THE LEFT HAND OF DAWN

Both according to François Lenormant ⁽¹⁾ and the Cambridge Ancient History, ⁽²⁾ cheques were in use in Babylonia from the earliest times. Such use of cheques has also been verified as having existed at Ur during the 3rd and 4th Millenniums B.C. by Sir Charles L. Woolley, and no doubt, by other archaeologists at other sites.

As the only clear meaning that can be given to the law No. 7 of Hammurabai, indicates that also were known in the 3rd Millennium or earlier, the principles of private money creation through the creation of receipts as against valuables on deposit with persons of "Repute," the existence of all the abuses against the men of the city, deriving from the exercise of the principles of inflation and deflation of the total number of such receipts indicating given numbers of the unit of exchange, may be deemed to have existed.

 

These inflations or deflations of the volume of the mass of abstract money, which indeed such false receipts may be called, and such as are particularly associated with the custom of making payments by cheque drawn on "deposits" created by such receipts as issued by such persons "of repute," and which could be manipulated as suited themselves and their friends etc., were directed towards creation of total monopoly of wealth and industry.

Further, as according to Paul Einzig, "a credit system developed in Greece as in other parts of the ancient world long before the adoption of coinage," ⁽³⁾ it may reasonably be supposed that well before the flood of refugees that must have poured out of Aram in the earlier days of the first millennium B.C. as a result of the Assyrian onslaught, Babylonian money power had already established branch agencies on the coast of Greece, and in the Mycenaean centers generally, from which they loaned their clay "promises to pay", expressed in terms of silver no doubt, as against collateral.

 

Such loans could be used to purchase those luxury goods and arms which were brought from the Syrian or Mesopotamian cities; but although the original loan had been but an entry in the ledger of the agent, probably, in the final analysis costing little more than the labour of slave scribe, the repayment demanded would be silver or slaves, or other equally desirable goods.

Clear evidence of the existence of this Babylonian force in the Mycenaean cities was yielded by verification of the fact of the existence of the mythological Cadmus of Grecian Thebes, reputedly Phoenician (Phoenician being simply a word used by the Greeks to describe those people that came to trade from the ports of Syria and Canaan), having probably been reality.

 

This historical fact was revealed by the discovery in modern day Thebes in the area that in ancient times must have been the national storehouses, of cylinders containing seals of a high dignitary of the court of King Burraburias who reigned in the city of Babylon in the first half of the 14th Century B.C.; which unmistakably suggested Cadmus, and his real part in the affairs of Thebes and those cities with which it was connected. ⁽⁴⁾ Further evidence of the activities of the Babylonians is indicated by the discovery of their seals in the Cyclades.

These trading stations established in Mycenae long before Homer, would have functioned very much as did the European trading stations on the West Coast of Africa during the eighteenth century A.D. ⁽⁵⁾ They were points from which agents of international money power could instigate internal warfare amongst the tribes, so that they would always have ready market for the products of their arms and other industries; the most desirable payment for these products being precious metals and slaves; as much in ancient times as in modern times.

As previously pointed out, the warrior princes of Mycenaean Greece had undoubtedly maintained steady supplies of these commodities as the result of their depredations over many years. But once they had thrown all their resources and military power into the gamble across the sea which was the campaign of the King of Lydia and the "Peoples of the Sea" against Pharaoh Merneptah of Egypt, and which ended in total disaster for them at the battle of Perire, the years of strength, and plenty, and being feared by their enemies were over...

It may reasonably be assumed that their total destruction while in confederation with the tribes and kingdoms of the Western Mediterranean at Perire on the Western marches of the Egyptian Delta in 1234 B.C., by the discipline of the massed archers of Pharaoh Merneptah, would have marked the Apogee of the parabola of their rise and fall. ⁽⁶⁾

 

In that battle it was proven that they had over-reached themselves, and, as history records, their descent from that Apogee was swift. Despite the excellence of their weapons and the skill at diplomatic maneuver of those forces supporting them, such as lay hid within the Babylonian money power, although so much of that world of ancient time had fallen before their fine copper weapons and their chariots, as a result of that unhappy battle, all such equipment was gone; and more than thinking of further conquests abroad, thought had to be for defense of hearth and home.

