Voyage 3. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

Voyage 3. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Περιήγηση 3η. ΙΒΗΡΟΥ ΟΔΥΣΣΕΙΑ

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

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

by 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, after
several years: better late than never!

We have begun with a historical flashback from Augusto Mascarenhas Barreto’s bilingual (in Portuguese and English) book on Fado / Origens Líricas e Motivação Poética (Lyrical Origins and Poetic Motivation). It is the starting point of the first chapter (Identity and Origins), just after 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’s Provençal in origin with Arabic melodic and poetic influence; it’s 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 Mascarenhas Barreto, “mingled with the aboriginal inhabitants and with 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.”

These homonymous toponyms are quite strange, indeed. It is not only the Ἕβρος (Hebrus or… Maritsa) in Thrace, the river dividing Greece and Turkey; it is also Caucasian Iberia, west of Caucasian… Albania (in today’s Azerbaijan), i.e. Georgia, in the hinterland of ancient Colchis, Medea’s homeland, with the Golden Fleece and Jason’s Argonauts. Logic says the Iberians’ cradle should have been there – but, on the contrary, most scholars 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), the Portuguese researcher, writer and poet points out the Moeras:

“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 Hellenic Moira is to be found in the spirit of Fado”.
(Mascarenhas Barretο)

The foreigners, you see, attribute to Greeks cultural characteristics that the latter claim they are due to 400 years of Ottoman yoke…

Odysseus blinding Polyphemus, early Attic black
figured amphora (circa 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,^(a) Odysseus. Among others, they say, he founded and walled Lisbon (see Chronicle 16: Iberian “El Dorado”):

• ^(a) The… “polytropic” versions the Homeric word “πολύτροπος” (polytropos) was 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”, Barreto says, “attributes the building of the ancient walls of the city [of 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.^(b) 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.”

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

• ^(b) Ulissea, i.e. Odyssey, from the Latin version of the hero’s name, Ulysses or Ulisses, hence Ulissípolis (Odysseupolis) > Ulissipo or Olisipo.

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 “classical” historical… science fiction. But how can he 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 even 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, of course, Galicia of Iberia and not that of Eastern Europe!)

Alis (Allis) Ubbo (Ubo) is generally 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. Demetris Michalopoulos, in an article about Mycenaean presence in Sardinia, 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 the omnipresent Phoenicians have certainly given. Can we associate the Semitic alis with the Indo-European root sal– (e.g. the English salt, and the Greek ἅλς (hals), meaning both salt and sea)? If so, Indo-European and Semitic languages should have had some common ground – at least on matters of common interest like navigation: this common ground was possibly formed through loan words from Mediterranean languages, such as the Minoan Cretan…

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

“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.”

Olissipo-Lisboa with the port on the Tagus in the 16th century

That’s how we “arrived” to Lisboa, the current capital of Portugal. But this is not the end of Barreto’s story. There’s more to it:

“Santarém, [which] stands looking over the River Tagus… is believed to have been founded in the 10th century BC by Abidis [Habis],^(c) of Greek origin, who gave it the name of Esca-Abidis. This prince, grandson of Gregoris [Gárgoris], king of the Iberian Peninsula, is said to have founded towns in Spain, too. According to legend, he was also 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”…

• ^(c) Habis, Habido, Abido, Abidas, Αbidis, Gabis, Gabid: his name’s versions in the various variations of the myth.

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

Odysseus and Calypso (with… Abidis?), 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 Atlas. Note that we remain in the same places that Heracles had toured earlier 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 with the 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 favourite custom of the era – started plundering and slaughtering, among others, also his genitor. Overwhelmed with remorse, when he realized he had become a patricide, he collected Odysseus’ body and, accompanied by his half-brother, Telemachus, and Penelope, voyaged back to the island of his mother, who turned them immortal. The “saga” ends 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,^(d) 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 high 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”, America? Logic, based on today’s knowledge about the world, makes us draw wrong conclusions. Moreover, the narrative takes place in Dante’s Inferno (see also Interlude. Synopsis 10*. Sailing to Rio de Janeiro!)

• ^(d) Here we find 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 her father because she had killed her husband…

Statue of Viriato in Zamora: The greatest Lusitanian hero in the resistance against the Romans was killed with treachery. When his assassins asked the Romans
for their payment, the latter answered: “Rome
does not pay traitors who kill their chief!”

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

“When Abidis was born,” according to 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 [Tagus].^(e) 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’,^(f) in memory of the place where he was reared by the hind.

• ^(e) 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 13 and 16).

• ^(f) Ἐσχάρα (eschara): hearth, fire-place (like ἑστία); pan of coals, brazier; watch-fires (of the camp); 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.

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

“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,^(g) changed the name of Scalabis to Santa Irene. When… the Arabs occupied the town (715), they called it Chantireyn” – and that’s how we “arrived” to Santarém.

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

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 Bullfighting: Minoan bull-leaping (ταυροκαθάψια, taurocathapsia; see also Chronicle 12. Minoan Cretan Thalassocracy).

Creto-Iberian ties due to Minoan thalassocracy in the Mediterranean.
A common cultural characteristic was bull worship and bullfifhting.

Taurocathapsia (bull-leaping), Minoan fresco

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 Bullfighting: Minoan bull-leaping (ταυροκαθάψια, taurocathapsia; see also Chronicle 12. Minoan Cretan Thalassocracy)^(h).

• ^(h) 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 which is now extinct. It survived until 1627 in a forest of Poland.

In his Memoriae Historicae, Strabo, geographer and historian of the Roman era, 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).

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 attacking bull (e.g. cape). He should withstand the initial impact (the tremendous weight of the animal plus speed), and also the subsequent shaking of the bull’s head so as to get rid of an unwelcome rider on his neck.

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

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 if we take into account that these Cretan “forcados” included women!

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 ca 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 if you talk about so extensive exchanges 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 κατα- (“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), in 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 bull-leaping (taurocathapsia), practiced in Spain, was called recortes. The recortadores competed at dodging and leaping over bulls without 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.

• >> Voyage 4. THE INDO-IBERIAN ARC
• << Voyage 2*. On DEMOCRACY
• << Voyage 2. IT ALL STARTED HERE…

Sailing to Rio de Janeiro!

