The ancient sagas of navigant heroes such
as Ulysses, the Argonauts, Gilgamesh, and the Shipwrecked Egyptian Sailor,
or the peripluses of pseudo-historical sailors such as Hanno, Himilco,
Pytheas of Marseilles and Scylax of Caryanda, are no more than coded verbal
maps of the route to the fabulous Indies, as we argue in detail elsewhere.
In other words, there was only one region
in antiquity that corresponded to Plato's description of the fabulously
rich Atlantis as a nation of worldwide navigants and suppliers of all kinds
of precious merchandise. That nation was India and, more exactly, the
two Indies, India and Indonesia. Down to modern times, as throughout all
antiquity, the Indies were the source of precious merchandises such as
the ones mentioned above. These merchadizes were all Indian exclusivities in antiquity. So, the fact that they are linked to Atlantis by Plato, and to Ophir (or Tarshish or Eden or "Tyre") in the Bible, is a stringent hint of the fundamental identity of all these locations with the fabulous East Indies.
Only later were alternative sources of
supply of the crucial tin (the British Cassiterides), of amber (the Baltic)
and of "spices" (the Americas) discovered to replace the fabulous Indies,
the true successors of the legendary Atlantis. The Phoenician and other
ancient navigants like the Carthaginians, the Minoan Cretans and the
Etruscans were the children of Atlantis. They were the survivors of the
Atlantean cataclysm who kept on the ancient naval commerce that made both
the glory and the immense wealth of the luciferine empires.
16) Riches in Metals
The problem of the supplying of tin for
the manufacture of the enormous quantity of bronze that characterized the
Bronze Age is far from settled. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, with
about 10% of the latter metal, which is indeed quite rare and expensive. The tin
mines of Kestel and Goltepe in the Taurus Mts. of Turkey in fact date from
the Bronze Age. But they are far from a sufficient source, and fell far
shorter than the hopeful expectations of the archaeologists, who saw in
them the possible solution of the ancient riddle of the source of tin in
antiquity.
The Spanish Tartessos, so often confused
with the legendary Tarshish that was the ancient supplier of tin according
to the Bible never produced a single pound of the crucial metal in antiquity.
As a matter of fact, the primeval Tarshish whence tin came in antiquity lay overseas,
in the Indian Ocean. Tartessos, its Spanish replica, was merely an artifice of
the clever Phoenicians in order to divert the potential competitors from the true
source of the precious metal (see item 15 above).
Likewise, the Cassiterides the legendary
"islands of tin" (kassiteros, in Greek) of Cornwall (England)
was only an alternative, far later source of supply of tin. The Cornwalian mines were only
discovered and activated by the Phoenicians at about the VI century BC. This is far too late for the Bronze Age, which ended at about 1,000 BC or so.
Herodotus (fl. 430 BC) had vaguely heard
of the Cassiterides, which he confused with Tartessos. Later writers applied
the name to some smallish islands off the coast of Spain or to the northeast
coast of Spain, in the region of Gades. But neither of these proved to
be the actual source of tin, and the Greco-Roman writers were not able
to identify the true location of the fabulous Cassiterides. The Cassiterides
retained their legendary existence even after the source of tin in Cornwall
was positively identified.
The little that was known for certain of the Cassiterides was that
they lay "outside the Pillars of Hercules", precisely as was the case of
Atlantis. The Greek name of tin,
kassiteros, derives from the Dravida
and Sanskrit
kacita, meaning "white metal". The fact that the European name of tin is Hindu demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt the
the Indian origin and provenience of the precious white metal.
Avienus makes a confused description of
the locations of the Cassiterides in his
Ora Maritima (96f.). He
places these mysterious isles which he identifies with Gades and Tartessos,
as well as the Oestrymnid Islands near the Pillars of Hercules and the
Sargasso Sea. Both these places are intimately connected with the site
of Atlantis. As a matter of fact, the word
oestrum, from which the
Tin Islands derive their name, means "fury", "hallucination".
And this etym (etymon, etymology) is merely the translation
into Greek of the name of the Moluccas, meaning the same thing in Dravida
(malukku).
