This posting reactivates our Bardot Blog of March 31, 2020 by evolved non-fictional means since then at addressing rationally, and sometimes academically, what the Ancient Greeks and Greeks’ previous ages after what the Fifth Century BC Classical Age mangled so irrationally. The essential fact and basis of the New Greek Mythology addresses the essential maliciousness of those Ancient Greeks towards that century BC, as either blithe or intellectually dishonest prehistorians about their earliest great regions and firmly held institutions. This includes of course their greatest men by Classical Greek Drama, even as we respect the attendant playwrights for what they had to do of artistry to win their ways through toughest competitiveness within their contemporary peers and judges. They were even worse as biographers of their forbears, especially their women, so many of whom by both sexes their audiences were ashamed of, or would not admit of as worthily illustrious. We say so especially of the Last Patriarchs and Founders of dynastic Houses within the Late Helladic Period a/o Age, whose compelling mythic personages drove the Late Aegean Bronze almost to a lasting great civilization. Call all such assertions against their detractors blasphemy, but therein resided the most truthful prehistory.
We’re the Bardot Group, scholars of antiquity since the 1920s, who treat all subject mythic personages as true persons of unwritten history and worthy of authoritative biography. Even though their names remain no longer as they were first introduced, or that they were ignorant of the orthodox polytheism engendered within the Greek Dark Age, 11th to 8th century as varily dated, their much earlier prehistorical places and times are known, and can be better known, by orally recited Greek Mythology & Lore at fullest developed evocations by rhapsodists (bards). Most of our postings are intentionally argumentative in refutation of academic scholarship that’s been longest times so wrong; and, too, that so much of it is no longer relevant or applicable to honest intellectual study. Everybody and everywhere are walking away from the stuff of our High Professoriats; students are voting with their feet, thus away! We’re intentionally, even intensively persuasive of cultural interpretations of the early myths so prominently great. We examine their existential purposes at origination, whereupon their aitiai, whereby they often carry themes convincing of our beliefs in the essential ephemera of folklore 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 novelistic fiction has accomplished. We have not yet covered so many of them, or so far, by our book publications, except to say that 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 of Bardot Books, R. Bacon Whitney, at his writing in pseudonym, Saltonstall Weld Bardot.
By this emended posting, here and now in 2023, 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 somehow, the months until now, the end of March, 2020, having proved futile cloud searching. 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 with, after so many Classics Departments have been put out of business across the college and university campuses 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 have been 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) statures. Our postings are about small steps by non-fictional approaches to the same topics. Through that second kind of immersion, by Bardot Blogging, we hope to draw commentary from persons of superior expertise than ours at whatever the topic, region or personage that we’ll put forward to them.
While I regret the decadent academic circumstances pertaining to the USA, we can eschew most academic High Professoriats globally as well. Thye’re 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 human ethnicities by 1600 BC, when then the Idyll fell into 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 has 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 of oblivion that happened to Ancient Hebrew during the early 20th century.
Wherefrom our sources of Antiquity or Prehistoric Reinterpretation:
Whitney’s 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 and EWastern Mediterranean civilizations. They are my sources who are no longer alive to speak further about themselves. 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 fired clay, also an tabulated human literacy discovered upon the Greek Peninsula; or upon Anatolia of the Hatti Imperial Age; or upon Crete Island beneath its Archipelago for what still sufficed of broad civilized influences at the end of its Imperial Minoan Period. There’s also Nilotis, besides, 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 remembered ascendancies. The Far East, which is the modern Middle East, makes quite a gulp, but we spoon its lores out as glibly and piecemeal — as digestibly as we can — through our preferred full 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 became dichotomous during the 20th Century: Early Greek Mythology had 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 throughout the Aegean islands and shores, 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 paramount man-gods, and two crone goddesses as sole surrogates of the Great Earth Mother.
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 durations of the Archaic, Lyric and briefly Renascent Eras to manifest literally, by alphabetic writ, how much they abhorred their long time venerated 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 manifestations . So great the abhorrence of how the legacy ancestors had behaved, though, that the Ancients largely expunged their respective prehistorical niches, or otherwise distorted their habitual heroic ways and standings. I stand as a sometimes highly conceited spokesman, an 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 Whitney a long time to compose our 189 Bardot Blogs unto a sufficient allure to build up any loyal followings. Over the first 40 or so compiled postings, they seemed not to have earned any commentary or attention reflective of his 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 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 became curious about the highly distinctive evolutions of a composite Greek ethnicity, whereby a Hellenic nation race, or genos, which became so very different from the much later Ancient Greeks whom text book Ancient History has composed. 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 great knowledges have rarely called them Hellenes (in English, at least).
