Blog Feed
Twitter
LAW PUNDIT Tuesday, February 24, 2009 2/24/2009 12:15:00 AM [Home]
[Print]
SlideShare is a Nifty Website for Uploading and Sharing Presentations such as Power Point or Photographs, with Audio & Video Integration Offered
We tried our Phaistos Disk and Elamite PPT on SlideShare.net and got excellent results. SlideShare also provided a transcript of the text without graphics or other slide formatting, which is in fact extremely useful for many purposes (see all that below).
SlideShare writes that it is "the world's largest community for sharing presentations" where "anyone ... can tag, download, or embed presentations into their own blogs & websites". It is particularly this ability to embed presentations anywhere that makes SlideShare so useful.
"Phaistos Disc And Elamite 30 October 2008 - Presentation Transcript
1. The Phaistos Disc An Ancient Enigma Solved Two corroborative Old Elamite scripts are deciphered using the Ancient Greek syllabic values obtained for the Phaistos Disc by Andis Kaulins in 1980. The texts from Elam lead to Crete and Mycenae. Presented 31 October 2008 at the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE PHAISTOS DISK on the 100th anniversary of its discovery in the year 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier. Conference: Society of Antiquaries, London, Burlington House, Piccadilly. Organisation and sponsorship: Minerva, the International Review of Ancient Art & Archaeology, Jerome M. Eisenberg, Ph.D., editor. Power Point Presentation Copyright © 2008 by Andis Kaulins
2. Andis Kaulins - CV • J.D. (Doctor of Jurisprudence) Stanford University Law School, Stanford, California, USA. • Former Lecturer in Anglo-American Law, Legal Research and Legal Writing, University of Trier Law School, Trier, Germany. • Co-author of the Routledge & Langenscheidt German-English, English-German Dictionary of Business, Commerce and Finance (3rd ed. 2007, 4th ed. in preparation). • Author of, inter alia: – The Phaistos Disc: Hieroglyphic Greek with Euclidean Dimensions (Darmstadt, 1980) – Stars Stones and Scholars : The Decipherment of the Megaliths, Trafford, 2003 & 2006 – Waren die Pharaonen Legastheniker? (Were the Pharaohs Dyslexic?), Dyslexia Journal, 1998 – Zum Ursprung des Horus-Glaubens im vordynastischen Ägypten (The Origin of the Cult of Horus in Predynastic Egypt), Efodon Synesis, 2005 – Sternensteine - Darstellungen frühgeschichtlicher Astronomie am Beispiel der Externsteine (Star Stones - Prehistoric Astronomy and the Extern Stones), Forschungskreis Walther Machalett für Vor und Frühgeschichte, 2005 – Die Himmelsscheibe von Nebra : Beweisführung und Deutung (The Sky Disk of Nebra: Evidence and Interpretation), Efodon Synesis, 2005 – Der Bodenhimmel der Oesterholzer Mark um die Spitze der \"Externsteinpyramide\" (A Megalithic Sky Map at Oesterholz), Efodon Synesis, 2006 – Das Tanum System - ein alteuropäisches Vermessungssystem? (The Tanum System : Ancient Land Survey in Europe), Forschungskreis Externsteine., 2007 – Der Osnabrücker Bodenhimmel (The Hermetic Planisphere at Osnabrück), Forschungskreis Externsteine, 2008. -2-
3. INTRODUCTION • Ladies and Gentlemen, • Thank you for attending my presentation and thank you to the organizers and staff of this conference for making it possible for me to be here. We are in the halls of art and history at Burlington House, and today we may see history being made – in the field of communications. The Phaistos Disk is after all a communication and storage device, albeit of very ancient vintage. • Today we all have our mobile cell phones, CDs and DVDs, and we take them for granted, but this technology was not always so easy to understand. In the early days of telecommunications Albert Einstein explained radio by saying: • “You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.... And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.” -3-
4. Albert Einstein’s Cat (Photomontage by Wolfgang Lauter in Der literarische Katzenkalender, 2008, Schöffling & Co.) In the case of the Phaistos Disk, we have a cat, but our cat has no tail and worse still, it is not meowing, and the issue has been rightly raised now whether we have a -4- real cat here at all.
5. To be or not to be? REAL or FAKE? That is the question • TO BE OR NOT TO BE. REAL or FAKE? • That is the Shakespearean question being posed here today. • Dr. Jerome Eisenberg has observed – correctly in my view – that the symbols on the Phaistos Disk were compiled piecemeal in part from other ancient sources. • I agree. The only question is, was this done in the modern era, or 3 to 4 thousand years ago? Dr. Eisenberg has concluded that it was a modern forger, an archaeologist, who did it. But I think, to the contrary, that it was the ancient Greeks themselves who did it. And I have evidence for that conclusion. -5-
6. The Invention of Letters in Greece • Gaius Julius Hyginus (ca. 64 BC – AD 17), who lived at the time of Christ, passed on many Greek tales in unadulterated form in his Fabulae, of which Number 277 deals with \"Ancient Inventors\". He writes as follows: • \"\"CCLXXVII. FIRST INVENTORS. The Parcae, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos [AK note: The Parcae are the Fates, in Greek Morae, and named Nona, Decima and Morta] invented seven Greek letters - A B H T I Y. Others say that Mercury invented them from the flight of cranes, which, when they fly, form letters. Palamedes, too, son of Nauplius, invented eleven letters; Simonides, too, invented four letters – Ó E Z PH; Epicharmus of Sicily, two - P and PS. The Greek letters Mercury is said to have brought to Egypt, and from Egypt Cadmus took them to Greece. Cadmus in exile from Arcadia, took them to Italy, and his mother Carmenta changed them to Latin to the number of 15. Apollo on the lyre added the rest....\" -6-
7. Greek Letters were taken from Ancient Sources by the Ancients themselves – the Crete Connection • The ancient record therefore confirms that the initial Greek letters, which constitute the origins of writing in Western Europe, were in fact a conglomeration of inputs, just as Dr. Eisenberg claims for the Phaistos Disk. Accordingly, this characteristic is no proof that the Phaistos Disk is not genuine. Quite the contrary, it is exactly what we would expect from ancient Greek letters, based on the historical record. The first Greek letters viz. symbols were in fact taken from numerous ancient sources, by the ancients themselves. • One inventor of Greek letters mentioned by Hyginus in fact has a clear connection to Crete: Palamedes, son of Nauplius and Clymene, the daughter of Catreus, king of Crete, son of the first king of Crete, Minos, and grandfather of Menelaus, the Greek husband of Helen of Troy. Catreus was thus the grandfather of Palamedes. -7-
8. A Man named Palamedes • Grandfather Catreus had numerous children. • His two daughters he is said to have given to a merchant mariner, Nauplius, to be married off in foreign lands. This mariner instead took Clymene for himself and sailed off into the sunset. Where did they ultimately settle? • Clymene in ancient Greek sources is also called Asia, which some allege is how the continent Asia got its name, thus pointing to a possible geographic Asian destiny. Indeed, Herodotus is puzzled by Ancient Greek usage of women's names to describe large areas such as Asia or Europe. But the answer – royal settlement - is clear. • It is Clymene’s son Palamedes who subsequently surfaces as the greatest inventor in the history of Greece, for Palamedes not only allegedly invented eleven of the Greek letters, but it is also said that he invented counting, currency, weights and measures, military ranks, dice, a forerunner of chess called pessoi, and improvements in winemaking. -8-
9. Technology Transfer from Elam to Crete • Amazing enough, but all of this could very well be true in the ancient era if the inventions of Palamedes were obtained by technology transfer from a foreign land, for Mercury (viz. Hermes) the bringer of letters, has the same meaning as \"merchant\". These inventions were brought to Greece from a distant land by traveling merchants. • As we have discovered, this distant land is Elam, the land – as we shall claim and explain here - where Clymene and Nauplius ultimately settled. It is the land in which letters were first stamped onto clay, just as on the Phaistos Disk, but long before it. An existing technology was thus imported into ancient Crete. We will discuss this in detail subsequently. -9-
10. The Previous Lack of Corroborative Texts • The second major argument raised by Dr. Eisenberg against the Phaistos Disk is the lack of corroborative texts. When Dr. Eisenberg initially asked me to present a paper at this conference, I declined, saying it was a losing proposition for me, since no probative proof of authenticity would be possible without corroborative texts. To my knowledge then, there were no such texts available, so it was pointless to come. • At Dr. Eisenberg's friendly insistence, I finally agreed to present a paper merely presenting my point of view that the Phaistos Disk was quite genuine, and giving my reasons for so believing. But in the course of research for this paper, a remarkable thing happened. - 10 -
11. Corroborative Texts from Elam • I discovered two texts that contained symbols with a great deal of similarity to a number of symbols on the Phaistos Disk. These texts were from Elam and were written in Old Elamite Script. Could they be connected? • Indeed, when I applied the syllabic values for the Phaistos Disc that I had obtained 30 years previously, I was able to read those Old Elamite Scripts without difficulty. They were written in Ancient Greek language, and the author was presumably Palamedes, the son of Clymene, and the inventor of Greek letters.
