Our Bardot Blogs are our non-fictional means of addressing rationally what the Ancient Greeks and Greeks by the ages after the Classical Age mangled so irrationally. That is due tio the essential fact that the Ancient Greeks from the 5th century BC onward were poor prehistorians about their earliest regions, and even worse biographers of their forbears, the leading mythic personages of the Late Aegean Bronze. Call that blasphemy, but that is a truth nevertheless.
We treat the subject mythic personages as true persons worthy of authoritative biography. Even though their names remain solely at they were first introduced, from the orthodox polytheism engendered within the Greek Dark Age, the much earlier prehistorical places and times are known, and can be better known, as Greek Mythology & Lore at their fullest evocation. Most of our postings are intentionally argumentative in refutation of academic scholarship that’s been so wrong; and, too, that it’s no longer relevant to honest intellectual study. Everybody and everywhere is walking away from the stuff of our High Professoriats; students are voting with their feet –Away! We’re intentionally, even intensively persuasive of cultural interpretations of the early myths. We examine their existential purposes at origination, the aitiai, which often carry themes convincing of our beliefs in the essential ephemera of Greek expression and culture. Behind our Bardot Blog postings, our studies since 1924 have offered far more robust expositions of the prehistorical subject matters than what historical novel fiction has accomplished. We have not yet covered so many of them, or so far, by our book publications, but we once had a good backlog of postings and Bardot Blogs. Often, moreover, they were compilations put into serial postings. All are by the publisher R. Bacon Whitney at his writing in pseudonym, as Saltonstall Weld Bardot.
By this page we set forth anew, even at forsaking so much of what we’ve already done.
Demolition and Re-Erection of past Bardot Blogs:
There have been 189 postings since Bardot Books contracted WEB.com and their compiler Word Press in 2009. Alas, we began a full rebuild to this website in mid-October, 2019, only to find that those Bardot Blogs all got lost to the ethernet over the months until now, the end of March, 2020. We resume with this posting, accordingly. Reintroductions shall be in order, of course, and the website itself has been modestly repurposed for classical studies buffs who can appreciate the realities with which we must cope after so many Classics Departments have been put out of business across the college and university landscapes of America. For lay readers in Antiquity, or persons mostly unread at classical religion, culture and literature, we afford a special kind of revival inherent the historicity of those academic disciplines. Bardot Books are about learning early Greek prehistory by step wise progressions through fictional immersions in oldest named regions and their most famous mythic personages of heroic and royal (sovereign) biography. Our postings are about small steps by non-fictional approaches to the same topics. Tthrough that second kind of immersion, we hope to draw commentary from persons of superior expertise than ours at whatever the topic, region or personage put forward to them.
While I regret the decadent academic circumstances pertaining to the USA, we can eschew our academic High Professoriats at cause of those plummets in broad public interest. We avoid their dogmatic insistence upon the oldest ways of non-fictional exposition of the prehistory of early Greece. Early Greek prehistory, for example, had little or nothing to do with the evolving genesis of the final Olympian Pantheon; we explore instead the deification of the Great Earth Mother, the Creatrix of All Living Things, and the Titans and Titanesses who were her progeny by the Fourth Creation. The creations myths of the pre-Hellenes reflected their Idyllic Age, through which they thrived and evolved until they became three major ethnicities by 1600 BC, when then the Idyll was in wane. Gaia Panhagia or the One-All-Holy Earth Mother spawned many aspects of Earth’s micro-cosmology until then. Much about those oldest deities have never converted well or popularly to intellectually honest fiction. Now, after many centuries of the High Professoriats’ nonsense, there is real danger that Ancient Greek shall go the way to same oblivion that happened to Ancient Hebrew in the early 20th century.
My sources reside in a different milieu of Antiquity, in the Bardot Group of Scholars of Antiquity, an interdisciplinary coalition of finders and founders of ascendant civilizations throughout the Late Aegean Bronze Age. They are my sources who are no longer alive to speak further about themselves from 1927 to 2005. They mostly related to findings upon the Greek Peninsula or within the Aegean Archipelago from 1640 to 1190 BC. That is the span of Early Greek Mythology as borne from the Great Oral Tradition. I resurrect other findings that arose from archaeological digs and clay entabulated human literacy discovered upon the Greek Peninsula; upon Anatolia of the Hatti Imperial Age; upon Crete Island beneath the Archipelago for what still sufficed of broad civilized influences at the end of its Imperial Minoan Periods. There’s also Nilotis, the Nile River Delta and best known landscape of Egypt by her New Kingdom’s dynasties of the 14th and 13th centuries BC. Nilotis embraced the Levant, the long and thin coastal plain of the Eastern Mediterranean. It stretched inland to “The Orient,” a toponym which once defined the longitude of earliest matured civilizations such as Old Assyria, Mesopotamia and some farther away great powers at lesser ascendancies. The Far East, which is the modern Middle East, makes quite a gulp, but we spoonits lores out as glibly and piecemeal as we can through our preferred immersion genre, proto-history. Such expository fiction by our books stems from the non-fictional sources for our offered postings, whereby to teach and render robustly from the Bardot Group’s copious analyses of Early Greek Mythology and Classical Greek Mythology.
