Re: Did the Trojan war really happen the way Homer said it did?

From: Franz Gnaedinger (frgn_at_bluemail.ch)
Date: 10/08/04 

Date: 8 Oct 2004 01:52:53 -0700

frgn@bluemail.ch (Franz Gnaedinger) wrote in message news:<2bf25455.0410062313.3992bda7@posting.google.com>...

I have to postpone my announced answer to the question

   what is language?

since o8TY got in my way again.

I began my scientific work 30 years ago, in the fall of 1974,
then at the official art school of Zurich, with a theory of
perception including an interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci's
Mona Lisa painting as an allegory of seeing (an English summary
of which can be found on my website www.seshat.ch) and a theory
on the process of civilization on the basis of a degree of
technological saturation, soon followed by a theory of language.

1) We see what we look at with open eyes, everything else we
don't see. 2) We really see what we seize by our mobile attention,
and these parts of our visual surroundings are magnified, while
everything else stays in the background of our perception or is
not seen at all. 3) We clearly see what we focus upon, a tiny spot
of our visual surroundings, corresponding to the fovea in the retina,
while everything else is seen unclearly. Why, then, do we believe
to see everything clearly? We just open the eyes and there is the
world in all its splendour ... This belief of ours testifies to
the marvellous organization of our eyes and of the mind: we move
and thus collect a knowledge of the world, and we move our eyes,
thus maintaining and updating our knowledge of all the many and
ever changing details of our respective visual surroundings.
Yet if we focus on a single spot, ever the same spot, not giving
way to the calls of our mobile attention that wishes us to take
up other important spots --- if we behave like that, and for
some ten or twenty minutes, our knowledge of all the casual
details of the momentanous visual surroundings dies away and
we can really perceive what we see by our eyes alone, without
the help and assistance of our knowledge ...

Point 1 is trivial at first sight, but not so trivial if we
consider the ratio visible / invisible, of what little we see
compared to all there is in the universe or even in the foam
of universes. Point 2 has recently been confirmed by a dramatic
experiment at the university of Chicago, as I recall. Observers
of a basteball game had been asked to focus on the moves of the
ball. Then a large man clad in a gorilla costume slowly passed
by. He did go unobserved. All the mobile attention was with the
ball, and everything else is not seen, as stated by my point 2.
Point 3 was established by visual experiments of mine: I focused
on a single spot and drew the room as it appeared to me. Once
a woman stood model for our drawing class. I always looked into
her eyes and drew her naked body as it appeared then. She noticed
my funny behaving and smiled at me. It became the best drawing
I ever did in my class. Then I saw a reproduction of the Mona
Lisa, looked in her left eye (in the center of the circle of
her head) and saw a smile appear, a beautiful, loving smile.
But when I looked on her lips, it suddenly disappeared. When
I looked in her eyes again, it came back. What happens here?
When we look into her left eye, we can't see her mouth clearly
anymore, we don't even see the corners of her mouth, but we know
well that these corners must be there, and so, guided by our
knowledge, we place them somewhere in the shadowy region of
her mouth and cheeks, yet, as the shadows of that region melt,
we place the corners of her mouth slightly beside and above the
actual corners, and thus it seems as if she would smile ...

I explained my finding to many people, and everybody understood
quite easily. Apart from the edus. I sent articles all over the
world and always got the same answer: very interesting but
unfortunately ... Erwin Koch of the Magazin of the Tagesanzeiger
Zurich wrote me in about 1984 that my work is very interesting
by unfortunately no reader will be interested in my article
since according to the opinion of the entire redaction everything
had been said and told about the Mona Lisa ... Five years ago I
wrote a message by the title

   Mona Lisa smiling

in sci.archaeology. Then, in 2001, one Dr. Margaret Livingstone,
neurologist at Harvard, published a book wherein she explained
the smiling effect of the Mona Lisa in the same way I do, she
got at least the fovea-retina part, while I don't know if she
also got the part about the mobile and the immobile attention.

Everything had been said and told about the Mona Lisa. Everything
had been said and told about ... (put in any topic of the humanities)

o8TY usually attacks me a couple of times. I counter his attacks
by telling you more about what I did in the early years of my
research.

