The Olympic Games were only for the men; women and slaves were not even allowed to watch, and there was a law which actually said that any woman caught watching the games would be thrown off Mount Typaion. Why were they so against women? All participants had to compete naked, and later on the organizers made them train without clothes on as well. Why, for heavens sake? Both the competition judges and the public had to be quite sure that participating athletes were normal human beings, that there was no cheating, and that everyone had the same chance. The word “athlete” actually comes from the Greek word athlos, and means prize or honor. And what has all of this to do with the story of the Argonautica? Bear with me a little longer.
Up until the 13th Olympic Games in 728 BC, only one single competition took place: the sprint over a stade, a distance of about 200m. Not until 720 BC was a longer run added, over a distance of two stades, about 400m. The first Olympic winner of this race was Acanthos from Sparta. From one Olympic Games to the next after that, new sports were allowed. The history of the games has been researched in detail by various historians. Herodotus, the “father of historians” (490–426 BC), read in person from his works at Olympia, which is how he first became known to his countrymen. The Greek historian Diodorus (about 100 BC), who was the author of 40 volumes of history books, visited the 180th Olympic Games.
Image 3: Megalithic stones at Olympia.
Image 4: Megalithic stones at Olympia.
Image 5: Megalithic stones at Olympia.
It is easy for me to use the history of the Olympic Games to demonstrate that no monsters, giants, Titans, “mixed beings,” or other freaks took part. The competitors were naked, and no cross-breed or hermaphrodite would even have been allowed to watch. No robots à la Talos were set to protect the Olympian temples, of which there were a good number, containing gold and silver. No fire-spitting dragons guarded valuable offerings to the gods with tireless eyes, and no “divine” offspring corrupted the games. At least we can be sure of this as far back as 776 BC. Competitions were held in Olympia prior to that, but these were not included in any historical records.
The oldest known reference to the Argonautica comes from the IVth poem by Pindar, who scribbled the story down about 500 BC. There were certainly no giants, Titans, or other descendants of the gods around in his day, or they would have been mentioned in the historical records of Olympia. Nor were there any a quarter of a millennium before that, at the first Olympic Games. Nevertheless, the story mentions gods, robots, the Golden Fleece, and an unsleeping dragon. Therefore the first people who told the Argonautica story must either have made up their monsters or taken them from far older sources. I can see no alternative.
The fairy-tale invention of a “speaking beam” or a “metal man” does not fit easily in the time of Pindar or even Apollonius. Nor does the unsleeping dragon which has no physical needs, spits fire, and does not die. If such figures were dreamed up in the fairy-tales of the times, we would know about it. In ancient Greece, after all, there was no end of poets and dreamers. Countless numbers of their stories have lasted the millennia, but no single one of them casts scorn on the invented lies of the others. So, surely, these stories must be older than the first Olympic Games.
The deeper we delve into the mists of human history, the more improbable becomes the technical gadgetry, such as that mentioned in the Argonautica. Our evolutionary model would lead us to conclude that the further back we go the simpler human thinking would be. Or is there anyone who seriously wants to put forward the view that the fairy-tale tellers reached for their clay tablets the moment that the first writing was invented?
Come with me on a voyage of the mind, which takes us back 4,000 years. We are in the town of Assur, which existed about 2,000 years BC. The development of writing is in full flow, and people are already trying to scratch into clay tablets some laws laid down by their clever ruler. The ruler demands that every one of his subordinates should implement the laws immediately, rather than judge things according to the whim of the moment. Making these “law tablets” is very hard work. First of all, the right mixture of clay must be pressed into square wooden frames, kneaded, and smoothed. Then the scribe draws fine lines in the clay with a sharpened stone. The whole process has been tested for weeks already, by inscribing the soft medium again and again with the wedge-shaped signs. Sometimes the stone tool scratches too deep and the wedge is then too broad at the top, at other times too much pressure is applied. Or the scribe’s hand trembles. Often the soft clay sinks just at the wrong place, hiding an important stroke which made one word into its opposite—such as “unjust” out of “just.” At last the wooden frames are laid out to dry in the sun. After a few hours one can see that the writing no longer looks right because the heat warps the frame. And many of the tablets break as they are removed from their frames.
You can see, therefore, that writing was both an exhausting process and a grave responsibility 2,000 years BC. Only a few mastered this new art. And now imagine that a dreamer turns up who only has one thing in mind: he demands 5,000 clay tablets in order to inscribe them with a made-up story, a dream, say—or, as one would call it millennia later, a fairy tale! The priests, the tribe, the ruler will only allow such a thing if they regard it as extremely important. And what sort of story would be important enough to spend years engraving it in clay?
Only one, certainly, which tells of an ancient, powerful, and, of course, true series of events, which must be retained for posterity. Lies and inventions are not inscribed in clay—and definitely not dreams.
