Athena in arms: the city-goddess of Athens, her contribution

Abstract

The two distinctive attributes of the goddess Athena are her birth from her father, Zeus, and her armed appearance as a war goddess. The aims of this thesis are, first, to probe and to prove that these divine attributes were given to Athena in the orientalizing context; and secondly, to investigate her new divine function as the city-goddess of Athens, which was given her in early 6th century. In the first introductory chapter these two attributes are examined as orientalizing phenomena in early Greek literature inspired by oriental literary models. First, in Hesiod's Theogony the supposed model for the Greek Succession Myth is one of the Hurrian Kumarbi Myths, from which the structure and some ideas including a male giving birth were presumably taken. Secondly, Homer's Iliad Book V: the model of the divine injury theme, that is, the episode in which Aphrodite is physically wounded by Diomedes, is the episode in which goddess Ishtar is injured, (mental injury,) by Gilgamesh, king of Uruk in Tablet six of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Homer made goddess Athena a war goddess in the context of his re-creation from the original episode. Homer also equipped Athena with Greek panoply in the same context in the Iliad book V. This was the first appearance of the armed war goddess Athena in Greek literature. The third part of the introductory chapter is a brief survey of orientalizing in art, particularly of vase painting, leading to the second chapter in which orientalizing phenomena in iconography are dealt with. In Chapter II, it is proved that an armed female figure depicted on a Protocorinthian vase from the Samian Heraion was reproduced on the model of the oriental armed goddess Ishtar, and her early introduction to Greek iconography is investigated in the second part of the chapter. In Chapter IV it is hypothetically demonstrated that the Athenians adapted the Corinthian armed goddess which was developed from this earliest armed female figure as the model of the image of their city-goddess, Athena, for their definitive political purpose in the first quarter of the 6th century; and how the armed Athena Polias and Ergane contributed to the making of their new people-centric social system, democracy, in its formative stage under the City-God Policy of Solon/Athens in the first half of the sixth century. Wasn't on this fundamental procedure Kleisthenes could be profitable in his 'reorganization' as highly evaluated generally? Chapter III briefly traces first how and why the world's first armed war-goddess Ishtar, the supposed-origin of war-goddesses in other civilizations in the world, was emerged/made, then how she was worshipped, how her divine status was in a long changing history up to the end of Neo Babylonian Age, 539 BC. In this thesis it is proved that the prototype of the Greek armed war-goddess Athena was the armed war-goddess Ishtar in the literary and iconographical spheres, and also in the socio-political sphere as the model of the armed city-goddess of Athens. We will see in these orirentalizing phenomena what the Greeks made of oriental impulse/inspiration/notion: why and how certain oriental impulses were accepted, how and under what conditions such influences worked, and how the Greeks merged them into their own culture; and in what ways and why the result of adaptation and transformation differed from the original impulses.