ARCHiPELAGOS | Passages (Chronicle)

ARCHiPELAGOS | Passages (Chronicle)

Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ | Δίαυλοι (Χρονικό)
/PORTUGUÊS/ ARCHiPELAGOS | Passagens (Crónica)

Over the Aegean islands | – come out and see! –
angels are flapping their wings | scattering roses…

Michales Loukovikas

I. REVISITANDO O ARQUIPÉLAGO | THE ARCHIPELAGO REVISITED
1. O arquipélago | The Archipelago
(a. Is Ionia in Bloom? / b. Where Is Athens?)
2. Κατολοφύρομαι (Katolophýromae) | I’m Wailing in Lament (Orestes)

Hélia Correia is in our hearts; she’s also in the heart of our Archipelagos! Our longest sequence is mainly based on her long poem, The Third Misery, which she begins citing Friedrich Hölderlin (from his poem Bread and Wine: What’s the use, what is the purpose of a poet in times of such indigence?). We followed in her steps and chose to have as a starting point his poem, The Archipelago. Then, during a trip up north, Amélia Muge convinced her old mother, Maria José, to recite with her some parts of the poem, and José Martins was there to record them. Good material to begin with… Now that I’m thinking about it, I feel it was a pity that Amélia’s daughter, Cristiana, did not take part, as well: we would have three generations reciting together!

The Archipelago, as Hölderlin reminded us, was originally the Aegean Sea and its islands. Therefore we had to start with Aegean music. I think we could find no better melody as an introduction than the beautiful traditional song whose first stanza you can read above. Yet, we felt that some Portuguese flavour was needed. So, next to Kyriakos Gouventas’ violin, we added the guitarra of Ricardo Parreira. Excellent combination!

Then we had to solve the problem of the sea. Initially, I added sea sounds (waves, seagulls, etc.) but Amélia objected: Too realistic, she said. And then she had an excellent idea: What about voices instead of waves? José and me replied in chorus: Yes! That’s it! Well, these choral waves, designed by José, and sung by Maria Monda (Sofia, Susana, Tânia), Cramol and Teresa Campos, made me feel they’re not only sea waves, but also those angels flying over the Aegean, scattering roses…

Euripides

That was the first, bright, rosy part of the poem (Is Ionia in Bloom?). In the second part, the dark, gloomy one (Where Is Athens?), I rearranged an old composition of mine (from The Gold in the Sky, on poetry by Ares Alexandrou) to pave the way to Euripides and Orestes, his tragedy. The stasimon Katolophýromae, introduced by Harris Lambrakis on the ney and recorder, is performed in ancient Greek by a chorus composed by Amélia, Andreas Karakotas, Manos Achalinotópoulos, and me as the coryphaeus. (We write about Euripides and Orestes in our Archipaedia, in the eBook accompanying the CD, where there is a wealth of information around Archipelagos. Much of this information is also presented here in our blog, following the links you see in the titles of each sequence).

1. Friedrich Hölderlin (Der Archipelagus, 1800-1801, excerpts, adapted into Portuguese by Amélia Muge) | a. Aegean traditional / b. Michales Loukovikas | Arranged by M. Loukovikas, A. J. Martins
2. Euripides (Orestes, 408 BCE, fragments: strophe–antistrophe) | Adapted-Arranged by M. Loukovikas

II. CANTOS DA ARGILA | SONGS OF CLAY
3. Embalar meninos, acordar adultos | Lullabying Children, Waking Up Adults
11. Μάγισσα Θάλασσα (Νέοι Λαοί τής θάλασσας) | Sorceress Sea (New Sea Peoples)

Hurrian hymn to Nikkal, Ugarit (13th century BCE)

Entering a time/space ship, we voyaged a millennium back, from Athens in 408 BCE to Ugarit, Syria, ca. 1400, listening to a Hurrian hymn. To tell you the truth, after Euripides, I was not so much fascinated; but Amélia was amazed, struck by its similarity to a Portuguese anti-fascist hymn: José Gomes Ferreira and Fernando Lopes-Graça’s Acordai! (Wake Up!). My oriental heart, on the other hand, was moved by some renditions of the Hurrian hymn in the chromatic genus. The problem was that these renditions moved away from Acordai. That’s why we decided to have the hymn in two variations, as a diatonic lullaby close to Acordai, and as a diatonic-chromatic lament about the refugees’ tragedy.

Weeping Woman’s Head with handkerchief (1937, possibly a study on Guernica),
by Pablo Picasso

I was so shocked when I saw by the seaside the body of an infant who drowned while his family tried to pass from Turkey to Greece. My lyrics begin with a phrase I heard from another refugee in Morocco, who could not cross the Gibraltar Strait to Spain: Every time I turn and see the sea, tears start falling down… My friend Andreas Karakotas interpreted the song so well tele-directed by me: I was in Lisbon, he was in Salonica! Ana Dias with her harp created the proper background here, as well as in the Imaginary Island of Utopia.

3. Amélia Muge / José Gomes Ferreira (excerpt from Acordai!) | Ancient Hurrian hymn (fragment) / Fernando Lopes-Graça (excerpt from Acordai!) | Adapted by A. Muge. Αrranged by A. J. Martins
11. Michales Loukovikas | Ancient Hurrian hymn (fragment) | Adapted-Arranged by M. Loukovikas

III. MACARONÉSIA | MACARONESIA (Macárōn Nẽsoe: Fortunate Isles)
4. Ali no meio do mar | Out There Amid the Sea
5. Dança do trigo | Wheat Dance
6. Um gingado lamento | Swinging Lament

Cesária Évora

Macaronesia consists of four archipelagos in the North Atlantic: the Azores and Madeira (Portugal), the Canaries (Spain), and Cape Verde. The name is derived from the Hellenic term Μακάρων Νῆσοι (Macárōn Nẽsoe, or Fortunate Isles, Isles of the Blessed), used by geographers for the Elysian islands to the west of the Pillars of Heracles (Strait of Gibraltar), a winterless earthly paradise, which according to Hesiod were the Elysian Fields, inhabited by heroes. Strabo identified them with the isles of the Hesperides.

Amélia’s Swinging Lament, dedicated to Cesária Évora, has this magic touch: I’ve loved it since the first time I listened to it. As the finale of a Macaronesian saga, it’s even better! Featured in this sequence is Amélia in the lead voice – together with Rita Maria who sings the Castilian part of the Wheat Dance – as well as Maria Monda and me in the vocals.

4. Traditionals of the Canaries & the Azores, Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J . Martins, A. Muge
5. Traditional of the Canaries, Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, A. Muge
6. Amélia Muge | Arranged by M. Loukovikas, A. J. Martins

IV. PENAS DE AMOR O QUE SÃO? | WHAT IS TO SUFFER FROM LOVE?
7. A tentação | Temptation
8. Δέδυκε ἀ σελάννα / Lua desceu, mergulhou | The Moon Has Set Down
(a. The Moon Has Set Down / b. Meanings Are Divided / c. Eros)

Sappho of Eresos, Roman copy of a 5th-century-BCE Greek original

Temptation, written by Hélia, is for me one of Amélia’s best songs. I told her many times it’s a pity it’s not in one of her own albums. So, here it is! And in a good company: that of Sappho’s.

Thanks to Amélia, who had the idea about her, I searched a lot, reading Sapphic poetry, and combined three fragments to compose:(*) The Moon Has Set Down, Meanings Are Divided, Eros. Moreover, I convinced Amélia she can also sing in ancient Hellenic (something that she described as… jumping into the abyss)! In this “jump” here, she is accompanied by Rita Maria, Catarina Anacleto and Maria Monda.

(*) Although her poetry was well-known and greatly admired in antiquity, most of it survives only in fragments, mainly because the Christian Church disapproved of her morals and the ecclesiastical authorities loved to burn her anthologies…

7. Hélia Correia | Amélia Muge | Arranged by F. Raposo
8. Sappho (in ancient Greek – and in Portuguese adapted by Amélia Muge) | Michales Loukovikas | Adapted-Arranged by M. Loukovikas

V. CANSAÇO DE SER | WEARINESS OF BEING
9. Sono de ser | Slumber of Being
10. The Hours

Fernando Pessoa

This sequence is dedicated to Fernando Pessoa. Slumber of Being is another favourite song of mine composed by Amélia. Her singing here is one of those rare moments; she’s accompanied excellently by Filipe Raposo.

The Hours, one of Pessoa’s English Poems, stands out, as well. I composed it for Sofia Vitória’s Echoes. I’m happy it was finally left out, so we can have it here with my… heavy metal arrangement reinforced by Kostas Hanís’ vibraphone and António Quintino’s double bass! Amélia and I synchronized our voices while the girls (Maria Monda) tuned themselves in chorus with us.

Amélia was fascinated by the way I composed this song. It was during one of my afternoon walks around my neighbourhood and I had The Hours stuck in my mind. I remembered Pink Floyd’s Time and the clocks ringing as soon as it started, and I decided to begin with clocks clicking the seconds, the minutes, The Hours… I walked that fast murmuring Fernando’s words and, all of a sudden, the bass line appeared! I kept on repeating this line, as I had nothing on me to record it, lest I forgot it until I reached home. By the time I arrived there, Fernando also offered me the basic melodic line! I worked furiously for Hours; I stopped only when I had even the arrangement ready. Overjoyed, I sent it immediately to Amélia…

9. Fernando Pessoa | Amélia Muge | Arranged by F. Raposo
10. Fernando Pessoa | Michales Loukovikas | Arranged by M. Loukovikas

VI. NA TAVERNA DO PORTO | IN A HARBOUR’S TAVERN
12. Versos quaisquer (Pedidos com instância) | Verses Whatever (Insistent Requests)
13. Ο Νικόλας ο ψαράς | Nicolas, the Fisherman

That’s the sequence of… fadobetiko (a term coined by Amélia). Her song, à la fado corrido, is based on a satiric poem by João de Deus, one of the greatest Portuguese poets of the 19th century. The intro to the song, played by Kyriakos Gouventas, has North Balkan flavour, because the poem starts with a reference to Transylvania.

Giorgos Mitsakis (L) and Vasilis Tsitsanis (R)

The tragic Nicolas, the Fisherman combines two of the greatest rebetiko composers: Vasilis Tsitsanis, one of the founders of modern rebetiko (paving the way for great composers such as Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis); and Giorgos Mitsakis, a skillful composer and lyricist, nicknamed the master as a bouzouki player.

With throbbing emotion (I burst out in tears while singing in the studio; Amélia and the sound engineer, Christos Megas, thought I was laughing…), I present the tragic figure of a black-dressed mother who is standing for months by the seaside, waiting for her son, Nicolas, to return to shore, as no one has the courage to tell her he drowned… This song moved the Portuguese, as well. I was told of black-dressed women who are still standing by the seaside gazing at the sea with empty eyes…

12. João de Deus | Amélia Muge | Arranged by A.J. Martins
13. Giorgos Mitsakis | Vasilis Tsitsanis | Arranged by M. Loukovikas

VII. ILHAS IMAGINÁRIAS | IMAGINARY ISLANDS
14. Uma ilha, Utopia | An Island, Utopia
15. Penélope de Ítaca | Penelope of Ithaca
16. Meninos perdidos | Lost Kids

Ulysses among the Phaeacians, by Jean Broc. Odysseus shows his physical arete by winning the discus-throwing contest after being taunted by a Phaeacian athlete. Long before Plato, Homer seems to be the first to describe Utopia, or even Atlantis, which he calls Scheria, the Phaeacians’ land.

