THE MEGALITHS AND AFTER
An exploration by Guy Gervis
1. Foreword
Until carbon 14 dating methods began to indicate the true age of the megalithic
monuments of North West Europe, it
had been thought that they had been inspired by cultures in the Mediterranean
area which had given some kind of
spiritual/religious input. Since then a great deal of archaeological work has
been done, and we now know that
these monuments started to appear during the fifth millennium BC, long before
any suitable inspiration was around
in the Mediterranean, and continued for over three thousand years. There has
been much discussion over whether
they were the result of separate initiatives by different cultures or whether
these initiatives were in some way
linked, the usual decision being that they were separate, but that leaves what
Colin Renfrew 1 described as the
‘central mystery' unanswered: what caused this relatively sudden proliferation
of megalithic monuments.
This mystery is partnered by a puzzle which concerns the origin of the
Indo-European languages. These cover a
great swath of countries between India and Ireland, and until recently it had
been believed that the languages
must have been spread by migrations. There has been a growing consensus recently
that migrations were less
frequent than had been imagined, and now it has been shown by studies on the
Y-Chromosome 2 that after the initial
migration into Europe from Siberia, some 30,000 years ago, the only substantial
immigration into Europe was from
Anatolia, starting probably around 10,000 years ago and carrying farming with
it. The effect of this was felt much
more in the South of Europe than in the North. Over the last two hundred years
3
much effort has been put into
trying to locate the ‘homeland' of the Indo-European culture, in the expectation
that this would lead to an
understanding of the patterns of migration, but as far as most of Europe is
concerned that option now seems to be
closed, leaving a considerable query as to how these languages did arrive in
Europe.
This exploration will seek to provide new perspectives on these two questions:
what stimulated the sudden
proliferation of megalithic monuments, and how were the Indo-European languages
spread, but we will also be
concerned with the Greek cultural inheritance from N.W. Europe
2. The Iliad becomes a star primer.
‘Homer's Secret Iliad' by Florence and Kenneth Wood, based on the work of Edna
Leigh, was published in 1999. This
book demonstrates with considerable confidence that the Iliad must have
originally evolved as a primer for
understanding the movement of the stars. It is shown that every warrior is
represented by a star, and that when
two warriors fought it was always the warrior represented by the brighter star
that won. The authors explain that
there is a star relevant context for most of the Iliad. For example, when Hector
is being chased by Achilles
around the city of Troy, we should be watching the constellation of Orion, which
is being followed around the sky
by Canis Major, and when Achilles' lance is launched from Sirius, the brightest
star in Canis Major, the lance
hits three stars representing the gullet and collarbone of Hector, which can be
identified within Orion.
For our purposes it is perhaps most significant to note that the movement of
precession is included in the story.
This is the slow, top-like wobble of the rotational axis of the earth, which
makes the role of pole star move
around a notional circle of stars every 26,000 years, and that the central drama
of the Iliad, the fall of Troy,
represents the period when the star Thuban loses its position as pole star,
which it had held for over two
thousand years. This happened in around 1,800 BC. This assertion is of such
importance that we should look briefly
at the kind of evidence that has been found.
The inevitability of the fall of Troy is referred to by both Hector and
Agamemnon in almost exactly the same
phrase ‘Deep in my heart I know that the day is coming when holy Ilium will be
destroyed, with Priam and the
people of Priam…' 4. Indications of an understanding of precessional movement
are given by battles and duels
between Greek and Trojan regiments which are allegories for the movement of an
equinox or solstice from one
zodiacal constellation to another, such changes being the result of precession.
For example Sarpedon being killed
is an allegory that explains the passing of the vernal equinox from Gemini to
Taurus. Troy is represented by the
constellation of Ursa Major, which is close to the pole star Thuban, in the
constellation of Draco, but when the
pole star role moves to Kochab, in Ursa Minor, around 1,800 BC Troy loses this
close association with the pole
star, and is thus deemed to have ‘fallen'. Close analysis of the Iliad story
reveals a wealth of information of
this kind, making it extremely difficult to refute the connection between Thuban
and Troy.
Once this connection has been accepted, another difficulty must be faced, which
concerns the likely date for the
composition of this drama, because, from a dramatic point of view one would
assume that it was composed during
Thuban's tenure of pole position. The significance of Troy, gleaming in the
night sky beside the pole star, is
lost once the pole star has moved on elsewhere. The authors of Homer's Secret
Iliad largely ignore this argument,
explaining that in Homer's time the stars around the then-pole star were of less
interest, and that Homer
therefore chose a previous celestial era for the tale. This cannot be proved,
and the possibility that the Iliad
was composed much earlier, well before Thuban lost the pole position, say around
3000 BC should certainly be
considered. Such limited information as we have suggests that this is also a
more likely date for the composition
of a work obsessed by stars.
Another astronomical fact included in the tale is the reappearance of the star
Sirius, after a long absence,
caused by precessional movement. The authors explain that this event took place
in around 8900 BC in Greece, and
is represented by the return of Achilles to the battlefield. Further to the
North this event would have been
somewhat later.
That one of the world's most valued literary masterpieces should have entwined
within it, as it were, a sub-plot
filled with sophisticated information regarding the stars is astonishing, but
the idea that these star movements,
from very early dates, had been detected and recorded in some way, is even more
so. It should of course be
stressed that if this is the true nature of the Iliad, no archaeological dig
will ever find Troy!
The authors of ‘Homer's Secret Iliad' provide a careful analysis of the story of
the Iliad in relation to the
stars, but when it comes to its birth into Greek culture they settle for Homer
in around 750 BC, aided by much
inherited wisdom from Greek sources, on which we have very little information.
It would be equally logical to
assume that this tale evolved outside Greek culture, suggesting that Homer was
perhaps a translator and
modernizer. There is certainly no evidence for such a sophisticated culture in
Greece around 3000 BC, nor at first
sight, anywhere else. Is there a serious lacuna in our understanding of
prehistory?
3. Other prehistoric anomalies.
The central mystery of the megaliths is why the peoples of Europe during the
Neolithic period constructed, with
enormous energy, thousands of monuments involving the manipulation of stones,
some of which were massive, moving
enormous quantities of earth to form other monuments, some of which were
circular, and of course setting up stone
circles. To give a few examples: Le Grand Menhir (Standing Stone) of
Locmariaquer, in the Morbihan, Brittany, now
broken, weighed 350 tons, and was over 20 metres long; the Cueva de Manga, in
Antequera, Andalusia, Spain, has a
chamber 6.5 metres at the widest, over 20 metres long, covered by five enormous
stones, one of which weighs 180
tons, all within a tumulus; the circular monument at Avebury is over 350 metres
in diameter within the circular
ditch, which used to be some 6 metres deep, with an outer bank some 4 metres
high. There were stone circles within
the space formed by the ditch, as well as the better known stone circles. It is
now known that there were many
timber circles, with a series of rings of timber posts, over 400 at Durrington
walls, where the overall diameter
was around 400 metres; some monuments had striking decoration carved into the
stones, such as at Newgrange, in
Ireland. These kinds of monuments have often been linked to the sun, moon,
planets and stars, although the exact
details of how has generated much discussion. Archaeological opinion, however,
is quite clear that there is no
evidence for any human settlements where sophisticated ideas such as those
implicit in this new understanding of
the Iliad could have evolved within Europe at this time.
