【B.英文稿】
He Xin: Six Crucial Points of Criticism on Pseudo Greek History
【Six Crucial Points of Criticism on Pseudo Greek History】
The problem whether the Greek civilization is fact or fiction lies in the following six crucial aspects. And these are the vital points which all cunning western scholars and their followers in China are always trying elaborately to avoid and have never dared to directly respond to:
I. 『Greece』 or 『Greek culture』 never existed in the history
As a matter of fact, I base my crucial arguments of criticism on the pseudo Greek culture and history on the following four points:
(1.) Some people think that Greece is a country. In fact, before the Greek independence campaign against the rule of Ottoman Turks in the 19th century, neither had there been a unified, independent and autonomous country with sovereignty named 『Greece』 on the Greek peninsula throughout the history, nor had there been a brilliant 『ancient Greek culture』 with Athens as its center.
(2. )As ancient Greece had never formed a unified country, it did not have independent sovereignty, kingship, dynasty or the king of Greece.
During most of the time in the history, the Greek peninsula was subordinate in whole or in part to Persia, Macedonian Empire, Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, and later the Ottoman Empire. However, on the Greek peninsula and its surrounding areas in history, there has never been a 『Great Greek Colonial Empire』.
[Please note: here it is not to emphasize whether a country or culture called 『Greece』 or something else exists, but to stress that there is no 『Greece』 as a sovereign country and culture throughout the history. The so-called Greek culture is a democratic Utopia fabricated in the modern western history and archaeology.]
(3) Before conquered by Alexander, there were only some small city-states with backward economy and culture on the Greek peninsula, such as Athens and Sparta. In the most prosperous period of Athens, there were only 20, 000 to 100, 000 citizens. As a matter of fact, this figure is overrated.
[There were around 20, 000 to 30, 000 citizens in Athens in the ancient times. Plus people in the surrounding villages and slaves, the gross population was about 100, 000. (This is based on the estimation made by Wang Daqing and Xie Guangyun, scholars specializing in Greek history.)
Greece is a mountainous country with harsh geographical conditions, and it has not overcome poverty so far. Without a convenient way of transportation, its city-states rarely contacted with one another. As in the history there was neither a unified Kingdom of Greece/Greek Empire nor a unified Greek army, the governing power of the rulers of the small city-states on this peninsula was always confined in their own limited territories.
(4.) Therefore, 『the great prehistoric Greek history』 which has always been circulating and admired was just a series of legends and fairy stories concocted and fabricated by the westerners after the Renaissance, by using the ambiguous concept of 『Greece』 and on the basis of the 『Homer’s Epic』 without a definite origin. As a matter of fact, it has never existed in history.
In fact, whoever wants to refute my criticism on the pseudo Greek history, he must first demolish the four points mentioned above to prove the existence of the Kingdom of Greece, Greek Dynasty, Greek Colonial Empire or 『Greek Democratic and Federal State』 before 1832 in the world, and to prove when and where the country Greece or the Greek nation has ever existed as a political system and a culture carrier. In this case, my criticism on pseudo Greek history will prove false, and all the greatness and glory can be attributed to this political and cultural entity.
However, if no such country called Greece can be found in history as an entity and principal part of Greek civilization, we will have no idea where on earth the unified Greek nation and culture exist. And we have to admit that all the fairy tales on the great and glorious 『ancient Greek history and civilization』 worshipped by fans of Greece at home and abroad are all nonsense.
II. Homer was an Asian and Homeric Hymns is not an epic of Greece
The source or origin of Homeric Hymns is suspicious and unclear.
Where on earth did Homer come from? What was his nationality? If there is no such country of Greece in the world, Homer would surely not be a Greek. Was Homer a world citizen without nationality?
Or was he a native European of Greek peninsula? The answer is no. Instead, Homer who has always been called a great Greek poet was not a Greek in Europe but an Asian—who was from Asia Minor.
It is interesting that, if there was no such country of Greece in the world at that time, how can Homer’s works be regarded as legends and epics about Greece?
Actually, who was Homer? When was Homer born? Is Homer a man or a woman? Is Homer a person or a group of people? These questions have not been made clear in the Western academic circles. However, all the available Greek prehistory was fabricated on the basis of the unidentified and inexplicable Homer Hymns and fairy tales!
[It is said that the Library of Alexandria, which was famous for keeping the only original copy of this work of Homer, was destroyed in chaos of war in the earlier years of the Christian era, without any piece of paper left. However, A Short History of Classical Scholarship written by the British writer Sandys in the 19th century is highly touted by Gao. Stop talking nonsense! That book is for closing the loopholes of the fabricated Western history, which is a pack of lies. For example, Sandys said that the Library of Alexandria survived the fire hazard, which was like a big blow to the British historian Gibbon, the granddaddy of research on the history of Greece and Rome.
Actually, it has always been controversial in the study of western history whether the Library of Alexandria truly existed on earth and whether it is possible for the library to have existed. This is still a problem now. There is no credible history of the west in the ancient times! There suddenly popped up some works about Greece and Rome in the west after the Renaissance. The authenticity of most of them has still not been verified.]
Gao has listed in detail the opinions of some British people on Homeric Hymns, declaring to have got a series of discoveries in the fragments of Egyptian papyrus. I am not a scholar of bibliology of Homeric Hymns, so it’s not my intention now to discuss the authenticity of the so-called Egyptian papyrus version of Homeric Hymns. I just want to say the papyrus will not be of any help to the fabricators of the pseudo Greek history.