Our fascination with imaginary and mythic places. So good that musically it ends up in Thrace, where I was born, with a… legendary zonarádikos dance, sung by Amélia and Maria Monda, and played by Manos Achalinotópoulos and Harris Lambrakis on the clarino (folk clarinet) and ney. But before that, we voyage to the islands of Thomas More’s Utopia (with Amélia also recalling Ares Alexandrou’s empty Mission Box), Odysseus and Penelope’s Ithaca, until, finally, we run aground on J. M. Barrie’s Neverland, finding not Peter Pan and Tinker Bell there, but some very peculiar Lost Kids.

14. Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, F. Raposo | Dedicated to Ares Alexandrou
15. Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, F. Raposo
16. Amélia Muge | Thracian traditional, A. Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, M. Loukovikas

VIII. EM TEMPO DE INDIGÊNCIA | IN TIMES OF INDIGENCE
17. Sem Deuses | Without Gods
18. Nós | We
19. Feitiço (Experimentos) | Spell (Experiments)
20. As ilhas do Egeu | The Aegean Islands
21. A ruína da Grécia | The Ruin of Hellas
22. Falamos de sombras (Democracia) | We Talk About Shadows (Democracy)
23. Um início | A Beginning

Hélia’s sequence based on excerpts from her poems The Third Misery and Indignation (We and Spell are from Indignation; the rest are from The Third Misery). As I have said, she begins citing Hölderlin: What’s the use, what is the purpose of a poet in times of such indigence? She also refers to him several times, especially when she speaks about Athens, as her poem is dedicated to Greece.(*) I was flattered when I saw the Parthenon on the cover of the book; Amélia was left speechless when she read the poem. We both decided this would be our main sequence.

(*) As I explained talking about Periplus, our previous work, Hélia is an enthusiastic hellenist and philhellene, who reinterpreted Hellenic myths from the point of view of female heroines, such as Antigone, Helen, and Medea. In her major poem, The Third Misery, and also in Indignation, both dedicated to Greece, she refers to Jason’s Argonauts, to the ancient Agora of the Hellenic poleis, to Homer’s Odyssey, to The Aegean Islands and The Ruin of Hellas, to the ancient gods, Pan and Alexandria, to Pericles and democracy. When she was awarded the Camões Prize (2015), the most prestigious literary distinction in the Lusophone world, she dedicated it 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 the modern Greeks’ part!

The Philhellene poet Friedrich Hölderlin, by Johanna Ebertz (1979)

Hölderlin’s citation in Without Gods is repeated in The Aegean Islands, in a completely different soundscape. Here, after many experiments, I used as a model the introduction to Echo, a composition by Manos Achalinotópoulos, developing it further as a free improvisation. As Manos is in our team, I was able to work on my idea with him. Harris Lambrakis, Amélia and Kyriakos Gouventas improvised, as well. So good, Hélia recited her own poetry!

We and The Ruin of Hellas are twin songs; Hélia’s poems here are also twins! I remember hearing inside me the melody of the Ruin already from the first time I read “Nós, os ateus, nós, os monoteístas,” (We, the atheists, we, the monotheists)… Then, changing the rhythm from five beats to six, I rearranged it to the verses of We.

I admit I knew almost nothing about Hölderlin. Trying to learn more in Wikipedia, I saw the card with the basic information: “Born – 20 March…” (Oh, I thought, same day with me!) “… 1770” (Gee, same year with Ludwig!!) At once, I thought of something that was more than crazy: Well, how about it? Third Misery… Third Symphony! Let me see… To tell you the truth, I didn’t expect much. I started humming the Misery to Beethoven’s Marcia funebre, in the Second Movement of his Eroica. I began with the 25th part of the poem, “Yes, we talk about shadows”… as it seemed to me more suitable. I was amazed! But there was more melody. So, now let’s go back and try the 23rd part, “The third misery is this one”… I was astonished!! A little more and we finish the first part of the Marcia, I thought. This little more was found in the 32nd part of the Misery: “All the squares seem like agoras of yore”… Most fantastic of all: Ludwig’s melody finished with Hélia’s “fervent word of democracy” – incredible!!! IT’S A MIRACLE!..

I searched for Beethoven’s score. I had adapted by heart the same melody in a previous work of mine (The Gold in the Sky); but this time I wanted to be precise. I meticulously rearranged his score, assigning his melodic lines to other instruments, leaving nothing out (I hope). The final crash test came when I presented my loucura to Amélia. As I don’t speak Portuguese, I realized that several words or phrases were out of place, not well adapted with the music. Her help in this matter was crucial. And then it was my turn to convince her that I did not want an operatic voice, I would hate such a voice, and perhaps even Ludwig might not like it – or else, why did he write Sotto voce under the title? I meant to say, I wanted her voice. Done! I’m very proud of the result – even if some purists will moan…

I can say here what I said before about Euripides: I do hope that if Ludwig listened to us, he would smile and applaud approvingly, despite the brickbats thrown by such purists! Featured also here, except Maria Monda, are Rui Vaz, José Manuel David and Pedro Casaes in the vocals, Filipe Raposo on the piano, as well as my friend Kosmás Papadópoulos with his clarinet.

What can anybody compose after such music? I guess Amélia did not even think about it – and she did very well; and presented such a graceful melody for A Beginning, standing next to Ludwig as equal! I consider this composition of hers as the best in our Archipelagos.

17. Hélia Correia | Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. Muge, A. J. Martins, M. Loukovikas
18. Hélia Correia | Michales Loukovikas | Arranged by M. Loukovikas
19. Hélia Correia (A. Muge) | Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, F. Raposo
20. Hélia Correia | Manos Achalinotópoulos, Amélia Muge | Arranged by M. Loukovikas
A free improvisation by H. Lambrakis, M. Achalanitópoulos, A. Muge, K. Gouventas
21. Hélia Correia | Michales Loukovikas | Arranged by M. Loukovikas
22. Hélia Correia | Ludwig van Beethoven (The Third Symphony, Eroica, 1804, Second Movement, first part: Marcia funebre, Adagio assai, Sotto voce) | Adapted-Arranged by M. Loukovikas
23. Hélia Correia | Amélia Muge | Arranged by A. J. Martins, F. Raposo

IX. JÁ SE DÃO AS VOLTAS TODAS | NOSTALGIA AND NOSTOS
24. Νοσταλγία: Το παράπονο του μετανάστη | Nostalgia: A Migrant’s Yearning
25. Nostalgia: Cantar de emigração | Nostalgia: Singing of Emigration
(a. Sodade / b. Run-Run se fue pa’l norte / c. Cantar de emigração / d. A Migrant’s Yearning)
26. Alegria | Jubilation (Alegria)

Rosalía de Castro (L) and Violeta Parra (R)

Our sequence about Migrations and Homecomings. Embracing several ideas of Amélia’s, I combined a rebetiko by Vasilis Tsitsanis (also known with the title Like an outcast I’m drifting about), with Rosalía de Castro and José Niza’s Cantar de emigração, Violeta Parra’s Run-Run se fue pa´l norte, and Armando Soares’ Sodade. Amélia had listened to me singing this rebetiko and sent me an adaptation of hers that reminded me of a fado. This was also included as an instrumental part. Moreover, I’m so happy to have here representatives of all four female choirs that Amélia invited for the project De Viva Voz (I was so deeply moved in that concert!): Cramol en masse, Maria Monda, Catarina Moura from Segue-me à Capela, and Teresa Campos from Sopa de Pedra, plus Rita, Rui, David and Pedro, Paló and Mariana Abrunheiro, Amélia and me – starting off in this adventure Like an outcast drifting about…

José Saramago,
by Carlos Botelho

An Amélia’s adaptation sums up this sequence, where José Saramago’s Alegria coexists with a fine melody by our friend, Giorgos Andreou, who is directing here the Plucked Strings Orchestra of Patras.

24. Vasilis Tsitsanis | Arranged by M. Loukovikas
25. a. Armando Soares (adapted by M. Loukovikas) / b. Violeta Parra / c. Rosalía de Castro (adapted into Portuguese by J. Niza) | José Niza / d. Vasilis Tsitsanis (adapted by A. Muge) | Arranged by M. Loukovikas, A. Muge
26. José Saramago | Giorgos Andreou | Adapted by A. Muge, A.J. Martins. Arranged by G. Andreou

X. O QUE AS ONDAS CONTAM | SEA WAVES TELLING TALES
27. Κύματα μύρια τού πελάγου / Ondas do mar de Vigo | Myriad Waves of the Sea of Vigo)
28. Contas do mar (Bulería de Sines) | Sea Tales of Pearls (Bulería of Sines)

Exuberance, by Penny Warden

Our last sequence begins with another adaptation of Amélia’s, combining a Cantiga de amigo by Martín Codax, with a rebetiko of Smyrna by Panaiotis Tountas, sung in both languages. Working at that time on Tountas’ songs, Women’s Portraits of Rebetiko, “painted” with his excellent Art of Modulation, I used to send copies of my work to Amélia; she thanked me, and wished me well on my birthday, with this beautiful adaptation.

Our finale is a peculiar Bulería I composed in Sines in 2012. We had gone there to arrange for our performance, presenting Periplus in the Festival Músicas do Mundo. We played the Bulería in its initial form in that concert. Since then we have changed the interposed song; what we have now is more suitable for a bulería as it also has a Spanish flavour, and I consider it Pan-Iberian; that’s why I combine Ricardo Parreira’s guitarra portuguesa with Thomás Natsis’ guitarra flamenca. It is sung so beautifully by Catarina Moura and Teresa Campos, together with Maria Monda, Amélia and, at last, a children’s choir. As Maria Graciete Besse aptly remarked analyzing Archipelagos:

“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.”

Enjoy!

27. Martín Codax (also adapted into Greek by Michales Loukovikas) | Panaiotis Tountas | Adapted by A. Muge. Arranged by M. Loukovikas (A major medieval Galician minstrel’s Cantiga de amigo combined with a melody by the greatest composer of the rebetiko of Smyrna)
28. Amélia Muge | Michales Loukovikas, Portuguese traditional | Arranged by M. Loukovikas, A. Muge

October 2017

● See also: PERIPLUS | Luso-Hellenic Wanderings (Chronicle) | GIORGOS ANDREOU on “ARCHiPELAGOS”
| MARIA GRACIETE BESSE on “ARCHiPELAGOS” | MARIA DO ROSÁRIO PESTANA on “ARCHiPELAGOS”

ARCHiPELAGOS
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
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
Hélia Correia & Maria José Muge: recitation | 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.
Authors
Manos Achalinotópoulos | Giorgos Andreou | Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) | Rosalía de Castro (1837 – 1885) | Martín Codax (13th – 14th centuries) | Hélia Correia | João de Deus (1830 – 1896) | Euripides (c. 480 – 406 BCE) | José Gomes Ferreira (1900 – 1985) | Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843) | Anonymous Hurrian (c. 1400 BCE) | Fernando Lopes-Graça (1904 – 1994) | Michales Loukovikas | Giorgos Mitsakis (1921 – 1993) | Amélia Muge | José Niza (1938 – 2011) | Violeta Parra (1917 – 1967) | Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935) | Sappho (c. 630 – 570 BCE) | José Saramago (1922-2010) | Armando Soares (1920 – 2007) | Panaiotis Tountas (1886-1942) | Vasilis Tsitsanis (1915 – 1984)

Chronicle 24. THE TRIUMPH OF CRETINISM

Chronicle 24. THE TRIUMPH OF CRETINISM

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 23-24. Η ΓΕΝΟΚΤΟΝΙΑ ΤΩΝ ΕΛΛΗΝΩΝ

● The Genocide of the Hellenes (Β) ● Hypatia’s Assassination ●
Colonialism and Slave Trade ● American and African Genocides

Michales Loukovikas

“We don’t need no thought control!”

