Have they moved the Pillars of Hercules?
In everyone's memory the Pillars of Hercules have always been between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, but that was not their original location. According to Sergio Frau the Pillars of Hercules are located between Sicily and Tunisia.
Who placed the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar and when? Was it really Hercules? And why there? And why did all those myths there, where the earliest Greeks never reached? Was the Atlantic Ocean truly the "Wild West" of the first sailors? And aren’t those riddles that crowd the earliest Mediterranean history perhaps just misunderstandings?
What was it? A dream? Or rather, an hallucination? Not a mirage, because I checked, checked, checked again. And I’m still checking now. And I’ve already spoken about it, in secret, with truly wise sages, who tell me that yes, it’s possible, probable, very probable... And that it has already happened in many other places, and so...
Anyway, it all happened suddenly. It was a flash, a lightning bolt: something that in an instant pierces your eyes, sticks needles in your back, melts your knees, and changes the way you see things.
How can I tell it?
I removed the Pillars of Hercules from Gibraltar. I put them back where the lands of Heracles-Melqart began, the God of all the Phoenicians and their seas. I returned them to where Sabatino Moscati said the Iron Curtain of Antiquity began, where Hesiod places his Bronze Threshold that divides Day from Night. I relocated them to the Strait of Sicily: the fortified zone, the Frontier, the Border. Beyond Malta lay the Wild West of the ancient Greeks; the treacherous waters controlled by the Carthaginians and their ships, forbidden to anyone who wasn’t Phoenician.
I took the Pillars away from Gibraltar, and...
It only took a moment: it was the most majestic and powerful spectacle one could imagine. How to describe it? Unimaginable if you haven’t seen it. Like having to describe the Victoria Falls, down in Africa, when suddenly the Zambezi—until then seemingly calm—bends at a right angle over a one-kilometer front and rushes to suicide down into that narrow, black basalt canyon.
At the Strait of Gibraltar, too, once you remove—if only for a moment, even just with your eyes—that "recent" Hercules and his threatening Pillars, suddenly—with the strong current flowing back between the two headlands that end Europe and Africa—all the defeated myths exiled to today’s Atlantic Ocean surge back into the Mediterranean.
It’s a powerful flow. Unstoppable: the most fantastic sacred procession anyone could witness. Centuries upon centuries of myths, monsters, and heroes all coming back together to reclaim the places that once belonged solely to them.
A flood of the Sacred. And by ancient magic, this western sea of ours—now devoid of history, deserted like the Moon—has returned to being the terrible sea of Baal and Cronos: thus, it’s clear now that they were two names for the same god. It’s the sea of Heracles-Melqart, who ruled over all the Sunset. Poseidon is terrifying again. And Typhon. And the Titans imprisoned right here, at the edge of the ancient Greek world.
And from Gibraltar, as beautiful as ever—finally abandoning their Moroccan exile and rushing to take their place in Libya again, right where Ptolemy had left them—the Daughters of Night, the Hesperides, return. And there are the Libyan Amazons, too, returning from behind, tired of being confused—even by encyclopedias—with those from the Caucasus. Completely different people... And with them is Athena, who’s truly a bit upset and returns to Lake Tritonis: devastated by cataclysms, flooded with water, but still her lake, the one that saw her birth. There, where Diodorus tells us the most sacred coast of Libya began, later ravaged by earthquakes.
And here are the omnipotent Mothers: some of them, the first, plump like goddesses; others, razor-sharp like white marble, who dominated the hearts of the Cyclades, Sardinia, Provence, and Catalonia. Even the monster with the divided body, Geryon with his fine tawny bulls, resurrects and reclaims Erytheia, the real one: his Balearics with Ophioussa-Formentera, without the snakes, and Majorca, and Minorca... And now—no longer an inexplicable "out-of-the-way stop" in Heracles' saga—Geryon can finally stretch his legs: for that tiny little island of Gades-Cadiz, where he’d been forced to live until now, was never truly his. Too small, now welded to the Andalusian land, too far from everything, with no other kings to share power with. Even Heracles/Heracles, the one of the first Greeks and Mediterranean labors, finally has a reason to thank the Sun for the cup it lent him. Because from Tartessos to Erytheia, alone, he would never have made it: to cross the Rough Sea between Sardinia and the Balearics, indeed, either the Sun helps you, or...
And all of the Western Mediterranean—that straddles the 2nd and 1st millennium BC, when myths and fears were told in ports—comes to life with people, trade, and a good life. Homer smiles, pulled and dragged by everyone, everywhere, all the way up to the Baltic, stretched like an elastic to justify stories with no geography. Apollo smiles, no longer forced to winter in the Hyperborean-England, those three months each year when he leaves Delphi. And parading between unknown ancient gods are also the fathers of their fathers: the immortal peoples of the Saharan rock art; the hunters of Altamira. With bows—and cloaks and horses and praying hands—the bronze saints of the Nuraghes come alive again; the builders of Spain, Africa, and Malta’s megaliths return.
The mythological copyright falls. For the entire duration of the Sacred Procession, only those on dry land are no longer the chosen races. Same race, same face... Just look immediately after: Isis was worshipped in Verona, Aquileia, Paris. Mithra soars high, everywhere, as much as the Sun. Like the Sun. He is the Sun. Christ, now, is stronger in Africa, Brazil, Peru.
Myths, gods, travel with desperation. They are the antidote: they merge, talk, fight, ally, copulate, produce offspring. Mixed Mediterranean blood... Blood like the sea currents that—if you sit still in a good boat and know their timing like the Ancients did—will take you anywhere.
And yes, Gibraltar has reopened!
Slowly, overwhelmed by a weight he still cannot shed, Atlas also approaches. He doesn’t come in through the Strait: he seems to slide along the mountain chain that traverses North Africa horizontally, dividing it from the Sahel. Looking closely—and especially following his path on Ptolemy’s maps—he is retracing the exact course that the cartographers once forced him to take, who knows when. He heads back up, stopping just where his mountain chain begins in Tunisia, right behind Kairouan. But perhaps he’ll climb further, a bit further...
No longer are the Isles of the Blessed in the Azores, nor are those lost Atlantises submerged under Columbus’s ocean, the Sargasso Sea, the Bahamas, or Cuba... The West where Saint Brendan sought his Eden is a bit closer, just where it was for the Ancients, who, instead of maps, had only myths to guide them.
Everything is close by, everything is inside here: with the Pillars of Fear now at the shoals of the Syrtes, which the Arabs today call Sahara for all the sand there, crouched beneath the water’s surface to swallow even today the unfortunate souls who arrive.
Only the Mycenaeans knew how to cross it, in 1300 BC, with fast, well-made ships. In fact, now, seen up close, you realize that Giovanni Garbini was right: they were the Sea Peoples, not just Mycenaeans. They were the masters of that ancient International Trade that placed goods, drugs, and trinkets along all coasts: Lebu-Libyans, Shekelesh-Sicilians, Shardana-Sardinians, Tursha-Tyrrhenians who built towers and later would be called Etruscans. And Peleset-Philistines, and people from Anatolia, Greece, the Black Sea... Crews that knew their stuff, skilled at avoiding the traps of the depths, understanding winds, and reading the stars. We’ll have to wait until the Phoenicians, around 800 BC, to find others as good.
But weren't they the same people? Or the children of their children?
It’s an anamorphosis. An astonishing anamorphosis: with the Pillars at the Strait of Sicily—right where the lands of Heracles-Melqart began—not even Hyperborea remains up north, in Scandinavia, England, or Siberia, straining to send early harvests of grain, figs, laurel, and olive up to Delos every spring. Even Heracles in Olympia can finally bring the sacred olive from here, from the Mediterranean, because further north it doesn’t grow, and never has. Hyperborea like the others—by miracle and because the gods willed it so—shrinks for a moment, becoming a sea serpent and, from Gibraltar, where they’d exiled it millennia ago, it re-enters its place. It takes back its form: rock and good land on the path of the northern wind, certainly, but—for the sailors coming from Greece—just beyond the headland of Boreas, which in Ptolemy’s writings is at Bizerte, just past Cyrene, where the coast begins to open up, forming the two Syrtes that swallow boats.
It’s worth visiting Hyperborea and the other Isles of the Blessed soon, now that they’ve just reappeared where they were for the Ancients. The bulldozers today are devouring them alive, piece by piece, day by day. They’re swallowing their beauty. Only spitting out History.
Before narrating this journey-investigation between words, maps, and reports of the Ancients in search of evidence, one confession is necessary: now, though, I believe! And at a certain point—with such a spectacle before one’s eyes—what does one do? They convert.
This is not yet the investigation. Who knows if it will ever be enough: or if it will remain just a sweaty catalog of the hundred, thousand possible investigations that not even ten lifetimes would be enough to recover lost time. Now, here, however, this is just an act of faith...
At this point, though, I believe. How could one not believe, after all... I believe! And I believe in them, the Ancients and not the Moderns, who for 2000 years and more had to reason with wrong maps in their hands. And now I believe that Zeus is the son of Cronos. And that Cronos was indeed imprisoned in a tower, on an island, where the Sun sets. And that he swallowed, one after the other, his children. I believe too that Delphi was truly the Navel of the World, placed there, nestled on its eagle peak, dominating right and left, East and West, on the 39th parallel. And I also believe that, right there, those two golden eagles released by Zeus from the edges of the known world met.
Now, who could have imagined, I even believe that those boundaries are marked by two petrified Giants, frozen there, buried alive. And that these two Giants are brothers, as today’s DNA still connects Sardinians and Anatolians. And that one is indeed Prometheus, at the Caucasus of the Dawn. And the other is Atlas, by the sea of the Sunset. And that Typhon, the other brother of this buried race, remained imprisoned down there, beneath Etna, measuring from below—with that colossal mountain of lava, fire, and fear—the course the Sun took in the sky with its chariot.
