"The Western story is far more ancient and inspiring than you think---and the more we see for ourselves the long-hidden facts of our achievements, the more our past lights up our human future."
Heraklion, Crete, Greece (PRWEB) April 17, 2017
In a public forum here where myth and history shaped the Western world, Dr. Jack Dempsey pointed to new human stories coming out of scientific digs into our crucial, formative turning-points. Where, after all, did those "savage" Philistines come from to wreak supposed havoc against early Israel?
"The roots of The West are deeper and more dazzling than King David or Athenian democracy," Dempsey said. "Our first and most successful founders were high-tech lovers of life for 2000 egalitarian years long before them, in Minoan Crete. That's longer than The Roman Empire. Not Utopia---just very smart. And their children's real-life stories among Sea Peoples and Philistines, never heard before, put our idea of ourselves in constructive new light."
If The West was first on a long healthy course, what changed?
"The Sea Peoples' grand-elders hailed from that stable dynamic Minoan life within nature's cycles. Their proud families honored women and kept peace with festivals like Olympic Games. Religion and society focused on an Earth Mother: there were no entrenched kings, and leaders answered to their people in fixed terms of political power. Then, suddenly, the Thera volcano explosion crippled that life (circa 1600 BCE). And into the ruins came "Homer's heroes," the Myceneans from mainland Greece with the manly ways of kings and love of war---only to collapse in a few centuries."
And then?
"Archaeology shows that many advanced Minoan families fled these disasters in tiny boats---and harrowing adventures carried them now as Philistines into the land called Palestine. Their name still applies because they planted, built, traded and married with native Canaanites and Hebrews: their coastal "promised land" meant keeping order on Pharaoh's rich highways of trade. But soon they faced the first emerging, sternly-patriarchal tribes of Israelites---and their claim on the entire land, promised by a god unknown to anybody else."
So why does it matter that The West refresh its story with 100 years of new multicultural discoveries?
"This conflict was fundamental to what The West became. There was, indeed, 'a choice.' So with our own crises in nature, culture and among world civilizations, the Sea Peoples' lives and achievements point a long, luminous, liberating heritage---a way toward many-sided human being."
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Digitial Scanning Inc. (USA) publishes classic American literature, history, cultural scholarship and sciences.
Dr. Jack Dempsey (Ph.D. Brown University) is author of "Ariadne's Brother: A Novel on the Fall of Bronze Age Crete" (Athens: Kalendis 1996) and "The Knossos Calendar: Minoan Cycles of the Sun, the Moon, the Soul & Political Power" (Heraklion: Mystis 2016)---besides 4 recognized books on Native/Early America. A guest of media from NPR to European TV, his works are called "required reading" by the journal "Ethnohistory" and "worth attention" by "Atlantic Monthly." Professional Collaborative Website: ANCIENTLIGHTS.ORG. Blog Talk Radio Interview on "Voices of the Sacred Feminine" Internet program January 18, 2017.