Chronicle 3. A CHRONICLE OF THE HUMANS

Chronicle 3. A CHRONICLE OF THE HUMANS

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 3. ΧΡΟΝΙΚΟ ΤΟΥ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΥ

● Academic Scholasticism ● Ares Poulianós: Archanthropus and Homo Erectus ● Homo’s Cradle: North Aegean and Macedonia ● DNA Analyses: Minoans, Mycenaeans, Cretans and Hellenes ● Paleolithic Odyssey ● Aegean Stonehenge ● Balkan Writing

Michales Loukovikas

Ain Ghazal Statues, Jordan, considered as one of the earliest large-scale human representations (ca 7250 BCE)

THE NEOLITHIC AGRICULTURAL revolution is the work of women, I said in our previous Chronicle, because, according to the division of labour of that period, they were the ones who gathered fruit, while men hunted. Women, therefore, should have foreseen the prospects of expanding available food by agriculture. It was a logical hypothesis I made in passing, noting that I do not know if any researcher has expressed the same opinion. Nevertheless, I stressed the need not to further engage in such speculations for the time being, and stick to generally accepted ideas – as long as they are not directly related to the issues under our consideration. Such are the assumptions connected to the theories of man’s African origin, and the origins of the inhabitants of Hellas, the Indo-European languages and their speakers, or even the Phoenician origin of the Greek alphabet, among various issues that are relevant, or sufficiently vague. As I’ve said, they are nothing but theories…

The situation prevailing in academic circles is, unfortunately, very sad, while – normally – universities should be temples of free movement of ideas, dialogue, knowledge and learning. So many theories, taken for “granted”, have already been overturned; and so much blood has already spilled, “in the name of” utter idiocies, touted as “divine laws”, whether “the earth moves”, or concerning the nature of the “Holy Trinity”, as if the “holy fathers” had X-rayed its components! A scientist who, instead of pursuing a “true understanding through reason”, as Plato said, yields to doctrine, to dogma (in order to forward his ego, as well), is nothing but a scholastic charlatan.

Archánthropus skull found in the Cave of Petralona in 1960

SΟ SCHOCKED I FELT when I came across the work of the anthropologist Ares Poulianós, who introduced us to the Archánthropus of Petrálona in Chalcidice, having already studied in depth the origin of the Hellenes: he was violently evicted from the cave and the museum which, nota bene, he had founded and funded himself (a period when several of his important findings “vanished”…), and had to spend endless hours in the courtrooms, rather than in excavation sites, in order to be vindicated – having against him even the Greek state, which ought to support him instead. That’s because he dared to overturn “well-established notions”, “divine laws”: that Homo’s cradle is not Africa, but the region of Macedonia and the northern Aegean. And after spreading all over the Mediterranean, the humans moved North and South, East and West. Therefore, the inhabitants of Hellas have been mostly indigenous, and the theories about the descent of the Indo-Europeans, or of any other people, from the North to the South, should be similarly discarded. According to this “Out of the Aegean” theory (it is also a theory), the Chronicle of the Humans is as follows:

Ares Poulianós

● 12-11 million years ago, the oldest Homo erectus (Standing man) appeared on earth. His bones and tools were found by Poulianós at Triglia, also in Chalcidice, not far from Petrálona; thus he called him Homo erectus trigliensis. In the same area, he discovered some nine-million-year-old ancestors of the horse. Hipparia appeared in Spain and Africa 500,000 years later. Homo erectus, in his Asian and African variants, emerged ten million years later(!), two million years ago, while the earliest African tools were made 2.5 (three at most) million years ago.

“Between twenty and seven million years ago, Earth really was the planet of the apes”, the anthropologist David Begun wrote in the New Scientist. “At least 100 species roamed the world before the first humans appeared. They… are more fascinating still for what they tell us about our own origins. Key human traits including big brains, dexterous hands, erect posture and long childhood can be traced back to this period. And the really surprising thing is that these features all evolved in European apes.”

“Earth: a planet of the apes. Key human traits evolved in European apes.” “Homo’s genesis due to great geologic-climatic changes in the Aegean.” (David Begun, Ares Poulianós)

“Apes and humans shared common ancestors in the very distant past”, said Poulianós. “The line of this evolution, however, was broken abruptly around twenty million years ago, with the great geologic and climatic changes taking place in the northern Aegean area. Throughout northern Greece… we encounter the well-known Petrified Forests… (with fossilized trunks over 17 million years old) as a result of volcanic eruptions that testify to the great and abrupt geological disturbances in the area. That epoch… is the beginning of a geological change, which prepared the evolution of the Primates. One of them was this twelve-million-year-old man.”

Graecopithecus (El Graeco)

● “Humans and anthropoids should have co-existed at that time,” remarks Marios Demópoulos, referring to the 10-million-year-old Ouranopithecus macedoniensis who was found in the areas of Chalcidice, Thessaloniki, and the Axiós (or Vardar) river. Anthropoids of the same period were excavated in other regions of Hellas, some quadrupeds, and other bipods, in a “semi-standing” posture.

● Graecopithecus (El Graeco), whose teeth were dug up in Hellas and Bulgaria, lived some 7.2 million years ago. These fossils are solid evidence that evolution of man’s genesis started in the Mediterranean 200,000 years earlier than Africa. “Graecopithecus is not an ape”, said Professor Nikolai Spassov. “He is a member of the tribe of hominins and the direct ancestor of homo”, who stood up and became bipedal to help himself find food with ease in the Balkan open savanna. The magazine New Scientist published a related article entitled Man’s cradle is Greece, not Africa.

● An important find is an elephant at Perdiccas near Ptolemaida, who lived three million years ago. It is the oldest hunting game in Europe, killed and chopped with dozens of sharp tools by a large group of Archanthropi in the Kozani area.

● 1.5 million years ago, man found refuge in caves to protect himself from the glaciers. In the Petrálona cave, the Archanthropus left the world’s oldest traces of fire, which he lit 1.1 million years ago. Similar traces of fire appear somehow later, one million years ago, in South Africa.

● The Archanthropus europaeus petraloniensis, circa 800-700 thousand years old, has been identified either as a Homo erectus, or Neanderthal, or an early form of Homo sapiens. Of course, those who worship orthodoxy speak instead of some archaic hominid unrelated to the above “classical” homos. Two 800,000-year-old skeletons were also found in the cave.

As we can deduce from the Archanthropus’ tools he was right-handed. Indirectly we can arrive to the conclusion that he may have had speech: right-handedness is linked to the left cerebral hemisphere, where the areas of speech are found. If he had speech, he might have had some elementary form of language… Besides, a hyena’s skull was found above its jaw, placed in a cave niche, as if it was some kind of “icon”. Thus man might have had some sense of symbolism since then.

● Moreover, special mention deserve the finds in the Apidima Cave, located on the western shore of Mani Peninsula in the southern Peloponnese. A systematic investigation of the cave has yielded Neanderthal and Homo sapiens fossils from the Palaeolithic era. The oldest skull fossil shows a mixture of modern human and primitive features, and has been dated to be more than 210,000 years old, making it the oldest proof of Homo sapiens living outside Africa. The skull is more than 150,000 years older than previous Homo sapiens finds in Europe… “Our results”, the researchers summarized, “suggest that at least two groups of people lived in the Middle Pleistocene in what is now southern Greece: an early Homo sapiens population, followed [sic] by a Neanderthal population.”

Mycenaeans and Minoans were close relatives, and ancestors
of today’s Greeks, according to an analysis of ancient DNA.

REGARDING THE INHABITANTS OF HELLAS and their origin, I firmly believe that, as a rule, the newcomers to a place are far less numerous than the indigenous and are easily assimilated. Exceptions are rare. This belief is confirmed by a recent analysis of ancient DNA, suggesting that today’s Greeks are indeed the descendants of Mycenaeans, with only a small proportion of DNA from later migrations to Hellas. We know, of course, that the Mycenaeans were Greeks. That’s why I consider even more impressive the finding that, at the same time, they were closely related to the Minoans, an earlier civilization flourishing mainly in Crete from 3000 to 1400 BCE.

The ancient genome came from the teeth of 19 people: ten Minoan Cretans (who lived between 2900 and 1700 BCE), four Mycenaeans from mainland Hellas (between 1700 and 1200 BCE), and also five Neolithic era or Bronze Age farmers from Greece and southwestern Asia Minor (between 5400 and 1340 BCE). By comparing this material to that of 334 other ancient people from several parts of the world and 30 modern Hellenes, the researchers drew their conclusions.

Minoan Linear A writing
(2nd millennium BCE)

For more than a century, the origin of the Bronze Age Minoans and Mycenaeans was an archaeological puzzle. The latter received from the former the symbols of their script, Linear A, and adapted them to the needs of their own language. This new script, Linear B, was deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952; then we realized that the Mycenaean was an archaic Greek dialect. However, we have not yet been able to read the Linear A texts, obviously because the Minoan tongue was completely different. We have also come to the conclusion that the same should have been true as regards the two peoples.

