THE EGYPTO-LIBYAN
PRESENCE IN PRECOLUMBIAN AMERICA

This article was first published in MES Journal Volume 9, 1995.
[Editor's Note: This paper was the basis for one of four major addresses given at the ISAC Determining the Truth I, A Symposium held at the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia on Saturday, April 23, 1994. The major speakers were Mr David Allen Deal, Professor J Huston McCulloch, Ms Ethel G Stewart, and Professor Cyclone Covey. The critics were Professors William J Poser, P Kyle McCarter, Richard J Perry, and Stephen C Jett. The Chairman for this auspicious occasion was the Distinguished Scholar Professor Cyrus H Gordon. This conference was a prideful statement by ISAC President and Founder Dr Joseph B Mahan that the Cultural Diffusion History Research community in the United States had made significant progress during the past decade.]

NATIVE LANGUAGES that outlast the memory of history prove nonindigenous, as our leading anthropological linguists discovered to their surprise. Recognizing recurrent Indo-European cognates in Indian speech beyond patternless coincidence, they laid open a genetic relationship of Native American to Old World languages. Children of their time, they ruled out ocean-voyages, assuming that the Clovis-Point flakers hiked across the Bering land-bridge 15,000+ years ago. Joseph Greenberg at Stanford University called their substrate language Amerind, by which he meant essentially Algonquin, which colonial Europeans found prevailing from the Gulf of Mexico to Labrador, excepting the Iroquois wedge of upper New York, then inland to the Great Lakes and Rockies--even the Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Cree, Potawatomi, and Sac and Fox spoke Algonquin, which skipped to the west coast: Wiyot, above San Francisco Bay, and Yurok, near the Oregon border, are Algonquin.

Our linguists assumed that languages Renaissance colonists and they themselves encountered in America were those of the original inhabitants--something untrue of England, Japan, Spain, France, Sicily, Turkey, Egypt, etc. And if the original they did not know Clovis-Pointers had predecessors, now carbon-dated 30,000 years ago in New Mexico and uranium-dated 200,000+ in the Calico Mountains of desert California (50,000 at Pedra Furada) or that Clovis Pointers were not Siberian, or factor a 7,000-year gap between the last known Clovis-Pointers, who seem to have died out with their large prey, and the first Woodlanders, who no longer enjoyed a Bering-Strait land bridge and possibly descended, in part, from circumpolar Red Paint People who crossed the opposite ocean. Positing an Athapaskan wave c 12,000 years ago, Greenberg computed 10,000 years too early--without benefit of Ethel Stewart's demonstration of the 1233-AD voyage from the sea-otter trading station at present day Vladivostok. Her date agrees with California the archaeologists' for Athapaskan arrival in California, c 1300 AD, mispresuming immemorial inland nomadism. All scientists saw the Eskimo wave as late (implicitly admitting a land-bridge to Alaska, let alone to Greenland, is unnecessary), while failing to see the BC Eskimo lateness nevertheless more than a millennium earlier than the Athapaskan.

Hearing the Indo-European in Amerind, linguists forgot their lexicostatistics by which any relationship after 15,000+ years' separation would be zero. We now realize the Indo-European languages disseminated with the spread of Neolithic farm villages long after the last glacier, in the language of the Goddess-religion that regulated agriculture and village life.

I suspect the Amerind/Algonquin culture similarly prevailed by way of the language of the religion that regulated agriculture--a process which could not begin in the Algonquin regions before 1000 BC when pottery first appeared (from overseas). Latercomers transferred farm and urban complexity that impressively progressed but aperiodically reverted.

We tend to forget regression; modern "primitives" once knew sophisticated math, for example. A colony extension freezes indefinitely at the state of transfer, while the generating vortex goes on changing--one reason for the lag between hemispheres; but Libyan and Iberic colonists, not to mention crude crews of refined nations, started at an arrested-Neolithic level. It is the farther Libyan, Numidian, that we call Old Libyan.

Since the Amerind language concentrated in eastern North America, its speakers ought to have penetrated from the east. Not till after World War II did experts realize that the circumpolar Red Paint culture could maintain Scandinavia-to-New-England contact with itself, as it did 7,000 years ago only by sea. A woodland-type stone coffin discovered in a Red-Paint Newfoundland mound they further glimpsed a possible Red Paint ancestry of Woodland moundbuilders who boxed ochred corpses in stone. Red Paint language would unlikely endure in Algonquin, but the ultimately intruded sacred language which prevailed doubtless creolized, as Fell conjectured, with languages already spoken. By the same process Indo-European had creolized native Neolithic and Early Bronze tongues into Hittite, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, etc.

