Sofia Torallas Tovar | Egyptians in Athens: Following the Trails of Words

It's a real pleasure tonight to welcome and to introduce Professor Sofia Torayas-Tovar from our own university. She is a professor in Classics in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and she specializes in Greek and Coptic papyrology, Greco-Roman Egypt and in Sociolinguistics. I think tonight's lecture will be a combination of those three items and I'm personally really looking forward to it. Professor Torayas-Tovar, I will say a little bit more about her in a moment, so she will give her lecture, then afterwards there will be an opportunity for questions and then after the questions we all invite you to a reception in the Mesopotamian Gallery. So Professor Torayas, as I said, she is a professor here in the Departments of Classics and of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. She received her degrees from the Universidad in Madrid in Spain and she is really a very international person. Apart from having had appointments in her home country in Spain, in Madrid, she has been in Berlin, in London, in Stockholm and in Bochum in Germany at the Ruhr Universität. She is on a number of editorial and other scholarly boards. She is very widely published. I counted on her CV six books plus two textbooks and several edited volumes, two of which have appeared this year with the Oriental Institute Press. And if you are interested, as you know, all OI publications are published freely, downloadable online the same day that they appear in print. So I urge you to go to the OI website, go to publications and there you will find those two volumes by Professor Torayas. So let me, without further ado, give you the title of the lecture, Egyptians in Athens, Following the Trails of Words, and I hope you'll join me in welcoming Professor Torayas. Thank you so much, Theo, for such a generous presentation and thank you everybody for being here so late and in finals week. I'm very grateful to the Oriental Institute for inviting me to giving today a member's lecture and to Matthew Welton for organizing the series. Today I'm going to talk about a topic, as Theo said, that covers some of my interests and it's been a project that I've been working on for a long time. It began being like a very linguistic project, like trying to look for loan words and understanding how they work. But then I was interested in how the speakers themselves perceived those words and how those words had a narrative behind and a historical and social narrative behind them. Of course, like my expertise was mostly on papyri, so I had to make an effort to go back and try to understand the origins of language contact between Greece and Egypt. So classical Athens was a more diverse space than our main classical sources can suggest. Many scholars have tried to show this diversity using different sources and literal interpretation. I want to contribute to this inquiry using words, loan words, flying words that traveled from from one language to the other and that act as cultural artifacts and witnesses of language contact. A loan word is a word partly assimilated from one language, the donor language, to another, which would be the target language. And as these words transition from one language to the other, they carry with them backgrounds and stories. To give an example, the word taco in English has a background of migration and shared culinary taste. The word software in Spanish has a background of globalized technologies. Can one use single words to help reconstruct a world of interconnectedness of shared cultural spaces? The ancient Greek language, as we know it through the transmitted literature and the canonical literature, was quite resistant to loan words. And most of the core vocabulary of the language of classical Greek is purely Greek, etymologically speaking, with a few contributions from pre-Greek first, some Phoenician, some Persian, and later on with history, even Latin and else. When it comes to Egyptian, there are approximately 100 loan terms that filtered into Greek throughout centuries of contact, including the period, the Greco-Roman period in Egypt. I am going to use these borrowed terms from Egyptian to explore today the cultural exchange and contact of these two civilizations in the early centuries, but before Alexander conquered the land of the Nile at the end of the fourth century BCE and thus created a stable common geographical space for Greeks and Egyptians. Starting from Athens, I will combine and contrast the evidence we have from Greek literature, most of it fragmentary, with historical evidence of the Greek colonies in the delta, to follow the trails of words of Egyptian products and Egyptian residents in Athens. So we start our journey in Athens in the fifth century, in the theater of Dionysus, where there were annual competitions of dramatic plays. It was the year 458 BCE and Aeschylus presented the what seems to be the first play and only survivor of a tetralogy known as the Danites. This cluster of lost theatrical, almost lost, only one survived, plays probably also included the Egyptians, the Danites, and the satyr play Amemone, all of which completed an extended plot around the Greek-Egyptian mythological conflict of the daughters