Interlude

Sailing to Rio de Janeiro!

/PORTUGUÊS/ Navegando para o Rio de Janeiro!
/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Πλώρη για Rio de Janeiro!

Afro-Brazilian Museum

ΙΙΙ Festival

TÃO LONGE, TÃO PERTO

Music and Poetry
in the Portuguese Language

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
May 2013

The Festival was organized in collaboration with the ensemble Música Surda: Andréia Pedroso, Antônio Jardim, Artur Gouvêa and Eduardo Gatto.

Testimony by Michales Loukovikas

 
WHEN AMÉLIA MUGE AND I began researching and exchanging material from our traditions, the Lusitanic–Portuguese and the Hellenic–Greek, many people raised their brows in irony and disbelief:

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

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

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

I can say that our collaborative results astonished even us! 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 in my radio programs that lands so far apart, like – say – India and Iberia, have been interconnected for thousands of years, since ancient times… Well, when the Hellenes say “ancient”, they mean BCE (before the common era), or BC (before Christ), if you like.

All these ideas were further reinforced when Amélia and I started working on Periplus. Of course, 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 ancient Greek themes we have in Periplus (Seikilos’ Epitaph, the First Delphic Hymn to Apollo, and Mesomedes’ Hymn to Nemesis) were included because of her own compositions that reminded me of the ancient Hellenic songs mentioned above. It’s very strange, indeed.

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 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 uncover them. One only needs to search, methodically, of course, with a proper compass”, a bússula, as we say in Greek or bússola as you say in Portuguese.^(a)

• ^(a) 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; its hard, compact and 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?

Antikythera Mechanism

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

• ^(b) There can be no great civilization without equivalent technology. A marvel in this domain is the Antikythera mechanism, the earliest analogue computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. Dated to ca 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, 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 periplus of the world
(detail from a map by Ortelius, 1590)

The extant peripli (plural of periplus) took place in the Mediterranean, the Indian and the Atlantic oceans. Herodotus also wrote about a periplus of Africa by Phoenicians on behalf of an Egyptian pharaoh. A 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 Scandinavia and concluded a periplus of Europe sailing via European rivers from the Baltic to the Black Seas and back to the Mediterranean. There are also people that believe the Minoan Cretans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Punics, and other ancient peoples sailed to the Americas long before the Vikings, Columbus – or, of course, Magellan, who attempted a periplus of the world but was not fortunate enough to conclude it.

Therefore, these voyages started long before recorded history, in the Bronze Age. There are some 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 ports of 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 in the Mediterranean with tin and in limited quantities.

The Minoans, and later the Greeks and the 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… All these places, especially Cornwall, had massive tin deposits. There, close to Galicia or even Cornwall, were the so-called Cassiterides Nesoe, the Tin Isles (cassíteros is tin in Greek). Herodotus and other historians write also about the links of the Hellenes and Phoenicians with Tartessos, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, and many people nowadays correlate the legendary Tartessos with the elusive Atlantis…

Andalusia: Tartessos, identified with Sanlúcar de Barrameda (?) by the cartographer, and Gadir-Gadeira-Gades-Cádiz, a Phoenician colony on three islands with Greek names (Erytheia, Kotinoussa and Antipolis), while its patron, Melqart, was a lookalike of Heracles, the city’s founder, according to a Hellenic myth…

AS A STARTING POINT THIS RESEARCH had some very simple questions:

One of the two full-size Greek bronzes of nude bearded warriors, the Riace Bronzes, cast about 460–450 BCE, recovered in 1972, considered as one of the symbols of Calabria

• 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 and where did they find it?

All the answers are given in our Chronicles (Once Upon a… Wave), following our Voyages (during the Mediterranean Periplus)^(c).

• ^(c) • Mediterranean periplus: Before sailing off | The universal Mediterranean | It all started here… | On democracy | Iberia’s Odyssey | The Indo-Iberian arc | A hybrid’s hybris… | The celebrated “trichordon” | The… “sun language” | “All music is Thracian and Asian” | “Do not maltreat our music!” | Music made of body and soul.

  • Once upon a… wave: Sailing around / Periplus | Minoan Cretan thalassocracy | Mycenae: from Knossos to Troy | Phoenicia’s stroke of fortune | The enigmatic Sea Peoples | Iberian “El Dorado” | An Iberian periplus revival | “We don’t need no thought control!” | “Carthago delenda est” | Iberia impartially viewed | An archaeologist’s Waterloo.

Our conclusion is that certain needs motivated the 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. The interaction concerned material needs but at the same time transformed the people that worked together exchanging also ideas and ideals, a process that led to the birth of civilization, of culture.

Sappho and Alcaeus, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

IT IS NOT SO OBVIOUS but we have something like a periplus in other human endeavours, too. Music was born together with speech. In an advanced stage, in ancient Hellas, music was either instrumental or song. Poetry in classical Greece was inconceivable without music. 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 to express the meaning of the words through sounds. Something similar also happens in a translation: then the periplus concerns two languages. It is the voyage of a text, its meaning and style, content and form, while it is adapted in order to start breathing in another language environment…

The Odyssey is a kind of poetic periplus. According to the Lusitanians, the wanderings of Odysseus (Ulysses) were Luso-Hellenic, as well: he founded Lisbon and had a child with the Iberian princess Calypso. Homer described Odysseus’ descent into 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 and the Makaron Nesoe, that is, 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).

Dante, in his Inferno, cites another version of Odysseus’ descent into the underworld with no return. The king of Ithaca, he writes, went out of the Pillars of Hercules and sailed south, crossed the Equator, continued voyaging for months, until he reached a bay with a big mountain. Then a tornado sank his boat.

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

The Conquest of Lisbon, by Roque Gameiro (1917)

• The modern Greek Homerist Ioannis Kakridis argues that the Odyssey is a work of poetry and not a travel log (or a navigator’s periplus). According to W. B. Stanford, Cape Maleas and the nearby island of Cythera, where Odysseus met storms (Odyssey, book 9), are “the last clearly identifiable places in his wanderings. After this he leaves the sphere of Geography and enters Wonderland.” (Wandering in Wonderland)…

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

Other scholars, however, turned against this euhemerism –^(d) some of them 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) considered that at least Ogygia and Scheria-Phaeacia, the islands of Calypso and Nausicaa respectively, were “imagined in fantasy” as being in the Atlantic.

