One
need recognize that they were executing a task of
grandiose complexity: they were forming
a plan of the development of all world history! No one
after them has undertaken such a fundamental problem.
They wrote, more than once, numerous volumes of writings
with the envelopment of the majority of countries and
peoples, but in the main it was the very same plan of
Scalger and Petavius.
What
is especially important, in this plan such a
structural-forming medieval result also is used as the
theory of historic cycles.
Quite a number of the names of the disciples of
their theory have been preserved. Traditional
historiography relates them to various epochs and
peoples. Here are both
Ancient Greece, and
Rome, and
China
and Central
Asia. The Roman
historian Polybius supposedly as early as before the
start of the Christian Era wrote a 40 volume "General
History," in which it was based on the notion of
"historic cycles."
Polybius and his confederates examined the
history of society as a rotation, as a movement along a
closed circle with a periodic return to the starting
point. This meant that mankind moves endlessly along a
wheel, stretched out in time.
Then an understanding
of the cycle as a spiral began to prevail, the
repetition of analogous, but distinct phases in a
forward movement, an undulating and progressive
development. (Yuriy Yakovets
"Cycles. Crises.
Forecasts" 1999)
As is explained in the books on "cycles," all
great phenomena and facets of life also have their own
"spirals," and each country, it is clear, also. They
endlessly are superimposed on each other, resembling on
the whole the entangled turns of barbed wire.
We will
not examine the validity of such a vision of history.
Perhaps there are its
own reasons in it. Let us say only that it too now is
enjoying relative popularity. In the times of Scaliger
it was overwhelming. And it allowed the chronologists to
arrange historical events as the theory suggested. And if they discovered
that, let us assume, on the coil of "ancient"
Greece,
which corresponds to today's coil, there is no event
similar to it, that has happened now, and then they sent
a duplicate of such an event into extreme antiquity.
Since history is repeated, that means at some time the
very same thing happened as today.
At the same
time, history should have been sufficiently consistent
and allowed to fabricate solid and convincing
genealogical rulers and to fill the past as if it were
with significant events which have great moral and
educational significance for the descendants. Scaliger and his
followers in the literal sense of the word created
history and were convinced that they were doing a good
thing.
They
fabricate history, unfortunately, in all epochs,
including too in ours, and in all countries, recasting
it in accordance with present political interests.
Let us look at how the medieval reality of
"ancient" Greece
was reflected in history. What do we know about this
country?
We know, to our
delight, much. To our delight for the reason that none
of the originals of the "ancient Greek" compositions
ever were in the hands of even the most conscientious
researchers. Some are only references in works ascribed
to various chroniclers, frequently also to the
legendary.
At that,
these works appeared after the millennium of the "Dark
Ages," when no one and nowhere recalled anything about a
Greece and a Rome. In the Middle Ages themselves
both the volumes of ancient historians and the poems of
Homer and also of other Hellas poets, and legends and myths were
found suddenly. . . Where they were hidden for ten
centuries, no one knows. And they still say that there
are no miracles in the world.
But
we will not find fault.
The
traditional views are such:
the history of Ancient Greece starts from the
turn of the 3rd and 2nd millennia B.C. -- with the rise of the first state
formations on the island of Crete, and ends in the 2nd - 1st centuries B.C., when the
Greek and Hellenistic states of the Eastern
Mediterranean were conquered by Rome and included as
part of the Roman Mediterranean power.
We
shall single out several bright moments in this history,
which are the most well-known to the readers. One of the most
popular is the Trojan War, described in the poems of the
great blind poet, Homer. Historians have been drawing
from them over the centuries one or the other signs of
the past. The poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey" became, per
se, a source for the construction of a whole section of
Greece's history.
The Trojan War,
as the traditional historians write, is a war of the
Achaeans against Troy at the
end of the 13th century
B.C.
