MARIA GRACIETE BESSE on “ARCHiPELAGOS”

MARIA GRACIETE BESSE on “ARCHiPELAGOS”

Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas

/PORTUGUÊS/ MARIA GRACIETE BESSE sobre ARCHiPELAGOS
/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Η MARIA GRACIETE BESSE για το ARCHiPELAGOS

Maria Graciete Besse: a Portuguese-French writer and poet

 
Practice of Relation
 

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages: Amélia Muge and Michales Loukovikas, Periplus

Maria Graciete Besse, Professor Emerita, University of Paris IV – La Sorbonne

mariagraciete7@aol.com
 

Every archipelago thinking is thinking of tremor, of non-presumption, but also of openness and sharing.

Édouard Glissant

 

Composer, songwriter and singer, Amélia Muge is well known in the Portuguese cultural panorama for the beauty of her lyrics and musical compositions. Born in Mozambique, the artist came to Portugal in 1984. Her first album, entitled Múgica, was released in 1992, followed by Todos os dias (1994). Throughout her career, Amélia Muge has regularly collaborated with José Mário Branco, Fausto, etc., and was awarded the prestigious Zeca Afonso Prize in 1995 for Maio maduro Maio (together with José Mário Branco and João Afonso). She received again this prize in 1998 for the album Taco a Taco, followed by other discs (A Monte, 2000; Não sou daqui, 2007) and numerous participations in national and international festivals. At present, the songwriter continues working with several artists, and composing for well-known fado singers such as Mísia, Camané, Ana Moura, Cristina Branco, and many others.

In 2009, Amélia Muge met the singer, composer and instrumentalist Michales Loukovikas, born in Thrace, a specialist in contemporary Hellenic music, especially rebetiko.¹ This meeting, under the auspices of the Internet, proved immediately to be fruitful, actualized in several projects and three albums: a CD-book in Portuguese and Greek (2011), which celebrates the work of the poet Ares Alexandrou, based on a previous work by Michales Loukovikas, entitled O Ouro do Céu (The Gold in the Sky); then Periplus / Luso-Hellenic Wanderings (2012), considered in Portugal as one of the best albums of the year; and more recently Archipelagos / Passages (2018), which includes a CD and an eBook, where we discover a musical and poetic adventure unfolding between Portugal and Greece, but also open to the wider world. In this work, the two artists celebrate the theme of voyage through different cultures and landscapes, in multiple time and varied space – Portugal, Greece, Macaronesia, South America, the islands of utopia –, proposing a crossed approach, endowed with an original sound that extends the fascinating Luso-Hellenic Wanderings of Periplus, to offer us now some passages that lead us beyond wanderings to new dimensions of the imagination.

• ¹ A popular genre, marked by the musical heritage of Smyrna (Izmir) and Constantinople (Istanbul), that mainly developed in Hellas during the 1920s, after the Greek refugee waves from Asia Minor.

Endowed with a great literary and musical quality, Archipelagos / Passages consists of 28 routes, distributed in 10 distinct island sequences, presenting itself as a work in the form of an archipelago. The term “archipelago”, as it is made explicit in the eBook (Archipedia) accompanying the CD (with texts in Portuguese, English and Greek), refers to a meaning prevailing in ancient Greece, where it designated the Aegean Sea, later denoting the Aegean Islands, and finally any island group. But the concept of an archipelago presents a high density of poetic connotations, being a tributary, in the Occidental collective imagination, to past centuries’ utopias in which the island appeared isolated. Talking about an archipelago, we can also evoke the ancient culture and, after Hölderlin, all the Hellenic, universal and immortal cultural richness. According to Saint-John Perse (1887-1975), another great poet fascinated by the island universe, there is an atmospheric environment and a psychological base behind the bright screen of the Mediterranean space impregnated with ancient history and civilization. The album of Amelia Muge and Michales Loukovikas opens with this enchanting dimension, emanating from the adaptation of a poem by Hölderlin.

Édouard Glissant, by Jennifer Dionisio

At the centre of the literary and musical universe this work offers, we can easily identify the paradigmatic concept of Relation, developed by the French poet, novelist and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928-2011), who proposed a rhizomatic poetics open to Diversity as a crossing between a place and the world.² Referring to the crossroads of diverse cultures, the Relation reflects an archipelago thinking, in which the islands cease to mean isolation, opening themselves to the whole world, that is, to a radiating force, opposing the totalitarian concept of closure and intolerance.³ Despite the geographical and cultural differences, we think that in Archipelagos / Passages there are in fact echoes of the work of this great Caribbean poet, mainly due to the sense of a trajectory, a precursor and a crossing, which are at the base of a way of thinking that is opposed to a vision of a closed, unitary world, proposing the stimulating presence of the Diverse, marked by the idea of movement. But, as Édouard Glissant has stressed on several occasions, the Relation does not mean a confused and disorderly mixture of cultures, inasmuch as the Diverse understands the existing differences, adjusting to each other, harmonizing. According to the poet, the Relation has an archipelagic dimension open to passage and to the whole world, a notion that allows conceiving not only politics but also identity, ethics, language and different modes of thinking. In Glissant’s opinion, the scheme of archipelago thinking does not lead to the notion of territory that is defined as a continental notion, because the archipelago is discontinuous, decentralized. In this perspective, the poet-philosopher distinguishes:

● continental thinking identifying with the system, arrogant, made of causal logic that can lead to war;

● and archipelago thinking, which is another way of thinking, more intuitive, more fragile, rhizomatic, associated with the unpredictable of chaos-world, a neologism that characterizes not disorder but the unpredictability.⁴

• ² According to Édouard Glissant, the Relation is everything that “relates”, in Poétique de la Relation. Poétique III, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p.187.

• ³ Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-monde. Poétique IV, Paris, Gallimard, 1997.

• ⁴ According to Édouard Glissant, the notion of “chaos-world is very precise: it is a cultural mixture, which is not simply reduced to a melting-pot, thanks to which the whole world is realized today.” Introdução a uma poética da diversidade, translated by Enilce do Carmo A. Rocha, Juiz de Fora, UFJF publishers, 2005, p. 98.

The Day of the God, by Paul Gauguin

Poetics of Relation: opacity has the radical potentiality for social movements to challenge and subvert systems of domination. Glissant demands for the “right to opacity”, indicating the oppressed can be opaque, not completely understood, and simply exist as different. The colonizer perceived the colonized as different and unable to be understood, thereby constructing the latter as the Other and demanding transparency so that the former could somehow fit them into their cognitive schema and dominate over them. However, Glissant rejects this transparency and defends opacity and difference because other modes of understanding do exist; he calls for understanding and accepting difference without measuring it to an “ideal scale”, and comparing and making judgments, “without creating a hierarchy” – as Western thought has done.

Rhizome is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972–80). They oppose it to an arborescent (hierarchic, tree-like) conception of knowledge, which works with dualist categories and binary choices. A rhizome works with planar-horizontal and trans-species connections, while an arborescent model works with vertical and linear ones. They use examples from the biological concept of mutualism, in which two different species interact to form a multiplicity. “The rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines, looks for the original source of ‘things’ and towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those ‘things’. A rhizome, on the other hand, is characterized by ‘ceaselessly establishing connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.’ Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a ‘rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, inter-being, intermezzo.’ The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favouring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.”

A surrealistic vision by Haitian artist Vanex Florestant

According to Glissant, archipelago thinking is also thinking of tremor, which is consistent with wandering and open to the future. Thus, shivering or tremor is the quality of what is opposed to the brutal, univocal thinking of oneself without the other, writes the poet, stressing that we need to shiver, because we suffocate in the middle of systemic and arrogant thoughts. We could add that we also need, more and more, spaces of epiphany, as the ones that Amélia Muge and Michales Loukovikas give us to listen to in this disc that designs unprecedented archipelagos, mobilizes mixed cultures, appealing to a dynamic of unanticipated subjectivations that designate a glance, a voice, a breath, a tradition traversed by multiple passages, fluid and shivering memories, in order to think about the complexity of the world, also inviting us to imagine the Encounter and to foster hope beyond all forms of utopia.

According to Glissant, as well as to Amélia Muge and Michales Loukovikas, the landscape is not just a simple scenario, but an active character in history. Thanks to the poetics of Relation, a part of nature, seen through the human eye, i.e. the landscape chosen according to subjective, emotional and affective parameters, is not only in a horizontal perspective, but designs a vertical profundity that invites us to reflection. Thus, the disc’s first thematic axis proposes a series of landscapes that refer to the beauty of Greece sung by Hölderlin, related to fragments of Orestes, the tragedy of Euripides, composed in 408 BC, evoking pain, sung in ancient Greek by Michales Loukovikas and chorus.

Orestes slaying Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, relief of a sarcophagus (ca 150 CE)

We then identify the presence of two distinct musical universes: the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, dating to 1400 BC – discovered in Syria in the 1950s, in the archaeological site of Ugarit – and Acordai (Wake Up), a poem by José Gomes Ferreira, set to music by Fernando Lopes-Graça in the 1940s. The sequence begins as a lullaby that starts from antiquity and reaches our days to awaken our sensitivity and intelligence, and imposes itself as a protest song. Parallel to the literary research of this remarkable musical work, we can speak of an ethical and political dimension in the noblest meaning of the term.

The disc begins with a voice of wisdom that recites Hölderlin’s verses (Amélia’s mother, aged 98) and ends with a children’s choir, thus
designing an itinerary that is projected into the future.

Archipelagos / Passages invites us to a voyage through real and imaginary spaces, proposing a geographical, literary and cultural route that convokes voices as different as those of Sappho, Euripides, Hölderlin, Pessoa, José Gomes Ferreira, Saramago, or even Hélia Correia, which is in the centre of the entire CD. It should also be noted that the disc begins with a voice of wisdom that recites Hölderlin’s verses (Amélia’s mother, aged 98) and ends with a children’s choir, thus designing an itinerary that is projected into the future. The ancient world and the space of the Mediterranean, the closed sea, opens up to the Atlantic and is confounded with the universe of Macaronesia, introduced through a traditional song of the Canaries connected with a song of the Azores and Cape Verdean rhythms in a beautiful tribute to Cesária Évora.

Cesária Évora, by Sersun

We can also observe that all this work is traversed by a fundamental question of Hölderlin, quoted by Hélia Correia: “What is the purpose of the poets in times of such indigence?” This melancholic question, posed in 1800 by the German Romantic poet, underlines the disillusionment of all those who saw the lights of the French Revolution go out in the Reign of Terror. However, Hölderlin does not exactly aim at the disillusioned with history but at those “abandoned by God”, bringing about the spiritual fall, the eclipse of transcendence. Anyway, we should remember that, three years later, the answer to this question arose when Hölderlin underlined the role and responsibility of the artist, stating that “the poets established everything that persists”. In the middle of the 20th century, Adorno evoked the crime against humanity and considered that it would be barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. But poetry persisted, as we know, and as is demonstrated by the work of Archipelagos / Passages that celebrates words coming from diverse cultural horizons, to remind us that Hölderlin’s question can be asked again in our days, due to the loss of many values that touch the contemporary world.

Odysseus’ marble statue (ca 1st century BCE) from the Anticythera (ship)wreck discovered by sponge divers near Anticythera in 1900. Statues, coins and other artifacts dating back to the 4th century BCE were found there, as well as the severely corroded remnants of the world’s oldest known analog computer, the Anticythera mechanism.

Archipelagos / Passages, therefore, celebrates a multiple landscape, crosses memories, establishes a dialogue with written and oral tradition, translates the rhythm of languages (Portuguese, Greek, Spanish, English, Creole), makes us listen to the breath that reveals the harmony, pain and violence of history – it is noteworthy that in one of the most beautiful sequences of the album, Amélia Muge dives right into the memory of the words and sings Sappho in ancient Greek, inviting us to travel through time and face the temptation of silence, before convoking an English poem by Fernando Pessoa to insist on the cadence of the hours, showing that time leads us to what Glissant called chaos-world, where we find the shock of contacts, the mixtures between very different realities, the identities and cultures that come into relationship with each other, without losing anything of their originality. This chaos-world is dominated by the sorcerer sea sung in Greek by another collaborator of the CD, Andreas Karakotas, that convokes an excerpt from the already evoked Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal and leads us to an Odyssey where Odysseus is on his way to his island, after a long journey through unknown lands. “Ithaca was everything”, says the poem, but it no longer exists. Odysseus has become a foreigner who takes the form of a beggar, a refugee – we might add today –, a migrant, whom Europe insults and lets him die in this immense cemetery called the Mediterranean. Then we enter a new thematic axis of the disc opposing utopia and dystopia, where the unforeseen, open to wanderings and sometimes to death, is inscribed, like that of Nicolas the fisherman, sung by Michales Loukovikas – the fisherman his mother is waiting for, as she does not know that her son drowned in the sea.

