You may have heard the news last week that “new evidence” from “scientists” demonstrates that the myth of Jason and the Argonauts was based on a real treasure-seeking expedition to the Republic of Georgia during the Mycenaean period. The story ran on Science News and was later picked up by some other outlets. The Daily Mail, for example, ran a similar story under the headline “The Golden Fleece Was REAL.” It was based on a recent journal article in Quaternary International, building on earlier work published in the Bulletin of the Georgian National Academy of Science by the same lead author in 2010. As the author of Jason and the Argonauts through the Ages, I read the articles with interest and dismay. This is all material I covered in my book. The media have been fleeced. Geologist Avtandil Okrostsvaridze of Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia, is the lead author for the two studies, which both seek to provide a rationalization for the Greek myth of the Golden Fleece and in so doing thus prove that (a) the Argonauts myth is true and (b) Georgia is therefore worthy of inclusion alongside Greece in the annals of history. The authors, of course, would deny (b), but given the leaps of logic involved in “proving” a myth true, there really isn’t another conclusion that makes sense. Every year there is another new claim out of Georgia seeking to “prove” the dependence of Greek mythology (and sometimes Greek language) on Georgia and portray Georgia as a font of European culture. The Argonauts myth, in its received form, tells of the voyage of Jason and his fifty companions to the distant land of Colchis, in what is now Georgia, to retrieve the Golden Fleece, the skin of the divine ram that carried Phrixus from Greece to Colchis a generation earlier. Okrostsvaridze’s “investigations” claim to have determined that “the phenomena of the ‘Golden Fleece’ according to our research, is connected with the sheepskin technique of recovering placer gold.” In this technique, a sheep’s fleece is used to trap particles of gold dissolved in water. The result is a fleece that is impregnated with gold and then destroyed to recover the bits of metal. Although the media present Okrostsvaridze et al. as having suddenly discovered this, the geologist and his team really contributed only one new thing to a very old claim: They used 1,000 ground penetrating radar readings to locate the largest source of placer gold in ancient Georgia, near Svaneti. Logically, the existence of gold does not imply a voyage from Mycenaean Greece to visit it. (The same trouble bedeviled Janet Ruth Bacon in her 1925 book The Voyage of the Argo, in which she tried to prove the Argonaut myth true but related to amber deposits rather than gold.) The claim that the Golden Fleece was really a soggy sheepskin used in gold panning dates back to Strabo, a man who—to be kind—had no idea what he was talking about. In Geography 11.2, Strabo sets off two millennia of speculation when he writes: “In their country the winter torrents are said to bring down even gold, which the Barbarians collect in troughs pierced with holes, and lined with fleeces; and hence the fable of the golden fleece” (trans. Hamilton and Falconer). Okrostsvaridze et al., however, prefer the much later version of the same story given in Appian (Roman History 12.103) around 150 CE: “Many streams issue from Caucasus bearing gold-dust so fine as to be invisible. The inhabitants put sheepskins with shaggy fleece into the stream and thus collect the floating particles. Perhaps the golden fleece of Aetes was of this kind” (trans. Horace White). This version, though 150 years after Strabo, better fits with Okrostsvaridze’s ideas about modern Georgian gold panning, which does not use troughs. Strabo, writing sometime between 20 BCE and 24 CE was 1500 years removed from the alleged events, 700 years removed from the first references to Jason in the Homeric poems, and 300 years removed from Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica. Despite the widespread assumption among geologists and archaeologists (but not Classicists) that Strabo had special insight into mythology, his rationalization is no better supported than the rationalizing “explanation” of his rough contemporary, Diodorus Siculus (Library 4.47), who claimed that the Fleece was actually the skin of a man named Krios (“Mr. Ram”), sacrificed and gilded. It has just as much evidence in its favor. The trouble is that Strabo is not an unbiased observer. At the time he wrote, his great-uncle was the governor of Colchis (Geography 11.2.38), and he had every reason to bolster Colchis’s profile by promoting its connection to the wonders of mythology. But Strabo also admitted that he was simply rationalizing a story whose basis in fact was primarily belief. Consider his words from Geography 1.2.39: For, as all admit, the original voyage to Phasis [western Georgia] ordered by Pelias, the return voyage, and the occupation, however considerable, of islands on the coasting-voyage thither, contain an element of plausibility, as do also, I am sure, I am sure, the wanderings which carried Jason still further—just as there is an element of plausibility in the wanderings of both Odysseus and Menelaus—as evidenced by things still to this day pointed out and believed in, and by the words of Homer as well. And what are the things pointed out and believed in? Some of the evidence comes in the form of later temples to Jason, themselves based on a misunderstanding of the Median word *yazona (“place of worship” = Persian ayadana) as Iasonion, or shrine to Jason. The most important, though, is that “the wealth of the regions about Colchis, which is derived from the mines of gold, silver, iron, and copper, suggests a reasonable motive for the expedition, a motive which induced Phrixus also to undertake this voyage at an earlier date” (1.2.39). In other words, Strabo here concedes that (a) the myth is not literal, (b) he is drawing conclusions rather than evaluating evidence, and (c) all of the explanations are based on looking for “reasonable” explanations for the fantastic, as supported by ancient texts.
