Sound Bite
Where does Greek history begin? Textbooks discussing Early Greek history leave spurious 'dark age' gaps where the evidence fails to match historians' fixed ideas. In this bold volume, dramatic claims regarding everything from the Trojan War to the 'Mask of Agamemnon' are argued in detail from both an archaeological and a literary perspective, unraveling historical conundrums that have stumped classicists for generations.
About the Book
Is it possible that the history of ancient Greece as found in the textbooks is seriously misdated? Emmet Sweeney is not the first to make such a proposal. That honor goes to Immanuel Velikovsky, whose series Ages in Chaos (1952) held that the whole of ancient Near Eastern history before the classical age was a fabrication.
Velikovsky identified Egyptian chronology as the source of the problem; and indeed the chronology of early Greek history, during the so-called Mycenaean period, was constructed along the lines demanded by Egyptian history. And, in a multitude of ways, legend and tradition agreed. For example, Homer's Iliad is full of references to the Phrygians, who were evidently close allies of the Trojans. Indeed, so intimate is the connection that we might suspect the Trojans themselves of being a branch of the Phrygian nation. Yet Phrygia, it is known, did not exist until the eighth century BC, when the Moschians, or Bryges, a Thracian people, migrated across the Bosphorus and settled in Asia Minor. Greek tradition is explicit that Priam, king of Troy during the famous siege, was a contemporary of Gordius, the first Phrygian king and founder of the capital city Gordion.
In this volume Sweeney explores the contradictions and "coincidences" that support a whole new view of ancient history.
Much of Greek myth is about the natural events of 850 BC and natural events which preceded them. This being the case, it seems reasonable to assume that the inhabitants of the region at the time were most probably at least in part ancestral Greeks. The culture of these Early Helladic folk was maritime and warlike. They raised great fortifications around many of their settlements which tended to lie along the coast. They were already familiar with tin-bronze, which speaks of trading relations with Atlantic Europe.
When considering the source of the military threat against which the Early Hellads raised their huge coastal fortifications, we need to think of Atlantic Europe and Atlantic North Africa, where a mighty seafaring culture, contemporary with Early Bronze Age Greece, is also attested. And this of course brings us into altogether deeper water, in more ways than one.
Introduction
In the book that follows I shall be arguing that early Greek history as found in the textbooks is seriously misdated. I am not the first to make such a proposal. That honor goes to Immanuel Velikovsky, whose series Ages in Chaos (1952) held that the whole of ancient Near Eastern history before the classical age was a fabrication. Velikovsky identified Egyptian chronology as the source of the problem; and indeed the chronology of early Greek history, during the so-called 'Mycenaean' period, was constructed along the lines demanded by Egyptian history. Thus when it became clear, towards the end of the nineteenth century, that the great flowering of 'Mycenaean' culture coincided with the Egyptian New Kingdom, especially the Eighteenth Dynasty, it was decreed that the Mycenaean Age belonged in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC, where Egyptologists had already placed the Eighteenth Dynasty. There were many dissenting voices at the time, most notably from the ranks of the classicists, and that great curmudgeon Cecil Torr fought a prolonged and very public battle with Flinders Petrie over the issue. In a thousand ways, claimed Torr, the Mycenaean Age showed itself to belong in the eighth or even seventh century BC. With what justification then did Petrie and the Egyptologists force their timescales into the world of the Aegean? Still, such doubts were ultimately laid to rest. The Egyptologists, who by this time were claiming a scientific foundation for their chronology, stressed the numerous connections disclosed by archaeology between the Mycenaean Age and the Eighteenth Dynasty and thereby compelled a second millennium date for the former.Many of the objections raised by Torr were later resurrected by Velikovsky. Echoing his predecessor, Velikovsky demonstrated that Mycenaean art and culture seemed to find its closest parallels in art and culture of the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Furthermore, it was found that Mycenaean material occurred at no great depth beneath that of the classical period, whilst in many places it was apparently associated with Archaic ware of the seventh and even sixth centuries. This, for example, was the case at various sites throughout the Peloponnese and southern Greece and most especially on Crete and Cyprus. And, in a multitude of ways, legend and tradition agreed. So, for example, Homer's Iliad is full of references to the Phrygians, who were evidently close allies of the Trojans. Indeed, so intimate is the connection that we might suspect the Trojans themselves of being a branch of the Phrygian nation. Yet Phrygia, it is known, did not exist until the eighth century BC, when the Moschians, or Bryges, a Thracian people, migrated across the Bosphorus and settled in Asia Minor. Greek tradition is explicit that Priam, king of Troy during the famous siege, was a contemporary of Gordius, the first Phrygian king and founder of the capital city Gordion.
Table content
Introduction
Chapter 1. An Age of Heroes
Where Does Greek History Begin?
The Rediscovery of Homeric Greece
The Early Debate
A 'Dark Age' Intrudes
The Dark Age in Asia Minor
Chapter 2. Archaeology and Art
Artistic Anomalies
A Bitter Controversy
The Emergence of Greek Culture
The Earliest Greek Culture
Contemporary Cultures
Chapter 3. The Question of Literacy
Epic Poetry
The Loss of Literacy
The Linear B Tablets
The Language of Linear B
Cadmus and the Phoenician Alphabet
Chapter 4. Evidence from Abroad
Thrace and Scythia
Magna Graecia
Etruria
Cyprus and the East
Chapter 5. Links Across the Seas
Greece and the East
Achaean Warriors Fight the Assyrians
The Shaft Graves of Mycenae
Pelops and Chariot Warfare
Agamemon in the Records of the Hittites
Mopsus
Chapter 6. The Course of History
Myth and History
A Dramatic Beginning
Greeks and Pelasgians
The Rise of Crete
Mycenae before Agamemnon
The Story of Thebes
Chapter 7. Bridging the Gap
The Dorian Invasion
The Age of the Tyrants
The Age of Colonization
Iron Swords of Tegea
Festivals and Legal Codes
Some Genealogies and Chronologies
Epilogue
APPENDIX
Phaeton's Fire and Heracles' Labors
Table 1. Bronze Age and Iron Age Contemporaries
Bibliography
INDEX
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