Y-chromosomal and Mitochondrial Haplogroups: Window Into Prehistory

1. Introduction

Before DNA sequencing was developed around the turn of this century (you can see Wikipedia for a summary of the details: see especially "shotgun sequencing"), prehistory was a relatively blank slate. Scientists knew that anatomically modern humans had spread out of Africa, reaching Australia and the Americas after Eurasia. Carbon-14 dating in the 1950s let them start putting dates on the available fossils. And that was pretty much it. People could spread all sorts of weird theories, whether in academia or less reputably, and except for the most extraordinary claims, like huge lost civilizations in places that weren't flooded at the end of the last Ice Age, who could say?

Then it became possible to sequence a living or dead person's mitochondria, which is passed without recombination from mothers to children of both sexes, a male's Y-chromosome, passed without recombination from father to sons, even whole genomes. Suddenly evidence for who was doing what in prehistory got stronger.

2. Y-Haplogroups

Male lines A (Khoisan and West African forager) and B (Central African inc. Pygmies) are earliest African.

C-M130 is found at highest frequencies among indigenous people of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russian Far East, Polynesia, Australia.

D is found at high frequencies only in Andaman Islands, Tibet, Hokkaido, Sakhalin, Kamchatka. It was dominant among the high-density Jomon foragers of Japan. (Ainu = 1/3 Jomon-1/3 Okhotsk-1/3 rice farmer).

E1b1b1 appeared in Levant, was spread by Near East Neolithic colonists: North Africa, Ethiopia and Somalia 60-80%, Egypt 40%, Semitic-speakers (outside Africa), Cyprus, Sicily-South Italy and the Balkans 18-27%, except Kosovo 45%. Other E clades evolved in North Africa, E1b1a expanding with Niger river agriculture and later Bantu.

F split from GHIJK in India.

G appeared to the west and was spread by Neolithic colonists: up to 91% of 5000-3000 BC males from Central Germany, Alps, France, Catalonia. Now 5% there except Tyrolian Alps (40%), 5-13% Iran, 31% Georgia and up to 74% in Causasian minorities.

H exists at 25-40% in South India and Roma, otherwise spread at 2-10% from Levant by Neolithic colonists (5500 BC Linear Pottery Culture, Spain) and much later Khmer.

Basal IJ appeared in Iran (only place found today) >45,000 years ago.

I appeared in Europe by 31,300 years ago, associated with male survivors of the Last Glacial Maximum, became the majority lineage of European foragers, now highest in Dargwa (NE Caucasian) 58%, Croats up to 73% (Herzegovina, Hvar island), south Sweden 55-60%, Norway 45%.

J appeared between Yemen and Levant 43,000 years ago. J-M304* is rarely found outside island of Socotra (Yemen). Clade J2 later spread by Neolithic colonists, presently Ingush (NE Caucasian) 89%, Crete up to 44%, down to 2-10% in Scandinavia and North European plain, Central Asia, Niger river, Indian-colonized SE Asia. Clade J1 is strongly associated with Semitic-speakers at decreasing frequency from Yemen (76%), e.g. Iraqis 33%, African Arabs around 20%: pastoralist origin?

K split in India, K1/LT diversifying in place/spreading west, K2a (parent to NO) appearing somewhere between SE Asia and Omsk >45,000 years ago and K2b splitting into K2b1/MS (Melanesians/non-Andaman Negritos and 1/3 Australians) & P (ancestor of Native American Q and Eurasian R).

L existed by 4200 BC, found at 33% in Chalcolithic south Armenia (3% in Bronze Age Bactria). It has highest concentration in Karnataka (68% in one tribe), Tamil Nadu and spread almost nowhere east of India: 25-28% in Balochistan, northern Pashtuns, Kalasha, 55% in Parsi priests, drops to 1-5% in Danubian Europe, east France, England, Ireland, Arabian peninsula, Egypt. T is found in isolated pockets that peak in SE India and north Somalia.

N is North Eurasian: Samoyedic Uralic speakers up to 75-99%, Estonians and Saami 40%, Siberian Turkic peoples 27-84%, Tungusic-speakers up to 45%, Buryats 20-48%. Spread after Beringia disappeared. Uralic speakers arrived in the Baltic 500 BC.

O appeared between Bengal and the Mekong 34-39,000 years ago, later expanded with rice farmers. Note that most Austronesian ethnicities are dominant O but Polynesian founders merged with C-M38 east of Indonesia.

Q is widely distributed in Asia at rates of 2-10%, but 94% of Kets (Yenisei river near Altai), 66% of Selkups (Samoyedic), 60% of Chelkans (Turkic, Altai region). Oldest sample is >15,000 BC from Yenisei. 6 subclades founded the Americas: up to 94% of natives except in Alaska and much of Canada (80% Inuit and Na-Dene speakers besides Navajo). On the Asian side of the Bering Sea, 33% of Chukchi people, 39% of Yupik Eskimos.

R is known to have existed in Siberia by the Last Glacial Maximum, but both R1a and R1b show young expansions. Most R1a men are R1a1a1, which itself split in two estimated 5,800 years ago, with Europeans and Indo-Iranians having different clades (yet Asian clade Z93 has been found from 6,000 years ago in Ukraine). From 2900 BC, 75% of Corded Ware Culture men had European R1a1a1, while Asian diversification correlates with Indus Valley population boom around 2600 BC: now highest in Poles and some Sindhi/Punjabi/Gujarati groups (60-72%). R1b1a is first found in Venetia 14,100 years ago and now strongly concentrated in Western Europe (where Iberia has unique R1b3), but present in 100% of Yamnaya steppe samples (3300-2600 BC) and a Kura-Araxes sample (4000-2600 BC Caucasian).

Takeaways, working backwards from R to A:

The presence of R1a in 4000 BC Ukraine, highly diversified in Bronze-Age-to-now India, and none recovered from the burial mounds of Yamnaya or presumed successor cultures (Andronovo, etc.) partially demolishes the belief of most Indo-Europeanists that R1 distribution supports their pre-existing belief that IE and Hinduism were introduced by an invasive new element not a year earlier than 1500 BC. Hindu fundamentalists would prefer that it originated in India, but it looks more like a Western at-least-males element entered India around the time the wheel was introduced, which predates the Mature Indus Valley Civilization by about 700 years (~3300 BC in India as well as places as far off as Central Europe). In turn, this makes it look like Yamnaya and Andronovo were spreading a Central to Western European male lineage across the steppe after 3300 BC, though not to such an extreme as to prevent present-day Kazakhstan being deeply diverse.

R being sibling clade to Q (Native Americans) is not shocking, but non-obvious and pretty cool. The closest clade to that pair peaking (60%) in the short, woolly-haired Aeta people was a big surprise. I think it was once mainstream anthropological belief that Asian peoples the Spanish called Negritos were survivors of a southern Recent African Origin route and Caucasoids+other Asians+Native Americans had diversified out of the founders of the northern route.

The correlation between Y-haplogroup O and the spread of rice farming looks surprisingly simple. The genetics of cultures out-competed foragers by adopting the Fertile Crescent package is much more complicated.

I would have thought Finns (51-61% N), Saami and Estonians (40%) spread from the NE of Europe proper rather than their male lineage being close to people from tropical Asia.

The fact that L is associated by most researchers with Neolithic farmers and its distribution looks like this feels like fodder for some radical new Indo-European theory where it’s associated with the Neolithic Revolution (like Colin Renfrew) but came from India and was spread more by priests than wholesale demographic change. Its sibling clade T is even weirder.

The deep Paleolithic splits of I (Western forager) and J (Near East) from Indian K isn’t surprising, but it’s kind of funny that Paleolithic Europeans had their male lineage largely replaced by a mix of its sibling clade J, the older G, and descendants of an even older split close to most Black Africans[1]. And all this before another invasion brought the European demography of known history.

And the E1b1 Africans look like descendants of Neolithic colonists (at least male ones), modulo the continued presence of A and B. The suggestion that E never left Africa until E1b1b did so just in time to explain Natufian farmer DNA while C and D men jumped out of Africa so fast that it’s hard to find traces in Africa rather than places like Tibet and Hokkaido (D) seems like discarding Occam’s Razor to preserve a subtle ideology in the Out of Africa model.

3. Mitochondrial Haplogroups

The earliest split from Mitochrondrial Eve is L0 and L1-6. L0 is associated with the peopling of Southern Africa with ancestors of Khoisan groups. L1-6 is estimated (by Soares et al. 2009) 167±36 thousand years ago. Undifferentiated L1'2'3'4'5'6 has been found in Neanderthal fossils from the Caucasus (Mezmaiskaya cave) and Altai mountains (Denisova cave), dated to before 50,000 years ago. What's interesting about that is that L1 is estimated to have split off 140,000 years ago, and is most associated in living people with African Pygmies. This implies that Homo sapiens sapiens emigrated from Africa >140,000 years ago and interbred with Neanderthals without replacing them like in the more recent Out Of Africa event. L5 is another group mostly only found among Pygmies.

L2 diverged later than L5, perhaps 60-70,000 years ago (great job naming your groups, guys). Silva et al 2015 examined how it documents "60,000 years of interactions between Central and Eastern Africa". This haplogroup represents 70% of African maternal diversity, with the major exceptions being in the Sahara, Pygmies of the central rain forest, and Khoisan peoples. The latter two were displaced by the Bantu Expansion over the last few thousand years.

L6 is a rare haplogroup that reaches a peak of nearly 50% in Yemen and has its next-highest concentrations in the Horn of Africa. I cannot find research establishing how much this distribution might be due to the Paleolithic southern route Out of Africa vs. the archaeologically-documented interactions between Yemen and Ethiopia after 1000 BC, or continuous gene flow in between. An origin in the Arab slave trade seems highly unlikely, because the peak is in Yemen rather than Africa and so many African slaves were Bantu people.

L4 is concentrated in Tanzania among the Hadza at 60-83% and Sandawe at 48% (both peoples who were until recently foragers, Sandawe adopting livestock and farming earlier), declining in a gradient through east-central Africa.

L3 was carried by the last common ancestor (LCA) of all non-African humans, with a defining mutation ~70,000 years ago. It is unknown whether it originated in Asia or Africa: it has seven equidistant descendants, with the two clades of modern non-Africans being M and N.

