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berniegreen



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Mick Harper wrote:
So, Bernie, what's your explanation? This is probably your most baffling remark to date

I don't have one: well not a nice neat one-liner of an explanation. But you may possibly recall that I made a post some weeks ago in which I suggested that "literate societies" can be divided into 4 distinct categories. Although types 3 and 4 logically and inevitably have progressed from types 2 and 3 respectively, it seems that it is by no means inevitable that a type 1 society will progress to a type 2. It may have been the case with Hebrew, for example, while it wasn't with ancient Egypt.

So I am prepared to believe that the kyboshing of the Myceneans put paid (totally) to a type 1 "literate society" and that a completely different type 2 "literate society" developed very rapidly after the dissemination of the newly arrived alphabet in 800-750 BC.

But even so I've never heard of writing dying out 'within a generation' just because the new mob didn't rate it. Why, it's almost as if you are grasping at straws.

No, believe it or not, there have been many instances. As I sit here typing this the only example that immediately springs to mind (apart from the Greeks) is the Olmecs of central America. But if you want better and further particulars I will rack my brains.

Yes, the Romans destroyed Carthage so thoroughly in 202 that they had to do it all over again in 146. And they did it so thoroughly then that it was surprising that it was the second largest city in the Western Med only a little later and remained so right up to Augustine's time.

Indeed. There are scores (perhaps, hundreds) of cities that were destroyed & rebuilt & destroyed & rebuilt again and so forth. But your point was that folks wouldn't be so stupid as to totally destroy in the first place. This shows a heart-warming faith in the rationality of mankind which is not, I believe, backed up by the record books.

Velikovsky made his prediction in 1950, Ventris confirmed his prediction in 1953. I would strongly asdvise you to concentrate on V's grasp of ancient history (which is brilliant) rather than his strictures on celestial mechanics (which aren't).

My understanding is that Ventris' work confirmed Velikovsky's (and quite a few other people's) guess that Linear B is indeed Greek. If you can point me to anything in which Ventris proposes that the dating of the Linear B "documents" should be set at 700 BC rather than pre-1150 BC I would be very interested.
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Mick Harper
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No, believe it or not, there have been many instances. As I sit here typing this the only example that immediately springs to mind (apart from the Greeks) is the Olmecs of central America
.
Wha-a-a-? The Olmecs went (that kind of thing is two-a-penny in history everywhere)....but writing? (And did the Olmecs pitch up 400 years later with the same language but in a different form of writing?)

But if you want better and further particulars I will rack my brains.

Please. Though technically speaking you really ought to have a few in your head before making such claims, shouldn't you? Otherwise we might get the impression you were just parroting orthodoxy.

Indeed. There are scores (perhaps, hundreds) of cities that were destroyed & rebuilt & destroyed & rebuilt again and so forth. But your point was that folks wouldn't be so stupid as to totally destroy in the first place. This shows a heart-warming faith in the rationality of mankind which is not, I believe, backed up by the record books.

Yes, yes, no doubt. I read this kind of thing everyday. But we Applied Epistemologists take the trouble to ask for examples. You tell us there are somewhere between scores and hundreds so... shall we say... ten... five... er...one? Remember, we are looking for something like (what you claim happened to) Knossus or Mycenae.

My understanding is that Ventris' work confirmed Velikovsky's (and quite a few other people's) guess that Linear B is indeed Greek.

The Velikovskians claim their man was unique so I'd appreciate a name or three. You are getting a reputation for not having examples in your mind when claiming they exist.

If you can point me to anything in which Ventris proposes that the dating of the Linear B "documents" should be set at 700 BC rather than pre-1150 BC I would be very interested

I have never and would never claim this. I have little doubt that Ventris believed in an orthodox timeline. Though of course Ventris was a complete outsider which was why he was able to put the orthodontists straight.
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Hatty
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Indeed. There are scores (perhaps, hundreds) of cities that were destroyed & rebuilt & destroyed & rebuilt again and so forth. But your point was that folks wouldn't be so stupid as to totally destroy in the first place. This shows a heart-warming faith in the rationality of mankind which is not, I believe, backed up by the record books.

If an entire city was razed to the ground why would it be rebuilt on the same site? (Even partial destruction entails a massive rebuilding programme; it took about 50 years to restore the damaged area of London, about a third, after the great fire).

Record books shouldn't really be taken as history lessons, it would be unwise to have too much faith in accounts written by victors bigging themselves up or conversely by the vanquished bemoaning the other side's brutishness. Aren't expressions such as razing to the ground and laying waste prior to blitzkrieg tactics used to denote a decisive victory rather than an accurate description?
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Mick Harper
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Actually it's a simple application of 'What is is what was'. Take Moscow -- burned down in 1812. Of course it was rebuilt...why? because all the roads lead to it, because all the people live thereabouts, because...because...because.

