Race is a dynamic, evolving, statistical notion. It is defined by the mean frequency of a certain number of genes that determine, for a given population, physical, pathological, and psychological predispositions or characteristics. To propose, with Professor Livingstone, to replace this term with ‘line of frequency’ thus reverts to wordplay — since it is precisely in the combination of ‘lines of frequency’ that anthropologists see the racial definition of the great branches of humanity.
George Montandon was the first, in 1933, to substitute the idea of ‘racial homogeneity’ with that of ‘pure race’, an ambiguous expression without scientific value — and otherwise easier to refute. ‘Evolution characterises itself by a greater and greater differentiation’, he observed elsewhere (La race, les races, Payot),91 there is every reason to suppose that ‘the undifferentiated is originally a primitive’.
Geipel also affirms that language and ethnicity ‘exert absolutely no influence upon one another’. It is well known that African Americans speak English. But the reappearance of the morphology proper to the African languages (agglutination) in Caribbean speakers or in ‘black English’ (the language of the black ghettoes in the United States) is no less revealing.
It can no longer be doubted that the context varies from one era to another. The event of the ‘Neolithic revolution’ would cause the encounter of human groups who had previously remained isolated during the entire period of racial formation. ‘This isolation conditioning the racial differentiation’, writes Giorgio Locchi, ‘is doubled by a linguistic isolation to which corresponds an extreme differentiation of language. From this fact, it is not hazardous to suggest that at the end of this era of humanity, each racial group corresponded to a specific language’ (‘Linguistique et sciences humaines’, in Nouvelle école, April-May, 1968).92
Some Publications
With exceptions made for the principal works of Georges Dumézil (Mythe et épopée, Gallimard)93 and Emile Benveniste (Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, Minuit),94 we only find a scarcity of recently published works in France consecrated to the (neglected) beginnings of Indo-European civilisation, such as those by P. Bosch-Gimpera (Les Indo-Européens. Payot, 1961),95 V. Gordon Childe (L’Europe préhistorique. Payot, 1962),96 Sigfrid de Laet (La préhistoire de l’Europe. Meddens, 1965),97 Guido A. Mansuelli (Les civilisations de l’Europe ancienne. Arthaud, 1967),98 and Jacques-Pierre Millotte (Précis de protohistoire européenne. A. Colin, 1970).99 And yet some of these titles prove to be strongly disappointing, while most of the works of the great contemporary Indo-Europeanists still wait to be translated. The university itself is completely disinterested in the subject: no course on the origins of our civilisation figures in the programmes of schools and faculties.
Despite (certain) shortcomings, Geipel’s work nevertheless comes at the right time. For, contrary to what its author affirms, the ‘hunt for the ancestors’ is neither sterile nor derisory. On the contrary: the most distant past inspires the most powerful future.
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L’anthropologie de l’Europe, a study by John Geipel.100 Laffont, 356 pages.
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Since the publication of the book by John Geipel, the only major works published in France on the Indo-Europeans have been those of Georges Dumézil, notably Idées romaines (Gallimard, 1969), Fêtes romaines d’été et d’automne (Gallimard, 1975), as well as vol. 2 and 3 of Mythe et épopée (Gallimard, 1971 and 1973).101 A special number consecrated to the work of Dumézil (with texts by Jean-Claude Rivière, Robert Schilling, Mircéa Eliade, Georges Charachidzé, etc.) has also been published by the journal Nouvelle école (No. 21–22, winter 1972–1973).
In English and German speaking countries, as well as in Eastern countries, Indo-European studies are clearly more successful. In the United States, an important quarterly periodical, The Journal of Indo-European Studies (Suite 108, 1785 Massachusetts Avenue N.W, Washington, D.C. 20036), has appeared since 1973 under the direction of Dr. Roger Pearson.
Heligoland: Atlantis?
So many stupid things have been written on Atlantis that serious people have ended up relegating the problem to the same category as extra-terrestrials, flying saucers, and the cave of Ali-Baba. It is necessary to put an end to these convoluted ramblings.
Jürgen Spanuth — sixty-five, convincingly eloquent, wearing Herr Doktor glasses — has investigated the problem of Atlantis for thirty years. Born in Austria, he studied at the Universities of Berlin, Vienna, Kiel, and Tübingen; in 1931 he was named Professor of Theology, History, and Ancient Archaeology. Since 1933 he has been the pastor of Bordelum, a small village in Northern Friesland, Germany.
