by David Astle
In Servia there were silver mines near Nova-Berda, and (Roman) gold mines near Saphina. Ancient mines of both gold and silver, chiefly the latter exist in other parts of Servia, but little is known of their early history. There are some twenty thousand acres of alluvions within fifty miles of Belgrade which might yet richly reward the hydraulic process. There is plenty of water with good heads and good grades for the gravel. Bulgaria also abounds in mines of the precious metals, but like most of those within the territory comprised within Ancient Greece, they have fallen to ruins and their history is forgotten.
.In many parts of Greece or European Turkey, where ancient mines were worked, a superstition is said to prevent the peasantry from visiting them. Malte-Brun especially mentions this of the old Roman mines near Traunick, and we ourselves have noticed the same superstition in the vicinity of the Roman gold mines in the Carpathian foothills. This superstition is probably due to the traditions of that cruel and relentless slavery to which their forefathers were subjected by the Greek and Roman Lords who once owned these mines. Valdivia, writing to the Emperor Charles V, declared that every castellano of gold from Peru cost a measure of human blood and tears. What was the cost of gold to the ancient Romans or the still more ancient Greeks, it would be hard to say: but a human life for every ounce would probably be well within the mark.[125]
For further information on mining in very ancient times in S.E. Europe, the activities of the Beaker people etc., the Cambridge Economic History should be consulted, though no special significance, such as obviously exists, will be pointed out therein relating this search for silver and gold to the private money creative system already well established in Babylonia at that time.
So to return to the main thread of this tale. It is clear that a relatively extensive, and hardened, and brutalized population existed in the localities of the mining industries of Epirus and farther North at the time of the flourishing of Crete, and Mycenae and of Cadmus of Thebes; formerly considered mythological, but clearly powerful agent of the Babylonian money power towards its search for the precious metals. This population, largely slave, given weapons and organizations, as the vanguard of the so-called militant shepherds, could be a serious threat to the civilizations of the South, so concerned with peace and the pleasures deriving from trade etc., which is born out by the records of history, scant as they are.
It is to be noted that Ugarit, wherein the Achaean had trade centre after 1300 B.C., great port, and location of manufacturies, fell well previous to 1190 B.C., when Rameses III of Egypt appears to have finally checked the Southward advance of its destroyer;[126] which suggests likelihood of them as having been those Northern people, not connected with the “Peoples of the Sea,” with whom Egypt undoubtedly established alliance at the time of the battle of Perire. Such allies may very well have been those we know of as the Dorians, who, as is revealed by the tablets of Pylos, clearly were sea raiders in their earlier days in the Mediterranean area. Further verification of these conclusions, though not of the Dorian alliance, exists in the deductions of Professor Albright (Syria, the Philistines, and Phoenicia; p. 31.), deriving from the information on the documents found in the Tablet Oven at Ugarit, that the sack of Ugarit, having obviously occurred shortly after the tablets were placed in the oven, dates from about 1234 B.C., which would be about the time of the victory of Merneptah of Egypt over the “Peoples of the Sea” at Perire.
The destruction Ugarit may very well have been an act of political revenge of a reawakened Egypt, working through the allies it would be raising up. For it is clear that the raiders who struck down this important city were well advised in that they chose the time for their attack as being when the ships of Ugarit had been ordered elsewhere, perhaps to Lydia, by the Hittites who appear to have been the overlords of the kings of Ugarit.[127] These raiders obviously were also well armed. In that day, much more so than today, the question was not so much as whether men were available, as whether effective arms were available for them to bear.
Ugarit was undoubtedly centre from which arms and supplies were shipped to the Libyans and the “Peoples of the Sea.” In such, therefore, it would have been agency of that greater force seeking to design the end of Egypt as it bad been known; and waiting for its plunder of sliver and gold.
The main Achaean states, suffering serious shortage of arms as a result of the battle of Perire, which appears to be verified by the dearth of military equipment recorded by the Linear “B” tablets unearthed at Pylos, obviously written shortly before the full force of the attack came from the North, were wide open to the enemy. On the reasonable assumption that Pharaoh Merneptah would have arranged for armed uprising of the numerous mine slaves to the North of Mycenaean Greece, together with organized attack from those nations of mid Europe, perhaps from as far afield as Denmark, trading partner of Mycenae,[128] it would have been reasonable for him to have supplied them with officers particularly instructed in siege work, and the arms with which, as a result of Perire, his arsenals would have been so well equipped.
One thing is clear, the Dorians known to be destroyers of Pylos, an action which paved the way for their conquest of the Peloponnese, were well organized, with a strong esprit de corps which remained with them until the last days of Sparta, and were well armed as armaments went in those days. Having ships, as the tablets of Pylos reveal,[129] they thus could maintain adequate supplies down the coast of the Adriatic. Above all they must have had previous experience in siege work such as could have been gained in the wars against the Canaanitic cities, for the tremendous walls of both Mycenae and Tyryns could not have been taken but by well organised armies with a strong and experienced engineering corps. It may safely be considered that a considerable part of the excellent arms with which the Dorians must have been supplied, was the plunder of Perire. The only uncertainty is whether these arms were obtained, as seems to be the usual thing in such circumstances, from the international money power direct, or from a scheming and resurgent Egypt where the god-king shone once again on the throne of the two lands, giving universal illumination as guide of his people’s destiny. After Perire, terrible battle that it must have been for the times, he certainly would have been in a position to “Divide and Rule.”
