A few thoughts on the Griffin Warrior Tomb, Pylos. A modest proposal.

There comes a time for saying some things, even if we're saying things we can't really claim to be qualified to say things about. What follows is a series of ramblings and jumbled thoughts. None of this is based on any insider information, because I have none. These are just some ideas that won't stop bothering me, so for the first time in a while I have to get them out there. I'll welcome your comments in the section below, if that's still a thing. So here I go.

The "Griffin Warrior" of NYT and Smithsonian and many other news outlets fame - and of Cincinnati excavation fame - is no Mycenaean. As many of you may have suspected, this guy is a Minoan, cut down in his prime, smack in the middle of the Cretan conquest of the Greek Mainland. We'll say he died of fatigue. The important thing here is that he's bringing Minoan material culture to Pylos and its region BEFORE the Mycenaean conquest of Crete, at a time when the Minoans still appear to have been in cultural if not military ascendency [note, I'm going to have to revise this, see post-script, below]. The fact that he got out and started his Princedom (RIP) here in Pylos just in time is hugely fortuitous, for us and for the rest of history. Despite his low literacy (assumed), he still managed to bring enough images and symbols along on his globetrotting adventure to make it quite clear that he knew his way around his world. The recently-unveiled agate sealstone showing some warrior (him) slaughtering his tartan-clad foes cannot be anything other than a clear indication of how, in an earlier outing, he slashed his way through the Scottish Highlands [to be clear, this is a joke]. But that's a novel for another time. The important thing here is that the guy depicted defeating his adversaries (whoever any of them is supposed to be) is very much in line with what we expect of an aristocratic Minoan, and at this stage at least, nothing like what we'd expect to see from a Mycenaean. This guy could have jumped straight off the seal of the Ruler of Chania, or out of the Prince of the Lillies fresco (less ideal) or, most tellingly, straight out of the scenes depicted on the frescoes at Akrotiri (you can find those for yourself, it's an exhausting task). I know, I know, the Ruler/Master of Chania impression could be post-conquest, but in my view the thing was probably fired in the destruction and thence added to the post-conquest rubble, rather than made, fired, and deposited in the immediate post-conquest phase.

The excavators have already suggested the people of the Griffin Warrior's world were doing a lot of Minoan-style things (dress and buildings are mentioned in the media), but at this stage I'm pretty sure there's still a general consensus as to the "Mycenaean" identity of the individual. I'd like to imagine this is purely for geographic reasons - he's buried on the mainland, and he is therefore Mycenaean merely as a shorthand and not for any other reason. I won't hazard any guesses as to what languages he spoke, nor do I think it's productive at this stage to think about what he might have called himself. But it is abundantly clear from his material culture set that he's hanging out with Minoans, he has access to a huge quantity of stuff made by Minoans (or, to be more objective, stuff made in workshops that normally supply the Minoan elite with certain of their luxury goods), and he has beautiful hair, of which he may have been quite proud (as implied by his combs, his mirror, and of course the exquisitely-carved sealstone). I am not aware of any direct parallels to the depiction on the sealstone, even from the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, which should be seen as roughly contemporaneous or even slightly earlier. The cushion seal from Shaft Grave IV (I think) may come closest, but the technical rendering isn't in the same league, maybe not even the same planet (cough cough). I am not aware of any other "Mycenean" parallels that are particularly compelling from this period - the warrior signet ring from Shaft Grave IV is strikingly dissimilar, and the "Quiet" Vapheio Cup, which does bear strong similarities, is by nearly every standard a Minoan import to the Mycenaean mainland (even if the "Violent" cup is a local product, as has been argued by Ellen Davis in a manner perfectly appropriate to the date of publication).

It's probably not a particularly surprising hypothesis (from a non-expert), given that these Mycenaeans and Minoans were pretty similar genetically (and here, also from a statistically miniscule sampling). I don't know my genetic analysis well enough to determine whether my theory that some Minoans migrating north might have contributed to the amalgamation of a new elite Mycenaean class that then mixed with the rest of the population and turned on its southern neighbors, but the idea makes a kind of sense to me. Certainly, these genetic studies do away with the old and nonsensical idea that the Myceaneans came raging out of the mountains into Greece and then conquered the Aegean and imposed a new bloodline on the world. But the possibility that a few such Northerners came to visit around the time the Griffin Warrior was also bashing heads around Pylos might help to explain the peculiarities (perceived) of the emergent Mycenaean genome.

