History

History is a funny thing. Modern historians considered Homer’s stories of Troy (in Iliad and Odyssey) as a pure fiction for a long time. Then in late 19^th century amateur archeologist Heinrich Schliemann shocked the historians by locating and digging up remains of Troy. Same thing happened with Odyssey. He was considered by most historians as fictional character until 1991 when Greek archeologists found the tomb of Odyssey from the island of Kefalonia, located on west coast of Greece.

It makes you wonder what kind of life Odyssey lived. Did he really have a long journey back to his home, Ithaca? What really happened on that journey? It also makes you wonder how big part of all the legends, stories about ancient heroes are based on actual historic events. One of my favourite such legend is the story of Atlantis. Plato was first one to write about Atlantis (in Timaeus and Critias). According to the story Athenian lawgiver Solon was visiting Egypt when he met priest of Sais, who translated him history of ancient Athens and Atlantis, recorded on papyri in Egyptian hieroglyphs, into Greek. That’s how we know (at least, according to Plato) about Atlantis, the way it was and of its ultimate destruction. Actual events would go back a long in ancient times, perhaps over eleven thousand years ago.

Personally after reading lots of material about Atlantis I’m inclined to believe that there was ancient civilization like that, which existed much earlier than historians think about well-developed civilizations. Civilizations do not always evolve straightly “forwards”, knowledge of things can be lost and found again. That’s why scientists scratch their head when they look at the pyramids or when they read the story written on papyri about ancient Egyptian sea voyage where Africa was circumnavigated 2000 years before Vasco da Gama. One metaphor about same phenomenon is the idea of growing up. People often tend to think that there are somehow wiser now than they were, for example, 5 years ago. This is not so. They have only changed. They may have become “better” in some things, more clever in another things and at the same time lost some realizations on the way. And what comes to essence of humanity – it is timeless.