Der folgende Artikel steht im Original an folgendem Ort:
Bahrain through the ages, the Archaeology / edited by Shaikha Haya Ali Al Khalifa and Michael Rice / The Ministry of Information, State of Bahrain, 1986 / Seiten 399-405 / geschrieben von G.W. Bowersock
Tylos and Tyre: Bahrain in the Graeco-Roman World
From the fourth century BC at the latest until the incorporation of Graeco-Roman traditions in Byzantine sources over a thousand years afterwards, the two islands of Bahrain and Muharrq in the Arabian Gulf were known as Tylos and Arados. Occasionally the spelling Tylos was corrupted, in both Greek and Latin, into the form Tyros, but the confusion of the liquids l and r is not uncommon in foreign words (such as Rhinocolura/Rhinocorura and Athloula/Athroula), and in this instance it reflects the fame of a well known city on the eastern Mediterranean coast. The legitimacy of the form Tylos for Bahrain is established by the most authoritative source we have for the Graeco-Roman period, namely an admiral wo served under Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BC, Androsthenes of Thasos.
Androsthenes went to Bahrain in 324 BC while the forces of Alexander were returning from India. He identified the island as Tylos and wrote an account of the plant life and pearl-fishing of the area as part of an overall narrative of his travels in the gulf under the title "Voyage Along the Indian Coast". Regrettably the work of Androsthenes does not survive, but since it was obviously the one thorough eyewitness account of Bahrain to which Greeks and Romans had access, it was studied and excerpted repeatedly in antiquity. The geographers Artemidorus and Eratosthenes used it in the Hellenistic age, the philosopher Theophrastus cited it at length in his botanical writings, and the historians of Alexander turned to it for evidence on naval expeditions. Under the Roman Empire the antiquarian Athenaeus found Androsthenes a precious repository of details on pearling; and the testimony of Androsthenes, sometimes at second hand through Artemidorus and Eratosthenes, continued to be quoted in the excerptors of the Byzantine era. The only Graeco-Roman evidence for Bahrain that is not manifestly dependent upon the report of Androsthenes is the registering of Tylos and Arados among the islands of the Arabian Gulf in the Geography of Claudius Ptolemaeus from the second century AD, but even here an ultimate debt to Alexander's admiral is likely.
The actual words of Androsthenes are quoted, among surviving writers from classical antiquity, only in Theophrastus, Strabo (borrowing from Eratosthenes), and Athenaeus. We may begin with the first two authors and return later to Athenaeus. Describing the beneficial effects of salt water on plants, Theophrastus invokes Androsthenes, "concerning the things in Tylos, the island in the Red Sea". In another passage, clearly drawing again on Androsthenes, Theophrastus locates Tylos "in the Arabian Gulf". Red Sea was a general term that, as can be observed here, was in use for the Arabian Gulf as well as for what is known today as the Red Sea.
Strabo, in his geographical work composed under the early Roman principate, explicitly cites Eratosthenes, who, in turn, gives a quotation from Androsthenes. After this Strabo provides information about Bahrain that was undoubtedly part of Androsthenes' account. The text of Strabo as transmitted gives the name Tyros instead of Tylos, but there can be no doubt that this is an error: we have not only Tylos in Theophrastus' verbatim quotation of Androsthenes but also in the statement in Stephanus of Byzantium as follows: "Tyros ... island in the Red Sea, which Artemidorus calls Tylos with an l". We know that Artemidorus based his treatment of the Arabian Gulf on Androsthenes.
The passage in Strabo is of the greatest interest and importance: "As one sails on farther other islands are Tyros (i.e. Tylos) and Arados, with temples like the Phoenician ones; and those who live on the islands say that the Phoenicians' islands and cities of the same names were colonized by them". Any knowledgeable geographer in antiquity would certainly have been impressed by the curious coincidence that two islands in the Arabian Gulf happened to have essentially the same names as two of the principal cities on the Phoenician coast - both of which were also islands. The names in both cases were Semitic, not Greek. Arados represents Arad, a name which survives in modern Muharraq; the other place kept the names in the forms of Arvad and Rouad. Tyros or Tylos represents what is even today the name for Tyre in Arabic. The confusion of a sad with Greek tau poses no difficulty, and, in this case, something similar may have also occurred in Arabic. In any case, two island cities so far apart called Arados and two called Tylos/Tyros must inevitably suggest some kind of relationship. Androsthenes declared that the sanctuaries on the Gulf islands resembled those in Phoenicia and, furthermore, that on those islands there was a tradition of colonization in Phoenicia. With that wilfulness that occasionally blemished late nineteenthcentury western scholarship some writers assumed that Androsthenes, and through him Eratosthenes and Strabo, had given exactly the reverse of the truth. The amazing coincidence of names and temples they believed had to be explained by Phoenician colonization in the Gulf, instead of by Gulf colonization in Phoenicia.
