Françoise Lecocq
Abstract
We propose a secular origin for a part of the narrative about the Egyptian sacred bird to which Herodotus gives the name φοῖνιξ and a long lifespan, both borrowed from Hesiod. For the making of a myrrh egg enclosing the paternal corpse and transported to the City of the Sun, Heliopolis, the priests may have nothing to do with what possibly refers to a popular tradition attested in a love song, where a female bird catcher sings about the birds of the land of Punt carrying to Egypt myrrh balls in their talons: that is the shape and matter of the egg. In religious iconography, the image of a bird holding round objects is seen for the falcon Horus. Then we study the legacy of these double sources in the development of the myth until Tacitus, the first historian writing about the phoenix after Herodotus. If the mummy-like egg disappears and if myrrh is replaced by cinnamon, the mythical bird, whose lifespan is linked with the calculation of the cosmic Great Year, appearing more often, encounters at least an Egyptian astronomical cycle and becomes at the same time more real as an official figure of the Roman imperial power.
Introduction
Since Van den Broek’s study on the myth of the phoenix fifty years ago,1 many documents have been discovered, textual and iconographic, and the in-depth analysis of the already known corpus delivers new sources and interpretations. We propose the hypothesis of a secular Egyptian origin for a detail in Herodotus’ narrative, ‘father of history’ in the fifth century BC, credited with introducing the mythic bird in Greek literature.2
Ἔστι δὲ καὶ ἄλλος ὄρνις ἱρός, τῷ οὔνομα φοῖνιξ. Ἐγὼ μέν μιν οὐκ εἶδον εἰ μὴ ὅσον γραφῇ· καὶ γὰρ δὴ καὶ σπάνιος ἐπιφοιτᾷ σφι, δι᾽ ἐτέων, ὡς Ἡλιοπολῖται λέγουσι, πεντακοσίων· φοιτᾶν δὲ τότε φασὶ ἐπεάν οἱ ἀποθάνῃ ὁ πατήρ. Ἔστι δέ, εἰ τῇ γραφῇ παρόμοιος, τοσόσδε καὶ τοιόσδε· τὰ μὲν αὐτοῦ χρυσόκομα τῶν πτερῶν τὰ δὲ ἐρυθρὰ ἐς τὰ μάλιστα· αἰετῷ περιήγησιν ὁμοιότατος καὶ τὸ μέγαθος. Τοῦτον δὲ λέγουσι μηχανᾶσθαι τάδε, ἐμοὶ μὲν οὐ πιστὰ λέγοντες· ἐξ Ἀραβίης ὁρμώμενον ἐς τὸ ἱρὸν τοῦ Ἡλίου κομίζειν τὸν πατέρα ἐν σμύρνῃ ἐμπλάσσοντα καὶ θάπτειν ἐν τοῦ Ἡλίου τῷ ἱρῷ. Κομίζειν δὲ οὕτω· πρῶτον τῆς σμύρνης ᾠὸν πλάσσειν ὅσον τε δυνατός ἐστι φέρειν, μετὰ δὲ πειρᾶσθαι αὐτὸ φορέοντα, ἐπεὰν δὲ ἀποπειρηθῇ, οὕτω δὴ κοιλήναντα τὸ ᾠὸν τὸν πατέρα ἐς αὐτὸ ἐντιθέναι, σμύρνῃ δὲ ἄλλῃ ἐμπλάσσειν τοῦτο κατ᾽ ὅ τι τοῦ ᾠοῦ ἐκκοιλήνας ἐνέθηκε τὸν πατέρα· ἐσκειμένου δὲ τοῦ πατρὸς γίνεσθαι τὠυτὸ βάρος· ἐμπλάσαντα δὲ κομίζειν μιν ἐπ᾽ Αἰγύπτου ἐς τοῦ Ἡλίου τὸ ἱρόν. Ταῦτα μὲν τοῦτον τὸν ὄρνιν λέγουσι ποιέειν.
There is also another sacred bird called the phoenix which I did not myself see except in painting, for in truth he comes to them very rarely, at intervals, as the people of Heliopolis say, of five hundred years; and these say that he comes regularly when his father dies; and if he be like the painting, he is of this size and nature, that is to say, some of his feathers are of gold colour and others red, and in outline and size he is as nearly as possible like an eagle. This bird they say (but I cannot believe the story) contrives as follows: setting forth from Arabia he conveys his father, they say, to the temple of the Sun (Helios) plastered up in myrrh, and buries him in the temple of the Sun; and he conveys him thus: he forms first an egg of myrrh as large as he is able to carry, and then he makes trial of carrying it, and when he has made trial sufficiently, then he hollows out the egg and places his father within it and plasters over with other myrrh that part of the egg where he hollowed it out to put his father in, and when his father is laid in it, it proves (they say) to be of the same weight as it was; and after he has plastered it up, he conveys the whole to Egypt to the temple of the Sun. Thus, they say that this bird does.3
After listing the problems raised by that text, compared with what we know about its Greek sources and about the Egyptian cult of two solar birds, the heron benu, a wader, and the falcon Horus, a raptor, we will examine its links, for the image of the bird carrying an egg of myrrh, with two possible sources not yet identified: the love song of a bird catcher and religious iconography.