His first book, Das enträtselte Atlantis (Stuttgart, 1953),102 appeared in French translation through Plon in 1955. L’énigme de l’Atlantide, published in France almost twenty years later, is unfortunately only a condensed version of a larger work of almost seven-hundred pages, entitled Atlantis (Grabert, Tübingen, 1965), which has attracted passionate debates.
‘Like many people’, remarks Spanuth, ‘I had long believed that it was a myth. And then in 1933, while I was working on the antiquity of the Near East, I discovered the inscriptions of Medinet Habu’.
The royal temple of Medinet Habu was recovered in 1927 on the site of former Thebes by researchers of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. It was constructed on the order of the pharaoh Rameses III (1200–1168 BCE) in order to celebrate the victory of Egypt over the mysterious invaders that historians designate by the name ‘Sea Peoples’ (or ‘People from the Seas to the North’). The text of the mural inscriptions that relate the event in great detail was published between 1934 and 1954.
Spanuth was therefore surprised to notice that this text closely matched the account of Atlantis transcribed by Plato in two of his later dialogues, the Critias and the Timaeus.
Around 570 BCE, relates Plato, the lawmaker Solon went to Egypt to ‘gather information on past ages’. Thus did he learn, from the mouths of the priests, about the very ancient kingdom of Atlantis, whose capital had been submerged by floods following a great natural catastrophe, and whose inhabitants, ejected from their home, launched an assault on the Mediterranean lands.
‘Solon was above all inspired by the heroic role played by Athens, his native town: it had been the only one at the time to conquer the inhabitants of Atlantis who, proceeding from Europe with a very powerful army, penetrated into Greece and occupied many other states’.
The ‘Sea Peoples’
Having returned to Athens, Solon transmitted this account to his friend Dropides, the great-grandfather of Critias the Younger, a contemporary of Socrates (as portrayed by Plato).
The bas-reliefs of Medinet Habu are indeed of the greatest interest. They describe the attacks of the ‘Sea Peoples’, how the assailants were repelled, and what the scribes learned from their prisoners. Now, Plato did not know anything about Medinet Habu. And those after him, who would situate Atlantis in every location on the planet, were even more ignorant.
The ancients willingly ascribed an extremely remote date to the events of their history because they considered them all the more important. Plato, who was no exception, placed the arrival of the Atlanteans on the Greek coasts at around 9,000 years before his own time, a date which is obviously impossible to retain, since during this era the town of Athens was still far from being founded.
By contrast, archaeologists know that in the last third of the eighteenth century BCE, Athens actually suffered an attack from ‘Sea Peoples’. The ‘Pelasgic wall’, built in complete haste, consequently protected the citadel of the Acropolis. The Greeks fought under the direction of King Codros, who would claim the victory, but lose his life. ‘This heroic action’, writes Plato, ‘has remained unknown because it is very ancient, and because the men who accomplished it disappeared a very long time ago’ (Timaeus 21d).
Repelled by the Athenians, the ‘Sea Peoples’ occupied Peloponnesus, Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, and part
of Asia Minor. Finally, having crossed Palestine and Syria, they arrived at the borders of Egypt, where in 1192 BCE, they attacked the army of the pharaoh. The fight was terrible. Rameses eventually won.
The invaders then receded towards Europe and the Near East, crossing the terrain like a hurricane.
‘Some of them would install themselves upon the Palestinian coast’, writes Spanuth. ‘It was by the tribe of the “Pheres”, which we know under the name Philistines (following the Hebraic pronunciation, Pheles, from the word Pheres). The Wenamun papyrus indicates that the “Saksar” fixed themselves on the west coast of Syria, whereas the “Dori” (the Dorians) colonised Peloponnesus, Crete, Rhodes, and the islands of the Aegean Sea’.
Considering what we know of the great Indo-European migrations, Jürgen Spanuth is attempting to discover the origin of these people, which the Egyptian papyrus designates with the term Haunebu (a term that the Greeks translated as ‘Atlantes’). Here again, he makes use of the lessons of Medinet Habu.
The bas-reliefs of the royal temple actually depict, with great precision, the physical aspect of the invaders, the horned helmets and crowns, carp’s tongue swords, the round shields that they used, the slender vessels bearing heads of swans or dragons on the prow as well as the stern, which they took into battle. These traits, Spanuth emphasises, correspond neither to the equipment nor the customs of the Ancient Near East. However, they irresistibly evoke Europe, and most especially Northern Europe of the Bronze Age.