Yet, it turned out that they were most closely related to each other, as they both got 3/4 of their DNA from the early Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean, and most of the remainder from some ancient populations related to those of Caucasia and Iran, according to the findings of the research team, reported in the scientific journal, Nature. It seems there was an early migration of people from the Orient to western Anatolia and the Aegean, after those early farmers had settled there, but before the Minoans split from the Mycenaeans.

Nevertheless, if the two peoples were not “brothers”, but “cousins”, it is because the Mycenaeans did have an important difference: some of their DNA (4-16%) came from Northern hunter-gatherers, who originated from Eastern Europe or Siberia. This suggests that a second wave of people from the Eurasian steppe came to mainland Hellas by way of Eastern Europe or Armenia, but didn’t reach Crete, according to Joseph Lazarides, a geneticist at Harvard University, who co-led the study.

Saffron gatherer: fresco replica from
Acrotiri, Thera (17th century BCE)

It is no wonder that the Minoans and Mycenaeans looked alike, with brown hair and eyes. This is exactly how artists in both cultures presented them on frescoes and pottery, although they spoke and wrote different languages. There were even more differences: the Mycenaeans, Lazarides observed, were militaristic, and their art was replete with war scenes, in contrast to Minoan art. Note that, because the Minoans used hieroglyphics in earlier times, some archaeologists, such as Arthur Evans, thought they were partly of Egyptian origin – which turns out to be wrong.

When the researchers compared the DNA of modern Greeks to that of ancient Mycenaeans, they found a lot of genetic overlap. Living Hellenes share similar proportions of DNA from the same ancestral sources as Mycenaeans, although they have inherited a little less DNA from ancient Anatolian farmers and a bit more from later migrations to Greece.

The continuity between the ancient and living Hellenes is “particularly striking given that the Aegean has been a crossroads of civilizations for thousands of years”, said George Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington in Seattle, a co-author of the study. It seems that the major components of the Greeks’ ancestry were already in place in the Bronze Age, after the migration of the earliest farmers from Anatolia set the template for the genetic makeup of the Hellenes and, in fact, of most Europeans. “Our results support the idea of continuity but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations,” the researchers added.

The results also show it is possible to get ancient DNA from the hot, dry lands of the eastern Mediterranean, says archaeologist Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge in Britain, who was not involved in this research. Scientists now hope they can get DNA from other ancient cultures, such as the mysterious Hittites, who came to ancient Anatolia sometime before 2000 BCE, and who may have been the source of Caucasian ancestry in Mycenaeans and speakers of early Indo-European languages in the region. His colleague, Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Göteborg, Sweden, who was also not involved in the work, agrees: “The results have now opened up the next chapter in the genetic history of western Eurasia – that of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.”

Minoan civilization: autochthonous and self-luminous…

Prince of the Lilies, Knossos (ca 1550 BCE)

ANOTHER RELATED RESEARCH, led by Stamatoyannopoulos, and focused on the Minoans, analyzed samples of DNA from some skeletons found in a cave on the Lasithi plateau and compared them with samples from 135 ancient and modern human populations. What the researchers told Nature is that Minoan civilization was created by the descendants of early colonists who sailed to the island from Anatolia 9000 years ago (?) and were genetically similar with the Neolithic inhabitants of the wider region. Thus there is no basis for any theories that the Minoans originated from Africa, as descendants of the ancient Egyptians or the Berbers. On the contrary, genetic similarities have been found with ancient and more recent European populations. The analysis also suggests that the Minoans are most closely related to the modern population of Crete, and also of Greece in general.

This genetic analysis confirmed the findings of Poulianós, after he had studied 1200 Cretans (including 200 women), that the majority of the population of the island is made up of indigenous people, at least since the Neolithic era. There have been, of course, migratory influences, but without significant alterations as a result. The human type still prevailing is the same, the so-called Caucasian-Mediterranean type (from Caucasia down to Crete), where the inhabitants of the Aegean islands south of Lesbos also belong. On the basis of the above data, the theory of the Semitic origin of the Minoans was also discarded. Not only the inhabitants of Crete, Poulianós points out, but also of Hellas in general, come mostly from a period before the arrival of the Achaeans. The findings of his research were made public in his book, The Origin of the Cretans, published in 1970 and reissued in 1996.

“What has been solved for us in the past years,” he writes in his preface, “is that Crete was inhabited not since the Mesolithic era, as we previously said, but since the Lower Paleolithic, that is, some million years ago. This is testified mainly by the stone tools of the first people who lived all over the Aegean even since the Upper Miocene. There are also bones of the inhabitants of Crete that date back to the Middle Paleolithic era. Crete has never been completely deserted by inhabitants. Not even during the great disaster caused by the eruption of the volcano of Santorini. Excavations unearthed human skeletons of all eras and ages… The key to understand these developments has been the Minoan Microcephalus, which was accidentally found in the basement of the Archaeological Museum of Heraclion. Except Minoan endogamy, the Microcephalus testifies to the biological evolution of the human species that began hundreds of thousands of years ago.⁽¹⁾ But it primarily proves that the Aegean Type, which is of the same age with the Continental one, is autochthonous. The same applies to the language of the Cretans that has always been Greek. Of course, there may have been variations of Hellenic created by long-term isolation in a place, even differences of pronunciation. But Greek was the dominant language throughout the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean, at least since the Middle Paleolithic.”⁽²⁾

Candia (Crete), by Abraham Ortelius (1584)

• ⁽¹⁾ According to the Anthropological Society of Greece (ASG), founded by Poulianós, “the skull of a microcephalus was discovered in the Minoan excavations at Zakros. It belonged to a 20-year-old man, most probably of the Minoan dynasty, whose brain’s volume did not exceed the 530 cubic centimetres. This genetic aberration was due to the long isolation and endogamy of the Minoans. Thus neither the Cretans, nor the Minoan dynasty, emigrated from somewhere else, but it was a product of local evolution. The skull was sent away to Vienna in 1971, under the pretext of a study, a fact that was considered as unscientific and illegal by the ASG. Confronted by the indifference of the Ministry of Culture for many years to repatriate it, there was no other way but the recourse to Hellenic Justice. This was finally done in the spring of 1997, and since then it is housed at the National Archaeological Museum.”

• ⁽²⁾ As the French archaeologist Paul Faure writes in his book, Life in Minoan Crete: “Ancient writers never considered Minoan monarchies completely different from those of the Homeric world. Even more, they always considered Minos, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon [Zeus and Europa’s children] as Greek rulers and their successors as consanguineous heirs, who ascended to the throne without conflict or interruption.”

Paleolithic Odyssey: most ancient navigators in the Mediterranean

I DO NOT KNOW IF THE CRETANS’ LANGUAGE has always been Hellenic, as Poulianós claims, but his bold expansion of their history into the distant past is already verified by archaeological finds: hundreds of stone tools dug out in the area of Plakiás, on the southern shores of Crete, which date back to 130-190 thousand years or even more! Quite impressive is that Crete has been an island for more than 5 million years; which means that the artisans who made all those tools arrived there by sea! The Minoan Thalassocracy during the Bronze Age is no wonder with such historical precedents.

The Mediterranean

In the summer of 2008, a Greek-U.S. team was searching in Crete for samples of life of its Neolithic inhabitants – nothing older than 11,000 years. The research team was headed by Eleni Panagopoulou, an archaeologist at the Directorate of Paleoanthropology and Speleology of Southern Hellas, and Thomas Strasser, an associate professor of art history at Providence College in Rhode Island. They were assisted by geologists and archaeologists, such as Curtis Runnels of Boston University. None of them could ever imagine how rewarding Fortune would be. “The idea of finding tools from this very early time period on Crete was about as believable as finding an iPod in King Tut[ankhamun]’s tomb”, remarked Runnels in jest…⁽³⁾

• ^(c) The first human presence in Crete was discovered accidentally, too, when fossilized footprints aged to 5,700,000 years old, predating other discovered tracks by 2,000,000 years, were found close to Tráchilos, Chaniá, in 2002, implying the possibility of hominin evolution outside Africa!

The plethora of findings excludes the possibility of some accidental stranding in this area. Everything points to the direction of an organized colonization. As Strasser stressed: “These early people were intentional seafarers; not individuals lost at sea.” Experts on early nautical history and archaeologists think that these ancient sea dogs had craft sturdier and more reliable than rafts. They must also have had the cognitive ability and knowledge to conceive and carry out water crossings over such great distances repeatedly in order to establish sustainable populations in Crete. “The fact that we have several hundred stone tools in nine different locations suggests that a large enough number of people came in order to sustain the populations and leave a visible archaeological trace”, Runnels said. “That means they didn’t just raft over once.”

“The results of the survey”, the Greek Culture Ministry said in a statement, “not only provide evidence of sea voyages in the Mediterranean tens of thousands of years earlier than we were aware of so far, but also change our understanding of early hominids’ cognitive abilities.” The research offers new perspectives on how our early ancestors migrated and expanded throughout the world, upturns the timetable of technological development, and pushes the history of navigation in the Mediterranean back more than 100,000 years. If early humans were crossing mare nostrum, Runnels said, then they certainly could have also crossed other water barriers, such as the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. “And that means that the assumptions that we have had – that the peopling of Eurasia was done by early hominins moving overland through the Near East, into India and down – will have to be revisited.”