The Phoenix from Hesiod’s fr. 304 to Herodotean Egypt
The first account on the phoenix is surprising, but Herodotus is not the first to mention the bird: it appears in a charade attributed to Hesiod, a list of μακροβίοι (‘long-lived beings’), connected with the calculation of cosmic cycles.
Ἐννέα τοι ζώει γενεὰς λακέρυζα κορώνη
ἀνδρῶν ἡβώντων· ἔλαφος δέ τε τετρακόρωνος·
τρεῖς δ’ ἐλάφους ὁ κόραξ γηράσκεται· αὐτὰρ ὁ φοῖνιξ
ἐννέα τοὺς κόρακας· δέκα δ’ ἡμεῖς τοὺς φοίνικας
νύμφαι ἐυπλόκαμοι, κοῦραι Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο.
A screaming crow lives for nine generations of men who have reached puberty; a deer is four crows; the raven grows old at three deer; then the phoenix at nine ravens; and we at ten phoenixes, we beautiful-haired nymphs, daughters of aegis-holding Zeus.4
That list is problematic, especially regarding the phoenix, despite the many partial or full quotations of fr. 304 that has become almost proverbial, in Greek and Latin literature, from Aristophanes to Ausonius.
Was that bird real or legendary? Whatever are the calculations to determine its imaginary lifespan, the results greatly exceed five centuries. It takes all Van den Broek’s science and ingenuity to show that Herodotus and Hesiod are nevertheless compatible if derived from Chaldean astrology. For these numbers are consistent only with the Babylonian sexagesimal computation system and its unit of 60, the sos. That sos multiplied by 540 (as 9 × 60) gives the Hesiodic phoenix a 32,400 years long lifespan, that is the duration of 972 human generations; but Herodotus only retains the figure 540, rounded to 500, considerably changing the order of magnitude.5 According to us, he borrowed from the Praecepta the name and the longevity all together not from the Heliopolitans, in spite of what he said.6
Herodotus is not even the second author mentioning the bird, since Porphyry accuses him of plagiarizing Hecataeus of Miletus, an historian and geographer:7 his curious use of the word περιήγησις could refer to the title of his predecessor.8 Not to quote his sources is the general practice for ancient authors. But the historian, being more of a geographer and ethnographer in that part of Book 2, attributes the authorship of information to himself, saying he has seen or heard what he is talking about, such as the phoenix presented as a real creature of the Egyptian bestiary, as are the crocodile or the hippopotamus. But his description of these last two animals is notoriously inaccurate9 and the very fact that he went to Egypt was questioned.
Moreover, the narrative is incomplete: neither the exceptional longevity nor the uniqueness of the bird is mentioned. In regard to the posterity of the myth, Herodotus does not expressly state that the young bird is reborn from the father’s corpse and no date is given for its alleged appearances, as we read in later authors, mentioning the reign of two pharaohs named in the same Book 2.10 The Greek historian is more interested in falcons and ibises, in the crocodiles or the bull Apis, not even mentioning the Heliopolitan sacred bull Mnevis, another incarnation of Ra. Herodotus signals the mummification and burial of animals in some temples.11 A real bird may have been venerated alive and mummified in Heliopolis, like did Mnevis, or the falcon of Edfu and the ibis of Hermopolis: he talks at length about these real birds of which thousands of mummies have been found.12 The common gray heron, from an existing creature, has become a religious and metaphysical entity under the name benu. The historian refuses to give too much detail on religious facts, out of respect for the divine mysteries. He does not associate any god by name with the sacred animal: one derives from the name of the city, Heliopolis, that the phoenix is related to the sun (Tacitus will say sacrum Soli),13 the main divinity of the country, under the names of Atum, then Ra-Horakhty ‘Ra of the two horizons’ (or Horus the Elder), the falcon god.14 The portrait, made after a painting he has seen, shows a raptor better corresponding to the falcon than to the heron benu. Attested from the first dynasties as well as the divine falcon, the benu lived two millennia before metamorphosing into the phoenix. It was a cosmogonic and astral, religious and funerary bird, mentioned in allusive religious documents spread over centuries: Egypt has no mythology in the sense of structured narrative, unlike Greece. They are the Texts of the Pyramids engraved on the walls of the Pharaonic mausoleums, without pictures, the Texts of the Sarcophagi painted on the walls of the coffins and the spells of the Books of the Dead (dating from the New Empire), written on papyrus and illustrated. The documentation is therefore mainly funerary. The benu was, in the Heliopolitan cosmogony, the first creature at the origins of the world created by the Sun god (other cities honor a goose); then it became a form of the morning and vesper time, and of the diurnal and nocturnal time, since the sun lives, dies and lives again every day and night The benu is also assimilated to the soul: ba, of gods and men (often portrayed as a bird with a human head) and is a psychagogue for the deceased. The bird appears in the religious and civil calendar, at the feasts of the solar god and of the New Year, for the Royal Jubilee, and at the heliac rising of the star Sopdet signaling the Nile flooding, the major annual event of the country. The two Egyptian divine, however real creatures, falcon and heron, were certainly associated, or even interchangeable, in the solar cult, embodying the star at its sunrise and sunset, in its diurnal youth, then its old age and its nocturnal death.