Roger Waters (Pink Floyd, The Wall)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ^(d) That’s what one version of the story says. Because, though it’s been 1,600 years since then, we still don’t know exactly what has happened. According to another version, Orestes ordered the execution of the monk Hierax (the provocateur in the expulsion of the Jews) for complicity in the murder of Hypatia. In a few days, says this version, Orestes was also murdered. Cyril, absolutely triumphant, declared that “Hypatia has gone to Athens”, while Orestes resigned and left. There had been no mob rule (ochlocracy), nor any tragedy. And then, Cyril himself nominated the new governor, the duopoly ceased, and religious tyranny enthroned itself in the erstwhile capital of wisdom. It’s amazing that, if you search for Orestes’ fate in the Internet, you read Cyril’s version: the prefect resigned and left… How then the parabalani were placed under his authority in 416?

Cleopatra at the entrance of
the Egyptian Museum in Cairo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aztec Calendar

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

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

Tenochtitlan (reconstructed)

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

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

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

That’s how we’ve described the collapse of the Bronze Age; a description that perfectly fits the collapse of Antiquity. The Christians played the role of the Sea Peoples. If it was famine that triggered those dramatic events, what led to “The Triumph of Cretinism”? Hunger and thirst for power? Avarice? Christianism again found itself at the antipode of humanism. (See Chronicles 18, 19, 20)

Christianism, Slavery and Slave Trade

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

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

Saul of Tarsos, the trouble-maker, in two paintings on the same topic – book-burning –
and by the same painter – Eustache Le Sueur: The Preaching of St. Paul at Ephesus (1649).
Therefore, the Nazis imitated “Paul” and “reprinted with enthusiasm” John “Chrysostom”…

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

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

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

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

In conclusion…

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

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

Arsons of Libraries

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

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

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

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

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

● Library of Alamut Castle (Iran, 1256): by Mongols, who captured the castle and destroyed the library.
● House of Wisdom (Baghdad, Iraq, 1258): also by Mongols during the city’s siege.
● Libraries of Constantinople (Byzantine Empire, 1453): by Ottoman Turks, after the second fall of the city, when hundreds of thousands of manuscripts were removed, destroyed, or sold from the libraries.

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

● Madrasah Library (Granada, Andalusia, 1499): by Cardinal Cisneros, ransacking it and ordering its books be burned in a central square.
● Bibliotheca Corviniana (Buda, Hungary, 1526): by Ottoman Turks after the Battle of Mohács.
● Monastic libraries (England, 1530s): by Henry VIII, when they were destroyed or dispersed, following the dissolution of the monasteries.
● Cornish Colleges (Cornwall, England, 1548): by Henry’s successor, Edward VI. The smashing and looting of the colleges at Glasney and Crantock brought an end to the scholarship which had helped to sustain the Cornish language and cultural identity.

The Mayan Codices on fire

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

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

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

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

Kukulcan pyramid, Chichen Itza (in Yucatán, Mexico)

Demographic Decline of the Hellenes also due to the Genocide

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

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

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

Reconstruction of the urban core of Tikal (Yax Mutal, in Guatemala, 8th century CE)

ARCHiPELAGOS • II. SONGS OF CLAY

AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages

 

II. SONGS OF CLAY
 

● Lullabying Children, Waking Up Adults
● Mágissa Thálassa: Sorceress Sea
(New Sea Peoples)

 

/PORTUGUÊS/ ARCHiPELAGOS • II. CANTOS DA ARGILA

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΑΡΧΙΠΕΛΑΓΟΣ • II. ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙΑ ΑΠΟ ΠΗΛΟ

ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages: AMÉLIA MUGE & MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS

03. Lullabying Children, Waking Up Adults

– Amélia Muge / Ancient Hurrian hymn (fragment) &
José Gomes Ferreira / Fernando Lopes-Graça (excerpt from Acordai!)
• Adapted by A. Muge / Arranged by António José Martins

Sleep, oh, sleep, / sleep, time,
you’re a child, / always young,
so much older / than the world,
a world that has come / from another world,
we don’t know / how it has begun.

Sleep, oh, sleep, / sleep, time,
of a being / so profound
that even confuses / high and low,
the air and the earth / and the sea.
Sleep, time, / in this song
that is passing / through the throat
growing bigger / ah ah ah ah ah
sailing on the sea, singing lullabies.

Ah ah ah ah ah,
oh, wake up, / for the day
reawakens / every word
turned to an isle / of the senses
we have lived, / we are living,
and all those yet to come
meant to grow / and to die
between being and non-being.

“Oh, wake up
all of you who sleep
lullabying the pain
of vile silences,
come to set on fire
the stars and our songs,
pebbles of the sea,
the world as well our hearts.”

Oh, wake up,
for the word is transformed
into sowing, into harvest
of the land, of the sea,
it’s the isles / ah ah ah ah ah
sailing on the sea, and awakening
oh, wake up!

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice: A. Muge • Clarinet: Kosmás Papadópoulos / D. Bass: António Quintino
Ney: Harris Lambrakis / Violin: Kyriakos Gouventas

●

Seikilos Epitaph: the song was found engraved on a tombstone (stele) from the Hellenistic town of Tralles, not far from Ephesus. Its melody is recorded above its lyrics in the ancient Greek musical notation.

● Dating to circa 1400 BCE, a hymn to goddess Nikkal is now the oldest surviving substantially complete notated work of notated music in the world (preceding by almost 1.5 millennia the oldest extant complete notated song dating to c. 200 BCE -200 CE, the Seikilos Epitaph – performed in our previous work, Periplus, sung by Hélia Correia). The hymn is among a collection of 36 Hurrian songs inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets, excavated at Ugarit, a port city in northern Syria, which was burned to the ground circa 1190 BCE by the Sea Peoples, a purported seafaring coalition of invaders, originating from western Asia Minor and southern Europe, and contributing to the Bronze Age collapse. The Hurrians were a Bronze Age people of northern Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia. While some composers’ names are known, this hymn is anonymous, and its transcription remains controversial: there are at least five rival decipherments, each yielding entirely different results. The Hurrian lyrics are at the top of the tablet; below is the Akkadian (Mesopotamian) notation for a song accompanied by a nine-string sammûm, a type of lyre, or harp (other tablets contain instructions for tuning the harp). The text is difficult to grasp, since the Hurrian language is not well understood; in addition, it seems it is a local Ugaritic dialect, differing significantly from other known dialects. ● There is a striking resemblance of the most acceptable version of the hymn’s melody to the emblematic Portuguese song Acordai! (Wake Up!), composed by Fernando Lopes-Graça before the tablet was found. Although the Akkadian notation refers to a heptatonic diatonic scale, there have been alternative variations in the chromatic genus. Lullabying Children, Waking Up Adults brings to the fore this resemblance to Acordai!, while Mágissa Thálassa (Sorceress Sea) combines a) the diatonic and chromatic genera, and b) the most acceptable version with a disputed decipherment used as an instrumental introduction and bridge. ● Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906 – 1994): a Portuguese composer, conductor and musicologist, influenced by his homeland’s popular music. He was a member of the PCP (Portuguese Communist Party) and a strenuous opponent of the Salazar dictatorship. ● José Gomes Ferreira (1900 – 1985): a Portuguese poet and fiction writer, who was also an activist against the dictatorship, becoming a member of the PCP.

The clay tablet with the Hurrian hymn to Nikkal, the oldest surviving substantially complete
work of notated music in the world found in Ugarit (14th – 13th centuries BCE)

11. Mágissa Thálassa / Sorceress Sea
(New Sea Peoples, fragment)

– Michales Loukovikas / Ancient Hurrian hymn
• Adapted / Arranged by M. Loukovikas

Every time I turn / and see the sea,
tears start falling down,
I’ve been unfit to tame the waves.

Odysseus Aylan, / Ithaca was everything.
Yet the voyage of your life / ended too soon.
I see your image everywhere / but you are elsewhere.
Starting off to go to Europe, / you forgot Penelope,
the caresses of your mother / drowned as well.
Time was frozen stiff and still / on the seabed fell asleep.
A Poseidon’s idea, / Odysseus…

When I see the sea / tears start falling down.
Sorceress. / When I see the sea…

Every time I turn / and see the sea,
I keep asking her / where’s this little kid
I’ve lost so I may find / and see him in his grave?

Sorceress Siren Sea.

• Adapted into English by Michales Loukovikas

• Voice: Andreas Karakotas • D. Bass: António Quintino / Harp: Ana Dias
Ney, Recorder: Harris Lambrakis / Percussion: José Salgueiro / Violin, Viola: Kyriakos Gouventas

Odysseus and the Sirens, a mosaic of the 2nd century CE in Tunisia

●

Poseidon holding a trident: from a Corinthian Sanctuary of the sea god.

● Odysseus and Penelope: see ARCHiPELAGOS • VII. ISLANDS OF IMAGINATION ● Aylan: Alan Kurdî (initially reported as Aylan, 2012 or 2013 – 2015) was a three-year-old Syrian Kurd whose image made global headlines after he drowned on September 2, 2015 in the Aegean between Bodrum (ancient Halicarnassus) and the island of Kos. He and his family were refugees trying to reach Europe. ● Poseidon: one of the twelve Olympians in the Greek pantheon. His domain was the ocean, and he was called the God of the Sea. In the Odyssey, he is notable for his hatred of Odysseus who blinded the god’s son, the cyclop Polyphemus. This prevented Odysseus’ nostos for many years. ● Sirens (Σειρῆνες): mythological daemons combining women’s heads and body of birds, and related to water, love and death; they lured sailors with their enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island.

• >> ARCHiPELAGOS • III. MACARONESIA
• << ARCHiPELAGOS • I. THE ARCHIPELAGO REVISITED

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. However, sometimes 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; Minoan 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.^(a)

• ^(a) 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.

One of the two figurines Ram in a Thicket. The excavation at Ur was a joint venture of the British Museum and the Pennsylvania University sharing the booty!

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.

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 every equally short-sighted scholar learn his/her lesson…^(b)

Lawrence (left) and Woolley at Carchemish

• ^(b) “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”…

With a secret ambition to turn Arthur Evans’ work in Crete upside
down, Leonard Woolley led himself to wrong conclusions. If Ur
had been his Austerlitz, Alalakh turned out to be his Waterloo!

The Knossos palace reconstructed

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,^(c) [!] 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…^(d) 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.

• ^(c) That’s why the… spectacled parrotlet (forpus conspicillatus) is not an endangered species!

• ^(d) 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.^(e) 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.

• ^(e) 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.^(f) 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’.^(g) 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?

• ^(f) 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). 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…

• ^(g) I used a similar argument in Chronicle 22 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 executed by travelling Minoan artists.” (Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier)

Knossos: the Throne Room with the griffins reconstructed

“In ‘Greater Canaan’…^(h) 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…⁽ⁱ⁾ 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

• ^(h) 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)

• ⁽ⁱ⁾ 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.^(j) 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.”

• ^(j) “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). 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 frescoes in Avaris, which were 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.

A Minoan heterotopia at Avaris. Taureador (detail)

“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”. There is a minor problem among archaeologists on the date of the 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 he] 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 any of the fragments discovered. The composition of the paintings and motifs also fit in perfectly with those of the Aegean world. Thus the overwhelming evidence seems to point into the direction of Minoan artists having been at work in Avaris.

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 in 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, which went from Mari via Qatna to the Mediterranean; Cypriote copper was transported in the other direction; 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.”^(k)

• ^(k) 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 true fresco or secco.

“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

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.^(l) 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!

• ^(l) 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!

b) INTERLUDE

Crossing the Atlantic

 

Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO!

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

● P e r i p l u s : Luso-Hellenic Wanderings ● An Atlantic Odyssey

Afro-Brazilian Museum

Festival ΙΙΙ

TÃO LONGE, TÃO PERTO
SO DISTANT, SO NEAR

Music and Poetry in the
Portuguese Language

Federal University
of Rio de Janeiro
(May 2013)

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”…^(a)

• ^(a) 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?(!)

