BLACK SAILS VIII + IMPERMANENCE
i get it now
[id: a series of six images showing a conversation between Benjamin Hornigold and Hal Gates in the fort of Nassau during season one of Black Sails. Text over the images reads: They're coming to terms with a very uncomfortable truth. And what is that? That no matter how many lies we tell ourselves, or no matter how many stories we convince ourselves we're part of, we're all just thieves awaiting a noose. /end id]
bear mccreary was crazy for that
Montagne de Bueren staircase in Liège, Belgium
March 18th 2024
Nantes, earlier this month!
one frustrating element of the new content bans on gumroad and patreon is that they're doing it to stay in line with their payment processors' policies, which themselves are in place to stay in line with FOSTA-SESTA.
which is a law passed in the united states, a country of which i am not a citizen and in which i do not live. i was legally prohibited from voting for or against FOSTA-SESTA, but because the platforms and payment providers i use are based there, i am expected to comply with it anyway.
and the tiktok situation shows us that any platform based outside the US can and will be either blocked from operating within it or forcibly divested from its foreign owners.
this is just another facet of american empire, by the way. it's more than bombs and guns and client states: it's that the US leverages its dominance over technology and finance to set policy for, effectively, the entire world.
“The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.”
— Georges Bataille
A sphinx inspired by a terracotta oil jar from the Taman Peninsula, 4th century BC
The ‘Ring of Minos’ from Knossos - depicts a goddess descending to earth and into a rowing boat with representations of tree worship.
Minoan, Bronze Age
Blue glass beads from the Late Bronze Age, found in 1885 when a Danish farmer ploughed up a cremation urn at Kongehøj. Made in Mesopotamia approximately 3,100 years ago, they offer evidence of long-distance trade connections in the prehistoric world.
image from here
“During the period of the Aegean Bronze Age (ca.3000-1000 BCE), the ancient cultures of the Minoans and the Myceneans on the island of Crete made extensive use of fragrant substances such as ladanum (also called laudanum) and saffron. It is said that shepherds would often meticulously collect remnants of ladanum, a sticky resin that comes from the shrubs of the Cistus ladanifer, from the beards of their goats after they had been grazing. As Jo Day, a classics professor at University College Dublin, remarked, the Minoans and Myceneans (1600-1200 BCE) also burned another spice as incense: saffron. Numerous frescoes at other Minoan sites, such as Akrotiri on the Greek island of Santorini, even depict the collection of saffron from the island. Later, saffron would be called κρόκος, where we get the modern word “crocus” from.”
"That Minoan and Mycenaean states pursued different strategies of political rule is reflected in different architectural plans found at Minoan and Mycenaean palaces.
Minoan palaces are designed around a large central court flanked by residential quarters, storage facilities, and ritual suites. The central court is the main space around which palace traffic circulated, and various wings of the building were most easily (or only) accessible via the central court (Driessen 2002 , 2004). Many Aegean prehistorians have accordingly advocated replacing the term “palace” with “court compound.” while the palace at Knossos has a “throne room,” its function appears to have been related more to ritual practices rather than political ones, and the throne itself is probably a later feature added during the Mycenaean period (Driessen 2002). Other Minoan palaces do not have throne rooms, and an iconography of the ruler is missing from Minoan representational art until the very end of the Neopalatial period (Davis 1995), which is very typical of corporate states (Blanton et al. 1996).
Moreover, there is an absence of very wealthy burials in Protopalatial and Neopalatial Crete that we might call “royal,” although there are major depositions of wealth within the palaces themselves. Recent work on Minoan palaces has, in fact, suggested that they were “communal, ceremonial centers that were used both by non-elite (outside) and by elite groups (inside) as meeting places for ritual, integrative actions” (Driessen 2002,). That the courts of the Minoan palaces were used for major communal rituals is indicated by two miniature frescoes found at Knossos, the Grandstand Fresco and the Sacred Grove Fresco.
The ritual role of Minoan palaces should not, however, diminish their administrative and economic roles, which were crucially important. Storage of agricultural staples was extensive in both Protopalatial and Neopalatial palaces (Christakis 2004, 2008), and the administrative texts of the Minoan palaces, while undeciphered, clearly monitor large amounts of foodstuffs alongside other valuable commodities and human labor (Palmer 1995). Even if these foodstuffs were ultimately destined for communal banqueting ceremonies, the economic impact of the Minoan palace cannot be ignored. It appears that Minoan economy and ritual were tightly integrated, not mutually exclusive, components of the larger, corporate state system (Day and Relaki 2002, 219–20).
Mycenaean palaces on the Greek mainland, on the other hand, are organized around a central “megaron” complex, which consists of a porch, an anteroom, and a large rectangular room with a central hearth bracketed by four columns and a throne regularly located to the right of the entrance. Flanking this megaron complex are small courts, storerooms, administrative quarters, and residential suites. Mycenaean architecture thereby emphasizes the importance of the enthroned king, whose title, as we know from the clay administrative tablets written in Linear B, was wanax (wa-na-ka).
Wealthy burials are an endemic feature of Mycenaean palatial societies and the communities that preceded them. At the palatial sites of Mycenae and Pylos, large corbeled “tholos” tombs are closely associated with the palace itself. These tombs have architectural precursors on the mainland in the form of Middle Bronze Age tumuli and on Crete in the form of large, circular tomb chambers (Rutter 1993, 789; Parkinson and Galaty 2007, 122). Mycenaean art, like Minoan art, lacks a clear iconography of the king himself; rather, the wall paintings of the palace act as a frame or focalizing device for the wanax, providing a ‘first-person’ (rather than ‘third-person’) iconography of power (Bennet 2007). As with the tholos tombs, the iconographic vocabulary of these artistic frames at Mycenaean palaces (e.g., heraldic lions/griffins, in-curved altars) is largely borrowed from the Minoan world.
In terms of political economy, Mycenaean palaces were interested in controlling the acquisition of exotic raw materials such as ivory, as well as their distribution as finished products (Burns 1999). Many of these goods are found deposited in rock-cut chamber tombs and corbeled tholos tombs, some of which are truly monumental (Cavanagh and Mee 1998). Palace-sponsored feasting is a feature common to all Mycenaean centers and arguably was one way for the palace to promote the centrality of the state, along with the individuals and corporate groups who contributed staples and material, in ritual practice. These features can be associated with network (as opposed to corporate) strategies that center on the individual and the control of prestige goods."
-State and Society, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean
Reconstructions of Minoan women's clothing by Dr. Bernice Jones.
They can be seen at the Hellenistic Museum in Melbourne, Australia.
Photos by Tahney Fosdike
Minoan frescoes. The 1600s BC was a great time for fashion.
I’ll try to post the actual pictures I took soon, but I was bored today and wanted to shirk some other responsibilities, so I decided to do some general vague Minoan or Mycenaean look since it’s been on the mind and also my hair was looking really good today and I wanted to take advantage of that haha