After all these events, largely indicating frustration of the schemes of international money creative power, particularly in its failure to bring about total collapse of that most ancient world which was Egypt, so far as Greece was concerned, there came a period known today as the “Dark Ages”; dark, because too little is known thereof. Such was the magnitude of the disaster that swept over the Achaeans, weaponless as they very well may have been, that for a time those trading stations established by the Babylonians, and that had flourished for so long, through the crumbling of so much of what had been in ancient days, may have been reduced or even closed.[130]
As however the turbulence died away, money power as centred in Mesopotamia. now with the plunder of half a dozen civilizations in its strong rooms, and a steady inflow of the precious metals deriving from the rapid expansion of the mining industry at that time, due to the improvement of the methods of exploration and smelting brought about by the use of tools of hardened iron, together with the availability of ample slave supplies as derived from all these wars, began to look around for new fields in which its power to create “Capital” could be used to best advantage. Thus once again the money creators of Mesopotamia turned their eyes towards the idyllic shores of Greece, and its forested mountains and hills; Greece which was clearly the gateway to Europe, and, through its command of the routes to the Hellespont and the Black Sea, to further Asia.
Analysing the sources, either Dorian or Ionian from which derived the impulses which gave driving force to the growth of the Greek industrial revolution, the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1898) says:
“The Ionian was that which most actively influenced the early development of Greece. But the Ionians themselves derived the most impulses of their progress from a foreign source. T
hose Canaanites or ‘lowlanders’ of Syria, whom we call by the Greek name of Phoenicians, inhabited the long narrow strip of territory between Lebanon and the sea. Phoenicia, called ‘Keft’ by the Egyptians, had at a remote period contributed Semitic settlers to the Delta or ‘Isle of Caphtor’; and it would appear from the evidence of the Egyptian monuments that the Kefa, or Phoenicians, were a great commercial people as early as the 16th Century B.C. Cyprus, visible from the heights of Lebanon, was the first stage of the Phoenician advance into the Western waters; and to the last there was a Semitic element side by side with the Indo-Europeans. From Cyprus the Phoenician navigators proceeded to the Southern coasts of Asia Minor, where the Phoenician colonists gradually blended with the natives, until the entire seaboard had become in a great measure subject to Phoenician influences. Thus the Solymni, settled in Lycia, were akin to the Canaanites and the Carians, originally kinsmen of the Greeks, were strongly affected by Phoenician contact. It was at Miletus especially that the Ionian Greeks came into commercial intercourse with the Phoenicians. Unlike the dwellers on the southern seaboard of Asia Minor, they showed no tendency to merge their nationality in that of Syrian strangers. But they learned from them much that concerned the art of navigation, as for instance, the use of the round built merchant vessels called, and also a system of weights and measures, as well as the rudiments of some useful arts. The Phoenicians had first of all been drawn to the coasts of Greece in quest of the purple fish which was found in abundance off the coasts of the Peloponnesus and of Boeotia; other attractions were furnished by the plentiful timber for shipbuilding which the Greek forests supplied, and by veins of silver, iron, and copper ore.
Two periods of Phoenician influence on early Greece may be distinguished: first, a period during which they were brought into intercourse with the Greeks merely by traffic in occasional voyages; secondly a period of Phoenician trading settlements in the islands or on the coasts of the Greek seas, when their influence became more penetrating and thorough. It was probably early in this second period, perhaps about the 9th century B.C. (probably the time of the first major Assyrian attack on the Arameans in 933 B.C.), that the Phoenician alphabet became diffused through Greece. This alphabet was itself derived from the alphabet of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics, which was brought into Phoenicia by the Phoenician settlers in the Delta. It was imported into Greece, probably by the Arameo-Phoenicians of the Gulf of Antioch, not by the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon, and seems to have superseded, in Asia Minor and the islands, a syllabary of some seventy characters, which continued to be used in Cyprus down to a late time. The direct Phoenician (I.E. Babylonian), influence on Greece lasted to about 600 B.C. (significantly about the time of the Seisachtheia at Athens, and the Laws of Lycurgus in Laconia). Commerce and navigation were the provinces that concerned the higher culture, the Phoenicians seem to have been little more than carriers from East to West of Egyptian, Assyrian, or Babylonian ideas.”[131]
Although the existence of the cities of Ugarit and Alalakh in the region of the Gulf of Antioch was unknown when the above was written, neither therefore had knowledge of those days received the impetus of the information recorded in their tablet hoards, nor were Linear “A” and “B” known, much less deciphered, revealing so much of Mycenae and its time, and that which had been before, the opinions expressed by this 19th Century writer more or less agree with those recently expressed by Sir Charles Leonard Woolley,[132] despite the belief of Sir Leonard some 26 years previously, that the script of the (Aramaic) tablets of Ras Shamra, site of ancient Ugarit, derived from the cuneiform of Sumeria and Akkadia.[133]
.And so to continue with the main thread of our narrative, it being thus quite clear that by 933 B.C., agencies for Babylonian imperialism were once again well established, in Greece, certainly in Ionia, and almost certainly farther afield on the Greek mainland, considering those favourable conditions existing in Greece at that time, the international money power of that day, in reality as blind a force to its own needs and purposes as it is today, on the advice of such Aramaean refugees no doubt, decided to reduce exports to Greece, and to finance the growth of native Greek manufactures. Such financing, whether through forgery of the existing currency of Greece, the iron or copper spits, out of the bloody scrap garnered from the fields of battle in Aram, or Arabia, or Israel, or Egypt; or by other methods known to them, as previously described, would present no problem.
