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TelMiles
In: London
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Thanks for taking the time to explain that, Mick. I think I get it now.
_________________
Against all Gods.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| all Applied Epistemologists know exactly what to do with unprecedented and unobserved, special-case historical events... Mick fails to appreciate that, having done away with all previous dark ages, he has eliminated all precedents for the concept. |
Wiki specifically lists only
the European Dark Ages (including the Migration period - pah!)
the Greek Dark Ages (a.k.a. the Bronze Age collapse)
the Dark Ages of Cambodia (ca. 1450-1863) (which I'd never heard of) but mentions in passing
the same was true in the formerly Roman province of Dacia, where history after the Roman withdrawal went unrecorded for centuries, as Slavs, Avars, Bulgars, and others struggled for supremacy in the Danube basin, and events there are still disputed. However, at this time the Byzantine Empire and especially the Arab Empire experienced Golden Ages rather than Dark Ages; consequently, this usage of the term must also differentiate geographically. If we must judge Dark Ages on the basis of information gaps, we must start by identifying the gaps in source material as opposed to gaps in historical accounts. If historians have been little interested in anywhere outside Europe, we have little chance of knowing the true size of the data set.
Still, Mick Velikovsky (Immanuel Harper?) only pooh-poohs one of 3 named Dark Ages. That doesn't count as having done away with all previous dark ages, eliminating all precedents for the concept.
As for the concept, Greece (as I understand it) is rather in odd in having a precipitate return to the exact status quo ante, but using the same language in a new script. It makes some sense, on the other hand, for the documented withdrawal of the Roman machine to result in financial/industrial collapse and not-entirely-un-evidenced barbarian tussles. And what emerged was different from what had gone before. We've seen 'immortal' companies go to the wall in the current recession and the cleaners hardly find any loose change dropped in the pub any more. During the War, every scrap of paper was saved to be re-used. And we don't have a glut of abandoned cars any more. We do have some evidence of the economic climate impacting material remains.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| the Greek Dark Ages (a.k.a. the Bronze Age collapse) |
This period is coincidental then with the end of the Great Stone Civilisation (c. 1000 BC?). Nothing seemed to take its place, nor indeed does anything much seem to have happened, except that presumably there was a steady though poorly documented technological advance.
The term Dark Ages was apparently 'invented' by Petrarch so it's essentially an Italiocentric concept, only valid if you accept Italian culture as the leader in Europe which of course it was in his day. His nostalgia for the Roman era is oddly reminiscent of our Gildas, who almost certainly 'gilded' the past. It's not unlike people from former Communist countries being interviewed and commenting on how much better off they used to be in the good old bad old days (surely it's stability, no matter how restricted the resulting lifestyle, they're missing).
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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We ought to make clear the daddy of these speculations and the AE reasons why it came about. And specifically why orthodoxy thinks the Battle of Kadesh occurred in 1274 BC and AEists place it at least six centuries later.
Since it is agreed that marrying up different societies' dating systems is complex and difficult, it follows that the correct procedure is to multivariate the whole thing so that 'a best guess' gradually emerges and then you can use apparent anomalies that arise from more data as it comes in to alert everybody to the fact that we haven't quite nailed it down yet.
Unfortunately the whole of history is based on chronology -- ie chronology is the Paradigm Theory of History -- so this approach cannot be used by academics. You will remember that academic subjects are based on the same model as the human brain -- any amount of data can be stored so long as it remains incremental ie in long continuous strings; if any radical rewiring is needed, the patient is temporarily pole-axed. (It's like discovering a spouse's infidelity, all bets are off for now and possibly for ever. Only AE-ists are able to observe complacently that actually remarkably little has changed.and the rewiring will overwhelmingly be the re-imposition of the status quo ante.)
Imagine a university where it is possible to say, "We are closing down the History Faculty while we sort out some dating anomalies. Please come back in a couple of years." Ancient History cannot cope with a model in which all dates are potentially subject to radical revision at all times, so it has adopted the more usual way of How to Construct a Paradigm Theory: "We have adopted the first reasonably coherent model and we are not prepared to listen to alternatives. Any anomalies arising will result in us putting our fingers in our ears and saying, "La, la, la, can't hear you, you're not a trained historian." Trained historians are trained to believe the Paradigm Theory is self-evidently true.
