Achievement

Many men and women deserve credit for moving human civilisation forward, for helping to cultivate the tree of knowledge, if you like. That being the case, it's almost invidious to pick out a greatest achiever or achievement. It would be akin to having to select a player of the match after a brilliant team display by Blackpool FC this afternoon. Nonetheless, I'm going to nominate Carl Linnaeus, as one worthy among many. His crowning achievement was to be the father of taxonomy. Sorry Hatshepsut, Aristotle, Euclid, Hippocrates, Pliny, Galileo, Newton, Merian, Darwin, Curie, Einstein et al. 

For those of you not familiar with Linnaeus, he only went and classified the natural world back in the 18th century.  "The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves; this notion consists in having a true idea of the objects; objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science." 

This classification, as outlined in 'Imperium Naturae' and 'Systema Naturae' is still the basis of the formal scientific naming system of animals, minerals and plants 300 years later. Good on him.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)

Linnaeus, born in Sweden and educated at Lund and Uppsala universities, was a biologist and physician who not only became a Professor of both Medicine and Botany but who also spent much of his life collecting, discovering and classifying plants and animals. By the time of his death he was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe, known variously as the Prince of Botanists, the "Pliny of the North" and one of the founders of modern ecology. 

From an early age he had a love of plants and the natural world. As a child he was given his own patch in his father's garden where he could grow flowers. At school he would bunk off and go exploring in the countryside looking for plants. As a student, at Lund and then Uppsala, he was lucky to have excellent mentors who encouraged his love of botany in particular.. 

the Linnaeus summer home at Hammarby near Uppsala

His greatest legacy is the system of classification that he developed and expounded in those seminal works of the mid-18th century, written in Latin as the international scientific language of the day. Linnaean taxonomy, his formal and rigorous multi-level system of naming things, soon superseded all previous attempts at codification. There are seven layers to Linnaean classification, applicable to all living things, and the sequence goes as follows: Kingdom - Phylum - Class - Order - Family - Genus - Species. (If you want a mnenonic by which to remember the sequence, I give you: kids prefer candy over fresh green salad.)

There are only five kingdoms: Animals (all multicellular living organisms), Plants (all green plants), Fungi (moulds, mushrooms, yeasts), Protists (amoeba etc) and Prokaryotes (bacteria and algae).

There are many phyla, including: Chordata (with backbones), Arthropods (jointed legs, exoskeletons) and Annelids (segmented worms).

Class is a subdivision of a phylum. For chordata, that might be: Mammals, Birds, Amphibians, Fish, Reptiles.

Within class there are orders. Within mammals are found such orders as: Carnivores and Primates.

Orders are further subdivided into families. The order of carnivores includes, among others, the families of: Canidae (dogs) and Felidae (cats).

Genus follows on from family. Felidae contains the likes of: Acinonyx (cheetahs etc), Panthera (lions and tigers etc), Neofelis (such as clouded leopard) and Felis (domestic cats).

Species is the lowest level of classification and, as you might have deduced from the paragraph above, divides a genus into specific animals (or plants or fungi etc). In my drill-down example, Panthera comprises just five species: Jaguar, Leopard, Lion, Snow Leopard and Tiger.

Because Linnaeus wrote in Latin, all seven divisions of any creature's full taxonomy are in Latin, and its binomial is always the genus and species. Accordingly, what we call a jaguar is termed Panthera onca and its full seven level classification is: Animalia - Chordata - Mammalia - Carnivora - Felidae - Panthera - Onca. Oh, the beauty of it.

What Linnaeus did for animals in the example above, he also did for plants.

frontispiece of Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, 1729

I don't know how far he got with his system of classification, whether fungi, protists and prokaryotes were afforded the same level of attention, but his methodology became universally accepted and scientists ever since have used it when discussing or writing about existing species, but also to categorise both 'new' species as they have been discovered in the last 300 hundred years, and to retrospectively categorise 'extinct' species as evidence about them  has come to light. That's quite some legacy, and a phenomenal achievement, I think you'll agree.

To conclude, a new poem from the imaginarium.

Shopping For Green Tea And Honey

Saturday market by the harbour wall

between rows of tamarisk trees,

sometimes referred to as salt cedars.

They shade the stalls in this island port.

Linnaeus, himself named after a lime tree,

devised the taxonomy by which this avenue

of tamarisks is known as Tamarix parviflora,

occasionally by its synonym Tamarix cretica.

I don't tell you any of this, you'd be bored.

Not much has essentially changed here

in centuries, except for tourists of course

and the euro replacing the oldest coinage.

I'm happily shopping for green tea and honey

but you're impatient to strip off, start tanning.

You'll burn, you always overdo it, won't be told.

We have two glorious weeks ahead. Go slow.

