Chronicle 5. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

Chronicle 5. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 5. ΙΒΗΡΟΥ ΟΔΥΣΣΕΙΑ

● Hellenes in Portugal ● Fado and Fate ● Odysseus
and Calypso in Lisbon; Their Son in Santarém
● Creto-Iberian Ties: Bull Worship and Bullfight

“Mosaic of a Phoenician trading ship” was the caption. Almost every word is a lie: the ship is neither Phoenician, nor trading; we also see in BIG, Hellenic letters: ΟΔΥΣΣΕΙΑ (ODYSSEY)… Inopportune comments of someone unable to read Greek!

Michales Loukovikas

“IN REMOTE TIMES, even prior to the 6th century BC, the Greeks colonised what is now Portuguese territory, exploiting mines, founding and fortifying towns, especially along the coast and in the basins of the larger rivers.”

Fado has been proclaimed as Intangible Cultural Heritage. Rebetiko, too: better late than never!

This historical flashback is Augusto Mascarenhas Barreto’s starting point in his bilingual (in Portuguese and English) book on Fado / Origens Líricas e Motivação Poética (Lyrical Origins and Poetic Motivation). It is the first chapter (Identity and Origins), following the preliminaries about fado: Portugal’s urban folk song was born in two of its oldest cities, Lisbon and Coimbra (with a distinct form in each); it is Provençal in origin, with Arabic melodic and poetic influence; it is a way of life (like rebetiko, flamenco, blues, tango, or any other authentic folk mode of expression, however “humble”, or even “marginal”, it is considered in origin); it’s dominated by nostalgia, by saudade, a keyword in fado coming from the Arabs, as well, and found corrupt elsewhere: it is Cape Verde’s sodade characterizing its nostalgic song, morna.

The Hellenes, says the Portuguese author, “mingled with the aboriginal inhabitants and the Iberians, who inherited from them certain ethnic and cultural characteristics. It is presumed that the Iberians were a people originating in the East of Europe. Iberus was the ancient name of the River Ebro, in Spain.”

Such homonymous toponyms are quite strange. It’s not only the Ἕβρος (Hebrus or… Maritsa) in Thrace, the river dividing Greece and Turkey; it is also Caucasian Iberia, west of Caucasian… Albania (a part of Azerbaijan), i.e. Caucasian Georgia, in the hinterland of Medea’s homeland, the ancient Colchis, where Jason sailed with the Argonauts for the Golden Fleece. Logic says the Iberians’ cradle should have been there – but most scholars, on the contrary, show to the direction of North Africa or the eastern Mediterranean.

North of the Greater Armenia, between the Black and Caspian Seas:
Colchis, Iberia and Albania. The Amazons were further north.

Among the cultural characteristics the Greeks bequeathed to Iberia (the Iberian Peninsula), Mascarenhas Barreto singles out the Moerae:

“The Hellenic Moira is to be found in the spirit of Fado… The word fado, derived from the Latin fatum, means fate, destiny – what has been foretold by the Oracle and which nothing can alter… Later, Moira became allied to Arab Fatalism.”

The foreigners, you see, attribute to the Hellenes cultural characteristics that the latter claim they are due to the 400-year-long Ottoman yoke…

Odysseus and Calypso in Odyssey-Lisbon

Odysseus blinding Polyphemus, Attic black
figured amphora (ca 7th century BCE)

MUCH MORE IMPRESSIVE is what Portuguese mythology says about the Iberian adventures of that “man of many ways”, “man for wisdom”, “of many wiles”, “of many turns”, “of twists and turns”, “of much resource”, the “skilled”, “ingenious” and “very resourceful” man,⁽¹⁾ Odysseus. He was the one who founded and walled Lisbon (see Chronicle 21: Iberian “El Dorado”):

• ⁽¹⁾ The… “polytropic” versions of Homer’s word “πολύτροπος” (polytropos) rendered into English by Richmond Lattimore, George Chapman, Alexander Pope, Allen Mandelbaum, Martin Hammond, Albert Cook, Robert Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Samuel Butler, Emil V. and D.C.H. Rieu.

“Legend”, says Barreto, “attributes the building of the ancient walls of the city [Lisbon] to the great Greek hero of antiquity, Ulysses, king of Ithaca and conqueror of Troy, who is supposed to have given the place the name of Ulissea – whence the word Ulissipo.⁽²⁾ Anyway, what is certain is that Lisbon was inhabited by the Phoenicians about 600 BC, and they named it Alis Ubbo, meaning ‘Calm Bay’. It was certainly visited by Greeks and Carthaginians, who established trade relations with the primitive peoples inhabiting the country. These tribes, who had mingled with the Celts and the Iberians, formed an ethnic sub-group: the Celtiberians.”

• ⁽²⁾ Ulissea, that is, Odyssey, from the Latin version of the hero’s name, Ulysses or Ulisses, hence Ulissipolis (Odysseupolis) > Ulissipo(na) or Olisipo(na).

“Legend attributes the building of the ancient walls of Lisbon to
the great Greek hero of antiquity, Ulysses”, i.e. Odysseus (Barretο)

The “Snake God” found in Tavira – the only Portuguese town, next to Huelva, where the Phoenicians actually settled.

● Ulysses’ Ulissipo is a “legend”, according to Barreto, but the Phoenicians’ Alis Ubbo is a “certainty”: it is the “classic” historical… science fiction. How can he really combine this conclusion with his starting point that “in remote times, even prior to the 6th century BC, the Greeks colonised what is now Portuguese territory”? Well, “what is certain is that”… if we are based on facts, neither the Hellenes, nor the Phoenicians or also the Punics ever settled in Portugal. This land could not compare with Andalusia that magnetized all the above due to its mineral wealth and strategic importance. The only area of Portuguese interest that drew their attention was the also mineral-rich Galicia. (By the way, I mean Galicia of Iberia and not that of Eastern Europe). Generally, Alis (Allis) Ubbo (Ubo) is also interpreted as “Safe” (or “Pleasant”, “Enchanting”, “Serene”, “Delightful”) “Harbour” (or “Port”, “Haven”, “Gulf”, “Cove”, “Shore”, “Inlet”): all versions describe a good anchorage and, therefore, all have something to do with the sea. In an article about the presence of Mycenaeans in Sardinia, Demetris Michalópoulos wrote inter alia:

“In ancient times, Cagliari, the current capital of Sardinia, was called Caralis. In all likelihood, the toponym derives from the Semitic word car, which means ‘white rock’”.

We assume that Caralis meant Bay (or Harbour, etc.) with a white rock, a toponym that was probably given by the omnipresent Phoenicians. Can we associate the Semitic alis with the Indo-European root sal-, e.g. the English salt, and Grecian ἅλς (hals), meaning both salt and sea? If so, Indo-European and Semitic languages should have had some common ground (at least on matters shared in common, such as navigation), with loan words probably derived from Mediterranean tongues, e.g. the Minoan Cretan.

“During the Punic Wars – between Rome and Carthage – the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by the Romans and, in 205 BC the town – then called Olissipo – was raised to the category of a Roman municipium. In 100 AD it was named Felicitas Julia, in honour of Julius Caesar, and the name was a promise of good fortune. In the year 376, the Visigoths invaded the peninsula. In 404 the territory was still occupied by Romans and barbarians, but in 522, after the departure of the Romans, a single Visigoth kingdom was formed, and the town came to be known as Olissipona. In 711 the Arabs invaded the peninsula from North Africa and occupied the town, to which they gave the name Lissibona… In 1147 Lisbon was re-conquered by Dom Afonso Henriques.”

An English frigate in choppy waters in the Tagus passing the Belém Tower,
by John Thomas Serres (1823)

That’s how we ended up to Lisboa, the current capital of Portugal, adds Barreto. But this is not the end of his story. There’s more to it:

“Santarém is believed to have been founded in the 10th century BC
by Abidis, of Greek origin,” son of Ulysses and Calypso. (Barretο)

“Santarém, [which] stands looking over the River Tagus… is believed to have been founded in the 10th century BC by Abidis [or Habis],⁽³⁾ of Greek origin, who gave it the name of Esca-Abidis. This prince, grandson of Gregoris [Gárgoris], king of the Iberian Peninsula, is also said to have founded towns… in Spain. According to legend, he was the son of Ulysses. Betraying the trust of Gregoris after having been given Alis-Ubbo (Lisbon), Ulysses secretly espoused Calypso, daughter of the peninsular king, who rushed with his army on Lisbon. Ulysses fled by sea, abandoning his spouse”…

• ⁽³⁾ Or Habido, Abido, Abidas, Αbidis, Gabis, Gabid: his name’s versions in various variations of the legend.

Odysseus and Calypso (with… Habis?), by Gerard de Lairesse

Consequently, Calypso was not a nymph on the Isle of Ogygia, as Homer says. Deviating from the greatest of the rhapsodes, the Lusitanians adopted Calypso as a princess of Iberia and daughter of Gregoris/Gárgoris, not of Atlas. Note that we remain in the same places that Heracles had earlier toured for the golden apples of the Hesperides and Geryon’s cattle. It is assumed that Ogygia must have been nearby the Pillars of Heracles, since Odysseus had to travel for 18 days in an easterly direction to reach Scheria, the Phaeacian Island, which many identify with Corfu. There’s a chance that Ogygia was one of the Pillars, today’s Spanish Ceuta on Moroccan soil, opposite the other Pillar, the Rock of Gibraltar. Although it is not an island now, it may have been one in the days of Homer.

According to Hesiod, the conqueror of Troy – and also of numerous… women (for he was so “skilled”, “ingenious” and “resourceful”) – had in total 16 sons and a daughter from six women. But in his long list, he includes no Abidis, Habis, or what. Odysseus had three sons from Penelope, one from the daughter of Thoas the Aetolian, eight sons and a daughter from Circe, two sons from Calypso, one from Callidice, the queen of Thesprotia, whom he later married, and another from Euippe, daughter of Tyrimmas, king of Dodona in Epirus. Note that, if we accept Hesiod’s genealogy of Odysseus, with nine children from Circe and two from Calypso, we must reverse the time he lived beside these two nymphs, according to Homer: one year with Circe and seven with Calypso.

Circe, by Charles Gumery

With such a “proliferation”, of course, Odysseus was in danger of falling by the hand of some… close relative – something that did happen in the sequel of the Odyssey, in the Telegony, or Thesprotis, the Epic Cycle’s final episode, attributed to Eugammon of Cyrene or Cinaethon of Sparta. Circe’s son, Telegonus, so the story goes, while searching for his father, landed on Ithaca where – according to the custom of the era – started plundering and slaughtering, among others, also his genitor. Overwhelmed with remorse, as he realized he became a patricide, he collected Odysseus’ body and, accompanied by his half-brother, Telemachus, and Penelope, returned to the island of his mother, who turned them immortal. This “saga” ends merrily there with a happy end worthy of… a Greek film of the ’60s: with the marriages of Circe with Telemachus and Penelope with Telegonus! Finally, only poor Odysseus was enveloped by murky darkness!

A similar end awaits our hero in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The father of Italian poetry presents a traditional variation of the Homeric version, in which Odysseus himself says that he never returned to Ithaca. From Circe’s island, Aea, Aeaea, or Aeaeë,⁽⁴⁾ he passed through the Pillars of Heracles into the Atlantic, crossed the Equator, sailing in the southern hemisphere for five months, until he reached a big mountain. Then a tornado had the ship spin three times and sink. They all drowned there. But where? In the “underworld”, or in the “new world”, in America? Logic, based on today’s geographical knowledge, makes us draw wrong conclusions. Moreover, the narrative takes place in Dante’s Inferno (see also Chronicle 15. Sailing to Rio de Janeiro!, Homer’s Odyssey is a poetic periplus).

• ⁽⁴⁾ It’s another homonymous toponym with the capital of Colchis, Aea (today’s Kutaisi). But there’s an explanation now: Circe was the sister of Aeëtes, the king of Colchis, and aunt of Medea, with whom she shared magic powers – and also temperament: they say that Circe was exiled to the solitary island of Aeaea by her subjects and father because she had killed her husband…

The Lusitanians, however, didn’t bother to… “set out for Ithaca” with Cavafy, nor cared about Odysseus, after he escaped, leaving Calypso behind. Naturally, they were more concerned about what happened “at home”; hence they paid much more attention to Abidis/Habis:

Olissipo-Lisboa with the port on the Tagus (16th century)

“When Abidis was born,” says Barreto, “Gregoris ordered him to be thrown in a cave to be devoured by wild beasts. In answer, however, to the entreaties of his daughter, he consented that the child should be delivered to Fate, according to primitive custom, and the boy was put in a basket and taken away by the current of the river.⁽⁵⁾ A hind adopted him and when the child was later found in a wild state by some huntsmen, his mother recognised him by a mark. Gregoris forgot his former anger and gave him schooling, so that he could succeed him in the government of the peninsula. The name Esca-Abidis (Escalabis) in Greek means ‘food of Abidis’,⁽⁶⁾ in memory of the place where he was reared by the hind.

• ⁽⁵⁾ Quite biblical the image, recalling “Moses baby” on the waters of the Nile… Conclusion: there’s no originality in the Judaic mythology, although it has since acquired “dogmatic authority”… (See also Chronicles 18, footnote 2, and 21, footnote 4).

Roman mosaic in Pedrosa de la Vega (Castile and León). The only known evidence of transparency.

• ⁽⁶⁾ Ἐσχάρα (eschara): hearth, fire-place (like ἑστία); pan of coals, brazier; (the camp’s) watch-fires; sacrificial hearth; fire-stick.

Ἑστία (hestia): hearth of a house; the house itself, home; household, family; altar; the hearth goddess Hestia, or Vesta in Latin. Hestiatórion is the Greek word for restaurant.

“As regards history, the Romans rebuilt the town in 153 AD and called it Scalabis-castrum. Julius Caesar raised it to the status of a capital – one of the four in Lusitania… In the year 500 when the Visigoths came to Lusitania, the barbarians and Lusitanians formed in that region a single people. In 632 the town of Tomar was the scene of the martyrdom of Irene… a nun. Her body, thrown into the river, was carried down as far as Scalabis… Nineteen years later, King Recceswinth, who was Catholic,⁽⁷⁾ changed the name of Scalabis to Santa Irene. When… the Arabs occupied the town (715), they called it Chantireyn” – and that’s how we ended up to Santarém.

• ⁽⁷⁾ Force of habit: “Catholic” is what Barreto wrote, instead of “Christian”, as he should, because the Schism was still to come…

Creto-Iberian ties due to Mediterranean Minoan Thalassocracy.
A common cultural characteristic was bull worship and bullfight.

GRAECO-IBERIAN TIES, clearly suggested by Portuguese mythology, date back to much earlier times than the Trojan War, to the pre-Hellenic era of Minoan Thalassocracy in the Mediterranean: they were Creto-Iberian. A common cultural characteristic of the Cretans and the peoples of Iberia was bull worship and bullfight, or rather bull-leaping (taurocathapsia; see Chronicle 17. Minoan Cretan Thalassocracy, conclusion).

In his Memoriae Historicae, Strabo, a geographer-historian of Roman times, who was born in Amaseia of Pontus (64-63 BCE) and died probably in Rome (24 CE), referred to the Lusitanian equestrian bullfight (“… the peoples of the coastline, who are fond of meeting, on horseback, the fierce Hispanian bulls”, he wrote).⁽⁸⁾

Reconstruction of a relief fresco of a bull by Arthur Evans
at the northern Propylaea of Knossos

• ⁽⁸⁾ The ancestor of the Iberian bull, aurochs, was described by Julius Caesar as “somewhat smaller than an elephant, swift and powerful; attacks both men and animals.” Charlemagne hunted a similar animal, known as bubalo. It is likely that the savage creature killed by St. George was an aurochs, and not a dragon, as the plastic artists present him. The aurochs (aur = wild + ochs = ox), or urus, is the bos primogenius that is now extinct. It survived until 1627 in a forest of Poland.

Apart from bullfighting on horseback, there was also the pega – from the verb pegar, which means catch, seize… the bull by the horns! In one kind of pegas, the so-called forcado was not only completely unarmed, but had nothing to fool the bull (e.g. cape). He should withstand the initial impact (the tremendous weight of the attacking animal plus speed), and the subsequent shaking of his head so as to get rid of an unwelcome rider on his neck…

There were more forcados, usually eight, as assistants in the pega to master the bull. It is the picture we have from the Minoan bull-leaping in an extant fresco of Taurocathapsia dating back to the 15th century BCE. Isn’t it impressive? Even more so if we take into account that these Cretan “forcados” included women!

Taurocathapsia (bull-leaping), Minoan fresco

Arriving at the other side of the Mediterranean, we can find the earliest known description of such a bullfight in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the legendary hero of Mesopotamia, whose name became associated with his futile struggle to obtain immortality. The epic, dating back to c. 2100 BCE, describes how the hero and his companion, Enkidu, kill the Celestial Bull that the goddess Ishtar has sent to punish Gilgamesh for spurning her advances:

“Enkidu seizes the celestial bull by the horns”, while Gilgamesh “approaches it slowly and jumps on its back; then grabs it by the tail”…

“The pegas”, Barreto concludes, “probably originated in the Neolithic ritual hunts. We may wonder whether the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula learnt this from the Cretans of the 3rd millennium BC, or if they themselves may have been the teachers, since the bulls were taken from their natural habitat in the peninsula to the island of Crete.”

But still, if you talk about so extensive exchange going on five millennia ago – whether it is bull-leaping, or even bull shipments from Iberia to Crete – how is it possible to be concerned about trivial “problems”, as to who were the initiators of this practice?

● Bull-leaping was a Minoan ritual connected with bull worship, where the bull was not killed, contrary to bullfight. When it passed to the Mycenaeans, it was called in Greek ταυροκαθάψια; from ταῦρος (“bull”) and κάθαψις, a rare noun composed of the words κατά- (“across”) and ἅπτομαι (“touch, reach”); thus, literally, “touching of the bull”. Representations (frescoes, statuettes, seals, etc.) of the ritual, outside Crete or Hellas, have been found in Asia Minor (Smyrna, Hattusa), Canaan, Egypt, Bactria, and the Indus Valley.

Juanito Apinani‘s speed and bravery in the bullring of Madrid,
from the etchings “La Tauromaquia” by Francisco Goya (1815-16)

● Non-violent taurocathapsia (bull-leaping), practiced in Spain, were called recortes. The recortadores competed at dodging and leaping over bulls without a cape or sword. Some used a long pole to literally pole-vault over the charging animal, which was not restrained by any guiding rope or similar safety device. The recortes were common in the 19th century. Etchings by painter Francisco Goya depict these events.

● In neighbouring Portugal, the bullfight’s second stage, called pega (“holding”), was the one referred to by Barreto. The so-called forcados challenged the animal directly without protection or weapon of defense. The front man provoked the bull into a charge to perform a pega de cara (face grab), secured its head and was aided by his fellows who surrounded and subdued the animal. The bull was not killed in the ring, in the audience’s sight, but by a butcher. After an exceptional performance, some bulls were healed, released to pasture until their end days and used for breeding.

