Aegean Quotes

We did all the standard camp numbers: "Down By The Aegean," "I Am My Own Great-Great-Great-Great Grandpa," "This Land is Minos's Land.

Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean sea.

Constantin Demiris had arranged with the authorities for her body to be buried on the grounds of the cemetery on Psara, his private island in the Aegean. Everyone had remarked on what a beautiful, sentimental gesture it was. In fact, Demiris had arranged for the burial plot to be there so that he could have the exquisite pleasure of walking over the bitch's grave.

My whore of a brother has done it again." "Then, as always, orders me to clean up the mess." "I think I hate him." Poseidon to his brother, Zeus.

All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth. But in the glow of the scribes' enthusiasm, she senses that in a city like Urbino, beyond the horizon, other possibilities might exist, and in daydreams she takes flight across the Aegean, through her spread fingers, until she alights in a bright clean palace, full of Justice and Moderation, its rooms lined with books, free to anyone who can read them.

For thousands of years humans were oppressed— as some of us still are— by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. Then, 2,500 years ago, there was a glorious awakening in Ionia: on Samos and the other nearby Greek colonies that grew up among the islands and inlets of the busy eastern Aegean Sea. Suddenly there were people who believed that everything was made of atoms; that human beings and other animals had sprung from simpler forms; that diseases were not caused by demons or the gods; that the Earth was only a planet going around the Sun. And that the stars were very far away.

When Dax turned to her, those blue eyes that reminded her of the Aegean Sea pinning her, all thought process left her mind.

We? 'Twas me who found the marks, not you, not any of you Aegean fools. And your king is the biggest fool of all, for if he'd deigned to unbind me before he sent us here to die, I could have listened for what we seek and followed it that way. Now I am as impotent as you." If considerably less ugly and stupid.

In NATO terms, Turkey is a key country because it controls the entrance to and exit from the Black Sea through the narrow gap of the Bosporus Strait. If it closes the Strait, which is less than a mile across at its narrowest point, the Russian Black Sea Fleet cannot break out into the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic. Even getting through the Bosporus only takes you into the Sea of Marmara; you still have to navigate through the Dardanelles Straits to get to the Aegean Sea en route to the Mediterranean.

sea, and was killed. The sea into which he fell was called the Aegean ever after.

I'm looking at the sea on the wall, and even though it's a copy of a copy of the Aegean, I wish you would grab me and take me to Greece.

Aegean Blues’. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on this planet,

Under the treaty of Sevres in 1920 Greece had been given Smyrna, and by 1922 the Greek army was trying to push its way up the Aegean coast. The Turks, however, had found a leader in Mustafa Kemal (Kemal Atatürk) with no regard for treaties and a committed hatred of the Greeks. He drove their army back into Smyrna, and then did what any Turkish leader would have done: massacred them.

During the persecutions under the Emperor Domitian, John was summoned to Rome, where he was tortured by immersion in a pot of boiling oil and subsequently banished to the island of Patmos in the Aegean sea. It was there he wrote his Apocalypse. It was only after the death of Domitian, in A.D. 96, that he returned to Ephesus, where he was still living during the reign of the Emperor Trajan (A.D. 98-117). He became so old and frail that he could no longer walk and had to be carried to meetings and services. All he could manage to say was, "My little children, love one another." He repeated this over and over.

Curl moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shine like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mothers arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children's entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on. She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it-a slight silver splinter, embedded just below the surface of her skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled-and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat and muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.

Off the Santorini cliff on a dark, starless night, I tossed a message in a bottle and love found me washed up on the black lava sand of the Aegean shore. As with my previous loves, volcanic in nature. Almost destructive before it started.

Whether or not the fame of Gilgamesh of Uruk had reached the Aegean – and the idea is attractive – there can be no doubt that it was as great as that of any other hero. In time his name became so much a household word that jokes and forgeries were fathered onto it, as in a popular fraud that survives on eighth-century B.C. tablets which perhaps themselves copy an older text. This is a letter supposed to be written by Gilgamesh to some other king, with commands that he should send improbable quantities of livestock and metals, along with gold and precious stones for an amulet for Enkidu, which would weigh no less that thirty pounds. The joke must have been well received, for it survives in four copies, all from Sultantepe.

Though she is all but forgotten today, Alice Kober single-handedly brought the decipherment of Linear B closer to fruition than anyone before her. That she very nearly solved the riddle is a testament to the snap and rigor of her mind, the ferocity of her determination, and the unimpeachable rationality of her method. Kober was “the person on whom an astute bettor with full insider information would have placed a wager” to decipher the script, as Thomas Palaima, an authority on ancient Aegean writing, has observed.

The revolt in Asia Minor was snugged out in 494, and the Athenians realized that they had acquired a dangerous enemy. Darius I's first attempt at invasion in 492 was abortive: a huge storm wrecked his fleet. In 491 the Persians demanded 'earth and water' --signs of submission--from the Aegean islands and mainland cities. Many submitted. Athens and Sparta not only stood firm but murdered the Persian ambassadors. The Athenians put them on trial and killed both the ambassadors and their translator for offenses against the Greek language; the Spartans simply thew them down a well.