Since the first into the field happened to be the Ancient Egyptian school of historians, their chronology has been adopted for everybody else in the Ancient World. And their chronology consists of (an itself dubious reading of) a single authority called Manetho, writing during the Ptolomeic era. So because (on some readings) Manetho puts the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 (since it was fought by Ramses II in the fifth year of his reign) it follows that the Hittites, who were also there, must have fought it in 1274 also. Which in turns means the whole of Hittite history can be dated from their king lists because it was Muwatalli in the whatever year of his reign who fought it.. But hold up! The Hittites fought the Chaldeo-Assyrians at the Battle of....so now we can date them as well. etc etc etc
So the history of Ancient History is one of a) marrying up events from one society to another and b) explaining away the anomalies caused because we now know, but orthodoxy doesn't, that the initial dating scheme was wrong. Next time you hear a phrase like "There is not a single date in the Bible that can be confirmed from Egyptian sources", don't doubt the Bible, doubt the historians. (Then go back to doubting the Bible...)
But also remember why orthodoxy clings so tenaciously and rationally to their scheme. Looked at from their point of view, since chronology really is a Paradigm Basis for All History, it would seem that all the advances of History in the last hundred or so years (ie since Manetho was adopted) is because of the correctness of the Manetho scheme. Every single advance seems to them eloquent testimony to the correctness of Manetho.
As we have seen with Darwinian Evolution, it never occurs to these cretins that the advances are all down to the fact that zillions of people are spending zillions of resources digging out new data. It is true that the process was kick-started by Darwin and Manetho -- by providing an agreed template and thereby the emergence of an academic subject -- but that doesn't prove either Darwinism or Manetho-ism right in themselves.
In fact it is the emergence of various anomalies that have emerged since that prove them wrong.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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As we have seen with Darwinian Evolution, it never occurs to these cretins that the advances are all down to the fact that zillions of people are spending zillions of resources digging out new data. ....
In fact it is the emergence of various anomalies that have emerged since that prove them wrong. |
What anomalies have arisen and when something doesn't fit, what happens?
{Seems to me that kings and pharoahs having the same name, differentiated simply by a numeral, is terribly confusing and the only Henrys I can remember are the first and eighth.}
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| What anomalies have arisen ? |
Velikovsky wrote five books detailing the anomalies for the six hundred years of spurious Ancient history:
1.1 Ages in Chaos
1.2 Oedipus and Akhnaton
1.3 The Assyrian Conquest
1.4 Rameses II and His Time
1.5 Peoples of the Sea
| and when something doesn't fit, what happens? |
Things either get double counted (so for instance one pharoah builds the Nile-Red Sea Canal and then another pharoah builds another Nile-Red Sea Canal six hundred years later and/or a six hundred year Dark Age is declared.
| Seems to me that kings and pharoahs having the same name, differentiated simply by a numeral, is terribly confusing and the only Henrys I can remember are the first and eighth. |
The problem is infinitely more difficlt because pharoahs have throne names as well as given names and titles AND each can get translated and transliterated by foreigners (apart from half the time pharoahs were foreigners). Look up any Biblically-named pharoah (say, Shishak) and discover how many candidates there are as to who he might be in Egypt. And remember we are reliant on Manetho getting all this right centuries later!
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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Didn't the Egyptians also have co-regencies from time to time, with indeterminable overlaps, which would confuse matters even more?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Not merely co-regencies (in the sense of, say, a son reigning alongside his father) but co-kingdoms in the sense of, for instance, Upper and Lower Egypt both having kings and both appearing in king-lists. Egyptians were intensely patriotic so it may well be that native kings get counted in even when they may not be ruling over much of the actual territory. Foreign-kings of course were normally sensible enough to adopt the trappings of pharaoh-hood and thus also get included in the king-lists eg the Ptolemies (but not the Romans unless perhaps if Antony had beaten Octavian).
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Are you telling us that the whole of history or at least the dating system for history has been devised from a list of kings with multiple names whose reigns may not even have existed? It's enough to make one take up deer-spotting.
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| Mick Harper wrote: |
| and when something doesn't fit, what happens? |
Things either get double counted (so for instance one pharoah builds the Nile-Red Sea Canal and then another pharoah builds another Nile-Red Sea Canal six hundred years later and/or a six hundred year Dark Age is declared. |
Or if they're Chinese, we can say they "turned inward". I was reading a National Geographic article about treasures discovered from a Chinese ship that sank c.800.
So if this magnificent ship wrecked in 800, it needs to be explained why the Chinese didn't do much sailing for a long time afterward. They turned inward and went into their shell:
| In A.D. 878, little more than half a century after the Belitung ship sank, a rebel leader named Huang Chao burned and pillaged Guangzhou, killing tens of thousands of Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Parsis. And not long after Zheng He's voyages, when Columbus reached the New World, the Confucian worldview won the day; China burned its fleet and turned inward. The Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Route, which had linked China to the world, lapsed into disuse. The Portuguese entered the Indian Ocean, and by the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Europe had begun to dominate world trade. "The whole of world history would have been different if the Chinese had not gone into their shell for 500 years," Miksic says. |
I suppose antique pots that are 1200 years old are much more valuable than those that are 200-300 years old.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Rocky wrote: | | I suppose antique pots that are 1200 years old are much more valuable than those that are 200-300 years old. |
bingo
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Has anyone heard of Hafgeirs saga Flateyings, supposedly a forgery? I can't find much information on it.
