Almost all our knowledge of the Bronze Age of La Mancha comes from recent excavations . . . It is clear that La Mancha is a region where many of the most important questions in European Bronze Age studies can be addressed.13
The La Mancha Bronze Age settlements date from about 2250 to 1500 BC – which fits in with the pattern of Minoan trading – with the Rio Tinto mines being worked for several hundred years, the miners later moving upriver and starting to farm on the Meseta, dotting the area with heavily fortified sites. As Dr Martin explains, the settlers in La Mancha coped with climatic uncertainties by practising relatively intensive agriculture.
The spectrographic analysis of bronzes from La Mancha sites show that they almost all consist of unalloyed copper of 96.9 per cent purity, with an arsenic content averaging 1.81 per cent. There is hardly any tin bronze. This arsenic content would have caused serious lung problems for the smelters.
Key to this argument is that ivory – which must have been sourced from Africa or India – has been found in excavation sites in the south of La Mancha. About 400 grams (14 ounces) of the material has emerged, mostly from buttons and bracelets: both raw, semi-worked up and as finished jewellery. It appears that ivory was worked up in La Mancha workshops – evidence of regular long-distance commerce. The well-defended, massively constructed settlements were also associated with new levels of intensive agriculture, of a more modern, Mediterranean character.
The early Iberian settlements with either mining operations or the structures to defend them were at Los Millares – copper; Almizaraque – silver; El Barranquete – gold; El Tarajal – both gold and silver; and Las Pillas – gold (see map). At that stage the work was primitive, the copper pure.
One particular mining culture, the ‘Los Millares’ people, caught my eye, thanks to the research of W. Sheppard Baird. Their name is derived from a major copper mining settlement of perhaps 1,000 people, on a site that had been discovered in the 1890s as the authorities were building a railway at Almería. Little is known about the Millares culture, but it seems to have spread across the southeast of Spain and it possibly reached as far west as the red-limbed Rio Tinto. As W. Sheppard Baird states:
. . . When they [the Minoans] surveyed the river basins of Almería in south eastern Spain they found everything they were looking for. For several centuries they probably would have been satisfied to sift the alluvial sediments for metals and established settlements in the river basin areas. Eventually they would have moved up to the inland sources of the alluvial metals to form permanent mining settlements, and that’s exactly what they did. By 3200 BC many of the towns of the Aegean Minoan colony (Los Millares culture) had been founded.14
The intriguing thing from my point of view was that a wholly new influence penetrated the Iberian culture around 1800 BC. The
Millares people suddenly took a giant leap forward in copper metallurgy. They began smelting arsenical copper: I would infer that the Millares learned so quickly at this early stage as a direct result of early contact with the Minoans.
Then, in turn, a mysterious new people, the El Argar, quite suddenly took over from the Millares. Excitingly, the El Argar influence began early, around 1800 BC, but it then developed: in 1500 BC the El Argar people entered their so-called Phase B, at which point a detectable Aegean presence infiltrated the culture. New introductions included huge pithoi – vases like the ones I’d first seen on Crete and Thera.
Crucially, from my perspective, the El Argar were people who had substantial links to the outside world. I am convinced that the El Argar were in truth the Minoans and that the vast expanse of southern and central Spain and its rich mining territory became one of their many colonies.
There are many clues to a history of Minoan colonisation at Los Millares – and to a later Mycenaean influence. For instance, its cemeteries have tholos (beehive) tombs identical to the Minoan beehive tombs that are found on both southern Crete and on the central Mesara plain. The remains of pottery, ivory and ostrich eggshells also hint at a culture that had substantial contact – at the very least – with our Mediterranean traders.
Ivory, bronze and ostrich eggs – suddenly, they all connected in my mind. Lisbon is possibly my favourite port in the world and I had been there many times. Had I not also heard tell of similar treasures, found in the ancient fortress of Saño Pedro at the estuary of the Tagus?
Entering the Tagus estuary is an experience no sailor ever forgets – it’s a truly magnificent natural harbour. The Tagus itself is a majestic river that knows no national boundaries. It strikes right through the heart of both Spain and Portugal, passing the magnificent, solitary splendour of Toledo, south of Madrid.