Thus renewing more permanently the base from which their trade into Northern Europe might be conducted, winter or summer, they were guaranteed a more steady flow of Carpathian, Illyrian, Thracian, or Attican silver. A base was also established from which the similar trade into the Pontic regions and South Russia could be better maintained; in addition could be reckoned on a growing industrial population to assist in the absorption of both Egyptian and South Russian surpluses of grain.
The petty but vigorous city states of Greece as existed and would come to exist, would form a good ground for experiment with money systems, and with new systems of government and, what is now-a-days called social systems. In the fevered imagination of the money changers scheming in their shaded courtyards of Babylonia, such experiments might even show the way towards that for which their souls yearned above all, and which still they had not been able to bring about: the total disintegration of the last great kingdoms of earth, which, it seems, no sooner had they been brought to the point of collapse, than somehow they came to rise again. “Kingship again being sent down from on High.”[134] The way might be shown to them by which they too, their God, themselves and theirs, might become Lords of the Earth; and indeed, whereby out of their midst might be set up that God-King who would preside over the governance of the Universe; its total and absolute ruler.
.And much of these strange yearnings came to be realized. The possibilities inherent in circulating pieces of precious metal of equal weight and fineness, and with the seal of state stamped thereon, as money, after the first major experiment therein in the Lydia of Croesus, were fully exploited in Greece. No doubt these ancient Greeks, the same as our people in this day, fondly imagined that the state imprinted marks on their so-called coinage, denoted the absolute integrity of their money; and while they continued in this belief, they were the more easily manipulated.
Thus the power of rejection or appointment fell out of the withering hand of a decadent, if not dying priesthood, into that hand that moved over the disks of precious metal in the shadows of the counting house; and rather than noble and selfless men in positions of power, came low and venal men wielding but the appearance of power. Such men being raised up from the blind mob, exercised no more control or rule than that which the forces behind money creation and issuance permitted to them; nor did they exercise guidance further than that limit dictated by the inferiority of their quality.
The Greek of those days, as the Englishman during the 17th Century A.D., was highly intelligent, industrious, and frugal, and he clearly served under his ancient and natural aristocracy proudly and gladly in war or in peace. His land was then covered with forests from which was available an ample supply of charcoal such as would last kilns and furnaces for a long time to come; from Thrace, not so far distant, came suitable timbers for shipbuilding. Hence the spark that gave light to the life of the Greek city state must have been smouldering well before the introduction of coined money from Lydia and its attendant possibilities of controlled credit manipulations much greater than had ever been before.
Consequently, at the time of its emergence into the light of history as we know it, Greece was to the known world in the same way as was England during the 16th and 17th Centuries, when, due to the stealthy stimulation of a “Credit,” or abstract money economy, money greed injected into the nobility caused them to forget their trust. The major manifestation of the forgetfulness of such trust was their seizure of the common lands for the purposes of sheep pasture, the growing wool trade now yielding good return in the expanding money economy; thus depriving the villagers
of their rightful livelihood on the land, and leaving them with no option but emigration into the cities. In the cities these villagers served as labour in mine or factory, there being totally at the mercy of rascals from foreign parts, or those who bad been raised up from their own ranks as most eager for food, and who were least critical of the hand that offered it to them.
So far as Greece was concerned, on to a scene idyllic in the loveliness of its tree clad hills and mountains and shores, came men from that Aramaic speaking money power out of Syria and Aram, plausible men who wept and moaned to the pitying Greek the slaughter of their people by the Assyrian. Refugees from the Hittite city of Carchemish, from Aramean Damascus, Kummuh, and Sama’l, and other cities. Cities which had crumbled to dust before the ferocity of the Assyrians under Shalmanezer and Ashurnazirpal; but whether Syrian or Babylonian, these men spoke and wrote Aramaic in one form or another, as the evidence of the Greek alphabet reveals,[135] and which would be further suggested by the nature of the tablets that were found (about 1935) on the site of Ugarit (now known as Ras Shamra), on the North Syrian Coast.[136]
These men brought with them the knowledge of precious metal commodity exchange, and amongst other deceptions easily perpetrated on a simple and trusting people, knowledge of the possibilities of creation of money and wealth through the rackets of storage of valuables as for safe custody; or the creation of credit as it is now euphemistically known, and its power as a driving force towards the establishment of industry amongst a healthy, trusting, and warlike people; and its power towards the creation of monopoly of ownership and control of such industry.