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TANGLES AND SWAMPS of Delta canals did not invite on to sea, as an unseparated sea in sight invited most Greeks. Many hundreds of islands strew the Aegean. While Greeks were as tribal as Israelites or Libyans and their death cult confining as Egyptians', only eldest sons had the duty of staying close to home to tend ancestral patriarchal graves, while denuded land left the sea the only option for betterment or even survival as population exploded. We wondered why men as wise as Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon felt skeptical of democracy, which Plato conceded the virtue of greatest variety; but the demos excluded women (half the adults), slaves (half the total population), and foreign merchants (main generators of wealth, who favored peaceful trade), so the majority of voters were poor men trained for war who wanted it as the quickest way to rise, by loot, including slaves. Greeks were great but the Greek ideal was the warrior, as for Romans, Libyans, Numidians, Mauretanians, Iroquois, Algonquins, ad inf. Greek city-states, like Maya, destroyed each other until a Macedonian dictator imposed order. Then kingdoms set about destroying each other. Greeks slew all defated men and enslaved their women and children. When not fighting themselves or Persians, they hired out as mercenaries, primarily to Egypt.

Villages must have dotted the flat, green, drying Nile Delta as early as 5000 B.C. [Karl Butzer 1959], notwithstanding Elise Baumgartel's insistence [1940 etc.] it was still uninhabitable/impassable marsh before c.3000 B.C. and noble John Wilson conjectured a continuous jungle [1951]. By c.4000 B.C. a mud-tholos city covered 60 acres at Merimda Beni Salama on the Delta's SW edge, 37 mi. NW of the site of Cairo. Bedouin were migrating into the Delta from Libyan and Sinai Deserts in the Neolithic. A crisscrossing predynastic pottery trail of trade and camp along the eastern Mediterranean does not appear in the western or beyond. Hypothesizing Phaistos-Disk pictographs and descendant Linear A as Semitic, astute Cyrus Gordon postulated a Semitic population in the Delta swarming to Crete--both ingenuities logical before Fell [1973, 1977] demonstrated both pictographs and Linear A essentially Hittite (Arthur Evans from the first had seen the Anatolian derivation of Minoan civilization) and John Evans' excavation of Knossos 1957-60 that verified Anatolian origins and found no Egyptian influence on Crete before 3000 B.C.--inconscpicuous before the 5th Dynasty of Egypt. While the Egyptian language evolved repletely Semitic, the whole Neolithic of Egypt presents no trace of or occasion for massive sea exodus from the Delta or any sea activity therefrom west.

Initiative energy of Egypt until near the end of the 20th Dynasty came downstream from the south. Nubet (Naqada) near the Wadi Hammamat entrance to the Nile from the Red Sea dominated from c.3600 B.C., and then Nekhen (Hierakonpolis) 90 miles farther south in the late predynastic, supplanted by This (Thinis/Abydos) in Middle Egypt, whence Narmer conquered the Delta, uniting the Two Lands into a superpower, and diked the Nile to found Memphis. This conquest c.3114 B.C., if two-plus millennia later, might have flushed Egyptians asea galore who, however, in this case fled NE into the Sinai if anywhere. Narmer possibly pursued them in that direction.

Egypt turned seriously to Mediterranean seafaring only with the brilliant Delta (Assyrian-loyal) Saite Dynasty, which consigned shipping largely to the Greek port the next-to-last Saite king Amasis (568-26 B.C.) permitted advanced-Greek Milesians to establish at Naukratis on the Canopic branch (10 mi. SW of Sais, on the Rosetta) as a way to tame Greek tide into the Delta and at the same time create a bilingual population as interpreters in an increasingly Greek Mediterranean. A Saite pharoah, Neko II, sent a Phoenician voyage around Africa clockwise from the Red Sea, not Delta, and a Greek pharoah, Ptolemy III, sent a Libyan voyage to circumnavigate the earth from the Red Sea, not Delta. The Ptolemaic capital Alexandria was dominantly a Greek and Greek-speaking Jewish city that un-Egyptianly undertook Mediterranean imperialism, but concentratedly NW into the Aegean and NE to Cyprus and Palestine.

