Today this sprawling metropolis is home to nearly 3 million people, a dizzying array of sights and sounds, and many of Japan’s most significant historical monuments. Osaka Castle played an important tole in the reunification of the country in the early decades of the 17^th century, and some of the earliest centres of Buddhism are to be found too.

Outside of the official city limits, the surrounding areas have way more people still. The metropolitan zone currently boasting nearly 20 million. More and more every day. You can find everything Japanese here, and from the rest of the world too. Eating and drinking along the busy major streets, a unique blend of the archaic and the hyper modern. Rapidly industrialised following the Meiji Restoration in the late 1800s, Osaka had been Japans major port and gateway to the outer world for going on two thousand years before. If you look in the right places still today, in the street ways, in the canals, and above all in the rising hills outside of town, you can still see the pre modern age that came before.

Just to the south of the modern day metropolis, some half an hour or so on the train is Sakai City. It’s not really a true city anymore, having been swallowed up by the wider metropolitan area to create one sprawling singular urban zone, but here amidst sleepy parkland, colossal green hills rise. Surrounded by deep ponds and moats where wildlife abounds, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were natural features. You can’t see it these days, but fifteen hundred years ago, the coastline would almost certainly have been visible, shores once having lapped not far from here, much further inland. Here, on a low plateau overlooking Osaka Bay, long before Buddhism first arrived in Japan, the kings and queens of old were laid to rest before history began. Originally survived by more than 100 massive funerary monuments. This is the Mozu Cluster, where 44 tombs survive today, the rest swallowed up by housing development since the Second World War.

The monuments that survive here come in all shapes and sizes. Some are simple circular or square shapes - known as empun and hofun. The largest and most famous however are the keyhole shaped tumuli known as Zempo koefun, seen today as the most advanced and detailed of this tomb building style. Their three main features being massive size, their encirclement by several water filled moats and their encirclement by many secondary smaller Kofun, also containing deceased individuals.

Back in the 1800s The Imperial Household Agency ruled three of the most massive tombs here to be those of emperors, and 18 others to be ancillary mounds connected to imperial mausoleums, thus prohibiting excavations at any of them. By volume, at 500 metres across and 300 metres wide, the most massive of all, the Daisen Kofun may well be the largest tomb in the entire world. Just ten kilometres away in Fujidera, another outlying city of Osaka, known as the Furuichi Cluster, yet another group of 12 massive keyhole kofuns survive with 200 metre length mounds and more. At 425 metres long and nearly 36 metres high, the largest here, the Ojin-tenno-ryo Kofun is thought to be the second largest in the country.

In 2019 all of these tombs together in the sprawling wider Osaka cityscape, at Mozu and Furuichi, unique not just for their immense size but the unique keyhole shape of their design, association with ancient individuals, and significance in the development of early Japanese history, were inscribed as Japans latest UNESCO World Heritage site. Still not popularly known, but joining the ranks of the other most massive tombs in the world at Giza, Xian, and elsewhere. In sheer scale they mostly dwarf the pyramids of Egypt in fact. As well as their peers at the great Mexican, Peruvian and Mississippian mounds of America.

Stretching for more than 100,000 square metres in total, if we include its three massive moats, the entire Daisen Kofun is an astonishing 460,000 square metres in mass, or 47 hectares. Enclosed by water, now sanctuaries for birds and fish, it rises an impressive 35 metres above the surrounding plain, back in its prime being clearly visible to passing seafarers in Osaka Bay.

Completely overgrown now by an entire forest, only truly visible as a tomb from the tori gate at its entrance, it has become a prominent landscape feature in itself. A viewing platform on the ground does not even begin to do it justice, the nearby museum does provide great amounts of information, though nothing of what is inside, for the tomb, as well as the surrounding ones have never been excavated.

A number of its contemporaries have been dug though, and the finds from these ones, which do reside in Sakai City Museum today as well as many others in the surrounding region such at Kashihara, Ichisuka, and the National Museum in Tokyo, have given archaeologists significant insights into the Japanese prehistory, revealing much information from 1945 onwards and in particular, for the Kofun era, since the 1960s. Revealing incredible grave goods and knowledge about their world.

Estimates on the efforts involved to build such a tomb vary wildly, but just as an example one calculation by influential archaeologist Saitō Tadashi, has 2000 people working over a 20 year period during the mid Fifth Century, others estimate 5000 workers labouring for more than year. Allegedly labouring away for the 16^th emperor of Japan, Nintoku, popularly remembered for his kindness and great achievements.

But what was life really like for the inhabitants of that age during the time of the very largest Kofun ever built, where only shreds of often contradictory written information exist.

Can we really envision Nintoku’s Japan, or whoever it was who inspired the association with an emperor?

At Goshikiyama near Kobe a Kofun has been painstakingly reconstructed and fully restored, allowing a unique glimpse into the Japan of 1500 years ago. In their prime, just like this one, the Mozu tombs would have been entirely deforested. Much more like pyramids than they appear today, though covered by row upon row of clay haniwa statues depicting all manner of sights from their world as well as the supernatural. Monsters and mythical beings alongside the mundane, arguably a little like the terracotta soldiers of china, soldiers there to protect the ruler in death. A kind of hearth guard perhaps who might accompany him to the next world. Some are mounted with saddles and bridles, clad in quilted costumes or slat armour. With single edged iron swords, lances, sometimes recurved bows and battle axes. Others are more complex, depicting houses and building as well as mundane animals and items. Overwhelmingly, what we see inside the tombs is the courtly life of the elite. Figures of power whose memory would eventually morph into the imperial house.

Like martial cultures all over the world the elites of the Kofun Era engaged in falconry and hunting. They feasted and listened to music made on stringed instruments. Perhaps like in other pagan heroic cultures like Scandinavia they sang of deeds undertaken by heroes and mighty ancestors.

Though occasionally more unusual things are found, like multiple burials, or some which seem to have stockpiled enough weapons to kit out a small army, the Nonaka Kofun having as many as 143 swords, 16 daggers and close to a thousand arrow heads within.

Such massive constructions as at Mozu and Furuichi don’t happen in a vacuum. Already tens of thousands may have been built by their time. Round, square, scallop shaped, and finally keyhole with a square front and round back. Certainly the individual interred here at Daisenryo had an immense amount of power, likely stemming form control over vast rice paddies and an elaborate system of subordinates, and probably as hinted at by the shaman queen Himiko mentioned in Chinese sources, some kind of religious authority. A pope, a Field marshal, a king all rolled into one, though these terms must be approximations at best, for this was a wildly different era to us today. Like the pagans of Scandinavia to Buddhisms Christianity.

Though we can only get glimpses of the interiors of the largest kofun today, at other Kofun all across Japan common assemblages are found. Iron tools like hoes and spade tips, ornaments, jewellery, glass beads, golden shoes and other elaborate dress ware and a very hard highly fired pottery called Sue Ware, grey with a blue cast, with many regional distinctions, sometimes fired to bring out a natural glaze from the silicon content of the clay. but only being possible with the extreme heat allowed by new furnaces of the Kofun Era. These were all elite items. The individuals they interred clearly at the very pinnacle of the sociopolitical order. Kofun also tend to reveal items heavily associated with a martial culture. Iron weapons like swords and spears, gilded bronze horse tacks, sash buckles, helmets, full cuirasses of armour not looking wildly different to the later samurai age.

What rests inside an emperors tomb we can only wonder. Though they may well be excavated by future generations. Perhaps using cutting edge new non invasive techniques we can only dream of.

The keyhole shape of the tombs themselves have sometimes been suggested to symbolise the connection to the afterlife and power of the deceased to create a gateway to this other world. Like Egyptian pyramids perhaps, aiding the deceased on their journey to the afterlife.

And just like in ancient Egypt as well as is later Japanese history like the feudal age and time of the samurai, concentrations of power were immensely unequal from very early on. Struggles for power between elite groups seems to have long been a clear and striking feature at the dawn of Japanese history.

As we have seen, the Mozu and Furuichi clusters are in an area that has long been the centre of settlement and power in Japan. Standing near the eastern edge of the Seto Inland Sea as well as in close proximity too other key waterways, the importance of sea born trade and communication for the elites here is clear, as well as heavy concentrations of raw resources like iron ore, salt and clay and good land for food cultivation.

Though much has been lost, hints do survive of the sort of society that flourished at this time. Seeming to emanate out from this region where the local chief men would be remembered as all powerful emperors. Known in later times as Yamato. The land from where everything else stemmed. The first kingdom of Japan.

In the Kanto Plain north of Tokyo, some 500 kilometres to the east of Osaka, nine large keyhole tombs stand amidst farmland, as well as hundreds of peripheral mounds. Dating to between the 5th and 7th centuries AD, this substantial group of Kofun survives partly due to its location outside of a large urban environment, and uniquely, due to the imperial Housing Agency missing it from its associations with vaunted emperors, since the 1960s it has seen several investigations by archaeologists.

Here at the Sakitama Kofun cluster, some of the best evidence for the expansion of the early Yamato state can be seen. For in one of the kofun, a near exact replica of Nintoku’s Kofun but one quarter of the size, besides the body of the lord buried here, an inscribed iron sword with gold inlay was of particular note. Bearing a highly unusual and unique inscription that could be read. For it was in an early medieval form of Chinese, the first writing system to be used by the Japanese.

Housed today in the Saitama Prefectural Museum, the Inariyama Sword was quickly declared a national treasure of Japan. Securely dated to either 471 or 551 AD it was made for an individual named ‘Wowake’, who names his ancestors, claiming descent from Obiko, recorded in the Nihon Shoki as a son of the emperor Kogen.

Another similar weapon, the Eta Funayama Sword, held at the Tokyo National Museum today reads the same as the Inariyama one as ‘ruling heaven and earth’ and Okimi, invoking the Mandate of Heaven and Great King of Yamato. Both together are seen by many archaeologists as links to the first archaeologically verifiable emperor Yūryaku - A Great King of Yamato.

The evidence then, suggests an aristocratic class at the upper echelons of a social hierarchy. Militaristic rulers likely responsible for the welfare of their people by undertaking shamanistic style rituals on their behalf. According to the later written sources as well as the archaeology, each clan, many of which are named, was ruled a patriarch, individuals who performed sacred ceremonies and rituals to the kami of the clan, a facet of Shinto religion that still survives today, but was even more different before the arrival of Buddhism. They did this to ensure the continuation and welfare of their state and people. As time went on it seems more areas were absorbed into the Yamato, gradually suppressing the independence of non subject elites, acquiring their agricultural lands and resources for their own ruler.

Not wildly different perhaps to Maya rulers and even those of early Europe. Originally kings and chiefs in their own right, clan members were aristocrats, awarded kabane, titles denoting political power and rank which ultimately replaced family names. Some of the most useful clans, also having royal blood from the lines of the emperors, were kept around as useful administrators. Developing a burgeoning state based on Chinese models of rule and even utilising the Chinese writing system. Though only a handful of inscriptions survive due to the perishable nature of writing materials, we of course have the histories of a few centuries later, recording contemporary events as well as those of the past.

According to the Nohin Shoji, and the Kojiki, powerful clans serving the imperial Yamato court were at one time or another the Koze, the Satsuragi, the Heguri, and most importantly the Soga who provided the chief minster of the government. As the state expanded, The Kibi Clan ruled Izumo Province, and perhaps in order to keep other clans such as the Soga in check, the Otomo and Mononobe were in charge of the military as well as secondary subsidiary ministers to the Soga. The Nakatomi and Inbe clans on the other hand undertook rituals and religious affairs on behalf of the Yamato. Perhaps themselves being played off against one another so one didn’t become too powerful. Yamato Great Kings seeming to be able to bestow titles at will to this upper class of elites who handled affairs for them. In turn, underneath this elite network of clan rulers, provincial leaders were called kuni no miyatsuko, themselves propped up by cadres of loyal warriors and a vast underclass of peasants.

Though our knowledge is largely based on much later histories from the already Sinified Buddhist Era of the 7^th Century, fragments from archaeology do also shed light into this formative era, critical to Japans eventual emergence as a cohesive fully formed state.

This cohesion, undoubtedly, seems to emanate out from the Kinai and eastern Setouchi regions, where rulers like Nintoku or whoever was buried in the Daisen Kofun petitioned China for royal titles, in turn their subordinates petitioning them for recognition in a vast hierarchical pyramid. In this way the individual buried in the Sakatima cluster, ‘Wawake’, would claim descent from the imperial family and kami, from second sons who never became great kings or even from emperors. Royal blood being all important. As was military might. Far from always resorting to outright violence though, regional chieftains could be bestowed with titles and brought in to the fold through diplomacy. In this way the clans of Kyushu and Honshu were consolidated around the Osaka Plains and Nara Basins. For it is important to remember that in the early days there were many other states too besides the Yamato. Some of which may have made kofun of their own.

At one time popularly thought to have pushed outwards from this Nara Osaka region into the northlands into wild realms of primitive Emishi and Ainu, it is now recognised that the rice growing culture of the Kofun era had already spread far and wide by the time the Yamato being swallowing up other peoples led by clans living a similar lifestyle. Though the Yamato written sources are propagandistic and written hundreds of years after the fact, archaeology can fill in some of the gaps.

Contrary to the prevailing current of influences moving east from the Asian mainland, the first Kofun tombs seem to have originated in the region around Nara and moved west from there, as well as north. One of the oldest so far investigated being Hokenoyama in Sakurai, Nara. believed to have been constructed around 250 AD. A portion of the artefacts excavated from the tumulus are held in the Kashihara Musuem today.

The northern most boundary is often seen to be Tainai near the industrial city of Niigata, where massive tombs have traditionally been associated with the Yamato. Here we have a piece of legend to go on too. The Kojiki describing the legend of Shido Shoguns expedition to the north. In this popular tale Yamato leader Obiko went north to Koshi whereas his son left for the east, eventually meeting at Aizu in present day Fukushima prefecture in southern Tohuku, the northern most point of late 4th century Kofun culture. With keyhole shaped kofuns seen all the way south at Tanegashima Island, this southern point off Kyushu is often seen as the southern-most boundary of the Yamato state.

It is important to remember that Japan at this time had not yet become a single unifying culture. A number of other tribes and groups then living on the islands. In the far north the horse riding Emishi, perhaps still survived by the Ainu of Hokkaido, and referred to as bearded barbarians of the far north. But even in the west supposedly ethnically distinct people lived, perhaps Austronesian in origin, though this is largely speculative.

One of those groups were the Azumi, worshippers of the sea god Watatsumi, a clan of seafaring warriors whose extensive knowledge of the sea allegedly made them a ready made naval force for the Yamato. Exploited as such by Kofun building kings as early as the Third Century, and being utilised for hundreds of years until their eventual banishment before the 7^th century. It may be that the Azumi are remembered incorrectly. Perhaps serving an entirely different kingdom than the Yamato.

—

Though popularly known as the Yamato Period due to the eventual success of that local chieftainship and enshrinement as emperors by the end of the period, initially they were just one polity among many. These other political units surviving all through the period. In particular during the first half of the Kofun Era very likely being in close contention for dominance. The region of Kibi for example to the west, near modern day Okayama, having Japans fourth largest Kofun. Tsukuriyama.

Others like Izumo, Koshi, Chikushi and Hi remained autonomous throughout the period too, probably owing hegemony to Yamato at times and going their own way at others. Likely only during the 6th century do the Yamato fully dominate.

Hints of bitter warfare between clans can be seen in tales like that of the supposedly 4th century Prince Yamato Takeru which hints at the borders of Yamato, being near the later Izumo Province and Kyushu. In the story, which may reflect a half remembered reality, this eastern land disobeyed the so called imperial court, so the prince was dispatched on a military expedition to subdue them, though the precise location is unclear, Kai province is named.

So what can we say about Nintoku himself? That Great King supposedly buried at the Daisenroyo Kofun, whose polity oversaw the creation of one of the largest funerary monuments the world has ever seen. During his reign, supposedly in the 4^th century. Well, not much. But overall, unlike many of the other emperors he was traditionally revered for his selfless and pure reign, popularly throught to have undertaken signifiant flood defences and engineering projects around Osaka, as well as suspending taxes for a time and even abolishing forced labour. His long and peaceful reign ending in death by natural causes at the age of more than a hundred.

The later sources argue that during this time the Katsuragi Clan, supposedly descended from a legendary grandson of the emperor Kogen, acted as the the power behind the throne, intermarrying with the royal family as was the custom to become indispensable.. By the end of the 5^th century however the Katsuragi began to fall out of favour, replaced by the Otomo Clan.

When the emperor Buretsu died with no direct heir in 507, so we’re told, a high ranking official named Otomo no Kanamura suggested Keitai, a distant relative in Koshi province to come to rule in Yamato, suggesting that anyone of royal blood could do the task if a direct successor was not available, and that descendants of Yamato kings could go out to rule in outlying lands as representatives of the main ruler in Yamato. By the 6th century the Otomo subsequently fell out of favour to be replaced by the Mononobe and Soga Clans.

By the time Asuka was made the royal capital in the 6th century, with the establishment of a permanent capital replacing the possible peripatetic rule f before, the Mononobe and Soga Clans vied for dominance at court. By this time a new way of life had come in from Korea, the kingdom of Baekje being especially prominent among the elite.

Buddhism had already reached Japan a century earlier via the Korean mainland, and to some, it was an unwelcome foreign intrusion. Mononobe no Moriya, champion of the old rites, fought fiercely to purge this new stain, finding support under Emperor Bidatsu (572–585), who upheld the ancient ways. But the tide turned with his successor, Emperor Yōmei, whose embrace of Buddhism shifted the spiritual balance of the nation.

What this struggle reveals is something often overlooked in Japan’s early history: the profound influence of its neighbors. Legend and official chronicles alike speak of clans whose origins lay beyond the sea, and in the last century archaeology has increasingly provided confirmation. Many scholars now seeing evidence of a shared cultural sphere spanning both shores of the Tsushima Strait. Not isolated realms but a singular cultural milieu where ideas, technologies, and even people moved freely between the emerging Japanese state and the kingdoms of Korea.

Given that it is even possible that a significant number of those interred within the great kofun tombs were of Korean descent, it becomes clear why the imperial household remains so reluctant to allow anyone to peer inside.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this here’s a documentary I made on ancient Japan-

‘I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

- Percy Shelley, 1818

Egypt has been the muse of poets for five thousand years and more. When Englishman Percy Shelley wrote these famous lines in 1818, though he hadn’t actually been to the land of the Nile, many of his countrymen were starting to do so, as well as adventurous Europeans from all over the burgeoning globe spanning empires created in those years. In that increasingly globalised age, with the blank spots on the map beginning to be filled in, what they found there completely amazed them. For many - totally shattering their long held views of the world.

Amidst the dry deserts and alluvial marshland in the far north easterly corner of Africa, there stood the ruins of an unfathomably old civilisation. Generations of builders, artisans and citizens having created monuments there to defy time, carving their names into stone, and casting their voices into the ages so many aeons in the past. Though the travellers didn’t know then the exact dates, nor could they read the elaborate inscriptions that coated those creations, they marvelled nonetheless. We still do so today.

By the time Jean Francois Champollion successfully used the Rosetta Stone to unlock the hieroglyphic script in 1822, the likes of Ozymandias would be consigned to history. The statue supposed to have inspired the poem - actually of Ramesses II at his Theban funerary complex - can still be seen today. Now, thanks to the work of Champollion and the generations of scholars that came after, the voices of Ancient Egypt can be heard again, for those patient enough to listen. A people who’d stood for millennia, and believed themselves to be eternal. One society obsessed with its own power and longevity to another, separated by aeons, united by the fragility of time.

A traveller today can still see the attempts some of those early modern visitors made at their own immortality, scrawled as they are over the colossal stone temples and palace complexes. From the late 1700s all the way through to today. Their authors gone, only the names remain.

Though a patient master, in the end, the desert and the sands will swallow all. Leaving only the river behind.

One of the most famous names of the ancient world to turn his attention to the Nile did so at the very beginning of what many would consider the discipline of history - Herodotus, the so called ‘Father of History’ who in the Fifth Century BC considered all the knowledge of the Greeks within his domain.

Herodotus once boasted that he knew the origins of all rivers. The only two that eluded him being something else entirely- The Borydsthenes, present day Dniester, whose frosty northern climes had escaped the learning of the Greeks, and the Nile, whose upper reaches existed outside the remit of the world. In his classic sure-headed style Herodotus further commented - ‘nor, I think, does any Greek’, and he was right. Still a mystery in Shelley’s day, the source of the Nile continued to elude until well into the Nineteenth Century.

Though of course Herodotus had his theories.

As far as most early greek Geographers were concerned the earth was envisioned as a vast singular series of landmasses encircled by a gigantic and raging stream known as Oceanus. Existing so far beyond the outer oceans that there was no mixing between the waters.

More than just a water-way, but a spirit with a vital being - Oceanus was the sun of Uranus and Gaia, primordial embodiments of the heaven and the earth. Together considered to be the base elemental forces responsible for the creation of the world. Oceanus was an extremely powerful deity, older and in many ways greater than the Olympians. So much so that Homer considered him second only to Zeus - nothing less than the father of all the rivers, and all the seas. For others of a more fantastical mind, from Oceanus rose all the stars.

As far as Herodotus was concerned, unlike all other rivers, most of the Greeks considered The Nile to be so long, that it flowed directly from Oceanus himself. A surviving map from the 6^th century BC geographer Hecataeus of Miletus still portrays this today. One of the greatest men of learning of his age, in this way were its often strange characteristics explained. Its predictable and completely regular life giving floods for four months of the year for example, which allowed an outrageously prolific agricultural output, seeming to be a land uniquely blessed by the gods. An output which still makes it by far the most populous country in the Arab world today.

Much has changed in the 2500 years since Herodotus’ day, and even the 220 since Shelley. The Nile is no longer a wild river. The Aswan Dam having regulated it completely since its creation in the 1960s. Even all the Nile crocodiles have been pushed south of the dam into the Sudan, creating unusual ecological conditions that we won’t know the full extent of for years. And yet, heading on a boat south of Luxor, stretches still exist where no edifice of the modern world can be seen.

Out here, where the wind sighs over shifting sands; herons take flight over the reeds. The gentle murmuring of cattle grazing on sand banks still call out the same as in ancient times. The river moves slowly, eternal, gilded by the first light of the day, and the occasional tomb or ruin on the banks.

Before the hum of engines, before cities came to the land, the Nile was here. Before empires. Before kings and queens laid their hands on the earth and called it their own. When the world was young. When the gods still walked amongst the living. And it will be here, in some form or other, long after we are gone.

There is a good argument that the Nile is the greatest river on Earth. The Amazon, The Ganges, The Yellow and the Indus all give it a run for its money, but in terms of sheer historical influence, population it has maintained and its length, it arguably beats all competitors. Giver of life & bearer of fate carving a path through the very heart of the ancient world, its waters still carry the weight of centuries. The weight of millennia. Ebbing against modern day skyscrapers, and temple walls alike. Where the greatest Pharaohs stood, their eyes turned to the stars, and the lowliest slaves toiled in the mud.

—

Today, millions still work on the river for their livelihoods. I spy one such enterprising craft on the approach to my balcony window. ‘Jalabiya?’ he yells, offering a selection of traditional long flowing robes which he’ll then throw up onto the boat after we barter for a price. I’ve been pre-warned about this ritual and I can’t help but take part. It’s been done this way for at least a hundred years since the days of Howard Carter and Agatha Christie, perhaps two hundred even for the most intrepid of adventurers. Who am I to not partake?

From the meandering marshes of the Delta to the bustling metropolis of Cairo, where pyramids rise and populations sprawl, the river heads on to Thebes, the beating heart of the ancient Egyptian world. From here things turn upside down, for Upper Egypt is in the south of the modern day nation. With so many incredible sites to be seen on this foundational water way of human civilisation, the river calls us onwards, upstream and ever deeper into the past.

This is a journey through geography and time, through the sands of history and the waters of oblivion. It is a story of gods and men, of pyramids and palaces, of life and of death. The sacred pulse of a thousand forgotten worlds. All bound by the rhythm of this ancient river, once worshipped as a god. This is the entire history of the Nile.

Alexandria. Where the lighthouse and the Great Library once stood. It is the largest settlement in all the Mediterranean. It wasn’t an Egyptian city to begin with, but Greek. Thrown up by Alexander of Macedon during his world conquest in the 4^th century BC. It is just one among many in the Delta. Lush region of life and gateway to the rest of the country.

Here in the late Bronze Age Pharaohs defended against Sea Peoples from the Great Green Sea, and before that Semitic invaders from the north in the form of chariot riding Hyksos warlords who eventually took over the entire north of the country. As all successful invaders would do, founding their own pharaonic dynasty. Innumerable cities are out here in the reeds. Most - forgotten and lost. A few have been excavated.

Further down the river where the many tributaries meet as one is Cairo. One of the great cities in the world. Again, like Alexandria, this place is new, the walled city of the Fatimids having seen a little over a thousand years of existence. With the Giza and Saqqara Plateaus and their mighty pyramids standing on high ground close by however, the place clearly had much older foundations. For in the obscure town of Mit Rahina in the outskirts of Cairo the greatest city in the world once stood. Memphis - the old capital of Lower Egypt, almost entirely inundated by modernity. Cairo is home to a slew of incredible museums too- The NMEC, The National Egyptian Museum and now The Grand Museum as well as many more. But it is further down the Nile where the real journey begins. At Luxor. And its ancient name. Famous throughout the ancient world. Thebes.

—

Famed in the works of most ancient historians, form Homer all the way through to Roman times, Thebes was legendary. The city of a hundred gates, where colossal statues still gaze unblinking, where an army of priests stalked beneath towering columns in the flickering torchlight. Their hymns, their spells, once so necessary, now lost. Here, where the Nile once bore golden barges along its banks, carrying warriors and poets, merchants, and bureaucrats. All alike plying the water road of commerce, power and faith, Thebes was the most important place of all.

There are many religious sites in Egypt of course, Herodotus considered them an especially religious and devout people. Of all those sites however one dwarfs the rest. In both size, splendour and sheer longevity, Karnak, dedicated to the god Amun-Ra remains the most iconic of all. By Herodotus’ day, the priesthood and gods here had uniquely dislodged themselves from the Bronze Age kings who’d been their original patrons. Surviving the fall of the old kingdom pyramid builders, the new kingdom empire builders, and on into the classical world. Unlike any other great power of the Bronze Age world. It’s no surprise that the Greeks of Herodotus’ day were in awe of the place, where priests tended fires that had existed already for at least two thousand years.

Still today, Karnak is absolutely massive, and ridiculously complex. Having evolved and changed many times over the thousands of years of its existence. Huge monoliths and statues greet you on arrival at the end of a vast processional way known as the Avenue Of The Sphinxes which once extended from the Luxor temple on the other side of town. Lining the sides are hundreds of awe-inspiring animal statues. Once you finally get inside the courtyard of the temple, even more statues stand absolutely everywhere you look. It’s all wildly impressive today, let alone when it was built in the Second Millennium BC. Roaming along gigantic corridors, The Hypostyle Hall is utterly jaw dropping to behold. With its gigantic forest of columns coated in colourful hieroglyphs, each one carved in hymns and histories. In its prime, enclosed, lit up by torchlight in the dark, it would have been even more awe-inspiring. With a site like this, no wonder the Egyptians were devout. Karnak, and in particular the Hypostyle Hall, is probably the most splendid surviving example of ancient civilisation not just in Egypt, but anywhere in the world. I can only imagine what the first European travellers thought of the place, their names still scrawled on the walls today.

And Karnak is just the beginning. Ancient Thebes contained a vast number of elaborately made monuments, funerary complexes and temples. Built for the living, and for the dead. Heading along the processional way from Karnak at the other end is Luxor temple, where the god Amun walked among the people during the stunning Opet festival, still humming with the memory of drums and incense, Luxor gives its name to the modern city today, and just by the temple is the Winter Palace. One of the most iconic hotels in Egypt.

In the 1920s this historic hotel had a particularly fascinating set of guests, bearers of incredible things that were temporarily kept here on their way from nearby tombs to the museums of the western world. The food and the drinks are excellent and it’s still an impressive place to stay, though we’re kept out back in a cheap new complex bolted on the back. But even if you stay at the cheap rooms of the Winter Palace today you can still drink in the very same bar Howard Carter announced his discovery to Lord Carnarvon and the other guests. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen at the nearby Valley of The Kings. Most famous pharaoh of them all.

Heading over to the other side of the river the next day things only continue to get more unreal. First we see the Colossi of Memnon, vast statues built to guard the Theban necropolis. The most famous part of which is popularly known as the Valley Of The Kings. Where pharaohs slept in gold, and the desert still cradles the dead. The common people having been laid to rest directly into the sands for time immemorial.

Hidden away in the western desert as it is, in the valley of the kings it’s not difficult to imagine guards standing on the cliff tops ready to shoot anyone bold enough to try and rob a grave. And yet, it’s likely that many of the robbings were inside jobs. Some being disturbed not long after they were interred.