Haplogroup N is older, sister clade M having a younger most recent common ancestor date than some subclades of N, such as haplogroup R. It has been proposed that N left Africa via the Northern route through the Levant, and M left Africa via Horn of Africa. "This theory was suggested because haplogroup N is by far the predominant haplogroup in Western Eurasia, and haplogroup M is absent in Western Eurasia, but is predominant in India and is common in regions East of India." However, "Southeast Asian populations and Indigenous Australians all possess deep rooted clades of both haplogroups M and N." (MacAulay et al 2005)

Haplogroup R* and R0 are found most commonly among the Soqotri, a Semitic-speaking people native to the island of Socotra, followed by Northeast Africa and the Arabian peninsula respectively. R0 has a daughter clade HV, which divides into V (Sami 40%), HV1 (Middle East), HV2 (South Asia), HV3 (Eastern Europe), and H (the most common mtDNA haplogroup in Europe).

R1 includes basal R1a* (found in Northwest Caucasian speakers and Brahmins from Uttar Pradesh), R1a1 (found in Northwest Caucasian speakers, Russians and Poles), R1b1 (Bulgarians, Armenians, Indians, Finland, and two Turkic peoples: Uyghurs and Yakuts).

R2 is found mainly in Pakistan's Balochistan province and NW India. It has a sister clade ancestral to J and T. T1a1a1 is particularly common in countries with high levels of Y-haplogroup R1a. In the Yamna culture, frequency of T1a and T2 were each 14.5%, a percentage higher than in any country today. T*, T1 and T2 are also found in Africa, primarily among Afro-Asiatic-speaking populations.

R5 is widely spread in India, peaking at 17%, with R5a1 and R5a2 found among Indians speaking Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages respectively.

Haplogroup F is a daughter of R9. It is most common in East and Southeast Asia and has not been found among Native Americans. In India, it reaches 50% on the Nicobar islands and 31% in Arunachal Pradesh, the country's most Northeastern state, but is otherwise unknown.

Haplogroup B, daughter of R11, diversified in China, with Tianyuan man from a cave near Beijing, 42-39,000 years ago, having it. It is now most commonly seen in Southeast Asia and Austronesian speakers (indigenous Taiwanese, Polynesians, Madagascar, etc). Its subclade B4b is one of five haplogroups found among Native Americans, the others being A, C, D, and X. B, like X, is not found in Paleo-Siberian tribes of northeastern Siberia. It is however found elsewhere in Siberia: among Mongols, Tungusic-speakers, and Siberian Turkic peoples. It has also been found in Iraq.

Haplogroup P descended from R more than 50,000 years ago, when Papua New Guinea and Australia were first populated. It is also found among the Aeta (Philippine Negritos) at 40% and Melanesians, Malaysians, Indonesians.

Haplogroup U descended from R no later than ~45,000 years ago, as it was found in Paleolithic Western Siberian remains from that time. It is found in 15% of Indians (only 8% in tribal groups). It is found in approximately 11% of native Europeans and is held as the oldest maternal haplogroup found in that region. All but one ancient modern human sequences from Europe belonged to maternal haplogroup U, making it the dominant type of mtDNA in Europe before the spread of agriculture from Anatolia (Fu Qiaomei et al 2013). Africa has a unique subclade, U6, which peaks among Algerian Berbers (29%) and Egyptian Copts (27.6%). Prehistoric samples of U6 are common from the Iberomaurusian culture (final Paleolithic Morocco to Tunisia).

Haplogroup A has a low diversity of mitochondrial genomes that belong to it relative to the degree of divergence from its nearest outgroups in haplogroup N, suggesting a population bottleneck 20,000 years ago or less. It is found in 7-15% of Tibetans, Mongols, Koreans, Japanese and the majority of Inuit and many Native groups of North and Central America.

Haplogroup X arose from N >20,000 years ago and has a dramatically disjoint distribution. It is present among Native Americans (but not in South America) and remains from Morocco, Iberia, and Central Europe (Linear Pottery culture) circa 5,000 years ago, at rates similar to its modern 7% of Europeans. It reaches 27% among Druze. In North America it peaks among Algonquian (25%) and Sioux (15%).

Haplogroup N1a is believed to have mutated from N anywhere from 32,000 to 12,000 years ago, in the Near East and more specifically the northern Arabian peninsula. The younger date is close to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Levant, an archaeological culture associated with the founder crops and domestic animals of western Eurasian agriculture and pastoralism. "The Linear Pottery Culture is credited with the first farming communities in Central Europe, marking the beginning of Neolithic Europe in the region some 7500 years ago. As of 2010, mitochondrial DNA analysis has been conducted on 42 specimens from five locations. Seven of these ancient individuals were found to belong to haplogroup N1a. A separate study analyzed 22 skeletons from European hunter-gatherer sites dated 13,400-2300 BC. Most of these fossils carried the mtDNA haplogroup U, which was not found in any of the Linear Pottery Culture sites. Conversely, N1a was not identified in any of the hunter-gatherer fossils, indicating a genetic distinction between Early European Farmers and late European hunter-gatherers. While no modern population is a close match to the LBK findings, the authors claim that the Linear Pottery population is most closely affiliated with modern Near East populations."

Haplogroup M (time depth >50,000 years) has the highest frequencies in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, China, Korea, and Japan, where frequencies range from 60%-80%. India has several M lineages that emerged directly from M*. Some small groups among eastern Siberians and Native Americans also have it at very high rates. Africa has only M1, raising questions of whether it appeared there or migrants from India eventually brought it west across Asia to Africa.

Haplogroup Q is a subclade of M29 with an inferred origin 50,000 years ago. It is especially found in New Guinea, Melanesia and Australian Aborigines. It is otherwise found, at much lower frequencies, among Austronesian-speaking peoples outside of Taiwan, indicating that both demic expansion and native foragers were important to the formation of the expanding Austronesians.

Haplogroup C is believed to have coalesced no later than 15,500 years ago, somewhere in Russia. It has a peak of 19-77% among different groups of the Tungusic-speaking Evenk people, with many Siberian Turkic peoples also having high frequencies. It drops to 15% or less among Mongols and Native Americans. In 2014, a now-extinct subclade was found in hunter-gatherers from Northwest Russia 7,500 years ago. C has a sister clade Z: Z1 is found at frequencies up to 28% among some Tungusic-speaking people and the Sami, while other subclades have found at 1-in-388 or less among Turks, Kazakhs, and Japanese.

Haplogroup D is another clade shared between Northeast Asia and the Americas. D4 is the most common maternal haplogroup for Japanese, Koreans, some Tungusic-speaking peoples, many Mongolic-speakers such as Buryats, and the Turkic Kazakhs and Telenghits. Up to 30% of Han Chinese have it. In the Americas, it predominates among fossils but rarely more than 17% among modern Natives except Paiute and Shoshone (up to 40%).

Haplogroup E is characteristic of Austronesian-speaking peoples, including native Taiwanese. The oldest evidence for it is from an 8,000-year-old skeleton found on Liang Island off the Southeast Chinese coast.

4. Prehistoric whole DNA

Beyond haplogroups, I've also written a summary of prehistoric whole-DNA sequencing from Europe. Other parts of the world to be added later.

4.1. Europe

As of 2014, some of the oldest European H. sapiens sapiens DNA was from Kostenki 14 in European Russia, 38,700 to 36,200 years ago (Seguin-Orlando et al).

“Kostenki 14 shares a close ancestry with the 24,000-year-old Mal’ta boy from central Siberia, European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, some contemporary western Siberians, and many Europeans, but not eastern Asians. Additionally, the Kostenki 14 genome shows evidence of shared ancestry with a population basal to all Eurasians that also relates to later European Neolithic farmers. We find that Kostenki 14 contains more Neandertal DNA that is contained in longer tracts than present Europeans.”

Before 38,700 years ago, you’ll see claims that all non-Africans were one undifferentiated population. I suspect that may be incorrect, there being evidence of Saharan and boat routes Out Of Africa.

European early modern humans (EEMH) lineages of 39 -26,000 years ago (often called Aurignacian after an archaeological horizon) were still part of a large Western Eurasian “meta-population”, related to Central and Western Asian populations. I would surmise that these people should be reconstructed as Cro-Magnon skeletons (as they used to be called: now EEMH) with skin like South Indians of farmer descent (i.e. native Dravidian speakers), except for a northern clinal variation toward fair skin and the red hair of European Neanderthals (not to be confused with West Asian Neanderthals, from whom I don’t think we have any red hair markers).

About that skin depigmentation:

“Using compound haplotype systems consisting of rapidly evolving microsatellites linked to one single-nucleotide polymorphism in each gene, we estimate that the onset of the sweep shared by Europeans and East Asians at KITLG occurred approximately 30,000 years ago, after the out-of-Africa migration, whereas the selective sweeps for the European-specific alleles at TYRP1, SLC24A5, and SLC45A2 started much later, within the last 11,000–19,000 years, well after the first migrations of modern humans into Europe.” (Beleza et al 2012) I don’t uncritically agree with this, because that would imply all EEMH redheads, who had “more Neandertal DNA that is contained in longer tracts than present”, being as dark-skinned as tropical East Asians or Dravidian-speaking peoples, lacking all of TYRP1, SLC24A5, and SLC45A2 in the time between our ~39,000 year-old sample and 19,000 years ago or later.

Anyway, as de-glaciation commenced in the Northern Hemisphere ~19,000 years ago, we find founder effects producing the lineage dubbed West European Hunter-Gatherer, which emerged from the Solutrean refugium of the Last Glacial Maximum (Jones et al 2015).

“We find that Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) belong to a distinct ancient clade that split from western hunter-gatherers ∼45,000 years ago, shortly after the expansion of anatomically modern humans into Europe and from the ancestors of Neolithic farmers ∼25,000 years ago, around the Last Glacial Maximum. CHG genomes significantly contributed to the Yamnaya steppe herders…” (about whom more later).

All of the successfully tested Mesolithic WHG Y-chromosomes, one from Luxembourg and four from Motala, Sweden, belonged to haplogroup I. Haplogroup I is the main candidate for Europe’s indigenous Y-haplogroup, which is today the most common Y-haplogroup in most of Scandinavia.