The treacherous Red Sea inhibited Egyptians as it had not Phoenicians and Israelites. Queen Hatshepsut's voyage to Punt (probably Somalia) and Ramesu III's to Punt (specifically Persian Gulf, where the "reverse river" Euphrates, not upside-down river of the Underworld emptied, were extraordinary once-in-a-dynasty historic feats. Tutmosy III's sole ocean voyage transported troops directly to the Eleutheros, Phoenicia, his 6th expedition northeast. Not until the Hellenistic Ptolemies did pharoahs develop Red Sea voyaging.

Greeks, Jews, and Libyans did not view drowning at sea with quite the horror of Egyptians for the fate of their souls. It is possible to drown in the Nile (most recorded drownings occurred in Delta morasses), but I have seen a young man bathing his horse in mid-Nile near Luxor, both standing only half-thigh deep. Matchless Egyptian expertise in river boating posed little risk of drowning. Thor Heyerdahl proved the seaworthiness of Egyptian reed boats, and cedar solar boats entombed with early pharoahs look wholly seaworthy but did not go to sea, intended to carry the deified pharoah's soul west in a sky voyage. When we come across this solar-boat concept in Indian lore--Creek Tukabatchee on the Tallapoosa, Ala., Cuna San Blas Islands and Gulf of Uruba--we recognize idiosyncratic Egyptian derivation. Ramesu III's touted voyage to the far west was yet to be taken, posthumously, by solar boat, recorded in the 133-foot Great Papyrus Harris that Ramesu IV inserted in his father's tomb with the mummy (death by assassination in the Theban "Escorial" Medinet Habu April 1151 B.C.). Ramesu III's list of specific places ruled proves no more extensive, if as, than Tutmosy III's and Ramesu II's which it copied.

Although Ramesu III repulsed the Sea People invasion of the Delta his Year 8 (1175 B.C.) he did not pursue into the sea. He repelled a Libyan land invasion in his Year ll, but advanced no farther west than the Canopic branch. He and his dynasty's successors reconquered Philistine Palestine, but that was NE as usual. The orientation of Ramesu III remained Upper Egyptian. Not until Ramesu XI proclaimed the Renaissance Era in his Year 19 (1080 B.C.) did Egypt's center of gravity shift decisively to the Delta and true cities develop there--ineffectually--at a time of Mediterranean chaos in the wake of empire disintegrations that left the sea to folk-wanderings and pirates. Many wanderer/pirates--Sikels, Sardinians, Philistines, Etruscans, Mycenaean Greeks and Cypriots may have proceeded all the way across the Mediterranean and beyond but were not Egyptian or Egyptian-sponsored.

SPACE REQUIRES DEFERRING why Minoan and Mycenaean seafaring got no farther west than Italy and East Sicily before the Trojan War tragedy which compositely involved collapse of Hittite, Achaian, and Egyptian empires along with drought & bubonic plague. Contrary to popular assumption, Mycenaean IIIB was a contracting and increasingly desperate period. IIIA was the expansive one, when Mycenaean prosperity rested on luxury trade in laudanum and perfumed olive-oil to Egypt. Much of Amenhotpe III's pottery at Thebes was Mycenaean IIIA, virtually 100% of that at his son Akhnaton's Akhet-Aton. The obliterative reaction of Akhnaton's erstwhile field-marshal Haremhab and bitter priests of Amon extended to Mycenaean cosiness; IIIB pottery ceased showing up in Egypt long before Ramesu II's 1259 treaty with Hittite Emperor Khattushilish formally boycotting trade with an enemy of either, decisively turning Achaian merchants to piracy & aggression against Khatti. Only in IIIC twilight, when vengeful losing Trojan confederates dominated the sea from Cyprus, did these Mycenaean peoples venture beyond Italy and Sicily--farther than sea-imperial Classical Athens, whose gaze remained fixed on the Aegean & Black Sea (before the diastrous siege of Syracuse).

The stele from Pontotoc County, Okla. which Gloria Farley brought to light shows the distinctive Aton sun-rays and beside them an extract of Akhnaton's Hymn to the Aton in Iberic Punic and ogam, as Fell deciphered and dated 1st century B.C. So this Egyptian heresy, supposedly expunged, went underground a millennium. Perhaps it passed from Siwa Oasis to Carthage, which did not materialize for at least half a millennium after Akhet-Aton's destruction (by Haremhab, no doubt, when he usurped the throne at Thebes c.1321 or 1319). Showing up with no intervening trace in post-Carthage Iberia and then on an Oklahoma branch of the Arkansas confounds. Aton rays (with odd script) recur in Burrows Cave. The Hymn infiltrated Israelite tradition after a lapse of many centuries, reflected in the 104th Psalm. The Greek myth of Oedipus reflects Mycenaean memory of Akhnaton, transferred to Thebes in Boeotia.

