A recurring comment left by the God Culture on this blog is that I have not disproven their entire thesis which is that the Philippines is Ophir, Tarshish, Sheba, Seba, the Garden of Eden, and that Filipinos are part of the Lost Tribes of Israel. They are correct. I have not disproven that magical cornucopia of a thesis. On the other hand they have not proven what they assert. They have gathered a lot of circumstantial information, misinterpreted much of it, and have declared that all roads lead to the Philippines.
It is not my intention to pull down the entire edifice of the God Culture in one fell swoop. It is simply not possible to do so. The amount of information they present is overwhelming and many of their conclusions rest upon their own biases. It is like disputing with a schizophrenic who claims to be the Messiah and that aliens are out to get him. You don't dive in head first and deny his claims point blank. You come around from the side and show him one-by-one how his beliefs are unfounded. Likewise the best way to go about disproving the God Culture's thesis is to look closely at the information which forms its basis and slowly dismantle it. This is in fact what the God Culture encourages their listeners to do when they say, "Test us." In that spirit I want to take a closer look at Chryse which they claim is Luzon.
The map on the left is a close-up of that of Pomponius Mela who writes of two islands, Chryse and Argyre, which the God Culture claims are Luzon and Mindanao respectively. They claim that Chryse is the ancient source of Greek gold and that the Greeks accurately mapped directions to this island. In one of their videos they say that
Greek armor found in Mindanao dated between 800 BC - 480 BC backs up this claim.
One of the ways to "test" this claim is to look at surviving ancient Greek maps and geographical descriptions in chronological order. If the God Culture's claims are true then what we should see is Chryse and Argyre on every single ancient Greek map. If these islands exist and are the Philippines then we should also see them positioned on the Eastern side of the Malay Peninsula.
King Solomon reigned from 970 - 930 BC. During that time he sent ships to Ophir which the God Culture claims is the Philippines. 100 years later King Jehoshaphat attempted to send an expedition to Ophir but the ships broke down and the mission failed. This means that the last record we have of anyone knowing the directions to Ophir was between 870 - 849 BC. Later on we will see that Tim says the Greeks inherited the knowledge of Solomon's Phoenician navy and thus knew the location of Ophir/Philippines. Do ancient Greek maps bear out this assertion?
1. The first map to look at comes from
Anaximander who lived between 610 - 546 BC. According to some he was the first to make a map of the world. Isn't that odd? If the Greeks were trading with the Philippines as early as 800 BC as Tim alleges why would Anaximander be the first to draw a map of the world two centuries later? And why would this map neglect the Philippines or any islands in Asia? Wouldn't there be massive and detailed navigation charts before he came along from which he could work? Only one fragment of Anaximander's works remains and his map is reconstructed from Herodotus's description.
On this map there are no islands in Asia and the land masses are perfectly and equally divided.
2. The next map comes from Hecateaus of Miletus whose dates are 550 - 476 BC. This map is based on and an improvement of Anaximander's map.
There are no islands in Asia on this map. The Indian sub-continent is a bit more prominent.
3. The next map belongs to Eratosthenes who lived from 276 - 194 BC.
This is the first time we see an island in Asia on a Greek map of the world. Taprobane, just south of India, is also known as Ceylon or Sri Lanka. Still no Chryse or Argyre.
4. The map of Posidonius is next. He lived from 135 - 51 BC.
On this map Taprobane has disappeared and there are no other islands in Asia.
5. Strabo's map is next. He lived between 64 BC - 24 AD.
On this map Taprobane is back but there are still no other islands in Asia.
6. Finally we reach familiar territory with the map of Pomponius Mela who died in 45 AD.
This map is found on page 572 of "Cram's Atlas of the World, Ancient and Modern." It is not much different from Strabo's map except that it is the first map to depict Chryse, the island of gold, and the only map to mention Argyre, the island of silver. Zooming in we see Chryse and Argyre are nowhere near each other.
On this map Argyre (Mindanao) and Chryse (Luzon) are separated by the Indian subcontinent. Some kind soul took Konrad Miller's 1898 map of Mela and added modern day political divisions.
Chryse and Argyre are not marked on this map but they are the two orange islands above Sri Lanka. Here we are 1000 years after Solomon sent ships to Ophir which the God Culture claims is the Philippines and we still see nothing that geographically resembles the Philippines. We see no land placed beyond the Mayla Peninsula in the South China Sea.
7. After Mela is the Periplus of the Erythean Sea which is dated to between 40 - 70 AD.
This map is based on actual trade routes between Rome and India. Following the directions in the Periplus does not lead one to the Philippines but to the Malay Peninsula. See how Chryse is located not in the Philippines but in the Malay Peninsula? I will discuss this more below. There is also no location for Argyre because the Periplus of the Erythean Sea does not mention this place.
