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THE BURNING OF TROY
AND OTHER WORKS IN QUANTAVOLUTION AND SCIENTIFIC CATASTROPHISM

by ALFRED DE GRAZIA

METRON PUBLICATIONS
PRINCETON,
N.J.,
U.S.A.


Note on the printed version of the book:

This book was processed by the Princeton University Computing Center, using the
processing language called Script. Photocomposition, cover make-up, layout, and printing
were accomplished by the Princeton University Printing Services.

Copyright * 1984 by Alfred de Grazia

ISBN: 0-940268-09-8

Copyright * 1984 by Alfred de Grazia All rights reserved

Printed in the U.S.A. in a limited First Edition

Address:

Metron Publications,
P.O. Box 1213
Princeton,
N.J. 08542





To
Eugene Vanderpool
Friend of the Agora of Ideas




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THE BURNING OF TROY

TITLE-PAGE

FOREWORD

01. The Quantavolutionary Scan


Part One: Historical Disturbances

02. The Burning of Troy
03. The Founding of Rome
04. Micah's Ark
05. The Catastrophic Finale of the Middle Bronze Age
06. Updating Schaeffer's Destruction Inventory
07. Nine Spheres of Venusian Effects
08. The Obliteration of Human Signs
09. Ancient Astronauts


Part Two: Geological Issues

10. Indians of Illinois
11. Ice Cores of Greenland
12. A Failed Excursion to the Caves of Aquitaine
13. The Latecoming Olduvai Gorge
14. Athens Quakes


Part Three: Working of the Mind

15. Comptinology and Tohu-bohu
16. Sandal-straps and Semiology
17. Making Moonshine with Hard Science
18. Holy Dreamtime in Wonguri Land
19. The 'Unconscious' as a Literary Revolt Against Science
20. O.K. Origins
21. Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's Rings


Part Four: Polemics and Personages

22. Marx, Engels, and Darwin
23. Religion and Education
24. The Outlook of Scientists
25. 'Scientific' Reporting
26. Eulogies to Three Quantavolutionaries


Part Five: Communicating a Scientific Model

27. A Cosmic Debate
28. Syllabi for Quantavolution
29. I.Q.: A University Program
30. Past, Present, and Future




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THE BURNING OF TROY

By Alfred de Grazia

.

FOREWORD

Entering a sparsely occupied and generally unknown region of thought is like moving into a
new land. The vistas are fresh, the soil unbroken. One wishes to settle down, put in
roots, build a house, raise a family. Yet the very restlessness that carried one to the
frontier will not subside. There is an opportunity to do everything, it seems; the whole
world attracts one and is in need of attention. So it often happens that an erratic and
mobile existence evolves. An energetic spell of construction ensues; a cabin is built,
animals are bred, a garden is grown, a mate is enticed, a stone wall begins to go up. Then
the winds blow, the wild animals pass heading upland, the rising sun beckons and the moon
waxes nervously full. Off one goes, leaving the finished things, the half-finished work,
freeing the pigs, and letting the roots wither. Now it is a new sight very day, a spring
discovered, a strange bird and animal, a day fishing, a day hunting, a day in the hollow
of a tree with a pain. The wonders of the region spin unendingly with the vault of heaven.
One is not fulfilled, but then one was not fulfilled before: such is the curse and its
thrilling clutch upon the pioneer.

I had thoughts akin to these while preparing this book. It contains pieces from
everywhere, notes and essays, topics vigorously attacked and promptly abandoned, because
one is moved by a different wondering. The earliest piece, concerning the mind of
scientists, was written decades ago, the last piece just the other day. Some of the work
reminds me of an abandoned plot of frontier land: if only a person had stayed there, he
could have built a life upon it, as neat as a Swiss chalet. And is the world not built
upon the stable creations of centuries? Yes -- but also upon the scouting parties, the
forays, the fantasies.

My friend Gerd Roesler came from Germany to an island of the Aegean, to Stylida on Naxos,
and I came there too. And there was none on the wild promontory and he wrote his Master's
thesis on the geology of Stylida, and years passed, and he wrote his Doctoral thesis on
the geology of the whole island, but after all of that he comes back and builds a house
next to mine, which has stood alone all the while except when I might be there. Knowing
much more of geology than I, to him the promontory was very old, whereas to this natural
philosopher, it seemed very young. So we stand upon it side by side, and I say to him,
"You see, Gerd, Stylida is young, even by your evidence." And he replies: "No, Alfred,
these rocks are millions of years old... but maybe..." and he laughs, for he likes the
feeling of the frontier, too.





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THE BURNING OF TROY

By Alfred de Grazia

CHAPTER ONE

THE QUANTAVOLUTIONARY SCAN

The nature that offers itself to our view, which includes the solar system, the earth,
and the biosphere, assumed its present form in a series of sudden leaps, occurring over
short periods of time. So goes the theory of quantavolution. Besides the idea of sudden
leaps, other principles are basic. First the original source of great changes in the
nature of the earth and man has been in the skies. Second, the latest period of time,
roughly the holocene period, say 14,000 years, has witnessed catastrophes. Third, the
great changes of recent times have created modern humans. In sum, nature and mankind
have been recently catastrophized and transformed by forces of exoterrestrial origin.

Science is full of controversies. It thrives upon dispute. Catastrophists are far fewer
than uniformitarians, but they are, if anything, more disputacious, both amongst
themselves and with others. Those who interpret natural history by the "sudden leap" of
quantavolution or catastrophe may not accept even one, much less all three of the
aforesaid principles.

For instance, one of the greatest current catastrophists, the geo-physicist Melvin Cook,
has treated a broad range of problems in the fossil record, movement of continents,
radiodating, and atmospheric changes without resort to comets or other exoterrestrial
forces. Another, Donald Patten, a geographer, makes it quite clear that his work is
related to and supported by Christian theology. The most famous catastrophist, Immanuel
Velikovsky, did not challenge the presumption that mankind is very ancient; although
unfriendly to Darwinism, he might well disagree with some of the mechanisms and
interpretations of human events that I have proposed. He would probably disagree as well
with other theories connected in my opinion necessarily with the catastrophic model.
These three examples could be multiplied. A practical difficulty faces a student of
general quantavolution in that its materials are nowhere properly indexed as such and no
special library of the field exists. Until lately, it has been the unwritten rule in
scientific journals to "tone down" any indications of catastrophism in articles and
especially in titles. Still I have come upon many hundreds of relevant items. They
emerge mostly from conventional sources of science. A smaller number are centered upon
quantavolution, with the appropriate perspective, and these are found in only several
special magazines or in old scientific sources. One moves among the conventional
literature with a practiced glance, like an archaeologist spotting bitty shards among
tons of debris.

William Corliss publishes at Glen Arm, Maryland, a quarterly scan of anomalistic
material, "Science Frontiers", often quantavolutionary it so happens. Thus, examining a
list of fourteen items, which he chose for Number 15, Spring 1981 --and these are only a
fraction of the works published around the time -- my brain was twitched by every one of
then, and I would like the reader to see how these raw twinges first enter the mind:

1. "Ancient Basque inscriptions are identified by noted expert on the so-called
Mechanicsburg Stones of Pennsylvania." Yes, Basque dwellers of the Tethyan Sea, fringes
of Atlantis, survivors of 6000 B. C., see Chaos and Creation. (NEARNA Journal)

2. "Agriculture was not a step forward in human development." Yes. Why plant when you
can reap without sowing. Probably a response to ecological stringency; humans could
plant immediately; cultural hologenesis. (Science)

3. "New discoveries of buried and changed Stonehenge stone configurations." Cf. changed
and variant stone and temple orientations also in Mesoamerica. Earth tilts involved. As
sky changes, orientations change. (Nature)

4. "Continental crust found 450 miles west of Gibraltar." Possible Atlantis material,
sunk and left behind by rapidly rafting land masses moving both sides of the Rift,
perhaps in the Saturnian deluge period. (Baltimore Sun, AP) 5. "Distant galaxies
resemble near galaxies." Yes, cf. Solaria Binaria. Short time. No "Big Bang." (Science
News)

6. F. E. Segal on "tired light." Light not tired. Just Busy. Gravitation very tired,
needs to be retired. (Nature)

7. On "free quarks." Not only are "fractional charges... almost as unnerving as
irrational numbers," but so too the ideal of infinite regression (or progression) in the
'size' of events: "man is the measure of all things" -- hardly. (Science)

8. "Do bacterias think?" Everything thinks, "Higher organisms, cf Homo Schizo, conduct
more elaborate transactions with the environment (and internally) to achieve "the
thinking effect". (Psychology Today)

9. Quick evolution: quantavolution of immunological systems, in re Ted Steele's studies.
Functions of organisms have their own bio-time, time not absolute. Life-career (birth to
death, etc.) is subjectively concept of the dominating ego, cf. Homo Schizo,
momentarily in charge: the trapped soul? How free is it if it is in a paraelectric
frame? (New Scientist)

10. Cf deep thrusting and folding burial concept in M. Cook's Earth Models, also my
Lately Tortured Earth. Deep is very deep, perhaps embracing the surface (including
exoterrestrial) origins of Soter and Gold's erupting, abiogenic, natural gases.
(Geotimes)

11. Iceland a meteorite crater, according to Whipple, with high iridium at Cretaceous-
Tertiary boundaries. Cf. galloping continental drift in Chaos and Creation. Was the C-T
boundary laid down yesterday in the chaos of Earth parturition and Moon eruption and
escape? (New Scientist)

12. "The Novaya Zemlya solar mirage" is likely, along with many such early phenomena of
the disordered skies, to sponsor some fine animistic legends of the heavens. (Physics
Today) 13. In re admitted "ice-ball fall in England," page C. Fort's comparable cases.
Electrical fashioning of balls, see E. Crew's new essay. (J. Meteorology - UK)

14. Lorber's work on an intelligent human with 1/ 10 normal brain matter fits Homo
Schizo theory, where I develop the concept of humanness being largely independent of the
large brain but a product of self-awareness, of the fearful loss of instinctual
integrity. (Science)

The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (London) publishes Workshop, containing
quarterly annotations of a score and more of titles relevant to quantavolution studies.
Thus, the eye catches the following points of the varied list of Volume 5: 1 (1982).
1. New 700 B. C. Martian period tablet: "The natural order of things somehow has gotten
reversed and the response of the high gods, the Shaddayin, is to turn day into night."
(Bull. Amer. Schl. Orient. Res.)

2. More material on the Thera disaster (of -1100?) and the confusion of dates. Tsunamis
devastate Greece and the Near East.( Bib. Archaeol. R.)

3. Reviews special issue of Frontiers of Science on Velikovsky's work.

4. The disputed case of Prof. A. C. Arp, who faces shut-down of project because he
believes quasars are close, not exceedingly remote, relative to our galaxy. (Daily
Telegraph report 9 March 1982).

5. Critique of N. Hembest's attack on 3 different theories of rapid (i. e. catastrophic)
shifts of Earth's poles. (The Unexplained, magazine).

6. Some birds (e. g. Japanese quail and zebra finches) are unexpectedly in-breeders, not
out-breeders, contra "need" for genetic variability. (New Scientist).

7. Two newly spotted asteroids make total of 40 on Earthcrossing orbits, ergo potential
encounters. (New Scientist). 8. Soviet Venera 13 and 14 results show solar radiation is
absorbed by Venus at 60 km and the clouds are mostly sulphur. How can "greenhouse
effect" work with these conditions? Implication: Venus heat is internal. (Aviation Week
and Space Tech.)

9. Viking Orbiter pictures heavy meteoric, volcanic, and erosional effect on Mars, with
possible meandering dry river systems. (New Scientist). Was Mars once (lately) biophile?

10. Review of "Burt Scandal" (BBC radio 4) on ethics and prestige of scientists.

11. Controversy over evidence of "plate tectonic" continental drift without continents
on Venus (Venera 14 findings) (BBC, Science in Action).

12. On the temperature extremes endurable by dinosaur's eggs. (New Scientist, Corriere
del Ticino)

13. A primitive "precursor" of the even-toed hooved animals (pigs) is now revealed to be
of a different family (mouse deer), so another "missing link" is gone. (New Scientist).

14. Jurassic find in China exhibits an earlier line of mammals that may have evolved and
extincted 30 million years earlier than accepted beginnings of present mammalia. (New
Scientist).

15. The Eocene-Oligocene boundary is marked with extinctions, microtektites and high
iridium levels of exoterrestrial event. (New Scientist).

16. Gravitational Constant may be changing, as applied to changing lunar orbit
(Astrophy. J.) Is one more Absolute deteriorating?

17. Venus and Earth have different origins, or Venus had no potassium or lost its argon-
40. (New Scientist). 18. Well-preserved Carboniferous Age fossil deposits near Glasgow,
both marine and terrestrial, with confused sedimentation (Nature)

19. Source of earthquake lights in rock friction discharges (New Scientist).

20. Soviet Kola peninsula Bronze Age settlements contemporary with Mediterranean, with
utensils and paintings, slate trade with far-off points. (Soviet Weekly). Possible polar
shift or drastic (exoterrestrial) climate changes.

21. High proportion of Late Minoan Cretan copper artefacts made from Greek, not
Cypriote, copper. (Nature Science). Culture shifts, or copper mine discoveries.

22. Density of wood in tree rings can indicate outer space events and exact weather
data. (Soviet Weekly).

23. Reviews listed of Clube and Napier's Cosmic Serpent as indicating mood of scientific
reception system re catastrophes.

24. Work of J. W. Follin on possibility of 4 billion year old solar system as a binary
(report in Memphis Commercial Appeal).

25. Ophiolites (from oceanic crust) found in mountain sediments suggest catastrophic
oceanbed lava extrusions buckling to form mountains. (Scientific American.)

26. Lack of texts -700 to -750 and erratic texts of mid-second millenium in Babylonian
otherwise accurate Babylon records in R. Stephenson studies. (New Scientist.)

