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The current issue of Science contains three articles that suggest the days of bashing North America's "Moundbuilder Myth" are over . . . maybe.

America's Lost City
Andrew Lawler
New excavations reveal surprising dimensions to North America's oldest city and its great earthen monuments.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/334/6063/1618

Does North America Hold the Roots of Mesoamerican Civilization?
Andrew Lawler
Ancient settlements in what is now Louisiana may have laid the foundation not only for the great city of Cahokia but perhaps also for Mesoamerican civilization.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/334/6063/1620

Preserving History, One Hill at a Time
Andrew Lawler
A handful of scientists are scrambling to preserve what they can of pre-Columbian North American mounds and prevent further destruction of structures that hold vital clues to ancient Native American society.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/334/6063/1623

Recent genetic studies have tended to throw cold water on the size and decimation of American Indian populations on European contact after 1492. A new study shows the falsehood of this thinking, and perhaps we are back to using the word "conquest" instead of the euphemistic term "contact." The conqueror of the Americas was not Europeans, though, but the diseases they unleashed on Indians.

According to Science magazine, "a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pushes the pendulum back toward dramatic population declines. Using both modern and ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from Native Americans, an international team concludes that about 500 years ago, the number of reproductively active Native American women quickly plunged by half, indicating a 'widespread and severe' contraction in population size."

The study summarized is:  Brendan O'Fallon and Lars Fehren-Schmitz, "Native Americans Experienced a Strong Population Bottleneck Coincident with European Contact," Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Dec. 5, 2011);  doi:  10.1073/pnas.1112563108.

Critics of the study say that the conclusions may be illusory since we do not have a lot of ancient Native American DNA. But we will never have a lot of Native American DNA. That objection seems lame, and we applaud the new study as at least a step in the right direction of rectifying the true story of the Americas and escaping the apologist blinkers of colonial "Smithsonian-styled" methodologies and mindsets.

 

A Greek goddess statue in the style of the Elgin Marbles was repatriated by a Los Angeles museum, marking the return of a valuable, but stolen piece of antiquity from the United States to Italy. Known as the Morgantina Aphrodite or Venus, the 7-foot tall marble is now displayed in a 17th century former Capuchin monastery in the tiny town of Aidone in central Sicily.

The plaque on the statue does not identity the goddess as Venus but reads,

The statue of a female deity from Morgantina, excavated clandestinely [i.e. looted by vandals] and exported illegally [i.e. purchased at an art auction without proper papers], was repatriated in 2011 by the J. Paul Getty Museum of Malibu.

Behind the terse wording  is a thirty-year tale of intrigue that shook the American art world, involving local looters in a Fiat carrot truck, possibly Mafia connections, the black market in Chiusso, Switzerland, the Italian government's persistent efforts to recover stolen antiquities and one woman at the center of it all, the Getty's former curator Marion True. Read about it in this month's cover story in Smithsonian Magazine, "Journey of a Goddess. A Case Study," by Ralph Frammolino.

Above:  Donald Yates at a similar statue of the goddess in recent travels to Turkey. Free download of his On the Trail of Europa. This and other titles available in DNA Consultants Online Bookstore.

Her profession is her religion
Her sin her lifelessness

--Bob Dylan

Will the archeological establishment's obtuseness about prehistory and the religion of the Great Goddess ever falter? In an article titled "Pieces of a Bronze Age Puzzle" in the current issue of Archaeology Magazine (Sept/Oct 2011, p. 15), Jessica Woodard discusses the "enigma" of thousands of broken Cycladic figurines from the tiny, uninhabited island of Keros near Naxos. Summarizing the decades long work of Cambridge archeologist Colin Renfrew, she dates the site to 2800 to 2300 BCE and (are you ready for this) speculates there was a lot of "social activity as well as ritual activity...relating to beliefs about life, death, and perhaps the hereafter."

This is tantamount to saying that the deliberately broken figurines were broken by people, human beings who lived a long time ago, on purpose. But what kind of rituals and "beliefs"? The word "religion" is mentioned nowhere. Evidently, since archeologists profess no religion themselves they cannot detect it in any of the people whose graves and relics they dig up.