The Raft of the Medusa, by Théodore Géricault (1818-19). The shipwreck shocked everyone as the victims were Europeans (French); it became an oratorio by Hans Werner Henze, and a film by Iradj Azimi. Now that these wrecks concern non-Europeans, they became a routine…

The poetic and musical route opens up, nevertheless, to the vision of a utopia, referring to the famous island invented by Thomas More in 1516, and whose roots are found in Aristotle and Plato. Utopia, as we know, represents something perfect, inseparable from the quest. The political meaning of utopia is related to an imaginary government that is impossible to achieve. The transformation of utopia into dystopia reveals a melancholic tropism that concerns our representation of time and history marked by catastrophe where the dream can be transformed into a nightmare (this catastrophe of which Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish philosopher, spoke in the early 1930s, already sensing the horror of the Holocaust); or into Neverland’s lost kids, sung by Amélia Muge, in a beautiful adaptation of a traditional Thracian rhythm, arranged by António José Martins and Michales Loukovikas.

The question posed by Hölderlin (“What is the purpose of the poets in times of such indigence?”), gains great intensity, like a litany, when it is expressed with Hélia Correia’s voice that evokes the ruin of Hellas, abandoned by all the gods (above all the gods of Finance in the moment of the recent crisis). The dystopian nightmare is transmitted with Beethoven’s music, more precisely the 2nd movement of the Third Symphony, the Funeral March, adapted by Michales Loukovikas, to express what Hélia Correia describes as the Third Misery (title of a magnificent book of poetry).⁵ The “third misery” mentioned by Hélia Correia, is “that of those who just don’t listen nor ask questions… don’t remember”, and corresponds to the dehumanization of the world in which we live, populated by shadows, that world that has lost every sense of hospitality – We Talk About Shadows is rightly the title of this song, in one of the most beautiful sequences in the CD.

• ⁵ Hélia Correia, A Terceira Miséria, Lisbon, Relógio d’Água, 2012 (with Parthenon on the front cover).

The next thematic axis of this work finally addresses the issue of migration with the nostalgia that fuels the singing of the migrant, where we hear echoes of other well-known tunes, Violeta Parra’s voice, or Rosalía de Castro’s verses, set to music by José Niza and sung by Adriano Correia de Oliveira.

Throughout the album, we can see that the Relation presents itself as something dynamic that reveals the world in its transition between interior and exterior, subjective and objective, near and distant. This Relation, as Édouard Glissant certifies, is a knowledge in the sense of knowing about oneself and about others, when the artist opens himself up to the drama of the world, but it can also mean a universe where Alegria (Jubilation) is sometimes inscribed – it’s the title of a poem of José Saramago, adapted by Amélia Muge and António José Martins, based on a composition and arrangement by Giorgos Andreou.

The poetic and musical voyage finally converges in a celebration of the sea, a meeting space to revisit a celebrated cantiga de amigo (a friend’s song) of Martín Codax, Waves of the Sea of Vigo, sung by Michales Loukovikas (in Greek) and Amélia Muge (in Portuguese), with a melody of rebetiko by Panaiotis Tountas – a music of Relation par excellence. The last sequence of Archipelagos / Passages is projected into the future because, as Amélia Muge sings, “there is always a boat to appear” and “everything will soon converge”.

Promenade à Utopia, by Igor Bitman

In conclusion, we can certify that this remarkable work by Amélia Muge and Michales Loukovikas does not intend to present a static world of formal knowledge, but opens up to a universe of relationships and possible revelations. Thus we discover the world in its unpredictable diversity through a voyage made up of multiple itineraries that pass through places that populate our memory, designing a trajectory attentive to the dramas of contemporary democracy, but also to the ever renewed miracle of life, of the splendour of a landscape, the shivering of hope. The album works on a constant Relation between the subject, the world, poetic and musical writing, utopia and dystopia, corresponding to an emblematic route that leads us to overcome all borders, all walls, to design a geopoetics of archipelagic insularity like a necklace of islands that “are there always calling us”, as we listen to in the last passage of the disc. For all these reasons, we think that Archipelagos / Passages constitutes a beautiful illustration of the Glissantian concept of Relation fed by mobility and passages, which include decentralization, shivering, openness to the Multiple and the Diverse, but also an invitation to an ethical and political reflection that projects us into a plausible future, which must take into account the generosity of an imagination capable of transforming the world.

● Presentation of ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages in Paris, Fondation
Calouste Gulbenkian – Délégation en France, November 7, 2018.
● Published in Limite, Revista de Estudios Portugueses y de
la Lusofonía, Universidad de Extremadura, vol 12.2 / 2018
● Adapted into English: Michales Loukovikas

● See also: GIORGOS ANDREOU on “ARCHiPELAGOS”
● as well as: GIORGOS ANDREOU on “PERIPLUS”

ARCHiPELAGOS Authors: Manos Achalinotópoulos | Giorgos Andreou | Ludwig van Beethoven | Rosalía de Castro | Martín Codax | Hélia Correia | João de Deus | Euripides | José Gomes Ferreira | Friedrich Hölderlin | Anonymous Hurrian | Fernando Lopes-Graça | Michales Loukovikas | Giorgos Mitsakis | Amélia Muge | José Niza | Violeta Parra | Fernando Pessoa | Sappho | José Saramago | Armando Soares | Panagiotis Tountas | Vasilis Tsitsanis
Nucleus: Amélia Muge: voice, guitarra braguesa, percussion | Michales Loukovikas: voice, accordion, sound effects | Manos Achalinotópoulos: clarino (folk clarinet), voice | Kyriakos Gouventas: violin, viola (5-string violin) | Harris Lambrakis: ney, recorder (pipes) | Maria Monda trio: Sofia Adriana Portugal, Susana Quaresma, Tânia Cardoso | Dimitris Mystakidis: guitar, bouzouki, baglamás, tzourás (the bouzouki family) | Ricardo Parreira: guitarra portuguesa | António Quintino: double bass | Filipe Raposo: piano, accordion, synthesizers | José Salgueiro: percussion
Special Guests: Hélia Correia & Maria José Muge: recitation
Guests (pro-bono): Mariana Abrunheiro: voice | Catarina Anacleto: cello, voice | Niovi Benou: claps | Teresa Campos: voice | Pedro Casaes: voice | José Manuel David: voice | Ana Dias: harp | Kostas Hanís: vibraphone | Andreas Karakotas: voice | António José Martins: music box, percussion | Catarina Moura: voice | Thomás Natsis: flamenco guitar, claps | Paló: voice | Kosmás Papadópoulos: clarinet | Rita Maria: voice | Rui Vaz: voice
Plus: Cramol: female vocal group of the Workers’ Library of Oeiras | PSO: Plucked Strings Orchestra ‘Thanasis Thipinakis’ of the Patras Municipality | Children’s Choir, dir. Catarina Anacleto: Santiago Fantasia, Gabriel Leite, Sophia Van Epps, Ana Pita, Marta Semblano, Patrícia Arens Teixeira

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Chronicle 13. PROFESSIONALS OR AMATEURS?

Chronicle 13. PROFESSIONALS OR AMATEURS?

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 13. ΕΠΑΓΓΕΛΜΑΤΙΕΣ Ή ΕΡΑΣΙΤΕΧΝΕΣ;

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

Michales Loukovikas

“IF I CANNOT CHANGE A SITUATION, I ACCEPT IT,” B.B. King confessed, clarifying the reason why he changed his style of blues.⁽¹⁾ His statement raises openly the problem of accepting every situation or not, whether one can create obeying to the dictates of companies, or of the public – which is already a conditioned element. Certainly, the room for creation becomes more limited. Even those who can cope with adversities would produce an infinitely more important work if they had a free hand. Those who manage not to debase their art under such strict control are really few. That’s why the ethos of music is already a concept unknown to musicians – something so hard to get that we are under the illusion we can find it among amateurs…

• ⁽¹⁾ Thelonious Monk advises exactly the opposite: “I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them 15, 20 years”…

Odysseus Overcome by Demodocus’ Song, by Francesco Hayez (1813-15)

Well, professionals or amateurs? We need to elaborate on this issue because, in the field of the arts, the former are burdened with all the sins of the world (the junk that’s for sale), while no one dares to call into question the noble intentions of those enveloped in the halo of an “art lover”; and this mentality has already imbued even professionals! We have arrived to the point where we… boast of our amateurism, considering professionalism to be hubris, in the land of the Homeric epics, i.e. the work of a professional rhapsode, where other, equally professional bards of the Odyssey era (sometime between 1250 and 1170 BCE) are also mentioned, namely Phemius and Demodocus. We are talking about a tradition we know for sure it’s been going on for at least three millennia – let alone that professional musicians existed well before the fall of Troy.

So, what is a professional? Generally speaking on any kind of work, because the situation around music is rather confusing, we can say that he/she is someone who: a) knows well how to do a job – has been specially trained, or skilled as an apprentice of an older artisan – and b) out of this job he/she can at least make a living.

Three Musicians, by Picasso

Anyone who does not meet the above requirements cannot be considered a professional and, moreover, if he/she doesn’t meet the first requirement, it’s (normally) impossible to get a job. Of course, the professionals may be good or bad depending on the degree they can meet such requirements. Thus a good professional is someone who cares for both the material he’s working on, and the material aspect of his profession – his earnings. Otherwise his craftsmanship would be degraded and could be easily replaced. Bertolt Brecht talked about this need in his time, but who listened to him then, and who remembers him now? “When you have something to say, to express,” said Pablo Picasso, “any submission becomes unbearable in the long run. One must have the courage of one’s vocation and the courage to make a living from one’s vocation… without compromise.”

The professional musicians’ denigration may be linked to the Europeanization epidemic that’s been sweeping the Hellenic state already since its establishment. The Ionian and Athenian serenades, operettas, various retros, and European light music in general, constituted the “scope of action par excellence” of the literate Europeanist super-professionals,⁽²⁾ while local traditional music was abandoned in the care of semi-professional, or even amateur, self-taught musicians, who were treated disparagingly by the music establishment. The result was that they felt inferior, as they could not even read music, among many other things.

• ⁽²⁾ It is striking that music which is described as… “lightweight” – superficially sentimental, and of a petty bourgeois character – is found only in the Occident, after the so-called “Commercial Revolution” that commercialized everything, even the arts. The one found in the Mediterranean is imitation! Traditional musicians in Hellas, when they’re playing such pieces, characterize them as “European”, even if they have Greek lyrics or composers… (See also Chronicle 11, Music and Nation).

Here’s the “root of evil”: at best, the state left local music to the mercy of fate; at worst, it was hostile against it. Several posts, public or not (teachers, directors, producers, interpreters of music), were surely occupied by these Europeanists. Under such circumstances, Hellenic music and its practitioners barely survived. They were obliged to do other jobs to survive – of course at the expense of their art that was degraded more and more, along with public taste. This profession “offered” so much insecurity that the locals (throughout the Balkans) handed it over to the “exclusive competence” of the Roma, the gypsies.

The dramatic improvement of the conditions of Hellenic
music came with a… tragedy: the Asia Minor Catastrophe.

Politakia, later Smyrnaic Estudiantina: the first one founded in Smyrna in 1898 by Basileios Sideres and Aristides Peristeres, the Constantinopolitans.