And then we continue on to where King Tut himself was found, one of the few non-looted graves in the site. Here lay not just Tutankhamen - really an obscure figure made famous only by the non-looted nature of his grave - as well as Ramesses II, Seti, Thutmoses, and many more of the biggest names from history. You can even enter many of the tombs, elaborately decorated with vividly colourful images of the grand cosmic journeys undertaken by kings in the afterlife and hieroglyphic writing to explain it all. Though almost all were emptied long ago, most within just a few centuries of their creation.

Arguably the most lavish grave of anyone ever known, the very reason for Tutankhamun’s fame is that his resting place was excavated largely in its original state. Just a boy, yet the wonder of all the world. What the grave of a pharaoh in their prime, a Rameses or an Amenhotep would be like, we can but dream.

Amazingly you can look upon the faces of many of the pharaohs originally buried here in the NMEC Museum in Cairo. Unearthed from their original graves and bundled together at Deir el‑Bahari during political instability in the centuries following the Bronze Age collapse, they were finally rediscovered some three thousand years later in the 1880s, and brought to their current location in an elaborate parade in 2021.

—

Not far away, another lesser known cemetery is to be found too. The Valley of the Queens having just as many tombs, and one, that of Nefertari, arguably being the most beautiful in all Egypt. Here, where important royal children were buried too as well as the many wives of the kings, the images are of personal scenes of the afterlife.

And of course, just as the tombs were private places, never meant to be viewed once sealed, we have the mortuary temples - so called ‘Temples of millions of years’. Where normal Egyptians could come and marvel at the kings turned deities and pray for their well being in return for help on the mortal realm.

Not wildly different to other mounds and graves the world over, just much more elaborately developed and organised, priests, workers and even the general public could approach to pay their respects during festival times in order to keep veneration alive for the venerated king. As well as maintain a healthy sense of awe at their deeds and by extension those of whoever currently sat on the throne.

The colossal walls of the Ramesseum for example, with its statues standing eternal vigil for the great ruler Ramesses II, are lined with triumphal depictions of his victories against the Hittites at Kadesh, the so called first battle in history in 1274 BC. At Medinet Habu, created for his son Ramesses III, later victories against Sea Peoples line the walls, specifically designed for the illiterate masses to understand.

And finally, we have the holy terraces of Hatshepsut’s temple, the most striking of the lot, carved directly into the mountain, where stone and sunlight perfectly embody the queens ambition and power, as well as the tragedy which would follow her end.

One of the greatest pharaohs of them all, Hatshepsut was the daughter Thutmose I and his royal wife Ahmose. Born somewhere around 1500 BC into one of the most prosperous ages in all Egyptian history. With no precedent for a sole female ruler running the country on her own behalf, no one could have predicted the rise to political prowess of Hatshepsut, not that she would popularly be regarded as one of the greatest pharaohs of them all. Marrying her half brother Thutmose II, the throne ultimately passed to his son Thutmose III, born to a secondary wife. Between 1479 and 1458 BC Hatshepsut remained the real power behind the throne, even depicting herself as a male pharaoh. During her reign she launched long distance trade expeditions that are still depicted at her temple today as well as great temple building projects and diplomacy.

There is a darker legacy too. Like would happen later on with the heretic king Akhenaten, after her death, the now sole ruler Thutmose III would attempt to wipe the slate clean, scratching her out of every monument and removing any mention of her in official ing list, as if she’d never reigned at all. Yet her temple survives, and her legacy too, many popular books being dedicated to her reign. Who now remembers her successor?

—

At every archaeological site in Egypt someone will try to sell you something. If you're weak like me you end up buying something each time. But after a while you finally start to make it stop, by learning to politely decline. At The Valley Of The Queens I’m confronted by something else. Not just a salesman but a master stone carver. Like a sight drawn straight from the New Kingdom, in the only surviving house from the village which used to stand in the valley, this man lives on an ancient tomb where he spends his days creating hand made replicas of ancient artefacts. My guide tells me he’s one of the best there is, and seeing his wares, I can’t argue. Soon enough, after the final boss of all bartering experiences I walk out with the most ludicrous purchase I’ve ever made. The Narmer Palette, wildly old sign of Egyptian unification from the early Dynastic period. You can’t buy this online.

Before leaving Luxor if you’re like me you have to visit Aboudi’s bookshop. I walk out with a suitcase full of Egyptology tomes. Incredible place, and finally it is time to go. Boarding a boat for the journey upriver, along golden shores we follow the Nile south. Past towering columns and forgotten tombs. Past mausoleums where kings and queens slumber in darkness, their triumphs, their tragedies forgotten.

On the way up the Nile, just as in ancient times, in the gaps between towns and cities, lush green lands open up on all sides, hammering home just how wildly productive the land here really is. To the extent that many Greek philosophers assumed it was created at the same time as the world. Few facts in antiquity were discussed more than the regularity of the annual and regular floods, seeming to be a gift from the gods. One author, whose works are all entirely lost, surviving just as fragments in the works of others, though considered one of the chief seven wise men of Ancient Greece, Thales of Miletus, conjectured that northerly so called Etesian Winds blew against the direction of the flow of the river, preventing the water from running into the sea and thus going into the land instead. Herodotus discounted this theory but still called Egypt an acquired country, a gift of the river. Later still, Strabo gushed about it, thinking it the best of all rivers, and as I gaze out over its banks at sunset, I can see why.

The boat keeps moving through the night, and by morning we’ve gone 100km to one of the most well preserved temple sites in all Egypt. Built not during the Bronze Age like most, but in the 230s BC by the Greek born Ptolemaic Dynasty. Specifically the pharaoh Ptolemy III Euergetes I, direct ancestor of Cleopatra.

But no Greek deities are venerated here. Hawk eyed and defiant, here the sky god Horus is the main recipient of worship. Still today, tens of thousands of visitors amassing to see his story, beautifully inscribed all over the walls. A story which as often happens in the ancient world, has many strange similarities to later tales.

The physical embodiment of order and kingship, Horus, is conceived from the goddess Isis, whose husband Osiris has just been murdered by Seth, the embodiment of chaos and violence, now in control of the throne. The young Horus is hidden in the marshes of the Delta, where he grows in power and yearns to return to avenge Osiris. Finally Horus returns, defeats Seth in a number of epic battles wherein he loses one eye and is crowned king, restoring order to the world.

With the sun rolling down the broken roof in golden shafts to illuminate this theatre of memory, the interior of the temple is cool and light, stones worn smooth by centuries of prayer. In its prime two thousand two hundred years ago, the sacred bark would have been here in its shrine room, attended by a whole host of priests. Even centuries after the fall of the new kingdom kings, some three thousand years into its existence, the kingdom of Egypt stood strong.

That evening we head past the sandstone quarries of Gebel El-Silsila as well as many inscriptions left by workers and priests. The breath of the gods are etched into the rocks here too with shrines to Sobek, Amun and many more. Finally, we float past rocks cut chapels carved into cliffs at the rivers edge. The last vestiges of influential people from all those millennia ago, though their names are lost, like the pharaohs they served, they too yearned to launch off to the heavens after death, to journey through the cosmos to secure a place in the underworld.

As the sun goes down we get off the boat once more. For this temple is arguably best seen at night. Some 63km south of Edfu, The twin sanctuary of Kom Ombo was also largely built during the Ptolemaic Age, though on much older foundations. Standing on a dune overlooking the river, the walls once dedicated to Sobek and Haroeris glow up, creating an awe inspiring and eerie experience.

Most obviously known as the crocodile god, Sobek, also associated with fertility represents the flood of the river. Haroeris, also known as Horus the Elder was a healing deity. Their veneration here was perfectly balanced. Medical tools suggesting ancient surgical knowledge having been fostered at this healing sanctuary under Haroeris’ all seeing serene gaze.

Though gone today, mummified crocodiles, once revered as living embodiments of the Nile flood, are front and centre at the adjacent Crocodile museum. With the taming of the Nile under the concrete of the Nasser Dam, Wild Sobek has well and truly been defeated of late. Times having changed a great deal since the Old Kingdom when Kom Ombo was first inhabited.

And yet, there are a few wild places left still.

—

Not far south of Kom Ombo the Nile narrows into an impassable series of rapids, broken up by boulders, rocks and increasingly shallow water known as the First Cataract. Strong currents here making passage all but impossible. In ancient times therefore it was often considered the very southern limits of Egypt. And here at the island of Elephantine at the edge of the map, a great city once stood, its ruins still standing today.

Here at Elephantine, where waters rise from unseen places, where the gods keep their silence and the river meets the mysterious land of Nubia to the south - with its ivory, incense and gold - the Nile holds its deepest secrets, wrapped in the myths of Hapi, the river god, and the wisdom of those who once called its banks home.

There has been a city here for at least four thousand years, and there is still one here today. At this jewel of the southern frontier temples to Satet and Anuket, goddesses of grace and flood, bloom in stone. All around at this trading post, garrison town, and religious centre, vast rows of urban structures sprawl.

I manage to escape from my tour group and head off to the very highest point of the site. From here where I can get a good view of the entire site I try and spy what I'm looking for. One particularly unusual feature of a strange and fascinating quality. For here is to be seen one of hose great vestiges of the Old Kingdom of the mid Third Millennium BC. A Pyramid.

And then I see it. It’s large labyrinthine prowess on show in a depressed area over on the other side of where we’d entered. It’s tumbled in on itself over the years, a far cry from its brethren on the Giza and Saqqara Plateus, but there it is. One of only a handful of pyramids built outside those more famous centres of power.

Not far away at the Aswan granite quarries, colossal unfinished and broken obelisks still lie in the ground, giving insight into how these massive monuments were made. Elsewhere empty husks are all that remain of many similar pillars transported from here to sites all along the Nile. Such was the painstaking nature of the masonry techniques here, if one was damaged it had to be abandoned. I wouldn’t want to be the guy who got that wrong.

Another brilliant bookshop is to be found not far away, and I add to the heap of I'm already lugging around. Soon we will go even further south, past the Aswan Dam and the great expanse of Lake Nasser to the true frontier, but we have one more stop to make before.

When the dam was created between 1972 and 1980 a number of archaeological sites were at risk of being lost forever. The solution was to move them, piece by piece, stone by stone. One such site that was moved, with the help of UNESCO, was the Temple of Isis at Philae. Still regarded today as one of the most picturesque temples in all Egypt, inspiration for poets and artists for centuries. Even in its new location on Agilkia Island, with the necessary boat ride to reach it, very little of the atmosphere has been lost. Seeming to rise from the water itself, with columns flowering like stems, reliefs pulsing with magic.

Though originally begun as early as the Seventh Century BC, the temple to Isis reached its height during the Ptolemaic Age, though it would survive long after. Nestled here at the edge of the Roman world as it was, here at Philae the last known hieroglyphic inscription was made in the year 394 AD. Made by a priest named Nesmeterakhem. Testament to a brief time when the cult of Isis spread far and wide throughout the knwon world, becoming one of the most populate mystery cults throughout the empire. Soon enough though Christianity would reign supreme. Nesmeterakhem may well have been one of the last to hold public vigil to the gods of old.

—

Some seven centuries before Nesmeterakhem’s day, when Karnak, Edfu, Kom Ombo and Philae flourished still and the Greeks ruled over Egypt’s political fortunes, one individual - the chief librarian of Alexandria no less, made the most scientific attempt yet at ascertaining the source of the Nile. His name was Eratosthenes, and he is most famous today for his realisation, 1700 years before Galilee, that the world is round. Also a cartographer in addition to his mathematical and philosophical pursuits, Eratosthenes created an accurate map of Egypt all the way up to modern Khartoum, and further put his mind to that most elusive of questions - the location of the source of the Nile.

Though Eratosthenes doesn’t explicitly speak of earlier theories like those of Euthymenes, two centuries later, the stoic Seneca expertly sums up the changing attitudes of geographers at the time - 'in those days there was room for lying, when there was no knowledge of foreign parts, it was easy for foreign parts to ship us romances.’ Eschewing travellers tales such as Seneca refers to, Eratosthenes wrote with astonishing accuracy of equatorial lakes far to the south being the likely sources of the river. Those lakes in Africa’s rift Valley are still immensely far away as we fly over the new one created just in the last few decades. At its southern edge, the end of Nubia and the edge of Egypt, is arguably the most awe inspiring sight in the entire nation. The temple of Abu Simbel.

Like Philae, Abu Simbel was moved from its original location in the 70s. Due to its sheer remoteness at the far side of Lake Nasser and the need to get a plane to reach it, uniquely there are far fewer tourists. Partly as a symbol of power to the present neighbours and subjects of the Egyptian pharaohs, and part as a monument to his own power for the ages. still marvelled at today, it was that ever present Ramesses II who made this place. A huge complex of sculptures, statues and monumental buildings. It is a fitting place to end our journey.

As we head back north across the desert I am reminded of the immensity of this land, and the secrets still out there even today waiting to be unearthed. Like Shelley, Herodotus and so many others who came before, we are visitors, no more.

All the while, the mountain above remained strangely clear, its gargantuan peak completely dominating the skyline when I’d gone up to the observation deck at my lakeside hotel before breakfast. Enjoying there my first up close meeting with that snow peaked monster at the heart of Japanese national identity.

Only later did I learn that this isn’t always so. The seemingly omnipotent Fuji-San by no means always revealing itself to passers by. Having already seen it clearly from the plane as I came in to land at Tokyo a few days earlier and then over and over again aboard the sprawling train network of the central highlands, it never even begins to get old. There’s just something special about that mountain. Always has been.

At 3776 metres, it is the tallest in all Japan. A sacred titan of gods and mortals standing sentinel down the centuries. Since its fiery creation some 100,000 years ago, when the heavens stretched their fingers down to the earthly realm, it has remained a muse to poets, a beacon to pilgrims, and now, the heart of a nation.

Once considered a god in itself, for millennia the silent giant has watched the march of history unfold around it. From the first fires kindled and pots created by Jomon hands as much as 15,000 years ago to the samurai who sought solace on its slopes in the last millennium. From the Shinto & Buddhist monks who traced its ridges in search of enlightenment, to the artists who immortalised its form in ink and woodblock, Fuji has born witness to the ceaseless movements of time. Today it is memory itself, carved in rock and snow. And it is still alive. All the meteorologists agree - its last eruption in 1707 will soon be followed by another.

But the mountains shadow is long, and beneath its towering form lies another realm entirely. An emerald labyrinth of gnarled roots and trees, where the wind is hushed to silence and the past seems to linger like an icy breath of air.

Also known as Jukai, the ‘Sea of Trees’, the forest of Aokigahara is many things. To interested travellers like myself it is a cradle of folklore, a place intrinsically linked to the story of the Japanese people. To others, one of whom I would meet that day, it is a place of darkness, and death - a kind of danger tourism hotspot. To yet more it is a refuge of solitude within only a few hours of the dizzying bedlam of the largest metropolitan area on earth. And finally, to a solitary few, it is a place where life meets a quiet end.

For there is a darkness beneath this ancient canopy, Aside from the popular tourist caves that can be found throughout and the many easy bus routes from the idyllic lake-side resorts like Shoji and Fuji, Aogokaraha has another name. The suicide forest. A place where men and women from all over Japan have come for centuries to slip silently away and rest eternal amidst the trees.

As far as Japanese folklorists are concerned, as well as many followers of the traditional Shinto faith of the islands - an immensely old religion - Aokigahara is far more than just a forest. It is a liminal place where life and death entwine. Past and present, legend and reality coming together in the shadow of a leviathan of the elder days. For those of this persuasion who dare to enter, it is a place that never truly lets go.

As I entered the forest that day, following the carefully laid out pathways and meeting many friendly faces along the way, I couldn’t help but think of the old stories of the place. Of the Yurei - wandering spirits trapped between our world and the next, drawn to the darkness in Aogikahara’s depths.

Like most traditional folklores around the world, though few survive anywhere near as completely as a place like Japan, tales of demons and spirits lurking in the trees of wilderness areas such as this are common. Calling out in the night and echoing through the labyrinth of moss and stone to lead travellers astray. But there was more to this forest, for in times of famine and hardship, it is said that people, old or weak or in some way perceived as a burden on the rest, would go to the forest to die, sometimes leaving their souls behind in its embrace. If you are of this way of thinking, then even today as modern roads pass through the vast expanse of green, the spirits of the dead remain. Perhaps adding their collective essences and energy to the woodland. Though those who were angry when they died or had unfinished business remain to haunt the place as dangerous Yurei.

But just as there is death there is life here too. The 35km area of Aogikahara is considered one of the most significant biodiversity hotspots in all of Japan in fact, with several species of rare butterfly and other animals found in abundance more than anywhere else in the central regions. Though you wouldn't know it due to the all pervading silence, vast amounts of animal species are to be found, including Asiatic Black Bears, Raccoon Dogs and Wild Boar. This is not surprising at all, for the ground I walk on as I enter the forest is clearly of volcanic rock. As much as this is a place of endings, it is also a place of rebirth, not just in the Buddhist conception of rejoining the cycle of existence after death, but in biology. For the entire forest has grown up on top of a lava bed of over a thousand years before.

It was during that eruption of 864 to 866, recorded in the Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku that the lakes of Motosu, Shoji and Saiko were formed, when the vast lava flow separated a larger lake. Lava having spewed forth down into the lake at its base, transforming the landscape into a network of chasms and caves formed deep below the surface, changing the landscape and surely the National psyche of the people around it too. Valleys were filled in, life eradicated. What a sight it must have been. The impact of the eruption being so severe that a shrine at Asama was established in the foothills to ward off further eruptions. And yet, though the biggest eruption in recorded history, the immensely fertile new ground led to the forest we see today.

By the Twelfth Century, though the power of the volcano survived in memory, enough in itself to create a whole slew of myths and legends enacted in songs and dance and perhaps contribute to the dark reputation of the place, it was deemed stable enough for Satsudai Shonin to establish a temple on the very summit. Worshippers regularly climbing as part of the syncretic religion of mountain worship known as Shugendo, as is common in Japan, a mixture of Buddhism and more ancient ideas.

Even with strong winds above, as I wander in the woodland, it is particularly quiet. Amidst the silence I remember the supposedly strange characteristics of the place - magnets and watches not working properly for example. A quick check reveals these to be travellers tales. And though the place feels like many other forests I’ve been to, I can perceive an eerie, otherworldly feel.

The giant trees that have grown up so densely over the last thousand years sometimes making it feel like dusk even though it’s the middle of the day. The foliage and the volcanic earth consistently blanketing every sound. With no carefully maintained tourist paths in pre-modern times, the ground itself would seem booby trapped with roots that threaten to trip up or grab out at all but the most observant of wanderer.

But what of the forest before the eruption? Before the volcano destroyed the land, before newer trees and stories with them grew tall and thick, before their tangled limbs wove a barrier between worlds. Of course, this land was already ancient, and Fuji-San remembers.

Around 11,000 years ago, an earlier eruption had caused a vast amount of lava to form the entire west side of the mountain we see today, completely altering its image. This was an age when Japan’s first complex societies shaped clay with fire, painted their bodies with ochre and constructed impressive monuments on the landscape - hunting, gathering, creating art and wandering.

During that age we know now as the Jomon Period due to the elaborate knot-work on their ceramics, the forest was a place of awe and reverence. More connected to the land than later peoples, those first inhabitants of Japan must have known the mountain was restless. The land itself moulded by its breath.

For thousands of years, complex hunter gatherers of the Jomon Period didn’t just live but thrived all through the central highlands of Japan to the slopes of Fuji itself. In those days when the wild wood coated all the earth, the hunters enjoyed intimate connections with the world around them, playing music, creating art, and perhaps like some still do today, feeling a presence in every rustling leaf and shifting shadow. They carved strange patterns into stone, fired great masterpieces in clay and in what was once assumed to be a unique case for people living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, came together to create mighty monumental architecture.

At the south western edge of the mountain one of their vast ceremonial sites can still be seen today. The settlement of Ōshika-Kubo, found when road works were being carried out in the 1990s unfortunately can’t be seen overground today but has nonetheless been investigated archaeologically. Dating to some 15 to 12,000 years ago, it is just one example of a complex society that spread over all of Japan for millennia. We don’t know for sure, but some facets of the Shinto religion may in fact stem all the way back from these wildly early people, still immensely popular in Japan today.

Finally by around 300 BC, everything would change. After tens of thousands of years of isolation, rice farming would arrive on the Japanese mainland. And almost immediately when this new and intensive way of creating food swept across the islands, wealth accumulation, elite rule and violence came with it.

This age, known as the Yayoi, most famously seen in the bronze bells that line museum shelves across the country, seems to be accompanied by a new Chinese style religion, way of life and population groups. Though no doubt some older Jomon ways survived too, ultimately merging to create Shinto.

It is in the period that follows, beginning in the first few centuries AD and only ending with the arrival of Buddhism by the Sixth Centiry, most famously known from its huge elite funerary monuments, that the Japan we know today has its roots. This was the age of the Kofun, a time of rising empires and warrior kings. When great tumuli - earthen pyramids - were built to house the mighty in death. The rulers and elite of this land, their bodies adorned with bronze and silk, were buried in chambers that in many cases, not being allowed to be investigated, still slumber beneath the soil.

If the Kofun had a presence around Fuji, Aogikara likely then being a place of reverence, and perhaps a border even then between the living and the lost, it lies buried deep. Perhaps those kings and queens of old still drift as unseen sentinels amidst the trees.

By the time Buddhism arrived in Japan in the Fifth and Sixth centuries AD, many of the characteristics we associate with the later age of the Samurai were already in place. A quasi-feudal system of haves and have-nots and the institution of the Emperor among them. One such facet of Japanese faith seeming to long predate the arrival of Buddhism is the Obon Festival, first recorded as having been celebrated under the empress Suiko (592-628).

Still celebrated every year in August all these centuries later, the original festival likely took place twice a year, in Spring and Autumn, always on the night of a full moon. Intrinsically linked to ancestor worship, not too dissimilar perhaps to ancient religions all over the world, the intention of the celebrations was to beckon the deceased home to their family homes to pay homage. In order to do so families will traditionally return to the lands of their ancestors, cleaning the household altars while there and taking part in a dance known as Bon Odori.

According to the old religion, when a person dies, their soul, or reikon leaves the body to enter a kind of purgatory. If the deceased died a good death and the proper funerary rites are performed they may rise to join the exalted ranks of the ancestors, watching over their descendants and returning each year during the Obon festival to receive thanks. If a person suffers a violent or sudden end however, or has strong unresolved emotions like anger, a desire for vengeance, jealousy, intense sadness and even love, or even if the proper funerary rites are not satisfactorily performed, the reikon will not be freed from its earthly cage, nor allowed back into the cycle of reincarnation. Transforming instead into a Yurei. A dangerous spirit or ghost. These Yurei are often associated with a particular place, and of all these places, the most yurei haunted of all, is none other than Aokigahara Forest.

Sometimes, the more harshly an individual was treated in life, or the lower the social rank they held, such as Oiwa in Yatsuya Kaidan, or other figures of Japanese literature, will lead to the return of an especially powerful Yurei. If the proper rituals and or emotional conflict suffered by the individual are never resolved, the spirit will remain on earth forever more, lashing out at the mortal realm and leading to the especially morbid reputations of Yurei haunted landscapes like Aokigahara Forest.

While waiting for the bus back to town, shattering my perceptions of Japan by being an hour late, I met a young metalhead from Taiwan. He’d studied Japan at university he’d told me, links apparently remaining strong between these two East Asian allies of the United States. I told him how I’d read of the folklore of Jukai, he told me he’d done the same. But he was there for something more he said. He’d left the paths, to go searching for a body. No doubt many other visitors do the same. The grim reality is that Aokigahara is the second most popular suicide destination in the world, only the Golden Gate Bridge being more popular.

Though as we have seen, the forest has over a thousand years of recorded history to draw from, much of its popularity in the last century in fact stems from a single work of fiction. A 1960 novel by Seicho Matsumoto by the name of Nami no Tō - Tower Of Waves. Though the nihilistic masterpiece of post-war malaise mostly takes place in Tokyo, its finale, where its beautiful heroin takes her own life, is of course in Aokigahara. Turned into a movie within a year of its release and followed by new adaptations every decade since, Tower of Waves was an absolute phenomenon in its day. Unfortunately, hundreds of bodies recovered from the forest have been found with the book on their person in the decades since. Other wildly popular books in Japan like Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami also contain suicide. Understandably, authorities in Japan stopped releasing figures of those who lose their lives in the forest a long time ago.

It isn’t that Japan is particularly rare in the world in its rates of self-inflicted death. The mythic concept of ubasute, where the infirm are left in a wild place to die, and shinju - lovers suicide, being similar to the Greek Tragedies and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for example. But the reasons that some go down this route remain very unlike those in the west. Imagine if the Greek tragedies had taken this concept alone and ran with it forever, with no Judeo-Christian values to condemn the killing of the self. The self-inflicted seppuku committed by samurai for example as well as the kamikaze pilots of World War Two are unlike anything seen in the west.

One argument is that the co-operative native of rice farming in East Asia leads ultimately to a collectivist culture in Japan and the areas of China and South East Asia where it predominates. By this reasoning, wheat and grain growing areas on the other hand tend to be more individualistic so can lead to individualistic cultures like Europe and United States.

Unlike in the west, In Japanese culture the self is deeply connected to the communal. Social mechanisms historically valorising rather than abhorring suicide as a worthy act if committed for the benefit of others.

From salary men who no longer wish to suffer the indignity of unemployment or who have made a grave mistake in business, to elderly folk wanting to remove their perceived burden on their descendants, innately hierarchical structures led by invisible networks of obligation and deference have traditionally acted to bind Japanese society by a code where self-inflicted death can be the ultimate heroic act.

All the way back in 1897 just as Japan was opening up to the wider world, sociologist Emile Durkheim investigated this concept, which he called ‘Altruistic Suicide’, finding it present in many cultures on Earth. From early legends where self immolation in particular was praised to the semi-legendary ubusate of the Eighteenth century where elderly or sick chose their own deaths to make way for the next generation, this tradition of self-sacrifice has verifiably existed within the Japanese psyche via myth and written works for centuries, perhaps even millennia, potentially being brought with the first rice farmers over two thousand years ago. With self-inflicted death even being framed positively as the removal of responsibility, even today through the lens of Japanese cinema, theatre and literature we can see these traditions personified when describing romantic acceptance of voluntary death. Quite simply it has become entwined with what it means to be Japanese.

In recent years however the forest has developed a particular reputation for the dark, with many locals apparently shunning the forest. Some even believing that merely entering the place can cause mental anguish that will ultimately lead to suicide if left unchecked. Arguing the negative energy of the many thousands who have died here to have infused with the trees to create especially dangerous Jukai.

Today, the human brain is widely considered the most complex structure in the known universe. A machine for the creation of of meaning which neuroscientists still barely understand, it is no surprise that certain locations like the Aokogihara Forest seem to conjure up feelings of malevolence for large numbers of people. Many locations the world over having developed either positive or negative reputations down the centuries, very often seeming to exist outside the realm of the human mind. Back in the early 20^th century concerns such as these inspired pioneering psychoanalyst Carl Jung to ask the question - does a landscape have memory? Or alternatively - does a landscape have a soul? Linking his question to the concept of the collective unconscious and Sigmund Freud’s idea of ‘Archaic remnants’ left over in human groups, his resounding answer was yes, certain places may become imbued with a sense of soulfulness due to the intense meanings placed on them by human cultures.

The concept of a ‘sacred landscape’ has become popular in academia in the last few decades. With investigations into how certain landscapes can influence human activities being undertaken in many disciplines. It has been argued that a sacred landscape is not simply what we see with our eyes, particularly for someone outside the cultural frame of reference, but a way of seeing with our mind. Ultimately this is the concept at the heart of the ancient Japanese Shinto faith. As well as most other animist religions all over earth - a kind of Shintoism once having been practiced by all humans, including my own ancestors in ancient Britain and Ireland. Absolutely everything was imbued with a spirit, some considerably more powerful than others.

Still worshipped at thousands of shrines today, though often left purposefully ambiguous, these ‘kami’ worshipped in Shinto can refer to animals, the souls of the dead, former emperors, forces of nature, landscape features, forests, people of particularly outstanding deeds and virtue, powerful gods and goddesses, like Ameraysi the sun goddess, the moon goddess Tsuyuyuomi, the storm god Susano, and vaunted ancestors. Shinto is a fascinating and particularly well developed insight into the ways ancient people throughout human history very likely viewed the world around them.

Having been added to many times over the centuries, particularly by Buddhism, the heart of Shinto is still intact, in particular the idea that upon death people can essentially be incorporated into the animist forces of nature. Many peoples all over the world still have their sacred mountains for example, places of numinous power, whether they realise this is the case or not. Originally they would likely have been seen as individual entities In Japan the relationship between these kami and natural places like mountains but also trees, rocks and waterfalls, designated as such by priests with traditional ropes and strips of paper has led to the establishment of thousands upon thousands of shrines, some wildly ancient, though anyone can put one up, and sometimes they do, particularly for lost loved ones. Creating symbiotic relationships between the shrine and the natural world. Some today are in built up environments but all originally would have been in a place of natural beauty. Transforming topographies to living graveyards.