The red color of the phoenix seems to come from its Greek name,15 as for the hippopotamus resembling a horse (ἵππος) according to Herodotus. Φοῖνιξ is borrowed from the Praecepta (via Hecataeus?), a polysemous word also designating an inhabitant of Phoenicia and the date palm. Herodotus uses the Egyptian name of the ibis and gives an Egyptian name for the crocodile,16 but not for the phoenix; neither etymology nor explanation is offered.17 The word as referring to a color means ‘blood red’, and probably ‘tinted with the precious purple originated from the land of Phoenicia’. Neither the falcon nor the heron is reddish, only the pink flamingo, φοινικóπτερος (‘red wings’) is, but it has almost no place in Egyptian religion and iconography.18 If the red hue is sometimes negatively connoted, as the color of the desert and its malefic god Seth, gold is positive and makes sense with the ‘Golden Falcon’ god. The titulature of the sovereign includes the name ‘Horus of gold’ (Hor nebu), whose hieroglyph shows a falcon above a necklace of that metal, shaped as a semicircle with pendants similar to drops. In the Texts of the Pyramids, the late pharaoh resurrects under the shape of a falcon and the Book of the Dead mentions a ‘golden falcon with the head of a benu’ (chap. 77).
If the red color derives from the Greek name, the gold color would be less descriptive than symbolic: besides its universal value and its connection with Horus, the matter of the body of the Egyptian gods is reputed to be gold. The adjective χρυσόκομα is inappropriate for a bird, referring not to feathers, but to hair, such as that of the Greek solar god Apollo,19 assimilated by Herodotus with Horus.20 The head of that last god is often crowned by the uraeus: a red solar disk surrounded by a yellow snake, while the divinity often has a red body (the male color) and a yellow loincloth. Furthermore, if the meaning of the Herodotean phoenix is also related to sonship and transmission of power, with religious and dynastic echoes, it effectively can refer to the father of Horus the young Osiris,21 the god who died and resurrected: that divine couple would make sense with regard to the bird piously burying the paternal corpse.22 But Herodotus’ phoenix is presented in a way that belongs less to a list of sacred birds than to the marvels of exotic fauna (and that point of view will last for centuries after him). For what interests him most is the journey of the clever bird finding a way to transport its burden between Arabia and Egypt.
All these negative remarks also concern other passages of his work where ancients saw ‘countless fables’;23 neither Aristotle in his History of animals nor Diodorus of Sicily nor Strabo in their developments on Egyptian animals will take up the story of the phoenix, although naming Mnevis.24 Between Herodotus and the Roman era, the Greek mentions of the bird are reduced to a few lines in rare authors;25 the phoenix seems to fall out of interest.
The Myrrh of Punt in the Love Song of the Bird Catcher
For Van den Broek, who mainly studies the Christian phoenix and does not dedicate a specific chapter to Herodotus, the historian is not credible and provides few properly Egyptian elements; so, the fable would come from an earlier Greek legend. But that is very hypothetical in the absence of any other text than the Praecepta, where the bird is used as an astrological allegory, still unidentified as a species, maybe legendary, maybe as real as the other creatures of its list, but none having a link with Egypt. At approximatively the same time, the most famous Phoenix is the Homeric preceptor of Achilles, always called ‘father’ or ‘old’.26
Modern historians however, after a time of denigration, are rehabilitating Herodotus by deciphering in Book 2 the interpretatio graeca of authentic Egyptian facts or beliefs.27 Françoise Labrique wrote a long article on the Herodotean phoenix, thinking that the historian has faithful theological information despite some analogic transpositions for his Greek audience.28 We partially confirm her validation, by linking to an Egyptian document of a rather unexpected nature the part about the extraordinary behavior of the bird: making a myrrh egg, enclosing in it the paternal remains like a mummy and transporting it to Heliopolis. The historical genre is unknown in Egypt; there is no narrative, neither secular nor religious, on the life and death of the divine birds.29 What is known about them comes from sacred texts and images, sculptures and paintings on the walls of temples and tombs, extending over a long time. But there is a corpus of tales and songs.
One often reads that Herodotus’ sources, as he says repeatedly, are the priests of Memphis and Heliopolis, the latter praised for their knowledge, in one of the oldest temples of the country.30 The priests indeed are the main holders of religious and historical knowledge, thanks to the records kept in their temples;31 the expression ‘the priests told me’ is a leitmotiv of Book 2 for both types of knowledge. For the phoenix, the source of that part of the narrative could be the ‘Heliopolitans’ as the secular inhabitants of the city.
The historian marvels at the phoenix making a funerary egg and transporting it. It is the image of a bird with a globe, on its head, its back or in its claws, not the same image as the picture previously mentioned, the one Herodotus saw with his own eyes, but another one coming from some popular source maybe unrelated to religion, perhaps … a love song.32 In a papyrus from the 19th dynasty (thirteenth–twelfth century BC), a female bird catcher sings a song for her beloved, called ‘brother’, in the manner of King Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’, and she speaks about birds carrying myrrh balls in their claws. That corresponds exactly to the shape and matter of the burden of the phoenix.
My beloved, my cherished one,
My heart is in search of your love
And everything created for you.
I shall speak to you, that all I do may be open.
I have come to set my snare;
In my hand are my bird cage and my throw-stick.
All the birds [apdw] of Punt [pwnt] alight in Egypt [kmt], anointed33 with myrrh [antyw],
But the one who comes first seizes my lure.