8. The next map comes from Dionysius Periegetes also known as Dionysius the Tourist. His dates are 117 - 138 AD.
Zooming in we see Chryse situated all alone between the Himalayas and the Ganges.
There is no Argyre. In the video Clue #53 Finding Chryse, Timothy talks at length about Dionysius starting at 32:13.
Tim only quotes a brief section from Dionysius' Description of the World which he
found on this website on page 38. The full text of Dionysius translated into English by Thomas Twyne in 1572
can be found on this page. The relevant section is "
Of the Islands in the Ocean." When we read this text we find that Dionysius is starting at the Pillars of Hercules and working his way clockwise around the world describing each of the islands in the ocean. The itinerary is as follows: Berlengas, Sacrum, Britannia, Thule, Chryse, Taprobane, and then there are a few other islands. Here is what he writes about Chryse which I have rendered in modern spelling:
But not far from this island there lyeth an other, which is called the farthest Thule, where as when the hot Summer Sun approacheth to the northern Pole, their nights be like unto perpetual day, in fairness and brightness, until he return again to the South.
From thence if a man sailing towards Scythia turn his ship to the East, he shall find Chryse, which is an other island of the Ocean, in the which also the sun shineth very clearly:
then if he return him contrary to the south, immediately he shall discover Taprobana, a great and large island, and plentifully replenished with all manner riches, and a brooder of many Elephants, which from thence are transported into Asia.
If you sail north to Thule and keep going around the world heading back south towards Scythia and then go East (he does not say how far East but on the map Chryse is close to the mainland) you find Chryse. Tim says that means the Philippines because it is Southeast of China and the directions say go south and east. That sounds good but Tim is unaware that Dinoysius continues his three-hour tour by saying if you go south from Chryse you will
immediately discover Taprobana which is Ceylon or Sri Lanka. Is Sri Lanka south of the Philippines? No. Therefore Chryse cannot be the Philippines! Chryse, even on the map Tim uses, is located right near the Ganges and not at all to the southeast of China.
The problem here is Tim does not have all of Dionysus' text in front of him. He only has a brief fragment. Tim quotes the first part that starts off "When your keel has ploughed" and gives his explanation. Then he says that Dionysius "reiterates a little later again leaving the northern climes." That is wrong. Dionysius does not reiterate anything. The two passages Tim quotes are the same passage translated into English, one from Greek and the other from Latin! We see these two passages in an article by Paul Wheatley in The Malaysian Historical Journal.
Tim makes this blunder because his source for Dionysius is literally a middle school teacher's classroom outline and not the actual text of Dionysius.
That is why he does not have the sequel about Taprobane being immediately to the south of Chryse. Just goes to show that diligence with sources is a must. Without the full text Tim has no idea what Dionysius wrote or that he is circumnavigating the globe and thus misinterprets him by identifying Chryse with the Philippines. Tim is ignorant of Dinoysius though he talks as if he is familiar with the text.
There is a lot more that could be said about Dionysius but the fact is he was a poet and not writing an exact geography. His intended purpose was
"only to impress up in the minds of his readers such a general notion of the subject as might enable them to appear to advantage by showing their superior knowledge among the ignorant."
The Malaysian Historical Journal, July 1956, pg 9 and 10
Dionysius's book was written to enable his readers to become the insufferable know-it-all at parties. Take note that his trip around the top of the world from the Pillars of Hercules to Britannia to China to India is pure fantasy because it was not until the 20th century that the Arctic ocean was opened up to ships. It appears Dionysius was unaware that the Arctic Ocean is covered in thick ice because he does not mention that fact. But none of that matters because Dionysius did not actually travel to the places he describes. He is simply using poetry to illustrate the geography of the known world which at that time did not include the Philippines.
9. Now for the most important map in all of antiquity, the map of Ptolemy. He lived from 100 - 170 AD.
This map represents the sum total of what the Greeks knew about the world by the 2nd century AD. There is no ocean past the Malay peninsula which Ptolemy labels Golden (Chryse) Chersoneses (Peninsula).
Here is a rather dramatic rendering of this map.
Such is the known world in the time of Ptolemy. There is no Philippines. There is no Argyre. There is no island marked Chryse. If the Greeks were sailing to the Philippines to find gold then why does the world end just before where the Philippines should be? Why is there no southern Africa if the Greeks circumnavigated it to arrive at the Philippines? It's because the Greeks never sailed to the Philippines and neither did King Solomon's navy. If they had then these maps would not end where they do. They would also not contradict one another.
Out of 9 maps only 4 have a location marked Chryse. Two of those maps show Chryse as an island while the other two maps show it as the Malya Peninsula. Only one map has Argyre. If Argyre corresponds to a real island, Mindanao says Tim and the God Culture, then why is it on only one map? Pliny mentions Argyre in his Natural History but he was using Pomponius Mela as a source. He also places Chryse and Argyre in a totally different location than Mela.