12. Background to the Phaistos Disc Decipherment by Andis Kaulins In The Phaistos Disc: Hieroglyphic Greek with Euclidean Dimensions: The ‘Lost Proof’ of Parallel Lines, Darmstadt, 1980, p. 18, the author of that book, Andis Kaulins, wrote as follows: - 12 -
13. “In ... 1977 a colleague ... at the University of Kiel departed on a vacation to Crete.... [S]he brought back a book from the Heraklion Museum in which a photo of Side A of the Phaistos Disc was pictured... Was it ... written in an Indo-European language? ... [if yes, this author concluded], it would have to bear a close relation to the Baltic languages [the most archaic still spoken Indo- European tongues], and ... in that case [yes, it should be decipherable]....” - 13 -
14. Three years later, this author's decipherment resulted in the book (viz. monograph) pictured here, which alleged to decipher the Phaistos Disc as a pre-Euclidean mathematical postulate written in Ancient Greek. The alleged decipherment was shown to a number of people who were of the opinion that the work was plausible, if also speculative, especially because of the lack of corroborative additional Cretan viz. Minoan material. - 14 -
15. A Review of Previous Research was conducted starting from the date of discovery of the Phaistos Disc by Luigi Pernier in the year 1908 - 15 -
16. Had anyone found the right path? Did the incomplete 1952 Ventris decipherment of Linear B as Ancient Greek indicate that Greek was the most likely language? The 45 pictographs on the Phaistos Disc appeared 241 times and appeared to be divided into words by vertical lines. Were the symbols syllabic? This author sensed that statistical analysis of letter frequencies and distribution would help to solve the mystery. A chart was made of the distribution and frequency of the pictographs. This frequency was then compared to the distribution of letters and letter combinations found at the beginnings of words in Ancient Greek, and also in Latvian and Lithuanian languages (the most archaic still spoken Indo-European tongues). Based on those stats and supported by Greek, Latvian and Lithuanian terms for the objects presumably depicted by the symbols, syllabic values were derived and analysed in a comprehensive Michael Ventris – Alice Kober type of syllabic grid, which included the major language consonants and vowels.
17. Phaistos Disc Syllabic Grid by Andis Kaulins 1980 - 17 -
18. Phaistos Disc Reading in Ancient Greek applying the syllabic values from the Phaistos Disc Syllabic Grid - by Andis Kaulins - 18 -
19. In English that Ancient Greek text could be read as follows: • SIDE A: Foreseen (are) - as given - standing straight lines (perpendiculars) • - to be constructed (drawn). - To the side - of either such line segment • - extend - a partner line - running - alongside. - The Problem (LEMMA): • - Consider - whether these - Parallel Lines - extended - stay - Parallels. • Consider - whether these - Parallels - extended converge (diverge). • - The synthetic - added line - would foresee - a medial (uncertain) - termination. • - Extended (beyond bounds) - a fixed (converging) - termination. • SIDE B: Next to - the categorized - just constructed lines - and flat to • - the side walls' - diameter - inscribe - a closed arc - and make it so that • - the new line - curve - in its course - the side walls - diagonally - joins. • - Tie together - yoked - the branched lines. - Connect - the standing • straight lines - and branched lines. - Run a line so that - the newly created • - geodetic lines - are met - and the branched lines - pair is yoked. • - The promised - solution - is given. - 19 -
20. That reading of the Ancient Greek results in the following figure … With the following modern mathematical reading of the Phaistos Disc If the parallel lines B, D and C are extended to f and g [and beyond but short of infinity], then the resulting angle x varies, [nearing 180 or 0 degrees] depending on where line f and g is drawn. Hence, the termination is uncertain. As the parallels B, D and C are extended beyond bounds (i.e. to infinity, or infinite ends), then the angle x [measured from the center of the circle to the lines drawn to the ends of the extensions of the parallel lines B and C] will get smaller and smaller towards D as the lines B, D and C are extended, thus suggesting a converging termination. - 20 -
21. The Mathematical Decipherment Explains the 4 and 5 knots which start each respective side of the Phaistos Disc since these represent the 4th and 5th Postulates of Euclid [right angles (4th) - parallel postulate (5th)] This pre-Euclidean \"proof\" anticipates a modern analysis of parallel lines by non-Euclidean geometry. It suggests that Euclidian geometry was known to the Greeks prior to Euclid, which, in view of such mathematically sophisticated ancient sources as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, should no longer surprise us. Indeed, the fact that Side A of the Phaistos Disc starts with 4 \"knots\" and Side B of the Phaistos Disc starts with 5 \"knots\" could indeed indicate that these are the ancient predecessors of Euclid's later 4th and 5th postulates, the 4th postulate of which postulated that all right angles equal one another (the Phaistos Disk speaks of perpendiculars) and the 5th postulate of which is Euclid's \"parallel postulate\" (as on the Phaistos Disc). - 21 -
22. The Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky in fact derived a proof in the 19th century which is similar to the mathematical proof found on the Phaistos Disk: \"... [In the figure above] line AB is perpendicular to CD. If we permit it to rotate about A counterclockwise, it will intersect CD at various points to the right of B until it reaches a limiting position EF, when it becomes parallel to CD. Continuing the rotation, it will start to intersect CD to the left of B. Euclid assumed that there is only one position for the line, namely EF, when it would be parallel to CD. Lobachevsky assumed that there were two such positions, represented by A1B1 and C1D1, and further, that all lines falling within the angle θ, while not parallel to CD, would never meet it, no matter how far extended. Now this is an assumption, and there is no sense in arguing from the diagram that it is evident that if A1B1 or C1D1 were intersected sufficiently far, they would eventually intersect CD. If, as Professor Cohen has pointed out, we rely wholly on our intuition of space, which is finite, there will always be an angle θ which grows smaller as our space is extended, but which never vanishes, and all lines falling within θ will fail to intersect the given line. [The reference is to Morris Raphael Cohen, Reason and Nature, p. 137.]\" Quoted from Edward Kasner and James Roy Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination, drawings by Rufus Isaacs, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1940/1967, pp. 136-137 (the Lobachevsky drawing is our adaptation) - 22 -
23. An Old Elamite Script as Corroboration for the Phaistos Disc What struck me immediately was the similarity between the first word on the Old Elamite text and the symbols on the Phaistos Disc, whereby the Old Elamite script looked like a more cursive version of the Phaistos Disc script. - 23 -
