I would like to share with you the The Palaikastro Hymn to Cretan Zeus. At the end of May in 1904 a fragmentary inscription bearing a Hymn to Zeus was discovered at Palaikastro in East Crete, during the excavation of the sanctuary of Dictaean Zeus, on top of the ruins of a Minoan harbour town which contained this hymn. From the very informative, and very well researched paper by Mark Alonge on the subject:
"The Palaikastro Hymn—better known as the Hymn of the Kouretes—does not celebrate a god of pre-Hellenic pedigree, who is Zeus in name only, as scholars have believed with virtual unanimity. Rather, an understanding of the conventions of Greek hymnic performance in its ritual context goes far to elucidating many of the ostensibly peculiar features of the Hymn. Moving out from Palaikastro, in eastern Crete, to survey the island as a whole, I show that the Cretan iconographic and epigraphic records contradict the widely accepted theory of a special, Minoan 'Cretan Zeus.' "
The hymn goes as follows:
"O supreme son of Kronos, salutations! All-powerful over refreshment, you stand at the head of the gods. Come to Dicte at the turn of the year and take pleasure in our song. We weave it for you with lyres, having blended it with pipes, and we sing having taken our places around your well-walled altar.
O supreme son of Kronos, salutations! All-powerful over refreshment, you stand at the head of the gods. Come to Dicte at the turn of the year and take pleasure in our song. For on this very spot, your shield-bearing guardians received you, an immortal child, from Rhea and beating their foot, kept you hidden.
O supreme son of Kronos, salutations! All-powerful over refreshment, you stand at the head of the gods. Come to Dicte at the turn of the year and take pleasure in our song. [two verses missing]…of the beautiful dawn.
O supreme son of Kronos, salutations! All-powerful over refreshment, you stand at the head of the gods. Come to Dicte at the turn of the year and take pleasure in our song. The Seasons teemed year by year and Justice held mortals in her power, and Peace, who loves prosperity, governed all creatures.
O supreme son of Kronos, salutations! All-powerful over refreshment, you stand at the head of the gods. Come to Dicte at the turn of the year and take pleasure in our song. But, lord, leap to our wine jars, and leap to our fleecy flocks, and to our fields of fruit leap, and to our homes made thereby productive.
O supreme son of Kronos, salutations! All-powerful over refreshment, you stand at the head of the gods. Come to Dicte at the turn of the year and take pleasure in our song. And leap to our cities and leap to our seafaring ships, and leap to our new citizens and leap to fair Themis.
O supreme son of Kronos, salutations! All-powerful over refreshment, you stand at the head of the gods. Come to Dicte at the turn of the year and take pleasure in our song."
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ReplyDeleteRespectfully, I would offer another interpretation:
ReplyDeleteHaving read the so-called "Hymn to the Kouretes" in Ancient Greek in Jane Harrison's "Themis", I have since encountered many flustered rebuttals to her translation of the text, insisting that this "Megistos Kouros" must be the Son of Kronos. But given that the Minoans were likely matrilineal, much like the Lydians and Etruscans up into the Iron Age, it begs the question why they would care at all about their male paternity.
Instead of applying the conventions of Homeric hymns to these odd, likely-Bronze Age verses, perhaps we should look to their potential contemporaries in the Rig Vedas. What you translate as "wine jars" likely contained no wine, but something more akin to the honey that the wineless Demeter might drink--the Soma brewed in Mycenae.
What we invoke in the "Hymn to the Kouretes" may in fact be the Mycenaean equivalent to the Vedic Indra. But because he is "Megistos Kouros", he is more Hermetic than he is Olympian.