Howard West | Locked Gates: Technological Advancements of the Ancient Past | Part 1 of 2

The Enemies of the storytellers of the past have always been a cynical People. These gatekeepers of knowledge have relegated the spinners of silk stories such as: The Labors of Hercules, Osiris and Isis, and Noah's Flood to the status of Fairytales. The same was true about Homer's works, and his great poems that described a civilization of chariots, fleets of ships, warriors, and palaces, which once flourished on the Greek mainland. For years the gatekeepers have discounted Homer's story of the expedition to Troy. All these stories have thought to have been colossal and compelling pieces of fictions, on the same lines as today's writers of fiction as Dean Koontz, Dan Brown, and Ann Rice. Even so, the wiser sort of Greek knew perfectly well that those myths and legends contained deeper meanings. Aristotle (in his Metaphysics, x8) admits, with regard to Greek mythology, that much wisdom had been lost, and much "added after the mythical style," while some knowledge, "may have been preserved to our times as the remains of ancient wisdom." Polybius, a Greek historian of the Mediterranean, and world famous for his book called "The Histories"; in which he covered in detail the period of 220-146 BC; he also confesses, changes in those myths and legends were recognized as a "necessary means to (the gatekeepers) political ends." Michael Neander (1529 -1581) a German astronomer, says that the connections between the constellations of the night sky and the ancient legends were "the fragments of a tradition, which transmitted the knowledge of divine things possessed in the earliest times." Therefore, people like Heinrich Schliemann have burning within them a faith in the historical veracity of Homer and other storytellers and have unearthed impressive evidence of the truth found in those ancient stories. Entire previously unknown civilization of vast material accomplishments and artistic achievement of a world now revealed, Myths have now become reality as the complex as Minotaur's Labyrinth. These discoveries present the students of prehistory with a maze of literary and archeological connections that as of yet has no path that satisfies everyone.