FELL FOLLOWED UP the pioneer labors of Silas Rand in detecting Egyptian, Greek, Celtic, Semitic including Arabic, Norse, and, west of New England, Siberic as components of Algonquin [America BC 1976, 268-69, 283-84; Saga America, 1980, 399-404]. Siberic in westward Algonquin suggests--or eliminates--Siberic as the tongue various peoples ultimately interfused from the east.

RAND RECOGNIZED Greek roots in Micmac (the Algonquin dialect widespread over eastern Canada and New England), while compiling his Micmac primer and dictionary of 1875, 1878 AD. Roger Williams had recognized Greek words and syntax in Narragansett Algonquin in his 1643 AD dictionary and thought this "barbarous rockie speech", as he called it, more Greek than the Hebrew his learned fellow Bay clergymen thought it; William Penn in the next generation thought Algonquin-Shawnee in Pennsylvania sounded Hebraic. (His word-list sounds strikingly Mayan.)

Fell found Micmac essentially Egyptian and its surviving ritual script hieratic Egyptian. He recently deciphered Tunica and two other Gulf isolates as Egyptian--once joined to the vast Algonquin consociation that a medieval Mississippian thrust from the Louisiana delta to Virginia bisected. The Appalachee spearhead, which we assumed Algonquin, has proved Muskogean.

EGYPTIAN SPEECH and WRITING crossed the Atlantic from the Mediterranean at various times but not before the 12th century BC and infrequently by the Egyptians, rather as the ritual language of Carthaginians and Libyans whose sun-religion was Egyptian. Hieroglyphic epigraphy--Arkansas through Colorado--that Gloria Farley's glorious book reveals, compellingly reinforces an impression of Egyptians in person, yet proves Egyptian nationality no more than Latin Vulgate would prove Italian nationality. (The ritual language of the Zulu sun-religion is Libyan, not Swahili; of Russian Orthodoxy is Bulgarian--called Old Slavonic--not Russian or Greek.)

North-European mariners crossed the North Atlantic, and Moroccans the equatorial Atlantic long before 1200 BC but not speaking Egyptian. Phoenicians reached Brazil but not before the 10th century BC a nd then from the Red Sea instead of Spain. If making south Mexico and Central America before the 10th or after the mid-6th BC, they crossed the Pacific from the Red Sea. If ethnic Egyptians reached Hawaii and California before modern times, they crossed the Pacific from the Red Sea. Phoenicians could not sail west past a Mycenaean blockade from the 15th century BC to the demise of Mycenaean IIIC-Cypriot domination of the sea lanes west. Sometime after 1000 BC they sailed through the Mediterranean to Tartessos at the mouth of the Guadalquivir above Cadiz, but their voyage to Rio Harbor likely embarked rather from Ezion-Geber at the head of the Red Sea. Voyagers crossed the Pacific from Japan, Korea, the Yangtze mouth, Indo-China, and Indonesia--perhaps even the Persian Gulf--before 1200 BC who did not speak Egyptian. Oceangoing under Egyptian auspices could have commenced after 1175 BC east but implausibly west before 950 BC--even then orienting expansion northeast to Palestine as for 2000 years past.

NO writing, pottery, or legend documents a massive exodus of Egyptians west across the Mediterranean, let alone the Atlantic, though Egyptians from their Red Sea coast might have crossed the Indian Ocean and Pacific in small numbers as commanders, astronomers, or metal-ore detectives. Egyptian records so sparsely mention the sea that Alessandra Nibbi at Harvard University declared wadj-wer (Great Green) meant Delta. A unique predynastic-royal-tomb-fresco at Nekhen (Hierakonpolis), south Egypt, depicts--before 3,000 BC--a Jamdat-Nazr-type seagoing ship-and-Pacific traversable--as royal solar barks of Byblos cedar entombed disassembled 3rd dynasty on appear. Reliefs as early as the 5th dynasty depict shipbuilding for heavy sea cargo. Tutmosy III transported his army in ships to the mouth of the Eleutheros over the wadj-wer during his sixth expedition NE 1484 BC. His aunt Hatshepsut had made an epochal voyage down the Red Sea to Somalia in impressive-reliefed ships such as ran 73 yards long when Ramesu III expressly built wadj-wer cedar-freighters for Palestine tribute to Thebes and portaged Somalian to Memphis--nothing west. Egypt anyway relied mainly on Phoenicians, Libyans, and Greeks for seamanship.

