I

’ve just arrived on the Greek island of Paros with Jane and Kellan. Paros, shaped like an egg, sits in the center of the Cycladic islands—those 220 islands southeast of Athens which spill out into the Aegean Sea.

Paros, neither particularly remote nor over-touristed, finds its following from Greeks and other Europeans who come for the food scene and the quiet. We’ve come here to explore Paros’ old sundrenched villages—and I’ve come with a very big question on my mind: could an ancient musical improvisational master, akin to a Django Reinhardt, Miles Davis or Jerry Garcia, have traveled through these islands, playing to audiences that sought out live spontaneous composition?

I have always had a distaste for the way modern culture treats the subject, and the way travelogues jump right into Hercules or Plato or the Iliad and Odyssey or the battle of Troy. The over-quoting of Plato bugged me, and the drama and glory and valor of brutal war in films about ancient Greece felt repulsive and indulgent to me.

At Greek restaurants, I was bothered by the worn out iconography lifted from old Greek vases, of frolicking Gods and the robed wealthy. I was never a fan of the faux-marble columns on square box mega-mansions, plastic grape vines and olive leaves.

When I was a freshman in college, I visited the Getty Villa Museum in Malibu which was modeled after the ancient Roman Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, filled to the brim with Greek and Roman antiquities. This sprawling villa, its fountains and pools and frescos, reminded me of my distaste for how we consumed ancient Greek history.

Then, something extraordinary happened, and it changed my life. 

While visiting the Getty Villa Museum, I wandered into a small room, maybe it was the smallest room in the entire museum. The room was dark, and only the displays were illuminated: a small collection of Cycladic statuettes and figurines. These figurines looked modern, as if they were carved for an exhibit at MOMA. They looked alien and mysterious. Their simple lines made them elegant and timeless.

But the wall panels explained that these figures were carved in the Bronze Age, some of them five-thousand years old. What’s more, they were carved on small islands in the Aegean Sea, many of them collected from Paros or its small sister island, Anti-Paros. This was not the artwork of wealthy high courts from some classical era, nor was it tied to eras of war or glory. Rather, these figurines appear to have been made by ordinary people living in small windswept island villages. Polished to a perfection by a civilization that was almost completely unknowable, lost to history. This old culture changed little over the millenia, and these figurines, like the culture that made them, also saw only incremental design changes over the millennia. 

These figurines reminded me that there was a Greek history for me—the sparsely documented and almost completely unknown story of ordinary people who lived in the far flung locales of the distant past.

In these elegant figurines was no Zeus or Poseidon, but the suggestions of history that felt compelling to me: what did these people eat? How did they fish? Did they travel from island to island? What did their homes look like, and what stories did they tell to their children?

Then, years later in New York, I saw it, the figurine that led me on a life-long itch, an itch which ends in these notes. Marbled Seated Harp Player is a Cycladic figurine known as one of the earliest representations of a musician in art. 

Believed to be from 2,800 B.C., and excavated in nearby Naxos Island, this figurine is surprisingly detailed, showing a musician engaged in the act of plucking his stringed instrument. The marble is precisely carved to show the musician’s thumb hitting a string. The musician looks up in the air, as if he is in a state of intense creative output.

For fans of live improvised music, we know this look well. For fans of Phish, it’s called ‘Trey Face’—that awkward look of guitarist Trey Anastasio lost in the magic of improvisation, Looking up, mouth agape, eyes withdrawn, staring blankly into the rafters of the stadium. Or that moment when The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia turns his back to the audience, focusing on nothing but the tiny red lights of his rig. In a state of intense improvisation, saxophonist John Coltrane stands hunched, his eyes closed, his face contorted. It looks as if he's dreaming.

Ever since I saw Marbled Seated Harp Player, I have wondered, how were people on tiny far-flung islands playing harps 5,000 years ago? What did that music sound like? And, ultimately, I wanted to confirm my suspicion: that figurine depicts a musician who is improvising, right?

Naoussa and the Improvisations of History

We are staying in the town of Naoussa, on the north coast of Paros. Today, Naoussa is a suave destination, complete with hip clothing shops and young partiers. 

Paros attracts its share of Instagram influencers, and you can see them in the crowds, sometimes looking sad and even lonely until the moment they turn their cameras on themselves, only then brightening with huge smiles.

At the center of the old harbor is a 13th century port guard fort, built by the Venetians to protect the commercial trade. In the Venetian era, there would have been two of these towers, tall enough to see far into the Aegean—an early warning against the Aegean’s timeless threat, pirates. 