The DNA that’s been extracted from prehistoric farmer skeletons indicates that the Neolithic Revolution in Europe was mostly a story of population replacement, not adoption of new technology. Non-Nordic lineages of WHG appear to have made minimal contributions to the descendants of the invading farmers, who cluster with modern Aegean people: but bear in mind that historical Greeks have a para-Nordic WHG element (Homer mentions white-skinned, red-haired Mycenaean aristoi). For this period, think Native American ancestry as a percentage of heritage among farmers north of the Rio Grande in recent times.

That Nordic WHG heritage survived among Europeans seems to be thanks to the Fertile Crescent agricultural package hitting a wall as it approached the Baltic. The “Danubian cultures” archaeological group produce Early European Farmer bones, and as you can see in yellow on this map, they didn’t reach the Baltic and touch the North Sea only at the mouth of the Rhine. Erteboelle and Comb Ceramic Culture on the same map represent hunter-gatherers selectively adopting technology from the invaders: if they didn’t already have villages, they were producing pottery and settling down, but they were more into intensive fishing than agriculture. It seems that domesticated species of the Fertile Crescent package needed time to be bred for colder conditions, giving the Nordic WHGs time to survive the Neolithic Revolution.

At ~8,400 years ago, the Early European Farmers (EEF), very closely related the Anatolian or Levantine farmers (other offshoots of which are colonizing Mesopotamia and the Nile/Green Sahara), are colonizing the northern margin of Greece*, places like Epirus and Corfu. 1-4 centuries later, their “Cardium pottery culture” is in modern Albania, Croatia, and the Adriatic coast of Italy. Contemporary with this, early examples of their pottery appear in Sardinia, though I don’t know when their “race” colonized the island (21st century Sardinians are >50% EEF). At 5500 cal. BC, the Cardium pottery culture expands into the southern half of France and parts of Spain.

*They were in the rest of mainland Greece and Crete somewhat earlier.

Analysis for ancient DNA found the rare mtDNA basal haplogroup N*, supporting an early Neolithic maritime colonization of Mainland Europe through Cyprus and the Aegean Islands by Near-Eastern farmers (Fernandez et al 2014).

By the time farmers reached Spain, they would have encountered a branch of WHGs with darker skin than themselves and the recessive gene for blue eyes. Maybe before that: I need data from outside Iberia.

Meanwhile, the Danubian or Linear Pottery Culture (which you’ll encounter abbreviated as LBK) spread from the Hungarian Danube (before 5600 BC) to Austria, central Germany and central Poland circa 5,500 BC, spreading east and north over the next three centuries until they hit the aforementioned wall for their domesticates very near the Baltic and somewhat further from the North Sea except along the Rhine. At the former limit is where they would have interacted with Nordic WHGs without replacing them.

To conclude this summary of the European Neolithic west of the Black Sea, also at circa 5300-5200 BC we find multiple cultures interacting in the Netherlands. Probably the most significant is the Ertebølle-Ellerbek horizon, which had an all-but identical southern form in Limburg, the Netherlands in contact with LBK. Ertebølle-Ellerbek skeletal remains are meager, but some DNA sequences have been collected, showing genetic links between Limburg, northern Germany, Denmark, and peninsular Scandinavia. Farmers make the jump from the mouth of the Rhine or northern France to the British Isles circa 4000 BC, and this population was >50% Early European Farmer (This raises the question of whether they were also <50% para-Nordic WHG like the Luxembourg Mesolithic sample. I still need to find Mesolithic Britain/Ireland/north France data.)

Looking east of the Black Sea, unter-gatherers of the Caucasus split off from the European hunter-gatherers who would go on to become dark-skinned, blue-eyed Iberians, light-skinned, redheaded Nordics, etc ~45,000 years ago. Until the Last Glacial Maximum ~25,000 years ago, they remained part of the Anatolian HG population whose descendants would include the first wheat farmers. Post-isolation, they are dubbed CHG, for Caucasian Hunter-Gatherer. Jones et al. 2015 analyzed CHG ancestry as represented by a Upper Palaeolithic male from Satsurblia cave, and a Mesolithic one from Kotias Klde cave, both in the foothills of western Georgia. These two males carried Y-DNA haplogroup J* and J2a. The researchers found that these Caucasus hunters were probably the source of the Near Eastern DNA in the Yamnaya (who I’ll finally get to anon).

Let’s emphasize “probably” there: this is one paper demurring to claim very high Bayesian probability. A competing claim is that Near Eastern DNA made its way to the Eurasian steppe via farmers from Iran.

Interesting to note that DNA from the Maykop farming culture of the north Caucasus has been sequenced and found to not be related to the adjacent steppe population.

Something amazing happened around the middle of the 4th millennium BC. Pictographs of wheeled vehicles appear on clay tablets from Uruk in modern south Iraq dated between 3700-3500 BC. Between 3500-3350 BC, evidence of the wheel suddenly appears all the way from Harappa in India (Ravi phase) to southern Poland (Funnelbeaker culture). We have every reason to suspect that it was invented by a speaker of proto-Indo-European or proto-Semitic, as the common ancestor of all European, Iranian and Indian wheel words is reconstructed by experts as *kʷékʷlos, a proper grammatical “reduplicated derivative” of *kʷel- (“to turn”). It’s also reconstructed as galgal, simply “roll” reduplicated, in Semitic languages. In Sumerian, “chariot” was GIGIR, with no known native source. “Wheel” is *grgar in the reconstructed ancestor of Georgian and the other South Caucasian languages, which likewise looks like a loan.

Unfortunately, the epistemology of dating in archaeology and genetics are not identical, so we don’t know if the people who first introduced the wheel to India and Eastern Europe changed the areas’s genetic profiles. But change did come from pastoraists who knew how to build wheeled vehicles.

As we saw, the most common Y-chromosomal haplogroup in Europe is R1b, with the closely-related R1a a contender for third place after the believed-indigenous (i.e. WHG had it) I1. Here’s a map. As the Bronze Age was starting in civilization to the south, one of the early adopters in the illiterate north was a nomadic culture called Yamnaya. They had carts, to which they yoked horses, a domesticate then unknown in Mesopotamia. They buried elite males with weapons under artificial hills, which we call kurgans. And when DNA from their skeletons is sequenced, the most common Y-haplogroup is R1b. Scientific consensus is that the spread of these genes was caused by the same phenomenon documented archaeologically as the collapse of prehistoric (i.e. illiterate) farming cultures and replacement by pastoralist cultures in Eastern Europe south of the Baltic and north of the Greek peninsula.

Weird fiction review: “Ubbo-Sathla”, Clark Ashton Smith

"Ubbo-Sathla" is part of Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea cycle of short stories. It was first published in Weird Tales, July 1933.

What is Hyperborea? As I've mentioned before, fantasy fiction used to be set at some time on Earth. Using a known historical period, though, requires research and can constrain one's imagination. So some time after Helena Blavatsky popularized her new religious movement Theosophy, some fiction writers who didn't believe a word of it took her concept that humans had developed on a series of lost continents - Hyperborea, Lemuria, then Atlantis - as nearly empty playgrounds to set tales of magic and adventure in.

"For Ubbo-Sathla is the source and the end. Before the coming of Zhothaqquah or Yok-Zothoth or Kthulhut from the stars, Ubbo-Sathla dwelt in the steaming fens of the newmade Earth: a mass without head or members, spawning the grey, formless efts of the prime and the grisly prototypes of terrene life"

We start with some bad theology from The Book of Eibon: Ubbo-Sathla is praised as “the source and the end” because (she?) is the cause of Earth life’s single-celled prototypes, while Yog-Sothoth “came from the stars.”

In 1932, Paul Tregardis found an interesting crystal in the London curio shop of a Jewish small businessman. Asked about it, the owner “gave the impression of being lost to commercial considerations in some web of cabbalistic revery.” (Would this be considered multi-layered stereotyping? “Running a business is boring, I’d much rather think about the Kabbalah!”) It seems “A geologist found it in Greenland, beneath glacial ice, in the Miocene strata. Who knows? It may have belonged to some sorcerer of primeval Thule.”

Tregardis was startled. Sounds like something he read in The Book of Eibon, “strangest and rarest of occult forgotten volumes, which is said to have come down through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea.” (How would one know that a book being the rarest or most obscure has any correlation to truth value? Hipster epistemology?) Tregardis is the sort of guy who owns a medieval French manuscript of it and has collated passages with the Necronomicon. There was a reference to the cloudy scrying crystal of the wizard Zon Mezzamalech, in Mhu Thulan. Dealer, I’ll take it!

Tregardis smiled at himself with inward irony for even conceiving the absurd notion. Such things did not occur—at least, not in present-day London; and in all likelihood, The Book of Eibon was sheer superstitious fantasy, anyway.

At home, he checked the one brief reference in The Book of Eibon: “he could behold many visions of the terrene past, even to the Earth’s beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the unbegotten source, lay vast and swollen and yeasty amid the vaporing slime…” but Zon vanished, and the crystal was lost. He stared into the crystal, which glowed with an inner light, and it hypnotized him into a sense of dreamlike duality where Paul Tregardis was also Zon Mezzamalech, who sought the crystal because all past years can be seen in it.

Zon Mezzamalech had dreamt to recover the wisdom of the gods who died before the Earth was born. They had passed to the lightless void, leaving their lore inscribed upon tablets of ultra-stellar stone; and the tablets were guarded in the primal mire by the formless, idiotic demiurge, Ubbo-Sathla.

When Paul regained consciousness as himself, he resolved never to to gaze into the magic crystal again. So of course, the next day, he gazed in!

Zon grew annoyed that he “beheld nothing more than a few fragments of the years of Mhu Thulan immediately posterior to the present-the years of his own life-time;” – time to disregard all dangers of magic and go diving into Deep Time! The orb past-life regresses him through Hyperborea’s rise from savagery to high civilization, then a man-like beast, a pterodactyl, an ichthyosaur, then a serpent-man who “bowed with hissing litanies to great serpent-idols”, then a crawling thing too primitive to build or dream. At last he becomes an amoeba-like thing in the shallows of landless primal Earth, somehow sensing Ubbo-Sathla and tilted in the mire the tablets of “the pre-mundane gods.” But a single cell has no eyes, and will only crawl mindlessly on the tablets, never read them.