THE SITUATION IMPROVED when and where the Greeks achieved economic prosperity that allowed them to support “full time” musicians. But the dramatic improvement of the conditions of Hellenic music came with a… tragedy: the Asia Minor Catastrophe. History shows again and again how much she can appreciate irony! Those uprooted from their ancestral homes moved in thousands into Greece (around 1.3 million people) and, together with their scanty belongings, carried with them the Anatolian sound and lifestyle – which evolved into a struggle for survival: they brought their songs and feasts, just in case they could alleviate their plight…

The Anatolian musicians were truly professionals, with excellent knowledge of both the Mediterranean and European traditions. But they were also refugees – thus, on the margins. It would take some time until they occupied responsible positions in the newly founded phonographic companies. Until then – as long as their equally marginalized public was still there – they would keep on playing their familiar repertoire of Constantinople, Smyrna and Asia Minor at large, with songs and tunes that enjoyed widespread approval in Anatolia; not in Greece, where they were not universally embraced, had a rather limited scope, for their sound was quite “unfamiliar” – let alone they were so difficult to sing and play, especially when the composers engaged in the art of modulation. These tunes could become the “yeast” to “ferment” a kind of indigenous erudite music. But their fate was similar to that of their creators and they were in turn marginalized. Another historical irony was that the so-called Smyrnaic songs were replaced by those of the hitherto marginalized and far simpler Piraeotic rebétiko.

Censorship on Music (Not Only Lyrics)

Hence the reasons for this preference were commercial – as well as political: these elaborate, demanding songs, as artistic products of an advanced culture, were reminiscent of lost homelands. They ought to be removed from collective memory to – supposedly – “heal” the “trauma” of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Firm was the conviction that this music was inextricably linked with the Turkish language spoken by several refugees. “National interest” dictated some drastic measures to be taken…

Smyrnaic songs on the margins for commercial and political reasons,
as reminiscent of lost homelands… Censorship on music targeted
minor thirds, a feature of the ancient Hellenic chromatic genus…

Apollo (raising his cithara), Music and Poetry, by Aimé Millet (1860–1869), on Paris Opéra Palais Garnier

This task was later taken over by the Metaxás dictatorship, imposing censorship that was not limited to lyrics, but extended to music, too (see Chronicle 9). The musical censors’ main target was minor third intervals (three semitones), the so-called “bemolli”,⁽³⁾ that is, the distinctive feature of the age-old chromatic genus – one of the three Hellenic genera, together with the diatonic and enharmonic. Even though there are some questions around enharmony, no one has disputed the chromatic genus: we know e.g. it was never used in tragedies – apparently because it did not fit there. Yet, according to Aristides Quintilianus (3rd century CE), Plutarch said that “the cithara, several generations older than tragedy, since its very beginning, used… the sweetest and most plaintive… chroma” (chromatic genus). Besides, the ancient genera can also be found, noticeably remodeled, in the Byzantine music. Yet, the Westerners can appreciate only scales, especially the diatonic, while their chromatic scale has nothing to do with the chromatic genus: Bingo!

• ⁽³⁾ “In 1936, when censorship on the songs was initially imposed, they ‘corrected’ the popular songs’ melodies removing the ‘oriental’ elements in an effort to ‘cleanse’ popular music. They aimed at various external features of the melody, primarily minor thirds or ‘bemolli’,(*) according to the musicians’ popular parlance.” (Giorgos Papadakis, Folk Self-Taught Musicians).

(*) Bemolle, in Italian musical terminology, means flat, “lower in pitch” by one semitone, notated using the symbol ♭. The opposite term is sharp, #, which is a raising of pitch by one semitone.

As Basiles Tsitsanes confessed in an interview with Papadakis: “With censorship at that time… we were taking away the bemolli. [Markos] Bambakares, for instance, wrote: ‘Every evening I ^♭will wait ^♭for you, girl’. We would change that mark and turn it without bemolle so as not to sound oriental… We wrote beautiful serenades at that time…”(!)

Tsitsanes Ouzerí (Tavern), Thessalonica

“How come that no one informed Metaxás on this problem?”, some naïve person may wonder. Well, if someone did, he must have… disappeared imprisoned or exiled later for “anti-state activities”! Under these abnormal conditions rebétiko turned professional. Persecutions affected everyone – both the Anatolians and the locals – for their music styles were first-degree relatives. Due to its tolerant police authority, Thessalonica then turned into an oasis where many persecuted found refuge. Thus, during its early years, rebétiko influenced the city and was influenced by it. Many most beautiful songs were composed then in (and about) Salonica.

Anyway, Hellenism’s painful shrinkage had also its positive effects, concentrating and condensing in Greece sounds of music born in three peninsulas: the Balkans, Asia Minor, and Italy. No country in this region enjoys such a privilege: it is its geography that determines the sound of its music. This little miracle, however, with Hellenism’s three-dimensional face, collided with the mantra “We belong to the West” and was anything but welcome to the rulers who would do everything for the people to lose orientation – and if possible, they would be happy to sign a presidential decree imposing… “occidentation”!

Sounds from three peninsulas (Balkans, Anatolia, Italy) condensed in
Hellas… Rebétiko’s foes covered all political spectrum (Right to Left).

Phoebus Anogeianakis in the Macronesos camp infirmary, drawn by Manos Katrakis (April 1950)

Controversy Over Rebétiko

Nevertheless, rebétiko’s foes covered the entire political spectrum from Right to Left. In late ’46 and early ’47, according to Phoebus Anogeianakis, the musical unions asked the government to intervene and take “appropriate measures” in order to stem the spread of rebétiko:

“This initiative,” he wrote in Rizospastis (Radical), the Communist Party newspaper, on January 28, 1947, “was gradually embraced by our music critics and columnists who, in their discussions and articles, grappled with its ‘moral’ and artistic value, as well as with its effect especially on the younger generation.⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ Here’s another reincarnation of the Spartan ephori (see the previous Chronicle)!

“Anathemas ‘in the name’ of morality at risk, or an off-hand evaluation of popular rebétiko song as it is presented – mind you – in a cosmopolitan tavern, prevented a critical assessment of rebétiko creating fuss and confusion.

“Just the criteria of our Western music education are certainly not enough to approach and study rebétiko, when indeed they are accompanied by the ‘current’ perception of morality. Many of its aspects naturally seem strange to us. We’ve strayed away so far from its sources following our paths that sometimes we find ourselves with difficulty.

“The tradition of demotic [folk traditional] song and, to a somewhat lesser extent, of Byzantine music, even though some would be surprised, continues in these songs that constitute a genuine form of today’s popular music.”

Piraeus (1933): Markos Bambakares (standing, left) with bouzouki, Giorgos Batis (centre) with guitar.

A week later, on February 4, Rizospastis published a reply letter to Anogeianakis, signed by his co-fighter in the ranks of the National Liberation Front (EAM), namely Alekos Xenos, also a musician. Noting that in the newspaper Ethnos (Nation), the composer Manoles Kalomoires adopted a similar position with Anogeianakis (this concurrence seemed rather… incriminating!), he outlined his diametrically opposite view:

“Rebétiko,” he wrote, “is one of the inherent contradictions of the bourgeoisie in decline. It appears in an embryonic form before the wars. It takes shape from melodic remnants of the Turkish conquerors and those melodies brought here by ship crews coming from Turkish ports. It is sung by the most lumpen strata created by the pauperizing economic tactics of capitalism.⁽⁵⁾ It carries the most reactionary traditions, in the degradation of a segment of the bourgeoisie.

• ⁽⁵⁾ Lumpen (rags in German): a ragamuffin and, by extension, every impoverished element. In Marxist theory, it is combined with the word proletariat to signify the most impoverished segments of the working class having no class consciousness. Proletarius in ancient Rome was someone totally destitute who could not give the state anything but his children (proles = child). Under capitalism, it is the one who cannot give the capitalist anything but his labour power.

“I think that we cannot find ourselves going back to rebetiko but to the few songs of our people’s latest Resistance and those that will be composed about it in the future.”

This fossilized thinking, which the party leadership – unfortunately – espoused, was disputed on the 23rd of the same month by Linos Polites with another letter to Rizospastis. After calling Xenos back to… Marxist order (“how come that the lumpen is a degraded segment of the bourgeoisie?”), he censured the domestic production of tangos, concluding as follows:

“I cannot believe that A. Xenos accepts there is popular tradition and style in the music of the Resistance songs since we know both their composers – he is one of them – and the clearly Western measures in the structures of their compositions.⁽⁶⁾ In addition, we know that during such a short time, individual creation can far easier give its fruits.

• ⁽⁶⁾ The Anthem (“With the golden armour of youth…”) of EPON (United Panhellenic Organization of Youth), on Sophia Mavroeides-Papadakis’ lyrics, was initially performed in the 1st Panthessalian Congress of EPON with music composed by Xenos, while in Athens it was sung with a melody composed by Anogeianakis – just to mention a characteristic example…

“Today, after the great lesson of the Resistance, the gap that separates us in matters of art from the people became more than obvious, and there is a clear need to find a point of contact. This point will be found in contemporary popular activities, if we examine them with less superficiality and more serious characterizations.”

Manos Hadjidakis

The controversy around rebétiko necessarily stopped, since another conflict had broken out – with live ammunition: it was the Civil War… Two years later, with the Left heading for defeat because of their own “mistakes” and betrayals (not because of the superior adversary firepower), another composer, also coming from the ranks of EAM, but disappointed and having turned around, undertook the urban folk song’s defense. It was the highly penetrating Manos Hadjidakis, who gave a lecture about rebétiko, describing also the prevailing atmosphere in the late 40s:

“Our times are hard and our popular song, which is not made by people of the fugue and counterpoint, so as to care for sanitation and makeshift hygienic make-ups, sings the truth and nothing but the truth.

“Our era is neither heroic nor epic and the end of the 2nd World War left almost all problems unresolved and up in the air…

“Furthermore, our homeland follows through with a war, almost uninterruptedly, with perseverance and faith in the final victory, but always – especially today – arduously and painfully. Consider now under these relentless conditions the virginal idiosyncrasy of our people; virginal because just one hundred years of free life could neither make it mature nor leave room for the latest European trends to take root. Imagine all this piled up vitality and beauty at the same time of a people like ours asking for an outlet, expression, contact with the outside world, and facing everything mentioned above as the main features of the era. Moreover, think of the extremely harsh realities in our country. Vitality is burned out, idiosyncrasy falls sick, beauty remains. This is rebétiko. And hence its thematology arises…

“Consider the virginal idiosyncrasy of our people. Imagine all this piled
up vitality and beauty of a people asking for an outlet, expression,
contact with the outside world… Vitality is burned out, idiosyncrasy
falls sick, beauty remains. This is rebétiko”. (Manos Hadjidakis)

The Era of Mélisande takes us to this period
that “is neither heroic nor epic”.

“Rebétiko manages to combine speech, music and motion in an admirable unity. From composition to interpretation, the conditions are instinctively created for this triple expressive coexistence that sometimes, when it reaches the limits of perfection, is morphologically reminiscent of ancient tragedy…

“Zeibekiko is the purest modern Greek rhythm; while hasapiko has assimilated a pure Hellenic peculiarity. Rebétiko is built on these rhythms; observing the melodic line of the song we can clearly discern the influence or, better, the extension of Byzantine chant. Not just examining the scales that are kept intact out of the folk musicians’ instinct, but also observing the cadences, intervals and mode of execution. Everything reveals the source, which is none other than the strict, austere ecclesiastical hymn…

“Who knows what new life the leisurely and pessimistic 9/8 hold for us in the future. But, in the meantime, we would have felt their strength for good. We will listen to them, very naturally and properly, raising their voice in our immediate surroundings and living in order to interpret our inner selves”…

Until the Civil War wounds healed up, many years had passed. The debate on rebétiko was rekindled in the dawn of the 60s because of Mikis Theodorakis’ Epitaph. But it was too late: the debate of the 60s seemed more like a… rebétiko epitaph – meaning it was post mortem – for its creative period, its breath, was already over…

Dinos Christianópoulos

“Persistent were the attacks on rebétiko, even after it was dead for many years,” said Dinos Christianópoulos. “Hostile was the attitude by nationalists and governments (especially by Metaxás, and more moderately by the Tsaldares government, that outlawed and persecuted it), considering it as a stigma of Graeco-Christian culture;⁽⁷⁾ religious organizations and the Church in general, that dealt with it as immoral; fanatic communists (among them even Várnales, although he frequented in taverns), who rejected it as an expression of bourgeois decay and decadence; a part of the bourgeois press, expressing the prejudice and respectability of high society; demotic song fans (mainly schoolteachers and provincial scholars); the conservatories’ people, who faced it with disgust and contempt; university folklorists, who considered it as an abortion of our popular culture; and a lot of little folks, who were emasculated by light songs.”