Camellia sinensis. loose leafed, weighed out

into a brown paper bag. And honey comes in

so many colours, depending on the varieties

of plants Cretan bees collected nectar from.

I prefer thyme honey, from Thymus capitatus.

Would you be interested to know that honey

is an excellent natural treatment for sunburn?

Green tea also. I'll save those facts for later. 

Thanks for reading, have a good week. S ;-)

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Journey

Travel is exciting. The processes we go through when planning, packing and setting off on a journey is all part of the ritual. How many outfits to take, what time to set off for a timeous arrival at check in. How many books to take - all part of the preparation for an adventure. My first couple of trips as a youngster were punctuated by travel sickness. Travelling through Wales on the backseat of a coach in the early sixties proved too much for my stomach. Similarly, my first flight on a BAC111 to Jersey from the then Speke airport also set me off. I am relieved to say that I improved with time.

My longest flight came in 2000 when I took my two children on a visit to my cousin in South Africa. Fourteen hours - far too long really but we all coped well. Unfortunately we had a four hour stop-over at Paris Charles De Gaulle, with a courtesy meal that affected my son. On arrival he had food poisoning from some less than fresh crevettes and spent three days very sick until we purchased some suppositories that sorted him out. 

The South African adventure was fantastic. We spent three days at the Pilanesberg game reserve, having close encounters with hippos, giraffes and twin cheetah cubs. We barbequed, swam in the Indian Ocean at Umhlanga near Durban and met real Zulu tribesmen and women who performed a dance in full costume on the lawn in front of our accommodation there. 

It was the first of many adventures with the kids. Two years later we headed off to Egypt. The Valley of the Kings, Temple of Luxor, Temple of Karnak,  Temple of Philae and the Aswan Dam. I liked to educate them through travel. They longed for a simple beach holiday but I am not that kind of Mum. 

The next trip was to Sorrento on the Amalfi Coast with visits to Pompeii and Positano. I love Italy. My parents took me to Venice where I returned on honeymoon. We went to the Lido and a gondolier lifted me on his back and ran with me across St Mark's Square. My new husband was flabbergasted and asked. "Where do you know him from?" Silly man - but it was so exciting!

My more recent trips have been without the kids in the company of the man in my life. We have been to many of the Greek Islands in the last decade. We began in Kefalonia, then Crete, my favourite. As you can already tell, I am a big history buff. The Homer poem about the island of Crete caught my imagination in grammar school and was always a future destination. I was not disappointed - the museum at Heraklion was incredible.  The ancient city of Knossos, although rebuilt in simulation, was incredible. 

I loved the beauty of the harbour in Kos and the ruins in Rhodes. Greece is so lovely. The weather is usually hot but not too humid, the food is lovely and there is so much to see. No doubt we will return - Covid put the blockers on most foreign travel but I still have long list of destinations to tick off. 

Journey

It’s a cliché I hear,
‘travel broadens the mind’
but I’m happy to know
that our travels abroad
enhanced our education.
The journey often long,
patience tested,
rewarded on arrival
at our far-flung destination.

What we have experienced.
the things we have learned,
the grandeur, the majesty
of ancient civilisation,
the diversity of people,
the wonders of creation.
Looking outwards
to understand
the global situation.

To those who do not travel
who stay insular at home
I recommend a journey
to Paris or to Rome.
just to breathe another’s air
walk in another’s shoes,
A single step begins
a journey to your own imagination.

Spot press - Baby arrived this morning

Thanks for reading. Adele

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Linear Bee

I hope the title raised either a smile or a quizzical eyebrow. The keeping of bees and the importance of honey have been central to Greek culture for millennia. We know this partly from decipherment of inscriptions in an ancient language designated as Linear B (an early form of Greek script). As both bees and the script feature prominently in this week's blog, I thought Linear Bee would make an appropriately punning header.

Apiculture (bee-keeping) has a long history in the Aegean. The ancients believed that bees were messengers from the Gods, intermediaries between heaven and earth, and that honey was a source of wisdom and poetry. The Minoans had a bee goddess, Potnia, and her priestesses were called Melissa (which means bee, from meli the word for honey). In later Greek mythology, Aristaeus was the god of bee-keeping.

By 600 BC bee-keeping was a fully developed and legally regulated concern in Greece and honey was valued not only as a food, the first natural sweetener and good source of energy, but also for its medicinal properties (both taken internally and used as a salve) and - in the form of beeswax - as a cosmetic in beauty masks. The great Koan doctor Hippocrates regarded honey as a panacea and the philosopher Aristotle wrote his first book on the art of keeping the little fellows.

There is even a Greek bee, apis mellifera cecropia , a sub-species of honey bee, favoured for its extreme gentleness and lack of a tendency to swarm. It thrives in the southern Mediterranean climate, for it likes the warmth and low humidity, and is not suited to the cooler climate of northern Europe.