It is at this point worth recording the hard words that Colin Renfrew used, in
his book ‘Archaeology & Language',
against George Dumézil, and his studies of the ‘three functions' in
Indo-European cultures. Dumézil spent a
lifetime on these studies including the Mahabharata, early Roman history, Irish
and Scandinavian myth, and myths
of the tribes between the Caspian and Black seas. Through all these cultures he
detected an ordering principle
which he called the ‘three functions', which could be described as (1) Magical
and Judicial Sovereignty (2)
Physical Force, including those of Warriors, and (3) Abundance and fertility
5.
When Paris made his judgement
between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, he was choosing between these ‘three
functions', opting for Abundance and
fertility, which of course includes beauty. 6 In discussing Dumézil's
contribution Renfrew wrote “if the social
institutions of Indo-European speaking groups as far removed in space as the
Celts and the Indians appear to have
common forms traceable back to a common ancestor, it is obviously necessary to
have some notion of what that
ancestral society was, when it flourished and where it was located. This is a
historical reality which Dumézil
never quite seems to offer. The proto-Indo-Europeans are left as a very nebulous
entity indeed.”
It is indeed true that Dumézil did not follow up his studies with further
studies on their implications, but his
studies have been continued by such writers as Bernard Sargent who, for example
detects a common origin for the
story of Achilles and for the Irish hero Cuchulain. The location of this common
origin remains uncertain. The
implications of these findings to some extent duplicate those we have been
discussing in relation to ‘Homer's
Secret Iliad'. We are looking for the location of sophisticated ancient
cultures, for which there is as yet no
physical evidence, and these two ancient cultures could turn out to be one and
the same.
For a different angle on this considerable problem, we will start by having a
look at the Etruscans, in particular
their relation with the Greeks. The traditional position on this is well set out
on a panel in the Villa Giulia
Museum, in Rome. “By the mid 7th century BC the Etruscan aristocratic classes,
through a complex process, started
conforming to the more developed Greek peoples, and besides aspiring to their
standards of living, also imported
several myths of ‘heroic' models. As a relevant consequence of this, the
Etruscans adopted Greek myths, and
particularly those linked to the great Homeric poem of the Trojan War, to the
perilous sea journeys inspiring the
great myths of the Odyssey and of the Argonauts, and the extraordinary deeds of
the hero for excellence,
Hercules”.
So far as I know the possibility that these myths were already part of the
Etruscan culture, before their contacts
with the Greeks, has not been considered. It does however seem worth
considering, for it gives another light on
decisions by Etruscans to buy thousands of pots, decorated with a fairly limited
range of mythical subjects, and
also perhaps their interest in the Greeks themselves. The idea that the
Etruscans simply wanted to conform to the
more developed Greek people should be considered in relation to their use of
writing, which was freely used by the
Greeks of this period, while the Etruscan use of writing was very restrained,
and there seems little doubt that
this restraint was a religious one, which continued even after Romanisation.
If such myths were included in the Etruscan culture, it implies that they were
Indo-European, but of course the
language they used is not. The language could well belong to the Villanovians,
and this could imply that the
Etruscans were not ‘invaders', but could originally have settled in small
numbers, adopting the local Villanovian
language, being followed by other Etruscans who did the same. In relation to
this possibility the Sovana-Sorano
area is of interest, in particular the tracks, or pathways which have been cut
deep into the tufa rock, as they
climb up the surrounding cliffs, giving a strangely secretive feel, worthy of
study in the context of immigrant
groups seeking to establish themselves.
Other good customers for Greek pots were the Scythians who had a particular
interest in Hercules, and the same
question could be asked in relation to their culture, as it could also for the
Celts. These cultures, as well as
that of the Greeks, were great inheritors, but there is considerable uncertainty
of exactly what, and from whom.
Is it possible that most of Europe around 1000 BC was covered with the dying
embers of a cultural fire, the origin
of which has yet to be identified? Our understanding of the post-Greek period
has become used to the idea that it
was the Greeks who started it all, whereas it might be more accurate to say that
it was the Greeks who were the
first to have reacted to this inheritance, but that it was a shared inheritance.
This lost culture can be approached from yet another angle, which draws
attention to its end. Recent genetic
studies on populations now show clearly that the migration of population, from
Anatolia, reached Europe through
Greece, and reached North Europe during the Mesolithic and Neolithic, but was
less important in the North. These
people had farming skills, but it now seems that it was the last serious inward
migration to Europe. 7 But while
there were no important population changes between the Neolithic period and the
subsequent Bronze and Iron ages,
there seems to have been a profound change in the nature of the cultures which
dominated the two periods. The
Neolithic seems to have been a relatively peaceful period, while later periods
gave great importance to warriors.
Some might identify this change as the natural course of social evolution, and
an adjustment to the increasing use
of metal, and the development of more effective weapons. But it is also possible
that it will be found that our
‘lost culture' had influenced the Neolithic peoples, and that its end brought
this influence to a close, leaving
the way open for domination by other influences. Archaeological studies show no
signs of ‘colonisation' during the
Neolithic period, but perhaps some other form of influence could have been
operating. Going back to the last
century Gordon Childe 8 suggested that the Neolithic flowering was the result of
religious/spiritual input. Is
this something our ‘lost culture' provided?
The end of this lost culture, which it might be convenient to refer to as
‘Lacuna' as current prehistory contains
not the slightest indication that any such culture existed, probably occurred
around 2500 BC, but there was
evidently no sudden collapse of the surrounding megalithic cultures, rather that
important changes began, which
slowly transformed the culture.
These notes in no way prove the existence of Lacuna, but given the difficulties
encountered by current thinking,
set out in the opening paragraphs, searching for evidence of it would appear to
be a perfectly rational procedure.
A hypothesis concerning the nature of Lacuna will therefore be developed, which
also opens the possibility that
our ideological and literary culture have much longer roots than had been
imagined. As we shall see, the end of
Lacuna was complete and terrible, but enough had been transferred to the
surrounding megalithic areas to have a
profound effect on their subsequent historical development.
4. The search for Lacuna.
In 1998 a paper was presented to the Prehistoric Society called ‘Doggerland: a
Speculative Survey' by B.J. Coles.
This gathered together existing evidence regarding the landbridge in the North
Sea, extending from East Anglia and
Kent across to Denmark, and down to the NW coast of the European mainland during
the last Ice Age, with its
subsequent slow erosion by the rising sea level. The very existence of this
paper suggests, perhaps, that
something of note may yet be found beneath these grey waters apart from oil and
gas, but nothing startling was
revealed in the paper. This is perhaps not surprising, since no-one has yet
carried out serious studies to
investigate the possibility that Lacuna could have existed there, but there were
some interesting findings.
The highest rate of water level rise, in this post glacial age, was found in
Denmark, between 8300 BP (indicating
Before the Present, conventionally taken as 1950) and 7700 BP, amounting to 48mm
per year, but there were wide
variations, due in part to the fact that in some areas land level was rising as
well as water level. This was
usually the result of the removal of the enormous ice load on the land. To
indicate the wide variation of water
level rise, there is an undated record of an annual rise of 5mm in the Wash.
