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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I don't recall you being given leave of absence, Duncan.
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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My request must have been delayed by the postal strike. Damn Reds!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Which reminds me, how does a postal service work in a pre-literate age? Is this the origin of the Druids and their legendary memory training? And they must have been privy to all the secrets which means either they were a specially trusted caste or were the KGB in waiting.
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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The ancients made use of a group called the Drawids instead. Letters containing images rather than writing were sent through the post.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Go on then, Dunc, try to convey a message with an image. This is a serious matter since it may...may...lead on to ideograms. Now of course in themselves ideograms cannot convey messages by, with or from the unlettered. But consider them as mnemonics to aid a messenger with lots of messages running around in his head....
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Dunc wrote:
| Reality check this people, from Project Troia's Chief Archaeologist |
Where is the bronze?
| Troy appears to have been destroyed around 1180 B.C. (this date corresponds to the end of our excavation of levels Troy VIi or VIIa), probably by a war the city lost. There is evidence of a conflagration, some skeletons, and heaps of sling bullets. People who have successfully defended their city would have gathered their sling bullets and put them away for another event, but a victorious conqueror would have done nothing with them. But this does not mean that the conflict was the war. |
The largest conflict in the Bronze Age world and not a scrap of bronze just slingshot stones (never mentioned by Homer in the Iliad or Odyssey); No swords, spears or weapons of any kind have been found not even discarded scraps. The only evidence is there is no evidence.
Again scholars twisting the Homeric saga to suit the evidence.
| Homer took for granted that his audience knew a war had been fought for what was alternately called Ilios or Troy. The bard was mainly concerned with describing the wrath of Achilles and its consequences. He used Troy and the war as a poetic setting for a conflict between men and gods. From the archaeologist's point of view, however, the Iliad can be interpreted as a "setting" in an entirely different sense. One may see Homer or his informants as eyewitnesses to Troy and the landscape of Troy at the close of the eighth century B.C. |
From the archaeologist's point of view Homer CAN'T be fitted into their evidence otherwise this statement (my italics) would be unnecessary.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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If we take the real date of Troy's fall ie c700 BC, what are the candidates sitewise in the traditional area? Not excluding Schliemann's Troy itself of course which had levels of this date...er...didn't it?
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Mick wrote:
| Well that's the problem. There are no candidates. Above level VIIc (1200 Cent BC; the proposed time line of Troy) there is only evidence major decline. No major settlements are present until Roman times and those are small by comparison to the descriptions of Homer. |
The problem lies in the whole Dark Ages proposition. The entire Velikovsky time line is flawed because he assumed a contemporaneous history between Egyptian and Old Testament history. Velikovsky assumed a synchronicity with a Palestine Old Testament but I believe this is erroneous. There was no Palestine Jewish history until AFTER Darius I conquered Babylon. The Biblical history prior to this happened somewhere else. Thus negating Velikovsky's missing 500 years. The same missing 500 years from Greek history can also be discounted as there was no Greek history prior to the Pelasgian settlement of Athens in the 8th Cent BC.
There was no Greek history prior to this. The Mycenaean culture was not Greek nor was there any Greek culture in Anatolia or Western Turkey until the 7th Cent BC. My own investigations conclude that the Mycenaean culture was Phoenician as the famous death mask found by Schliemann is exactly like those in the Louvre which are of Phoenician origin.
And it is from Schliemann and Homer that Historians ancient and modern have assumed a Dark Age. Even the archaeologists of the Troia Project concluded that the Wilusa, Ahhiyawa and Danaya (the supposed combatants) were not Greek.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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So are you breaking the entire Greek/Trojan nexus? Is Troy something dreamed up by Greeks for mythic purposes or did it exist contemporaneously or was it already ancient history that the Greeks bent to their own purpose?
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| So are you breaking the entire Greek/Trojan nexus? Is Troy something dreamed up by Greeks for mythic purposes or did it exist contemporaneously or was it already ancient history that the Greeks bent to their own purpose? |
There is no Greek/Trojan nexus because the Trojan NEVER fought against Greeks.
Find me ONE SINGLE reference in any of Homer's works that mentions Greeks?
Greece DID NOT EXIST at the time of the Trojan War.
It was part of the collective ancient memory of those who became the Greeks.
The question to be asked is WHO WERE THE GREEKS?
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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| There was no Greek history prior to this. The Mycenaean culture was not Greek nor was there any Greek culture in Anatolia or Western Turkey until the 7th Cent BC. My own investigations conclude that the Mycenaean culture was Phoenician as the famous death mask found by Schliemann is exactly like those in the Louvre which are of Phoenician origin. |
One big problem Komori, the Mycenaens wrote in Linear B which has been shown to be Greek. The 'tablets' containing this written evidence have been found throughout their palaces, not just at Mycenae itself but Tiryns, Pylos, Argos etc. The 'death mask' could quite easily be a copy of Phoenician styles or the Phoenician versions could as easily be copies of the Mycenaen.