27. Low-density comet impact blamed for Tunguska 1908 event (U. S. R. & D. Associates,
New Scientist).

28. Meteroid impacts (5 to 10 km diam.) may have created various large basaltic oceanic
plateaus. (Nature.)

30. Comets now observed frequently to impact on Sun. (New Scientist).

31. High anomalous magnetism and radioactivity detected at megalithic sites may indicate
ancient man had sensing devices for astronomical constructions. (New Scientist.)

32. Lunar rock magnetism without lunar magnetic field raises questions of origins of
rock. (New Scientist.)

Most of the items were culled from conventional scientific sources such as the New
Scientist and Nature. A much more extended, regular survey is obviously needed; still,
that limited and antagonistic sources should provide access to so much relevant
quantavolutionary material is noteworthy.

The eye of the catastrophist (this quantavolutionary primevalogist) is trained to see a
record of natural destruction in the history of nature and man. Others, trained in
uniformitarian ways of thought, will try to explain the same sight by gradual processes,
or be oblivious of it. Niagara Falls, whose turbulence soothes the doubts of
honeymooners, excites the catastrophist. For it cuts back into its source by a certain
footage each year and this permits us to measure how long its gorge has been growing.
Apparently only several thousand years have passed since the Great Wisconsin Ice Cap
suddenly melted to create the Great Lakes and their Niagara outlet towards the sea. The
age of the Falls has been reduced by 300% in consequence. But perhaps a great deluge and
flooding created the lakes and a great earthquake the rift of the St. Lawrence River.

Let us continue our noting of some relevant studies, going back in time for a few years.
On January 6, 1977, the New York Times reports the detection of a quake on Mars. One
asks, for the hundredth time, "How can seismism shake celestial bodies that have
supposedly been undisturbed and cooling off for billions of years?" The inconstant Sun?
A recent encounter?

The eye notes an article in the newspapers of early 1976: a Soviet scientific expedition
has moved into the territory of the Tunguska (Siberia) meteoritic explosion of 1908
where a flourishing new kind of forest has sprung up and new species of plants have been
seen. The catastrophist thinks, "This explosion has been long on my mind. If it had
maintained its path for minutes longer before striking St. Petersburg (now Leningrad),
the capital of the Russian Czars would have disappeared in heat and dust. The heat was
fierce, in thousands of degrees; no wonder odd biological phenomena have occurred. But
why the absence of a crater? Was the meteoroid actually an explosive gas cloud, and was
it a gas cloud that blasted Sennacherib's great army besieging Jerusalem in 687 B. C.?"

In 1975 Soviet astronomers detect X-rays emanating from planet Saturn. X-rays signify a
very recent explosion, a nova event, on a star. In a small nova, one that does not
disintegrate the body completely, the shell blasts off, and the wounded body bleeds
these rays for thousands of years. The quantavolutionary thinks: "Mythology from several
places reports that Saturn, the planet-god, flew into a fiery rage... Velikovsky in 1965
wrote Harry Hess of Princeton, to urge that Saturn be studied for the emission of x-
rays." And what a truculent monster appears to be the son of Saturn, Jupiter, upon
examination by spacecraft.

In 1974 the astrophysicist Robert Bass demonstrates mathematically that the structure
and motions of the solar system cannot be presumed to be stable even to one thousand
years. Bass is a catastrophist. He is also sympathetic to biblical creationism. The
quantavolutionary reads him carefully. "Will Bass lead me astray out of enthusiasm, or
into the Promised Land? Will any uniformitarian arise now to challenge him, to prove his
equations wrong, to defend what is after all the heart of the uniformitarian position,
that the solar system is stable because the laws of Newton and the mathematics of La
Place claimed them to be so?"

In 1974 oceanographer Cesare Emiliani of the University of Miami published results of
core drillings showing that the Gulf of Mexico had filled with fresh waters from
tremendous recent flooding and speculated that the event may have been tied to the
sinking of Atlantis, with both occurring around 11,500 years ago. The catastrophist
conjectures about the fresh waters of the Gulf of Mexico. First, they could be the
floodwaters of the suddenly destroyed ice cap, an inconceivably great deluge, perhaps
tied into the practically complete resurfacing of the earth about 11,500 years ago. In
1974 the chemist John Anderson reports experiments indicating that radiocarbon activity,
the chief present method of dating back to 50,000 years ago, was neither random nor
constant. If the isotopes of radioactive carbon, for reasons yet unknown, decay
sporadically or eccentrically, may not the method be unreliable?

In 1973, chemist Harold Urey, a Nobel prizewinner, conjectures that a cometary encounter
with Earth could explain the abundant tektites from extra-terrestrial sources that are
strewn about the world. Several scientists have collected and studied these small glassy
stones and estimate their amount in the billions of tons. Since time immemorial the
Chinese have called them "pearls of the dragon" and collected them. And Urey thought
that the cometary collision might have annihilated the dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs looked like the Chinese dragon. Perhaps Urey is right in principle, wrong
in time. Quickly the quantavolutionary puts on the cap of a mythologist. All heavenly
animals (the Zodiac for instance) represent recognizable species; perhaps the most
ancient men knew dinosaurs by sight. Thus the peculiar revolutionary vision, like that
of a surrealist painter, contorts time and form, then settles down to give battle over
the evidence.

In 1973, the geologist Derek Ager of Swansea College (Great Britain) writes that "the
history of any one part of the earth, like the life of the soldier, consists of long
periods of boredom and short periods of terror." Elsewhere he says, "the periodic
catastrophic event may have more effect than vast periods of gradual evolution." He
think that "for the ultimate control, sooner or later, we must face the possibility of
an extra-terrestrial cause, though in most geological circles one seems to be expected
to blush when doing so." The catastrophist understands the dilemma of Ager: he longs to
test his intellectual weapon, but the minds and materials of 150 years of science are
constructed to refuse the test.

In the same year, 1973, I am reviewing, from the revolutionary perspective, evidence
about the famed "Burnt City" of Troy. I concluded that neither the torch of the invader,
nor accident, nor earthquake, nor a single volcano had suddenly scorched and collapsed
the famed Troy IIg. Multiple volcanic venting and extra-terrestrial electrical encounter
had to be invoked to explain the observed facts and myths. Uniformitarian methods of a
century had failed to identify the problem precisely and permitted not a whisper about
the high energy expressions of catastrophes.

In 1972 the engineer Ralph Juergens announces his theory that the solar system was an
electrical system operating on galactic fuel. Particles from the Milky Way bombard the
sun, building up a heat that sends out the sun's radiance. (Concurrently, experimenters
announced the failure to detect the sun's presumed neutrino output from its supposed
atomic furnaces.)

The theory of Juergens poses a dilemma to catastrophists. Velikovsky adhered to the
nuclear-furnace theory. He did not feel the need for Juergen's theory to win the war for
catastrophism. C. E. R. Bruce and Eric Crew in England were catastrophists as well,
whose interests, as pioneer and disciple, were in extending the discussion of cosmic
electricity. They, too, disagreed with Juergens. Again, the quantavolutionary worries
about the stultification of connections and internal disagreements.

But when Juergens publishes two articles on electrical types of destruction found lately
on the Moon and Mars, the catastrophists agree and applaud. The electrical ravaging is
by cosmic lightning and probably happened within the past several thousand years.
Juergens general theory is held in abeyance. (It is, incidentally, accepted by me, and
is used and extended by Earl Milton and me in the model of Solaria Binaria.)

In 1970 the palentologist D. J. McLaren, in a presidential address to his colleagues,
reviews the wholesale extinction of species at certain times, and then ventures that a
heavy meteoroid explosion should be introduced by way of explanation. Following an
explanation of the effects of what I have since termed a "catastrophic tube,", he
remarked, "this will do." He would have pleased George Cuvier, who for a century has
entered the textbooks as "the father of fossil paleontology" but "unfortunately a badly
mistaken catastrophist." In 1968 René Thom publishes his first paper on the topological
mathematics of catastrophe theory. After eight years, the less specialized media, such
as the Scientific American, described his work. Actually, Thom is concerned with
describing symbolically and graphically the basic types of ways in which situations
build up and come crashing down.

In 1966 the geo-physicist Melvin Cook lays down a barrage of arguments against accepting
uranium-lead, potassium-argon and other techniques for the dating of older ages. As a
catastrophist, his accomplishments are numerous; none, to my knowledge, has so
competently analyzed the overwhelmingly authoritative techniques of radio dating that
have come to dominate geological, astrophysical, and archaeological dating.

In June 1956 the New York Times reports that the temperature of planet Venus, newly
measured by radio astronomers, exceeded the boiling point of water. Studies increased in
number; so did the estimated heat. When finally in the 1960's and later the space
vehicles of the USA and U. S. S. R. reached Venus, they found a globe whose surface
temperatures hovered around 925d. But in 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky had published Worlds
in Collision. There he described Venus as hot to the point of candescence. He reasoned,
mostly from ancient sources and legends, that it had ejected from Jupiter's region
burning. Further, its erratic course through the skies had involved it in heat-provoking
encounters of the second and first millennia B. C. with Mars, Moon, and earth.

In 1953 geologists Alan Kelly and Frank Dachille propose the island of Bermuda to be the
focus of a giant meteoritic explosion in recent times. Their work, if known, would have
stimulated among a small circle of scholars an interest in discovering impact craters
around the world. (It should also have stimulated the writers of the 1970's who were
excited by the mysteries of the "Bermuda Triangle.") Between 1950 and 1955 Velikovsky
published three of his celebrated works. In 1963, I prepared a special issue of The
American Behavioral Scientist on "The Velikovsky Affair." It analyzed the reasons why
scientists generally were refusing to hear of theories and evidence contradicting the
uniformitarian paradigm. If there is any lesson to be taught from this cause célèbre, it
is this: "You must be ready to consider conflicting theories. You cannot stand rigidly
in the face of contrary evidence. You cannot be mass-minded and call yourself a proper
citizen of science."

In 1950, the German paleontologist Schindewolf tied exoterrestrial impacts and
radioactivity directly to the main periods of biological extinction and creation.

I could move, too, into the 1940's, when Claude Schaeffer assembled massive proof of a
set of concurrent destructions of Bronze Age civilizations by natural causes. I have
found many sources of quantavolutionary thought and studies ranging farther and farther
back in time; often they are inaccessible to most readers and buried from sight inasmuch
as they are not referred to in modern literature. A large job of recapturing them is
before us. Indeed one could recede for thousands of years back to the now faintly heard
primeval voices that are fossilized in bone, stone, pots, and oral myth.

In concluding here, I wish earnestly that my readers will turn to my books without the
preconception that studies of catastrophes must be science fiction, or a work of the
occult, or a defense of Biblical literalism. I do not criticize adversely such works,
some of which I admire; it is simply that they are different. My books should be read
and judged form the standpoint of a cosmogonic model of quantavolution that is derived
from a growing body of scientific studies in various fields and a review of the most
ancient as well as of the most recent sources.

Just as an archaeologist reconstructs a pot from a few shards, and a paleontologist an
animal from a few bones, we have to reconstruct a general history from the rare
"treasures that have come down to us", as Aristotle said. I ask not for belief but for
consideration. I seek for open thinking upon another model in the competition for the
best design of the sciences and humanities.

This said, let us take up a study of "The Burning of Troy," a work which I began, as I
mentioned above, in 1973. The idea came to me while on the Island of Naxos. I was
reading Schliemann's famous story of how he found the Treasure of Priam on top of a
wall, and I exclaimed to myself, "What a strange place to bury a treasure!"








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THE BURNING OF TROY

By Alfred de Grazia

Part One: Historical Disturbances

CHAPTER TWO

THE BURNING OF TROY

[1]  Scientists probing the subsoil in their attempts to build up the record of
prehistoric and ancient humanity have paid little attention to ashes and other
evidences of high heat and conflagration that they have encountered. We would agree
with Claude F. A. Schaeffer who wrote in 1948 that "Our inquiry has often been made
difficult by the rarity in most reports of observations on beds as a nuisance or of
little interest" [2] . The recent excavation of settlements of Minoan times, buried
beneath or affected by the tephra of the exploded volcano of ancient Thera-Santorini,
did posses the broader perspective that Schaeffer sought. Marinatos and others
introduced research on the far-flung effects of the disaster. Heezen and Ninkovich
discovered a layer of ash on the south-eastern floor of the Mediterranean Sea that they
could ascribe to the Santorini explosion. Charles and Dorothy Vitaliano followed up
with analyses of tephra from scattered locations on Crete and elsewhere  [3] . The
search and testing are continuing. Still, the Thera case is exceptional, and even yet
far from complete. The ash coverings of settlements have rarely been analyzed. We speak
of overall calcination, and not so much of the bones of hearths that have lent evidence
of the ecology, cuisine, and religious ceremonies of early human groups.

Overall calcination has sometimes, with less than complete evidence, been interpreted
as the work of torch-bearing invaders. For example, James Melaart uses the convenient
phrase "Whether by accident or by enemy action" to describe the destructive combustion
of Troy IIg  [4] . Earthquakes, too are invoked with some frequency, although a
determination that a fire is an effect of an earthquake is by no means simple. On rare
occasions, where there exists a historical record such as Pliny the Younger's
description of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A. D., volcanism is admitted and may lead
ultimately to excavation. There are still other possible causes, as we shall see.

The contention of this paper is that reports of past excavations should now be reviewed
with a revised set of questions. Moreover, and because of the ultimate inadequacy of
the information typically contained in them, it is suggested that a new
interdisciplinary calcinology be devised and carried into future excavations and the
testing of soils and debris generally. The rich experience afforded by the excavations
of Troy can serve to expose the problems that justify a new approach. Afterwards, we
can define in a preliminary way the body of techniques that needs to be assembled and
developed.




{S : THE "BURNT CITY" OF TROY}

THE "BURNT CITY" OF TROY

In some exciting passages, which have unquestionably been among the most widely read of
all archaeological writing, Schliemann describes how, in May of 1873, he uncovered "The
treasure of Priam," King of Troy during the war between the Greeks and Trojans.
(Neither his identification of the Treasure as Priam's nor of the City as the Troy of
Homer is at issue here, and therefore these problems are passed over lightly.)

