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HOMER IN THE BALTIC~ The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales

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rockessence
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« on: March 19, 2007, 06:23:58 pm »

I have made 2 threads on this subject at AR and wanted to begin one here, not quite sure if this is the preferrable location...I suppose it always can be moved!  If the legendary sailors that took part in the Troyan war are eventually proved to be "the Sea Peoples" as the Climatic Optimum grew to a close, forcing the tribes of the far north to seek a warmer climate southward, then this may well be the best place...

I will begin with a review of Professor Felice Vinci's book by Barnes Review:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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New from Barnes Review!

New Evidence Indicates Legendary Greek Tales Took Place in the Baltic

When we read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, (which just about every schoolchild in America has been asked to do for generations) we naturally assume them to be largely tall tales, set in the eastern Mediterranean area. However, while there are elements of the fantastical in these epics, there is also a solid historical core. That may not surprise TBR readers, but what is surprising is that the setting of the events is not in the modern areas of Greece and Turkey at all (forget about Heinrich Schliemann). According to a growing number of thinkers, these events happened even earlier than we might have thought, and far to the north, in the lands we think of as the home of the Vikings. Sound far-fetched? Read on . . .

By John Tiffany

The idea that the Mykenaens had a northern origin is not really a new one, although it may come as a novelty to most TBR readers. It may also come as a surprise to learn that the “Troy” (actually at least nine Troys at what is today Turkey’s Hisarlik) discovered by Heinrich Schliemann may not have been the original Troy of Homer.

Consider the region of Troy. In the Iliad it is stated to be located along the Hellespont, which is systematically described as being a “wide” or “boundless” sea. We can therefore exclude the notion that it refers to the Dardanelles, where the city found by Schliemann lies. The identification of this city with Homer’s Troy continues to raise doubts among the cognoscenti. One of the first critics was Moses Finley in his famous The World of Odysseus.

Amazingly, evidence has now emerged to make a convincing case that Homer’s Troy was in what today we call Finland, and the ancient Achaeans, as the forerunners of the Mykenaeans are called, resided, at the time of the legendary Trojan War, in the region of Scandinavia.

Swedish historian Martin P. Nilsson was one of the first to come out with this amazing thesis that the Mykenaeans had a Nordic origin. In Homer and Mycenae and The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and Its Survival in Greek Religion, Prof. Nilsson reports on archeological evidence uncovered in Mykenaean sites in Greece that supports the theory that the Achaean population came from the north. Examples: the presence of large amounts of Baltic amber in the most ancient Mykenaean tombs in Greece (but not in the later ones), the Nordic features of Mykenaean architecture and the racially Nordic skulls found in the Kalkani necropolis.

Between 13,000 and 8000 B.C. the vast glaciers of the last ice age melted, and the levels of the world oceans rose by 360 feet, submerging vast areas of what we now call the continental shelves of the world. The effect of this glacial melting and sea level rise on archaic European life marked the end of the Paleolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic era. Much of the civilization of that time may have been in areas that are now under the sea.

One needs further to realize that the climate in northern Europe, including Scandinavia and the Baltic area, was significantly milder in the Bronze Age, until the second millennium B.C., than it is today. This period of warmth, from 8000 B.C. up till 500 B.C., is known as the postglacial climatic optimum (we will call it the PGCO), which can in turn be broken down into four phases. Here we are concerned with the warmest of these, which is called the Atlantic phase. This was quite long lasting, from 5500 B.C. until 2000 B.C.—over 3,000 years, which allows plenty of time for civilizations to arise, flourish and fall.

During this time, the winters were mild and humid; the red fir, alder and hazel forests of the cooler phases preceding it in the Baltic area gave way to mighty oaks, which require warmer climate. The climate then began to cool off again, and beech trees and firs began to prevail during what is called the Sub-Boreal phase of the PGCO. Research on pollens proves beyond doubt that these changes in climate and vegetation actually occurred, as Mario Pinna, professor of earth sciences at the University of Turin, explains in his traits on climatology.

Before the Atlantic era came the Recent Pre-Boreal (RPB; 8000-7000 B.C.) and Boreal (7000-5500 B.C.) periods.

Homer’s works may well have had their real-life setting in the Sub-Boreal period.