Tutankhaton succeeded his brother or half-brother son of Akhnaton at Akhet-Aton, only to be forced to change his suffix to amon and move back to Thebes, where his violent death at 20-25 surely was deliberate assassination, did not go entirely forgotten before Howard Carter's 1922 rediscoveru of his tomb. Tutankhamon's cartouche on an alabaster egg discovered c.1900 in Idaho awaited Frank Norick's identification 1977 during the U.S. exhibit from the tomb.

LIBYAN DYNASTIES, seated in the Delta and viewing the sea different from Egyptian, may have sponsored voyages to America; but Sheshonq I followed hoary Egyptian tradition in concentrating NE by land and insisted on Egyptian religion and 12th-Dynasty forms generally. Sheshonqs mentioned in Spanish and Texas inscriptions, Fell perceived, were late non-Egyptian local Libyan potentates. The earliest Egyptian inscriptions found in America are associated with Libyan. Fell conceded they cannot predate 800 B.C.--a generous terminus a quo. The bilingual Egyptian/Libyan stele excavated 1886 at the tip of Long Island identifies a crew hailing from South Egypt, implying a Red Sea embarkation, though we would expect a ship that reached New York to have sailed from the East-Delta capital Bubastis. Fell conjectured Libyans taught Micmacs to write the language they were already speaking and that the stele was a later Algonquin copy.

Even more deliberately archaizing by Middle-Egyptian standard of a millennium before, non-Egyptian Sudanese of the "Ethiopian" 25th Dynasty ruled from Napata (Gebel Barkal) far south, below the 4th Cataract. King Piankky his Year 21 (730 B.C.) invaded north clear to the Delta, his father Kashta having got to the 1st Cataract and claimed Egypt. Piankhy returned to Napata and ruled Egypt through his mainly-Libyan vassals. Perhaps soldiers of this dynasty thereafter called themselves Men of Piankhy.

Burrows inferred a possible connection with Algonquin Piankeshaw (Men of Piankhy), once confederated with Illinois Cahokia and Kaskaskia as well as Shawnee, Potowatamie, Miami, Cheyenne, Ottawa, Sak & Fox, et al. and co-occupied the area of Burrows Cave 1805. Algonquin Piegan, usually lumped with Blackfeet, called themselves Pikunni.

Sudanese came to write their own language in hieroglyphics. If any of them migrated to America the brutal Assyrian invasion which destroyed Memphis under Sennacherib and Thebes under Esarhaddon likely occasioned it, as the equally brutal Persian invasion of Kambyses would have displaced Saite Greeks and Egyptians large-scale. We know nil what influence Assyrian and then Persian domination of Phoenicia and Egypt had on Carthage, which perhaps displayed Ninevite ziggurats like the world's greatest city of its time.

Phoenicians seem to have sailed everywhere once the Cypriot blockade dispersed with Mycenaean IIIC demise c.1000 B.C.--until Classical Greek cities arose to block, and Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, and Macedonia successively commandeered Phoenician cities' merchant marine for their own navy. The Phoenician voyage that inadvertently reached Paraiba, Brazil expressly sailed from the Red Sea around Africa. The Phoenician colony, Carthage, carried on westward on a larger scale. Punic inscriptions have shown up in New England. Fell saw the lure there timber, a terrible problem for a desert maritime power. Masts did not last; shipworms gobbled hulls; Carthage did not control forests of North Spain but, When unable to import past Greek enemies from the Lebanon, may have relied on Atlas Mts. of Morocco.

The step-pyramids discovered 1991 on Tenerife in the Canaries must be Carthaginian and, if so, the more likely Teotihuacan duplicates were. Carthaginian coins of the 4th century B.C. found on Corvo of the far-NW pair of Azores suggest that the lush desert island with rivers Carthaginians had discovered which Athenians heard about the next century might have been Sao Miguel, the nearest Azore to Cape Roca, Portugal (740 mi.), rediscovered c.1427 uninhabited. Fell guessed Cuba. Trinidad or Marajo in the Amazon mouth come to mind in preference to Cuba. Ireland was known and not desert.

