Ancient Tales, Ancient World, The Iliad, The Odyssey

Ancient World Now:Minoan Crete

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #35.

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Some tech difficulties after an “upgrade” made us miss last week! With this temporary fix we are back on track, and as promised, here is Minoan Crete.

Upon her discovery, this lovely lady was nicknamed “La Parisienne”, and she is a major icon of Minoan civilization.

Who were these amazingly artistic people? The jury is still out. Their civilization flourished between 2200 BC and 1450 BC, long before the Golden Age of Athens. In fact, that’s 1,000-2,000 years before Pericles and his fabulously enduring monument, the Parthenon. Consider the events and world changes that have happened within the past 2,000 years! The Knossos palace finds of Sir Arthur Evans in 1899 AD shook the archaeological world! This ancient Bronze Age civilization existed only in the dim distant memory of legends. They are referenced in Homer and the stories of the ancient heroes, but until Evans’ excavations between 1899 AD and 1935 AD, the magnitude of their power and prestige was unknown. This is the land of King Minos and the Labyrinth of Daedalus. Of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur. This is the land of the bull dancers and the snake goddesses. And their story is still unclear!

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford houses the Sir Arthur Evans finds. I was there in 2006 and remarked to myself how antiquated it looked for such an important collection. Lo & behold, the museum was renovated in 2009. I will definitely visit in the future.

Enjoy the podcast! Next week, the Mycenaeans. Bring it on, Clytemnestra!

Ancient World

Ancient World Now:The Bronze Age

Click here for direct link to audio podcast Episode #34.

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The Princess of Vix must’ve been an amazing lady! When she was buried around
480 BCE, they laid her to rest in a chariot and put in her grave an enormous wine-mixing vessel called a krater. The bronze krater was made in Laconia (area around Sparta), or on the island of Rhodes, measures 5 feet 4 inches tall, and weighs 450 lbs. To get an idea how big that is, take a look at the photo of its excavation!

This single archaeological find points to the significance of imported wine to the wealthy Celtic warrior class and to Bronze Age trade between the Mediterranean and Europe. Ah, if we could only catch a glimpse of this maiden. I am quite sure she’d outshine the Mona Lisa. And she would crush her completely in any physical contest! I’d give anything to have her gorgeous gold torque (480 grams & 96% pure gold)!

Margaret Oliphant’s exceedingly useful Atlas of the Ancient World, gives two-page general, but erudite, breakdowns of time periods and civilizations. I reach for it to remind myself which came first, the Sumerians or the Assyrians. Or to answer questions like: when did those crazy Roman emperors rule? Today I read from Oliphant’s section on the Bronze Age.

In addition, I read a section on Bronze Age Trade from The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece by Robert Morkot. These Penguin atlases remain my favorite. If you are following along with my podcasts, this is a good book to get. You can pick it up used from Amazon for a couple of dollars, believe it or not.

Always on the lookout for references to the ancient world in our everyday lives, I found this 70’s punk band called
The Vix Krater! Their logo was this funky sketch of our lady’s famous vessel.

Next week: Crete & the Minoan civilization (Bronze Age continued!)

Ancient World

Ancient World Now:Neolithic Greece, Anatolia, & the Levant

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #33.

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Check out this site in our area of interest—the Franchthi Cave in the Peloponnese, which was continuously occupied from about 20,000 BCE (Paleolithic) to about 3,000 BCE (late Neolithic). Who wouldn’t live in a cave if you had the chance??? Apparently some people! In contrast to Franchthi’s loner types, some Anatolian folk decided to shack up en masse and created the settlement at Catal Hoyuk in modern day Turkey. The official website is not as user-friendly as it should be, but you can check out the cool videos of the archaeologists on the ground showing how it is all done.

Thank the gods I’ve gotten us through the Stone Age! Next week we turn our attention to The Bronze Age!

Ancient Tales, The Writing Life

Ancient World Now:Freya Stark

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #32.

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Freya Stark went boldly where no woman (& sometimes no man) had gone before. She is one of the most fascinating women of the 20th century. Born in 1893, she followed in T.E. Lawrence’s and Gertrude Bell’s footsteps across the Middle East. Like her predecessors, she learned Arabic and Persian, and lived the life of a nomad whenever she was able. She often traveled where no woman had gone before, and in some cases could claim to be the first Western explorer. She dressed as was the native custom in the lands she walked, and crossed deserts and mountains by camel. She wrote touchingly perceptive descriptions of what she saw, as with the scene in today’s podcast of young Turkish boys going off to war in the Black Sea town of Giresun. She knew her classics, knew her geography, and knew her “place” (on the road!). She wrote dozens of books and lived to be 100 years old, dying in our own lifetimes, in 1993.
Today I read from her book Rome on the Euphrates.

Check out Moe’s Books in Berkeley for a top-notch selection  of Classical literature.

Thank you, Freya, for being bold and brave and living your life to the fullest!

Next week we continue with prehistoric times, focusing on the Neolithic period. When will it end???

Ancient World, The Writing Life

Ancient World Now:Homo sapiens in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic Eras

Click here for direct link to audio podcast #31.

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Yabba Dabba Do! Here are Bianca & Jacob on the Flintstone ride at The Canyon Inn. Click here for the Flintstones Theme Song! It cracked me up (no pun intended!) that I was working on this podcast on Stone Age humans and I happened to be sitting right next to this Flintstone mobile! Talk about “Ancient World Now”! I always loved that their legs powered their vehicles!