Regarding the slow disappearance of
this landbridge the paper notes “For the present, there is insufficient evidence
to do more than note that marine
conditions were established in the South of the North Sea between c.7000 BP and
5000 BP.” The paper also confirmed
that while it lasted, there was nothing to suggest that ‘Doggerland' would not
have provided a satisfactory human
habitat.
The paper also quoted Graham Clark, the excavator of Star Carr, the early and
important Mesolithic site in
Yorkshire, referring to the North Sea: "the submerged land had been the
heartland of an early Mesolithic culture",
but it is curious that the hunter gatherers there, occupying over 200,000 sq.km
of good land, during the dramatic
post-glacial warming, when a rich variety of trees and vegetation were spreading
up from the South, should have
not appeared in the archaeological record of the surrounding territories. While
the loss of land was a slow
process, because the water level rose only a few centimetres each year, people
normally would not have been
trapped on islands about to be submerged. They would have had plenty of time to
move out on canoes, which were
certainly in use at this time.
Mesolithic hunter gatherers were extremely adaptable. They had to be to survive
the extraordinary changes that
followed climatic warming.9 Some group among those in the lands which would be
submerged had probably realised
that their favourite camp site or perhaps hunting forest was going to go under
the sea unless they took action.
Maybe it was in a narrow valley, and they decided to construct a protection
against the sea. Perhaps it worked,
and perhaps it didn't, but it would have created interest. These groups were not
isolated, other groups would be
having the same problems, other sea protection experiments would have been made,
and an evolution of effective sea
defences would have started. This is likely to have been between 8,000 and 7,000
BC, and it is perhaps not
surprising that the foundation myth of these people would have involved
Poseidon, the god of the sea. They were in
a unique position in the history of the world - their survival depended on their
ability to organise their society
so that these defences which eventually became enormous could be constructed and
maintained. They were in effect
in a social pressure cooker, and over some five thousand years their evolution
would have outdistanced that of the
peoples around them.
It was Jean Deruelle in his book “De la préhistoire à l'Atlantide des
megaliths', published in 1990, who was the
first to examine seriously the possibility that the Dogger Bank, and what would
have been a great fertile plain to
the South of it, were the location of Atlantis. He became convinced that the 30
metre deep trenches around the
great plain of Atlantis, included in Plato's description, must have been
protective banks 30 metres high, a
difference which could have originated in a mistranslation at some stage in the
transmission of the story. It is
interesting to note that the word dyke can mean either a ditch, or an
embankment. The highest protective banks, at
30M, would have been built up on a base 180M wide. If such protective banks had
been well constructed and
maintained, Atlantis would have been able for a time to resist the rising water
levels. Deruelle, who is an
engineer by training, has calculated that 50 men would be needed to maintain
each kilometre length of 30M
protective bank. He also suggests that there would have been an outlying
protection between what is now the Dogger
Bank and Denmark, against the full force of the gales from the North. None of
the remaining banks would be exposed
to full ocean waves.
As Jean Deruelle mentions , it was Robert Graves who first suggested the Dogger
Bank area as the likely site of
Atlantis, 10 as he had found folk-tale echos, which could be related to
Atlantis, all along the Atlantic seaboard
from the Hebrides down to Gibraltar, and even as far down as the Yoruba in West
Africa. He had realised that the
Dogger Bank and associated areas were the only substantial land mass on the
Atlantic fringe, which had disappeared
in the post glacial era. His doubts concerned its remoteness from the
Mediterranean world.
Once the North Sea has been accepted as a continuation of the Atlantic, with the
British Isles sitting, as it
were, within the Atlantic, Plato's geographical description begins to make some
sense and, most importantly, his
list of associated territories, ‘ruled' by Kings from Atlantis, have a high
level of correspondence with the
megalithic areas. These are the British Isles, the Southern part of Scandinavia,
and the continental land
adjoining the Atlantic right down to Gibraltar, the North coast of Africa, which
Plato extends as far as Egypt,
and the lands adjoining the Tyrrhenean Sea. Jean Deruelle refers to these areas
as an Empire, but we have already
noted that archaeologists have found no indications of a colonial system in the
megalithic areas, and Empire does
not seem to be the correct description, but what word would be appropriate
presents some difficulties as we shall
see.
A note should be added to avoid confusion between ‘Atlantis' and ‘Lacuna'. The
Atlantis story is derived from the
writings of Plato, which certainly have plenty to offer the Lacuna story. We do
not know how the Egyptian priests
of Sais obtained their information. But it was they who talked with Solon, who
in turn talked to an ancestor of
Plato. Jean Deruelle suggests that the probable source, in Egypt, was records
obtained by debriefing captives
taken during the onslaught from the ‘People from the Sea'. We will come to that
part of the story later. But there
is a difficulty with the identification ‘Atlantis', in that it has now been
‘found' all over the world, including
a number of places in the Mediterranean as well as Antarctica, often with only
slight reference to what Plato
actually wrote, and for this reason a different identification seems
appropriate. Lacuna relates to this
particular analysis of North Western Europe's prehistory, with the inference
that it was the home of the Iliad,
and also nurtured the ideas behind the ‘three functions' identified by Dumézil
relating to a stable society, which
were destined for a long run within Indo-European cultures. The word Atlantis
has become a roving mythical freak.
Lacuna owes much to the Atlantis story, is godmother, as it were, to the
Indo-Europeans, and is fixed in the North
Sea.
5. Lacuna.
Plato's description of the Royal City of Atlantis has usually been equated with
the fabulous, which it may well
have been towards its end. But it could have started as a town with good
defences having had to earn its eventual
security by defending itself. There was a series of concentric circular walls,
the largest having a diameter of
some 5.5 kilometres, perhaps originally located on land well above high tide
level, but eventually there were
three linked circular canals, at sea level, within this diameter, with the
formal part of the town being
constructed between these canals, which were in turn linked to a canal from the
sea. I would certainly identify
the fairly common rock drawing which is known as ‘cup and handle', as an
identification related to the Royal City.
We do not know when this City might have started, but we do know that before
4500 BC for several thousand years
average temperatures were above current levels, and this could have helped to
incubate the evolution of Lacuna
into a sophisticated city where the creation of works such as the Iliad would be
possible.
The Royal City, in Plato's account, was also a busy port. This would nowadays be
understood to imply wide trading
relations, but it is worth remembering that there is no word for commerce in the
old Irish language, and the
possibility should be considered that what was going on was altogether ‘other' a
type of evolution that did not
lead directly to our own, although we have inherited much from it. It seems
possible, for instance, that there was
much that was kept secret in Lacuna. The City and island may not have been open
to outsiders. And the boats
keeping contact with the far-flung ‘kingdoms' described by Plato, may all have
come from Lacuna.
The description given by Critias, in Plato's account, of the great plain
adjoining the Royal City, is of a fertile
and well managed agricultural region. The LBK farming culture now thought to be
an adaptation made by Mesolithic
peoples of farming in Southern Europe reached areas near the North Sea in around
6,000 BC, and it seems possible
that the inhabitants of Lacuna took over this system and improved it. Surrounded
in its later years by the
protective bank against rising sea level, the farming described by Plato bears
no resemblance to the farming in
adjoining megalithic areas, which is being increasingly accepted as having been
very limited. The recent and
entirely unexpected discovery of a granary type building in Balbridie on
Deeside, of late Neolithic date, with
evidence of substantial grain holding, 11 might suggest the possibility that
Lacuna exported grain. Was this sold,
or a gift? If we knew this we would have a clue to the relationship between
Lacuna and the "kingdoms".
