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All Things Roman (History)
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Komorikid


In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Who were the Pirates?

The word pirate comes from the French -- pirate
The etymology is said to be Latin from - pirata
Which in turn is from the Greek -- peirates derived from peiraein

The interesting thing about this is that r and l are interchangeable in Greek.
Thus PUROS becomes PYLOS.
The root of peiraein is peira/peras which means
Extremity of a portion of space, Boundary, Frontier, The ends of the earth, The remotest lands, Of a thing extending through a period of time

It is also the root of Piraeus the port of Athens (Peiraias in Greek)
In it interchanged form Peilas it is the root of Pelagos/Pelasgians/Peliset

The founders of mainland Greece were the Pelasgians who landed at Peilaias (Pireaus) and founded Athens.

The pirates were the Sea People of history; the Phoenicians, Etruscans, Venti, Celtic mariners, and the Vikings who sailed to and came from the remotest land at the ends of the earth. And where were the ends of the earth to civilisation in the Eastern Med -- The Atlantic!
The pirates came from the Atlantic -- well actually they never really left.
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Komorikid


In: Gold Coast, Australia
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There is one other group of mariners I left out. The Pelasgians were none other than the Belasgians or Belgae whose primary port was Dieppe (Thebes by the consonant shift -- Th > d and b > p )

Thebes was the home of Cadmus the man who invented writing.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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Thebes was the home of Cadmus the man who invented writing.

That's odd... there's a Caedmon whom we came across in the Bede discussion, an apparently illiterate shepherd boy inspired by a dream to compose a hymn, specifically about The Creation. Sounds like a metaphor to describe the invention of poetry.

(Some scholars identified Caedmon as a Celtic name and point to Old Irish bards as the source for Bede's story).
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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Cadmus/Caedmon: their names sound like academy, possibly suggesting these characters were representative of learning rather than 'real' people.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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KomoriDude wrote:
Thebes was the home of Cadmus the man who invented writing.

Can anyone find out what Thebes means? From this Cadmus character, it sounds like it should have something to do with the the First City, the Beginning of Time, the Garden of Eden... something along those lines. (It sure seems to have been the "First City" of Egypt.)

The best I can find is Tebet, Tebeth, Tevet: In the Jewish calendar, the fourth month of the civil and tenth of the religious year, usu. coinciding with parts of December and January; i.e. what everyone else calls New Year.

And Hatty wrote:
That's odd... there's a Caedmon whom we came across in the Bede discussion...

Could we have a slightly more mythical character, please?

Apparently not.

Caedmon is the earliest English poet whose name is known...


one of twelve Anglo-Saxon poets identified in medieval sources, and one of only three for whom both roughly contemporary biographical information and examples of literary output have survived...


wont to make religious verses


Cf. Theraputae

in English, which was his native language.

Why make a point of this?

By his verse the minds of many were often excited to despise the world, and to aspire to heaven.

Cf. Theraputae/Christians

Caedmon's only known surviving work is Caedmon's Hymn, the nine-line alliterative vernacular praise poem in honour of God which he supposedly learned to sing in his initial dream.

The first is the only to survive?

The sole source of original information about Caedmon's life and work is Bede's Historia ecclesiastica... Bede gives no specific dates in his story.


One evening, while the monks were feasting, singing, and playing a harp, Caedmon left early to sleep with the animals because he knew no songs.

He secluded himself from the others.

While asleep, he had a dream in which "someone" (quidem) approached him and asked him to sing principium creaturarum, "the beginning of created things."

In the Beginning...

He told his foreman about his dream and gift and was taken immediately to see the abbess.

A shepherd was taken to see the Holy Mother to sing praises to God. The Little Drummer Boy was next in the queue.

After a long and zealously pious life, Caedmon died like a saint: receiving a premonition of death, he asked to be moved to the abbey's hospice for the terminally ill where, having gathered his friends around him, he expired just before nocturns.

Jesus Christ.

