What we call ar-chaeology, pale-

ontology, and Classicalscholarship today, arenothing but completelyshameless, and arbitrary,and obscene frauds,which have been runout of Cambridge andOxford Universities formany centuries—cer-tainly well back into theSeventeenth century,but earlier as well.

Almost all of whatyou consider as undis-puted fact related toClassical archaeologyand related areas andprehistory, is not only not undisputedfact, but it’s largely completely arbitraryfiction, with no support whatsoever. Andif I were to take on to illustrate that assuch, I could spend all day doing it. So,I’m just going to try to use one exam-ple—the story of British archaeologicalcant concerning “Minoan” civilizationon the island of Crete, and the deci-pherment of the writing known as Lin-ear B which overturned it—which, tomy mind at least, locks up the case veryconcretely.

But I want first to mention brieflysome examples of fraudulent scholar-ship in the treatment of the work of thegreat Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484-425 B.C.), especially as it was indicationsin Herodotus which pointed LyndonLaRouche toward recognizing the exis-tence of a very high, prehistoric mar-itime culture spanning the broader Indi-an Ocean area.

This maritime culture extended allthe way from at least the island ofSumatra, the westernmost island ofIndonesia, to the east coast of Africa,and the arc above, which goes throughpresent-day Oman, Yemen, up throughwhat we now call the Persian Gulf, thesouth coast of Iran, what we now callPakistan, and at least halfway down thewest coast of India, in the period as earlyas perhaps 8000-10,000 B.C., perhapsmuch earlier—which is much earlierthan the British would allow. And all ofthis is completely denied, or ignored, orobscured by the reigning British acade-mic authorities.

Slandering Herodotus

Many, although not all historians of theBritish schools, have disputed or evenridiculed the historical veracity ofHerodotus’s history of the Persian Wars.I think the actual, unstated basis of theirobjection, in fact, is that they object toany portrayal of the struggle betweenrepublicanism and oligarchism, whichhas dominated world history since theIonian Revolt against the Persian-Baby-lonian empire (c. 500 B.C.) described by

Herodotus. They objecteven more to the fact thatthe republican forces, here afew badly outnumberedGreeks, defeated the Per-sian-Babylonian worldempire, which had gath-

ered a huge multi-national army tosmash Greece, in the Persian Wars of theearly Fifth century B.C. So, Herodotus, asthe principal source on the Persian Wars,is telling a story which oligarchists wouldrather not hear. That seems to have beenas true in the ancient world as today: itwas the oligarchist Plutarch (A.D. c. 46-120) who wrote that Herodotus, the“father of history,” should instead becalled the “father of lies.”

The leading oligarchs of Plutarch’stime consciously traced their own lin-eage to the oligarchs of the BabylonianEmpire. So do the British royals andleading aristocrats of today. They alsoknow that the Achaemenid PersianEmpire which tried to crush Greece andfreedom in those days, was nothing buta dispensable armed force, nothing but“muscle,” for the Babylonian usurerswho were the real rulers. The Babyloni-ans used Persian military “muscle” theway the British have used American“muscle” in their recent wars againstIraq and Yugoslavia.

Thus, British-dominated historianscarp at Herodotus’s numbering themultinational (i.e., NATO-like) horde

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We Need To Free Ourselves from British Archaeological Frauds

COMMENTARY

FIGURE 1. The ancient world.Heinrich Schliemann excavatedthe cities of Troy and Mycenae, SirArthur Evans the remains of Knossos.

The historian Herodotus

__________

This article is adapted from a presentationto the Presidents’ Day conference of theSchiller Institute/International Caucus ofLabor Committees, Feb. 14, 1999.

The

Gra

nger

Col

lect

ion

Click here for Full Issue of Fidelio Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 1999

© 1999 Schiller Institute, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited.

which Xerxes threw against Greece inthe Second Persian War (480-479 B.C.) at1,700,000 men. Why? Why did none ofHerodotus’s contemporaries apparentlypoint out his colossal blunder?—a ten-fold overestimation, according to somemodern Britons. But, as far as I know,Herodotus’s comtemporaries used simi-lar figures. Did Xenophon similarlyvastly inflate the numbers of the Persianhorde, led by a rival to the Emperor, inwhich he himself travelled across AsiaMinor in 401 B.C.? And similarly inflatethe numbers of the much larger hordewhich defended the then-Persian capitalof Babylon against it?

