The Tediad - Introductory Remarks

##Introductory Remarks by Dr. Phadius Gillenderg

At the age of five, I declared to my parents that I would be the one to discover the ancient lost city of Athens. Fueled by my passion for discovery, I started excavating my sandbox in the backyard. At a meter down below the surface, below the cat shit horizon, my first dream came to an end when I was informed by my smirking father that Athens was never lost and had been populated continuously for a great deal of time. I was crushed, but somehow I absorbed my defeat and began immediately planning for the next one.

Years later, I attended Quonsokensett University, a small, maddeningly Catholic liberal arts school. There I double-majored in archaeology and classical studies, a path that was both unprecedented and ultimately unrecognized by the registrar(fn).

After graduation, I secured a job at the university’s Archaeology Museum as an Assistant Curator. I spent a large amount of time in the university’s museum archives, also known as the Morgue. In fact, it had been a functioning mortuary until it was purchased by the campus nearly a decade earlier(fn). Artifacts that were not interesting enough to be put on display upstairs were sent down into the dim bowels of the archives to sleep away the centuries in snug styrofoam-lined specimen cabinets. These were my favorites.

It was a glorious place to work. I had free reign of it all, except for the university’s vacuum-sealed private special collections chamber.

During one long stint in the Morgue, I came across the writings of a little-known pre-Socratic philosopher named Pravokrates. Putting aside the thousands of years between us, I developed a great bond with Pravokrates. Reading his words was like looking into a window of the past. Sure, the window was small, and cracked, and adorably superstitious, but what little light shone through illuminated my world. In one of his few recovered clay tablets, he commented on his crowning achievement, a lengthy tale of a man named Tedieous.

Who was this Tedieous character? Why hadn’t any other scholar mentioned him before? What had he done to warrant his own story? Quite frankly, why this guy?

I poured through the remaining texts but could find nothing more. Hundreds of unanswered questions rested dormant in the sediment of my brain waiting for some hopeful rockslide of inspiration to set them free.

Three long months passed by before I read the name Tedieous again. Three months is also incidentally how long it takes to break into the university’s vacuum-sealed private special collections chamber. Through scholarly methods I cannot discuss, I gained unsupervised access. This was where they kept the good stuff: fragile parchments, flaking paintings, mummified animals, you name it. In the very back, I came across a fragment of a clay tablet, unattributed to Pravokrates, but definitely written in his style. According to the tablet, Tedieous’ final resting place was on the island of Crete in the Tomb of Tedieous.

I won’t say that locating this undiscovered tomb became an obsession; I merely thought of nothing else to the neglect of all other responsibilities. I was eventually granted permission to organize an expedition. That summer I took a team of unpaid undergraduates on an archeological excavation of Greece’s Cuba. Crete is well known for its amazing Bronze Age Minoan palace ruins at Knossos, all of which were carefully bulldozed to build unfaithful restorations where they once stood.

I feel like I need to present a short history of these early people. The Minoans of Crete were the first noteworthy Greek civilization to rise above a multitude of unnoteworthy ones. Many consider the Minoans to be the heralds of the Western world. They helped to innovate so many things that we considered common today such as international commerce, a written language, complex architecture, and the tradition of sacrificing children to bovine-headed monsters.

They thrived for a little more than a thousand years, which isn’t too shabby, but were conquered due to their strange reluctance to build fortified walls around their beautiful palaces. Their northern neighbors, the Mycenaeans as we call them now, were exactly the sort of people you would want to keep back with a fortified wall. Maybe two.

The Mycenaeans absorbed the Minoan’s island, their culture, their writing, and all their precious labyrinths. While the Minoans enriched their empire through trade and the pursuit of art, the Mycenaeans enriched theirs through ambitious conquest and the pursuit of fleeing survivors. Many famous Greek heroes were from this stock: Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Ajax, Menelaus, and Spencer.