• ⁽⁷⁾ Unlike “Graeco-Roman world” or “Graeco-Roman culture”, the term “Graeco-Christian culture” or, even worse, “Graeco-Christian civilization”, is a… Hellenic (or, rather, a “Graeco-Christian”) exclusiveness, reminding us of that old… Graeco-fascist slogan “Hellas of Greek Christians”!

Noteworthy is an essay by Costas Takhtsēs on Zeybékiko – written with ypsilon because of a theory “that the etymology of the word comes from Zeus and bekos (bread in Phrygian)”. This incisive text of 1964, rather lengthy to quote it here, deserves to be read in whole, inter alia, for its important reflections, such as:

Costas Takhtsēs

“Contrary to classical Hellenic culture that modern Greeks aspired to resurrect after the War of Independence in mainland Hellas, the Byzantine world was clearly ‘oriental’. The Turks borrowed and imitated this ‘oriental’ civilization, giving to it, over time, a heavier, Turkish character, and exactly this secondary product was what generations of Greeks of servitude experienced, and brought with them when they came, as refugees, to old Hellas.”

“The ELAS (Greek People’s Liberation Army) guerrillas,” he also wrote referring to the years of Resistance, and dissolving the embellished picture Xenos tried to create, “along with some demotic songs, depending on the area, sang Hellenized versions of Russian, and – how tragicomic! – even of… German songs and paeans.”

It is useful and didactic to see in outline the distressing finale of the story about the rebétiko zeybékiko as narrated by Takhtsēs:

“The bourgeois resisted [the zeybékiko songs]; but they soon realized the futility of the effort. Thus, using the well-known method of rationalization or the equally well-known tactic of neutralization through containment, they embraced and adopted them. It’s always the best way to castrate a ‘revolution’ – cheap, safe, and bloodless. They started going on nightly treks to various taverns with bouzouki bands, the menu prices went up, the bouzouki players showed off, were flattered, saw that they had discovered a goldmine, buttoned up, even wore tuxedos, started varying their repertoire ever more with the softer, empty of any message or thought, but more tantalizing, tsifteteli, the prices went up again, the simple people got scared, withdrew to unknown taverns with still unknown bands, the eccentrics and the bourgeois discovered them, they occupied the tables there, as well, until the people, finding no place to sit, were compelled to gather on the outside, staring at the bands, the Americans and the bourgeois, in order to listen to the songs that were born out of them, but were far too expensive for their pockets. Thus a paranoid situation prevailed with the tourists and the bourgeois who went to see the people, and the people who went to see the tourists. Admiring products of economic misery that they were not willing to share except only aesthetically and from afar, the tourists flattered the people, for whom they became both a spectacle and objects of wonder.

“Well: with the collaboration of some well-meaning, and many dishonest or foolish people, an amazing robbery has taken place before our eyes: the people’s right to, at least, lament their fate. The zeybékiko songs have become the status quo, established themselves, lost their edge, their meaning, and have become, in turn, the occupational tangos of our time. More Greek, of course, than the tangos but, mind you, they no longer speak of social injustice, nor about the bitterness of life, they don’t protest, they consent. They speak about bourgeois pseudo-pleasures and pseudo-worries, and now and then about the bitterness of migration, which is absolutely crucial, since migration means not to face reality, but to flee from it – the only kind of flight that is still allowed, when it’s not imposed.

“Let me conclude: Those songs that managed for a while to become the means of expression of a people’s protest against their exploiters of all kinds, are now composed according to ‘plutocratic’ methods of mass production by the exploiters themselves, or they are just financed by them, for consumption by the people, and the people, who do not understand, or pretend not to understand, who have had some food to eat after the war, and, because of this little food, imagined they’ve become rich – sing them!

“I am somehow fit to judge the aesthetic result of all this unprecedented farce; and it’s lamentable”…

After such a text, silence is golden. Even Donn Pohren’s crucial conclusion that “once a minority’s authentic musical expression becomes fashionable, it fades”, pales into insignificance. The same applies to Anogeianakis’ characterization in 1961 that “certain current rebétiko song features correspond to commercial jazz (stylized super production, exaggerated performance through microphones and loudspeakers, showing off of silly virtuosity).”

“Once a minority’s authentic musical expression
becomes fashionable, it fades”. (Donn Pohren)

Medusa, by Caravaggio (1595)

Entertainment and Edutainment

HERE’S THEN WHERE WE HAVE ENDED UP: musicians “executing” every night, all the time, the same repertoire with no substantial changes, and bored as hell, just like their customers. When the musicians do not enjoy their art, when pathos or joys of life have been replaced by bathos or superficial revels, then “merriment” and “happiness” come by artificial means – drinking at best. When the musicians fail to engage creatively and freely in improvisations, having in mind just an outline, a sketch of the repertoire, leaving everything else on the spur of the moment, when they avoid – because they are afraid – to be carried away by their imagination, and prefer to be on sure ground, then at best they may provide entertainment – for the people to forget their troubles, to be fooled away – though they should provide (at least sometimes) edutainment, “soul therapy”.⁽⁸⁾ When the musicians act dictatorially, playing at full volume, and forgetting that music has pianissimo and fortissimo, and a plethora of modes and rhythms, the people go out to blow off some steam, get drunk and break loose, making more noise than the amplifiers and behaving like a horde of barbarians. Then – I’ll say it again – the musicians have lost their best allies: the aficionados, the music lovers.

• ⁽⁸⁾ “Edutainment” (edu-cation + enter-tainment) is so weak and pale compared to the Hellenic ψυχαγωγία (ἀγωγὴ ψυχῆς = soul leading or training, education of the soul) – but what can I do?

When we shoot the piano player without looking in the mirror,
chances are we’ll be finally left without a piano player!

But – you’re bound to ask – aren’t professionals like that? Why should I support them? Well, these are the bad professionals, I would answer – regardless if they make up the majority now. Willy-nilly, they’ve fallen into the trap where other professionals, such as journalists, have also been caught, thinking that they are… coffee men and, consequently, they make coffee according to the customers’ preferences!⁽⁹⁾ They do not seem to bother at all that the order for… “light-sweet” music or news is not given by some “clients” but by their bosses. On the other hand, let’s not forget that if there was no public well-disposed to junk “music” or “news”, the bosses would willy-nilly have second thoughts. Hence, when we… shoot the piano player without looking in the mirror, chances are we’ll be finally left without a piano player!

• ⁽⁹⁾ That was a publisher’s basic argument of defense in the trial of some journalists for violating a draconian Press Law… I wonder why that publisher, employing “coffee men”, has not yet entitled his newspaper as “Cafeteria”!

Music is no joking matter. It’s an art requiring years of study, either with sheet music and books or next to another musician – but always on the instrument. It takes persistent and consistent effort and study to master the technique of a single instrument and, moreover, to decipher the secrets of a single musical “language”. The same applies to a singer: not everything depends on a “divine charisma”. How is it possible to consider this verbiage of “cold” professionals and “sensitive” amateurs as well-grounded? How can a lyricist e.g. pose as a composer when he is musically “illiterate”? What would this rhymer say, indeed, if someone, who had never sat down to work on language and metrics, declared to be a “poet”? You’ll tell me that I forget a very important parameter: in Hellas, you are whatever you declare to be!

Popular songs, they say, are simple. Yes, but they are not simplistic! The great difficulty in their composition lies in this very simplicity. Especially if you have studied theory of music, it is rather easy to compose something complicated. If you attempt to simplify it later, if you leave just the basic melodic line, then the substance, the quality of your inspiration, reveals itself.

Let’s suppose that divine inspiration strikes a musically “illiterate”: he will not be able to elaborate on that because he lacks proper knowledge. If this elaboration is taken over by someone else: the end result will be different from what he had in mind. Even if he “hits it big” and becomes a “star”: he will have capitalized on the erudition of third persons, who will, unfortunately, in most cases, remain unknown. Additionally, if he wishes to sing his creation, as it has become trendy lately: he will fail, as well, because, even if he doesn’t sing out of tune (if…), he has not worked his vocal chords, ignores completely the vocal techniques, he doesn’t know the secrets of breathing, articulating and singing, and much more.

Of course, one may refer as an example to the Beatles, who composed brilliant music being musically “illiterate”. Apart from the fact that they, too, capitalized on the erudition of their outstanding producer, George Martin, I have to stress I don’t mean by any means those musicians who are theoretically “illiterate”: the Beatles were professional musicians, since the time they played – completely unknown – in Hamburg.

Liszt “trembled at the idea of some self-taught virtuoso studying music,
so as to keep the impulsive power of his musical instinct virginal.”

It’s obvious I don’t refer to autodidacts, i.e. to self-taught musicians, who do not have only disadvantages but also advantages against their theoretically erudite colleagues. Let alone that a conservatory may destroy a natural talent. Liszt e.g. admired so much an autodidact virtuoso that “he trembled at the idea of him studying music, so as to keep the impulsive power of his musical instinct virginal and unchanged”, as Sophia Spanoudes wrote in 1952 in her well-known column in favour of Tsitsanes. As to the strong advantages of autodidacts compared to erudite artists, Giorgos Papadakis explained why such musicians have been the salt of the earth:

“A self-taught instrumentalist is obviously required to solve many difficult technical problems alone. He is obliged to improvise solutions to problems already solved, since a teacher or a method would have significantly shortened the time required to do it… That’s why many times he needs to re-invent the wheel. The price can be high, but he may reap a reward that many musicians would envy: a quite personal style derived from personal improvised ways of addressing technical problems. This is evident in the way of playing of those musicians who have learned out of commitment and play with commitment.”

Basiles Tsitsanes on a stamp

The musically “illiterate”, however, are also sly: they declare they are “popular composers”, instead of “popular musicians”, because otherwise the trick would have been exposed at once. So let’s have a brief look at this category, as well:

“A popular composer”, wrote Phoebus Anogeianakis:

“a) is an uneducated person, endowed by nature with musical gifts, someone who has not studied music (whatever knowledge he has is due to his extensive experience as a professional, especially… because of his contact-collaboration with musicians of light music);

“b) ‘composes’ mainly songs or short instrumental pieces (of a dance or free rhythmical type) usually with the help of a popular instrument;

“c) ‘bases’ his work on Greek popular music tradition; but at the same time he is under certain influences (from foreign popular music or also… from local or foreign popular-like art light music).”

It’s obvious that a popular composer according to Anogeianakis also needs to combine the qualities of a self-taught musician according to Papadakis, if he is to acquire a quite personal style – and vice versa: an autodidact must be gifted by nature with musical talents and have extensive experience in order to re-invent the wheel…

When Pan purloined Apollo’s lyre, by David Henry Souter

One more thing: the term “art music”, prevailing in the 60s when Anogeianakis’ text was written, is, of course, completely inappropriate, because it implies that popular music is probably… “artless”! Clearly annoyed and in a sarcastic mood, as well, Tsitsanes once commented that the difference between popular and “art” composers is that between eyewitnesses to a crime and some others who… just heard about it!

And what about the… “illiterate”? Where can we group all those who surely have nothing in common with either Tsitsanes or the Beatles? No need to ask: they are the… perpetrators of the crime!

• >> Chronicle 14. MUSIC MADE OF BODY AND SOUL
• << Chronicle 12. “DO NOT MALTREAT OUR MUSIC!”

