Fighting for the Other: Typologies and Stereotypes

Across cultures and epochs, from Archilochos of Paros to the Wagner Group, soldiers of fortune have always enjoyed a rather dubious reputation. Supposedly fighting for an employer to whom they have no other tie than the salary they receive, mercenaries almost inevitably generate diffidence and suspicion. In a recent study, Alexander Spencer collected an impressive array of witnesses, including Nicolas Machiavelli, Frederick the Great, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to document the persistence of this reputational problem.Footnote ⁹ With remarkable cross-cultural consistency, the image of the mercenary has long been associated with a rich collection of negative topoi. A man whose trade is violence cannot but be suspected of enjoying it, and accordingly mercenaries are often described as particularly brutal. Readers of Herodotus will remember the story of Phanes of Halikarnassos, the mercenary captain in the army of Pharaoh Amasis II who defected to the Persians and taught King Cambyses II how to get his troops across the Sinai Desert. In retaliation, the pharaoh’s Greek and Karian mercenaries cut the throats of Phanes’ children under his eyes and drank their blood before going into battle with the Persians.Footnote ¹⁰ Others will perhaps think of atrocities associated with European and South African mercenaries in the Congo Crisis of the 1960s, or of the sack of Cesena by John Hawkwood’s mercenaries in 1377; the list could go on.Footnote ¹¹ On the other hand, a man who fights for money may be suspected of being more concerned with his own skin than a patriotic fighter should—hence the topos of the soldier of fortune feigning war, as in Petrarch’s memorable line about bavarico inganno, or “Bavarian trickery,” chastising the supposed lack of commitment of German mercenaries in fourteenth-century Italy.Footnote ¹² The same topos is worked out in detail in the influential indictment of mercenaries contained in Machiavelli’s The Prince.Footnote ¹³

Looking for empirical evidence that contradicts these assumptions is a futile activity, as is usually the case with rhetorical topoi. This layering of hostile rhetoric, however, creates a real problem for any comparative study of mercenaries in the Eastern Mediterranean during antiquity, and ultimately for any comparative study of mercenaries at all, in that it undermines all attempts at a definition. For practical purposes a definition of mercenary does of course exist, one agreed upon at the highest level and enshrined in the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention of June 8, 1977. According to this definition, a mercenary is any person who:

A very similar definition was adopted in the same year in the Organization of African Unity’s Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism.Footnote ¹⁵

One scarcely needs to point out that this whole definition would be anachronistic for any premodern context.Footnote ¹⁶ In fact, since 1977 it has become anachronistic twice over, as events have overtaken the assumptions on which it was based. Consider for instance point (c) about higher pay, which clearly reflected outrage about First-World mercenaries fighting in the Third World in the decades after the Second World War, or point (d), which only made sense as long as mercenaries were hired abroad or deployed by parties from countries different from their own.

It is precisely the use, explicit or more often implicit, of such anachronistic definitions as a touchstone and the lack of a robust comparative angle that has provoked debates among Greek historians on the use of the term “mercenary,” especially in reference to the archaic period. In an earlier article, I argued against the idea that archaic Greek war workers were simply a small number of wayward aristocrats who fought in accordance with the requirements of aristocratic reciprocity and should therefore be distinguished from “real” mercenaries.Footnote ¹⁷ Such a notion is an illusion created by the survival of evidence that inevitably privileges social elites and their supposedly aristocratic warrior values; it confuses rhetoric and social practice. To take a few examples almost at random, the same aristocratic ethos based on honor and reciprocity is found in the discourse about early medieval Scandinavian warrior bands, whose enrollment as war workers is amply documented, and even in the early modern evidence for Swiss hired soldiers and the south-German infantry known as the Landsknechte, who fought in the service of foreign powers. And yet nobody really disputes their qualification as “mercenaries.”Footnote ¹⁸

The lack of a shared reflection on what we might mean when we speak of “mercenaries” creates multiple impasses for the study of war workers, especially in the ancient Mediterranean, where the evidence is thinner. A telling example, which has special relevance for my main area of interest, is offered by scholarship on that most remarkable war machine, the army of the Neo-Assyrian kings, in particular between the end of the eighth century BCE and the first half of the seventh, from the reign of King Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 BCE) onwards. When it comes to the presence of mercenaries in this context, opinions diverge sharply, often without much discussion.Footnote ¹⁹ Royal annals regularly report that the king of Assyria, as part of the widespread custom of deporting the enemy population after a victory, took over part of their armed forces, often the elite units, and incorporated them into his own army—in the words of royal inscriptions, he “counted them among the Assyrians.”Footnote ²⁰ Recent studies have emphasized the way that the multiethnic army of the late eighth and seventh centuries is portrayed in palace reliefs at Nimrud and elsewhere, and how non-Assyrians clearly played an important role in its forces.Footnote ²¹ Should we call them “professional soldiers,” “auxiliaries,” or “mercenaries”? All three terms are used by Assyriologists, who do not seem to dwell too much on their choice of terminology.

A problem of definition is clearly muddying the waters. Referring to units identified with an ethnonym serving under the command of the governor of an Assyrian city, Nicholas Postgate states that they were “full-time professional soldiers,” but also that “there is no evidence that they were mercenaries serving in return for payment.”Footnote ²² Karen Radner, however, points to the presence of hired war workers in the army of Sargon II, who reigned from 722 to 705 BCE.Footnote ²³ What exactly would make foreign war workers serving in the Assyrian armies non-mercenaries? That official sources like Assyrian royal inscriptions depict all components of the Assyrian army as performing their duty of loyalty to their king is surely no proof that none of these soldiers had been hired from abroad. In his analysis of the disputed term kitru (usually considered to relate to [military] aid, auxiliary forces, or allies), Mario Liverani has shown that Assyrian royal inscriptions present military support in exchange for economic reward as an activity associated with Assyria’s enemies.Footnote ²⁴ Yet, a fleet that Sennacherib, son of Sargon II, assembled at Nineveh to sail down the Tigris in 694 BCE included Greek sailors, and assuming that they were all prisoners of war rather strains credibility.Footnote ²⁵

An awareness of parallel discussions among scholars of other cultural contexts would certainly be helpful here. In particular, medieval and modern historians have tended to draw on a broader comparative basis, with results that repay the attention of those interested in the world of the ancient Mediterranean. In 2007, Sarah Percy devoted a book-length discussion to the definition of mercenary soldiers from the twelfth to the twentieth century. She approached late medieval and early modern European history from a sociology and political science perspective, with the aim of historicizing several kinds of military entrepreneurs active after the Second World War and the strong stigma attached to them. Her main conclusion was that “for as long as there have been mercenaries, there has been a norm against mercenary use.” The strong norm against mercenary soldiers derives from the perception that they ultimately fight for themselves rather than for any cause that could morally justify their violence. At a deeper level, however, the fact that mercenary soldiers appear to act outside of legitimate political control is also a key motivation. In Percy’s definition, then, a mercenary is “a fighter who engages in combat without a cause, for financial gain, and without being under the control of a state or legitimate authority.” On the basis of these criteria, she proposes a typology of different kinds of fighting personnel, from the Free Companies of the Middle Ages to the security contractors of private military companies (PMCs). In her view, four factors underpin the strong norm against mercenary service across historical contexts: a clear distinction between native and foreign soldiers; the notion of a just cause for taking up arms; the sense that it ought to be members of a community who fight on its behalf; and the assumption that mercenaries are less reliable on the battlefield.Footnote ²⁶ An epiphenomenon of this norm is the frequent use of euphemistic terms to designate these workers, such as Reiseläufer (travelers) for Swiss mercenary soldiers of the fifteenth century, soldati di ventura (soldiers of fortune) for mercenaries serving in Italy in the same period, or, closer to us in time, “security contractors.”

