PREFACE

The task of my few words is to ask prominent scholars to reconsider their opinions about the dark age of Greece in the light of Velikovsky’s present book. My personal difficulty is mainly caused by the fact that a short preface cannot be a scholarly treatise and therefore it is impossible to ask here all the questions which arise when Velikovsky’s theory is applied to our special problem. And as I am not an archaeologist, but a Greek scholar, I am not able to control how far Velikovsky is right in questions of stratigraphy. Here I depend on his quotations of archaeological reports and it is not possible for me to decide how far his selection of passages from these reports is subjective. My difficulty is that now I have to accept the view that the period of Geometric style overlaps, at least partially, the Mycenaean and Minoan period. This is new for me, but I admit that it is not impossible that two different artistic approaches can exist at the same time.

But the most important problem in connection with the present book is how far this theory is dictated by the whole of Velikovsky’s chronological system and how far his results in the present study are valid independently from it. Velikovsky puts the “true time of the events recounted in the Iliad in the second half of the eighth century and the beginning of the seventh. . . . The time in which the drama of the Iliad was set was -687; yet the poet condensed the events of more than one year into the tenth year of the Trojan siege, the time of the Iliad’s action.” Velikovsky came to this date because he identified the description of the battle between the gods in the Iliad with a cosmic catastrophe. His date for the conquest of Troy is unusually late. As Homer had to live after the events he describes, the space of the time between Homer and the classical Greek literature seems to me personally to be too short. But the main question is about the interrelation between Velikovsky’s chronological system and the single historical facts. Or in other words: does this system solve the concrete difficulties in our approach to ancient history? The present book tries to solve such a serious problem, namely, does the so-called dark age of Greece really exist? Is the supposed span between Mycenae and classical Greece too long? Are we not in this case victim of a false Egyptian chronology, which was invented by Egyptian patriots in order to show that the Greeks were in comparison with the Egyptians mere children? Was the history of Egypt in reality much shorter than it is supposed today? If this could be shown, then the problem of the dark age of Greece would disappear. Only open-minded specialists can reject or accept Velikovsky’s solutions. One thing is clear: the new book treats a real problem. It was not its author who created it. The whole complex of questions was re-opened by the decipherment of the Linear B script, when it was definitely shown that the Mycenaeans were Greeks, speaking a language which was an older stage of the linguistic substrate of the Iliad and Odyssey. It is a merit of the new book that it offers an original solution for a real problem. Will there be a sufficient number of good specialists who are prepared to wrestle with the proposed solution?

Prof. David Flusser Hebrew University