Chronicle 24. THE TRIUMPH OF CRETINISM

Chronicle 24. THE TRIUMPH OF CRETINISM

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 24. ΘΡΙΑΜΒΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΚΡΕΤΙΝΙΣΜΟΥ

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We don’t need no education…

We don’t need no thought control!

Roger Waters (Pink Floyd, The Wall)

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Michales Loukovikas

● The Genocide of the Hellenes (Β) ● Hypatia’s Assassination ● Christianism
and Slavery ● Colonialism and Racism

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“THIS WAS NO TIME FOR A PHILOSOPHER to be philosophical. ‘The tyrant’, as the philosophers put it, was in charge… Houses were entered and searched for books and objects deemed unacceptable. If any were found they would be… burned in triumphant bonfires in town squares… Anyone who made sacrifices to the old gods could, the law said, be executed. Across the empire, ancient… temples had been attacked, their roofs stripped, their treasures melted down, their statues smashed. To ensure that their rules were kept, the government started to employ spies… and informers to report back on what went on in the streets… and behind closed doors in private homes.

“The consequences of deviation from the rules could be severe and philosophy had become a dangerous pursuit. [A scholar] had been arrested and tortured to make him reveal the names of other philosophers… A fellow… had been flayed alive. Another had been beaten before a judge until the blood flowed down his back. The savage ‘tyrant’ was Christianity… the Christians were ‘the vultures’.”

Revealing, overwhelming evidence in Catherine Nixey’s breathtaking book, The Darkening Age / The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. It’s high time we “tear down the wall” of this Christian Iron Curtain:

“When modern histories describe this period… they tend to call it the ‘triumph of Christianity’.⁽¹⁾ It is worth remembering, however, the original Roman meaning of the word ‘triumph’. A true Roman triumph wasn’t merely about the victory of the winner. It was about the total and utter subjugation of the loser. In a true Roman triumph the losing side was paraded through the capital while the winning side looked on at an enemy whose soldiers had been slain, whose possessions had been despoiled and whose leaders had been humiliated. A triumph was not merely a ‘victory’. It was an annihilation.” And it wasn’t very far from a pillory, I should add.

• ⁽¹⁾ Χρίειν (ancient Hellenic: to anoint) > Χριστός–Christ (anointed) > Christianus (Latin) > crétin (French) > cretin. You see, Christianism and cretinism are (etymologically) identical!

A Roman Triumph, by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1630)

That was exactly what the Christian leaders were after: “that all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims”, declared “Saint” Augustine to his congregation in Carthage – obviously, after he had a meeting with the… “Most Merciful” God himself!

“Christian observers would look on the tolerance of their non-Christian neighbours with astonishment. Augustine marveled at the fact that the pagans were able to worship many different gods without discord while the Christians, who worshipped just the one, splintered into countless warring factions… Despite that, he was not willing to extend such tolerance himself. It was, he concluded, the duty of a Christian to convert heretics – by force, if necessary… For those who wish to be intolerant, monotheism provides very powerful weapons. There was ample biblical justification for the persecution of non-believers. The Bible… is very clear on the matter of idolatry… And what precisely did God advise as a punishment for idolatry? Deuteronomy was clear: a person indulging in this should be stoned to death. And if an entire city fell into such sin? Again, the answer was clear: ‘destruction is decreed’.”(!)

ROMAN EMPERORS RULED ALEXANDRIA through a Roman Governor, or Prefect, with civil personnel which consisted mainly of Hellenes. This had worked well, until the moment that Constantine inaugurated a “Christian Monarchy”. Then a second hierarchy of officials appeared, in conflict with the old one. The “unorthodox” thought became a crime, and this second (continuously burgeoning) Church hierarchy, headed by a bishop, policed popular sentiments. This duopoly was an explosive mixture: the prefect derived his power from the emperor, of course; but the bishop considered he derived it from God – thus he was out of control. The conflict was sure to come if the bishop was an ambitious and fanatical person, such as Cyril, having opposite him an educated and urbane prefect, called Orestes. It was a clash between the tolerance of classic antiquity and the vulgar intolerance of the “New World Order” of Christianism. Moreover, it was unavoidable, as the atmosphere, mainly in Alexandria, had been explosive for some time.

The Lighthouse on Pharos islet (one of the 7 Wonders of Antiquity) and Alexandria in the background

● “The parabalani in Alexandria”, explains Nixey, “have been described as a ‘terrorist charity’ – a strange oxymoron… These men did, at times, good deeds but they also sowed fear. ‘Terror’ is the word used in Roman legal documents about them… The city had a new bishop, Cyril… the zealot Theophilus’s nephew. And, true to family form, he was a thug. Even Christians had reservations about this ambitious and brutal man: he was, as one council of bishops put it, ‘a monster’” – but “a monster” that could at any time deploy the parabalani, or his reserve army, several bands of fanatic, black-shirt monks. Soon, violence reigned.

The circumcellions were another extreme North African terrorist gang, based mainly in Carthage. Initially concerned with remedying social wrongs, they became linked with the Donatists, condemned property and slavery, advocated free love, canceling debt, and freeing slaves. But gradually, says Nixey, they “became notorious not only for their suicides but for their vicious attacks on those who didn’t share their particular Christian beliefs. [Their] ‘holy’ violence alarmed even the Church”, for they targeted not only the festivals of the old gods (a favourite target), but also priests, who were tortured and horribly killed as “traitors”. “Augustine called [their methods] ‘a new and unspeakable kind of violence’… and others might have been shocked by such acts – but the Church was reaping what had been sown. A few decades earlier, as… Brent D. Shaw has pointed out, Christian preachers had been glad of the circumcellions’ violence and cultivated it: in the attacks against the temples such freelance destroyers had been eminently useful and were drafted in to do the strong-arm work of pulling these buildings down… ‘Where there is terror, there is salvation… Oh, merciful savagery!’, said Augustine” – in tempore non suspecto. It was inconceivable that such gloating oxymora could turn into boomerangs! Such was the era’s “atmosphere”…

Hypatia, by Raphael (detail
from The School of Athens)

Great Terror: Hypatia’s Assassination

● 415. The Great Terror in Alexandria culminated with the brutal murder of the astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher, Hypatia, “a most beautiful, most vertuous, most learned, and every way accomplish’d Lady; who was torn to pieces by the Clergy of Alexandria, to gratify the pride, emulation, and cruelty of their Archbishop, commonly, but undeservedly, stiled St. Cyril”, as the philosopher John Toland said. The astronomer Carl Sagan linked Hypatia’s death with the demise of the Alexandrian Library. The assassination, symbolizing the end of Alexandria as a centre of wisdom and scholarship, was instigated by Theophilus’ nephew and successor, Cyril, the so-called “Pillar of Faith”, proclaimed as a “Doctor of the Church”, and canonized as… “Saint” – of all Christian denominations! Who are, indeed, the ones that err deplorably? All the Christian Churches in the world, or those who described him as a “thug”, “monster”, or as a “proud Pharaoh”, as the emperor Theodosius II called him?

Cyril began his reign the way he meant to go on: by persecuting his opponents. He eyed enviously the wealth of the Novatians, an established Christian sect of puritans. Edward Gibbon described them as “the most innocent and harmless of sectaries.” But they weren’t going to support him, and they had already joined his opponents. So, one of Cyril’s first acts was to close their churches and seize their sacred vessels and ornaments. He next, says Nixey, targeted the Jews:⁽²⁾

• ⁽²⁾ John “Chrysostom”: “’the synagogue is not only a brothel… it is also a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts… a dwelling of demons… a place of idolatry’. St Chrysostom’s writings would later be reprinted with enthusiasm in Nazi Germany.” (C. Nixey)

“A Christian attempt to regulate the dancing and theatrical displays – apparently much enjoyed by the city’s Jewish population – started a complicated chain of reprisals that climaxed in a Jewish attack on some Christians. Some were killed – and Cyril was provided with the pretext he needed. Mustering together a mob of the parabalani, as well as some of the merely brutal and enthusiastic, he ‘marched… to the synagogues, took possession of them, purified them and converted them into churches’. ‘Purified’ in such texts is often a euphemism for stole, self-righteously. The Christians then completed their work by purifying the Jewish ‘assassins’ of their possessions: stripping them of all they owned… they turned them out of the city into the desert.”

“Without any legal sentence, without any royal mandate, the patriarch, at the dawn of day, led a seditious multitude to the attack of the synagogues. Unarmed, unprepared, the Jews were incapable of resistance; their houses of prayer were levelled with the ground, and the episcopal warrior, after rewarding his troops with the plunder of their goods, expelled from the city the remnant of the unbelieving nation,” noted Gibbon.

Alexandria: the Canopic Way (now Ṭarīq al-Ḥurriyyah), the principal thoroughfare, intersected by the Sōma, where Alexander’s tomb was located – the two main arteries with the Agora in the centre.

“Orestes,” recounts Nixey, “looked on in horror… Ostensibly the most powerful man in the city, he was nonetheless unable to stop the uprising: a mere governor’s retinue was no match for 800 marauding, muscular parabalani. And the numbers of Cyril’s militia swelled. Around 500 monks descended from their sacks and caves in the nearby hills, determined to fight for their bishop. Unwashed, uneducated, unbending in their faith, they were, as even the Christian writer Socrates [of Constantinople, or Scholasticus] admits, men of ‘a very fiery disposition’. One day, they surrounded Orestes and began to insult him, accusing him of being a ‘pagan idolater’… One of the monks threw a rock and struck Orestes on his head. The wound started pouring with blood. Most of his guards… scattered… Orestes was left almost entirely alone.”

Orestes escaped. The order was probably “Terrify him!”, not “Kill him!” Some passers-by also intervened. The governor appealed to Theodosius II, the child emperor, and his guardian sister, Pulcheria – a pietistic “Christian virgin”, who was waging her own campaign for Christ, by turning the imperial palace into a monastery. Later on she was also “sanctified”! The appeal was in vain. The monk, named Ammonius, was executed for the attack, Cyril immediately hailed him as a “martyr”, but the Alexandrian Christians were in turn appalled: the execution took place for the attempted murder of the prefect, not for the culprit’s faith. Several people intervened, and Cyril, a master in manoeuvres and behind-the- scenes schemes, was obliged to bring the matter to a close – for the time being. But now a blood sacrifice was required to appease the henchman of Christ…

Hypatia, by Charles William Mitchell, brutally murdered by “Saint” Cyril’s thugs inside the Caesareum, his headquarters

Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, the astronomer, rose to become the supreme figure of the Alexandrian School of Philosophy, which was second only to the Athenian School. Her fame attracted students (including Christian theologians) from across the Mediterranean. She was also very much respected by Orestes, who quite often consulted her. Cyril was incensed that Hypatia’s reputation and talents were giving the cause of Hellenism a “dangerous prestige”, and thereby preventing the “progress of the Faith”. The bishop had no scruples to liken the relationship of Hypatia and Orestes to that of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. “If she could,” he ventured, “she would set up an Egyptian Empire”! As he inveighed against the “harlot” from his pulpit, more fanatics swarmed in from the desert in response to his call.

● One day in March 415, Cyril agitated a “Sturmabteilung” of Black-shirts, a mob of 500 fanatical monks, possessed

“by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader [a minor cleric] named Peter”, testified Socrates Scholasticus. They “waylaid [Hypatia] returning home and, dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with ostraca [potsherds]. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them”…⁽³⁾ “No one in Alexandria was punished for her murder. There was a cover up”, adds Catherine Nixey.

• ⁽³⁾ It seems that the burning of dead bodies (or of any opponents, while they were still alive) was “typically” the final stage of the “etiquette” of bigoted brutalities. Traditionally, Alexandrians, and others in those years, carried the remains of “the most abominable criminals” usually outside the urban (and also… urbane) limits to incinerate them, cleansing symbolically the city. They burned the body, as well, to prevent the cult of a martyr or a hero. As we have seen, this was the fate of George, Marcellus, Mark – and now of Hypatia. So, there’s a chance that “Mark” the… “Venetian” (whom we met at the end of the previous Chronicle) is in fact Alexander the Great!

● Hypatia’s brutal murder sent shockwaves throughout the empire. Cyril, whom everyone saw as the culprit, had done something unprecedented, even with the standards of the era, targeting a prominent intellectual woman, and was now in great danger. Alarmed at Cyril’s conduct, the council of bishops of Alexandria sent an embassy to Constantinople, and an investigation was soon launched to determine his role in the murder. In the autumn of 416, emperors Theodosius and Honorius issued an edict, removing the parabalani from the bishop’s power and placing them instead under Orestes’ authority. Cyril probably only managed to escape some heavy punishment by bribing imperial advisers. The restrictions on the parabalani (limiting their numbers, and forbidding them to attend “public spectacles”, or enter “the municipal council or a courtroom”) show that they were found equally guilty. However, Cyril proved he was a master of intrigues: in two years, the parabalani were again placed under his control, and after a while, he had come to dominate the Alexandrian council. There was nothing to block his way anymore while heading for… “sainthood”!⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ That’s what one version of the story says. Because, though it’s been 1,600 years since then, we still don’t know exactly what has happened. According to another version, Orestes ordered the execution of the monk Hierax (the provocateur in the expulsion of the Jews) for complicity in the murder of Hypatia. In a few days, says this version, Orestes was also murdered. Cyril, absolutely triumphant, declared that “Hypatia has gone to Athens”, while Orestes resigned and left. There had been no mob rule (ochlocracy), nor any tragedy. And then, Cyril himself nominated the new governor, the duopoly ceased, and religious tyranny enthroned itself in the erstwhile capital of wisdom. It’s amazing that, if you search for Orestes’ fate in the Internet, you read Cyril’s version: the prefect resigned and left… How then the parabalani were placed under his authority 1.5 years later?

Cleopatra at the entrance of
the Egyptian Museum in Cairo

Sometimes history is not written by the winners. Cyril’s propaganda may have worked for centuries. The rumours for Hypatia’s defamation (“she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through her Satanic wiles”) echo in the writings of the 7th-century Coptic bishop, John of Nikiû. In the Middle Ages, Hypatia was co-opted as a symbol of Christian virtue, or her death was equated with that of Christian martyrs. The last advocate to speak out “in Defence of Saint Cyril and the Alexandrian Clergy” was perhaps Thomas Lewis in 1721. Since then, more and more books and works of art turn against Cyril and extol Hypatia. In 1853, Charles Kingsley romanticized her in his novel, Hypatia, as “the last of the Hellenes”. She was honoured as an astronomer, as well, in 1884, when a main belt asteroid and a lunar crater were named after her. “Unfortunately for Cyril et al”, said Abby Norman, “by killing Hypatia, they immortalized her. Indeed, had they left Hypatia alone, her work and name would likely have been lost to history. In death, she is as she was in life: unwilling to be silenced, ever-tenacious in her curiosity and wonder.”

● Regarding the Caesareum, where the hideous assassination took place, it was not an ordinary church, but “Saint” Cyril’s headquarters! And, needless to say, it was not a church, but an ancient temple that was “sanctified” at the turn of the 4th century, when Christians set about appropriating the property of all other religions to wipe out all their traces throughout the world. The Caesareum was conceived by Cleopatra as a dedication to Marc Antony. It was finished by the man that “finished” them, Octavian-Augustus, who, after wiping out all traces of Marc Antony in the temple and Alexandria, dedicated it to… himself!

● 420s. There was soon more trouble in Carthage, says Nixey, taking us to the other North African “hot spot”. “The one-mile-long temple of the Roman goddess Caelestis and all nearby sanctuaries were leveled… Fights could ensue during destruction and, in the process, Christians were sometimes killed [as well] – not necessarily a bad thing to some Christian minds”…

Parthenon in ruins and an Ottoman mosque (built after 1715), by Pierre Peytier (early 1830s)

● 429. A widespread persecution of Hellenes, who were considered as demon followers, was accompanied by the plunder of the Parthenon. Athena’s temple survived for nearly one thousand years, until Theodosius II decreed in 435 that all ancient temples throughout the empire be closed. In the last decade of the 6th century, it was converted into a church of Virgin Mary. Thus the Parthenon, disguised as “Parthenos” (“Virgin”), became the fourth most important Christian pilgrimage destination in the Byzantine Empire after Constantinople, Ephesus, and Thessalonica.

● “Even the Acropolis had not escaped”, remarks Nixey: “The colossal statue of Athena, one of the most famous works of art in the empire, was torn down from where she had stood guard for almost a thousand years, and shipped off to Constantinople… Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked. Faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off and gods were decapitated.”

East Pediment: Parthenon’s Marbles, or Elgin’s (for the British), or Mutilated (by the Christians)

“Go to Room 18 in the British Museum”, she challenges. “You will find yourself in front of the Parthenon Marbles,⁽⁵⁾ taken from Greece by Lord Elgin in the 19th century. The astonishingly lifelike statues are, today, in a sorry state: many are mutilated or missing limbs. This, it is often assumed, was the fault of Elgin’s clumsy workmen or fighting during the Ottoman occupation… But much was the work of zealous Christians who set about the temple with blunt instruments, attacking ‘demonic’ gods, mutilating some of the finest statuary Greece had ever produced… The East Pediment fared particularly badly. The vast majority of the gods have been decapitated… They were pushed off… and smashed on the ground below, their fragmented remains ground down and used for mortar for a Christian church.”

• ⁽⁵⁾ If you search for the “Parthenon Marbles” in Wikipedia, you’re redirected to the “Elgin Marbles”! Not only for the British authorities, but for Wikipedia, as well, the marbles (still) belong to the looter…

“Today, histories of this period, if they mention such destruction at all, hesitate to condemn it outright. The 1965 edition of The Penguin Dictionary of Saints records with little more than amused indulgence that Martin of Tours ‘was not averse to the forcible destruction of heathen shrines’. In modern histories those carrying out and encouraging the attacks are rarely described as violent, or vicious, or thuggish: they are merely ‘zealous’, or ‘pious’, or ‘enthusiastic’ or, at worst, ‘over-zealous’. As… John Pollini puts it: ‘modern scholarship, influenced by a Judeo-Christian cultural bias’, has frequently overlooked or downplayed such attacks and even at times ‘sought to present Christian desecration in a positive light’.”

The Rape of the Parthenon begins on July 31, 1801: Elgin removing the Marbles (reconstruction)

● In 457, politics bowed to religion, when Leo I became the first emperor to be crowned by the patriarch of Constantinople. In 491, the empire’s submission to Christianism became complete, when Anastasius I was obliged to sign a written declaration of orthodoxy before his coronation.

● Etrusca Disciplina, the Etruscan books of cult and divination, untouched by all ancient cultures, were collected and burned by the Christians in the 5th century, almost a millennium after the Etruscans had ceased to exist as a people…

Justinian: Genocide Act IΙI – Codex Justinianus

Goddess (Leto) carries a child (Apollo); roof ridge of the Etruscan Portonaccio Temple at Veii (510–500 BCE)

● 529. This year, which is often cited as the end of Antiquity, Justinian decided to shut down the Platonic Academy that had been revived in 410 as a centre for Neoplatonism and mysticism. The old Academy was probably destroyed by the Roman dictator, Sulla, in 86 BCE. The faculty members, wrote the Hellene poet and historian Agathias, looked for protection under the Sassanid king Khosrow (Khosrau) I (531-579), known to Hellenes and Romans as Chosroes, in his capital at Ctesiphon, carrying with them precious scrolls of literature, philosophy, and science. While exiled, Simplicius of Cilicia (perhaps others, too) might have gone to Harran (Carrhae or Hellenopolis), near Edessa, in Upper Mesopotamia, founding an Academy-in-exile. This school should have survived until the 9th century, facilitating a revival of the Neoplatonic tradition in Baghdad, with the foundation of the House of Wisdom in 832. Two of the major centres of learning in the intervening period (from 5th to 8th centuries) were the School of Nisibis (Nusaybin, close to Harran) in Asia Minor, under Persian rule at the time, and the Academy of Gundishapur, founded by Khosrau. The Austrian philosopher and educator Rudolf Steiner commented that the culture of Gondishapur (also home of a Library and a Medical school-hospital) was a premature efflorescence which was undermined and destroyed by the Islamic troops in the 7th century (Parallel Lives of monotheistic religions).

The “barbarians” were being Hellenized,
while the Hellenes were being barbarized

All this eastward “brain drain” started in 489, when emperor Zeno decreed the closure of the Nestorian Christian theological and scientific centre in Edessa. Its scholars were then transferred and absorbed into the School of Nisibis. There, in collaboration with those Hellenistic philosophers, who were banished from the Academy of Athens, carried out important research in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and other sciences. The Academy of Gondeshapur became known for medicine and learning. Khosrau gave refuge to various Grecian philosophers and Syriac-speaking Nestorian Christians fleeing religious persecution by the Byzantines, and commissioned them to translate Hellenic and Syriac texts (on medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and other useful crafts) into Pahlavi (Middle Persian). Gloomy conclusion: the “barbarians” were being Hellenized, while the Hellenes were being barbarized!

The School of Athens (1510-1511), by Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino)

● The Codex Justinianus was completed in 529, i.e. the year the emperor closed down the Neoplatonic Academy as anti-Christian. It may have been Theodosius who initiated the adoption of laws and the signing of decrees against Hellenism, but the one who sparked persecutions of gentiles on a massive scale was none but Justinian with the codification and reform of the law. As he was convinced that the unity of the empire presupposed the unity of faith, it appeared to him obvious that this faith could only be the “orthodox”. Those of a different creed were subjected to persecution, which imperial legislation had effected from the time of Constantius and would now vigorously continue. The Corpus Juris Civilis contained two statutes that decreed the total eradication of Hellenism even in civic, private life, which were zealously enforced. Contemporary sources (John Malalas, Theophanes of Byzantium, John of Ephesus) tell of severe persecutions, even against many high officials, experiencing strict Inquisition, exile and threat of capital punishment, with executions carried out even in the emperor’s very presence: some by burning, others by drowning. The alternative, the only way out for anyone to escape, was Christianization. Thus these Byzantine Crusades had no end. In Asia Minor alone, John of Ephesus reported to have converted 70,000 gentiles. Other peoples under Byzantine rule were also Christianized. The worship of Amun in Libya was abolished; so were the remnants of the worship of Isis in Egypt.⁽⁶⁾ The state suppression of Hellenism made all non-Christians a public threat. The word Hellene was no longer an insult, but a deadly accusation. With this legal arsenal on hand, which was supplemented by new provisions, the emperors, in complete accord with the Church, continued the Genocide of the Hellenes…

• ⁽⁶⁾ “Justinian decided to destroy the frieze in the beautiful temple of Isis at Philae in Egypt.” (C.N.)

Artemis, Roman copy of a Greek original
(1st century CE)

● When legal loopholes were detected, or if something escaped the attention of the ever-vigilant bishops, Christian “commoners” took action: in the mid-530s they started burning or cutting forests in Hellas because they were… dwellings of demons! Blind fanaticism destroyed the oak forests of Zeus, the fir forests of Artemis and Pan, the olive groves of Athena. The results were devastating since all this deforestation caused the drying up of rivers and springs and the total disruption of the country’s ecosystem…

● “A series of legal hammer blows fell”, says Nixey of the Codex: “anyone who offered sacrifice would be executed. Anyone who worshipped statues would be executed. The laws went further. This was no longer mere prohibition of other religious practices. It was the active enforcement of Christianity on every single pagan in the empire… Everyone now had to become Christian… Those who refused would be stripped of all their property… lose their civil rights, be left in penury and ‘in addition’… they would be ‘subject to the proper punishment’… and then would be exiled. The ‘insane error’ of paganism was to be wiped out from the face of the earth… It was this law that led… Edward Gibbon to declare that the entirety of the barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was… It was from this moment, said later historians, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe.”

