Following on from my previous post, the figure of Heracles is just too complex to be just a fantasy. The ancient Greeks, for their part, considered the demigod to be at least partly historical, but too far removed from their own time to make any precise judgment about if and when. Herodotus, for instance, was ambivalent about which was older, the Greek version of Heracles or the Egyptian / Levantine equivalent, the god Melqart, and guessed that one of them had lived roughly 900 years before his own time, i.e. the 14th century BCE.
While the deeds and traits stuck onto the demigod across history are invented products of different social contexts - the travels of Heracles to Sicily and Rhegium, for instance, sound very much like a justification for Greek colonizing efforts in the region - the 'original' Heracles must have been inspired by some historical role or personage, for ancient writers, dynasts and statesmen to consider him an ancestor in the first place.
There are lots of other examples of this kind of thing; take, for example, the figure of Hengist, whose behaviour in old Welsh and later Anglo-Saxon literature is almost certainly legendary, but has traces of a historical individual who, after dealing with internecine tribal conflicts on the continent, might have led foederati across the North Sea to serve a Romano-British ruler. Archaeology has indicated that the legend of Aeneas, a figure of claimed descent and propagandizing works in ancient Rome, has grains of truth to it - a truth much more humble than the legend. The city of Alba Longa was indeed settled circa 1200 BCE by foreign emigrants, and Mycenaean culture did reach the area about the same time, but it was more a string of villages and farmsteads, importing a few choice objects, than a thriving colonial city in the classical sense.
If, then, Heracles had a historical prototype, who was it? Walter Burkert, in his book Greek Religion (1986), argues that the iconography of the demigod has connections with ancient Near Eastern traditions, particularly depictions of him ascending to the heavens, riding a flaming chariot. His main association, however, is with the animal world. His battle with the Hydra has connotations to Mesopotamian serpent-battling scenes, and the god Ninurta appears similarly with a lion-skin pelt, a club, and with an ability to tame birds of prey. Burkert goes further in linking this lord-of-animals trait as a product of the Upper Paleolithic. According to him, the original Heracles was a shaman who employed hunting-magic - stealing the cattle of the sun, battling man-eaters - able to enter the land of the dead, a world guarded by a dog. The Heracles legend, therefore, is a distant memory of the spiritual closeness between humans and animals that existed in the earliest human societies.
This could even be taken further; the contrast between the head-on, traumatic, brute-force killing Heracles employs with animals and the ranged, at-a-distance killing preferred by his contemporaries could even echo the behaviour of the Neanderthals compared to the more complex hunting strategies of anatomical humans. Perhaps the whole story is a reflection of the relationship between the two, with the remaining Neanderthal males used by the dominant humans at the start of the Upper Paleolithic as hired muscle to take down the bigger beasts. So was Heracles a Neanderthal? It's as valid as any other theory.
His side-deeds or parerga, undertaken after or during the Twelve Labours, seem to support this interpretation. They paint Heracles as a headhunter, inflicting torture on barbarous raiders and rulers across the Mediterranean. The behaviour of his opponents, and Heracles' treatment of them, might reflect the ancient Greek attitude towards their 'uncivilized' neighbours, and of their perceived victory over their less civilized or cultured predecessors, but they also echo, especially the fights against the Egyptian king Busiris and the giant Cacus, a custom of head-hunting and human sacrifice that archaeologically can be dated back to the Mesolithic, such as the head-cluster pits found at Ofnet in Germany. Headhunting was also common to La Tene Celts and other societies in contact with the Graeco-Roman world.
On the other hand, several of Heracles' Labours point to a less ancient origin. The tenth labour, for instance, has him return from stealing Geryon's cattle and stopping over at Sicily, where he enlists the aid of a local king called Solous and his daughter Motya to recover some that escaped. Soloeis, the eponymous city, and Motya, were both early Phoenician colonies that features temples to Melqart. A similar tale is said for Nora, a Phoenician colony home to the 8th-century 'Nora stele', which is the first to mention Tartessos, whereby Norax, son of Erythria, comes from Tartessos with a party of Iberians to establish his colony. Therefore, Heracles could be a personification of pre-Greek colonialism, or a Greek amalgamation of the origin stories of different Phoenician colonies, who might have all credited Melqart with leading them to good harbours.