Next Chronicle 14. MUSIC MADE OF BODY AND SOUL ● Man: a Musical Being ● Music, Nature and Language ● Singing Neanderthals ● Baby Talk ● Talent ● Art of Soul vs. Art of Beauty ● Ecstasy and Catharsis ● Ritual Music and Dance ● Ethos in Music

GIORGOS ANDREOU on “ARCHiPELAGOS”

GIORGOS ANDREOU on “ARCHiPELAGOS”

Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Ο ΓΙΩΡΓΟΣ ΑΝΔΡΕΟΥ για το “ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ”

Giorgos Andreou, a distinguished Greek composer and pianist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fado, by José Malhoa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck and congratulations on your work!

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

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

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

ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. IMAGINARY ISLANDS

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages

 

VII. IMAGINARY ISLANDS

 

● An Island, Utopia
● Penelope of Ithaca ● Lost Kids

.

/PORTUGUÊS/ ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. ILHAS IMAGINÁRIAS

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • VII. ΝΗΣΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΦΑΝΤΑΣΙΑΣ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

14. An Island, Utopia
Dedicated to Ares Alexandrou

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

In that name without a place / without knowing where to be
it’s out there and ever-changing / so inviting but eluding
there’s something we have found / something that no one can reach.

Something we can say it’s perfect / between the recto and reverso
sweet and bitter, warm and chilly, / it’s an island…

Something that can liberate / and confine and cause pain
and enslave, also relieve, / it’s an island whose name is Utopia.

In the more absurd desire, / or in the darkest of darkness,
or in a box that is empty, / it’s an island…

Telling us about a house, / a foreigner away from home;
an Odyssey of the idea that created the illusion
of this island whose name is Utopia.

Eternizing horizons / far away beyond horizons
in the night or in the day / fog is out there in the distance
vision is blurred, imprecise, / where myopia itself
is an island whose name is Utopia.

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice: A. Muge / Recitation: Michales Loukovikas • D. Bass: António Quintino
Harp: Ana Dias / Ney: Harris Lambrakis

●

Elysian Fields, by Carlos Schwabe (1903)

● Utopia: an imagined community or society with highly desirable or nearly perfect conditions for its citizens. Utopian ideals place emphasis on egalitarian principles, with the method of implementation varying according to the ideology of each proposal. The term utopia was coined by Thomas More for his book Utopia (1516), describing a fictional island society in the Atlantic. The word comes from the Hellenic οὐ (not) and τόπος (place) and means no-place. Eutopia, from the Greek εὖ (good) and τόπος, meaning good place, is the correct term to describe a positive utopia. Utopia and eutopia in English are homophonous; thus they became synonymous, as well. The opposite of eutopia is dystopia – from the Hellenic δυσ- (bad) and τόπος, i.e. cacotopia, or anti-utopia. ● Plato‘s Republic is sometimes being described as a dystopia. Τhis book, one of the most influential works on philosophy and political theory, is chronologically the first recorded utopian proposal. The citizens are categorized into a rigid class structure of golden, silver, bronze and iron socioeconomic classes with limited social mobility (reminding us of the Indian caste system). The golden citizens are trained in a rigorous 50-year-long educational program to be benign oligarchs, the philosopher kings. The wisdom of these hereditary rulers will supposedly eliminate poverty and deprivation through fairly distributed resources. True knowledge, however, is reserved for the elite, while the lower classes are expected to fulfill their functions to the state loyally until the end of their lives. Censorship is common, to prevent impiety and immorality from corrupting the youth. The Platonic Republic has few laws, practices a form of eugenics to weed out the disabled, and deliberately hires mercenaries to conduct war in the hope that the more warlike populations of surrounding countries will be eliminated (what the Punics did until finally Carthage was razed to the ground). Indeed, who would like to live in such a harsh, unfree utopia, if his/her metal were not noble? In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper singled out the Platonic Republic as a totalitarian dystopia, with a government composed only of a distinct hereditary ruling class, while the lower working class is given no role in decision making and treated as human cattle. Undoubtedly, the greatest utopia is to expect solutions from such philosopher kings, even though they are world-famous and have influenced generations upon generations of thinkers.

● Ares Alexandrou; real name, Aristoteles Vasiliades; 1922 – 1979): a Greek novelist, poet and translator. Always on the Left but unconventional (I belong to the non-existent party of poets), he is the author of a single novel (To Kivōtio, Mission Box) which is widely considered to be among the modern Greek classics. He was born in Petrograd to a Greek father and a Russian mother; they all moved to Greece in 1928. During the Nazi occupation, he joined a communist youth resistance group but soon left in disagreement. After the ‘liberation’ of Greece, however, the British arrested and deported him to a camp in Libya. Furthermore, even though he did not participate in the ensuing Civil War (1946-1949), he was arrested due to his refusal to disavow his political beliefs and sent to ‘islands of exile’ and prisons. He was finally discharged in 1958. Because of the dictatorship in 1967, he decided to move to Paris, where he died in 1979 from a heart attack, having lived to see his novel published in French. His poems (1941-1974) were mostly written in exile. Nevertheless, due to his unconventional character, only two composers set his poetry into music: Michales Gregoriou (Undelivered Letters, 1977) and Michales Loukovikas (The Gold in the Sky, 2008). Three songs from the Gold were included in Periplus by Amélia Muge and Loukovikas (2012): Illegal Note, Lullaby, The Inner Dictates.

The Golden Age, by Lucas Cranach the Elder

15. Penelope of Ithaca

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

Quietly weaving her designs, / a slyness that’s so refined,
to escape while staying there / she turns the hours to zero

On the loom she spins her days / in the web of all her sorrows
on the loom her nights unravel / in the texture of her sighs

If Ulysses runs the space / she’s voyaging in time
in the air of all her movements / her own steering wheel’s the shuttle

Aboard that craft she’s sailing / it’s her looming errant loom
her yarn goes from a to z / back and forth and to and fro

In the threads of this web is / where the fabric’s the idea
of a story where the wait is / done while sailing in the sea
at the rudder of a loom

Going forward, standing still and / working hard without going
past this point, a spider’s web for / days and months and many years
starting over and again

Time was then just like a fabric / interwoven in this manner
in Penelope while waiting / she sailed tired on this endeavour

Such was her determination / that the difference perhaps is this
between waiting for Ulysses / or Sebastian the king

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice: A. Muge • Cello: Catarina Anacleto / D. Bass: António Quintino
Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Percussion: José Salgueiro / Piano: F. Raposo

●

Homer

● Homer (Ὅμηρος, late 8th – early 7th centuries BCE): the semi-legendary author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epics originally transmitted orally, which became the central works of Greek literature. He was said to be a blind bard from Ionia, in central coastal Asia Minor. The influence of the Homeric epics on Western civilization has been incalculably vast , inspiring many famous works of literature, music, and visual arts. ● The Odyssey is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad dealing with the Trojan War. It focuses on Odysseus (Ὀδυσσεύς, Ulysses in Latin, ca. 13th – early 12th centuries BCE), king of Ithaca, and his nostos, the ten-year eventful journey home after the fall of Troy. He also plays a key role in the Iliad and other works of the Epic Cycle. Renowned for his brilliance, guile and versatility (πολύτροπος), he is hence known by the epithet cunning (μῆτις, cunning intelligence). ● As it is assumed that he has died, his wife, Penelope, known for her faithfulness to him, must deal with a horde of unruly suitors, the mnesteres. Devising tricks to delay them, she pretends to be weaving a burial shroud for her elderly father-in-law and claims that she will choose a suitor when she has finished. Every night for three years, she undoes part of the shroud, until an unfaithful serving woman discovers her trick and reveals it to the suitors. Obliged to change course, she declares that whoever can string Odysseus’ rigid bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads may have her hand. The only one who can do that is Odysseus himself. There follow the scenes of mnesterophonia (slaying of the suitors) and the hero’s recognition by Penelope. ● Sebastian I (1554 – 1578): King of Portugal who disappeared (probably killed) in the battle of Alcazar in Morocco. Portugal’s defeat led to its integration in the Iberian Union under the Spanish crown for 60 years. Sebastião is often referred to as “the desired”, as the Portuguese longed for his return to end the country’s decline.

Penelope and the Suitors, by John William Waterhouse (1912)

Odysseus’ Recognition by Penelope
Rhapsody 23 (excerpts)

– Homer “Odyssey”
• Edited by Michales Loukovikas

[…] and so much her heart
pondered, if she should stand aloof and question her dear husband,
or go up to him, so as to hold and kiss his head and hands.
After she had entered […]
she sat down over against Odysseus, in the light of fire;
[…] but there he […]
was looking down, and waiting still to see whether his dignified wife
would tell him something the moment that her keen eyes beheld him;
but she sat long in silence; amazement came upon her soul,
while she was looking over him at times steadfastly with her eyes;
other times she knew him not […]

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

One of the dramatic threads in the account of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca is the gradual revelation of his identity: he is seated before a columned façade representing his palace, Penelope and his son, Telemachus, stand before him, as the old nurse, Eurycleia, washes
his feet and recognizes him from an old scar (terracotta relief, 450 BCE)

16. Lost Kids

– Amélia Muge / Thracian traditional tune, A. Muge
• Arranged by António José Martins, Michales Loukovikas

Little kids, my ass! / we have all grown up
time is misleading / in a paradise
but age is so mixed-up / and thinks we‘re infantile
so everyone retorts, / Thank you, we don’t buy!

Lost and missing, yes, / we may really be,
but rather be lost / than full of baloney
and such certainties / that may turn us all
blind and armless devils, / deaf and also lame

Never we obey / to your every “must”
neither sleep too early
doing somersaults / to chase the fear away

Never never never
never say yes, / never say no,
if you don’t know why, / never be distracted

There are many faces / with a snobbish air
they do not see straight, / only sideways
if what you say has nothing / got to do with me
go and waste your time / with someone else, you bear!

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

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

●

● Neverland: a fictional location featured in the works of J. M. Barrie, an imaginary faraway place, where Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys and other mythical creatures live (there are no lost girls because, as Peter explains, girls are far too clever to get lost). Although not all people who go there cease to age, the best known Neverlander famously refused to grow up, and this is often used as a metaphor for eternal childhood (or childishness), immortality, and escapism.

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • VIII. IN TIMES OF INDIGENCE
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • VI. IN A HARBOUR’S TAVERN

Chronicle 5. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

Chronicle 5. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 5. ΙΒΗΡΟΥ ΟΔΥΣΣΕΙΑ

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

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

Michales Loukovikas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odysseus and Calypso in Odyssey-Lisbon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Circe, by Charles Gumery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taurocathapsia (bull-leaping), Minoan fresco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• >> Chronicle 6. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Jondo)
• << Chronicle 4. ON DEMOCRACY

Next Chronicle 6. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Jondo) ● Roma, Bartók, Pohren and Flamenco ● Lorca, Falla, Pedrell and Cante Jondo

Chronicle 27. AN ARCHAEOLOGIST’S WATERLOO

Chronicle 27. AN ARCHAEOLOGIST’S WATERLOO

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 27. ΤΟ ΒΑΤΕΡΛΩ ΕΝΟΣ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΛΟΓΟΥ

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

Michales Loukovikas

.

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

(Constantine P. Cavafy, Ithaca)

A Minoan woman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taureador: Fresco fragment from Avaris, 16th BCE

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

Minoan Ladies in Blue fresco, ca 1525-1450 BCE

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

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

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

Sumerian silver lyre of Ur (2600-2400 ΠΚΧ)

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

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

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

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

Lawrence (left) and Woolley at Carchemish

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

The Knossos palace reconstructed

Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier vs. Leonard Woolley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Papyrus fresco on Thera

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

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

Ritual sprinkler in rock crystal
from Kato Zakros, Crete

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

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

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

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

Knossos: the Throne Room with the griffins reconstructed

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

Asherah, Canaanite fertility goddess

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

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

La Petite Parisienne de Crète…

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

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

Minoan fresco frieze at Avaris reconstructed

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

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

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

A Minoan heterotopia at Avaris. Taureador (detail)

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

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

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

Ahmose fighting back the Hyksos

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

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

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

Theran rosettes

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

Minoan female acrobat
(ivory, 2800-1100 BCE)

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

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

Differences Between Minoan and Pharaonic Society and Art

Wild duck on Thera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theran boy-boxers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mycenaean women procession fresco

Before Tin, it was the Obsidian…

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

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

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

Grandstand Minoan procession fresco

Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO!

ii) INTERLUDE

Crossing the Atlantic

 

Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO!