In like manner, until it was recentlyrediscovered, Herodotus’s account of thecanal Xerxes dug for his invasion fleet,inland of Mount Athos, was consideredby some to be another fantastic exagger-ation, and proof of the author’s unrelia-bility. But the rediscovered canal hasexactly the dimensions given byHerodotus.

Here’s a final instance: Herodotuspersonally verified the existence of thePelasgian language-culture, an impor-tant pre-Hellenic people already attestedby Homer, and attested in other clearways. They were significant in themediation of Egyptian culture to theearly Greeks. But today, many writers ofthe British school will only permit theuse of the name “Pelasgian” betweenquotation-marks.

One reason for the British distaste for

the Pelasgians is that most ancientGreek and Latin authorities, Herodotusamong them, agreed that the Etruscansof Italy originated from an expedition ofPelasgians sent from Anatolia. The oldRoman imperialists destroyed virtuallyevery monument they could find of thesuperior Etruscan culture; today’sBritish imperialists must content them-selves by making a complete hash ofEtruscan studies. The Etruscans wrotein the same alphabet we use today; any-one can easily learn to pronounce theirnumerous surviving writings, and yetofficially, their language and originsremain a total mystery, thanks toBritish-inspired obscurantism.

The late Barry Fell, author of Ameri-ca B.C., was probably on the mark here.He interpreted the Linear A writing ofCrete as an Anatolian language similarto Hittite, and then interpreted surviv-ing Etruscan writings as that same, hith-erto unknown, Anatolian language—just written in a different script. ThePelasgian presence in Crete has beenknown since Homer, and is attested byPelasgian place-names found there.“Gortyn” in Crete, is likely the sameplace-name as Croton in Italy.

Perhaps, as you will see later, thereason archaeologist Arthur Evans wasable to make so little sense of his Cre-tan excavations of what he called“Minoan” civilization, is that he wasactually excavating ruins of a peoplethe British arbitrarily deny to have

existed: the Pelasgians.These are merely a few illustrative

examples. Let’s move on to the meat ofthe story.

Schliemann and the Homeric Epics

At the time the great German scientistHeinrich Schliemann was born in 1822,the British considered that the Homericepics, the Iliad and the Odyssey—andthere’s no dispute about this, becauseCambridge publishes something everyfew years to give the official line—werepure fantasy. They said correctly—andthere was a reason for this—that half ofHomer’s cities in Greece, wereunknown to the Classical Greeks at thetime of Plato; but they also said thatthere was no such place as Troy, therewas no such thing as a Trojan War, itwas all a big fairy tale.

Schliemann, as a young man, becamecaptivated by these epics and learnedGreek predominantly in order to have acomplete mastery of the two epics. Hebecame convinced of what today is sci-entifically provable, which is that farfrom being fairy tales, these are the mostaccurate historical records we have, andprobably ever will have, in key features of minimally Greece and the surround-ing areas of the Mediterranean between 1700 B.C. or so, and 1200 B.C., which wasroughly the time of the Trojan War.

So Schliemann devoted his life todigging up Troy, and uncovering thiscity which had been the scene of thisfamous battle. He realized that he wasnot going to get foundation grants todo it, so he devoted most of his firstforty-six years to becoming a multimil-lionaire by various ventures, includingbuilding railroads in America and Rus-sia, smuggling arms to the Russiansduring the Crimean War while theBritish were trying to prevent himfrom doing so, and various other basi-cally good deeds which were also remu-nerative. He also became a U.S. citizenduring this period.

So, eventually, he got the money,and he excavated Troy. And, lo andbehold! Troy was there, when andwhere Homer had described it. And itwas one of these many discoveries

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FIGURE 2. The Classical Greeks knew that a Greek civilization had predated theDark Age following the Trojan War. But British archaeology denied this.

c.1700 B.C.

t

c.900 B.C.

t

c.400 B.C.

t

c.1200 B.C.