His fragrance has come from Punt,
And his talons [anwtf] are covered with resin [qmyt].
But my yearning is toward you.
Let us set him free together,
And I shall be alone with you.
I shall let you hear my voice
Lamenting over my (bird) anointed with myrrh.
How wonderful it would be if you were there with me
When I set my snare.
(How) pleasant it is for one who is cherish
To go to the fields.34
Is the detail of the bird with droplets of resin in its claws realistic? The myrrh tree, commiphora (‘gum bearer’), from -φόρος (‘-bearing’) and κόμμι (‘gum, resin’) (after Egyptian qmy), grows in southern Arabia, homeland of the Herodotean phoenix. That distant, mysterious and paradisiac country of Punt35 (its Egyptian name) was supposed to be inhabited by the gods. Pharaohs organized expeditions to import, among other items, the precious fragrant resin antyw produced by the myrrh tree, much appreciated and used in their religion and specially the embalming of the dead.36 There are two documents on these expeditions, textual and iconographic. In the absence of an historical genre, Egyptian literature has tales, such as the one in which a sailor ventures into Punt where a snake king reigns; no bird, but a lot of myrrh, brought back to Egypt by the hero.37 The figurative document is the relief, on the walls of the Deir el-Bahari temple, showing the expedition to Punt of Queen Hatshepsut between 1479 and 1457 BC.38 One can see trees with myrrh and a large flying bird, maybe a cinnyris, a species of multicolored humming bird with metallic reflections, but a small creature,39 having a characteristic tail with two longer feathers, one clearly visible on the relief.
Could it be the model of the phoenix transporting a myrrh ball? It is difficult to say because the scene shows a rural landscape with huts, trees, cows, donkeys, monkeys, turtles, fish and that bird, perhaps only decorative. An unfortunate break in the stone does not allow to see if it carries pellets in its claws, but the myrrh trees show neither drops of resin nor leaves, just silhouetted and streaked with branches. For myrrh exudes from the trunk, as does Boswellia frankincense, another local production, which the poet Ovid makes the food of the bird under the word ‘tears’.40 The drops can weigh up to 200 grams. Like any resin, it is sticky, and it is not impossible that a bird would get caught in it: glue and traps are precisely the two techniques of bird hunting.41 Nor is it implausible that a bird flies away with a pellet of myrrh stuck to its claws, as it is said in the song. Would the Hesiodic allegorical φοῖνιξ have become in Herodotus, by a phonetic encounter and/or a pseudo-etymology, ‘the Puntite’, i.e. the inhabitant of Punt, a word variously vocalized as punet or punit?42
In the real world, the transport was made by ships, such as those seen on Hatshepsut’s relief or in the tale of the shipwrecked sailor. But behind the Herodotean phoenix as a marvelous transporter of aromatics could be the bird of a folk legend about the importation of myrrh, born from the fact that pellets of the resin can stick to the claws of a bird. The phoenix collecting myrrh recalls other legendary creatures linked with aromatics: the cinnamon birds collecting the twigs of the spice of that name in the same Herodotus and also in Aristotle – Pliny the Elder will confuse them with the phoenix because κíνναμον (‘cinnamon’), is a word of ‘Phoenician’ origin, i.e. Semitic.43
But one has also seen a religious background in the text despite Herodotus’ skepticism. His story loosely reminds of the cosmic egg of some Egyptian narratives about the origins of the world: in the Hermopolitan cosmogony, the demiurge: the ibis-god Thoth, lays it on the primordial mound coming out of the waters; brooded by the gods, it produces the sun when hatching.44 In Greece, in the Orphic beliefs too, besides reincarnation into birds,45 there is a primordial deity of light born from an egg, whose name Phanes may have been, falsely but significatively, linked to φοῖνιξ.46 For the phoenix however, it is not about birth, but death: nowhere and never is the bird hatching from an egg.
But that image of a bird with a ball is omnipresent in Egyptian religion. The winged solar disk behedety, another figure of the divine falcon, shows blue gray wings on either side of a red disk representing the sun, looking like a bird flying with extended wings and carrying a ball in not visible claws. Behedety is a cult name for the falcon-headed god Ra, also called ‘Lord of Punt’ as the God’s land, especially worshiped at the Edfu temple. Also common is the image of the ba bird, symbol of the soul of the dead, a hybrid with a human head, sometimes assimilated with the benu, carrying in its claws the cross of life, ankh, whose upper part has an ovoid shape. Another frequent figure is the shen ring carried by the falcon god Horus or a vulture goddess. That circular symbol expresses ‘eternity’, the circle having neither beginning nor end, like the Ouroboros snake biting its tail; the shen had also a solar meaning when the sun disk is depicted in its center. On Tutankhamun’s pectoral, a multicolored falcon bears the red solar disk on the head and holds in each claw a shen ring surmounted by the ankh cross (Fig. 1).
Later, some authors describe the phoenix carrying a load of spices on the wings, while the image of the bird perched atop a ball becomes official with a new meaning: no more the sun, but the terrestrial globe dominated by the imperial power, where the phoenix replaces the Roman eagle.