‘There is every reason to think’, he writes, ‘that the point of departure of “Atlantis” must be situated in northern Germany or southern Scandinavia between the 52nd and 58th degrees of northern latitude. This region also corresponds to the “ninth sphere”103 of Egyptian cosmology, from whence the prisoners came, according to the scribes, whose testimony they received’. It also corresponds to the place that the Greeks considered the ‘pillars of the world’, as it is recounted in the myth … of Atlantis.
The three principle tribes of the ‘Sea Peoples’, the ‘Pheres’, the ‘Saksar’, and the ‘Denen’, would thus be the distant ancestors of the Frisians, the Saxons, and the Danes.
On the Rediscovery of the Ancient Basileia
The Atlanteans, Plato tells us, used a precious material called orichalcum. It was most probably yellow-amber, which two thousand years before our era, was an object of intense trade by Northern Europeans. Wasn’t the god Apollo, whose cult was borne in Greece by the Dorians, supposed to return every year to Hyperborea, where on the banks of the Eridanos (the Eider), his sisters cried tears of amber? ‘Now there is only one place’, Spanuth underscores, ‘where yellow amber was extracted in antiquity. It is precisely on the coastline of Schleswig-Holstein, between the North Sea and the Baltic’.
It is also there that the Elbe, the Weser, and the Eider converge, rivers whose courses were brutally modified by great natural catastrophes that occurred precisely in the eighteenth century BCE. These catastrophes, which caused the collapse or subsidence of the rivers of the North Sea and the Baltic, can be placed in relation to those which caused the ruin of the Cretan civilisation and the eruption of the volcano of Thera, Santorini, ravaging the Hittite empire in Asia and the Mycenaean kingdom in Greece, of which the Bible bears testimony with the episode of the ‘seven plagues of Egypt’ and the seaquake that allowed the dry crossing of the Red Sea.
‘All of this’, continues Spanuth, ‘brings us to the vicinity of the isle of Heligoland, in the North Sea, which corresponds exactly to the description given by Plato of the sacred capital of the Atlanteans, the ancient Basileia.
Etymologically, moreover, Heligoland (heiliges Land) means ‘sacred land’. In antiquity, it bore the name Basileia, then Balcia and Abalcia. Even today, old legends report that a temple ‘of glass’ or a fortress of ‘yellow-amber’ was engulfed by a marine pit off the island, and transformed into a seaside resort.
All that remained for Spanuth was to prove his thesis. In 1953, two underwater excavation campaigns had been undertaken to the east of Heligoland. At the place that had been indicated to them, the divers retrieved some plaques of bronze identical to those of which Plato spoke, as well as imposing murals of a lost city.
After the publication of Atlantis, Jürgen Spanuth received more than 16,000 letters from readers, including numerous scholars. Many felt that he had opened a serious pathway. More serious in any case than the far-fetched thesis of an ‘Atlantic Atlantis’, for which geological proofs are completely deficient, and whose adherents forget quite simply that the name of the Atlantic Ocean was only given to it much later, in 1665, by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher.
‘The mystery of Atlantis’, Spanuth declared in Paris on 10 June 1971, ‘can be considered resolved’.
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L’énigme de l’Atlantide, a study by Jürgen Spanuth.104 Published by Vie Claire (Périgny-sur-Yerres, 94520 Mandres-les-Roses), 156 pages.
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In a new book, Die Atlanter. Volk aus dem Bernsteinland (Graubert, Tübingen, 1976),105 Jürgen Spanuth puts together a dossier on Atlantis incorporating new data and a critique of localities proposed, more or less to date, by different authors (the Atlantic, Azores, Crete, Thera-Santorini, etc.). Some of these additions have already been the subject of articles published in the journal Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Tübingen). The book is under translation and scheduled to appear through Éditions Copernic.
The controversy to which the hypotheses of Pastor Spanuth have given rise is revealed in an essay by Gerhard Gadow, Der Atlantis-Streit. Zur meistdiskutierten Sage des Altertums (Fischer, Frankfurt/M., 1973).106 The author, who in a previous work (Erinnerung an die Wirklichkeit. Fischer, Frankfurt/M., 1971)107 had violently attacked the fanciful claims of Erich von Däniken, feels to the contrary that the hypotheses of Spanuth have every chance of corresponding to reality.