Trojan War

t

Dark Age

toward Classical Greek Civilization

Phoenician alphabet(still used today)

MyceneanGreek Civilization

Linear B writing

Homericepics

t

‘GoldenAge’

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where there really is nocounter-position, becauseHomer had said in numerousplaces—he had given sightings,saying if you stand on MountOlympus and you look here,and you stand and look here—he hadgiven all kinds of sightings for the loca-tion of Troy. And there, where hissightings said it should be, indeed itwas! [SEE Figure 1]

Now, all the British could do was totry to criticize Schliemann for disre-garding later, higher layers of the city—because it had been inhabited until veryrecently, actually—to get down to thelayer which he thought represented theTroy of the Trojan War.

So this completely overturned every-thing of British archaeology, eventhough the British ran archaeology andthey continue to run archaeology andClassical studies, not just in Britain butin all countries. The whole thing hadbeen blown up.

And before they could recover fromthat, Schliemann determined to dig upthe capital of King Agamemnon, the“king of men,” the leader of the Greek, orwhat Homer called Achaean armies, inthe Trojan War, in the town of Mycenae.

Unlike Troy, Mycenae was a knownlocation in the Peloponnesus in Greece,although it had long ceased to be a city,or even a town. And Schliemann dug itup, and came up with what he said werethe grave masks of King Agamemnonand his wife, Clytemnestra, along with ahuge amount of other material, showingclearly a Greek culture which had longpreceded the period the British allotedto Greek culture.

The historical view held by theClassical Greeks was something like

this: That there had been a Greece ofhigh culture, with writing—a distinctkind of writing from any used today—until about 1200 B.C., the time of theTrojan War [SEE Figure 2]. Then, therehad been a fall-off into a Dark Age,until, say, about 900 B.C., when therehad been a revival of Greece, amongother things with a new alphabet, andwith a new political system—totallynew. The two political systems werecompletely distinct. And that then,Homer had taken existing poems aboutthe actual Trojan War, many of themwritten at that time, and composedthem into a great, unified masterwork,but composed of true historical ele-ments, in maybe 900 or 700 B.C., some-thing like that. That was always theGreek Classical view.

But the British view was, that therewere no Greeks before 900 B.C.—orroughly so.

‘Crete of a Hundred Towns’

So after digging up Mycenae, provingthat, Schliemann dug up Tiryns, anoth-er of Homer’s ancient capitals. He madeother excavations as well, and he finallydetermined to excavate Knossos, thefabled capital of Crete—what Homercalled “Crete of a Hundred Towns”—which was supposed to be the mosthighly-populated, in some sense themost highly-developed part of this earli-er phase of Greek culture, whichbecause of Schliemann’s discovery iscalled Mycenaean Greece.

So Schliemann went to the island ofCrete. He tried to purchase the site ofKnossos, the castle, from a Turk. Butthe sale never worked out, and Schlie-mann died on Christmas Day, 1890,under somewhat dubious circum-stances. According to Lyndon La-Rouche, Schliemann’s son was actuallymurdered, which is not surprising.Many of the most significant Classicalscholars, who had discovered thingsinconvenient to the British, have diedunder questionable circumstancesshortly thereafter.

Immediately thereafter, an English-man named Arthur Evans purchasedKnossos, beginning the purchase in

Heinrich Schliemann

Left: Colossal storagejars (“pithoi”), un-earthed by Schliemannat Troy, June 1873(illustration fromSchliemann’s “Ilios”).

Bottom: The LionGate, entrance to KingAgamemnon’s citadel atMycenae, discovered bySchliemann in 1876.

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1893, and concluding it in 1900. (Earlier,Evans had been arrested by Austrianauthorities for complicity in an insurrec-tion in the Balkans, while claiming to bestudying ethnology and archaeologythere.)

And, for about a quarter-century,Arthur Evans sat on this piece of realestate, fencing it off—you could onlycome in as his personal guest or hisemployee. He discovered mounds ofwriting. His dream was to decipher thewriting. To make sure that nobody elsedid, most of it was not shown to anyother scientist until after his death.

