Internet Café/Pool Hall
Last night I went looking for an internet café so I could check e-mail and send the most recent Crete reports, and I’m walking on the street where the hotel is back toward the town center and I hear this very welcome and very lovely little click sound from a place I’m passing, and I look in and there’s a pool table, a real billiards table (no pockets— very special) and five guys playing cards and some other guys (almost all in their 40s and older) watching soccer or playing some kind of Tetris on one of the six computers around the room, and I’m in there like I belong.
And the first thing was I got asked if I wanted to join the card game, and I thought that was a really bad idea, financially.
They set me up with power and the password and don’t charge me, and I check e-mail and download some messages to answer back in the room, and I come back later, launch the reports, answer the messages, etc., get invited to play some English Billiards, all very nice.
Moseying through the Museum
Hit the local Arco Museum and the package express early this AM in Sitia—I’m on the north coast of Crete and as far east and north as I’ll be on the island.
One of these experiences was much better than the other.
The museum was small, but had lots of really good stuff in it, although I could have used more explanations in English.
The more you know about something, the more interesting it is, and here’s a chance to learn more about this great civilization, the Minoans, and there just wasn’t much on the little cards, although there were lots of unique things, like grave goods, to look at and wonder about.
I did learn that the dates I’ve been generally including about the Minoans have been off— I’ve been sharing that they were the predominant group on the island (true) from about 4000 years ago until about 3250 years ago, when the local Greek island volcano blew up pretty good, and the resulting tsunami(s) and fires ended the great classical period of Minoan history (also true).
Ironically, the fires were a real gift to the archaeologists, as they burned (fired) the clay writing tablets, hardening them so we can read them. Without that firing, the tablets would have turned into dust and two whole languages (Linear A and Linear B—written in a kind of farmer plowing pattern—the first line is left-to-right, the second line is right-to-left, and so on.
I have read about Linear A and B since I was in college, and today I got to see some of the little clay tables with the text on them. Very cool.
Well the dates (4000 years ago) were for the start of the great palace-building constructions, but the Minoans go back almost 2,000 years before that, so we’re talking almost 6,000 years here. That’s almost 250 generations.
Farmers to Rulers
This bloviation got longer than I thought it would when I began it, so I’ve moved it down to the bottom of this report.
It’s some sociological/psychological/anthropological wonderings on my part about how people moved from just a bunch of farmers together in a valley to one of the families emerging as the local rulers, and then hauling in all the religious trappings (the gods want me to rule you— they told me so) to support it.
One of the nastiest books I’ve ever read through is The American Heretics Dictionary, taut little aphorisms about the state of the world from an almost anarchistic/leftist worker (rather than law-and-order capitalist) point of view.
They used a lot of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary definitions, so it’s pretty elegantly anti-establishment.
In The American Heretics Dictionary, one of the definitions of religion is that it’s an institution that keeps the poor from eating the rich.
Anyway, the current state of rambling about this topic is down at the end of this report.
My Next Gig Is an Appearance on Martha Stewart, or
Susan Strikes Again!
I have some more cloth loot to bring home— stuff I have purchased since I shipped the gym bag home and I have gotten some boxes at the local market to pack the stuff into. (The local post office doesn’t have boxes for sale.)
These are mostly table linens and surprisingly, are for myself— this must be some kind of late male-menopause nesting urge— since the only table I have is in a storage unit. . . .
But I saw this stuff and it appealed to me so I snagged it:
I attacked the plastic bags full of table runners and a table cloth and all the wool and goat hair I’ve been scrounging and got it into a couple of boxes and contained it with a roll of wide scotch tape and it’s all now packed and wrapped and labeled but the local post office is closed until Monday so I saw a DHL-type delivery outfit, took the boxes in, weighed them (about 15 lbs for the pair of them) and found out it would cost €200 to ship it home.
Yikes!!!
So I’ll be hitting the post office Monday AM— the gym bag (they said 88 lbs, but I’m not sure I really believe them) cost only about 60% of that to ship.
More Minoans I
Agnes— Open the Museum!
The first place I hit on the road was Hamezi-- I stopped to see the little ethnographic museum there, and after navigating some pretty narrow streets, walked up the steps in the town from the main square.
The museum was locked, but there was a guy a couple of doors down working on replacing a door, and he called to his mom, who lived across the street from the museum, and mom made a couple of phone calls without result, then told me, “Pende, dehka letto” (5, 10 minutes), and headed down the stairs.
Well, about ten minutes later, here she comes, followed by the docent/ owner, who unlocked the place and showed me around.
