In many ways, “Minoan” Crete seemed like a Freudian paradise. Here the archaeologists unearthed colourful frescoes of naked-breasted women participating in the dangerous “bull-vaulting” game, whilst statuettes of bare-breasted goddesses, holding writhing snakes in each hand, emerged from various parts of the island. Evans spoke glowingly of a pacifist matriarchy that flourished before the coming of the warlike and patriarchal Greeks, and his vision was hugely influential in academic circles for at least half a century. It is a vision which has been humorously outlined by Rebecca Bradley on the dust-cover of her book, Goodbye, Mother: The Warriors of Crete: “Once upon a time, on an olive-strewn island in a wine-dark sea, beautiful people lived in peace under the rule of the Great Goddess and her matriarchal avatars. The like of their palaces was not seen again until the advent of shopping-mall architecture in the twentieth century; their artistry flowered like the saffron blossoms collected by their luscious bare-breasted maidens. This was Minoan Crete, stronghold of the Matriarchy and the Great Goddess, flower child of the ancient world — until those nasty patriarchal Mycenaeans and even nastier Dorians came along and crashed the party. Oh yes, and there’s something about a volcano on Santorini, and a few earthquakes as well, but the rot really set in when the men from the mainland took over.”
Perhaps the most prominent high priestess of the Great Goddess was Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994). During the 1950s and 60s Gimbutas developed her so-called “Kurgan Thesis;” basically the idea that the archaeological marker of the arrival in Europe of Indo-European-speakers was to be found in the Bronze Age Kurgan mound burials of the Pontic Steppe, a vast region incorporating most of present-day Ukraine, southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan. Controversially, Gimbutas further claimed that these nomadic Indo-Europeans brought with them a warrior-culture dominated by male sky-gods, which supplanted earlier matriarchal and goddess-worshipping cultures. In this, she echoed ideas already expressed at great length by Robert Graves in his 1948 book The White Goddess. Over the next three decades Gimbutas developed her ideas further in a series of books, articles and lectures delivered at campuses throughout America and Europe, where she was immensely influential amongst the burgeoning women’s movement. Three major works, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974), The Language of the Goddess (1989), and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), presented an overview of her conclusions regarding what she saw as Europe’s primeval matriarchy.
The importance of Gimbutas in the development of the matriarchal myth, and also by extension in the development of modern radical feminism, cannot be overstated. Her archaeological experience and expertise, together with her wide knowledge of linguistics and anthropology, seemed to give academic credibility to the romantic and poetic ramblings of Arthur Evans and Robert Graves. Yet in retrospect it is hard to imagine why anyone with even a modicum of common sense could have been taken in.
There were warning signals everywhere. Right from the beginning, for example, many historians were critical of Evans’ interpretation of Minoan Crete, and a devastating blow was delivered in 1974 when German author Hans Georg Wunderlich published his Wohin der Stier Europa trug? (Where did the Bull carry Europa? published in English in 1975 as The Secret of Crete). Here Wunderlich, a trained geologist, examined the structure of the “palace” of Knossos in Crete in detail and came to the conclusion that the building could never have been a palace for the living. It was, instead, a charnel house, a massive necropolis which doubled as an arena for human sacrifice. For the happy-go-lucky “bull vaulting game”, said Wunderlich, was nothing of the sort: it was a ferocious form of human sacrifice which involved young men and women being gored and trampled to death by a sacred bull. This, said Wunderlich, was the origin of the legend of the Minotaur. Since Wunderlich’s time human sacrifice has been confirmed as an integral part of Cretan religious practice, whilst the supposed “pacifism” which Evans and others had imagined, was exposed as nonsensical.
Emmet Scott, “The Myth of the Primeval Matriarchy”, The Gates of Vienna, 2016-07-13.
August 11, 2019
QotD: Deconstructing “Minoan Crete”
August 2, 2019
QotD: What we mean by “civilization”
Which is when the dime dropped and I realized you guys immediately translated civilization to “as good as we have or better.” Which, of course, made me giggle. Because I’d have liked you to tell a Roman, with their world-bestriding empire that they weren’t civilized. Or, before that a classical Greek.