Of Paul’s vanishing, there was a curt notice in several of the London papers. No one seems to have known anything about him.

This is a simple short story, condensing the meditation on Deep Time Lovecraft used as an element in several much longer tales. And as short story, its genre seems to be moral fable. Don’t be an occultist or you could die/vanish from what you mess with. 

The Late Bronze Age

Aeneas And His Family Departing From Troy, by Peter Paul Rubens

This essay is intended to organize my knowledge of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean. This is a subject that touches on archaeology, Greek mythology, Hittite, Egyptian and (slightly) Biblical history.

1. A Greek-centric Overview

While writing was known throughout the Late Bronze Age (LBA) Eastern Mediterranean (the Greek language is first documented on clay tablets using a syllabary called Linear B), so few clay tablets have survived that archaeology is our main source of knowledge, and that means relying on pottery for knowledge. The relevant pottery sequence is Late Helladic IIA, IIB, IIIA1, IIIA2, IIIB1 & IIIB2, with IIIC seemingly associated with the Bronze Age Collapse. Archaeologists’ attempts to assign dates to pottery have weak epistemic status, but lucky for us Egypt was engaged in foreign trade in the sort of things that needed pottery containers. So for example, when the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten’s capital was abandoned, shards of small closed Late Helladic IIIA2 pots suitable for transport of costly perishables were left behind for archaeologists to find. Some Egyptians were buried with IIA pots while Thutmose III ruled (for reasons unclear to me, archaeologists assume IIA as already in use in Ahmose I’s time). IIIB1 & IIIB2 in Egypt have been found in the context of Pi-Ramesses, the capital Ramesses II built on/near the site of the old Hyksos capital Avaris.

As can be seen in any Classical historian from Herodotus on, Greek mythology was conceptualized as taking place over a few hundred years up to the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War, circa 1200 BC. The early Hellenistic Parian chronicle furnishes a particularly exact example of this mindset. Though such things must be taken with a lot of salt, a date range of 1574/3 to 1209/8 BC for the span from Deucalion to the fall of Troy approximately matches the 18th and 19th Dynasties of Egypt that the Mycenaean civilization was demonstrably contemporary with.

During the IIA phase, Crete was culturally dominant over Mycenae and the other cities of the mainland (Tiryns, Pylos & the Menalaion of Laconia in the Peloponnese, Athens, Thebes & Orchomenos in central Greece, Iolkos in Thessaly). “It is during LH IIB that the dependence on Minoan ceramics is completely erased. In fact, looking at the pottery found on Crete during this phase suggests that artistic influence is now flowing in the opposite direction; the Minoans are now using Mycenaean pottery as a reference.”

The term “Minoan” for the Bronze Age civilization of Crete is problematic. The Cretan palace-states came into existence circa 2000 BC, while the mythic kings of that name are a nephew of Kadmos and an older contemporary of Theseus. Some of our sources for Greek mythology, like the Bibliotheka of pseudo-Apollodoros, provide a king list for Knossos, the most important Cretan palace and city. It goes Asterion (mortal husband of Europa, who was abducted from Phoenicia by an amorous Zeus) – Minos son of Europa – Lykastos – Minos II, who was husband of Pasiphae, father of Ariadne and Deucalion, stepfather of the Minotaur – Deucalion’s son Idomeneus, who had the authority to involve all Crete in the Trojan War with 80 ships. Folk memory recorded no dynastic break in the relevant time frame except Minos son of Europa himself.

IIIA is an era of uniform mass production. Potters employed in all the palace-states (note, not necessarily by the palaces – we can actually see a mix of state-run and free market industries in palace-states) produced indistinguishable output, which was spread by trade networks from Upper Egypt to islands north of Sicily. I’d think this implies generations of internal peace, if not a single “Achaean” - Ahhiya(wa) in Hittite - kingdom.

IIIB (starts after the abandonment of Akhenaten’s capital, post-1334 BC) saw a decrease in uniformity and a dramatic decrease in trade with Cyprus. It would be nice to know why, but Late Bronze Age Cyprus with its cities and scribes is a lost civilization. The corresponding period in Egypt was Ramesses II and his 19th Dynasty predecessors. At the end of this period, the palaces of Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos were burned. While mobs who burn buildings are usually enemies of civilization, the fire at Pylos baked the clay tablets that had most recently been written on. Numerous Pylos tablets record assignments against an expected sea attack.

2. Greek Cities

2.1. Mycenae

“Rich in gold” was its Homeric epithet, and in the Iliad its king was able to command the kings of other cities. The citadel covered ~3 hectares, almost 50% larger than the unfortified palace of Thebes, with a peak city size of 32 hectares.

The sequence Late Helladic IIA-IIIB2 purportedly spanned 350-plus years ending ~1190 BC. Greek mythology only records seven generations of kings, two of which ruled after the sack of Troy:

Perseus

Electryon (father of Alcmene, Heracles’s mother), Sthenelus

Eurystheus

Atreus (new dynasty)

Agamemnon

Orestes (also king of Argos and Sparta)

Tisamenus (same, Mycenae destroyed)

However, the facts on the ground are that Mycenae either had the oldest royal line in mainland Greece, or we’re looking at preservation bias. Grave Circle B, 117 meters west of the Lion Gate, has 12 simple cist graves and 14 shaft graves, at least 6 of which were family tombs because multiple bodies were found in them. The latest pottery found in the graves is LH I. The oldest graves are cists for men, with poor grave goods. The later the grave, the more they found women, along with gold and unknown imports once contained in Cycladic and Cretan pots.

The younger Grave Circle A has 5 family shaft graves plus a lone male grave, whose 19 bodies and their grave goods were excavated by Schliemann. He gave artifacts names associated with the Iliad, which is much too young: there was nothing in them later than LH IIA. In later phases, royalty was buried in more imposing tholos tombs. We know the people in “A” continued to be seen as important ancestors until the Bronze Age collapse, because it was one of the sites the LH IIIB walls were built to enclose. It’s tempting to think of Atreus as a real person, ordering the building of walls around the palace as well as the 9 tholos tombs (of the Perseids?) and Grave Circle A from whose dead the King of Mycenae derived his authority.

2.2. Tiryns

The site of Tiryns is only 15 kilometres Southeast of Mycenae in the Argolid. Pausanias reports the tradition that the walls of both were “cyclopean”, i.e. must have been built by cyclopes. “Even two mules working together couldn’t have moved the smaller stones.” In mythology, it was said to have been founded by Proteus, twin brother of Perseus’s grandfather Acrisius. The twins were enemies and Proteus fled to Lycia, raising an army to help him return to Argos, where they recruited cyclopes and founded Tiryns over Acrisius’s objections.

The 2-hectare acropolis hill of Tiryns actually goes back much further than even myth, with a poor Neolithic village succeeding by a larger Early Helladic (Early Bronze Age, third millenium BC) village. In LH IIA, the village on the south half of the hill was turned into a palace. On the plain below the hill, a city grew to more than 20 hectares during LH IIA-IIIB. At some point the entire hill was fortified even though there was nothing of value on the north half – besides the high ground itself. Nonetheless, mysterious attackers still managed to burn the palace at the end of LH IIIB.

However, Tiryns was reoccupied and the lower town grew to 25 hectares in LH IIIC. It was not abandoned until the 8th century BC, when the city of Argos gained hegemony in the Argolid.

Argos, did you steal my ancestors?

If oral traditions have a core of truth, we still have to expect them to get reworked for propaganda purposes. Near the beginning of the Classical Period, 490 BC or a bit later, Aeschylus the Athenian wrote a tragedy about Danaus the Egyptian and his 50 daughters, who fled to Argos in the first pentekonter so the king of Egypt couldn’t force them to marry their first cousins. They beg King Pelasgos of Argos for protection.

“Pelasgos” is obviously a mythic ancestor for Pelasgoi, who Greek historians say were in the land when their ancestors arrived. Mythographers, writing in Classical through Roman times, assigned the Danaid Hypermnestra and her husband Lynceus, their son, grandsons Acrisius and Proteus and Acrisius’s daughter who gave birth to Perseus to Argos. If we assign the characters to Tiryns and Mycenae instead, we can associate the Danaids with the mysterious gold-bearing women of Grave Circle B & A.

2.3. Pylos, in writing

Pylos was a town even in the Middle Bronze Age, occupying an area of 5.5 hectares and growing to 14 in Late Helladic IIIA, when the palace is believed to have been built.

Greek mythology records only four kings of Messenia, the region Pylos controlled: Perieres (son-in-law of Perseus), his son Aphareus, Neleus, and his son Nestor (who adventured with three generations of heroes).

The number of Linear B tablets recovered from Pylos is 1,087 – a quarter as many as Knossos, Crete but an order of magnitude more than anywhere else on the mainland. Surviving tablets were used for administrative records, so what they reveal are divine and personal names, land ownership, tax collection, what craftspeople were employed by the palace, and at Pylos in particular orders for soldiers.

The largest landowner was the wanax. He owned three times as much land as anyone else and it was tenemos, perhaps meaning sacrosanct. Centuries later, in Homer’s still-archaic Ionian dialect, this word reappears as anax, referring to the high kings Agamemnon and Priam… and Zeus. The word definitely had divine as well as “feudal” connotations, just like English “Lord.” This title also shows up later in personal names like Demonax (“people-lord”) and the pre-Socratic philosophers Anaxagoras (“lord of the forum”), Anaximander (“lord of the estate”) and Anaximenes (“the lord endures”).

Next came the lawagetas, whose duties in the tablets are scarcely distinguished from his superior. Just before Pylos palace was burned, there were three other landowners who owned as much, but he was the only person besides the wanax whose land was a tenemos.

Pylos was one of only two towns in Messenia: the average settlement size, even for tax collection centers of which there were 9 in the eastern province alone, was 1.53 hectares, meaning their population was probably just under Dunbar’s Number.

Administrative activity was closely related to religion, and we have preserved numerous deities:

Anemoi (the winds) in the form Anemon Hiereia (wind priestess), Ares, Artemis, Dionysus, Diwo (i.e. Zeus), Diwia (“Goddess” – Dione?), Eileithyia, Enyalius (later both an epithet and a son of Ares), the Erinyes, Hephaetus (indirectly through personal name Hephaistion), Hera, “Mater Theia”, Paean, Poseidon and Posidaeia.

