AFTER THE ODYSSEY, OR: SOFT LANDING IN A FALL?

 

B. Lukács

CRIP RMKI

H-1525 Bp. 114. Pf. 49.

 

ABSTRACT

            The identity of Homer is long enough promlem. Generally the text of the Certamen is neglected; this Late Antique text states that Emperor Hadrian heard from the Pythia that Homer (the author of Odyssey) was the grandson of Odysseus & Nestor. Now, this scenario is self-consistent and also consistent with Classical Antique historical chronology, moderngeology and recent knowledges about tidal breaking Mycenaean way of landownerhip & the start of relatively cheapsteel production.

 

0.0. IMPORTANT TECHNICAL NOTES

            For avoiding misunderstanding here are explained the unorthodox points of usage in this study.

 

Point 1: Calendar

            Pure year numbers always mean BC, except the References where they are AD. While BP is a well defined term in the radiocarbon canon, where BP 1= AD 1950, then AP should be used too. So here “Present” is the time of writing the study, for definiteness' sake AD 2012.

 

Point 2) Names

            The orthography of Greek names is always awkward. It is usual to mix Greek, Latin and English forms and now the Greek may be modern Katharevusa and Dimotiki Greek, as well as Classical Attic, Doric and Mycenaean as well, I do mix them although I will gradually eliminate different forms for the same person.     

            The overwhelming majority of names occurring here are Mycenaean/Classical Greek. Some Greek names are common in English (as e.g. Aristotle). They are left in English. Some ones are very familiar from Latin and so are left in Latin. As for Greek, there are variations as Mycenaean/Syllabary Greek, Classical Alphabetic Greek (in its many dialects), Katharevusa and Dimotiki. I tried to avoid Dimitiki, and the Syllabaric Greek form is not always attested. Classical Alphabetic and Katharevusa are quite near to each other, written Katrharevusa being more or less the New Testament Greek. Generally I use Classical Greek forms but I prefer the reconstruction of Bronze Age Greek forms making use of Syllabaric texts and theories for linguistic evolution.

            Classical Cyprian regarded itself as a separate language (“the other offspring of Mycenaean”); bilinguishes are known. Classical Cyprian was written in Syllabaric, which was not the same as Mycenaean, but clearly related. Two examples for the differences is kas/kai “and” and g(o)tolis/polis “city”. The differences are bigger than between Literary Croatian/Literary Serbian (both being artificial, going back to bthe false Illyrian Theory and the Gaj/Karadzhic Agreement) but smaller than between kaj-Croatian (Slavonian of Zagreb, do not confuse with Slovenian of Lubiana, but the two are in close kinship) and shot-Croatian of the Sriem (Sirmium).

            Some Greek dialects and Cyprian preserved the vau, the 6th letter of the alphabet. So Attic Korę is Korwa in some non-Attic inscriptions. Such variants are not suppressed in the text.

 

 

0.1. PROLOGUE

            The title is a paraphrase of that of the fourth Chapter of Marks’ book [1]. The main difference is that Marks is interested in the further story of a literary hero, while I speak about the story of the real person behind. My goal is ambitious, difficult to reach and at the end I shall not be sure that I am successful. But for me only the real person is interesting here; you will see from Part 1, why.

            I shall use Iliad & Odyssey frequently, and Hesiod’s texts and those of the “Homeric Cycle” too. Now, Iliad & Odyssey have been as canonised as the Bible, and so I will cite them as the Bible: book, chapter, lines. Of course, different translations do exist, just as for the Bible. I ignore the possible small differences.

            But Hesiod and the Cyclic authors are not so canonised. For them I use Evelyn-White [2]. Almost a century old, but I think it will suffice.

            All year data are BC or BP, except the References, as told. BC is nor marked. The present topic is really in far past.

 

0.2. INTRODUCTION; FALLS VS. SOFT LANDINGS

            In the present years our civilisation (called sometimes Western, sometimes developed and lots of other names, but rooted in the technological revolution having started in Western Europe some 300 years ago) is believed by many to be in mortal danger. The final causes claimed are manifold. Maybe environmental pollution. Maybe the exhaustion of fundamental sources (oil, ores etc.). Maybe the capitalistic society destroying itself. Maybe Ex Oriente Lux. Maybe a special combination of all these. Maybe something else similarly inevitable and vital. The pessimistic wings of such intellectual movements simply prophesize total breakdown of civilisation, while the optimistic ones try to teach humanity to reform completely the lifestyle because the breakdown of the present one is inevitable: maybe the human civilisation can survive at the countryside without airflights (pollution + oil shortage) and raising vegetables organically.

            Well, the optimistic scenario is not so utterly dark as the pessimistic one; but even in it the present "developed" civilisation goes away, only a memory will remain as myths (and our generation will be remembered as sinners against Nature/Divine Order, except the very few leaders of the optimistic wing of environmentalists who prophesized but we laughed on them). Now, I would like to show that the prophecies are wrong; but I cannot do that, which, however, does not prove that they are not wrong. Of course I can list previous prophecies somewhat similar which have proven wrong. I list a few only as examples.

            A very famous Hungarian poet (whom we do not read but esteem high) wrote in 161 BP (sorry for the quality of my translation): "Humanity is the sprout of dragon teeth; No hope, no hope!". Another wrote a drama in 151 BP about the past, present and future of humanity, where the future after 4000 years is a cooling Sun, with a handful of survivors at the Equator hunting seals Esquimaux-style. I do not cite names & titles: English-reading people probably cannot meet them, and surely lots of similar ones were produced in English during the time of establishing our successful modern civilisation.

            August Bebel, august Social Democrat leader of Germany, wrote a sociological prediction just before the First World War, about the peaceful end of Capitalism and the coming of Socialism. The scenario is that the Concentration of Capital is an economical law of capitalism. So monopolies are developing, first in the national economies, then internationally. Now, when all the economy will be in the hand of a few families and Work will already have been organised on global scale, capitalists become replaceable, the society takes over and will govern work.

            In the same time novelist H. G. Wells wrote many utopias about the same theme. The first such is [Time Machine] where in the far future the descendents of the idle rich (the elois) dance on green fields but in the nights the descendents of the oppressed working class (the morlocks) come up from the depths and eat them. Somewhat later he visioned [The Food of the Gods and How It Came to the Earth] a mutant variety of Humanity with much higher stature which is the hope of the Future (I cannot imagine, why being big would help; and of course I do know that Wells' giants are not viable for physical reasons), because present humanity is doomed (being the sprout of dragon teeth, no hope, no hope?).

            Just after the First World War it was a majority opinion that the prewar system of society is doomed. Lots of new societies were planned and in many countries they were introduced or at least tried to. Now we know that these ideas were in the best case naive and unviable; where they were seriously forced, they  created catastrophes.

            Then came the Great Crisis. All the intellectuals of developed countries saw clearly that now societies were indeed at the brink of the chasm. Nothing will be the same afterwards even if there will be any Afterwards. H. G. Wells wrote a novel [The Shape of the Things to Come] where the Crisis still goes on at the end of the century, although optimists already see weak signals of recovery; Europe returned to village life, in the USA the federal government still exists but the White House is self-supporting via agriculture, service is maintained by runners and horsemen. Railways stopped everywhere but the USA maintains an automobile industry of very small scale, c. a hundred cars per year. And then, unexpected, in the real world the Crisis ended after 4 years. But just before the end of the Crisis, because of the general opinion that End Is Coming, Stalin & Hitler took power.

            Then came the Second World War, again convincing the intellectuals that Nothing Can Be Left Unchanged. And the present thinking about the Fall of Modern Civilisation goes back directly to the 70's.

            However the above short list does not mean that the present civilisation will not fall. We know two examples for Falls in the history of Europe: the Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire, and the Greek Dark Ages from 1100 to 700. Henceforth all data is to be meant in BC; no AD years will occur.

            The Late Marxist Historiography (from c. 40  BP) in Hungary emphasized that the Fall of the Roman Empire was indeed a Fall, but only at the top of the Society: cities shrank, public libraries withered away, but agricultural technique developed continuously and the general living standard remained increasing. E.g. ploughs were improving so that agriculture appeared in the Northern, non-Imperial regions as well. This may or may not have been true, but about the newer Fall documents are very abundant, so even if interpretations seem distorted enough (e.g. Early Medieval French documents about grain yield are unbeliveably low), day to day work of historians will bring a clear picture sooner or later.

            So here I concentrate on the Fall of Mycenaean Society and Greek Dark Ages. Was then and there a "soft landing" or was not? And: can be that an example for us if the next Fall comes? (If; I am not convinced about a new Fall, but it does not hurt to think forward.) If we cannot find a story of Ancient Greek Soft Landing and if everything Falls, still soft landing is possible for us; but we would be more optimistic with an ancient parallel.

            The central hero of this study will be Odysseus, wanax of Ithaca. Not only because he is interesting for us via the Odyssey. He anyways looks like an important figure of his age (although he is often believed mythical) and his home at the Western Islands of Greece was the best possible place for a soft landing of a fallen civilisation. Anyway, his only well-documented competitors amongst the last rulers of the Old Civilisation just going to Fall are Agamemnon & Menelaus; and the first is killed just having returned from Troy, so starting a new chapter of an age-old vendetta, and the second is falling into oblivion everywhere outside Sparta.

            And there is even a psychological theory where Odysseus is the early example for New Humans. It will come in due course, we do not have to accept the theory, but why to neglect it?

 

PART I: THE PROBLEM STATED

 

1.1. BEFORE AND AFTER THE FALL: ONE CIVILISATION OR TWO?

            Modern historians sometimes view the civilisation in Ancient Greece as the same before and after the Fall (however with a long Dark Age); but they frequently regard them two, distinct, but the second sprouting from the first. The ambiguity comes from the fact that we do not see strong external influence on the second; it seems as if High Civilisation first broke down to the grassroots, and then sprouting again.

            Some details will come in due course; here for demonstrating that the author may be physicist but he reads historians, let us cite the famous A. Toynbee [3]. He lists the different Civilisations, he finds c. 3 dozens, some affiliated to others, some affiliated to a single other, and this is the relation between Aegean (the earlier phase) and Hellenic (which ends only with the Western Roman Empire). You may, of course, consider them as one; but then the discontinuity between them is rather serious. And what was the exact connection between the succumbing Old and the victorious New?

            The first civilisation is going into decline with the Siege of Troy. This may or may not be a simple coincidence (and this is just the topic of this study), but the coincidence is a fact. The old civilisation does not die overnight: a troubled Mycenaean world lives for almost a century and after that the Submycenaean ceramic style still exists and some communities, say in Mycenae herself, continue a life poorer and poorer (see in Table 1 later). If it was High Civilisation vs. Barbary, why it died at the end?

            There are two possibilities: either the old civilisation had completely broken down and the new started from barbarism, or the new civilisation sprouted during the dying of the first. I think the second happened. The Greek polis civilisation will grow in the second; and historians think they can explain how and why. But the "transition" from old to new is badly understood.

            Already "classical" Greeks c. 500 knew the problem, and ingeniously built up the scenario of The Return of Heraclids/The Doric Migration, using mythic and Homeric tradition. The facts to be explained are simple and certain enough.

            1) Before Troy (in our terminology: The Fall) at the Pelopponesus there were aristocratic Achaiean states. At the end of the Dark Age the Peloponnesus is mainly Doric, with the remainder of the old ruling layer only in Arcady. [My comment: Now we have written documents from the old civilisation, and dialectology supports continuity between the old official and new local Arcadian speeches.]

            2) After the Dark Age Peloponnesian states are rather egalitarian amongst the full-right citizenry, but with a not full-right substratum. That substratum sometimes declares itself the old population.

            3) However even in Sparta some continuity with the old state is in the ideology.

            Now, a scenario elaborated by Classical Greek historians explained such facts quite handily. Maybe the best presentation which is extant is at the beginning of the book of Thucydides [4], but you can find texts at Plutarch too and short mentions everywhere. The explanation goes as follows.

            A) Heracles was a rightful heir of some Achive kingdom, but for family troubles/divine interferences he served an Achive king, and remember that later he was the Lord ofTiryns. When he died/went to Olympus, his sons wanted to occupy his heritage but the gods forbad it (for any reason of Them). So the host of the Heraclids retreated to Middle Greece, where there was even in Thucydides' time a small Doris.

            B) There the Heraclids became friends with the Doric leaders, and 80 years after The Fall of Troy the host started again.

            C) They rolled up the Achive kingdoms of the Peloponnesus, the Achive population mainly became subjugated, some fled to Cyprus, to the Eastern Aegean or even to Italy; but some refugees took themselves into hilly Arcady. But the leading layer of the New Order was partially Achive (the Heraclids), so some ideological continuity is not surprising.

            We can tell derisive things about historians of Classical Antiquity, and indeed if Herakles existed and he was a prince anywhere, then that place was Thebes, not Mycenae or Argos (of course there is a myth explaining even this), but our schemes are not much better. They were of course updated since c. 150 BC by modern Class Struggle ideas. Now, Hungarian Marxist scholarship knew already 30 years ago that the presence of "classes" in Antiquity is nontrivial (in Marxist sense) and that such class struggles were overly exaggerated by Stalin himself since 80 BP [5]). Of course, I am not arguing for a Marxist interpretation; but the inclusion of bitter class struggles into historical explanation came from Marxism, so if even Marxists have arguments against...

            Anyway, modern explanations vary and combine 3 ideas: uprisings of low-state Achives, Doric migration (as part of the Bronze Age migrations, Sea People, Phrygians at Hattušaš, Philistees &c.) and "climactic changes". But there are problems, and these problems are well-known to the historians. The Dorians may have been hard warriors compared to overcivilised city-dwellers; but if they lived apart for centuries in Northwest Balkan or anywhere, the Doric dialect would have differed very much from Aiolic, Ionic and Achaean. Well, Doric was a well-recognisable dialect in Classical times, but well within mutual understanding. Maybe the most striking difference was a written one: Ionian/Attic eta, so ę, is replaced by Doric alpha, so a, as in dęmos/damos. But note that Attic epsilon is short mid unrounded front, Attic eta is long open unrounded front, while Attic alpha is long or short open unrounded back. So this difference of the Attic and Doric dialects is simply a shift from front to back of long unrounded open vowels; and this vowel is the only long, unrounded, open one in both dialects. Really, such dialectal differences exist also in Magyar, never living anywhere outside of the Carpathian Basin for the last thousand years.

            So Classical Doric does not indicate too long separation. Also, Dorians might have been fearsome fighters if brandishing steel weapons against bronze-carrying Achives, but if Achives did not yet learn iron technology, how could Dorians do this in remote Northwestern Balkan (or anywhere in remote Europe)? The impossibility of a Northwestern steel sword scenario is in the achaeological fact and literary tradition that steel came from the East, the Hittite Empire. This question will be properly treated in Part 2.

            Internal disturbances may have happened in the Peloponnesian kingdoms; the Atreid myths contain vendettas and the excavations in Mycene found traces of fires speaking about either sieges or unrests or both. The problem is that there are too many. But the myths know nothing about revolts of underclass Achives.

            And there is a minor (?) chronological problem. The Doric Migration was dated to 1104 by the Alexandrine scholars (80 years after Troy). This is OK according to the c. one century of dying civilisation. But that date is too late for the Bronze Age Migration. We do know that the last battle of the Sea People in the delta of Nile was in the 8th year of Ramses III, so c. 1177. This is too early for the occupation of the Peloponnesus. (Of course, Bible-preferring historians have suggested many changes in the chronology of the Egyptian New Kingdom, still the majority-accepted data seem to be more or less good.)

            So we do not yet understand exactly how and why the Fall happened; so we cannot learn the morale of it. Let us try another approach, from more physical angle. I think we know better the relevant physical laws than the ones governing history. But first of all see some chronology to avoid clumsy circumlocations about "when". Also let us see some facts & statements about Odysseus, who seems to be a worthy hero of a losing cause. Is he such?

 

1.2. A TENTATIVE ARCHAEOLOGICAL CHRONOLOGY

            Archaeologists can make a good relative ordering via layers; this is of course not an absolute chronology. However they may find foreign artifacts in layers when cross-references may help, they may find inscriptions &c., and also C14 dating may help although its general error is too great for the present topic. Anyway, according to the present state of art the age of the layers seem to be as in Table 1. Let us see a very simplified Table showing correspondences between Archaeologic strata and absolute ages, even if the latter are uncertain c. for a generation even now. The third column is my note if I see anything certain & noteworthy:

 

Archaeologic

Calendar

My note

Early Helladic

Till c. 1900

Before Greeks

Middle Helladic

1900-1575

Greeks in Greece

Late Helladic (LH) I

1575-1500

 

LH IIA

1500-1450

Knossos' acme

LH IIB

1450-1400

Achaeans in Knossos

LH IIIA1

1400-1350

Linear B writing in use

LH IIIA2

1350-1300

 

LH IIIB1

1300-1230

 

LH IIIB2

1230-1190

 

LH IIIC

1190-1100

From Fall of Troy to Fall of Mycenae

Submycenaean

1100-1050

Bronze Age Civilisation tries to survive

Protogeometric

1050-900

Early Iron Age

Early Geometric

900-850

 

Middle Geometric

850-760

Homer?

Late Geometric

760-700

 

Subgeometric

700-600

Hesiod?

Archaic

600-500

Written history

Classical

500-323

What we learn in school

Hellenistic

323-31

Alexander, epigonoi &c.

 

Table 1: Greek layers and present chronology

 

            This chronology is in a Ph.D. Theses [6], but it reflects more or less the common opinion of the present years. E.g. [7] puts LHIIIC to 1200-1075 instead of 1190-1100, Submycenaean to 1075-1025 and the beginning of Protogeometric to 1025, while [8] has an Early LHIIIC starting in 1200/1190, a Late LHIIIC plus Submycenaean from 1100 to 1025 and then Protogeometric. These are rather only differences in "rounding": observe that there are no written sources bw. say 1100 & 700, the statistical error of the C14 method is bigger than the differences of the chronologies and Table 1 seems to be the "lest rounded" of the three so we remain with it.

            We have two data for the Fall of Troy from Hellenistic ages: 1209 & 1183, calculated by Alexandrine librarians. The difference is moderate, but the first is slightly before the Fall of Hattušaš, the second is marginally after, and the end of the Hittite Empire clearly was important for the Siege of Troy, we shall see why. Observe that the end of Late Hellenic IIIB is almost exactly the date of the Trojan War as the Alexandrine scholars dated it. Late Hellenic IIIC is almost exactly the period of grace until the Return of the Heraclids (1104 according to Plutarch in modern counting), and the Submycenaean, when old traditions still cling, is c. more half a century.

             You can put Homer & Hesiod almost anywhere, and indeed their relative and absolute dating is the regular homework of phylologists & historians; in addition Homer can be anybody in the Homerid "clan". Still, nobody would generate disturbances on a scholarly conference putting Homer to the end of Dark Ages and Hesiod to the very beginning of written history.

            Henceforth for clarity I accept the Alexandrine date 1184/3 for the Fall of Troy; it is conform with Table 1 and, as we shall see soon, with astronomy too. One would think that a few years would not count too much, but wait a minute…

 

1.3. ODYSSEUS, WANAX OF ITHACA, EITHER REAL OR MYTHICAL

            Henceforth I formulate my statements assuming that there was a real person called Odysseus, Lord of Ithaca, involved in the Siege of Troy. I rather would not write "as if he were", because in formal English this more or less would imply "impossibility". That I would not want to imply. Really, I more or less am convinced about the real existence of such an Odysseus (some reasons come in due course), and were he not real, this study would not have too much point. Why to discuss the "soft landing" of the dynasty of somebody who never existed?

            But my assumption does not mean that everything written about him did really happen. On one hand many things can be poetic exaggerations, additions of several centuries and such. On the other, observe that the real time of the Odyssey is slightly more than a month from Calypso's island to the massacre of the suitors. The other adventures are told by Odysseus to various listeners. There are stories in the Odyssey which we know to be lies; others may be. The 10-10 year spans of Iliad & Odyssey are clearly poetic.

            The Odysseus of the Homeric epic and of tradition is a mature but young man at the start of the Trojan campaign: his son is a baby at the beginning (Od. IV, 144-146). According to Homer the siege took 10 years, and so Odysseus was born c. 1213. If we do not believe in the 10 year siege (and practically nobody believes), then we have an alternative. Either Odysseus' birth must be brought upwards, or we must assume that Telemachus was not a baby at the beginning of the story. I take the second horn of the alternative; soon we are going to understand why. But because Telemachus is already not a baby at the beginning, we must shift the birthdate of Odysseus somewhat down; let it be c. 1216.

            Odysseus is the Lord of Ithaca, Lord of the Palace. As it became a commonplace in the second half of last century, after reading the Mycenaean texts, the Homeric texts do not remember correctly the Mycenaean palace economy; it was more organised than in the epics. However even in the Odyssey we read about lots of women weaving, cooking &c. No doubt, the Palace of Ithaca had its proper place at the top of the taxation system. Somebody at the head of such a palace was not a basileus in Mycenaean times; the basileus was a honoured person, leader of a small community, but the Lord of a Palace was somebody with a more exalted title. We know/reconstruct now only one such title: the wanax. In Classical times it is only a title for some gods, and it appears (as Anax, the "w" or digamma being long extinct in Attic) in the name of three philosophers Anaxagoras/Anaximandros/Anaximenes, of whom the first indeed was sure about his divinity. However Homer still remembers; and note that the young son of Hector, slain by the Achives after the siege, has the name Astyanax. Its meaning is: the wanax of the city. So indeed wanax is the Lord of the Country/Fortress/Acropolis. Of course, small Astyanax was not the wanax: that was old Priam. Astyanax was a nickname: he would have been the wanax if growing up. His true name seems to have been Scamander. For more about the word, see App. A.

            So the Odysseus of Homer is a wanax. There are several wanaktes (the word has a -kt- stem) in Greece; surely at least a few dozens suggested by the Catalog of Ships in Il. II. The Lord of all of them is Agamemnon. We may call him the High Wanax. Homer tells anax andrôn, Wanax of (All?) Men. But it seems that the taxation system remained within the separate kingdoms. There is no mention of taxation to "abroad". And no Homeric text speaks about Ithaca paying tax to Agamemnon. Odysseus' debt is a military service: when Agamemnon commands, to go to Troy with retainers.

            A wanax was not "an ordinary man". Albeit we know too less about Mycenaean religion, obviously a wanax was the "natural lord", "loved by the Gods" or something such. Odysseus is regarded as a "natural lord" even if the suitors take their chance when they believe he has died. It is an open question what would have happened with Telemachus after the second marriage of Penelope; anybody could get ideas from the myths.

            Odysseus' "rank" is well demonstrated by a dialogue between him and goddess Athena in Od. XIII, ll. 375-391. The situation is very characteristic and later I will return to its wider neighbourhood as well. Just before the lines the goddess searches the Cave of the Nymphs if the place is appropriate to hide the hoard Odysseus got from the Phaiakes; and then Odysseus carries the tripods, clothes, gold &c.. So goddess and wanax work together, although Athene has clearly the role of a boss/supervisor. Then they come out of the cave, sit under a tree, and discuss the situation, almost as two wanaktes (I cannot write “a wanax and a wanassa”, the wanassa is not a female ruler but the wife of a wanax). Goddess Athene calls Odysseus c. "divine scion" (l. 375), and when Odysseus answers, he calls the goddess Goddess (l. 384). Well, they are not of the same rank, still the dialogue is quite loose and matter-of-fact. During it Odysseus asks for a favour (for help when fighting the suitors), but he does not make a formal convocation, but asks as a somewhat weaker asks the stronger. Athena is of course Dweller of Olympus and such; still the dialogue is not even as formal as between client and patron. Well, previously Athena declared that she liked the foxiness of Odysseus.

            So Wanax Odysseus comes from a divine lineage. For Greeks, both before the Fall and after this meant something almost definite. Great lineages came partly from gods; generally a god generated the first ancestor with a daughter of a hero or of a local bossman, in rare but not unheard of cases a goddess enticed a heroic mortal. And there is the Flood.

            According to the myths once Zeus wanted to get rid of humanity, so sent a Flood [9]. But Prometheus told his son Deucalion to build a barge. This happened in Thessaly. So Deucalion, son of Prometheus, and his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus (and Pandora) survived (also a few fleeing into the mountains). After the Flood Zeus told that He would fulfil one wish of Deucalion who wanted to repopulate Thessaly. (The Flood was clearly local. Cranaus of Attica ruled it through.) He got the advice to throw stones; and from the stones new humanity arose.

            But Deucalion & Pyrrha generated in the traditional way as well. The first child was Hellen (OK, maybe his true father was Zeus), the second Amphictyon, who later would be the successor of Cranaos, and then a daughter, Protogeneia. Hellen is the forefather of the Hellenes.

            This is myth for us. However the Parian Marble dates the event as any historical event, to 1529 [10]. Of course the Parian Marble (written in 264) is a several years off, dating the Fall of Troy to 1209 instead of the correct 1184. But now the important thing is that the Marble states that from 1521 the Greeks called themselves Hellenes (when Hellen became the King of Phthiotis). The Classical Greek Marble writes basileus, not wanax. Cadmus built Thebes 2 years later.

            Here you can see the difference between men and divine men. Men of the earth are governed by divine men. Deucalion is son of Prometheus, at least a smaller god, the subjects come mainly (not exclusively) from stones. Of course the Marble is off by c. 300 years: proto-Greeks came to Thessaly c. 1900.

            Odysseus appears us as a more or less "good ruler". However in a Mycenaean context this is not our "good king". Odysseus is not cruel to his own men. That is quite enough for the head of a Bronze Age taxation pyramid.

 

1.5. ODYSSEUS' ASTRONOMICAL CHRONOLOGY

            On the day of the latter massacre of the suitors, at the noontime meal something nontrivial happens in the Palace of Ithaca. The suitors sit at the tables, and then Athena causes some confusion. Then in Od. XX, 356 the seer Theoclymenus tells something which may be translated in many ways, however surely the Sun, the sky and something unlucky or bad is mentioned. Since Freiherr von Oppolzer many scholars and scientists thought about a solar eclipse, and Oppolzer did indeed calculate a datum. That is April 16, 1178. (This is a Julian datum; for times before the Gregory calendar astronomers work in extrapolated Julian calendars and the primary datum is in Julian days.)

            However, Oppolzer's calculation is not enough. Surely, there was a solar eclipse on Apr. 16, 1178; but solar eclipses are total in a narrow strip only, and because of tidal frictions, minor disturbances and unknown reasons the "mean solar day" is not the same as the time of physics. Presently the day becomes longer and longer c. 2 ms/year, and that is a summed up time difference of several hours since 1178. For the calculations we best can use the NASA eclipse catalogs, updated c. yearly, which can use a smooth ΔT curve fitted from more or less sure eclipses. The present catalogs (without artificial "corrections") say that the respective eclipse was total at Ithaca in early afternoon.

            So [11] recalculates Odysseus' home travel from Calypso from astronomical viewpoint. They tell that according to Odyssey he saw the good constellations. They also tell that no other total solar eclipse was visible from Ithaca between 1250 and 1115. Since the date is a few years after the Fall of Troy (according to the Alexandrine scholars), if there is a "good" eclipse for the text of the Odyssey, this is that. (And you see, this means that the Parian Marble’s date for the Fall of Troy, 1209, is not conform with the scenario.) They cautiously tell that this does not prove that Odysseus was real.

            Of course they are right as far as we require such a certainty as usual in Celestial Mechanics. However, surely no Greek would have remembered an eclipse in far Ithaca if something important would not have occurred just then or a few days after (in which case the eclipse remembered later as an omen). So something must have happened on Ithaca a few days after vernal equinox (in that year that was 1 Apr). The event was important, at least for Ithaca.

            Now, 1178 is 5 years after the Fall of Troy. (The year for which the Alexandrine scholars calculated the Fall of Troy started in 1184 and ended in 1183.) We cannot know what happened with Odysseus before March 1178. Surely he wandered a lot, but he could not have been in the decisive battle in the Delta of the Nile; that would come in one more years. The possibility that he might have been in earlier Sea People activity is tempting, but we will not discuss it here. For any case now we have 5 years and 2 months for Odysseus' wandering, the 10 years was too round.

            Telemachus' epic chronology is clearly false. If he is a baby just before the Start to Troy and the two epics take 10-10 years, then Telemachus would be 21 at the massacre. But from the stories it is clear that he is still young (21 would be mature man in Bronze Age Greece, he would have been an acting wanax.) If he was a small child at the beginning, and if the two stories cover, say, 5-5 years, then Telemachus is 14-15 at the culmination. This fits to his epic role.

            Then Odysseus is c. 38 when returning home. Penelope is a few years younger. In Bronze Age they are no more young; but they are not yet old. People not really mathematically minded believe from life expectancy data that people aged more rapidly in the past. This is an oversimplification. Of course some illnesses caused degeneration; but lots of modern illnesses were rarer. People could die more easily; but who survived some illnesses, did not have much less life expectancy than now. Two Egyptian Kings are demonstrations. Pepi II of the Old Kingdom before 2000 ruled 94 (!) years and with this he is still world recorder. (He started in childhood.) The date comes from ancient historians, but moderns do not really confront it. And Ramses II of the XIXth Dynasty ruled 67 years (1290-1223). His mummy is extant, and antique historians recorded that he had a lot of sons (from many wives), but the first 13 died before him, so the 14th, Merneptah, inherited. This shows that Ramses II had indeed exceptional vigour, but such kings did occur.

            So Odysseus & Penelope were in mature middle age but still not old at the Massacre of the Suitors. There is nothing utterly impossible in the story.

 

1.6. VOTIVES TO ODYSSEUS

            Sylvia Benton some 70 years ago heard some rumour that a generation earlier somebody dug out a bronze tripod on Ithaca. Benton excavated a cave on Ithaca, which she  identified as a fanum of the Nymphs, there were also some votives to Hera & Athena, but also to Odysseus [9-11].

            Benton's conclusions: continuous use of the fanum at least from Bronze Age to Hellenistic; Nymphs' cult; Odysseus' cult from Geometric times to Hellenistic; the early cult would be represented by 12 or originally 13 bronze tripods, the latest by a fragment of maybe a terra-cotta mask with the inscription "EYKHĘN ODYSEI", so c. "offering to Odysseus".

            She emphasized the parallel of the Early Helladic 12 (originally 13; the owner of the site found one half a century earlier) with the 13 bronze tripods which Odysseus had got from the Phaiaces and transiently deposited in "the cave of the Nymphs" when arriving at Ithaca (Odyssey, XIII, 346-371).

            The modern reanalysis is [15].  Deoudi reexamines lots of finds from the excavation in the 30's, kept at the Stavros museum. She concludes that the cave was in use in EH II, but that use was rather domestic. A single fragment of a kantharos of Grey Minyan variety signals EH III (or MH?) visitors, the usage restart in LH IIIA, but that is already cultic, and it is continuous until Hellenistic ages. So Benton was right: from Bronze Age. Deoudi confirms cult of the Nymphs, that of Hera, corrects Athena to Artemis (more conform to nymphs, indeed) and identifies the pottery from Middle Geometric as Corinthian & Attic.

            She finds kylikes from LH to Early Iron A (roughly the Proto/Early Geometric of Table 1) and this she regards as an evidence for the continuity of the cult.

            However she guesses that the importance of the cave increased with Early Geometric, and the 12 (13) tripods were deposited then.

            So far so good: but observe that Early Geometric is earlier by c. 50 years than Homer, except on the Parian Marble (if he was a single person; if not, maybe there is still a whole century to the formulation of the Odyssey). So Benton's original guess is still viable: the tripods seem earlier than the formulation of Odyssey XIII, 13-15 (the tripods given), the description of the Cave of the Nymphs (Od. XIII, 102-104), and the story of the deposition of the tripods in the cave (Od. XIII, 346-371).

 

1.7. JAYNES ON ODYSSEUS

            Julian Jaynes 35 years ago published a book [16] where he argued for an unfamiliar scenario. Very briefly, our cortex is almost separated into two; the left and right hemispheres are apart, except for two "cables", of which the bigger is called corpus callosum. In the great majority of patients it seems that only the left brain can govern the speech organs, but the right brain also contains the respective centers (and in the case of a damage in very early childhood the right brain can take over). It would be unwise to go into details; brain science is developing rapidly.

            Now, for some intellectual activities the left and right brains differ. E.g. the left brain is stronger in routine activity (as e.g. summing up large columns of numbers), while the right is stronger in "intuition" (anything that may be in reality). The right is stronger in humour or in spatial orientation, while, as told above, the left is stronger in speech. (Indeed, it is better that in speech one hemisphere dominate the other; otherwise problems would arise in competition for governing the speech organs.)

            Jaynes, partly from historical texts, partly from old epics, partly from observation of schyzophrenics concluded that from Neolithic to the end of Bronze Age the brains of civilised humans worked "bicamerally". Until routine activity was enough, the left brain directed the activity and the right one acted as a supervisor. If problems arose the right brain gave an out-of-routine command, of course through the corpus callosum. The left hemisphere took it as a spoken command; and the actual timbre was as usual for the individual. (His/her father/mother; the king; his/her guardian god, &c.). Of course, Bronze Age individuals did not know that they had two hemispheres, but they knew that gods exist, the deceased can speak under proper circumstances &c.

            Then at c. 1300 this way of organising the use of the brain started to change. Our present way is much more complicated with much interactions between the hemispheres. Jaynes was rather lame to explain why and how the change happened; obviously the time was too short for anatomical changes, but obviously the use of the brain is very much influenced by early "training", so by the socialization of small children.

            The theory is not too accepted; but it may be caused by the fact that the theory is somewhat atheistic, telling that the god-idea of religions comes from the right cortex of us. In fact, this atheistic undertone would not be necessary (for example, assume that the right hemisphere is more apt to contact Divinity, or anything else); but Jaynes' father was a Unitarian minister, and (oppositely to Szekler Unitarians) many New England Unitarians, even if ThD, do not believe in God, or at least are not convinced in His reality. However the theory has its merits; and it is important here because Jaynes discussed Iliad, Odyssey, and the individual Odysseus a lot.

            His opinion very briefly is as follows:

            1) The two poems were created continuously between 1200 & 800, but the Odyssey is slightly younger than the Iliad.

            2) Older and younger layers can be taken apart with some fidelity;

            3) The older layers reflect a bicameral psychology, as he defined it.

            The first 2 points are generally accepted. As for Point 3, it means that in the older layers, and especially in Iliad, the heroes do not decide. Agamemnon takes away Achilleus' captive girl Briseis; of course Achilleus is angry. Later (Il. XIX) Agamemnon tells that sorry, but not I did this, but a god. Achilleus accepts this and does not tell as we would: that Agamemnon lies. Heroes are fighting with spears but cannot reach each other because of man-high shields, bronze armor & such. Then comes a god telling to one of the heroes: Stupid hero, stick him at the other side. And then Hero A is successful and Hero B dies. And so on. So until the fight is routine, it is directed by the left brain ("man-side"); if that is not enough, the right ("god-side") gives an idea, which seems to be divine command/advice. The heroes do not contemplate, they do not visualize themselves in hypothetical situations; they do not make plots and do not lie (or not too much).

            Except Odysseus. Jaynes tells that Odysseus represents the "new mentality", mostly in Odyssey. As Jaynes tells: "Odysseus of the many devices is the hero of the new mentality of how to get along in a ruined and god-weakened world". And he tells that (from Iliad to and through Odyssey) "From a will-less gigolo of a divinity to the gore-spattered lion on his own hearth, Odysseus becomes 'Odysseus'".

            Now, if Odysseus became the symbol (or anything else) of the new mentality, then Benton's findings in the Cave of the Nymphs are not too surprising. Jaynes indeed uses Benton's reports in his argumentation, although, strangely, only through an indirect citation. And he states that "Contests in worship of him were held in Ithaca at least from the ninth century".

            And now we should reread Od. XIII, from the moment when Athena, still in the disguise of a young shepherd, meets Odysseus near to the Cave of Nymphs.

            Odysseus tells a lie. (Of course, he does not want to be recognised prematurely.) Then in line 287 Athena becomes herself and is proud c. as a mother whose son just made a clever thing. Of course Odysseus could not misdirect her; but that would be too much to expect. Odysseus is not in disguise. The goddess tells that very good; you lie as no mortal, you are the trickiest mortal and I am the trickiest on Olymp. Look, even you were unable to recognise me in disguise; now to business. There are problems in Ithaca, be careful. Yes, I did not help you too much in the way home but I did not want to clash with my uncle Poseidon, who is very angry because of your affair with His son, the Cyclops. (The goddess explains, why she helped so little: she was not in the position. A rather unusual dialogue between goddess & mortal.) Look: the situation in the palace is such and such.

            Then, as we already saw, they go to the cave, then the friendly discussion under the tree, then She promises to help him against the suitors. This is really a dialogue unheard of in the Iliad, and unusual even in Odyssey. Odysseus is special.

            Indeed, if close posterity recognised some new and useful mentality in Odysseus, then they remembered and honoured his memory. But of course only if he was a real person; close posterity generally does not honour mythical figures. And look: the cult is local. In later centuries many localities claimed to have relics of Homeric heroes, even in Southern Italy. But Odysseus' cult was performed in his home Ithaca. Ithaca in IXth century must have known if in the XIIth there had been a wanax on the island called Odysseus. This cannot have been the external influence of the Odyssey backward in time.

            Because there is not yet an Odyssey in Early Geometric. And even if there is some proto-Odyssey, the poet (let him be proto-Homer) cannot know that there are just 13 bronze tripods in the Cave of Nymphs on Ithaca. Except if he visited Ithaca and went into the Cave of Nymphs; or if he lived on Ithaca. Both possibilities are strong arguments for a real Odysseus, onetime wanax of Ithaca who participated in the massacre of some enemy, either invaders, or occupants, or quarrelsome suitors of his wife when he was believed to be lost, on or near to 16 Apr, 1178. Maybe not only with the help of his half-grown son and a few servants (and Goddess Athena); that may be poetic exaggeration.

            In Part 2 for a while we leave Odysseus and other heroes, and turn to iron and steel as physical and chemical materials. But at the end we must return to Odysseus (and Telemachus) to see if soft landing was possible and especially on Ithaca; and also for more chronology.

 

1.8. AND ODYSSEUS’ CONTEMPORARIES?

            Clearly for us literary values and such are pointless here: Odysseus is an example for Soft Landing if he really lived. The details of historicity of the heroes will come up in Parts 5 & 6, when enough data will have been accumulated. Still, let us see here briefly some other heroes of Odyssey (and Iliad), important for us here.

            Agamemnon is anax andrôn in the Iliad, Wanax of (All) Men, meaning surely All Civilised Men of the Mainland and Nearby Islands. That is a hazy kind of overlordship, maybe even only for one campaign. Surely in peacetime Mycenae had no rights over Thebes, for example. But this is a complicated question, and we do not know the details of political relations c. 1190. For any case, when in Odyssey Odysseus starts back from Calypso, Agamemnon is dead for years. Archaeology have not yet unearthed anything Linear B text naming Agamemnon; but Linear B tablets mainly preserve inventories and tax documents, and almost exclusively from the last civilised year of the palaces of wanaktes; namely the tablets were raw clay, and the burning flames of Fall preserved them. As Table 1 shows, modern archaeology accepts c. 1190 as the Last Year of Good Old Times, end of LH IIIB2, and since according to Alexandrine scholars the Fall of Troy is 1184/3, one havoc in Mycenae may have been in 1183. But according to myths and historians, this was not the last one; and surely the tax tablets of the previous year would not have mentioned Agamemnon; Aigistus in the best case.

            In the story Menelaus is the brother of Agamemnon; but this may mean epically any close blood kinship. Menelaus is at home for years when Odysseus starts back from Calypso and Telemachus starts to get information about his father. Telemachus in fact visits him, but this may be poetic freedom as well. Menelaus is not mentioned on clasy tablets found up to now and has nothing to do with Soft Landings.

            Note however, that Atreus is surely common ancestor of Agamemnon & Menelaus, and a Hittite tablet (where the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform writing was in use, some tablets were preserved deliberately in ovens, and the idea was quite usual to preserve royal decrees, names and such) a king mentions an Achaian Atreus (Attarsiyas of the Akkhiyawa). He may be that ancestor.

            Nestor of Pylos, however, will be important later. There is no archaeological evidence even for him, albeit the Pylos Palace is under excessive excavations. There may be various explanations: the absence of archaeological evidence does not prove at all that Nestor would be mythical. Wait until Chap. 5.5. Here I note only that 1) in myths and Classical Greek history Nestor is from the Neleid lineage and later (c. 50 years after our story) Neleids appear also on the throne of Athens; 2) in the story Nestor is old enough, he was old enough even in Iliad and conservative enough, but still vigorous and healthy as a Mycenaean Sir John Falstaff) and 3) in the tradition he had many sons.

