ARCHiPELAGOS | Passages (Chronicle)

ARCHiPELAGOS | Passages (Chronicle)

Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ | Δίαυλοι (Χρονικό)
/PORTUGUÊS/ ARCHiPELAGOS | Passagens (Crónica)

Over the Aegean islands | – come out and see! –
angels are flapping their wings | scattering roses…

Michales Loukovikas

I. REVISITANDO O ARQUIPÉLAGO | THE ARCHIPELAGO REVISITED
1. O arquipélago | The Archipelago
(a. Is Ionia in Bloom? / b. Where Is Athens?)
2. Κατολοφύρομαι (Katolophýromae) | I’m Wailing in Lament (Orestes)

Hélia Correia is in our hearts; she’s also in the heart of our Archipelagos! Our longest sequence is mainly based on her long poem, The Third Misery, which she begins citing Friedrich Hölderlin (from his poem Bread and Wine: What’s the use, what is the purpose of a poet in times of such indigence?). We followed in her steps and chose to have as a starting point his poem, The Archipelago. Then, during a trip up north, Amélia Muge convinced her old mother, Maria José, to recite with her some parts of the poem, and José Martins was there to record them. Good material to begin with… Now that I’m thinking about it, I feel it was a pity that Amélia’s daughter, Cristiana, did not take part, as well: we would have three generations reciting together!

The Archipelago, as Hölderlin reminded us, was originally the Aegean Sea and its islands. Therefore we had to start with Aegean music. I think we could find no better melody as an introduction than the beautiful traditional song whose first stanza you can read above. Yet, we felt that some Portuguese flavour was needed. So, next to Kyriakos Gouventas’ violin, we added the guitarra of Ricardo Parreira. Excellent combination!

Then we had to solve the problem of the sea. Initially, I added sea sounds (waves, seagulls, etc.) but Amélia objected: Too realistic, she said. And then she had an excellent idea: What about voices instead of waves? José and me replied in chorus: Yes! That’s it! Well, these choral waves, designed by José, and sung by Maria Monda (Sofia, Susana, Tânia), Cramol and Teresa Campos, made me feel they’re not only sea waves, but also those angels flying over the Aegean, scattering roses…

Euripides

That was the first, bright, rosy part of the poem (Is Ionia in Bloom?). In the second part, the dark, gloomy one (Where Is Athens?), I rearranged an old composition of mine (from The Gold in the Sky, on poetry by Ares Alexandrou) to pave the way to Euripides and Orestes, his tragedy. The stasimon Katolophýromae, introduced by Harris Lambrakis on the ney and recorder, is performed in ancient Greek by a chorus composed by Amélia, Andreas Karakotas, Manos Achalinotópoulos, and me as the coryphaeus. (We write about Euripides and Orestes in our Archipaedia, in the eBook accompanying the CD, where there is a wealth of information around Archipelagos. Much of this information is also presented here in our blog, following the links you see in the titles of each sequence).

1. Friedrich Hölderlin (Der Archipelagus, 1800-1801, excerpts, adapted into Portuguese by Amélia Muge) | a. Aegean traditional / b. Michales Loukovikas | Arranged by M. Loukovikas, A. J. Martins
2. Euripides (Orestes, 408 BCE, fragments: strophe–antistrophe) | Adapted-Arranged by M. Loukovikas

II. CANTOS DA ARGILA | SONGS OF CLAY
3. Embalar meninos, acordar adultos | Lullabying Children, Waking Up Adults
11. Μάγισσα Θάλασσα (Νέοι Λαοί τής θάλασσας) | Sorceress Sea (New Sea Peoples)

Hurrian hymn to Nikkal, Ugarit (13th century BCE)

Entering a time/space ship, we voyaged a millennium back, from Athens in 408 BCE to Ugarit, Syria, ca. 1400, listening to a Hurrian hymn. To tell you the truth, after Euripides, I was not so much fascinated; but Amélia was amazed, struck by its similarity to a Portuguese anti-fascist hymn: José Gomes Ferreira and Fernando Lopes-Graça’s Acordai! (Wake Up!). My oriental heart, on the other hand, was moved by some renditions of the Hurrian hymn in the chromatic genus. The problem was that these renditions moved away from Acordai. That’s why we decided to have the hymn in two variations, as a diatonic lullaby close to Acordai, and as a diatonic-chromatic lament about the refugees’ tragedy.

Weeping Woman’s Head with handkerchief (1937, possibly a study on Guernica),
by Pablo Picasso

I was so shocked when I saw by the seaside the body of an infant who drowned while his family tried to pass from Turkey to Greece. My lyrics begin with a phrase I heard from another refugee in Morocco, who could not cross the Gibraltar Strait to Spain: Every time I turn and see the sea, tears start falling down… My friend Andreas Karakotas interpreted the song so well tele-directed by me: I was in Lisbon, he was in Salonica! Ana Dias with her harp created the proper background here, as well as in the Imaginary Island of Utopia.

3. Amélia Muge / José Gomes Ferreira (excerpt from Acordai!) | Ancient Hurrian hymn (fragment) / Fernando Lopes-Graça (excerpt from Acordai!) | Adapted by A. Muge. Αrranged by A. J. Martins
11. Michales Loukovikas | Ancient Hurrian hymn (fragment) | Adapted-Arranged by M. Loukovikas

III. MACARONÉSIA | MACARONESIA (Macárōn Nẽsoe: Fortunate Isles)
4. Ali no meio do mar | Out There Amid the Sea
5. Dança do trigo | Wheat Dance
6. Um gingado lamento | Swinging Lament

Cesária Évora

Macaronesia consists of four archipelagos in the North Atlantic: the Azores and Madeira (Portugal), the Canaries (Spain), and Cape Verde. The name is derived from the Hellenic term Μακάρων Νῆσοι (Macárōn Nẽsoe, or Fortunate Isles, Isles of the Blessed), used by geographers for the Elysian islands to the west of the Pillars of Heracles (Strait of Gibraltar), a winterless earthly paradise, which according to Hesiod were the Elysian Fields, inhabited by heroes. Strabo identified them with the isles of the Hesperides.

Amélia’s Swinging Lament, dedicated to Cesária Évora, has this magic touch: I’ve loved it since the first time I listened to it. As the finale of a Macaronesian saga, it’s even better! Featured in this sequence is Amélia in the lead voice – together with Rita Maria who sings the Castilian part of the Wheat Dance – as well as Maria Monda and me in the vocals.

4. Traditionals of the Canaries & the Azores, Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J . Martins, A. Muge
5. Traditional of the Canaries, Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, A. Muge
6. Amélia Muge | Arranged by M. Loukovikas, A. J. Martins

IV. PENAS DE AMOR O QUE SÃO? | WHAT IS TO SUFFER FROM LOVE?
7. A tentação | Temptation
8. Δέδυκε ἀ σελάννα / Lua desceu, mergulhou | The Moon Has Set Down
(a. The Moon Has Set Down / b. Meanings Are Divided / c. Eros)

Sappho of Eresos, Roman copy of a 5th-century-BCE Greek original

Temptation, written by Hélia, is for me one of Amélia’s best songs. I told her many times it’s a pity it’s not in one of her own albums. So, here it is! And in a good company: that of Sappho’s.

Thanks to Amélia, who had the idea about her, I searched a lot, reading Sapphic poetry, and combined three fragments to compose:(*) The Moon Has Set Down, Meanings Are Divided, Eros. Moreover, I convinced Amélia she can also sing in ancient Hellenic (something that she described as… jumping into the abyss)! In this “jump” here, she is accompanied by Rita Maria, Catarina Anacleto and Maria Monda.

(*) Although her poetry was well-known and greatly admired in antiquity, most of it survives only in fragments, mainly because the Christian Church disapproved of her morals and the ecclesiastical authorities loved to burn her anthologies…

7. Hélia Correia | Amélia Muge | Arranged by F. Raposo
8. Sappho (in ancient Greek – and in Portuguese adapted by Amélia Muge) | Michales Loukovikas | Adapted-Arranged by M. Loukovikas

V. CANSAÇO DE SER | WEARINESS OF BEING
9. Sono de ser | Slumber of Being
10. The Hours

Fernando Pessoa

This sequence is dedicated to Fernando Pessoa. Slumber of Being is another favourite song of mine composed by Amélia. Her singing here is one of those rare moments; she’s accompanied excellently by Filipe Raposo.

The Hours, one of Pessoa’s English Poems, stands out, as well. I composed it for Sofia Vitória’s Echoes. I’m happy it was finally left out, so we can have it here with my… heavy metal arrangement reinforced by Kostas Hanís’ vibraphone and António Quintino’s double bass! Amélia and I synchronized our voices while the girls (Maria Monda) tuned themselves in chorus with us.

Amélia was fascinated by the way I composed this song. It was during one of my afternoon walks around my neighbourhood and I had The Hours stuck in my mind. I remembered Pink Floyd’s Time and the clocks ringing as soon as it started, and I decided to begin with clocks clicking the seconds, the minutes, The Hours… I walked that fast murmuring Fernando’s words and, all of a sudden, the bass line appeared! I kept on repeating this line, as I had nothing on me to record it, lest I forgot it until I reached home. By the time I arrived there, Fernando also offered me the basic melodic line! I worked furiously for Hours; I stopped only when I had even the arrangement ready. Overjoyed, I sent it immediately to Amélia…

9. Fernando Pessoa | Amélia Muge | Arranged by F. Raposo
10. Fernando Pessoa | Michales Loukovikas | Arranged by M. Loukovikas

VI. NA TAVERNA DO PORTO | IN A HARBOUR’S TAVERN
12. Versos quaisquer (Pedidos com instância) | Verses Whatever (Insistent Requests)
13. Ο Νικόλας ο ψαράς | Nicolas, the Fisherman

That’s the sequence of… fadobetiko (a term coined by Amélia). Her song, à la fado corrido, is based on a satiric poem by João de Deus, one of the greatest Portuguese poets of the 19th century. The intro to the song, played by Kyriakos Gouventas, has North Balkan flavour, because the poem starts with a reference to Transylvania.

Giorgos Mitsakis (L) and Vasilis Tsitsanis (R)

The tragic Nicolas, the Fisherman combines two of the greatest rebetiko composers: Vasilis Tsitsanis, one of the founders of modern rebetiko (paving the way for great composers such as Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis); and Giorgos Mitsakis, a skillful composer and lyricist, nicknamed the master as a bouzouki player.

With throbbing emotion (I burst out in tears while singing in the studio; Amélia and the sound engineer, Christos Megas, thought I was laughing…), I present the tragic figure of a black-dressed mother who is standing for months by the seaside, waiting for her son, Nicolas, to return to shore, as no one has the courage to tell her he drowned… This song moved the Portuguese, as well. I was told of black-dressed women who are still standing by the seaside gazing at the sea with empty eyes…

12. João de Deus | Amélia Muge | Arranged by A.J. Martins
13. Giorgos Mitsakis | Vasilis Tsitsanis | Arranged by M. Loukovikas

VII. ILHAS IMAGINÁRIAS | IMAGINARY ISLANDS
14. Uma ilha, Utopia | An Island, Utopia
15. Penélope de Ítaca | Penelope of Ithaca
16. Meninos perdidos | Lost Kids

Ulysses among the Phaeacians, by Jean Broc. Odysseus shows his physical arete by winning the discus-throwing contest after being taunted by a Phaeacian athlete. Long before Plato, Homer seems to be the first to describe Utopia, or even Atlantis, which he calls Scheria, the Phaeacians’ land.

Our fascination with imaginary and mythic places. So good that musically it ends up in Thrace, where I was born, with a… legendary zonarádikos dance, sung by Amélia and Maria Monda, and played by Manos Achalinotópoulos and Harris Lambrakis on the clarino (folk clarinet) and ney. But before that, we voyage to the islands of Thomas More’s Utopia (with Amélia also recalling Ares Alexandrou’s empty Mission Box), Odysseus and Penelope’s Ithaca, until, finally, we run aground on J. M. Barrie’s Neverland, finding not Peter Pan and Tinker Bell there, but some very peculiar Lost Kids.

14. Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, F. Raposo | Dedicated to Ares Alexandrou
15. Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, F. Raposo
16. Amélia Muge | Thracian traditional, A. Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, M. Loukovikas

VIII. EM TEMPO DE INDIGÊNCIA | IN TIMES OF INDIGENCE
17. Sem Deuses | Without Gods
18. Nós | We
19. Feitiço (Experimentos) | Spell (Experiments)
20. As ilhas do Egeu | The Aegean Islands
21. A ruína da Grécia | The Ruin of Hellas
22. Falamos de sombras (Democracia) | We Talk About Shadows (Democracy)
23. Um início | A Beginning

Hélia’s sequence based on excerpts from her poems The Third Misery and Indignation (We and Spell are from Indignation; the rest are from The Third Misery). As I have said, she begins citing Hölderlin: What’s the use, what is the purpose of a poet in times of such indigence? She also refers to him several times, especially when she speaks about Athens, as her poem is dedicated to Greece.(*) I was flattered when I saw the Parthenon on the cover of the book; Amélia was left speechless when she read the poem. We both decided this would be our main sequence.

(*) As I explained talking about Periplus, our previous work, Hélia is an enthusiastic hellenist and philhellene, who reinterpreted Hellenic myths from the point of view of female heroines, such as Antigone, Helen, and Medea. In her major poem, The Third Misery, and also in Indignation, both dedicated to Greece, she refers to Jason’s Argonauts, to the ancient Agora of the Hellenic poleis, to Homer’s Odyssey, to The Aegean Islands and The Ruin of Hellas, to the ancient gods, Pan and Alexandria, to Pericles and democracy. When she was awarded the Camões Prize (2015), the most prestigious literary distinction in the Lusophone world, she dedicated it to Hellas, where poetry comes from, without which we would be nothing and have nothing, as she said, concluding her speech with the exclamation Long live Greece! Therefore it’s a double pity that no one is interested in publishing The Third Misery in Greece. Well, this is a fourth misery on the modern Greeks’ part!

The Philhellene poet Friedrich Hölderlin, by Johanna Ebertz (1979)

Hölderlin’s citation in Without Gods is repeated in The Aegean Islands, in a completely different soundscape. Here, after many experiments, I used as a model the introduction to Echo, a composition by Manos Achalinotópoulos, developing it further as a free improvisation. As Manos is in our team, I was able to work on my idea with him. Harris Lambrakis, Amélia and Kyriakos Gouventas improvised, as well. So good, Hélia recited her own poetry!

We and The Ruin of Hellas are twin songs; Hélia’s poems here are also twins! I remember hearing inside me the melody of the Ruin already from the first time I read “Nós, os ateus, nós, os monoteístas,” (We, the atheists, we, the monotheists)… Then, changing the rhythm from five beats to six, I rearranged it to the verses of We.

I admit I knew almost nothing about Hölderlin. Trying to learn more in Wikipedia, I saw the card with the basic information: “Born – 20 March…” (Oh, I thought, same day with me!) “… 1770” (Gee, same year with Ludwig!!) At once, I thought of something that was more than crazy: Well, how about it? Third Misery… Third Symphony! Let me see… To tell you the truth, I didn’t expect much. I started humming the Misery to Beethoven’s Marcia funebre, in the Second Movement of his Eroica. I began with the 25th part of the poem, “Yes, we talk about shadows”… as it seemed to me more suitable. I was amazed! But there was more melody. So, now let’s go back and try the 23rd part, “The third misery is this one”… I was astonished!! A little more and we finish the first part of the Marcia, I thought. This little more was found in the 32nd part of the Misery: “All the squares seem like agoras of yore”… Most fantastic of all: Ludwig’s melody finished with Hélia’s “fervent word of democracy” – incredible!!! IT’S A MIRACLE!..

I searched for Beethoven’s score. I had adapted by heart the same melody in a previous work of mine (The Gold in the Sky); but this time I wanted to be precise. I meticulously rearranged his score, assigning his melodic lines to other instruments, leaving nothing out (I hope). The final crash test came when I presented my loucura to Amélia. As I don’t speak Portuguese, I realized that several words or phrases were out of place, not well adapted with the music. Her help in this matter was crucial. And then it was my turn to convince her that I did not want an operatic voice, I would hate such a voice, and perhaps even Ludwig might not like it – or else, why did he write Sotto voce under the title? I meant to say, I wanted her voice. Done! I’m very proud of the result – even if some purists will moan…

I can say here what I said before about Euripides: I do hope that if Ludwig listened to us, he would smile and applaud approvingly, despite the brickbats thrown by such purists! Featured also here, except Maria Monda, are Rui Vaz, José Manuel David and Pedro Casaes in the vocals, Filipe Raposo on the piano, as well as my friend Kosmás Papadópoulos with his clarinet.

