[Half of the work or more in this chapter is from my reading of the primary sources, and constitute ancient corroboration of Astle’s case, particularly on Alexander and Solon and the Persians.]

Chapter 6

Babylon, Banking, And Bullion

The first big bad guys of standard history, the Assyrians in their 900s B.C. conquests, seem, on Astle’s consideration, not so much oppressors of small states, but as rebels against international banking, using small states as branch offices. The front men for the banking operations were primarily Arameans, an Arуan people whose written language was the source of both Greek and Hebrew writing. Aramaian and Greek would be the two languages the New Testament was first recorded in, which in this context brings to mind Jesus driving the money changers from the temple, not so much as correcting a blasphemy as we assume, but affronting an ancient financial faith. The banking network extended from India to eastern Anatolia. Use of the term Phoenician applied to the Aramean refugees from the Assyrian ethno-national revolt, is something like describing the Norman British ruling class as Anglo-Saxon, which they are manifestly not.

The coinage reforms in Athens under Solon [1] in the 590s B.C. were a form of regional standardization by international weight via local mintage establishing community authority, related to large scale bullion movement, due in part to local mining and in part to removal of treasure from Assyria banking centers. After reactionary local politics rocked the banking establishment, Solon seems to have been a front man for the bankers who, in order to continue basing their operations in Greece, had to stop enslaving its people through debt, labor and fraud, and needed to import slaves into Greece to work the mines. Some free Greeks did join the gangs of mining slaves for a time.

The basis of Greek coinage would now be the drachma, “circulated at par with the shekel” of Babylon due to weight reforms. This extended the common market into the Greek sphere and would bring with it reform in Athens, severe reform in Sparta, [2] and war from the east.

Solon, the philosopher Archon [mayor] of Athens reformed the “the old noxious contracts” that were “a mere snare for the liberty of a poor free man and his children.” This was called “shaking-off-of-burdens,” which established them as an enemy of the Babylonian system and its Persian puppet kings, who then extended their military occupation into Europe in 512 B.C., above Greece, in Thrace, where rich mines were in operation.

That 512 invasion of Europe by Darius, the invasions of Greece by he and his successor Xerxes in 490 and 480 B.C., viewed in our murky mirror, begin to take on some of the proxy aspects of an American Petro-Dollar war racket. The improvement of the Laureion silver mines controlled by Athens, very close to where the Persians landed in 490 at Marathon [3], positioned Athens as a regional rival to the Persians. That class of international brokers who handled the affairs of the King of Kings who must tax some 30 captive nations, seem to have also helped improve Athenian mining and minting. Athens now had a dictatorship under Solon that discouraged slavery of its people, and granted citizenship to rural folk from other nations willing to relocate to work as artisans in Athens.

These brokers are only hinted at in Herodotus’ account of the great war between Persia and Athens. An Asiatic Greek, Herodotus had as much access to the Persian camp as to the Greek, largely through interviews with the train of Greek exiles that worked as advisors to the Great King. Spies, secret police, torturers and executioners are referred to vaguely as “those whose task it was,” to do such terribly necessary things as punish a river god by flogging it, slay the sons of the subject King of Lydia and loot his entire treasury along with all movable resources such as beasts, hay, slaves and food.

Astle has an inkling, and I expect he is correct, that being expelled from Sparta for promoting degenerate consumption and debt slavery, these faceless, nameless brokers would work with the Athenian rivals of reactionary Sparta, promoting conflict with the King of Kings, who was also dependent upon their system of exchange, their shipping and their consequent control of the slave trade.

“Out of war could only come good to them and theirs. Whether the Great King remained great, or Athens took his place…” The term “hand over fist” for making loads of low investment money seems perfect for this war monger activity. They would provide financial services, to include turning captive slaves into money, the measure of their gain determined only by the ruin of war—the more terrible and destructive, the higher their profit. It is clear form my study of the Greco-Persian Wars that Xerxes gathered the better part of the military of 30 nations, even dismounting the Scythian horse archers, and marching them to the edge of the world to be marooned. The grain of Egypt was heaped in great depots by thousands of ships. The lands, people and treasures of Anatolian and European vassal kings were pillaged on the way to Greece. The great army was marooned and the Great King returned with his Persian troops, to be King Supreme. For he had sent the flower of the warriors of 30 nations to die by war, hunger and thirst on the door step of an upstart power with a seat at the money table. Napoleon used the same strategy in his invasion of Russia, with most of his manpower not French.

The Macedonian invasion of Persia 150 years later by Alexander had been planned for so long as a known, and long frustrated, necessity. For mines dotted Northern Greece and they must be got or kept. After Alexander gained the agreement of all of Greece save Sparta, who had come back into the power of the bankers, hopeless revolts popped up in mining areas to the north which Alexander had crushed when he was a prince of 16. As well, Thebes, which Alexander and his Father had crushed 2 years earlier, rose up in hysteria, having been convinced by returned exiles that he was going to kill them anyhow, so they might as well die defiantly. Those folk who were not killed by their vengeful neighbors were sold into the same international system by the hand of the man that system secretly opposed, for he could not do without money to pay his troops. I have skipped ahead here, as Astle does not take us to Alexander and will declare the death of freedom before the rise of that money power’s greatest foe. [4] These extinguished Thebans were, ironically or not, the scions of the Arameans under Cadmus who had fled the wrath of the Assyrians.

The Laws of Lycurgus rejecting money in Sparta pressured the refugee bankers, a multi-ethnic network of socio-economic parasites, to cooperate with Athens rather than follow the normal course of undermining the social structure and extracting slaves, silver and gold from the host society.

…

Notes

-0. seisachtheia

-1. Solon would advise Croesus of Lydia, who did nationalize his banking, and was then crushed by Cyrus, seemingly on their account.

-2. see part 12

-3. Fennel field

-4. this will be covered under Arrian