PT 4:
But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.
I have told you briefly, Socrates, what the aged Critias heard from Solon and related to us. And when you were speaking yesterday about your city and citizens, the tale which I have just been repeating to you came into my mind, and I remarked with astonishment how, by some mysterious coincidence, you agreed in almost every particular with the narrative of Solon; but I did not like to speak at the moment. For a long time had elapsed, and I had forgotten too much; I thought that I must first of all run over the narrative in my own mind, and then I would speak.
Here we find another interesting clue. Critias has just told us that Socrates was discussing the very things that are included in this story — that everything Socrates had been saying the previous day “agreed in almost every particular with the narrative of Solon.” Apparently, this story had been handed down via another line of transmission.
And so I readily assented to your request yesterday, considering that in all such cases the chief difficulty is to find a tale suitable to our purpose, and that with such a tale we should be fairly well provided. And therefore, as Hermocrates has told you, on my way home yesterday I at once communicated the tale to my companions as I remembered it; and after I left them, during the night by thinking I recovered nearly the whole it. Truly, as is often said, the lessons of our childhood make wonderful impression on our memories; for I am not sure that I could remember all the discourse of yesterday, but I should be much surprised if I forgot any of these things which I have heard very long ago. I listened at the time with childlike interest to the old man’s narrative; he was very ready to teach me, and I asked him again and again to repeat his words, so that like an indelible picture they were branded into my mind.
As soon as the day broke, I rehearsed them as he spoke them to my companions, that they, as well as myself, might have something to say. And now, Socrates, to make an end my preface, I am ready to tell you the whole tale. I will give you not only the general heads, but the particulars, as they were told to me.
The city and citizens, which you yesterday described to us in fiction, we will now transfer to the world of reality. It shall be the ancient city of Athens, and we will suppose that the citizens whom you imagined, were our veritable ancestors, of whom the priest spoke; they will perfectly harmonise, and there will be no inconsistency in saying that the citizens of your republic are these ancient Athenians. Let us divide the subject among us, and all endeavour according to our ability gracefully to execute the task which you have imposed upon us. Consider then, Socrates, if this narrative is suited to the purpose, or whether we should seek for some other instead. [Plato, Timaeus, translated by B. Jowett]
And we come to the final understanding that conveys to us the secret of the story of Atlantis: that it did not actually come from an Egyptian priest as we would now think of an Egyptian priest, but that this was a story that was created to “execute the task which you [Socrates] have imposed upon us,” which was to provide the clues that the "Egyptian priest" was in no way related to the land we now know as Egypt.
As for Wilkens location of Troy in England, the reader might want to recall the passages from Diodorus Siculus quoted in a previous chapter of this pesent series. There is something more from Diodorus regarding the Hyperboreans:
And there is also on the island both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple, which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape. Furthermore, a city is there which is sacred to this god, and the majority of its inhabitants are players on the cithara; and these continually play on this instrument in the temple and sing hymns of praise to the god, glorifying his deeds…
They say also that the moon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a little distance from the earth and to have upon it prominences, like those of the earth, which are visible to the eye. The account is also given that the god visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished, and for this reason the Greeks call the nineteen-year period the “year of Meton”. At the time of this appearance of the god he both plays on the cithara and dances continuously the night through from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiades, expressing in this manner his delight in his successes.
And the kings of this city and the supervisors of the sacred precinct are called Boreades, since they are descendants of Boreas, and the succession to these positions is always kept in their family. [ Diodorus of Sicily, English translation by C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, Volumes II and III. London, William Heinemann, and Cambridge, Mass., USA, Harvard University Press, 1935 and 1939.]
What did it mean that every nineteen years a god “dances” from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiades? This suggests to us a very specific date is being recorded in this myth. The heliacal rising of the Pleiades does not happen every 19 years. So, aside from telling us about a regular event that occurred every nineteen years, the myth has recorded something else very significant, the date of which is internal to the myth. When did the Pleiades rise just before the sun on the vernal equinox?
