The First Pillars of Hercules
Looking with new eyes at the ancient Mediterranean... At a time like ours when spaces are dilating, rediscovering that dream and myth are very close and are reality, or were, like the Isle of Atlas and the Shardana.
Interview with Sergio Frau, by Biancamaria Bruno
Sergio Frau, let's retrace your journey. In 2002 you publish a large, brick-sized volume: The Pillars of Hercules, an investigation. Subtitle: The first Geography, a whole other History. There you proposed, based on strong clues, that the Pillars of Hercules at first were not located at Gibraltar, but at the Sicilian Channel. Do you want to explain a little bit about the origin of this research of yours? I mean, from what suspicions did you start? What certainties did you land on?
All "fault" of Vittorio Castellani, a great researcher: astrophysicist, archaeologist, academician of the Lincei, curious about everything and, what's more, really likeable. Even the book he did for Ananke, When the Sea Submerged Europe (Quando il mare sommerse l’Europa), while dealing with a very difficult subject (the rise in sea levels due to the Great Thaw), has a brisk, serious, over-documented but pyrotechnic style, so much so that it is read with enjoyment: it raises waters, moves megaliths, resurrects ancient civilizations. And yet, at one point, on two facing pages, he shows the Strait of Gibraltar in the 3rd millennium B.C. (such as we know it today) and, mirrored, the Strait of Sicily, before the sea level drowned it under the current layer of water that makes it one of the most murderous places in the Mediterranean. Well, that image showed a Sicily that was much larger, so much so that it still incorporated Malta and Gozo. So much larger that it almost touched Tunisia, also with lands yet to be submerged. In fact, in the Mediterranean of the Ancients, there was another strait, and it was right there, in that treacherous area where Homer's fears are crowded, where Mount Etna makes fire and flames, where crazy islands appear and disappear by surprise, and where everyone is shipwrecked a bit, even St. Paul who resents his captain for choosing that route full of shoals. A strait, in short, to enter the Western Sea, the Okeanos of the most ancient Ancients!
But then, though, if there were two straits, who, when, how and why had put the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar? And why such a Greek bogeyman, put there, where no Greek was needed, since the greatest risks an Eastern sailor would have to face a month and a half at sea before Gibraltar? What if, instead, the "first" Columns at first had been right there, in the Sicilian Channel, marking all the risks? This was the starting doubt: the Great Doubt, so fascinating that-once it had now come-it was no longer possible to put it aside. It had to be faced.
And at that point?
At that point - it was September 1999 - one had to gear up for a beautiful adventure, of course, but completely unexpected. The first phone call was to Andrea Carandini, who knows everything: "Professor, excuse me, is there any study on the Pillars of Hercules?" Answer, "I guess not. But let me have time to get more information." A few days later, he gave me photocopies of Michele R. Cataudella. The title, How Many Were the Pillars of Hercules?, confirmed that the theme was there, that the problem was open, wide open, and that it would be fascinating - and inevitable - to go ahead with the in-depth study. Indeed, how was it possible to have so much vagueness and confusion about the very Pillars of Hercules that were supposed to represent what architects call a strong, unequivocal signal, so much so that there were multiple placements, always, however, contradictory?
And at that point?
I had to build myself a Greek sailor's head. Above all, consider his relationship to the sea, proportion myself to the routes of the time: Like a Menelaus who, returning from Troy, sacrifices bulls to keep the gods happy, terrified of having to cross the short channel between Turkey and Greece at Thessaloniki, and like the inhabitants of Santorini who - invited by the priests of Delphi to emigrate to Libya to solve a famine - decide with a thousand anxieties to go as far as Crete to see if there, by chance, there was not someone there who could tell them where exactly that unknown Libya was. Small, then terrifying journeys, which - seen with their own eyes - made Gibraltar seem far far away, almost as if it were the moon....
Thus began - with stratigraphic work on classical texts - the hunt for who, first, had used the term Pillars of Hercules: Pindar, there he is at last! Fantastic days and days, those: of great readings, a thousand suspicions and many confirmations. With in the lead - like a commandment - respect for what the Ancients left us in writing.
How so?
Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, the Tragedians are among the first to put down on paper what until a few centuries earlier were only tales from oral traditions. Here: I forced myself to always take them seriously-just as is being done at UNESCO rediscovering the history of Africa through its oldest tales, fossilized in tradition-knowing that it was those very words of theirs that had built the great Greek culture. The Iliad and Odyssey were recited as masses for the people, as were the tragedies: those words, those myths, those cosmogonies were stamped in your head, right from adolescence, and-along with the sky, the sun, the stars-constituted the cultural baggage that accompanied you everywhere, forever. If they swore to you about a Prometheus chained to the Caucasus of the Greek Dawn, brother of an Atlas in the Sunset Sea, you had to listen to them: if the Caucasus is real and rocky, why should the brother's island be a reverie? Too many times I have happened to read writings by us moderns that speak light-heartedly of Herodotus' geographical ignorance or the confusions of Homer, of Euripides.... Not only that: for the greatest witnesses of the ancient Greek world, there is always ready the accusation of ignorance whenever they are dragged out of the Pillars of Gibraltar...
Let's get back on course. What about outside the Columns of the Sicilian Channel?
In the book I called it an anamorphosis.... In fact, it is: just choose the right angle of view and interpret the writer between the fifth century and the end of the third century B.C. (when Eratosthenes will imperiously move the Columns to Gibraltar to represent and expand a world that Alexander and the crisis of Carthage made larger) and everything becomes clearer. Seven of the most representative authors of antiquity stop being bewildered in today's Ocean and become very realistic in the Western Mediterranean.
A few names?
First and foremost Herodotus, serious, very serious, always ready to say, "This one I know for sure; this other one I've only been told, but unfortunately I have not been able to verify it..." A trustworthy one, in short: one who swears to you three times that he doesn't know how Europe ends in the West, but who-since at one point he tells us about Tartessus, a place extremely rich in metals beyond the Pillars of Hercules, is transported with his tales all the way to Andalusia, only to be accused of contradicting himself. Or Dicearchus, a 4th B.C. geographer, who leaves written that the Pillars are closer to Greece than the end of the Adriatic, and is accused of having measured wrongly, since Gibraltar is more than twice as far from Greece. But Dicearchus - in my opinion - is talking to us about the Sicilian Channel. Just as Pindar and Aristotle are also pointing out the lagoons, the former, and the windless shallows, the latter, in the area of the Pillars of Hercules, with all of us moderns always ready to sentence, "Shallow waters in Gibraltar? Wrong, ignoramuses!"
What have been the subsequent developments?
For the good or for the bad?
First the good, then the bad.
Well, first of all having succeeded in infecting with my doubt many of those who still enjoy reasoning. A conference at Unesco in Paris, another at the Accademia dei Lincei, at the Science Museum in Turin, in Rimini for the Festival of Archaeology. And, also, dozens of well-done TV broadcasts: with an entire episode of Gaia with Mario Tozzi, CNR geologist and great popularizer, who gave me a very first check-up of the land of Sardinia to understand if indeed - as the memories of the East say - this island of the West may have suffered a Slap of the Sea that changed its history, transforming it from the paradise it was into a hell of mud and bad air. And, also - with the edition of my book in German - to have been able to dare to say, to an all-Berlin audience, that Theodor Mommsen was wrong with those dogmas of his about the Ex-Orient lux and with all his Dori über Alles, and that the Mediterranean was once far more symmetrical than much ideological antiquity of the Nineteenth and Nine Hundred told us. And, moreover, the satisfaction of having reopened reasoning about Sardinia, about its true role in the second millennium B.C.E., with its Shardana in the court of the Ramses, with that constructive paroxysm of hers that causes at least twenty thousand nuraghi to be pulled up on the island, with its thousand unmistakable signs of exchanges between East and West-in the sign of the Mother Goddess, with statues almost identical to those Anatolian first and the Cycladic later, that were there for all to see, but that no one wanted to look at.
And in the bad?
The former archaeological superintendent of Cagliari, Santoni Vincenzino, whom I have repeatedly accused of "high treason of his function" for all the havoc he authorized, tolerated and encouraged, at one point set out to organize with lena a collection of signatures against my hypothesis, an Appeal to the Mediterranean, even - trying to block the events that Unesco had in the pipeline to reason about my research. Apart from a hundred or so of his famils and subordinates (who were obliged to sign for peace of mind), from the entire Mediterranean then came another hundred signatures in all, collected moreover on trust, at the Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory, where the then president got herself ensnared in what remains a black and dumb page of the very glorious institute.1
How did it end up?
Well, that superintendent today is under investigation for "corruption and abuse of office" for allowing the massacre of the most beautiful Punic necropolis in the Mediterranean. His good people now keep their distance from him, pretending they don't know him. But no one from the Institute of Prehistory has yet apologized....