“Centuries later, Al Mas’udi, an Arab traveller, would visit a town on the edge of Europe and reflect on what had happened in the Roman Empire. ‘During the early days of the empire of the Rum’, he wrote… ‘the sciences were honoured and enjoyed universal respect. From an already solid and grandiose foundation, they were raised to greater heights every day, until the Christian religion made its appearance among the Rum: this was a fatal blow to the edifice of learning; its traces disappeared and its pathways were effaced’.”

● The first millennium of Christianism went on and concluded this way – there is no need to repeat ourselves. You can see how shattered is in fact the “unbroken continuity” of ancient Hellenic and Byzantine civilizations, having as a “malignant appendix” that inarticulate fascist bark: “Hellas of Greek Christians”!⁽⁷⁾

• ⁽⁷⁾ The main slogan of the military junta (1967-1974) in Hellas (when it was turned into… Hell-ass!)

Crusades, Colonialism and Slave Trade

Siege of Antioch (1097-98), detail of a
medieval miniature, by Jean Colombe

THE CRUSADES, after the East-West Schism, were conducted under the sanction of the “Holy See”. Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in 1095, with the declared goal of restoring Christian access to the Jerusalem area. There followed six major Crusades against Muslim territories in the Orient, and many minor ones, as part of a 200-year struggle for the control of the “Holy Land” that finally failed. After the fall of the last Christian stronghold in 1291, the Vatican mounted no further coherent response in the East. Similar papal-blessed military campaigns against “pagans”, “heretics”, and “excommunicated” people, undertaken in the Occident for various economic, political, or religious reasons, were the Albigensian Crusade, the Aragonese Crusade, the Northern Crusades, and the Iberian Reconquista. The “burning of books and heretics or infidels”, of course, was in the agenda of all Crusades. The Crusaders’ conduct was shocking not only to modern sensibilities but to European contemporaries, as well, for the Crusaders pillaged the lands they passed through; there was also at least one case of cannibalism in the Levant! In the Rhineland, the First Crusade resulted in the slaughter of 8,000 Jews in the first of Europe’s pogroms. It also led to the massacre of at least 70,000 citizens in the fall of Jerusalem. The nobles carved up the territory that they had gained rather than return it to the Byzantines, as they had vowed to do. Even worse, the Fourth Crusade resulted in the conquest and sacking of Constantinople, and the partition of the Byzantine Empire. (On the Crusades, see Chronicle 9, Crusades and Lebensraum – Urban, Hitler and Zionists, and especially Crusades in the West, Chronicle 11, The Crusades).

The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, by Eugène Delacroix (1840)

● 1193. Nalanda, an ancient centre of higher learning with a great library in the Indian Bihar, was sacked by Turkic Muslim invaders from southern Afghanistan. The university was so vast that it is reported to have burned for three months after the invaders set it on fire…

● 1258. The House of Wisdom in Abbasid-era Baghdad was a library, translation institute and research centre. The scholars, mainly Persians or Greeks, translated all available Hellenic texts – scientific, philosophic, and many more. A great part of ancient Hellenic literature survived and became known in Europe thanks to these translations into Arabic. The House and all other libraries in the city were destroyed by the Mongol ruler Hulagu. The waters of the Tigris ran black for six months with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river…

Materia medica (Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς), by the Greek physician, pharmacologist and botanist Pedanius Dioscorides, translated into Arabic

● 1452. Pope Nicholas V may have tried to revive the spirit of the old Crusades in the East, one year before the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, as his nephew, Loucás Notarás, was the Byzantine Megas Doux (Grand Duke). However, European attention was already focused on the more promising opportunities opening up in the West. So, Nicholas’ papal bull, renewed repeatedly by future pontiffs, granted Portugal (and later Spain, of course) “full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms… and other property… and reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.” Effectively, these “geographically unlimited” bulls extended the Crusades’ legacy all over the world justifying European colonialism and, by all means, “ushered in the West African slave trade”. This trade was about to take off with the transport of African slaves to America, and the popes would go on “granting permissions” and “issuing bulls” – as they were no fools – to guarantee their booty share!

● 15th century. Arabic Muslim books were burned wholesale by Catholic Spain. About 5,000 Arabic poetic manuscripts were consumed by flames in the public square at Granada, in 1499, on the orders of the Archbishop of Toledo. At the same time, a number of Hebrew Bibles and other Jewish books were burned at the behest of the Spanish Inquisition.

● The Aztec emperor Itzcoatl (1427-28 to 1440) had all historical codices burned – on the grounds that it was “not wise that all the people should know”! Thus the way was paved for the development of a state-sanctioned “history” and mythos – but also for the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés in 1521.^(h) This signaled a new era of genocides and holocausts committed by Christians holding the cross in one hand and the sword in the other. The new crusaders and slave traders, together with the inquisitors, had new challenges to face, new frontiers to cross, new “books to burn and infidels to bury” in the “New World”, under the sanction and arbitration of the good, old “Holy See” – with profit in mind, as always!

Just take a look at Tenochtitlan (reconstructed): with a population of almost 300,000, it is believed it was the world’s largest city at the time, the capital of an empire of almost 5 million people. Compared to Europe, only Paris, Venice and Constantinople might have rivaled it. It was five times the size of the contemporary London. Entering the city the Spaniards thought it was a dream. These people were the “savages” that had to be Christianized and “civilized”…

● Tenochtitlan, today’s Mexico City, was the city of the Mexica (hence Mexico), dominating in the Aztec Empire and ruling over several other tribes. All these people, for sure, did not fall from the sky. Civilization in Mesoamerica appeared during the 3rd millennium BCE – in the era of the Cycladic and Minoan civilization in the Aegean, before the arrival of the Hellenes in Greece. The earliest known major civilization of Central America was the Olmecs (1500 – 400 BCE). However, there were pre-existing cultures as early as 2500 BCE that were gradually displaced. As the oldest civilization, it greatly influenced those that followed. Among these influences is what we consider to be their “black spot”: human sacrifice. The most characteristic artistic creations of the Olmecs are their sculptures of colossal heads, up to 3 meters high and weighing from 25 to 55 tons.

Mayan Kukulcan pyramid, Chichen Itza, in Yucatán, Mexico

The most outstanding and long-lasting civilization of the Western Hemisphere was developed by the Maya, noted for its most sophisticated writing system in pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, mathematics, calendar, astronomical system. They were excellent architects building pyramids, temples, and other elaborate edifices. Their culture reached the level of the most famous civilizations of antiquity. Their archaic period began before 2000 BCE, followed by the pre-classic period (2000 BCE – 250 CE), the classic (up to 1000 CE), and finally the post-classic period. They were also aware of the meaning of the number 0 (which… troubled the ancient Greeks), although they probably borrowed this knowledge from the Olmecs. The Maya should have had close relations with the Toltecs, as we can see from their mutual influence. The Toltecs (10th – 12th century CE) were the forerunners of the Aztecs (14th – 16th century). The latter considered the Toltecs as their spiritual ancestors and their culture as the epitome of civilization.

Urban core of Tikal or Yax Mutal, Guatemala, Maya, 8th century CE, reconstruction

● In conclusion, a fleeting glimpse at the “future”: Abelard, in the 12th century, was made to burn his Theologia himself. Later, he was judged as a heretic, since, among other things, he praised the pagan philosophers of classical antiquity. He was excommunicated by the pope, who ordered him to be perpetually silent, confined in a monastery, and his books to be burned. His pupil and colleague, Arnold of Brescia, refused to abjure his beliefs after a synod, where they were condemned, and went on to lead the Commune of Rome against the Vatican, but he was finally executed. The Church ordered the burning of all his writings, which was carried out so thoroughly than none of them survives. By the end of the 15th century, Savonarola ordered all the works of Ovid and also Boccaccio’s Decameron to be burned. In the 16th century, Servetus was burned in Geneva at the order of the city council, dominated by Calvin, because a remark he made in his translation of Ptolemy’s Geographia was considered heretic! Angelo Carletti’s theological work so infuriated Martin Luther that he had it publicly burned. In the 17th century, Luther’s German translation of the Bible was burned in parts of Germany controlled by the Catholics. In the 18th century, Voltaire’s works were burned several times in pre-revolutionary France. In 1821, Heinrich Heine, in his play, Almansor, referring to the burning of the Quran by the Spanish Inquisition, wrote: “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” It is the episode we’ve used as a starting point in these additional Chronicles, with the “burning of books and burying of scholars” in China. It goes without saying that “triumphal bonfires”, as “God-blessed work”, in a way, never stopped…⁽⁸⁾

Thousands of books smoulder in a huge Nazi bonfire during
a wave of book-burnings that spread throughout Germany

• ⁽⁸⁾ “Robert Drews described the Bronze Age collapse as ‘the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire’. Several people nostalgically referred to the cultural memories of the disaster as stories of a ‘lost golden age’, when ’civilization was wiped out’.” (See the conclusion of Chronicle 18).

Polish Catholic priests burn now (2020) books etc. they
consider “offensive”: the Inquisition moved to Poland!

That’s how we’ve described that catastrophe, the collapse of the Bronze Age; a description that perfectly fits the collapse of Antiquity. The Christians played the role of the Sea Peoples. If it was famine that triggered those dramatic events, what led to “The Triumph of Cretinism”? Hunger and thirst for power? Avarice? Christianism again found itself at the antipode of humanism.

Christianism, Slavery and Racism

THE SLAVERY CONVENTION (to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery), an initiative of the League of Nations in 1926, was followed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, explicitly banning slavery. The Christian Church? Too little, too late. Only in 1965, the Second Vatican Council declared without qualification that slavery was an “infamy” that dishonoured the Creator and was a poison in society. And what about the Orthodox Church? Or the other Churches?

The Bible (Old and New Testament) endorses slavery. Its prohibitions refer to all other matters but human enslavement (see previous Chronicle). In the Old Testament, God (i.e. the man who speaks in his name) not only approves the practice, but also lays down rules for buyers and sellers (ItalicusExodus) – as there was no… Ministry of Commerce at that time! And not only that: men are at liberty to sell even… their own daughters (Exodus)! The New Testament instructs slaves to accept their position with humility (Paul’s Ephesians), and also to please their masters in everything [?!] (Titus, cf. Colossians). But in case the slave owners are Christians, the slaves are commanded to serve them better than other masters, “so that the name of God and the teaching may not be defamed” [!] (Timothy). Jesus himself mentioned slavery more than once, but never with the slightest hint of criticism of it. He even glorified the master-slave relationship as a model of the relationship between God and humans – the “slaves of God” (Matthew). “Saint” Augustine’s view that slavery was ordained by God as a punishment for sin was endorsed by the Church. “Slavery among men is natural,” proclaimed another “saint”, Thomas Aquinas, “for some are naturally slaves according to the Philosopher” (Aristotle). A Church Council taking place at Gangra, in Asia Minor, in 362, excommunicated anyone who encouraged a slave to despise his master, or to withdraw from his service. This would in time be incorporated into Church Law, where it would remain until the 20th century.

Saul of Tarsos, the trouble-maker, in two paintings on the same topic – book-burning –
and by the same painter – Eustache Le Sueur: The Preaching of St. Paul at Ephesus (1649).
He set an example that the Nazis and other fascists followed later on with enthusiasm…

The Third Lateran Council in 1179 imposed slavery on anyone who opposed the papacy. The citizens of Venice were condemned to slavery three times: in 1309, 1482, and 1506. The same thing would happen to the whole of England in 1508. Soon the Church would become the largest slave owner in the Roman Empire.⁽⁹⁾ The popes and bishops owned slaves. Pope Innocent VIII accepted the gifts of large numbers of slaves from the royal couple of Spain: the exceptionally devout Isabella sent him numerous slaves from Málaga, in 1487. Ferdinand, the next year, so as not to lag behind, sent him 100 Black Moorish slaves, whom he then distributed to various cardinals and “nobles”. The Spanish Inquisition consisted of fanatics in everything – even in the enslavement of human beings. One single inquisitor, the notorious Torquemada, had 97,371 people condemned to slavery! In 1493 (the year after Columbus “discovered” the Americas), pope Alexander VI made explicit the rights of Catholics there. He authorized the king of Spain to enslave non-Christians of the Americas at war with Catholic powers – or, in other words, anyone who resisted the invasion and seizure of his land. Pope Paul III confirmed in 1548 that all Christian men and all members of the clergy had the right to own slaves. Papal galleys went on slave-hunting expeditions along the coast of Africa! “Sir” John Hawkins, the most notorious, but very “pious”, English slave trader, named his slave ships Angel, Jesus and Grace of God…

• ⁽⁹⁾ It had been common for polytheists, Greeks and Romans, to emancipate their slaves. But the emancipation of the Church’s slaves was declared impossible, on the grounds that these slaves were owned not by the clergy, but by… God himself; therefore only the slave owner could legally dispose of his… “goods”.

The Slave Trade (Slaves on the West Coast of Africa), by François-Auguste Biard (ca 1833)

Until the discovery of America, the slaves were mainly prisoners of war, debtors, or victims of religious persecution. However, black African enslavement did not result from wars, financial indebtedness, or religious prejudice. The reason was the need for labour in the Americas, after the failed effort to enslave the Native Americans. West Africans had agricultural knowledge and skills. They also had a relative immunity against malaria adapted from centuries of living in the tropics that the European indentured servants did not. These were the reasons for the African Holocaust. The brutal system of slavery and the subjugation of millions of people had to be justified with an ideology. After Christianism, this ideology was racism. Racists declared (also very “piously”) that the “white race” had been “chosen” to rule the earth “in God’s name”.

In conclusion…

THESE EXTRA “CHRONICLES WITHIN THE CRONICLES”, I remind you, had Ábdera of Andalusia as a starting point, during the revival of an ancient Periplus of Iberia in Chronicle 22. We then voyaged to Ábdera of Thrace and met its most celebrated citizen, Democritus. Plato’s antipathy towards the Atomist philosopher, asking his students to destroy all Democritean works they could find, in combination with the fact that no such works have survived, were more than a challenge for a “Periplus in the Archipelagos”, sailing on seas the “Big Brothers” erased helter-skelter from the maps. Oceans of abuses are hidden there. I’ve just gleaned some information on the initial period (until the time the first caravels crossed the Atlantic), limiting myself to cases of intentional crimes that came to my attention. A study in depth – I’m sure – would reveal the Prince of Darkness himself…

What conclusions can we draw? A “naïve” person would expect to find the first traces of the idea of human rights in religions, especially the monotheistic ones, which should uphold the “sanctity of human existence”. In fact, the history of human rights finds such traces in some legal codes of antiquity (Mesopotamia, Persia, India, Hellas, Rome), not in the Bible, skipping Judaism and Christianism. The reason is that those who cared about such rights were the philosophers and not the prophets (with the exception of Muhammad due to special conditions). The kings who wanted to conquer the world, the priests who wanted to conquer the mind, infringed as a rule on human rights. I guess that if the Declaration of Human Rights and Freedom of Religion had been adopted and observed since the dawn of the Common Era (AD), the only monotheists in the world nowadays might have been the Jews…

Arsons of Libraries

BOOKS ARE DEADLY ENEMIES OF “BIG BROTHERS”. ARSONS OF LIBRARIES are a form of cultural genocide or cleansing, a purge:

● Xianyang Palace and State Archives (China, 206 BCE): the palace was burned during Xiang Yu’s rebellion, triggered by the “burning of books and burying of scholars”.
● Library of Alexandria (Egypt, 48 BCE, 272 CE, etc.): by Julius Caesar, Aurelian, et al: multiple arsons by multiple perpetrators – but not intentional arsonists…
● Library of Antioch (Syria, 364): by Jovian, because Julian the “Apostate” had heavily stocked it with plenty of new… “apostate” volumes!
● Library of the Serapeum, with what was left from the Library of Alexandria (Egypt, 391): the building was systematically looted, burned, and razed to the ground, by Theophilus, on orders by Theodosius.
● Library of Córdoba (Andalusia, 976): by Almanzor, the de facto ruler of Al-Andalus, and religious scholars; in a surge of “ultra-orthodoxy”, they burned books of “ancient science”.
● Library of Ray (Tehran, Iran, 1029): by Mahmud of Ghazna, because its books were deemed as “heretical”.

Shah Mosque, Isfahan, by Pascal Coste visiting Persia in 1841

● Library of Avicenna (Isfahan, Iran, 1034): by Mas’ud of Ghazna, conquering the city.
● Library of Tripoli (Lebanon, 1109): by Baldwin’s Crusaders and mercenaries, looting and burning part of the city.
● Library of Ghazna (Afghanistan, 1151): by Ala al-Din Husayn, sacking and burning the city for seven days, destroying libraries and palaces.
● Library of Nishapur (Iran, 1154): by Oghuz Turks, who sacked and burned libraries, destroying partially the city.
● Nalanda (India, 1193): by Bakhtiyar Khalji, who sacked the University complex, the most renowned foundation of Buddhist knowledge at the time. The destruction is a milestone in the decline of Buddhism in India.
● Imperial Library of Constantinople (Byzantine Empire, 1204): by Crusaders (Franks and Venetians) who destroyed it, burning and selling its books.

Great palace, Constantinople, peristylium, ca 5th-6th century

● Library of Alamut Castle (Iran, 1256): by pro-Christian Mongols, who captured the castle and destroyed the library.
● House of Wisdom (Baghdad, Iraq, 1258): also by Mongols during the city’s siege.
● Libraries of Constantinople (Byzantine Empire, 1453): by Ottoman Turks, after the second fall of the city, when hundreds of thousands of manuscripts were removed, destroyed, or sold from the libraries.
● Madrasah Library (Granada, Andalusia, 1499): by Cardinal Cisneros, ransacking it and ordering its books be burned in a central square.
● Bibliotheca Corviniana (Buda, Hungary, 1526): by Ottoman Turks after the Battle of Mohács.
● Monastic libraries (England, 1530s): by Henry VIII, when they were destroyed or dispersed, following the dissolution of the monasteries.
● Cornish Colleges (Cornwall, England, 1548): by Henry’s successor, Edward VI. The smashing and looting of the colleges at Glasney and Crantock brought an end to the scholarship which had helped to sustain the Cornish language and cultural identity.

The Mayan Codices on fire

● Maya codices (Yucatán, Mexico, 1562): there was no Itzcoatl among the Maya with the “bright” idea to burn their codices. The arsonist was found in the face of bishop and conquistador Diego de Landa, a cruel, fanatical priest, as described by historians, who led a violent campaign against “idolatry”, burning almost all Mayan manuscripts (useful in deciphering Mayan script, knowledge of Maya religion and civilization, or the history of the American continent): “We found a large number of books in these characters [hieroglyphs, he said], and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they [the Maya] regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction”… Only three extant codices are widely considered unquestionably authentic.

Aztec Calendar

The Arsons of Libraries Chronicle stops here. Not because there were no more arsons. The list, unfortunately, is too incomplete and never-ending. But this was our time frame: until the time the first caravels started crossing the Atlantic. And instead of transporting products and ideas, they used to carry murderers, spoils, and slaves…

As regards these two Chronicles, The Genocide of the Hellenes and The Triumph of Cretinism, they are dedicated to that kid, with his questions, on the beach of Theotokos, at the Sepias cape, in southeastern Pelion, asking: “Why, dad, have they built the chapel on ancient ruins?”

Why then? Because, in a way, the Genocide of the Hellenes never stopped… Shall we be able some day to estimate the hecatombs of the victims?

Demographic Decline of the Hellenes Due to the Genocide, as well

IN 500 BCE, c. 100 million people lived in Asia, Europe and Africa. The Hellenes around the Aegean numbered 3 million in the 5th century. In the 4th century, adding the colonists, as well, they approached 8-10 million. This means they represented 5-10% of the total – without counting those who were Hellenized during the Hellenistic period. Now, all Greeks, plus expatriates, reach 16 million, while the world’s population has risen dramatically to 7.7 billion. This, of course, means they represent just a very small percentage of only 0.21%.

• >> Chronicle 25. “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST!”
• << Chronicle 23. THE GENOCIDE OF THE HELLENES

Next Chronicle 25. “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST!” ● Colonization ● Tartessos: the Apple of Discord ● Impact of Persian Expansion ● Phoenicians and Punics ● Tartessos and Carthage Ruined ● Macedonia and Rome

The Alexandrian Library in its heyday…

ARCHiPELAGOS • VIII. IN TIMES OF INDIGENCE

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages

 

VIII. IN TIMES OF INDIGENCE

.

● Without Gods ● We ● Spell
● The Aegean Islands ● The Ruin of Hellas
● We Talk About Shadows (Democracy)
● A Beginning

.

/PORTUGUÊS/ ARCHiPELAGOS • VIII. EM TEMPO DE INDIGÊNCIA

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • VIII. ΣΤΗΝ ΕΠΟΧΗ ΤΗΣ ΕΝΔΕΙΑΣ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

Hélia Correia: The Third Misery & Indignation (excerpts)

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

17. Without Gods

– Hélia Correia / Amélia Muge
• Arranged by A. Muge, António José Martins, Michales Loukovikas

What’s the use, […] what is the purpose
Of a poet in times of such indigence?

[…] without gods, without even
Feeling their absence, we are born,
And unable to remember, draining,
Sucking everything, even that which do not
Serve us as aliment, whatever circulates
In the bowels of the earth, its own lymph,
The one that the Argonauts even saw
Exuding, like blood, from rocks and stones
When everything sang, got injured and wounded.

• Voice: A. Muge / Vocals: Maria Monda, A. Muge • D. Bass: António Quintino
Percussion: José Salgueiro / Violin: Kyriakos Gouventas

Argo, by Konstantinos Volanakis

● Hélia Correia (born 1949): a Portuguese novelist, playwright, and poet. She reinterpreted Hellenic myths from the point of view of female heroines, such as Antigone, Helen, and Medea. The sequence In Times of Indigence is mainly based on her acclaimed poem A Terceira Miséria (2012), a tribute to Greece, following in Friedrich Hölderlin’s footsteps. She was awarded the Camões Prize, the most prestigious literary distinction in the Lusophone world, which she dedicated to Hellas, where poetry comes from, without which we would be nothing and have nothing, as she said, concluding her speech with the exclamation Long live Greece! Therefore it’s a double pity that no one is interested in publishing The Third Misery in Greece. Well, this is a fourth misery on our part! ● Argonauts: heroes in Hellenic mythology who, in the years before the Trojan War, around 1300 BCE, accompanied Jason to Colchis, on the Black Sea coast, in present-day Abkhazia and western Georgia, in his quest to find the Golden Fleece. The term comes from their ship, Argo, named after its builder, Argus. Thus Argonauts literally means Argo sailors. ● While sailing by eastern Phrygia, they encountered stormy weather and, advised by a prophet, they climbed Mount Dindymon, sacred to the mountain mother, Cybele, whom the Hellenes identified with Rhea. There they offered sacrifices to the Dindymene mother and, commanded by Orpheus, they danced in full armour and clashed with their swords on their shields… Hence from that time forward the Phrygians propitiate Rhea with the rhombus and the drum. And the goddess responded: the trees shed fruit, the earth put forth flowers, and wild animals came up wagging their tails. And she caused yet another marvel; for hitherto there was no flow of water on Dindymon, but then an unceasing stream gushed forth from the peak, and the dwellers around called that stream Spring of Jason. And then they made a feast in honour of the goddess on the Mount of Bears, singing the praises of Rhea most venerable; at dawn the winds had ceased and they rowed away from the island. (Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica)

18. We

– Hélia Correia / Michales Loukovikas
• Arranged by M. Loukovikas

We, the abandoned ones, those who do not
Even perceive in what way to placate
And whom,
We, the dumbfounded,
Fraternized with all the landless, we,
The destined for a bleak starvation,
Barbarians with our feet in the black tar,
Heavy drinkers of petroleum, how can it be that

Once more the square,
The Agora, unites us?