Greek mythology tells how Venus, the eldest of the Fates, was born at sea and stepped ashore on several islands, where her cult continued, notably at Cythera, Crete, Naxos and Cyprus. All the "enigmatic" broken figures clearly relate to the worship of the Mother Goddess. Marija Gimbutas covers the featureless face, arms crossed over breasts and other unmistakable signs of the Goddess or Magna Mater in her voluminous writings, including The Language of the Goddess. We suggest if Colin Renfrew cannot bring himself to read Gimbutas he at least dip into Pausanias, the second century CE author of a guidebook to Greece in ten volumes. There he will find many descriptions of these votive offerings to the Goddess.

Archeologists may also want to acquire at least a bowing acquaintance with Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade. Both Gimbutas and Eisler describe three invasions of the warriors of the steppes with their male gods following the year 3000 BCE that spelled an end to the long period of female-based life-celebrating religion in the Middle East and Old Europe. Only the Minoans, Etruscans and certain other peoples from Asia Minor and the Greek Islands were able to retain the Mother Goddess in the new mostly male pantheon, which was focused more on death than rebirth.

The only puzzling part of the Keros Hoard is how archeologists could overlook its abundant testimony to the Mother Goddess religion.


Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" depicts the Goddess' first coming ashore. (No, this is not the famous original in the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence. This is a cheap reproduction hanging on the walls of a Rome pizzeria.)

Emergence petroglyphs as featured on previous blog posts about the Hopi, Sea Peoples, Hohokam, Fremont Indians and Cherokee ("Haplogroup B and Water Clan Symbols") have also turned up now in Patagonia in southern Chile, on the tip of the South American continent's Pacific Coast. They were identified in Hawaii already. These findings suggest the stick figure of a woman giving birth, or emergence petroglyph, is Pacific-wide and confined to that hemisphere, not instanced in Europe, the Middle East or Africa.

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Patagonian emergence petroglyph is reproduced from the International Newsletter on Rock Art (INORA), no. 58 (2010), where it was reported discovered in a cave of the Madre De Dios Archipelago 2000-2008. The researchers attributed it to the Kaweskar Indians, "a nomadic sea people now vanished." Its style matches similar petroglyphs from Hawaii and the American Southwest. It was grouped with sun disks, dancing figures and a horned anthropomorph, all painted in red ochre. The name Kaweskar means simply "Mankind." INORA.

Review of Cleopatra, A Life by Stacy Schiff
and Some Thoughts on the Ptolemies and Incest

She had a big nose but was she fat?

There have been many biographies of Cleopatra, called the Fatal Monster by the Roman poet Horace. About the author of this newest one, we are informed, "Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and a fellow at the center for Scholars & Writers, and received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Schiff has contributed to The New Yorker and The New York Times, where she has been an op-ed columnist. She lives in New York City."

A blurb on the back of my copy, which my wife gave me for Hanukkah at my hinting, Joseph J. Ellis oozes, "It is a beautiful pairing--the most alluring and elusive woman in recorded history, and one of the most gifted biographers of our time. Style, like leadership, is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. We see it here on every page."

Indeed.

Am I the only one to be irritated by Ms. Schiff's much vaunted style or pretense to scholarship (she is called a "great historian" in another blurb on the book jacket)? Is it too late to get the Putlitzer Prize Committee to reconsider? Is this the way books are now marketed, trumpeted about like digital reality choices or teenage girls' ring tones?

I haven't made it past Chapter 2 (which has the Harry Potter title of "Cleopatra Captures the Old Man by Magic"), but I have been repeatedly arrested in my attempt to read the peculiar style of this Pulitzer Prize-winning author, not by admiration and awe but shock and misunderstanding. Here is a sample that stopped me on p. 20:

She hailed instead from a line of rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged Macedonian queens, a line that included the fourth-century Olympias, whose greatest contribution to the world was her son, Alexander the Great. The rest were atrocities.

There are several things wrong with these two sentences (ask my wife, who teaches Freshman Composition at a community college, bless her heart). Let me list some, in the spirit of an old-fashioned schoolmaster:

• "Hails" for "comes from" is a cliche which, since the nineteenth century, has been avoided by all those except high school newspaper interns. Even then, it is usually caught by their instructors.
• "Instead" if you read the previous sentence to which it refers is not clear. Did Cleopatra come from not-an-Egyptian background or not come from the not-Egyptian background everyone in Egypt thought?
• "Rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged": from whose point of view? Ours? Posterity's? Cicero's? Her brother's? Ours after Ms. Schiff has made her case? People magazine's? Wikipedia? One cannot imagine a "great historian" saying this on p. 20 of their "dazzling" and "enduring" masterpiece, calling on "considerable powers to bring Cleopatra back to life for us." One can also not excuse, even if one can imagine, an author praised for "what only the best writers can do...making the world new again" sprinkling so many loaded and stale epithets around like that. Mark Twain said read and reread your work. If you find an adjective kill it. Ms. Schiff's style crawls with adjectives. If it were to be disinfected we would be left with little at the core, rather like peeling back the layers of an onion.
• Olympias...her son:  lack of pronoun agreement
• The rest:  the rest of what? The rest of the Olympias? The rest of the Macedonian queens? Oh, I see. I had to reread the passage. Schiff means "the rest of the various Olympias' contributions to the world." Atrocities? That seems a pretty harsh verdict. Particularly for unknown and undiscussed persons. Perhaps it is an allusion to the Olympias of the U.S. Senate. or minor actresses in Hollywood who co-star with Cher? One of Jackie O's rivals?

Well, you get the idea. Schiff has read too many historical novels and obviously been to too many writing workshops and written too many grants, but what about her content and scholarship? Having read several books on Cleopatra, including Michael Grant's biography published, lo! these forty years ago, and having a doctorate in classical studies, I was keen on seeing if the new stupor mundi did its subject justice from a factual or evaluative point of view. I am sorry I can't give a good report.

My old Swiss Doktor Mutter in grad school used to say of a recommended source it was "steeped in the literature." If the author of this new "definitive" biography is steeped in anything it is Celestial Seasonings. The book reads as though it were written between emails and then tweeted to her fans in breathless acts of self-admiration.

The reason I am interested in Cleopatra is that was the name of Pocahontas' Cherokee mother. The real Pocahontas, her real mother. Cherokee stories are full of the Macedonians, Jews and Thracians; witness the many tales of Stone Finger or the many Greek names. I am Cherokee, and a Pocahontas descendant, so I would like to find out all I can about my kinswoman's namesake. My interest goes beyond following the latest trend or craze in historical fiction.

I was particularly interested in the Ptolemies' habit of sister-brother marriage or incest. What does Schiff make of this? Before I answer that question, what does Schiff say of Cleopatra's parentage and genealogy? It is all very lurid and sketchy to be sure, or to put it in the words of the publisher, just, you know, "astonishing if rare historical facts meticulously and lovingly excavated." The afterword thanks a zillion people, including "big names" like Sarah B. Pomeroy (an authority on women in classical antiquity) and "the late Lionel Casson" (born Lionel L. Cohen, who died at age 94 on July 18, 2009). Included are a passel of editors at Little, Brown ("At every stage they have set the gold standard"), as well as a publicist, Jessica Almost, at the literary agency William Morris "for shepherding book and author along." Stop! That's more than we wanted to know.

First, who was Cleopatra's mother? Any "definitive" biography ought to address this subject. Here's what Schiff says:

Of Cleopatra's mother we have neither glimpse nor echo; she disappears from the scene early in Cleopatra's childhood and was dead by the time Cleopatra was twelve (p. 26).

Here's what Michael Grant wrote in 1972 (described accurately as "an eminent historian who has held distinguished academic posts"),

We do not know who Cleopatra VII's mother was. In view of her daughter's subsequent fame this is rather strange (p. 3).

Grant goes on to weigh the papyrological evidence and other historical witnesses. He concludes,

On the whole, then, it seems most likely that Auletes' first wife and sister, Cleopatra V Tryphaena, was the mother of our Cleopatra (p. 4).

What of the Ptolemies' incestuous practice of marrying brother and sister over many generations? Schiff writes that there is no word for "incest" in the Greek language. Really? What was the Oedipus cycle about? Something Sophocles, Euripides and the other playwrights had no word for among the tens of thousands they expended on the theme? She also writes,

The practice resulted in no physical deformities but did deliver an ungainly shrub of a family tree (p. 21).

Grant straightforwardly writes, on the other hand,

Since the time of Ptolemy II there had been many...brother-sister marriages in the same royal house, and, in spite of obscurities regarding her pedigree, there is no doubt that Cleopatra VII, for all her outstanding intellectual and physical endowments, was the product of generations of incest. As those who breed cattle are well aware, the marriage of near relations, although it gives a double chance for blemishes to appear, also makes the recurrence of initial excellences more probable, without necessarily impairing fertility

And as to the question of whether Cleopatra was tainted or twisted by her genealogy (one Schiff skirts):

It is doubtful, however, if the Ptolemies escaped genetic trouble altogether, for a number of them were abnormally fat. This characteristic had been present in the family since its first emergence upon the historical scene, and then Ptolemy VI Philometor, and Cleopatra's great-grandfather Ptolemy VIII Euergetes (Physcon), and her great-uncle Ptolemy X Alexander I, were all monstrously overweight. It is not clear if this disability also appeared on the female side of the family; at any rate there is no record of Cleopatra, who only lived to the age of thirty-nine, becoming gross. Nevertheless, it is a possibility that certain elements in her character may have been due to this persistent in-breeding -- notably her total absence of moral sense, and a tendency to murder her brothers and sisters which may have been partly an inherited family habit (p. 27).

But for the battle of Actium, it would have been the Egyptian Empire, not the Roman Empire, that dominated the last 2,000 years of "Western Civilization," as it had the previous 3,000 before the Common Era. Instead of the voodoo vamp sport of scribblers and schoolboys, Cleopatra would be the most revered political figure of our educational institutions and popular culture, akin to Elizabeth I for the British and English-speaking peoples. Schiff's book does not do Cleopatra or Ptolemaic history justice.

The only thing we know for sure about her is that she committed suicide with the bite of a snake after her peace overtures were spurned by Octavian, the future Augustus. It was a noble gesture, refused, and a death undeserved. Her children were accepted into the Roman nobility and raised by Octavian's half-sister Octavia. Their blood flows in the genealogies of many nations today.

It is sad to see Cleopatra VII reduced to a tawdry reality show star by the modern American publishing industry.

Or at Least One of Its Kings

The royal mound cemetery at Taillten, modern Telltown in County Meath, houses the burials of numerous kings and nobles from early Ireland. These begin with Ollamh Fodhla, whose death occurred in 1277 B.C.E., and run to just before Conchobar Mac Ness, who died in A.D. 33 according to the Annals of Tighernach, written in Old Irish and Latin in the early Middle Ages. Pronounced "CON ah war," Conchobar is the first of the name Connor or O'Connor in Irish annals. His mother was Queen Ness, and his nephew Cuchulain, the famous hero of the Ulster cycle of stories.

"Our oldest and most trustworthy authorities state that Taillten ceased to be used as a cemetery on the death of Conchobhor," wrote Irish antiquarian (the term used before "archeologist") William F. Wakeman in The Handbook of Irish Antiquities in 1891, drawing on field reports dating back to 1848 (London:  Studio, 1995). What made Conchobar's burial unusual was that, unlike the previous kings of Ulster entombed at Taillten, he "wished that he should be carried to a place between Slea and the sea, with his face to the east, on account of the Faith which he had embraced" (p. 94).

It seems obvious that Conchobar converted from pagan druidism to a new religion, one that emphasized burial facing east. The new religion could not have been Christianity, although Irish myths claim, anachronistically, that Conchobar died upon being told by druids that Jesus had just been killed "by the Jews." Christianity was not widespread until the fourth century of the Common Era. Jews, like Christians, are buried facing east.

According to Celtic tradition, Conchobar was one of the two men who believed in God in Ireland before the coming of the Faith, Morann being the other man. Such a statement can only mean that Conchobar and his advisor Morann were monotheists or Jews.

In Conchobar's day, Judaism attracted millions of converts. Eventually between one-tenth and one-quarter of the inhabitants within the limit of the Roman Empire professed Judaism. Often it was a syncretistic form combined with other rites and beliefs.

The story of a king converting to Judaism with many of his subjects and descendants following him is a phenomenon documented from more than one historical time point associated with mass conversions. The Hellenized Hasmonean dynasty established under Judas Maccabeus ruled the Kingdom of Israel for over a hundred years, spreading Jewish religion to many others in the Middle East. Bulan was a Khazar king who led the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism. The Babylonian prince Machir, also known as Todros, Theodore, Theodorich, Dietrich, William and by other names, converted most of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Narbonne/Septimania in southern France.

It is likely the Irish high king Conchobar inspired many of his people to accept Judaism. The introduction and early spread of Christianity in Ireland could have been facilitated by the pre-existence of Jewish institutions in the country.



King Ollamh Fodhla's Throne at Taillten, covered with tifinagh (North African) inscriptions. Conwell, On the Cemetery of Taillten (1879).

Ashkenazi Jews May Have Founded Israel,

But Hebrew-Speaking Khazars Created Ashkenaz

Yes, the Khazars spoke Hebrew. It was the official language of the medieval kingdom, just as it is today in Israel. That is one of the surprising revelations of a book titled The Invention of the Jewish People, by Tel Aviv history professor Shlomo Sand, who devotes half a chapter to the “strange empire in the East” (London:  Verso, 2009).

Judaism has not always been a closed society. During all but the last four or five centuries of its existence, it has been a proselytizing (and stabilizing) force in world events. Great states like the now-forgotten Khazaria played a role in the balance of powers and destiny of world civilization. The policies of the Kagan and his viceroy the Bey were praised everywhere for creating a prosperous, multi-ethnic, multi-faith state that held sway over the lives of millions for five centuries (700-1200).

Out of the Mists of Time

In an older book, Catastrophe (New York:  Ballatine), David Keys pursues a wider theme. He also has a chapter on Khazaria, “The Jewish Empire.” In it, after reviewing what we know about the medieval state, he concludes:  “The Khazar empire prevented the westward spread of Islam. If it had not been for the military might of the empire, Islam would likely have rolled west into pagan eastern Europe and possibly even into pagan Scandinavia in the eight and ninth centuries A.D.” He postulates that the Vikings could well have become Muslim, as well as Poland, Hungary, Romania, eastern Austria, the Czech and Slovak lands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Danelaw, the Viking state that emerged in eastern England.

“If the Khazar empire had not prevented Islamic expansion, it is even possible that the Normans (originally Vikings from Denmark) might have already been Muslims for two hundred years by the time they conquered England in 1066. What’s more, if the Arabs had occupied what is now the Ukraine and Russia [rather than the Khazars, who founded Kiev, Russia’s first capital], a Viking people known as the Rus would never have been able to push south and east from the Baltic to establish Russia” (p. 98).

An “investigative archeologist,” Keys attributes the rise and spread of the Khazar state to a devastating volcanic explosion in Java in 535 that caused worldwide darkness, crop loss, famine, droughts, floods, migration of peoples and destabilization of regimes. Among the losers in what has passed into history as the Dark Ages were the Byzantines, Britons, French, Spanish, south Arabs, Tang Chinese, Teotihuacan and Peruvians. The winners were Avars, Huns, Koreans, Japanese, Toltecs, Incas, Mohammedans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings and Visigoths. The global disaster had far-reaching effects that formed the modern world.

Sand is a professor in the department of European history (separated, curiously, from “Jewish” history in his country, Israel) and is concerned, as all historians are, with books. On the basis of records and written accounts, he reveals Khazaria’s rise as no opportunistic accident to adorn a schoolboy’s tale but as a historical phenomenon central to the formation of world Jewry. What Sand and Keys have in common is their iconoclastic, multi-disciplinary approaches. Independently, they assign a prominent role to Khazaria in world history. Both attack taboo subjects with relish and finesse and are soundly ignored, no doubt, in the balkanized institutional world of learning.

Physical Evidence in Genes

Sand was apparently unaware of Keys or the global catastrophe of 525, but Keys has an excellent genetic summary of the heritage of the Khazars, one that is consistent with the latest research into the unity and diversity of the Jewish people(s).

“The Jewish empire’s other legacy was the creation of a large pool of Jews of ethnically non-Jewish origin who subsequently became a major part—perhaps even the numerically dominant part—of northeast European Jewry and subsequently of world Jewry,” Keys writes (p. 99). He goes further and substantiates and characterizes the convert origin of the Ashkenazi community in the ascendancy in modern Israel and the United States.

“This group, according to tradition, comprises the majority of the descendants of the ancient Israelite tribe of Levi—people who today still bear the name Levi or Levy. Significantly, it does not include a Levite subgroup—the Priests themselves—who often have the name Cohen. . . . This genetic marker does not even show up among the Cohens (descendants of the ancient Israelite Chief Priests)—but only among the descendants of Assistant Priests [Levites]. And then only within Ashkenazi (northern European) Jewry . . . . If some top Khazars were adopting Cohenic Levitical status (i.e., Chief Priest status), then it is more than likely that others—a larger number—were adopting ordinary Levitical status (i.e., Assistant Priest status). Adoption of Cohenic or ordinary Levitical status by converts was and is expressly forbidden by rabbinical law, so the Khazars had to develop a mythic national history that gave them the right to Levitical status” (p. 100).

Kaftans and Yarmulkes

Both Keys and Sand write of the revealing role of Yiddish, the lingua franca of medieval European Jewry and first language of 80% of the settlers in the modern-day Land of Israel. They agree that Yiddish, even though it has a medieval German base, has more elements that are Slavic, Romance, Hebrew, Aramaic and even Turkic and is more accurately to be regarded as the result of a relexification process by originally mixed Sorbs, Magyars, Khazars and others, not as the dialect of west German or Rhineland Jews. In conventional Jewish teaching, Yiddish is regarded as a prestigious import from the Rhadanite and other Romano-Frankic Jews (who were Judean merchants under the Romans, according to most, hence retaining the desired link to ethnic origins in the Middle East). In the new view, Yiddish loses a lot of its special historical claims and becomes simply a language of convenience in the polyglot Khazar domain of former times.

The two books attribute also a superabundance of anthropological characteristics of Ashkenazi Jews to Khazar predominance, including shtetls (townlets), silk kaftans, fur headdresses, naming individuals after Jewish holidays (we have an Aunt Hanukkah and Uncle Pesach in our family tree) and innumerable place-names in Eastern Europe. Finally, Sand notes that the word yarmulke is derived from a Turkic word (p. 247).     

Although the “Khazar thesis” is largely ignored or silenced by Israeli leaders and Jewish scholars, it is unlikely that the rulers of the modern state of Israel will make any constructive impact on the course of world events on the scale of Khazaria. Jews should study Khazaria's intellectual and international model of statecraft instead of the tired and chauvinistic histories of nineteenth-century Zionists. As Sand says, “Why not begin to dream its future afresh, before it becomes a nightmare?”

    

Mary Settegast is described on the jacket simply as an archeological researcher, the 20-year-old book being Plato Prehistorian; 10,000 to 5,000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology (Hudson:  Lindisfarne, 1990). It's obvious she is not a member of the entrenched academic community of archeologists and prehistorians, for she spends most of the introduction to her fascinating study inveighing against the Old Model and New Archeology and defending the value of myth. She then retells the Egyptian Priest's tale from Plato's Timaeus about how Solon's ancient Greek ancestors defeated an aggressive Atlantic sea-power situated on a now-lost continent beyond the Straits of Gilbraltar--the so-called Atlantis myth, which has no other source but the writings of Plato. Her thesis is that Plato is representing what he believed to be historical fact. Among other arguments, Settegast points out that it would have been impious for him to contrive a political fiction and put it in the mouth of Critias, who attributes the story to his grandfather, who received it from Solon himself, given the occasion of the dialogue, a celebration of Athena's festival day. She asks, "Would Socrates have Critias offer to the goddess as 'a just and truthful hymn of praise' (Timaeus 21) an intentional misrepresentation of Athena's own past history with the Greeks?"

Once Plato's word and intentions are vindicated it is possible to study the scattered clues he gives us to prehistory of the Mediterranean world in a new light. Settegast makes a good case that the Magdalenian cave art of 17,000/15,000 to 9000 BCE preserves the fading glory of an Atlantic culture of enormous power and sophistication that came to an abrupt end toward the end of the tenth millennium. She brackets the question of the location of a sunken continent and dwells instead on the blunders of modern prehistorians who fail to grasp the advanced picture of civilization left to us in Paleolithic remains like the Lascaux paintings. For instance, most anthropologists have explained the paintings as vehicles for sympathetic hunting magic without noting that it is the horse that is most commonly depicted while excavations of Magdlenian sites reveal almost exclusively the remains of reindeer as their principal animal food. The religious significance of the animals is lost on most analysts. Plato, as usual, provides the pertinent clue: the Atlantics worshipped Poseidon and regarded his sacred animal the horse with great awe. A revisionist look at the horses in cave paintings clarifies that the lines on horses' heads represent harnesses, not natural contours or anatomical details, proving that the Magdalenians or Atlantic peoples had tamed the horse by 12,000 BCE, some eight thousand years before the date assigned to the domestication of the horse in the conventional model.

 

Upper Paleolithic writing recovered from Magdalenian cave sites (top) compared to characters in three early written languages:  (b) Indus valley signs, (c) Greek and (d) Runic. Settegast (p. 28) after Forbes and Crowder, 1979.

I've just started to read the book and will conclude this "preview" for the blog by mentioning that one obstacle to accepting Plato's story at face value was that he describes the Atlantics as literate. The recent reevaluation of the "magic signs" in Magdalenian caves as a writing system with heirs in many Old World alphabets seems to bear him out once again...and make his detractors look stupid and full of hubris. It is the effect many Socratic dialogues were meant to have on their readers.

Addendum:  One of the offshoots of Atlantic Culture according to Plato Prehistorian was the Çatal Hüyük civilization that flourished in Anatolia from 6200-5300 BCE. Only 2-3 % of the 32 acre site has been excavated, but what has come to light so far includes amazing cyclopean walls, refined wall paintings and peculiar religious practices such as a vulture-bull rite, leopard shrine and Mistress of the Animals cult reminiscent of Venus figurines. It is conceivable that Atlantic Culture itself was spurred to life originally by admixture of Europeans with Neanderthals, since there are numerous signs of Neanderthal culture in  archeological remains. Significantly, the Venus figures once associated with Gravettian Culture now appear to have had their origins with Neanderthals, who occupied Europe for 350,000 years before H. sapiens sapiens. Venus figurines were worn about the neck by Neanderthals, as proved in several excavations in Spain and elsewhere. In 1961, archeologists unearthed the skull of a Neanderthal man in the ancient site of Chalcedon on the east side of the Bosporus in Asia Minor, although the find is seldom mentioned today.

Our Neanderthal Index is based on affinities with archaic populations presumed to carry the highest rate of admixture with Neanderthals. These include many of the Atlantic and Mediterranean populations mentioned in Plato Prehistorian, including Greek, Turkish, Syrian, Arabian, Basque, Egyptian and Berber.