I recently published an article about writing on Mount Hymettos over the last (nearly) 3,000 years – a bit of a departure for me personally because I was trying out some new place-centred approaches to practised writing. Then a couple of weeks ago when I was playing with my son with his Duplo, I realised I could recreate many of the scenes with resources we already had! So here we are, a Duplo tribute to writing on Mount Hymettos, in honour of International Lego Classics Day. Along the way, there was also a very exciting intervention by way of a Lego research session led by our Visiting Fellow Helen Magowan… But let’s begin by talking about the mountain.
You can read my research article, “Mount Hymettos, Athens: A Holy Place for Writing”, HERE.
The city of Athens has a long-standing relationship with its natural surroundings, of which one of the most striking features is Mount Hymettos – not a pointy, singular sort of a mountain, but a 16-km long, hulking mass of rock stretching all the way down the city’s east side to the Saronic Gulf. In classical times it was especially known for two natural products: a bluish marble that was quarried there, and honey that was purportedly the best in the Mediterranean, courtesy of its thyme-fed bees.
The bees of Mount Hymettos
Below you can see Hymettos in the distance, as seen from the Acropolis in the very centre of Athens. Its main peak is in view towards the left side of the picture, but you would be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t stand out very much from the rest of the mountain. Nevertheless, that peak was home to an important sanctuary to Zeus, where the largest collection of early Greek alphabetic inscriptions has been found. We don’t have any surviving Greek alphabetic inscriptions that date earlier than the second half of the 8th century BCE, while these examples from Mount Hymettos date to the mid 7th century BCE – some 200 years before Classical Greek writers like Plato or Euripides. Out of around 700 inscriptions dated to the 8th-7th centuries BCE, a massive 150 come from the Hymettos sanctuary, almost all inscribed on ceramic cups.
Mount Hymettos as seen from the Acropolis. Photo courtesy of Theo Nash.
The Greek writer Pausanias tells us that there was an altar to Zeus Ombrios, literally Zeus of the Rain, on the mountain. That makes sense because Hymettos acts as a weather vain for the city, an indicator of what is to come. The inscriptions from the sanctuary don’t mention Zeus Ombrios though, they refer to Zeus Semios: Zeus of the Sign. One of the things I am very interested in in my research at the moment is the concept of the sema (the word from which Semios derives) in this period. It is possible that there was an early link between the word sema and the letters of the alphabet – which is actually something I’ve recreated in Lego before, focusing on the only reference to writing in the Iliad, where the word sema is specifically used.
The inscribed cups have three distinct features that suggest that writing was an important act for the activities from the sanctuary:
The mention of Zeus Semios Several examples of inscribed alphabetic sequences (ΑΒΓΔΕ… etc) Several inscriptions that specify “X wrote this” or similar.
My suspicion is that writing actually took place as part of the ritual activities at the sanctuary. This could help to explain why seemingly low value ceramic cups were considered worthy offerings to Zeus – it was not the object but the writing it bore that was the most important part of the dedication.
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