The Prehistory of Greek Writ
Since Early Greek Mythology means for us solely oral source recitations, in general, allow nevertheless that other great scholars to our best knowledge have ferreted out, or taken reasonably upon faith, corroborations of mythical historicity despite the lost writ by formulized syllabaries of the Greeks extant during the long last floruit of the Late Aegean Bronze Age.
Theirs is the premise of “our real fiction.” It evolves from supposition and requires careful working hypotheses of other prehistoric sources; they include vastly studied material science and art. Earliest myths were wrought upon masterful pottery and mosaic panels that illustrate a latent historicity through their subjects depicted and reflective of period. Ceramic arts affected such content until the enabled transformations of their subjects through description by Greek alphabetic writ. Homer, we believe, was the first to supplant myths written from syllabaries as recitals of his own bardic genius dictated master scribes of alphabetic writ.
The Bardot Sisters, who long preceded my publishing of Bardot Books, tasked with the philology inherent a transition from writ by syllabary to alphabetic writ for the purposes of historical or literary exposition. They also were tasked with the writs of numeracy by many Bronze Age cultures and their scriveners. Our philologists were once young female bright stars at languages and their decoding from fired entablature. They became my own nice old ladies until they passed on from the Bardot Group. They taught me much that is new and otherwise oldest inspired, so that I can dare becoming the pseudonymous Master Translator of all their own composed Oldest Greek. For without them, there could not have become, in any way substantively, Saltonstall Weld Bardot. Without him, though, there couldn’t be Robert Bacon Whitney, his publisher and the founder of Bardot Books since 2007.
We have an entire section of this website devoted to him
Late or Last Age of Patriarchs: Fifteenth Century BC’s Second Half Dynamics:
Far into this century’s Late or Last Age of Patriarchs, until rapidly emergent new dynasts after1415 BC, conquerors or interlopers by foreign origins ceased rampancy and trample of the indigenous natives under matriarchates. Instead, they took upon themselves the native models of sovereign manhood. They took wives of matrilineal sacral majesty and were vouchsafed in return the status od Medon or Governor in an idiomatic English sense. I often use the term Consort Home Protector, unless the new and mighty husband was a Warlord won to the status of Overlord –Tëretaön [Tay-Reh-TAH-own]. They became Helleniized as their generation matured into civilized consolidations of martial gains and females’ pacification eftorts. This movement had already united over the Fifteeenth century BC the three earliest, core pre-Hellenic ethnicities which defined the early Greeks.
The generalized theory behind this predictable tendency of invaders to become “nativized” has been attributed to the syndicated political commentator Joseph Alsop, who was also a Classics’ enthusiast. Mentör corresponds to Alsop’s coherent argument that interloping conquerors abandoned all rapacity once they’d succumbed to a nigh idyll by comparison from where they’d come from. Marital aspirations for the primeval, still extant matriarchs of native sovereignties took over. The warlord conqueror courted them on their own terms in order to become the Consort, or Lord of House, or Consort Home Protector. They knew nothing about agronomy, of course, while his aspired bride was a governance over vast plantations under tilth or at regularizing livestock husbandry. They prospered off his “maiden nymph,” her mother, or her grandmother, even to supporting their fellow interlopers his subordinates to provide for.
A Husband or consort proved apt to melding with matriarchal agronomic regime. He willingly became of Second Estate by pledged loyally and due homage to the female First Estate over the sovereign order. He undertook the role and model of a selfless champion defender. His life was a forfeit to defend that hierarchic order. The best of them, Pelops, proved exemplars of patron land stewardship and martial readiness of the rural commonfolk and townspeople. He conducted agrarian surpluses to export commerce. All such roles put in play for his Meda or High Matron, as realized by Hippodameia for Pelops. He became the prototype an Elite Man, Esthlos, by his willingly subordination to her Persëid ancestral dynasty. After a while, he roved a Late Patriarch over all the Argives, becoming a self-made Hero, after selflessly managing the salvation of his wife’s First Estate of Great Princesses.
Our Bardot Blogs have much to say about the Greek cultural anthropology of matriarchy, co-regency of husband and wife, and the sometimes off marriage traditions which arose from men and women safeguarding each other’s granted heritage and inalienable legacies. For there came a time when the matriarchal Idyllic Age vanished — or, as Hesiod expressed the end of Silver Age humankind and it replacement by the first martial metal bronze, a Bronze Age humankind began in transition to the bellicose Iron Age humanity.
Herakles the Superhero
The most remarkable departure of Classical Greek Mythology, by its eclipse of the Earliest Greek Mythology, is its vast accretion of stories and anecdotes that enlarged the mostly obscured mythic saga about Herakles. He’s no way to be found in any paramount posture of a truly itinerant hero, or a sometimes maniac under Olympian Hera’s supposed scourge of his mind. For, all-in-all the mythical accretion of a Saga, he became the pan-Hellenic superhero. He exists as such, though, solely by much later myths, most of early writ by the alphabet, and long after the lifetime of his true mortal self – Alkeios son-of-Amphitryon and Alkmenë. His birth is still disputed as either Argive or Theban, because both those parents were born Great Prince and Great Princess, respectively. And yet Alkeios was conceived in Thebes where Amphitryon was custodial regent, and whereto Alkmenë followed him, to make amends for causing his banishment over the “staged accidental death” of her father Elektryon.
