GIORGOS ANDREOU on “ARCHiPELAGOS”

GIORGOS ANDREOU on “ARCHiPELAGOS”

Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Ο ΓΙΩΡΓΟΣ ΑΝΔΡΕΟΥ για το “ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ”

Giorgos Andreou, a distinguished Greek composer and pianist

BETWEEN the Portuguese and the Greeks, they say, there’s a great affinity. They are two peoples with superb achievements at sea. We, Greeks, have given glamour to the Archipelago, i.e. the Aegean Sea, since ancient times with the awesome and, at the same time, dazzling archetype of the great voyager, Odysseus, an (almost) intertemporal person now, who has remarkably managed to get into the consciousness and cultures of all the peoples of the world, thanks to that major text, the “Odyssey”, which is essentially what? It is a man’s struggle with the sea – at times his friend, at times his enemy – in order to return to his land, Ithaca, to fulfill his “nostos”, to eat “nostimon” (delicious) bread, to experience what Homer calls “nostimon hemar” – the day of his return home. The significance of the word “nostimon” is so great that has ended up in us, Modern Greeks, having the meaning of a dish which is good and not “anoston” (tasteless). While “anostos” is the one who cannot return to his homeland. These are excellent wordplays of the language.

I’d like to point out some important lines of approach in this new work by Amélia Muge and Michales Loukovikas. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the idea of an “integral recording”, what we call a concept album, tends to fall apart, returning to an era of separate tracks that are being played on the radio inconsistently. I do not blame them; separate songs are fine, as well. But recording history has given us the opportunity to create masterpieces resembling literary works, novels: i.e. a whole disc having a single theme, or variations on a single theme, being a story. There are prominent Greek composers, who have set poetry to music producing significant work, as well as great foreign bands, such as Pink Floyd, and many others, who have benefited from this mode of recording.

Amelia and Michales have loved this mode; they have honoured it to the full. Both “Periplus”, their previous joint effort, and “Archipelagos”, are integrated acoustic, aesthetic, cultural immersions that you cannot listen to in parts; you have to listen to them in whole, seeing the development of their own aesthetics, sensitivity, artistic targeting, and through them, all the important parameters that inevitably come to light, even more so when two cultures meet, converging and also diverging.

Everything is featured and entertained in “Archipelagos”: great poets that I feel the need to mention. We begin with an anonymous hymnodist from Ugarit 3500 years ago; it is a Hurrian hymn, whose music is set to Greek and Portuguese lyrics, that curiously its musical motif sounds very much like a Portuguese anti-fascist anthem, “Acordai!” (Wake up!). Sappho, Euripides, with a choral ode from “Orestes”, Friedrich Hölderlin, João de Deus, Rosalía de Castro, José Gomes Ferreira, Hélia Correia and, of course, the two tremendous Portuguese literary personalities, Fernando Pessoa and José Saramago, are also present.

Regarding songwriters, those entertained here are Martín Codax (a medieval Galician bard), the celebrated Violeta Parra, Armando Soares, José Niza, as well as the Greeks Panagiotis Tountas, Giorgos Mitsakis, Vasilis Tsitsanis, along with some composers, most prominently Ludwig van Beethoven. Now what’s Beethoven doing in a meeting between Portuguese and Greeks? Alright, there are always some artistic… perversions! It is, of course, justifiable because, strangely enough, this “Marcia funebre”, in the Second Movement of the Third Symphony, has made a match in a “diabolical” and paradoxical way with a poetic creation by the eminent writer Hélia Correia,^(*) a philhellene, who has also produced significant work under the influence of the Hellenic spirit, the ancient above all. Other composers are Fernando Lopes-Graça and me… (I have not referred to Michales and Amelia, as I do not consider them to be just authors in this work; I regard them as pillars. I’ve just mentioned those who are entertained in their work).

• ^(*) Hélia Correia’s poem, referred to by Giorgos Andreou, is “The Third Misery” (A Terceira Miséria, 2012), dedicated to Greece, with the Parthenon on the cover. It’s a pity, indeed, if it’s not published in Greek.

