Any actual history drawn from the Iliad and even the existence of an actual Homer himself, is speculative at best, and almost certainly wrong.

Homer comes from the Greek word for “the thigh” – hemeiros – and we have the famous myth of Dionysus being born from Zeus’s thigh after his mother Semele (Cybele-Zemlaya-Earth) was killed by Hera.

The Iliad, like the Torah and the Gospels, is an allegory for astrological movements of the stars and constellations and attempts to weave an anthropomorphized story where the gods and man meet in a war of heaven and earth, on the ancient hermetic principle of “as above, so below.”

These were people trying their best to make sense of the world in which they knew so little.

Even the idea that the Trojan war as an actual war has not been validated. Schliemann’s so called discovery of Troy, the subsequent acceptance of the war as actual history is something like finding Noah on Mount Ararat.  With DNA studies, historical linguistics and comparative religion, many of these stories are turning out to be mythology, from Jesus to Moses (Ra-Messes) to his brother Aaron (Sharron = Sargon), to Noah=Gilgamesh and Job=the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer and even our Father Abraham=A-Brahmin.

On the Indo-European side, the Iliad is a story of various peoples from the Pontic Steppes in Central Asia and their settlement of disparate lands beyond the “Ebros=Evros=Europe” river and the lands around the Black Sea in ancient Iberian Albania, the region of today’s Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine. Another region they settled somewhat earlier is Anatolia – today Turkey, a land where the Indo Europeans and the Semitic people met, warred, and influenced one another, then much later is conquered by the Turkic people from Eastern Steppes who were etunically Mongol.

The fundamental premise of the story is, in my view, a war between two groups of people who drifted culturally in their identity – Hellen, representing ‘Ellenoi, or the Greeks, as in Hellas, is kidnapped by Paris/Parthian/Persian and what follows is the Argive war to revenge the dishonour this brought. You can see how this is a foundational myth meant to unify the Greek people into a common identity. Thus, much is made about how different or “Oriental” the Trojans are, but they appear to be communicating in the same language and don’t have difficulty understanding one another. Then again, they speak with Gods also, so anything is possible in fantasy.

We know that historically, war was commonplace between the Ancient Indo Europeans and the Mongols/Turkmen but also among one another. One branch goes East and rules India creating the Sanskrit Vedas, and the others settle around the black Sea. The Indian group is kicked out and moves to Persia. Their upper castes of Brahmin/Magi like Zarathustra create Zoroastrianism. DNA studies show that Iranians are mostly however not Caucasian but the language is.

In the Iliad, Helen launches “a thousand ships,” and Troy is described as a bit of a Hodge Podge of people and customs – so this is very possibly indeed Anatolia, where the Hittites and other Indo-European people migrated to and mixed with the Semitic cultures of Ashur, Phoenicia, and others.

These are all speculative impetuses for the creation of the story, which probably picks up on motifs and tales of many different wars, and reflects periods of migration in a culture of honor while weaving in a narrative of supernatural intervention and astrology.

Names, however, are useful, because to have any connection, they would have been real names. But what the story is doing here is socio-political: the author is mentioning different names for the different people in order to assert a unifying ideology against tribalism – “remember back when we were a single people and fought the Trojans.”

This is one of the most fundamental themes in all human cultures. To unite cross tribally, humans invent or make up or simply blame a third party. If aliens attacked the Earth, humans wouldn’t care what race or ethnic origin one human was vs another, we would feel a bond with all humans as another creature from another planet was attacking us.

This is called scapegoat mechanism. We unite individually or tribally by creating fear of someone else: such as for example, when Trump put the blame for all sorts of social problems on the Mexican illegals.

So the use of Danaan, or Danoi, or Achaeans, Argives, Panhellenes (they are Pan-Helenoi because they came together to rescue Hellen, see how this is a unifying myth), is the mention of different people with different identities who are united into a common identity through this, their foundational myth.

