The assumption that words are iconic rather than arbitrary and conventional signifiers lead to an entirely new perception of ancient texts. There is abundant evidence for this assumption in modern words. A collection of words sharing letters and meaning may identify sememes represented by individual letters or letter combinations. Families of non-cognates that share letters also share sememes. For example, flood and flail are semantically quite distant – they are not typical cognates in the current sense of the term – but do share the sememe of forth and back movement in the letters F and L.
Similarly, following Egyptian and more ancient practices, the letters of the original Phoenician or later Semitic abjads were given the names of the most iconic and familiar objects representing the sememes for which the letters were designed. For instance, the name mēm (water) was given to the letter M representing an up-down movement like a wave. Thus, the name of a Phoenician letter provides a first approximation of the semantic value of the letter. This value may be refined, expanded, and diversified by observing the use of a letter in other words of which the meaning has been established (training set of words).
Having
collected a list of sememes associated with each letter, we may recombine these
sememes in the order dictated by the letters of new words. We may thus
reconstruct the meaning of other words with established meaning for validation
(validation set). Once validated, the sememes may be agglutinated in the order
dictated by the letters of words that are not well understood (test words) to generate predictions about the meaning of such words. The generated predictions can be tested against poetical and mythological ontologies stating the relations between the target proper names and toponyms (who is who, from where, and did what). This method was
applied here to predict the meanings of proper names and toponyms from
ancient Greek poetry and mythology with astonishing results. This application
was ‘manual’ and verbose, suited to discourse about proof of
principle. However, it is foreseeable that automated artificial-intelligence
algorithms can be applied to much more excellent training, validation, and test sets of
words soon.
It turns out that Zeus is principally the thunder rain and, metaphorically, life
or survival. His wife Hera is the house, or the forest, and, metaphorically, expansion
by procreation. The rest of the Olympian gods, the top aspirations, are objects
or processes tightly associated with survival in prehistoric Greece. Atlantis
is a water distribution network, and its kings are devices and procedures that
made that technological achievement possible. Knossos is pottery. Minos is the
manual work, the Minotaur is the working ox, the stress of work, and the cost or tax of labor. A labyrinth is a plowed field and any construction that presents a pattern. Ariadne is the headland and the road, and Theseus is the
paid service, the urban worker, or the cheap labor. Hesiod’s Theogony[1] is all about technological
inventions describing materials and production methods and classifying the
products according to structure, form, and function. Hesperides are the oil
lamps, and Heracles, a simple tree-branch used as a torch among its many other
uses.
Each
poet and mythographer treat the same old stories, one inspired by the
others. Atlas and Atlantis are mentioned by Homer, Hesiod, and
Solon. The poets strive to make up new, more expressive names and join them
with more dramatic ontologies. Still, the themes are familiar: those from the
primitive Paleolithic techniques through the Neolithic revolution, agriculture, mining, shipping, commerce, to urban development. Chimera and Bellerophon are consecutive versions of the
metallurgist’s bellows, the latter featuring a valve called Pegasus. Aphrodite
is the sand. Sand is the female prototype because metallurgists pour molten
metals into it. The Trojan War was a struggle among market forces to determine the right price for manufactured, traded, and distributed goods. Achilles
is the trowel; if it does represent a human entity, this is the class of
builders. Helen of Troy is the sand hourglass. I have found no traces of religious
spiritualism or superstition in Greek mythology so far.
[1] The
author of Theogony, I should say; but
I will continue to use the name Hesiod
for simplicity despite my doubt that the poetic persona corresponds to the
physical writer of the poems.