Greek Mythology
Partial Truths of Epikoros Theology
Belus was the King of Egypt, and father of Danaus and his brother Aegyptus. Belus’s wife was either Achiroe, or Side1 - potentially both given the polygamous nature of Kings from this region - with Side being a clear designation for the Phoenecian capital in the era and mother city, Sidon. Achieroe is also clear as a “daughter of Nilus”2, essentially representing the native Egyptians. The identification of the exact mother for Danaus and Aegyptus is unclear, but Danaus has a daughter also named Side for whom a town of Greek Laconia was named.
Reportedly his twin brother Agenor ruled Phoenicia - which makes sense given his potential marriage to Side - making Belus King of Egypt, aligning with his fatherhood of Aegyptus and Danaus, himself a King of Libya. Similarly, Agenor may have married the daughter of Belus named ‘Damno’, birthing four children: Cadmus, Cilix, Europus, and Phoenix. Cadmus was the legendary Phoenician founder of the Boeotian city of Thebes in Greece, and reportedly the one who brought the Phoenician script over to Greek, creating the Greek alphabet. Cilix is Cilicia, Europus was his only daughter, and obviously namesake of “Europe”, and Phoenix is their proper term for Phoenicia.
From a marriage between Zeus and Europa we get a son named “Minos” where modern scholars have post-facto given this name to the civilization on Crete called Minoa, where Minos was King. We see an indication that for the Greeks, Minoans had an association of descent from Phoenicians which would correlate with the Torah potentially including Minoans as one of Ham’s descendants, like the Phoenicians, rather than being part of the Japhethites.
Eventually both the descendants of Danaus and Aegyptus reunite and intermarry into the Argos royal family through the daughter of Lacedaemon and his wife Sparta - both obvious names of the “Dorian” people and the lands they settle. In this lineage is born a daughter named Danae, the daughter of Argos’s King, birthing the legendary hero Perseus founder of Mycenae.
While this story is seemingly nothing but a myth, it serves in the eyes of the ancient Greeks to explain how people such as the Danaans (Danaus) arrived in Argos, mixed with the Lacedaemonians/Spartans, “Dana-ized” their culture and founded Mycenaean civilization. We see an attempt to explain Minoa, how the Greek language arrived from Phoenicia, how shipbuilding traditions began, and attempts to legitimize founders of major Kingdoms - such as Minos and Perseus through being the sons of Zeus; as well as Agenor (Phoenicia) and Belus (Egypt) are created by the god of primordial waters and brother of Zeus, Poseidon.
While a full discussion of Greek myths isn’t necessary, it should be mentioned that Poseidon and Zeus, along with their third brother Hades, operated as a sort of “Creator, Sustainer, Destroyer” trio of gods. This triad mythos is found throughout Indo-European culture, with examples like: Odin, Freyr, and Thor (Norse); Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva (Hinduism), The One, The Thought, The Soul (Neoplatonism) and even the obvious “The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit” of Christianity which served as an attempt to subsume this dominate belief archetype. What is important about this is that we see Poseidon “birth” many of the foundational civilizations - at least from the Greek view point - but Zeus is the one who maintains, and founded many of the later Kingdoms from what Poseidon sets up.
So far all of this has not been “Greek genealogy” but rather “Argive genealogy.” Argive in this case relating to the terms Achaean and Danaan, which could all interchangeably be used to refer to the cultural substrate making up the “Mycenaean Era” of Greek history. In other words, Dodanim-Kittim, or Denyen-Ekwesh.
Through Perseus and his numerous children and grandchildren we get many of the figures notable in the Dark Ages of Greek mythology, however if we want to understand the Greek genealogy rather than Argive we have to look at who they claimed descent from, the eponymous Hellen, where we get the term Hellenes. Hellenes would be the Greek version of a “unified” term for all Greek peoples similar to the Hebrew Javan. Like Javan’s four children Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim and Dodanim, Hellen also has four children named Dorus, Achaeus, Ion, and Aeolus corresponding to the four primary Greek cultures.
The story of the Heracleidae, descendants of the legendary Heracles, is likely a misreading of the diffusion of Doric culture and language across Greece. Among his descendants is none other than the Rhodian King Tlepolemus showing how the Dorians are associated with Rhodes. Another example of this is Hyllus, son of Hercules, who engages in prolonged military wars with the King of Mycenae. Hyllus joins with the ancestor of the Dorians, and attacks the Mycenaeans, conquering their territory and founding the states that go on to become “Dorian”. While the “invasion” of these so-called Heracleans is doubtful, it was more than likely a peaceful co-mingling with the native peoples of the land following a large depopulation during the Bronze Age Collapse.
What we see is a transition between Argive and Greek proper where many of these groups diffuse and assimilate with the inhabitants of Greece, forming new cultures. This “Dorian” era corresponds to the period of Greek assimilation, juxtaposing with the more “Mycenaean” Argive period. How these earlier Greeks and later Greeks correspond is unclear, and still requires work to fully understand the tapestry of their ancestry seemingly as complex as the mythologies they composed.
For our purpose I would like to separate “Pre-Greek” mythology and “Proper Greek” mythology. Legends related to Argive figures are not in fact natively the stories of the Greeks who are telling them, and are perhaps passed down from many of the Near Eastern cultures from whom these figures claim descent. Modern scholars tend to group “mythology” into one bucket, but the reality is that ‘mythology’ is simply a term for ancient writings which can have a variety of focus and intents. What is Homer’s Catalog of Ships? Is this a story meant to relate ethics, or philosophical inquiry, or is the catalog an attempt to explain historical migrations? When Plato writes his allegory of the cave, or discusses his ideal society in The Republic, is he claiming the cave is a literal place that exists, or that the Republic is a prophetic society that will be set up in the days to come? Indeed the actual “category” of ancient mythological works needs to be fleshed out further if we want to understand the way ancient Greeks viewed what they were writing.
Mythology can be divided into three traditional categories: Etiological, Historical, Psychological. Etiological myths - coming coincidentally from the Greek term for reason “Aetion” - explain how something came to be, or why something is the way it is; in other words origin stories. Historical, as the name suggests, are meant to serve as literal retelling of past events that happened, but oftentimes infusing these stories with great meaning by rearranging, or including important elements to heighten metaphorical imagery. A psychological myth on the other hand is meant to be an exploration into someone's mind through non-literal language to help teach something, or provide meaning. While these are the classical designations of myth, the problem here is that the Torah serves as all three, and specifically the Table of Nations is not just a origin story, nor is it simply a historical narrative, but also an attempt to explain the past to readers from not just our ancient past, well into the future. In other words, the Table is not merely myth, and ascends these simplistic categorizations that serve as mere inputs to our informational understanding of the Torah.
This distinction is important because one should not mistake these sources for anything similar to Torah, even if they confirm aspects, or provide clues to the ancient context. There can be some simple layer of truth to these mythologies that has been lost to time, only recoverable from these fragments of history embedded in the mythology. Very obviously all of these Argive myths encode a memory of an era when Myceneans were navigating the Mediterranean, up-ending the world order. Similarly, the Heroic Epics of the Homeric age record the perspective of the growing ‘Greek’ peoples and their own fantastic conquests of the once Mycenaean territory.