Some goddesses are uncertain because they were called by the titles wanassoin, “two ladies” – the mainstream guess is Demeter and Persephone, or potnia, “our lady.” a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja seems to be Athena, but there was also “Our Lady of Thebes”, “Our Lady of Grain” (Demeter?), “Our Lady of the Labyrinth”, etc.

The tablets include personal names. Female names attested at Pylos include Alexandra, Theodora, Eritha, Korinsia (Korinth-woman, a slave) and a VIP named Karpathia, a “key-bearer” who owned two plots in the Sphagianes district. Male names include Wedaneos the lawagetas, Akhilles, Alektruon, Amphimedes, Augewas (who the wanax feasted when he was appointed a ko-ro of the demos), Echelawon (who owned a ship of the fleet and huge estates), Glaukos, Hektor, Khalkeos (“smith”), Klumenos (a commander in the coast guard and ko-re-te official), Lukios (Lukka-man, a slave), Ploutinos (“rich”), Poimen (“shepherd”), Orestes (a junior officer), Tros, Turios (Tyre-man).

2.4. Laconia

Sparta and its region Laconia are fundamental to the Iliad. But when Mycenae, Pylos and other LBA cities were surveyed by archaeologists and Athens and Thebes were shown to be power centers at the time, Sparta was missing. The closest connection to the Bronze Age world was the Menelaion 5 kilometres away, where an Archaic hero cult to Helen and her husband grew up around a Mycenaean aristo’s great hall (megaron).

That changed in 2008 when farmers who owned land 11 kilometres south of Sparta, in the parish of a one-room church named Ayios Vasileios, tried to dig a new terrace for their olive orchard and dug up a Linear B tablet instead. Since writing was used for palace management in LBA Greece, archaeologists knew the farmers had dug into a palace archive and swept in.

The first tablets published were about the sale of weapons, textiles and perfume, showing you what industries a Mycenaean palace engaged in rather than leaving to independent craftspeople.

Ayios Vasileios was a large town even before the LHIIIA palace buildings archaeologists have found so far: growing from nearly nothing to 21 hectares during Late Helladic I. Those buildings were destroyed at the end of LHIIIA, a century before the Bronze Age collapse. Stone foundations were split, there’s a fire destruction layer, and one room had 20 bronze swords in a layer of organic debris. More mysteriously, another room had a thick layer of animal bones, potsherds and precious objects, as if a temple left a big mess.

Greek mythographers like the Bibliotheke author record a substantial list of “Spartan” kings. The first inhabitants of Laconia were said to be the Leleges under an eponymous leader Lelex. Like him, his son and grandson Eurotas (also the name of the river where Ayios Vasileios and Sparta were located) were petty chiefs of marsh land, until Eurotas drained it to improve farming.

Interestingly, a prestigious linguist proposed that Lelege is cognate to lulahi, a class or tribe mentioned in Hittite texts as too impure for priests and other temple servants to talk to.

Eurotas married his daughter Sparta to Lakedaemon, supposedly the son of Zeus and a star (the Pleaid Taygete). Their dynasty lasted another 4 generations: Amyklas, Kynortas, his sons Perieres and Oibalos, and Oibalos’s sons Hippokoon and Tyndareos. Tyndareos’s “sons” the Dioskuri died young and the Atreides married into his family, triggering the Trojan War. That was the end of the independent kingdom until supposedly two Heraclidae founded a new one after destroying the Mycenaean state.

2.5. Athens

It may not have had anything to do with Jerusalem, but Mycenaean Athens might have had to do with ancient Israel. The acropolis continued to be occupied throughout the “Greek Dark Ages”, with a dramatically impoverished population huddling inside Mycenaean walls called “Pelasgian” throughout the Archaic period (~776-490 BC), after which new fortifications were built in the aftermath of the Persian Wars. Although they’re not identified as Pelasgoi in the Iliad, the Athenians maintained a tradition that they were indigenous people who picked up the Ionian Greek dialect from their neighbors, having neither been conquered at the beginning of the Heroic Age by Achaeos and Ion nor by the Heraclidae.

So if the “Pelasgian” tradition isn’t a later fiction, Late Helladic IIIC Athenians emigrating from the overpopulated acropolis might have been one element in the Peleset who conquered the southern coast of Canaan during the reign of Ramesses III.

Because it was continuously occupied and became a large, rich city again, preservation bias works against the LBA acropolis and lower town of Athens. It’s known that the Erechtheion, which gets its name from a mythic king, Erechthonios or Erechtheos, was built on top of a palace building. The association with both a Heroic age king and Athena (the Periclean Erechthion was dedicated to both Athena and Poseidon, but replaced a mid-6th century temple of Athena burned by the Persians) suggests a folk memory of the sacred function of a Mycenaean king. Another of the few Mycenaean finds on the acropolis is a fountain associated with Late Helladic IIIB/IIIC, echoing the strategic water source attested in Classical times.

The coastal towns of Thorikos, Brauron (later called sacred to bear-Artemis) and Marathon have LHI material including tholos tombs at Thorikos and Marathon, making it possible they developed before Athens had a lower town. The agora had a LHIIB cemetary, and it’s certain that the palace was built by this phase.

A tradition reported by Strabo was that when Kekrops the serpent man was king of Attica, his subjects lived on farmsteads in the midst of their fields, and because they were being attacked by pirates and the Boeotians to their north, he ordered them to move into 12 towns for protection: Kekropia (Athens or the acropolis), Thorikos, Brauron, Eleusis, Aphidna, Tetrapolis (all archaeologically identified), Tetrakomoi, Epakria, Dekeleia, Kytheros, Sphettos and Kephisia. Eleusis subsequently had its own priest-kings, and Kekrops’s descendant Erechtheos was said to have gone to war with Eumolpos of Eleusis to reunify Attica, in a myth that suggests the existence of Mycenaean period human sacrifice.

In the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships, Menestheus son of Theseus brings half as many ships (50) as Mycenae, suggesting a realm half as populous or developed, which does not contradict the LH IIIB evidence.

Mythic kings of Athens:

Kekrops - Kranaos - Amphiktyon, uncle of the first “Hellenes” - Kekrops’s foster-grandson Erichthonios the serpent man - his son Pandion I - Erechtheos and his brother Kekrops II - Pandion II - Aegeas (usurper) - his son Theseus - Theseus’s sons Menestheus and Demophon, who fought at Troy

2.6. Thebes and Orchomenos

In the century before the Bronze Age collapse, the palace of Thebes, Kadmeion after the hero Kadmos, occupied the center of the acropolis, forming a stone-walled “castle keep” in the middle of a larger defensible area of high ground. The potsherds are Late Helladic IIIB followed by evidence of burning circa ~1200 BC, indicating instability a century before the collapse that was successfully dealt with, unlike the great collapse later. Note that preservation bias works against the site, which like Athens had a long occupation history to destroy Mycenaean remains.

The Kadmeion has produced a treasure trove of Linear B tablets 1/6 or less the size of Pylos. I’ll go into those another time; annoyingly a Wikipedia-level review will show you nothing but controversy. One noteworthy detail is the claim that the island of Euboea was ruled by Thebes.

The Iliad and other mythic material preserve a belief that there were two states in Heroic age Boeotia, and this is corroborated by its capital “Minyan Orchomenos” being another major archaeological site. Somewhat confusingly, the Middle Bronze Age (2000-~1600 BC) pottery of mainland Greece is called “Minyan ware”, despite the fact that the mythic genealogy places their founder Minyas only a few hundred years before the Trojan War.

The palace seems to have been built in LH IIB, after a long existence as a village as early as the Neolithic. Like most, it was burned at the end of LH IIIB.

Between the two cities, Lake Kopais was drained for agriculture and one of the strangest fortified settlements of the Mycenaean civilization was built. Gla (an Albanian name, indigenous name speculative – perhaps Homeric Arne) was a large village or… something surrounded by 20 km of walls. Permanent buildings were few and potsherds were distributed at uneven depth, making it reasonably probable that farming occurred within the walls, with residents erecting short-lived huts in whichever fields were fallow.

2.7. Iolkos

The Bay of Volos forms the southeastern extremity of classical and modern Thessaly. The overland route to the region passes from Boeotia through the sparsely-populated mountainous district of Phocis on the upper Kephisos and then north through Thermopylae in Malis. By sea, the Bay of Volos sits right at the north end of the island of Euboea.

Greek mythology records Thessaly’s original name as Aeolia and treats it as a wild region, productive for horse husbandry and populated by centaurs as well as uncivilized Hellenic tribes, but with an outpost of civilization at Iolkos (Volos). This fits the archaeological evidence: three of the few Mycenaean settlements in Thessaly are ports on the bay, Dimini, Kastro, and Pefkakia. At the beginning of this century, archaeologists turned up a Mycenaean palace at Dimini. An untouched tholos tomb (Kazanaki) with gold grave goods also turned up, and oh by the way, Iolkos really only figures in Greek mythology in the generation before the Trojan War, when Jason was sent on a suicide mission for the Golden Fleece by King Pelias, his usurping uncle.

The pottery evidence indicates that the Bay area was incorporated into Mycenaean civilization during Late Helladic IIA, or some time between ~1550 BC and the middle of Thutmose III’s sole reign. The plain of Larissa and the west only start to adopt Mycenaean material culture even selectively in LH IIIA. It’s currently understood that LH IIA economic development was driven by “Minoan” need for metals, with a string of sites radiating north from the silver mines of Lavrion (which remained famously productive in Classical times). From Lavrion, Brauron and Thorikos, ports/outposts appeared in Boeotia and on the east coast of Euboea, ending at the Bay of Volos. At the end of this period, either the colonized or parties unknown in the Peloponnese (the gold-rich elites of Mycenae are most likely, but trade with Crete is also believed to have created the Laconic and Messenian elites) overthrew not only the Cretan navy but also seized Knossos, after which Linear B tablets replace the undeciphered Linear A.

At Dimini, Linear B is only attested in a couple of inscriptions: no tablets have yet been found. This is probably only because of the lack of a fire-destruction layer. Dimini was abandoned at the end of LH IIIB with the other palaces save Kekropia (acropolis of Athens) and Tiryns, or very early in IIIC, presumably starved out by economic disruption. Curiously though, there’s also a dearth of seals and religious iconography, so the rulers were probably less sacred and controlled a smaller economy, which matches the palace being the smallest.