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

Plutarch (1st-2nd centuries CE) also placed Ogygia 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 and mathematician Kepler (1571 – 1630) estimated that “the great continent” was America and attempted to locate Calypso’s island.

In her work entitled The Wine Dark Sea, the American Henriette Mertz argued that Circe’s island is Madeira, Calypso’s island one of the Azores, while the intervening travels record a discovery of North America: Scylla and Charybdis are in the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia, Canada, while Scheria is in the Caribbean.

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 – the starting point of the Amazon.

Odysseus may not have been the first Hellene to go down there: according to Mertz, a century before the Trojan War and the Odyssey, in the 13th century BCE, the Argonauts travelled across the Atlantic Ocean, down the east coast of South America, past the mouth of the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro to 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 religious, cosmological, cultural and commercial centre of a pre-Columbian empire that extended 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.

Some writers interpret the Homeric epics as “British ballads” or “Viking sagas”. The Belgian Théophile Cailleux suggested in his Pays atlantiques décrits par Homère (Atlantic lands described by Homer, 1878) that Troy 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, somewhere between Jerez and Cádiz, in the delta of the Guadalete (where another Trojan War hero, Menestheus, supposedly settled: see Chronicle 7). But Cailleux was unlucky: some time after his 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. Thus there was no great thirst for geohistorical speculation then in the market.

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

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 the screenplay somewhat modified: the Trojan War was fought around 1200 BCE between groups of Celts, says Wilkens. Those living in Cambridgeshire were attacked by fellow Celts from the Continent to win access to the very profitable tin mines in Cornwall. He further hypothesizes that the Sea Peoples (see Chronicles 3-5) 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 Iliad and Odyssey. He locates Scylla and Charybdis at present day St Michael’s Mount, at the tip of Cornwall, he moves a bit Ithaca from Guadalete to Cádiz, while the topography of the Laestrygonian Telepylos (“Far-off port”) looks to him similar to that of Havana. Alas! His nationalism turned out to be his Achilles’ heel: “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…^(e)

• ^(e) If one takes Cailleux and Wilkens for granted, the Trojans left Britain after the war to settle in Italy, but 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 when his great-grandson Brutus was banished, he started wandering and was finally directed by the goddess Diana (Artemis) to settle on the island Albion in the western ocean. He named the island Britain after himself, defeated the giants who were the only inhabitants there, and on the banks of the Thames he established his capital, Troia Nova, which was later renamed London.

In The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales (1995), the Italian Felice Vinci assumed that 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 BCE, and bringing their traditional oral sagas to the Aegean. The islands of Odysseus’ kingdom, Ithaca, Dulichium, Cephalonia, and Zakynthos, would correspond with islands in the Danish archipelago of South Funen, and Troy with Toija in SW Finland; the Hellespont could not be identified with Dardanelles, but with the Gulf of Finland; Mycenae would have 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 Faroe Islands (among Britain, Scandinavia and Iceland); Scheria, home of the Phaeacians, with the environs of Bergen; 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. According to Vinci, the same region is the setting of other Hellenic mythological tales, such as the Argonauts’ voyage. Referring to Plato’s dialogue Critias, he maintains that Athens used to rise formerly on a flat fertile zone in the Baltic, perhaps near the town of Karlskrona in southern Sweden.

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

Regarding the background of Homer’s epics, 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 in the Atlantic, initially to Morocco, the Canaries and Madeira, and then heading north to Ireland, Scotland and Iceland.

More extreme views have occasionally surfaced that the whole geography of the Iliad and the Odyssey can be mapped on the coasts of the northern Atlantic. According to this, Troy was in southern England, Telemachus’ journey took him to Andalusia, while Odysseus wandered around the Atlantic coast. Some others turned recently 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, would be that the Trojan War was actually a Star War…

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

Chronicle 6. IBERIAN “EL DORADO”

Chronicle 6. IBERIAN “EL DORADO”

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 6. ΙΒΗΡΙΚΟ “EL DORADO”

● Minoans, Mycenaeans and Phoenicians in Iberia ● The Source of Tin to Make Bronze ● Sardinia ● Odysseus and Calypso in Lisbon or Ogygia ● Tartessos

by 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”, Dan Stanislawski notes in his Study in Historical-Political Geography: The Individuality of Portugal, and particularly in the 7th Chapter about Contacts Βetween the Ancient Civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and Iberia.

A model of Los Millares with its walls

“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 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.”

Hellenes in Iberia: Athena, Atlas, and Heracles with the golden apples of the Hesperides; marble relief, 5th century BCE

This is a “neat” example of the established historians’ ‘classic’ mentality: Reserved when they write or talk about Minoans, even Hellenes, but garrulous when they lecture about Phoenicians. Indeed, why was it so difficult for the Aegean peoples to reach Iberia? They were surely not inferior to the Phoenicians in seamanship and, furthermore, Crete was far closer to Iberia compared to Phoenicia. In addition, who controlled Mediterranean trade at the time? The Phoenicians or the Mycenaeans? Why should the Egyptian trade items of this period found in Spain “almost surely be associated with Phoenician intermediaries”? The crucial question, however, this mentality does not answer is: Where did the Bronze Age Mediterranean find tin to produce bronze? Who were established as sea traders in those years to transport this precious metal to the Mediterranean? Alas, not the Phoenicians! It is the reason why the evidence of their presence in Iberia is anything but “convincing”… On the other hand, there are detailed descriptions of Minoans extracting metals from the area of Lake Superior and carrying them through the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico to be transported to the Mediterranean! One cannot exclude this, but we do not intend to take you that far. It is better to remain on Iberian soil.

Where did the Bronze Age Mediterranean find tin to produce bronze?
Who were established as sea traders in those years to transport this precious metal to the Mediterranean?