24. Old Elamite Script is Undeciphered but some Syllabic Values have been postulated Old Elamite script from Elam, the ancient kingdom southeast of Sumer and Akkad, with its capital at Susa, and the source of the Code of Hammurabi, is today southwest Iran. Written records place the beginnings of Elamite culture at ca. 3200 BC. Mainstream archaeologists view Old Elamite to be an undeciphered pictographic script - for whose symbols syllabic values have in any case been alleged to apply to Old Elamite by some researchers as follows: - 24 -
25. A second Old Elamite script - 25 -
26. Old Elamite is Known to be Genuine Because of an Akkadian Bilingual Text The second Old Elamite script, shown on the previous page, is of great importance because it has an Akkadian bilingual text, which has been translated, based on the Akkadian text, to mean that a monument of some kind was erected for or by an important personage in Susa (German version from Harald Haarmann, Universalgeschichte der Schrift, Campus Verlag: Frankfurt and New York, 1991, Sonderausgabe 1998, Parkland Verlag, Cologne, p. 374.): • [German] \"Seinem Herrn Inshushinak, dem Menschenbildner (?), 2. habe ich Shilhak- Inshushinak, 3. der Statthalter von Susa, 4. der König des Landes Elam, 5. der Shempishhukische, 6. eine Säule (?) aus Kupfer (und) Zedernholz geweiht.\" • [Our English translation of that error-filled conversion] \"For his master Inshushinak, the sculptor of human forms (?), I, Shilhak-Inshushinak, Administrator of Susa, King of Elam, has dedicated the Shempishhukische, an obelisk (or column) (?) of copper and cedar wood.\" Since a number of symbol combinations are repeated identically on both Old Elamite scripts in this presentation, it is then logical to presume that both Old Elamite scripts have a similar content and relate to the dedication of monuments to or by important Elamite personages at Susa. - 26 -
27. Dual Syllabic Grid of Old Elamite Script and Phaistos Disc Symbols Based on the two Old Elamite scripts presented here, it has been possible to create a Dual Syllabic Grid of the symbols on the Phaistos Disc and on the Old Elamite Scripts - 27 -
28. Corroboration of the Genuineness of the Phaistos Disc and its Decipherment by Andis Kaulins Using the Dual Syllabic Grid for the Phaistos Disc and the Old Elamite Scripts, it has proven possible to decipher both Old Elamite Scripts, with sensational content, and thereby also to corroborate not only the genuineness of the Phaistos Disc but also the correctness of its decipherment as an Ancient Greek mathematical text by Andis Kaulins in the year 1980. - 28 -
29. The English Decipherment of the 1st Old Elamite Script, written in Ancient Greek, reads: “Ruler over all (Pantarchas). In memory, the deceased in these walls of a new temple is laid to rest. The collected elders, ordained by God, and the lone (sole) companion of King Labynetus, Nitokris, administrator in death, in Susa erected this temple in memory, in sorrow created.” - 29 -
30. The English Decipherment of the 2nd Old Elamite Script, written in Ancient Greek, reads: “This great hall of columns [“statue” in the Akkadian bilingual], Peloponessus, was erected in memory of the deceased Queen Nitokris of Mycenaean descent, separated from her home in Mycenae and now in sorrow separated in death.” - 30 -
31. How did Ancient Greek get to Elam? Was Nitokris the true Helen of Troy or Clymena of ancient Greek legend? The ancient name for Troy was Ilium or Ilion: (Greek Τροία, Troia or Ἴλιον, Ilion; Latin: Trōia, Īlium, Hittite: Truwisa or Wilusa). Ilium thus bears a close word correspondence to the term Elam. Did both identify the same place? In Persia? We must recall that the currently accepted location of Troy in Anatolia as popularized by Heinrich Schliemann and as defended in our day by Manfred Korfmann has been called a fantasy construction by Frank Kolb, and, indeed, there is almost no probative evidence proving that Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey was actually Troy. Nothing in historical or archaeological data gives Hisarlik any great ancient importance. Homer spoke of springs west of the city of Troy, but there are none at Hisarlik. But there are underground springs on the Susa plain. - 31 -
32. The Importance of Elam to the Beginnings of Writing and Civilization “[I]t was here [in Elam], rather than in Mesopotamia proper - which after all lies only fifty miles to the west of Susa - that civilization as we know it truly began. - Richard Critchfield, How Lonely Sits the City Susa and Elam are therefore of great historical and archaeological interest. Jacque de Morgan, famed for having found the Code of Hammurabi and called the father of prehistoric archeology by some, wrote (Recherches sur les origines des peuples du Caucase, p. 16, 1912): \"In the Nile valley I developed the conviction that the first civilizations, from which the Egyptian empire arose, came from Chaldea and that the Mesopotamian plains had therefore been the cradle of human progress. Susa, because of its very early date, provided the possibility of solving the greatest and most important problem, that of our origins. This city, in my view, belonged to that primordial world that had witnessed the discovery of writing, the use of metals, the beginnings of art. If the great problem of origins was to be solved one day, it was in Chaldea, and especially at Susa, that it was necessary to seek the basic elements.\" [emphasis added] - 32 -
33. The Origin of Seals and Stamps as on the Phaistos Disc As far as the origins of writing are concerned, in fact, some of the oldest seals and stamps ever discovered have been found at Susa in Elam. As on the Phaistos Disc, the ancient technology of \"writing\" symbols onto seals consisted of stamping carved impressions onto clay. The Phaistos Disc does not implement an unknown ancient technology, rather, it implements a technology otherwise unknown to Crete. - 33 -
34. The geographic placement of Troy toward Persia is suggested by other evidence. The Iliou persis (Greek: Ἰλίου πέρσις, Latin: Iliupersis) is a lost Greek epic of the so-called Epic Cycle (also called the \"Trojan Cycle\") of Greek literature, of which fragments have survived. The current mainstream translation of the title phrase Iliou persis as \"Sack of Ilium\" is unpersuasive and doubtful in view of the Ancient Greek root περσισ- (persis-, \"Persian\"), whereby πέρσις (pérsis) \"destruction\" is surely a derivative meaning attached to the folk name. Iliou persis in its original context thus most likely actually meant \"Elam in Persia\" or \"Hellas in Persia\". In any case, it was in fact the similarly named Paris (perhaps originally \"Persis\", the Greek from Persia) who, according to the legend of the cause of the Trojan War, eloped with or abducted Helen of Troy, the stepdaughter of King Tyndareus. That entire complex of ancient tales provides us with the necessary Mycenaean connection, as follows, according to Greek legend: - 34 -