But first there are some other islands of which we must make mention. Patala, as we have already stated, lies at the mouth of the Indus: it is of a triangular figure, and is two hundred and twenty miles in breadth. Beyond the mouth of the Indus are the islands of Chryse and Argyre, abounding in metals, I believe; but as to what some persons have stated, that their soil consists of gold and silver, I am not so willing to give a ready credence to that. After passing these islands we come to Crocala, twenty miles in breadth, and then, at twelve miles' distance from it, Bibraga, abounding in oysters and other bell-fish. At eight miles' distance from Bibraga we find Toralliba, and many others of no note.
Pliny, Natural History, Book 6, Chapter 23
The Indus is on the Western side of the Indian subcontinent. Why does Pliny place Chryse and Argyre there when Mela places them on the other side near the Ganges? Pliny contradicts Mela even though he is using Mela as a source.
Tim is not content to take the Periplus or Mela at face value. In fact when he talks about the Periplus he has to editorialize it to fit his thesis.
"Periplus of the Erytheaen Sea in the first century records Chryse and Argyre as being located in "the last part of the inhabited world toward the east, under the rising sun itself beyond the land of China which brought silk to India."
https://philippinefails.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-god-culture-dishonestly-edited.html
All of that is a lie. The Periplus does not mention Argyre and the Periplus does not locate Chryse beyond China. You can listen to Tim twist the Periplus out of all meaning in his video Clue #53 Finding Chryse starting at 19:40.
To editorialize, as he admits he does, and add "beyond China" does not elucidate the text at all. Tim's addition makes the Periplus say what it does not.
63. After these, the course turns toward the east again, and sailing with the ocean to the right and the shore remaining beyond to the left, Ganges comes into view, and near it the very last land toward the east, Chryse. There is a river near it called the Ganges, and it rises and falls in the same way as the Nile. On its bank is a market-town which has the same name as the river, Ganges. Through this place are brought malabathrum and Gangetic spikenard and pearls, and muslins of the finest sorts, which are called Gangetic. It is said that there are gold-mines near these places, and there is a gold coin which is called caltis. And just opposite this river there is an island in the ocean, the last part of the inhabited world toward the east, under the rising sun itself; it is called Chryse; and it has the best tortoise-shell of all the places on the Erythraean Sea.
64. After this region under the very north, the sea outside ending in a land called This, there is a very great inland city called Thinae [i.e. China], from which raw silk and silk yarn and silk cloth are brought on foot through Bactria to Barygaza, and are also exported to Damirica [=Limyrike] by way of the river Ganges. But the land of This is not easy of access; few men come from there, and seldom. The country lies under the Lesser Bear [Ursa Minor], and is said to border on the farthest parts of Pontus and the Caspian Sea, next to which lies Lake Maeotis; all of which empty into the ocean.
https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/periplus/periplus.html
In paragraph 63 Chryse is located near the Ganges and it is described as both "the very last land towards the east" and "an island in the ocean." Paragraph 64 starts off "After this region." What region? Chryse. After Chryse and to the north is China. Rememeber we are traveling East. China is not East of the Philippines. It is West. So after Chryse going eastward and to the north is China. Chryse is not the Philippines.
The correct location of Chryse according to the Periplus is shown on map 7 above. It is Indo-China including the Malay Peninsula and not the Philippines. This text is almost 2000 years old and the only people who say the Periplus points to the Philippines are modern day revisionists like Timothy Schwab and the God Culture as well as Abraham Tabilog and J.G. Cheock who have both written extensively about the pre-Spanish Philippine culture and its alleged Hebrew roots.
Tim hates scholars and scholarship rather passionately but nevertheless it is always good to read what others have written. From the Journal of Asiatic Studies in 1847 we read the following from a commentary on the Periplus:
Khruse, which is mentioned as situated at the mouth of the Ganges, is regarded by Dr. Robertson as an imaginary island. From its being described as lying directly " under the rising sun and at the extremity of the world towards the east," Dr. Vincent identifies it with Sumatra, which is situated on the Equator, and is celebrated for its gold and tortoise shell. Khruse, it will be observed, is twice mentioned by Arrian first as a continent, and secondly as an island, and in both instances, as a place in the immediate vicinity of the Ganges from which, it would seem that Arracan or some island off that coast, is the locality that is here referred to. Perhaps the expression "directly under the rising sun," applies merely to the situation of Khruse within the torrid zone. Arrian seems to have been aware, that Desarene and the country of the Kirrhadse and Bargoosi lay to the north of the Tropic of Cancer : and after describing these countries, therefore, he traces the course from them towards the south, and defines the intertropical position of Khruse by the expression above mentioned. Khruse was the most remote maritime region towards the east that was known in the time of Arrian, as appears from its situation being referred by him, to " the extremity of the world towards the east." In all probability, however, it comprehended, not only Arracan, but likewise the country designed by Ptolemy, the Golden Chersonese, which is now generally admitted to be Pegu. It is likely also that it included Malacca and Sumatra.