One of the more intriguing sections in the Plato account of Atlantis, and
perhaps something he hoped would have
appealed to Socrates, to whom the Dialogue was being addressed, (although in
fact he was already dead) concerns
the powers of the Kings. These were said to be descended from five pairs of male
twins, offspring of Poseidon, the
founder of Atlantis. Atlas, the eldest son and most important king, ruled the
island itself, while the others
ruled the various territories. These Kings were subject to strict laws, which
were said to have been recorded on a
column in the Royal City. Before dismissing the possibility that some form of
writing existed, some of the
‘decorative' stone reliefs found in Malta should be studied with care. They have
much of the quality of Islamic
inscriptions. Under these laws no King could attack the territory of another,
and all were to cooperate in the
defence of Royalty. Perhaps these laws indicate that the original interel interest of
Atlantis in adjoining territories
was that of self-defence.
A fascinating aspect of these kingly powers is that they were subject to peer
judgement. The Kings met every five
or six years, and the proceedings started in the bull ring with multiple bulls,
where the Kings, without aid other
than a spear and net, each sought to catch the sacrificial bull. There were then
ritual undertakings to abide by
the laws, and when these were completed the Kings, arrayed in beautiful blue
robes, submitted themselves to
judgement by the other Kings. The death penalty had to be agreed by a majority.
It appears that some kind of
political wisdom had been achieved, and some kind of political wisdom seems to
be implied by the ‘three functions'
that Dumézil found so well embedded into Indo-European cultures.
The most important item in this overall hypothesis is that Lacuna succeeded in
implanting a language, presumably
her own language, in all these territories, and with this language came
spiritual and intellectual stimulus, the
‘three functions', and a rich mythology. The work of Dumézil shows how multiple
are the connections between the
myths of say India and Ireland. 12 The intellectual and spiritual life of Lacuna
had several thousand years to
achieve the kind of confidence that has been achieved by a number of the
subsequent major religions of the world,
leading to the establishment of schools where the faith and culture were
protected and encouraged, and
subsequently spread through the adjoining territories aided by the power and
influence of the kings. We cannot
know what mix of people, organisations and buildings was used, but the effect
seems to have been a great surge of
activity and confidence, resulting in the construction of thousands of
monuments. This is what Colin Renfrew
described as the central mystery concerning the megaliths. But it is worth
noting that the megalithic earth and
stone structures are not uniform, often have a local quality, and there is a
considerable variation in when they
were made. For these reasons it does seem probable that what was provided was a
stimulus, both spiritual and
social, rather than organisation and a skilled workforce.
It will have been noticed, however, that the ‘adjoining territories' listed by
Plato have no links whatever with
the Eastern section of the Indo-European language area, which include Anatolian,
Iranian, and Indo-Aryan within
which the same cultural influences can be traced as those found from the Western
megalithic areas. However, there
is a further series of megalithic sites to the East, and although, for whatever
reason, not included by Plato in
his list of ‘adjoining territories'. Had these sites been subject to the same
influences as the Western megalithic
sites, the full spread of the Indo-European culture as we know it would have
been stimulated, without any
additional population movements to those which are known about, including the
‘Aryan' invasion of India from the
North in around 1600 BC.
The two megalithic areas which are likely to have provided this stimulus are at
the Eastern end of the
Mediterranean extending from the North of Syria almost down to the Red Sea,
during the IV & III millennia, and
North West of the Black Sea in the Caucasus, during the III millennium. There
are also widespread megalithic sites
in India, but most of them seem to date from the II millennium, probably after
the ‘Aryan' invasion.
To get a picture of early population movement to the East of Europe Y-Chromosome
analysis 13 gives us a picture of
early population movement to the East of Europe and shows that most of the area
around the Black and Caspian Seas
were originally populated around 8000 BC from the north, off the older migratory
route heading west towards
Europe. This movement continued towards the south later on, and much of the
Indian population derive from this
group. The Kurgan culture north of the Black and Caspian Seas would have been
influenced by the megalithic culture
in the Caucasus, as would the Scythian culture later on, with their fascination
for Hercules. In Europe the DNA
marker defining this population which came south in around 8000 BC is rare,
suggesting that it is unlikely that
the Celtish culture and language was spread by migration from the east.
Robert Drews' analysis of the crucial development of chariot warfare is
presented in his book ‘The Coming of the
Greeks'. This development took place in Armenia between the Black Sea and the
Caspian, by Indo-Europeans with a
megalithic heritage, around 1700 BC. It resulted in a series of chariot led
invasions including the takeover of
Greece by Aryan charioteers, who founded the Mycenean dynasty, that of the
Hittite empire in Asia Minor, and also
the Aryan conquest of the North of India. The megalithic inheritance can
certainly be seen in the construction of
Tiryns and Mycenae, and again in India it seems that the majority of the
megalithic constructions are after the
Aryan invasion. The intense excitement of chariot warfare can be felt in some
passages in the Rigveda with Indra
himself as charioteer.
There is a big difference between the manner that events unfolded in the
‘adjoining territories' in Europe and
North Africa, as listed by Plato, and these other areas, stimulated from the
Caucasus and the Near East, for
there, after the destruction of Lacuna, the culture in the east was spread
further by chariot warfare, notably to
India. As we shall see Greece not only received the Mycenean culture from the
east, but later on a further input
of a related culture from the north.
None of this would have made sense unless Lacuna had not only mastered Poseidon
with protective banks against his
onslaughts, but also evolved effective sea going boats, and crews to man them.
The spread of this culture around
the coasts of Europe, and through the Mediterranean as far as the Black Sea,
would have been impossible without
them, but we have no solid evidence for either during say the IV millennium BC.
It is extremely unlikely that
anything would have survived from the boats themselves, since they would have
been constructed of perishable
materials, such as wood and leather, and if Lacuna guarded her boating skills,
they would all have disappeared
when she did. Sea conditions around the British Isles, Brittany, and
Scandinavia, are some of the most demanding
in the world, providing a hard training for mariners, but it is also from these
areas that traditions of excellent
mariners have endured. So it could be that soon that after the end of Lacuna,
this tradition started to revive,
based on the memory of LacunaÚs fleet.
There will undoubtedly be some who feel that this possibility of an accomplished
Lacuna is wrong or unlikely,
because things have always moved forwards. Of course there have been dark ages,
but generally these only lasted a
few hundred years, and then things moved on again. To accept a situation where a
highly developed culture,
especially one within which we may trace some of our own roots, suffered a
complete and catastrophic end, is
difficult. But catastrophes do sometimes occur out of the blue.
The catastrophe was dated to around 2500 BC by Jean Deruelle, as the time when
Malta was abandoned. There is a
series of remarkable megalithic structures on Malta, which have become known as
‘Temples', which he believes
belonged to the kings associated with Atlantis, and were used for meetings.