35. The Mycenaean Connection \"Tyndareus Τυνδαρεύς (or Tyndareos Τυνδάρεως) was a Spartan king..., husband of Leda and [step]father of Helen.... Tyndareus' wife, Leda, was seduced by Zeus ... disguised ... as a swan. She laid two eggs, each producing two children ... from one egg, Pollux and Helen were the children of Zeus; from the other, Castor and Clytemnestra were the children of Tyndareus. When Thyestes seized control in Mycenae, two exiled princes, Agamemnon and Menelaus came to Sparta. Tyndareus received them.... Agamemnon married Clytemnestra. Helen ... had many more suitors for she was the most beautiful woman in the world. When it was time for [Helen] to marry, many ... kings and princes came to seek her hand.... Tyndareus [would not] send any of the suitors away for fear of ... giving grounds for a quarrel.... Odysseus proposed that, before the decision was made, all the suitors should swear a most solemn oath to defend the chosen husband against whoever should quarrel with the chosen one. This stratagem succeeded and Helen and Menelaus were married. Eventually, Tyndareus resigned in favor of his son-in-law and Menelaus became king of Sparta.... Some years later, Paris, a Trojan prince came to Sparta to marry Helen, whom he had been promised by Aphrodite. Helen fell in love with him and left willingly, (although it is also suggested that he may have simply kidnapped her, with neither theory being conclusively proven) leaving behind Menelaus and Hermione, their nine-year-old daughter.... Menelaus' attempts to retrieve Helen ... caused the Trojan War.\" [emphasis added] – Wikipedia - 35 -
36. Helen of Troy and Paris in Cyprus, Sidon (Phoenicia, including Tyre) and Egypt (Sais) The connection to Crete is strengthened by the legendary account that on the night that Helen and Paris left Sparta, they were able to do so because Menelaus had left Sparta to sail to Crete for the funeral of his grandfather King Catreus: \"The myth about Catreus [son of King Minos of Crete] and his children is proof (known as well from the archaeological findings) that in the so called \"heroic age\" a close relation existed between Crete, Mycenae, and the other places in the Peloponnese and also between Crete and the islands such as Rhodes.\" The Trojan War holds more surprises in the legendary account, some of which seem to be conveniently ignored by those who modernly discuss the location of Troy. As written by Robert Graves (Robert von Ranke-Graves), based on numerous Greek sources, Helen and Paris, after leaving Sparta, sailed to Cyprus, Sidon (Phoenicia) and the Nile Delta of Egypt, where, at the latter, they founded a temple on the Canopic branch of the Nile. As explained below, this could have been at Sais: \"Sais or Sa el-Hagar was an ancient Egyptian town in the Western Nile Delta on the Canopic branch of the Nile.“ The patron goddess of the \"Egyptian\" city Sais was Neith, whose cult at Sais is allegedly attested in texts clear back to the 1st Dynasty, but nothing archaeological has been found earlier than the New Kingdom at that alleged location of Sais, in fact \"only a few relief blocks in situ\". Interesting then, according to legend, is that ancient Sais was allegedly built by Greeks, not Egyptians, prior to the cataclysm. \"Herodotus wrote that Sais is where the grave of Osiris was located.... Diodorus Siculus attested that it was the Athenians who built Sais before the cataclysm. While all Greek cities were destroyed during the cataclysm, the Egyptian cities including Sais survived. ... There are today no surviving traces of this town prior to the Late New Kingdom (ca. 1100 BC)…. - 36 -
37. Geography of the Flight of Helen of Troy and Paris The legendary route of Helen and Paris to Troy does not speak for Hisarlik as Troy, for Paris and Helen went to Troy after leaving Egypt, and they would not have gone that far South only to return even further to the North. Troy is clearly elsewhere. - 37 -
38. Why did the Greeks have trouble FINDING Troy and who did the really attack? According to Herodotus, the Greeks had trouble finding Troy, which would seem to exclude Hisarlik as the location of Troy, since that location would easily have been known to them, being in their own back yard. The legend relates that the Greek warships in pursuit of Helen and Paris initially and mistakenly attacked the people called Teuthranians (we think this was the Tyranians, the people of Tyre, near Sidon) who claimed that Helen was not in their land, and put up fierce resistance, inflicting serious losses on the Greeks. Tyre would in that case then be the origin of the later name Troy, which became confused historically by the ancient writers with Ilium (Elam), the actual location of Helen and Paris. - 38 -
39. Queen Nitokris and Crete In addition to the above connections of Helen of Troy and other essential historical personages to Mycenae and Crete by legend, there is also a potential linguistic connection to Crete in the name of Queen Nitokris…. The Egyptian Queen Nitokris, according to current scholarship, is regarded to be a different Queen than the \"Babylonian\" Elamite Queen Nitokris, but we leave a discussion of the issue of whether these were separate Queens or not to a later date, since this is a question of chronology and other matters too broad to discuss here. In the Mycenaean context here, it is important to note that Nitokris is read Neit-krety in Egyptology and could in fact thus be read as \"goddess (or woman) of Crete\". In very archaic Indo-European (e.g. Latvian) the term meita is similar to neit viz. neith and means simply \"girl\" or \"woman\", so that the original meaning of Neit-krety might simply have been \"girl from Crete\". Sais in Egypt was thus the Temple of Neith and the similarly named Susa was the city of the Queen from Crete. But that could also be Clymene rather than Helen of Troy, whose husband hailed from Crete. - 39 -
40. Queen Napirasu of Elam Helen of Troy [or, also possible, Clymene] was thus Queen Napirasu, wife of King Untash-Napirisha [either King Labynetus or King Naublius] of Elam, whereby the similar name Na-piris-ha could be the Paris of ancient Greek legend who eloped with Helen - or in the alternative - Napirisha could be the name equivalent to Naublius. A statue of Queen Napirasu, unique for its time, composed of 3760 pounds of bronze and copper, was found in Susa, Elam, and is today, perhaps fittingly for its namesake, a part of the Iran collection in the Louvre in the city of Paris, France. In that statue we thus see either Helen of Troy or Clymene as the life-size statue of Queen Napirasu. - 40 -
41. Statue of Queen Napirasu The Louvre labels this statue as: \"Queen Napirasu, wife of King Untash-Napirisha, circa 1340-1300 BC, [photograph] © R.M.N./D. Chenot, Statue found at the Tell of the Acropolis, Susa, Iran, Bronze and copper, H. 1.29 m; L. 0.73 m, Jacques de Morgan excavations, 1903.\" Statue of Queen Napirasu, Louvre. - 41 -
42. 42. - 42 -"
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 2/24/2009 12:15:00 AM
SlideShare is a Nifty Website for Uploading and Sharing Presentations such as Power Point or Photographs, with Audio & Video Integration Offered
We tried our Phaistos Disk and Elamite PPT on SlideShare.net and got excellent results. SlideShare also provided a transcript of the text without graphics or other slide formatting, which is in fact extremely useful for many purposes (see all that below).