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our ‘air’ (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be ‘high’, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd. Of course, such an overweening purpose did not develop all at once. The mere stories were the thing. They arose in my mind as ‘given’ things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially since, even apart from the necessities of life, the mind would wing to the other pole and spend itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’. Of course, I made up and even wrote lots of other things (especially for my children). Some escaped from the grasp of this branching acquisitive theme, being ultimately and radically unrelated: Leaf by Niggle and Farmer Giles, for instance, the only two that have been printed. The Hobbit, which has much more essential life in it, was quite independently conceived: I did not know as I began it that it belonged. But it proved to be the discovery of the completion of the whole, its mode of descent to earth, and merging into ‘history’. As the high Legends of the beginning are supposed to look at things through Elvish minds, so the middle tale of the Hobbit takes a virtually human point of view – and the last tale blends them.

death is predestined for all mortals. Souls live forever, but the body does not. Unless you are immortal, both the soul and body are tied together."~Taznikos Abyssos

A soul could be resurrected and re-born to another body, its memories restored, but once the house it belonged to had been emptied, they could no longer call it home."~Taznikos Abyssos

Sea, autumnal sweetness, islands bathed in light, diaphanous cloak of delicate rainfall clothing Greece’s eternal bareness. “Happy the person,” I thought, “who is deemed worthy, before dying, to sail the Aegean.” This world offers many pleasures: women, fruit, ideas. But I think no pleasure exists that plunges a person’s heart into Paradise more than the joy of cutting across this sea on a gentle autumn day, murmuring the name of each island. Nowhere else are you transported from truth to dream with such serenity and ease. Boundaries fade; the mast of even the most dilapidated ship sprouts buds and grapes. Here in Greece, truly, necessity blossoms most certainly into miracle. Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek (p. 23). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Pythagoras was born around 570 B.C. in the island of Samos in the Aegean Sea (off Asia Minor), and he emigrated sometime between 530 and 510 to Croton in the Dorian colony in southern Italy (then known as Magna Graecia). Pythagoras apparently left Samos to escape the stifling tyranny of Polycrates (died ca. 522 B.C.), who established Samian naval supremacy in the Aegean Sea. Perhaps following the advice of his presumed teacher, the mathematician Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras probably lived for some time (as long as twenty-two years, according to some accounts) in Egypt, where he would have learned mathematics, philosophy, and religious themes from the Egyptian priests. After Egypt was overwhelmed by Persian armies, Pythagoras may have been taken to Babylon, together with members of the Egyptian priesthood. There he would have encountered the Mesopotamian mathematical lore. Nevertheless, the Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics would prove insufficient for Pythagoras' inquisitive mind. To both of these peoples, mathematics provided practical tools in the form of "recipes" designed for specific calculations. Pythagoras, on the other hand, was one of the first to grasp numbers as abstract entities that exist in their own right.

Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction. Anyone who has traveled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm, yes. I think so.

Suppose a would-be writer can't begin? I really believe there are many excellent writers who have never written because they never could begin. This is especially the case of people of great sensitiveness, or of people of advanced education. Professors suffer most of all from this inhibition. Many of them carry their unwritten books to the grave. They overestimate the magnitude of the task, they overestimate the greatness of the final result. A child in a prep school will write the History of Greece and fetch it home finished after school. "He wrote a fine History of Greece the other day," says his fond father. Thirty years later the child, grown to be a professor, dreams of writing the History of Greece -- the whole of it from the first Ionic invasion of the Aegean to the downfall of Alexandria. But he dreams. He never starts. He can't. It's too big. Anybody who has lived around a college knows the pathos of those unwritten books.

Hang on, you two!’ the ram said. ‘There’s a lot of turbulence over this part of the sea and –’ ‘AHHHHHHHH!’ Helle, who was not hella good at listening, slipped off the ram’s back and plummeted to her death. ‘Darn it!’ said Chrysomallos. ‘I told you to hang on!’ After that, Phrixus dug his hands into the ram’s fleece and wouldn’t let go for anything. The place where Helle died was a narrow channel of water between the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea. Forever afterwards it was called the Hellespont, I guess because Hella Stupid would’ve been impolite.

Edin Viso's poetry and prose bear the obvious marks of dark drama-of a soul variously splayed apart and cinched back together...This is a book of psalms-at once craggy and rough as the Balkan landscape, and sublime as sunrise on the Aegean Sea. There are calluses on the palms, dried blood on the knuckles, and dirt under the fingernails of these pieces. And there is grace...Edin is a poet who knows the value of a blanket, a single orange, a moment shared...He is a man who is unafraid, and who does, in the pages before you, "take off his skin and dance in his bones.".

Rona soon picked out her own plot of land - one hundred eighty acres that stretched along the bottom of a rocky hill and only a stone's through from the shoreline. Quickly, much more quickly than natural for a man much less a woman - even one of Rona Blackburn's stature - a house appeared. She filled her new home with reminders of her previous one on the Aegean island she had loved so much: pastel seashells and a front door painted a deep cobalt blue - a color the yiayias always claimed had the power to repel evil. Then she set up her bed, made a pit for her fire, and erected two wooden tables. One table she kept bare. The other she covered in tinctures and glass jars of cut herbs and other fermented bits of flora and fauna. On this table, she kept a marble mortar and pestle, the leather sheath in which she wrapped her knives, and copper bowls - some for mixing dry ingredients, some for liquid, and a few small enough to bring to the mouth for sipping. And when the fire was stoked and the table was set, she placed a wooden sign - soon covered in a blanket of late December snow - outside that blue front door. It read one world: Witch.

Opinion polls showed that two-thirds of Greeks rejected the conditions attached to the bailout, but wanted to stay in the eurozone. Demonstrations spread throughout Greece advocating a “No” vote. So the Germans and French tried to frame the issue in a narrow way designed to get a “Yes” answer: Did voters want to be part of Europe? The aim was to avoid asking the really important question: Did Greek voters want to impose a decade of depression on themselves, cut public services, impose anti-union labor “reforms,” and sell off the Athenian water supply, its port, their beautiful islands and their gas rights in the Aegean to Germans and other creditors?