Stone Age fishing and navigation

The research, which continued in 2009, reached the top ten discoveries of 2010. No wonder, because until then we believed that ancient humans reached Crete, Cyprus, a few other Greek islands, and possibly Sardinia, no earlier than 12,000 years ago. Orthodoxy claimed that the capability to construct and victual crafts, and navigate them to distant coasts, arrived only with the advent of agriculture and animal domestication. We thought that the earliest rafts were logs with sails made of animal skins lashed to a tree limb to catch the wind. We imagined that on such rafts the obsidian found in the Franchthi cave in Argolis was somehow transferred from Melos. The increased use of this most precious volcanic rock 13,000 years ago shows that the people of Argolis or Melos were accomplished seafarers. The earliest known boat, found in the Netherlands, dates back only 10,000 years; convincing evidence of sails only show up in Egypt around 2500 BCE. Although wooden boats don’t normally survive the ages, we know that one of the earliest members of the human family, Homo erectus, was able to cross several kilometers of deep water more than a million years ago to reach Flores and Sulawesi islands of Indonesia. Much later Homo sapiens braved treacherous waters to colonize Australia by 65,000 years ago.

Who were the artisans of the Cretan tools? We can only speculate on that based on their technology. The artifacts are very similar to tools used by Homo erectus more than a million years ago, and by Neanderthals, as well, until about 130,000 years ago. Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found them noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old! These tools may testify to sea-borne migrations of Neanderthals from the Near East to Europe, argued Strasser; which means that they were navigating in the Mediterranean. Others prefer Homo heidelbergensis,⁽⁴⁾ in the role of a Paleolithic Odysseus. Whatever the case, it seems that early humans were capable of long-distance navigation, sailing at will in the open sea and using sea routes. Most probably, the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates Homo sapiens, remarked Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. “The orthodoxy until pretty recently was that you don’t have seafarers until the early Bronze Age,” adds archaeologist John Cherry of Brown University, an initial skeptic regarding these finds. “Now we are talking about seafaring Neanderthals. It’s a pretty stunning change.”

• ⁽⁴⁾ The first Neanderthal was found in the Neander valley of Rhineland. Heidelberg gave its name to Homo heidelbergensis. Early Homos theorized to be Africans turned out to be… Germans?(!)

The last of the Neanderthals…

How long took the voyage to Crete? It depends on the starting point and the time of voyage. Even when the Mediterranean reached its lowest known point, plummeting some 150 metres below current sea level, those leaving from Asia Minor or Hellas would have had to make three separate water crossings ranging from 20 to 40 kilometres each to reach Crete. If, on the other hand, the seafarers departed from Africa, they should have been prepared to cross 200 kilometres of open sea water. “We can’t say the toolmakers came from Libya,” commented Strasser. “If you’re on a raft, that’s a long voyage, but they might have come from the European mainland by way of shorter crossings through Greek islands.” And why did they go there? Crete, according to the researchers, was an attractive place to hunt for food, with a variety of wildlife – such as deer, but also dwarf elephants and hippopotami, equal in size to cows and pigs respectively (due to the insular conditions that gave birth to the microcephalus) – as well as many edible plants. At the heart of it all, though, there was something fundamental to all human beings, Panagopoulou suspects: “I think they were mainly motivated by curiosity and the desire for exploration.”

The surprise discovery prompted researchers to go to other islands in search of their… Fortune. A Hellenic-Canadian team uncovered hundreds of tools that were embedded in the soil of a quarry on Naxos. The island was likely accessible only by watercraft even in glacial times, when sea levels were lower. The hand axes and blades resemble those the Neanderthals and modern humans made from about 200,000 until 50,000 years ago. They require a more sophisticated technology than those found in Crete. Similar tools, attributed to Neanderthals, have turned up on a number of other Aegean islands. Paleolithic artifacts have also been recovered on the Ionian Sea isles of Cephallenia and Zacynthus. The plethora not only of tools, but also of sites where they were found, adds weight to the idea of purposeful settlement. “People are going back and forth to islands much earlier than we thought”, Simmons said. Earlier even than these findings in Crete suggest. The discovery of human remains and stone tools in Spain, dating to over a million years ago, may indicate that, long ago, some ancient hominins were finally able to cross the 15 kilometers of the hazardous Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco. On condition they were Africans. What if their starting point was the Aegean? And the sea they crossed was the Mediterranean, not the Strait?

Neolithic farmers from the Aegean built Stonehenge!

STONEHENGE GIVES CLUES that confirm Poulianós’ theories, after a DNA analysis of 67 Neolithic and six Mesolithic Britons, who lived in the period between 8500 and 2500 BCE, according to the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. It is striking that the Neolithic Britons were descended from Aegean and West Anatolian farmers, who followed the Mediterranean route of dispersal: they journeyed westward to Iberia and travelled north through France to Britain, which was then sparsely populated by Mesolithic hunters. This happened about 4,000 BCE, while the massive expansion of people out of the Aegean and Asia Minor had started in 6,000 BCE – thus spreading the Neolithic revolution into Europe.^(e)

• ⁽⁵⁾ Another ancient DNA related study showed how Mediterranean grain (specifically wheat) came to Britain through trade around 6,500 BCE, before the Neolithic farmers’ arrival there.

There are dozens of archaeological studies detailing the spread of farming and new cultural practices across Europe. But scientists weren’t sure whether those new traditions arrived with new people, or reflected the spread of ideas. These migrant newcomers, who introduced agriculture to Britain, brought new farming techniques, pottery, and new religious cultures and beliefs, such as the tradition of building monuments using megaliths. Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, was part of this culture, as a temple aligned with the movement of the Sun (see Chronicle 18, Introduction). The main part of the monument was built around 3000 BCE.

DNA suggests that most European hunter-gatherers of the time had dark skin combined with blue eyes. Genetic analysis shows that the Neolithic farmers, by contrast, were paler-skinned with brown eyes and black or dark-brown hair.

Towards the end of the Neolithic, around 2450 BCE, the descendants of the first farmers, who had almost completely replaced the older hunter-gatherers, were themselves almost entirely replaced by a new population, called the Bell Beaker culture, that migrated from continental Europe. Thus Britain saw two extreme genetic shifts in the space of a few thousand years.

Reconstructed hut in Dispelió Neolithic lake settlement

Early Balkan writing

WHATEVER HAPPENS regarding the cradle of Homo, which, by “axiom”, is in Africa, is repeated in the case of writing, whose cradle is found in 4th-millennium-BCE Sumer, according to conventional archeology. In spite of that, far too many finds in the Balkans, already in the 19th century, are inconsistent with this “axiom” – and probably for this very reason, comments on purpose archaeologist Colleen Anne Coyle, few are aware of these discoveries.

● Turdaș, Romania; Vinča, Serbia: a cache of artifacts with previously unknown inscriptions was excavated in Romania in 1875. Then, a similar cache was found in Vinča, a suburb of Belgrade, Serbia, some 245 km from Turdaș, in 1908. Later, more such fragments were recovered in Banjica, in another part of the Serbian capital. Since, over 150 sites have been identified in Serbia alone, but many have not been fully excavated. Thus, the culture of the whole area is called the Vinča culture with the homonymous symbols of the Danube, Old European, Balkan, or Vinča-Turdaș script, used in the Neolithic during 6th to 5th millennia BCE.

Balkan (Danube Valley, Old European) script:
the oldest writing in the world?

● Sitovo, Bulgaria: an inscription was found in 1928 on the wall of a rock shelter close to Plovdiv. The Sitovo inscription may be the only one containing so many symbols (around 50), where we possibly have a complete text. The archaeologist Alexander Peev, who discovered it, sent a copy of the text to Soviet colleagues in the hope that they could help in deciphering it. But, as he was an active anti-fascist, he was executed 1943, on suspicion of sending a coded message to the USSR… The inscription was published in 1950.

● Tărtăria, Romania; Gradeshnitsa, Bulgaria: more tablets with inscriptions with the Vinča symbols were discovered in 1961, inside a grave, in the area of Alba Iulia, Romania. Several scientists suppose that the tablets may date to around 5500-5300 BCE. If indeed the symbols are a form of writing, then the Danubian culture would far predate the earliest Sumerian script. They would thus be the world’s earliest known form of writing. Such a controversial claim would surely provoke reactions. There were scholars who considered certain symbols to be Sumerian – therefore the result of forgery – or, at least, quasi-Sumerian proto-cuneiform. Analyses of the symbols, nevertheless, showed that they have little similarity with Near Eastern writing, resulting in the opinion that these symbols and the Sumerian script probably arose independently. Others had objections related to the stratigraphy of the site… On the other side of the Danube, in the Vratsa Province, north-western Bulgaria, more clay artefacts with incised marks, dated to the 4th millennium BCE, were excavated in 1969. The lack of symmetry, complexity and variability in the patterns proves most historians’ theories of a decorative function to be unreliable; and the same is true about the claims they were property marks, or potters’ “signatures”.