According to scholar Pia Laviosa Zambotti, the Atlantic period, peaking about 2500 B.C., was “the best climatic period Scan dinavian countries have ever known, which justifies the high cultural level achieved in Scandinavia around 2500 B.C. . . . This long, favorable climatic period saw the development of northern cultures, including the Maglemose and Erte boelle civilizations, and Bronze Age culture, and the construction of dolmens and ‘passage grave’ tombs.”

Zambotti reports of the Sub-Boreal era: “[T]he temperature dropped. . . . Beech trees spread, and leafy flora migrated from northern Sweden to more southern areas. . . .”

The idea that the Atlantic era Baltic area was the homeland of Homer’s heroes is most recently set forth by a magisterial new book, The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales, by Felice Vinci.

But is this just another crank theory, some of which may appear convincing at first sight? On the contrary, Vinci—a nuclear engineer with an extensive background in Latin and Greek studies, who has been researching his theory on the northern origin of Greek mythology for many years, has done his homework well. Nearly every page of his 370-page book offers additional evidence for this remarkable theory.

But probably the most convincing single piece of evidence concerns place names, which often serve as “fossils” that tell the investigator what sort of people once lived in an area, because quite often the names they give to local features persist long after the people themselves, and even the memory of them among the modern locals, have vanished from the region. (This is quite obvious from our own country, the United States, which still has thousands of place names based upon old American Indian languages.) Vinci gives example after example of how supposedly Greek place names correspond with place names in the Baltic area.

Often an ethnic group when it migrates from one region to another, will take their place names with them and apply them to what seem appropriate features in their new, adopted homeland.

But could the correspondences cited by Vinci be caused by mere coincidence? The catalog of ship names proves there is more to this situation than coincidence alone.

The reason: if you read the list of ship names as given in Homer’s Iliad starting with Iliad 2.494 to 97 and 507-10 (266 lines of verse, known collectively as The Catalog of Ships), which present us with 29 Achaean fleets that took part in the Trojan War, and match them as best you can with the place names of Greece, you find they skip all over the region. Neither is the sequence hierarchical. For example, the commander-in-chief, Agamemnon, who “was the most eminent; he led a great many troops” (Iliad 2.580), is listed ninth.

Yet when you match them to places in the Baltic area, you can go down the list, item by item, and they correspond not to random locations in the Baltic; rather they proceed in stately fashion in a counterclockwise direction around the Baltic Sea. (This is a traditional way of ordering things that goes back into the mists of time; Vinci gives several examples.)

Vinci provides the reader with a map of the Baltic showing the exact, counterclockwise progression of places and peoples listed in Homer’s Catalog of Ships (see page Cool:

Hyrie (modern Herraeng), in Sweden, Aulis (Norrtaellje), Thebes (Taeby), Boeotia, Minyhae, Phoci, Crisa (Kisa), Thron ion (Tranas), Tarphe (Torpa), Locris, Euboea (Oeland), Cal larius (Hallarum), Athens (Karlskrona), Asine (Asum), Tiryns (Tyringe), Troezen (Traene), Calydon (Kiel), Pylene (Ploen), Ole nus (Wolin), Aetolia (Jutland), Crete, Rhodes (Rodniki), Lin dus (Lida), Crapethus (Klaipeda), Curetes (Kurland), Casus (Cesis), Libya (Livonia), Cos (Koeo), Phthia, Helias, Thessalus (Teis sala), Troy (Toija), Pherae (Voera), Iolcus (Jolkka), Titanus (Tiiton ranta), Meliboea (Myllyperae), Pelion (Paljakka), Oloos son (Oulu), and Cyphus (Kuivniemi).

In many cases, the similarity of the ancient and modern names is obvious even to the layman. Such a neat sequence could not happen by accident.

The Achaean migration from the Baltic to what is today called Greece fits in with the diaspora of other Indo-European populations in the first half of the second millennium B.C.: the Hittites in Anatolia, the Cassites in Mesopotamia, the Tocharians in Turkestan and the Aryans in India. As to the latter, it is remarkable that Bal Gangahar Tilak, a Hindu scholar, found traces of the probable Arctic origin of the Aryans in the Vedic hymns. This squares with clues emerging of a still earlier location of the Achaeans, connected to the mythical world of the gods, even more northerly than the Baltic one, in the Lappish area and even the coast of the Arctic Ocean.

