Gekho

this is my best friend, the dipylon oinochoe. its a beautiful little wine jug from the late geometric period. 22cm tall. you may know it from such hits as “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” or “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” etc etc. i’ve been researching him for a project lately. and i think i’m the only one who understands him now.

anyways it’s one of the oldest longer inscriptions we have from the late 8th/early 7th cent BCE. everyone and their mother wants to translate this little guy. they’re all reading it and going “oh wow! its got a perfect hexameter at the start! ‘whoever of the dancers dances most delicately!’" and then they all go "Wait What Do Those Last Signs Mean.”

there are 24 different interpretations. but thats fine. whatever. beef over the last signs seems normal enough. you see that a lot. personally i think its too broken to really tell for certain (those fractures are a bit unfortunately placed tbh) but i fear i am also just a very skeptical guy when it comes to definitive translations so my take on that should be considered with a grain of salt.

but because im researching this oinochoe, i'm reading all these articles arguing over what it Means and what the Implications Are. and you would think… its 2025… we’ve kinda all agreed “pots aren’t people” for several decades… surely there’s an analysis somewhere that focuses Solely On This Pot’s Context... idk like trying not to focus solely on its inscription for once???

but no. no, this is too much to ask for apparently. everyone’s going “well it must've belonged to a dancer! lets talk about dance competitions and homer and the gymnasium how this is all reflected in this one jug!” someone even dropped this one line theorizing it was “passed around at a party,” like it has just been consistently assigned as belonging to a dancer you cannot escape this idea. i tried to find any different ideas. i could not.

so i’m stuck here going “Where Is The Context” because it seems to be, uh, Not Discussed Anywhere. every article is citing back towards stephanos koumanoudes (the guy who purchased it in 1880) but they are Also saying “yeah it was found in 1871! source: koumanoudes!” But He’s Not The Guy That Excavated It, Guys, Where Is It From? nobody is giving me the answer. my favorite one is culhed, he just says “under obscure circumstances,” which is quite possibly the least helpful way to describe this somehow nebulous provenance. but then culhed offhandedly cites someone else. just in the footnotes, as you do. and that someone is yannis galanakis, my new hero.

now yannis galanakis (2011) does not give a single flying fuck about the dipylon oinochoe. he is here for one thing and one thing only: an unpublished stirrup jar that was bought by a totally different guy. most of his article is just concerned about this stirrup jar, how it was sold with a skull (??), and Who Sold That Skull. but galanakis’ stirrup jar is, coincidentally, from this same excavation in 1871. so in his article, where he’s referencing all these people associated with private excavations northeast of the dipylon gate (around modern-day plateia eleutherias), galanakis casually drops the line “among the finds associated with these excavations are some of the most important examples of late geometric pottery, like the dipylon oinochoe.” this is 1) more than Literally Everyone Else I Have Been Reading has been saying and 2) PROVIDING PRIMARY SOURCES FOR THIS DIG?

and these sources.... these primary sources have never been mentioned in Any Other Publications re: the dipylon oinochoe??? except MAYBE one from 2013 (coulié) thats in french, apparently only available in print, and the nearest copy is a library 2hrs away from me (so i cant actually verify what she says yet). but every other article about the dipylon oinochoe is basically like “yeah, see powell 1988” -> “yeah, see koumanoudes 1880” -> “i bought this from some guy named ioannes, lol” and its just created this Massive Echo Chamber where the provenance is "Koumanoudes" and the context is "Dancer." when... we have... two publications... written by people who were actually involved in this private excavation (which to be clear here was very much illegal at some points, but ioannes palaiologos do not care abt the government saying Stop Excavating Please). these two sources are hirschfeld (1872) and rayet (1888).

the provenance that these 1870s/80s accounts are providing isnt Actually That Detailed, but there are parts that line up pretty well (ie, swords/spears/knives being found in the graves, murex on top, several layers of successive tombs) which are Totally Absent from later articles talking about the purpose of this vessel, of its inscription, and of its owner/transcriber (which i dont think can be determined Anyways [cf Arrington 2024, this is just a Normal Take i think] but like whatever i guess Pots Are People Now, according to Powell 1988+Binek 2017+Osborne 2006). i phrased it in my paper and my presentation as “its like this oinochoe been totally disconnected from its context” and its to the point where its so egregious that someone will, in one article, drop a reference to galanakis’ research on the excavation of 1871 (where he cites two eyewitness accounts) and not. Not Once have they looked into it.

because if they had. and this is the fucking crazy part ok this is where i Lost My Shit For A Solid Week. there is, in hirschfeld 1872, an identical oinochoe (number 48, page 147 in this journal) with the same damn height (22.5cm; powell 1988 says the dipylon oinochoe is about 23cm) and decoration (a grazing deer) and concentric lines its a goddamn identical piece just judging from the description of it (and hirschfeld very unhelpfully did Not include this jug among his plates). deers grazing arent very common in late geometric pottery, its mostly just the dipylon workshop cranking them out AND theres only a few oinochoe attributed to dipylon workshop so This Is Quite Possibly The Same Vessel (or so i thought, we'll get to that). the one problem is that this vessel is just NOT from dipylon??? its from the old military hospital in athens??? which was built south of the acropolis in 1834??? and they found roman mosaics during that construction??? so this mentioned vessel could actually have been found in the 1830s??? and again nobody has said jack fucking shit about this connection, afaik i am the only one who has ever actually sat down with these Implications all lined up in a row, so i had to try and disprove myself on my own like it was 5d chess. i was the “I Want To Believe” meme but if it was about the dipylon oinochoe being from somewhere near dipylon.