            Still Nestor is not a hero of Soft Landing. He may have died in peace, but the palace was demolished by flames (later?), and the name of the last wanax is not mentioned in the Neleid lineage.

            Others may or may not be historical. E.g. we do not have anything tangible about Achilleus; but the name itself appears on a Linear B tablet.

 

 

1.9. THE CHRONOLOGY OF CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY ABOUT END-MYCENAEAN & DARK AGES

            While our historiography is better than that of Classical Antiquity, and the latter's archaeology was next to nothing, some classical historians were really bright fellows, they were only a millennium separated from Mycenaean times (and we are from more than 3 millennia), and they (especially the librarians in Alexandria) could work from lots of texts which are unavailable for us now.

            Of course, we do not have to accept their schemes, for example on the grounds that they confused mythology with history. And this is indeed a problem, because Classical Greece did not read Mycenaean Linear B texts.

            I do not tell "could not read". First, Cypriote syllabaric script was dominant on that island until Hellenistic times, and that syllabary partially reads Linear B. Second, because we cannot be sure that Mycenaeans wrote only inventories. Cypriot inscriptions about names and short historical statements are known; it is possible that such inscriptions survived also on the mainland still into Classical Antiquity. We know only (but that we know) that the extant texts of writers of classical antiquity do not mention such texts; who knows why? (The most serious exception is Pausanias [17], who, when writing about the Theban Citadel, speaks about bedchambers of great Bronze Age people as if Bronze Age inscriptions would identify the rooms; but that might have been Classical Age tourist business.)

            Surely the old writing became forgotten at the mainland and anywhere except Cyprus sometimes at the beginning of the Dark Age; and the structure of the society radically changed during the Dark Age. Howev er oral tradition remained. Classical Antiquity was full with stories about old heroes & cities we now clearly classify as pre-Fall (although no stories seem to go back to the Old Homeland before 1900). We do not know how correct was this oral tradition; but we know that Classical historians took it seriously and worked from it, building up more or less self-consistent schemes. They may be totally wrong; but they may not be either.

            Of course oral history works with nice round data. For start you can consult with Thucydides [4]; I will be here very economic with more formal references, this study not being a monograph of Ancient Literature. It is enough to state that the Alexandrine librarians, Apollodorus (and/or Castor), Plutarch, Diodorus, Eusebius & George Synkellus did clean up things. Eratosthenes’ Chronology is not extant, but a fragment is, and that is crucial. You may find it in [18]. Eusebius is extant, although not the original, but its Middle Age Armenian translation, whence Latin, German and English translations have been done [19]. The result is cca.

 

Event

Relative date, ys

Fall of Troy

0

Boeotian Migration

60

Aeolian Migration

?

Dorian Migration

80

Ionian Migration

140

Lycurgus

299

First Olympiad

408

 

Table 2: Chronology of major events in the Late Antique consensus

 

            Note that nobody was too interested about Aeolians (until of course Ephorus of Cymae). The zero point, the Fall of Troy, had various dates [18], but the dates definitely were dense at c. 1200, and in Alexandrine times other ones, it seems, were already out of fashion, and except for one or two decades a consensus had been reached for the time of Plutarch.

            Now, we should fix the date of the Fall of Troy. It seems that the most professional attempts were that of Eratosthenes, senior Librarian of Alexandria, and the one preserved on the Parian Marble [10]. Both counted, of course, from the First Olympiad backwards; but in modern counting the first gives 1184/3, the second 1209/8. The difference is 25 years, not much; but we cannot use data of the 2 conventions together in face value. In addition we have seen in Chap. 1.5 that the first dating is conform with the astronomical dating of the Ithaca total solar eclipse, while the second is not. Since I would not like to throw away the historical efforts of the compiler of the Marble, I simply shift the zero point of the tradition of the Parian Marble to that of the Alexandrines and give Items 20-29 of the Marble as

 

Item

Year

Event

Note

20

1234/3

Theseus becomes King and starts his reforms

-

21

1230/29

Amazon siege of Athens

-

22

1226/5

7 against Thebes

-

23

1193/2

Greeks go to Troy

13th y. of Menestheus King of Athens

24

1184/3

Troy is taken

Menestheus' 22th y., 7th day b. end of month Thargelion

25

1183/2

Areos pagos trial of Orestes

-

26

1177/6

Teucer founds Salamis on Cyprus

Demophon King of Athens

27

1052/1

Ionian exodus

Led by a Neleus

28

914/3

Hesiod

Last digit illegible, ±5 ys.

29

882/1

Homer

Diognetus King of Athens

 

Table 3: The corrected chronology of the Parian Marble from Theserus to Homer

 

            Of  course the Marble does contain errors. In the present Table Item 27 repeats the last sentence of Item 23 (obviously a “pen error”), and Item 29 calls Diognetus King, while he was Arkhon for Life. But otherwise Items 20-29 are self-consistent and are in conformity with Eusebius.

            Now, observe that Classical Greek tradition did remember dynastic troubles and deposition/abdication of Theseus. And the Parian Marble often mentions Athenian kings/arkhons even at non-Attican items. So let us see a King List from Erechtheus to Codrus, the last King, more or less consensus one:

 

King

Line

Abdication

Cecrops II

Erechteus

No

Pandion II

Cecrops II

Yes

Eupalamos

Erechtheus

?

Aegeus

Pandion II

?

Theseus

Pandion II

Yes

Menestheus

Erechtheus

Yes

Demophon

Pandion II

No

Oxynthes

Pandion II

No

Apheidas

Pandion II

No

Thymoites

Pandion II

Yes

Melanthus

Neleus (of Pylos)

No

Codrus

Neleus

Yes

 

Table 4: The last Kings of Attica

 

            So all kings closing with Thymoites trace back his origin to Erechtheus, and the tradition remembers father/son sequences from Erechtheus to Apheidas, but with 2 interpositions of Eupalamos & Menestheus. Then Apheidas is followed by his younger brother (some historians stated that Thymoites had killed Apheidas, some not), the next King, Melanthus, is a foreigner.

            Surely this is not a falsification. Why to concoct a false story in Athenian tradition about Pylian takeover in Athens? Even if we are sceptic about oral tradition, it would be hard to imagine a reason to falsely claiming Pylian origin of the two last Athenian Kings. In addition, Codrus' memory was dear to Athenians; according to Athenian tradition his "abdication" was a self-sacrifice saving Athens. Tradition tells that all the 13 lifetime arkhon after him originates from him (in continuous father/son succession). So these 15 rulers come from Pylos, the Neleid lineage. This may or may not be true; but why to state so falsely in Athens?

            Obviously something nontrivial happened in Athens in the second half of XIIth century, when somebody from the Neleid dynasty (so from Pylos) took over. Maybe the lineage of Erechtheus via Pandion II died out; maybe a coup d'état happened. For any case, Eusebius seems to put the event to 1127.

            It is interesting that this date is exactly the same as the end of Thebes kingship according to Eusebius; and it is only 3 years before the date of the "Boeotian migration" according to Thucydides [4] and the Alexandrines. So it seems that c. 1127 some Thessalians took (and demolished) Thebes, and then they tried to take Athens. Very probably the Neleid takeover in Athens was a more or less peaceful solution of the "Thessalian danger".

            As for Pylos itself you must wait until Part 5. But we still do not know the time of the Aeolian Migration. Now, Strabo [20] in Book 13, 1, 3 tells that the colonisation of Aeolis was started by Orestes. When he died in Arcady, the campaign was continued by his son, Penthilus, 60 years after the Fall of Troy, so in 1124. (Note: that is the year of the Boeotian Migration!) His son, Arkhelaus, led Aeolians to Cyzicene. His youngest son, Gras, reached the Granicus, and also took the island of Lesbos.

Then we have the time data, but still something must be clarified. Namely, Arcady is on the Peloponnesus, and the later Aeolian dialect is not too similar to Mycenaean & Arcado-Cyprian. Note also that Thucydides writes for explaining something during the Peloponnesian war in late Vth century, that while Spartans are Dorians and Athenians are Ionians, Aeolians are kin of the Boeotians [4]. And Strabo in 8, 7, 1 & 8, 8, 5 states that in Arcady the successor of Orestes was Tisamenos.

 This suggests a story. Maybe Penthilus was a younger son of Orestes, who went to North and dwelt on some Northern lands of Father Orestes. Then came the migration from Thessaly to Boeoty; that made havoc in Thebes, the Northwestern invaders took strong positions in Boeoty, some Old Boeotians emigrated, and Penthilus led this emigration. This happened c. bw. 1127 & 1124. Maybe we can add something to this. Maybe we cannot; wait until Part 6.

 And, for an end of Chap. 1.9, let us compare the times of this Classical chronology with the present archaeological chronology:

 

Classical History

Year

Modern archaeology

Year

Fall of Troy

1184

Start of LH IIIC

c. 1190

Boeotian Migration, takeover of Neleids in Athens, Aeolian Migration

1127/4

?

?

Dorian Migration/Return of Heraclids to Peloponnesus

1104

End of LH IIIC, start of Submycenaean

c. 1100

Colonisation of Ionia

1052

End of Submycenaean

c. 1050

 

Table 5: Comparison of Classical & Modern chronologies from the Fall of Troy to the Ionian Exodus

 

The correlation is strong. The exodus to Cyprus starts a few years after Troy (see Item 26 of Table 3), with the start of LH IIIC, there are “troubles” through LH IIIC, Submycenaean starts when the Dorian Migration starts, and Submycenaean, the last remnant of the “Good Old Society” ends with the last big exodus.

 

 

PART 2: ON STEEL

 

2.1. The Arrival of Steel

            Since Worsaae everybody divides the past into Stone, Copper/Bronze and Iron Ages; and the division is simple and true. Indeed, the tool and even jewel styles came in this sequence. Even 2 centuries ago, without scientific dating methods, it was clear that if long enough sequences of layers were dug up, the deepest ones contained only stone tools/jewels. Then, maybe, some pottery appeared (let us call that also stone; it is burnt clay), and maybe a very small amount of copper, gold or silver was in the jewels, but not as tools. Then came an age when copper appeared as tool, but rather as weapon, and after some time bronze substituted copper, albeit not necessarily as jewellery. Of course, stone remained in use as tools; but metal tools had higher prestige.

            Bronze Age was long enough, with lots of cities, temples, burials and whatnot. Old Egypt, Sumer, Akkad &c. were Bronze Age civilisations And these civilizations were great. Even the later Greeks (whose we honour) told big stories about old Pharaohs, described the pyramids and told tales about old astronomy. Well, sometimes Egypt had her own problems. But then Akkad/Babylon was the leading civilisation, using also bronze for cutting tools/weapons. Always bronze.

            Maybe it is not obvious, but in the oldest books of the Bible everything is about Bronze Age. Abraham, his grandson, Jacob, and his son Joseph, who will be sold to Egypt, have bronze. Joseph's descendant, Moses, organising the Exodus, has only bronze. The Hebrews trek to the Holy Land, occupy a part of it, and everything is bronze. No other metal as tools/weapons. OK, sometimes copper is used too; but copper is one of the two components of bronze. (The other is tin.) If somebody uses bronze, he has copper too, but bronze is better for tools/weapons.

            And then something happens. Appears the iron. Starts the Iron Age. A few centuries later Hesiod remembers the change as catastrophe, the appearance of a new and inferior race of men. (Works and Days, 156-173; but Hesiod himself does not try to return to Bronze.) Outside of Egypt everybody uses mainly Iron (albeit statues are made of bronze, and some special tools too, e.g. on ships.) Iron Age have started.

            Even before scientific dating we could quite well date when it started. Bible and Homer are explicit.

            In the Book of Samuel (1Sam 13, 19-22) the Philistines already have Iron, the Hebrews not yet. So if there is some problem with the plough of a Hebrew farmer, he must pay silver to the Philistine smith. And when young David (as a soldier of King Saul) duels with the Philistine Goliath, the latter has a big iron lance. Even in the time of great I. Newton the uncertainty of the date was not big; Newton dated Saul to c. 1070 [21]; we put the end of his reign to 1020. Newton’s chronology was slightly long but not too much. And in Homer's Iliad all the weaponry is bronze/copper. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are Bronze Age stories.

            Now, ancient Greeks wanted to know when happened the Fall of Troy, and when did Homer compose the stories. For the first, as I told, in Hellenistic times two years were selected: 1183 & 1208. The first is the date of the Alexandrine head librarian Eratosthenes, the second is the date on the Parian Marble. The difference is not big, present archaeology is in no contradiction with either of them, but the Parian Marble chronology collides with the Odysseus chronology, namely with the astronomical dating of the eclipse [11]. The way of calculation was careful counting of generations between Troy and the First Olympiad, the fix point of Greek Chronology. So I use the Alexandrine chronology. (As for Homer himself, Greek counting gave something c. 900; for the Parian Marble it is excellent, for us that is too old by at least a century, but of course we still do not know if Homer was a definite person or a string of Homerids.)

            But: why Iron, either bad and fateful as Hesiod the poet thought,, or useful as Hesiod, the farmer at Ascra did, propagated almost overnight as a plague? Historians generally do not have great pains about this. Anyway, the sudden appearance and the fast propagation is a fact. In a later Chapter we will see the recent best chronology. But now let us see the reasons for suddenness & irreversibility. (And here I admit that the change did not happen in Egypt.  Egypt remained in Bronze Age for 6 more centuries. But that looks like as an exception.)

            Classical Antiquity knew 7 metals [22]. This statement is not so definite as a modern scientific statement, because ancients had no Periodic Table, and while they were absolutely sure that copper differed from gold, they were not sure that there was nothing between; see Aristotle, Item #49 of On Marvellous Things Heard [23]. But for first approach every learned ancient, say, in Classical Greek times, would have agreed in 7 metals: gold, silver, copper, lead, tin, mercury & iron. More metals may exist (would have they told), but they are somewhat hypothetic, as, say, oreichalcum. (OK, later Emperor Nero ordered to mint some coins from this metal, which we call brass, but in Aristotle’s age still nobody was exactly sure what this metal was.)

            Now, let us see these 7 metals. The last column was more or less known; the others are our scientific advancements:

 

Metal

Concentration in upper crust, weight,

Oxidation potential, Volt

Melting point, °C

Au

5*10-9

-1.50

1063

Ag

1*10-7

-0.80

961

Cu

8*10-5

-0.34

1083

Hg

5*10-7

-0.79

-39

Sn

3*10-6

+0.14

232

Pb

1.5*10-5

+0.13

327

Fe

5*10-2

+0.44

1535

 

Table 6: The 7 metals of Classical Antiquity, according to [21]

 

            A high positive oxidation potential means a tendency to react aggressively with oxygen, 0.00 V is the value for hydrogen. For alkalis as e.g. K & Rb it is almost +3 V. So the first 4 metals will not take the oxygen from water until the water is not acidic (briefly: will not rust; since rainwater is always slightly acidic, copper very slowly turns green), and the next 2 only very slowly. Also, we have a greater chance to find gold in natural metallic state than any of the others. But gold is the rarest, so maybe very early pre-scientific prospectors could have found more silver than gold. But maybe not; because the yellow colour helped. It is a historical fact that in early civilisations the gold was more expensive than silver, but not too much; and in Egypt the treasury was the Silver House, not the Gold House. Otherwise see App. C.

            Thenceforth we may forget about mercury. It is liquid and it was familiar only for alchemists. A good metal is not liquid. As you see, copper is more abundant by almost 3 orders of magnitude than silver, and still does not react with water. The not so negative oxidation potential means that the overwhelming majority of copper is in compounds; but still the potential is negative, so the compounds are easy to break up. Surely at the beginning of Copper Age prospectors collected the metallic copper (metallan is something "to look for" in Greek); later metal deposits were exhausted, but some experimentation found ways to liberate copper from coloured compounds.

            Metals are better for tools than stone or ceramics. A flint knife can be sharper than a copper one, but fragile and any damage is irreversible. A small damage can be corrected by reshaping but you loose a part of the knife; and having broken it you must throw it away. The metal knife can be remelt, and then, with some work, you have again the full knife. But copper is not too hard and definitely it does not keep the edge too well. However adding some tin the mechanical properties will be much better; and also the molten alloy can be much better cast. So, until you have only the set {Au,Ag,Cu,Sn,Pb}, the only reasonable strategy is as follows.

            Gold and silver are no good for tools and weapons, and they are rare so expensive. Therefore they are for jewels.

            Copper is good, but not too hard. In addition, it has a tendency of bubbles in casting.

            Dull gray soft lead is not too good for anything, except that you can draw or write on it. Indeed, in Antiquity it was used for curse tablets.

            Tin is nice white. You could use it for cheap substitute of silver. However you need all of them to make bronze from copper (bronze is better and easier to be cast). Namely, for physicochemical reasons, you need c. 10 % Sn and 90 % Cu for bronze. Now, Sn is rare. The cosmological ratio Sn/Cu is 1/150, because of the much higher atomic mass of Sn. (The details of cosmic abundance will be told in App. C, and we will return to the tricks of Sn in Cu in due course.) OK, in terrestrial upper crust the theoretical ratio is 0.038, but tin ores are more difficult to break up (see the oxidation potential) than copper ones, plus copper ores are generally more colourful than thin ones, so easier to find. So tin is always much below the needed 0.1 ratio, therefore it is a bottleneck in Bronze Age.

            Of course, there are ways. First, you make the swords from bronze, but can make the shields from copper. Second, after a while the tin deposits of civilised world are exhausted, but you can organise caravans to far, exotic places, as the Tin Islands (really Cornwall) or Magan & Meluhha (even now we are not sure what they were, but one of them may have been Oman and the other Western India or even Malaya). There is tin also in Bohemia, but nobody knew that, and in the Altai Mountains, and in the Late Bronze Age the Andronovo Culture (horse-taming Iranians & Ugors) used that easily with pack horses, but the Altai was unknown for Mesopotamians & Egyptians, not having enough pack horses anyway.

            So Bronze Age Civilisation worked well, but tin was difficult to get. Therefore Bronze Age Civilisations were socially pyramid-like. Outside Andronovo Lands the expeditions for tin needed organisation. A great merchant could done it, but an individual commoner could not order the expedition. So in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia & Greece great princes ordered expeditions; great merchants performed it and gave the tin to the princes. Then the princes told to their household bronze-makers to make weapons & tools.

            The weapons were then distributed among the soldiers of the princes. As for tools, some were used by the household artificers. But for the agricultural metal (not too much was in use), the prince distributed them according to his preference. So the farmers became dependent on him.

            It is necessary to emphasize that the strongly layered pyramid-like structure of Bronze-Age Egypt, Mesopotamia, Hatti, Greece &c. was natural, coming from the rarity of tin. In Cornwall tin was local commodity or in the Andronovan Lands the bronze-maker could go to the Altai with his own pack horses; so in these lands the Prince was not needed for getting the fundamental tools of everyday activity. It is possible, of course, that still some princes sat lordly on the farmers, e.g. if they have conquered a community; but it was not necessary. For the opposite: very far from the tin ores the lofty princes were the natural solution. With a hypothetical success of a revolt of the oppressed there was a small chance that an egalitarian ideology won and the new prince/king/wanax would declare the fulfilment of the aims of the downtrodden. But if you look the semirecent history of Eastern Central Europe (between the Second World War and the fall of the Soviet Union) you can see that the influence of ideology on realities is practically nil anyway.

            Mycenae is a good example. Greek myths, of course recorded much later, tell us about vendettas of the Atreids. While a myth is not history, there may be little doubt that there had been a Wanax Atreus; a similar name is mentioned in Hittite records, with connection to Ahhiyawas, so the person seems to be an Achive Atreus, either father of Agamemnon himself, or another with the same name. And about 1250 archaeologists detect extensive damages in Mycenae, so maybe somebody wanted to take the city or even took it. And then again, c. 50 years later.

            Of course it would not be History to identify the 1250 damages with a specific turn of the myth. However we may believe the myth until the point that there were two clans (or two branches of one) in Mycenae struggling for power; and sometimes the ousted faction tried to go back.

            Both the Odyssey and the myths tell us that Aigistus, from the other faction, took the advantageous situation that Agamemnon and his soldiers were under Troy, enticed Queen Clytaimnestra, and ruled as King. Nothing impossible in this. Then Agamemnon returns, and Aigistus & Clytaimnestra kill him. There are disturbances, child Orestes is smuggled out, and Aigistus continues to rule. And after years Orestes returns and kills Aigistus & Clytaimnestra. Again disturbances, and somebody exiles Orestes. So far nothing impossible; and we then understand the repeated damages in Mycenae. Strong men are warring for the rule of a country, meaning a stronghold, a city and agricultural lands around. For the farmers it is not important, who is King. The city knows that they will be at least sacked, but possibly massacred too if the faction now outside gets in. The stronghold is the place of the household troops, high leaders &c.; they all are doomed if the other faction gets in, as you can read in Iliad & Odyssey. The hypothetical possibility of "liberating the oppressed" is not an aim, even if it is possible that the guys outside promise some reduction of the taxes. The social layering, being a consequence of worldwide shortage of tin, regenerates after disturbances.

            And now back to Table 6. In the upper crust iron is more abundant by a factor 600 than copper, and by 15,000 than tin. In addition, it appears everywhere. The negative side is that because of the rather positive oxidation potential it is more difficult to reduce the ores (in that time mainly more or less pure oxides as hematite & magnetite), and the melting point is quite high. As for the second point until Chinese porcelain kilns iron was not really melt: for the details observe that even Aristotle describes an impossible process (see later) so even scientists of Classical Antiquity did not understand the details. As for the first point, carbon can reduce the iron oxide.

            Much later, in European Early Middle Ages the reduction technology in Northern Europe was simply to dig a hole. Then put roughly ground charcoal, iron ore and something forming slag (say, limestone), cover it and burn the charcoal. After, say, 10 days the final product is a "loaf" of iron, with slag and maybe carbon nuggets inside. The smith can remove the nuggets by heating and hammering. The process goes in this way always if the ratio of ore and charcoal was proper, if the cover was tight enough not to permit oxygen to enter but not too tight not to permit carbon dioxide to leave & so on.

            V. Gordon Childe emphasized that Bronze Age had nothing similar to later smiths. Bronze Age metalworkers were jewellers for techniques. This is really so, and for physical reasons. Copper, silver and gold all melt around 1000 centigrades, and so can be safely handled in liquid state in ceramic receptacles to mix. Tin melts well below. This technique could not been used for iron. I will try to use termini technici proper to Very Early Iron Age, but it is not easy for us, moderns, being e.g. the alternat name for jewellers now goldsmiths.

            However, the resulted iron is practically useless. (A piece of iron is reported from Ur c. 2500; maybe it was an experiment [26].) Namely, generally you need steel, not iron, at least for weapons and primary tools.

            Pure iron is rather soft and do not resist macroscopic deformation. This is not a drawback of iron: it is true for any pure metal. Imagine a 3-dimensional lattice of atoms, say in some cubic lattice (easiest to visualize). Then the densest packing is layers of atoms in a chessboard and the next layer shifted by half a square, so the atoms of the upper layer are in the interstices of the lower one. (The thing is really more complicated, plus Quantum Mechanics is involved too, but let us proceed.) The lattice length, a side of a square, is in the Ĺ range.

            Now, let us take an ideal lattice without errors. (An error can be: a missing atom, an extra atom in an interstice or an atom of foreign kind which would need less or more space.) If you, somehow, can attack a specific layer and then shift it "horizontally" by one lattice length, the new configuration is indistinguishable from the original. So the only energy which is needed is somewhat "raise" all the atoms of the layer by half an Ĺ and even this energy is got back at the end of the shift. Of course, the process is never ideal and is tricky, but this is the reason behind the low resistance of ideal lattices against deformations.

            Lattice errors can help (they resist the slip), and this is the reason that e.g. cold hammering of copper, creating lattice errors, improves the mechanical properties. But foreign atoms are even better, and that is alloying. Of course, if the two kinds of atoms form a more complicated but very regular chessboard then the situation does not improve too much. E.g. take two metals and alloy them so that all the first neighbours of an atom of type A are atoms of type B; and vice versa. Then simply the lattice length is doubled, the resistance then is higher but still not too much. But if the distribution is more or less random, the upper layer is pinned to the lower at some points where the configuration is far from ideal.

            Some metals "do not like" the atoms of some other metal and then they do not form alloys. (The liquid analogy is water + oil.) Some pairs do form alloys but the result has some bad properties. Even now, with Quantum Mechanics at hand, sometimes we cannot predict the result. However now we have a few dozens of pure metals at hand and can make any experiment.

            However ancients had the 7 metals, and mercury can be used only for solving the others ("making amalgam"). Again forget first about iron; then you can make 10 two-component alloys from them.

            Au+Ag is the electrum. The first high value coins of Croesus of Lydia (already in Iron Age) were made of electrum, maybe because it is not so soft as gold.

            Au+Cu is tumbaga, not used in Ancient Europe, but some American civilisations liked it.

            Au+Sn was not useful.

            Au+Pb neither; and dull gray Pb is not proper for jewels.

            Ag+Cu was used: a minor amount of copper increases the mechanical resistance of coins. However we are still before coined money. But of course some copper is good also into jewel silver for the same reason.

Ag+Sn was not good for anything.

Ag+Pb was good only to falsify pure silver.

            Cu+Sn gave the bronze, with a serious improvement in mechanical properties if the Sn ratio is at least 10 %.

Cu + Pb is not too good, except, maybe, for bells.

            Sn+Pb has an interesting property. While both metals have low melting point, at some ratios the alloy has even lower. Now we use such alloys to make metallic contact in electronic lattices. No doubt, ancient jewellers used low melting point alloys to connect precious metals.

            With the inclusion of iron, we could form 5 more two-component alloys. However even we do not use such alloys; and c. 1300 smiths probably could not melt iron, so alloying was rather complicated, and then pure iron is soft.

            However during the ore reduction the iron takes some carbon. While carbon is not a metal, it fits into the iron lattice rather well, first as a guest atom, and, second, as the "intermetallic compound" Fe3C, cementite. Then the pinning atoms are present at the end of reduction.

            Well, in more than 3 millennia, we learned that the Fe+C phase diagram is rather complicated. It is a university course for physicists and the majority of my fellow students hated it. However now it is enough to know that:

            1) If C is of low concentration, the iron is soft;

            2) above 1.7 % carbon the material is hard, but breaks;

            3) between c. 0.4 % and 1.7 % the material can be made elastic, hard &c., in appropriate processes called "tempering", “quenching” and such termini technici of smiths. The processes include cold hammering, warm hammering, hot hammering, heating to red glow, heating up and then throwing into water &c. We, physicists, now theoretically understand why such processes help. E.g. heating to red glow and then throwing into water creates internal stresses which cannot be relinquished until the martensite needle crystals do not dissolve; if done appropriately, they do not dissolve for generations, and the internal stress makes the surface hard. (And I think, if you do not know which Fe+C combination is the martensite, you maybe are not too curious to know it just now.) Ancient smiths did not know the internal structure of steel, but collected lots of experimental knowledge. If the C content is not optimal, then e.g. hot hammering helps to burn away the extra C, and if C is low, forming thin layers and putting them into charcoal, and then hammering injects some C into Fe.

            Obviously for ancients the useful iron appeared with the advent of steel. But first we must distinguish irons according to provenance. Because of the 21 % O concentration in the atmosphere, native iron is absent except for very specific situations (as e.g. iron grains in the Disco basalt where the ascending lava traversed a carboniferous layer). So terrestrial iron is in ores, say hematite, and when reduced by the smith, it is an Fe+C alloy. Then the smith starts to apply his tricks.

            But, albeit rare, meteorite iron can be found and has interesting properties. Now we know that meteorite iron is generally an Fe+Ni alloy, where the alloying happened in the very youth of Solar System, and the ratio is rather constant with 8-9 % Ni. And this nickel-iron is resistant to corrosion + keeps the edge. (Well, it is not so hard as a first class carbon steel.) Interestingly, if you melt meteorite iron, the product will break. We now fully understand, why: between 4.5 % and 20 % Ni content there is no regular lattice structure for the alloy, so at 9 % Ni content the matter must contain domains of 4.5 % and 20 %. The matter of the early Solar System cooled very slowly, on million year scale, and the domains formed have become microscopic. If we melt it and then it resolidifies, the domains become large and the nickel-iron will sometime break at a domain border.

            There was first the meteorite iron. Names are different, but generally involve "heavenly". Well, anyway, metallurgists could not melt it, so they hammered, hammered, and  made, say, a dagger. It was very good, harder than bronze, more elastic than bronze &c., so it was a proper dagger for the King; the King got it from the Sky God. (For an almost recent example from the Carpathian Basin see the story of Priscus Rhetor, in embassy to Attila Tanhu of Huns. Attila did get a sabre from Heaven.) Some experts believe that meteorite iron is behind the name amutum used in the records of Assyrian merchants based in Anatolia c. 1900; in that time amutum was more expensive than gold, which is not strange at all; prospectors find less meteorite iron than gold.

            Then some industrious bronze maker in Ur c. 2500 discovered a way to reduce hematite. The product was similar to amutum, but not the same. Its mechanical properties were inferior.

            However the research was successful later. At c. 1400 at least two kinds of artificial amutum did exist. One contained C as alloying, the other C and Ni. A very few Eastern Anatolian artefacts do contain Ni.

 

2.2. On the Propagation of Smith-Magic

            As we saw earlier, rules of Chemistry prescribe the general process of producing Steel. On the other way, these rules come from the physics of atomic shells, so from pure Quantum Mechanics (meaning that neither Relativity, nor Gravitation is needed here).

            It is quite another a question, why Iron is the second most common metallic element in the upper crust (5 %); that is a consequence of Cosmology itself, including full General Relativity, so Relativity+Gravity, united, and then Planetology, from the formation of Solar System to present. We relegate this to Appendix C and here we regard the thing that Fe is the second most abundant a fact. The really most abundant one is aluminium, with an abundance of 8 %; but Al has so positive oxidation potential that even now its production in industrial quantity needs electrolysis. The element remained unknown until 4 centuries ago.

            Let us summarize first the processes of smithy needed in Antiquity to produce pure carbon steel, but in modern chemical language:

            0) If the ore is carbonate, FeCO3, then that must be converted into oxide, FeO or Fe2O3. This step is very similar to one in copper smelting; in addition at the beginning there was a lot of almost pure oxide ore to start the process there.

            1) Starting with oxide (of any type), you must use carbon as reducing agent, because carbon was the only element in substantial quantities not in compound whose oxidation potential was positive enough to take away the oxygen from iron. Fortunately, the endproduct carbon dioxide is gaseous, so it goes away. Symbolically we can write:

              2FeO + C → 2Fe + CO2

although the details are complicated. The process needs heating because it is extremely slow at moderate temperatures, but it is exotherm; and it definitely does not need temperatures melting the iron oxide or iron. This is fortunate because iron melting temperatures are high. The melting point is 1538 °C for pure iron; with C addition it decreases for a while and its minimum is 1145 °C at 4.3 % C content (the eutectic, ledeburite). While I am not absolutely sure that Mitannite, Hurrite or Eastern Hittite elite smiths could not reach that temperature (reasons come later), melting surely was not the main way of production in Early Iron Age; proof is that in Europe the solid state process was used up to High Middle Age. Carbon steel can be produced in solid state.

            2) You must balance the iron ore and carbon quantities. Exact balance was technically impossible then; so charcoal should overshoot the ore, otherwise reduction remains partial. Carbon diffuses well in the hot iron lattice, so the endproduct of reduction is a highly inhomogeneous and slag-infected iron loaf, with C content generally over 1.7 %; an impure raw iron.

            3) Then the next step is to remove the impurities. This is a simple if tiring process, because the slag does not alloy with the iron. After a lot of heating, hammering, forming thin sheets &c. the impurities drop away; and, C diffusing rapidly in hot iron, the inhomogeneities in the Fe+C alloy diminish. However generally still the C content is too high. Above 1.7 % the matter is raw iron, maybe hard but rigid, with the danger of breaking, and cannot be quenched. Such a metal is improper for edged weapons. So the next step is the control of the proper C content, except that for cauldrons, pots and low-quality eating knives you can go immediately to Step 7.

            4a) In the majority of cases the C content is too big. If the raw iron is hot, the oxygen of the atmosphere reacts with the surface. Because the oxidation potential of C is greater than that of Fe, the oxygen attacks C and the CO2 goes away. However this happens only in a very thin layer. Fortunately C diffuses fast in hot Fe. (Keeping it at 700 °C for a day, the characteristic diffusion length is 1 mm.) If you could keep thin iron sheets hot without contact with C, it would take only time. However early smiths had only charcoal embers for heat source. So they had to form a thin sheet by hammering hot, then put it back on embers but only while again hot enough (to keep C diffusing in minimal), then exposed it again to oxygen, then again heating up, and so on, repeating this in lots of time.

            Of course they did not know modern chemistry, so surely they had a variety of explanations based on wrong theories, magic &c. I am sure that they used also potions, lards &c., some of them may even helped a little (oxidation). Also, I am sure they hammered the hot sheets a lot; this is meaningless for oxidation, but the material was still somewhat inhomogeneous and hammering helped that. Finally they reached the appropriate C content (different for steels for different purposes). I have no idea how they detected that they reached the desirable state; but they knew what to observe.

            4b) If the C content is too low, the forged iron is too soft. However then you form a thin sheet, put charcoal on it, and fold the sheet in a zigzag way. Then put the thing on embers, heat it, hammer it &c.; the carbon diffuses in, and after some time the C content is OK.

            5) Now you fold over the thin sheet many times to get the desired thickness. Then you heat up, hammer, heat up, hammer, &c. This is now to form a "3-dimensional" iron piece from the thin sheet. With long enough hammering in hot enough state diffusion over the original sheet boundaries forms a more or less homogeneous piece.

            6a) For ploughs and lower-quality swords now the matter is ready. It is not fragile and it is reasonably elastic but keeps its form against deformations.

            6b) For high-quality sword blades and good daggers you need quenching. However before that you must get the final shape.

            7) Solid state shaping happens, of course, with heating and intensive hammering. Edges must afterwards be ground.

            8) You are now ready for everything except elite swords & daggers. For them the most important final step is quenching. You heat up the blade to red hot, and then throw it into water. We know what happens in lattice level during the rapid cooling; they did not know even that a lattice level existed, but did know that if performed appropriately, the blade cuts harder without becoming fragile.

            There are many more last phase processes, most surely unknown in Early Iron Age. However I think tempering was known. If you quenched the blade too much, you can correct the thing by heating up again and cool slowly.

            9) And now, finally, your steel is ready. You may grind once more the edge, you may put inscriptions/drawings on the blade, and of course you must make guards/pommels, some handles or supports for the pots & cauldrons, but this is really apprentice work.

If you could have melted the iron loaf, things would have been much less complicated. Instead of Steps 4)-5) you would melt the Fe, put C in, and keep stirring. Say, C is too much. But the surface of the hot liquid is in contact with the oxygen, so after a while the C content goes down. The problem is that you cannot use cauldrons for containing the liquid. There are heat-resisting ceramics, but no such forge was reported from Early Iron Age. Much later Aristotle wrote about melting, but in obscure language and the described process is impossible in details, see Appendix D. Western European smiths used the solid state process still in Middle Ages; in China sometimes in our Classical Antiquity the later porcelain kilns reached a high enough controlled temperature for liquid state processes, but not in Early Iron Age. Famous Medieval swordsmiths both in Damascus and in Japan still worked with thin layers of steel, folded over and over.

            My problem, hinted a few times, is connected with a very few artefacts which are very difficult to explain without melting; the two best documented ones being the Mace of the Ugarit King, and Tut-ank-Amun's Steel Dagger. Both contain Fe, C and Ni in XIVth century, from Hatti or Mitanni. Now, meteoritic iron is Fe+Ni and Early Iron Age steel is Fe+C. The obvious explanation would be to mix them after melting. The problem is still unsolved, but it is not important now, because such artefacts are not reported from Early Iron Age upwards. Maybe there was a very expensive technology for (C,Ni) steels known only in a few royal forges, and the secret was lost in the Fall of Bronze Age. Carbon steel was routinely known for late Hittite Kings in XIVth and XIIIth centuries, but archaeology does not show us armies with steel swords. The technology thus was known from Step 1 to Step 9, but surely only a few smiths were operating.

            We are practically sure that Steel started in the Hittite Empire on in a dependency of the Empire on the East, about 1400. As for the inventors, Greek tradition is equivocal, either the Chalybes or the Tibarenoi, but the two tribes were neighbours, at the Eastern end of the Back Sea, near to Caucasus. Biblical scholars sometimes believe that in Genesis the name of the Tibarenoi is behind the great smith Tubalcain, still in ?Bronze Age. As for the time, welded iron came out in present Armenia, at Shohdog-Kara-Da g, from c. 1400 [24]. As for written texts, see e.g. the letter of Hattušiliš III to an Assyrian King who asked for steel swords and got only one [25]. For some review see [23c].

            Hittite royal embargo became ineffective with the burning of Hattušaš in c. 1190. The Secret, i.e. the technology 1-9, was out of the barn.

            Now, how speedily could it propagate? If and where there is request for the new technology, a master smith must teach apprentices. The technologic chain 1-9 is long, tiresome (in literary sense too) and has no written description. (How to describe, e.g., when are we ready with Step 4?) From day to day the master must instruct the apprentices. As for journeymen, the business is expanding into vacuum, so only masters can get a new place to smithy. In addition, the apprentices must be very strong, must eat very well and a lot (hammering, grinding &c.) and of course there are innumerable other problems. So let us say that a smith can teach a new master smith in 15 years. According to Late Bronze Age situations he is probably not too active as a smith after being a master for, say, 20 years, although he still may be able to give some oral advices. Assume that he had 3 apprentices, something happened with 1 of them in 15-20 years (this apprenticeship cannot start effectively before adolescenthood), 1 is his son, inheriting the forge, and the third can start a new forge at some new place. That is doubling the smiths in 15 years.

            In Classical Antiquity & Early Middle Ages the Western European norm was 1 smith for each substantial village. Now, how many substantial villages were in Late Bronze Age Greece?

            I do not know. Surely, Mycenaean Linear B tablets mention some villages and with caution some wild guesses could be done for the areas of the palace economies of Knossos, Mycenae, Pylos, Thebes & (maybe) Iolkos, whence we do know tablets. From other region we do not know. E.g. there is Kalydon where Princess Atalanta was born in c. 1270 (see the Argonauts, dated by Hellenistic scholars to c. 1250). The kingdom was substantial, see the Kalydon Hunt with Kings, Princes and Heroes in abundance. How many substantial villages were there in 1150?

The Catalog of Ships (Iliad 2) tells us whence how many ships went to Troy, and under whose lead. 1174 ships are mentioned from 29 districts, tribes, ethnics or anything, and c. 174 local geographic names are told. However these towns, vales &c. are homes of heroes, not villages of peasants. Substantial peasant villages must have existed in greater numbers.

Let us try with 500. That is 9 doublings, so 135 years. Starting with the first smith arriving into Greece in 1175, 15 years after the Burning of Hattušaš (a rather conservative estimation), the new market is more or less in good operation in 1040. As far as I know, iron artefacts are in non-negligible quantity after 1050 according to archaeologists, and they are really dominant in next century; but of course nobody throws away his bronzes, not even his bronze sword. The Submycenian/Protogeometric border, maybe showing the transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age life is again c. 1050.

            This demonstrates that probably nothing at all hindered the propagation of the new technology in Greece. As the smith arrived at a new hopeful locality, he sold out a few knives & daggers, in the meantime looked for iron ore, which was everywhere around and he was taught to find it, and started a forge from absolutely nothing except his hammer. A big rock works as an anvil until a better one is forged. Maybe first the new mages were banned from Menelaus' Sparta (in fair order still in 1178 according to Homer, even if Palace Economy has ceased), from Tiryns (but this is doubtful; see later) and the upper city of Mycenae, where the Atreid vendettas still went on.

            The villages with smithies became economically independent of the Kings. They might have paid taxes for a while, partly because warriors with bronze swords appeared to collect taxes, partly because they still felt themselves dependent, and partly for long-time tradition. But they did not really need the King anymore for farming. Well, they needed the smith. The smith was not cheap. He had a lot of new and useful knowledge, he definitely did seem a smaller wizard, and he and his apprentices were very strong and had steel weapons. Looking at the problem from a Near East angle the Book of Samuel does tell us the prices just before Saul becomes King of Israel.

