Thomas Harrison
also possible to make out a very good case that, at least in the case of some
gods, Herodotus really does believe that the
Greek names derived from
Egypt. The case is especially strong in the cases of Dionysus and of Heracles
where Herodotus offers precise contexts for the introduction of their cults
from Egypt to Greece (.-, ); in both cases, interestingly in the light of
his argument that the Greek alphabet derived from the Phoenicians, the
middlemen in the introduction of these cults are Phoenician.
We are still left with the original contradiction, however. How can He-
rodotus believe both that the name ‘Dionysus’ derived from Egypt, and that
Dionysus is the Greek name for Osiris (..)? Richmond Lattimore sug-
gested that the solution lay in the fact that
gods can have more than one
name. However, Herodotus’ manner of making equations suggests a transla-
tion of equivalent names, not that the Egyptians or Scythians have, as it
were, another name tucked away. His translations of gods’ names are per-
formed in precisely the same way as his translations of more humdrum
pieces
of vocabulary, for example his observation that
πίροµις
is ‘in the
Greek language
καλὸς κἀγαθός
’ (..). (Are
we to assume in these cases
that the Egyptians in fact used the term
καλὸς κἀγαθός
alongside
πίροµις
, or
that they were all bilingual?) For a brief moment, I fantasized recently that
another, similarly bold, solution might exist. If the names of the Egyptian
gods, for example Horus ‘the lofty one’, were in fact taboo names,
might
Herodotus have thought that the Greeks’ names were the real, unmention-
able, Egyptian names? However, we should, I think, resist solutions which
presume that Herodotus knew much more than he wanted to disclose. He-
rodotus repeatedly mentions the name of Osiris despite a considerable dis-
play of reluctance to do precisely that: surely, then, he would at least have
mentioned the existence of other names, had he known them.
Ultimately perhaps we should not struggle
too officiously to make He-
rodotus consistent. There are, however, some ways of softening, or helping
to understand, the contradiction: and these lie in his understanding of the
nature of language. To begin with, despite the impression of his discussion
of the Pelasgians that the Greek language
was born fully-fledged, and de-
spite the success of the surviving Pelasgians in ‘guarding’ their original lan-
guage, Herodotus knows that language changes. This is implicit, of course,
in the idea of the Pelasgians’ preservation of their language. It is also evident
See Harrison (n. ).
See, e.g., S. Morenz,
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