There was a blacksmith shop display in one room, an olive press in another, and a two-room cottage display with beds and furniture and dishes and about what you’d expect in one of these villages about a hundred or so years ago.
Very sweet.
Hamezi Minoan Site
Outside town was a Minoan villa/fortress, rare, as it’s the only oval one, which may have been dictated by the topography of the site— although I’ve seen lots of others in similar kinds of places, and they aren’t oval at all.
Here’s the view toward the north, looking back at the town where the little museum is and the sea beyond.
I also saw a couple of rare falcons, who nest on a nearby island but who hunt in the valley below the ruin.
Oleander
The guidebooks generally suggest that there’s too much concrete in this part of Crete, and it’s not as pretty just or motoring along (with some big exclusive-looking hotel complexes here and there) but all over the island, including here, are these almost-tunnels of oleander, and often in three shades, not just the two you see here.
And there is oleander all over the place here--- it’s a delight.
More Minoans—II
I went out to a great place called Vasiliki, a very early Minoan site most of the way to where I was going to stay at the end of the day.
There is another really big place near here, Gournia, and I thought if the weather was more moderate I’d stop on the way into town, but it was terrifically hot and so will hit it early in the AM.
But Vasiliki is hardly visited— I knew about Knossos and the other big sites, but didn’t know about this one until I read The Rough Guide to Crete.
It was locked, but I am, as I have stated here more than once, a trained police officer, and I searched around for clues about how I might still be able to get in the site.
There was a rental car out on the road— and this was the end of the trail to the site, and I hadn’t seen the people, so . . . . they had to have gotten in somehow.
And it wasn’t too long afterward with some pretty serious sleuthing involved that I discovered a cleverly camouflaged way to enter the site right next to the locked gate.
You must be Chinese!
And when I went in and climbed up to the top of the little area, here’s a couple sitting in the shade (no dummies here—it’s at least 90, I’d guess) and I went up to them and said, in my best tourism lingua franca
Kali spera Bon jour Guten Tag
(Greek, French, and German for “good day,”)
And the man said, “You must be Chinese!”
Well, that was pretty clever of him, and I told him so, and his name is Geoff, and the lovely woman with him, Hannike, was from Holland, and they live in southern Spain, near where I’ve been on a previous trip, and we visited for a while, and he asked me how I knew to come out to the place.
I told him I’d read about it in The Rough Guide to Crete, and he got this really big smile on his face, and said that he’d written it. And later, when I checked, there was his picture, right there in the back.
So I told him about the reports I’ve been writing, and gave him the web-site information, and he’ll take a look at it.
I told him I’m not interested in a job (they are cutting back anyway—subsequent [every three years] editions of the travel guides will be somewhat smaller, he said) but I would certainly like to be a resource of some kind for him—
I don’t expect to hear from him right away; it’s his birthday, and if a lovely Dutch redhead had flown in to spend a week or so with me for my birthday, I’m not sure I’d even go outside. . . .
But I do hope to hear from him. Even if they just used a photo or two— what a kick that would be!
He said that they get some pretty interesting comments from readers of their books when their trips are over— they also have a really hard time keeping information current, as museums renovate or change hours (the dance I danced at Aghios Triados coming to mind: the guidebook had one time right and the guy I gave the terra-cotta shard to up at Festos had the other time right, but they also each had one wrong).
He said he got a complaint on Amazon’s comment page for their Rough Guide to Spain: (Sounds like Americans, but could also be Germans or Austrians, I guess— there’s really no geographical limits to whiny, self-centered, fatuous twits.
“We went to the Alhambra,” the complaint read, “but the hours you had were wrong, and we had to wait a whole hour for it to open with nothing to do.”
And someone had responded to that post by suggesting if they couldn’t find some interesting way to occupy an hour in Granada, Spain, that maybe they just ought to stay home.
Vasiliki
(I went back out this (Sunday) AM to see what it looked like when it wasn’t 90+ degrees and the sun wasn’t beating down) and here are those images.
You can see from this picture that they need to bring some sheep or goats out here to expose some more of these wonderful walls.
So Lovely, So Careless
And finally, a little social anthropological research.
I was parking the car up the street from the hotel here in Ayios Nikolaos, and walking along the sea-wall looking at the water, and saw these amazing sights:
I mean they look intelligent, but they are both incredibly forgetful and absent-minded, and someone ought to do something.
I studied the second one later, quite deliberately, when she came out of the water, and will report that she put on her shoes first, and then a hat, and then a top. . .
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
This is a subject that I clearly need to get a better grasp of, put my finger on somehow, and perhaps get to the bottom of, sociologically, of course.
