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Open letter to science editors
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KRONOS Vol II, No. 2
THE GOD KINGS AND THE TITANS:
The New World Ascendancy in Ancient Times
by
James Bailey
(St. Martin's Press, New York, 1973; $9.95)
Reviewed by
ROGER W. WESCOTT
Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics
Drew University, Madison, N. J.
Note: Reprinted with permission from The Comparative Civilisations Bulletin (published by The
International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilisations), Haverhill, Mass., 01830,
Fall-1974.
The God-Kings is a fascinating book, boldly heterodox and eloquently argued. And it
is visually attractive, being clearly printed and well illustrated.
Its thesis, in brief, is that "establishment" historians, blinded by professional
over-specialisation and the dogma of inevitable progress, have failed to consider the growing
probability that there was regular transoceanic contact between the Old and New Worlds
during the pre-Christian era. More precisely, says Bailey, during the period between the late
sixth and the early first millennia B. C. there was a worldwide culture ruled by a South-West
Asian aristocracy and based on the metallurgy of copper. This period, in turn, is divisible into
three subperiods of about two millennia each: during the first of these (the sixth and fifth
millennia), copper was unalloyed, religion was earth-centered, and power was focused in
Mesopotamia; during the second (the fourth and third millennia), copper yielded to bronze,
religion became heliocentric, and power diffused to India and the Mediterranean; and during
the third (the second and first millennia), the old thalassocracy, having been displaced in
Eurasia by iron-smelting upstarts, recruited fresh soldiers and labourers from Black Africa and
removed to new power-centers in Mexico and Peru. The continued spread of iron and the
growth of predatory Old World land empires combined to eliminate first the links between the
two cultures and then all Eurasian records of American glory.
The chief evidence for this sweeping reconstruction of ancient history consists of
Mexican sculptures and bas-relief carvings of Negroids and Caucasoids, Canaanite rock
inscriptions ranging from Brazil to Tennessee, and persistent Nahau, Maya, and Quechua oral
traditions of white gods who came from across the Atlantic.
Bailey is but one of several scholars who have recently posited pre-Columbian cultures
of global extent. Among these are Constance Irwin (in Fair Gods and Stone Faces, 1963),
Charles Hapgood (in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, 1966), and Cyrus Gordon (in
Before
Columbus, 1971), of whom Gordon stops at the third millennium B. C., while Hapgood
pushes back into the Mesolithic Period.
My personal inclination is to be sympathetic with Bailey and his confreres, if only
because they have the intellectual courage to examine and deal with ancient evidence that most
historical investigators of the past century and a half have swept under the scholarly rug.
Of necessity, Bailey draws much of his evidence from ancient myth and legend --
especially Homer. In his interpretation of fantastic beings and occurrences, however, he is a
strict Euhemerist. For him, gods and titans are honorific synonyms for Bronze Age rulers and
noblemen. Doctrinal differences between early religions do not, in his view, refer to any
praeternatural reality but symbolically reflect clashes of economic interest among early
peoples.
On balance, I am persuaded that Bailey and his fellow "ecumenists" are right about the
reality of a world-wide Bronze Age network of travel and trade. On the other hand, I am not
satisfied with Bailey's explanation of the relatively sudden rupture of his network during the
late second and early first millennia B. C. Both the Minoan and the Indus Valley civilisations,
for example, show evidence of swift and violent destruction by fire and flood about 1500 B. C.
While it is possible that iron-wielding Indo-European invaders were responsible for both
cataclysms, it may well be that these coincident large scale catastrophes themselves require an
explanation of global scope, such as the near-collision of Earth and Venus hypothesized by
Immanuel Velikovsky in
Worlds in Collision.
The only realm in which Bailey seems to be clearly out of his depth is that of philology.
In the area of graphonomy, he equates scripts with alphabets, despite the fact that most scripts
are not alphabets, confuses hieroglyphic Hittite with cuneiform Hittite, and states that ancient
Greek had no w, although many non-Attic dialects did (the name for it having been
"digamma"). In the area of phonology, he talks of "glottal p" in Minoan and Mayan -- a
phonetic impossibility, unless he means glottalized p. In the area of etymology, he suggests the
cognation of the three Classical words okeanos, "ocean current," aqua, "water," and
oikoumenê, "inhabited world," when no Indo-Europeanists support these equations. In the
area of linguistic classification, finally, he describes Ancient Egyptian as "partly Semitic,"
which is the taxonomic equivalent of referring to horses as "partly cattle." Egyptian was
closely related to Semitic, as horses are to cows; but hybridization, in the strict sense, is no
more feasible in the one case than in the other. My negative assessment here is, I think, due
less to the fact that I am a linguist by trade than to the fact that Bailey, like many good
amateur scholars, mistakenly assumes that language is capricious and lawless, so that one
man's opinions about it are as good as another's. In fact, language is probably the most
rule-governed sphere of human behaviour, with the result that we can often trace the history
of individual words and speech-sounds back to a time-depth of five millennia -- even when the
history of the peoples who spoke the languages involved is not known for half that long.
Fortunately, however, none of Bailey's linguistic errors affect his major historical contentions.
One matter on which Bailey remains inexplicit is one about which I continue to feel
curious, and that is the social structure of the Bronze Age thalassocracy he so glowingly
re-creates. As the editor of African Drum, he was known as an ardent civil libertarian and
racial egalitarian. By implication, on the other hand, his White thalassocrats were so arrogantly
monopolistic of power that they treated not only non Whites but even Whites of lower caste as
domestic animals or midgets, in relation to whom they themselves acted as gods or giants.
Quite apart from the moral issues involved, one wonders how such an extreme cultural
polarisation came about. For, prior to the sixth millennium B. C., social stratification among
hunting peoples seems to have been non-existent and even among horticultural peoples to
have been minimal. Does this puzzle leave room for yet more extravagant hypotheses, such as
that of Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods?
Bailey's prose is lucid and fluent, though an editorial eye flinches at the large numbers
of sentence splices and sentence fragments he produces. Outside of maps (where Nazca
appears as Nasca on one page and Nazco on another), typographica are mercifully few. The
only one that suggests misspelling is the ubiquitous appearance of Phaecian for Phaeacian.
In sum, The God-Kings is an exciting book, which should be required reading for
anyone whose intellectual curiosity about the past is not circumscribed by
The Cambridge
Ancient History.
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