Vila Nova de Saño Pedro was a great Bronze Age fortress; built, archaeologists think, in a concentric style. It sat overlooking the Tagus estuary and was first excavated by the anthropologists H.N. Savory and Colonel do Paço.
To my delight, I discovered that there was a match, of a kind: Saño Pedro is completely contemporary with Los Millares. In his research papers, Savory draws parallels with the metalworking culture of the Los Millares late phase: 2430 BC. Saño Pedro’s tombs did in fact contain exotic goods like ivory, alabaster and ostrich eggs – the classic signs of Minoan trading and influence. My memory had served me well. There was also evidence of a religious cult involving a female goddess – a deciding factor in Minoan religion.
Savory memorably describes the way in which c.2500 BC Vila Nova de Saño Pedro II had its own concentric fortifications. He makes analogies with Chalandria on Syros, another Minoan base in the Mediterranean, and his instinct seems to have been that the Early Bronze Age colonisation here came from the Mediterranean.
I was hatching a plan. At some point I was due to give a lecture at Salamanca University. Marcella and I should take advantage of the trip and investigate the Tagus and its path through Spain.
The Guadiana River (see map) would take us to Évora. Just west of there, close to the copper mines at Saño Domingos, was my target, the Bronze Age astronomical site of Almendres Cromlech. A sister site of Stonehenge in England, Almendres was fascinating to me partly because it is not exactly unique. The devil, as ever, is in the detail.
Almendres is interesting in the context of this quest primarily because of one thing: it was built at the precise latitude where the moon’s maximum meridian altitude is the same as the latitude of the site – 38 degrees 33 minutes north. This means that when the moon is at its highest, its orb is directly above the observer on the ground.
The only other latitudes where this happens are at Stonehenge and Callanish, on the west coast of the isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.
Scholars already agree that the stones of Almendres, like those of Stonehenge, mark where the sun rises and sets at the equinox. The first excavator to investigate Almendres was the archaeologist Luis Siret. The evidence he saw convinced him that the new ‘El Argar’ settlers in Iberia were civilised seagoing traders who sought ores and kept the natives in the dark when it came to the huge value of the substances they traded. In his early reports Siret also mentions that the settlers traded in and manufactured oriental painted vases in red, black and green pigments. As we know, the Minoans’ absolute speciality was colourful pottery. Black and green are colours derived from copper. The settlers also brought objects such as alabaster and marble cups, as well as Egyptian-type flasks, amber from the Baltic and jet from Britain.
So: we have strong evidence of a new culture arriving in Iberia, a people who were interested in the raw resources of gold, tin, copper and silver, and there is a gathering weight of evidence that these people were the Minoans.
This was the crucial link. The Minoans needed to read the stars: without that, they couldn’t navigate. Astronomical stone circles could have been used to determine latitude and longitude and the dates of the equinoxes and to predict the positions of the sun and the moon and their eclipses way into the future. What if the Minoans who’d worked or supervised the copper mines at Saño Domingos and perhaps
elsewhere in Spain had also – somehow – been involved with the astronomical stone circles at Almendres?
For now, though, there were plans to make. We flew to Madrid, with the aim of heading through Ávila and Zamora to Lisbon. En route we would try to find evidence of Minoan visits following the course of the Tagus, either in museums or at archaeological sites. I rang one of the professors at Salamanca for advice and was advised to take a look at Almendres. I was also given an intriguing fact: that the La Mancha Bronze Age had ended abruptly. The well-defended, massively constructed settlements came to a relatively sharp end about 1500 BC – at the time when Minoan Crete was also abruptly crushed by the Theran tsunami.
The Morra, Motilla and Castillejo settlements of La Mancha were suddenly abandoned – virtually all of the radiocarbon dated sites withered within a century of one another. I would later find out that Bronze Age mining ceased equally suddenly in Britain, Ireland and America at around the same time:1500 BC.
CHAPTER 21
SPAIN AND LA TAUROMAQUIA
But we still had some time to spare in Madrid. I asked the professor: what should we do?