Beyond or to the north of Khruse was situated Thina—a region the boundaries of which are mentioned as extending even to the confines of the Caspian, and the Euxine seas, the former being erroneously described according to the prevailing opinion of that time, as communicating with the Northern Ocean.
Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol 16, pgs. 26-27
Chryse or Khruse is not the Philippines according to the author of this article which is titled "Remarks on the Sequel to the Periplus of the Erythean Sea."
Wilfred Scott writing in 1912 has this to say about Chryse as he comments on the Periplus:
Chryse Island (the "golden").—There can be little doubt that by this was meant the Malacca peninsula, known to Ptolemy as the Aurea Chersonesus, although the location "just opposite the Ganges" disposes of a long voyage in rather summary fashion. Immense gold mines of ancient date have been discovered in the Malayan State of Pahang, north of Malacca, and these are probably the ones which gave the name of "golden" to the peninsula. It is known from Chinese records that ships from that country made the journey to Malacca as early as the 4th century B. C, and perhaps as early as the 12th; while the legend of Buddha's visit to Cambodia is at least suggestive of the great influence exercised from India over all Indo-China.
The Periplus of the Erythræan sea; travel and trade in the Indian Ocean, pgs 259-260
"There can be little doubt" that Chryse is the Malacca peninsula. Why is that? Because he wants to hide the truth about the Philippines or because the Periplus points to that location? Tim will go with the former reason. Regarding this wealth in Malaysia Sir Hugh Charles Clifford has this to say in 1904:
M. Auguste Pavie in the second volume of his monumental work on Indo-China contends that ancient Kambodia is the original Ophir, and that to the whole of the vast peninsula, rather than to its southern portion of Malaya, was applied in ancient days the name of the Chersonesus Aurea. The wonderful civilisation of the Khmers which brought into being the splendid buildings of Angkor, of which more will be said in a later chapter, testifies to the existence of a mighty empire in Indo-China which must once have been a centre of wealth and commerce.
In these circumstances M. Pavie's arguments seem to be impossible of acceptance, and the recent discovery in the Malayan State of Pahang—the home of apes and ivory and peafowl—of immense gold mines of very ancient date and of a workmanship that has no counterpart in southeastern Asia, supplies an ample reason for the designation of “golden" so long applied to the Chersonese. Here, hidden away under the shade of the primeval forest, are excavations which must have yielded in their time tons of the precious metal, and if Josephus spoke truly, and did not, as is more probable, merely hazard a bold conjecture, here perhaps are to be found in the heart of the Chersonesus Aurea the mines of Solomon the King.
Further India, pgs. 12-13
It is interesting to read that this man thinks the Malay Peninsula could be the source of King Solomon's mines and thus Ophir. Gold, peacocks, and ivory correspond exactly to the biblical record of what was found in Ophir and brought back to Israel. More important than the vast wealth of this area as evidence for the claim that it and not the Philippines could be Ophir is the fact that the Greeks had little to no knowledge of East Asia until after the beginning of our era which is to say after the birth of Christ.
It is not easy to realise to how late a period in their history the Greeks remained in almost total ignorance of the Eastern world, or indeed of any inhabited lands lying at a distance from the sea board of the Mediterranean. It was not until the invasion of Xerxes forced the fact upon their attention in uncompromising wise that they completely grasped the proximity of Persia. Hecataeus of Miletus, who wrote between 520 and 500 b. c, is the first of the ancients to make mention of India and the Indus by name, and Megasthenes, who was in the service of the Syrian King, Seleucus Nicanor, during the third century b. c, was the earliest writer to extend the western acquaintance with the East to the banks of the Ganges. He traversed the great peninsula from the Indus to the former river by means of what he describes as " the royal road "—probably the first of the grand trunk-roads of India—crossed successively the Sutlej and the Jumna, and descended the Ganges to Palibothra, a town at the mouth of the Sone which was the capital of a king called Sandracottus (Chandra-gupta). He brought back with him much detailed information concerning the country, its people and its products, and he speaks of cinnamon and other spices as being imported from the southern parts of India, which may possibly be an indication of the existence, even in his time, of the spice-trade of the Malayan Archipelago.