Case study: The Zoroastrians Would it really have been so bad if the Muslims had conquered Europe? After all, the Christians would still have been able to practice their religion. They would just have had to put up with a little discrimination, right? Although “a little discrimination” is all that most Islamic apologists will acknowledge about dhimmitude, the long-term effects of the dhimma were much more damaging for non-Muslims. Even centuries after the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the Coptic Christians maintained an overwhelming majority there. Yet today the Copts amount to just 10 percent, or less, of the Egyptian population. It’s the same story with every non-Muslim group that has fallen completely under Islamic rule. The Zoroastrians, or Parsis, are followers of the Persian priest and prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra (628–551 B.C.). Before the advent of Islam, Zoroastrianism was for a long period the official religion of Persia (modern-day Iran), and was the dominant religion when the Persian Empire spanned from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River. Zoroastrians were commonly found from Persia to China. But after the Muslim conquest of Persia, Zoroastrians were given dhimmi status and subjected to cruel persecutions, which often included forced conversions. Many fled to India to escape Muslim rule, only to fall prey to the warriors of jihad again when the Muslims started to advance into India. The suffering of the Zoroastrians under Islam was strikingly similar to that of Christians and Jews under Islam farther to the West, and it continued well into modern times (even to this very day under the Iranian mullahocracy).

Stop! Ok, seriously, how old are you two? You’re acting like teenagers instead of old ass immortal men!" “Well, yea we are kind of old, but we’ve been around so long, we don’t have anything better to do. Living a long time can really turn you into a cranky bitch. Just wait ‘till you meet my father. We do all we can to enjoy ourselves. But I’m serious when I need to be.”~ Ariadne Phillips and Taznikos Abyssos

At a time when travel is for many easy and anodyne, their voyages through the Sahara, the Balkans or across the Mediterranean – on foot, in the holds of wooden fishing boats and on the backs of land cruisers – are almost as epic as those of classical heroes such as Aeneas and Odysseus. I’m wary of drawing too strong a link, but there are nevertheless obvious parallels. Just as both those ancient men fled a conflict in the Middle East and sailed across the Aegean, so too will many migrants today. Today’s Sirens are the smugglers with their empty promises of safe passage; the violent border guard a contemporary Cyclops. Three millennia after their classical forebears created the founding myths of the European continent, today’s voyagers are writing a new narrative that will influence Europe, for better or worse, for years to come.

If repping could be compared to a car: the office reps are the engine and the hotel reps are the drivers. If the engine doesn’t work, the driver can’t move forward; but if the driver refuses to drive, there’s no point in having a perfectly functioning engine. So, next time you take a holiday, enjoy the drive the rep takes you on - but remember to appreciate the office staff, who work to ensure that you don’t come to an unexpected grinding halt.

Ceil moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shine like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mothers arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children's entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on. She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it-a slight silver splinter, embedded just below the surface of her skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled-and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat and muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.

Theseus Within the Labyrinth pt.2 But nobody like Theseus likes a smart girl, always telling him to dress warmly and eat plenty of fiber. She was one of those people who are never in doubt. Had he sharpened his sword, tied his sandals? Without her, of course, he would have never escaped the labyrinth. Why hadn’t he thought of that trick with the ball of yarn? But as he looked down at her sleeping form, this woman who was already carrying his child, maybe he thought of their future together, how she would correctly foretell the mystery or banality behind each locked door. So probably he shook his head and said, Give me a dumb girl any day, and crept back to his ship and sailed away. Of course Ariadne was revenged. She would have told him to change the sails, to take down the black ones, put up the white. She would have reminded him that his father, the king of Athens, was waiting on a high cliff scanning the Aegean for Theseus’s returning ship, white for victory, black for defeat. She would have said how his father would see the black sails, how the grief for the supposed death of his one son would destroy him. But Theseus and his men had brought out the wine and were cruising a calm sea in a small boat filled to the brim with ex-virgins. Who could have blamed him? Until he heard the distant scream and his head shot up to see the black sails and he knew. The girls disappeared, the ship grew quiet except for the lap-lap of the water. Staring toward the spot where his father had tumbled headfirst into the Aegean, Theseus understood he would always be a stupid man with a thick stick, scratching his forehead long after the big event. But think, does he change his mind, turn back the ship, hunt up Ariadne and beg her pardon? Far better to be stupid by himself than smart because she’d been tugging on his arm; better to live in the eternal present with a boatload of ex-virgins than in that dark land of consequences promised by Ariadne, better to live like any one of us, thinking to outwit the darkness, but knowing it will catch us, that we will be surprised like the Minotaur on his couch when the door slams back and the hired gun of our personal destruction bursts upon us, upsetting the good times and scaring the girls. Better to be ignorant, to go into the future as into a long tunnel, without ball of yarn or clear direction, to tiptoe forward like any fool or saint or hero, jumpy, full of second thoughts, and bravely unprepared.

People have traditionally talked about civilization “spreading” from place to place and not happening by other means. This is the result, I think, of two forms of self-deception. First of these is self-congratulation. If we suppose—as people throughout history have regularly supposed—that the way we live represents the climax of human achievement, we need to represent it as unique or, at least, rare: when you find a lot of examples of something that you expect to be unique, you have to explain the effect as the result of diffusion. Yet, in reality, civilization is an ordinary thing, an impulse so widespread that it has again transformed almost every habitable environment. Peoples modest enough in the faceof nature to forgo or severely limit their interventions are much rarer than those, like us, who crush nature into an image of our approving. The attitude of these reticent cultures should therefore be considered much harder to explain than that of the civilized. The second self-deception is belief in what might be called the migrationist fallacy, which powerfully warped previous generations’ picture of the remote past. Our received wisdom about prehistoric times was formulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Europe was enjoying her own great imperial age. The experience of those times convinced self-appointed imperial master-races that civilization was something which descended from superior to inferior peoples. Its vectors were conquerors, colonists, and missionaries. Left to themselves, the barbarians would be mired in cultural immobility. The self-perception of the times was projected, almost without utterance, onto the depiction of the past. Stonehenge was regarded as a marvel beyond the capabilities of the people who really built it—just as to white beholders the ruins of Great Zimbabwe (see page p. 252 ) seemed to have been left by intruders, or the cities of the Maya (see page 158 ) to have been erected under guidance from afar. Early Bronze Age Wessex, with its chieftainly treasures of gold, was putatively assigned to a Mycenean king. The sophistication of Aegean palace life (see page 292 ) was said to have been copied from the Near East. Almost every development, every major change in the prehistoric world was turned by migrationist scholarship into a kind of pre-enactment of later European colonialism and attributed to the influence of migrants or scholars or the irradiation of cultural superiority, warming barbaric darkness into civilized enlightenment. Scholars who had before their eyes the sacred history of the Jews or the migration stories of Herodotus had every reason to trust their own instincts and experience and to chart the progress of civilization on the map. The result was to justify the project of the times: a world of peoples ranked in hierarchical order, sliced and stacked according to abilities supposed to be innate.

