Greece, Miletus and Thales - The Birth of the Boundary Breakers - 3,000 b.c to 550 b.c.

I owe an immense debt of gratitude for the information on pre-historic Greece to the following articles from the Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-97. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1997: Emily D. Townsend Vermeule. Samuel E. Zemurray and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor Emerita of Classics, Harvard University. "Greek and Roman Civilizations, Ancient" and "Greece in the Bronze Age;" M. Sinclair F. Hood. Archaeologist. Director, British School at Athens, 1954-62. Author of The Minoans and others. "Greek and Roman Civilizations, Ancient;" William H. McNeill. Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History, University of Chicago. Author of The Rise of the West and others. "The History of the Eurasian Steppe;" Timothy C. Champion. Professor of Archaeology, University of Southampton, England. Coauthor of Prehistoric Europe. "European History and Culture;" Ioan Petru Culianu (d. 1991). Visiting Professor of the History of Religions and the History of Christianity, University of Chicago. Author of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance and others. "European Religions, Ancient;" Eugene Vanderpool (d. 1989). Professor of Archaeology, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1949-71. "Athens."

James Mellaart. Catal-Huyuk: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967: 68.

Since new evidence for the Indo-European invasions and their origins is being unearthed and reinterpreted constantly, these dates are extremely approximate. Some experts give the date as 1900 b.c. And one of the most interesting dissidents on the subject, Robert Drews, feels the date of these civilizational takeovers, is as late as 1600 b.c. (Robert Drews. The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.)

Michael Grant. The Rise of the Greeks. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1987: 1; John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, Oswyn Murray. The Oxford History of the Classical World: Greece and the Hellenistic World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988: 4.

Here they fathered a little-known and now extinct Caucasoid people known as the Tocharians. James Opie. "Xinjiang Remains and 'the Tocharian Problem'". The Journal of Indo-European studies, Fall 1995. J.P. Mallory. "Speculations on the Xinjiang Mummies." The Journal of Indo-European studies. Fall 1995.

David Anthony. "The Origin of Horseback Riding." Scientific American, December 1991: 94-100; David W. Anthony. "The Archaeology of Indo-European Origins." The Journal of Indo-European studies. Fall 1991; David W. Anthony. "Horse, wagon & chariot: Indo-European languages and archaeology." Antiquity; a quarterly review of archaeology. September 1995; David W. Anthony. "Shards of Speech." The Sciences, January 1996; Dorcas Brown and David Anthony. "Excavations in Russia." Oneonta, NY: Hartwick College, downloaded here; David Anthony and Dorcas Brown. "Soft Bits and Hard Questions." Oneonta, NY: The Institute for Ancient Equestrian Studies, downloaded 4/98, http://www.hartwick.edu/anthropology/softb.html; David W. Anthony, personal communication, 4/8/98.

Colin Renfrew has won considerable attention for his dissenting view that the Indo European language was not spread by horse warfare but by peaceful agricultural expansion. See: Colin Renfrew. "The Origins of Indo-European Languages." Scientific American, October 1989: 106-114; Colin Renfrew. Archaeology and language: the puzzle of Indo-European origins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Eric P.Hamp, "On the Indo-European origins of the retroflexes in Sanskrit." The Journal of the American Oriental Society, October 21, 1996: 719-724.

This is an inference derived from Herodotus' account of the Ionian capture of Miletus in roughly 1,000 b.c., when the Ionian civilization was heavily Indo-European in character. Says the Father of History, "The purest Ionians of all, brought no wives with them to the new country, but married Carian girls, whose fathers they had slain. Hence these women made a law, which they bound themselves by an oath to observe, and which they handed down to their daughters after them, 'That none should ever sit at meat with her husband, or call him by his name'; because the invaders slew their fathers, their husbands, and their sons, and then forced them to become their wives. It was at Miletus that these events took place." Herodotus. The History of Herodotus. In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Irvine, CA: World Library, Inc., 1996. CD-Rom. The view I'm presenting is my own, but it is supported in its general outline by Robert Drews, who writes that the Indo-European invasions were not the result of random wanderings but were, like the Ionian conquest Herodotus describes, "well planned and well organized, and their leaders knew where they were going and what they would do when they got there. The PIE [Proto-Indo-European] speakers' object in leaving their country was to take control of societies that were vulnerable and that could be profitably exploited." (Robert Drews. The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East: 198.)

