Chapter 4
The Left Hand Of Dawn
“...cheques were in use in Babylon from the earliest times. Such use of cheques has also been verified as having existed in Ur during the 3rd and 4th Milleniums B.C. by Sir Charles L. Wolley…”
“...a credit system developed in Greece as in other parts of the ancient world long before the adoption of coinage.”
“...the original loan had been but an entry in the ledger by the agent, probably, in the final analysis costing little more than the labor of slave scribes.”
The Theban origin legend of Cadmus [in Ovid] points to a Near Eastern patrimony in the late Bronze Age. Of interest is that Thebes will play the pivotal role of keeping Asiatic interest before its own community, indeed its survival, from 479 B.C. through to 335 B.C., helping Persian interests against Athens, Sparta, the region of Boetia and the Macedonians, until it is extinguished for this habit of siding with international interests against those of its neighbors and own people.
“Further evidence of the activities of the Babylonians is indicated by the discovery of their seals in the Cyclades.” These are a small chain of islands off of Greece.
The smallness of garrisons at Megiddo, Gezer, Jerusalem, wealthy Byblos, and Syrian Brigawaza, indicate limited metal weapons for arming troops circa 1200 B.C., and also no armed population, but slaves.
The isle of Thasos was colonized in earliest times by Phoenicians, credited to a mythical brother of Cadmus, Thassus, involving the search for Europa. A Thasian Herakles is noted by Herodotus in a statue antedating Herakles son of Amphytryon. That makes three, possibly four Herakles founding various cities with financial [temple] ties to the Near East as well as introducing rules for sacred agons. [see the Gods of Boxing] I take these threads to indicate imperial Late Bronze Age colonization of the primitive Greeks by the financial centers of the Near East. The siege of Troy, in this light, might have been simply a proxy war to wipe out Troy using the Greeks in the waning cycle. The Armarna Tablets indicate a system of religious finance, in the form of missives between heads of state, such as:
“To Niphururia king in Egypt, Thus saith Burraburias, King of Karadunias, thy brother. I am well. With thee, thy house, thy wives, thy sons, thy land, thy chief men, thy horses, thy chariots, may it be very well… Now since my work on the House of God is great, and vigorously have I undertaken its accomplishment, send much gold.” [1]
Study of Bronze Age politics, tend to indicate in the above way, a lateral brotherhood of class loyalty, of joint financial, religious and military interest between kings, with the exclusion of their race, their religious followers, their citizens and slaves from any concern. Gold and the singular God, the Patriarch of Heaven, are in a sense, one.
In Greece, mines were founded and exploited by Near Eastern colonizers in the Late Bronze Age, during its collapse, and in the ensuing Iron Age. [see Ovid in the 4 ages, from gold to Iron.] In the 400s B.C., one Polycrates [City-taker] bought off the Spartans from holding the valuable mining center of Samos by coating lead coins with gold. In the times of Theophrastus, [2] circa 240 B.C., he describes the method of mining on Samos:
“Those who work in the mines cannot stand upright, but are obliged to lie down either on their sides or their backs: for the vein they extract runs lengthwise and is only two feet deep, though considerably more in breadth and is enclosed on every side with hard rock.”
The Balkans, from Corfu, the place where revolution began in 430, igniting the Peloponnesian War, to the Black Sea, had been mined for gold and silver extensively in the Bronze Age. These areas would remain central to Near Eastern and increasingly Roman interest until late Antiquity, forming the core of the Roman Christian Empire until 1204, and thence to the Ottomon Turks.
“In many parts of Greece or European Turkey, where ancient mines were worked, a superstition is said to prevent the peasantry from visiting them. Malte-Brun especially mentions this of the old Roman mines near Traunick, and we ourselves have noticed the same superstition in the vicinity of the Roman gold mines in the Carpathian foothills… probably due to the traditions of that cruel and relentless slavery to which their forefathers were subjected… Valdivia, writing to Emperor Charles V, declared that every castellano of gold from Peru cost a measure of human blood and tears… a human life for one ounce would probably be well within the mark.”
