sections: 1.
Introduction; 2.
Geology; 3. Human
Cultures; 4.the
name "Pithecusa"; 5.Pithecusa;
6. the
Spread of Literacy; 7. Giorgio
Buchner; 8. Geophysical Observatory
8. related entries &
bibliography/sources
Introduction
In 1930, Amedeo
Maiuri, the renowned Neapolitan
archaeologist, lamented that "Ischia is still
completely unknown." He would be pleased to know
that a lot of work has since gone into remedying
that situation. Excavations and research on the
wealth of artifacts uncovered on "Pithecusa" (the
ancient Greek name for Ischia) as well as
radioactive dating of the mineral deposits on the
island — all work done since the 1940s (and still
going on) —
permit us now
to sketch the geological history of the island over
the last 150,000 years as well as the history of its
human inhabitants over the last 5,000 years.
Geology
Seen from above, Ischia is roughly
a rectangle at the western entrance to the Gulf of
Naples. The four corners are almost exactly at NW,
NE, SW and SE. The island has a 34 km (c.21 miles)
coastline and a surface area of 46.3 square
kilometres (c.18 sq miles). Ischia and her
neighbors, Procida and
Vivara, are all islands of recent and intense
volcanic origin (unlike the other island neighbor, Capri, on the other side of
the gulf, which is really a broken-off fragment of
the Apennine mountain chain —
an extension
of the Sorrentine peninsula). Ischia consists of Mt.
Epomeo (787 meters/2,589 ft., photo, below)
surrounded by a number of various types of "volcanic
units," (small, extinct or dormant craters), and it
is here that recent research has corrected the
misconception that Mt. Epomeo is a deeply eroded
central volcanic crater. In 1930, the Swiss
vulcanologist, Alfred Rittmann, established that the
greenish tufa rocks of Epomeo are not the remains of
a crater, but the products of a powerful eruption
that were thrust up and broken into blocks (called
"uplifted horst").
Radioactive dating has shown that
the oldest formations on Ischia go back 150,000
years; they are on the eastern and southern edges
of the island. About 40,000 years ago there
occurred the powerful Campanian eruption and caldera collapse.
(That eruption is estimated to have lofted as much
as 40 km3
of ash and pumice into the atmosphere. By way of
comparison, one of the most powerful volcanic
eruptions in recorded history —
on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883 —
sent about 18 km3 of such material
into the air).
The Campanian cataclysm sank much of the island of
Ischia. Between 25,000 and 18,000 years ago, the
sunken green tufa and sea mud (clay) deposited on
top of it were then thrust up again by the intrusion
of molten magma from below, breaking up into many
blocks (horst), causing many faults, and creating
Mt. Epomeo. (That clay later became important to
humans as raw material for pottery manufacture.) The
volcanic units around Epomeo continued to be active
for some time, and the island as we know it was
still being formed through significant lava flows as
recently as 5,000 years ago. The last eruption on
the island occurred in 1302 AD and caused documented
damage to inhabited medieval
sites. ^to top
Human
Cultures
The extreme volcanism on the island made
the presence of truly early humans unlikely. (Even
a Neanderthal is not going to move out to an
exploding island.) The oldest evidence of human
settlement on Ischia is, thus, from a scant 5500
years ago, the Later Middle Neolithic Period
("Recent Stone Age," for short). Substantial
remains were found in the 1960s near the town of
Ischia: undecorated as well as painted handmade
pottery, terracotta weights for fishing nets,
flint and obsidian knife-blades. From somewhat
later (c. 1400 BC) there are finds of pottery
belonging to the so-called Apennine Culture,
widespread in Central Italy and part of southern
Italy. That period then runs into the Mycenaean
period, that is, a few centuries on either side of
the Trojan War (c. 1200 BC). The
Mycenaeans set up trading posts at various points
in the Western Mediterranean, including Ischia,
but generally did not displace native peoples.
Judging from the Iron Age implements of about 1000
BC, the natives on Ischia were Indo-European (IE),
probably Oscans, a sister people of the other IE
peoples on the Italian mainland, including the
Sabines, the Samnites,
and the Latini.