Where do you stand now?
I have moved on, very far ahead... But, before I bring out the new research, I would like there to be a geological verification on the very many nuraghi buried by mud that we have already presented in the exhibition-catalogue Atlantikà: Sardinia, Island Myth.2 This is a truly extraordinary, disturbing documentation: dozens of aerial photos taken by Francesco Cubeddu flying over archaeological areas of Sinis, in the Oristanese region, with his paramotor. Only geology and proper laboratory analysis, now, will be able to verify with certainty whether that mud disaster came from the coast with a tsunami and, above all, whether Sinis and Campidano are Pompeii of the Sea. I would like it to be the land of Sardinia, now, to tell its story, to let us know its story: a kind of autobiography of a really strange island, first a paradise and then a hell...
"Centuries and centuries of monsters and heroes all re-entering together, taking possession of places once theirs alone," so you write. And the result is that those monsters and heroes, whom we thought inhabited beyond Gibraltar, bewildered and evanescent floating who knows where, find themselves concentrated in the Western Mediterranean. A strange effect: in an age such as ours in which spaces dilate, to the point of making boundaries irrelevant, you restore and circumscribe them by proving, in a way, that dream and myth are very close and are reality, or have been, like the Isle of Atlas and the Shardana.
What is considered "prehistory" by us is already "History" for other peoples, such as the Egyptians or the Mesopotamians, who wrote everything down. Hard to think that their Far West was who knows where, and we were not, with our Mediterranean of the West, the Great Green of the Egyptians. The boundaries to be torn down - in my opinion - are now mainly mental ones, sclerotized by the passage of time and misunderstandings: resigned patterns, but sometimes without evidence or logic. Instead, those to be restored, hand in hand according to the ages, are the real ones of the Ancients, who - it is known - slip, disappear, return: with the Sea Peoples who in the 2nd millennium B.C. shuttled between East and West (as some wrecks filled with a truly multi-ethnic cargo show), and yet also with the "Iron Curtain" that separates - a thousand years later: from 509 B.C. onwards, writes Sabatino Moscati, - the Greek world from that Phoenician-Punic koiné that we will find later, confederated and armed behind Hannibal, in that great sea of ours where Aristotle testifies there was Hercules to be master of the entire West.
What insight have you gained into the geopolitics of the ancient Mediterranean? Your investigation also sheds reflected light on some so-called mysteries of antiquity, such as that of the origin of the Etruscans, for example...
Poor Etruscans: they paid a very dear price to fascism....
In what sense?
Mussolini, at some point around the 1940s - a little bit influenced by Hitler, a little bit exalted in his own right - decided it was time to put an end to the thousands of scholarly diatribes about the origin of the Italic peoples. "Here we are all Ario-Romans! Enough questioning...," he had the columns of Race and Civilization sentenced. One of the first to take him all too seriously was Massimo Pallottino, the father of Italian Etruscology, who, dedicating his book to the Duce, established the dogma "It is useless to search for origins: people exists here and now..." The rest no longer mattered. Thus, while abroad French and Germans, especially, continued to get busy, questioning themselves, here at home - at the third generation after Pallottino - wondering something about the origin of the Etruscans is still taboo. Yet.
And yet?
Yet I am sure that even many homegrown specialists have a hard time accepting for good, with resignation, what is usually described and explained as a mighty irradiation of "Villanovans," who from that area next to Bologna would have filled the whole of Italy with Etruscans. Those who know the Villanovan phenomenon - and its poor urn- cannot fail to realize, at the first glance, that those people are refugees, settled there for good, and burning their dead for who knows what and how many fears. And that, three centuries later, they will restore on the heights of Italy a mighty, highly organized federal civilization that has constants from Lucania all the way up to the Alps, in places as far from the sea as possible. I am reminded of the beautiful title of an exhibition at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris about them: Tous parents, tous différents, all a little different, but all related. Sometimes archaeology, by dint of exaggerated specialists and zooming in, seems to split hairs, only to forget that one hair was the starting point.... Bianchi Bandinelli complained about this half a century ago, denouncing the paroxysmally analytical slope that studies on the ancient world were taking, often neglecting moments of reflection, synthesis, doubt production.
And this phenomenon of crowding on the heights of the interior, how do you explain it?