SlideShare writes that it is "the world's largest community for sharing presentations" where "anyone ... can tag, download, or embed presentations into their own blogs & websites". It is particularly this ability to embed presentations anywhere that makes SlideShare so useful.
"Phaistos Disc And Elamite 30 October 2008 - Presentation Transcript
1. The Phaistos Disc An Ancient Enigma Solved Two corroborative Old Elamite scripts are deciphered using the Ancient Greek syllabic values obtained for the Phaistos Disc by Andis Kaulins in 1980. The texts from Elam lead to Crete and Mycenae. Presented 31 October 2008 at the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE PHAISTOS DISK on the 100th anniversary of its discovery in the year 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier. Conference: Society of Antiquaries, London, Burlington House, Piccadilly. Organisation and sponsorship: Minerva, the International Review of Ancient Art & Archaeology, Jerome M. Eisenberg, Ph.D., editor. Power Point Presentation Copyright © 2008 by Andis Kaulins
2. Andis Kaulins - CV • J.D. (Doctor of Jurisprudence) Stanford University Law School, Stanford, California, USA. • Former Lecturer in Anglo-American Law, Legal Research and Legal Writing, University of Trier Law School, Trier, Germany. • Co-author of the Routledge & Langenscheidt German-English, English-German Dictionary of Business, Commerce and Finance (3rd ed. 2007, 4th ed. in preparation). • Author of, inter alia: – The Phaistos Disc: Hieroglyphic Greek with Euclidean Dimensions (Darmstadt, 1980) – Stars Stones and Scholars : The Decipherment of the Megaliths, Trafford, 2003 & 2006 – Waren die Pharaonen Legastheniker? (Were the Pharaohs Dyslexic?), Dyslexia Journal, 1998 – Zum Ursprung des Horus-Glaubens im vordynastischen Ägypten (The Origin of the Cult of Horus in Predynastic Egypt), Efodon Synesis, 2005 – Sternensteine - Darstellungen frühgeschichtlicher Astronomie am Beispiel der Externsteine (Star Stones - Prehistoric Astronomy and the Extern Stones), Forschungskreis Walther Machalett für Vor und Frühgeschichte, 2005 – Die Himmelsscheibe von Nebra : Beweisführung und Deutung (The Sky Disk of Nebra: Evidence and Interpretation), Efodon Synesis, 2005 – Der Bodenhimmel der Oesterholzer Mark um die Spitze der \"Externsteinpyramide\" (A Megalithic Sky Map at Oesterholz), Efodon Synesis, 2006 – Das Tanum System - ein alteuropäisches Vermessungssystem? (The Tanum System : Ancient Land Survey in Europe), Forschungskreis Externsteine., 2007 – Der Osnabrücker Bodenhimmel (The Hermetic Planisphere at Osnabrück), Forschungskreis Externsteine, 2008. -2-
3. INTRODUCTION • Ladies and Gentlemen, • Thank you for attending my presentation and thank you to the organizers and staff of this conference for making it possible for me to be here. We are in the halls of art and history at Burlington House, and today we may see history being made – in the field of communications. The Phaistos Disk is after all a communication and storage device, albeit of very ancient vintage. • Today we all have our mobile cell phones, CDs and DVDs, and we take them for granted, but this technology was not always so easy to understand. In the early days of telecommunications Albert Einstein explained radio by saying: • “You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.... And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.” -3-
4. Albert Einstein’s Cat (Photomontage by Wolfgang Lauter in Der literarische Katzenkalender, 2008, Schöffling & Co.) In the case of the Phaistos Disk, we have a cat, but our cat has no tail and worse still, it is not meowing, and the issue has been rightly raised now whether we have a -4- real cat here at all.
5. To be or not to be? REAL or FAKE? That is the question • TO BE OR NOT TO BE. REAL or FAKE? • That is the Shakespearean question being posed here today. • Dr. Jerome Eisenberg has observed – correctly in my view – that the symbols on the Phaistos Disk were compiled piecemeal in part from other ancient sources. • I agree. The only question is, was this done in the modern era, or 3 to 4 thousand years ago? Dr. Eisenberg has concluded that it was a modern forger, an archaeologist, who did it. But I think, to the contrary, that it was the ancient Greeks themselves who did it. And I have evidence for that conclusion. -5-
6. The Invention of Letters in Greece • Gaius Julius Hyginus (ca. 64 BC – AD 17), who lived at the time of Christ, passed on many Greek tales in unadulterated form in his Fabulae, of which Number 277 deals with \"Ancient Inventors\". He writes as follows: • \"\"CCLXXVII. FIRST INVENTORS. The Parcae, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos [AK note: The Parcae are the Fates, in Greek Morae, and named Nona, Decima and Morta] invented seven Greek letters - A B H T I Y. Others say that Mercury invented them from the flight of cranes, which, when they fly, form letters. Palamedes, too, son of Nauplius, invented eleven letters; Simonides, too, invented four letters – Ó E Z PH; Epicharmus of Sicily, two - P and PS. The Greek letters Mercury is said to have brought to Egypt, and from Egypt Cadmus took them to Greece. Cadmus in exile from Arcadia, took them to Italy, and his mother Carmenta changed them to Latin to the number of 15. Apollo on the lyre added the rest....\" -6-
7. Greek Letters were taken from Ancient Sources by the Ancients themselves – the Crete Connection • The ancient record therefore confirms that the initial Greek letters, which constitute the origins of writing in Western Europe, were in fact a conglomeration of inputs, just as Dr. Eisenberg claims for the Phaistos Disk. Accordingly, this characteristic is no proof that the Phaistos Disk is not genuine. Quite the contrary, it is exactly what we would expect from ancient Greek letters, based on the historical record. The first Greek letters viz. symbols were in fact taken from numerous ancient sources, by the ancients themselves. • One inventor of Greek letters mentioned by Hyginus in fact has a clear connection to Crete: Palamedes, son of Nauplius and Clymene, the daughter of Catreus, king of Crete, son of the first king of Crete, Minos, and grandfather of Menelaus, the Greek husband of Helen of Troy. Catreus was thus the grandfather of Palamedes. -7-
8. A Man named Palamedes • Grandfather Catreus had numerous children. • His two daughters he is said to have given to a merchant mariner, Nauplius, to be married off in foreign lands. This mariner instead took Clymene for himself and sailed off into the sunset. Where did they ultimately settle? • Clymene in ancient Greek sources is also called Asia, which some allege is how the continent Asia got its name, thus pointing to a possible geographic Asian destiny. Indeed, Herodotus is puzzled by Ancient Greek usage of women's names to describe large areas such as Asia or Europe. But the answer – royal settlement - is clear. • It is Clymene’s son Palamedes who subsequently surfaces as the greatest inventor in the history of Greece, for Palamedes not only allegedly invented eleven of the Greek letters, but it is also said that he invented counting, currency, weights and measures, military ranks, dice, a forerunner of chess called pessoi, and improvements in winemaking. -8-
9. Technology Transfer from Elam to Crete • Amazing enough, but all of this could very well be true in the ancient era if the inventions of Palamedes were obtained by technology transfer from a foreign land, for Mercury (viz. Hermes) the bringer of letters, has the same meaning as \"merchant\". These inventions were brought to Greece from a distant land by traveling merchants. • As we have discovered, this distant land is Elam, the land – as we shall claim and explain here - where Clymene and Nauplius ultimately settled. It is the land in which letters were first stamped onto clay, just as on the Phaistos Disk, but long before it. An existing technology was thus imported into ancient Crete. We will discuss this in detail subsequently. -9-
10. The Previous Lack of Corroborative Texts • The second major argument raised by Dr. Eisenberg against the Phaistos Disk is the lack of corroborative texts. When Dr. Eisenberg initially asked me to present a paper at this conference, I declined, saying it was a losing proposition for me, since no probative proof of authenticity would be possible without corroborative texts. To my knowledge then, there were no such texts available, so it was pointless to come. • At Dr. Eisenberg's friendly insistence, I finally agreed to present a paper merely presenting my point of view that the Phaistos Disk was quite genuine, and giving my reasons for so believing. But in the course of research for this paper, a remarkable thing happened. - 10 -
11. Corroborative Texts from Elam • I discovered two texts that contained symbols with a great deal of similarity to a number of symbols on the Phaistos Disk. These texts were from Elam and were written in Old Elamite Script. Could they be connected? • Indeed, when I applied the syllabic values for the Phaistos Disc that I had obtained 30 years previously, I was able to read those Old Elamite Scripts without difficulty. They were written in Ancient Greek language, and the author was presumably Palamedes, the son of Clymene, and the inventor of Greek letters.