In what sense could the Mycenaen culture be Phoenician? Do you mean that Greek speakers 'adopted' the trappings of a dominant culture in the same way that modern Britons drive German cars and wear Italian clothes?
I'm sure that in your research you would have encountered the idea of the Greek Dark Age and the Dorian invasions of Greece that led to the demise of Mycenaen civilisation. However we regard this 'dark age', the currently prevalent view amongst Archaeologists and Historians is that Mycenaen Greece was succeeded by Classical Greece with the population pretty much unchanged. Mycenae was certainly much more of a pan-Greek phenomenon than the era of Classical City States, where only after the abortive Persian invasions did political leadership pass to Athens, then Sparta, then Thebes and finally Macedon.
What this demonstrates is that an empire centred on Mycenae could certainly have mobilised the forces for a protracted war against Troy/Illios/Wilusa. The evidence, uncovered by Korfmann, clearly shows that the city was big enough and controlled the key shipping lane through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea and the rich lands of Colchis in modern-day Georgia. He has also shown that the city was sacked at the time Hittite sources tell us it was by a power from the west. As Mycenae was the major power source in the Aegean at the time then the evidence is certainly mounting up...
| Find me ONE SINGLE reference in any of Homer's works that mentions Greeks? |
Homer calls the Greeks 'Achaeans'. They lived in the cities I mentioned above. If we take a British parallel then the Greeks called us 'Pretani', the Romans called us 'Britanni' and our government now call us 'British'. Give or take a few migrations we are pretty much the same people.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| One big problem Komori, the Mycenaens wrote in Linear B which has been shown to be Greek. The 'tablets' containing this written evidence have been found throughout their palaces, not just at Mycenae itself but Tiryns, Pylos, Argos etc. The 'death mask' could quite easily be a copy of Phoenician styles or the Phoenician versions could as easily be copies of the Mycenaen |
No the culture called Mycenaean wrote in a script that has been 'assumed' to be Proto-Greek which is 'assumed' to be Proto Indo-European (PIE). Any relationship by historians and linguists to PROTO anything should set off alarm bells with anyone trying to decipher ancient language.
As late as 2001 the whole Linear A/B = Proto Greek has fallen into disrepute. The latest published article that I'm aware of equates the Linear scripts as possibly the earliest attempts to vocalise Phoenician. 'The First Inscription in Punic: Vowel Differences in Linear A and B' by Jan Best.
| I'm sure that in your research you would have encountered the idea of the Greek Dark Age and the Dorian invasions of Greece that led to the demise of Mycenaen civilisation. |
This is out dated information and is now hotly debated by archaeology. The area supposedly the Dorian's homeland (North West Greece) has no substantive evidence that can be attributed to Dorian culture as it is understood by historians. The problem is that there are no traces of any Dorians anywhere until about 1050 BC.
The changes in burial practices from Mycenaean group burials in tholos tombs to individual burials and cremation are associated with the culture of the Dorians. This flatly contradicts Homer who describes in detail the burial of Hector, Achilles and Patroclus as being precisely like the Dorian practice. How could the Dorians replace a practice that was (according to Homer) commonplace in Mycenaean/Achaean culture?
The other misnomer in your argument is that none of the cities you listed ever existed in Greece BEFORE the classic period. Thucydides states that the Pelasgians were the first to establish Athens and they were not indigenous people. The Dorians and the Pelasgians came from somewhere else. They brought their culture and their language with them, gave their new cities familiar names and integrated with whatever local population were present at the time. This according to ancient writers and present physical evidence is of a sparsely populated land that grew from maritime settlements.
What historians are belatedly finding based on the present archaeological evidence is that it would be impossible for the places supposedly associated with the Trojan War to have supported the population densities required to supply the listed numbers of a warrior class as combatants. Pylos, Sparta and Mycenae can barely support the small populations that still exist there today and that is only because of modern tourism.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Velikovsky predicted that Linear B would be Greek to everybody else's derision and when Ventris came along and showed it was everybody forgot to congratulate ol' Veli for some reason.
This of course is the best possible evidence for the redating since clearly Mycenean Greece is pretty much the same people doing the same things in the same places in the same language as the Classical Greeks. So sticking seven-eight-nine hundred years and an entire Dark Age in between them is such a non-starter I'm amazed that even the dreary old scholars don't smell at least a very small rat.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Komorio is correct to ask "Who were the Greeks?". But the even more profound question is "What is Phoenician?"
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