Deep Sea Crete
These days the Atlantic shipping lanes in the centuries before Columbus are generally recognised to have been like Piccadilly Circus on a Friday night. What with Vikings, Romans, Phoenicians and the Irish Saint Brendan the Navigator, who appears to have popped out for a pocket of fags one Sunday morning and returned having discovered Newfoundland, there can barely have been room anywhere between Miami and Fishguard for a David Walliams charity marathon. And now …..Minoans.
The seafaring Minoan Empire is the subject of Gavin Menzies newest book. Menzies’ previous one, 1421, was about the Chinese Admiral Zheng He, whose epic voyage to the Americas and Antipodes Menzies believes predated Columbus by the best part of a century. Now it seems the Minoans were Amundsen to Zheng He’s Scott. It doesn’t seem to have any relation to feng shui until you read it carefully. Indeed Menzies makes the statement that all astrological systems are “bunk” because they don’t account for the precession of the equinoxes (by which stars alter their position relative to the Earth over time). It’s another fascinating and convincing book but he’s wrong on both these counts; as we shall see.
Winning Bronze
Menzies’ thesis is that Plato’s Atlantis actually consisted of the twin Minoan islands of Crete and Thera (or Santorini) which were hit by a mammoth tidal wave around 1450BC. He sees the seafaring Minoans as ushering in the Bronze Age. Bronze of course was the first metal workable both for weaponry and jewellery and would have given its first users a huge – and indeed sharp- edge. No longer could weapons, buildings and even ships only be made out of wood, stone or ceramics.
Metal offers an exactitude that neither wood nor stone can approach. From an Elemental point of view, Metal is pretty much identical with precision. This is a leap forward comparable with the wheel.
The bronze that brought this revolution about is an alloy of copper and either tin or arsenic. The problem with using arsenic is that the alloy is less stable and the early metallurgists will tend to have died making it. For the best bronze what you need is very pure copper and lots of tin. Which takes the Minoans to at least two unlikely destinations: Britain and the Great Lakes of North America. Where the feng shui comes in.
The Circle Line
Menzies reckons the Minoans wintered at Callanish in the Outer Hebrides and that they used circles of standing stones there and elsewhere (including one in the shallows of Lake Superior) as devices by which, given position, they could tell the date by the stars and vice versa. He then compares the circles to the “Nebra Disk” excavated in Germany in 1999, which is of the right antiquity and shows sun, moon and various apparent stars, implying it could be a kind of “pocket” stone circle; like an early astrolabe. What the disk certainly shows is the Pleiades, a constellation which features on the earliest Chinese compasses (or luo pans) as one of the Mansions of the Moon, a system that may have allowed the Chinese to relate time and place and which certainly does take account of the precession of the equinoxes. My own luo pan shows the Mansions and they are a big part of my own practice of zi re or Date Selection.
Menzies’ Minoans, aided by the stone circles, ride the Gulf Stream to the Great Lakes, (braving the traffic) where uniquely pure seams of copper are located and where there are the remains of extensive digging from the right timeframe and no sign of the excavated copper. They time their home voyage to Crete by reference to the Lake Superior and Callanish circles so as to pick up the returning Gulf Stream and clear the English Channel and Bay of Biscay between storms. Then suddenly around 1450BCE the digging stops.
I pointed out to the author that the Mansions of the Moon actually does allow for precession and he, very graciously, showed keen interest but when I digested his thesis for my old teacher, Derek Walters, probably the leading Western authority on the Mansions, Derek remarked drily that Stonehenge would be “a bit inconvenient for Minoan mariners”
He of course, has a point.
To hear Gavin Menzies discuss this, click here.