I can say 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…^(b)

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

• ^(b) When Hellenes say “ancient”, they mean BCE (before the Common Era), or BC (before Christ), if you like.

All these ideas were further reinforced when Amélia and I started working on Periplus.^(c) 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.

• ^(c) 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”.^(d)

• ^(d) 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 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;^(e) 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.

• ^(e) 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 world 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, a Phoenician colony on three islands with Greek names (Erytheia, Kotinoussa and Antipolis), whose patron, Melqart, was identified with Heracles, the city’s founder, according to Hellenic myth…

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

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

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

● 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.

● Mediterranean Periplus: in Search of Orpheus

Before Sailing Off | The Universal Mediterranean | It All Started Here… | A Chronicle of the Humans | On Democracy | Iberia’s Odyssey | Indo-Iberian Arc (Jondo) | Indo-Iberian Arc (Duende) | A Hybrid’s Hybris… | The Celebrated Tríchordon | The… “Sun Language” | “Music Is Thracian and Asian” | “Do Not Maltreat Our Music!” | Professionals or Amateurs? | Music Made of Body and Soul

● Cassiterides Archipelago: Sailing to Tartessos

Mediterranean Periplus-Paraplus | Minoan Cretan Thalassocracy | Aegean: Knossos, Mycenae, Troy | Phoenicia’s Stroke of Fortune | The Enigmatic Sea Peoples | Iberian “El Dorado” | Iberian Periplus Revival | The Genocide of the Hellenes | The Triumph of Cretinism | “Carthago Delenda Est!” | Iberian Cross(Check) | An Archaeologist’s Waterloo

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 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…

Sappho and Alcaeus, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Appendix: An Atlantic Odyssey

● The 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.

Despite that, other scholars, turned against this euhemerism – or even against the great rhapsode.^(f) 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”… Eratosthenes (3rd – 2nd centuries BCE), on the other hand, commented 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.”

• ^(f) 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.

Map of Rio de Janeiro (Dutch Atlas 1600)

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 and mathematician Kepler (1571 – 1630) estimated that this “great continent” was America and attempted to locate Calypso’s island.

● 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. Yet, 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,^(g) 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.^(h)

• ^(g) 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.

• ^(h) 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!⁽ⁱ⁾ 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”…

• ⁽ⁱ⁾ 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 there was supposed to rise and set 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. 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 demonic 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. I must remind them (pulling their legs) that the Hyperborean land, as a terra incognita, was located by ancient writers in the North, of course, but all across Eurasia, from NW Europe to NE Asia. So, there appeared some “Chinks” to claim that the Hyperboreans were most probably Chinese – a view that would be strongly disputed also in Japan, Mongolia and Siberia!

None of his 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. But he has 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!^(j)

• ^(j) 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, in this case Rungholt, where ceramics were recovered evidencing trade exchange 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 the background of Homeric epics, the Flemish Karel Jozef de Graeve, in his République des Champs Elysées (Republic of the Elysian Fields, 1806), pointed out the area around the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Delta.

Finally, the French Gilbert Pillot, in Le Code Secret de l’Odyssée (The Secret Code of the Odyssey, 1969), “saw” Odysseus crossing the Pillars of Heracles and voyaging on the Atlantic, initially to Morocco, the Canaries and Madeira, and then heading north to Ireland, Scotland and Iceland. He thought most probably – 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.

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. After all, he explained, the wine produced on the isle of Circe – which he identified with one of the Hebrides – 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. 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.^(k) 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…

• ^(k) An elderly Homer, it is said, was going around Ios with children, singing the carols of the time.

● 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.

THE “CLASSICAL” MEDITERRANEAN ODYSSEY

● [1] TROY. Setting sail, Odysseus and his men were greeted by friendly and calm waters.
● [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. On the twentieth day of sailing he 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)

Chronicle 26. IBERIAN CROSS(CHECK)

Chronicle 26. IBERIAN CROSS(CHECK)

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 26. ΙΒΗΡΙΚΗ ΔΙΑΣΤΑΥΡΩΣΗ (στοιχείων)

● Emporia On the Nile ● Rebels and Mercenaries ● 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,^(a) 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.

• ^(a) 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, located in the Nile Delta, on its westernmost branch, c. 70 km southeast of its mouth, where Alexandria later rose, 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 7th 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. 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.

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 became 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.^(b) 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:

• ^(b) I’m happy that 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], 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”…

THE TARTESSIAN CULTURE

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.

“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. Of course, those Trojans were in search of a new homeland. As for the Greek “heroes” 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), 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”…

As we know, Aeneas founded Rome, while Antenor and Opsicella cities in the NE of Italy, 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, or so they say, and ended up 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 Chronicles 5 and 21). Teucer also arrived in Galicia and Lusitania (see Chronicle 20), having previously passed from Mastia (or Massia, the later Carthago Nova, today’s Cartagena in Murcia; see Chronicle 22).

Breogán and the Tower of Heracles, A Coruña

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

• ^(c) 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. 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, and thus endangering Roman rule in Hispania (Iberia).

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, says that the Galicians are of Greek descent (Gallaeci graecam sibi originem asserunt). At least, adds Justin, this genealogy is claimed by the Galicians themselves.

The fact that some Galicians said they descended from Greeks may be explained by the origin of the Celts who, according to Herodotus, might have come from Thrace, speaking perhaps also Hellenic (apropos, see Chronicle 20).

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 until 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” about 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 colonization to the West 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

A WESTWARD MOVEMENT

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).

“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.^(d) 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).^(e) With her metals, Spain was a magnet for the early traders, whereas Portugal attracted casual traders at most”…

• ^(d) 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. (Dan Stanislawski, D.S.)

• ^(e) 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 [Coruña, Galicia].^(f) 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 [some 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)

• ^(f) 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,^(g) 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…^(h) 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

• ^(g) 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.

• ^(h) 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)

Hellenic ship, mocaic (ca 1st century BCE-CE)

GREEK EXPLORATION AND SETTLEMENT

“The earliest Greek ventures may perhaps be dated as of the 9th or the 8th century BC. Possibly Rhodian and Chalcidian sailors were in the western Mediterranean at this time… The line of Ionian names stretching along the islands and coasts of the western Mediterranean and to the Atlantic coast of Portugal – the names with the –ussa termination – can probably be ascribed to this early period. These names are important in dating the arrival of the Greeks in western waters. They mark the island route of the early Greek navigators. Starting from Syrakoussai [Syracusae] in eastern Sicily, they may be followed through Ichnussa (Sardinia), Melussa (Menorca), Rornyussa (Mallorca) and Pityussa (Ibiza). The latter three, even now, are identified on maps as the Balearics or Pityusas. The -ussa names extend westward to the Straits of Gibraltar and up the Atlantic coast of Portugal to Ophiussa, in the region of Lisbon, and the general area of Portugal plus Galicia may have been vaguely termed Ophiussa.”

The “Balearides” (Gymnesian) and the “Pityusae” Isles on an old map

● The Balearics comprise two island groups: the Gymnesians (Mallorca and Minorca) and the Pityuses (Eivissa or Ibiza and Formentera). The term “Balearic” derives from the Grecian Βαλλιαρεῖς or Βαλεαρεῖς (from βάλλω, meaning “to launch”), referring to the islanders who were skilled slingers and served as mercenaries for the Hellenes, Punics, and Romans. However, Strabo regarded the word as of Phoenician origin, as similar to lightly armoured soldiers the Hellenes called γυμνήτας, hence Gymnesiae (from γυμνός, meaning naked). This does not mean they fought naked, but that they used much lighter armament than the hoplites. Anyhow, according to Lycophron’s poem Alexandra, the toponym refers to shipwrecked Boeotians who were cast nude on the islands (a story obviously invented); or to the islanders themselves who were often nude (because of the year-round benevolent climate). In the Gymnesian Isles there are megalithic stone monuments (naveta, taula and talaiot) which speak of a very early prehistoric human activity. They are similar, but not necessarily related, to the nuraghe of Sardinia and torri of Corsica. One of the earliest cultures on Minorca was influenced by other Mediterranean civilizations, including the Minoan. Those islanders e.g. may have imitated the inverted plastered timber columns found at Knossos (such evidence is probably not “convincing” enough for Stanislawski). There is also a tradition that the Balearics were colonized by Rhodes after the Trojan War. The Pityusic Islands (from Grecian πιτύα, pine tree) are sometimes informally called in English as the Pine Islands, which is identical to the Hellenic name Πιτυοῦσαι, i.e. “pine-covered islands”. In antiquity they were listed in Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography under the names Ophiussis and Ebyssus, which had a town of the same name. It is the port Ibossim founded by Phoenicians in 654 BCE, later known to Romans as Ebusus, hence Eivissa (in Catalan) or Ibiza (in Castilian).

THE PHOCAEAN GREEKS

Herodotus, by Jean-Guillaume Moitte (1806)

“Herodotus said that it was Greeks from the city of Phocaea in Asia Minor who were first to navigate in the western Mediterranean waters. It may seem temerous to question the facts of the father of history, but Antonio García (A. G. y Bellido, Hispania Graeca [Hellenic Iberia]) does so convincingly. The Phocaeans, says he, arrived late upon the scene, profiting by earlier maritime contacts. Nor does he accept the statement that the important voyage of Colaeus, the Samian, was a voyage of discovery of Tartessos for the Greeks. This widely heralded 7th century journey was, to him, merely one – although perhaps the most profitable and spectacular up to that time – of many such voyages that had been made by Rhodians, Chalcidians, Samians, and others.⁽ⁱ⁾

• ⁽ⁱ⁾ Another point of view is expressed by H. R. W. Smith in his review of García’s Hispania Graeca. Smith does not deny the thesis of García but says that he can find no reason to believe that the Phocaeans reached Tartessos prior to the time of Arganthonios, the Tartessian king friendly to the Greeks, or before the voyage of Colaeus. (D.S.)

A Satyr on pottery found at Alalia

“Whatever the dating may be – and the archaeological inquiry has far to go – the Phocaeans certainly became the most active and effective Greeks in the area. Their colonization had energy and breadth and was the only one in the western Mediterranean with lasting results… There is no specific evidence that this activity was connected with the decay of Tyre, but there is such a coincidence in time. Tyrian decline had begun by the end of the 8th century BC and was notable during the following century. This was the time of the voyage of Colaeus, the Samian (650 BC), the founding of the Phocaean colony of Massalia, present Marseille (600 BC, or approximately then), and the founding of Alalia in Corsica (640 BC, or approximately 40 years prior to Massalia). Some time before the end of the century, Mainake [Maenaca], the most westerly of Phocaean colonies, was founded near Málaga.^(j)

• ^(j) Within 20 miles to the east, says García; Smith suggests that it might even be at approximately the outskirts of present Málaga. (D.S.)

● Some dates are different here. The difference in Colaeus’ voyage is not important (650, not c. 640 BCE); but the dating of the founding of Alalia is almost one century earlier (650 instead of 566 BCE). Was it initially a temporary seasonal settlement?

Following the Mediterranean island route, the
Phocaeans arrived from Asia Minor to Iberia.

“This century was one of intimacy between Phocaeans and Tartessians. The reign of Arganthonios of Tartessos began in the 7th century BC. The ancient sources spoke of his 80-year reign but probably, in typical Greek fashion, they dramatized a dynasty or a period by creating a mythical longevity for a single ruler. Whether this represented one ruler or several does not alter the fact that there was frequent and close contact between Tartessos and Phocaea. This was the period of the Phocaean maritime dominance during which the Tartessian king lent money to the Phocaeans to build their fortifications against the threat of the Persians.”