Percy’s emphasis on normative discourse draws attention once more to the remarkable cross-cultural stability of negative topoi associated with foreign war workers. Though she does not formulate this explicitly, her approach also suggests that in practice the term “mercenary” functions as an epithet as much as a description—something I will discuss further below. One point is particularly important for the present discussion. The tirades of Italian humanists, culminating with Machiavelli’s The Prince, or the moral criticism of the Zurich reformer Ulrich Zwingli, are not specifically modern or even early modern phenomena; on the contrary, they find parallels much earlier in time. In the fourth century BCE, Isokrates chastised the Athenians in his speech On the Peace for employing mercenary soldiers, whom he calls “common enemies of humankind” and describes as criminals, deserters, and—most telling for a Greek—men without a polis, apolidai, ready to change sides if offered higher pay.Footnote ²⁷ Similarly, in a famous discussion of martial bravery, Aristotle questioned the loyalty of mercenaries when faced with especially dangerous situations and the prospect of defeat, as opposed to citizen conscripts who would fight to the death.Footnote ²⁸

A similar stigma may already have been attached to mercenaries in the archaic age. One typical epiphenomenon of the social norm against mercenary service, namely the use of euphemistic terminology to refer to such soldiers, is documented as early as the middle of the seventh century BCE, if not before. The poet Archilochos of Paros referred to himself as somebody who will be called epikouros “like a Karian.”Footnote ²⁹ The Greek term epikouros means something like “helper” or “ally,”Footnote ³⁰ and the Karians from Western Asia Minor, as we shall see in detail later, were famous for serving as mercenary soldiers, especially in Egypt. Archilochos’ line is therefore likely meant to puncture the euphemism of the epithet and point to its real meaning. The sense of this fragment is confirmed by another line from Archilochos, which can be translated as something like “an epikouros is liked as long as he fights.”Footnote ³¹

One wonders whether we might go even further back in time. The word epikouros features frequently in the Iliad, where it indicates the many contingents from different areas of Asia Minor and Thrace who supported the Trojans against the Achaian army commanded by Agamemnon. Their role, at least in the eyes of the Achaians, was absolutely crucial: according to Agamemnon, without them Troy would have fallen almost instantly, since the Achaians outnumbered the Trojans by more than ten to one (Iliad 2.123–33). What motivated them to fight, on the other hand, is not entirely clear. The epikouroi appear to have joined the war because Hektor had summoned them (Iliad 16.538–40). The latter describes their function as being to protect the wives and children of the Trojans, that is, to prevent the city from falling—much as Agamemnon observed from the opposing camp (Iliad 5.472–89). Hektor furthermore claims to be wearing down the Trojan people so as to increase the thymos of the epikouroi, to keep them in good spirits, we might say. In other words, community resources were being consumed in order to reward these fighting men (Iliad 17.220–32). In the world of epic poetry, the question of whether they would have fought even without a reward was not a meaningful one, and we are left to wonder.

Beyond the Homeric epikouroi, traces of the familiar anti-mercenary rhetoric can also be found in early documents from the Eastern Mediterranean. The prophecy of Jeremiah (46:16–17) concerning the Battle of Karkemish, where Nebuchadnezzar II defeated Pharaoh Necho II in 605 BCE, describes the pharaoh’s soldiers in terms that clearly point to their being non-Egyptians ready to abandon their employer:

Further along, a second prophecy is even more explicit (46:20–21):

In other words, mercenaries are ready to fatten themselves in peacetime, but when war comes, they are easily defeated and abandon their employer—the same trope is found in both Machiavelli and Aristotle. In case anybody were tempted to take these stereotypes seriously, we should note that the conquering army of Nebuchadnezzar itself probably included Greek mercenaries.Footnote ³³

Already then, the stereotype was used by opposing sides to condemn their enemies, in both directions. Not too far away in time and space, the victory stele of Pharaoh Amasis II, which describes his triumph in the civil war against the legitimate Pharaoh Apries in 570 BCE, speaks of the “countless Greeks” who fought for his opponent. Amasis, on the other hand, is said to have addressed his army with these words: “The one who fights valiantly is the one who fights for his land. His heart is ready to fight in order to protect the well-being of his relatives.”Footnote ³⁴

The version recounted on the stele corresponds to the narrative relayed by Herodotus, which presents Amasis’ uprising as an indigenous movement against the Greeks.Footnote ³⁵ Before we, too, buy into this rhetoric, it may be useful to point out that three years later, when, according to the Amasis stele, Nebuchadnezzar attacked Egypt in order to reinstate Apries, a Babylonian text mentions the presence of Greeks among the troops that Amasis mustered to repel the invasion.Footnote ³⁶ This reciprocal accusation stresses that fundamental elements of the anti-mercenary rhetoric go back at least to the seventh century BCE, and may be earlier still: Assyrian narratives of the campaign of Sennacherib against Jerusalem in 701 BCE appear to mention the mercenaries of King Hezekiah abandoning him at the terrifying sight of the Assyrian army.Footnote ³⁷

The stability of this rhetoric belies a very diverse landscape of war workers. In a comparative study of mercenary soldiers in the Middle Ages, Stephen Morillo has attempted to sketch a general typology of fighting forces in order to capture this heterogeneity.Footnote ³⁸ While mostly based on a study of medieval warfare, his typology is intended to work for a broad spectrum of periods and cultures, including antiquity. It is based on two parameters: the social embeddedness of the fighters and the respective role of political versus economic factors in their motivation. The first parameter has some affinity with the traditional dichotomy of local versus foreign fighters. More precisely, it measures the extent to which fighters fulfill military obligations that are part of their broader social role or, as Morillo puts it, are construed “in terms of recognized nexuses of social relationships.”Footnote ³⁹ The second parameter measures the respective importance of politics and economics in shaping their terms of service.Footnote ⁴⁰

Morillo’s analysis makes several interesting points immediately evident. In the ancient Mediterranean world, as in the early Middle Ages but probably not in the early modern period, war workers could undergo changes in their conditions of employment that would involve them taking up permanent residence in the land of their employer. For instance, warrior bands who raided the coasts could subsequently become paid fighters in the employment of their former victims. This may have been the case of the Greek and Karian “men of bronze” eventually hired by Pharaoh Psammetichos I (r. 664–610 BCE), if we can take the story of their raids seriously, and is certainly true of the Viking bands raiding the British Isles—King Æthelred of Wessex, for instance, repeatedly enlisted them between the end of the tenth century and the first years of the eleventh, with variable success.Footnote ⁴¹ One paradoxical result of this transformation was that the new hirelings could find themselves fighting off attacks by other warrior bands of the same origin. Clearly, this kind of arrangement, especially if it involved grants of land, could move groups of fighters rather drastically along Morillo’s axis of social embeddedness.Footnote ⁴² Evidence for second-generation mercenaries is provided by the famous inscriptions of the Greeks in the army of Psammetichos II at Abu Simbel, to be discussed below. By the time they stared down Cambyses’ army, many Greek and Karian mercenaries must have been settled in Egypt for generations. Should we stop calling them “mercenaries”?