We have been accustomed to look to the East -to Mesopotamia and Babylonia- for the beginning of Greek enlightenment, but probably when exploration has penetrated farther into the secrets of the Aegean, we shall find that the initial impulse came, not from the borders of the Euphrates, but from the islands and coast-lands of the Levant.

Man, you should write a book.’ ‘I know. You couldn’t make this stuff up, could you?

She could picture herself now in the cool water with the sun on her face, totally alone and at peace with the stunning Greek scenery all around her. She hadn’t even been here for a full day yet, but she was desperate to feel that she was away from her usual surroundings and all her responsibilities and become a different - liberated - woman, even if it was only for a week.

Greek culture owed tremendous debt to the Aegean ... This civilization had grown old, and passed away centuries before the period of Greek learning with which Homer has made us familiar.

Sea Grapes" That sail which leans on light, tired of islands, a schooner beating up the Caribbean for home, could be Odysseus, home-bound on the Aegean; that father and husband's longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name in every gull's outcry. This brings nobody peace. The ancient war between obsession and responsibility will never finish and has been the same for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since Troy sighed its last flame, and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough from whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the conclusions of exhausted surf. The classics can console. But not enough.

If the Philistines were early associated with the Minoan civilization, and the Pulasti were an Aegean people, it is to be concluded that in their first contact with the Israelites they were a more advanced people - the givers rather than the borrowers of a new culture.

Thirteen Thirtyfive Strongest taste loudest drop head is filled the thought, unlocked Strongest taste loudest drop head is filled the thought, unlocked Strongest taste loudest drop head is filled the thought, unlocked Strongest taste loudest drop head is filled you'd be thirteen I'd be thirty-five gone to find a place for us to hide be together, but alone as the need for it has grown you'd be thirteen I'd be thirty-five gone to find a place for us to hide be together, but alone as the need for it has grown, yeah cha cha, cha cha, cha cha cha cha, cha cha a cave or a shed a car or a bed a hole in the ground or a burial mound a bush or a tree or the aegean sea, will do for me cha cha, cha cha, cha cha cha cha, cha cha, ha I can say that you look pretty you turn my legs into spaghetti you set my heart on fire for you I found a vent in the bottom of a coal mine just enough space for your hands in the inside if you go do let me know you'd be thirteen I'd be thirty-five gone to find a place for us to hide a den or a dessert perhaps an ink squirt a cellar, a wishing well, a war or a guarantee will do for me for you I found a cell on the top floor of a prison just enough space for you to fit your feet in if you go do let me know for you I found a cell on the top floor of a prison just enough space for you to fit your feet in if you go please let me know I go running with a heart on fire I go running with a heart on fire I go running with a heart on fire I go running with a heart on fire I go running with a heart on fire I go running with a heart on fire I go running with a heart on fire

Ramadan was one of more than a million refugees and migrants who took boats and flimsy dinghies to European shores in 2015. Along with forty-seven others, most of whom were Syrian, he crossed the Aegean in an inflatable raft that he estimates was made for a maximum load of twenty-five people. ‘There were so many children on it. We went out in the night. The kids were crying. We kept telling them, ‘See the light there in the distance? That’s where we are going.’” Four hours later, they landed, the boat already halfway full of water and on the brink of sinking. They emerged onto the rock shores and made their way back to solid land after, as Ramadan put it, seeing death yet again.

Aegean Sea. Yakub plotted his revenge against his enemies: “to create upon the earth a devil race.” Yakub established a brutal island regime of selective breeding—eugenics meeting colorism. He killed all Dark babies and forced Light people to breed. When Yakub died, his followers carried on, creating the Brown race from the Black race, the Red race from the Brown race, the Yellow race from the Red race, and the White race from the Yellow race. After six hundred years, “on the island of Patmos was nothing but these blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils—savages.

The imported Egyptian and Near Eastern objects found in the Aegean form an interesting pattern, perhaps related to the Aegean List.

Julius Caesar captive when he was sailing on the Aegean Sea.

I always thought the Aegean was a thing of beauty and a joy for ever,’ Lyster said as he stood with Bennett and Kelly on the casing. ‘Wine-dark seas and cool islands full of sloe-eyed houris and that sort of thing.

While they read these stories, moreover—and this is a comforting thought for those who believe that the best way for anyone to become a lover of real literature is to be exposed to it early and often—boys and girls are not only gratifying their love for a stirring tale, they are making the acquaintance of the great story-tellers of the past, taking them into their lives as companions. This early contact gives children an experience which will keep their horizon in after life from being entirely circumscribed by the mediocre and ephemeral. If a boy has sailed the wine dark Aegean, or climbed a height whence he could watch Roland’s last heroic stand in the Pass of Roncevaux, some gleam remains, and there is far less likelihood that his adult reading will be entirely commonplace.

