Mopsos the diviner (1)

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The name of a migrant diviner which links the Orient and Greece is that of the seer Mopsos. According to the Greek version in the Hesiodic Melampodia, he was a nephew of Teiresias. He first founded the oracle of Claros and later emigrated to Cilicia, where the city of Mopsuestia carried his name. The name Mopsos appears in the Hittite Maduwattas text as Muksus. The famous Luwian-Phoenician bilingual inscription from Karatepe in Cilicia from the eighth century BCE introduces the king Azitawadda from the “house of Mopsos”. The hieroglyphic Luwian text attests the name as Moxos, which is also preserved in the Lydian tradition by Xanthos the Lydian (FGrHist 765.F.17). These testimonia can be combined to reconstruct a real history of one king Mopsos and his progeny in Asia Minor, but it is significant that a name from the Hittite-Cilician tradition is used in the Greek myth to identify one of the great seers who was, in the Greek view, connected with Cilicia. Several seers of Paphos also had the Cilician origins. Next to Mopsos there is Amphilochos, the son of Amphiaros. Mopsos and Amphilochos together are honoured as the founding heroes of the famous oracle of Mallos in Cilicia, where oriental and Greek traditions meet in a special way. The “Hesiodic” text about Mopsos may come close in time to the Karatepe inscription, that is, to the Assyrian period. The spread of the art of the seer from the Euphrates to Greece and the Etruscans presents the plausible background for the development of the Mopsos myth. The Greek narrative has reversed the circumstances, as the Greek Mopsos is made to emigrate to Cilicia, although according to the local documents his “house” had been established there and not in Greece. It is interesting that the myth has Mopsos defeat Calchas “the best bird augur” in a contest of seers, and the bird augury played a notable role in Babylon.

Bibliography

Amar Annus

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