RA JAIRAZBHOY thinks Egyptians seeking the sunset founded the Olmec civilization in the reign of Ramesu III, who, however, specified imperial ventures only south and as far as the hill-country of the Fenkhu (Phoenicians) NE. The Papyrus Harris' "great sea of inverted waters" that Jairazbhoy hopefully cites meant the Arabian Sea, into which flowed the Euphrates, which Egyptians knew as the reversed river. Heinrich Quiring and George Carter surmised Ramesu's pyrrhic Year-8 victories freed him to send gigantic cedar galleys for gold in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Pacific [ESOP 2(1), #27 (Feb, 1975), 1-10] but misread Papyrus Harris' 10,000 products traded to and from Punt as 10,000-man expeditions. Yet Egypt regained world influence. Ramesu reconquered Palestine to Beth-shan; Philistine temples flaunt statues of the current Rammessid Pharaoh. (Ogam shows up amidst hieroglyphics in the tomb of Ramesu VI.) Ramesu XI proclaimed a Renaissance Era his Year 19 (1100 BC), which led to the prosperous Delta-based 21st dynasty when the vizier of the North became Smendes I. Memphis, Tanis, and, in the west Delta, Sais, Egyptianized-Greek Naukratis, and Hellenized-Egyptian Alexandria throve great world ports, into which Jews and Arabs thronged. Alexandria stayed a fabulous megalopolis through Assyrian, Persian, Roman, medieval-Arab, and Ottoman Turkish times. The Greek-speaking Byzantine empire mastered the entire Mediterranean in the 6th century AD--too late to entrench Woodland Algonquin. The prior Egyptian stratum of Mexico/Central America/ and west South America seems transpacific, but Egypt's neglected metropolitan Delta-centered centuries offered disasters and opportunity for unchronicled boat-people to take flight to the west.

Pharaoh Necho II in Saite times sent a Phoenician fleet around Africa clockwise from the Red sea; Ptolemy III in Hellenistic times sent a Libyan fleet to circumnavigate the globe from the Red Sea. The earlier Phoenician voyage of the Paraiba inscription expressly reached Brazil from the Red Sea around Africa instead of from the Delta through the Mediterranean.

A bilingual Egyptian/Libyan stele excavated in 1888 AD at the tip of Long Island identifies a crew as coming form south Egypt, implying a Red Sea port, but, had they embarked as we would expect of an expedition that reached New York, at the 22nd-Dynasty Delta capital Bubastis, their voyage could not have predated the 10th-century dynasty-founder Shishonq (a name that turns up in ancient Spain and Texas--the Texan doubtless, as Fell notes, referring to a king in Libya long after the Libyan dynasties of Egypt).

THE EARLIEST EGYPTIAN inscriptions found in America tend to occur associated with Libyan, of which none predate 800 BC, Fell conceded [America BC, 268-71]. Might Libyan Egyptian have been Old Algonquin? Libyan inhered in Woodland Algonquin before redoubling in Muskogean after the Vandals conquered the western Mediterranean and Moslems overran North Africa--impelling, as Joseph Mahan diagnosed, the revolution of burial-mound Woodland to temple-mound Mississippian.

NO EVIDENCE WARRANTS dating suffusion of Egyptian throughout eastern America before the Iron-Age 1100s BC notwithstanding Fell's belief that the Algonquin ancestors departed Egypt possibly in the Neolithic, positively the Bronze Age. He imagined voyagers of the Libyan 22nd dynasty of Egypt teaching Algonquin Micmacs how to write in hieratic, the Egyptian they were already speaking [America BC, 285, 268, 270]. It did not occur to him that the Algonquin pioneers themselves might be Libyans using the ritual language of their Egyptian religion.