It's only when four hundred years of spurious history is hanging around that Moscow appears to have disappeared from 1812 till c 2212.
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Hatty
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The Moscow fire, as with the Great Fire of London, was an accident waiting to happen to a city mainly constructed of wooden buildings; whether a result of carelessness or sabotage the city wasn't utterly destroyed although ravaged (about three quarters was burnt) so not an example of complete (or irrational) destructiveness.

The new mob had no use for this scribal accounts keeping

Conquerors would be intensely interested in valuations of their newly acquired possessions, surely a method of keeping track and the people equipped to do so already in situ would be considered a bonus?
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Mick Harper
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You raise an interesting point. The Russians burned their own city to deny it to the Frogs (or so they claim). As far as I know, no orthodox historian has ever claimed that Knossus was burned down by its own people. In fact I cannot offhand think of a single example of this explanation being proffered, even though it is on the face of things a more rational policy than destruction by the attackers.

The archaeological evidence would be much the same either way. Another example of archaeologists being a bunch of complete dickheads..
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berniegreen



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Hatty wrote:
Conquerors would be intensely interested in valuations of their newly acquired possessions, surely a method of keeping track and the people equipped to do so already in situ would be considered a bonus?

Indeed yes if the conquerors held similar concepts of value to the conquered. But not, one might suppose, if the conquered were, say, a settled farming community and the conquerors were a relatively primitive bunch of nomadic pastoralists. Or if the conquered had a settled hierarchical palace-culture and the conquerors were a non-hierarchical tribal mob on the move looking for land and looking to displace whatever incumbent population they found.
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berniegreen



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Mick Harper wrote:
Wha-a-a-? The Olmecs went (that kind of thing is two-a-penny in history everywhere)....but writing? (And did the Olmecs pitch up 400 years later with the same language but in a different form of writing?)

A paper that I read by Benjamin Worf talks about Olmec inscriptions and their writing systems. But once they went, their writing went with them.

But if you want better and further particulars I will rack my brains.

Please. Though technically speaking you really ought to have a few in your head before making such claims, shouldn't you? Otherwise we might get the impression you were just parroting orthodoxy.

Okay, but it will have to wait until I get back from Singapore.
And I will also have something to say about orthodoxy then.

Indeed. There are scores (perhaps, hundreds) of cities that were destroyed & rebuilt & destroyed & rebuilt again and so forth. But your point was that folks wouldn't be so stupid as to totally destroy in the first place. This shows a heart-warming faith in the rationality of mankind which is not, I believe, backed up by the record books.

Yes, yes, no doubt. I read this kind of thing everyday. But we Applied Epistemologists take the trouble to ask for examples. You tell us there are somewhere between scores and hundreds so... shall we say... ten... five... er...one? Remember, we are looking for something like (what you claim happened to) Knossus or Mycenae
.
No, I dont think so. In the context of this particular point it is quite enough if I give one example, which gives the lie to your original contention.

My understanding is that Ventris' work confirmed Velikovsky's (and quite a few other people's) guess that Linear B is indeed Greek.

The Velikovskians claim their man was unique so I'd appreciate a name or three. You are getting a reputation for not having examples in your mind when claiming they exist.

I have read several times (and most recently in a tome by Michael Grant) that there were four schools of thought (i.e. guesses) before Ventris settled the matter. One school punted for Minoan and/or Cypriot; another for Egyptian; a third for a hitherto unknown tongue and the fourth for Greek. I have no idea what the names of the various punters were.

I have never and would never claim this. I have little doubt that Ventris believed in an orthodox timeline. Though of course Ventris was a complete outsider which was why he was able to put the orthodontists straight.

In that case would you mind backtracking and explain your earlier post, because I simply do not understand the point that you were making.
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DPCrisp


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But not, one might suppose, if the conquered were, say, a settled farming community and the conquerors were a relatively primitive bunch of nomadic pastoralists.

Do we know of any nomads who hated civilisation so much that they wanted to destroy it out of spite, or to return a city to pasture?

(Or do we presume that nomads knew as well as we do that they were utterly reliant on civilisation, but that selling their livestock is not the only way to make money out of the townies?)

Or if the conquered had a settled hierarchical palace-culture and the conquerors were a non-hierarchical tribal mob on the move looking for land and looking to displace whatever incumbent population they found.

Do we know of any tribal mob that went looking for an incumbent population to displace? I thought there were plenty of tribal mobs that went looking for an incumbent population to lord it over.

Switching from non-hierarchical mob to settling on the land is a neat trick. Was there no land where they came from? (Who is supposed to have come down with the last shower of rain: the people historians dream up, or their readership? They're so cynical: exploiting poor old Joe Public for their own gain.)