It was not, however, until after the beginning of our era that the first, faintest hint reached Europe concerning the existence of lands lying to the east of the Ganges. It is found in the writings of Pomponius Mela, whose date can be fixed from internal evidence at a. d. 43, which make mention of a headland named Tabis, described by the author as the most easterly extremity of Asia, and of another, apparently further to the south, called Tamus. Off the latter lay Chryse, or the Golden Isle, while Argyre, the Isle of Silver, was opposite to the mouth of the Ganges. Pomponius Mela places the land of the Seres—the name by which the inhabitants of northern China were known—south of Tabis and be- tween that headland and India. These statements, though they represent nothing more than a vague groping after the truth, are interesting because they mark the dawn of a perception that beyond the Ganges there lay further to the east certain inhabited lands, and because they show that in Pomponius Mela's time the Seres were recognised as occupying country at the extreme east of the Asiatic continent. Concerning Chryse itself Pomponius Mela, it is probable, entertained no very definite ideas, but his mention of the mythical isle indicates that a new geographical conception had come into being. Henceforth the Ganges was no longer to be regarded as the eastern limit of the habitable world.
Further India, pgs. 2-4
Sir Hugh Charles Clifford makes the same observation I have made just by surveying the available ancient Greek maps. The Greeks had no idea of the geography of the East. Tim also admits this fact but still insists that they sailed to the Philippines. The abundant available evidence does not support Tim's claim.
Another article worth reading which discusses most of the maps surveyed above is "The Malay Peninsula as Known to the West Before AD 1000" by Paul Wheatley. I shall not quote any of it here but I will leave a link to this short and informative article.
There are two more maps Tim has used in his videos to prove that Chryse and Argyre are the Philippines. First is the 1492 map of Martin Behaim.
In this map Argyre and Chryse are located much farther east than in Mela's map. Argyre is located south of the equator while Chryse is near Japan. This map contradicts all the Greek maps and descriptions by placing Chryse farther away from Asia. Tim says that this map shows the evolution of the thinking
about Chryse and Argyre but that does not make any sense. Tim's original
claim is that the Greeks sailed to the Philippines and accurately mapped the way. There is no room for the evolution of thinking about the location of the Philippines. Either the Greeks knew the location of the Philippines or they did not. The nine maps above prove that they did not. Martin Behaim's map from 1492 is superfluous and beside the point because we are interested in what the ancient Greeks knew not what a German man from 1492 thought.
The second map Tim uses to prove that Chryse and Argyre is the Philippines is the Turin map.
This map dates to the twelfth century and is an illustration of a commentary on the Apocalypse of St John. Like the Behaim map it is superfluous. What we are interested in is what the Greeks knew not what medieval monks or renaissance explorers thought. This map is not even supposed to be an accurate geographical representation of the world but is completely symbolical. The inclusion of Adam and Eve should give that away.
That fact that Chryse and Argyre are to be found on later European maps should be of no surprise. As Thomas Suarez, the man whom the God Culture derides as being no true scholar yet who they still continue to cite as a source, writes:
The association of Southeast Asia with gold was so strong that Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews (second half of the first century), wrote that Ophir, the land from which King Solomon had fetched gold, is now known as Aurea Chersoneus (Golden Peninsula, i.e. Malaya.) Josephus thus began the recurring idea that the Ophir of the Bible was in Southeast Asia, a belief that can be found in earnest through the latter nineteenth century. Various places were believed to have been the site of Ophir, from Malaya to Indochina, Sumatra, and the Pacific Ocean.
"Josephus thus began the recurring idea that the Ophir of the Bible was in Southeast Asia..." So far the maps from ancient Greece appear to bear out that claim. None of them feature any island of gold until Pomponius Mela comes on the scene after the birth of Christ. He is also the only one to mention Argyre. Mela predates Josephus while the Periplus is somewhat contemporary with him. The Periplus shows that Chryse is the Malay peninsula or Aurea Chersoneus. It could be that Josephus was influenced by this text to assume that area was Ophir.
In Thomas Suarez's book
Early Mapping of the Pacific we read the following:
The European mapping of the Pacific was at times a mapping of the European psyche: such icons of Christendom as Paradise, Ophir, the lost tribes of Israel, and Purgatory, all found their way to the Pacific at the hands of European authors and mapmakers.
pg. 13
We know this is true as both Columbus and Magellan viewed their voyages through the text of the Bible. Each man thought he was going to Ophir. Many thought that newly discovered peoples were part of the lost tribes of Israel. History was interpreted through the lens of the Bible as today it is interpreted through the framework of evolution.
Contrary to what Tim says Magellan's discovery of the Philippines did not settle the matter about the location of Ophir.
In the sixteenth century, places mentioned in the Judeo-Christian Bible were frequently still viewed as actual earthly locales. Most influential of these were passages about Ophir, the fabled land of riches and the place from which King Solomon was believed to have acquired his treasure. Early writers generally thought Ophir to lay in Africa or Southeast Asia, but by the sixteenth century, the Pacific became the preferred stage in the minds of some Spanish pilots and cosmographers. In the 1520s, Rodrigo de Santa Ella, founder of the University of Seville, wrote that Ophir lay in the middle of the Pacific. Seafarers followed the lead: it was sought by Sebastian Cabot in his aborted attempt to reach the Moluccan in 1526, as well as by Villalobos when he crossed from Mexico to the Philippines in 1542.