Here, in my opinion, Morillo’s approach brings a problem to the surface without really offering a solution. In his comments, he envisions “true mercenaries” as operating in an open market for violence: “one condition for true mercenary service is that there be not only pay, but market options unconstrained by limited numbers of potential employers.” Morillo’s “true mercenaries” thus exist only in situations where there are no “political and cultural factors that effectively limit the choices of soldiers for hire as to their choice of employer.” In other words, “a wider social context of market economics and capitalist or proto-capitalist business organization are likely preconditions for the rise of a true mercenary market.”Footnote ⁴³ Morillo is not alone in considering that a modern market economy is necessary for the existence of “true mercenaries.” This position, however, is paradoxical. The notion of “true mercenaries” sits uncomfortably with the evidence for the stability of the hostile rhetoric observed by many scholars, most extensively by Percy, and confirmed by evidence from the ancient Mediterranean: most of the war workers to whom that rhetoric applied would not be “true mercenaries” in Morillo’s definition.

Ultimately, Morillo seems to me to fall prey to the same fallacy that his work does so much to dispel. Whatever one thinks of the mechanisms of the market itself, it is not clear that there have ever been contexts in which people involved in organized violence could regulate their allegiances purely based on financial profit. To take an extreme case, ISIS could not have hired Blackwater contractors, no matter how much money it might have been prepared to offer the American company.Footnote ⁴⁴ It may be that “true mercenaries” are those who fight exclusively for profit, but I doubt that there is a single historical case in which groups of “true mercenaries” really chose their allegiance based exclusively on the possibility of maximizing profit without any cultural or political constraint. Morillo’s “true mercenaries” are thus a sociological abstraction or a Weberian ideal type. What we observe in practice is the existence of broader or narrower ranges of choices. War workers or groups of war workers may find themselves, and have often found themselves in history, in situations where they could choose between opposed parties in a war, and accordingly came to fight against other war workers with the same background who took a different option. Such situations, however, always materialize in specific political frameworks and are never guided purely by economic considerations.

Be this as it may, Morillo’s taxonomy provides a helpful instrument to categorize the reasons for and conditions under which people end up participating in organized violence, state-sanctioned or not, far from their community or in a foreign cultural context. What it does not do, however, is offer a way out of the definitional problem surrounding the concept of mercenary. There, in my opinion, Percy has come closer to offering a viable solution: “mercenary” should not be taken as a descriptive term that indicates a definite social phenomenon, but rather as a bundle of connotations, essentially derogatory, that apply throughout history to several different kinds of people involved in organized violence under varying conditions. Beyond these connotations, it is for the historian to observe or reconstruct their conditions of employment and their implications for whatever research question she or he might be pursuing.Footnote ⁴⁵

All the case studies I will be looking at here involve war workers serving an employer who was foreign to them, that is, other in ways that we would call cultural or linguistic but which the actors themselves would almost certainly have understood in terms that would now fall under the broad category of ethnicity. Seen from a certain point of view, typically that of their enemies, these war workers could thus be exposed to the rhetorical opposition of foreigner versus indigenous, and to all the negative stereotypes clustering around the concept of “mercenary.” The surprising cultural plausibility of these stereotypes, that is, the fact that historical actors could take them at face value, should not distract us from the fact that we are dealing with a rhetorical construct that both encompasses and masks a diversity of historical circumstances.Footnote ⁴⁶ Should we then abolish the term “mercenary” altogether? Reforming language is an ambitious purpose, and my goal here is rather more modest. I would simply urge awareness of what is really at stake when scholars argue that certain groups of war workers were, or were not, mercenaries: we are using a term loaded with connotations but whose denotive meaning remains elusive. We can do so for simplicity, but only as long as we are aware of this fundamental fact and its implications for the arguments that we construct around that term.

Military Migrants and Culture Transfer

The Greek and Karian war workers in the service of the pharaohs of the XXVI dynasty, which lasted from the mid-seventh century BCE to the late sixth, are the best-known case of a military diaspora from the archaic Mediterranean.Footnote ⁴⁷ A late source, the collection of stratagems by Polyaenus, a contemporary of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, assumes that Karians were already present in Egypt when the dynasty’s founder, Psammetichos I, came to power in 664 BCE, but it is hard to tell whether the story of the Karian mercenary captain Pigres told by Polyaenus was based on reliable sources.Footnote ⁴⁸ Material evidence, as we shall see, nevertheless points to the presence of Greek and Karian war workers in Egypt from the middle of the seventh century.Footnote ⁴⁹

According to Herodotus, the Greeks and Karians had already been raiding the Nile Delta for some time when Psammetichos finally hired them.Footnote ⁵⁰ Some aspects of the story, such as the oracle that ordered the pharaoh to enlist the “men of bronze”—an allusion to the armor of Greek and Karian heavy infantry—are obviously of doubtful historicity. In modern scholarship, however, there is a tendency to reject this narrative altogether and to identify Karian and Greek mercenaries with the troops that King Gyges of Lydia had sent to aid Psammetichos in his revolt against his Assyrian overlords, as detailed in the famous Rassam Cylinder of the Assyrian king Asshurbanipal.Footnote ⁵¹ Most recently, Hans van Wees has argued that Psammetichos’ revolt probably occurred around 645 BCE, shortly before the death of Gyges at the hands of the Kimmerians. In this scenario, the Greek and Karian soldiers would have been acting as in effect an allied contingent.