Anyway, this is something I've been thinking about ever since the amazingly-awesome story first hit the headlines, and I have no more supporting evidence than I did initially. But some of the pieces seem to fit. I also start to feel as if there are some interesting tie-ins to the peculiarly Pylian (?) Mycenaean palace and structures (much later) to go with the semi-Minoan origins of the Griffin Warrior. Since we're being a bit loose with our data here, an anachronistic proposal is hereby proffered: the Griffin Warrior is nothing less than a younger brother of King Minos (let's call this guy proto-Theseus), banished from his homeland due to a good Medieval-style inheritance system. The Griffin Warrior takes his trusty band of comrades to make his way in the world, and upon arriving in Pylos realizes that this place is amazing. Having carefully conquered some of the region for his band, he kicks the bucket. But not before planting some seeds of resentment against his brother and the Minoan Civilization. That resentment would build in his descendants, even as somewhat friendly relations were maintained with the Minoan metropoleis (yes, I said that). Eventually, the technological and economic scales tilted in favor of the Mainlanders, who orchestrated a bloody conquest of Minoan Crete, placing their own hero (we'll say this is the Griffin Warrior's grandson) on the newly-installed throne at Knossos, flanked as he should be by those heraldic griffins.

Update March 8: I've now read Stocker and Davis 2017 on the "Combat Agate" (in Hesperia 86, pp. 583-605) very carefully, and I don't think it pushes me away from any of my initial impressions (in a couple cases they've anticipated some of what I've written above). So that's a good sign. They've also indicated that a forthcoming publication outlines the evidence for the LHII chronology of the burial, which I'm very interested to see. It seems we may be a couple generations after Grave Circle A at Mycenae, but there are all sorts of complexities with that evidence, so I'm reserving judgement.

My Postscript:

Following the LHII chronology proposed (and eventually to be published), I'm going to radically revise everything we know about the Trojan War and its later accounts. Knossos IS Troy, the Griffin Warrior IS Aeneas. See, what happened was the Mycenaeans in LHIB or LHII early besieged Crete, and after 10 years (or a long time, anyway), the other palaces all fell (this is what Homer's Greeks were doing all throughout the Epic Cycle, laying waste to cities around Troy and elsewhere) and, eventually, Knossos capitulated - a Horse easily defeats a Bull in some circumstances. Our Griffin Warrior friend gathered up his belongings and some of his family, escaping burning Troy (=Knossos) just in time. He headed for mainland Greece, where he has some distant cousins or uncles or something, and when he arrived at Sandy Pylos he decided to settle in, along with a trusty band of Minoans. These people were eventually absorbed into the broader Mycenaean network (out of expediency or maybe through a series of badly-arranged marriages and treaties), hence the huge Linear B archive from the palace's later phases. Back at Knossos, c. 1450 BC, some of the cleverer aristocrats (not in the royal line) showed their Mycenaean conquerors how to keep records of the things brought into the palace using a really cool script, and the Mycenaeans enlisted the assistance of Proto-Homer for the creation of a new syllabic script more in line with their value set, Linear B. They used this in the place of Linear A for a time, then sent copies of the new syllabary back to mainland Greece, where other tax-men started using the same conventions.

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June 22, 2013

Even though Google will be stealing as much of our personal information as possible from this next posting, I still thought it might be interesting for some of the anonymous people of the internet to have a look at what we’re up to these days. So here’s some of what has happened since last I wrote:

We had a baby.

We’ve been trained somewhat in the parenting arts.

We’ve met lots of people and traveled all over the place.

We’ve sold and bought a car.

We’ve packed up everything we owned and sent it off to the other side of the planet – the long way around, apparently.

We’ve moved to New Zealand.