I walk out to the fort on a stone and concrete jetty, enter it through one of its six embrasures and then exit out another, onto a shallow rock reef facing out towards the Aegean.

Beyond the defensive fort, I can see the view that the ancient Naoussans may have seen, and I wonder about whether a small musical group, maybe a duet, or a trio, or even a quartet, might have hitched a ride on some early trading vessel, ready to play to an audience familiar with their group and hungry for new, live melodies.

Before I can imagine that, I have to find out if there might have been performers and audiences that sought out live improvised music so long ago. There is this idea that true improvisation in music is something that was invented, perfected, and perhaps lost in the twentieth century—the Golden Age of Jazz.

Let’s take a step back and define musical improvisation. It is true that any live musical performance has elements of improvisation. The way a singer leans in on a certain sung word, a solo, extended out, modified and played pitch perfect, or the decision by a bandleader to feel the audience and make a snap judgment to alter a song in the setlist. And this would have been true in the ancient past, too, for there is evidence that musical notation, and the role of the composer, was almost absent in ancient history.

For our purposes, we’ll define musical improvisation more narrowly as a group of musicians composing new passages of music on the spot, having a large quiver of musical ideas, learned from classical training, guilds, travel or consumption of diverse and exotic scales, tunings and melodies. Perhaps especially, this includes the ability of bandmembers to listen, build upon and react to the ideas being spun live by fellow bandmates.

If The Beatles are the most successful band measured by pieces of studio music sold around the world, then perhaps Mozart and Beethoven are the most successful musicians if we measure the ubiquitousness of their compositions around the world.

But both musicians saw themselves primarily as live performers, rather than composers, and their compositions were inspired by their live inventions.

The Benedictine Monk, Placidus Scharl, who heard Mozart play live, is quoted describing his early years:

Even in the sixth year of his age he would play the most difficult pieces for the pianoforte, of his own invention. He skimmed the octave which his short little fingers could not span, at fascinating speed and with wonderful accuracy. One had only to give him the first subject which came to mind for a fugue or an invention: he would develop it with strange variations and constantly changing passages as long as one wished; he would improvise fugally on a subject for hours, and this fantasia-playing was his greatest passion.

Mozart’s passion was not to compose, but to find the music while playing it. He was not taught how to improvise, he was born with a desire for it. 

And he was not the only one. Bach, Handel—almost all of the great composers of history—had a desire and compulsion to perform and create spontaneously. Their compositions which are beloved today are largely the result of piecing together bits from their live improvisations.

Some of these live improvisations have been transcribed to paper and exist in written form today. However, I cannot help to wonder if their most amazing musical moments were performed live, containing fragments of spontaneous beauty that walloped the composed versions, filled with nuance that could never be transcribed to paper, and are now lost to history forever. 

If improvisation is natural to some musicians from the classical era, then we can deduce that improvisation is an innate skill shared by some musicians, regardless of era or the trends of the day.

But could advanced improvisation have existed in the ancient past?

Interview with Charu Suri

To explore that question, I reach out to jazz pianist Charu Suri while she is driving with her husband and daughter to the International Singer-Songwriters Association Award ceremony,  where she has been nominated for seven awards. Suri has quickly gained an international reputation for her band’s compositions and improvisational jazz performances, which blend’s Western jazz with Eastern musical traditions, including ragas, the world’s oldest known formal mode of improvisation, and a format that produces some of the most enchanting longform improvisations in the world today.

Erik: You’ve lived in different places around the world. How did these different continents shape your music?

Charu Suri: I was born in Madurai, India, and then moved to Nigeria at age 5, when my father got a job abroad there as the CEO of a record label, and the bungalow we lived in came with a piano. 

My mom basically said ‘you took to the keys like a fish took to water, started playing and never stopped!’ 

I returned to India at the age of 9, and studied Carnatic music as well as Western classical. So of course, growing up during my formative years in India, I was immersed in ragas and Western classical, and that has shaped my sound completely. In fact, that's how I hear music. 

Erik: You are sometimes described as someone who fuses jazz with music traditions from Central Asia like Carnatic music and Sufi music, and of course raga. While such a fusion is definitely novel, isn't borrowing from different traditions at the heart of improvisational music? Doesn’t improvised music need to explore the bounds of sound? 

Charu Suri: Yes, at the core, that is exactly what my album has been about all along, bringing together different cultures rooted in the heart of improvisation. 