This may be so, but some points need to be raised. First, raiding the Nile Delta for booty seems to have been very much within the range of activities that Greek warrior bands could consider undertaking in this period, at least to judge by the Odyssey. The false biography that Odysseus feeds the swineherd Eumaios presents him as a Kretan, the illegitimate son of a wealthy man, who had no interest in home and family but only in war, ships, and weapons. Playing this role, Odysseus recounts that, after returning from Troy, he had mounted a marauding expedition to Egypt, fitting nine ships and embarking a large band of warriors. Following six days of feasting, they set off for the Nile Delta and started plundering everything in sight, until a large army of Egyptians led by their king sallied forth, slaughtering some of the warriors and capturing the others; their leader, the imaginary Kretan, threw himself at the feet of the Egyptian king and managed to have his life spared.Footnote ⁵² The very fact that the story was invented by Odysseus, alongside its distinctly unheroic tone, suggests that it was meant to sound plausible. After all, Greek marauders were already known to Assyrian local administrators on the Phoenician coast in the second half of the eighth century.Footnote ⁵³

The second point is that there is no evidence that Southern Ionia and Karia were ever under Gyges’ control. Miletos was still fighting back Gyges’ second successor, Sadyattes, long after his death. If Gyges indeed sent Greek and/or Karian war workers to help Psammetichos, he must have first hired them, in whatever way, and one wonders to whom they reported once they were on their mission. Even if this scenario is accepted for the beginning of the phenomenon, the material and epigraphic evidence seems to support the conclusion that, after the first wave, a stable flux of fighters established itself and then continued through the ebbs and flows of Lydian power in Asia Minor—after all, Gyges’ kingdom was wiped out by the Kimmerians just a few years after his action in favor of Psammetichos, much to the schadenfreude of the Assyrian king, and was accordingly in no condition to send military support to anyone. On balance, however, it still seems more likely to me that Greek and Karian war workers found their way to Egypt by themselves, without being commandeered by the king of Lydia.

The Greek and Karian mercenaries of the XXVI dynasty have left behind a significant corpus of evidence. Inscriptions in Karian from Egypt include a large group of grave stelae recovered out of their original context—mostly in the excavations of the necropolis of Saqqara North—and pointing to the existence of a Karian necropolis between Saqqara and Abusir.Footnote ⁵⁴ Most famous among Greek historians is a series of inscriptions on the legs of the colossal statues of Ramses II in Abu Simbel, documenting the participation of Greek war workers, probably alongside Phoenician soldiers, in the expedition to Nubia led by Psammetichos II in 593 BCE.Footnote ⁵⁵ The main Greek inscription is in Dorian dialect and provides a sketchy narrative of the events. It is accompanied by a shorter one, possibly engraved in a different phase of the same expedition and in any case on the leg of a different statue, and by several personal names. The individuals recorded in these inscriptions may have come from the cadres of Psammetichos’ army rather than its rank and file, considering that they were literate. Some indicate the polis they came from, others only their patronym: it would be possible to speculate that the former had enlisted recently and the latter were themselves children of war workers who had likewise served in the Egyptian army.Footnote ⁵⁶

Serving away from home for long periods of time, Greeks and Karians in Egypt often seem to have assumed to varying degrees hybrid identities, assimilating partially into the local culture. This process was perhaps facilitated by the common usage of settling mercenaries in their employer’s territory, making them owners or beneficiaries of land allotments and transforming them into military colonists—that is, in the terms of Morillo’s typology, increasing dramatically their level of social embeddedness. A frequent sign of assimilation was the adoption of an Egyptian name, often though not always connected to intermarriage with the local population. Among the Greeks whose names appear on the colossus of Abu Simbel, for instance, there is a Psammetichos son of Theokles. In the same period, funerary inscriptions of Karians from Saqqara document their marriages with Egyptian women, with their sons bearing Egyptian names.

The material record preserves evidence that is even more striking. An Egyptian stone sarcophagus now in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, dated to the late seventh century BCE, belonged to a dignitary of the XXVI dynasty with the perfectly Egyptian name of Wahibre-em-akhet; four canopic jars of alabaster and several ushabtis—the characteristic statuettes meant to function as servants for the deceased in the other world—of the same man have also been found.Footnote ⁵⁷ Alexandra Villing has recently assembled all of the evidence on this prominent figure, adding to it a series of inscribed reliefs now in the British Museum that very likely also come from his tomb, which, if this is the case, would have been located in the necropolis of Saqqara.Footnote ⁵⁸ All the material evidence for Wahibre-em-akhet looks about as Egyptian as it possibly could. From the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the sarcophagus, however, we learn that his father and mother were called Arkeskares and Sentiti, which have long been recognized as Egyptian versions of the names Alexikles and Zenodote. In other words, the parents of Wahibre-em-akhet both bore Greek names. The kind and quality of the sarcophagus tell us that the occupant himself must have had close connections to the court or at any rate held a high rank in the royal apparatus. This is confirmed by the title “bearer of the royal seal” given on one of his canopic jars; literally indicating an official authorized to make dispatches with the royal seal, this was actually an honorific title, which did not designate a specific function but certainly implied that the individual enjoyed royal favor and proximity to the court.Footnote ⁵⁹ Considering the possible scenarios, there seems to be no serious alternative to the conclusion, advanced by Günter Vittmann, that Alexikles and his son were officers in the army of the pharaoh. In any case, Wahibre-em-akhet had assimilated into Egyptian culture to the point of adopting not only Egyptian burial customs but also Egyptian notions of death and the afterlife, as demonstrated by the iconography and especially by the inscriptions on his sarcophagus. This impression is reinforced by the inscriptions that Villing has connected to his burial, which include parts of the Book of Going Forth by Day, also known as the Book of the Dead, a large collection of spells meant to ensure that the soul of the deceased would be able to participate in life beyond the grave.Footnote ⁶⁰ In short, if we did not know the names of Wahibre-em-akhet’s parents, we would have no reason whatsoever to infer his foreign heritage.

The case of Wahibre-em-akhet is rare but not unique. There is evidence for at least one parallel, a high-ranking officer in the military of Psammetichos II, Wahibrenebquen son of the general Psamtik‘auneit, whose family, documented for at least two generations before him, was of Karian origin.Footnote ⁶¹ These prominent individuals can be seen as one end of a spectrum running from foreigner status to total assimilation—keeping in mind that the evidence may give us a one-sided picture. Gravestones from the necropolis of Saqqara, also dating to the XXVI dynasty, provide various intermediate shades along this spectrum. A corpus of over forty stelae with inscriptions in Karian, along with an additional twenty or so fragments, have been found reused in contexts dating from the second half of the fourth century BCE onwards, though nothing is known of their original location within the necropolis. The vast majority consists of characteristic false-door stelae, but some are simple rounded stelae with no decoration except for their inscriptions. The presence of several bilingual inscriptions means that this corpus has played a decisive role in the decipherment of the Karian alphabet.