• Voice: Amélia Muge / Vocals: Maria Monda, A. Muge • D. Bass: António Quintino
Guitar: Dimitris Mystakidis / Percussion: José Salgueiro / Piano: Filipe Raposo

● Agora: a central spot in ancient Hellenic poleis. Literally it means gathering place, assembly. The agora was the centre of political, artistic, spiritual and athletic life of the city. Later, it also served as an economic centre, as a marketplace, where merchants kept stalls or shops to sell their goods. This attracted artisans who built workshops nearby. From this twin function of the agora as a political and commercial space came the two Greek verbs ἀγορεύω, agoreúō, I speak in public and ἀγοράζω, agorázō, I shop, I buy.

An imaginary depiction of the Agora of ancient Athens at the time of Pericles

19. Spell

– Hélia Correia / Amélia Muge
• Arranged by António José Martins, Filipe Raposo

All those – not in existence
Those who have left us terrified, alone,
With no proper tools and devices,
Without thinking,
Without these temperamental gods
Who liked to take sides during the battles.

Being transformed into pigs, by a spell,
Due to malevolence,
Oh, yes, exactly
Just like in the Odyssey,
We do not know
– and the Greeks cannot remember –
What can we do so as to
Break the spell?

Circe Invidiosa, by John William Waterhouse

Experiments
– Amélia Muge

The ear of a pig
Plus a cat’s paw
The eye of a mouse
A crooked branch
Half of the beak of a skylark

Rosemary dried
A pomegranate
A lame’s nail
The leg of a frog
Grandma’s tongue,
preferably twisted

A drop of spit
A cactus peak
And a fish scale
A pussy’s fur
Wings of a fly bound in a bundle

An arm and a leg
A rubber check
A coin with a hole
The belch of a banker
An entire year’s sweat

• Voice, vocal effects, recitation: A. Muge
• Percussion: José Salgueiro, A.J. Martins
Synthesizers: F. Raposo

● Odyssey: see Homer in ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. IMAGINARY ISLANDS.

●

20. The Aegean Islands

– Hélia Correia / Manos Achalinotópoulos, Amélia Muge
– A free improvisation
by Harris Lambrakis, M. Achalinotópoulos, A. Muge, Kyriakos Gouventas
• Arranged by Michales Loukovikas

[…] Only later […]
He who did not know how to be docile […]
Became conscious of the howl that was emitted
From all the islands, with their shorelines
And their deserted forests. […]

[…] Yes, that was
The initial misery, the desertion of
The gods. The second one, their death,
That on Pan’s death was announced
With the lament of the forests, the mournful
Clamour of the Aegean Islands. […]

What’s the use, […] what is the purpose
Of a poet in times of such indigence?

• Recitation: H. Correia / Voice: A. Muge / Vocal impros: M. Achalinotópoulos, A. Muge
• Instrumental impros: H. Lambrakis, ney; M. Achalinotópoulos, clarino; K. Gouventas, violin
Drones: K. Gouventas, viola; António Quintino, d. bass; Catarina Anacleto, cello

Pan and Syrinx, by Jean François de Troy.

● Aegean Islands: see ARCHiPELAGOS • I. THE ARCHIPELAGO REVISITED. ● Pan: the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, mountains, and pastoral music, connected to fertility and spring. He had the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, just like a satyr. The Greeks also considered him to be the god of theatrical criticism. His name originates from the Greek verb πάειν, páein (to pasture); the word panic is derived from his name, due to the sudden fear the people felt in the mountains hearing strange animal sounds. Syrinx, a nymph known for her chastity, was also panicked when she was chased after by Pan. In order to escape, she was transformed into hollow water reeds that made a haunting sound when the god’s frustrated breath blew across them. He cut the reeds to fashion the first set of pan pipes, which are also known as syrinx. Pan became a significant figure in the Romantic movement in the 18th and 19th centuries, and also in the Neopagan movement of the 20th-century.

●

21. The Ruin of Hellas

– Hélia Correia / Michales Loukovikas
• Arranged by M. Loukovikas

We, the atheists, we, the monotheists,
We, anyone reducing sheer beauty
Down to petty chores, we, the poor but
Well-adorned, the poor but feeling cozy,
Who are always willing to delude ourselves
Amazed while gazing upwards, at the towers,
Supposing that inside we could reside,
Glory of eagles with no eagles there,
We suffer, yes, from the one and same indigence,
From the ruin of Hellas.

● Atheism: the absence of belief in the existence of deities, the rejection of belief that any deities exist. It is contrasted with theism, which is the belief that at least one deity exists. The etymological root for the word originated before the 5th century BCE from the Greek ἄθεος (atheos), meaning without god(s). The actual term atheism emerged in the 16th century. ● Monotheism: the belief in the existence of only one god that created the world, where he interferes and is all-powerful. A distinction may be made between exclusive monotheism, and both inclusive or panentheistic monotheism which, while recognizing various distinct gods, postulate some underlying unity. Monotheism is distinguished from henotheism, a religious system in which the believer worships one god without denying that others may worship different gods with equal validity, and monolatrism, the recognition of the existence of many gods but with the consistent worship of only one deity.

• Voice: Amélia Muge / Vocals: Maria Monda, A. Muge • Clarino: Manos Achalinotópoulos
D. Bass: António Quintino / Guitar: Dimitris Mystakidis / Ney: Harris Lambrakis
Percussion: José Salgueiro / Piano: Filipe Raposo / Violin: Kyriakos Gouventas

22. We Talk About Shadows (Democracy)

– Hélia Correia / Ludwig van Beethoven
• Adapted/Arranged by Michales Loukovikas

The Third Symphony (Eroica), Second Movement, first part
Marcia funebre, Adagio assai, Sotto voce (1804)

Yes, we talk about shadows. Thinking twice,
We did burn every thing: Alexandria,
The sages and the women, […]
The noble heart. We have on our shoulders
The apparatus of the destroyers, […]:
That kind of arrogance
Out of which the Occident has been lost.

The third misery is this one, […].
That of those who just don’t listen nor ask questions.
[…] don’t remember. And, contrary
To the exalted Pericles, they turn to
Be one with […] those who surrender,
Those who shall mix themselves like a liquid
Within a liquid mass, the form is lost,
The statue is turned into dust.

All the squares
Seem like agoras of yore, astounded
By the concentration of organisms,
By the use of the word, the passionate
And fervent word of democracy […]

Monument to Beethoven, by Francesco Jerace (1895)

• Voice: Amélia Muge / Vocals: Maria Monda, A. Muge, Rui Vaz, José Manuel David, Pedro Casaes
• Cello: Catarina Anacleto / Clarinet: Kosmás Papadópoulos / D. Bass: António Quintino
Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Percussion: José Salgueiro / Piano: Filipe Raposo
Violin, Viola: Kyriakos Gouventas

● Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827): a German composer and pianist, a crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music. He remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers. ● His Third Symphony, a large-scale composition completed in early 1804, is one of his most celebrated works. Initially he dedicated it to (Napoleon) Buonaparte (its original title), who he believed embodied the democratic and anti-monarchical ideals of the French Revolution. He tore off the dedication when he learned that Napoleon had declared himself Emperor. The score was published in 1806 under the Italian title Sinfonia Eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grande Uomo (Heroic Symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great Man). When informed of Napoleon’s death (1821), Beethoven said, I wrote the music for this sad event 17 years ago, referring to the second movement, Marcia funebre, funeral march; Adagio assai, very slow; Sotto voce, low voice: intentionally lowering the volume of one’s voice for emphasis, giving the impression of uttering a truth which may surprise, shock, or offend. In music, it is a dramatic lowering of the volume, vocal or instrumental – not necessarily pianissimo, but definitely a hushed tonal quality.

Hypatia, by Charles William Mitchell (1885)

● Alexandria: founded circa 331 BCE by Alexander the Great, it became an important centre of the Hellenistic civilization. It was famous for its Lighthouse (Pharos), one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and its Great Library, the largest in antiquity, which was burned repeatedly by Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs. Its demise has become a symbol of knowledge and culture destroyed. It was part of a larger research institution, the Musaeum, where many of the most famous thinkers of the ancient world studied: Archimedes, Aristarchus, Ctesibius, Eratosthenes, Euclid, Hero, Hipparchus… Most of the books were kept as papyrus scrolls. Estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 scrolls at its height. After the main library was destroyed, scholars used a daughter library in a temple, the Serapeum, located in another part of the city. ● In 391 CE the Serapeum and the remnants of the Great Library were looted and burned by army troops and Christian fanatics, at the decrees of the Emperor Theodosius and Pope Theophilus. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon described Theophilus as the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood. ● The Great Terror in Alexandria climaxed in 415 with the brutal murder of the philosopher, mathematician and astronomer Hypatia, instigated by Cyril, Theophilus’ nephew and successor, counted among the Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and canonized as a Saint! In his Historia Ecclesiastica, Socrates of Constantinople, a contemporary Christian historiographer, testified that Cyril agitated a mob of 500 fanatic monks possessed “by a fierce and bigoted zeal [… They] waylaid [Hypatia] returning home and, dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum [Cyril’s headquarters], where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with ostraka [potsherds]. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.”

Cleisthenes

● Democracy (δημοκρατία, rule of the people) was conceived in classical Greece as a system of government where the citizens exercised power directly, not through representatives. The first democracy in the world was established in Athens in 508 BCE under Cleisthenes as a direct, participatory system, in which the citizens voted themselves on legislation and executive bills, while those selected for office served collectively. The selection was done mostly by lot, not election, because the latter favours the rich, noble, famous, educated, eloquent, and handsome. Allotment was regarded as the most democratic means to prevent the corrupt purchase of votes and give citizens a unique form of political equality. In this way more and more citizens were engaged in politics, ruling and being ruled in turn, as Aristotle wrote. Elected rather than chosen by lot (therefore coming from the higher classes) were the ten generals, due to their necessary expertise in matters of politics and war, and also those who handled large sums of money: any embezzlement could be recovered from their estates. The contempt the first democrats felt for those who did not participate in politics is obvious in the word idiot, from the Greek ἰδιώτης, i.e. a private person, someone who is not actively participating in politics. We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business, Pericles declared; we say that he has no business here at all. ● Pericles (c. 495 – 429 BCE): a prominent, influential statesman, orator and general, between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, whose name is connected with the Golden Age of Athens.

Pericles’ Funeral Oration, by Philipp Foltz (1852)

23. A Beginning

– Hélia Correia / Amélia Muge
• Arranged by António José Martins, Filipe Raposo

What are the arms at our disposal, if not these
We find inside the body: our own thinking,
The idea of polis, but redeemed
From a great abuse, the very notion of home and
Of hospitality, too, and of commotion
From which we see the rise of the poem, from which
We’ll see the rise of the collection of our deeds
And misdeeds as humans, a beginning.

• Voice: A. Muge / Vocals: Maria Monda • Cello: Catarina Anacleto / D. Bass: António Quintino
Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Percussion: José Salgueiro / Piano: F. Raposo / Violin, Viola: Kyriakos Gouventas

● Polis literally means city in Greek, but referring mainly to the body of its citizens rather than its area; it can also mean citizenship. The Hellenic term that specifically means the totality of urban buildings and spaces is ἄστυ (ásty). Before the Battle of Salamis e.g., the Persians managed to occupy the ásty of Athens, but not the polis, as the citizens boarded the ships of the Athenian fleet and left. In modern historiography, polis is used to indicate a Greek city-state, though this term is inadequate. The Greek poleis were not like the Phoenician city-states, which were ruled by a king or a small oligarchy, with their inhabitants being mere subjects. Thus the term polis came to signify state: politeia in Hellenic means city, but also state, republic, polity, government, governance, etc. while politeuma means regime. Not to mention politics…

●

The Library of Alexandria during its heyday, its acme

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • IX. NOSTALGIA AND NOSTOS
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. IMAGINARY ISLANDS

Chronicle 14. MUSIC MADE OF BODY AND SOUL

Chronicle 14. MUSIC MADE OF BODY AND SOUL

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 14. ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗ ΨΥΧῌ ΤΕ ΚΑΙ ΣΩΜΑΤΙ

Venus of Brassempouy: mammoth ivory figurine, one of the oldest human face representations (23.000 BCE)

● Man: a Musical Being ● Nature, Music
and Language ● Singing Neanderthals ●
Baby Talk ● Talent ● Art of Soul vs. Art of
Beauty ● Ecstasy and Catharsis ● Ritual
Music and Dance ● Ethos of Music

Michales Loukovikas

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but
the one most responsive to change”.
(Charles Darwin)

MAN IS BY NATURE A MUSICAL BEING; meaning that song, i.e. music and lyrics combined, together with movement, or dance, has always been a fundamental human characteristic, serving his various needs. Besides, music, speech, and dance, a “Holy Trinity” according to the poet Kostēs Palamās, show how close the relationship between sound, body and soul is.

Music, speech, dance: a “Holy Trinity” (Kōstēs Palamās)

Quite strange is that the ancients, even the primitives, felt the impact of musical sound onto their bodies much more intensely than modern humans. Obviously, Christianism and Occidental mentality are largely responsible for the enormous degradation of our senses. Thus experts of many disciplines are now required to work together in order to fully comprehend this subject in depth.

Hunting scenes in a Lascaux cave painting

Natural sounds played a key role in the genesis of music: the sounds of Nature constituted the raw “materials” that gradually began to take shape. According to Darwin, a primary stimulus was animal cries, especially during breeding season, when an orgasm of sounds and movements prevailed, so rich and varied that man inevitably imitated, responding to that exquisite call of Nature’s Choir. Yet, man, as a species of the animal kingdom, had congenitally his own “repertoire”, which he gradually enriched – initially by imitation, and later by inspiration.

The emergence of art was directly linked to elementary manifestations of magic, even before the latter was systematized as a form of religion. Cave paintings, of a much later period compared to music, are examples of utilitarian art: men tried to exorcise all the animals they depicted so as to have plenty of game, or propitiate their spirits, if they were awe-inspiring beasts, and gain their powers. That is why the cave paintings are usually found not in the “living rooms” of the caves, but deep inside, in the “sanctuaries”, where, according to Iégor Reznikoff, the areas are most resonant: it seems they were their “icons”…

Spirit propitiation had broader applications, especially to natural phenomena that seemed supernatural, or during work time to coordinate movements, or even to master the “spirit” of the stone or wood that man wished to turn into a tool. Music played a key role in such cases though it was lost in the mist of time. Today, millennia later, we can comfortably admire the cavemen’s performances in visual arts. But who has ever listened to their songs?

The question above is rather rhetoric. Still, there’s another one that is crucial to be answered:

What is music? What’s its origin?

MUSIC IS FOUND EVERYWHERE, in every culture or civilization, even the most isolated tribes: it is a feature of the human species – perhaps of other species, as well. Moreover, music is influenced by all aspects of a culture or civilization, including socio-economic organization, lifestyle, climate, technology… Emotions and ideas expressed through music, the circumstances in which it is played, the attitudes toward musicians and composers – all these vary according to space and time.

Indian Ghost Dance in eastern California: the figures form a circle dance.

As we have said, music had probably its origin in Nature’s sounds and rhythms. Men most likely imitated these phenomena using similar patterns with repetition and tonality. There are musicians who deliberately imitate natural sounds: folk fiddlers trill like birds, while Beethoven’s “Pastoral” 6th Symphony recreates the soundscape of a thunderstorm. Onomatopoeia is at times related to shamanistic beliefs or practices.⁽¹⁾ It also serves entertainment and edutainment, or practical purposes (such as lure of animals in hunt).

• ⁽¹⁾ A shaman is a person regarded as having access to the “world of spirits”, entering into a trance state (very different from normal waking consciousness), and acting as a diviner or healer.

● Hugo Riemann, a theorist and composer, in his Catechism of Musical Aesthetics (How do we listen to music?, 1890), [Katechismus der Musik-Ästhetik (Wie hören wir Musik?)], thinks that the song of birds approaches true music and cannot be treated separately from human song, since both are the expressions of a single sensibility; while Louis Lucas, in his New Acoustics (Acoustique Nouvelle, 1840), discusses (what he calls) excellence of the enharmonic genus, and says: “It makes its first appearance naturally, as an imitation of bird song, of animal calls, and of the endless range of sounds made by material things.” Manuel de Falla was greatly influenced by Lucas and his Acoustics in his mature compositions.

Magdalenian horse (15.000-10.000 BCE):
a game, long before it was tamed.

If the imitation of a bird song is considered music, then the bird song itself may also be regarded as music! Indeed, according to a study of zoomusicology,⁽²⁾ bird songs are based on musical principles: those of repetition and transformation. It’s not only birds: whales and dolphins have also exceptional vocal capabilities, while monkeys are unrivaled on drums and percussion as they beat hollow logs, most probably in order to demarcate their territories, creating rhythmic patterns in which some experts detect elements of “dialogue”, “call and response”.

• ⁽²⁾ Zoomusicology is the study of “music” made by non-human animals, or rather the musical aspects of sounds produced or received by them, as a means of their communication. It is described as the “aesthetic use of sound communication among animals.”

In any case, everything depends on our definition of music – that is, whether a “musician” has the intention to stir up the emotions through his sounds, which is probably linked to his ability to reflect about time (past and future). Men became “artists” 130 thousand years ago (though this timeframe is debatable) creating jewelry, other artifacts, and cave paintings, while they started burying their dead with rituals. It was a form of a “cultural revolution”. If we assume that all those new forms of behaviour suggested the emergence of consciousness, then music – as we know it – appeared in the same timeframe. Still, this is a rather narrow conception of music. As it usually happens in Africa until now, in prehistory too the concept of music was broader, including dance and worship. And not only: at that time it also served communication among the members of a group of people helping to coordinate action and strengthen their bonds. Thus its role was crucial to their survival.

Music evokes strong emotions and opens paths to other states of awareness. In general terms, strong emotions are associated with evolution (reproduction and survival). Darwin pointed out the importance of music to sexual selection.⁽³⁾ Both singing and dancing require large energy reserves. Thus a singer or dancer, like a peacock displaying its feathers, is more likely to attract a mate to date. There is a counterargument though: in most species using singing in the selection of mates, it is the female that chooses and the male that sings – as a rule alone. In the human species, nevertheless, music is mostly a team sport where everyone is involved. Man is the only mammal having mixed choirs (with men, women and children). Something similar is found only in certain species of Australian and African songbirds with males and females singing in chorus.

Charles Darwin, by George Richmond

• ⁽³⁾ “When we treat of sexual selection we shall see that primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing, as do some of the gibbon-apes at the present day; and we may conclude from a widely-spread analogy, that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes, – would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph, – and would have served as a challenge to rivals. It is, therefore, probable that the imitation of musical cries by articulate sounds may have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.” (Darwin, The Descent of Man)

The first musical “instrument” was obviously the voice of man who, even before he could master speech, had a vast range of expressive sounds: imitating natural sounds, plus singing, humming, whistling (a gamut of styles), shouting, crying, laughing, coughing, yawning, or producing various sounds through the mouth. (See Darwin’s The Origin of Species on music and speech). Add motion to all of these sounds: not only dance, but also grimaces, gestures and movements of individual body parts (head, arms and legs). In like manner, the first percussion “instruments” were hand claps, finger snaps, stones, wood and whatever could be used to accentuate rhythm. Man-made instruments would appear much later when humans started making tools.

By the way, let me make clear that talking about “humans”, I refer, in fact, to the Hominini. The oldest tools found in Tanzania were made 2.6 million years ago, i.e. before the emergence of the various human species (Homo). We suppose that the first tools were made by Australopithecus, who then transmitted this knowledge to Homo habilis. Our ancestors proceeded to the next phase of tool-making 1.7 million years ago with Homo erectus. (See the Chronicle 3, where this theory is disputed). I maintain, therefore, that sound preceded speech and that music, song, a capella (with no instrumental accompaniment), emerged together with voice as a characteristic of some Hominini, or even Hominids. Besides, we know for sure that music was not born with modern humans (Homo sapiens) – who, as they say, were musically not as talented as the Neanderthals!

The Singing Neanderthals, according to Steven Mithen.
In the beginning was the sound: music precedes speech.

The oldest musical instrument: the Divje Babe flute (Slovenia) possibly made by the Neanderthals

In his study The Singing Neanderthals / The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen, an archaeologist and professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading in England, expands mainly two ideas: a) the parallel development of what modern man calls music and language, and b) his original idea that the Neanderthals had a peculiar proto-music/language: it was holistic (not composed of segmented elements), manipulative (influencing emotions and hence behaviour of oneself and others), multimodal (using both sound and movement), musical (temporally controlled, rhythmic, and melodic), and mimetic (utilizing sound symbolism and gesture) – i.e. “a pre-linguistic musical mode of thought and action.” That is why, as Manuel de Falla and Federico García Lorca said, “many suppose that chanting is the earliest form of language”, or that song is older than speech. Prosody (“melos of speech”, according to Aristoxenus), was the “melody” produced during ancient Hellenic speech, which was musical, not dynamic as it is now (see Chronicle 6, footnote 6, and Chronicle 12, footnote 7).

Music as the Mother of Speech

● Music (singing) as the Mother of Speech (language) is an idea shared by Darwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt.⁽⁴⁾ We get an idea when we examine the pronunciation in several languages. Closer to the original source are tonal languages, such as Chinese, where each syllable is uttered with a different note or pitch. Then it’s the pitch accent languages, such as ancient Hellenic, where only the stressed syllable is uttered at a higher note-pitch. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the interval between the accented and non-accented syllables reached to an anything but negligible fifth interval (e.g. E-B, see Chronicle 12). Additionally, there are dynamic languages such as modern Greek with the stress given through an increased volume of the voice, not a higher pitch. The difference with ancient Hellenic is obvious in poetry where the accents had no effect on the poetic metres, as they would if the stress were dynamic. The poetic rhythm was musical, prosodic (alternating long and short vowels), and not dynamic. Poetry was musical, having melos (the melody of pitch accent) and rhythm (with long and short movements).

• ⁽⁴⁾ Except Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, Darwin, Falla and Lorca, many other authors have been led to suppose that word and song had once been the same thing – of course, after the word was germinated by the song.

An aggressive Neanderthal woman is rather misleading since, according to National Geographic, the genes linked to modern man’s aggressive behaviour were probably absent in the Neanderthal DNA. This may explain their disappearance…

In her review on this book, Ellen Dissanayake, of the University of Washington in Seattle, initially lists the vast ocean of knowledge such a study like Mithen’s requires: evolutionary theory; human evolution (social lifestyle, environment); palaeoarchaeology (linguistic and musical abilities and their development); anatomy (ear, vocal tract, brain and musical capacities); neurobiology (brain chemistry, musical cognition and emotion, neuroanatomy of music); origin and evolution of language (similarities and differences with music, semantics, syntax, prosody); music-like communication systems in some other animals (non-human primates, whales, birds, etc.) and their relevance to human communication; music psychology and linguistic behaviour in children; ethnomusicology; the art and practice of music; and the findings of music therapy and the psychology of musical emotion. I can also mention biomusicology or evolutionary musicology.