And every time the Sun rises, I now know that it’s rising from the Ocean of the Black Sea, and that it will disappear into the Ocean of the Sunset, which terrifyingly surrounds us, before the Balearics but after Sardinia. And I know that my world—when I must reason with them, to understand them—is only this. And that how Europe ends, I needn’t know anymore, since not even Herodotus knew... And I know well that beyond the Pillars, which Heracles-Melqart placed at the Channel of Monsters in Sicily, it’s madness to venture. For there his lands begin... And sea upon sea. But from there—from that very near Afterlife—the Ancients sent us not only Athena Tritonia with her amber skin and her blue eyes like those of the people of Cap Bon and the Chott el-Cherid, but also a hundred other children of the West, of Ocean, of Night, of Medusa, of Thetis... And even fears, anxieties, torments come from the darkness of the Sunset. The Harpies, the Furies, Sleep so similar to Death, the Drowning Sun... They are children of Night. Poseidon is the child of Ocean. And—and I must believe it, for they swore it—Poseidon’s son and Libya, Baal, whom the Greeks called Belos-Cronos, but whom his followers in the Middle East linked to the princes of Mesopotamia, Ninus, Semiramis: the Kings of Kings. And it’s sad, terrible, inevitable, but it is indeed in this Afterlife that, sooner or later, we all end up, far from everything: in the Isles of the Blessed, among the asphodels, if we’ve behaved well. To suffer like dogs in the mud and darkness of Hades, if there’s—rightly so—a grave sin to atone for. It’s Rhadamanthus who decides everything, Heracles’ mother is his bride.
And I believe Hesiod when he rambles on and tells me that there have been many sunken civilizations. The caves of Lascaux, of Cosquer, and a hundred caves drowned under water or buried alive with all those beautiful drawings from 15,000 years ago tell me so too.
And yes, I believe. And since I now believe, why not believe Plato's gang too, then? In Solon, in Timaeus, in Critias' words, since I’ve always snubbed them until now as mere creators of fairytales for UFO enthusiasts? Beyond the true Pillars of Hercules—and now, listening to them, it’s clear—there is an island, and from this island, you reach other islands and the continent that encircles everything... Its king is the son of Poseidon, the Sea. His name is Atlas. We’ll get there...
We’ll get there if the gods will it. If there is a certain answer to the Great Doubt, the beginning of everything: "Who—and when—placed the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar?". We’ll get there if the Library of the Ancients—read and reread with this crazy anamorphosis in mind—confirms it.
Before starting to tell the story of the Isle of Atlas, Plato doesn’t just have Timaeus say these words:
"...If we cannot offer you explanations entirely logical and precise, don’t be surprised; but—provided our words are no less plausible than those told by others—let us be content, remembering that, I who speak and you who judge, are human by nature: so it is enough for us, on these matters, to accept a plausible myth, and not search further."
Then he has Socrates respond like this:
"Very well, Timaeus. And the issue must certainly be addressed just as you say. For now, we have received your prelude with great admiration: so continue..."
If Herodotus is considered Fool
The List of Shame is impressive: the Great Ones ridiculed! "Homer gets it wrong..."; "Hesiod gets confused..."; "Herodotus gets lost..."; "Timaeus goes astray...". And Avienus? He even gets the sea wrong... He says he’s describing the Mediterranean, but instead, he’s transcribing ancient voyages along the Atlantic Coast and the North Sea... Even Dicearchus, one of the Fathers of Geography, makes a serious blunder... Imagine, he claims that the end of the Adriatic is farther from the Peloponnese than the Pillars of Hercules... He says it's ten thousand stadia from Cape Malea to the Pillars... Madness! A colossal mistake! Polybius had already refuted him, correcting him: "It’s twenty-two thousand five hundred stadia!" Not ten thousand, by any means!
But Polybius, as we know, is already modern...
And what about Silenus, who makes Etna a daughter of Ocean? And the three tragedians, then? Certainly brilliant in everything, but zero when it comes to cardinal points! Is that possible? And then: was there really anyone among them who actually placed those Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar? Or was there someone who, by chance, didn’t do it?
Big hunt again, this time. The problem here now is ignorance: is it really theirs? Of the Ancients? Or is it rather ours, since, when it comes to certain things—like the Pillars...—we have continued to misunderstand the most ancient Ancients?
No one seems to have questioned the exact location of the first Pillars of Hercules, so everyone confidently states: "They! It’s the Ancients who are wrong. Herodotus? The father of lies!" they declare, often without appeal, even the best contemporary scholars. And they provide meticulous evidence for it.
The Herodotus who talks about Tartessos? Professor F. Javier Gòmez Espelosìn from the University of Alcalá de Henares handles him with precision in Herodoto, Coleo y la historia de la España antigua:
"It is certainly probable that Herodotus, in Samos, heard vague reports about the navigator’s feat (a certain Coleus of Samos, driven by winds to Tartessos, editor’s note)... He must have paid little attention to the precise connotations that the news implied, especially given his deep unfamiliarity with the Distant West and his declared inability to offer actionable and truthful information about it."
And even here, no one considers the possibility that Herodotus was just being serious: that if Herodotus first tells you he doesn’t know the far West, but then talks about Tartessos, there might be a case that Tartessos wasn’t as far west as we think... We shall see...
The Herodotus who places the Celts beyond the Pillars of Hercules? He gets scolded by Alberto Grilli in The Celts and Europe: "Herodotus’ passage contains considerable inaccuracies, the most notable being the claim that the Istros (i.e., the Danube) originates from the city of Pyrene, instead of from Mount Pyrene, as Aristotle will much more rationally do in his Meteorologica...". But Aristotle gets it wrong too, though...
But does Herodotus really err by speaking of Pyrene and not the Pyrenees as the source of the Istros? We shall see...
Are they truly the ignorant ones? The List of Ancient Shame could fill pages and pages... But a question: is it really possible that, regarding the knowledge of the Mediterranean, all these greats, the greatest of antiquity, were as muddled and disoriented as we are told?
Homer, Hesiod, and even later Herodotus are, yes, the first lights that illuminate the Greek world, which, in the 8th century BC, had just begun to write again, but all around them in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Egypt, people had continued, stylus in hand, to jot down notes on goods, trade, journeys, peoples... Many of these people, often traveling themselves, were the very ones we read today. These writers often shared what they wrote publicly, reciting it, offering it to princes, reading it at festivals: the news had to be thoroughly checked...
Could they really have risked embarrassing themselves with such imprecise directions and erroneous routes, as we so lightly claim today? Might there not have been someone in the audience who then raised their hand to protest: "Homer, what are you talking about!? How can you say that Corfu/Scheria is far from everyone? That it’s surrounded by endless waves when it’s just a short swim from the coast?" Respect is due, then...
Here we read a book fantastic in many ways for all the information it manages to pack into 722 pages. It’s called Manual of Ancient Geography, and it’s not new: it was written in the mid-19th century by William Smith, a genius of historical-geographical erudition (and dissemination) from the English school. Barbera publishers in Florence printed it. Smith writes:
"Timaeus (280 BC), who is said to have surpassed his contemporaries in knowledge of the West, places Sardinia near the Ocean and has the Rhône empty into the Atlantic..."
And a bit further down, speaking of Herodotus, amber, and its trade routes:
"It was said to come from the Eridanus, which, according to the reports, flowed into the Northern Ocean."
Another error, then! Since today Eridanus is understood to be the Po (although, from time to time, fragments of ancient doubts between Eridanus and the Rhône resurface), and the Ocean has to be today’s Ocean... Of course, put that way, it can only be an error... Yet, some of those "errors" that made Professor Smith shudder have, in the century and a half since, slowly turned into truths, thanks to archaeology.
Smith, however, speaking of the Atlantic, writes:
"This ocean was known only through vague reports. Plato believed it to be so muddy because of a sunken island called Atlantis, that no ship could navigate it. Aristotle believed it to be as shallow as the Mediterranean was deep and so calm as to be unnavigable."
And he confidently explains:
"In all these accounts and in the ignorance shown by the Greeks, we can recognize the influence of the Phoenicians, who were intent on preserving the monopoly of trade in the Ocean for themselves, and to this end spread the most exaggerated reports. Many of the rumors they spread seem to have the same foundation: the truth was distorted, and dangers exaggerated. Thus, the opinions of Plato and Aristotle likely referred to the Sargasso Sea near the Azores."
Were Plato and Aristotle ignorant too? Or, rather, visionary (since, according to Smith’s interpretation, which is still the current one, the two were even aware of the Sargasso Sea)? Or instead, misunderstood, with an Atlantic Ocean for them entirely different from what it is for us today? An Atlantic like the one Critias describes, the Sea of Atlas beyond the mouth that the Greeks called the Pillars of Hercules, where there was an island, and from this island, one could reach other islands, and from those the land that encircles everything, a true continent...
Were the Ancients ignorant? There’s a story told today like it’s a joke. Or at least like the caricature of a scientific verification. It’s the one about the madman on the highway, driving the wrong way. The madman has the radio on. And he hears: "Attention! Attention! Special announcement! There’s a madman driving the wrong way on the highway along the stretch...". And he, the madman: "What do you mean just one? There are ten! There are a hundred, driving the wrong way!...". At the very beginning, steering this research against all usual routes and every reasonable hypothesis, I thought I’d save it for a self-portrait, once it was all over, inside a soap bubble. But then... Instead, as I hopped lanes, driving the wrong way in the lane of the Ancients, reading more, better, and with trust and respect for the most ancient Ancients, suspicion arose about the others, the Moderns. What if it’s they, instead, driving the wrong way?
What if they’re the ones who’ve passed through the wrong Pillars? What if they find themselves aligned only with the most recent ancient sources but out of step with the more ancient Ancients? Many must not know it... Otherwise, coming against the wind through those Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar, and landing in a hundred fantastic cities or islands without ever finding archaeological evidence, some doubt would have crossed their minds, at least once.
In Herodotus' Far West
Can geography hide history? Can a wrong map drown the most ancient myths—Atlantis included—in a sea of oblivion? Or in the Atlantic? Were the very first Pillars of Hercules really at Gibraltar? Or rather at the Strait of Sicily, where monsters and depths terrified the earliest sailors? So: who and when put those Pillars down there? Was it really Hercules? And Tartessos, the silver Eldorado that Herodotus places "beyond the Pillars," was it really Spain? And why does the great Reporter of Antiquity mention it together with Corsica?