So, the egg of myrrh may originate from different sources at the same time, from a popular tale and from religious images. The love song offers the figure of a bird with a pellet of myrrh in its claws coming from Punt to Egypt; that pellet has become in Herodotus’ narrative a kind of egg, more realistic and appropriate for a bird, even if that egg cannot be laid, since the phoenix is a male (the word ‘father’ is used several times).47 However, the egg is a funerary artifact containing the mummified corpse of the father, because myrrh is the main ingredient of the embalming process; it is transported to Heliopolis for the burial, along the spice trade route, but by air, not by sea, from East to West. In a similar way, another sacred animal, the scarab, as a form of the god Khepri, rolls a ball of dung, image of the sun at its zenith.48
Herodotus’ Legacy in the Myth until Tacitus
What will remain of the double- or even triple-natured phoenix of Herodotus, taking its name (plus one color) and its long lifespan from the astrological allegory of the Hesiodic Praecepta, described mostly as the Egyptian divine falcon Horus and acting as the birds of Punt, land of myrrh, in the love song?
It will continue to appear as a creature of Egyptian wildlife (not religion), in ethnographic or natural science books and in catalogs of wonders, for its longevity and asexual reproduction. The gaps in the narrative will be filled by inventions or borrowings from other legends, or even confusions.49 Then, with the drastic shortening of its Herodotean lifespan, the phoenix will be allowed to appear in the real history of Rome, before returning to a sacred register with Christianity, adopting the phoenix as the proof of the bodily resurrection.
The legacy proper to Herodotus is to have linked almost indissociably the φοῖνιξ to Egypt,50 to the cult of the Sun, and to the pious burial of a father. But the name and the lifespan do not come from that country. The main potential for the development of the myth was in the polysemy of that name and in the interpretation of the lifespan, the two borrowed as a whole from the allegorical bird of the Hesiodic enigma. For the historian, φοῖνιξ meant only ‘red’. But for the following authors, the word provides matter to elaborate: from Ezekiel the Tragedian and Ovid for Pagans and from Tertullian to Lactantius Or rather Pseudo-Lactantius according to Henke (2020) 535 sq. for Christians, the bird is seen perched in the homonymous date palm and/or living in the homonymous land Phoenicia, sometimes under the alternative name of Syria, even Assyria.51
For the joyous song of the bird catcher, the Greco-Roman posterity will embroider a love story, but a sad one, to explain the origin of the droplets of that resin, called ‘tears’, as does Ovid.52 The link to the myth of the phoenix will then be replaced by the toponymic anthroponym ‘Phoenician’, since ‘myrrh’ is a Semitic word: princess Myrrha is said to be the incestuous daughter of a king sometimes named Phoenix of Byblus,53 fathering Adonis, i.e. the Phoenician god Tammuz.54
The Egyptian mummy underlying the egg of myrrh most often disappears, replaced by a more rational and universal nest55 of twigs, preferentially cinnamon due to the confusion between the phoenix and the cinnamon birds: that egg makes no sense compared to the Greek and Roman funerary customs. Moreover, the fire appears, probably originating in the religious practices of these two peoples, burning animals in honor of the gods on the altars56 and cremating their dead on pyres of aromatics. The hollowed ‘egg’ of myrrh will only return in Celsus and Achilles Tatius who do not use the word, but replace it by σφαίρα (‘sphere, globe’),57 or βῶλος (‘lump, clod’) of myrrh.58
As for the several centuries long cycle, originally linked to the calculation of the duration of the Great cosmic year, which was the topic of the Hesiodic fr. 304, the subject was reactivated during the first century BC. Chaldean astrology revived in Berossus, whose theories were largely diffused in Rome. Ancients believed in the cyclical nature of time, with planets returning to their original position at regular intervals. The cosmic order was considered immutable. For Plato, the length of the Great Year was 25,920 years.59 For Berossus, it was 432,000 years, divided into three seasons and twelve months;60 the tenth month would have ended at Alexander the Great’s death; a new cosmic month thus began with the advent in Syria of his lieutenant Seleucus, in 312, while Ptolemy became the first Greek Pharaoh (that is probably why Manilius mentioned the phoenix for that year). Then the duration is shortened to 12,954 years in Cicero, Tacitus and Solinus.61
It has been proven that the phoenix lives for 540 years … Authorities are convinced that its life coincides with the cycle of the Great Year, although many of them say a Great Year lasts not 540 years, but 12,954.62
Not all authors are interested in the longevity of the bird, using vague expressions: ‘a long age’, ‘many centuries’. Those specifying a number usually keep Herodotus’ 500 years, but other figures appear, rarely explained: 540, 1000, 1461, 7006. For Manilius according to Van den Broek, 540 is the exact Babylonian number deduced from the Hesiodic charade, but rounded by Herodotus, although it is strange that, no more than the historian, Manilius does not multiply it by 60.63 From now on, many scholars will propose each their own figure: for Chaeremon, author of treatises on astronomy and hieroglyphs, 7000 or 7006, Pliny the Elder and the poet Martial 1000, Tacitus 1461.64 As they try to precisely date the return of the cycle symbolized by the bird, the phoenix is leaving myth to enter the time of history, when it is supposedly exhibited on the Roman forum at the sight and for the joy of a credulous people in 48 AD.65
By the way, not only scientists, but also the political community, and even the religious sphere are interested in these calculations.66 Some sibylline oracles, from Jewish origin, announce the close end of the Roman empire coined ‘the time of the phoenix’. Tacitus also is interested in the topic of the Great Year,67 and his figure 1461 is the duration of an astronomical period considered to be the Egyptian Great Year. At the end of the Sothic, or canicular, year, or cycle, the heliacal rising of the star Sopdet (in Egyptian), Sothis (in Greek), Sirius or Canis maior (in Latin), coincides at Heliopolis at the same time with the New Year and with the beginning of the Nile flood. That event was to occur on July 19, 139 AD, twenty years after Tacitus’ death, and had previously occurred around 4241, 2781 and 1321 BC.
