ACHILLES’ TUMULUS OR BURIAL MOUND IN THE ALBA (white) ISLAND (LEUCE)

PART 1 - Ch.V.4

(The temple of the Hyperboreans in Leuce island)

V. 4. ‘Okeanos (the Ocean) in the old traditions.

In the Apollinic legends, near the pious Hyperboreans, and north of the Greek zone, appears also the archaic Ocean, which plays such an important role in the Urano – Saturnian theogony. Hecateus Abderitas tells us that Apollo’s island from the region of the Hyperboreans, was in the parts of the Ocean.

The word Oceanos did not have in the beginning the meaning which was later given to it by the Greek authors, or in other words, the primitive Ocean of the old legends is not the Ocean of the historians and geographers, beginning even with old Herodotus’ time.

At the time of Homer, the Greeks did not know the external sea, which today we call ocean. They had not explored westwards even the whole of the Mediterranean Sea. And as for the northern areas of Europe, their geographical notions had not extended in that epoch farther than the Black Sea and the Lower Danube. The world was not always known as it is today, and even in Herodotus’ time, a quite late epoch after all, the geographic Greek horizon stopped at the Lower Danube. “North of Thrace” writes Herodotus, “nobody can know what sort of people live; it only seems that beyond the Istru there is uninhabited, infinite land” (lib. V. c. 9).

On another hand, the word Okeanos is not even Greek (the Greeks had only the general term of Thalassa for the notion of sea). It belongs to the archaic Pelasgian lexicon, by its original form (aqua), as well as by the ending an – os. By its primitive meaning, the word Oceanos meant big stagnant water [1].

[1. In Romanian language the word ochiu (and more correctly ociu) has the meaning of locus paluster (Lexiconul de Buda) and lake (TN – lac)(Cihac, Dictionnaire d’etymologie Daco-Romane, I. 184). So the form Ocean appears only as an increase in meaning of ochiu, ociu, meaning big lake. According to Diodorus Siculus (I, 12. 5) the ancients understood by the word Oceane, humidity].

In the beginning the authors of antiquity used the word Oceanos as they had borrowed it from the Pelasgians, applying it exclusively to the Black Sea, which in a very remote prehistoric epoch, was only an immense lake, having no outlet to the Mediterranean Sea (Strabo, Geogr. I. 3. 4). Strabo also tells us (Geogr. I. 2.10), when speaking about the Argonauts sailing towards the land rich in gold (Colchis), that in that epoch the Black Sea was considered as another Ocean.

He says that those who navigated on the Black Sea, considered themselves as having traveled as far from the inhabited world, as if they had gone beyond the Columns of Hercules, and everybody believed that this sea was the most vast among the seas, reason for which it had been given the name of Pontos.

Even the archaic name Axenos (Axenus), given in the beginning to the Black Sea, was only a simple form of Greek pronunciation of the old Pelasgian word Ocean (Oceanos)(Strabo, Geogr. V. 3; Mela, lib. I. c.19). The antique etymologies which propose that Okeanos would derive from the adjective ochus, fast, and Axenus from the Greek word Axenos, inhospitable, have neither meaning, nor historical basis.

On another hand we find in Gaul even in the 4^th century ad, the form Accion ( = Ocean), used as a name for the vast lakes (Rufus Aviennus, Ora maritima/ after Mullerus in Cl. Ptolemaei Geographia, Ed. Didot, p.235).

This Ocean (or vast lake) of prehistoric geography, included not only the hydrographic basin of the Black Sea, but at the same time the wide, deep and slow course of the Istru, or the lower Danube.

So, in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (Argon. IV. 282), a work of important Alexandrine erudition, the “wide and deep” lower Danube or Istru appears under the name of the Gulf or Horn of the Ocean (Keras Okeanoio).

But the name of Oceanos was applied exclusively to the lower Danube (Okeanos potamos), especially in the theogonic legends of Homer (Odyss. XII.1) and Hesiodus (Theogonia, v.242. 959), probably because this great river of the ancient world was considered the final left over of the great masses of water which had covered the basin of the Romanian country and Hungary in past geological epochs. This explains at the same time why the dwellings of the Hyperboreans appear to have been near the Ocean with Hecateus, while with Pindar they appear near the Istru or the lower Danube (Olymp.III.17).

We’ve therefore established that, from a geographical point of view, the Hyperboreans’ Ocean, about which Hecateus Abderita writes, is neither the Arctic Ocean, nor the Western Ocean, or other unknown or imaginary sea, but exclusively the sea located north of the Greek world, the sea which Herodotus names “the most admirable of all seas” (lib. IV. 85), which Pomponius Mela (lib. I.c.19) and Dionysius Periegetus (Orbis Descriptio, v. 165) name “immense sea”, which the Romanian folk traditions name the Sea of seas (Codrescu, Bucium. Rom. III. 139) and which is named “Mare majus” on the medieval geographic maps.

In this Ocean therefore, at the edge of the Greek known world, was the holy island of Apollo, which, as we shall see in the following chapters, presents itself in everything as the Leuce Island or Alba (TN – white), which later on was consecrated to the memory and tomb of Achilles.

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