What can anybody compose after such music? I guess Amélia did not even think about it – and she did very well; and presented such a graceful melody for A Beginning, standing next to Ludwig as equal! I consider this composition of hers as the best in our Archipelagos.

17. Hélia Correia | Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. Muge, A. J. Martins, M. Loukovikas
18. Hélia Correia | Michales Loukovikas | Arranged by M. Loukovikas
19. Hélia Correia (A. Muge) | Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, F. Raposo
20. Hélia Correia | Manos Achalinotópoulos, Amélia Muge | Arranged by M. Loukovikas
A free improvisation by H. Lambrakis, M. Achalanitópoulos, A. Muge, K. Gouventas
21. Hélia Correia | Michales Loukovikas | Arranged by M. Loukovikas
22. Hélia Correia | Ludwig van Beethoven (The Third Symphony, Eroica, 1804, Second Movement, first part: Marcia funebre, Adagio assai, Sotto voce) | Adapted-Arranged by M. Loukovikas
23. Hélia Correia | Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, F. Raposo

IX. JÁ SE DÃO AS VOLTAS TODAS | NOSTALGIA AND NOSTOS
24. Νοσταλγία: Το παράπονο του μετανάστη | Nostalgia: A Migrant’s Yearning
25. Nostalgia: Cantar de emigração | Nostalgia: Singing of Emigration
(a. Sodade / b. Run-Run se fue pa’l norte / c. Cantar de emigração / d. A Migrant’s Yearning)
26. Alegria | Jubilation (Alegria)

Rosalía de Castro (L) and Violeta Parra (R)

Our sequence about Migrations and Homecomings. Embracing several ideas of Amélia’s, I combined a rebetiko by Vasilis Tsitsanis (also known with the title Like an outcast I’m drifting about), with Rosalía de Castro and José Niza’s Cantar de emigração, Violeta Parra’s Run-Run se fue pa´l norte, and Armando Soares’ Sodade. Amélia had listened to me singing this rebetiko and sent me an adaptation of hers that reminded me of a fado. This was also included as an instrumental part. Moreover, I’m so happy to have here representatives of all four female choirs that Amélia invited for the project De Viva Voz (I was so deeply moved in that concert!): Cramol en masse, Maria Monda, Catarina Moura from Segue-me à Capela, and Teresa Campos from Sopa de Pedra, plus Rita, Rui, David and Pedro, Paló and Mariana Abrunheiro, Amélia and me – starting off in this adventure Like an outcast drifting about…

José Saramago,
by Carlos Botelho

An Amélia’s adaptation sums up this sequence, where José Saramago’s Alegria coexists with a fine melody by our friend, Giorgos Andreou, who is directing here the Plucked Strings Orchestra of Patras.

24. Vasilis Tsitsanis | Arranged by M. Loukovikas
25. a. Armando Soares (adapted by M. Loukovikas) / b. Violeta Parra / c. Rosalía de Castro (adapted into Portuguese by J. Niza) | José Niza / d. Vasilis Tsitsanis (adapted by A. Muge) | Arranged by M. Loukovikas, A. Muge
26. José Saramago | Giorgos Andreou | Adapted by A. Muge, A.J. Martins. Arranged by G. Andreou

X. O QUE AS ONDAS CONTAM | SEA WAVES TELLING TALES
27. Κύματα μύρια τού πελάγου / Ondas do mar de Vigo | Myriad Waves of the Sea of Vigo)
28. Contas do mar (Bulería de Sines) | Sea Tales of Pearls (Bulería of Sines)

Exuberance, by Penny Warden

Our last sequence begins with another adaptation of Amélia’s, combining a Cantiga de amigo by Martín Codax, with a rebetiko of Smyrna by Panaiotis Tountas, sung in both languages. Working at that time on Tountas’ songs, Women’s Portraits of Rebetiko, “painted” with his excellent Art of Modulation, I used to send copies of my work to Amélia; she thanked me, and wished me well on my birthday, with this beautiful adaptation.

Our finale is a peculiar Bulería I composed in Sines in 2012. We had gone there to arrange for our performance, presenting Periplus in the Festival Músicas do Mundo. We played the Bulería in its initial form in that concert. Since then we have changed the interposed song; what we have now is more suitable for a bulería as it also has a Spanish flavour, and I consider it Pan-Iberian; that’s why I combine Ricardo Parreira’s guitarra portuguesa with Thomás Natsis’ guitarra flamenca. It is sung so beautifully by Catarina Moura and Teresa Campos, together with Maria Monda, Amélia and, at last, a children’s choir. As Maria Graciete Besse aptly remarked analyzing Archipelagos:

“The disc begins with a voice of wisdom that recites Hölderlin’s verses (Amélia’s mother, aged 98) and ends with a children’s choir, thus designing an itinerary that is projected into the future.”

Enjoy!

27. Martín Codax (also adapted into Greek by Michales Loukovikas) | Panaiotis Tountas | Adapted by A. Muge. Arranged by M. Loukovikas (A major medieval Galician minstrel’s Cantiga de amigo combined with a melody by the greatest composer of the rebetiko of Smyrna)
28. Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas, Portuguese traditional | Arranged by M. Loukovikas, A. Muge

October 2017

● See also: PERIPLUS | Luso-Hellenic Wanderings (Chronicle) | GIORGOS ANDREOU on “ARCHiPELAGOS”
| MARIA GRACIETE BESSE on “ARCHiPELAGOS” | MARIA DO ROSÁRIO PESTANA on “ARCHiPELAGOS”

ARCHiPELAGOS
Nucleus
Amélia Muge: voice, guitarra braguesa, percussion | Michales Loukovikas: voice, accordion, sound effects
Manos Achalinotópoulos: clarino (folk clarinet), voice | Kyriakos Gouventas: violin, viola (5-string violin) | Harris Lambrakis: ney, recorder (pipes) | Maria Monda trio: Sofia Adriana Portugal, Susana Quaresma, Tânia Cardoso | Dimitris Mystakidis: guitar, bouzouki, baglamás, tzourás (the bouzouki family) | Ricardo Parreira: guitarra portuguesa | António Quintino: double bass | Filipe Raposo: piano, accordion, synthesizers | José Salgueiro: percussion
Guests (pro-bono)
Mariana Abrunheiro: voice | Catarina Anacleto: cello, voice | Niovi Benou: claps | Teresa Campos: voice | Pedro Casaes: voice | José Manuel David: voice | Ana Dias: harp | Kostas Hanís: vibraphone | Andreas Karakotas: voice | António José Martins: music box, percussion | Catarina Moura: voice | Thomás Natsis: flamenco guitar, claps | Paló: voice | Kosmás Papadópoulos: clarinet | Rita Maria: voice | Rui Vaz: voice
Plus
Hélia Correia & Maria José Muge: recitation | Cramol: female vocal group of the Workers’ Library of Oeiras | PSO: Plucked Strings Orchestra ‘Thanasis Thipinakis’ of the Patras Municipality | Children’s Choir, dir. Catarina Anacleto: Santiago Fantasia, Gabriel Leite, Sophia Van Epps, Ana Pita, Marta Semblano, Patrícia Arens Teixeira.
Authors
Manos Achalinotópoulos | Giorgos Andreou | Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) | Rosalía de Castro (1837 – 1885) | Martín Codax (13th – 14th centuries) | Hélia Correia | João de Deus (1830 – 1896) | Euripides (c. 480 – 406 BCE) | José Gomes Ferreira (1900 – 1985) | Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843) | Anonymous Hurrian (c. 1400 BCE) | Fernando Lopes-Graça (1904 – 1994) | Michales Loukovikas | Giorgos Mitsakis (1921 – 1993) | Amélia Muge | José Niza (1938 – 2011) | Violeta Parra (1917 – 1967) | Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935) | Sappho (c. 630 – 570 BCE) | José Saramago (1922-2010) | Armando Soares (1920 – 2007) | Panaiotis Tountas (1886-1942) | Vasilis Tsitsanis (1915 – 1984)

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Chronicle 11. “MUSIC IS THRACIAN AND ASIAN”

Chronicle 11. “MUSIC IS THRACIAN AND ASIAN”

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 11. “ΘΡᾼΚΙΑ ΚΑΙ ΑΣΙΑΤΙΣ Η ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗ”

● “Barbarian” Contribution to Hellenic Instrument Making and Playing ● Antiquarianism and Ancestor Worship ● Multi-String Instruments, Psalteries ● Diapason, Harmony, Polyphony
● Music, Poetry, Nation ● Folk
and Erudite Music ● Hydraulis
● Crusades ● Strabo on Music

Michales Loukovikas

“… and all music is considered to be Thracian and Asian.” (Strabo)

SUCH AN APOPHTHEGM by Strabo, the famous historian and geographer, on the prevailing opinion in his time (64 BCE – 24 CE) about the Thracian and Asian origin of all music – hence also of its instruments – recurs again and again like a leitmotiv, but also as a reminder to all Hellenes who start from the Thracian Orpheus’ lyre, and end up to General Makryiannes’ tambourás.

“In Tsakoniá one comes upon the most ancient Tsakonian dance that is characterized by its Apollonian paeonic rhythm of five beats, the snake-like cycling, circling, folding and unfolding of the dance company, with their coryphaeus [leader] dancing around them and sometimes opposite the second dancer, reminding us of a Pythic nomos [Pythian ‘law’ or canon] of dance and music (Apollo’s battle against Python),⁽¹⁾ and not of Theseus and Ariadne’s imaginary thread, as it is usually proclaimed thoughtlessly and irresponsibly by Athenian dance companies.”

• ⁽¹⁾ Nomos was the most important type of musical composition and interpretation in ancient Hellas. The Pythian or Pythic nomos, played on the homonymous aulos, was created by Sakadas and won him the first prize of auletic art in the Pythian Games in 586 BCE. Its purpose was to describe the battle between Apollo and Python. Thus, it has been the first known example of the so-called program music – the one describing a theme, in contrast with the absolute or abstract or pure music (see also Chronicle 16, footnote 9, and Chronicle 21, footnote 5, with the text above).

Simon Karás

As long as one is preoccupied with “antiquarianism”, that is, as long as he is just a… carrier of the “virus”, there is no big problem. What happens, however, if he becomes symptomatic and possessed by “ancestor worship”? The result is more than obvious in the above citation from a record with Songs of the Peloponnese, issued by the Society for the Dissemination of National Music – a text written by Simon Karás himself, despite his contribution on this domain that has certainly been immense and invaluable.

Such were the fantasies put forward in all seriousness from both sides, as if it mattered much whether the Tsakonian dance reminds us of a Pythic nomos, or if, on the contrary, it reenacts, faithfully or not, the escape from the Labyrinth, when we know that the… Minotaur is anything but dead, and Karás pointed his finger at him immediately afterwards:

“In the once resounding with musical instruments Peloponnese”, he complained, “we have a problem if we try to find musical instruments worthy of their names. Much labour and effort was needed on our part in order to find a clarino [folk clarinet], a violin, or a laouto [folk lute] in entire prefectures, and on many occasions to transport musicians many kilometres away so that they could match with others and form a company.”

Qanun (psaltery)

This “Pythic nomos” mentality made Karás claim that almost all folk instruments played today, or allegedly used in the past, in Greece are Hellenic in origin. In a similar text on a record with Songs of Constantinople and the Sea of Marmara, he wrote:

“The psaltery qanun together with the ancient Greek and Byzantine thambura [the tambur], thanks to the former’s many latches [or mandals] and the latter’s many tied frets, were the instruments used in teaching the theory of musical modes (echoe) and intervals in the past.”

The term psaltery was general in ancient Hellas and not related to the religious Byzantine psalms, as it referred to all string instruments that were played directly with the fingers without a plectrum. This category included, among others, the nabla, simicium and trígonon (harp). They were multi-string instruments as a rule, some of them not “psalteries”, played with a plectrum. The most impressive of the latter was most probably the sambuca (sambycē), more than one metre high and looking like a homonymous siege engine.

Harpist (Trígonon player) of Keros

In any case, it seems that the numerous instruments of this family, especially the ones with many strings, did not differ much – at least for the non-connoisseurs who naturally confused them. Some of them were played upright evolving into the harp, while others were placed horizontally and ended up as the qanun and santur. These instruments were known and in use in Greece before it became… Greece, i.e. since the (pre-Hellenic) early Bronze Age of the 3rd millennium BCE. The best example is the Harpist (Trígonon player) of Keros, a beautiful Cycladic figurine dating back to 2800-2300 BCE. The Cycladic islanders were very fond of the trígonon, as more such figurines of harpists have been recovered.

Despite the long history of these instruments in Greece, Plato, as well as other philosophers, criticized them as unmanly, while Aristotle‘s student, Aristoxenus of Tarentum, the so-called Musician, (a most important figure in ancient Hellas in the area of music theory, one of the pioneers of musicology as we would now say), described them as ἔκφυλα, that is alien – in the word’s literal sense and not the metaphorical that’s been left to the modern Greeks (i.e. degenerate).

What’s interesting here, οf course, is not a moral evaluation but the origin of the instruments. There is enough evidence, albeit unclear, that seems to point to an Asian or Thracian origin (what Strabo has said). Much more convincing are the archeological finds with a plethora of depicted harpists excavated in the Near East – mainly in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Harpist of Keros is unique, but only as an exquisite work of visual art.

The name of a similar instrument called phoenix, originating most probably in Phoenicia, points to the same direction. But the mentality peculiar to a good number of modern Greeks was also widespread in ancient Hellas. So, the Delian historian Semus, having in mind the well-known saying and established notion “there’s no place like home”, claimed that the phoenix was thus named because its arms were constructed of Delian “phoenix” (palm tree in Greek). What we get, indeed, out of this claim is that in his time Delos was not only inhabited and not barren as it is today, but it was covered instead with vegetation – or, at least, there were several palm trees!

Epigonion

Based on this “logic”, it was argued that the epigónion, another multi-string instrument, was named after its inventor, Epigonus of Ambracia, a musician of the 6th century BCE. It took an expert on musicology such as Curt Sachs to bring forth the apparent etymology of the word (ἐπὶ = on + γόνυ = knee), describing the way a musician placed the instrument on his/her knee(s).

Qanun, on the other hand, was the name of the monochord, an instrument with just one string, used mostly by music theorists to determine the mathematical relations of sounds (from κανών = rule in Greek). It was called Pythagorean qanun, because its invention was attributed to Pythagoras. The great Samian philosopher, mathematician and music theorist of the 6th century BCE, however, before going to the Occident to set up his school in Crotone, Magna Graecia, had travelled around a lot in the Orient and became familiar with the Egyptian and Assyro–Babylonian achievements in every domain.

Pollux, who instructed us about the origin of the tríchordon (pandura), wrote about the monochord that this simple instrument was invented by Arabs. On his part, Nicomachus of Gerasa, a Pythagorean mathematician and music theorist of the 2nd century CE, said that the monochord was very often called phánduros, i.e. pandura. In this way we have come full circle back to the tríchordon, the ancestor of the thambura, tanbur, and the rest of the long-necked lutes we have already seen (in Chronicle 9. The Celebrated Tríchordon).

Sailor playing laouto

“The santur, a multi-string pectis, is structured on tempered semitones”, Karas goes on… bombarding us while he presents the instruments accompanying the Songs of Constantinople and the Sea of Marmara. “The oud, a fretless medieval guitar, with its tuning based on the ‘sýstēma ametábolon’ of antiquity (a tone and three or four synēmména tetrachords), shows its Hellenic origin. The laouto, an ancient Grecian and Byzantine mágadis (its double strings conform to ‘diapason’), is tuned in fifths.”

The fact that the (“100-string”)⁽²⁾ santur is performed with tempered intervals in Hellas, as in the rest of Europe – i.e. with “alien” and artificial intervals that meet the requirements of European polyphony and not of Greek “national music” – would be expected to at least frustrate Karás. But he just passed by… Note that in the instrument’s cradle, Iran, the santur is tuned according to the intervals of the relative modes the musician is going to perform.

• ⁽²⁾ The san-tur (cent, hundred, and tar, string): supposedly a 100-string instrument – although the classical Persian santur has “only” 72 strings.