That cycle has nothing to do with either the benu or the falcon, or even with the pharaohs named by Tacitus, remarking with reason that these years are too close to each other to match with the Herodotean cycle. The first sovereign is more or less imaginary, the second and third are real characters. Sesosis is the Herodotean Sesostris,68 idealized as the best of all rulers, a composite of some historical pharaohs, the first in the list of Book 2, when Amasis II is the last sovereign of independent Egypt (570–526 BC) before the Persian conquest at the end of the excursus on that country.69 They are the only two pharaohs about which Diodorus speaks, summing up his predecessor by immediately narrating Amasis’ life after that of Sesostris. These two facts may have played a role in Tacitus’ choice.70 For the Decree of Canopus of Ptolemy III, in 238 BC, rearranging the obsolete Egyptian calendar to coincide with the real course of the stars, it is generally accepted as the reason why the phoenix is pretended to appear under his reign; so, it is only a chronological symbol.71
Paulo Fabio L. Vitellio consulibus post longum sae-culorum ambitum avis phoenix in Aegyptum venit prae-buitque materiem doctissimis indigenarum et Graecorum
multa super eo miraculo disserendi. de quibus congruunt
et plura ambigua, sed cognitu non absurda promere libet. 5
sacrum Soli id animal et ore ac distinctu pinnarum a ceteris
avibus diversum consentiunt qui formam eius effinxere: de
numero annorum varia traduntur. maxime vulgatum quin-gentorum spatium: sunt qui adseverent mille quadringentos
sexaginta unum interici, prioresque alites Sesoside primum, 10
post Amaside dominantibus, dein Ptolemaeo, qui ex Mace-donibus tertius regnavit, in civitatem cui Heliopolis nomen
advolavisse, multo ceterarum volucrum comitatu novam
faciem mirantium. sed antiquitas quidem obscura: inter
Ptolemaeum ac Tiberium minus ducenti quinquaginta anni 15
fuerunt. unde non nulli falsum hunc phoenicem neque
Arabum e terris credidere, nihilque usurpavisse ex his quae
vetus memoria firmavit. confecto quippe annorum numero,
ubi mors propinquet, suis in terris struere nidum eique vim
genitalem adfundere ex qua fetum oriri; et primam adulto 20
curam sepeliendi patris, neque id temere sed sublato
murrae pondere temptatoque per longum iter, ubi par oneri,
par meatui sit, subire patrium corpus inque Solis aram
perferre atque adolere. haec incerta et fabulosis aucta:
ceterum aspici aliquando in Aegypto eam volucrem non 25
ambigitur.
In the consulate of Paulus Fabius and Lucius Vitellius, after a long period of ages, the bird known as the phoenix visited Egypt, and supplied the learned of that country and of Greece with the material for long disquisitions on the miracle. I propose to state the points on which they coincide, together with the larger number that are dubious, yet not too absurd for notice. That the creature is sacred to the sun and distinguished from other birds by its head and the variegation of its plumage, is agreed by those who have depicted its form: as to its term of years, the tradition varies. The generally received number is five hundred; but there are some who assert that its visits fall at intervals of 1461 years, and that it was in the reigns, first of Sesosis, then of Amasis, and finally of Ptolemy (third of the Macedonian dynasty), that the three earlier phoenixes flew to the city called Heliopolis with a great escort of common birds amazed at the novelty of their appearance. But while antiquity is obscure, between Ptolemy and Tiberius there were less than two hundred and fifty years: whence the belief has been held that this was a spurious phoenix, not originating on the soil of Arabia, and following none of the practices affirmed by ancient tradition. For – so the tale is told – when its sum of years is complete and death is drawing on, it builds a nest in its own country and sheds on it a procreative influence, from which springs a young one, whose first care on reaching maturity is to bury his sire. Nor is that task performed at random, but, after raising a weight of myrrh and proving it by a far flight, so soon as he is a match for his burden and the course before him, he lifts up his father’s corpse, conveys him to the Altar of the Sun, and consigns him to the flames. – The details are uncertain and heightened by fable; but that the bird occasionally appears in Egypt is unquestioned.72
If the imperial historian is interested in the phoenix, it is not only because Roman authors of the first century have developed and embellished the myth (either poets: Ovid, Statius, Martial, or naturalists: Pliny the Elder), but because the allegorical bird is at his time a topical subject, since a new Sothic cycle is foreseen for a date relatively close to him: 139 AD. Even if Tacitus writes about the bird for the year 34, during Tiberius’ reign,73 that must have to do with contemporary preoccupations: he lives under Trajan. The occurrence of the Sothic year in the second century is later mentioned in Censorinus’ treatise The Birthday Book, with no hint to the bird: it was not necessary.74 So, why that interest of Tacitus for the phoenix? It is not a prodigy like others: the bird has become since the beginning of the century a political and sensible matter (not to mention the growing interest of Christians): all considerations about the lifespan of the emperors, about the duration of the world and its renewal or possible end have to be controlled and supervised by the power in place, and the myth of the phoenix falls into that category.