Understand I am not imagining others before us had the internal combustion engine, or steam, or trains, or … Sure, they might have, but that’s a heck of a coincidence, since those things usually come about by an individual stroke of genius, and even when they do they often aren’t used the way we did (Romans and their mechanical toys.)
To imagine other civilizations of which we’ve forgotten every trace followed exactly the same route we did to the same place we’re at requires believing that inventing steam and the internal combustion engine and harnessing electricity is as natural to humans as dams to beavers.
Now, maybe that’s true. It would certainly make for a very good science fiction story. (Short story, I think. Too much of a punchline thing for a novel.) BUT the odds defy rationality.
I was imagining, you know “builds houses of wood or stone. Domesticated SOME animals. Has villages and cities. Might have trade over long routes. MIGHT have had wheeled vehicles.” (The last, as we know, one can have quite sophisticated civilizations without.)
Look, it’s not your fault. Since the seventies, we’ve been bombarded by crazy BS about superior aliens or superior lost civilizations. (And before that, there was a trickle of it, too, going back I think to the eighteenth century, just couched in different terms.) You’ll get stuff about how the pyramids were built of stones that floated at the sound of a certain note. (A C note, or the equivalent, I bet. “Listen, Mac, you take this stone to the top of the pyramid, I give you a C Note. A hundred Amontheps in your pocket, bucko. Buys a lot of fish and falafel.”)
Part of this, and part of the reason it intensified since the seventies were the “unilateral disarmament people.” You know, those jokers who wanted us to get rid of our own nukes and stand disarmed in front of the USSR, who would then realize we were peaceful, and not attack, and everyone would live in peace and harmony with rainbows and farting unicorns. Yes, it was a stupid and crazy idea since the continued survival of the USSR depended on plunder and conquest. But I’ll remind you our last president still believes that bag of moonshine. All of it, including the unicorn farts.
Sarah Hoyt, “We Are The Superior Civilization”, According to Hoyt, 2017-05-15.
July 27, 2019
Life and Death in Herculaneum (Prof. Wallace-Hadrill)
Cardo Maximus
Published on 20 Jun 2013
June 4, 2019
Missing Isle of Lewis chess piece discovered in Edinburgh
It’s always irritating when you lose a chess piece, but this one’s been missing for a long, long time:
A medieval chess piece that was missing for almost 200 years had been unknowingly kept in a drawer by an Edinburgh family.
They had no idea that the object was one of the long-lost Lewis Chessmen – which could now fetch £1m at auction.
The chessmen were found on the Isle of Lewis in 1831 but the whereabouts of five pieces have remained a mystery.
The Edinburgh family’s grandfather, an antiques dealer, had bought the chess piece for £5 in 1964.
He had no idea of the significance of the 8.8cm piece (3.5in), made from walrus ivory, which he passed down to his family.
They have looked after it for 55 years without realising its importance, before taking it to Sotheby’s auction house in London.
The Lewis Chessmen are among the biggest draws at the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
They are seen as an “important symbol of European civilisation” and have also seeped into popular culture, inspiring everything from children’s show Noggin The Nog to part of the plot in Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone.
Sotheby’s expert Alexander Kader, who examined the piece for the family, said his “jaw dropped” when he realised what they had in their possession.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
May 29, 2019
QotD: Past civilizations
… when anyone says “there was a civilization before us” your head (our head) jumps to airplanes, trains, steel mills, refrigerators, dentistry.
I’m telling you the chances of that are negligible, though I won’t scruple using a more advanced than us past civilization to give my characters a nasty shock when they get to space. I won’t because that’s just cool.
However of things like Ancient Greece or Rome? I almost think the chances against it are worse. And of course civilizations that live and die by coastal sailing would be mostly engulfed in the great melt of the last ice age.