And this is what happened. After mankind had finally invented writing, or rather had learned it from the gods, what was written down were commercial agreements and later royal decrees or reports of wars and battles. The few, hand-picked experts who were capable of writing did not use this power to record rubbish. The clay tablets were not there to immortalize any dreamer’s fantasy. The only things written down were those which were of truly outstanding importance—including tales about the gods, their superhuman weapons and supernatural power. Such tales already existed and were not suddenly invented. There was no place for trivial or escapist literature in the holy texts. Not only the rulers but also the priests would have absolutely refused to countenance that.
So why are descriptions of a mysterious technology of the gods to be found amongst the oldest written records? What made these things so important that they were written down at all? The Epic of Gilgamesh was written thousands of years BC, as were the stories of the first Chinese emperors and their heavenly dragons. And in the most ancient version of the Gilgamesh story, written on clay tablets 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, we find the robot Chumbaba, the “tower of the gods,” the “door that speaks like a person” and the lightning-rapid missiles of the gods. We also hear of a space journey of course, for Gilgamesh is carried up away from the earth, and describes the view from a great height.
I’d better stop there; I have already explored these tales in other books, to which those who would like to look further can refer.1, 2
The historian Dr. Ernst Curtius wrote 190 years ago: “History does not know about the infancy of any race.”3 This is true, for each people only enters historical record after it has formed a community about which something can be written. Herodotus was certainly not the first historian on the planet, history was written down centuries and millennia before him. Herodotus was a scholarly person. He did a thorough job in the libraries of his time, for he was always curious and interested in knowing more, and wanted to find out the real truth about his Greek gods.
Through his diligent research he discovered the origin of the Greek gods in Egypt. He found out that the Egyptians were the first people to keep precise records about their gods and kings, and that they knew of very ancient festivals which “have only recently begun to be celebrated in Greece.”4
Herodotus discovers his Greek gods, together with all the rites dedicated to them, in ancient Egypt, and he has no compunction in being open about it, al
though his devout compatriots could easily take offense. Isis, Herodotus declares quite matter-of-factly, is none other than the Egyptian name for Demeter. The goddess Athene and the gods Helios, Ares, and many others all have their origin in Egypt. In the second book of his Histories, from Chapter 60 onward, Herodotus describes diverse festivals honoring these gods, and how they took place in Egypt. He always retains a critical perspective, distinguishing between personal experiences and things which have only been told him at second hand. He also meticulously notes things he does not wish to write about, either because they are sexually offensive, or because he does not believe what he has been told. Herodotus even pursues the question as to why these superhuman beings are called “gods” at all. The answer he comes up with leaves no room for doubt: because they were the original teachers of mankind, and also because “they ordered everything and shared out everything amongst themselves.”5
Herodotus also derives from his Egyptian sources year-counts which can make us blink in surprise. In Chapter 43 of his second book, he writes that Heracles was known to the Egyptians as a very ancient god. From Heracles to the reign of Amasis, he says, 17,000 years passed. And then he gives two numbers which make the heads of our scholars spin. To the travelling Herodotus—and all this of course happened about 450 BC—the Theban priests read out the names of 341 generations of rulers, which they had carefully recorded. These 341 generations correspond, according to Herodotus, to 11,340 years, and since then there have been “no further gods in human form” in Egypt. Herodotus was not just chatting with simple stonemasons or gossiping traders. The people he was talking to were educated priests; and when, astonished, he asked them if this was true, this elite of priests confirmed that the 341 kings had been people “quite different from the gods,” and that before them gods had ruled in Egypt, and lived among human beings. (Whoever wants to check this out can read book 2, Chapters 142 to 145 of Herodotus’ Histories.) And once more Herodotus assures us that the Egyptians knew “for certain, because they continually reckon the years and record them.”6 The same priests also read to Herodotus from a book the names of all 330 kings, together with the dates of their reign, which followed the reign of Pharaoh Menes.
Our sharp-witted exegetes, philologists, archaeologists, and religious historians of the present day cannot begin to come to terms with these enormous periods of time. Before written history begins, they know only the great black hole of the Stone Age, during which the human beings who had descended from apes slowly and surely expanded their knowledge. They learned to use stone tools and gradually developed a language. They formed closed tribes for safety, invented the arrowhead, the spear, and finally the bow, and at some point found out how to win iron from rock. At the same time, they put up gigantic megalithic constructions. And when they eventually invented writing, they immediately used stone styluses to imprint clay tablets with fairy tales that had a technological slant!
And our experts, who straitjacket their brains in endless conferences and discussions, and who quote from each other’s works all the time so as to “remain scientific,” cannot come up with any better explanation than the psychological one. They write sentences such as: “To place the chronology of the oldest dynasties before the middle of the 4th millennium is ridiculous and clearly invented.”7 Or: “Complete nonsense,” or: “We can happily leave this passage out, for it contains nothing but fantastic nonsense.” This kind of viewpoint is absolutely sure that “the history of ancient Egypt only really began around 3000 BC.”8 Any other version of mankind’s history is unthinkable, even if the chroniclers of the most varied peoples provide concrete dates. The holy dogma of evolution allows no other alternative.