There are many who assume that a “heliacal rising” means that a star or constellation is in conjunction with the sun. But this is probably not correct. The ancients were practicing observational astronomy. Otto Neugebauer, in his many studies regarding what the ancients did or did not know about science and mathematics, noted the following:
When we watch the stars rise over the eastern horizon, we see them appear night after night at the same spot on the horizon. But when we extend our observation into the period of twilight, fewer and fewer stars will be recognizable when they cross the horizon, and near sunrise all stars will have faded out altogether. Let us suppose that a certain star S was seen just rising at the beginning of dawn but vanished from sight within a very short time because of the rapid approach of daylight. We call this phenomenon the “heliacal rising” of S, using a term of Greek astronomy. Let us assume that we use this phenomenon as the indication of the end of “night” and consider S as the star of the “last hour of night.” […]
We may continue in the same way for several days, but during this time a definite change takes place. […]
Obviously, after some lapse of time, it no longer makes sense to take S as the indicator of the last hour of night. But there are new stars that can take the place of S. Thus year after year S may serve for some days as the star of the last hour, to be replaced in regular order by other stars. [Neugebauer, Otto, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, (New York: Dover 1969)]
In order to observe a heliacal rising of a star or group of stars, they must rise long enough before the sun to be “observed,” because as soon as the sun rises, the stars can no longer be seen. The heliacal rising of the Pleiades would have to occur at least 36 minutes before the sun comes up, in order to be seen. So, the real question seems to be: when did the Pleiades rise around half an hour before the sun, at the time of the equinox? When were the Pleiades the stars of the “last hour of the night”, and what might have been the significance of this event?
Certain “standard” texts, written by individuals who have not taken into account the observational nature of a heliacal rising, have given 2300 BC as the date, because this was when the Pleiades were conjunct the Sun on the Vernal equinox. However, after careful calculations of our own, as well as assistance by expert astronomers, the date of the actual heliacal rising of the Pleiades, in the terms that Neugebauer has given us, occurred on April 16, 3100 BC.
April 16, 3100 BC where the God danced all night on the equinox until the rising of the Pleiades:
[A] "Dark Age", meaning a period from which little is known despite much information before and after that period, occurred about 3100 BC to 3000 BC. For example in Mesopotamia this period is called Jemdet Nasr.
About 3100 BC there was suddenly a change to more primitive ages compared to the preceding Uruk period. For example the numerical token system dwindled.
In 3000 BC however there was a sudden recovery. This is called the Early Dynasty, which can be described as the first known culture, that began to have some kind of a centralized system. And the tokens were not only numerated again, the basis for writing was born.
What happened 3100 BC, maybe right in 3114 BC? That's the year 0 in Mayan calendar.
There are many stories around the world of great floods. There are two small craters from about this time, but what seems more probable, is a huge meteorite swarm that both caused much damage on land, brought up tsunamis and blanketed with dust the atmosphere. It may have been a break-up of a great comet in the inner parts of the solar system. People were panic-stricken.
The beginnings of civilizations, however, got despite of the immediate damage, a first great rise, after about a hundred years had gone. There was a great boomtime that eventually led to the rise of the first great civilizations in the beginning of the third millennium BC. The prime example is the unification of southern and northern Egypt.
The great mystery is how did the fusion happen? There is not any clear indication of one part conquering the other. It seems like the northern culture won over the southern, but that the new kings came from the south. The artifacts hint that the first King of the unified Egypt was called Menes and that the unification took place between 3150 and 3110 BC.
3100 BC has been traditionally held as the watermark between the Predynastic and Early Dynastic Period in Egypt. It took still 400 years before it was transformed in the so called Old Kingdom in about 2700 BC. These timestamps have oddly enough a great resemblance to the Mayan year 0.
The Mesopotamians had the great variations in their pre-writings that finally led to the first marks that really can be called as writing. Also the wheel was introduced. The great city-states Ur and Uruk were built, and around 2600 BC they had began to be part of a larger political union.