^to top
These
early natives of Ischia produced large
terracotta amphora, called pithol, with lug handles, as
containers for foodstuffs. They had a characteristic
shape, and more of them have been found on Ischia in
comparison to other Iron Age sites. This may be the
source of Pliny the Elder's claim (Nat. Hist. 111,
6.82) that the pith-
in Pithecusa is the same as the one in pithol —
thus,
Pithecusa, Land of the Big Jugs! A competing
etymology says that the pith- is the same as in pithecantropus,
thus, "monkey," and traces back to Greek mythology:
a race of mischievous little forest creatures called
Cercopes
were turned into monkeys by Zeus and banished to
various volcanic areas, one of which was Ischia.
Thus, Pithecusa meant "Isle of the Monkeys." Either
way —
indeed, even
in some third or fourth way —
it is thus
likely that the immigrants to Ischia from the Greek
island of Euboea settled a place they already knew
as "Pithecusa" rather than naming it that,
themselves.
(Later nomenclature: Virgil referred to the
island as Arime,
saying it was the island mentioned by that name in The Iliad (II,
783). Later, the Romans called it Aenaria,
possibly not from the
name of Aeneas,
as attractive as that theory sounds, but rather from
the
Latin aenum, meaning bronze or metal in
general, confirming the flourishing
metallurgical activity of the area.
Some crazed revisionist etymologists also hold out
for a Semitic origin: I-schra, "black island." [The
problem with that one is that all the sand on the
island is white.] The current name, Ischia, appears
for the first time (as iscla, derived from the Latin insula [island]
in a letter from Pope Leo III to Charlemagne in
813.)
No
matter which version you like, the
Euboean Greeks who settled on the hill at the NW
corner of the island (now Mt. Vico, above the modern
town of Lacco Ameno) did so in c. 770 BC. It does
seem strange that Greeks would come this far north
to found the "first Greek settlement in Italy,"
before sites on Sicily such as Syracuse or further
up on the mainland at Elea
or Paestum, all suitable
sites that colonists would have had to pass on the
way. Yet, scholars now think the Pithecusa was not a
typical polis;
that is, not a result of a pattern
of colonial expansion to
spread Greek city-states beyond the Aegean. There
is, in fact, no literary reference to the founding
of such a Pithecusan colony. The extreme variety of
artifacts on the island is seen as evidence that
Pithecusa was an emporion,
a port of commerce and trade in advance of the wave
of Greek expansion that led to the city-states of Magna Graecia and purposely
set in a favorable position for trade with non-Greek
peoples in more distant parts of the
Mediterranean.
^to top
Pithecusa
The
acropolis of Pithecusa was on the
north-western hill, Mt. Vico, with water on two
sides. The necropolis was to the west in the
adjacent valley of San Montano. That valley is 500
meters long, 75-150 meters wide and runs SE to NW
between the slopes of Monte Vico and the slope of
the Zaro lava flow. The valley was used for
burials for 1000 years, from the foundation of
Pithecusa until the beginning of the third century
AD. So far, no graves of an aristocracy have been
found; that is, no cremated bones in bronze urns
as found at Cuma and back in Eretria (on the
island of Euboea, itself). This supports the view
that Pithecusa was not a polis but simply a thriving
commercial center, all merchants with no aristocratic
rulers. (Many of the artifacts found at Pithecusa
are, in fact, from burial sites and were not found
simply "lying around" beneath the earth, say, near
the acropolis.)
Archaeologists have found a great variety of pottery imported from different regions of Greece: Corinth, Euboea, Athens, Rhodes and others yet to be identified. Importantly, Pithecusan pottery is found elsewhere in the Mediterranean, including North Africa, Spain, southern France and the middle east, as well as in many Italian regions: Apulia, Calabria, Sardinia, Etruria, and Latium. Workshops for the working of iron have also been found. Also, the Pithecusans worked gold and silver and minted coins.
The
conclusion of all this is that the settlement was
home not only to Greeks, but to a mixed population
of Greek, Etruscan and Phoenician inhabitants.