According to mythological tradition, the
abduction by Paris, the son of the Trojan king Priam, of
the beautiful Helen, the wife of the King of Sparta,
Menelaus was the casus belli. Then irregulars of
kings from almost all the areas and cities of Greece,
who at sometime had laid claim to Helen's hand and were
connected by a vow to always aid him whose wife she
became, were assembled. According to Iliad
there were 100,000 warriors in the Achaean force,
and 1,186 ships.
An
attempt to obtain Helen's return by negotiations (the
embassy of Menelaus and Odysseus to Priam) failed, and a
siege of the city began which lasted more than 9 years.
The events of the final, 10th year of the war make up
the content of "Iliad." Apollo's priest,
Chryses, asked Agamemnon to return to him a
daughter who had been taken captive, Chryseis, but was
refused. Apollo, who had been
aiding the Trojans, inflicted a plague on the
Achaean forces. In order to propitiate
the god, Agamemnon returned Chryses' daughter,
but in exchange took Briseis from Achilles as his
prisoner. The angry Achilles
refused to take part in the war. The Achaeans
began to meet with failure after this, and many heroes
were casualties.
Only when the Trojans burst into the Achaean camp
and began to threaten the ships did Achilles send his
friend Patroclus, having given him his own armor. The Trojans ran to the
protection of the fortress walls, but Patroclus died by
Hector's hand. Achilles, avenging his
friend and in new armor forged by Hephaestus, entered
the battle and killed Hector, desecrating his body.
Hector's father, the old Priam, on coming to Achilles
prayed for the return of his son's body. At the sight of the
father's grief, Achilles softened and gave back Hector's
body. "Iliad" ends with the
funerals of Patroclus and Hector.
Excavations in the places referred to in the
myths about the Trojac war supposedly confirm the
historicity of a huge military clash of Achaeans with
the tribes of the northwestern part of Asia Minor in the beginning of the 13th Century B.C.
So write the traditional historians.
They suppose that the fall of
Troy occurred in 1225 B.C. The
precision of the date is astonishing if one considers
that no written sources which confirm it exist. Well and
when did Homer live? According to the
Columbian Encyclopedia (U.S.), the poems "Iliad" and
Odyssey were written by the poet for an aristocratic
audience in Asia Minor before 700 B.C. That is, if one
is to believe this report, the author lived 500 years
after the war. Just how come one can write beautiful
verses and about events of such long standing? One can
expect everything from poets. But, you see, Homer didn't
write anything, not ever: he was blind. Moreover, his poems,
written in small print, take up 700 pages!
Let us assume
Homer possessed a staggering memory and recalled all the
lines composed by him. But you see, the poems weren't
written during down his lifetime as well. Commentators
report to readers that a special commission in Athens wrote
down the "Iliad" and Odyssey" for the first time several
hundred years later. How did these works
then get to the commission?
The
traditional historiography promotes the following
version: fellow citizens of
the poet learned by heart all 700 pages, then retold
them to new audiences, who in their own turn, to the
next generations, and thus it was continued for several
centuries.
For
the sake of fairness, it must be said that the 20th century knows several
outwardly similar cases. When the Kirghiz, who live in
Central Asia, received their written language for the
first time (the first half of the 20th century), their national
oral epos "Manas" finally was fixed on paper, the text
of which was handed down from generation to generation.
In Uzbekistan
in that very same decade, the "Alpamysh" epos was
written down. Musicians and poets used special
techniques and methods for the fixation of the famous
Uzbek "Makom," the popular sung legends of hoary
antiquity.
It would seem,
in relation to "Iliad" and "Odyssey," one also can
assume such a variant. But all the trouble is in the
fact that these poems over many centuries are the "Dark
Ages"! - they were not known to anyone. The traditional
historians themselves write: "In medieval Europe, they knew Homer
only through the quotations and references from Latin
writers and Aristotle. At the end of the
14th century, the
Italian humanists became more closely acquainted with
Homer. . . Only in 1723 did the first translation of the
"Iliad" appear, done by the poet Anton Maria Salvini".
It is
asked, where then was the text of the Homeric
compositions for nearly 2,000 years? In which heads were
they kept? And did a blind poet by the name of Homer
exist in any event?