2.8. Crete, circa 1400-1200 BC.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Sir Arthur Evans upended our understanding of Western history by excavating a pre-Greek civilization on Crete, which he gave the problematic name Minoan after King Minos. While in Greek mythology Minos was a nephew of Kadmos the founder of Thebes, Knossos and lesser cities Evans excavated had palatial layers dating back to 2000 BC, half a millennium older than the mainland civilization. There was indoor plumbing and statuettes and frescoes depicted women in flounced, structured skirts and tight bodices with plunging necklines.

But you can read about that in any survey of the Minoans, from book-length to Wikipedia entry. What we’re concerned with are the last centuries of the Greek and Near Eastern Bronze Age. Alas, this is complicated by the long shadow Evans casts over Cretan archaeology: he dated the “final destruction” of the Knossos palace, which follows a Protopalatial Period (Middle Bronze Age), native Neopalatial and then a period of rule by Greek-speakers, to shortly after 1400 BC. However, later archaeologists found stirrup jars and other material Evans dated to 1400 BC at Thebes and Pylos in Late Helladic IIIB context – just before the Bronze Age collapse. The “Palmer-Boardman dispute” over whether to associate destruction at Knossos and the Linear B evidence with the general collapse or keep the ~1400 BC date remains unresolved.

It’s generally accepted that palaces at other cities on the island - Phaistos, Mallia and Zakros - were abandoned when Greek-speakers conquered the island circa 1450 BC. The towns themselves remained occupied with much-reduced population, but authority was centralized at Knossos. A second important center was Chania or Kydonia, a harbor town in the west. Chemical analysis suggests that the Cretan stirrup jars on the mainland were made from clay local to this area, unsurprising as it was well-suited to trade with the Peloponnese and central Greece. Linear B finds from this settlement are securely dated to Late Minoan IIIB (= LH IIIB), followed by evidence of fire.

In general, IIIB shows evidence of a breakdown in security/prosperity. Coastal villages where the pottery sequence goes through IIIA show a break in settlement, in favor of better-defended villages further inland. Then while civilization per se disappeared on Crete following the general collapse, the current evidence does not suggest post-apocalyptic depopulation: after probably absorbing an influx of refugees, LM IIIB settlements continued into IIIC and the Early Iron Age, including Knossos itself.

3. Anatolia

3.1. Milawata, and Greek culture in Hittite cuneiform.

Having covered all the cities of mainland Greece, let’s look at Miletus on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. Called Millawanda and later Milawata in Hittite tablets, the latter name also appears in Linear B tablets from the archives of Pylos and Thebes. Archaeologists have found “Minoan” artifacts at the site of the archaic/classical Miletus (strengthening the identification) they date as early as 1900 BC, a century after Crete’s First Palace Period began and well before Cretan presence in Greece. When Mycenaeans took over Knossos, Millawanda passed into their control.

The first Hittite references to Millawanda occur circa 1320 BC, when it supported a rebellion against King Mursilis II after his second campaign season. King Uhha-Ziti of Arzawa called the new Great King “a child” for demanding the extradition of defeated princes who fled to him and formed an anti-Hittite alliance with Seha River Land and Ahhiya (i.e. Achaea, which had a pan-“Hellenic” sense in Homer rather than the north coast of the Peloponnese). Uhha-Ziti was defeated and Millawanda has an LH IIIA destruction layer followed by Hittite-plan fortifications.

The city is then mentioned in the “Tawagalawa letter”. Unfortunately this was a multi-tablet letter of which only the third has been found, but the author is generally believed to be Hattusilis III, Mursilis II’s youngest child, and from it we know that Millawanda was ruled from Ahhiya, had a governor named Atpa and his/the city’s territory included a place called Atriya (Atre-land – note that Atreus’s family was said to be from Asia). The titular Tawagalawa, brother of the King of Ahhiya, has been suggested by numerous scholars as a Hittite rendering of “Eteokles”, as it would have been in the Bronze Age before Greek dropped most w-sounds (e.g. wanax -> anax).

The real purpose of the letter, though, is another Hittite extradition request. It seems that an adventurer named Piyama-Radu had made himself king of Wilusa (Ilium) but had lost the throne in a conflict with the Hittites. He was now an exile in Ahhiya and the Great King of Hatti wanted him, promising “my brother” of Ahhiya safe conduct. Amazingly, he says further that “these days we have an agreement on Wilusa, over which we went to war.”

Finally, the name of the city shifts in the “Miliwata letter”, now closely matching the Linear B spelling. This letter demands that the recipient client ruler resolve a dispute over hostages, turn over fugitives from Hittite justice, and turn over a pretender from Wilusa to a Hittite envoy so that the Hittites can reinstall him as king there. The letter reminds the recipient that the recipient’s father had turned against the Hittite king. The Hittite king then installed the recipient as king in place of that one’s father. It also alludes to Piyama-Radu as a troublemaker of the past.

Not surprisingly, Miletus then has a destruction layer associated the Sea Peoples.

3.2. Troy

We must of course mention Troy VIIa, perhaps the most famous destruction layer of the Bronze Age collapse (I won’t mention Cyprus, because we have no texts and fire-destruction there could be associated with invasions by two Hittite kings, father and son, the father Tudhaliya IV ruling during the last 25 years of Ramesses II). Mainstream archaeologists date Troy VIIa to 1300-1190 BC. Its richer predecessor Troy VI, covering 27-30 hectares, is dated circa 1700-1300 BC and was destroyed by an earthquake. In Greek mythology, “earthshaker” Poseidon and his nephew Apollo built Troy walls during the reign of Laomedon, an ancestor of Priam (of confused genealogy). I need to research the rationale behind that absolute date of ~1190 BC, but if its place in the relative, material-based chronology can be pushed up to more than a decade before the Mycenaean palace burning and burning of Ugarit at the end of LH IIIB, it raises the credibility of Homer as a source.

4. the LBA Levant

5. The Bronze Age Collapse

5.1. The Sea Peoples

In Greece at the end of Late Helladic IIIB, the palaces of Mycenae, Tiryns & Pylos were destroyed by fire, and the scribes of Pylos tell us they were watching for attack by sea.

“The Sea Peoples” are a famous term in ancient history. The term finds its origin with French Egyptologist Emmanuel de Rougé in 1855, describing a pylon documenting Year 8 of Ramesses III. Ramesses III was crowned in 1186 BC, second pharaoh of the 20th Dynasty, son of two nobodies – no confirmed relation to the first two Ramesseses. However, Egypt’s troubles with Sea Peoples started with Merneptah (1213-1203). In his Year 5, the Libyans (nomads and/or stateless fishermen) formed an alliance with “Northerners coming from all lands”: Ekwesh, Teresh, Lukka, Sherden, and Shekelesh. The names Lukka, Sherden and Shekelesh are sometimes linked to the Classical Lycia region of modern Turkey, Sardinia and the Siceloi of Sicily.

Thirty years later in the Ramesses III narrative, the list of attackers has changed to Denyen (could be Danaan, one of Homer’s two terms for all “Greeks”), Peleset (very probably Hebrew Plišt, Philistine), Shekelesh, Sherden, Teresh, Tjekker, and Weshesh. The Hebrew Bible tells us that the Philistines lived in the coastal cities of Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron and Gath, where archaeologists have found locally-made Late Helladic IIIC pottery – above a terminal Bronze Age destruction layer at Ashdod and Ashkelon. Hazor, Acre, Megiddo, Sukkot (last scarab before destruction was of Queen Twosret, ruled 1191–1189 BC), Bethel and Lachish are other sites in Canaan with evidence of terminal Bronze Age destruction.

Further details about the Sea Peoples:

Only two of these groups are named before the Bronze Age collapse apparently starts (which is in the middle of Merneptah’s 10-year reign). The Sherden are first mentioned, already as sea raiders, in the context of Ramesses II’s Year 2 (1278 BC).

“The unruly Sherden whom no one had ever known how to combat, they came boldly sailing in their warships from the midst of the sea, none being able to withstand them.”

Having defeated them at Egypt’s coast, he incorporated many of them into his royal guard. They armed themselves with torso armor, horned helmets, shields and long swords (by bronze standards). Now here’s the weird part: as early as 1200 BC, bronze statues of warriors wearing those horned helmets appear on Sardinia. Isolated from the eastern Mediterranean world by the Strait of Messina, Sardinia was already home to what’s called the Nuragic civilization (despite lack of cities and writing), a culture whose striking feature is that almost every square mile, every village in a settlement density equal to 11th century England, had a stone tower (nuraghe). Did they have a reliable route from Sardinian to Egypt and the Levant throughout the 13th century BC, or were they conquistadors who conquered Sardinia after being defeated in Egypt? This theory points to the plain around Sardis whose farms later supported the Lydian capital being called the Sardinian plain, suggesting that the island was “new Sardinia.”

The Lukka were Hittite vassals from the western part of modern Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, called Lycia in Classical times, when Ramesses II fought the Great King and his assembled vassals at Kadesh.

In Merneptah’s great Karnak inscription, the Sherden and Lukka are joined by never-before-attested groups called the Shekelesh, Eqwesh and Teresh. The theory of de Rougé was that Shekel-esh could be identified as Sikel-oi, Eqw-esh as Homeric Achaeans and Ter-esh as Turrhēn-oi. Thucydides mentions the Sikeloi in vi.4 when recounting the history of Sicily, and says they lived on the east coast of Italy before migrating to the island which took their name. Turrhenoi are... more complicated.

Then Ramesses III’s mortuary temple hieroglyphs and Papyrus Harris I found nearby say that during his late majesty’s Year 8 (1178 BC), Sherden, Shekelesh and Teresh teamed up with more peoples we’ve never heard of before, the Denyen, Peleset, Tjekker and Weshesh. Denyen could be Homer’s Danaans (used interchangeably with “Achaean”) or the Israelite tribe of Dan (see second page of Kelder, "The Egyptian Interest in Mycenaean Greece"). The Peleset are very probably the Philistines (Hebrew Pleset), who manufactured Late Helladic IIIC pottery in Canaan. But if they were from the Greek sphere, why “Pleset” and not “Achaean” or “Danaan”? Ah, well just because they had Greek material culture doesn’t mean they were ethnic Greeks: since 1873, the name has suggested to have the same root as Pelasgoi, the indigenous people Greek historians say their ancestors replaced.

