"That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise." -- David Hume, philosopher, 1772
I think I get it now.
I finally understand the wisdom of Sonchis of Sais.
And it's terrifying actually.
The Wisdom of Sonchis of Sais: Why the Greeks Have No History Prior To Homer
From Plato's Timaeus:
"There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt." -- Sonchis of Sais, priest, ~600 B.C.
What this means is that the Sun (Helios) either (1) literally gave birth to another astronomical body (Phaeton) being either a star or a planet, or (2) figuratively captured an extrasolar body, either a star, planet, or comet which yoked, captured, and disturbed the orbits of the solar system, in particular the rotation of the Earth. And that Phaeton was zapped by an electric discharge, possibly from Jupiter.
"Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us."
When remarking on the Deluge/Great Flood of All, Sonchis even says, "after the usual interval."
WTF is the usual interval? Our history only goes back a few thousand years lol.
Herodotos, The History, Book II, Chapter 142:
[1] Thus far went the record given by the Egyptians and their priests; and they showed me that the time from the first king to that priest of Hephaestus, who was the last, covered three hundred and forty-one generations, and that in this time this also had been the number of their kings, and of their high priests.That's once every 2,835 years. Which means 2148 could be a rough one.
[2] Now three hundred generations are ten thousand years, three generations being equal to a hundred. And over and above the three hundred, the remaining forty-one cover thirteen hundred and forty years.
[3] Thus the whole period is eleven thousand three hundred and forty years; in all of which time (they said) they had had no king who was a god in human form, nor had there been any such either before or after those years among the rest of the kings of Egypt.
[4] Four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to experience; twice he came up where he now goes down, and twice went down where he now comes up
The Egyptian priests are biologically and politically uniformitarian saying no harm came to Egypt as a result but Plato is more catastrophic. He says in The Statesman, "And animals, as we know, survive with difficulty great and serious changes of many different kinds when they come upon them at once. ... Hence there necessarily occurs a great destruction of them, which extends also to-the life of man; few survivors of the race are left...."
This explains how Democritus and Hippolytus knew that worlds collide.
"consider what impetuous force
Turns stars and planets in a diff'rent course.
I steer against their motions; nor am I
Born back by all the current of the sky.
But how cou'd you resist the orbs that roul
In adverse whirls, and stem the rapid pole?" -- Ovid, Phaeton
And that is the reason why the Greeks have no science prior to Thales and no history prior to Homer.
"I spent much care upon the history of the Arcadian kings, and the genealogy as given above was told me by the Arcadians themselves. Of their memorable achievements the oldest is the Trojan war." -- Pausanias, geographer, Desciption of Greece
ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι
-- B.P.
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17 comments:
I guess this proves that human ideas about the universe haven't stopped since OUR origin.
OiM
Velikovsky, followed by Gunnar Heinsohn, shows that Egyptian hsitory has been expanded considerably - this is discussed in Ginental's book Pillars of History.
Unravelling this historical mess is a literal headache and a most disputatious area of study.
I side with Heinsohn's reconstruction purely on stratigraphical considerations.
Louis,
As always, thank you for sharing. I will have to take a look at Pillars of History and Heinsohn.
OiM
It's finding time to read and study all this that overwhelms me sometimes.
I need to get Ginenthal's latest book as well.
Interesting blog about Venus
http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/tag/venus/
You lost me here:
"And that Phaeton was zapped by an electric discharge, possibly from Jupiter..."
"And that Phaeton was zapped by an electric discharge, possibly from Jupiter..."
Sonchis says Phaeton "was destroyed by a thunderbolt."
WHY THE GREEKS HAVE NO HISTORY BEFORE HOMER
That is a debatable proposition: There is history, although, admittedly sketchy and incomplete.
See, Wikipedia entry: History of Greece.
It's recognized that the Greeks migrated into Greece in several waves. And that classical Greece was not fully formed until the 8th century B.C. with the rise of the city-states.
Perhaps, with the lack of a city-state structure, the writing of history was not taken up beyond the elongated ballad, or poems of Homer, which were designed as an oral tradition to be memorized and recited at the camp fire or later at a symposium.
To attribute this lack of written history from the Greek culture as a result of being nearly wiped-out by electromagnetic forces based on a few lines from a Egyptian priest seems premature.
Say what you will about Velikovsky, he only drew his conclusions after years of pain staking research and comparison across multiple historic sources from multiple cultures.
Velikovsky didn't hang such a dramatic conclusion, as why there was no "Greek history before Homer" on a few lines of history.
It is easy to draw conslusions from a few lines of history, but just as easy to be wrong.
Of the "the wisdom of Sonchis of Sais" we know that Egypt was not "nearly wiped-out" by electromagnetic forces because he states as much, yet, electromagnetic forces are not localized phenomenon, that is Velikovsky's major point.
Surely, Sonchis of Sais would have knowledge of these sky-filling phenomenon due to his contact and familiarity with Egyptian history that was well recorded for centuries prior to his appearing on the scene.
Yet, Sonchis, at best makes only vague reference to diasters, but not to electromagnetic phenomenon.
OilIsMastery, your conclusions over-reach the evidence at hand.
You'll need more evidence before you can conclude there was no history before Homer because of recurrent electromagnetic forces.
Anaconda,
I am not simply basing it on the fact that Plato talks about it in Timaeus, Critias, The Statesman, and Laws.
It's also based upon Homer (all of Nestor's brothers were killed by Mars) and archaeological evidence (temple of Hera built immediately after destruction of Tiryns).
Furthermore, I don't consider a "Dark Age" with no written word and no literature to be history.
@Anaconda "OilIsMastery, your conclusions over-reach the evidence at hand. You'll need more evidence before you can conclude there was no history before Homer because of recurrent electromagnetic forces."