Santur

The pectís and mágadis, which Karás identified with the santur and the laouto respectively, were two similar multi-string psalteries of Lydian or Thracian origin. If we trust Aristoxenus, “they were one and the same instrument”. The Lesbian Sappho (around 630-570 BCE) was said to be the first musician to use the pectís. Living in the 4th century BCE, in the same culture that had brought forth these instruments, Aristoxenus had not only reliable information but also a “legitimate right” to identify these instruments. Where did Karás of the 20th century CE find this right (in his effort to defend the so-called Hellenic “national interest”)?

For the same reasons – i.e. in order to demonstrate the “unbroken continuity” between ancient and modern Greece – he identified the oud with the medieval guitar. The Asian (Assyrian) cithara (kithara) is already familiar to us, as well as its genealogical tree (see Chronicle 7). The sad truth is that, in the sense that Karás wished for, neither the cithara (guitar), nor the oud or laouto were Hellenic. In fact, the last two, etymologically and organologically, come from the Arabic oud (al oud > laúd) – which in turn also originates in Persia.⁽³⁾

• ⁽³⁾ The most typical instrument of the Arabs, the oud, originates in Persia, where it is called barbat or barbud. The same is likely true of the most typical instrument of the Indians, the sitar (see last footnote in Chronicle 7). And as it turns out, the world’s first bowed string instrument also appeared in Iran c. 10th century CE. In addition, Persian classical music is, to me, the superb of its kind in the Orient. I once remarked in jest: “Iranians are the only ones who can look in the eye Ludwig” (van Beethoven)!

Claiming that this instrument had a Greek character (and thus denying that this character was Arabo-Persian), Karás invoked its “tuning based on the ‘sýstēma ametábolon’ [with] synēmména tetrachords” –⁽⁴⁾ i.e. presenting the reader with something impressively grandiose and sufficiently incomprehensible! Personally, I think that these systems confuse, rather than enlighten, the average music lovers. Therefore, I suggest that we pass them by. But the same does not apply to diapasōn.

• ⁽⁴⁾ The tetrachords of the sýstēma téleion ametábolon can be either synēmmena (attached) or diezeugmena (“divorced”, detached).

Mágadis-pectís

The mágadis, as well as other multi-string instruments, had its strings in double courses tuned in octaves (e.g. D-d) that the ancients called “διὰ πασῶν” (dià pasōn). The verb “μαγαδίζειν” (to perform mágadis style) denoted a technique of producing a melody in octaves. This is how the Arabs play the qanun nowadays. According to several writers, the term mágadis (which also defined a kind of aulos) came from the word magás, meaning the “bridge” of a string instrument. However, the historian Duris attributed it to a Thracian musician called Magdis.

The ancient Hellenic musical term diapasōn is just one of those the Westerners adopted to give prestige and develop their music. Once the most delightful daughter of the Muses, the Greek Μουσική, became… cosmopolitan, passing to so many languages of the world, it was natural that she would be accompanied by her terminology – but with the original meaning of the terms altered more or less. A well-known “victim” of this adoption is ἁρμονία (harmony). Consulting a musical dictionary you are about to read:

“Harmony: two or more notes sounding together;⁽⁵⁾ the vertical dimension of music. It appears around the 9th century CE, when we have the first polyphonic compositions. Until then music is monophonic, that is, based on a melody with no harmony at all…”!

• ⁽⁵⁾ It should have been “three or more notes”, because if only two notes sound together, there’s “no [Occidental] harmony at all”! The human beings e.g. have always sung “mágadis style”, in octaves, because men’s voices sound in a lower register than those of women and children. Even if it is monophony, it’s still “two notes sounding together” (heterophony). The same happens if we add a drone or ison to the main melody. Note that the traditional polyphony worldwide is much more ancient than the erudite West European.

Dance of the Muses on Mount Helicon to Apollo’s accompaniment, by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1807)

How come, you wonder, that the ancient Hellenes invented a term for something they did not have?(!) Searching for some answer, you conclude that harmony for them was any of the various arrangements of notes within an octave, in a system where its parts were connected in such a way as to form a perfect whole (hence harmony) – i.e. it was the mode, echos, “route”, maqam, dastgāh, raga. Therefore, harmony in modal music is not about notes sounding together, but refers to the relationship of any note with those that have preceded and the others that follow, in a system structured dynamically and horizontally, rather than statically and vertically.

Harmony: any arrangement of notes of an octave; the relationship
of any note with those that preceded and the others that follow.
Polyphony appears whenever there is no space for microtones.

Women musicians, Al-Andalus (Andalusia)

Not even polyphony originated in the Occident. We have seen that polyphony is not only one. Just think of how many kinds of polyphony are still practiced in the area centered on the Balkans, e.g. in Epirus or Albania, in Thrace (of Greece, Bulgaria, or Turkey), on the Caucasus (the area around Georgia), or in Corsica and Sardinia, and many other places. Polyphony appears whenever there is no space for microtones. It’s inconceivable in Anatolian music due to the diversity of its intervals, but natural in Epirotic music, and any other based on the pentatonic – the most ancient of the scales, with five degrees (instead of seven) and whole tones without semitones.

Diapasōn, as a term, is related to harmony and derives from the phrase “ἡ διὰ πασῶν τῶν χορδῶν συμφωνία” (the concord through all the notes). Thus, it was the eighth, “ἡ καλλίστη συμφωνία” (the best concord), according to Aristoxenus. Later on, the term diapasōn replaced that of harmony. For the Byzantines it was “ἡ διαοκτὼ ἤ δι’ ὀγδόης ἁρμονία” (the harmony through the octave). Diapasōn nowadays is also a tuning fork, or any standard pitch used for tuning. A full, rich outpouring of harmonious sound is another, more general, meaning.

Nevertheless, it’s true that not even the concept of music remained unchanged – indeed, this development took place in ancient times. In the 5th century BCE, the term music appeared for the first time in Pindar’s Olympian Victory Odes and Hymns, and later in Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ Histories. For a long time this term denoted the combined spiritual and mental performance especially in art and literature. As Plato says in the Republic, the body needs exercise while the soul requires music. A “narrower” definition of the term was lyric poetry, that is, poetry with music, melos (melody). Besides, at that time poetry without music was unthinkable, inconceivable.

Women musicians, Egypt

The two arts became independent in the 4th century BCE. It was then that the two terms acquired their current meanings. Previously, poetry denoted creation, construction (ποιεῖν = to create, to make). With the special meaning of artistic creation, it was first used by Simonides of Ceos (6th – 5th century); a poet was thought to be a composer of music. The word music was perhaps invented by Lasus of Hermione (6th century), one of the first artists that combined qualities of a musician and a musicologist, dealing with both the art and science of music.

As for the perception of music, there were two schools: the Pythagorean and the Aristoxenian. Pythagoras disapproved of the appraisal of music through the senses (hearing). The virtue of this art, he used to say, is that we can perceive it through the intellect (mind). Aristoxenus, on his part, supported a dual scientific principle: on the one hand, he based himself on the sense of hearing to perceive and appraise the pitch, intervals, etc.; and on the other hand, he relied on the intellect in order to distinguish the mechanisms of sounds.

Cümbüş

After all these “digressions” (which were, in part, the… purpose of this Chronicle), let’s see some of the instruments that Karás rejected outright. Surprisingly, he turned against the cümbüş, or “djimbisi”, as he “Hellenized” it,⁽⁶⁾ describing it as a “mixobarbarian [i.e. half-barbarian] combination of an Occidental banjo, laouto and oud”, and complaining because “it’s been replacing the oud (the medieval, ancient-style guitar)”… Yet, the single Occidental feature on the cümbüş is its soundboard (the metallic soundboard of the banjo). But why should we bother about how the sound of an instrument is amplified? Its basic part is the “neck” and the intervals produced by the fingerboard – and the cümbüş is normally fretless: that is, even subtle variations in pitch are possible, as if we play an oud, or a violin. So, why such fury?

• ⁽⁶⁾ The word cümbüş, according to some (far-fetched) claims, comes from the word symposium!

Not to mention the way Karás filled up the table of contents on a record with Songs of Thasos, Lemnos and Samothrace, renaming the (distasteful to him) bouzouki as… tambourás. Ironically, the producers of a disc with Cretan songs have done exactly the opposite for commercial reasons, renaming Stelios Foustalieris’ tambourás, his bulgarí, as… bouzouki! Why this masquerade? Can we safeguard any “Greekness” with such… “transvestite” disguises?

Since the cümbüş, according to Karás, is “mixobarbarian” (half-barbarian), I can’t help but remember that in ancient Hellas, only one out of the four basic modes, or “harmonies”, was Greek in origin: it was the Dorian. Two of them, the Lydian and the Phrygian, were “barbarian” by birth (originating in Lydia and Phrygia), while the fourth was… “mixobarbarian”: the Mixolydian – a creation, according to Aristoxenus, of Sappho, from whom the tragedians received it, as the pathos of this harmony was appropriate to their plays. As Plutarch commented: “the mixolydian is pathetic, in harmony with the tragedies”.

In Hellas only one out of the four basic modes was Greek in origin: the Dorian. The Lydian and Phrygian were “barbarian” by birth, while the
fourth was… “mixobarbarian” (half-barbarian): it was the Mixolydian.

Psaltery

Anyway, all the above are “details” when speaking of Karás, whom I was lucky to enjoy at work during the third and (unfortunately) last musicological symposium at Delphi in 1988. I assure you, he was an excellent teacher; a real master, not at all… yalancı (fake), like those of “tambourás”, who might have been his students (see Chronicle 9). That’s why I insist on my criticism, targeting them rather than him. Indeed, he’s been a “nestor” in the field of the Greek traditional music – which, however, has never been “national”, as he declared in the title of his society (and I don’t think he meant… ethnic music!). So, let’s have a look in brief at the relationship between music and nation.

Music and Nation

MUSIC IS AS OLD AS WE ARE: it’s innate in humans. The birth of nations, on the other hand, is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of mankind. Their purpose is not to satisfy some human needs, as music does, but rather to serve economic and political aims. Of course, I refer to nation states and not to ethnicities that are something different, derived since ancient times from various clans and tribes. Thus: there are no national characteristics in music. In essence, there is no Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish etc. music. Using national attributes, we simply mean that a piece has e.g. Hellenic lyrics, if it is a song, or that its composer is Greek. In fact, far too many “Hellenic” songs have actually nothing to do with local traditional music (they can be described as rock, tango, mambo, pop, etc.), no matter if they have Greek lyrics or composers.

There’s no national music. Folk music is ethnic, not national.
Erudite music is multinational (but never international).

Indian itinerary musician, by Shagufta Mehdi

Folk music is born as an idiom in areas smaller than the present nation states, under conditions of agricultural natural economy – regions which are generally divided now among neighbouring nation states (Thrace is divided into three). The pace of its development, or the inflow of foreign elements, is determined by the geography of each area. That’s how separate musical idioms are articulated. A “problem” arises due to the lack of racial “purity” in these places, as they are inhabited by people of various ethnicities, each one with its own peculiarities. All these special characteristics are gradually digested, forming a common idiom, though they keep their autonomy to a certain degree. And as we have seen (in Chronicle 6), the more the ethnicities, the richer the idiom. As a result, folk music is ethnic, not national.

Erudite music, on the other hand, has been a collective effort of élite musicians streaming into the metropolises of multinational empires. The involvement of artists from several ethnicities or nationalities, each with another background, makes this music multinational (or transnational, but never international). This also applies to the European classical music, though broadly speaking, national borders had been already drawn there before the period of its great acme. How can we define e.g. Händel’s music? Is it German or English? Or Beethoven’s? Is it German or Austrian? Or Chopin’s? Polish or French? Or when Bach transcribes Vivaldi? Is the transcription German or Italian music? Or even Kurt Weill’s music? Is it German, American, or… Jewish?

“National schools”, in addition, appear much later, employing ethnic sound colours, but also erudite music forms. Therefore, there is no national character even there. A good example is Modest Mussorgsky’s celebrated suite Pictures at an Exhibition, one of the masterpieces of Russian “national school”: the suite was orchestrated in an exemplary fashion by Maurice Ravel, one of the pioneers of French “national school”, and in this version it became a favourite all over the world. Moreover, the half-Basque Ravel, born in a town near Spain, composed many works based on Spanish “national school” – as did composers from other, even faraway, countries, as well, such as Russia, or the USA.

In the final analysis, why should we care about the alleged national character or origin of music, or even its instruments? Such thoughts distract our attention from the essence of the matter, which is music itself. After all, who can trace its evolution? Who indeed was the first human who noticed that a tense bowstring produces a sound? Or that the sound (pitch) changes depending on where he touches the string? Or that it is amplified if we use something hollow to function as a soundboard? Such findings came one after the other…

These discoveries are as old as man; which means they should have taken place in Africa, the alleged cradle of human race (see another approach in Chronicle 3). What does this mean? That music and its instruments are African-born? Not at all! It just means that in various periods of time, in several areas of the world, very similar instruments have emerged, based on the same natural laws.

In various times and spaces, very similar instruments
have emerged, based on the same natural laws.

All such “national” claims have ulterior motives, because music is also older than ownership, not only nations. Besides, things are very simple, provided that we’ve got rid of the blinders of “ancestor worship”, and common sense has prevailed:

Reconstructed silver lyre of Ur, Mesopotamia

“We say that a musical instrument belongs to the folk tradition of a country only when its people have sung with this instrument their aspirations and sorrows, especially in times-watersheds in their history,” writes Phoebus Anogeianakis with simplicity and clarity, cutting the… “Gordian Knot”, and bringing us down to earth from the nebulae of “antiquarianism”, while he gives us the key to go deeper into the subject.

“Musicology classifies an instrument as part of the folk tradition of a country based on this criterion. What we are mainly interested in is if this musical instrument has been loved and used widely by the people of this country, and also made by local craftsmen or by the local folk musicians themselves – no matter if this instrument has come from outside, from another country, nearby or distant.”

Hydraulis (Pipe Organ)

ONLY BASED ON THE ABOVE APPROACH, we can say that the lyre and cithara, or bárbitos and phorminx, were Grecian instruments. Because, in truth, all instruments used in ancient Hellas were imported from the Orient – except one: an instrument we know for sure that was invented by the Greeks, not in Classical times, but during the Hellenistic period and, moreover, outside Greece, in Alexandria, Egypt, the largest centre of Hellenism in the post-classical era. Ironically, this unique instrument with a Greek patent is not played in Hellas anymore and has since been glorified in the hands of some Westerners – prominently those of Johann Sebastian Bach…

All instruments in Hellas were from the Orient – except the hydraulis.

Hydraulis, Dion (1st century BCE)

This instrument was the hydraulis, the water organ, today’s pipe organ, in its embryonic form. It was invented by the Alexandrian engineer Ctesibius, in the 3rd century BCE. Some attribute the invention to his contemporary, Archimedes; his contribution though should have been indirect, through the achievements of his ingenious mind, as he was the most renowned figure in the realm of science in the ancient world. Quite rightly, these Greek scientists are thought of as the spiritual fathers of Leonardo da Vinci, and many other inventive minds of Europe from the Renaissance onwards.

Ctesibius apparently based himself on the Syracusan’s hydraulic inventions and applications, mainly on hydraulic clocks – a device that is also attributed to both. Along with hydraulics, Ctesibius studied pneumatics – the science dealing with pneuma, that is, the air, and its several applications.⁽⁷⁾ In fact, he is considered as the “pneumatic” (spiritual) father of this science, as he studied in depth an earlier observation: that invisible air, gas, is something material.

• ⁽⁷⁾ Hydraulics and pneumatics are sister sciences, dealing with liquids and gases respectively.

Let me say en passant that the rapid decline of the Greek language, due to the decline of Hellenism, in parallel with the imposition of Christianism, has brought about a decline also in the semantics of ancient terms such as pneuma (breath), where only connotations contrasting with matter (i.e. mind, intellect, spirit) have survived. The ancient spirit (pneuma), you see, was lost as soon as it turned into… “Holy Spirit” (Ghost)! Despite all the treatises on pneumatics by the Alexandrians, there is no such entry in Modern Greek dictionaries.⁽⁸⁾

• ⁽⁸⁾ Although Hellenic is the world’s oldest recorded living language, the original meaning of the word pneumatic (of or relating to air, breath) was lost in Modern Greek, except in the case of the pneumatic tools (using air pressure). Note that e.g. in Romance languages we can find the same word (Italian pneumatico, French and Portuguese pneu, Spanish neumático) meaning pneumatic tire. In Modern Greek, on the other hand, the relevant term inner tube is called sambrela, which is a loan from French (chambre à air). Thus, for the same thing more or less, some “barbarians” use a Hellenic word; the Greeks have a “barbarian” (French) loan instead!