If then the latest estimate of the date of the battle of Perire, given as 1234 B.C. by W.F. Albright, ⁽⁷⁾ is correct, that the destruction of Egypt itself was planned over the period of 16 years or so following the sack of Troy (1250 B.C. according to the modern dating and that of Herodotus), is reasonable supposition. The organizing, arming, and training of such widely diverse peoples as formed the army of King Meryey of Lybia, would have taken many years of careful planning.

Considering that the plunder that acceded to Pharaoh Merneptah, after the battle, of at least ten thousand swords, mostly copper and bronze, the rest gold and silver, and the 120,000 pieces of other military equipment in copper and bronze, under the methods of production of that day represented years of work, ⁽⁸⁾ perhaps Merneptah did not on this occasion melt them into bullion, or sell them to the agents of international money power who undoubtedly were amongst those camp followers appearing to support his army.

 

He may have made the obvious move, as is suggested by the fall of Pylos about 1200 B.C. ⁽⁹⁾ of using this plunder in weapons to arm the tribes of Epirus, and perhaps farther North, who clearly would be the natural enemies Achaeans.

 

These tribes, although recorded by some as being shepherds, were just as likely to have been slaves revolting from the mining industries established by the Babylonian money power through the instrumentality of the Achaeans and Mycenaeans; which mining industries produced the gold that was such a commonplace in the homes of the nobility of Mycenaea and the silver that was so much needed for the maintenance of that financial system based on silver by weight which was the foundation of what may have become, by this time, a total world hegemony of private money creative power.

Following is a digression on the mining industries that existed in Greece and to the North about the time of Cadmus who, as previously pointed out, was one of the principal Babylonian agents to the Mycenaean world. His approximate date may very well be known from the dating of the seal found at Grecian Thebes; ⁽¹⁰⁾ which reveals that Cadmus probably lived during the reign of King Burnaburiash (sometimes known as Burraburiash) of Babylon, who was contemporary of King Tutankhamen of Egypt (1358-1353 B.C.).

 

The same Burnaburiash is best known by his letter to King Tutankhamen as was found in the Tel Amarna archives, in which, pleading for gold in no uncertain terms, he achieves an immortal fame ⁽¹¹⁾ ...

Nearly one hundred years before the more extensive knowledge of these times, such as exists today, Alexander Del Mar, relying on his own observations as a mining engineer, and on the records of the ancients, wrote as follows respecting the mines from which the agents of the world-wide Babylonian financial hegemony, such as Cadmus of Thebes drew their steady flow of gold and silver...

After description of the thoroughness of Roman mining in Spain in the Asturias, and detailed mention of Laureion near Athens, he continues: ...

"Thassus, an island off the Thracian coast (written Thasso by the Greeks and Thassus by Livy) was originally colonized by the Phoenicians... Thassus itself is probably a corruption of Iassus for Pausanias informs us that Thassus was the son of Agenor, the brother of Europa, and the leader of the Phoenicians (and therefore, brother of Cadmus the founder of Thebes) ⁽¹²⁾ which are details that belong to the myth of Iassus.

Herodotus says that he himself visited the island of Thassus, where he saw a temple to the Thasian Hercules 'erected by the Phoenicians, who built Thassus while they were engaged in the search for Europa, an event which happened five generations before Hercules, the son of Amphytryon, was known in Greece.' The "Thasian Hercules" was Iassus.

We know but little more of the early history of Thasus beyond the fact that its mines were celebrated for their yield of gold and silver; that the most productive ones were in the S.E. district between Aenyra and Coenyra; and that the Thasians, in addition to the mines of the island, owned and worked those of Scapte Hyle (or Scaptesyla) on the Thracian main. These last in the time of Darius yielded an average annual product worth or equal to 80 talents. The mines on the island did not produce so much at this period, although at an earlier one they had annually yielded between two or three hundred talents.

About 60 miles S.S.E. of Cape Sunium is the island of Siphnos, which in the time of Polycrates B.C. 580-22 and perhaps long before, was famous for its rich mines of gold and silver.

'Their soil produced both gold and silver in such abundance that from a tenth part of their revenues they had a treasury at Delphos equal n value to (all) the riches which that temple possessed.'

In the Roman period, time of Strabo, Siphnos was noted for its poverty: for says Pausanias, speaking of the interval,

'Afterwards their gold mines were destroyed by an inundation of the sea.'

Mount Pangaeus is in Thrace on the River Nestus, about two hundred miles W.N.W. from Constantinople.