The book by Sergio Frau (Le Colonne d'Ercole, an investigation) after a long pause at Tartessos, in an effort to truly understand that paradise of metals that Spanish archaeologists have been searching for centuries without finding it (and which famous Bible scholars like Ravasi hypothesize to be in Sardinia), and after noting that no real evidence links Herodotus’ Tartessos to today’s Iberian coast on the Atlantic, embarks on a census of the other Pillars of Hercules & Herodotus, finding several very suspicious ones.
The Black Athena of the Tunisians; the Tartessos of the very old and silver-rich times; the Celts, but from Spain; the fabled people of the Atlanteans, who have no proper names and never dream... It sounds like Macondo. It’s Herodotus. Herodotus mentions Tartessos three times. However, only once does he describe its location "beyond the Pillars of Hercules," which, for him, are indeed in the West, but in a puzzling, jumbled, boundless West, without signposts or precise directions. So, this new stage is entirely dedicated to verifying Herodotus and his Pillars: when he talks about them, where does he place them exactly?
Herodotus names the Pillars ten times. We've already seen one double pair (placed before Cape Solòeis, which he swears is "on the northern coast of Libya," the first two; after Cyrene but before reaching Tartessos, the other two). Now we’re on the hunt for all the missing ones. Herodotus always hints at them indirectly, taking them for granted. Almost as if to say: "Who doesn’t know them?" A bit like we used to with the Iron Curtain or the Yellow Peril... Then try finding the iron of the Curtain... Or the yellow of Fear... For this investigation, finding Herodotus' Pillars is as important as those of Hercules, perhaps even more so: they are crucial to establishing, at the very least, his view of the world, to mark where—according to him, who knew better than anyone—the Far West of the ancient Greeks began.
Herodotus wrote in the 5th century BC. He lived roughly between 485 and 425. He traveled extensively. He understood the people he met. He listened to them. And he respected them. He almost always used good sources... And so, he soaked up everything he could from Delphi, always being very detailed and meticulous every time his Histories intersect with stories involving the city of the Pythia, sacred to Apollo. For an author, rinsing one’s information in Delphi was always a guarantee. Herodotus must have done this. This is why his testimony is so important now.
His Sea of Atlas. Another journey, then, more Pillars to be tracked down, zigzagging with Herodotus, in Herodotus. Here he is in his first book, just finishing separating the seas of that time. He takes it for granted that the Pillars he’s talking about are those of Heracles: "The Caspian Sea is on its own, without mixing with the other sea. In fact, all the sea that the Greeks navigate, and the one outside the Pillars (exo steleon), called Atlantis (meaning 'of Atlas,' or 'Atlantic'), and the Erythraean Sea (meaning 'burnt,' Red) are one sea."
You read this and rush to the footnotes. But you only find:
"The idea is that Ocean surrounds all the landmasses, from which it is deduced that the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean should communicate by encircling Africa."
But that's not right! That’s Homer, who has everything encircled by Ocean... Yes, Herodotus does talk about Ocean, but in entirely different terms (II. 23), seemingly distinguishing it from that Atlantic, which he places, confidently, beyond the Pillars and on which he feels he can testify without doubt.
Whereas:
"Whoever, while speaking of Ocean, has brought the account into unknown matters, cannot even be refuted; as for me, I do not know of the existence of an Ocean river; I believe, instead, that Homer or one of the poets who lived before invented the name and introduced it into poetry."
"Atlantis," then... "Red Sea," then... But an "Atlantis" isolated and, in any case, distinct from Okeanos, it seems. And a strange Red Sea that you still don’t quite know what it is, where it is, or how big it is. Well, we shall see...
The Ligurians, but from Spain. Second book (par. 33), second Pillars. Again, Pillars of Heracles & Herodotus together:
"The river Ister (the Danube, editor’s note), which rises from the territory of the Celts and the city of Pyrene, flows and divides Europe in half. The Celts live beyond the Pillars of Heracles and border the Cinesii, who are the last of the inhabitants of Europe toward the West. Flowing through all of Europe, the Ister empties into the sea, the Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea, editor’s note), where the colonists from Miletus inhabit Istria."
The overcrowding beyond Gibraltar of these Celtic peoples—who, as we know, formed the heart of Europe—seems very bizarre, suspicious. Having doubts already in mind... it becomes even more so when you try to find out who exactly these Cinesii were, their neighbors. In encyclopedias and dictionaries of classical antiquities, the Cinesii are practically extinct. In fact, they are extinct. They’ve disappeared from Utet, the Garzantina, the old Pomba, from Zingarelli... In the Schenkl-Brunetti Greek dictionary, there’s just a brief mention: "Iberian people. Herodotus." In the Gemoll: the same...
Treccani? God bless Treccani!
Cinesii? "An ancient people of Ligurian origin (!!!), from the southwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula in today’s Algarve region. For Herodotus, the Cinesii beyond the Pillars of Hercules were the last people of Europe to the West. After the Iberian expansion (3rd century BC), they disappeared." The Cinesii also survive in five lines in the Devoto-Oli, where their "s" becomes a "t": "Cinetes: ethnic name. An ancient people of Ligurian origin (!), according to Herodotus, they were the last people of Europe to the West, disappearing after the Iberian expansion." Devoto was someone who knew a lot about the ancient peoples of Italy... It must be thanks to him that these Cinesii-Cinetes are still around. Without this testimony from Herodotus pushing them to the edges of the world, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, these Cinesii would likely stay, more or less peacefully, in Liguria.
The Celts of Spain? Indeed. Just like their neighbors, that International of Celts who, by their nature, would fit well there, where the Danube really originates, and where we’ve always imagined them so far: forming the heart of the Old Continent, as even archaeology attests... So much so that, placed down there beyond the Pillars of Gibraltar, in Spain, they surprise just about everyone.
Even José Luis Maya González, head of the Chair of Prehistory in Barcelona, is astonished... Maya González has dug and explored all over Spain. He’s pierced through millennia: Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age...
And he writes:
"Although the term Celts is usually associated with Europe north of the Alps and the sources of the Danube, paradoxically, some of the earliest references to these peoples indicate their presence on the Iberian Peninsula. This is the case with Herodotus, whom we have already mentioned when speaking of the Celtic presence beyond the Pillars of Hercules or the Strait of Gibraltar, and therefore near the Atlantic coasts and close to the westernmost population."
So: the Celts ended up there, paradoxically, only because Herodotus placed them beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which—normally, habitually—are understood to be Gibraltar, hence...
You also search for the Celts in Venceslas Kruta’s Superdictionary (Les Celtes, Bouquins Laffont) and first, you find yourself catapulted among many Spanish Celts from afar, but then you search deeper and see that even for him—who is the Grand Priest of the Celtic World—these other Celts placed down there, from an archaeological standpoint dated to the 5th century (which would be the right one), aren’t very convincing...
Kruta, then, page 123:
"The historical migrations of the Celts in Italy and the Danubian regions provided specialists with the foundations of a model of Celtic settlement in Europe, which would have occurred through progressive expansion from a central nucleus, identified in the central-western Hallstatt area covering the northeast and east of present-day France, southern Belgium, southern Germany, Switzerland, western Austria, and Bohemia."
And Spain, no?
Kruta continues:
"It is from this initial nucleus that the Celts would have proceeded from the 6th century BC, not only to the south and southeast but also to the west and southwest."
Yes, but Spain?
Kruta goes on:
"The clues to the stages of this expansion, which were not attested in the sources, should therefore be sought in the spread of Hallstatt materials typical of this cultural area or in that of later La Tène materials. A radial model, at first glance very satisfying, has been established, which features in most syntheses dedicated to the Celts, even in very recent ones."
A radiation from the heart of Europe, then. But now, Spain? Here it is:
"It is true that the case of the Celts of the Iberian Peninsula integrates rather poorly into this scheme, but people insist on pointing out Hallstatt or La Tène elements to support the existence of direct links that would have connected them to the historical Celts or their Hallstatt ancestors... The result was never very convincing..."
In short: even Kruta doesn’t really see these Celts in Spain. Nothing definitive, of course... Especially when trying to understand whether it is correct to use them as a lever to move the Pillars.
However, the following remains on record:
- archaeological evidence mostly places the Celts at the heart of Europe;
- a Spaniard who knows a lot says it’s "paradoxical" that Herodotus places them there, in his land, and that they make little sense there;
- that—this being even more paradoxical—he places them only there, "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" right where that "Danube of the Pyrenees" of his originates as well.
Clear, right? No. But it’s still Herodotus... And Herodotus, obviously, is Herodotus... How can you not believe him? You might admit, perhaps, that he’s mistaken about the sources of the Istro-Danube. That he knows nothing about those sources in the Black Forest... But with the indulgence that one always grants geniuses who, as we know, with practical things... But certainly not about the peoples, who are his specialty...
So—if you really have to choose and sacrifice part of his testimony—you prefer to say he’s wrong about that city of Pyrene (as the source of the Istro), rather than about the Celts and Cinesii-Ligurians so out of place down there in Algarve that not even those who study them can really imagine them there...
Thus, the Celts—just to give credit to the great historian, even without substantial archaeological evidence—are dragged to Spain to play the part, somewhat muddled, of "Celtiberians," a term which, however—according to Maya González—only appears with the Roman invasion of Spain... And those export Ligurians, then? Those Ligurian-Cinesii also ended up down there—but only to disappear immediately—beyond Gibraltar, where no one has ever found any trace of them.
Time for reflection! Is it really possible, though, that as soon as Herodotus places something (like Tartessos) or someone (like these Cinesii) beyond the Pillars of Hercules, they always end up disappearing? And, moreover, without ever leaving any trace? It’s clear that the Pillars were so terrifying... That no one ever dared venture beyond them... As soon as you pass them, you vanish! But did Herodotus really place his Pillars "there"? At Gibraltar? And who says so? So far, he hasn’t! If there’s one thing clear to us moderns, it’s that the Pillars of Hercules are the Boundaries of the Ancient World, the Finis Terrae, the Ultimate Limit, the Non Plus Ultra... Herodotus, however—at least if you read him with that initial doubt in mind—is crowding his Beyond with peoples, nations, and inhabited cliffs that seem to point straight towards the Americas...
Strange. Strange but true!