of Danaus. For these Egyptians, Danites and Amemone, we have merely the title and a few fragments. In the extant play, in the suppliants, the plot brings a chorus of the 50 daughters of Danaus to the city of Argos, fleeing from a forced marriage to their Egyptian cousins, the sons of their paternal uncle, Aegyptus. At the feet of King Pelasgus of Argos, the suppliants entreat him to protect them, reminding him of their Greek ancestry. With the Argive people in favor, King Pelasgus grants them protection, only to shortly have the Egyptian herald at the city gates requesting the immediate return of the women for marriage to their cousins in Egypt. The plot, at least in the surviving play, seems to end happily for the women, whose Greek background is recognized, and they remain in Argos, thanking the Greek gods. The Egyptian cousins of the Danites, on the other hand, are featured as sex-crazed barbarians, part of the Greek stereotype of Egyptians, while the women, the daughters of Danaus, are reclaimed to their original Greek background and saved from the captivity and forced marriage. Nevertheless, the lost plays of the trilogy extend the plot into an intricacy of less happy events, which include the fulfillment of the forced marriage of the daughters of Danaus to their Egyptian cousins in the play The Egyptians, followed by the fatal wedding day in the Danites, in which the massacre of the bridegrooms takes place. And I brought this beautiful painting by John William Waterhouse with the supplicants carrying water, which is a regular representation in art. It's a convention since antiquity to show their eternal punishment for the murders of their newly wedded spouses. But the supplicants must have resonated with the Athenian audience by telling a story that echoed experiences in their own time. The Suppliants is a tale about migration from Egypt to Greece and from Greek to Egypt. It is also a play about how the Greeks imagined the Egyptians, their marriage rituals, and their customs. And perhaps this mythically staged story about migration and intermarriage is not only mythical, because all mythical narratives are at the same time mythical, and they connected with the audience with their worldview and their experiences. For instance, King Pelasgus of Argos mentions in line 311 precisely two places in Egypt where there were colonies of Greeks since the 7th-6th century BCE, Memphis and Canopus. Memphis is the place where Herodotus situates the famous colony or community of Helenomenphites. The Greeks that had settled there already in the 6th century before Christ and Canopus in the Delta was part of a cluster of Emporia since the 7th century, together with Naocrates and Heraclion Tonis. But how much did the Athenians read in this story that connected to their everyday life? As I said before, I would like to explore this world of exchange and cultural contact in the Mediterranean of the 5th-4th centuries following the trails of words, specifically Egyptian loanwords in Greek, which can help us understand the worlds opening behind them. And our first word today is baris, a type of flat-bottom freighter used on the Nile, which has an Egyptian etymology. The suppliants is one of the earliest pieces of extant Greek literature, together with Herodotus, that features loanwords from the Egyptian language. It is known that one of the resources of Greek comedy to present foreigners or barbarians was to place gibberish in their mouths, sometimes even an actual foreign language, but this was not the case with tragedy, which generally just had foreigners sound like Greek speakers as much as in Homer. What we do find in Aeschylus is a more subtle device, in Aeschylus precisely in the suppliants, which is to characterize the Egyptians on stage and their voices as foreign. So he calls the women, the Danites, xenai, foreigners, and he refers to their language as a barbarian language, Carvana Audan, and he also places a few loanwords of Egyptian etymology in the mouth of the chorus of Danites and in the mouth of the Egyptian herald. These are the terms that we find there, syndonia, linen cloak, baris, which is the bark that I told you, and hamsa, the crocodile. How not? Let me read you one of the lines so that you get an idea of how these words appear in the play. Wail and shout and call upon the gods, says the herald to the women. You will not escape the Egyptian bark, using baris. Cry out, utter a strain of woe, more bitter still. This literary dramatical device has been interpreted as a resource to create Egyptian ambience, to mark the space on stage with exoticism, and to characterize the actors through their voices. The repertory of Egyptian words is certainly limited, since these words ought to be identifiable, albeit exotic, for an Athenian audience that did not know the Egyptian language, or did it know more than we think. The presence of Egypt in the imaginary world of Greeks since the mid-fifth century is quite significant, but their mythical role is not the only explanation for the presence of Egyptian characters and Egyptian words in the play that we're talking about. Rather, the myth comes alive on stage precisely because it speaks to the audience familiar with Egyptian customs and their language. The Egyptian terms I