Those mythologies are dichotomous: Early Greek Mythology originated the most famous mythic personages and the earliest regions of their sovereignty. They were recitals of great heroism by the strictly oral dissemination that’s still dubbed the Great Oral Tradition. While its recitations began as early as 1625 BC, or long afterwards the diffusion of the proto-Indo-European speaking forbears of the Greeks, the myths of greatest origination became of bards called rhapsodists. Their best offerings were precisely memorized, to become “classically” imparted by constant reiterations from 1450 BC onward. They embedded within the recitations the genuine historicity inherent the myths of first origination by evoking honestly the true forbears of the Ancient Greeks. They, however, did not like their forbears for what they heard of their regional ancestries. They sought to expunge or greatly revise the prehistorical provenances of myth, legend and mythic sagas. The highly revisionist Classical Greek Mythology, dating from 500 BC,ff., attended that century’s maturation of a polytheistic orthodox religion, which all modern eras of scholarship affix to the Olympian Pantheon of six elite goddesses, six man gods, and two crone goddesses.
Those revisionists take the dub of Ancient Greeks. They were primarily the Athenians, and they were mostly very bad historians at masterpiece prose literature even as represented by Herodotus and Thucydides: Neither “father of history” liked their LABA forbears very much. Grant to them that they wrote sympathetically in behalf of other Ancient Greeks such as Spartans, Corinthians, Cretans, Argives and Thebans. They had much to learn about them during the Greek Dark Age from 1190 to 780 BC. The early and yet culturally reconditioned Greeks spanned the durationa of the Archaic, Lyric and briefly Renascent Eras to manifest literally, by alphabetic writ, how much they abhjorred their ancestries. By so many criteria of redefinition we have insistently found what their cultures were about, by what religious beliefs they composed, and even for what else they aesthetically idealized of males’ and females’ finest form and beauty . So great their abhorrence of how their ancestors had behaved, though, that the Ancients largely expunged their respective prehistorical niches, or otherwise distorted their habitual heroic ways. I stand as a sometimes highly conceited spokesman and often pseudonymous author for the Bardot Group at correcting the manifest intellectual dishonesty of the Ancient Greeks whom we know so well from the Masters of Classical Greek Mythography.
It took a long time to compose our 189 Bardot Blogs unto sufficient allure to build up many loyal followings. Over the first 40 or so compiled postings, they seemed not to have earned any commentary or attention reflective of stimulated curiosity . But that changed to a steady following of lay persons to classical studies, mostly very young high school and college students, who were looking for fresh ways of understanding the earliest Greeks ever known. Immersing themselves in the Idyllic Age, an evolution from the 2nd millennium BC, they have proved responsive to my evocations of the Late Helladic Period (of mainland Greece), the Late Cycladic Period (of the Greek Archipelago) and the several Minoan Periods (Crete from 1800 to 1352 BC). At last they have become curious about the highly distinctive evolutions of Greek ethnicity, whereby a nation race, or genos, became so very different from the much later Ancient Greeks of text book Ancient History. The Prehistoric Greeks have proven, I like to think, not so markedly estranged from their own immediate predecessors — whom I must call pre-Hellenes. For “Greece” is always and forever Hellas, even if her inhabitants by all ages of knowledge have rarely called them Hellenes (in English, at least).
Mappings
I’ve used a lot of images over my 189 postings, and likely I’ll have to revive them again hereon. Here are a few……..