● A “safer” style of this ritual, practiced in French Gascony, used young cows instead of bulls, which were furthermore guided by long ropes attached to their horns, so that they ran directly towards the sauteurs (“leapers”) and écarteurs (“dodgers”), and were restrained from trampling or goring them should they miss a trick.

● In faraway South India, in Tamil Nadu, there was a related ritual, the jallikattu, as part of the harvest celebration. The participants tried to leap onto a bull, reaching for the money packets tied to its horns as a prize. The event has been depicted in rock art dated at least to the 3rd century BCE.

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Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO!

ii) INTERLUDE

Crossing the Atlantic

 

Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO!

● Periplus: (Luso-Hellenic Wanderings) ● An Atlantic Odyssey

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΠΛΩΡΗ ΓΙΑ RIO DE JANEIRO!
/PORTUGUÊS/ NAVEGANDO PARA O RIO DE JANEIRO!

Afro-Brazilian Museum

ΙΙΙ Festival

SO DISTANT
SO NEAR

Music and Poetry in the
Portuguese Language

Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro, May 2013

Tão Longe Tão Perto Organized in collaboration with the ensemble Música Surda: Andréia Pedroso, Antônio Jardim, Artur Gouvêa and Eduardo Gatto.

Michales Loukovikas

WHEN AMÉLIA MUGE AND I BEGAN researching and exchanging recorded material from our traditions, the Lusitanic–Portuguese and the Hellenic–Greek, several people raised ironically their brows:

“Oh, they are loucos”, they thought – some even said. “Portugal and Greece are so far apart. Impossible to find common ground”…⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ Imagine what people with “raised brows”, just like them, will say now that we are talking about a triangle (not that of… Bermuda): Portugal, Brazil and Greece. Well, Portugal and Brazil, OK, the relation is too obvious: former metropolis and colony; but what about Greece?(!)

● This text was presented during the festival Tão longe, tão perto, in Rio de Janeiro.

I confess that our collaborative results astonished even us! Or even me, I should add, that I have been researching this field for years, arriving to the conclusion that civilization, culture, is the result of give and take, of exchange. I have also shown during my radio program (Mediterranean periplus, 9.58 fm, ERT3) that lands located so far apart, like, say, India and Iberia, have been interconnected for thousands of years, since ancient times…⁽²⁾

• ⁽²⁾ “Ancient” for the Hellenes means BCE (before the Common Era), or BC (before Christ), if you like.

Flamenco (by Hyatt Moore): an exciting art
interconnecting Iberia and India

All these ideas were further reinforced when Amélia and I started working on Periplus.⁽³⁾ For sure, there are some “dark spots” still now; questions that remain unanswered. A big question for me e.g. is: how can Amélia, a Portuguese born in Mozambique, compose in an ancient style? You see, all three themes of ancient Grecian music and poetry we have in Periplus (Seikilos’ Epitaph, the First Delphic Hymn to Apollo, probably by Athenaeus, and Mesomedes’ Hymn to Nemesis) were included after certain compositions of hers reminded me of these ancient Hellenic songs. It’s very strange, indeed.

• ⁽³⁾ It’s not so obvious but there is something like a “periplus” in different human endeavours, too. Music was born together with speech. In an advanced stage, in ancient Hellas, music was either instrumental or song. Poetry was inconceivable without music in classical Greece. The two arts got… divorce later, in the 4th century BCE. However, either before or after, a “periplus” was (and still is) needed to combine sounds with words, and express the meaning of the words through sounds. Something similar happens in a translation: then the “periplus” concerns two tongues. It is the voyage of a text, of its meaning and style, content and form, while it is adapted in order to start breathing in another language environment.

Andalusian ivory cylindrical pyxis,
i.e. a box to keep precious cosmetics
or jewelery (10th century)

However, apart from these “dark spots”, which will always challenge us to come up with some satisfactory answers, we were soon able to assemble the rest of the puzzle rather easily. And when our Periplus was released, I could say:

“You know, the links are there, waiting for us to bring them to light. One only needs to search, of course, methodically, with a proper compass – a bússula, as we say in Greek, or bússola, as you say in Portuguese”.⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ We have the same word coming from Greek (pyxos > pyxis-pyxida > buxis-buxida > box, boîte, and bussola), with the plant pyxos (> boxwood) as a starting point; this hard, compact, durable wood has been used since ancient times to construct vessels, such as pyxides, and also musical (string and wind) instruments. Note that its seeds are kept in a capsule also called pyxis. Indeed, who among the non-specialists would ever imagine that the English box is of a Greek origin?

Anticythera Mechanism

The Mediterranean and the Oecumene beyond

THE GREEK PENINSULA AND ARCHIPELAGO was not a beginning in world history. The Hellenes received much wisdom from the Orient (Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt) and turned it into science;⁽⁵⁾ it was a great feat! What they left behind was a marvelous literature – uma literatura maravilhosa, indeed! Thus the Hellenic civilization became the foundation of the Occidental cultures.

• ⁽⁵⁾ There can be no great civilization without equivalent technology. A marvel in this domain is the Anticythera mechanism, the earliest analogue computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. Dated to c. 100 BCE, it was recovered in 1901 from a wreck between the Peloponnese and Crete, but its significance and complexity were not understood until a century later. Devices of a comparable level would reappear in the 14th century CE in Europe, with the construction of astronomical clocks. Professor Michael Edmunds of Cardiff University, who led a 2006 study of the mechanism, said:

“This device is just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful, and the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed just makes your jaw drop. In terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”

Victoria, the sole ship of Magellan’s fleet to complete the world’s periplus (detail from a map of Ortelius, 1590)

The extant peripli took place on the Mediterranean, the Indian and the Atlantic Oceans. Herodotus wrote about a periplus of Africa by Phoenicians on behalf of an Egyptian pharaoh. Some Greek from Alexandria, Egypt, described the Indian Ocean coasts of eastern Africa and India. Pytheas, from the Hellenic colony of Massalia (modern Marseille, France), voyaged north to the British Isles and also Scandinavia, and concluded a periplus of Europe sailing via European rivers from the Baltic to the Black Sea and back to the Mediterranean. There are people who believe that the Minoan Cretans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and Punics, and other ancient peoples, such as the Chinese, sailed to the Americas long before the Vikings, Columbus – or, of course, Magellan, who attempted a periplus of the Earth but was not fortunate enough to conclude it.

Hence these voyages started long before recorded history, in the Bronze Age. There are historical clues that the Minoans, in the time of their Thalassocracy, travelled as far as Cornwall, Britain, in search of tin – or else, they obtained this important metal at harbours in southern Gaul. Tin is a necessary component of bronze (±90% copper plus ±10% tin). There were vast quantities of copper in the Mediterranean. Cyprus e.g. was full of copper and the name Cyprus comes from copper (and vice versa). But tin? There were very few places with tin in the Mediterranean and in limited quantities.

The Minoans, and later the Greeks and Phoenicians, sailed initially to Iberia that was rich in these minerals. The Andalusians probably led the Cretans to Galicia, Brittany and Cornwall: they knew the way… These places, especially Cornwall, had massive tin deposits. There, close to Galicia, or even Cornwall, were the so-called Cassiterides Nēsoe, the Tin Isles (tin is cassíteros in Greek). Herodotus and other historians wrote also about the links of the Hellenes and Phoenicians with Tartessos, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, and several people now correlate the legendary Andalusian city with the elusive Atlantis.

Tartessos – identified here with Sanlúcar de Barrameda (?) – and Gadeira-Gadir-Gades-Cádiz, on three islets with Greek names (Erytheia, Kotinoussa and Antipolis), outside the Pillars of Heracles,
the Strait of Gibraltar, in the Sea of Darkness, the Atlantic

Critical questions as the starting point of the research

MY RESEARCH, in the first part we have already voyaged, aimed at that complacent Greek highbrow “hot air”, summed up in the phrase “our own Orient” (see Chronicle 6, footnote 1). So, I raised that vast “Indo-Iberian arc” to demarcate the Mediterranean historical and cultural space. The starting point in the second part was these simple questions that had to be answered:

● Where did the Bronze Age Mediterranean find tin to produce bronze?

● Who were the established maritime traders of the time to bring this most crucial metal to the Mediterranean, as tin was rare around the basin?

I attempt to give some answers in the 2nd part, Cassiterides Archipelago: sailing to Tartessos, following the 1st part, Mediterranean Periplus: in Search of Orpheus. (Hellenic) music is my focus in the 1st part; (Mediterranean) history in the 2nd.

One of the Riace Bronzes, two Greek full-size nude warriors (ca 460–450 BCE), recovered in 1972, considered as a symbol of Calabria.

Α. Mediterranean Periplus, in Search of Orpheus

Prologue. Before Sailing Off
1. The Universal Mediterranean
2. It All Started Here…
3. A Chronicle of the Humans
4. On Democracy
5. Iberia’s Odyssey
6. Indo-Iberian Arc (Jondo)
7. Indo-Iberian Arc (Duende)
8. A Hybrid’s Hybris…
9. The Celebrated Tríchordon
10. The… “Sun Language”
11. “Music Is Thracian and Asian”
12. “Do Not Maltreat Our Music!”
13. Professionals or Amateurs?
14. Music Made of Body and Soul

Β. Cassiterides Archipelago, Sailing to Tartessos

15. Sailing to Rio de Janeiro!
16. Mediterranean Periplus-Paraplus
17. Minoan Cretan Thalassocracy
18. Aegean: Knossos, Mycenae, Troy
19. Phoenicia’s Stroke of Fortune
20. The Enigmatic Sea Peoples
21. Iberian “El Dorado”
22. Iberian Periplus Revival
23. The Genocide of the Hellenes
24. The Triumph of Cretinism
25. “Carthago Delenda Est!”
26. Iberian Cross-Check
27. An Archaeologist’s Waterloo

Appendix: 28. The Making of the Mediterranean Periplus | 29. Biblio – Disco – Graphy | 30. Michales Loukovikas – bio.

A general conclusion is that certain needs motivated humans to live together, to communicate, to exchange. That’s how society was born, the cities were created, the classes and division of labour emerged, and writing was invented. People’s coordinated interaction concerned material needs but transformed at the same time all those who worked together, exchanging ideas or ideals; it was a process that led to the birth of culture, of civilization.

Homer’s Odyssey periplus

HOMER’S ODYSSEY IS A POETIC PERIPLUS. According to the Lusitanians, Odysseus’ wanderings were Luso-Hellenic, as well: he founded Lisbon and had a child with the princess of Iberia, Calypso. Homer described Odysseus’ descent into the Hades, the underworld, which was outside the Pillars of Heracles, that is, the Strait of Gibraltar. The Hellenes located in the same area the Garden of the Hesperides or the Makarōn Nēsoe, i.e. the Fortunate Isles, the Islands of the Blessed, or Elysium, what today is thought to be Macaronesia (the Azores and Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde).

Strabo and Solinus said that Odysseus, after the fall of Troy, navigated westward to Lusitania, founded Lisbon, and then desired to try his fortune on the Atlantic – where he disappeared, with no trace left behind. This is a version of Odysseus’ story mentioned also by Pere Antoni Beuter, a Valencian historian, who referred to Dante Alighieri, saying he shared this view. Indeed, in his Inferno, the Italian poet described Odysseus’ descent into the underworld with no return. The king of Ithaca, he wrote, went out of the Pillars of Hercules, sailed south, crossed the Equator, and then continued voyaging for months, until he reached a bay with a big mountain. Then, a tornado sank his boat; everybody drowned there.

I really don’t know why, but I feel this bay with the big mountain is… the River of January: Rio de Janeiro! I would really love to confirm that…

The siege of Lisbon, by Roque Gameiro (1917)

Appendix: An Atlantic Odyssey

● A modern Greek Homerist, Iohannis Kakridís, argues that the Odyssey is a work of poetry and not a travel log (i.e. a navigator’s periplus). According to W. B. Stanford, Cape Maleas and the nearby island of Cythera, where Odysseus met storms (see the Odyssey, book 9), are “the last clearly identifiable places in his wanderings. After this he leaves the sphere of Geography and enters Wonderland” – a wander in wonders!

Nevertheless, due to the great impact of the Homeric epics, the attempt to work out “a Geography of the Odyssey” started as early as Hesiod, a Homer’s contemporary most probably, and by the Hellenistic period, the literature on the subject had really thrived. There were even passionate debates among the scholars whether Odysseus’ wanderings were confined within the Mediterranean, or if they indeed expanded into the Atlantic – indicating that for them the ocean was not a “terra” (mare) incogita.

Sappho and Alcaeus, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Despite that, other scholars, turned against this euhemerism –⁽⁶⁾ or even against the great rhapsode. The mythographer-grammarian Apollodorus of Athens (2nd century BCE) wrote that Homer imagined the wanderings as having taken place in a kind of fairyland in the Atlantic. Strabo (1st centuries BCE-CE) thought that at least Ogygia and Scheria, the islands of Calypso and Nausicaa respectively, were “imagined in fantasy” as being in the Atlantic – so, they both mentioned the Atlantic! In addition, he insisted that any hypothesis at all, no matter how outrageous, is more plausible than saying “I do not know”… Yet, Eratosthenes (3rd – 2nd centuries BCE) remarked rather sarcastically: “You will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds.”

• ⁽⁶⁾ Euhemerism: from the mythographer of Sacred History, Euhemerus: a view that the gods have been deified humans and that the myths have a historical basis.

Plutarch (1st – 2nd centuries CE) was sure Ogygia was in the Atlantic, and specifically west of Britain. Additionally, he repeated what Plato had described as a continent on the other side of the Atlantic, claiming that from this continent Ogygia was about 900 kilometres distant. The German astronomer Kepler (1571 – 1630) estimated that this “great continent” was America and attempted to locate Calypso’s island.

Map of Rio de Janeiro (Dutch Atlas 1600)

● In her research entitled The Wine Dark Sea (1964), the American Henriette Mertz argued that Circe’s island was Madeira, Calypso’s island one of the Azores, while the intervening voyages recorded a discovery of North America: Scylla and Charybdis were in the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia, Canada, while Scheria, the Phaeacians’ land, was in the Caribbean, in the Gulf of Mexico, possibly in Florida. Such travels were done with the help of sea currents she studied. It was them, mainly the (Mexican) Gulf Stream, which took Odysseus to the Sirens (Haiti or Cuba, and to the Island of the Sun, of Helios (Nova Scotia or Newfoundland).

Enrico Mattievich, an Italian-Peruvian retired Professor of Physics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (where our festival took place), “brought” Odysseus to South America, proposing that his journey to the Underworld actually took place there. The river Acheron is the Amazon, he argued in his Journey to the Mythological Inferno (1992). After a long voyage upstream, Odysseus met the spirits of the dead at the confluence of the rivers Marañon and Ucayali – i.e. at the starting point of the Amazon.

Another study connected to that of Mertz’s is Siegfried Petrides’ Odyssey – a Naval Epic of the Greeks in America (1994). Grecian literature is full of references about the geographical and astronomical knowledge of the Hellenes, which allowed them to use the constellations for directions. Petrides’ long experience as a sailor allowed him to confirm, or even clarify, Mertz’s conclusions, providing extra details on the wind directions, sea routes, islands, etc. A clarification is that ancient Greek sailors did not rely on mere chance to reach America but had fast and versatile vessels that could easily cross the Atlantic. They also knew perfectly well how to combine and take advantage of both the sails and the rows, thus covering very long distances.

Demetris Michalópoulos, of the Institute of Hellenic Maritime History, described a Peripeteia [Adventure] in the Atlantic: Ulysses’ voyages between Europe and America – referring also to Petrides. His anything but controversial starting point is the coast of Libya, the land of the Lotophagi. His next stop, the land of the Cyclopes, seems to be nearby: Sicily or somewhere in Magna Graecia, according to the prevailing opinion in late antiquity. All the same, there is no mention to Italy in the Homeric text. The only information given by Homer is that, in the past, the Cyclopes were neighbours of the Phaeacians in the “immense Hyperia”. Yet, the latter were compelled to migrate to Scheria, because the Cyclopes were anything but friendly… But where was Hyperia located? If we now accept what we have just rejected, i.e. the prevailing opinion in late antiquity, the Cyclopes lived in the Mediterranean near the Laestrygonians. In the Homeric text, there are some indications about the Laestrygonians’ land: “the outgoings of the nights and of the days are close together”… Michalópoulos supposes that the Laestrygonians lived in a region where, in summer, the days are very long and the nights very short, that is, in Scandinavia. He also refers to Tacitus, who wrote that Odysseus reached at least Germany. Hence Hyperia was somewhere there. Yet, there is a “little problem”: between the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians, Odysseus voyaged to Aeolia that, although “floating”, is identified most possibly with Mallorca. But a return trip between Scandinavia and the Balearics is… a little too much!

Then we set sail to America. Circe’s Aeaea, the Underworld, the Hesperides and the Gorgons were all in the “remote West”, according to Hesiod. Ogygia, wrote Plutarch, was five days away from Britain. Arriving there, one must navigate through “a heavy sea, muddy and agitated by currents”. Such a place can be the Sargasso Sea, in the North Atlantic Ocean, where Bermuda may be the location of the isle of Calypso. The nymph instructed Odysseus to sail with the Ursa Major constellation on his left. After eighteen days, he reached Scheria, possibly in Iberia. Ithaca’s king and other Trojan War heroes had made their presence felt in the peninsula. According to Strabo, even a town therein was named after Odysseus. There is a tradition, as well, adopted by Camões, that the etymon of Lisbon is Ulysses, i.e. the Latin form of the name of our hero. Hence the “Homeric” river of the Phaeacians is the Tagus, whose bed was so rich in precious metals that it was described as “equivalent to the Pactolus”, the well-known gold river of Asia Minor (Silius Italicus).

Odysseus may not have been the first Greek (or European) to step on American soil: according to Mertz, some time before the Trojan War and the Odyssey, circa 1300 (or 1225) BCE,⁽⁷⁾ the Argonauts travelled across the Atlantic Ocean, thanks to the Gulf Stream, crossed the Sargasso Sea (Apollonius of Rhodes’ “floating islands”) and then touched at Puerto Rico. They sailed southwards by South America, past the mouth of the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro until the Río de la Plata of Argentina, and, following it upstream, reached the altiplano of Bolivia arriving at Colchis, or Tiwanaku, where the Golden Fleece was kept. Centuries later Tiwanaku became the cultural, religious, cosmological and commercial centre of a pre-Columbian Empire extending around Lake Titicaca in present-day western Bolivia, southern Peru and northern Chile from 300 to 1150 CE. But this area must have been inhabited as early as 1500 BCE.⁽⁸⁾

• ⁽⁷⁾ Michalópoulos (The Argonauts in the Black Sea) moves the expedition to a distant past in the first half of the 19th century BCE. In very ancient times, he says, “voyages were longer and more venturesome than those in late antiquity”, while “the Euxine had been a center of international trade”. The Argonauts were Minyans, the most prominent tribe of the Pelasgians. The latter are presented as ancestors of the Hellenes, colonizers of the Black Sea, and also of Italy, inventors of the alphabet – a civilizing people.