And no, Europe hasn’t been extensively studied. As I said before, Europe is mostly built on Europe. And you can’t dig in a field without finding SOMETHING. If you think everyone runs to the academics or the authorities when something is found, you don’t understand people’s interest in building a house, or sowing a field, as opposed to you know, giving up ownership of their land in all but fact. Frankly I’m amazed so many people do report discoveries.
But the thought of “superior civilizations” got me to thinking of what say the Romans or the Greeks, or those other ancient civilizations if they ever existed, would make of us in the West. We cross the globe by flying through the air. Not just heads of state or priests, no, common people. Hell, our pets fly. Most places have clean, fresh water that someone doesn’t have to carry a mile or so (which has been most of the work of humanity I think, forever.) Forget aqueducts. We have water that comes from our faucets whenever we want it. Cold AND hot. We have temperature control inside our houses, allowing us ignore the weather and keep warm in winter and cold in summer. We can magically cure diseases that killed millions of people by injecting this magical elixir into the sick person’s veins. Our old live a long time in relative comfort. We get our teeth fixed and replaced, so most people can chew to the end of their lives. Most of us can read, and most of us have access to untold wisdom of the sort their hermetic orders would kill for.
We are the superior civilization. We are the enlightened ones, the shining and resplendent inhabitants of the wonderful future.
And we worry about what gender we feel like being that day, who is allowed to pee where, whether someone used the wrong word to refer to someone else who might be offended, whether our use of fossil fuels offends Gaia, whether slapping a kid on the behind is a criminal offense, whether we are doing all we could do with our lives.
In other words, we’re neurotic, unsatisfied, and a bit crazy like most of people who were born and raised rich throughout most of human history.
Which is why if we really were doomed to repeating a cycle, and if the civilizations before us were the same but more advanced, the message of the pyramids would be “Don’t use so much toilet paper. Just wash one square and reuse it.”
Perhaps we should be grateful they are truly profoundly unlikely to ever have existed or tried to send us any message.
Sarah Hoyt, “We Are The Superior Civilization”, According to Hoyt, 2017-05-15.
May 16, 2019
Bronze Age collapse
archeo atlas
Published on 3 Jan 2014The Influence of Climatic Change on the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Dark Ages
When is an archaeological artifact merely “recyclable”?
In Sweden, they’ve got such a rich history of archaeological artifacts that they’re no longer preserving, categorizing, cleaning, displaying, or storing new artifacts that come to light … they’re dumping them in the recycling bin. Literally:
An amulet ring from the Iron Age, an example of the sort of newly found artifact that Swedish archaeologists are recycling. (Photo from Svenska Dagbladet, caption from Never Yet Melted)
In what looks like a new paroxysm of self-hatred and cultural suicide, Sweden has begun destroying artefacts from its ancient Viking history.
One might think that the country, over-run by hordes of Middle Eastern “asylum seekers”, would wish to preserve as much of its national identity and cultural heritage as it could. Even at the most mercenary level, Viking sites, museums, artefacts and souvenirs have been huge tourism money-earners. The television series Vikings shows Western man’s fascination with the hairy old sea-rovers. The immensely popular books and films of The Lord of the Rings drew in large part upon Norse mythology as well as Christianity, showing its deep resonances even for modern man.
Now an angry archaeologist has blown the whistle on the fact that the curators of Stockholm’s Länsmuseum have been ordering the systematic destruction of newly-found artefacts from the Iron Age and the Viking period with the weak excuse that the material would be too burdensome to process. This is despite the fact that preservation of the past is what being a museum curator is meant to be all about.
Coins, arrow-heads, ritual amulets, weapons, jewellery and weights that were kept in the past are now dumped into metal-recycling bins upon discovery instead of being cared for and displayed. Museum excavators are instructed to recycle unearthed iron elements into scrap metal on the weak pretext that “it would take too many resources to process, identify and store them”. The findings are usually quickly disposed of in order to make way for construction machines and building workers.
Ironically yet appropriately, the boom in excavation which has led to the doomed artefacts being unearthed has largely been to provide housing for the asylum seekers flooding into the country, and who are now pushing the crime-rate back towards, well, towards Viking levels.
