A concise interpretation of the Elaia disc and
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Provisional English
translation of the inscription on the Elaia disc as deciphered by Derk
Ohlenroth: Enter Elaia’s grove, kindle
peeled wood (stripped from the bark), beat the earth round about the smoke
rising from the sacrificial fire, and neigh suddenly like a pair of horses: Aio
aé! come, Noble Late ‘Night’, always born anew by the goddess … The disc
shows Elaia’s grove in Phigalia, in the center field a baking oven (Evans 7)
symbolizing Demeter Elaia, resembling the oven of the Bird Goddess in the
shrine at Sabatinovka in the Southern Bug Valley, Moldavia, Early Cucuteni Next to the oven is a wave (Evans 45)
representing Poseidon who was originally the river god. Poseidon followed
Demeter Elaia, she fled him and turned into a mare, whereupon he turned into a
stallion and raped her. Demeter Elaia became Black Demeter Melaina the angry
one and caused a famine. She bore a child and gave birth to a daughter by the
name of Despoina, Her secret name was Nyx ‘Night’, and she was an alter ego of
Gaia. The above formula evoked her and made her speak through her priestesses
and thus give oracles.
The author of this
paper believes that the Vinca culture of Old Europe, a term coined by Marija
Gimbutas, partly survived in Arcadia. A Vinca spiral meant life. A rectangular
spiral is found in the center of the loaf-shaped clay plaque from Banjica near . Round
spirals appear on another loaf-shaped clay plaque from Vrshac, Vinca culture,
c. 5000 BC or early fifth millennium BC . A double spiral is seen on the womb of
the pregnant goddess from Medvednjak, Vinca culture, between 5000 and 4500
BC
. The spiral on the disc has the same meaning of life: performing the horse
ritual brings Nyx to life …
Now for a fable.
The priestesses of
Demeter Elaia the friendly one and Black Demeter Melaina the angry one knew a
lot about gardening. They imported edible olives from Crete and planted them in
their grove. Around 1700 BC a hopeful young man was raised in Lycaion. He
worshipped the supreme god at an altar on top of Mount Lycaion, wherefrom he
had a splendid view over the Peloponnese, and spent considerable time in
Elaia’s grove learning about agriculture. As a young man he traveled to the
Argolis, where he was considered such a prodigy that the king of Tiryns who
resided in the beautiful Circular Building on top of the limestone hill and had
no son adopted him for his prince. The Mycenaeans worshipped Sseyr, Middle
Helladic name of Zeus. The young man said: ‘We worship a supreme god residing
on top of Mount Lycaion, he resembles your Sseyr, he must be the same god …’ It
came to happen that a famine menaced the Argolis, whereupon the young man
traveled to Elaia’s grove, evoked Nyx, and got her oracle via her priestesses.
The wise women told him to plant edible olives in the Argolis, and to be as
industrious as a bee. Well, the young man took olive twigs and portable
beehives from Phigalia to Tiryns, and, with the help of willing and laborious
people, turned the Argolis into a flowering garden that nourished everybody. He
declared Sseyr from Tiryns and the god from top of Mount Lycaion to be one and
the same god. He worshiped Sseyr in a shrine in the Circular Building, and
Demeter Elaia in a complementary shrine. He placed portable beehives on the
walls in honor of Demeter Elaia, and kept falcons and eagles in honor of Sseyr,
even tamed some of the birds and made them hunt for snakes. He was very
inventive and found a solution to almost every practical problem. Thus he
luckily averted the famine, and when the old king died he was appointed new
king of Tiryns. People liked him, some feared him, and a few said he was no
genuine Argivian, just a stranger from Lycaion. He tried to convince the latter
by caring about the safety of Tiryns and of the Argolis in general. He
installed guards on top of the Circular Building and along the walls of Tiryns.
Moreover he founded a union for the protection of the . The
emblem of this union was the watchful Eye of Argos: a circle of dots around a
central dot
. The king presented himself as the lion-wolf-dog-bee king – the lion being the
Mycenaean emblem of power, the wolf being the Lycaian emblem of power, the dog
a useful guard, and the bee an emblem of industry, sacred to Demeter Elaia.
