Tjeker

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Ramses III defeating the sea peoples, wall painting at Medinet Habu.
Ramses III defeating the sea peoples, wall painting at Medinet Habu.

The Tjekker or Tjeker were one of the Sea Peoples who raided Egypt and the Levant during the 13th and 12th centuries BCE. They are documented as raiders defeated by pharaoh Ramses III of Egypt in years 5, 8 and 12 of his reign.[1] Although he claimed to have "annihilated" the Tjeker,[2] subsequent documents describe them as residing in some cities of northern Canaan. Either the scribe exaggerated in the customary style of the inscriptions, or his majesty meant that he only destroyed the Tjeker who had campaigned against him.

Contents

[edit] Origin

The Tjeker were of an origin that is uncertain today; a possible linguistic connection has been suggested with the Teucri[3][4], a tribe described by ancient sources as inhabiting northwest Anatolia to the south of Troy.[5]

A recent alternative theory identifies the Tjeker with the Shikala (Shekelesh) of a letter found at Ugarit,[6] based on a hypothesis espoused by Elmar Edel that the Ugaritic sh was equivalent to Egyptian t, so that Shikala might be read Tikala or Tikara. Woudhuizen has this to say:[7]

However, a serious disadvantage of the latter line of approach is that the Shekelesh would remain without proper identification. Moreover, the equation of Tjeker with the Teukroi receives further emphasis from archaeological as well as historical evidence.

[edit] Tradition of Cretan origin

Crete, showing the ancient sites.
Crete, showing the ancient sites.

The geographer, Strabo,[8] says that the Teukroi (Τεύκροι) came from Crete, in search of a new home. They had received an oracle to "stay on the spot where the earth-born should attack them." They were encamped at the site of the future village of Chryse, later incorporated into Hamaxa, then Alexandria Troas, when an attack of mice devoured the leather in their equipage, so they settled the region and renamed the mountain they saw in the distance, at whose foothills they were, to Mount Ida after Mount Ida, Crete.

The location of Chryse is not known for sure, but that of Hamaxa is marked by the ancient salt works there, which exploited the outcroppings of rock salt. They are all located in Ayvacık, Çanakkale province of Turkey, at the tip of the Biga Peninsula (the Troad). According to Strabo[8] the Teucrians built a temple to Apollo Smintheus at Chryse. The classical name for the temple was the Smintheum, containing a pre-Greek word Smin-, or sminth- presumably "mouse."[9] This name may indicate a Minoan provenience, or more likely a general pre-Greek one, as other Pelasgians, the Leleges, settled nearby. There are quite a few Sminthea throughout the Aegean world. Or, the word may simply have been used by wandering Mycenaean Greeks from Crete.

The temple was moved in classical times. Currently a temple exists to Apollo Smintheus at the village of Gülpinar, dating to about 330 BCE.[10]

[edit] Date of Cretan migration

The Teucri must have preceded the Trojan War, as they fought in it on the Trojan side. In fact, according to the mythology, the Teucri preceded the Dardanians in the Troad. Accepting this myth as true in broad outline, Woudhuizen[11] uses other evidence to put together a possible date for the arrival of the Tjeker in Anatolia.

The argument is that the Dardanians are to be associated with Troy VI, the 6th city up from the bottom at the site of Troy. It began about 1600 BCE in the Middle Bronze Age. Trojan Grey Ware, found in Troy VI, is nearly identical to Middle Helladic Minyan Ware found on mainland Greece, probably not Greek, in this theory, but of Thraco-Phrygian speakers, on the move from the Balkans to Anatolia.[12]

The Tjeker therefore must be Middle Minoan, which means that they spoke the Minoan language rather than Mycenaean Greek, at least originally. As evidence Woudhuizen mentions inscriptions in Linear A found at Troy and Middle Minoan III sealings displaying Cretan hieroglyphics from Samothrace. He sets the date of the migrations at 1800 BCE.

According to Virgil[13] the Teucrians brought Cybele from Crete to Anatolia, where she became a Phrygian goddess. In Crete she was perhaps Kubaba.

[edit] Destiny

[edit] Anatolian remnant

1888 map of the Troad showing a possible location of Gergis to the south of Bunarbashi.
1888 map of the Troad showing a possible location of Gergis to the south of Bunarbashi.

According to Herodotus,[14] the Gergithae, "a remnant of the ancient Teucrians", participated in the Ionian revolt against Persia of the early 5th century BCE and were "conquered" by Hymeas. They were still there in the village of Gergis to be passed by the army of Xerxes on its way to Greece in the Persian Wars.[15]

The location of Gergis remains unknown.[16] Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann were convinced it was at Choban Tepe to the south of the village of Bunarbashi, where the hill of Bali Dagh, believed by Jean Baptiste Lechevalier to be the site of Troy, was located. There is, however, nothing distinctive about the site, and the name, Gergis, is not much help, becoming Yerc- and Yirc- in Turkish. Getzel M. Cohen says "Gerg- toponyms are quite widespread in western Asia Minor",[17] overextending the original Teucrian range; in other words, like Mt. Gargaros, the names probably precede the Tjeker in the region.