 

Pliny says that the gold mines in this range were opened by Cadmus: indeed it is probable that all the mines in ancient Greece were opened by the Phoenicians or the Venetians, before they were worked by the Greeks.

 

Phillip of Macedon about B.C. 358, being informed that in ancient times (that would be previous to the so-called Dark Ages of Greece) ⁽¹³⁾ these mines had been productive, caused them to be reopened, with the result that he obtained from them annually more than a thousand talents. It is from the gold of Pangaeus that he struck his "Phillips," whose type during the following century was so extensively copied by the Gauls.

The island of Samos, once called Cypar-Issa, is on the west coast of Asia Minor near the mouth of the Caystrus and ruined Ephesus. It was colonized originally by the Bacchidae, who were presumably Phoenicians or Venetians and who, on being driven out of Samos by the Ionians, settled afterwards in Samothrace. We know little of the early history of Samos...

 

The Samian mines were of gold and silver, the ores of which were reduced on the river Imbrasus. The extant gold, silver, and electrum coins of Samos are numerous. Some of those commonly attributed to Sardis, were ascribed by Sestini to Samos. Herodotus reports that Polycrates bought off the Lacedaemonians, who tried to deprive him of the island, with a subsidy of lead coins thinly cased with gold, and thus cheaply got rid of his unwelcome visitors.

 

The mines of Samos were still worked in the time of Theophrastus, about 240 B.C., for he wrote concerning them:

'Those who work in these mines cannot stand upright, but are obliged to lie down either on their sides, or their backs: for vein they extract runs length-wise and is only two feet deep though considerably more in breadth and is enclosed on every side with hard rock. From this vein the ore is obtained.'

Mines of gold or silver or both were worked by the so-called Pelasgians in many parts of Greece, chiefly in the mountains of Albania, Dalmatia, Croatia, Bosnia, Servia, Thrace and Bulgaria.

 

The remains of a smelting furnace composed of colossal hewn stones (once again the cyclopaean stone works of Mycenae?), ⁽¹⁴⁾ together with heaps of refuse silver ores, can still be seen in Albania, almost in sight from the houses of Corfu (Corcyra). Similar structures and remains are said to exist in Dalmatia.

 

In Bosnia at Slatnitza, on the road to Scopia, six miles from Traunick, the Romans worked gold mines on an extensive scale and they were probably worked by the Greeks before the Romans. There are reported to be gold mines in several mountains near Zvornick and Varech. The rivers Bosna, Verbatch, Drina, and Latchva are auriferous. Many silver mines have been worked in the neighbourhood of Rama or Prezos, Foinitca and other villages, called Sreberno, Srebernik, or Srebernitza.

 

Cinnabar is obtained near the convent of Chressevo, and this deposit was probably worked for mercury in very ancient times. About B.C. 470, Alexander, son of Amyntas, possessed a mine near lake Prasis and Mt. Dysia in Macedonia, which yielded him a talent per diem.

In Servia there were silver mines near Nova-Berda, and (Roman) gold mines near Saphina.

 

Ancient mines of both gold and silver, chiefly the latter exist in other parts of Servia, but little is known of their early history. There are some twenty thousand acres of alluvions within fifty miles of Belgrade which might yet richly reward the hydraulic process.

 

There is plenty of water with good heads and good grades for the gravel.

 

Bulgaria also abounds in mines of the precious metals, but like most of those within the territory comprised within Ancient Greece, they have fallen to ruins and their history is forgotten...

...In many parts of Greece or European Turkey, where ancient mines were worked, a superstition is said to prevent the peasantry from visiting them. Malte-Brun especially mentions this of the old Roman mines near Traunick, and we ourselves have noticed the same superstition in the vicinity of the Roman gold mines in the Carpathian foothills.

 

This superstition is probably due to the traditions of that cruel and relentless slavery to which their forefathers were subjected by the Greek and Roman Lords who once owned these mines. Valdivia, writing to the Emperor Charles V, declared that every castellano of gold from Peru cost a measure of human blood and tears. What was the cost of gold to the ancient Romans or the still more ancient Greeks, it would be hard to say: but a human life for every ounce would probably be well within the mark..." ⁽¹⁵⁾

For further information on mining in very ancient times in S.E. Europe, the activities of the Beaker people etc., the Cambridge Economic History should be consulted, though no special significance, such as obviously exists, will be pointed out therein relating this search for silver and gold to the private money creative system already well established in Babylonia at that time...