Not long after the publication of Tacitus’ work, the new emperor Hadrian replaces his adoptive father Trajan deceased in 117 and produces to honor him gold coins showing, for some, the phoenix crowned by a nimbus with twelve solar rays (symbolizing the months of the year), for others the bird in the zodiac circle with the legend Saeculum aureum (‘Golden age’). Neither a heron nor a raptor, but a large wader, it is now an official symbol inaugurating a long numismatic series: an identical son replaces his father, with the promise of dynastic continuity and of ensuing bliss for the world (Fig. 2).
Fig. 1: A jewelled falcon of Tutankhamun with the sun disk on the head, carrying in its talons the shen ring, symbol of the eternity of the universe, surmounted by the ‘ankh’ or sign for life in Ancient Egypt. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dalbera/1816840234/in/set-72157602827251285/. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Fig. 2: Aureus, Hadrian, 117/118 AD. The phoenix, here a large wader with a short beak, is identified by a stylized radiate nimbus. ID 00535894001. Purchased by and licensed to Françoise Lecocq, University of Caen Normandy, France.
Then, emperor Antoninus will produce in Alexandria, in the very year of the renewal of the Sothic cycle, another coin with the phoenix and the word Ἀιών (‘Eternity’). That political propaganda around the bird is probably the reason why the Roman historian feels obliged to believe in the existence of that Egyptian bird: contrary to Herodotus, he and his country are personally concerned. In any case, and no more than all other authors (but not all are historians), does he distinguish the Hesiodic astrological symbol from the Egyptian sacred bird.
Conclusion
We read three strata of sources in Herodotus’ narrative on the phoenix: one taken from Hesiod, one from the love song (or the tale underlying it), one from Egyptian religion. The historian borrows from the allegorical bird of the Great Year in the Hesiodic Praecepta its name and its century-long longevity (all what we know about it), although misquoting or misunderstanding the calculations made in a Babylonian computation system. He borrows from the love song of the bird catcher a bird of the land of Punt carrying a ball of myrrh in its claws, a real or allegorical creature. He applies that Hesiodic name and lifespan, that have very early become almost proverbial, plus the ball of myrrh of the song to an Egyptian solar bird linked with Heliopolis, probably the benu specific to that city, but also the omnipresent falcon carrying some circular symbolic objects. For the development of the potential of his heritage, various puns on its polysemous name confer to the bird a preferential tree and country: the homonymic date palm and Phoenicia. That is more important than the fact that, originally red by name, the phoenix becomes multicolored, like many exotic birds, in the stories and the mental images; some authors even look for another etymology.75 The aromatics multiply and diversify, mainly under the influence of the cinnamon bird of the same Herodotus, but they are now the materials of a nest (as a cradle or a pyre), avatar of the myrrh egg. The mummy-egg remains only as an approximate shape in a couple ‘bird + circular object’, but the references have changed: it is either a nest or the earth globe, according to whether the phoenix is treated as a real being or a symbol; in the latter case, the sphere is no longer transported, but used as a perch. The lifespan of the bird lengthens over time, according to some astrological theories and astronomical events, from the propagation in Rome of Berossus’ Babylonian theories on the Great Year to the occurrence of the Egyptian Sothic cycle in 139, echoed by the historian Tacitus. He therefore judges necessary to speak about the phoenix: it is no more some ancient, strange and foreign creature, but a hot topic in the Roman Empire. He integrates in the narrative borrowed from his colleague Herodotus new elements coming from intermediate developments of the myth and even the names of two Herodotean pharaohs, but above all, he actualizes the subject in regard to the concerns of his fellow citizens on the duration of the universe, including not only scholars, but Christians and the Roman emperors themselves: the future of the world is at stake.
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Notes
1
Van den Broek (1972).
2
See Lecocq (2008).
3
Hdt. 2.73, transl. by Macaulay 1890.
4
Praecepta Chironis, fr. 304 M-W, transl. by Most (2007).
5
Van den Broek (1972) 67–145.
6
Contra, see Labrique (2013) (not entirely convincing according to the reviews of her article).
7
Hdt. 2.73; Porphyrus, in Euseb. Praep. Euang. 10, 3: Ἡρόδοτος ἐν τῇ δευτέρᾳ πολλὰ Ἑκαταίου Μιλησίου κατὰ λέξιν μετήνεγκεν ἐκ τῆς περιηγήσεως βραχέα παραποιήσας, τὰ τοῦ Φοίνικος ὀρνέου καὶ τὰ περὶ τοῦ ποταμίου ἵππου καὶ τῆς θήρας τῶν κροκοδείλων (“Herodotus in his second Book has transferred many passages of Hecataeus of Miletus from the Geography, verbally with slight falsifications, as the account of the bird Phoenix, and of the hippopotamus and of the hunting of crocodile”) (transl. by Gifford [1903]).
8
Dillery (2018).
9
Hdt. 2.68 and 71.
10
Tac. Ann. 6.28.
11
Hdt. 2.67.
12
He provides an explanation only for the cult of the ibis, protecting Egypt from the invasion of Arabian flying snakes (Hdt. 2.75).
