Dr Jack Dempsey

PRESS RELEASE: December 21 2008 (Winter Solstice)

SCHOLARS REVEAL ANCIENT KEY TO WESTERN TIME AND POLITICS

---Long-Sought Minoan Calendar Unlocks Secrets of Royalty, Religion and Olympic Games---

Two American scholars working 37 years apart report key discoveries about Minoans of Bronze Age Crete: the first and longest period of Western civilization (roughly 4000 years ago), whose advanced and mostly-peaceful traits have intrigued archaeologists for 100 years. Dazzling Minoan frescoes and artifacts grace the world’s museums---but no calendar ever unlocked the most powerful symbols of Crete’s social order, politics and spiritual life.

“We’re still connected to them,” said historian C.F. Herberger, who in 1972 published the first demonstrations of Minoan time. “They predate Homer, the Parthenon and Old Testament. Why does a 4-year cycle still govern The Olympics? How did women and men share power on the first Western throne? And, how did Crete function so well without kings? Those have been crucial questions. As it turns out, good answers were hiding in plain sight.”

Where? Built into the elegant border of a famous fresco from the palace or “Labyrinth” of Knossos---which shows women and men at the dangerous sport of bull-leaping. Harvard’s renowned archaeologist Alexander Marshack was first to call Herberger’s discovery “valid and valuable.” But it took computer-age methods to show the calendric connections between real cycles of Moon, Sun and nature, patterns in the Bull-Leap Fresco’s border, and the Minoans’ central symbols of authority, from the Throne of Knossos to their Labrys or Double Axe.

Dr. Jack Dempsey’s 2009 Calendar House: Secrets of Time, Life & Power in Ancient Crete’s Great Year tests Herberger’s discovery against a range of established facts from astronomy, ecology and expert analyses. With over 400 photos, diagrams, charts and evidences of every kind, it confirms the Knossian 8½-year cycle of time---signaled, at each beginning and end, when New Moon meets Winter Solstice and, 6 months later, Full Moon meets Summer Solstice.

“Great Years go on,” Dempsey reports (a new cycle begins 12/20/09 and 6/20/10). “Minoans adopted these pairs of signs and countersigns to keep farming, sacred festivals, and Games too in step with nature. Now we can see how they used astronomy like a constitution, to shape and limit executive powers of women and men on their Throne.” Minoan Great Year astronomy (and no kings) traveled with Cretans later into the Palestine of Biblical times.

“Their model was partnership, like Moon and Sun,” Dempsey adds. “Now the Minoans can tell us more of how they sustained so much progress for 2000 years before Homer.”

[ON REQUEST: More Info, free CD copy of Calendar House, Interviews w/both Authors]