Vico
(1668-1744), the author of the work "Principles of the
New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations"
thought that the Homeric poems were written by various
authors and in various epochs. He, as also many others,
started from the works themselves. They were written as
magnificent verse, polished to perfection, and strike
one with a wealth of vocabulary and persistent
expressions, and this testifies beyond controversy to
the fact that the author or authors were grounded in the
solid poetical traditions of their time. However, we
know neither Homer's predecessors nor followers. As
early as the 20th
century, there existed the opinion that Homer created in
proud solitude. On the other hand, the composition of
the poems is loose, full of long, drawn out passages,
unnecessary insertions and digressions, which don't
relate to the subject. For specialists, this is serious
evidence of the fact that more than one author had art
and part in the creation of Iliad and "Odyssey."
A question about the authorship of the "Iliad"
and the "Odyssey" was put forward in 1795 also by the
German scholar Friedrich August Wolf in a forward to an
edition of the Greek text of the poems. Wolf considered
the creation of a large epos in an illiterate period as
impossible, suggesting that the tales were created by
various poets.
Scholars
were divided into "analysts," followers of Wolf's theory
(the German scholars Karl Lachmann, A Kirchhoff with his
theory of "small eposes;" G. Herman and the English
historian George Grote with their "theory of the basic
kernel," in Russia F.F. Zelinskiy shared it) and the
"unitarians," adherents of a strict unity of the epos
(the translator of Homer, Johann Heinrich Voss and the
philosopher Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch, Friedrich Schiller,
Johann Wolfgan von Goethe, and Hegel in Germany, and
N.I. Gnedich, V.A. Zhukovsky and Alexander Pushkin in
Russia.)
At the same
time, however, not one of them doubted that nonetheless
there had been a Trojan War.
The archaeological digs performed later, in
particular by Heinrich Schliemann literally according to
Homer's poems, also somehow showed that the Trojans at
sometime had been beaten with the Achaeans there in
particular where the "Iliad" indicated. Contemporary
commentators of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are in
full rapture from Schliemann: "The sensational
discoveries of G. Schliemann in 1870 - 80 have shown
that Troy,
Mycenae and
the Achaean strongholds are not myths, but reality.
. The consistencies of a
number of his finds in the fourth tunneled tomb in
Mycenae with
Homer's accounts have amazed Schliemann's
contemporaries. The impression was so
strong that Homer's epoch for a long time began to be
associated with the period of the flourishing of Achaean
Greece
in the 14th - 13th centuries B.C."
However, in
other works devoted to the Trojan War, the traditional
historians just as joyfully write: "Like Columbus, he
opened up a world more astonishing that that which he
had searched. These riches were many
centuries older than Priam and Hecuba; these graves were
not the tombs of the Atrides, but ruins of an Aegean
civilization in continental Greece,
just as ancient as the Minoan epoch of Crete. While not suspecting
it himself, Schliemann confirmed the truth of Horace's
famous line: vixerunt fortes ante Agamemnona - "Brave
men were living before Agamemnon."
So, finally, did Heinrich Schliemann discover
Troy or
something else? No one knows.
Indignation bursts from archaeologists when they recall
Heinrich Schliemann. They write that he was a
self-taught person, had digs while not observing any
rules and destroyed beyond hope whole cultural groups at
the site of an ancient settlement, which arbitrarily was
called Troy by him.
That is how the discoverer turned out.
As
regards the Trojan War itself, then it turns out there
is evidence of its immediate participants. That is,
there was. And these participants are called Dictis and
Dares Phrygius. Only they didn't live in great
antiquity, but in the Middle Ages and wrote not in
Greek, but in the Latin language. At that, their "dry
and monotonous account of the facts of the siege" was
thought of more highly in those times than "Homer's
incredible poem." In particular, not just anybody writes
in such expressions but the traditional historians
themselves.
The journals of
Dictis and Dares gave birth in medieval Europe to a multitude
of works which are combined today under the title of the
"Trojan Cycle." And their fame
eclipsed the fame of Homer until the 17th century itself: "Dares Phrygius became
one of the most well-known writers of antiquity."