If the colonizing efforts before the 6th century BCE can't provide an answer to the historicity of the demigod, then perhaps the societies they interacted with can. Stone stelae are found all across south-western Iberia, dating just before the full-fledged colonization of that area by the Phoenicians, which are thought to depict renowned warriors, surrounded by all the implements of warfare - swords, shields, bows, arrows, buckles and armour. Many of these objects are also found on Bronze Age rock art in Galicia and in southern Scandinavia, both in the same style with images of combat, heroism and naval warfare. One type of shield, known as the V-notched shield, is known both from these artworks and archaeologically as spreading from Ireland to Scandinavia and southwestern Iberia, and from there to Sardinia and other islands in the Mediterranean.
While Heracles does not sport any identifiably Irish or Iberian weaponry - preferring the club - many of his attributes seem to line up with the 'Atlantic' warrior ideology expressed by stelae and material culture. Several of the locations where he performs his Labours or is credited with founding a city - Erythria, Sardinia, Sicily, Liguria, Cyprus - are, or are close to, Bronze Age rock-art sites, or else where Bronze Age mercenary groups from the west migrated to or originated from. It is possible, therefore, that the legend of Heracles emerged from historical interaction between the Atlantic Bronze Age and the Mycenaean eastern Mediterranean, via the emigration of the Sea Peoples.
Heracles is also closely associated with roads and protection against malicious highwaymen, which have always been regarded as the 'lowliest' of criminals, preying on unsuspecting travellers purely for profit, and his travels always aim to follow a direct route from one city or region to his master's city of Tirynis. Given the Mesopotamian precedent of a club-wielding warrior demigod mentioned above, there is an intriguing phenomena which might have given rise to a folk hero, who defended travellers from harm - the Old Assyrian karum trade network, where Assyrian merchants between the 20th and 18th centuries BCE navigated the valleys of eastern Anatolia, exchanging copper for tin and clothing with central Anatolian city-states. The danger and hardship that these trade missions encountered is well documented by cuneiform tablets - often letters to relatives back home warning of their perils, or letters from relatives demanding that they return.
The phenomenon was relatively short-lived - collapsing after the establishment of the Hittite kingdom - but long enough that stories about a vigilante or mercenary leader taming the wild pathways by brute force - a Caped Crusader of the Bronze Age - could have taken root. Other short-lived Assyrian figures passed into Greek legend, such as Sammuramat as the mythic Serimais, so why not Heracles?
Lastly, the demigod's darker side might be another historical Bronze Age survival. Julian Jaynes and several other scholars have argued that prior to the socio-economic and environmental collapses of the 13th, 12th and 11th centuries BCE, the majority of people had a 'bicameral' mentality, where one hemisphere of the brain communicated information to the other hemisphere that it received, which the person would experience as a separate entity 'speaking' to them. Jaynes claimed that the Old Testament, Mesopotamian texts and Egyptian literature show that this psychological state was interpreted as Gods commanding the individual to make decisions. This mentality was only broken down when sudden catastrophic events forced societies to make more proactive decisions, instead of relying on signals from their immediate environment. Since this would have no reflection in the archaeological record - people would still do and make the same things, only without a God telling them to do so - the concept is flimsy, relying on a few surviving texts of the Bronze Age, and only ones from the Near East and the Aegean.
Still, if it does have some truth to it, then the Heracles story is a good reflection of it. Hera spins the demigod into a rage, and Apollo tells him to service the king of Tirynis and perform the Twelve Labours. Much like in the Iliad, the Gods interact with Heracles as human beings; Atlas begs him to give him a break from holding up the earth, Diana rescues her pet deer from him, and Poseidon's son wrestles with him three times. His freedom and immortality after completing the Labours, in the same vein, works as a metaphor for the collapse of the old mentality, with the hero now released from both his physical and phycological chains, no longer a puppet of the Gods.
So who was the real Heracles? Was he a Neanderthal-for-hire, a Paleolithic shaman, a Mesolithic headhunter, a Bronze Age heroic warrior, a Phoenician colonial founding-father or an Assyrian superhero? Was his craziness rooted in memories of an evolutionary psychology? Everything is equally possible, and more likely than not the Heracles present in Greek and Roman literature inherits some or more from each.
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I'll wrap the essay-long deep dive into Heracles up in a final part, as there are some real historical figures that are well worth exploring to get to the bottom of the matter.
References:
Burkert, W. (1985). Greek religion. Harvard University Press.
Falkenstein, F. (1994). The Early Holocene Occupation Of Caves In The Balkans. transition, 182(185), 76.
Jaynes, J. (2000). The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Ogden, D. (2021). The Oxford Handbook of Heracles. Oxford University Press.
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