The "Mediterranean Curtain" that "divided" Greeks and Phoenicians
Who and when placed the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar? Were they really there already in the 5th and 4th centuries BC? Did the Far West for the first Greeks begin there? And those Enchanted Islands of theirs? The ancient witnesses, pushing them into today’s Atlantic, sound strange, false, bewildered. Sometimes absurd... All the clues, however, lead here: to the Strait of Sicily! After risking shipwreck with the Argonauts in the Syrtes, the enormous swamp between Libya and Tunisia... After encountering the first Gardens of the Hesperides (always there in the area, before, with Rome, they ended up on the ocean coast of Morocco)... After realizing that—in that treacherous sea between Sicily and Africa—disasters and fears crowded the minds of sailors 2,500 years ago... After recording that both the most verified Aristotle, as well as Plato with his Atlantis, spoke of shallow depths "beyond the Pillars of Hercules"... After measuring the Strait of Gibraltar, where even at its shallowest point there are still 300 meters of water... After all of this, the book finds what everyone considers the Iron Curtain that divided the world between Greeks and Phoenicians: were the Pillars really there? From the book by Sergio Frau The Pillars of Hercules. An Inquiry we preview part of the chapter "The Frontier" today.
Fernand Braudel:
“Great contrasts break the unified image of the sea: the North is not, cannot be the South; and even more, the West is not the East. The Mediterranean is too elongated along the parallels, and the threshold of Sicily splits it in two, more than reuniting its fragments.”
And Sabatino Moscati:
“Carthage, it seems evident, sought to lower an Iron Curtain halfway through the Mediterranean, to block the Greeks’ access to the West: we can now trace the placement of this Iron Curtain from Cape Bon, up through Pantelleria and Malta, to western Sicily and the Sardinian territory: these are the premises of the conflict with Rome.”
And Moscati, again in the same Notebook No. 238 of the National Academy of the Lincei (from 1978), but a bit further down:
“Armed with these strongholds, Carthage exercised a control over the central Mediterranean hitherto unsuspected, fortifying Cape Bon, establishing a presence in Pantelleria and Malta, dominating the western triangle of Sicily and, essentially, all of Sardinia. Beyond this area, Carthage's political sovereignty over the Mediterranean coasts was full until the clash with Rome.”
Moscati dedicated his life to the study and excavation of the Phoenician-Punic world. If he says so, it’s to be believed.
This is no dream.
Nor is it a delusion.
Nor even a flash: it’s simply geopolitics. Archeo-geopolitics...
And it really is a Frontier that Moscati is talking about! And, moreover, fortified! A boundary for the Greeks! Absolute control of the rest of the Western Sea! So what sense, then, at that point, do the other Pillars/Frontiers in Gibraltar have? What sense does it make to begin fearing Gibraltar, if instead it was, somewhere here, in the Channel, amid all the ancient monsters, that the most dangerous Iron Curtain of Antiquity stood?
Greeks, Phoenicians...
Same race, same face?
All relatives of Cadmus, so all brothers?
Not a chance! Not even close. Especially when it came to making golden deals or trading silver! The sources—just seek them out, they’ve been investigated by attentive scholars—speak of wars, tensions, destruction, skirmishes, bullying, and always there. Two, three centuries of "low-intensity" warfare, but with sudden flare-ups and constant terror.
Even today, Malta is a Fortress. It has the most beautiful, most powerful, most golden walls in the world. Of a limestone that, if the Sun wishes, and sets to striking them, and sets well, and caresses them just right, they all ignite with a wild orange hue, as if Andy Warhol had passed through to paint them.
Even Tunisia’s top archaeologist M'hamed Hassine Fantar, just across the Channel, writes on page 99 of Les Phéniciens en Méditerranée:
“Embedded in the heart of the Mediterranean, Malta, in the eyes of the Phoenicians, held a very high strategic value. It was fundamental, indispensable for the protection of their areas of influence.”
And Michel Gras, in his splendid The Mediterranean in the Archaic Age, published by the Paestum Foundation, writes:
“Carthage, at the bottom of the great gulf guarded by Cape Bon to the east and Cape Farina to the west, is in a position at once central and marginal. Central, because it is located at the point of greatest narrowing of the Mediterranean; nonetheless, it is marginal, as it does not fully belong to either the eastern or western basin...”
And, still, from there it guarded everything. It could even see the ships being launched by those in Sicily, everyone says...
In short: it could very well have been that the Frontier was here, while the Pillars of Hercules were down there, at Gibraltar...
But then why is there not one—among the Sages questioned so far—who tells us that! Who swears it. Who—at least with words—locks Gibraltar down as securely as the Channel was locked!
But then, if it really was like this—if the first Pillars were really down there—well, then it would have truly been a trap, another of those famous tricks of those cunning Phoenicians: a Western Mediterranean that you enter all calm and...
Then, by surprise—snap!—the Phoenician snare!
And you’re trapped there, in enemy territory...
Did they really do it?
The oldest sources—those up to the mid-3rd century BC, at least—don’t say so. In fact...
None of the most important authors of antiquity—whom we’ve interrogated together—place the most famous Pillars in History and Geography—at Gibraltar with certainty. In fact...
The more one investigates, the closer the Pillars come. After all, the war line was right here, at the Channel. Mario
Attilio Levi:
“…In the western part of the island (of Sicily, Editor’s note), and especially at Lilibeo and Mount Erice, there were impregnable positions, against which the Greeks were never able to carry out actions that could endanger Carthaginian dominance. The Carthaginian island positions of Malta, Gozo, and Lampedusa reinforced their dominance of the central Mediterranean and control over the Strait of Sicily.”
A bit further up... A bit further down...
But where exactly were the Pillars?
What was important for Carthage was always never to let that pincer formed by Lilibeo and Cape Bon fall into enemy hands.
And, west of that threshold, the Ancient Far West. Today, if you go to Cape Bon, your phone will show: “Trapani.” It’s Paradise for them, Trapani. Because there, in Tunisia, 12 hours of work—six days a week—are paid 400,000 lire a month, and across the Channel—if you manage to get there alive and not drown in it—you’re worth five times as much and, then yes, you can send money home. And when you’re old, you’ve even built your own house...
There, Kelibia and the other fortresses rise up powerfully to guard the sea. Still standing on cyclopean stones from who knows when...
They dot Cape Bon, once ready to alert each other with fire or smoke, or reflecting the sun on mirrors. And to pounce on those who shouldn’t have passed through there. Strabo, a century and a half after the fall of the Punic Empire (XVII.1.18), writes:
“The Carthaginians used to sink the ships of foreigners heading towards Sardinia or the Pillars of Hercules.”
The Punic bastions of Kelibia, with their great ancient stones, today form the foundation for more recent bunkers. They remind us that it has always been a tough area. With that sea of theirs, ready to intervene, always serving as an ally.
That the treacherous waters of the Channel were a true weapon of war, a military secret of Carthage—and that it had been for centuries, watched over by monstrous creatures before even by fortresses or by Pillars that kept the Greeks at bay—is now, beyond doubt.
It certainly became so after that terrible Pyrrhic victory of the Phocaeans in the Corsican Sea. The Battle of Alalia: as important as Marathon, as Waterloo, as... Had it gone differently, then, North Africa might have been entirely Greek by the 6th century, perhaps. A Magna Graecia as vast as the entire West...
(Indeed, these are precisely those Phocaeans from Asia Minor, devotees of Artemis of Ephesus who, just a few generations earlier, before settling in Corsica, had met Argantonios, King of Tartessos in Sardinia).
“From then on, the boundaries of the Greek world did not extend beyond Sicily and the eastern coast of Spain,”
swears John M. Cook, the former director of the British School of Archaeology in Athens, in his The Greeks of Asia Minor.
Sea forbidden to the Greeks, then! Even for him...
And he’s writing precisely about that 540 BC.
Year 540 BC...
And the Greeks are no longer passing through the Strait of Sicily.
Sea forbidden to the Romans as well from 509 BC, if the dating of the treaty between Rome and Carthage—which is widely accepted—is correct.
A Carthaginian defeat, beaten by the Agrigentines, sets the entire area on fire. It’s now 480, the eve: four years later, Pindar—in his courtly tours in Sicily—will begin to reinforce his odes with that forest of Pillars of Hercules that suddenly form a barrier for Greek sailors and their dreams of great voyages. His, as far as we know—Pindar, the trusted bard of Delphi and its colonial policy—was the copyright of that sign indicating Finis Terrae... And here, anyway, at the Channel there was a Frontier. The Frontier! Indeed: an Iron Curtain!
All of them, the Sages—from Plato to Braudel, Moscati, Gras—knew it already! It’s only us, they tell us “Gibraltar!” and we still believe it. We believe it, we trust it, we believe it and keep believing and trusting it until proven otherwise, at least...
It was here, however, instead, that the Lands of Melqart, Master of the West, began. Melqart: the god read, spoken, made into Herakles by the Greeks. The Hercules who was the master of the West, swore Aristotle.
In his book, Gras writes:
“Gibraltar was probably considered, since the 8th century with the first voyages of the Euboean Greeks, an essential reference point. In fact, the oldest Greek tradition gave the Strait the name of the Pillars of Briareus, from the name of a Euboean hero who was worshipped in the Euboean city of Chalcis; later, and probably through assimilation with the Phoenician Melqart, who had a temple nearby, it was to Heracles that they referred, and throughout antiquity, people spoke of ‘Pillars of Heracles’ and then ‘Pillars of Hercules’.”
Could the same reasoning be applied to another Strait? And, also, to another Briareus? Because there’s Callimachus who, in the first half of the 3rd century BC, in his Hymn to Delos, writes:
“...As when all the recesses of Etna are shaken by flames and smoke, because Briareus, who lies beneath, is turning over...”
Could this be the right Briareus?
Were the first Pillars of Hercules also here at the Strait of Sicily? The ones of Briareus? If they weren’t, still, a danger sign could have been placed there anyway...
What do you do, place the “Danger!”—Non plus ultra!—sign at Gibraltar and not place one here? Here, where everything and everyone wants to swallow you up? From monsters to sands? And often, then, they succeed too. What cunning people, though, these sly Phoenicians: Red Foxes with the wrong signs...
Here, in Malta, anyway, when you dig you don’t find, nor have you ever found, Greek stuff. Maybe just a bit, but—as we know—even vases travel... Here the island, if you see it on archaeologists' maps, is all dotted with tombs that are only Phoenician or Punic.
