Beyond The Pillars Of Hercules: Megalithic People Of Kronos Reaching America
Plutarch's (46-125 AD) narrative in De Facie quae in orbe lunae apparet about continental Greeks could be the last memory, miraculously surviving the millennia, of prehistoric settlements of people coming from northern Europe, who reached the American continent in the Megalithic period. Plutarch claims that the island Ogygia (where the Odysseus lived with the nymph Calypso in the Odyssey, lies in the North Atlantic, near the Arctic Circle. Ogygia is identifiable with Nólsoy in the Faroe Islands. Plutarch also says that beyond Ogygia there are three other islands, "as far from Ogygia as from each other", and beyond them there is "the great continent that surrounds the ocean". These three islands can be identified as Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. This is the transatlantic route to America followed by the Vikings around the year 1000 AD to reach Finland, when the Medieval Warm Period (10 to 12th century) made the voyage easier and free of icebergs. However, during the prehistoric Holocene Climatic Optimum (HCO, corresponding to the Megalithic Age), this route was even easier to navigate.
Odysseus and Calypso by Arnold Böcklin (1883) (Public Domain)
Prehistoric European Civilization Of Navigators
In the same chapter, Plutarch also mentions the "Sea of Kronos" (the North Atlantic) and the "people of Kronos", confirming the fact that the mythical Golden Age of the god Kronos was focused on the Nordic world. The "people of Kronos", therefore probably correspond to the Megalithic civilization, which according to Bettina Schulz Paulsson was characterized by “an advanced maritime and navigation technology”. Its disappearance was one of the greatest discontinuities in human history; however, this testimony by De Facie provides insight that the collapse of this prehistoric civilization was most likely caused by the end of the Climatic Optimum, which enveloped the far north in a vice of ice, and interrupted maritime connections between the opposite shores of the ocean.
This Megalithic civilization, that existed in Europe in the fifth millennium BC, predates the Egyptian one. According to Diodorus Siculus the Greek historian of Agyrium in Sicily, (80–20 BC) in his Library of History, the mythical Egyptian god Osiris, considered the "firstborn son of Kronos", travelled the world until he reached "those who lean towards the Pole."
Sea of Kronos also referred as the Gulf of Rhea what today is called the Adriatic Sea. Argonautica Map by Abraham Ortelius (1624) (Public Domain)
This seems to be the latest echo of memories dating back to a very remote period of the predynastic Egypt, corresponding to the Neolithic era, when the Climatic Optimum made some regions located even at very high latitudes, habitable. Regarding these three islands that characterized the transatlantic route, their coherence with the geographical reality of the North Atlantic shows that there had been navigators who, following that route, had reached the overseas continent of America. In this regard Plutarch states in a no less surprising phrase: "The coast of the continent is inhabited by Greeks settled around a gulf that is no less extensive than Meotis [today's Sea of Azov, east of Crimea] and whose entrance is exactly in a straight line with the mouth of the Caspian Sea. These Greeks are called and considered “the Continentals” (ēpeirotas)”.
At first sight this indication may seem an odd, absurd fantasy, if it is assumed that those "Greeks" must have originated from the Mediterranean. However, it acquires meaning considering the context of the original location of the Achaeans in the Nordic world (founded on the passage in De Facie regarding the position of the island of Ogygia) and taking into account that in Medieval times their Viking descendants managed to reach the American continent.
It also corresponds perfectly to the geographical situation of the Gulf of St Lawrence (whose entrance is on the 47° parallel, exactly at the same latitude of the “mouth”, the upper side, of the Caspian Sea), where the St Lawrence River flows through the largest estuary in the world, draining an enormous basin including the North American Great Lakes.
#/media/File:Arnold_B%C3%B6cklin_008.jpg){kind=link}