Most of our past postings have related to the first half of the Fourteenth century BC of the Late Aegean Bronze Age and, again, the first half of the Thirteenth century BC. The continuity to our roving of this geography expressed above has been Cephalos, born in 1389. He lived almost to the end of his century. His descendants by the the royal House and dynasty named for him — the House of Cephalos — became the three successive Cephalids, all Great Wanakes (singular Wanax), over the Cephallenes, upon their realized maritime High Kingdom of Cephallenia along the west coast of the Greek Peninsula. Those entitled sovereigns were still alive as the Thirteenth century began — Arceisius, Laertes and Odysseus. By 1298 BC Cephallenia had realized a status of a sea empire of thalassocracy, which Odysseus was able to sustain through the Trojan War Era, 1266 to 1220 BC. His son Telemachus had then to dissolve the great naval sway, but did not live to witness its final dissoluation by 1190 BC. This last date is the agreeable year certain for the beginning of the Greek Dark Age; it conforms to the Middle Dating Method of correlative dating by the Egyptologists of our past two modern centuries. We explain about such dating below, because the dating of prehistory had proven dynamic, thus changeable, owing to the insiders’ game of experts at Antiquity to constantly befuddle us, the mostly lay people followings of the powers within the geographic boundaries offered above. They have done so without explanation.
Readers of Bardot Blogs should understand that the Late Aegean Bronze Age can no longer be defined as the Greek Peninsula & Archipelago from modern Central Greece south to Crete Island of the former Minoan Imperial Age. The Bardot Group upon which my source learned disciplines of Antiquity have depended. defines it as all of Anatolia. or Ancient Asia Minor. That geography includes peripherally Nilotis, or the Nile Delta, of imperial Egypt; and the thin littoral harbor cities of the Levant as far inland and eastward as the line running from the Sea of Galilee to shore of the Euxine Sea. Levantines and Lelegans were the sea rovers of whole extended families whose real homes were the Mediterranean Sea itself, thus a domain defined by the Egyptians as the Great Green. The Aegean Sea was late to become the single body of water associated with its Age: It composed in Antiquity from the Cretan and White/Northern Sea to the North Rim Sea, composing also the lateral Karian and South Seas as well.
The Map so rendered was accomplished by the Trojan War Era. Delos Isle by then became regarded for its placement within the Mid-Sea Isles, the later Cyclades Isles, of the now Greek Archipelago. It significance became lastingly understood as the only agreeable epicenter for all mariners originating from all compass points of deep interiors. Every body knew Delos, although for most of them it was the Isle that situated upon the outermost boundaries of what they regarded or deem as maritime civilization. It was most certainly such to the Cephallenes of the farthest west, the region which proves to knit together all I can say of Antiquity.
While these twin images are overviews by viewpoint from Northeast and above the Strait of Abantis (later Euboea) to the Strait of Messenes which separated the South Sea from the Ionian Sea, the right side serves legends to the most ancient names known for regions and places before they were changed by the Ancient Greeks’ Dark Age forerunners. The date for both images by overviews is 1380 BC plus or minos a decade. This was Cephalos’ accomplished microcosm beginning from his ninth year of age, while he was Ward of Eleusis and Prince of Attica by his mother Herse. He lived his Saronic Gulf Years until 1360 BC, or until late that year he accidentally killed his wife High Princess Prokris by a spear cast over the pointing snout of his Pharaoh Hound Lailaps. He was then banished, all future kith and kin included, and lived a second lifetime begun as an exile but eventually, by ascendancy, to the first ever High Chief of the Echinades Isles. Accordingly, he is the mythical personage who ties the prehistory of the Greek Fourteenth century BC together.
We follow this mapping with a linear chronology of his lifetime until his exile in 1360 BC.
Legend: Kekrops remains agreeably the first King and branch royal patriarch over the House of Erechtheus of Attica. He made a greatest marriage for himself when he wed Metiadusa, a hereditary matriarch and titular Diomeda over Eleusis, a sacred shrine principality upon the Saronic Gulf. Their great wedlock began when she decided that she would make a life marriage with Kekrops and live where he lived or where he ruled. The marriage produced the son Pandion circa 1430 BC, who overcame many reverses to live a long and splendid life. His sister Herse was born after Metiadusa’s many miscarriages circa 1405, but the blessings of and by her birth celebrations caused Kerops to be deposed by his three brothers led by the oldest Metion and his uncle Xuthus, husband to Kekrops’ sister Kreousa. They had coveted, were induced to seek and finally seized the two mainland parts of Attica through a coalition of patron clans dominating Aktika, the aboriginal homeland of the Atticans, also known as the Low Peninsula. That seizure drove Kekrops and Metiadusa to Eleusis for five year of happiness at upbringing of Herse. Kekrops dies circa 1400 BC to close his century.