Gilgamesh, the great flood-king, lived during this period. Pre-Minoan culture was rising in Crete. Neolithic settlements, Stonehenge, Newgrange, Skara Brae in the Scottish Orkney island were built. The coastal menhirs (great stones) began to be built in Brittany.
( For info on dating Stonehenge, see my article Pincknett and Prince and the Cassiopaeans.)
Dick Meehan adds to this list flood marks in paleoclimatic data, methane peak in Greenland ice and a cold time according to bristlecone pines in Britain. Although any one of these in itself would not be of any great concern, the timing of them in a frame of only 100 years, is the thing that makes us suspect that something unusual was going on. And actually, the next 1000 years or so were a very restless time globally.
The aftermath of this may have been a 2807 BC ocean impact described by Bruce Masse in Peiser et al.: Natural Catastrophes (Oxford, 1998). If this is the great Flood Comet, as Masse seems to indicate, this explains why the Sumerian story of Flood, on which basis the Genesis Noachian Flood story is built, is combined with the story of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh reigned in the 27th century, 300-450 years before the two great cataclysms in late third millennium BC. Or were the comet or comets swarming and breaking up during the whole period of 3114 BC to 2807 BC with diminishing frequency and damage ending temporarily in a great splash in the Atlantic? [Timo Niroma, Helsinki, Finland]
From Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets by Duncan Steel:
The outrageous suggestion that I am going to make is that the Taurid Complex was producing phenomenal meteor storms between 4,500 and 5,000 years ago, accompanied by multiple Tunguska-class atmospheric detonations, and that Stonehenge I was designed to allow the (awestruck, terrified) culture of southern England to make observations of the Phenomena and to perhaps predict their recurrence.
Peter Lancaster Brown, in his book on megalithic sites, wrote that "Eclipses, comets and meteorites were astronomical phenomena widely observed by the ancients. But probably only eclipses were predictable." (Steel means to imply that Stonehenge I was needed to make observations because meteorite falls are far more unpredictable, but and at the same time may be long-lasting and recurring. - TN.)
Let me suggest that survivors and descendants of the global cataclysm that occurred at the time of the war between Atlantis and "Athens" were reduced to little more than a Stone Age existence for a very long time except, perhaps, for small enclaves here and there which later gave rise to "civilizing" impulses at various locations around the planet. And just as some of the "good guys" survived, so were there survivors of the Evil Empire of Atlantis. Again I note the polarities between the "circle people" and the "pyramid people".
Later, there was again a battle, a great betrayal at the Cloisters of Ambrius followed by another global disruption, fixing the event in the minds of the people as being "like the destruction of Atlantis" so that the stories were joined together.
Such events would embrace the myths of the Daughters of Danaeus and the Sons of Aegyptus, as well as the story of Orpheus - the "massacre at the Cloisters of Ambrius" - a war between ancient peoples inhabiting Britain and those inhabiting continental Europe where the place names so strongly reflect the descriptions given by Homer as described by Wilkens. Refugees fled to the higher lands, to Eastern Europe, to Eurasia, to Egypt and beyond. Of course, just who is "on first" and who came from where is extremely difficult to determine without long and careful analysis.
It is in the most recent of these events - at the time of the fall of the Bronze Age civilization around 1600 BC - where the final pieces of the drama took place. This last episode is where we will finally find Helen.
In fact, when you think about it, the stories in the Bible are remarkably similar to the Greek myths with most of the fantastic elements removed, names changed, and genealogies inserted to give the impression of a long history. One could say that the "history" of the Old Testament is merely "historicized myth." And of course, the myths that it was historicized from may have belonged to an entirely different people.
Again we remember that the winners (or the survivors) write the history, and we have a very strange story to tell... about Helen and the Exodus Conspiracy: the face that launched a Thousand Wars.
But we have much ground to cover before we face Helen.
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/Laura-Knigh...-lkj-04-03-06-i.htm
