"The Baltic Origins of Homer's Tales" is up next... actually, I cheated and read "The Time Traveller's Wife" for fun. I also just received today Wilkens new edition of "Troy." I'm really glad to see that it is out and I think I'm going to ask the guys to put a link to it from our own bookstore page so that more people will be aware of its existence.
I think that it will be hard to displace Wilken's siting of Troy because of two things: the evidence of the Rivers and the ancient designation of the "gog-magog" hills.
Another item that ought to be read in conjunction with these books is the "Oera Linda Book," which I also have here. Then, read the stuff I dug up about the Frisians, Franks, Chatti that I included in the "Jupiter, Nostradamus and Return of the Mongols" series.
Seems to me that the Frisians were related to those who destroyed Troy, and also related closely to the Hittites, the Luvians, and later the Khazars. I think that the Khazars and Huns were almost identical. Here's what Bram Stoker wrote in "Dracula":
Bram Stoker said:
"'...Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?' He held up his arms. 'Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race; that we were proud; that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back? Is it strange that when Arpad and his legions swept through the Hungarian fatherland he found us here when he reached the frontier; that the Honfoglalas was completed there? And when the Hungarian flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the victorious Magyars... "
Seems that this passage (which Stoker drew upon classical knowledge to write) suggests that the Huns were NOT descended from the "Scythian witches who mated with devils" but that the phenotype was "Szekely."
The Columbia Encyclopedia tells us:
ethnic group of Transylvania and of present-day Romania. Except in a few isolated communities, where the ancient customs of the Székely have survived, there is little difference between Székely and Magyars. The Székely (also known as Szeklers or Siculi) came into Transylvania either with or before the Magyars. Their organization was of the Turkic type, and they are probably of Turkic (possibly Avar) stock. By the 11th cent., however, they had adopted Magyar speech. They later formed one of three privileged nations of Transylvania (the others were the Magyars and the Saxons)
Regarding the Scythians, denied by Stoker as the progenitors of the Huns, note that:
Scythians flourished from the 8th to the 4th cent. B.C. They spoke an Indo-Iranian language but had no system of writing. They were nomadic conquerors and skilled horsemen. They seem to be related to the Saka, another nomadic tribe that roamed the steppes of central Asia at about the same time. The so-called Royal Scyths established a kingdom in the E Crimea before the 9th cent. B.C. They seem to have maintained themselves as a ruling class while others (probably native inhabitants) worked the grain fields.
The Scythians are traditionally associated with the area between the Danube and the Don, but modern excavations in the Altai Mts., particularly at the site of Pazyryk, suggest that their origins were in W Siberia before they moved E into S Russia in the early 1st millennium B.C. Scythian power was maintained in the 8th cent. B.C. in obscure warfare with the Cimmerians.
The Scythians, considered barbarians by the Greeks, traded (7th cent. B.C.) grain and their service as mercenaries for Greek wine and luxury items. They invaded (7th cent. B.C.) upper Mesopotamia and Syria. They threatened Judah but never actually occupied Palestine. They also made incursions into the Balkan Peninsula, and a century later the mysterious campaign of Darius I against them (c.512 B.C.) may have checked their expansion, although it was no conquest. They destroyed (c.325 B.C.) an expedition sent against them by Alexander the Great.
After 300 B.C. they were driven out of the Balkans by the invading Celts. In S Russia they were displaced (2d or 1st cent. B.C.) by the related Sarmatians, and part of their empire became Sarmatia. Sarmatians were later driven out by the Huns.
The Sarmatians, who until c.200 B.C. lived E of the Don River, spoke an Indo-Iranian language and were a nomadic pastoral people related to the Scythians, whom they displaced in the Don region. The main divisions were the Rhoxolani, the Iazyges, and the Alans or Alani. They came into conflict with the Romans but later allied themselves with Rome, acting as buffers against the Germans. They were scattered or assimilated with the Germans by the 3d cent. A.D. http://columbia.thefreedictionary.com/Scythia
What I wonder is: could it be possible that the Scythians were the refugees from Troy that fled EAST?