So to return to the main thread of this tale... It is clear that a relatively extensive, and hardened, and brutalized population existed in the localities of the mining industries of Epirus and farther North at the time of the flourishing of Crete, and Mycenae and of Cadmus of Thebes; formerly considered mythological, but clearly powerful agent of the Babylonian money power towards its search for the precious metals.

 

This population, largely slave, given weapons and organizations, as the vanguard of the so-called militant shepherds, could be a serious threat to the civilizations of the South, so concerned with peace and the pleasures deriving from trade etc., which is born out by the records of history, scant as they are...

It is to be noted that Ugarit, wherein the Achaean had trade centre after 1300 B.C., great port, and location of manufacturies, fell well previous to 1190 B.C., when Rameses III of Egypt appears to have finally checked the Southward advance of its destroyer; ⁽¹⁶⁾ which suggests likelihood of them as having been those Northern people, not connected with the "Peoples of the Sea", with whom Egypt undoubtedly established alliance at the time of the battle of Perire.

 

Such allies may very well have been those we know of as the Dorians, who, as is revealed by the tablets of Pylos, clearly were sea raiders in their earlier days in the Mediterranean area. Further verification of these conclusions, though not of the Dorian alliance, exists in the deductions of Professor Albright (Syria, the Philistines, and Phoenicia; P.31.), deriving from the information on the documents found in the Tablet Oven at Ugarit, that the sack of Ugarit, having obviously occurred shortly after the tablets were placed in the oven, dates from about 1234 B.C., which would be about the time of the victory of Merneptah of Egypt over the "Peoples of the Sea" at Perire.

The destruction Ugarit may very well have been an act of political revenge of a reawakened Egypt, working through the allies it would be raising up. For it is clear that the raiders who struck down this important city were well advised in that they chose the time for their attack as being when the ships of Ugarit had been ordered elsewhere, perhaps to Lydia, by the Hittites who appear to have been the overlords of the kings of Ugarit. ⁽¹⁷⁾ These raiders obviously were also well armed. In that day, much more so than today, the question was not so much as whether men were available, as whether effective arms were available for them to bear.

Ugarit was undoubtedly centre from which arms and supplies were shipped to the Libyans and the "Peoples of the Sea". In such, therefore, it would have been agency of that greater force seeking to design the end of Egypt as it bad been known; and waiting for its plunder of sliver and gold.

The main Achaean states, suffering serious shortage of arms as a result of the battle of Perire, which appears to be verified by the dearth of military equipment recorded by the Linear "B" tablets unearthed at Pylos, obviously written shortly before the full force of the attack came from the North, were wide open to the enemy.

 

On the reasonable assumption that Pharaoh Merneptah would have arranged for armed uprising of the numerous mine slaves to the North of Mycenaean Greece, together with organized attack from those nations of mid Europe, perhaps from as far afield as Denmark, trading partner of Mycenae, ⁽¹⁸⁾ it would have been reasonable for him to have supplied them with officers particularly instructed in siege work, and the arms with which, as a result of Perire, his arsenals would have been so well equipped.

One thing is clear, the Dorians known to be destroyers of Pylos, an action which paved the way for their conquest of the Peloponnese, were well organized, with a strong esprit de corps which remained with them until the last days of Sparta, and were well armed as armaments went in those days.

 

Having ships, as the tablets of Pylos reveal, ⁽¹⁹⁾ they thus could maintain adequate supplies down the coast of the Adriatic. Above all they must have had previous experience in siege work such as could have been gained in the wars against the Canaanitic cities, for the tremendous walls of both Mycenae and Tyryns could not have been taken but by well organized armies with a strong and experienced engineering corps...

 

It may safely be considered that a considerable part of the excellent arms with which the Dorians must have been supplied, was the plunder of Perire. The only uncertainty is whether these arms were obtained, as seems to be the usual thing in such circumstances, from the international money power direct, or from a scheming and resurgent Egypt where the god-king shone once again on the throne of the two lands, giving universal illumination as guide of his people's destiny...

 

After Perire, terrible battle that it must have been for the times, he certainly would have been in a position to "Divide and Rule"...