He identified Abnaki Mide script of the Indiana Pottawatamies as Cypriote [ESOP 8(1), #185 (1980), 44-49] and detected mixed Egyptian and Greek in the Abnaki/Micmac sacred medical terminology [ESOP 7(1), #139 (1979), 7-20], elsewhere also treating Abnaki and Algonquin Micmac interchangeably.

He dated American Cypriote epigraphy to Carthaginian times, when, however, the script was surely extinct in the Mediterranean. In America it could predate Egyptian or Phoenician--found on a Peruvian board game writing Quechua, on an Ecuadorian gold zodiac, and in Indiana, Michigan, and Georgia. Fell believed Cypriote lives in Cherokee and its Sequoyan syllabary. He detected Celtic as well as Greek in the Cherokee, judging Cypriote 1/3 Greek [ESOP 12(2), #307 (1984), 206-207; Saga America, 68-69; Ancient Vermont (1978), 76-79]. Like Linear B, Cypriote adapted signs of Minoan Linear A. The Metcalf Stone and other American specimens taken for Linear-A writing are likely Cypriote--the Mycenaean IIIC script of the Trojan-coalition losers of the Trojan War who shared Mycenaean culture and reconsolidated on the island of Cyprus.

MINOAN LABYRINTHS in America came with 8th-century-AD North-African refugees from the Arab conquest of North Africa who retained Neolithic and Bronze Age ways. Minoan Cretans never got past south Italy and east Sicily west, to judge by the pottery trail. Neither had Achaian Mycenaeans, who concentrated on the opposite Aegean shore east and Egyptian Delta south, their lucrative market for perfumed olive oil and laudanum. Nearly if not 100% of the pottery excavated at Akhnaton's capital Akhet-Aton is Mycenaean IIIA.

Gloria Farley's Pontotoc Stele from the South Canadian River of Oklahoma attests: the Aton heresy went secretly west with caravans to Carthage, Iberia, and America; the Aton-sun-rayed stele extracts Akhnaton's Hymn to the Sun in north-Portuguese Punic and Ogam Punic [ESOP 4(2), #93 (1977); Fell, America BC, 159] that could not predate the Punic-speaking/writing Carthaginian empire. Aton sunrays, Ogam, Punic--even the cartouche of Akhnaton's Chief Wife Nefertiti--appear on Burrows Cave stones, along with Carthaginian Tanit, horse heads, elephants, ships, 8-spoke wheels, etc.

THE 1259/58 BC TREATY of Ramesu II and Khattushilish III to bring peace to the Aegean and Near East by superpower reconciliation required each party to boycott enemies of the other. So Egypt cut off trade with Hittite-enemy Achaia, intensifying the Achaian encroachment on Hittite Asia Minor and turning Achaians to piracy on Egyptian commerce.

An Achaian combined with a Trojan Anatolian-Aegean-coast-plus-Kilikia coalition overthrew the Hittite empire and assaulted the Egyptian. Aging Pharaoh Merenptah halted their push south in and off the Negev during his Year 5 (1208 BC). The Achaian coalition returned against their exposed former-allied Trojan brethren 22 years later for the Trojan War, which in a decade drove masses of losers destructively downcoast to regroup on Cyprus and attack Egypt by land and sea in Year 8 of Ramesu III (1175 BC) as Libyan tribes simultaneously attacked from the west. Both aggressions failed against Egypt, but the Cypriot coalition destroyed each Achaian stronghold one by one--Mycenae itself, Tiryns, Knossos, Pylos, etc--sitting ducks after the Achaian-empire breakup into its component cities at the internal coup in the capital, Mycenae. The losers--now winners--controlled the sea lanes west, as superseding Cypriot pottery at Taranto and east Sicily verifies.

Of this Trojan-Cypriot coalition, tall Philistines of the Troad and off-lying islands wearing vertical-feather circle headdresses stand out in Medinet Habu reliefs of Ramesu III, labeled Peleset or Palesti in Egyptian (Hebrew Pelishtim, Greek Pelasgoi). Fell impossibly confused them with 6-centuries-earlier Norwegians but who look more like Narragansetts. They largely settled south Canaan; others stayed on Cyprus; still others meandered to Morocco and perhaps America. Etruscans in the coalition settled central Italy, Sicels Sicily, and Sardinians Sardinia. The founding of Cadiz on the Atlantic coast, which Strabo and Pliny date before 1100 BC, reflects this IIIC westward movement, not Phoenician, which a Cypriot-Mycenaean blockade penned before 1000 BC. The Odyssey may recall the first Mediterranean/America roundtripping, as Henriette Mertz discerned, but classical Greeks forgot in their horizon-shrunk dark age when they lost literacy and a sense of time/chronology.