Jonah Blank. Arrow of the Blue Skinned God: retracing the Ramayana through India. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. D.D. Kosambi. Ancient India: A History of Its Culture and Civilization. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965. Romila Thapar. A History of India, Volume One. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. The validity of applying information from India to Greece is supported by Robert Drews' in the conclusion of his 201-page reconstruction: "the Hellenization of Greece thus seems to parallel the Aryanization of northwest India." (Robert Drews. The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East: 200. See also Howard Bloom. The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition into the forces of history. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995: 210-213.)

Hesiod. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica (c. 8th-6th Century b.c.), on the CD-Rom Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Hesiod. The Homeric hymns. And Homerica with an English translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

There was a major Mycenaean palace at Athens. Geoffrey Barraclough, editor. The Times Atlas of World History. London: Times Books, 1984: 67.

Michael Grant. The Rise of the Greeks: 34.

Women could not own property or even buy or sell anything worth more than a measure (medimnos) of barley on their own. (Oswyn Murray. "Life and Society in Classical Greece." In The Oxford History of the Classical World: Greece and the Hellenistic World: 206.)

Oswyn Murray. "Life and Society in Classical Greece." In The Oxford History of the Classical World: Greece and the Hellenistic World: 211-212.

Geoffrey Barraclough, editor. The Times Atlas of World History: 74-75. Rand McNally World Atlas. New York: Rand McNally, 1986: 21.

Oswyn Murray. "Life and Society in Classical Greece." In The Oxford History of the Classical World: Greece and the Hellenistic World: 198. Will Durant. The Story of Civilization: Part II--The Life of Greece. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939: 136-138. Equally helpful, if not more so, is the CD-Rom edition: Will Durant. The Story of Civilization: Part II--The Life of Greece. Irvine, CA: World Library, Inc., 1991.

Will Durant. The Life of Greece.

Michael Grant. The Rise of the Greeks: 39-41.

Herodotus. The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. New York: Penguin Books, 1972. Herodotus. The History of Herodotus. On the CD-Rom Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Since the story of Thales is reconstructed primarily from tidbits given by Plato, Aristotle and Herodotus, it can be told in many ways...and has been.

Herodotus. History of Herodotus. In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0.

Plutarch. Agis. In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Solon was, indeed, a contemporary of Thales. Some historians believe Lycurgus was a mythological figure. Others feel he was real. If he existed, he would have been putting together his code during Thales' days as a political advisor in demand. Just to show how difficult it is to arrive at historical judgements, some scholars feel that Plutarch, who wrote roughly 650 years after Thales' death, is not a source to be taken seriously.

Plutarch. Solon. Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0

Sun-Tzu is reputed to have been an advisor living in the period of Thales, and is said to have been responsible for the insights in the book popularly attributed to him, Ping-fa (The Art of War).

George Forrest. "Greece: The History of the Archaic Period." In The Oxford History of the Classical World: Greece and the Hellenistic World: 20. Herodotus. The Histories of Herodotus. Ernle Bradford. The Battle For The West: Thermopylae. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1980.

Plato. Theaetetus. In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Plotting the movement of planets and stars was a specialty of one of Persia's prize possessions, Babylon.

Herodotus. History of Herodotus.

F. Diamandopoulos. "Thales of Miletus." In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume Seven, edited by Paul Edwards, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1967: 97. Aristotle. Heavens. Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Aristotle. Metaphysics. Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. The macro-gods of sky were banished in favor of micro-gods one could finger in a stone or chew in a leaf of grass...for, as Aristotle put it in one of his references to Thales' cosmogony, "all things are full of gods." (Aristotle. Soul. Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0.) This can easily be interpreted as an early way of saying that each thing has its own inherent properties, a concept Aristotle would have found congenial.