GoCorral

Greek myths describe periods of hundreds or thousands of years when humans were around and the Titans ruled. And before Cronus was born there was a long time where just the primordial deities were around hanging out and doing whatever primordial deities do.

So how far back does my timeline of Cimmeria go? A hundred years from current events? The Trojan War? The war between the Titans and the Olympians? The birth of Gaia from the void?

I picked the birth of Deucalion as where my timeline would start.

For those of you who don’t know, Deucalion is the Greek mythological version of Noah. A lot of religions have versions of Noah. Archaeologists link these stories to flood events at the end of the last ice age.

Deucalion is the “Father of Humanity” in Greek mythology, so he is a natural starting point for a timeline about Humans.

But where do I line up Deucalion with an actual historical timeline?

Fortunately, there is a event in Greek myths that has a counterpart in reality, the Trojan War!

The remains of Troy have been found with multiple layers of cities built on top of each after the previous layer was destroyed.

Two of the layers are reasonable candidates for what was destroyed at the end of the Trojan War. These two layers are called Troy VI and Troy VII.

Troy VI was destroyed first around 1250BCE and Troy VII was destroyed around 1183BCE.

So which was the Troy the Greeks destroyed?

Luckily the myths give us an easy answer. Troy was attacked and damaged a few decades before the Trojan War by Heracles. Thus if we were to line up mythical and historical events we would claim that Heracles destroyed Troy VI in 1250BCE and the Greeks destroyed Troy VII in 1183BCE.

From there it’s a matter of counting backwards generationally from the Trojan War to Deucalion.

It turns out that Patroclus is the best candidate for counting backwards to Deucalion. Figuring out Patroclus’s age is somewhat dependent on Achilles’s age.

The good news is that Achilles’s age is given in the Epic Cycle. He is eight years old when Odysseus takes him off to the Trojan War. It takes two years to get to Troy and the Greeks are there for ten years. That means Achilles would’ve been 19 or 20 near the end of the war.

Patroclus is meant to be Achilles’s older cousin and pederast. I guessed that he was seven years older.

So we count backwards 27 from 1183BCE and we get 1210BCE as the birth year of Patroclus. Patroclus was the second son of Menoetius. We count backwards for Menoetius, assuming that he had his first child at 25 (typical for Greeks), with a 2 year gap per child. Continue this process until you reach Deucalion and then add a bunch of years to Deucalion because he lived longer than normal Humans do just like Noah.

Obviously, I could use a similar system to date many of the events in Greek mythology, but that’s a huge pain in the ass. It’s enough that you know that all the heroic myths take place over a roughly 200 year period, with most of them concentrated around the 50 years leading up to the Fall of Troy.

And without further ado, here is the first installment in the Cimmerian Timeline.

1421BCE: Deucalion is born.
1339BCE: The Great Flood happens, signaling the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Heroic Age.
1196BCE: Paris steals Helen and the call goes out among the Achaeans.
1195BCE: Odysseus finds Achilles at Scyros and the ships sail to Troy, ravaging almost every settlement enroute to the great city.
1193BCE: The Achaeans arrive at Troy.
1183BCE: Troy falls, signaling that the Heroic Age will end soon.
1173BCE: Odysseus returns home.
1159BCE: Odysseus is killed by Telegonus, his son with Circe. Telegonus takes Penelope and Telemachus back to Circe’s Island. Telegonus marries Penelope and Circe marries Telemachus. This death and marriage signal the end of the Heroic Age and the beginning of the Iron Age for Greece.

-GoCorral

Next: Cimmerian Timeline Part 2