            A generation ago there were celebrations in Israel for the third millennium of taking Jerusalem. So this happened c. 1015. That seems to be correct, because in the last 2 centuries common opinion was that David defeated Saul c. 1020. So Saul's youth is c. 1050. (I. Newton believed in 1070.) Now Samuel's first book tells us that then a ploughshare or an axe was 2/3 shekel, and the Philistines had smiths but the Hebrews not. Well, 2/3 shekel is a substantial price, but not impossibly high. We are speaking of 5.6 g silver, which, before Iron Age, meant c. 1 kg crude copper, so much less bronze. In 1050 in the Holy Land bronze was already not a concurrent of iron/forged iron/low quality steel. (Surely the axe was steel.)

            The propagation of steel does not need any explanation: it was as fast as it was possible. What needs an explanation (which will not be given here) is: how were earlier the Hittite Kings able to prevent every smith from running away.

 

2.3. ANCIENT IRON PRICES

            When did really start the artificial production of any ferrous metal from terrestrial materials? There are no extant records. But there is a terminus ante quem, 2500 BC, since the Ur dagger is reduced iron [26]. But this was in metal-poor Sumer, a metal-poor territory. In Anatolia or Transcaucasia iron reduction processes may have started even earlier.

            Now, market price is an indicator of quantity of production. The appearance of a new source causes a drop in prices. Ancient iron or steel prices not too far from metal-rich territories were sometimes recorded. I am no historian, but even I know some data:

            1) There was a Northern Mesopotamian (“Old Assyrian”) commerce post in Kanish (Kültepe), well inside Anatolia, between 1950 and 1700 BC. It seems that it became abandoned when the Hittite Empire became strong enough to organize the metal export. There is a record for price rates: 1 siklum amutum (some ferrous metal) = 5 siklum gold = 40 siklum silver [27]. We can take the midpoint: 1825.

            2) In the Old Babylonian Age (c. Hammurabi) there is a record: gives 1 siklum iron (crude iron?) = 5 siklum silver [28]. That is c. 1680.

            3) A record from Ugarit during the time of the Hittite hegemony gives the rates: 1 siklum silver = 1/2 siklum "iron" = 1/3 siklum gold = 30 siklum copper [29]; that time is c. 1350.

4) In New Babylonian times, c. 600 the rate was: 1 siklum silver = 225 siklum iron (crude or not) [27].

            5) 12 years ago a newspaper gave metal-market prices. The silver was standard silver, I do not remember the type of “iron”, but the ratio was 530.

            Then you see that the ratio changed much less in the last 2600 years than in the previous 1200 ones. So let us try with two exponentials: the result is Fig. 1. BP is Before the Present of writing this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig. 1: Old and newer iron/silver price ratios. Look at the intersection of trend lines at Early Iron Age.

 

 

            The trend lines meet at c. 850. But we have no data from the critical century around 1100. Remember the much more preferred iron price to bronze one at 1Sam 13, 19-23. It seems that when Hattušaš had been demolished and the Secret started to West, iron prices suddenly dropped a lot.

            Surely this drop was not exactly overnight. We can guess the continuous but serious and rapid decrease according to the story of migrating smiths above. This decrease and the next two centuries are important for the chosen topic of this study. So let us try to restore the price curve between 1300 and 600! I am sure that more data could be found, but the next Figure will be enough to show the trend at least. First I give the Figure, then the explanation.

            We again start from the prices used in Fig. 1; they are now Points 1-5 in chronologic order. Point 6 is the calculated price at the event mentioned in 1Sam 13, 19-22. In that time the copper/silver ratio was cca. 0.033, the bronze/silver of course higher but in the same magnitude. Iron ploughshares have reason only if iron is cheaper than bronze. As you see, in the youth of Saul the calculated price ratio is 0.028, iron is already cheaper than copper. Point 7 is the result of the fit to Points 1-3 on Fig. 1 at 1190, when the Hittite Empire dissolved and the Secret of Iron got free.

            Now, soon after 1190 a transition happened. The characteristic time of this transition was calculated in the previous Chapter, and was guessed to be c. 135 years. So before 1190 we use the exponential fit from Points 1-3; after that we use an exponential transition from Point 7 to the Iron Age trend (Points 4 & 5) with the scale time 135 years. The smooth curve is an artefact; surely it fluctuated enough.

            The extrapolated curve gives an "iron"/silver price ratio c. 105 at 3000 BC. Then, if the extrapolation was still valid, iron was 104 times rarer than gold. This may not be too far from the concentration of iron meteorite nuggets. So any iron production must have started between 2500 and 3000.

 

 


Fig. 2: Calculated iron prices from past; for the method see text.

 

PART 3: ON LITERATURE

 

3.0. WHY TO DISCUSS ODYSSEUS' PICTURE IN LATER LITERATURE?

            I declared at the beginning that I am interested in the real Odysseus. Then why to speak about literary criticism?

            The answer is simple enough. First, literary criticism can detect self-contradictions in a story, warning us that something is impossible. Second, in the last hundred years it is a commonplace that the texts of Iliad & Odyssey were formed, patched together and so by oral artists, the aodioi, declaiming the hexameters with the background of sounds of the lyre. Then Odyssey is a patchwork of original songs or fragments of songs, and literary experts may (or may not) clarify the lines where the final story is patched together.

 

3.1. HESIOD & THE CYCLIC POETS

            As for Odysseus, we have three traditions, the Homeric, the Cyclic and the Boiotian; and also something in between. We will go into details in later Chapters as well; but the Homeric text is clear. In the Odyssey XI, in Nekyia, the psyche of Teiresias predicts to Odysseus (ll. 100-137) lots of difficulties; tells that he will kill lots of men at home, afterwards he will have to go to a new adventure to walk so far that the paddle he will carry will not be recognised as such; then the adventure will be over, he may return home, offer a hecatomb and he will live into peaceful old age, with the people of Ithaca living happily. And almost at the very end of Odyssey, XXIV, 477-486 Zeus tells Athena that Odysseus remains king in peace and bounty.

            OK; but there is the Cyclic tradition.     In general the Trojan Cycle is under Homer's influence. Greek literary tradition dated Homer the oldest and the other authors newer, so maybe they wrote their epics "around" Iliad & Odyssey. Anyways it seems that they were in no explicit contradiction with Homer; it is hard to decide, however, because they are not extant. For any case the story after the return of Odysseus was in the Telegony of Eugammon of Cyrene, florebat about 568. In Telegony Odysseus goes away again. Lots of adventures; and at the end his son Telegonus (by Calypso) arrives at Ithaca and not recognising him kills with a spear. Everybody is sorry and then Telegonus marries Penelope and Telemachus Calypso (see also rejuvenation and such).

            And then Homer's rival, Hesiod of Ascra, Boioty, also has Odysseus as one of the heroes of Theogony, as he was wandering and producing sons with divine Calypso & Circe.

            Observe that even the now available text of Hesiod seems corrupt. See the Descent of Gods. Lines 1011-3 tell that Circe born 2 sons to Odysseus, "Agrius and Latinus, who was faultless and strong". Now, Latinus is in the core part of Roman (well, maybe Alba Longan) tradition: for us he seems to be the eponym ancestor of the Latins. Hesiod florebat c. 700, or somewhat, but not so much, later. Sure, Hesiod knows of the Etruscans. In 700 the Etruscans of Veii may have heard of Latinus, the mythic ancestor of goddamned Romans, but I think the farther Etruscans did not care too much about. Then how could know Hesiod about Latinus? My guess is that a hyperloyal Greek inserted the line after 192; but for now I simply tell that the Latinus line must come from a later scribe. Now the Thebes school, being concurrent of the Homerids may have concocted strange ends to the Odysseus story, in spite of the Homeric Teiresias prediction and the recorded words of Father Zeus to Daughter Athena. And still they did not do it; but, interestingly enough, Cyclic Eugammon did. By this I do not state that Homer is who knows the Ithacan tradition (albeit he is at least right about the number of tripods in the Cave of the Nymphs at the moment of composing Canto XIII); but I do claim that we must be sceptic about latter stories.

            Apollodorus tries to concoct a whole story from the Odyssey and from some variant of the other traditions. There Latinus is the son of Calypso (Apollodorus is Hellenistic and in his time the Roman tradition is already known to some Greeks), Telegonus is of Circe. After some wandering Odysseus returns home, Telegonus of course does not recognise him, kills him with a spear, everybody is sorry, Telegonus marries Penelope, carries her to Circe, who transport them to the Isles of Blessed (eternal youth & life). Albeit Apollodorus does not explicitly state it, with Odysseus dead and Penelope far away, surely Telemachus takes the throne.

 

3.2. ON THE AUTHORESS OF THE ODYSSEY

            Samuel Butler at BP 115 published a theory that the Odyssey is not the product of Homer (anybody he had been) but of a Ionian princess from Western Sicily who wrote herself into the poem as Nausicaa, Princess of the Phaiakes [30]. The literary gentlemen were shocked, and almost all of them refused the idea. Victorian society (even Late Victorian) simply could not imagine a girl writing Odyssey. No doubt, Butler wrote the book to provoke the society. Still, some of his arguments seem good. And since his idea was that this "Nausicaa" had concocted a brand new and false story about Ithaca, Odysseus and Penelope (fearing that she herself would get bad reputation otherwise), the topic must be discussed here. In addition, while the work was almost unequivocally refused, some decades later R. Graves wrote a novel [Homer's Daughter] into the Butlerian scheme, and its memory may still linger.

            The strongest argument of Butler is Od. XI, 29-330 & 385-635. At the Far West Odysseus descends to the entrance of Hades, and kills sheep, because the souls will come to the blood. He wants to get a prophecy from Tiresias, but the seer had already died. Indeed, lots of souls appear, but first he wants to speak with Tiresias.

            According to Homer and Classic sources, the Greeks had at least 3 entities translated to Modern languages as soul (or spirit or ghost; observe that in some Modern religions the Third Person of Trinity is the Holy Spirit, in some the Holy Ghost): thymos, psyche & eidolon. In the Nekyia story no thymos appears, and only one eidolon: that will be indicated by an asterix. As for an explanation of this, see [31], [32].

            In the order of speaking the souls are as follows:

 

N°

Male

Female

Note

01

Elpęnor

-

Fresh dead companion

02

Tiresias

-

The seer

03

-

Antiklea

Mother of Odysseus

04

-

Tyrô

Mother of Pelias of Iolcus

05

-

Antiope

Mother of Amphion & Zethus

06

-

Alcmene

Mother of Heracles

07

-

Epi(Io)caste

Mother/wife of Oedipus

08

-

Chloris

Mother of Nestor

09

-

Leda

Mother of Castor & Pollux

10

-

Iphimedeia

Mother of Othos & Ephialtes

11

-

Phaidra

Wife of Theseus

12

-

Procris

-

13

-

Ariadne

Daughter of Minos

14

-

Maira

-

15

-

Clymene

-

16

-

Eriphyle

See the 7 Against Thebes

17

-

A few unnamed

-

18

Agamemnon

-

Wanax of Men

19

Achilles

-

Comrade at Troy

20

Patroclus

-

Comrade at Troy

21

Antilochus

-

Comrade at Troy

22

Aiax

-

Comrade at Troy

23

Minos

-

Son of Zeus, King of Crete

24

Orion

-

Demigod

25

Tityos

-

Son of Gea

26

Tantalus

-

Evil hero

27

Sisyphus

-

King of Corinth

28

Heracles*

-

Already god

 

Table 7: Psyches (and an eiolon) Odysseus meets in the Nekyia

 

            Now, Butler believed that a male poet would not have put female psyches to N°'s 3-17. Moreover, the first 2 psyches are exceptional being N° 1 comrade Elpenor, who died just recently, and N° 2 the goal of the excursion to Hades. Ergo: a woman composed this, who was mainly interested in great women.

            This is not Butler's only argument, but this seems the strongest: and I cannot explain the phenomenon. Then he argues that a young Greek princess, still unwed, must have strong opinion about female morality (either from heart or for seeming), otherwise she could not marry well. Now, comes the most important argument (now for us) of Butler.

            Penelope is the model of female morality/fidelity in Odyssey. However there were also opposite statements about Penelope in Classical times, telling that she lay with some of the suitors or even with all (and that godlet Pan came from this adultery); that Odysseus at the end sent her home to her father, &c. These poems are not extant; but the Hellenistic Apollodorus [9] registers the rumours/traditions. Now, Butler accepts the anti-Odyssey traditions and tells that Nausicaa feared similar rumours about herself, so she whitewashed Penelope. While I definitely cannot follow here Butler's argumentation, not being myself a young Greek princess, if the argumentation is good, then the post-Odyssey story of Ithaca should be revised.

            In his Chap. V Butler discusses the statements of the Odyssey that Odysseus' father Laertes lives in his country house and does not visit the palace. He believes that somebody is lying in the story, and he corrects it; it seems that his opinion is that Penelope exiled Laertes to the countryside somehow. And then now Laertes remains in his country house: "the reason for his never coming to town was now partly, no doubt, the pall; partly the scandalous life which his daughter [sic!; really daughter-of-law] was leading; but mainly the writer's inability to explain his non-interference".

            Butler tells that Laertes was rich but the poetess needed him poor. Laertes "must have had money, or how could Ulysses be so rich?". And about Penelope, from the text of Odyssey, he states that "she is an artful heartless flirt". She could send home the visitors, but she does not.

            In addition, the title of Butler's Chapter XI is "Who Was the Writer?". Title of Chap. XIV contains the phrase "the writer of the Odyssey". Butler is clearly in the opinion that Princess 'Nausicaa' wrote the poem. Now the present Greek alphabet goes back to cca. 775, coming from Phoenicia. There was an older script, called (Mycenaean) Linear B, a syllabic writing. While it was without distinction of long vs. short syllables, so not too good to write the various verses, it may have been used to help memory. But there is no trace of use of this syllabary anywhere after c. 1100, except for Cyprus, where an inscription has been found from that time, a single word, in Reformed Syllabary [33], used later in Cyprus until Hellenistic times. (Either Reformed Cypro-Minoan or Reformed Linear B; it is impossible to tell). This syllabary is also not good to write verses. So in 1100 a Princess, or a Prince, may have written, but not in Sicily; either in some fortunate corner of Greece where somebody still knew Linear B or in Cyprus. However even then the writing would have been only a memory-helper; the prosody could have been maintained in oral exercises. Imagine a Cypriote princess conducting such exercises without divulging the "secret" of the gender of the poetess. I think we may pass.

            We shall see clearer in Part 4 about Laertes' money, Telemachus' inheritance and Penelope's right to send home the suitors from the palace. Fortunately it is not necessary do discuss them here. Namely, via unbroken logic, Butler concludes in Chap. XI that the poetess is a princess of Drepanon; in Chap. XII that she wrote between 1150 & 1050; and that she was Ionian. Now a few years after Butler there started excavations ending in a new paradigm. The Butlerian time date is now not accepted (but think of Emperor Hadrian; you will understand this note in Chapter 5.1); and no Ionians in Sicily for a few more centuries. The original Butlerian scheme is chronologically & archaeologically impossible. In addition we are sure now that the Cyclic poets were centuries later than Iliad & Odyssey. So we do not have to care about the Butlerian scheme until it is not rewritten very much (which I cannot see now in spite of Graves' novel), and a Cyclic story about Ithacan troubles may or may not preserve a part of reality.

 

PART IV: RECONSTRUCTING ITHACA BETWEEN 1200 & 1150

 

4.1. Memories of Agamemnon, Menelaus & Odysseus

            It is not without interest to review the popular opinion of Greek posterity about these three heroes of the Trojan War. Summarizing the answer first, Agamemnon is a tragic hero, the winner of the Trojan War but killed afterwards, his capital plunging into bloody vendettas and then falling down. Menelaus is rather an unheroic figure of success, getting back his wife and living in domestic happiness. Odysseus is a real hero, struggling, and finally returning home; but the tradition is slightly ambiguous. Now let us see the three separately.

            Agamemnon wins, returns home and in the very day of his homecoming is killed by Aigistus, lover of the Queen, Clytaimnestra. (Although, first the success was not total, see later, and second, Eusebius preserves a tradition [19] that Troy was taken in the middle of his reign.)  Aigistus is then King, child Orestes is smuggled out, his two elder sisters are badly treated by their mother. Electra plans vengeance but cannot do it, then after a decade Orestes returns, kills Aigistus & Clytaimnestra, but because of the wrath of the Erinnyes, and civil disturbances leaves Mycenae again. His later career is not unequivocal in the tradition, but his grandson, Gras, leads the exodus to Aiolis. This is maybe a somewhat garbled reminiscence of the fall of the Mycenaean Palace Economy, Submycenian struggle for the Good Old Days, disturbances of the coming Iron Age & such. In Classical Times Agamemnon himself did not get too much individual cult. However, according to the On Marvellous Things Heard of the Aristotelian Canon [23] Item 106 tells that he has it in Tarentum (Taras). I need an Appendix about Sparta both for Agamemnon and for Menelaus, so here I only tell that the foundation of Tarentum is highly nontrivial. The city was founded by emigrant Spartans not much after the First Messenian War (according to Plutarch, ending in 710), and the emigrants were children of full-right mothers and not full-right fathers. After reading Appendix F it will be clear that the tradition carried by these "parthenoi" was not fully Doric.

            Menelaus is King of Sparta according both to Homer and to Spartiote tradition. While the Sparta we know from archaeology does not show a Bronze Age capital, the center of Menelaus' kingdom may have been in the neighbourhood. Menelaus and Helen got state cult in Sparta, the witnesses are Polybius [34], Isocrates [35] & Pausanias [17], and I used [6] too. The Menelaion in Classical times was a site where the heroic cult of Menelaus & Helen was performed, and the site has some Mycenaean precursor with LH IIIB2 pottery & such. (According to Table 1, that is just the time before Paris elopes with Helen, if you take everything in face value.)

            Now, about the heroic remembrance of Menelaus outside of Sparta. Odyssey IV about Telemachus' visit in Sparta tells us that in the tenth year after the Fall of Troy Menelaus is already at home. He gives a magnificient feast to Telemachus & Peisistratus, son of Nestor. During the feast enters the fair Helen, with some womanly tools of spinning, sewing, needlework & such, and small talk starts. Helen mixes some tranquilizer into the wine because Telemachus is sorrowful, and declares that she had been influenced by Aphrodite, but at the end in Troy she would have liked to go home. In general everybody is nice to everybody, husband & wife like each other, Menelaus briefly speaks about Aigistus killing Agamemnon, tells that he cried for his brother, but the vengeance is Orestes'. So much about this hero; but observe that Menelaus & Helen’s behaviour is quite conform to Jaynes’ bicamerality [16].

            And now the Aristotelian statement. We do know that Aristotle & the Lyceum recorded the constitutions of 144 states, almost exclusively Greek. Only the Constitution of the Athenians is extant; from some others we know a few fragments. Barnes' Aristotelian collection gives a single fragment of the Constitution of the Ithacans (Fr. 504 in the 3rd ed. of Rose [1], [36]), and that text is indifferent now. However Marks gives another fragment, Fr. 507 Rose [1], omitted by Barnes, he knows why. It is preserved in Plutarch's Moralia, 294D, and goes as follows. After killing the suitors their relatives stood up against Odysseus. Neoptolemus of Epirus was chosen as arbitrator. He sent Odysseus to exile, but decided that the relatives of the suitors must pay a yearly sum for the damages to Odysseus' house. Odysseus went to Italy, his son Telemachus took the throne of Ithaca, he freed Eumaeus & Philoitius, and these two became ancestors of two clans maybe still in existence 800 years later, in Hellenistic times. So again: success and peace; Odysseus' house leaves something for far future.

 

4.2. ITHACA AT THE DAWN OF THE TROJAN WAR

            To be sure, our archaeological knowledge about Ithaca in c. 1190 is almost nil. Of course something can be learnt from the Benton excavations [12]-[15], and just recently the unearthening of

‘Odysseus’ Palace” has been reported; but not so much about the society. Of course we may use Iliad & Odyssey, as raw material.

            Surely there was a wanax at the top. Eumaeus, the "divine swineherd", in Odyssey dios hyphorbos, in Modern words perhaps the swineherd of the State, tells in Od. XIV, 58-66 that there are now strangers/foreigners/impostors in the Palace; otherwise he would be able to give substantial gifts, but not now; and if that returned, who, alas, will not anymore, Eumaeus would get oikos & klęros, land & house, and wife, as a faithful servant gets it from a wanax (written centuries later as "anax", for a discussion, see [5].) That is, literally, a simile; and here Eumaeus does even not state that the lost good leader is Odysseus; but there is no doubt that the Head of the State is a wanax not a basileus, or anything else.

            Il. II, 631-637 (part of the Catalogue of Ships) tells that Odysseus led to Troy warriors from Ithaca and neighbouring lands below Nęriton, from Aigilips & Crocyleia, from Zakynthos & Samos, and from the opposite mainland. So this is the approximate area of the "Ithacan Empire" c. 1190.

            Some caution is needed when identifying Homeric placenames with Modern ones; there exists a State Authority in Greece, for naming, renaming &c., working with heavier hand than the Rumanian one between 1918 & 1989. However now we have an Ithaca, a Zakynthos, and a Kephallenia, with a city named Samę on it. From placenames in the neighbourhood whence the warriors were led not by Odysseus I guess that the mainland possessions were at the mouth of R. Akheloos.

            The fleet of Odysseus was rather moderate: 12 ships. While the fleet of Ęlis was even smaller, Aitolia and Dulikhion sent 40-40. This may mean that the Ithacan "empire" was thinly populated; but there is an alternative. Cyclic & later poems tell that Odysseus did not want to go to Troy but had to. This will be important in the next Chapter.

            Iliad & Odyssey do mention social classes; but somewhat obscurely; we shall understand later, why. However, Odyssey mentions bought/captured workers; and lots of female servants. Eumaeus, the divine swineherd, has been bought; and still he is divine. So for reconstructing Ithacan society some more data are needed. This will be done later.

 

4.3. ITHACA ON THE VERNAL EQUINOX OF 1178

            The Odyssey gives lots of information about Ithaca. Of course that is the Ithaca of epics, not necessarily the real one. But we use Odyssey for the reconstruction of the Fall; if we are cautious enough, we may learn something.

From [11] we see that the vernal equinox of 1178 is a few days before Odysseus' homecoming. Let us see the situation; in the lack of any archaeological key I work from Odyssey; when other sources (Cyclic poems, Apollodorus &c.) do not contradict, I use them too.

            Odysseus' father, earlier wanax, now seemingly retired, is in fact retired to his country lands, and do not govern. See the speech of Athena in Od. I, 188-193, a hairbreadth before the chosen date, Telemachus in Od. XVI, 138-145 a hairbreadt later, and also the scene at Od. XXIV, 205-211, again a few days later. His wife, Anticlea, is dead, see Od. XI. For any imagination of Butler about him, they are unfounded, as we shall see later.

            In the Palace the acting wanax is Telemachus, albeit great caution is needed towards the many suitors. Remember that nobody confirmed yet Odysseus' death, even if it is generally believed. Penelope's status is cca. Dowager Queen; she is courted by the suitors, she has no power on "men", but governs the womenfolk of the Palace (Od. XXI, 343-353). It is an interesting question if she can rule above the male servants; probably in domestic causes she can. Telemachus has no brother (Od. XVI, 97-98, and no sister is mentioned), a sister of Odysseus was married out much time ago.

            Surely there was a hierarchy in the Palace amongst the servitors, but that would be difficult to decipher, and is not too important now. For that in Late Mycenaean times see a subsequent Chapter; but with one exception, I cannot imagine that men from foreign palace hierarchies could go into the palace of another wanax to suit the assumed widow. For arguments, wait a little; but I differ from Butler, so there will be supporting arguments.

            And now come the suitors. Surely they are "men of rank", "princes" or such. Telemachus, in general, tells to Athena in Od. I, 245-248 that they are from the neighbouring islands, Dulikhion, Samę (Kephallenia), Zakynthos & Ithaca. Od. XVI, just after vernal equinox, is more detailed: 52 from Dulikhion, from Samę 24, from Zakynthos 20 and from Ithaca (the best ones) 12. That would be 108. We does not have to believe the exact numbers; but observe that from the 108 total 52 is foreigner. (From Dulikhion Meges led the warriors to Troy, on 40 ships.) The remaining 56 is from the Ithacan Empire. Had Odysseus led more heroes to Troy, now Dulikhion could simply annect the mini-Empire.

            Who are the suitors for status? Surely men of rank. According to almost contemporary Pylean lists some could be qa-si-re-u, some te-re-ta; but wait a little for the Mycenaean ranks. But surely the foreigners have some great freedom in their own state; in the Ithacan Empire the Law and Order is in anarchy, so they could be anything. Still, I do not believe in 12 of te-re-ta if a Pylean table mentions only 3 in Messene. (Although other tablets mention more of them; not everything is sure about them.) The most should be qa-si-re-u or sons of such [38]. (That is the word pronounced in Homer as basileus; but the expression does not yet mean "King". They may be local chiefs.)

            And there are servitors. But I emphasize that their status is not that of the slaves of Classical Greek times, or that of servus/serva in Roman Law. Moreover, not even that of Classical Age helots & such. We saw that Eumaeus, although bought by Laertes from foreigners, is a "divine swineherd", dios hyphorbos. Later Eumaeus & Philoitius (he is also called divine at Od. XXI, 340; he keeps the state cows & sheep) are fighting on the side of Odysseus; something unusual for Classic slaves, and they would be just the heads of the 2 new clans being created by Telemachus. Let us now pass.

 

4.4. THE MYCENAEAN TABLETS ABOUT SOCIETY

            From, say, 100 BP lots of tablets were found, mainly on Peloponnesus, with an unknown writing, which, on statistical grounds, seemed syllabaric. Lots of experts started to decipher it, but first without too much success. A few experts called attention to similarities with the Cyprus syllabary, but the majority did not look for Greek; rather they expected Minoan i.e. pre-Greek Cretan, which language is untranslated even now. And then, in BP 60 Ventris & Chadwick deciphered it and found it "very Archaic Greek". We are at this majority opinion now. The tablets seem inventory texts, originally on raw clay. The present idea is that at regular intervals the tablets were destroyed/reused as raw clay; and we have the last ones, having become bricks in flames of destruction.

            Such tablets are known at least from Knossos, Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes & (?) Iolcus; and there is no reason to believe that the destructions were synchronous. However, consulting with Table 1, we can get approximate probable dates. In Thebes the wholesale destruction may come after Oedipus (7 Against Thebes) c. 1225 [19], or, even more probably, at the Northwestern Landtaking in Boeocy, c. 1124. In Mycenae & Tiryns there were surely subsequent havocs in the Atreid-Thyestid vendettas. But in Pylos it may have been later. Since the "Dorian Migration" started in c. 1104, and the end of the Pylos Palace (“Nestor’s Palace”) seems from the contemporary written documents caused by a large enough invasion, then the wholesale destruction should be c. 1100, the end of LH IIIC. It is usual to speak now about a Postpalatial Period of closing Bronze Age, but it seems that in Pylos the Palace was in usual use at the destruction preserving the tablets. Maybe the next Submycenaean was Postpalatial; or maybe at other places the palaces went out of use somewhat earlier. The matter is not yet clear, and dogmatism does not help.

            This later end of Palatial Age in Pylos at 1100 seems convenient if we believe Odyssey. In early 1178 Telemachus visits Nestor in Pylos and Menelaus in Sparta; and everything is OK. Well, this is poesy, but a very important and simple fact stated in a poem. You do not have to accept it; but if we can shift the catastrophe of Pylos to two generations later, and as far as I know we can, it is simpler to do it.

            We shall interpret the tablets later. But let us see the writing. 91 syllable signs are distinguished, more than 80 deciphered (some with doubts), and in addition some hieroglyphic signs were founds, some deciphered, some not. However the hieroglyphs seem to be used only for inventory headlines & such, supporting the readings. In principle the 91 syllables are enough.

            Still, the reading is not unequivocal. Not all syllables existing in Classical Greek are distinguished. The consonants are too few, and only 5 vowels are distinguished instead of the Classical 7. (This is a proper place to refer at an Appendix G, although the nontrivial relation of Greek a’s end e’s was already mentioned in Chapter 1.2.) And so on. So at places intuition can be used; but it seems that the really unknown words are few; so no strong non-Greek elements entered Greece during the Dark Age. The strong infusion into the vocabulary had happened during and just after the Greek Landtaking, having formed a usual Indo-European dialect into Archaic Greek bw. 1900 and maybe 1600 [38].

            Now let us see an entry published first by Ventris & Chadwick in 1956 [39]. The double numbering of the entry is 31(152). It is a land inventory, naming the user and a quantity of wheat; most probably the seed grain planned for sowing; this was a usual way in Mesopotamia too. The quantity is, of course, a modern "round" transcription. I am translating back from Magyar; the original book being unavailable for me. Also I avoid doubling; when possible I give only the Mycenaean. I used somewhat [5] too, but not in translating.

 

Wa-na-ka-te-ro te-me-no. To-so-jo pe-ma: GRA 30. Ra-wa-ge-si-jo te-me-no. GRA 10. Te-re-ta-o. To-so pe-ma: GRA 30. To-so-de te-re-ta: VIR 3. Wo-ro-ki-jo-ne-jo e-re-mo. To-so pe-ma: GRA 6.

 

            The unit of grain is cca. 120 l. Wanakatero temeno is surely wanakteros temenos: the temenos of the wanax. The temenos is a Homeric word, so no problem with the meaning: a special piece of land separated from the general one. In post-Homeric texts only gods & temples have them. The rawagesijo temeno is surely ra(/la)wagesios temenos: the temenos of the ra/lawagetas. This is very probably a lawagetas: some leader of the common people/laos. Toso(jo) pema is: so much sperma, i.e. seed (grain). Tereta is surely telestas (or not so surely; we shall later see an alternative): while the exact meaning is still in doubt, because telę is tax, while telos is goal in Classical Greek, they are surely "civil" officials organising, tax collecting, or both. The worokijonejo eremo looks as "the fallow of the worgions", except that it is slightly unnatural to expect 720 l grain from/for a fallow. A worgion can be any people, except that the stem may be connected with wergę=work. But this is not sure.

            We will use this text for understanding Society. But remember: it comes from Pylos, surely just before Destruction, if the destruction was made by the wild Dorians, then  from c. 1100; and it was deciphered in BP 56.

 

4.5. MARX, ENGELS, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND SUCH

            When Butler started to write [30], the key text posing very serious doubts about his scheme, Ref. [40], was already written c. for 3 decades. However 1) if he had known it, he, freethinker and daredevil, still would have not read it;  and 2) the text was in manuscript and remained so for other half a century. The text is a fundamental text of scholarly Marxism, known simply as Grundrisse; more officially see as [40]. Of course I did not read it (I do not know anybody who has); but a part of it was edited separately as [41], in Magyar, and that I have on my bookshelf. I do not know if it exists in English, but why not; the title is something Ways of pre-Capitalist Production or such. (The manuscript is mainly German, the original publication, some 80 years after writing it was German, and surely some Trotskists translated either [40] or [41] to English.)

            The whole Grundrisse remained in manuscript. It was a study while Charles Marx planned to write Das Kapital. It seems that he did not find editor for the Grundrisse. After his death F. Engels inherited the manuscript and also did not publish it. After Engels' death the manuscript became the treasure of the Socialist Movement and the Second International, but they did not publish it. (I read an interesting story in end-Communist years in Hungary that Marx had a very consequent but unique handwriting, and only Kautsky, the renegade, was able to read the ms's. Now the majority was afraid that Kautsky, the renegade, would insert or delete some sentences if he cannot be checked; but, as told, only he could read it. I am not sure that the Grundrisse ms. was involved in the story; and of course everybody may or may not believe it.) Finally, when starting the Collected Works of Marx and Engels in Moscow (from which, of course, several smaller writings, not nice about Russia, were excised), a group had produced a German edition; it is in translation in the 46th volume of the Hungarian edition of the Collected Works. As for the English edition, I have no idea.

            Now, in Victorian times people either believed that we are very near to perfect times or they believed that the present order of society will collapse soon. To the first group belongs S. Butler (he could not believe this), to the second H. G. Wells. The first would not read Grundrisse even if in print, the second would strongly misunderstood it.

            Still, some very intellectual Marxists read the Grundrisse (and misunderstood it) until J. V. Stalin (Dzhugashvili) on the First all-Soviet Conference of Communist Kolkhozniks (I am not joking; I learned such things a few hours weekly at the University; I had to) told that only Revisionists would speak about the Asian Way of Production; it was Slavery, albeit not too developed. Then of course nobody spoke about that anymore, because Siberia is cold.

            However Russia occupied Hungary at the end of WW II. Still nobody spoke about the Asian Way of Production, because only people returning from Russia knew about and they knew that it is unhealthy. But 11 years later there was the Hungarian October Revolution. That was stamped into earth; but then Government learned that there are more sensitive and less sensitive topics. Stalin had already been declared Bad Guy in Hungary, so his opinion about the Asian Way of Production ceased to be sacrosanct. And then started F. Tőkei. He definitely read the Grundrisse and many other works of Marx, and wrote books about them. His position was delicate, because Party Leadership would have been more happy if he did not write them; but it is better if somebody writes about landownership in Ancient India than if he discusses Warsaw Pact. In fact his enemies (also Marxist philosophers) wrote some denunciatory letters to the Central Committee of the Party telling that he discusses too much the Asian Way of Production while Soviet and East German colleagues do not do this [42]; but he survived it.

            Now, if you read [40] or [41], there is a great possibility that you do not understand anything. But if you read, read and read, at the end you understand that Marx believed that in Ancient Asia there was no private ownership of lands. For mobilia the ownership may or may not existed, depending on place & time. (But even if it existed, it was not very strong. The ruler might routinely confiscated it if he wanted.) The private ownership of lands appeared first in Greece.

            OK. Marx might or might not be right in this question. Of course, Tőkei told that in this question Marx was right and Stalin not; and this was a defendable opinion in Communist Hungary. Now, my opinion is that Marx was a very impolite scholar, and he was wrong in lots of questions; but he was also right in some, and especially in this. Think; on Ancient Eastern alluvial fields, without natural border just how could somebody got the idea to portioning out lands to individua; and why? So the natural state was communal ownership of, maybe, a village; later empires were formed and then the Whole Community was the abstract owner. Of course, it does not really work; but the Big Guys tell that they manage the lands for the Whole Community. Until they leave enough to the peasants, the peasants are quiet. When there is not enough, there are disturbances and either some peasants are killed, or the leaders. In the second case there will be a new Top Man, and everything starts again.

            Anybody in Hungary could know this from the Hungarian Agricultural Communes and Community-Owned Factories; but people did not know that even Intellectual Marxism tells that this is not good. And they told it silently and garbled, otherwise...

            But Marxism had to be interested in Ways of Property. The majority of non-Marxist historians were not even interested.

            And there is the Tin, needed for Bronze in Bronze Age. Tin must be brought from far away (except for Cornwall and Southwestern Siberia), so the society has anyways the tendency to be rigid and layered, with central government. Of course in Greece there were natural borders. So it was not trivial that an Eastern-type society with common ownership could or could not be maintained there in Bronze Age. And then Ventris & Chadwick deciphered Linear B.

 

4.6. MYCENAEAN GREECE IN THE LINEAR B TABLETS

            I warned the readers in Chap. 4.5 that it is not easy to read the tablets; and if we read them, there still may be problems with the interpretation. However lots of scholars have been read them for more than half a century.

            From books now we learn that

1) The Top

            On the top of the state stood 2 persons, the wanax and the lawagetas. Only these 2 had temenos, i.e. separated, encircled pieces of land. But the temenos of the wanax was bigger, say triple, so really he was at the top. See e.g. [5], [39], [43]. The wanax is the central figure, but his role is partly religious; the lawagetas is completely secular, he is the military leader and maybe also the chief of communal work. In Pylos at the catastrophe the person who was wanax was called Ekhelawon or Enkhellawon; the lawagetas was cca. Wedaneus.

            At this point it is worthwhile to call attention to the fact that the great majority of the tablets used to distil textbook wisdom about land property is from the last year of Pylos.

2) The First Layer below the Top

            They are maybe the telestai. They are either big landowners or tax collectors (the two are diametrically opposite roles, but see the great chemist Lavoisier), but their income is big. In the Palace there are some officials, say do-po-ta (house-master?), wa-na-se-wi-ja (attendant of the wife of the wanax?), ko-re-te, po-ro-ko-re-te (albeit these two were maybe not in court but led/supervised something countryside), e-te-do-mo, &c.). In the Army/Navy there are e-qe-ta, maybe "Followers" liaisons between Palace and Army/Navy. In the countryside there are ko-re-te and po-ro-ko-re-te; the da-mo-ko-ro seems a high official, but from the first half, damos, probably not in the Palace. In addition there is the qa-si-re-u, later basileus, more than one, maybe some local leaders at the countryside; one in a district or more?

3) The Common Folk

            From the word itself and from Pylos tablets it seems as if the common folk collectively were the da-mo, damos. They work on the fields. Also the wanax and the lawagetas had their own special artisans, e.g. the ke-ra-me-u, the kerameus, so vessel-maker, or the e-te-do-mo wa-na-ka-te-ro, the armorer of the person of the wanax [43], [44]. Now, they are below Layer 2; but are they in Layer 3 or somewhere between? Also, did a telestas or a basileus have his personal kerameus (I think, not his own kalkheus, but I am not sure), and if they had, were they in the Common Folk layer?

4) "Outsiders"

            There is a group in Pylos tablets which Palaima [43] reads as worgioneion, interprets the name as "outsiders" and identifies them with the non-Pylean individuals on the tablets. From numbers it seems that the worgioneion is socially lower than the damos.

5) And the Servants?

            Still there remains a lot of individuals, who are not artisans but simply work. Common servants of the palace; surely personal servants of a telestas or a basileus &c. Were they free or slaves?

            And who owns the land, the bronze &c.?

            Let us emphasize that it is the standard reading, but not the only one. E. g. there is Vanda P. Kazanskiene. She comes from a nation much more familiar with Marxism, classes &c. than myself; and she can easily recognise IE instrumental, locative &c. Lithuanian has a 7-case declension system. (Mine has 35 cases, but it is not IE.) Now, Kazanskiene derives te-re-ta from (Classical) tęres as guards [45] (and for her ko-to-no-o-ko is not “landholder” or “landowner”, but “protectors of the ko-to-na” either ktona or ktoina). And she counts 13 or 14 te-re-ta in Pylos. Indeed, 3 guardians would be too few for Messenia; maybe 14 was enough.

            Now, this is the proper place to return to Marx (who did not write anything about the Mycenaean society because he died c. when Schliemann excavated in Mycenae, and 7 decades before the decipherment of the tablets) and to Tőkei, who just the contrary. Marx told [41] that in Ancient Asian civilisations there was no real owner at all, the Land in principle was owned by the Community, which did not really exist; in practice it was managed by the Supreme Chief, Emperor, Pharaoh &c., in the name of the Community, but he was unable to do it, so the top men did something and either that worked or not; but there was no real ownership. And Tőkei [5] detailed these statements, it was even more clear that such a system was not optimal and in some cases simply inevitably broke down; and he stated that Mycenaean Greece was a hodgepodge of such "Asian" mini-Empires. (They were small, I think, because in Greece there were natural borders.)

            There is no meaning of "free" in such a society. Everybody depends on the community. Maybe a wanax was the most free; but he did not have "money" or "treasure". Wanax Enkhelawon in Pylos did not own anything important (Ok, maybe some of his tunics and shoes); but he was the wanax, so he lived in the wanakterial palace, ate at the table of the palace &c. If he ceases to be wanax, he loses all this. Maybe there is a coup d'état; then he is either killed, or flees. Maybe he abdicates; then his successor may or may not keep him at the palace; if not, he goes to his relatives. Maybe he becomes senile, so unfit; then first his advisors keep this in secret, and in proper time kill him. And so on. There was no such thing that the property of an ex-wanax.

            You may not believe this; it is not a too strong argument that this was Tőkei's opinion from an unpublished manuscript of Marx. However: can you show me a single mention of private property on the Linear B tablets?

            Tőkei [5] gives an example, using [39], with the double numbering Item 27(118). There is a certain Warnataios, who seems to be a substantial landowner. He has a parcel of 242 l wheat (roughly the fifth of the temenos of Wedaneus, the lawagetas, so indeed a big parcel). The parcel is a ko-to-na ki-ti-me-na, which is usually translated as "private land" because in Classical Ages ktęnos=property, however it seems that the ki-ti-me-na would mean in Mycenaean times rather "a fallow ploughed by sy", that is "newly taken into use". Now, anything is the ki-ti-me-na, Warnataios has 242 l of it. However 4 persons, an artisan, two priests and a priestess, "lease" 70 l of it.

            OK, Warnataios is the owner, and a part of his parcel is leased by others. However at Item 28(131) the same Warnataios leases 60 l land from the damos. Now is Warnataios on one hand a big private landowner, and a tenant of the community on the other? What is Warnataios really in Pylos?