The Karian stelae from Saqqara appear to cover much of the chronological span of the presence of Karian war workers in Egypt.Footnote ⁶² Among those dating from the end of the seventh century BCE are a number with bilingual inscriptions in Karian and Egyptian, the latter in hieroglyphs. Some of these are decorated in purely Egyptian style, so that, without the Karian inscription, they would be undistinguishable from normal Egyptian funerary stelae of this period. At a later date, starting probably from the middle of the sixth century, we find stelae inscribed in Karian alone, with relief decoration that is predominantly Egyptian in terms of its iconography but which finds its closest stylistic parallels in contemporary East Greek sculpture, leading scholars to assume they were made by East Greek or Karian craftsmen active in Lower Egypt.Footnote ⁶³ As in the case of the sarcophagus of Wahibre-em-akhet, the iconography of these stelae refers to very specific Egyptian notions of death and the afterlife, and seems to suggest that their owners subscribed to such beliefs, implying that they had to a remarkable extent assimilated Egyptian religious ideas. This evidence can be considered alongside a small but significant corpus of dedications to Egyptian gods with inscriptions in Greek and Karian, including three bronze statuettes of the Apis bull, one carrying a bilingual Karian-Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription, the other two inscribed in Greek. Interestingly, the Karian inscription attributes the dedication to an interpreter.Footnote ⁶⁴

The balance between assimilation and the retention of original ethnic identity documented by these monuments is fascinating. Clearly, the continuing use of the Karian alphabet and language in the inscriptions demarcated the owners of these stelae from their Egyptian surroundings, but at the same time, the use of both languages and especially of the iconography of Egyptian religion are obvious markers of cultural assimilation. Scanty as it is, the evidence might be taken to suggest a difference in behavior between Greeks and Karians in this respect: there are no extant bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics, and indeed the only stele with a Greek inscription from the Saqqara necropolis of which I am aware, bearing the name Exekestos, is a false-door type inscribed uniquely in Greek.Footnote ⁶⁵ But before pressing this too far, it should be noted that Karian stelae of the same false-door shape are themselves inscribed only in Karian. More to the point, the false door is itself inseparable from the Egyptian notion of kah, the vital spirit of the dead which is supposed to enter and exit the grave through the door, by virtue of the relevant spells.Footnote ⁶⁶ The use of this shape in itself could thus be taken as a sign of the assimilation of Egyptian views of the afterlife, albeit on a more modest social scale than in the case of Wahibre-em-akhet.

Of course, the fact that war workers serving abroad for long periods of time should adopt aspects of the culture that surrounded them, even quite fundamental ones like ideas about death and the afterlife, to say nothing of language, while in itself interesting, would not alone imply that their hybrid identities had any impact on cultural developments in their homelands, wherever those might be. This is part of the reason scholars looking for the actual carriers of orientalizing culture have considered traders, itinerant craftsmen, priests, and poets, but not, until recently, war workers.Footnote ⁶⁷ Traders, of course, move back and forth between different cultural spaces. But there is also evidence, and not only from antiquity, that military diasporas could maintain contact with their place of origin over enormous distances, and that such contacts could have a perceptible impact on their culture back home. There is a medieval case study that is particularly illuminating in several ways.

From the late eighth through the eleventh century CE, Scandinavia was home to a distinctive culture, whose impact reverberated from the British Isles all the way to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean; the carriers of this culture go by the name of Vikings.Footnote ⁶⁸ To the student of archaic Greece, Vikings offer an inevitable sense of déjà vu: halls filled with feasting warriors, bound by the generosity of war leaders and enthralled by the intricate songs of the skalds, celebrating the heroic deeds of those leaders in highly stylized praise poetry—warriors always ready to jump onto longships and embark on expeditions for raiding and plundering—who does not think of the world of Homer? The Kretan alter ego of Odysseus and his imaginary companions resemble a Viking warrior band in many respects, and the analogies can be teased out further. Like the Greeks of the archaic period, the Vikings inhabited the periphery of a more advanced and wealthier world, in this case post-Roman Britain and especially Carolingian Western Europe. Like the Greeks, they came from poor lands and were organized into relatively flat social hierarchies, where, in Weberian terms, charisma clearly dominated over tradition. Also like the Greeks, they engaged in trade and piracy, without drawing too fine a line between the two, and on occasion they could provide their services as war workers, often to those who had previously been their victims.Footnote ⁶⁹ Finally, they were perfectly ready to settle overseas. I have pointed elsewhere to the analogies between early Greeks and Vikings, and the comparison has been developed further by Juan Signes Codoñer and Liviu Mihail Iancu.Footnote ⁷⁰ Here, however, I will focus on one particular region of the Viking world, looking at the way these warriors came to the Black Sea and finally to Byzantium, creating a military diaspora in the capital of the Byzantine Empire.

Norsemen, mostly from Sweden, had been traveling to northern Russia and Ukraine in search of furs and slaves since at least the ninth century CE. Following river valleys, first the Duna and the Neva, and then, after Lake Ladoga, the Dnistro, they reached the Black Sea.Footnote ⁷¹ By that time, they had established a chain of settlements along the way and were known to the peoples of the Black Sea as the Rus’, mentioned in Byzantine sources as a minor power on the margins of the Byzantine world. They even managed a surprise attack on Byzantium in the summer of 860 CE, plundering monasteries on their way, just like Viking raids in Britain. The patriarch Photios mentions them in two homilies from that year: in his eyes, they were rather mysterious—he calls them Skythians, with the typical Byzantine habit of applying ethnic names from classical Greek authors to the realities of his own day, and portrays them as cruel and primitive, little more than beasts.Footnote ⁷² Within a century, however, the Byzantine emperors had come to see in these primitive warriors an opportunity. Basil II recruited war workers, known to Greek authors as Varangoi, from Russia and Scandinavia, initially for the civil war he was fighting against the general Bardas Phokas. In time, they formed a special unit which came to operate both as a palace guard and as crack troops on campaign. In modern scholarship, they are typically called the Varangian Guard or simply the Varangians.Footnote ⁷³

The role of the Varangians in culture contact between Scandinavia and the Byzantine Empire has received sustained scholarly attention only very recently.Footnote ⁷⁴ Scandinavian soldiers serving the Byzantine emperors are now recognized as the crucial factor in cultural interaction, cultural encounter, and the spread of cultural influence between these regions.Footnote ⁷⁵ The evidence for the enduring connections between Scandinavian war workers serving abroad and their land of origin is impressive. Over thirty runic stones, mostly from Sweden, commemorate warriors who had died in Greece; in other words, as the stones themselves state, in the service of the Byzantine emperors. Intriguingly, the blessing formula on these stones replicates a standard Greek Orthodox blessing for the dead.Footnote ⁷⁶

Given the resilience of these connections, it is hardly surprising that some of these military migrants decided to return home at some point, as in the case of Ragnvaldr Ingvarsson, a high-ranking Varangian, commemorated by a runic stone from Ed in Sweden.Footnote ⁷⁷ Such homecomings could be glamorous. The hero of the Icelandic Laxdæla Saga, Bolli Bollason, is said to have served as a Varangian in Byzantium in the first years of the eleventh century. The description of Bolli riding to meet his mother on his return to Iceland in the year 1030 is worth quoting, for it will ring familiar to Greek historians:

Probably the most prominent, and historically the best documented of the Scandinavians that served the Byzantine emperors was Haraldr Sigurdsson (also known as Haraldr Hardrada), who came to Micklagardr, “the big city,” as Byzantium was called in Old Norse, with a retinue of five hundred warriors. Over about a decade, he served one emperor, allegedly blinded another, and fought in Asia Minor, Sicily, and the Holy Land.Footnote ⁷⁹ The significant wealth he amassed was wisely sent for safekeeping to Yaroslav the Great in Kiev, and certainly played a role in the later career of Haraldr, who became king of Norway and finally lost his life at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, fighting against Harald Godwinson for the throne of England in September 1066. His failed attack paved the way for William the Conqueror, who defeated Harald at the Battle of Hastings less than three weeks later. The purple cloak worn by Haraldr, a gift from the emperor, became famous in Scandinavia, but this was far from the most important influence he brought back from Byzantium. Highly unusual outside the Byzantine Empire at the time, his way of monopolizing minting and managing the coinage of his kingdom, including introducing debased coins, was clearly a result of his experiences as a Varangian, as is confirmed by the imitation of Byzantine coins in his coin types.Footnote ⁸⁰