After menacing their part of the Mediterranean, the Mycenaeans sought opportunities to expand their brand. The city of Troy, sitting pretty on top of the Hellespont, that vital waterway connecting the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, was seen as an excellent place to visit and ideally burn to the ground. It was from this period of intense regional turmoil that the enigmatic figure of Tedieous emerged.

After two years of intense preparatory research, aggressive grant proposals, and vigorous negotiations with local governments, we arrived. While waiting for our official government permits to be officially ratified, I had my team begin an unofficial excavation.

We began digging a series of twenty separate trenches across the Cretan countryside. Though wildly destructive to the environment and disruptive to local transportation routes, we made tremendous progress. It was in plot C20B where my team discovered some intriguing clay tablets. The tablets were worn and cracked, but a discerning eye could make out the faint remains of strange markings.

We were right on the verge of discovery when the Cretan government decided to step in and halt our progress. They told us that they would drop the hundred or so charges made against us as long as we left the island immediately and promised never to return. I agreed to their terms. I sent the undergraduates back on the next flight to the States. I, however, snuck out of the airport and returned to plot C20B under the cover of darkness and an inconspicuous plastic tarp.

Equipped with only the remaining supplies in my backpack, the tarp, a university procard account that might close at any minute, a few souvenir t-shirts from the airport gift shop, a rusty shovel, and a stolen backhoe, I put my heart and soul and backhoe into digging deeper. I was not just digging deeper into the strata of the earth but deeper into the strata of my being.

On August 25th, 1993, I made a breakthrough. I had uncovered the stone roof of a vast underground structure. For the next week, I feverishly dug around what emerged as a grand tholos tomb. A tholos tomb, also known as a beehive tomb due to their tendency to be filled with ravenous bees, is a dome-like structure comprised of ever tapering rings of brick. They were used by the ancient Greeks to bury their kings, as pyramids were seen as rather indulgent.

After repeated collisions with my backhoe, I created a man-sized hole in the roof through which I entered. I repelled downward to the floor on a chain of strung together t-shirts.

Like the third floor lavatories back at Quonsokensett University, the interior was pitch black, perpetually damp, and filled with the same stagnant air for untold generations. In the soft embryonic glow of my burning travel guide, I set my eyes upon the undisturbed ancient walls. I don’t know if it was the overwhelming thrill of discovery, the vague smell of entombed corpses, or the stifling lack of oxygen, but I immediately passed out upon the stone floor and did not wake up for several hours.

Unlike any previously uncovered tholos tomb, this one had tablets embedded into the walls that spiraled around the interior. Each tablet contained many perplexing symbols, occasionally resembling the symbols used in the early Mycenaean alphabet Linear B, but more often than not they resembled freshman handwriting. Using what I knew of ancient languages, I managed to translate the first few symbols to produce the title:

Tediad

To my amazement, an entire story was written upon the walls.

This was the Tomb of Tedieous.

This was his story.

I was vindicated.

Starting at the bottom of the floor, I painstaking recorded the contents of each tablet in my field book. Around and around the room I crawled, making my way up the walls of the chamber. I had to construct a makeshift scaffolding out of scavenged fence posts so that I could reach the slates on the upper portions of the dome.

After five grueling months, I recorded just about all the tablets. Also at that time, the Cretan locals had alerted the authorities about my continued presence. They had noticed all the food, flashlights, fence posts, and backhoes I had been borrowing from their villages. I was pulled out of the chamber, handcuffed, beaten for a few minutes, and then arrested. I tried to tell them I was vindicated, but no one would listen.

Behind the bars of a Cretan jail, I waited, slept, and brooded. Between long afternoons of staring through the cell bars as tiny motes of dust floated off into oblivion, I found some free time to start translating the symbols into a complete story.

At first, the process was frustrating. I began to wonder if the symbols were just my innermost thoughts projected upon the world around me.