• ⁽⁸⁾ Both the expedition of the Argonauts and the Trojan War that followed aimed at the control of the Black Sea by the Hellenes. The legend of the Golden Fleece was based on a practice of the local tribes: they would place a lamb’s fleece at the bottom of a stream to entrap gold dust that was washed down from upstream. In some regions this practice is still now in use. The capital of Colchis, Aea (Kutaisi), is said to have been one of many cities that were founded in Eurasia by Egyptians. This account is combined with one by Herodotus, citing Egyptian priests. Their story was about the legendary pharaoh Sesostris, who once led an army north through the Levant and Asia Minor, all the way to Colchis. He settled colonists there, at the river Phasis (modern Rioni), and then he turned westward across southern Russia, and south through Romania and Bulgaria, until he reached eastern Hellas, from where he returned home. Herodotus cautioned that much of this account came second hand via Egyptian priests, but also noted that the Colchians were commonly known to be Egyptian colonists. According to Strabo and Diodorus Siculus, Sesostris conquered the whole world, from Ethiopia in the South, to Scythia in the North – or, who knows, even South America in the West!

● Some writers interpret the Homeric epics as “British ballads” or “Viking sagas”, and in this way pass off their North-to-South cultural-transmission theory. Such pseudo-theories are centuries older than German nationalism, and definitely inspire all the Northerners – who may figure out they are descendants of the “Hyper-Northerners”, the Hyperboreans!⁽⁹⁾ The idea that the inspiration for Plato’s Atlantis can be found in the Baltic was the… “grandfather” of all these books. In the “heroic” 17th century of Sweden, the foremost champion was the all-round Renaissance scholar (astronomer, physician, “archaeo-historian”, and even more) Olaus or Olof Rudbeck, who caused consternation with his mammoth, 2,500-page work, Atland eller Manheim, translated into Latin for scholarly use as Atlantica. He claimed there, among other things, that the oldest district of his home town, Uppsala, was the centre of “lost Atlantis”; thus – by the extravagant logic of cultural diffusion – Sweden was the cradle of western civilization going back to Adam and Eve! Despite ridicule from his local university colleagues (who also accused him of forgery), he was turned into a national icon – and not only: he was admired at the court of Louis “l’état c’est moi!”, proposed as a member of the Royal Society in London, celebrated in cafés, salons, and academies across the cosmopolitan “Respublica literaria”, and read avidly by Montesquieu and Leibniz, while Isaac Newton wrote to request… a personal copy of Atlantica! After his death, Swedish monarchs would be crowned over his grave! He had fanatic followers and became the subject of a satiric illustration, captioned: “The archaeologist Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) reveals his ‘Predecessors’ – Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, Apollodorus, Tacitus, Odysseus, Ptolemy, Plutarch and Orpheus – the ‘Truth’ about Atlantis”…

• ⁽⁹⁾ Along with Thule, the Hyperborean land was among several terrae incognitae to the ancients. The Hyperboreans were a race of giants, three metres high, enjoying lives of sheer happiness and living to the age of one thousand! The sun was supposed to rise and set there only once a year – hence living a thousand days would be the same as living a thousand years! This also, to modern ears, suggests a possible location within the Arctic Circle. They were the most blessed of peoples, living in a perfect land, located “beyond Boreas”, the North Wind. The coldness of the northern countries was due to the cold breath of this wind. Thus the land “beyond Boreas” was a warm and sunny land! Besides, the only one among the Olympians, who was venerated there, was Apollo: the Hellenes thought he spent his winter there. The giants reciprocated by sending their delegation and offerings to his sacred Aegean island, Delos! Pindar sang of “the marvellous road to the assembly of the Hyperboreans: Never the Muse is absent | from their ways: lyres clash and flutes cry | everywhere maiden choruses whirling. | Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed | in their sacred blood; far from labour and battle they live.”

Arctic continent on the Gerardus Mercator map (1595)

● “Northerners and Hyper-Northerners”: I started with wordplay, but we ended up filled up with swastikas! Northerners, mainly Scandinavians, wishing to counter the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean culture, identified themselves with the Hyperboreans. This trend was very strong in the 17th century in Sweden, when it was a great power, where the champions of the ideology of Gothicism declared Scandinavia to be both the Hyperborean land and lost Atlantis! After all, the Arctic Circle is their land… Generally, European culture self-identified as Hyperborean. Inevitably, adaptations followed by the ethnologist Karl Penka (Origins of the Aryans, 1883), John Bennett (The Hyperborean Origin of the Indo-European Culture, 1963), and several others. According to some esotericists, the Hyperboreans were part of the Golden Race (where, of course, all these “thinkers” belong, for sure), and their land was the Golden Age polar centre of civilization and spirituality. Mankind, they claim, does not rise from the ape, but devolves progressively into an ape-like condition, as it strays physically and spiritually from its mystical otherworldly homeland in the Far North, succumbing to the South Pole’s daemonic energies… Some outright charlatans, like Robert Charroux, the alter ego of Erich von Däniken, relate the Hyperboreans to an ancient astronaut race of “very large, very white people”, who arrived here and selected “the least warm area on the earth because it corresponded more closely to their own climate on the planet from which they originated”…

● Except perhaps the last ones, who profit out of their… charlatanism, all the rest are racists and fascists. The Nazis e.g. considered Hyperborea as the cradle of the “Aryan race”, while their party was hatched within the “Thule Society”. Let’s remind them (pulling their legs) that Hyperborea, as a terra incognita, was located by ancient writers in the far North, of course, but all across Eurasia, from NW Europe to NE Asia. So, some “Chinks” claimed that the Hyperboreans were Chinese – a view that would be strongly disputed especially in Japan, but also in Mongolia and Siberia!

None of Rudbeck’s descendants ever achieved such a Triumph. Most unlucky was a Belgian lawyer, named Théophile Cailleux (Pays atlantiques décrits par Homère: Ibérie, Gaule, Bretagne, Archipels, Amériques; Théorie nouvelle. Atlantic lands described by Homer: Iberia, Gaul, Britain, Archipelagos, the Americas; New Theory. 1878). Troy, he claimed, was situated in East Anglia, on the heights outside Cambridge, known as the Gog Magog Hills (rather far from the sea); while Ithaca, he believed, should be sought in southern Andalusia, between Jerez and Cádiz, in the Delta of the Guadalete (where a Trojan War hero, Menestheus, allegedly settled: see Chronicle 22). Yet, some time after Cailleux’s book was published, Heinrich Schliemann triumphantly proved that Troy and Mycenae existed as powerful cities, at the right time and in the right place to have fought a Trojan War such as the epics describe. As a result, there was no thirst for geohistorical speculation then in the market…

Homère, L’Odyssée; lithographies by Marc Chagall

More than a century later, the Dutch Iman Wilkens presented the same idea again. His book, Where Troy Once Stood (1990), takes us to the same hills that Cailleux pinpointed, but with a scenario somewhat modified: the Trojan War was fought c. 1200 BCE between groups of Celts. Those living in Cambridgeshire were attacked by fellow Celts from the Continent to win access to the profitable tin mines in Cornwall. Wilkens further suggests that the Sea Peoples (see Chronicles 18, 19, 20) were Celts who settled in Greece and the Aegean as Achaeans and Pelasgians, bringing with them the oral poems that were translated and written down in Hellenic around 750 BCE, forming the basis of the Homeric epics. He locates Scylla and Charybdis at present day St. Michael’s Mount, at the tip of the Cornish peninsula, moves a bit Ithaca from the Guadalete to Cádiz, while the topography of the Laestrygonian capital, Telepylos (“Far-off port”), looks to him similar to that of Havana, Cuba. But he’s got an Achilles’ heel; he (too) is a nationalist:

“It appears that Homer’s Greek contains a large number of loan words from western European languages, more often from Dutch rather than English, French or German”, he thoughtlessly wrote, speaking of tongues that have not existed until at least 1000 years after Homer!⁽¹⁰⁾

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ If one takes Cailleux and Wilkens for granted, the Trojans left Britain after the war to settle in Italy. Anyway, three generations later they returned to found the “British nation”. Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), written around 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth, begins with the Trojan Aeneas who, according to Roman legend, settled in Italy after the war. But his great-grandson Brutus was banished, started wandering and was finally directed by the goddess Diana (Artemis) to settle in the western ocean, on the island of Albion, which he named Britain after himself. He then defeated the giants who were the only inhabitants there, and on the banks of the Thames he established his capital, Troia Nova, renamed later as London.

A variation of this North-to-South cultural transmission is that early Grecian sailors might have come for long-distance trade in tin etc. and also took this wonderful epic tale back with them, transforming it into an “ethnic” epic when it was written down in verse. The northern peoples preferred not to write out their compositions, relying on prodigious feats of memory (as Caesar said of the Celtic bards). However, over time the original northern version could have been lost in wars and migrations. Another North-to-South cultural-transmission theory is that the northern tribes were the Sea Peoples who swept south to attack also Hellas, around 1200 BCE. The Greeks that survived assimilated the northerners’ campfire tales and made them their own when they flourished again, also thanks to these tales, after their Dark Ages.

Atlantis, Poseidonis: the last remnant of the lost continent (imaginary reconstruction)

This “theory” was foreshadowed in several books by Jurgen Spanuth (1907-1998), a German pastor, classical scholar, and amateur archaeologist. He maintained that all these events survive in distorted version not just in Homer but also in Plato’s Atlantis parable. Spanuth compared Homer’s and Plato’s descriptions on a point-for-point basis, and suggested both derived from a common origin. This was the rise and fall of a mighty Bronze Age seafaring nation living in the Jutland area, which fell when an “Atlantean” North Sea flood drove them southward into the Mediterranean; they were the Sea Peoples that the Egyptians defeated in the Nile Delta. Their tale of how their vast empire collapsed in a flood was recorded by the Egyptians, and then Plato picked it up through Solon, who was briefed by priests when he visited Egypt (Das Entratselte Atlantis; Atlantis – The Mystery Unraveled; 1953, all through Die Atlanter; Atlantis of the North; 1976). German nationalism was all too clear in these inflated claims – in effect assuming credit for another people’s cultural foundations – and the reception of the books was rather cold in the reviews. Rebuffed by the mainstream, the pastor turned to some right-wing German magazines, which marginalized him further. If he succeeded in something indirectly is that he rekindled interest for new excavations in sunken North Sea ports, e.g. Rungholt, where ceramics were recovered evidencing trade between Frisia and Minoan Crete dating back to 1600-1400 BCE!

The other variant of the North-to-South cultural-transmission “theory”, with a largely Scandinavian setting, has a certain peculiarity: the storyteller is an Italian, the nuclear engineer Felice Vinci – probably the only Mediterranean accepting that his ancestors received the “lights of civilization” from the North. The reception was dismissive, as usual, and the Finns were quick to label it “an interesting joke”! The book is entitled Omero nel Baltico (Homer in the Baltic, 1998), or The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales: The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Migration of Myth. The Achaeans were a Baltic people at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE, coming to Greece around the 16th century (after the Trojan War that took place in the 18th century), bringing their traditional oral sagas to the Aegean. Odysseus himself, claims Vinci, was Dutch(!); the islands of his kingdom, Ithaca, Dulichium, Cephallenia, and Zacynthus, correspond to islands in the Danish archipelago of South Funen, and Troy to Toija in SW Finland; the Hellespont could not be identified with the Dardanelles, but the Gulf of Finland; Mycenae stood in the same place as modern Copenhagen; and Odysseus’ voyage would have taken place along the coasts of Norway: Ogygia could be identified with one of the Faeroe Islands (among Britain, Scandinavia and Iceland); the Phaeacian land, Scheria, with Bergen’s environs; Circe’s island, and the places she describes (the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis) may be placed in the Lofoten archipelago of northern Norway; and Aeolus’ island in the Shetland archipelago, NE of Scotland. The same region is the setting of other Hellenic mythological tales such as the Argonauts, adds Vinci. Referring to Plato’s dialogue Critias, he claims that Athens rose formerly on a flat fertile zone in the Baltic, perhaps near Karlskrona in southern Sweden.

Il Ritorno di Ulisse (Odysseus’ Return), by Giorgio De Chirico (1968)

● Regarding Homeric epics’ background, the Flemish Karel Jozef de Graeve, in his République des Champs Elysées (Republic of the Elysian Fields, 1806), pointed out the area around the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Delta.

Finally, the French Gilbert Pillot, in Le Code Secret de l’Odyssée (The Secret Code of the Odyssey, 1969), “saw” Odysseus crossing the Pillars of Heracles and voyaging on the Atlantic, initially to Morocco, the Canaries and Madeira, and then heading north to Ireland, Scotland and Iceland. He most probably thought – quite rightly – that “secret codes” are… sold out, and claimed he discovered “a secret message in the Odyssey”, with a “hidden” itinerary over the Atlantic, from the Canaries to Iceland through the British Isles. The verse epic, he argued, was a Hellenic syndicate’s way of concealing navigation data inside an “entertainment” – acting as an elaborate mnemonic. The Greek mariners could thus remember, yet protect, the key details (sailing directions, times, dangers) of their all-important northern trade route, leading to the sought-after sources of tin: the Cassiterides, or Tin Isles – a terra incognita, as Herodotus complained, impossible to locate, but a key to prosperity mainly in the Bronze Age.

Eternally mapping Homer’s Odyssey

MAPPING HOMER’S ODYSSEY, Armin Wolf concluded that Scheria-Phaeacia should have been in Calabria, Italy, as it is located between two seas: the Tyrrhenian and the Ionian Seas. The capital of the Phaeacians stood at the Tiriolo and Marcellinara region, in the Catanzaro province, he claimed. Additionally, he referred to the dozens (or hundreds?) of attempts to map the Odyssey; several of them we have already presented; but he added some more:

In 1898, an anonymous author with the pseudonym Eumaeus claimed that Odysseus had completed a periplus of Africa (centuries before the Phoenicians, mentioned by Herodotus), and had even discovered America. Pseudo-Eumaeus (the real one was Odysseus’ swineherd and friend) was the first to use the ocean currents to trace the route of the king of Ithaca. In 1925, even the distinguished archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld drew a map of Homer’s world in which, apart from the “established” stops of the Odyssey, he pinpointed the southernmost tip of Africa, and there he located Telepylus of the Laestrygonians and also – like “Eumaeus” – Aeaea, Circe’s island.

After World War II, several maps placed the Odyssey on the Atlantic and North Sea: British Isles, Iceland, Norway. The Swiss F. J. Wil, in 1950, added Faeroes in the list, while the German Otto Zeller, in 1959, expanded the map from Gibraltar and the Azores to Norway and Heligoland. Karl Bartholomäus, professor of archaeogeodesy, in 1977, tried to prove by astronomical calculations that the track from Calypso to Nausicaa leads from the Azores to Heligoland. The German judge Hans Steuerwald, in 1978, “sent” Odysseus to Cornwall and Scotland. The wine produced on Circe’s isle (identified with one of the Hebrides), he added, was in fact Scotch whisky…

Incan Golden Solar disc, used as a star map.
It was lost during the Conquista.

A multitude of writers have created fantastic routes on the oceans of the earth. This mania of inventing “theories” probably reached its climax in 1983, with the Austrian ethnologist Christine Pellech, who argued that Odysseus had sailed right around the earth – before Magellan! She saw no difficulty in the great hero taking just seven days to row from the Mediterranean to Norway, and then in a single day the whole way from Norway to Canada! It goes without saying, of course, that he discovered the Strait of Magellan and Australia…

● More extreme views about the geography of the Homeric epics keep on surfacing, either centered on the Atlantic, or extending all over the globe. Some others turned their eyes to the sky arguing that the Homeric geography is to be found there, and that the Iliad and Odyssey can be decoded as a star map. What we will hear next, I suppose, is that the Trojan War was actually a… Star War!

LABYRINTH OF MAPS

● TROY. NW Asia Minor, Turkey: Hisarlık || E England: Cambridgeshire || SW Finland: Toija.
● LOTUS EATERS (LOTOPHAGI). Libya: a headland in the Gindanes area | Gulf of Sidra || Tunisia: Djerba (Meninx) island.
● CYCLOPES. Italy: SE Sicily, near Etna and Lentini (Leontini) | Marsala, W Sicily | Gulf of Naples || Spain: Balearics archipelago || Scandinavia.
● AEOLIA. Italy, N Sicily: Aeolian Islands (Lipari [Meligounis], or Stromboli [Strongule], or Ustica) || Spain: Balearics archipelago (Mallorca) || Scotland: Shetland archipelago.
● LAESTRYGONIANS. Italy: SE Sicily | N Sardinia || France: S Corsica || Scandinavia || Cuba: Havana || S African tip.
● CIRCE’S AEAEA. Italy: Monte Circeo, Lazio-Latium (< Latinus, Circe’s son) | Ischia, Gulf of Naples || Portugal: Madeira || Norway: Lofoten archipelago || S African tip || Scotland: Hebrides archipelago.
● HADES, UNDERWORLD. NW Hellas: Acheron river || Italy: lake Avernus (< Greek Aornos = with no birds), near Cumae, Campania, where Aeneas also found it || Peru: Amazon River.
● SIRENS. Italy: Cape Faro, by the Strait of Messina | Sirenuse archipelago, or a headland between the Gulfs of Naples and Salerno | Naples itself | Lucanian coast || Haiti or Cuba || Norway: Lofoten archipelago.
● SCYLLA & CHARYBDIS. Italy: Strait of Messina || Canada, Nova Scotia: Bay of Fundy || SW England: St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall’s tip || Norway: Lofoten archipelago.
● THE SUN (HELIOS) ISLAND. Italy: Sicily || Canada: Nova Scotia or Newfoundland.
● CALYPSO’S OGYGIA. Maltese archipelago: Gaudos, modern Gozo || Morocco-Spain: Pillars of Heracles (Ceuta) || Portugal: Azores || Bermuda || Denmark: Faeroes.
● NAUSICAA & PHAEACIANS’ SCHERIA. NW Hellas: Corcyra (Corfu) || Cyprus || Carribean-Gulf of Mexico-Florida, USA || Portugal: Lisbon || Norway: Bergen || Germany: Heligoland || Italy: Calabria.
● ITHACA. W Hellas: Ithaca, or Cephallenia, or Leucas || Andalusia, Spain: Guadalete Delta or Cádiz || Denmark: S Funen.

Celestial map by the Dutch cartographer Frederik de Wit (17th century)

Homer’s mystery: the epimyth of a myth

ANY HYPOTHESIS AT ALL, NO MATTER HOW OUTRAGEOUS, is more plausible than saying “I do not know”… After all, what do these stories show, even those that are crazy and nuts? What else but the greatness of Odysseus and Homer, the creator of the Iliad and the Odyssey; two wonderful epics that the classicists initially treated as written poetry and also the rhapsode as a writer. Until Milman Parry (1902–1935) appeared in the 1920s, and indicated it was oral musical-poetic tradition. His research on the process of oral poetry improvisation through “stock epithets” and “reiteration” (words, phrases, stanzas) established that these formulae were artifacts easily applied to the hexametric lines of oral tradition. A two-word stock epithet (e.g. “the resourceful Odysseus”) is reiterated, permitting the rhapsode to improvise and complete the verse. This research by Parry and his assistant, Albert Lord, was conducted in Yugoslavia.