and i'm digging through as many sources as i possibly can find to prove there's a mysterious second jug that might be from this hospital area (which, granted, was still a funerary space during the geometric period). i went through all of hirschfeld's references to alexander conze's plates showing pottery shapes, but they just ended up also being oinochoe, which made me lose my mind even more. hirschfeld would be like "yeah this deer was in this position from conze taf VII-2" and you go "ok so whats conze taf vii-2 look like? oh my fucking god its a GRAZING ANIMAL AGAIN." at some point i ended up reading a phd dissertation from the national and kapodistrian univerisity of athens to know more about this military hospital?? and then i switched gears and went searching through coldstream 1968’s list of geometric pottery (it might be outdated now, but it was the only thorough source i could find atp) and went through Every Single Oinochoe from the dipylon workshop and almost every single one was totally different. like they just could not be this mystery oinochoe (in which case, I Would Have Some Really Bad News About The Dipylon Oinochoe).

until i found my second best friend. munich CVA 3 taf 112. who literally nobody except me gives a shit about. its taf description is 2 paragraphs long. its the exact same height as these two aforementioned oinochoe. it has the exact same deer grazing motif. fuck it, its even got an unknown provenance because it was acquired from Some Guy Named Paul in 1907 (who also has connections to people like furtwängler [most unfortunate last name ever], another guy who wrote about the dipylon oinochoe in 1881). so in my quest to achieve some sort of emotional resolution here i possibly found a sister vessel to the dipylon oinochoe??? and maybe even that jug's provenance. who knows. i dont wanna say anything definitive yet. also if anyone has access to paul julius arndt's personal papers and especially his financial records, hit me up, because where the fuck did he get this identical looking jug.

however. most modern scholarship about the dipylon oinochoe does not care about munich cva 3 taf 112 (and its similarities to the dipylon oinochoe), or the few references to the 1871 excavations at palatia eleutherias several blocks northeast of the dipylon gate (and what little context/descriptions they provide of funerary remains), because they do not care about the dipylon oinochoe. they care about the letters inscribed on it, and they want to debate the meanings of those letters in a self-inflicted vacuum devoid of all other evidence beyond 35 legible signs and 11 fragmentary/illegible ones.

Because you’ll get so many text fragments that are totally divorced from the tangible world! We’ve got snippets of lost books which were preserved as translations in Latin grammars or from being quoted in letters, which means we have no idea how accurate they are—are they paraphrased? Simplified? We cannot tell.

Or you’ll get definitive editions of things passed around that have underlying biases. My favorite example of this is the Iliad—most of our current text comes from an Athenian “standardized” edition that was put out by Athens a thousand years after the events of the war. It emphasized Athens a bit more than necessary.

Or! Or! Some guy in the 1890s will provide a small translation of obscure text! And no one else wants to do it themselves, so for a hundred-odd years it’s the only translation used—until someone looks at the original again, finally, and realizes he censored all the gay sex from it. (Though to be fair these were more often given Latin translations alongside the chaste English ones.)

Like when Gandalf spent literal PAGES trying to figure out why the vibes were off in Moria and Legolas chimes in with just "it's a balrog :) that shit's evil :) we're so fucked :)" like what do you MEAN you knew already and just didn't tell him??

Or at the beginning of Two Towers when Aragorn thinks there's something nearby so he puts his ear to the ground to listen, and then like 10 minutes later is like "hmmm i hear horses" and Legolas is just like "mm yep. there are 105 blond bitches with spears" like you just let your friend put his face in the dirt and you can SEE them??

gandalf is scratching his head in moria, and legolas is thinking "oh man, the wizard noticed something off *besides* the obvious balrog that we all are aware of??"

Unsurprisingly this book has quotable genius right out of the gate.

Roger Ebert on his Aunt Mary: When she was in the kitchen, she was on automatic. She had two speeds: Cook and Serve. She did not know how to measure salt. "Just throw in about enough, honey," she told me. This was her poetic wisdom about how to estimate the number of potatoes sufficient for a meal:

One potato

For every member of the family.

One potato for the pot.

And one last tater, honey,

And they were like "What?"

And I was like, "Agility isn't the ultimate form of preparedness. Contingency is. Agility still requires you to flounder and figure out a solution in the moment, but if you have a contingency plan, all you have to do is implement it."

And they were like "But you can't make contingency plans for every situation!"

And I was like, "Yeah, you basically can if you just identify all of your basic dependencies and contingency plan around the loss of any dependency," and then I gave a few examples.

And they all stared at me like I'm an alien.

As he described to the interviewer a moment of panic and how he he overcame, the interviewer said, in one of those, summarise-last-answer-given-with-appropriate-levels-of-respect-in-order-to-proceed-to-next-question phrasing’s, “Wow, so you rose to the occasion -“

Try telling that to Chrétien de Troyes. Aka the guy who invented Lancelot.

“Arthurian canon isn’t French”

Clearly you don’t own an air fryer. Also clearly you haven’t read literally anything written after the Norman invasion.

“Arthur needs to be a knight in shining armor”

If he lived at all he lived almost a thousand years before widespread adaption of plate armor.

“He can’t be in plate armor because that’s anachronistic”

Try telling that to Thomas Mallory.

“The fairy stuff is leftover from Celtic myth/Celtic gods)

lvl 2: the plural version of octopus is octopi because if a word ends with "us" the plural version replaces the "us" with "i" e.g. cactus -> cacti and fungus -> fungi

lvl 3: actually, that rule is only for latin words. octopus is a greek word and the correct plural is octopuses or octopodes

lvl 4: actually, language is descriptive not prescriptive. since enough people over time have used octopi as the plural for octopus, it's a valid plural

"none of you ever send corrections when I offer the draft so y'all have consented to my version"

"we don't read that shit"

"you must trust me implicitly to create our shared reality that's so sweet"