mentioned in Aeschylus, and the ones I will bring up in the reminder of this paper, are perfectly adapted to the morphology of Greek. They are not the result of casual interferences, or words chosen by the author, by Aeschylus in this case, to convey exoticism. They were adopted as Greek words, and these terms are known and understood by an Athenian audience, and fit perfectly into the syntax of their language. These Athenians lived in an Athens described by Xenophon in the Constitution of the Athenians. Thanks to their naval power, the Athenians have developed relationships with varied peoples, and have discovered different kinds of luxury, so that if there was any pleasure in Sicily, in Italy, in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Lydia, in Pontus, or Peloponnesus, or anywhere else, they were all gathered into one by Athenian naval power. Moreover, hearing all the languages, they adopted one word from one, another from another. Thus, while the Greeks make use of their own language, way of life, and dress, the Athenians use a mixture of Greek and non-Greek. Xenophon's text explains the adoption of words from other languages, together with customs and ways of life, pointing at trade and the control of the sea, as the main agent for the interrelations of Athenians with foreign peoples, among them the Egyptians. These trade liaisons also caused migration. As much as we find Greeks in Egypt, as I mentioned before, in Memphis, and in the Emporia of the Delta, there were also Egyptians who lived in Athens. It is their lives that I will try to reconstruct, using literary evidence, following the trails of words. And our next word is nitron. Sodium carbonate, natron, with an Egyptian etymology, nature, which also appears in many other languages of the Mediterranean, using the Egyptian word, because it was a product that was used in general to dry fish and meat, to produce faiennes, it was also like an excellent insecticide, so it was a very important product also in construction. Let me take you across the Mediterranean, to the origin of these Egyptian residents in Athens, especially to the Greek foundations in the Nile Delta, Naukratis, Heraklionthonis, and Canopus. In the site period, in the 7th-6th centuries BC, was a period of greater stability. There was a favorable climate for commercial exchange, as well as for tourism and exploration trips, as those reported by Hecateus and Herodotus. Commercial ties kept increasing from the 7th century BC onwards. Several Mediterranean harbors, Athens, Ephesus, Klatsomene, Phaselis, Phosea in Ionia, Naukratis, Heraklionthonis in Egypt, Tyre and Byblos on the coast of Levant, but a few examples, constituted a highly dynamic exchange network for all kinds of products, and also an important source of linguistic and cultural exchange. The products often traveled hand-in-hand with the terms that were used to call them, from the mouths of traders, travelers, and pirates. Nothing remains of the languages spoken in these harbors, the pidgins, developed by traders of different origins to understand each other in their transactions. A pidgin is a simplified form of a language used for communication between people not sharing a common language. Imagine a harbor with Phoenicians, Greeks, Egyptians doing business, exchanging products, and learning each other's language. Nothing survived of these conversations, but the terms linked to the realities and the products have remained as archaeological artifacts that can be used to identify trade routes and products. The ports of Egypt evidently participated in this commercial transfer, and the products of the land of the Nile reached all points of the Mediterranean. Fayens, alabaster, and scarabs have been found in Phoenician establishments throughout the Mediterranean, from east to west. Naukratis had been founded in the 7th century, probably on top of an already existing Egyptian settlement, where according to Strabo, a first century geographer, Greek speakers from all origins, Ionian, Dorian, and Aeolian, established their businesses, married Egyptian women, and gave birth to generations of Greeks born in Egypt. Intermarriage is often not easy to reconstruct, so a graffito like this one from Naukratis, like the one that you see here on the screen, is an interesting witness of love between a Greek man, Gorgias, and an Egyptian woman, Thamounis. This is a fragment of an Athenian bowl from 420 to 410 from Naukratis. Who were these Naukratites? An interesting epigraphic testimony provides us with detail worthy of demographic analysis. This is the decree of Lindos, well, a fragment of the decree of Lindos from 411 to 408 BC. The beneficiary is a certain Pytheas, an Egyptian from Naukratis. This short text opens one of the most relevant questions for our study, and that is the question of the identity of the speakers, that of their legal profile and their linguistic and cultural profile, and whether or not these two profiles coincide. Pytheas, with a Greek name, is characterized in this inscription as an Egyptian, not being a native of Athens or other Greek city. Despite being born in Egypt, his mother tongue may be Greek, as is his name, or perhaps he is a bilingual individual. In the same inscription, a bit, in a couple of lines