This process was kept secret until a declaration by Johan Runer, the museum’s archaeologist. He had tried to raise the alarm before but only met indifference from the liberal Swedish media. According to Runer, this has been going on since at least 2016. He claims an entire ancient settlement was secretly levelled to allow roadworks.
If this story seems familiar, it’s because it’s not a new phenomenon … I blogged a similar story back in 2017.
May 15, 2019
Jade of the Maya
Lindybeige
Published on 10 Apr 2019Guatemala – another video from my trip there, this time looking at the jade in the local museum, plus obsidian, idols, and 1970s fashion tips.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige
Camera: Jeremy Lawrence (https://www.futtfuttfutt.com)Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.
website: http://www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
April 28, 2019
The Battle of Lützen – 1632 – The 30 Years War (in Swedish, with English sub-titles)
Gripen
Published on 3 Dec 2015One of the bloodiest battles of the Thirty Years War. Sweden vs. the Holy Roman Empire. A mass grave has been found, with the victims from the battle. Are they Swedish/Finnish soldiers or German mercenaries?
(This Swedish documentary has English subtitles).
From the comments:
Blah b
2 years ago
This documentary is often painful to watch, the way inexperienced modern people with no sense of empathy project their values onto those times. They weren’t “defenseless men standing still”. Armies had learned the hard way that massed musket fire won battles. If everybody is looking for cover and looking out for themselves, you can never operate such rigid units.So the individual soldier was harshly drilled to indeed stand still even with cannonballs tearing through his unit, or another unit standing 30-80 meters away. Because if individuals acted as individuals, the battle would be lost and the army would be destroyed.
But when that machine operated, it would win battles. The system invented by Maurice of the Netherlands ensured that if you were attacking a group of musketeers, every 20-25 seconds, they could deliver a crushing volley that can kill or injure 10-25% of a another unit, that means they only needed 2-3 salvos to achieve a local victory. Untrained units would literally never touch a musketeer, as his unit would’ve routed the attackers before they got within touching range.
Also there were no standing armies, there was no national identity as such. Mercenaries were totally acceptable. Mercenaries could become very loyal and reliable if paid on time [and] consistently, and would easily crush national armies that usually lacked the routine of professional soldiers. Loyalty and your identity was constructed differently. It would’ve been perfectly normal for me to utterly hate and maybe kill my neighbours if they were of a different religion. Otherwise, a Swedish protestant from far away was an ally with the right ideas. I wouldn’t have been able to understand him and everything would be alien about him, but I’d consider him a friend, and Catholics from the next village where I’d lived all my life would be enemies.
Unless the king comes around and says the Catholics are friends. Because the king is appointed by God who runs the world on a day to day [basis], and you obey without question. If the king says it’s so, that means God himself agrees and says it’s so, and you don’t question God. Loyalty until death is about the least you owed your king in those days.
People who can’t understand how such things worked historically, really should not be making documentaries…
January 23, 2019
A new beginning for the Middle East: The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia
The British Museum
Published on 18 Jul 2014The Cyrus Cylinder is one of the most famous objects to have survived from the ancient world. It was inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform on the orders of Persian King Cyrus the Great (559-530 BC) after he captured Babylon in 539 BC.
The cylinder is often referred to as the first bill of human rights as it appears to encourage freedom of worship throughout the Persian Empire and to allow deported people to return to their homelands. It was found in Babylon in modern Iraq in 1879 during a British Museum excavation.
January 1, 2019
The Greatest Ancient Empire you have never heard of … The Mitanni
Epimetheus
Published on 4 Oct 2018The Greatest Ancient Empire you have never heard of … The Mitanni
The Mitanni capital city of Washukanni has never been identified although there are a few locations “mounds” where the city is most likely located. It will be one of the most exciting and illuminating discoveries when this ancient capital is unearthed — (I hope it happens in my lifetime) — if there are tablets there (maybe even a library!) that could very much rewrite the history of the middle east and civilization. I have been fascinated by the Mitanni for quite some time and I am very happy to share this video with you all 😊 I hope you enjoy, and it stirs your curiosity!
