As to the site of Ephesus, on the micro-scale, archaeologists are continuing to explore its palaeo-geomorphology; the processes and stages in river development which fostered the port, and which later led to its demise. As a tool for local quantification, stratigraphy is well developed. However, with modern technologies, far more complex and immensely significant matters await verification. Regular events exist, called Ice Ages, which have the capacity to wipe the planet’s face clean on a global scale! These alternate with ‘Water Ages*’. They may be caused, inter alia by the solar system’s regular passage through colder regions of space.
In the retreat of the Ice, for Anatolia, I suspected we had the key to a whole raft of issues. The past extent of the ice is discernable from clear-ice-permafrost deposits and from glacial erosion and deposition. But these latter clues are not visible when the Ice Cap was permanently stationary. Then weight-effects like soil and coal and oil are the clues.
Issues such as the following need answers:
• What governed the establishment of the first settlements at Çatal Hüyük?
• Why had the Egyptians called the Mediterranean The Great Green since ‘time immemorial’? (This seemed clearly to be a reference to long records, to variable sea levels and to the migration of the climate belts).
• Why was there a significant break in the archaeological record about 12,000 years ago?
• Why is there a typological difference in the architecture of the Great Pyramids and a few Cyclopean temples from the generically different temples of Pharaonic Egypt?
• Why does the Great Sphinx have water erosion? (See JA West’s ‘Serpent in the Sky’).
• How was it that Egyptian Civilization had suddenly emerged out of nowhere?
• How the unsurpassed 6-fold Egyptian calendar could be developed in a thousand years or so when it required at least 50,000 years of recorded, precessional sightings from an observatory to construct such a calendar?
• How, indeed could an entire integrated system of Myth, Measure and Symbol be there from ‘square 1’?
• But, on the fragmentary evidence of the damaged Turin papyrus, everyone believes that ‘Egypt began about 3500 BC’. This is not an equivalent piece of evidence!
‘History begins at Sumer’ is a similar truism. But Sumet Jumsai and Buckminster Fuller’s penetrating studies ofThai Culture (in ‘Naga, Siamese and West Pacific Cultural Origins in SE Asia’), conservatively suggest that when the vast, ice-covered, Asian land mass was uninhabitable, and when water-for-ice abstraction had lowered sea levels significantly, mankind took refuge on the inter-tropical SE Asian continental shelf . This is visible on certain ancient maps! Civilization, then largely water-based, according to these authorities, re-colonized the planet via the East Asian Water-margins and then via India and Sumer and Egypt.
Contrary and complementary hypotheses exist too, of course. One is uniformitarianism, the generally accepted, mundane notion that everything has always been more or less the way it is now, and that geological processes are slow, but human progress lightening fast! Others, like Velikovski, von Daniken, Berlitz, RILKO and a host of SF writers have catastrophist or interventionist ideas and hypotheses.
One compelling Ice Age Catastrophist argument is advanced by RF Walworth and GW Sjostrom*. They cite, as a tiny evidential point, the findings of Birdseye. This man, a founder of the leading US Frozen Food Company researched the digestion within and the edibility of the famous Siberian Mammoths. He found, that to produce these ancient, widespread, and edible corpses, an instantaneous temperature drop to below minus 150 degrees F was required!
Walworth and Sjostrom further calculate and evidence that Ice Age sea levels have dropped far below the acknowledged 600 feet, to six miles, in fact! And that ice up to 10 miles thick stretched from pole to pole. Hydrological surveys of the ocean beds reveal beach deposits and alternating shallow-water lime stones and deep sea oozes. And, of course, the famed sub-marine canyons and river-deltas are further evidence.
To all this, we may add matters like Flood Myths (accounts of what happened when the ice melted and the ‘deep sea retreat refuges were inundated’), the vast, widespread and ecologically disparate geologically ‘Recent’ bone beds, and the Hindu memorized traditions that ‘the World has been destroyed, not once, but many times’ as issues of consequence.
And on a macro scale!
A further, cultural fossil related to such a catastrophic event and its consequences is the integrated series ofOpicinus di Canestris maps, last redacted around 750 years ago, and published in facsimile by the Warburg Institute with a German commentary by R Saloman. Even as recently as 200 years ago ‘our civilization’ lacked the technology (the chronometer etc) to construct such maps. Where did they come from? C. Hapgood, in his ‘Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings’ looks into this matter, together with Piri Reis’ Chart, and the maps of Hadji Ahmet and Ben Zara. He estimates that the projection focused in Egypt. The di Canistris map of Anatolia is particularly excellent.
From the degree of sedimentation plotted on these maps for places such as the Nile delta, from illustrated vestigial ice, and from the triangulation points, etc, much can be learned. But whilst creative writers, astronomers and theorists interested in mathematical problems are challenged, the archaeologist in the field may be tempted to bury her/his head in the sand of uniformitarianism.
I had had no intention of writing such a piece as this. I had merely set out to analyze the symbols on the Kilts of Artemis. But the clues demanded other investigations. Now it is time to return to micro-scale details.