down, he is described as a hermeneus interpreter, which perhaps gives us a clue to his multilingual profile, although we can also be inclined to take a second interpretation of the word hermeneus, not as an interpreter, but rather as a middleman or broker. They also interpret different things, but they also interpret. While the identity of Pytheas is not entirely clear, he could be an Egyptian with a Greek name, a Greek born in Egypt and thus considered and characterized as an Egyptian of Naukratis, but this inscription offers us a quick peek into the linguistic and demographic composition of the population of Naukratis and other parts of the Mediterranean trade network. So let's follow Pytheas the broker, or Pytheas the interpreter, on his way to Naukratis on his ship. At least two documents from the 5th century BC allow us to reconstruct the nature of the commercial exchange of the Greeks of Athens and Ionia and the Phoenicians with Egypt. One of these, and the most important, is a papyrus from Elephantine containing a record in Aramaic of the customs clearance of ships from Asia Minor and Syria at the ports of Tonis and Naukratis, this dating from around 475 BC, a time when the Persian king Xerxes reigned in Egypt. This papyrus records the arrival in Naukratis of Greek ships from Phaselis in Ionia, one of the cities participating in the founding of the Greek emporium of Naukratis. These ships arrived with a cargo mainly of wine and oil and Phoenician ships, probably from Telgasa, carrying Sidonian wine, cedar wood, bronze, iron, wood, Samian soil, tin, and building materials to Egypt. From Egypt, the most important export, that of natron, is also mentioned in this document, perhaps because this was the most important export and perhaps it was because it was taxed with a harbor fee. The Egyptian name features in all languages where it was marketed, in Hebrew neter, as I said before, in Arab natron, in Hittite nitri, and all originating from Egyptian nature natron. A second document complements this papyrus in the reconstruction of the circulation of products in Egyptian harbors. I refer to the decree of Nectanebo, a bit later, from 380, written on twin stelae, one of them spectacularly recovered from the underwater excavations in Heraklion. This decree mentions import of gold, silver, timber, and worked wood. Column nine, in particular, mentions the maritime tributes levied by order of the pharaoh on the import and export of products. Greek economic historians still debate to what extent it was subsistence products, including grain, construction products, such as all kinds of stone or even natron, rather than luxurious or semi-luxury goods that were the mainstay of the regular export trade from Egypt, and this remains a matter of debate. Certainly, we know that numerous other goods were imported from Egypt to Greece at a small scale, such as papyrus and linen, perfume and linseed oil, calcite alabaster, Egyptian amulets, and foodstuff, such as salted or pickled fish from the Nile. All of these products so much appreciated in Greece. Natron is the only product that is mentioned in the fiscal records, perhaps because it was the only one that was taxed with tariffs at the harbor, while many other products could be exported on a smaller scale, leaving no trace in the fiscal documents, but leaving as witnesses the words that accompanied them in their journeys. What evidence do we have of the appreciation of the Greeks of a number of exotic products of Egyptian origin? These products reached the Greek markets hand-in-hand with the terms that named them in origin, and these terms permeated into part of the written production. Just as pottery and other archaeological objects are used as testimony to commercial exchange, lexical borrowings can be interpreted as archaeological artifacts that provide us with complementary evidence of contact. A parallel examination of the historical or archaeological evidence of commercial exchange and of the earliest lexical borrowings of Egyptian into Greek reveals a surprising, albeit expected, coincidence. The adoption of foreign realities through trade, together with the words that designate them in the language of origin, is what we call cultural lexical borrowing, as opposed to what is known as core borrowing, which occurs in situations of intense contact and affects the basic vocabulary of the languages in contact. As I said, this is not the case of Greek, which only took a few loan words from Egyptian. We have no trace of the latter phenomenon, like the core borrowing, at this early stage of Greek-Egyptian relationships, but we can surmise that it occurred in many multilingual areas of the Mediterranean, in those harbors that I spoke about. As I said, a small stronghold of lexical borrowings in literary text resisted the filtration executed by the textual tradition. These words are morphologically regularized, so they fit perfectly into Greek syntax, and they attest to a reality, that of the cultural and linguistic contact between Greeks, and in this case, Athenians and Egyptians. So, let's sail back from Naukratis to Athens, in Pytheas' merchant ship, full of merchandise of various kinds, from the most famous papyrus, to fine textiles, faience ornaments, spices, and aromatic