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 also flourished in Almería, in modern eastern Andalusia, between 1800 and 1300 BCE. The Argaric culture was characterized by the early adoption of bronze, which allowed local dominance over ‘copper age’ (chalcolithic) neighbours. Their mining and metallurgy were quite advanced, with bronze, silver and gold being mined and worked for weapons and jewelry. They developed sophisticated ceramic techniques, as well, and traded with other tribes.

Argaric gold sword

The collective burial tradition, typical of European Megalithic Culture, was abandoned in favour of individual burials (and the tholos or ‘beehive’ tombs in favour of small cists). This trend seems to have come from the eastern Mediterranean, most likely from Mycenaeans (skipping Sicily and Italy, where the collective burial tradition remained for some time yet). In the next phase of this culture, beginning ca 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 circa 2000 BCE. Cultural exchanges during the Mycenaean era are very clear in the Mediterranean, with the Argarians adopting Greek funerary customs, while the Hellenes also imported the Iberian tholos for the same purpose.

Note that whoever reached 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 ca 1300–700 BC that consisted of different civilizations in Portugal, Andalusia, 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 important culture was that of Tartessos, a harbour city and the surrounding region in the southern Iberian coast (southern Andalusia). It was the first organized state of the peninsula, developed culturally and politically by the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. The area is referred to in the Greek mythology of the era as a reminder of the Mycenaean presence and campaigns 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.^(a) Geryon dwelt on Erytheia or Erytheis, an island of the Hesperides in the ‘far west’ of the ancient world: Hesperia was the West and more precisely Iberia; Erytheia was called one of the Hesperides, but also the fearsome giant’s daughter. “Geryon was killed by the great strength of Heracles at sea-circled Erytheis”, Hesiod says in his Theogony. Heracles set up two massive spires of stone to stabilize the area and ensure the safety of ships sailing through the Straits, called the Pillars of Heracles. He also founded Gadeira on Geryon’s island, where the Phoenicians would build later the colony of Gadir (modern Cádiz): a tumulus near Gadeira was associated with Geryon’s final resting-place. There are also legends about Heracles being buried in Spain. A later generation of Hellenes linked the area to Tartessos. The Fortunate Isles, also called the Isles of the Blessed, or Elysium, were thought to be somewhere outside the Pillars of Heracles, as well.^(b) As regards Geryon, he is mentioned among the mythical kings of Tartessos. His grandson Norax (or Norace) conquered the south of Sardinia, founding the city of Nora, and becoming a hero of the Nuragic mythology.^(c) He dictated the first laws, divided the society into seven classes, and forced the nobles to work. Later Gárgoris introduced commerce, beekeeping and new agricultural tools such as the plow. This last innovation is also credited to his (grand)son, Habis (Habido, Abidis, or Abidas), who succeeded him in the kingdom of Tartessos.

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

• ^(a) The Hesperides (Ἑσπερίδες) in Hellenic mythology were nymphs very fond of singing, who tended a blissful garden in a far western corner of the world, located near the Atlas Mountains in northwestern Africa, at the edge of the encircling Oceanus, the world-ocean. They were said to be the daughters of Hesperus, which means the Evening Star of the planet Venus, equivalent to vesper. They were three (like other Greek triads: the Graces and the Moerae, Fates): Aegle (“dazzling light”), Arethusa (“waterer”), and Erytheia (or Erytheis, “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 chosen for all citrus species was hesperidoeidē (“hesperidoids”) – implying that they came from the Occident, while in reality their origin was the Orient (Southeast Asia)…

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

• Some peoples name the orange after Portugal, the former main source of imports: Greek portokali (πορτοκάλι), Bulgarian and Slav-Macedonian portokal, Romanian portocală and Georgian phortokhali. Also in South Italian dialects, orange is 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 kallos (‘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 that lived in the area. The same applies to the names Galicia and Gaia, the twin city of Porto, at the Douro mouth.

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

• ^(b) In the Fortunate Isles, or Isles of the Blessed, heroes and other favoured mortals in Greek and Celtic mythology were received into a winterless blissful paradise. These islands were thought to lie in the ‘Western Ocean’ near the encircling ‘River Oceanus’. 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.”

Modern geography names these islands as Macaronesia (from their Greek name Makárôn nêsoi (‘Μακάρων νῆσοι’). They are the Azores and Madeira (Portugal), the Canaries (Spain) and Cape Verde.

Metallic model of a Nuragic ship

• ^(c) The close relations between Iberia and Sardinia implied by mythology are confirmed by archaeological, architectural, linguistic, cultural and historical evidence. On the other hand, the Sardinians had contacts with the Mycenaeans, who traded throughout the western Mediterranean, and the Cretans, e.g. with Kydonia, modern Chania, as shown from pottery recovered in excavations in Sardinia. The influences, though, seem to 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 Balearic Islands. Some scholars see similarities even with Mesopotamian structures and attribute them to migrations, particularly of Sumerians, to the West. Ancient Greek historians and geographers described the mysterious megalithic nuraghe as daedaleia, implying there was a connection with Daedalus, who, after working in Crete and building the labyrinth there, settled in Sicily and then in Sardinia. During the Chalcolithic period, in the dawn of the Nuragic civilization in 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, most probably by Minoans and, later on, by Mycenaeans. The Nuragic people became skilled metal workers and were among the main metal producers in Europe. Passing to the Bronze Age, they started using this new alloy to make a wide variety of products, such as weapons, tools, even votive offerings, e.g. bronze vessels that show their close relationship with the sea. Sardinia was not on the map of tin sources and trade in ancient times (Cornwall-Devon, Brittany, Iberia, Bohemia–Saxony). However, 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. Therefore, traders from the Aegean, as well as other areas where tin was scarce, very often travelled there. This fact can explain the 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 also locally made replicas, in half a dozen findspots that seem to have functioned as “gateway” communities.

Sardinian and Corsican tribes: the Corsi, perhaps from Liguria, moved to Corsica from N. Sardinia; the Balearic Balares, from Iberia or S. France, may be related with the Basques; the Iolei may originate in N. Africa, Sicily or E. Mediterranean. The Gallurese, Logudorese and Campidanese dialects correspond probably to these tribes.