A hydraulis excavated at Aquincum (modern Budapest) in 1931

Well, what pneumatics anyway? After all, no work of Ctesibius has survived. The opposite is true of a later engineer whose work is partly extant – although he remains similarly inconspicuous among the Hellenes. He was an Alexandrian, as well, called Hero(n), and most probably lived in the 1st century CE. Apart from his numerous wonderful inventions – his aeolipile or steam engine, a windwheel, and also gates that opened automatically – he perfected Ctesibius’ water organ based on the principles of pneumatics. But if the Modern Greeks hear his name by chance and wish to learn more about his work, they are obliged to consult foreign publications, since his treatises have never been published in Hellas…

The Alexandrian engineers could not go unnoticed in Rome or Constantinople that were great powers. Byzantine scientists admired mainly Hero’s “automata” and perfected them. There were several such mechanisms in the palaces (golden plane trees with singing birds, lions and other wild animals roaring while turning their necks, griffins flapping their wings, etc.) in order to impress foreign visitors.

The hydraulis was equally impressive; thus the musical instrument ended up as… diplomatic. In the 8th century, the Byzantine emperor Constantine V, the so-called… Copronymus,⁽⁹⁾ offered an organ to the Frankish king Pepin the… Short, and what followed is common knowledge more or less (the instrument is now known all over the world by the Greek term organ, meaning instrument among other things). We can see the potential impact of gifts exchanged between “blue bloods” on history, especially that of music. No matter if diplomacy has never promoted culture, politics has an impact on civilization – mostly negative now…

• ⁽⁹⁾ Copronymus, meaning dung-christened! Obviously, he was… “rewarded” with this epithet by ecclesiastical circles because he was an iconoclast. They said that he supposedly… stooled in the font when he was baptized! The usual Christian venom…

Church (pipe) organ

The Crusades

THIS IS OBVIOUS in the political history. Despite the gifts to the Europeans, the underlying Schism among Christians was formalized, the “Holy See” declared a “holy war” against all the “infidels” (under the sound of… pipe organs most probably!), and that’s how the Crusades began,⁽¹⁰⁾ leading to the first fall of Constantinople, as soon as the Orthodox Christians were included among the “infidels” – or else among the “heretics”, who are always… worse than the “infidels”! The control of the Orient necessitated the overthrow of “Romanía” (the Byzantine Empire), and the division of the booty between the crusaders.

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ How is it possible a ballyhooed “religion of love” to be plagued by an avalanche of schisms and (“holy” or “unholy”) wars? As usual, Christianism emerges as the champion in this field, as well, followed by the other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam.

● The Crusades, initiated by the popes, aimed at violently imposing Catholicism all over Europe and western Asia during the early 2nd millennium CE. (On the violent imposition of Christianism during the 1st millennium CE, see Chronicles 23-24: The Genocide of the Hellenes, and The Triumph of Cretinism). They were directed against either Muslims and Orthodox Christians in the Orient, or “pagans”, “heretics”, and “excommunicated” people in the Occident, for various politico-economic and/or religious reasons. Prominent among them were the Northern or Baltic, the Albigensian or Cathar, and the Aragonese Crusades, as well as the Iberian Reconquista. The Northern Crusades (13th century) were colonization campaigns of Christianization mainly against the pagan Baltic, Finnic and West Slavic peoples of the Baltic Sea, but also against Orthodox Christian East Slavs. The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) was a 20-year campaign to eliminate Catharism in southern France. The Cathars were a Christian sect thriving in Southern Europe between the 12th and 14th centuries. The Aragonese Crusade had no religious pretense whatsoever. It was undertaken in 1284-1285, because Aragon conquered Sicily, defying the “Holy See”. The Reconquista spanned 780 years, from the Arab conquest of Iberia in 711, to the fall of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492.

● There were far more “holy wars” declared by the “Holy See”: in the 13th century, pope Gregory IV declared war on… black cats, describing them as “instruments of Satan”! So, he ordered their extermination all over Europe. But the “Cat Crusade” backfired, as it resulted in an increase in the population of plague-carrying rats…

The Crusades (1096-1204): 1st (purple route), 2nd (green), 3rd (red) and 4th Crusade (orange): it started from Venice and ended in Constantinople, the ultimate goal of Venetians and Franks.

That crucial turning point was the beginning of the end, leaving its indelible stamp on the history of not only the Mediterranean, or even Europe, but also of the whole world, because since then everything changed. It was the end of the era that began in the Near East during the Neolithic period, with the birth of civilization, and the Mediterranean as the epicentre of historic developments. Mare nostrum was de facto marginalized. Its fortunes would since be governed by non-Mediterranean powers.

As is normal in their routine, the perpetrators made sure of their “absolution” through their propaganda that even their victims reproduce – perhaps because perpetrators and victims are now “allies”, “partners”. Whitewashing first became grotesque (with all those highly hypocritical… “crusades for peace”), and then macabre – as soon as bombs started falling in the first… “humanitarian war” in history, even without the United Nations’ consent!

Crusaders: “liberators” of Jerusalem, “conquerors” of Constantinople!
Whitewashing became grotesque (with all those “crusades for peace”),
then macabre – as bombs started falling in the first “humanitarian war”!

Let’s open our dictionaries again: the Crusaders were “medieval warriors who took part in the campaigns of Western Christians against people of another faith mainly for the liberation of the Holy Land”! And who from? Who else but the “infidels”, the Muslims. The lexicographers et al. don’t seem to bother at all that these lands are equally holy for Islam, or that the “infidels” are perhaps more religious than the Christians. Sincerely, I cannot comprehend how come that Greek historians portray the Crusaders as “liberators” of Jerusalem in 1099, and at the same time as “conquerors” of Constantinople in 1204.

The Capture of Constantinople in 1204, by Domenico Robusti Tintoretto

WE MAY HAVE DEVIATED FROM OUR PATH but essentially our subject was not so much the Thracian and Asian origin of all music, as the futility of antiquarianism or “ancestor worship” that are nothing but empty words. See, e.g., the hydraulis we were lucky to excavate at Dion:⁽¹¹⁾ It was initially announced that the instrument was polyphonic. Doesn’t this mean, too, that the music of late antiquity was polyphonic? Was there a thorough research in advance, or such a conclusion was reported lightheartedly? Was their aim to restore the instrument or to revamp it in the font of European polyphony?

• ⁽¹¹⁾ A tomb stele with a depiction of nabla was also found at Dion.

A diaulos player in a symposium, by Euaion painter

Can we possibly assume that those ancient musicians we see so often depicted with diaulos (double aulos) played in… thirds?⁽¹²⁾ Or that perhaps the multi-reed syrinx (Pan pipe) is another polyphonic instrument? I cannot conceive of the hydraulis as being suitable for… Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, the same way as a performance of modal music pieces on the pipe organ is equally impossible. Each instrument is made based on the specifications of the music genre which is prescribed for.

• ⁽¹²⁾ The now dominant two-note consonance, the third, was considered as dissonance and also a cacophony by ancient Hellenes and Byzantines alike.

“Big deal”, is the cynics’ answer. There are some… Jurassic Park enthusiasts who wish to make up for the water organ’s lost time, mastering the repertoire of the pipe organ, and also composing new music especially for the hydraulis. And we applaud and give the… cloners a big “hurrah”!

Music according to Strabo

Bronze head of Orpheus (460 BCE)

Ἀπὸ δὲ τοῦ μέλους καὶ τοῦ ῥυθμοῦ καὶ
τῶν οργάνων, καὶ ἡ μουσικὴ πᾶσα Θρᾳκία
καὶ Ἀσιᾶτις νενόμισται δῆλον δὲ ἔκ τε τῶν τόπων, ἐν οἷς αἱ Μοῦσαι τετίμηνται…

From its melody and rhythm and instruments, all music has been considered to be Thracian and Asian. And this is clear, first, from the places where the Muses have been worshipped, for Pieria and Olympus and Pimpleia and Leibethra were in ancient times Thracian places and mountains,⁽¹³⁾ though they are now held by the Macedonians; and again, Helicon was consecrated to the Muses by the Thracians who settled in Boeotia, the same who consecrated the cave of the nymphs called Leibethrides. And again, those who devoted their attention to the music of early times are called Thracians; I mean Orpheus, and Musaeus, and Thamyris; and Eumolpus, too, got his name from there. And those writers who have consecrated the whole of Asia, as far as India, to Dionysus,⁽¹⁴⁾ derive the greater part of music from there. And one writer says, “striking the Asiatic cithara”; another calls the aulos as “Berecyntian” and “Phrygian”;⁽¹⁵⁾ and some of the instruments have been called by barbarian names, “nabla” [nevel], “sambycē” [sambuca], “bárbitos”, “mágadis”, and several others…

• ⁽¹³⁾ Pimpleia was a small town nearby Dion. It was famous in antiquity as Orpheus’ place of birth. Others insisted the great musician was born and buried by the Muses in the adjacent Leibethra. His tomb, where birds used to sing, was later destroyed by a flood. Still others say that Orpheus lived in Leibethra only temporarily.

• ⁽¹⁴⁾ See e.g. the Dionysiaca (5th century CE), Nonnus’ Hellenic epic poem in 48 books, the longest surviving poem from Graeco-Roman antiquity. In Homeric dialect and dactylic hexameters, its main subject is the life of Dionysus, his expedition to India and his triumphant return.

• ⁽¹⁵⁾ Berecyntian, from Berecyntus, a mountain on the banks of the Sangarius river, in Phrygia, that was sacred to (Berecyntian) Cybele.

• >> Chronicle 12. “DO NOT MALTREAT OUR MUSIC!”
• << Chronicle 10. THE… “SUN LANGUAGE”

Next Chronicle 12. “DO NOT MALTREAT OUR MUSIC!” ● “Golden Age” and “Decline” ● Modernists and Conservatives ● Script and Notation ● Musical Accent ● Odeon and Conservatory ● Folklore ● Collective and Individual Creation ● Democracy and Art

Chronicle 10. THE… “SUN LANGUAGE”

Chronicle 10. THE… “SUN LANGUAGE”

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικο 10. Η… “ΓΛΩΣΣΑ-ΗΛΙΟΣ”

Calligraphic tree of life, Turkey (1897-98)

● Linguistics à la Turca ● İsmail Beşikçi and the Kurds ● Egyptian, Graeco-Byzantine, Arabo-Persian and Turkish Music ● Assimilation Through Religion and
Language ● Arabic Music Schools

Michales Loukovikas

“HITTITES, SUMERIANS, EGYPTIANS, ROMANS, Indians and Chinese: they all owe their existence to the Turkic race; their cultures and languages have been created by the Turks. Arabs and Jews are of Turkic origin; the prophet Muhammad was a Turk, as well. And all the languages of the world are derived from Turkish, the mother of all languages. The Kurdish language is non-existent; it is just a corrupt dialect of Turkish; the Kurds are nothing but Turkish highlanders”.

Psychotic megalomania? Absolutely! But also a… university thesis, or even more: an official state policy! This aphorism might very well be the starting point of a synopsis about the official Turkish ideology on the national question. Everyone in the Eurasian zone – except the Hellenes, the Persians, and… barbarians – owe almost everything to the Turks: their very existence, their language and culture, let alone their music!

“What about the Hellenes?”, some “Romioí” anxiously insist on asking, as they refuse to accept that they have either… never existed, or – most likely – are included among the “Romans” of the above citation quoted from the gold-bound kitabs of the sages.

“The question on the origin of the Yunanlılar [Ionians] has been clear since the time of Homer”, is the smug reply. “The great rhapsode was also a Turk called Omer. Besides, the Europeans have preserved his name almost intact: Homer”!

Well, I’m not referring to freaks of a sick mind. It is perhaps hard to believe but these ideas are championed by academics! The “Great Idea” (Megale Idea) has died out in Greece(?), but in Turkey it is alive and well, and (desires to be) the master of the world…

Anatolian languages

The Kurdish languages belong to the Iranian and Indo-Iranian branches of the Indo-European family. Therefore, they are related to the Persian (Farsi), Indian Sanskrit, Hellenic and most European languages. Even… worse (for the Turkish “linguists”), the ancient languages in the Anatolian area, still spoken or extinct, such as Hittite, have also been Indo-European.⁽¹⁾

Asia Minor/Anatolia: the multitude of peoples, languages and countries in antiquity.

• ⁽¹⁾ Most probably by the 1st century BCE, the native Anatolian languages went extinct, since the area was heavily Hellenized after the conquests of Alexander the Great. This makes Anatolian the first known branch of Indo-European to become extinct. The languages that are attested (written in cuneiform or hieroglyphs) are the following:

Hittite in central Anatolia; Carian; Lydian; Cappadocian; Pisidian; Sidetic in Pamphylia; Palaic in Paphlagonia; Isaurian on the Taurus Mountains; the Lycian branch, where Milyan is included; the Luwian branch, centered in Cilicia, but also extending northwest, where the Trojan language perhaps belonged; possibly Lycaonian; or the subsequent Pamphylian. Other Indo-European tongues in the peninsula were Phrygian and Mysian, probably belonging to the Paleo-Balkan languages, together with Thracian, Dacian, the Illyrian branch, and others, indicating that the Phrygians, and possibly the Mysians, went to Anatolia from the Balkans.

● Nationalism cries out: “one country, one people, one language!”, versus Reality, depicted in the above diverse mosaic of Anatolian countries, peoples, and languages.

Against this panspermia of ancient native Indo-European Anatolian languages and dialects, the Turkic languages (Turkish is just one of them) are relatively newcomers in Asia Minor, and belong to the Altaic family, together with the Mongolic tongues. Some linguists group the Altaic and Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) languages together (in the Ural-Altaic family). No such hypothesis connecting the Altaic and Indo-European languages has been put forward. It doesn’t matter much to Ankara’s “scientists”. So, they teach linguistics this way… à la turca:

Subject: The Sun Language Theory

“As is well known, the word soleil means sun in French. In the Turkic dialect of Yakut [Sakha] we can find the corresponding word silai. As the ‘s’ of the Yakut dialect turns to ‘g’ in the other Turkic dialects,⁽²⁾ it is self-evident [!] that the word comes from a Turkic root meaning light. Nevertheless, the Turks prefer the more common Turkish word günes. But the proof of the Turkic origin of the word soleil has been a revelation of a great linguistic and scientific truth, from which most important conclusions are derived”…

Signed (unashamedly): İ. N. Dilmen, professor.

The theory that Anatolia might be the cradle of the Indo-European languages was distorted into a pseudo-theory they had a Turkic/Turkish origin though: a) the popular hypothesis postulates their root in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and expansion by early 3rd millennium BCE; b) the earliest evidence of Turkic tongues as a separate group comes almost four millennia later in an early 8th century CE inscription found in Mongolia; c) the first reference to “Turks” appears in Chinese sources of the 6th century CE; d) Asia Minor was invaded by the Seljuks in the 11th century, ultimately resulting in permanent Turkic settlement in the peninsula.
● Above: a Hattian pair of long-horned bulls (copper,
c. 2300-2000 BCE)

• ⁽²⁾ This text makes clear that, according to Dilmen (and “linguists” à la turca), there are no Turkic languages; they are all Turkish dialects. He defined Yakut (or Sakha) as a dialect, although it is considered a language. Nationalist stranglehold on social sciences is very well known (Dilmen is a “very good” example). That’s why there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect. The most common and most purely linguistic criterion is that of mutual intelligibility. It seems logical but it’s deceptive and far from scientific:

• Once I was in Granada with two Italianas searching for a good place to listen to flamenco. I still remember my amazement when I heard the girls asking passers-by for information: they spoke Italian, the others answered in Spanish, and there was no problem of mutual intelligibility! What does that mean? That Italian and Spanish are dialects? If so, of what language?

• On the other hand, one day, while eating in the University Dining Hall, there were two Cypriots sitting at the same table opposite me and speaking their village vernacular. I understood zero, nil, nothing at all! Not even the topic of discussion! What does that mean? That Helladic Greek and Cypriot are not Hellenic dialects but separate languages?