Ophir figured not only into European attraction to the Pacific, but also its geographic theory. The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 had established a Line of Demarcation to divide the undiscovered, non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal. This theoretical Line ran 370 leagues (approximately 1770 kilometers) west of the Cape Verde Islands, and continued around the earth through the Pacific. Another 250 years would pass before longitude could be determined with accuracy, however, and in the interim the Line was pushed eastward by the Portuguese and shoved westward by the Spanish. Each used any available argument where science was wanting—and for the Spanish, the Bible's account of Ophir served as evidence. When representatives of Spain and Portugal met in Badajoz in 1524 to discuss these Pacific conflicts, the Spanish used the length of time Solomon's ships took to reach Ophir—three years—as proof that it lay so far to the east as to clearly be within the Spanish realm no matter how one determined longitude.
Amerindian reports gleaned by the Spanish in Peru fit the puzzle of Ophir perfectly, "confirming" that a land of riches lay in the Pacific. Pedro Sarmiento, later to become a member of the Mendana expedition, met one Tupac Inca Yupanqui, who claimed to have encountered along the Peruvian coast merchants who had sailed into the Pacific on balsa craft. According to Sarmiento, Tupac Inca met "some merchants who had come by sea from the west, navigating in balsas with sails. They gave information of the land whence they came, which consisted of some islands called Avachumbi and Ninachumbi, where there were many people and much gold." Gold, to Sarmiento, suggested Ophir.
Tupac Inca, however, "did not lightly believe the navigating merchants," so he consulted a man who was "a great necromancer and could even fly through the air." The medium not only confirmed the truth of the merchants' story by divination, but also used his magic arts to go to the place himself. He "traversed the route, saw the islands, their people and riches, and, returning, gave certain information of all to Tupac Inca." Tupac Inca's invoking of the supernatural to confirm the truth of the Pacific land found a willing subject in Sarmiento, who himself was so intrigued by the mystical that he was held in suspicion by the Inquisition.
Pg. 61
After Magellan's discovery of the Philippines the Spanish still had no idea where Ophir was. The Spanish did not consider the Philippines to definitively be Ophir. Instead they looked in the middle of the Pacific and they even considered Peru as a possible location. Pedro Sarmiento was so willing to believe that he was caught up in the divinations of a Peruvian Indian named Tupac Inca. That is to say he was so ready to believe that he could find Ophir he believed any hokum that fit his preconceived notions.
Much of this article has been a direct response to a video the God Culture posted in February as a response to me. That is Clue #53 Finding Chryse: Don't Follow Antiquated Paradigms.
There is a whole lot of nonsense in this video that I am not going to address as it would take too long. However a few things Tim says require mentioning.
First he begins by telling us:
"In our videos we have offered very little on the land of Chryse."
This is not true at all. There are at least 5 videos where Chryse and Argyre are discussed. I have
documented that on a previous blog entry. Chryse and Argyre are fundamental to Tim's thesis. To say he has offered very little about them is misleading.
Tim goes on in his introductory statement to say:
"This (Chryse) is the ancient land of gold for the Greeks...Because he (Jospehus) didn't even know what that area of the world (far East Asia) truly shaped up to even look like geographically. He nor anyone else back then. So let's not pretend that they did. Let's not pretend that somehow they were able to superimpose a map of the Philippines, the modern Philippines, that whole shape, back then because that is absolutely ridiculous and just nuts to bring that up.
"In all fairness to he (Josephus), Ptolemey, Pliny, and the others of their era they're honing in on the location indeed just as explorers did on many things...The Phoenicians or Solomon's navy in part certainly knew the route of Ophir and its location. They went there every threes years during Solomon's reign and beyond. The Greeks absorbed that culture into theirs especially the mariner acumen and no doubt knew where Ophir was though they could not get there from the Red Sea port any more as the Phoenicians did."
"We see no evidence that any of these writers being quoted (Josephus, Mela, Pliny, Ptolemey, etc.) however actually went there (Ophir) and the first hand accounts come from Barbosa, Magellan, Pinto, Pigafetta, and the like. And those are priceless in value in determining where this is. And yes we place more weight on the eyewitness accounts as we should. However this is a Youtube video so we are going to stay away form the weeds ok? The so-called scholarly method of talking in circles just to get back to the point and proving nothing. We don't play in that paradigm."
There is so much happening in this opening salvo. It's an atomic explosion of stupidity. First of all Tim says nobody during the time of the ancient Greeks knew what the area of East Asia looked like geographically. Then he says that the Greeks undoubtedly knew where Ophir was because they inherited this information from King Solomon's Phoenician navy. Then he ends by saying the accounts of Spanish explorers in the 1500's are more valuable than ancient Greek maps.