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

The Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

● The weird thing is that no one dares to say: fairy tales! Even more funny is that so many well-intentioned (and a few… bad-intentioned) people try hard to interpret the uninterpretable, although it is well-known that “you better stay away from the Bible’s dates”! It’s weird, so let’s have fun: “such mistakes are made by copyists or translators; are mistaken attempts to correct mistakes; deliberate extensions of the patriarchs’ ages by the ‘Seventy’ [Jews who translated the Old Testament into Greek], multiplying by 5 or 10, for the patriarchs to ‘fit’ with the Flood ‘myth’; confusion between ‘months’ and ‘years’; or between solar and lunar years; or between Sumerian and new numbers; the names do not refer to individuals, but to ‘dynasties’,” as in the case of Arganthonios. We also have fundamentalist interpretations: “a water vapour canopy protected the earth from radiation before the Flood; early humans had a better diet; or the more we sin, the less we live: the humans were originally to have everlasting life, but sin was introduced into the world by Adam and Eve, its influence became greater with each generation, and God progressively shortened human life, particularly after the Flood”… Amen!

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GREEKS AND PUNIC
PEOPLES IN THEIR RELATIONS WITH IBERIA

The island and bay of Gadir: the Phoenicians’
springboard for attacks against Tartessos

“The period of the decline of Tyre was not only important for the Ionian Greeks, but also for the Tyrian colony of Carthage. During the time of Phocaean colonization, Carthage too was expanding. As early as 653 BC, it had established the colony on Ibiza of the Balearics, which lay athwart the Greek island route to the west. After 573 BC, when Tyre fell to the Babylonians, Carthage showed increasing independence. Competition for western metals was growing between the two great rivals, Carthage and Greece. It is reasonable to assume that the friendship of Arganthonios (or that of his dynasty), through almost a century of time, was more than mere affection and amiability. It probably represented a form of alliance in which the Tartessians aided the Phocaeans in their struggle against the threat to their mother city. In return, Greeks supported the Westerners against the growing aggressiveness of Carthage and the Punic colony of Gadir, which threatened the area of Tartessos. Almost from the time of their founding of Gadir the Phoenicians showed their expansionist tendencies. It was not long before they were using the island as a base of attack against the mainland and the Tartessians.

“Graeco-Iberian friendship: alliance against the aggressiveness of Carthage and Gadir. Almost from the beginning the Phoenicians used the island as a base of attack against the Tartessians… Graeco-Iberian contacts: history of amity; the Iberian hospitality toward Greeks was proverbial… Friendship and mutual support against the common enemy served both.” (Dan Stanislawski)

Dionysus (the god of the grape-harvest, winemaking
and wine), by Exekias (cylix, c. 530 BCE)

“The Greeks were usually neither pacific nor friendly neighbors when the prospect of gain was apparent. In this they differed little from the Phoenicians. However, in their relations with the Tartessians they had no desire, it would seem, for control of land or people, but merely wanted to trade their products, especially olive oil and wine,^(k) for Tartessian metals. In fact, the history of Greek contacts with Iberians is one of amity, and the hospitality of the Iberians toward Greeks was proverbial. The purposes of both peoples were served by friendly intercourse and mutual support against the common enemy, especially after the increased importance and the expanded ambition of Carthage. A major clash for complete dominance of the area was inevitable. This was speeded by events in the eastern Mediterranean area”…

• ^(k) Pierson Dixon, The Iberians of Spain, and Rhys Carpenter, The Greeks in Spain, state that the olive tree and the vine were introduced into Spain by the Greeks. Olive oil was exported from Greek Akragas [Agrigento] to Carthage in the first half of the 1st millennium BC. No doubt the Greeks traded in wine with Iberia. Wine made from grapes is very old in the countries of the eastern Mediterranean, and the Phoenicians were famous merchants of wine… (D.S.)

THE ALALIA COLONY AND ITS EFFECTS

Artemis, Phocaea’s patron goddess; Massaliote “heavy” silver drachma (ca 390-220 BCE)

DAN STANISLAWSKI, IN THIS PART of his story, turns his attention to the historic developments in Asia Minor: in 546 BCE, Cyrus conquered Lydia and Ionia, causing “a mass migration of perhaps half of the population of Phocaea to their Corsican colony of Alalia… All the men in this city of probably 5,000 to 7,000 people had gone. This population figure suggests the large number of available vessels, and points to the commercial importance of the city at that time”. The Battle of Alalia took place “sometime between 540 and 535 BC”, with its disastrous impact on the Hellenes and, even more, on the Tartessians.

“Carthage may then have sealed the Straits of Gibraltar, as Carpenter suggests. More likely, the Straits had been largely sealed for a long time, but after the battle the land route between Mainake and Tartessos was also blocked. Mainake itself was destroyed by the Carthaginians toward the end of the century, to end its traffic and its competition with the Carthaginian settlement in the location of present Málaga”…

ECONOMIC CHANGES IN THE WEST

Phocaean electrum coin with playing seals

“As Carthage had inherited the western empire of Tyre, so did Massalia fall heir to that of her mother city, Phocaea. Greek trade became centered here, with the end of Phocaean maritime enterprise in the West of the Mediterranean. Trade through France to Brittany and beyond had been undoubtedly important to the Massaliotes previous to this time, but the record had been obscured by the greater drama of the struggle on the Mediterranean. During the last half of the 6th century BC, during which time Carthaginians grasped complete power in the West, the prosperity of Galicia – presumably based upon tin – declined. This decline may have been due to the change from the sea route, by way of the Straits, to that from Massalia, via the French rivers, to the northwest and ultimately to Britain”…

“Galicia’s decline due to the change from the sea route, via the Straits, to that from Massalia, via the French rivers, and ultimately to Britain.” (Stanislawski)

Stanislawski offers four possible explanations for the Galician decline; probably the second one is the most important:

Bronze Age gold helmet found in Leiro, Galicia

“More likely, the Galicians had for some time been not producers, but purveyors, of tin from French Armorica or the British Isles. If this were true, the direct land route from Massalia would have skirted the Carthaginian barrier and eliminated Galician middlemen… At approximately the same period of time there was an increased interest in silver… by the avidity with which the Greeks of Asia Minor sought it for coinage… Perhaps the richest of ancient silver mines was that of Mastia (or Massia), a region second only to Tartessos in commercial importance. The ancient prosperity of the region and of its most important city, also named Mastia (or Massia), the later Cartago Nova, and probably the site of the present Cartagena, was based upon silver mining through several centuries. Great amounts were mined under the direction of Hannibal in the 3rd century BC, and it was still a large operation at the time of Polybius in the succeeding century.”

CARTHAGINIAN DOMINATION OF THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN

Armor of a Punic officer

After the battle of Alalia, “Greek commercial activity in Iberia was ended and Carthage was less inhibited in the spread of its control. Tartessos, which had feared the Carthaginians and had allied itself with the Greeks, was left without support and was destroyed.^(l) In the following century, probably 20,000 Iberian mercenaries were fighting in Sicily for the Carthaginians… Celts were also serving as mercenaries in the Carthaginian forces.

• ^(l) If there was no city of that name, it is not important to the larger fact that the area as a whole was put under the control of the Carthaginians of Gadir (Carpenter, The Greeks in Spain). (D.S.)

Dido (or Elissa, founder of Carthage), attributed to Christophe Cochet

“There was an increasing reliance upon mercenaries from the peninsula, not only from the fringes but from deep within the interior as well. In the late 3rd century BC, Hannibal’s army included Celtiberians from the northern interior, Galicians from the extreme northwest, Lusitanians from Middle Portugal, Vettones from the middle Tagus drainage – and these do not complete the list. Such troops, however, were something other than pure mercenaries; many had been forcibly impressed into service… During earlier centuries no general antagonism in Iberia seems to have been engendered by the Carthaginians. Locally there may have been antagonism, such as probably existed between the Carthaginians and the Tartessians, but for the tribes of the interior the Carthaginians may have had a friendly appeal. They offered an opportunity to fight with pay. It was later, when the Carthaginians had expanded their power and increased their need for troops that their tactics changed with regard to these tribes of the interior, which had long served as a source of manpower. When Hannibal, in desperate need for troops and under economic pressure, forcibly impressed some of them into his armies, the others reacted in bitter opposition. The tribes of the interior were a bellicose lot. An opportunity to fight for pay was not distasteful to them but a demand that they submit to enslavement was another matter. According to Strabo they resisted Hannibal as they later did the Romans for somewhat the same reasons.

“Nevertheless, tens of thousands of mercenaries were introduced to new lands and cultures of the middle and eastern Mediterranean. Since this process had been going on from as early as the 6th century BC and many men had returned to the peninsula, the effect upon attitudes of the peoples of the Meseta [‘Plateau’, in the heart of Iberia] and even some of the remote western coasts may have been considerable.”

The harbour of Carthage

● In relation with her mercenaries, Carthage had already had a war in her… liabilities: the Mercenary or Libyan War (240-237 BCE), immediately after the First Punic War. It was a rebellion of her mercenaries, with Libyan support, due to her inability to pay them, since she had to pay first the huge war indemnities to Rome. She confronted a “Foreign Legion”, consisted of Iberians and Celt-Iberians, Baleares, Celts, Greeks and others. Bilateral negotiations were fruitless due to lack of confidence, but also to the multilingualism of the mercenaries, making it impossible to find a compromise. Very soon, hostilities broke out and the mercenaries captured Tunis. Threatened directly, Carthage had no choice but to capitulate to the demands of the mercenaries. The latter, with their strengthened bargaining position, started asking more and more, as e.g. that the Libyans, who were neither mercenaries (the Punics had recruited them), nor citizens of Carthage, should be paid, as well, together with the Numidians, or the escaped slaves who were fighting on their side. Once again the Punics had no choice but to agree…

Silver coin of Hamilcar Barca

The conflict would have ended there if two of the mercenary commanders, Spendius, a Campanian slave, and Mathos, a Libyan Berber, had not persuaded the Libyans of the army that Carthage would take revenge for their part in the revolt as soon as the foreign mercenaries were paid and sent home. They were joined by many towns and villages of Libya, as the people there were fed up with the Punic yoke, and finally, by all the mercenaries. What had started as a simple “labour dispute”, exploded into a full-scale revolt threatening an empire… Outmatched in every aspect – men, money, and supplies – and unprepared, Carthage “staggered” as long as Hanno the “Great” was in charge. The generalship was eventually given to Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal’s father, who managed to defeat, in 237 BCE, those who he once commanded in Sicily, fighting against the Romans. He cleverly used the “psychological war”, won over a part of his opponents, and annihilated the rest in the decisive “Battle of the Saw” – that was not even a battle: he blockaded the mercenaries in a steep ravine, until they starved to death. The barbarities and atrocities were far too many in this “relentless”, “truceless war”, according to Polybius, with no rules of conduct – the “most impious war in history”. Mutilations and crucifixions on both sides shocked everyone then.

A smaller mercenary revolt in Sardinia was put down with Roman help. Rome, in this war, was an ally of Carthage, so she could continue paying the indemnities! Besides, the Romans would soon occupy both Sardinia and Corsica. Losing the two islands, the Punics had only Iberia to “milk” in order to get back on track. If Thucydides were alive, he would have much to write about… We can act accordingly; drawing parallels between the Carthage-and-her-mercenaries relation and that of the USA with their own mercenaries (Osama, Taliban, the Islamic State, etc.). Or about Carthage’s racist disadvantage, as Punic citizenship was an exclusive privilege; so, they refused to give political rights e.g. to the Libyans, and consequently were obliged to rely more and more on mercenaries. That was Rome’s advantage in the second Punic War, when Hannibal, despite his victories in Italy, was unable to break the ties of Rome with her allies. Or even about how many “Great” men, like Hanno, the “pacifist” – because of his personal interests, i.e. money – are finally so small. The only one from all those I mention in these Chronicles, who really deserves this epithet, must be Alexander.