Schliemann reports  [5]  that the "Trojans of whom Homer sings" occupied a stratum of
debris "from 7 to 10 meters, or 23 to 33 feet, below the surface. This Trojan stratum,
which, without exception, bears marks of great heat, consists mainly of red ashes of
wood, which rise from 5 to 10 feet above the Great Tower of Ilium, and the great
enclosing Wall, the construction of which Homer ascribes to Poseidon and Apollo; and
they show that the town was destroyed by a fearful conflagration." He calls this ruined
level "the Burnt City," and others have used his phrase since then.

The large slabs of stone leading down to the plain from "The Scaean Gate" for 10 feet
were so weakened by heat that they crumbled upon exposure, though farther on the slabs
continued hard and intact.

"A further proof of the terrible catastrophe is furnished by a stratum of scoriae of
melted lead and copper, from 1/ 5 to 1 1/ 5 inches thick, which, extends through the
whole hill at a depth of from 28 to 29 1/ 2 feet." Several visiting geologists and a
construction engineer gave this opinion, and all concluded that large deposits of these
existed at the time of the city's destruction.

Schliemann continues: "That Troy was destroyed by enemies after a bloody war is further
attested by the many human bones which I found in these heaps of debris, and above all
by the skeletons with helmets, found in the depths of the temple of Athena; for, as we
know from Homer, all corpses were burnt and the ashes were preserved in urns. Of such
urns I have found an immense number in all pre-Hellenic strata on the hill."

Then he says: "Lastly, the Treasure, which some member of the royal family had probably
endeavored to save during the destruction of the city, but was forced to abandon,
leaves no doubt that the city was destroyed by the hands of enemies. I found this
Treasure on the large enclosing wall by the side of the royal palace, at a depth of 27
1/ 2 feet, and covered with red Trojan ashes from 5 to 6 1/ 2 feet in depth, above
which was a post-Trojan wall or fortification 19 1/ 2 feet high."

Schliemann spotted the Treasure through a protruding copper article. "On the top of
this copper article lay a stratum of red and calcined ruins, from 4 3/ 4 to 5 1/ 4 feet
thick, as hard as stone, and above this again lay the above-mentioned wall of
fortification (6 feet broad and 20 feet high) which was built of large stones and
earth, and must have belonged to an early date after the destruction of Troy."

With his knife, he first withdrew this small copper shield, then a copper caldron with
handles, then a copper plate to which a silver vase "had been fused ... in the heat of
the fire" [6] . Next came a copper vase, a bottle of gold, a cap of gold and then other
vessels of pure and alloyed metals, wrought and cast-copper, silver, gold, electrum.
There were useful objects, ceremonial objects, and daggers, battle-axes, and lance-
heads. Various weapons had "pieces of other weapons welded onto them by fire."

"As I found all these articles together, forming a rectangular mass, or packed into one
another, it seems to be certain that they were placed on the city wall in a wooden
chest ... such as those mentioned by Homer as being in the palace of king Priam. This
appears to be the more certain, as close by the side of these articles I found a copper
key about 4 inches long, the head of which resembles a large safe-key of a bank.
Curiously enough this key has had a wooden handle; there can be not doubt of this from
the fact that the end of the stalk of the key is bent round at a right angle, as in the
case of the daggers."

     Schliemann conjectures on the scene: It is probable that some member of the family of
     King Priam hurriedly packed the Treasure into the chest and carried it off without
     having time to put out the key; that when he reached the wall, however, the hand of an
     enemy or the fire overtook him, and he was obliged to abandon the chest, which was
     immediately covered to a height of from 5 to 6 feet with the red ashes and the stones
     of the adjoining royal palace... [7] .

     That the Treasure was packed together at terrible risk of life, and in the greatest
     anxiety, is proved among other things also by the contents of the largest silver vase,
     at the bottom of which I found two splendid gold diadems..., a fillet, and four
     beautiful gold ear-rings of most exquisite workmanship: upon these lay 56 gold ear-
     rings of exceedingly curious form and 8,750 small gold rings, perforated prisms and
     dice, gold buttons, and similar jewels, which obviously belonged to other ornaments;
     them followed six gold bracelets, and on the top of all two small gold goblets  [8] .

Finally, Schliemann adds, "The person who endeavored to save the Treasure had
fortunately the presence of mind to stand the silver vase, containing the valuable
articles described above, upright in the chest, so that not so much as a bead could
fall out, and everything has been preserved uninjured" [9] .

Schliemann says that death was risked in hastily retrieving the Treasure. Like many
another digger, he was preoccupied with artifacts and architecture. And indeed there
seemed to be nothing in the literature than a Greek-set fire. Furthermore, he was
already reading the ancient story of the burning of Troy into his findings. He "knew"
what he would find. So did the world of readers.

But there are puzzling aspects to his account. First of all, there is the immensity of
the blaze. Can the burning of a stone and wood town of 5,000 or so inhabitants produce
a bed of ashes that may have amounted to 15 to 20 feet on its first fall? For we read
that it was reduced to several feet of thickness and was so hard that a huge stone wall
nearly 20 feet tall could be built on top of it afterwards. And the whole area was so
completely buried that the walls of the subsequent settlement were planned and built in
complete ignorance of the orientation of the walls and passageways below. "The more
recent walls run in all directions above the more ancient ones, never standing upon
them, and are frequently separated from them by a layer of calcined debris, from 6 1/ 2
to 10 feet high" [10] . The depth of the ashes is all the more impressive when it is
observed that they formed on top of a wall. Then or afterwards, some part of the ashes
would fall or drift or be blown off the top of a wall. And why would the bearers of
such a Treasure, if they had even half a minute of time, leave the Treasure on top of a
wall when they might at least have tipped it over onto the ground, and then fled?

The ashes are spoken of as "red Trojan ashes," "ashes and stones" that buried the city,
"mainly red ashes of wood." How thick a layer of ashes does a hand-burnt ancient city
dissolve into? What kinds of heat would have been generated on the average outside and
within houses? The answers are not now known, but might well be discovered.

Craig C. Chandler writes that he has "never seen 'red ashes of wood' in natural fires,
and the term sounds much more like a distillation residue than a combustion residue"
[11] . With the suggestion of a distillation, the remote possibility of an early
invention of "Greek Fire" intrudes. This presently unknown, highly volatile and intense
weapon was possibly of petroleum plus an accelerant, and was used by the Byzantines
against their enemies for centuries. But this was more than two millennia later.
Further, "Greek Fire" would not account for the huge amount of ashes.

A completely wooden and overstuffed contemporary house will leave no more than ankle-
deep ashes when it burns to the ground, and then only on its own foundation. A
flourishing natural forest and the ground cover is estimated to provide 200 tons
organic matter per acre  [12] . When reduced fully by heat, it will give up 160 tons of
water, gases and other compounds to leave 20 tons of carbon residue and 20 tons of oily
distillates. Further reduced to fine cinder and ash, it would weigh less and have less
volume. If spread over an acre, the residue would amount to perhaps a pound per square
foot; its height could scarcely measure 6 inches in its freshly fallen state. Chandler
has pointed out that forest fires of the greatest intensity do not consume more than a
fraction of the living material, producing perhaps 3 tons per acre of ashes. "This is
an amount about 10 times as great as the fertilizer you spread on your lawn in the
spring ... Ash residue from the burning of a city is measured in inches, rather than
feet" [13] . And we seem to be faced at Troy by perhaps 15 feet, or 30 times as much
ash, even allowing for no wind to blow the cloud of city ashes off the citadel onto the
plain and for no drift off the top of the city wall.

But, to proceed, if the city were under tight siege, would not the Treasure have been
carefully packed and readied for any emergency? Would it not perhaps have been buried
in a safe place or carried off to a friendly town? Schliemann assumes that a Trojan
custodian was transporting the box. He discovered what appeared to be a copper handle.
Would not at least two persons have carried it? It was heavy. Moreover, several guards
and priests would have been assigned to accompany the porters on their urgent mission.
The key to the box was found, but it may have been placed inside the box; its presence
does indicate haste, or else it would have been kept by a keeper of the keys or by the
chief of the little group of movers and would have vanished with him.

If the "Greeks" were in hot pursuit, as Schliemann implies, would they not have caught
up with the Treasure and carted it off? It would have been laid down by its porters,
who would have fled for their lives. Would the "Greek" warriors have set such a blaze
that they were frustrated in one of their primary objectives in capturing the city, to
loot it of its valuables? Conquerors try not to burn a city before they loot it. Other
treasures and valuables were located by Schliemann. Apparently the "invaders" were in
some part, at least, frustrated in one of their most enjoyable missions by
conflagration. We might assume that other treasures were indeed found and carried away.
Their neglect of the deposits of lead and copper, an unconscionable dereliction, is
puzzling; lead and copper supposedly ran in streams over the city grounds.

Schliemann found no bones or warrior's equipment at the site of the Treasure save for a
small copper shield, which may have been in or on the chest. Indications are, unless
his search was incomplete, that the porters separated themselves physically from the
Treasure in a great hurry and that the "pursuers" were blocked from reaching it. Unlike
the ashes with which Vesuvius buried ancient Pompeiians and from which Fiorelli in 1863
ingeniously extricated their images by injections of liquid plaster, the ashes of Troy
were apparently hot. They fused and welded exposed metal objects. The wood chest had
disappeared. Any humans would have been incinerated and would have disappeared like the
box, but they would at least have left their buckles and arms, and possibly teeth or
long bones.

Why did the porters try to go over the wall, instead of through the gate? Schliemann
suggests that the "Greeks" commanded the gates. Possibly.

But now we wonder whether, in fact, there were any Greek invaders climbing out of their
famous Wooden Horse and reinforced by their returned comrades. For Schliemann does not
find typically "Greek" (Achaean) utensils or weapons; therefore the conflagration could
not come sometime after the foreigners had occupied the city and mingled their
artifacts with those of the Trojans. Also, we should be inclined to deny that any
invaders of any type were present. We are aware that contemporary scholarship assigns
Schliemann's Troy to a period long before the "real" Trojan War. It is now called
TroyII and Troy VIIa is the "real Troy," in one leading opinion  [14] .

A half century after Schliemann's work, a University of Cincinnati expedition returned
to the site of Hisarlik. They explored painstakingly the area, employing the best
archaeological techniques that the state of the art and the typically modest funding
could provide. Apart from their extensive work on the other levels, the Cincinnati
archaeologists, under the leadership of Carl Blegen, examined closely the ruins of the
Burnt City-Level IIg by their code. The debris over the whole site is deep, yet less
deep that the debris atop Schliemann's Wall.

     The stratum of Troy IIg had an average thickness of more than 1 m( eter); it
     consisted mainly of ashes, charred matter, and burned debris. This deposit apparently
     extended uniformly over the great megaron and across the entire site, eloquent evidence
     that the settlement perished in a vast conflagration from which no buildings escaped
     ruin. This is the 'Burnt City' of Schliemann ...

     In all areas examined by the Cincinnati Expedition, it was obvious that the
     catastrophe struck suddenly, without warning, giving the inhabitants little or no time
     to collect and save their most treasured belongings before they fled. All the houses
     exposed were still found to contain the fire-scarred wreckage of their furnishings,
     equipment, and stores of supplies. Almost every building yielded scattered bits of gold
     ornaments and jewelry, no doubt hastily abandoned in panic flight.

     Most of the famous 'treasure' recovered by Schliemann may now be safely attributed to
     Troy IIg... [15] .

Thus writes Blegen (1963) and the evidence behind his words stacks up in several large
printed volumes and a considerable archive. Blegen continues, seeking to explain the
destruction:

     Whether the disaster was brought about by enemy action or by accident cannot be
     certainly stated, though there are considerations that point to each of these
     alternatives. If the city had been captured and razed by conquerors, some of the
     luckless inhabitants would surely have fallen victims to the attack, and an excavator
     might expect to find in the ruins remains of human skeletons. So far as is
     ascertainable in the archaelogical records, we have actually only one instance in which
     a fragment of a small adult skull was definitely found in the stratum of Phase Ilg.
     Schliemann mentions the skeletons of "two warriors" with bronze helmets, found in the
     burnt layer; but the stratigraphic position is not certified, and the helmets later
     turned out to be fragments of a bronze vessel. One might therefore conclude that the
     occupants of the town escaped. On the other hand, if an invading army took the city it
     would surely have thoroughly looted the houses before putting them to the torch; and
     few if any 'treasures' of gold and silver would have been left for archaeologists to
     recover. But again a counter-argument might hold that if all or most of the citizens
     had run away to safety, they would surely have returned sooner or later to recover the
     treasures they had left behind. Their failure to do so can only be accounted for by
     assuming that some powerful deterrent prevented their returning. What actually happened
     to bring about the burning of the whole establishment is still an unsolved mystery, but
     it is a fact that Troy II was totally destroyed" [16] .

The mystery remains, and the range of speculation is both limited and expanded. We are
compelled to put aside the Schliemann reconstruction as a rather complete fictional
tale. In doing so, we are led to the alternative that some huge natural force ruined
Schliemann's Troy. Enemy forces had not shown a gradual "intent" to destroy Troy, else
the Treasure would have been packed and readied for transport. The disaster did not
begin by slow degrees, else it would have permitted exit by the main gate. Or perhaps,
to avoid panic or disorder, the Treasure was being sneaked out of town.

Might it have been an earthquake followed by fire? There are few indications of fallen
stones. It would not have been these that prevented the Treasure from being carried out
the Gate of the city. Although the scene that we are reconstructing was not created by
a great earthquake, a mild earthquake may have occurred. If it did, it had not prompted
the government to abandon the town up to this last moment of disaster. Valuable objects
were strewn on the floors of numerous homes. The evidence from "the depths of the
Temple of Athena," where bones and skeletons were found, is ambiguous: people, sensing
an earthquake, flee from the crashing roofs and walls of their structures. A large
quantity of bones was found in the debris of, and next to, adjoining apartments  [17] .
Were these people trapped and buried by the quake? Possibly. Or did they die of heat or
suffocation and were their bones preserved freakishly while most bodies were quickly
consumed by intense heat?

