Tag: greek

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Palmyra’s Unknown God

In 2015 the terrorist army calling itself the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’, or ‘ISIS’ captured the historic Syrian desert city of Palmyra and soon began to trash its ancient ruins which included carved references to an anonymous deity mentioned in numerous Aramaic inscriptions as “lord of the universe.” Ironically, whatever, the terrorists intended for this ‘unknown’ god, he and other pre-Islamic religious figures found in Palmyra have recently emerged from obscurity, at least among scholars.

Aleksandra Kubiak-Schneider, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wrocław in Poland, compared the inscriptions from Palmyra to others throughout Mesopotamia from the first millennium BC and discovered that the gods worshiped in Mesopotamia were referred to by names similar to the anonymous god from Palmyra like, “Bel-Marduk”—the supreme god of Babylon—who was also referred to as “merciful.” The phrase “lord of the world”—a title similar to “lord of the universe” was sometimes used to indicate “Baalshamin,” a sky god. The anonymous “god” mentioned in the Palmyra inscriptions she says was not a single god, but rather multiple deities including Bel-Marduk and Baalshamin. She also contends that the reason people did not mention the names of such deities, was to signify respect. 


The Palmyra story is reminicent of the Unknown God or Agnostos Theos mentioned in the New Testament. According to the Book of Acts, when the apostle Paul visited Athens, he saw an altar with an inscription dedicated to the ‘unknown god’, and, when invited to speak to the Athenian elite at the Areopagus, he contrasted this “unknown god” with his own.


To some, the attempt to wipe out the “idolatry” of ‘infidels,’ implies severe psychological dysfunction and a hysterical, defensive, need to rid the world of any knowledge of the very existence of earlier times to induce, and reinforce, what some have termed collective amnesia (“Fighting to Forget,” by Martin Ruggles, Atlantis Rising Magazine #113).


Our world today, it has been argued, is the product of a series of forgotten catastrophes. Like the ancient priests of Sais, whose story to the Greek lawgiver Solon, is the basis of Plato’s account of Atlantis, modern ‘catastrophists’ tell us that the story of humanity is a cycle of great ascents, followed by cataclysmic falls, and ensuing great forgetings—also known as ‘amnesia.’ Palmyra was not the first or the last time that one religion has tried to repress another, but it may have been the first where the attempt was put on display in real time for the entire world see.

AR #111

Catastrophism Reconsidered

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Lost Map of Ancient Astronomer, Found

A medieval parchment from a monastery in Egypt has yielded a surprising treasure. Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky.

Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the find as “rare” and “remarkable”. The extract is published online this week in the Journal for the History of Astronomy. Evans says it proves that Hipparchus, often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece, really did map the heavens centuries before other known attempts. It also illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.


The manuscript came from the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, but most of its 146 leaves, or folios, are now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. The pages contain the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a collection of Syriac texts written in the tenth or eleventh centuries. But the codex is a palimpsest: parchment that was scraped clean of older text by the scribe so that it could be reused.


The older writing was thought to contain further Christian texts and, in 2012, biblical scholar Peter Williams at the University of Cambridge, UK, asked his students to study the pages as a summer project. One of them, Jamie Klair, unexpectedly spotted a passage in Greek often attributed to the astronomer Eratosthenes. In 2017, the pages were re-analysed using state-of-the-art multispectral imaging. Researchers at the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in Rolling Hills Estates, California, and the University of Rochester in New York took 42 photographs of each page in varying wavelengths of light, and used computer algorithms to search for combinations of frequencies that enhanced the hidden text.


Nine folios revealed astronomical material, which (according to radiocarbon dating and the style of the writing) was probably transcribed in the fifth or sixth centuries. It includes star-origin myths by Eratosthenes and parts of a famous third-century-bc poem called Phaenomena, which describes the constellations. Then, while poring over the images during a coronavirus lockdown, Williams noticed something much more unusual. He alerted science historian Victor Gysembergh at the French national scientific research centre CNRS in Paris. “I was very excited from the beginning,” says Gysembergh. “It was immediately clear we had star coordinates.”
(https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03296-1)

AR Issue #60

Document Reveals Archimedes’ Genius