Here, right here—and Giorgio Casti, the inventor of the monthly Bolina, assures it, a maritime tool for sailors arriving by boat from the East—you would want a Port Captaincy, or a temple to Melqart/Herakles, to guide you through a route that from here onwards becomes terribly risky. After all, it’s here that the ancient maps of Ptolemy place two very important islets. One sacred to Juno, who had first been Hera, even earlier Ishtar-Astarte, and perhaps even earlier the Moon. The other sacred to Hercules, who for the Greeks was Herakles and for the International Phoenicians, Melqart. Were these the two islets of which Euctemon, in Avienus, speaks? These two islets are considered the oldest testimony, along with Pindar’s poems, on the Pillars of Hercules. And are they really the product of ignorance, as some say? One was sacred to the Moon, the other to Heracles. But—careful!—the seabeds are shallow and dangerous: to get there, you first have to lighten the ship...
Aristotle repeats it too: shallow waters and no wind.
Gibraltar? Out of place, off-topic: you need mud and sand along with the Pillars of Hercules. That mud and sand that—no matter how hard you try—you’ll never find at Gibraltar...
It’s here, at the Channel, where there are those sandbanks that the best witnesses describe. That Pindar in the Third Nemean Ode says precisely this about Heracles and his Pillars, in 476 BC:
“This hero, this god, placed them as illustrious testimony of the farthest limit of his navigation. On the sea, he had tamed enormous beasts; for his love of adventure, he had explored the currents of the shallow seabeds...”
Incontrovertible: shallow seabeds signed by Pindar, signed by Aristotle, signed by Plato... Here, yes, not at Gibraltar which is 13 kilometers wide at its narrowest point, and where—even at its shallowest—there are at least 300 meters of currents that make your ship shoot away with the odometer going wild...
It’s Malta, with its archipelago, anyway, the entrance to the funnel: you enter and you leave—if you leave—only after passing the Lilibeo-Cape Bon pincer.
But, if you’re a Greek of those years, what do you leave for?
To go where? If you’re Greek, you should have everything in order: charts, passes, seals... And yet, you still risk it all. Is it worth it? If you’re Greek, in fact, you don’t enter at all... Besides, to the left is Carthage, for days and days, forever, down to Lixus. Straight ahead, or to the northwest, is the Great Sea of Sardinia and the Balearic Islands, which, again, are all Carthage too. But if you go there, in the deep waters, you can no longer see the coast. And the coast—if you’re Greek and from the 6th, 5th, 4th century—you don’t let go of it... You keep it, there, in sight, as your lifeline...
And Malta really does seem to have been placed there just to signal that, with it, the journey into the beyond began.
The "Pillars" moved to Gibraltar: this is how Eratosthenes hid Atlantis
Really, always in Gibraltar? Or before, in the Strait of Sicily? As many ancient texts suggest? Where were the very first Pillars of Hercules actually located? The stakes are now really high: soon, we’ll have to verify the credibility of Plato and his stories about Atlantis. Because he left us written records that beyond that mouth, which the Athenians called the Pillars of Hercules, there was an island. And from that island, one could reach other islands and the continent that surrounds everything... Now, as we exit from the Lilibeo-Cape Bon strait, that Platonic "fairy tale" takes on surprisingly realistic features... The problem is: how, when, and why did the first Pillars of Hercules shift from the Strait of Sicily - where wise men of the past and present say there were cursed seabeds and even the Iron Curtain of Antiquity separating the Greek Sea from the Phoenician Sea - to Gibraltar? And who was responsible? All clues - 300 pages of clues - compel us to search the Library of Alexandria. The prime suspect is, in fact, its Magnificent Director: Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the Father of Modern Geography.
Sergio Frau's book - The Pillars of Hercules: An Investigation drags that Genius of the New World before a hypothetical Tribunal of Geography. There, after hearing the best witnesses of Antiquity - from Polybius to Strabo, who hurl a hundred accusations of superficiality against him - and the best experts of the Modern Age - from Prontera to Aujac (the minutes of the trial are on record in the book) - they demand the condemnation of the Great Geographer for having shifted the borders of a world that had become larger, thus encrypting the first Mediterranean history... From that section of the book, we are today anticipating The Prosecution's Closing Argument.
We report the argument exactly as it appeared in the Prosecution’s photocopies: "There’s no doubt that everything changes after Eratosthenes and the communicative power radiated from his Library of Alexandria. The question that you jurors must ask yourselves here, now, is only this: was Eratosthenes' action negligent or intentional? A misunderstanding of what the External Sea was? Or, instead, a deliberate choice made coldly for the sake of symmetry? Because that’s exactly how, from then on, the New Order of Alexandria triumphed over Tradition.
And from Alexandria, that Order would spread across the world. A world that, soon, would become entirely Roman. And yes: with him, Order reigned in Alexandria. But all around, it was still chaos... The Battle of Zama happened in 202 BC: the agony of Carthage, which had begun 40 years earlier with the losses of Malta and the fortress of Lilibeo, became irreversible starting then. With the treaty of 201 BC, Heracles/Melqart, god and ruler of the West, hauled ashore the handful of ships Rome now allowed him: his powerful fleet would never again dominate the Great Western Sea. Remember: he had already lost Sardinia, along with Corsica, in 238 BC. Malta and Sicily had become Roman in 241 BC, along with the Egadi Islands. It was during those years that Eratosthenes redrew the world. The Iron Curtain that had choked the Mediterranean was now gone.
And the Pillars of Hercules? A good title, certainly, but now meaningless: a brilliant, evocative, magical place name ready to be reused at the first opportunity. Which is exactly what happened! For a totally different story, for the New Geography. A geography that would rename the Phoenician West with all its impossible names, written in squiggly lines without vowels and, moreover, written backwards. As if all of the USSR, vanquished, suddenly came upon us to be translated from Cyrillic...
Pillars of Hercules in the process of deportation... The countdown has already begun! They will soon take off, just like the Omphalos from Delphi...
“The Navel of the World, still stuck in Delphi? And just because Zeus had made two golden eagles meet there, on that sacred peak, released from the edges of the known world? Are we crazy?” Eratosthenes must have asked himself, impatiently.
“No way!” he must have replied. “New world? New navel! Done!”.
These are already certain realities! Thoroughly documented, Members of the Court... In fact, it was precisely this way that sacred Delphi was stripped of its title, and Rhodes suddenly gained the honor of becoming the New Omphalos, the Center of the Great Earth redrawn - created - by Eratosthenes.
No! Rhodes didn’t have any particular merits! Nor any sacredness to boast! Its real, unique fortune was simply being located, like Malta and Gibraltar, along what we today call - thanks also to Eratosthenes - the 36th parallel: the Fundamental Parallel.
A bit like Greenwich... Take away its meridian and...
Eratosthenes had been forced to do it, that sacrilegious insult to Delphi, to its priests, to Apollo son of Leto, to Zeus?
All Alexander's fault... And Simmetry...
Indeed, The Great - with that Aristotelian obsession of measuring, cataloging, and mentally possessing spaces and times - had not only conquered the world up to India, up to Samarkand, where he arrived in 329 BC (just a century before Eratosthenes’ major cartographic works), up to the Ganges...
He had measured it, step by step, bema by bema. Bematists, that’s what the Macedonian Emperor’s step-counters were called. Their task was to take evenly spaced steps, count them accurately, remember them, and report them to the cartographers. In Eratosthenes’ Alexandria - the heir and archive of all the data collected by Alexander & Co. in the East - they likely had the roughly accurate measurements of the world as far as the Ganges, whereas before Alexander, people knew barely anything about the Indus.
Thousands of pieces of data, confused information, but clear ideas, and a whole world to reconstruct: the most fantastic puzzle in history! Enough to drive one crazy trying to piece it together: the eastern boundary of the known world - that of Zeus and his golden eagle released from the Lands of Dawn - had always been at the Caucasus mountains, precisely where Prometheus had been chained as a marker.
The western boundary - the departure point of the other golden eagle, the one from the Sunset - was in the hands of his brother Atlas, also bound but in the sea, holding up the Sky of the Sunset. Always there, in the middle, between the 38th and 39th parallels, "the parallel of Delphi!", and probably - at least by measuring the equidistances on a modern map - in Sardinia. That’s how Delphi, sitting at the center, under the midday Sun, at the halfway point, made sense...
But try putting it all neatly together now - with all that new India - on a map... The known world looks overwhelming. The ecumene now tilts entirely to the East, widening towards the Ganges: it’s all disorganized, disoriented, asymmetrical, unwatchable, unworthy of Alexandria...
An adjustment of aim is needed!
"Done! If we could just adjust it for Zeus and his two eagles, surely we could do the same for Heracles/Melqart, a defeated god, and his two pathetic, obsolete, and now useless pillars, a monument to the fallen commerce of Carthage...".
And there they are, finally, Eratosthenes' Pillars in Gibraltar. There they stand, suddenly! Solid, justified, authoritative, incontrovertible, definitive, theoretical, geometrical. Brand-new pillars holding up the brand-new world. The Great World of Alexander the Great, finally stretched out properly on the newly drawn maps to provide certainties to a public that was a blank slate, ignorant of geography, a new science that hurls grand words like sfragide or dodecahedron or, who knows, gnomon, until no one dares to question anything anymore. Who could have, anyway?
And yes: these are the Exact Sciences, now! Stuff only for experts... And who dares speak against them now... If the Pillars are there, they must have their good reasons... If they were placed there - especially by the scholars of Alexandria, who knew so much - why touch them? So now they’re there - symbols of disturbing geometric power - closing off the West at Gibraltar. No longer indicating that the depths of the Strait, if you don’t know them, can still kill you with water and mud.
They’ve become satellite symbols, the Pillars of Eratosthenes. Down there, far, far away, encrypting the ancient texts. Preventing you from understanding anything about the world as it had been until then. Making the flights of the Myths meaningless. Turning off the light on the Dark Years.
Lighting up the sign: Dark Age.
They’ve shifted West. As if it were nothing. Like a road sign. Like sacred borders only to Native Americans that then a random Custer and his men, arriving there, feel free to rename sacrilegiously, without a care - on that same 36th parallel that now, from Rhodes, first skewers Malta and the Strait where the ancient Pillars of Hercules once stood, and then Gibraltar, the new Queen of the Borders.