Regards Franz Gnaedinger

> In my previous message I explained how the special geography
> of Greece triggered a leap in the civilizatory process. However,
> the same geography was a risk, since every political union in
> such a territory was prone to fall apart.
>
> I see a will to ban that risk, from the Middle Helladic period
> of time to Homer's time.
>
> Eponymous Tiryns, I believe, reconciled the female religion
> and civilization of Old Europe, which may have survived in
> Arcadia, with the new male religion and civilization of the
> Greek invaders (as explained over the past months).
>
> The main topic of the Iliad, announced in the opening lines,
> was the wrath of Achilles. Obviously the union of northern
> Greece, personified by Achilles from Thessaly, and southern
> Greece, personified by Agamemnon and others from the Argolis,
> from the Peloponnese in general, and from the surrounding
> islands such as Ithaca, was in danger.
>
> The bard or main bard of the Iliad may have come from the
> Peloponnese and flourished on the eve of the first Messenian
> war, while the main bard of the Odyssey could have been
> Melegistes of Smyrna (Izmir) on the ancient mouth of the
> river Hermos. Melegistes would have imitated the bard of
> the Iliad, and he would have assumed the pen name Homer,
> actually Homaeros, a word that means hostage and may also
> be a pun of many components:
>
> Hermos Hermaes homoios homaereo Homaeros
>
> Smyrna, hometwon of Melegistes, was built on the ancient
> mouth of the river Hermos. Hermaes was the messenger of the
> gods and may as such well have been Homer's alter ego in
> the epic. Hermaes also was the god of the thieves, which may
> be self-ironic on behalf of Melegistes / Homer, whose Odyssey
> is a pasticcio of texts by at least a dozen bards (according
> to Riccardo Mansilla of the Free University of Mexico who
> applied a DNA taxonomy computer program to the Odyssey) --
> he had "stolen" texts of other bards, so to say. Homoios =
> equal, similar, would refer to the similarity of the Iliad
> and Odyssey, while the verb homaereo = I unite would indicate
> Homer's wish to unite Greece and keep together the Greek
> mainland, the many islands, and the Ionian colonies on the
> eastern shore of Anatolia.
>
> What about homaeros = hostage? If, say, a member of the
> family of Melegistes had been taken a hostage by a ruler
> from an Anatolian kingdom, such an event could well have
> raised fear in the aspiring bard, namely that the union
> of the Greek mainland, the islands and the Ionian colonies
> was at stake, and the Messenian wars would only have increased
> that fear, which may also have been known to the bard or main
> bard of the Iliad. And then the two bards would have overcome
> their well justified fear(s) by composing their epics that
> united the Greeks by giving them a common root in history
> and mythology.
>
>
> Next time: what is language?
>
> Regards Franz Gnaedinger www.seshat.ch
>
>
>
> > The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and
> > China formed themselves along rivers, whereas Greece has an
> > entirely different geography: no village is farther than 60 km
> > from the sea, I learned in school, and the Greek archipelago
> > counts numerous islands and isles. Ruling and supplying and
> > keeping together the dwellers of such a territory was a great
> > challenge, which, I believe, stood at the begin of what we call
> > the Greek Wonder.
> >
> > You may remember my assumption that the lost original of the
> > Phaistos Disk was a pair of gold disks worn on the shoulders
> > by eponymous Tiryns and his successors. On gold disks, the hide
> > symbol would be a golden fleece, meaning gold ingots in the
> > shape of a fleece, and remind of the Golden Fleece retrieved
> > by Jason and the Argonauts either on the eastern shore of the
> > Black Sea or in the lower Danube basin. Homer in book 12 of the
> > Odyssey: "Of all ships that go down to sea one only has made
> > the passage, and that was the celebrated Argo ..." The passage
> > in question was, I believe, the perilous waterway between the
> > Black Sea and the Aegean.
> >
> > Anyway, the Argonauts, who may symbolize the Middle Helladic
> > sailors from Argos and the Argolis, were the most experienced
> > and daring sailors of their time, and their close intimacy with
> > the sea may be indicated by a curiously intertwined pair of
> > symbols on the Phaistos Disk, namely the wave, phonetic value N
> > (ny) according to Derk Ohlenroth, referring to nautos = ship and
> > nausporos = navigable, and the ship, phonetic value Y (ypsilon)
> > according to Derk Ohlenroth, referring to hydros (beginning with
> > an aspirated ypsilon) = water, in the plural waters, element of
> > a ship.
> >
> > The Greek god of the sea was Poseidon. On the Linear B tablets
> > Poseidon was even more important than his brother Zeus. Poseidon
> > was originally the god of the rivers, then he became also the
> > god of the seas. Furthermore, Poseidon was the creator of the