Mappings of the Oldest Hellenic Geography
I’ve used a lot of images over my 189 postings, and likely I’ll have to revive them again hereon. Here below 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 at Eleusis. 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 Era of Helen, 1266 to 1220 BC, famously dubbed the Trojan War Era. His son Telemachus had then to dissolve that great naval sway, but he did not live to witness its final dissolution by 1190 BC. This last date is the agreeable year certain date for the beginning of the Greek Dark Age; it contentiously 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 and challenged, owing to the insiders’ game of experts at Antiquity to constantly befuddle us, their mostly lay people followings of the powers erstwhile within the geographic boundaries offered above. They have done so by fiat, without explanation to many lay scholars who command of them argument and persuasion.
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 an elapsed Minoan Imperial Age. The Bardot Group upon which my source learned disciplines of Antiquity have depended, defines it as inclusive of all of Anatolia, 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 south shore of the Euxine Sea. Levantines and Lelegans were the sea rovers of whole extended families whose real homes were the Eastern Mediterranean Sea’s littoral, a domain nominated by the Egyptians as the Great Green. The Aegean Sea was late to become the single body of water associated with a Bronze Age: It composed in Antiquity from the Cretan and White/Northern Sea to the North Rim Sea, composing also the ancillary Karian and South Seas as well.
The Map so rendered was accomplished by the Era of Helen 1285 to 1220 BC. 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 of origins by the outer compass points of deep and foften trackless interiors. Everybody at seafaring knew Delos, although for most of them it was the Isle that situated upon the outermost boundaries of what they regarded or deemed a limit of their own maritime civilization. It was most certainly such to the Cephallenes of the farthest west, the region which proves to knit together all Whitney has striven to say of Antiquity.
While these twin images are overviews by viewpoint from Northeast and above the Strait of Abantis (later “of 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 minus 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 when he accidentally killed his wife High Princess Prokris by a spear cast over the aimful snout of his famous Pharaoh Hound Lailaps. He was then banished, all future kith and kin included, whereupon he lived a second lifetime begun as an exile haunting Thebes, but eventually, by earned ascendancy, become 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 monarch and foremost 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 wherever 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 attendant her birth celebrations caused Kerops to be deposed by his three brothers. Led by the oldest Metion and his high priest uncle Xuthus, husband to Kekrops’ sister Kreousa. The brothers had long coveted, and were induced to seek and finally seize the two mainland parts of Attica through a coalition of patron clans dominating Aktika, the aboriginal homeland of the Atticans, also known as the LowerPeninsula. That seizure drove Kekrops and Metiadusa to Eleusis for five years of happiness at upbringing of Herse. Kekrops died 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 Tutelary Matron Goddess over the Atticans. After the revolt, the Goddess became the Patron God Potnia Athena, enduring as such until the Ancient Greeks chose to worship her in stately maiden form as no longer the daughter of Themis by Zeus. Her aspect as the Goddess of Strategic Wisdom and Practical Arts remained from the matron form deity she’d long been to the strictly chaste, but always most alluring temptress Goddess Athena. She loved one at a time great men, but eschewed carnal comforts from gods, or the most precocious of immortal men such as Cephalos.
From High Chieftainate to Kingdom:
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 High 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 primordial Lapiths. Pandion refused the bribe of territorial grant, deeming it indefensible. 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 Aigeus 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 books under common title of 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 by what immediately follows in review or reinstatement. Classical Studies Buffs do not need to learn how loath the Ancient Greeks were to use or apply dates to their prehistoric epochs, eras and ages. They also know that their later historical ages, or those mostly artistic for their literature, produced Masters irrespective their eschewing co-relative dating or many other orthodoxies that we take by their insistences. By contrast, the Bardot Group have been greatest adherents of dating, even to sinking or swimming just barely upon their veracity.
But Truth is often rendered malleable if its bases shift ground or position by the supposedly most 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 of developments, and offered 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 their preservation of the material opera of Antiquity through illumination.
The second major shift has been by a threefold progression based upon honorable pretexts about base definitions of dates and methods of dating. I began as a schoolboy student of Latin and a 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 peerages 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; the second tabulation they created out of excessive self-esteem, and by disdain for all other Antiquarians. They manifest a hubris to know best without apology that they have been twice wrong, perhaps to err anew a third time inexcusably, without any apologies for their imposed orthodoxies upon us, the humble working scholars and groupies who know fastidiously well the Great Atlas of Oldest Times and Places.
I shall resume from a next postings what new or neglected readers can cogitate for themselves, or from what this First Bardot Blog has introduced of a revival of Bardot Blogging. We are going on and out of our way our way to what defines the New Greek Mythology, because most faithful readers will want to know about how we sometimes must poke arrogant Antiquarians in the eye.
for the Bardot Group,
Westhampton, New York
What Egyptology has wrought……….
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