There is a disputed translation of the
last sentence of Critias, which suggests that the Kings were assembled, there
where they had extremely costly
houses, in the centre of the entire world, and were being addressed by the King
of Atlantis to consider the
future….and there Plato breaks off. 14 For a sea based federation Malta would
have held a key position in the
centre of the Mediterranean, but it was suddenly abandoned.
6. The end of Lacuna.
The end of Atlantis was presented by Plato in Timeus. There were earthquakes and
cataclysms, and within a day and
a dreadful night which followed, the people of Atlantis were buried, and
Atlantis itself was forced beneath the
waves and disappeared. Is there really no other memory of such a momentous
happening?
In Greek literature there are accounts of the end of the ‘Golden Age', and the
possibility should be considered
that the ‘Golden Age' and Atlantis, and therefore Lacuna, were one and the same.
There is the well-known story of
Kronos, the deity who ruled over the Golden Age, eating his own children. It
seems quite plausible that this story
started with a quite different meaning, where his ‘children' were his subjects,
whom he had failed to save from
disaster. Then there is the story where Kronos ‘castrates' his father Uranus.
But Uranus ‘was' the sky and the
stars. Could not this castration relate to the fact that after the disaster the
sky and the stars were shrouded
for some time?
Reading Hesiod's account of the end of the Golden Age, which occurs in the
Theogeny, it seems likely that two
separate accounts of the same event have been included. There is the battle
where Zeus overcomes the Titans, who
were the previous gods, and there is the strange story concerning Typhoeus, the
son of ‘gigantic Gaia'. The
translation used here is that of Richard Latimore.
When Zeus eventually overcomes the Titans, they yield absolute power to him, but
the battle has been hard fought,
and “the wonderful conflagration crushed Chaos, and to the eyes' seeing and the
ears' hearing the clamor of it
absolutely would have seemed as if Earth and the wide heaven above her had
collided, for such would have been the
crash arising as Earth wrecked and the sky came piling down on top of her, so
vast was the crash heard as the gods
collided in battle”.
Typhoeus a “powerful god”, with a “hundred snake heads” from which “fire
flared”, produced strange and horrible
sounds, and again the battle was hard fought. But eventually “when Zeus had put
him down with his strokes,
Typhoeus crashed, crippled, and the gigantic earth groaned beneath him, and the
flame of the great lord so thunder
smitten ran out along the darkening and steep forests of the mountains as he was
struck, and the greater part of
the gigantic earth burned in the wonderful wind of his heat, and melted…”
There are two other accounts which are likely to have covered the same event.
The first occurs in the story of
Gilgamesh where parts of a quite different story seem to have been grafted on to
what is generally accepted as a
‘Deluge' event. 15 But the ‘ark' here turns out to be a monstrous seven storey
affair in the form of a cube, and a
cube leads us to Saturn, Kronos, and the Golden Age, with the possibility that
Utanapishtim, or Ziusudra, as he
was known in the earlier Sumerian version, was the last ruler of Lacuna. This is
someone that Gilgamesh, with his
pride in the walls of Uruk he had built, would certainly have known about, and
have been interested to meet. At
the beginning of the story it is made clear that Gilgamesh was travelling
towards the sunrise when he approached
the end of his long journey, which he would have been as he went up what is now
the English Channel, before
plunging down into the depths below Lacuna. Utanapishtim (Ziusudra) describes to
him the final moments of Lacuna
in these words “Irragal pulls out the masts; Ninurta causes the dykes to give
way; the Anunnaki raised their
torches, lighting up the land with brightness; the raging of Adad reached unto
heaven and turned into darkness all
that was light….Even the gods were terror struck at the deluge….Ishtar cried out
like a woman in travail; the
lovely voiced lady of the gods lamented ….'How could I command such evil in the
assembly of the gods…'”.
The other account is from the Twilight of the Gods. Scandinavia would, of
course, have been all too aware of the
catastrophe which took place in land adjoining them. This account is translated
from ‘Mythologie Générale'
published by Larousse. “The vault of the sky, shaken by the sound of the army on
the march, catches fire from the
furnace that surrounds it, and breaks in two… The giant Surt fills the entire
world with fire, the universe is
nothing more than a brasier, flames lick out from all rock fissures, steam
whistles from everywhere, all life is
annihilated, only bare soil remains…. And then the seas overflow; waves press
against waves blowing up and boiling
and slowly covering everything; the earth disappears under the sea”. “The sun's
rays slowly took the colour of
blood and then vanished altogether. The world is enveloped in a terrible winter
during several years”. “Everything
is finished, - but then starts again. From the debris of the old world a new
world is born”.
In ‘Hamlet's Mill' by Georgio de Santillana & Hertha von Dechend, the authors
were convinced that not only were
archaic myths all based on the stars, but that disasters, such as those
described in these excerpts, were related
to the movements of the heavens as a result of the earth's precession. They
signalled the moments when
irreversible change had occurred in the visible stars, and a new zodiacal age
was announced. 16 Looking at these
excerpts I am inclined to believe that whatever connections there may be within
these accounts to yet even older
stories, the excerpts are in part too precise and vivid to be other than
inherited memories of a real event, and
that the most likely interpretation is of a collision of an asteroid, or similar
body with the earth, bearing in
mind that Lacuna, which would have been largely below sea level, would have
represented a very exposed target. So
far as I know no scientific studies have been carried out to check out this
possibility.
It is also perhaps worth pondering the possible coincidence that the Iliad, a
tale of a doomed city, was conceived
on Lacuna, which was doomed, if not by an asteroid, then later on by rising sea
levels.
So are there no other references to this terrible event, and its aftermath?
‘Sid' is often found in the enormous collection of old Irish myths, which was
made in mediaeval times. 17 It is
also an idea that has been twisted and turned in all directions in later Irish
folk tales. In old Irish myth Sid
was an island, or perhaps a group of islands. Sid means Peace, and the island,
which is usually singular, is a
paradise despite the fact that it is to be found underwater. To arrive there one
leaves one's boat among the
treetops! Banshee, who are women in search of men, come from Sid, often as
birds, and when they have found a man,
he is not seen back on earth again. Sid is also known by a number of different
names, including the Plain of
Pleasure, the Great Plain, the Land of Promise, and also the Other World.
The location of Sid is not clearly explained, and almost certainly changed over
time. There were, after all,
probably over two thousand years during which the stories could evolve. After a
while it was found that Sid could
be reached from any lake, or other stretch of water, and even from caves. In
later versions it is to be found, or
at least looked for, in the West with the setting sun.
Early on there were many attempts to visit Sid, and among the main attractions
were the apples, which were very
special. They were of the colour of gold, and were the size of the head of a
month old baby. They tasted like
honey, and when you ate them they lasted for ever. These apples became the
symbol of Royalty. There are a number
of pictures of the Virgin and Child from the early Renaissance where the Virgin
holds an apple. Sometimes it is
held between her breast and the child. This apple has been said to symbolise
purity, for to identify it with that
from the Garden of Eden makes no sense, but it is much more likely to be the
symbol of Royalty.