            Aithioqus also has a ki-ti-me-na parcel of 188 l wheat; but almost all, 180 l, is leased by 6 persons, priests & priestesses. And then Aithioqus leases 174 l from the community.

            Ru-83-o(s) also has ki-ti-me-na land: 180 l. But 98 l is leased from him.

            This is not landownership. Rather a system, where all the land is registered, different individuals use parcels and pay tax, but surely if somebody takes a fallow into use, that needs some effort, and so he gets special favours. Tax-free for some time? But Warnataios' ki-ti-me-na is 188 l wheat!

            Anyway, the Homeric euktimenos can be applied on a city, on a house, on an orchard or on a ploughland. If it is a house, then it is "well-built". So maybe the ktimena parcel was taken into use from fallow by effort. It is not (yet) property, but something approaching it. This is caused by the complicated terrain and stony lands of Greece; such difficulties were much smaller in Mesopotamia.

            Even the wanax is not an owner. Yes, a nice big parcel is given him: 3600 l. But the wheat-equivalent shows that this is also common land; but not of a damos, but of the Community of Whole Pylos.

            And now we can finally kill out Butler's idea that Nausicaa whitewashed Penelope to pr vent rumours. There is the Palace of the wanax on Ithaca. There is a wanassa in it, Penelope; but her husband, Odysseus, is lost, probably dead. The palace is not owned by Penelope; it is the Palace of the Community of the Ithacan Empire. And there is really no wanax, representing the Community. Laertes, anything is now his status, lives in countryside. Telemachus was a minor; now he is mature but has not yet been installed as the new wanax. (No such act is mentioned in Odyssey.) On the shifty grounds that Odysseus may still return, or Telemachus may be the new wanax everything goes as usual, except that the suitors are present. Obviously not 108; that is epic exaggeration, but still many. What would have happened if Laertes appealed on his "rights"? Even if he had rights, he is a feeble oldster; maybe a suitor would kill him and keep it in secret. I think Laertes lives in countryside just to avoid a conflict where he could not defend himself and no higher authority would exist to do it. Similarly if Telemachus told the suitors to go away, they would laugh and tell that his status comes from Odysseus, because he himself is not wanax. And Odysseus is probably dead. There is no wanax, there is no global government in the State; this situation is anomalous.

            And if Penelope tells "go away"? Then the suitors would tell that a woman alone in the Palace is impossible. Choose one of us; then maybe that suitor would be installed as wanax. (The winner would give treasury for the others when he is installed; from that time he will be Wanax of Ithaca, and may give away State property between some limits). If not, there will be disturbance and maybe your son dies. (Dozens of suitors against one man.)

            OK; maybe Father Zeus defends the family. But maybe not; if Odysseus is dead then maybe Zeus is not fanatic to defend his family.

            On a more secular level, old communal societies did not honour “individual rights” and not even “inheritance”; of course, it was known that internal peace was disturbed if individuals were attacked; and families were generally able to keep their houses and mobilia, but this was a usage, not a strict right.

            Well, Westerners generally do not feel this. They live in societies with well established private property for 3 millennia, and with exclusively private property with more of 1; therefore they could not imagine the working of a communal society even if the intelligentsia often believes it good. However from World War I Russia/USSR was a communal society, and we learned its working from such disciplines as e.g. Scientific Socialism.

            While we know next to nothing about end-Mycenaean ideology, and the deeds of the leaders may have become confused in mythology, the details of power struggles of the USSR bw. BP 90 & 20, a par excellence communal society, are well documented, as well as the ideology behind. So if one believes that in a communal society there is clear-cut Anglo-Saxon Law & Order or Property, or even a clear rule for heredity, let us see the list of the Supreme Leaders of the USSR.

            The USSR was a declared communal society, building communism (of Eastern style, anything communism might be). During WWI Ulyanov, nom de guerre Lenin, meaning “of River Lena”, made a revolt, caught State Power, and started to build his ideal communal society in Russia, communal enough even without his ideas. Indeed in the majority of well-populated Russia there was no individual peasant land property until BP 107.

            In BP 90 the winners formed the new state of workers & farmers from the part of Russia surviving WWI and Lenin was the topmost man; however immediately he started ailing, exact reason somewhat mythical even now. He died in BP 88, and power struggles started. In these struggles a member of the top layer loosely called Politburo, namely Dzhugashvili, started to intensify his influence. Originally he was the mere Secretary of the Politburo, a post influential but not really powerful. But he participated in the struggles and the top few purged each other, so he, as Stalin (meaning steely), came out stronger and stronger, but keeping his humble title as Secretary (to be sure as First Secretary). Note that a communal ideology does not prefer titles as King, President &c. The supreme power belongs to People. Until abstract People has not learned to administer this power, a group administers it, but of course for People. Steely Stalin was First Secretary of this group.

            C. BP 80 Stalin was stronger than primus inter pares. The last concurrent, Bronshtein, nom de guerre Trotsky, was exiled (in BP 75 killed by paid bravos in Mexico) and then Stalin's title solidified as Chief Secretary of the Communist (Bol'shevik) Party of the USSR, albeit you did not get into troubles if you called him Vozhd', meaning something similar to Führer.

            Stalin died in spring BP 59, probably in a natural way, and it seemed that Malenkov would be the next First Secretary. (According to a document published in c. BP 25 while still living but on his deathbed Stalin was deposed and Malenkov nominated as new First Secretary.) However Head of Secret Police Beria had ambitions too. In the liquid situation Malenkov plotted with two other Politburo leaders, Molotov & Khrushchev. The latter was only marginally Russian being a Russian-speaking Eastern Ukrainian, Chief Secretary of the Ukrainian branch of the Party. Khrushchev had some ties to the Army, Beria was arrested at the Politburo meeting and put into a silo. Then after less than 2 weeks it had been decided that Beria was a spy paid by imperialists (which was not true) and had committed many terrible unlawful deeds (which was). He was shot. Then the winning triumvirate divided power, Khrushchev got the power in Party, Malenkow became Head of the Council of Ministers (in less artificial language Prime Minister) and the weakest Molotov became an influential Minister.

            2 years later Khrushchev was already strong enough to downgrade Malenkov from Prime Minister to Minister of Electrification. So Malenkov & Stalin's Old Guard became angry. They joined to Malenkov & Molotov, and an anti-Khrushchev bloc of 7 has got a majority of the Presidium of the Politburo on June 18, 1957.

            However that august body in principle could only advise. The advise went to the Central Committee, a few hundreds. Khrushchev had more friends in Army than the plotters, Army transported the Central Committee members to the meeting, and Khrushchev had the majority.

            The 4 main plotters became downgraded but not even arrested. Malenkov became the director of an electric power plant in Kazakistan, Molotov went to Mongolia as ambassador, Kaganovich, a leader of Stalin's friends, became the director of a potassium factory in Mountain Ural, and Shepilov became the head of an Economy Scientific Institute in countryside. According to Khrushchev these 4 formed the Anti-Party Group. The 5th plotter, Prime Minister Bulganin, remained Prime Minister for a while, and I must confess that I do not yet know anything about the fates of Pervukhin & Saburov, Plotters 6 & 7.

            So Khrushchev was the winner of the day. However another group of plotters, led by Brezhnev, Kosigin & Podgorny, won in 1964. There was some ideological difference, but I guess the main difference was how to handle Red China (Mao was very angry at Khrushchev but not yet at Brezhnev), Khrushchev declared that he was ill & old, and retired.

            The winners divided power. Brezhnev became First Secretary, Kosigin Prime Minister and Podgorny Head of State. Now, years later Podgorny visited friendly Somalia making pro-Somalian speeches. Somalia & Ethiopia were warring for Ogaden and while he was in Somalia, the Ethiopian military leaders declared themselves Marxist-Leninist. So when Podgorny went home he became ousted and the Eternal Friendship of Etiopia & the USSR became solid and unbreakable. (I remember terminology.)

            In BP 29 the long-ailing First Secretary Brezhnev died and Andropov, having serious kidney problems and being quite old, became successor. He started a stricter regime, but anything he planned, he was so ill that died in 11 months, the majority of the time in hospital for dialysis. The successor was Chernenko, also seriously ill (I never knew the details but maybe heart problems) and even older. He was already hospitalized and we do not know his plans because he died within a year.

            The the Central Committee finally elected a relatively young and energetic First Secretary, Gorbachev. He had plans and published them. He wanted “glasnost'”, c. transparency, “perestroika” or rebuilding of State, and prohibition of alcohol. He got lip service for the first 2 and not even that for the third. As a step of rebuilding, the Head of State was renamed as “President of USSR”, he was elected by some 99 % as such, but killings already started between Azerbaidjan & Armenia. Then Central & East European dependent states started to go over to USA and/or Western Europe, and even the 3 Baltic states were in open revolt. There Soviet military, with the approval of Gorbachev, killed some 13 Lithuanians, but that was not enough. So in the middle of August, BP 21, a coup d'état was performed. The President was kept in home arrest. The coup was laughable, the second man of the coup later told in court that he did nothing because he was continuously total drunk, and a leader of Russia proper, Yeltsin, plotted with regional leaders to dissolve the USSR. After a few days the coup broke down, Gorbachev became free, but USSR broke down in weeks. So Gorbachev was the first and last President of the USSR.

            This is the proper way of governing a modern declared communal society, but not the only one. In North Korea the third generation of father-son succession is just being installed, and Rumania under Nicolae Ceausescu planned the gradual investment of his single true son, Niku, but the father was massacred in December 1989 by the military (it was formally a military court decision, but I watched the “trial” on TV, and the decision was ready before the trial  and was performed with machine guns).

            In Hungary, not a communal society only occupied by the USSR, the last Communist Parliament made lots of constitutional changes in 1989-90, and elections happened exactly in the normal time. More Western European countries, never communal after Charlemagne, may have seen bloody dictatorships in the last century, but more or less in was clear who was the boss and why. I think the analogons of Mycenaean Greece in our time are USSR, North Korea or something in between, without clear and established Property, formalised Politics and such.

            We cannot really know about power struggles in LH IIIC Tiryns, but surely they existed. Greek mythology is full with vendettas and other murders, and our knowledge about Mycenaean religion is scant. Even if the names of gods are familiar, their commands and morality are not. Zeus might have forbidden regicidium, female adultery or treason even in 1200; but from the myths the general impression is that He did not punish heroes for such behaviour in many cases.

            So much about Butler. He assumed not only Victorian morality in 1178, but also British Property Law and constabularies at 3200 BP. As for the way of government & administration we know more but not enough. It seems that before the Fall of Troy the wanaktes were somehow “bigger than the other mortals by head & shoulder”. They, e.g., descended from gods. Still, mythology “records” cases when the wanax was killed by a hero without divine punishment. And for the last century, after the Fall of Troy, we know very little. Palaima could recognise the name of the last Pylian wanax, Enkhelawon, but he is absent in the tradition and his opinion is that he was a homo novus; and we do not know how the Neleids lost the Pylian throne. The best post-palatial site is Tiryns and there Maran's excavations show that a body governed under a Head, whose authority was not such established as in LH IIIB. Homer tells us that in 1178 the Pylos Palace is still unharmed and Nestor is single ruler, even if present-day archeology doubts it, and that Menelaus is Wanax of Sparta, but his followers are much more independent than in the Good Old Days, more or less in the Tiryns way of life, but also under the old pre-Troy leader.

 

4.7. WANAX, LAWAGETAS, KHAGAN, BEG, AND THE MYSTICAL "DUAL KINGDOM"

            There remained a single but very important problem before Part 4 is finished. Namely, there is some anomaly about wanax & lawagetas. We can start from: where is even a single lawagetas in Iliad & Odyssey? I will use in this Chapter Refs. [43] & [44] extensively, so will not repeat the References.

            The lawagetas seems to be the War Chief. If so, they should appear in Iliad, but there is no lawagetas there. An explanation, on which I can only laugh, is that "lawagetas" is 4 syllables, so it is hard to form hexameters with it. See Palaima himself in [33].

            Or, if any prosodic problem would have arisen, the military leaders would have appeared under an alternative title. The military leaders of the Greek kingdoms cannot leave out of the Trojan War.

            No doubt Wanax Agamemnon could go into war and somebody takes care of his armor. Later Wanax Enkhelawon of Pylos had a personal armorer called Atukhos. Still, Atukhos seems to have been an insignificant guy. OK, the wanax' armor is ready; but the real fight, in the spirit of the recent majority opinion, was done by Lawagetas Wedaneus. At Troy Agamemnon cannot be the lawagetas of Mycenae; he is wanax andrôn. But then?

            Well, of course I do not know the answer. But I have ideas. I list a few.

Solution 1: No military lawagetas in 1190.

            The lawagetas may have been an important office, but originally was not military. He was organizing the common works, for example, and had no temenos. During LH IIIC more and more wars and other disturbances happened and the lawagetas got an exceptional position just under the wanax, so Wedaneus was comparable to Enkhelawon in Pylos c. 1100; but not yet in 1190. Indeed, [5], [39] and [43] cite the same single tablet for two temenoi, one third of the other. You should not generalise from a single date for whole Greece and for centuries.

Solution 2: The institution of lawagetas was not pan-Hellenic

            Maybe some kingdoms had a strong military-minded lawagetas, but not all of them. E.g. Mycenae, with a young wanax, did not need one, but old Nestor of Pylos had one; simply his name was forgotten, or he is in Iliad but under a different title.

Solution 3: The Arabic Way

            In present decades some Arab states prefer a way that there is a ruler, while one of his sons (maybe the Heir Apparent) takes the post of Prime Minister. Now, if so, then maybe under Troy Laertes at home was the Wanax of Ithaca and Odysseus at present the Lawagetas of Ithaca. But the tradition forgot the title since in Odyssey Laertes is weak and old.

 

            I do not believe in Solution 3, because then Laertes still wanax in 1178, and then he cannot simply retire to his country house. Still the situation is anomalous: it is absurd to assume that Laertes retired from being wanax just when Odysseus started to Troy. This question may remain unsolved until we know more about the wanax ideology.

            Double Kingdoms are not rare. One was the Khazar Kaganate. The Khagan was so sacred that people did not dare to look at him; so he seldom went outside and then a big golden Sun-disc was carried before him. In the meantime the beg managed the state. If the Khagan became feeble, he was killed (tell non-Khazarian sources), because the fertility & prosperity of Khazaria were maintained by and through the Khagan; he had special contact with the spirits.

            Now, this is almost exactly Palaima's suggestion for the wanax ideology; see the details in Appendix A. If so, Laertes already could not be wanax, but there was nobody to transfer the title to.

            Another kinds of Dual Kingdoms is the Nepalian model. There the ruler was a maharaja-hiraja (descended from God Indra) while the routine activity was led by a simple maharaja helper. Then for more than a century a strong maharaja made his office also hereditary. In Japan in the last 900 years the tenno was not interested in the routine, with the exception of a few, but very important tennoes.

            Finally, let us see Hungary. When Magyars arrive at the Carpathian Basin, Arab & Persian sources write about their Double Kingdom. So historians are looking for it, but unsuccessfully. But during the Communist decades Hungary realised a Triple Kingdom. There was a Head of State; the President of the Presidium. He was a weak figure but his ceremonial activity was needed. There was a Prime Minister, governing the routine work. And there was a First Secretary of the Only Party, governing the Prime Minister. This model worked for 40 years.

            I believe that Double Kingdoms are in general ephemeridal (albeit Japan is an important exception). Exceptionally strong Second Man with a weak Supreme boss may start such a government, but it may easily cease as well. So maybe sometimes the lawagetas was able to get a temenos, at other times not.

Aristotle in the Athenian Constitution [23] preserves an interesting point of ancient tradition about the Athenian state. He tells that the first three magistrates were the King, the Polemarch and the Arkhon, in this sequence. Kingdom existed from "ancestral antiquity", and until Medon or Acastus the King was the ruler. Next came the Polemarch, which office was created if "some of the kings proving feeble in war"; Aristotle mentions Ion as such Polemarch, and for later pre-Draconian times he believes it to have been a regular office. And then, with Medon or Acastus the holy aspects of the Kings were performed by a Head of State, but the secular office of Kings was transformed into Archons; and with Medon the line of life archons continued smoothly in the royal family.

            Let us see the chronology. According to Late Antique common opinion Ion was second cousin of Pandion II (see Table 4 earlier). In Eusebius Pandion II ruled from 1307 to 1282. At the Parian Marble Pandion II is mentioned at two entries, at both the numbers are damaged, but the first is probably 11X where 35<X<0 and the second is probably 1062; both in the relative chronology of the Parian Marble. Readjusting again the chronology of the Marble to get 1184/3 for the Fall of Troy the first would be between 1373 and 1339 and the second 1301. So probably Ion took the office of Polemarch in the second half of XIVth century. Finally, Medon, the first lifelong Archon starts in 1069 according to Eusebius and a few years difference is at most in other Late Greek historiographers.

            It seems that in Mycenaean times Aristotle's King was the wanax and his Polemarch was the lawagetas. But then what is old Laertes? I do not know; but some 850 years ago the Japanese produced Retired Emperors regularly. During the Taira Civil War Retired Emperor Antoku was drowned in a maritime battle. He was 5 years old.

            Let us again take Item 31(152) from [39]:

 

Wa-na-ka-te-ro te-me-no. To-so-jo pe-ma: GRA 30. Ra-wa-ge-si-jo te-me-no. GRA 10. Te-re-ta-o. To-so pe-ma: GRA 30. To-so-de te-re-ta: VIR 3. Wo-ro-ki-jo-ne-jo e-re-mo. To-so pe-ma: GRA 6.

 

C. 1100 in Pylos Wenadeus lawagetas has almost the honours of Enkhelawon, the wanax. But only the honours. He has a temenos. But only so much land as the average telestas. I think the importance of the title lawagetas is exaggerated.

 

PART 5: ON THE HISTORICITY OF THE ODYSSEY AND OF ITS HEROES

 

5.1. CLASSICAL GREEKS ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF ODYSSEY

            For Classical Antiquity the author of the Odyssey was Homer, who was generally a well-defined person, even if different historians identified him differently. (We would tell that this was so because a whole sequence of aoidoi, maybe from the Homerid clan, formed the text for centuries; and surely the text seems to be composed of blocks and in hexameters old lines are often reused.) The person was mainly put into Aiolis or Ionia; in Classical Antiquity seven cities were mentioned as his birthplace, the most popular 3 having been Smyrna, Chius & Colophon. In Classical Antiquity literary experts and historians obviously used various literal traditions, so not only his birthplace but also his father varied. Also the origin of his name; the idea that the name "Homer" comes from an Aiolic word "blind" is old. There are sometimes quite mythic ideas that his father was a river god (e.g. of River Meles) or that his mother was a water nymph. But he is generally a solitary man, from Dark Age, his texts then being maintained by the Homerids.

            But there is also an interesting tradition, preserved in a Latin ms. from the time of Emperor Hadrian. Some experts argue that a part of the text goes back even to the sophist Alcidamas of IVth century [2]. The text is called alternately as Certamen, or The Contest of Homer and Hesiod. For any case the extant text of the Certamen tells that Emperor Hadrian asked the Pythia who was Homer, and the seeress answered that he was the son of Telemachus & Epicasta, daughter of Nestor of Pylos.

            As for the time he worked, Herodotus put him 400 years before Herodotus' time [46], so into the middle of IXth century; and see the Parian Marble, renormalized here as told in Chap. 1.9, giving 882. This might have been the majority opinion, but if the Pythia was right, Homer lived in the XII-XIth century. Even this earlier date is marginally conform with the transmaritime traditions: a rudimentary Aiolis existed in 1100, Miletus was on the Eastern shore of the Aegean from Late Hittite times, and the Ionian exodus started in 1052 according to Eratosthenes.

            So for the overwhelming majority of Classical Greeks Homer was historical. ?He may be non-historical for lots of Modern historians; but Eratosthenes was 800 years after him accepting the longest chronology while we are minimally for 2700. Also, in the times of the Alexandrian Library (whose senior researcher was Eratosthenes) already scientific/scholarly criticism and community already existed; so the datum is not simply a guess of Eratosthenes.

 

5.2. ODYSSEY PATCHED TOGETHER BY AOIDOI

            We now generally believe that the Odyssey was a work of subsequent generations of aoidoi, mostly on the Eastern shore of the Aegean and on islands nearby. For Classical Greeks this would have been almost a sacrilege; but in a weaker form the idea was not impossible for the Alexandrine scholars. They compared the written texts of Iliad & Odyssey, and found differences. Now, they knew only myths about the origin of the Greek writing, but they did know that originally the text was maintained orally and the written texts go back only to c. 550. So they assumed that behind the different written texts there were diferent oral traditions, so the extant text was being formed and reformed by aoidoi for centuries. They excised the probably late lines and marked dubious ones.

            We now believe in more substantial alterations in the Iliad, and for Odyssey, we believe in blocks patched together. So, for example, the "Nekyia", a great part of Canto XI, may have been originally quite independent.

            Indeed, in real time the Odyssey narrates c. 40 days from the Island of Calypso, maybe in the Western Mediteranean, to Ithaca [11]. The other stories are stories which Odysseus tells during these 40 days. Anyone could have inserted a new story.

            If we accept both Eratosthenes [18] and Ref. [11] (which are at least objective works, not literary critisism), the odyssey of Odysseus was 5 years, not 10. The 10 is for symmetry with the Iliad; so you may expect lots of interpolation indeed. And see at the Cyclic poems. (Strictly speaking, Iliad & Odyssey are also in the Cycle. There are 6 non-Homeric poems in the Ycle, from 5 non-Homeric authors, see Table 8 at the end of this Chapter.)

            It seems that the Cyclic texts were known for Classical Antiquity and became lost either in the Dark Ages after Antiquity, or maybe somewhat earlier when scrolls were replaced by codex-type manuscripts. The neglect of the financial problems of the Alexandrian Library after Ptolemy VII did not help either. However synopsises are extant, and Virgil uses them intensively in the Aeneid. They are as extensively discussed as it is possible from fragments in [2] and go very briefly as follows, mainly after Proclus' synopsises

            The Cypria (by either Stasinus or Hegesias, but let us accept the first for definiteness' sake) tells the things just before the Trojan War, most definitely the "abduction" of Helen. It narrates the two assemblages of Greeks in Aulis, with the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, and Artemis stealing her from the altar. It ends with the Cryseis affair and a Catalogue of Trojan allies, so smoothly going to the start of the next one.

            Which is no other than the Iliad.

            The Aethiopis of Arctinus of Miletus tells the last but one stage of the Trojan War, from the arrival & death of Penthesilea, Queen of Thracian Amazons to the cremation of Achilles, and the argumentation of Odysseus & Aiax, after which Aiax kills himself.

            The Little Iliad of Lesches of Mytilene (or Pyrrha) starts with the above mentioned strife of Odysseus & Aiax, tells lot of nice stories about Odysseus, including his secret negotiations with Helen, and the Woodden Horse. It ends just before the Fall of Troy.

            The Sack of Ilium by Arctinus of Miletus starts when the Greeks apparently sail away, leaving the woodden horse on the shore; the Trojans take it into the city, Aeneas leaves with his followers to Mt. Ida, Sinon signals to the returning Greeks, and "iam ardet proxima Ucalegon", as Virgil writes. Troy falls, the Greeks exterminate the male members of the royal family plus Polyxena, former bride of Achilles, and take the womenfolk as captives. Menelaus takes home Helen.

            The Returns by Agias of Troezen tells the returns of Greek leaders, excluding Odysseus. It ends with the return of Agamemnon, his murder, the vengeance of Orestes; and finally the homecoming of Menelaus & Helen.

            Here comes chronologically the Odyssey.

            And finally the Telegony of Eugammon of Cyrene. Odysseus goes to a wandering prophesized by Tiresias in the Nekyia (Od. XI) until he meets somebody not recognizing an oar. Then he might go home; but he does not, and marry Callidice, Queen of Thesprotians. Later he returns to Ithaca, but is incidentally killed by Telegonus, his son by Circe. Then Circe makes some rejuvenation magic, Telemachus marries Circe and Telegonus Penelope. (But Scholiast Eustathias mentions Calypso as mother.)

            Now observe that the stories are not in contradiction with Iliad & Odyssey, even if the emphasis is different and the Telegony is hard to be reconciled with Zeus' promise in Od. XXIV, 483. Hence lots of experts now assume that they are the newer, written into the holes of the two great poems. But let us see the ancient opinions. They vary, but for Alexandrine times a kind of consensus arrived. So:

 

Poem

Author

Florebat:

Note

Cypria

Stasinus

850

1

Iliad

Homer

882

2

Aethiopis

Arctinus of Miletus

776

 

Little Iliad

Lesches of Mytilene

660

 

Sack of Ilium

Arctinus of Miletus

776

 

Returns

Agias of Troezen

740

 

Odyssey

Homer

1100 or 882

3

Telegony

Eugammon of Cyrene

568

 

 

1          According to Tzetzes Stasinus, son-in-law of Homer finished Cypria from a material given him with the bride of dowry. This, and the Parian Marble, gives the datum.

2          Parian Marble

3          The first datum is from the Certamen (as the Pythia's opinion.)

 

Table 8: The Epic Cycle

 

Now, the Cyclic authors others than Eugammon give lots of details from before, during, and just after the War, but (at least according to Proclus) not about Odyssey. The Telegony seems to give details about Odysseus not in Odyssey; and he may have connected non-Odyssey tradition about Odysseus [1] but not the anti-Penelopean stories of [9]. So we may seem some traces of various Dark Age Cantos about Odysseus; some collected into the Odyssey, some not. As for the Iliad, it is clearly a patchwork, but this belongs to the next Chapter.

            Homer occurs twice in Table 8. This is so, because it is not obvious that the proto-texts were not independent.

 

5.3. TROY

            As for the historicity of Troy, we may be positive. Troy was excavated by Schliemann, it was demolished by fire &c. Earlier layers show demolitions by fires or earthquakes. It is not impossible that its previous demolition, is the one which the tradition assigns to Heracles and puts into the childhood of Priam, old during the Troyan War.

            So far, so good. But obviously Iliad's Troy is much larger than the archaeological Troy. At a point Iliad mentions 50,000 defenders, which could not have been even quartered in the real Troy. Poetic exaggeration is always possible, but here the exaggeration is absurdly extensive. See also the 10 years of the siege for so small a fortress. But there is a way to preserve "the essence"; not the literary/poetic one, but that a transmaritime expedition happened, for ~10 years, and finally the Westerners won it, but with great losses. I immediately draw a crude picture of it, but first let us discuss more signals for a patchwork.

            E.g. the weaponry obviously comes from different times. Figure-8 shields appear together with whole-body shields and with (round?) bossed shields. Chariots appear as regular war "machines", but chariot tactics is nowhere. Except for a command of old Nestor the chariots are simply vehicles, carrying the Greeks from the shore to the battlefield; there the heroes step down. Some heroes are shown by moderns to belong to other stories not extant now. There is no mention of the Hittite Empire expiring just in the years of the Siege of Troy not far away. And so on.

            Well, this is just as we expect if the story was patched together after centuries of turbulent times and great changes. A story about the last great and victorious adventure of the Good Old Times. Nobody anymore remembers the details, and the aoidoi repeat quite well formed lines of half-forgotten stories. Surely the Iliad is a patchwork.

            But what about the size of the real Troy? There is an alternative. Either the Greeks were not in contact with Troy for decades after the Iliad, completely forgot the dimensions, and absurdly exaggerated a raiding expedition against a small fortress, or Troy was simply a fortress in a key position but the expedition indeed was substantial.

            The first horn of the alternative can be easily ruled out. The general area of Troy was already in Aeolian hands less than a century later; and nobody seriously doubts the Aeolian connections of the author of the Iliad. Even the language contains lots of Aeolisms, even if its dominant layer is Ionian. If one was even minimally interested in Troy in 1000 or 900, he met some Aeolian and asked him about the locus. However the second horn is hopeful.

            50,000 defenders are impossible in the real Troy. However Iliad mentions various actions not at Troy. The Greeks take "cities" (of unknown sizes), take captive women, treasures and so. Both Briseis and Chryseis are taken in such actions. Not only Cypria but Iliad as well mentions lots of Asians & Thracians and so. Both Briseis and Chryseis are taken in such actions.

 

5.4. ODYSSEUS

            As for the Odyssey, it does not look as a patchwork, but it is be such. No clear greater anachronism is seen. Of course the palace economy is hazy. In Ithaca we do not know what really was the palace economy (and wait for the next Chapter anyways); but surely Nestor's Palace in Pylos should have been more grandiose than described in Odyssey; but this may be simply a simplification. The Palace of Alcinous may quite be an idealisation of a Palace of Mycenaean Greece even if Scheria is not a real place. Some adventures are clearly fables, of course. Scylla & Charybdis may be allegories of the Messina Straight, with its serious ebbs & tides, giving a theoretical problem to Aristotle almost a millennium later [23]. The cyclopes are clearly sailors' stories and no doubts, were taken from a lost poem. The Sirens near to Naples are from another fable or myth. A great part of the Odyssey is stories which are told by Odysseus to various listeners; and we do know that Odysseus often lies. (Jaynes would tell: he already can lie. In Od. XIII, 287 Athena reacts very positively when Odysseus can) To be sure, according to our present knowledge there is an anachronism in a false story. At Od. XIX, 177 Odysseus tells a story as Castor Hylakides, the Cretan, and describing the population of Crete mentions 3 Dorian tribes. Now, we do know that Odysseus is just lying. But even in a lie, he would not mention Dorians on Crete, 74 years before the Return of the Heraclids. Line 177 is surely a bad historical knowledge well after 1104. (Or is here something connected with the Doric Mystery? I do not believe in this solution too much but I mention a possibility in App. E, with the discussion of 3 Doric phyles before even the Invasion.)

            However Canto XIX, Line 177 is "not important from the viewpoint of our topics". We are here not interested in the details of the Odyssey, but in the "global picture". from the viewpoint of social changes, Coming of Iron & such the "esssence" of Odyssey is: the Wanax of Ithaca went into the Eastern War c. 10 years ago and there are no reports about him. Then he arrives from the West without (or: with only a few) followers, and kills the basilei looking for the Throne and his wife, Penelope; and this happens (± a few days) on April 16, 1178 (Julian calendar). This core story may be true or untrue, independently of the stories about monsters with six canine heads or with singing females with birdie legs mentioned by the hero earlier during feasts. If the core story is more or less true, then Odysseus is historical.

            Then first let us see the datum. That comes from astronomy: a total solar eclipse happened at that day, near to noon, on Ithaca. Maybe it was observed on a few nearby islands too, but on not many: solar eclipses have narrow strips of totality. No other total solar eclipse happened on Ithaca for ±150 years. Greek astronomy was unable to predict total solar eclipses until c. 400, and total solar eclipses definitely were not recorded in the Dark Age. As far as we know in Greece such records did not exist even in Bronze Age; and the Bronze Age records were unreadable later anyways. Merely a total solar eclipse without details may have been orally preserved as an omen; but only if something important coincided with the eclipse. Aoidoi centuries after 1178 could have patched together a fabulous and interesting adventure story and could select a name for the hero; but not with a total solar eclipse on a possible year and in a good season.

            In the last years Litsa Kontorli &  Th. Papadopoulos excavate on Ithaca at 4 hopeful sites of which one has the inspiring (but of course not in itself serious) name "School of Homer". In 2005 a clay tablet was found with the Linear B sign 09, which is "-se-" [47]. (Well, it is also -se- in Linear A and Cypriote; the sign was originally probably a trident.) Later reports tell interesting news about a 3-story substantial building (Odydsseus' Palace), used from Middle Bronze to Roman times or try to interpret the tablet. While I saw only redrawings, a composition with terrible lack of any perspective seems to show a man tied to a mast, around with a monster composed from an octopus and a mammal head (which is interpreted by somebody as Scylla), a half-man, half-pig (which is believed to be a companion turned by Circe into a pig) and a half-bird, half woman (which may be a Siren, especially because in Classical Greek she would be Seiren, so in Linear B se-re or se-ra); as if the drawings would illustrate Odysseus' travels. Well, in 2005 the tablet was mentioned [47] as "badly-preserved", we should be rather cautious; but at least the Linear B sign is not out of context.

            And in addition there is the local cult of Odysseus mentioned in Chap. 1.6. I would tell that the historicity of Odysseus has good odds.

 

5.5. AGAMEMNON

            Agamemnon in the Iliad is Wanax of Men, Lord of Mycenae, High King of Mycenaean Greece, High Leader of the Greeks in the Eastern War closing in 1183. This of course does not prove historicity.

            He is also father of Orestes, Electra, Iphigenia/anassa & Chrysothemis. But neither he, nor any of the children is attested on contemporary tablets, statues &c., so this is also not a proof. Of course no statue inscriptions were ever found from Mycenaean times, and any clay tablet inscriptions mentioning Agamemnon would have destroyed on the command of Aigistus & Clytaimnestra in a day after killing Agamemnon; but there is still no proof.

            Everybody in Classical Antiquity regarded Agamemnon as historical (see e.g. Aristotle's On Marvellous Things Heard #106), but this only means that everybody believed him historical.

            However a Hittite King mentions an Attarsiyas of Akkhiyawa or something such. This is surely Atreus the Akhive, and this is a text contemporary to the respective Atreus. And in all the myths Atreus is the father of Agamemnon & Menelaus. So Atreus seems historical, and he had descendants. So it seems that in c. 1190 Mycenae had a wanax whose ancestor was Atreus, and why to search for another name than Agamemnon preserved in tradition. Of course myths are myths, so it is not sure that he was the son; he may have been, say, a grandson.

            Agamemnon’s son Orestes, Wanax of Mycenae &c. is abundant in mythography. However let us be careful. Greek mythography has evolved into two modern disciplines: our mythography is about deeds of gods (be they real or imaginary according to the opinion of the modern scholar), while the other part is History (invented or real, maybe interpolated for political reasons too). A good example is Iosip Vissarionovitch Dzhugashvili (1879-1953), bloody tyrant and Chief Secretary of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of USSR for decades. He is surely a historical person. But some deeds of him may have been invented for political reasons. E.g. he may have been the natural son of an Ossetian merchant (indeed his mother was the handmaid of such a one), but there are no records for the paternity, and the official parent was Georgian; First Secretary Dzhugashvili (in the Movement Stalin, from stal', steel) was vehemently against the idea and the poet Mandel'shtam perished in a camp in 76 BP for disseminating the idea of Ossetian descent (and you can look at the present Ossetian-Georgian relations to understand the previous sentences). Or; before the XXth Congress of the said party hundreds of stories of his magnifience were the parts of official Soviet history; they were purged after the said Congress. Also there were probably-sounding stories that until 1936 at the visits of important Western delegations co-nationalist Ordzhonikidze personated Dzhugashvili being taller and generally more heroic-looking. (And then Comrade Ordzhonikidze suddenly died, details doubtful). So inventions in the details do not rule out the historicity of the person.

            However his official birthday is 21st of December. Now that is the Winter Solstice. Lots of ancient Sun Gods/Goddesses were born/rejuvenated on such days, and lots of sons of Them were born then. So even if I. V. Dzhugashvili was not declared Sun God (he originally being a devout Christian of a sort, and later a devout Atheist), the detail of his birthday is now Theology. (And indeed he was in official history not only steely but bright &c. too; something "as the Sun" for the Soviet peoples and the oppressed masses abroad.)

 

5.6. MENELAUS

            First see which I told about Agamemnon. Of course, myths abridge and simplify, so he may have been not the brother of Agamemnon, but for example a cousin.

            In the State of Laconia Menelaus had state cult. Votives were found in the excavations of the Menelaion at Sparta [6]; more to Helen than to her husband; no surprise, Helen, real or a Moon-goddess, was believed to be daughter of Chief God Zeus.

 

5.7 ORESTES & SONS

            Orestes is the brightest hero of a lost cause in Greek history, son & avenger of the murdered Agamemnon; Wanax of Mycenae but ousted by a revolution (or what), fleeing from the Erynnies until Athens (this is surely Athenian propaganda), marrying Hermione, daughter of Menelaus, so inheriting Sparta too. In later years he is mentioned in Arcady (which became, as we know from dialectology, the last refugium of Akhives on the Balkan); but also in connections with Elis, Thebes, and most importantly, in the Aolian Exodus.

            According to any Ancient Greek text extant, Agamemnon's rightful heir and avenger was his som Orestes. While some details may be interpolations & inventions of later authors, if Agamemnon existed, he should have children. I personally have doubts that the name was originally Orestes. That name seems to mean something "mountaineer", and refers probably his later connections with Arcady; the question will be discussed in Chapter 6.4.

Muzaffar Demir, from Muğla University, Turkish, so the rightful recent champion of the Aiolian Cause, wrote the story from Asia Minor's viewpoint [48]. The majority of the story belongs to Chap. 6.4 and will be told there. But I cite here a sentence of him: "In view of the above mentioned sources [Apollodorus B.2.7.8; Thucydides 4.134; Herodotus 1.67-8; Diodorus 9.36.3; Velleius Paterculus 1.1.3 and Pausanias 1.33.8, 2.18.5, 2.31.4, 3.1.5, 3.3.5, 3.11.10, 3.16.7, 7.1.7, 7.25,7, 8.5.1, 8.5.4, 8.34.2, 8.54.4. Note that these authors, maybe with the exception of Apollodorus, were historians. B.L.], though one could question, but not definitely say that Orestes was not a real figure within the politics of the Mycenaean World despite the fact that, as in the case of any Meycenanen [sic!] hero some mythical aspects are attributed to him”. [The sentence is rather convoluted, as Uralics and Altaics tend to form them, including me; and we form the emphasis also in quite different ways because of our free word orders so an emphasis of ours does not always come clear for an Indo-European. The responsibility is of course completely ours in such cases; but still the English language has its shortcomings compared to our ones.] Now if Herodotus, Thucydides, Diodorus, Pausanias, Velleius Paterculus & Demir regarded Orestes as historical, I do the same.

            However the name is worthwhile to discuss. The 3 or 4 sisters of Orestes have names fit to wanassas: Iphigeneia/Iphianassa, Chrysothemis & Electra are grand names. Orestes on the other hand seems to mean "of the mountain" or such. Surely Agamemnon would have given a grander name to his probable successor. It  looks rather a nickname or a nom du guerre. Something is still ununderstood here; but this argues for historicity. To an imaginary figure in a legend surely a grander name would have been given.

 

5.8. NESTOR

            Nestor also is not attested in contemporary texts; but let me repeated: Mycenaean texts mention proper names only for annual inventories. It seems that the tablets were inventories, tax records & such, they were on raw clay, and were not turned into permanent. (I cannot imagine why.) Only total destruction preserved the tablets by fire, so the records of the last year are available. While Mycenae burned repeatedly, we cannot be so fortunate in every city.

            Immortals may be well attested, because their temples are long-living. But in Pylos we know only the last wanax' name is preserved in the final fire: c. Enkhelawon. (And his lawagetas is Wedaneus.) And there is no chance for him to be the son of Nestor. We return to this question in Chap. 5.10, but let us see the Classical Greek historians.

            According to Eratosthenes the Fall of Troy is 1183. According to Eusebius, a descendant of Nestor got the Athenian throne in 1127. According to Thucydides the Thessalians' migration to Boiotia is 1124; but this two data surely coincide since Prince Melantheus won in a duel against a Boioian/Thessalian chief somewhere in the neighbourhood of the border of Boiotia & Attica, and it is hard to imagine a major attack against Attica with a still unconquered Boiotia left behind.

            The two data can, however, be approximately simultaneous if we take into account a chronological convention of the Classical Greek historians. For events after the first Olympic games they counted forward but often only for a 4-year period between 2 games. Now, 1127 & 1124 are nearer to each other than 4 years, so they were virtually the same negative Olympiad, so historically simultaneous. And obviously these pre-Olympiad data are only approximate.

            This dating will be crucial, but the 3 year controversy is not important. Namely, Enkhelawon at the destruction of the Pylos palace is very probably not a Neleid, but also, it seems as if in 1127/4 Prince Melantheus could aspire to the Athenian throne even against the ruling autochtonous Athenian King (wanax). Even without knowing the details, this story has any sense only if in 1127/4 Melantheus belongs to a dynasty of a strong, organised and far enough state. Then the Neleids in Pylos were deposed later between 1124 & 1104, maybe in the very last years. 3 years do not matter, but it is important that the Palace of Pylos stand still in the 1120's.

            OK, recent archaeologists do not like this, mainly because the ruins of the Pylos palace practically do not yield Postpalatial/LH IIIC finds. We return to this in Chap. 5.10. Of course it matters not too much if in 1178 still old Nestor was the wanax, or he was dead and a son of him ruled the state; the age of Nestor may be a nice literary topos. But the ordered succession of the Neleid line, if happened, is important.