The thing is, they all existed independently and were doing similar things, in their own traditional ways before realizing that they weren't the only ones doing it, but now we are at a stage and position to learn about each of them and pay the proper respect to each tradition.

Erik: Raga is partially a form of improvisation, but it is more than that. Can we talk about the raga in terms of its ancient history? 

Charu Suri: The thing to note about a raga is that it is a musical tradition that does not just come from India, but from many eastern cultures: India, Pakistan and to some extent Uzbekistan. 

All of these cultures practiced more modal music than Western music, which is more tonal. Modal music is mostly about scales, and these scales are not exactly as conventional as the Western framework. The use of these scales in Ancient Eastern cultures can be microtonal, or semitonal. It can be linear and nonlinear, so the idea is that you jump around these scales, skipping notes.

In a Western scale, if you are playing a scale, you would use every single note. Whereas, in a raga, you may be completely skipping notes and jumping freely around, and when you’re coming back down the scale, you might play all the notes. So, there is a certain formality to the Western scale which the raga defies. 

To understand the raga, you have to understand what they were used for. They were used to paint a mood, and in history, that may be rooted in a religious practice, or some other cultural and traditional purpose. Often, a certain raga is associated with a certain type of day. So, when I am playing a raga, I take great care to introduce it as a morning raga, or an afternoon raga. 

Erik: What is the difference between how a morning raga and an afternoon raga sounds?

Charu Suri: Well, in a morning raga, you will almost always have major accidentals - the note of a pitch. For example, you have Shudda swara, the natural note. If you are playing an F, the Shudda swara would be F. But the F flat would be Komal swara. And a Teevra swara is the sharp note. But morning ragas are always about the happier, sharpened note. So, the context was that morning was a time to play optimistic music, and the scales of these ragas are simply more joyful and pleasant. 

Erik: So, an evening raga might be more blue?

Charu Suri: Blue is a great way to describe the evening ragas. They are often more blue and melancholic, but there are exceptions. You can mix it up. An artist can create an aura or texture that is different. 

There is great improvisational license in a raga, and yet, a raga is a raga. If you play something, you are going to stay in that raga. In Indian vocal traditions, you will never find something that departs.

Erik: We’re talking about improvisation in the ancient world. But are ragas just a footnote of ancient history?

Charu Suri: No, the raga was absolutely important to the culture. It was part and parcel to the artist and the audience. The artist created a sonic world with these notes and the audience consumed it. It was very much like how we think of as jazz. That’s what we have been doing our whole life—improvisation is the heart and soul of raga.

Erik: Were a lot of scales being created?

Charu Suri: It is almost like a Pandora’s box, because there are so many different cultural and geographic groups, so these people would be making up scales that were based off of older scales that were passed down from generation to generation orally. So, each one would be very different. It would take systemic gathering for it to get carried down. 

There are at least 183 ragas that we know exist today, but maybe there are way more out there that have not been documented. They are all over the place. We know the popular ones because they keep getting repeated. But, I am always discovering new ones. Bagesri is a new one I found. It is actually a beautiful raga that is meant to be played late, late evening, as in after midnight or early dawn, and this is a raga which is totally different from anything else. You can’t really appreciate a raga unless you really slow down in the moment of the day in which it is intended to be played.

That is asking a lot for Generation Z and our short attention spans these days, but it is kind of what I want to do in my concerts. To slow down to that particular moment of the day. I can play Chopin in E Flat any day, but these ragas come with tradition.

Erik: Because the Jazz Age is a 20th century phenomenon, I think sometimes we synonymize the invention of improvisation with this era. When was raga invented?  What era are we talking about?

Charu Suri: Mostly, the ragas evolved in the 8th or 9th century, There are two clear schools in India, the Hindustani tradition in the North, and the Carnatic tradition in the south, and the ragas are grouped further into garanasm which are styles of schools.  But raga goes back further than that. There are some raga traces as early as even the 1st century. Some believe raga goes back further than that, maybe to 500 B.C.

However, there were precursors to the raga going back as far as 4,500 BC. For example, there was the Saam Ghayan, a very well structured mantra that was played during sacrifices and rituals. It wasn't very extensive, only three notes, but it was a good precursor to the raga.

Erik: When a raga musician is improvising, are they thinking differently than when they are just performing, or even composing? Can you describe what is going through your head when you are improvising live? 