Aristotle, means "the best purpose." In 384 BC he was born in Stagira, Greece on the Peninsula of Chalcidice in central Macedonia, located on the northern coast of the Aegean Sea. Aristotle was orphaned at a young age and moved to Athens as a teenager, where he continued his education at Plato’s Academy. After completing his education, Aristotle married Pythias, who bore him a daughter that they also named Pythias. In 343 BC, Philip II employed Aristotle to become the tutor to his son Alexander, who later became a great general. By 335 BC, Aristotle returned to Athens and established his own school, known as the Lyceum. Aristotle conducted courses at the school for the next twelve years. While in Athens, his wife Pythias died. Following her death Aristotle wrote most of his work, of which only remnants have survived. His most important treatises included Poetry, Politics, Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics and the meaning of a soul. Aristotle spent his life studying and teaching almost every subject possible at the time and added a great deal, to most of them. His resulting works became the encyclopedia of Greek knowledge. Near the end of his life, Alexander and Aristotle unfortunately became enemies resulting from Alexander's relationship with the Persians. The details of Aristotle’s life are sketchy at best, and the biographies that Aristotle wrote remain speculative. Although Aristotle contributed to the knowledge of the day, historians can only totally agree on very few things.

Carol Bell, a British academician, has recently observed that “the strategic importance of tin in the LBA [Late Bronze Age] … was probably not far different from that of crude oil today.”3 At that time, tin was available in quantity only from specific mines in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan and had to be brought overland all the way to sites in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and north Syria, from where it was distributed to points farther north, south, or west, including onward across the sea to the Aegean. Bell continues, “The availability of enough tin to produce … weapons grade bronze must have exercised the minds of the Great King in Hattusa and the Pharaoh in Thebes in the same way that supplying gasoline to the American SUV driver at reasonable cost preoccupies an American President today!

Annabeth knit her eyebrows. “We’ll have to talk to Tantalus, get approval for a quest. He’ll say no.” “Not if we tell him tonight at the campfire in front of everybody. The whole camp will hear. They’ll pressure him. He won’t be able to refuse.” “Maybe.” A little bit of hope crept into Annabeth’s voice. “We’d better get these dishes done. Hand me the lava spray gun, will you?” That night at the campfire, Apollo’s cabin led the sing-along. They tried to get everybody’s spirits up, but it wasn’t easy after that afternoon’s bird attack. We all sat around a semicircle of stone steps, singing halfheartedly and watching the bonfire blaze while the Apollo guys strummed their guitars and picked their lyres. We did all the standard camp numbers: “Down by the Aegean,” “I Am My Own Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandpa,” “This Land is Minos’s Land.” The bonfire was enchanted, so the louder you sang, the higher it rose, changing color and heat with the mood of the crowd. On a good night, I’d seen it twenty feet high, bright purple, and so hot the whole front row’s marshmallows burst into the flames. Tonight, the fire was only five feet high, barely warm, and the flames were the color of lint. Dionysus left early. After suffering through a few songs, he muttered something about how even pinochle with Chiron had been more exciting than this. Then he gave Tantalus a distasteful look and headed back toward the Big House. When the last song was over, Tantalus said, “Well, that was lovely!” He came forward with a toasted marshmallow on a stick and tried to pluck it off, real casual-like. But before he could touch it, the marshmallow flew off the stick. Tantalus made a wild grab, but the marshmallow committed suicide, diving into the flames. Tantalus turned back toward us, smiling coldly. “Now then! Some announcements about tomorrow’s schedule.” “Sir,” I said. Tantalus’s

The waiter brought my ouzo and a glass of water. I wished the deck lights were brighter because I love to see ouzo turn blue when you add water to it.

Sam would stand on the beach at dusk for long periods of time staring at the particles reflectively glisten across trillions of tiny explosion points watching sunsets of the Aegean Sea fade out. Sam would change his visible spectrum across wider ranges allowing the elements and their cascade of radiance to repeat and dance in vibratory field mechanisms unimaginable. The waves would crash glowing with blue bioluminescence but on the opposite ends of the spectrum creating red shift tides that grew and shrank on black sand while the sun burned in turquoise.

Ionia was one of the most important Greek regions. It was located on the Aegean shore in Anatolia.

The Minoans at this time had spread their influence right across the southern Aegean.

perhaps even thousands, before our imagined Aegean dawn in the year 1500 BCE.

Philip nursed ambitions of holding influence from across the Aegean to the Persian Empire.

into the Aegean by order of the Senate in 67 BCE with five hundred ships and over a hundred thousand

a new centre of power and wealth has been making its mark farther north, and closer to the Aegean,

a ship that sank in about 1300 BCE while on its way from the Levant via Cyprus towards the Mycenaean Aegean

He stands freezing in the dark courtyard looking up at their bright windows, as he has many nights since moving away. Because of his promise, he does not go up. He is thinking of the day she came back from the hospital. They did not know her then. He was looking down because of the happiness in her voice talking to her husband as they went across the courtyard. She saw him and, grinning, held up the newborn child. Now it is the last time ever. He finally knocks. Her eyes widen when she opens the door. She looks to indicate her husband is home as she unbuttons her dress. He whispers that his hands are too cold. It will make me remember better, she says, and puts them on her nakedness, wincing, eyes wild with love. It is snowing when he leaves, the narrow street lit here and there by shop windows. Tomorrow he will be on the train with his wife, watching the shadows on the snow. Going south to live silently with perfect summer skies and the brilliant Aegean.

