Built by giants time out of mind ago: Mykenai
Trip Start
Jun 14, 2008
1
12
26
Trip End
Jul 01, 2008
Where I stayed
Olympia, Peloponnese, Greece
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Before I go on about what we saw, some explanation of terms I've been using such as "classical period," "archaic period" etc., courtesy of this website
http://www.greeklandscapes.com/travel/history.html :
Stone Age (circa 400,000 - 3000 BCE)
Paleolithic (circa 400,000 - 13,000 BP
Mesolithic (circa 10,000 - 7000 BCE
Neolithic (circa 7000 - 3000 BCE)
Bronze Age (circa 3300 - 1150 BCE)
Cycladic (circa 3300 - 2000 BCE)
Minoan (circa 2600 - 1200 BCE)
Helladic (circa 2800 - 1600 BCE)
Mycenaean or Late Helladic (circa 1600 - 1100 BCE)
Dark Ages (circa 1100 - 700 BCE)
Archaic (circa 700 - 480 BCE)
Classical (480 - 323 BCE)
Hellenistic (323 - 30 BCE)
Roman (146 BCE - 330 CE)
Byzantine (330 - 1453 CE)
More info on the Wiki here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece
"Prehistoric" literally means before literacy, something that was gained in ancient
Greece, sometime during the Minoan era, then lost in the dark ages, and regained when Archaic Greeks adopted a Phoenician alphabet, the root of Greek writing, both ancient and modern, that we know now.
The citadel of Mykenai is perched on top of a hill with a commanding view of the fertile land below; one gets the impression that was the idea. It was clearly built not only to defend - with such features as a well-fortified water supply - but to impress, as the Lion Gate attests. And yet, at some point in the 1200s BCE, the city, though still prosperous, was abandoned.
The evidence suggests that, while the Mykenaians had a king, they worshipped mostly Goddesses.
What struck me the most about the place is the true megalithic construction, megalithic meaning literally, "made of really big stones." I have a theory that there is a lost European/Middle Eastern art of construction using mammoth masonry. You see it in Greece; the feeling among classical writers was that these old citadels were built by giants, as they couldn't conceive how normal-sized humans could do the work. (The title of this post is an approximate or perhaps exact quote from near the beginning of The King Must Die by Mary Renault.) You also see it in Egypt, where pyramid-building suffered a huge decline subsequent to the building of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
So how do you explain backwards steps in technology? Dark ages, sure - but why, if there is a way to build with huge stones that was lost, haven't we, with our abilities to improve technology, re-discovered it?
I guess it comes down to a matter of priorities. Technology will march forward in the direction for which there is a societal impetus. We don't care whether our buildings last forever any more. We are happy to be impermanent, with our fast-changing styles and planned obsolescence. Hardly anything is, to borrow the idiom, etched in stone any more; most of our information is no longer even recorded on any material medium, but takes the ultimately ephemeral form of a stream of electrons. We don't build out of megaliths any more because we don't really want to.