About Aeneas we read:
Aeneas was the son of Anchises and Venus. He was a cousin of King Priam of Troy, and was the leader of Troy's Dardanian allies during the Trojan War. After the fall of Troy, he led a band of Trojan refugees to Italy and became the founder of Roman culture (although not of the city of Rome itself). He was the mythical progenitor of the Julian gens through his son Ascanius, or "Iulus," and Virgil made him the hero of his epic, the Aeneid.
In the Trojan War, Aeneas was one of the most respected of the Trojan heroes, perhaps second only to Hector. He engaged in abortive single combat with the Greek heroes Diomedes, Idomeneus, and Achilles; twice he was rescued through the intervention of gods. When Troy was sacked by the Greeks, Aeneas fought on until he was ordered by the gods to flee. He finally left the city, carrying his father and the household gods (see Penates) on his shoulders; his wife Creusa was lost in the confusion, but his son Ascanius escaped with him.
Aeneas and the Trojan remnant then wandered across the Mediterranean, hounded by the enmity of Juno. In one of the most famous episodes of the Aeneid, they were cast ashore near the north African city of Carthage, where they were hospitably received by Dido, the city's founder and queen. There ensued a love affair between Dido and Aeneas which threatened to distract Aeneas from his destiny in Italy. Mercury was sent to order Aeneas to depart and Aeneas, forced to choose between love and duty, reluctantly sailed away. Dido, mad with grief, committed suicide. When Aeneas later encountered her shade on a trip to the underworld, she turned away from him, still refusing to forgive his desertion of her.
In Italy, Aeneas allied himself with King Latinus, and was betrothed to Latinus' daughter, Lavinia. Lavinia's former suitor, Turnus, goaded by jealousy and the machinations of Juno, declared war against the intruder, and a period of bloody fighting (the Italian Wars) followed. Aeneas was victorious, eventually killing Turnus in single combat, and went on to found the city of Lavinium. At the end of his life, Aeneas was deified at the request of his mother, Venus, and became the god Indiges.
In the Aeneid, Aeneas' most common epithet is "pius," and Virgil presents him as the exemplar of the Roman virtues of devotion to duty and reverence for the gods. http://www.pantheon.org/articles/a/aeneas.html
So, it seems that it was "common knowledge" that Aeneas escaped from Troy - possibly with others - and it may have been only later that Virgil co-opted the legend for the genealogy of the Romans.
Notice the Fulcanelli makes a point of Aeneas in a major clue:
Varro, in his Antiquitates rerum humanorum, recalls the legend of Aeneas saving his father and his household gods from the flames of Troy and, after long wanderings, arriving at the fields of Laurentum, the goal of his journey. Fulcanelli inserted a footnote to the word Laurentum, telling us that “Laurente (Laurentium) is cabalistically l’or enté (grafted gold)”.
As I wrote in Secret History:
The gold work of the Scythians is legendary and bespeaks a culture far finer than is generally supposed by current scholars. The jewelry of the region of Ukraine is so similar to the work of the European Celts that it is hard not to see the connection. But, even older than many of the specimens of metal and stonework jewelry is a 20 000 year old bracelet carved from a single piece of mammoth ivory, found at Mezin, Ukraine. This piece has a magnificent design which can be found to this day in the embroidery of Ukrainian costumes. This pattern is also similar to, but predates the famous Greek “meander” pattern, or “maze.”
Geoffrey of Monmouth may have been influenced by a more ancient knowledge of Aeneas since he begins his history with the adventures of Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas, who, after much traveling and fighting, landed on Britain, which was uninhabited except for a few giants.
Again, from Secret History:
Over and over again we have seen our tracks of the Grail/Ark lead us to Russia, to Central Asia, to the Scythians, the Tribe of Dan. [....]
Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor made the serendipitous discovery of the parallels between the stories of King Arthur and the Ossetian saga of Batraz which has enabled a major leap in understanding the origins of the themes, and we hope to develop it further here. According to Littleton and Malcor, a fellow scholar, J. P. Mallory, told them that at the end of the Marcomannian War in the year 175 AD, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius sent a contingent of 5,500 Sarmatian cataphracti from Pannonia to Britain. Their descendants survived as an identifiable ethnic group into the fourth century and possibly longer. It was, as Littleton and Malcor put it, just an “interesting bit of trivia” gleaned from Tadeusz Sulimirski’s book The Sarmatians.
Sarmatians are a sub-group of Scythians, and the term “Scythian” can mean either the ancient Scythian tribes described by Herodotus, or, in the larger sense, it can apply to all of the Northeast Iranian steppe peoples. The Scythians of antiquity, and their cousins, the Sarmatians and Alans, were nomads of the Central Asian steppes. At the time of their greatest manifestation on the stage of history, the tribes extended from Hungary to China. These Scythians were big, blond and blue-eyed, and based on the accounts that have come down to us, and archaeological findings, their nomadic culture has sharp parallels with the most ancient occupants of Europe.
At the end of the classical period, these steppe dwellers had been driven to the edges of their homeland by the Altaic speakers, the Huns and Turks. Some migrated to Afghanistan, eastern Iran, western India, and others invaded the Roman Empire as either conquerors or supporting mercenaries. Many of them migrated into Britain, Italy, France, Spain and North Africa. Others retreated into Poland, European Russia and the Caucasus. The assumption has been that the Scythians, the sub-tribes of Iazyge Sarmatians, Alans, etc, vanished without a trace. But that is not, apparently, the case. It seems clear, upon reviewing the evidence, that the steppe dwellers became the aristocracy of Europe. According to Littleton and Malcor, another group of the Alani retreated into the Caucasus and survived as an ethnic group called the Ossetes, or Ossetians, in what is now known as the Republic of Georgia.
The Holy Grail was the chief concern of the Alans who settled in Gaul and Spain in the fifth century. They were tall, blonde and good looking, and lived a nomadic life in wagons. Their main claim to fame was their skill as horsemen. The Scythians (including the Alans) were referred to as Goths, and the one thing they all had in common was their extraordinary art. They assimilated into the territories they finally settled in, intermarrying with the Romans and other indigenous people. The name “Alan” and “Goar” are common among these groups, being passed down from generation to generation.
In addition to becoming the rootstock of most of the nobility of Europe, the Alans introduced the steppe pony and the Alan hunting dog. They introduced chain mail and the customs that were later to become Norman and Breton chivalry, and above all, let it be repeated, their natural home was on the back of a horse. Alienor of Aquitaine was undoubtedly a descendant of the Alani and the Nart sagas were a natural part of her heritage, becoming the foundation for the Grail stories written and promulgated through her “courts of love” after Geoffrey of Monmouth created the “history of Arthur.”
So, if it is possible that the refugees from Troy went EAST as all the alchemical and Grail literature suggests, and then returned to Europe much later as the Sarmations, Goths, etc, (many by way of Byzantium), then maybe the Trojan War was not fought over a woman at all: it was fought over an object... perhaps something like the "Ark"? And maybe it went East with Aeneas and all of the stories subsequent to this time are just pale imitations of the real deal? Maybe the story of Troy itself is only a reflection of the story of the Wars that ended Atlantis? And maybe, again, it was fought over a "thing," a creative or destructive power, rather than over a woman.
Thinking about it that way puts an altogether different slant on it. We could certainly say that, in the present day, Bush is trying to fight a war over a "creative or destructive power," that he does not wish anyone else to have. Imagine, if you will, what might happen if Bush does manage to blow up most of the world, and only thousands of years down the road does humanity manage to recover. What kinds of myths and stories would be passed down about this present situation? How would the re-telling of Bush and his rage against Iran and Iraq be transformed into myth and legend???
Of course, it is more romantic to tell a story about a woman who was so beautiful that a war was fought over her, but practically speaking, it is not very likely to have happened.