Centaur: bronze figurine from Campo de Caravaca (Murcia), probably made in Greece (6th century BCE)

In conclusion…

DAN STANISLAWSKI, I REMIND YOU, was the one who had rejected the possibility of a Minoan presence in Iberia; the one who had “forgotten” the Mycenaeans, attributing the role of the transporters of the Egyptian archaeological finds in Spain to the Phoenicians – and, indeed, during a time of Mycenaean domination in the Mediterranean (1400-1200 BCE); he was the one, in addition, who had “ignored” the Hellenic emporia in Egypt, mainly Naucratis; the one I accused he was “spectacled”, wearing “Phoenician myopic glasses”!

For all the above we can appreciate even more his own personal “view” of Iberia, since it’s anything but biased in favour of the Greeks. All the more so, when we realize that his story is almost identical with the historical panorama in our three “Iberian” Chronicles (21, 22, 25): Ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι, as Euclid would say, or quod erat demonstrandum (Q.E.D), or “what had to be demonstrated”. There is just one last Chronicle left: we shall be dropping anchor at emporia or touring palaces in the Near East, to come full circle back to our starting point, in a voyage full of surprises, as we’ll be meeting on the road itinerant artisans, artists, and masters, “members of the Architects’ and Painters’ Guilds”, whose writing, nevertheless, in Linear A, would puzzle the renowned archaeologist Leonard Woolley…

• >> Chronicle 27. AN ARCHAEOLOGIST’S WATERLOO
• << Chronicle 25. “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST!”

Next Chronicle 27. AN ARCHAEOLOGIST’S WATERLOO ● Emporia in Egypt and the Levant ● Leonard Woolley’s Waterloo ● Itinerant Minoan Artists ● Creto-Egyptian Ties ● Differences Between Minoan
and Pharaonic Society and Art

Left: a clay tablet from Knossos; the Linear A script that puzzled Leonard Woolley.
Right: an inscription in the Greek alphabet by Massaliotes in Catalonia:
“Hail, Thespis Massaliote, son of Aristoteles”.

Chronicle 25. “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST!”

Chronicle 25. “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST!”

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 25. “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST!”

● Colonization ● Tartessos: the Apple of Discord ●
Impact of Persian Expansion ● Phoenicians and Punics ●
Tartessos and Carthage Ruined ● Macedonia and Rome

Michales Loukovikas

Back to the ancient Mediterranean troubled waters

Prow of a ship on a Punic coin (replica)

IF PLUTARCH’S PARALLEL LIVES PORTRAYED peoples in pairs, one could very well parallel the Minoans to the Canaanite Phoenicians, and the Mycenaeans to the Carthaginian Punics:^(a) the latter expanded not only founding colonies, but also through conquests. Crete and Phoenicia, by contrast, with their limited territories, could not become springboards for war expeditions. Expansion was only possible through trade and colonization, thanks to their navigators.

• ^(a) Especially in this Chronicle, a clear differentiation is needed between the Canaanite Phoenicians and the Carthaginian Punics, so as to avoid confusion: the term Canaanite refers to Phoenicia, Canaan; the term Punic to Carthage; while the term Phoenician covers both, the entire family in the Mediterranean.

Attican hydria (vessel to carry water; 6th century BCΕ)

The restrictions the Greeks faced, as soon as they awoke from their “Dark Ages”, in order to expand anew to the West, were the “faits accomplis” the Phoenicians had set up in the meantime. The Hellenes had no problem to cross the Aegean as it was a Greek sea. With Troy burned down, no one could block their entrance to the Black Sea – only Nature. That’s why they euphemistically called it Euxine Pontus, “hospitable sea”, trying to appease Poseidon, and dominate there. But they knew that in the Mediterranean competition was fierce. The Phoenicians, who avoided “cruises” in the Aegean and the Black Seas,^(b) were “omnipresent” anywhere else, having created their commercial network while they voyaged on the seas almost alone. They were motivated by profit through exchange. Part of the profit, though, had to be paid as tribute to the metropolises, or the empires, which took turns in the role of the master of Phoenicia.

• ^(b) I do not mean to say that the Canaanites did not sail in the Aegean; Hellenic ships voyaged to Canaan, as well. The Graeco-Phoenician relations were age-old, and their exchange was done on equal terms. What I mean is that the Aegean could never become Tartessos: a Canaanite trader voyaging to Hellas was just a trader; the same person in Iberia acted like a monopolist.

Generally speaking, an ancient colony differed from a contemporary one in that the former was a polis (not a country) founded by another polis, the metropolis. In addition, a Hellenic colony was usually sovereign from its inception. However, in the Phoenician world, a colony, although autonomous, had to pay tribute to the metropolis: Carthage e.g. was a dependency of Tyre. This was out of need: the Phoenicians lacked the population to found large self-sustaining colonies and most of them had fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, with Carthage being one of the few exceptions.

Magna Graecia, Carthage and Etruria

The Greeks had other problems or incentives: hunger, wars, or various disputes, drove many to other lands. Population growth and cramped spaces in Hellas, in combination with a desire to expand the sphere of economical influence, had motivated them to settle in Italy c. 800 BCE. It was the next place to colonize and Hellenize after the shores of Asia Minor or the Black Sea. In the next 150 years, several poleis founded their colonies along the coast of southern Italy and Sicily, controlling trade routes and dominating the Strait of Messina. This zone came to be known as Magna Graecia. The Phoenicians generally avoided any military confrontations with the Hellenes, unless a land of strategic importance was at stake, e.g. Sicily. To the north, the Greeks faced another adversary, the Etruscans, who had risen to the status of a regional power in Italy, and also expanded in the western Mediterranean, due to the mining and trade of metals. The Hellenic presence was undermining their interests, especially since the Phocaeans began founding colonies on the coasts of Corsica, Gaul, and Iberia. This obliged the Etruscans to ally themselves with the Punics, whose interests also collided with those of the Greeks.

A navigator at Zakantha (Sagunto)

The situation began to change dramatically sometime after 640 BCΕ, when the first Hellene trader dropped anchor at Tartessos. It was possibly the first arrival of a Greek at Iberia in historical times, after the voyages of the Mycenaeans and their legendary heroes (e.g. Heracles) to the peninsula. This sailor was Colaeus (Κωλαῖος), a Samian silver explorer and trader, who arrived at Tartessos c. 640 BCΕ, according to Herodotus. In an era when merchants were anonymous, the “father of history” thought that Colaeus was important enough to note. Since no other Greek merchant had previously sailed to Tartessos, Colaeus was able to obtain a cargo of metal (150 kg of silver) and take it back safely to Samos, thus realizing one of the greatest trade profits at the time. The Massalian Phocaeans followed Colaeus’ route many years later and also dropped anchor at Tartessos. Herodotus wrote that the Phocaeans were the first Hellenes to make long sea-voyages, having discovered and explored the coasts of the Adriatic, Tyrrhenia, Iberia, and Tartessos. He added that Arganthonios, the famous Tartessian king, welcomed the Greeks and urged them in vain to settle there. But why “in vain”? After all they did settle there. And why was the king so anxious to have them in his land? The answer to this question is given by the historical developments.

Phocaean warrior (500-480 BCE)

Hearing that the Persians were becoming a dominant power in the area of their metropolis, Phocaea, the king gave them 1500 kg of silver to build a defensive wall about their city. Despite this wall, however, Phocaea was conquered in 546 BCΕ. Rather than submit to Persian rule, most Phocaeans abandoned their city. Some of them fled to Chios, others to their colonies in Corsica and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, they founded Elea c. 540 BCΕ, and some eventually returned to Phocaea. It is the period when Persia captured the Hellenic cities on the Asia Minor coast. Ironically, the Greeks were not alone in this tragedy; the Canaanites suffered even more: the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Tyre in 572 BCΕ; then, in 539, the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Canaan; Phoenicia declined further and was obliged to pass the baton to Carthage; the Canaanites moved to their colonies, even to the new rising metropolis. The consolidation of the great Empire of the Achaemenids would re-arrange the map of the entire Mediterranean, not only in the Orient but also in the Occident. The 6th century BCE proved to be a major turning point.

The consolidation of the Achaemenids rearranged the map of the
entire Mediterranean, East and West. It was a major turning point.

Phoenician ship, marble mosaic

PHOENICIAN COLONIES were founded on both routes to Iberia and its mineral wealth: a) along the North African coast, and b) on the northern island route (Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearics).^(c) As we mentioned before, they paid tribute to either Tyre or Sidon, but neither had actual control on them. This rule changed c. 650 BCΕ, when Carthage gained independence from Tyre, establishing hegemony over other Phoenician colonies in the West. While some of them willingly submitted, giving up their foreign policy, and paying tribute to the Punics, others in Iberia and Sardinia resisted. Carthage sent troops there and appointed magistrates, retaining direct control over them. It was a policy rigidly enforced during the Punic Wars, when Carthage would become the undisputed leader of all Phoenicians, and resulted in a number of Iberian towns siding with the Romans. If that was the treatment reserved for their kindred, their brothers, one can easily imagine what would happen to all the rest.

• ^(c) What was the purpose of the Phoenician colonies on the second route to Iberia? The first one was the natural route linking Phoenicia with Iberia sailing by the North African coast; while the second one was the natural route linking Greece with Iberia voyaging from island to island. So, this was not a trade route for the Phoenicians. Its exclusive purpose was to block the Hellenes to sail west: it was of strategic importance.

Dido building Carthage (The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire), by J. M. W. Turner (1815)

The founder of Carthage, according to Greek historians, was Elissa, renamed as Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid. The city was built on a promontory, making it master of maritime trade in mare nostrum. All ships crossing the sea had to sail between Tunisia and Sicily, affording the city great power and influence. Founded in 814 BCΕ, it was one of the largest cities in Hellenistic times (by some estimates, only Alexandria was larger). The Punics, unlike other Phoenicians, had a landowning aristocracy, who controlled trans-Saharan trade routes and ruled the hinterland of North Africa. Besides, unlike the Romans, and despite the lack of manpower, Punic citizenship was exclusive, and the goal of the state was more focused on protecting commerce. Exempt from taxation, the citizens were primarily involved in this domain as traders or workers. As a result, Carthage could not afford to wage long wars, because commercial activities slowed down.^(d)

Dido and the walled city of Carthage, medal (ca 1550 CE)

• ^(d) This contradiction is the superpowers’ Achilles’ heel. Carthage, as a commercial empire, would prefer peace; but as a commercial empire, had to conduct wars continuously – and this is in fact what happened: first against the Hellenes, and then against the Romans. In addition, the Punics’ refusal to grant their neighbours privileges, in order to integrate them into their society, turned them into a small, privileged, but vulnerable minority until the end, and obliged them to rely more and more on mercenaries during the wars. This would prove fatal for Carthage…

The war machine, however, was very efficient. Its navy was one of the largest in the Mediterranean, using serial production to maintain high numbers at a low cost, while the army included the now extinct North African elephants trained for war. Carthage turned west and became the “middleman” between mineral resource-rich Iberia and the Orient. The eastward expansion along the African coast was blocked by the Greek colony of Cyrene, founded in 630 BCΕ. The wars against Hellenes were due to the vulnerability of the Punic economy to Greek competition, since products “Made in Carthage” were inferior to Hellenic goods. The Greek colonists posed a twofold threat: a) undercutting the Phoenicians by offering better products; and b) taking over the distribution network.

Wars against Hellenes due to the vulnerability of Punic economy to
Greek competition: Punic products were inferior to Hellenic goods.
The Greeks posed a twofold threat to: a) undercut the Phoenicians by
offering better products, and b) take over the distribution network.