A Queen without a soul and without history. A Queen, but without monsters or mud. A Queen, only because at least now everything fits.
They’ve slipped. And by slipping all the way down there, the Pillars have dragged far, far away the History, and the stories, and the dignity of the Western Mediterranean. They’ve sucked the blood and life out of the ancient Sea of Heracles/Melqart, the one that with a good wind would take you from Tyre to Carthage, from Carthage to Tharros, from Tharros to Ibiza, from Ibiza all the way up to Cadiz, the holy city, where you could continue speaking the same language, praying to the same gods, in temples all exactly alike.
The Sea of Heracles/Melqart, beyond his Pillars, that sea that had always terrified the Greeks, is gone: it’s adrift with all its myths. He himself watered down, dissolved in this brand-new Ocean. An Ocean that, of course, is no longer Homer’s and that will soon even steal its ancient name: the Atlantic. The Sea of Atlas and all those new Moroccan Hesperides.
Order reigns in Alexandria. And from Alexandria over the world. Rome will take care of claiming it and squeezing it as needed.
The Empire of Heracles/Melqart is no more. In fact: it never existed.
Even Atlantis has vanished. They dissolved like salt in the new seas of those maps that will fill the world’s eyes with awe, reverence, and admiration until today. Myths drown in there: they’re no longer needed. They don’t help you understand brotherly peoples anymore. Or warn you about enemy ones.
They become just strange, distant, ridiculous stories of a quarrelsome, half-crazy, half-dumb Pantheon, drowned in the New Sea and in absurdity.
The West is the Bahamas now. The Sun sets among the Sargassos.
The gods of the Sunset float, gasping, far from everything. Battered. Like the remnants of a shattered altar, of a crucifix in a hundred pieces. Am I wrong? You try bringing them all out again, all those gods, now that they’ve just returned, all together.
Acquitting Eratosthenes? It would drown them all again.
In 146 BC, Rome scattered salt over the flattened ruins of Carthage. Thousands of seals - unearthed from excavations - recall those Carthaginian scrolls burned at that time. They should have written entirely different stories.
A different History.
Melqart has dissolved into the sea. Every one of his words is ashes. That sea in which his name once reflected is in pieces: Melqart is shattered, now there’s only Heracles left... Acquit Eratosthenes? Think. Think carefully before doing so.”
The Judge: “Finished?”
The Prosecution: “Finished.”
Acquitting Eratosthenes? Those who truly wish to acquit him may stop here. Don’t even turn this page: now that the Pillars have returned to their place, in that Strait of Sicily that once choked the small world of the most ancient Ancients, we will leave the open sea of this investigation to dare the treacherous waters of hypothesis.
Hypotheses, to be clear! Not fantasies! Otherwise, we would have immediately begun working with a light heart and imagination... And then all this stuff, and what follows now, could have been written down in just two months, without losing a big chunk of life... It’s inevitable, unfortunately: impossible not to go beyond.
Once we’ve reached this point...
Yes, because just a little further beyond, past these Pillars of Hercules, there is - yes, certainly... - the risk of ridicule. But there’s also Plato, standing there like a siren... That 70-year-old Plato of the Timaeus and the Critias who, in the 4th century BC - a hundred years before Eratosthenes and his cartographic revolution - wrote: "In front of that mouth which the Athenians call the Pillars of Heracles there was an island, and from this island, one could reach other islands, and the continent that surrounds everything...".
How can we now plug our ears with wax? Bind ourselves? By what? By whom? It’s Atlantis that Plato is talking about, the Fairy Tale Island, the Sacred Puzzle Paradise of Poseidon, Throne of King Atlas (who holds up the sky of the Sunset) and of his twin brother Gadeiros, who has all his southern coasts fortified and guarded by towers.
Many great people have already shipwrecked there while searching for it... None of them, so far, though, had ever left from these Pillars of Hercules, these in the Strait of Sicily, now returned - without any license, for the first time, after 2200 years - to their ancient place...
Shall we try? Let’s try. But the investigation ends here. Now, it’s really a gamble to dare beyond these Pillars of Heracles of the Non plus ultra... It’s true: only madmen do it. But worst-case scenario, we’ll find ourselves gasping again out at sea, but at least no longer alone, like until now when only the Ancients kept you afloat. Shipwrecked, yes, but, from now on, in excellent, extraordinary company: with Bacon, who in the 1660s swore Atlantis was in America; with Frost, who in 1909 saw it in Crete; with Frobenius, who in 1910 placed it in Nigeria; with Bérard, who in 1929 said Carthage; with Luce & Marinatos, who in 1969 and 1971 bet on Santorini, and everyone believed them; or with the German CNR, now searching near Troy. With... Who knows, maybe a long time ago, before crossing the Pillars of Hercules - these Pillars of Hercules here, here in the Strait of Sicily - someone, seeing you anxious, tense, scared, would come up to you and say: “Fair winds!”."
Beyond the Pillars there is Atlantis, the mythic island
From the book by Sergio Frau, Le Colonne d'Ercole, un'inchiesta, we anticipate some excerpts from the Forum on Atlantis, Enigma of Enigmas. Rome (XXI century AD).
CRITIAS: "So: in front of that mouth which you call the Pillars of Heracles, there was an island. Those who arrived there could pass from this island to other islands and reach the continent that surrounds everything..."
COORDINATOR: One moment! We need an introduction... Today, we begin with the only existing witness: Critias. After all, he is the one who heard this story of Atlantis from his grandfather – also named Critias – son of Dropides, relative and close friend of Solon, who in turn heard it told in Sais, Egypt, in 560 BC, by a priest there. It was Critias, by reporting it to Socrates, who allowed Plato to give us that brain-teaser transcription which, although incomplete...
A fine group of people is participating in this First World Forum dedicated to the Island of King Atlas. More than just a videoconference: here, now, we are connected with Time and Space. It is also the first time, in about 2,200 years – since, according to our inquiry (and the cartographic hypothesis that resulted from it), Eratosthenes moved them to Gibraltar – that the Pillars of Heracles to be crossed to land in Atlantis, in the very heart of the Far West of the ancient Greeks, are back in the Sicilian Channel, where – presumably – they still were in 356 BC, marking the beginning of the Carthaginian world.
COORDINATOR: Back to Critias. I propose, however, that we skip any further introduction – skip the part where you Greeks are always like children, without memory because cataclysms occasionally wipe it out, leaving only the illiterate alive – and the issue of locating Atlantis.
CRITIAS (quoting the words spoken by the Egyptian holy man to Solon): "In front of that mouth which is called, as you say, the Pillars of Heracles, there was an island. This island was larger than Libya and Asia combined, and those who arrived there could pass from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the opposite continent that surrounds that real sea."
COORDINATOR: In what sense, "real sea"?
CRITIAS: "Because all this sea that lies on this side of the mouth I've mentioned seems like a harbor with a narrow entrance, but the other you could call a real sea, and the land that entirely embraces it, a real continent... Now, on this island of Atlas, there was a great and marvelous royal power that ruled the entire island and many other islands and parts of the continent. Additionally, they dominated, on this side of the Strait, the regions of Libya up to Egypt, and of Europe up to Tyrrhenia (literally, originally, the Land of Towers or the Island of Towers; later, Etruria, ed.)."
SPECTATOR: "Attention, though: here Critias, with just ten words, has just dismantled the framework of your hypothesis."
COORDINATOR: In what way?
SPECTATOR: "When he says 'on this side of the Strait they dominated Europe up to Tyrrhenia,' it seems to place the Pillars and their mouth firmly at Gibraltar. Or not?"
COORDINATOR: But earlier, when he talked about an island and a continent that surrounds everything, he certainly wasn’t talking about the Atlantic Ocean of today...
SPECTATOR: "The only possibility is that – at least in certain years – the term Tyrrhenia was used in a broader sense... Including, say, Sardinia and Corsica with their nuragic towers, as well as Apulia, Sicily, its islands... But that’s not attested to by anyone, not even archaeology... Or am I wrong?"
DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS: "At that time, the name Tyrrhenia resonated throughout Greece, and all of Western Italy, removing the names of individual populations, took on that name."
COORDINATOR: Now that's news! Go ahead, Critias.
CRITIAS: "...And all this power, united together, once attempted in a single move to subdue your region (Greece, ed.) and all those on this side of the Strait."
COORDINATOR: Did the priest really say, “on this side of the Strait”?
CRITIAS: "...all those on 'this side' of the Strait! Then, Solon, the power of your city (Athens, ed.) appeared heroic in virtue and vigor to all nations. For, surpassing all others in strength of mind and in all the arts useful in war, partly leading the Greeks, partly proceeding alone out of necessity when the others defected, after facing extreme dangers, they defeated the invaders and raised the trophy of victory. Thus, they prevented those who had not yet been subjugated from being conquered, and generously freed all the others who lived on this side of the Pillars of Heracles."
COORDINATOR: According to Massimo Pallottino and other great scholars, the story seems to depict the invasion of the Sea Peoples against Egypt: there, too – in the early 12th century BC – an assault from the West; there, too, a federation of peoples* – *the Libyan Lebu, the Sicilian Shekelesh, the Tursha (Tyrrhenians?), the Sardinian Sherden... – all eventually defeated... However, that was around 1200. To what period did you date the whole affair when recounting it to Socrates and the others?
CRITIAS: "In total, nine thousand years had passed..."
COORDINATOR: Reading the account you, Critias, entrusted to Plato’s pen, it mentions writing, bronze, weapons, chariots, triremes, and war carts for archers... However, we moderns have no evidence of such things at such an early period. Do you consider the date of 9399 BC to be certain?
CRITIAS: "Solon translated what the priest said into Greek..."
SPECTATOR: "Some have suggested that Solon misunderstood the priest precisely on this point: that the holy man of Sais was referring to 'months' and Solon misinterpreted it, translating 'years' instead..."
