesopotamian literary, mythical and other cultural influences upon Greece demonstrated in West's book (which is superb and which I highly recommend).

Marc Van de Mieroop's book Philosophy Before the Greeks, Princeton, 2017 edition, did not show me that which its title describes, nor, apart from an assertion that Pythagorean triples were in use in Mesopotamia 1000 years before Pythagoras -- an assertion which did not come with a footnote which would aid someone hoping to confirm it -- did Walter Burkert's contribution, "Prehistory of Presocratic Philosophy in an Orientalizing Context," to The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, Oxford, 2011, p 55. Perhaps I should read them again, more slowly.

Or perhaps I should show more respect to an academic consensus, even when it contradicts my sense of what is prima facie obvious. Perhaps, when there is widespread astonishment among the experts at some achievement, as there is in the case of the achievement of Pre-Socratic philosophy, I should be more open to the possibility that the astonishment is justified. Astonishment is what I'm feeling more and more as I search for philosophical predecessors of the Pre-Socratics and -- sorry, Dr Van de Mieroop, sorry, Dr Burkert -- keep finding none.

The Homeric Question: West vs the Oralists

In a blog post I published in February entitled Papyri of the Iliad; Also: Academic Conventions, I mentioned the late M L West (1937-2015) and the 1569 papyri of the Iliad which he consulted for his Teubner edition, which was published in two volumes in 1998 and 2000.

Back in February, I knew scarcely anything about West. Before this, he was, to me, above all one of the two editors of the selected fragments in my 1990 OCT edition of Hesiod. Since then, I've learned that West was involved in a debate over the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey which is very spirited, to say the least, and which has been going on for decades. (I know that you academics who are reading this know much more about this debate than I do. As I keep repeating, my blog posts about Classical studies are written by a layman for other laypeople.) West said that both poems were composed in the 7th century BC, first the Iliad and then the Odyssey, by two different individuals; on the other hand, scholars known as oralists, or proponents of oralism, assert that... let's see -- what exactly do they assert? I believe they're saying that no one person can be regarded as the author of either or both poems: that they were the products of oral composition and performance up until the moment, in the 6th century, when one version of each poem was written down. The oral performances continued for some time after this first written version, and account for the many of the discrepancies among the manuscripts. I believe that's more or less what the oralists are saying.

I know that I don't know anywhere near enough Greek to take an intelligent position on this controversy. To do so, I would have to be able to evaluate the textual variants in Homer, and decide whether I beleive that West or the oralists account for them more convincingly. All I can tell you is that I like the things which West wrote about it in English. Beginning with the first I ever heard about West's disagreement with the oralists: in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.09.06, answering reviews of his volumes of the Iliad by Gregory Nagy and Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, West writes:

"My critics are both (though it takes them in different ways) devotees of the Oralist faith, and they reproach me for not paying sufficient regard to the Good News."

That made me smile. West has had me from the moment I read that. Furthermore, unfortunately, Nagy, Nardelli and others representing the oralist standpoint actually do write, at least when they're writing in opposition to West's answers to the Homeric question, in a strident, dismissive, unpleasant manner reminiscent of religious fanatics answering the views of those who disagree with them.

I'm not saying that West is right and that the oralists are wrong. I am saying that West states his case much more persuasively in English than the oralists do. But, of course, English is ultimately not what this is about.

Papyri of the Iliad; Also: Academic Conventions

In my recent blog post entitled Manuscripts, I wrote:

"[...]several months ago, I sent a email to a distinguished scholar, asking him whether he could round out some areas of my knowledge of the Oxyrhynchus papyri project: Are any of the papyri still in the boxes Grenfell and Hunt put them into between 1897 and 1904? Are we approaching the state of things where all that is left are tiny little pieces of papyrus? Questions like that.

"He hasn't gotten back to me. That hurts my feelings, but it's entirely his prerogative, of course. Finally today I sent an email to the general guestions-and-suggestions-etc address of the Oxyrhynchus project, which is perhaps where I should've inquired to begin with."

In Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, Munich & Leipzig, 2000, p 87, M L West writes that, as the Egypt Exploration Society wished, he did not give any details of the 850 unpublished Oxyrhynchus papyri (Correction: 827 unpublished papyri used by West in his edition, plus 23 first published in Manfrdi et al, Papiri dell'Iliade, Florence, 2000. I think. Much of what I write in CI and about Classics on my blog should be proofread by experts before anyone thinks of taking it seriously, because of things I don't know and full-time academics do know.) used in his edition of the Iliad, 1998--2000, and he thanks them for their permission to now include their inventory numbers and summary details in his catalog of papyri of the Iliad, which contains a total of 1569 items.

Because of those details, I can see that those 850 papyri which in 2000 were either unpublished or published for the first time, are certainly not inconsequential little scraps. They seem generally to be about as big as most of the Homeric papyri already published. This does not give the impression that the Oxyrhynchus project is almost all out of significant papyri. I need to try to find out how many more have been published in the last 18 years, and discovered in that time, if the existence of those latter have been made known to the public.

To judge from West's pointed expression of thanks to the Egypt Exploration Society for their permission to divulge details about unpublished papyri, maybe the reason that neither the above-mentioned distinguished scholar nor anyone else from the EES has yet gotten back to me with details about unpublished papyri is that such details are conventionally thought of as proprietary secret knowledge of the EES, only rarely made public in extraordinary circumstances, such as when a scholar of West's stature is involved. I'm ignorant of the ways in which things are usually done in Classical Studies and papyrology, Perhaps I've been making making requests for information which are generally considered impolite at best. Consultation with some Classicists and papyrologists about mores and conventions, learning a little about the way things are usually done, certainly would do me no harm, and might save both myself and some scholars a great deal of future embarrassment.