İsmail Beşikçi and
the Kurdish Question

Since I don’t like to be branded as “nationalist”, I invoke a Turkish scientist in the true sense of the word, the sociologist İsmail Beşikçi, a man who’s spent most of his life in Turkish state prisons not because he has committed any crime, but because he’s had the courage to publicize his documented views. Beşikçi has been persecuted/prosecuted, just because he initially criticized (and polemicized later on) the Turkish ruling ideology as it was set forth in such “scientific” theses – and even more because he has studied in depth and wrote extensively about a taboo subject: the Kurdish question.⁽³⁾

Kurdish musicians (1890)

• ⁽³⁾ The on-going war between Turks and Kurds dates back to the “Turkish War of Independence”, which established a Turkish nationalist state that has repressed the human rights of Kurdish people. The Kurds felt betrayed because they had taken part in almost every “dirty job” of the Turks from the late 19th century to the 1910s, mainly in the first ethnic cleansings of the 20th century, as they thought that they “cleared” the place for themselves. The perpetrators of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Genocides (1.5 million + 900.000 + 400.000 = almost 3 million dead) were Turks, Kurds, Arabs and Caucasian Muslims: in fact, it was the genocide of heterodox people by the Islamists. But the Turks were primarily nationalists; so, they also turned against the Kurds, who finally rebelled. Major historical events, before the PKK revolt, include the Koçgiri, Sheikh Said, Ararat, and Dersim rebellions (1920, 1925, 1930, and 1938).

• Note that Beşikçi was born a Turk, not a Kurd. So he deserves our admiration even more.

The citations quoted above (except that reference to Homer) are from Beşikçi’s Historical Thesis on Turkey / The Sun Language Theory and the Kurdish Question, which cost him three years in prison, since he was “reckless” enough not to deny the existence of a nation… The first thing he took into account was the nature of the positions adopted by Turkish “scientists”, under the “guidance” of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), in 1930. Based on official documents, speeches and “scientific” theses, Beşikçi analyzed the formulation and development of the ideology of Kemalism, exposing its unscientific, racist and chauvinistic nature. In one of his numerous apologies (i.e. speeches in defense of himself), he attacked the official “Justice” of the Kemalist regime:

İsmail Beşikçi

“As a repressive state mechanism, this court threatens writers and intellectuals with imprisonment, favours police measures and secret trials, condemns scientific thought, prefers the secret services’ reports against truth and sociological findings, imposes verdicts without – at least – taking into account the defense of the accused and, using loopholes, accepts colonial oppression and tyranny, denying the reality of the existence of the Kurdish nation, something that is an objective fact above the will of people and institutions.

“This court essentially acts as an administrative and political body with a seemingly ‘independent function’ and ‘independent judgment’. It functions like the gendarmerie, police, national security service and other similar services, attempting to impose the hegemony of the official ideology through its verdicts. Rejecting an objective truth, your court is lying, considering the conclusions drawn by systematic societal research, the reliable knowledge, and the rights we advocate, as incriminating evidence.

“This court acts like the gendarmerie, police, national security
and other services, attempting to impose the hegemony
of the official ideology through its verdicts.” (İsmail Beşikçi)

Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk)

“In its verdicts regarding my books, your court states that ‘the sacred memory of Atatürk is stained’. What does that mean? It means that the Kurdish masses – men, women and children – will be continuously sent to exile, to the gallows, will be slaughtered, that laws and decrees will be shamelessly adopted on this logic – but anyone who criticizes such phenomena will be tried on the grounds of ‘libeling the sacred memory of Atatürk’. How can one consider genocide, exiles, the complete assimilation enforced in Kurdistan by the Kemalist regime as ‘sacred memory’? The division and partition of Kurdistan, the implementation of the tactics ‘divide and rule’ against the Kurdish nation, may be ‘sacred memory’ only for the imperialists and colonialists.

“The Turkish universities, on the other hand, as slaves of the official ideology, reject in principio scientific thought obscuring and denying the reality of the Kurdish nation. They consider the official ideology, which is based on fraud and indifference towards objectivity, as the only irresistible and definite reality. Thus they present this official ideology as scientific and legal. It is at this point that the ‘independent’ court and ‘independent’ judgment intervene, trying under threat of punishment to prevent any criticism of the university professors who, through political charlatanism, demand material and social privileges”…

This trial took place in 1979, just one year before the so-called “democracy” was overthrown in a coup of the army, the mighty pillar supporting at that time the regime. More trials and convictions preceded and followed for Beşikçi. Even if he could live two or three lives, he would not have time enough to serve the 200 plus years in prison imposed on him in total. Released in 1999, he was sent back to court in 2010 – that is, even after the collapse of Kemalism – for “propaganda” because of an article entitled The Rights of Nations to Self-Determination and the Kurds, which cost him 15 extra months in jail.

In January 1981, he sent a Letter to UNESCO from his prison, stigmatizing the decision of the Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization of the United Nations to declare that year as The Atatürk Year.⁽⁴⁾ A new conviction followed. Undeterred, he continued sending letters from the dungeons to international organizations that, of course, ended up in the hands of Turkish judges, who imposed new sentences. A letter to the Journalist Union of Switzerland e.g. cost him 10 years!

• ⁽⁴⁾ Note that: a) Kemal is the only person to receive such recognition by the UN “Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization”; b) education, science and culture have suffered much from his policies; c) the recipients of this recognition were, in fact, his heirs governing Turkey at the time: the military putschists; it was as if they were rewarded by UNSESCO for their… coup d’état in the previous year!

But even in his trials (where we lose count, indeed) with his apologies (several of these speeches were put together in his testimony, Defense), he persevered with remarkable courage and selflessness in order to defend the rights of the Kurdish people, relying on the public sense of justice; a sense that has ceased to govern the decisions or actions even of the “competent” international organizations.

We imagine spontaneously that we have before us İsmail B, personifying Josef K, Kafka’s main character in The Trial. But our association is rather incongruous: Beşikçi has not been a surreal figure of absurdist fiction but an indomitable hero of free thought and scientific knowledge, a symbol of our time – exactly because people like him are so rare today. However, he had the misfortune to be born in Turkey. Therefore, he will never be awarded a Nobel Prize!⁽⁵⁾

• ⁽⁵⁾ He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 but… what can one expect from a Nobel Committee that has awarded the prize to persons such as Henry Kissinger (1973), Menachem Begin (1978), Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres (1994), Barack Obama (2009), and the neo-liberal European Union (2012) – but has not honoured Mahatma Gandhi?

Âşık Veysel

I’m certainly not to blame for politicizing the issue of linguistics à la turca, as it is an issue profoundly political. Lay, if you will, the blame on Alain Gheerbrant who “cast the first stone” by paralleling Mustafa Kemal to Âşık Veysel (see Chronicle 9). No doubt, there are even worse cases. One thing is to credit “exclusively” the Turks with Anatolian music; another thing is to do the same with the music of Constantinople; especially if we bear in mind that the Ottomans described this music as Arabo-Persian; it was called Turkish, or even Ottoman, only after the Republic was established, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire…

● There are cases of “friendly fire” on this issue, which is, nevertheless, anything but crucial. It’s just a matter of orderliness and correct terminology. See e.g. the starting point of Stéphane Yerasimos, the Greek-born director of the French Institute of Anatolian Studies, when he presented an album with old “Ottoman music” featuring, among others, compositions by Dimitrie Cantemir, who was anything but Ottoman:⁽⁶⁾

Cantemir on a Romanian stamp

• ⁽⁶⁾ Cantemir was a great intellectual (philosopher, musicologist, composer, linguist, ethnographer, geographer, historian), and prince of Moldavia where he learned Greek and Latin and acquired a profound knowledge of the classics. He lived in forced exile for 23 years in Constantinople, where he studied at the Patriarchate’s Greek Academy, wrote about music and also composed. How is it possible to classify his music as “Ottoman” when the composer also fought against the Ottomans as an ally of Peter the Great in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1710–11?

“This project of performing Ottoman music on original instruments”, Yerasimos wrote in the booklet, “arose from a simple question: why not apply the method that has been already successfully followed in Europe for several decades, and try to re-discover the spirit and the performing style of the Ottoman music of the great period – the 17th and 18th centuries?”

Constantinople / from Byzantium to Istanbul, by Stéphane Yerasimos

● The Empire that substituted the once powerful Byzantine Empire after its downfall was Ottoman, indeed, as it was controlled by this tribe. But is this sufficient reason to classify also the music of post-Byzantine Constantinople under the same heading? My objection is due to the explicitly ethnic import of the term Ottoman as it means Turkish. On the contrary, the term Byzantine is supranational, referring in general to “the eastern part of the Late Roman Empire that, after the fall of Rome, continued as its successor until 1453.” In both these empires, the Byzantine and Ottoman, culture was a collective work of all ethnicities living within their boundaries. Ethnic identities can be found only in cultures that have been cultivated by peoples distinguished for the originality of their contributions to human civilization. If e.g. there has been no Phoenician civilization, given that the Phoenicians were heavily influenced by the Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Hellenes, in the same way there’s been no Ottoman civilization either. Let alone that, compared to the Ottomans, the contribution of the Phoenicians, especially in the spread of the alphabet, has been far more important.

Christianism and Islam: Differences in Assimilation

QUITE DIFFERENT APPROACH ADOPTED ALAIN DANIÉLOU, Gheerbrant’s compatriot and namesake. As an adviser to UNESCO’s International Music Council, he supervised several outstanding recordings of world music, such as Unesco Collection: A Musical Anthology of the Orient; Musical Atlas; Musical Sources; and Anthology of Indian Classical Music / A Tribute to Alain Daniélou. As a producer of the Cairo recordings, Taqâsîm and Layâlî, on instrumental or vocal modal improvisations, he formulated a thought-provoking synopsis that begins as follows:

Alain Daniélou playing sitar (1987)

“The melodic system peculiar to the Arabic-speaking peoples of the countries bordering on the Eastern and Southern shores of the Mediterranean is the result of a long evolution. It derives from the adaptation by the Arab conquerors of the ancient Greek, Persian, and Egyptian systems, which gradually developed into a unified and highly original art.

“‘Until the 13th century the theorists refer to Greek theories, but subsequently there arose a distinctly independent theory and an art, cultivated at the court of the Caliphs, which became increasingly refined and elaborate. Until the end of the 19th century, this art continued to develop under the influence of fresh Persian and Byzantine elements, which had become more prominent owing to the Turkish domination’ (d’Erlanger).”

“The melodic system of the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Mediterranean derives from the adaptation of the ancient Greek, Persian, and Egyptian systems”… “Until the end of the 19th century, this art continued to develop under the influence of fresh Persian and Byzantine elements.”
(Alain Daniélou, Rodolphe d’Erlanger)

The conclusions we can draw are quite astonishing, indeed: until the eve of their empire’s downfall, the Ottomans – at least in the domain of music – were still under the influence of the empire they had abolished half a millennium before! It was natural that the Arabic-speaking peoples, then vassals of the Ottomans in the region, were equally influenced. In this way, the Byzantine echoe echoed and resonated throughout the Mediterranean: the Christians, mainly in the western part of mare nostrum, were influenced through Byzantine ecclesiastical chant, at least until the 11th century when, due to the Schism, Gregorian chant became obligatory for the Catholics; the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire in the Orient were also influenced – not by ecclesiastical chant, of course, but by the erstwhile Byzantine secular music.

Lady With Tambourine, oil painting, Qajar period, Iran

Persian influences may be considered natural, because the Iranians had already realized their self-determination, having their own independent state. But what can anybody say about Byzantine music, especially secular, which – supposedly – ceased to exist as soon as the state that gave birth to it was erased from the map? How could it possibly influence the Mediterranean on the eve of the 20th century, and even impregnate it with “fresh” musical elements?

Trying to resume what Alain Daniélou and Rodolphe d’Erlanger have said, and the thoughts they have induced, we can imagine a historical model as follows: the Arabs (those coming from the Arabian Peninsula) were cultivated adopting the ancient Hellenic, Persian, and Egyptian cultures. They knew, therefore, very well that their empire would not last long if they were not able to assimilate the civilized Mediterranean peoples they had conquered. It was an indispensable prerequisite to safeguard their caliphate and stay in charge.

The Arabs knew their empire would not last long if they did not assimilate the ancient peoples they had conquered. This could only happen through religion (Islam) and language (Arabic), breaking the ties of these peoples with their glorious past. All they needed was a combination of incentives and coercion.

Under the circumstances, this could only happen through religion, first of all, and secondarily (but equally important), language. It was absolutely necessary for the Arabs to break the ties of these ancient peoples with their glorious past, making them convert to Islam and (even better) adopt Arabic. Hence they could exert undisputed control over their vast empire. A combination of incentives and coercion was all they needed. It was a rather moderate tactic compared with the one endorsed by the Christians to convert the Hellenes, unleashing an outright violent campaign, a long, widespread genocide (see Chronicles 23-24, The Genocide of the Hellenes and The Triumph of Cretinism).

When the Ottomans took over the Caliphate, they also adopted Arabic culture that had sprung out like an amalgam from these ancient civilizations. Note that this synthesis started bearing fruit only in the 13th century, after Constantinople fell for the first time to the Crusaders and Venetians in 1204. No similar cultural renaissance took place during the Ottoman period. That’s why there were still “fresh Persian and Byzantine elements” into the Court music and art until the last days of the Ottoman Empire. What exactly was the Ottoman contribution? It was not so much musical but mainly political – through this wide, unified area – allowing these “elements” to have a great impact on every corner of the empire.

Arabic Music Schools – Turkish Music

Salah el Mahdi

ACCORDING TO THE TUNISIAN PROFESSOR Salah el Mahdi, who spoke at the International musicological symposium at Delphi on Rhythms, Modes and Scales of Mediterranean Music in 1988,⁽⁷⁾ the Near East was influenced by the “old Turco-Byzantine music, extending to the Balkans and Caucasus”:

• ⁽⁷⁾ The European Cultural Centre of Delphi’s English text concerning this International Meeting renders the Greek musical term τρόπος (mode) as… manner. Unfortunately, no one there noticed it to correct it…

“Arabic culture is an integral and significant part of Mediterranean culture”, he said. “The modes of Arabic music are classified into four major schools:

“a) The Maghreb School; it is represented by the Arabo-Andalusian musical heritage introduced into this area by the Arabo-Andalusian refugees in the 14th and 15th centuries. This music survives today across North Africa, along with the old music of the Libyan people of this region.^(h)

• ^(h) Ancient Libya: The name referred to a) the region west of the Nile Valley, corresponding more or less to the modern Maghreb (North Africa except Egypt); b) the country immediately west of Egypt; or c) to the whole of Africa that was still more or less a terra incognita. Herodotus wrote that the Phoenicians carried out the first periplus of “Libya” (Africa) on behalf of the Egyptians. Talking about the Libyan people, Mahdi most probably referred to the Berbers and the rest of the Maghrebis.

“b) The Near East School; it is represented by the musical heritage of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and, of course, Egypt. In part, this school has influenced Libya and Tunisia, which thus participate in two schools, as they are found in between. The Near East School has been influenced by the old Turco-Byzantine music, extending to the Balkans and Caucasus.

“c) The Arabo-Persian School; it is represented by the Abbasid musical heritage that was created in their great capital, Baghdad. It’s been the musical act in Iraq, Iran and all the [former] Soviet Republics of Central Asia as far as China.

“d) The Arabian Peninsula School; it includes Saudi Arabia, Yemen, all the Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman, and has had a twofold influence: from India and Africa.”

Now that we are sufficiently informed, and also have the necessary standard of comparison, we may have some fun enjoying Bernard Mauguin’s sophistries:

“Born in the shadow of Islam, Turkish classical music has been confused early in its history with art music of Persia and the Arab peoples. This common origin has been the cause of a persistent misunderstanding and, in general, little distinction is made between these various musical forms, which are usually grouped together under the vague heading of ‘Oriental music’…

“However, just as a knowledgeable listener can easily distinguish a work of Bach from a work of Berlioz, he could never confuse the playing of a Turkish musician with that of an Arab or an Iranian musician. Classical Turkish music has its own distinct personality”…

Johann Sebastian Bach

Wow! We are talking about such colossal differences: those between Bach and Berlioz! Who would have the guts to disagree? But these are differences of eras, between two composers (one baroque, the other romantic) who created in the same tradition of Occidental “classical” music during the so-called common practice period (baroque, classical, romantic). Racial differences (i.e. German vs. French) were rather insignificant. The same applies to the distinction among Turkish, Arab and Iranian musicians: their main difference, especially before the creation of national states, was also a difference of eras. If Mauguin compared Bach not with Berlioz but with Brahms, he would have noticed that they too are “easily distinguishable”. However, such a comparison between two composers of common origin (both Bach and Brahms were Germans) would have deprived him of any pretext for his chicaneries.