If anywhere can hold memory or a soul as Jung ponders then, surely it is here in this most sacred of places in a land where the past never truly sleeps. To those of Shinto persuasion, already psychologically prepared to feel a certain way when they arrive, the forest is a powerful place indeed. Where the earth whispers. Where time slows to a breath and the wind carries voices long forgotten. Light and shadow weaving their endless dance amidst the murmurs of history, myth and the unseen world beyond.

As an outsider in the sea of trees I find not darkness, but peace. A place of stark beauty, of solitude and serenity. I stare upwards to the canopy, and venture forward into its depths.

In its prime some twenty five hundred years ago this was sacred ground. One of those places where the veil thins between our world and the next. Ruled by shared tradition as much as the actual priesthood of Artemis and Apollo who oversaw habitation here, no one was permitted to die or be born. Pregnant women and people of old age would be removed to the adjacent island of Rhenia or further afield before any potential affront to the gods.

But just like other special places - the likes of Mecca, Gobekli Tepe, Cahuachi, Poverty Point and Stonehenge among them - people flocked. Travelling here en-masse from lands far away, both on festivals at certain times of the year, and at other times. Still today it holds a special reputation for the spiritual.

In the Classical Age and as early as the Archaic, Delos was fixed in place as one of the cardinal points in the world of the Greeks. Where the god twins Apollo and Artemis were said to have been born and could still be reasoned with by mortal men. As a site of utmost importance, Delos was up there with the other foremost centres of Delphi, Olympia and Dodona. Roughly situated at the centre of the Cycladic islands, their very name stems from their encirclement of this religious centre.

Unlike Olympia, where the legendary Heracles was said to have instigated the famous Olympic Games, the origins of Delos are shrouded in mystery. Talk of Hyperboreans coming down from distant lands beyond the north wind to leave offerings have long intrigued scholars, though in truth we have no idea where Hyperborea was. Ideas ranging from Central Asia to Nordic Bronze Age Scandinavia. Archaeological digs over the past 150 years have began to tell a new story backed up by all the science of the modern age, and yet raised so many more questions too.

Above all, today, and for the last two thousand years, Delos has been a dead place. Its once verdant lagoon dried up. Most life besides lizards and feral goats gone. Remnants of the once thriving ancient city left forlorn. In its later days turned into a vast open air Roman slave market, with 10,000 said to have passed through daily in its prime, no one lives here now.

Howling surf batters the hull of the small ferry as we arrive in the gloom of an April morning. Persistent wind battering both us and the island on our approach, our small group of travellers get a brief sense of how difficult sea travel could be both now and in the ancient past.

Having arrived on the ‘big ferry’ to Mykonos the day before, I’d headed out first thing the next morning to go two boats deep. Like the similarly characterful ‘small ferry’ from Amorgos to Koufonisi - accessible only upon the completion of an initial journey on a larger boat - only the most persistent come here. The best kind of destination.

Passing by the tiny islets of Megalos and Mikros Rematiaris, the larger necropolis island of Rhenia careens into view. Its entire 17km surface coated with the graves of dead Delians, it still looks greener and more full of life than Delos today. Finally, the central mountain of Delos rises up, the same sight that would have greeted pilgrims from all those millennia ago. Visible from the nearby islands of Tinos and Mykonos, here stood not just a flourishing ancient city but remains from the Bronze Age long before.

On the slopes leading up to the summit stands of deities once stood, brought here as offerings from lands as far away as Egypt, Syria and Anatolia. All around, though barely perceptible today, are the remnants of the Mycenaean past too. For like many sites all across Greece, at Delphi, Dordona, Olympia, Epidaurus and most others, the classical remains have antecedents from the earlier mythic age of heroes at the very beginning of Ancient Greece. Through largely hidden underneath the sprawling remnants of the classical city, the more excavations are carried out, the more and more of the Mycenaean settlement is revealed. Yet still for the most part Delos keeps its secrets.

Considering it is nowhere more than 1300 metres wide, with a total area of only 6.85 kilometres the history and importance of the place is grossly bloated compared to its tiny size. Having taken part in pivotal epoch defining events over and over again, it is all the more strange considering its rocky and infertile soil with only a small cultivable valley in the north west where the sanctuaries of Apollo and Artemis once stood - the reason for the importance of the place. But there is a lot on Delos that is unexpected and strange. Always had been.

I - Travellers On The Spiral Sea

When early antiquarian Kyriakos of Ancona arrived on Delos in 1445, though the legacy of the place had never been forgotten, it was a forlorn island. Where once some 30,000 had called the place home, thriving and bustling with the goings on of commerce and ritual life, it was now entirely empty, save a handful of occasional shepards. Kyriakos, regarded by many as a ‘father of archaeology’ due to his investigations into antiquity, was well aware of its importance. The festival of Delia having been one of the major events in the Pan Hellenic World, second only to the Olympic and Pythian Games. Perhaps as visitors still do today he would have tried to imagine the horse races around the fields, dramatic performances in the theatre, musical and theatrical contests and vast feasts taking place every four years, when the population would swell to many times its usual size.

Still in his day, though the islands were blighted by pirates, both from the Catholic west and the Islamic east, the locals then living through some of the hardest times in their entire history, the place was coated in art and monumental architecture. Despite large amounts of marble being removed for construction projects on neighbouring islands, especially by the time Constantinople finally fell to the Turks in 1453, shattering the Eastern Orthodox world, huge amounts of physical evidence still remained. In many ways Delos having stood still, unchanged for over a thousand years.

There is a good argument that it was individuals like Kyriakos - who in a surviving work described and sketched the colossal statue of Apollo of the Naxians among other curiosities from the classical past - ultimately led and fed into the renaissance then just beginning to unfold in his native Italy, and soon the rest of Europe. For though he was the first, a whole slew of other travellers would soon arrive to marvel at the still visible ruins of those elder days.

By the 17th century, one of the new foremost powers in the Cyclades, the Venetians, arrived to load up one of the famous Delian Lions of the Archaic Era to take it back to their city, where it remains to this day. Other artefacts and sculptures were taken to Rome, England, and elsewhere, just as other pieces of marble continued to be removed to be used for construction work.

Finally in 1873 the first archaeologists of the new modern age arrived. Though still a new discipline, using relatively primitive methods at the time, like all the newly founded schools of archaeology in Athens, the French would nonetheless launch one of the most important and extensive digs in history, in large part amounting to the clearing and revealing of that great ancient city, rather than analysis and detailed dating, and there was a lot of clearing to do.

In 1904 a museum was founded on the island to store the wealth of uncovered artefacts and statues, such as the rest of the famous Archaic Lions. It remains one of the oldest in all of Greece. From then until 1914 the most substantial and significant excavations of all were undertaken. The lead archaeologists as well as conservationists and technicians working throughout the year, carrying out site conservation as well as restoration work in order to reduce the damage caused by removal of vegetation and to keep it accessible to visitors. In doing so they revealed the commercial, political and religious centres of the site, as well as many private houses of wealthy merchants and citizens. Many of which enjoyed the use of private wells in central courtyards, the water table of the island being relatively near the surface in a granite substructure, thus explaining why and how people lived here on a rocky barren island with no known spring.

There was a sacred lake too in those days, which had to be filled in 1925 due to its high risk of malaria. As well as a river at certain times of the year when rain water would flow down from the north west slopes of Mount Kythnos to form the River Inopos, which would be collected in a cistern at the bottom. Perhaps this was done as early as the Third Millennium BC when the first known inhabitants of the island made their homes on the rocky hillsides. Their ceramics can still be seen in the museum today.

Finally between 1958 and 1975 a new series of intense excavations were carried out, this time with radio carbon dating and modern techniques. A detailed chronology and story of the island was achieved.

II - Of Elder Days

As far as the ancient writers were concerned - their opinions being preserved in the works of the 5^th Century BC writer Thucydides - the very first inhabitants of Delos were Carians and Phoenicians. The latter often used as a catch-all term to describe people the Greeks viewed as particularly old, illustrious and otherwise unexplainable. There is no real evidence for either in the archeology of Delos.

For the reality of the first Delians we must look upwards to the mountain peak which dominates the island - Mount Kythnos - first dug by the French in the late 1800s. Though those early pioneers weren’t entirely sure what they were looking at, little context then existing from other regions to corroborate it, it ultimately turned out that the fragments of prehistoric fortifications underneath and largely destroyed by the later classical remains dated from a time thousands of years even before the Delian festival, to the final centuries of the Third Millennium BC Cycladic Civilisation which once thrived throughout the Aegean.

From around 2500 BC those earliest international seafarers of the region, famous for their ‘canonical’ folded-arm figurines seen in museums throughout the world, came to Delos to settle on the mountain peak. Here, some one hundred and thirteen metres above the plain below they enjoyed the maximum amount of visibility possible, allowing for their control of the modest fertile valley and sea around. Here they built oval huts and survived as best they could during what appears to be an age of upheaval and great change which followed the golden age of Cycladic civilisation, possibly with attacks being relatively common from the sea. In the 1970s eminent Archaeologist Sir Colin Renfrew first distinguished this so called ‘Kastri Period’ from the mature Cycladic Keros-Syros Culture of before. Unfortunately, the fate of these people is mysterious and simply not enough evidence exists at present to build an accurate picture. Though similar Kastri sites on Syros and Naxos were violently destroyed by around 2200 BC.

By the end of the Fifteenth Century BC a new people arrived. As part of a trend of westward movements into the Aegean, Crete and Asia Minor, Mycenaean seafarers out of the mainland were able to establish sovereignty. During this age of ocean-born expansion and pre-eminent in war, they felt secure enough to build their settlement not atop the highest peak but in the fertile little valley by the seashore. In 1946 when excavators worked at the Seventh Century BC Sanctuary of Artemis, in one corner they found Mycenaean bronze and gold artefacts as well as pottery sherds, burned bones and more. The Sanctuary of Apollo too, which reached its zenith in Archaic and Classical times, appeared to have been founded or at least seen some sort of establishment since the late Bronze Age, the vaunted age of Homer and the heroes of the Trojan War.

The most impressive find of all from that mythic time of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and one of the most unique found anywhere, is the ivory plaque still housed in the museum today depicting a Mycenaean warrior with large double shield and a boars tusk helmet. With anywhere from twenty to one hundred boars needed to make such an item, the most elaborate of all, which survive in museums all over Greece, were almost certainly symbols of high status worn by high ranking warriors. Thus explaining the proud and somewhat arrogant stance of the figure on the ivory plaque. A helmet was proof of bravery and illustrious heritage, perhaps this figure was even the adventurer who claimed Delos in the first place. A Fifteenth Century BC tomb seen on neighbouring Mykonos may have belonged to a similar adventurer. The sudden growth of many previously obscure mainland sites at this time suggesting a culture of heading out to the world to claim riches and bounty. Items could then be passed down as heirlooms to create links to a heroic past and even form kingships, such as with the helmet given by Meriones to Odysseus in the Odyssey, attesting to the nobility of his ancestors, perhaps having seized or raided islands of the sea.

By the Thirteenth Century BC the tomb on Aggelika had already fallen into ruin, and by the Twelfth Century collapse of Mycenaean Civilisation we simply don’t know what happened to Delos. Whether the inhabitants again took to the mountain, or again to the sea to raid once more, remains entirely speculative. But by the time civilisation arises once more in the early First Millennium BC we begin to have much more evidence.

III - The Birth Of Gods

Today, the mythology of the Ancient Greeks is some of the most well-known in all the world. No doubt significantly contributing to the legendary status of Delos in the Ancient Greek mind. The story of the island being inextricably tied up with the origins of two of the foremost and most popular of all Hellenistic deities.

Artemis, the powerful moon goddess associated with all things of the natural world, and Apollo, the so called ‘most Greek of all the gods’, in charge of light, poetry and music, which in typical grandiose manner the Greeks liked to think they were most popularly associated with. Up on Mount Olympus, as usual, the father god of the Greeks, Zeus was up to no good, sleeping with as many females as he could, be they divine or mortal. When the mother goddess Hera found out about these indiscretions, and of course, she always would, the fate of these women was not enviable.

One such fleeing individual was Leto, a daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe. Having successfully escaping Hera’s wrath by traveling far across the world, Leto eventually found shelter on a strange wandering island. No one else could see this land as it journeyed around the ocean, moving with the waves, so Leto thought it a perfect place to harbour herself and Zeus’ child - not being quite land nor water so safe from the wrath of Hera. For nine days and nine nights Leto laboured there until finally she gave birth to twins. And in that moment, the wandering island which had previously been ‘adelos’ - invisible, became ‘Delos’ - visible.

By the Seventh Century BC in the Archaic Era, the sacred lake near where Leto conceived would become the Sanctuary of Apollo, a haven for pious travellers from afar. Together with the mountain associated with Zeus, Kythnos, becoming major focal points for the island’s sacred geography. In time developing into one of the most important religious sanctuaries in the world. From this time onwards, visitors would arrive from all across the Hellenistic world to honour the gods with wild ceremonies, revelry and sacrifice, described with admiration in the roughly contemporary text known as the Homeric Hymn to Apollo.

At this natural crossroads between Mainland Greece and the colonies of Asia Minor, with trading partners beyond in Egypt, Phoenicia and Syria, outside influence can be seen here too, Delos being something of an international place from the beginning. As early as the Seventh Century BC in the mysterious Archaic Era, around the time Homer would have lived if he had existed as an individual person, and evidenced by the strange naked kouros statues in the local museum today, the neighbouring island of Naxos, always a powerhouse in ancient times, extended its influence here.

At the main Chora of Naxos the power of this one state island can be seen in the truly gigantic Ionic temple they were in the process of creating at the time the Persian invasion fleet of Darius came by in 499 BC. History does not relate what happened to Delos during this pivotal historical moment, but by the time Greece flourished into the Classical Age just after the Persians were thrown out of the Greek mainland and the islands for good at the battle of Salamis two decades later in 480 BC, a new power had arisen, one that had a huge part in the victory. The Fifth Century BC was the age of Athens.

Just a year after the final Persian defeat at Plataea in 479 BC, the major instigator in the campaign, Athens, founded a new sea spanning organisation to ensure another invasion was not successful. Delos was a place of such importance that it would not only give its name to this ‘Delian League’, but act as its focal point and location of its treasury. By 454 BC however it was clear who was in the driving seat, with Athenian leadership having been solidified over the entire league, known by many historians as the ‘Athenian Empire’. In that year the treasury was moved from Delos to Athens itself.

As far as archaeologists are concerned, though significant works of art have been found, Delos was still a relatively modest place at this point, with farm houses scattered around religious sanctuaries. People likely flocking here only at certain times of the year. At other times it being a relatively normal place without a huge population.

By the time war broke out between Athens and the other great power of the Greeks, Sparta in 431 BC, Delos was firmly under Athenian control, like most Aegean islands, contributing ships to the Athenian navy. In the sixth year of the war when leading Athenians went to visit the Oracle of Delphi, they were instructed to remove all dead bodies from Delos to purify the place, relocating the dead to the nearby island of Rhenia and forbidding anyone to be born or die on Delos ever again. By 422 BC they went even further, forcibly relocating the entire population to Athens.

Given the fate of neutral Milos, attacked by Athens in 416 BC for the crime of not contributing to the war effort, seeing all its menfolk killed as a result, its women and children sold into slavery, it could be argued that Delos got off lightly. Though it was irrevocably changed as a result.

Finally in 404 BC the war came to an end with Athens defeated by the Spartan Peloponnesian League. Though by 378 BC yet another Athenian led confederacy was established, this time being called the Second Delian League, surviving until 355 BC and ultimately leading to the final defeat of Sparta.

Today, the sanctuary on Delos with it’s large public squares, buildings and even structures dedicated to foreign religions, like Egyptian gods Anubus, Sarapis and Isis as well as Syrian Gods Hadad and Atargatis form a completely unique group of architectural monuments, covering a long period from the Seventh Century BC all the way through to the First Century BC. However, for the most part, the sprawling series of ruined structures we see today between the port and the sacred mountain stem from one particular period. For in 166 BC due to the politics of the day and a new economic policy, Delos saw an incredible boom in population. The new bosses in town, and controllers of the fate of the Aegean, taking over the island and declaring it a free port. In the space of just a few decades people from all over the world would flock to make their fortunes, whether in the business of trade, or serving those who were. Of course, this was the age of the Romans.

IV - Heart Of The Sea

By the middle of the Second Century BC a new master rose to the fore in the Aegean. First had been the Macedonian successors to Alexander the Great, then a confederation of Greek city states under The Achaean League, and finally by 146 BC, came the age of the Romans. For in that year not only was Carthage destroyed in the east, but the foremost Greek city of Corinth put to the sword in the west, leading to the total Roman domination of Greece, the end of the Hellenistic age, and the inundation of Roman slave markets with hundreds of of thousands of new Greek captives.

The Sack of Corinth in 146 BC however, more than most other conquests the Romans ever achieved, had the effect of irrevocably altering the conquerers. Though now militarily and politically in charge of the entire Classical Greek World, Rome found itself exposed to the totality of a culture most of its citizens viewed as superior to its own. In light of this vast cultural influence by the conquered, nothing could stay the same. The age of the Greco-Romans had begun.

And in this new world of Mediterranean unity the Romans needed a commercial hub, a single location they could develop as an alternative port of call to the traders coming in from the east, in part to rival the trade rich city of Rhodes. Some twenty years before the destruction of Corinth they’d made their decision, in 166 BC, choosing the island of Delos for its neutral location, already existing game as a religious centre and its deep harbour, as a free port, exempt from taxes.

In 146 BC when Corinth and Carthage fell, vast numbers of slaves would be processed through Delos to be transferred to the rest of the Roman world. According to Strabo the harbour being capable of admitting and sending away ten thousand slaves in a single day. In no time at all becoming ‘The maximum emporium totius orbis terrarum’ - the largest trading centre in the world.

The financial implications of paying no taxes not being lost on the ambitious businessmen of the burgeoning Roman Republic, organisations all over the Mediterranean were quick to incorporate the island into their organisations. And as they did so, yet more ships would arrive, continually unloading and loading up on all manner of goods and human cargo. Today in a recent study it was estimated that as many as one hundred and fifty large cargo ships of 250 tonnes capacity or more could anchor simultaneously in the harbour with another one hundred smaller passenger vessels and fishing boats with no issues.

By the time Corinth burned in 146 BC, located conveniently on the route from Italy to Greece and Asia, Delos became the undisputed transit hub of the entire Roman Mediterranean. These days of plenty are described in the works of many historians and writers of the era, but most obviously they can be seen in the unusually rich archaeology left behind. Still coating near enough every corner of the island. Not just temples and administrative buildings, but restaurants, shops, hotels, hostels, fast food stands, taverns and brothels, the latter situated in new quasi-red light districts that coalesced around the harbour to serve travellers coming in from afar.

Others still settled permanently, a number of rich private houses having been excavated, complete with mosaics, wall frescos and statues. Likely to be the properties of the bankers, ship owners and wealthy merchants who’d traveled to Delos to take part in the boom, it was they who financed the host of engineers, builders, architects and potters who also flocked to fulfil the needs of their wealthy patrons. Originating from all corners of the Mediterranean world and even beyond in Egypt, Asia Minor and the Near East, by around 90 BC, the especially cosmopolitan population of the island had risen to as high as 25 or even 30,000. As far as we can tell these people lived in peace in Greek style houses, and adopted a Greek way of life. Their children studied in the same gymnasiums, they were able to worship whatever gods they chose in their own sanctuaries and lived harmoniously without serious problems. And in this new age, albeit in a different way, the festival continued too. The Romans now obsessed with the Greek world, a commercialised version of the festival of Apollo would continue, Delos becoming a sort of Dubai of the Classical Age.

With every new ship coming into the harbour at Delos not only merchandise but people and ideas were brought in, as well as news from every other coastal city of the Mediterranean world, seeming a small neighbourhood along the edges of the Roman lake. It was a world full of opportunities, not just for men, who made up the large majority of visitors, but women too. One building that was recently excavated showing a fascinating snapshot of life on the island at the very height of its prosperity.

Apparently opened in the Second Century BC to quench the thirsts of foreign visitors, the tavern served only wine, either hot or cold, along with a number of snacks and nuts. Not too dissimilar to a busy tavern today in London or New York, patrons would stand, either by the wooden counter or out on the street if weather permitted. The woman who lived in the upstairs room was of most interest to archaeologists however. With wildly differing opinions of who she was. Like similar discoveries in Pompeii she may have been a prostitute, the proprietor of the establishment, or even both. It’s possible she also had a more specialised business model, engaging in the sale of amulets, spells, curses and fortune telling to those who came by. Her small fortune was excavated too, including at least one hundred and twenty coins from all over the known world. In an example of proto-free market capitalism and one of the strongest indicators for Delos’ prosperity we will ever see, the lady seems to have had no issue in being paid with foreign currency, probably being easily exchanged at one of the islands banks.

While coins are found from all over the burgeoning Roman republic, a clear skew to those of the east can be seen, with only a few from the west being present, and none from the surrounding Cycladic islands. Both the flow of trade and the identities of transient merchants and sailors clearly having an eastern bent, just as the Romans always would. But with great wealth comes great risk. The only reason we can see such detail at the tavern is because of its complete destruction by fire, never to be rebuilt. Delos’ prosperity would burn bright, and go out just as quickly. Not lasting even a hundred years.

V - How A City Dies

In 88 BC, after a brief intermission, war returned to the Aegean Sea. Buoyed up by recent victories in Asia Minor, this was the age of one of the greatest foes the Romans ever fought - Mithridates VI Eupator, the king of Pontus. In legend, and probably in reality too, Mithridates made himself immune to poisoning by micro-dosing it from a young age in the intense back-stabbing world of rival Hellenistic dynasts from which he emerged, and now he would wage his vendetta against Rome.

In that year, in the midst of the final titanic attempt at dominion in the Eastern Mediterranean by a Hellenistic ruler, Mithridates personally came to Delos with a fleet to ravage the place. Rome reacted however and by 69 BC the island had largely recovered to its former glory. But Mithridates was not finished. In that year, as he fought hard to restore lost territories and maintain the web of allegiances that had made him strong over the long decades of his kingship, the ruler of Pontus launched his loyal subordinate, a pirate Lord named Athenodoros, to return to Delos. This time the damage would be terminal. There is a reason why we know so much about the place, like Akrotiri, Pompeii and the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh, it wasn’t just burned down but left in such a state that it would never recover. Like Corinth before it, vengeance was final.

Thanks to the well excavated taverns and town houses of the city as well as various other finds on the island we can now piece together its final day. Like Pompeii, a snapshot of a thriving settlement before the end

It was a winters evening when the pirates first arrived. Unfortunately for the locals their guard was down, and most were inside sheltering from the cold. At the tavern, customers stood around the burning brazier or the bar. A total of 38 cups were in use, found fallen in the floor in the chaos that ensued. Soon the burning brazier would spread to the entire building, the settlement suffering conflagration to such an extent that it is still particularly evident in the archaeological record, mainly in the north quarter of the city.

Further into the island an amphora had been lowered into a well earlier in the evening to keep its contents cool for evening drinks. It was never retrieved. Elsewhere a desperate woman buried her jewellery and similarly never returned.

Like the similarly ravaged Bronze Age city of Akrotiri on Thera no bodies have been found. Some lucky ones may even have escaped, but for most their absence may well be as a result of their being taken into slavery. Harsh retribution or draconian justice perhaps for the many tens of thousands who’d passed through the Delian slave pens over the previous century.

Delos would not recover this time. The calamity that had befallen its population twice would not be allowed to happen a third time. The former prominence and tax exemptions of the island now being transferred to harbours further to the west. And with the final defeat of Mithradates in 63 BC as direct Roman rule extended to the east they would make their bases there too in other nodes on the east-west nexus. The wealthy merchants, shop owners and bankers moved on.

By the Second Century AD when the apologist Tertullian wrote the following words - ‘And Samos shall become sand and Delos unseen’, Delos and it’s still visible ruined structures had become a by-word for desolation and abandonment, frequented now by only a handful of shepards and solitary visitors from elsewhere in the islands. Once blessed by the gods, the island had become invisible once more.

Finally, by the early Christian period when such pagan associations were officially shunned, this isolation served to bring the island into some small prominence once more. Like in ancient days when religion had been foremost in dictating the islands fate Delos once more became an important sanctuary, though not frequented by anywhere near the same numbers as in elder days. For a few hundred years then from around the Third Century AD, Delos served as the headquarters of the Bishop of the Cyclades, to which the flocks of Kea, Seriphos, Syros and Mykonos prayed.

By the later Sixth Century AD and onwards piracy had definitely returned. The pendulum swing between golden age and dark age having turned back to the latter - a deep dark lasting more than a thousand years. Only by the Nineteenth Century with the defeat of the Ottoman Turks could this dark age in the Aegean be said to have truly come to an end. Pirates are unheard of in the Mediterranean today, but who’s to say another one won’t arise again, with marauders taking back to the seas as they have throughout history.

Delos is a phenomenal place to visit today, steeped in myth, history and archaeology. Depending on the weather conditions range from deep and ominous to light and airy. I can’t recommend it enough. Thanks and see you next time. Let me know about your experiences on Delos in the comments, and here is a 6.5 hour film I made earlier on the entire history of Mycenaean Greece -

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Born from the life giving waters of the Sarasvati and Indus rivers - the latter still one of the most important in the world - vast orderly settlements of mud-brick architecture are found throughout the modern nation state, as well as over the border into Northern India. Sprawling over a landmass considerably larger than any other in the Bronze Age world. The tell tale signs of their visitations are found much further away too in what is now Uzbekistan, Iraq and the Arabian Gulf - all across the known world of their day.

Masters of art, engineering and commerce - of a level far surpassing most human beings then alive on the planet - their fate and much of their way of life remains a total mystery. Though literate, their undeciphered pictorial script remains one of the great enigmas of the ancient world. Known as the Harappan culture today due to the name of the site first discovered and still one of its largest cities, it is popularly known under a different name - The Indus Valley Civilisation.

With streets whispering of globe spanning expeditions, unseen gods, and hidden wisdom seeming so far ahead of its time, the most famous city of all is not Harappa, but a vast mound of mud-brick refuse situated further down river. Constructed on top of a vast platform mound, which may have originated as a flood defence, it is an immensely impressive visage today. After you’ve seen it, you don’t forget a place like Mohenjo Daro.

Roughly translated as The Mound Of The Dead Men, digs undertaken here since the 1920s have revealed more secrets than at most Harappan sites. Giving archaeologists some of the most famous finds of all. And yet, today it rises from the dust like a riddle - streets once alive with activity now silent. I had plenty of time to ponder the mysteries of Mohenjo Daro when I arrived in October 2023. Patience very much being a virtue in modern day Pakistan.

We’d arrived on site an hour earlier after a lengthy voyage cross country to find we’d been deprioritised due to a surprise visit by the US ambassador. His security detail understandably in a permanent state of high alert given the history of political assassinations in the still young nation. The night before, a number of cockroaches casually wandered around my room when I’d returned from dinner, the distinct musk of cigarette smoke filtering around the specifically non-smoking room. Yet to be stricken down by the perfunctory stomach illness seeming to beset the British in this part of the world, the rest of our group of like-minded archaeological enthusiasts seeming to be struck down one by one, often in spectacular fashion on the open road - I just hoped to survive the visit to that most spectacular of Bronze Age cities. And Mohenjo Daro does not disappoint.

Since its discovery in the 1920s, and subsequent excavation by the legendary Sir Mortimer Wheeler, not yet then a knight of the realm but soon to be made one largely due to his contributions to world archaeology here, I’d read that the place had been gradually eroding away ever since. Though this undoubtedly is still the case - the sheer amount of digging over the past century leading to much of the exposed city being destroyed by the elements - there is still an immense amount to see. Labyrinthine passageways winding around the great central stupa, itself a relic from the later Gandhara and Kushan era when Buddhist rule here was the norm. Whether those late classical builders knew they were adding the final works to an already ancient city - the largest yet discovered in this part of the world - or whether they knew anything whatsoever of that once mighty civilisation, history does not relate. But when rediscovered in the 1920s, its existence had faded so completely that it wasn’t just lost to history, but even myth.

Despite attempts to link certain seal stones like the Pashaputi Seal to the later Hindu god Shiva, and others supposedly in yoga like poses, attempts in recent years to link the Indus Valley Civilisation to the earliest phases of Indian history have sometimes taken on a political edge, and have never been fully accepted by archaeology at large. As far as most researchers are concerned, this was something else entirely. Even today vast amounts lies un-excavated still, under subsidiary adjacent mounds to the main tell of which the stupa tops. The place was so abundant in fact, the same as Harappa nearly seven hundred kilometres away, that in the late Nineteenth Century large amounts of its bricks were used as readymade fill for railway tracks.

Even after its sudden fame in the 1920s however, the Indus Valley was generally seen as somehow inferior to the supposedly superior culture of Mesopotamia, the wellspring of Biblical times and subsequently much of the culture of the Western World. Out here in the borderlands of the sub-continent where the map had previously been blank, such a society could only be incorporated as a subservient power into the existing Near Eastern world.