Homer (a Hellenic name in Aeolis) was born in Smyrna (Ionia’s northern limit), or on the island of Chios, and died on the Cycladic island of Ios. His name means hostage, follower, or blind (ὁ μὴ ὁρῶν: “he who does not see”). Like Thamyris or Hesiod, Homer was a wandering minstrel, who hanged around with ordinary people – fishermen, sailors, potters, shoemakers, or elderly men – at harbours.⁽¹¹⁾ This image, of course, is far from that of a court musician-poet. Rapidity-ease of movement and plainness of expression-thought do not distinguish the great epic poets Virgil, Dante, or Milton. They rather distinguish the humbler epico-lyrical school. But Homer does not belong to that school, neither his poetry is in any sense ballad poetry. This is apparent through the higher artistic structure and value of his poems. It is his noble and powerful style that eventually separates Homer from all forms of ballad poetry and popular epic. His art is distinguished from the works of Virgil, Dante, and Milton, due to the comparative absence of underlying motives or sentiments. In Virgil’s poetry, a sense of the greatness of Rome is the leading motive of a passionate rhetoric, veiled by the considered delicacy of his language. Dante and Milton are still more faithful exponents of the religion and politics of their time. French epics display sentiments of fear or hatred of the Saracens. In Homer’s work, the interest is purely dramatic. There is no antipathy of race or religion. He is principally interested in human feeling or emotion, and also drama. Indeed, his poems are often referred to as dramas.

Above all, we need to remember that Homer recited his epics; Virgil, Dante, and all the rest wrote them down…

• ⁽¹¹⁾ An elderly Homer, it is said, was going around Ios, the last stop of his life’s voyage, together with children, singing the carols of the day.

● Influences from the mythology and literature of Near East have been seen in the Odyssey. Martin West has noted some parallels between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey. Both Odysseus and Gilgamesh travel to the ends of the earth, and even to the underworld. Odysseus follows instructions given to him by Calypso, or Circe, a daughter of the sun-god Helios. Their islands are located at the edges of the world. Gilgamesh also gets directions from the goddess Siduri, who also dwells by the sea at the ends of the earth. Others correlate Homer with Hittite epics. It seems that the great epic poet was equally “resourceful” with his protagonist, Odysseus.

THE “CLASSICAL” MEDITERRANEAN ODYSSEY

● [1] TROY. Setting sail, Odysseus and his men were greeted by friendly and calm waters. He had not committed hubris yet…
● [2] ISMARUS, LAND OF THE CICONES. Odysseus and his men looted the city and robbed it of all its goods. The crew refused to leave quickly and fell asleep on the beach. The next morning the Cicones returned with their fierce kinsmen from the mountains. Odysseus escaped but lost many men. On leaving, his twelve ships were driven off course by fierce storms.
● [3] THE LOTUS EATERS’ ISLAND. Odysseus’ scouting party ate lotus fruit with the natives. This caused them to fall asleep and stop caring about ever going home.
● [4] THE CYCLOPES’ ISLAND. The giant one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus devoured two of Odysseus’ men each day. Odysseus gave Polyphemus intoxicating wine and then blinded him with a wooden stake. As a result, Odysseus was haunted by the wrath of Poseidon, the Cyclops’ father, who cursed Odysseus to wander the sea for years.
● [5] AEOLIA, LAND OF AEOLUS, GOD OF THE WINDS. Aeolus gave Odysseus hospitality for a month and then a leather bag containing all the winds, except the west wind, so as to return safely home. However, the crew foolishly opened the bag while Odysseus slept, just as Ithaca came into sight, thinking that it contained gold. The resulting storm drove the ships back to Aeolia, but Aeolus refused to provide any further help.
● [6] TELEPYLOS, IN THE LAND OF THE LAESTRYGONIANS. These man-eating giants attacked the fleet with boulders, sinking all the ships but one and killing hundreds.
● [7] AEAEA, CIRCE’S ISLAND. Circe turned all of Odysseus’ men into pigs after feeding them cheese and wine. Hermes gave Odysseus a drug called moly in order to resist Circe’s magic. She agreed to change Odysseus’ men back to their human form in exchange for his love. They remained on the island for one year feasting and drinking.
● [8] HADES, THE UNDERWORLD. Guided by Circe’s instructions, Odysseus crossed the ocean and reached a harbour at the western edge of the world where he sacrificed to the dead and summoned the spirit of the prophet Tiresias to advise him.
● [9] SIRENS. Odysseus escaped by having all his men plug their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast. When he heard their beautiful song he begged the men to untie him but they ignored him.
● [10] SCYLLA & CHARYBDIS. Circe advised Odysseus to sail closer to the six-headed monster Scylla, for the whirlpool Charybdis could drown the ship. However, Scylla devoured six of his men.
● [11] THRINACIA, HELIOS’ SACRED ISLAND. Though Odysseus warned his men not to kill any of Helios’ sacred cattle, they disobeyed. Helios’ daughters told their father and he destroyed the ship and all men save Odysseus.
● [12] OGYGIA, CALYPSO’S ISLAND. The nymph made him her lover for seven years. On behalf of Athena, Zeus sent Hermes to tell Calypso to let Odysseus go.
● [13] SCHERIA, THE PHAEACIANS’ ISLAND. Washed up on the shore, Odysseus was found by Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous, who entertained him and escorted him to Ithaca.
● [14] ITHACA. On the twentieth day of sailing Odysseus finally arrived home.

• >> Chronicle 16. MEDITERRANEAN PERIPLUS-PARAPLUS
• << Chronicle 14. MUSIC MADE OF BODY AND SOUL

Next Chronicle 16. MEDITERRANEAN PERIPLUS-PARAPLUS ● Periplus: Circumnavigation or Log ● Navigators and Intellectuals ● The Peloponnesian War and Euripides ● Nomos (Law Song)

Chronicle 21. IBERIAN “EL DORADO”

Chronicle 21. IBERIAN “EL DORADO”

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 21. ΙΒΗΡΙΚΟ “EL DORADO”

● Minoans, Mycenaeans, Phoenicians
in Iberia ● Fortunate Isles, Hesperides
● Sardinia ● Odysseus, Calypso,
Ophiussa ● Tartessos

Michales Loukovikas

“ONE FREQUENTLY MEETS CLAIMS that there was contact between the far western coasts of present Spain and Portugal, and Crete of Minoan times”, comments Dan Stanislawski in his Study in Historical-Political Geography: The Individuality of Portugal, and specifically in Chapter 7 about Contacts Βetween the Ancient Civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and Iberia.

“It is not only a seductive idea but it makes a reasonable hypothesis, for the Minoans were good navigators, traders, and seekers of metals. Had they known anything of the Iberian Peninsula they might well have been attracted; however, while it is quite possible that the Mediterranean island route to the west was used by them (Rhys Carpenter, The Greeks in Spain), as yet there is no convincing evidence that it was. The excavations of Almerían culture at Los Millares, which may be dated as of 2000–1800 BC, presented certain items reminiscent of Aegean cultures, but there is no evidence that would clearly demonstrate connection. Such items may represent nothing more than casual parallelism. Other finds of a somewhat later period in Spain make better evidence of contact with the eastern Mediterranean lands, for they can be neatly equated with materials of the Egyptian Tell-el-Amarna of 1400–1200 BC. The Egyptian trade items of this period of time are well known to Spanish archaeology and almost surely may be associated with Phoenician intermediaries. As of the present date, such items may be taken as the earliest evidence of direct contact between Iberia and the eastern Mediterranean navigators.”

Where did the Bronze Age Mediterranean find tin to produce bronze?
Who transported this rare and precious metal to the Mediterranean?

A model of Los Millares with its walls

Voilà! Here is a “neat” example of the established historians’ “classic” mentality: reserved if they write or talk about Minoans, even Hellenes, but garrulous when they lecture about Phoenicians. Indeed, why was it so difficult for the peoples of the Aegean to reach Iberia? They were certainly not inferior to the Phoenicians in seamanship and, furthermore, the Aegean was far closer to Iberia in comparison to Phoenicia. Besides, who controlled then (“1400–1200 BC”) the Mediterranean trade? The Phoenicians, or the Mycenaeans – whom Stanislawski “fails to bring in mind”?(!) Why should the Egyptian trade items of this period found in Spain “almost surely may be associated with Phoenician intermediaries”? The crucial question, however, this mentality does not answer is: Where did the Bronze Age Mediterranean obtain tin to produce bronze? Who were established then as sea traders to transport this profitable metal to the Mediterranean? Most obviously, the Mycenaeans. That is why the evidence about the Aegean peoples’ presence in Iberia is anything but “convincing”… Regarding the “opposite point of view”, there are detailed descriptions of Minoans extracting metals from the area of the Lake Superior and carrying them through the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico destined for the Mediterranean! Although we cannot exclude this, we do not intend to take you that far. It is better to remain on Iberian soil…

Los Millares, by Marianne Weil, cast bronze (2008)

Some “non-established” historians link the distinctive culture of Los Millares in Almería with The Early Minoan Colonization of Spain (W. Sheppard Baird). Far more interesting is the following El Argar culture, which flourished in Almería, as well, in today’s eastern Andalusia, between 1800 and 1300 BCE. This Argaric culture was characterized by the early adoption of bronze, which allowed local dominance over “copper age” (chalcolithic) neighbours. That people’s mining and metallurgy were quite advanced, with silver, gold, and bronze being mined or worked for weapons and jewelry. They developed sophisticated techniques, and traded with other tribes.

Argaric gold sword

The ancient collective burial tradition, typical of European Megalithic Culture, was abandoned in favour of individual burials; the tholos or “beehive” tombs in favour of small cists. This innovative trend seems to have come from the eastern Mediterranean, most likely the Mycenaeans – skipping Sicily and Italy, where the collective burial tradition remained for some time yet. In the next phase of this culture, beginning c. 1500 BCE, burial in pithoi (large jars) became most frequent. Again this custom – that never reached beyond the Argarians’ circle – must have come from Hellas, where it was used after c. 2000 BCE. During the Mycenaean era, cultural exchanges are very clear in the Mediterranean, with the Argarians adopting Grecian funerary customs, while the Hellenes also imported the Iberian tholos for the same purpose.

Note that whoever arrived at Iberia could easily find the way to the tin ores of Brittany and Cornwall, through the Western Iberian Bronze cultures that had some degree of interaction, not just among them, but also with other Atlantic cultures in Britain, France, etc. It is the so-called Atlantic Bronze Age complex of c. 1300–700 BCE that consisted of different civilizations in Andalusia, Portugal, Galicia, Armorica (the part of Gaul that included Brittany), and the British Isles. The Atlantic Bronze Age was marked by economic and cultural exchange, which led to a high degree of cultural affinity manifested in the coastal communities from Galicia to Scotland, while commercial contacts extended from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean.

Heracles fighting Geryon, ca 540 BCE

Next notable culture was that of Tartessos, a harbour city and the surrounding region in southern Iberia (in Andalusia). It was the first organized polity of the peninsula, developed culturally and politically by the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. The area is mentioned in the Greek mythology of this era as a reminder of the Mycenaean campaigns and presence in Iberia. Heracles went to perform two labours there: to kill Geryon and obtain his cattle; and to steal the golden apples of the Hesperides. Geryon dwelt in the “Far West” of antiquity, on an island of the Hesperides, Erytheia (Erytheis); that was the name of one of the Hesperides, and also the fearsome giant’s daughter. The Occident, and more precisely Iberia, was called Hesperia. “Geryon was killed by the great strength of Heracles at sea-circled Erytheis”, sang Hesiod in his Theogony. Heracles set up two massive stone spires to stabilize all this area and ensure the safety of ships sailing through the Gibraltar Strait, called the Pillars of Heracles. He also founded colonies; among others, Gádeira, on Geryon’s island, where the Phoenicians would later establish their headquarters: Gadir (now Cádiz). A tumulus nearby Gádeira was associated with Geryon’s final resting-place; and there are legends about Heracles as being buried in Spain, as well.

Geryon is also mentioned among the mythical kings of Tartessos. His grandson, Norax (Norace), conquered the south of Sardinia, founding the city of Nora, and becoming a hero of the Nuragic mythology. He dictated the first laws, divided the society into “seven classes” and forced the aristocrats to work. Later Gárgoris introduced commerce, beekeeping, and new agricultural tools such as the plow. The agricultural innovations are also credited to his (grand)son, Habis (Habido, Abido, Abidas, Abidis, Gabis, or Gabid, as he is mentioned in various variations of the legend), who succeeded him on the throne. Later generations of Hellenes linked the area to Tartessos. They thought the Garden of the Hesperides and the Fortunate Isles, i.e. Isles of the Blessed, or Elysium, could be found somewhere outside the Pillars of Heracles.

Heracles, Hesperides, Fortunate Isles, Sardinia

Medusa Bronze Plaque

● Heracles was great-grandson of Perseus, the legendary founder of Mycenae, who killed the Gorgon Medusa. To achieve that, he had to find the Hesperides who would give him the necessary weapons. Finally, cutting off her head, from her neck sprang Pegasus and Chrysaor (gold + sword), the result of her meeting with Poseidon. Later Chrysaor became king of Iberia. Geryon, his son and heir, dwelt on the Hesperides island of Erytheia, the “red island” of the Vesper, so called because it lay under the sunrays in the sunset. It was identified with Gadir, there were also alternatives, such as one of the Balearics, or even the Delta in the estuary of the Tartessos river (Guadalquivir; see Chronicle 26, Tartessos and the Phoenicians). Heracles, on his way to this area, according to Herodotus, crossed the desert of “Libya” (Maghreb) and became so frustrated at the heat that he shot an arrow at Helios, i.e. the Sun. The god, “in admiration of his courage”, gave Heracles the golden cup (boat) he used to sail across the sea from West to East each night. Heracles reaching Erytheia on it was a favourite motif of the vase-painters. Diodorus Siculus, on the contrary, claimed that Heracles raised a large fleet in Crete to sail against Chrysaor, the wealthy king of Iberia, and his three sons. Stesichorus, in the 6th century BCE, composed a Song of Geryon (Γηρυονηΐς), where he made the first reference to Tartessos, with the Hesperides nearby. Later Strabo reported the same location in his Geographica.

Heracles with nymphs, a satyr, and Pan in the Garden of the Hesperides, by Hesperides Painter, hydria (water jar),
ca early 4th century BCE

Heracles’ way back home with the cattle was eventful. He crossed the Pyrenees that he himself had created when his beloved Pyrene bore a serpent and was so terrified that she fled to the woods where she died. Heracles created a tomb for her by piling up rocks, thus forming the mountain range. Arriving at Gaul, in the Monaco area, he turned away the previous gods. As a result, the temple of Heracles Mónoecos (single + house) was constructed on a promontory – called thus as it was the sole temple in what is now the Côte d’Azur. The Phocaeans built the colony Mónoecos there in the 6th century BCE. The only deep-water port in Monaco is dedicated to the great hero: Port Hercule. Heracles also founded the cities Alesia and Nemausus and became the father of the Celts. Reaching Liguria, two giants, Al(e)bion and Bergion, Poseidon’s sons, attempted to carry off his oxen, but the hero killed them. In this fight, he was assisted by Zeus with a shower of stones. The Italian route was rather uneventful as far as the tip of the peninsula, near Rhegium, where an ox jumped into the sea and swam to Sicily. Eryx, another son of Poseidon, king of the homonymous city and also excellent boxer, appropriated it. Heracles fought with him and killed him in order to take the animal back. The only problem afterwards was when Hera made the cattle mad in Thrace. Heracles was obliged to go as far as the Hellespont to recover the oxen, and take them to king Eurystheus, who sacrificed them to Zeus’ sister-wife.

● The Hesperides (Ἑσπερίδες) in Hellenic mythology were nymphs, aficionadas of singing, who tended a blissful garden in a far western corner of the world, near the Atlas Mountains in northwestern Africa, at the edge of the Oceanus encircling the Oecumene. They were three daughters of Hesperus, the Evening Star of the planet Venus or Vesper (just like other Greek triads, such as the Graces and Moerae, Fates): Aegle (“dazzling light”), Arethusa (“waterer”), Erytheia (“red one”). The Garden of the Hesperides was Hera’s orchard in the Occident, where either a single tree or a grove of immortality-giving “golden apples” grew. In later years, it was thought that they might have actually been oranges, a fruit unknown to Europe and the Mediterranean before the Middle Ages. Under this assumption, the Hellenic botanical name for all citrus species is ἑσπεριδοειδῆ (“hesperidoids”) – implying that they have come from the Occident, while in reality their origin is in the Orient (Southeast Asia).⁽¹⁾

A traditional Rabelo boat in the Douro used for centuries
to transport people and goods, mainly wine

• ⁽¹⁾ In some languages, the orange is named after Portugal, the former main source of imports: Greek portokali (πορτοκάλι), Bulgarian and Slav-Macedonian portokal, Romanian portocală, Georgian phortokhali, South Italian dialectic portogallo or purtualle. Related names are found in non-European languages, as well: Turkish portakal, Arabic al-burtuqal, Persian porteghal, and Amharic (the Ethiopian language) birtukan.

Portugal’s name derives from the Roman Portus Cale that evolved into Portugale during the 7th and 8th centuries. Cale was an early settlement located at the mouth of the Douro River, in the north of what is now Portugal. The etymology of the name Cale is mysterious, as is the identity of the town’s founders. Some historians have argued that Hellenes were the first to settle Cale and the name derives from the Hellenic word callos (κάλλος, beauty), referring to the beauty of the Douro valley. However, the mainstream explanation is that it is an ethnonym derived from the Callaeci, or Gallaeci, who lived there. The same applies to the names Galicia and Gaia, the twin city of Porto, at the Douro mouth. (On Greek colonies there, see Chronicle 26, Odysseys in the Aftermath of the Trojan War: Colonization of Iberia).

Macaronesia: the Azores, Madeira,
the Canaries and Cape Verde

● In the Fortunate Isles, or Isles of the Blessed, heroes and other favoured mortals in the Greek and Celtic mythologies were received into a winterless blissful paradise. These islands were thought to lie in the “Western Ocean”, near the “Oceanus River” encircling the earth. Strabo located them opposite “Maurusia” (Mauritania, Western Sahara and Morocco), beyond the end of the world, where neither snow nor heavy rains ever fell, with the beneficially invigorating cool breath of Zephyrus constantly blowing. Plutarch, referring to these isles several times in his writings, located them firmly in the Atlantic a few days’ sail from Iberia:

“The islands are said to be two in number separated by a very narrow strait and lie [2,000 kilometers] from Africa… A firm belief has made its way even to the barbarians that here are the Elysian Fields and the abode of the Blessed of which Homer sang.”

Geography now names these islands as Macaronesia (from the Greek name Makárōn nēsoe (Μακάρων νῆσοι, Isles of the Blessed): the Azores and Madeira (Portugal), the Canaries (Spain) and Cape Verde.