12. Background to the Phaistos Disc Decipherment by Andis Kaulins In The Phaistos Disc: Hieroglyphic Greek with Euclidean Dimensions: The ‘Lost Proof’ of Parallel Lines, Darmstadt, 1980, p. 18, the author of that book, Andis Kaulins, wrote as follows: - 12 -
13. “In ... 1977 a colleague ... at the University of Kiel departed on a vacation to Crete.... [S]he brought back a book from the Heraklion Museum in which a photo of Side A of the Phaistos Disc was pictured... Was it ... written in an Indo-European language? ... [if yes, this author concluded], it would have to bear a close relation to the Baltic languages [the most archaic still spoken Indo- European tongues], and ... in that case [yes, it should be decipherable]....” - 13 -
14. Three years later, this author's decipherment resulted in the book (viz. monograph) pictured here, which alleged to decipher the Phaistos Disc as a pre-Euclidean mathematical postulate written in Ancient Greek. The alleged decipherment was shown to a number of people who were of the opinion that the work was plausible, if also speculative, especially because of the lack of corroborative additional Cretan viz. Minoan material. - 14 -
15. A Review of Previous Research was conducted starting from the date of discovery of the Phaistos Disc by Luigi Pernier in the year 1908 - 15 -
16. Had anyone found the right path? Did the incomplete 1952 Ventris decipherment of Linear B as Ancient Greek indicate that Greek was the most likely language? The 45 pictographs on the Phaistos Disc appeared 241 times and appeared to be divided into words by vertical lines. Were the symbols syllabic? This author sensed that statistical analysis of letter frequencies and distribution would help to solve the mystery. A chart was made of the distribution and frequency of the pictographs. This frequency was then compared to the distribution of letters and letter combinations found at the beginnings of words in Ancient Greek, and also in Latvian and Lithuanian languages (the most archaic still spoken Indo-European tongues). Based on those stats and supported by Greek, Latvian and Lithuanian terms for the objects presumably depicted by the symbols, syllabic values were derived and analysed in a comprehensive Michael Ventris – Alice Kober type of syllabic grid, which included the major language consonants and vowels.
17. Phaistos Disc Syllabic Grid by Andis Kaulins 1980 - 17 -
18. Phaistos Disc Reading in Ancient Greek applying the syllabic values from the Phaistos Disc Syllabic Grid - by Andis Kaulins - 18 -
19. In English that Ancient Greek text could be read as follows: • SIDE A: Foreseen (are) - as given - standing straight lines (perpendiculars) • - to be constructed (drawn). - To the side - of either such line segment • - extend - a partner line - running - alongside. - The Problem (LEMMA): • - Consider - whether these - Parallel Lines - extended - stay - Parallels. • Consider - whether these - Parallels - extended converge (diverge). • - The synthetic - added line - would foresee - a medial (uncertain) - termination. • - Extended (beyond bounds) - a fixed (converging) - termination. • SIDE B: Next to - the categorized - just constructed lines - and flat to • - the side walls' - diameter - inscribe - a closed arc - and make it so that • - the new line - curve - in its course - the side walls - diagonally - joins. • - Tie together - yoked - the branched lines. - Connect - the standing • straight lines - and branched lines. - Run a line so that - the newly created • - geodetic lines - are met - and the branched lines - pair is yoked. • - The promised - solution - is given. - 19 -
20. That reading of the Ancient Greek results in the following figure … With the following modern mathematical reading of the Phaistos Disc If the parallel lines B, D and C are extended to f and g [and beyond but short of infinity], then the resulting angle x varies, [nearing 180 or 0 degrees] depending on where line f and g is drawn. Hence, the termination is uncertain. As the parallels B, D and C are extended beyond bounds (i.e. to infinity, or infinite ends), then the angle x [measured from the center of the circle to the lines drawn to the ends of the extensions of the parallel lines B and C] will get smaller and smaller towards D as the lines B, D and C are extended, thus suggesting a converging termination. - 20 -
21. The Mathematical Decipherment Explains the 4 and 5 knots which start each respective side of the Phaistos Disc since these represent the 4th and 5th Postulates of Euclid [right angles (4th) - parallel postulate (5th)] This pre-Euclidean \"proof\" anticipates a modern analysis of parallel lines by non-Euclidean geometry. It suggests that Euclidian geometry was known to the Greeks prior to Euclid, which, in view of such mathematically sophisticated ancient sources as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, should no longer surprise us. Indeed, the fact that Side A of the Phaistos Disc starts with 4 \"knots\" and Side B of the Phaistos Disc starts with 5 \"knots\" could indeed indicate that these are the ancient predecessors of Euclid's later 4th and 5th postulates, the 4th postulate of which postulated that all right angles equal one another (the Phaistos Disk speaks of perpendiculars) and the 5th postulate of which is Euclid's \"parallel postulate\" (as on the Phaistos Disc). - 21 -
22. The Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky in fact derived a proof in the 19th century which is similar to the mathematical proof found on the Phaistos Disk: \"... [In the figure above] line AB is perpendicular to CD. If we permit it to rotate about A counterclockwise, it will intersect CD at various points to the right of B until it reaches a limiting position EF, when it becomes parallel to CD. Continuing the rotation, it will start to intersect CD to the left of B. Euclid assumed that there is only one position for the line, namely EF, when it would be parallel to CD. Lobachevsky assumed that there were two such positions, represented by A1B1 and C1D1, and further, that all lines falling within the angle θ, while not parallel to CD, would never meet it, no matter how far extended. Now this is an assumption, and there is no sense in arguing from the diagram that it is evident that if A1B1 or C1D1 were intersected sufficiently far, they would eventually intersect CD. If, as Professor Cohen has pointed out, we rely wholly on our intuition of space, which is finite, there will always be an angle θ which grows smaller as our space is extended, but which never vanishes, and all lines falling within θ will fail to intersect the given line. [The reference is to Morris Raphael Cohen, Reason and Nature, p. 137.]\" Quoted from Edward Kasner and James Roy Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination, drawings by Rufus Isaacs, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1940/1967, pp. 136-137 (the Lobachevsky drawing is our adaptation) - 22 -
23. An Old Elamite Script as Corroboration for the Phaistos Disc What struck me immediately was the similarity between the first word on the Old Elamite text and the symbols on the Phaistos Disc, whereby the Old Elamite script looked like a more cursive version of the Phaistos Disc script. - 23 -