Still, it’s very weird for three ethnic groups no one had ever heard of to appear as raiders ~1208 BC and more to team up with them 30 years later, don’t you think?

Whoever they were, if the Sea Peoples were threatening the civilizations of Egypt, Canaan, and mainland Greece, you’d expect ports in between to feel the effects too. Indeed, just like Pylos, we have clay tablets from the port of Ugarit baked during the fire, from the city’s prince/king to a senior king of Cyprus:

“My father, behold, the enemy’s ships came; my cities(?) were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots(?) are in the Land of Hittites, and all my ships are in the Land of Lukka?… Thus, the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.”

Per Wikipedia, Ugarit’s destruction level contained LH IIIB ware, but no LH IIIC. Therefore, the date of the destruction is important for the dating of the LH IIIC phase. An Egyptian sword bearing the name of Pharaoh Merneptah was found in the destruction levels.

The Hittite Empire ports of Mersin, Tarsus and Alalakh also have fire-destruction layers, as does Byblos in northern Lebanon. Further inland, Aleppo, Carchemish on the Euphrates and the Hittite capital Hattusas have terminal Bronze Age destruction layers. As far as I know, those three sites have no known connection to the Sea Peoples alliance. So which happened to the high king in Hattusas first, burning of ports or badly losing a war inland?

5.2. Did 150 years of drought cause the Bronze Age collapse?

A 2013 study of fossilized pollen particles from the Sea of Galilee shows a 150 year drought. In the region where pollen would waft into the Sea of Galilee, apparently climate change caused a succession of severe droughts from about 1250 BC to about 1100 BC, leading to a sharp decline in oak, pine and carob trees... and the economically-important olive tree. If this finding could be replicated further north, we might have a story of agricultural laborers turned desperadoes.

5.3. Postscript from Greek mythology.

In Greek mythology, the last etiological myth is “the return of the Heraclidae”, which they used to explain the population speaking the Dorian dialect. Heracles’s son Hyllus was said to be an exile in Thessaly because of the schemes of Eurystheus, king of Mycenae before Atreus and Agamemnon, and his patron Hera. Aegimius the Dorian adopted him and, skipping irrelevant details, the third generation of Heraclidae built a fleet to land a Dorian army on the coast of the Argolid, ending the dynasty of Mycenaean kings by defeating the son of Agamemnon’s son Orestes, burning the city, and transferring power to Argos as well as taking over the isthmus of Corinth, Sparta and conquering Messenia, which had been ruled from Pylos in the mythic age.

Lovecraft review: "The Whisperer in Darkness"

This novella was originally published in the August, 1931 issue of Weird Tales. The cover went to a Tarzan clone called Tam, Son of the Tiger by Otis Adelbert Kline. Not even a naked woman!

This is the story where Lovecraft’s famous Mi-Go were introduced… sort of. They come from Yuggoth, and Lovecraft had already written a sonnet cycle called “Fungi From Yuggoth”. Lovecraft would allude to them a third and final time in At the Mountains of Madness as competitors of the crinoid Old Ones who caused their decline during the Jurassic.

Anyway, the story is told in past tense in May 1930 by protagonist Albert Wilmarth, who teaches literature at Miskatonic University and doesn’t want to admit that he’s crazy. In May of 1928, he started getting mail from a Henry Akeley forcefully arguing for the truth of Vermont hill folklore about a pre-human race described as human-size, pinkish, crustacean-like, with a distinct head bearing multitudes of short antennae and “vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs.” From an 1839 monograph collecting folklore from the oldest people in the state, Wilmarth described Puritans calling them familiars of the Devil, Scots-Irish linking them to the malign fairies and “little people” of the bogs and raths, and best of all, native Pennacook saying they’re extraterrestrials “from the Great Bear in the sky, and had mines in our earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they could not get on any other world. They did not live here… They could not eat the things and animals of earth, but brought their own food from the stars.”
He tried to tell the credulous these stories must be false, because they’re no different from the fairy delusions of Ireland and Wales, “belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or ‘Abominable Snow-Men'”, etc, which they just tried to turn around on him as the folklore being evidence of the beings’s being real and active in the past.

This same debate would later play out in real life between UFO believers and skeptics with no acknowledgement of Lovecraft.

However, in Akeley’s description, the aliens aren’t associated with eerie flying objects, but “being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the ether”. Why Lovecraft chose to make it thus, I don’t know: the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment had discredited outer space being filled with light-bearing aether (and the rapid acceptance of special relatively after 1905 removed the theoretical need for something to propagate light waves), and by 1897 there were already alien sightings in the United States associated with spacecraft.
Akeley said he found “great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics half worn away which I found in the woods on Round Hill, east of here; and after I took it home everything became different. If they think I suspect too much they will either kill me or take me off the earth to where they come from.” He offered to mail it and a phonograph recording, which Wilmarth accepted in the name of Science, though at the same time Akeley’s claims gave him a stereotypical Lovecraft scholar anxiety attack:

I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connexions—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum—and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way.
…
I am almost glad that the letter and record and photographs are gone now—and I wish, for reasons I shall soon make clear, that the new planet beyond Neptune had not been discovered.

Then came the record, made around 1 AM on “May-Eve—the hideous Sabbat-night of underground European legend”, “near the closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain rises out of Lee’s Swamp.”

(A CULTIVATED MALE HUMAN VOICE)

. . . is the Lord of the Woods, even to . . . and the gifts of the men of Leng . . . so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named. Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!

(A BUZZING IMITATION OF HUMAN SPEECH)

Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

(HUMAN VOICE)

And it has come to pass that the Lord of the Woods, being . . . seven and nine, down the onyx steps . . . (tri)butes to Him in the Gulf, Azathoth, He of Whom Thou hast taught us marv(els) . . . on the wings of night out beyond space, out beyond th . . . to That whereof Yuggoth is the youngest child, rolling alone in black aether at the rim. . . .

(BUZZING VOICE)

. . . go out among men and find the ways thereof, that He in the Gulf may know. To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock. . . .

(HUMAN VOICE)

. . . (Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth through the void, Father of the Million Favoured Ones, Stalker among. . . .

It then transpired that Akeley’s attempt to ship the hieroglyphic stone was intercepted by a person whose eerie description could correspond to a Mi-Go in a mask and trenchcoat just as well as a human agent. Summer vacation dragged on, and on August 15 Wilmarth received a letter from Akeley claiming that three of his dogs had been shot, human and claw prints on the farm, his phone line cut and a tree felled across the safest road to town. We get it already, but Lovecraft gilds the lily with more letters, meant to raise tension but just making Akeley look like a farmer who’s gone violently insane, shooting up his home to the point of accidentally killing one of his own dogs. That said, he does convey that the aliens have strange bodies despite being as fragilely mortal as humans:

It was dead, of course. One of the dogs had it, and I found it near the kennel this morning. I tried to save it in the woodshed to convince people of the whole thing, but it all evaporated in a few hours. Nothing left. You know, all those things in the rivers were seen only on the first morning after the flood. And here’s the worst. I tried to photograph it for you, but when I developed the film there wasn’t anything visible except the woodshed. What can the thing have been made of?

Well, Wilmarth finally travels to visit his penpal on Wednesday, September 12 (shouldn’t he be teaching a class by now?), only after receiving a typed, not handwritten, letter in which violent anxiety has been reversed into a message that the aliens are friendly:

What I had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious—my previous estimate being merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.
…
Actually, they have never knowingly harmed men, but have often been cruelly wronged and spied upon by our species. There is a whole secret cult of evil men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring them on behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions. It is against these aggressors—not against normal humanity—that the drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed.

I’ll leave how that first quoted sentence relates to Lovecraft’s attitudes to other human cultures to the reader.
But let’s backtrack to the phonograph. The aliens seem to be polytheists who believe in Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, his Great Messenger Nyarlathotep and “Him Who is not to be Named.” Note that the source contradicts the subsequent Cthulhu Mythos, where each alien god has one or more “servitor races”. August Derleth assigned the Mi-Go to Hastur. Is there a term for the reading comprehension version of a malapropism?
As repeatedly requested in the last letter, Wilmarth told no one where he was going and traveled with the phonograph and every photo and letter Akeley sent him… only differing in arriving by train in the closest town around 1 PM rather than the trustworthy letter’s suggested 10 PM. Why yes, this man IS too dumb to live. He’s met at the station by a Mr. Noyes, an urbane man whom Wilmarth nervously felt to have a familiar voice as it politely pumped him for information. Gosh, I wonder where he could have heard his voice before! At the house, Noyes told him Akeley was ready to see him, but he had this asthma attack you know, he can only talk in a whisper and he’ll be clumsy for a couple days with his feet all bandaged…
OK, so he went to talk with Akeley and found him seated in a darkened room with “rigid, immobile expression and unwinking glassy stare”, a scarf high around his neck and a loose dressing gown too long to see his pants. He asked repeatedly for the return of everything he sent before starting to wax joyfully about Yuggoth, the nearest planet fully populated by this pan-cosmic genus of sapients of which others are but degenerate offshoots… it matters not that the Sun is no brighter than a star out there, for “They have other, subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them,” said the totally normal human singing their praises in a darkened room. He went on:

You know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R’lyeh when it was above the waters. They’ve been inside the earth, too—there are openings which human beings know nothing of—some of them in these very Vermont hills—and great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai. It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came

The first part of this got contradicted just six months later when Lovecraft wrote AtMoM, while the latter stuff is a reference to “The Mound”, which he had ghostwritten for Zealia Bishop around January 1930.
Wilmarth got spooked by his host insinuating that tomorrow they’d discuss their voyage to Yuggoth… yes you too, if you choose. “complete human bodies did not indeed make the trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill of the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human brains” in high-tech jars. The portable brain can be kept alive with liquid nutrients, electrodes reach through and connect with elaborate instruments capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of sight, hearing, and speech, then, on every planet covered by their civilisation, there are mechanical bodies it can be plugged into. His host then showed him shelves with a dozen brain cylinders: “Three humans, six fungoid beings who can’t navigate space corporeally, two beings from Neptune…” Hugh Man Akeley, who was totally normal, invited Wilmarth to plug any into a certain machine to communicate with, but “Don’t bother that fresh, shiny cylinder joined to the two testing instruments—the one with my name on it.” Wilmarth obeyed and the system spoke:

“Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven different celestial bodies—planets, dark stars, and less definable objects—including eight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and time? All this has not harmed me in the least. My brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call the operation surgery. The visiting beings have methods which make these extractions easy and almost normal—and one’s body never ages when the brain is out of it. The brain, I may add, is virtually immortal with its mechanical faculties and a limited nourishment supplied by occasional changes of the preserving fluid.