Bach vs. Berlioz: not German vs. French music but
baroque vs. romanticism (plus genius vs. average…)

No doubt that if instead of Western theorists we had their Oriental colleagues, things might have been even worse, since everyone would have “trumpeted one’s own merchandise”. Salah in Delphi e.g. spoke of Turco-Byzantine music because he was not a Turk; that’s why he gave no due emphasis to the role of Persian music theorists, something that the Iranian Hormoz Farhat did; but he in turn “forgot” the contribution of Byzantine musicians, which Simon Karás put forward at the forefront – and so on…

What the Orient needs is an era of Renaissance and Enlightenment – sine qua non – something that the Occident intentionally obstructs for its own interests. These interests, I’m afraid, are served, consciously or not, by those Western theoreticians who can’t see the forest for the trees (or, if you like, focus on the finger and can’t see it’s pointing to the moon), i.e. focusing on the secondary (the local differences in music), and minimizing the primary (its common features). The classic recipe: divide et impera! Or rather: διαίρει καὶ βασίλευε, as the one who first adopted this tactic was probably Philip of Macedon…

• >> Chronicle 11. “MUSIC IS THRACIAN AND ASIAN”
• << Chronicle 9. THE CELEBRATED TRÍCHORDON

Next Chronicle 11. “MUSIC IS THRACIAN AND ASIAN” ● “Barbarian” Contribution to Hellenic Instrument Making and Playing ● Antiquarianism-Ancestor Worship ● Multi-String Instruments and Psalteries ● Diapason, Harmony, Polyphony ● Music, Poetry, Nation ● Folk and Erudite Music ● Hydraulis ● Crusades ● Strabo on Music

Chronicle 6. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Jondo)

Chronicle 6. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Jondo)

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 6. ΙΝΔΟΪΒΗΡΙΚΟ ΤΟΞΟ (Jondo)

● Roma, Bartók, Pohren and Flamenco
● Lorca, Falla, Pedrell and Cante Jondo

Michales Loukovikas

IT’S A PLEASANT SURPRISE whenever you meet the familiar figures of ancient Hellenes emerging from the pages of books about other peoples’ ways of life and expression – such as fado and flamenco – and also playing leading roles in legends that are probably unknown to modern Greeks.

No doubt “casting” those heroic Hellenes in the mythological dramatis personae of the world is not so strange a phenomenon. It is a measure of the splendour of ancient Grecian civilization. But what’s quite unexpected is to find such legends in books dealing with music (see the previous Chronicle).

Indeed, there are so many myths, stories, and tales, about Heracles, Odysseus and, even more, Alexander! And it’s no coincidence at all. It’s them that have defined our common historical background: the westward voyages of Heracles and Odysseus, and the eastward drive of Alexander, outline this wider area, the one that, schematically more or less, I described as the historical space of the Mediterranean.

Alexander’s exploits in the Orient are still widely acclaimed and echo in so many legends about Iskandar. In the western Mediterranean, on the contrary, the whole picture is rather obscure; it lacks clarity. It was quite natural for me to focus my attention there for an extra reason: until recently almost everyone in Greece referred to the Eastern Mediterranean, not just as the “gravitational” centre of this historical space, but as though it constituted an area apart from both the western half of mare nostrum, and also the eastern extension of the Mediterranean space into continental Asia.⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ Now everybody’s talking of the one, unified Mediterranean. Well, that is something! Once upon a time – not so long ago – the cliché and catch phrase (overused ad nauseam) was “ἡ καθ’ ἡμᾶς Ἀνατολή”, meaning something like “our own Orient”, and referring to the long gone Hellenistic East. The exact meaning differed widely depending on the person using it. The best description of the phrase I know is Cavafy’s poem In the Year 200 B.C. (see Chronicle 2). The worst ones are found in the speeches of politicians who, in the past, combined it with the so-called “Megale Idea” (“Great Idea”, about an even “Greater Hellas”), which proved to be not a “great idea” at all, and has since become a national nightmare…

The Rock of Gibraltar, the European Pillar of Heracles (1850)

Andalusia, the western end of our historical space, has received
so many cultural elements from its eastern end, India, that
the wide scope of exchange becomes more than evident.

Well, I searched for evidence to the contrary; and I arrived to the conclusion that there’s no better and more convincing example than music – or rather, culture – of Andalusia: the western end of our historical space has received – and indeed repeatedly – so many cultural elements from its eastern end, India, that the wide scope of exchange becomes more than evident.

If the Hellenes have also been involved in this give and take, so much the better. But apart from les enfants terribles de l’antiquité, there are some others, as well, that delineate our historical space; a quite humble people who, without having bequeathed to mankind splendid monuments of art and literature, were able to leave their indelible mark wherever they passed through, despite the relentless persecution they suffered. I’m talking about the Gypsies, the Roma who, in their own way, remind us that civilization is not only sublime art and culture; it is also the primitive but authentic way of human expression – which, we need never to forget, was the starting point of every art form.

So, let’s go and meet them remaining on Iberian soil: from the world of fado in Portugal, we cross into that of flamenco in Andalusia – and what we hear first of all is… a passionate dispute about the origin of flamenco! It’s an old controversy still going on strong between the advocates of an Andalusian birth certificate and those who see the genre as a Romani creation.

Gypsy dance in the gardens of the Alcázar, in front of Charles V Pavilion, by Alfred Dehodencq (1851)

Even prejudiced persons are obliged to recognize that the Gypsies – or at least some of their tribes – have an innate talent for music. They are quick though to assert that the Roma are not distinguished for their creative inspiration, but just for their skill in the execution of music. Although self-contradictory, this view was expressed, in all seriousness, even from authoritative personalities, perhaps with good intentions. It’s true such controversies erupted in countries, like those in Eastern Europe, with a strong gypsy presence, during the formation of the so-called “national schools” in music. But the root of the problem goes far back:

Music was not a lucrative – and hence respectable – occupation for
centuries, when the only professional musicians around were Gypsies.
After the economic conditions had changed and many locals became
musicians, it was almost impossible to “purify” the local musical idioms…

Music as a profession was not a lucrative – and hence respectable – occupation for centuries, when the only professional musicians around were Gypsies. After the economic conditions had changed and many locals had become musicians, it was almost impossible to identify and set apart the indigenous musical elements from gypsy additions – or with a different phraseology, to “purify” local musical idioms. Still, we cannot blame the Gypsies for this “problem” (if, indeed, there was one)…

Béla Bartók

“Contact with foreign material,” according to Béla Bartók, the celebrated Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist, “does not merely imply the exchange of melodies, but – and this is even more important – is also a stimulus for new styles to arise… The current situation of Eastern European folk music can be summarized as follows: As a result of the continuous interaction of several peoples’ folk music, a tremendous wealth of melodies and melody types has emerged… Therefore, the lack of racial purity that has appeared as a final result has had crucially beneficial resonances. A complete separation from foreign influence means stagnation; well-assimilated foreign impulses offer possibilities of enrichment.”

“Contact with foreign material is a stimulus for new styles. Racial purity means stagnation; well-assimilated foreign impulses offer possibilities of enrichment.” (Béla Bartók)

Only racists would reject such important conclusions. But nationalism is also a problem, especially in an area like Eastern Europe as it was already described. Even Bartók was not immune to such “national sentiments”. When he realized that Hungarian folk songs traditionally employed by “classical” composers were not autochthonous, he decided to make a research. So, in 1908, he and Zoltán Kodály, his colleague and compatriot, travelled into the countryside to collect old Magyar folk melodies, which had previously been categorized as “gypsy music”. In contrast, they discovered that these folk melodies were based on pentatonic scales, similar to those in Asian folk traditions, as those of Anatolia, Central Asia and Siberia.

Gypsy Girl with a Mandolin,
by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

● First of all, the Magyars themselves are anything but autochthonous: they came from the Urals to what is now Hungary rather recently: in the 10th century CE. The Roma perhaps arrived there somehow later but without plundering the area around, as the Magyars did. (Alas, this is the reason why there’s no Roma state today…) Why, then, should the Magyars care so much about indigenity? What Bartók and Kodály proved after all was that old Magyar folk melodies originated in Asia, and therefore, were not autochthonous either!

● Concerning the other melodic treasures of this area, Bartók said: “As a result of the continuous interaction of several peoples’ folk music, a tremendous wealth of melodies and melody types has emerged.” All of these melodies and melody types have been neither Austro-Hungarian, nor Czecho-Slovakian, nor Serbo-Croatian, nor Romanian or even Romani (since the Gypsies have also participated in this give and take). They belong to all without exception – and this is quite annoying to all nationalists!

● As regards the erudite compositions implied above, the “classic” example is Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, which he based on popular tunes and melodies performed by Romani bands of the time. Another famous work (by a non-Magyar composer) is Brahms’ Hungarian Dances – his most profitable, although only three out of the 21 dances (11, 14, and 16) are his own compositions.

In a land of “gypsy violins” famous worldwide, playing mainly heptatonic scales, a heated controversy broke out in 1933 regarding the point at issue. When Bartók intervened, he claimed that:

“If we want to be precise, the term ‘gypsy music’ is incorrect, and what is described as ‘gypsy music’ is in fact nothing but Hungarian music played by Gypsies”…

Alas, this “contact with foreign material” seems rather a “great idea” as long as it excludes Romani contributions! Nota bene, any “pure”, “autochthonous”, melody anywhere in the world would be tantamount to a chimerical “Holy Grail”!

Gypsy school (of violin and other strings in Hungary), by Janos Valentiny (1896)

Gypsies in Andalusia and Flamenco

LET’S RETURN to Andalusia and flamenco to delve into the substance of this point at issue. The cultural substratum here is far richer in finds, with the successive layers of several civilizations. It is obvious how misleading the dilemma “Gypsies or locals?”, “black or white?” is – and if you don’t suffer from colour blindness, you realize very soon that this can be nowhere true.

“In flamenco music”, says Christian Scholze, “there are elements of Arab, Indian, North African, Greek and Jewish influence, and the respective proportions of these are hotly debated by flamencologists. What they do agree on is that the roots of flamenco lie in the suppression of the Gypsies. Wherever Gypsies found refuge and shelter over the centuries are today’s centres of flamenco.”

Voilà! There is Greek influence detected in flamenco! Most important, though seemingly paradoxical: among all those cultures referred to by Scholze, the only one that did not have “bearers” actually present in Andalusia, when flamenco’s formation began during the 16th century, was Hellenic culture. Additionally, at that time, both Greece and the Byzantine Empire were not “on the map”, having already lost their independence.

What I mean to say is that, apart from the local andaluces, there were at that time in Andalusia Arabs and North African Moors; there were also Gypsies (as “bearers” of North Indian culture), and Jews. They were all the heterodox people that the decrees of Ferdinand and Isabella had declared personae non grata in the name of religious “purity”, a kind of racism, in order to consolidate the “new (Catholic Castilian) order”. That was the end result of the Crusades: a sanctified ethnic cleansing!

Death and Apocalypse, by Hieronymus Bosch

The dilemma was clear-cut: convert to Catholicism or get the hell out of here! And “for fear – even terror – of the Jews” and the rest of the heterodox people, the infamous “Holy” Inquisition began a persecution spree “in the name of God”. Most Arabs and Jews (the Gypsies had no… address and it was difficult to track them down) were forced out of their homes, finding refuge mainly in Morocco and hoping that they would soon return – a hope shared by all refugees such as those from Asia Minor. Others (mainly Jews, not Moors who found themselves in a familiar environment in the Maghreb) chose to emigrate and ended up in the lands that until recently were Byzantine, but had already passed under the control of the Ottomans – inter alia, in Thessalonica.

All those who stayed without changing their religion, or some others, who were judged as insincere in their “repentance”, went underground, lived together and closed ranks out of necessity, despite all their differences, in order to confront the common enemy. Very soon this unlikely mixture of people was “enriched” with “new blood”: the Andalusians, who passed in turn to the other side due to various problems with the new authorities. The conquest of America, you see, started then, and the necessary “manpower” was recruited mainly in Andalusia.

Flamenco was born in such circumstances from these fugitives. But where were the Greeks? And how did they manage – being absent and from afar – to exert their influence? There can be only one answer: thanks to the splendour of their civilization – even though it was already a relic of the past.

El jaleo, by John Singer Sargent (1882)

An eristic could possibly dismiss scornfully Christian Scholze. His view, however, is not new-fangled. It is shared by most musicologists who say more or less the same. The editors of the Classic CD magazine e.g., publishing an interview with the guitarist Paco Peña, epitomized the origins of flamenco as follows:

“A synthesis of several styles, the music of the Gypsies at the base of the Iberian Peninsula comes from Moorish, Byzantine and Jewish sounds, and at a certain point of its evolution it acquired the name flamenco.” (These editors forgot a most important parameter: India).

If that is not enough for you, here’s the American flamencologist and guitarist Donn E. Pohren, author of a trilogy on flamenco (The Art of Flamenco, Lives and Legends of Flamenco, A Way of Life) translated into many languages, and teacher of the Andalusians, in Jerez de la Frontera’s Cátedra de Flamencología – without “lecturing” at all, as he has experienced flamenco’s way of life side by side with Gypsy and local performers of this music before it became fashionable:

“Contrary to a widespread belief, the Spanish gypsies were not the sole creators of the mysterious art called flamenco. Rather, it is generally agreed that flamenco is a mixture of the music of the many cultures that have played important roles, directly or indirectly, throughout the centuries in Andalusia, the most important of these being the Muslim, Jewish, Indo-Pakistani and Byzantine.”

It’s the very first paragraph in the main part of his book dealing with The Art of Flamenco when he sets out to examine it. This chapter, Origin and Background, ends up with the etymology of flamenco: “Where did the term flamenco come from?”, Pohren wonders. “Again, no one knows, but theories abound”… We have already met the fugitives who probably created flamenco. Dismissing several theories about the origin of the word, rather picturesque (e.g. Flemish, flamingo, flame, etc),⁽²⁾ Pohren presents the most credible:

• ⁽²⁾ Flemish, due to the Spanish Jews who found refuge in Flanders; flamingo, because of the supposed similarities in posture between the bird and a flamenco bailaor(!); and flame, as a graphic metaphor of flamenco’s essence.

“Possibly the most likely theory states that the word ‘flamenco’ is a mispronunciation of the Arabic words ‘felag’ and ‘mengu’ (felagmengu), which means ‘fugitive peasant’. It is likely that this term was borrowed from the Arabs (Arabic was a common language in Andalusia at that time) and applied to all the persecuted people who fled to the mountains. Through usage in Spanish ‘felagmengu’ was transformed into ‘flamenco’, until eventually the term flamenco was adopted by the fugitives themselves and in turn applied to their music.”

Cante jondo (Lorca, Falla, Pedrell)

If all the above are again not enough for you, I need to resort to… indisputable sages – meaning in other words to invoke the views of acclaimed Spaniards who surely know what they’re talking about. Well, how about Federico García Lorca, his friend and tutor, Manuel de Falla, or his mentor’s mentor, Felip(e) Pedrell?⁽³⁾

• ⁽³⁾ The composer, guitarist and musicologist Felip Pedrell has been the instructor of almost every outstanding composer of Spain’s “National School”: not only Manuel de Falla, but also Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados and Joaquín Turina.

García Lorca used the title Poema del Cante Jondo for a collection of poems in 1921. The next year he helped Falla in the organization of the Concurso de Cante Jondo, held in Granada on 13 and 14 of June 1922, with a memorable series of performances held at the Alhambra. Cante jondo or grande (deep, great song) is the most breathtaking of the flamenco forms, the most authentic or pure and, in the interwar period, the most marginalized. That’s why the two friends tried to support it. The other two forms – cante (inter)medio and chico (intermediate and small) – were considered as rather vulgarized forms, a point of view perhaps corresponding to the realities of the interwar period; Lorca will soon present his own well-grounded explanation.

Federico García Lorca, by Emily Tarleton

To promote the Concurso, Falla wrote the essay El cante jondo (canto primitivo andaluz), in which he presented the results of his own research indicating that the primary foreign influences contributing to the origins of jondo were three: Byzantine ecclesiastical music coming from the eastern Mediterranean; Moorish music from North Africa and Arabia; and especially that distinct music of India and its rhythms, brought by gitanos, who began arriving in Spain more than five hundred years ago. Lorca on his part gave a lecture on February 19, 1922. Citing Falla, he also put forward these three historical events that shaped jondo:

• “a) the Spanish Church’s adoption of [Byzantine] liturgical chant;
• “b) the Saracen invasion; and
• “c) the arrival in Spain of numerous bands of Gypsies.⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ Lorca’s English texts on Cante jondo and Duende are based on A. S. Kline’s translations.

