The
Hekla event has been pinned down through tree ring dating to 1159 BC
with some precision. That date was followed by a twenty year
agricultural collapse in northern Europe. Tree ring dating has done
the same for us regarding Thera but without the same precision.
Radiocarbon
dating for the Great Pyramid, Great Orme, and Lake Superior are
coincidental and map the response to a huge new demand for high
quality copper well beyond previous capacity. We choose 2420 BC as a
working date although precision is likely best described as plus or
minus a century.
I
also conjecture that Hekla was part of a larger subsidence event
along the Mid Atlantic Ridge that actually induced the tsunamis that
wiped out the port at Gibraltar (see Rainer Kuhne this blog) and
certainly wiped out the port on Lewis and on Bimini.
The
evidence suggests that the global aspect of the copper trade ignited
with the demand created by the Great Pyramid. Prior to that I
suspect that we will find good indications of local networks but
little more than sufficient to sustain local need. More important
than that is that the Lake Superior copper provide the Minoans and
their successors, the Atlanteans a natural monopoly of the highest
quality bronze tools. Every other source of copper made crummy bronze
that was unpredictable in behavior without extensive working and
reworking. It was more suitable for brass if they used zinc at all.
This needs to be kept in mind with all ancient mine sites.
What
I expect to become clear is that the Minoans led an age of
exploration and succeeding trade enterprise that reached out and
touched effectively every meaningful corner of the globe. Seamanship
obviously preceded this and was already well engaged in this
enterprise before the Great Pyramid but it was certainly the driver
afterward. This was a leap forward.
This item was prepared by Dale Drinnon in response to my last post on this topic a couple of days ago.
This item was prepared by Dale Drinnon in response to my last post on this topic a couple of days ago.
-Now this is all well
and good but it does not go nearly far enough. Ever since
Archaeologists began checking their radiocarbon dates to see how far
the dates were off by using tree-ring chronology, it has been
recognised that the Bronze Age of Europe was as old as the Old
Kingdoms of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and in Eastern Europe the Bronze
age was very old indeed. Crete may be regarded as an outlying
edge of the very old cultures established in the Balkans and in
Thrace. One of the older sourcebooks on European
archaeology, Prehistoric Europe, stated in one place that flow
charts had been created for the establishment of metalworking
cultures the whole world over, and all lines led back to Southern
Mesopotamia circa 4000 BC by that reckoning (a second flow chart
was attempted for the spread of pottery, which was very much older,
and led to the disputable result that pottery originated in
Mongolia 10,000 years ago. Later discoveries in Africa
destroyed that notion) That first part is very likely true
although the origin of the expansion of the metal-workers has had to
be pushed further back in time.
Mediterranean Trade in the Late Bronze Age
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Now there is a general
problem in correlating Radiocarbon dates beyond a cetain point in
prehistory, and another in matching up the relative chronologies of
different places into an absolute equivalency. The second problem is
along the lines of Velikovsky's "Ages in Chaos", but it is
generally agreed that there are at least a few dates which are
commonly repeated that simply don't match up with the ancient
records. Now part of this problem involves Crete and part of this
problem involves the eruption of the Thera volcano which is often
said to have ended the Minoan culture of Crete. More modern research
has shown there are several discrepancies in saying that the Thera
Volcan ended the Minoan culture on Crete, and part of this resolves
into a dispute over dating the volcanic eruption and another aspect
involves the interpretation of what was actually meant by
"Minoan.""Minoan" culture which recognises a king
named "Minos" and outlying ports that also refer to "Minos"
are actually late in the sequence and refer to the period when the
Cretan Island Empire was being run by Mykenian Greek Militia from the
Mainland.This cultural phase began before the eruption of the Thera
volcano but mostly occupied a stretch of time that came AFTER it. On
the other hand, the beginning of the palace-building cultures on
Crete are much earlier and look to have been a local outreach of
Egyptian culture during the earlier part of the Old Kingdom. This
does not refer to the religion of the people already inhabiting Crete
and the associated islands, since the iconography and what we can
tell of rituals and beliefs extend solely from "Old Europe".
Hekla Volcano erupted
about the same time as Thera and possibly Aetna, but there are
problems with the dating for each individual volcanic eruption and
the problems are compounded in trying to prove the volcanoes erupted
simultaneously. When you are talking margins of error that can span a
thousand years in all, it is difficult to be precise. The date of the
eruptions has not only been given as 1000 to 1100 BC but also
after that, and also again as far back as 1600 to 1750 BC:
Velikovsky's date of 1500 BC merely takes the average.
###
Diffusion of Cultural levels by 2000 BC. Blue
areas are the highest levels of Civilisation, but the red areas
are next on down and are expanding. Green areas are agricultural
and nomadic with domesticated animals
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There is also a theory
that the aristocracy of the Megalith-builder area of Europe developed
out of principles deriving from Egypt and the Near East at about this
same time, and the change can be told by an increase of wealth in
grave goods and aggrandizement of certain wealthy individuals when
the older burials tended to be communal. Sometime around 4000 BC the
core cultures began to be much wealthier and a currency based on
silver and gold rings or bracelets was established. The idea of a
wealthy merchant class had a lot to do with the spread of the Bronze
Age, and originally the very idea of using Bronze tools fell to a
very special elite. Bronze tools were always more rare and
valuable than iron ones, and only the elite could afford them.By 2000
BC the wealthy merchants and the aristocracy they supported were
established from Britain to China and Southern Siberia, to Southeast
Asia, India, and to large sections of Africa North of the Equator.
Soon after 2000 BC we definitely start to see their extensions into
the Americas as well. Expansion was driven by the contining need to
find more and better sorces of copper and tin as the older sources
continued to run out. Eventually the whole structure exhausted and
people began to look into the practical aspects of using iron for
tools. The occurance of a major natural disaster (or a series of
major Natural disasters) at the time of the transition did not help
the situation any.
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