He restored a part of what he calledthe “Palace of King Minos.” It’s sort of aDisneyland of Crete. He admitted thathis restoration didn’t coincide with whathe had found there in the first place. Hewrote three books—three large books—about his finds, and more or less invent-ed what he called “Minoan civilization,”which I think is a term which should beruled illegal, because he didn’t know theculture of the people who lived there, hedidn’t know their language, he didn’tknow where they came from, and hedidn’t know what they did. He had a lotof suppositions which were unprovable.

The main thing he had, whichyou’ve all seen, is pictures of youngwomen jumping over bulls—or whatmay be pictures of young women jump-ing over bulls, or it may not. And thishe did indeed find. And he established,to his satisfaction, that Minoan civiliza-tion was a very high civilization, and hadspread out to surrounding areas, civiliz-ing the Greeks. I mean, he couldn’t beclear himself whether these Minoanswere themselves Greeks or not. Butthey supposedly civilized the Greeks.And he would prove his case: Whenev-er anybody saw a picture of a bull, theywould say “Ah! Minoan culture!” Theywere spreading out and civilizing otherpeople.

He named the whole thing afterKing Minos, a legendary king of Knos-sos in Crete, who demanded sevenAthenian maidens and seven youths forhuman sacrifice every year, until The-seus shut the thing down. So he namedit “Minoan” after this King Minos; buthe totally disagreed that human sacrifice

or anything of this sort had taken placethere. His King Minos was a very gentleold man, and full of cultural gifts.

And so it goes. Because the Britishcontrol the field, this is hegemonic. Andyou’ll read about Minoan this andMinoan that, and Minoan influence inall kinds of books. But if you ask theauthor of the books, “Well, what isMinoan? What language did theyspeak? What was their astronomy?,”nobody knows anything. They onlyknow they had young ladies jump overbulls, which in itself is questionable.

So the whole thing is a fraud.

The Labyrinth

Recently, I was given a wonderful bookby a recently deceased German geolo-gist, Hans Georg Wunderlich, who wasvery suspicious of this Knossos/Crete

story. Even today, apparently, there aresort of barriers around the place. I mean,Wunderlich wasn’t allowed, even as ascientist, to root around in there. But hetook the standard five-dollar tour, orwhatever it is.

The layout of the palace is like alabyrinth. In fact, it actually is alabyrinth—because there’s a definitemeaning to what a labyrinth is. So,Wunderlich took the tour, and as a geol-ogist, the first thing he noted, was thatevery single thing—all the walls and allthe floors in this entire rather large com-plex—were made of gypsum. But gyp-sum, as those of you who are geologistspresumably know, is not a stone you canuse to build a dwelling place in whichpeople can live, because just by walkingto and fro daily to the front door, you’llwear a trough into it until your whole

78

Above: Sir Arthur Evans, excavationsite, Knossos. Right: Above-ground“Verandah of the Royal Guard,”Palace of Knossos.

“Bull-leaping” wall fresco, Palace of Knossos, Crete.A

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house wears away. It can’t be used as a adwelling place for the living—or rather,it can’t be used as a dwelling place, to putit more generally.

There are other peculiar things aboutwhat is exhibited today as the Palace ofKing Minos at Knossos. One is what forsome reason Evans decided to christen“the Queen’s apartment.” It’s completelyunderground. She obviously was not aheavy reader, because the only light thatcomes in, is when the door is open. Andthere is room for a bed in there. But theroom is full of these huge pithoi, whichare huge Greek storage vessels, usuallyfor wine, several dozen of these. So,apparently, the Queen slept in a roomwith tons of olive oil or wine or some-thing or other, for some reason.

Furthermore, most of these pithoi, orjugs, stop two or three inches before theceiling. So there was no way to get inthere and get a dipper in and get any-thing out—which made their use asstorage vessels questionable.

In fact, some of them were walled offin niches in the wall. So Wunderlich,who has a bit of a sense of humor, saidthat when they sent the maid down forwine, they would have to send a masonto take the wall apart so that she couldget into the jug to get the wine out.