In fact, Vinci finds Olympus, with the name almost un changed from Achaean times, when it was called Oulympos, in Finland, where it is now called Oulankajoki. (Interchanges between p and k are common in Greek dialects. There is, for example, pou and kou for “where” and pote and kote for “when.”)

Homer writes of a journey by the goddess Hera, from Olym pus to Lemnos. Along the way she passes through Pieria (Lap land), then travels along the Gulf of Bothnia’s west side from north to south (Emathia and Thracia to the Achaeans), and finally cuts across the sea toward Lemnos (modern Lem land). This, says Vinci, confirms the location in Sweden of Homer ic Thrace, which is also where the Norse god Thor lived.

Bronze Age artifacts are frequently found by Scandinavian farmers plowing their fields, although we hear little about this.

Vinci points out many similarities between the region of the Finnish Toija and Homer’s Troy, which can be verified by any visitor to Finland. Aerial surveying of the area of Toija and Kirkkojaervi gives us a good picture of where the ancient Trojan War may well have taken place. (We anxiously await more focused and in-depth archeological investigation.)

It is interesting to note that when Homer speaks of the Styx, he never refers to it as a river. Instead he uses the expression “the waters of Styx” (hydor Stygos). “Styx” means “hateful” and its root, styg-, is very similar to the Norwegian stygg, meaning “ugly.” Vinci identifies the Styx as the lakes Kitka and Livojaervi, one of which flows into the White Sea while the other flows into the Baltic, based on what Homer says about the Styx.

Homer also writes about a murderous whirlpool. There is nothing like this in the Mediterranean, but there is such an eddy in the Lofoten archipelago of Scandinavia. It is known as the Maelstrom, or, in Norwegian, Moskenstraumen. For centuries, there have been tales of ships being swallowed up in this region. The British Admiralty advises sailors to steer clear of it.

In short, from all the converging information magisterially summarized by Vinci, the Urheimat, the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans, emerges as an Arctic land. It lay in the northernmost part of Scandinavia, or rather, the area stretching from Lapland to the Kola Peninsula. Five or six thousand years ago, the primordial Indo-European civilization developed there, thanks to the favorable climate of that era.

It seems remarkable to think that nowadays the Finns spend their time skiing on their native slopes, unaware that they may be trampling with their ski boots the very ground where lay the “fragrant altar” of the shrine of the king of the gods, Zeus, and where Paris awarded the golden apple to divine Aphrodite.

Whether you are a fan of Greek civilization or simply an Aryan buff, you will find much of interest in Vinci’s tome, recently translated into English from his native Italian.

http://www.barnesreview.org/html/jan2007lead.html

« Last Edit: March 19, 2007, 06:26:28 pm by rockessence » Report Spam   Logged

ILLIGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM

Thus ye may find in thy mental and spiritual self, ye can make thyself just as happy or just as miserable as ye like. How miserable do ye want to be?......For you GROW to heaven, you don't GO to heaven. It is within thine own conscience that ye grow there.

Edgar Cayce

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rockessence
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« Reply #1 on: March 21, 2007, 03:23:30 am »

LOOKING FOR HOMER IN SCANDINAVIA
BARD TEAM EXPLORES POSSIBLE ORIGINS OF GREEK EPICS

Four recent Bard graduates and William Mullen, professor of classics,
spent last June and July sailing the Baltic in order to test an astounding
theory put forth by Felice Vinci, whose studies trace the Homeric epics
to the Baltic region. Vinci, author of The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic
Tales: The “Iliad,” the “Odyssey,” and the Migration of Myth, asserts that
he has reconciled geographic incongruities in Homer’s works that have
confused scholars for hundreds of years.

The towns, countries, and islands described in the Iliad and the Odyssey do not always match the geographical realities of the Mediterranean. Vinci’s new theory posits
that the Achaeans were Baltic natives who migrated from Scandinavia
to Greece around the 16th century BCE in search of warmer weather,
after a climatic downturn (well documented by mainstream climatologists).
They brought with them an established set of place-names. Vinci’s
theory holds that the migrants, finding in the eastern Mediterranean a
topography similar to the one they left, proceeded to remap configurations
of their Baltic homeland.