Royalty was probably part of the inheritance from Lacuna, and the story of Sid
would have derived from a drowned
Lacuna. Story telling, perhaps aided by the wisdom of the druids, could have
eased the trauma caused by the
disaster in the surrounding territories. We have another reference to Sid in
Welsh myth in Avalon, the Land of
Apples, where King Arthur was taken, and the possibility of another interesting
allusion to apples in the name of
Apollo.
7. The puzzle of Troy.
This exploration started with the consideration of a remarkable book concerning
the Iliad, ‘Homer's Secret Iliad',
which demonstrates that the story of the Iliad must have started as a kind of
star primer. We are now to embark on
another remarkable book on the Iliad, which is unfortunately out of print,
‘Where Troy Once Stood' by Iman
Wilkens, who demonstrates that the story of Troy can be traced, by means of the
names of rivers and places, to the
megalithic areas of NW Europe. Troy itself is to be found in the Gog Magog hills
near Cambridge, with the Acheaen
boats beached on the south shore of the Wash. In those days the Wash reached
further to the south, and hence would
have been nearer to Troy on the Gog Magog hills.
If the story of the Iliad was conceived in Lacuna, it is perhaps not such a
surprise to find traces of the story
nearby, although it is now impossible to deduce whether the story used existing
place names, or whether, such was
the renown of the story, that it was used afterwards as a source to provide
names to suitable locations. What is
certain is that the second alternative was used later on, when the Iliad was
carried down to Greece, as Iman
Wilkens explains, and was used as a basis for naming a whole range of geographic
features and even countries. Iman
Wilkens became convinced that the War of Troy actually took place around the Gog
Magog hills, but if the Iliad was
conceived as a star primer, it is virtually impossible that a later war took
place in line with the story.
Before showing some of these identifications of place names, it should be
mentioned that Iman Wilkens is not the
first person to have placed Troy on the Gog Magog hills, as he explains
Théophile Cailleux published a book in
1879, drawing the same conclusion on the basis of a close analysis of Odysseus'
travels.
A group of rivers to be found south of the Wash makes a good starting point. The
names in italics are to be found
in the Iliad. Compare Ise with Aesepius, Rhe with Rhesus, Roding with Rhodius,
Cam with Scamander, Granta with
Grenicos, the Great Ouse with Simoeis, and the River Thames with Temese (this
actually occurs in the Odyssey). It
should be noted that most of the rivers are also in the right place for the
Iliad story, and it is this
continuation of similar names in the right place that goes on throughout the
book. There are also identifications
of places, such as Crete, which turns out to be Scandinavia, with plenty of room
for the ninety cities which Homer
accords it. It is in fact not described as an island, but ‘sea-girt', which is a
reasonable description of Denmark
and the southern parts of Norway and Sweden, with their associated islands.
Aulis, where the Achaean boats met
before going on to Troy, would have been Limfjorden, in Jutland, where there is
a good protected anchorage. This
is not far from Mt Knossen, (suggestive of Knossos) which is again not far from
the find spot of the extraordinary
Gundestrup cauldron. Homer gives Egypt as being just five days sailing with a
north wind. This makes sense from
Denmark down to Egypt, which is on the River Seine, while from Crete to Egypt in
the Mediterranean would take less
than five days. Egypt can best be identified with a string of places ending in
–nil, Mesnil, near Le Havre,
Miromenil, Vimesnil, and so on. None of the names like Crete and Egypt existed
in the Mediterranean before Homer's
Iliad flowered in Greece. Herodotus is believed to have been the first to refer
to Egypt by that name.
When Iman Wilkens decided that the war of Troy took place in England, he was
deciding between two possibilities.
Either it took place there, or down in Turkey. He did not get involved in the
possibility that the war never took
place. But it would be useful to follow through the kinds of argument that
persuaded him that it was in England,
because they may help us to decide what did happen there. For if there was no
war, it is possible that something
else happened, and we need to identify it. Firstly there were arguments
comparing East Anglia with North West
Turkey including the climate. The sea in the Iliad is often wine dark but never
blue, which does seem
extraordinary for the Mediterranean, and he mentions other indications of
inclement weather. There is the matter
of place names, far more of which are identifiable from the Iliad up north, than
is the case in the Mediterranean.
This enabled him to place all the regiments listed in the Catalogue of Ships,
which we will look at later. He
demonstrates a very rich and interesting vein, in what might be termed
supporting myth. I will give two examples.
He identifies the Helle Sea with the sea separating England from the continent
of Europe, including the Channel,
the North sea, and the Baltic, and points out the enormous number of place names
reflecting this identification,
such as Helford, Helston, Helladon, Hull, Hougate, Hellegat, Heligoland,
Hellevad, and so on. The word is of
extremely ancient Indo-European origin, often referring to the Kingdom of the
Dead. Then there is another location
for the Pillars of Hercules, at the Straits of Dover, indicating yet another
geographic feature which seems to
have been picked up and relocated, when the Greeks settled in the south. This
identification must have endured for
some time after this, up north, because it was referred to by Tacitus. But it
also calls in question the standard
search point for Atlantis, somewhere just out from Gibraltar.
There are other kinds of evidence that the War of Troy actually took place in
East Anglia. There are enormous
earth works crossing the fens between the Gog Magog hills and the Wash, of which
some 18 kilometres survive, known
as Fleam dyke and Devil's dyke, with an average height of 5 metres and a ditch
depth of 4 metres, which have not
been satisfactorily placed in any historic or prehistoric context. Iman Wilkens
points out that the ditches face
inland, which means that they were built by invaders. There have also been
enormous finds of objects from
bronze-age armour, weapons, and chariot equipment in this area. The largest
hoard, of some 6000 objects, was found
in a position that would have been close to the end of the dyke defending the
beach on the Wash, since swept away,
where the Achaean boats would have been drawn up. No remains of the walls of
Troy have been found, but he points
out that what is described in the Iliad is an earthen wall, likely to have been
eroded.
We should now look hard at the Catalogue of Ships. The first question is whether
this really belongs to an Iliad
conceived as a primer for the stars, although the authors of ‘Homer's Secret
Iliad' raised no such question. It
appears to be an important record, which would certainly have made sense if
there had been a war. But without a
war it presents a bit of a puzzle. Could there have been an event of some sort
without the actual war? But there
is a quite different point. If the Iliad dates from around 3000 BC, as has been
proposed, it is extremely unlikely
that it would have been possible to identify the origin of all the ships,
because hamlets and villages had not
begun the process of growth, which got going in the Bronze Age, many of them
continuing to this day. So this is an
additional argument for the Catalogue having been added during this later
‘event'. But let us look at a summary of
Iman Wilken's findings from the Catalogue of Ships:
Firstly the Achaean forces:
Southern Scandinavia, 230 boats;
Holland and Germany, extending into Switzerland, 243 boats;
Northern France, excluding Brittany, 419 boats;
The West coast of France, excluding Brittany, and the West coast of Spain, 294
boats.
While the summary of the Trojan forces is as follows:
England excluding East Anglia, 5 regiments;
East Anglia, 4 regiments;
Scotland, 5 regiments;
Wales, 1 regiment;
Brittany; 1 regiment.