The name of the municipality of Gergis is linked with its suburb, Marpessus. Pausanias quotes[18] some writings at Delos by the sibyl Herophile stating that she was "mountain-begotten by a mother from Ida" at Marpessus. Pausanias says that in his time the place had a population of 60.

Herophile had been the priestess of the Smintheum of the Teucrians at Alexandria Troas. Pausanias says that she was "born before the Trojan War" and gave prophecies to Hecuba of "that future which we know was to come true." The prophetic tradition continued, as the ten sibyls of Varro mentioned in Lactantius[19] include the Hellespontine Sibyl at Marpessus near Gergitha, who "lived in the times of Solon and Cyrus."

The Gergis of that time was important enough to issue coinage, as a few coins with its name have been found with the head of Herophile on one side and a seated sphinx on the other, dated ca. 400-350 and 350-241 BCE.[20] Subsequently Attalus I moved its population.

[edit] Balkan stronghold

According to Herodotus[21] some citizens of Paionia on the Strymon (Struma) in the central Balkans of today's Serbia told the Persian king, Darius, that their people were colonists of the Teucrians of Troy. The Iliad (see under Trojan Battle Order) states that Paeonian archers from the Axius (Vardar) fought on the Trojan side. For the adventures of the Paeonians with the great king, see under Paionia.

Strabo[22] from classical times confirms that they existed and represents them as colonists of Phrygia, which is not necessarily contradictory, as by his time Phrygia had once included the Troad. He says that they were also called the Pelagonians after an eponymous founder Pelagōn. Moreover, Paeonia was the southern neighbor of Balkan Dardania, which was isolated from Anatolian Dardania.[23]

Strabo classifies both ethnic pockets as Illyrian and notes that the Romans had driven them into the hinterland for their piracy, which they practiced after using the Vardar as an access route to the Aegean. He goes on to point out that they were "formerly great" but had been "reduced in warfare" and now were "utterly ruined", the Dardanians being "utterly wild" and living in caves beneath dung heaps, an expression that may well be colored by Strabo's value system, which would have been pro-Roman.

[edit] Settlement on Cyprus

According to Athenaeus,[24] the Greek hero, Teucer (whose mother was a Trojan), exiled from Salamis near Athens by his father, Telamon, founded Salamis on Cyprus. He took with him some of his mother's people, the Gerginae, who were the same as the Gergithae, as prisoners of war.

[edit] Settlement at Dor

Israelite Dor, 8th century BCE.
Israelite Dor, 8th century BCE.

The Tjeker conquered the city-state of Dor, on the coast of Canaan near modern Haifa, and turned it into a large, well-fortified city,[25] the center of a Tjeker kingdom that is confirmed archaeologically in the northern Sharon plain; it was violently destroyed in the mid-eleventh century BCE, firing the mud bricks red and depositing a huge layer of ash and debris. Ephraim Stern[26] connects the destruction with the contemporary expansion of the Phoenicians, which was checked by the Philistines further south and the United Monarchy. No mention of the Tjeker is made after that time, the period of archaeological and literary silence. The Tjeker are one of the few of the Sea Peoples for whom a ruler's name is recorded - in the eleventh-century papyrus account of Wenamun, an Egyptian priest, the ruler of Dor is given as "Beder".

After two intermediate occupations, the earlier of which has yielded imported Cypriote ceramics as well as Phoenician wares[27] and is followed by a well-stratified and important Phoenician presence[28] in the early 900s the site of Dor fell to the Israelites under David.

[edit] Mythology

An ethnic identity, the Tjeker must have formed during a long period of common residency, polity and language. The tradition offers basically two candidates for a homeland: Crete or the Greek mainland, especially Attica. There is no sign of them in Attica beyond the words of a few late mythographers. Cretan mythology is intertwined with their story.

Minoan archaeology would do very well as evidence except that it is not ethnic-specific. The Minoan language remains unknown. Cretan mythology is not tied to any one people. No Tjeker are mentioned in Linear B and possibilities in Linear A depend on the brand of partial "decipherment"; i.e., there is no real decipherment and therefore no reference to the Tjeker.

As a last resort the early scholars in the field turned to modern names; specifically, it was probably Flinders Petrie who proposed a linguistic relation to Zakro.[29] On the one hand there is no evidence whatever to support the connection. On the other, nothing prevents such a speculation; in fact, a Minoan community and palace has been found at Zakro, the name has the right consonants, modern names do appear in Linear B (though not Zakro), and the eastern Crete location faces the Levant. Some modern scholars do accept the association.[30]

That the Tjeker were a sea-faring nation is proved by the evidence. This habit led to their dispersion and assimilation to other cultures in Anatolia, Palestine, Cyprus and the Balkans. When they moved as a nation to Anatolia they were perhaps still close-knit with a sense of tribal unity. It was at this time that Teucer appears as an eponymous ancestor; that it, it was customary in the tribal view of the period to devise an ancestor of the same name from whom the tribe is made to descend. The early history of the tribe becomes the doings of the ancestor. If the family of Teucer married into the family of Dardanus, then Teucrians and Dardanians exchanged marriage partners.