But, perhaps, Dictis and Dares also were
invented? Nothing like it. Both
of them are mentioned in Homer's poems. If one recalls
that the text of "Iliad" and "Odyssey" appeared for the
first time only in the 14th century, then everything
falls into place. They really existed and really wrote
their journals long before the author or authors of the
poems which afterwards mentioned them in their own
compositions.
There is an interesting fact in the history of
the Middle Ages: supposedly in the 8th - 9th centuries A.D. at the
court of Charlemagne there lived the famous poet
Englebert. And he bore the name
of Homer! Would he one way or the other give his own
name to the Greek variant of the description of the
Trojan War?
However, we won't persist in this, because there
is one more fact worthy of mentioning. The 19th century German historian
Ferdinand Gregorovius in the thorough monograph, "A
History of the City of Athens in
the Middle Ages," gives a detailed alphabetized index of
the names of rulers, heroes and warriors. Among them is
also the family Saint Homer, that is St. Homer, who
played a noticeable role in the history of
Italy
and Greece
in the 13th Century A.D.
Representatives of this family were participants of the
"Trojan" war of the 13th
century. It is fully assumable that someone of the
representatives of this family - a remarkable poet of
the 14th - 15th centuries - collected and wrote down the
family legends of the family of Homers about this war in
the form of the two grandiose epic poems.
In any case, "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are belated
works of art which were created in the Renaissance epoch
as the poetic peak of all the "Trojan Cycle." (Gleb Nosovskiy,
Anatoliy Fomenko "Russia
and Rome," Vol.
1)
The Trojan War
in "ancient" Greece
is an imaginary reflection of the
Gothic War, which occurred in the early Middle
Ages. A detailed comparison of the two wars shows their
coincidence even in trifles. We shall cite some of the
results of the research described in the book
"Russia
and Rome."
The Trojan kingdom knows seven kings who ruled in
sequence. The first is the
founder of the city and all the state. The fall of Troy and the
death of the kingdom occurs with the seventh king.
The
Roman
Empire, described by Livy, also has seven
emperors who ruled in sequence. The first is the founder
of the city and the state. Rome comes
to an end and is turned into a republic during the
seventh empire.
Both wars last almost equally:
the first - 10, the second - 12 years.
The
Trojan kingdom was destroyed twice. And these collapses
are the only ones in its history.
In the history of the Roman Empire (according
to Livy) and its duplicate - Roman Empire III (in the
West), there also were two collapses. The second and
final is the Gothic War. These two collapses are also
the same in the history of Roman Empire III.
The
two newcomer-strangers Jason and Hercules destroyed the
first Trojan kingdom. "Newcomers from the
West. . . captured the city" ("Trojan Legends")
The
two newcomer-strangers Odoacer and Theodoric destroyed
the "purely Roman" Empire (First Empire), having invaded
from the northwest.
After the first
destruction, the Trojan empire, in essence also becomes
Trojan: earlier it had been
called the Dardan Settlement.
After the first
collapse, the Roman
Empire in the West changes its name. It is
turned into an Ostrogothic kingdom in
Italy.
A Tarquin-ruled dynasty.
The
Trojan name arose from the name of the new king, Troil,
who "built more than others in the city and gave it his
own name - Troy."
A new
name appears at the end of the Roman Empire II - the
Emperor Trajan.
The newcomer Greeks
complete the second and final destruction of the Trojan
kingdom.
The
second and final collapse of the Roman Empire III in the
West also is the handiwork of the newcomer Greco-Romans.
The
Trojan War flared up because of a woman - a so-called
offence to Helen, wife of Menelaus.
The
Tarquin War was caused by an offence to Lucretia. This
is most colorfully described by Livy. A quarrel breaks
out between the husband rulers of the kingdoms over
whose wife is better. "Each extremely
praises his own," and the quarrel soon develops into an
armed conflict.
In the tale
about Troy,
Paris
kidnaps Helen by force.