24. Old Elamite Script is Undeciphered but some Syllabic Values have been postulated Old Elamite script from Elam, the ancient kingdom southeast of Sumer and Akkad, with its capital at Susa, and the source of the Code of Hammurabi, is today southwest Iran. Written records place the beginnings of Elamite culture at ca. 3200 BC. Mainstream archaeologists view Old Elamite to be an undeciphered pictographic script - for whose symbols syllabic values have in any case been alleged to apply to Old Elamite by some researchers as follows: - 24 -
25. A second Old Elamite script - 25 -
26. Old Elamite is Known to be Genuine Because of an Akkadian Bilingual Text The second Old Elamite script, shown on the previous page, is of great importance because it has an Akkadian bilingual text, which has been translated, based on the Akkadian text, to mean that a monument of some kind was erected for or by an important personage in Susa (German version from Harald Haarmann, Universalgeschichte der Schrift, Campus Verlag: Frankfurt and New York, 1991, Sonderausgabe 1998, Parkland Verlag, Cologne, p. 374.): • [German] \"Seinem Herrn Inshushinak, dem Menschenbildner (?), 2. habe ich Shilhak- Inshushinak, 3. der Statthalter von Susa, 4. der König des Landes Elam, 5. der Shempishhukische, 6. eine Säule (?) aus Kupfer (und) Zedernholz geweiht.\" • [Our English translation of that error-filled conversion] \"For his master Inshushinak, the sculptor of human forms (?), I, Shilhak-Inshushinak, Administrator of Susa, King of Elam, has dedicated the Shempishhukische, an obelisk (or column) (?) of copper and cedar wood.\" Since a number of symbol combinations are repeated identically on both Old Elamite scripts in this presentation, it is then logical to presume that both Old Elamite scripts have a similar content and relate to the dedication of monuments to or by important Elamite personages at Susa. - 26 -
27. Dual Syllabic Grid of Old Elamite Script and Phaistos Disc Symbols Based on the two Old Elamite scripts presented here, it has been possible to create a Dual Syllabic Grid of the symbols on the Phaistos Disc and on the Old Elamite Scripts - 27 -
28. Corroboration of the Genuineness of the Phaistos Disc and its Decipherment by Andis Kaulins Using the Dual Syllabic Grid for the Phaistos Disc and the Old Elamite Scripts, it has proven possible to decipher both Old Elamite Scripts, with sensational content, and thereby also to corroborate not only the genuineness of the Phaistos Disc but also the correctness of its decipherment as an Ancient Greek mathematical text by Andis Kaulins in the year 1980. - 28 -
29. The English Decipherment of the 1st Old Elamite Script, written in Ancient Greek, reads: “Ruler over all (Pantarchas). In memory, the deceased in these walls of a new temple is laid to rest. The collected elders, ordained by God, and the lone (sole) companion of King Labynetus, Nitokris, administrator in death, in Susa erected this temple in memory, in sorrow created.” - 29 -
30. The English Decipherment of the 2nd Old Elamite Script, written in Ancient Greek, reads: “This great hall of columns [“statue” in the Akkadian bilingual], Peloponessus, was erected in memory of the deceased Queen Nitokris of Mycenaean descent, separated from her home in Mycenae and now in sorrow separated in death.” - 30 -
31. How did Ancient Greek get to Elam? Was Nitokris the true Helen of Troy or Clymena of ancient Greek legend? The ancient name for Troy was Ilium or Ilion: (Greek Τροία, Troia or Ἴλιον, Ilion; Latin: Trōia, Īlium, Hittite: Truwisa or Wilusa). Ilium thus bears a close word correspondence to the term Elam. Did both identify the same place? In Persia? We must recall that the currently accepted location of Troy in Anatolia as popularized by Heinrich Schliemann and as defended in our day by Manfred Korfmann has been called a fantasy construction by Frank Kolb, and, indeed, there is almost no probative evidence proving that Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey was actually Troy. Nothing in historical or archaeological data gives Hisarlik any great ancient importance. Homer spoke of springs west of the city of Troy, but there are none at Hisarlik. But there are underground springs on the Susa plain. - 31 -
32. The Importance of Elam to the Beginnings of Writing and Civilization “[I]t was here [in Elam], rather than in Mesopotamia proper - which after all lies only fifty miles to the west of Susa - that civilization as we know it truly began. - Richard Critchfield, How Lonely Sits the City Susa and Elam are therefore of great historical and archaeological interest. Jacque de Morgan, famed for having found the Code of Hammurabi and called the father of prehistoric archeology by some, wrote (Recherches sur les origines des peuples du Caucase, p. 16, 1912): \"In the Nile valley I developed the conviction that the first civilizations, from which the Egyptian empire arose, came from Chaldea and that the Mesopotamian plains had therefore been the cradle of human progress. Susa, because of its very early date, provided the possibility of solving the greatest and most important problem, that of our origins. This city, in my view, belonged to that primordial world that had witnessed the discovery of writing, the use of metals, the beginnings of art. If the great problem of origins was to be solved one day, it was in Chaldea, and especially at Susa, that it was necessary to seek the basic elements.\" [emphasis added] - 32 -
33. The Origin of Seals and Stamps as on the Phaistos Disc As far as the origins of writing are concerned, in fact, some of the oldest seals and stamps ever discovered have been found at Susa in Elam. As on the Phaistos Disc, the ancient technology of \"writing\" symbols onto seals consisted of stamping carved impressions onto clay. The Phaistos Disc does not implement an unknown ancient technology, rather, it implements a technology otherwise unknown to Crete. - 33 -
34. The geographic placement of Troy toward Persia is suggested by other evidence. The Iliou persis (Greek: Ἰλίου πέρσις, Latin: Iliupersis) is a lost Greek epic of the so-called Epic Cycle (also called the \"Trojan Cycle\") of Greek literature, of which fragments have survived. The current mainstream translation of the title phrase Iliou persis as \"Sack of Ilium\" is unpersuasive and doubtful in view of the Ancient Greek root περσισ- (persis-, \"Persian\"), whereby πέρσις (pérsis) \"destruction\" is surely a derivative meaning attached to the folk name. Iliou persis in its original context thus most likely actually meant \"Elam in Persia\" or \"Hellas in Persia\". In any case, it was in fact the similarly named Paris (perhaps originally \"Persis\", the Greek from Persia) who, according to the legend of the cause of the Trojan War, eloped with or abducted Helen of Troy, the stepdaughter of King Tyndareus. That entire complex of ancient tales provides us with the necessary Mycenaean connection, as follows, according to Greek legend: - 34 -