After all these events, largely indicating frustration of the schemes of international money creative power, particularly in its failure to bring about total collapse of that most ancient world which was Egypt, so far as Greece was concerned, there came a period known today as the "Dark Ages"; dark, because too little is known thereof. Such was the magnitude of the disaster that swept over the Achaeans, weaponless as they very well may have been, that for a time those trading stations established by the Babylonians, and that had flourished for so long, through the crumbling of so much of what had been in ancient days, may have been reduced or even closed. ⁽²⁰⁾

As however the turbulence died away, money power as centered in Mesopotamia. now with the plunder of half a dozen civilizations in its strong rooms, and a steady inflow of the precious metals deriving from the rapid expansion of the mining industry at that time, due to the improvement of the methods of exploration and smelting brought about by the use of tools of hardened iron, together with the availability of ample slave supplies as derived from all these wars, began to look around for new fields in which its power to create "Capital" could be used to best advantage.

 

Thus once again the money creators of Mesopotamia turned their eyes towards the idyllic shores of Greece, and its forested mountains and hills; Greece which was clearly the gateway to Europe, and, through its command of the routes to the Hellespont and the Black Sea, to further Asia...

Analyzing the sources, either Dorian or Ionian from which derived the impulses which gave driving force to the growth of the Greek industrial revolution, the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1898) says:

..."The Ionian was that which most actively influenced the early development of Greece. But the Ionians themselves derived the most impulses of their progress from a foreign source. Those Canaanites or 'lowlanders' of Syria, whom we call by the Greek name of Phoenicians, inhabited the long narrow strip of territory between Lebanon and the sea. Phoenicia, called 'Keft' by the Egyptians, had at a remote period contributed Semitic settlers to the Delta or 'Isle of Caphtor'; and it would appear from the evidence of the Egyptian monuments that the Kefa, or Phoenicians, were a great commercial people as early as the 16th Century B.C. Cyprus, visible from the heights of Lebanon, was the first stage of the Phoenician advance into the Western waters; and to the last there was a Semitic element side by side with the Indo-Europeans.

 

From Cyprus the Phoenician navigators proceeded to the Southern coasts of Asia Minor, where the Phoenician colonists gradually blended with the natives, until the entire seaboard had become in a great measure subject to Phoenician influences. Thus the Solymni, settled in Lycia, were akin to the Canaanites and the Carians, originally kinsmen of the Greeks, were strongly affected by Phoenician contact. It was at Miletus especially that the Ionian Greeks came into commercial intercourse with the Phoenicians.

 

Unlike the dwellers on the southern seaboard of Asia Minor, they showed no tendency to merge their nationality in that of Syrian strangers. But they learned from them much that concerned the art of navigation, as for instance, the use of the round built merchant vessels called , and also a system of weights and measures, as well as the rudiments of some useful arts.

 

The Phoenicians had first of all been drawn to the coasts of Greece in quest of the purple fish which was found in abundance off the coasts of the Peloponnesus and of Boeotia; other attractions were furnished by the plentiful timber for shipbuilding which the Greek forests supplied, and by veins of silver, iron, and copper ore.

Two periods of Phoenician influence on early Greece may be distinguished: first, a period during which they were brought into intercourse with the Greeks merely by traffic in occasional voyages; secondly a period of Phoenician trading settlements in the islands or on the coasts of the Greek seas, when their influence became more penetrating and thorough.

 

It was probably early in this second period, perhaps about the 9th century B.C. (probably the time of the first major Assyrian attack on the Arameans in 933 B.C.), that the Phoenician alphabet became diffused through Greece. This alphabet was itself derived from the alphabet of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics, which was brought into Phoenicia by the Phoenician settlers in the Delta.

 

It was imported into Greece, probably by the Arameo-Phoenicians of the Gulf of Antioch, not by the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon, and seems to have superseded, in Asia Minor and the islands, a syllabary of some seventy characters, which continued to be used in Cyprus down to a late time. The direct Phoenician (I.E. Babylonian), influence on Greece lasted to about 600 B.C. (significantly about the time of the Seisachtheia at Athens, and the Laws of Lycurgus in Laconia).