THE FALL OF TROY and the reverse-destructions took place close together in telltale pot-style-clocking Mycenaean IIIC:1. Achaian pirates joined their avenging cousins of the same life-style who spoke a Luvian/Greek koine, ie, Cypriote, and traversed the Mediterranean in the wake of Odysseus, who was gone 20 years.

Dorian, Phrygian, and Israelite displacing freed Phoenicians to sail to the Strait of Gibraltar, but, within two centuries of their founding Carthage and other colonies in West Africa, the rise of Classical Greece again blocked them westward, and a series of powers--Saite Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Makedonian Greece, Ptolemaic Egypt, and Rome commandeered the Phoenician merchant marine for their navy.

Carthage meanwhile blocked the Greeks from the western Mediterranean as the Greeks blocked them from the eastern, obliging Carthage to maintain contact with her Egyptian Vatican, Libyan/Sudanese-speaking, virtually-independent remote Siwa Oasis, by caravan.

A GREEK COLONY in arctic America, whose memory Plutarch preserved c 100 AD, would have been Carthaginian manned by Greek slaves and/or mercenaries before Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BC in the 3rd Punic War [On the Face that Appears in the Moon]. Plutarch's source was an early-AD stranger who returned to rebuilt Roman Carthage from an island off the colony's American coast. Greek town names and funerary inscriptions along the Amazon River system bespeak, also, forgotten Carthaginian slave-colonization there [Mertz, ESOP 4(2), #83 (1977); Bernardo da Silva Ramos, Inscripcoes (Rio, 1932)]. If this colony lay in the vicinity of Chignecto Bay, Newfoundland, it would square with Mertz's diagnosis of the Odyssey. If Fell's hypothesis of American Cypriote as Punic-instead of IIIC-associated would happen to hold up, Plutarch's colony would relate to the Abnakis of Maine.

THE EMPEROR AURELIANUS'S 272-AD leveling of Syrian Palmyra (NW of Damascus, opposite Cyprus) partly accounts for the Arabic Fell found permeating Algonquin. Refugee escape to and through the Roman Mediterranean must have followed the model of Bar-Kokhba Jews 140 years before. Fell deciphered a Peabody Museum Manitoba-Cree birchbark manuscript praising God in the Consonantal Arabic alphabet of Steles in Palmyra's ruins, which was also that of the Algonquin Ojibway writing. (The steles lay undeciphered until the latter 19th century.) [ESOP 3(1), #54 (1976).] Algonquin was not altogether or necessarily primeval but still formulating medievally late. And Roman-Palmyran Arabic was not its latest accretion.

FIGURINES FROM THE WOODLAND burial mounds exhibit incredible ethnic diversity--oriental, negroid, caucasian, but the bones of the dead do not differ from the Indians' who inhabit the same areas today (except for signs of seasonal malnutrition). Culture does not always equal ethnicity or does significant impact mean large numbers. Indian tribes celebrated a solitary man or small group who once taught them civilization.

Mahan sees nonmongoloid Yuchi miccos or shamans as the binding element in the farflung Shawano confederation of Algonquin-speakers, which embraced the Muskogeans who invaded with a temple-mound culture speaking a non-Algonquin tongue--inferrably Libyan--which had reached America with Egyptian long before.

Scythian/Sogdian Indo-Persian Yuchi (which sounds Semitic) was a different language from Algonquin Shawnee within the Shawano confederation. Yuchi Sun-King Samuel Brown Jr, who spoke Yuchi, Muskogean Creek, and Shawnee, said the secret Shawano-confederation ritual language Red Man was different from these. US Indian Agent John Johnston wrote in 1819 AD that Shawnees on the Ohio hardly understood their own archaic ritual language, which, if preserved exact while everyday speech kept changing, should logically be the purer Egyptian that the priests arrived with. By the 18th or 20th century AD, it would sound as Chaucerian English to modern English. (Coptic congregations today do not understand their ritual language, which priests still read in the original Coptic.) Yuchi priests did not write or ceased to write in Red Man, heard since 1819 AD only by initiates.