Punic gold coin with a horse

The empire depended heavily on its trade with Tartessos and Iberia in general, from which it obtained vast quantities of silver, lead, copper, and cassiterite that was essential for the manufacture of bronze. Carthage’s trade relations with the Iberians and the naval might that enforced its monopoly on this trade and with tin-rich Britain allowed it to be the sole significant tin broker and bronze maker. This monopoly, one of the major sources of power and prosperity for Carthage, should be maintained at any cost; a Punic sea merchant would rather crash his ship upon the rocky shores of Britain than reveal to any antagonist how it could be safely approached. In addition to being the sole significant distributor of tin, its central location in mare nostrum and control of the waters between Sicily and Tunisia (the Pillars of Heracles within the Mediterranean) allowed it to check the Orient’s supply of tin, as well. Carthage was also the largest producer of silver, mined in Iberia or North Africa, and, after the tin monopoly, this was one of its most profitable trades. The purple dye was also one of the most highly valued commodities, being worth 15-20 times its weight in gold. Ancient sources agree that Carthage via its trade had become perhaps the wealthiest city in the world. However, without the monopoly on trade with Tartessos and Iberia at large, the Punic Empire was inconceivable. Its leaders should have been aware of this fact when they replaced the Canaanites as overlords of Iberia c. 575 BCΕ. Sometime afterwards the Massaliote Phocaeans turned up at Tartessos. King Arganthonios’ friendship with the Hellenes must have greatly annoyed Carthage that felt its monopoly was at stake. It was urgent to take action against the “intruders”, in order to establish itself as the greatest economic and military power in the West of the Mediterranean.

The Punic Empire was inconceivable without Iberia.
The Battle of Alalia: a Grecian “Cadmean victory”…

Trireme, a mosaic from Carthage

This “action” took place in the Tyrrhenian Sea c. 537 BCΕ: it was the historic naval Battle of Alalia. When the metropolis Phocaea fell to Persia, most citizens chose to move to Alalia (or Aléria in Roman times), their colony in Corsica. But this led to a decline of Punic and Etruscan trade in the island and to an alliance between Carthage and Etruria. Their joint fleet of 120 ships, disguised as a pirate force, was defeated by just 60 Phocaean ships carrying people to Alalia. It would have been a great tactical victory of the Greeks, who wiped out an enemy force twice as large; but they lost almost two-thirds of their own fleet. Herodotus said it was a Cadmean victory – what would later be described as a Pyrrhic victory.^(e)

• ^(e) Cadmean is a victory involving one’s own ruin; from Cadmus, legendary founder of Thebes, who required water from a spring guarded by a water-dragon and all his companions perished. Herodotus could not know the subsequent similar phrase, Pyrrhic victory, achieved at such a devastating cost that it is a prelude to defeat. It is named after Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans twice in 280-279 BCΕ during the Pyrrhic War. The Romans suffered even greater casualties but had a much larger supply of men. Pyrrhus is reported as saying: “Another such victory and I come back to Epirus alone”…

King Pyrrhus of Epirus

Realizing that they could not withstand another attack, the Hellenes evacuated Corsica, and sought refuge in Rhegion. According to a legend, Greek prisoners were stoned to death by the Etruscans, while the (more practical) Punics sold them into slavery. Etruria got hold of Corsica, and Carthage kept Sardinia. The Punics would fight two more major naval battles with Massalia, losing both, but still managing to safeguard Iberia and close the Pillars of Heracles, the Strait of Gibraltar, to Hellenic shipping, thus containing Grecian expansion in Iberia until 480 BCΕ. The Massaliotes made no gains and just kept control of their Iberian colonies. It seemed as if the Iberian status quo remained in place; but in fact, a great tragedy was unfolding in Andalusia with the collapse and demise of the Tartessian polity and civilization.

Tartessos… delenda est!

SOME AUTHORS CONSIDER that this Phocaean victory/defeat in Alalia and the absence of Greek traders in Tartessos led to the collapse… Here we go again! During all those centuries of development, these authors saw only Phoenicians trading there. But, all of a sudden, the Hellenic presence became so vital for the Tartessians’ survival that they died out when the Punics cut their “oxygen” off! Other scholars offer the alternative of an “armed conflict”, but in general terms, and avoid being precise as to who was fighting whom. There are also versions of the Tartessian tragedy that specify both the perpetrators and time: “The Punics brought about the collapse by 530 BC”. Carthage should have put Tartessos in “quarantine”, sometime after the death of Arganthonios c. 550 BCΕ. This was the reason why ten years later, with the Punics and Etruscans allied against the Hellenes, the Tartessians did not remain “prudently neutral”; so, they stood by the Greeks and paid dearly. The situation did not allow “luxuries” such as neutralities…

King Arganthonios of Tartessos

Emboldened by the outcome of the Battle of Alalia, the Punics unleashed such a “reign of terror” that even their kindred in Gadir turned against them. The Punics besieged promptly the fraternal Canaanite colony and captured it. The Gaditans suffered so much and for so long that in 206 BCΕ, during the second Punic War, they rebelled against Carthage; and when Gadir fell to the Romans, they hailed the victors. Certainly, the new overlords were no better: just one year later, the Roman presence was shaken by a mutiny and an Iberian uprising against them. There was at least one aspect where the Canaanites proved to be superior to the Punics: just after the fall of Gadir, the Persian king Cambyses became master of Egypt in 525 BCΕ. Carthage was then spared a trial of arms against the Persian Empire, since the Canaanites refused to lend ships to the Persians for an African expedition against their own brothers. It seems that at least for the Canaanites, unlike the Punics, blood ties were still important. But even without losing a war, the Punic Empire may have paid tribute irregularly to the Great King of Kings.

The Punics were spared a trial of arms against the Persians, because the
Canaanites did not lend ships for a Persian expedition against Carthage.

Treasure of Tartessos, El Carambolo

Carthage proceeded to destroy Tartessos and drive Greeks away from southern Iberia, defending its trade monopoly in the western Mediterranean, with attacks even on the merchant ships of its rivals. Historical reports indicate that Tartessos had little military defense, as its success was always based on trade and friendly relations with its neighbours. This is hard to believe, however, for the kingdom was so wealthy that many Iberian tribes would covet it. There should have been defensive walls and deterrent land and sea forces, that is, army and navy. As for the date of the catastrophe, in several historical texts we can find one that sets the date as 533 BCΕ, i.e. it is consistent with what was cited before (“by 530 BC”), and another one sometime later, around 500 BCΕ. We cannot be sure if the two dates refer to the same event, or if there was an “armed conflict” between Punics and Tartessians that lasted about thirty years. “It is reported”, we can read in one of those texts, “that around 500 BC, Tartessos was attacked by the Carthaginians, who destroyed the capital and left it without protection from the sea.” It makes sense if we remember those accounts that Tartessos had a sophisticated system to regulate the river flow, and also its supposed similarity to Atlantis.

“Tartessos was attacked by the Punics, who destroyed
the capital and left it without protection from the sea.”

Auletris (woman playing aulos), Iberian high-relief from Osuna (Seville province, end of 3rd or beginning of 2nd century BCE)

The abrupt disappearance, and the fact that its capital has never been found, led to a lot of speculation: how could such an important civilization disappear with no traces left behind? If the capital eludes us, there are Tartessian cities that can “speak” the truth. Balsa–Tavira in the Algarve was violently destroyed in the end of the 6th century, probably together with the capital and other sites, when the Punics proceeded to impose their “iron will”. Maenaca (Mainake), the Hellenic colony founded close to Málaga under the aegis of Tartessos, is claimed it was also destroyed c. 500 BCE. We additionally know that many Canaanite colonies were deserted at the same time. We cannot be sure if this was connected with Phoenicia’s decline, or Carthage’s “ethnic cleansing” operations, or some local rebellions. Despite the numerous excavations, it has not been possible to locate with certainty either Maenaca, or Acra Leucá at Alicante, or the city of Tartessos. Whatever the result of these continuous efforts, the ancient texts that mention these cities cannot be ignored; otherwise, the story of Tartessos and its demise should be treated as fiction, as well…

Bronce Carriazo: a Tartessian bronze plaque found near Seville representing a local goddess of the marshes and assimilated to Astarte and Hathor

There is a tendency to present the Canaanites as “peaceful colonists”, while the Punics as “warlike colonialists”. However, we have seen the Phoenicians acting in a manner anything but peaceful whenever they could “manage” the adversary.^(f) In a text on the History of old Onuba (Huelva), except numerous open questions and hypotheses, we have some interesting data presented. Tartessos, it seems, began gradually sinking into crisis and decline in the 8th century BCΕ, at a time when there was a co-existence of Phoenician and Grecian colonies such as Gadir and Portus Menesthei, which was identified as a Phocaean site.^(g) The author was impressed by the closeness of the Greek site to the Tartessian capital and noted what the archaeologists in Huelva had observed, i.e. a decrease in Phoenician pottery, in parallel with an increase in Hellenic ceramics of far better quality.^(h)

• ^(f) We can’t say that this mentality has been a Phoenician peculiarity; it’s a human characteristic: virtually everyone acts likewise. The Hellenes e.g. very often acted as the “bullies” of antiquity (though this feature sometimes saved them, as it happened during the Persian Wars). Regarding the Canaanites, let’s go back to Chronicle 20. The Enigmatic Sea Peoples: one of them

“the Tjeker, moving to Canaan, captured the city-state of Dor and turned it into a large, well-fortified capital of their kingdom. Dor was violently destroyed in the mid-11th century BCΕ by the expanding Phoenicians, who were checked by the Philistines, and then by the Hebrews.”

And, of course, except these minor local powers that blocked Phoenician expansion, there were superpowers, such as the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians. Conclusion: there was absolutely no room for Phoenician expansion in the Levant.

Hellenic helmet, Asta Regia (Jerez de la Frontera), close
to Portus Menesthei

• ^(g) Amid all this speculation and conjecture, the author claims that the 8th century was “a time when Phoenician and Greek colonies, such as Gadir and Portus Menesthei, coexisted”. When did this coexistence actually occur? Was it in the 8th or in the 6th century? In Chronicle 22, both versions were presented:

“The Hellenic cities on the Mediterranean coast of Iberia probably appeared on the ‘map’ after the foundation of Massalia, c. 600 BCΕ”. However, “the Hellenes of the Homeric era (at least their goods) arrived at Iberian ports… in the 9th or 8th century BCΕ. Those who transported the Greek ware… might very well have been the Phoenicians… What the Phoenician ships could not transport and, therefore, made the Greek presence absolutely necessary in Iberia, was Hellenic culture, art, ideas, models, architecture, burial habits, etc.”

• ^(h) The author seems to be obsessed with the Greeks, presenting them as a destabilizing factor, allegedly terrorizing the countryside and promoting their goods by force! He accepts, however, that these goods were better in quality! In such cases, the ones who resort to violence are the monopolists with less attractive products, so as to avoid free competition. Anyway, he admits that all his hypotheses are not based on archaeological finds.

The worsening of the situation in the next century is manifested by the almost total disappearance of open settlements, with the walling of cities. During the 6th century, we notice the outbreak of another crisis evidenced by the decrease of mineral exports. Its tragic climax is attested with the destruction of Tartessos by the Punics, because it was an ally of the Greeks. The conquerors, nota bene, had no intention to eliminate just the resistance of the conquered, indicating how merciless this confrontation had been, equivalent to what we now describe as “genocide”. The descendant culture of the Turdetani in southern Andalusia marks a return to the socio-economic features of the late Atlantic Bronze Age within the Iron Age conditions of the 5th century BCΕ, which is translated as a regression of at least two or three centuries.