And then it occurred to me. True, I was a scientist, but primarily I was a storyteller. The symbols were not concrete representations. They were vessels of thought. They were open brackets through which I was supposed to insert my own meaning. Much like the oral tradition that first cultivated the great epics, I had to tell this story with my own words and in light of my own experiences. Mythology is associated with the past, but it is a living, reacting, breathing, excreting, copulating, budding, and importantly an evolving entity. I was not artificially altering the myths or spinning them with my modern sensibilities; I was part of their natural transmission.

With this revelation, I went through the hundreds of thousands of lines of symbols, picked out the good ones, and extracted one of the most important stories of all humankind. It took me just under seven years.

The Tediad is an epic tale about a less-than-epic Greek character named Tedieous. He suffered from modern afflictions like indecision, awkwardness, crushing doubt, troublesome coworkers, and difficult encounters with dolphin-people. He was not the conventional Greek hero, but perhaps that fact makes him that much more important. He was a regular Joe in a supernatural world of mythical creatures, bickering gods, heroes, villains, anti-heroes, anti-villains, and a seemingly endless supply of epithets.

As I started translating this story, I knew that it would ruffle some of the well-preened feathers in the archaeology community. I have been brutally criticized by all my colleagues for the way I have presented this story. Even professionals from completely unrelated fields have stepped in to make their revulsion known.

They claim that the alterations I made were unnecessary, damaging to the historicity of the work, and altogether in bad taste. Upon their fancy golden pedestals of historical accuracy and document literalism, they say that the bold modernization of the dialogue, the introduction of several extraneous subplots, the inclusion of unmentioned characters, the complete omission of several consecutive chapters, and the whole dolphin-person fight scene all dangerously compromise the integrity of the original work.

I respond by saying, perhaps.

Perhaps, I did change the story a little more than I needed. Perhaps something is lost when you introduce bizarre love triangles that in no way existed in the original work. Perhaps the modernization of the dialogue obscures the meanings of the original story. Perhaps the dolphin-person fight scene was a frightening glimpse into my own depravity.

But you know what? That is history folks.

Contrary to what your history teachers taught you back in school, assuming that any modicum of information made the frightening leap between their mouth and your brain, history is not something that happened a long time ago. History is something that happens today inside of all of us. History is not the pure account of past events, it is a biased, filtered, tainted, twisted, contorted, and an utterly mangled account of past events. History is a view through a long series of grimy discolored windows. Avoiding this distortion is as effective as embracing it.

Moving along.

Some have claimed that I made up many of the details of the discovery to exaggerate my findings. Some have noticed that the details I discuss don’t match the entries in my field notebook.

To this, I ask why were you reading my personal field notebook? That’s my caked blood on the pages, not yours.

Next.

There is also the repeated claim that my translation possesses several instances of blatant plagiarism. Apparently some unknown German archeologist named Dr. Gerwald Staudacher discovered the exact same ruins and created his own comprehensive translation. He later published his findings in a suspiciously similar book, Der Tediologie. I guess some people consider it plagiarism when the other book came out thirty years before your own.

I dismiss these charges on the grounds that my book is far better, far longer, and that I am still alive while he is not.

Much like Tedieous’ journey, my journey has seen nothing but hardship. When I finally returned to the states, I had lost twenty pounds. I was diagnosed with something like black lung. My wife had secretly remarried. My office had been turned into a storage room for obsolete projector equipment. Most egregious of all, my beloved Archaeology Department had merged with the Art History, Linguistic, and Anthropology Department to form the College of Human Expression Studies.

The world had forgotten me, just as it had forgotten the story of The Tediad. At my unceremonious homecoming, I realized something profound. My struggle had become entwined with this Bronze Age story. Two unrelated tales, separated by thousands of years were today holding each other up, like two drunken pub-goers stumbling across the street at night. I was not just telling Tedieous’ story; I was telling my own. It became my life’s purpose to make this story known to the world, no matter what obstacles awaited me.

Here could very well be my last hope.

I present to you The Tediad, in its purest entirety.