So this wasn’t much of a palace.But it was a labyrinth. And what was

a labyrinth? Labyrinths were knownfrom Egypt, like the labyrinth ofHawara described by Herodotus. Alabyrinth was not simply what we usual-ly think of as a puzzle. The labyrinthswere Egyptian buildings for the dead,with long series of rooms, such as youwould expect to find in your image of a“labyrinth.” But they were all paired,one room below ground, one roomabove ground.

The room below ground wasdevoted to the remains of a high offi-cial, or a sacred crocodile in this case.Not a pharaoh—they were buried sep-arately. And the corresponding roomabove ground, which was immediatelyabove it, was devoted to worship of thespirit of the entity which was buriedbelow. So that’s what a labyrinth was.And that does describe Knossos: Youhad matched rooms above and below,

in a labyrinthine pattern.Now, it’s clear that these pithoi were

actually used for burial of people, not forstorage of olive oil or anything of thatsort.

When Evans excavated, he foundthem all completely empty of anythingwhatsoever. But what he failed tonotice—living on this site for twenty-sixyears—was that the reason the nativesnever approached what he called the“Palace of Minos,” was because you hadto climb over piles of human bones toapproach the place. They were metershigh—especially at the exits. Evans mayhave thought they were garbage fromthe kitchens.

What had happened, was that you’dhad several millennia of grave robberies.The grave robbers had emptied thepithoi and other burial places. They did-n’t want to be caught in this dastardlyplace. They carried the remains outside.They took the gold face masks and jew-elry and other things they had come for,and left the bones. So the place was sur-rounded by a tumulus of human bonesin every direction—which ArthurEvans failed to notice. And so he madeup this whole myth about Minoan cul-ture. So as I say, the whole term shouldbe outlawed.

Decipherment of Linear B

When Schliemann discovered Troy, thewhole game was up. The British shouldhave stopped then. They should havesaid: “Well, we’ve done our best inarchaeology and paleontology for a fewcenturies, it hasn’t worked out, every-thing has been completely wrong, andwe’re going to devote ourselves to otherpursuits, like gardening.”

But, they didn’t. In Knossos, ArthurEvans found what are called two typesof writing. He really found two lan-guages expressed in the same alphabet.It’s not an alphabet which was used afterthe period of the Dark Ages. It’s a syl-labic alphabet, presumably from theNear East. And he could not deciphereither of the kinds of writing. One wascalled Linear A and the other was calledLinear B.

Subsequently, examples of Linear B,although not Linear A, were found all

over Greece. So, by the time of shortlyafter World War II, Britain, which wasin charge of these things, was full ofexamples of Linear B writing. Andthere was a big race on—just like withDNA—as to who could be the first todecipher Linear B.

Linear A was considered more prob-lematic, because since it wasn’t found inGreece, it was apparently the languageof whatever non-Greeks lived at Knos-sos. And there was great confusionabout that, because Evans had beenunable to turn up anything significant.But Linear B clearly expressed the lan-guage spoken in Greece—in all parts ofGreece—from something like 1700 B.C.,or perhaps earlier, to 1200 B.C.

So, who could decipher it? Every-body was trying. The problem was, asusual, the rules of the game. The rulesof the game of Oxford and Cambridgewere, again, that there were no Greeksin Greece in this period; whoever wasthere, they definitely were not Greeks.And that what Linear B must repre-sent—this was the official line of Oxfordand Cambridge—was a “mixture of dif-ferent languages.”

Now, it’s absurd. Nobody speaks amixture of different languages—asidefrom extreme inebriation or other con-ditions. And nobody writes a mixture oflanguages.

But the Oxford prescription for deci-phering Linear B, was that you mustdecipher it as a “mixture of languages.”And they had the names of the lan-guages: Lydian, Phrygian, and two orthree others spoken in ancient AsiaMinor. Unfortunately, they didn’t knowany of those languages. They just knewthe names of them. They knew that theyhad existed at some point, but nobodycould speak them, or anything. So youwere supposed to decipher thisunknown text, into four or five com-pletely unknown languages. It’s quite achallenge.