I’ll just say if I ever thought I was still in Kansas, this pretty much took care of that notion.
I’ll keep you posted— further reports on the way at the speed of light.
How Do You Get Kings When You Start with Farmers?
So here’s a question I’ve been trying to answer, going back to when I took Anthropology in college, and later when I taught it at Terrace.
One of the great revolutions in human history was the invention of agriculture.
Before ag, we were hunters, fishers, gatherers, which meant we were nomadic, following the seasons in an area, hitting the rip food when it was ripe, then going to the next place.
If you are nomadic, you can’t afford to have much stuff, because you have to carry everything from place to place.
There was a kind of transitionary phase between gathering and farming, and that was herding— and that’s about when we domesticated dogs— some where around 8,000 years ago. And I’m not current of the research, but I’m sure there are lots of connections between herding and farming---
Of course, you can see how herding provides some safety net between gathering (very chancy way to earn a living) and farming (another chancy way to make a living, granted, but a lot less chancy than gathering).
“Say, Jethro—did you notice this year's wheat grows better where we kept the sheep last year? Hmmmmm.”
You can milk the animals and eat the animals and make clothes out of their hair, although then you need some kind of lowest-possible-level technology— a back-loom, for example for making the cloth, rather than some big, complicated (heavy) standard loom.
But in a gathering society, everyone is pretty even— there may be some better gatherers than others, or better hunters than others, but it’s pretty egalitarian.
And everyone has the same job: all the women gather (about 80+% of the food, by the way) and all the men hunt.
One change you get when you settle down and start to farm is that you get to have lots more stuff, because you are in the same place all the time.
And lots more children— now the children aren’t a burden, scaring away the game animals, or having to be tended when you are out getting dinner; you can just send them out to weed or keep the crows out of the wheat.
And you start to have specialization of labor. Since 10 gathering families can usually feed about 10 gathering families, the economy is pretty stagnant.
But 9 farming families can feed 10 families, so pretty soon you get some specialists— metal working, for example, would emerge pretty early as it requires tools and training, so now you have one guy making the plows and shovels and planting dibbles and rakes. . . .
And then pretty soon you have a harness maker— making all the reins and harness equipment so you can use animal power to plow with.
And then a carpenter of sorts, who knows how to make things from wood, so he makes all the plows and tool handles and works with the harness maker at first, probably, to make yokes . . . . you get the idea.
But then, and this is the interesting part for me, and I’m not sure we really know any of this anyway, there were two other (originally may have only been one. . . .) specialists that emerged--- one was priests and the other was the rulers.
So you have little farming villages all over these hills and in these valleys oven now, here on Crete, that historically were about a day’s journey on foot apart (just think about what that means in terms of selecting marriage partners—have to be outside your village, generally, but not so far away that you couldn’t know them. This, obviously, is the environment that produced arranged marriages).
But I’ve been in these little isolated villages, and you can drive to them now and they go to the local big towns once a week to shop, or the loudspeaker trucks roll through. . . but even now—even with telephones and TV and trucks and bus service-- these places are pretty remote--
I stopped in one place here the first day I had the car and was asking about a place to stay, and was told that maybe, in Pergama (near the olive oil factory) there might be places to stay.
This was a young woman who worked in a taverna where the tour busses stopped for lunch, and she said, “Gee—I don’t know about Pergama—I mean, it’s at least a half-hour a way,” saying it like it was a really long way and she’d hardly ever been there.
But I don’t know how one family starts to amass the power in a little farming village and eventually becomes the ruling dynasty and has the force to order palaces and big courtyards and all that to be built.
Except there’s a short cut that could well be the standard pattern.
Nomads can always steal from farmers— as in The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven— and nomads are probably better fighters and tougher, too— they live on the road all the time.
And nomads often have group leaders, where farmers usually do not— and when the nomads take over a valley full of farms and kill or enslave the farmers, someone who has been in charge of the nomad band would probably want to keep right on being in charge.
So this could be the standard pattern— it’s what the Hebrews did.
What their accounts tell us is that after forty years of wondering in the desert after the Egyptian enslavement (there’s nothing in the Egyptians’ records about any of that, by the way, and the Egyptians wrote everything down) they got to the land of milk and honey and killed all the farmers who’d built the farms and were already there.
As I suggest, I could be the standard pattern. (I’ll e-mail all this to Geoff, the Rough Guide guy, as Cretan pre-history is his specialty, and what got him out here in the first place, and that led to the guide books. . . .
I’ll be reading a lot about this when I get home— thinking about this farmer to god-king sequence has piqued my interest pretty well.
No comments:
Post a Comment