According
to Livy, Sextus Tarquinius seizes Lucretia and dishonors
her. . .
Don't let
the numbering of Roman Empires I, II and III confuse the
readers. In the opinion of the adherents of the new
chronology, the real Holy Roman Empire was
in the 10th - 11th centuries. The rest, which are
referred to by the traditional historiography in various
centuries are the imaginary reflections of the Middle
Ages.
The
parallels between the Trojan and Gothic wars are
endless. Even the famous episode with the Trojan horse
coincides. What is known about
it? It is so huge that
several hundred warriors were able to find room inside
it. It stands on wooden legs. It in some way got into
the city. In "Iliad" it says that the stupid Trojans
pulled it into Troy. This
is as absurd as the historical joke about the fact that
the shepherds of ancient Greece
were singing Homer's verses for several hundred years
while educated people didn't write down the poems.
(Dmitri Kalyuzhny, Aleksandr Zhabinsky)
Is
there anything similar in the Gothic war?
Of course. The Greeks also used guile in the
storming of Naples (New
Town or New Rome), which they had not been able to take
in any way. They penetrated it at night through a huge,
recently deserted aqueduct which was a stone tunnel with
an exit beyond the fortress walls. In the morning they
opened the gates, and the troops who attacked
slaughtered the still sleeping defenders of the city.
The
evidence of the fact that the famous Trojan horse is the
poetic form of the real aqueduct water supply is not
complicated. The first Trojan
chronicles which reached us, as we recall, were written
in Latin. And in Latin the word "horse" is written
"equa," and water is "aqua." That is, practically the
same. Moreover, the word
aqueduct - "aqua-ductio" - "that which leads water" is
identical to the word "that which leads a horse" -
"equa-ductio." There is a difference in only one vowel.
Therefore,
aqueduct also was changed into a perception of the late
foreign authors who confused one vowel, in horse, which
called into being a blossoming of
absurd legends about the Trojan horse.
It must be said that
there are a lot of similar events in literature, and it
concerns in particular the literature and not the true
history. Only the most well-known. We already have
talked about the fact that in the translation of the Old
Testament from Hebrew to Greek the Reed Sea, on the bottom of which Moses led
the Jews during the Exodus from
Egypt, was turned into the Red and even
remained so in the text of the Scripture. There also is
another famous example, but it is somewhat amusing.
Charles Perrault, the author of the world-renowned tale
"Cinderella," was not writing in the least about a glass
slipper which fell off the heroine's foot at the ball.
He was writing about a lady slipper, edged with fur. But
in the translation from the French, the lady slipper by
mistake became a glass slipper, and this was so in
keeping with the spirit of the tale, that the slipper
has stayed in it forever.
And so the
aqueduct in the passing of centuries in the poems was
changed into the Trojan horse.
The classical period in this
story, according to the accepted periodization, embraces
the time from the threshold of the 6th and 7th centuries
to 338 B.C. Greece had to defend its distinctive
character and right to existence in a struggle with the
Achaemenid power, which was realizing its expansion to
the West. Let us chose one moment in this battle:
In
480 B.C., a huge Persian army and navy under the
leadership of King Xerxes invaded Greece. Despite the
heroic resistance of a detachment of Spartans headed by
King Leonidas in the Thermopylae ravine, the Persians
broke through to Central Greece. The population of
Athens fled, the conquerors captured the city and
plundered it. The main events occurred in 479 B.C., when
the Persians endured two defeats - both on the land and
at sea. Greece had been able to defend its independence.
The
legendary battle at Thermopylae of 300 Spartans with the
Xerxes horde is well known to the whole civilized world.
It is glorified in many works as an example of
fearlessness and bravery of people in a struggle for the
freedom and independence of their country. The "father
of history" Herodotus wrote about it in his monumental
work, "The Histories," which is devoted mainly to the
wars of the Greeks with the Persians.