A wonderful thing happened concerning myself: I had written a musical motif in the CD “Swallows in the Rain” (which I recorded with the outstanding Plucked Strings Orchestra “Athanasios Tsipinakis” of the municipality of Patras), asking the excellent poet Dionysis Karatzas to recite three of his poems, so as to have also his voice recorded along with the songs that were born within me due to his poetry. Indeed, he read the poems on a composition that I called “Like a Play”. Listening to this music, Amélia picked a poem by Saramago, “Alegria”, and perfectly matched melody and poetry as if by magic! There are more magic moments: Saramago’s wife has been a very interesting actress having also worked in Patras, a philhellene, as well. Thrilling coincidences…

Plucked Strings Orchestra “Athanasios Tsipinakis” of the municipality of Patras

In our cultures, those related to sea, the poetic phenomenon is central. We can compliment ourselves that we are musicians, but the cultures in which Hellenes and Portuguese belong are above all poetic cultures. Their great dynamic is poetic creation. Poetic creation, I would say, from Homer to Pessoa, dictates in a way the reflection of these cultures, the way they gaze at themselves and the world, the way in which they ponder on the idea of voyage. Great poetic texts in both cultures deal with the sea, the human adventure. There have been great voyagers – the Portuguese have their own great explorers, e.g. Vasco da Gama – people who have struggled with the sea, even drowned, so that we could improve our understanding of the world, find new seas, new lands. But what these cultures are looking for above all is a deeper poetic connection of our being with the universe around us.

Fado, by José Malhoa

It is no coincidence that these cultures, for which the Poetic Mode is of great importance, preserve what we call folk culture – have their own Folk musical Tradition. The Portuguese have the well-known Fado, beloved all over the planet; we have our great Demotic Tradition and, at the same time, an important branch that sprang out from it, our folk song, which started from Smyrna as an urban song, and developed from Rebetiko to a city Laïkó song, reaching its climax with geniuses, such as Tsitsanis or, sometime before, Tountas, who has been a bridge between these two routes.

What, then, is that which preserves folk tradition in these cultures? (Because there are cultures – great at every level – which no longer have a folk tradition, a folk song of their own, but only academic). It is this poetic reflection, poetic consciousness, which is not (only) individual. There is a collective universe behind every individual in these cultures. I firmly believe this is due to the relationship with the infinite that the sea symbolizes. The water is the unconscious, the long voyage, underneath our logic, where we put islands, meaning logic, surrounded by the subconscious of the immense sea. That’s how a sense of unity is born: while we are individuals, we are simultaneously a Community; and we express ourselves (how else?) through this Community.

The most important expression of the Community is Tradition – music, dance, visual arts. Whatever tradition we pick as an example, we realize there’s a sense of coherence, of discipline: I conform myself to a pattern that exists for centuries now, I work on it, taste it, add or remove something, and give it back to go beyond me, when I no longer exist, though I exist through it, within it. This is a way of approaching our reality, a way with which our two cultures, the Hellenic and the Portuguese, have learned to live and create for centuries and centuries.

Tradition, by Olin Levi Warner (1895). Bronze tympanum
over the main entrance of the Library of Congress in Washington.

All of the above are in a way recorded in “Archipelagos”. Of course, do not expect some musicological treatise. No creator or artist owes anything like that. First of all, what counts is his/her personal taste, mental euphoria, and the connections he/she has chosen. The artist defends a personal “meaning” while proposing a work of art. This meaning, however, at the same time symbolizes the whole, because Tsitsanis is also all the rest, just like Beethoven is in a way all Classical music. Thus a gesture has always a wider scope than the choice of a person.

I invite you, therefore, to listen, feel and love “Archipelagos” for what it is: the meeting of two creative persons, two important artists, two excellent musicians-composers, and the way they conform themselves to Tradition and at the same time renew it. Because a Tradition that remains stagnant and is not renewed will inevitably die and be “frozen”. As well as a renewal that is more “irreverent” than it’s proper – i.e. its audacity disturbs the balance of aesthetic and moral options, and is gradually transformed into an offense, damage, “unconventional” attitude, which anyway dissolves the fabric of Tradition – is equally reprehensible.

The Temple of Poseidon at Sounion; the point where Aegeus jumped into the sea, since his son, Theseus, blinded by arrogance and hybris (he had killed the Minotaur, but thanks to Ariadne, whom he later abandoned on Naxos), forgot to raise the white sail of good news
for his father waiting anxiously to see him back…

I believe that Amélia Muge and Michales Loukovikas have achieved this admirable balance creating in fact a work of art, so much flattering for us Greeks, as it is called “Archipelagos”. There are many archipelagos, but historically the first one and immortal throughout the ages, thanks to the “Odyssey” and the father of all, Homer, is the Aegean Sea, which, as Aeschylus has written, many times we see it blooming dead, either by a tempest, or some naval battle or catastrophe, or an unexpected return without a white sail, such as that which led Aegeus in despair to jump into the waters and henceforth the sea to be called Aegean.