The main event may have been a sudden fall of ashes that began as a light warm shower
and then developed into a heavy downpour of hot material. The fall would have
incinerated all organic material except those people, plants and animals that were
already in deep refuge where they suffocated and were later buried. It would have
melted all exposed supplies of metal and partially exposed metal parts. Within a space
of hours the city would have been covered and its life ended.

There would have been no survivors or enemy awaiting outside to reoccupy the destroyed
city, excavate it, collect its treasures, enjoy its strategic location  [18] , and
carry on or provide a substitute for its culture. If there were, they would have been
blasted, drowned in ashes or suffocated by gases while the city disappeared before
their eyes.

The destroyed setting does not support a firestorm, such as incendiary bombs, dropped
en masse from airplanes, inflicted upon the cities of Dresden and Hamburg in World War
II. There the ash levels were insignificant, because "firestorm winds scour the burned
area clean" [19] .

The setting suggests the action of Vesuvius in burying Pompeii and Herculaneum, the one
in falling cinders and ashes, the other in towering lava flows. It was the falling ash
and gases that buried and suffocated the people whose images were recovered seventeen
hundred years later. Some had chosen not to flee and took refuge in their houses;
others could not flee; still others were drowned in ashes while in flight. Pliny the
Elder was gassed to death as he stood, miles away, directing a rescue operation.

The destruction wrought by the explosions and collapse of the islet of Krakatoa off
Java in 1883 was done largely by tidal waves  [20] . Although many persons were burned
severely and succumbed to exhaustion in the hot ash-laden and gas-polluted air, the
fall of ashes was not great enough to bury houses. The fall-out colors are not well-
described; at least white, gray, black, brown, green, and red material was mentioned.

Examining the territory around Troy (modern Hisarlik), we find no active or extinct
volcanoes  [21] . Mount Ida, famous in Homer, is 30 miles to the Southwest of Hisarlik.
It is not reported as an active or extinct volcano. At 30 miles of distance, in order
to have caused an ash-rain that would bury Troy, it would have had to explode in
successive bursts of fury, exceeding the Krakatoan and Vesuvian (79 A. D.) disasters.

The Thera-Santorini explosion of late Minoan culture occurred hundreds of miles away in
the South Aegean Sea, and is not synchronized  [22] . In any event, although it might
have generated waves capable of battering the coastline of northwest Asia Minor, its
ash-fall would probably not have reached so far and so heavily. Ninkovich and Heezen
seem to have found that the overwhelming fallout of Thera ash occurred in the
Southeastern Mediterranean Sea.

Yet geologists might consider whether internal earth stresses could have induced not
only the familiar cone volcanoes but also fissure eruptions, which, no matter how
voluminously eruptive, leave little evidence for the unsuspecting eye once they have
become extinct. A geologist might then search for some scars and volcanic products on
the modern landscape.

It is well to remind ourselves that Homer, in describing at least one Trojan war, has
Mt. Ida behaving in peculiar ways when the gods of heaven enter the battle of Greeks
and Trojans:

     "From high above the father of gods and men made thunder terribly, while Poseidon
     from deep under them shuddered all the illimitable earth, the sheer heads of mountains.
     And all the feet of Ida with her many waters were shaken and all her crests, and the
     city of Troy, the ships of the Achaians" [23] .

The underworld god shrieked in terror and leapt from his throne at the prospect that
"Poseidon might break the earth open." And Hera laid such a dense fog upon the
battlefield that none could see to engage. There is a terrible fire over the whole
scene that "first was kindled on the plain" and parched it and burned the dead
warriors, then turned to the river, boiling it and its tributaries. Hera, wife of Zeus,
ordered up tempests from seaward to fan the flames, which another sky-god and also
volcano god, Hephaistos (Vulcan), had started. All of this bespeaks volcanism with
accompanying earthquakes, and possibly fissure volcanism too. Here again, we should
remind ourselves that a) the site of the "real Troy" may not be the Hisarlik site, b)
there may have been several wars over the site through the ages, c) the war of which
Homer sang was possibly an image of several partially idealized wars, and d) the final
Homeric war probably occurred, if Velikovsky's reconstruction is followed (which
eliminates the Greek Dark Age), in the late eighth and early seventh centuries. Troy
IIg therefore existed at an earlier time, and we are quoting here passages regarding
the landscape, nature forces, and effects of a later age or composite of ages. The date
of destruction of the "Burnt City" is not at issue here.

The ancients were adamant concerning the activities of the great sky gods. Hence a look
into the skies for the cause of the burial of Schliemann's Troy is not unreasonable.
But will it be only for the effects of remote volcanism? An anomalous detail demands
attention: Schliemann mentions that the stones of the road out of the gate had been
heated to the point of disintegration but, a few feet further out, the stones continued
in good condition. The natural force seems here to have been selective, destroying by
heat the crown of the hill, but sparing at least this part of the plain around.
Alternatively the outer stones may have been relaid at a later period, or the first
fires may have consumed the city premises alone, with the ash-fall coming later. Or
again, at the Vitaliano's suggestion, should we return to an attacking force that
heaped fires before the wooden gate to force an entrance; too, they may have hurled or
shot many fiery brands at the gate. The total context is indeed important to bear in
mind, whatever its complexity.

Lightning can be hot and selective and may focus upon elevations. Ancient lightning and
fire have received little attention from archaeologists and geologists. E. V. Komarek,
Sr. writes, "I believe that the reason we have so little information on ancient fire
scars or lightning streaks is that apparently no one has searched for them"  [24] .

Seneca, the Roman author, has a character in Thyestes begging Jupiter to bring disaster
upon Earth "not with the hands that seek out houses and undeserving homes, using your
lesser bolts, but with that hand by which the threefold mass of mountains fell ...
These arms let loose and hurl your fires" [25] . Could there have been a qualitatively
different kind of Jovian thunderbolt playing about the world in mythical and
prehistoric times? A ramified bolt of hundreds of strokes is not impossible to imagine.
The myriad lightning and fire effects in the Krakatoa disaster are worth recalling, but
these occurred within a radius of a few kilometres  [26] . The mysterious melted copper
and lead, alluded to above, which covered a large area, according to Schliemann, might
have originally been deposits that contributed to the attractiveness of the site for
lightning discharges.

They form a "stratum of scoriae, which runs through the greater part of the hill, at an
average depth of 9 metres( 29 1/ 2 feet)." Were they stored by the Trojans or were they
"welded scoriae (Schweisschlacken)" of volcanoes; that is, fragments carried up by the
powerful blast of expanding gases, ejected in a molten state, and solidifying after
falling with a smacking sound back to the ground? --"upon impact, they are squashed out
flat, and are welded together where they fall"  [27] . Volcanoes are not known to eject
such scoriae to any considerable distance.

Still another possibility needs to be added: a meteoric fall or shower, Homer's
"divine-kindled fire of stones." If a large meteor had passed nearby without crashing,
its immense heat would have consumed and raised into the sky the ashes of countless
trees and the dust of exploded and cyclonized fields. But the people appear to have had
warning, however brief.

A veritable deluge of meteoric particles from outer space, as from a large comet's
tail, might produce and contribute to combustion and burial. A cometary or planetary
near-encounter, and resulting fall of gases, hydrocarbons, burning pitch, and stones,
of course, is Velikovsky's "first cause." Even metals (again the layer of copper and
lead) have been reputed to fall. Such events are unknown to modern experience but are
indicated by ancient legends from many places  [28] , and by various geological and
biological phenomena  [29] .

We cannot ignore the Biblical sources that speak of "fire and brimstone (sulphur)" such
as that which wiped out "the cities of the plain." The Cincinnati team writes in
several places of the greenish-yellow discoloration characteristically found in the
debris of streets and other once open areas  [30] . Was this brimstone?

The clays are curious. Area 210 of the city shows much disintegrated clay and debris,
plus pots, but no signs of burning. A house of Square A3-4 is in ruins "covered by a
mass of clay more than 0.50 meters thick, which has turned red from the effects of
internal heat" [31] . The roofs were of clay and wood, but the depth is remarkable and
so is the color. Is there more than one kind of clay in the ruins? Is this the same
"red" that Schliemann reports as "the red ashes of Trojan wood?" For that matter, is it
part of the omnipresent red dust that Velikovsky pursues through early references from
numerous cultures in connection with the planet Venus  [32] ?

At this stage of research, one craves evidence that the rude Achaeans were quite stupid
but were geniuses at setting great fires from above. Or that all excavators exaggerated
in their reports. Barring these explanations, the evidence speaks, or rather, whispers
faintly, on behalf of a regional multiple volcanic explosion of gases, hot scoriae and
ashes, some element of which rained down suddenly and heavily upon Troy, burning,
burying, and baking. The Treasure of Priam would be buried atop the wall where it had
been placed as its bearers cast a final despairing glance upon the abysmal world on all
sides.

One should be warned, however, that a theory of concurrent regional plinian eruptions
would call up a search for causes of a more fundamental kind. Volcanism on a grand
scale is another word for general catastrophe: What force can roil up the mantle and
wrench around so much of the crust of the Earth at a single moment of time?


{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE BURNING OF TROY: }
{P PART 1: }
{Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: }
{C Chapter 2: }
{T THE BURNING OF TROY}
{S - }

{S : A NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY METHOD}

A NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY METHOD

The mystery of the "Burnt City" of Troy will soon be a century old, but its solution
may be within grasp. It can now be reviewed in light of substantial advances in
empirical technique and general additional and spectacular theories. The latter are
provided most forcibly by Claude Schaeffer and Immanuel Velikovsky.

In 1948, Professor Schaeffer, who had excavated at Ras Shamra-Ugarit, published a
treatise on comparative stratigraphy of the Near and Middle East during the Bronze Ages
of the second millennium B. C. He incorporate the work of many predecessors, including
the investigators of Troy-Hisarlik, into a theory that a sequence of fires and
earthquakes had destroyed Bronze Age civilizations concurrently, several time over, in
the vast area stretching from Troy and Egypt to Persia, and even beyond into China.
Similar phenomena are recorded for Etruria (Tuscany), Meso-America, and elsewhere  [33]
and might someday be synchronized. At the time of Troy IIg, reports the Cambridge
Ancient History (I: 2, 406), following in Schaeffer's footsteps, three-quarters of the
settlements of western and southern Anatolia were permanently destroyed.

Although he is a catastrophic revisionist, Schaeffer has not gone deeply into causes.
He demonstrated the hard evidence of universal destruction. He invoked earthquakes
followed by fire, or where earthquakes were not in evidence, simply enormous
calcination. He exculpated invaders as the destroyers of civilization in many
instances, even though he employed conventional terms such as "the Peoples of the Sea"
that are used to explain the abrupt termination of many civilized communities. He can
point often to disturbed and unsettled human elements who came upon the sites
afterward.

(Significantly, Blegen had already shown that a new cultural element did not succeed
Troy IIg; the Troy III culture was closely related  [34] . This is remarkable because
the calcinated debris of Troy IIg was never dug out and was probably unknown, yet the
debris of the old city was strong enough to become the foundation of the new city
walls.)

In his command of the natural sciences involved and their interweaving with ancient
sources and psychology, Velikovsky has excelled all writers on questions of
catastrophe. Working independently, he published in 1950 his account of universal
destruction of the second half of the second millennium. He asserted that heavy seismic
disturbances and devastating flames consumed the same ancient civilizations. But, with
the aid of ancient legends and documents, he insisted upon the role of overall
volcanism, heavy meteoric falls, and as "first cause," a derangement of the planetary
system that brought down upon the earth the proverbial "wrath of the gods," not only
Olympian gods, but Hebrew, Egyptian, Babylonian, Olmec and other gods [35] .

Unfortunately, for twenty-five years, the assemblages of ideas and facts of Schaeffer
and Velikovsky, "an extraordinary polymath," in the words of the late Columbia
University classicist, Moses Hadas, were subjected to unscientific vilification.
Schaeffer, Professor at the Sorbonne and a renowned excavator, has been hardly cited
for his magnum opus. Few scholars have been ready to confront the anomalies of their
own findings. One exception was Spiridon Marinatos, who plunged to his death in 1974 at
the famous site of his work. His excavation of the Minoan culture of Thera-Santorini,
from beneath the effects of the plinian explosion of the island, called international
and interdisciplinary attention to the destruction of a critical portion of
Mediterranean civilization.

But Blegen of Cincinnati was also an exception; he was disposed to a cautious
empiricism, but was piqued by the strange events that had befallen Minoan and Mycenaean
civilization. In the voluminous published records of the Cincinnati expedition, we find
the following lines:

    "A large collection of earth samples was also made this year. (1937). Specimens were
    taken from all strata of all main layers in the principle areas of digging, and the
    number of small bags thus collected exceeded 400. They were shipped to Cincinnati for
    scientific examination by specialists in geology and botany"  [36] .

When, in 1974, we discovered this passage, we made inquiry, only to find that the
sample had never been analyzed. The long period of World War II had intervened.
Personnel left, never to return. Other interests took priority. The samples rested in
their cloth bags in the attic of McMicken Hall at the University of Cincinnati.
Finally, in 1975, material from the bags was provided to Professor George Rapp of the
University of Minnesota for eventual analysis. This material will serve for the first
calcinological testing of the causes of the destruction of Troy-Hisarlik. It will
perhaps form the basis of testing also the more general theories advanced as to the
causes of the destruction of many ancient civilizations.

What questions should be asked of these humble sacks of debris, and, by extension, of
all similar samples to be drawn from other destroyed settlements? In other words, of
what should consist the science that investigates ancient destruction by combustion --
call it "calcinology," perhaps?

We may address this question either by taking up one by one the theories as to the
origins of the combustion, or by taking up the techniques for the investigation of
combustion. In respect to the theories, one would inquire into the possibilities of one
or a combination of accidental fire; "the invader's torch"; Greek Fire; seismic-caused
fire; explosive local volcanism from fissures or now extinct cones; fall-out of tephra
from remote, perhaps general, volcanism; ramified lightning; petroleum (bitumen,
asphalt, naphtha) rain, non-volcanic and extraterrestrial; and gas explosion in the
atmosphere, terrestrial or extraterrestrial by origin.