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https://www.patreon.com/Epimetheus1776Mitanni, Hurrians, Mitanni empire, Egyptian empire, Hittite empire, Babylon, bronze age, bronze age collapse, bronze age empires, bronze age great kings, Mesopotamia, ancient middle east, ancient Mesopotamia, Mesopotamia documentary, Mitanni documentary, greatest ancient empire, most powerful ancient empire, Babylonian empire, bronze age diplomacy, Nefertiti, tushratta, Akhenaten, Suppiluliuma, Assyria, Assyrian empire, Washukanni, Kurtiwaza, Shattiwaza, Shaushtatar, chariots, chariot warfare, the Mitanni, Babylonian empire, ancient near east, Hurrian migration, documentary Mitanni, lost empires, ancient egypt, bronze age chariots, ancient civilization, lost civilization, lost empire, discovered civilization, most powerful ancient empire
December 15, 2018
Who were the Sea People? Bronze Age Collapse
Epimetheus
Published on 24 Nov 2018Operation Odysseus Playlist link- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
My Patreon-https://youtu.be/wUmPluCC27Q
Who were the Sea People? and the Bronze Age Collapse
December 9, 2018
MYSTERIOUS ‘Sea People’ And Their Unknown Origins
Beyond Science
Published on 28 Aug 2017Who were these mysterious sea people?
November 29, 2018
El Zotz – Lost City of the Bats
Lindybeige
Published on 28 Nov 2018The Maya built many cities that even now are reappearing from the jungles of Central America. The first video of many in a series.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige
I was not paid to make this video, but INGUAT paid for my flights, accommodation, and activities.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
▼ Follow me…
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.
website: http://www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
November 20, 2018
QotD: Why do we drink?
Alcoholic beverages, like agriculture, were invented independently many different times, likely on every continent save Antarctica. Over the millennia nearly every plant with some sugar or starch has been pressed into service for fermentation: agave and apples, birch tree sap and bananas, cocoa and cassavas, corn and cacti, molle berries, rice, sweet potatoes, peach palms, pineapples, pumpkins, persimmons, and wild grapes. As if to prove that the desire for alcohol knows no bounds, the nomads of Central Asia make up for the lack of fruit and grain on their steppes by fermenting horse milk. The result, koumiss, is a tangy drink with the alcohol content of a weak beer.
Alcohol may afford psychic pleasures and spiritual insight, but that’s not enough to explain its universality in the ancient world. People drank the stuff for the same reason primates ate fermented fruit: because it was good for them. Yeasts produce ethanol as a form of chemical warfare — it’s toxic to other microbes that compete with them for sugar inside a fruit. That antimicrobial effect benefits the drinker. It explains why beer, wine, and other fermented beverages were, at least until the rise of modern sanitation, often healthier to drink than water.
What’s more, in fermenting sugar, yeasts make more than ethanol. They produce all kinds of nutrients, including such B vitamins as folic acid, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin. Those nutrients would have been more present in ancient brews than in our modern filtered and pasteurized varieties. In the ancient Near East at least, beer was a sort of enriched liquid bread, providing calories, hydration, and essential vitamins.
[…]
Indirectly, we may have the nutritional benefits of beer to thank for the invention of writing, and some of the world’s earliest cities — for the dawn of history, in other words. Adelheid Otto, an archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich who co-directs excavations at Tall Bazi, thinks the nutrients that fermenting added to early grain made Mesopotamian civilization viable, providing basic vitamins missing from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet. “They had bread and barley porridge, plus maybe some meat at feasts. Nutrition was very bad,” she says. “But as soon as you have beer, you have everything you need to develop really well. I’m convinced this is why the first high culture arose in the Near East.”
Andrew Curry, “Our 9,000-Year Love Affair With Booze”, National Geographic, 2017-02.