Although a fabulous oral rendition out of the Greek Dark Age’s final invaders and interlopers seems to deliberately confuses us, there’s even dispute about his true historical name, the approximate date of his lifetime’s end, and how he died. For the most part, however, Alkaios/Alkeios became a composite superhero of many generations of last arrived ethnic Greeks, the Illyrian Doric Greeks and the Greeks whom Dubbed Achaeans. They affixed an agnomen or homorific of acclaim, Herakles, over many epochs that ran into the Dark Age. The contrived superhero becomes clearly a Doric prototype of the superior form of prehistorical patriarchs out of Anatolia, but he’s not yet so lodged within the prehistory of Mentör’s lifetime during the Thirteenth century BC. He knew the Dorians as most prudish and deeply religious Highlanders who were still a mostly quiescent, obscure tribal culture by his alpine nation race. That Herakles became born from both those last arrived ethnicities conformed to a ruthless, brilliant strongman and furiously raging made him a harbinger of the rough and tough Hellenes who emerged from the four centuries of the Greek Dark Age and was finally formulated by his feats over a brief Greek Renaissance.
Before the Polis, or City-State
There was no urban density in the LABA alike the later Polis or City-State. During the LABA only Troy and Miletos of Anatolia came close to that model of both rural and township statehood at concerted meld. Although the first conceptualized polity, subsumed by the Polis, evolved from earliest Greeks at mass flight away from the Greek Peninsula and west coast colonist within Anatolia’s much milder Dark Age after 1100 BC. There the meld of townsmen and rustic bumpkins took a long time to gestate into a prime governance best described as urban. Refugees from Hellas upon Anatolia proved first concurrent with trends by the Age of Colonization. Organized expeditions of eager colonists reached a zenith from 1150 to 950 BCE, whereby urban entities harmonized their commoners of both rural and town folk (the damoj and laoi). Any prior tradition of such polity lies far beyond the purview of Mentör and our opera by his syllabaric writ. Mentör’s times are best characterized by large regional sovereignties or tribal lands which we should translate as commonwealth commerce entities. There’s a taint of communism about the broadly landed entities at nascent social amalgamations; but they’re not in any way comparable, or as foul as the proletariat that Marx, Engel, Lenin or Stalin made a sham of deeply venerating. Rather, the social contract that led to the polis, or poleis, evolved into oligarchy and limited franchise democracy. What was lost by either form was “a prosper alike, suffer alike” perceptual attitude of all citizens under oligarchs and demagogues. Neither form affected their populaces alike the happy matriarchal traditions of Matrons reciprocating Tenants at harmonizatiion of dual work and enterprise sharing as a commonweal.
Wilderness Bufferlands
Finally, the most stable regions of the LABA were lowland or littoral, as either surrounded by wilderness or mountainous barriers. They were the founders or an orthodox polytheism which Demeter, Hestia and Themis got rolling until its inclusion of all deities composing the Olympian Pantheon. There were important step evolutions between the trinity of goddesses and the final pantheon By contrast, the tribal lands of Highlanders dispersed the alpine central massif running down both mountain range divisions of the Greek Peninsula; they were religiously dedicated to the Goddess Beasts Wild (Theia Therön). Conservatories or sacral preserves acted for integration of buffer highland disallowing intrusion by lowlanders: The Highlanders were active a hunting guides, and they might have allowed invaders to trespass over them briefly. Nonetheless, the wilderness was never attractive habitat for permanent conquest by waves of hostile bands of interlopers.
Such dispositions remained bucolic and nigh idyllic until Pelops and Aiakos — conqueror and re-conqueror, respectively, over the south and north mainland divisions of the Greek Peninsula. The change of dispositions began with Pelops, after he subjugated the coastal Westlands of the south mainland peninsula. He consolidated those conquests through formal cooperation with the Southland Highlanders. They assisted his formal adoptions of petty royalties, composed of indigenous, mostly west coastal high chieftains. He resettled his foreign-born, equestrian caste of elite warriors among them, even to bringing them west and out of his homeland of birth, Maionia of Anatolia. His systematic territorial gains of Argolis and the Argolid Peninsula he accomplished through a dynastic marriage, whereby husband and wife bonded their respective hereditary landedness to each other. Afterwards, Pelops, a High Prince by birth, fell into the predictive pattern of subordinationm whereby conquerors succumbed to their wives, an imperial Great Princess in the case of Hippodameia.
