PART
4 – Ch.XXIV.2
Prehistoric
monuments of metallurgic art in
(Stele Chryse Megale – The great gold column)
XXIV. 2. The country of
Uranos in the region of
Evhemerus’
According to Evhemerus, the old king Uranus, while he ruled the world
empire, often spent time in the region named Panchea, which formed a part of
Which was though
Uranus’ country? It is the first question which presents itself here, in order
to orient ourselves about the geographical situation of “
According to Diodorus Siculus, the inhabitants near
the Atlas Mountain (Oltului), the
masters of the “blessed country”,
who excelled by their special piety and their hospitality towards all their
neighbors, boasted that the gods of the ancient world were born there.
Thus they said that
the first king of theirs was Uranos, the Sky, Ceriul, in the later meaning of the word, in reality “Muntean” (N.T. – of the mountain), as
this name derives from ouros, in
Ionic form, mountain. They said that
this Uranos had first gathered together the people who lived on their own, and
made them assemble in communes; that he gave them laws and stopped them live
lawlessly, or by the manner of the wild beasts; he taught them to cultivate the
good fruit and conserve them; he subjected the most of the world, especially
the lands towards west and north; that he, especially devoted to the study of
the courses of the stars, could predict many things which could happen in the
universe; that he established the rules of the year, by the motion of the sun
and made them known to men; he divided the year in months by the motion of the
moon…His name was then applied to the sky, not only because he had known in
depth about the rising and setting of the stars and other sky phenomena, but at
the same time in order to make known his merits to the entire world.
Uranos’ rule in the
northern parts of Istru appears not only in the tradition of the Hyperboreans from near Mount Atlas,
which Diodorus communicates, but it forms at the same time the foundation of
the oldest Pelasgian legends, written about in the poems of Homer and Hesiodus.
The origin of all the gods, tells us Homer, was at Okeanos potamos.
The “Arabia felix” of Evhemer, crossed by a
great number of rivers, a country which was characterized by its abundant
crops, rich in flocks, gold and silver mines, copper and tin, with its pious
people and its patriarchal organization, is one and the same with the “blessed
country”, or the happy region of the inhabitants from near Mount Atlas, where
it was the country and residence of Uranos, the first founder of the great
Pelasgian empire.
As a geographical
region,
Even in the most
ancient Greek legends the Istru (‘Istros)
appears as a son of
Similarly, the Latin
poet Plautus, who lived in the 3rd
century b.c., mentions an Arabia
near the Euxine Pontus, a country,
says he, where grows in abundance the absinth (Comoediae, Trinumus, Act III).
The Pontic Arabia of Plautus stretched from the Hem Mountain, along the shores
of the Black Sea up towards the river Borysthene or Dnieper (TN – Nipru), a
region about which the poet Ovid writes
that “it makes him shiver, its deserted plains covered only with the sad
absinth, bitter harvest, worthy of the earth which produced it” (Ep. Ex Ponto.
III. 1. 23-24).
In the 17th
century we find described by Paul of
Aleppo the same European
Apart from the
mythological genealogy of Istru, son of
The geographer Ptolemy says (Geogr. lib. III. c. 10.
7), that the shore of the Black Sea, starting from the northern arm of the
Danube, to the mouths of the river Borysthene and bordered at west by the river
Hierasus or Siret, was inhabited by a population called Arpii, while Ammianus
Marcellinus calls the same land
Arabia (lib. XXXI. C. 3).
Finally, the
erudite archaeologist Bessonov of
To all these
ancient geographical sources about Arabia from near the Istru we shall add here
another characteristic fact, namely that during the Middle Ages, on the
heraldic coats of arms of the Romanian country were shown three African heads,
meaning Arab, and two on those of
Moldova (Homer calls the pious
Hyperboreans from near Oceanos, Ethiopians
- Iliad, I. 22; Aeschyl, Prom.
vinct. v. 808).
As we see, the name
Only the confusion
made by the Greek authors of the epoch of decadence of geography, is
responsible for the fact that the name “