essences, and many Egyptian products of the pharmacopeia. Back in Athens, let's look at the Egyptian products sold in the markets of the harbor of Piraeus and Athens itself. The Athenian comedian Aristophanes produced a play, now regrettably lost to us, represented probably in 423 BC, which bore the title, Cargo Ships, or Holkades, and probably dealt with the Mediterranean trade, and the ships that supplied Athens with all sorts of foreign goods. A fragment of another play, by the comic Hermippus, written around 430 BC, gives us a description of the variety of goods that were unloaded in Piraeus, and their geographical origin, in which he emphasizes, among the multitude of products, basic and luxury ones, those from Egypt, and those were sales and papyrus rolls. But many more small trade products of Egyptian origin were highly appreciated in Athens. Some were part of the Greek pharmacopeia. In turn, Greek pharmacopeia is heavily influenced, precisely, by Egyptian techniques. Egypt is the country most often mentioned in the medical Hippocratic treatises. Among the products, I want to highlight ammy, cumin, kiki, castor oil, comi, gum, kifi, compacted incense, and then there's others like soru, melanterite, or others, and they all have Egyptian etymology. Sampsoukhos, for example, is an interesting one, because it's the herb of Suchos, or Sobek, the crocodile god of the Fayum, and it's the word for marjoram. So, as I say, all of them carry Egyptian names. In Egypt, the trade in drugs, aromatic substances, and dyes had always flourished. Although it intensified in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the use of these terms already appears in much earlier times. Herodotus talks about kiki and comi. Plato includes kiki in a list of oils. So, let's stop briefly on another term, a medicinal treatment, or we can say it's powdered antimony, kol, used for eye painting, which was imported from the mines of the eastern desert, and it's the word that we find in Greek for kol. Ion the Poet, in the 5th century, mentions this product as not indicating that it's of Egyptian origin, but using the Egyptian word stimi, and he says it's black stimi for painting the eyes, chomatographon, which I find a very interesting word. And later, Antiphanes, in the 5th or 4th century, he mentions stimi in a listing that seems to, this is a fragment, and unfortunately we cannot reconstruct more around it, because that's what happens with fragments, that they are fragmentary. So, it mentions in a listing that seems to describe a woman grooming herself, stimi, katoptra, krovilos, kekryphalos, kol, mirrors, hairbands, and hairnets. Since we're going back onto the stage, one of the most, one of Egypt's most prized perfumes is going to be our next word, psagda. Psagda appears in a fragment of Aristophanes' Lost Clay Banquetters, and he says, and so it's a word, it refers to an Egyptian perfume or it's not clear exactly what it was, but it has an Egyptian origin, and Aristophanes mentions it in Banquetters, described as very decadent people using perfumes, so that this is more or less the context we can reconstruct. Let's see, what perfume shall I give you? Do you like the psagda? So, it's a known perfume, if he's using it there. So, now from perfumes, let's turn to some less well-smelling products, fish, and our word here is alaves, an isle fish with an Egyptian etymology. The export of salted and pickled fish from Egypt may also explain the multitude of fish names that can be traced back to an Egyptian origin or an Egyptian etymology. The attestation of multiple names of fish from the Nile in Herodotus, Theodorus, Atheneus, and Xenocrates was perhaps not due only to zoological interest, but rather to an everyday reality, that of imports of foodstuffs from the Nile, especially pickled and salted fish. Atheneus, a Greek author who in the second third century wrote a monumental work called The Dinner Table Philosophers, collected a wealth of experts from different authors, mostly referring to food and things referring to banquets, that are otherwise lost. So, many of the fragments that I've mentioned here, we have them thanks to Atheneus, and he provides a large number of testimonies which he transmits to us from the comedians among the comedians Aristophanes, Ophippus, and Diphilos. Many of these contexts can be interpreted as popular scenes and placed in the markets of Athens and Piraeus. A fragment from Aristophanes' cargo ships, Olkades, that I mentioned before, includes a list includes a list of vessels and a list of fish among which those from the Nile stand out carrying names of Egyptian etymology. You see Escombroi, Koliai, Leviai, the ones I marked in boldface, Leviai and Saperdi, are the Nilotic Labio and the Tilapia. The Nilotic fish that were the most popular for food consumption are precisely the Tilapia and the Nilotic Labio. Both species of fish appear in the Aristophanic fragment and they have an Egyptian etymology. So, as you can see Tilapia goes back to a possible Egyptian shepherd and we have it also in in Coptic is Shafuri and the Nilotic Labio, Alaves, which it has other Alaves and Levias are different forms in Greek but they go back probably to Egyptian Lepi or Repi. But let's turn now from the products to the people. The