The history of the Varangians highlights the striking resilience of the links between war workers and their homelands, sometimes thousands of kilometers away, but also the kinds of impact such contacts could have on those homelands themselves, including on practices such as craftsmanship in precious metals, monumental architecture, and mural painting that do not, at first sight, evoke the agency of war workers.Footnote ⁸¹ The Varangians also remind us that migrant war workers, whatever image they might project, were not all impoverished outcasts: a minority came from the social elites of their homelands, and could move back and forth depending on what would most enhance their personal status; others were retainers of such more prominent warriors. When they did return home after serving far away, they inevitably brought back with them their new self, changed in both superficial and less superficial ways by long and deep exposure to cultural difference.Footnote ⁸²

Although much thinner than the evidence for the Varangians, the evidence for Greeks in Egypt points to comparable phenomena. One of the Greeks who served the rulers of the XXVI dynasty, Pedon son of Amphinnes, has left behind a remarkable dedication to an unspecified god, most likely Athena. The object, unprovenanced but said to come from the Ionian city of Priene, is a typical Egyptian cube statue of basalt, of a kind in fashion under the XXVI dynasty. Dated stylistically to the reign of the dynasty’s first pharaoh, Psammetichos I, its skirt bears an inscription giving biographical details on the dedicant. This was normal for Egyptian cube statues,Footnote ⁸³ except that this inscription is in Greek. Greek epigraphists usually resist dating it any earlier than the early sixth century BCE, although their arguments sometimes appear aprioristic, given the scarcity of comparanda.Footnote ⁸⁴ The text reads as follows: “Pedon the son of Amphinnes brought me from Egypt and dedicated me. The Egyptian king Psammetichos gave him as a prize for his bravery a golden necklace and a city.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The rather puzzling reference to the gift of a city need not detain us here, except insofar as it suggests that Pedon must have been a fairly high-ranking officer, and that returning to Ionia, if this is what he did, was not the only option open to him.Footnote ⁸⁶ Particularly interesting for our purposes, however, is Pedon’s showcasing of the extraordinary rewards he received from the pharaoh, along with his specification that the object he was dedicating came from Egypt. Clearly, Pedon did not want this information to be lost on the viewer, and the inscription and the form of the object reinforce each other in making this explicit. By dedicating in a Greek sanctuary an object from Egypt, recognizable as such and with an inscription eliminating any ambiguity, Pedon was also making a statement on his own hybrid identity.

Pedon of course was not the only Greek mercenary who returned home. His statue is merely the best preserved example of a larger corpus which includes items of similar dates from Rhodes, Samos, and Miletos.Footnote ⁸⁷ The sparse literary evidence concurs. The poet Alkaios famously greeted his brother Antimenidas, returning from his service in the Neo-Babylonian army between the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the sixth, with these words: “You have come from the ends of the earth, the hilt of your sword is ivory bound with gold.” According to Alkaios, Antimenidas had performed a great deed while fighting as an “ally” of the Babylonians, rescuing them from trouble by slaying a warrior only a palm’s breadth short of five royal cubits—a giant well over two meters tall.Footnote ⁸⁸ Like Pedon, Alkaios makes no mention of the fact that his brother had actually been enrolled as a war worker: he calls him an ally, or symmachos in Greek. Antimenidas’s sword immediately recalls Footbiter, the famously ornate blade carried by Bolli Bollanson upon his return to Iceland from Byzantium, or the purple cloak gifted to Haraldr Hardrada by the emperor. These were symbols of wealth and status articulated in a foreign and exotic language, not only conveying success obtained abroad but also intimating that now the hero belonged in a category apart from his former peers.Footnote ⁸⁹

One wonders how many of the Syrian, Assyrian, and Egyptian prestige objects dedicated in Greek sanctuaries during the archaic period belonged in the same category as Antimenidas’ sword and Pedon’s statue, or for that matter Bolli’s sword and Haraldr’s cloak. Late eighth- and early seventh-century Assyrian horse trappings from the sanctuary of the goddess Hera on the island of Samos, for instance, would make perfect sense as dedications by elite war workers—in fact, no other interpretation strikes me as equally plausible, for it is hard to see how else one would acquire trappings made for warhorses in the royal Assyrian manufactures.Footnote ⁹⁰ The same is true of the bronze mace heads of Assyrian or North Syrian provenance, also found in the Heraion of Samos: the mace appears as the standard symbol of military authority on Assyrian royal reliefs. The men who dedicated these objects must have acquired them either as war booty or, more likely, as rewards for and symbols of their loyal service.Footnote ⁹¹ Finally, there is a famous group of North Syrian horse trappings that have been found scattered in various locations, including Eretria, Samos, Miletos, and Rhodes. Two carry Aramaic inscriptions identifying them as booty taken by King Hazael of Damascus from the kingdom of Unqi in what would later be the region of Antioch on the Orontes. One of these comes from a late eighth-century context, which suggests that these objects left Damascus in connection with the sacking of the city by Tiglath-Pileser III in 732 BCE.Footnote ⁹²

These objects take us back in time beyond the age of the Greek and Karian war workers in Egypt. On the other hand, we know that Greek pirates had been present on the coast of the Levant since the second half of the eighth century BCE, when King Sargon II boasted in his inscriptions of having captured them “like fish from the sea.” The Greeks with whom his successor Sennacherib clashed off Tarsus in Cilicia, in the very first years of the seventh century, are unlikely to have been other than pirates themselves—possibly turned war workers in support of some local potentate.Footnote ⁹³ Sennacherib’s own fleet, which sailed down the Euphrates and then across the Persian Gulf in order to attack the Chaldeans in the lower Ulai region, was manned by Phoenicians and Greeks. Meanwhile, foreign war workers were present in several of the armies that tried to check Assyrian expansion in that period. Stephanie Dalley has pointed to the Samarian tradition of mercenary service, and Assyrian propaganda at least recounted that King Hezekiah of Judah hired war workers to defend Jerusalem, only to be deserted by them once the Assyrian army drew in sight.Footnote ⁹⁴

The Assyrian army itself, according to present scholarly consensus, came increasingly to rely on foreign fighters, although their exact position within the army is debated and their presence often has to be teased out of reticent sources.Footnote ⁹⁵ For the earlier period, the only clear-cut case seems to be that of the Ituayans and Kurraians, probably from Lower Mesopotamia, who formed a foreign legion of sorts, usually but not exclusively at the orders of Assyrian provincial governors. As discussed above, the presence of foreign war workers in the Assyrian army has sometimes been denied due to an unhelpful combination of terminological insularity and excessive belief in the rhetoric of Assyrian royal documents. In practice, Assyrian kings appear to have enlisted large portions of the military elites of the kingdoms they defeated, moving them to the imperial capitals and recompensing them with land or salaries in kind. These war workers could become deeply integrated in the imperial machine, but at the same time they clearly preserved their ethnic identity. To imagine them as subject to a coercive discipline which excluded them from any freedom of movement is to take imperial rhetoric for social reality.