 

Commerce and navigation were the provinces that concerned the higher culture, the Phoenicians seem to have been little more than carriers from East to West of Egyptian, Assyrian, or Babylonian ideas..." ⁽²¹⁾

Although the existence of the cities of Ugarit and Alalakh in the region of the Gulf of Antioch was unknown when the above was written, neither therefore had knowledge of those days received the impetus of the information recorded in their tablet hoards, nor were Linear "A" and "B" known, much less deciphered, revealing so much of Mycenae and its time, and that which had been before, the opinions expressed by this 19th Century writer more or less agree with those recently expressed by Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, ⁽²²⁾ despite the belief of Sir Leonard some 26 years previously, that the script of the (Aramaic) tablets of Ras Shamra, site of ancient Ugarit, derived from the cuneiform of Sumeria and Akkadia... ⁽²³⁾

...And so to continue with the main thread of our narrative, it being thus quite clear that by 933 B.C., agencies for Babylonian imperialism were once again well established, in Greece, certainly in Ionia, and almost certainly farther afield on the Greek mainland, considering those favorable conditions existing in Greece at that time, the international money power of that day, in reality as blind a force to its own needs and purposes as it is today, on the advice of such Aramaean refugees no doubt, decided to reduce exports to Greece, and to finance the growth of native Greek manufactures.

 

Such financing, whether through forgery of the existing currency of Greece, the iron or copper spits, out of the bloody scrap garnered from the fields of battle in Aram, or Arabia, or Israel, or Egypt; or by other methods known to them, as previously described, would present no problem.

Thus renewing more permanently the base from which their trade into Northern Europe might be conducted, winter or summer, they were guaranteed a more steady flow of Carpathian, Illyrian, Thracian, or Attican silver. A base was also established from which the similar trade into the Pontic regions and South Russia could be better maintained; in addition could be reckoned on a growing industrial population to assist in the absorption of both Egyptian and South Russian surpluses of grain.

The petty but vigorous city states of Greece as existed and would come to exist, would form a good ground for experiment with money systems, and with new systems of government and, what is now-a-days called social systems.

 

In the fevered imagination of the money changers scheming in their shaded courtyards of Babylonia, such experiments might even show the way towards that for which their souls yearned above all, and which still they had not been able to bring about:

the total disintegration of the last great kingdoms of earth, which, it seems, no sooner had they been brought to the point of collapse, than somehow they came to rise again...

"Kingship again being sent down from on High". ⁽²⁴⁾

The way might be shown to them by which they too, their God, themselves and theirs, might become Lords of the Earth; and indeed, whereby out of their midst might be set up that God-King who would preside over the governance of the Universe; its total and absolute ruler...

...And much of these strange yearnings came to be realized.

 

The possibilities inherent in circulating pieces of precious metal of equal weight and fineness, and with the seal of state stamped thereon, as money, after the first major experiment therein in the Lydia of Croesus, were fully exploited in Greece... No doubt these ancient Greeks, the same as our people in this day, fondly imagined that the state imprinted marks on their so-called coinage, denoted the absolute integrity of their money; and while they continued in this belief, they were the more easily manipulated.

Thus the power of rejection or appointment fell out of the withering hand of a decadent, if not dying priesthood, into that hand that moved over the disks of precious metal in the shadows of the counting house; and rather than noble and selfless men in positions of power, came low and venal men wielding but the appearance of power. Such men being raised up from the blind mob, exercised no more control or rule than that which the forces behind money creation and issuance permitted to them; nor did they exercise guidance further than that limit dictated by the inferiority of their quality.

The Greek of those days, as the Englishman during the 17th Century A.D., was highly intelligent, industrious, and frugal, and he clearly served under his ancient and natural aristocracy proudly and gladly in war or in peace...

 

His land was then covered with forests from which was available an ample supply of charcoal such as would last kilns and furnaces for a long time to come; from Thrace, not so far distant, came suitable timbers for shipbuilding... Hence the spark that gave light to the life of the Greek city state must have been smouldering well before the introduction of coined money from Lydia and its attendant possibilities of controlled credit manipulations much greater than had ever been before.

Consequently, at the time of its emergence into the light of history as we know it, Greece was to the known world in the same way as was England during the 16th and 17th Centuries, when, due to the stealthy stimulation of a "Credit," or abstract money economy, money greed injected into the nobility caused them to forget their trust.