“Singing Neanderthals”, according to Mithen, had a vocal tract and respiratory control that could have enabled speech, but perhaps they lacked the neural network that was necessary for language. This means that in the beginning was the sound: music preceded speech. Moreover, pre-sapiens hominids, such as the Neanderthals, perhaps lacked metaphorical thought – the ability to have in mind at the same time information from several different cognitive domains. Symbolic artifacts have not yet been found in their dwelling sites, indicating absence of symbolic thought and hence symbolic utterance: spoken language. But the harsh realities and challenges faced in such a hostile environment during the Ice Age required complex emotional communication and cooperation. Therefore, they developed a “music-like communication system that was more complex and more sophisticated than that found in any of the previous species of Homo”. Mithen emphasizes the importance of “emotional intelligence” – the ability to express one’s feelings with face, voice, and body, and decode the emotional signals of others.

It’s impressive that singing was preferable to talking. Why were the symbols of spoken words less reliable than an emotional melody? What were the pros and cons of language?

What is language? What’s its origin?

Sleeping antelope, Sahara, southern Algeria

WE READ THE ABOVE QUESTIONS at the gate of a Congress Palace, the venue of a thought-provoking international symposium. Intrigued by this notice, we go inside and there we hear everyone disagreeing with everyone else! But still, there is a recurring theme of almost paramount consent – something that escaped even Darwin’s attention: a prerequisite, they say, for the emergence of language is that there must be trust within the tribe (what we now call “society”)! Meaning that some kind of social transformation generated unprecedented levels of public trust, liberating this way a potential for linguistic creativity, which was dormant until then. Under normal conditions, as the saying goes, “words are cheap”, “double-talk”, i.e. unreliable symbols on which the tribe could not count for survival; in other words, language was not trusted to become an evolutionarily stable strategy.

When a cat purrs, we mostly feel sure that the animal is content. We trust the signal because it just can’t fake that sound. Vocal calls of the primates may not be so trustworthy. Their social intelligence is characterized as “Machiavellian” – self-serving and without moral scruples. Monkeys and apes often attempt to deceive one another, while at the same time remaining constantly on guard against falling victim to deception themselves! Paradoxically, this very trait is theorized as blocking the evolution of a language-like communication among them! A verbal signal sounds like the cry “Wolves!” by a shepherd trying to fool the others in the well-known moralizing pedagogical story. Once proven false, nobody takes it for granted anymore or even cares. Therefore, socially reliable institutions are necessary, where every scoundrel, “monkey” or “shepherd”, is accountable. In a hunter-gatherer society, a basic mechanism inspiring trust is the collective ritual. (In our society, all the above adequately explain our crisis).

Baby talk and the embryo’s audio stimuli

No features on “Venus” of Willendorf (28.000-25.000 BCE), only reproductive: probably she was a Mother Goddess

Last but not least is what we call “baby talk” – not the talk of a baby still unable to speak, but the one used by adults (usually mothers) while addressing infants, touching and caressing them: a melodic and undulating language, combined with strong gestures, exaggerated facial expressions and rhythmical head and body movements. This is indeed a language because the baby understands the meaning of all these sounds and movements: that is, comprehends the mother’s intentions. In this sense, such a language is similar to music having two main functions: to strengthen the mother-child relationship, and help the infant to speak. In this way its chances of survival increase. Man’s ability to synchronize himself with an external pulse – which is probably unknown to other mammals, including primates – was derived from the primordial mother-infant interaction that in time transformed itself into a proto-music/language – à la Neanderthal!

“Baby talk” has a similar “lexicon” in all cultures. The way mothers and babies raise and lower their voices, change simultaneously expressions and move their hands, is equivalent everywhere, despite linguistic differences such as between musical and dynamic languages. The reasons may be genetic or environmental – in the sense that all embryos grow in a similar environment and can hear twenty weeks before birth, far longer than other animals, most of which cannot hear before birth. During these weeks, the human fetus can also perceive movement and orientation. In addition, it senses the emotional state of the mother via the internal sounds of her body (voice, heartbeat, footsteps, digestion, etc.) and in this way adjusts its postnatal demands (e.g. crying), improving the chances of its survival. The embryo’s capacity to learn and remember sound patterns seems to confirm the idea. In this case, the internal sounds of the human body, and their relationship with the emotional state, may be associated with the relationship between audio-rhythmic patterns in music and their strong emotional charge.

A maenad (bacchante) with a tympanum and a satyr with diaulos (double aulos)

“The human being is musical by man’s very nature”. (Iégor Reznikoff)

“MAN”, IÉGOR REZNIKOFF REMARKED,⁽⁵⁾ “is a speaking being. However, I am absolutely sure that he is also a musical, a singing being, like birds. We know that the various species of birds are also distinguished by the way they sing. The same happens with humans who are distinguished not only by their speech, but also by their singing.

• ⁽⁵⁾ Reznikoff’s remarks were recorded by Despoina Paisidou-Lazaridou in Delphi in 1986 for the radio program, Living and Learning (ERT3). It was the time I started “sailing” on the airwaves as a “chronicler”, presenter, and also music supervisor, during the first round of the program on the Chronicle of Music. Nevertheless, the making of a radio program was something that I learned watching the producer Katy Vlachou with her immense patience and also open mind: she let me present in a public mass medium what I was not allowed to do at the time in a… private one (the newspaper Thessaloniki).

The Education of Achilles by Chiron (fresco from Herculaneum,
a city more wealthy than neighbouring Pompeii)

“These features, I believe, are part of human nature. They are deeply connected with man’s organic nature – his ears and throat, that is, his vocal capacities. That’s how he is born and created since his conception. A child e.g. can hear even when it is in the womb of its mother as a fetus and remembers some elements of music and the voice of its mother or her song.⁽⁶⁾

• ⁽⁶⁾ “Voices and audio stimuli to which a fetus is exposed during pregnancy are not only perceived but also recorded in its memory”, a scientific team concluded in a study. “Thus, if as a fetus it listened to soft music of natural instruments, as an infant it immediately calms and quiets down under the same sounds, while another baby, who had no such experience when it was in the belly of its mother, keeps on screaming”…

Music activates the brain’s centres of communication

● Besides, except the “Singing Neanderthals”, there are also “Singing Embryos”! A research showed that fetuses react to sound stimuli and “sing”! Some researchers at Institut Marquès in Barcelona showed that a fetus can detect sounds and even react moving its mouth and tongue, proving that the ears of the embryo are fully developed by the 16th week of pregnancy. The leading researcher said that the fetuses responded to music moving their mouths as if they were trying to talk or to sing. Music activates the parts of the brain associated with communication, and when the embryos hear it, they react with movements similar to those of a cry, which is the first stage before speaking and singing.

“Music is deeply rooted in humans. Singing is a characteristic of the human species. It is not something recent in man’s social life. The mechanism of hearing and its relationship with speech is characterized by complexity and is located deep inside the brain. Thus it cannot be something recent. In short: the human being is a musical being by man’s very nature.”

Generally speaking, the different species are born as tabula rasa regarding those qualities to be acquired – i.e. that must be gained after birth, depending on the current conditions faced by each species for its survival. But they bear in their DNA all those inherited capacities and qualities that have emerged as acquired ones (upright position, articulation, etc.) and ensured the survival of the species during the millennia of its evolution. This is where all the wisdom of the past is stored – together, of course, with natural musical capacities.

Music Lesson (Herculaneum, early 1st century AD)

“Musical ear”: a characteristic of the majority or of a minority?

Despite all that, we know that talent, an innate musical inclination, or a “musical ear”, do not characterize all persons but rather a minority. How come that some of them can sing beautifully or at least correctly, while others, who equally love music, sing out of tune?

“There is innate musical disposition, musical talent, which is often hereditary: see the Bach family”, said professor Demetris Thémelis “But in general terms, everyone can learn music up to a point. Most people sing out of tune because they’ve had no proper musical education, except in some cases where they may have some physical problem e.g. hearing impairment. Or they may listen properly and have some feel for music, but face some problem in the larynx muscles. There are many cases of distinguished musicians, productive composers, who are ‘cacophonous’, i.e. they cannot sing well because of such problems.”

This may be so, but then how come that in the Third World and, moreover, in the countryside, anywhere far from metropolitan urban centres, i.e. wherever children are naturally brought up, almost everyone can sing and dance well? Here’s Ellen Dissanayake’s comment:

“It is not spoken language itself that overlays or stunts musical ability”, she said, “but the factors in modernized societies that have made music a specialty – individuality, competitiveness, compartmentalization, institutionalization – reinforced by the high degree of literate (not oral improvisatory) training required to read (and compose) musical scores as well as literary texts. In small-scale pre-modern societies (and in any large modern sub-Saharan African city, as well in children anywhere who are exposed customarily to frequent communal musical activity), everyone participates in music – regularly, spontaneously, and wholeheartedly – and benefits thereby from the many adaptive advantages” it offers.

Iégor Reznikoff

You can see, therefore, how crucial is the role of the mother, as well as that of the family, or social environment in general, for the development of a child’s innate musical inclination. This must be the explanation for the existence not only of musical families, but also of musical tribes among gypsies or blacks. Not everything is hereditary, in spite of the important role of heredity: the potential capacities must be cultivated; otherwise they remain dormant, inert, like some atrophic member.

“We can say that African Americans have this divine gift”, said Reznikoff, referring to the innate inclination, the special talent. “Africans have a long tradition in music and singing. Furthermore, they have kept some primitive ways of expression and emotion, and thus they are probably closer to antiquity. The ancient Greeks also loved singing and dancing very much, as the Arabs do now.”

“Since we are human beings, with the senses of audition and vision, it happens that we have constants in art. These constants in music have to do with the natural laws of resonance and consonance: when a chord vibrates, it follows the laws that govern the sound, producing sounds and harmonics that delight our ears; so, our bodies respond.

“It is striking that an instrument like the cithara is found in all cultures. The behaviour of a string and our bodies is the same everywhere. Something similar happens with the auloi. Note that these instruments have been used in several ways in all cultures. But with few exceptions, and apart from modern Western civilization, we see everywhere the same musical laws to apply. It is a global concept of consonance precisely because we are dealing with a natural law.

“This concept, nevertheless, was lost since the early 19th century when the piano was introduced into music changing the natural tuning of the instruments; for the piano is tuned differently, with the equal intervals of the tempered scale. This tuning is wrong if we consider it from the point of view of natural resonance. It is due to the enormous development of music – but a kind of cultivated, sentimental, conceptual music which has abandoned its natural foundation that is rooted in our body and soul.

“Something equivalent has happened in painting: we have ancient art, or iconography, and then we have the art of beauty, even if it depicts saints, or Theotokos: Raphael’s Madonna is really beautiful, her movements are beautiful, and art lies in this beauty, not in the power exerted deep inside your soul by an icon. We have lost these deep roots related to our biological bodies – because we must not forget we are material beings obeying to natural laws. Nowadays art is too conceptual as e.g. abstract art, or even electronic music with computers.

“In antiquity people had delicate, fine ears catching all nuances. The lyre was a ‘soft’ instrument, just like those old traditional ones. When one listened to music on those instruments, he used his spirit even more: let us remember the long texts of old songs. Now, of course, we have all these huge pieces of machinery with the many decibels! All instruments are amplified and modified for that purpose. The violin is already a ‘hard’ instrument like the piano.

“I, personally, believe in a natural approach of antiquity – without imitating or copying it. We must go back to the delicate acoustics of antiquity, because finally man remains the same body and soul. These natural laws – so rich that they have created all those cultures – are like oxygen for us. In the big cities, of course, we may live in air pollution but we are not made for this: it is better for us to breathe fresh air…

“Music’s purpose in antiquity was not just fun. It mainly had to do with the invisible world. This is also true for the Pythagoreans, and later for the Platonic school, or even previously for the Orphic tradition, which influenced the Christian Church. For the Orphic tradition, music actually serves as a link to the invisible: for the preparation of the journey of the soul after death to eternity”…

The “labyrinth” of Reznikoff’s thought, or the contraposition between “soft” and “hard” instruments, may confuse us. The key to grasp its essence lies in that apt example from the art of painting. Sweet melodies and gentle voices, e.g. in most lullabies, are the equivalent to Raphael’s Madonna. Quite the contrary was what Plato suggested about children that cannot go promptly to sleep: “mothers do not offer them peace, but movement instead, always rocking them in their arms, not silently but with some melody, and in this artless way they make the kids fall asleep”. If you experiment, they say, you will see that the… Platonic technique is highly effective!

Catharsis: the mental and moral purification through Dionysian ecstasy.

Orpheus, by Marc Chagall

A SIMILAR MISUNDERSTANDING seems to obsess psychotherapists who choose music with soft sounds, having waters trickling and birds singing as… garnish in the background. But what the ancients were after during their psychotherapeutic rituals was exactly the opposite with their deliberately intense and monotonously repetitive music.

Using suitable melodies and rhythms, they made the mentally disturbed person to flush to such a degree that a reaction would follow bringing him back to his previous normal condition. Such methods of “sorcery” survived even in the so-called “civilized” world until the 60s. Certainly, now that we have become so very “cultured”, musical sounds can hardly excite us…

“Fire cleanses, while water purifies”, said Plutarch. Catharsis was the mental and also moral purification through Dionysian ecstasy in ancient Hellas. This is the original meaning of the term; not the one used in periods of political corruption in modern Greece. According to Aristotle, it was what the audience in a tragedy was subjected to through feelings of pity and fear caused by the suffering and tragic end of the heroes.

“There was a close link between the swamps (as sources of infections and fever), the subsequent neuromental disorders and their cure with music in the therapeutic rituals of the Corybantes and the Bacchantes”,⁽⁷⁾ wrote Denise Jourdan-Hemmerdinger in the synopsis of her paper on Music in the Therapeutic Rituals of the Corybantes and the Bacchantes, at the Musicological Symposium at Delphi in 1988.⁽⁸⁾ “These data allow a better reading of ancient texts. We can reconstruct them not anymore in an entirely irrational context with widespread mysticism, but in a reality with tragic experiences in the time line.

Cybele and Attis, three Corybantes, Aeon, Helios, Selene, Phosphorus, Hesperus, Poseidon, Thetis and Gaea,
on the Parabiago plate (2nd-4th century AD).

• ⁽⁷⁾ Corybantes: Cybele–Rhea’s priests in Phrygia, connected with Dionysus-Bacchus, performing orgiastic dances accompanied by cymbals, rattles, auloi, tympana (tambourines) [> corybantism (catharsis)]. We have already seen Dionysus’ followers, the Bacchantes, Bacchae or Maenads (< mania), as Orpheus’ slayers (in Chronicle 12, footnote 3).

• ⁽⁸⁾ With this… Sibyllic synopsis, Jourdan-Hemmerdinger tried to give some idea to the audience about her paper. Unfortunately, she had a formidable opponent: relentless time. Within a very short time – granted to each speaker – she had to expand on her vast thesis that could be the subject of a separate symposium. The… machine gun tempo she chose to say “everything” in time eventually proved to be a boomerang for her extremely interesting topic.

“So the biological and pathological cause of hallucinations reappears as an archetype of the mythological and dreamlike world of fantasy. Although the monotheistic religions expelled the ancient gods, who played a therapeutic role, they did not eliminate malaria – a scourge as old as the world but always present. This Thraco-Phrygian and Orphico-Pythagorean music therapy survived more or less in some folk, religious, pagan traditions.

“What did these specific kinds of music consist of? What body and soul level did they act upon? How and why were they effective? The texts give us an idea. Can we get even further? Obviously, if we work on this rich and diverse file with a fortunate conjuncture of data of the geographical and ethnological hematology, and medical anthropology – sciences already containing a wealth of information – adding the results of ethnomusicological research, without forgetting ancient and medieval musicology, either Oriental or Occidental.”

Bacchic Dance of Maenads in a Wood,
by Gustave Doré

Ethnological, musicological and medical research was eventually carried out in Asia (India, Indochina, Siberia), Africa (Ethiopia, Senegal), America (Haiti, Native American Indians and Eskimos), and Europe. Such phenomena were observed in Magna Graecia, especially around Taranto, with the renowned tarantella dance that was a key element of the musical exorcism to counteract the poison of the tarantula spider.

Part of the same tradition is a – mostly – Thracian fire ritual, called anastenária (nestinarstvo in Bulgarian Thrace). The oldest written information about such barefoot dances on smoldering embers is found in Euripides’ The Bacchae. Later Strabo wrote about Artemis’ priestesses in Asia Minor and Italy performing such dances at will. In Byzantium the dancers were called “psychária” or “asthenária” (hence anastenária or nestinari), while around 1800 such rituals were prevalent not only in the Balkans but also throughout Anatolia.

Music and dance contribute to an emotional release
and thus have a therapeutic effect on the participants.

Anastenária’s most striking feature is probably the “incombustibility”, “immunity from fire” – the (seeming, at least) negation of a natural law. This element of the ritual stirs our imagination so much that almost everyone forgets to mention the key role of music and dance which, according to many experts, contribute to an emotional release and, in this way, have a therapeutic effect on the participants. In a sense, therefore, this ceremony is a psychotherapeutic ritual system.

Levi-Strauss believes that these systems provide the patient with a gateway to express inexpressible conditions. During this therapeutic process, the participant receives from outside a social myth that has no conflicts and, therefore, does not correspond to his previous personal condition. In such a context, reality is compelled to identify with this social myth. Without music and dance, however, methexis is not possible:

“Monotonous music”, the psychiatrist Constantinos Constantinides wrote in his Notes on Fire Walking of Anastenária and a Possible Explanation of Incombustibility, “is a prerequisite to a change of mental mood, creating an equivalent emotional state, and triggering the subcortical (motor and emotional) centres, so as everything is easily and automatically executed, eliminating the inhibitory effect of the cortex.

“Generally motivated also by music, dance is known as a largely automatic event and as such a new prerequisite to the creation of the whole mental ecstatic state – even more so if it is religious. That is why all primitive religions are ‘danced’, all happy events are ‘danced’. While dancing, there is a peculiar emotional state, there is more automation and unconscious function, and there is more or less self-absorption and a break of contact with the environment. One could say that dance is a certain step to ecstasy, opens the way to the phenomenon of ecstasy.”

“Dance is a certain step to ecstasy, opens the way to the
phenomenon of ecstasy.” (Constantinos Constantinides)

“Music particularly seems to coordinate a tendency to group unification”, commented another psychiatrist, Pantelés Kranidiotes, analyzing Anastenaria as a Psychosomatic Phenomenon. “Constantinos Romeos realized just that, commenting ‘music makes the human soul to feel such desolation that it desires to mingle with the other dancers seeking to let it go’. On the other hand, Polydoros Papachristodoulou underlines the impact of music on these people saying that music ‘exerts some particular influence on the nervous system of hysterical, naïve peasants’.

Davul

“But anyway, regardless of the quality of the receiver, everyone would perceive this fascinating power of music, if above all he experienced the crucially overwhelming davul in the ‘hangout’, where ‘all the spectators were agitated and rocked’ under its sounds.

“Emotional arousal is more secure when music is more familiar. This is obviously the purpose of conflating this religious ceremony with songs, which clearly translate the various deepest emotions of the people’s psyche and where above all is the dominion of heroic elements, which can only bring about an arousing, wild ecstasy.

“This combination seems much more effective to induce the required emotional orgy than the ecclesiastical chants and hymns, which are totally absent in this religious ceremony, as they produce a rather static ecstasy.

“The music of the fire dancers, familiar to them over the centuries, is a creation and property of their own emotional universe and that is why it can definitely stir it and indeed with an intensely arousing way.⁽⁹⁾ But here it seems that rhythm plays the main role in music and – as the musicologist Pantelés Kavakópoulos says – ‘what excites the fire dancers is the davul with its varying rhythms’.”

• ⁽⁹⁾ These psychiatrists, it’s obvious, look on the fire dancers “from on high”: they see “hysterical, naïve peasants” with “the people’s psyche”, immersed in “an arousing, wild ecstasy”, which is described as an “emotional orgy”, under the sounds of a music that is a “property of their own emotional universe”… They recognize, however, that the impact of this music and dance, in that particular environment, is equally catalytic “regardless of the quality of the receiver”, apparently having in mind that nowadays, among fire dancers, several “hysterical, naïve”… intellectuals and scientists are included!

First a fetus hears mother’s heartbeat. The pulse is recorded deep in
the brain; when excited, man’s inhibitions are neutralized, and he is
in ecstasy, acting not as an individual but as a member of a group.

Relief of a maenad holding a tympanum

RHYTHM, INEXTRICABLY connected to dance, is the first musical element man experiences. The initial sound a fetus hears is the mother’s rhythmic heartbeat, long before it enjoys her singing – if she has a sweet voice. But even if she doesn’t, this primary pulse is recorded deep in its mind, in the subcortical centres of the brain; when they are excited, man’s inhibitions are neutralized and, as a result, he is overwhelmed with ecstasy, acting as a member of a group and not as an individual.⁽¹⁰⁾ That’s why melody, the second element of music, is intentionally monotonous and persistently repetitious, while the lyrics, if it’s a song, are just as rudimentary: precisely to prevent the re-activation of the cortex and achieve the culmination of ecstasy.

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ Music has been my first occupation, since I was 15, playing in the band of my father, Iannes Loukovikas. I remember that, also due to my music education, I wondered, and was annoyed, as well, whenever an audience glorified some drummer, or anyone playing percussion, in his solo, although his performance was not as difficult as the other musicians’ who, nevertheless, never received such an ovation. The answer to this childish question of mine is given here…

Such phenomena could not go unnoticed by ancient Greek philosophers, who have testified how crucial the role of rhythm is for the preservation, modification or loss of ethos in music. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many others investigated the ethos in rhythm, melody, genera and harmonies or modes, not only because music was the foundation of education, but also because – quite rightly – they considered music as a form of language, capable of expressing almost as much as speech and exerting a catalytic effect on people, especially the youth.

Ethos of music (rhythm, melody, genera,
modes): exuberant, restrained, or serene.

Cybele with a tympanum, bronze statuette (2nd century CE)

“No act among people is performed without music”, Aristides Quintilianus used to say, while Plutarch stressed that “the formation and preparation [of young people] to be good [citizens is achieved] through music”, for the Orphean art is really beneficial “on everyone and every well-instructed act”, concluding: “Foul music and wicked songs lead to prodigal morals and unmanly lives, and men to indulgence and flabbiness and effeminacy”…

The ethos of music was generally distinguished as exuberant (the one causing agitation or excitement); restrained (the opposite); or serene (that calms down). Comprehensive philosophical studies were apparently based on observations on ancient folk rituals, such as musical therapeutic ceremonies. The philosophers found that every rhythmic or melodic movement resulted to certain emotional reactions, positive or negative – depending on the intended purpose. Thus they concluded that the sounds with the beneficial effects should be praised and the others to be condemned.

It was natural that the concept of ethos was also exploited for the condemnation of musical innovations by the conservatives, as we have already seen (Chronicle 12. “Do not maltreat our music!”). But in no way does this fact mean that musical ethos is worthless. Why else should the idea be adopted by Persians and Arabs and so many others?

“OK, if it’s not worthless, it is certainly completely unknown today”, the dissidents counter-argue. “Why should we care about the ethos of music (and not only) in an exceptionally unethical era in every respect? Isn’t it… an anachronism?”

Dear reader, my dearest fellow voyager, don’t you think that having come thus far, it means there is a deeper reason in earnest?

●

.

After the Mediterranean periplus, in search of Orpheus,
we set sail to Tartessos, in the Cassiterides archipelago…

Let’s follow the… tin!

• >> Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO!
• << Chronicle 13. PROFESSIONALS OR AMATEURS?

Next Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO! (Crossing the Atlantic / So Distant, So Near) ● Periplus – Luso-Hellenic Wanderings ● An Atlantic Odyssey

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Chronicle 12. “DO NOT MALTREAT OUR MUSIC!”

Chronicle 12. “DO NOT MALTREAT OUR MUSIC!”

