Still figuring out photos, will work on it for tomorrow.
The alarm rang at 7:00, which was a nice change of pace from
the 6 am-ish alarms from the last few days. I grabbed breakfast quickly and
headed out into Herakleion to buy food for lunch. One really nice thing here in
Greece is that prices are exactly as displayed. The taxes are all built in to
the prices shown on the shelves and it’s way easier to figure out how much
money to take out to pay. I’m aware that there are reasons why this doesn’t
work in the U.S. due to taxes being more subdivided within states, cities, and
municipalities. Back from digressing, I snagged some sandwiches, chips and 2/3
of a kilogram of cherries (so many cherries).
We loaded our stuff into the bus and took a short drive to
the Herakleion Archaeological Museum, which houses much of the “good stuff”
from the palace sites that we had visited in previous days. We were guided
through the lecture by Dr. John Younger, a scholar with diverse interests in
antiquity. We focused a lot on Minoan and Mycenaean art. John described the
difference between the Minoans and Mycenaeans as “nuts and wild” vs.
“conventional and organized” in what we can glean from their cultures.
One practice in particular that we talked about was bull
leaping. This practice is hotly, hotly debated in classical fields, but from
what we can tell, the practice involved some form of interacting with a bull
and performing gymnastics. The Minoans appear to have provoked the bull to
charge and then grabbed its horns to get tossed over the back of the bull. The
Mycenaeans used a slightly less risky method, which seems to have involved
jumping down from a raised platform onto the back of the bull and then
somersaulting off.
The fresco.
This fresco is the Mycenaean style, which shows the central
figure pushing off of the bull’s back while two white figures appear to
interact with the bull, perhaps by holding it. It’s also possible that the
figures on either end are depictions of the jumper before, during, and after
the jump. There is another theory that the people to the left and right of the
bull are women, their purpose unknown. This is because in Minoan art, only
women are depicted in white. The specifics of bull leaping remain unknown to
us, but the topic drives significant discussion still in academic circles.
Another really cool artifact that we saw was the elephant
tusk from the palace at Zakros. This is concrete evidence of trade with Africa
or the Near East. In the second millennium BCE!!! It’s crazy how luxury goods
like this get transferred from place to place in the ancient world. There are
also some indications of Egyptian influences on Minoan art, which is even
crazier. Unlike a luxury good that can be traded outside of its place of
origin, the artist would have had to have seen or talked to someone who had
seen such art. It’s possible that the art could have been on traded objects as
well and this whole observation is obviously not particularly exciting from an
academic standpoint, but to me it’s really really cool how trade happened so
long ago.
A truly massive tusk.
We also went upstairs in the museum and saw the famous
frescoes of the blue monkeys. They are depicted gathering crocus blooms, which
will eventually become saffron. According to Dr. Younger, the Minoans have
other depictions of animals acting like people as well, which is not common in
the ancient world. It certainly shows a different view of animals than many
later cultures and there are probably interesting comparative articles about
Minoan vs. conventional western attitudes towards animals based on art.
The famous monkeys.
While I won’t summarize the rest of the lecture here, it was
very well done and I left feeling edified. We headed back to the bus and got on
the road to Mallia. At Mallia, we met Dr. Younger again and he showed us around
the site. In the courtyard at the palace, there’s a hemispherical stone with an
indent in it. As we were walking into the courtyard, I asked Dr. Younger the
function of the stone. He responded, “I’ll talk about it over in the shade.”
I’ll put the next part of episode in a script (and also third person, because
first person scripts are weird).
Dr. Younger (DY): Who
asked that question about the rock in the courtyard?
Matthew (M) raises
his hand.
DY: Okay. Go over to
it, on the far side, and, before you get whistled at by the guard, take a
running start and launch yourself using the dimple on the back of the stone.
M: with trepidation Sure….