Charu Suri: For me, everything is lyrical, and so much of it is about feeling. I try to break up my improvisation into mini-fragments, or licks, and then I repeat them and often create patterns, which is what most jazz musicians do. The style of improvisation is very much personal and fluid. I try not to have a preconceived notion of where a piece will go, relying on the music's impetus and pulse and rhythm section interplay to carry me forward. So much of it is about feeling, feeling, feeling!

Erik: How is live spontaneous music different from studio compositions? If one is not better than the other, what is the specific value of improvising to a musician and an audience? 

Charu Suri: There is nothing that beats live improvisation! The energy, the feedback from the audience....all of that lends and fuels the fire! Studio albums and compositions are great in their own way, because they allow for excellence and a quieter ambience that allows for better and more quality listening. Each one is different.

So, with the help of Charu Suri, we’ve established a deep history to improvisation in the Ancient East, one that was so widespread in Central Asia, we can only assume it surfaced in other forms in other regions of the world as well.

But then, what about the instruments? Did instruments exist that could make deep, expressive live music?

The Instruments of Lefkes

On the way to the seventeenth-century village of Lefkes, nestled in the low mountains in Paros’ middle, I ask taxi driver Dimitris about the low walls, zigzagging across the landscape. “They look like they could be 500 years old?”

“1,000, at least.”

These drystone walls are stacked on top of each other without the use of mortar, and create a pattern of terraced landscapes across much of the Cyclades, making otherwise infertile land cultivable. 

Cycladic islands typically see rain only in winter, but that rain comes down fast and hard, resulting in the constant threat of flooding. But the carefully placed stone bricks, wedged and stacked precisely together, holds moisture in the terraced hills, allowing rainwater to release slowly throughout the growing season.

“When I was a kid, I worked on maintaining those walls. It is back-breaking work. But do you know, these walls also depict private property, and even though it looks like they are random, the government uses them to know which family owns what land. There are precise logs about property ownership. These records are sometimes a thousand years old!”

I ask Dimitris about the sheer-white bench wall cut from the terraced olive-grove and pine laden hillside. 

It’s a small marble quarry, he explains, abandoned because continuing to mine there would threaten a house nestled in the rocky terrain above. 

Such small quarries still exist on Paros, but the most productive mines, built just a few miles from here, are long depleted and abandoned.

The semi-translucent white marble of Paros kept the island on the map in ancient Greek history. Among the most coveted in history, Parian marble was mined on and off from 600 BC until all the quarries were depleted by the nineteenth century. Parian marble was used in time’s most treasured statues such as Venus de' Medici. The marble was also used to build The Acropolis and the Temple of Zeus. It had a unique translucence and rigidity which made it the most sought after in ancient history. 

Seeing the white marble reminds me of those Cycladic musician figurines, most of which were also made from the marble of Paros, and other nearby Cycladic islands, although upwards of three-thousand years prior.

Like the famous antiquities made of Parian marble, the Cycladic figurines were carved and then polished to precise perfection. The difference is that while the famous antiquities were made in ages of great wealth, patronage and culture supporting great works of art, nobody knows what purpose the much more ancient Cycladic figurines served. 

These figurines were very small, often about six inches tall, and could not stand upright on their own. They were painted, and likely represented real people rather than Gods. Maybe there was a religious aspect to these figurines, but I see them as more likely serving a more ordinary purpose: Cycladic figurines were artworks held by ordinary people in ordinary households. 

Like our obsession with faces, celebrity, beauty and representations of family, these figurines were likely just the same—everyday compositions of those we cherished, found beautiful, or whose fertility or safety in childbirth we prayed for. It wasn’t that they were for one thing—like funerary icons, rather, they were the ancient Cyclades’ equivalent of photographs, serving diverse purposes.

It is true that most Cycladic figurines are female, and that there are suggestions in the forms of fertility and childbearing. But what do we make of the male harp player, or the male aulos player, both seemingly depicted as lost in musical improvisation?

Is it possible that these elegant and mysterious figurines were not religious icons at all, but rather more akin to family photos, surfer girl posters, or Instagram art? 

In my college days, I can recall that if you would tour a representative set of male dorm rooms, you would find some posters depicting women humming with the arc of fertility. You might find some photos depicting people back home—a family, a brother or sister, or some friends. There may be a few photos of sports figures. Possibly more so, you might see band posters, music posters, and of course you would also find posters depicting musicians (Mine was the 1967 black and white photo of Jimi Hendrix, smoking a cigarette). 