The contradictions are palpable. If the Greeks knew where Ophir was and if that was in the Philippines and if Ophir/Chryse/Philippines was the ancient land of Greek gold then it stands to reason that the men who sailed there mapped it out and knew the geography of the land. To mock the notion that Greek mariners should have been able to draw a more or less geographically accurate map of the Philippines if they had been there shows that Tim is not really thinking about what he is saying. Either they sailed to the Philippines for gold and mapped it out as he claims or they didn't. He can't have it both ways.
To get to the Philippines from the West one has to sail through the Strait of Malacca or between Java and Sumatra.
Look at all those islands the Greeks would have encountered on the way to the Philippines. And yet there is no mention of them in the Periplus or in Mela or in Ptolemy. It makes no sense that they would ignore Sumatra, Java, and
Borneo which is the third largest island in the world! Are we really to believe that the Greeks missed them completely? That they sailed to the Philippines and decided to represent them as the two tiny islands of Chryse and Argyre and ignore all the other islands?
To assert that the Greeks sailed to the Philippines yet did not map out this precarious and exacting course with the utmost accuracy is insane. It would be of the greatest importance for Grecian traders to have accurate maps of the area. Tim's solution, later on in the video, is that the route and the land were simply lost until the time of Magellan. That is no solution at all and presupposes that the Greeks sailed to the Philippines without actually proving it. Saying they lost the route and lost the land which is why no maps show the Philippines accurately is the equivalent of saying the dog ate my homework. In this case the dog ate the ancient Greek's trade route maps.
If Tim responds to me by saying, "Go watch our videos if you want to see how we prove Chryse is the Philippines" then I ask which ones? He started off this video by saying they had offered very little on the land of Chryse. In this video which is supposed to be about finding Chryse he spends very little time discussing what the Greeks actually knew. While he does discuss the Periplus, Mela, and Dionysius he spends way too much time emphasizing Magellan.
Whatever Magellan and his crew thought is beside the point. Again what we are interested in here is what the Greeks knew, not what Magellan thought. Fact is Magellan had no idea where he was going. He THOUGHT he was going to Ophir but he did not KNOW that. He was guessing the same as Columbus who thought he had landed in Asia. Magellan did indeed falsify Barbosa's book by crossing out the word Lequois and writing Tarsis and Ofir. This shows how obstinate he was in the idea that he would be sailing to Ophir. He had no idea the Philippines existed just as the Greeks had no idea they existed as the maps above prove. As I showed above Magellan did not get the last word in about Ophir for the Spaniards as they continued to search for it after his discovery of the Philippines.
At 26:50 Tim says the following:
"But in that day they did not have the geography of South East Asia down yet. No surprise. And no reason to critics them for it frankly. They also didn't know the shape of the Philippines. Uh-oh! Don't they d-didn't they have map from 2010 to show? Because that's what someone is doing online and saying "Oh this is what the Philippines looks like." That's not what it looked like back then according to the map so let's get that straight. So again no surprise. However our contention all along is they knew that Ophir was in the Philippines. They just kept drawing it wrong, naming it wrong, until Magellan found it. And they started to get it right. They certainly did not know the shape of Luzon and Mindanao that's ludicrous to even bring up such a point."
This line of reasoning does not make any sense whatsoever. Tim says the Greeks knew Ophir was the Philippines and that they had actually been there but they kept drawing and naming it wrong for nearly a millennium! Then Magellan came along 1500 years later and set everyone straight. He again mocks me for daring to suggest that if the Greeks had actually been to the Philippines they would have mapped it correctly and not left out the Visayas. Tim has no coherent solution to their wrong mapping and only makes the Greeks look like fools when he says they kept getting it wrong until Magellan got it right.
What Tim fails to understand and what the maps above bear out is that the fact that the Greeks do not have any maps showing the Philippines or any lands east of the Golden Chersoneses is very strong proof they never went there. It is unbelievable that Tim puts so little faith in the Greeks and so much faith in Magellan. The Greeks mapped out what they knew and the fact is they did not know the Philippines or anything beyond the Malay Peninsula even as late as the 2nd century AD.
At 42:44 he says:
The only question is why don't we already know this. Why are there so many writings which confuse these very clear directions which line up with one another as well as these maps? I mean it doesn't make sense that it should be so complex. Well it's not. How can these authors dismiss Magellan of all people? Even those who write about his locating Ophir and Tarshish putting it in writing and then they forget about the whole thing as if it never happened. We call that willing ignorance blinded by a paradigm in essence. Locating them was the primary goal of Magellan. So why wouldn't that be taken into account? It doesn't seem to be in many writings, not necessarily all but many.