• The late Bronze Age (15th–13th centuries BCE) saw vast population migrations, such as that of the Sea Peoples who destroyed the Mycenaean and the Hittite worlds and also attacked Egypt (see the previous Chronicle 5). Some scholars say that the Sherden, one of the most important tribes of the Sea Peoples, are to be identified with the Nuragic Sardinians, who settled on the island either before or after the failed invasion of Egypt. These theories remain controversial for most archaeologists and historians. Simonides of Ceos, however, in a lost work reported by Zenobius, spoke of raids by Sardinians against Crete during the Sea Peoples’ invasion of Egypt. This would at least confirm that Nuragic Sardinians frequented the eastern Mediterranean at that time. Further proof comes from 13th century Nuragic ceramics found at Tiryns and in the Sicilian Agrigento area, along the sea route linking the western to the eastern part of mare nostrum. The second largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily was called Ichnousa by the Greeks. It was probably named Sardinia after Sardus, a mythical hero of the Nuragic pantheon, who colonized the island from Libya. He 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, who were repeatedly checked by the Carthaginians and the 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). The Phoenicians finally appeared in the area for the first time around 1000 BCE and began visiting Sardinia with increasing frequency. The most common ports of call where they dropped anchor were Caralis, Nora, Bithia, Sulcis, Tharros, and Olbia. From the 8th century they started founding (or appropriating) strongholds and cities primarily on the strategic southwest coasts of the island.

Launeddas

• Sardinia, along with neighbouring Corsica, is a special case in terms of music, as well, cultivating one of the oldest forms of vocal polyphony – perhaps 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 instruments of music. 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 originally 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, producing some of the “most elemental and resonant (sounds) in European music”, as Alessio Surian observed.

Cynetic writing with a human figure, 8th century BCE

Gárgoris is mentioned as a mythological king of one of the peoples of Tartessos, who lived in today’s Algarve and Low Alentejo of southern Portugal. They were the 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. After she had got pregnant, he ordered that she should be locked up and the child be killed. The baby was abandoned on a hill close to a lair of wild animals, 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, or devoured by dogs or hungry pigs, or thrown to the sea. Protected by Fortune, Habis managed to survive against all adversities. Raised by a hind and grown up like a savage, he became a skilful bandit, but was captured by peasants who led him to the king. Seeing his birthmarks, Gárgoris recognized he was his (grand)son. Impressed by his miraculous survival of all his ordeals, the king named him heir to the throne. Recorded by the Roman historian Trogus Pompeius, the legend was narrated in verse by Jerónimo de Arbolanche in his poem Abidas (1566). There are other versions of the myth, as well. In one of them Gárgoris is identified with Cronus eating his children, while his (grand)son is presented as persecuted for he introduced agriculture in pastoral Tartessos. A third variation, which found quite unexpectedly its way into a book about fado, covers up the incest factor, but embellishes the story with our cherished Homeric heroes (see also Voyage 3: Iberia’s Odyssey):

Map of the Lisbon area with Olisipo, Sintra, Escalabis or Scalabis, and Salacia, an ancient Roman town in present-day Alcácer do Sal

Gárgoris is identified with the Iberian king Gregoris mentioned by Mascarenhas Barreto in his book Fado – Lyrical Origins and Poetic Motivation. In his numerous mythological and historical digressional footnotes, he connects this monarch to Odysseus and Calypso, referring to the founding of Lisbon and Santarém:

“Legend 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. Anyway, what is certain is that Lisbon was inhabited by the Phoenicians around 600 BC and they named it Alis Ubbo, meaning ‘Calm Bay’.”

The founding of Santarém is thought to be correlated to that of Ulissea > Ulissipo > Olissipo > Olissipona > Lissibona > Lisboa.

“It is believed to have been founded in the 10th century BC by Abidis, of Greek origin, who gave it the name of Esca-Abidis”, Mascarenhas Barreto writes. “According to legend, this prince, grandson of Gregoris, king of the Iberian Peninsula, was also the son of Ulysses who, betraying the trust of Gregoris after having been given Alis Ubbo (Lisbon), secretly espoused Calypso, daughter of the peninsular king, who rushed with his army on Lisbon. Ulysses fled by sea, abandoning his spouse. When Abidis was born, 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 Abidis was put in a basket and taken away by the current of the river [Tagus]. A hind adopted him and when the child was later found in a wild state by some huntsmen, his mother recognized 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’ in memory of the place where he was reared by the hind.”

“Legend attributes the building of the ancient walls of Lisbon to Ulysses, who is supposed to have given the place the name of Ulissea – whence Olissipo, Lissibona and Lisboa… Santarém is believed to have been founded in the 10th century BC by Abidis, of Greek origin [son of Ulysses and Calypso], who gave it the name of Esca-Abidis (Escalabis)… (Mascarenhas Barreto)

Odysseus and Calypso, by Max Beckmann

Once more, the stories about Hellenes are ‘legends’, those on Phoenicians ‘history’. Possibly true, there were no Greek settlements west of the Pillars of Heracles, only voyages of discovery. The myth of an ancient Hellenic foundation of Olisipo by Odysseus is not true. On the other hand, there is no evidence either to support the myth of a Phoenician foundation of Lisbon “around 600” or as far back as 1200 BCE under the name of Alis Ubbo (“Safe Harbour”), even if there were some organized settlements in Olissipona with clear Mediterranean influences either at that distant time or later. Likewise, contrary to myth, except the voyages of discovery, there is no record of Phoenician colonies beyond the Algarve, namely Balsa and Tavira, close to the Portuguese-Spanish border, with substantial Phoenician settlement and influence since the 8th century BCE. Essentially, Phoenician influence in modern Portugal was through cultural and commercial exchange with Tartessos.

As regards Calypso, according to the Greek mythology, she 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).^(d) 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, and some have identified either or both with Atlantis. Plutarch again writes specifically that “an isle Ogygian lies far out at sea, distant five days’ sail from Britain, going westwards”, and also 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!^(e) Hence the view that it was Homer before Plato who first spoke of Atlantis.

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

• ^(d) Ogygia is linked to the Ogygian deluge and the mythical king of Attica and/or Boeotia, Ogyges, in the sense that Ogygian means ‘primeval’, ‘primal’, ‘at earliest dawn’. This means that Calypso’s island was primeval. Thus, when Aeschylus calls the Nile Ogygian, he does not suggest that the island was in Egypt, as some thoughtlessly thought…
• The Hellenic mythology mentions three deluges: those of Ogyges, Deucalion, and Dardanus.

