FranzJoseph
December 21st, 2003, 03:12 AM
Below is a short excerpt from the prolific Ed Nyland's home page. It's part his effort to prove that the story of Odysseus (and Homer's other tales) was actually a Northern Saga. The Greeks borrowed and redacted it many, many centuries after it actually happened. Indeed, Nyland is only one of many who has discovered the elements of Homer's "Greek" tales in the North and centuries earlier. There was also the Dutchman Iman Wilkens who places the story in the British Isles as well. Other scholars insist it was further to the east, but the essentials are roughly the same.
Nyland's book, Oddyseus in the Hebrides, is well worth the effort it takes to find (I think Amazon.com will special order it for you, but they charge extra. Try the used services first, like abe.com). The main thing is that Nyland, like the late Barry Fell, is one of the upstart historians who insist that official history is bunk. That much we probably all agree on.
Anyway his homepage contains much of value all by itself:
http://www.islandnet.com/~edonon/homepage.htm
A WORLD IN TURMOIL by Ed Nyland
In order to understand the epic which Homer wrote down, the reader has to know that this was an era of enormous and unprecedented change, religious conflict, brutality, even mass genocide. It was the beginning of the end for the peaceful Goddess civilization of our neolithic ancestors and the triumphing of the war-like sky gods of the new patriarchy of the Near East. For millennia the old Goddess religion had been associated with the seas and contact between the widely scattered tribes had mainly been maintained by boat. The peoples fighting for a change to patriarchy, all located on the mainland, had changed from a herding economy to an agricultural life style and had lost their relationship with the sea, if ever they had it. Only on islands had it been possible to ward off the threat of the new sky gods. In the eastern Mediterranean the large island of Crete and the smaller islands to the north in the Aegean sea had been able to resist the disaster because the Cretan sailors were undisputed master of the eastern Mediterranean. The islands in and the lands surrounding the western Mediterranean were still firmly in the domain of the Goddess, as was the civilization on the Atlantic islands off the west coast of Europe, well known to the Mediterranean sailors who traded with this region. If it had not been for the Odyssey and a few legends like Prince Breckan's death in the whirlpool, St. Adamnan's biography of St. Colomba and Martin Martin's book about the early days, we would never have known about it, in spite of all the marvelous and puzzling neolithic monuments which hundreds of thousands of tourists come to see yearly in Ireland and Scotland. There is a great deal more to British and Irish neolithic history than the stories about a ragtag bunch of heathens dragging around and planting large stones upright to measure the solstices.
A RICH AND LOVELY LAND (XIX: 173).
The people of Crete had been able to maintain belief in their nature Goddess because no one dared challenge them on the sea. Around 1450 B.C., this beautiful civilization was suddenly savaged when the very large volcano on Thera erupted with enormous ferocity and covered much of eastern Crete with a thick layer of volcanic ash, burying crops and collapsing houses. Burning embers fell on the city of Iraklion [from: ira-ak.-.li-on, ira-aki-ili-onda, iraun (to suffer) akiarazi (to exhaust) ilinti (firebrand) ondagarri (disastrous): "The disastrous firebrands (made us) suffer from exhaustion"] and destroyed many of the houses which had not collapsed from the violent earthquakes and the ash fall. The tsunamis which followed, must have destroyed the ships in the north coast harbours and wrenched huge stones out of place inside the harbour piers and docks. Large waves inundated the coastal area and obliterated all that had not been destroyed by the quakes and the fires. Many people living near the north shore of the island drowned with the crews on the ships. Devastation in the disaster area was total and in time the formerly strong economy collapsed with the society. The proto-democratic form of government died and was not heard of again until a limited version (for men only) was restored in Athens, almost 1000 years later. In time, the Achaians from Greece took advantage of the helpless condition of the country and in ca 1400 B.C. the once peaceful country of Crete was overrun by the aggressive warriors of the Greek pirate kings; the last gylanic (1) civilization of the eastern Mediterranean was no more.
AN EPIC FROM SCOTLAND AND IRELAND WAS WRITTEN DOWN IN GREECE.
Many authors have commented that the climatic and sailing conditions, described by Homer, were far more appropriate for the north Atlantic than for the Mediterranean and throughout the ages this possibility has been noted by many others: most of the Wanderings belongs in the North Atlantic! It looks like Homer had taken an essentially Scottish and Irish legend; he changed, added and manipulated the epic in such a way that it fitted, more or less, in the Mediterranean. That's where the detectives came in and many are the people who tried to find out where he really went. These chapters will attempt to provide some of the details of what happened.
In the epic-editing and -altering process Odysseus, the main player in the travelogue, was assigned an island on the west coast of Greece by Homer, and appointed (in the story only) as king. He was given a wife and a son, and almost all of his original heroic achievements were eliminated; other suitable legends were borrowed from foreign countries and inserted, and the rest of the original story was dreadfully mixed up to the point that there was little left recognizable of the original epic. It is probably true that the writing we have in the Odyssey is wholly Homer's, but, having said this, I must repeat that there had to be a very different Odyssey which he worked from, but which never survived Homer and other censors and was probably lost forever when the treasured libraries in Alexandria were burned to the ground on orders from the new religious masters in the east and in Rome. Everything Homer has written must now be regarded with the greatest suspicion and approached with questioning.