> > waterborn horse that served as emblem of a ship, as on the gold
> > ring from Mokhlos in Crete:
> >
> > http://www.seshat.ch/home/elaia.GIF
> >
> > Early on in this thread I explained that the famous Trojan Horse
> > might have been a ship with the bow sprit in the shape of a
> > stallion. Poseidon turned himself into a stallion when chasing
> > Elaia / Demeter. When Odysseus leaves pleasant Scherie in book
> > 13 of Homer's Odyssey the ship starts like a team of stallions:
> > "And now, like a team of four stallions on the plain who start
> > as one at the touch of the whip, leaping forward to make short
> > work of the course, so the stern of the ship leaped forward,
> > and a great dark wave of the surrounding sea surged in her wake."
> >
> > Dolphins are excellent swimmer. Their elastic skin makes them
> > swifter than many a ship. Modern ship builders are trying to
> > imitate the dolphin skin in order to make their vessels and
> > submarines swifter. The body of a doplin is closer to water
> > than the rather stiff vessels made of wood or steel, and so
> > one may say that the more properties of water are incorporated
> > in a ship the better it is.
> >
> > Now picture an Argivian sailor watching dolphins: These animals
> > are marvellous swimmers. They are born in the water, they live
> > in the sea, their flexible and streamlike bodies make them
> > swifter than any boat. If only our ships could be made in that
> > way, emerging by some kind of magic out of water itself ...
> >
> > Such was the idea behind the relations wave - ship and ship
> > - water on the Phaistos Disk, revealing a close intimacy of
> > sailors and sea that stood, I believe, at the begin of the
> > Greek Wonder, for seafaring was a challenge that triggered
> > many leaps in technology, science, and civilization.
> >
> >
> > Next time: reconciling and unifying
> >
> > Regards Franz Gnaedinger
> >
> >
> > > The rules of the game I played over the past months were simple.
> > > Relying on Derk Ohlenroth's decipherment of the Phaistos Disk
> > > and using just a small dictionary of ancient Greek I looked out
> > > for words that suit both the pictograms and their phonetic values.
> > >
> > > An example. Evans 12 shows a circle with a central dot and six
> > > dots along the margin. That pictogram can't show a round shield,
> > > for the Middle Helladic Achaeans used basically rectangular shields.
> > > What else can it mean? Similar signs are painted on the staring
> > > plaster head from Mycenae, and so I assume that Evans 12 was the
> > > emblem of a watchful Argivian Alliance. According to Derk Ohlenroth,
> > > Evans 12 has the phonetic value O, omikron. Is there a suiting word
> > > in the basic word treasure of ancient Greek? Yes, horkion, beginning
> > > with an aspirated omikron, meaning oath, alliance, union, coalition.
> > >
> > > I tried the same with a couple of other signs and found reasonable
> > > matches. Then I checked the signs of the first six fields of the
> > > Tiryns side and obtained promising results. Now I dared go for all
> > > signs in all the 31 + 30 = 61 fields, online, without really knowing
> > > whether I will succeed or fail, but with a good feeling about it.
> > >
> > > My assumptions were that eponymous Tiryns came from Lycosoura near
> > > Phigalia, was appointed king of Tiryns, struggled to be as well
> > > accepted as any native king, promoted agriculture, overcame a famine,
> > > got an oracle by a priestess of Nyx in Elaia's grove at Phigalia
> > > (be as industrious as a bee, and as willing to defend your own),
> > > introduced the edible olive elaia in the Argolis, and was
> > > commemorated as the first lion-wolf-dog-bee king in line on the
> > > gold signet ring from Tiryns
> > >
> > > http://www.seshat.ch/home/ring.gif
> > >
> > > and as the gardener Lord Laertes in Homer's Odyssey.
> > >
> > > These assumptions carried me through, while a formerly vague idea
> > > of mine was put in concrete terms: eponymous Tiryns reconciled
> > > the female religion and civilization of Old Europe with the new
> > > male religion and civilization.
> > >
> > > The fields don't always coincide with the words and convey visual
> > > messages modulated over the verbal ones.
> > >
> > > Each sign found an explanation.
> > >
> > > A wonderful surprise are the equations that establish equivalences
> > > and symmetries and are the very tool of human reasoning.
> > >
> > > A further surprise are the hides, which, on gold disks, would be
> > > golden fleeces = gold ingots in the shape of a fleece, evoking
> > > Jason and the Argonauts who retrieved the famous Golden Fleece
> > > either on the eastern shore of the Black Sea or in the lower Danube
> > > basin, and that surprise goes along with a curious intertwining
> > > of a pair of signs, namely wave > ship, and ship > water that shall
> > > be explained
> > >
> > > next time: origin of the Greek Wonder

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