Literature and History.com

Hello and welcome to Literature and History.

Episode 109, Cornerstones.

In this program, we will bring our season on late antiquity to its close,

introduce our new season on early Islamic history, and talk a bit about where we've been

in the Literature and History Podcast so far. I want to begin this show with a story.

This story is about a single block of stone. The city of Orcominos is in Biotia, in Greece.

Orcominos is about 50 miles northwest of Athens as the crow flies, and it sits at the west end of a fertile

lowland, spotted with lakes and ringed with mountains.

The town of Orcomanos is a minor tourist destination, home to an ancient Mycenaean

Acropolis on a promontory to the west.

Close to the town center, there is a complex of ruins that includes a circular, vaulted

Mycenaean period tomb, or Tholos.

This beehive tomb is famous within circles interested in Bronze Age Greek culture,

but in terms of famous tourist spots in Greece, certainly not in the same league as the

Parthenon or Delphi. Usually dated to about 1250 BCE, the circular tomb sits surprisingly well

preserved among younger ruins from the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods, its massive

ashlar blocks still tightly pressed together, 3,000 years after being constructed. Across the street from this old

Meissenian tomb, often called the Tomb of Minius, there is a very old Christian church built

in the 800s, CE. It's called the Byzantine Church of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary,

and though it's 2,000

years younger than the Bronze Age Tholos just a stones throw away down the street, the Orcominos

...