Publisher's Synopsis
This book presents three original concepts:
- The route of Jason and the Argonauts through Finland just before the Trojan War.
- Decipherment of all proper names in Argonautica.
- Reconstruction of ancient cities by recognizing post holes in aerial photographs.
Many readers will be familiar with the Argonauts, but not the location of their voyage. In agreement with Felice Vinci, the Aegean Sea is moved from Greece to Finland. This move allows a straight-forward reconstruction of the route of the Argo, with 160 identities accompanied by 24 city plans along the route. This route is quite compact, entirely within 30 miles of Olympos.
This book hopes to dispel the perception that Finland was a backwater during the Bronze Age. It presents detailed images of city after city visited by Jason and the Argonauts during their four-month voyage. Jason started at Pelasgia, next to Mt. Pelion. Its present name, 'Old Man Hill', refers to Zeus, who lived nearby at Olympos in 2000 BC, 800 years before the Argo set sail.
While following the voyage of the Argo, I discovered that most Greek deities perished in 1940 BC, when the Icelandic volcano Hekla erupted and spewed deadly hydrogen fluoride. Construction of buildings at Olympos and Lemnos ended at this time.
The reconstruction of Jason's route was made possible by a brilliant insight from Felice Vinci of Rome (Homer in the Baltic, 1993). Based on scraps of evidence, he deduced that the List of Ships in Book 2 of Homer's Iliad proceeded counter-clockwise around the Baltic Sea beginning north of Stockholm. In short order he found a hundred matches, in sequence. In this list, Troija appears near Toija, 15 km east of Salo. Troy lies 10 km away, at an intersection named Yli-kulma meaning 'high corner', similar to Iliad from Yli-ahta meaning 'high trap'. Across the road was the famous settlement Pohjola in the Finnish epic Kalevala. In this epic, Väinämöinen is the same person as the legendary bard Iason; his brother Ilmarinen is the same person as Dardanus. Dardanus and his wife Bateia founded Dardania on land she owned near Pohjola. Later kings changed the name to Troija in honor of the Trojans from Turkey. Both burial mounds of Dardanus and Iason lie on twin islets 4 km south of Troija.
The route is fun, full of surprises, like the dragon, or the cutting down of the sacred grove of oak trees that bore the fleece. Only one name matches that on a topo map, Lemnos, all else has been forgotten. The original Olympos is alluded to as the settlement of tall and large men. Children were all named by a grandparent upon their first encounter using an algorithm that Homer hinted at for Ulysses.