Teucrians and Dardanians collaborated in building the state of Troy, which controlled the Dardanelles and ruled widely in Anatolia and the Balkans. They were limited by the Hittite Empire inland, and the Greeks across the Aegean. The sea-peoples phase represents their limitation by the Egyptian Empire. During this phase the Trojans and Teucrians were still distinct although cooperating entities. Shortly a wider Greek coalition put an end to Trojan predation.

After the fall of Troy the Teucrians lost their distinct identity. In the Aeneid of Virgil Trojans are called Teucrians, and the late mythographers adopted the habit with no one to set them straight. From then on history sees them on the run, reduced in Anatolia to a few villages. In Palestine they assimilated to the Philistines and then to the Israelites; in Cyprus, to the Greeks; in the Balkans, to the Illyrians. For a time people existed who claimed descent from Teucer. By the first few centuries BCE their trail had disappeared.

Main article: King Teucer

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ The campaigns are covered under Sea Peoples and are not repeated here.
  2. ^ Pritchard Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament 3rd ed. (Princeton University Press) 1969, p 262.
  3. ^ Not to be confused with the Greek hero, Teucer, although he may have been named for the ethnic origins of his mother, a woman of the Troad.
  4. ^ The identification of Tjeker and Greek Teukroi, Latinized to Teucri, was first made by Lauth in 1867, and was repeated by François Chabas in his Études sur l’Antiquité Historique d’après les sources égyptiennes et les monuments réputés préhistoriques of 1872, according to the Woudhuizen dissertation.
  5. ^ Sandars Page 170, "The Tjeker."
  6. ^ M. Dietrich and O. Loretz, "Das Seefahrende Folk von Šikilia" Ugarit Forshungen 10 1978, pp 53-56. The proposer of the theory is actually H.R. Hall, according to Woudhuizen. For the letter, see under Sea Peoples.
  7. ^ The dissertation under "Tjeker."
  8. ^ a b Strabo, Geography, XIII.1.48, found in English at perseus.tufts.edu, with the Greek available at Perseus also.
  9. ^ The classical word would appear to be segmented smin-theus, "god of mice", but Strabo XIII.1.64 says "sminthi means mice" and in fact the identifiably pre-Greek part of the word is -nth-, as in Corinth, labyrinth, etc.
  10. ^ Some good photographs of this location can be found at the livius.org site
  11. ^ Dissertation under Tjeker.
  12. ^ Woudhuizen (whom see) cites Leonid Gindin for this theory.
  13. ^ Aeneid Book III Line 104 ff.
  14. ^ Book V Section 122.
  15. ^ Herodotus, Book VII, Section 43.
  16. ^ This information was true as recently as 2004 with the publication of An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, Editors Hansen and Nielsen, by Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198140991, which covers the topic on Page 1001 under Marpessos. This page is available on Google Books preview.
  17. ^ The Hellenistic Settlements in Europe, the Islands, and Asia Minor, University of California Press, 1995, ISBN 0520083296, Page 167, available for preview on Google Books.
  18. ^ Book X, Sections 12.1, 12.2.
  19. ^ Book I, Chapter 6. The whole passage is quoted by Milton S. Terry, Sibylline Oracles, Translated from the Greek into English Blank Verse, 1890, pages 7-19, displayed at elfinspell.com.
  20. ^ Barclay Head in Historia Numorum: a Manual of Greek Numismatics, at [1].
  21. ^ Book V Section 13 following.
  22. ^ Book VII Section 38 following.
  23. ^ Book VII, Section 6 following.
  24. ^ Deipnosophistai VI, 68, 256b.
  25. ^ Dor XII, c. 1150-1050)
  26. ^ Page 31.
  27. ^ Dor XI-X
  28. ^ Dor IX
  29. ^ James Baiki mentione it on p. 166 of his book, The Sea-Kings of Crete, 2nd edition, Adam and Charles Black, London, 1913, available on-line.
  30. ^ Redford, p. 252.

[edit] References

  • Redford, Donald B. (1992). Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03606-3. 
  • Sandars, N.K. (1987). The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the ancient Mediterranean, Revised Edition. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-27387-1. 
  • Stern, E., "New Evidence from Dor for the First Appearance of the Phoenicians along the Northern Coast of Israel" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research No. 279 (August 1990), pp. 27-34.
  • Woudhuizen, Frederik Christiaan (1992). The Language of the Sea Peoples. Amsterdam: Najade Press. 
  • Woudhuizen, Frederik Christian. April 2006. The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples. Doctoral dissertation; Rotterdam: Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Faculteit der Wijsbegeerte.

[edit] See also