This saga is preserved in an unsigned, eighteenth-century manuscript, Additamenta 6, folio (Add. 6,fol.). Today housed in the collection of the Arni Magnusson Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavik, Iceland, the manuscript was originally held as part of the ArnamagnanCollection in Copenhagen, Denmark. According to the flyleaf:'Saga af Hafgeyre flateying udskreven af en Membran der kommen er fra Island 1774 in 4to exarata Seculo xij' (Hafgeirs saga Flayetings was copied from a twelfth-century manuscript written in quarto, which came [to Copenhagen] from Iceland in 1774).
While such a manuscript might appear unremarkable, as a number of paper manuscripts were copied during the late eighteenth century in Copenhagen, then the capital of Iceland and the seat of Icelandic manuscript transmission during this period, only twelve Old Norse/Old Icelandic manuscripts of those catalogued in the Copenhagen collections are dated to the twelfth century, while a mere eighteen are dated to 1200 (Kalund 512). The dating on the flyleaf is therefore unusual, and as it turns out, suspect as well, since no catalog entry exists to record the existence of the alleged source manuscript.
Moreover, according to Jorgensen, the motif sequences found in Hafgeirs saga bear a striking resemblance to those found in the well-known mythical-heroic saga Halfdanars saga Brunufstra (157). And in a fascinating argument based primarily on this fact, Jorgensen argues that Add. 6, fol. is a forgery, claiming that Thorlakur Magnusson Isfjord, an Icelandic student studying and working in Copenhagen during the 1780s, composed and sold Hafgeirs saga as a copy of an authentic medieval Icelandic saga.
In spite of its questionable origin, Hafgeirs saga stands as a remnant of Iceland's literary, linguistic, and textual history, and Add. 6, fol. can therefore be viewed as an important cultural artefact. |
The quote's from pg. 185 here:
http://www.ekl.oulu.fi/dh2008/Digital%20Humanities%202008%20Book%20of%20Abstracts.pdf
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It may be that all Icelandic sagas are bogus. One of the big things about all nationalist revivals is the sudden appearance of poetry in the appropriate language and form -- Taliesin in Wales, Ossian in Scotland, Beowulf in England. Seek and ye shall find!
The AE aspect of this is that a) nationalists want urgently to believe and b) nobody else cares very much one way or the other. Just consider who has a vested interest in exploding Icelandic sagas. S'right! Just us!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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So, just to round things off the AE way, it all comes down to who's-first-in-the-field. As it was the Egyptologists, they get to decide the dating-matrix. And first in the field for Egyptologists were the Manetho-scholars, so Manetho's dating scheme is now the benchmark for all Ancient history whether in Egypt, Babylonia or (ultimately) China..
And remember why. Constructing dating schemas is a highly complex, highly tortuous, highly specialised, highly etc etc. business. So whenever a historian wants to date something for his lickle monograph he has a choice. "Shall I use the existing dating scheme, get published and be awarded a lifetime tenured post in a university, or shall I spend the next twenty years investigating the present dating scheme with the result that either it turns out to be correct and I will have wasted twenty years of my life or it turns out be wrong in which case my monograph will be returned to me (unless on the offchance that it happened to be sent for peer review to two people who have just spent twenty years etc etc but have not yet advertised the fact and therefore are still considered sound referees)."
And every time a work get published using the current dating scheme so that dating scheme will be strengthened because it will represent yet another piece of evidence that the dating scheme works a treat. And yet still the entire house of cards is resting on Manetho. No, not on Manetho, on a coupla scholars' interpretation of Manetho done about a hundred years ago when very little Egyptology was known in the first place. In academia, everything rests on the amount of work done, not on the soundness of the underlying assumptions.
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Eric Wargo
In: Washington, DC
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | In view of our chat here since, have you changed your mind and believe now that Juniper actually refers to the berry rather than a woman since we have established that juniper is a memory aid? |
Not exactly, but surely it has to be significant to your discussion that the apotheosis of mixed drinks, the martini, is constructed along specifically homeopathic lines, being a mixture of gin (juniper) plus the absence of vermouth (wormwood). The classic recipes call for pouring some gin and just looking at the bottle of vermouth (Churchill) or merely allowing light to pass through it into the gin (Bunuel). Wormwood as a pure symbol in relation to the juniper, or as some kind of "vanishing mediator" a la Christ, must hold the key to a lot of historical mysteries ... but how?
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