On the history of Heligoland, there is a book by Jacques Mordal (Héligoland. Presses de la Cité, 1967), which, at least on the question of origins, remains relatively superficial. In the German domain, we find more precise information in a study by Werner Lorenzen, Helgoland und das früheste Kupfer des Nordens (Niederelbe-Verlag, Otterndorf, 1965).108 On the cartographic history of northern Frisia, cf. also: Arend Lang, Kleine Kartengeschichte Frieslands zwischen Ems und Jade (Heinrich Soltau, Norden 1962).109
Linear B was from Greek
He was called Michael Ventris. He died in 1956 at 34 years of age. Upon learning of his death, Georges Dumézil, historian of religions, would write: ‘Before the centuries, his work is done’.
His work was the decipherment of ‘linear B’, an achievement that enjoys a comparable role in relation to the study of Greek as the translation of the Rosetta Stone by Champollion does for Egyptology.
The story traces back to the last century. In 1876, an innovative German travels through Greece, Iliad in hand. He believes that Homer had spoken truly. He had good reason. Six years after having discovered the ruins of Troy on the Anatolian site of Hissarlik, Heinrich Schliemann discovered, in the northwest of Peloponnesus, in a wild and mountainous region, ‘cyclopean’ murals from the fortress of Mycenae. And then the Treasury of Atreus and the royal grave circle.
Mycenae is not the capital of the ‘Mycenaean’ world, but it is the most celebrated and best-known site. The founders of the Mycenaean civilisation are the Achaeans. Arriving from the north, they came to Greece at the beginning of the second millennium BCE, passing through Macedonia and Thessaly. In the same period, the ‘battle-axe people’ (Streitaxvölker), ancestors of the Germanic people, imposed themselves on the megalithic populations of northern Europe. The Hittites laid the foundations of an immense empire. The Indo-Aryans lead themselves towards the Indus Valley.
The Achaeans, colonising the Aegean Sea, installed themselves at Lipari, Cyprus, and Sicily, establishing strongholds in northern Syria, and destroyed Troy, guardian of the Hellespont (Bosphorus), key to the wheat trade. They subdued the autochthonous Mediterranean populations
, and imposed their language upon them, derived from common Indo-European.
In Schliemann’s time, the Achaeans were still poorly understood. The leading question was the origin of their power.
In 19o0, a British scholar, Sir Arthur Evans, born in 1841, believed himself to have found the answer. Crete, barely liberated from Turkish rule, was fully effervescent. Excavating the ruins of the royal palace of Knossos, Evans discovered a brilliant and even refined civilisation: a palace with complicated structures, sumptuous frescoes, painted ceramics. It was the ‘Minoan’ civilisation (named after King Minos, builder of the legendary Labyrinth).
In the course of his digs, Evans also found some clay tablets, seemingly ‘baked’ due to a fire, which bore a mysterious, non-alphabetic writing. Incapable of deciphering it, the specialists nevertheless recognised two neighbouring systems: Linear A, traced from left to right, which is the most ancient (1750–1450 BCE), and Linear B (1400–1200 BCE). The tablets composed in Linear B are more numerous. More than three thousand would be discovered.
A ‘Psychological Divide’
From this moment, Evan’s opinion was arrested. The ruins of Knossos, he affirmed from 1909 (Scripta Minoa I), are those of an ancient Aegean civilisation of a Mediterranean or Semitic type. Mycenae, apparently, is merely a ‘Minoan province’. The ‘barbaric’ Achaeans, students of the Cretans, had been the subjects of a great colonial empire founded on naval and commercial domination. Greece is the spiritual heir of the orient.
However, this diagnostic did not satisfy the entire world. In 1924, Forrer discovered Hittite texts that speak of a powerful ‘Archaiwoi’ whose sovereign is considered equal to the pharaoh. Alan J. B. Wace contrasted the palace of Minos, tortuous and confused, to the royal palaces of Mycenae and Tiryns, which have a vigorous art organised around the hall of the throne and the megaron. Some pieces of ‘Aegean’ ceramic uncovered in Egypt reveal themselves to be Helladic and not Minoan; and vases exhumed at Knossos as simple imitations of an art originally from Corinth, in continental Greece. The ‘psychological divide’ which separates the Achaean civilisation from that of Crete appears increasingly deeper. But the researchers who attempt to diminish the rift run into violent opposition. Wace, notably, was forced to abandon the direction of the English School at Athens. The spirits were only seemingly appeased after the death of Evans, which occurred in 1941 when the Wehrmacht invaded Crete.
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