Today with the benefit of a hundred years of scholarship we know that Harappan society in fact dwarfed Sumeria, and differed greatly from it. Still little evidence of warfare having ever been found, as well as a great uniformity of construction style and little evidence of social stratification even and burial evidence. No lavish graves like the Royal Burial Pits of Ur so famously excavated by Leonard Woolley at the start of the Twentieth Century.

The stark difference between Sumeria and the Indus can be encapsulated in a quote from Mortimer Wheeler himself. Actually remarking rather on the differences between Rome and Greece, Mortimer lamented the rigid uniformity of Rome compared to the wild experimentation and creativity of the Greeks. One being a unified empire with the same style everywhere, the latter a series of independent city states. Yet Rome triumphed. No one would argue Golden Age Athens to be more powerful than the empire. The standardised bricks, units of measurement, and architecture seen at all Indus Valley sites though covering thousands of kilometres in scale in this case being akin to the formulaic Romans.

Even beyond the still fertile rivers of the Indus, which allows Pakistan to have a vast population today in a relatively small area, another river once flourished, arguably just as great. Dead now - its course changed in antiquity - vast ruins still pin prick the desert around the dried out beds of the Ghaggar-Hakra river. Receiving way less monsoon rain now than the rest of the Indian sub-continent.

Heading up river towards Mohenjo Daro on a domestic flight from Karachi the day before, mighty metropolis of the coast and one of the world’s mega-cities, we’d made landfall in the provincial centre of Sukkur, gateway to Mohenjo Daro. In the airport on the way there a journalist and aid worker named Dev struck up a conversation about all things Pakistan, philosophy and much more, completely shattering my idea of the country as a monolith. Born and raised in the southern most region bordering with India, Dev is a Hindu, and not particularly religious. Grounded for two or three hours, a businesswoman befriended us too, arranging for Pakistani cookbooks in English to be given to all of us in huge elaborate boxes. She worked for Coca Cola and was on her way home after winning an employee of the month competition in Dubai. Upon finally boarding I was a little alarmed as the sound of a prayer blasted out over the tinny airplane speakers. Thankfully, Pakistan Air runs on more than faith alone.

The next morning as we headed over a bridge I got my first glimpse of the Indus. Like the Nile, the Amazon and the Yellow, undoubtedly one of the world’s great rivers and cradles of civilisation. It is a wildly impressive sight to behold. Soon enough as we reach the industrial outskirts of Sukkur on our rickety tour bus I see that we have already reached our first Indus Valley site. One of the largest of all in fact, Lakhan-jo-daro, once having spread all across town. Though largely coated in the urban sprawl today its excavators hypothesise it to have been by far one of the largest Harappan cities of all. Now, little more than rubble remains.

A few hours later we finally arrived at the outskirts of the Mound Of The Dead Men. Once the American Ambassador finally made his retreat, we moved in. Heading up to the citadel to get our first view of the entire site, sprawling as far as the eye can see all around. The Great Bath and the Stupa right there before us. Of course, the ‘Citadel’ is not alone. Extensive sections of the so-called lower city having been dug too. More than three hundred housing units, the most excavated at any city of the Third Millenium BC, giving archaeologists a wealth of data to work with. Its famed mysteries and differences from more well understand places like Ur not stemming from a lack of data, but its undeciphered writing system.

Nevertheless excavations have clearly demonstrated the city to be made up of a complicated series of habitation layers built on top of one another down the long ages of its occupation, from around 2700 to 1700 BC. The well shafts being the only constant down the long generations, consistently being extended further and further upwards as buildings ebbed and flowed.

Standing on top of the citadel I begin to get a sense of the sheer scale of the city as another suburb of the city rises up in the distance. Many other such tells are still un-excavated. Even further away fortifications enclosed the entire site of some 300 hectares. Having visited many sites from the Third Millennium BC throughout the Aegean Sea, this absolutely dwarfs them all, estimated to have been home to some 40,000. Europe and Anatolia at that time being mere barbarians on the edge of the world.

But what sort of structure ruled the city? Whether it was kings, emperors even, priest rulers, or a caste of trader lords, no one can say definitively. The so called citadel once suggested to be a military stronghold during the days of Sir Mortimer Wheeler. But the evidence is lacking. No formalised burial traditions are found here at all, and burials overall are extremely diverse throughout the Indus world. At Dhovalira for example, just over the border in India, evidence of tomb-like chambers with beads and pots inside but no bodies have been investigated, suggesting cremation. Overall however, how the people of the Indus viewed death and religion remains ever elusive.

Archaeologist Gregory Possehl and many others since the very beginning have suggested an Indus obsession with water, most commonly seen with the so called Great Bath, a vast rectangular water tank of fine brickwork at the heart of the city. but also with its many wells, perhaps revealing a religious ideology based on ritual use. Other researchers remain skeptical. It may just be that Harappans were concerned with sanitation and cleanliness due to a prevalence of tropical disease. Some Indian scholars have even sought to link the Great Bath to later Hindu tradition. Though evidence for this is by no means definitive. Even the date of the stupa itself is not fully agreed upon. Though usually dated to the Kushan age due to the large amount of coins King Vasudeva I (191-232 AD), an Italian researcher Giovani Veradi, recently suggested it may have originally been a kind of ziggurat from Indus times, structures seen all across the civilised world at that time, from Mesopotamia to Turkmenistan.

After a couple of hours on site in the full heat of the day, we begin filing back out of the ruins to the welcome shade of the on-site museum. Like the similarly excellent Archaeology Museums in Karachi, Lahore, Taxila and Harappa itself, many of the exhibits are in English. A leftover from the days of the British Empire which I can’t complain about. An exceptional collection is to be seen, one of the best in the country. Not only were Harappans outstanding engineers, but sophisticated craftspeople of extraordinary skill. Still generally utilising tools of stone, though also versed in metal working, Harappan artisans created ornamental beads of turquoise, lapis lazuli, carnelian, agate, faience and more, from raw materials originating all over the world. Many would remain within what is now Pakistan, but some, such as the carnelian beads found in the Royal Graves of Ur in what is now Iraq traveled widely. Other goods show up everywhere in between, particularly in what is now Iran and Oman. And from that Persian Gulf region marine molluscs were imported to Harappan Cities. There the shells would be crafted into ornate jewellery, figurines, small vessels and even gaming pieces. The earliest dice and some of the earliest board games of the world being found here. Metal working of course was important too, with imported copper and tin being processed to create mirrors, jewellery and statuettes. Though in a unique situation for this time, evidence of weaponry is largely lacking.

Like most ancient cultures however the most abundant objects of all are the ceramics. Indus Seals in particular, found in abundance at home, are also seen abroad at sites like Ur in Mesopotamia, which during its halcyon days at the end of the Third Millennium seems to have had a resident population of Indus Traders. Though we can’t read the Indus Script we can read the cuneiform of Ur which talk of flourishing trade at the time with the exotic lands of Meluhha beyond the sea, almost certainly the Indus Valley Civilisation. Resident traders would actually live in Mesopotamia as well as the lands of Dilmun and Magan in between, thought to be Bahrain and Oman respectively. Plying the open waters in reed boats with cotton sails, Indus merchants seem to have regularly taken the Monsoon winds across the Indian Ocean to Oman and from there up the Persian Gulf to Mesopotamia, in an especially lucrative system. Utilising the famous trade wind to cross 800 kilometres of open waters just as people still do today. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests Harappans were in control of the trade, the quarries and the markets. It was mostly their goods that ended up elsewhere without a lot found of the outside world at their sites, though it’s possible they were buying perishable goods. Gregory Possehl, an expert on this early world system, says that although not necessarily warlike as we would recognise it, the Indus people were ‘aggressive traders. There is no doubt about it’.

Though everyday household items of clay are the most common ceramics found at Mohenjo Daro, many terracotta figurines have been found too, depicting animals and humanoids. Traditions that existed long before at the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh from as early as 7000 BC. At Mohenjo Daro they may have served as guardians of household shrines - a small insight into the otherwise lost religion of the Indus. The most famous figurine of all, named the ‘The Priest King’ by its excavators a hundred years ago, has a good claim to being the mascot of the entire Indus Valley civilisation. It lives today in the excellent National Museum of Pakistan in Karachi. But here at Mohenho Daro the picture is greatly expanded by the exhibition of a whole collection of similar sculptures. Most having lost much of their definition over the millennia, though showing the Priest King to be part of a vigorous sculpture making tradition.

The other most famous artefact from Mohenjo Daro is the so called ‘Dancing Girl’. Named as such due to her perceived similarity to court dancers of much later periods in colonial India, though the reality of her appearance remains entirely speculative. Certainly she is adorned by many items which have been located archaeologically such as bangles, semi precious stones and necklaces. Other bodily adornments like nose studs earrings and conical head ornaments are seen too, all of which are still seen in modern India.

Back at the entrance after a hearty lunch I’d spotted what appeared to be a squirrel darting around. Recognising it from one of the many stamp seals I’d seen over the years. The other most famous one, fantastically named ‘The Unicorn’, I was yet to see, besides a large statue of it and a number of local stone masons selling replicas. Much has been made of this so called unicorn over the years, like the ‘Dancing Girl’ and the ‘Priest King’ it having become synonymous with Harappan civilisation. Indian archaeologists in particular have long sought to link it to later Hindu tradition, unicorns being a common creature in Indian folk stories such as Vishnu’s Titio of Ekasringa. Though just as likely to owe their origins to the rhinos which once thrived here. In reality ‘The Unicorn’ may simply be a bovine animal like a cow seen from the side.

The end of the Indus Valley Civilisation is one of the most thoroughly debated of any in the world. Much of the evidence suggesting one of the most significant cultural breaks in all prehistory. From the end of the Third Millennium BC on, a long decline was ushered in by climatic deterioration. Finally ending in the middle Second Millennium BC, by which time the land and culture which inhabited it was a shadow of its former self. No longer urban, literate or outward looking. Though the Indus itself survived the drought, as a result of a weakening of the monsoon weather system, the once lush Ghaggar-Hakra river was entirely dried up, leaving just wasteland where once lush forests and grasslands stretched. And here is where the controversy stems. At some point during the decline a new people arrived in North India. By the end of the Second Millennium BC this new culture had replaced the language of the Indus with an Indo-European one. It would be a thousand years before writing would emerge again, based on the entirely different language of the horse riding newcomers. Though very little is for certain here and so many mysteries remain, the non Indo-European family of Dravidian languages, surviving only in the southernmost regions of India, may be akin to the original tongue of Mohenjo Daro.

Heading back to the bus we meet up with our police escort - A bunch of guys with ak-47s hanging off the tuktuk in front of us - and on we go to our next destination. Like clockwork, with Mohenjo Daro completed, as if everything had been held together just for the event, my constitution begins to fall apart. Gazing out at the incredible sites and sounds on the highway around me, I settle in for a challenging six hour drive along bumpy dirt roads towards Harappa and Taxila beyond. A journey across thousands of years of South Asian prehistory.

Wildly frustrating at times - the saga of attaining a visa and the chaos of Islamabad airport being particular highlights - Pakistan remains one of the greatest countries I’ve had the pleasure of visiting. The reality is that I was the impatient one. The Pakistanis around me approaching life with stoic acceptance. Always a welcoming grin and a happy face wherever I found myself.

In a nation where the Mausoleum of the beloved founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) faces a real struggle to keep the lights on, and almost everyone lives in a state of poverty, Mohenjo Daro is of course at risk. With so much of the site now exposed to the air without protective covering, it is slowly being eroded away - more being lost every time it rains. If nothing is done, it is only a matter of time now before it all melts away into dust. As a direct result of its excavation; the gods they worshipped, baked bricks they made into homes, and script with which they recorded it all, disappearing forever.

A city once so alive, seeming so immortal, leaving just dust in its wake. Perhaps one day in the future archaeologists will dig through the remnants of our own world, marvelling at the records we left behind, and pondering as the writing suddenly goes blank, our histories lasting only as long as the computer chips on which they are stored. How long until our own towering cities of glass and steel will come to an end? Our story, like the Harappans before us will be nothing more than a layer of earth, ephemeral fragments and forgotten dreams.

Thanks for reading. If you want to know more about the fascinating world of the bronze age. Here’s a 6 and a half hour documentary I made on Greece during the Mycenaean era-

Just a light wind accompanies us as we lift off into the skies - we couldn’t have asked for better conditions. The plane shudders slightly in the warm air as we climb higher, a vast expanse of sand and gravel stretching to the horizon. But there is life here too, lush greens lining both sides of the Nasca river valley just as they have for thousands of years. We’re not headed to these settled regions though - we’re going outside the habitable zone.

Levelling out at some one thousand feet in the air, it isn’t long before the first clusters reveal themselves far below. Wide straight lines extending across the wasteland for hundreds of metres. As I squint my eyes, attempting to take in as much as I can in the brief seconds our pilot allows, the unmistakable outline of a leviathan careens into view - a mighty whale etched into the soil of the pampa some fifteen hundred years in the past.

The plane wheels around so both sides can see this colossal mystery etched out on the sunburnt parchment, and then we’re off to the next. Thousands of them are out here. Straight lines, trapezoids, spirals, and most famous of all - geoglyphs depicting animals, with the largest being well over a hundred metres in diameter. For a century now since their rediscovery by early aviators in the 1920s, they have baffled scholars and the general public alike. Theories ranging from celestial calendars, sacred pathways and messages meant only for the gods.

Today most tourists come to Nasca to see the most famous of the geoglyphs - the monkey, the spider, the condor, the hummingbird and many more, all hundreds of feet in diameter. But there is much more to be seen too. Deeper into the pampa, (meaning plain in Spanish) and amidst the neighbouring Palpa Valley, thousands upon thousands of similarly time intensive creations were writ large on the gravelly desert floor by pushing the dark top layer away from the pink hued sand underneath. In total, these shapes stretch across the hillsides and plateaus between the lower branches of the Rio Grande in Southern Peru for an astonishing thousand miles and more, over an area of four hundred square miles - their purpose remaining largely unknown. It’s not at all hyperbolic to say that this landscape is one of the most important archeological locations on the planet.

Arriving into the town of Nasca the afternoon before after a coach journey of nearly five hundred kilometres from the capital, it doesn’t take long to see how much the popularity of the Nasca Lines has impacted life over the past sixty years. All the way down the coast from Lima small towns like this one line both sides of the highway. Most are gripped by poverty, often of a type scarcely seen in the western world, shanty towns of corrugated iron and immense hardship at the bottom rung of this especially unequal country. Many thrown up only in recent decades since the mass exodus of impoverished mountain folk heading to the lowlands in search of a better life and to escape political turmoil. In Nasca however, where tourists have flocked since the 1960s, bringing money with them, the situation doesn’t seem so bad. The clear effects of the tourist industry can be seen in flourishing local business, myriad souvenir shops and excellent cafes in the town centre. From the pavement to the street signs above, and everywhere in between, depictions of the geoglyphs can be seen everywhere we look.

Heading over to the far side of town my wife and I do what we do best and take a stroll to the local museum, where we come face to face with the builders of the lines. Their mummified heads - long dark hair still intact, impressive colourful polychrome ceramics and some of the greatest textiles ever made in the Americas; and by extension, the world, are to be seen. Unfortunately due to the extreme poverty of this Latin American nation almost all Nasca artefacts ultimately derive from looted cemeteries. Only adding to the enigmatic nature of this ancient culture which long predates the more famous Inca who greeted the first Spanish Conquistadors in 1532. Even today, undisturbed sites are extremely rare. Most settlements and cemeteries already pocked by looters holes by the time archaeologists hear of them.

Nevertheless there is still much that has been learned over the past century of study and more. Outside in the museum courtyard we see one of the great secrets to Nasca success, a culture which thrived out here amidst the Rio Grande, Ica and Pisco two thousand years ago, where rain is almost non existent today. Here is a life size recreation of the engineering marvel that brought life to the desert, allowing the irrigation of vast tracts of lands that would otherwise have been wasteland. We know it as a puquio - an underground aqueduct. Hundreds of these marvels still survive today, some are even still in use. Far from a total mystery, the ingenious engineers who made the puquios are the builders of the Nasca Lines. And they didn’t stop there, not far from the town of Nasca the vast ceremonial centre of Cahuachi with its mighty pyramids rises up over the river. One of the most impressive ancient settlements in all of Peru. But that’s a story for another day.

The Nasca river valley may appear desolate to the traveler who visits today, but it wasn't always this way. Though this corner of the Atacama Desert has been drying up continuously for thousands of years, the bones of four thousand year old deer and other species that no longer inhabit the region pay testament to a once flourishing land teeming with life, as well as vibrant human societies who came to live alongside them.

Archaeologist Marcus Reindel who completed the most recent work on the Nasca Lines - a vast international study lasting more than a decade, theorises that like many other places on earth, Ancient Mesopotamia among them, it was this very hardship of environment that led to the flourishing of civilisation here, spurred by the successful colonisation of the desert for as long as the land and the sky allowed it - as long as at least some water could be harnessed from its distant source in the Andes mountains.

That evening, following a healthy dose of Pisquo sours and excellent Peruvian cuisine, we head to the observatory at the DM Hoteles. Until her death in 1998 at the venerable age of 95 this historic hotel was home to a local legend. Known today as the Lady of Nasca, there is a good argument for Maria Reiche to be the very reason we and all the other travellers of the last six decades are here.

A mathematician by training with a great deal of expertise in astronomy too, Reiche first came to Nasca in the 1930s from her native Germany as assistant to the American historian Paul Kosok. After Kosok’s retirement, Reiche made it her life’s work to unravel the mysteries of this corner of southern Peru. Writing a total of fifteen books on the subject, she would never leave.

Beginning with 1949’s Mystery on The Desert, very much in line with popular theories at the time of Maya astronomer kings and astronomical alignments at stone circles and temples all over the world, Reiche was convinced that the lines had to be a kind of calendar for the local priestly class to understand the world around them and predict events for their agricultural society. For decades, working largely alone, Reiche would go out to work tirelessly on the pampa, measuring, walking and writing, and though her theories are now largely disregarded she still holds a reputation as populariser of the lines and thus the reason for the towns prosperity. The house she lived in on the Pan American Highway for the first decades of her career has been converted to an excellent museum. Her room in the DM Hoteles, given free of charge for the last twenty five years of her life is still preserved in her honour.

Not all theories are created equal, and by the late 1960s, much to Reiche’s irritation, the fringe idea of a Swiss writer who’d never actually spent time in Nasca would eclipse the work of legitimate researchers in the popular imagination. His name was Erich Von Daniken - convicted criminal and pseudoarchaeologist whose 1968 book can be traced directly to the Ancient Aliens series that plagues the History Channel today.

In the late 2000s, at a car boot sale near Glastonbury in the south west of England - knowing nothing of the wider story of the Nasca Lines - I myself came upon this book in that other hot bed of new age spirituality. Treating it mostly as a riveting story of science fiction I devoured Chariots of the Gods? in just three days, enthralled by the wild ideas and globe trotting archaeological adventure. If only it was real. As Mulder in the X Files famously said some ten years before- I wanted to believe. Unfortunately once I began to seriously study archaeology in my final years of university, any charade of Von Daniken’s legitimacy fell away into the abyss. It is a book so riddled with flagrant mistakes and fabrications that on a second flick through recently, the hindsight of fifteen years of research exposes it as the work of a charlatan. A visit to Nasca cements this realisation even further. As Maria Reiche famously once commented, given the nature of the pampa she was afraid the spacemen would have gotten stuck.

Heading past the Whale the array of geoglyphs we see is staggering. The Lizard - sliced cleanly in two by the builders of the Pan American Highway, who had no idea it was there at the start of the Twentieth Century. The Monkey - almost two hundred feet wide, with its doubly wound spiral tail curled in the dust. The Hummingbird - poised in eternal flight. The Spider - spun from the very bones of the land, and the Condor, its vast claw clearly visible at ground level. These are the most famous ones. Further afield it gets even stranger. A mighty tree, branches grasping through the desert, a one hundred foot tall humanoid with owl-like eyes, arms raised to beckon us from a nearby hillside. Many date back hundreds of years even before the time of the Nasca to their precursor culture the Paracas which would grow continuously into the Nasca as they moved inland in search of water and land to irrigate. Now, with the benefit of decades of serious archaeological investigation, we can comfortably say it is this search for the life giving liquid that almost certainly led to their creation.

As for the method of their creation, experimental archaeologists have successfully created Nasca Lines many times over the last decades. Without considerable effort, in 1982, American author Joe Nickell and just five others were able to recreate The Condor in a field in Kentucky, using just sticks and rods, traditional methods available to the Ancient Nasca. The mighty claw of the bird being clearly visible from the ground, but the rest of it, only ever intended to be seen by the gods.

Setting aside Von Daniken and Reiche, and going in with no preconceived notions, over the last two decades the latest researchers have compiled immense amounts of data. Far from being intended for human eyes from above, we must remember that people on the ground made the lines. Magnetometry in particular, which maps the ground in immense detail, clearly shows that vast numbers of people walked along the lines. Occasionally smashing finely made pottery into the floor as they went, and engaged in ceremonies by altars lined with food and offerings.

Working primarily in the relatively unknown Palpa Valley just to the north of Nasca, beginning in 2009, Marcus Reindel and Johnny Isla, a German and a Peruvian respectively, working with a large international team of geologists, drone operators, archaeologists and even computer scientists , have compiled a vast database of precise information in order to comprehensively map out the entire region. The lines were found not just to have correlated with geographical features and shown clear evidence of being repeatedly walked on, but the line makers were driven, without a doubt, by an ‘inescapable concern about water’. Unlike Reiche’s idea of orientation to the heavens, or Von Danichens landing grounds for aliens, the lines unmistakably and unsurprisingly pointed to the source of Nascan water, the Andes.

Coming here from all over the Nasca world on pilgrimages, people would walk or even dance along the lines, many specifically designed to be wide enough for just a single person. It has long been noted that most of the animals depicted are those associated with water. The spider for example always being found close to water and the condor traditionally coming down from the Andes after rain. Here travellers may have absorbed the essences of the animals depicted, as part of irrigation ceremonies to beseech the gods for rain and fertility.

Viewed again with this in mind, most of the geoglyphs reveal themselves as ritual maze like labyrinths with entrances and exits. They are pathways, rendered with continuous lines that do not cross themselves. And as for the vast trapezoids, the largest of all the Nasca Lines - one of which in the valley of Ingenio has had just a tiny fragment of it in converted into a football field, occupying only a fragment of the enclosed space - they may not have been used for a vastly dissimilar purpose in the past. Just like the geoglpyhs, the ground on the edges of studied trapezoids being found to have been walked on considerably. But the inner sections left empty, almost certainly ritually cleaned like the central plazas of Cahuachi before. They may have been vast open air amphitheatre type arenas for ritual ceremonies and places for people to gather.

Though specifically warned to not turn my head to look out of both windows as the plane rolled from one side to the other, I simply couldn’t help myself. And as the plane finally came to land just half an hour later, waves of intense nausea began to spread over my body, only subsiding when we arrived at Cahuachi not long after. The central place of the Nasca world with its vast pyramids rising over the river. Here, where water rises naturally out of the earth as if by magic, a great conglomeration of lines are to be seen. Messages written in stone and time. Spoken not with words but with the language of the earth, sky, and most importantly, of water.

Thanks for reading. If you want to learn more about the incredible world of the Pre-Colombian Americas. Here’s a 4 four documentary I made earlier on the Maya -

Loomed over by mighty mountain chains, the island of which it is a part, Naxos, is unique in many ways. To enter the hinterlands of this largest landmass in the Cycladic Islands is to roam in a continent in itself. A land awash with mythic associations and genuine epoch defining archaeology. Where the demi-god Dionysus danced and Zeus himself is said to have spent his childhood.

Much closer to the sea, past the foothills and ancient groves of the western lowlands, the remains of Mycenaean chamber tombs sprawl at the waters edge. Mostly ruined now on the jagged rocks of Aplomata where they’ve stood for well over three thousand years. Victim to the earthquakes which have so often blighted this hauntingly beautiful land.

The tombs overlook a modern town today, commercial hub and largest on the island. A new shoreline for a new epoch.

Just as on many a Greek island there are hotels, beer-guzzling Brits and ancient temples, but Grotta beach is different. Just metres out into the surf at this northern point of the administrative centre of Chora, the ruins of a complete submerged ancient settlement are to be seen, other sections having once sprawled under the modern town.

In ancient times, the view here would’ve been very different. The shoreline, and bronze age city with it, jutting out much further into the waves.

On windy days, of which there are aplenty on the Cyclades there’s no chance of sighting the bulwarks of those 3400 year old remains. But when it’s clear, a truly astounding display is to be had. A real life Atlantis that sunk beneath the waves at the end of the late Bronze Age.

I - To The Sea

When Scottish archaeologist Duncan Mackenzie set out from Athens to Phylakopi to embark on the first full-scale excavations in the Aegean at the very end of the Nineteenth Century, on one occasion in particularly bad conditions it took ten days to reach the island of Melos.

Standing out on deck today, the relatively short crossing from Ios to Naxos should only take five or six hours. The crossing from Athens to Syros had taken just a couple, and Syros to Ios not much longer. But that’s when the biting reality of the Cycladic weather began to make itself known.

Stranded on Ios, at the mercy of the mighty wind, I was given my first taste of what must have been a regular occurrence for mariners before the advent of the modern world. An immensely strong squall of wind having formed outside of Athens, temporarily stalling all shipping in the region.

It was the end of the season on Ios and few holiday-makers remained, the usually bustling party island now being reduced to its few hundred permanent residents and a healthy scattering of wild-eyed life-long travellers. I had the particular pleasure of conversation with a reincarnated Atlantean. An Australian who’d travelled to Ios to open a Stargate, she reliably informed me.

Finally setting out at 5pm, we headed out the long way. First to Santorini - where the very real Atlantis-esque metropolis of Akrotiri was inundated by volcanic ash during the middle Bronze Age - before rounding Paros and heading back up to our final destination. A thick black maelstrom of surf churning in the abyss below.

I’d been exploring the ruined citadels of the mainland when I first heard of that submerged city off the Naxian shore. Perhaps it was the dusty October air, maybe the burned off dry grass framing the immense blocks of cyclopean masonry, but the sea appealed immensely at that moment. Just as we know it did to those late Bronze Age mariners who took to the waves from bases like Mycenae, Tiryns, Orchomenos & Thebes over three thousand five hundred years ago to expand their glittering realms into the Aegean.

Yet unlike on the mainland, where for the most part the surviving sites from that far-flung era consist of fortified hill-top centres and overgrown cemeteries. as impressive as they often are, on Naxos, according to my guide book, the remains of part of an entire late bronze age city can be seen, amidst the waves and the tourists off Grotta beach in the main settlement of the island. And not only that but ancient Cycladic ruins too, built by the ancestors of the Mycenaeans from well over a thousand years earlier. Still standing underneath the modern town, Unearthed every now and then by construction work.

So then, after a week amidst the great citadels and capitals of the Mycenaean world, I found myself in Volos, where in myth the famed hero Jason and his argonauts set out on their expedition to distant Colchis across the Black Sea, and where a very real Mycenaean palace has been excavated in recent years. From there we set out for the sea.

That ferry from Ios was itself over fifty years old, a slow moving elegant relic from an older time. Veteran of a thousand storms. The wine-dark sea was calm by then, accommodating even. A few beers and some pastries later and we arrived. Ushered out the doors by expert crewman, and onwards, into one of the most important settlements in the ancient history of the Aegean.

II - On The Island

Heading south from Chora, mountains loom in the blue sky above. Low shoreline stretching off to the west.

To trace that coast further, past windswept holiday homes and plots of farmland, you’ll reach an exposed promontory jutting out to the sea, flanked by a cove on either side. And on top of that crag, stone buildings, of a date well close to four thousand years in the past.

It’s not signposted, and few know of its existence today, but this is Mikri Vigla, once of the most important Middle Bronze Age settlements on the island, with links to Melos, Thera, mainland Greece and arguably most importantly, Minoan Crete. For in the last century a fine collection of anthropomorphic figurines was found here, leading to the proposed identification of this site as a Minoan style hill-top sanctuary, one of the only ones ever found outside of Crete, testifying to the importance of the island during that distant epoch of Minoan hegemony over the waves.

Today most visitors come for the beaches. If they are aware of the history it’s the classical age that takes precedence. And yet, astonishingly, as hundreds of years of archaeological investigation has clearly demonstrated, in terms of its antiquity, Mikri Vigla is far out-shadowed by the other offerings of the island.

From the Fifteenth Century AD, first explorers and then antiquaries travelled to Naxos to speculate and investigate its deep past. By the time the sensational tombs of the long lost Cycladic Civilisation began to be investigated on nearby Syros, it wasn’t long before similar finds were made on Naxos too. A major centre for that remarkable Aegean spanning culture that thrived over a thousand years before even the heyday of both Minoan and Mycenaean Greece in the Second Millennium BCE.

Peeling off the coast toward the vast mountains of the interior, a wilder land opens up. Low hills giving way to rising valleys lined by oak trees and olive groves. Before long in this starkly beautiful land you can no longer see the sea. Dwarfed by Mount Zas, the tallest on the island, one of many sites where Zeus, king of the gods is said to have spent his childhood, genuine Neolithic and Bronze Age remains have been excavated.