Cadmus or Kadmos, in Greek mythology, was a Phoenician prince

Hmm. They reckon Caedmon is a Celtic name and the Celts are linked to the Phoenicians.

He came in the course of his wanderings to Delphi, where he consulted the oracle. He was ordered to give up his quest and follow a special cow, with a half moon on her flank, which would meet him, and to build a town on the spot where she should lie down exhausted.

Smacks of Heracles chasing the hind (marked with the Sun's rays) from east to west, until she tired and stopped. In the far west. KomoriWilkens says Thebes = Dieppe.

Intending to sacrifice the cow to Athena, Cadmus sent some of his companions to the nearby Castalian Spring, for water. They were slain by the spring's guardian water-dragon (compare the Lernaean Hydra), which was in turn destroyed by Cadmus

Ah-hah: they've noticed it, too.

Cadmus/Caedmon is a Dragon Slayer, eh?

Nevertheless, Cadmus was deeply troubled by the ill-fortune which clung to him as a result of his having killed the sacred dragon, and one day he remarked that if the gods were so enamoured of the life of a serpent, he might as well wish that life for himself. Immediately he began to grow scales and change in form.

So he was treated badly for being a Dragon Slayer and made to look like the beast. All very Plato's Cave.

Harmonia, seeing the transformation, thereupon begged the gods to share her husband's fate, and she did (Hyginus).

She wanted to be like him? Reminds me of one of Lazarus' sisters: was it Martha? Was Martha the one who sang (harmoniously) on being delivered from Egypt?

In Phoenician, as well as Hebrew, the Semitic root qdm signifies "the east"

Ah-hah! Garden of Eden; the Rising Sun, source of all things.

a Phoenician adventurer... the introduction of the alphabet, the invention of agriculture and working in bronze and of civilization generally.

As with Caedmon, writing stands for all the civilised arts.

In the religious writings of Kabbalah, Adam Kadmon is a phrase meaning "Primordial Man," or "Primal Man"
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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There's a Thebes in both Egypt and Greece of course. Velikovsky spins an entire book (Oedipus and Akhenaten) on that fact.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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in English, which was his native language.

Why make a point of this?

Seems it was an anomaly...inserted by a later hand? Sprung from someone's mind to explain apparently mysterious origins? (Funny how it's always a shepherd boy who figures in discoveries...like statues of Virgins with mystical powers). He must have been heaven-sent.

...one day he remarked that if the gods were so enamoured of the life of a serpent, he might as well wish that life for himself.Immediately he began to grow scales and change in form.

Sounds like he was seeking god-like status (hubris?). The serpent/dragon lives forever by renewing its skin; shape-shifting is a sign of immortality in mythology.

Was Martha the one who sang (harmoniously) on being delivered from Egypt?

It was Miriam, sister of Moses, who sang The Song of the Sea I think...coming out of the sea is very like renewal, or baptism even, a new beginning. N.B. There were two versions of the song, male and female, like two halves... completeness?

In Phoenician, as well as Hebrew, the Semitic root qdm signifies "the east"

Ah-hah! Garden of Eden; the Rising Sun, source of all things.

In Hebrew "quodem" means early (there's an expression "quodem col" meaning 'first of all...')
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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There's a Thebes in both Egypt and Greece of course.

The Egyptian city, in Egyptian, was "The City" or "The Southern City" or "The City of Amun" (the Creator), so I guess it's natural for the Greeks to call it Thebes, their First City.

Is it (still) explicit in Greek legend that Thebes was the very first city, founded by Cadmus, the inventor of civilisation?


It was Miriam, sister of Moses, who sang The Song of the Sea I think...

Was Miriam also a sister of Lazarus? Miriam = Mary? Harmonia = Miriam and wants to be a Christ?
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Who were the Pirates? The interesting thing about this is that r and l are interchangeable in Greek.

I thought that was Chinese - - anyway it's all Greek to me.