‘Oh, go to the Prado. It’s unmissable.’
Unmissable it certainly was. The Museo del Prado has one of Europe’s most extraordinary collections of art. The collection once belonged to the Spanish royal family. We went through gallery after gallery of the most exquisite work – from The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch to Rubens’ The Three Graces – very robustly fat, as he chose to show them. We thought what we’d seen could scarcely be bettered until, with sore feet and a desperate need for something wet to keep the energy up, we stopped for a cup of tea.
Marcella had a teacake and a fresh injection of blood sugar. While I sat, still stupefied by the weight of my aching feet and the sheer enormity of the Spanish kings’ echoing palace, she began diligently researching what remained to be seen.
‘I’m not convinced I can take any more culture,’ I grumbled.
Marcella firmly piloted me towards a quiet but large room, where a number of silent students, charcoal in hand, were absorbed in sketching. The gallery had a hushed and reverent atmosphere and I soon understood why. The room houses an electrifying series of sketches by the romantic Spanish genius Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes.
Goya’s 19th-century series of etchings, ‘La Tauromaquia’, is a mesmerising sequence of images that document the bullfighting stunts and techniques used in his time. In his pictures, matadors stand on tables, or even chairs. Dogs are used to bait the bull. You see ‘encierros’, where the bulls are let loose to run through the town. In one picture the matador is standing firm . . . while in another, he is pole-vaulting over the bull.
Sketch No. 90 is called: The Agility and Audacity of Juanito Apiñni in [the ring] at Madrid. The bold Apiñni is in the act of somersaulting backwards between the bull’s horns, with the aid of a pole. The matador leaps over the bull’s back, to land triumphantly behind its rear legs (see second colour plate section).
What was so familiar about this astonishing spectacle? It suddenly hit me where I’d seen it before – at the Minoan palace of Knossos. The fact that the image itself originally came from a miraculously long-lived fresco created sometime between the 17th and 15th centuries BC only made this all the more astonishing.
Was this a coincidence?
I thought not. Long ago in Medina, on the night before the Feast of the Assumption, I’d witnessed the extraordinary spectator sport of bull-leaping. Lately, I’d seen evidence of it again in Crete, southern India and Kerala. What I’d been witnessing – had I stopped to think about it – was a calling card. It had been sitting out the centuries, but it was there, written in the colourful script of the Minoans. This practice, I was sure, was a signature that the Minoans had left for us to read: those same Minoans who had probably first emerged from Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia – possibly the world’s first city and a place that the Minoans had perhaps first built. The evidence from Çatalhöyük shows that its people worshipped the bull; logic tells us that when they then reappeared in Crete the bull became central to their sacred festivals.
I’d found images showing the practice of bull-vaulting wherever I’d since speculated the Minoans had been; starting at Crete’s palace of Knossos and voyaging all over the Near East to the Egyptian Nile Delta, then Syria, across the Aegean and all the way down to the south coast of Kerala in South India. The practice had also survived here in Spain, a popular inheritance that has lasted from the 3rd or early 2nd millennium BC to the present day.
The spreading cult of the bull was also backed up by a growing number of archaeological artefacts. Thanks to the ‘Beyond Babylon’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I’d seen figures leaping the bull in Babylon, the image stamped clearly on a clay seal. In Athens’ National Archaeological Museum is a bronze ring that shows a clean-shaven bull-leaper wearing a Minoan-style loincloth somersaulting on to the bull’s back. His long hair flows in the air. Again, at Kahun in Egypt an image on a wooden box shows the leaper’s epic dance against death. At Çorum in Turkey, a vase from an old Hittite settlement is decorated with thirteen figures gathered around the bull while once again the bull dancer plays out the dangerous game. In Antakya you will find a similar scene in a simple black and white drawing.
A distinct spring had come back into my step; all tiredness forgotten. What was not forgotten was an image that was still alive in my head. It was from the Archaeological Museum on Crete and to me it almost proved everything about my theory. Tiny, but telling: it was a Minoan medallion, about 6 centimetres (2.5 inches) wide, that I’d noticed in a cabinet towards the end of the rows of exhibits. It depicts a bull being led on to a ship.
