Chronicle 3. A CHRONICLE OF THE HUMANS

Chronicle 3. A CHRONICLE OF THE HUMANS

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 3. ΧΡΟΝΙΚΟ ΤΟΥ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΥ

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

Michales Loukovikas

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

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

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

Archánthropus skull found in the Cave of Petralona in 1960

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

Ares Poulianós

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

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

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

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

Graecopithecus (El Graeco)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minoan Linear A writing
(2nd millennium BCE)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minoan civilization: autochthonous and self-luminous…

Prince of the Lilies, Knossos (ca 1550 BCE)

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

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

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

Candia (Crete), by Abraham Ortelius (1584)

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

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

Paleolithic Odyssey: most ancient navigators in the Mediterranean

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

The Mediterranean

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

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

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

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

Stone Age fishing and navigation

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

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

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

The last of the Neanderthals…

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

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

Neolithic farmers from the Aegean built Stonehenge!

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

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

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

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

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

Reconstructed hut in Dispelió Neolithic lake settlement

Early Balkan writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dispelió flutes

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

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

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

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

Tang dynasty Chinese calligraphy

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

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

Hieroglyphs on stele (c. 1321 BCE)

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

Göbekli Tepe: a sort of totem pole with humanoid figures

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

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

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

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

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Chronicle 5. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

Chronicle 5. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 5. ΙΒΗΡΟΥ ΟΔΥΣΣΕΙΑ

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

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

Michales Loukovikas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odysseus and Calypso in Odyssey-Lisbon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Circe, by Charles Gumery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taurocathapsia (bull-leaping), Minoan fresco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chronicle 27. AN ARCHAEOLOGIST’S WATERLOO

Chronicle 27. AN ARCHAEOLOGIST’S WATERLOO

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 27. ΤΟ ΒΑΤΕΡΛΩ ΕΝΟΣ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΛΟΓΟΥ

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

Michales Loukovikas

.

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

(Constantine P. Cavafy, Ithaca)

A Minoan woman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taureador: Fresco fragment from Avaris, 16th BCE

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

Minoan Ladies in Blue fresco, ca 1525-1450 BCE

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

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

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

Sumerian silver lyre of Ur (2600-2400 ΠΚΧ)

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

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

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

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

Lawrence (left) and Woolley at Carchemish

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

The Knossos palace reconstructed

Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier vs. Leonard Woolley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Papyrus fresco on Thera

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

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

Ritual sprinkler in rock crystal
from Kato Zakros, Crete

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

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

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

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

Knossos: the Throne Room with the griffins reconstructed

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

Asherah, Canaanite fertility goddess

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

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

La Petite Parisienne de Crète…

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

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

Minoan fresco frieze at Avaris reconstructed

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

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

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

A Minoan heterotopia at Avaris. Taureador (detail)

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

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

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

Ahmose fighting back the Hyksos

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

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

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

Theran rosettes

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

Minoan female acrobat
(ivory, 2800-1100 BCE)

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

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

Differences Between Minoan and Pharaonic Society and Art

Wild duck on Thera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theran boy-boxers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mycenaean women procession fresco

Before Tin, it was the Obsidian…

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

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

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

Grandstand Minoan procession fresco

Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO!

ii) INTERLUDE

Crossing the Atlantic

 

Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO!

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

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

Afro-Brazilian Museum

ΙΙΙ Festival

SO DISTANT
SO NEAR

Music and Poetry in the
Portuguese Language

Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro, May 2013

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

Michales Loukovikas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anticythera Mechanism

The Mediterranean and the Oecumene beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical questions as the starting point of the research

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

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

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

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

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

Α. Mediterranean Periplus, in Search of Orpheus

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

Β. Cassiterides Archipelago, Sailing to Tartessos

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

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

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

Homer’s Odyssey periplus

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

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

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

The siege of Lisbon, by Roque Gameiro (1917)

Appendix: An Atlantic Odyssey

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

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

Sappho and Alcaeus, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

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

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

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

Map of Rio de Janeiro (Dutch Atlas 1600)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arctic continent on the Gerardus Mercator map (1595)

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

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

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

Homère, L’Odyssée; lithographies by Marc Chagall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eternally mapping Homer’s Odyssey

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

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

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

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

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

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

LABYRINTH OF MAPS

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

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

Homer’s mystery: the epimyth of a myth

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

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

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

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

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

THE “CLASSICAL” MEDITERRANEAN ODYSSEY

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

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

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

Chronicle 26. IBERIAN CROSS-CHECK

Chronicle 26. IBERIAN CROSS-CHECK

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 26. ΙΒΗΡΙΚΗ ΔΙΑΣΤΑΥΡΩΣΗ (ΣΤΟΙΧΕΙΩΝ)

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

Michales Loukovikas

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

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

The Minoan international trade: colonies and emporia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statue of Viriathus in Zamora

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

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

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

The Palace of Minos at Knossos

TARTESSOS: CONTRIBUTION TO THE OLDEST HISTORY IN THE OCCIDENT

THE MOST ANCIENT REFERENCES

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

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

THE PRE-TARTESSIANS

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

TARTESSOS AND THE PHOENICIANS

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

TARTESSOS AND THE PHOCAEANS

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

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

THE TARTESSIAN CULTURE

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

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

The Arrival of Aeneas at Pallanteum, by Claude Lorrain

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

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

Breogán and the Tower of Heracles, A Coruña

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celts in Europe

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

CONTACTS BETWEEN THE ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS
OF THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND IBERIA

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

A WESTWARD MOVEMENT

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

CONTACTS WITH THE WEST COAST OF IBERIA

Celtic art in Spain

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

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

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

HOMOGENEITY OF THE IBERIAN MEDITERRANEAN REGION

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

EARLY POLITICAL GROUPS AND CONFUSION OF NAMES

Winged griffin of Tartessos (700-575 BCE)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 those 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 population of the two largest islands (Gymnesians) is stated by Diodorus at 30,000.