Then that means pirate = pilot - - so sometimes they were the good guys who guided vessels through dangerous waters.

(Yes I know that's obvious - - but it is my first go at this game).
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Then that means pirate = pilot - - so sometimes they were the good guys who guided vessels through dangerous waters.

That's bleedin' amazing, Chad. One of my recurring themes on the other site is that various 'races' in European myth always seem to have a dual nature: bad guys who are sometimes good. And they seem to correspond to this group of invaders Komori mentioned (although we seem to disagree about who they were).
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Are we talking about the Atlantians here? - - Didn't I read somewhere that their civilization extended along the Atlantic coast from North Africa to Scandinavia, with their major city on an island off Cadiz?

If that's the case then I wouldn't have thought they were the indigenous people of the North. - - Just another ruling élite.
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Hatty
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A group of erudite historians discussing Carthage and its dramatic end mentioned that the battle for Sicily between Rome and Carthage took twenty-two years despite the Romans' distinct advantage of having far shorter supply lines; the eventual victory of Rome was attributed by them to 'doggedness' and the ability to adopt or assimilate enemy tactics, such as copying the captured Carthaginian ship that AJ noted.

What really caught my ear was that Carthage, said to be the richest city in the world, was symbolised by a fig (Cato is supposed to have produced a fig from his pocket when urging the senate to finish off Carthage once and for all); one of the learned professors let drop that fig was one of the words used by the ancients referring to female genitalia before moving hurriedly on. [There was a rule applied to Carthage, apparently based on Plato himself, that stated 'you can't be a good city unless more than ten miles inland' which rather suggests a symbolic correlation between the sea/womanly wiles/corruption etc.].

The destruction of the city was clearly seen as a moral cleansing and the panel compared the event to Bush's 'shock and awe' campaign which didn't exactly raze Baghdad to the ground. The 'fig' metaphor reinforces the moral degeneracy of the Carthaginian population (isn't it the case that one's enemies are always seen as morally inferior?) at the moment when control over Mediterranean trade and shipping was being disputed.

(Another fascinating detail came up, the Carthaginian manufacture and worldwide export of garum, a strong fish paste made from rotted fish entrails, not perhaps so different from anchovy paste which is used in Mediterranean and Asian cuisine and is almost addictive, adding flavour to practically any dish).
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Mick Harper
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Yes it's perfectly clear that this garum vies with salt as the True Lever of the Ancient World. We might investigate the possibility that the two are, for various usages, substitutes for one another.

One connection that springs to mind is that salt is used in prodigious quantities to preserve fish but presumably a by-product of a fish processing industry is a prodigious amount of fish entrails hence the invention of the garum industry.

I suspect that the importance of Carthage is less to do with its 'strategic position' in the Sicilian Narrows and more to do with the filthy great salt lake it has right next door. However, somebody should find out whether this is natural or just ex-industrial affluvium. Archaeologists/ historians aren't very good at spotting this sort of stuff. They insist it's only us that makes prodigious messes.
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Hatty
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Garum was an immensely important flavour-enhancer; one of the academics likened it to ketchup though it may be closer to monosodium glutamate (MSG) obtained from fermented carbohydrates. It would be hard to find a recipe in a Roman cookbook that didn't include garum, even in sweet dishes.

It was mixed with other ingredients such as wine, vinegar, oil, pepper and water, similar to fermented fish sauces still used in southeast Asia and to anchovy paste, made from ground anchovies, spices, vinegar and water, found throughout Mediterranean cuisine.

Carthage was likened to a factory, perhaps this was indeed the first international industry that arose out of salting fish (there was even a kosher version that omitted shellfish) but the most prized garum came from Cartagena (New Carthage) in southern Spain. [Is it the salt content or the fermentation process that makes this seasoning so 'addictive'?]
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Mick Harper
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First off, we need to know how they make monosodium glutamate (and who 'invented' it). Anyone who knows how to produce a universal flavour-enhancer is clearly going to conquer the world.
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