The obvious points of interest are that Brittany is allied to the Trojans, and
also that Ireland is not
represented on either side, but otherwise we are looking at groups coming from
the old megalithic areas. One of
the things now understood about the larger megalithic monuments is that they
were often being modified, presumably
for different events. This must have sometimes implied enormous effort for a
single event. The remaining 18
kilometres of dykes, as well as the assembling of this enormous number of men,
certainly indicates a considerable
effort. Was there a return to a scale of event known during megalithic times?
For the moment we will call it the
‘Troy event', and then assemble such information that we have, which might help
us to understand it.
8. Understanding the ‘Troy event'
The first obvious point is that the unifying idea behind the event must have
been the Iliad itself, but it seems
likely that the martial qualities of the story were emphasised rather than its
role as a star primer.
In subsequent history it is perhaps curious that Troy, the loser, seems to have
been given greater importance than
the Achaeans, who were the victors. The Aeneid expresses the determination of
Rome to be associated with the
mystic glory of Troy, and subsequently in mediaeval times a number of European
countries, including England and
France, claimed the same source for their Royal lines. There was a considerable
mediaeval literary output
throughout Europe, growing out of the works of Dares and Dyctus, who were
supposed to have been witnesses to the
war, before Homer's work became known. 18 Perhaps they were at the Troy event.
Much of this literary work has a
strong flavour of chivalry and mysticism. Perhaps one of the objectives of the
Troy event was to re-establish the
important thread of Royalty from Lacuna. The Catalogue of Ships is certainly
witness to the prestige that presence
at this event conferred.
Jean Deruelle, in his book ‘De la préhistoire à l'Atlantide des mégalithes',
which we have already considered in
relation to Atlantis, proposes that the strange story of ‘The People from the
Sea' can be given an acceptable
interpretation, if the initiative is understood to have come in part from the
North West of Europe. The other part
came from North Africa, also part of Lacuna's territories, but there is no
indication of their presence at the
Troy event, nor in the Iliad. For most historians who have written about ‘The
People from the Sea' the energies of
the megalithic period had been dissipated, and the Celts had not yet ‘arrived',
so the possibility of initiatives
from NW Europe could be ignored.
The importance of ‘The People from the Sea', as a destructive force, must be
emphasised. Robert Drews, in his book
‘The end of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe CA.1200 BC'
lists 47 major sites which were
destroyed in the Eastern Mediterranean. These include Pylos, Tiryns, Mycenae,
Thebes, Kydonia, Troy, Tarsus,
Hattusas, Enkomi, Ugarit, Kadesh, Aleppo, Megiddo, Bethel, and Ashkelon. The
Hittite Empire, and Mycenean Greece
were wiped out, and Egypt was at one time partially invaded. This was all
between 1230 and 1180 BC.
On Egyptian inscriptions the invaders were also referred to as the ‘People from
the North', and the ‘People from
the Islands', which has encouraged some historians to label them as Greeks, but
the Greeks were well known to the
Egyptians, so why the mysterious titles?
Jean Deruelle traced most of the warrior groups who operated from boats to the
Tyrrhenian Sea, an old megalithic
area. These seem to have supported forces operating on both the North African
coast, and others who worked their
way through Greece and Asia Minor, and eventually down through Syria towards
Egypt, although it should be pointed
out that a large proportion of the sites destroyed in the north were easily
reached from the sea. It is not easy
from the documents available to form a clear picture of what happened. There
are, for instance, some much quoted
references from Egyptian sources, which make the attacking forces look like
emigrating nomads, rather than
warriors, but their success suggests otherwise.
Robert Drews' analysis of the start of Chariot warfare has already been
mentioned. This took place in around 1700
BC, and led to the Mycenean dynasty in Greece, the Hittite Empire in Asia Minor,
the Hyksos dynasty in Egypt, and
the Aryan invasion of North India. In ‘The End of the Bronze Age' he describes
how foot soldier tactics had
developed by around 1200 BC, leading to the end of the dominance of chariots.
‘With a long sword as his primary
weapon for hand-to-hand warfare, the raider required an “open” space, in which
his agility and fleetness could be
exploited. But before the hand-to-hand fighting began, the chariots had to be
overcome, and it was surely for this
purpose that the raiders brought javelins. Again, the javelins suggest a
swarming tactic, the javelineer running
forward and then hurling his weapon at a team of chariot horses.'
19 But a key
weapon in this new approach was the
slashing or cut-and-thrust sword, which was new. Previous swords had tended to
be thinner thrusting swords, less
effective for slashing. For a long time it had been thought that this weapon had
been developed in the Near East
in around 1200 BC, and it was known as the Naue Type II, but it is now agreed
that it was first used in middle
Europe around 1400 BC, and by 1200 BC it was widely used from Scandinavia to the
Rhone, and sure enough in the
hoard found at Isleham at the end of the dyke guarding the Achaean boats on the
Wash, are some bronze slashing
swords of this type.
If the ‘People from the Sea' came from the north, and acquired great riches
during the major destructions which
they perpetrated, it would not be surprising if some of them settled somewhere
on the Mediterranean. Clear
evidence for this is limited at the moment to the Phoenicians, who seem to have
settled in with the Canaanites,
but fairly rapidly introduced some very particular skills. These included boat
building and navigation, and the
ability to manage a wide trading network. They also introduced a much simpler
alphabet, the basis of our own,
which was easier to use than the cuneiform or hieroglyphic writing then in use.
The Etruscans have already been mentioned, and although this is not at present
accepted, it seems highly probable
that they also owed their presence in Tuscany to their collaboration with the
‘People from the Sea', and relative
wealth may well have made it easier for them to settle in beside the
Villanovians. Among their skills was water
engineering. They constructed remarkably long and straight drainage tunnels, and
they drained the marshy areas on
the coast of Tuscany which were a source of mosquitoes, a task that the Romans
failed to maintain after they had
conquered the Etruscans. Their art also shows a quality of humanism. There are
several funerary sculptures of
couples, who are obviously taking pleasure in each other's company. This quality
is not found elsewhere in the
Mediterranean at this time. Their fascination with a number of myths, including
the Iliad, has already been
mentioned.
After thinking through these different aspects, can we be sure about the nature
of the ‘Troy event' that we were
seeking to clarify? The answer must be no, but there does seem to be a
possibility that it was an event to launch
an extremely effective and destructive campaign in the Eastern Mediterranean.
But it is difficult to conceive in
what way they might have defined the project to ensure the participation of
these vast numbers drawn from such
wide distances. It is worth noting the oddity that, something over two thousand
years later, the crusades were
launched, another great south-easterly trek, during which the original aim was
sometimes lost. Could this be the
case with the Troy event? It might have been far more successful than had been
expected. Without knowing how the
project was defined it is impossible to know.
What would have gone on as these vast numbers of troops arrived in the Wash at
the start of the Troy event? The
domination of the Iliad on the event would have been reinforced as everyone set
to on the construction of the Troy
battlefield. The work on the dykes alone would have kept large numbers occupied
for months, and then this
battlefield would surely have been used for training the disparate troops who
were assembled, for it is clear that
warfare was a serious business. Finally there must have been an aura of Royalty
permeating everything, and the
Troy event would have left memories for the participants, full of some glorious
purpose.