At this place where myth and archaeology entwine, gnarled ancient woodland still holds sway, just as it once did on every Cycladic island, from the bleak north of Syros to the rugged peaks of Amorgos. Other isolated remnants of that long ago time before our ancestors began to alter their environments in the Neolithic can still be seen at the museum at the centre of the island, in a classic Cycladic settlement. In design not having changed much since the days of Kastri and Skarkos we’d seen in the days before, separated by more than four thousand years.

Greeted by the wide smile of the curator, in the museum we learn of the very first traces of habitation on the island on Stelida hill. Mesolithic hunters having braved the open sea to reach new edens like this. Great risks bringing even greater rewards.

Finally as the mountains begin falling away, the road leads down to lowlands of the east. Here very few people live today, particularly toward the south, where there are no towns and few holiday resorts. Aside from a few shepards huts and mountain hamlets it is a depopulated land. But this was not always the case. When metallurgy first arrived in the Aegean at the beginning of the Third Millennium BC, here on the south east coast is where people thrived, their settlements thus having largely been saved from destruction for us to visit today.

Given the sheer age of Early Cycladic (3000-2000 BCE) settlements the bulk of evidence tends to come from cemetery sites. Many of which suffered looting long before archaeologists got a chance to undertake studies. Nevertheless a picture of a densely populated Naxos has been developed, in some areas significantly more so than it is today. Coastal settlements existing all around the island wherever flat plains lie adjacent to safe harbours. Of which there are many.

—

Isolated by the Zas range, the southern-most Cycladic settlements at Spedhos, Kalandos and Panormos must have had more in common with the neighbouring islands to the south than their Naxian neighbours to the north and west. Safe from the violent north wind, this was a safe stopping-off point for travellers from distant lands. In clear view of a particularly significant religious sanctuary rising way out in the calm blue. So close and yet so far.

For in those days, at the foot of nearby Keros, stood the island settlement of Dhaskalio, a pyramidal visage constructed of white Naxian marble. Its size, impressive architecture and offerings from almost every island in the Cyclades, testify to its sacred importance to the inhabitants of all the islands. Where we know people came from afar to celebrate and worship.

On a hill-top at the southern end of Naxos, in clear view of Keros, the settlement of Panormos must have been an important place in its day. But ultimately, everything ends. Toward the end of its existence at the end of the Third Millennium BC Panormos was heavily fortified, and like most Cycladic sites, met a fiery end.

The exact circumstance that led to the end of Cycladic Civilisation remain one of the great mysteries of prehistoric archaeology. Climatic disturbances, and natural disasters and outside invasion all being proposed. But by around 2000 BC it was over, and Naxos, just like all the islands of the Aegean, underwent great change. Whilst the Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages are well represented on Naxos, for the Middle Bronze Age we have next to nothing.

Heading back over the mountains, while the south and east go silent, the Cycladic settlements that also existed on the west coast would become the nexus of a new society. At Chora, Kastraki, Agiasos, Apollonas and Mikri Vigla.

It is at Mikri Vigla that we get some of the best evidence for this next phase on the island, for at least some archaeologically verifiable newcomers had by then arrived. A gradual ‘Minoanisation’ being seen from as early as 1900 BC. In the form of settlers or incoming fashions. An outpouring of the palatial civilisation of Crete that can be seen all over the Aegean at this time, and even beyond. A gradual adoption of Minoan styles being seen on Rhodes and all the way north along the Anatolian coast to the Dardanelles, Lemnos and Samothrace, including sites in Anatolia itself like Miletus with its excellent natural harbour.

Other sites with large safe havens for ships to call at like Kea, Melos and Thera became melting pots for people as well as cultures. Nodes in a burgeoning international trade network oozing from Crete to Italy in the west, the Levant in the east. This burgeoning international Cretan system can most obviously be seen at the massive city of Akrotiri on Thera where ornate murals adorn luxury private homes. Though no so-called palatial complexes have yet been found like those on Crete, on Naxos too links to the Cretan palatial elites have been found, in the form of inscriptions in Linear A, a unique Cretan writing system.

Unfortunately, besides Mikri Vigla and a handful of other noted sites in the north west and central parts of the island there is little other evidence for the middle Bronze Age on Naxos, but by the Late Bronze Age all that was to change. For yet another culture had arrived.

Heading back over the Zas range toward the main Chora of the island where all roads lead today, a classical sanctuary sprawls on a low hillside. In the shade of gnarled oak trees evidence of open air worship and communal meals has been found as well as occupation during the earlier Mycenaean age.

In classical times the place was a centre of worship for the demi-god Dionysus, son of Zeus. That trickster god said to have frolicked in Naxian groves during the age of heroes, ultimately becoming entangled with the daughter of King Minos of Crete, Midea after she was abandoned by Theseus heading back to Athens after defeating the minotaur.

While archaeological evidence of the slaying of the Minotaur is lacking, genuine Bronze Age offerings have been found at the sanctuary of Yria. This was was a place where people danced, revelled and spoke to the gods. Cultural traditions that originated on the mainland and may well have flowed directly into the later classical age. For by the Fourteenth Century BCE, though a ‘de-Naxianisation’ never took place, a process of  ‘Mycenaenisation’ had certainly arrived.

It remains unclear whether the Mycenaean advance into the Cyclades was based on political expansion, conquest, or cultural and economic, but soon enough in the form of pottery, stone vases, figurines, wall paintings and tholos tombs it can be seen all over the island. It was at this time that habitation seems to have permanently shifted to the west of the island, where shelter from winds, better harbours and efficient control of the straits to Paros could be utilised, as well as being closer to the mainland.

Though people would sometimes move inland to re-occupy older sites, like in the medieval age,  from then on, the modern Chora, known as Grotta in ancient times, has the distinction of being the only true urban centre on the island. Unlike many other Cycladic islands which had several competing city states, on Naxos, in classical times just as before in the Mycenaean age, there was only one.

III - By Grotta Beach

In the Fourth Century BC the lauded philosopher Aristotle had much to say on his world. Polymath and teacher to Alexander the Great, that great cornerstone of Western thought wrote as many as two hundred treatises in his lifetime. Among them was one specifically concerning the citizens of the island of Naxos. Though like so much from the ancient world the work is lost today, brief fragments do survive in the works of later writers. All of them speak of famously wealthy Naxian citizens all living together in one place. In one city.

Archaeology and history both suggest that some time in the very earliest days of the Archaic Era, almost all other settlements on the island fell out of use in favour of this single polis. Both it and the wider island becoming synonymous with the name Naxos. By far the largest Cycladic island to have a single political centre. A situation so unique as to warrant a philosophical investigation by the likes of Aristotle.

—

The earliest known reference to a fortified city on the island comes from the works of Herodotus, when he described the unsuccessful besiegement of the place by the Persians in the summer of 499 BC. Later still Atheneus makes mention of the city existing earlier in the Sixth Century BC. A situation that remained the same by the time of the Roman writer Pliny. And though just how long that had been the case was a mystery to those ancient writers today we have archaeology to add to the tale.

Though Naxian prehistory is still an unfinished puzzle, the main chora of the island today is clearly a place of astonishing antiquity. One of the only sites in the Cyclades to have evidence of habitation all the way from the Early Helladic in the Third Millennium BCE to the present, and a good deal of archaeology having been carried out too, though always constricted by the difficulties of modern habitation. Consequently, unlike the Cycladic and Mycenaean levels, the precise locations of the late archaic and classical cities remain unknown.

Some of the very first Western European explorers to arrive on Naxos in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire noted the existence of the ancient city under the modern one. The likes of E. G. Pitton, Joseph Tournefort, E.D Clarke and W.M Leake all writing accounts in the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Soon being followed by the earliest full scale archaeological enquires on the cusp of the Twentieth Century. Excavations have continued ever since.

Perhaps the most iconic sight in the Chora today - just as it was in ancient times - is the remains of the colossal temple of the Archaic (C. 800-480 BCE). Jutting out to the sea on a rocky promontory known as Palatia today, the temple, dedicated to Delian Apollo, whose sanctuary on Delos lies just over the sea to the north, was never actually finished. Though if it had been it would have been one of the largest in the Greek world at the time.

Bounded now by high rises and modern streets, Palatia stills wears its ancient heritage proudly. The small bays on either side likely providing good shelter in the Bronze Age from north and south winds, a double harbour for incoming ships.

In the mid Twentieth Century Greek archaeologist Nicholaos Kondoleon hypothesised Palatia to be the original Cycladic acropolis of the settlement. Though no concrete evidence has been found here thus far, the archaic temple having destroyed any foundations that may have once survived, Kondoleon based his assertion on decades of uncovering ruins amidst the urban sprawl. For on the flat plain opposite Palatia, bounded by a river bed to the east and the hills of Aplomata and Kamini to the north, the city of Grotta once sprawled. Abundant drinking water from the river and salt from nearby marshes providing a solid basis for settled life. It comes as no surprise then, given the excellent position for a settlement that the oldest traces of settlement go all the way back to the Neolithic. With two other hills, also coated in thick habitation layers today, providing easy locations for fortified sites. One now encased in the bastions of a Venetian castle, the other the oldest high school in the city.

When German archaeologist Gabriel Welter arrived in the 1930s to embark on the first modern excavations in Naxos he found a place of immense antiquity. Describing a number of early Helladic buildings, more of which have been dug out during construction work over the last century and can still be seen.

Welter also found what he described as two cyclopean walls of a fortified settlement of the Late Helladic III era. Over which the remnants of a badly preserved second settlement stood. Unfortunately no plans of the digs were ever published, nor any pottery illustrated. Welter refilling his trenches and covering them with sand after he was finished. With the subsequent hostilities between Germany and Greece even leading to the locations of the digs being temporarily lost.

The next excavators to arrive were Greeks, Nicholaos Kondoleon and Vassilis Lambrinoudakis, who would dig on and off at Chora all the way from 1949 to 1985. Like Welter before them, both men found evidence of a significant settlement dating from the Early Bronze Age all the way through to the late Mycenaean era. As well as investigating rich elite cemeteries on the adjacent Aplomata and Kamini hills. The wealth and power of which, they concluded, should imply the existence of a Mycenaean acropolis like those of the mainland.

There is a reason why this isn’t a popular tourist destination like the vast remains of Akrotiri or Phylakopi however. Not only is the proposed location of Kondoleon’s citadel completely coated by medieval Venetian structures, but today much of the lower city itself remains under beach front real estate. Another significant portion, lying underwater.

Though only scant sections of the city have been excavated to date, whenever construction allows it, real insights have been gleaned into just how important the place was in the Mycenaean era and before. Colossal walls, building structures and even a well-built road surviving to the present, the latter constructed in a style most recently associated with similar discoveries made on Crete at Palaeokastro, Mallia and Kommos. Suggesting the existence of itinerant Minoan craftspeople lending their expertise across the Aegean. Connections between Naxos and Minoan Crete that are also seen in fine pottery that closely imitates Minoan shapes and decoration. Naxian styles having leapt from plainware to elaborately sophisticated designs during the late Middle Bronze Age, just maybe with the arrival of immigrant Cretans to the settlement. Perhaps followed by native Naxians developing their own expertise to imitate the Cretan styles to near perfect level. Perhaps with the intention of selling them on for themselves. Naxians making their own fortunes from the craze for Cretan culture. Because when Minoan culture spread across the Aegean, just as the Mycenaean way of life did after, the situation on the ground may have largely been a cultural expansion rather than primarily a population movement. And by 1400 BC the new craze was for the Mycenaean world. On Naxos, like much of Mycenaean archaeology, most obviously seen in the cemetery evidence.

Through a scattering of fragmented Mycenaean burials have been found across Naxos, by far the best finds were made just next to the main city, where two clusters of collapsed chamber tombs at Aplomata and Kamini yielded significant amounts of metalwork from the middle and late Bronze Age, as well as jewellery, gold, seals, and ornate pictorial pottery.

Given the clear demarcation between the two groups, researchers have suggested the possibility of two competing clans or kin groups having held sway over Mycenaean Naxos. An abundance of bronze weaponry and other war gear for horses implies the existence of a sword-wielding horse-breeding class of warriors. Like so many elites around the globe and in the Mycenaean world in particular, there being a clear emphasis on warfare and hunting in the grave goods. Other items including symbols of prestige and insignias of office. Heavily suggesting those interred to have been active in the management of the island and governance of its economy.  With clear evidence of imports not just from Crete, but Cyprus, the Dodecanese, Attica, the Peloponnese and even the Argolid itself, these must have been very lucrative positions to hold. Naxos seeming to straddle the line between both east and west, and fascinatingly, uniquely, even after the collapse of the palace states of the mainland by the Twelfth Century BCE, it continued to thrive, making up a core part of a so called ‘post-palatial Aegean geography’.

Things were changing though, and even out here in the midst of the islands, Naxos couldn’t escape. Notably within the chamber tombs at the very end of their existence in the Eleventh Century BCE were found two Naue II swords, a new type spreading across Europe at the end of the Bronze Age. For many researchers symbolising the end of the old chariot style of warfare and coming world of the Iron Age.

—

By the time the Persian war machine under Darius the Great arrived at Naxos in 490 BCE to punish the Greek world, ravaging the then flourishing city, enslaving those who didn’t flee to the mountains, the island had been inhabited continually without a visible break for thousands of years. Enjoying of late a period of true greatness which can be seen in the impressive monuments of the nearby Pan-Hellenic sanctuary on Delos, of which Naxos was a major patron, and in the vast marble quarries and temples of the hinterlands.

By the later Eleventh Century BCE, after the Mycenaean Age, those Naxian survivors of the Bronze Age collapse are thought to have retreated inland from the lower city to the raised citadel. Though today any ruins from those middle years lie hidden beneath medieval structures, a vast Venetian castle complex taking up most of it.

Of note for the curious visitor to the citadel today is the archaeological museum, filled with all manner of fascinating pieces from the long history of the island. Many of the artefacts originating from the cemeteries at Aplomata and Kamini. Still venerated today just as they were in the centuries after the Bronze Age. Though here there wasn’t a collapse as such, ways nonetheless changed over the years, populations dwinded. And as the age of Homeric poetry flourished by the Ninth or Eighth Centuries BCE they harked back to their mighty ancestors. In the long winter nights, battered by howling wind and rain, telling stories of the giant figures who once waged their Machiavellian struggles, voyagers who crossed the known world, and hopes for the future to do so themselves once again.

IV - Sunken City

In its prime the Mycenaean city of Grotta spanned an area of some 35,000 square metres. Today it remains the most extensively excavated of any Cycladic settlement of the late bronze age. Whereas the similarly impressive city of Phylakopi on Melos, with its megaron at the heart of the site, is often argued to have been subject to one of the Argolid centres, on Naxos the seat of a powerful aristocratic elite can be seen. Holding sway over the abundant natural resources of the island as well as the production and export of goods to lands far away. Perhaps alone among the Mycenaean settlements of the Cycladic Islands that we know of, Grotta may well have operated independently.

Though much remains invisible, the Mycenaean settlement underneath Chora was clearly a significant urban centre. With well designed harbour installations and various other public works like cemeteries, workshops and perhaps most impressive of all, no doubt protecting its citizens from their violent brethren on the mainland, colossal city walls.

To walk the tight-nit winding streets of a Cycladic settlement today is to experience a very ancient method of settlement construction. The burrow-like streets with occasional covered walk-ways providing excellent protection from the heat of full summer just as they do the extreme winds of winter. For as long as people have built significant settlements on Naxos they have built them like this. Some designs just work. Even with the heavy Mycenaean influence coming over from the mainland during the Fourteenth Century BCE, it seems that older Cycladic values were merged with a fresh infusion of political might. Creating something new but still Naxian all the same.

For the most part, besides the epic fortress of Aghios Andreas on Sifnos, those most obvious of Mycenaean traits, the citadels, are absent from the Cyclades, Asia Minor too. Palaces with painted walls too have generally not been encountered yet. But at Grotta, typical Mycenaean fortifications can be seen, in a type of cyclopean wall unique in all the Cyclades.

Heading through winding streets from the citadel down to the beach, in the late summer of 2022 I walked over the remains of so long ago. And finally when we reached Mitropolis Square I found what I’d been searching for. For here where wide scale excavations could get deep under the city, almost every level of habitation was revealed, including of course the glory days of the Thirteenth Century BC.

Excavations here and at other parts of the city revealed not just a flourishing settlement but one that was beset by the ever perennial threat in this region. Because some time around 1200 BC an earthquake seems to have struck, which may have been made much worse by the inevitable flooding caused by the low lying nature of the settlement. The old city then seems to have been levelled and a new centrally planned one built on top, with a particular north-south orientation and enclosed by mighty walls, consisting of colossal stone base and mud-brick superstructure. This latest city would survive for centuries to come. A much longer time than almost any other Mycenaean power centre at the time.

Even after the breakup of the palatial system of the mainland, mercantile activity continued, as well as the high level of ship building of the previous century. Though of course, this was a dangerous time, for when central powers crumble, piracy flourishes. Archaeologist Andreas Vlachopoulos calls the Aegean Sea routes at this time ‘anti-monopolist’, and large crater pots from Kos portray scenes of intense sea born warfare, as do others from many other centres. Overall though, unlike many other areas in the Aegean, at the end of the Second Millennium BC Naxos wasn’t just surviving, but thriving. With a community now more Naxian than anything else.

As the so called Proto-Geometric Phase (C. 1050-900 BCE) is gradually approached, narrative scenes portrayed on pottery are often triumphant. Of heroic labours being undertaken by seafarers. Not surprising, for in that coming age the exploits of heroes would be regarded above all else.

At some point a man made channel had been built to connect the Palatia headland to the city, giving it two harbours to utilise. But these efforts had been too much too late. Perhaps as a result of earthquakes, or simply because of rising waters evidenced by sand deposits, by the Eleventh Century BC, the northernmost part of the city had been completely submerged, a quay and other houses only just surviving above the waves.

We don’t know how or when exactly, but at some point the decision was made to abandon the place entirely, the remaining population moving their homes up to the Kastro Hill where the archaic and classical cities would develop. There, life continued as it had. The old city turning into a place for the dead. Random burials eventually being organised into a geometric era cemetery, with enclosures for tombs. There, where the still visible walls of the city stood above ground, individuals were carefully buried alongside their vaunted ancestors. Finally, a large earthen tumulus was built over the geometric cemetery at Mitropolis Square. Likely becoming a focal point of worship and commemoration of those who came before. The impact they had on their descendants being so profound that they could not, or would not abandon their city.

Heading out of the Mitropolis Museum and down toward the sea, a scattering of Mycenaean edifices can be spied, though almost all have been covered up for protection since their excavations. Near the western end of the beach three Early Cycladic houses can still be seen on either side of a narrow lane. But it is out on the beach itself and the surf beyond where the best remains of all are to be found. Near perennial winds make the task difficult, but after two days of trying, the city underneath the waves can clearly be spied.

Only future investigations will reveal more of the secrets of this Bronze Age powerhouse, but until then aerial photography will have to suffice.

Though new populations would continue to arrive during the course of the Iron Age as the great reshuffling of the Greek colonisation period began, like most places, it is entirely likely that many inhabitants of the Chora today are descended from those heroes of long ago. Only future excavations will reveal what other wonders lie hidden under the urban sprawl.

If you’d like to learn more about the Mycenaean world, then here is a video I made earlier on another fascinating archaeological site from that axial age. Thanks and see you next time.

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Alongside scrap metal and plastic, like few other places in the world this region of the Mediterranean has a glut of evidence from the ancient world too. Not just settlement sites and outposts but vast metropolises of the ancestors in abundance. A time when many of those settlements of antiquity surpassed modern towns in both size and relative splendour.

One of those places, hidden up high on a little visited ridge-line in the south central Peloponnese is Nichoria.

Unlike so many others in a wide arc from here all the way to the north side of the Black Sea, and westwards too to Italy, this sprawling site doesn’t originate in the Archaic or Classical eras of Greek history. Of Athens & Sparta & Alexander the Great.

Nichoria dates to a time before. To the First Greece. For here are to be found a number of Tholos Tombs, relics from the Mycenaean Age. Of Homer’s Odyssey and Jason’s monster ridden search for the Golden Fleece. Of forlorn colossal citadels of the prehistoric world. Cyclopean masonry and heavily armoured chariot riding warrior lords. Of elaborate palaces and intricately crafted bath tubs, olive oil, feasting and wine.

Though little remains now above ground from that ancient time, to walk in the once mighty citadel here at Nichoria today is to gain a fleeting window into the heroic past.

I - Search For A City

When archaeologist Carl Blegen set about digging up the ancient ruins of Pylos In 1939 the world watched on in awe. Within weeks, astounding discoveries were made.

In the midst of an immensely impressive palatial complex dating to the Second Millenium BC an entire archive of records was unearthed, written in a mysterious text known as Linear B. By far the largest collection of the writing system ever discovered, it could only have been the long lost library of an ancient European kingdom, known previously only in epic storytelling tradition and myth.

Soon enough the place was named for the wise king said to have ruled these parts in the days of the Trojan War. The long disappeared world of the Iliad and The Odyssey seeming to come back to life. Today, whether strictly historical or not, it still proudly bears that name. The Palace of Nestor.

Though a golden age for archaeological research, the late 1930s was of course a time of immense societal turbulence and cataclysmic change too. Within a matter of months of the first digs at Pylos the Axis powers moved their plans to fruition. Greece, falling within the orbit of fascist Italy, would doggedly fight for its independence for years to come.

When Blegen was finally was able to return to Pylos to regroup with his Greek colleagues; like the aftermath of all wars, everything had changed.

For one thing; radiocarbon dating, a by-product of the ridiculously high budgets pumped into the war effort, was bringing archaeology in line with modern science for the first time. Providing exact dates within around 50 years or so where rough estimates had sufficed before. But when it came to periods of the very late prehistoric period, such as the heyday of Mycenaean Greece and the previously only mythic Trojan War, the new dates were often shockingly accurate to the estimations of classical scholars.

Unknown to Blegen, on the other side of the Atlantic, a New York scholar had been tirelessly working for decades on the Linear B tablets found on Crete as far back as the late 1800s by Sir Arthur Evans.

Though Alice Kober died before the work could fully be brought to fruition, her efforts and those of countless others would culminate in 1952 when Linear B was finally successfully translated.

As it so often does, the breakthrough came from an outsider.

Michael Ventris, an amateur code-breaker had long had a hunch that Linear B was in fact Greek, in its very earliest archaic form, and that hunch turned out to be correct.

Finally by the mid 1950s for the first time in over three thousand years the words of that ancient land could be read. The stories they told, though usually consisting of minimal records rather than epic sagas, have nevertheless added near unfathomable amounts to our understanding of Bronze Age Greece. Specifically revealing unique insights into the inner workings of one of its foremost kingdoms, sprawling across Messenia. In Homeric tradition, said to be the kingdom of Pylos ruled over by wise old Nestor.

Amidst the hundreds of tablets in the so called ‘Archives Complex’ at the Palace of Nestor were found a number now known as the Coastguard Tablets. A unique list of the defences and settlements in the kingdom, for administrative purposes described as divided into two provinces - de-we-ro-ai-ko-da-I-ja and pe-rai-ko-ra-I-ja, meaning the ‘Hither’ and the ‘Far’ Lands. Usually assumed to be oriented from Pylos, perhaps as well as the recently discovered secondary capital centre at Iklaina not far away.

The list begins at the northern portion of the ‘hither’, or ‘near’ province, running down and along the coast of the peninsula, ending with just one town in the ‘far’ province. It is possible that the only settlements listed are those on the coast or near enough to the coast to act as part of a sea borne defence system. Perhaps explaining why most of the settlements in Pylos, unlike the Argolid and elsewhere, did not need fortification walls, their mastery over the coast being their defence.

Though no consensus exists today, given the fragmentary nature of the sources and the sheer antiquity of their age, the Hither or Near Province has nonetheless been widely hypothesised to lie west of the Aegaleon and Skala mountains, with the Far Province and its shorter coastline situated within the hinterlands of the Messenian Valley. Just one town of the Far province is named in the Coastguard Tablets. Not surprisingly ever since their translation scholars have hypothesised where that town could be.

Translated as the rather indecipherable name Ti-mi-to-a-ke-e, it was not the capital but one of seven principle towns, usually assumed to be a coastal site or near to the ancient shoreline at least, as well as being close to the provincial border. With hopes of finding another archive, the search was on.

Of the nearly two hundred sites surveyed over the ensuing decades, just a handful of particularly large candidates were pinpointed as potential locations for Mycenaean towns or cities. One of those sites, among the ten largest in the whole of Messenia and a place already highlighted by Ventris’ colleague and Mycenaean expert John Chadwick, is Nichoria.

Besides the Taygetos mountains rising in the haze to the east, the summit of Nichoria provides excellent visibility in all directions. A natural crossroads well placed for communication as well as defence.

Only two kilometres south is the Messenian Gulf, just about visible today in a narrow coastal strip past hilly expanse of olive groves. It is important to remember that shorelines shift and change over thousands of years. Here in ancient days the waves would’ve lapped much closer than they do today.

In the Pylos Tablets Ti-mi-to-a-ke-e is said to have acted as a lookout station. One node in a vast coastal network.

We can imagine runners heading off or beacons being lit to send messages to the palace as soon as unwanted visitors were seen, be they trade ships to be taxed or plundered, attack fron other Mycenaean palace lords or pirates.

A little further north on the adjacent hill prehistoric remains have been found too, tentatively identified as a lookout post for the city. Perhaps to protect the exposed posterior side from surprise visits.

With hopes of archives and immense discoveries the archaeologists soon moved in.

II - Expedition Messenia

The archaeologists knew it was special as soon as they saw it poking out of the ground. Deep hollow eyes staring back at them from the sundered earth. Not much wider than pin pricks when compared with some of the more famous finds of its kind like the lady of Phylakopi and the multitudes of idols found at Mycenae. And yet; crude as it is, somehow primal, fearsome even, the so called Dame of Nichoria does seem to reside within that well known category of Mycenaean sculpture, most famously seen with the so called idols of Mycenae itself. At just 0.067m high it is a small piece, the lower part of the face unfortunately having been chipped away at some point in the past, leaving behind mystery of what the face originally looked like - whether it had been round or long and pointed like the Lord of Asine.

From the polos the Dame wears it has been concluded to be female, perhaps like hypothesised examples from Minoan Crete, representing a cultic priestess. When the piece was first sculpted it may well have been up to an impressive third of a metre in height. Though no evidence of paint has so far been found, its gritty and coarse surface may simply have worn away over the millennia.

Today the Dame of Nichoria remains one of the most interesting pieces found at the site. Speaking of a very real apogee of Mycenaean occupation that took place here in the Late Helladic III B Period, aka the 13th Millenium BC.

By the time the intensive five year programming of large scale digging undertaken by the university of Minnesota under the direction of professor William A McDonald was completed in 1974, a number of fascinating breakthroughs had been made. Thankfully for the archaeologists involved, Nichoria had indeed been a place of great significance. Though, given the complicated layers of habitation, and significant levels of erosion and damage over the millennia, the place remained frustratingly difficult to comprehend.

From their first arrival in 1969, to the last trenches of 1974, a total area of 50,000 square metres would be dug. Six strenuous campaigns of trench digging meticulously covering an area of 5000 square metres. And yet though this may sound a lot it represented just ten percent of the areas showing evidence of human habitation. As with all digs, priorities had to be made. Choices taken.

In addition to the various pieces of Nichoria that were still privately owned and thus out of bounds for digging, only some of the trenches made it down to undisturbed soil, both due to time constraints and as a result of the decision to not destroy later buildings to get down to the ever mysterious Mycenaean levels.

Nevertheless, even with these difficulties, the Mycenaean pottery pieces alone numbered over eight hundred; small finds in general more than two thousand. Animal bones and sculpture fragments in particular giving significant insights into burial customs, diet, architecture and even foreign contacts. Above all else seeking evidence of Nichoria’s relationship with the rest of the Pylos kingdom, one of the more significant finds was the evidence of resident bronze smiths, like the Dame, dated by pottery fragments to the era of the tablets (LHIIIB).

By the 70s, though John Chadwick had ultimately changed his mind on Nichoria, surmising it to be not Ti-mi-to-a-ke-e  after all, but potentially another town, in the south west quadrant of the near province, the importance of the place as a Pylian town matching descriptions in the tablets could not be denied. Crucially all being described as having bronze industries tied to the palace, with contributions being passed back and forth. The bronze working at Nichoria then provides a rare convergence of contemporary Mycenaean records and archaeology.

—

Back in 1969 it had all begun when a test trench in the north and west of the site revealed Mycenaean foundations and a great sigh of relief. Though like most areas of the site, which continued to be intensively inhabited until well into the high medieval era, later ruins stood on top, obscuring much of the most ancient levels. In this case, mysterious geometric structures from the end of the dark age following the Mycenaean age.

And yet even so, entire streets from that late Bronze Age city were ultimately uncovered, especially on its southern side where curving terrace walls gave tantalising hints to the majesty of the place in ancient days.