Metallic model of a Nuragic ship

● Close relations between Iberia and Sardinia implied by mythology are confirmed by archaeological, architectural, linguistic, cultural and historical finds. The Sardinians had also contacts with the Mycenaeans, who traded in the western Mediterranean, and the Cretans, e.g. with Cydonia, modern Chaniá, as shown from pottery recovered in excavations in Sardinia. But influences may have been even wider. The stepped pyramid of Monte d’Accoddi, near Sassari, is somehow similar to the monumental complex of Los Millares in Andalusia and some later edifices in the Balearics. Certain scholars see similarities even with Mesopotamian structures and attribute them to migrations, particularly of Sumerians, to the Occident. Ancient Greek historians and geographers described the mysterious megalithic nuraghe as daedaleia, implying there was a connection with Daedalus who, after working in Crete, where he built the Labyrinth, settled in Sicily and then in Sardinia.

During the Chalcolithic period, in the dawn of the Nuragic civilization of the 18th century BCE, copper was used to make weapons and other items. Soon the island, rich in mines, notably copper and lead, saw the construction of numerous furnaces for the production of alloys traded across the Mediterranean, possibly by Minoans, later on by Mycenaeans, and perhaps even Sardinians. The Nuragic culture acquired skilled metal workers who were among the main metal producers in Europe. Passing to the Bronze Age, they used this new alloy to make a wide variety of products, such as weapons, tools, even votive offerings, e.g. bronze vessels that indicate their close relationship with the sea. Sardinia was not on the vital map of tin sources and trade in ancient times (Cornwall-Devon, Brittany, Iberia, Bohemia–Saxony). But because of its other mineral wealth, it served as a centre for metals trade at that time and likely actively imported tin from Iberia for export to the rest of the Mediterranean. Traders from the Aegean, therefore, and other areas where tin was scarce, went there very often. This fact explains cultural influences on the Nuragic civilization from Mycenae, Crete and Cyprus, as well as the presence of late Bronze Age Mycenaean, Cretan and Cypriot ceramics, and locally made replicas, in half a dozen findspots that seem to have functioned as “gateway” communities.

Sardinian and Corsican tribes

The late Bronze Age (15th–13th centuries BCE; see also previous Chronicles) saw vast population migrations, e.g. those of the Sea Peoples, who destroyed the Mycenaean and Hittite worlds and also attacked Egypt. Some scholars connect the Sherden, one of the Sea People tribes, with the Nuragic Sardinians, who might have settled on the island before or after the failed invasion of Egypt. These theories are controversial to most archaeologists and historians. But Simonides of Ceos, in a lost work reported by Zenobius, spoke of Sardinian attacks against Crete during the Sea Peoples’ raids in Egypt. This would at least confirm that Nuragic Sardinians frequented the eastern Mediterranean at the time. Further proof comes from 13th century Nuragic ceramics found at Tiryns and at the Sicilian Agrigento (Acragas) area, along the sea route that linked the Occidental to the Oriental part of mare nostrum.

The second largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily was called Ichnussa by the Hellenes. It was most probably named Sardinia after a legendary hero of the Nuragic pantheon, Sardus, who colonized the island from Libya. His father was Makeris, who might be connected with the Phoenician Melqart, also identifiable with the Libyan Heracles. So, Sardus is also associated with the Heracleidae that settled there led by Iolaus, a nephew of Heracles, according to Diodorus Siculus. Iolaus may have given rise to the tribe of Iolei, Iolaensi, or Iliensi,⁽²⁾ who were repeatedly checked by Punics and Romans, but they were never subdued. He also founded many cities from the Black Sea area to Sicily and Sardinia, requesting the assistance of Daedalus. Some of the latter’s edifices were still standing in Diodorus’ time (1st century BCE). Finally, the Phoenicians appeared in this area for the very first time around 1000 BCE, and began visiting Sardinia with increasing frequency. Later, from the 8th century onwards, they started founding (or appropriating) strongholds and cities primarily on the strategic southwestern coast of the island. Common ports of call, where they dropped anchor, were Caralis, Nora, Bithia, Sulcis, Tharros, and Olbia (mostly Hellenic toponyms).⁽³⁾

• ⁽²⁾ Sardinian and Corsican tribes: the Corsi (perhaps from Liguria) moved to Corsica from North Sardinia; the Balearic Balares (from Iberia or South France, perhaps related with the Basques), settled in the north-central of Sardinia; the Iolei (from North Africa, East Mediterranean, or West Sicily) settled in the central-south area. The Gallurese, Logudorese and Campidanese dialects may correspond to these tribes.

Launeddas

• ⁽³⁾ Sardinia and neighbouring Corsica constitute a special case in terms of music, too, cultivating one of the oldest forms of vocal polyphony, as ancient as the polyphony of Epirus and Albania. Unesco classed this kind of song, called cantu a tenore, as intangible world heritage in 2005. A similar style, cantu a cuncordu, corresponds to the Corsican paghjella and is liturgic in nature.

The polyphonic tradition extends to the musical instruments. A typical polyphonic woodwind instrument made of three pipes is the launeddas (also called “triple clarinet” or “triplepipe”). The pipes are played with circular breathing and the sound may be continuous. One of the pipes functions as a drone and the other two play the melody in thirds and sixths. Predecessors of the launeddas can be traced back to approximately 2700 BCE in Egypt, where reed pipes, depicted on tomb reliefs and pyramids, were called memet. The launeddas date back to at least the 8th century BCE and are still played in religious ceremonies and dances (su ballu). The musicians use extensive variations on a few melodic phrases, and a single tune can last over an hour, creating some of the “most elemental and resonant sounds in European music”, as Alessio Surian said.

Legendary Odyssean Lisbon

Cynetic writing with a human figure (8th century BCE)

GÁRGORIS IS MENTIONED AS A LEGENDARY KING of one of the peoples of Tartessos, who lived in today’s Algarve and Low Alentejo of southern Portugal. They were called Cynetes, Cynesioi, or Conii, the westernmost dwellers of Europe, according to Herodotus, who distinguished them from the Celts. Gárgoris, as the legend goes, had incestuous relations with his daughter, whose name has not survived. The… “fateful act” happened one day when a bee strung her; Gárgoris, wishing to heal the wound, massaged her with his mouth, and thus they were overwhelmed by passion (it’s unclear exactly where the bite was)! After she had got pregnant, he ordered that she should be locked up and the child be killed. The boy was abandoned on a hill very close to a lair of wild beasts, which instead breast-fed and protected him. When Gárgoris learned that his (grand)son was still alive, he ordered that he should be taken away from the cave and put to death in another way: in a stampede of cows, devoured by dogs or hungry pigs, or thrown to the sea. Protected by Fortune, Habis managed to survive against all adversities: the animals nursed him, or a sea wave carried him ashore. Raised by a hind (Habis in the Cynete language means fawn), and grown up like a savage, he became a skilful bandit, but was captured by peasants who led him to the king. The boy’s birthmarks made Gárgoris realize that he was his (grand)son. Impressed by his miraculous survival of all ordeals, he named him heir to the throne. Recorded by the Gallo-Roman historian Pompeius Trogus (1st century BCE), the legend was narrated in verse by Jerónimo de Arbolanche in his poem Abidas (1566).

Perseus and Andromeda (1870), by Gustave Moreau

According to Justin, a Latin historian who wrote the Epitome of Pompeius Trogus Philippic Histories, Habis, as a king, made revolutionary social reforms, “dividing the citizens among seven cities”, and forbidding slavery because of debt, which was a common phenomenon in ancient times. Justin also commented on some parallels of the legend with similar stories on other progenitors, such as Perseus, Moses, Romulus and Remus, expressing the view that Habis was superior to the founders of Rome, who were just obliged to milk a she-wolf, without passing all those adversities to demonstrate a similar or superior ability to survive.⁽⁴⁾ With so charismatic a king, the area between the Guadalquivir and the Sado estuary, in Setúbal, was spectacularly transformed, for Habis introduced agriculture, with cereals and cattle farming, thus improving the nutrition of his subjects. The land was ruled by his descendants for centuries. His legislative work was also great, with the laws in rhyme he introduced, which, in the years of Tartessian acme, numbered “six thousand verses”, according to Strabo. This tradition of laws in verse seems to have begun in archaic times, when writing was not widespread, so that people could memorize and observe the laws.⁽⁵⁾ Such laws were obviously written in the Southwest, or Tartessian script,⁽⁶⁾ the oldest of the Paleohispanic scripts (7th – 5th century BCE). It extended between the Guadalquivir and Sado estuaries, even in the interior of Iberia, reaching Alicante and Murcia in the East, where a Graeco-Iberian alphabet was used. There is no agreement about how these scripts originated; some researchers claim their origin is linked only to the Phoenician abjad, while others believe that the Greek alphabet contributed, too. It seems that no one gives priority to the Hellenic script. Alas! All these “Philo-Phoenicians” were unable to find any “Phoenico-Iberian” script!

Odysseus and Calypso, by Max Beckmann

• ⁽⁴⁾ I have commented on the parallels with “baby Moses” (see Chronicle 5, footnote 5): Habis’ stamina was supreme! As regards Perseus, when he was a baby, his grandfather, Acrisius, cast his mother, Danaë, and him into the sea, in a wooden chest, fearful of an oracle that his grandson would kill him. During his trials when he grew up (he beheaded Medusa and saved the Aethiopian princess Andromeda from Cetus), he could not be victorious if he was not the son of Zeus – hence, he was the foremost of all!

• ⁽⁵⁾ More about the ancient Greek musical nomoi, i.e. the age-old tradition of laws in verse meant to be sung in order to be memorized and observed, see Chronicle 11, footnote 1, and Chronicle 16, footnote 10.

• ⁽⁶⁾ Or South Lusitanian, or Bastulo–Turdetanian, or escrita conia (script of the Conii or Cynetes).

There are also other versions of this legend. Gárgoris is identified with Cronus eating his children, while Habis-Abidas is presented as persecuted because he introduced agriculture in pastoral Tartessos. Another version, which found quite unexpectedly its way into a book about fado, is a later adaptation to make the story morally acceptable by covering up the incest factor. Thus it combines the legend with the myth of Lisbon foundation, and the Odyssey, embellishing the story with our cherished Homeric heroes. In this version, as related by Augusto Mascarenhas Barreto in his numerous mythological and historical digressions in the book Fado – Lyrical Origins and Poetic Motivation, Gárgoris is renamed as Gregoris, the Iberian king, while his daughter is none other than Calypso; in this way, her son’s father is, of course, Odysseus, and Ogygia is no longer an island but a location at the estuary of Tagus, the future Lisbon. According to Barreto, the Ithacan king walled the settlement and named it Ulissea (Odyssey) – whence the word Olisipo(na) – while the son he had from Calypso, named Abidis, after passing the aforementioned ordeals, founded Scalabis (Santarém), and some other cities (e.g. Astorga, Astigi; see also Chronicle 5. Iberia’s Odyssey).

Map of the Lisbon area: Olisipo, Sintra, Scalabis, and Salacia, present-day Alcácer do Sal

There are many versions of the Lisbon foundation myth, as well. In one of them, a thunderbolt lit the skies and exploded into flame in an unknown land. Then Odysseus was instructed by Zeus (the great god of Thunder and Lightning) to build a city on the point of impact. This land, says another version, was ruled by charming Ophiussa, who had a huge snake tail instead of legs. The queen fell madly in love with Odysseus and, in order to keep him there, offered him the throne. Our cunning hero pretended to accept the proposal, fearing for his life; but all the while, he was secretly filling up his boat with supplies; and one night, while the queen was asleep, he and his crew fled into the darkness. Outraged the next morning, Ophiussa hit her tail so hard on the ground that she created the seven hills where Lisbon is built. This story introduces us to Ophiussa, the Land of Serpents, a name given by the ancient Greeks to Atlantic Iberia, what is now Portugal and Galicia, and specifically the area around the Tagus estuary.

A female Uraeus Serpent, one of the forms in which Isis is depicted (Ophiussa’s sister perhaps?)

● The land the Hellenes called Ophiussa was the Oestriminis (Extreme or Far West) for the Romans, something like Finis terrae (“end of the earth”, from a Mediterranean perspective). Rufus Avienus Festus, a Roman poet of the 4th century CE, in his Ora Maritima (Sea Coast), inspired by the Massaliote Periplus (6th century BCE), a Greek mariner’s log, wrote that the Oestrimni, a people who had been living in this area for a long time, had to flee after an invasion of serpents. In fact, these serpents were not snakes but people linked to the Saephes, or Ophis (People of the Serpents), and the Dragani (People of the Dragons), who came to colonize this land. The Saephes were neighbours of the Cynetes, living in an upland region near the Tagus estuary, close to an island Avienus called Poetanion; along with another tribe, the Cempsi, they had taken that territory by force from the Oestrimni. The newcomers were most probably proto-Celts or Celtiberians, while the Oestrimni were the Paleolithic inhabitants of Atlantic Iberia.

The Ophis, who worshiped serpents, lived mainly on inland mountains of northern Portugal and Galicia, or by the mouths of the rivers Douro, Cávado, Tagus and Sado. The Saephes lived in Cynetic land (in the Algarve and Low Alentejo, where Gárgoris reigned), together with the Cempsi. The latter, perhaps with strong Germanic and Ligurian influences, entered Iberia c. 650 BCE and finally settled in the Tagus valley and in the peninsula of Setúbal, where Avienus located the lugum cempsicum, the current Cabo Espichel. Finally, the Dragani, who settled in the north-western Iberia (Cantabria, Asturias, Galicia, Beira), must have come from Liguria, a region of north-western Italy, with strong Celtic influences, that is, they were Celto-Ligurians. Their name shows that they may have introduced the dragons into Iberia, where the locals must have already had their own griffins in their cults.

Another supernatural being in the Portuguese and Galician mythical tales is Moura Encantada (Enchanted Moura). A legend relates that on the summer solstice a maiden-serpent, a chthonic goddess, revealed hidden treasures to people journeying through forests. This maiden lived, as they said, in the area of Porto. Festivities related to this goddess occurred during the solstice. She would change into a snake during the rest of the year, living under rocks, and shepherds would set aside some milk from their flocks as an offering to her.

Calypso and Odysseus, by William Russell Flint

Calypso, according to Greek mythology, was not a princess but a nymph on the island of Ogygia, daughter of Atlas, hence she was also called Atlantis (Homer), or an Oceanid, that is, a daughter of Oceanus (Hesiod). However, both versions are linked with either the Pillars of Heracles area or the Atlantic Ocean. Atlas, the Titan who held up the celestial sphere, was identified with the Atlas Mountains in northwest Africa. Scholars who have examined Homer’s work and geography, among them Strabo and Plutarch, have suggested that Ogygia and/or Scheria, the Phaeacians’ island, were located in the Atlantic,⁽⁷⁾ and some have identified either or both with Atlantis. Besides he makes clear that

“an Ogygian isle lies far out at sea, distant five days’ sail from Britain, going westwards”.⁽⁸⁾

Deucalion and Pyrrha, by Andrea del Minga, throwing stones behind to recreate mankind

• ⁽⁷⁾ On the geography of the Odyssey, see Chronicle 15. Sailing to Rio de Janeiro!, Appendix: An Atlantic Odyssey

• ⁽⁸⁾ Ogygia is linked to the Ogygian deluge and the mythical king of Attica and/or Boeotia, called Ogyges, in the sense that Ogygian means “primeval, primal, at earliest dawn”. This means that Calypso’s island was very ancient. So, when Aeschylus calls the Nile Ogygian, he doesn’t suggest that the island was in Egypt, as some thoughtlessly thought.

● The Hellenic mythology mentions three deluges: those of Ogyges, Deucalion, and Dardanus.

Plutarch additionally mentions “the great continent”, which was interpreted as a reference to either America, or an allusion to Plato’s Atlantis. Many traits of the Phaeacians, including their seamanship, are suggestive of either Minoan Crete or Atlantis. The description of their palace is that of a very advanced civilization. Above all, their ships were superb, quite different from the galleys of the Trojan War, and… steered by thought!⁽⁹⁾ Hence the view that it was Homer before Plato who first spoke of Atlantis.

• ⁽⁹⁾ Computerized ships: the best a “Periplus in the Archipelagos” can have! Of course, with this technology in mind among other things, the idea that Scheria-Phaeacia could be Corcyra-Corfu must be ruled out. It appears far more plausible that the Phaeacians were after all the Minoans with the palace of Knossos and their amazing ships!

Homer

● Homer described the ships as faster than falcons, while King Alcinous explained to Odysseus what sort of information the ships required in order to take him home:

“Tell me your country, nation, and city, so that our ships may shape their purpose accordingly and take you there. For the Phaeacians have no pilots; their vessels have no rudders as those of other nations have, but the ships themselves understand what it is that we are thinking about and want; they know all the cities and countries in the whole world, and can traverse the sea just as well even when it is covered with mist and cloud, so that there is no danger of being wrecked or coming to any harm.”

“Fairy tales”… As with the foundation of Lisbon, the refrain we can hear in chorus over and over again after all these stories is that they are myths; it’s not reality. Again and again, traditions about Hellenes are “legends”, those concerning the Phoenicians “history”… Possibly true, there were no Grecian settlements west of the Pillars of Heracles; only voyages of discovery. Olisipo’s foundation myth by Odysseus is nothing but a myth. On the other hand, there is not the slightest evidence to support the “history” of a Phoenician foundation of Lisbon “around 600 BC”, or as far back as 1200, under the name of Alis Ubbo (“Safe Harbour”), even if there were some organized settlements in Ulissea-Olissipona with clear Mediterranean influence, either at that distant time or later; it’s nothing but a myth, as well.⁽¹⁰⁾ Likewise, except the voyages of discovery, there is no record of Phoenician or Punic colonies beyond the Algarve, namely Balsa–Tavira, close to the Portuguese-Spanish border,⁽¹¹⁾ with substantial Phoenician settlement and influence since the 8th century BCE. Essentially, Phoenician influence in today’s Portugal was due to cultural and commercial exchange with Tartessos.

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ Such a Copper Age settlement is the Castro Zambujal, the most important in the peninsula of Lisbon. The locals, probably together with Eastern Mediterranean settlers, based their economy on intensive farming, and were also part of an economic network importing minerals like gold, copper, amphibolit stone, and ivory, between 3000 and 1700 BCE. It is a site with relatively good conservation – some walls still exist up to a height of 4 meters, as the community constructed a wall around to protect itself from attacks.

Balsa: a coin depicting a horse and a fish (50 BCE)

• ⁽¹¹⁾ Tavira’s origins date back to the late Bronze Age (1000-800 BCE). The Phoenicians took hold of the town in the 8th century BCE, when it became one of their first settlements in the Iberian West, creating “a colonial urban centre, with massive walls, two harbours, at least two temples, and a regular urban structure”. This last characteristic, however, reminds ancient Hellenic city planning, and not that of Phoenician or other Semitic settlements (see in Chronicle 22, in the beginning, a comparison made by Strabo between the Greek Maenaca and Phoenician Malaca, in the area of today’s Málaga). The original Phoenician name of the town was perhaps Baal Saphon, or Baal Shamin, after the NW Semitic and Mesopotamian Thunder and Sky gods. It was later shortened to Balsa. Others, on the contrary, insist that the term Balsa is of Iberian, perhaps Basque, origin. It can be found now in other parts of the world.