In order to explain all the inconsistencies, people invent “moon years,” accuse the historians and chroniclers of making mistakes with their figures or exaggerating the grandiose nature of their kings, or think up types of calendar which actually never existed—such as the Sothis or Sirius calendar for the Pharaoh kingdoms. And what becomes of our much-praised “scientific approach” if we simply ignore all the dates which so many scribes and chroniclers so carefully recorded? Herodotus is far from being the only one to include dates and periods in his stories. In my last book9 I showed comparative figures from all over the place. The conclusion to be drawn is not that the ancients had a problem counting, but that we simply don’t want to acknowledge the reality of those times.
The Greek philosophers Plato (427–347 BC) and Socrates (470–399 BC) are still regarded, even by our highly advanced culture, as outstanding, sharp-witted thinkers. Their treatises and dialogues fill thousands of pages, and they were always at pains to get at the truth. Whoever reads Plato’s Dialogues will find out the real meaning of philosophy and dialectics. In his dialogue entitled The Laws, Plato enters into conversation with a guest of his from Athens, with Cleinas from Crete and with the Lacedernonian Megillos. These men also discuss past ages, and the Athenian says:
If we look closer we will find that the paintings and sculptures created 10,000 years ago—and I mean this amount of time precisely, not in the usual vague sense of the term—are neither more beautiful nor uglier.10
Why does the Greek emphasize the fact that he means a precise period of “10,000 years”? Because the Greeks regarded all numbers above 10,000 as anything from “big” to “infinite.” In Book 3 of the same Dialogue, the men speak quite openly about the downfall of earlier cultures. It is clear that knowledge of these extinct civilizations was self-evident in those days—and not just of small nations decimated at some point or other by war or natural disaster. No, people knew about a global catastrophe caused by a great flood. In Plato, one can read in detail about the eradication of whole countries and cities, and that only small groups survived in mountainous regions. These survivors, he says, had preserved the art of pottery, had lived by hunting, and could make blankets and simple weapons, for they could do this without iron. The use of metals, on the other hand, he says, was taught them by the gods, “so that the human race, in the midst of the travail in which it found itself, would regain fresh impetus and strength to develop.”11
One can read how the cities of the plains and by the sea were destroyed and all the metal mines were submerged so that it was no longer possible to get new ore. All tools were lost as well, and much knowledge, including the “art of politics.” Subsequent generations, says Plato, soon forgot how many millennia had passed. Many people interpret this Dialogue as a kind of assumption, as if Plato were saying “Let’s assume this happened, that the world went under and people had to start again from the beginning, how would it be.” But this view doesn’t have much mileage, for the mention of extinct cultures in Plato is not confined to The Laws. And the Athenian expressly says that he is talking of a precise figure of “10,000 years.”
But why should such a catastrophe have occurred? In Plato’s Politics one reads with astonishment about: “The miracle of reversal of the rising and setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies. Where they now rise, there they once set, and rose on the other side.”12 That sounds quite absurd, but in our time gains another dimension. Just imagine a globe and give it a spin around its own axis to get our days and nights. Now tilt the axis over and let the globe continue the same rotation as before—not, in other words, stopping its spin and reversing it. What happens? To the inhabitants of the earth it seems that the sun has changed its path. Of course it hasn’t really, but turning the earth’s axis in another direction makes it seem so. And a change in the earth’s axis will also inevitably lead to terrible floods. Ever since we have known that the magnetic field of our planet shifts, a change in the angle of the earth’s axis has been within the bounds of possibility.
Centuries before Plato, the poet Hesiod lived in Greece. Several epics, poems, and fragments of his have survived the millennia. The best known work is his Theogony, which was written between 650 and 750 BC.13 In it he mentions frightful beings who once inhabited the earth. The gods themselves had created them: dre
adful figures “with 50 heads, and from their shoulders hung down enormous limbs.”14 The fire-spitting dragon is also already part of Hesiod’s menagerie. Apollonius, living 300 years later, cannot therefore have been the inventor of the dragon in the Argonautica.
From the shoulders of the gruesome, snaking dragon grew a hundred heads, its dark tongues flickering and licking about in all directions. From each pair of eyes of the hundred heads light flashes and bums…when he looks his gaze burns like fire. And each of the appalling heads has its own reverberating voice, a wondrous multiplicity of sound.15
One can also read in Hesiod’s Theogony how the goddess Chimaera, from whom we get the word “chimaera” or “mixed being,” gave birth to a fire-snorting monster. The monster possessed three heads, that of a lion, a goat and a dragon. The dragon head “snorted the terrible ardour of a fiercely glowing fire.”16
Once again it is not clear where Hesiod got his information. It is assumed that he too used original Egyptian sources. His accounts are too colorful, too precise and too technologically slanted to have arisen in his own time. In his book Works and Days, he writes that the gods created four races before they created the human race: “First the gods, they who dwell on the heights of Olympus, brought forth a golden race of much-discoursing men.”17
The above quote is translated from a German version of 1817. Professor Voss translated the Greek to read “they who dwell on the heights of Olympus”. In newer versions of the same passage, we find a slightly different slant: “[gods] dwelling in heavenly houses.”18
Odyssey of the Gods Page 5