I executed the actions asked of me and for my efforts
received a round of applause from the rest of the group. Dr. Younger then
explained that the stone was used in a proto-Mycenaean variation of the ritual
that didn’t involve grabbing the horns. On the way across the site, he also
told Luke and me about depictions of essentially ancient picadores who are shown stabbing the bulls to weaken them. This was
an element that we were not previously aware of, but given the parallels with
bullfighting in Spain, we had speculated to exist.
The speculated bull-leaping stone.
We also saw a workshop where it appears an audit of some
kind was being conducted on the goods paid to the central palace as tribute.
The paraphernalia of the audit was put down extremely suddenly and so
archaeologists found medallions that were hung on individual pithoi, massive (I could sit in one)
jugs, of tribute. The information on those medallions was being recorded on 4
sided bar tablets, which were in turn summarized by the tablet found in the
next room over. This level of sophistication, while implied to have existed
elsewhere, does not have the physical presence like Mallia.
Following the site lecture, we retired to the café and ate
lunch using the foods that we had purchased in Herakleion. I chatted for most
of lunch with Elliot and Cole, students working on research nearby. After
lunch, they joined our band on the bus, as we were going to where they needed
to be next. Amy made an executive decision to skip Dreros and Lato, and so we
headed for Mochlos after dropping off Elliot and Cole.
Mochlos was, to put it succinctly, a rollercoaster. We
rolled into town and piled off the bus quickly, as we thought were late to meet
our guide, Dr. Jeffrey Soles. However, he had not yet arrived and we hit the
beach for some swimming. Mochlos is an island a short distance off the coast of
mainland Crete, although according to geoarchaeologists it was probably
connected to the mainland in antiquity. Luke decided to swim to the island
instead of waiting for the boat to take us and was followed by Brad, Asia,
Cassia, Melanie, Abi, Amy, Sally, and me. We got to the island after a decent
swim. It wasn’t the easiest swim for me, as I haven’t kept up with my fitness
as well as I should have since frisbee ended in the spring.
Mochlos from the shore.
We hung out on the shore for a bit while we waited for boat
to bring the rest of the group across. After the rest of group was ferried
across, Dr. Soles gave us a tour. Mochlos has an incredible amount of
archaeologically relevant finds. Preserved between two layers of Minoan
flooring is ash from the eruption at Thera. This means that Minoan civilization
survived the eruption at Thera.
Additionally, incredibly wealthy goods of someone who
appears to have been a priestess were found in the main Minoan building. These
goods include 80 amethyst beads, which is nearly a quarter of all beads found
to date on Crete. There was also a bronze trident, fully intact, from the
Levant, and a tin ingot. Now, the tin ingot might not be the most impressive
appearing item, but it’s important to understand that it came from so far away.
As in, speculated to have come from Afghanistan far away. The tin started at
its theoretical source somewhere far to the east, moved into the Levant through
Iran and Iraq, and was traded for in the Levant. So it came from a looong way
away and that’s really cool.
The shore from Mochlos.
Dr. Soles was a funny and articulate speaker and told us
about a practice on the island that was completely off my radar until this
point. There is a tour service, run by a former Berkeley classics faculty
member, which brings women on a tour through Crete to follow the Minoan goddess
across the island. Apparently, there is a triangular stone at Mochlos which people
believe to represent the pubic triangle of said goddess, and so this tour conducts
pagan rites on the island.
Then it was time to go back. I rang a bell three times to
signal the town that we wanted to go on the boat back and then was persuaded by
some of my colleagues to swim back as well. I climbed out of the water onto the
beach as the boat was pulling in. Tim added his name to the list of people who
swam the distance on the way back. We all piled on to the bus and headed for
Siteia. Shoutouts to Jessica, Claudia, and one other person who grabbed all our
stuff before getting on the boat, I would not have been able to walk around
Mochlos without my shoes. Also, Mom, I’m totally fine you don’t have to worry
about me swimming distance like that.
Thanks for reading. Tomorrow we start with the Siteia
archaeological museum and then move on to a few other sites, including the
“Gorge of the Dead,” which I’m hoping will live up to its spooky name.
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