The town was violently destroyed by conflict, at the end of 6th century BCE and was deserted for a century. This probably happened while Tartessos was devastated by the Punics. During the post-Tartessian, or Turdetanian period, the Iberian colonies seceded from Punic hegemony (410 BCE). As a result, Tavira recovered, during the urban bloom of the area, and became bigger than ever. But this renaissance did not last long: the city was destroyed and abandoned again by the end of the 4th century BCE. After Carthage was razed to the ground, in the mid-1st century BCE, the Romans created a new port, some 7 kilometres from Tavira, which inherited the name Balsa.

“The Tartessian fortunate city.” (Herodotus)

Arganthonios

RETURN TO TARTESSOS. The legendary polity appears, circa the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, in Greek and Near Eastern sources. Homer must have been again the first one to sing in the Iliad of a gold-bearing land in the western limits of the world (Iberia), before the Great (Atlantic) Ocean, where people lived happily for many years. The “Tartessian fortunate city”, according to Herodotus, was just outside the Pillars of Heracles, at the estuary, or precisely οn the Delta, of the homonymous river, and governed by a centenarian king named Arganthonios – a name that certainly referred to his great wealth.

Another historian, Ephorus, described in the 4th century BCE

“a very prosperous market called Tartessos, with much tin carried by river, as well as gold and copper from Celtic lands.”

Around the end of the millennium, however, there are indications that the name fell out of use creating the impression that the city might have been lost due to natural or other causes. Apart from Thera, Tartessos is a strong candidate for the site of Atlantis. They must have had more in common due to Minoan influence. The Andalusians, just like the Hellenes, may have benefited from the Cretans not only economically, but culturally, as well. Archaeological finds in Tartessos have built up a picture of a widespread culture, with the core area extending from the Guadalquivir valley to Huelva, but also covering the entire southern Iberia, from the Tagus estuary to the southern land of Valencia. Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century CE, identified the river and gave details on the location of the city:

“They say that Tartessos is a river in the land of the Iberians, running down into the sea by two mouths,⁽¹²⁾ and that between these two mouths lies a city of the same name. The river is the largest in Iberia, and tidal, that of a later day called Baetis” – named Guadalquivir (“Great River”) even later by the Moors.⁽¹³⁾

View of the river Guadalquivir (1854), by Manuel Barrón y Carrillo

• ⁽¹²⁾ Strabo also spoke of two mouths, creating a Delta at the river’s estuary, while describing the region and estimating its size. In this passage, which is like a periplus of the Pillars of Heracles area, he doesn’t refer to Tartessos city (non-existent in his time) – though it is mentioned by the later Pausanias. The land, says Strabo, has its “natural borders” drawn by the riverbeds of Ana (Guadiana) and Baetis (Guadalquivir), eloquently nicknamed “the silver river”. Tartessis was the toponym referring to the land, while the capital was called Tartessos, like the river.

• ⁽¹³⁾ Aristotle’s idea about the river was even grander, as he thought it rose from the Pyrenees! You see, even a genius can fail miserably! But Pausanias also erred, because the Guadalquivir is just the fifth longest river of Iberia, after the Tagus, Ebro, Douro and Guadiana. According to Livy, the local (Tartessian and Turdetanian) names for the Guadalquivir were Kertis and Rerkes.

The eastern mouth of the river, the only one existing now, was much wider at that time. The western mouth does not exist anymore, but it is thought that it was located near Huelva. In this area we now find only a number of lakes. At that time, between these two river arms, there was a large lagoon with at least one island in it where the legendary city was probably located. The landscape is completely different now. Some findings lead to the conclusion that there must have been two natural disasters (tsunamis) that caused the islands and the dry areas to sink, one that happened around 1500 BCE, and the other in 200 CE.⁽¹⁴⁾ Therefore, none of them is linked with the demise of Tartessos, between the late 6th and early 5th centuries BCE, when most sites were inexplicably abandoned…

Geography of Tartessos and Iberia; 7th-5th century BCE. N to S: Dragani, Oestrimni, Ophiussa, Saephes, Cempsi, Cynetes.

• ⁽¹⁴⁾ These natural disasters are significant, as they give us some clues about the city of Tartessos – its founding and disappearance. The first catastrophe, around 1500 BCE, implies that the city was apparently founded in the following period, i.e. at some point during the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. As for the second disaster, ca 200 CE, it must have changed so dramatically the topography of the area that it has not been possible to locate the city until now. Moreover, we do not know the extent of the destruction caused by the Punics when they set out to raze the Tartessian civilization from the face of the earth. That is why Tartessos remains a legendary city to this day.

The Tartessians were excellent in engineering and had created a sophisticated system to regulate the water flow of a tidal river. Strabo described an advanced, urbanized society with many flourishing, wealthy cities along the banks of the Tartessos-Baetis-Guadalquivir River:

“They are considered to be the most educated of the Iberians, they have a scripture, even historical chronicles, poems, and laws in 6,000 verses”, he wrote.

Treasure of Tartessos, El Carambolo

Tartessian culture is divided mainly into two periods: The first is characterized as “geometric” and coincides with the late Bronze Age ranging from 1200 to 750 BCE – corresponding somehow to the Greek geometric art (Parallel Lives in art? Who knows)… The second is termed “oriental”, influenced by Phoenicians and Hellenes alike, ranging from 750 to 550 BCE, when it was gradually superseded by the classic Iberian culture. A similar shift to the Lusitanian culture occurred in the southern Portuguese territory, mainly in the Algarve and Low Alentejo, with littoral extensions up to the Tagus mouth. Significant elements of the period were the introduction of the potter’s wheel, and several other major advances in craftsmanship, e.g. architecture, and also in agriculture. Another noticeable and notable element was the increase in specialization and stratification. Writing was a very important development. With the arrival of the Hellenes, whose influence extended far beyond their colonies,⁽¹⁵⁾ this “orientalism” began to transform itself into the Iberian culture, especially in the South East. Greek influence is visible in the gradual change of the style of the monuments approaching more and more the architectural models of the Hellenic world. The Iberian script evolved from the Tartessian with noticeable Greek influence. A variant of the Hellenic alphabet (Ibero-Ionian script) was also used to write Iberian texts.

• ⁽¹⁵⁾ There are maps showing only one Greek colony in the entire Iberia: Emporion. All other cities
  are shown as local or Phoenician. Even Acra Leucá (a toponym made up of two Hellenic words) is shown as a Phoenician colony! By what magic wand did the Greek cultural influence spread? How could it penetrate even the Phoenician sphere of influence?

Culture (from Cicero’s “cultura animi”) is also material, denoting the artifacts a society creates and their connection to social relations. Civilization is certainly inconceivable without division of labour and technology. Culture and civilization necessitate an economic base in order to thrive. In the case of Iberia, it was the metals that opened the way to the dawn of the Bronze Age, sped up later when some Easterners arrived there. But mining and smelting preceded the coming of Minoans, Greeks, or Phoenicians. Alluvial tin was panned in the Iberian streams from an early date. The Río Tinto mines, along the river that flows into the Gulf of Cádiz at Huelva, are estimated at 8,000 to 10,000 years old. They have been mined for copper, silver, gold, and many other minerals, by Iberians, Tartessians, Phoenicians, Hellenes, Romans, Visigoths, Moors and Spaniards, for such a long time that the place has turned into an environmental disaster zone.⁽¹⁶⁾

Río Tinto: beautiful colours but… poisonous!

• ⁽¹⁶⁾ After its exploitation for ten millennia, the Tínto area looks like a “lunar landscape”, or even worse. Recently it has gained scientific interest due to the presence of so-called extremophile aerobic bacteria that dwell in the water. The extreme conditions there may be analogous to other locations in the solar system thought to contain liquid water, such as subterranean Mars, or Jupiter’s moon Europa, where an acidic ocean of water is theorized to exist under its frozen ice surface.

El Corazón de la Tierra: the Heart of the Earth (uprooted…)

Thus the river is of interest to astrobiologists. Based partially on research done near the Río Tinto, two NASA scientists reported in 2005 they had found strong evidence of present life on Mars! They may have been obliged to retract, but who knows? The Americans may one day employ… Martians as slaves! That is the reason why Europe, eternally in the role of a satellite, is being transmuted into… Europa, moving inexorably towards the gates of El Dorado vigilantly guarded by Cerberus!

Giant geysers of water vapour are thought to eject off the frigid, icy surface of the Jovian moon Europa.

The invention of coinage intensified the search for bronze and silver in the 7th century BCE. Consequently, trade links, formerly largely in elite goods, assumed a broader economic role. By that time, silver extraction in Huelva Province had reached industrial proportions. Huelva city was certainly connected to Tartessos; it contains the largest accumulation of imported elite goods and should have been an important centre. Excavations in the heart of the town revealed a great industrial and commercial emporium that lasted several centuries. Some 90,000 ostraca (ceramic fragments), indigenous and imported (Phoenician and Greek), were exhumed. All these vessels, dated from the 10th to the 8th centuries BCE, precede finds from other Phoenician emporia. The existence of foreign produce and materials together with local ones permits us to imagine its old harbour as a major hub for the reception, manufacture and shipping of diverse products of various and distant origins and destinations. Finds in other parts of the city help us estimate its habitat in some 20 hectares, which constitutes a sizable extension for a site in Iberia during that period. The analysis of written sources and the products exhumed, including thousands of Hellenic ceramics, some of which are works of excellent quality by known potters and painters, tends to identify this habitat with the lost city of Tartessos.

• >> Chronicle 22. AN IBERIAN PERIPLUS REVIVAL
• << Chronicle 20. THE ENIGMATIC SEA PEOPLES

Next Chronicle 22. AN IBERIAN PERIPLUS REVIVAL ● Tartessos (B) ● Colonies in Provence, Iberia, Maurusia ● Tin and Silver Routes ● Democritus and Plato ● Topography of the Area Beyond the Pillars of Heracles

Oceanus, Roman mosaic at Ossonoba, modern Faro, Algarve, Portugal.

Chronicle 18. AEGEAN: KNOSSOS, MYCENAE, TROY

Chronicle 18. AEGEAN: KNOSSOS, MYCENAE, TROY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 18. ΑΙΓΑΙΟΝ: ΚΝΩΣΟΣ, ΜΥΚΗΝΑΙ, ΙΛΙΟΝ

● Stonehenge ● Dorians and Sea Peoples ●
Mysteries ● Trojan War and Bronze Age Collapse

Michales Loukovikas

The Atreid dynasty palace at Mycenae

AS HEIRS OF THE MINOANS, the Mycenaeans assumed control of “Tin Routes” – i.e. the maritime trade network of metals from the Occident. Their acme lasted for about 250 years until the Bronze Age collapse. This extensive network sheds light on the reason why Mycenaean artifacts have been found well outside the boundaries of the Mycenaean world: swords located as “far away” as Georgia in the Caucasus; an amber object inscribed with Linear B symbols in Bavaria, Germany; double axes and other objects dating back to the 13th century BCE in England (Wessex, Cornwall) and Ireland. There is convincing evidence that during the final phase of construction of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, around 1600 BCE, those builders there had commercial contacts with “the great contemporary Mediterranean civilizations”, as the astronomer Gerald Hawkins wrote, that is, “Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, Egypt, and the ancestors of the travelling-trading Phoenicians.” The grave of a Mediterranean teenage boy, who died c. 1550 BCE, and several items of Mediterranean origin, have been found in the burial ground of Stonehenge.

Sunset at Stonehenge

● Hence, according to Hawkins, the Mycenaeans were already included among the navigating merchants of long distance voyages even before the conquest of Minoan Crete, together with the “ancestors of the Phoenicians”. The English astronomer and author, famous for his work in the field of archaeoastronomy,⁽¹⁾ published an analysis of Stonehenge in 1965 and was the first to propose the purpose of this megalithic monument as an ancient astronomical observatory to predict movements of the sun and stars. (See Chronicle 3, on Stonehenge as a work of migrants from the cradle of Homo, i.e. the Aegean, and also on the kinship between Minoans and Mycenaeans).

• ⁽¹⁾ Archaeoastronomy: the study of how people in the past “have understood or used phenomena in the sky, and what role the sky played in their cultures.”

Mycenae, Lion Gate

The Mycenaean era (c. 1700 – c. 1100 BCE) is the historical setting of much myth and literature of the Hellenes such as the Epic Cycle and Greek tragedy. Scholars have traditionally blamed the collapse on an uprising, or an invasion by another Hellenic ethnic group, the Dorians, though at least one Mycenaean centre, Pylos, was most probably destroyed by the so-called Sea Peoples. There are theories of natural disasters or large-scale drought, which could have contributed, too. The movements of people from the Balkans and Asia Minor to the Near East at that time have been attested. The internal factors theory has the Mycenaean culture falling in the course of societal conflicts brought on by a rejection of the palatial system by the underprivileged strata of society, which were quite impoverished by the period’s finale. Another hypothesis mingles social with ethnic divisions. In this context let’s have in mind that the Iron Age made large numbers of rather cheap weapons accessible to all. War was no longer an aristocratic privilege. The iron weapons were not as good as the bronze ones but they could still kill… (See the previous Chronicle, footnote 6).

Heracles

● The Dorian invasion is a concept devised by ancient Greek historians to explain why pre-classical dialects and traditions in southern Hellas were replaced by others that prevailed in the classical era. The Dorians, a Greek legend asserted, took control of the Peloponnese in the so-called “Return of the Heracleidae”. The meaning of the concept changed several times, as historians, philologists, and archaeologists, used it in vain attempts to explain the cultural discontinuities expressed in the data of their fields. The pattern of the arrival of Dorian culture on certain islands, such as Crete, is also not well elucidated. Despite some 200 years of investigation, the historicity of the Dorian invasion has not yet been established.

Sea peoples depicted as prisoners in Egypt

● The Sea Peoples were an alliance of seafaring raiders from southern and central Europe, and the Mediterranean Sea, especially the Aegean area, who sailed (and also marched) east invading Hatti, Cyprus, Syria, Canaan, and Egypt, and bringing about the Bronze Age collapse. Pharaoh Merneptah explicitly refers to them by the term “the foreign countries (or peoples) of the sea”. Leaving Mycenaean Hellas out of the list of the victims, some scholars believe they can identify most of the Sea Peoples mentioned in Egyptian records; they supposedly were the: Ekwesh–Achaeans (if they were, why should they destroy Pylos? “Because they were Hellenes!”, is the sardonic answer); Teresh–Tyrrhenians (the ancestors of the Etruscans); Lukka–Lycians; Sherden–Sardinians; Shekelesh–Sicilians; Tekrur-Teucrians (who might have been… either Trojans or Greeks); and Peleset–Philistines (Palestinians?), allegedly coming from Crete. The Peleset and Tekrur were the only major Sea People tribes that settled permanently in Canaan. Note that several of these peoples had been used as mercenaries or “allies” by both the Egyptian and Hittite Empires, before they turned against them (see the next two Chronicles 19 and 20, on the Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age collapse).

A Mycenaean woman with her breast exposed
but… in profile – not en face à la Creta…

Mycenaean settlements were not confined in southern Hellas, but also appeared in Epirus, Macedonia, the Aegean islands, the coast of Anatolia, Cyprus, Canaan and Italy. The towns were well fortified, in contrast to Minoan Crete. The best Mycenaean palaces were excavated at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos. They were heirs of the Minoan palaces but far inferior in structure. The heart of the palace was the megaron, i.e. the throne hall. Staircases found in Pylos indicate that the palaces had two stories. Located on the top floor were probably the private quarters of the royal family. Supreme power appears to have been held by the Homeric ἄναξ (“divine lord”, “sovereign”, “host”), or king. His role was military, judicial, and also religious. Occurrences of the word in texts having to do with offerings suggest that the sovereigns were worshipped.

Apart from that, no priestly class has been identified yet. Furthermore, it remains problematic to pick out a place of worship with certainty. It seems that a lot of gods and religious conceptions of the Minoans were fused in the Mycenaean religion, the mother of the classical Hellenic religion. The Eleusinian mysteries were established during the Mycenaean period on a pre-Greek vegetation cult with Minoan elements. Demeter and other gods appear in Arcadian myths as animal-headed. Representations of the processions of “daemons”, using animal masks, remind us of the Hellenic myth of the Minotaur. Dionysus, the only Greek god who died in order to be reborn, as he often appeared in the religions of the Orient, was related to the Minoan myth of the “Divine Child”, abandoned by his mother, and then brought up by the powers of Nature.⁽²⁾ Mycenaean painting was very much influenced by the Minoan art. Bull-jumping frescoes are found at Mycenae and Tiryns as well. Nevertheless, the Mycenaeans depicted the animals only in relation to man, or as victims of the hunt, and thus displayed a different relation to nature compared to the Minoans.

A procession of lion-headed “daemons” offering libation jugs to the seated goddess who raises a ritual vessel. The sun wheel and the crescent moon are in the sky. (Gold signet ring, the largest from the Mycenaean world, found in Tiryns, but made by a Minoan workshop in the 15th century BCE)

• ⁽²⁾ The “Divine Child”, “Baby Moses”, or Habis, a son of Odysseus and Calypso (we meet him when we visit Iberia, see Chronicles 5 and 21), etc. are anything but unique, as they are found in many cultures, based on the same idea, but not necessarily from the same origin. Similarly, the Deluge myths, connected with the last deglaciation, are widespread among many cultures all around the world. The Mesopotamian Utnapishtim, Deucalion, Noah, etc. are heroes of the same story in several versions. It is a pity that modern Greeks are more familiar with Noah than Deucalion. The reason is that these stories are related as myths, except those in the Bible, considered “sacred”. But what else is the Bible if not Hebrew mythology?

Phryne at the Poseidonia in Eleusis, by Henryk Siemiradzki (1889)

Eleusinian, Cabeirian and Orphic Mysteries

● The Eleusinian mysteries (Ἐλευσίνια μυστήρια) were initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis. Of all the mysteries celebrated in ancient Hellas, these were held to be the ones of greatest importance. Most likely their basis was an old agrarian cult which may go back to the Mycenaean and Minoan periods. The mysteries represented the myth of the abduction of the daughter (“korē”) from her mother by the king of the underworld, Hades, in a cycle with three phases: the “descent”, “search” and “ascent”, when Persephone was reunited with Demeter. Her resurrection was symbolic of the rebirth of all life. The rites, ceremonies, and beliefs were kept secret. Since the rituals involved visions and conjuring of an “afterlife”, some scholars believe that their power and longevity came from psychedelic agents. The only requirements for membership were freedom from “blood guilt”, meaning never having committed murder, and also not being a “barbarian” (unable to speak Greek). Nevertheless, the festival later spread to Rome. Women and even slaves were also allowed initiation. Comparative studies show parallels between these Hellenic rituals and other similar systems in the Near East, such as the Egyptian cults of Isis and Osiris, equivalent Syrian and Persian cults and, of course, the Thracian–Phrygian Cabeirian mysteries.