“This mysterious migrant folk”, Lorca went on, “arriving in Andalusia, united ancient indigenous elements to what they themselves had brought, and gave cante jondo its definitive form. That is shown by the qualifying term ‘gitana’ which the siguiriya retains. This is not to say, of course, that cante jondo is purely gypsy, since Gypsies exist throughout Europe and elsewhere in our peninsula, while these songs are only nurtured in Andalusia. It is a cante purely andaluz, the seeds of which existed in this region before the Gypsies arrived.”

Except local elements, there are Graeco-Byzantine, Arabo-Moorish,
Indo-Romani, perhaps even Jewish influences detected in flamenco
(García Lorca, Falla, Pedrell, Pohren, Scholze, et al.)

Flamenco guitar

In Falla’s conclusions, as well as in Lorca’s lecture, we find the same contributing factors in the formation of flamenco; with only one exception: Jewish influence is conspicuously absent… Regarding the Romani contribution, Lorca evaluated it in its proper dimensions, avoiding to speak neither in favour of an Andalusian parthenogenesis – for the Gypsies “gave cante jondo its definitive form” – nor of a Romani birth: despite the many similarities he cited among key elements of cante jondo and some Indian songs, mostly love songs (he will deal about that later, as well), Lorca persistently insisted that “jondo is a cante purely andaluz”.

Indeed, flamenco was impossible to be born in India; but, without the Roma, not even in Andalusia; just like rebetiko: it was impossible to be born in Asia Minor; but, without the Anatolian refugees, not even in Greece; or just like the blues: it was impossible to be born in Africa; but, without the black slaves, not even in America. If this is true about the blues, an almost exclusively black music, you can imagine how much more relevant it is in the cases of flamenco and rebétiko where two locals became leading figures: Paco de Lucía and Basiles Tsitsanes.

Flamenco was impossible to be born in India; without the Roma not
even in Andalusia. Rebetiko was impossible to be born in Asia Minor;
without the Anatolians not even in Greece. Blues was impossible
to be born in Africa; without the blacks not even in America.

Rebet, etching by Tassos

“Every cloud has a silver lining”: the truth of the apophthegm is revealed in these diamonds of musical culture. We can now enjoy their sparkling beauty thanks to the Roma, the Anatolians and the black Africans – those that played the role of a catalyst in processing and refinement of these diamonds of the Orphean art – who, nevertheless, suffered tremendously. Of course, some people had to play the role of the villains. For the Gypsies, among others, the villain was Timur. For the Anatolians, it was Kemal. For the blacks? Here we lose count…

Lorca also analyzed the difference between cante jondo and flamenco in general – “an essential distinction based on antiquity, structure and spirit”:

“The essential difference is that the origin of cante jondo must be sought in the primitive musical systems of India, that is, in the first manifestations of song… It is cante imbued with the mysterious colour of primordial ages; flamenco is relatively modern and it cannot be said to acquire its definitive form until the 18th century…

“Spiritual colour versus local colour: that is the profound difference. Cante jondo is, then, the rarest specimen of primitive song, the oldest in Europe, bearing in its notes the naked shiver of emotion of the first oriental races. Manuel de Falla affirms that the Gypsy siguiriya is the only genre on our continent that preserves in all its purity the primary qualities of the primitive songs of the oriental peoples.”

Let’s have a closer look at this siguiriya gitana, an appropriate song to express sorrow, deep pain, despair. According to Falla, it is the archetype of cante jondo, as Lorca defined it in another lecture entitled Architecture of Cante Jondo (1931). Whether the siguiriya is “gitana” or “purely andaluz” we better leave it to the Spaniards. For us outsiders, far more interesting is the common position of the three musicians mentioned above, namely Pedrell, Falla, and Lorca (he was also a musician, let’s not forget). I quote from his lecture of 1922:

Felip Pedrell

“The great master Felipe Pedrell, one of the first Spaniards to treat questions of folklore scientifically, writes, in his magnificent Cancionero popular español:

“‘Musical orientalism survives in various popular songs and is deeply rooted in our nation through the influence of ancient Byzantine civilization on the ritual used in the Spanish Church, from the conversion of our country to Christianity until the 11th century when the Roman liturgy [i.e. Gregorian chant] can be said to have been fully introduced.’⁽⁵⁾

• ⁽⁵⁾ So, we can also speak of siguiriya griega, or bizantina, not only of indiana, gitana or andaluza!

“Falla adds to this statement of his old master, specifying the elements of Byzantine liturgical chant revealed in siguiriya, which are: the tonal modes of primitive systems (not be confused with those known as Greek modes), the enharmony inherent in those modes, and the lack of metric rhythm in the melodic line.

“‘These same properties characterize certain Andalusian songs which appeared long after the Spanish Church’s adoption of Byzantine liturgical music, songs which have a close affinity with the music which in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia is still called… «the music of the Moors of Granada».’ [The siguiriya gitana has] ‘specific forms and characteristics distinct from its relationship to sacred chant and the music of the Moors of Granada’.”

Falla, concludes Lorca, “has found an extraordinary agglutinative Gypsy element… of Indic origin.”

“Chanting is the earliest form of language”. (Falla, García Lorca)

Nevertheless, the findings of this triad (Pedrell, Falla and Lorca) go far beyond the relatively recent past, to prehistoric times. Lorca explains:

Manuel de Falla: “El… músico brujo”

“The essential similarities that Manuel de Falla notes between cante jondo and certain songs of India are:

“‘Enharmonics, as in intermediate modulation; a restricted melodic line, rarely exceeding the compass of a sixth; and the reiterative almost obsessive use of a single note, a process proper to certain forms of incantation, including recitations which might be termed prehistoric, and have led many to suppose that chanting is the earliest form of language.’⁽⁶⁾

• ⁽⁶⁾ Chanting: a short, simple series of syllables or words sung on or intoned to the same note or a limited range of notes; a monotonous rhythmic call; a primitive “recitative”, vocalism; prosody (“melos of speech”, according to Aristoxenus), i.e. the “melody” produced during ancient Hellenic speech (see Chronicle 12, footnote 7, and Chronicle 14, Music as the Mother of Speech).

“In this manner cante jondo, especially siguiriya, creates the impression of sung prose, destroying all sense of rhythmic metre, although in fact its literary texts are assonant tercets and quatrains.”

Going way back into history, we can parallel this incantation-recitation with the so-called paracatalogē (παρακαταλογή) of ancient Hellenic tragedy, “a kind of melodramatic recitation of tragic and pathetic parts”, as Giorgos Iohannou says, “something intermediate between the catalogē, i.e. the usual recitation of chants, and the proper song, the ode.” Note that Iohannou defines as a “chant” even the catalogē. Let us not forget that the ancient drama was all in verse. That is why the modern Grecian word for song, tragoudi (τραγούδι), comes from tragedy, while out of paracatalogē the word paralogē (παραλογή, ballad) was coined. Besides, the above quotation comes from an Iohannou’s collection of ballads.

The paracatalogē was accompanied – usually by aulos; in this sense it differed from the catalogē; as a melodramatic recitation, it was not a sung recitative; it also differed from the ode, because there was no melos (melody), other than a certain rhythmic emphasis, and the tonal or pitch accent of the ancient Hellenic language, which was musical, not dynamic like modern Greek. The tragic and pathetic effect was achieved by inserting paracatalogē within sung parts (ἐν ταῖς ᾠδαῖς). This technique enhanced the dramatic appeal of the text.

In Hellenic tragedy, “paracatalogē, a kind of melodramatic recitation
of tragic and pathetic parts, was something intermediate between the catalogē, the usual recitation of chants, and the proper song, the ode.” (Giorgos Iohannou)

• >> Chronicle 7. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Duende)
• << Chronicle 5. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

Next Chronicle 7. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Duende) ● Lorca and Duende ● Pohren and Flamenco: Dance and Guitar ● Cithara and Pandura

Roman sarcophagus with scenes of Bacchus depicting various ancient instruments:
tympanum, aulos and cymbala (210-220 CE)

Chronicle 19. PHOENICIA’S STROKE OF FORTUNE

Chronicle 19. PHOENICIA’S STROKE OF FORTUNE

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 19. ΦΟΙΝΙΚΗ: Η ΕΥΝΟΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΤΥΧΗΣ

● Phoenicians and Sea Peoples ● Minoan Eruption on Thera ● Trojan War and Bronze Age Collapse (B)

Michales Loukovikas

PARADOXICALLY ENOUGH, “A CRITICAL TURNING POINT in history, an important element mentioned by many sources, and yet given consideration by virtually none, is the simple fact that – in the midst of a cataclysm which destroyed almost every city in the area of the eastern Mediterranean – the Phoenician cities remained untouched… accorded a special status by the invading peoples”.

Such is the standpoint of Sanford Holst, a specialist on Phoenicia, in his analysis on Sea Peoples and the Phoenicians: A Critical Turning Point in History, adding equally unequivocally:

“There was a relationship or partnership of some nature between the Sea Peoples and the Phoenicians”…

“A critical turning point in history mentioned by many sources, and yet given consideration by virtually none, is that, in the midst of a cataclysm destroying almost every city in eastern Mediterranean, Phoenicia remained untouched, accorded a special status by the invading peoples… There was a relationship or partnership between the Sea Peoples and Phoenicians”. (Sanford Holst)

Warship and winged hippocamp
on a Phoenician coin

However, as he is “Philo-Phoenician”, he tries to minimize the importance of the Minoans in his text regarding the Origin of the Phoenicians, Interactions in the Early Mediterranean Region. Reversing historical periods, he opts to portray the Minoans as the Phoenicians’ “pupils”, and uses the usual “beautiful” phrases as a cover-up:

“Around 2000 BC”, he maintains (but in reality, circa 3000 BCE), “the beautiful Minoan civilization arose on Crete, accompanied by many indications of ‘Eastern influence’. By that time the Phoenicians had long been established as major sea traders on the Mediterranean. [!] That the Minoans received influences from them and others in the form of specific pottery, architectural practices, social practices, legends and language are very much in evidence”…

Such assertions, by the way, were made by the great archaeologist Leonard Woolley, but eventually, they backfired and were discarded as entirely erroneous (see Chronicle 27. An Archaeologist’s Waterloo).

Ship with dolphins: wall painting replica
from Minoan Thera (17th century BCE)

The Phoenicians may be the “darlings” of most historians; but none would ever dare to claim that their civilization was older than that of the Minoans. Consequently, the latter were the real masters, and their good pupils, as it turned out, were not the Mycenaeans but the Phoenicians, when the Cretans voyaged to Canaan very often for trade.

“The Phoenicians began to develop as a seafaring, manufacturing, trading nation when the Cretans – the first masters of the Mediterranean – were overthrown by the Greeks”, R. A. Guisepi points out in his text on The Phoenicians.

The Minoan Eruption on Thera

They probably ventured out on the open sea some time before, in the early 16th century, trying to profit from the misfortunes of the Cretans (mainly due to the Minoan eruption), but in vain: the Minoans were still standing, and afterwards they were succeeded by the Mycenaeans…

“The Late Minoan I period as a whole [1600-1450 BCE] represents the zenith of Minoan civilization”, W. Sheppard Baird contends in his study about The Bronze Age Eruption of Santorini and Late Minoan IB Destruction Event, and then explains: “Their cultural and maritime economic influence throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea would never be exceeded. This was a time of great social and political cohesion and commercial and industrial prosperity. Their only economic rival in the Mediterranean was the Egyptians. The Minoans at this time ruled the seas with the largest navy and commercial fleet ever seen in the Mediterranean. Then it all came crashing down with the incredible eruption of the Theran marine volcano”…

● The Minoan eruption was one of the largest volcanic events in recorded history (and probably the second biggest after Tambora, Indonesia, in 1815 CE), devastating Thera, nearby islands and parts of Crete. The eruptions, generating tsunamis and preceded by earthquakes, provided a basis for or inspired Plato’s Atlantis story and the Titanomachy in Hesiod’s Theogony. The exact date has been difficult to determine. The initial date of 1500 BCE appeared to be incorrect, as radiocarbon dating analysis indicated that the eruption occurred at least a century before, c. 1627-1600. A volcanic winter after the eruption provoked the collapse of the Xia dynasty in faraway China, following “yellow fog, a dim sun, frost in July, famine, and the withering of all five cereals”. Heavy rains and storms that ravaged Egypt have been attributed to short-term climatic changes caused by the eruption. W. Sheppard Baird suggests the idea that at least one pyroclastic surge of superheated steam travelled at a very high speed over 110 kilometers of sea water to incinerate large areas of Crete spreading destruction, havoc and death. The Mycenaean conquest of the island occurred about 150 years after the catastrophe; therefore, many archaeologists speculate that it induced a grave crisis in the Minoan civilization that made things far easier for the Mycenaeans. The internal political conflict hypothesis is also presented here. It is a realistic scenario because of the instability the catastrophe provoked. It could also be a factor that might have paved the way for the Mycenaeans. Their operation in Crete lasted from c. 1450 to 1375 BCE, when Knossos finally fell.

An island volcano similar to that of Thera

W. Sheppard Baird refers to this “big bang” on Santorini, even when he is more concentrated on The Origin of the Sea Peoples:

“When the Theran volcano exploded in the Aegean”, he suggests, “it would have been difficult enough for the surviving Minoans to resurrect the Mediterranean trade routes amid the incredible devastation. The effective Minoan policing of the old trade routes from piracy that was in place before the eruption might have never again been achieved”. Describing the aftermath of the Sea Peoples’ raids, he concludes: “By this time all of the great Bronze Age powers that had existed before the volcanic eruption, except the Egyptians, lay shattered, depopulated, and would never recover. In sharp contrast, the Phoenicians survived completely unscathed and invigorated. It was the beginning of the ‘Age of the Phoenicians’ in the Mediterranean. What did they do? They headed straight for the gold, silver, and tin of southern Iberia to establish trading outposts [emporia] and colonies.”

Mycenaeans and Hittites vs. Phoenicians and Sea Peoples

Seal of Tarkummuwa, king of Mera, surrounded by Hittite hieroglyphs and cuneiform script: this bilingual inscription provided the first clues for deciphering Hittite hieroglyphs.

Not “what did they do?” but “how did they make it?” should be the first question to ask – followed by the crucial query: “Who were the Phoenicians’ adversaries?” Sanford Holst explains:

“The Phoenician people had been dominant sea traders in the Mediterranean prior to 1500 BC [in fact, they had attempted unsuccessfully to establish themselves as such after the Minoan eruption]. Then the rise of the Mycenaeans caused sea trade to fall into the hands of that new power. This pushed the Phoenicians backward from the west. The growth of Ugarit as a major sea trader located just north of the Phoenicians exerted additional pressure from that direction. Immediately beside that powerful city were the Hittites.”

Hattusa, Lion Gate

The Phoenicians’ adversaries, therefore, were the Mycenaeans and the Hittites, including Ugarit. A war between Egypt and Hatti in the early 13th century was inconclusive and the Hittites kept all the lands they had taken. Then the great pharaoh Ramses II died in 1213 BCE, and the Sea Peoples appeared on the scene four years later, waging their first doomed raid against Egypt, “the breadbasket which had been supplying the Hittites with wheat via Ugarit”. The hungry Sea Peoples wanted bread and the breadbasket was Egypt, but this did not serve the Phoenicians’ interests. It was urgent for them that the Sea Peoples’ attention be turned elsewhere: to the Aegean and Anatolia, to the Mycenaeans and Hittites…

The hungry Sea Peoples wanted bread, the breadbasket was Egypt, but
this did not serve the Phoenicians’ interests. The Sea Peoples’ attention
should be urgently turned elsewhere: to the Aegean and Anatolia…

“What led to the special treatment the Phoenicians seem to have been given by the Sea Peoples? What services could the Sea Peoples possibly have received from these maritime traders?”, Sanford Holst wonders.

The answer is, of course: bread – if not something more than bread. As for the… “circuses”, well, the investing Phoenicians hoped that they would be rewarding enough; how fruitful they were in fact, not even the most optimistic Phoenician could ever dream of or imagine… Holst has the story unfolding:

The Sea and Land Peoples’ raids

“With the Hittites threatening their northern border, the Phoenicians would reasonably have supported whichever groups among Sea Peoples wanted to shift attacks away from the failed effort at Egypt and toward a more promising one against the Hittites. Though the Hittites themselves had no excess food to offer, they stood between the Sea Peoples and an achievable goal: the land of Canaan, which was second only to Egypt as a source of wheat. In addition, by going through the Hittite land and Canaan, the Sea Peoples would bring a force numbering hundreds of thousands to confront the wheat-rich Egyptians – rather than the handful of warriors who had failed on the first attempt.