Greece, in fact, has more beehives per acre than any other country in Europe. The wide biodiversity of its flora combined with powerful summer sun means its varieties of honey are dense, rich and among the finest.

a colony of colourful Greek hives

There are six main types: Thyme honey (the most highly thought of) produced from the thyme flowers of Crete and Kythera in spring; Blossom honey from wild flowers and orange groves in Halkidiki; Chestnut honey (the rarest) from Epirus, possessed of a faint, pleasant bitterness; Pine honey, high in antioxidants and minerals, accounts for 65% of all Greece produces; Heather honey, produced in early autumn when the heather blossom, is dark, thick and crystalline; Fir honey, from Vytina in the Peloponnese, is the only certified PDO honey.

Because it was Greek week at Lidl supermarket last week, I have been enjoying authentic Greek yoghurt with dried figs and Halkidiki honey for breakfast recently.

My favourite, though, is the thyme honey from dusty Crete, which I discovered when visiting the island nearly half a century ago. They do say that first impressions are lasting ones. It is very possible that Minoan Crete, nearly 4,000 years in the past, was the birthplace of apiculture, of bee worship (referenced above) and of the high regard for honey as a valuable and health-giving commodity. The beautiful  Malia pendant, discovered at Malia in Crete in 1930, is graphic testament to this regard. It dates from approximately 1800 BC, is worked in gold and shows two symmetrical bees. It's the most stunning piece of Minoan jewellery and if you ever get the chance to to go Heraklion Archaeological Museum, do seek it out.

famous bee pendant

Today's poem is partly in memory of that first visit to Crete in 1974. We pitched tent and stayed for a few days on Amnissos beach to the east of Heraklion. It was deserted. This was pre-hotels, villas, tourist package holidays, more the tail-end of the hippy trail. The area was unspoiled, unbuilt-up, probably looking much like it had for the last several hundred years. It was also the summer of the Cyprus war (the last major military engagement between Greeks and Turks), so many had been deterred from visiting the region. 

It was quite symbolic to me, having read Homer, to know that we were camping in a place where Odysseus had made landfall: "He had been driven to Crete by a gale which had blown him off his course at Cape Malea when bound for Troy. He put in at Amnissos, where the cave of Eileithyie is - a difficult harbour to make - only just escaping from the storm." (The Odyssey, XIX, lines 186 following.) Amnissos was the harbour for the bronze-age Minoan palace-town of Knossos circa 1380 BC. The sea-level is 3 metres higher now than it was in the bronze age, but the walls of submerged houses are still visible from the current shore. It was also here during excavations in 1932 that fragmented clay tablets were uncovered bearing a script that came to be known as Linear B.

Linear B clay tabled reconstructed

For a long time, archaeologists and classicists argued about the nature and origins of the script, many suggesting it was more akin to Babylonian or Egyptian hieroglyphs than anything else and that the artefacts had probably been brought to Crete (and mainland Greece) by traders. The truth, when the code was finally cracked by Michael Ventris in the 1950s, was that Linear B is actually a written form of early Greek, though obviously the symbols differ from the script that became dominant in the Aegean with the rise to prominence of the Mycenaeans. It is now known that writing in Linear B on clay tablets was a common practice in Minoan times to record inventories, trading transactions, treaties and official documents - but it is in the nature of clay to soften and crumble, so that 99.99% of these artefacts had only a limited life and were often broken down into soft clay to be reused. The 0.001% that we have today only survived because they were accidentally (and providentially) baked to hardness and thus durability in the fires that burned the great Minoan palaces to the ground in an act of war.

Here then (finally, you say), flowing from the Hellenic chamber of the Imaginarium, my latest...

Amnissos 1974

Broken Knossos somewhere to our backs,

here on wide Amnissos beach whose sand

still radiates as twilight steals  the day, we

sit and conjure visions of longships hulled

along its shore, tents pitched just like ours 

and fires roasting fish and flesh. Phantoms

roar in war formation, shattering the mood,

an age-old enmity renewed in Eastern skies

with Cyprus the prize; once quiet descends

again we contemplate past times and place,

a gentle murmur of lapis waves contrasting

with such echoing ire as torched a Minoan 

palace, the trick of destruction which saved

in perpetuity clay tablets bearing baked-in

witness shaped in ancient script to ordinary 

lives. Those testimonies, rendered shards in

further acts of desecration, lay buried in the

Cretan sand we sit on as history ran full tilt

down three millennia until, disinterred and

deciphered in our very lifetime, they spoke

through strife and smoke against all odds -

my favourite: "one jar of honey to the Gods".


Thanks for reading. Keep eating honey, S ;-)

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