The influence of returning war workers on cultural practices in their homelands, though it remains understudied, is a phenomenon familiar from various historical contexts. Here one could think, once again, of the cultural impact of returning Varangians on different aspects of their lands of origin. Long overlooked by scholars, the cultural transfer generated by these war workers has finally come into focus thanks to the recent work of Roland Scheel. His list of prestige objects from Byzantium found in Scandinavia includes “ivories, silk, glass, pottery, coins, pectoral crosses and—much more significantly—local adaptations of the latter two in the eleventh century.” Scheel continues: “Later on, murals in Danish churches … show the astonishing influence of Byzantine style and iconography, and cannot be connected directly to any surviving Rus or western European intermediaries.”Footnote ⁹⁶

The evidence marshaled by Scheel had long challenged scholars due to its diversity: on top of the multiple languages that any historian of the Byzantine Empire needs to master, much of the evidence for the history of the Varangians comes from the later Nordic sagas, in which bits of much earlier skaldic poetry are often embedded, requiring specific linguistic and textual knowledge to interpret. This kind of evidence delivers a healthy cautionary tale to the student of interactions between Greeks and their eastern neighbors. Scholars have often argued for minimalist interpretations of such interactions on the basis that references in Greek literary sources to the main political realities of the Anatolian, Mesopotamian, and Levantine worlds are vague and imprecise. Yet the much better documented traffic between Byzantium and Scandinavia has left in the Nordic sagas memories of the political world of Miklagardr that are every bit as vague and fabulous, and if they may seem more abundant, the reason is simply that the evidence overall is incomparably more plentiful. Making negative arguments based on scarcity of evidence for a context like the Iron Age Mediterranean is in any case rather dubious. The example of the Varangians shows that the logic of such arguments is in fact just one more case of pseudo-common sense, one of the most insidious traps for historians of any era.

The role of archaic Greek war workers has undergone no reassessment comparable to that of their Scandinavian counterparts.Footnote ⁹⁷ Ever since Burkert formulated the concept of an Orientalizing revolution to describe the manifold developments in early archaic culture brought about by increased interaction with the Near East and Egypt, scholars have become much more alert to the question of cultural mediators. Although war workers have so far received short shrift, the newly acquired tastes and spending power of wandering warrior leaders would seem to be a promising angle from which to rethink how Greek heroic poetry came to absorb the extensive influence of Near Eastern literature now recognized by scholarship.Footnote ⁹⁸

On firmer ground, evidence relating to the Greeks and Karians in Egypt during the XXVI dynasty, as we have seen, shows striking levels of assimilation into local culture and of cultural hybridity. This is particularly remarkable given the absence of any comparable evidence from the great mercantile settlement of Naucratis on the Nile delta, populated by Greek traders in the same period. The presence of thousands of Greek war workers in Egypt from the middle of the seventh century could easily be connected to the emergence of new kinds of expensive cultural artifacts in Greece itself, for instance the kouros statuary type, which is clearly of Egyptian inspiration.Footnote ⁹⁹ In considering how this new object came about, we may have focused too much on the skills of the craftsmen and not enough on the tastes of their patrons. On another level, we can also wonder how much of Herodotus’ discussion of Greek and Egyptian religion derives from the historical experience of war workers. After all, the high officers at least were much closer to the Egyptian intellectual elite than any of the traders in Naucratis.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Burkert himself notes that new conceptions of the afterlife and of the immortality of the soul in late archaic Greek culture must be a result of the influence of Egyptian religious ideas. For this influence to have been possible, there had to be Greeks who were familiar with Egyptian notions of the afterlife—we cannot but think of the false-door stela of Exekestos from Saqqara and of the sarcophagus of Wahibre-em-akhet.

Ethnogenesis in the Shadow of Empires

The tendency of multiethnic, especially imperial, armies to organize their contingents along ethnic divides is extremely widespread. Countless cases, including some already mentioned in this study, show that foreign war workers were no exception, usually forming ethnically homogeneous units. The Greeks and Karians who served in the armies of the XXVI dynasty most likely followed the same pattern, and the same is true of the Jews of Elephantine, probably recruited and stationed on the island under Psammetichos I.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Obviously, basic practical needs, such as understanding each other in situations of danger and fighting in an organized and coherent fashion, account to some extent for the tendency of multiethnic armies to divide along ethnic lines. On the other hand, scholarship on ethnicity has amply shown its contextual and constructed nature,Footnote ¹⁰² and there is no reason to assume that in a military context the eminent flexibility of ethnicity would not apply. In fact, scholars approaching the question from a strictly empirical angle have come precisely to this conclusion. In an attempt to come to grips with the phenomenon of the ethnicity of war workers during the Middle Ages, Kelly DeVries evokes the case of the Huns:

DeVries proceeds to provide an impressive series of examples, most notably the supposed Norsemen of the Byzantine Varangian Guard, many of whom, from the second half of the eleventh century onwards, were actually Saxons who had abandoned England after the Battle of Hastings, to say nothing of the Slavs who were also represented in their ranks.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Similar observations have been formulated by Dirk Kolff in his book on the ethnohistory of military labor in sixteenth-century India:

That the same happened in antiquity, and on occasion for reasons similar to the ones envisioned by DeVries, is more than just a suspicion. The military unit formed by the Jews of Elephantine appears to have included some Aramaeans, just as the Aramaeans of nearby Syene, another supposedly ethnic unit, also included some Jews.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Slightly earlier in time, one wonders if all the Ituayans serving in the Neo-Assyrian armies could possibly have been from the Aramaic tribe of that name—the fact that there were quite so many of them calls to mind DeVries’ remarks about the Huns.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