 

The major manifestation of the forgetfulness of such trust was their seizure of the common lands for the purposes of sheep pasture, the growing wool trade now yielding good return in the expanding money economy; thus depriving the villagers of their rightful livelihood on the land, and leaving them with no option but emigration into the cities. In the cities these villagers served as labour in mine or factory, there being totally at the mercy of rascals from foreign parts, or those who bad been raised up from their own ranks as most eager for food, and who were least critical of the hand that offered it to them.

So far as Greece was concerned, on to a scene idyllic in the loveliness of its tree clad hills and mountains and shores, came men from that Aramaic speaking money power out of Syria and Aram, plausible men who wept and moaned to the pitying Greek the slaughter of their people by the Assyrian. Refugees from the Hittite city of Carchemish, from Aramean Damascus, Kummuh, and Sama'l, and other cities.

 

Cities which had crumbled to dust before the ferocity of the Assyrians under Shalmanezer and Ashurnazirpal; but whether Syrian or Babylonian, these men spoke and wrote Aramaic in one form or another, as the evidence of the Greek alphabet reveals, ⁽²⁵⁾ and which would be further suggested by the nature of the tablets that were found (about 1935) on the site of Ugarit (now known as Ras Shamra), on the North Syrian Coast. ⁽²⁶⁾

These men brought with them the knowledge of precious metal commodity exchange, and amongst other deceptions easily perpetrated on a simple and trusting people, knowledge of the possibilities of creation of money and wealth through the rackets of storage of valuables as for safe custody; or the creation of credit as it is now euphemistically known, and its power as a driving force towards the establishment of industry amongst a healthy, trusting, and warlike people; and its power towards the creation of monopoly of ownership and control of such industry.

What must have been cottage industry in Greece, soon became industry under organization and under methods of semi-mass production, long since known in Sumeria, and Akkadia, and Assyria etc. Such industry could only be organized on the basis of money wages in the case of freemen, and therefore only with labour, slave or free, trained to the concept of money, and the making of money, as the be-all and end-all in life.

Athens made pottery and ships; Corinth made pottery and ships; Megara made textiles.

 

Athens, with ample surpluses of olive oil sufficient to maintain a substantial export trade in that commodity, and with the production of silver from the Laureion mines but a few miles from the city, became centre of an entre-pôt trade with those other Greek city states that relied on copper or iron fiduciary money systems to drive their industry and exchanges; money systems if of state design and control, that international banking had little use for...

But without the economic organization deriving from participation in the orbit of the international money market controlled by the international silver bullion brokers and their agents, the bankers of the Piraeus who controlled above all the flow of silver from Laureion and Thrace, and Samos, and mines further afield, it is doubtful if that dynamic force engendered from the union of Dorian and pre-Dorian Greece could ever have become that which it did become: the point to which a great part of the power and learning gravitated from those fast dying worlds of the most Ancient Orient; thence being thrust forth again amongst men to constitute that which may prove to have been one of the last stages of man's endeavor upon this earth.

It was the beginning of an apparent reassemblance, a false renewal of learning and life which was to reveal momentarily, in fading glory, the fusion of that world of the companions of Zeus, golden-headed giants descended to earth from their home amongst the gods, and the world of Crete where dark children of the sun basked in the light and comfort of him who to them was god on earth as he walked in his gardens at Cnossos.

...Both god, priesthood and people lived in this distant sunlit world in the mystic harmony of ancient systems of life... They lived with little knowledge of warfare or weapons of war... Their cities were without wall or visible defense so long had they been without fear... In a mild warm climate, they needed little clothing, and their women who wore no more than a heavy flounced skirt, proudly and fearlessly displayed the loveliness of their breasts...

 

References

1. François Lenormant: La Monnaie dans l'Antiquité; Book l; pp. 113-122.

2. Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. I; P. 392.

3. Paul Einzig: Primitive Money, P. 225.

4. Jacquetta Hawkes: Dawn of the Gods, P. 205, (New York, 1968). Also Britannica 1898, Vol. XI. P. 92. Also the deductions of Professor Sayce in Mycenae, P. 265. P. 365.

5. Captain Theodore Canot: The Adventures of an African Slaver; (New York; 1928). Also Cambridge Economic History, Vol II; P. 16.

6. W.F. Albright; P. 32.

7. The estimate given by Breasted in his edition of 1956 is 1220 B.C. However the deductions by which Professor Albright arrives at his conclusion that the battle of Perire was fought in 1234 B.C. are most convincing, and do not leave much doubt.