So wrote Alexander del Mar: History of Precious Metals,
pp. 47-50, 1886
The Bronze Age Collapse from about 1300 down through 1177 B.C., to include mythic relations by Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Apollonius, Ovid and Virgil, indicate that some banking power, based in temples that acted as branches of deposit for counting houses, probably based in Babylon, which seems to have weathered every storm until the tide of Islam, was active arming, perhaps hiring “Sea Peoples” to complete the wreckage of the host civilizations. These Sea Peoples are attested as sometimes mercenaries for the very empires they would demolish, sailing from as far away as Denmark!
When the Dark Ages came down it was as if a curtain was drawn concealing the fact that the bankers of Babylon “now with the plunder of a half dozen civilizations in its strong rooms,” was in an excellent position to broker deals for weapons, silver, gold and slaves, the latter yielding more of the former, with small polities. Much of this could be done through colonial missions, setting up temples on islands adjacent to ore bearing mainlands, and where this failed to extract the ores, to incite nomads from the hinterlands to pillage. This latter method permits the metal brokers, dealing in silver, gold, bronze, iron and steel to supply both sides and despoil the loser in the end. The colonists are indicated as “Canaanites” or Syrian “lowlanders,” coastal people named by the Greeks as Phoenician, for the purple robes that were used to dress clergy and royalty, [3] and from whom the phonetic alphabet was brought to Greece as an improvement in Linear A and Linear B record keeping.
Using the cedar forests of Lebanon as resource, Cyprus as a safe port, there was “a Semitic element side by side with the Indo-Europeans [Aryans],” attested by the ancient sources, Semites and Arуan explorers fully integrated, as also seen in Punic/Nordic inscriptions in the North Atlantic as early as 1700 B.C. As in later ages, timber sourcing would move, as old forests were despoiled, from Europe to America, so did Near Eastern timber give way to European timber in the Bronze Age and Iron Age; ever westward, clear cutting the forests. [4]
In the early Iron Age, circa 933 B.C., Aramean “Phoenicians,” were driven from Syria by Assyrians. These refugees colonized and dominated Greece until the laws of Lycurgus in Sparta and political reform in Athens in the 600s corrected the degeneration of local politics. The center of financial gravity was, at this time, shifted back to Babylon, with the fall of Assyria and the rise of the Medes and Persians, and had been expanded to Carthage in North Africa. The Greco-Persian wars will loom in a more left-handed light as we progress in this inquiry.
Astle points to the “experimental social systems” of Greece as in the main machinations financed by “money changers scheming in their shaded courtyards in Babylon,” and in the minority, traditional backlashes against international banking. At the core of this was private production of money, fraudulently claiming to be state issued money, stamped with the head of the very king that money was put into circulation to enslave or unseat. The people would be sold into slavery to plunder the forests for kilns to smelt the ore that they dug from the mines, continuing the process of habitat and ethnic annihilation upon which banking is based. The cycle of rural flight from monopolized and despoiled countrysides to work in urban manufacturing, and also to be shipped as slaves to new resource extraction locations described in the ancient world is exactly that documented in Early Modern England during the Enclosure Period. [5]
“Such industry could only be organized on the basis of money wages in the case of freemen, and therefor only with labour, slave or free, trained to the concept of money, and the making of money, as the be-all and end-all of life.”
“...a great part of the power and learning gravitated from those fast dying worlds of the most Ancient Orient.”
So did the spirit of Prometheus, depicted enchained in the 450s by Aechylus, spread the technologies of the ancient east to the young west.
…
Notes
-1. One skips from family, to land, to warlords, to horses and to chariots, with the people itself not even ranking as a natural resource!
-2. Student of Aristotle.
-3. Judges, those robed figures at athletic venues, were in fact priests acting in a sacral capacity. As money has spread over the ages, the robes of priests have ascended to white and descended to black as a way of denying concord with kings as sacred duties are exchanged for civic, imbuing civics with the vestments of faith and interpretation of ideology. There is no more sinister, visible functionary than the robed judge.
-4. A letter from my patron, Baruch, of Isrаel in 2018 indicated an attempt to undo this age old desert making process, involving more kiln and quarry burning than ship making. From 1688 through 1820, almost every tree in Pennsylvania, a land once covered in 95% forest, was clear cut for iron forge and mining. This writer has visited two old iron works.
-5. 1520s thru 1820s, roughly, peaking in the 1600s and 1700s.