On that southern side, running along and over the edge of the hill, another wall was found, (running north east to west south-west), which may also be of Mycenaean date. Though this particularly intriguing section was unable to be excavated fully it has been hypothesised to house the deeply buried remnants of a grand gated entranceway, perhaps not worlds away from the famous examples at Mycenae and Tiryns.

On the western side, in a section known as Area V, a number of important finds were made. In that part of the hill, thought to have once formed a natural gully or hollow, centuries of plowing and vine farming had unfortunately caused severe destruction. Nevertheless a great deal of material was uncovered, including corner moles for creating intricate jewellery of interlocking ivy leaf bands, and the Dame of Nichoria.

In addition to the bronze working area in Unit III-IV actual bronze goods and other crafted items were found too. For example well over two hundred spindle whorls were collected, dating all the way from the Middle Helladic to the so called dark age following Mycenaean times. Notably, on a rubbish dump one large figurine body dating to the early days of Mycenaean settlement was found, the head unfortunately missing. (N1528)

Though animal figurines are fairly common at Mycenaean sites. Generally assumed to be idols, perhaps representing deities, larger ones are much more rarely found. Notably, a sizeable fragment of an animal figurine was found at Nichoria, thought to be a pig.

Originally standing at around 0.10 metres up to its neck, larger when it had a head, it’s not the most impressive example ever found, but it does put Nichoria within the mainstream of late bronze age society at the time. Not far away was also found a small horses head not unlike those found at Mycenae and published by Angela Tamvaki.

And yet for those searching for the lost city of the archival records a single pot sherd provided the most tantalising evidence of all, suggesting the existence of a literary elite, for it bore an inscription in Linear B.

But what of the layout of the settlement? Where did the people live? And what can the archaeology tell us about their lives? Well, unfortunately the area has suffered so much from erosion and looting over the years that stratified information is patchy at best. Rather than a detailed plan we have an immensely complicated series of habitations obscuring Mycenaean foundations.

But when those buildings can be seen, they are a far cry from the glittering palatial centres at the heart of the Pylos polity. In comparison to the palace of Nestor and the multi storied complex at Iklaina, they have been called crude and provincial.

The final reports from the Minnesota expedition for example stated with certainty that no building prior to the Byzantine era had been roofed with terracotta tiles. A luxury style that had been seen as early as the Third Millennium BC at sites like Lerna in the more affluent Argolid.

Nichoria did not seem to follow the conventions of the more distant capitals. Perhaps the elites here simply didn’t need to invest their wealth in such flamboyant displays of power, towering over the surrounding hill and plains people outside their walls anyway.

But what of that elite? As usual, for them we have some of the best evidence of all. Seen most obviously in the mighty dromos and tholos tombs that survive largely intact to the present. One in particular at Nichoria, intricately built from limestone likely to be used by the ruling dynasty, ranks among the largest and most impressive in all the Mycenaean world.

When cleared in 1971 and fully excavated down to its original base level in the next year, as expected, most of the tombs contents were long gone. Various fragments of ivory and bronze and sherds just giving hints of what had once been interred. The one constant in archaeology often being near total disappearance to oblivion.

Far from a modern occurrence, the initial opening and looting of the tombs took place as early as the end of the Mycenaean era.

By the 4th century BC they had become places of veneration once more, just as they likely were at the time of their construction, places to visit the venerated ancestors, real or imagined. Clearly still prominent structures, like many other tholos and chambered tombs in Messenia, becoming cultic centres.

Elsewhere in the site a great deal of so called ‘dark age’ evidence dated tentatively to around 1050-975 BC is regularly found among the scree and rubble, including coiled bronze rings, earrings and an elaborate pin. A good deal more evidence than at many Mycenaean sites, suggesting some sort of continued habitation. The possibility of a collapse here like at the palatial centres has been suggested by possible burning evidence, though this is far from definitive.

What the evidence does definitively show is that after the so called ‘dark age’ came the geometric period, equally mysterious time before even Archaic Greece. During that time a much reduced Iron Age village would develop in the section of the site known as Area IV

Given the evidence from the digs. From the cemeteries, the buildings and material goods, there is no question of the re-use of the Acropolis in the era after the Mycenaean apogee. Often in a much reduced state. After about the 11th C BC, perhaps after an intermission of 100 years though we cant say for sure.

But what of the beginning of Nichoria? How did it develop? And how did it become part of the Pylos kingdom?

III - From Polis to Provincial Capital?

When people first came to Nichoria, long before the fences and the cultivated olive groves, it looked very different to today.

When those early farmer ancestors of the late Stone Age arrived, the place was still a prominent feature or course, though not yet shaped by the hands of humanity. Portions of the cliffs edge and hillside ultimately having been cut down and moulded over the ages.

Forests coated the land in those days; of gnarled oak, pistachio and more, and though largely invisible now from an archeological perspective, high places provided good vantage points for settlements. But most alien of all, visible in geological features indicative of coastal erosion on the base of the cliffs, the sea likely lapped at the hills edge.

Only in relatively recent centuries would the sandy coastal plain we see today begin to form. So when the revolutionary concept of metalworking first appeared in Greece at the beginning of the third millenium BC, seeming to go hand in hand with elites since the very beginning, coastal trading routes became integral to the power of rulers in the increasingly socially stratified society of the Bronze Age. Nichoria, with its ready made defences and adjacency to the sea roads, must have seemed a perfect location, and unsurprisingly a small autonomous community began to coalesce.

Archaeologist Philip Rapp goes so far as to suggest an archaic lagoon once extended well into the valley mouth of the Karys River, providing not just shelter form storms but good landing sites for small prehistoric vessels, until it dried up in the Roman era. The precise location of the harbour at Nichoria however remains a mystery. No digs as of yet having confirmed a location in the ever changing landscape.

Given the apparent coastal nature of the site, it comes as little surprise then that some of the most impressive remains from the early layers seem to have originated, at least in influence, from elsewhere. For in the later part of the Middle Helladic Phase, in terms of pottery styles, there is a great deal of similarity with Minoan Crete. That famed island of palace builders and seafarers spoken of by the classical historian Thucydides as the first great sea power, or thalasocracy of the Aegean, lying not far to the south. In myth ruled over by King Minos, the builder of the labyrinth; archaeology too suggests a very real flourishing in the middle Bronze Age. Likely influenced a great deal by the power of Ancient Egypt, they in turn likely had a marked effect on the people to their north and west, along shore lines as far north as Troy.

In those days the archaeology at Nichoria suggests a modest scattering of families scattered widely over the ridge, a largely self contained community with evidence of metallurgy. And though cultural influence from Crete can be seen, no doubt trade links foestered with one or more of the palatial centres of the island, no evidence of political or economic domination can be seen. No burials are found either, which matches with Crete itself for that period, sky burials or sea burials hypothesised as means of disposing of dead, suggesting the culture of Crete may have been somewhat contagious.

With the exception of Malthi, Nichoria remains one of the only prehistoric settlements in the South-Western Peloponnese to be investigated in depth. The two local centres seeming to have played similar roles throughout the Middle and Late Helladic Periods, ultimately sharing the same fate of the wider political events of the Aegean. For by the Sixteenth Millenia BCE major change was on the way.

In around 1600 BCE the island of Santorini exploded, obliterating habitation on the island and launching tidal waves and dust clouds across the sea. Such was the power of the destruction and resulting tidal waves, the pumice from the eruption can actually be seen at Nichoria. Much closer to the eruption zone however was Crete. A century of chaos ensued and the forging of an entirely new system.

To the north meanwhile, in the Argolid of mainland Greece and neighbouring Attica and Boeotia, in bays and inlets sheltered from the shockwave from Thera, the various ships and war vessels of the mainland, previously a rather provincial culture would move out and forge the world anew. Soon enough, Crete and the rest of the Aegean would be Mycenaean.

Nichoria was no exception; like a history of the Mycenaean world in miniature, a gradual shift being visible in the archaeology as well as significant population growth. The place seeming to be the centre of an emerging political and social unit of considerable complexity in the Late Helladic I and II, very much in the mainstream of the Mycenaean world. One of the main pieces of evidence for this, is from the cemeteries, dating to the very earliest days of the late Helladic, continuing in throughout the Mycenaean age. For unlike the previous eras, the great lords and ladies of Nichoria were now laid to rest in mighty tombs that are still visible today.

Throughout the last two hundred years of scholarship on the Mycenaean world, ever since the halcyon days of Schliemann and Tsountas, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on tholos and dromos tombs as concrete evidence of so-called ‘royal’ dynasties. After all, those early researchers reasoned, who else but kings and queens could afford such edifices?

And yet, in reality, besides the immensely wealthy grave goods compared to other graves of the time, outside of Homer’s Catalogue of Ships which talks at length of petty kingdoms though actually written down hundreds of years later, very little corroborating evidence exists. The massive tomb on Mykonos for example - now languishing as a rubbish dump for an oblivious hotel - though once the greatest in all the Cyclades, does not seem to correspond with a nearby city or centre of any known kingdom. Likewise we do not in actuality know whether the early so called ‘kings and queens’ of Nichoria actually controlled the surrounding territories or even villages lying much beyond the orbit of the settlement in their most prosperous phase when the tombs began to be in use. It begs the question whether these were actually royal dynasties at all, or if a multitude of ways of governing could have been in use, like proto-polises of the later classical age.

Though it seems likely that exploitation of land resources in the immediate areas would have been intensive, along with considerable trade coming and going by land and sea, without written records it remains difficult to know whether a polity existed solely on the acropolis itself or extended to the surrounding area. Though clues can be gained from neighbouring sites.

—

Just two and a half kilometres away at the village of Daphni, another tholos tomb is to be found, along with possible indications of an adjacent Mycenaean settlement. Should we be imagining a fully autonomous neighbouring dynasty within three kilometres of Nichoria? Or should alternate hypotheses be sought for Tholos tombs? A cadet branch perhaps, like those that have been suggested for Tiryns, Midea and Mycenae itself, or even a ruling family of favourite courtiers designated as princes to supervise villages and towns. Not quite fully independent politically, but following burial customs of the capital as best they could.

And finally we have the question of just when, how and even if, Nichoria was subsumed into the larger Pylos polity.

What we do know is that by the Fourteenth Century BCE, the apogee of the site was ushered in. The quality and quantity of the finds from the Tholos tomb, even with the place having been looted show prosperity reached a peak. Whether the rulers interred there were put in place by Pylos or not, lasting into the Thirteenth Century BCE apparently without a break, we can’t say.

As for the ‘palace’ hoped for by the archaeologists; though nothing concrete has been found thus far, during the LHIIIA period there are indications that something akin to one may have once existed. In the central saddle of the south- eastern side of the ridge, in the location known as Area IV, a heavily eroded LHIII complex has been suggested as the administrative centre of the site. Perhaps once independent; later ruled over by a provincial governor reporting back to Pylos.

Just like it says in the Iliad then, the possibility exists of a dynasty of vassal kings ruled by an over-king; themselves in turn ruling over even smaller units. Though whether this distinction was one that even mattered to most inhabitants we can’t say, life possibly going on much as it had before.

And as for the governor of the city, amazingly, if the place was indeed Ti-mi-to-a-ke-e, the coastguard tablets give us his name.

IV - The Life Of Perimos

When I visited Nichoria in the late summer of 2022 a great deal had changed since the days of the Minnesota expedition; those excavators unknowingly having stood near the end of the so-called ‘golden age’ of archaeology. For want of funding and inclination, large-scale excavations of sites like this one are rare now. Reinterpretation of existing information and small scale digs having become the norm.

For many reasons, to visit today is to step back in time. And though a few individuals did come through during our brief time on the ridge, far from the usual hordes of tourists filling the major sites like Mycenae and Athens, we mostly had the place to ourselves. There is no entrance fee; no visitors centre, and no gift shop. Few fences to block off out of bounds areas. And for precisely these reasons visiting Nichoria was one of the most memorable experiences of the entire trip.

So it was then, on a sleepy morning on the road from Nafplion to Pylos, we made our stop. As far as I could tell some fifty years had passed since the place had been dug. The still visible trenches and exposed foundations having become overgrown over the years. Dangerous even, to unsuspecting passersby.

With few information boards and only scattered fragments to be found online, sites like these demand an imagination. Besides the Tholos tombs there are few visible remnants. But that’s precisely why I love the place. For someone used to British hill forts, and Neolithic settlements, imagination is often all we have. Cyclopean wall, or ridge line. Ancient citadel or patch of earth, it isn’t easy to tell. But in order to do so, thankfully we can turn to the records of the digs themselves.

And in the late 60s when the team from Minnesota began digging here, almost immediately they found the place to have been a flourishing settlement. Though as we have already seen, one of their great desires remained to find an archive of Linear B tablets like those found at Pylos dating to the LHIIIB2 period, the late Thirteenth century BCE.

Tablets that document an extensive and well organised bureaucratic system. A snapshot of a kingdom stretching north to the Nedha River and along the coast to Kalamata, indisputably administered from the palace at Pylos; fired, fused and saved from oblivion entirely unintentionally when the place was destroyed around 1200 BCE.

Unfortunately after some forty weeks of systematic digging, no archive was found. Nor even a conclusive palatial centre or administrative hub. A mere single pot sherd bearing a possible mark of Linear B being the only evidence that anyone at Nichoria had been literate at all.

Nevertheless, when utilising the Pylos tablets alongside the archeological data we can glean a great deal of information not only on how Nichoria functioned but how it was likely to have been governed too, even if its identification as Ti-mi-to-a-ke-e is incorrect.

For the tablets give the mayor of Ti-mi-to-a-ke-e at the time of the destruction of Pylos a name. An extremely rare figure coming alive from those ancient records. His name was Perimos. And even if Nichoria was a different site, surely it too had a Perimos.

What happened to Perimos, or whatever the mayor of Nichoria had been called at the time of the end of the kingdom remains completely unknown. As does the manner of its destruction and who precisely carried it out, the violent upheavals at the end of the Bronze Age remaining one of the great mysteries in world history. With outside invasion and domestic revolution being equally suggested. It’s even possible that our mayor was one of the leaders of the attack on Nestors Palace, throwing off the shackles of distant rule in a time of change. For Nichoria may well have survived the end of the bronze age. At least for a time.

But what of Perimos before that fateful destruction? And what can the tablets tell us of Nichoria at the very apogee before the fall?

Up until the cataclysmic change that brought the palatial centres of the Aegean to their knees by the Twelfth Century BCE the resource that

kept the world moving was bronze. In that time before currency as we would recognise it, and when the vast majority of people had no access to metal of any kind, that alloy of tin and copper was utilised primary to forge instruments of power. Weapons of war; beautiful craft items and gifts of kings.

While copper was rare, being found only in a handful of locations, tin was virtually non-existent, those who could gain access to the meagre trickle coming in from what is now Afghanistan and perhaps a few other places, could become extravagantly rich. And though we don’t know enough about Bronze Age trade to definitively talk of monopolies, it does seem that in the Aegean the tin trade was linked above all else with the central authorities of the palatial centres.

In Messenia in particular the Pylos Tablets speak of bronze imports being allocated to each town and regional capital in melted down lump sums, to then be reworked by the various regional metal-smiths as they saw fit. Fascinatingly, at Nichoria, chemical analysis does indeed suggest most of the metalwork to have originated from reworked bronze rather than alloys of raw tin and copper.

Chemical analysis also indicates the bronze to be extremely low in tin; perhaps the rarest and most sought after resource in the world at the time, and one clearly not given up lightly by the kings at Pylos. The bronze at Nichoria is so low in tin in fact that it almost can’t be called tin bronze.

And of course in return for that bronze that marked the elite at Nichoria out as different, such regional towns no doubt provided a range of services for the palace centre at Pylos. In return for protection no doubt they paid their taxes, and in a pre-monetary system this came in the form of goods and when the need arose, military service. Indeed, the very reason why the concept of literacy was forged in the first place was to record such transactions and tributes. And Linear B is no exception. The surviving tablets mostly recording economic information. And within the Pylos tablets in particular we are told of the productivity of the various settlements of the kingdom.

No doubt due to the capital brought in for their lucrative woollen coats, sheep were by far the most common animal recorded on the tablets. Other animals recorded on the tablets are pig and a few cows, used primarily for their hides. Though in the archaeological record cattle are extremely rare. Goats too, not mentioned in the tablets, are the common of all, used primarily for their milk and meat as sustenance rather than exporting to the palace.

Besides animal produce, among the other goods of the utmost importance to the palace economy was flax. Nichoria, sited on one of the most heavily watered places in an exceptionally fertile province, with no fewer than five major rivers, and broad coastal plains, was perfect for the growing of the product. Today the region still produces half of the flax grown in Greece. With a convenient land route also existing to the Pylos heartlands to the west where raw flax could be sent on to the palace, in return for his aid in bringing tribute to his overlord Perimos was likely a very rich man. And if the Tholos Tomb did indeed contain the remains of the leaders of the site, the bone and skull fragments of between ten and seventeen individuals having been found in all, Perimos may well have been laid to rest among them. Tiny fragments left behind by grave robbers giving hints of the bronze vessels, sealstones and other riches deposited with them for the next world.

Artefacts that clearly place Nichoria very much in the mainstream of Mycenaean society. Far from a backwater as once assumed, pottery fragments too demonstrate a few imports form the Argolid, and even Mycenae itself. And in one particularly well preserved area the buildings line up neatly along the remains of a well-planned cobbled stone street.

So then, though we may have discovered where Perimos’ life came to end, and there is of course no reason to assume that a palatial complex would even be recognisable here in the same way as they are at Pylos, Tiryns, Mycenae or Thebes, one last question remains. Where did our governor reside in life?

At both edges of the ridge slightly raised up areas, acropolises within the acropolis; have long been hypothesised as potential locations for the administrative heart of the city; homes of the rulers of Nichoria, or even a lost palace.

One of the sides, though damaged extensively over the millennia, revealed no evidence of Bronze Age habitation at all. The north-west edge however, though also having suffered extensive damage over the millennia, did reveal evidence of Mycenaean buildings. Only fragments having survived.

If an administrative archive had ever existed here, without clear evidence of a conflagration at the end of Nichoria’s Bronze Age, the sun-dried tablets would have simply been scattered and disintegrated back to the earth. Paradoxically, it is only destruction that saves such records from oblivion.

Today Nichoria lies dormant, awaiting further techniques in the future to unlock the last of its secrets. Thankfully, it is safe, for now.

Thanks for reading. I’m Pete Kelly. If you enjoyed this article then you’ll likely enjoy this video I made on another Bronze Age culture. Until next time.

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Astride windy cliffs by the foothills of that mountain range, a great headland juts out into the Irish sea. It was here in ancient days well over three thousand years ago that copper was mined by the great Bronze Age metal barons; international wares moulded and shipped to all corners of the island and beyond.

The cairns and settlements of that distant time can still be seen amidst the tourist trains and guest houses. The modern town of Llandudno oozing and stretching along the coast.

But the copper mines of the Great Orme aren’t the only relic of the past in this ruin-strewn land. Just an hour’s walk inland along an estuarine river valley, stands Conwy. One of the most complete medieval walled settlements found anywhere in the world. It’s still standing circuit complemented by the immense castle built here by the English in the Thirteenth century.

Today Conwy is the very epitome of a medieval settlement in Britain. Immaculate round towers draped together with precise curtain walls, drawbridges and killing zones. And yet, Conwy Castle is a relatively recent construction, thrown up by foreign occupiers, living in a fenced-off pale. The herculean visage of Conwy Mountain and its Iron Age hill fort ever looming to the west, persistent reminder of the ancient inhabitants who’d once been the undisputed masters of this land.

And there is another reminder too. Another castle, hailing from a more modern age. Just over the water from Conwy.

For hundreds of years before the English ever came near to this region, it was from here that the rulers of the land administered their kingdom.

This is Castle Deganwy.

Though little remains now besides crumbled towers and ruined foundations, it’s famous in myth, history, and archaeology alike. Long before the Thirteenth century wars of Edward Longshanks.

For it is at Deganwy, arguably more so than at any other site in Wales that a powerful Sub-Roman kingship can be brought from back from oblivion. When excavators dug underneath the later medieval foundations here in the 1950s not only was a royal centre for a Sub-Roman warlord rediscovered, but firm evidence of links to a burgeoning continent-spanning trade network immediately following the end of Roman rule in Britain

During that mist-shrouded time of legend when there is usually almost no evidence at all to go on, this place is one of the most important to be found anywhere. In archaeology as well as in myth.

We know that from here a dark age warlord, or king ruled, perhaps moving between similar bastions on distant Anglesey and the Lyn Peninsula too. Just maybe administering and politicking over one of the largest realms in Britain.

II - ‘Dragon of the Island’

Britain’s Fifth and Sixth Centuries are its most underrepresented of all in terms of historical evidence.

Where once elaborately maintained Roman towns and cities sprawled over the lowlands, linked by mighty road networks, way-stations, and fortress bastions; their roundhouse living British subjects eking out a life in the wild borderlands beyond, now almost no evidence is to be found. The literate city life and currency of the Fourth Century having given way very quickly to isolated holdouts and mass decentralisation.

In truth there is very little archaeology to go on when compared even to the Iron, Bronze and Stone Ages that came before.

What does very quickly become clear when studying the still sizeable mass of evidence though is that the long span of history had apparently very quickly been interrupted. In the space of a single generation a kind of post-apocalyptic society taking over in vast swathes of the island.

In written history too, besides much later myths and legends compiled into purported chronicles and histories, a mere handful of contemporary documents are all that remain. Scraps of information rescued from the darkness.

Even the much respected and pored over histories of Nennius & Bede were written much later, in the Seventh and Eighth centuries when intellectual connections with continental Europe had resumed, Britain gradually becoming literate and relevant once more.

And yet, at Deganwy, records do remain for those wastelands of knowledge in the Fifth and Sixth centuries. Amazingly, a work which references a king who may well have ruled this place. For in Gildas’ famous work ‘On The Ruin of Britain, the most complete of all sources for the Sixth Century, he includes is a historical list of kings along with brief pieces of information, and one of those rulers, Maelgwyn Gwynedd, the so called ‘Dragon of the Island’, looms large in traditional stories centred on the power-base here.

It is incredibly rare to find Sub-Roman settlements anywhere, let alone one with associations with a known ruler. But in later generations, Deganwy, as well as the Conwy Mountain on the other side of the river, and a number of other sites in the immediate vicinity were associated with Maelgwyn. The oldest mention seems to be in the Annales Cambriae, an albeit later, historical account, originating in the Tenth Century, but known to contain much older information within.

Maelwgyn is thought to have dominated Northern Wales, with power-bases in Anglesey, Snowdonia and the marches too, the gateway to his realm. And what a spot this must have been for a dark age king. Perched on a dead volcano, wooden fortifications adapted and moulded around natural buttresses provided by geology. With clear visibility on every side, it’s an excellent location.

And according to Gildas, Maelgwyn was a vicious tyrant, an idolatrous usurper and all round terrible individual. When thinking of later medieval kings who angered the church, like the Holy Roman Emperor Henry I and murderer of Thomas Beckett, King Henry II, Maelgwyn sounds like a king all right.

If the kingdom of Gwynedd had indeed been one of the most powerful realms in Britain, and archaeology supports this too, there is a good reason for his success. In peripheral areas where the Roman way of life never fully take hold, the still militarised citizens had less far to fall. Continuing their way of life more easily than those in the more advanced lowlands who relied on foreign imports and commercial activities for their very way of life. Out here on the western sea ways the fall of Rome doesn’t seem to have been nearly as severe.

III - Foundations

For me, getting the train to Wales has always been a strangely mystical experience.

Amidst the rising hills and the woodland, if you’re lucky when glancing out that window, you might catch a glimpse of Offa’s dyke; colossal Early Medieval earthwork stretching from sea to sea. Closer scrutiny reveals hill forts, mountains, and of course, castles.

On this particular journey, hugging the north coast, I see distant wind farms guarding the hazy horizon, beached battleships, near unfathomable leagues of muddy sand, and very few settlements.

When finally we pull into Conwy station I can already see medieval fortress walls. Here, just as it always has, the castle dominates everything. Standing guard over pubs and great restaurants, holiday makers and hikers, and of course, the city walls.

Down in the bay, by tug boats and fishing vessels, you can see all the way down the estuary to the sea. But on the far side of that water where two mis-shapen mounds rise, a short walk over the bridge, along pebble lined paths, that is Degnnwy.

More than half a century ago now, another figure came here. An archaeologist. Also interested in that ancient castle, its crumbling ramparts all but gone today. His name was Leslie Alcock, one of the most famous of all archaeologists in that time.

For these were the halcyon days of the 1960s and Alcock also embarked on excavations at a number of other sub-roman sites, most notably Cadbury Castle in Somerset. Widely publicised as one of the best candidates for Camelot, mythical home of the legendary British king, Arthur.

But outside of the very successful and lucrative media campaigns launched by the Somerset digs, Alcock's interests ranged far and wide all over Britain. Arguably his most brilliant written work concerned itself with the Picts and the Welsh as much as the southern British and Cornish. His digs took him all over the island, from the Somerset Levels to Loch Ness. From South Wales to Southern Scotland. Excavating at many of the most famous sites from Sub-Roman Britain.

In importance however arguably few were surpassed by Deganway, potentially the only one with a good argument for its rule by a historically verifiable king.

When Alcock and his team first came here in 1961 the place looked much the same as it does today. Perhaps a few less houses and more green fields but overall largely forgotten and untouched down the centuries.

And when they started to dig, making trenches beneath Thirteenth Century stone bastions, and continuing to do so for another five years to come, it wasn't long before the evidence of those long lost years before began rising to the surface. For Deganway has much older foundations than those of the high medieval princes of Gwynedd.

It soon became clear that like most hill-forts in Wales Deganwy’s history stretched far back into the mists of time. With evidence being unearthed of life during the Roman period. The recently abandoned ancestral tribal centre on Conwy Mountain was located just to the north, a nearby fortress of the imperial occupiers to the south.

Unfortunately though we can say little with certainty about the Roman era here, we know that after the Romans left it became truly important.

High up on the rocky vantage point here, well over a hundred metres above the sea, the place was undoubtedly a safe haven during those uncertain times. A refuge from seaborne Irish raiders and neighbouring Romano-British warlords alike. The fortress itself, now little more than ditches and mounds, is modest to our eyes. Constructed of wood, likely with room to comfortably host a few hundred individuals at most, trusted warriors to line the fortification walls. Probably only the larger of the volcanic mounds was occupied.

Wooden palisades line the hill-top, a scattering of houses and huts for the kingly retinue within. Smoke billows from hearths and smithies, old tracks line the hill-side from walled gateway down to the shore, where tiny coracles come up to sell their wares. For above all else it was access to the sea that made life here possible, arteries to lands far away.

In an island with few settlements to see at all, this was one of the most impressive, and no doubt a beacon to travellers from afar, who came to barter for goods and knowledge.

And beneath that rocky stronghold, clustering around the timber halls of a strongman and his family, there may well have been a fairly sizeable civilian settlement. The beginnings of state formation perhaps in the Sub-Roman world, driven by the needs of those seeking protection; any sort of stability they could get, from a battle-hardened warlord.

And of course we have the material objects too. Astonishingly the very same style of pottery as is found at Tintagel, Cadbury Castle, Dinas Powys and even much further afield at Dunadd, royal capital of the Dal Riatans, in Ireland and all over Sub-Roman Britain. A dozen of these shards had been imported from the Mediterranean, suggesting far-reaching contacts of those who ruled here.

It’s widely assumed that the ruling dynasty of the fledgling kingdom of Gwynedd had their main powerhouse at Aberffraw on Anglesey, but many other citadels have been excavated from this time too, at Dinas Emrys, Garn Boduan, Dinorben and more. It’s possible that like the later medieval rulers of Wales leadership was peripatetic, with the court constantly moving on a circuit between elite centres.

If Deganwy had indeed been a capital of Gwynedd, even for a short time, or of some other kingdom now lost to the ages, the threads of fate had other ideas for the place, it entering a steady decline over the centuries, particularly as the focus of Gwynedd solidified on Anglesey and the innards of Snowdonia.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle the first Degannwy met its final end in 812 when it was struck by lightning, burning to the ground.

The small-folk never forget its once held importance though, unlike many other areas in Britain, entering into myth and legend.

IV - Legacy

By the early 1200s the wooden hall of the Sub-roman power brokers had long since rotted away. The warriors and traders of those distant days having already dissipated into bardic myth and legend. Today it is the towers and foundations of that era that remain. Stone-built masonry crafted by the various powers who came this way in the High Middle Ages.

For in that later age some eight hundred years before the present this area of Wales was a battle ground once more. The frontier-zone in a titanic conflict waged by generation after generation of French speaking English kings for control of the northern Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd. The last to resist English expansion.

In 1210 in the latest of those hard fought battles, Englishmen came to Deganwy.