If my conjecture is plausible, then what do we make of the depicted Cycladic musicians? Were these musician figurines religious icons? Or fertility icons? Or is it more likely these are posters of a Jimi Hendrix, only 5,000 years ago?

Jimi Hendrix had an expressive instrument, an electric guitar, which is not actually a guitar, but an instrument which resembles a stringed instrument that existed in one form or another for thousands of years. 

One thing we all associate with Jimi Hendrix was his prodigious use of the whammy bar, a little arm extending out from the instrument’s bridge, allowing him the ability to temporarily change pitch. 

Such vibrato systems produced a number of hallmark sounds that helped propel music into the modern era. But without whammy bars and other such modern inventions, how could ancient music have been adequately expressive enough to match accomplished improvisation?

What did that harp depicted in Cycladic figurines sound like? And that flute, or, rather, aulos?

Well, actually, it turns out ancient whammy bars did exist in Ancient Greece.

Maybe the best way to resolve this is to put together the instruments of a small traveling band. Rather than just asking this question for a specific period, we’ll consider instruments from every period in ancient history, from the early Bronze Age of 3,300 B.C. to the Athenian era of about 400 B.C.

Instrument One: Aulos

One of the Cycladic figurines depicts an aulos player. Since this instrument is represented in one of the earliest Cycladic figurines, and is known from throughout ancient Greek history, and ubiquitous in the Athenian era, we can consider this a very likely instrument to appear in an ancient quartet.

The aulos, a double-reeded instrument, is no longer played by musicians in the modern world, and only recently are musical historians starting to put together how it might have been used, although good archaeological specimens exist and depictions of it abound in art. Sometimes incorrectly referred to as a flute, this instrument looked like two flutes extending out from dual-reeded mouthpieces.

The aulos likely played only a handful of notes, but its power was in its unusual, haunting tones, and it could produce an enormous range of notes and sounds. Sometimes, it probably served a purpose similar to the Scottish bagpipe; setting a tone; creating a constant drone to which the other instruments could play over. But it was also an expressive instrument in its own right, and, very importantly, it was loud. Its melodies could accompany an entire chorus.

An aulos would have been a perfect instrument for a traveling musician, but I suspect that an aulos player, an aulette, would have been comfortable with other wind instruments. In fact, the syrinx, or pan flute, was invented in the Cycladic islands around the same time as the oldest known Cycladic figurines. I will propose that a professional traveling aulette also played a flute or a syrinx.

Instrument Two: Kithara

The speed in which new inventions or discoveries could spread around the world in ancient times can be baffling. While stringed instruments were likely popularized in Mesopotamia around 3,500 BC, the harps that were depicted in Cycladic figurines had a unique shape, and featured design differences from the harps of the East.

Since archaeologists have discovered harp players depicted in the Cyclades as far back as 2,800 B.C., and that these harps had already evolved considerably from the forms found in the East, we can assume these instruments started flowing out of the East, through Anatolia and into the Mediterranean , almost instantly.

In fact, the Aegean region of the Mediterranean was the primary contact point between the East and the West: Anatolia, or present-day Turkey, is just a hop and skip from the Cycladic Islands. There is no other similar geographic contact point between the East and West. 

The island civilizations produced here in the Aegean were trading civilisations, and instruments from the East were flowing freely and easily into the Aegean. 

Stringed instruments were evolving all over the Old World. Lutes (a broad categorization of stringed instruments which look like guitars or ouds) were evolving in Mesopotamia, and lyres (which look like handheld harps), were being developed in Egypt. Perhaps most importantly, there was considerable design experimentation happening across the ancient world with all these broad instrument groups. 

Today, if you walk into an instrument shop, and you and remember these notes, you may be surprised by the diversity of commercially saleable stringed instruments: guitars, basses, ukuleles, violins, banjos, mandolins, and perhaps a few more specialty instruments, like an African oud or a zither.

But if there were a giant music store that collected all the types of stringed instruments of the ancient old world, it would be the size of a mall; thousands of unique variations on the lute, the lyre and the harp.

Of all this diversity, there was one instrument that had become the choice instrument in the Athenian era of Greece—the kithara. This instrument resembled a handheld lyre, but with a large soundbox and four to seven gut strings. It was built with much more complexity than the more pastoral lyres, and was celebrated as the instrument of choice for virtuoso performers.

No specimens of this ancient instrument exist today, although by studying the non-technical paintings that depicted them, music historians have built replicas that have helped to understand how they were used.