COORDINATOR: You’ll see – if you give us the chance – that we too, through completely different means, will arrive at more or less that dating hypothesis. Massimo Pallottino, a rigorous scholar certainly not suspected of archaeological flights of fancy, wrote in 1951: 'It seems, first of all, worth noting that the illuminating parallel drawn in 1913 by Frost between the traditions of the containment wars of the 13th and 12th centuries against the looming threat of the Sea Peoples and certain aspects of Plato's account of Atlantis is now more than just a simple possibility. There were, and still exist, those gegramména (written records, ed.) such as Timaeus, 24; books (the Harris Papyrus) or inscriptions (the Karnak Stele, the Athribis Stele, the Israel Stele; Medinet Habu, etc.), in which the defeat under Pharaohs Merenptah and Ramses III of two powerful foreign coalitions coming from land and the "islands of the sea" and pressing not only on Egypt but, at least for the second one, also on all the other lands except that of the Hittites, was narrated.' Did you hear that? And it's Pallottino, not Merlin the Enchantress... We were in Athens, victorious against the invaders. Please, Critias, continue with the story."
CRITIAS: "In later times, however, terrible earthquakes and floods occurred, and in the course of a single day and a dreadful night, all your warriors (of Athens, ed.) were swallowed up into the earth, and likewise the Island of Atlantis was submerged and disappeared. For this reason, even today (around 560 BC, when the dialogue in Sais takes place, ed.) that sea has become impassable and unexplored, blocked by the mud shoals that the Island created when it sank."
ARISTOTLE (from the Meteorologica): "The sea beyond the Pillars is shallow because of the mud, but it is not windy because it lies in a depression..."
COORDINATOR: Critias, can you repeat the priest’s exact words for us? From where exactly did he say these Egyptian invaders came?
CRITIAS: "...a great power that arrogantly invaded Europe and Asia at the same time, coming out of the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, at that time, it was possible to cross that sea."
COORDINATOR: So he uses the term Atlantic Ocean! What could Solon have meant in those years – in 560 BC – by the Atlantic Ocean? And what did you mean later, when you spoke of it, in 399 BC?
APULEIUS (from De mundo, published in the mid-2nd century AD): "The largest seas are the Ocean and the Atlantic, which mark the boundary of our globe."
JUSTIN (who – copying from who knows where in the 2nd century AD – in his Philippic Histories tells of the Phocaeans who founded Massalia-Marseille among the Ligurians): "And so, having dared to push to the farthest shores of the Ocean, they finally arrived in the Gallic Gulf, at the mouth of the Rhone, and captivated by the beauty of the place..."
COORDINATOR: So, despite the usual storm over the names of the Ocean/Great Western Sea, now following the hypothesis of this research, we could not only place the Mythical Island in front of the exit of the Sicilian Channel, but also bring that horde of invaders from the West, and moreover, precisely around 1200 BC. Who were they?
SERGIO F. DONADONI: "Two of these Sea Peoples are mentioned in the earliest Egyptian sources. The Luka, first of all, who appear in the tablets of Tell el-Amarna with piratical traits and reappear later among the Hittite allies against whom Ramses II fought at Qadesh. Then the Sherden – and more extensively – who also appear in Tell el-Amarna, in two letters from Ribaddi of Byblos, who had them in his service. But more remarkable is a stele of Ramses II, known as the Sherden Stele, which speaks of them: 'As for the rebellious-hearted Sherden, they could not be fought from eternity. They came, mighty (of heart -?...) on warships in the midst of the sea, and could not be resisted...' Beyond this clear description of the Sherden’s piratical activity, their position in the overall composition of the stele is noteworthy: it speaks of the peoples of the North, those of the South, of the East, of the West, and finally adds, according to the rule of Egyptian geographical lists, these 'from the middle.' If we consider, for example, the Poetic Stele of Thutmose III, less orderly, it lists the four cardinal points and adds to them the Center, represented by 'Those who are on the Islands in the middle of the Sea'; and so too in the Hymn to Aten, it speaks of 'South and North, West and East, and the Islands that are in the middle of the Sea.' In the text we are discussing, the Sherden take on a similar function: could it mean a similar geographical situation? It is hard to say no."
COORDINATOR: So, professor, you don’t place the Sherden in Anatolia – as has been done throughout the last century – but rather among the Islands of the Great Green Sea?
DONADONI: "The Sherden are not mentioned in Hittite texts: therefore, they cannot be located in Asia Minor."
COORDINATOR: Two dates mark the presence of these pirates in Ramses III’s lands: in a Nile battle in 1178, where they were defeated; with women and children, in 1175 BC, and there it was a real massacre. How did it end?
DONADONI: "The two groups were annihilated. The depiction of the battle comes with a brief and severely damaged text that provides only fragments of royal valor celebrations."
COORDINATOR: How then did you Egyptologists manage to interpret them?
DONADONI: "There is the figurative part: it shows the typical feathered headdresses of the invaders, the horned helmets adorned with a disc (or sphere) of the Sherden in the Egyptian army, and – in the confusion of the melee – the heavy chariots, each pulled by four oxen, caught up in the battle zone, where women and children are alongside the barbarian warriors: in a situation quite different from the old 'genre' theme that accompanies war scenes."
COORDINATOR: Meaning?
DONADONI: "Desperately migratory! On this point, the texts, despite the rhetorical dross, are fairly explicit."
GIOVANNI GARBINI: "If the Sea Peoples, who had maintained peaceful trade relations with the Egyptians for so long, at some point tried to settle in Egypt by force, it means that something happened behind them that pushed them to that desperate act."
COORDINATOR: "Desperate act" is an expression usually associated with suicide?
GARBINI: "Desperate act!"
COORDINATOR: Professor Donadoni spoke of an "anguished migration" with carts, women, and children, using this phrase for the second invasion in Ramses III’s time, in 1175. Now, you speak of a "desperate act." Could there really have been cataclysms behind those population movements...
DIODORUS: "May I?"
COORDINATOR: Please, Master!
DIODORUS: "The Amazons (those Libyan ones, allied with the Atlanteans according to what Diodorus writes just before this sentence in his Bibliotheca, ed.) were completely destroyed by Heracles, at the time when, traveling through the western regions, he planted the columns of Libya..."
COORDINATOR: You know, actually, about the Pillars of Heracles...
DIODORUS: "...Heracles believed it would be terrible if, having proposed to benefit all of mankind, he had left some peoples dominated by women. It is said that even Lake Tritonis (in Tunisia, where the Amazons had their city, ed.) disappeared following earthquakes, with the parts facing the Ocean breaking apart."
COORDINATOR: A testimony worth three! No, four! Earthquakes west of Egypt! In the Tritonide region, that is, inland from the Syrtes... With Heracles just about setting up pillars there. And, moreover, the Ocean right in front...
What if it reappeared now? Suddenly. If, from the middle of the sea, an island suddenly reappeared? And if it happened just beyond the Pillars of Heracles, which have just returned to the Sicilian Channel? And if it were at the center of all the oldest routes? And if this island now reappeared, as it was 3,200 years ago? Alive, rich, green, and astonishing? With 8,000 gigantic towers? And with others that are no longer there now? With "Anatolian" red and yellow necropolises from 3000 BC? And with that crazy ziggurat placed there, near Sassari, 4,300 years ago? And with all the metals of the world? And with a climate that – as we know – is almost always spring? With palms, deer, orichalcum? And rivers of silver, islands of lead, and mountains of iron, and firestones, and hot water springs? And with the oldest elders in the Mediterranean? If suddenly an Island reappeared, in the middle of the Western Sea? Already ancient, even for the Ancients. If Sardinia reappeared now?"
Thus Zeus abducted the sorrowful daughter of the West
Beyond the Pillars of Heracles, which between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC, when Plato wrote about Atlantis, guarded the Sicilian Channel, making it the Iron Curtain of Antiquity, there was an island that became a myth. From that island, one could reach other islands and the continent that surrounds everything... Atlantis was not a riddle! It was just a misunderstanding: the first encrypted story, by the new geography. According to Sergio Frau's hypothesis, developed in the book Le Colonne d'Ercole, un'inchiesta, when Plato writes about the wonders and cataclysms of Atlantis, the Pillars were not yet at Gibraltar, where Eratosthenes would move them in the 3rd century BC.
The route to Atlantis, therefore, becomes mandatory: toward an island that, dominating Africa up to the western borders of the Pharaohs, threatened Egypt. It was Massimo Pallottino who noted the similarities between the aggression described by Plato and the assaults that the Sea Peoples/Islanders launched against Ramses III: the first in 1178 BC, militaristic, with ships attacking; the second in 1175 BC, desperate, with wagons, women, and children. As if fleeing something terrible, happening in the West. Was the island they came from really Sardinia? Did that paradise in the middle of the sea, in 1175, turn into Hell? From Frau’s volume, we anticipate two excerpts from the finale.
"How – and more importantly, why – did Sardinia disappear from the Sea of Atlas? And where did it go?" How can such a colossal artifact, right there in the middle of the sea, breaking the routes, under everyone’s eyes, just disappear, as it happened? You doubt a hill of mud. And then, inside it is Barumini, a fallen giant... Of its 8,000 towers, 60 have been investigated, searched, scoured. What percentage is that? 0.000, who knows... Sardinia really seems like Osiris: quartered, dismembered, and buried here and there... "Here and there," yes. But "here and there" where? It’s as if everyone had torn away a piece of its history, glory, geography. Like pieces of flesh. Alive. Tartessos took its silver away. Took it to Spain, Spain. Hyperborea, dragged way up there, into the mists, stole its eternal spring, and the oldest elders, and even the peaceful retreat of the first gods: the mother of Apollo, the parents of Hera, the father of Zeus, who is, after all, always Baal/Kronos.
Atlantis, then, drowned in the Sargasso Sea, or something like that... The hordes of the first Tyrrhenians – that ancient People of the Towers, of the Tyrrhenian trumpets made by boring shells and of Pirates in the first oral traditions – who, at some point, around 750 BC, or so, became just the Tyrrhenians/Etruscans of three or four centuries later.
And what if it was actually Sardinia – or at least its absence from the First History and the Second Geography – the missing link that later derailed everything? And what if that "Everything" – which is, then, the Protohistory of the Mediterranean – had been reconstructed perfectly, but incorrectly? Like reassembling a necklace only to later realize it strings together too many riddles, in a chain. And, moreover – riddles and fragments – all linked, tightly, chronologically intertwined; so close, all so close to those years, around the 12th century BC. A Big Bang of new stuff. Mysterious. Dark Age, they call it, the end of the Bronze Age, the beginning of Iron. It’s the Age of Mud.