OMG! Anaconda is actually expressing skepticism concerning some hair-brained idea! I guess you woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
OIM, I'm surprised you haven't mentioned the chronology of Berossus and his Babylonian History:
http://www.livius.org/fa-fn/flood/flood3-t-berossus.html
In it Berossus asserts that 432,000 years of Sumerian history elapsed between the beginning of civilization and the Great Flood. Of course, modern paleoanthropologists tell us that the species Homo sapiens sapiens didn't exist 400,000 years ago, but hey, if you can find some ancient author asserting it's so doesn't Velikovsky tell us it must be believed?
BTW, according to Carl Sagan, Berossus' depiction of the sea being Oannes comes the closest of any ancient story to a realistic depiction of an extraterrestrial.
@ OilIsMastery:
I need to revise and extend my comment.
Velikovsky does present evidence that would suggest there might not be a 400 year gap in history between the battle of Troy and the beginning of Classical Greece.
Whether Velikovsky's time line or the conventional time line should be given more weight is certainly up to debate.
The methods of developing the conventional time line of ancient Greece seems to have difficulties being that it's based on Egyptian history that has its own pitfalls and uncertainties.
I keep an open-mind and await further developments of the evidence.
My expectation is that you'll oblige my curiousity with further up-dates.
@Anaconda "Velikovsky does present evidence that would suggest there might not be a 400 year gap in history between the battle of Troy and the beginning of Classical Greece."
If I read correctly in a previous post, OIM was posting something about the Trojan War being in 687 BCE which is 90 years after the start of the Olympic Games. Did I get that one right?
We do have one hard date in all this and that is the solar eclipse which the Greek philosopher Thales predicted. We know it occurred on May 28th, 585 BCE, just 102 years after the supposed 687 BCE Trojan War. That's a lot of stuff to fit into only one century - Homer, Hesiod, etc. So I'm extremely skeptical of this Velikovskian chronology.
Tom,
Thx for the headsup on Berossus. I haven't read him before.
"If I read correctly in a previous post, OIM was posting something about the Trojan War being in 687 BCE which is 90 years after the start of the Olympic Games. Did I get that one right?"
That's right. Nestor mentions the first Olympic games in the Iliad and in the Meteorology Aristotle describes Homer as "modern."
As further evidence for the 7th century we also have the doves on Nestor's cup and the clasp on Odysseus's cloak.
There's a lot of counter-evidence to the claim which you conveniently ignore:
1.) According to the Iliad the Achaeans (i.e., Greeks) are led by King Agamemnon who hails from the city of Mycenae.
2.) There is archaeological evidence that Mycenae was at the height of its power during the Bronze Age but it went into a steep decline after 1250 BCE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenae
"The destruction of Mycenae is part of the general Bronze Age collapse. Within a short time around 1250 BC, all the palaces of southern Greece were burned, including the one at Mycenae."
3.) The warriors in the Iliad are described as being clad with bronze, not iron. This is clearly the Bronze Age being referred to:
http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.2.ii.html
"these sent a hundred ships under the command of King Agamemnon, son of Atreus. His force was far both finest and most numerous, and in their midst was the king himself, all glorious in his armour of gleaming BRONZE- foremost among the heroes, for he was the greatest king, and had most men under him."
"When they were close up with one another, Alexandrus came forward as champion on the Trojan side. On his shoulders he bore the skin of a panther, his bow, and his sword, and he brandished two spears shod with BRONZE as a challenge to the bravest of the Achaeans to meet him in single fight. Menelaus saw him thus stride out before the ranks, and was glad as a hungry lion that lights on the carcase of some goat or horned stag, and devours it there and then, though dogs and youths set upon him."
"His dart was not sped in vain, for it struck Democoon, the bastard son of Priam, who had come to him from Abydos, where he had charge of his father's mares. Ulysses, infuriated by the death of his comrade, hit him with his spear on one temple, and the BRONZE point came through on the other side of his forehead. Thereon darkness veiled his eyes, and his armour rang rattling round him as he fell heavily to the ground."
And hundreds of other quotations. The weapons are always bronze. This is the Bronze Age Homer is talking about. Iron was introduced into Greece by the Dorian invaders after Mycenae had already collapsed. If the Trojan War was fought in 687 BCE then why are the weapons described as bronze, not iron?
Tom,
1) It is obvious that Agamemnon was from Mycenae. I'm not sure what that is supposed to prove.
2) The Lion Gate of Mycenae has been determined to be of late geometric age.
3) Iron was widely used but did not supplant the dominant use of bronze for some time.
All you have shown is that your date of 1250 B.C. for Mycenae is wrong.
@OIM
"1) It is obvious that Agamemnon was from Mycenae. I'm not sure what that is supposed to prove."
The point is that the Iliad agrees with archaeological evidence that Mycenae was a great power during the Bronze Age but not in the 7th century BCE.
"2) The Lion Gate of Mycenae has been determined to be of late geometric age."
That's your evidence, the doorway resembles a doorway from several centuries later, therefore it must be of the same age? Using that argument the replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee must date from the 5th century BCE, right?
"3) Iron was widely used but did not supplant the dominant use of bronze for some time."
O.K. So let me get this straight. The Trojan War was fought during the Iron Age but they were still using bronze weapons? ROFLMAO. Yeah, right.
The truth is there is no Greek history before Homer because they tried to take the real history taught to them in Kemet and place themselves at the beginning of it all which is how we are taught in school. The Greeks tried to teach us math and did it wrong which is why we count from the time Jesus died on the cross and we are still for yours behind because we are taught math wrong along with everything else To understand what we have left of human history the only real records come from Kemet
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