And the end of those refugee years, Attica rose in revolt against Metion’s coalition and dissolved the high priesthood of Xuthus, a worshipper of Poseidon who sought to demote Athena as the Matron Tutelar Goddess over the Atticans. After the revolt, the Goddess became the Patron Potnia Athena, or Tutelar Goddess over their race, enduring as such until the Ancient Greeks worshipped her in maiden form as no longer the daughter of Themis. Her aspect as the Goddess of Strategic Wisdom and Practical Arts remained from the matron form deity to the strictly chaste, but always most alluring Goddess Athena.
Pandion was appointed High Chief in Kekrops’ stead without complications over his expatriate status as a refugee solaced by Pylia over Alkathoos, the matriarchate upon the Upper Isthmus of Ephyrea which neighbored Eleusis. He ruled the Atticans for twelve years by commutation from that marriage, but did much to unite them into a proper kingdom — but, alas, not quite: The High Kingdom of Kadmeis, its House of Kadmos ruled by Labdakos, interfered in the consolidating unity. He sought to bribe Pandion into an expansion as Greater Attica through a gift of low country demesnes and dominions which belonged to the Lapiths. Pandion refused the bribe of territorial grant, deeming it infendable, so the bribe went to the sons of Metion and his two brothers. They usurped Pandion and sent him packing back to Alkathoos and his wife Pylia. Thus began the hideous Metionid Regime of Attica which ended only after Landakos died and Pandion mustered his adopted son and three natural sons by Pylia into a revolt that became named the Second Restoration of the Kekropids ( because his own ascendancy to rule Attica in sole right was called the First Restoration). By then Herse had taken a powerful consort in Deion of Dauleis who sired off her lap Cephalos in 1389 BC. The Summary Chronology above must serve for his Saronic Gulf years of lifetime, whereby the robust premises of my translated fictional immersions of Mentor, all proto-histories by his authorship, to compose the volume of five book parts titled Cephalos War of Eleusis: I thru V.
Dating as a Dilemma for Prehistorians, the Late Dating Methodology, in particular
I address new and oldest lay readers of my Bardot Blogs in particular. Classical Studies Buffs do not need to learn how loath the Ancient Greeks were to use or apply dates to their prehistory epochs, eras and ages. They also know that the later their historical ages, or the more artistic their literature, the Masters respective to all of them eschewed co-relative dating or any of the orthodoxies that we take for granted. By contrast, the Bardot Group were great adherents of dating and sank or swam upon their veracity.
But Truth is often rendered malleable if its bases shift ground or position by the supposedly rigorous determinants of numeric datings. Most recently there have been two such major shifts that have proven especially aggravating for me at following my exemplars afforded dates of events and developments and spans of prehistoric times. The first is the hideous academic imposition of changing from BC and AD to BCE and CE, respectively. Even agnostic persons cannot tolerate such an atheism as secular humanism has at last wrought. All it has meant, however, is a final expunction of all legacy scholarships by persons of religious ordinations. And yet Classical Studies began with monks, religious clerics and the their preservation of the material opera of Antiquity.
The second major shift has been by a threefold progression nased upon honorable pretexts about base definitions of dates and methods of dating. I began as a schoolboy student of Latin and college educated student of Homeric Greek with tabulations of Periods and Ages by the Old Dating Method. It appears within the image placed below my closing signature for this posting through two progressions of dated events, the Kingdoms and Dynasties of Egyptian Pharaohs, and Prehistorical Events as Dates by Methodologies of Dating. At left, we tabulate from Egyptology, whose scholars of highest perrages have determined all that we know, or are likely to ever know, from their compiled lists of Pharaohs and attendant artifacts relevant to each of them. At right, by contrast, we demonstrate in tabular fashion the two major shifts that shifted the nigh canonical Old Dating Methodology to the Middle/Late and Latest Dating Methodologies. I remark with emphasis that both tabulations are by Egytpologists; they second tabulation they created out of excessive self-esteem, disdain for all other Antiquarians and a hubris to know best even without apology that they have been twice wrong, perhaps a third time inexcusably, without any apologies for their imposed orthodoxies on us, the humblers working scholars working the Atlas of Oldest Times and Places.
I shall resume from a next postings what readers can cogitate for themselves from what this First Bardot Blog has introduced. We are on our way to what defines as the New Greek Mythology, which most faithful readers will want to know about.
for the Bardot Group,
Westhampton, New York
What Egyptology has wrought……….
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