Scarlett-clad knights and rumbling siege engines rolling out from Chester by the orders of the Plantagenet King John. The castle still prospered in those days. A stone built keep having been thrown up here to guard the western passes into Snowdonia, not by the English but by a native Welsh ruler. Perhaps the greatest of all. An immensely impressive king in all but name who dominated Wales for over fifty years. Playing enemies against one another with clever statesmanship and mopping up the rest into his ever growing state amidst Machiavellian power struggles of epic proportions. He was Llewelyn mac Iowerth, better known to history as Llewelyn the Great, and for a brief time at least Deganwy was his castle

As a child Llewelyn had watched his two uncles squabble over the sought after succession to the throne, as well as the battles of the multitude of other rulers waging similar struggles throughout Cymry. Yearning above all for a unified and strong homeland, by the year 1200, through sheer military might, he'd successfully wrested control of Gwynedd. But he wasn’t finished yet.

Not just a great tactician but a brilliant diplomat too, Llewelyn was able to forment an alliance with the embattled english King John, ultimately marrying his daughter Joan in 1205.

By 1208 Llewelyn had seized the entirety of neighbouring Powys, leaping to the opportunity when it’s king fell foul of John. By 1210 however relations deteriorated. Perhaps fearing the ever growing power of the Welsh king, John invaded.

Faced with the overwhelmingly powerful siegecraft of the Earl of Chester, Deganwy fell without much of a fight. Llewelyn falling back to the relative safety of the mountains.

Seeking terms soon after, all Welsh lands east of the River Conwy were to be forfeit. Yet in a remarkable comeback, as soon as the English left to deal with matters closer to home and in France, Llewelyn was back. This time in alliance with most of the other Welsh kings.

As always, he picked his moment well, for soon enough all out war broke out in England between John and his barons, ultimately culminating in the king having to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, which guaranteed the rights of his lordly retainers and theoretically somewhat curbed the power of the king.

Llewelyn was there of course, having sided with the alliance against the tyrant king, and by 1216, in all but name, he was the king of all Wales. Able to portion out lands to nobles in the kingdoms far outside his traditional borders, acting as an overlord of all.

After John’s death, Llewelyn concluded a treaty with the boy king Henry III, though peace with England was all but assured due to the uncertainties attached with an infant ruler. The Welsh Prince was free to play his hand.

In the realms of the Norman marcher lords in the south-central hill country many a Welsh knight was crafted for war, and Llewelyn’s reputation grew and grew as he became more embroiled in the perenial wars there, sometimes allying with marcher lords, sometimes with other welsh rulers. Whichever suited his schemes best.

Finally by 1234 a true peace was declared, and for the last 6 years of his reign, having been named ‘Prince of Wales' in 1228, an honorific position as befitted the elder statesman he now was, he ruled over a truly peaceful land.

Almost immediately after his death however, as Dafyd ap Llewelyn attempted to solidify his new kingdom, Henry III was back at Deganway. The boy king was now a man.

This time he seized the castle for good, undertaking an extensive reconstruction scheme, spending a fortune in the process. When the castle was destroyed for good in 1263, left in the ruinous state we see today, it wasn’t the English that did it.

When Llewelyn the Last, a prolific castle builder himself, and every bit the match of his namesake grandfather, came here in the 1260s the place had become a symbol of English power. A revival seemed to be on the cards, but unfortunately for this Llewelyn, his adversary was one of the greatest kings the English ever had.

For before Edward Longshanks waged his wars against the Scots, earning teh title the Hammer of the Scots in the process, it was to Wales that he came to wet his teeth. When he was finally hounded into submission, there would be no mercy. Llewelyn The Last was taken to the Tower of London. He was hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor.

Opting to leave the Welsh fortress at Deganwy in ruins forever more, Longshanks had a new castle thrown up using all the finest technology of the time. Conwy Castle remains as a constant reminder of that war torn age. It would be seven hundred years before the Welsh would win any sort of independence once more.  

If you enjoyed this article here’s a video I made about early medieval Britain:-

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By the mid Twentieth Century life hadn’t changed a great deal here since the days of Alexander the Great, known in these parts as Iskander. That great conquering warlord who first gave his name to the city well over over two thousand years ago.

By the time Sylvia Matheson arrived in the mid 1950s, westerners were still very new to Afghanistan.

A journalist and amateur archaeologist from Britain, she’d been yearning to set foot inside the secretive highland nation for years. Once having stood at the borders of Iran’s eastern desert gazing with wonder over the snow peaked mountains to the east.

Now, invited by French archaeologists Jean Marie and Ginette Casal to work on their well established archaeological dig as a team leader, she not only had her chance to work in that most elusive of Central Asian countries, but would write a lively account of her adventures. Though sectarian strife and iconoclastic fury still simmered underneath the surface, the 1950s seemed an innocent time filled with hope for the future, and besides rip-roaring descriptions of the archaeology itself, her ensuing book ‘Time Off To Dig’ is filled with touching and genuine interactions with her Afghan workmen and their families. A life which would soon some crashing to an end.

The Casals had already been in Afghanistan for years by that point, and they would remain for longer. Their site was one one the most important and baffling ever discovered in the vast landlocked mountain nation. For a time one which captivated the world.

Today Mundigak oozes along a dried up river valley. Dusty ground and rising mounds home to tarantulas, giant ants and not many signs of the settled city life which once thrived here more than four thousand years ago. The changing course of the waterway in antiquity sounding the final death knell of the place. So long ago as to be near unfathomable.

Wasting no time, not long after she arrived the Casals took Matheson to see the most iconic section of the site, recently having made headlines the world over. Already half reduced from its original height of around sixty feet, the man-made tell known as Mound A was nonetheless still wildly impressive to behold. For once this had been a focal point of the city and naturally one of the main focuses of the dig.

Cutting down from the upper most layers with spade and trowel, at first the refuse of Late Bronze Age nomadic wanderers had been carefully catalogued and removed; post-apocalyptic squatters eking out a living in the refuse of the world that came before. The final years of life here before the record goes blank for good.

Underneath, the ruins of a vast monument were soon uncovered, an extremely large building covering almost the entire mound having been thrown up at the very end of settled life here.

And yet the further down you go the story only becomes more complex. For underneath that mighty monument stood the layers the Casals thought to be the very apogee of the site.

A complex corridor-lined citadel was to be found. Made up of terraces, rooms and columns, surrounded by an elaborate array of walls and battlements. And at its heart, one of those rare buildings of antiquity that leaves a lasting impact on the enquiring mind. A particularly sturdy construction; its outer facade lined by painstakingly maintained colonnades of white-washed mud brick on a carefully built platform, still standing in the 1950s to around four and a half feet high.

It’s thought another layer of colonnades would’ve originally rested on top of the base one, a platform or bench around two feet wide running around the base. The tops, decorated by intricately crafted merlons arranged in a battlement design. Amazingly the bases of this second level of colonnades would’ve been vast. Judging by the diameter they may have been even larger than the surviving ones.

When Matheson arrived at the site thick coats of whitewash still clung on to the outer facade of the building just as they had since they were first carefully layered on by artisans in the Third Millennium BC. Ginette Casal counted twenty nine separate layers on one particularly well preserved side room.

Brilliant red ochre was then still visible above doorways. Leading to suggestions by scholars of the time that the Colonnades at Mundigak could only be the remains of a great palatial temple complex, such as had been recently excavated at sites like Ur in Mesopotamia.

Though the whole structure was made of mud brick architecture, the entire eastern side having already been lost to erosion, it had been immensely sophisticated in its day, match for anywhere in the world. Massive sturdy walls, hearths, basement storage units and staircases to upper floors all surviving to be excavated.

And during the long gone days of its glory this complex would’ve glistened over the valley below, visible for miles around on the approach to the city, smoke rising from pearl white walls. Anyone approaching from afar would’ve been awed and dazzled long before they reached the city gates. Undoubtedly it had been built by a people with a strong artistic sense.

Mundigak had been a sight to behold, and its people knew it. Clearly here had existed one of the great cities of Asia. Rich and powerful; outward looking, and as far as Matheson was concerned, strikingly Mesopotamian.

Due to the great similarity between mud-brick and natural mud, sites like Mundigak are incredibly difficult to dig, and heartbreakingly the intricately built colonnades of that astounding palatial complex had already begun to erode away by the time Matheson arrived. Just twelve months after their first uncovering from thirty feet of sand. During which time its labyrinthine rooms and passageways had been painstakingly hollowed out of their tomb of four thousand years by well drilled Afghan workmen. Every particle meticulously removed by hand.

The artefacts so far pulled out of the earth had been impressive too. Beautiful goblets with large birds on them having being found the season before; reminiscent of peacocks Matheson thought, or turkeys.

Humped bull figurines had been found too. Similar to Harappan carvings from the contemporary Indus River Valley. Carnelian jewellery, blue beads & green steatite seals further  cemented the economic and perhaps societal links clearly fostered with the Indus Valley Civilisation to the south and east.

And just like other Third Millennium BC sites in a wide arc across Eurasia, from Oman to Greece to Egypt to Central Asia those elaborately crafted sealstones had not just been decorated with ornate symbols but pierced by holes, likely intended to be hung on a chord around the neck. Worn by priests, traders, kings or all of the above.

Evidenced by the wide ranging goods and artefacts traveling thousands of miles across the known world by sea and land, this was a linked up world.

The stamps seals at Mundigak become gradually more elaborate as time goes on until the last layers of the site when entirely new designs are added. During the 1950s, in the shadow of the Second World War, the theory for this shift rested firmly with the military. Invaders being thought to bring new ideas to the city in the last centuries before its final end. Though today as the pendulum ever swings back and forth internal societal change is favoured.

Looking down from Mound A in that heady summer of 1955 Sylvia Matheson could see a massive and imposing site stretching across the entire valley floor. Only a tiny fraction having been excavated. Many other tells could be seen too stretching to the horizon. All of them man made, wide terraces crumbling over hillsides.

The modern village of Mundigak, the ‘Village of the Small Mound’ was likely built on ruins also. And that’s where Matheson came in, for now she would supervise the uncovering of Mound B.

When the pyramid builders of Egypt threw up their mighty monuments to the heavens in the Third Millennium BC, the city of Mundigak was already old. When the priest scribes of Old Sumeria first made the revolutionary leap to recording knowledge on mud brick tablets in the legendary lands between the two rivers there was already a thriving settlement here. Even as the scattered tribes of Europe went about their hunter-gatherer existence just as they had for millennia, some kind of civic life had already taken hold in this mightiest of cities on the Helmand river.

As Sylvia Mathson beheld the thirty foot high site surrounded by a deep moat now designated as ‘Mound B’ she had no idea what she would find, but as the weeks went by the place gradually revealed its secrets.

At first Mound B seemed to be a sizeable castle. Enormous heavy stones acting as foundations for a thick complex of mighty mud brick structures. Large square buttresses and thick outer walls surrounded residential areas and domestic structures. This had clearly been an important and well designed part of the city.

The Finds were fascinating and unique too. Notably a small marble table with six inch legs being uncovered, surrounded by numerous earthenware goblets and drinking flasks. As far as Matheson was concerned they resembled the sort of table set still seen in her day at the courts of Indian princes.

And yet just like urbanisation itself, Mound B was a place of contrasts. Though the site seemed to have been perfectly aligned with Mound A with the utilisation of masterful town planning. Its buildings undoubtedly designed to look good, with an artistic sophisticated slant; one corner seemed at least for a time to have been a kind of shanty town coated in animal bones and several feet of refuse.

As excavations continued it was hypothesised that Mound B had been a residential area whereas Mound A might have become a spiritual temple palace complex. Matheson was reminded of the recent excavations of Ur in Mesopotamia and Leonard Woolley’s wide ranging hypothesise on worshipping on high places.

And then a portion of a city wall was found criss-crossing the mound, apparently with little regard for the previous grid planning. Ultimately more walls were found. Not just Mound B but the entire city being encircled by a much larger than expected series of mighty bastions.

And yet still so many mysteries remained. There were more mounds yet to dig. And beyond that way off into the rest of Afghanistan surely there were other cities too. Only a small part of the overall picture being found here by chance. Mundigak did not exist in a vacuum.

The most recent Radiocarbon dates placed the earliest occupation at Mundigak in the Fourth Millennium BC, but other estimates put it further.

By the Third Millennium, copper and tin appeared, linking the place with the outer world. Sources of tin are not far away perhaps hinting at part of reason for places success, but copper had to be brought in from afar. One carbon date gate a time of 2650 BC for the mature city, give or minus 300 years for the very new technology at the time.

And yet, it remains a curious fact that in hundreds of miles of open land just a handful of scattered sites from the Early Bronze Age have been found in Afghanistan. But what sites they are. In recent years some similarities have been found between Mundigak and the settlements at Kot Diji, and Deh Morasi Ghundai, but due to the fragmented nature of research the rest remain buried or lost.

There are of course similarities with the Indus Valley Civilization, almost certainly major trade partners of some kind, material goods being found relatively in abundance. But the Indus is still quite far away. To the east, just over the border in Iran there are similarities with the ‘Burned City’ of Shah I Sokhta, one of the greatest early Bronze Age sites every uncovered. Due to the similarities between the two metropolis some scholars have even argued for an ‘Early Bronze Age Helmand Civilization’. The distances between the sites however was still massive, surely quashing any idea of a singular unified kingdom. Independent polities sharing a similar culture, like Sumeria, being much more likely.

Even by 1957 when Matheson returned to Afghanistan for the last season at Mundigak the white-washed colonnades had already all but disappeared. There being no hope of permanently preserving it, besides dig notes and black and white photographs it is lost.

And yet by that time after seven consecutive summers of digging, an astonishing picture of an early Bronze Age polity had been revealed.

As the dig progressed more mounds had been dug. Mound G revealing a particularly unusual assembly of structures. A huge rectangular enclosure within thick walls of mud brick with a series of courtyards and small rooms opening out from each other decorated with red paint, burnt stones and mud brick dais. The excavators surmised it to be a kind of temple.

By that time cemeteries had been uncovered also, containing individual graves along with pottery associated with Mound B. A little of the story of Mundigak could finally be told.

In the later Third Millennium BC, during the Ninth level of occupation, Mundigak had been a truly astonishing place. Originally having lived on Mound A the citizens seem to have made a conscious decision to move domestic life to Mound B, keeping their original home as a sacred centre with almost no domestic items being found. Mound A was levelled and a vast colonnaded monument built.

Around three sides of the temple were a number of much smaller rooms, or cells. Containing a vast wealth of hoarded items in underfloor storerooms only reached from above. Some contained bone needles and pins. Others goblets with beautiful patterns arranged in series according to size and pattern. Whether this was tribute stockpiled by a priestly class or stashed items for import or export has remained in debate ever since.

At the city of Ur Leonard Woolley had found a similarly majestic great temple at the ceremonial heart of the metropolis, with side rooms attached that he associated with ministers of war, justice, agriculture and finance. Linking up large courts and public rooms for administration.

Here at Mundigak behind the colonnade had been a maze of rooms also. Where many unusual and elite looking items were found. Terracotta drains served the buildings. Female figurines looking like mother goddesses, spindle whorls, cups and bowls of alabaster, marble pestle and mortars, and perhaps most interesting of all, seals of a geometrical nature, a proto-writing system perhaps. Made of steatite, and even bronze, scattered with a few other bits and pieces of metal.

Just maybe, not unlike Ancient Sumeria, rent, tithes and offerings had been paid to the gods here. So temples had to have large store rooms around central sanctuary where people paid their dues.

But then, something happened. There was no fanfare, there may have been no inclination of it happening at all, but by 2100 BC Mundigak had passed the peak of its glory.

After flourishing over a span of time longer from the Norman conquest to today the days of that mighty city of the prehistoric Afghan highlands were numbered.

As so often is found in cities of the ancient world, the glorious apogee was followed swiftly by a fall. Very early on the narrow walkways in front of the Colonnaded temple palace of Mundigak had been found to have been blackened by fire, corridors strewn with arrowheads, spears and sling pellets. Prior to the destruction event, hastily built fortifications may already have been thrown up in the form of a defensive wall across the northern face of the Colonnades. To no avail. There was a short, sharp struggle followed by a fire. It may be that most had already fled.

No bones were found in situ from that attack which blackened the walls, though one shallow communal grave was found at the foot of Mound A.

It’s difficult to say what happened on that day, but the archaeology clearly suggests streets and foyers, granaries, palaces and temples alike all being put to the torch. The great centre of the city becoming a funeral pyre visible for miles around. Visible from every corner of the valley.

But people did remain. Though in what state we cannot say. Afterwards the entire mound was turned to a new purpose. A vast monument to inter the remains of the earlier age. Whether the citizens of Mundigak were put to work on this new construction project we simply cannot say.

I am reminded of the burial tumuli placed atop the Early Helladic sites of Lerna and Thebes at around the same time, toward the end of the Third Millennium BC, and like in Early Helladic Greece the simple pottery and material goods of the conquerors stand in stark contrast to the majesty of those who came before. This eleventh level was much less sophisticated. A cultural break suggesting a new era and perhaps a new people. That last huge building they placed atop the mound slowly deteriorating until finally, perhaps aided by earthquakes that occasionally still wrack the region, it fell to ruin. Home now only to Shepards and nomads.

When Mundigak had first been settled trees had coated those fertile river valleys on the edge of the Himalayas. By the end of the city not much remained. Consumed by the insatiable maw of urbanity. Timber has been hard to come by ever since, and yet mud brick architecture was the norm here, a city could survive without wood. Much more devastating was the drying up of the riverine waterway that had first brought life to the valleys.

By 1000 BC when the last inhabitants of Mundigak clung on to some semblance of the sophisticated city life of their ancestors the surrounding valleys were already near incapable of supporting life. Soon enough the people would move on, and the place consigned to oblivion.

By the end of the 1950s when Matheson geared up to leave Afghanistan for good, she saw the first hints of what was to escalate in only a few short decades. The Russians too investing in the country in full force.

Today, sprawled on a desolate plain, Mundigak yearns for further investigation. Its stunted and stalled investigation left as a reminder of the common heritage, humanity and lack thereof that unites us all. Mundigak is for everyone or no one at all.

If you want to learn more about the Third Millennium BC then here is a documentary I made about the contemporary Akkadian culture of modern day Iraq:-

Shadows, dust and colossal empty crevices where two of the great wonders of antiquity once stood. Fragmentary piles of rubble collected and catalogued by UNESCO World Heritage Organisation, and memories.

Last Winter my wife and I visited Paris’ Guimet Museum in search of the incredible prehistoric past of Afghanistan housed there after close to a century of collaborative effort between the French archaeological expedition and eager generations of Afghan scholars.

In the closing days of 2022 within those carefully curated halls, in the basement to be precise, an exhibition had been put on, displaying some of the prehistoric antiquities and photographs that remain of that golden age of Afghan archaeology. Taking us on a trip back in time to the ancient past of that most steadfastly isolated of Central Asian countries.

Far from a peripheral land, two thousand years ago Bamiyan had been at the very forefront in the exportation of goods and ideas all across the known world. For hundreds of years these remote Hindu Kush valleys acting as a cultural melting pot of ideas and peoples and a global centre of Indian Buddhism.

Only a little further north on the banks of the Oxus River the teachings of the Buddha were first carried into China, where they would leave a pivotal and lasting impression still very much felt today. The religion later moving back into India from there when it eventually died out in its place of birth.

The Bamiyan basin also acted as an excellent stopping off point for secular travellers; camel trains and wanderers heading along the well-trodden Silk Roads from the west. For back in that direction in those days stood the mighty superpowers of Persia and Greece. Two sprawling empires which would also leave lasting impressions on ancient Afghanistan.

It was from the north in fact that some of the most visible influence would come. For it was there in the land of Bactria that Alexander the Great had marched his armies to conquer in the Fourth Century BC. His generals and officers ultimately forging a Greco-Bactrian society which flourished for even longer than those Greek governorships organised in Persia. It was in this way that many ideas originating in India and Central Asia made their way to Europe, and Hellenistic togas made their way onto the Buddhas at Bamiyan.

Though Buddhism itself, for reasons still little understood, did not spread westwards into the Sassanian or Roman empires, Bamiyan, at a crossroads between India, China, Bactria and Persia stood in an excellent position to receive influences from all of these far-flung lands. Blossoming into a flourishing caravansary, trading post and spiritual refuge, regularly visited by devout Indians and Chinese on pilgrimage as well as mercantile Sogdians, Persians and no doubt, Greeks.

And in this multicultural land artistic matters were taken very seriously.

First came the cave systems. The cliffside here having been hollowed out and dug for thousands of years, creating an elaborate complex of interconnected tunnels and rooms stretching deep into the bedrock, walls coated by wonderfully elaborate and colourful murals depicting the stories and teachings of the people who flourished here from around the Second Century AD. Ultimately close to a thousand such rooms were hollowed out, almost every surface coated in the colourful artwork of those bygone days.

Next came the Buddhas themselves. Probably begun some time in the Fifth or Sixth Centuries AD when the Hephthalite White Hunnic steppe-empire ruled over Bamiyan. The statues are truly remarkable achievements. At a colossal 114 and 165 feet respectively they were carved by hand directly out of the sandstone cliff face. Perhaps most moving of all, those individuals who first conceived of and began the work would never see it finished, taking as much as a century to complete. Secular rulers and generations ebbing and flowing as the celestial message of the Buddha remained.

A complete departure from pre-existing sculptural traditions in the area, some scholars like Takayasu Higuchi see this new concept of colossal statues as an import from the west, from places like Egypt where the vast effigies of Rameses II still stood guard as they had for close to two thousand years. The concept perhaps being transmitted by an individual or group who made the journey there and back to the distant Nile.

And so it was. Whatever their origin, the work was eventually completed. Bamiyan continued to flourish, seemingly protected from the goings on in the wider world.

In 827 AD Korean Monk Hui-Chao came this way, writing that the king of Bamiyan was still Buddhist at that time.

By the Eleventh Century however, urged on by the feared outriders of Mahmud of Ghazni; mighty Turkic slave-general turned independent emperor, Islam first came to the valley.

Twelve times Mahmud had unleashed his horde onto the Indian subcontinent, waging an unceasing war against what he saw as a collection of idolatrous heathen states, and now firmly within his orbit, Bamiyan’s Buddhism would begin to ebb.

By the time Genghis Khan arrived in the Thirteenth Century, facing a defiant yet now mostly Muslim populace, he nevertheless took issue, as was usually the case. Turning his might on the caves themselves, where people still made their homes.

By the time the Pashtun king Abdur Rahman Khan conquered the region in 1893, the largest ethnic group in Bamiyan were the Hazaras, according to one theory they were at least in part the descendants of indigenous Turkic people and the warriors of Genghis Khan.

Though already firmly Muslim for hundreds of years, in a foreshadowing of what was to come a century later, many of the previously independent people of Hazarajat were rounded up and carted off to a life of virtual slavery. Forced to become indentured servants in the cities, serfs tied to the land in the countryside. For the Hazara are Shia, now living in a largely Sunni nation. Seen as beyond the pale of true Islam, their independence was stamped out, their mosques destroyed.

And yet soon enough cooler heads had prevailed and bridges were gapped. For a time the fledgling young nation of Afghanistan forged by those Nineteenth Century Pashtuns had flourished. Economic prosperity going hand in hand however with western culture, a situation hard line conservatives could never quite come to terms with. Underneath the surface ethnic and sectarian divisions continued to boil. From the outside, covetous foreign powers moved pieces on the board.

By the time the Taliban came to power in 1996, forging a fragile and brutally strict unity out of the various descendant factions of the Mujahadeen still fighting since the Russian invasion of the 1980s, the country had been ravaged by war for over twenty years. According to one report one in five children then being born in a refugee camp.

A year later the Hazaras of Bamiyan, long time sectarian enemies of the majority Pashtuns, were hemmed in. Out of the three or four million now surrounded by the encroaching Taliban army, one million stood at very real risk of starvation, and worse if the Taliban managed to get through. All relief attempts by the UN were blocked. Hunger now being used as a weapon for the first time in the twenty year conflict.

Far from being a backward mountain people as their sectarian enemies liked to portray them, many of the Hazaras present had recently fled Kabul after the Taliban takeover. Numbering university professors amongst their ranks, teachers and other professionals dressed in western clothing, harbouring at least some western ideals. Forced back to their ancestral lands now due to the war ravaging the nation. Now all alike sheltered in the caves in the shadow of the Bamiyan Buddhas.

With few allies to call on, the Hazaras had no choice but to rely on their co-religionists in Shi’ite Iran, who began flying in military supplies and vital food convoys. Soon enough Russia got involved too. Prompting the Taliban to successfully persuade Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to send them aid. The stage was set for a new ‘Great Game’.

Yet far from a united front, many factions existed within the Hazara, made up of millions of individuals with vastly differing political and social ideas, and that winter, hemmed in on all sides, the Taliban sat back and watched the Hazara tear themselves apart.

By August 1998 when the city of Mazar-i-sharif finally fell to the Taliban advance, many of the Hazara’s worst fears were confirmed when the violence boiled over into full on ethnic cleansing. Taliban soldiers driving around in pick up trucks indiscriminately shooting at anything and everyone that moved, ostensibly only targeting Hazara but also killing many others caught up in the fury. And soon enough, the violence spilled over into Bamiyan too. Anywhere between five and twenty thousand people being indiscriminately massacred.

As 200,000 revolutionary guards began manoeuvres just over the Iranian border, Iran-Pakistan relations hit an all time low. The conflict now threatening to drag in all of the surrounding powers into far more than a mere proxy battle. And somewhere amidst the chaos rockets were fired at the groin of the smaller of the Bamiyan buddhas; dynamite placed at its feet. Having survived the wrath of Genghis Khan, many of the cave frescoes now finally met their end.

In April 1999 Bamiyan changed hands again. Hope remained for the Buddhas. But by the start of 2001 the entire area found itself under Taliban occupation once more, now dominating the majority of the country besides the far north still held by the Northern Alliance.

The retribution of the Taliban would be harsh.

In February 2001 Mullah Mohamed Omar issued an edict from Kabul. On the grounds of their alleged idolatrous nature and potential to be used as objects of heathen worship, the Buddhas at Bamiyan would not be suffered to exist.

Far from the first attempt to destroy the mighty edifices, in 1646 the future Mughal emperor of India, Aurangzeb had one of his canons fire at the foot of the larger of the Buddhas, destroying part of its legs. The hands too had later been broken off by other zealous passersby. In truth they’d been under steady attack for more than a thousand years, kept intact by their sheer size. But by 2001 all the might of the modern world could not be stopped.

Between February and March 2001, not just the colossal Buddas, but a systemic obliteration of the entire cultural heritage of Bamiyan was carried out. By that time some fifty caves with frescos still survived, albeit desecrated over the years with faces carved out, but now they would entirely be destroyed. Because this time it would be different. This time the Taliban had demolition experts with them.

There are many eyewitnesses left to bear witness to the terrible events that followed. Local villagers were rounded up by gunpoint and forced to participate. Perhaps most damning of all, many of those carrying the guns were not even Afghans. Notably a large number of Arabs under Osama Bin Laden having operated in the country since the days of the Russian invasion, Pakistani, Chechen, Sudanese, Filipino, Kashmiri and Chinese jihadists further swelling their ranks. The latest in a long line of foreign aggressors to wage war in that valley near the roof of the world.

Drilling holes into the rock, five or six feet deep, the foreign soldiers stuffed the crevices with vast amounts of dynamite.

Long the peaceful guardians of this historically pivotal crossroads and arguably the jewel in the crown of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage, those wonders of the world that had taken one hundred years to build, were obliterated in seconds.

Those forced to participate saw their culture fall through their fingers like grains of sand on that day. All the pressure of influential world leaders and international cultural organisations alike ultimately powerless to stop an unrecognised government intent on eradicating its own Pre-Islamic heritage.

By the end of the year the September 11th attacks had kick-started yet another invasion of Afghanistan, this time by the Americans, and the Bamiyan region was liberated from the Taliban once more.

For the Buddhas though, and for much of the rest of Afghan archaeology, it was already too late. The events of February and March being just the final culmination of twelve years of systematic looting and devastation of Pre-Islamic sites, leaving Afghanistan bereft of its once world class array of Greek, Buddhist, Mongol and even early Islamic history.

It wasn’t long before chunks of the Buddhas began showing up for sale in Pakistani bazaars, reportedly being sold as paperweights. And though huge pieces still remain at the base of the now empty alcoves, painstakingly collected by UNESCO and local people, due to the sheer costs involved, and with still vast amounts of infrastructure like bridges and schools still derelict and broken in the region, the decision has been made not to rebuild.

Today the empty alcoves are left as a reminder of just how fragile a society can be. How easily culture can be lost.

It’s thought that as much as 70% of Afghanistan’s excavated heritage has been destroyed over the last three or four decades. Either destroyed outright or disappearing into the collections of private buyers on the black market.

One notable occasion taking place amidst the civil war in 1993 when a rocket attack tore through the Kabul Archaeological Museum, resulting in widespread looting and the need to re-excavate the surviving museum collection.

It’s difficult not to be moved as we walk the corridors of the Guimet Museum, vast panorama of Bamiyan splayed on the basement walls ahead of us.