 

5.9. OTHERS

            I would rather doubt the historicity of some “secondary” figures of Odyssey. Some of them may be historical, some could have come from other, now completely lost, compositions, and a few can be quite fictitious. Hexameters are not easy to compose, the text evolved during the whole Dark Age, and it is not always easy to change names when mora counting, syllable counting, accents &c. all count. I demonstrate the problem only with one wanax: Neoptolemus, son of Hero Achilles.

            Achilles is the real protagonist of Odyssey's predecessor story, the Iliad. He is a young hero, dying at the end of Iliad, so, if the Classical Greek historians were right, in 1184. If the war took 10 years, then it started in 1193, and then Achilles was on the verge of being adult.

            While 1193 is simple algebra, the second half of the sentence is mythography. Namely, of course, everybody can remember the story about the daughters of King Lycomedes of Skyros. Well, of course, Achilles' mother was Goddess Thetis, and knew that if her son goes to Troy, dies there. So she gave him female garb, named as Aissa, and asked Lycomedes to keep him as one of his daughters. OK, and he produced Neoptolemus with one of the real daughters, Deidameia.  Then, after Achilles' death Neoptolemus joins the Panhellene army, perfoms secondary class heroic deeds, then returns home, thence goes to Epirus, there becomes wanax and when Odysseus massacres the suitors of Penelope, Neoptolemus is the mediator preventing the vendetta.

            Now, this curriculum vitae is impossible. Even if the Trojan War took 10 years, at its last year Neoptolemus could not be older than 11. Too young for heroic deeds. In addition, when Achilles went to Lycomedes, he must have been a young adolescent, otherwise he could not have been shown as a maideb=n. OK, maybe he was adolescent enough to fertilize Deidameia, so, say, he was 14. If we take everything in face value, then Achilles was born in c. 1207, and Neoptolemus in c. 1194. Then in 1178, when the suitors are killed, he is 16, and already King, not in his paternal city Iolcus, but in far southern Epirus. This is highly improbable. In addition, obviously the 10-10 years of the war and of Odysseus' Nostos are very probably poetic exaggerations, as we explicitely shew it for Odysseus' adventures at least.

            The chronology can be rectified in various ways. E.g. we may assume, that Neoptolemus was the Epirote wanax, with no original connection with Achilles, but in the Dark Age a quite unfounded claim of the local royal family was accepted. Then such a Neoptolemus might have been historical; and then what?

            And surely the sea monster Scylla was not historical at all.

 

5.10. THE PROBLEMS ABOUT THE LAST DAYS OF PYLOS

            It would be necessary to know the time of the destruction of the complex called "the Palace of Nestor". We do not know if Nestor had lived there; the only wanax whose habitation is attested on tablet is Enkhelawon, Last Wanax of Pylos, who tried to defend it, unsuccessfully, against foreign invaders. Surely that was an invasion, not an internal strife. Tablets tell us about the alert of Army & Navy. The most tempting explanation for the invaders would be the "Return of the Heraclids" rolling up the civilised realms of the Peloponnesus in a short time, maybe in years according to historians of Classical Antiquity They put it to c. 1104.

            However we cannot confirm this dating from, say, C14 of the charcoal of the destruction, and I, as a physicist, do not expect such improvement of radiocarbon methods in the near future. Let us see why not.

            The accuracy of C14 ages is a much discussed topics. As you will see, I cannot give a final answer to the question which demolition horizon is synchronous with the final burning at "Nestor's Palace" in Pylos, even if the Pylos finds are abundant. For this let us see first the problem in general.

            Originally the C14 method seemed simple enough even if a precision measurement. Cosmic radiation transforms some N14 of the atmosphere into C14 via a reaction

p + γ → n + e + ν                                                                                                                    (5.10.1)

The C14 abundance is small, but easily measurable; let us call the C14/C12 ratio n0≈1.5*10-12. The living organisms are c. in equlibrium with the environment, but after death the ratio starts to decrease according to an exponential decay law; so in bones &c. we find a lower ratio, depending on the time between the death and present. Both n0 and the half life time is easily measurable in nuclear physics laboratories (for the half life time now 5568 years seems the best value) and the terrestrial atmosphere is a global reservoir; so the archaeologist's task is to take a measurable amount of unadultered piece of a bone or charcoal from the layer and transfer it to a C14 laboratory. The method was first suggested in 1946, and a methodical check on 1000 - 4500 years old samples in clear historical contexts showed that the method worked; the error at c. Mycenaean times seemed very roughly 150 years.

            Then lots of refinements happened. Let us write the results symbolically as

              Age = tlab + b ± δb ± σ                                                                                                           (5.10.2)

Here the first term comes from the measurement, and the fourth term is the statistical error of the measurement, decreasing with the improvement of the nuclear technique. The second and third are the bias. Namely there are distortions too. The third term is for taking into account our uncertainty of the bias.

            It seems that now σ of the Mycenaean samples is well below 100 years; however together with δb the statistical error is 100 years or greater. Let us see why.

            In major parts b and δb are connected with the changes (both in time and in location) of n0. E.g. n0 is time-dependent. Cosmic radiation, and especially its solar component, is known to be time-dependent (it depends even on the 11-year cycle of sunspot number) but also n0 depends on climate, which changes with time.

            To see the reason of temperature-dependence, a good amount of CO2 is dissolved in the oceans. That is "old carbon", so C14-poor. But with increase of global temperature water can dissolve less gas, so in the time of rising temperatures some "old carbon" goes into the atmosphere making n0 decrease. And so on. There are lots of such effects, summed up in the bias. Some of them is still not understood, so it is hidden in δb.

            Ref. [49] summarized the status of art about 40 years BP, when Mycenaean archaeology was already in motion. Let us take thence a Mycenaean-age Egyptian date. The reed artefact is connected with Ramses II (1290-1224). However uncalibrated evaluations gave 1180±50, marginally still possible. Some older artifacts, however, gave impossible dates.

            Now, dendrochronology helps to measure b(t). If you have old enough living trees, then you can count the tree rings, and in the same time can measure the radioactivity in that ring. This in itself decreases the Mycenaean ages by c. 250 years. Ref. [49] estimated the combination of the third and fourth terms to c. ±100 ys about 1200.

            However as time goes by, newer and newer distortions are recognised. I mention only one here, found by an all-Scandinavian group trying to C14 dating the last century of the Viking presence on Greenland (600-500 BP). All dates were too old, except an ox from Brattahlid, the farm of the Founder [50]. It turned out that Greenland Vikings went over seafood, and seafood contains lot of "old carbon" as seawater has. In a more or less historically dated cemetery from 600-550 BP at Herjolfness [51] the wool garments gave 580±15 BP, but the bones gave c. 1000 BP.

            Pylos was an important seaport, Mycenae was an inland city, and Knossos was a seaport on an island. I do not expect C14 synchronicities amongst them better than c. 1 century.

 

Now, at the end of the Chapter, let us summarize the situation as follows.

            1) The Pylos palace was destroyed when Enkhelawon was wanax and Wedaneus lawagetas [52].

            2) Enkhelawon expected the attack and organised the defense.

            3) Up to now no physical methods can date the event better than "LHIIIC", and no useful synchronicities have been found either.

            4) While later use of some parts of the Palace seem probable [53] [54], it seems that Enkhelawon was the last wanax.

            5) While Enkhelawon may have ruled any time during LHIIIC, by definition he must have reigned before Postpalatial.

            6) Postpalatial is believed to be sometimes in the second half of LHIIIC. Dickinson puts it [8] tentatively to "1180/40".

            7) With a destruction at c. 1180 the Nestor story of Odyssey would be sheer poesy. However this dating is improbable. Even 1140 would be slightly too early. In 1127/4 a Neleid prince from Pylos has still enough influence to be King in Athens. His enthronement in Athens not necessarily marks his ousting from Pylos either: in Iliad & Odyssey Nestor has many sons, so Melantheus may be a grandson of a son who never ruled.

            8) Palaima discusses orthography & grammar of Pylian scribes under Enkhelawon [52], and identifies Hand 24 as probably "the personal scribe" of the wanax, possibly from Sa-ra-pe-da. The home dialect of Hand 24 is the "Special Mycenaean", not the Standard Chancellery language. Palaima has Polish & Lithuanian roots. Both languages distinguish Dative & Locative; Lithuanian even more than Polish has a full 7-case paradigm. Now, Palaima detects confusion between Dative (-ei) and Locative (-i). During the subsequent Dark Age Locative coincided with Dative, except a few Arcadian inscriptions coming from remnants of Achaians. Palaima considers this dialect "substandard" but his discussion leads to the idea that the dialect of Hand 24 was more modern than that of the Palace. While I agree with Palaima that this is not enough to believe that Hand 24 is "proto-Doric" because the Dative takes the functions of Locative also in Ionian & Aiolian, obviously Hand 24 is an uncouth countryside speaker; and if he is the personal scribe of the wanax, then the wanax must also be too a homo novus. Maybe Enkhelawon was the last effort of the Pylian ruling class to counter the external barbarians. If so, then the Neleid lineage was indeed ousted but not much before 1104. But of course this is a speculation, too hazy.

            9) As told at the beginning of this Chapter, it is tempting to believe that the Returning Heraclids were the invaders. But then it was in c. 1100, and then there was no Postpalatial Age in Pylos at all. And at the last year of the reign of Enkhelawon, Last Wanax of Pylos, the tablets reflect working redistributive economy.

            10) As a Hungarian I am familiar with working redistributive communal societies. Of course that which I was familiar was not optimal; still worked. Now, Schofield [55] detects shortage of tin already before the Fall of Troy in Pylos: in Nichoria a workshop did not produce new bronze by alloying but reworked old bronze. Indeed, rulers of subrecent redistributive societies bw. c. 65 & 25 BP not only lived together with shortages but regarded them as ideologically useful. Of course Mycenaean rulers did not need this ideological support because then no working individualist society existed as a competitor.

            My point is that “Postpalatial”, if we take the term in face value, is not a time period, but an interval of the process going out of Bronze Age. LH IIIC Tiryns is “Postpalatial”, because according to modern archaeology, the Palace had been partly renovated, but obviously without true palace economy. So we may tell that in Tiryns there was a Postpalatial, during LH IIIC, so between, say, 1180 & 1104. Homer tells something very similar about Sparta, even if there the LH IIIC finds are doubtful. But in Odyssey Sparta is peaceful (with some obscure mention of recent disturbances), and we are only 5 years after Troy, so pottery styles did not have been changed. Then according to Odyssey the society in Pylos is still the old one in 1178 and the palace is intact. Now, this statement is not necessarily true, but at least self-consistent. If the palace is intact in 1178, then the way of life, including pottery styles, do not have to change drastically.

            And, as told, C14 is a good dating method, but only non-physicists can believe a less than 40 years σ between two cities of different environs. Even with the improbable σ=40 years the chance for a random fluctuation of 2σ=80 years would have 5 % chance, small but not smaller than the mistake of all Classical historians. My opinion is that present C14 cannot decide if the Pylos palace was demolished in the post-Troy disturbances in, say, 1180, or in the Doric invasion, say, in 1104. Of course, physics, archaeology, ethnography, sociology properly combined maybe could...

 

5.11. AND WHAT MAY HAVE HAPPENED DURING LH IIIC?

            This Chapter is highly uncertain, because of our present lack of knowledge.about LH IIIC history. Almost nothing is certain in this short century; however it existed and still belonged to Late Bronze Age. Reconstruction via mythology is almost impossible because the main part of mythology is pre-Odyssey stories. Indeed, Graves in the closing story of his "Greek Mythology" tells that Odyssey is not a last myth, but the first novel. Some myths may belong to LH IIIC, since e.g. Orestes is the younger contemporary of Odysseus and some other myths may carry some details belonging to it; but the great heroes of mythology, Perseus, Tantalus, Atreus &c. belong to earlier periods, if any. Even Heracles seems LH IIIB1: in the stories the Late Bronze Age environment is undisturbed.

            Classical Greek historians performed a Herculanean task of removing inconsistencies and patching together a chronology; but of course their material archaeology was rudimentary as well as their social sciences. Until decyphering Linear B by Ventris & Chadwick [39] and the (unechoed so undetected) Marxist reform by Tőkei [5] everybody tried to think if essentially Iron Age terms, albeit without iron.

            Now let us see what would be our task about LH IIIC, and what is the task whose satisfactory fulfilment unfortunately has a small chance even now.

            Everybody now seems to put the beginning of LH IIIC to c. 1190 and the end to c. 1100. And this seems quite reasonable. Erathosthenes puts the Fall of Troy to 1184-3 [18] and Thucydides puts the start of the Doric Migration to 1104 [4]. The 80 years between is mainly unknown and surely was full of turmoils. Even from Odyssey it is clear that after the Fall of Troy the Mycenaean social order starts to decay; and from the undated part of late myths as well as from the Oedipus and Orestes stories we learn something about usurpations, raids &c. in Balkan Greece.

            As I told in the previous Chapter, this 80 years is practically within one standard error of C14 if we calculate both measurement errors and biases. So we are left with relative chronologies, pottery, mural & building styles and Classical Greek historians; so we cannot be sure. And still: the 80 years have happened, therefore we should fill them in.

            The expression of Postpalatial Age used by recent historians expresses something important. Surely the ancient age of heroes, remembered as e.g. the transient improvement of the declining human nature just before Iron in Hesiod, at the end did go down. With strong enough decline the old magnificient (or at least big) palaces went to disrepair and finally maybe abandoned. However: when?

            And why? From Odyssey (and from some other Cyclic poems, unfortunately not extant), it is clear that internal struggles started just after the Fall of Troy. Agamemnon is killed, Aegistus usurps and child Orestes is smuggled away; Odysseus' return takes at least 5 years and an attempt of usurpation waits for him; Teucer emigrates to Cyprus and founds Salamis &c.

            To be sure, this is not yet the Arrival of Iron. Iron has not yet arrived at the Balkan, it is just going to arrive, as was told in Part 2. That will be an important factor later during the Submycenaean.

            The calculation shown in Part 2 suggests c. 16 smiths in Greece in 1105. While this number is utterly unreliable, it still demonstrates that in the eve of the Doric conquest alternative weapon sources independent of wanakterial courts were no more impossible.

            I will return to the dialect of Enkhelawon soon. But a coup d'état before 1104 does not mean "before 1124". These troubles are rather political troubles, maybe in the troubled Anatolian situations the Wa tern tin trade routes are also disturbed, and especially, I guess, the consequences of a prolonged and at the end unsuccessful Asian adventure did not help either.

            Of course, the Siege of Troy was finally successful. But if you compare the remains of Troy with the mention of occupied cities and the description of the Asian coalition in Iliad, obviously the goal originally was greater and Troy was only a partial success. Even at the end Troy is abandoned as well. The Black Sea route has been opened; but it is then not used. It seems as if total exhaustion of the winner led to troubles at the beginning of LHIIIC.

            And, finally, how to live without palaces in Bronze Age Greece? Communities without centralised society could have not remained civilised beyond, say, 10 years. The reason is twofold.

                First, land property was originally communal. We saw in Part 4 that there was no private property of land in Mycenaean Greece [5], so serious agricultural problems would have arisen when  State vanished from above the peasants. This is, however, an arguable point. Maybe the wanakterial system collapsed but the basilees took over and an oligarchy of them governed State. Then the Palace remained empty (or was destroyed and not restored) and still Life went on, for a while, and amongst internal chaos from time to time.

            But, second, Tin was hard to get. When State went away, the long-range merchants went away too, and there came no Tin anymore. While reuse of bronze helps somewhat, a bronze society has her death sentence without new tin. And Iron only started to arrive.

            So even in Postpalatial Age society could not have worked without palaces. While this seems to be a contradictio in terminis, it really should mean a different State, with another way of organisation, with smaller but still existing wanakterial power. Maybe a weak wanax with a strong lawagetas (this we do see in Pylos under wanax Enkhelawon although historians classify his Pylos as Palatial because the Palace is still intact). Maybe not even under the title wanax. Remember Athens in next century where after the self-sacrifice of the Neleid Codrus the ruling family separated religious roles from secular ones and continued its rule as mere Archons for Life [19], [23]. Or think about the various rulers in Europe after our First World War when the material infrastructure was restored but there were ideological crises and various movements came to power claiming the necessity of reforming/upturning the old order and styling the bossman as Duce, Führer, Caudillo (all meaning loosely Leader), or by more communal societies The First Secretary of the Central Committee (even he was also called alternately Vozhd' = Leader). Note Italy between First and Second World Wars where the traditional kingdom with its ideology remained and simultaneously a Duce emerged with high power. We do not know how „Postpalatial” bossmen styled themselves; but surely this changed from state to state. It is even not necessary to believe in the same social organisations bw. 1190 & 1100 throughout the whole Greece; in our semirecent history bw. The World Wars the old governing order remained in Great Britain, France and a number of smaller states mostly Kingdoms (of which Hungary was unique keeping the Kingdom ideology with an empty throne and with a Governor until the throne was empty, definitely not with the same rights as a King), while in Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Russia individual tyrants emerged and in smaller Eastern states the situation was simply liquid. Mutatis mutandis, this may have been the situation in Postpalatial/LH IIIC.

            As for individual states let us see Pylos, Laconia, Mycenae, Tiryns & Athens, of which we have the most information for this short century. Some information comes from mythology, some from Homer and some from archaeology.

            Pylos yields a great quantity of archaeologic data including written texts. I have already discussed these, and only repeat that there is no trace of serious ideological changes until the final destruction of the Palace (this is seen from the Pylian tablets, not from Odyssey), which seems to be caused by outsiders. I also have told about my doubts to narrow down the uncertainty below one century, and the whole Postpalatial does not seem longer than c. 50, maximally 80 years [8]. So there is no archaeological evidence either for or against a Postpalatial Period in  Pylos. (LH IIIC finds are rare there.) On the other hand myths & Cyclic Odyssey & Nostoi speak about the undisturbed LH IIIC reign of old Nestor, and Greek historians speak about rule of the Neleid lineage for at least 2 more rulers. In contrast, no myth or Classical historian speaks about Enkhelawon, last wanax of Pylos according to modern archaeology, who surely was a homo novus [52].

            As for Homer, he is exhaustive about Pylos. The wanax is old Nestor who was under Troy as a fighter, and one of his sons, Antilokhos, is killed there. In 1178 he is at home and Telemachus meets him first at the seashore, making an old-style and peaceful hecatomb with 4500 Pylians. 6 living adult sons are mentioned by name, and one, Peisistratus, is mentioned in Od. III, 400 with a formula which seems to be a transparent rewriting of the lawagetas, the leader of people. It seems that the Arabic system of Chapter 4.5 is at work in Pylos, but the lawagetas is not a very important office because Peisistratus is the only unmarried adult son. Canto III emphasizes the traditional and peaceful rule of Nestor.

            We know next to nothing from modern archaeology about Sparta and the Palace of Menelaus, except that there were some buildings in the neighbourhood. Homer in Odyssey sings about peace and familial happiness of Menelaus & Helen in 1178; but the society seems as a hybrid of Palatial & Postpalatial. Menelaus is rich and he definitely has court officials as e.g. Eteoneus who is either a herold or an officer or both. We hear about a great banquet too, but nothing about the throne-room, and then the story continues in the „private flat” of Menelaus. And Od. IV, 621-3 describes another banquet without a proper Palace economy; the guests of the banquet bring in the animals, wine and bread.

            The modern archaeology of Mycenae started too early without advanced methods, to exact dating is difficult. However lots of frescoes and hoards are extant; and mythology deals much with wanakes of the city. Unfortunately Eusebius is equivocal [19]; he writes both that Aigistus killed Agamemnon and that he ruled 35 years and Troy fell in the 18th. Mythology and Classical history both speak about the usurpation of Aigistus, the vengeance of Orestes, the ousting of Orestes, the return and his marrying Hermione, daughter of Menelaus & Helen. It is not sure that all the stories are true; but later Aeolians honoured the memories of Agamemnon & Orestes, so surely he was the latest great Achive wanax. It is also sure that his rule was full of crises.

            It seems that during these crises Tiryns regained her own government. Mythology & Classical history is almost silent, but modern archaeology is not, and Tiryns is almost the only explicitly Postpalatial find [56]. (The other is Midea.) Tiryns is well known because since the 80’s a methodical excavation supervises the finds of c. 1910. J. Maran [56], [57] reports quite new results.

            In Tiryns the palace (the Upper citadel) had been completely destroyed at the end of LH IIB (which is roughly the Fall of Troy, see Tables 1 & 5), as the nearby Mycenae, and as Mycenae it also was rebuilt; but in a new way. The new megaron was built within the ruins of the walls of the old one, but did not have a hearth. The Throne got exactly the same place as in the old megaron, but the entrance was new, so the throne was visible for the moment of the entry. The new altar was erected in the place of the old one, but its form was different. No frescoes were in the new megaron. Some rituals happened in nearby rooms but at lower positions. There were no other substantial rooms on the top level. The debris had been cleared away at points where it weas necessary for processions &c., but otherwise it was left in unused rooms. The Middle and Lower citadel, on the other hand, were more populous than before. At the lowest level a very unpalatal lifestyle can be observed, with individual bigger buildings surrounded by small ones. And so on.

            Now Maran believes that he sees signals of changed ideology/society. The throne is evidence of one individual on the top; however the megaron is not a living place of the wanax, but a “conference room”. No hearth, so no hearth ideology for the wanax (in mythology supplicants sit in the ash of the hearth &c.). Separate rooms for ritual deeds may mean that the wanax did not claim ritual holiness. The palace economy was not restored; it seems that both the chief men and the wanax were left for their own devices in their own houses. And so on. (And I, with my experience in the least communal of the really communal states before BP 22, and with the theory I learnt from Tőkei [5] can tell that the more communal state the more grandiose communal works as e.g. building activity. A really communal Tiryns LH IIIC would have cleared away all the debris.) And the Tiryns Hoard, found in the December of 1915 contains gold, ivory, cups; but also unworked bronze and an iron sickle. The second shows that Tiryns still existed when Iron arrived, but the iron sickle was still somewhat either exotic or expensive; and the first indicates that tin was hard to acquire.

            And note that the picture of new Tirynthean life looks similar to Menelaus’ new life in the Odyssey.

            In Athens society survived the crises, but crises did happen. Myths, Classical historians and  Marmor Parium all know about Theseus' exile, Menestheus' coming into power, then Theseus' lineage regaining power. Later, c. 1125 comes the last native Athenian Wanax, Thymoites, who is, by some Classical historians, accused with fratricide or slovenness, or both. He is replaced by Melantheus the Neleid, son of Andropompus, „from Pylos”, and under the new dynasty Athens fights against the Doric invasion. While she is successful, ideology changes. This is shown first by „the reforms of Theseus” of which some may be newer by a few generations [5], and obviously by the state reform after the death of Codrus, described in details by Aristotle [23]: the wanax separated his religious and secular powers, the first was taken by a High Priest, formally the second official continued to be the Polemarch, surely an alternative title of the Lawagetas, and the real leader was the third man, the Archon, from the family of the wanaktes. (Look; this is the Hungarian system between BP 56 & 22: a figurehead President of the Presidium as First, a Head of the Council of Ministers with autonomy in everyday matters as Second, and the true Power as the First Secretary of the Ruling and Only Party and a common member of the Presidium as Third.)

 

PART 6: POSSIBLE SOFT LANDINGS DURING THE DARK AGE AND THE WAY TO TRIBES

 

6.0. FROM STATES TO TRIBES

            When the alphabetically written history emerges from the clouds of the Protogeometic then Archaic Age, we meet personal and city names more or less familiar from Homer, and legends. Now, reading Linear B, the feeling of continuity is even stronger. Later grand names appear in Linear B as names of ordinary people, e.g. Aigeus, Akhilleus &c. and familiar city names as Knossos, Mycenae, Thebes &c. But the similarities do not include geopolitics.

            The domains of wanaktes are roughly comparable for size to the later bigger city states; but internally they are, as we saw, not city states, and the Mycenaean World seems to be culturally homogeneous. Hardly any dialectal differences are seen in the Linear B tablets.

            When Greece emerges again from the clouds of analphabeticity, a few big dialectal groups are there, also with some misty dialectal identities: these are c. the Dorians of Doris, Peloponnesus, the Southern Aegean islands, Southwestern Asia Minor and Magna Graecia, the Arcado-Cyprians of  Arcadia, Cyprus and Pamphily, the Ionians of Attica, the mid-Aegean islands and the middle part of the shores of Asia Minor, the Aiolians of the Troad and the norther shoreline of Asia Minor, the Northern Aegean islands as e.g. Lesbos, and, in lesser extent Boeocy and Thessaly, and finally a not too well defined Northwestern group. Obviously migrations and a few centuries of separate evolutions, of which now we do not know enough, formed these dialectal groups.

            Also, in the myths, whose time is c. the Mycenaean Age, Greece is “cosmopolitan”: a hero can come from anywhere and kills the king, marries the widow or the heiress, Heracles’ mother descends from the Peloponesus but lives in Thebes and such. On the contrary, end-Archaic people generally remains in the proper dialect group, e.g. the father of Hesiod flees some famine in Aolis and emigrates to the mainly Aiolic Ascra, Boeocy. OK, state power went down at the end of the Submycenaean, new types of cohesion formed, and we see hazily these.

            Observe that the old, Bronze Age, Mycenaean societies were “communal”. Either, as the Hungarian Marxists told, because the private property of lands and other substantial tools of production have not yet come into existence (they had not yet come, indeed), or, as Jaynes told, because Mycenaeans were still of bicameral mentalities, everybody misidentifying his/her own right hemisphere with Father, Mother, Wanax, Guardian God or such, and so behaving himself/herself as a nice communally-minded person, or because of a combination of the two, or because of any other reason, say because of the faraway sources of Tin. When the Dark Age is over, we see relatively individualist polis citizens, privately owning their lands and discussing their tasks. We not only do know from history that this was not a matter of one generation: obviously somebody socialized as a cog of Community could not perform the jump into Individuality, Liberty and his/her own Responsibility. Some exceptional persons could guess more about the nature of changes; then they organised groups. Later Greek poets remember them, and the later reality is the groups they forged. The later classifications are essentially fourfold: Ionic, Doric, Aiolic, Achaean (plus the ill-defined “Northwesterners”, some “inclusions” and such). Now, Achaeans in the Classic times lived mainly in Arcady, and our linguists could detect the Achaean origin of the Cypriots too. Ionians always told that they survived the Barbarian incursions after the Fall of Troy in Attica and then came the Ionian Exodus to the Aegean islands and to Asian Ionia from 1052 led by Neleid Princes. (As for the earlier origins stories did exist, but obviously the identity was forged in Attica; the City of Athens was successfully defended against Doric barbarians about 1090, the only greater Mainland territory where society survived the end of Mycenaean civilisation.) Aeolians become those who participated in the Exodus from Boeotia to Aiolis, and even if Thucydides knows about the original links between Boiotia and Aiolis, Aeolians practically did not have a mother country on the Mainland. Finally Dorians were the conquerors, the winners at the old territories, except for Athens, were they were unsuccessful, and in Arcady where they maybe were not fanatic to win.

            By other words, it seems that the new tribes were formed according to the outcomes of Early Dark Age wanderings and struggles. Dorians, Ionians and Aeolians may have been local groups somewhere earlier, giving their names to the new entities. As for these original groups, we know next to nothing, and guesswork is being done since Classical Antiquity. Dorian/Doric as group name has PIE etymology, deru/doru being something "tree/forest" [58], so it might denote sylvan people or wildmen or pastoralists; according to some guesses, even "hillmen". Classical Doris was a hilly region, but not the only one where people lacked/were free of the Mycenaean redistributive society. So original Doris might or might not be the Classical one. As for the original Ionia, it is a commonplace for Athenian authors that it was on the Northwestern part of the Peloponnesus, c. the later Elis. However Athenian authors are not self-consistent. According to the Attidographers & Aristotle Ion, maybe the first Polemarch (lawagetas) in Athens [23] was second cousin of Wanax Pandion II c. 1350. For us now Ionians is a group having group identity as defenders of Athens against Dorians bw. 1104 & 1052, and then both who participated in the Ionian Exodus and those who remained in Attica. Even if obviously some of them originally were Pylians (e.g. the Neleid princes and their retinue) and maybe other Northern Peloponnesians as well. The group identity seems to have been formed bw. 1090 & 700. As for the Aiolians, even educated guesses are not easy. They seem to be Northerners, and "civilised" in the same time, so the defeated but not subjugated Northern city-dwellers. The group identity occurs for us in the Aiolian Exodus, c. 1127, and anybody may look for an earlier Northern group giving its name to the emigrants. However the problem is that the Exodus was organised & led by the rightful heirs of Agamemnon, from the South. On the other hand the Aiolian dialect may be archaic, but it does not seem to keep specifically Mycenaean archaisms. Maybe the analysis of the relatively new Thebes Linear B texts will show something.

            There is no problem with the fourth tribe. It looks as if some Mycenaean city-dwellers (so Achaeans proper) took themselves into hilly Arcady. The Arcadian dialects indeed preserved some Mycenaean remnants (as traces of the old 7-case declension paradigm, e.g.). But for lifestyle they rather reprimitivised; the redistributive Mycenaean society vanished, and Arcadians forgot their Cypriot brothers.

            As for the intradialectic "tribes" (phyles), Dorian cities had 3 as a rule. In Ionian cities this number was originally 4 (in Asia Minor occasionally 6), so Ionian & Dorian societies were not the same in their hypothetic "primitive" stage; which is, of course, natural if this "primitive" status was secondary or nonexistent in Ionia. As for Aiolis, lots of peculiarities (as e.g. the multiple basilees in Skepsis according to Strabo (XIII, 1, 52 of [20]) of the Aiolian society demonstrates it. As for the Achaeans in Arcady the data are poor, but agriculturists/pastoralists of the surrounds of Mycenaean cities are not expected to remember the primary organisation before the State. Even the Dorian three-phyle system may be secondary because of the phyle names. Pamphyloi is surely “Men of Various Tribes.

 

6.1. EMIGRATIONS

            We did know about big emigrations even centuries ago and now know more; but not yet everything. It seems that the first big exodus was to Cyprus, where according to the Parian Marble Teucer founds Salamis during the Odyssey. Dialectology confirms the close connection between Mycenaean and Cypriote, so the emigrants may have fled LH IIIC problems. A contemporary Achaean emigration into Magna Graecia is an idea from Classical times; but not proven.

            Then comes the Aolic exodus around the death of Orestes; synchronous with somebodies’ migration from Thessaly to Boeocy, and some Northwesterns’ to Thessaly in c. 1127. Classical texts are unclear: a term “Thessalian” may either mean the Old Thessalians going to Boeocy, or the Northwesterners just settling down in Thessaly as well. For any case Greece is still cosmopolitan. In 1127 Melantheus of Pylos saves Attica in Boeocy (surely against old Thessalians trying to continue the march into Attica), becomes the next Attican King, and his son, Codrus, in 1090 becomes the martyr hero of Attica.

            It seems that the subsequent Ionian exodus is mainly led by Neleid offspring. And no more great exodus is meant in Classical sources; colonisation campaigns start after 3 more centuries from overpopulated urban centres.

 

 

6.2. LEUKADE

            The so far most important and rich site revealing the LH IIIC – Submycenaean/Protogeometric border's both sides is at a village on the island Euboia between Chalcis & Eretria whose Antique or even Katharevousa name is not known. In Dimotiki it is Lefkanti. However note that -ef- is the Dimotiki pronunciation of the Classical -ευ- diphtong before consonants, -ντ- often stands for the simple consonant -d-; the pronounciation of -δ- being no more -d-; and Dimotiki -ι is continuing also original -η, -υ, -ει &c. To me, the „most Classic” name not in contradiction with the written Dimotiki form sounds as Λευκαδη, i. e. Leukadę, but I  am no Classical scholar. For any case, the first half is from λευκος=white, and similar toponyms are known, as e.g. that of the island next to Ithaca, Leucas, now written as Leucas/Lefkas/Lefkada.

            There are theories that Leukadę was called Lelanton, Old Eretria or Old Chalcis. We do not know; but we do know from Thucydides that Chalcis & Eretria fought the first war after Troy where lots of cities were involved but the opponents were two Greek cities [4]. The details were somehow confused even for Thucydides in Vth century, and for details oral tradition is controversial, but it happened sometimes in VIIIth century. In Classical times Chalcis &b Eretria were substantial but not too big or important cities, but it seems that in the VIIIth century they were amongst the leading ones of the Greek world. This is supported by Strabo's notes [20] that many cities of Southern Italy were founded in the early colonisations by Euboians, Aeolians or both; e.g. Cumae was such a joint foundation of Kyme of Aiolis and Chalcis of Euboia, and near to Cumae Pithecussai of Chalcis & Eretria is the first known inscription in alphabetic Greek coming from Phoenician. Either Etruscans instantly took it second-hand, ot the inverse way happened.

             Leukadę supports this story of early Euboean grandeur. The city of unknown name existed since Middle Bronze Age. During LH IIIC some calamities (e.g. burning) did happen, but the city was restored rapidly. And the population remained there after LH IIIC (see e.g. [59] or the site of the British excavation group [60]). After LH IIIC the civilisatoric level remained more or less constant.  Leukadę was not a center of a Mycenaean redistributive state, we do not know if she belonged to one, may have been a market emporium, or a port, did not have a palace or palatial economy; somehow it seems to have been self-supporting and so had the chance to survive. And indeed it survived.

            Of course, after the Burning of Palaces there was the Problem of Tin. We do not see tin shortage in Leukadę, but if they were merchants/sailors, this is not too surprising. And we see signals of good maritime connections with Cyprus, whither Mycenaeans just were emigrating. Cyprus was the Copper Island; and, while it did not produce tin, a copper island had imported tin. Also, Iron went to Cyprus slightly earlier than to Greece (look at maps, it is near to Eastern Anatolia), and Iron is early in Leukadę in Greece. It seems that c. 950  Leukadę erected the biggest Greek building after LH IIIC, the „Heroon”, either the grave of the local chief, or his mansion, or a temple or all of this; true, it was a woodden building, but 14 m x 50 m big, with lots of funeral goods for the chief and his wife. It seems that  Leukadę was not as big, but was richer and more civilised than contemporary Athens, Sparta or Corinth.

            And then came the Lelantian War. It was the biggest war since Troy, and for duration the tradition goes up to 60 years (surely exaggerated); the city became abandoned. The inhabitants went to either Chalcis, or to Eretria. And roughly in that time Hippocles of Chalcis and Megasthenes of Kyme co-founded Cymae in Campania, according to Strabo the first colony in Magna Graecia. Not everything has been lost in the Dark Ages.

 

6.3. OTHER AEGEAN CENTRES

            According to the previous Chapter islands may have proven better sites for civilizatoric survival, i. e. survival of societies than the mainland. Namely, the Mycenaean society was communal, with individuals „at their places”, superiors told underlings what to do, the wanax ordered far Tin and so on. Such civilisations, while hardly competitive, are quite viable; Egypt, Kar-Duniash (=Babylon) and Assyria was working quite well, and indeed Egypt of the New Kingdom seems to have been a nice (albeit strongly layered) society. However, individuals being kept strictly on their places, these societies were conservative, did not invent too much, and if great changes came they broke down because of rigidity. Now, an island is isolated, and a shipping relay port or an Aegean might be part of the Aeolian & Ionic exoduses, discussed immediately. Rhodos, however, may be Akhive. Strabon [20] mentions Tlepolemos of Tiryns, who led people to Rhodos „before the return of the Heraclids”. But Tiryns was a good example for unsuccessful but attempted adaptation and a trial for building a less pyramidal society.

 

6.4. OTHER CENTRES ON THE MAINLAND

In recent years several mainland cities/towns were reported surviving the end of LH IIIC better than expected, but none so well as Leukadę. The great Peloponnesian cities were either destroyed or taken just after 1104 by the Dorians.  Be the Dorians anything suggested so far, either a barbarian Greek tribe on the far Northwest, or oppressed proletariat of the Mycenaean cities, or hillmen/foresteers outside of palace economies, their takeover was not good to preserve the old civilisation. The End of Palaces, 90 years ago, was still survived in Tiryns, the citadel was restored in some extent, a wanax continued to sit on the throne then; but not after the advent of the Dorians.

Of course out-of-way towns might be successful, as Amyklai, Orchomenos or Gla; and first of all, Athens. Let us see first Athens.

Athens did survive, for a while under the old dynasty, and later under another Mycenaean dynasty, the Pylian Neleids, as we told already. According to the Attidographers, Thucydides, the Alexandrines and Eusebius the Dorians did not take Athens when they took the Peloponnesus; some 15 years later they tried with a siege, but the King, the Neleid Codrus, sacrificed himself and the Dorians withdrew, Athens became for a while a refugium for the old civilised states, and then started an exodus of the population surplus to „Ionia” on the islands of the Aegean and on the Eastern shore. Any details may be falsification, but the whole picture cannot. Surely old Athenian institutions differed from old Doric ones, the Ionian and Dorian calendars differed, the 3-phyle Doric system was different from the 4-phyle Athenian; and excavators do not see breaches on the city wall or demolition at the Acropolis from that time. And the King/Archon lists are continuous. The last 2 Kings are Neleids from Pylos, the great city of Nestor, already demolished when King Codrus sacrifices himself for Athens, and after him come more than a dozen  Neleid Archons for Life.

Still, we do not see too much preserved ancient knowledge/lifestyle. Writing is not preserved in Athens, at least there is no later mention of the old writing system. Pottery styles change in parallel with New/Dark Age Greece. When writing reappears, the Athenian dialect does not show a recidive locative, instrumental or ablative. Maybe the Dark Age in Athens was not as dark, as in Mycenae, but was not too bright either.

And now let us see the 3 mentioned smaller cities. Both Gla and Orchomenos are in the generic area of Thebes. Maybe when the non-Mycenaean Thessalian Boiotes in 1127/4 took the later Boioty, the Mycenaean population retreated to Orchomenos. The later Classical sources and myths are full with age-old Theban-Orchomenan strifes.

Gla was not a palace of any size but a substantial tower-fortress. Classical myths do not mention it, and the name is modern. But archaeology shows that it was a center of some kind during the Dark Age. But we do not hear about old civilisation saved in these 2 centers.

Amyklae is somewhat more hopeful. We know that when Sparta, originally the old city of Menelaus the Atreid, Lord of the Menelaion, was just 4 Dorian villages, Limnai, Mesoa, Kynosura & Pithane, Amyclae was their most fanatic enemy. Later Amyclae was taken (into the confederation of villages, such increase of Leagues, Federations & Unions happened in history and not always in common will). Amyclae kept sufficiently exotic traditions & rites to be recorded centuries later by Classical sources. Now, recent excavations show the continuity of ritual acts not only in Amyclae, but also in the 4 villages of Old Sparta. Some continuity of the population is also probable. But this is not new at all.  Ribáry [61] 126 BP mentions lots of cult practice continuity with the Achive times in Sparta, the cults of Menelaus and the Dioscurs and the old Achive Talthybiades clan as the herolds of the new kingdom. Still, we do not see old Golden Age wisdom and civilisation preserved.

 

6.5. AIOLIS

            Aeolians were never too interesting for highbrow historians, mythographers and philosophers. One of the  rare counterexamples is Plato's letter to Hermeias, Erastus and Coriscus. He obviously wants to plot with them, but the letter is so careful that we now cannot understand it. Another counterexample is Aristotle, foster son of „Proxenos of Atarneus”; that obscure person might even have been the proxenos of Atarneus, a small Aeolic state, later in the youth of Aristotle, part of one of the rare examples of a super-polis territorial states of the Greek world. (Other examples before Alexander the Great being Laconia, Attica, Macedon or the Kingdom of Bosphorus.) Atarneus in the 340's was part of a state stretching from Assus to Atarneus, Atarneus seems to have been the titulary capital, Assus the biggest city, and the state was led by Herm(e)ias, Tyrant of Assus, father-in-law of Aristotle.

            Athenians were not interested, Spartans even less, so moden historians are neither. Still, the exodus happened, Aeolians carried to the Northeastern Aegean shore the Mycenaean civilisation, and excavations corroborated a relatively civilised and Mycenaean-rooted lifestyle. Still we do not see any „lost wisdom”; and Aeolic language is no more Mycenaean than Ionic or Doric. Inscriptions show a standard 5-case nominal paradigm, the „Newspeak”, the sound vau is better preserved than in Ionian, but there are other examples of this in the mainland, and the Aeolic dialect is simply the third of the first-millennium Greek dialects which do not go back to Mycenaean [38].