And the great guys in the kitchen made me an amazing Bleu-Cheese Garden Burger and the Canyon Inn’s famous fries. I was in heaven! Thanks, guys!

This is the book I picked up in Berkeley yesterday: Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. I’ve learned so much from it already! Incredibly rich in obscure details on the products being traded around the Bronze Age Mediterranean and Aegean.

Sorry, Fred, we will have to leave your crude Stone Age world behind soon!

Ancient World

Ancient World Now:Australopithicene to Homo sapiens neanderthalensis

Click here for direct link to audio podcast Episode #30.

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In 2008, researchers unveiled the first look at a DNA-based reconstruction of Neanderthal woman. And last year, National Geographic reported that DNA evidence shows that Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens (us!) interbred! Egads! What’s more, most modern humans have a little Neanderthal DNA in them. Check out the National Geographic article.

And download today’s podcast which looks at those oh-so-lovely early hominids.

The Writing Life

Ancient World Now:Change is Good

Hello Friends,  

Last week, my editor at Scholastic told me that my book will not be reprinted and will only be available as a download. I had been looking forward to making a few changes to a new edition.
I felt like a friend had died and was sad all day. Later, I began to see it as the natural unfolding of this new technology. Cuneiform on clay tablets, papyrus, vellum & parchment, movable type….

Thanks to my friend Austin, I saw my first iPad a couple of weeks ago: I am astounded at the possibilities. And I am one of the biggest bibliophiles around! So celebrate this new era with me and check out my new Scholastic e-book. Let’s just see where this takes us! It’s all good.

Thanks for staying with me!

Gwen

Ancient World

Ancient World Now:From Earth’s Beginning to Early Hominids

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #29.

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Yes. I’ve gone right back to the beginning. In my quest to understand the origins of democracy from ancient Athens and the spread of Hellenism after Alexander the Great, I had to go right back to Neolithic times. And to understand Neolithic times, I had to understand Paleolithic times, and on and on, until finally, I was back at the beginning of life on Earth itself. That’s what I call a top-notch three-day weekend! So hunker down and let’s take a look at those oh, so early days.

Thanks to the efforts of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, we have these mostly-standardized chronological divisions:

The 3 Pre-Cambrian eons:
Hadean Eon
Archean Eon (Eo era, Paleo era, Meso era, & Neo era)
Proterozoic Eon (Paleo era, Meso era, & Neo era)

The 1 Cambrian (multi-celled plants & animals) eon:
Paleozoic era
Mesozoic era (Triassic period, Jurassic period, & Cretaceous period)
Cenozoic era-current era, divided thus:
Paleogene period (Paleocene epoch, Eocene epoch, & Oligocene epoch)
Neogene period (Miocene epoch & Pliocene epoch)
Quaternary period (Pleistocene epoch & Holocene epoch YOU ARE HERE!)

And look at all those Greek affixes! My students would have a field day! And the very first eon is named after the Greek underworld, Hades! I did not include the dates, as they do not concern me much. I mean, really, who can comprehend 4.6 billion years?

This week’s podcast will walk you through the Pre-Cambrian eons and give you a brief overview of the Phanerozoic eon in order to prepare you for next week’s look at Stone Age humankind. Enjoy!

Ancient Religions, Ancient Tales

Ancient World Now:Death & the Underworld in Ancient Greece Redux

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #28.

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Redux: brought back or restored; from the Latin “reducere”, meaning to “bring back”. This episode is our final installment of the five-part series on Odysseus in the Underworld. Tech difficulties required a “re-broadcast”. So—enjoy! And please make time for a little Gilbert Murray in your life. You will not regret it. I am waiting for one of his books, The Five Stages of Greek Religion, to arrive in the post. Can’t wait!

Next week begins a series on the periods of Greek history.

The Rise of the Greek Epic, by Oxford’s famous classicist Gilbert Murray, was first published in 1907. It is one of the smoothest reads I have ever encountered and Murray’s erudition is tempered with the charm of the everyday. He is genuine. I wish I could have known him. This Australian-born Oxford scholar once taught Greek at the University of Glasgow. He refused a knighthood in 1912, and was a friend to one of my all-time favorite rebels, George Bernard Shaw. Murray’s daughter, Rosalind, was a writer and married Arnold Toynbee, the famous historian. Ah, the good old days, when the mind was more important than the toys you had….

On the right is a photo of Gilbert Murray taking a break from reading, by Alfred Eisenstaedt (whose birthday is the same as mine: December 6).

From The Rise of the Greek Epic:

“Among the pre-Greek populations the most prevailing and important worship was that of the dead….But the men of the Migrations had left their father’s graves behind them….At times like these of the Migrations it was best not to bury your dead, unless indeed you could be sure of defending their graves….(the enemy) can dig up some of your fallen comrades from their graves….There is hardly anything in Greek antiquity which is so surrounded with intense feeling as this matter of the mutilation of the dead….There was one perfect way of saving your dead from all outrage. You could burn them into ultimate dust.”

This, then, is why you have burial practices and funereal burning existing side by side in ancient Greece. This also puts into perspective the horror with which both Greeks and Trojans looked upon Achilles’s treatment of Hector’s dead body. And, gives me more reason to hold Odysseus in contempt for leaving Elpenor’s body unburied on Circe’s island! This is an outrage!

Today’s episode is all about death and the underworld in ancient Greece. Fascinating and useful info for all you ancient world groupies out there, as death abounds in Homeric epic and Athenian tragedy. Enjoy! And check out Gilbert Murray!

Stories From the Ancient World