Gold horse-head Carthaginian coins have been found on the Arkansas system and in Burrows Cave. Tanit, whom Gloria Farley located in Okla., Kas., Ohio, Vt., Tenn., N.M., Colo., Nev., Calif., & Mexico, also appears on gold coins from Burrows Cave, along with representations of Ba'al Hammon with Tanit as Sun and Moon, eight-spoke Tophet wheel-designs, etc.

Carthaginians reached South America. Old Greek toponyms which Henriette Mertz recovered in Brazil, mostly on the Amazon--Phedra, Hipolito, Thetys, Olimpias, Ateleia, numerous places ending opolis or apolis, Solimoes, Ares, etc. (not to mention Cumana; an Aphrodite sanctuary made Comana on Mt. Eryx, Sicily, the Las Vegas of Ptolemaic/Roman times) could date Greek Archaic to Middle Ages, but Greek names in rhebuses and other inscriptions Bernardo de Azevedo da Silva Ramos discovered and deciphered along the Amazon system by 1929, coupled with non-Brazilian bull and hippopotamus designs, plus funerary terms like thanatos, indicate late-ancient African Greek in plantation cemeteries worked by Greek war-prisoner slaves or Greek-speaking Mediterranean-Roman subjects. Recurrence of Helios (Sun) in place of Apollo, Selene in place of Artemis as Moon, and Isis (the one Egyptian deity widely accepted in the Roman Mediterranean) along with invocations of Zeus, Aphrodite, Ares, Kronos, Hermes, and Blas/Blos (of Pirenne, one of the Greek Seven Sages), gives more away than the inner ring of the late-Greek zodiac. (The archaizing Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods revived Blas as e.g. Plutarch's Symposion.)

Marc Antony identified with Apollo, Kleopatra (VII) with Isis. She built an Apollo shrine for Antony and issued coins of herself as Isis. Her daughter Kleopatra Selene Ptolemy when queen of Mauretania issued coins of herself as Isis also. The crocodile Selene sometimes added on her coins had rescued Osiris' corpse for Isis. A crocodile among Burrows-Stone engravings bolsters Paul Schaffranke's decipherment of Helios Alexander, Juba, Caesar, Baetis (Guadalquivir), Gades, & Ptolemy. Recurring Etruscan (or Neapolitan Chalkidik) letters lambda II, read retrograde Khe-li[os], Schaffranke discerned, II the Etruscan syllable khe or rough H, as perhaps Alexandrians pronounced it. Mauretanians fought with Caesar in Spain, whether that explains their Spanish usage of antique Etruscan letters, written retrograde like Etruscan, Egyptian, Punic, Hebrew, earliest Greek and early runes--also, like Egyptian at times, left/right and boustrophedon; but Juba II wrote Latin in Mauretania, learned in Rome.

Despite Ptolemaic cultural standard of the whole Mediteranean and Ptolemaic encouragement of India trade after Eudoxos and Hippalos (his navigator?) discovered the Arab/Hindu secret of direct passage with monsoons instead of by coast which Nabataean and Yemen Arabs could impede, the Alexandrian navy, berthed in the east harbor of the Pharos mole, concentrated NW in the Aegean and NE to Cyprus and the Levant. While the west harbor throve with merchant shipping--Rome and Carthage best customers when not at war with each other--Delta ships could not go farther west, except for Ptolemy II's chief admiral, who got Carthaginian permission to visit ports west of Carthage, to but not through the Pillars. After Ptolemy III, Alexandria could not exercise political effectiveness west of Greek/Jewish Kyrenaika next door. So much for Ptolemaic transversing west--before Queen Kleopatra Selene in Roman Mauretania.

Julius Caesar had taken 4-year-old Prince Juba of Numidia hostage at Cirta following the Battle of Thapsus 47 B.C. This pensive boy grew up in the Rome household of Caesar's grandniece Octavia (sister of Octavius, whom Caesar adopted posthumously by his will, after which Octavius called himself Caesar; he received the title Augustus 25 B.C.). Among other royal children in this household were the twins of Kleopatra (VII) and Marc Antony--Kleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios, ten years younger than Juba--and their year-younger brother Philadelphos. Augustus married Juba to Selene and installed them king and queen of Mauretania (Algeria and Morocco) at the Carthaginian port Iol, renamed Caesaria (Cherchell, Algeria), where Juba resumed writing 50 books (papyrus rolls), 75% Greek, 25% Latin, of which only a hundred fragments survive in the Old World. His coin legends are Latin, Selene's Greek Basilissa Kleopatra.