During one of Alexander’s marches, near the
Sea of Galilee, a hand’s throw away from the legendary Garden of Eden, near the
Macedonian camping site, was said to be, a soldier, and pupil of Aristotle, and
Theophratos, of Lyceum University at Athens (Macedonian veteran), and scholar
known to be: Kebes, who became fascinated with the unnaturally shaped stones
collected from the surrounding farms, in which he kept until after Alexander’s
Campaigns: he made drawings of them, and were uninteresting to the artisans at
the Athens’s Academy, but he interpreted them, and the Academy’s view of
them, in the following manner:
“If you look at a map of the world you will see Europe, Greece, and a
bent finger that leads into the Mediterranean Sea.
South of that, lies Crete, east the Aegean Sea, hence, we are in Asia
Minor, we have behind us the Pillars of Hercules,
and in front of us India, we have Jerusalem, and ancient Egypt, but who
can tell me were these unnatural shaped stones I’ve
collected, came from, no one. I asked: who carved this stone? What
beginnings of civilization carved them? What where these
people called? And were they people?
And the group of scholars listening, said—gasping: ‘You dare to pass old
stones on
to us?’ I didn’t respond, but
asked instead: What population did this come from? The Jew, the Egyptian? They looked at a map,
and the isolated fragments I had brought to them to view, and said
nothing, as if it was of no value. I said to them: It is time that
you know. I told them: one population precedes another, is this not so? And I added: If we do not know, then it
must be older than all those we do know of, this only makes sense. They looked at me
as if I was an intrusive sea. They told
me, ‘It’s from some wonderer of long ago.’ This I agreed to, it was obvious.
But how
long ago, and who were they? I asked.
They again looked at a map, an older map. A voice said from the group:
‘Elephant Hunters of long ago.’ Traditions and dogmas rubbed one another down
to a minimum of conversation; they wanted to talk of Plato’s
philosophies or Aristotle’s teachings with Alexander. Not unnatural cut
stones. But I think as they pondered, these Elephant
Hunters, as they called them: had teeth, perhaps skulls smaller than
ours, I have seen them too, and some cracked abruptly, with
force. Perhaps they, like us,
picked fruit from the trees, but more so, because there are no animals in that
area worthy of eating,
lest elephants. I didn’t ask them to consider this—it would be indigent,
and they would no longer have anything to do with me, but
I
think: maybe our ancestress were from a hinterland we know little to nothing
about, and such be our past, and this they and
we
in the past have never considered, as if we always were, but they know
we were not always—I told myself: they know that
Greece and Egypt were not the beginnings, only the beginning of Greece:
before it was Greece—who were we? we forgot what it we were called, and
likewise, Egypt forgot what Egypt was
called, and the Sea of Galilee, was the sea with no name but it was there—and
in time the Jews appeared, gave it a proper name, and the Elephant Hunters, as
my comrades have called them, were there,
but not the elephant, the elephant was never there: and they know this,
even if they do not say they know this because they know Alexander brought the
elephants there on a war march, and I was there with the elephants, and so they
are known not to have
been part of this land mass. And they also know, that there was before
them a population, and before them another population:
countless—but they do not want to open that ancient door, perhaps they
think the gods will forbid this kind of knowledge,
become angry—like at Troy and cause a stampede in the heavens, one that
will break the earth open as it did with Troy, and
we will become like the gods,
and then what?...”
#3354 (5-21-2012)