Intrigued by Vinci’s hypothesis, the Bard crew set out to investigate
the theory substantially for the first time, so that full-scale scientific
research on the analogies might follow. Repeating place-names, called “homotopes”
(for example, New York State has its Ithaca, Troy, Syracuse, Carthage, Utica, and
Rome), have led Vinci to a highly detailed reconstruction of the Homeric epics in an
original Baltic setting. Vinci has matched place-names in the Homeric epics with
more than 300 Baltic homotopes that fit the Mediterranean topography.

Although Vinci’s work was translated into Russian in 2005 and published in
English in January 2006, events that accelerated international discussion of the theory,
no one had conducted extensive hands-on research of it. Until the Bard team
stepped in. “I took it upon myself to spearhead the introduction of Vinci’s work,”
Mullen says. “Vinci himself had been to only a small subset of the Baltic sites, and
what the Bardians and I are doing is fully documenting the project.”
The Bard team, originated by the students involved, consisted of Mullen, Sophia
Friedson-Ridenour ’05, John Hambley ’06, Dane Klinger ’06 and BCEP ’06, and
Caleb Morfit ’05. Called the V–TEAM (an acronym of Vinci Team for Epic Ancestor Mapping), the group sailed for three weeks in a chartered 37-foot sailing yacht. Using
Vinci’s homotopes, the journey retraced the Greek expedition to Troy, from the gathering
of ships at the Bay of Aulis/ Bay of Norttälje, to stops in the Åland archipelago,
to the plains of Troy/Troija.

“If Vinci’s account of Homer’s Baltic origins were established as fact,” says Mullen, “we would all imagine the Iliad and Odyssey afresh in a new seascape which, when it was warmer by 4 degrees Celsius, must have been almost paradisal in its beauty. And the Bardians will have been among the first to witness a testimonial to the prodigious powers that peoples on the move have of taking their old stories with them and remapping them onto new places.”

In Stockholm, the V–TEAM met Vinci. In July, Mullen and Vinci continued on
their own, traveling to St. Petersburg, Russia, where Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of
the Hermitage State Museum, had invited them to discuss Vinci’s work. Piotrovsky is
helping to test Vinci’s theory by arranging collaboration between archaeologists from
the Hermitage and the University of Pavia in Italy. The archaeologists are comparing
Bronze Age and early Iron Age findings in Russia, Ukraine, the Black Sea, and the
Mediterranean. Vinci and Mullen were also greeted by several scholars associated
with Smolny College, Bard’s sister liberal arts college in St. Petersburg.
Mullen then traveled to Bergen in southwest Norway and sailed for one week around Nordkapp, the northernmost point in Europe.

According to Vinci, this setting was home to such famous figures and sites in the
Odyssey as Scylla and Charybdis, Circe, Helios’s cattle, and the Phaeacians, Lestrygonians, Cyclops, Sirens, and “house of Hades.” The final leg of the trip brought Mullen to Copenhagen, where he met with a Danish playwright, Niels Djamkaer (who is working on having Vinci’s book translated into Danish).

The V–TEAM (http://vteam06.googlepages.com) was funded by a grant from
the Sea Education Association, as well as by private benefactors. The photographs
taken by the V-TEAM, along with its daily blog (vteam06.blogspot.com), form the
basis of an interactive CD-ROM, allowing viewers to explore the 2006 voyage, as
well as Vinci’s theory, in greater detail. This, in turn, will form the basis of a more
extensive CD-ROM that Mullen and Vinci plan to include in the jacket of future
translations and editions of Vinci’s work.

The research also led to V–TEAM presentations at such venues as the American-Scandinavian Foundation in New York City.  Using Vinci’s book as a guide, the V–TEAM’s work presents, Mullen says, ample  documentation in support of Vinci’s theory and contributes to a growing body of work surrounding the investigation and testing of it. SD Cinematografica, an Italian film company, is planning to make a documentary on Vinci’s thesis, and has expressed eagerness to join the crew of Mullen’s proposed V–TEAM ’07 voyage.

The second trip plans to retrace routes and revisit sites of the Odyssey, a venture that will require a bigger ship and larger crew, which Mullen hopes to make more multinational in light
of Vinci’s belief that his theory represents “an early instance of the unity of Europe.”