Back in the early years of the Persian rise to greatness, while Cyrus was still in Lydia, he had found himself unexpectedly visited by a delegation from across the Aegean Sea. The ambassadors were Greek, but quite different from the Greeks of Asia, whose cities, prosperous and tempting, Cyrus was plotting at that very moment to crush and make his own. The strangers wore their hair long; they sported distinctive red cloaks; they spoke not with the subtlety and sense of propriety that conventionally marked an ambassador’s language, but brusquely, bluntly, rudely. The message they gave the greatest king on earth was simple: Cyrus should leave the cities of the Ionians well alone; if he did not, then he would have to answer to those who had sent them—the Spartans. Evidently, the strangers felt that the mere mention of this name was sufficient to chill the blood, for they added nothing more. Cyrus, turning from them, was obliged to summon a nearby Ionian attendant. “Tell me,” he demanded, all bemusement, “who are the Spartans?

The Monastery of Saint Naum is an ancient foundation, begun in 905 by the saint himself on the shores of Lake Ohrid. Naum chose an enchanting place for his monastery. Lake Ohrid, a pane of still turquoise water shimmering in the mountain air, looks like a droplet of the Aegean plopper in the middle of the Jablanica Mountains. The monastery stands at a point on the shore -- now the boundary between North Macedonia and Albania -- where a series of springs emerge from the base of Mount Galičica. They are ice cold and immensely clear. The point where they emerge from the ground is surrounded by a grove of tall, ivy-covered oaks, in the midst of which stands a single spreading fig tree.

On the map the southern part of the Peloponnese looks like a misshapen tooth fresh torn from its gum with three peninsulas jutting southwards in jagged and carious roots. The central prong is formed by the Tayegtus mountains, which from their northern foothills in the heart of the Morea to their storm-beaten southern point, Cape Matapan, are roughly a hundred miles long. About half their length - seventy five miles on their western and forty five on their eastern flank and measuring fifty miles across - projects tapering into the sea. This is the Mani. As the Taygetus range towers to eight thousand feet at the centre , subsiding to north and south in chasm after chasm, these distances as the crow flies can with equanimity be trebled and quadrupled and sometimes, when reckoning overland, multiplied tenfold. Just as the inland Taygetus divides the Messenian from the Laconian plain, its continuation, the sea-washed Mani, divides the Aegean from the Ionian, and its wild cape, the ancient Taenarus and the entrance to Hades, is the southernmost point of Greece. Nothing but the bleak Mediterranean, sinking below to enormous depths, lies between this spike of rock and the African sands and from this point the huge wall of the Taygetus, whose highest peaks bar the bare and waterless inferno of rock. The Taygetus rolls in peak after peak to its southernmost tip, a huge pale grey bulk with nothing to interrupt its monotony.

Ciel moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shone like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mother’s arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children’s entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on. She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it—a slight silver splinter, embedded just below the surface of the skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled—and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat and muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.

It stretched from the Indian subcontinent to the eastern shore of the Aegean,

Now, it is possible that the ground-loom existed farther north also: to the northeast, in the steppes (where, however, large cloths to this day are by preference made by felting), and to the northwest, where it might conceivably have co-existed with the warp- weighted loom, the two looms having been specialized for different purposes. Yet the warp-weighted loom is so different in its concept that it is hard to believe that it was not independently invented, by people who originally knew nothing of the two-beam ground-loom, although they almost certainly already knew the principle of weaving under tension, as with a backstrap loom, for example (see Chapter 11

in a dinner at our house that weekend.

Greeks from their age-long homes along the Asiatic littoral to certain islands in the Aegean. I have also said that Admiral Usedom, one of the big German naval experts in Turkey, told me that the Germans had suggested this deportation to the Turks.

What we recommend is a contest.” “Of Champions?” asked Achish. “Yes,” said Goliath. “If you assemble your forces for war, we will call out their mightiest champion to engage in single combat with our mightiest champion to resolve the conflict without massive loss of soldiers.” It was a common stratagem from their Aegean origins. But it was also known and practiced among Mesopotamian and Canaanite cultures as well. So the Israelites were familiar with it. Goliath continued, “This tactic will surely draw out their hidden messiah by an appeal to his vanity.

Yet in Paul's letters we can hear something more than his own genius: an echo of female voices, of conversations over the years with the women of the Aegean cloth trade who were his close collaborators. During this long fellowship, the apostle has not only been talking to women: he has been listening.

Philistia had been settled generations earlier when the Mediterranean Sea Peoples had left their habitations in search of new territory and landed on the shores of Canaan. They were not a singular people, but consisted of a variety of Aegean clans; Cherethites, Pelethites, and even Caphtorim, from the island of Caphtor, also known as Crete. These Sea Peoples had quickly established their presence on the coast and immediately launched an invasion of Egypt. They were repelled and so accepted a form of vassalage under the Pharaoh’s authority. They became known collectively as Philistines and maintained a profitable control of the access to shipping routes to the rest of the world, including Egypt, for travel and trade. The land route from Canaan to Egypt eventually was called the Way of the Philistines.

Aegean Islands 1940-41 Where white stares, smokes or breaks, Thread white, white of plaster and of foam, Where sea like a wall falls; Ribbed, lionish coast, The stony islands which blow into my mind More often than I imagine my grassy home; To sun one's bones beside the Explosive, crushed-blue, nostril-opening sea (The weaving sea, splintered with sails and foam, Familiar of famous and deserted harbours, Of coins with dolphins on and fallen pillars.) To know the gear and skill of sailing, The drenching race for home and the sail-white houses, Stories of Turks and smoky ikons, Cry of the bagpipe, treading Of the peasant dancers; The dark bread The island wine and the sweet dishes; All these were elements in a happiness More distant now than any date like '40, A. D. or B. C., ever can express.