See we are tired of this kind of circular so-called scholarly reasoning which accomplishes nothing really. Which no longer proves things in today's world but goes around in circles chasing its tail. We had someone come in and debate on a science thing not long ago and they came back and they said, We're scientists. We don't prove things." Huh? Hee-hee-hee, I'm sorry what? Hee-hee-hee was, was that, did you really say that really? Ok.
So one ends up polarized from such journey and instead we can learn and progress unhindered by such paradigms. And we shall! And hopefully you will too. It is time to smash through the ceiling and break out of the box and think and test for ourselves. Not how an author here or there tells us to think. Even the Bible is to be tested! Believe me it will pass every one. Because the very same paradigm that claims superiority is the same one who lost, not just an earring, not just a little piece of gold no, no, no, no the entire land of gold in all of history. They forgot where it was. Now that is gross negligence in any other profession. There's an obvious reason why it was lost. It was intended to be lost to the world and kept among the few.
See we just cut through the crap and and get to it. And because we do we found Ophir while scholars twiddle their thumbs arguing about what one author pontificated versus another when many times all three, yes I mean all three, the two authors and the person also pontificating, they're all wrong! And no one is actually thinking They're watching a puppet show.
Tim repeats the word "paradigm" ad nauseam without telling us what this paradigm is. A paradigm is a worldview. What worldview is keeping anyone from making the leap and declaring along with Tim that Chryse is Ophir is the Philippines? Again Magellan is of no consequence here as the topic of this video is locating Chryse. The fact that Tim brings up Magellan over and over just shows that his conclusions are already drawn and that he does not really want to talk about Chryse. He wants to prove that Chryse is Luzon. He takes it for granted that Chryse/Ophir/Philppines are the same.
Then there is the nonsense about the location of Ophir/Chryse being intentionally lost to the world and kept secret among a few people. It is a baseless accusation of a broad conspiracy. True the location of Ophir was lost and remains lost to the world but that does not mean there is a conspiracy about it among modern day scholars or even ancient Greeks. Plenty of ancient knowledge, like how Stonehenge and the Pyramids were built, is lost.
We see quite clearly here Tim's utter disdain for scholarship and real historical inquiry. He does not care what any historian or expert has to say about the subject unless it agrees with his conclusions. Investigate the Periplus to see what it says about Chryse? Test what the God Culture has to say? Sure but only if your conclusions match Tim's. Otherwise you are a fool and a paid communist agitator who is not interested in "truth."
It seems what Tim wants is immediate and easy answers with no lingering questions or doubts. That is simply not how historical inquiry works especially when dealing with ancient history. There will always be questions and lingering doubts. On the other hand there will sometimes be definite answers and reasonable certainty. If someone says they have all the answers about an ancient historical problem we should dismiss that person out of hand.
Tim concludes by saying the following at 45:50:
"Remember one thing though. We are not proving an historical case here. That is not what this is. That is not what we ever claimed it to be. We are proving a multi-disciplined position with strong pose across-the-board. The reason our foundation is incredibly strong is because we set it in scripture and that is solid rock."
This is just what I wrote at the beginning of this post. It is simply not possible to knock down the God Culture's claims in one fell swoop because the amount of information, some true and much more false, they present is overwhelming. One is forced to trudge through a lot of muck as one goes about testing them. It is better to treat the whole thing like a game of Jenga taking out one block at a time until the whole crumbles from the lack of foundation.
But silly me I thought Tim and the God Culture were proving a historical case. Tim brings up so much history I suppose one could be forgiven for thinking the God Culture is attempting to prove historically that the Philippines is Ophir and that Filipinos are part of the lost tribes. If the God Culture is not proving a historical case and their foundation rests in scripture then it would seem that Tim does not think the scriptures are historical!
Addendum:
In the comments below I made the comment:
"That 1492 map by Behaim? Look again! The Malay Peninsula is clearly labelled "Golden Chersoneses.""
The representative of The God Culture says:
"Behaim labels Chryse and Argyre as Philippines stupid so no, the Malay Peninsula is not in the middle of the South China Sea..."
"The Malay Peninsula on Behaim's 1492 map labels the Malay Tip as Coilur not Aurea Chersonesus nor the Golden Peninsula."
First of all Behaim does not identify Chryse and Argyre as the Philippines. They had not even been discovered yet. What he does do is place those two islands far to the east.
Secondly it is not true that Behaim labels the Malay Peninsula Coilur and I will demonstrate it.
That is the Malay Peninsula. What is confusing The God Culture is that on Behram's map there is a second non-existent East Asian peninsula known as
the Dragon's Tail.
The red arrow points to the Malay Peninsula and the yellow arrow points to the non-existent Dragon's Tail. What is also confusing The God Culture is that they identify the Golden Chersoneses as being the island of Chryse and thus the Philippines. Behaim does not make this identification.