So Strabo is no good witness, and Appian admits with his “perhaps” that he is simply speculating. In fact, Okrostsvaridze et al. take Appian to have declared that the Argonauts were on a gold mining expedition and the Fleece was a gold panning implement, when he did no such thing. They confuse material from Strabo and Appian and appear to have little understanding of either. All of this is predicated, of course, on the idea that the object of the Argonauts’ voyage was always Colchis. But there is no evidence that the Greeks placed the Argonauts’ voyage in Colchis prior to Eumelus, in the fifth century BCE Corinthiaca, whose surviving fragment in Pausanias’s Description of Greece (2.3.8) is the oldest association between the Jason myth and Colchis. Neither Homer nor Hesiod know of Colchis—and indeed the Greeks are not known to have ventured to that side of the Black Sea until after the time of Homer. There is no evidence at all of any Mycenaean expeditions that far to the east. The slim thread connecting older stories to Colchis is the statement attributed to Hesiod in the Apollonius scholia at Argonautica 4.284 that the Argonauts reached the river Phasis. However, M. L. West, the great Classicist, demonstrated that the toponym Phasis was originally mythical and only later applied to the Rioni in Georgia. Instead, our earliest source to give a geographic location for the Fleece, places it somewhere else entirely. Mimnermus, writing around 630 BCE and preserved in Strabo (1.2.40), claims that the Fleece rested in the city of Aeëtes, on the banks of the River Ocean, in the land of Aea “where the rays of the swift Sun lie in a chamber of gold.” Later, Aea was identified as the capital of Colchis, but this is a late gloss, as evident from the similar and undoubtedly derivative toponym Aeaea, the island of Circe, which was sometimes in Aea (Pherecydes) and sometimes in the farthest west (Homer), depending on the author. The challenges of mapping the glorious dawn land of Aea onto the real geography of wet and dank Colchis were enough that Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica bears the visible seams of trying to stitch together opposing concepts. M. L. West, who has made two different arguments about the origins of the name Aea, concludes in both that the name refers to the dawn and simply represents a mythological land where the sun rests at night—no more real than the magic islands where Heracles found golden apples, or any other mythological land. These mythic places were rationalized and mapped onto the real world during the Archaic period, but they would not have originated in reality, except perhaps in the vaguest way. Whether you find such arguments convincing or not, the fact that there is no archaeological evidence for a trip to Colchis in Mycenaean times, nor evidence of an Argonaut myth related to Colchis before Eumelus, should give pause to any geologists or archaeologists who want to declare Strabo the one true guide to understanding ancient mythology without subjecting his claims to the same critical scrutiny expected of any other historical argument. Oh, and read my book. I covered all of this in much more depth there.
27 Comments
EP
12/2/2014 03:31:05 am
Okrostsvaridze has this in common with Scott Wolter: They are both professional geologists who have no noteworthy expertise in history, archaeology, or comparative mythology.
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Cathleen Anderson
12/2/2014 05:30:15 am
Wow! That fact just sort of went right by me when I read the article. It sure does seem to be true though.
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EP
12/2/2014 05:45:39 am
You're not being sarcastic, are you? :)
Clay
12/2/2014 04:10:56 am
When I saw the title and first sentence, at first I thought that you meant the state of Georgia in the southeastern United States. What, another mythical expedition from the Old World to America that didn't make it into the history books? You might want to clarify this.
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Clete
12/2/2014 05:35:33 am
It appears that many of the researchers have "Georgia on my mind". Ray Charles would be proud.
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Colin
12/2/2014 06:18:16 am
Jason - do you have any information regarding the history of this “country generally regarded as peripheral to ancient history actually cradle of civilisation” trope, eg. Bosnian “pyramids”, Oera Linda book etc. ?
