Читать книгу The Herodotus Encyclopedia - Группа авторов - Страница 324

CHRISTOPHER BARON

University of Notre Dame

“Ammon” refers both to the Sîwa OASIS in the western DESERT of EGYPT (BA 73 C4) and to the god, equated by the Greeks with ZEUS, whose sanctuary and ORACLE were found there. Herodotus attributes the community there to colonists from Egypt and ETHIOPIA (2.42.4), ruled by a king ETEARCHUS in or just before Herodotus’ time (2.32.1). The archaeological and literary evidence indicates a Libyan people influenced by or adapting Egyptian culture, including the iconography of Ammon wearing a ram’s‐fleece headdress (Asheri in ALC, 425–27). Herodotus places the Ammonians ten days’ journey west of Egyptian THEBES; they are the first people living along the sand ridge he envisions running the length of north Africa, i.e., LIBYA (4.181); the actual distance is 900 kilometers (Corcella in ALC, 704–5).

The oracle of Zeus/Ammon was well‐known to the Greeks by the fifth century BCE. PINDAR was said to have written a hymn to Ammon and dedicated an image of the god at his temple in Boeotian THEBES (Paus. 9.16.1), and Herodotus includes it as the only non‐Greek oracle tested by CROESUS (1.46.3). He also links it with the oracle of Zeus at DODONA, both by reporting the account he heard from the priestesses at the latter and by noting the resemblance in divinatory methods at the two sites (2.55–57). Herodotus uses an oracle issued by Ammon to the CITIES of MAREA and APIS as PROOF of the correctness of his own argument concerning Egyptian GEOGRAPHY (2.18). The “Spring of the Sun” was also famous in antiquity (e.g., Diod. Sic. 17.50.4–5; Lucr. 6.840–78) and still today maintains its constant temperature, creating the illusion that it fluctuates opposite to the daily heating and cooling cycle of the desert (Hdt. 4.181).

The Ammonians were supposedly the object of a failed attempt at CONQUEST by the Persian king CAMBYSES (II), who in his MADNESS sent an army of 50,000 men across the desert. They were last seen at Oasis (the “ISLAND OF THE BLESSED”), believed by the Ammonians to have been buried by a sandstorm (3.26). The most famous ancient visitor to the temple was Alexander III of Macedon in 331 BCE, who (according to some accounts) was greeted as the son of Zeus (Plut. Alex. 27) and later issued coinage bearing the image of Ammon/Zeus.

SEE ALSO: Aeschrionian Tribe; Black Athena; Cyrene; Nile; Temples and Sanctuaries