‘I’ve got gallery knees,’ I announced, as we emerged into the wide avenues and blasting heat of Madrid. ‘And museum legs.’ But I wouldn’t have missed the drawings I’d just seen for the world.
CHAPTER 22
BLAZING THE TRAIL TO DOVER
Southern England: the 20th century AD. It was 1992 and workmen in Dover, England’s busy passenger port, were digging an underpass to link with that wonder of modern transport technology, the Channel Tunnel.
As they dug down below what had been the debris of the medieval town – and then went even deeper, past the Roman layer – the men struck the perfectly preserved remains of a prehistoric ship. Downing tools, they stared in amazement. They knew, because of the depth at which they were working, that they were looking at something extraordinary. Gleaming in the narrow beams of their tungsten lights were the gnarled, blackened remains of a wooden ship.
Archaeologists mounted a rescue operation to record and salvage the timbers, cutting the boat into thirty-two pieces after carefully photographing and recording each piece. They were concerned that the ship, which had been preserved in the wet clay for thousands of years, would disintegrate into a puff of smoke once it reached dry air. So as they lifted the thirty-two sections by crane they placed them in a special container filled with preservative chemicals, itemising them meticulously so that they could be sure to replace the pieces according to the order in which they had been found.
This amazing rescue took just twenty-two days, a great tribute to all involved. Today the consensus is that the Dover Boat deserved all of its reverential treatment. The oaks that had made it had been cut down around 1500 BC. This boat was sailing long before Tutankhamun ruled in Egypt and at a time when ancient Britons were still using Stonehenge. Yet it is not just its great age that makes this ship remarkable. As one of the few pieces of complex technology from the Bronze Age that has survived almost intact, it tells us a great deal about the era; and Britain itself.
The boat is one of the oldest found in the world. What strikes the visitor instantly is the vessel’s brute strength. Her timbers, although black with age, are perfectly preserved, glinting with what looks like a veneer of jet. The planks which form the hull were carved, rather than sawn, from whole tree trunks. It�
�s what’s called a ‘sewn’ boat; thongs bind the planks together, which were caulked with moss and beeswax.
The train from Victoria was running late that day and I could feel the anxiety of the other travellers as they thought about their delayed meetings, or missed connections at the port. Luckily, I didn’t have any such time pressures. Looking at the soft-focus mist that was beginning to descend, I tried to project my thoughts back to the morning of 26 August 55 BC, when Julius Caesar arrived with his Roman invasion fleet. He came, he saw, but he didn’t conquer. Nevertheless, by the 3rd century AD, when Dover’s so-called ‘Painted House’ was built (alternatively known as the brothel), the town was a fully fledged Roman settlement. Even the ancient grass trackway, which became known as Watling Street, was paved over on its way to Canterbury.
So I paid the £2 ticket price for a round-trip bus ride and settled down to see ‘Dubris’, the town the Romans founded on the River Dour to defend their British interests. It was amazing to think how much must still be lying undiscovered underneath the ground, forever locked up by the mass of modern, Georgian or even medieval buildings that have been stuffed on top of Dover’s Roman layer. No one had even known how much of it was here until the 1980s, when the town council dug up a car park and found a Roman fort. Up on the hill, Dover Castle looked down haughtily as I struggled to see the Pharos, or Roman lighthouse, through the gathering mist.
We got to the market square and I ambled off to see the boat itself, wondering what I would find. What I saw was, in some ways, a shock.
I thought back to the light-as-air ships of Thera’s frescoes, greeted by diving swallows swooping around them; the crowds massing to see them as they arrived safe home from a major sea voyage. And then there was the steeplechaser that was the Uluburun. By comparison the British boat is an arthritic old carthorse. The Dover Boat had no rudder, mast or sails – all of the power came from rowers or paddlers. She also looked extremely heavy – more suited to the calm of a meandering river than the open sea. To view the Dover Boat please go to the second colour plate section.
The Lost Empire of Atlantis Page 19