Myth And Prehistoric Global Navigation


130 x 180 x 106 mm 182 pages		Dr. J.J. Fraenkel Translation by Dr. R. Bremer Myth And Prehistoric Global Navigation A dialogue ISBN 90-7771308-5 Dutch version	Buy this book € 13,95 AKO (NL) $ 19.53 Amazon.com £ 10.64 Booksurge (UK)
The author
		Dr. J.J. Fraenkel (1913) is born of a well-known family of classicists and a classicist himself. As such he has published several articles in scientific magazines. In this book he defends his thesis that ancient navigation included the oceans.

Back cover text
		Following the story of Jason and his comrades, which Homer knew, but of which the original is lost, the immortal poet made a new and more instructive poem on the wanderings of Odysseus. These are described in the so-called Alkinou Apologoi and have much in common with the Argonautica. But Homer's interest was the people and their world and in fact the actual navigation of Odysseus' ships appears to be merely an artificial scheme to unite the tales he heard from sailors and foreigners -neither the poet nor his contemporaries or even the later Greeks had the vaguest idea where the fabulous islands and realms described in the Odyssey were actually located. Yet it is surprising that no rumour penetrated into the legends about the largest of all oceans - the realm of Poseidon. Mankind had to wait until the discoveries of Columbus, Magellan and Vasco da Gama before learning some real (pre-) historic background for what is often considered to be mere fairy-tales or instances of comparative mythology.	Notice... Fragment... Notes...

Notice
		Dialogue is the form I have chosen for the wording of my ideas on Myth and Prehistoric Global Navigation. By alternately making one speak and the other listen, no time is lost on adducing far-fetched source material alien to a normal conversation. Nor does the subject of the present essay lend itself to proving a theory: its purpose is making acceptable, or as it is called plausible, certain propositions. Between the interlocutors no such difference of opinion exists as would result in altercations. In the second part have been gathered all the necessary notes, some of them rather lengthy, that would otherwise have interrrupted the spoken text too much. The reader should be generally acquainted with those stories from the Odyssee -books 5 to 12- dealing with the so-called voyages of Odysseus and his arrival among the Phaeacians.
		J.J. Fraenkel

Fragment
		But what should we think of the term exoceanism? I don't care whether antiquity located Odysseus' wanderings beyond the Pillars of Hercules, since in my opinion the ancients set out from the wrong presumptions anyway. It is said that Eurystheus' servant crossed the Ocean in a sun boat, for that matter, either going to or returning from the Hesperides. I may well return to that myth later. For now, I must stick to the point I am trying to make, which is my assumption that all seas and oceans were sailed in prehistoric times and that the vessel, boat, canoe or raft is the oldest means of transport⁸---with some peoples older than the cartwheel---that made human migration possible. But why don't you continue with a less ponderous subject, first telling what you know, or think you know, about Odysseus' wanderings? Here and there I read that the attempts to locate his landfalls and those of his mariners should be abandoned as senseless⁹. One of the first to apply modern methods to the question was Victor Bérard in his voluminous report Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée (Paris 1902-03). Since then there have been many others, and some have been rejected with mockery.

Notes
	8.	I cannot refrain from quoting the opening words of Heyerdahl's book Early Man and the Ocean (see n. 2): Man hoisted sail before he saddled a horse. He poled and paddled along rivers and navigated the open seas before he travelled on wheels along a road. Water-craft were the first of all vehicles. With them the Stone Age world began to shrink. By hoisting sail or merely travelling with the current, early man was able to settle the islands. Territories that could be reached overland only by generations of gradual transmigration for those who had to confront obstacles like swamps and lifeless tundras, naked mountains and impenetrable jungles, glaciers and deserts, could be reached in weeks by casual drift or by navigation. Water-craft were man's first major tool for his conquest of the world.
	9.	In his book Homer's Readers (Newark/London 1981) p. 249ff., the author Howard Clarke devotes a chapter entitled 'The Geographical Homer' to the attempts to locate Odysseus' wanderings (plane, errores) somewhere in the world, preferably in the Mediterranean region. Clarke says that the oldest attempts were made by Hesiod (see Strabo, Geographica I, 2, 14) for South Italy and Sicily. The author counts some seventy proposals, all seriously argued in the course of time. One cannot help but acquiesce in Clarke's criticism. Yet the inclination or habit of speaking of Odysseus' voyage, and the desire or lack of desire to pinpoint where it took place, is based on a misconception which even Clarke does not escape. It is Odysseus' adventures that have a basis in fact, whereas the wanderings should be taken to be a compositional means used by the poet to interconnect the stories.
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