Aiakos would perform much the same kind of creation, of autonomous imperial regime, through his re-conquests of territories, by which the last waves of Minyan invaders had to forego all of modern Central Greece of the Peneios River Basin. Having fully reversed or repulsed the Minya, by chasing them back to their oldest former borderlands, By then they had become too well-settled to turn back to their former homelands – above the Aegean’s North Rim Sea, the Dardenelles & the Strait of Dardanos and the north coast of the Sea of Marmara. Desperate to stay permanently settled, the Minyans rendered unto Pelops their homage and liege fealty in 1381 BC. Attaining further, after a complete capitulation of their equestrian might, Pelops let the Minyans settle peaceably as a High Kingdom. He placed them in confederation with Aeoleis, his first founded High Kingdom. Upon that stupendous outcome, Aiakos performed at maritime and overland commerce, at astute administration and by fortuitous marriages a much more expansive imperium, establishing a confederate Great Kingdom. Its construct upon the north mainland consolidated his lesser petty royal realms, falling just short of another High Kingdom that finally recomposed into later Boeotia. His underling kings, men of considerable martial strengths, served him in fealty. Eventually ruling autonomously, their descendants enjoyed “the Patriarch” who lived so long above themand. His ensuing martial successors predeceased him, but their equestrian and martial paramountcy endured on as Aeoleis and Minya until the Trojan War. Into its hostilities a second Peleus fatally volunteered all his might and force over a 10-year duration. The Minyans who fought under his son, the Great Prince Achilles, are known from Homer’s The Iliad as Myrmidons.
The Trojan War Era
A duration from mid-1266 to 1230 BC, its truest knowledge necessitates an almost complete abandonment of credence in Classical Greek Mythography. Its mythographers engendered a 30-year close of that era, whereupon it vanished and the Late Helladic Period IIIC began circa 1190 BC. We have to recognize the hard fact that the Bronze Age Greeks never actually knew who the Trojans were before Troais became a High Kingdom of northwest Anatolia. The 40-gap years became very prolific of recited epic poetry and fulsome prose accounts, such as survive from Quintus of (Anatolian) Smyrna. He lived within a coastal entrepöt inhabited by the many Greeks who had chosen not to return to their homelands upon the Greek Peninsula and/or Archipelago.
They became dubbed squatters after the Sack of Troy and the Wasting of Ilion. They were properly spoils takers, but they were far more than bare subsistence denizens that the Ancient Greeks of the First millennium BC eventually displaced by mass migration into Aeolia, Ionia and Doria. By then some eight epic recitals of considerable length had set down a Saga of the Trojan War. It was totally by and about Greeks, and not about Trojans in fealty to Great Kings over the imperial Hatti of central Anatolia.
We have essayed, of course, who Helen really was, by whom born and wherefrom her sacral matrilineage to rule the Highlanders. She lived from 1284 to 1225 BC. Her death is attributed to the vengeance of widows of Rhodes Island, acting in support of their queen, Polyxo, who had lost her husband Tlepolemos to the war for which Helen was solely blamed. This may not be a credible death, because alternate obscure versions have her dying of old age much later than 1225 BC. Importantly, she was neither Helen of Sparta nor Helen of Troy. She was an only daughter entrusted by her mother Nemesis to fostering by the House of Oebalos over Lakonia. The Wanassa of Lakonia was Lëda of Aetolia, a devoted subject of Nemesis. She was the Queen Holy Matriarch over all Highlanders of Greece. Helen, therefore, was the heiress presumptive to a new realm, a virtual imperium, the Wilderness Wilds of both mainland divisions of the Peninsula. For such a grand renewal of that realm had been prophesied, to wit, that Helen and her twin brother Polydeukes (Pollux in Latin myth) were force sufficient as combined for an arousal of all Highlanders wherever situated their tribes, phratries, and broadest regional brotherhoods.
Our book, Penelopë, Princess of Lakonia, accounts for Helen’s childhood as both a foster sister and dearest held cousin to the many granddaughters of Gorgophonë — the fourth Wanassa of that name; she was also Queen Matriarch over a vaster region than Lakonia – Amykai. Helen’s only foster brother was Kastor, whom Classical Greek and Roman mythographers have often mistaken as a fraternal twin of Polydeukes. He was the son and heir presumptive of his father Tyndareos; and while he lived he had hoped that Helen’s twin Polydeukes would become is junior co-regent, by succession to his uncle Ikarios, the father of the first cousin Penelopë.
From such beginnings, and through her maidenhood and marriage to Menelaos, we account for her abductors, the Trojans led by Alexander (Paris) and Aeneas. Once stolen away from Lakonia, there next emerges her life as an Anatolian suppliant under the protection of the Hatti Great Kingdom. From their she learns that she’s to become queen consort to Alexander, High King presumptive over Wilusa. Thus she’s the successor to his mother Hekabë, the wife of High KIng Priam over the Trojans. Helen abides her captivity as the exalted matriarch over Wilusa for nearly eight years. Then, finally and briefly, she’s for two years a Trojan High Princess, no longer the queen of Wilusa, but in part a suppliant, instead, under the safeguard of Priam and Hekabë. So only very late in the Trojan War was she an occupant of the famous siege bastion, the high city Pergamon, within which Fortress Ramparts Ilion that the Greeks are supposed to have sacked.
Both as prehistory and Early Greek Mythology Helen becomes through our Bardot Blogs the subject of an entirely original biography, which ends with her later life as the beloved Wanassa of the Wilderness Wilds.
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