“But a problem had to be overcome. The Mycenaeans continued to hold the Aegean and attacked the Anatolian people from the seaward side. To deal with this, warriors and ships in the Sea Peoples confederacy poured from Anatolia and the Black Sea into the Aegean, where they ravaged the Mycenaeans. Following this widespread disruption the Mycenaean cities withered and eventually died. When the Aegean had been thus cleared, the people of western Anatolia were able to turn their full attention to the Hittites.”

“The Mycenaeans continued to hold the Aegean and attacked the Anatolians from the sea. To deal with this, the Sea Peoples poured into the Aegean and ravaged the Mycenaeans [until their] cities withered and died. When the Aegean had been thus cleared, the Western Anatolians were able to
turn their full attention to the Hittites.” (Sanford Holst)

Hector‘s corpse brought back to Troy (detail); Roman
relief from a marble sarcophagus (ca 180–200 CE)

Holst apparently alludes to the Trojan War. If so, it explains why the fighters on the Trojan side, as Homer says, sounded just like the Tower of Babel builders – that is, speaking various languages and thus needing to have orders translated to them by their commanders. It seems, therefore, that the fall of Troy did not seal the end of the war. The Sea Peoples counter-attacked, bringing the war on Hellenic soil.⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ So, were the Greeks a part of the Sea Peoples? The answer is evidently negative: “No, they were not!” Or were they? We need to elaborate on that in our next Chronicle.

Let’s compare Eberhard Zangger’s view:

“The Sea Peoples may well have been Troy and its confederated allies, and the literary tradition of the Trojan War may well reflect the Greek effort to counter those raids.” Hence the Iliad may well reflect this conflict.

“The Sea Peoples may well have been Troy and its confederated
allies, and the literary tradition of the Trojan War may well reflect
the Greek effort to counter those raids.” (Eberhard Zangger)

“In 1182 BC Ugarit fell [burned to the ground and left unoccupied thereafter] and the flow of wheat from Egypt was cut off”, says Holst. “Approximately two years later the Hittite empire died. Now nothing stood in the way of the Sea Peoples’ exodus.⁽²⁾ With their wives, children and household possessions in two-wheeled carts, the Sea Peoples – now more properly the Land Peoples – flowed across on their path of destruction and, observing their special relationship with Phoenicia, they by-passed that land. Flowing down through Canaan they destroyed the cities they encountered. Many settled beside the wheat fields and took some of the land for themselves and their families. A very large number of the Land and Sea Peoples continued onward and eventually arrived at the border between Canaan and Egypt. There a great battle was fought and the Sea Peoples were finally stopped.”

The “Horses of St. Mark” in Venice: a tiny part of the incalculable booty pillaged by Venetians and Franks…

• ⁽²⁾ Writing “exodus”, Holst clearly sought “Biblical” connotations. The historical connotations though are more compelling: it is irresistible the urge to compare or find parallels between the Sea Peoples and the First Crusade (1096–1099 CE), especially the so-called People’s, or Peasants’, or Paupers’ Crusade – although, if we wish precision, we need to describe it as the Unruly Mob’s Crusade. If, on the contrary, we try to find analogies with the Phoenicians’ conduct, we need to “flash forward” to the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204), branded as the “Cursed Crusade”, as it was originally intended to conquer Muslim Jerusalem by means of an invasion through Egypt; but instead, in April 1204, the Crusaders mercilessly sacked Christian Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, which was partitioned among the plunderers, establishing the Latin Empire. The Venetians in this Crusade acted just like the Phoenicians in the Sea Peoples’ raids during the Bronze Age collapse. One day we may get to know who the Phoenician “Enrico Dandolo” was, and how he contributed to this collapse…

● Just a tiny portion of the incalculable booty pillaged by Venetians and Franks in the city is the “Horses of St. Mark” in Venice, a work that some attribute to Lysippos. Napoleon stole later the… stolen horses but, after Waterloo, they were returned to their… legitimate looters!

The Egyptians won the battle but, as we have seen, lost the war. Who else did? The Mycenaeans, the Hittites, Ugarit, and also the peoples of Canaan – except the Phoenicians. Even the militaristic Assyrians can be counted among the losers being obliged to withdraw to their borders for protection. In short, all the great powers of the day. As for the winners, apart from the Sea Peoples themselves, there is no doubt:

“Under the destructive force of the Sea Peoples’ attacks, all of the
Phoenicians’ powerful adversaries had been destroyed. The Phoenician
cities were untouched by this devastation that happened around them,
which left these people in an advantageous position.” (Sanford Holst)

The battle of the Egyptians with the Sea Peoples

“The Phoenicians seem to have gained more than anyone else from the mass migration of the Land and Sea Peoples”, Holst sums up. “Under the destructive force of the Sea Peoples’ attacks, all of the Phoenicians’ powerful adversaries had been destroyed. The Phoenician cities were untouched by this devastation that happened around them, which left these people in an advantageous position.

“The historical record shows their active cities quickly began to expand their domain by placing trading posts in Cyprus, the Aegean, Sicily, Sardinia, North Africa, Algeria, Morocco and Spain. Among the cities they created were these in Morocco: Lixus (modern Larache), Sala (Rabat), Mogador (Essaouira) and Tingis (Tangier); in Spain: Gadir (Cádiz), Malaka (Málaga), Ibisa (Ibiza); in Algeria: Icosia (Algiers); in Tunisia: Utica and Carthage; in Sardinia: Karalis (Cagliari); in Sicily: Panormus (Palermo);⁽³⁾ in Cyprus: Kition (Larnaca). The Phoenicians gave rise to a powerful and wealthy sea-trading empire which stretched from Morocco to the Levant.”

• ⁽³⁾ One of too many similar cases: colonies supposedly founded by the Phoenicians but known by their Greek names as the Canaanite toponyms (if there were such names) were forgotten…

● Therefore, Sanford Holst is absolutely right to underline that “this element turns out to be one of the keys which help to unlock the mystery of the Sea Peoples – an event which changed the course of history.”

Carthage reconstructed

“Age of the Phoenicians”

THE RESULTING POWER VACUUM WAS A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY for the Phoenicians to take advantage and emerge as true heirs of the Minoans, rising as a great maritime power. Their zenith in history (1200–800 BCE) coincides with the dark ages of all their antagonists. Enjoying almost complete freedom of movement for such a long time, they methodically built their trading empire; and when the tide of history brought the great powers back (Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians), subjugating Phoenicia from the 9th to the 6th centuries BCE, they were prepared to shift the hub of the empire from the Near East to the centre of the Mediterranean, from Canaan to Tunisia.

Under Persian yoke, many Phoenicians migrated to colonies, such as Carthage. There they might realize their dream to become a real empire, achieving military supremacy, as well, which was rather infeasible in the narrow strip of Phoenicia. As for the Hellenes, they gradually woke up from their dark age and, starting in 900 BCE, rushed to make up for lost time founding their own colonies not only in the Mediterranean, but also in the Black Sea, where the Phoenicians never dared to enter. Studying a map of 550 BCE, the Greek superiority is obvious. The Phoenicians faced a very serious problem: lack of manpower. But they enjoyed a crucial strategic advantage: the control of the Pillars of Heracles,⁽⁴⁾ the Strait of Gibraltar,⁽⁵⁾ where Carthage would impose a blockade to secure its monopoly with metal-bearing Iberia, the lost city of Tartessos, and the Atlantic, North and South. Using e.g. gold obtained by their expansion of the African coastal trade in the mid-4th century BCE, the Punics minted gold staters bearing a pattern in the reverse exergue of the coins, which some have interpreted as a map of the Mediterranean with America (or Atlantis?) shown to the West.

Hellenic and Phoenician colonies (in blue and in red respectively) 550 BCE

• ⁽⁴⁾ The Pillars of Heracles of the Hellenes were the Strait of Gibraltar. But in earlier times, when they had not gone so far, this phrase referred to the “strait” between Tunisia and Sicily. Thus the Phoenicians, and later the Punics, sought to control both the “internal” and “external” Pillars.

• ⁽⁵⁾ Gibraltar is the European Pillar of Heracles on Spanish soil but controlled by Britain. The term means “Rock of Tariq” (Gibr al-Tariq), from the name of Tariq ibn Ziyad who led the vanguard of the Arabs that invaded Iberia in 711 CE.

● However, long before the Spaniards, the British and the Arabs, the Visigoths and the Vandals (hence the name of Andalusia), the Punics and the Romans, the Phoenicians or the Greeks, long before the Celts, even the Iberians and locals, the rock was occupied by the Neanderthals. The evidence in Gorham’s cave, between 125,000 and 25,000 years ago, makes it their last known holdout. Similarly on the opposite, African Pillar, Ceuta, in Moroccan territory but controlled by Spain, the oldest traces of human presence go back 250,000 years.

The Punic coin with the exergue supposedly depicting the ancient world, ca 341 BCE

That was the background of Phoenicia’s sea trade enterprise that spread across the seas from 1550 to 300 BCE. The Phoenicians were remarkable in seamanship and famous as “traders in purple”, due to their monopoly on the precious purple dye of the murex snail, once profusely available in the eastern Mediterranean, though exploited to local extinction, and used, inter alia, for royal clothing. In fact, the word Phoenicia derives from the Hellenic words φοῖνιξ and φοινός, i.e. purple, passing to Latin as Punic.⁽⁶⁾ They called their country Canaan, which may also mean Land of Purple. If so, Canaan and Phoenicia are synonyms. Hecataeus said Phoenicia was formerly called Χνᾶ (Khnā). However, the Greek term did not correspond to a cultural identity that would be recognized by the Phoenicians themselves. It is uncertain if and to what extent they viewed themselves as a single ethnicity. It was a civilization organized in city-states, similar to Hellas. They would come into conflict and one city might dominate the others, though they could collaborate in leagues or alliances, as well. In terms of language, life style and religion, there is little to set the Phoenicians apart from other Semitic cultures of Canaan as markedly different.

The Minoan “Phoenician” purple

• ⁽⁶⁾ Seeking information on purple in Wikipedia, you are redirected to the so-called “Phoenician” or “Tyrian” purple, extracted from a spiny sea snail: Murex, or Bolinus, or Haustellum, brandaris. Despite being established as such, nevertheless, purple must have been a Minoan invention; the Phoenicians appropriated it, together with several Cretan innovations, and brought them huge profits after the Bronze Age collapse. As the most expensive and finer dye, purple has long been considered a royal and divine symbol and privilege: the higher one was in political or religious hierarchy, the more purple clothes one was allowed to wear. Therefore, it also meant the purple royal robe and, thence, royal power.*

* Medicine “took revenge” on all those “blue bloods”, terming as purpura (porphyra) a skin disease with red spots. (Etymology of the word purple: < Latin purpura <Greek porphyra (πορφύρα) < of unknown origin; it seems, however, it is perhaps the only Minoan word still in use).

A horse head on a Punic coin (replica)

● Archaeologists have found substantial numbers of murex shells in Crete, dating to the 20th – 18th centuries BCE. Thus, the Minoans must have pioneered the extraction of purple, centuries before the Tyrians, and the Phoenicians in general. An important site was the now uninhabited islet of Chryse (Golden), also known as Gaidouronesi (Donkey isle), 15 km south of Crete off Hierapetra, where archaeologists excavated a Minoan settlement dating to 1800-1500 BCE, with purple dye workshops and many artifacts. The Minoans developed various purple dye tones (from blue to red) depending on the method of processing. Accumulations of crushed murex shells have been found in other parts of the Mediterranean, e.g. Apulia, Magna Gaecia. It seems that Laconia was the place with the best purple production in Europe, the islet Meninx (Djerba) in Africa, and Tyre in Asia.

Apart from purple, the Phoenicians exported textiles, glass, and wine to Egypt, where grapevines would not grow, and obtained Nubian gold, Iberian silver, and British tin. However, what was once thought to be direct trade is now believed it was indirect. Timothy Champion suggests it was under the control of the Celts of Britanny.⁽⁷⁾ In any case, the recovery of the Mediterranean economy after the Bronze Age collapse was largely due to the work of Phoenician traders, who re-established long distance commerce.

• ⁽⁷⁾ This is a very simple but quite interesting idea: Why should any trading sailor, be it Minoan or Mycenaean, Phoenician or Carthaginian, take the risk of travelling around Iberia and then up to Britain, when tin from Cornwall or Brittany could be transported overland through Gaul-France? It is the reason why Carthage tried in vain to prevent the founding of the colony of Massalia: even with Gibraltar blockaded, tin from Cornwall or Brittany was available in the Mediterranean, and Carthage could not impose an all-out monopoly.

While trade and colonies spread, the Mediterranean was split into two with the Phoenicians sailing along and finally dominating the southern shores, while the Greeks were active along the northern coast. This arrangement did not exclude mutual intrusions, as the examples of Cyrenaica and Sardinia indicate. The two cultures clashed rarely, mainly in Sicily (due to its strategic position, opposite Carthage, at the “internal Pillars” of the Mediterranean), and finally settled into two spheres of influence. When the Punics took over, things changed dramatically.

Melqart on a Phoenician silver tetradrachm

Despite the exergues, which supposedly depict America (or Atlantis), what we can see on the other side of the Phoenician “coin” is a certain kind of cultural deficiency. Their art lacks some unique characteristics that might differentiate it from its contemporaries. This is due to its being highly influenced by foreign cultures: primarily Egypt, Assyria, or Hellas. Their art was an amalgam of foreign models and perspectives. In addition, although they are credited for the spread of their “abjad”, from which all major alphabets originated, they used this script mainly for their trade business.⁽⁸⁾ And apart from their inscriptions, they have left almost no other written sources – or they have not survived. We even ignore the name of their “Lord of the Sea”, their “Poseidon” – quite strange for a society of sailing merchants where such a deity is so very important.

• ⁽⁸⁾ The precursor to the “Phoenician alphabet” was likely of Egyptian origin as the Middle Bronze Age abjads from Canaan resemble hieroglyphs or, far more specifically, an early abjad found in central Egypt. In addition to being preceded by proto-Canaanite scripts, the Phoenician abjad also followed the Ugaritic “alphabet” of Mesopotamian origin. Hence, the consonantal Semitic “alphabets” should have originated in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The same could be said about the Minoans, whose deities we also ignore, if we do not take into account that they represent an older civilization, whose script is still undeciphered. Note that there was a god of the sea and the rivers, named Yam (Yaw), in the Canaanite Pantheon. Was he worshipped by the Phoenicians? It seems that, except Baal (Baal-hamon and his consort Tanit were the patrons of Carthage), the Phoenicians specifically honoured Melqart, patron of Tyre, the founder of most colonies, including Gadir (Cádiz) and Carthage. Gradually, due to mutual influence, Melqart was identified with Heracles. But for sure, none of these gods could substitute Yam-Poseidon. Therefore, the mystery (a people of seamen without a god of the sea) is here to stay…

Semiramis, by Eliseo Fattorini (19th century)

● If we search for the entry “Phoenician mythology” in Wikipedia, we are redirected to a certain Sanchuniathon, a purported author of three lost works in the Phoenician language, supposedly surviving only in partial paraphrase and summary of a Greek translation by Philo of Byblos, according to the bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius. All we know about Sanchuniathon’s work comes from Eusebius, citing the only surviving excerpts from his writings, as summarized and quoted from his supposed translator, Philo. The hypothetical date of the alleged writings take us back to a time before the Trojan War, around the time some other hypothetical persons lived, such as Moses, “when Semiramis was queen of the Assyrians”. Thus Sanchuniathon is placed in the mythic context of an antiquity from which no Hellenic or Phoenician writings have survived. Paradoxically enough, however, the “writer” is made to refer disparagingly to… Hesiod, who lived in the 8th century BCE! Some have suggested that Eusebius’ intent was… “pious” (“eusebeia” means “piety” in Greek): he desired to “discredit polytheism”; others that it was a forgery by Philo himself. Anyone can draw his own conclusions about the real motives of the forgers, whoever they were. At any rate, you are certainly quite astonished when finally a search for “Phoenician mythology” is redirected to a hoax – “pious” or not…

• >> Chronicle 20. THE ENIGMATIC SEA PEOPLES
• << Chronicle 18. MYCENAE: FROM KNOSSOS TO TROY

Next Chronicle 20. THE ENIGMATIC SEA PEOPLES ● Bronze Age Collapse Due to Famine ● Trojan War and Anatolian Sea Peoples ● Merneptah Stele and Exodus ● Hittites and Luwians

Twelve Hittite gods of the Underworld in a sanctuary of Hattusa