Because of its fine harbor and location more or less
equidistant from the Etruscans, the early Italic
tribes of central Italy, the island of Sardinia and
Phoenicians from the Middle East and North Africa,
the traders of Pithecusa were very successful, at
least for a short time. At its peak (around 700 BC)
Pithecusa was home to about 10,000 people.
What
happened next —
the decline of Pithecusa and the rise of Cuma —
is not that clear. Both Strabo and Livy
have passages about the Euboean Greeks who founded
Pithecusa and nearby Cuma, although it isn't clear
from these literary sources which was first. Experts
now hold that Pithecusan pottery is the older of the
two; thus, the settlement at Pithecusa came before
Cuma. This has nothing necessarily to do with the
theory that the Pithecusans might have left the
island because of volcanic activity and, themselves,
founded Cuma, a few miles across the waters on the
mainland. That may have happened, but, alternately,
Cuma may also have been founded by a separate band
of settlers shortly after the year 700 BC. There is
not a lot of proof one way or the other.
Geologically, nothing seems to have happened that
would have forced the Pithecusans to desert the
island. They had chosen their site well and were
generally spared damage from eruptions as well as
from landslide activity from Epomeo. So, one colony
founding the second one, or two separate groups
founding their respective colonies —
the jury is out on that one
and not likely to return anytime soon.
Whatever the case, with the rise of Cuma,
Pithecusa declined in importance and by about the
middle of the 600s was no longer an autonomous
trading center and had become a dependency of
Cuma. The Cumans (and their dependent
Pithecusans), were then aided in 474 BC by Hiero I
of Syracuse who sent a fleet to help defeat the
Etruscans who were threatening Cuma. Hiero
occupied Ischia and left behind a garrison to
build a fortress that was still in existence in
the Middle Ages. (Cumans were themselves later
displaced by more settlers and moved a bit further
down the coast to found Parthenope,
which then begat Neapolis/Naples somewhat later.)
"Nestor's
Cup"
Volcanic activity on
Ischia started up again in 470 BC and continued.
Later, there was so much volcanic activity during
Roman rule, that very few Romans settled there.
The volcanism is probably why the young Octavian
(not-yet Augustus) decided to trade Ischia to the
city of Naples in 29 BC for Capri, one-fifth the
size. Suetonius, in his Lives of the Caesars, tells of a
dried-up old oak suddenly greening back to life
the minute Octavian set foot on Capri! The future
emperor took that as a good sign and also a good
way to unload an exploding island. A bit before
that, in the civil and social wars that wracked
Rome at the beginning of the first century BC,
Cuma and Pithecusa bet on the wrong horse. The
right horse, the vindictive general Sulla (138
BC-78 BC), may have destroyed the old acropolis on
Mt. Vico. That may be why very few remains of it
have been found. ^to top
Discovered
in 1954, the most famous artifact found on
Ischia is Nestor's Cup. It
was an import from the island of Rhodes and a burial
artifact laid into the tomb of a 12-to-14-year-old
adolescent, a grave now numbered as 168. There were
27 vases in the tomb, a rich send-off. Examination of four of
them in early Corinthian style puts the burial at
about 720 BC. The famous inscription on "Nestor's
Cup"...
"This is Nestor's cup, good to drink from. Whoever empties it will be seized by desire for Aphrodite, crowned with beauty."