Herodotus, by Jean-Guillaume Moitte (1806)

THE PHOCAEAN GREEKS

“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.⁽¹⁰⁾

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ 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.⁽¹¹⁾

• ⁽¹¹⁾ 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: an alliance against Carthage and Gadir’s aggressiveness. 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,⁽¹²⁾ 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”…

• ⁽¹²⁾ 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.)

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

THE ALALIA COLONY AND ITS EFFECTS

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”…

Phocaean electrum coin with playing seals

ECONOMIC CHANGES IN THE WEST

“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:

Armor of a Punic officer

“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

Bronze Age gold helmet found in Leiro, Galicia

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.⁽¹³⁾ 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.

• ⁽¹³⁾ 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, Celts, Baleares, 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 (they were recruited), nor citizens of Carthage, should be paid, together with the Numidians, or the escaped slaves who were fighting on their side. Once again the Punics had no choice but to agree…

Salammbô, by Alfons Mucha (1896), based on Gustave Flaubert’s same-titled historical novel (1862) that was in turn based on Polybius. The heroine is Hamilcar’s daughter and priestess loved passionately by Mathos…

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.

Silver coin of Hamilcar Barca

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 ones from all those I mention in these Chronicles, who really deserve this epithet, must be Alexander and Cyrus.

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 on the way we’ll be meeting 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 18. AEGEAN: KNOSSOS, MYCENAE, TROY

Chronicle 18. AEGEAN: KNOSSOS, MYCENAE, TROY

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

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

Michales Loukovikas

The Atreid dynasty palace at Mycenae

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

Sunset at Stonehenge

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

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

Mycenae, Lion Gate

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

Heracles

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

Sea peoples depicted as prisoners in Egypt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eleusinian, Cabeirian and Orphic Mysteries

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

Samothracian relief showing Agamemnon
being initiated into the Cabeirian rites.

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

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

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

The Myth of Orpheus, by Marc Chagall

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

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

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

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

The choral dancers frieze from the Temenos in Samothrace

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

A Mycenaean jar with an octopus and fish

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

Trojan War, Bronze Age Collapse and Dark Ages

The gold funeral Mask
of “Agamemnon”

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

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

The map of Eratosthenes

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

A tablet with Linear B symbols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mycenaean dagger with a hunting scene: men vs. lions

Chronicle 17. MINOAN CRETAN THALASSOCRACY

Chronicle 17. MINOAN CRETAN THALASSOCRACY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 17. ΚΡΗΤΟΜΙΝΩΙΚΗ ΘΑΛΑΣΣΟΚΡΑΤΟΡΙΑ

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

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

The palace of Minos at Knossos

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

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

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

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

Bronze Apollo with Lyre, Pompeii

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

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

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

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

Replica of the Uluburun shipwreck

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

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

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

The Pleiades, by the Symbolist Elihu Vedder (1885)

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

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

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

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

The Dolphins mural at Knossos

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

Knossos Palace (reconstruction)

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

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

Sacred symbols: bull and labrys

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

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

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

Minoan Snake Goddess

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

What conclusions can we draw?

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

A Minoan beauty on Thera

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

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

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

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

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

The mysterious Phaestos Disc (side B)

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

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

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

Theran antelopes

Minoan Trade and Influence

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

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

A Theran fisherman

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

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

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

The entire Ship Procession or Flotilla frieze at Acroteri, Thera

Bronze and Orichalcum or Chalcopyrite (Brass)

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

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

Andean birdman, tumbaga

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

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

Brass French horn

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

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

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

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

The Cassiterides

CYPRUS WAS THE MEDITARRANEAN “copper island”; the word copper comes from the name of the island: from the Latin phrase Cyprium (aes), “Cyprian (metal)”. A possible etymological origin of the name Cyprus is the Sumerian words for copper or bronze (zubar / kubar), due to the massive deposits of copper ore found in the island. But where did the Minoans find tin – the necessary component – to produce bronze? Tin was very rare in the eastern Mediterranean. The only known source of cassiterite in the area was Kestel-Göltepe on the Taurus Mountains of south-central Anatolia. It supplied tin from the late 4th millennium to the mid-19th century BCE, when the ores became uneconomical or ran out. There were three other sources of tin available to the Minoan traders: the distant northeastern Afghanistan, central Europe (Bohemia), and the Occident, with vast amounts of tin in places such as Iberia, Brittany, in northwestern France, and especially Cornwall, in southwestern Britain. For the seafaring Cretans, the West was the destination they probably preferred best.⁽⁷⁾ When the Taurus mines shut down, western tin became more important and the Minoans would have completely monopolized the supply of tin into the