13
Tac. Ann. 6.28.
14
He is different from Horus the Young, the only son of Isis and Osiris.
15
See Guilleux (2001) cf. φοινίκουρος, (‘red-tail’), the Luscinia phoenicurus; φοινικόπτερος, (‘red-feathered’), the flamingo; φοινικόρυγχος, (‘with a red bill’); φοινικόλεγνος, (‘red-streaked’); φοινικόλοφος (‘purple-crested’). On these birds and all others, see Thompson (1895).
16
Hdt. 2.69: χάμψα; see also Diod. Sic. 1.83–89; Strab. 17.1.38 (Σοῦχος) and 17.1.39–40.
17
No more than for ἴρηξ (‘falcon’) (Ionian form for ἱέραξ, etymology unknown).
18
See Lecocq (2019a).
19
For example, in Ar. Av. 217.
20
Hdt. 2.156.
21
See Belluccio (1993); Quirke (2001); Postel (2013); Coulon (2013).
22
Hdt. 2.144 and 2.156.
23
See for example Cic. De leg. 1.5.
24
Diod. Sic. 1.83–88; Strab. Geog. 17.38–40.
25
Antiphanes of Rhodos Homopatrioi 173, Ezekiel the Tragedian Exagôgè, fr. 17.256–269, and Aenesidemus of Cnossos Pyrrhonian discourses (in Diog. Laert. 9.11.9).
26
Iliad, passim.
27
See Tallet (2010); Postel (2013).
28
Labrique (2013).
29
See Medini and Tallet (2018).
30
Hdt. 3.3.
31
See Raue (2018).
32
There is only a funerary song mentioned in Book 2 (Hdt. 2.79).
33
Or ‘coated’ [wrH].
34
P. Harris 500, transl. by Simpson (2003) 312.
35
In the southeastern part of the Arabian Peninsula (Servajean [2019]).
36
The two other mentions of myrrh are also about religion and mummification (Hdt. 2.40 and 86). See Aufrère (2017).
37
See Parkinson (1999).
38
See Taterka (2016).
39
See Ratié (1979) 151 (erroneously spelled ‘cinnytis’). Its modern name is coined after κιννυρíδες: τὰ μικρὰ ὀρνιθάρια (‘the small birds’) mentioned in Hesychius’ Lexicon; it resembles one of the names attributed to the father of the legendary heroin Myrrha (Ov. Met. 10.299). That bird does not figure on the relief of the Botanical garden of Thutmose III in Karnak, inspite of what Ratié wrote.
40
Ov. Met. 15.394.
41
See Vendries (2009).
42
For several other puns in the elaboration of the myth, see Lecocq (2016).
43
Hdt. 3.111 (without a name); Arist. Hist. An. 9.13.616a (κιννάμωμον ὄρνεον); Plin. HN 10.97 under the name cinnamolgus, assimilated with the phoenix in HN 12.85; see Lecocq (2009) and (2011).
44
See Bickel (1994).
45
See Turcan (1959).
46
See Albrile (2000) and Lecocq (2019b).
47
For another association of a bird, an egg and myrrh, see Aufrère (2017): female falcons were supposed able to produce myrrh resin.
48
Zucker (2004) 85–86.
49
See Lecocq (2016).
50
However, no visible traces of Egypt in Manilius (Plin. HN 10.3–5).
51
Ov. Met. 15.393; Lactant. de aue Phoen., 65 and 80.
52
Ov. Met. 10.298–367.
53
Hes. fr. 139 M-W.
54
See Detienne (1994) chapter 1, “The Perfumes of Arabia”, 5–36.
55
With sometimes also a more realistic, but less poetic worm born from the decaying corpse (Manilius in Plin. HN 10.4).
56
As in Pompon. 3.83.
57
Origen. C. Cels. 4.28.
58
Ach. Tat. 3.25.
59
Plat. Tim. 39d.
60
Van den Broek (1972) 90–96.
61
Cic. Nat. D. 2.51–52; Tac. Dial. 16; Solin. 33.15.
62
Solin. 33.12–3, transl. by Apps, Gaius Iulius Solinus and his Polyhistor (Ph.D. Diss. Macquarie University [2011]).
63
Plin. HN 10.4–5.
64
Chaeremon Hieroglyphs, in Tzetz. Chil. 5.395–398; Plin. HN 29.29; Mart. Epigr. 5.7.2; Tac. Ann. 6.28.
65
Plin. HN 10.5.
66
See Lecocq (2020).
67
Tac. Dial. 16.
68
Hdt. 2.102–110, cf. Diod. Sic. 1.53–60.
69
Hdt. 2.154–182, cf. Diod. Sic. 1.60–69.
70
The appearance of the phoenix during their reign in Tacitus may be explained by the use of a summary of Herodotus’ Book 2 such as: “Egypt: pharaohs, from Sesostris to Amasis; the phoenix in Heliopolis,” understood as “The phoenix came in Heliopolis under Sesostris and Amasis.”
71
Van den Broek (1972) 416.
72
Tac. Ann. 6.28, transl. by Jackson (1937).
73
Or in 36 (Dio Cass. 58.27.10).
74
Censorinus DN 18.10–11.
75
For example, the Vienna Physiologus; see Lecocq (2019b).