...reminds us of the role that Pithecusa must have played in the transmission of literacy from Greece to Italy. Much earlier scholarship on the subject, such as Carpenter (1945, below), does not even mention (!) Pithecusa, concentrating almost entirely on the role of Cuma. The author says:
The latest student of the material, Edith Hall Dohan, in her extremely competent and valuable study of Italic Tomb-Groups in the University Museum, came to the conclusion that it was during the period 680-650 B.C. that "foreign influence penetrated deeply into Central Italy"... [and]... Commercial relations between Etruria and Greece had thus lasted almost precisely two centuries, from ca. 680 to 474 B.C. Early in that span of years the Etruscans had learned the Greek alphabetic signs...[and]... Payne reported for Corneto "great quantities, especially early Corinthian" and stated that "Caere and Vulci have probably produced more Corinthian vases than any other Italian sites. [Reference is to Necrocorinthia, a study of Corinthian art in the Archaic Period by H.G.G. Payne, first published in 1931.]There have been recent important finds of great quantities of Pithecusan pottery bearing Greek inscriptions; also, there is newer archaeological evidence of trade between Pithecusa and Etruria. These discoveries have helped push the date of 680 BC back a bit into the time of the flowering of early literate culture on Ischia and forced us to reevaluate the notion that only Cuma, important as it was, was responsible for the Etruscans learning the Greek alphabet. Also, it bears mentioning to the modern reader that in the period from, say, 700 to 500 BC, there was no single "Greek alphabet" to pass on. Literacy in Greece was still so new that various parts of the Greek homeland developed their own variations of the earlier Phoenician writing system and carried those variants out into Magna Graecia. A list of such variants includes names such as Corinthian, Accadian, and Ionic, and there are even examples of forms of letters reworked by Greek settlers after they settled in Italy. The complexity of deciphering all of those variants and determining influences in the spread of literacy should not be underestimated.
Giorgio
Buchner
Many of the
archaeological discoveries on Ischia since the
1940s have been the result of work done by Giorgio
Buchner. He was born in Munich in 1914 and passed away
on Ischia in 2005. His German father and Italian
mother had acquired property on Ischia and the family
moved there before WW II. Buchner studied the classics
in Naples and became fascinated by the early history
of the area. His graduate thesis in Rome in 1938 was
on early human settlements on the Flegrean Islands
[Ischia and Procida] from pre-history to the time of
the Romans. He started serious work on Ischia in the
late 1940s. At the time, though scholars had known of
a settlement called Pithecusa, it was more or less
considered to have been a secondary Greek stop-over,
some sort of a trading post perhaps. Over the years,
Buchner was responsible for hundreds of important
finds on Ischia, starting with his dramatic discovery
of Nestor's Cup. Buchner changed the way
scholars looked at Pithecusa. In 1947, he and
vulcanologist, Alfred Rittman, created a small museum
for their finds on the island. In 1999, it was
officially inaugurated as the Archaeological Museum of
Pithecusa in the presence of museum dignitaries from
the international community.
The
Geophysics Observatory in Casamicciola
I am remiss not to mention
the Geophysics Observatory in the town of
Casamicciola. It was founded by Giulio Grablowitz
(1846-1928) (image, left) in 1885 after disastrous
earthquakes in 1881 and 1883. Grablowitz was an
eminent Italian geophycist born in Trieste. Nature
magazine said this of him in its 1928 obituary:
"He remained at this observatory for more than forty years until it was closed in 1926, furnishing it entirely with instruments of his own design...He was also a member of the government commission which planned the geodynamics branch of the central meteorological office, and was one of the founders of the Italian Seismological Society."
The Geophysics
Observatory was the first such institute in Italy to
monitor geophysical events. The Ischia city council is
currently pushing to make the existence of this
important institution better known to tourists who
visit the island. It is still a working scientific
site. It includes a museum that lets you look at some
of the history of the place even if you can't read the
squiggles on the charts. You do sense, however, that
there is something alive down there. Indeed, Mother
Earth, is alive and kicking. Grablowitz's "Seismic
tubs" squiggled like crazy in 1906 when the great
quake leveled San Francisco. He even set up telegraph
lines to tell the main office of meteorology and
geodynamics in Rome to stand by for a squigglegram.
Ischia is quite proud of all
this and wants you, the tourist, to know about it. The
observatory is at Via Grande Sentinella, Casamicciola
Terme, Ischia.
related
entries: Ischia (1), Ischia (2), Nestor's Cup, Uncovering the Bronze Age
on Procida, The
Etruscans in Campania, Geology of the Bay of
Naples, Magna
Graecia, Ancient
Peoples of Italy, Cuma,
The Etruscan language,
Amina/Picentia, The Epomean Tales, Miscellany (June
2016-new digs), The
Alphabet in Italy.