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 12. “ΜΗ ΚΑΚΟΥΡΓΕΙ ΤΗΝ ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗΝ!”

Pericles

● “Golden Age” and “Decline” ● Modernists and Conservatives ● Script and Notation ● Musical Accent ● Odeon and Conservatory ● Folklore ● Collective and Individual Creation ● Democracy and Art

Michales Loukovikas

PERICLES’ “GOLDEN AGE”, THAT PERIOD of the greatest acme of ancient Hellenic civilization, coincided paradoxically with the years of “decline”, which seemed to fall upon Greece in the mid-5th century. This downward trend was a kind of omen foretelling, just like a Cassandra, the upcoming “civil” Peloponnesian War. The most dramatic reaction to “remedy the evil” was quite… anti-dramatic: the democratic polis of Athens decreed in 440 BCE the cessation of all theatrical and musical activities for four years!

“Do not maltreat our music!” (Ecprepes, a Spartan ephor)

Performing in Sparta those days with his modern nine-string cithara, Phrynis of Mytilene encountered the angry outcry of the ephori (ephors) who, shouting out “Do not maltreat our music!”, forcibly removed the two “extra” strings, and obliged him to play with the “classical” (in the 5th century) seven-string cithara.⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ “Ecprepes, an Ephor, cut out with an adze two of the nine strings of Phrynis the musician, saying, ‘Do not maltreat music’.” (Plutarch, Moralia).

● So, the musical ethos was “restored” with an adze! “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” (Cicero, Edgar Allan Poe)

Was it indeed a clear manifestation of the ephori’s extreme conservatism, or had Phrynis, a leader of the innovative school with an exceptionally melismatic and modulative style, perhaps gone too far and actually maltreated music? We shall never know: first of all, we did not… listen to him play. But even if we had heard him play, we would still be unable to make up our minds judging by our ears – by our own standards, if you like, i.e. by the current criteria on music.

A 12-string lyre: an unparalleled “hubris”!

However, Pherecrates, a contemporary comic poet and musician, was strongly in favour of the ephori, if we consider that in his comedy, Chiron, he had presented Music as complaining to Justice for abuses committed by innovators, such as Timotheus of Miletus, Melanippides of Melos and Phrynis – whom, however, the comedian forgave because when he grew older, he came… to his senses! On the contrary, Pherecrates threw several “brickbats” at Timotheus and Melanippides, who remained impenitent until the end, playing their even more… “evil” twelve-string instruments!

Comic playwrights, however, with their innate conservatism, permit me to say, are not the most reliable sources, judging by the way Aristophanes has “taken care” of another great innovator, Euripides. The tragedian believed in the talent of Timotheus, while Aristotle, together with other philosophers, also praised the work of modernists:

“Without Timotheus”, the thinker of Stageira wrote in his Metaphysics, “we would not have so many melodic compositions, and without [his teacher, and also formidable rival] Phrynis, we would not have Timotheus either.”

“Laconism (brevity) is the soul of wit”, the ancients declared. But the Laconian ephori set out to… disprove them, hurriedly expelling Timotheus from their polis with a lengthy decree, which the Roman philosopher Boethius preserved:

“For Timotheus of Miletus came to our polis and dishonoured our ancient music by despising the seven-string lyre, and also corrupted the ears of the young people by introducing a greater variety of sounds, and gave music a feminine and sophisticated character by increasing the number of strings;

“For he depraved the melody’s simplicity and soberness, which it had thus far, instead of preserving it;

“We, the king and the ephori, declare we criticize Timotheus, and additionally compel him to remove from the nine strings those that are not necessary leaving only seven; and we banish him from our polis setting him as an example for all those who would like to introduce to Sparta some improper practice in the future”…

A 13-string barbitos

● Timotheus was fool enough to go to Laconia despite Phrynis’ reception there. We just hope he was spared the… adze! In our previous Chronicle we referred to the four basic modes (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian). There were also three genera (diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic). Each one of these modes and genera, but also the rhythms, had its own ethos. It seems that people like the Spartan ephori, or even Athenian elitists such as Plato, preferred the Dorian mode and the diatonic genus, and disliked all the rest. This might’ve been the reason for the… “ephoral” rage rather than the multi-string instruments themselves, which simply enabled the musicians to modulate through modes and genera. We have seen the same circles condemning the multi-string instruments as unmanly and effeminate. It’s not by chance that this attitude was shared by later conservatives such as the Catholic leaders. In the 11th century, they rejected the chromatic and enharmonic genera and retained only the “harder and more natural” diatonic genus, “for the diatonic is very firm and virile, the chromatic very soft and feminine, the enharmonic dissonant and moreover useless”!⁽²⁾ That’s why the musicians in the Occident were left with just the diatonic scale!

• ⁽²⁾ Quoted in Adrien de La Fage, Essais de diphthérographie musicale (Paris, 1864), emanating from a manuscript at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella, in Florence: “… quia diatonum firmissimum et virilem, chromaticum mollissimum et feminilem, enharmoniumque dissonum insuper et inutilem.”

Orpheus depicted on an old Greek stamp

The ephori’s “puritanism” was not just a phenomenon of the years of “decline”. This mentality of “supervising everything” characterized them also in the past, bringing them into conflict – among others – with another Lesbian musician, the famous Terpander, legendary heir to Orpheus’ lyre,⁽³⁾ who lived from the late 8th to the mid-7th century, i.e. in the so-called “creative” times. In fact, he spent most of his life in Sparta, where he was called in during a period of political crisis to… pour oil on troubled waters. Indeed, he was able to restore peace and tranquility in the city with his music composed specially for the occasion! But the ephori, instead of thanking him, demanded… an apology because he played – alas! – a seven-string cithara and not a “traditional” – at the time – four-string instrument! They could not even suspect that this specific peace-restoring music could not be played on a four-string lyre…

The ephori could not even suspect that Terpander’s
music could not be played on a four-string lyre…

• ⁽³⁾ Legend says that when the Thracian Maenads killed Orpheus – apparently because he failed to honour Dionysus, or even because he spurned their advances – they cut him to pieces and threw him and his lyre into the sea. The waves carried his head and the instrument to Lesbos, where some fishermen found and delivered them to Terpander. He kept the lyre and looked after the burial of his great colleague.

Apollo in front of the Academy of Athens

But there was a sacred intervention – as “deus ex machina” – by Apollo himself, whose cithara, by… “divine coincidence”, was also seven-string! It was confirmed by a rumour that craftily circulated those days. Later, sanctioned with the seal of the Delphic Oracle, “the Spartans honoured the Lesbian songwriter”, according to Heraclides Ponticus (from Pontic Heraclea, 4th century BCE), adding: “for god commanded them through prophesies to listen to him”. As they were accustomed to always overdo (let alone it was an Olympian command to obey to Terpander), the Spartans in the future placed everyone else “after the Lesbian songwriter”, as Aristotle wrote.

The prevalence of the art of this unparalleled (in his time) citharoedus, at the expense of the ephori’s scholasticism, benefited in many ways the Spartans, who secured not only a peacemaker in times of political turmoil, but also the founder of their musical life. Among other things, Terpander was the first to invent a kind of musical notation for the proper performance of the Homeric epics.

Unfortunately, the opposite happened millennia later with the notorious report On Literature, Music and Philosophy by the ephori’s descendant, Zhdanov, whom Stalin considered an expert also on issues of music because he could… “play the piano a little bit”!⁽⁴⁾ The “father of socialist realism”, who in 1934 had nationalized even… culture, so as to turn it into a political tool, in his report of June 24, 1947, demanded from the great composers Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and Shebalin to repent publicly, denouncing themselves! What a pity there was no Pythia anymore…

• ⁽⁴⁾ See Ares Alexandrou, the exile, by Demetris Rautópoulos.

It was the nadir of a cultural policy aimed at creating… yes-men in literature and the arts – a policy that undermined the highest interests not only of culture, but also of the revolution. Note that it was not restricted within the Soviet Union: it was also imposed on all “sister” parties. The Zhdanov report was discussed by Greek party intellectuals even on the barren islands of exile: it was unanimously approved! There was only one “dissonant” voice: that of Ares Alexandrou…⁽⁴⁾

Well, starting from historical paradoxes, we have ended up to historical parallels that are often detrimental to historical truth. Spontaneously we are in solidarity with the musicians and confront the… “Zhdanovist” ephori with disgust. In fact, we cannot be absolutely sure – especially in such times of “decline” – which side was finally right: Phrynis and Timotheus or the ephori? Let alone that the above slogan of the “villains” fits perfectly well into the current situation concerning our music and, I believe, we should all cry out loud rhythmically and in chorus: DO NOT MAL–TREAT OUR MU–SIC!

A blind Egyptian harpist

Professional Musicians and Notation

OUR ONLY CERTAINTY is probably that these historical episodes refer to professional musicians, heirs of a long tradition starting since very old times – since prehistory. Once the humans began producing more than what was absolutely necessary, resulting in surplus product which some of them gradually appropriated, and thus constituted themselves as a ruling class, since that moment musicians emerged as a separate profession.

First-rate musicians in the Orient were closely connected with the royal courts or the clergy – if they were not courtiers or priests themselves. This situation later changed in ancient Hellas due to climatic conditions that were mild and did not necessitate strong central power. These conditions nurtured a similar attitude among the Greeks and a relaxed relationship with the gods. The development of democratic ideas took place in the same context, as I have tried to explain (see Chronicles 2 and 4).

The Hellenes have had open and inquiring minds exactly because they’ve been open to the outside world, as a result of the same conditions. Just a look at a map of Greece explains why. Thus, the oriental influence has been catalytic. The ancients, however, unlike us, did not like to… “copy and paste”. So, they adapted every recipe to their tastes by adding or removing ingredients. Having borrowed their script from the Cretans already in the 15th century BCE, with the necessary changes to meet the requirements of their language (Minoan and Mycenaean Linear A and B scripts), they received (probably from the Phoenicians around the 9th century BCE) the symbols with which they created their own alphabet – a real alphabet with letters for consonants and vowels alike, in contrast to the Semitic consonantal abjads. Then, using the same symbols (what would be more logical?), they arrived to the point to also invent musical writing (notation) as early as the 7th-6th century BCE.⁽⁵⁾

Seikilos Epitaph
While you live, shine | have no grief at all
| life exists only for a short while
| and Time demands his due.

• ⁽⁵⁾ The Delphic Hymns to Apollo (138-128 BCE) are the world’s earliest extant substantial musical fragments. The second hymn was composed by Limenius, while the first one most probably by Athenaeus. The oldest extant complete musical composition in the world is Seikilos Epitaph (1st century BCE or CE), engraved on a stele: its main part, the song (excluding the prologue and epilogue), bears symbols denoting the melody.

“The Hellenes had musical notation well before the 6th century BC”, Iégor Reznikoff said at the 2nd Musicological Symposium of Delphi in 1986. “They were very good in keeping records; that’s the reason why we know so much about ancient Greek tradition and return to it, as many other traditions had no musical writing and thus we know nothing about them.”

“Many ancient notations were invented by priests for priests and cantors, and some were even kept secret”, Curt Sachs remarked.

A culture with a script was not necessarily a culture with a musical script; and if the notation existed, it might have been… top secret! Music, with its catalytic effect on humans and magical powers, was a deadly enemy of all religions, but also a mighty weapon in the hands of priests, who made sure that knowledge around this art was a well-kept secret within the very select circle of initiates.

Music, with its catalytic effect on humans, was a deadly enemy of
all religions, but also a mighty weapon in the hands of priests, who
made sure that knowledge around this art was a well-kept secret…

Music lesson (lyre class)

This means that the Hellenes have not been the inventors of musical notation, but it was them who first used it not for religious-authoritarian reasons, but for didactic purposes, given that music was at the heart of education provided to children since they were six. This shows some differences between the cultures of the Greeks and “barbarians” – i.e. those speaking tongues incomprehensible to Hellenes. Greek culture was not theocratic (there was no reason to be), which is why knowledge was a public good and right. The initiation into the mysteries was part of the devotional process, but the role of religion was totally different, as it was anything but rigidly dogmatic – a basic feature of monotheism.

The Hellenes used the archaic alphabet for instrumentation, and Ionic letters for the song.⁽⁶⁾ This may indicate that instrumental notation preceded the vocal one. Obviously the latter became necessary because of music’s further development, thereby varying the melodic lines of voices and instruments.

• ⁽⁶⁾ The idea was later adopted by Byzantines and West Europeans alike (except the Italian school) designating the musical notes with the initial letters of the alphabet: πΑ, Βου, Γα, Δι, κΕ, Ζω, νΗ, and Α, Β, C, D, E, F, G, instead of the Italian terms Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si – a terminology also used in Modern Greece, as if local musical theory never existed…

1st Delphic Hymn to Apollo, in vocal notation, cretic foot (quintuple), and Phrygian or Hyperphrygian modes with variations.

Thus we are able to play even now the extant ancient Hellenic music “remnants” – of course, approximately. That’s how – based on various indications – we also approach ancient Grecian phonology, speech, pronunciation, which was musical and not dynamic as it is now.⁽⁷⁾ The difference is enormous. This implies that the divergence between ancient and modern music has become even greater.

• ⁽⁷⁾ Contrary to modern Greek, ancient Hellenic had a musical accent, meaning that the accented syllable was not uttered with a stronger voice but at a higher pitch than the rest. Dionysius of Halicarnassus said that this interval was not just one or two tones, as we would imagine, but in a way similar to that of a fifth in music (e.g. D–A)! Nota bene, the acute, circumflex, and grave accents also implied different pronunciation in ancient Hellenic (see also Chronicle 14, Music as the Mother of Speech).

Europeanization of Hellenic Music

THE ARGUABLE CONTINUITY of Greek civilization, through the succession of classical antiquity with the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods – and the necessary adjustments at each stage due to changing conditions – seems to have been interrupted with the Ottomans’ arrival. Thus, we tend to identify the emergence of any divergence during this period. However, such phenomena have been much older, as the rapid linguistic changes taking place already in the Hellenistic period show. As far as music is concerned, colossal differentiations emerged much later, not because of the Turkish yoke, but – how ironic! – as soon as this yoke was thrown off and the modern Greek state was established, supported on foreign “crutches”.

A rule that was then undermined from above concerned the link between folk and erudite music. The fact that Constantinople, Thessalonica and Smyrna – the great centres of Byzantine and Ottoman eras – were outside the borders of the new state made things easier for the erudite musicians (all of them educated in Europe) to impose the music they could play and compose, regardless if it had nothing to do with local tradition.

Moreover, due to the fact that the former conqueror shared this tradition, a new kind of servitude appeared since then, leading also to attempts to “harmonize” Grecian music (based on the Western conception of harmony; see Chronicle 11) – the demotic song and ecclesiastical Byzantine chant: that was the only erudite music left in Greece, as secular Byzantine music was thoughtlessly ceded to Turkey, without Hellas claiming its share of this age-old cultural heritage.

Haven’t those in power realized that the people risked turning into tabula rasa? Haven’t they wondered if among the ages thrown into the dustbin, the Golden Age of Pericles was also included? No problem! They bathed in the spotlight just the Parthenons (i.e. the dead meaning of the Golden Age), then set up “new Parthenons” on barren islands of exile,⁽⁸⁾ and finally set out to strangle whatever little had survived from this legacy with the asphyxiating embrace of concrete. The architectural chaos they’ve created may have knocked architecture down the podium of the fine arts, but that’s what “business with pleasure” is all about – and this combination is better achieved through… defects: that’s how wallets become thick!

• ⁽⁸⁾ “New Parthenon”: description of the open torture chamber of Macronesos made by Panaiotes Kanellopoulos, government minister during the civil war and future prime minister.

The wonderful ancient Odeon of Herodes Atticus,
on a slope of the Acropolis of Athens

The Europeanization of Greek music has been going on apace all along, as long as the tutelage provided in conservatories,⁽⁹⁾ aka foreign music language schools, is based on European standards. The absence of “national” music education at its place of birth, while “third world” countries in the Orient boast of their higher music institutes, might be unthinkable in any country other than modern Hellas. Everything perhaps can be explained by amateurism or the absence of a cultural policy – without excluding the possibility of a conscious act. After all, isn’t this absence of policy also… a policy?

• ⁽⁹⁾ A conservatoire is called odeon in Greek. However, the ancient Hellenic Odeon was not meant for music lessons but for musical shows, singing exercises, music and poetry competitions, and the like. The odeons were similar to ancient Greek theatres, but were far smaller and provided with a roof for acoustic purposes. One of the best examples of such a building is the Odeon of Herodes Atticus (Herodeion) in Athens. As regards the term conservatory, it is surely unmusical as it also refers to conservatism, greenhouses, and preservatives!

It is quite serious, indeed. Any child inclined to music, regardless of stimuli, will be obliged to attend a conservatory having no choice: he/she will necessarily be taught a foreign musical language – the erudite European. It’s another case of brainwashing – not only of this child but also of his/her future listeners, since it is impossible to “shepherd” the public to listen to occidental music, if you don’t “produce” musicians specifically trained for the role, blocking the emergence of new traditional musicians, and marginalizing those who are already active. It’s been another scheme of the ruling circles in order to eradicate local traditional music and thus mutate the collective consciousness of the people.

The ruling circles tried to eradicate local tradition and mutate the
people’s collective consciousness. But some conservatives resisted.

Taking into account all these attempts, the continuous attacks against all local musical genres since the Hellenic state has been established, it is a miracle that this tradition has survived!⁽¹⁰⁾ It prevailed, of course, because it’s deep-rooted – but also because of a certain peculiarity: there was resistance against these attacks – mainly from conservative opponents of cosmopolitanism (such as Simon Karás, though sponsored by the Ford Foundation), and not from progressive Greeks, as it would be “proper” and “normal”. The fact that it was conservatives who mostly contributed in safeguarding Hellenic traditional music, created more confusion, obscuring the real problems.⁽¹¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ Miracle upon a miracle: In my first articles about Mediterranean periplus for the newspaper Thessaloniki, concerning the need to establish a Mediterranean Conservatoire in the city, I had written that we would be obliged to bring teachers from countries where modal music tradition is still alive to transmit their knowledge. Eventually, life itself triumphantly disproved me (and I rejoiced!): In no time at all, a new generation emerged replete with great musicians who are also theoretically skilled – and that was the Achilles’ heel of the old generation… This, my dear fellow travelers, is the magic of DNA!

• ⁽¹¹⁾ I remember when I started the Mediterranean periplus program: I was obliged every day, for months – perhaps the entire first year – to prove with my comments I’m progressive. It was as if I said: “It happens that I deal with traditional music, but I’m not some conservative nut!” I felt so strong this need then. You can understand the prevailing atmosphere at the time…

Carols, by Nikephoros Lytras (1872)

Living Tradition or Folklore?

The conservatives, for sure, care about the conservation of music the way it has passed down to us. They are mainly interested in the conservation of the type (sum of typical features or clichés) of tradition, which is not seen in connection with the rest of the Mediterranean cultures, where it belongs. It is the typical attitude of the folklorists who miss the whole point. Thus they concentrate their attention on collecting songs and tunes in the form they’ve been polished to perfection by countless generations of musicians, disregarding personal creative interventions by current folk artists, ignoring that such innovations – if adopted by public taste – refined and perfected folk songs. They also reject any further similar effort as an attempt to adulterate their purity, arguing that, in the era of individualism, the practice of collective development of music is long gone.

Folk songs were created and perfected not by the people, but by
musicians as exponents of society or some strata… Only a thorough
understanding of traditional music will enable its development…

This may be true; but disregards the fact that the songs we so admire have been created and perfected not by the people in general, but by their musicians, as exponents of society at large, or some social strata. The composers and lyricists have been some talented persons, not society in general. In addition, we have no right to throw the inflow of new elements into traditional music in the purgatory condemning it to a standstill – which is equivalent to death; as Heraclitus said: τὰ πάντα ῥεῖ (everything flows); therefore, whatever does not flow, dies out. It goes without saying that I do not argue in favour of an uncritical acceptance of all new elements. I’m just pointing out the consequences of blind negativism: by cutting the thread of continuity, we offer the worst service to tradition. Are our folklorists under the naïve impression that barricading themselves behind the wall they are erecting, they would be supposedly safe? In the Internet era they behave like ostriches!

Trio of musicians playing diaulos, cymbala and tympanum (mosaic from Pompeii).

No objection that after the invention of the phonograph, especially since the record companies have also undertaken the promotion of their “merchandise”, the role of the people has shrank into that of a passive “receiver”-listener. So much for the famous public taste! Hence, in the era of individual creation, only a thorough understanding of traditional music will enable its further development under the new conditions – which is the hoped-for result – instead of serving as couleur locale. This development, of course, cannot come up with revivals such as the “neo-demotic”, or “neo-rebétiko”, that discredit the whole verbiage about “roots”, precisely because of the adherence of their protagonists to the past – if not to money…

Democracy and Art

● THE CULTIVATION of art, of culture as a whole, I’m afraid, is incompatible with the vulgar version of “representative democracy” – which is dominant today. Under pure, direct democracy, the citizens, who actually held power, were obliged to take all the critical decisions by themselves, either in the Heliaea, or in the Ecclesia of Demos, gaining de facto a political criterion and responsibility that today’s “subjects” do not possess. In addition, the polis obliged the wealthy to fund dramatic performances, while the citizens, instead of paying, were paid to see them (from the theorica fund). Suppose you were an ancient Athenian and, during the Dionysia festival, you were exposed to the dramatic art of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, with their high-level poetry and music in their plays. If so, your culture, your cultivation, would be far more refined than what you have today. (See Chronicle 4. On Democracy, where our “representative democracy” is defined as oligarchy).

Bronze mask depicting Dionysus bearded
and horned (200 BCE – 100 CE)

Unfortunately, direct democracy has been a historical parenthesis. What’s happened before or after? The arts were then cultivated under the auspices of the ruling class. The kings or princes in their Courts, as well as several Maecenas – all of whom were cultivated, unlike their subjects or today’s rude plutocrats in power – really cared for the arts and the artists, if they were not artists themselves. Unfortunately, except the ancient Hellenic miracle, born out of pure democracy, all other classical forms of art were due not only to the celebrated artists of the era, but also to those exploiters and oppressors who supported them… Now, the rude ruling plutocrats do everything to ensure that their subjects are (or will become) equally rude. It is the only way their plutocracy will not be questioned. And those plutocrats who decide to play the role of politicians, as a result, are voted in by the crowd.

According to the commercialism of the era, demand determines everything: from detergents to works of art! And if the “rude crowd” does not buy works of art? So much the worse for the artists – who once again depend on the prosperous: either those few, with artistic sensibilities, or the many, who want to satisfy their vanity, or simply to show off! What would the general public choose today? Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven? Ravi Shankar, Parisā, Munir Bashir? Or the trash passed off as music? The good thing in the time we live is that the economic base is not fully reflected on the superstructure. Meaning that, in addition to the majority of trash buyers, there is also a sufficient minority with artistic, ecological, social, political, economic and also other sensibilities. The bad thing is that the ebb and tide in our socio-political balance is the determining factor. Hence, for sure, the people are not without responsibilities in the present circumstances, because it depends on them where this balance is tilted each time. Until one day the tide becomes permanent…⁽¹²⁾

• ⁽¹²⁾ I’m talking as daydreamer about a “permanent tide” in the time of the Internet, where “free downloading” is the thing. At a time when the vast majority of young people think that music is (to be offered) “free”, Music, as an art, has worn her burial shroud… So, let me be self-critical, as well: in the Internet era, I also behave like an ostrich!