America doesn't count, by the way, since the point was that there was no population standing in their way.
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Hatty
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As far as I know, no orthodox historian has ever claimed that Knossus was burned down by its own people. In fact I cannot offhand think of a single example of this explanation being proffered, even though it is on the face of things a more rational policy than destruction by the attackers.

It's a familiar tactic to burn crops and kill livestock when being harried by an invader, so why not with urban areas where feasible. In the programme about Stalin's relationship with his western allies we were told he instructed his Minister of Oil to set fire to the oil reserves in the Caucasus to stop them falling into German hands, but only at the last possible moment.
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Mick Harper
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I'm beginning to think that most of these 'destroyed layers' we are always reading about are accidental -- either a la Moscow accidental, by attacker or defender, or just plain accidental. Bernie seems to agree since he can't come up with any Knossus-type examples except Carthage which re-appears constantly. And we certainly have enough proper history by now to be able to judge the correct case. So are there any examples from the well-documented recent past?

One of AE's principal criticisms of Orthodoxy History is that they have a built-in tendency to make everything sexy and exciting whereas the truth tends to the mundane. This would be another example of the syndrome.
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Hatty
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Libraries were constantly being burned down and because book-burning is linked with barbarians, ranting fanatics and general anti-intellectual posturing, the fires are assumed to have been deliberate. Since it's known that scribes in the past were wont to complain of the cold, fires in libraries as elsewhere were more likely to have been started to keep warm than to destroy the treasures contained. Except Lindisfarne perhaps. Or is that another example of propaganda?
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DPCrisp


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fires in libraries as elsewhere were more likely to have been started to keep warm than to destroy the treasures

Yes, tinder boxes are bound to go up every now and then.

either a la Moscow accidental, by attacker or defender, or just plain accidental

Wudja mean?

---

Salting the earth is only known from Carthage innit. i.e. it's treated as an obvious and effective tactic, used in ancient times... but all we have is the Romans saying they did it once, so the direct evidence that Carthage was ever thoroughly put paid to is... what?
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Ishmael


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DPCrisp wrote:
Salting the earth is only known from Carthage innit. i.e. it's treated as an obvious and effective tactic, used in ancient times... but all we have is the Romans saying they did it once, so the direct evidence that Carthage was ever thoroughly put paid to is... what?


We've talked about this elsewhere -- and concluded that "salting" the Earth may have had quite a different meaning originally.
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DPCrisp


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Hmpf. Wiki's Carthage article simply says

Through a series of misunderstandings, a belief that the Carthaginian farmland was salted to ensure that no crops could be grown there developed in the modern period.

referring to

Ridley, R.T., "To Be Taken with a Pinch of Salt: The Destruction of Carthage," Classical Philology vol. 81, no. 2 (1986).

of which, someone else on t'internet says

The salting of Carthage is a legend. R.T. Ridley... says the first reference he can find to the salting of Carthage comes from the twentieth century.

The same reference is used in Wiki's Salting the earth article:

After sacking the city of Carthage and forcing the few survivors into slavery, an area 50 miles around the city was reportedly salted... the first reference to the Roman salting of Carthage is found in the 19th century German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius, in History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages -- making it highly likely that the story is a later fabrication.

OK, there is disagreement over the dates of the sources, but it's odd that the most famous example is dismissed while other examples go uncontested:

Salting the earth refers to the practice of spreading salt on fields to make them incapable of being used for crop-growing. This was done in ancient times at the end of some wars as an extremely punitive scorched earth tactic.

The Assyrians are described in ancient records as salting the capitals of neighboring countries which repeatedly rebelled against paying them tribute�including Mitanni in c. 1290 BC, and centuries later, Elam in c. 640 BC.

According to the Book of Judges (9:45) in the Old Testament, Abimelech, the judge of the Israelites, sowed his own capital, Shechem, with salt, ca. 1050 BC, after quelling a revolt against him.

In Spain and the Spanish Empire, salt was poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor

Likewise, in Portugal, salt was poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor...
In this place were put to the ground and salted the houses of Jos� Mascarenhas, stripped of the honours of Duque de Aveiro and others, convicted by sentence proclaimed in the Supreme Court of Inconfidences on the 12th of January 1759... In this infamous land nothing may be built for all time.


It looks like salting the fields appears only in the case no one believes. Accounts of Carthage sometimes say the ruins were salted and the others here say "capitals", "capital" and "houses"; "nothing may be built for all time" is a court ruling; and "poured onto the land" sounds more like a libation than a blanket treatment.

It sounds like nothing more than throwing spilled salt in the Devil's face or baptising with salt: warding off evil, saying "and don't you come back", a magic spell, ritual purification and protection.
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