• ^(e) Homer describes the ships as faster than falcons, while King Alcinous explains to Odysseus what sort of information the ships require in order to take him home:

“Tell me your country, nation, and city, 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.”

Computerized ships: the best a Periplus can have! Of course, with this technology in mind among other things, the idea that Scheria-Phaeacia could be Corfu must be ruled out.

Arganthonios

Back to Tartessos. This legendary land appears in Greek and Near Eastern sources circa the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. Most probably Homer was again the first one to refer in the Iliad to a gold-bearing land in the western limits of the world before the great ocean (Iberia) where wealthy people lived happily for many years. The Tartessian fortunate city, according to Herodotus, was beyond the Pillars of Heracles and had a king named Arganthonios, because of his wealth most probably.^(f)

• ^(f) The word Arganthonios is apparently based on the Indo-European word for silver and hence money. Tartessos was very rich in silver. Similar names appear in inscriptions of the Roman period and on silver coinage in Gaul. Arganthonios, the ‘Silver Man’ (ca 670–550 BCE), ruled Tartessos for 80 years (ca 630-550) and lived to be 120 years old. The idea of great age and length of reign may result from a succession of kings using the same name or title. Nevertheless, one could retort that he died… quite young, if we take into account that, as the Bible says, “all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine [969] years”!

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. The two of them had probably more in common, namely Minoan influences. The Andalusians, just like the Hellenes, may have benefited from the Cretans not only economically, but culturally, as well. Archaeological discoveries there 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 mouth of the Tagus to Valencia. Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century CE, identified the river and gave details of 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, 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.

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

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 of which happened around 1500 BCE and the other in 200 CE. Therefore, none of them is linked with the demise of Tartessos. Most sites were inexplicably abandoned between the late 6th and early 5th centuries BCE.

Geography of Tartessos and Iberia; 7th-5th century BCE

Strabo described an urbanized society with many flourishing, wealthy cities along the banks of the Tartessos (Guadalquivir) River. The Tartessians were very good in engineering, with a sophisticated system to regulate the river flow.

“They are considered to be the most educated of the Iberians, they have a scripture, even historical chronicles, poems, and laws in verse”, he wrote.^(g)

• ^(g) More about the ancient nomoi, that is, the very old tradition of laws in verse meant to be sung so as not to be forgotten by the people, see Chronicle 1.

Their culture is divided into two periods: The first is called “geometric” and coincides with the late Bronze Age ranging from 1200 to 750 BCE – exactly corresponding to the Greek geometric art (Parallel Lives? Who knows…). The second is termed “oriental”, influenced by Phoenicians and Hellenes alike, ranging from 750 to 550 BCE, when it was 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 other major advances in craftsmanship, e.g. architecture, and also in agriculture. Another noticeable element was the increase in specialization and stratification. A very important development was writing. With the arrival of the Hellenes, whose influence extended far beyond their colonies, this ‘orientalism’ began to transform itself into the Iberian culture, especially in the South East. The 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 influences. A variant of the Hellenic alphabet (Ibero-Ionian script) was used in a few cases to write Iberian, as well.

Treasure of Tartessos, El Carambolo

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. Mining and smelting preceded the coming of Minoans, Greeks, or Phoenicians. Alluvial tin was panned in the Tartessian streams from an early date. The Río Tinto mines along the river, which 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 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.^(h) The invention of coinage in the 7th century BCE intensified the search for bronze and silver. Hence trade links, formerly largely in elite goods, assumed a broader economic role. By that time, silver extraction in Huelva Province reached industrial proportions. Huelva city was certainly connected to Tartessos; it contains the largest accumulation of imported elite goods and must have been an important centre. Excavations in the heart of the city revealed a great industrial and commercial emporium lasting several centuries. Some 90,000 ceramic fragments, indigenous and imported (Phoenician and Greek), were exhumed. This pottery, dated from the 10th to the 8th centuries BCE, precedes 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 origin. 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.

Río Tinto: beautiful colours but… poisonous!

• ^(h) The Tinto area, after its exploitation for ten millennia, 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 ice surface. Thus the river is of interest to astrobiologists.

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

• 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 were obliged to retract, but who knows? The Americans may one day employ… Martians as slaves! That is why Europe, eternally in the role of a satellite, is already being transmuted into… Europa, moving inexorably towards the gates of El Dorado vigilantly guarded by Cerberus!

• >> Chronicle 7. AN IBERIAN PERIPLUS REVIVAL
• << Chronicle 5. THE ENIGMATIC SEA PEOPLES

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

Chronicle 3. MYCENAE: FROM KNOSSOS TO TROY

Chronicle 3. MYCENAE: FROM KNOSSOS TO TROY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 3. ΑΙΓΑΙΟΝ: ΚΝΩΣΟΣ, ΜΥΚΗΝΑΙ, ΙΛΙΟΝ

● Stonehenge ● Dorians and Sea Peoples ● Eleusinian, Cabeirian, and Orphic Mysteries ● The Trojan War and the Bronze Age Collapse

by Michales Loukovikas

 

The Atreid dynasty palace at Mycenae

AS HEIRS of the Minoans, the Mycenaeans assumed control of the “Tin Routes” – that is, 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 some light on the reason why Mycenaean artifacts have been found well outside the limits 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 from the 13th century BCE in Wessex and Cornwall, England, and in Ireland. There is convincing evidence that during the final phase of construction of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, around 1600 BCE, the builders were in commercial contact with “the great contemporary Mediterranean civilizations of Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, Egypt, and the ancestors of the travelling-trading Phoenicians,” as Gerald Hawkins said.^(a) The grave of a Mediterranean teenage boy that died ca 1550 BCE and several items of Mediterranean origin have been found in the burial ground of Stonehenge.