increasingly cosmopolitan Athens of the playwrights hosted a thriving and multilingual resident alien communities which included a large Egyptian population dedicated mainly to trade. Merchants of Egyptian origin, perhaps even from a community of Greek origin in Egypt, settled in Athens and Piraeus where they were legally foreign residents or metics. Although they obtained certain concessions given the importance of their commercial activity. Apart from the evidence provided by literature that I have been mentioned and some more that I will mention now, we have at least seven funeral inscriptions from Egyptians and Naucratites in Athens and Piraeus for this period. One of them even bilingual that you can see in this slide. So the Greek says Pais, Pais Naucratites. Pais is, I don't know if one could say that Pais like servant from Naucratis can be, I think it's more likely the Egyptian name Pais is the Naucratite. And the text in Egyptian that you see in two lines is being worked by Marina Scolano and it probably has two names but it's not connected to the to the text below. But it's an interesting witness of the presence of Egyptian speaking residents in Athens. I will highlight two of the most flourishing businesses coinciding with the products mentioned above, perfumes and fish. Egyptian perfumes were especially appreciated in antiquity and it's not too surprising that the sources provide us with at least three specific names of Egyptian perfumers who settled in Athens in the 4th, 5th and 4th centuries BC. Their names Dinias, Peron and Athenogenes are Greek but they are described as Egyptians. The phenomenon has two possible explanations. That they were Greeks coming from Egypt or born in Egypt, so not like Pythias the Naucratite that is considered an Egyptian, with Greek names but without Athenian citizenship rights, so therefore metics, or that they were just Egyptian metics who had adopted Greek names as a strategy to integrate into Greek society, which is a well attested phenomenon in antiquity, taking the local names to fit better into the economic dynamics. We know of these three perfumers through literary sources, especially once more Fragmentary Comedy, which offers us just a few verses from which to draw meager conclusions. Dinias appears in the play Medea, described as an Egyptian. He's mentioned again in Heraclides in a derogatory manner, as an Egyptian engaging in a business considered effeminate, like selling perfume, and unworthy of a good Athenian. And Peron appears in Anaxandrias again just as an Egyptian, selling ointments and perfumes and so on, connected to food massage, so it's interesting. The third of the Egyptian perfumers in Athens is Athenogenes, whom we know from the speech written against him by Hiperides, around 330. Athenogenes is a metic, an Egyptian resident, who owned three perfume businesses in Athens, and who was accused of fraud by the Athenian Epicrates, whom he had convinced with by deceit to acquire a slave and a business that carried hidden debts. These three perfume sellers are but the tip of the iceberg of a guild that probably inhabited the streets of Athens and popularized the perfumes and essences from Egypt. Another of the guilds in which the Egyptian population stands out is that of the fishmongers, or fish picklers, perhaps merchant of salted or pickled fish. The fishmonger Hermaeus, also of Egyptian origin to judge by the context, appears peeling and gutting fish in the fragments of the comedy The Fishes by Archippus. In another fragment of the same comedy, three fish names are mentioned referring to the species of the Nile, among them the tilapia and the labio. So let's go back to the Danites now, the stage suppliants who claimed Greek heritage when they approached King Pelasgos at Argos, placing them in parallel with the Egyptian Neocratite immigrants in Athens, we find some interesting coincidences. They are tanned by the sun of Egypt, they claim Greek origin, though they have some noticeably Egyptian ways of life and firm liaisons with the land of the Nile. While the mythical Danites were requesting protection, Egyptian metics in Athens were probably requesting to be allowed to develop all aspects of their cultural life. In this vein, we have evidence that they were endowed a plot of land, probably at the end of the 5th century, to build the temple to Isis. Our next word is going to be calasides. It's a long tunic which tassels and or fringes at the bottom, which has an Egyptian etymology. And you will see why. This is our next word. So the evidence we have for the foundation of the, or at least the date or the antequem date for the foundation of the temple of Isis is epigraphic. It's a decree from 333 that you see on the, well you see one of the lines on the screen where the Athenian statesman Lycurgus grants permission to Cypriot traders from Kythion, so Phoenicians, to build a sanctuary of Aphrodite Astarte and at the end of this decree there is this line added, in the same way as the Egyptians were granted to build the temple of Isis. So we know that before 333, the Egyptians of, the Egyptian residents in Athens were allowed to, were given an enthesis, were given a plot of land to build their temple. This comparison provides a terminus antequem for