Only a tiny handful of items excavated from Afghanistan have made their way to the display cabinets here. Truth be told, there isn’t much to see. The permanent Indus Valley Civilisation wing upstairs is closed for refurbishment and there isn’t a permanent Afghanistan exhibition as I’d hoped. Most people being more interested in China, Japan & Cambodia it seems. All I can hope for is that somewhere in the back rooms some of the excavated material from Afghanistan still remains.

—

When the French Expedition to Afghanistan first began in September 1922, almost exactly a century removed from my visit to the Guimet, the world certainly seems to have been a simpler place. A brief moment of calm amidst the violent upheavals of the Twentieth Century.

The French had soon been followed by Italians, Americans, Japanese, British, Indians, Soviets and most importantly, Afghans who’d conducted their own digs in the mid 1960s.

These were excavations that extended Afghan history back thousands of years to the distant Early Bronze Age of the Third Millennium BC, and even earlier, uncovering a dizzying array of sites inhabited down the long centuries since.

Yet more multitudes are still waiting to be dug, having only been preliminarily surveyed or simply marked on a map. Their secrets thankfully still safe under the ground for future generations to behold.

Perhaps most importantly, due to the uniqueness of the opportunity to reveal such a rich, previously un-archaeologically unexplored land, these digs were carried out with the utmost scientific vigour, highlighting the very latest cutting edge techniques each country had to offer.

One of the most impressive and astonishing digs of all was conducted by the French in the 1950s. For in the mountains north of Kandahar the unthinkable had happened. A mighty city of the ancient world had been revealed. Contemporary of Ancient Sumeria and the Indus Valley Civilization. During a time when nothing else like it existed in the vast majority of the world.

That mist-shrouded prehistoric metropolis five thousand years removed from today should be a wonder of the world, and yet it remains barely even known. Its very existence an affront to conservative hard-liners in the state it now finds itself in.

—

A handful of Early Bronze Age sealstones were on display at the Guimet when I visited, similar to ones I’ve seen over a wide area from Greece to the Arabian Sea. But of the rest of the finds, of the elaborate goblets, the pottery and the statues, I know not. There is no one left to speak for Mundigak today.

In order to delve deeper into the story, and to find those who did once speak for that vaunted city of old we must go back just a single generation from the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas to the halcyon days of 1955…

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If you want some more History Time then here’s a video I made earlier:-

On Burghead Beach it’s easy to look back through time.

Here, astride the waves and white-brown sands of the very northern extremities of Britain, can still be found a view entirely untouched by the industry of the modern world. There are no cars, no houses. And on a storm-tossed evening like this one, no people.

Walking on sodden sands; wind howling past treelined cliffs above, it isn’t difficult to imagine hunters of the upper Palaeolithic going about their business. Furrowed brows preparing de-shelled crustaceans and gutted fish for the journey home. Fur-clad wanderers not too dissimilar to us today.

Looking seaward and ten thousand years into the future, Viking sea-raiders can be envisioned in the surf, harsh shouts ringing out with the longships dragged up on shore.

A different time. A different people.

There are a few signs of more recent activity, truth be told. Like many a remote beach on the North Sea and beyond, the odd pill-box and tank trap from the Second World War still stand resolute against encroaching waves. Defending against an invasion which never came.

Yet nevertheless the landscape here is one that has changed less than most down the long millenia from antiquity. Not to mention the immense epochs of natural history before. It’s almost astonishing to think that when the very first people - if you can call them that - set foot in this part of the world some million or so years ago, the very same waves lapped on this shore. Long before woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers; when great lumbering whales still walked the terrestrial earth, and our ancestors leapt through proto-African trees far to the south on the equator. Before dinosaurs and colossal Permian monsters. Before Ben Nevis and the Grampian Mountains of the Highlands lurched upwards into existence. Even before the first fish walked upright out of the waves in the Devonian some four hundred million years in the past, before trees and grass first took root on the land; the base geology of this vista was here.

Viewed at this speed, goliath plate boundaries audibly crunch and spasm; mountain chains lurch upwards from the deep, impossibly high, before sinking back down to the underworld. Entire orders of Animalia rising and disappearing in the blink of an eye. Churning waves over billions of years from the Proterozoic to the Holocene.

Yes; in such a place as this, taking refuge in the eerie calm at the heart of an early summer storm, it’s easy for minds to wander. To contemplate the deep geological past, and our minute place within.

But I’m not strictly here to seek out such great aeons of eternity.

Other visitors are on my mind to anchor this place in time. Similarly windswept travellers of a very different age.

For along these sands not long ago at all - a mere handful of generations - lived a people very different to us in some ways, but completely similar in others.

Long before Viking raiders came here in the Ninth Century AD, this was the very heart of the land of the Picts.       

—          

Carrying on up the beach to the east, chasing the dim fading light of the day, I follow on the trail of those ancient ancestors. A great headland beyond dominating the skyline.

Their destination as much as mine.

Today, as then, it’s a fishing town. It hasn't grown much since its heyday in the 1800’s. To the casual observer it might seem no different to any other town in northern Scotland. And yet, isolated here on the edge of the bleak northern ocean, not far from the fictional realm of Lord Summerisle of The Wicker Man, strange rituals linger.

I see colossal waves crash into the seaward walls of the harbour on my approach. It’s a sight that might not have been too alien to our early medieval companions some fifteen hundred years in the past. For underneath that Nineteenth century town is a capital of old. A fortress of kings that once dominated not just these seaways but territories stretching far and wide into the Moray hinterlands.

Of course, it had a different name then.

In those ancient days, Fortriu was a name to held in reverence and awe, and though we don’t know definitively what they themselves called their mightiest fortress, it does have a modern name.

When Burghead was renovated in the Third and Fourth Centuries AD; atop pre-existing Iron Age foundations, just as the Roman Empire to the south began it’s long terminal decline, there was simply nothing else like it.  The skill of its artwork and architecture a match for anything for centuries to come. Formidable defences and bastions much stronger than any other known Pictish site.

And in the tumult of the Fourth Century, it’s hard to imagine such a place not being involved in the Pictish invasions recorded in the late Roman records. Perhaps sailors from here went south during the Great Barbarian Conspiracy in 367 AD, seizing control of the entire province for a time alongside Saxon and Irish allies from across the sea. Perhaps they continued to do so well into the purported ‘Age of Arthur’ of the Fifth century and beyond, all the way through to the start of the Viking Age.

And Burghead didn’t just survive here, through all those tumultuous years. It thrived. Only to be finally consumed by the wants of modern engineering experts at the beginning of the Victorian Age, to make way for the town we see today. Leaving just fragments behind.

Though little remains now, atop windswept headland, commanding the Moray Firth, here once stood one of the greatest of all settlements in Sub-Roman Britain. One of the greatest in Europe at the time. With links to the far off Mediterranean and for a time, an astonishingly naturalistic artistic tradition unrivalled anywhere. This is the story of Burghead.

II - The Burning Of The Clavie

The fishermen of Burghead have always held covenants with the sea. Flickering torchlight in the deep mid-winter long having blessing the boatmen for their voyages into the storm-tossed surf.

Like many traditional seafaring societies, in Old Europe and all over the globe, it’s been that way for as long as anyone can remember; longer than memory in fact. Longer than history itself. And like those other ancient seafaring societies, there is a healthy dose of ritual involved.

It all begins at 6pm.

Every year on the 11th January - New Years Day prior to the Sixteenth Century Gregorian calendrical reforms - fifteen young fishermen assemble on the far side of town. There the sacred ceremony begins. A time honoured tradition passed down from one generation to the next.

A half cask barrel has already been prepared, filled with wood and inflammable liquid. It is lit, held aloft on a long pole by the leader of the group, usually a new individual each time, traditionally one who has impressed the others over the previous year.

In days gone by this real life Lord Summer Isle would take the Clavie around every single boat in the harbour, to bless them for the year to come - seeking to prevent any impending misfortunes. Ultimately though as the harbour grew ever larger in recent centuries, this part of the ritual became impossible.

Heralded by torchlight down the old town streets today, The Clavie King leads his crew. Stopping off at certain houses as they go, to distribute embers and spread good luck for the coming year.

Finally they reach Doorie Hill. The highest part of the town, and the only place today where the original ramparts of the fort remain highly visible. The Clavie comes to a rest, being laid on a stone altar that was built in the Nineteenth Century. More timber is added and a great bonfire erupts on the hillside for all the town to see. By around 7:30pm it’s all over.

The Festivities come to a close as pieces of burning wood are fished out of the flames - handed around as good luck charms and wards against witchcraft.

Somehow, despite it’s clear pagan undertones, out of mind and out of sight on the remote Moray coast, the annual Burning of the Clavie largely seems to have escaped clerical condemnation. Only a few records survive of serious investigations by the mainstream church. In 1689 a group of young men were reprimanded for ‘having made a burning Clavie, paying it superstitious worship, and blessing the boats after the old heathen custom’, but few other mentions exist. Up here astride the north wind, this ancient custom has clearly survived.

By 1809 Burghead, and Scotland as a whole had gone through an era of immense change in the space of a single generation. The Battle of Culloden was still within living memory and the Highland clearances well underway, bringing large swathes of the countryside under direct English control. Increasingly ambitious colossal engineering projects now regularly carried out to impress the Scottish into joining in with the British imperial project.

One notable figure of that age was Scottish born civil engineer and military general, James Roy.

Fascinated with the ancient past; in the late 1700’s Roy undertook a detailed survey of Scotland. Working from a document recently uncovered by antiquarian Charles Bertram. In Latin it was known as ‘De Situ Britanniae’. In English - ‘The Description of Britain’; thought to have been a Fifteenth Century manuscript based on a lost contemporary account of Britain by a Roman General.

Utilising the detailed textual descriptions and map of northern Britain found within the work, Roy sought to find hard archaeological evidence for the Roman presence in Scotland, specifically one of the most northerly Roman settlements, named as Ultima Ptoroton.

Of course it wasn’t long before Roy came to Burghead to assess the still mighty ramparts of the town. So impressed was he that he couldn’t even begin to contemplate them as natively built. As far as he was concerned, and most experts at the time, Burghead could only have been built by the Romans.

Unfortunately for Roy, though fully accepted by almost all antiquarians at the time, including the most famous of them all, William Stukeley; ‘The Description of Britain’ was a forgery.

Ultima Ptoroton, Richard of Cirencester & the Roman general he’d supposedly based his work on were all elaborate fabrications by Bertram.

Fortunately for us however, though Roy’s conclusions were tragically misguided, like at numerous other sites across Scotland, he created a detailed map of what the fort had looked like prior to the current town being built. This map remains immensely important, because, just over a decade later, the fort would almost all be gone. By the end of its remodelling between 1805 and 1809 it being a shadow of its former self.

But the engineers weren't finished yet.

—

In 1809 when the engineers sought a water supply for their new harbour, an elderly fisherman spoke of a tradition of a well once having existed in the vicinity. The engineers listened, and after digging exploratory pits near Doorie hill an astonishing discovery was soon made. A flight of steps leading down to a hollowed-out chamber fed by local springs. Clearly it was man-made, and of an immense age.

In line with the scholarship of the day the well was described as a Roman Bath in official reports. Though in retrospect it’s roughly hewn subterranean depths bear little similarity to those of southern Britain and the continent. Ultimately the chamber would be expanded, with new wider steps dug into the bedrock. Though after detailed considerations, thankfully it was deemed unsuitable for supplying the town, allowing further research to be carried out in the future.

And as for the identity of its creators, only much later in the century, after a slew of discoveries shocked researchers and laypeople alike across the island, would alternative explanations be considered. For the Picts took a long time to be considered capable of creating such a site, perpetually branded as wild savages of the northlands, capable of creating little more than mud huts and violence.

When the real archaeologists finally arrived at the end of the Nineteenth Century, the well at Burghead was finally given an early medieval date, suggesting its origins at first as an early Christian baptistry. Finally when a large Celtic stone head was retrieved from the murky depths, coupled with similarly astonishing discoveries from all over Scotland, the truth would finally be contemplated. Rather than Roman or Christian, this had been a Pictish ceremonial haven. A home, or embodiment of a native water god. Finally, after a thousand years of oblivion, brought back from extinction.

The fort itself depicted on Roy’s map was massive. Measuring some one thousand feet in diameter, with two citadels located within. A complex series of colossal ramparts utilising Iron Age foundations swelled to an astonishing eight metres of width at the base. Likely once standing to a height of six metres, possibly topped by even more impressive wooden defences and walkways. When first constructed during the Early Historic Period they were flanked by a killing zone of three banks and ditches. And like many other sites of the time the place was vitrified; fired in such intense heat that stone melted and fused into impressive bastions, arguably created as much to impress as for actual defence.

At three times the size of any other enclosed site in early medieval Scotland, and walls of a much greater width, this could only have been one of the earliest surviving power centres of the Picts. Just maybe preserving the sacred fire rituals of the kingdom which once thrived here in days of old.

III - The Camp of The Feathers

Along the north-east coast of Scotland, jagged cliffs and inhospitable shores stretch for some five hundred miles. Cutting a triangular swathe centred on the Moray Firth, largest body of water of its kind found anywhere in Britain. North of the Cairngorms and not far from the River Ness and the Great Glen; vast sweeping overland route through the highlands, it’s a relatively sheltered and strategically important land. One thousand years ago this was the realm of Mac bethad Mac Findlaich, Mormaer of Moray and real historical figure behind the Shakespeare play. Historically it’s always exercised a certain level of independence, and at times, dominance over the lowlands.

Nestled between teeth-cut stone & grey sand, for those who knew where to find it, excellent anchorage could be found here. Focal points for seafaring people to come together. To fish, to trade; to settle.

And when first recorded in the early Scottish and Irish annals of the later Early Middle Ages - mere scanty shreds of information amidst a slew of Pictish kingdoms that once ruled the far-flung corners of northern Britain - this region is a good candidate for perhaps the most powerful of all; a Scotland before. The mysterious kingdom of Fortriu.

From here between the Fourth and Eighth centuries AD the Picts of Fortriu, perhaps sailing from Burghead amongst other sites, were unquestionably the masters of the sea. In the Fourth and Fifth centuries AD they are recorded as a colossal naval threat to the ever weakening defenders of Roman Britain, and traditionally were recorded by Gildas, Bede and Nennius alike as the main reason why Anglo-Saxon mercenaries were invited over the channel in the first place during the age of the tyrant Vortigern.

Even earlier, in the decades immediately following the Roman invasion of Britain, coins from the Mediterranean are found this far north, and further still, on distant Orkney. Testament to long held diplomatic connections with the south-lands.

One of the more notable finds at Burghead is a Greek coin from the reign of the Emperor Nero (54-68 AD) just following the initial Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD by his predecessor Claudius (41-54 AD).

How the coin got this far north is anyone’s guess, be it loot, via diplomacy or trade. But quite astonishingly one hint may come from a manuscript first penned half a world away on the sweltering Nile. In the distant Egyptian port city of Alexandria.

—

In the Second Century AD the Greco-Roman Geographer Ptolemy penned one of the most extraordinary works to survive from antiquity. A description of the entire known world, based on the best geography and scholarship of the day, unlike Bertram’s ‘The Description of Britain’, Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ is the real deal, and though he never travelled as far as the cold frontier of Britannia, let alone further into the barbarian wilds beyond, his informants undoubtedly did. For Ptolemy based his work on the far-flung stories of sailors, merchants and soldiers, spanning the vast distances around the Roman world, from frost-ridden Ireland where half-monsters were said to dwell, to the distant shores of India and the Silk Road beyond.

And during that brief window of time, in the days of the Five Good Emperors of Rome, when the Pax Romana really could be said to concretely exist outside the realm of propaganda, not just one wall, but two stretched across the north of the recently conquered province of Britannia.

And even beyond that Antonine Frontier Ptolemy recorded not just the names of settlements, but scientific data that could only have been recorded by individuals on the ground.

The northern-most of these places, where precise astronomical measurements were meticulously taken, giving it a maximum day length of 18.5 hours, compared to the 17 hours recorded at London, was recorded as Pinnata Castra, perhaps also known in the Ravenna Cosmography as Pinnatis. Roughly translating as the ‘Winged Camp’, or ‘Camp of the Feathers’, the place is perhaps one of the four sites listed as strongholds of the Vacomagi tribe. Though it remains unclear whether the ‘polis’ was a native town or a temporary camp built by the advancing Roman legions, it’s precise location and identity has long been a source of speculation and study.

For General Roy and many a researcher since, the Iron Age precursor of the Pictish fort at Burghead ever remained the best candidate for Pinnata Castra. When archaeologists finally returned in 1969, using all the methods of modern science, their conclusions were fascinating.

Though no definitive evidence surfaced to link Burghead to Pinnata Castra, the place was certainly was occupied during Ptolemy’s age, when Roman rule stretched as far north as it ever would. It was occupied as early as the Bronze Age in fact, remaining a centre of importance for thousands of years.

And if Burghead ever had been occupied by the Romans, their existence here was a transitory one. For the tables would soon turn.

From the end of the Second Century AD until the final collapse of Rome under the heel of barbarian invasion in the Fifth, the native inhabitants of Scotland would go on the war-path, recorded for the first time as Picts, or painted-men, feared throughout Western Europe, in vast armies they would pour down from the highlands over and over again, hurling themselves on Roman walls and those of their descendants for centuries to come, bringing back plunder and reputation.

In Scotland the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was a golden age.

—

When I arrived in Burghead in the early summer of 2022 storms raged in the wind-tossed sea. The pubs were all closed. No hotels and only a few holiday homes then open for business. The pandemic had been hard on a small town such as this. Bracing myself for the biting gale I ventured out to the immense ramparts at Doorie Hill, still impressive now even in their much reduced state.

Handed a set of keys by the warden of the excellent visitors centre, I let myself into the well, before gazing out to azure ocean waves. Just eight miles seaward across the Firth stands Portmahormack, an important recently excavated early monastic site, with clear links to Burghead. Another similar monastic site at Kinneddar lies just a morning’s walk inland. The proximity of these religious centres is often now seen as evidence of Burghead’s status as a royal centre.

But I’ve come here looking for even more evidence of royal authority. Something set in stone. Found not just in the visitors centre here but in the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. For here at Burghead exist some of the greatest treasures of art in the entirety of early medieval Europe.

When the Burghead Bulls were pulled out of the ground during the expansion of the town in the early 1800s their significance was almost completely ignored; dismissed as barbarian detritus to be shunned in favour of a - fantastical as it would turn out - glorious imperial Roman past.

Around thirty stone slabs are thought to have been retrieved from their original settings around the outer shell of the fortress. Displaying a degree of naturalism rarely found anywhere during that age, they speak of a time when martial strength and militaristic prowess were favoured here by a pagan warrior cult from the Fifth to Seventh Centuries AD, stretching long into the era traditionally seen as Christian. Clearly, here at the far northern extremities of Europe, where Christianity had latterly been accepted but nonetheless left adrift to develop on its own, martial leaders could worship in whatever unorthodox ways they saw fit.

Today only six of the carvings survive. Most were used as construction material for the town over two centuries ago, built into the quayside bastions of the new harbour.

Unfortunately, though the archaeological evidence at Burghead is some of the most significance in all of Sub-Roman Britain, the archaeology is almost all we have to go on. No great work of a Bede or a Nennius survives to chronicle the early Pictish kings, and though the Burghead Bulls as well as the seemingly hierarchical entranceways into inner fort and royal hall seem to suggest royal associations, all we have to go on in history are shreds of Irish and later Scottish writings to document the once mighty realm of Fortriu. For when the Scottish Kingdom of Alba arose to the south in the years to come there was little space for tales of an independent Pictish realm to its north.

By the time Vikings came to the Moray Coast in the Ninth Century AD the age of the Picts was already coming to a close. Long having been pulled into the encroaching orbit of the Scots of the Western mainland, the exposed eastern coast fell easy prey to those marauding Norsemen.

The Irish Annals of Ulster records the annihilation of Fortriu in fiery language and other mentions of the destruction of a Torfness in the much later Orkneyinga Saga might similarly record a significant end. Most telling of all, in archaeology no sign of occupancy at Burghead survives after this date.

But just maybe, though it’s impossible to say definitively, a shred of that ancient kingdom might survive. The martial bull-cult of its ancient kings transformed by fleeing small-folk into the fires of the burning Clavie.

If you want to learn more here is a 3 and a half hour deep dive into this time period:-

Behind me the now familiar batch of buildings that make up Chiapas’ Maya Bell Hotel huddles in a forest clearing. Battered old swimming pool to one side, restaurant and car park the other. And ahead, clearly visible now amidst twisted trunks and undergrowth, is a buried remnant of the ancient world.

A pyramid of the Maya civilization which once ruled these lands well over a thousand years ago.

And not just that, but a platform mound too. It’s well-built masonry long hidden beneath clusters of roots and earth. Then it dawns on me. Perhaps I’m already walking within a plaza of that once mighty urban society. Forlorn now, left to the forest.

I begin scanning the rest of the tree line, suddenly feeling very small. Today the priests, warriors and peasants who once called this place home are all gone, but the evidence they left behind is far from it. Despite decades of continuous digging, countless completely un-excavated suburbs still lie buried beneath the jungle floor. Largely vacant since the fall of the city some twelve hundred years in the past.

Because this isn't just any city. It’s one of the most iconic of all. Integral in the study of Central America’s Mayan Civilisation. Dazzling experts and travellers alike in the midst of the Chiapan rainforest since it was first rediscovered by the modern world just over two hundred years ago.

The night before I’d been woken from my slumber in the early hours. The persistent rain having finally let up for a brief while, howler monkeys could clearly be heard unleashing their cacophonous din across the treetops.

When we'd arrived at Palenque the evening before, after a full days journeying south from Mérida, it had been incredibly wet. The boggy ground already seeming full, despite days more rain on the way. The geography of the place intent on hammering home its difference from the dry north.

For down here in Mexico’s far southern corner of Chiapas, true rainforest is to be found. No longer the dry scrub of the sun-baked Yucatán peninsula of the north.

Down here hills rise and mist-clouds churn ever constantly across the tree tops. Past temple mounds, platforms and scattered settlements. During my visit the rain seemed to very quickly get inside everything, laying a persistent dampen mist upon the inside of my lodge and all my belongings within. But in a place like this it’s very difficult to be disgruntled. Only helped by the monkeys roar, I drifted into a deep slumber that night. Dreaming of ancient priests and distant temples.

I awoke to a re-emergence of the deep rain. A quick breakfast and into the van I shuffled, joining our motley group of travellers from all over the world, and onwards we went, toward the centre of the city. From where fourteen hundred years ago Pacal and his dynasty ruled over one of the foremost kingdoms of the maya world. Amidst the sleepy daydream of an early morning my mind wandered to the masses who once called this place home. Philosophers studying the nature of the universe. Artisans and craftspeople working away at wonders, and above all else, labourers and townspeople going about their business. Oblivious to the machinations and political events of the ruling class.

The several minutes drive from the Mayabell down the highway and into the archaeological park hammers home the enormity of the site, the sprawling map our guide shows us only adding to the sense of colossal scale.

During the Twentieth Century it took decades for archaeologists to survey the place using agonisingly slow ground surveys. And this being a site that is much better known than most. Today, LIDAR technology is completely revolutionising the field. High tech lasers fired from planes finding new structures every season. Even lost cities re-emerging in the deep forest.

The rain lets up just a little as we disembark the bus. Soaked up by massive trunks looming above as we enter the woodland. Serpentine paths winding around river beds and mud-piles. Our guide - El Gato, named for his panther- like eyes he says with a grin, a native of neighbouring Tabasco, soon locates the first stop of the day - a tiny opening under a great tree lined hill side. ‘Who wants to go in?’ he says.

The inside of the opening is surprisingly large. Spacious enough for myself and eventually a Tariq and a Chingis to comfortably walk. And soon we realise - several bats and a whole host of insects to accompany us, a plethora of subterranean denizens having taken up residence in the structure long ago. It had been above ground once. A stone built house for well-to-do members of a Palenque community. Subsumed under the forest floor by generations of falling vegetation.

What had life been like for the people who lived here I wonder as we head further through the canopy. Did they have any sense of the political and military events so often talked about by Mayanists today?

Several more underground houses later we arrive at an overgrown temple crowning a rising hill-top. Up and up we climb past mud piles and squelching puddles, clinging to vines as we go.

Only then it dawns on me that we’re climbing a pyramid, a big one. Completely covered now by diagonal forest floor. Only the top most building peaking out at the summit gives away the reality of its man-made nature. A hint of what almost all Mayan cities looked like at the dawn of the Nineteenth Century before they were cleared by archaeologists.

It remains an amazing fact that despite Palenque being one of the earliest cities re-discovered by modern excavators, it still has near unfathomable mysteries left to be unlocked. Only the very immediate centre having been properly cleared and studied, and that’s where we're headed next.

Our first glimpse of the city centre is of grey-black limestone stairways rising endlessly to the sky. Temples and wood-supported platforms sprawling upwards through the trees. And when we exit the shelter of the woodland toward open green fields, sodden feet our companions, the sight we see isn’t too dissimilar to that which would've greeted Mayan pilgrim travellers some thirteen hundred years ago when the city stood at the very height of its prime.

The intense reds and whites of the stuccoed facades have long gone, but the immensity of the architecture remains. The sheer shock factor when faced with such colossal constructions. Built by human hands alone, no pack animals existing in this part of the world. But as far as most Mayans were concerned, those mighty edifices could only have been the work of gods.

Adjacent to that first massive pyramidal complex I soon spot the most famous structure of the whole site, and one of the most famous in the entire Maya world. The Temple of the Inscriptions.

It was here in the 1950’s that Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier worked with his team for more than ten consecutive seasons. Uncovering vast amounts of information on the history and society of the kingdom. Most famous of all however was their digging under that particular pyramid structure. For here was excavated the very first tomb ever discovered in the Maya world, and one of the first in the Americas as a whole. The excavations revealed vast amounts about Maya beliefs on life, death and society in general. Before that day, Maya funerary customs had been a total mystery.

Within the tomb, coated in jade - one of the most precious materials in the Maya world, the body of King Pacal the Great was found. You might know him from the Civilization series of PC games as the perennial leader of the Maya faction. Fated to be the first uncovered during the modern age, quite simply, unlike almost all other Maya kings & queens, he’s famous.

But Pacal’s legacy is a strange one. When infamous Swiss pseudo-intellectual Erich von Däniken published the best-selling ‘Chariots of the Gods?’ In 1968, he argued Pacal’s sarcophagus lid to be a depiction of an ancient astronaut. Though erroneously claiming it to have been found at the city of Copan many hundreds of miles away in Honduras, the details and the facts weren’t important. The Pseudo-archaeological concept of Ancient Aliens was born.

When travelling across the far north of the Yucatán a week earlier I’d spent a day with a German guide advertising himself as an archaeological expert with some equally interesting views. ‘The Smithsonian has several giant skeletons they keep hidden away’ he tells me, as well as a bizarre hypothesis about an Egyptian Old Kingdom city of 50,000 inhabitants nestled in the deep recesses of the Grand Canyon.

Thankfully we arrive at the city of Ek Balam just before my brain melts out of my ears, and by the time we explore Coba’s tree-lined highways I’m not at all surprised when he begins his Ancient Aliens spiel.

Amidst this slew of bizarre claims Wolfgang (name changed to protect his identity) relates a particularly grisly incident when every archaeologist working on The Temple of the Inscriptions in the 1950s dropped dead upon opening Pacal’s tomb. Unfortunately for my confused guide, it takes just a few seconds google to confirm Alberto Ruz Lhuillier lived happily until 1979.

Another of his uncorroborated claims is of another tomb at Palenque, that of The Red Queen. Coated, he says, in a mysterious red substance unknown to science. At Palenque it is very easy to find the name of that substance. Cinnabar.

In the face of these bizarre and easily refutable claims I realise just how fragile all this knowledge really is, and how easily it can crumble in the wake of charlatans.

Upon hearing of my travel plans Wolfgang also unreliably told me of Chiapas being an incredibly dangerous place, and that I’d certainly need a police escort.

We do head past Zapatista villages. Autonomous Mayan communities who’d gone their own way since the 1990s amidst armed conflict. Quite justifiably having rejected governorship by the far off central Mexican government after centuries of foreign rule. Though today the place seems incredibly calm. The people friendly & welcoming. In my opinion a much calmer place than the bustling chaos of cartel-ran Playa Del Carmen where Wolfgang calls home. It’s a reminder that perhaps we shouldn’t listen to the media machine so much.

The media often spins a particular story, and story is ultimately how we view the world. Go and see a distant land for yourself and the picture on the ground is often very different.

We spend the rest of the afternoon exploring the city. Past aqueducts, ball- courts, endless temples, pyramids and buildings. Palenque is a stunning place, nestled within an incredible natural landscape. It’s one of my favourite Maya sites of the whole trip. And when finally we get back to the hotel, after a brief swim in the pool, I know what I have to do. Overgrown pyramids and temples looming all around.

If you want to hear more about the Mayans then head on over to my YouTube channel for a four and a half hour deep dive into the entire history of the Maya, from the distant Second Millennium BC to today, including a colourful cast of kings, queens, conquistadors, explorers and archaeologists. Cheers and see you next time.