The sea, this time, really split in two. The butterfly broke. The hourglass Mediterranean of Gras split in the middle, at the Sicilian Channel: it dumped all its sand out there. It’s all sand and mud, the Age of Mud. And ships stopped. And regrets. It was then – in the 12th century – that the world of the Oldest Ancients disappeared forever. Better to let all that mud settle before getting back to sea to trade. It will take, then, at least three centuries to patch up the network of ancient trade and its thousand routes. And, surprisingly – with ships stopped, and the lead and tin of the West no longer reaching the ports – a powerful eruption of iron technology. Sparks of metallurgy flying around, falling everywhere. Igniting the world and the furnaces, all at once.
Take a compass. Point it at Sardinia. And all around – as far away from the sea as possible, at first – perched on rocky outcrops, or protected by plateaus, or barricaded behind the Alps, or acting as princes in Verucchio, or minting coins in Sardis, or becoming priests in Delphi – all up there, in those eagle nests – if you want, if you look for them, you’ll find the Peoples of the Enigmas. Like backwashes – debris from a massive storm surge on the shore, after the great tempest – those people.
Take the routes of the 2nd millennium, the ones that made you rich. Take them now, but only to flee. Leave the sea. Flee the sea. Go inland. Burn your dead now, for they are too many. And go, inward, climb up, up to those rocks. There, at least, the sea won’t reach you.
Aeschylus’s Prometheus:
"Tartarus hides, in the deep darkness of its abyss, Kronos the ancient and those who fought by his side."
Homer of the Iliad (there is a Zeus who confronts Hera, in Book VIII):
"And I don’t care about you, if you get angry, not even if you reach the furthest boundaries of the earth and sea, where Kronos and Iapetus sit, not enjoying the rays of the high sun, nor the winds, but all around is deep Tartarus..."
Suddenly, then, strange things start happening everywhere. Some still call it Indo-European Diffusionism. With everyone saying everything and the opposite of everything. Believe everyone? Impossible. Believe nothing? Madness. Choose one? A shame, though, to give up on the others. Dig into it like a mine of good stuff? Identify the right veins? Pull out all those fragments of truth – or doubt – that, when fused together, turn into hypotheses, precious clues?
Is it gold? Or is it silver, what Venceslas Kruta writes in L'Europa delle Origini:
"The ancient cultures of the Bronze Age are transformed or undergo the impact of population movements. Without having the breadth that was once attributed to them, these displacements are nevertheless important and radically disrupt the landscape of certain regions. It is not a short-lived phenomenon, but a complex process, perhaps linked to climatic changes. The result is the formation of cultural complexes that can be considered the initial nuclei of historical peoples. Indeed, starting from the end of the Bronze Age, the constant evolution, without apparent breaks, of the so-called Villanovan substratum of the Etruscans, the Celts of the so-called Golasecca culture of Northern Italy, their relatives in Central-Western Europe, the Venetians, the Ligurians, and the other Italic peoples, as well as that of the Illyrians, can be traced. This observation could not simply be a series of fortuitous coincidences..."
To find such fragments. Precious veins. Streams of solid thought... The only way is to try... To each his own mystery. But almost all at once, from 1100 BC onward. And almost all quite similar: Metals & Mysteries, fused together. As if, suddenly, a secret formula had lost its copyright. As if the best minds from a hidden, protected, invulnerable laboratory had to flee, racing across the world. And make do.
Rich only with their know-how: iron, fire, and great walls. Save whoever can. With what they know.
Homer writes:
"As someone hides a glowing ember among a lot of black ash, there, on the edge of the fields, because he has no neighbors around, keeping the seed of the fire, so as not to have to go, who knows where, to find it..."
Whoever knows fire, whoever knows iron, eats anywhere in antiquity. Just look at the African Shamans. Just pay attention to the name "siderurgy" (metallurgy), something that still brings you to the stars today. Just touch iron, for it’s still magical.
Just read Homer:
"...Here lay the treasures of the king: bronze, gold, and most laborious iron."
It’s enough to just listen to what Mircea Eliade writes:
"The blacksmith is the primary agent of diffusion of mythologies, rites, and mysteries related to metallurgy."
If you have learned to understand them, to know how to choose the right stones, the ones you strike and spark fire from, and that make fire with nothing, if you know those stones, you’ll get by anywhere. Even if the Sea turns against you.
You can even pretend to be a god, at that point... If you know the Sky, and know the eclipses, and read the stars... Then, if you hit the mark, you are the Voice of God, at that point... You can even claim that you ended up down there, chained to the Caucasus, just because you gave fire to the people, and that now you eat your liver in regret. And that an eagle is eating it too, but that’s part of the punishment, and Zeus sent it upon you. Yes, you can even say you are Prometheus. And that you have a brother buried alive right there across from you, on the other side of the world, along the path of the Sun, holding up the Sky. And that his name is Atlas.
And if you’re Prometheus, you can also make your fame soar with Aeschylus:
"Who before me discovered the hidden gifts of the earth, bronze, iron, silver, gold? No one, I know well, honestly speaking. Know this briefly: everything men know comes from Prometheus."
Iron, fire, drugs, and god: all together. They will believe you... Steal the Sun from them. And then give it back. Predict an eclipse for them. Turn the Sun all black. And then turn it golden again. Drug them, from time to time, as you know how, in the name of god. Make water flow for them, as if by magic; give them iron; give them weapons; heal them with medicine, herbs, miracles, holes in the head – and you’ll see, they will believe you.
Listen again to what the Daughters of Ocean say to Prometheus:
"The whole land cries out its lament. And the men of the West mourn your solemn honor and your ancient splendor and that of your people."
There’s a whole sea of people believing you. Mourning you. Aeschylus believes you: they will all believe you. They will believe. Suddenly. Everywhere.
Eliade:
"Even before changing the face of the world, the Iron Age generated a great number of rites, myths, and symbols, which have had significant resonance in the spiritual history of humanity."
Iron, fire, drugs, and god: all together. Suddenly. Everywhere.
There’s the Enigma of Urartu, the metalworkers of Ararat, the sacred volcano that is now visited by setting up a base camp in Sardar. The first king of those Sari: Sardur I. Then Sardur II. Then Sardur III... What is it, an apocalypse? Or a dynasty of April Fools? They will reach Sardis in Lydia. They will take to the sea again. Herodotus and twenty other authors swear that from there they come – or return? – the Etruscans/Tyrrhenians, those from there. Dionysius says they are our people, and he knows for sure that from here they set out. Strabo places his Tyrrhenians, Builders of Towers, in Sardinia, even before the Phoenicians. Are all three right? All three are right!
There’s the Enigma of the Thracians, who appeared suddenly, after so much bronze, to forge iron – and build cyclopean structures – around 1050, on the Black Sea. With Sofia still called Sàrdica at the time of the early Ecumenical Councils. At a certain point, certainties evaporate... And you end up suspecting quite a bit, even of the Philistines: also not at all clear in terms of their authentic origins. Survivors of the Islands, the Bible baptizes them – the Remnants of Kaphtor – when around the 11th century they start building houses and lighting furnaces down in Tzur (the "Rock," that is, the Tyre of Lebanon), which only Alexander will truly conquer, but seven centuries later.
The Philistines/Palestinians are blacksmiths who know a lot... They keep their mouths shut about how to make iron, how to temper it, how to treat it. And who knows how to reach 1500 degrees in that area, at that time... They open their mouths only to tell you, then, how much it all costs. Everyone says – because the ancient texts say so – that the Philistines come from Kaphtor, the Survivors of the Islands... But no one is really ready to swear where this Kaphtor actually is. Often – when essayists are in a rush, because they’re aiming for something else – you’ll find written, hastily: Kaphtor = Crete... But then – as soon as there’s time for more serious analysis and room for doubts – counter-evidence arrives in rapid succession, suggesting it might not be Crete...
Anyway: if there was a diaspora, this that follows may be its memory...
"On the beach of Sidon, a bull was trying to imitate a loving trill. It was Zeus. He was shivering, as when gadflies stung him. But this time, it was a sweet shiver. Eros was placing the maiden Europa on his back. Then the white beast plunged into the water, and his imposing body emerged enough so that the girl would not get wet. Many saw them. Triton, with his resounding shell, answered the nuptial bellow. Europa, trembling, clung to one of the bull’s long horns. Boreas also saw them, as they cut through the waters. Malicious and jealous, he whistled at the sight of those tender breasts, which his breath exposed..."
Testimony of Roberto Calasso (from The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 20th century AD).
But enough with poetry and fine words, for now. Here, we need to verify, step by step, the path the mythographer says: the abduction of Europa – according to our source, which is always well-documented – takes place in Sidon. (Many others – as we’ll see – say Tyre. Still others – more generic, like Homer – mention Phoenicia).
In any case, we’re there, on the Syro-Palestinian coast... From Sidon, then, they pass by Triton and presumably his lake, they pass Boreas and the promontory, heading – we know – to Crete, then to Lycia, which is still Asia Minor... But then, however, it’s not true that we’re "there"! This is a route from West to East! This one too: just like that of Euripides’s Phoenician Women! Identical! Not just a strange zigzag of a bull mad with love, as the three main stops might suggest at first glance: Phoenicia/Lebanon (that is, 35[°] meridian) – Crete (25[°], so Westward) – Lycia (30[°], so Eastward again)...
Certainly, one feels a bit ridiculous. Not only trying to understand the logic of an excited bovine, even if – deep down – it is Zeus. Not so much having to overlook Europa’s tender breasts, to earnestly measure meridians. But above all, getting excited about probing the most secret aspects of the newly abducted girl, profaning her true intimacy: that almost forgotten obscure etymology of Sunset/Erebu that Europa hides...
After all, Calasso – as a couplet of his fascinating book – quotes Salustius from On the Gods and the World, who warns:
"These things never happened, but they are always."
While here, instead, until now, everything has always been believed to be true... And that they always happened, but – at a certain point, only from a certain point onward – they were never understood. Never again... After all, if no one – except for the German linguist Max Leopold Wagner – has ever let you know that both Tyre of Lebanon and Tharros of Sardinia were both called Tzur by the Phoenicians, how can one manage to imagine a Tyre also in the West?
By Sergio Frau
