burningman

Late Minoan III Motif(LMIIIA)
from pottery sherd
Alatsomouri near Pakheia Ammos
1300 BC

The motif is from the Late Minoan III (LMIIIA) period. It was found on a pottery sherd at Alatsomouri near Pakheia Ammos in 1966. The piece is dated at 1300 BC which places it late in the Minoan period when considerable Mycenean influences are evident in most of the archeological record. The motif was immediately noted for its similarity to a faint tattoo remnant on a remarkably preserved human remains fragment found the previous year at Zakros but dated at ~1650 BC. Simoriah was born on Thera in 1666 BC and had this pattern tattooed as an arm band in 1648. Following a mortal injury on a trading mission in Anatolia, his body was embalmed in a canopic jar filled with honey. His body had been tightly bound with wire. He was interred in a tomb at Zakros in 1635 BC. An immortal, but unaware of the fact, Simoriah spent 3600 years conscious, at first believing himself to be in an afterworld, in the funery vessel. He was released in 1965 when a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania took samples from the tissue encased in ancient and rock hard honey like a dragonfly suspended in amber. The insanity of the millenia of isolation had driven out any semblance of functional consciousness and it would be years before Simoriah would even regain the ability to process visual information.