There would have been some exultant and some terrible times as this purpose
worked its way round the Mediterranean
and the soldiers who returned would have been altered by these events, leading
to changes in the social fabric and
traditions on their return. Since the attacks continued for around fifty years,
there would have been more than
one generation that sailed away, reinforcing these changes, and it seems that it
was several centuries before any
major initiatives took place again among these northern groups, who of course
would later be known as the Celts.
Curiously it was the Phoenicians, the Etruscans, and of course the Dorians, down
on the Mediterranean, who would
start leading the way forward towards a different world.
Was this quiescent period for the Celts the time when the roots of their
artistic tradition took hold? We do not
know. Nor do we know whether there remained at that time any lingering
inspiration from Lacuna, in the way of
objects or traditions. But what is clear is that the ‘third function' was alive
and powerful, and that many
beautiful objects would be crafted later on. We can also dismiss the idea, which
appears from time to time, that
these were all the result of Greek influence.
It seems likely that further detailed archaeological studies on groups such as
the Etruscans and the Phoenicians,
as well as of any other groups who may have settled in the south, will be the
most effective way of confirming the
link between the People from the Sea and North West Europe.
A word should be added about Ireland, which did not take part in this event. It
has been assumed by a number of
researchers that the rich store of mythology to be found in Ireland is the
result of a less turbulent history than
the rest of the Celtic regions. For a start they were not invaded by the Romans.
Christian-J.Guyonvarch and
Françoise le Roux, for example, in their wonderful book ‘Les Druides' make it
clear that they consider that what
was described in Ireland, would certainly have applied to France. However it
does seem possible that the fact that
Ireland did not take part in the Troy event also helped to preserve the
traditional way of life there, while
participation with the People from the Sea led to important social changes. This
would have distanced the social
organisation in participating areas such as France from that in Ireland.
We have not yet formally delivered the Iliad to Greece, and this must be done.
It is remarkable that although
there has been an enormous weight of academic study applied to Greece,
considerable uncertainties remain regarding
the early history. Among these uncertainties is the nature of the arrival of the
Dorians.
20 They have at times
been identified as forming part of the People from the Sea, and as responsible
for the destruction of the Mycenean
Dynasty. In other accounts they emerge, sometimes quite peaceably speaking a
Greek dialect, from the north of
Greece. The fact that they are known to have been great supporters of Hercules
gives no problem to most
historians, because of course he was a good Greek. But Hercules was well known
in Lacuna, long, long before the
Iliad, and the Dorian invasion.
There are a number of place names in England with Dorian connections such as
Dorchester, Dorking, and also
Appledore, which has been identified as Apollo/Dorian, and occurs in both Kent
and Devon. But the largest group of
place names with this derivation is to be found in a broad swath going south
east from Holland, where there are
many, down to Rumania. Doorn, Doorwerth, Apeldoorn, Dorenburg, Dorenhagen,
Dorten, Dornban, Dorfgastein, Dorio,
Dornach, Dornesti, the list goes on, leaving a strong suggestion that the
Dorians were settled in these places for
some time, although we do not know exactly when. Iman Wilken's identification of
places where boats came from in
the Catalogue of Ships shows some thirty boats coming from the same swath. It
seems very likely therefore that
when the Dorians arrived in the north of Greece they had already made a slow
migration from the north, not far
from Lacuna, where their ancestors would have been well instructed in the matter
of the Iliad, as well as in a
great deal of other ‘wisdom' which would later fascinate Plato.
Towards the end of this terrible fifty year period during which the People from
the Sea continued their attacks,
the coastal areas of the Peloponnese became almost deserted, and it seems likely
that some Dorians involved in
these raids would have thought to let their kinsfolk in the north know that this
was so, for groups of Dorians
started coming down to settle in the Peloponnese. The language that the Dorians
spoke would have been a variant of
Proto-Indo-European, which would have been the language of Lacuna. The Aryans
who had arrived earlier from the
east, with their chariots, to establish the Mycenean Dynasty, spoke another
variant of Proto-Indo European, which
was derived from the implantation of ideas from Lacuna in the area of megaliths
on the east of the Black Sea, and
these two variants became Greek.
Another point of interest in this particular swath of territory across Europe is
that the Hallstat culture, where
the Celts were first identified, is located right in the middle of it.
9. Conclusion.
The hypothesis presented has wide implications and counters many current
assumptions, so it might be helpful to
set out the main props which underpin it.
Perhaps the most important is the work described in the ‘Journey of Man' by
Spencer Wells identifying the way in
which the world has been populated by studies on markers in the Y-Chromosome.
This makes it clear that there was
no big migration into Europe from the East to account for the spread of
Indo-European languages and culture. The
migration from Anatolia is too early, and more pronounced in Southern Europe.
This work confirms the studies
described by Bryan Sykes in ‘The Seven Daughters of Eve' on the mitochondrial
DNA, which only covered Europe but
gave the same story. These studies force a radical review of a number of current
assumptions, in particular
regarding the Celts, which it now seems reasonable to regard as descendants of
the Neolithic people who built the
megalithic monuments.
Pushing the Iliad back into the III millennium BC will outrage many people, but
the studies in ‘Homer's Secret
Iliad' explaining the extent to which the Iliad is star dominated are very
persuasive, as is the evidence that the
reign of Troy was identified with that of Thuban as pole star, which came to an
end in around 1800 BC. It was this
that initiated our search for a very early sophisticated culture which could
have nurtured the Iliad.
Dumézil's extensive work on Indo-European mythology, and on the Three Functions,
has been of profound importance
to the development of this hypothesis. Many of these myths are fascinating and
the links between them demand an
explanation. Again we are looking for a very early sophisticated culture to
account for these links.
Jean Deruelle's work ‘De la préhistoire à l'Atlantide des megaliths' sites
Atlantis on the Dogger Bank, with a
great plain to the South. I have disagreed with several aspects of this work, in
particular his suggestion that
the European megalithic areas were run as a great empire, but much of it has
been of great value.
I found Iman Wilken's work ‘Where Troy Once Stood' to be of great importance,
because his identification of
geographical Iliad features in England and North West Europe, helped to confirm
the Dogger Bank location for
Atlantis, (which I have renamed Lacuna), and makes sense of a North Sea location
for Lacuna as the birthplace of
the Iliad.
Finally I found Robert Drews' two books on Greek history to be a great help in
understanding what still seems to
remain a rather puzzling period.
So much for the props for the hypothesis, but I should confirm that the paper
does provide answers to the
questions raised in the Forward. It is suggested that the great burst of
activity that led to the construction of
these thousands of megalithic monuments was the direct result of spiritual and
cultural inspiration provided by
Lacuna. It is also suggested that the prolonged contact time during which this
inspiration was followed up, which
would have amounted to over a thousand years in most cases, also had the effect
of passing on the language of
Lacuna to what became the Indo-European language area. We also saw how the
Iliad, which was conceived in Lacuna,
came down to Greece with the Dorians.
The awakening of the Royal City from the depths of the North Sea could upstage
Sleeping Beauty! The real
possibility that a somewhat mysterious but highly accomplished Lacuna did exist
suggests a parallel with a planet
which has yet to be found, but whose effects on surrounding planets have been
measured, and it is to be hoped that
this exploration will help to stimulate the vital researches which are necessary
to pursue the matter.
St Didier-sur-Arroux, France, June 2004.