General Prehistory Publications

Our book immersions in the Late Aegean Bronze Age capture the feelings of the Pre-Hellenes who preceded the earliest Greeks whom we no longer call Hellenes (as they are by the modern Greeks themselves). The LABA, moreover, is now well-proven to be literate and numerate at expressing itself, even if very lacking of what we call literature. Because of that and other deficiencies, the Age cannot be called historic, because neither last pre-Hellenes or early Greeks left us nothing about themselves accept for accountancies of goods.

Dialects and Inflection of Greek speaking people
by the reckonings of their final ethnicities during Ancient Greek History

Still, we have our oblique means to knowing the evolution of languages at before, during and after the earliest known speeches of the Pre-Hellenes. We know their inflections and dialects by what became of their Oldest Greek until Homeric Greek and, finally, Attic Greek, a chief dialect of the Ancient Greeks, from 500 BC ff. At issue, whenever classical scholars speak of literacy or numeracy, is just how conscious the Greeks were of themselves, and how importantly they believed in what their forbears had been and had passed on of their experiences. My great grandfather R. R. Bardot and the philologists of the Bardot Group expound about a bright, self-confident and most grateful Greece to the pre-Hellenes and the earliest Greeks. They had gotten Life right because their worlds favored them with natural bounty, good climes, and safe existences excepting only for earthquakes, storms and like violences.

Certainly they worshipped their ancestors by identifying their importance in the wondrous regions were first settled, and then broadly populated with accomplished descendants. While we concede that there’s very little that’s been rigorously proven of first events, developments and their consequences: And yet we hold the GOT as evident of historicity as a prehistorical consciousiousness. They recited about their forbears, and imagined how they had been. The sifting of the past was an ubiquitous talent through evolving times and peoples who had passed on to an afterlife. The  earliest Greeks made agreeable a general world  view that they sensed constantly expanding beyond the near and even the  farthest distances around them.

There are many scholars, nonetheless, who deem the pre-Hellenes very lacking in the requisite intellectual development and curiosity to have base their spoken fables, myths and legends in pasts “especially well told” for historical events or developments for whatever had most excited their forbears. They bore to descendants the excellence of their results for family, community and region. Howsoever latent the historicity, such content was passed down and along faithfully to their originated version. Memory was not lost by professional recitation of Rhapsodists, and especially faithful the tellings were their myths of sensational personages and the places earliest ever known because identified with their lifetimes. To capture the humanity of past persons, and how they had lived impacting lives worthy of faithful historicity, states the rhapsodists leading to Homer the epic poet had minds near perfect at recall of what was vocally transmitted down through time. Remembrances were likely recited many times over again, but it was the Greeks amazing vocal retention that explains the fidelity to original recitations based in a definable past. What survived was either robust, retold at great length, or very vividly, by short story. But our point remains that so much was remembered for each unitary opus, became collectively an opera of sagas, mostly about greatest persons, or about the regions that they were identified with.

The continuation of so much that was recounted of the past made up the body of Early Greek Mythology. It survived very well into the Greek Dark Age from 1190 to 775 BC. By the Eighth century BC, there began a rapid renaissance which led to new reckonings by the Ancient Greeks of what their long past forbears had been about. They were disturbed by most of it, because of newly modern notions of normative behavior. Many Ancient Greek places had produced descendants who actually hated their forbears. What those ancestors had spoken about themselves presented oddities that could no longer be tolerated. Much of revisionism attended the recitals of the oldest myths and their greater sagas. The result was much of transformation, including much expunction of historical content in myth, until Classical Greek Mythology brought orthodoxy to what could properly be remembered and passed along by word of mouth.

We shall have more to say about the evolving dichotomy between best remembered recitals from Early Greek Mythology and the revisionist transition of them to newly modernized recitals or dramatic enactments. What follows explains how we confidently can analyze the revisionism or recapture the expunctions so that mythic personages by the prehistorical atlas of times and places. We also introduce our syntheses of what we’ve regained through what we call our Bardot Blogs.