Homeric Hymns is mainly about the legend that Achaeans attacked the city of Ilium. However, neither did this war take place on Greek peninsula nor could it be called the 『Greek』 war. Since the country of Greece did not really exist, how could there be a war of the Greek against foreign invaders? In fact, the Achaeans mentioned in Homeric Hymns were Asians (Ionian—Asia Minor) rather than Europeans on the Greek peninsula or in Athens of Greece.
In Western archaeology during the past century, it has been recognized that the war described in Homeric Hymns took place in Asia and Asia Minor on the east coast of Mediterranean Sea. (For example, in the end of the 19th century, a German scholar Schliemann discovered the relics of an ancient city in Hissarlik on the western coast of Asia Minor, and he believed that this ancient city was the capital city Ilion of the ancient Trojans.)
To sum up, Homeric Hymns has nothing to do with the so-called history of the Greek peninsula, particularly, the history of Athens and Greece. So, it is irrelevant to identify Homeric Hymns as the epics of the Greeks.
III. Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations did not belong to Greece
Some people argue that there were discoveries about Minoan and Mycenaean cultures in Greek archaeology. I’d like to ask them whether there was a country called 『Greece』 in the world between 3000 BC and 1000 BC.
If the answer is no, why do people include the two independent island cultures into ancient Greece which didn’t exist at all? Someone said it was based on the fairy tales of Homer. This is nonsense at all. If Homer’s fairy tales could serve as a testimony to history, the Journey to the West and the Legend of Deification could be included in the textbooks of Chinese history.
As for the so-called Minoan and Messinia archaeology, though the unearthed are not all fakes, there are quite a lot of fake antiques disclosed and doubted by western scholars. (For example, the clay pots with exquisite paintings are rather doubtful, because all the human beings had not been able to invent the technology of colored pottery firing and painting then.) And the ox-headed monster Minos, the king of Crete, is absolutely a fake. And it is surprising that those linear letters A/B on clay tablets are similar to the square characters of Classical Chinese. In my opinion, it seems that they are not genuine. I question it boldly and verify it carefully to assume whether they were forged by foreigners by imitating the clay square characters of China in the Stone Age. Things like the clay tablets were easy to forge.
IV. Plato’s and Aristotle’s works are doubtful
As for Plato’s and Aristotle’s works, it is true that they have all been passed down from unknown sources, without any original versions left. (Hope the discussion will not be directed to the argument that I do not know ancient Greek so I am not qualified to discuss it. If I am not, there will be no one eligible on the earth! Those so-called Greek works are hardly the original versions in ancient Greek, but are either in Hebrew or in Arabic. No one has ever seen the original version in ancient Greek). If someone argues there are such versions, please tell us which Chinese version of these Greek works is translated directly from ancient Greek?
As for those innumerable works of Aristotle, they are most probably made up of works of different authors in ancient Asia Minor in different periods, and even Mr. Miao who translated the complete works of Aristotle into Chinese is also suspicious of it.
V. Most of the so-called great Greek philosophers and scientists were not Greeks in Europe but Asians.
The most ironic thing is that the so-called great Greek philosophers, except Plato, worshipped by numerous Chinese fans were not native Athenians or Greeks, but were Asians—from Asia Minor, including those quite famous such as Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, etc.
All these are iron-clad facts. How can they be denied?
One of the important ways used in the western academic circles to fabricate pseudo Greek history is to steal the developed ancient civilization and philosophy of Asia Minor (i.e. Ionia), and then disguise them and pass them off as European civilization of Greece (Athenian Greece).
VI. There’s no coherence between ancient Greek and Roman civilization and the barbaric Germanic and Anglo-Saxon civilization.
In addition, it will give worshippers of the West in China the greatest blow that the Greek civilization is not the source of the western white culture. Since the Holy Roman Empire times, the western white people have adopted Greece and Rome as their ancestors. However, just as one of Voltaire’s for pseudo imperial tradition"the holy Roman empire," said a meaningful words -——" This Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor empire!"
Even if the history of Greece is totally true and there is no pseudo history, it will make no difference at all. It is because the Greeks and later Romans are by no means the ancestors of Germanic people, Anglo-Saxons (those people from Northern Europe), and nor is the so-called Greek and Roman civilization the source of western civilization. Neither are these people the same race, nor are their cultures coherent by inheritance.
On the contrary, the Germanic people, including Anglo-Saxons, were always the sworn enemies of the Greeks and Romans. These white people were called by Greeks and Romans barbaric ethnic groups speaking pagan languages. These barbarians were regarded as enemies by Greeks and Romans.
These white people originally did not have ancient history which they could take pride in. Because they felt embarrassed at their barbaric origin, they fabricated pseudo history of Greece and Rome which they worshipped as their ancestors. And the so-called Renaissance movement was actually a campaign that the white race (Latin, Germanic people and Anglo-Saxons) systematically forged the western civilization.
It is just on the basis of the six aspects which are described rather concisely above that I risk to challenge a sea of Greek literature and archaeological discoveries in the west in modern times.
To uncover the pseudo history of Greece and Rome is to smash a large hole in the civilization myths of the West. I believe there must be Chinese successors following this thought to keep thinking and make serious research. And then they will find the whole world history written by westerners is actually fabricated according to the western values in recent times—and by no means credible. And the pseudo history that I have disclosed is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Chinese civilization was corrupted seriously because of the ruling of Donghu tribes and Qing Dynasty in the past nearly 300 years before the establishment of PRC, but the ancient civilization of Great China was rather brilliant in Han, Tang, Song and Ming Dynasties, so we Chinese do not have to fabricate our history and civilization. We Chinese should build up our cultural confidence and self-esteem and feel proud of our own culture.
(發表於2014年3月13日)