            This is obviously a consequence of the fact that, albeit the Exodus was organised by the sons of Orestes of Mycenae, Wanax of Mycenae & Sparta, still the masses were Northerners, kins of the Boiots, the mysterious descendents of Aeolus. They might have been in some connections with the Pylian Neleids; according to mythographers Neleus went to the Peloponnesus from the North; but LH II history is not yet really written. However, clearly, substrate influence could also complicate the situation, if we heed to Garrett’s note about the origin of Greek.

            As told earlier in Ref. [38] Garrett observes that in the Mycenaean texts the vocabulary is very “Greek”, but the nominal paradigm is good Nuclear PIE and phonology is between Late PIE and Greek. His opinion is that the “Greekness” of the vocabulary is a result of heavy infusion of Aegean words (surely Kulturwörte as local plants, spices, the bathtub &c. The time bw. 1900 & 1200 was not enough to seriously alter the nominal paradigm (and not too much for the verbal one either). But, since borrowed words do not block partial understanding, an IE continuum still existed. And this is seen by Garrett in the verbal paradigm where Eastern dialects in First Millennium BC still are similar to Hittite while Western ones to Latin, Oscan & Umber. But some of the Eastern shore Indoeuropeans seems to have spoken dialects c. 1500 involved in the solidification of the Greek as a language; Garrett calls the attention of Attic-Hittite vs. Doric-Italic common linguistic elements [38]. Demir mentions Tantalus and Pelops going from Mt. Sipilus (later Aiolis) to Mainland Greece [62]; and their Greekness was never in doubt. It seems that in their time the kentum IE’s of the two parts were within common understanding. What difference existed was forgotten in a generation. Later the differences between the two shores may have increased, but they were rather near and then the idioms of the Eastern shore may have been assimilated by Aiolians (in Ionia the differences may have been bigger or the lifestyles more different; see the next Chapter). There are even Classical stories (see e.g. Strabo [20]) where Aiolians identify themselves with the Trojan side.

            Aiolians sometimes even identified themselves with the Trojan cause. Strabo [20] in XIII.1.27 cites a citizen of Ilium. In the war against Mithridates the Roman army occupied Ilium in 10 days, and the commander was proud to be able to take Troy in 10days while Agamemnon spent 10 years with the siege. Yes, replied the citizen, because we had no Hector. The citizen did not take too much risk: the Roman also identified himself with the Trojans.

            Anyways, Aeolians in Archaic & Classical do not show too much interest in sciences. Their lifestyle is unique in the role of women and in sexual mores, and this may be Mycenaean inheritance; or not.

 

6.6. IONIA

            Ioni a was interesting to Classical Greek historians and is also for our ones too. Still archaeology and Classical chronology does not agree. The Classical dating is, as we saw, 1052, and there are no clear archaeological finds for more 2 centuries. I cannot solve the ambiguity. Still, the Ionian colonisation cannot have happened much later, otherwise all the Asia Minor shore would have become Aiolian. But the obscure period is analphabetic.

            The claims for the leading role of Ionia belong to a later period, just before Classical Ages and it seems that these claims are real, even is slightly exaggerated. Surely the Ionian exodus was organised in the biggest Ionian city, Athens, not demolished in the Doric invasions. The key roles of Neleid princes can also be true. But two old claims cannot be true. First, not all the leaders could have been Neleids, because Athens was not subjugated by Pylos. After 1127 the Kings were Neleids, but there is nowhere anything indicating that collaterals of the old Athenian royal family or countryside strong families would have been massacred, exiled &c.; and even the Neleids have planned it, they could not realize it after some time bw. 1127 & 1104. So, surely, not only Neleids led the exodus.

            And surely the Ionian migrants were not all Athenians. On the islands they met people whose language was similar to that of Athens, but not the same. These they could have easily assimilate; by any chance the differences did not hinder mutual understanding. Later, in Early Classical times Attic and Ionic were 2 clearly different written dialects.

            Surely the migration transported ways of life, old knowledge &c., much harmed on the mainland (except Athens) in the Troubles. That is quite understandable that for a while Ionia led in philosophy, industry and mercantile activity. What should be surprising for us is that later Athens, the mother city of Ionia in the “Old World”, was able to pass again Ionia.

            We cannot understand the details of early Ionic colonisation without clarifying the role of Miletus. Miletus is Greek well before the Trojan War. Hittite documents write about Millawanda in the Akkhiyawa land, and everything in the Hattusas archives must be pre-LH IIIC. The Akkhiyawa tablets are not well dated, 50-100 year differences are known, but they are surely from the heyday of the Hittite New Kingdom. So it is common opinion that Miletus was a Bronze Age Akhive seaport.

            Now, it seems that Miletus survived the Troubles as a Greek city and then surely it helped the incoming Ionians. In later centuries it was considered a Ionic city and now we do not know its role before and just after 1052.

            At other points the incoming Ionians met local resistances of not well identified peoples, Karians, Leleges &c. who remained in the Greek historical tradition, but whose languages and sociologies were rather obscure for the Classical writers and definitely “non-Greek”. By any chance the majority of these peoples were Indo-Europeans (as in the interior we know this about the Phrygians and on the South about the Lycians), and then some old common traditions existed, even if the Phrygians were satem Indoeuropeans, so evolved independently by more than a thousand years. Also, we may guess that the Indo-Europeans of later Ionia did not participate in the formation of the Greek language/“nation”.

            Namely, late sources know about fights in the future Ionia, e.g. Herodotus [46] tells a terrifying story of genocide after the exodus in Miletus. The pattern is: to kill the men and subjugate the women. No doubt, such things happened. On the other hand, he writes about more than half a millennium old events, from oral tradition. But here was no such tradition in Aiolis. It seems that the autochtones of Aiolis felt themselves closer to the Westerners than those of Ionia; one glue to bind together is the common or at least understandable speech.

            We practically do not know anything about the languages of Karians & Leleges but they may have been Indo-Europeans; Phryges definitely were. Lycians and in the heart of Asia Minor also were such. However the Anatolian group evolved more than 2 millennia separately, and the Phrygians spoke a satem language separated from kentum Greek at least for a millennium [63]. Garrett's idea that until 1400 Greek still was a dialect of a continuum from the shores of Asia Minor to Central Italy can be true only for kentum non-Anatolian dialects. Now, if the pre-Exodus Indo-Europeans of Anatolia were kentum people and there were satem speakers in Ionia, that is an explanation.

            There are also “traditions”, e.g. about the proper place of women. In Classical times Ionians mixed men and women least in society, while Aiolians the most. In the Mycenaean civilisation and maybe in Asia Minor in the time of the exodus as well women were less separated than in Classical Athens.

            Maybe this is behind Herodotus' dirty story. But maybe simply he, the Doric, was simply surprised about sexist Ionians. And the story even may come from the foundation of Miletus, generations before Troy.

           

6.7. CRETE & AL.

            Crete is a big island, and relatively separated from the mainland. After Minoan times it was politically fragmented. Odysseus' stories told under the alias Castor Hylakides mention about 90 or 100 cities, different languages and different peoples. After the Dark Age it is still fragmented, mainly Doric, but the Eteocretans, probably the descendants of the Minoans, are still majority around Praisos at the Eastern extremities of the island, and Cydonians on the West exist until Classical times. So, although the Dark Age history may have been chaotic, no genocide happened. There is no trace of “preserved ancient civilisation/knowledge” in the Praisos area, but neither in the Doric part. We see an egalitarian, “Doric” civilisation everywhere.

 

6.8. CYPRUS

            Cyprus is a successful exodus of the upper layers of the old Mycenaean society, just during the emergence of the Troubles. (Teucer, a prince of Old Salamis, founds the new one in Cyprus a year after Odysseus gets home.) Until Alexander the Great the Greek part of the island keeps its aristocratic lifestyle, its Arcado-Cyprian language and its syllabaric writing. For the other Greeks Cyprus is very exotic, and, for example, the aristocrats keep the chariots, which go out of use everywhere else during LH IIIC.

            But we do not see old wisdom or elsewhere lost civilisatoric level, when the Dark Age ends. And the island is too far to influence much other parts of Greece. On the other hand, during the Dark Age Cyprus might have carried an important role in the overseas shipping, at the beginning of the Troubles amounted a lot in the tin trade, and had Iron Age a few decades earlier than Mainland Greece. Maybe Cyprus was a stabilizing factor when Dark Age went on.

 

6.9. MAGNA GRAECIA?

            Dark Age Magna Graecia was and is a mystery. It is an idea since Classical Antiquity that Sicily & Southern Italy got emigrants at the end of the Trojan War. Romans preserved the Aeneas tradition, in which an allied chief of Troy leaves the burning Troy and after lots of adventures arrives at Latium, where he founds the Alba Longa dynasty. From the Greek side the Cyclic epics and local Magna Grecian tradition speak about various heroes becoming shipwrecked or emigrating into Italy. In Frag. 507 Rose [36] of the Constitution of the Ithacans (=Plutarch Moralia 294B) it is told that after the massacre of the suitors arbiter Neoptolemus solved the Ithacan crisis with Odysseus' emigration into Italy, while Telemachus became King of Ithaca. And there is also Butler's idea even if now we know that it cannot have been true.

            And in spite of the idea haunting continuously for 2500 years, there is no evidence for LH IIIC emigration into Italy, while the trade connections is a fact.

 

6.10. ITHACA

            Did happen a Soft Landing on Odysseus' island Ithaca? The recent excavations may find a direct answer, but they probably will not. According to our present knowledge about matters Mycenaean inscriptions and burned clay tablets telling: „This is the grave of Laertes, retired wanax of Ithaca; may his psyche be contented at the Fields of Elysium”, or: „Let every basileus, terestas and damokoros know the will of wanax Odysseus, son of Laertes, in his twentyfourth year of ruling: In the new and unexpected situation we introduce, on the grounds of the success of the reformed Palace Economical System in Laconia of Wanax Menelaus, the following new rules:...”. Such texts were not found anywhere in Greece in Linear B.

            Then: what indirect signals can be imagined if Ithaca performed a Soft Landing in a Greece in turmoil? Without claiming a complete list, we should observe

            1)         a tradition that Wanax Odysseus was a man among men even if more perfect in quantitative terms;

            2)         an early cult of Wanax Odysseus navigating successfully the boat of Ithaca on the troubled waters of the crisis;

            3)         an internal connection between Wanax Odysseus and Transcendent Wisdom;

            4)         a relative prosperity of Ithaca in the transition;

            5)         no mass dying in the transition on Ithaca;

            6)         rapid „modernisation”, anything exactly is meant here;

            7)         later good memory of the wanax at least in Western Greece.

            Now, let us see the items in due course. Some of my arguments will be Jaynesian, but I cannot expect that the readers accept Jaynes' ideas, so the Jaynesian arguments will be given in a different font.

            As for Point 1, both in Iliad and in Odyssey, Odysseus shows a par excellence „human” behaviour, for his men a comrade (but of course he is the boss); for others, Greek or Trojan, he is a cool-minded person. (For us now he seems sometimes a villain, but he is the very early Modern Man, meaning a very modern man according to standards in 1184.) He does not obtain divine commands; he gets advices from Athena, but only from Her, and this belongs to Point 3. Indeed, compare Odysseus of both epics and Hero Achilles dying young and getting eternal fame.  Achilles' mother is a real goddess, he often raves and wins after death, while more or less uninterested about his people.

            For Point 2, the early cult on Ithaca is proven by Sylvia Benton, we do know this since the end-30's,  see Chapter 1.7.

            Point 3 is a triviality. Goddess Athena is the divine Rational Wisdom. (But observe that Athena does not give commands of unknown goals. She advises. On the contrary, Wanax andron Agamemnon gets a divine command to take away captive Briseis from Achilles, this is followed by lots of troubles, and then Agamemnon tells that he is not responsible; it was a divine command, not his will.)

            Points 4 & 5 go together. In recent years data are accumulating about population data in LH IIIC – Protogeometric. Moschos [64] tells that in that period Achaea & the Ionian Islands, and definitely Kephallonia showed relative prosperity and, at least calculating from cemetery sizes, there was population growth, surely by immigration. Reasons may be manifold, but less organised peripheries suffer relatively less when the organisation collapses; and islands may be refugia. But read then [65]: „In fact it is more than likely that the great boost in the pottery production of Ithaki and the considerable influence of the Kefalonia LH IIIC style on the formation of the Ithakan PG, as will be seen below, was due to some emigration from Kefalonia to Ithaki towards the end of LH IIIC.”. So at the LH IIIC- Protogeometric border Ithaca was relatively safe & prosperous.

            As for Point 6 we cannot compare technical details as modernity, and observe that we cannot expect Iron in Ithaca. According to Part 2, 1178 is Bronze Age, and Odysseus wandered on ironless West. However socially the Odyssey is modern. When Odysseus have returned, he is not a Zeus-nourished wanax. He is a basileus who plotted with Eumaeus the swineherd and later also with Phoiloitius, the cowherd & shepherd against men of rank even of Ithaca. (And, according to Aristotle & Plutarch this two would be made clan fathers by Telemachus.) The Odyssey is socially more modern than the Iliad.

            And Point 7 is true too. Odysseus, wanax of small, unimportant, and originally not famous Ithaca is the central and unique protagonist of the second Homeric epos, composed from exactly the same number of cantos as the Iliad, where, however, there is no single hero.

            And at the end Odysseus is successful. Who else in the Iliad & Odyssey? The Trojan heroes heroically die (excepting Aeneas, who flees, but not in Iliad). The biggest hero, Achilles, dies in Iliad. Agamemnon, the leader of the victorious (?) long campaign, goes home and immediately is cut down as an ox by the paramour of Wanassa Clytaimnestra. A number of other heroes & wanaktes, all more famous from bigger kingdoms than Odysseus are lost on sea, in vendettas or by other means. (Menelaus goes home, carries Helen too, and they live happily, after an initial problem which is made obscure in the epos, but which put an end to Laconian Palace Economy. So Menelaus is successful. But he is not heroic.) But Odysseus is successful, and heroic; as Jaynes tells [16]: "From a will-less gigolo of a divinity to the gore-spattered lion on his own hearth, Odysseus becomes 'Odysseus'". This is indeed Point 7.

 

6.11. THE AUTHORS OF ODYSSEY

            The title of this Chapter differs by a mere 2 letters from the title of Butler's work [30], but the result will be quite different. Of course I cannot expect unambigous acceptance; the problem is open for at least 300 years. But I think my proposition will be at least self-consistent. The self-consistent picture will be repeated in an expanded form in the Conclusions, now let us see only a preview.

            I am not interested in the Iliad. The two works are surely intertwined, but that is not too interesting. Even if we honour Emperor Hadrian, the former Governor of Pannonia in Acquincum, which is now District III of Budapest, Telemachus' son cannot have been the author of proto-Iliad. The texts are now intertwined after being orally propagated by centuries. It is believed that Pisistratus fixed the texts about 550, but even Aristotle cites lines in 330 not in our books. And only the great Alexandrine librarians fixed totally the text. Pisistratus could fix the text in Athens, but not for Greece. During centuries the texts evolved, either the Homerids existed or not. Here I am interested in Odyssey.

            Now comes the picture, conform with the excavations of Benton [12-15], Papadopoulos & Kontorli-Papadopoulou [47]. Astronomy of Baikouzis & Magnasco [11] are considered as hard a fact as the excavations. (In both topics misunderstandings do happen sometimes.) The sociology of Tőkei & Marx [5], [37-39] and the psychology of  Jaynes [16] are taken seriously when do not collide with the previous ones. And of course a distinguished Roman Emperor (who was even an honoured Governor of Pannonia earlier!) must get precedence over mere scholars of literature (the Certamen in [2]). All other sources may or may not correct in this Chapter.

            Certamen claims that the actual Pythia told to Emperor Hadrian that Homer was the son of Telemachus of Ithaca & Epicaste of Pylos. You may believe that I am mad; no, only brave. If the self-consistency is impossible, then we have disproven the statement of the Certamen, and that would be a nice result either. (See also reductio ad absurdum in mathematics.)

            Well, obviously Homer, grandson of Odysseus & Nestor, could not compose the whole 24 cantos as we know the work; some parts and innumerable lines came later. (It is just marginally possible that Linear B literacy survived until 1140 and then Homer could write down a composition of many cantos; but Linear B did not write vowel length, did not distinguish some consonants, and had almost lethal problems with consonant clusters.) But the proto-Odyssey must have contained the Circe story, a serious part of the wandering, definitely the sirens and Scylla, because of the clay tablet from Ithaca with such drawings; also Calypso (the startpoint of the direct homecoming (the homecoming is astronomically correct) and the Phaiakes (Benton found 12 bronze tripods in the Cave of Nymphs which were already there when the Odyssey was not yet famous Greecewise). Obviously also some massacre of the suitors must have been in the proto-Odyssey.

            So far, so good. The grandson of Odysseus of course wants to guarantee the everlasting fame of his grandfather & father, not of Neoptolemus or Menelaus. And Nestor may be unimportant in the plot, but he is his other grandfather. (See the Pythia; we are interested here only in self-consistency.)

            Then the proto-Odyssey goes out of Ithaca and lives in the community of aiodioi. It incorporates parts from other works, which afterwards became forgotten as poems. (No writing anymore, only bards preserve the texts, and they sing what they are asked to sing. Nobody is anymore interested in the old songs. There are new problems.). Surely there had been stories about the Greek Landtaking; they are not autochtonous and the Landtaking happened, maybe in phases, bw. 1900 & 1600, so it must have been an orally preserved very important event still in 1183. But now from mythology one gets obscure information back to, say, only 1600 and there is no epic composition. And even mythology does not know anything about the Greek Homeland, which was in less temporal distance than 1 millennium. (Makkay [66] believes that the Homeland was along River Tisa, the area of the Alföld Linear Pottery c. 5500, then that of the successor cultures of copper then bronze Tiszapolgár, then Bodrogkeresztúr, and about 3000 the people went gradually South. I like the picture, but there are problems in it if we use calibrated C14 ages; and I am a physicist, so it is terrifying for me to give precedence to History.) Unfortunately linguistics cannot help. In 3000 all IE languages except Anatolians and maybe Tokharians were in the Late Common IE unity with at most dialectic differences. In 1900, at the Landtaking, very probably all kentum languages (minus Anatolian & Tokharian) were still mutually intelligible, surely Celtic & Italic were and Greek, without the many Minoan/Aegean Kulturwörte as asaminthos = bathtub and hiakynthos was at least similar. And, as Garrett argues [38], with mutual understanding the distinct languages do not evolve. Greeks may have come from almost any direction in 1900, except that not from the satem region.

            However, what is interesting now, neither mythology, nor literary scholarship can answer the question either. So the old stories are lost, and maybe in such a way, that some stories were not sung anymore and the good hexameter lines were used up in the fashionable new stories. In this process Iliad & Odyssey grew. The authors are the innumerable bards.

            But there may have been known authors as well. The non-Homeric Cyclic epics count 6 works: sometimes now we have fragments sometimes only a prosaic synopsis [2]. But we know the names of the authors: and in Classical antiquity all the 5 was regarded younger than Iliad & Odyssey. But very probably Stasinus, Arctinus, Lesches, Agias and Eugammon worked from the same common pool of hexametric lines. The first 2 is definitely older than the alphabetic Greek writing.

            Nekyia may have come from anywhere in any time between the grandson of Odysseus & the first Olympiad. But in the present Odyssey the bard of the Phaiaks sings the very end of the Trojan War, with the Woodden Horse and the final sack. Then look at Table 8:  the stories of Lesches and Arctinus are mentioned in Canto 9 but as a mere 21 lines. Then it is very probable that the Little Iliad & Sack of Ilium were written first and then incorporated into the Phaiak story for some colouring. Even all the 5 non-Homeric authors can be regarded as part-authors of the Odyssey.

            As for the Iliad, it and the Odyssey are intimately connected in their present forms, but a hypothetical proto-Odyssey about the fantastic adventures of the Wanax of Ithaca, his return and the massacre on one hand and the siege of Troy, the ravings and heroic deeds of Achilles and the deeds of the Supreme Leader Agamemnon on the other might originally have been quite independent. Maybe in the proto-Iliad of an unknown author, also much shorter than now, the Wanax of Ithaca appeared only in a few lines as a peripherical king insignificant compared to Achilles, son of a goddess, but still interesting as an extraordinally foxy fellow compared to the others. But when the two proto-epics interacted in the community of bards, the tricks well elaborated in proto-Odyssey diffused into the proto-Iliad.

            Julian Jaynes [16] did believe in the historicity of Odysseus, see Chapter 1.7. Now his reconstruction was that there was a transition from mentalities of the old bicameral ones, where the left and right hemispheres were roughly independent, so the persons visualized the activity of the left hemisphere as their own, and that of the right one as divine intervention. The new mentality worked in the continuous interaction of the two hemispheres. Such a person is always aware about the existence, more tricky and more planning. (No anatomical difference is needed; essentially a different upbringing would result in the new mentality, only initially this is not known.) Now, one of the many kings of Greece about 1190 was nearer to our modern mentality than the others, namely Odysseus. (Persons below the top can be neglected; in the old mentality they perform the commands of the wanax.) That he was trickier than the other kings became important  in a crisis when others met insurmountable problems, and so he could help his people and became famous.

            In the Iliad only Odysseus is self-aware and tricky, and he is not a central figure. In the Odyssey also only he is self-aware, but now he is the central figure making the decisions. And on Ithaca gradually even the commoners became tricky, as the influence of the royal family.

 

PART 7: CONCLUSIONS

 

7.0: HOW TO GET A CONCLUSION?

            This last Part is the summary of the present knowledge. Archaeology is developing; meteoritics as well; and I hope that scholars of history will take gradually the knowledge from physics & chemistry necessary to understand the old Dark Age.

            So first I tell the suggested and self-consistent picture; this is an expanded version of a part of Chap. 6.11, but now it is really conclusion. (Let us call it, for obvious reasons The Hadrian Scenario.) Also, I repeat the self-consistent Coming of Iron in Chap. 7.2. But self-consistency is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Truth, so next I tell some points where later the construction will be possible to disprove. (The well-known criterion of Sir Karl Popper.) Than is Chap. 7.3. A self-consistent scenario is sensitive on consistency, so a bad reconstruction is easy to be disproven. Finally the last Chapter 7.4 will discuss the Dark Age from the viewpoint of Lost Old Knowledge.

 

7.1: THE PICTURE

            1) There are serious problems in Greece at the end of LH IIIB. The exact nature of these problems is not yet clear. Climate changes are possible, but you should not explain everything with climate changes. Population excess is also a tempting explanation, but the Ithaca & Laconia pictures in Odyssey do not support it; it seems that in Odyssey people eat better than in Pericles' Athens, and the environment is also richer. Jaynes [16] offers a reason: the starting breakdown of the older bicameral mentality. This may be a reason, because the breakdown does cause disturbances; but it is more or less acausal to use the breakdown as cause, rather it might have been the effect. (In Iliad everybody is still bicameral except for Odysseus and Jaynes believes that the few bicameral lines are late additions; in Odyssey Odysseus is massively non-bicameral, but the others are not.) But Schofield's excavations in Nichoria [55] detect bronze shortage from LH IIIB. It seems that there was a problem with the Eastern tin trade. If somebody thinks it not a sufficient trigger for a war, think about Pearl Harbor. Japan started the war because of USA trade embargo. In LH IIB every weapon is bronze, and armament is either copper or bronze.

            2) Somebody, very probably Agamemnon, the High Wanax, suggests a way out: a war against the other shore of the Aegean. There were there some Mycaenean bases, e.g. Miletus, and see the Hittite documents about Akkhiyawa. But the majority of the eastern shore was not Akhive territory. Paris/Alexandros might or might not have “abducted” Helen of Laconia, wife of Menelaus, kin of Agamemnon. The abduction is laughable, but adultery is quite realistic. For a casus belli the breaking of the sanctity of marriage as an example of Trojan perfidy is nicer than the shortage of tin. The council of Akhive wanakes vote for Eastern War.

            3) Odysseus, Wanax of Ithaca (and of neighbour lands) is not overzealous. Maybe since he is less dependent in the Ionian Sea on the Eastern trade that Mycenae & Pylos. But to understand this the less bicameral mentality surely helps. He must participate, but he does not lead a full fleet.

            4) Here comes Iliad; but surely originally it was much shorter and more historical. This proto-Iliad has been a subject of reconstruction by us for at least 200 years and the work is not yet ready. Suggestions are manifold, but irrelevant for us now. But Odysseus is tricky in Iliad; the other heroes are not. The expressed immorality of Iliad's Odysseus may be partly true: bicameral morality is quite different from the more modern one, and he stood in between. Surely his experiences under Troy and afterwards formed a lot in his norms.

            5) The chronology of Iliad is not real; very probably it did not last 10 years, but it very probably took a few years. According to Jaynes, the story was composed later from the memory of  confused people in transient stage from bicameral mentality to modern one, and this may explain the contradictions. But Iliad is not a historical work written under Alexandrine norms; it is a poem.  The endyear is fixed by the Alexandrians: 1184/3. Real time starts in the penultime year and ends maybe already in the last one, with the funeral rites of Achilleus, Wanax of Phthiotis. Early events of the campaign are told partly in later Cantos, partly in other poems of the Cycle. When Iliad ends, the real heroes of both sides (Achilles & Hector) are already dead, but la lotta continua. But it is clear from Iliad that the original goal was broader than the fortress of Troy. We even now can detect that Troy and Ilium (in Hittite Taruisa & Wiluisa) were not exactly synonyms, but in 3 millennia confused the usage.

            6) The narrower goal is reached, Troy burns (the details, not necessarily exactly correct, are written in Iliad Parva, Sack of Ilium and the Phaiak part of Odyssey), the city is demolished, the royal males killed, the females are taken captives. But after this the Greek army withdraws. In Iliad as well as in the post-Iliadic part of the Cycle, the Asian coalition plays a non-negligible part. This does not mean that you should take the Amazons of Penthesilea, of Memnon the Ethiope in face value. However now we do know that the destruction of the Anatolian center of the Hittite Empire is synchronous with the Trojan War. Hattušaš's burning is dated to c. 1190. Something big is just happening East of the Halys just when Achilles and Hector are warring at the shore. Of course, the attackers of Hattušaš could not have been the defenders of the shore.

            7) Troy had been destroyed and never restored in its old glamour; its gold, silver & bronze taken, but this was no solution for the Mycenaean problems. Surely the heroes saw this, and the heated argumentations in the Cyclic poems between Iliad & Odyssey reflect this (that: what should we do now). Greek tradition knows about massive mishaps via winds & leaks; but while everything is possible on sea, the Aegean is familiar for Greeks, and many islands can work as stepping stones. But at the southern shores of the Mediterranean the Sea People is just campaigning against Egypt proper; Ramses III will repel them from the Delta of Nile in 6 years. So any hero missing at home may have gone pirate/ally of the Sea People. Most definitely Menelaus, who in Odyssey tells that he was in Egypt, because of the winds, and got gifts from a king who is definitely not Ramesses III (Od. IV, 125-132).

            8) Some could return, some not. But we know from Nostoi & Odyssey that practically anybody returning had problems at home; the only serious exception is Nestor. Agamemnon went directly home and was killed by Aigistus & Clytaimnestra; Menelaus returned alter 8 years, and there are the obscure ll. Od. IV, 95-96 that he almost lost his palace. Indeed, Palace Economy is absent in Od. IV. Greece made the transition from LH IIIB to LH IIIC. The internal problems & the weakening of tin trade could not be solved by the Sack of Ilium, and the long absence of wanakes with the majorities of their troops gave ample possibilities for revolts, raids &c.

            9) Odysseus, Wanax of Ithaca, wanders 5 years of which we know practically nothing, Odyssey's real time is the last 40 days of the sea travel, and while this 40 days are astronomically correct [11], even this travel starts from Calypso's island and by any chance this goddess is not real, and for the Phaiak stop they are unidentified. We may believe that he lost his men. He was wandering 5 years, Troy having been taken in February, 1183. It seems that Odyssey did not refer to his real adventures and completely covered them with fairy tales, sailor stories & such. We may think that the real stories were not victorious enough. But we know that Odysseus could lie; Herself Athena tells this in Od. XIII, and note that according to Jaynes, lies are unusual for a bicameral person. [See also the novelette Bluff of Harry Turtledove.] So this was an unusual ability of the Wanax of Ithaca. He arrived incognito c. April 1, 1178, and killed the suitors on April 16, just after the total solar eclipse. Surely his helpers were some Palace people and Ithacan islanders in whom the mental sound (from the right hemispheres) were firm enough to remain faithful to their Wanax. The incognito 16 days could be enough to find and organise them. At this point Odysseus is c. 38 old, Telemachus, according to his semipassive role, cannot be more than 15, and conclusively father Laertes is in early 60's. We may doubt that Laertes is still alive; but there is no gain in that. Odysseus was not at home since c. 1188, and he went away (it seems) as wanax. Either Laertes died at 50, or he became Retired Wanax before then; but I have not the slightest idea how and why, and this point is not crucial in the Big Picture.

            10) On April 16 there happened a total solar eclipse. I am sure that in that time nobody on Earth could predict a total solar eclipse; however not fully bicameral Odysseus may have recognised the oppurtunity given by the consternation. (The Odyssey frequently mentions Athena's advices to Odysseus.) His men acted swiftly and won. The wanax has returned.

            11) Tradition is equivocal about Odysseus' later life, but every source agrees in that the next ruler was Telemachus. Surely in this time the story of the wandering wanax grew and became more and more fabulous. The population was still bicameral enough not be able to tell apart true stories, fables and utter lies; but, no doubt, they were proud about the unusual ability of the ruler and the new behaviour became a status signal. The ruler was an example; and on the other hand, the ruler himself knew about lies so he could elaborate tests to detect lies; and he had to.

            12) About 1170 Telemachus married Epicasta of Pylos whose father he visited in 1178. His name is mentioned by the Pythia to Emperor Hadrian as Homer [2], although this is rather a nickname.

            13) About 1140 the grandson of Odysseus & Nestor starts to compose the story of the success of one grandparent and the grandeur of the other. Royal scribes may yet be active, although they were less important in the past than in Pylos, Knossos &c. (but they might be useful in truth checks). Anyway, Linear B is improper to write hexameters; but they can be used to write plots & synopses. In this time the Ithacan miniempire is intact, life is peaceful (hence the immigration from Kephallonia [64]) in the otherwise turbulent LH IIIC/Postpalatial. The moderate Palace of Ithaca is intact (Papadopoulos & Kontorli, [47]). Iron Age probably did not start yet on the Ionian Islands.

            14) About 1120 the proto-Odyssey is ready. It contains at least Circe, Scylla and the Syrens (the clay tablet), Calypso (the start to home), the Phaiak episode (the 13 tripods), Telemachus' visit in Pylos & Laconia (the author is Telemachus' son), and the core of the Ithacan events from April 1 to April 17. If Homer is not the first son, then he does not inherit and has some time to propagate the poem.

            15) C. this time the local cult of Odysseus starts. In the next century the story becomes pan-Hellene and c. 1000 a devotee deposits 13 tripods in the Nymphs' Cave [12-15].

            16) Until post-bicameral mentality is not solid, epic poetry is not clearly different from history. People of older mentality are better to sing and old poetry is text+accent+lyre sound [16]. For recent Indo-European languages pitch quality or musical accent is quite important in Slovenian, makes lexical differences in Eastern Slavic and Swedish and makes distinctions in declension cases in Lithuanian. In older IE languages pitch quality was more important, and this is definitely so for Classical Greek. Strabo [20] in XIII.1.57 tells a story about the substantial Aiolian city Assus and a Stratonicus, excentric zithern player. Il. VI, 143 is a line generally understood as: If you step nearer [to holy/divine], Fate gets you sooner. However, Stratonicus sang this line as: Go to Assus and Fate gets you sooner. The two variants was exactly the same in pre-Alexandrine Greek writig, not marking either capitals or accents. So ασσον meant both “nearer” and “to Assus”. Gradually it became clear that the writing was not unambiguous, but the Alexandrine librarians fixed the accent marks exactly. Then Stratonicus' variant was Ἆσσον, and in speech/song this was unambiguous. No music is handled in the right hemisphere and simple text is in the left one, but the accents in the right. For the old mentality the epic came from a god(dess), so among aodioi/bards the bicamerality helped. (See a discussion and some breferences in [79].) But the right hemisphere is not exactly logical, rather intuitive. So oral poetry was not only oral, but it was composed without the supervision of the left hemisphere. Hesiod still “really” heard the muses.

            17) This god-inspired way of operation therefore was general in Archaic Ages, and the end is clearly marked when individuals appear as authors, with clearly defined home cities, times of activity and such. As for the Cyclic poets, this is some time bw. 800 & 700. Until that there is no definite authorship, the poems are composed by the gods who then put them into the mouths of the bards. In the Dark/Archaic Age lots of shorter compositions may have existed, whose lines were taken and put into other compositions. That we can recognise when a line is exactly the same in Iliad and Odyssey; for lost poems the borrowing may be guessed but cannot be proven. Classical authors assumed/reconstructed a pseudo-clan Sons of Homer of bards, sustaining the texts of Iliad & Odyssey, somewhere on the Asian shore. Obviously this clan was the workshop of the composition and the Sons were the secondary authors.

            18) Iliad and Odyssey now are stylistically similar, but the proto-poems probably were not. Iliad has many heroes, of which Achilleus is the greatest, but not central. Odyssey has a central hero and the others are episodists. Now both poems have 24 Cantos, and 24 is also the number of letters in the Ionic alphabet; clearly this is artificial.

            19) The free composition almost stopped when Pisistratus made the texts written down. Still, the texts were somewhat elastic until Alexandria.

            20) Therefore there is no need to identify the authors of proto-Odyssey and proto-Iliad. According to Emperor Hadrian the author of the proto-Odyssey was the son of Telemachus and Epicasta, “Homer” of Ithaca; the initiator of proto-Iliad could have been anybody but probably in Aiolis or Ionia, or perhaps in Leucade. The first version of the Odyssey was composed in the safety of Ithaca, Ithaca landed smoothly in the new word, while, as Jaynes emphasizes, the Iliad started under tumultuous conditions amongst warring, fleeing and confused people whose old societies and mentalities had broken down.

            21) As for the Coming of Steel, that was not a planned process, there was nobody directing it; it was a product of Free Enteprise Economy of smiths, expanding into vacuum. See the next Chapter.

 

7.2: IRON

            As far as we know, physical laws are objective. Therefore the shortage of tin was unavoidable, and the much greater abundance of iron oxide ores was a fact. Since the Viking-fashioned iron reduction did not need any technology beyond Mycenaean technology, only know-how, it could propagate with individual smiths. Steel is more difficult, but again, pure carbon steel needs only the know-how, and heavy physical work. The latter is present in native apprentices. So when the know-how is ready, world is ready for iron. Bronze is expensive (tin is complicated to get), steel is harder. No historical explanation is needed until this point.

            Of course, the receiving society must be ready too. Neolitic farmer societies do not need iron, so maybe a neolitic village would not support a smith. Three knives could be simply bought from a travelling merchant, as this happened in our semirecent past in Third World. Howeven Mycenaean Greece honoured warriors and warriors need metal weapons. Also, they had layered societies, so somebody would have been able to order the carbon steel swords; and on the Mycenaean side small states existed, so the receiver side was unable to forbid the iron. So nothing hindered the acceptance.

            Maybe a centralised conservative Greek state could forbid, for some decades. But there was no such unified state even before the crisis ending with the Trojan Pyrrhic victory and immediate destruction. Anjd in warring environment who bans technology loses the war.

            The Dorians came in 80 years. The timescale is good if the smithies were in Greece. Iron came from the East, and Dorians lived either in spots in Greece (Doru = wildman/mountaineer), or Northwest from Greece proper. There was nobody with iron industry on the Northwest in LH IIIC. And Dorians then had no proper states so they must have had iron weapons/ploughshares. (The tin problem!)

            For possible ban, remember the Tiryns iron ploughshare from the end of LH IIIC from the Lower Citadel!

            On the other hand, there was some barrier at the source side. We do see signals of royal embargo, and surely the first Hittite steel technology was “too good”, so could not propagate. Being this nontrivial, we must discuss it briefly.

            Greek tradition is that steel was first produced at the Eastern end of Black Sea; two neighbour tribes are mentioned the Chalybes and the Tibarenoi. Indeed, the Caucasus is, according to archaeology, old iron/steel area. From c. 1400 there is a sporadic appearance of steel objects, from the East. I mention here only the war ax of the prince of Ugarit, and the steel dagger of King Tut. This is not yet Iron Age: they are prestige weapons, there are no armies with steel. And both the princely ax and the royal dagger contain some percents of nickel.

            Nickel is good in steels; makes the steel rust-free, elastic, edge-keeping &c. But it was nontrivial to reduce nickel. Not that Fe and Ni were really different chemically; but good Ni ores are rare, and melting happens above 1500 centigrades. Without that an (Fe,Ni)O or (Fe,Ni)CO3 ore would be needed. They are even rarer. The most familiar mixed ore is (Fe,Ni)S, pentlandite, and starting with a sulfide is dangerous for the artefact: S causes breaks even in traces. We do not really know, which ores were used for (Fe,Ni,C) steels in Bronze Age at East, but Aristotle & Strabo do mention rust-free steels East of the Halys.

            Anything this original technology was, it was not a mass production. The simplest but very expensive technology may have been: a high-temperature furnace from fireproof stones, reduced iron and iron meteorites. The first item is far from being technologically simple but both Aristotle and Strabo reports fireproof stone East of the Halys; the second is easy but not yet steel; and the third is very rare. However this technology is good for individual prestige blades. Maybe later the technology was developed to reduce nickel ores instead of the use of meteorites; but this was not the way Europe took. That was the reduction of Fe-oxides and then pure carbon steel; this was European smith technology, it needs lot of work, but no rare materials.

            For this technology there is not too much in Anatolian archaeology, but we do know that the cheaper technology must have existed in Hittite lands c. 1190. Namely at the destruction of Hattušaš any royal embargo stopped and iron appears in Tiryns in 80 years, on the Southern shores of the Mediterranean even earlier, and the Bible gives steel price in a 1070 context and tells that the smiths of the Holy Land are Philistees. The latters are of the Sea Peoples, they participated in the Anatolian turmoil, and if you do not want to use far-fetched scenarios where the robbers/burners develop new technologies within years, the alternative is the presence of the cheaper technology in the Hittite Empire at 1190.

            So for smith technology Greece was ready in 1190, at the beginning of LH IIIC/Postpalatial, the Hittite side had the technology, and royal embargo on hi-tech became ineffective in 1190. Anything else to explain?

 

7.3: AND IF NOT?

            This concerns both Chapters 7.1. and 7.2. Both Chapters were self-consistent, but not proven. As for Odyssey, recent Ithaca excavations are important, and if the first expectations fail to be confirmed, the probability of the Hadrian Scenario decreases, albeit not to 0. Also, the scenario now depends  on fitting together results of many disciplines. The agreement between the end of the Trojan War and the total solar eclipse at Ithaca is excellent: the previous one in Alexandrine chronology is 5 years 2 months earlier than the latter in our astronomy. The second date is almost certain from two-body calculations; there must have been a total solar eclipse on 16 April, 1178. We return to the eclipse immediately. But the details of the Alexandrine methods are not known, and in Classical times there were concurrent data. E.g. with the Parian Marble dating there are 31 years between the events.

            Bringing upward the Fall of Troy one or two years do not count, but more would rule out any adventure of Odysseus. Namely total solar eclipses are rare at a given place. It is highly improbable that an eclipse a few year apart could have been miscalculated for place and that was seen in Ithaca. But before 762 ΔT values of eclipse calculations are more and more uncertain, so it is possible that the eclipse (which, of course did happen on that day) was invisible from Ithaca, or at least not total. Now, while this is possible, it is not probable; but  ΔT tables are improving.

            Also, the Pylos palace destruction is crucial. If in 1178 the Wanax of Pylos was not Nestor, but a descendant from the Neleid line, that only weakens the Hadrian Scenario as a “poetic license”. But were truly proven that the destruction of the Palace happened c. 1190, a keystone of the Hadrian Scenario would drop out. I can and did tell why this is not possible with the C14 method now, but the technique is improving too.

            As for Chap. 7.2. you can rely on physical laws. But some archaeologists do not see Iron in Greece for decades. No iron until the Dorian Invasion is hard to imagine/ would be hard to explain, and would need unexpected agents (as e.g. Philistees) for Greek Iron Age. It is very difficult to prove a negative statement, but surely the scenario told in Part 2 and Chapter 7.2. would greet local iron artefacts from LH IIIC. While there is a ploughshare from Tiryns, that is not local beyond doubt, and it is not enough.

 

7.4: THE LOST WISDOM OF CIVILISATION, NOT SEEN

            In Part 6 I repeated and repeated: no important lost knowledge is detected at various refugia. Now comes the explanation why I repeated this.