But in fact there is nothing inherently implausible about Androsthenes' report, and there is good evidence to support it. Over a century before the expedition of Alexander the Great the historian Herodotus had visited Tyre on the Phoenician coast. In Book II he notes that he was told in Tyre that the city had been settled 2'300 years before. Calculating back from approximately 450 BC, we obtain a date from Herodotus of 2750 BC or so for the foundation of Tyre. Later, in Book VII, the same historian reports of the Phoenicians generally that long ago, as they say themselves, they once dwelled on the Red Sea and from there they migrated through Syria to the Mediterranean coast. Accordingly we can recover from Herodotus a tradition among the Phoenicians themselves that they came originally from the Red Sea, which - as we have already seen - is a perfectly normal Greek way of referring to the Arabian Gulf. In other words the local Phoenician tradition of the fifth century BC, as reported by Herodotus, exactly matches the local tradition in the Gulf itself a century later, as reported by Androsthenes. Both traditions make the Gulf the homeland of the Phoenicians. Obviously the concordance of these traditions is strengthened by the parallel names of the cities of Tylos and Tyre, and of Arados and Phoenician Arados. Knowledgeable readers will be reminded of other well known parallels of nomenclature between Phoenicia and the Gulf, such as Jubail (Byblos) and the Sür in Oman. For the dispatch of colonists from Bahrain to the Mediterranean Herodotus provides an approximate date of 2750 BC.
Although it would be foolish to put any weight on Herodotus' precise date (it is the tradition that counts), excavations on Bahrain itself as well as discoveries in Mesopotamia have now established that Bahrain was undoubtedly a more important place by the early third millennium than had formerly been surmised. It appears to have been a trading station for traffic between Babylonia and the Indus valley, and it has been suggested that financing of these far-flung operations came from Ur. There is nothing at all improbable about a colonial emigration from the mercantile center of Bahrain to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean in this period, and there is the remarkable unanimity of the traditions in the two parts of the world in so-called classical times to support it. As for Phoenician itself, we have, by the end of the fourth millennium, no contradictory evidence, as far as I am aware. "Aucune ville en Phénicie n'est attestée avant cette époque (i.e. la fin du IVe millénaire), mais elles vont naître, nombreuses."
In another passage Strabo takes up once again the current belief that Phoenician Tyre and Arados were colonized from the homonymous islands of the Arabian Gulf. At the end of Book XVI he cites Homer's Odyssey (IV.84), "and we came to the Ethiopians and the Sidonians and the Eremboi". This line is part of Menelaus' account of seven years of wandering, and the references to the Ethiopians and Eremboi allude without any doubt to coastal territories of East Africa. It would be odd therefore, as Strabo immediately recognizes, for the Sidonians mentioned in this Homeric verse to refer to the natives of the Phoenician city of Sidon. Furthermore, Menelaus had already covered Phoenicia in the preceding line, along - reasonably enough - with Cyprus and Egypt. Accordingly Strabo raises the possibility that Homer's Sidonoi are not the people of Sidon but are rather the inhabitants of the Arabian Gulf whom the ancients knew under the general appellation of Sidonians. Strabo asks "whether we should understand - by Sidonians - some of those people who inhabit the Persian - i.e. Arabian - Gulf, of whom the natives of our own Sidon are colonists, just as writers speak of island dwellers on Tyre and Arados there, of whom our own Tyrians and Aradians are said to be colonists".
It is clear that in this passage Strabo alludes explicitly to a broad colonization of Phoenicia from the Arabian Gulf, of which the settlement of Tyre and Arados was only a part. And in referring to this tradition, which he reasonably assumes to be a familiar one in his own day, he forms a close link with the tradition reported by Herodotus nearly four centuries earlier. We can now state with certainty that rightly or wrongly the Graeco-Roman world accepted a tradition that ascribed the settlement of Phoenicia, several millennia before, to colonists from the Arabian Gulf. We can state further, without certainty but with some degree of probability, that this tradition may, in fact, accurately reflect patterns of migration in the distant past when the Gulf was already a vital commercial area and Tylos (Bahrain), in particular, a major trading station.