It’s not a comprehensive list, but those are the bullet points. The first item is easily the most exciting one, our little guy is amazing and cute and hilarious and of course the best looking and most intelligent boy anyone has ever had. I won’t go on and on, he gets embarrassed easily.

I can’t go into all of this one: we pretty much knew everything about parenting before our son was born, but constant practice has refined our techniques such that we’re now the idiots giving people unsolicited advice about how to care for their children. Feels pretty good knowing it all.

We have been to a few different places over the past year, some of them closer to some places than to other places. For example, our trip to Seattle took us closer to California than did our trip to New York Citeh. Our trip to Mexico had us closer to El Salvador than did our trip to Wisconsin. Our visit to Portugal had us closer to Italy than did our trip to Cincinnati. You get the picture. Now that we’re in New Zealand, I guess that puts us closer to Australia than we were when we visited Brasil that one time. So it all makes a kind of sense.

Selling a car to a private party in the US is relatively simple. All you have to do is find a complete stranger who is extremely trustworthy and honest, and who is willing to pay the asking price on your vehicle. Then all you have to do is fill out all the paperwork, collect legitimate payment, deposit said payment in your account, and hand over all the documents and the keys. Easy as pie. I never made pie, though, that was really Grant’s thing. So if you can avoid it, don’t sell your car. It might be easier to wrap it around a tree and let the insurance company sort it out. Just more dangerous and (maybe) more stupid. Buying a car in another country is even easier than selling one in the US. All you have to do is give someone a whole huge stack of cash and they’ll take care of the rest. Assuming you’re buying it from a legitimate authorized dealer. Otherwise, I’m not sure how to do it. In New Zealand, all cars are valued at about 150% of what they would get in the US. So, for example, a 2004 Corolla with relatively low kilometers will set you back about $10,700 NZ. That’s outrageous. But, for some inexplicable reason, you can score a 2012 Daihatsu Sirion for about the same price, with almost no kms and a valid Toyota-backed factory warranty. I’d go for the latter, even if it does mean driving a cherry red tiny car for the next hundred years or so. Incidentally, our new car is almost exactly the same age as our son.

We didn’t actually pack up most of our things, someone else did that for us. Somehow the container that they loaded for us is going by train to NYC from Chicago, then it’s being loaded onto a ship and sent around the world. I can’t figure out if it’s going through the Suez or the Panama or the Straits or where or how. But in mid-/late-August we’ll have a container in port. I suppose that Customs will want to dig through the whole thing, because it has been packed so neatly, and then eventually it will be delivered to us wherever we’re living at that time. More paperwork awaits.

I don’t think we would have moved, if we had to pack ourselves. Even packing our four suitcases and all the necessities for the 12 week containerless period was almost too much for us. But that brings me to United Airlines. There are good things and bad things. The good things include their willingness to somehow allow us more checked items by two than they should have, and to charge us literally nothing for our checked baggage. We were expecting to pay $100 or $200, that was the way we packed. So that was nice. Not so good? What the complete morons in Houston did to my guitar case in the 3 minutes it was in their care. I cannot express the horror I felt at picking up my never-before-used-outside-the-house guitar case to see the corners scuffed and damaged as they now are. When we have a bit more time, I’ll send the pictures to our friends at United and hope the oafish imbeciles handling luggage at that particular gate get their proper chastisement. But I’ll assume nothing happens. Because that’s to be expected when you pass your valuables over to stupid people against your will. So the United people have good and bad qualities, like all of us, I suppose.

So that’s about it. It has rained/sleeted pretty much ever since we arrived, but that’s what we were expecting, so nobody’s terribly disappointed. The advantage of arriving in winter is that we get to see just where the sun might actually hit houses while we’re checking around to the various neighborhoods around campus. We also get a very clear sense of just how warm the houses are (not at all, thus far). Rent is so high that a person with slightly more impetuousity (that’s a new word for you) might buy a house for roughly the same amount as he’s looking at spending on a rental. But these people aren’t that kind of a person, so they’ll be renting, I suppose.

That’s all I have to say about all of that. What do you think of that, Google? Any good data you can sell to the highest bidder? What sorts of targeted ads will you pop into my email now? I’ll try to up some pix too, to keep even the visual learners entertained.