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

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

Afro-Brazilian Museum

ΙΙΙ Festival

SO DISTANT
SO NEAR

Music and Poetry in the
Portuguese Language

Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro, May 2013

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

Michales Loukovikas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anticythera Mechanism

The Mediterranean and the Oecumene beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical questions as the starting point of the research

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

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

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

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

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

Α. Mediterranean Periplus, in Search of Orpheus

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

Β. Cassiterides Archipelago, Sailing to Tartessos

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

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

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

Homer’s Odyssey periplus

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

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

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

The siege of Lisbon, by Roque Gameiro (1917)

Appendix: An Atlantic Odyssey

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

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

Sappho and Alcaeus, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

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

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

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

Map of Rio de Janeiro (Dutch Atlas 1600)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arctic continent on the Gerardus Mercator map (1595)

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

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

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

Homère, L’Odyssée; lithographies by Marc Chagall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eternally mapping Homer’s Odyssey

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

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

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

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

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

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

LABYRINTH OF MAPS

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

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

Homer’s mystery: the epimyth of a myth

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

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

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

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

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

THE “CLASSICAL” MEDITERRANEAN ODYSSEY

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

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

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

Critical remarks on “PERIPLUS” in the Press

Critical remarks on “PERIPLUS” in the Press

/PORTUGUÊS/ Comentários sobre o “PERIPLUS” na imprensa
/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Σχόλια για τον “ΠΕΡΙΠΛΟΥ” στον πορτογαλικό Τύπο

 

GREECE IS HERE TO SING

Nuno Pacheco, “Público” – February 20, 2012

Amélia and Michales have completed the first intermusical voyage of the modern era between Portugal and Greece, doing what no-one else has done until now: strengthening links, interconnecting notes (the musical ones, because the others are rare), creating new itineraries with ancient routes as starting points…
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CIRCUM-NAVIGATION TOWARDS THE ROOTS OF THE FUTURE

Maria Ramos Silva, “i” – February 21, 2012

An innate understanding of musical affinities, generosity and contagious sense of humour. Amélia and Michales, a Portugal-Greece in the leadership of the championship of building bridges among peoples…

A cauldron of sounds where cultural affinities are cooked beyond the frontiers of crisis…
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LUSO-HELLENIC EPIC

Nuno Pacheco, “Público/Ípsilon” – February 24, 2012

Amélia Muge has made, together with Michales Loukovikas, the disc that no-one else has produced yet, uniting Portugal and Greece, Occident and Orient, past and future…

Amélia Muge and Michales Loukovikas, in a time that the crisis sweeps Portugal and Greece, put in “Periplus” the vigour of the ancient epics, proposing a Luso-Hellenic musical voyage that encompasses, within the same adventure, other neighbouring cultures, from Asia to Africa…

●

“Periplus”, an idea so dear to Amélia Muge, has been a risky bet since the beginning. Uniting cultures of the Mediterranean with neighbouring ones of the Atlantic and of the Indian oceans, mixing the Occident and the Orient without giving in to multicultural “pastiches” of dubious taste, demands an enormous dose of dedication, determination and knowledge. The touchstone came across Amélia in the link of Portugal and Greece, working with Michales Loukovikas (an excellent discovery) and sharing with him and a lot of musicians of great talent, Portuguese and Greeks, such an adventure. The result is a diamond polished to the point of almost perfection…

All this in a contemporary approach where the melodic and rhythmic lines of the two countries approximate, interconnect and challenge each other in a natural and fluid form, as if they have always been neighbours and conversed like that…
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WE ARE ALL GREEKS

João Lisboa, “Expresso/Atual” – February 25, 2012

A summit of Portuguese and Greek poets and musicians, presided by Amélia Muge and Michales Loukovikas, in order to confirm the idea that much of what we are exists on the other side, as well…

Mediterranean, of course. Which had as a port of departure for its exploration the interest about the work of the Greek poet Ares Alexandrou… and was prolonged through an intuitive search of points of contact and common identity features that… one needs only to discover…
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PORTUGAL AND GREECE UNITED FOR ONE NIGHT IN LISBON

João Moço, “Diário de Notícias” – February 25, 2012

“Periplus”… much more than a mere collection of songs, is a musical voyage through Portuguese and Greek traditions, evoking also the ancient epics while the future is being gazed on…

This musical meeting between Portugal and Greece gains a double symbolism, as well, in a moment that both countries face intense social problems…
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DAEDALUS AND OTHER ACCOUNTS

Nuno Rogeiro, “Sábado” – March 1, 2012

For decades now, I have been following with interest the singular path of Amélia Muge between a mythical tradition and the “social” themes. But “Periplus, Luso-Hellenic Wanderings” is even more beautiful. Musicians and instruments, from here and from the Hellenic archipelagic peninsula, an Odyssey in sounds, the Mediterranean, real and imaginary, the Occident where Portugal reposes, dreams and suffers, with two grand ballads: “Heavy as Iron” and “Zum Zum”.
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AMÉLIA MUGE + MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

João Miguel Tavares, “Time Out” – March 21, 2012

… There is an immense irony in the fact that “Periplus”, which has as a subtitle “Luso-Hellenic Wanderings”, celebrates that sort of Mediterranean umbilical cord linking Greece with Portugal at least since the myth of the foundation of Lisbon, that is attributed to Ulysses. Brothers in the economic bankruptcy, the two countries join forces here to celebrate their cultural wealth on the face of any austerity – Amélia Muge’s discs are a luxurious filigree of sounds, instruments and verses, and “Periplus” is no exception.

More than that: they are always anything but obvious. If she joins here forces with the Greek musician and composer Michales Loukovikas, it is not to create an euro-pudding with a braguesa guitar and a bouzouki. Yes, there is a braguesa guitar, and yes, there is a bouzouki, as there are traces of rebetiko and fado, there are Pessoa’s verses and Delphic hymns. But nothing is approached in a conventional way – quite the contrary, each track is an accumulation of surprises, as in “Shine”,^(*) where Hélia Correia sings (yes, sings) in Greek, as for example in “The Foliage of a Rose”, a magnificent theme that sums up perfectly how it is possible to make a Luso-Galician-Greek patchwork without leaving a single seam on display…

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^(*) It is the “Epitaph” composed by Seikilos sometime after the 2nd century BC; an epigram engraved on a cylindrical tombstone with lyrics and music (the symbols of the ancient Greek notation): that is, we have a song, the oldest extant complete song in the world. The tombstone was found in Aydin, ancient Tralles, nearby Ephesus, in Asia Minor. Our title derives from the first verse: While you live, shine…

One day we met Hélia Correia and, among other things, we told her that this “Epitaph” will be included in “Periplus”. To our great surprise, Hélia not only knew Seikilos’ composition (which most Greek musicians ignore), but she immediately began to sing it in ancient Greek! We then decided that Hélia was entitled to sing the “Epitaph” in the disc, as well…

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>> “PERIPLUS”: an interview to a Hellenic newspaper

Chronicle 26. IBERIAN CROSS-CHECK

Chronicle 26. IBERIAN CROSS-CHECK

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 26. ΙΒΗΡΙΚΗ ΔΙΑΣΤΑΥΡΩΣΗ (ΣΤΟΙΧΕΙΩΝ)

● Naucratis ● Adolf Schulten and Dan Stanislawski ● The Trojan War Odysseys ● Metal Attraction ● Cassiterides ● Balearics ● Arganthonios ● Graeco-Tartessian Friendship Against Phoenicians and Punics

Michales Loukovikas

ALTHOUGH DAN STANISLAWSKI accepted there were Contacts Between the Ancient Civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and Iberia,⁽¹⁾ he was against the idea of any Aegean presence in the peninsula, and remained faithful to the mainstream scholarly favouritism towards Phoenicia. Commenting on the “claims that there was contact” between Iberia and Crete, he conceded it is “a seductive idea… a reasonable hypothesis”, but “as yet there is no convincing evidence that the Mediterranean island route to the west was used” by Minoans.

• ⁽¹⁾ See the beginning of Chronicle 21 with the first paragraph of Chapter 7 from Dan Stanislawski’s Study in Historical-Political Geography: The Individuality of Portugal (1959). His other studies on Portugal are: Portugal’s Other Kingdom: The Algarve (1963), and Landscapes of Bacchus: The Vine in Portugal (1970).

The Minoan international trade: colonies and emporia

Such tangible, “convincing evidence” in the hands of archaeologists, i.e. a load of Egyptian trade items found in Spain, is of “a somewhat later period”, after the fall of the Minoans, c. 1400-1200 BCE. Although we cannot rule out the possibility of “Phoenician intermediaries”, we must have in mind that in this “somewhat later period” (late Bronze Age), especially in Occidental Mediterranean, sea trade was in the hands of those who brought about the fall of the Minoans, meaning the Mycenaeans – who, strangely enough, are not even mentioned by the American professor! Therefore, his assertion that the Egyptian trade items found in Spain “almost surely may [!] be associated with Phoenician intermediaries”, is anything but scientific.

Besides, the Aegean presence in Egypt, i.e. the origin of these trade items, dates back to at least the Mycenaean times, and possibly further back into the Minoan age, when a trade settlement was founded in the Nile Delta under the aegis of the pharaohs, namely Naucratis (Ναύκρατις). It was the first and, for much of its early history, the only permanent Hellenic colony in Egypt, acting as a symbiotic nexus for the interchange of Egyptian and Grecian trade items, art and culture. When a historian “forgets” the Mycenaeans and Naucratis, it means he’s wearing “Phoenician myopic glasses”!

The Calydonian [Boar] Hunt, from a Laconian black-figure cup by the Naucratis Painter (ca 555 BCE)

● Naucratis is located in the Nile Delta, on its westernmost branch, c. 70 km southeast of its mouth, where Alexandria later rose; it was not only the first Greek settlement in Egypt, but also its most important harbour in antiquity until the rise of Alexander’s city. Its first period is obscure, due to the collapse of Mycenaean civilization and the ensuing “Dark ages” (1100-750 BCE). A cultural “renaissance” during the 8th century brought about renewed Hellenic contacts with the Orient and its two important river civilizations of the Nile and Mesopotamia. Herodotus writes that a shrine known as Hellenion was a co-operative enterprise financed by nine Greek poleis: four Ionian (Chios, Clazomenae, Teos and Phocaea), four Dorian (Rhodes, Halicarnassus, Cnidus and Phaselis), and one Aeolian (Mytilene). Miletus, Samos, and Aegina had their own separate sanctuaries. This means that the natives of at least twelve cities of Hellas worked in a collaboration that was not only rare but proved to be lasting.

● The sister port of Naucratis was the harbour town of Heracleion or Thonis, Egypt’s main seaport to Greece, which was only discovered in 2000 by a French underwater archaeologist, Franck Goddio. Its ruins are located 2.5 km off the modern coast. The city was built on some adjoining islands connected with bridges and intersected by canals. It submerged into the sea in the 6th or 7th century CE, probably due to major earthquakes and floods. The “Stele of Naucratis”, with a pharaonic decree, describes Heracleion as a “harbour in the Sea of Hellenes”, referring to the Mediterranean.⁽²⁾ Its twin “Stele of Heracleion” was recovered in 2000. The city’s Grecian name is linked to a large temple of Khonsu, whom the Greeks identified with Heracles. It is believed the city was visited by the great hero, or even by Paris and Helen on their flight from the jealous Menelaus, before the Trojan war. Heracleion’s mythic wealth was lauded by Homer, as well.

• ⁽²⁾ The Egyptian pharaohs, let’s remind each “spectacled” historian, described the Mediterranean as “the Sea of Hellenes”, not as “the Sea of Phoenicians”!