Sunset at Stonehenge

• ^(a) Thus, according to Hawkins, the Mycenaeans were already included among the navigating merchants of long distance voyages even before the conquest of Minoan Crete, while the Phoenicians (their “ancestors”, as he put it) made their first steps. Hawkins was an English astronomer and author, most famous for his work in the field of archaeoastronomy. He published an analysis of Stonehenge in 1965 and was the first to propose its purpose as an ancient astronomical observatory used to predict movements of the sun and stars. Archaeoastronomy is 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 period (ca 1600–ca 1100 BCE) is the historical setting of much Hellenic literature and myth, including the Epic Cycle and Greek tragedy. Historians have traditionally blamed the collapse on an uprising or an invasion by another Hellenic ethnic group, the Dorians, though at least one of the Mycenaean centres, Pylos, was most probably destroyed by the so-called Sea Peoples.^(b) There are also theories of natural disasters or large-scale drought, which could have contributed, as well. The movements of people from the Balkans and Anatolia to the Near East at that time were quite real. The internal factors theory has the Mycenaean civilization falling in the course of societal conflicts brought on by a rejection of the palatial system by the underprivileged strata of society, who were quite impoverished by the period’s finale. Another hypothesis mingles social with ethnic divisions. In this context it has to be stressed that the Iron Age made large numbers of comparatively cheap weapons accessible to all. War was no longer a privilege of the aristocracy. The iron weapons were not as good as the bronze ones, but they could still kill… (See the previous Chronicle 2).

Heracles

• ^(b) 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 the ones that prevailed in the classical era. Greek legend asserted that the Dorians took possession of the Peloponnese in the so-called ‘Return of the Heracleidae’. The meaning of the concept has changed several times, as historians, philologists, and archaeologists used it in 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 200 years of investigation, the historicity of the Dorian invasion has not been established.

Sea peoples depicted as prisoners in Egypt

• The Sea Peoples were a confederacy of seafaring raiders from Southern and Central Europe and the Mediterranean, especially the Aegean Sea area, who sailed (and then 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”. Omitting Mycenaean Hellas from the list of the victims, some scholars believe that they can identify most of the Sea Peoples mentioned in Egyptian records: They were supposedly Achaeans (Ekwesh; if they were, why then should they destroy Pylos? – “Because they were Hellenes!”, is the sardonic answer…); Tyrrhenians (Teresh), ancestors of the Etruscans; Lycians (Lukka); Sardinians (Sherden); Sicilians (Shekelesh); Philistines, that is Palestinians (Peleset), possibly coming from Crete; and Teucrians (Tekrur), who could be either Trojans or Greeks! The Peleset and Tekrur were the only major tribes of the Sea Peoples that settled permanently in Canaan. Note that several of these peoples had been used as mercenaries or ‘allies’ by the Egyptian and Hittite Empires before they turned against them (see Chronicles 4 and 5).

A Mycenaean woman with her chest exposed but… in profile – not en face
as the Cretan fashion was…

Mycenaean settlements were not confined in southern Hellas, but also appeared in Epirus, Macedonia, islands of the Aegean, the Asia Minor coast, 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 the heirs of the Minoan palaces but inferior to them. The heart of the palace was the megaron, 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 a king, identifiable in the Homeric ἄναξ (‘divine lord’, ‘sovereign’, ‘host’). His role was military, judicial, and religious. Occurrences of the word in texts having to do with offerings suggest that the sovereigns were worshiped. Apart from that, no priestly class has yet been identified. Furthermore, it remains problematic to pick out a place of worship with certainty. It seems that many gods and religious conceptions of the Minoans were fused in the Mycenaean religion, the mother of the classical Greek religion. The Eleusinian mysteries were established during the Mycenaean period on a pre-Hellenic vegetation cult with Minoan elements. Demeter and other gods appear in Arcadian myths as animal-headed. Representations of processions with animal masks, or of ‘daemons’, remind us of the Hellenic myth of the Minotaur. Dionysos, 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’ who was abandoned by his mother and then brought up by the powers of nature.^(c) Mycenaean painting was very much influenced by Minoan art. Bull-jumping frescoes are found at Mycenae and Tiryns, as well. However, 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 (15th century BCE)

• ^(c) The stories of the ‘Divine Child’, or ‘Baby Moses’, or Habis, an Odysseus and Calypso’s son (we will meet him when we voyage to Iberia, see Chronicle 6), etc. are anything but unique, as they are found in many cultures, based on the same idea but without necessarily from the same origin. Similarly, the Deluge myths, in connection with a Megaflood due to the last deglaciation, are also widespread among many cultures all around the world. The Mesopotamian Atrahasis, Deucalion, Noah etc. are heroes with the same background. It is a pity that modern Greeks are more familiar with Noah than Deucalion. The reason is that these stories are related as myths, tales, except those in the Bible, which are considered ‘sacred’. But what else is the Bible if not Hebrew mythology?

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

• The Eleusinian mysteries (Ἐλευσίνια μυστήρια) were initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis in Hellas. Of all the mysteries celebrated in ancient times, these were held to be the ones of greatest importance. It is acknowledged that their basis was an old agrarian cult which probably goes back to the Mycenaean or rather Minoan periods. The mysteries represented the myth of the abduction of the daughter (“kore”) from her mother by the king of the underworld Hades, in a cycle with three phases: the “descent”, the “search” and the “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 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 similar systems in the Near East, such as the cults of Isis and Osiris in Egypt, the Syrian and Persian cults and, of course, the Thracian–Phrygian Cabeirian mysteries.

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

• The Cabeiri (Κάβειροι) were enigmatic chthonic deities, protectors of sailors, who were imported into Hellenic ritual and may have also included Hittite and proto-Etruscan elements. They were worshiped in a mystery cult closely associated with that of Hephaestus, centered οn the north Aegean islands of Lemnos and Samothrace, and also at Thebes. Other places of worship included Imbros and Seuthopolis in Thrace, and 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 nationality. Everyone, men and women, adults and children, the free or the enslaved, Hellenes and non-Hellenes, could participate. After all, both the Samothracians and Lemnians were originally non-Greek: the Lemnians were possibly related to the Etruscans; they were Hellenized after Athens conquered the island in the 6th century BCE; however, the cult of the Cabeiri survived the period of Hellenization. The Samothracians were associated with the Trojans and Pelasgians; in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods they used a so-called “barbarian” language even in Roman times. Thebes was connected to Samothrace, primarily through the wedding of Cadmus and the Samothracian Harmonia. The Cabeiri also bear many similarities to other fabulous races, such as the Telchines, Cyclops, 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.