Michael Ventris was a Greek-bornBritish subject who had been a cryptog-rapher during World War II. He was aBBC announcer, he was an architect, hewas a very talented man. And presum-ably because of his cryptographic, orcrypto-analytic experience, which was

79

very relevant, he undertook avery, very laborious effort to deci-pher Linear B, based on this thesisof this mixture of what are calledgenerally Anatolian languages.

And then he wrote in hisbook—he got to write one bookon this subject—he wrote in hisbook, “It occurred to me oneevening, what if it were Greek?”And very soon, he had decipheredall the Linear B in his house. Andthen he sent out for everythingelse and deciphered it all—it wasall Greek!

Lo and behold! But this was obviousfrom the start, if you followed the story.Lo and behold, these people wereGreeks speaking Greek. They just had adifferent alphabet.

So he got to publish one book whichlaid it all out. And again, it’s one ofthose things which nobody can dispute,because mostly what it turned out theyhad was tax records. You know,“Farmer Georgios has a cow namedBlackie.” I mean, that’s typical of thekind of thing they mostly had. Nobodycould dispute it. It was completelybeyond question.

But the British were furious. Immedi-ately after writing his book, but before itcould be published, he was hit by a truck inLondon and killed. I believe he was in hisforties. So that was it for him.

In the course of his book, which Iread, he said: We have to revise ourwhole view of Greek etymology—whatword comes from what? Becausebefore the decipherment, we had theGreek of 900 B.C. and after, let’s sayroughly, and not anything before thattime, and now we have all this. Somany well-meaning guesses at whatword comes from what, turn out to bewrong when you see what people reallysaid back in 1500 B.C. or so. And he dida little of that in his book.

Now, I have several Greek etymo-logical dictionaries. I have the one that’ssupposed to be the leading—I paid afortune for it—the leading current one,as far as I know, dated 1982, out of Ger-many. As far as I can see, there’s notone mention of Ventris or what’s calledMycenean Greek in the entire book,

from beginning to end. And thereason is, because the British areBritish. (Actually it’s a German,not an English book, but it’sBritish scholarship.) They justdon’t want this to have happened.They say “Well, it happened, butwe’d rather it hadn’t happened.So, forget it!”

Murder at Oxford

Just to give you a final exam-ple—this I included in a shortversion of a book review I wrote forFidelio some months ago—the kind ofpeople you’re reading when you readBritish Classical scholars, are the kindof person I’m going to describe. It’sjust that in this case, it’s a documentedincident.

There’s an Oxford professor—heprobably still is the head of the Classics

Department—who recently wrote in hisautobiography, that he had gained hisposition by murdering his rival. This isin his autobiography! He’s the head ofthe department. He has been knight-ed—he is Sir Kenneth Dover! I don’tknow when the knighting came in rela-tion to the murder.

But he is Sir Kenneth because of his

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Left: Linear Btablet found atKnossos.

Bottom: Syllabicgrid developed byMichael Ventris forthe decipherment ofLinear B script.

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services to the study of Greek. And hewrote in his autobiography, that he hadmurdered his competitor. What he saidbriefly was—this is all true, believe it ornot—is that “I saw he really wasn’tgood for Oxford. But just to have invit-ed him over for tea and shot him in thehead, I couldn’t do it, because I wouldhave had to face the Coroner’s Jury, andI cannot tell a lie. So therefore, I didn’tdo that.

“Instead, I invited him over and gothim drunk, and he told me an embar-rassing personal secret”—which heneglects to repeat in the book—“andsoon, the man began to get anonymousletters, first a few, then more and more.Then things appeared on bulletin boardsthroughout Oxford,” referring to thisthing, whatever it was. And then he says,one day the guy killed himself with anoverdose of sleeping pills and alcohol.

And this Sir Kenneth Dover says, “Igot up that morning, the sun was shin-ing, I felt perfect. I knew Oxford wasembarked on the right path,” with himas head of the Classics Department,which he may still be today.