In respect to the techniques, one would speak of ambiance induction; artifact analysis;
comparative historical deduction; thermal-visual examination; morphological
examination; electron scanning microscopy; chemical mineralogical tests; thermo-
luminescence tests; tests for paleo-magnetism. Inasmuch as individual techniques may
dispose of more than one theory, it may be best to proceed by offering a few words
concerning their relevance.

Fundamental to pursuing all causal alternatives is a careful inductive study of the
ambiance of combustion. Whether performed on records of past expeditions or upon a
setting itself, a skeptical and fully alert reading or examination is required. We have
entertained too close a circle of interests and hypotheses; the Trojan record shows
this. So do hundreds of other excavation reports.

First of all, an interdisciplinary group of scientist must set standards and criteria
for entering upon a testable location. Conventional archaeology has certainly proceeded
far along these lines, but new parameters need to be added, taken from geology and
meteorology, as for instance, the effects of wind and the strength of building
materials. The camera that has come to play an important part in contemporary
investigations needs to be aimed at the hypotheses, so to speak. The pioneering work of
the engineer, C. Lerice, in magnetomatic and radiotropic anterior probing of subsurface
forms is worthy of generalization to standard practice. Standards for measuring depth
of debris, original and actual density of calcination, percentage of ash content, and
architectural and object deformities should be set up. Pre-selection and logging of
samples should be systematically done in the manner of the Cincinnati expedition of
1937.

The analysis of artifacts is sometimes conducted as part of a treasure hunt. To this
day, objects from the Treasure of Priam have not been studied carefully to determine
whether they have been fused by heat or by oxidation. Objects are described as they are
found but not to the extent that a specific set of hypotheses is applied to each object
as to how it might have been placed or dropped, or slipped, or fallen as a result of
direct or indirect natural causes.

Nor has an inductive, comparative, historical method been always conscientiously
pursued. A single anomaly in a closed layer may be worth more to science than a golden
chalice. To dismiss the anomaly as an "impossible" intrusion, a "similarity", and
"forerunner" is all too common practice. The attempt of the University of Cincinnati
expedition to reconcile the anomalies of location of their carefully uncovered sherds
in the face of the conventional Egyptian-anchored chronology is a case in point. "The
discovery of these 7th-century sherds 'in several areas in the strata of Troy VIIb1
stratified below layer VIIb2', which is supposed to represent the 12th century,
"presents a perplexing and still unexplained problem."  [37] . Fortunately the self-
restraining, objective empirical techniques of the expedition simply stood even against
an authoritative chronology at a later date. One goal of calcinology is to establish a
frame of analysis that can be transferred from one excavation to another both to
interlock events and to serve eventual critiques of received versions of the
comparative development (and destruction) of civilizations.

I should place in the same category of historical comparative method the application of
mythology. Dorothy Vitaliano, pursuing a strict uniformitarian theory, has nonetheless
exemplified the necessary marriage between myth and geology that research properly
demands; to her, myth serves as a clue to past events, especially when they are
extraordinarily forceful [38] . Sometimes, as in the case of Troy, there are direct
myths describing events overtaking the site. In other cases, myths may be transferred
from other times and places as hypotheses.

The examination of bones found in circumstances of combustion may well be expanded.
Paleosteology ordinarily does not address itself to the degree of heat to which human
remains have been subjected, or whether the heat was searing or slow. For example, a
separate volume in the Cincinnati Troy series, its other merits aside, does not answer
questions relevant to the sudden destruction of the city  [39] . How much heat reached
the people whose skeletons remained? Would the heat elsewhere have erased entirely any
humans and animals? Contemporary arson experts can transfer their "know-how" to such
queries.

Contemporary fire experts and combustion chemists can also contribute useful principles
for the visual examination of thermal effects. A high sensitivity to variations in
color and texture is still not a prerequisite for professional archaeology.
Conversations with persons concerned with combustion problems come around repeatedly to
unanswerable questions of color, stains, textures, bubbles and cracks.

The morphology of combustion environments would deal with terrain features that might
have altered, of for that matter remained significantly unaltered, in the course of the
destructive combustion. Earthquakes uplift and crack the earth. Volcanic and seismic
fissures leave different traces. Lightning can burn and dig distinctive fissures as
well.

It would be useful to perform core drillings in the hinterland of destroyed settlements
to discover whether the ash trapped about the ruins is also present in some natural
lowland areas of slow deposition, removed from human habitations. Recently, for
example, the Athens Metro project tested the subsoil to a depth of 20 meters in 228
locations for the purpose of planning subway construction. Archealogical finds were
noted and covered over, but the ordinary corings were not handled properly for the
analysis of combustion or other natural phenomena. Almost all samples show "Athens
schist," a vague term for sandstone, siltstones and the like; most of the preserved
cores are disturbed and eroded by water used in the drilling  [40] . (The rock cores,
incidentally, show highly intense fracturing near the surface.)

Unfortunately, oil exploration does not concern itself with logging the cores brought
up from the near subsurface of wells during the drilling  [41] . It may be possible in
the future to make a cooperative arrangement with petroleum geologists to provide such
data. Apart from its usefulness to social and natural history, near subsurface samples
may reveal chemical and morphological peculiarities of areas overhanging oil pools,
such as distillates of hydrocarbons indicating surface origins. (Again, this would
appear to be an appropriate scientific response, as there are frequent references in
myth to rains of sticky substances from the sky.)

This conjecture leads naturally to inquiry into the composition of shales, clays, and
soils found in connection with ancient destruction. An analysis of "samples that cover
depositional chemical environments ranging from continental and coastal soils to marsh
and subtidalmarine deposits" of recent ages had disclosed complex polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbon assemblages (PAH) with "a high degree of similarity in the molecular weight
distribution of the many series of alkyl homologs" [42] . This PAH is carcinogenic and
mutagenic. The soils sampled were from widely separated locations on and off the New
England coastal region. Forest pyrolysis and atmospheric transport was suggested. A
search for other nonbiological organic compounds was indicated. The cause of such an
immense fire is conjectural, as is indeed the postulate of the fire itself.

Are we so swollen with pride that we cannot review Ignatius Donnelly's Ragnarok (1883)
and not gain from it at least a doubt as to the origins of some of the world's clays?
Clay is conventionally assigned to sedimentation or decomposed structural material,
without inquiring as to possible volcanic or other sources. Yet a geological walk along
many a Greek island beach may pass across deposits of pumice dust and of gray clay that
visually suggests bentonite. Donnelly claimed a cometary origin for a heavy rain of
fire and gravel that destroyed part of the globe and most of mankind. What does the new
geology say to this? At least in regard to calcinated settlement debris and top open
area subsurfaces nearby, what is called for is an increased resort to professional
morphological, visual, and tactile examination, then to chemical mineralogical tests,
and also to electron scanning microscopy.

Reference was made earlier to the extraordinary layer of copper and lead scoriae found
by Schliemann in the burnt city. Is this mined ore, purified metal, or ore in a natural
state? The origins of metals are not a settled matter. There is too long a stone age,
too ready an access to ores, too abundant a mythology to relax in the arms of
conventional theory.

Sample tests are generally inexpensive and well structured; they require only small
amounts of material, often only a gram. But of course, the sampling technique is
critical and a manual of instructions for sampling calcination with a mind to covering
all hypotheses raised by this paper is a task for the future.

The idea that thermo-luminescence, radiocarbon, potassium-argon, and fission-tract
dating techniques can be applied to combustion studies with good effect is natural but
perhaps overly optimistic. Of course, calcinology is interested in dating inasmuch as
one of its aims is the establishment of concurrences in destruction; if two spatially
separated combustion processes point to the same or related causes, then their dating
will not only confirm their relationship but will also permit a more secure dating of
other sites where similar combustion but insufficiently related artifacts and
structures are discovered.

Thermal effects encountered on calcinated sites play a large role in permitting age-
determinations (as in thermoluminescence tests and fission-track dating) by providing a
basal date from which calculations of age may be made, and in obscuring chronology by
contaminating burned substances through mixing, as in radiocarbon dating. However, it
will be of interest to apply long-term dating techniques such as the potassium-argon
method if only to check whether the test gives an impossibly old date to a recent
volcanic event. Where uranium minerals have been used to give color to artifacts of
glass, the fission-track technique may provide reliable dates and a check on
radiocarbon dates. If an artificial glass is subjected subsequent to its manufacture to
combustion temperatures of over 600 degrees centigrade, the fission-tracks may be
partially or entirely erased, permitting the date of the new calcination to be
determined from the tracks now present. Tracks in volcanic glass should date the
eruption that produced it. Extra-terrestrial microtektites lend themselves also to
fission-track dating and can be searched for in ruins  [43] .

Tests for radiation levels of the debris are indicated because of the possibility that
the destruction may have involved atmospheric or air-transported agents. For instance
the radiation levels would vary from the norm if lightning had struck or a meteoric
pass-by had greatly raised temperature levels. Lightning effects may also be indicated
by magnetization of metal pieces; for this reason and also to determine whether a
change in the magnetic pole had occurred, supposing a catastrophe to have been
widespread, the then-exposed rocks should be tested for abnormal magnetism, and ceramic
sherds of successive levels should be tested for the same and for possible reversal of
direction from one level to another.

As the gamut of tests and procedures is subjected to the concerted attention of
scholars of relevant fields, it may be expected that a system of producers and a
battery of tests will evolve -- simpler, easier to employ, practicable given the
conditions of archaeological exploration. The resultant research and testing would
possibly confirm that archaeology and geophysics have overlooked some significant part
of the absolutely small fund of ancient data. At that point, not too far away, we may
begin to speak of a new subfield of science called paleo-calcinology.

And when this task is finished, we might turn to another new subfield, which beckoned
us temptingly even as we tried to concentrate upon calcination, paleo-seismism. Here
the implication is that the Mercalli scale may be quite inadequate to denominate
thrusting, folding, and crustal rising and falling that may have occurred in the time
of man, and that the present awareness of settlement sites is merely fractional; much
more may have disappeared or is effectively hidden so as to lend a false perspective to
the human story.

Also paleo-diluviology, the study of ancient floods and tidalism. And still another,
paleo-meteorology, a study that would include the great winds that can sweep away
everything down to bed rock, given the slightest faltering of the earth's rotation, or
the passage of any substantial material from outer space through the atmosphere. Part
of the total task, we seem to be saying, is to separate ancient real occurrences from
ancient myth. The larger task is to distinguish real ancient catastrophism from literal
theology, not to denigrate theology but so as to recognize catastrophism for what it
did to shape man and his environment.




{S : POSTSCRIPT OF NOVEMBER, 1983}

POSTSCRIPT OF NOVEMBER, 1983

The author's interest in the calcinology of Troy led the University of Cincinnati
authorities to propose an investigation of samples of debris that had been stored for
many years at the University. Generous grants were obtained from several foundations
and in 1982, the Princeton University Press published Supplementary Monograph 4 of the
University of Cincinnati Excavation at Troy, under the title of Troy: the
Archaeological Geology, by George Rapp, Jr. and John A. Gifford. The present author,
whose own research proposal had failed to receive support, was not consulted at any
stage of this work. However, since his original memorandum, on which the preceding
article was based, had been made available to the investigators in the very beginning
and he had called their attention to the possibilities residing in the neglected
samples, there may have resulted some effect on what was done in the investigations.

If so, it is not notable in the book just cited. The book does not state its
hypotheses. Its tests discovered only that in almost all samples, whatever the level, a
reed (arundo donox) occurred; the finding lacks significance since the reed is used in
making bricks. In sample number 81 (p. 130) of Phase IId, burned earth was analyzed to
revel charcoal, bone, and pelecypod fragments. There appears to be nothing of further
interest to calcinology proceeding from the entire investigation. The soil samples were
not, however, exhausted, and a future investigation is still possible, hopefully by
means more sophisticated than those described in the published work. The senior author,
without serious defense of the thesis, seems to support earthquakes as the cause of
destruction. ('... one earthquake of Richter magnitude greater than seven to affect the
Troad about every three hundred years. ' (p. 46)).




{S : Notes (Chapter 2: The Burning of Troy)}

Notes (Chapter 2: The Burning of Troy)

1. This paper is an expanded version of one that was first presented on June 18, 1974
before the international symposium --Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar
System  --held at McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ontario, and was published in Volumes I: 4
and II: 1 of Kronos magazine. The author is wholly responsible for the theory and
presentation of this report. He wishes to acknowledge his obligation, however, to a
number of persons who kindly supplied information and advice as he was preparing it.
Among them are: C. C. Chandler, Director of Forest Fire and Atmospheric Sciences
Research, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service; Arthur Brown, Geological
Engineer, Technical Consultant, Athens Metro Project; Ruben G. Bullard, Department of
Geology, Cincinnati Bible Seminary; J. L. Caskey, Professor of Archaeology, University
of Cincinnati; Dr. Howard W. Emmons, Karman Laboratory of Fluid Mechanics and Jet
Propulsion, California Institute of Technology; John Greeley, Professor of Physics,
University of the Bosphorus; Billie Glass, Associate Professor of Geology, University
of Delaware, Newark; W. A. Hans, Engineer, Fire Protection Department, Underwriters
Laboratories Inca; John Gnaedinger, President, Soil Testing Services Inc., Northbrook,
Ill; Jorg Keller, Professor of Mineralogy, University of Freiburg, West Germany; G.
Marinos, Director, Department of Geology and Paleontology, University of Athens; Dr.
Charles D. Ninkovich, Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, Palisades, N. Y.; Dr. Gerd
Roesler, Consulting Geologist, Naxos, Greece; Eugene Vanderpool, Archaeological
Photographer, American School of Classical Studies, Athens; Eddie Schorr,
Archaeologist, Houston, Texas; Dorothy Vitaliano, Associate Professor of Geology,
University of Indiana, Bloomington, Ind.; Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, Princeton, N. J.

2. Claude F. A. Schaeffer, Stragigraphie comparée et chronologic de l'Asie Occidentale
(London: Oxford U. Press, 1948), p. 7.