YUCHIS, Mahan elucidates, were a moon people with sun kings, their tribe comprising a union of two traditions back in Bronze Age Central Asia. Egypt became the world's first and longest-enduring superpower by the union of Two Lands--the Red Kingdom, or Delta, and White Kingdom, or Upper Egypt. A pharaoh wore the Red and White Crowns alternately or combined. On Yuchi analogy, Upper Egyptians would have regarded themselves a white-fire Moon people, Lower Egyptians as red-fire Sun-blood people.

SUBJECTS and ALLIES of Carthage included Iberians, Etruscans, and Libyan-speaking tribesmen from Kyrenaika to Cape Verde on the coast, Siwa to Timbuctu in the desert. These Libyan-speakers all embraced the Egyptian religion of Carthage, whose chief god Ba'al Hammon was Punic "Lord Amon". War prisoners consisted largely of Greeks taken in modern-scale wars on Sicily, but Sicilian Greeks turned allies during the all-out 2nd Punic War. Carthaginians commanded but were too few to man the mighty fleets, endless caravans, and distant garrisons

Egypt had similarly employed Phoenicians and Greeks, as Rome, later, Greeks, Libyans, and Gauls. When Saite Naukratis in the West Delta throve the world's greatest port, its native mariners and merchants were Greek-descended Egyptian citizens speaking Greek and Egyptian interchangeably. They would have transmitted Egyptian religion and language as well as Greek. The native language of Jews outside of Judea was Greek. Fell found an anomalous Egyptian dialect in West Libya and a Canaanite dialect in Morocco.

Many desert Libyans of the Carthaginian labor-pool dwelt in tholos huts, got tattooed, and wore Pontiac and other familiar American-Indian hair-styles, sprouting ostrich feathers--in many ways retaining the archaic usage of the Trojan-coalition Sea Peoples, which only the backward Carians of the Aegean world held over into Classical times. The ideal of Libyan tribesmen was the warrior. In American isolation they stagnated at this already-arrested level.

The Libyan 22nd and 23rd dynasties of Egypt--more Egyptian than the Egyptians themselves--insisted on the old Egyptian culture, which they galvanized in an official archaizing revival. Assyrian incursion up-the-Nile reintroduced in Egypt the language which was essentially old Semitic Akkadian that Akhnaton had still employed in the Amarna Letters. Persian domination introduced, not Persian, but Semitic Aramaic into the writing practice of the Egyptian bureaucracy.

Egyptian, Punic, Celtic, and Libyan sometimes occur together in America--occasionally with Greek and/or Iberic. Languages comprising Algonquin appear together at numerous sites--two or more at a time--in an Egypto-Libyan-Punic context, most notably Burrows Cave, potsherds from whose top silt--evidently the latest phase before sealing--fall borderline Woodland/Early Mississippian, contemporary with the sudden rise of Cahokia not far west, the likely cause of sealing/abandonment c 800 AD. Chief Brown confided to Mahan that the Shawano never told the Creeks the secret of this Skillet-Fork cave's existence though admitting them to the confederation.

Gloria Farley detected the Egyptian day/night-balancer cemetery-god Anubis with flail rising on his back in the Oklahoma-panhandle Anubis Cave (where his name was written Inpu, the Egyptian form) and a Libyan- script/Celtic-ogam/Egyptian-hieroglyphic trilingual equinoctial inscription.

Below the Saharan Fezzan of far-SW Libya, where dwelt Carthaginian Garantes allies, reliefs like several Gloria found along the Cimarron River stretch complete with horse, spear-bearer, Tanit, and Libyan ogam [Farley, ESOP 3(2), #69 (1976) and 8(2), #198 (1980), 157-161; Fell 3(2), #76 (1976)].

Such evidence multiplies consistently, distantly, overwhelmingly.

WHILE TRANSOCEANIC VOYAGES took place in remote times, none that any evidence warrants emanated from the Mediterranean Sea with Nile antecedents before the instigating of the dreadful upheaval of the late-13th to early-10th centuries BC, when the Achaian, Hittite, and Egyptian empires disintegrated during a protracted drought concurrent with floods to the north that drove hordes of people south from the Danube--when city-destruction, chaos, plague, and piracy reigned, folk-wanderings changed the map, and depopulation ran to 80%. Not for nothing did this composite Trojan-War event obsess the Classical mind.