Picture the east Aegean sea by night, And on a beach aslant its shimmering Upwards of 50,000 men Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

Ancient Ways The Greek Isles are divided into several major chains lying in the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and the Ionian seas. The Cyclades chain alone includes more than two hundred islands clustered in the southern Aegean. In the southeastern Aegean, between Crete and Asia Minor, there are 163 islands known as the Dodecanese chain. Only 26 of these are inhabited; the largest of them is Rhodes, where the world-famous Colossus once stood. The Ionian chain of western Greece (named for the eponymous sea) includes the large island of Corfu. Cyprus lies in the eastern Mediterranean, south of Turkey. Today, Cyprus stands politically divided, with Turkish rule in the north, and a government in the south that remains independent from Greece. However, the island has always been linked culturally and linguistically to Greece, and it shares traditions and ways of life with the smaller islands scattered to its south and west. In the Greek Isles, history blends myth and fact. Historians glean information about the early days of the Greek Isles from the countless ancient stories and legends set there. According to Homer, battleships sailed from the harbors of Kos and Rhodes during the Trojan War. A well-known legend holds that the Argonauts sought refuge from a storm on the island of Anafi in the southeastern Cyclades. The lovely island of Lésvos is mentioned throughout the Homeric epics and in many ancient Greek tales. Tradition has it that the god Helios witnessed the island of Rhodes rising mystically from the sea, and chose it for his home. The ill-fated Daedalus and his son, Icarus, attempted to soar through the skies over the magical island of Crete, where the great god Zeus was born in a mountaintop cave. Villagers still recount how Aphrodite emerged from the sea on a breathtaking stretch of beach near the village of Paphos on Cyprus. Visitors must actually lay eyes on a Greek island to gain a full appreciation for these ancient stories. Just setting foot on one of these islands makes you feel as if you’ve stepped into one of the timeless tales from ancient Greek mythology.

It is no wonder that historians trace the birth of Western civilization to these jewels of the Aegean, Ionian, and Mediterranean seas. The Greek Isles are home to wide-ranging and far-reaching cultural traditions and mythic tales, not to mention the colorful history and unforgettable vistas that still draw thousands of tourists to the region every year. Minoan ruins stand alongside Byzantine churches and Crusader fortresses. Terra-cotta pots spilling over with hibiscus flowers adorn blinding-white stucco houses that reflect the sun’s dazzling light. Fishing villages perched upon craggy cliffs overlook clusters of colorful boats in island harbors. Centuries-old citrus and olive groves dot the hillsides. Lush vegetation and rocky shores meet isolated stretches of sand and an azure sea. Masts bob left and right on sailboats moored in secluded inlets. Each island is a world unto itself. Although outsiders and neighbors have inhabited, visited, and invaded these islands throughout the centuries, the islands’ rugged geography and small size have also ensured a certain isolation. In this environment, traditional ways of life thrive. The arts--pottery, glass blowing, gem carving, sculpture, and painting, among others--flourish here today, as contemporary craft artists keep alive techniques begun in antiquity. In the remote hilltop villages of Kárpathos, for example, artisans practice crafts that date back eons, and inhabitants speak a dialect close to ancient Greek. Today, to walk along the pebbled pathways of a traditional Greek mountain village or the marbled streets of an ancient acropolis is to step back in time. To meander at a leisurely pace through these island chains by boat is to be captivated by the same dramatic landscapes and enchanted islets that make the myths of ancient Greece so compelling. To witness the Mediterranean sun setting on the turquoise sea is to receive one of life’s greatest blessings.

Circumcision is well-known in the ancient Near East from as early as the fourth millennium BC, though the details of its practice and its significance vary from culture to culture. Circumcision was practiced in the ancient Near East by many peoples. The Egyptians practiced circumcision as early as the third millennium BC. West Semitic peoples, Israelites, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites performed circumcision. Eastern Semitic peoples did not (e.g., Assyrians, Babylonians, Akkadians)—nor did the Philistines, an Aegean or Greek people. Anthropological studies have suggested that the rite always has to do with at least one of four basic themes: fertility, virility, maturity and genealogy. Study of Egyptian mummies demonstrates that the surgical technique in Egypt differed from that used by the Israelites; while the Hebrews amputated the prepuce of the penis, the Egyptians merely incised the foreskin and so exposed the glans penis. Egyptians were not circumcised as children, but in either prenuptial or puberty rites. The common denominator, however, is that it appears to be a rite of passage, giving new identity to the one circumcised and incorporating him into a particular group. Evidence from the Levant comes as early as bronze figurines from the Amuq Valley (Tell el-Judeideh) from the early third millennium BC. An ivory figurine from Megiddo from the mid-second millennium BC shows Canaanite prisoners who are circumcised. Southern Mesopotamia shows no evidence of the practice, nor is any Akkadian term known for the practice. The absence of such evidence is significant since Assyrian and Babylonian medical texts are available in abundance. Abraham is therefore aware of the practice from living in Canaan and visiting Egypt rather than from his roots in Mesopotamia. Since Ishmael is 13 years old at this time, Abraham may even have been wondering whether it was a practice that would characterize this new family of his. In Ge 17 circumcision is retained as a rite of passage, but one associated with identity in the covenant. In light of today’s concerns with gender issues, some have wondered why the sign of the covenant should be something that marks only males. Two cultural issues may offer an explanation: patrilineal descent and identity in the community. (1) The concept of patrilineal descent resulted in males being considered the representatives of the clan and the ones through whom clan identity was preserved (as, e.g., the wife took on the tribal and clan identity of her husband). (2) Individuals found their identity more in the clan and the community than in a concept of self. Decisions and commitments were made by the family and clan more than by the individual. The rite of passage represented in circumcision marked each male as entering a clan committed to the covenant, a commitment that he would then have the responsibility to maintain. If this logic holds, circumcision would not focus on individual participation in the covenant as much as on continuing communal participation. The community is structured around patrilineal descent, so the sign on the males marks the corporate commitment of the clan from generation to generation. ◆

After the initial shock subsides, the Aegean Sea, turquoise and limpid, enveloping my limbs feels like a gigantic womb. I think, as we swim side by side moving our legs and arms in unison like synchronized frogs, of the sea as the mother of the first creatures who crawled out of it and somehow, eventually became me and Patron’s operatic wife. She is still wearing her glasses and is careful to keep her teased puffy hair out of the water.