Eponymous Tiryns
also introduced an ingenious lunisolar calendar from Asia Minor: a year has 12
months of 30 days, plus 5 and occasionally 6 days, while 63 continuous periods
of 30 days – or 270 weeks of seven days – yield 1,890 days and correspond to 64
lunations. Actually he used a variant of this calendar: a week has nine days,
five weeks are 45 days, 8 periods of 45 days are 360 days, add 5 and
occasionally 6 days and you get a year of 365 and sometimes 366 days. 21
continuous periods of 45 days – or 105 weeks of nine days – are 945 days and
correspond to 32 lunations. This calendar was visualized in a simple yet
appealing way: as a flower of eight petals, each petal representing 45 days or
five weeks, while the 5 and occasionally 6 additional days of the solar year
were represented by a small circle in the center. The flower was at the same
time a symbol of the sun that rules the year and makes the cereals grow and the
flowers bloom …
Now the king had
good friends in southern Central Crete, where he liked to spend winter. Crete
in the Middle Helladic / Middle Minoan period of time was a laboratory of
writing. So the king consulted a good friend among the scribes, elaborating an
idea of his own, telling him he would like to convey Elaia’s grove at Phigalia
and his beloved Tiryns on a pair of gold discs that he could wear on his
shoulders. The Tiryns disc should also tell about his success as king. The pair
of gold discs should bear inscriptions conveying stories in a double form, both
as texts and as pictures. How can this be achieved? with a new script that renders
single sounds like A or E or S or L in the form of tiny pictures that can be
assembled to visual messages. The same sound can be represented by several
different pictures, allowing for more graphic possibilities. For example S may
be given by several signs, among them a soldier [Evans 2], O can again be
written by more than one sign, one of them being the shield of a soldier, and
this shield may be decorated with the emblem of the Argos Eye [Evans 12]. On
the linguistic level, shield O followed by soldier S would yield the frequent
Greek ending –OS, while on the visual level a shield and soldier represent a
guard. Guards must bee seen all over There are more visual messages, for example two
waves on the margin indicating the former course of the river Manesse (Evans
45), the woman with the mane and protruding face showing Demeter Elaia as she
turns into Black Demeter Melaina (Evans 6), portable beehives on the wall
(Evans 24), a falcon catching a snake (Evans 31), and so on
The king and later
his successors wore the pair of gold discs on their shoulders, recognizable as
minute spirals on the gold signet ring from Tiryns, where we see Eponymous
Tiryns before Demeter Elaia, raising a libation jug, appearing as
lion-wolf-dog-bee king, behind him three successors, in between the kings three
olive twigs growing out of olives, practically the same sign as Evans 13. Ears
of grain are seen on Demeter Elaia’s gown, and as rain in the sky. Behind the
happy goddess hides the eagle of Sseyr
. The gold discs are lost – perhaps waiting for
discovery in an as yet unexcavated part of Tiryns? Luckily the scribe and
friend of Eponymous Tiryns made a clay copy of the pair of gold discs and baked
them together into a single disc. The copy was kept in the
Homer, finally,
paid homage to Eponymous Tiryns in the Odyssey, where he appears as Lord
Laertes the gardener who planted the olive tree around whose trunk Odysseus and
Penelope build their immovable bed, symbol of the ever lasting Greek
civilization.
Franz Gnaedinger,
September 2008 (written for a conference)
Postscript (October
2008)
In my fable I say
that the kings of
Owing to the
wonderful decipherments by Derk Ohlenroth – Elaia disc,
Zeus 2700 BC – the Middle Helladic name of the god
was Sseyr (Doric Sseus), which I see as emphatic form of Magdalenian* TYR
meaning: he who overcomes in the double sense of rule and give. Tyr- may have
been the name or title of the first Greek king arriving in the
Arkeisios 2200 BC – Magdalenian*
Laertes 1700 BC – gardener, would have introduced the
edible olive in the Argolis, Argos Eye, watchful union of Argivian towns,
Argonauts, gold, gold discs worn on the shoulders by Laertes and his successors
Odysseus 1200 BC – the root of the name means hate
(Ialian odio), Trojan war caused by beautiful Helen, symbol of tin that came
from the Ore Mountains in Middle Europe or from Central Asia and was in either
case bound to pass Troy, which was symbolized in Polyphem. Odysseus and
Penelope (a pun on the
Telemachos 700 BC – Homer’s time, Messenian wars, Homer
fearing for the unity and stability of the Greek civilization, Gyges on the
horizon, danger of a new Polyphem as motivation for uniting the material of dozens
of bards into the Iliad and Odyssey that mark the begin of the European
literature
* As for
Magdalenian: lascaux01.htm
/ lascaux02.htm (having reconstructed an amazing lunisolar
calendar from ideograms in the Lascaux cave in early 2005 I need a matching
language and try to reconstruct one, relying on the approach to early language
by Richard Fester. For example his KALL became my KAL meaning Underworld, once
a beautiful place – Greek kalos means beautiful –, a word of many derivatives,
among them Helen Hellenes keltoi Celts Helvetii, referring to ancient miners
who got precious metals from the ground)