3. J. W. Mayor, Jr summarizes the work of Marinatos and Galanopoulos in "A Mighty
Bronze Age Volcanic Explosion," XII Oceanus (Woods Hole, Mass.), 3 April 1966, and
Voyage to Atlantis (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1969). Christos Doumas summarizes the
latest "official" theory of the succession of events at Thera in Antiquity XL VIII
(1974), 110-15, plates. Also, cf. D. Ninkovich and B. C. Heezen, "Santorini Tephra,"
Colston Research Society Papers, 17 (1965), 415-53; the papers of J. Keller, D. L.
Page, and C. and D. Vitaliano in Acta of the First International Scientific Congress on
the Volcano in Thera, Greece, 1969 (Athens, 1971); and C. and D. Vitaliano, "Volcanic
Tephra on Crete," Amer. Jrnl. Archaeology, Vol. 78, no. 1, Jan. 1974, pp. 19-24.

4. IX Anatolian Studies (1959).

5. This and the following quotations are from pages 16-17, 348, and 325 of H.
Schliemann, Troy and Its Remains (1875).

6. Ibid., p. 330. Schaeffer, op. cit., 223-4, claims that he saw no evidence of flame-
exposure (feu d'un incendie) on the objects exhibited at the Berlin Museum from the
treasure, and suggests chemical fusion. Also, radiative heat would be an alternative to
"chemical fusion" if one must be sought.

7. Schliemann, op. cit., p. 333.

8. Ibid., pp. 334-5.

9. Ibid., p. 340.

10. Ibid., p. 302; cf. p. 347. The walls and gates of ancient cities had usually an
orientation to the cardinal directional points. The "de-alignment" of successive Trojan
escarpments is itself cause for suspecting and investigating a possible reorientation
of the hill.

11. Communication of March 7, 1984. Bruce V. Ettling and Mark F. Adams accelerated
combustion of woods, cotton cloth, and plastics by hydrocarbons (fuel oil, gasoline,
could be etc.) and discovered by gas chromatography that accelerate hydrocarbons could
be distinguished from the natural hydrocarbons in the char. (" The study of Accelerate
Residues in fire Remains," N. D. offprint, Washington State University. College of
Engineering Research).

12. Allan O. Kelly & Frank Dachille. Target: Earth, The Role of Large Meteors in Earth
Science (Carlsbad, Calif.: the authors, 1953), p. 192.

13. Loc. cit.

14. Blegen, Troy and the Trojans (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), pp. 161-4. Troy IIg
is presently dated to ca. 2200 B. C. by the conventional chronology.

15. Ibid, p. 69. There is a contradiction here with fin. 13, as to how many bones were
found.

16. Ibid., p. 70.

17. Op. cit., p. 17.

18. It is well to stress that an influential school of experts on Troy consider the
Trojan War( s) to have been essentially a struggle for the command of the Dardanelles,
through which heavy commerce funneled. Cf. Emile Mireaux, Les Poems Homériques et
l'Histoire Grecque, 2 vols. ( pairs: Albin Michel, 1948), ch. II, XIV, et passim. A
strategic city that had to be put to good economic use might be thoroughly destroyed,
short-sightedly, and another later on built upon the site. Even if this were true of
Troy VII, would it have been also true of the earliest Troys, a habitual
shortsightedness?

19. Chandler, loc. cit.

20. Rupert Furneaux, Krakatoa (1964).

21. Communication from Prof. Jorg Keller, Institute of Mineralogy, Univ. of Freiburg,
June, 1974.

22. Israel M. Isaacson (E. M. S.), "Some Preliminary Remarks about Thera and Atlantis,"
KRONOS I, 2 (Summer, 1975). pp. 93 ff.

23. Iliad (Lattimore trans., 1951), p. 405.

24. "Lightning and Fire Ecology in Africa," Proceedings Annual Tall Timbers Fire
Ecology Conference (April 22-23, 1971), 473-511,475.

25. Quoted in I. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (N. Y., 1950), p. 218.

26. Furneaux, op. cit., 73, 97, et passim.

27. A. Rittmann, Volcanoes and Their Activity, trans. by E. A. Vincent (1962), pp. 12-
13. 218.

28. Worlds in Collision, especially "The Hail of Stones," "Naphtha," "Ambrosia,"
"Rivers of Milk and Honey," "Samples from the Planets."

29. Harold Urey, "Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods," 242 Nature (March 2,
1973), p. 32; Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (1955), 147-53.

30. Troy (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton U. Press), Vol. 1, 325, 363.

31. Ibid., p. 373.

32. Cf. Worlds in Collision. 48-51, "The Red World."

33. CF. Nicola Rilli, Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino (Firenze: Tipografia Giuntina,
1964). Also, Michael D. Coe R. A. Diehl, and M. Stuiver, "Olmec Civilization, Veracruz,
Mexico: Dating of the San Lorenzo Phase," 155 Science (1967), 1399-1401 (the authors
report that many pieces of asphalt litter the excavated ruin level). F. Wendorf, et.
al., "Egyptian Prehistory," 169 Science (18 Sept. 1970), no. 3951, pp. 1163, 1169 and
figure 1, speak of widespread brush fire in reference to a bed of ash in the Nile
Valley. Geologist Louis Lartel, in his first studies of Cro-Magnon man near Les Eyzies-
de-Tayec, Dordogne, in 1868 uncovered five archaeological layers covered with ash. And
so forth.

34. Op. cit., p. 700.

35. E. C. Baity, "Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Thus Far," 14 Current
Anthropology (October, 1973), 389-449.

36. Vol. I, p. 17.

37. I. M. Isaacson, "Applying the Revised Chronology," IV Pensee, no 4, 5, p. 14,
quoting C. W. Blegen, Troy, V. IV, 1, p. 158.

38. Legends of the Earth (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1973).

39. J. Lawrence Angle, Troy: The Human Remains (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton U. Press,
1951).

40. Site visit with Arthur Brown, Geologist and technical consultant, Athens Metro
Project, September 11, 1974.

41. Communication of April 24, 1974 from K. F. Huff, Manager, Exploration Division,
Exxon.

42. M. Blumer and W. W. Youngblood, "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Soils and
Recent Sediments," Science (April 4, 1975), p. 53.

43. W. Gentner, B. P. Glass, D. Storzer and G. A. Wagner, "Fission Track Ages and Ages
of Deposition of Deep-Sea Microtektites," 168 Science (17 April 1970), 359-61.




{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE BURNING OF TROY: }
{P PART 1: }
{Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: }
{C Chapter 3: }
{T THE FOUNDING OF ROME}
{S - }



THE BURNING OF TROY

By Alfred de Grazia

Part One: Historical Disturbances

CHAPTER THREE

THE FOUNDING OF ROME

For some time now, the founding of Rome has been accredited to truculent Latin rustics
lost in the miasma of VIII century history. The more glorious legend of its
establishment by Homeric heroes, particularly Aeneas, prince of Troy, has been in
abeyance. However, in the light of recent theory and newly uncovered fact, the two
stories can be blended in to a credible account. To suggest the new history is my
purpose here.

To begin with, I would allude to two larger ideas, which we shall be carrying into the
Italian setting. One is the increasing probability that a period of over 400 years of
accepted chronology around the Mediterranean world did not exist and should be stricken
from the record. These are the so-called Dark Ages of Greece, which were placed in the
historical record in the first place to correspond with four hundred years of Egyptian
chronology that were also non existent. "The Aegean prehistorians", writes J. Cadogan,
"have no choice but to adapt themselves to the Egyptologists" [1] .

This may seem still to be true to most ancient historians, but a generation ago
Velikovsky, in his book Ages in Chaos, knocked out the Egyptian centuries at issue and,
following his cues respecting the Greek Dark Ages, I. Isaacson (Schorr), the Review of
the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies of England, the journal Kronos, Velikovsky
himself, and even the present writer have worked to close the Greek time gap.

Hence, it is possible now to connect Cadmus of Thebes with Akhnaton, the butning of
Pylos with the destruction of Troy, to tie together in fact a number of natural
catastrophes and movements of people that Claude Schaeffer had coordinated in time, and
that could readily be slipped down by four hundred years into the VIII century. For
Schaeffer's inventory of destroyed sites of the XIII century "Peoples of the Sea" period
reveals that these settlement were succeeded by towns of archaic Greek, Greco-Roman, or
other much more modern settings not older than the VIII. century.

The case of Troy, so close to our subject here, is especially instructive about the
pseudo-time gap. As J. N. Sammer sums up the evidence  [2] , Troy-Hisarlik VIIb was the
last Bronze Age city of the famous site. There followed a Greek town of the VII century
or later; no deposits intervened. Furthermore, there was an abundant continuity. Gray
Minoan pottery was found in Troy VI, Troy VII, and the Greek Age Troy. The forms of
settlement were identical in the Late Bronze Age (supposedly the XII Century) and the -
700 or later Greek settlement. A Late Bronze house was obviously used by VII century
Greeks. Beset by the dogmas of Egyptian chronology, scholars such as Blegen and
Coldstream resorted to the excuse of an abandonment followed by contamination in a
mixing of debris.

In Egypt this was the time around the pharaoh Ramses III, on whose temple of Medinet
Habu relating to the year 8 is recorded the "Invasion of Sea Peoples," that "They were
coming while the flame was prepared before them, forward toward Egypt"  [3] .

Fire "before them" is not metaphor but refers probably to the innumerable cases of
destruction by fire at this time, a fire which may have been from fierce earthquakes,
volcanism, and exoterrestrial sources, which desolated many peoples and sent them out as
marauders and colonists. Or so it is argued in a number of places, and it is precisely
this kind of general ecological destruction encountered in VIII and VII century history
that helped to confuse the dates by seeming to cause "Dark Ages" of barbarism,
depopulation and continual movement and strife of peoples. Hence, the second point about
the background of Rome is that the town originated in a turbulent period when the war
planet Mars, Homer's "bloodstained stormer of walls," became a top god in Troy and not
by coincidence in Rome.

The latest consensus may be expressed in the words of F. Castagnoli:  [4]

     Archaeological excavations have opened up new prospects: the considerable
     documentation of evidence of the Late Bronze Age (particularly in the zone involved
     directly with the legend such as Ardea and Lavinium) and the Mycenean imports in
     Southern Etruria, and between Reatino and southern Umbria, has reinvoked the thesis (for
     some time cast aside) of a true historical reality adumbrated in the legend; joined to
     this suggestion is the hypothesis that various manufactures of the oldest Latium
     civilization reflect Cretan models and finally the theory that the Latin language
     reveals Mycenean traces. In consequence, the coming of Aeneas to Latium my not be an
     artificially created myth, but instead, in a certain sense, a tradition, that is, the
     echo of real occurrences, the arrival of Aegeans in Latium during the period of the
     Trojan War.

This certainly does not go far enough to suit our views, but will do for a start.

At the magnificent bimillennial exposition honoring Virgil in the beautiful setting of
the Campidoglio in Rome in 1981, the heroine was the famous sculpture of the wolf of
Rome, suckling Romulus and Remus. A small boy listened while his father explained: "She
nursed the orphans, and Romulus then founded Rome." The wolf was fashioned alone in
ancient times, possibly by an Etruscan master, and the twins were added only several
centuries ago. The wolf of Rome and the Mars-Ares of Aeneas' may not have been far
apart.

Already in antiquity and possibly based upon the word of Herodotus alone, the Trojan
wars had been placed in remote antiquity, the XII and XIII centuries. When the Romans
came to deal with this date, they found that their tradition of Romulus as founder of
the city proper in the VIII century (753,747, etc) was impossibly disconnected with the
Trojans, who now seemed to have disappeared four centuries earlier. Thereupon at the end
of the III century B. C., Q. Fabius Pictor, a Roman writing in Greek, first (to our
knowledge) bridged the gap by inserting an Alban line of Kings: but a more recent
quotation from him (see below) seems to contradict this reputed view. In contrast,
Ennius and others connected Aeneas and Romulus directly, as grandfather and grandson.

F. Castagnoli tells us how skepticism discounted the tradition :

     The Trojan origin of the Latins was already put in doubt in the seventeenth century by
     the humanist Philipp Cluever, a rigorous critique of philological aspects begun in the
     middle of the Eighteenth Century (Niebuhr, Klausen, Schwegler, etc.); principally upon
     their work has been based the interpretation of legendary material accorded by most
     historians of ancient Rome.

It is understandable that since the Romans had not been able to stabilize the history of
their origins, the legendary part would fall prey to the new scientists who were bent
upon sharpening their tools against superstition.

Later on the strong interest of the Etruscans in Aeneas was exposed. Also presented was
the theory that Greek writers had created the legend. But then, after Mycenean
connections had been liberally displayed in the archaeology of Italy, the notion of
archaic elements corresponding to the myth grew up. More recently Latium has come under
exploration, including especially Lavinium.

In the Iliad (302-8), the god Poseidon saves Aeneas from being killed by Achilles so as
to preserve the house of Dardanus, beloved of Zeus, whose head will be Aeneas and also
Aeneas will be king of Troy with many generations to follow. Hera adds that Troy must be
substituted. So went the logic behind the legend.

But of course there was more than nonsense in the Iliad. In the years when Virgil was
writing the Aeneid, Properzio publicized him, announcing that he would revive the armed
exploits of the Trojan Aeneas and the wall built upon the Lavinian strand. "Take
yourselves back, Roman and Greek writers! There stands hidden something greater than the
Iliad."

In the middle of the VIII century, Ilioupersis of Arctinus and Miletus spoke of the
secret flight of Aeneas from Troy up Mount Ida. Later the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite
promises Aeneas a kingdom with a glorious future, a Troy restored. In the VI century a
coin of the city Aineia on the Chalcidean peninsula displays Aeneas in flight from Troy,
whence to found this same settlement.

That Aeneas went west appears for the first time in the fragmentary record in a table of
the Capitoline Museum illustrating the work of Stesichorus of the VII century. In one
scene Aeneas leaves through a Trojan gate; in another, Aeneas, with his father,
Anchises, son Ascanius, and companion Misenus board a ship eis ten Hesperian, "toward
the west." Anchises carries the sacred idols.

A direct connection of Aeneas with Latium appears a century later, at the end of the V
century, with two Greek historians, Ellanicus of Lesbos and Damaster of Sigens. The
story also appears of the burning of the Trojans' ship by their womenfolk, and of the
naming of Rome after the Trojan heroine Rome, ringleader presumably in the affair.