These premodern and early modern case studies have one aspect in common: to the extent that we can tell, they share what we might call a bottom-up strategy, in the sense that they all point to a manipulation of ethnic categories by individual war workers. The study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial armies provides cases of the opposite phenomenon, that is, the manipulation of ethnic identities by and in the interest of imperial power structures. In a fascinating investigation of what she dubs “ethnic soldiers,” Cynthia Enloe has shown how imperial armies tend to generate and sustain the rhetorical construct of the “martial races,” that is, of ethnic groups that are supposedly homogeneous and marked by qualities such as bravery, loyalty, and endurance. This is an idealized vision of all an empire could desire from its soldiers, for the purpose of the construct is precisely to create a charter of identity that certain marginal groups may want to buy into, while at the same time enhancing enlistment by mobilizing local authority structures which thereby become willing instruments of imperial domination.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Enloe’s main case study is of the famous Gurkhas, still recruited into the British army from Nepal. She shows that their collective identity emerged as a direct product of their role in the British army, where they replaced a previous “martial race,” the Rajputs, in the wake of the Indian Great Mutiny of 1857. There is in fact no ethnic group in Nepal called “the Gurkhas.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Lionel Caplan has shown how the legend of martiality and masculinity attached to them was a creation of British observers, mostly military men, who imagined the Gurkhas as “warrior gentlemen,” an alter ego of their own self-image.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Given the nature of our sources, the rich texture of the study of martial races in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is obviously out of reach for historians of antiquity. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the phenomenon itself had no ancient parallels or comparable precedents. Taking her cue from Enloe, Carol van Driel-Murray has argued that the emergence of an ethnic group called the Batavians in the Lower Rhine region during the Augustan Age was itself in all likelihood a product of the Roman provincial administration manipulating the local situation to create a notional “martial race” upon which the army drew heavily for military recruitment.Footnote ¹¹¹ To my knowledge, further ancient case studies have not yet been explored—although the way that Greek war workers were perceived, especially during the fourth century BCE, may offer promising subject matter. For the time being, I would like to propose that the bottom-up system of ethnic affiliation and the top-down system of ethnic ascription be regarded as two extremes of a spectrum when it comes to the operation of ethnicity within multiethnic armies.

With these parameters in mind, I want to return in conclusion to the collective identity of the Greek war workers of the XXVI dynasty. The Egyptians appear to have called them Haunebut, a word of unclear etymology and very ancient origin, already in use during the Bronze Age, possibly even then to indicate people coming from the Aegean area.Footnote ¹¹² The larger unit in which they were deployed was apparently known to the Egyptians as “the foreigners,” which the Greeks translated as alloglossoi.Footnote ¹¹³ But what did they call themselves? Herodotus refers to them as “the Ionians.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Measured against the meaning of this term in the classical period, this appears a little strange. Among the war workers documented at Abu Simbel there are at least two Rhodians, and the main inscription that commemorates them is in Doric dialect. If the collective name used by these groups was really “Ionians,” it must have meant something quite different from what it had come to signify by the fifth century BCE.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Rather than moving backward from later periods, taking for granted that “Ionians” was an ethnic term with clearly delimited boundaries, encompassing those Greeks of Asia Minor who spoke Ionian dialects, we can approach it from the perspective of earlier ages, keeping in mind the dynamics of empire and ethnicity sketched above.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The name Iavones appears already in two fragmentary Linear B documents from Knossos on the island of Krete, which seem to be lists of military contingents, possibly designated by ethnonym.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In the Iron Age, the term first surfaces in non-Greek documents, that is, in official correspondence from the provincial administration of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III, probably in 730 BCE or thereabouts, and then in the royal inscriptions of his successor Sargon II. In both cases, it indicates marauders coming from the sea to attack coastal areas under Assyrian control, deservedly defeated by the Assyrian king.Footnote ¹¹⁸ At this time it had assumed the form “Yawan,” which would remain the name of the Greeks in the Near East. By the reign of the next king, Sennacherib, these marauders had been integrated as sailors into the Assyrian royal navy.Footnote ¹¹⁹

If we forget for a moment what we think we know about the term “Ionians,” there is a very simple way to explain at least in general terms how this name, applied to the former enemies of the Assyrians, came to designate the Greek military diaspora in Egypt. From an Assyrian point of view, the name Yawan cannot have meant anything much more precise than “sea-borne marauders coming from the West,” and it is clear that a threatening reputation was attached to them. Wherever exactly the Greeks who were raiding the Nile Delta some decades later came from, as a collective name the term “Ionians” would have made sense both to them and, probably, to their interlocutors. The pharaoh needed troops, and if “Ionians” was indeed the name given to feared bands of marauders, that was a guarantee of their efficacy. On the other hand, for the Greeks, regardless of what they would have called themselves in the Aegean, assuming the identity of “Ionians” could be a way of staking a claim to military prowess—a kind of self-advertisement.Footnote ¹²⁰ If so, at this point the term “Ionians” might have meant something like “warrior bands from the northwest with a propensity for marauding, known for enlisting as war workers in different contractual relations with wealthier and better organized political systems, typically kingdoms.”

This scenario, however we decide to nuance it, would have interesting consequences for how we understand the meaning of this ethnic term in Greece itself. The only other case in which the name “Ionians” is used to indicate Greeks speaking dialects belonging to different families, including Doric and Aeolic, is in Herodotus’ narrative of what we still call today “the Ionian revolt,” that is, the revolt of the Greek cities of Asia Minor and of the coastal islands against the Persian Empire in 499 BCE. Scholars have often wondered about the author’s use of the term “Ionians” for the rebels.Footnote ¹²¹ If we look at the composition of the “Ionian” mercenaries of Psammetichos II who left their trace in Abu Simbel, however, we find a representative selection of the poleis that animated the revolt: Kolophon, Teos, Ialysos. It is worth entertaining the notion that the Ionian identity of the rebels may have been a survival from a not too distant past, when the name “Ionians” commanded respect in the pre-Achaemenid world of the Eastern Mediterranean. Regardless of what we think of this conclusion, there is sufficient reason to consider the possibility that in the archaic age the Ionian identity may have originated, or at any rate taken a new inflection, not in the land we are used to calling Ionia, but on the periphery of the Greek world, in the conflicted and violent borderland between the Greeks and their eastern neighbors.

Between the eighth and the sixth century BCE, people moved around the Eastern Mediterranean for many reasons. More perhaps than scholars tend to acknowledge, plunder and war played an important role, especially for long-range movements that brought into contact cultures located far apart from one another. Even this rather unsavory kind of human interaction had the potential to impact all parties involved in multiple different ways, including in cultural terms. Throughout history, mobile groups of war workers have shown the capacity to settle and assimilate, but also to preserve a separate identity and maintain contacts with their lands of origin. Invisible most of the time, these practitioners of violence capture the attention of historians and archaeologists only occasionally, and they may be difficult to recognize—in part because of the negative rhetoric that accompanies their activities from the earliest sources we have. Often moving in the higher echelons of the local hierarchies they encountered, they were ideally positioned to operate as an interface between distinct cultures. Comparative historical case studies show that these groups were capable of a significant cultural impact. The framework of interaction between them and the larger military systems they operated within often had a powerful influence on their own sense of their collective identity, producing effects that reverberated all the way back to their lands of origin.

My tentative reconstruction of the role of Greek war workers in the “Orientalizing revolution” is made plausible, though not of course demonstrated, by pertinent historical parallels, ranging from tenth-century Viking bands to twentieth-century Gurkhas. In all these cases, culture contact and identity formation emerge as by-products of the social and political dynamics I have sought to identify in this article. No Greek, we may presume, enlisted in the army of the pharaoh to learn about the kah and the immortality of the soul, or in any Near Eastern army in order to hear the Song of Ullikummi or other ancient East Semitic poems, much less to bring knowledge of such cultural artifacts back to his fellow Greeks. And yet, in my opinion this is precisely what happened—demonstrably, in certain cases, and more broadly if my arguments will be deemed persuasive.