The hetaera Phryne Removing Her Veils, by James Pradier (bronze, 1845)

● A celebrated Thracian hetaera, who lived in Naucratis in the 6th century BCE, was Rhodōpis. According to Herodotus, she was a fellow-slave of the fable teller Aesop, with whom she had a secret love affair. Charaxus, Sappho’s brother, who had gone to Naucratis as a merchant, fell in love with her, and ransomed her from slavery with a large sum of money. Sappho accused Rhodōpis in a poem of robbing her brother of his property. Other lovers – insist Diodorus and Pliny – erected… even a pyramid for her! Rhodōpis (rosy-cheeked), or Doricha, was the model for the original version of the Cinderella story recorded later by Strabo.

● Athenaeus, born in Naucratis, flourishing in the late 2nd – early 3rd centuries CE, was a Greek rhetorician, grammarian and gastronomist. His books have been lost, but a 15-volume synopsis of his 30-volume Deipnosophistae (Banquet Connoisseurs) mostly survives. It is an immense store-house of information, on matters linked to dining, music, songs and dances, games, courtesans, and luxury. Guests included wealthy persons, patrons of art, and scholars, jurists, musicians, and others, as well, who described the lifestyle, the arts and scientific knowledge of the Greeks. In the course of discussing classic authors, they made quotations from nearly 800 writers and 2,500 works, many of them unrecorded. Thus we are entrusted much valuable information about the ancient world and many authors that would be otherwise unknown. (We have consulted Deipnosophistae repeatedly in our Chronicles).

Campaspe, Alexander’s courtesan, a prominent
citizen of Larissa, by John William Godward (1896)

● An Athenaeus’ contemporary, a bit older, was Julius Pollux (Ἰούλιος Πολυδεύκης), also born in Naucratis, flourishing in the late 2nd century CE and living a long life of more than 80 years. He was a grammarian, sophist, scholar and rhetorician, whom Commodus appointed a professor-chair of rhetoric in the Athenian Academy – due to his melodious voice, according to Lives of the Sophists by Philostratus. No work of his rhetoric has survived. His valuable extant work is Onomasticón (Ὀνομαστικόν), a thesaurus, or a dictionary, of Attic synonyms and phrases in ten books, arranged not alphabetically but according to subject-matter. It supplies in passing plenty of rare information on many points of classical antiquity – objects in daily life, the theatre, music, politics – and quotes numerous fragments of lost works. Thus, Pollux became invaluable for William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1842). (We have repeatedly consulted Pollux in our Chronicles, as well).

● Under the circumstances, Stanislawski, an expert on Portugal, a scholar whom we described as wearing “Phoenician myopic glasses”, cannot be suspected of pro-Hellenic bias in his narrative about those fateful events in Iberia, related in three Chronicles (21, 22, and 25). At the same time, we’ll be able to cross-check the accuracy of our own testimony. But before that, let us give the floor to the German historian and archaeologist Adolf Schulten, who will give an answer to the question concerning the contacts between Iberia and the Aegean. Schulten (1870–1960), who also studied in Greece, dedicated his life to Spain, where he conducted extensive research and excavations; therefore, he is considered a key influence on Spanish archaeological studies. Among others, he searched – but, unfortunately, with no success – to find Tartessos in 1924 and Maenaca in 1948. Very popular in Portugal and Spain are his biographies on two great figures of the struggle of the Lusitanians against the Romans: Viriathus (1927) and Quintus Sertorius (1926).

Statue of Viriathus in Zamora

● The great Lusitanian hero, Viriathus, started fighting after a massacre committed by the Romans in Lusitania with 30,000 victims. He was assassinated in his sleep, in 139 BCE, by the three men he had sent for peace talks with the Romans, who bribed them instead. When the conspirators asked for their prize, the Romans said: “Rome does not pay traitors who kill their chief”! Big talk to avoid payment, since the same tactic was used again in the next century to get rid of Sertorius, whose aim was to create an independent Iberian Republic. He was a Roman statesman and general, opponent of the dictator Sulla during the Roman civil wars. His popular, pro-Iberian policy had displeased many Roman aristocrats, and was eventually assassinated, also by traitors, during a feast, in 72 BCE. When his will was read, they saw he named as his chief beneficiary the… chief conspirator! The next year, the “victorious” Pompey, returning from Iberia to Italy, helped in the suppression of the gladiators’ insurgency led by Spartacus, with whom Sertorius was in contact.

Schulten made a thorough examination of the Mediterranean Spanish coast in 1919, preparing a critical edition of Ora Maritima (Sea Coast), by Avienus (hence of the Massaliote Periplus, as well), a study that led him to Tartessos.⁽³⁾ Excavating in the current Doñana National Park, close to the mouth of the Guadalquivir, he found a Roman town in Cerro del Trigo, which he believed was located on the remains of the legendary city. But, despite all his efforts, he found no trace of it. The result of his excavations, among others, was the publication of a study in 1924. A second edition, greatly improved and expanded, followed in 1945, and reissued in 2006. It was entitled: Tartessos – Contribution to the Oldest History in the Occident:

• ⁽³⁾ We followed the same route in Chronicle 22: An Iberian Periplus Revival.

The Palace of Minos at Knossos

TARTESSOS: CONTRIBUTION TO THE OLDEST HISTORY IN THE OCCIDENT

THE MOST ANCIENT REFERENCES

“BY ALL ACCOUNTS, AN ORIENTAL PEOPLE that, before the Phoenicians, sailed along the coast of Spain were the Cretans, the people of Minos, the oldest maritime power in the Mediterranean… Cretan toponyms are found even in Corsica. In Sardinia we encounter Cretan copper bars. In the Balearics, Aegean vases and bull heads similar to those of Crete have been discovered. Oriental ornaments of ivory, turquoise, or amethyst, have been found on the southeastern coasts of Spain… It seems that the Iberian alphabet contains eight Cretan graphemes… According to Egyptian monuments, the Keftiu, i.e. the Cretans, had large amounts of silver. This silver could have come from Spain… In Falmouth of Cornwall a tin bar has been found with the characteristic shape of Cretan copper bars, i.e. the double swallowtail. This fact could be an indication of exchange between Crete and Tartessos, as the Tartessians traded with the Oestrimni [see Chronicle 21, Legendary Odyssean Lisbon], who sailed to England… Further proof that the Cretans were sailing to Spain can be found in the name of Tartessos itself. The termination in -essos is primitive pre-Hellenic of Asia Minor, mainly of southern Asia Minor. It is very widespread in the regions of Caria and Crete. Thus, perhaps the name of Tartessos does not come from the Phocaeans, but from the Cretans and the Carians. The toponyms ending in ‘-essos’ spread to the Occident, as is evidenced by their appearance in Sicily (Herbessos, Telmessos). If the name of Tartessos is Cretan, then we need to examine whether the Phoenician ‘Tarshish’ is derived from ‘Tartessos’, rather than the indigenous toponym”…

The Statuette of Geryon (6th century BCE), bronze sculpture, showing the 3-headed giant, probably found in Chiusi in Italy, one of the towns of the Etruscan dodecapolis.

THE PRE-TARTESSIANS

“Hispanic [Iberian] daggers of copper and silver of the 3rd millennium have been found in Crete… Where did the silver and tin that the ancient 3rd-millennium-BC Oriental empires used come from?… It is reasonable to suppose that in the 3rd millennium BC, the Orient extracted silver and, above all, tin, from Andalusia and that the Cretans or Carians were probably the agents of this trade, as were later the Phoenicians”…

TARTESSOS AND THE PHOENICIANS

“Geryon, considered as the personification of the Tartessos [Guadalquivir] River, does not pertain to Gades, as later ignorance would have it, but to Tartessos. And the island Erytheia, his dwelling, which took his daughter’s name (Pausanias), could not have been the island of Gades, but the island formed by the Tartessos Delta, in front of which his castle rose. But when Tartessos disappeared, confusion made the figures of Geryon and Erytheia to be mistakenly transferred to Gades. However, the most ancient mythographers clearly place Erytheia on the Delta of the Tartessos River. Stesichorus says that Erytheia ‘faces’ the sources of the river, i.e. its mouth. Pherecydes asserts that Heracles went to Tartessos, and, therefore, places Erytheia here and not at Gades”…

TARTESSOS AND THE PHOCAEANS

“There is another testimony on the Phocaean trips to Tartessos: the Ionian names of islands and coastal sites that are found all along the way, on the Italian coast, in Sardinia and Spain, way down to Tartessos. These are several toponyms ending in –οῦσα [-ussa], widespread in Ionian regions on the coast of Asia Minor, and their presence in the Occident undoubtedly reveals the passage of the Ionians, of the Phocaeans. On the Italian coast we can find: Πιθηκοῦσα [Pithecussa] (Ischia), Ἀνθεμοῦσα [Anthemussa], Σειρηνοῦσα [Seirenussa, Sirenuse] (islands in the Gulf of Salerno). In Sardinia: Ἰχνοῦσα [Ichnussa] (the Ionian name of the island). On the eastern Spanish coast: Μηλοῦσα, Kρoηοῦσα [Melussa, Croeussa] (Mallorca and Minorca?), Πιτυοῦσα, Ὀφιοῦσα [Pityussa, Ophiussa] (Ibiza, Formentera). On the southern coast: Πιτυοῦσα [Pityussa] (Cape Sabinal), Καλαθοῦσα [Calathussa] (in the Bay of Huelva?), Κοτινοῦσα [Cotinussa], old name of the island of Gades. On the southwestern coast: ἄκρα Ὀφιούσης (prominens Ophiussae, Avienus), Cape Roca – the extreme toponym indicating the limit of the Phocaean sphere. We know from this old [Massaliote] Periplus that the neighbouring estuary of the Tagus was linked to Tartessos through a Phocaean commercial road”…

Harvester Vase: a Minoan stone vessel from Hagia Triada, Crete (1500-1450 BCE), originally covered in gold leaf. The relief depicts a sowing festival: a central figure shaking rattle leads the others singing and carrying pitchforks. Notice the diminishing of figures in one of the oldest examples of perspective.

THE TARTESSIAN CULTURE

“Could perhaps Tartessos be a colony founded by some Oriental people of those that were part of the Aegean civilization, e.g. of Crete?… There are reasons to support this hypothesis: the ancient culture of the pre-Tartessians, the numerous coincidences with the Orient and the older oriental nations, the possibility that primitive navigators have founded a colony in Andalusia, as later the Tyrians founded Gades. And besides all this, the name itself of Tartessos alludes to the Orient. If Tartessos were a colony of Aegean navigators, e.g. of Cretans or Carians, this would at once explain its ancient and high culture, as well as the coincidences with Crete in metallurgy, writing, the bull cult, etc. As an Aegean colony, Tartessos would have been founded around the 3rd or 2nd millennium BC, and certainly before the Tyrian voyages. Thus the Tyrians would have invaded the maritime domain of the old Aegean navigators, both in the Occident and in the Orient. A Cretan Tartessos could only be founded before the fall of Cretan power (in 1200). Thence, the ruin of Crete would have influenced the Occidental colony, explaining thus the scarce resistance of the Tartessians against the Tyrians. The possibility that Tartessos is an ancient Aegean colony must therefore be studied.”