It is through stories and mythology that we create a narrative of who we are that allows us to have meaning in our lives. The importance of the Iliad is that in addition to the Jewish stories, they form the foundation of all of Western Culture. The synthesis of the two traditions is what we call Christianity – the Hellenic attempt to synthesize Neoplatonism and Greek culture with Judaism.

The fact that many of these stories aren’t objectively true doesn’t matter. They have an important part in teaching us what Yaakov Malkin has called “eternal truths” – that is, the characters may be made up and the context may be false, but there are eternal truths that are always a part of human life – love, hate, death, injustice and yearning for justice, war, pain, and joy too. From these we hopefully glean virtue, and become better and more enlightened people.

But the objective truth of a Troy or any of this as actual history is definitely not been validated and should not be understood as such.

The Danoi are mentioned together with Ehrani, or the Aryans, in a number of places, and in the Vedic scriptures. We find many ethnic names in the ancient myths that reflect the exciting history some of these tribes would have had before they finally settled the regions we are more familiar with. One of the most interesting is in the Vedic scriptures where it talks about a great war between those who served Ram, or Brahma, their chief deity, and those who served the devil, his enemy, called Serbinda. When Serbinda was defeated, his people fled the mighty Ram, and went elsewhere. Wonder where.

Achaeans sounds awful similar to the Royal Family of Persia, the Achmaeonidae.

DAN- probably comes from a variation in the ancient Proto Indo European meaning the same thing that Aryan meant, with various spelling Ehrian, Iranian, D-arya-vush (Darius), and even Slav-an: “Wealthy, noble, rich, famous, legendary” and influences various linguistic concepts such as “us” or “our people.” In the Gaelic you thus find dan or don to mean “us,” in the Spanish “don” retains an honorific titulary purpose as in “Don Juan”, and dan or don becomes in the Germanic and English “than” as in something is “higher” or “lower” *than* something else – again connoting a kind of comparing someone to a noble person and their rank.

However, remember than the Trojans worship the same gods. Chryses, which has a Greek name, or a PIE name at least, is a priestess of Apollo. Apollo is the sun god, and this isn’t often repeated, but the root word of Chryses is the same root as Christos – which does not mean “the Messiah” but comes from the Greek word for “yellow, bright yellow” as in “crystal” or “crystalline” or “golden” since Christos is of course an anthropomorphized Sun or Helios. Χρύσης Khrúsēs.

Given that they speak the same language and have the same religion, by most standards we would conclude they are the same people. Ethnicity isn’t exactly a science of purity. No single human population has only very related genes, even families have many different genes due to the way chromosomes combine.

Also, Homeric Greek is a form of Ionian Greek. From what we know of migrations today, the early people into Europe went from the Caucuses into Anatolia, thus we have the Cappadocian myth of St George and the Dragon (Georgia is in the PIE homeland) and so it is entirely possible that the earliest Greeks come from Anatolia into Europe, and that Argives sail from Anatolia to Troy where Troy was on the Greek homeland, rather than the other way around. Some theories say that Troy was actually on the Adriatic, in the Herzegovinian town of Gabele. Like Cybele. Semele.

We find other proof that this is astrotheology – Glaukos, famous Trojan fighter, means “shiny” in Greek. So, these are probably stars and planets in their celestial movements, and a fight between dark and light, constellations and gods. Glaukos is the son of Bellerophon, the hero who rides the winged horse Pegasus, you know, like Mohammed.

So the Danaans are an early tribe of the Caucasus and Homer is weaving a unifying underlay mythology here to suggest a common identity to the different Greeks. Keep in mind that Greek is from the Latin, Graecia, and we don’t really find it until Aristotle.

He writes that the Graikoi (Γραικοί), came from the area where Dodona and Achelous was inhabited by the Selli (Σελλοὶ) and a people formerly called Graeci and now Hellenes (Έλληνες). The word literally means “Grey-haired” which could stem from the encounter of the Semitic peoples with the Indo-European. Tacitus for example tells us that the German children looked horrifying, “their hair so fair, they look like old men, though they are children.”

Cue in the “Waves of the Dan-ube.”