Ancient Greeks and America

 

By Michael Issigonis

 

Ερυθρόδερμοι, Red-skinned

• When you grow up in Greece, you know about the red-skinned people probably from the movies about “cowboys and Indians”
• There is certainly no red skins, but somewhat a darker skin compared to the white skin of new immigrants in the USA coming mostly from Europe
• But the Greeks have a pale chocolate color skin after are being burned by the sun every summer
• Therefore, some of the American natives have a Greek-like skin

 

My destiny?

• I finished school in Greece and as there was no geology courses at Greek universities I had to change country
• Why geology?
• My civil engineer father wanted to venture into mining, but had limited knowledge of the rocks
• A government geologist made a report about his nickel property and basically condemned it as worthless

 

 

 

• My father was very suspicious of the report and I thought he was right, but how can I prove it?
• Some time later we learned that the said geologist was going to take over the property after my father would drop it as worthless!
• Are they all cheaters and swindlers? The 1961 election was called “illegitimate & violent” (Βία και Νοθεία)
• There had to be a better place on Earth than Greece of the 1960’s

 

England

• I graduated geology from Sheffield and the Camborne School of Mines
• Most of my graduate classmates were given a free pass to Australia (by boat, air traffic not established yet)
• I wrote 3 letters to universities in Canada, Australia and South Africa
• I got an enthusiastic reply from Toronto U and moved to the “New World”

 

Ποδόσφαιρο (soccer)

• Some Greek students and I played football (soccer) in a Toronto park and everyone around us were asking what kind of a game was that! Someone had brought the ball from Europe – none could be found in the New World
• Maybe that was the beginning of soccer in America!

 

Geology in Canada

• Geology and mining: this is how Canada became an industrialized country
• Copper, nickel, gold, silver, iron, uranium
• Everyone thought that Canada started the era of mining
• How wrong we were!
• How about mining copper in Michigan, USA 5,000 years BEFORE Christ?

 

Change in career

• After working in exciting projects mining and exploring for metals throughout Canada
• someone invited me to TEACH geology at a university
• I joined a new project teaching geology to American natives. The instruction was not based at the university, but in aboriginal settlements called “reserves”
• The government preferred the natives to live separately from the rest of the Each person is given house and money, but no education or training! Not a fair deal!

 

Greek professor P. Halamandaris

• His background was from Lemnos island. His parents immigrated to Suez, Egypt for work and himself graduated from Alexandria U. and Indianapolis U
• The family name was coined from “Χαλάω μάνδρες”, “ I break & fix fences”
• When Pandelis arrived in Canada he asked to be introduced to native teachers! His colleagues ridiculed him “natives are only good for drinking”
• So, he applied for federal money to educate the natives. After a big fight, he was successful

 

Pandelis’ program in Manitoba

• A group of “traveling professors” would spend a month at a time on each native reserve to complete one course
• Program can run simultaneously in several reserves until the standard education degree is completed. It took at least 5 years
• After 45 years of success and more than 3,000 native teachers, the program was abolished! It was adopted, however, in other Canadian provinces as well as Australia

 

My first day in a reserve

• The natives could still speak their own language among themselves
• I knew something is going on
• Their language sounded like Greek, but it was not modern or ancient; it must have been more ancient than classical!
• “Istam, istam, istam”: the commonest words spoken. But this is ῾Ίστημη῾, “I am trying to get your attention”, “come here”, “hello”

 

A Cree dictionary

• Years later among the first to be published was a dictionary named after the biggest native “tribe”
• But, “Cree” must be from Crete!
• Now, you must be getting my story
• From this dictionary, one can realize that ancient Greek was one of the native’s oldest languages which was mixed by other words from people that arrived in North America coming from Asia

 

 

 

 

• From the Cree dictionary I could also find the meaning of ancient Greek words that are forgotten or not known in Greece:
• “mycenae” means turtle shell. The hill where ancient Mycenae is located has the shape of a turtle shell when viewed from above
• “Attik” means deer, maybe Αττική
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  was a place with lots of deer (before the farmers & fires started..)

• “Kimon” means rain
• “Sysipho”, means a goose

 

• Etc, etc The roots of some words are identical in Cree and Homeric dictionaries

 

People from Crete to America

• The natives were using stones as tools, but not metals
• Around the Great Lakes (where Michigan is) there was a metal treasure that cannot be found elsewhere on earth: Plenty of native (pure) copper that was visible on the surface in both the Keweenaw peninsula and the Isle Royale (called Royal island, after its copper treasure that is found there), Michigan

 

Who got interested on this metal first?

• Investigators in the USA talk about ancient natives being involved in the mining
• How could the local natives get interested in a substance for which they have no use?
• It is more probable that traveling prospectors would be interested even if they had come from far away
• We know the Minoans using Linear A (1,800 BC) were mining silver in the mountains of If you look at their boats, they could travel ANYWHERE on Earth. They were also professional miners around Greece and as far away as the Iberian peninsula

 

Investigator David Pompeani

• Discovered that mining can be dated by the pollution it creates from attached pieces of wood found with it
• The pollution consisted of small amounts of lead (associated with the copper) and potassium (associated with the fires used to soften and extract the copper)
• Wood can be dated accurately by the carbon 14 method

 

Established dates of mining in ancient Michigan

• Small amount of initial mining around 10,000 BC
• Continuous extensive mining from 5,000 BC to an abrupt end at 1,200 BC
• Next mining activity did not start until 1,850 AD and is continuing today
• About half a million tons of copper was removed from the rocks in ancient Michigan