By the 1580s he had already hired a professional researcher from Chania in Crete—there was a Venetian connection—to search for the oldest and purest of the Chrysostom manuscripts and to buy them. Savile recommended the agent look in Patmos, the beautiful island in the eastern Aegean where the monastery of St John was said to harbour the greatest treasures, and to acquire what he could. It was a lifelong fascination for Savile which culminated in his great edition of Chrysostom’s work, printed and published between 1610 and 1612 at the appalling cost of £ 8,000. By then, Savile had assembled 15,800 sheets of manuscript (which he presented to the Bodleian Library in Oxford). All the great libraries of Europe had been searched, not only in Mount Athos, Constantinople and the island of Chalce, but in Paris, Vienna, Augsburg and Munich.

In this crowded world, we must learn to navigate by speech, as ancient mariners taught themselves to sail across the Aegean Sea.

vessel Louisa that met a ghastly fate on the Aegean island of Skiathos, said to be infested with werewolves. There was the lost Bulgarian village of Dradja where the cruelest torture by an avenging mob could not force the villagers to give up the killer beast that dwelt among them. Most of the stories dated from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there were reports of werewolves as early as the writings of Herodotus in 450 B.C., and as recently as the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1959. “The local newspaper clippings you can go over yourself,” Inez said. “The earliest I could find was in 1919. Altogether, there have been sixteen reported deaths or disappearances in this valley with no logical explanation. Your two young friends with the van would make eighteen.” “Still,” Karyn said, “that’s more than fifty years, and this is a wilderness area where a lot of things can happen lo people.” “Those are only the reported cases. I know of at least two that never made the papers.” “Has anyone told you what happened to the people who lived in this house before you?” “The Fennos? No.” “It was just over four years ago. The old people hadn’t been seen in town for a week or so, and there were inquiries. Your friend Anton Gadak came out to investigate. He found the two of them dead. Supposedly, natural causes.” “That’s not so strange. The Fennos were quite old, weren’t

despite the description in the Egyptian texts of a single event, the migration of the Sea Peoples was at least a half-century-long process that had several phases…. It may have started with groups that spread destruction along the Levantine coast, including northern Philistia, in the beginning of the twelfth century and that were defeated by Ramesses III in his eighth year. Consequently, some of them were settled in Egyptian garrisons in the delta. Later groups of Sea Peoples, in the second half of the twelfth century, succeeded in terminating Egyptian rule in southern Canaan. After destroying the Egyptian strongholds … they settled in Philistia and established their major centers at Ashdod, Ashkelon, Tel Miqne, and other places. These people—the Philistines of the later biblical text—are easily identifiable by several Aegean-derived features in their material culture.78

M" Mnemosyne’s silent M drives me to the dictionary Her baby sister makes an n run. Youth does not tarry Those diaphanous, luminescent water jellies, Mnemiopsis, small as sneezes, I can only conjure as Knee me up, Sis Spelling? Easier to recall these beauties as invasive carnivorous, cannibalistic, and hermaphroditic (They eat each other and fuck themselves) Mnemonic is a device that helps me remember birthdays and phone numbers of those I no longer love but can recall in traces Or how to sequence pi to a thousand places as Guinness names me a mnemonist. Or my own birthday because my mother died the day before Just a handful of words end in mn, and the soul they limn: autumn, solemn, damn, condemn, the a capella hymn But hundreds contain mn. A standout: that Jurassic cephalopod, belemnite, long gone, yet its name and phallic fossil live on And should those Siamnese twins stand at the head, they’re led by a vowel that takes m by the hand and leaves n to bed another syllable. Amnesia. You are what you forget Still, the mother of all muses has a name hard to set Mnemiopsis, mnemonist, mnemonic, Mnemosyne— such elegance I should be able to recall: these words all begin with silence Perhaps her name once began with A: Out one day, bathing carefree in the Aegean, she fell for a creature she could feel but not see— say, a tentacled jelly—got entangled with the beast, lost the A, Tore her chiton, and returned in disarray Zeus said, Where’s the A I gave you on the birth of Calliope? She, recalling his trysts, yet savoring her berth, wanted no scene Saw in backward glance, the gem wedged in coral’s gritty teeth A’s so plebeian. Words are rife. Alcmene, Europa, Hera, adultery Few can spell my name yet spell I cast when lives are spent I am the Titan Mnemosyne, Goddess of All Memory, and off she went leaving Zeus to rue her gift and curse Yet wise manager, was hers not the golden purse?

the Aegean Sea is a vast swathe of inky velvet studded with diamond crystals

In the survey released in February 2020 cited at the beginning of this book, one respondent noted the interrelatedness of the factors involved in our own current world situation, writing: “While extreme climate events are weakening the societal governance and infrastructure, food and water security will become more and more serious, causing large-scale immigration and further inequity. If several geopolitical crises occur in parallel, many states cannot handle the situation properly, due to lack of resources and with the internal conflict, it would cause catastrophic outcomes all over the world.”13 The parallels between events in our modern world and what happened during the Bronze Age Collapse in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean were already readily apparent, but now we need also to take into consideration the catastrophic direct effects of the COVID-19 virus and the ripple effects of the contagion on financial and economic systems that went global at about the same time as the release of the survey.

Moreover, it is especially relevant that the kingdoms, empires, and societies of the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean can each be seen as an individual sociopolitical system. As Dark says, such “complex socio-political systems will exhibit an internal dynamic which leads them to increase in complexity.… [T]he more complex a system is, the more liable it is to collapse.”25