Rosicrucian Beacon Magazine - 2012-09 - AMORC

Originally the city of Míletus was built on a peninsula jutting out into the sea, but the landhas reclaimed itself and the sea is now some 10 kilometres (6 miles) away.influence. Legend has it that an influx of Minoans fromCrete occurred, displacing the indigenous people. Thesettlement was renamed Míletus after a place in Crete.Following the devastation caused by the eruption of Theraand the demise of Minoan civilisation, the Late BronzeAge (c: 13 th century BCE) saw the arrival of other Indo-European Luwian language-speakers from south centralThe wealth of Míletus was the result of itssuccess as a trading centre.First of the SevenThere is a saying that the Greeks alwayshave a word for it. But for one Greek inparticular, that word is ‘amazing’. Thalesof Míletus was the first of the great Greekphilosophers, one of the Seven Sages ofAncient Greece, who was said to have beenthe originator of the phrase ‘Know thyself ’which was engraved on the front façade ofthe Temple of Apollo at Delphi. There isa question mark about Thales’ birth year,which is believed to be around 640 BCE, butall sources agree that he died in 546 BCE,aged 94 years.Míletus, where Thales was born, was themost important city of a series of city-statesthat stretched along the east shore of theAegean Sea. An area dotted with myriads ofislands large and small, notched with multitudes of inletsand bays, and with a favourable climate. His parents wereExamyus and Cleobuline. Some said he was of Phoenicianancestry. Others said that he belonged to a noble Milesianfamily. In any case, time has shown that Thales gave as muchprestige to his city as he received from it.Thales appears to have always remained unmarried.This event was important enough to be mentioned byPlutarch in his Parallel Lives, in the story of Solon ofAnatolia known as the Carians. The town was destroyedin the 12 th century BCE and starting about 1000 BCE theterritory was resettled extensively by the Ionian Greeks.Legend relates of an Ionian foundation event sponsoredby a founder named Neleus, (a Mycenaean Greek,) fromthe Peloponnese in the south of mainland Greece.Apart from Greece proper, the Greeks had spreadaround the Aegean Sea and along the coast of modernTurkey. The Greek Dark Ages that followed were a timeof Ionian settlement and consolidation in an alliancecalled the Ionian League. There then followed the ArchaicPeriod of Greek civilisation that began with a suddenand brilliant flash of art and philosophy on the coast ofAnatolia. In the 6 th century BCE, Míletus was the site oforigin of the Greek philosophical and scientific tradition,when Thales, followed by Anaximander and Anaximenes(known collectively, to modern scholars, as the MilesianSchool) began to speculate about the material constitutionof the world, and to propose speculative naturalistic, asopposed to traditional, supernatural explanations forvarious natural phenomena. Science was born.Thales of Míletus was the first of the great Greek philosophers, one of theSeven Sages of Ancient Greece, who was said to have been the originatorof the phrase, ‘Know thyself ’.10The Rosicrucian Beacon -- September 2012