WHY WAS THIS DASTARDLY DEED DONE?
But why was this complicated and time-consuming effort made to alter and mutilate the ancient epic? Would it not have been easier to just ignore it and never write it down? The reason for this was probably that the epic was badly needed in the effort to bury the very strong oral mythology of the previous gylanic (1) civilization and to cover it up with a rewritten and mixed up mythology founded on the promotion of the new sky gods for Greece, as Michael Wood wrote:
"the classical Greeks had no good source for their prehistoric past. Oral tradition, especially in the shape of Homer, was all they had to rely on, because, as Josephus points out in his preface to the 'Jewish War', it was 'late, and with difficulty, that they came to the letters they now use". (p.29)
The ancient, homegrown legends of the original Goddess civilization did not suit the new masters but the basic story of the Odyssey did. It didn't matter that Odysseus was no Greek, he just served the purpose, so they made him a Greek. This book is my effort to restore at least some of the original epic, using the findings of other sciences, mainly archaeology and linguistics, and make an effort to expose the foreign elements which Homer had, more or less cleverly, glued into the Odyssey.
AN INCREDIBLY OLD STORY.
The Odyssey describes events which happened around 1180 B.C, mainly in the Atlantic, and the greatly altered version we have today was written sometime around 750 or 700 B.C. For over 2700 years the book has been regarded as an epic of enormous importance; it was required reading in classical Greek schools and was used to give credibility to the newly invented pantheon of Greek sky gods and goddesses, designed to replace the ancient mythology. These newly invented stories then were taught as the nation's sacred legends, just as the name
"Hellas (Greece), he - el. - .la - as. tells us:
he - ele - ela - asi
herri - eleizako - ela - asiera
nation - sacred - story/legend - origin
"Our nation's sacred legends (tell) our origin".
And a phony origin it was, but it stuck and to this day our students have to learn the nonsense as true Greek history. There is no doubt that the Odyssey is the oldest European literature we have and that it came to us in the Greek language. It is no fluke that this ancient legend has survived the vagaries of time, because it was protected and authorized by the various religious masters, the Christians included. The epic also adds 1000 years to Ireland's and Scotland's written history. It has been translated innumerable times during the many centuries of its existence. The translation by Richmond Lattimore is used by me because I consider his work to be in a class by itself and the best available. Lattimore preserves Homer's style of writing and meaning as closely as possible. It also is easy to use his work as a reference because the lines are carefully numbered.
[...] (Continued at Nyland's homepage)
Nyland's book, Oddyseus in the Hebrides, is well worth the effort it takes to find (I think Amazon.com will special order it for you, but they charge extra. Try the used services first, like abe.com). The main thing is that Nyland, like the late Barry Fell, is one of the upstart historians who insist that official history is bunk. That much we probably all agree on.
Anyway his homepage contains much of value all by itself:
http://www.islandnet.com/~edonon/homepage.htm
A WORLD IN TURMOIL by Ed Nyland
In order to understand the epic which Homer wrote down, the reader has to know that this was an era of enormous and unprecedented change, religious conflict, brutality, even mass genocide. It was the beginning of the end for the peaceful Goddess civilization of our neolithic ancestors and the triumphing of the war-like sky gods of the new patriarchy of the Near East. For millennia the old Goddess religion had been associated with the seas and contact between the widely scattered tribes had mainly been maintained by boat. The peoples fighting for a change to patriarchy, all located on the mainland, had changed from a herding economy to an agricultural life style and had lost their relationship with the sea, if ever they had it. Only on islands had it been possible to ward off the threat of the new sky gods. In the eastern Mediterranean the large island of Crete and the smaller islands to the north in the Aegean sea had been able to resist the disaster because the Cretan sailors were undisputed master of the eastern Mediterranean. The islands in and the lands surrounding the western Mediterranean were still firmly in the domain of the Goddess, as was the civilization on the Atlantic islands off the west coast of Europe, well known to the Mediterranean sailors who traded with this region. If it had not been for the Odyssey and a few legends like Prince Breckan's death in the whirlpool, St. Adamnan's biography of St. Colomba and Martin Martin's book about the early days, we would never have known about it, in spite of all the marvelous and puzzling neolithic monuments which hundreds of thousands of tourists come to see yearly in Ireland and Scotland. There is a great deal more to British and Irish neolithic history than the stories about a ragtag bunch of heathens dragging around and planting large stones upright to measure the solstices.
A RICH AND LOVELY LAND (XIX: 173).