I don't explain it: I record, verbalize and try to test a hypothesis to be confirmed altogether. In the 12th century B.C., however, Sardinia empties out on me. Giovanni Lilliu, a great of Sardinian archaeology, brings to an end just with the 12th century, the Golden Age of the nuraghi. In the 11th, however, we find new people on the interior peaks of Italy. Cortona, Arezzo, Orte, Orvieto, Perugia... Yet we never ask - dare we not ask? - why people from the sea have perched up there, in there, in the cold. Nor why this same people pay Charon to be ferried back to a marine Afterlife that reappears in a thousand nostalgias. And, even, the many certainly Sardinian evidences (bronzetti, small ships, urns) found in Etruscan burials have always been underestimated...
So?
If geology confirms my hypothesis of a killer sea - the Slap of Poseidon of the Ancient Witnesses - that killed the mind-blowing Sardinia of the 2nd millennium B.C., it will be interesting and obligatory to verify how much, in the origin of the Etruscans, the flight from the Island and the diaspora of those blacksmiths who knew a lot, a very lot, arriving on the peninsula from a land of silver veins and a thousand mines contributed precisely. Up to now we have reasoned about the Ancient World, dazzled by that former Oriental lux that first the Church, and then nineteenth-century archaeology imposed. Sardinia, armored by bad air first, by inadequate studies later, has remained on the sidelines despite its primacy, distorting the whole puzzle.
One example?
The "ox-skin" ingots. Those copper ingots symbolize the entire Bronze Age: the Egyptians, the Cretans, the Cypriots depicted them. In Sardinia, all those that have been found have always been called "Cypriot imitation." But then, if one goes to the Archaeological Museum in Nicosia, one finds a huge map that censuses ingots found around the Mediterranean: in that census, there is only one dot on Cyprus, on Sardinia nineteen. If indeed the Sardinians were imitating Cyprus, they certainly knew how to do it admirably, since on the island, in addition to ingots, many smelting stones have been found attesting to autarkic productions. It is almost a duty to put ourselves back under and try to understand. Or, at least, start questioning again with enthusiasm, passion and all the intellectual honesty that is needed. After all, that the period between the 12th century and the 9th century B.C. - when the entire Mediterranean suddenly emptied out and we found new settlements as far away from the coasts as possible just about everywhere - is a "dark age" is told by the very name archaeology gave it a few decades ago: Dark Age. And that it is worth going into those distant dark ages, delving as deeply as possible, is attested to by the thousands of verifications to which I subjected that research of mine filled with anxiety (for the gamble taken) and chock-full of question marks (1,792 of them were calculated for me with a click at the printer's). One out of all of them is this one by Andrea Carandini later published in Diogène, Unesco's cultural journal: "Sergio Frau's inquiry interested me greatly because it gave a kind of real geography to what was already known: namely, that the Greeks had their own very distant mythical past, the time of Cronus, the time of Uranus, that is, the time before Zeus, who was the supreme god of the Greeks who set order, who set order to the world. This Paradise was yes, on the one hand, in the very distant past. But it was also in the present of the Greeks: that is, it was in the West. In the West-that is, in these Western islands-this Paradise Lost lived, survived, and there it was also the world of the dead. Now, in much later times, this Paradise Lost had been seen around or beyond the Pillars of Hercules imagined in Gibraltar. Sergio Frau's great merit is to have discovered and brought back to actuality and given coherence to a completely different horizon, that is, this lost world, which the Greeks somehow looked at with enormous nostalgia, was not beyond the Mediterranean, but consisted of the Western Mediterranean itself. Before, the limit was the Adriatic; at a certain point, the biggest limit was precisely the Sicilian Channel; and this seems to me to be an important and fundamental acquisition of Frau, who also has the merit of not being an academic and therefore of having shown that passion and research is something that can seize everyone." It was impossible to stop at that point.... Or was it?...
Another interesting aspect also emerges from your work: that the Greek world had in antiquity very great competitors in populations and cultures that were perhaps less "media-oriented," as we would say today, but just as, if not more advanced, in terms of social organization, as I think well represented, for example, by the bronze statues of Nuragic art.