Dispelió tablet: oldest known
(pre-Linear A) written text?

● Youra, Alonnesos; Dispelió, Castoriá, Greece: this Balkan culture was related not only to the Black Sea, but also to the Aegean, with statuettes similar to the Cycladic civilization. On the now uninhabited islet of Youra in the Northern Sporades and inside the “Cyclops Cave”, in 1992, archaeologist Adamantios Sampson located ostraca (potsherds, ceramic fragments) dated to 6th – 5th millennia BCE bearing incisions. “The ostraca bear incised unidentifiable symbols”, he said. “It is possible that they echo evidence on an Aegean Neolithic ‘script’, or ‘proto-script’, – a very fashionable subject of discussion in Greece after similar finds in the Castoriá lake,” the Dispelió tablet. Equivalent symbols were also discovered at other Neolithic sites in Hellas (e.g. Euboea, Mykonos, and Nisyros), having several similarities with incised symbols on ceramics of the early Bronze Age in the Cyclades, and directly connected with the Balkan script that was discovered in Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria.

The Dispelió tablet (or script, or disc) is the most important archaeological find at the Castoriá lake settlement discovered accidentally in 1932. But excavations started 60 years later, in 1992, by George Hourmouziades. The tablet was found the next year; it is wooden and carbon 14-dated to ca 5260 BCE; the settlement was inhabited from 5600 to 3000 BCE. The tablet bears charagmata, i.e. inscribed markings, said the archaeologist, “a Neolithic man’s attempt at communication that we hope we’ll be able to interpret one day.” It appears to be a form of proto-writing, 2,000 years older than the proto-Sumerian pictographic script, or 4,000 years older than the Cretan or Mycenaean linear types of writing. Except the tablet, many other ostraca were also found bearing the same type of writing. It is important that the symbols did not resemble the human figures, the sun and moon, or other figures ideograms usually depict. They actually showed signs of advanced aphaeresis (abstraction) that indicates they are the result of cognitive processes.

Dispelió flutes

In February 2004, Hourmouziades commented that the text with the markings could not be easily publicized, because it would ultimately change the current historical background concerning the origins of writing and articulate speech, depicted with letters, instead of ideograms, within the borders of the ancient Greek world – and by extension, the whole of Europe… A number of items in the settlement attest to its economic and agricultural activities, animal breeding and diet preferences, as well as ceramics, wooden structural elements, seeds, bones, figurines, personal ornaments, or bone flutes: one of them, dating back to the 6th millennium BCE, is the oldest found in Europe – if we assume that the Divje Babe flute in Slovenia (43,100 years old) is not man-made.

● Vinča, the largest Neolithic settlement on European soil, was a metropolis with a thriving culture in the period 4500–3500 BCE. The settlements in the area were much larger than all the other European cultures of the same period. Some of them were more extended than the prehistoric settlements of the Aegean and the Near East that were built a millennium later. Vinča, in particular, became the largest market in southeastern Europe, not only for the exceptional value of its products, but also for the rare materials or other goods imported from either Transylvania or the Aegean and the Adriatic coasts. Impressive is the thematic variety of the figurines (naked or dressed, standing, kneeling or sitting, female, male and hermaphrodite, or masked, and especially the figures with the mother and child in her arms), but also the stylistic evolution from the naturalistic, to the realistic, and eventually the abstract.

Proto-cuneiform tablet (c. 3100–2900 BCE): account of barley distribution with cylinder seal (impression of
a man, hunting dogs and boars)

● Around 7,000 known languages are spoken nowadays; there were even more in the past. However, written languages have been rather few: in the course of human history fewer than 100 major scripts have appeared. Scripts, presumably, have developed only wherever there is a need, a reason, for them. The cuneiform script in Mesopotamia emerged from counting and accounting – until the third millennium BCE, when the Sumerian metaphysical concern for the afterlife paved the way for something more than a “shorthand” and used initially for funerary inscriptions. Such a need for record-keeping did not exist in the Balkans at the time, say the dissenters. But this is another “axiom”, as others argue, if we take into account that e.g. Chinese characters were first used for ritual purposes, in association with the royal “sacred power”. Thus needs vary from place to place.

Tang dynasty Chinese calligraphy

Throughout the Balkans, the same symbols have been repeatedly found in times and places separated by great distances. Hence they were understood by many individuals who lived in different areas and eras, a fact that lends support to the notion that they were indeed examples of proto-writing,⁽⁶⁾ if not a rudimentary writing system. A theory is that the symbols were used for religious purposes in a traditional agricultural society. Nevertheless, some scholars have pointed out that more than a quarter of the inscriptions are located on the bottom of a pot – an ostensibly unlikely place for a religious inscription. Such symbols on various artefacts are widespread and highly standardized denoting the existence of an inventory used by scribes. Consequently, outstanding scientists support the view that the Balkan script is the oldest writing in the world. Have in mind that there are approximately 700 different characters, around the same number of symbols used in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

• ⁽⁶⁾ A question is certainly brought up: what is writing? The difference between proto-writing and writing is that while the former encodes information, the latter encodes language.

Hieroglyphs on stele (c. 1321 BCE)

The repetition of certain symbols of the Balkan script in the Linear A tablets points to the Minoan civilization as being among the inheritors of this writing system that migrated south, towards the Aegean and Crete – unless this course was the reverse. The same applies to the Hellenic language and writing. Scholars tend to “forget” about the Mycenaean Linear B and think that ancient Hellenes learned to write around 800 BCE from the Phoenicians. Still, a crucial question emerges: How is it possible for the Greek language to have 800,000 word entries, ranking first among all known languages in the world, with the second next having only 250,000 word entries? And how is it possible for the Homeric epics to have been created at about 800 BCE – that is, just when the Hellenes learned to write?(!) It would be impossible for the ancient Greeks to write these poetic works without having had a history of writing of at least 10,000 years back, according to a US linguistic research. Note, in conclusion, that while ancient Eastern civilizations used ideograms to express themselves, the ancient Greeks were using syllables and letters, in a similar manner to today’s scripts.

Göbekli Tepe: a sort of totem pole with humanoid figures

● If indeed the Balkan script is the oldest, it does not mean that it fell from the sky! As it is rightly pointed out, the study of symbols carved and painted in caves by our “primitive” ancestors may eventually persuade archaeologists to look back beyond the Balkans and Sumer. This universal system of symbols in cave art may have been carried around the world during human migration from homo’s cradle – wherever that was. The symbols are also found outside caves, e.g. on rocks, or in ornaments. The use of abstract symbols in communication is a critical turning point in the mental skills of our ancestors. Deciphering their underlying meaning is extremely complicated. Some prehistorians argue that in the caves, “we are nearly always associated with animal figures and thus cannot be said to be the first steps toward symbolism.” Conversely, scientists from other disciplines, e.g. linguistics, suggest that both signs and animals were meant to convey ideas in the same manner as a written language. Cognitive mechanisms necessary for the development of cave and rock art are likely to be analogous to those employed in the expression of symbolic thinking required for language.

Of course, the path from primitive symbols to the Balkan and Sumerian scripts is far too long. There must have been many intermediate stages of development. One is probably located at Göbekli Tepe, in SE Anatolia, in North (Turkish) Kurdistan, very close to Şanlıurfa. It was founded before the 10th millennium BCE, and was abandoned in the 8th. There are circles of massive ‘T’-shaped stone pillars – the world’s oldest known megaliths. Prior to this great discovery, Sumer was assumed to be the beginning of everything: the first organized society, having invented the wheel. Most probably, such breakthroughs should be transferred to Göbekli Tepe, where we are also confronted with what appears to be the earliest yet discovery of writing. About 20 symbols – at least – seem to have been in use. This in itself does not portend to a complete language but it is possible that other findings may occur as, so far, only a third of the site has been excavated. Obviously, the history of writing will be enriched with the Anatolian symbols, which take us back to at least 10,000 BCE.

• >> Chronicle 4. ON DEMOCRACY
• << Chronicle 2. IT ALL STARTED HERE…

Next Chronicle 4. ON DEMOCRACY ● Authentic Democracy: Direct and in No Way “Representative” ● Castoriadis and Chaos ● The Trial of Socrates ● Ecclesia and Heliaea ● French and Haitian Revolutions ● Plato’s Republic

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Chronicle 27. AN ARCHAEOLOGIST’S WATERLOO

Chronicle 27. AN ARCHAEOLOGIST’S WATERLOO

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 27. ΤΟ ΒΑΤΕΡΛΩ ΕΝΟΣ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΛΟΓΟΥ

● Emporia in Egypt and the Levant ● Leonard Woolley’s Waterloo ● Itinerant Minoan Artists ● Creto-Egyptian Ties ● Differences Between Minoan and Pharaonic Society and Art

Michales Loukovikas

.