A kithara, we now believe, had advanced features that made it an exceptionally expressive instrument. It is believed that each instrument was built for the specific kitharode musician, constructed to fit his body shape and size. Wearing the heavy instrument via a strap, he could at once play and alter the sound of the instrument: the kithara featured a metal bar along its top, allowing the kitharode the ability to bend the pitch, like a whammy bar. 

This instrument was likely invented only in the final Athenian era of Greece, but it was preceded by earlier professional lyres. So, our second instrument is either a kithara, or an earlier prototype. Regardless, such a professional lyre would have brought a big, exciting sound as both a rhythm and lead instrument. The kithara, of which our word guitar stems, would have been ubiquitous in Athenian concerts and plays, often played by the star musician, or used by solo performers.

Instrument 3: Tympanum Hand-Drum

Percussion in Ancient Greece came in very different varieties than how we perceive it today. Many of the percussion instruments were small, ringing metal objects, similar to castanets. But a traveling percussionist would have been drawn to the hand-drums such as tympanums and tambourines. A tympanum hand-drum would be an ideal instrument for a percussionist who needed a hardy travel instrument that created enough volume in a variety of ancient environments.

While percussion's role in the Ancient Mediterranean was small, such instruments would be the perfect complement for a singing poet.

Instrument 4: Pandura

Every virtuosic band has its improvisational leader—this is that musician who appears in world history only so often, and who just sees notes in front of her, and perhaps whose head is so filled with musical ideas, she just has to just get them out into the sonic universe.

Compare our earlier discussion of Mozart, dancing around the pianoforte, to the twentieth-century guitarist Django Reinhardt, and it sounds like they have something rare in common. Writes Ian Cruikshank of Reinhardt, “His hugely innovative technique included, on a grand scale, such unheard of devices as melodies played in octaves, tremolo chords with shifting notes that sounded like whole horn sections, a complete array of natural and artificial harmonics, highly charged dissonances, super-fast chromatic runs from the open bass strings to the highest notes on the 1st string, an unbelievably flexible and driving right-hand, two and three octave arpeggios, advanced and unconventional chords and a use of the flattened fifth that predated be-bop by a decade.”

So, if a successful improvisational band needs its Mozart or Reinhardt, what instrument did they play? This virtuoso may have passed up the kithara, for its weight and its limitations. 

While we associate only certain instruments with Ancient Greece, all of the instruments of the Ancient world could have passed through Ancient Greece, including a variety of African ouds, bolons and koras, and the many strange harps, lutes and lyres of Egypt, where much of the early evolution of stringed instruments occurred.

One instrument that appeared in Ancient Greece was the pandura. This was a long-necked lute with three or four strings, and a small resonating chamber. This instrument is depicted in sculptures and artwork throughout the Mediterranean , the Levant and North Africa as an instrument that was lightweight, ideal for a musician teaming with musical ideas. 

Perhaps our virtuoso doesn’t use a pandura, per se, but some unknown cousin of it. Some lightweight, expressive, foreign instrument with a fretboard that can dance and move with the ideas of its master.

Our imaginary quartet then is made up of four musicians. We have an aulete, who lays down a droning pitch with an aulos wind instrument. We have a kitharode, who plays supporting rhythms and leads on the advanced kithara lyre. We have a percussionist with an assortment of hand drums, and our group is led by a Pandura-lute master.

Now that we have our band, how do we know whether they could have traveled the Mediterranean? How did they get around, was it safe or accepted, especially for foreign or female musicians? And was there a willing audience outside of the densest population centers?

Piso Livadi and Ancient Travel in the Mediterranean

Jane and I walk from Lefkes down to the coastal village of Piso Livadi on a hot, dry morning. 

The village wraps around a shallow-water half-moon harbor, showing off its mix of small, anchored fishing boats.

From the short promenade, I can just barely make out nearby Naxos Island, and I wonder how easy or safe it would be to motor across to the quiet, rocky beaches of that much larger island. 

Of course, I am also thinking about our imaginary quartet, and whether it would have been conceivable for traveling musicians to move safely and reliably from city to city, island to island, two-thousand, three-thousand or even five-thousand years ago. 

Ancient mariners of the Mediterranean knew that there was a season for ship travel: the seas were reliable and calm from May through September. Today’s view of this Aegean passage is proof: glass water, a gentle breeze at sea.

To understand sea travel in the Mediterranean, let’s recall the Pacific Ocean, where hominids first jumped across large bodies of water, to islands in Indonesia, to Australia and beyond, hundreds of thousands of years ago.