the foundation and permission for the Egyptians to establish their temple of Isis in Piraeus and connects this foundation to Lycurgus. Although one cannot infer the motivations of Lycurgus for granting land to the foreign communities, one might imagine that it would favor trade by keeping the Egyptian metics in Athens happy as the other, the other communities definitions in the, in the case of the, of the, of the temple of Astarte. However, this, this favor to the, to the foreign communities might have also generated some disagreement or resistance from the most conservative citizens opposed to immigration and, and this is where our word calasitis comes into, into, into, into, into the picture. This opposition is reflected again on stage in the parodies of Lycurgus, the statement, first in Aristophanes' birds, where he appears bearing the name of the ibis, the Egyptian bird. Furthermore, he appears in a fragment of Cratinus, characterized as an Egyptian or Egyptophile by reference to his dress, his Egyptian tunic, and in the function of the carrier of the throne, the diphrophorus, which was usually performed in the, in the processions by the metics. So we have here, let Lycurgus go behind them carrying the being a metic, dressed in a calasitis. The calasitis, by the way, is a, is this Egyptian long tunic that the, the readers of Herodotus must have known because Herodotus had described it like when he described the, the, the priests in, in Egypt saying they wear a linen tunic with fringes covering their legs, which they called calasitis. Now to some conclusions. My lecture today was about language contact, trade, staged foreigners, and worlds and words as cultural artifacts. My research in this area was at first a more technical linguistic exploration focusing on the phenomena of adaptation of borrowed words to a foreign morphology and the adjustment of two different phonetic systems. With time, I became interested in evaluating the perception of speakers who pronounced those words as foreign or as their own words, always within the academic boundaries of linguistics. But we can go even further in this exploration. When words become something more than a lexical unit to the eyes of the scholar, when they are instead perceived as cultural artifacts, they suddenly break from these boundaries of linguistics and extend into other cultural historical appreciations. Their context, social and historical, illuminates their use. And reversely, as cultural artifacts, loanwords become crucial to our understanding of the everyday exchange in the market, the street, the temple, the harbor in fifth, fourth century Athens. But as the old saying goes, verba volant, words fly. Our cultural artifacts, immaterial as they are, become a complicated witness. But nonetheless, witness to the presence of Egyptian products, Egyptian residents in Athens with their language, with the Egyptian words which name the realities they brought in their merchant ships. The Athenian audience of the suppliants knew more about the civilization of the Nile than just the stereotype that Aeschylus has staged. They bought fish and perfume on the streets of Athens. They were neighbors, shared the streets, their kids probably played together, and they engaged in conflicts and trials. It is true that the stage Egyptians we find in comedy and tragedy might be the stereotyped figures, as many other foreigners are, but they also represent a familiar presence in the Athens of the fifth, fourth century. The audience watched those characters through their own experience and background on Egyptian things and persons, even on their language. I think there are two further takeaways from this inquiry. Athens was a far more diverse space than the extant classical sources show at first glance. About 90 percent of the total of Greek literature has been lost, and from this large percentage we have but fragments that attest to their existence. This tells us also about the fact that most references to this diversity disappeared in the literature lost. The text, and the second one, the textual paradoxes or transmission of the classical texts was ruthless with non-pure Athenian elements. The incredibly assorted diversity of the foreign and local communities in Athens and the Piraeus did not seem interesting for the scholarly agenda through history, and these fascinating characters and their lives and their products disappeared from the classical heritage, fortunately surviving in miserable fragments. And let me finish with a poem that I will give you as a Christmas present. So as I was finishing preparing this paper, a Spanish poem came to my eyes, and I thought that this was not by chance, and this is only the first. It's a poem about love by the Spanish poet Luis García Montero. Words are ships, and they get lost just like that, from mouth to mouth, from fog to fog. They carry their merchandise through conversations without finding a port, nor a night that waits them down like an anchor. Thank you very much. For over 100 years, the OI has been a leading research center for the study of ancient Middle Eastern civilizations. Join us in uncovering the past and learn about the beginnings of our lives as humans together. Become a member by visiting oi.uchicago.edu slash member.