Hi Qoais;
Actualy, the numbers appear higher because the board keeps you logged in if you don't click log out and just close your browser or go to another site. Look at your time logged in, mine says 1 day 2hours 19 minutes and when I logged in I only chose 1 hour. I'm pretty sure I clicked log out yesterday, and I always clear my cookies. That's why the ratings are so high.
Hercules really has nothing to do with the Greeks having a previous knowledge of the west, even though his voyages do.
Hercules generally falls into 3 different categories being;
Greek; 1250.bC, Phoenician,2350.bC or was it 2700, I forget what Herodotus said, and Egyptian, 17,440.bC or 17,000 years prior Herodotus.
The Phoenician one around 2700 compares with the Sumerian Gilgamesh as hercules. Gilgamesh may have also travelled to the pillars at gibraltar.
The Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean
http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/Lesson 22: Aspects of Mycenaean Trade
THE AMBER TRADE
The source or sources of the amber found in the Aegean can be determined by means of infrared spectroscopy. Most of the amber from Mycenaean Greece, as well as that from Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, comes from the Baltic Sea.
There is no evidence from Egypt for true amber, as opposed to other fossil resins, before the 18th Dynasty (ca. 1570 B.C. onwards). The earliest amber in the Near East may date from ca. 1800 B.C. at Assur and Hissar (level IIIC), or it may date from as early as ca. 2400 B.C. in the finds from a grave at Tell Asmar.
Greece's earliest amber comes from Shaft Grave O in Grave Circle B at Mycenae and from an early tholos at Pylos in Messenia, both of which contexts are dated to the latest phase of the MH period (ca. 1725-1675 B.C., on the high Aegean chronology).
The first Baltic amber arrived in Greece ca. 1725-1675 B.C., possibly in only three consignments (one each for Mycenae, Pylos, and Kakovatos [Messenia]). The next consignment need not have arrived until the transition from LH IIIB to LH IIIC ca. 1200 B.C., this time possibly through middlemen in northwest Greece, as suggested by finds of the material in Aetolia and Epirus. The early consignments, it has been argued, probably came to the Peloponnese by sea, possibly from as far away as Britain on the basis of remarkable similarities between Mycenaean and British spacer plates.
Atalante brought to my attention the obsidian trade with Pantelleria ca6000bC.
It is common knowledge of the obsidian trades anywhere in that time frame.
Just google it, for example;
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us&q=obsidian+sailing+pantelleria+6000bc&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=I'm not sure where his article is and or his source, however there is also articles on obsidian here in AO.