            The Mycenaean civilisation was refined & rich. (This is not my opinion; I am a physicist and I know that we do not have generally valid criteria to decide; this is the opinion of History.) The barbarous Dorians destroyed this refined civilisation, and during the subsequent small-scale wars, wanderings &c. lots of knowledge/wisdom may have been lost.

            And indeed, some knowledge became lost. Archaeology can detect even during LH IIIC the loss of some techniques in jewellery and in fresco painting. In Iron Age we do not know new frescoes for centuries. The syllabaric Linear B writing became lost, excepting Cyprus, where

was invisible for centuries. Lots of cities became ruins or at least their populations very seriously decreased and the general urban level as well. Buildings became much smaller and simpler. Bathtubs vanished. And so on.

                However, as I told, the criteria are not objective. Frescoes were very important for the last fresco painters without patrons, and also for historians of arts now. But the absence of new frescoes is simply a signal of a more egalitarian society, not of losses. In this last Chapter I try to discuss serious losses on „technical”, „civilizatoric” and „social” territories, although there would be hard to unambigously define these ones. The important Mycenaean refugia are: Leukade, Arcadia, Cyprus, Athens, Aiolis & Ionia. But I will not discuss Leukade in details here; that happened in Chapter 6.2 and note that Leukade became empty for the end of the Dark Age. Before that it was Greece's leading community, in the Xth and IXth centuries: biggest buildings,  most various artistic objects & such. So there continuity helped, but the real comparison would be c. 700, when already we have date from the other refugia too.

            Arcadia & Cyprus are the places to where Mycenaean upper classers emigrated en bloc and they became the majority. Athens defended herself from the Dorics, and Aiolis & Ionia are the goals of mass emigrations, the first before the Dorian Invasion, the second after that but from uninvaded Attica. Comparison can be any important mainland area except Athens about 700.

 

Technology

            Iron was practically synchronous everywhere. We will not discuss ceramics; that is mainly done from artistic points in the literature and it is pointless to argue if Submycenaean with old roots is superior or inferior to new Protogeometric. From the middle of the Dark Age other metallurgy than iron/steel is either shipwright technique or art. Of course, ships need noncorroding metal, but even there high-carbon castiron is a competitor. On the land there are no more bronze tools/weapont in abundance.

            Building activity (houses, temples, city walls) are uniformly below Late Mycenaean level. For me it seems that in Europe in 700 there are no big differences in building level, but in Europe there is only a few buildings from 700. In Aiolis & Ionia there are ruins from 700 but not very impressive ones. In Old Smyrna, originally not Ionia but Aiolis, a few excavated buildings go back to c. 850 but they are 3 m*5 m houses with a single room: and nothing from the previous 270 years. The first big buildings are temples (no substantial temples are known from the Mycenaean times); the Hera temple in Samos c. 800 was a building of 180 m2, with a line of 13 columns in the axis. Even this is an area of the quarter of the Leukade Heroon; true, that was woodden.

            The technological leading role of Ionia is commonplace but there are 3 problems. First, the mainly Ionian intellectuals of the Classical Age of course preferred Ionian predecessors. Second, the great technological age of Ionia mainly starts after 700, so cannot be caused by knowledge from 1100. Third, some claimed discoveries were rather borrowings. Glaucus of Chius could not invent iron welding, anything is written by Herodotus, because a welded iron piece is known from the later   Armenia, c. 1400 [24]. And Theodorus & Rhoicus of Samos may have been good bronzeworkers, but they could not invent the cire perdue technique known worldwide from Bronze Age.

            As for science, Thales of Miletus is the very first Greek astronomer, but much after 700, and this seems true for all sciences, including Mycenaean times backward too.

 

Urbanization

            Here this word will not refer to the sizes of cities but to the “level”: pavements, aquaeducts, public baths &c. These civilizatoric achievements were present in the bigger Mycenaean cities until LH IIIC, and not for a time anywhere. Well, Athens remained a city even in the Dark Age; but we do not know much about its Dark Age pavement. And the scarcity is communal efforts is not lost knowledge, but shifted emphasis. In communal societies the Whole comes first (told the wanax and his bureocrats). In more individual societies cyclopian walls, buildings and big pavements are not so important.

 

Society

            Not only the GDP counts; and that was even more true in Antiquity. People depended more on personal contacts, and so they tried to optimalize some well-being, if their life was supported. Of course, in this question our modern opinion does not matter much. We discuss 4 items: organisation, lifestyle gender roles & language. Pre-Dark-Age heritage should be seen in them.

            In Mycenaean kingdoms people were not equal, but it is not clear what were the weights of birth & personal excellence. We do not know about the role of more primitive organisations as phratrias, clans and phyles; while they might have existed. The society was quite bureocratic, which would suggest an Ottoman ideology where everybody has the chance to end as Grand Vizier, and then with a red cord of silk; But innumerable (later) mythological stories emphasize the divine descent of Mycenaean leaders. Anyway, there are no records about phyles; but there are no records of almost anything except for inventory and taxation.

            The origin of the Greek phyle system is unknown. We see them from Archaic, say 700. The principle is then that the families of the polity (say: a polis) belong to subunities of small fixed number. These are the phyles.

            If such a system is ancient, then one of two possible origins have great probability. Either the polity had in the past merged together with another, quite distinct group, or the origin of the polity was unitary and we see a worldwide phenomenon: a mechanism against marriages of near blood kins, leading to genetic problems.

            In the first case we would expect lots of 2-phyle politeias; but this is dangerous, keeping alive the division. It is better to create at least 3 phyles, with fictitious descents at least in the third. On the other hand, in a politeia of unitary origin ethnographers tell that originally the tribe created 2 half-tribes and decided which parent defined the half-tribe of the child. Say, it was patrilinear. Then the original male belonged to 1, he could take a wife only from 2. Then their children belonged to the half-group 1, so they could take wives/husbands only from 2. And so on. The system is simple, in fact prevents at least some genetically dangerous pairing and does not create internal divisions. Indeed, everybody has 2 parents, one from 1, one from 2. Bigger tribes create more subgroups, but always even for number, and fix a rule how to calculate the subgroup of the child. Again, 2 is not good if politics enter, but 4 is good. Later, for big enough subgroups, the chance of close kin marriages goes down, and the  society may even forget about them. Or some politicians might completely reorganise the phyles as it happened in VIth century Athens.

            Now, in classical times, about which our knowledge is firm, different phyle numbers existed in Greece. Dorians almost everywhere had 3: Hylleis, Dymanes & Pamphiloi. From Aiolis we know about also 3: Apodotoi, Ophioneis & Eurytanes, but we have this information only since Hellenistic time, and about large Western territories we know nothing at all. However in Attica there was 4 and in Miletus even 6 [67]. The 6 phyle in Ionia is certain, because they can be find in inscriptions in Miletus and in 3 of her colonies, of which Kyzikus was founded in 750, + in 4 further cities. Then we know that the 4 Athenian phyles were Argadeis, Aigikoreis, Hopletes & Geleontes, while the further 2 (added in Ionia?) were Oinopes & Boreis.

            It seems that the original Ionian system was 4 quartertribes, and in Ionia, via some alliances with at least a part of the autochtones, it was expanded to 6. (But then Herodotus' text about genocide in Miletus is probably only a rumour.) So the phyle names are not pan-Hellene, and the Attic-Ionic system has even number of the phyles, the Doric and Aiolic 3. OK, the Doric seems artificial (Pamphyloi ≈ Men from all tribes), but that may be the need to avoid two subtribes. If a group preserved the old system of Mycenaean society, that cannot have been the Dorian invaders, they are either the emigrating Aiolians (of whose original phyles we are quite ignorant)|Now, there is an idea that the Attic phyles were originally employments in Mycenaean Athens (priests/scribes, warriors, shepherds, plant cultivators; see also Plato on the Ideal State), but we should know more about Arcadia, Cyprus or Aiolis bin 700 to draw conclusions.

 

Lifestyles

            Mycenaean societies were pyramid-like, so the upper crust made banquets of some type. Homeric rulers and heroes mutatis mutandis did the same, remember the Phaiak scene, Menelaus and the suitors in the Ithaca Palace. Dorians were egalitarian, and surely did not organise elaborate banquets, if they wanted to make festivals for the tribe that rather might have been a big barbeque, while the everyday Doric common eating is described in Sparta by Ancient authors, and we know that the institution existed in Crete too.

            Now, we know the communal feasts from Classical Athens, and it is rather Mycenaean. And it seems that the banquets in Archaic Aiolis were also rather Mycenaean: frescoes from Larissa show it [68].

 

Gender roles

            Greek society was quite patriarchal, as all historical Indo-European ones with the silliness of grammaical genders. (Magyar is unisex, together with all Uralians, Altaians, Basque, Chinese, Japanese, and Anatolians & Armenians as the only unisex Indo-Europeans.) True, in all historical times male and female roles differed for obvious reasons, but generally in lesser degree than for Indo-Europeans. (Girls, e.g., often went into battles among Turks, and while this was exceptional among Magyars, it was not unheard of. The main reason is obviously the light horse archer type battle, where strength was not too important.)

            Now, the quite different roles, and sometimes the social separation of sexes show the following scheme among Greeks:

            We do not know too much about Mycenaean times but separation was only moderate and women had some social roles. This may have been Cretan influence.

            In Odyssey women generally remain among themselves, but are not kept in purdah.

            In Classical times Dorians separated women only mildly and in Sparta not at all. Ionic Greeks made puns and slanders about this.

            Ionians and especially Athenians strongly separated the women: no official positions for them except for priestesses; excluded from banquets except hetairas and flute girls; places apart in theaters; not going alone to the street, even to the market-place, except for low-class ones; advisable veils &c.

            Aiolians mixed most and easiest.

            There Aiolians seem to be closest to the Mycenaean social life; but it would be good to know details & history of the differences.

 

Language

            Language is a very important social tool, albeit the causes of changes are not always understood, but they are often socially driven.

            The Mycenaean was a dialect, with 8 or 9 cases in declension. The first millennium descendant is the Arcadocyprian. Ancestors of the other dialects are unknown, except as pen errors in Pylos, most definitely by Hand 24, the personal scribe of Last Wanax Enkhelawon.

            The Homeric dialect seems a mixture of Aiolic and Ionic, but with a fully operative Instrumental and a full direction triality by endings.

            Arcadian in some Archaic/Classical inscriptions still keeps a 7-case system, but all the others are at Classical 5: Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative. Aiolic, Ionic & Doric differ from each other, but it would be difficult to find a pair nearer to each other than to the third.

            For any chance I do not detect useful ancient wisdom, lost in the turmoils but saved in Arcadia & Cyprus, refugia of upper crust Mycenaeans, or in Aiolis & Ionia, without Doric Invasion.

 

            And a last, important note. Sure, Tin was a bottleneck. Then a school of recent years tells: spare and recycle. And bronze is extremely recyclable. It is a simple alloy of only 2 components, and the tin ratio is generally c. 10 %. So recycling does not take too much work, and definitely nothing else than melting and a negative form is needed.

            Schofield [55] observed sole recycling in Nichoria from LH IIIB. Still, it did not solve the tin problem. The advent of Iron solved it, deliberating some 3 more orders of magnitude metal. Also we now know that iron oxide is far less environment pollution and poison than copper compounds.

 

 

APPENDICES

 

APPENDIX A: ON WANAKTES

            The title is ungrammatical, but I have explanations. It is ungrammatical because in English "on" (indeed any preposition) goes not with the Nominative, but with the Common case, which was originally the Accusative. With pronouns the situation is clear: not "on I", but "on me". So I should have written either "On wanaktas" (Pl. Acc.) or "On wanaxes" (importing the Greek Sg. Nom. and using as an English word. The form in the title is a hybrid.

            However (come the explanations) first, all English nouns have identical Nominative and Common, and, second, the Greek plural Accusative would be quite similar: "wanaktas" in Classical Greek, maybe "wanaktens" or "wanaktęs" in Mycenaean times. For the reader the 3 forms are probably indistinguishable.

            Classical Greek (meaning c. Vth century) used the word very sparingly. Sometimes the noblest Olympians were called "wanax", but no mortals. In addition, the digamma "w" went out of the use in Athens in early times, before the transcription of Iliad & Odyssey from oral performance while the digamma remained the part of the alphabet and indeed was used to denote Number 6 in the scientific writings (the other two letters preserved only as numbers in Athens were the koppa and the sampi). So the Homer texts do not contain digamma, and in names it was used as Anax-.

            But everybody who counted knew that in Homer originally the word started with a "w". At least 2 clear signs showed this.

            First, in the rather formal Greek epic language the preceding word sometimes feels if the next start with vowel or consonant. Sometimes this is true even in prose. Preposition “ex” is “ek” before consonants. So even the modern “ex” in “ex-ergy” should be “ek” in “ektropy”. Some people still speak about “extropy”, but they do not know Greek. Second, some non-Attic dialects retained the initial "w" until Alexander the Great; and especially the Cypriotes continued to use "wanax" as a rank. So we also knew the initial "w" even before reading the first Mycenaean texts. (But physicists, slightly more than a century ago, did not care if “erge” was originally “werge”. For “energy” that would not mean any difference; but for “exergy” it would.) As told, in Athens the word was used as "Anax".

            The word appears in Iliad 257 times, of which 251 is singular; this is natural from the meaning. In the Odyssey it is much more infrequent, which shows something.

            The word is a masculine noun, from Third Declension, more specifically, from those of consonantal stems. The stem is wanakt-. Its feminine counterpart is wanassa, and in Mycenaean times that generally means the wife of a wanax. But not always: e.g. a daughter of Agamemnon, the same or not as Iphigenia, is called by some mythographers as Iphianassa. And especially this name poses problems. Anything be the characteristic property, ability &c. of a wanax, the name Iphianassa is a declaration that she will realize it by force. But she is a princess. What could she have done by force? (Or is this naming analogous with Alexandra? As the feminine counterpart of Alexandros, the meaning is cca. “victorious against men” or even “repelling men”. Now such a name may have been proper for the first Alexandra, of Ilium, who was virgin until the sack of Troy, her name is better known as Cassandra. But later the name was in everyday usage.)

            Now there are two important questions. First, what is the exact meaning of this word, second, what is this word from grammatical viewpoint and what was its evolution from Mycenaean to Classical Greek? As it will be seen, we cannot decisively answer the first question, while the second does not seem too problematical.

            Already from Homeric texts it was clear that the wanax was the paramount chief of an independent domain. (You may call them "kingdoms".) One kingdom, one wanax. (This is the reason that dual & plural uses are infrequent in Iliad.) He is also somehow "sacrosanct". Homer's frequent formula is "Zeus-born, Zeus-nourished". They are "nearer to the gods" than their people. One explanation is that some (remote or not) ancestor of them was a god/goddess, another is that Zeus, wanax of the Olympus, has His attention on the mortal wanaktes.

            Then, with the deciphering of Mycenaean texts, the situation became even more explicit. In the bigger kingdoms two persons, tell us the Modern textbooks, stood at the top of the taxation & power pyramid: the lawagetas and the wanax. The lawagetas was the commander of the Army/Navy, and probably also the chief of common works. However the wanax stood higher; his temenos (separate land) was bigger &c. The lawagetas performed totally secular activities, while the wanax was frequently involved in rites [23].

            As for the titles, the lawagetas is not a problem. Probably the "law-" part comes from the predecessor of Classical "laos", c. "people", and "-ag-" comes from in Indo-European stem meaning "activity", "urge", "lead". So he is the Leader of People, both in peace and in war.

            However the meaning of "wanax" is not clear at all (See e.g. Palaima [44] who cannot decide either.) The majority opinion is that this title comes from Aegean, spoken in Greece before the Greeks, and we do not speak Aegean, so then the title does not lead us to anywhere.

            Of course there are Indo-European etymologies too. E.g. Hajnal [69] tries with "uen-ag-", so he is who leads the kingdom to Gewinn.

            Very nice but what is "Gewinn"? While it seems that English translations would be lame, the question is ironically familiar for a Hungarian. At the first half of the '50's, during the strictest Stalinism, the strictest Stalinist leadership recognised that the system would not work; and they introduced a mild reform in the services (restaurants & such). The slogan was "to give the shop into gebin", where "gebin" is the Magyarized form of the Budapest Yiddish word for "Gewinn". It meant that the leader of the shop could put a part of the income into his pocket; bigger if the Gewinn was bigger.

            Obviously this Gewinn was not "profit" even if Palaima translates it so [44]. First, because it would have been impossible to introduce in 1953 a system in Hungary under Soviet control whose name is "profit". Second, "profit" is clearly defined, while our "Gebin" system was anything but clearly defined. So it may be misleading to translate Hajnal's etymology as "person leading the country to profit". Palaima does this, and explains Astyanax as a person leading the city to profit, and Iphianassa (Iphigeneia?) as a person achieving profit by force; but of course the second is absurd, and even the first is lame. Mycenaeans did not have the notion of profit.

            Still, the problem here is clearly with Modern English. Profit is the difference between income and outcome. A Mycenian kingdom surely did not maximize that. However there were ideas about the prosperity of the kingdom. So Indo-European "uen-ag-t" may have meant the person who "achieves/guarantees the abundance" of the kingdom.

            However some problems do remain. For example, how could poor Iphianassa (in post-Homeric tradition offered to the gods for the success of the campaign in Aulis) be a person achieving abundance by force? And second, in Iliad lots of wanaktes are fighting under Troy, but no lawagetas is mentioned. Or was the Trojan War a Crusade/Jihad? Then and only then the wanaktes must lead the army; but as we know, the Olympus was divided in about that war, and Zeus was neutral.

            So we do not yet exactly know what was a wanax; but surely he was the First Man of the Kingdom, Zeus-born & Zeus-nourished, who could best guarantee the gods' goodwill for the kingdom.

On the other hand, basileus, the later royal title (sometimes even at Homer) was an important but not too high title in Mycenaean times, and even in Homer more than one of them is mentioned per kingdom. The title is clearly Mycenaean, and appears in Linear B as qa-si-re-u. Later in Cypriote syllabaric it is pa-si-le-wo-se: labiovelar stops vanished from the language in the few centuries of Dark Age. Note that for bilinguishes Cypriote-Greek ones are real bilinguises, not transcriptions. (E.g. και = ka-se [33].) But IE etymologies are in doubt for “basileus”.

            The title wanax remained in use in Cyprus, whither lots of Achaians emigrated during Postpalatial times and when the Dorians finally occupied Peloponnesus. But  the Cypriote usage is strange. First, Goddess Aphrodite (with Her chief temple in Paphos) is Wanassa. OK, but earlier the wanassa was the wife of the wanax, and while Aphrodite has a divine Husband (Ares), Her substance is not being somebody's wife. OK, this is the usual ambiguity of Nuclear IE languages (not present in Hittite & Armenian, not distinguishing masculine/feminine): see Queen Elisabeth I was a Queen without any husband (hence the Old Dominion Virginia), Queen Elisabeth II is a Queen with a husband of mere Prince and Royal Consort; but Queen was also Mrs. Wallis for a short time until his husband, King Edward VIII, abdicated. But the second anomaly is not so easy. According to the Politeia of the Cypriotes of Aristotle (not extant but represented by Frag. 483 of Rose [36]), on Cyprus a King is basileus, but his wife is wanassa, and the son of the basileus & wanassa is a wanax. I cannot follow the logic of this usage.

            Well, we cannot give a final answer to "exactly what was a wanax?" until new inscriptions are found. But we can clarify the evolution of the word from Middle Mycenaean (or even from earlier times if the word is Indo-European) to Classical Greek.

            In the Homeric language (halfway between Late Mycenaean and Classical Greek) the word is wanax, its stem is wanakt-. (The concurrent title is basileus). The syllabic Mycenian writing (confirmed by the much later syllabic Cypriote) is wanaka. Now the rules of the Mycenaean writing forbid (with a few exceptions) to write more than one consonant per syllable (no sign), and even that one can be only at the beginning of the syllable. So wanaka is quite regular for wanakC, where C is any consonant, maybe even more than one. (On the other hand, the Cypriote writing always writes -s at the end as -se.) Greek words have a suffix for Nominative and it is often -s, in the Classical Alphabetic often represented in a psi or ksi.. So Classical & Cypriote Greek and Mycenaean Syllabaric point to a wanaks=wanax or a wanakts.

            Classical analogy (except that feminine) is nyx (night); the Nominative ends in an -x, but the Genitive is nyktos. So the stem is nykt-. (And you can see, after more than 4000 years of divergent evolution from sound to sound between Greek and English: originally the English -gh- stood for a k-sound (voiced, aspirated), and the -t- from the end of the stem is present in English too. So wanax may even be an Indo-European word for phonology.) We of course cannot be sure how the word was pronounced in Nominative in 1200: wanaks is a quite possible pronunciation, but also wanakts, with a c-type "ts" affricate. (See Hittite –z [70], and that Arcadian alphabetic Greek could write affricate ts with the letter tsan. This affricate re-emerged in Byzantian times.)

            In the Homeric texts the only mildly surprising form is a Vocative in Il. III, 351, where Wanax Agamemnon speaks to Zeus, Wanax of Gods, telling: "Zeu Ana!". But we are in Homeric times. The W- was here, but the Athenian transcription did not write it; the Vocative is the pure stem, but in Homeric times already words can end only with -s, -n, -r or vowel. So a -t ending is impossible; but also a -k one. (But note that Garrett is unsure when the right word end became so restricted; because of Linear B orthography. In Linear B texts he can detect closing –m, and for the others he can only tell that “before Homer” [38])

            In Mycenaean times the noun paradigm contained 8 or 7 cases: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, Ablative (?), Locative and Vocative, in Singular, Dual & Plural, but Ablative is questionable (some scholars think it already had coincided with Genitive), the Dual was rudimentary (maybe it was always so) and in the Plural the Vocative was the same as the Nominative (not sure that also in accent). Then, for fun, I try to guess the full singular paradigm of the word as Wanax Agamemnon himself pronounced it. (Note that Homer still regularly used Instrumental, and sometimes Locative & Ablative.) Of course I do not guarantee the success. I am no Greek scholar.

            At this point I did not use the standard Mycenologist literature; it is more fun if I do the reconstruction. I used Modern languages, most frequently Lithuanian [71] that language keeping a fully operative 7-case system. Of course some Homeric loci are very useful too.

            Homer is generally believed to use a 5-case paradigm (Nom., Voc., Acc., Gen., Dat.), but this is not true. He definitely use Instrumental (the suffix is -phi), and he uses a direction triality adding regular suffixes to words (-de = into, -thi=in, -then=from). The first would be a 9th case (Illative), the second seems to be a Locative, and the third is an operative Ablative. (Of course, Dr. Kazanskiene’s opinion would be much more decisive than mine.) Neglecting Illative, somewhat interpolating between Classical/Homeric Greek and using reconstructed Indo-European as pointer we get something.

            But also note that stems with -kt- were quite regular in Indo-European and some of them are quite conservative. We cannot look for the counterparts of wanax, the only related word is in Phrygian and that may be borrowing from Mycenian. However let us see the analogy word nyx (Cl. Gr.), naktis (Lith.), noč (Rus.), night (Engl.), ne-ku-uz (surely c. nekts) (Hit.).

            And now the tentative paradigm:

Case

Classical alphabetic

Mycenaean syllabic

Note

Nom.

wanax

wanaka

1

Voc.

Wana!

Wana!

 

Acc.

wanakta(n)

wanaka(ta)

2

Gen.

wanaktos

wanakato

3

Abl.

wanakthen

wanakate (?)

4

Dat.

wanakti

wanakati

 

Loc.

wanaktothi

wanakoti

5

Ins.

wanakt-phi

wanakapi

6

__________________

 

1: Classical "x" is an abbreviation for "ks". Earlier it may have stood for an affricate. Or the compound may have sounded as "kts" with a k stop and a "ts" affricate, written in contemporary Hittite with a "z"; we do not know. But surely until Homer "t" dropped from "kts".

2: Contemporary Hittite writes the closing -n, but -kt- stem nekts is not found in accusative. In Greek there was a tendency of weakening "n" in suffixes, so the "n" may have been there in 1200.

3: A wanato syllabic form is possible as well.

4: The form seems exotic, but compare it with Homeric "ouranothen".

5: The ending here is Homeric. In European languages keeping Locative the suffix is -i (Lat.), -je (Lith.) or -e/-i (Rus.; -i in noči).

6: Endings compete in successors of PIE: mi, -bhi and -iu. Baltic and Slavic uses successors of -om and -iu; in Russian the thumb rule is -iu in Feminine, -om otherwise, but in Lithuanian there are words which can take any of the two. As for Greek, -phi (obviously from -bhi) is well attested both from Homer and from Mycenaean tablets.

 

Table 9: My reconstruction for the Singular declension of “wanax”

 

 

APPENDIX B: PAUSANIAS ON INSCRIPTIONS

            The text is in 9.11 of [17], telling about Thebes, the Electran Gate. Chapter 11 and the very beginning of 12 tells as follows:

            „On the left of the gate named Electran are the ruins of a house where they say Amphitryon came to live when exiled from Tiryns becaus of the death of Electryon; and the chamber of Alcmena is still plainly to be seen among the ruins. They say that it was built for Amphityon by Trophonius and Agamedes, and that on it it was written the following inscription:-

                        When Amphitryon was about to bring his bride

                        Alcmena, he chose this as a chamber for himself.

                        Anchasian Trophonius and Agamedes made it.

            Such was the inscription that the Thebans say was written here...”

 

            Now, the text is unambigous for first sight. Amphitryon, Alcmene & Trophonius is pre-Dark Age (Alcmene is the mother of Heracles, so LH IIIB1), and Trophonius, if wrote at all, wrote in Linear B. But no similar Linear B texts, and no inscriptions at all were found in the excavations of more than 70 years.

            And observe that Pausanias did not read the inscription. The Thebans said... He saw some mural depicting, the Thebans said, the Witches delaying Heracles' birth, but „the figures are by this time rather indistinct”. This text is no evidence for Linear B LH IIIB inscriptions.

            Herodotus also writes something similar half a millennium earlier [46]. But he is a well-known storyteller.

 

APPENDIX C: COSMIC AND TERRESTRIAL IRON ABUNDANCES

            In the last half a century cosmic element abundances are explained via cosmology & astrophysics, using also some statements of nuclear physics too. The story runs as follows.

            The Universe started with a Big Bang (c. infinite density & temperature some 12-18 billion years ago). Between 8 & 15 microseconds quarks became bound in hadrons. At 1 s these were almost exclusively p and n. Then already the temperature was low enough, in the range of 1 MeV, so neutrons started to decay, giving p, e and antineutrino, but n half-life is somewhere at 900 s, so for a while they had the chance to form nuclei where they survived because of binding energy. For the first reliable calculation for abundances after several hours see [72]; the numbers did not change too much since then.

            Namely after a few hours the hadrons were mainly H (p, d & t), c. 95 % He (He3 & He4≡α), 4-5 %, and Li7, traces. Heavier nuclei had only very low chance to be formed, because it would have required multiple collisions.

            These nuclei, except for H3≡t, are stable, so their neutrons are preserved. At c. 300,000 ys the temperature went down to c. 3000 K, the nuclei caught the free electrons and thenceforward the situation is familiar, except that practically every atom was H & He.

            After some hundreds of Mys the first galaxy formed, and in the spiral galaxies the first stars. (The known oldest gamma burst is at z=8.3, and quasars are known from z=7.) The first stars used the pp cycle resulting in He; later supernova explosions scattered this He, and also red giants produced C and neighbours O & N in the scheme 3He → C. The process is exotherm until Fe26, so abundance peak is expected around Fe, and this peak is increasing in the Universe, Fe being a final state. Other nuclei can be both fuels and products. For this see e.g. [73]. The present stage, according mainly to stellar observations, is similar to those given in [74].

 

 

Fig. 3: Cosmic abundances according [72]. Solid line: odd Z, dashed line: even Z.

 

 

            Our Earth was formed 4.55 billion years ago, from the nebula going to be Sun, but some distillation processes went by, because light (low-Z) elements have greater chance to remain in the interplanetary medium. Finally H & He were mainly collected with giant Jupiter & Saturn. The primary solid state abundances of the interior Solar System are shown maybe by H3 chondrites for whose compositions see [75]. Of them I selected by chance Y-792947, collected 32 years ago by the Japanese institute NIPR at the Yamato Antarctic icefield in the general area of Showa station. The meteorite is a bigger one, 233 g, and the Antarctic conditions preserve quite well the interior parts of bigger stones.

            According to meteoritic canon, the analysis gives the composition in mass %, and everything is calculated for usual compounds. The result is as follows.

 

Compound

Mass %

Note

H2O

3.50

1+2

SiO2

34.02

3+2

Na2O

0.54

3+2

Al2O3

2.32

3+2

MgO

22.52

3+2

CaO

2.24

3+2

P2O5

0.11

3+2

TiO2

0.08

"Fe"

Fe°

8.05

"Fe"

FeS

4.90

"Fe"+3

FeO

16.70

"Fe+2"

Fe2O3

2.85

"Fe"+2

Ni°

1.28

"Fe"

Co°

0.04

"Fe"

Cr2O3

0.27

"Fe"+2

MnO

0.26

"Fe"+2

K2O

0.08

4+2

 

Table 10: Composition of H3 chondrite Y-792947. C content was not detected but it may have been a few ‰. Cl is usually lost, maybe for being in halite, NaCl, and washed away during analysis. O, S, Ti, Mg, Si, Ca, Fe, Ni and Mn are even-even nuclei, emphasized by boldfaces. In the Notes the numbers are rows of the periodic system; "Fe" means metals in the Fe peaks of Fig. 3 (Row 4).

 

            Now, what do we see here? First, that light atoms have a chance to go into solid phase in compounds; H not much even in H2O because that compound is volatile. The {CNO} triad is Third Generation in stellar nucleosynthesis, no more than 0.15 % in the cosmic abundance, but O, as an aggressive volatile element, has overwhelming chance to survive in nonvolatile compounds.

            Metals of Row 3 are Fourth Generation in nucleosynthesis, but with the originally much more abundant O they form nonvolatile compounds, so survive. As Fourth Generation nuclei they were much less abundant than {CNO}, but their survival probability is almost 1. As for the relative abundance in the triad {Si,Al,Mg} we expect higher abundance for even-even Si & Mg than for odd-even Al just as in the cosmic abundance Fig. 3; and it is indeed so. Mg is an order of magnitude more abundant in Y-792947 than Al. Even-even nuclei have higher binding energy, so produced more, than others.

            For higher generations the abundance is much smaller, except at the Fe peak. Nuclei there, being the final equilibrium stage of stellar nucleosynthesis, accumulate in the Universe.

            Bigger nuclei are produced in stellar nucleosynthesis as an "accident", e.g. during supernova explosions. Still, at "magic numbers" for protons and neutrons, not yet completely explained by nuclear physics, binding energies go up, and then formation processes result in peaks. One such is Sn: Z=50. Indeed the cosmic ratio Sn/Ag is c. 10 (none of them can be quantitatively detected in meteorites). For cosmic abundances the ratio Sn/Cu, important for bronze, is 1/150, and being nonvolatiles, this should be the ratio in planetary bodies. Pb208 is doubly magical, so no big surprise is that in cosmic abundance Pb/Sn > 2.

            Now, meteorite Y-792947 may show quite well the bulk of Earth, but the composition of terrestial crust is much different. Numbers change with the evolution of mining, but in the crust some half is O and some quarter is Si. As for the remainder, Al is c. 8 %, Fe is some 5 % and Mg is less. This is so, because during crust differentiation and later volcanism SiO2 formed a lattice for taking in metallic oxides; and silicates containing Al2O3 are both lighter and melting at lower temperature than those containing MgO. Very ancient basalts have much more MgO than present ones; now Mg-silicates are in the lower crust, not yet intensively mined except for oil. Fe-silicates  are also heavy, still lots of Fe came up; but the cosmic mass ratio Fe/Al is c. 26.

            So this is the final "distillation" process leading for historical abundances. Here I give the very crude approximate mass ratios in the upper crust, based on cosmic abundances and terrestrial upper crust formation, for the "seven primordial metals" + two used by ancients without knowing it:

 

Metal X

X/Fe mass ratio in upper crust c.

Au

5*10-7

Ag

3.5*10-7

Cu

5*10-4

Hg

<1*10-4

Sn

3.5*10-6

Pb

9*10-6

Zn

0.001

Ni

<0.1

 

Table 11: Approximate upper crust abundances for 9 metallic elements

 

            The expected ratio Au/Ag ≈ 1.5 is rather surprising. The low crustal Ni abundance surely is caused by the chemical vagary that silicates like NiO less than FeO.

            Observe that Zn and Ni is not really rare in the crust. However they were never observed in pure metallic state, so in Classical Antiquity they were neglected as metals.

 

APPENDIX D: LIQUID IRON AND THE ANCIENTS

            In Europe iron & steel is produced mainly through a liquid phase since High Middle Ages (and in China since several centuries earlier). So in everyday language now melting iron is a synonym of reducing the iron ores. And in Classical Antiquity copper producers might have even believed that Heat liberated copper from its coloured ores. So many historians now routinely speak about ancient molten iron. Of course, chemists and metallurgists know better; but they do not write history books about Submycaenian, Doric Invasion & such. Also, the few remaining old-fashioned blacksmiths are silent in the discussions.

            But really, the exact story of the Fall of Mycenaean Palaces, the Submycenaean/Protogeometric change, dialectal changes and Advent of the Dark Age are too weakly documented to tell the story of Appearing Iron from historical facts. So it is better if we use Laws of Physics/Chemistry as much as we can.

            Let me first summarize my point here as: in Antiquity generally iron was produced in solid state and steel production remained in that phase too in first approximation; but there are a few findings from the last one and half centuries of the Hittite Empire, probably from Eastern Anatolia which are difficult to explain with solid state technology (but later such mysterious artifacts are not repeated).

            Written texts are generally not too useful. Homer sings about Late Bronze Age, so he does not mention blacksmiths. Hesiod does, but Works and Days do not go into details. Herodotus or Plato are not interested. We must wait until c. 330, when Aristotle, the first real scientist, writes something. Not too much.

            In his book Meteorologica, which then meant changes and transitions, he writes a few sentences about melting iron and producing steel, focussing on the solid-liquid transition. In  the 1995 edition of his Collected Works [23], Bk N° 383a29-b6 is translated as:

“...But those which solidify by refrigeration and the evaporation of all their heat, like iron and horn, cannot be dissolved except by excessive heat, but they can be softened -though manufactured iron can be melt, to the point of becoming fluid and then solidifying again. This is how steel is made. The dross sinks to the bottom and is purged away: when this has been done often and the metal is pure we have steel. The process is not repeated often because the purification of the metal involves great waste and loss of weight. But the iron that has less dross is the better iron. ...”

            Now, the text may be clear as an ancient text. However the process given is physically very problematical. “Dross” may be impurities/slag, or may be some iron which is being lost. However, specific gravity of slag is much less than that of liquid iron; and surprisingly enough the specific gravity of solid iron is slightly less than that of the liquid one. So nothing could sink down to the bottom.

            I will return to the curiously obscure sentences, but for this moment I am satisfied with the idea that the Stagirite asked a smith, who gave obscure answers not to divulge business secrets.

            There is one more item in the Aristotelian Canon about iron production. On Marvellous Things Heard, Bk N° 830a5-847b10 goes as:

“#48     It is told that the production of Chalybean and Amisenian iron is very peculiar; for it grows together, as at least they assert, from the sand that is carried down by the rivers. Some say that they simply wash this, and smelt it in a furnace; but others that, after frequently washing the deposit left by the first washing, they burn it, and insert what is called by the fire-proof stone which is abundant in the country. This iron is far more beautiful than the other kinds. But if it were not burnt in the furnace it would not at all differ, as it appears, from silver. Now they say that it alone is not liable to rust, but that it is not very plentiful.”

            This is Eastern Anatolia (Amisos is east of Sinope at the Black Sea shores), the old Hittite land. Do they still remember something? But it would be rather difficult to repeat the process from text. The text is clearly a hearsay, albeit I hope at the end we shall see somewhat more clearly. I think, the key is the “fire-proof stone”; of course it is meaningless to put fire-proof stones into the furnace together with the ore.

            350 years later Strabo, the biggest geographer until Ptolemy, tells stories about metallurgy. I did not find a good text about iron; albeit on the old Hittite lands he mention communities specialised to iron/steel. But there is a phenomenally unclear text about oreichalcum (i.e. brass) production in Aiolis, which I will give at the end of this Appendix for demonstrating that ancient scholars understood next to nothing about metallurgy.

            Now back to Aristotle’s text. He is obviously hesitating if “iron” can be really melted or it is only softened. First, let us see that the main technical problem was not high temperature, but high temperature in a furnace. Pure Fe melts at 1535 °C. So you must build the furnace from something still reliable at 1535 °C. Recently it is told that you need something above Segner fire-proof class 26, and this something must be a ceramics. A few stones are similarly fire-proof, but not many; Aristotle explicitly tells that “mill-stone” (some basalt) melts. And you then must have a similarly fire-proof mortar too. Everyday brick is unstable at such a temperature. Although most ceramics does not melt, at high temperatures they soften or fragment.

            Now, for Classical Greek science even the difference between heat and temperature was not observed. True, from the physics of Aristotle the lest untrue was Thermodynamics [76], a part of his Meteorologica, the Science of Changes. This statement is far from being a critique: Plato's physics is totally useless for us. But 2350 years is a lot of time.

            Aristotle did not distinguish extensive and intensive variables in Thermodynamics; and nobody else for more 2000 years. Maybe the first ones observing the problem were Count Rumford 200 years BP and Carnot a generation later; and the first scientist methodically distinguishing Heat and Temperature was Black, teacher of Watt. At the interaction of two systems the extensives tend to add up, while the respective intensives tend to converge. So simple materials are melted via heat; but they melt when the temperature passes the melting point not when you transferred "enough heat". (In addition, a century ago we became certain that Heat is not a thermodynamic extensive; the well-defined one is Internal Energy, and Heat Transfer is a part of the Internal Energy Change; but that is a small detail now.) Pure elements and a few other materials melt clearly, at a definite temperature, but generally with an intake of latent heat, so at the melting temperature the temperature increase stops for a while, and more and more solid parts turn to liquid. For pure Fe this happens at 1535 °C.

            Chemical compounds may or may not melt without decomposition/change. Aristotle knew this, but did not know, why. We do know, why; it depends on the strength of interatomic forces between the atoms versus intermolecular ones. As a result common salt can be melt at 801 °C, but common sugar "caramelizes".

            Alloys show an intermediate temperature range in melting. An alloy is the solid state mixture of 2 (or more) metals, but here a "metal" is not a metallic element, but anything solidifying as a regular "metallic lattice". E.g. cementite, Fe3C, is such, so cementite can be alloyed with iron, Fe. Both solidify in cubic lattices.

            But let us first consider very briefly copper and silver. The two kinds of atoms mimic each other quite well, and consequently they solve each other in any ratio, and also they can substitute each other in solid state indiscriminately. However, letting the mixture cool down slowly from above 1084 °C (the melting point of Cu), some nontriviality happens.

            At a given temperature the real equilibrium state is two mixtures; one in liquid state, the other as small crystals. At first Cu predominates in the crystals. As we approach 960 °C, the melting point of Ag, the liquid phase is less and less, and at a temperature depending on the initial ratio the whole alloy is solid. If the cooling was really slow, a solid solution is formed; the Cu and Ag "atoms" (really ions) are randomly mixed in the lattice.

            Now, iron and cementite can solve each other indiscriminately in liquid phase, but not in solid phase. The iron-cementite alloy is of additional type, so if iron predominates, the cementite cubes are random amongst the irons. (That is, actually, an austhenite lattice.) Above some Fe3C content (the maximum is c. 10 %, 1.7 weight % C, at 1145 °C), the iron cannot adopt all the Fe3C in solid state, so the matter is a mixture of crystals of austhenite and cementite. The alloy has the minimal melting point (eutectic), 1145 °C, at c. 4.3 weight % C, then the Fe3C/Fe ratio is c. 2/1. This solid matter is called  ledeburite, but really it is a mixture of small austhenite and cementite crystals.

            (Sorry; I cannot tell the story simpler. Any metallurgist, which I am not, would accuse me with serious simplifications. And this is fairly recent knowledge: the full Fe+C state diagram was constructed mere 112 years ago. Earlier the empirical information was diffuse and the paradigm inadequate. But without this information there would remain the Aristotelian text completely meaningless.)

            But as we let the matter cool down below 1145 °C, the austhenite can contain less and less C. Austhenite is even unstable below c. 730 °C. Remember this.

            Let us first summarize the kinds of “irons” familiar to ancients but in a language halfway modern.