The Real Mesopotamia

Briefly, just to reference prehistoricIndian Ocean cultures:

There’s great difficulty created byBritish fixations on Semitic studies. Forexample, in many different ways,according to which cult you listen to,the rights of the royal family are basedon their descent from various Semites.Queen Elizabeth is officially supposedto be a descendant of King David. TheBritish Israelite Society, of which weknow many members, actually, includ-ing leading members, has a much morefar-going thesis, which is that the peo-ple claiming to be Jews today are actual-ly not Jews at all. That all the Jews leftIsrael and went to Britain at some time,and that the present British are theJews, and the Jews are impostors, orsomething.

The British are fixated on Meso-potamia, the area between the Tigrisand Euphrates Rivers in present-dayIraq, as being the origin of civiliza-tion—by virtue of being the origin of oli-garchic civilization. This was an oli-

garchic, very perverted civilization, andthe British want to claim that all civi-lization arose, quite recently in fact,from the oligarchic civilization ofMesopotamia, particularly what’s com-monly called Babylonia.

You run into all kinds of problemswith British scholarship because of thisnarrow fixation. On the other hand,however, it caused them to foster exten-sive research into Babylonian (Akkadi-an) and other Semitic writings. So,around 1875, it began to be apparent,especially to continental Europeanscholars, that the Babylonian alphabet orsyllabary—it was not an alphabet likeours—was radically inappropriate forthe writing of the Babylonian language.It couldn’t have been devised for writingBabylonian, but must have been devisedfor writing some other language, andadapted with great difficulty for thewriting of Babylonian.

And then this other language wasdiscovered, which was called Sumerian.The Sumerians had invented the Baby-lonian style of writing to represent theirown very different language, for whichit was much more appropriate. It was acompletely different language.

And what gradually became appar-ent, although there were tremendousfights about this in the period of 1875through 1925, was that the Babyloni-ans—that is, the Semites, or theMesopotamians generally—had beenuncivilized, had not lived in cities, hadnot had the use of writing, had not hadmuch of any modern technology, until aforeign people appeared called theSumerians, who initially appeared rightat the northern end of the Persian Gulf,where their main centers remained,even though they spread out from there.And from these foreign people, theSemites got writing and all forms of cul-ture—astronomy, arithmetic, you nameit. Now, the last Sumerians, really, diedout certainly by 2500 B.C. After that—infact, up until several hundred yearsbefore Christ—the language was not aliving language, there were no moreidentifiable Sumerians, certainly not inthe cities.

But until into the First millenniumB.C., however, in the Babylonian court,

arguments were presented in theSumerian language, which was a for-eign language completely differentfrom any language which anybodyknew. You had to hire somebody whospoke this language to represent you incourt. The decisions were written inthis language. Everything was done inthis foreign language—medical educa-tion, astronomical, scientific, mathemat-ical—all were done in the Sumerianlanguage, which was a foreign languagefar more different from the Semitic lan-guages than Latin is from English,where you once had a comparable sortof phenomenon.

So, a vastly superior culture hadcome and civilized many of the Semitesof the area, and then had gradually, overthe millennia, been submerged amongthem and could no longer be identi-fied—although the language was car-ried on for many centuries, for thesekinds of ceremonial reasons. So, this wasa fascinating business which came tolight over this period.

The reason I’m mentioning this, isthat this Sumerian language comes fromthe same language family as that of theancient Dravidian culture of the IndusValley, of Harappa and Mohenjodaryo,which preceded the arrival of the Indo-Aryans, the speakers of what becameSanskrit, into India from the centralAsian plateau. And the whole thesis is,that at a time which I can’t date, but cer-tainly well before 4000 B.C., there was asingle, ocean-going culture, which pre-ceded the shared culture of the IndusValley and Sumerian riparian (river-side)cities. A maritime culture, which wentfrom Sumatra, as the terminus of thecurrent which leads from south of Cey-lon eastward, which spread across theIndian Ocean area, as far as the east coastof Africa. And there was one unified cul-ture speaking one unified language manymillennia ago; a maritime culture whichhad outposts in various locations.

This was very much older than thesupposed “origin” of civilization in oli-garchic Mesopotamia. All of which iswholly antithetical, heretical actually, tothe accepted canon of British archaeo-logical authorities.

—Tony Papert

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