All the more so, because the Minoans apparently imported tin from Tartessos at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. At any rate, what strikes me is that in Schulten’s text, too, the Mycenaeans are… conspicuously absent! “The fall of Cretan power” did not take place “in 1200”, when the Bronze Age collapsed, together with the Mycenaean power, but c. 1450 BCE, when the Mycenaeans took over Crete. Then they inherited not only the Minoan Thalassocracy, but the network of the Cretan colonies and emporia, too. The Bronze Age collapse coincided with the Trojan War that was followed by a westward “exodus” of Trojans and Hellenes:

The Arrival of Aeneas at Pallanteum, by Claude Lorrain

Odysseys in the Aftermath of the Trojan War: Colonization of Iberia

THE TROJAN WAR, in the time when it was fought, was not a heroic war. It was accompanied by the eastward movement of the Sea Peoples, and the westward “exodus” of both Hellenes and Trojans. For sure, the latter were in search of a new homeland. As for the Greeks who managed to survive, after a long, ten-year absence, with the spoils not rewarding enough, as Strabo says, were not welcome back home (see Chronicle 20, The Luwian Civilization: The Missing Link in the Aegean Bronze Age), and either had a tragic end (e.g. Agamemnon), or were forced to follow the life of pirates. Such fate awaited “heroes” such as Aeneas, Antenor and Opsicella; or Diomedes, Menelaus, Menestheus, Odysseus and Teucer – for whom “later poets sang”…

Breogán and the Tower of Heracles, A Coruña

Aeneas is linked to Rome, while Antenor and Opsicella founded cities in the Italian North, with the latter ending up in Biscay. Among the Greeks, Diomedes, son of Tydeus, arrived in Lusitania and Galicia, where he founded Tyde (today’s Tui), an Aetolian city, as Silius Italicus writes. Menestheus, the leader of the Athenians in the Trojan War, was expelled from Athens by Theseus’ sons, and set ashore with his entourage in Andalusia, at the mouth of the river Criso (Guadalete), where he founded a colony and an oracle in his name: it was Portus Menesthei, today’s El Puerto de Santa María (see Chronicle 22). Odysseus founded and walled Lisbon (see Chronicle 5, Odysseus and Calypso in Odyssey-Lisbon and Chronicle 21, Legendary Odyssean Lisbon), while Teucer arrived in Lusitania and Galicia, where he founded Pontevedra (see Chronicle 20, Teucer-Teucrus of the Troad and Salamis), having previously passed from Mastia (or Massia, the later Carthago Nova, today’s Cartagena in Murcia). Some include Aveiro among the cities supposedly founded by Greeks in Lusitania. That’s why, they add, the women there are so beautiful!

Silius distinguishes the Aetolians from the Grovii (or Gravii in Latin), who lived in the coastal northern Lusitania, spreading also into Galicia.⁽⁴⁾ However, Pliny states “Helleni, Gravii, Castellum Tyde, graecorum sobolis omnia” (Hellenes, Grovii, the Castle of Tyde, they are all Greeks).

• ⁽⁴⁾ Pomponius Mela stated that all the tribes were Celtic, except for the Grovii, who worshipped gods different from the Celts. Pliny also rejected that the Grovii were Celts; he considered them to be of Greek stock. They cooperated with the local Gallaeci tribes in the aftermath of Viriathus’ death, in order to take revenge for his assassination. So, they attacked the Roman settlements in Lusitania, gaining momentum with the support of other tribes along the way, and reaching the south of the Peninsula, near Andalusia, thus endangering Roman rule in Hispania (Iberia).

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

Teucer and his companions, says Strabo, founded some peoples in Galicia such as the Hellenes and Amphilochians. Something similar happened in Cantabria with certain Spartans. Relevant information is given by Pompeius Trogus, who translated into Latin the stories of the world from Hellenic literature. Justin, who compended Trogus’ work, points out that the Galicians claim they are of Greek descent (Gallaeci graecam sibi originem asserunt). This may be explained by the origin of the Celts who, according to Herodotus, might have come from Thrace, speaking perhaps also Hellenic (see Chronicle 20, Thracian and Celtic Coincidences).

Isidore of Seville (Híspalis), citing Latin writers, stated that, due to their Hellenic origin, “the Galicians are endowed with great ingenuity”. While Jerome couldn’t agree more: “… almost all islands, rivers, lands of the entire orb neighbouring the sea, are occupied by Greek inhabitants, who, as we have already said, owned all the maritime places from the Amanus [Nur] and Taurus Mountains [Asia Minor] to the British Ocean.”

According to Strabo, all the Northern highlanders in general – Galicians, Astures, Cantabrians, Basques – made hecatombs ritu graeco and married more graeco. In Cantabria, one could also meet Messenians and even Trojans, except for the Spartans, who expanded as far as the Douro’s mouth, leading a Laconic life.

Homer’s Odyssey is unique, but the Trojan War’s Odysseys were too many, from both belligerents, eventually enriching the Western Mediterranean – mainly Italy and Iberia – with “new blood”.

Celts in Europe

● When scholars like Stanislawski “forget” the Mycenaeans (not to mention the Minoans), they end up… uttering bubbles, such as: “Greek colonization to the West was very late, especially if we compare it with the Phoenician.” In fact, the Phoenicians were last in line, and their western colonization came even later. Let’s move now to Stanislawski’s text, Contacts Between the Ancient Civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and Iberia:

CONTACTS BETWEEN THE ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS
OF THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND IBERIA

Celts lived mainly in Galicia; Celtiberians in Portugal
and half of Spain; Iberians in the other half (Andalusia
to Catalonia); Basques in NE Spain (and SW France).

A WESTWARD MOVEMENT

“THE EARLIEST PASSAGE of Phoenician ships through the Straits of Gibraltar was probably made during the general period of time when the Central European farmers and pastoralists were first entering the Cantabrian region. These events preceded the 1st millennium BC. Later, Greek exploration and trade grew, following the example given by Phoenicia, perhaps as early as the 9th century and certainly by the end of the 7th century BC. Such contacts can be equated in time with the acceleration of the East-West movement of peoples and cultures which took place in the North with the advent of the Celts, who may have appeared in Iberia as early as 900 BC, and the main force of which was felt by the 6th century. Between the 6th and the 3rd centuries BC, while the lands of the western Mediterranean were developing under the influence of active and aggressive Greeks and Carthaginians [Punics], northern Iberia was changing under the influence of Celts of later arrival from beyond the Pyrenees. However, there was a difference between the early contacts along the Mediterranean coasts and those of the Central Europeans with northern Iberia. It was not opportunity for settlement that drew men along the southern coasts, but trade… It was the attraction of metals that drew the early Greeks beyond the Straits of Gibraltar and along the western coasts of Spain.”

CONTACTS WITH THE WEST COAST OF IBERIA

Celtic art in Spain

“It is possible that the early merchant wayfarers sailed up the west coast to trade directly with Galicia. But if they did, the coast of present Portugal represented a gap in their interest, for there is almost no record of them there.⁽⁵⁾ It would seem that Portugal was then, as through so many periods of time before and after, apart from the main stream of events. It possessed no great source of silver such as the mines of Andalusia, nor of copper or tin (with slight exceptions in both cases).⁽⁶⁾ With her metals, Spain was a magnet for the early traders, whereas Portugal attracted casual traders at most”…

• ⁽⁵⁾ There are slight exceptions; e.g., there is the Egyptian scarab of the 7th century BC that was found in a pre-Celtic level at Alcácer do Sal. (D. Stanislawski)

• ⁽⁶⁾ There is no record e.g. of Carthaginian exploitation of the copper of the Alentejo, which Romans later mined at Aljustrel. As all of southern Portugal is poor in tin, silver, and gold, there was little there to distract them from their preoccupation with such places as Andalusia and Murcia. (D.S.)

HOMOGENEITY OF THE IBERIAN MEDITERRANEAN REGION

“At the time of their first contacts with the west, the earliest Phoenicians and Greeks encountered a culture area with fundamentally similar characteristics throughout. It extended along the Mediterranean coasts, slopes, and adjacent interior valleys, from the Pyrenees to the Guadiana River… With their usual perspicacity, the Greeks recognized this area as being essentially homogeneous and sharply different in culture from the Celtic territories of the interior and of the north and west peripheries”…

EARLY POLITICAL GROUPS AND CONFUSION OF NAMES

Winged griffin of Tartessos (700-575 BCE)

“Indisputably, one of the important Iberian groups was that of the Tartessians, wealthy farmers and traders in metals. It was their knowledge of the sources of metals that first brought them in touch with the Phoenicians and Greeks. They knew the coasts to the west and northwest of their home, for the tin and gold that they traded came from Galicia. They were also able to furnish silver, copper, and lead, which came to them from the Guadalquivir River basin. It appears that tin was the product of greatest importance at the time. The early centuries of the pre-Christian millennium were times of great opulence along the coast of Galicia. That this wealth was due to tin may be inferred from the fact that the Greeks used the term Cassiterides to identify the area. However, the question as to the ultimate source of tin is moot. In spite of the lack of archaeological evidence it seems likely that, in the earliest years of trading, it came from alluvial deposits along the river banks of Galicia. There is a possibility, however, that Bronze Age connections with French Brittany and with the British Isles had continued and that the Galicians were merely purveyors of tin from those places. This basic necessity of bronze-users was scarce in the other parts of the Phoenician and Greek world. There was no tin in all of North Africa, Asia Minor, Caucasia, Cyprus, mainland Greece, and the Greek islands. The mines of Tuscany were small. It is no wonder that both Galicia and the Tartessians were prosperous and that the Phoenicians and Greeks were attracted to the area.”

“Tin was the product of greater importance. This basic necessity of bronze-users was scarce in the Phoenician and Greek world.” (Dan Stanislawski)

According to Pomponius Mela (1st century CE),
the Makárōn nēsoe (Fortunate Isles) are the Canaries; the Hesperides are at Cape Verde;
and the Cassiterides are the Azores

● “The Cassiterides are ten in number, and lie near each other in the ocean toward the north from the haven of the Artabri [A Coruña, Galicia].⁽⁷⁾ One of them is desert, but the others are inhabited… Of the metals, they have tin and lead, which, with skins, they barter with the merchants for earthenware, salt, and brazen vessels. Anciently the Phoenicians alone, from Gades, engrossed this market, hiding the navigation from all others. When [other navigators] followed a certain [Phoenician] shipmaster, that they might discover the market, the jealous shipmaster willfully stranded his vessel on a shoal, misleading those who were tracking him, to the same destruction. Escaping from the shipwreck by means of a fragment of the ship, he was indemnified for his losses out of the public treasury.” (Strabo)

• ⁽⁷⁾ According to Strabo, the Artabri (or Arrotrebae) were an ancient Gallaecian Celtic tribe, living in the extreme NW of modern Galicia, about Cape Nerium (Cabo Prior), outskirts of the harbour city of Ferrol. In Magnus Portus Artabrorum during Roman times (1st century BCE, even before), they traded in metals (like silver, gold, tin and iron), or even wild horses. The port was located on a turbulent, unpredictable sea, in the bay of Ferrol, and the rias of Ferrol, Betanzos and Coruña, with the Tower (lighthouse) of Heracles. Ptolemy refers to the Galaeci Lucenses and their capital town, Lucus Augusti (now Lugo).

● “The islands called Cassiterides, situated in the open sea approximately in the latitude of Britain, lie opposite to, and north of, the Artabrians… They that inhabit the British promontory of Belerium,⁽⁸⁾ by reason of their converse with the merchants, are more civilized and courteous to strangers than the rest. These are the people that make the tin… They beat it into four-square pieces the size of dice, and cart it to a British island, near at hand, called Ictis…⁽⁹⁾ For at low tide, all being dry between them and the island, they convey over in carts an abundance of tin in the mean time. But there is one thing peculiar to those islands, which lie between Britain and Europe; for at full sea they appear to be islands, but at low water for a long way they look like so many peninsulas… Hence the merchants transport the tin they buy of the inhabitants to France, and for thirty days’ journey they carry it in packs on horses’ backs through France to the mouth of the river Rhône.” (Diodorus Siculus)

The Cassiterides and Bolerium (depicted
here as an islet) south of Britain

• ⁽⁸⁾ Belerium, or Bolerium, now Land’s End: a headland on the western tip of Cornwall, the most westerly point of England. Diodorus’ text is very often connected with St. Michael’s Mount.

• ⁽⁹⁾ Ictis, or Iktin: an island described by Diodorus as a tin trading centre, somewhere off the coast of southern England, with its exact location unknown; candidates include St. Michael’s Mount, or Looe Island, off the Cornish coast, also known as St. Michael’s Island, or St. George’s Island.

● “There are two kinds of lead, the white (plumbum album) and the black (plumbum nigrum). The white is the most valuable; it was called by the Greeks cassíteros; and there is a fabulous story of their going in quest of it to the islands of the Atlantic, and of its being brought in barks made of osiers, and covered with hides. It is now known that it is the production of Lusitania and Gallaecia… White lead was held in esteem in the days even of the Trojan War – a fact attested by Homer, who called it ‘cassíteros’… It is extracted with great labour in Hispania [Iberia] and throughout all the Gallic provinces, but in Britannia it is found in the upper stratum of the earth in such abundance, that a law has been spontaneously made prohibiting anyone from working more than a certain quantity of it.” (Pliny)