If plans proceed as Mullen hopes, a V–TEAM ’08 would depart from St. Petersburg
and sail down the Dnieper River to the Black Sea and thence to the eastern
Mediterranean, retracing the southern migration route of Vinci’s “proto-Greeks.”

—William Mullen, Sophia Friedson-Ridenour, John Hambley, Dane Klinger, Caleb Morfit


http://www.bard.edu/alumni/publications/bardians/2007spr/pdfs/homer_in_scandinavia.pdf
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ILLIGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM

Thus ye may find in thy mental and spiritual self, ye can make thyself just as happy or just as miserable as ye like. How miserable do ye want to be?......For you GROW to heaven, you don't GO to heaven. It is within thine own conscience that ye grow there.

Edgar Cayce
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« Reply #2 on: January 14, 2008, 07:27:26 am »

DearROCKINCENSE,


THE Homeric EPOCH " Illiad & Odyssee "
have been situated at various times since the 1500-ds in northern Europe because of Town name simularity, but these TOWN names did not survive 1.000 years unchanged, besides many Nordic towns were younger than 1.000 years when their Atlantic or Homeric orgins were-first-suggested- in the FRENCH " Romans-de- Gestes" ! Which were translated and Copied into German and Nordic dialects , so this whole Sherade , of an -Homeric- Odyssee in Scandianvia", is invented in " modern times " .

BESIDES I have established that the Geography of the ODYSEE much more fits the region of the RED- SEA and the Indian OCEAN whence Odysseus went with more Ships than he could MUSTER in peacetime as a " Kinglet", so he intended to use the War-ships awared or alotted to his personal command, to fetch BARTER, before by Federal Treaty he was to hand them back again to their original owners ! 

This BARTER was FRANKINCENSE, ( only to be got from:from ADEN/ Atlantis/ Ad-Land Escheria.)and NOT the AMBER or Barnstone from the Oder-Neisse or Botnic-Gulf as the supposed" ERIDANUS- River ". which started the TROJAN- War rather than the poor misfortuned -clever- woman HELEN !

BESIDES,  the Geo-Name " ERIDANUS" is a word/ consoant corruption from: MERIDAN(= Meridium.) or:"  MER- de- DAN."  which is no-other that the present GULF -of- ADEN. !  ( The PONTOS of Punt, thus Punt is Atlantis(see elswhere for explanation like: perhaps in a nutshell, My SUB-Script ? ?

JULIA is right FINland has noHomeric tradition, and I am not convinced neither, I am sure " GEORGEOS" would ably refute this Homeric-Finland theory without difficulty, BESIDES did we not have had these Euphoric rumblings with Robert Sharmast or Mark PONTA about Cyprys or MALTA ? recently some other Greek Scholar discovered Atlantis on Sardinia or the Baleares or AZORES(=prince- Riven-o-Azar.)  or even America & Mexico ! why not the North-Pole ? ( the germans fought a World-War over that Location !)

I am / feel sorry for Prof ( "of Classics":)William Mullen and Dr Reiner KUHNE too.or MARIO  DANTAS with his Greenland-expectations ! Nice litterary work(-s) but:  What did they come-up with, besides ancient Folktales & touristic Sunset pictures, ? NO ATLANTISGrin

Sincerely    CryBlueHue "    Cry  dd 14 Jan.2008
« Last Edit: January 14, 2008, 07:31:34 am by BlueHue » Report Spam   Logged

( Blue's)THEORY, locating"original" Atlantis( in Aden-Yemen.)
1: ATLANTIS =Fake=Latin name, original Greek: ATHE(=a Region in Aden)
2: Atlantic-OCEAN=Greek: RIVER-of-Atlas+also" Known "World-OCEAN(=Red-Sea)
3: Greek-obsolete-Numeral 'X' caused Plato's Atlantisdate:9000=900
rockessence
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« Reply #3 on: September 03, 2009, 06:46:18 pm »

Now I remember why I just gave up..... too much to bother with..
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ILLIGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM

Thus ye may find in thy mental and spiritual self, ye can make thyself just as happy or just as miserable as ye like. How miserable do ye want to be?......For you GROW to heaven, you don't GO to heaven. It is within thine own conscience that ye grow there.

Edgar Cayce
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