The Battle of Salamis, by Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1868)

The Phoenicians’ double crushing defeat in Sicily and Salamis

AFTER IMPOSING “PAX PUNICA” in southern Iberia, Carthage turned its attention to another land of strategic importance mostly controlled by the Hellenes: Sicily. The Punics planned the largest overseas expedition thus far: after three years of preparations, they sailed for Sicily. It was the first Sicilian War,⁽ⁱ⁾ which coincided with Xerxes’ expedition against Greece in 480 BCΕ, prompting speculation about a possible alliance between Carthage and Persia. But even with no official pact, Carthage should have timed its expedition with that of the Achaemenids to exclude the possibility of any aid sent from Hellas to Sicily. The outcome of both expeditions was disastrous for the invaders. For the Phoenicians it was a double defeat: not only of the Punics in Sicily, but also of the Canaanites fighting in the naval Battle of Salamis under Persian orders. The repercussions brought sweeping changes in Carthage: an oligarchic Republic was then established, and also an isolationist policy was followed for the next 70 years when Carthage took no action against the Hellenes, nor even aided any of their rivals. Economically, sea trade with the Orient was cut off by the Greeks in Hellas, while the cities of Magna Graecia boycotted Punic merchants. This led to the development of trade with the West and caravan-borne trade with the East. Focus was shifted on the exploration and expansion in Africa and Europe. This isolationism explains why the two great maritime empires in the 5th century BCΕ, Carthage and Athens, were not engaged in war. Athens began massive exports of pottery in this period to Iberia, especially in the southeast. But again, as in the previous Canaanite era of Iberia, the archaeologists do not know yet if the ships that transported the ware were Punic or Athenian.

The ancient theatre of Tauromenium (Taormina) in Sicily

• ⁽ⁱ⁾ Essentially, the three Sicilian Wars or, more properly, the Greek-Punic Wars, were a lamentable continuation of the relentless “tradition” of civil war among the Hellenes, with Carthage being always involved, changing sides, and finally winning, as a rule, the lion’s share. These wars, the longest lasting conflicts of classical antiquity (600–265 BCΕ), would culminate in the Punic Wars (264–146 BCE) against the Romans, and end with Carthage being razed to the ground.

While Carthage was engaged in another Sicilian War, the rise of Macedon under Philip II and Alexander the Great saw the defeat of the city-states in Greece and the fall of the Achaemenid Empire. All the Phoenician cities in Canaan submitted except Tyre that was besieged and sacked in 332 BCΕ. The thriving Greeks in the Hellenistic period gradually ousted the last remnants of the formerly dominant Phoenicians over trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean, while their culture disappeared entirely in Canaan. So, the Punics were the last of the Phoenicians. And they were spared another perilous ordeal when Alexander died in Babylon, in 323 BCΕ, while raising a fleet in Cilicia to invade Carthage, Italy, and Iberia…

The Punics were spared another ordeal when Alexander died,
while raising a fleet to invade Carthage, Italy, and Iberia…

Alexander with Heracles’ lion sculp,
cast stone plaque (1st-4th century CE)

Battles of the Diadochi with the three-way struggle among Antigonid Macedon, Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria were also good news for Carthage avoiding unnecessary conflicts with the successors. Trade relations were reinstated with Egypt, together with sea-borne access to the eastern markets for the first time since 480 BCΕ. It seemed as if Carthage had also inherited the Phoenicians’ good fortune, since two superpowers, the Persian and Macedonian, could not realize their plans to campaign against its domain. But the confrontation with Rome would prove inevitable. The Punic Wars were a series of three conflicts lasting from 264 to 146 BCΕ. The first one was fought for the control of Sicily. Carthage, finally, evacuated it and paid heavy war indemnities. The end of the war found Rome with a large navy able to prevent sea-borne invasion of Italy, control sea trade routes, and invade foreign shores. Sardinia and Corsica were also seized, while Carthage had plunged into another war with its mercenaries. At last, the most powerful state that emerged in the western Mediterranean was Rome.

Carthage spent the years after the war improving its finances and expanding its empire in Hispania (Iberia), preparing for the next war that is most remembered for Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with elephants. He resoundingly defeated the Romans in several battles, but was unable to cause a break between Rome and its allies. Equally important, despite his many pleas, he never received sufficient reinforcements, because Carthage opted to send extra forces only to its source of wealth, Iberia. Thus Hannibal was not able to achieve his goal of ultimately conquering Rome and winning the war. This gave the Romans self-confidence, while they were fighting simultaneously in Italy, Sicily, Iberia, and also against Carthage’s ally, Macedonia. Finally, the war was taken to Africa, where Carthage was defeated and its control reduced to only the city itself.

Hannibal in Italy: his feat in crossing the Alps with elephants, though many did not survive,
passed into European legend: detail of a fresco by Jacopo Ripanda (ca 1510)

“Ceterum censeo, Carthago delenda est!” (Cato)

The resurgence of hostilities fifty years later, when Carthage recovered its wealth and power, was linked with anti-Roman agitations in Iberia and Hellas. Cato the Elder gave the “motto” for the annihilation of Carthage, ending all his speeches, no matter what the topic, saying: “Carthago delenda est!”, “Carthage must be destroyed!”.^(j) Rome presented a series of unacceptable demands, claiming that Carthage must be demolished and rebuilt away from the coast, deep into Africa. In 146 BCΕ, after a three-year siege, it was systematically sacked and burned to the ground, with the fields salted to make the ground completely infertile and useless for future generations.^(k) No Punic war records exist, since the books of the Library of Carthage were distributed among African tribes and none remain on Punic history.

In the end, Elissa-Dido was deprived of her immortal fame – by Aeneas…

• ^(j) Cato (234–149 BCE) was a reactionary statesman, the first to write a Roman history in Latin, and prominent for his anti-Greek views, since he saw Hellenism as a threat to Roman culture.

• ^(k)Ares Alexandrou, Ascent (conclusion):

(…) remain there and look on to the end
look at them, those with keys and others with handcuffs
who’ll be demolishing
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . as allies
roofs bridges wells
look at them
while they’ll be leveling down the town you’ve built
and sowing it with salt.

Elissa-Dido was finally deprived of her immortal fame – by Aeneas…

• >> Chronicle 26. IBERIAN CROSS(-CHECK)
• << Chronicle 24. THE TRIUMPH OF CRETINISM

Next Chronicle 26. IBERIAN CROSS(-CHECK) ● Emporia On the Nile ● Rebels and Mercenaries
● The Trojan War Odysseys ● Metal Attraction ● Cassiterides ● Balearics ● Arganthonios
● Graeco-Tartessian Friendship Against Phoenicians and Punics

Punic tetradrachm with Elissa-Dido and a lion

Chronicle 22. AN IBERIAN PERIPLUS REVIVAL

Chronicle 22. AN IBERIAN PERIPLUS REVIVAL

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 22. ΑΝΑΒΙΩΣΗ ΠΕΡΙΠΛΟΥ ΤΗΣ ΙΒΗΡΙΑΣ

● Tartessos (B) ● Colonies in Provence, Iberia, Maurusia
● Tin and Silver Routes ● Democritus and Plato ●
Topography of the Area Beyond the Pillars of Heracles

Michales Loukovikas

AFTER THE SEA PEOPLES’ RAIDS and the following Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century BCE, the Phoenicians started setting up their sea-trade monopoly. Carrying out their “master plan”, and enjoying a free hand, as their antagonists were passing through a long “Dark Age”, “they headed straight for the gold, silver, and tin of Iberia”, and became “partners” with the Tartessians. At last, they were masters of the Mediterranean! A lot of Phoenicians chose to settle in local towns, profiting from their hospitality. That’s what Strabo implied writing that “the best cities of Tartessos were inhabited by the Phoenicians”.

Phoenician gold ring with two dolphins, a symbol of Gadir

Later they secured a harbour of their own nearby. It was Gadir, the “walled city”, called Gádeira by the Hellenes, and Gades by the Romans (modern Cádiz).^(a) Its founding is dated traditionally to 1104 BCE, although no archaeological strata there can be dated earlier than the 9th century. Therefore, we assume that in its earliest days, it was merely a small seasonal trading post. According to a Grecian legend, the city was founded by Heracles on Erytheia, Geryon’s island, when he killed him. One of its notable features in antiquity was a temple dedicated to the Phoenician god Melqart, who was associated with Heracles by the Greeks. It was still standing during the 1st century, and some historians believe (based in part on this information) that the columns of this temple were the origin of the myth about the Pillars of Heracles.

• ^(a) Gadir means wall, fort, and this in turn means the walls were the distinctive feature of the city in an area and era when cities were probably not walled. It also implies that the Phoenicians felt the need of such protective walls. Consequently, their relations with the locals were based on anything but in good faith since the beginning.

● The Phoenician settlement was built on one of three neighbouring islets in the Gulf of Cádiz, known as Erytheia, Cotinussa, and Antípolis, which are all Greek toponyms.

Soon the entire coastline around this strategic area, on both seas and continents – the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Europe and Africa – was full of Phoenician settlements. However, they were more densely concentrated there, in the south, than further up the coast. So, the Hellenes, when they finally re-appeared on the scene, were able to establish their own trading emporia along the northeastern coast before venturing into the Phoenician zone. Encouraged by the Tartessians, who strongly desired an end to the Phoenician economic monopoly, the Greeks stepped on Andalusian soil and founded Maenaca (Mainakē), very close to the Phoenician Malaca, on the coast of Málaga, possibly at modern Vélez-Málaga. The Massaliote Periplus, which gave an account of a sea voyage round Iberia in the 6th century BCE, placed Maenaca in the dominion and under the aegis of Tartessos: the peninsula was a magnet for everyone due to its great wealth and strategic importance.

Tartessos, with Phoenician and Greek colonies: its core area is shown in green,
with its sphere of influence spreading in the entire southern Iberia.

Regarding the uncertainty on the whereabouts of Maenaca, Strabo pointed out in his Geographica that its ruins, close to Malaca, could still be seen in his time (64 BCE – 24 CE); he additionally collated the regular Greek urban plan versus the haphazard Semitic layout of the Phoenician site, whose location suggests it was a more dense and irregular urban cluster than neighbouring Maenaca.^(b) But even if we are still puzzled about the latter’s exact site and life span, the Hellenic cities on the Mediterranean coast of Iberia probably appeared on the “map” after the foundation of Massalia (modern Marseille), c. 600 BCE, by Phocaeans from Ionia in Asia Minor – something that the Punics had tried but failed to prevent. This city gradually became a thriving trading centre and a major rival of Carthage for the Iberian markets, and especially the tin trade through Gaul-France.

• ^(b) The father of urban planning was Hippodamus (Ἱππόδαμος, 498-408 BCE) from Miletus, an urban planner, architect, mathematician, physician, meteorologist and philosopher, hence the Hippodamian plan of city layouts. Most impressive in his plan was a wide central area that was kept unsettled and in time evolved to the agora, the centre of both the city and its citizens.

The Greek Colony of Marseille, by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1869)

Later on the Phocaeans founded Alalia in Corsica c. 566 BCE and moved towards Iberia. Some popular theories claim that at least one of their settlements, Rhode (modern Roses), at the northeastern tip of Iberia, dates back to the 8th century, as a colony of the Aegean island of Rhodes; but in fact, it seems it was founded in the 6th century BCE by Massaliotes, perhaps with some admixture of colonists from nearby Emporion (today’s Empúries). Still, as in the case of the Phoenician settlement in Gadir, Rhode might have been nothing more than a small seasonal trading post of Rhodes in the 8th century; or perhaps, the colonists that settled there, two centuries later, were mainly Rhodians serving in the Massaliote army, along with Cretans, in a special force charged with surveying vigilantly the Punic movements in southern Iberia.

Nevertheless, popular theories should not be discredited and discarded without serious thought or research, just because they are “popular”; those concerning Rhode, for sure, were not born out of nothing. Sailing towards Provence, we can see that traders from Rhodes were visiting this coast since the 7th century BCE. Rhodian pottery from that century has been found in the area of Marseille,