… Hope the voyage is a long one…
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbours seen for the first time!
May you stop at Phoenician emporia
to buy fine things…
And may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars…

(Constantine P. Cavafy, Ithaca)

A Minoan woman

UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, in the process of a research, in order to present a topic, you know beforehand in general terms what you’re looking for, while searching for documentation. Sometimes, however, the thread you have in hand to find your way in the “labyrinth of history” leads you to unanticipated landscapes, “into harbours seen for the first time”! Then a strong desire is born to “stop at Phoenician emporia… | and visit many Egyptian cities | to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars”, as Cavafy advises in his Ithaca. These are, indeed, the happiest moments of a research!

It happened exactly that when from the Aegean emporia in the historical space of the Mediterranean, I ended up following itinerant Minoan artists to distant lands! I felt I was obliged to give more information about these emporia, after referring to Naucratis in the previous Chronicle, when I realized I have already used this term several times in connection with colonies or trading posts; but the emporia were not exactly colonies or trading posts, though related to both. Writing in the Encyclopaedia of the Hellenic World about Commercial posts and harbours, Elias Petropoulos tried to clear things out:

“The term emporium denoting a type of settlement or colony first appears in ancient literature rather late, in the 5th century BC. According to some scholars, an emporium should be understood as the locale of the emporos (or merchant), i.e. the traveller carrying commodities. The word emporos etymologically originates from the preposition en and the word poros, meaning sea route. The word appears in Homer’s Odyssey twice. In both cases the epic poet obviously meant a private individual who travelled for professional reasons. Hence we could suppose that the word emporium originated from the word emporos. Unfortunately, this word does not appear on [Mycenaean] Linear B tablets, and this is rather surprising, but it also leads to the obvious conclusion that the word was coined at a later time. Scholarship on the subject argues that the word or term emporium (in the sense of a colony or settlement and not that of a simple commercial transaction or exchange of products) appears first in writing in the work of Herodotus in the mid-5th century BC. By the 4th century BC the word is found written on an inscription (known as ‘the inscription of Pistiros’) which has been unearthed quite recently in a settlement of the modern Bulgarian (ancient Thracian) hinterland, close to Philippopolis…

Emporium < Emporos (< en + poros) = a voyager on a sea route

The Babylonian Marriage Market (1875), by Edwin Long,
inspired by a passage in the Herodotan Histories

“According to information we can extract from Melpomene, Herodotus’ fourth book [of Histories], the Black Sea was home to several emporia, as the ancient historian described them… There are also more scattered references in the other eight books of Herodotus. These emporia were located outside the Black Sea, and situated in the Mediterranean. The case of Naucratis among them really puzzles us: the ancient historian mentions it as both a polis and an emporium. Many studies have dealt with this issue, but nevertheless we still cannot determine the early nature of this settlement with certainty. The term usually understood as the opposite of emporium is colony, which is considered as a complete form of settlement in the model of the ancient Greek polis, featuring a distinct form of political and social organization. A colony was obviously established in the context of a predetermined plan of action, and under the auspices of a god (or gods) through an oracle, with every formality on the part of the metropolis, possessing an agricultural hinterland and its own coinage… However, in some cases, an emporium may be characterized as a proto-polis or proto-settlement, in the sense that it could act as an early stage in the foundation of a colony or polis.”

Frieze of a landscape with river; Acroteri, Thera – when there were still rivers on Santorini…

Egypt with Alexandria, Naucratis, Avaris, Sais, Pelusium, Memphis and Thebes mentioned in this Chronicle.

Emporia, according to Wikipedia, were places that the traders of one people had reserved to their business interests within the territory of another people. Except Naucratis, famous emporia in Egypt included Avaris and Sais, where Solon, the Athenian legislator, went “to gather stores of knowledge from its scholars”, in 590 BCE. Similar emporia were founded in the Levant, such as Al-Mina and Posideion in Syria. Sais (or Zau in ancient Egyptian) was located in the western Nile Delta. The city’s patron goddess was Neith. The Greeks, such as Herodotus, Plato and Diodorus Siculus, identified her with Athena and hence postulated a primordial link to Athens. Diodorus recounts that Athena built Sais before the deluge that supposedly destroyed Athens and Atlantis; all Hellenic cities were wiped out in that cataclysm, but the Egyptian cities survived. In Plato’s Timaeus and Critias (around 360 BCE), a priest in Sais entrusted to Solon the story of Atlantis, with its aggression against Greece and Egypt, and its eventual defeat and destruction by a natural catastrophe.⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ The story of Atlantis may be connected with either ice melting after the last Ice Age (but Hellas was non-existent then), or the Sea Peoples’ raids and the consequent Bronze Age collapse. This could have been the “cataclysm” that destroyed Greece, while Egypt barely survived… (See the Chronicles 18, 19, 20, especially the last one).

Taureador: Fresco fragment from Avaris, 16th BCE

Avaris (today’s Tell el-Dab’a), the capital of Egypt under the Canaanite Hyksos, was also located in the Nile Delta, in the northeastern region. Its position at the hub of Egypt’s emporia made it a major administrative and commercial centre. Excavations have shown there was a busy harbour catering to over 300 ships in a trading season. Artifacts inside the precinct of the palace, possibly a temple, have produced goods from all over the Aegean. Most impressively, there were even Minoan-like wall paintings similar to those found in Crete at the Palace of Knossos. It is speculated that there was close contact with the rulers of Avaris, whoever they were, and the large building with the frescoes allowed the Cretans to have a ritual life in Egypt. French archaeologist Yves Duhoux also proposed the existence of a Minoan colony on an island in the Nile Delta.

Minoan Ladies in Blue fresco, ca 1525-1450 BCE

Outside of the Aegean, only three sites have an indisputable record of Minoan civilization, one being Avaris in Lower Egypt, the others Kabri and Alalakh in the Levant. Kabri, in Palestine, near the Lebanese border, is notable for its Minoan-style wall paintings. In the summer of 2009, more Aegean-style frescoes were found at the site. Apparently, the Canaanite rulers of the city wished to associate it with the Mediterranean culture and avoid Syrian and Mesopotamian styles of art that other cities in Canaan adopted. Alalakh was a late Bronze Age city-state in the area where Seleucid Antioch would rise by the end of the 4th century BCE. It was occupied from before 2000, when the first palace was built, and destroyed probably in the 12th century by the Sea Peoples (as were many other towns of coastal Anatolia and the Levant). Alalakh was never reoccupied and its place was taken by the nearby port of Al-Mina during the Iron Age.

Mantiklos Apollo, from geometric to orientalizing period, bronze, (c 700-675 BCE, Thebes, Hellas)

Al-Mina (“The Port” in Arabic) is the name that archaeologist Leonard Woolley gave to this ancient trading post in the Orontes estuary. According to Woolley, it was an early Hellenic trading colony, founded a little before 800 BCE in direct competition with the Phoenicians to the south. Large amounts of Greek pottery established its early Euboean connections, while the Syrian and Phoenician ware reflected a cultural mix typical of an emporium. The controversy whether it is to be regarded as a native Syrian site, with local architecture and pots, and a Greek presence, or as a Hellenic trading post, has not been resolved. Al-Mina served as an outpost for cultural influences that accompanied commerce with Urartu and Assyria through the shortest caravan route. Pottery recovered from later levels after 700 BCE shows that a Hellenic presence endured through the 4th century BCE, with pottery imported from Miletus and deftly imitated locally, apparently by Greek potters. Al-Mina is a key to understanding the role of early Hellenes in the East at the outset of the Orientalizing period of Greek cultural history. Robin Lane Fox has made a case for the Greek name of the site to have been Potamoi Karon mentioned by Diodorus Siculus; he suggestively linked it to karu (“trading post”) in an Assyrian inscription, which would result to Rivers of Emporia.

Sumerian silver lyre of Ur (2600-2400 ΠΚΧ)

Woolley identified Al-Mina with Posideion mentioned by Herodotus and Strabo, but recent scholarship places the latter at Ras al-Bassit, located 53 kilometres north of Latakia (Hellenistic Laodicea) by the Mediterranean. Excavations there revealed a small settlement of the late Bronze Age, when it may have functioned as an outpost of Ugarit to the south. Unlike Ugarit, Bassit survived the passage of the Sea Peoples and into the Iron Age. It had strong links with Phoenicia and Cyprus, and a Greek presence was attested from the 7th century BCE. Posideion expanded and its acropolis was fortified in the Hellenistic period.

Ram in a Thicket: one of a pair of figures found at Ur. The excavation was a joint venture of the British Museum and the Pennsylvania University. Then they decided to share the booty!