• >> Chronicle 13. PROFESSIONALS OR AMATEURS?
• << Chronicle 11. “MUSIC IS THRACIAN AND ASIAN”

Next Chronicle 13. PROFESSIONALS OR AMATEURS? ● “Do Not Maltreat Our Music!” (Β) ● Autodidacts or Literate? ● Asia Minor Catastrophe and Rebétiko ● Censorship on Music ● Controversy Over Rebétiko ● Entertainment and Edutainment (B)

Dedication to Bacchus (Dionysus), by Lawrence Alma Tadema

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 2. IT ALL STARTED HERE…

Chronicle 2. IT ALL STARTED HERE…

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 2. ΟΛΑ ΑΡΧΙΣΑΝ ΕΔΩ…

Ploughing in Egypt

● Neolithic Revolution ● Cities, Exchange, Writing ● Aegean and Orient: Differences ● Irrigation and Trade Networks ● “Asiatic Mode of Production” and Centralization ● Nature, Gods and Democracy

Michales Loukovikas

IT ALL STARTED HERE: in the Mediterranean – in the Fertile Crescent.

The Fertile Crescent

ALTHOUGH BORN SUPPOSEDLY in Africa, man was civilized around the Mediterranean, in the Near East, more specifically in the arc formed by Mesopotamia, the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine) and the Nile valley in Egypt, also extending to Cyprus and Anatolia, as far as the Taurus Mountains: it was the so-called Fertile Crescent, where man made the first giant leap with the Neolithic agricultural revolution. It took millennia until something equal in scope happened again, with the industrial revolution that started in England in the 18th century.

Man made the first giant leap in the Fertile
Crescent with the Neolithic revolution

Neolithic baker

Despite the view that this second revolution signaled a return to barbarity, let us stick to generally accepted ideas for the time being. Even common sense says the key was the first step, when hunters and gatherers became pastoralists and farmers. This development was probably brought about by women: gathering fruit was their responsibility together with children, while men hunted.⁽¹⁾ Thus, we can reasonably assume that agriculture, especially farming, the main aspect of the emerging rural economy, has been an innovation brought forth by women.⁽²⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ That sexual division of labour explains numerous differences in mentality between the sexes that still characterize them, causing misunderstandings in their relationships.

• ⁽²⁾ I do not know if any researcher has ever made the above very logical guess. As I have pointed out, however, we should no further engage in such speculations for the time being, and better stick to generally accepted ideas – as long as they are not directly related to the issues under our consideration. Such are the assumptions related to the theories of man’s African origin, the origins of the inhabitants of Greece, the Indo-European languages and their speakers, or the Phoenician origin of the Greek alphabet, among various issues that are relevant, or sufficiently vague. As I have said, they are nothing but theories… (See our next Chronicle of the Humans).

As is well known, a farmer is more bound to the land than a hunter-gatherer or a pastoralist. Thus, the transition to farming led to the creation of permanent settlements that gradually grew: they became villages, some of them towns, or even cities. The latter – as the Hellenic and Latin words polis (πόλις) and civitas indicate – brought about both politics and civilization. Man began his gradual transformation into what Aristotle would much later call a “political animal” to identify a new distinctive feature of Homo sapiens vis-à-vis the other species.

The transition to farming led to the creation of settlements
that gradually grew: they became villages, towns, cities.
The latter brought forth both politics and civilization.

The ancient city of Mari on the Euphrates (reconstruction)

Cities require central authority and hierarchy, imposing monuments, division of labour, specialization. They necessitate the arts and crafts, architecture, pottery, commerce, metallurgy… The Mediterranean periplus began tentatively at that time, in parallel with the caravan routes along land roads that were inaccessible and dangerous. Consequently, so long as man familiarized himself with the sea, he’d rather sail than travel on land. It is an oxymoron that the liquid element is far more “solid” and safe, but that’s how it is. Besides, land roads were largely non-existent at that time.

No need to say, the exchange of commercial goods is accompanied with the exchange of ideas, aesthetic patterns, intellectual “goods”, innovations. That is how the new way of life spread rapidly inside and outside the Mediterranean basin, reaching eastwards as far as the Indian subcontinent and beyond: the Indo-Mediterranean contacts date back to at least the third millennium BCE, or even earlier.

The exchange of commercial goods is accompanied with
the exchange of ideas, aesthetic patterns, innovations.

Early Mesopotamian writing tablet recording
the allocation of beer (3100-3000 BCE)

The conditions were already ripe for the next titanic step: writing. Even though the reasons for this great innovation were initially… bureaucratic (administrative record keeping, transfer of orders and messages), the invention and subsequent simplification of writing with the alphabet was indispensable as a condition for the systematic transfer of knowledge between generations and, of course, for the cultivation of literature and the arts – fields where the Hellenes excelled.

Although the ancient Greeks constitute a universal point of reference, one needs to turn away from every temptation of nationalist simplifications. A “threat from the East” was present also then: it was the Persians. At the same time, knowledge from the East was present there, too: any Hellene philosopher aspiring to become a sage would go there for his “PhD”! The Orient was the source of innumerable ideas, and artifacts, along with their know-how. However, everything imported and adopted, had to be adapted according to the local needs and tastes; and some went by the wayside…

Alexander

Aegean vs. Orient: Differences

One of the several historical paradoxa of this period e.g. concerns the differences between the Aegean and the Orient in their political structures. The decentralized Grecian city-states that flourished in the Iron Age, i.e. in classical times, had few Oriental equivalents: the Sumerian and Phoenician cities. On the contrary, the prevailing state entities in the East were centralized empires of both the Bronze and Iron Ages. Be that as it may, the mighty Achaemenid Empire was repeatedly defeated and humiliated by the “Amphictyony” of Hellenes – except the Thebans and some other so-called medísantes (μηδίσαντες) “Quislings”: i.e. all those who surrendered to the Persians-Medes and fought on their side.

● “Except the Thebans”: it is a reference to the subsequent and far more well-known “except the Lacedaemonians”, from the famous victorious inscription on the Battle of the Granicus river in 334 BCE: “Alexander, son of Philip, and the Hellenes except the Lacedaemonians”! In the previous year, the Spartans, spoiled during the “Median” or Graeco-Persian Wars, as they had always been in command, refused to participate in Alexander’s campaign, because there would not be… a king of Sparta in command! Constantine Cavafy poetically commented:

In the Year 200 B.C.

“Alexander, son of Philip, and the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians…”

We can very well imagine
how completely indifferent the Spartans would have been
to this inscription. “Except the Lacedaemonians” –
naturally. The Spartans
weren’t to be led and ordered around
like precious servants. Besides,
a pan-Hellenic expedition without
a Spartan king in command
was not to be taken very seriously.
Of course, then, “except the Lacedaemonians.”

That’s certainly one point of view. Quite understandable.

So, “except the Lacedaemonians” at Granicus,
then at Issus, then in the decisive battle
where the terrible army
the Persians mustered at Arbela was wiped out:
it set out for victory from Arbela, and was wiped out.



Constantine Cavafy,
by Panaiotes Daphiotis

And from this marvelous pan-Hellenic expedition,
triumphant, brilliant in every way,
celebrated on all sides, glorified
as no other has ever been glorified,
incomparable, we emerged:
the great new Hellenic world.

We the Alexandrians, the Antiochians,
the Seleucians, and the countless
other Greeks of Egypt and Syria,
and those in Media, and Persia, and all the rest:
with our far-flung supremacy,
our flexible policy of judicious integration,
and our Common Greek Language
which we carried as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians.

Talk about Lacedaemonians after that!…

(Adapted into English by Edmund Keeley / Philip Sherrard)

Alexander’s empire

● So much for the phrase “except the…”, that’s always been very “trendy” in Hellas. As for the “medísantes” (derived from the Medes, Media, mentioned by Cavafy), they have flooded the land, indeed! Among others, they include even Themistocles, the man who triumphed supreme in the battle of Salamis! His successors have so much ballooned that a list of their names is almost impossible. They are well-known and visible, nevertheless: they mostly crowd the corridors and salons of the ruling elite…

But why In the Year 200 B.C.? Why Cavafy alludes in his title to such a later date? We ignore the poet’s intentions… At any rate, that year the 2nd Macedonian War broke out ending three years later with Rome’s victory over Macedon. It was the beginning of the end because since then Greece fell under full Roman control.

It was not so much that the Hellenes did not want, but rather did not
need an imperial government, as a result of objective conditions…

“THE NECK OF A GREEK the yoke will not abide”, one could say. OK, but this was a result of objective conditions. It was not so much that the Hellenes did not want, but rather that they did not need an imperial government. What for them was an extraordinary situation requiring collective and comprehensive effort, for the Easterners was an everyday struggle with an opponent much more powerful than the mightiest empire: Nature itself…

Babylonian map (canals and irrigation systems) West of the Euphrates (1684-1647 BCE)

Expanding his presence in an environment of rather great contrasts, a land that would be barren without the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, with abundant waters but also with floods and cataclysms lurking, the Easterner realized the need for coordination of the efforts of all communities. Next to deserts, symbolizing the constantly present, absolute evil, these rivers were a blessing from heaven but had unpredictable behaviour: thus, they should be tamed. Major public works, especially for irrigation and drainage, were a prerequisite for human survival; commerce, as well, for the supply of the communities with absolutely necessary raw materials, but also luxury goods.

Well, these basic networks of irrigation, and also of state-run trade, necessitated centralized power that should inspire fear. Obviously, all those in power needed law-enforcement agencies: the army and clergy; they needed imposing, majestic palaces, monuments, temples. It’s what Karl Marx has called the “Asiatic mode of production”, and is a key to understand Oriental despotism. A by-product is the relative – or ostensible, as others say – stagnation, or even immobility, that has characterized these societies for millennia until now.

Irrigation and trade necessitated centralized power inspiring fear.
Law-enforcement agencies, the army and clergy, were necessary.
It was impossible for democracy to grow on Babylonian soil.

Babylon

Let us not forget, however, that these societies cultivated astronomy, geometry, mathematics – for the same reasons they invented writing; societies that created wonders, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon – though hanging from a thread: the infrastructure that had made them great was also their Achilles’ heel. You realize that with just a look at the ruins of Babylon conquered and pillaged by time.⁽³⁾ It was absolutely impossible for democracy to grow on Babylonian soil.

• ⁽³⁾ When this text was written, Babylon had not been conquered by the USA. Yet the conquerors were conquered in turn, as well. But the price was heavy: disregarding the consequences, the US forces built a military base on Babylonian ruins. Dr. John Curtis of the British Museum described how the archaeological site was in some parts leveled to create a landing area for helicopters and parking lots for heavy vehicles. The occupation forces, he wrote,

One of the dragons from the Ishtar gate

“caused substantial damage to the Ishtar Gate, one of the most famous monuments from antiquity… American military vehicles crushed 2,600-year-old brick pavements, archaeological fragments were scattered across the site, more than 12 trenches were driven into ancient deposits and military earth-moving projects contaminated the site for future generations of scientists… Add to all that the damage caused to nine of the moulded brick figures of dragons in the Ishtar Gate by soldiers trying to remove the bricks from the wall.”

● It is well known that American soldiers, and other personnel from the “Coalition of the willing” (invaders of Iraq, e.g. Poles, also stationed in Babylon), looted many antiquities that found their way to private collections.

The Oriental despots, satraps and tyrants were “necessary evils”. And, because there is always a match between worldly and heavenly powers (the concept of monarchies held “by the Grace of God” is in fact quite ancient), equally almighty and omnipotent, terrible and frightful, have been the Oriental gods; especially since they’ve been left alone with no competition at all, after their antagonists had been “dealt with” by the clergy of the new monotheistic religions.⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ I am still wondering: How is it possible for the transition from polytheism to monotheism to be regarded as progress when, in fact, it has been regression? The Judaization of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds (in the Orient and Occident respectively) through Christianization was a sine qua non precondition of obscurantism during the Dark Ages.

The Oriental despots, satraps and tyrants were “necessary evils”. Equally almighty, terrible and frightful were the Oriental gods. No comparison
with the Olympians, who were full of shortcomings: they were human.

Leda and the Swan (i.e. Zeus), by Correggio (1531–32), with children musicians on the left.

No comparison whatsoever with the Olympians, who were full of shortcomings, as they were human, made in the image of the mortals that had created them, the Hellenes, their way of life, their society – or, rather: societies, for Greece, its topography, generated decentralization. The land was most beautiful, indeed, but not a paradise on earth. Living standards could improve through expansion, conquest, but also colonization. Either way, each option contributed to an even greater decentralization.

Life, therefore, was not a “test for some happy afterlife” – an idea the common people of the “Asiatic mode of production” should necessarily entertain. The Greeks were shaped and inspired by Hellenic Nature. They philosophized and discussed public issues under her beneficial influence. She “dictated” the forms of their state and political organizations – regardless if they both fomented discord. Their model was the city-state, polis; democracy was their ideal; and freedom their highest virtue – regardless if they lived in a slave and “male” society. It seems contradictory… Moreover, their democracy was pure, direct; today’s so-called “democracy” is the so-called “representative”, where power is not exercised by the people anymore, but by their so-called “representatives”, contrary to the very definition of democracy. (See the additional Chronicle 4 on Democracy). More and more oxymora and paradoxa…

Living in this ambience, the Greeks have not only summarized, but humanized, as well, the ancient world. They have shown what measure, proportion, harmony is. They have turned knowledge and culture into every free citizen’s right, and not that of a privileged closed caste. They have also left their invaluable heritage systematized and documented for future generations. However, just like their gods, they have been full of shortcomings, born out of the same environment that has fostered their virtues, with individualism underlying all. They are called les enfants terribles de l’antiquité. Rather, of human history, I would say…

• >> Chronicle 3. A CHRONICLE OF THE HUMANS
• << Chronicle 1. UNIVERSAL MEDITERRANEAN

Next Chronicle 3. A CHRONICLE OF THE HUMANS ● Academic Scholasticism ● Ares Poulianós: Archanthropus and Homo Erectus ● Homo’s Cradle: North Aegean and Macedonia ● DNA Analyses: Minoans, Mycenaeans, Cretans and Hellenes ● Paleolithic Odyssey ● Aegean Stonehenge ● Balkan Writing

The Temple of Poseidon

Chronicle 23. THE GENOCIDE OF THE HELLENES

Chronicle 23. THE GENOCIDE OF THE HELLENES

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 23. Η ΓΕΝΟΚΤΟΝΙΑ ΤΩΝ ΕΛΛΗΝΩΝ

● “Burning Books, Burying Scholars” ● Libraries Burned ● Massacre
of Thessalonica ● Delphi, the Serapeum and the Temple of Artemis
in Ruins ● Sacrilege of Alexander’s Sōma ● The Darkening Age

Michales Loukovikas

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GENOCIDE: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” (The UN Genocide Convention)

 

“In the early Middle Ages, in the time of Valens, Valentinian and Theodosius, there was a veritable ‘Inquisition’ established in the East, whose atrocities, persecutions and massacres were in no way inferior to those of the Spanish Inquisitors, who just persecuted people for sinister faith, while the Orthodox ‘penalizers’ in the Orient intended to eliminate en masse anyone who was Hellenizing or philosophizing on the face of the earth.” (Emmanuel Rhoides)

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NATURAL SELECTION, Charles Darwin’s revolutionary evolutionary theory – a cornerstone of biology – does not apply to man-made creations, which are instead “artificially selected” (censored), on the basis of ideological prejudice against all non-conformist ideas. Big Brother, it seems, has been omnipresent long before George Orwell’s 1984, burning not only books and libraries, but on many occasions the authors themselves, while “purifying” society and rewriting “history”… The motives of such crimes against humanity are very rarely outright politico-economical; as a rule, they are disguised behind a religious mask – especially when this religion is monotheistic, i.e. antagonistic to all the other creeds, authoritarian, and also power-hungry. Note that among the monotheistic religions, Christianism is the “unchallenged champion” of such crimes. Here is a short list of the first phase:

● 213–210 BCE. The “burning of books and burying of scholars” campaign during the Qin Dynasty of ancient China epitomizes the “war against freedom of thought and speech” that is still raging: all Chronicles, except those by the Qin historians, the Classics of Poetry and History, works of Confucius and several other schools, should be burned; and anyone discussing these books be executed. More than 460 scholars, or almost 1200, according to another count, were buried alive. The campaign soon led to revolts and war resulting to a further damage of texts of history: the capital was sacked and burned, in 207 BCE, destroying the officially sanctioned works in the imperial library, as well.

● 53 CE. Saul (Paul) of Tarsus, the trouble-maker, combined his preaching with book burning in Ephesus. This episode inspired many artists applauding such actions (see e.g. paintings by Eustache Le Sueur, Lucio Massari, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, etc.) that all fascists imitated with enthusiasm… Acts of the Apostles, 19: “Τhey counted the value of [the burned books] and found it came to 50,000 pieces of silver” = more than 20 million €!

“Βurning of books and burying of scholars”: late dynastic period painting

● Circa 160 CE. Epicurus’ book Established Beliefs was burned in a Paphlagonian market, by order of a charlatan prophet. It was just a first glimpse of what would follow, as soon as these charlatans climbed up the highest echelons of power…

● 170s CE. Describing the Bible as “utter trash”, “a Greek intellectual named Celsus launched a monumental… attack against the new religion”, writes Catherine Nixey in her well-documented study, The Darkening Age / The Christian Destruction of the Classical World – hence our many, lengthy quotations in the previous, present, and next Chronicle. “Celsus was more than disdainful; he was worried that this religion – which he considered stupid, pernicious and vulgar – might spread even further and… damage Rome. Over 1,500 years later, the 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon would draw similar conclusions, laying part of the blame for the fall of the Roman Empire firmly at the door of the Christians… The Church… promptly placed his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of banned books.⁽¹⁾ Even in liberal England, the atmosphere became fiercely hostile to the historian”.⁽²⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ Updating the Index (1900), pope Leo XIII stressed: “It is totally unacceptable to support, defend or allow freedom of thought, of speech… as if these rights are given to man by Nature”!

• ⁽²⁾ But even in the 20th century, the Pythons’ “1979 film, Life of Brian [parodying the life of Jesus], was banned in several countries.” (C. Nixey)

Library of Celsus in Ephesus (2nd century CE), the third-largest in the Roman world after Alexandria and Pergamum, was the funerary monument of Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, governor of Asia (Minor). The library, an architectural marvel, and its 12,000 scrolls, were burned by Christian Gothic barbarians, who also destroyed the magnificent Temple of Artemis there, one of the 7 wonders of antiquity (262 CE). The library’s façade was restored in the 1970s.

● However, both Celsus and Gibbon were right: “What… if God and Caesar both laid claim to the same thing? Well, said the great thinkers of the first Christian century, in that case God took precedence. As Augustine put it, if God’s law diverged from Roman law, then the Heavenly City and its inhabitants were compelled ‘to dissent, and to become obnoxious to those who think differently’… At the highest level the Church was starting to challenge the power of the state. Roman observers had long noticed the Christian tendency to consider themselves above the law… ‘There is no crime’, declared Shenoute, ‘for those who have Christ’… Murder committed for the sake of God was not a crime but actually ‘a prayer’… As Christianity gained in power their acts of defiance gained in boldness. Courtrooms in the east of the empire were disrupted by sinister groups of dark-clad, psalm-chanting monks… Monks – anonymous, rootless, untraceable – were able to commit atrocities with near impunity… Even Theodosius, a wholeheartedly Christian emperor, mutedly observed that ‘the monks commit many crimes’.” Gibbon, on his part, comparing the monks with “a race of filthy animals”, wrote: “In almost every province of the Roman world, an army of fanatics, without authority and without discipline, invaded the peaceful inhabitants; and the ruin of the fairest structures of antiquity still displays the ravages of those barbarians”.

● Catherine Nixey begins her dramatic narrative in Palmyra in 385 CE. Exactly the same scenes, unfortunately, would unfold in the city of Zenobia, the “nymph of the desert”, even nowadays, committed by the terrorists of the Islamic State. But what’s happened now in a single region of Syria, or in one country, Afghanistan, by the Taliban, was then about to spread to an entire empire and last for many centuries:

It’s ironic that the new fundamentalists’ target was again Athena: the statue of Al-lāt, equated with the goddess of Wisdom, destroyed in 2015; so was the Lion at the temple’s entrance. (We see Asclepius on the wall). Other ISIS crimes: the monumental arch in Palmyra’s colonnade (also 2015); Tetrapylon (2017); the theatre (used for executions, 2017); the Baal Shamin temple, blown up; etc…

“The destroyers came from out of the desert. Palmyra must have been expecting them: for years, marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots, armed with little more than stones, iron bars and an iron sense of righteousness had been terrorizing the east of the Roman Empire. Their attacks were primitive, thuggish, and very effective. These men moved in packs – later in swarms of as many as five hundred – and when they descended, utter destruction followed. Their targets were the temples… Great stone columns that had stood for centuries collapsed in an afternoon; statues… had their faces mutilated; temples… fell in a single day… In this atmosphere, Palmyra’s temple of Athena was an obvious target… The ‘triumph’ of Christianity had begun.”

● “Today”, says Nixey, “almost no one has heard of Celsus and fewer still have read his work… It simply disappeared… Almost all information about him has vanished, including any of his names except his last… The long and inglorious Christian practice of censorship was now beginning… Celsus accused Christians of actively targeting idiocy in their recruitment… Lack of education made listeners vulnerable to dogma, he argued. Christians ‘do not want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe, and use such expressions as «Do not ask questions; just believe», and «Thy faith will save thee»’… They declare that ‘Wisdom in this life is evil, but foolishness is good’ – an almost precise quotation from [Saul’s (Paul’s) Epistle to the] Corinthians… To men as educated as Celsus… this was unfathomable: in Greek philosophy, faith was the lowest form of cognition.”

Christianism Has Never Been an Ideology of Liberation

● Christian leaders might have “actively targeted idiocy in their recruitment”, but were anything but… idiots themselves, choosing as their ideal target group “the vast majority of the empire – perhaps 80-90% of men, and a higher percentage of women – [that] was illiterate”. The Christians selected them because they were “hoi polloi” (the many), in order not to upgrade them (with “bread, education, freedom!”), but to downgrade the whole society to their level. Christianism has never been an ideology of liberation; quite the opposite:

The Slave Market, by Gustave Boulanger (c. 1882): in the Roman era,
the “merchandise” was multi-racial; racism would appear later…

“Many of those who set out for the hills” to become monks, Nixey points out, “were poor and illiterate. Some were even slaves – much to the irritation of their Christian superiors. Nietzsche and Engels would later equate Christianity and its values with slaves and slave morality – but if that was true, then no one had told the most powerful Christians in this period. They had no truck with such dangerously revolutionary ideas as the emancipation of slaves. Far from encouraging the escape of Christian slaves, senior clerics cracked down hard on any who attempted to escape their mortal bondage by disappearing into the desert for a more heavenly servitude. When one bishop advised slaves to desert their masters and become ascetics, the Church was appalled and promptly excommunicated him. ‘We shall never’, stated a Canon of the Holy Apostles, ‘allow such a thing, which brings sorrow to the masters to whom the slaves belong’… In the 4th century, St Theodore appeared: a saint whose speciality was finding missing slaves. Sleep on St Theodore’s tomb and… he would appear in your dream and show you where your recalcitrant slave was hiding.” (Then the Church will collect the reward!)

Seen from this perspective, the analogies between Christianism and fascism – apart from the same methodology – become more apparent. Both, though they are systemic, tempt and entrap the underprivileged. (More about Christianism and slavery, and how they are related, you can read in the next Chronicle).