There’s always a drama behind our cultures. However, we have already attained the manner, kindness, wisdom and mental integrity not to mourn this drama, but save it as a precious patrimony, a bittersweet balance between light and darkness, life and death – isn’t human destiny likewise throughout the ages?

Good luck and congratulations on your work!

Speech during the presentation of “Archipelagos”
at “Janus” bookstores in Athens on May 4, 2018

● See also: MARIA GRACIETE BESSE on “ARCHiPELAGOS”
● As well as: GIORGOS ANDREOU on “PERIPLUS”

Advertisement

Chronicle 11. “MUSIC IS THRACIAN AND ASIAN”

Chronicle 11. “MUSIC IS THRACIAN AND ASIAN”

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

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

Michales Loukovikas

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

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

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

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

Simon Karás

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

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

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

Qanun (psaltery)

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

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

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

Harpist (Trígonon player) of Keros

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

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

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

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

Epigonion

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

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

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

Sailor playing laouto

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

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

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

Santur

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

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

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

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

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

Mágadis-pectís

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women musicians, Al-Andalus (Andalusia)

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

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

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

Women musicians, Egypt

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

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

Cümbüş

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

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

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

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

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

Psaltery

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

Music and Nation

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

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

Indian itinerary musician, by Shagufta Mehdi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconstructed silver lyre of Ur, Mesopotamia

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

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

Hydraulis (Pipe Organ)

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

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

Hydraulis, Dion (1st century BCE)

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

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

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

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

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

A hydraulis excavated at Aquincum (modern Budapest) in 1931

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

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

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

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

Church (pipe) organ

The Crusades

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Capture of Constantinople in 1204, by Domenico Robusti Tintoretto

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

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

A diaulos player in a symposium, by Euaion painter

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

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

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

Music according to Strabo

Bronze head of Orpheus (460 BCE)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chronicle 18. AEGEAN: KNOSSOS, MYCENAE, TROY

Chronicle 18. AEGEAN: KNOSSOS, MYCENAE, TROY

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

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

Michales Loukovikas

The Atreid dynasty palace at Mycenae

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

Sunset at Stonehenge

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

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

Mycenae, Lion Gate

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

Heracles

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

Sea peoples depicted as prisoners in Egypt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eleusinian, Cabeirian and Orphic Mysteries

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

Samothracian relief showing Agamemnon
being initiated into the Cabeirian rites.

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

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

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

The Myth of Orpheus, by Marc Chagall

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

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

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

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

The choral dancers frieze from the Temenos in Samothrace

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

A Mycenaean jar with an octopus and fish

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

Trojan War, Bronze Age Collapse and Dark Ages

The gold funeral Mask
of “Agamemnon”

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

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

The map of Eratosthenes

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

A tablet with Linear B symbols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mycenaean dagger with a hunting scene: men vs. lions

Chronicle 17. MINOAN CRETAN THALASSOCRACY

Chronicle 17. MINOAN CRETAN THALASSOCRACY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 17. ΚΡΗΤΟΜΙΝΩΙΚΗ ΘΑΛΑΣΣΟΚΡΑΤΟΡΙΑ

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

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

The palace of Minos at Knossos

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

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

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

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

Bronze Apollo with Lyre, Pompeii

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

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

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

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

Replica of the Uluburun shipwreck

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

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

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

The Pleiades, by the Symbolist Elihu Vedder (1885)

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

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

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

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

The Dolphins mural at Knossos

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

Knossos Palace (reconstruction)

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

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

Sacred symbols: bull and labrys

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

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

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

Minoan Snake Goddess

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

What conclusions can we draw?

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

A Minoan beauty on Thera

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

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

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

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

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

The mysterious Phaestos Disc (side B)

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

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

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

Theran antelopes

Minoan Trade and Influence

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

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

A Theran fisherman

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

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

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

The entire Ship Procession or Flotilla frieze at Acroteri, Thera

Bronze and Orichalcum or Chalcopyrite (Brass)

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

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

Andean birdman, tumbaga

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

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

Brass French horn

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

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

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

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

The Cassiterides

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

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

The blue monkeys fresco on Thera

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

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

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

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

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

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

• >> Chronicle 18. AEGEAN: KNOSSOS, MYCENAE, TROY
• << Chronicle 16. MEDITERRANEAN PERIPLUS-PARAPLUS

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

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