The story told by Greeks (and no Roman history in Latin is known until much later) is
seen in Italian perspective about 300 B. C. when the historian Timaeus of Tauromenium
attests to sacred Trojan relics preserved in a sanctuary of Lavinium. Several decades
later, the poet Licofronius, depending upon Timaeus, confirms him and details on the
existence of the legendary Lavinium.

About the same time, Q. Fabius Pictor was writing his history. A recently discovered and
fragmented inscription says only this about him:

     He enquired into the arrival of Hercules in Italy and (?) the alliance of Aeneas and
     Latinus ... Not (?) much later Romulus and Remus were born  [5] .

Thus contrary to his reputed view, Pictor (or Pictorinus as the inscription has it)
carries Aeneas in the VIII century. The mention of Hercules is not queer. In The
Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, I review the legendary ties between the good-
man figure Hercules and the god Ares-Mars, and place the sons of Hercules, the
Heraclids, as the invaders of Greece in the VIII century, at Pylos, for example, where
they fight against the Pylian kinsmen of the young Nestor, later famous as an old
warrior of the Trojan War. Another case implicating Hercules-Mars and the Heraclids
reminds us of the Roman case. It is introduced by Desborough in his book on the The
Greek Dark Ages  [6] .

     Temenos was one of the three Heraclid leaders who with the Dorians seized the
     Peloponnese, according to the conventional Greek chronology at the end of the twelfth
     century. He had a grandson called Rhegnidas, who gained control of the little town of
     Philius; this would be not much later than the middle of the eleventh century. This
     event, as we are told by Pausanias, resulted in the departure to Samos of the leader of
     the opposition party in Philius, Hyppasos; and Hyppasos was the great-grandfather of
     "the famous sage Pythagoras." Pythagoras should then have been living at the end of the
     tenth century, and so one might think, one has an admirable Dark Age situation : until,
     that is to say, one discovers that Pythagoras belonged to the middle of the sixth
     century, a difference of no fewer than three hundred and fifty years.

The Heraclids are evidently of the eighth century. In the superior guidebook to the
Bimillenario Virgiliano at the Campidoglio in Rome, 22 September to 31 December 1981, we
find the major leads needed to connect Enea nel Lazio to the larger Mediterranean
framework of time and events.

Hundreds of archaeological discoveries are displayed and all of the sites excavated
until now are described. The distinguished editors and authors do not speak of a "Dark
Ages" in Latium or Italy. They act nevertheless as if they existed. Therefore we find
that when all the artifacts can be grouped by centuries they concentrate into two groups
, the first from the XI to XIII century B. C. and the second from the VIII century to
the end of the Republic.

     The archaeological record of contacts between the Aegean world and Tyrrhenian Central
     Italy are few and difficult to interpret. Presently one treats with seven fragments of
     pottery and five fragment of bronze coming from the areas of Luni sul Mignon, San
     Giovenale, Monte Rovello, and Prediluco-Contigliano none of them coastal... It is almost
     impossible to assign them precise form and the decoration is too generic to permit all
     but the broadest dating  [7] .

Not only is there an absence of imported articles over the centuries between the
supposed time of Aeneas and the time of the founding of Rome, but indigenous discoveries
of the period are also rare (and, we argue, perforce non-existent). Hundreds of dates
and artifacts mark the Bimillennial Exposition. Perhaps only a dozen are slipped into
the period between the XI and VIII centuries. The earlier objects and dates are of
Italian provenance; the later ones are heavily Greek.

The earlier period carries Central Italy into late Bronze and the beginnings of the Iron
Age. The cultural uniformity of southern Etruria and Latium is called total already at
this XI century boundary. Iron tools of Aeneas are attested to. And then, following the
"Dark Ages", there occurs an outburst of production and trade.

     The king and cities of Virgil become then historical realities only when figured in
     the early Bronze Age: it is on the other hand certain that their origins need be sought
     in that crucial period, the Late Bronze age  [8] .

The arrival of "Aegean" people in the XIII Century, writes one authority, Renato Peroni,
should have inaugurated a process of elements deriving from various fields of human
activity, beginning with the material culture.

     Yet of all this, in the archaeological sources related to the period of Latium that
     interests us, there is not the slightest trace. It is hard to imagine a cultural
     continuity, in ceramics for instance, greater than that which is presented during these
     centuries  [9] .

Peroni, after expressing grave doubt that one could have an invasion and occupation
without cultural impact, though that is what archaeology seems to reveal, repeats that
in the XIII to XI Centuries (and significantly for our argument he terms the XI "less
developed") "the cultural uniformity of southern Etruria and old Latium appears to be
total."

What else can he say, so long as he believes the long chronology inherited from the
Egyptologists: "The literary sources and archaeological evidence permit us to assign the
destruction of Homeric Troy to the XII century. The Latium of the 'saga' of Aeneas is
therefore of the period contained between the Middle Age of Bronze (XVI -XIV Century B.
C.) and the first phase of Latin civilization (X Century)"  [10] .

He goes on to survey the town sites occupied in the late Bronze Age, and finds a
continuity of occupation going into the age of iron, such as Ardea, Ficana, Pratica di
Mare, and Acqua Acetosa Laurentina. This in itself is remarkable, considering the lapsed
centuries and the absence of cultural remains of the long period of time.

Also remarkable is the evidence that between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning
of the Iron Age the number of inhabited places of Erturia dropped by four fifths  [11] !
At the same time, the underpopulated regions of Latium and Sabina held their own and
increased slightly their settlements.

"So rapid a process of depopulation (in some cases occurring violently, in others
voluntarily abandoned) and the incorporation of the population in a few proto-urban
centers will make way, in its turn, to the mechanisms of formation of a complex society,
even of a 'stratal' type, at the beginnings of the Etruscan nation." Meanwhile, the
Latins were beginning to accrete settlements.

This scenario of Peroni suits exactly our theory of a period of natural catastrophes and
survivors occurring in the VIII century. One age disappears into another without
evidence of transition. As in Greece the culture reverts to survivorship; strife is
rampant. The Trojans arrive amidst a general desolation and disorganization, gain a
foothold without difficulty even welcomed in a way, and begin to expand and to found new
towns, among them Rome.

In Southern Italy and Sicily a similar set of events is occurring. The scholar's "Dark
Ages" myth prevails. After the mid-XIII Century, writes L. B. Brea, "a real Dark Age set
in only to be brought to an end five centuries later with the Greek colonization of
Sicily and Southern Italy." Before it set in, there had been much trade with the
Mycenean century and a flourishing civilization. However, we find that the city of Gela
was established by a warrior from Troy in 690 B. C. We also note that at Agrigento and
Segesta artwork in Mycenean style was practiced at both of the interfaces of the Dark
Ages. Further, dome-shaped Mycenean tholos tombs were closely alike across the imagined
500-year gap. And that at Morgantina excavators founds a Greek fort constructed just
above and on top of a destroyed Mycenean level.

Virgil has Aeneas landing in Latium, at the mouth of the Numicus river (Sol Indiges,
Troia and by today's name Fosso di Pratica). The hero, desperate to feed his men, chase
an animal for distance of all 24 stadi (4440 meters) and comes upon a herd of pigs on a
hill. He sacrifices them there and founds the town of Lavinium. The names and distances
between the two given by Virgil are exact today  [12] . Titus Livius remarks on the
name, Troy, given to the place of landing. The Trojan altars were said to be still there
at the end of the pagan era, by Pliny the Elder and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the
historian.

At Lavinium, named for Aeneas' wife, Dionysius visited in the I century B. C. There he
witnessed relics supposedly of Aeneas held in a sanctuary and tomb dedicated to the
Trojan hero  [13] . The preservation of the relics and the identification of the tomb
might well have been impossible if they have originated in the XII century; it is more
plausible that they had lasted from the VII or at least until the time of Timaeus of
Tauromenum about 300 B. C., who saw them. Recently, the "tomb of Aeneas" has been
uncovered and placed in the VII century, with remodeling into shrine occurring in the IV
century  [14] .

Dionysius describes a round temple at Lavinium that housed the idols of the Trojans,
which seems to have been emulated in the round temple of Vesta and the Penati of the
Roman Forum. The small Lavinium temple is replicated on a coin of the Emperor Antonius
Pius.

Aeneas probably rested in several places on his way to Latium, in Asia Minor, Macedonia,
Crete, Carthage, and Sicily. Apollo's oracle at Delos told him to seek the lad of his
ancestors and this was taken by his father, Anchises, to mean Crete. The refugees did go
there, finding a desolate and abandoned settlement. They began to settle down but were
beset (significantly) by a natural disaster that made further consultation with Apollo
necessary. Luckily, a second trip to Delos was not required because voices authorized by
Apollo urged them to find the true place of their origins, and they set sail for the
West  [15] . Anchises could not remember Italy, hence had not been born there, but
recalled that certain ancestors had come from there, Dardanus and Iasius, and had been
Olustrians or Italians.

On the way to Italy, they stop at Carthage, which is, says Virgil, still under
construction by Queen Dido, who has fled with her supporters from a berserk brother who
ruled Phoenicia. Here we encounter a chronological problem; to be sure it is not a
matter of centuries but of a generation. Dido is best placed at -804 or -803, before the
dates which we accept for the Trojan War( s), which may have occurred over most of a
century, at which time Aeneas would most likely have left Troy. Moreover, the dates
assigned traditionally to Romulus, a grandson of Aeneas, are -772 (-771) to -717, and to
the founding of Rome -747 or thereabout.

Either Aeneas left upon an earlier sack of the city, or someone related to Aeneas and
therefore confused with him visited Dido. The stop itself was not unexpected. There
appears to be a non-Greek connection that binds in alliance the Trojans and their
Thracian and Anatolian friends, the Carthaginians, and the Etruscans. Etruria, said
Herodotus, was settled by Anatolian Lydians before the Trojan War  [16] .

But who might have visited Carthage and could be mistaken for Aeneas? Philistos and
Appios clearly give 50 years before the Trojan War as the date when Carthage was
founded. Timaeus gives -814 and Josephus independently gives -826. Yet Carthage's
earliest archaeological remains afford specimens of Greeks material ascribed to the last
quarter of the VIII century, presumably -725 to -700  [17] .

Were the Phoenician and Trojan refugees in motion a century apart? Not according to
Virgil, obviously, who describes a torrid love affair between Aeneas and Dido. And not
according to the traditional dates for Romulus and the founding of Rome; if Aeneas
abandoned Dido at the turn of the century, he could have grandfathered Romulus at the
appropriate moment, about -772. Arie Dirkswager, in an unpublished manuscript lent the
author, offers a solution. He suggest that the king of Tros who founded Troy then moved
to Italy where he founded Etruria and gave the Etruscans his name, about -815. It was he
who knew Dido! Then later, the refugee party led by Aeneas would join its kinsmen about
747 B. C., when Troy burned.

However, although we also view the Etruscans and Trojans as related, we see a later date
for the Trojan wars finally to end, and one has to place Romulus and the founding of
Rome into the very end of the VII Century.

We are perplexed now and have exhausted our meager supply of information. The most
plausible suggestion I can afford is that the Trojan Wars were several until the city's
final destruction (and we cannot confirm the site of Hissarlik - Schliemann's discovery
- as more than a frontier post in the struggles). Given the practices of those times, an
age of colonization and restless wanderings having begun, Aeneas, Prince of Troy, led
his party of refugees out at an early stage of the wars (which Homer combined into one
for literary effect and from amnesiac causes), did visit Dido at the turn of the
century, and so history picks up with Romulus and the founding of Rome in the middle of
the next century. We are introducing one doubt in order to relieve ourselves of several.
And we should be grateful if some brilliant scholar carried down the whole scenario by
another century to place it squarely in the catastrophic VIII and VII centuries.

We have relieved ourselves of several notions: that Virgil was only glorifying Rome by
mythmaking; that the "Dark Ages" existed Italy between -1200 and -700; that Aeneas and
Troy were of the XII Century; that Aeneas and Romulus were fictional characters; that
were was no significance to Mars and the Wolf of Rome; that he Etruscans were long
settled in Italy and were a natural and continual foe of the new Latins; that the Romans
were a simple farm folk who took well to fighting; and that in the VIII Century natural
conditions were normal.

We understand better why the exasperating gap between Aeneas and Romulus was created:
the need to integrate chronology of diverse cultures by basing it upon what was believed
to be the nearly perfect chronology, the Egyptian; the scholarly skepticism of all
legend until recently, especially when wolves and feral infants are tied to the mythical
package, not to mention the hallucinogenic pantheon; the seeming circular confirmation
of Etruscan-Greek-Roman interrelations; the ignorance and neglect of great natural
disasters, such as Aeneas encountered in Crete; alternative explanations of the Dark
Ages such as long-drawn-out climatic changes, restless northern tribesman, and normal
decay of civilizations; the injection of artifacts and personages falsely into the gap
of time; and the vanity of Roman noble families who had attached themselves genetically
to the fictitious personae of the noble line of Alba Longa extending back to Lavinium,
including even the Caesars.

We surmise, by way of contrast, that Aeneas was a Trojan noble, active around -800. He
left a beleaguered Troy in an early stage of successive sieges, founded settlements in
several places, eventually in Latium, near Etruscan relatives, and among a disastrously
weakened native population.

A prompt acculturation and cultural homogenizing began, catalyzed by the disorganizing
effects of a turbulent nature. His daughter Elia mothered Romulus (and one fantasizes
that his godmother was Roma who led the female party which burned the Trojan ships to
prevent further wanderings). The heavens were producing some of the disasters, and the
planet Mars was connected with them to the point that the god could be the godfather to
Romulus who eventually joined him in a cyclonic episode. The wolf of Rome was the symbol
of Mars. The experience of Italy was being replicated throughout the world in those
times; many peoples were practically destroyed; many new towns were founded. The
Mycenean civilization was wrecked, so too the Cretan, so too many another including the
Siculian of Italy and Sicily. The Bronze Age lurches abruptly into the Iron age.