35. The Mycenaean Connection \"Tyndareus Τυνδαρεύς (or Tyndareos Τυνδάρεως) was a Spartan king..., husband of Leda and [step]father of Helen.... Tyndareus' wife, Leda, was seduced by Zeus ... disguised ... as a swan. She laid two eggs, each producing two children ... from one egg, Pollux and Helen were the children of Zeus; from the other, Castor and Clytemnestra were the children of Tyndareus. When Thyestes seized control in Mycenae, two exiled princes, Agamemnon and Menelaus came to Sparta. Tyndareus received them.... Agamemnon married Clytemnestra. Helen ... had many more suitors for she was the most beautiful woman in the world. When it was time for [Helen] to marry, many ... kings and princes came to seek her hand.... Tyndareus [would not] send any of the suitors away for fear of ... giving grounds for a quarrel.... Odysseus proposed that, before the decision was made, all the suitors should swear a most solemn oath to defend the chosen husband against whoever should quarrel with the chosen one. This stratagem succeeded and Helen and Menelaus were married. Eventually, Tyndareus resigned in favor of his son-in-law and Menelaus became king of Sparta.... Some years later, Paris, a Trojan prince came to Sparta to marry Helen, whom he had been promised by Aphrodite. Helen fell in love with him and left willingly, (although it is also suggested that he may have simply kidnapped her, with neither theory being conclusively proven) leaving behind Menelaus and Hermione, their nine-year-old daughter.... Menelaus' attempts to retrieve Helen ... caused the Trojan War.\" [emphasis added] – Wikipedia - 35 -
36. Helen of Troy and Paris in Cyprus, Sidon (Phoenicia, including Tyre) and Egypt (Sais) The connection to Crete is strengthened by the legendary account that on the night that Helen and Paris left Sparta, they were able to do so because Menelaus had left Sparta to sail to Crete for the funeral of his grandfather King Catreus: \"The myth about Catreus [son of King Minos of Crete] and his children is proof (known as well from the archaeological findings) that in the so called \"heroic age\" a close relation existed between Crete, Mycenae, and the other places in the Peloponnese and also between Crete and the islands such as Rhodes.\" The Trojan War holds more surprises in the legendary account, some of which seem to be conveniently ignored by those who modernly discuss the location of Troy. As written by Robert Graves (Robert von Ranke-Graves), based on numerous Greek sources, Helen and Paris, after leaving Sparta, sailed to Cyprus, Sidon (Phoenicia) and the Nile Delta of Egypt, where, at the latter, they founded a temple on the Canopic branch of the Nile. As explained below, this could have been at Sais: \"Sais or Sa el-Hagar was an ancient Egyptian town in the Western Nile Delta on the Canopic branch of the Nile.“ The patron goddess of the \"Egyptian\" city Sais was Neith, whose cult at Sais is allegedly attested in texts clear back to the 1st Dynasty, but nothing archaeological has been found earlier than the New Kingdom at that alleged location of Sais, in fact \"only a few relief blocks in situ\". Interesting then, according to legend, is that ancient Sais was allegedly built by Greeks, not Egyptians, prior to the cataclysm. \"Herodotus wrote that Sais is where the grave of Osiris was located.... Diodorus Siculus attested that it was the Athenians who built Sais before the cataclysm. While all Greek cities were destroyed during the cataclysm, the Egyptian cities including Sais survived. ... There are today no surviving traces of this town prior to the Late New Kingdom (ca. 1100 BC)…. - 36 -
37. Geography of the Flight of Helen of Troy and Paris The legendary route of Helen and Paris to Troy does not speak for Hisarlik as Troy, for Paris and Helen went to Troy after leaving Egypt, and they would not have gone that far South only to return even further to the North. Troy is clearly elsewhere. - 37 -
38. Why did the Greeks have trouble FINDING Troy and who did the really attack? According to Herodotus, the Greeks had trouble finding Troy, which would seem to exclude Hisarlik as the location of Troy, since that location would easily have been known to them, being in their own back yard. The legend relates that the Greek warships in pursuit of Helen and Paris initially and mistakenly attacked the people called Teuthranians (we think this was the Tyranians, the people of Tyre, near Sidon) who claimed that Helen was not in their land, and put up fierce resistance, inflicting serious losses on the Greeks. Tyre would in that case then be the origin of the later name Troy, which became confused historically by the ancient writers with Ilium (Elam), the actual location of Helen and Paris. - 38 -
39. Queen Nitokris and Crete In addition to the above connections of Helen of Troy and other essential historical personages to Mycenae and Crete by legend, there is also a potential linguistic connection to Crete in the name of Queen Nitokris…. The Egyptian Queen Nitokris, according to current scholarship, is regarded to be a different Queen than the \"Babylonian\" Elamite Queen Nitokris, but we leave a discussion of the issue of whether these were separate Queens or not to a later date, since this is a question of chronology and other matters too broad to discuss here. In the Mycenaean context here, it is important to note that Nitokris is read Neit-krety in Egyptology and could in fact thus be read as \"goddess (or woman) of Crete\". In very archaic Indo-European (e.g. Latvian) the term meita is similar to neit viz. neith and means simply \"girl\" or \"woman\", so that the original meaning of Neit-krety might simply have been \"girl from Crete\". Sais in Egypt was thus the Temple of Neith and the similarly named Susa was the city of the Queen from Crete. But that could also be Clymene rather than Helen of Troy, whose husband hailed from Crete. - 39 -
40. Queen Napirasu of Elam Helen of Troy [or, also possible, Clymene] was thus Queen Napirasu, wife of King Untash-Napirisha [either King Labynetus or King Naublius] of Elam, whereby the similar name Na-piris-ha could be the Paris of ancient Greek legend who eloped with Helen - or in the alternative - Napirisha could be the name equivalent to Naublius. A statue of Queen Napirasu, unique for its time, composed of 3760 pounds of bronze and copper, was found in Susa, Elam, and is today, perhaps fittingly for its namesake, a part of the Iran collection in the Louvre in the city of Paris, France. In that statue we thus see either Helen of Troy or Clymene as the life-size statue of Queen Napirasu. - 40 -
41. Statue of Queen Napirasu The Louvre labels this statue as: \"Queen Napirasu, wife of King Untash-Napirisha, circa 1340-1300 BC, [photograph] © R.M.N./D. Chenot, Statue found at the Tell of the Acropolis, Susa, Iran, Bronze and copper, H. 1.29 m; L. 0.73 m, Jacques de Morgan excavations, 1903.\" Statue of Queen Napirasu, Louvre. - 41 -
42. 42. - 42 -"
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 2/24/2009 12:15:00 AM
......Creative Commons License