A scholar on a sarcophagus, 180-200 CE

“A few decades after Celsus wrote On the True Doctrine, a more monumental assault was made on the Christian faith by another Greek philosopher”, Nixey goes on. “Yet today this philosopher’s name, like Celsus’s, has been all but forgotten. He was, we know, called Porphyry and his attack was immense – at least 15 books [Against the Christians]… It targeted Old Testament history, and poured scorn on the blind faith of Christians… Porphyry’s works were deemed so powerful and frightening that they were completely eradicated. The first Christian emperor, Constantine… announced… they were destroyed. In the same letter Constantine also consigned the works of the heretic, Arius, to the flames and announced that anyone who was found hiding one of Arius’s books would be put to death. A century or so later, in AD 448, Porphyry’s books were burned again, this time on the orders of… Theodosius II and Valentinian III.”

The Christians’ Psychopathology

● The Christian counter-attack to Celsus came some eighty-odd years later, and signed by Origen: thanks to his text, we now know what the True Doctrine was about. In the meantime, Clement of Alexandria formulated a Christian guide in his own manual, Paedagogus (Tutor; a most inappropriate title), which exposes alarmingly the psychopathology of Christian leaders, even before these fanatics climbed up to power. What Nixey says is most revealing and hair-raising:

“As Clement wrote, the Lord himself had said: ‘I will sharpen my sword… and render justice to mine enemies, and requite those who hate me. I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh from the blood of the wounded’. (Who on earth was there – and where? – to listen to this sadist and write down his dictum?) “Clement,” proceeds Nixey, “in… authoritative paragraphs, peppered with frequent… threats from the scriptures, advised the faithful on every aspect of their day, from what they were allowed to eat and drink to what they could wear; from how they could style their hair to even what they were allowed to do in bed.⁽³⁾ In… his guide he censured almost every human activity.”

• ⁽³⁾ Preachers: “Sex between husband and wife is allowed but it should not be enjoyed.” [!] (C.N.)

Fresco from Herculaneum depicting a banquet

Two centuries later, “John Chrysostom advised avoiding dinners altogether in favour of funerals. ‘It is better to go’, he thundered… ‘where there is weeping, lamentation, groans, and anguish, and so much sadness, than where there is the dance, the cymbals, and laughter, and luxury, and full eating and drinking’… [! In addition,] contact with women of all kinds was something to be feared and, if possible, avoided altogether… [! But he] jubilantly observed: ‘The tradition of the forefathers… the tyranny of joy, [!] the accursed festivals… have been obliterated’: Pagan festivals, with their exuberant merriment and dancing, were banned… In 407 [the year John died], the old merry ceremonies were forbidden… If anyone declared himself an official in charge of pagan festivals then, the law said, he would be executed.”⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ “The firebrand preacher John Chrysostom – John ‘Goldenmouth’ – [the rock star of the era] was so charismatic that crowds of Christians would pack into Antioch’s Great Church to hear him speak, his eyes flashing, then leave as soon as he was finished, ‘as if’, he observed, with a distinct want of monkish humility, ‘I were a concert performance’.” (C.N.)

“In literature of a newly sadistic strain, Christian writers outlined in graphic detail what awaited those who did not comply with the edicts… The punishments for sinners were atrocious… The Apocalypse of Peter reveled in verse after stomach-churning verse on what happened in Hell. In it, the reader is taken on an infernal safari in which the retributions for various misdeeds are pointed out with relish… Even children don’t escape.”⁽⁵⁾

• ⁽⁵⁾ See what a church of Lesbos is distributing now (April 2019) to elementary school pupils – an entire screed, entitled Children’s Guide to Confession (of “sins”)… Just get an idea:

● “Do you by chance like to listen to secular songs on the radio? (…)
● “Do you by chance go to the theatre and the cinema? (…)
● “Do you by chance go to parties and dance sinful dances? (…)”
There’s no end to children’s “sins”, arranged in an array of categories and countless chapters…

Oedipus and the Sphinx, by Gustave Moreau

“Theatre was abhorred as a repository of blasphemous filth… What the Greeks considered civilized – even civilizing – Christian preachers reviled as ‘depravity’… a ‘disease’ and a ‘wanton madness’… Everything about the theatre was… from the Devil. The theatre… was a place of lust and drunkenness, a ‘citadel of all vile practices’. The ‘abominations’ that happened on stage were a ‘lawless corruption’ designed to pollute the ears and eyes of the audience… Tragedies were bloody, comedies were wanton… Actors were whores: Christians regularly substituted the words ‘actor’ and ‘dancer’ with the word ‘prostitute’; the theatre itself was ‘the temple of lust for prostitution’. Almost every kind of display was… stained with Satanism… As one preacher boasted, Christians smashed the flutes of the ‘musicians of the demons’ to pieces… The music that people danced to was considered perilous, for music can take away men’s senses, and mesmerize them, whipping them into a frenzy of lust… As Tertullian joyfully explained, all of these miscreants would be consumed in the avenging fires of the Lord – and he and his fellow obedient Christians would be there, enjoying the sight. What need for the theatre or the hippodrome now?, he asked. Because for the Christian faithful there are ‘other spectacles to come – that day of the Last Judgement, when the hoary age of the world and all its generations will be consumed in one fire’.”

Constantine: Genocide Act I – Persecutions in Perpetuum

● 313. The Edict of Milan on Freedom of religion, which Constantine the “Great” and “Saint” adopted, was meant to protect the Christians, but as it turned out, it seems it concerned only them. Following Galerius’ initiative, who had adopted a similar measure in 311, the emperor aimed at consolidating peace (Pax Romana) in the empire, something that had not been achieved through the persecution of Christians. But he was a… mama’s boy (as his mother, Helena, was a fanatical Christian). Therefore, instead of imposing the strict implementation of religious freedom, he was anything but impartial: the ancient gods on his coinage were replaced by Christian symbols, especially the “XP” monogram, which he had also on his labarum. Hence it was obvious the persecutions would go on; there was just a change of roles: the formerly persecuted were now the persecutors. It was also obvious that the new persecutions would be much more brutal and bloody, widespread and long-lasting (in perpetuum), for the very simple reason that the Christian leaders, who found themselves in a dominant position, confronted the vast majority of the empire’s subjects, who remained faithful to their traditional gods.⁽⁶⁾ Besides, it was even ironic that the persecutions were further multiplied because, as soon as the Christian priesthood was legalized, infighting broke out! As early as 313, the year of the edict, until 317, bishops threw brickbats against bishops in Carthage, until they asked for Constantine’s arbitration. There were three ecclesiastical councils and two trials before one faction (that of Donatus) was judged schismatic, with the result that its property was confiscated and the clergy banished.

The Pearls of Aphrodite, by
Herbert James Draper (1907)

• ⁽⁶⁾ “Christians at that moment were very much in the minority. It has been estimated they made up as little as between 7 and 10% of the empire’s total population.” (C.N.)

“The emperor Constantine proclaimed himself a follower of Christ”, recounts Nixey. “Under his auspices, the Church was soon exempted from taxes and its hierarchy started to be richly rewarded. Bishops were paid five times as much as professors, six times as much as doctors – as much even as a local governor. Eternal delight in the next life, bureaucratic preferment in this. What more could one wish for?”

● 325-326. Emperor Constantine ordered a temple of Aphrodite in Jerusalem to be demolished for the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre there. In the meantime, all the Hellenic sanctuaries on Athos were destroyed, while in the following years even more ancient temples were burned and torn down, and Christian churches erected on the ruins. Soon, this “operation” became “legal”, ordered by the king – who made sure that there were no pagan temples built in his New Rome.

“The great Roman and Greek temples were – or so Eusebius said – broken open and their statues brought out, then mutilated”, writes Nixey. “Officials ‘scraped off the material which seemed to be usable, purifying it by smelting with fire’, then poured the precious metal into the public purse… Constantine, as his nephew the ‘apostate’ emperor, Julian,⁽⁷⁾ would scornfully say, was a ‘tyrant with the mind of a banker’… A market of plundered art developed and Christians… took to levering out and selling statues that were particularly valuable… The Greek poet Palladas archly observed, as he looked at a fine array of gods in the house of one wealthy Christian, that ‘the inhabitants of Olympus, having become Christians, live here undisturbed: for here, at least, they will escape the cauldron that melts them down for petty change’.”

• ⁽⁷⁾ Julian, the “Philosopher”, for the polytheists, the “Apostate”, for the monotheists, depending on the philosophic or religious ideas and priorities or prejudice of each value system…

But early Christians were neither “bankers”, nor wealthy merchants; they were ignorant people and idiots – including some emperors:

“As Julian acerbically observed, while Constantine robbed the temples, his sons overthrew them.” Nixey describes vividly how, “in a spasm of destruction never seen before… the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art… In Athens, a larger-than-life statue of Aphrodite has been disfigured by a crude cross carved on her brow; her eyes have been defaced and her nose is missing.⁽⁸⁾ In Cyrene, the eyes have been gouged out of a life-sized bust in a sanctuary of Demeter, and the nose removed; in Tuscany, a slender statue of Bacchus has been decapitated. In Sparta, a colossal statue of the goddess Hera looks blindly out, her eyes disfigured by crosses. A beautiful statue of Apollo from Salamis has been castrated and then struck, hard, in the face, shearing off the god’s nose. Across his neck are scars indicating that Christians attempted to decapitate him but failed… In Egypt, countless chisel blows neatly defaced… the images of the gods in the Dendera temple complex on the left bank of the Nile. Divine figures were attacked with tiny hack marks – usually several hundred for each figure… Eberhard Sauer, a specialist in the archaeology of religious hatred, has observed that the closeness of these cuts… hints at blows made with almost frantic rapidity.”

“Purified” head of an ancient Hellenic statue in Samos

• ⁽⁸⁾ “A naked statue of Aphrodite was, wrote one Christian historian in disgust, ‘more shameless than that of any prostitute standing in front of a brothel’… Far less easy to feel desire for a statue who has had a cross gouged in her head, her eyes blinded and her nose sliced from her face.” (C.N.)

“We will never know quite how much was wiped out. Statues were pulverized, shattered, scattered, burned and melted into absence… Others were so well disposed of that they will probably not be found: they were thrown into rivers, sewers and wells, never to be seen again… The sacred groves of the old gods… were set about with axes and their ancient trees hacked down… Moments of vandalism were immortalized in glowing terms in Christian hagiographies… Far more violence was buried by silence… While it might take months of effort, years of training and centuries of accumulated knowledge to build a Greek temple, it took little more than zeal and patience to destroy one… People built themselves houses from the stones of demolished temples… One law announced that the stones from these temples should be used to repair roads, bridges and aqueducts. In Constantinople, a former temple of Aphrodite was used to store a bureaucrat’s chariots… The desecration continued for centuries.”

● Let’s pick up the thread again. The king ordered the execution of the eunuch priests in Egypt, because they… “offended” his “morals”. The same fate awaited dozens of gentiles, pagans, who were considered as “sorcerers of the evil”, and responsible for the poor harvesting in 335. Among them was the philosopher Sopater of Apamea, a disciple of the Neoplatonist Iamblichus, despite the favour and personal friendship of Constantine he enjoyed. According to the Hellene historian and sophist Eunapius, the king was convinced by some adviser that, by magical arts, the pagan philosopher had… obstructed the arrival of a fleet laden with grain! Constantine’s son, Constantius II, a zealous Arian, also persecuted the seers, prophets, magicians, astrologers, and other diviners, for he feared he would be deprived of his throne by “spells”! The serpent of Judeo-Christian obscurantism had been hatched…⁽⁹⁾

• ⁽⁹⁾ As I commented in Chronicle 2, footnote 4, the Judaization of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds (in the Orient and Occident respectively) through Christianization was the precondition – sine qua non – of obscurantism during the Dark Ages.

● A Hellene, for the early Christian Church, was a gentile, a pagan; the word retained that meaning until the end of the millennium. The Greeks distinguished themselves from others according to cultural standards; the Jews did so according to religious standards. It is more than obvious what each people’s contribution to civilization and what their ideals have been. In his Epistles, Paul almost always juxtaposes Hellenes to Hebrews, in disregard of all other ethnicities (Romans, Syrians, Egyptians, etc.) living in the area at the time. It is more than obvious who he considered an enemy! Another “softer” interpretation is that a Hellene for him was a polytheist, while a Hebrew was a monotheist. Nota bene, a gentile is, first of all, a non-Jew (and not a non-Christian). The word Hellene meaning pagan has persisted into modern times. Many advocates of a revival of the Olympian gods’ worship call themselves Hellenic Polytheists, while the religion is called Hellenism. Such persons outside of Greece are careful not to imply that they consider themselves Greek nationals.

The Council of Gods, Raphael (1517-18)

● “The word ‘pagan’,” according to Nixey, “was a pejorative and insulting word… It was also a Christian innovation: before Christianity’s ascendancy few people would have thought to describe themselves by their religion at all. After Christianity, the world became split, forevermore, along religious boundaries; and words appeared to demarcate these divisions. One of the most common was ‘pagan’. Initially this word had been used to refer to a civilian rather than a soldier. Later, Christian writers concocted false, unflattering etymologies for it: they said it was related to the word pagus, to the ‘peasants’… It was not; but such slurs stuck and ‘paganism’ acquired an unappealing whiff of the rustic and the backward – a taint it carries to this day.”

Besides, the English writer thinks it is better to “avoid ascribing modern nationalities to ancient characters and instead describe them by the language they chiefly wrote in. Thus the orator Libanius, though he was born and lived in Syria, is described not as a ‘Syrian’ but as a Greek. This was a cosmopolitan world where anyone… might consider himself to be a ‘Hellene’ – a Greek”, she adds.

● Constantius was the emperor who initiated the anti-paganistic legislation that in time would become the basis of the Inquisition. He escalated persecutions, as well, setting up a concentration camp in Scythopolis, Palestine, where Hellenes, other gentiles and all those who were considered to be “enemies of the empire”, singled out by vile royal counselors, were tortured and killed. Relevant evidence is given by Ammianus Marcellinus – “a former officer and Hellene”, as he used to describe himself, even in those hard times, born perhaps in Antioch. The idea for the construction of the camp was attributed to to George of Cappadocia, bishop of Alexandria, whose end would be as bad as his life was, once Julian ascended the throne.

Victory column of Diocletian (erroneously mentioned as Pompey’s pillar) erected at the Serapeum in 297 CE after suppressing a revolt in Egypt. It’s a granite monolith 20.46 m high (total height 26.85 m.)

● 356. “It became illegal – on pain of death – to worship images”, observes Nixey. “‘Pagans’ began to be described as ‘madmen’ whose beliefs must be ‘completely eradicated’, while sacrifice was a ‘sin’ and anyone who performed such an evil would be ‘struck with the avenging sword’.” Christianism’s Orwellian Brave New World was in need of a surveillance network. “Roman emperors had always used informers – ‘delatores’. Now, they were put to the service of the Church. Men of all ranks were required to become informers… If they refused or failed in their duties, then they themselves would be held accountable. Among those whom the clergy were tasked with reporting on were actors, actresses and, as one revealing little law added, prostitutes ‘who wore monastic habits’. The punishments could be terrible… [e.g.] by having molten lead poured down [one’s] throat. Correction was paramount.” (!)

Julian: a Parenthesis of Hellenism

● February 4, 362. Julian promulgated an edict to guarantee freedom of religion, proclaiming that all religions were equal in front of the Law, and that the Roman Empire had to return to its former religious eclecticism, according to which it did not impose any religion. As a student of philosophy in Athens, the last emperor who consciously rejected Christianism, was initiated to the Eleusinian Mysteries, which he later tried to restore, and became acquainted with two future bishops and “saints”: Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea.

Julian (361–363) was a complex personality: “military commander, philosopher, theosophist, social reformer, and man of letters”, who wrote in Greek. Of course, several of his works have been “lost”; one of the most important of such “lost works” was his Against the Galileans (Christians). He was half-Hellene from his mother. His parents were Christians; he was given a Christian education. Yet, he converted from Christianism to Hellenism when he was 20. The emperor’s role did not suit him, as he disliked absolute autocracy. He considered the ideal ruler as being primus inter pares (“first among equals”), and equal before the law to his subjects. Julian often frequented in the Senate, participating in debates as a member, not as a king. His habit of talking to his subjects on an equal footing, dressing casually, and leading an ascetic lifestyle, were all misunderstood by “hoi polloi”, who thought that he should behave like an all-powerful Emperor.

Julian the Apostate Presiding at a Conference of Sectarians, by Edward Armitage (1875)
Julian the… Sectarian? But at that time, sectarians were the Christians!

He continually sought to reduce the burdensome and corrupt bureaucracy, and dismissed the surplus staff, either civic officials, or secret agents. He promoted decentralization for the same reason, transferring authorities to the cities from the capital. Of course, he repealed the stipends that Constantine had awarded to bishops, and removed the privileges of the Church, as well. He envisioned the institution of a philanthropic system, as the Christian charities were open to all, including pagans, and criticized the priests of the old religion: “These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also; welcoming them into their agapae,⁽¹⁰⁾ they attract them, as children are attracted, with cakes.”

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ The agape (“love” in Greek) feast was a communal meal shared among early Christians.

After five months in Constantinople, he spent the next nine months in Antioch, preparing a campaign to Persia. He was disappointed a lot there, when he saw wealthy merchants hoarding food and selling it at high prices, with the situation heading for a famine. Despite his interventions, the curia and the city’s leading citizens did nothing. Finally, he fixed prices, and imported grain from Egypt; at the same time, he forced the landholders to sell. Then he tried to resurrect the ancient oracular spring of Castalia at a nearby temple of Apollo, where, however, a bishop had been buried. His order for the bones to be removed resulted to a massive Christian procession; shortly after, the temple was destroyed by fire. In 363, he ordered Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem to be rebuilt: again, fires broke out and the works stopped. No need to say that in both cases, these fires were acts of sabotage by Christians, which could be described as “acts of terror”.

Mercurius killing Julian (Coptic icon). According to a “tradition”, Basil of Caesarea had been imprisoned at the start of Julian’s campaign. He prayed for help to Mercurius, who appeared in a vision, claiming to have speared Julian to death…

Julian was mortally wounded under mysterious circumstances during the Persian campaign, before he could implement his vision (“an act of God!”, the Christians would blissfully say, praising the “Lord”). But was it, indeed, “an act of God”? In 364, Libanius said that Julian was assassinated by a Christian soldier of his own army; but 14 years later, he… corrected himself, claiming that Julian was killed by a “Saracen” – though this turnaround happened in a period when the Christians were back in power. According to John Malalas, Basil of Caesarea commanded the assassination. Later Christian historians propagated the idea that Julian was killed by “saint” Mercurius. Considered apocryphal (Christian fantasy) is a report that his dying words were “νενίκηκάς με, Γαλιλαῖε!” (“You have won, Galilean!”). Julian would certainly speak in the plural: “You have won, Galileans!” (Compare his work Against the Galileans): there’s a big difference.

● As regards bishop George, according to Julian himself, Ammianus, as well as Christian historians, such as Sozomenus, Theodoret, or Socrates Scholasticus:

“George manifested his anti-pagan zeal in excess with arbitrary acts and insulting speeches, exacting onerous taxes, procuring the banishment of Zeno, a prominent pagan physician,⁽¹¹⁾ preventing the pagans from offering sacrifices and celebrating their gentile feasts, and bringing Artemius, duke of Egypt, whom the Alexandrians dreaded, for he was much given to the destruction of idols: he invaded with an armed force into the superb temple of Serapis [Serapeum], which was forthwith stripped of images, votive offerings, and ornaments… The news of Julian’s accession arrived at Alexandria on November 30, 361. George was at the height of his pride and power: he had persecuted and mocked the pagans, who now… felt that the gods could, at last, be avenged”… He was thrown into prison with two others who had overthrown a pagan altar; but “in the morning of December 24, the pagan mob again assembled, dragged them forth with horrible shouts of triumph, and kicked them to death.” Then they led the bodies through every part of the city and “eventually burned the remains on the shore, casting the ashes into the sea.” Alexandria, the glorious centre of Hellenistic civilization, was gradually sinking into the abyss…

• ⁽¹¹⁾ Everything Hellenic was “from the Devil”, as well, and banished: knowledge, science, medicine. Medical books were also burned and the only therapeutic methods left were blood-letting and… exorcism. Only dehumanized humans would never question the Christian “new order”…

St. George Killing the Dragon, by Bernat Martorell (1434-35): the same iconography, with a dragon
in the place of Julian!

● But who was that “duke of Egypt” (dux Aegypti), Artemius? For the Christians, he was none other than the “martyr” and “saint” Artemius of Antioch, where he was tried and beheaded in 362 for abuse of power and maladministration of his province, having demolished temples and broken down their idols – on his own will, or instigated by George. The Church apparently felt that his work was “God-blessed”! However, there’s a chance that in Julian’s years, we have not only one, but two “martyrs”: Artemius and George. The English historian Edward Gibbon e.g. identifies George of Cappadocia, the bishop, with… George of Lydda, the “saint”! The former was an Arian (i.e. a heretic), therefore, a “black sheep”. But the latter was the hero of a legend that, in several variations, fascinated even the Muslims. So, he should be preserved. The disinformation operation was thus put into motion (keep in mind that what information we have has passed through… a thousand censoring “sieves”)! George the “saint” was supposedly martyred in 303, during the Diocletian persecution. The technology of the era, however, did not allow a non-existent person to acquire flesh and bone. That’s why we know nothing about the “saint”, nor is there any proof that he ever existed. Whatever we know is according to… tradition. The oldest text referring to the legend, but without naming George, is Eusebius’ Church History in the 4th century (about his credibility, see Chronicle 19, last paragraph). The oldest text preserving fragments of the legend is in a Greek hagiography, a 5th-century palimpsest. But its compiler, just like Gibbon, also identifies the martyr with his namesake bishop.

● “As the early Christian author Origen admitted”, comments Nixey, “the numbers of martyrs were few enough to be easily countable; the Christians had died for their faith ‘occasionally’… Several saints appear never to have existed at all. It is now thought that fewer than ten martyrdom tales… can be considered reliable… There were few persecutions of those years: the Decian; the Valerian, seven years later, and ‘the Great [Diocletian] Persecution’ fifty-odd years after that in AD 303. And not all of these ‘persecutions’ were intended to explicitly target Christians… The Romans did not seek to wipe Christianity out. If they had, they would almost certainly have succeeded… The martyr stories… show what the scholar G. E. M. de Ste. Croix called ‘an increasing contempt for historicity’… The brief and sporadic Roman persecutions of Christians would pale in comparison to what the Christians inflicted on others – not to mention on their own heretics.”

● 363. When Julian was dead, the “purple” (the “crown”, as they used to say of later kings) was given, due to a “misunderstanding”, to Jovian, who established Christianism again as the official religion. Being under the influence of “saint” Athanasius of Alexandria, he moved “as if by magic” from tolerance to bigotry, subjecting those who worshipped ancestral gods to death and also ordering the Library of Antioch to be burned down.⁽¹²⁾ However, he was unable to complete his “mission”: he died (or… they made him die) half a year later. Very soon this task would be undertaken by Theodosius I.

A Greek rider seizes a mounted Amazon (armed with a double-headed axe) by her Phrygian cap; mosaic, 2nd half of the 4th century CE
(in the time of Jovian); from Daphne, a suburb of Antioch.

