Percy:  Let's now explore Screen C.  Place the Quadrant up on the Big Screen.  The year is 332 BC.  The name of the province has changed, and is now under the control of the Hellenic Empire from Macedonia.   Again, we assume the Quadrant has a full charge in this transition -- all the dome components change. 

Red:  Yeah.  I get that.

Percy:  Next we slice open the trade lane high-voltage cable to see what changed in the M3 Power Supply.   Here it is on the Big Screen.

Red:  I'm still not clear how we determine the M3 without reading grammar.

Percy:  Just put the name of the empire and its rulers in the search engine, paired with words like roads, language, coins, transport, metallurgy.  Pretty simple.  It doesn't take long to figure out the messages, money and movement.  The detritus of civilization that creates history. 

Red:  So the new message software is Koine Greek?

Percy:  Yeah, a kind of lingua franca of Greek dialects.

Red:  And the medium of movement...

Percy:  The new transportation security reflects the new empire, along with a new shipping technology, the Quadrireme -- a heavy oared ship that apparently is transforming naval warfare.

Red:  Makes sense, given the speed of Alexander's eastern Med conquest...and money?

Percy:  Here we need to take care about mixing up future events with the Screen.  Each Hellenic kingdom has a mint and produces coins.  The primary trading coin is called the tetradrachm, first produced by Athens.  But the Hellenic coins have a new feature: portraits of the living rulers.

Red:  Sounds like a synthesis of money and propaganda.

Percy:  Doesn't it just?

Red:  So how did you determine the primary mine and mint was in Macedonia?

Percy:  It took a few searches before I found what I was looking for.  The jackpot was "mines" together with the name of the founder of the Macedonian Empire, "Phillip II."  Alexander's father.  What came back has familiar names:

​

After securing the western and southern borders of Macedon, Philip went on to siege Amphipolis in 357 BC. The Athenians had been unable to conquer Amphipolis, which commanded the gold mines of Mount Pangaion, so Philip reached an agreement with Athens to lease the city to them after his conquest, in exchange for Pydna (which was lost by Macedon in 363 BC). However, after conquering Amphipolis, Philip captured Pydna for himself and kept both cities (357 BC). Athens soon declared war against him

 

Red:  Yeah...those battles with Athens over the mines in Thrace.  So Phillip seized the mines in 357 and Alexander did his thing in 332...oh my 25 years later.

Percy:  Uncanny, huh?  Could be coincidental...but worth noting.  Now that we have identified the Empire HQ and mine, let's toss the 3-Wheel on the Big Screen.   And from it we can set up the Trade Circuit and map on the Big Screen.

Red:  O.K.  Something clearly stands out in the Grid and map.  The Imperial HQ flipped from the Asian Gateway across the entire eastern Med to the Balkans.  The miners took over the entire Intake Valve all the way to the Asian Gateway?

Percy: Looks like it. 

Red:  But obviously the changes in the M3 Power Supply didn't happen overnight.  Let me take a wild guess...twenty-five years? 

Percy:  Actually, 27.  What Wikipedia tells us is that Alexander, after seizing the western side of the Persian Empire, heads to the eastern side.  He returns to Babylon in 323, dies aged 32, and his generals fight over the spoils.  The borders only settle around 305, with the Jezreel Valley caught between the two greatest powers: the Ptolemaic state in the supply depot and the Seleucid on the Europe-to-Asia metal trade lane. ​

Red:  So the crossroads become a frontier?

Percy:  Looks like it to me.  The upshot is that the circuit knitted together by the Persian Empire fractures back into independent states when it collapses.  Only these states are controlled by a bunch of squabbling Greek colonists, not their native population.  Yet it appears they are still part of one trading network.  To drop deeper into this system we need to update our Plotter's Wheel, then determine if we can construct a Tessera from it.   Here it is on the Big Screen.

Red:   I can see you re-calibrated the Screen date to 305 BC...and changed the location of the mine...everything else looks the same.

Percy:  Yep.  The mines shifted west from the Anatolian to Balkan Peninsula.  Just a hop, skip and jump over the Aegean.  The swirl of its islands reveal that they are part of the same collision zone -- crumpled little platelets caught between the rock of the African plate and the hard place of the Eurasian.  Out of this fractured terrain came the Western Metal Intake Valve.  Now let's see if there's a viable propaganda story about this transition in our trade node.  Type Alexander into the search bar of Biblehub.com and we find the conquest mentioned in the opening of 1 Maccabees.  Wikipedia tells us Maccebees was written during a Jewish revolt of the same name, against the Seleucids, about 150 years later. 

Red:  Again, no contemporary propaganda story to test.  But the tools all worked.  So we jump back through the gateway into 3-Space? 

Percy:  Not yet.  We must avoid going sequential.  Mix things up.  Jump around, break the structural biases of linear time.  Let's move to Room 3, where the trickle of writing turns into a flood.

​