Ancient Greece Reloaded Home | About Us | The Project | Contact Us | Login | Login Connect with Facebook Connect with Google Or use your Email address Login Sign up Email / Username Password Remember me on this computer Back Login Forgot password? Full Name Email Address Password Send me occasional email updates Back Register Subscribe Enter Your Valid E-mail Home Sitemap Travel Mythology Biographies Library Blog Forum Doctrinum E-Shop Hyperborean Giants Hyperborean Giants, Lost Civilizations, and the Fear of the Future The Greeks, while inventing cool stuff like democracy and baklava, were the New York hipsters of the ancient Mediterranean, constantly complaining about the lack of sophistication of their neighbors, and the absence of good gyros outside Athens. Basically, you were Greek, or you were a savage, illustrated rather succinctly and obnoxiously by the Greek idiom from antiquity pas mē Hellēn barbaros (“whoever is not Greek is a barbarian”). In fact, the term “barbarian” derives from the Greek barbaros, thought to have been onomatopoeia for incoherent “babbling” (as in, speaking bad Greek), and probably originating in an even older proto-Indo-European source, as ancient Indian Sanskrit has a similar term barbaras (“stammering”). The Greeks looked down on the Persians, the Illyrians, the Dacians, and pretty much everyone inside and outside the Balkans (primarily due to their various autocratic leaders, non-fluency in the Greek language, and general lack of foresight to have not been born Greek). This makes their consistently positive attitude across hundreds of years towards a mythical northern utopia called Hyperborea, reputedly populated by giants that lived for a thousand years especially puzzling. The second fact that any examination of the Hyperboreans brings to light is just how fragmentary our knowledge of the ancient world is, as countless scholars of antiquity refer to commonly known texts that we have either lost completely or have only partially reconstructed from the quotations of scholars of only slightly lesser age. Could a population of thousand year old giants have formed a socially advanced civilization in of the northern reaches of Asia long before what we regard as Classical western antiquity, and vanished without a physical trace, leaving only vague references and cultural memories among their neighbors? Tracking evidence regarding the existence of the Hyperboreans is like playing a historical game of telephone, doubly complicated by the fact that there was a great deal of disagreement among ancient and classical scholars as to where exactly Hyperborea might be located. Personally, I find it a little disconcerting that a race of giants blessed with longevity might have been happily living north of Thrace (or maybe Siberia or the British Isles, according to some scholars) long before Homer wrote The Iliad, and the reason we don’t know about them is that nobody seems to remember exactly where they hung out, papyrus has an annoying tendency to rot, and invaders have always had this excruciatingly irritating habit of burning libraries because nothing erases your enemies from the face of the Earth more effectively than torching everything they’ve ever known; literacy is a fairly modern phenomenon, without which a library is basically a warehouse for kindling, and libraries (and apparently librarians) burn really well. To examine the Hyperboreans is to read a litany of forgotten works and obscure references to books nobody has seen or read in a least a millennium or two. Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) assures us that Greek poet Hesiod (around 700 B.C.) wrote about the Hyperboreans (of which we have only a few fragments – one of which happens to be “of the well-horsed Hyperboreans-whom Gaia the all-nourishing bare far off by the tumbling streams of deep-flowing Eridanos”), as did Homer in a lost work called Epigoni, but a Homeric hymn to Dionysus does mention “As for this fellow we men will see to him: I reckon he is bound for Aigyptos or for Kypros or to the Hyperboreans or further still”, and poet Aristeas (7th Century B.C.) is rumored to have commented on them in a lost poem called Arimaspea. Three hundred years before Herodotus, it seems there were quite a few important folks writing about the Hyperboreans, and it is our good fortune that Herodotus had an obsessive-compulsive attention to detailing his sources, and amidst accounts of nasty monsters and uncouth tribes, he calls out the Hyperboreans as especially civilized. There is still another account, which has obtained credit both with the Greeks and barbarians. Aristeas the poet, a native of Proconnesus, and son of Caustrobius, relates, that under the influence of Apollo he came to the Issedones, that beyond this people he found the Arimaspi, a nation who have but one eye; farther on were the Gryphons, the guardians of the gold; and beyond these the Hyperboreans, who possess the whole country quite to the sea, and that all these natio...