The people of Crete had been able to maintain belief in their nature Goddess because no one dared challenge them on the sea. Around 1450 B.C., this beautiful civilization was suddenly savaged when the very large volcano on Thera erupted with enormous ferocity and covered much of eastern Crete with a thick layer of volcanic ash, burying crops and collapsing houses. Burning embers fell on the city of Iraklion [from: ira-ak.-.li-on, ira-aki-ili-onda, iraun (to suffer) akiarazi (to exhaust) ilinti (firebrand) ondagarri (disastrous): "The disastrous firebrands (made us) suffer from exhaustion"] and destroyed many of the houses which had not collapsed from the violent earthquakes and the ash fall. The tsunamis which followed, must have destroyed the ships in the north coast harbours and wrenched huge stones out of place inside the harbour piers and docks. Large waves inundated the coastal area and obliterated all that had not been destroyed by the quakes and the fires. Many people living near the north shore of the island drowned with the crews on the ships. Devastation in the disaster area was total and in time the formerly strong economy collapsed with the society. The proto-democratic form of government died and was not heard of again until a limited version (for men only) was restored in Athens, almost 1000 years later. In time, the Achaians from Greece took advantage of the helpless condition of the country and in ca 1400 B.C. the once peaceful country of Crete was overrun by the aggressive warriors of the Greek pirate kings; the last gylanic (1) civilization of the eastern Mediterranean was no more.
AN EPIC FROM SCOTLAND AND IRELAND WAS WRITTEN DOWN IN GREECE.
Many authors have commented that the climatic and sailing conditions, described by Homer, were far more appropriate for the north Atlantic than for the Mediterranean and throughout the ages this possibility has been noted by many others: most of the Wanderings belongs in the North Atlantic! It looks like Homer had taken an essentially Scottish and Irish legend; he changed, added and manipulated the epic in such a way that it fitted, more or less, in the Mediterranean. That's where the detectives came in and many are the people who tried to find out where he really went. These chapters will attempt to provide some of the details of what happened.
In the epic-editing and -altering process Odysseus, the main player in the travelogue, was assigned an island on the west coast of Greece by Homer, and appointed (in the story only) as king. He was given a wife and a son, and almost all of his original heroic achievements were eliminated; other suitable legends were borrowed from foreign countries and inserted, and the rest of the original story was dreadfully mixed up to the point that there was little left recognizable of the original epic. It is probably true that the writing we have in the Odyssey is wholly Homer's, but, having said this, I must repeat that there had to be a very different Odyssey which he worked from, but which never survived Homer and other censors and was probably lost forever when the treasured libraries in Alexandria were burned to the ground on orders from the new religious masters in the east and in Rome. Everything Homer has written must now be regarded with the greatest suspicion and approached with questioning.
WHY WAS THIS DASTARDLY DEED DONE?
But why was this complicated and time-consuming effort made to alter and mutilate the ancient epic? Would it not have been easier to just ignore it and never write it down? The reason for this was probably that the epic was badly needed in the effort to bury the very strong oral mythology of the previous gylanic (1) civilization and to cover it up with a rewritten and mixed up mythology founded on the promotion of the new sky gods for Greece, as Michael Wood wrote:
"the classical Greeks had no good source for their prehistoric past. Oral tradition, especially in the shape of Homer, was all they had to rely on, because, as Josephus points out in his preface to the 'Jewish War', it was 'late, and with difficulty, that they came to the letters they now use". (p.29)
The ancient, homegrown legends of the original Goddess civilization did not suit the new masters but the basic story of the Odyssey did. It didn't matter that Odysseus was no Greek, he just served the purpose, so they made him a Greek. This book is my effort to restore at least some of the original epic, using the findings of other sciences, mainly archaeology and linguistics, and make an effort to expose the foreign elements which Homer had, more or less cleverly, glued into the Odyssey.
AN INCREDIBLY OLD STORY.
The Odyssey describes events which happened around 1180 B.C, mainly in the Atlantic, and the greatly altered version we have today was written sometime around 750 or 700 B.C. For over 2700 years the book has been regarded as an epic of enormous importance; it was required reading in classical Greek schools and was used to give credibility to the newly invented pantheon of Greek sky gods and goddesses, designed to replace the ancient mythology. These newly invented stories then were taught as the nation's sacred legends, just as the name
"Hellas (Greece), he - el. - .la - as. tells us:
he - ele - ela - asi
herri - eleizako - ela - asiera
nation - sacred - story/legend - origin
"Our nation's sacred legends (tell) our origin".
And a phony origin it was, but it stuck and to this day our students have to learn the nonsense as true Greek history. There is no doubt that the Odyssey is the oldest European literature we have and that it came to us in the Greek language. It is no fluke that this ancient legend has survived the vagaries of time, because it was protected and authorized by the various religious masters, the Christians included. The epic also adds 1000 years to Ireland's and Scotland's written history. It has been translated innumerable times during the many centuries of its existence. The translation by Richmond Lattimore is used by me because I consider his work to be in a class by itself and the best available. Lattimore preserves Homer's style of writing and meaning as closely as possible. It also is easy to use his work as a reference because the lines are carefully numbered.
[...] (Continued at Nyland's homepage)