Special interest in the colonization of Phoenicia, especially Tyre and Arados, appears not to have been confinded to Strabo during the early Roman principate. The emperor Augustus' grandson, whom he had adopted as his son and heir, Gaius Caesar, embarked on an Arabian campaign in about 1 BC; and although the details of his objectives and movements are still obscure to us, we do know that knowledgeable scholars of the time studied the sources in order to equip the young Gaius with the necessary background material for his operations. The strongly hellenized and highly literate king of Mauretania, Juba II, is known to have composed a handbook on the Roman East for Gaius' edification. This work evidently described the islands of the Arabian Gulf, as we can readily see from a reference in Book XII of the Natural History of the elder Pliny. There Tylos insula is described as full of forests (repleta silvis) and wool-bearing trees (lanigerae arbores), and Muharraq is also mentioned as Tylos minor. Pliny then names Juba as his source for cotton growing on the islands. Juba can thus be seen to have disposed of detailed information about Bahrain at that time, and he may be presumed to have had access to Androsthenes' work. Like Androsthenes he calls the island Tylos, not Tyros (a form which has intruded into Pliny's text of Book VI in a passage also expressly drawn from Juba on pearl-fishing in the Gulf). But Juba's designation of Muharraq as Tylos minor instead of Arados is notable. It points to a source, written or even oral, quite distinct from Androsthenes.
One may be justified in concluding, therefore, that the nature and history of Bahrain had a certain contemporary relevance to the foreign policy of Augustus at the end of the first century BC. The testimony of Strabo and Juba, taken together, is proof enough. Even the cultivated elite of the Arab world itself at that time may have played a role in educating the young Roman prince. It seems that a native of Charax, at the mouth of the Tigris in the northern corner of the Arabian Gulf, composed another work for the instruction of Gaius. Pliny's Natural History gives this local scholar the name of Dionysius, although it is tempting (if unnecessary) to assume a textual corruption concealing the well known geographer Isidore of Charax. Pliny says of this author, whether Dionysius or Isidore, quem ad commentanda omnia in orientem praemiserat divus Augustus ituro in Armeniam ad Parthicas Arabicasque res maiore filio ("whom the deified Augustus sent in advance to the East to write a full account when his elder - adopted - son was about to go to Armenia to launch Parthian and Arabian campaigns"). After taking due note of this writer Pliny is then careful to explain that he prefers to follow, in his own treatment, Juba of Mauretania instead of the man from Charax. Overall, however, it is apparent that the Arabian Gulf probably received more attention under Augustus than at any time since Androsthenes in the days of Alexander.
The only other identifiable quotation from Androsthenes' Paraplous occurs in Athenaeus, whose dazzling erudition is mirrored in his vast miscellany called "The Sophists at Dinner" (Deipnosophistai) from the late second century AD. In Book III of this work Athenaeus excerpts some lines of the Paraplous on the subject of pearling in the Arabian Gulf. Androsthenes notes that the shellfish that produced pearls was highly prized throughout the whole region, and he reports that the native word for this creature was berberi: "one particular kind - of shellfish - is what those people call berberi, from which the pearl stone is made". This precious testimony, cited from an authoritative work of the fourth century BC, has been largely ignored. And yet the native Gulf word berberi should excite curiosity in view of the emergence under the Roman Empire of the word barbary to cover the coastal areas of the Arabian Sea and Gulf, precisely where the pearl-fishers flourished. Stephanus of Byzantium was sharp enough to recognize that Barbaria as an ethnic designation was different from "barbarian". In any case, Androsthenes' evidence for the word berberi deserves a place it has never yet had in discussions of the origins of Greek Barbaria. The village Barbar in the north of Bahrain, where Danish excavators have uncovered an important temple, may well preserve that word which Androsthenes heard on the lips of residents there over two thousand years ago.
In late antiquity, less than two centuries before the Prophet, the Greek epic poet Nonnos, from Panopolis in Egypt, gives us a tradition about the settlement of Tyre that is wholly different from that which Greeks and Romans had inherited from Androsthenes. By this time, with the new empire already well established at Byzantium, the Tyrians had evidently constructed an elaborate and otherwise unattested foundation legend proclaiming themselves as indigenous inhabitants of the region. In Book XL of his Dionysiaca Nonnos, who is singularly well informed about local traditions in the East, makes the god Heracles of Tyre tell the visiting god Dionysus that the people of the city sprang from the unplowed earth and built upon the rocks of the island in the immemorial past. They are said to be autochthonous. There is no trace whatever in Nonnos of immigration from the Gulf - unless, by chance, it is to be found in the name of a local water-nymph, who is invoked in a description of the site of Ras alcain at Tyre. She is called Abarbare, and one cannot help wondering whether in this strange name there is perhaps an echo of the people who long before, in the Arabian Gulf, had fished for berberi.
genau oeps..