A Bored Shepherd Writes Himself Into History
Something that came up a lot during my research for ‘The Far Edges of the Known World’ was just how important seemingly unimportant things are to our understanding of history. A recent discovery in Greece offers another example of this!
Imagine the scene, you are a shepherd sat around in a field with your flock, some 20 kilometers due south of Athens, in the 6th century BCE. The hot Greek sun is beaming down on you as you watch over a scene you have witnessed every day for the past decade or more. The boredom of yet another few hours loom ahead of you, so you decide to scratch something onto a nearby stone; leaving a mark that will join hundreds of others found in the area.
You have recently been to Athens and seen the vast temple atop the Acropolis, the tallest point in the city. (This is at least 50 years before the building of the famous Parthenon, so it is an earlier temple that does not survive). The size of which you had never seen nor imagined before. In this moment of tedium in the fields, you decide to try and draw it.
As you attempt to scratch each line in your picture you realise the task is a difficult one, so you do your best with your reconstruction. Around the base you record the name of the temple: to Hekatompedon, the 100-foot building.
Before the Parthenon
There has been a long and very niche debate about whether the Acropolis housed a large temple or temples before the building of the Parthenon in 447 BCE: where it or they may have stood and when they dated from. Archaeological finds that predate the big temple to Athena offered clues, but nothing concrete. This inquiry made all the more difficult because the Acropolis was destroyed during the invasion of the Persian king Xerxes in 480 BCE.
The discovery of graffiti made by a shepherd has shed much light on the topic. The style of Greek alphabet that he used can be firmly dated to the 6th century BCE, at least 50 years before the Parthenon was built, and a few decades before the destruction by the Persians.
So we have a depiction of an archaic Athenian temple which would have sat on the Acropolis - thanks to a very bored shepherd.
Written into History
But besides confirmation of something we already kind of knew about, far more important is the fact that this exists at all! The graffiti comes not just as a picture, but with the written word as well.
The shepherd even gives us his name, the otherwise unknown Mikonos. This means that a 6th century shepherd was able to read and write. This raises many questions about literacy rates in archaic Athens and indeed about our assumptions regarding these as well.
Call me old fashioned, but I would not have assumed that ancient shepherds were educated and literate like this. More fool me.
Makes me think of the highly literate Hesiod.