• ⁽¹³⁾ “Jovian ordered the destruction” of the Library of Antioch, relates Johannes Hahn in his Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt (Violence and religious conflict), “because he wanted to gain the favour of the Antiochians. Nevertheless, he failed completely: not only the pagans but also the Christians interpreted this as a barbaric act… He burned the temple, with all the books in it, at the urging of his wife, with his concubines laughing and setting the fire”…

● The “witch-hunt”, in the meantime, continued with even greater intensity, after Julian’s short reign: Hellenic philosophical and scientific treatises were burned in public, and hundreds of Greeks or other pagans, accused of sorcery, were being pilloried, imprisoned, tortured, executed, and their properties were confiscated. Among them was another philosopher, Simonides. Such accusations arose from the practice of theurgy, performed by Neoplatonic philosophers. It was “man’s conscious participation in the divine work,” which was accomplished by rituals, invoking god, or gods, with the goal of achieving henosis (union with the divine) and perfecting oneself. It is what the mystics, such as the Sufis, are after until now, with rituals using music and poetry, singing and dancing – and what the people of the Church detest until now.

● In 364, Maximus, Julian’s instructor in philosophy and theurgy, was accused of causing a lengthy illness in the new emperors, Valentinian and Valens, but was acquitted due to lack of evidence. In 365-366, however, he was again arrested for illegitimate enrichment. A heavy fine was imposed and he was tortured since he was not able to pay… Around 370, his name was implicated in some rumours about an oracle on who the next emperor would be. Valens reacted hysterically, unleashing a massacre, and as a result, he was loathed by his subjects. Maximus was tortured and beheaded in 372, although, according to Eunapius, he had no involvement in this plot.

St. Paul and the burning of pagan books at Ephesus, by Lucio Massari (1612). Acts of the Apostles, 19: “Τhey counted the value of [the burned books] and found it came to fifty thousand pieces of silver” = more than 20 million €!

● 4th century, 3rd quarter. “One of the most infamous assaults on thinkers and books took place in Antioch… Ammianus Marcellinus… one of the finest historians of the era, happened to be there. An accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals… A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments’ was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded. ‘Innumerable books and whole heaps of documents, which had been routed out from various houses, were piled up and burnt under the eyes of the judges. They were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence… Throughout the eastern provinces whole libraries were burnt by their owners for fear of a similar fate; such was the terror which seized all hearts’… As John Chrysostom crowed, the writings ‘of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated’.” Catherine Nixey sums up with the most tragic consequence: “It has been estimated that less than 10% of all classical literature has survived into the modern era.”

Omphalos of Gaea (navel of the Earth): Delphi with the Temple of Apollo (reconstruction)

Theodosius: Genocide Act IΙ – Massacre of Thessalonica
Christian Vandals in Delphi

● 390. Another “miraculous” metamorphosis was witnessed on Theodosius (379–395). His policy of tolerance in the beginning of his reign gave way to bigotry. The bloody turning point came with his order to his Gothic troops to commit the abominable massacre of Thessalonica in the Hippodrome in 390, when the citizens rebelled against his Germanic mercenary garrison (see Chronicle 18, footnote 5). The people had been invited to watch chariot races; but the Goths closed the gates and slaughtered everyone. The result: 7,000-15,000 Thessalonians killed. Ambrose, the archbishop of Milan, was quick to capitalize on this golden opportunity: he excommunicated Theodosius, and thereby turned him into his obedient instrument.⁽¹³⁾ The king submitted himself completely to the Church, and agreed to do public penance, adopting a new role as the champion of the Christian faith. The result was the so-called “Theodosian decrees”, breaking up pagan institutions and destroying their temples. The first act of his “penance” was perhaps the ruination of the temple of Apollo and most of the statues and works of art in Delphi, in the name of Christianism, in the same year (390).⁽¹⁴⁾ The sacred site was totally destroyed by Christian zealots in an attempt to obliterate all traces of Hellenism, which was already proscribed, a “religio illicit”: gentiles would be sought out by Christian informers, brought to court and in many cases executed. This “war on the infidels” was transferred to Alexandria the next year.

• ⁽¹³⁾ Ambrose could manipulate three emperors: Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius I; naturally, he was “sanctified”! Adopting Constantine’s tactics, Gratian in 382 confiscated every paganist property. Valentinian’s legislation practically outlawed polytheism. Theodosius’ decrees were effectively a declaration of war on Hellenism. He not only authorized, but also participated in Christian zealots’ attacks against ancient shrines, when priests were killed and temples destroyed.

Aphrodite: clay figurine from Myrina
(2nd century BCE)

• ⁽¹⁴⁾ In fact, Delphi was already in a desolate state, with its treasures plundered and shattered: the oracle was visited by Oribasius, Julian’s personal physician, in 362, on behalf of the emperor, and received one of Pythia’s last “prophecies” (or, rather the cry: “Help!”). At least, that’s what the Christian historian Philostorgius says, but we ignore if it is a fact, or another case of falsified truth, of “history” written by the Big Brothers:

  .

  Tell the emperor,

  the splendid palace fell to the ground.

  Phoebus no longer has a house,

  nor the prophesying laurel,

  nor the speaking spring;

  the speaking water evaporated as well.

● 391. “Theodosius passed a formidable law. ‘No person shall be granted the right to perform sacrifices; no person shall go around the temples; no person shall revere the shrines’. Nor could anyone… venerate his household gods, or burn lights, put up wreaths, or burn incense to them. Then… a new and more terrible law came. ‘If there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down’… A bishop named Marcellus became ‘the first… to put the edict in force and destroy the shrines’… As the laws against pagans were building to an aggressive crescendo, [he also] destroyed the vast and still hugely popular temple of Zeus at Apamea… It fell with a crash that was loud enough to bring all the townspeople running… Marcellus [at last] was seized and burned alive by outraged polytheists… Today he is worshipped as a saint in the Orthodox Church.” No one could ever imagine what building would be the Christians’ next target. Catherine Nixey’s narrative builds up to a climax:

Serapeum of Alexandria (reconstructed)

● “At the end of the first century of Christian rule, the Colosseum dominated Rome and the Parthenon towered above Athens. Yet when writers of this period discuss architecture, these aren’t the buildings that impress them. Instead, their admiration is drawn by another structure in Egypt [despite destruction inflicted by Artemius]. Its great halls, its columns, its astonishing statues and its art all made it… ‘the most magnificent building in the whole world’. Everyone had heard of it. No one has heard of it now. While tourists still toil up to the Parthenon, or look in awe at the Colosseum, outside Academia few people know of the temple of Serapis.⁽¹⁵⁾ That is because… a bishop, supported by a band of fanatical Christians, reduced it to rubble.”

• ⁽¹⁵⁾ It is astonishing that none of these edifices (Parthenon, Colosseum, Serapeum) was included among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World!

The Serapeum and Artemision Razed to the Ground

● In 391, the enormous Serapeum, together with what was left out of the great Library of Alexandria, were looted, burned and razed to the ground by Christian fanatics and troops, at the decrees of Theodosius and archbishop Theophilus, whom Edward Gibbon describes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as “the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.” The archbishop had discovered an underground Mithraeum,⁽¹⁶⁾ and together with his followers, mockingly displayed the worshippers’ sacred artifacts offending them enough to provoke an attack on Christians. The latter counterattacked, forcing the Mithraists to retreat to the Serapeum. Theodosius had given Theophilus the go-ahead to destroy, and just asked him to avoid another massacre. As the Christian historiographer, Socrates Scholasticus says in his Ecclesiastical History, Theophilus “caused the Mithraeum to be cleaned out… Then he destroyed the Serapeum… The heathen temples were therefore razed to the ground, and the images of their gods molten into pots and other convenient utensils for the use of the Alexandrian Church.” The temples that were demolished could be declared “abandoned”, as Theophilus immediately noted in applying for permission to convert them into Christian churches – an act that must have received general sanction, for cave-like mithraea turned into crypts, and temples forming the foundations of churches, appear throughout the Roman Empire in the 5th century.

• ⁽¹⁶⁾ Note that we know almost nothing about Mithraism, a religion contemporary with – and rival of – Christianism, practiced from about the 1st to the 4th centuries CE.

5th-century scroll: Theophilus standing triumphantly on the ruins of Serapeum: his eyes betray his paranoia…

● Standing triumphantly in the ruins, Theophilus looked around in search of his next victim and, after he razed to the ground numerous shrines all over Egypt, turned against the followers of Origen, embarking on a paranoid campaign that killed 10,000 monks: the massacre was unavoidable after all… Nevertheless, the slaughterer is considered a “saint” by the Copts!

“According to later Christian chronicles”, notes Nixey, Serapeum’s devastation “was a victory. According to a non-Christian account, it was a tragedy – and a farce. The Greek writer Eunapius felt the destruction was done less from reverence for the Lord than out of pure greed. In his account the Christians weren’t virtuous warriors: they were hoodlums and thieves. The only thing that they did not steal, he observed acidly, was the floor – and that was left ‘simply because of the weight of the stones which were not easy to move’… The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world,⁽¹⁷⁾ were all lost, never to reappear. Perhaps they were burned. As the modern scholar, Luciano Canfora, observed: ‘the burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity’.”

• ⁽¹⁷⁾ “It was over a millennium before any other library would ever come close to its holdings.” (C.N.) On the devastation of the Alexandrian Library, see Chronicle 18, footnote 6, and Chronicle 24, Arsons of Libraries.

● The destruction of the Serapeum was seen by many authors as representative of the “triumph of Christianity” over other religions – or the victory of a Hebrew god over Hellenic, Roman, Egyptian, Persian, etc., deities – hence other cultures; while that of the Alexandrian Library symbolized “knowledge and culture ruined”. The library held almost 700,000 scrolls from Hellas, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, India, and several other countries, being part of a grand research institute, an ancient university, called the Musaeum (House of the Muses), where many of the most famous thinkers of the ancient world studied and worked, such as: Archimedes, antiquity’s greatest scientist; Ctesibius, the father of pneumatics and inventor of the hydraulis (water organ, or today’s pipe organ; see Chronicle 11, Hydraulis, Pipe Organ); Euclid, the father of geometry; Eratosthenes, who argued for a spherical earth, calculated its circumference, and the tilt of its axis, to near-accuracy; Hero, the father of mechanics, inventor of the first steam engine (aeolipile), a follower of the Atomists; Hipparchus, the father of astronomy and founder of trigonometry; Aristarchus, who proposed the first heliocentric system of the universe; his case is an excellent example: his only extant work, On Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon, is based on the geocentric model; the other book that proposed the alternative hypothesis of heliocentrism is known only through citations by other scientists, such as Archimedes. Is this just a coincidence? Absolutely not!

Library of Alexandria (reconstructed)

● In 392, Theodosius banned the mysteries of Aphrodite in Cyprus, while “saint” Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, Christianized gentiles en masse with the threat of slaughter and fire, destroying all sanctuaries. The next year, the king extended the ban to all Pan-Hellenic artistic and athletic festivals and games, such as the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, and also the Roman Actia. Given the opportunity, the sanctuaries in Olympia were plundered. In 395, Christian atrocities spread all over Greece, including symbolic sites – not only Olympia, but also Dion, Delphi (again), and Eleusis, where the ancient sanctuary was set to fire and all priests were killed because they had tried to revive the Eleusinian Mysteries.

● Violence reigned supreme during the late 4th century, with ancient temples destroyed and turned into Christian churches, their statues, altars, sanctuaries, carried around and mocked in public before they were shattered, gentile priests killed, and libraries burned. Surviving texts describe this widespread catastrophe in the Orient and Occident, referring among others to: the devastation of holy sites that extended rapidly throughout Egypt; the leveling of all temples in Gaza; the destruction of temples and idols in Syria and around Carthage; the attacks of Martin of Tours on holy sites in Gaul; and the list goes on…

The destruction of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia was ordered by Theodosius II in 426 CE

“In France”, writes Nixey, “St Martin, or so the Life of Martin proudly records, ‘set fire to a most ancient and famous shrine’ before moving on to a different village where he ‘completely demolished the temple… and reduced all the altars and statues to dust’. Hagiography records such attacks not as dismal… acts of vandalism but proof of a saint’s virtue. Some of the most famous saints in Christianity kicked off their careers… demolishing shrines. Benedict of Nursia… was celebrated as a destroyer of antiquities. Upon arriving in Monte Cassino, just outside Rome, he smashed an ancient statue of Apollo and destroyed the shrine’s altar. He toured the area ‘pulling down the idols and destroying the groves on the mountain… and gave himself no rest until he had uprooted the last remnant of heathenism’… John Chrysostom, hearing that Phoenicia was still ‘suffering from the madness of the demons’ rites’, sent violent bands of monks, funded by the faithful women of his congregation, to destroy the shrines in the area… In AD 401, Augustine told Christians in Carthage to smash pagan objects because that was what God wanted and commanded… His congregation, eager to sack the temples, started reciting Psalm 83. ‘Let them be humiliated and downcast forever. Let them perish in disgrace’… It has been said that 60 died in riots inflamed by this burst of oratorical fire.” It was an undeclared war.⁽¹⁸⁾

The Sack of Rome by the [Christian] Barbarians
in 410, by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre (1890)

• ⁽¹⁸⁾ Centuries of brainwashing created the false impression that Christianism fell like a “ripe fruit”, in a society tired of polytheism, where everyone embraced the new religion. Eusebius mentions street-fighting in Alexandria between Christians and polytheists, occurring as early as the mid-3rd century. A little later, early in the 4th century, “Spanish bishops were moved to declare that: ‘If anyone breaks idols and is killed on the spot’ he would not… be awarded the martyr’s crown”, as Catherine Nixey notes.

This peculiar civil war forced many people to convert to Christianism, but secretly they remained polytheists. Some had the courage to “apostasize”, just like Julian, adopting Hellenism again. It was the reason why laws against “apostasy” were promulgated by Gratian and Theodosius, with the penalties getting heavier and heavier. Polytheist writers blamed the Christian hegemony for all the evils of the empire, such as the Sack of Rome, in 410, by Alaric. Certainly, these books, and all similar writings, were destroyed by the Christians, who threatened to cut off the hands of anyone who dared to make copies of such “banned” literature.

● Alaric and his Goths were Christians (Arians), while the sack of Rome was the beginning of the end for the Western Roman Empire.

“The orator Libanius… and other worshippers of the old gods saw… their temples ‘in ruins, their ritual banned, their altars overturned, their sacrifices suppressed, their priests sent packing and their property divided up between a crew of rascals’… The vicious and thuggish attacks on the temples weren’t done out of piety, said Libanius [echoing Eunapius]. They committed them out of pure greed… ‘These attacks are a source of income’ because after raiding not only shrines but also peasant homes, ‘the invaders depart with the loot from the places they have stormed’.”

Saul of Tarsus, the trouble-maker: his preaching and book burning at Ephesus inspired many artists who applauded such actions that all fascists imitated. Here’s another version: The Story
of St. Paul: The Burning of the Books at Ephesus, by Pieter Coecke van Aelst (tapestry, detail: designed c. 1529, woven before 1546)

● A fundamentalist mob, led by “Chrysostom”, destroyed completely the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of antiquity, in 401, ten years after its closure. Its ruins were used to decorate the Hagia Sophia (columns), the Senate (bronze gates), the palace, and other buildings of Constantinople. A first verbal attack on the temple by Saul-Paul caused a violent riot. Destructions by the Christians started at the end of the 1st century. The “baton” was later taken by the Christian Goths who plundered Artemision in 262 CE. Archaeologists had been searching for six years before they located its traces in 1869.

● The impression one gets on this first “Christian century” is that Julian’s failure to restore freedom of religion was a turning point: the Christians realized what they had achieved and what they were in danger of losing. Their attacks would then reach proportions of an annihilation of all non-Christians, a true genocide – to a paroxysmal point.

●

Reconstruction of the procession carrying Alexander’s body based on Diodorus’ description

Sacrilege of Alexander’s Sōma

IN THIS ATMOSPHERE OF CHAOS AND POLARIZATION, utmost decay and moral degradation, proclaimed as “the triumph of Christianity over idolatry”, the symbolism of a “Victorious Jesus” could not be overwhelming without the “defeat” and “conquest” of the invincible conqueror, Alexander the Great. The king died (probably poisoned) in Babylon in 323 BCE. His body was en route to Macedonia, when it was hijacked by Ptolemy Soter for the prestige of having Alexander’s tomb in Egypt. The deceased, who had been declared as “the son of Amun” by the god’s oracle at Siwa oasis, asked shortly before his death to be buried there, in the temple of Zeus Amun, rather than alongside his biological father, Philip, at Aegae. Ptolemy Philopator built a magnificent mausoleum in Alexandria, inside a huge precinct, known as Sōma (Body), which became one of the most famous and sacred sanctuaries of the ancient world, for Alexander was worshipped as a god in the Macedonian and the Roman Empires – especially in the city he had founded, where he was like a patron. A large number of rulers and politicians, officers and officials, both Hellenes and Romans, paid respects to Alexander visiting the mausoleum. Julius Caesar was the first Roman leader to go to the Sōma, as a pilgrimage to the grave of his hero. Many others followed, from Augustus to Severus. However, there were some sacrilegious villains, like Caligula, who removed the breastplate, and Caracalla, who took the tunic, ring, and belt, while his troops were looting Alexandria for several days, slaughtering over 20,000 citizens, mainly young people, in 215, because of a satire produced in the city mocking his claims that he had killed his brother, co-emperor Geta, in self-defense.

City plan of ancient Alexandria with the four flashpoints framed in red: the Musaeum and the
Library, the Serapeum, and somewhere between the “Sōma”, the tomb of Alexander

● Nevertheless, even in such a bloodbath and plunder, with the sole exception of those “pickpockets” wearing the imperial purple, there was no real threat to Alexander’s Sōma until the next century. Ammianus Marcellinus described how bishop George, passing by the Sōma, in 361, wondered intentionally aloud in front of the people of Alexandria about the great and magnificent temple of the city’s genius: “How long will this tomb stand?”, he asked. By “genius”, Ammianus meant the tutelary deity of the city, Alexander. After a while, as we have seen, “George was killed for repeated acts of pointed outrage, insult, and pillage of the most sacred treasures of the city.” Besides, he was hated by all, pagans and Christians alike. But George was not alone. Theodosius, in 391, declared illegal the veneration of Alexander, together with all other pagan gods, and afterwards, says Alexandre Grandazzi in his Historia, “a violent Christian and anti-pagan riot exploded leading to the destruction of the great temple of Serapis, and possibly reached… the Sōma: an allusion… in a speech by the orator Libanius indicates that the body was removed from the tomb to be exposed publicly for the last time.” It seems that the body was hijacked again, and buried in a Christian manner since, according to the new dogma, it should be interred, while the preceding practice of entombment was thought to be idolatrous. Everything referring to Hellenism was destroyed, while the burial of important, illustrious persons was no longer done in mausoleums, but in Christian basilicas and underground. It is the time when Alexander’s remains “mysteriously” vanish. Already at the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries, John “Chrysostom” boasted in a sermon that the Macedonian king’s tomb was “unknown to his own people”, i.e. to the Alexandrian polytheists. Some decades later, Alexander was included by Theodoret in his list of famous personages whose graves had been “lost”.

Alexander the Great, several versions, by Andy Warhol (1982)

● There are a couple of references to a mosque or tomb of Alexander in Arabic texts dating from the 9th and 10th centuries. They probably allude to a mosque that was reconstructed from ancient architectural elements in the 11th century. Alexander’s empty sarcophagus was found there by Napoleon’s forces in 1798. Leo Africanus, who visited Alexandria around 1517, wrote:

“In the midst of the ruins of Alexandria, there still remains a small edifice, built like a chapel, worthy of notice on account of a remarkable tomb held in high honour by the Mohammedans; in which sepulchre, they assert, is preserved the body of Alexander the Great… An immense crowd of strangers come thither, even from distant countries, for the sake of worshipping and doing homage to the tomb, on which they likewise frequently bestow considerable donations.”

Alexander the Great, mosaic,
by Alexandros Giannios

George Sandys, visiting Alexandria in 1611, was also shown a sepulchre venerated as Alexander’s resting place. Whatever the fate of the tomb that was “mysteriously lost” again, these testimonies constitute a double defeat over Christianism: a) Alexander’s veneration continued either with or even without his body, despite the sacrilege; b) a comparison between the two monotheistic religions here ends up overwhelmingly against Christianism.

● According to 21st century historians, such as Andrew Chugg, author of four books on Alexander, one entitled Alexander the Great, the Lost Tomb, there’s a chance that the embalmed body of the great Macedonian king might be preserved in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, where it has been mistakenly venerated as the body of Mark the Evangelist! The latter had gone to Alexandria in 49, and founded the Church there, becoming its first bishop. However, there were Alexandrian pagans who resented his efforts to turn them away from the worship of their traditional gods. So, in 68, they placed a rope around his neck and dragged him through the streets until he died (the mobs, you see, were not a Christian invention: they have been an essential and indispensable “tool” of every ideology and doctrine).

Two Venetian merchants brought the mummy from Muslim Alexandria to Venice in the 9th century, and the doge ordered the so-called Chiesa d’Oro (Church of Gold) to be built next to his palace. The possession of an important relic would have serious political consequences. With a supposed evangelist on its territory, Venice acquired a status almost equal to that of Rome. During the construction of a new basilica in 1063, the relics “mysteriously” disappeared. According to a tradition, “Mark” himself revealed the location of his remains in 1094 by extending his arm from a pillar to the doge of the time.

Since 1811, the mummy rests in a crypt under the church’s altar, inside a marble sarcophagus on which there are also several Macedonian symbols. On the contrary, the Copts believe that Mark’s head remains in a church named after him in Alexandria, parts of his relics are in St. Mark’s Cairo Cathedral, and the rest are in Venice.

Nevertheless, there’s just one “little detail”: early Christian writers, such as Dorotheus, Eutychius, and also the author of the Chronicón Paschale, say that Mark’s body was burned by the pagans! How could it be possibly embalmed?

A scientific study on the remains would reveal the secret of their origin. Radiocarbon dating would establish if the body is old enough to match to that of Alexander. And, it would be possible to reconstruct his facial features from the skull (wherever it is), and inspect the bones for signs of multiple injuries, particularly the one inflicted on Alexander’s chest when an arrow penetrated into his sternum…

Do you sincerely think there will be any Church officials who would ever allow such a study, putting at risk the Church’s “history” for History’s sake?

• >> Chronicle 24. THE TRIUMPH OF CRETINISM
• << Chronicle 22. AN IBERIAN PERIPLUS REVIVAL

Next Chronicle 24. THE TRIUMPH OF CRETINISM ● The Genocide of the Hellenes (Β) ● Hypatia’s Assassination ● Christianism and Slavery ● Colonialism and Racism

Ruins and Columns of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

Chronicle 17. MINOAN CRETAN THALASSOCRACY

Chronicle 17. MINOAN CRETAN THALASSOCRACY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 17. ΚΡΗΤΟΜΙΝΩΙΚΗ ΘΑΛΑΣΣΟΚΡΑΤΟΡΙΑ

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

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

The palace of Minos at Knossos

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

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

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

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

Bronze Apollo with Lyre, Pompeii

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

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

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

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

Replica of the Uluburun shipwreck

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

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

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

The Pleiades, by the Symbolist Elihu Vedder (1885)

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

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

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

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

The Dolphins mural at Knossos

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

Knossos Palace (reconstruction)

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

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

Sacred symbols: bull and labrys

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

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

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

Minoan Snake Goddess

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

What conclusions can we draw?

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

A Minoan beauty on Thera

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

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

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

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

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

The mysterious Phaestos Disc (side B)

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

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

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

Theran antelopes

Minoan Trade and Influence

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

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

A Theran fisherman

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

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

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

The entire Ship Procession or Flotilla frieze at Acroteri, Thera

Bronze and Orichalcum or Chalcopyrite (Brass)

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

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

Andean birdman, tumbaga

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

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

Brass French horn

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

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

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

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

The Cassiterides

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

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

The blue monkeys fresco on Thera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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