Woolley began work at Al-Mina in 1936, after the excavation in Mesopotamia, at Ur, where he discovered Sumerian royal tombs of great wealth. He made up his mind to work by the Mediterranean coast because he was interested in finding ties between the Aegean and the Mesopotamian civilizations, and also wished to throw light, as he wrote, “upon the development of Cretan civilization and its connections with the great civilizations of Nearer Asia”. Disappointed at Al-Mina, as he did not find a Bronze Age port there, he soon moved his interests to the earlier, more urbane site of Alalakh, where he worked before and after World War II (1937-39 and 1946-49). It seems, however, that his “view” was anything but “impartial”, for he, too, was “spectacled”, wearing “Asiatic myopic glasses”. All those clues on the “connections” he was interested in were there, of course; but, having already in mind an elaborate scenario, and most probably the secret ambition to turn Arthur Evans’ work in Crete upside down, he led himself to erroneous conclusions. If Ur had been his Austerlitz, Alalakh turned out to be his Waterloo! His failure to interpret his findings correctly should be taught in every School of Archaeology, helping each equally short-sighted scholar learn his/her lesson…⁽²⁾

Wishing to turn Arthur Evans’ work in Crete upside down, Leonard Woolley drew wrong conclusions. If Ur had been his Austerlitz, Alalakh turned out to be his Waterloo!

Lawrence (left) and Woolley at Carchemish

• ⁽²⁾ “Sir” Charles Leonard Woolley (1880-1960) was knighted in 1935 for his contribution to his discipline, since he was considered as one of the first “modern” archaeologists. Volunteered by Arthur Evans to run the excavation on a Roman site in northern England, Woolley started his career in 1906, later admitting: “I had never studied archaeological methods even from books… and I had not any idea how to make a survey or a ground-plan”. He worked with T. E. Lawrence, the later famous “Lawrence of Arabia”, on the excavation of the Hittite city of Carchemish in 1912-14. His work at Ur, starting in 1922, led to the discovery of the royal tombs and inspired Agatha Christie in writing the novel Murder in Mesopotamia. The writer later married Woolley’s assistant, Max Mallowan. Woolley was one of the first archaeologists to propose that the “great deluge” of the Bible was a local flood, after identifying a flood-stratum at Ur of “…400 miles long and 100 miles wide; but for the occupants of the valley, that was the whole world”…

The Knossos palace reconstructed

Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier vs. Leonard Woolley

REFERRING TO MINOAN ARTISANS TRAVELLING OVERSEAS: The Alalakh Frescoes and the Painted Plaster Floor at Tel Kabri (Western Galilee), the German archaeologist Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier, who excavated at Kabri, explained how Woolley’s ambition to upturn Evans boomeranged back on him:

“The uniqueness and seeming suddenness of the emergence of the Cretan palace system in the Aegean has often been explained by connections with and influences from the older advanced civilizations of the ancient Near East. In Alalakh… Woolley thought to have found what he had looked for: in Yarim-Lim’s palace he recognized ‘unmistakable connections’ with Minoan Crete. Similar building techniques… as well as frescoes ‘identical in colouring, technique and style’ at Alalakh and Knossos led him to the conclusion that ‘there can be no doubt but that Crete owes the best of its architecture, and its frescoes, to the Asiatic mainland’, and that ‘we are bound to believe that trained experts, members of the Architects’ and Painters’ Guilds, were invited to travel overseas from Asia (possibly from Alalakh) to build and decorate the palaces of the Cretan rulers’.

“Crete owes the best of its architecture, and its frescoes, to Asia.”
(Leonard Woolley)

Yamhad, with Halab (Aleppo) as capital, and several toponyms mentioned in this Chronicle:
Carchemish, Alalakh, Ugarit, Qatna, Hazor in Canaan, Mari, Babylon, Ur.

“Woolley’s main argument for this theory, which has been accepted by eminent scholars,⁽³⁾ [!] was that ‘Yarim-Lim’s palace antedates by more than a century the Cretan examples in the same style’… However, after a long debate on ‘Alalakh and Chronology’, Woolley’s date (‘between c. 1780 and 1730 BC’) proved to be too high. Yarim-Lim of Alalakh was not – as Woolley had thought – Yarim-Lim I of Yamhad, the contemporary of the great Hammurabi of Babylon, but a younger brother of King Abban [Abba-El?] of Yamhad who gave Alalakh to him as an appanage principality…⁽⁴⁾ The dates recently proposed by different scholars lie between c. 1650 and 1575 BC. In regard to architecture… the evidence is far from substantiating Woolley’s theory of Near Eastern architects working in Crete… The orthostates of Alalakh are c. 300 years later than the orthostates of the first phase of the Old Palace at Phaistos… Fragments of wall paintings from Yarim-Lim’s palace show characteristic Minoan motifs which appear contemporary or even earlier in Crete. Moreover, the sense of movement detectable in the wall-painting fragments from Yarim-Lim’s palace is characteristically Minoan and in opposition to Near Eastern tradition.

• ⁽³⁾ You see, the… spectacled parrotlet (forpus conspicillatus) is not an endangered species!

• ⁽⁴⁾ There were three kings of Yamhad under the name of Yarim-Lim and, of course, far more local rulers with the same name, such as the one in Alalakh. Woolley (more than anyone else) should have known better before he wrote that “Crete owes the best of its architecture, and its frescoes, to the Asiatic mainland”…

Papyrus fresco on Thera

“Woolley’s strongest argument for a direct connection between the Alalakh paintings and those in Crete was that they both were executed in true fresco painting on wet lime plaster. But it is exactly this fact which definitely disproves Woolley’s theory of the Near Eastern ancestry of Cretan fresco painting. Until most recently the Alalakh frescos formed the only known example of true fresco painting on the ancient Near East. In Crete, true fresco painting is known at least from c. 1900 BC on. Thus true fresco painting apparently has been first invented on Crete, probably because it was suitable to the temperament of the Minoan artists.⁽⁵⁾ Technique, style and iconography of the fresco fragments from the Yarim-Lim palace at Alalakh indicate that their resemblances to the Cretan wall-paintings worked in the reverse direction as that originally thought by Woolley.

• ⁽⁵⁾ While the Egyptian artists of this period painted their wall paintings in the “dry-fresco” (secco) technique, the Minoans used a “true” or “wet” painting method, allowing the pigments of metal and mineral oxides to bind well to the wall, which required quick execution. The nature of this technique encouraged improvisation, spontaneity, and the element of chance. Since they had to work within the time constrains of the drying plaster, they had to be very skilful, and their fluid brush strokes translated into the graceful outlines that characterize Minoan art. For this reason, this method of painting was most appropriate for the fluid moments of life and nature scenes that the Minoans favoured, which contrasted sharply with the strict stylization and stereotyping typical of frescoes from other Mediterranean cultures of the same time. The figures of Minoan frescoes are depicted in natural poses of free movement that reflect the rigours of the activity they engage in, an attitude characteristic of a seafaring civilization accustomed to freedom of movement, liquidity, and vigour.

Ritual sprinkler in rock crystal
from Kato Zakros, Crete

“There is much evidence that Cretan objects of art were highly valued in the ancient Near East. In the Mari tablets Cretan imports are mentioned… The prestige character of the Cretan objects in the Mari texts is indicated by the fact that two of them were presented by King Zimri-Lim of Mari to other Mesopotamian Kings. As finds of Kamares pottery at Ugarit, Qatna, Byblos and Hazor demonstrate, this outstanding pottery was highly esteemed in the Levant. Thus, at least from the 19th century BC on, Crete within its relations to the Levant was not only the receiver but developed into an equal partner producing works of art for which there was a great demand in the Near East.⁽⁶⁾ These Cretan works of art arrived by some kind of exchange or trade in the Levant. But, as Woolley has stated, ’one cannot export a palace on board of a ship, nor is the «art and Mystery» of fresco-working a form of merchandise’.⁽⁷⁾ Do we therefore have to reconstruct just the reverse scenario as that suggested by Woolley, i.e. Cretan artisans travelling to Alalakh for painting the frescoes there?

• ⁽⁶⁾ I ignore the Levantine contribution to the Minoan culture and, unfortunately, Niemeier gives no information on the subject. What I do know is how much the Cretans were indebted to, and how much they were benefited by learning from, the Egyptians (see Chronicle 17, Minoan Trade and Influence). I can imagine, in addition, how much the Egyptians would have benefited if they were not so stuck-up to let themselves learn from the Cretans…

• ⁽⁷⁾ I used a similar argument in Chronicle 22, Conclusion, to show the necessity of Hellenic presence in Iberia: “What the Phoenician ships could not transport and, thus, made the Greek presence absolutely necessary in Iberia, was Hellenic culture, art, ideas, models, architecture, burial habits, etc.”