8. The details of the mining, treatment and smelting of unoxidized ores as took place about this time in the Austrian Alps, are evidence of a long and tedious process (Cambridge Economic History, Vol II, pp. 19-20.).

According to Professor W.F. Albright in The Amarna Letters from Palestine, (P. 12.): "when we glance through the Amarna letters, we cannot but be impressed with the smallness of the garrisons which were considered adequate by the local princes when clamouring for aid; the prince of Megiddo wants a hundred men, but three other chieftains including the princes of Gezer and Jerusalem, are satisfied with fifty each. Even the prince of wealthy Byblos who constantly asks for assistance, is generally satisfied with two hundred to six hundred infantry and twenty to thirty chariots. Brigawaza of the Damascus region also wants two hundred men ..."

Correlating these informations, it is clear, that although populations were much less in that day (the latter half of the second millennium B.C.), the limiting factor to military force was the availability of arms, not as is today with its unlimited supplies of metal, the availability of men (hence "conscription").

9. Jacquetta Hawkes: Dawn of the Gods, P. 24.

10. Ibid. P. 205.

11. Letter 9 of the Tel Amarna Tablets; Vol I; P. 29. (Samuel A.B. Mercer; Toronto, 1939.). The translation reads as follows: To Niphururia, king of Eg[ypt], say. Thus saith Burraburias, king of Karadunias, thy brother. I am well. With thee, thy house, thy wives, thy land, thy chief men, thy horses, thy chariots, may it be very well. Since my father and thy fathers with one another established friendly relations, they sent to one another rich presents, and they refused not one another any good request. Now my brother has sent [only] two minas of gold as a present. But now, if gold is plentiful, send me as much as thy fathers. But if it is scarce, send half what thy father did. Why didst thou send only two minas of gold? Now, since my work on the House of God is great, and vigorously have I undertaken its accomplishment, send much gold.

There is little doubt that it was about this time that gold was beginning to augment silver in Babylonia as reserve in the ratio of 13:1 approximately ... Hence it might reasonably be assumed that the worthy Burnaburiash could very well have been egged on by force other than that of sheer godliness.

12. Bracketed comment by present author. Britannica, 9th edition, Vol. VIII.

13. Bracketed comment by present author.

14. Ibid.

15. Alexander del Mar: History of the Precious Metals, pp. 47-50.

16. Breasted, pp. 480-481.

17. Cyrus H Gordon: Ugaritic Literature, p. ix, p. 120. (Text 118) Rome, 1949.

18. Cambridge Economic History, Vol. II, P. 16.

19. Jacquetta Hawkes: Dawn of the Gods, P. 209.

20. Cambridge Economic History; Vol. II: P. 19.

21. Britannica. 1898: P. 90: Vol. XI.

22. Sir Charles Leonard Woolley: Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization, pp. 651-658, London, 1937.

23. Sir Charles Leonard Woolley: Abraham, P. 23, 24. Also see P. 80 present work.

24. This quotation which comes from Sir Charles L. Woolley's translation of the Sumerian King Lists, (Excavations at Ur, P. 249.), reads in full: " The Flood came. After the Flood came, Kingship again was sent down from on High "...

25. Frederick William Madden, M.R.A.S.: Coins of the Jews, P. 29; London; 1881.

26. According to Sir Charles L. Woolley in his book Abraham (pp. 23-24.): "At Ras Shamra on the North Syrian coast, there have recently been unearthed documents of a very surprising kind; there are clay tablets bearing inscriptions in cuneiform, but the signs represent not syllables as in Babylonian, but letters of the alphabet, and the language is a form of Aramaic closely related to Hebrew: they date from the 14th Century before Christ. Consequently we see that by the time of the Exodus people living in Syria and speaking a tongue akin to the Israelite were so accustomed to the idea of writing that they had modified the old established script of Sumer and Babylon to suit the peculiarities of their own language."

However, in his latest book: Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization, (Pp. 651-658), Sir Leonard Woolley states that the various scripts of Ancient Syria deciphered or otherwise, and including Phoenician which he definitely claims to be parent script of ancient Greek, all derived from the Egyptian picture writing or Hieroglyphics (via the Hieratic of 2000 B.C.) in agreement with Madden who wrote one hundred years ago. (See chart on P. 75 of the present work.)

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