Photograph courtesy of Michael Cosmopoulos
Today’s tourism brochures brag about the beaches of Pylos; two millennia ago, Homer sang of “sandy Pylos.” But the red clay soil of nearby Iklaina is what matters to archaeologist Michael Cosmopoulos, because that red clay is slowly giving up the secrets of the first known experiment in federal government.
Eleven years ago, Cosmopoulos, the endowed professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, wheedled permission from the Greek government (and funding from the Canadian and U.S. governments, as well as private donors) to dig at Iklaina, on the west coast of the Peloponnesus. Only one man had preceded him: Spyridon Marinatos, who back in 1954 found evidence of a possible palace there: indications of massive walls, covered in frescoes, and tons of pottery.
But after just four days of excavation, Marinatos got sidetracked by news of Santorini, said to be a Greek Pompeii. He rushed off to the island of Thera to uncover artifacts perfectly preserved by lava and ash. The palace stayed buried.
Cosmopoulos, who was born in Athens, was determined to relaunch the Iklaina dig. He spent eight patient years surveying the site with the Global Information System and Global Positioning System, learning what was buried where. Finally, in 2006, excavation began, and his team of students and vacationing St. Louis archaeology buffs carefully unearthed houses and other buildings. They had been scorched by fire, the team quickly realized, and were studded with bits of weaponry.
Iklaina, Cosmopoulos is now sure, was one of the district capitals in the Kingdom of Pylos, which was probably stitched together from various chiefdoms around 1500 BC.
The kingdom’s central palace, just 4 miles from Iklaina, had been unearthed by Carl Blegen back in 1952. He pronounced it the Palace of Nestor, sure it had been ruled by a real king who was later mythologized in Homer’s Iliad. A compound of four buildings, the Palace of Nestor sat on a high ridge, surrounded by ravines, the steep hillsides terraced with olive groves. Inside the compound, Blegen found a throne room, a wine magazine—its walls lined with large wine jars, or pithoi—and once-brilliant frescoes: a hearth painted with spirals of flame; floors faux-painted as marble; walls covered with animals, people, and fantastic creatures. Even better, he found a trove of nearly 1,000 clay tablets archiving the operations of the kingdom, including various taxes paid by the districts.
Those tablets hold clues to the first known federal-state relationship in the world. “It is a two-tiered government, in many ways like ours,” Cosmopoulos explains. “The state was divided into districts, each with its own capital and local administration, and their notations make it clear that certain government functions were centralized, while Iklaina retained local authority over others. If you want to stretch it, you can call King Nestor the father of federalism!”
Until Cosmopoulos reopened the Iklaina dig, the only information about Myceneaean (Late Bronze Age) federalism had come from the Palace of Nestor. “It’s like looking at the United States only from Washington, D.C.,” Cosmopoulos explains. “Iklaina was the seat of the local government. We know the local governor was in charge of several financial transactions that took place at his district, but he reported to the king; there’s evidence for transfer payments, mostly in the form of bronze from the ‘federal’ capital to the ‘state’ district capitals.”
Members of the Iklaina dig have found shards of rhyta, or ceremonial vases; rock crystal; plaster fresco fragments painted blue and red; clay and stone spindle whorls that were used for weaving; clay pendants and amulets that look like old-fashioned ship anchors. “Most archaeologists believe they were apotropaic, meaning they were meant to keep evil away,” Cosmopoulos notes.
They’ve also come upon wheat barley, ancient olive pits, and fish bones and scales, although they’re not yet certain what kind of fish. Cosmopoulos’ wife, Deborah, is a zooarchaeologist, so she has analyzed the bones of sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle as well as wild boar and deer. She can even pinpoint what season the deer were killed, because their antlers were about to molt.
“It’s a constant excitement,” Cosmopoulos says. “I’ve been excavating for many years, but the idea that we are the first people to lay eyes on an artifact that has not seen the light of the sun for more than three millennia still sends chills up my spine.”
He has mysteries to solve, always. Last summer, they found the skull of a teenage girl who had suffered from hypoplasia, a condition caused by severe physical stress. “What was her story?” he asks himself often. “Why was she laid there?”
The more the expedition unearths, the happier the townspeople—who originally resented the incursion—and the Greek government, which funds part of Cosmopoulos’ endowed professorship at UM–St. Louis. “Excavation permits are hard to get in Greece, but with good reason,” he says. “For decades, archaeologists have been excavating but not publishing the results.”
Cosmopoulos documents his results—but he also finds himself dreaming about the civilization he’s trying to reconstruct. “What archaeologist doesn’t?” he asks. At the end of hot days’ work, his students often imagine the ancient inhabitants “sipping their wine, watching the sun dive into the Ionian Sea.”
Pylos was isolated, cut off from the rest of Greece by mountains—but connected by sea. “It was a naval power with extensive trade connections through the Mycenaean world,” Cosmopoulos says. “And we suspect that the end of the kingdom came by sea as well. There is evidence that the main palace and other sites were destroyed by fire at the hands of an enemy sometime around 1200 BC, and that the enemy arrived by ship. The clay tablets record the movement of troops from inland to the coast, which is very interesting, given the fact that shortly afterward, the kingdom was overrun by invaders. It seems they had some sense of incoming danger and tried to boost their defenses—but it didn’t work.”
The Iklaina site was destroyed, he believes, around the time of the Trojan War—which was mythologized by Homer, but which most archaeologists believe was based on a historic event sometime between 1200 and 1100 BC.
“The whole Mycenaean Bronze Age was very warlike,” Cosmopoulos observes. “Wall paintings were usually of war scenes, and the texts point to a sort of medieval society, with a king, the aristocracy, and the knights who hunted in their leisure time but mainly fought wars. We have representations of ladies of court, and we have references to women slaves in the clay tablets; we even have their names and the names of their children. Some are supposed to have come from Asia Minor; it is possible they came from Troy.”
How sure is Cosmopoulos about his site’s significance? “First, Homer tells us that King Nestor ruled over different districts and each had one main town as a capital,” he says, listing his sources. “Second, we have the clay tablets found in the main palace. And third, the evidence from archaeology matches the evidence from textbooks and literature.
“This is one of the few sites where mythology, archaeology, and ancient literature converge,” he concludes. “Basically, we are trying to separate fact from fiction. Homer came four centuries after the Trojan War, so we need to be very careful about the clues he gives us about Mycenaean society.”
So far, the dig’s only excavated about 8,000 square feet, or a fifth of an acre. “I think we’ll be there another 10 or 15 years,” Cosmopoulos says happily. “It’s over 100 acres.”
For more details or information about joining the dig, visit pylosdig.org.
Jeannette Cooperman is the magazine’s staff writer and—luckily, for this story—the wife of a historian.