“The sense of movement is characteristically Minoan, in opposition to Near Eastern tradition. Kabri and Alalakh show a purely Minoan iconography and technique. This can only mean they were made by itinerant Minoan artists.”
(Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier)

Knossos: the Throne Room with the griffins reconstructed

“In ‘Greater Canaan’…⁽⁸⁾ there are two other sites which can contribute to the problem: Qatna and Tel Kabri. Fragments of wall-paintings from the palace at Qatna show [techniques] in the characteristic Aegean manner. Tel Kabri lay on one of the most important trade routes of the ancient Near East, [Way of the Philistines,] the later so-called Via Maris…⁽⁹⁾ In the palace of the local ruler… a threshold was plastered and painted with… similar floor-techniques and designs of the Minoan palaces but not from the Ancient Near East… There is evidence that the walls of this room were also covered with painted plaster of which unfortunately only tiny fragments have been preserved. The plaster floor has been painted in true fresco technique… found also in Cretan and Theran fresco painting but not in tempera and fresco secco. The colours in the floor’s painting are… very similar to those of Cretan and of Theran wall-painting… Originally the floor… imitated the slabs of a stone pavement… In Crete painted plaster floors imitating slab-paved floors are known from [c. 2000 BCE]. Other parts of the Kabri floor were decorated with floral motifs. Among them are chains of stylized linear iris blossoms of a characteristic Minoan type which occurs first in frescoes and vase-painting [in 1700-1500 BCE]. Such kind of decorative mixture is a characteristic feature of Minoan fresco painting… The Kabri floor and also the fresco fragments from Yarim-Lim’s palace at Alalakh do not have only single Minoan motifs foreign to ‘Greater Canaan’ which could be explained as intrusive or incorporated elements arriving by motif transfer, but they show a purely Minoan iconography as well as technique. This can only mean that they were executed by travelling Minoan artisans…

Asherah, Canaanite fertility goddess

• ⁽⁸⁾ Greater Canaan: “the area between the Amuq plain [where Antioch was later built] to the north and the deserts to the south and to the east for the middle and late Bronze Age… appears to form a largely uniform civilization with regional variations.” (Ruth Amiran)

• ⁽⁹⁾ The historical name of the road, sadly for the Israeli Jews, was Way of the Philistines, since it crossed through the Philistine plain, where the Gaza Strip is located. Via Maris was “fished up” out of the Vulgate – “via maris”, meaning “by the way of the sea” – without specifying any road (there was no such Roman name denoting any road anywhere). The modern name was adopted so as to… expel the Palestinians from their homeland, Palestine, even on archaeological terms!

La Petite Parisienne de Crète…

“We have evidence for exchange of information on the equipment of the palaces within the ancient Near East (to which Minoan Crete belonged in a certain sense as a westernmost member). That Cretans actually travelled to the Levantine coast is proved by a tablet from the Mari archives mentioning a Cretan who purchases tin at Ugarit from agents of the Mari palace. A tale in the mythological poetry of Ugarit is of highest interest in our context. In it the goddess Anat is sending the divine messenger over the sea to the god of handicrafts, Kothar wa-Khasis, who is brought from his throne in Kptr (almost unanimously identified as Caphtor = Crete) to build a splendid palace for god Baal and to furnish it with precious works of art.⁽¹⁰⁾ As Arvid Schou Kapelrud has stated, Kothar is ‘the master-builder and the master-smith as he is found in the Near Eastern courts of this time, a highly skilled specialist’. In Canaanite mythology the god of handicrafts was called from Crete to furnish the palaces of the deities with precious works of art; in reality the rulers of Tel Kabri (Rehov) and Alalakh (and other cities, possibly Qatna) asked the rulers of Crete for sending artisans to decorate their palaces with fresco painting. As has been demonstrated by Carlo Zaccagnini, the sending of specialized workers is well-attested in the framework of the diplomatic relations between the rulers in the ancient Near East, their transfers are inserted into the dynamics and formal apparatus of the practice of gift-exchange.”

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ “KPTR” may be identified with “Caphtor”; but the latter’s identification with Crete is anything but certain. Biblical Caphtor may refer to: a) Pelusium in the Nile Delta; b) Cilicia; c) Cappadocia; d) Cyprus; e) Crete (see Chronicle 20, Pelasgians and Philistines-Peleset). Egypt fits far better here because in all references to Kothar, except the poetic tale mentioned above, his abode is identified as “HKPT”, which is possibly read as “Hikaptah”, or “House of the ka (soul) of (god) Ptah”, i.e. Memphis. The Hellenes pronounced this Hikaptah as Aegyptos, hence the name of the country in many languages.

Minoan fresco frieze at Avaris reconstructed

AFTER THE DISCOVERIES in Alalakh and Kabri, the absolutely impressive Minoan wall paintings in Avaris with a long frieze of taurocathapsia (bull-leaping) against a labyrinth pattern, griffins or rosettes, recovered during Manfred Bietak’s excavations there,

“instantly created much sensation, since among the scenes depicted on them are spectacular representations of bull leaping so closely identified with Minoan cult and culture”, as Wolf-Dietrich and Barbara Niemeier commented in another paper on Minoan Frescoes in the Eastern Mediterranean.

“From 1990 on, we suggested that the Kabri and Alalakh frescoes were painted by travelling Aegean specialists, and [some time later] Bietak and Nanno Marinatos did the same for the Avaris frescoes”.

A Minoan heterotopia at Avaris. Taureador (detail)

There was a minor problem among archaeologists on the date of these frescoes. Wishing perhaps to please everyone,

“Bietak and Marinatos came to the conclusion that ‘Minoan wall painting existed in Avaris both during the late Hyksos period and the early 18th Dynasty’. Bietak had regarded as possible that ‘trade… links between Avaris and Crete… might have survived a dynastic change and might have carried on into the 18th Dynasty, even after the fall of the Hyksos.’ There is indeed enough evidence from history that the kind of diplomatic and economic relations which apparently are behind these fresco paintings can survive the changes of regimes.

“According to Bietak, ‘king Ahmose, the founder of the 18th Dynasty, fits particularly well into the picture of Minoan connections.’ He imagines the possibility of a political deal between Ahmose and the ‘Minoan Thalassocracy’ in which the Minoan fleet helped Ahmose – who had no fleet – against the danger still threatening from the Hyksos harbour bases in southern Palestine. There is no archaeological or textual evidence for the latter hypothesis, and it recalls rather imaginative and today forgotten scenarios connected with the expulsion of the Hyksos, like those according to which Mycenaean mercenaries helped Ahmose in evicting the Hyksos, or according to which fugitive Hyksos princes conquered the Argolid and subsequently were buried in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. Moreover, Ahmose already had a fleet: he captured Avaris after a series of assaults by both land and water [and then] proceeded to southern Palestine.”

Ahmose fighting back the Hyksos

Even a pharaoh with a fleet of his own would surely prefer to have the far more experienced Cretan navy on his side, than against him, allied with the Hyksos! The Avaris paintings indicate an involvement of Egypt in international relations and cultural exchanges with the eastern Mediterranean either through exchange of gifts or even marriage. They additionally point to Minoan authority as being involved in Egyptian affairs, possibly because Crete had a strong naval force to offer the pharaoh, and also to Avaris as a place where these cultural exchanges took place, meaning the city was incredibly important to Egypt.

Girl from Acroteri, Thera: detail
from the fresco of the lilies

The marriage of a Minoan princess to an Egyptian pharaoh may be one possible scenario. Bietak has suggested that the Avaris frescoes were painted by Minoan artists who were members of the entourage of a Knossian princess married to a pharaoh, whom he first identified as a Hyksos ruler, then as Ahmose, and later as Thutmose III. At last, who was the Cretan girl’s groom? The Minoan eruption on Thera (c. 1640 – c. 1540) coincides with the Hyksos period in Egypt (1650–1550 BCE). But because the exact moment of the eruption escapes us, we can not speculate if the marriage took pace then and when. There follows Ahmose with his New Kingdom, when the Egyptians considered the Aegean to be part of their “empire”. The term must not be understood literally, because in Egypt, they misinterpreted even the gifts given to the pharaohs: “The Egyptians, with their characteristic egocentric sense of superiority, would have presented such gifts as tribute”, remarks A. R. Schulman. At any rate, “Ahmose fits particularly well into the picture of Minoan connections”. Thutmose could very well be the groom, too. Besides, we know that he had three foreign wives: Menwi, Merti, and Menhet. However, a problem arose: another dynastic change that happened during his reign, in the middle of the 15th century BCE – not in Egypt but in Crete, when the Minoans were put under the yoke of their own “Hyksos” (foreign rulers), the Mycenaeans. Therefore, if there was a wedding, it should have happened in the beginning of Thutmose’s reign, when the actual pharaoh was his stepmother, Hatshepsut, or immediately after her death, in 1458 BCE.

Theran rosettes

Whatever the case, these unique wall paintings are of Minoan style, technique, and content. There is a long frieze of bull-leaping and grappling against a maze pattern. Marinatos has made a case that the rosette motif, a prominent feature of the “Taureador” paintings, reproduces the Knossian rosettes, and that it is a distinct Minoan symbol. The frescoes also depict griffins, hunting scenes, felines chasing ungulates, several life-sized figures, and a white female wearing a skirt. Especially important are the Minoan palace emblems, such as the half rosette frieze, and the presence of big griffins that are the same size as the ones in the Knossian Throne room. The technique of painting is typically Aegean, while the style is of very high quality and compares with some of the best paintings from Crete. The use of Minoan royal motifs in a palace of Avaris, says Bietak, indicates that “an encounter on the highest level must have taken place between the courts of Knossos and Egypt,” while the large representation of the female in the skirt may suggest a political marriage of a Minoan princess to the pharaoh.