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EP
12/2/2014 06:23:11 am
I think I can help you with that, but... are you interested in something more specific? Because it's way too broad a subject otherwise.
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12/2/2014 06:45:40 am
I think it's often tied to a country's efforts to integrate itself into the international community as an equal. It's been going on forever. Rome invented "Trojan" ancestors to give it equal footing with the Greeks, whom they perceived to be more cultured. In the nineteenth century, rivals Britain and the newly-unified Germany both competed to prove their countries were where humans first evolved. Russia is one of the best examples: The tsars took over Byzantine iconography and imperial imagery in order to give Russia a fictive connection to the mainstream of Europe as the Third Rome rather than a peripheral backwater.
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EP
12/2/2014 08:50:25 am
Yeah, this phenomenon is pretty much universal. In fact, a lot of what Jason covers in his blog (including some of the "Aliens!" stuff) can be traced to something of the kind.
Not the Comte de Saint Germain
12/2/2014 09:00:15 am
At least the Russians actually had some kind of historical tie to the Byzantine Empire, though Russia wasn't remotely a successor to the empire, just a region that had been culturally influenced by it.
EP
12/2/2014 09:08:54 am
Interestingly, and in part due to Macedonian efforts, modern Greeks are actually somewhat ambivalent about claiming Philip and Alexander as their own.
Not the Comte de Saint Germain
12/2/2014 09:18:21 am
Kenneth Harl, who has a long but fascinating series of lectures on Alexander's campaigns, has pointed out the irony that Alexander never really understood democracy, let alone endorsed it, but his face used to appear on Greek money alongside the name of the state, which of course translates to "Greek Democracy."
Peter N.
12/8/2014 07:30:26 pm
@Not the Count St. Germain,
EP
12/2/2014 06:19:13 am
To give people some idea of how shoddy the reasoning of these Georgian researchers really is, here is their discussion of the alternative views (ignore, if you can, the terrible Georgian Engrish):
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Shane Sullivan
12/2/2014 06:46:07 am
And, of course, they had to trot out Schliemann. Atlantis enthusiasts would be proud.
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Shane Sullivan
12/2/2014 07:14:13 am
"Every year there is another new claim out of Georgia seeking to “prove” the dependence of Greek mythology (and sometimes Greek language) on Georgia and portray Georgia as a font of European culture."
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EP
12/2/2014 08:52:09 am
Throw in some creepily racialist haplogroup pseudo-genetics and you basically have Georgia's mainstream academic historiography.
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Not the Comte de Saint Germain
12/2/2014 09:03:21 am
I've seen a lot of this kind of nationalist junk, and Shane has nailed it.
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Only Me
12/2/2014 09:58:48 am
Well, we can resolve this issue right now. All we need is an enterprising geologist to test the purity of Georgian gold versus Grecian gold coins and BAM! Mystery solved.
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EP
12/2/2014 10:03:05 am
Except they didn't have coins back then :P
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12/2/2014 10:11:45 am
There is actually a French scientist who wanted to "prove" that the Argonauts really ventured to Georgia by doing trace analysis of Mycenaean artifacts to prove they came from Georgian mines (never mind that there would be other explanations for how gold traveled). She made a big media stink in Europe a few years ago as she prepared the tests, but when I tried following up about why she didn't publish the results of the tests, she never responded to me and to the best of my knowledge (and limited access to French scientific literature) never published them. I'd conclude from this that the results weren't what she wanted.
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EP
12/2/2014 10:25:49 am
What's her name? 12/2/2014 10:49:26 am
Maria Filomena Guerra. The most recent paper I've seen from her claimed to prove Mycenaean gold from Volos (Iolkos) was alluvial, but couldn't connect it to Colchis.
EP
12/2/2014 11:15:00 am
She published a few papers since then, but none on this topic. One of them is a prima facie interesting paper (with three co-authors) on metal use in pre-Columbian Cuba.
Only Me
12/2/2014 11:23:35 am
This is one of those times where I made a joke and learned something new. Jason, EP, thank you!
Kal
12/3/2014 11:52:06 am
I seem to recall an old episode of The Dukes of Hazzard which allegedly takes place in Georgia, in the USA, and that in this episode Boss Hogg wanted to steal the legendary Golden Fleece and take it back to his bank. Good luck with that. But then we're talking about the wrong Georgia. Lol.
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