Samothracian relief showing Agamemnon
being initiated into the Cabeirian rites.

● The Cabeiri (Κάβειροι) were enigmatic chthonic deities, protectors of sailors, who were imported into Hellenic ritual keeping Hittite and proto-Etruscan elements. They were worshipped in a mystery cult associated with that of Hephaestus, and centered οn the north Aegean islands of Samothrace and Lemnos, and also at Thebes. Other places of worship included Imbros and Seuthopolis in Thrace, or various sites in Macedonia, Asia Minor and the rest of the Aegean. The Samothracian cult spread during the Hellenistic period, eventually initiating Romans. As the cult’s origin was non-Greek, the “barbarians” were also accepted: the initiation had no prerequisites for age, gender, status or ethnicity. Everyone, men and women, adults and children, the free or enslaved, the Hellenes and non-Hellenes, could participate.⁽³⁾ After all, both the Samothracians and Lemnians were originally non-Greek: the latter might have been related to the Etruscans; they were Hellenized after Athens conquered Lemnos in the 6th century; but the cult of the Cabeiri survived the operation of Hellenization. The Samothracians were associated with the Trojans and Pelasgians. In the Sanctuary of the Great Gods,⁽⁴⁾ they used a so-called “barbarian” language even in Roman times. Thebes was linked to Samothrace through the marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia, the Samothracian. The Cabeiri bear many similarities to other fabulous races, such as the Telchines, Cyclopes, Dactyls, Corybantes, and Curetes. These groups were often confused or identified with one another, since many of them were also associated with metallurgy – just like Hephaestus.

• ⁽³⁾ A Samothracian relief showing Agamemnon being initiated into the Cabeirian rites gives credit to the idea that the Eleusinian mysteries originated from the Cabeirian cult through Thracians who settled at Eleusis.

• ⁽⁴⁾ The famous Winged Nike (Victory) of Samothrace (c. 200–190 BCE) stood at the island’s Temple complex, on a rostral pedestal representing a ship’s prow, and dedicated to the Great Gods.

The Myth of Orpheus, by Marc Chagall

● The Orphic (Ὀρφικά) mysteries may have also had their origins with the Cabeiri. They were religious beliefs and practices originating in the Hellenic and Thracian worlds, but associated with poetry ascribed to the mythical musician and prophet Orpheus, who descended into Hades for his beloved Eurydice and returned. Orphics also revered Persephone and Dionysus for the same reason. Initiation into Orphism, as in the case of the Eleusinian mysteries, was associated with an “afterlife”.⁽⁵⁾

Behold Alaric, the Messiah, entering triumphantly
Athens, followed by Christian “blackshirts”…

• ⁽⁵⁾ In 390 CE, Emperor Theodosius I ordered his troops to commit a most horrific massacre, one of the worst in all history, slaughtering 7,000-15,000 Thessalonians in the Hippodrome, because they had rebelled against his Germanic mercenaries. To expiate his sin, two years later, in 392, he closed all ancient sanctuaries by decree, and imposed Christianism as the sole religion, with the abolition of the Edict of Milan (313 CE) on freedom of religion. Thanks to Theodosius, the “Saint” (for the Church), or the “Great” (for History), as soon as the Christians were free from persecution, they started persecuting all the others! The last remnants of the Mysteries were wiped out in 396, when another German, the Christian Alaric, invaded Eleusis with many local Christians “in their dark garments” – the “Blackshirts” of the era – desecrating the old sanctuaries and killing all priests. Having ravaged Attica, the “Messiah” of the Christian mob entered triumphantly Athens. Then he invaded the Peloponnese, sold citizens of Corinth, Argos, Sparta, etc. into slavery, crossed the Gulf of Corinth and marched to Epirus, halting plunder and slaughter only when he was made a magister militum by the emperor. He surely deserved better: sanctification! (See Chronicles 23-24, on the Massacre of Thessalonica and the violent Christianization of the Empire through The Genocide of the Hellenes and The Triumph of Cretinism).

● Apropos: Most of the Theodosian dynasty emperors, as well as the last ones of the Occidental Empire, were puppets of Germanic kingmakers, the so-called magistri militum (military masters) or stratelates, such as Aspar in the East, and Ricimer in the West. As for Alaric, he captured and plundered even Rome, in 410, marking the beginning of the end of the Western Roman Empire.

The choral dancers frieze from the Temenos in Samothrace

After the conquest of Minoan Crete, the Mycenaean foreign trade
took off: production of goods meant to be sold abroad increased.

A Mycenaean jar with an octopus and fish

COMMERCE REMAINS CURIOUSLY ABSENT from all the written sources in Linear B. However, it is known that the Minoans exported fine fabrics to Egypt; no doubt the Mycenaeans did the same. They probably borrowed knowledge and expertise from the Minoans on matters related to navigation, as is evidenced by the fact that their maritime commerce did not take off until after the collapse of the Minoan civilization. It seems that certain products, especially fabrics and oil, even metal objects, were meant to be sold outside the kingdom, because they were made in quantities too great to be consumed solely at home. Pottery was also produced in great quantities. Especially after the conquest of Minoan Crete, production increased considerably, notably in Argolis, the area of Mycenae, with great numbers exported outside Hellas. The products destined for export were more luxurious, featuring heavily worked painted decorations that incorporated mythic, warrior, or animal motifs, etc. The Mycenaean network extended as far as Spain, Britain, and central Europe, while their pottery has been found in Sardinia, Sicily, southern Italy, the Aegean, Asia Minor (amongst others at the old settlement of Miletus, where high-quality ceramics, Minoan or Mycenaean, have been recovered), other parts of Anatolia, Cyprus, Canaan and Egypt. The Minoan and Mycenaean maritime foreign trade is one of the most important chapters of the Bronze Age history, and an open challenge to every archaeologist or historian.

Trojan War, Bronze Age Collapse and Dark Ages

The gold funeral Mask
of “Agamemnon”

The Mycenaeans inherited the Minoan thalassocracy when they became masters of Crete; but they did not last long. The Trojan War, taking place in 1194-1184 BCE according to Eratosthenes,⁽⁶⁾ the Sea Peoples’ raids, and the great instability of the era, led to their downfall during the Bronze Age collapse. Many historians think the transition to the Iron Age was violent, sudden and culturally disruptive. The Aegean and Anatolian palatial civilizations were replaced, after a hiatus, by the isolated village cultures of the so-called “Greek Dark Ages”, which were dark, indeed, but not only Greek. In just fifty years, in the first half of the 12th century, the downfall of the Mycenaean world and the Hittite Empire, the catastrophe in Syria, Canaan, and Egypt, and the cultural collapse that followed, resulted in the interruption of trade routes and the severe reduction of literacy. The Mycenaean Linear B script was forgotten. The Hellenes would need to re-invent writing in the late 9th or early 8th centuries BCE.⁽⁷⁾ During that period almost every city was violently destroyed and usually left unoccupied thereafter, such as Mycenae, Hattusa, the capital of the Hittites, and Ugarit. Troy was destroyed at least twice before being abandoned. Fewer and smaller settlements suggest famine or war (or both), leading to decimation and depopulation.

• ⁽⁶⁾ Eratosthenes (Ἐρατοσθένης, c. 276 – c. 195 BCE), from Cyrene, was a geographer, astronomer, mathematician, poet and music theorist (characteristic of the ancient scholars’ polymathy). He was the first to calculate the circumference of the Earth, and also the tilt of the Earth’s axis, with remarkable accuracy. He may have also accurately calculated the distance from the Earth to the Sun. He invented the term geography, a system of latitude and longitude, and created the first world map with parallels and meridians in his cartographic depictions based on the available geographical knowledge of the era. He invented the leap day, and was the founder of scientific chronology, trying to fix the dates of the chief political and literary events from the conquest of Troy. (Regarding the timing of the Trojan War, see also Chronicle 16, footnote 6).

The map of Eratosthenes

● Eratosthenes was a chief librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt. The library, a major centre of science and learning in the ancient world, was repeatedly destroyed by Romans (Julius Caesar in 48 BCE, Aurelian in the 3rd century CE), the Christians (Theodosius and pope Theophilus in 391), and Muslim Arabs (`Amr ibn al-`As in 642), resulting to an irretrievable loss of knowledge for mankind. (On burning of books and libraries, see also Chronicles 22 (the case of Democritus), and 23-24).

A tablet with Linear B symbols

• ⁽⁷⁾ Greek alphabet: allegedly derived from the “Phoenician alphabet”, it was in turn the ancestor of numerous other European and Middle Eastern scripts, including Latin and Cyrillic. However, a very important change was made in adapting the Phoenician system to Hellenic by introducing vowel letters. The Greeks were obliged to make the same innovation twice because the vowels are significant in their language. When the Mycenaeans adapted the Minoan Linear A script to their needs, they borrowed 87 Cretan symbols; 82 corresponded to syllables and five to vowels. Linear A is still not deciphered and, therefore, we ignore if this brilliant idea of the vowel letters was Cretan or Hellenic. According to the definition used by modern authors, this feature makes Greek the first alphabet in the real sense, as distinguished from the purely consonantal Semitic “alphabets”, the so-called “abjads” (from the Arabic word for alphabet). The Phoenician abjad belonged to the family of the closely related West Semitic scripts. (On Balkan and Greek script, see Chronicle 3, last part: Early Balkan writing).

Achilles discovered by Ulysses (Odysseus), by Jan de Bray

The Trojan War was just an act of this tragedy on a big scale involving numerous ethnicities: the fighters in Troy’s alliance are depicted in the Iliad as speaking various languages and thus needing to have orders translated to them by their commanders. On the Greek side instead, the Trojan campaign was anything but pan-Hellenic: even the great hero, Achilles, tried to avoid the war disguised as a girl in the palace of Skyros but was exposed by Odysseus! The king of Ithaca too tried to evade “conscription” pretending to be mad! Areas such as Macedonia, Epirus, and in part Thessaly, stayed away, probably because they were under the control of the Dorians, who would proceed to the Peloponnese some time later, filling the vacuum created by the demise of the Mycenaeans. Up to 90% of small sites were abandoned and all palaces destroyed, suggesting depopulation on a major scale. Athens and some other cities continued to be occupied but with a more local sphere of influence, limited trade and an impoverished culture, from which they took centuries to recover.

The Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, Attica,
with its Doric order columns at sunset

The Dark Ages would last for more than 400 years. The decoration on Hellenic pottery, after circa 1100 BCE, lacks the figurative adornment of either Minoan or Mycenaean ware, and is restricted to simpler, generally geometric styles (1000–700 BCE). It’s the reason why this age is also called Geometric, or Homeric, due to the composition of Homer’s epics, circa the 8th century, in the context of the Epic Cycle. Those epics, a by-product of the new alphabet and inspired mainly by the Trojan War and its aftermath, which would later feed the tragedians’ imagination, also together with the emergence of the Grecian poleis, in the 9th century, were the first signs of recovery in Hellas.

The celebrated Winged Nike (Victory) of Samothrace – looted by the French, just like Aphrodite of Melos (Venus de Milo). Three Victories were found in the temenos: the second was snatched by the Austrians, while the third, at last, remained on Samothrace. The statue of the first Victory is 3.28 m high (with its wings) and 5.58 m with the marble ship’s prow on which it stands.

The catastrophe was even worse in Anatolia. Every important settlement shows a layer of destruction. Here civilization possibly did not recover to the level of the Hittites for another thousand years. Cyprus witnessed two destructive waves: by the Sea Peoples (c. 1230), and Aegean refugees (c. 1190 BCE). Ugarit, in Syria, was burned to the ground. In addition, the coastal cities from Gaza northward sank into havoc. Nevertheless, paradoxically enough, the raids did not affect the Phoenician cities; they were confined in southern Canaan. Assyria, protected by the best army in the world, also remained intact; but was obliged to withdraw to its borders for a very long time. As for Egypt, although victorious against the invaders and surviving for a while, it succumbed some time later.

Robert Drews describes the Bronze Age collapse as “the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire”. A number of people nostalgically referred to the cultural memories of the disaster as stories of a “lost golden age”, when “civilization was wiped out”. Hesiod spoke of Ages of Gold, Silver and Bronze, separated from the modern harsh and cruel world of the Age of Iron by the Age of Heroes. It seems that, as a result of the Bronze Age collapse, the disruption of long distance trade, an aspect of the so-called “societal collapse”, cut easy supplies of tin, making bronze impossible to produce.

The disruption of long distance trade cut easy supplies of tin,
making bronze impossible to produce (a “societal collapse”).

• >> Chronicle 19. PHOENICIA’S STROKE OF FORTUNE
• << Chronicle 17. MINOAN CRETAN THALASSOCRACY

Next Chronicle 19. PHOENICIA’S STROKE OF FORTUNE ● Phoenicians and Sea Peoples ● Minoan Eruption on Thera ● Trojan War and Bronze Age Collapse (B)

Mycenaean dagger with a hunting scene: men vs. lions

Chronicle 17. MINOAN CRETAN THALASSOCRACY

Chronicle 17. MINOAN CRETAN THALASSOCRACY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 17. ΚΡΗΤΟΜΙΝΩΙΚΗ ΘΑΛΑΣΣΟΚΡΑΤΟΡΙΑ

● Minoan Society and Art ● Linear A-B, Phaestos Disc
● Tin Bronze ● Bull-Leaping (Taurocathapsia)

Michales Loukovikas
Swallows and lilies, fresco on Thera-Santorini (ca 1650 BCE, detail)

The palace of Minos at Knossos

THE MINOAN CIVILIZATION, the crème de la crème of the Aegean cultures in the Bronze Age, arose on the island of Crete, flourished from the 30th to the 15th centuries BCE, and then vanished. It came to light again at the outset of the 20th century CE, thanks to the British archaeologist Arthur Evans. The term Minoan refers to the legendary Minos. We presume, on no evidence, that it was not a name but a royal title. In the Odyssey, composed centuries after the demise of the Minoans, Homer calls the natives of the island Eteocretans (“true Cretans”); most probably, they were true descendants of the Minoans. In addition, there were several settlements in the Aegean and the Ionian Seas, as well as in Sicily and Canaan, known by the name Minoa. The root min– appears in some Aegean languages, toponyms, and in the name of an autochthonous people inhabiting the Aegean, the Minyans.

The Ship Procession or the Flotilla frieze at Acroteri, Thera (detail)

We assume (again, on no evidence) that the Cretans were not Indo-Europeans, but a Mediterranean people, possibly related to the Pelasgians and the Minyans – the pre-Hellenic dwellers of the Aegean. Crete remained free from invasions for many centuries, and managed to develop an independent and very distinct civilization, one of the most advanced in the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age, together with that of Egypt. Linear A, the Minoan script, has not yet been deciphered – though it is similar to Linear B, the Mycenaean Hellenic script. It possibly represents an Aegean language, unrelated to Indo-European tongues. (On the Aegean, Crete, Minoans, Mycenaeans, sea voyages, etc. see Chronicle 3; on the Pelasgians, Minyans, Greeks see Chronicle 15, footnote 7, and Chronicle 20, The historicity of the Iliad).

Grace in the Aegean: the art of the Minoans (Eugene Hirschfeld)

Bronze Apollo with Lyre, Pompeii

“Crete was well placed in relation to sea trading routes”, observes Eugene Hirschfeld, writing on Grace in the Aegean: the art of the Minoans. “Thucydides wrote that Minos was the first to build a navy:

“‘The first person known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into most of which he sent the first colonies… and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use’.”⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ Piracy is most ancient; in all likelihood, it appeared together with navigation. The Tyrrhenians, Illyrians and Thracians were known as pirates in ancient times. The Aegean island of Lemnos, a haven for Thracian pirates, long resisted Hellenic influence. By the 1st century BCE, there were pirate states along the Anatolian coast, threatening the commerce of the Roman Empire.

“With their merchant fleet,” says Hirschfeld, “the Minoans came to dominate the seas, sailing for hundreds of miles in search of trade from Spain in the west to Syria in the east…⁽²⁾ It is possibly a measure of both the Minoans’ geographical isolation and the strength of their fleet that their coastal towns seem to have had few fortifications. Thus their period of ascendancy was called by Arthur Evans the Pax Minoica or ‘Minoan peace’ – a time when cities needed no walls.⁽³⁾ Like Pax Romana, of course, such a peace, if it existed, would have been the product of military strength rather than pacifism.”

Replica of the Uluburun shipwreck

• ⁽²⁾ “We should never under-estimate how ‘joined up’ the ancient world was”, Hirschfeld footnotes. “See for example the late Bronze Age shipwreck [at Uluburun], which was carrying a remarkable assortment of international goods from northern Europe, Africa and Mesopotamia”.

● The ship carried one of the most spectacular late Bronze Age assemblages to have emerged from the Mediterranean Sea dated to the late 14th century BCE. It was similar to Graeco-Roman vessels of a later time and was found in 1982 by a sponge diver in south-western Asia Minor.

• ⁽³⁾ Although Evans’ vision of a Pax Minoica has been criticized recently, it seems there was little armed conflict in the island itself until the following Mycenaean period. Archaeologists say the Minoans often show weapons in their art, but only in ritual contexts. Claims that they produced no weapons are erroneous; Minoan swords were the finest in all of the Aegean. Furthermore, no evidence exists for a Minoan army, or domination of peoples, outside Crete.

The Pleiades, by the Symbolist Elihu Vedder (1885)

● The Minoan Cretans used celestial navigation. Besides, they surely had knowledge of astronomy: the palaces and mountaintop sanctuaries have architectural features that align with the rising sun on the equinoxes, as well as the rising and setting of particular stars. The Cretans voyaged to Thera, Egypt, Iberia… Such trips, even that one to Santorini, would have taken more than a day’s sail; thus the sailors would have been left travelling by night across open water. Then the sailors would use the locations of particular stars, especially those of the constellation Ursa Major, for their orientation. Written records of such navigation using the stars go back to Homer’s Odyssey, where Calypso tells Odysseus to keep the Bear (Ursa Major) on his left, and at the same time observe the position of the Pleiades, the late-setting Boötes and the Orion, as he sailed eastward from her Ogygia isle traversing the Ocean. Celestial navigation was as important as shipbuilding: the development of nautical know-how and technology was necessary for the expansion of the Mediterranean civilizations.

● This knowledge characterized all major navigating cultures. Before the Minoans and Mycenaeans, well before the Phoenicians, who were last in line, such a seafaring people covering long distances with their ships had been the Carians. According to Thucydides, it was largely the Carians who settled the Cyclades (and other Aegean islands) prior to the Cretans. The Minoan expansion during the Middle Bronze Age into this region seems to have come at their expense: they were pushed eastwards towards this area in Asia Minor called later Caria, and many turned to piracy as a way of life. Then Minos established his navy to control the Aegean and put down piracy. Ironically, the Carians did not find peace not even on the Asia Minor coast. Hellenic colonies in Doris and Ionia pushed them further into the hinterland, and those who started as seafarers ended up as land people (see the map).