Minoan female acrobat
(ivory, 2800-1100 BCE)

“Dynastic intermarriage was a favoured diplomatic tactic in the Bronze Age Near East,” the Niemeiers point out. The entourage of a foreign princess, some scholars suppose, “would comprise several hundred people, who until the end of their lives remained in the harem of the pharaoh, and that one can well imagine that at Avaris the rooms of the foreign princess and her entourage were decorated according to her desires. [However], at Alalakh and Tel Kabri, the frescoes probably had been attached to the walls of major ceremonial (and possible ritual) halls of the palace, not of the private rooms of queens or princesses.”

The technique of using lime plaster in two layers with a highly polished surface, fresco in combination with stucco, are all techniques that are not Egyptian but first seen in Cretan paintings. The colours used by the artists are clearly Minoan. Using blue instead of grey is Minoan, with that colour convention being seen in Egypt later, due to Aegean influence. Besides, there are no Egyptian hieroglyphs or emblems among the fragments. The composition of the paintings and motifs also fit in perfectly with all those of the Aegean world. Thus the overwhelming evidence seems to point into the direction of Minoan artists working in Avaris.

Differences Between Minoan and Pharaonic Society and Art

Wild duck on Thera

“The differences between the styles of Egyptian and Minoan arts have been analyzed by Henriette Antonia Groenewegen-Frankfort and, most recently, by Bietak,” the Niemeiers comment. “According to Groenwegen-Frankfort, Minoan art differs from Egyptian (and ancient Near Eastern) art in its ‘absolute mobility in organic forms’. Bietak aptly explains this with the different cultural patterns of both civilizations. The Minoan society was not – as the Egyptian one – dominated by writing, listing, and absolute order, and therefore Minoan art was not subjected to hieroglyphic clichés and a rigid canonical order. As to a comparison of Canaanite and Minoan arts, we do not have, unfortunately, many objects of art from the middle Bronze Age Levant. But those which are extant show a style distinctly different from the Minoan one. For instance, the bird representations on bone inlays from Megiddo and Lachish seem motionless in comparison to the crane on an ivory plaque from Palaikastro. Canaanite female and male metal figurines appear stiff in comparison to the Minoan female and male metal figurines displaying strong inner tension and dynamics.”

“Minoan art differs from Egyptian art in its ‘absolute mobility in organic forms’.” “The Minoan society was not dominated by absolute order; so
Minoan art was not subjected to hieroglyphic clichés and rigid order.”
(Henriette Antonia Groenewegen-Frankfort and Manfred Bietak)

Another map of the area, with arrows pinpointing the places mentioned in this Chronicle): Alalah, Carchemish, Ugarit, Qatna, Byblos, Megiddo, Mari, Babylon, Ur.

As it turned out the wall paintings at Avaris, Alalakh, Kabri, possibly Qatna (17th – 16th centuries BCE), were not the older ones.

“Earlier are the painted stone imitations in Zimri-Lim’s palace at Mari [18th century BCE]. The excavator of Mari, André Parrot, compared the stone imitations to those at Knossos. He also asked for possible connections between the Mari and the Knossos murals, and, pointing to the evidence for their connections provided by the Minoan precious objects mentioned in the Mari archives, he apparently tended to see some Cretan influence in the murals there.”

● Located in Mesopotamia, far from the Mediterranean, Mari (today’s Tell Hariri) was a Sumerian and Amorite city on the Euphrates. It flourished from 2900 to 1759 BCE, when it was sacked by Hammurabi, despite the gifts king Zimri-Lim had given him. More important was Mari’s strategic position as a relay point between northern Syria and lower Mesopotamia. The city came to control the trade lanes between different regions such as Iran, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. The royal palace contained over 300 rooms and was possibly the largest of its time (over 1,000 rooms, they say, had the palace of Knossos)! More than 25,000 tablets were recovered while excavating Mari, as Parrot noted, “bringing about a complete revision of the historical dating of the ancient Near East, and providing more than 500 new place names, enough to redraw the geographical map of the ancient world.”

● Qatna (modern Tell el-Mishrife), 18 km NE of Homs, was one of the largest Bronze Age Syrian towns. Trade routes in the 2nd Millennium connected Mesopotamia with Cyprus, Crete, Egypt. Qatna is mentioned in the tin trade, linking Mari, via Qatna, to the Mediterranean; Cypriote copper was also transported on this route; their alloy, bronze, was most valuable during both the Bronze and Iron Ages.

Theran boy-boxers

Regarding the ethnic composition of the “Minoan” workshops, there are various possibilities: the frescoes were painted a) by travelling Aegean artisans; b) under the supervision of Aegean artists, assisted by Levantine painters, after they were trained by them; c) by Levantine students of Aegean masters. The idea of mixed workshops seems more appealing, probable, realistic. Decorating huge palaces was a great undertaking. However, it would seem unthinkable to imagine Cretan ships full of artists travelling around the Mediterranean for this task. The artistic teams should have been rather small, working necessarily with local apprentices.

“It is difficult to decide in each case which of these solutions is the correct one,” point out the Niemeiers. “We would agree with Philip P. Betancourt that only a very small percentage of the fresco paintings is known and that ‘we are touching the tip of the iceberg of a whole series of interrelated workshops, working in Knossos, the Aegean islands, on the coast of Western Asia and in Egypt, perhaps travelling back and forth, perhaps occasionally exchanging personnel, or going back to Knossos to learn the most recent things’… The Alalakh, Kabri, and Avaris frescoes are to be seen ‘in terms of the forging of an élite koiné – artistic, iconographical, ideological, technological – in the circumstances of the intense maritime interaction between the coastal areas of the Eastern Mediterranean’,” as Susan Sherratt proposed. Marinatos has argued that these paintings are evidence of a koiné, a visual language of common symbols, which testifies to interactions among the rulers of neighbouring powers. This idea is adopted by the Niemeiers, as well: “The Minoan artists involved in the painting of all these frescoes apparently formed an important element in the growth of the so-called ‘International Style’ of the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean.”⁽¹¹⁾

• ⁽¹¹⁾ Not only of the eastern part of the Mediterranean: according to some fresco experts, similar wall paintings have also been found in “faraway” Morocco. However, it is not clear if they are painted with the true (wet) fresco or secco technique.

“Interrelated workshops worked in Knossos, the Aegean islands, the Western Asia coast and Egypt, travelling back and forth, exchanging personnel, or going back to Knossos to learn the most recent things.” “An élite koiné – artistic, iconographical, ideological, technological – was forged in the circumstances of intense maritime interaction between the coastal areas
of the Eastern Mediterranean.” (Philip P. Betancourt and Susan Sherratt)

Cretans in Egypt, bringing gifts of metal, jewelry etc, facsimile of a painting in Thebes, Egypt, 18th dynasty
(early 15th century BCE)

Whatever happened to the Avaris wall paintings? One group of them had fallen off the wall of a doorway, and another group of fragments was found in dumps deposited by the north-east palace. The frescoes seem to have been removed during the later Thutmosid period – when there was no Minoan Crete anymore, after it was taken over by the Mycenaeans.

“Minoan fresco painting apparently was a rather short-lived phenomenon in the Levant and Egypt – in Egyptian terms, covering the Hyksos period and the very beginning of the early 18th Dynasty,” the Niemeiers sum up. “Later, we find again paintings of nature scenes which appear to breathe a Minoan spirit. They were, however, executed in secco technique and certainly were not painted by Aegean artists. Minoan wall painting was a thing of the past at that time.”

Without Minoan Crete there was no room for Minoan art. Minoan workshops were still busy, of course; but the artistic masters worked for the new political masters, the Mycenaeans; there were no Greek artists at that time to compete with them. But their new works of art are not typified as “Minoan” anymore; they are called “Mycenaean”, sometimes with a footnote that they were made by Cretan artistic workshops. Would anyone ever think to describe as “Cretan” the masterpieces of another great Cretan master, who lived more than three millennia later, namely Doménicos Theotocópoulos, the famous El Greco?

Mycenaean women procession fresco

Before Tin, it was the Obsidian…

HERE WE ARE AGAIN AT OUR STARTING POINT, my dearest fellow voyagers, having come full circle back: we began with Periplus and Minoan Cretan Thalassocracy, and we concluded with Emporia and Minoan Cretan fresco.⁽¹²⁾ Now we can start anew, picking up the thread again, going back even before our starting point – before man learned how to work metals, when he voyaged in search of an equally valuable material: the obsidian. So, let’s attempt to go back to the Neolithic era. Let’s schedule it, at least: our vivid imagination is our strong point!

• ⁽¹²⁾ See also Chronicles 3, 5, and 17, 18, 19, about Crete, Cretans, Minoan civilization, navigation and trade, thalassocracy, fresco, taurocathapsia, etc.

• >> 28. THE MAKING OF THE MEDITERRANEAN PERIPLUS
• << Chronicle 26. IBERIAN CROSS-CHECK

Grandstand Minoan procession fresco