But
whether there was such a battle in actual fact and
really whether Herodotus lived in the 5th century B.C.
evokes deep and well-founded doubts. Having glanced at
Ferdinand Gregorovius' writing devoted to medieval
Greece, we will find there a detailed description of the
same battle. With only one difference: instead of the
Spartans, 300 knights were active in it.
The
events in the Middle Ages developed according to the
same plan as with "antiquity." (According to the
"historic cycle"!) Byzantine and Turkish forces attack
the country (1275 A.D.) Much about them is curious, the
navy supports them from the sea. They surround the city
of Neopatria. The city's ruler, having safely escaped
and stealing his way through Thermopylae to Duke Jean la
Roche, asks him for help. The latter gathers 300 well
armed knights and meets the aggressors in the
Thermopylae ravine. By the way, among the knights is
Lord de Saint Homer, that is, of the Homers. But this is
an aside. At the sight of the large numbers of enemy,
Jean la Roche pronounces the famous phrase: "Many
people, but few men." It is well known by the fact that,
it turns out, the Persian King Xerxes pronounced it
1,800 years before the duke, when he was preparing to
battle with the 300 Spartans. Here are Herodotus'
precise words: "Then, one can say, it became clear to
all, and especially to the king himself, that the
Persians have many people, but among them the men are
few."
An
absolute coincidence. Therefore, it cannot be
accidental. Ferdinand Gregorovius is in some confusion
from such a turn: "It seems to me that these words are
borrowed from Herodotus.. . Although its expression was
able to enter the duke's head simply at the sight of a
similar state of affairs." The author, naturally, is in
no condition even to imagine that it is a question of
one and the same battle, and that, most likely,
Herodotus was writing his book not in great antiquity,
but as early as after the battle at Thermopylae, not
earlier than the 14th
century. Otherwise, he would not have found out what the
most gallant and worthy duke had said.
Ferdinand Gregorovius generally notes quite a few
coincidences that occurred in the Middle Ages, with the
period of "antiquity." For example, of the sort:
"Suleiman, the valiant son of Orhan, crossed the
Hellespont
by night in 1345. . . Here for the first time the Turks
gained a foothold on European soil. The Byzantines
compared this horde of conquerors with the Persians and
even called them that same name." That which they were
comparing was not surprising:
people always compare something somehow. But the
fact that they called the Turks Persians defies any
explanation. This in any case what the German masses of
the Second World War called the French, recalling
Napoleon's campaigns.
The
next famous event in Ancient Greece is the Peloponnesian
War of 431 - 404 B.C. It is described in detail by
Thucydides, a military leader and Greek historian of
that time, in "The History of the Peloponnesian War."
The traditional
historiography reports that his work became will known
in Europe
thanks to the Latin translation of Lorenzo Valla and the
English of Thomas Hobbes. That is, according to historic
measurements, quite recently. Just where did the
book disappear over the centuries until it became
well-known in Europe? Traditional
historiography is keeping quiet.
The historians
are saying nothing and because of the fact that the
views of Thucydides', who is
well-known for his aphorism, are very close to the
logical creations of the father of political science,
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527 A.D.), who thought that
in history one must search for methods of strengthening
sovereign power and that its main goal is to serve the
interests of the rulers. Thucydides expressed himself
more abstractly, but per se he thought the same way:
"History is a philosophy in examples." With such an
approach there cannot even be talk about an objective
account of the movement of events that took place. This
is a view of a medieval historian who worked for the
sake of certain goals. And you see, between Thucydides
and Machiavelli, in the opinion of the traditional
chronology, is the abyss of centuries.
Let
us look at what Thucydides writes.
In
431 B.C., a war broke out between the Peloponnesian and
Athenian naval allies, which had seized all of
Greece
and received the name of the Peloponnesus. It continued, with a
short period of truce all of 27 years, but Thucydides
told only about the first 20 years.
Adherents of the new chronology think that
well-known medieval war in Greece
(1374 - 1387), which led to the death of the Catalan
state on this country's territory, was its original.
The people of
Navarre
and the Athenians participate in the14th century war. A most huge
congress preceded it, at which delegates from all the
areas of Greece
had gathered.