Sardinia-as well as Corsica-is paying the handicap of having been cut off from the great nineteenth-century research. It was a plague-ridden land of confinement, poverty, resistance and terrible fears: with wagons taking away the dead from malaria (solved only by the Americans' Ddt, mid-century) and with foreigners reluctantly landing there after making wills... Lilliu, Enrico Atzeni, Carta Raspi and a very few others provided the computation of its records-the megalithic urbanization that punctuates it from north to south, the tens of thousands of tholoi that make it unique, the records of metallurgy-but it was not enough to balance the Schliemanns, the Winckelmanns, the Vivant Denons who were pulling civilization in the other direction. So much so that even today there are those who speak of the tholos as a Greek architectural module that took root in Sardinia. There is little point in mentioning that the whole of Greece has only 116 tholoi mostly underground, and Sardinia has at least twenty thousand.... Just as the so-called "Nuragic bronzes"-which, however, in my opinion appear after the end of the Nuragic period: almost nostalgic icons of a beautiful period, now lost forever-have long been underestimated; instead, they show well the creative expertise of a civilization that for the entire 2nd millennium had set itself to represent nothing. Then - after the Great Crisis, the "done deal," in my opinion - here they are, realized by the thousands, those small masterpieces that, even magnified - as we did photographically for the Atlantika exhibition at the Lincei, bringing them up to one meter and eighty centimeters - perfectly hold the proportions of the great sculpture of which, so far, only one, extraordinary complex has been found in the 1970s - the Giants of Monti Prama - ended up, however, buried in warehouses for thirty years, until the current, very complex restorations underway.
Sardinia is yes an island that has, however, the characters of a small continent. How do you think this research of yours can contribute to strengthening the relationship between nature and culture in such a delicate ecosystem as that of a land and a sea that, in summer, become a destination for hundreds of thousands of tourists, encouraged to "environmental consumerism" also by the destructive policies of the current government?
Half of Sardinians know well that they live in a unique land that should be respected and loved out of all proportion. It is the other half that is of great concern, and to this one we should now make only cynical, venal speeches, the only ones capable of breaking through hearts that beat like cash registers: to make it clear that the more we build, the more we fight nature to death, the more we bastardize the landscape, and the less money will come in the future. What sense could there be in embarking to end up in super-equipped, overcrowded beaches, in terraced houses all around a supermarket that acts as a parish, forgetting what the sea is without the smell of tans and without the chatter of beach umbrella neighbors? And, to the Lords of the Bulldozers, let them finally understand that, by now, it is possible to get more work and more money in destroying the real estate nonsense of the last few years, restoring and reinventing the landscape with a Great Land Reclamation, rather than devouring more intact nature. The "Soru years" have created unprecedented awareness, so much so that now even these "new ones" have called a great artist, sculptor Pinuccio Sciola, to be the guardian of the landscape. To him -- in love as he is with his Sardinia, steeped as he is in international good taste, tough as he is when there is to be a fight for a just cause, such as this one -- should be given confidence...
What travel itinerary would you suggest to those who want to follow your "route"?
In the island it is almost always spring, just as the Ancients said. Two, however, are the Sardegne to be seen in an attempt to understand it: the intact one of Nuraghe Losa or Nuraghe Arrubiu, of the menhirs of Goni and Laconi, the secret, barbaric and sumptuous one of Romanzesu and Sorgono. And then there is the other, the one buried by mud, yet to be fully understood and on which I hope my research will shed light: Sinis with all its buried mastodons, Barumini, with the palace of su Nuraxi once covered by a mound of mud that is now a Unesco heritage site, and, still there, Casa Zapata where upon entering-surprise, under a transparent floor and walkways that cut through a crazy space, reinvented by architect Pietro Reali, an enormous nuragic complex appears that the mud hid for millennia, until 1990. It is the double background of an island: its most secret history that there, suddenly, reappears. It reappears and excites.
References
- All documentation at www.colonnedercole.it, in the section The Excommunication of the Altar Boys.
- At www.colonnedercole.it, in the Atlantika section.
Sergio Frau, 61, is currently the "youngest" of the founders of Repubblica, where he joined in 1975, at age 26, a month and a half before the new newspaper came out. An investigator first, editor of Dossier and Weekend later, correspondent for Cultura after that, he has worked with Angelo Guglielmi and Giovanni Tantillo's Rai, with Emanuele Milano and Andrea Melodia's Tmc. He has published only one book, The Pillars of Hercules, an investigation (Nur Neon, 2002), now in its tenth edition and just released in Germany. To accompany the conferences held on his research at Unesco and the Accademia dei Lincei, he organized, with Giovanni Manca and Massimo Faraglia, the exhibition "Atlantikà: Sardinia, Island Myth," presented with a catalog currently in distribution.