 

            Here we will distinguish 5 different metallic substances, all predominantly Fe, so called loosely "iron", and in use before the Industrial Revolution. They come as follows:

            1) Pure iron, Fe. It is a rather soft metal (~80 Brinell grade), fairly resistant to corrosion, rust &c.

            2) Raw iron, Fe with some C, mainly above 1.7 % (weight). This substance is slightly harder than the previous one (cca. Brinell 165) but rather fragile; resistant to corrosion. (Called also castiron, which would be anachronistic here, or pigiron.)

            3) Forged iron, Fe with minor C content. It is soft (between the previous two) and resistant to corrosion.

            4) (Carbon) Steel, Fe with non-negligible but <1.7 % C and practically nothing else. It can be made hard by tempering (up to 600 Brinell), but it is not resistant to corrosion.

            5) Nickel-iron, Fe with 5-12 % Ni (plus minor components each below 1 %, as seen later). It is not extremely hard, but strong, elastic, keeps the edge and can be hardened by tempering; it is slightly resistant to corrosion.

All other alloys are ignorable up to the industrial revolution.

            Now, Iron Age could not be based on pure iron as improper for tools (being only slightly harder than unhammered pure copper), but forged iron is not too good for tools either and raw iron needs caution, being fragile. So "Iron Age" needed carbon steel or nickel-iron. But steel production was a nontrivial process with Bronze Age technologies (as will be seen) and nickel is scarce in Earth's crust; a metal discovered only in 261 BP. There is a combined Fe-Ni ore, pentlandite, which appears as ore mineral in igneous rocks in small quantities, but it is a sulphide, and the remaining S would cause fragility, just as in pyrite irons.

            However, almost pure nickel-iron is found in rare nuggets, not unsimilarly (but more rarely) as for gold and copper. Namely, the so called iron meteorites are predominantly nickel-irons. (App. C showed that both Fe and Ni belongs to the Fe peak of cosmic abundance., and in the formation of the Solar System metallic Fe & Ni precipitated together., so the ratio is c. homogeneous.) Therefore the first "iron" objects, hammered from the rare and precious meteoritic nuggets, were nickel-irons, an alloy never produced industrially afterwards until 261 BP. And this "natural" nickel-iron was superior to anything artificial except some very good steels. Ref. [22] emphasizes the disappointment of the first blacksmiths producing an inferior Ersatz when trying to steal the secret of the extraterrestrial metal.

            Present metallurgy does not use nickel-irons of meteoritic compositions. Either nickel is less, up to 5 %, or is above 20 %, or Cr is added too. (In the neglected range the ground state texture is a kamacite-taenite mixture, with mechanical properties dependent on the Ni content.) However extra- and interpolations give the properties mentioned in Point 5. Tempering is possible by heating and quenching for the average Ni/Fe ratio, because the kamacite-taenite phase borders.

            So what should be compared to Bronze Age is not Iron but Steel Age. Metals 1-3 are as hard as bronze, have no superiority and the higher abundance of iron ores is true but remember the difficulty in reducing and inability to melt and cast; they could not replace bronze in everyday use, and this is the reason for the long delay when even artificial iron objects are sporadic. This situation was an inevitable consequence of two simple physicochemical facts: iron melts higher than copper, and much nearer to the melting points of furnace construction materials.

            Observe that without melting the iron the alloying experiments (for the analogy of tin, arsenic or antimon added to copper) are almost impossible (and we do know now that other metals available in pure state then would have not helped too much). On the other hand another physicochemical fact enabled the ancients to correct the improper carbon content after reduction still in solid state. Namely, the diffusion coefficient D(T) of C in Fe is surprisingly high, and steeply grows with temperature. It is almost 10-6 cm2/s at 700 C° (the copper smelting temperature) and 10-5 cm2/s at 1100 C° (the copper casting and iron smelting temperature) in pure α-iron [77]. Therefore the average distance of carbon propagation by diffusion in time t is

              s ~ (D(T)t)˝                                                                                                                           (D.1)

So the diffusion length in one day at 700 C° is 0.1 cm, at 1100 C° 0.3 cm, not too much but enough for blades.

            Roughly the very C-free iron (up to c. 0.25 %) is “forged iron", or something such, but can be used only for ornaments, being soft (as I told earlier, most pure metals are soft for simple physical reasons), then comes steel, the border between steel and raw iron is at 1.7 % C, which is the maximum C content of austhenite. Thence upward, but for practical reasons until the eutectic, 4.3 %, we have raw iron. The main difference is that steel is elastic, not rigid, and can be quenched, while raw iron is hard, but may break and cannot be quenched. The reason is simple enough, but the explanation was unavailable in Classical Antiquity.

            Let us cool a matter with less, but not much less C than 1.7 %, from 1145 °C. Soon the temperature is too low for austhenite of the original composition to exist. So the equilibrium configuration becomes austhenite+cementite. If the cooling is really slow, the domains will be microscopic, the matter will not break but will not be too hard either. At faster, but not too fast cooling the domains are bigger, and the matter can break at domain borders.

            However in a really fast cooling from 1145 °C there is no time for the composition to change, and there remains the austhenite composition. It is unstable at room temperature, but diffusion times are very long. The sword will be hard (internal stresses from extra energy in the lattice), but will not break (homogeneous lattice structure). At very low C content the matter is almost pure Fe in the lattice, so soft; above 1.7 % there is no homogeneous austhenite structure at any temperature, so you does not have anything to quench, and if you try it to quench, it will sooner or later break because of the extra  cementite outside the austhenite texture.

            For a quite thermodynamical formalism I can summarize as follows.

If a system is in a "false ground state" with extra energy, then the pressure decreases; by other words sucking stresses appear. This is easy to show for an isotropic medium, where, from fundamental thermodynamics,

              e = Ts + µn - p                                                                                                                       (D.2)

              de = Tds + µdn                                                                                                                       (D.3)

where e is the energy density, T is the temperature, s is the entropy density, µ is the chemical potential, n is the particle density and p is the pressure. Now let us introduce the free energy density f≡e-Ts=f(T,n). Then

              df = f,TdT + f,ndn                                                                                                                   (D.4)

              p = -Tf,T + nf,n - f                                                                                                                  (D.5)

Then an additive constant term fo in f results in a contribution -fo in p. So in non-equilibrium crystalline structure there appears a “sucking stress”, the lattice is more strongly kept together and this is enhanced hardness.

            Thus an iron alloy can be hardened if at the particular composition the high temperature lattice is different from the low-temperature one; and specially if the low temperature phase contains some alpha-iron, while the high one is gamma. The quantitative details may depend on the details of the diagram.

            And note that FeNi from iron meteorites may also do the trick, mutatis mutandis. Namely, at low Ni content the low temperature equilibrium FeNi structure is alpha (kamacite), afterwards it is alpha+gamma, and for high content it is gamma (taenite). The diagrams are awkward at low temperatures, but from the analysis of iron meteorites it seems that below 5 % Ni they are pure kamacite, and above 20 % they are pure taenite. Below the higher value the high and low temperature structures differ.

            Almost all iron meteorites show the Widmannstatten pattern of intersecting lines, indicating kamacite-taenite domains. So they are (alpha+gamma) at low temperature, and gamma at higher ones. Then by slow heating and subsequent quenching an unstable higher energy state is frozen in, so this matter must harden, similarly to but perhaps quantitatively less than carbon steel. Quenching is impossible for pure taenites. But such meteorites are rare. Iron meteorites in pure kamacite state (i.e. with low Ni content) are not extremely rare, and according to the scheme they could be quenched, but maybe not too well, as carbon steels of low C content. I definitely do know that resolidified Ni-iron has the tendency to break, surely along kamacite-taenite domain borders. I do not know if anybody tried with tempering. But in ancient times any heating happened on coal fire, so the nickel iron absorbs some C, helping the hardening.

            Even without different phases heating and quenching helps a little, because the high temperature lattice defect abundance is higher and it freezes in, producing an additive term in the internal energy. My guess is that the moderate hardening of hammered copper has a similar thermodynamic explanation; hammering produces abundant lattice defects. So it is possible that in the IVth millenium BC such a technique was in use for bronze. If so, it might have been a natural idea to adapt the technique for the new metal, where it must have been successful.

            Now, the ancients could make raw iron. In the overwhelming majority of cases they produced it in solid state, because they did not have fire-proof stone/mortar for the furnace. However, observe that ledeburite, the eutectic of Fe and Fe3C, melts at 1145 °C, only 61° higher than Cu. Furnaces of Cu smelters and bronze workers are appropriate to smelt ledeburite.

            However, the original composition was generally not of 4.3 % C. If higher, than you heat up the furnace just until melting starts, took away the liquid, and you can continue with ledeburite. If you are too picky, you get too less liquid. To get more, its C content will be above 4.3 %, so one smith chooses one strategy, the other another.

            If the original composition of the solid Fe was lower than eutectic, then the strategy must have been opposite. Then the needed steel remains solid and you have to get rid off the liquid ledeburite. In each case you cannot finish the process, because the furnace cannot be used at the temperature when the whole matter would melt.

            In the first case now you have a ledeburite ingot, and more process is needed to oxidise away the surplus C (hammering &c. at red heat). In the second case, when the original C content was below 4.3 %, there is a slight chance that you can catch a solid crust of good composition, but I would not bet. (Really, the Chinese were the first to be able to cast steel, not much after Aristotle, in their superior furnaces developed for fine ceramics.)

            But now you can see that Aristotle was not stupid; his age did not yet have the proper terminology for temperature, first order phase transitions & such, and he (or an adjunct of him) observed one step of iron processing in a furnace, not the whole one. In addition, he was correct to hesitate between melting & softening of iron. The matter at, say, 1200 °C, is a mixture of solid and liquid states, and the consistency of the matter is something "soft".

            However I am sure that there were proper iron furnaces in Eastern Anatolia. Item #48 of On Marvellous Things Heard speaks about an iron speciality and a "fire-proof stone".

            And now, to close this Appendix, I give first 3 further Notes from On Marvellous Things Heard, these for copper, only to show the status of mineralogy at the leading scientific center of the world in 322, and then, as a comparison, a short note of Strabo 3 centuries later, about brass. I comment all of them.

#49:     They say also that amongst the Indians the copper is so bright, pure and free from rust that it cannot be distinguished in colour from gold; ...

            This is surely about brass, Cu+Zn. Indeed, some brasses are quite golden. Aristotle's age did not identify zinc as a metal, but they knew some zinc compounds, e.g. cadmeia = ZnCO3.

#50:     They say that Celtic tin melts much more quickly than lead. The proof of its fusibility is that it is believed to melt even in water: ...

            Wood's Metal, 1/8 Sn, 1/8 Cd, 1/4 Pb and 1/2 Bi, melts at 71 °C. Lipovitz's Alloy, 2/15 Sn, 1/10 Cd, 4/15 Pb and 1/2 Bi, melts even at 60 °C. Some industrious Gallic smiths seem to have produced a similar alloy, by long experimentation. Bi2S3 sometimes appears together with SnS.

#62      Men say that the copper of the Mossynoeci is very brilliant and white, no tin being mixed with it; but there is a kind of earth there, which is smelted with it. ...

            The "kind of earth" was surely a nickel ore. Already at 20 % Ni the CuNi alloys are quite white; the US dimes contain only 25 % nickel. 3 Bactrian Greek kings minted CuNi coins with 20 % Ni content; we do not know how they did it. Ni, as a metal, was identified only in 261 BP.

            And now let us see Strabo, the greatest geographer of the world until Klaudios Ptolemaios, who was at the site. He is 3 centuries after Aristotle, and still... His note is about a locality in Aiolis, where brass was produced. The translation is from [20], XIII, 1, 56:

            Next to Scepsis are Andeira, Pioniae, and Gargaris. There is found at Andeira a stone, which when burnt becomes iron. It is then put into a furnace together with some kind of earth, when it distils a mock silver, [here the translators insert as an explanation, (Pseudargyrum),] or with the addition of copper it becomes the compound called oreichalcum. There is found a mock silver near Tmolus also. These places and those about Assus were occupied by the Leleges.

            The text looks as a mistranslation; but it is not. The original does contain the burning, the transition to iron, the pseudargyrum &c. Aristotle's text of iron production is much more professional.

            Well, the "stone" must have been a zinc ore, maybe the cadmeia. I do not know what the "becomes iron" means. According to modern chemical literature, ZnO is reduced by C but then the metal is gaseous. Maybe this is "distils a mock silver", but the mock silver is not identified as a new metal. Surely if you reduce ZnO and CuO together, you can get some brass. Oreichalcum is surely brass, although the etymologic interpretation is "mountain copper". Plato in the Atlantis story speaks about oreichalcum as the second most expensive metal of the ancient Atlanteans, whose secret later became lost. Not much after Strabo Emperor Nero minted some brass coins and some Romans mentioned the alloy as aurichalcum, surely because of its similarity to aurum = gold. But Strabo believes in processes when a stone first becomes iron, and then mock silver.

 

APPENDIX E: DORICS IN CRETE IN 1178?

            Even in Classical Greek times details of the Fall were already hazy. No surprise: the last time when Bronze Age Greek civilisation worked normally was just before the Trojan War, say 1200; and in the usual interpretation Iron Age civilisation started to emerge from obscurity at the beginning of the 700's. E.g. adaptation of Phoenician alphabetic writing is dated to c. 775, somewhere near Cyme in Southern Italy. That is a hiatus of more than 400 years. Without written records it is a miracle that at least the chronology arrived at in Alexandrine times became better that wild guesses and exaggerations.

            According to Classical Age consensus, at the Fall of Troy Dorians lived in hilly and not too big Doris in Middle Greece. Sons of Hero Heracles befriended them and started with them to conquer their paternal heredity, the Peloponnesus, in 1104. Now, this may and may not be true.

            1178 is a time  many decades before the Doric Invasion. If these lines were written in the Dark Age, during which Crete got Doric majority, then why to mention a Doric minority before the Dark Age? If this is some old topos from an older, lost, composition, then whence came these Dorians? Or really the name meant “uncivilised”, as the Indo-European etymology suggests?

            The Indo-European etymology of the word is sure enough. Pokorny gives lots of IE words deru~dōru~drū &c. with the meaning “tree, wood, forest”. A few examples are Oind daru, Alb dru, Hit taru, Osl drъva. Av drvaena is “woodden”, Lat durus is “hard”, and Cym derwen is “oak”.Without completen

            As for Greek, the related words are δρυας “tree, oak” and δουρος~δορος “spear”. So Dorians may have been men of woods, men of hard as wood, or spearmen. Suggestions of “hillmen” came as analogy. Sometimes Pokorny thought that the tribe originally may have been Celtic, where the stem is of course the same as shown by the Cymru word, and also by the Druids, but the assumption is not necessary now, the  Greek etymology is quite satisfactory. (And during Bronze Age Ggreeks & Celts were far from each other). If somebody lives in the forest, and hard & raw as oak, then he is not a part of Mycenaean redistributive society.

            As for the 3 phyles Pamphyloi is quite clear. As for Hylleis & Dymanes, etymologies are equivocal. But we do know from Greek myths and historians, that the Sons of Heracles b(disinherited bvAchaean upper crust elements?) made an alliance with the “original Dorians” to get back their righteous heritage. Classical Greeks believed that this happened in Central Greece where even afte Dark Age there vwas a small Doris; but woodsmen, wild men, hillmen, hardy spearmen &c. could have lived in LH IIIB anywhere far from the cities, even in Messenian Sa-ra-pe-da, probable home of Wanax Enkhelawon & his personal scribe Hand 24.

 The question is, when was the alliance formed. Again, Csommon Sense and mythology must be simultaneously used, which is not easy and not safe at all. Yet, if Heracles lived at all, he still lived in 1250, since he is important in the Argonaut story. He dies/goes to Olymp not much later; that is near to the end of LH IIIB1. So n c. 1230 some troubles may happen, in the way that is in archaeology & biology.

            Now, the story is surprisingly clear for a myth. First the oldest son, Hyllos takes the lead, when all the Heraqclids reached manhood, and is successful, but comes a plague. Then Hyllos retires to Central Greece, marries the last paramour of Heracles, Iole, and the Dorian King Aigimios adopts him. Strabon [20] in IX, 4, 10 tells that Aigimios was the king of Pindos. So ths is the time of the alliance.

            After 3 years Hyllos again invades the Peloponnesus, meets the King of Mycenae (in the myth Atreus), but he battles with Ekhemos, King of Tegea, who kills him in battle. Then the Sons and the Dorians do not invade for 50 years, or, alternatively, until the third generation. Finally the Sons and Dorians invade in the fourth generation and win. Then, with the initial years until the smallest Heraclid grows up and some years here and there this is cca. 5 generations. Take 25 years for a generation. Since Greek historians calculated the invasion to 1104, the start of the tale is 1229, which is the start of LH IIIB2 for a year. The Sons meet Atreus and Hyllos is killed in battle c. in 1215, and then there is no battle until c. 1165. That is well in LH IIIC and maybe the beginning of Postpalatial. No doubt, in Postpalatial lots of palaces were destroyed; OK, some were des troyed by the new alliance of 3 phyles.

            And then the Sons had been the Hylleis, from H|yllos. Then the people of Aigimos must have been the Dymanes.

            This algebra gives us that the alliance was made in 1220. No big problem with 3 phyles of Dorians on Crete in 1178, but that story of Castor Hylakides can be later insertion as well.

 

APPENDIX F: ON THE NONTRIVIAL ROOTS OF SPARTA

            What comes here I took from a Hungarian high school textbook 125 years old [61]. Surely, other textbooks told similar things then, before the dominance of pacifism, high influence of Socialist thinking and nationalistic philosophy among scholars; but later the new ideas won. From that time I read only [61]. I do not claim that [61] is right; but maybe it gives us some idea independent of 2500 years of Athenian authors.

            In that year the author (just as e.g. I. Newton in [21]) still does not know too much about the Bronze Age Greek civilisation. Schliemann has just excavated something in Mycenae, so maybe the Greek civilisation ascended first on the Peloponnesus; anyways the myths tell something such. The Achives surely were great in the time of the Trojan War, but later that tribe (or what) fell from the top.

            Now let us see early but somewhat tangible states & histories. Thebes, Athens and Corinth were ancient and legends tell something about ancient kings. Homer worked maybe in the ninth century according to Herodotus; but [61] believes this too early. But Eratosthenes puts the Fall of Troy to 1184; and in the next century migrations start. One is the Dorian Migration, starting in 1104. (Such data came mainly from the Alexandrine scholars who calculated the Fall of Troy, and from Plutarch & Thucydides [4] writing “80 years after the Fall of Troy” or “four hundred years before the Peloponnesian War”, obviously somewhat round numbers. But they used a lot of earlier texts not extant now.)

            Orestes killed Aigisthos & Clytaimnestra in 1176, then there were some complications, but finally he ruled Argos, Sparta and Arcadia. After him his son, Tissamenos was King. But then came the Dorians (and the sons of Heracles). They occupied almost the entire Peloponnesus, with the exception of Arcadia. But now let us see Sparta.

            During the Dorian Migration a great chief, Aristodemus, was thunderstruck, which is surely a sacred thing. He left two sons, maybe twins, Procles & Eurysthenes. Procles' son was Agis, Eurysthenes' one Euripon, and hence come the dual Spartiate kingdom. The Dorians became the warriors, got taxless lands and the subjugated Achives paid the taxes. However the royal courts were full with Achives, the priests, administrators &c. of the old Achive Spartan state. E.g. the Talthybiades clan, as in Agamemnon's time, continued to give the heralds, tells [61]. And then we cannot be too surprised that in Doric Sparta Achive Menelaus & Helen continued to get state cult, tell I. (This is the main reason to cite [61]. The idea is good, even if it was written 125 years ago.)

            King Prytanis, the Agid, had 2 sons, Eunomus & Lycurgus. Eunomus died but left a baby. Lycurgus did not claim the kingship, but started to travel and elaborated a constitution. According to Plutarch this happened c. 804. The Lycurgean constitution was unchanged for 4 centuries, until the reform of Epitadeus. With that Sparta started to decline.

            Under the old constitution the warriors were Dorians. But other Greeks did live in Sparta, e.g. Achives. The First Messenian War longed for 20 years. During that time the Dorian warriors were not home, and their wives born sons from other men. (Maybe from Achives, the old tribe of Agamemnon & Menelaus). When the victors returned home, they found sons which were Spartiates from the mothers' side but  not on the fathers'. What to do?

            They were called parthenioi (rather call them sons of virgins than accuse the wives with adultery) and when they became adults, they were helped to occupy Tarentum in Italy.

            And now I am at the point. According to Aristotle, On Marvellous Things Heard, #106 (Bk N° 840a7-16) Tarentum was the only city in his time celebrating a sacrifice to the Agamemnonids and only to them at that day. Women could not eat this sacrificial meat; surely because of the bad memory of Clytaimnestra. But the founders of Tarentum were Achaean servants of the Dorians! They remembered the old King of the old tribe. This was the only city in 322 to keep the good memory of Agamemnon. For anybody else Agamemnon's memory was not too dear. (He was a victor, but on long run not successful, and maybe carrying bad luck.) Menelaus is the opposite; read Odyssey, Canto IV, how successful and happy he remained. And Helen had a divine beauty.

 

APPENDIX G: LONG AND SHORT E’S and A’S: FORMANT FREQUENCIES

            Mycenaean was one of the Greek dialects; the oldest preserved in writing, but definitely not ancestral to  the dialects of Classical Age, except, of course, Arcado-Cyprian. Simply the others are unattested from Second Millennium. Then there is no surprise that the relations between the First Millennium dialects are not clear for us.

            What is, however, a surprise is that even Aeolian seems not too near to Arcado-Cyprian, in spite of our expectations from (quasi?)History. Lots of Classical Age sources state that the Aeolian Exodus was lead by the grandson of Orestes; and surely, Orestes was raised in Mycenaean culture. We shall understand this in future; but until that let us see what we know.

            In a very illuminating short work Garrett [38] claims that Proto-Greek is not reconstruable and probably did not exist. While nobody has to accept this, let us see what does this mean.

            From Classical times we know quite well Ionic-Attic, Doric & Aeolic; Cypriote is known somewhat too and, while Arcadian is badly attested, its precursor, Mycenaean is known from the Bronze Age tablets. Now, Proto-Greek is by tacit definition a language which was LCA of all dialects and, in the same time, already not PIE or not {PIE-Anatolian-Tokharian}. This is the language about whose existence Garrett is sceptic. He argues that the declension system of the LCA (if the LCA existed at all) was still quite PIE, the uniquely Greek phonologic changes were still ongoing or even not that in the Mycenaean tablets and only the vocabulary was "Greek", with the many Aegean words taken into the language of the invaders.

            Garrett's arguments seem to be strong, even if he is in clear collision with the evolutionary trees generated by computers (see e.g. [63]) suggesting a millennia-long solitary life of Greek (OK, together with Armenian).

            We now will not try to solve this problem. But obviously anything clearing up the relations amongst the old dialects may help somewhat.

            Naturally the degree of kinship between Mycenaean and Doric is important; the Peloponnesus was Mycenaean-dominated in 1200, Doric-dominated a few centuries later, and according to Classical-Age historians, the Return of the Heraclids, producing the change, started c. 1100. Now, if Mycenaean was near to Proto-Doric, then the change was rather social (revolts of the oppressed & such), while if they were not close kins, then a massive immigration happened. Now, Proto-Doric is not attested, but for anybody familiar with the Linear B tablets and at least Athenian slanders about Doric the common a-vocalism of Mycenaean & Doric as opposed to Ionic-Attic is a commonplace. Attic demos is damos in Doric and da-mo in Linear B; and Attic Athene is Athana in Doric. Now I am going to demonstrate (via physical methods) that the difference is not great, so at least it would need great caution to use it for an evidence of close kinship. But let us first start from very late PIE.

            PIE was poor in vowels. It seems that the original inventory was only 2: "e" & "o", with marginal "a", and with two glides, w/u & y/i. With the deaths of the 3 laryngeals the system became richer, e.g. long vowels developed; but this is still the 5-vowel system, believed universal by Latin-writing West.

            The first alphabets for Indo-Europeans do not support the idea of 5 vowels. It seems that the first IE alphabet (adapted but not copied from Phoenician c. 775) was the Greek; and alphabetic Greek has 7 vowels. The alphabet was taken synchronously for non-IE Etruscan too, and via Etruscan into Latin, Oscan & Umbrian. Now, the Latin alphabet used 5 vowel signs (V & I being originally really glides), but Oscan used 6 signs. We do not know too much, of course, about the Latin of the age of the 7 kings; but we do know about the vowel lengths of the Late Roman Republic via hexameters, and it is obvious that writing did not reflect the lengths but they were present. From Early Imperial Ages Vulgar Latin is reconstruable, and clearly there were at least 9 vowels even if length is ignored:

              ị

            į

          ẹ

        ę

     a

        ǫ

          ọ

            ų

              ụ

 

Of course, the exact pronunciations are unknown.

            Mycenaean had a 5-vowel orthograhy, even if there are a few Linear B signs which seem to be pure vowels and still neither a, nor e, nor i, nor o, nor u. Maybe they are diphtongs. Classical Greek diphtongs evolved from vowel-glide combinations; maybe Mycenaean ones too, but who knows?

            The Cypriote syllabary was close kin of the Linear B, and it was in use until Alexander the Great; and it is clearly a pure 5-vowel syllabary. But this is not an evidence for a 5-vowel dialect. In Linear B and Cypriote syllabaries 2 extra vowels would inflate the syllabary by 40 %. Even the 5-vowel one used at least 91 signs; any enrichment would have made the syllabary impractical.

            Observe that in Classical Attic, epsilon is an e-sound but as that, short and closed (by other word high, something an ẹ), while eta is long and open (low); omicron and omega are similarly related. This is at least 7 vowels.

            Now for an English speaker (be it either English or American or Australian) there is a big difference between an a-sound (either short or long) and a long e-sound; while a millennium ago the ancestor of the recent "ee" was still an e-sound, now it is an i-sound.

            This would suggest a scheme in which the long vowel is more closed than the short one; and in some cases this is true. But the Greek example suggests the opposite. Now, for recent languages acoustic analysis is possible. Here I turn to such ones; but I use strongly Magyar data. (That language is loosely called Hungarian too; but Hungarian is a state, not a language.) Magyar is the biggest Uralic language, and the Uralic languages have a unique position. The Uralic family is clearly in some intimate relation to Indo-European, but common etymologies are few (although clearly not borrowings). Palaeo-Uralic either was not so vowel-poor than PIE, or the reconstructions went to wide away. The grammar is quite different, albeit the family is generally considered Nostratic. (And that is my first language, so I have internal information too.) Decades ago I participated in a speech acoustics study (see e.g. [78], [79]) which yielded objective numbers.

            Let us see first a comparison of Magyar and American English; for averages of male speakers. The discipline looks for formant frequencies; in first approximation that means the locations of local maximums of the Fourier spectrum of the sound. It seems that more or less the first two formants are enough.

 

 

 

 

Fig. 4: Two-formant positions of American English (pentagrams, numbered, for the code see Table 12) and Magyar (heavy dots, national orthography) vowels

 

            For the Magyar vowels the data are from [79]; for American English from [80]. Of course the formants are insensitive of length. Ignoring length, Magyar has 9 different vowels, American English 10 (and Queen's English 11). Being Magyar orthography fairly phonetic, the 9 sounds are clearly shown by native orthography. On the other hand, since English orthography goes back to Anglo-Saxon times, its present notation is haphazard. The 9 to 10 vowels are shown on Fig. 4 on the two-formant place. The Magyar vowels are denoted with the vowel letters, the American ones are numbered, and the code is according to the single vowel in the words listed below:

 

1

Heed

2

Hid

3

Head

4

Had

5

Hod

6

Hawed

7

Hood

8

Who'd

9

Hud

10

Heard

 

Table 12: The numbered American English vowels of Fig. 4

 

            As you can see (and could see it even better if I enclosed the tolerance regions too), the two vowel systems are quite different. I would leave the American system to the Americans, but the Magyar system is clear for me. According to the first formants there are 4 grades, which may be called, e.g., low, low-middle, high-middle and high. Grade 1 is represented by only one sound, á, low-middle by 2, a & e, low-high by 3, o, ö & é, and high again by 3, u, ü & i.

            Although now length is ignored, Magyar (and Slovakian) orthography always use prime for length. So the ö of Fig. 4 stands for two Magyar sounds, ö & ő,  whose formants coincide.

On an openness grade the 2 or 3 sounds differ for back/front and labial/illabial formation. In Turkish, with an obscure relation to Magyar, but very close in grammar, Grade High has 4 vowels, and in sequence growing in F2 they are: labial back, illabial back, labial front and illabial front. Magyar grammar still shows this fourth high vowel, albeit phonetics does not; I would not go into details. Vowel á is illabial back, a is labial black, e is illabial front, o and u are labial back, ö and ü are labial front, and finally é and i are illabial front. The smallest symmetric lattice covering these sounds is 4*4; and that is Fig. 5. In this scheme only 9 of the 16 lattice points are occupied; however two-formant data suggest this system.

            Figure 5 shows the 4*4 system. Using the existing 9 points, the other 7 can be inter/extrapolated. However observe that at Grade 1 the points would come too near to each other, and surely this is the reason that Grade 1 is represented by a single sound. As for the trapezoidal shape, surely anatomy is behind. That, or a triangular shape, holds for many languages. I used a 2-number notation for the vowels now not extant in Magyar; first number is Openness from 1 to 4, second number {lab. back, illab. back, lab. front, illab. front}; as for the 9 existing sounds see the Table below.

 

 

 

Fig. 5: The 4*4 scheme of 2-formant schemes as extrapolated from Magyar & Turkish

 

 

Á

1,2

A

2,1

E

2,4

O

3,1

Ö

3,3

É

3,4

U

4,1

Ü

4,3

I

4,4

 

Table 13:  Magyar vowels in the 4*4 scheme

 

            The scheme seems wide enough to incorporate all Altaic & Uralic languages, and at least the stressed vowels of Indo-European ones. (In the last group some unstressed vowels have no clear enough  phonetics.) So I would use this 4*4 lattice for Greek,, be Mycenaean or not.

            The recent Greek vowel system is very much simplified, but Classical Greek seems to have been something

 

Α

1,2

Ω

2,1

Η

2,4

Ο

3,1

Ε

3,4

Υ

4,1/2/3

Ι

4,4

 

Table 14: Greek vowels in the 4*4 scheme. The vowels are Classical Attic ones except for Y where regional differences and historical reconstructions are taken into account too

 

 

 

For υ all the 3 possibilities are real, but the (4,1) pronunciation in High Classical Attic was for the original diphtong ου. The scholarly consensus is for (4,3), but it is possible that this simply the influence of German scholars, who had their native ü=(4,3). The system is more symmetric with choice (4,2).

            Of course, a 3*4 lattice is possible too, but then Grade 2 is too crowded with 3 vowels (Grade 1 is then empty.) Maybe linguists have something to state. I argue in the 4*4 scheme.

            We can substitute the Magyar frequency data for the Classical Greek ones (which is of course quite arbitrary) and then we can approximately orientate ourselves using Fig. 5 and Tables 9 & 10 for the formants of the Old Greek vowels. But now observe that:

            1) In Classical Attic α, υ and ι could have been either short and long; but η was always long while ε short; and ω long while ο short.

            2) In recent literary Magyar long á is Grade 1 while short a is Grade 2; while long é is Grade 3 while short e is Grade 2. The other sounds may be both long and short.

            3) In spite of the openness difference in literary Magyar á is the long pair of a, and é is that of e; this is clear from declension & conjugation. In the first written Magyar texts almost a millennium old some nouns still ended in a short vowel, which is now lost, but reappears in declension. Similarly, the nominatives of nouns with Sg3 possessive endings now end in short a/e (e.g. ház 'house', háza 'his/her/its house; fej 'head', feje 'his/her/its head') get the (surely) original long vowel back during declension: feje 'his head' → fejében 'in his head'.

            4) However there is a dialect at the Northern boundary of the Magyar language, Palóc, with an opposite representation for the a-sounds:

 

Length

Letter

Common Magyar

Palóc

Short

A

(2,1)

(1,2)

Long

Á

(1,2)

(2,1)

 

Table 15: Variants of Magyar A & Á

 

 

This does not result in any communication problem between the two communities of speakers.

            5) There is a non-negligible area where there is a short (3,4) too. This then corresponds in suffixes to the other 2 short Grade 3 vowels, o & ö. Again, full communication is possible. On the Southern linguistic boundary, this short (3,4) is substituted by (3,3), ö. Again, no communication problem.

            And now let us go back to Greek. The only difference observable in writing in the Doric/Attic damos/demos pair is that the first vowel is α/η. However the Doric α here is long, so really the only difference is (1,2)/(2,4). In addition, it seems that at the dawn of Classical times there was a {long (1,2)}→{long (2,4)} vowel change in Ionic/Attic. Then the a-vocalism in some words is the "original Greek", therefore the "Dorism" of some Mycenaean words is only conservativism in Doric, no special nearness of Doric & Mycenaean.

 

APPENDIX H: KOTONA KITIMENA VERSUS KOTONA KEKEMENA

            The Pylos Tablets give us lists about land holdings, usage & such. We do not know, what the terms meant in 1100. We are half a millennium before Roman Laws strictly distinguishind property, possession and occupation. However it seems that 3 types of parcels occur in the texts: te-me-no, ko-to-na ke-ke-me-na and ko-to-na ki-ti-me-na. The first is clearly the Homeric and later temenos, although after Homer only temples of gods have a temenos. The other two are more difficult, and different experts interpret them differently. So let us go first to formal grammar.

            Ko-to-na ke-ke-me-na vs. ko-to-na ki-ti-me-na suggests 2 parallel expression: the first word, identical for the two, should be the general idea, so a noun, the second differentiates, so that is an adjective or something similar derived from verbs, say a participle. The ending, identical for both expression, -me-na, suggests a Passive Participle in Feminine, exactly -mena in Classical Greek. Ko-to-na seems conform to the gender of -mena, even if we cannot be sure about a final consonant.

            So we have to identify a noon, X, and two verbal stems, Y- & Z-; and both expression is of structure:

(Y/Z)-ed X

Here I note that English has only Past (or Perfect) Participle in Passive, while e.g. Russian has both Past and Present. We cannot be sure about this participle, but it is surely Passive.

            Ko-to-na does not see to be a problem. From the general lay of the texts it is something "land/estate/parcel" and in Classical Greek the epic word for land, soil &c. is "khthôn", feminine. In Mycenaean orthography both the consonants and the vowels are correct, except for the lack of the closing -a. You may assume that -na was written to avoid ko-to, which is uncharacteristic enough; or may assume a Mycenean *khthôna. But such highly speculative ideas are not necessary now, because of the existence of a word "ktoina"="parcel. Ko-to-na is the exact Linear B written form of a ktoina.

            To this point everybody seem to agree, so the 2 expressions mean

Y/Z-ed parcel

Then let us see Y/Z, ke-ke-/ki-ti-. Here the opinions diverge.

            Ventris & Chadwick [39] first tried loosely with communal/private. However later Chadwick was very cautious [81]. He did not even try to etymologize "ke-ke-“, but sees from the tablets, that ke-ke-me-na parcels finally belong to the damos, so ke-ke-me-na means approximately "common", "communal", or such. On the contrary, he etymologizes "ki-ti-" = "kti-", with a meaning "cultivated" or something converted to agronomy from wasteland. And through this, finally and maybe "private".         

On the other hand, Tőkei [5] did etymologize. His idea is

Y = (ke)k(e)

Z = kti

However he was not a Greek linguist (I am even less). So he was rather ignored.

            Since the correspondence of Y is strangely written here, I must write a few explaining sentences. Tőkei's first suggestion is a verb, whose Classical form is keimai = I lie down.

            So the stem is "kei" and if that is a diphtong, the "-ke-" writing is quite correct. But we see another "ke-" at the beginning!

            Yes, but in Classical times "keimai" served as the Perfect paradigm of "tithęmi" = "I set down sg/I lay sg". So in Classic times "keimai" was deponent and acted as the Perfect of the Middle/Passive of "tithęmi". Therefore in Classical times its Participle ended with "-mena" as one waits from a deponent verb mimicking Passive, but formally Active.

            Instead of more high-brow discussions consider a favourite example word of verb declensions: paideyô = teach. Its Passive Perfect the Sg. 1 is pepaideumai, with reduplication in the front but exactly the same suffix as at keimai. And the Perfect Participle is pepaideumena.

            We do not know when "keimai" became deponent; it happened sometimes before Classical. If it happened after 1100, then "kekeimena" was a quite good participle. Or, if syncope happened (for some verbs it happens), then "kekmena", but that would have written also as ke-ke-me-na. And then "ko-to-na ke-ke-me-na" is "lying parcel", so "fallow" or "out of use". OK, Chadwick's observation was good. The fallow land did not belong to any other, than the damos, the village community.

            Now, let us see ko-to-na ki-ti-me-na. The stem looks like "kti-". And here comes a group of "kt-" words from Classical Greek which belong together somehow:

 

Ktaomai

Get for oneself

Kektęmai

Have

Ktear

Treasure

Ktęsis

Acquisition

Ktętikos

Tenant/possessor

 

Table 16: Classical meanings og Greek “kt” “possession words”

 

            As the first word, Virgil, the French Enlightment and the Marxist movement all believed that Property started with somebody taking a part of the Common for himself. (I do no write him/herself; if matriarchates existed, they were still community societies.) Only, this happened gradually. Tőkei reconstructs the process as follows. First, still in Mycenaean times, some active & influential men broke fallows/wastes. In Greece this was not simple or easy: some lands left fallow were left so not for waiting for returning abundance but because they were too stony, or did not get enough water, or, say, terraces were needed on hills, and maybe even walls to prevent erosion on the sides of hills. The fallow, of course, belonged to community, the damos.

            Of course the damos acknowledged the plans because without breaking the fallow there was no grain thence at al. But all community societies periodically redistribute the lands. If that happens too soon, the active individual has worked, and loses the result. (My guess is that then the damos distributes the new land to some close kin of the ko-ro-te.) So the Palace registered the special benefits of the person in connection of the new land. Of course these benefits could have been anything: reduced tax for a time period, exemption from redistribution for a time period, or such. Then this land belonged to him (for a time), and you may call him a land-holder; but this was no property in the since of Roman Law or modern Britain. In several centuries private lands may have appeared in the wanaxdom (wanakteria?) of Pylos; but in the year of the record about the parcels of Warnataios (of which the smallest, a mere 2 l piece, was used by the personal armourer of Wanax Enkhelawon) the Dorians & Sons of Heracles arrived at Pylos, destroyed the Palace, the scribes died or fled to Arcady or Cyprus; and the Dorians redistributed the land on their own ways.

            Some times later Homer calls buildings & parcels "euktimenos" which would be cca e-we-ki-ti-me-na in Linear B. A building is such if well built; for a parcel it means something free of stones, regularly ploughed, encircled by fence &c. That is indeed a "ko-to-na e-u-ki-ti-me-na". In the stateless times it remains at the "builder" until a new band of foreigners does not uproot him. At the time of Hesiod it is already property.

 

APPENDIX I: ON REFERENCE [19]

            Eusebius' Chronicle is a priceless compilation of the key informations of Antique History, and is extant, except for minor lacunae. However the text had an interesting history.

            It seems that the text was written in the middle years of Constantine the Great, in two real Books (I mean, codex format, not rolls), in a brand new type of composition: true comparative Tables. These Tables were in Book 2, while Book 1 gave the texts behind the information in the Tables. Of course, you may expect lots of pen errors in the copying until Gutenberg; some of them could later be corrected by comparing manuscripts.

            However the two Books reached us on two different routes. Book 2 had been translated into Latin by the Bible-translator Jerome and this Latin manuscript then was maintained. But neither Greek nor Latin ms. of Book 1 is extant, although excerpts do exist. Book 1 remained in Grabar, Late Antique/Early Mediaeval Literary Armenian. We do know that the Grabar translation was made mainly from the original Greek, but a Syriac translation was also used. As you can imagine, the Chronological Tables have the most pen errors & lacunae; but that part seems intact in the Latin text.

            Then in 194 BP an Armenian Unitus (by other word, "Greek" Catholic) priest/linguist who is known for Armenians as Mkrtich' Awgerean but for Westerners as Jean-Baptiste Aucher, published the Armenian text printed in Venice, in a bilingual Grabar/Latin edition. This is the text I will formally refer; however I in fact used Internet texts as a recent Internet edition of Book 1 made by Robert Bedrosian, English from Grabar, on http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/eusebius_chronicon_02_text.htm, and for Book 2 those of http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ about jerome_cronicle numbered as _00_eintro_htm, _01_prefaces_htm and _02_part1.htm. Later parts were not necessary here.

            Awgerean’s Latin text was then translated into Modern European languages.

           

 

 

 

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