Behold, the first uploaded Singularity nerd! Wilmarth though reacted fearfully, internally calling this things normal human beings weren’t meant to know and “blasphemous influences”, yet somehow he took a nap in the guest room before bolting upright and driving away terrified in a stolen old Ford, from Akeley’s garage. A sheriff’s posse found bullet holes, the dogs and livestock all missing with no having bought them, and Akeley vanished with the clothes Wilmarth saw him in discarded. There were no cylinders or other evidence, of course. But Wilmarth insists it was no dream that he was awakened by sounds of extraterrestrials entering the bedroom, while “a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept me inert”. When he regained muscle control, he tried to find Akeley to flee with, but instead his flashlight found in the easy chair metallic clamps attached to… “the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.”
Gosh, bet you didn’t see that coming. Seriously though, this story is fascinating in its precociousness. Here published in 1931 are aliens that have been operating on Earth so long that our science-ignorant ancestors identified them as Fair Folk (and yetis), who want to abduct people and do surgery on them. There’s a coverup involving human agents, and they’re in contact with American elites, though here it’s implied to be Lowell Observatory rather than the federal government.
It’s also an early example of the claim that it’s not viable for human bodies to explore outer space, but by discarding the body with advanced technology your consciousness could explore the visible universe and beyond as an immortal that can plug in to different bodies.
So this story prefigures by decades a chunk of real-world belief and a chunk of SF, and Lovecraft just kind of tossed it out there as opposed to being something he liked to revisit frequently once created (see Cthulhu, crinoid Old Ones). I’m impressed.

Weird Fiction review: "The Challenge From Beyond"

This was a round robin story by Catherine L. Moore (known for medieval French sword and sorcery and Solar system-set Weird SF), Abraham Merritt (a novelist whose staple genre was “lost races”), H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and someone named Frank Belknap Long. It was the brainchild of Julius Schwartz, then a literary agent, but better remembered for his work at DC Comics long after the deaths of Lovecraft, Howard, and Merritt. It was written in the summer of 1935 for the September issue of Fantasy magazine.

C.L. Moore

George Campbell, a geology professor, is camping during summer break. When an animal disturbs his campsite, he picks up a rock to throw at it, but it’s “Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded corners.” It’s an age-worn artificial cube of quartz, and inside is a small disc with “Wedge-shaped characters, faintly reminiscent of cuneiform writing.” (He didn’t notice this while making camp?) He’s weirded out by how this could exist, his internal monologue running in the channel we now call “Lovecraftian”, even though it’s not his turn yet. “could there, in a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he held? Or—might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space into the unformed rock of a still molten world?” He turns off his flashlight… did the cube continue glowing a moment?

Bare summary doesn’t do justice to Moore’s luxurious prose, the positive feature that balances her harebrained plot development.

A. Merritt

Campbell can’t sleep. He gets back up to experiment with the cube. It acts weird when photons hit it, but only if he’s paying attention. “His mind must travel along the ray, fix itself upon the cube’s heart, if its beat were to wax, until … what?” Much unnecessary detail of sights, sounds, etc. follows, then the object absorbs him.

And he passes the baton to…

H.P. Lovecraft

Campbell’s mind traverses the vast physical distance between where he was and some unknown cosmic destination. It’s scary to not have a body, especially if your internal monologue assumes materialism! He tries to think as he moves, and “Some cell-group in the back of his head had seemed to find a cloudily familiar quality in the cube—and that familiarity was fraught with dim terror.” Because of course he remembers that, as a professor, he’s familiar with the Eltdown Shards, cuneiform-like clay tablets geologists found in pre-carboniferous strata in England thirty years ago. While a few scientists “hinted at” their heretical artificiality (in Lovecraft, do academics ever make clear claims rather than hinting or insinuating?), he only remembers something about a cube because he’s also read the far less reputable book by “a deeply learned Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings” purporting to translate the Eltdown Shards. If the Reverend is right (of course he is), on an extra-galactic planet “a mighty order of worm-like beings whose attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination” gradually colonized their entire galaxy. No technology could let them navigate to other galaxies in person, so in their thirst for knowledge of all space and time “They devised peculiar objects—strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance—which could be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe,” and when by chance a mind observed one some indefinite amount of time after it landed on a planet, the hypnotized mind will be beamed to the worm-people’s planet, where one of the natives can perform a mind-swap to go exploring the victim’s extra-galactic space-time coordinates.

Sometimes, when a potentially important race capable of space travel was found, the worm-like folk would employ the cube to capture and annihilate minds by the thousands, and would extirpate the race for diplomatic reasons—using the exploring minds as agents of destruction.

Only a few of the numberless cubes sent forth ever found a landing and response on an inhabited world—since there was no such thing as aiming them at goals beyond sight or knowledge. Only three, ran the story, had ever landed on peopled worlds in our own particular universe. One of these had struck a planet near the galactic rim two thousand billion years ago, while another had lodged three billion years ago on a world near the centre of the galaxy. The third—and the only one ever known to have invaded the solar system—had reached our own earth 150,000,000 years ago.

It was with this latter that Dr. Winters-Hall’s “translation” chiefly dealt.

Fortunately for Earth, it was then dominated by the Great Race, who knew a thing or two about mind transference, so their scientists reacted efficiently and “carefully hid the thing from light and sight, and guarded it as a menace.”

Now and then some rash, unscrupulous adventurer would furtively gain access to it and sample its perilous powers despite the consequences—but all such cases were discovered, and safely and drastically dealt with.

 

(I love the mental image of tentacled, cone-shaped adventures, wielding weapons and bracing their mighty muscles.)

Fifty million years ago, the beings sent their minds ahead to escape a peril from the inner Earth, and the whereabouts of the cube were lost to Earthly minds ever since. In a delightful bit of self-parody, Lovecraft has Campbell note the length and detail of this “translation” relative to the small number of Eltdown glyphs.

He wakes up and tries to move, bu thoughts like “move my hand” have no coherent output, and his five senses are not what he’s used to. Good ol’ body horror. A fellow being comes in, like a pale grey centipede, and appears to threaten him.

Robert E. Howard

He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards.

Campbell mans up (centipedes up?) and thinks of his old body as just a cloak that would have been cast off upon a natural death anyway. What had that life “ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression?” The only positive things in memory were “the physical delights of his former life.”

But he had long ago exhausted all the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exotic joys.

Bwah?

Campbell also has access to the neurons of the being who left this body, Tothe of the planet Yekub. “Carved deep in the physical tissues of the brain, they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George Campbell; and his human consciousness seized them and translated them to show him the way not only to safety and freedom, but to…” power! He’s doing the full Nietzsche.

Understanding that the centipede threatening him with a metal box is Yukth, “supreme lord of science”, he kills him anyway. He uses Tothe’s memories to run to the shrine of a floating white sphere and seize it – the god of Yekub! (though why the aliens worship a dumb old sphere for an idol has been forgotten for a million years.) Conan the Centipede kills the nearby priest and glories in thoughts of how he’ll be king now! He, who dared the easy thing no “man of Yekub” ever would, for as an Earthling he is Beyond Good and Evil as the centipedes subjectively think of them! Muwhahaha!

Frank Belknap Long

In Campbell’s body, Tothe walks around like an idiot, frothing at the mouth. His fingers are clawed now?

Meanwhile Conan the Centipede streaks through fern-planted avenues between the cyclopean buildings under the alien sun. Woo, got your god!

Back on Earth, Tothe is overwhelmed by bestial human brain patterns and tries to eat a live fox.

Meanwhile thousands of worm-shapes prostrate themselves as the ex-Campbell undulates toward the throne of spiritual empire.

Back on Earth, Campbell’s body/Tothe dies by drowning and is found by a fur trapper. He finds it much hairier and beast-like than Campbell left it, and dripping black ichor instead of blood.

Meanwhile the divine sphere acts on Tothe’s body, burning with “a supermundane spirituality all animal dross.” Then it communicates:

“On all earth, living creatures rend one another, and feast with unutterable cruelty on their kith and kin. No worm-mind can control a bestial man-body when it yearns to raven. Only man-minds instinctively conditioned through the course of ten thousand generations can keep the human instincts in thrall. Your body will destroy itself on earth, seeking the blood of its animal kin, seeking the cool water where it can wallow at its ease. Seeking eventually destruction, for the death-instinct is more powerful in it than the instincts of life and it will destroy itself in seeking to return to the slime from which it sprang.”

Thus spoke the round red god of Yekub in a far-off segment of the space-time continuum to George Campbell as the latter, with all human desire purged away, sat on a throne and ruled an empire of worms more wisely kindly, and benevolently than any man of earth had ever ruled an empire of men.

Whoa, he ended it with a huge Take That to Howard’s intentions.

Well, you don’t read a round robin for narrative cohesion. You want to see the different authors’s styles contrasting in small chunks. And this one is better than most, because not everyone just spews their style onto the page with a straight face: Lovecraft in particular has the self-awareness to make fun of himself. Howard might have been doing the same: Conan the Centipede is a more over-the-top power fantasy than actual Conan, who often showed a code of ethics.

Merritt does the least by far. Moore had the job of creating a character and MacGuffin, so she couldn’t run wild like Howard or Howard. And not having read Frank Belknap Long, his section, while very distinct, has the least to contextualize it. How does an alien not understanding human instincts turn the body into a werewolf? What were Long’s psychological preoccupations as an author? That stuff about the unutterable cruelty of Earth life and how humans can only act better because of ten thousand generations of conditioning echoes the French Counter-Revolutionary philosopher Joseph de Maistre (e.g. Seventh St. Petersburg Dialogue), filtered through the later Darwinian paradigm shift.