The Myth of Orpheus, by Marc Chagall

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

Behold Alaric, the “Messiah” of the Christian mob, entering Athens, having ravaged Attica! He invaded the Peloponnese, sold citizens of Corinth, Argos, Sparta, etc into slavery, crossed the Gulf of Corinth marching to Epirus…

• Emperor Theodosius I closed the sanctuaries by decree in 392 CE. Two years before, in 390, he had ordered his troops to commit one of the most horrific massacres in history, slaughtering at least 7,000 Thessalonians in the Hippodrome, because they had rebelled against the emperor’s Germanic garrison,⁽*⁾ and the imposition of Christianity with the abolition of the Edictum Mediolani (313 CE) on freedom of religion. As soon as the Christians were free of persecution, they started persecuting all the others, thanks to Theodosius the “Saint” (for the Christian Church), the “Great” (for the official History)… The last remnants of the Mysteries were wiped out in 396, when the Goth king Alaric invaded Eleusis accompanied by Christians “in their dark garments” – the “Blackshirts” and “Sturmabteilung” (SA) of the time – desecrating the old sacred sites and killing all the priests… Alaric halted slaughter and plunder only when he was appointed magister militum by the emperor. He surely deserved better: sanctification!
• ⁽*⁾ Most of the Theodosian dynasty emperors, as well as the last ones of the Western 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. (See Chronicle 7⁺ on the violent Christianization of the Empire).

The choral dancers frieze from the Temenos in Samothrace

A Mycenaean jar with an octopus and fish

Commerce remains curiously absent from the written sources in Linear B. However, it is known that the Minoans exported fine fabrics to Egypt; the Mycenaeans no doubt did the same. Most probably they borrowed knowledge of navigational matters from the Minoans, 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, notably 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 and featured heavily worked painted decorations incorporating mythic, warrior, or animal motifs. The Mycenaeans’ network extended as far as southern 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 Minoan and Mycenaean ceramics have been recovered), other parts of Anatolia, Cyprus, Canaan and Egypt. Minoan and Mycenaean foreign trade is one of the most important chapters of the Bronze Age history and an open challenge to every archaeologist and historian.

The Mycenaean maritime commerce did not take off until after the collapse of the Minoan civilization. Especially after the conquest of Crete, production of goods meant to be sold outside the kingdom increased considerably…

The gold funeral Mask of ‘Agamemnon’

The Mycenaeans, as conquerors of Crete, became heirs to the Minoan thalassocracy; but they did not last long. The Trojan War, that took place in 1194-1184 BCE according to Eratosthenes,^(d) the Sea Peoples’ raids, and the great instability of the epoch, led to their downfall during the Bronze Age collapse. Many historians believe 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 50 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 writing was forgotten. The Hellenes would need to re-invent writing in the late 9th or early 8th century BCE.^(e) In this period almost every city was violently destroyed and often left unoccupied thereafter, such as Hattusa, the Hittite capital, Mycenae, and Ugarit. Troy was destroyed at least twice, before being abandoned. Fewer and smaller settlements suggest famine and depopulation.

• ^(d) Eratosthenes (Ἐρατοσθένης, ca 276–ca 195 BCE), from Cyrene, was a geographer, astronomer, mathematician, poet and music theorist (characteristic of the ancient scholars’ global knowledge and eruditeness). He was the first person 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 was the first person to use the word ‘geography’, invented a system of latitude and longitude, and made the first world map incorporating 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.

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), Christians (Theodosius and Patriarch Theophilus in 391) and Muslim Arabs (`Amr ibn al-`As in 642), resulting to an irretrievable loss of knowledge for mankind.

A Linear B tablet

• ^(e) The Greek alphabet, probably derived from the Phoenician ‘alphabet’, 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, namely the introduction of vowel letters. The Greeks were obliged to make the same innovation twice because the vowels are significant in their language. Adapting the Minoan Linear A script to their needs, the Mycenaeans borrowed 87 Cretan symbols; 82 corresponded to syllables and five to vowels. Linear A is still not deciphered and so 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’, which are called “abjads” (derived from the Arabic word for ‘alphabet’). The Phoenician abjad belonged to the family of the closely related West Semitic scripts.

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 the alliance of Troy 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 evade ‘conscription’ disguised as a girl in the palace of Skyros! Several areas, e.g. 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. None of the palaces survived and up to 90% of small sites were abandoned 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 Dark Ages would last for more than 400 years. After ca 1100 BCE, the decoration on Hellenic pottery lacks the figurative adornment of 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, ca the 8th century, and the entire Epic Cycle. Those epics, a by-product of the new alphabet and inspired mainly by the Trojan War and its repercussions that would later feed the tragedians’ imagination, together with the emergence of the Greek poleis in the 9th century, were the first signs of recovery in Hellas.

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

The catastrophe was even worse in Anatolia. Every important site shows a layer of destruction. Here civilization possibly did not recover to the level of the Hittites for another thousand years. Cyprus witnessed two waves of destruction: by the Sea Peoples ca 1230, and by Aegean refugees ca 1190 BCE. In Syria, Ugarit was burned to the ground. In addition, the cities along the coast from Gaza northward were destroyed. However, strangely enough, the raids did not affect the Phoenician cities; they were confined in southern Canaan. Assyria, who was protected by the best army in the world, also remained intact; nevertheless, it withdrew to its borders for a 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 referred to the cultural memories of the disaster as stories of a “lost golden age”. Hesiod e.g. spoke of Ages of Gold, Silver and Bronze, separated from the modern harsh cruel world of the Age of Iron by the Age of Heroes. It seems that the disruption of long distance trade, an aspect of the so-called ‘systems collapse’, cut easy supplies of tin, making bronze impossible to produce.

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

The disruption of long distance trade cut easy supplies of tin, making bronze impossible to produce.

• >> Chronicle 4. PHOENICIA’S STROKE OF FORTUNE
• << Chronicle 2. MINOAN CRETAN THALASSOCRACY