 

Overview

• Someone discovered and removed the copper to a distant land
• This is the “missing copper” of Michigan
• Who wanted the copper and where did it go?
• Copper started the Bronze Age in Europe about 3,000 BC
• Copper oxhide ingots of unknown origin (came from outside the Mediterranean) have been found in Investigators are trying to find their origin in Central Asia and the Urals at the moment and not many are suggesting Michigan as their source

 

The Minoans

• Historians put a date of 9,000 BC when they first settled on Crete
• They travelled by boat, they are “mariners” already, ahead of all other peoples at the time
• They needed metals to cut and shape wood to make their boats. That is how they started in mining and metallurgy
• The words “to mine”, “mining”, “minerals” etc were created after them. Archeologists called them after their first king Minos

 

 

 

 

• They established copper mines in Michigan that worked on the surface, just below the surface and underground down to 25 meters (old miners could not pump water out of a mine below more than 25 meters until the arrival of the first pump in modern times)
• Their biggest underground mine is the Minong (after Minos?) on the island of Royale. The name of the mine survived 2,500 years in the local tradition! You could only imagine who did the mining at the ancient time… really was there anyone else?

 

The ancient miners

• Also left digging tools, copper tools as well as pictographs of boats that they used to get there
• They dug around 5,000 pits to get the lumps of pure copper out of the ground
• Some boulders of copper are still underground ready to be lifted up to the surface
• They must abandoned their mining suddenly

 

What else is happening in BC

• Along the Mississippi river valley numerous mounds of earth are erected from about 9,000 BC to 1,200 BC
• Some are as big as the pyramids of Mesoamerica
• Someone needs dry land along this river with frequent flooding, especially in the summer
• Someone is doing a lot of transportation all this time
• Lots of copper tools are found in these mounds

 

Copper tools by the thousands

• Have been discovered in the state of Wisconsin
• Someone is using the river network before it joins the Mississippi to transport copper
• So, this is how copper left the continent to be exported to a different country / continent

 

Other happenings in the years BC

• All along the west coast of Europe structures called Stone Circles are created by someone
• There are hundreds of them
• Copper tools were found in and around them
• These structures are all visible from the coast and are meant to be used by mariners
• Beside the circle of stones, these is also a

particular direction that is indicated in them

• They were built from 3,500 BC to 2,000 BC

 

Who used the Stone Circles?

• Mariners bringing copper from America to Europe
• The Atlantic is a difficult ocean to cross
• When you are trying to go westwards you don’t know which DIRECTION to take
• This direction is indicated in all of these Stone Circles
• In France it is East-West, in England NE to SW

 

These directions

• Were used by mariners BEFORE they ventured westwards
• If this direction was the way they came in from America, this is the direction they should travel going westwards
• The clockwise direction of the wind over the Northern Atlantic was known to those ancient mariners
• Next time humans learned about them was during the modern era with help from satellites

 

After 2,000 BC

• There was no need to construct Stone Circles anymore
• The mariners knew which direction to take to get to North America
• After 1,200 BC, the Minoan Empire collapsed, probably due to the eruption of the Thera volcano that devastated the thriving towns on the north shore of Crete and the island of Santorini

 

 

 

• In turn the copper mining in Michigan stopped
• The transportation of copper into Europe stopped
• The busy traffic along the Mississippi slowed down, but it picked up later on with the Empires of Mesoamerica
• Traffic across the North Atlantic stopped, therefore, mariners forgot how to cross the Atlantic

 

Renaissance

• Was brought to Europe by the Byzantines abandoning their Empire due to the onslaught brought about by the Mongols and Turkish peoples moving west from Central Asia
• A revival of trade across the oceans started again
• Captain Colombus obtained funds from Spain and Portugal to reach the Far East. Before he could start, he went to consult his uncle on the Greek island of Chios. Somebody had a memory of the cross-the-Atlantic route of thousands of years before

 

A summary

• Traces of ancient Greek language among American natives
• Ancient mining discovered in Michigan!
• A lot of copper was moved out of the country
• A long trace of copper tools and objects found going southwards along the Mississippi and into western shores of Europe in “Stone Circles”

 

 

 

• Plenty of copper was moved into Europe and started the Bronze Age
• I propose that the Minoans discovered the pure copper in Michigan, then worked out a method to mine it , then a method to transport it to Minoan metallurgists to make copper and later bronze tools
• There was extensive usage of bronze as tools and as weapons in combat

 

 

 

• Homer reported that Achilles’s shield was made of several layers of bronze
• It was used at the battle of Troy, around 1,200 BC
• It was far easier to make bronze by combining tin with pure copper than using copper ore that had to be roasted to remove the copper before it is fused with tin

 

Provenance of metals

• There is a recently developed branch of science that tries to identify the origin of the metals used in making tools and weapons
• It is called archaeometry and it is in its infancy
• People think that each mine has unique characteristics that can identify the metals produced in that particular mine
• In this way, it may be possible to point to an article of copper and say this metal came from Cyprus, for example

 

 

 

• So far, there are some successes and some failures in archaeometry
• The characteristics involved are isotopic compositions, trace elements and chemical analyses
• This promising tool may provide the absolute proof of where the Michigan copper went

 

 

*Special thanks to Dr. Michalis Issigonis in Canada