One after the other, all the unique features of this marvelous civilization seem to arise from only one: the Minoans’ thalassocracy, their “geographical isolation and the strength of their fleet”, as Eugene Hirschfeld points out and explains in detail immediately afterwards:

“As a maritime trading civilization, it is unsurprising that the Minoans left us some beautiful fresco images of their ships, wooden sailing vessels superior to any others on the Mediterranean. Perhaps because of this fleet and the protecting seas, military images are unusual in Minoan art. Until the attacks by the Mycenaeans in 1450 BC, there is no real evidence that the Minoans fought wars with any other culture. This is in stark contrast to their contemporaries: the city states of Mesopotamia were constantly at war, celebrating their exploits on such works as the Stele of the Vultures, and Egypt covered tomb walls with images of military pomp. The Minoans preferred leisurely scenes or sports. They loved to decorate walls with murals of dolphins, flowers and fish. Their art has a grace, movement and exuberance distinct from the art of Egypt and Sumer, and… their craftsmanship is second to none.”

The Dolphins mural at Knossos

A cultural paradox: a great power without militarism; a palace that was
not a royal residence, neither the king was glorified; a religion with no
grandeur; while women were equal to men and free – or so it seems…

Knossos Palace (reconstruction)

This civilization is really an astonishing paradox: a great power without a military aristocracy; a palace that was not a royal residence, and neither the anax (king) was glorified; a religion with no grandeur; while women were equal to men and free – or so it seems. Besides, free expression was a basic feature of Minoan art.

“The Minoans were skilled and sensitive architects, and the palaces count amongst their greatest works of art. The most famous is the palace at Knossos, often called the ‘Palace of Minos’. A multi-storey complex of corridors, rooms and staircases built around a central courtyard, the palace boasted impressive plumbing as well as lovely frescos, columns and gardens. Visitors found its ‘agglutinative’ architecture of over 1000 rooms so confusing that it is thought to have inspired the myth of the Minotaur’s Labyrinth. Knossos was an entire community, a centre for religion, pottery production and storage of trade goods, and a venue for festivals. For this reason the term ‘palace’ is not adequate for describing these Minoan complexes.”⁽⁴⁾

Sacred symbols: bull and labrys

• ⁽⁴⁾ The Palace of Knossos is five times the size of Buckingham Palace, with 3-4 floors, a sewerage system, a type of hot water heater, flush toilets and lots of red coloured columns. Millennia later, the Versailles had no toilets at all except for the royal couple! That’s why not only the palace but its gardens, as well, stank awfully…

● On Minoan architecture, true fresco, or how they spread in the Near East with itinerant Cretan craftsmen and artists, see Chronicle 27. An Archaeologist’s Waterloo.

“Sitting at the apex of a trading empire, the Cretan kings were extremely wealthy. It is therefore interesting that they appear to have ordered no sculpture, memorials, king-lists or other works to boast of their power and status… We find nothing like the mighty monuments to the god-kings of Egypt. We have no record either of a king Minos or of any other named monarch, male or female… Historian R. F. Willetts has suggested that the apparent modesty of the Minoan aristocracy can be explained by a difference in religious emphasis: the Minoans did not seek to associate the king with the immortal gods, like the Egyptians or Mesopotamians, but worshiped a particular vision of nature. From this standpoint, images glorifying the king were unnecessary.”

Minoan Snake Goddess

“Women seem to have enjoyed higher status in Minoan culture than was usual in the Bronze Age and… served as administrators and priestesses… Women’s relative equality may be because of the absence of military threat, giving far less impetus to the development of a male warrior discourse and thus a greater role and respect for women. It is tempting when looking at images of young women somersaulting over bulls with the men to conclude that women enjoyed considerable freedom… As for religion, Minoan art provides us with faience figurines of a ‘snake goddess’, and frescos… on which women priests outnumber men. No images of male deities have been found from the peak of Minoan civilization. The apparent prominence of women in Minoan religion has led to conjecture that the principal deity or deities of Minoan Crete may have been female, e.g. an earth or mother goddess.”

What conclusions can we draw?

“The absence of battles, kings, boastful inscriptions and historical
events in Minoan art is surprising for the time.” (Eugene Hirschfeld)

A Minoan beauty on Thera

“Minoan art does show a greater emphasis on spontaneity and invention, and is more secular and informal… less constrained by rigid conventions and geometry”, Eugene Hirschfeld remarks. “The absence of battles, kings, boastful inscriptions and historical events in its art is surprising for the time. We need to recognize such distinctions [but] without falling into the crude formulations sometimes used in the past, such as posing cultured Minoans against barbarous Mycenaeans.

“Arnold Hauser’s first explanation for the particular character of the Minoans’ art is the relatively modest role of religion in their society. Minoan shrines seem to have been small, even in the palaces, kept in people’s homes or built in out of the way places like hills and caves. There is nothing like the great cult of the dead seen in Egypt, or the grandiose works that went with it. There was therefore less impetus towards sternly imposed conventions. He also admires the urbanity of the cultural life that arose around the palaces:

“‘The freedom of Cretan art can be partly explained by the extraordinarily important role which city life and commerce played in the island’s economy… Probably city life was nowhere so highly developed as in Crete’.

“The ‘palace’ was the centre of Minoan life: of trade and agriculture, but also of art. It was perhaps this union of trade and culture in a context of long internal stability that gave Minoan art its urbane liveliness. Crete’s geopolitical situation may also have exerted an influence. With the natural protection of the sea and backed by their fleet, the Minoans had little need to fear invasion. In the absence of a warrior class, not only were women’s rights better than in most Bronze Age cultures, but art was less constrained by the military and religion.”

“It was perhaps this union of trade and culture in a context of long internal stability that gave Minoan art its urbane liveliness.” (Eugene Hirschfeld)

The mysterious Phaestos Disc (side B)

“It is very likely that writing arose in Minoan culture for the same reason it did in Sumer: to keep accounts”, adds Hirschfeld. “An early pictographic script… was replaced in around 1700 BC by one which represented sounds, i.e. a true alphabet, known as Linear A… It has still not been deciphered… If there is imaginative literature among these writings, we cannot read it. We have no Minoan poetry, no songs, no history, no scripture. It is a great culture, but a silent one… One of archaeology’s more mysterious objects is the Phaistos Disc… A fired clay disc, covered on both sides with spirals of stamped symbols… They belong to none of the writing systems mentioned above.”⁽⁵⁾

• ⁽⁵⁾ The Phaestos disc is unique because all these symbols seem to have been impressed into the clay using 45 stamps, reproducing a body of text with reusable characters. The German linguist and typographer Herbert Brekle maintains that the disc is an early document of movable type printing, because it meets the essential criteria of typography, while the American geographer, historian and anthropologist Jared Diamond described it as “by far the earliest printed document in the world”. Discovered by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in the palace of Phaestos in 1908, the disc (15 cm wide) captured the imagination of amateurs and professionals, and many attempts have been made to decipher it – but in vain…

“We have no Minoan poetry, no songs, no history, no scripture. If
there is imaginative literature among these writings, we cannot
read it. It is a great culture, but a silent one.” (Eugene Hirschfeld)

Theran antelopes

Minoan Trade and Influence

MINOAN CULTURE’S INFLUENCE outside Crete manifests itself in the presence of Minoan handicrafts on the mainland of Greece. After around 1700 BCE, the material culture of the Hellenes achieved a new, higher, level due to Minoan influence. The connections between Crete and Egypt were prominent. Minoan wares were found there, while several Egyptian items were imported, especially papyrus, as well as artistic ideas. The Egyptian hieroglyphs served as a model for the Minoan pictographic writing, from which the Linear A writing system developed.

Later (late 15th – early 14th century BCE), the Minoan palaces were occupied by the Mycenaeans, who adapted the Minoan Linear A script to the needs of their own language, a form of Greek, which was written in Linear B. The Mycenaeans generally tended to adapt rather than destroy Cretan culture, religion, and art, and they continued to operate the Minoan economic system and bureaucracy. After about a century of partial recovery, most Cretan palaces and cities went into decline in the 13th century BCE. When the Bronze Age came crashing down some time later, Crete did not feel the agony of death…

A Theran fisherman

The Minoans were traders, and their cultural contacts reached far beyond Crete – to copper-bearing Cyprus and Asia Minor (or Anatolia), Egypt and Canaan (the Levant), the Balkans and the Black Sea area, mainly Colchis (Georgia–Abkhazia), Mesopotamia, even faraway Afghanistan. Paintings in Thebes, Egypt, from the 15th century BCE, depict a number of Minoans bearing gifts. Inscriptions record these people as coming from the “islands in the midst of the sea”, and may refer to gift-bringing merchants or officials from Crete. Minoan techniques and styles in ceramics also provided models for Helladic Greece. Along with Thera, Cretan ‘colonies’ can be found on Cythera, an island close to the mainland that came under Minoan influence in the 3rd millennium and remained Minoan in culture for a thousand years, until the Mycenaean occupation in the 13th century, as well as on Melos, Cea, Aegina, Rhodes, Miletus, and elsewhere. The Cyclades and the Dodecanese were in the Cretan cultural orbit.

Certain locations in Crete emphasize it as an “outward looking” society. The palace of Kato Zakros e.g. is located within a bay, 100 metres from the modern shore-line. Its large number of workshops and the richness of its site materials indicate a centre for import and export. Such activities are elaborated in artistic representations of the sea with ships and sailors, e.g. the Flotilla fresco on Thera. Homer recorded a tradition that Crete had 90 cities. Multi-room constructions were found also in “poor” areas, revealing a social equality and even distribution of wealth derived through trade. There was a high degree of organization, with no trace of the military aristocracies that characterized the following cultures. While the Mycenaeans relied mainly on conquest to expand, the Minoan Cretans were a mercantile people engaged primarily in overseas trade. No doubt they should have been involved in the Bronze Age’s most crucial trade of tin: tin, alloyed with copper, obviously from Cyprus, was used in the manufacture of bronze. The Minoan decline seems to be correlated with the decline in the use of bronze tools in favour of iron ones.

Multi-room constructions were discovered even in the ‘poor’ areas, revealing
a social equality and even distribution of wealth derived through trade. There was a high degree of organization, with no trace of military aristocracies…

The entire Ship Procession or Flotilla frieze at Acroteri, Thera

Bronze and Orichalcum or Chalcopyrite (Brass)

A Thracian bronze deer, 9th-6th century BCE

● In the beginning, bronze was made from naturally or artificially mixed ores of copper and arsenic. That is why it was called arsenic bronze. Tin was used only later, becoming the sole type of major non-copper ingredient of bronze in the late 3rd millennium. Tin bronze was superior in that the alloying process could be easily controlled and the alloy was stronger and easier to cast. Moreover, unlike arsenic, tin is not toxic. The earliest tin-alloy bronzes date to the late 4th millennium in Iran, Mesopotamia and China. Copper and tin ores are rarely found together (exceptions include one ancient site in Iran); thus, serious bronze work has always involved trade. The major source for tin in Europe was England’s deposits of ore in Cornwall, traded as far as the eastern Mediterranean. Though bronze is generally harder than wrought iron, the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age because iron was easier to find and to process into a poor grade of metal. Bronze was still used in the Iron Age. Roman officers e.g. had bronze swords while foot soldiers had iron. Archaeologists suspect that a serious disruption of the tin trade precipitated the transition. Mass population migrations c. 1200-1100 BCE reduced the shipping of tin around the Mediterranean (and from Britain), limiting supplies and raising prices. As cultures advanced from wrought to machine forged iron, they learned how to make steel, which is stronger than bronze and holds a sharper edge longer. There are many bronze alloys but modern bronze is typically 88% copper and 12% tin. Historical bronzes are highly variable in composition, as most metalworkers used whatever scrap was on hand.

Andean birdman, tumbaga

● Orichalcum is mentioned in several ancient writings, most notably in the story of Atlantis as recounted in Plato’s Critias dialogue. It is first mentioned by Hesiod in the 7th century BCE, and in a Homeric hymn dedicated to Aphrodite. Plato says that the metal was considered second only to gold in value. But by his time, it was known only by name. Pliny the Elder points out that it has lost currency due to the mines being exhausted. The name derives from the Hellenic word ὀρείχαλκος (from ὄρος, “mountain” and χαλκός, “copper”). Plato’s orichalcum has been held to be either a gold-copper alloy, or a metal no longer known, or mythic like Atlantis. The Romans transliterated “orichalcum” as “aurichalcum”, meaning “gold copper”. The Andean alloy tumbaga is something similar, being a gold-copper alloy. In Virgil’s Aeneid, a gold-silver alloy is mentioned. In later years, orichalcum was used to describe the sulfide mineral chalcopyrite or brass, that is, a copper-iron or copper-zinc alloy. The colour of brass is generally golden-yellow, while that of bronze is brown-red.⁽⁶⁾

• ⁽⁶⁾ Once I had the naïve impression – based on a mechanistic perception of the succession of historical ages (where what comes next is “deterministically superior” to what has preceded it) – that the Iron Age was superior in every aspect to the Bronze Age. Generally this is true. But there are some anomalies, some logical paradoxes, especially in the beginning of the new age, since you have to accept that the “iron” Dorians were more civilized than the “bronze” Achaeans.

Brass French horn

● A similar sham, by the way, is the idea of the “superiority” of monotheism versus polytheism, while in fact it is a colossal setback – and the Christian obscurantism of the Dark Ages proves it. When everyone claims the exclusivity or monopoly on truth, when polytheistic tolerance is lost, then the result is… Jerusalem as the capital not of Israel but of hatred among monotheists!

● Iron weapons, made out of necessity, were “poor weapons”, but also the “weapons of the poor”. Thus the aristocratic monopoly on the conduct of war ceased. One could perhaps argue that “war was democratized”. Even so, is the right to kill a “democratic” right?(!)

Where did the Minoans find tin, the necessary component to produce
bronze? No doubt, Minoan ships should have transported British tin…

Theseus with Ariadne and the Minotaur,
mosaic at Paphos: a Cretan theme in Cyprus.

The Cassiterides

CYPRUS WAS THE MEDITARRANEAN “copper island”; the word copper comes from the name of the island: from the Latin phrase Cyprium (aes), “Cyprian (metal)”. A possible etymological origin of the name Cyprus is the Sumerian words for copper or bronze (zubar / kubar), due to the massive deposits of copper ore found in the island. But where did the Minoans find tin – the necessary component – to produce bronze? Tin was very rare in the eastern Mediterranean. The only known source of cassiterite in the area was Kestel-Göltepe on the Taurus Mountains of south-central Anatolia. It supplied tin from the late 4th millennium to the mid-19th century BCE, when the ores became uneconomical or ran out. There were three other sources of tin available to the Minoan traders: the distant northeastern Afghanistan, central Europe (Bohemia), and the Occident, with vast amounts of tin in places such as Iberia, Brittany, in northwestern France, and especially Cornwall, in southwestern Britain. For the seafaring Cretans, the West was the destination they probably preferred best.⁽⁷⁾ When the Taurus mines shut down, western tin became more important and the Minoans would have completely monopolized the supply of tin into the Eastern Mediterranean with their navy and shipping. Objects made by Minoans suggest there was an extensive network with mainland Greece, Anatolia, Cyprus, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and westwards as far as Iberia, and also even further, that is, Bohemia, Brittany and, of course, Cornwall. Trade in nearby lands was direct, while in distant lands it could also be indirect through middlemen. Undoubtedly, Minoan ships should have transported British tin. If they also dropped anchor at British harbours it’s another story.

• ⁽⁷⁾ Not that the Minoans disregarded tin coming from the Orient: a tablet from the Mari archives mentions a Cretan who purchased tin at Ugarit from agents of the Mari palace in Mesopotamia. This tin came in part from Afghanistan, where Minoan items have been found. Others, however, insist that the said tablet refers, on the contrary, to the purchase of Cretan tin by Mari (500 kg, in 1670 BCE). Mesopotamia, they say, imported mainly Cretan tin and Cypriot copper to make bronze. Central European tin was carried through the Amber Route leading from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea.

The blue monkeys fresco on Thera

The Cretans derived their surplus from trade, unlike Babylonia and Egypt that principally relied on agriculture. They were the unrivalled long-distance traders, masters of the sea routes, having developed the most advanced navy that had ever been seen. They traded not only their own manufactured goods, “Made in Crete”, such as ceramics and metalwork, but acted as intermediaries, as well, trading raw materials and finished products throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. Their most valuable re-exports were pottery, copper, tin, gold, or silver. They were on the move not only in the Orient but also in the Occident, founding emporia all around. Their most privileged trade contacts in the East were surely those with the Egyptians, while their most significant Western partners should have been the Iberians, as the peninsula was rich in metals, especially silver, but also tin. Trade in tin was very lucrative in the Bronze Age, because, as we have seen, it is an essential component of true bronze, and comparatively rare: only gold and silver are rarer. Apart from the cassiterite deposits in Iberia, the locals obviously knew the route to the Cassiterides…⁽⁸⁾

• ⁽⁸⁾ The Cassiterides, that is, the Tin Islands (from the Greek word for tin: cassíteros), were thought to be situated somewhere near the west coasts of Europe. Ancient writers (Strabo, Poseidonius, Diodorus Siculus, etc.) described them as islets off northwest Iberia. Dionysios Periegetes (i.e. the Voyager) mentioned them in connection with the mythical Hesperides. Stesichorus and Strabo wrote that the Hesperides were by legendary Tartessos (where we shall voyage in due time). But if information of those ancient writers is ignored, it is traditionally assumed that these isles refer to the British Isles as a whole, because of the significant tin deposits in Cornwall; these deposits have become very limited due to their over-exploitation for millennia. (About the Cassiterides see especially Chronicle 26, Early Political Groups).

The metals were just the opening move of a far broader economical and cultural exchange. A lot of Iberians e.g. are nowadays intrigued by the fact that so long ago the Minoans were practicing their own version of “bullfight”. In his bilingual (in Portuguese and English) book, Fado – Lyrical Origins and Poetic Motivation, Mascarenhas Barreto refers to the Neolithic hunting rituals as a possible origin of the bull-leaping “pegas” during Portuguese bullfights, or even other similar daring games with bulls, and wonders

Cretan gold ring: four women with long robes
and bare breasts in a “cult scene” (ca 1500 BCE)

“whether the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula learnt this from the Cretans of the 3rd millennium BC, or if they themselves may have been the teachers, since the bulls were taken from their natural habitat in the peninsula to the island of Crete” (see, as well, Chronicle 5. Iberia’s Odyssey, Creto-Iberian ties).

Nevertheless, when one speaks of such extensive exchanges taking place in the 3rd millennium BCE, with customs adopted and bulls transported so far away, is it really so important to know who imitated whom?

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Next Chronicle 18. AEGEAN: KNOSSOS, MYCENAE, TROY ● Stonehenge ● Dorians and Sea Peoples ● Mysteries ● Trojan War and Bronze Age Collapse

Ταυροκαθάψια (bull-leaping) depicted on a Knossos fresco (15th century BCE)