Immanuel Velikovsky - The Dark Age of Greece.pdf

(3019 KB) Pobierz
1
T
HE
D
ARK
A
GE OF
G
REECE
by
Immanuel Velikovsky
www.varchive.org/dag/index.htm
2
A Technical Note
I have been asked by the compliers of the Velikovsky archive to briefly explain the
present condition of Velikovsky’s unpublished manuscript entitled
The Dark Age of
Greece.
Velikovsky worked on the manuscript of
The Dark Age of Greece
fairly
intensively during the last years of his life, drawing in part on the library research of
Edwin Schorr, a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, whom he
employed for this pupose in Princeton for several summers in a row in the mid-
seventies. Readers of Pensée know Schorr under his
nom de plume
Israel M.
Isaacson, which he used to protect himself from the wrath of his professors at
Cincinnati. At the time that I began to work for Velikovsky in 1976, the manuscript
was still “work in progress.” While Velikovsky was writing and rewriting the main
text, my task was to annotate the material, drawing in part on the voluminous notes
and photocopies of articles prepared by Schorr and partly on my own research. In
addition, Velikovsky and I co-authored certain sections; others, written solely by
me, were to have been included in a supplement to the book. Subsequent to 1980,
pursuant to Elisheva Velikovsky’s wishes, I moved some of these contributions
from the main text into footnotes and removed the rest from the manuscript
altogether. Several of them were published in
Kronos
VIII.2 in 1983.
Another planned supplement to
The Dark Age of Greece
was to have been Edwin
Schorr’s work on Mycenae,
Applying the Revised Chronology.
This detailed study on the archeology of Mycenae was commissioned by
Velikovsky and written specifically for this purpose. Although incomplete, it is an
impressive work of scholarship that deserves publication.
Jan Sammer
In this edition Jan Sammer’s annotations are distinguished from Velikovsky’s text
by being placed in square brackets and displayed in red letters. All such annotations
should be understood as being by Jan Sammer, unless marked with the initials
EMS, in which case they are by Edwin Schorr. In conformity with reliable
information we have received with respect to Velikovsky’s plan for the book, we
have included Schorr’s and Sammer’s work as a supplement to
The Dark Age of
Greece.
The Editors
3
P
REFACE
The task of my few words is to ask prominent scholars to reconsider their opinions
about the dark age of Greece in the light of Velikovsky’s present book. My
personal difficulty is mainly caused by the fact that a short preface cannot be a
scholarly treatise and therefore it is impossible to ask here all the questions which
arise when Velikovsky’s theory is applied to our special problem. And as I am not
an archaeologist, but a Greek scholar, I am not able to control how far Velikovsky
is right in questions of stratigraphy. Here I depend on his quotations of
archaeological reports and it is not possible for me to decide how far his selection
of passages from these reports is subjective. My difficulty is that now I have to
accept the view that the period of Geometric style overlaps, at least partially, the
Mycenaean and Minoan period. This is new for me, but I admit that it is not
impossible that two different artistic approaches can exist at the same time. But the
most important problem in connection with the present book is how far this theory
is dictated by the whole of Velikovsky’s chronological system and how far his
results in the present study are valid independently from it. Velikovsky puts the
“true time of the events recounted in the Iliad in the second half of the eighth
century and the beginning of the seventh. . . . The time in which the drama of the
Iliad was set was -687; yet the poet condensed the events of more than one year
into the tenth year of the Trojan siege, the time of the Iliad’s action.” Velikovsky
came to this date because he identified the description of the battle between the
gods in the Iliad with a cosmic catastrophe. His date for the conquest of Troy is
unusually late. As Homer had to live after the events he describes, the space of the
time between Homer and the classical Greek literature seems to me personally to
be too short. But the main question is about the interrelation between Velikovsky’s
chronological system and the single historical facts. Or in other words: does this
system solve the concrete difficulties in our approach to ancient history? The
present book tries to solve such a serious problem, namely, does the so-called dark
age of Greece really exist? Is the supposed span between Mycenae and classical
Greece too long? Are we not in this case victim of a false Egyptian chronology,
which was invented by Egyptian patriots in order to show that the Greeks were in
comparison with the Egyptians mere children? Was the history of Egypt in reality
much shorter than it is supposed today? If this could be shown, then the problem
of the dark age of Greece would disappear. Only open-minded specialists can reject
or accept Velikovsky’s solutions. One thing is clear: the new book treats a real
problem. It was not its author who created it. The whole complex of questions was
re-opened by the decipherment of the Linear B script, when it was definitely shown
that the Mycenaeans were Greeks, speaking a language which was an older stage of
the linguistic substrate of the Iliad and Odyssey. It is a merit of the new book that it
offers an original solution for a real problem. Will there be a sufficient number of
good specialists who are prepared to wrestle with the proposed solution?
Prof. David Flusser Hebrew University
4
The Reconstruction of
Ancient History
The history of the ancient East is an interwoven nexus, embracing Egypt, Israel,
Syria and Mesopotamia, known also as the Biblical lands. The interconnections
extend to Asia Minor, to Mycenaean Greece, and to the Mediterranean islands—
Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean archipelago. The histories of many of these nations
are, for most of their existence, devoid of absolute dates and depend on
interrelations with other nations.
The chronologies of the Mycenaean civilization in Greece and of the Minoan
civilization on Crete are built upon contacts with Egypt, for Egypt’s chronology is
considered reliable. In turn, the widespread Mycenaean and Minoan contacts and
influences found in the archaeological sites of many countries are distributed on the
scale of time by detailed study of Mycenaean and Minoan pottery and its
development. This pottery is found in countries as far apart as Italy and the
Danubian region.
Egyptian History
Although Egypt’s chronology is used to determine the dates of other cultures,
Egypt had no written account of its history, and the earliest surviving effort to put
its past into a narrative is from the pen of Herodotus of the mid-fifth century
before the present era, regarded by modern historians as largely unreliable.
1
Though various king-lists from earlier times have been preserved, it is the list of
Manetho, an Egyptian priest of Hellenistic times, (third pre-Christian century) that
served the historiographers as the basis for making a narrative out of the Egyptian
past. The names read on monuments were equated, often by trial and error, with
Manethonian dynasties and kings. The mathematics of history, it was agreed, could
not be entrusted to Manetho, and is largely borrowed from the sixteenth-century
European chronographers, notably Joseph Scaliger, and his sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century emulators Seth Calvisius and others,
2
who dated in the same
tables also various mythological motifs, such as the scandals among the Olympian
gods or Heracles’ heroic exploits.
With the reading of the Egyptian hieroglyphs achieved in the nineteenth century,
some selected dates of Scaliger were used by Lepsius (1810-84) to date the
monuments and thus the reigns of the kings of Egypt whose names were on the
monuments. Lepsius was, for instance, of the view that Ramses II was the pharaoh
of the Exodus—and thus Biblical history, too, was drawn into a comprehensive
scheme on which other histories could find their first foothold. Such was also the
case with “Hittite” history because of a peace treaty of Ramses II with one of the

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin