I just posted a review to amazon.com and amazon.co.uk
We had just made an international move and were waiting in our new house for our delayed shipping container to arrive with our library. I was quite at loose ends without anything to read when this book arrived in the mail, sent by a friend who knew I was without books. I can tell you that, after reading the cover, if my library had been there, I would never have read it. "Stuff and nonsense!" I snorted! Who was this guy to suggest that Troy was not close to Greece, that all the scholars were wrong?
Well, it's really a good thing I didn't have anything else to read! So many questions answered!
Most people are not aware that not one of forty characteristics of the City of Troy and the Trojan War plain fit the Mediterranean setting. What is astonishing is that the author of the Odyssey does give ALL the information needed to exactly place where Troy Once Stood! For example:
* The Achaeans built 1186 ships for their attack on Troy, they could have travelled the short distance overland far quicker and cheaper if Troy really had been in the Turkish setting.
* Odysseus claimed to have got home by travelling as a passenger on a ship going from Crete to Sidon (present day Saïda in Lebanon), but that is the opposite direction he needed to go in the Mediterranean setting.
* Agamemnon tells us it took him a full month to sail from his kingdom Argos to Ithaca, we know the trip takes less than 24 hours in the Mediterranean setting.
* The mythical location for Troy in Turkey is far too small to accommodate the invading army of about 100,000 men and the long pursuits in horse-drawn chariots.
* The extensively travelled Greek geographer Strabo who lived 2000 years ago (1200 years after the Trojan War) believed that some of the ports of call in the Odyssey should be found in the Atlantic because of the mention of tides that do not really exist in the Mediterranean.
Well, what really baked my noodle was the part about the rivers. Language and how it morphs over time is a particular interest of mine and Wilkens showed that he knew his stuff. The plains near Cambridge and the Gog Magog Hills is a place where more than 12 rivers mentioned in the Iliad can still be recognised by name even today.
Iman Wilkens is not the only one who has suspected that there was something fishy about locating Troy in Turkey. The modern day scholar Professor Sir Moses Finley, emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge (Fellow of British Academy) after years of study and writing countless renowned books on Greek history, also opined that the weight of evidence made it clear that Troy and the Trojan War did not occur in Greece and Turkey, but some where else. Sir Moses said...
"There has come to be an abundance of empirical evidence that the world Homer wrote about did exist.
"The opinions of later Greeks and 19th Century scholars are irrelevant. We are confronted with this paradox that the more we know, the worse off we are. Homer's Trojan War must be evicted from the history of the Greek Bronze Age..."
In an even older work "Troje lag in Engeland: Odysseus landde in Zeeland" (translated: Troy lay in the United Kingdom: Odysseus landed in the Netherlands) Ernst Gideon followed the work of the 18th and 19th century Belgium authors De Grave and Cailleux, who took pains to show that Troy was located in England and that the Odyssey took place in the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel.
Like Iman Wilkens, Ernst Gideon realized that the ocean Homer wrote about is wide, wild and dangerous, never smooth and sunny, the color was grey and never blue, and such an ocean could not have been the Mediterranean sea.
In short, the weight of the EVIDENCE makes it quite clear that Troy and the Trojan War did not occur in Greece and Turkey (as we know it today), but some where else.
It also raises many unanswered questions that Wilkens does not deal with. For example, we know that the land we now call "Egypt" was never called by that name until the time of the Greeks. It is very possible that a far more ancient Egypt, located elsewhere, was the legendary home of the great mysteries and "spiritual knowledge" referred to in myths and legend. And if that is the case, it turns philosophy on it's head.
The fad for all things “Egyptian" has been with us for a very long time. The fact is, the Egyptian civilization was static and limited. What’s more, it caved in on itself, and never managed to produce any significant work of benefit for humanity, as Otto Neugebauer showed conclusively in his "The Exact Sciences in Antiquity".
The open-minded thinker ought to really consider the purported mysteries of Egypt in terms of the fact that they were so ignorant that they devoted a huge amount of energy to their “cult of the dead." The whole Egyptian shtick is focused around preserving dead flesh for future or otherworldly reanimation. The very fact that there are so many of these dead bodies for Egyptologists to dig up is the clearest evidence that the Egyptian beliefs were nonsense.
The whole issue of the excitement over Egyptian civilization is the belief that they had some mysterious powers because they built the pyramids and we can’t. And has it never occurred to anybody that the existence of the pyramids in conjunction with the worship of an elite group of human beings, while everybody else was wearing loincloths and sweating in the hot sun, might suggest a relationship between the two? The fact is, the Egyptian civilization seems to have been the chief example of a vast chasm between the haves and the have-nots, and they managed to do it longer than anybody else.
In a very real sense, finding that the original Egypt was in France restores to Western Civilization its true heritage, displacing the unnatural Fascist, Asiatic monotheism brought to us courtesy of Judaism.
Iman Wilkens discusses the Celts and their culture as well. We are taught almost nothing about the Celts in school, though they seem to be considered as the ancestors of most Europeans, thus also Americans. The question we need to be asking is: Why is it that the religion and culture of the Mesopotamian region dominates our lives and our culture when it is, in effect, “foreign" ?
Celtic vernacular literature, including myths, stories and poems, in its written form, dates mainly from the Middle Ages. It is based on oral transmission that goes far beyond the Christian Era. It is very difficult to get a clear picture of the pre-Christian Celts from the transmitted texts, not only because of the typical mixture of myth and reality, and the lapse of time, but also because the Roman empire sought to stamp it out starting with Caesar and continuing with the Roman church under the influence of Christianity, daughter of Judaism.
However, studying what is available closely, one gets the impression of a dynamic, somewhat undisciplined people. The Celts were proud, imaginative, artistic, lovers of freedom and adventure, eloquence, poetry, and arts. You can always discern the Celtic influence by the great artistic talents of these peoples.
The Celts were VERY suspicious of any kind of centralized “authority," and this is, in the end, what brought about their downfall. They could not stand against the hierarchical war machine of the Roman empire. In a sense, you could almost say that this is how Hitler nearly conquered Europe, most especially France. Gauls take the principles of liberty and equality VERY seriously - right down to the common man on the street who in no way considers himself inferior to the Prime Minister.
One of the principal historians of the Roman era, Julius Caesar, tells us that the Celts were ruled by the Druids. The druids “held all knowledge." The Druids were charged with ALL intellectual activities, and were not restricted to religion, per se, which suggests to us that “religion� and “knowledge� in a more or less scientific approach, were considered essential to one another - symbiotic.
It is later writers who began to vilify the Celts by accusing them of the usual things that people get accused of when someone wants to demonize them: human sacrifice, homosexuality, and so on. Most of that nonsense goes back to Posidonius, who has been quoted as an “authority� by every other “authority� on the Celts since. Unfortunately, when one checks Posidonius, one finds that he really didn’t have a clue and was probably making stuff up to fulfill an agenda.
The lack of written texts by the Celts has been the greatest problem for historians and students of the Celts. A lot of ideas are “supposed� or ancient sources with agendas have been relied on, and some of them even propose that there was a “taboo� by the Celts on putting things into writing.
Iman Wilkens idea of why the Celts didn’t write things down is one of the flaws of the book. He suggests that this was how the Druids kept their power.
But, if we look at what Caesar said was that the reason for the ban on writing, we find that it was really quite logical. The Druids were concerned that their pupils should not neglect the training of their memories, i.e. the Frontal Cortex, by relying on written texts.
It is worth noting that, in the nineteenth century, it was observed that the illiterate Yugoslav bards, who were able to recite interminable poems, actually lost their ability to memorize once they had learned to rely on reading and writing.
So, it seems that the Druids were actually concerned more about the accurate transmission of their knowledge than "holding power."
Although the Druids prohibited certain things from being written down, it’s clear that they DID write. Celtic writings in Ogamic script have been found on many ancient stones. Caesar tells us that the Celts were using the Greek alphabet when the Romans arrived in Gaul in the first century BC.
The destruction of Celtic culture was so complete that we know very little about their religion. We do know that they celebrated their “rites� in forests and by lakes without erecting any covered temples or statues of divinities. Tacitus tells us:
"They do not think it in keeping with the divine majesty to confine gods within walls, or to portray them in the likeness of any human countenance. Their holy places are woods and groves and they apply the names of deities to that hidden presence which is seen only by the eyes of reverence."
Plato had doubts about the Greek origins of Homer’s work because not only do the physical descriptions in his poems not correspond to the Greek world, but also the Homeric philosophy is very different from the mainstream Greek philosophy we know about today.
According to Homer, the philosophy of the ancient world was that there was a third element that linked opposing elements. Between the body and the soul, there is the spirit. Between life and death there is the transformation that is possible to the individual, between father and mother there is the child who takes the characteristics of both father and mother, and between good and evil there is the SPECIFIC SITUATION that determines which is which and what ought to be done.
In other words, there are three simultaneous determinants in any situation that make it impossible to say that any list of things is “good� or “evil� intrinsically, and that the true determinant is the situation.
In any event, the symbol of this philosophy is the triskele, representing three waves joined together.
The simultaneous existence of the third element does not mean that the notion of “good� and “evil� did not exist or was not reflected in the Celtic law. There is no way to make "black or white" laws that must be followed by rote. A people must have wisdom to discern each situation and apply justice, not blindly, but with eyes wide open to the realities of the world and the situation. What was clear was that it was understood that nothing could be “cut and dried� in terms of law, that each situation was unique and the circumstances had to be carefully weighed.
Aristotle considered Gaul to be the “teacher� of Greece and the Druids to be the “inventors of philosophy.� The Greeks also considered the Druids to be the world’s greatest scholars, and whose mathematical knowledge was the source of Pythagoras‘ information.
What we can discern from Wilken's work is that there was an ancient and noble civilization associated with the Megaliths that no longer exists and even its high knowledge and nuanced philosophy has been forgotten - except for the Iliad and Odyssey.
It is a fact that the Earth is literally blanketed with megaliths from some ancient civilization. Tens of thousands of them! There are variations in placement and style, but the thing they all have in common is their incredible size and their undeniable antiquity. It is now understood by the experts that the megalithic structures demanded complex architectural planning, and they propose that it was the labor of tens of thousands of men working for centuries.
No one has ever made a systematic count of the megaliths, but the estimate goes beyond 50,000. It is also admitted that this figure represents only a fraction, since many have been destroyed not only by the forces of nature, but also by the wanton destruction of man.
Even though there are megalithic monuments in locations around the world, there is nothing anywhere else like there is in Europe. The megaliths of Europe form an “enormous blanket of stone.� Great mounds of green turf or gleaming white quartz pebbles formerly covered many of them. The megalithic mania of ancient Europe is:
"Unparalleled indeed in human history. For there has never been anything like this rage, almost mania, for megalith building, except perhaps during the centuries after AD 1000 when much the same part of Europe was covered with what a monk of the time called a ‘white mantle of churches.’ […]
"The megaliths, then, were raised by some of the earliest Europeans. The reason that this simple fact took so long to be accepted was the peculiar inferiority complex which western Europeans had about their past. Their religion, their laws, their cultural heritage, their very numerals, all come from the East. The inhabitants, before civilisation came flooding in from the Mediterranean, were illiterate; they kept no records, they built no cities. It was easy to assume that they were simply bands of howling half-naked savages who painted their bodies, put bear-grease on their hair and ate their cousins." (Reader’s Digest, The World’s Last Mysteries, 1977.)
The interesting thing about the megalith builders is that the peoples who were able to perform these utterly amazing feats of engineering are still, in most circles, considered to be barbarians because they did not build cities, engage in agriculture, develop the wheel, or writing. Yet, they did something that clearly cannot be, and was not, done by “civilized� peoples who did all of those “civilized� things. They had some sort of “power� that we cannot replicate and do not understand.
What is also found in the same areas are many sculptures of female goddesses found in the most ancient archaeological levels.
According to the experts, the discernible idea of the religion of the goddess is that of an infinite bounty of the Great Mother. It is proposed that such peoples didn’t engage in agriculture because the idea of “owning land� may have been abhorrent to them. The idea of “forcing� the earth to yield, rather than accepting the natural abundance the Goddess provided was simply not a part of their philosophy. Their Goddess was a Star Being, and she was worshipped in outdoor Temples that were laid out along Celestial Archetypes.
Iman Wilkens restores to us a fragment of True European History and perhaps it is time for us to turn our attention to trying to learn more about it in the proper context. After all, Judao-Christianity has brought the world to the verge of total destruction in less than 2000 years. The Celtic cultures existed for many, many thousands of years, accomplishing great feats of engineering and producing a culture that was pre-eminent throughout the world until they were destroyed by the monotheistic infection - due mainly to the fact that they did not accept a single, monolithic authority.
Iman Wilkens book is filled with rich details and piles of supporting evidence that includes ancient historic writings, accurate geographic and topographic description matching, detailed maps, countless archaeological finds, historic place name matching, cultural and linguistic evidence.
This book is a MUST read for everyone, most particularly people of European and Mediterranean heritage.