{S : Notes (Chapter 3: The Founding of Rome)}

Notes (Chapter 3: The Founding of Rome)

1. An extension of remarks at a conference of the Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary
Studies at Lake Kashagawigamog, Ontario, August, 1983.

2. "Dating the Aegean Bronze Age without Radiocarbon," 20 Archaeometry (1978) 212.

3. W. F. Edgerton and J. A. Wilson, Historical Records of Ramses III (Chicago: U. of
Chicago Press, 1936), 53; While J. H. Breasted (Ancient Records of Egypt (1906), IV, 37-
8) translates "They came with fire prepared before them, forward to Egypt."

4. In Enea nel Lazio: Archaeologia e Mito (Milano: Fratelli Palombi; 1981), 5.

5. R. M. Ogilvie, Early Rome and the Etruscans, New York: Humanities Press, 1976, 16.

6. London: Benn, 1972; Malcolm Lowery provides this instance in I Soc. Interdiscip.
Stud. 1 (Jan. 1976) 16. I cite another in The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars,
"Crazed Heroes of Dark Ages."

7. Enea nel Lazio, 107.

8. Alessandro Guidi, in Enea Nel Lazio, 94.

9. Enea nel Lazio. 87.

10. Ibid., 88.

11. Ibid., 92.

12. Ibid., 157.

13. Ibid., 158.

14. P. Somella, Rediconti 44: Atti di Pontificio accademia di Archeologia (1971-2), 47-
74; Enea nel Lazio, 157-8, 172-7.

15. Aeneid, III, 94-6 (Humphries trans.) pp. 64, 66.

16. Histories I, 94, (80-1 in the Penguin ed., 1954).



{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE BURNING OF TROY: }
{P PART 1: }
{Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: }
{C Chapter 4: }
{T MICAH'S ARK}
{S - }




THE BURNING OF TROY

By Alfred de Grazia

Part One: Historical Disturbances

CHAPTER FOUR

MICAH'S ARK
Velikovsky persuasively traces the ruins of Baalbek to the ancient seat of a fine city
constructed during the reign of Solomon  [1] . Baalbek, too, was the second capital of
Dan. "The Danites, migrating to the north, took with them Micah and his idol, and it was
placed in Dan of the North." (3.14) The Oracle of Micah probably was set up in the
"house of high places," a temple that was built at Dan by Jeroboam "to contest and to
surpass the temple of Jerusalem." (3.15) The oracle remained in high esteem at least as
late as the fourth century of the present era, when Macrobius in his Saturnalia wrote of
Baalbek: "This temple is also famous for its oracles." (3.14) The Emperor Trajan
questioned the oracle in the year 115.

Velikovsky's notes, compiled by Jan Sammer, show two more indications of what the oracle
might have been. Of Baalbek-Dunip-Seti's Kadesh, "the place is known as Yenoam (' Yahweh
speaks') which refers to the oracle." Then , "Yenoam-Dan (Yehu probably introduced the
cult of Yahweh at Dan). Yenoam, read in Hebrew, could be interpreted as "Ye [Yahweh]
speaks..." Writes Sammer: "Velikovsky evidently saw in the name a reference to the
oracle of Dan." I agree, and Yehu might be interpreted as a form of Yahweh.

But Velikovsky did not proceed to identify the oracle further, although this would have
strengthened his case all around. In my book on God's Fire: Moses and the Management of
Exodus there occur the following lines:

     We hear that on one occasion the Ark was duplicated by a young man named Micah in his
     home, a surprising occurrence, reminiscent of claims that the nuclear bomb can be home-
     made. The lad's mother was quite proud of him; she had consecrated her silver for the
     purpose (Ju. 17: 3) He made a graven image, a molten image, an ephod, a terraphim, and
     hired a priest. Nothing untoward occurred save that men from the tribe of Dan descended
     upon the household and carried away the ark and its Levite attendant. Later we learn
     that the true Ark was kept at Shiloh, whence it was occasionally employed.

I owe the realization that Micah's image was an ark to J. Ziegler (YHWH, 34-35). He
points out that mere images of material are common in ancient Jewish household; that the
word which is translated "image" as in "any standing image" comes from the word "neck,"
hence refers to any arrangement or instrument capable of discharging an ark, that Micah
needed both insulating carved wood and metallic sides, that is, both "a graven image and
a molten image" to fabricate his ark. Ziegler perceives that the first and second
commandments go together, expressing the absolute preference for Yahweh followed by the
prohibition of graven images, by which is meant any competitive presentation of the
divine who was displayed on the true Ark.

The Danites, after stealing the image (ark), erected it in the capital of the country
that they had savaged. "And they kept the carved image of Micah ..., all the day that
the house of the God continued in Shiloh," an obvious reference to the prototype "true"
Ark of the Covenant that rested at Shiloh for a long time.( Ju. 18: 13)

Hence a functioning Ark, an electrical apparatus that has been described elsewhere
(Ziegler, op. cit. A de Grazia, "Moses and his Electric Ark," Midstream, Nov. 1981),
found a home in Baalbek, where appropriately, it was mounted upon a hill site. There, in
the years of declining terrestrial discharges, it might still on occasion approach the
norm of activity that its prototype (then in the temple of Solomon at Jerusalem)
displayed during the Exodus under the direction of Moses.

In Velikovsky's article, the "thing" is an "oracle," an "image," and an "idol," vague
terms applied to the Ark in conventional Biblical exegesis. Too, they are terms that the
editors hostile to the Northern Kingdom would use to avoid suggesting that something
approaching in shape, intent, and functions the most sacred Ark would be operative
there, or anywhere else. The oracle of Micah was also called "a voice ... from Dan" by
Jeremiah, and "voice" was a term used literally and liberally in regard to the presence
of Yahweh on the Ark.

The "oracle of Micah," or Micah's Ark, lends authenticity and credibility to
Velikovsky's reconstructions of the history of Baalbek. Some fifteen years ago, during a
rambling conversation that took in the crises over Lebanon, Velikovsky fixed me with a
confiding gaze and said: "Baalbek was part of Israel. I have never published it because
it might cause trouble." He felt that such proof would be made the basis for a claim to
Lebanon by Jewish extremists. He was complex; here he was a man of peace; but usually
his scale of demands paralleled or even advanced beyond those of incumbent rulers of
Israel.

The complexity of his character is involved in the oracle of Baalbek, too. We note his
statement about Jeroboam, who built the "house of high places" at Baalbek-Dan and had
built the Jerusalem walls under Solomon; "before becoming king of the northern kingdom
he lived as an exile in Egypt. He introduced the cult of the calf in Dan."

Velikovsky despised any Jewish minion of a foreign power. Nor did he like the "Golden
Calf." He acknowledged its enduring presence in Hebrew religious history, opposing it to
the "superior" abstractions of Moses Yahwism. Velikovsky did not see the Ark as a
functioning electrical machine, and merely grunted in response when, a year before his
death, I mentioned to him that an electric Ark was a feature of my manuscript of Moses.
Two years earlier, I had raised the subject of Ziegler's book YHWH and it was obvious
that, although he had received it, he would not read in it.

Probably he saw, in the image of the calf, which was the only ritual image turned up by
the Baalbek excavations, a synopsis of Baalbek Dan's dedication to the apostasy of
Jeroboam and the Ten Tribes, a taboo-guarded subject in Jewish tradition. In sum,
Velikovsky probably regarded the Ark of the Covenant as a mere holy litter, in the
modern scholarly conception of bedouin ritual apparatus, and may have assumed, with
embarrassed haste, that the oracle of Micah related to the worship of the calf and
embodied its image, whereas most likely the oracle was the Ark of Micah and preceded
Jeroboam's assumption of power in Baalbek; it was infuriating to the southerners, who
later on supplied the editors of the Bible.



{S : Notes (Chapter 4: Micah's Ark)}

Notes (Chapter 4: Micah's Ark)

1. III Kronos( 1981-2) nos. 2, 3.



{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE BURNING OF TROY: }
{P PART 1: }
{Q HISTORICAL DISTURBANCES: }
{C Chapter 5: }
{T THE CATASTROPHIC FINALE OF THE MIDDLE BRONZE AGE}
{S - }




THE BURNING OF TROY

By Alfred de Grazia

Part One: Historical Disturbances

CHAPTER FIVE

THE CATASTROPHIC FINALE OF THE MIDDLE BRONZE AGE*

(* A paper presented at the IX Congress of the International Union of Prehistorical and
Protohistorical Sciences, Nice, 1976.) Catastrophes are defined as large-scale intensive
natural disasters. All the world's religions are founded upon original catastrophes.
Indeed, so obsessive is the connection between catastrophes and gods, that human
cultures, even the most scientifically advanced ones, refused to turn over the study of
catastrophes to science. As a result, science and scientific history made their way
after 1840 in defiance of the very idea of catastrophes, that is, of a quantavolutionary
as contrasted with an evolutionary primevalogy. Quantavolution promises, as I would like
to illustrate here, an ability to penetrate some pre-historic and historic problems that
have caused confusion in uniformitarian, gradualist, evolutionary theory.

We are dealing here with a large area of the Earth, and with 2500 years of time. We
should guard against defining catastrophe by some measure that turns out to be a mere
uniformitarian statistic. The incidence of catastrophe between 3500 B. C. and 1000 B. C.
must be much greater than the incidence of the past 2500 years, an equal length of time,
to support my thesis. That is, we should add up all the Vesuvius and Krakatoa eruptions,
the Caribbean hurricanes and Kansas cyclones, the Siberian meteoroid falls, Swiss
avalanches, sinkings and risings of town harbors, Yangtse and Mississippi River floods,
frozen Baltic winters, prolonged Saharan droughts, etc. Then convert the intensity and
rate of these events into 2500 year averages. Then, further, if these recent indicators
appear to compare 1 to 1, or even 1 to 2, with the Bronze Age indicators of the
expression of high natural energy, perhaps the thesis should be abandoned... And many
scholars would be pleased to confirm that the human record has been uniform, gradual,
and linear, instead of catastrophic and cyclical. Furthermore, they would feel that the
technological progression "from stone to bronze to iron ages" had some essential
meaning, or that a sociological progression "from hominid, to hunter-gatherer, to
pastoral, to agricultural, to industrial" also has meaning. They would further be
reassured that the great gods that succeeded each other on the altars of ancient
cultures were only the typical occasional results of the human pastime of inventing new
gods whenever normal life routines were disturbed by the tides of fortune or war.

But suppose the incidence of catastrophe is 1 to 3, or 1 to 5, or 1 to 100, comparing
the modern age with the Bronze Ages! Then the catastrophic or quantavolutionary thesis
will be nailed upon the door leading to ancient history. If it becomes reasonably
apparent that the Bronze Ages exhibited high energy expressions and effects in multiples
of 2, 3, 5 or a hundred times the expressions and effects of high energy in recent
years, then all fields of ancient history and ecology must undergo change. Many cultures
would have been caused to disappear in natural disasters. Human nature may have acquired
the character of desperation. Personal behavior and institutional practices may have
become suffused with the effects and expectations of intense traumas. In short, the
world of natural and social history becomes a different world and had better be studied
differently.

Let us look briefly, then, into the middle of the second millennium B. C., that is, some
3500 years ago. (Because there is some confusion of chronology and much controversy
about it, I shall mention dates between 1700 and 1400 B. C. and venture an opinion later
respecting their simultaneity and succession.) Did the events so dated happen at the
same time or not?

I shall commence by paying homage to Claude Schaeffer. For it was he who, despite
onerous preoccupations during the French War of Liberation, assembled and analyzed the
mass of data which was finally published in 1948 under the title of Stratigraphie
Comparée et Chronologie de L'Asie Occidentale, IIIe-IIe millénaires. In this great work,
he compared some 40 important archaeological sites in the Near and Middle East for
evidences of sudden destruction. And he found, without fail, that there had appeared
several levels over a period of thousand years when destruction seemed simultaneously to
descend upon Bronze Age cultures.

His general conclusions were several:

1. Certain outstanding events... struck simultaneously a definite number or even the
totality of urban centers of Western Asia... Not only is this conclusion persuasive as
originally inscribed, but many locations can now be added to the doomsday list.

2. The catastrophes struck six times: roughly, about 2350, 2100, 1700, 1450, 1365, and
1235 B. C.

3. "The various countries of Western Asia affected by the perturbations reacted
according to their own resources. Now these varied considerably, sometimes from one
region to another, as a function of the climatic and geographic situation. Thus the
chronology of the layers deposited during the periods of real stability between the
great crises may present a deviation from one site to another. That is, nevertheless,
never considerable and hardly ever exceeds fifty years." Even this discrepancy may be
due to errors in dating the material uncovered.

4. The perturbations of cultures were caused by natural catastrophes, often giant
earthquakes and fires, rather than by the hand of man. Cultural ruptures only rarely
were caused by human elites, but "by atmospheric cataclysms or other calamities, such as
earthquakes ... We perceive as yet only imperfectly the initial and actual causes of
certain of these great crises. We put ourselves here expressly en garde against a
generalization of the seismological explanation."

5. Long-enduring hiatuses or lapses followed the destruction, as after 1700 B. C.: "In
all the sites examined up to now in Western Asia, a hiatus or period of extreme poverty
causes a rupture of the stratigraphic or chronological sequence of the layers around
1700 B. C., and revival began only around 1550 B. C., 150 years later."

John J. Bimson, reviewing "the Conquest of Canaan" in the time of Joshua, finds in the
records of excavation half a dozen destroyed settlements beyond those reported by
Schaeffer in Palestine alone - Arad, Hormah, Gideon, Hebron, Hazor, et al. All went down
in violent conflagrations. It is noteworthy that Bimson, on the say-so of Epstein,
excludes Megiddo, holding that there was no break between Middle Bronze and Late Bronze
ages. In this case, Schaeffer is in contradiction: "The stratigraphic picture of Megiddo
shows an interruption of occupation between 1650 and 1550 B. C. The excavators report a
variety of remains from the Recent Bronze Age, subsequent to 1550, and of remains from
the Middle Bronze Age, antecedent to 1650, in the zone of contact of the two layers."
There do not seem exceptions to this world-wide disaster which so many s