Plato, in Timaeos, describes the story of the sun's inadequate son who mimics his father. He is called Phaethon (shining) and caused hardships to several peoples on earth. In the past, Phaethon was associated with visible luminous electric phenomena and fires on the earth related to the volcanic explosion of Santorini. Plato regards Phaethon's story as a non-fabricated myth but on the contrary as true information from the past. In the text, time of the event is not given, but the general analysis of Timaeos' and Critias' passages in connection with Atlantis proves that the 12th century BC is the obvious century of the event. Plato claims it had happened thousands of years before Solon's 6th century BC. Herodotus, a century earlier, records that Egyptian history extends thousands of years before his time. However, centuries later, ancient Greek writers and Egyptologists illustrate the use principally of moon calendars by the Egyptian priesthood in all epochs. The priests, when recording the ancient history of their country used moon calendars whereas Pharaoh's high officials used solar calendar, when issuing governmental edicts. Dividing these thousands of years by the number of the full moons of the Metonic circle-year we come to the beginning of 12th century BC. A comet actually introduces a parallaxis in its orbit with respect to the orbits of the planets and their satellites as the myth describes. However, the luminous phenomena in volcanic eruptions do not. Homer, on the other hand, describes the same phenomenon with a variety of complex images as happening during the war between the Achaean Greeks and the Trojans. The comet appears as Athena coming from the west in the form of a shining “star”, in other words, as Phaethousa. The female and male appearances of the same strange and rare phenomenon seen by different people in the Aegean can be explained as an optical illusion. Numerous traces of fires have been spotted in archaeological sites corresponding to 12th century BC in Bronze Age sites in East Mediterranean. They are assigned as results of earthquake activity. In fact, the seismic storm which occurred as a domino effect has left indisputable evidence at the above sites. The decisive scientific methodology may prove that, apart from fires caused by earthquakes, Phaethon could have also caused some fires. This may be proved by taking samples of burnt soil from 12th century BC horizon far away from palaces or settlements. The contact between falling burning cometary fragments and forests causes fires. Furthermore, its tail, consisting of ionized plasma, stardust and water particles, interacts with the atmosphere producing precipitation. For instance, Irish bog trees and Asia Minor oaks exhibit an anomalous precipitation event within their growing rings in 1159 BC and in the years after (see [2, 18] respectively). At exactly the same period, ice-cores present extreme high acidity peaks, whereas in Ireland, Greenland and Asia Minor a kind of climatic shift appears.
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Papamarinopoulos, S.P. (2008). A Comet during the Trojan War?. In: Paipetis, S.A. (eds) Science and Technology in Homeric Epics. History of Mechanism and Machine Science, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8784-4_26
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