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Late Bronze Age Collapse

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Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#91

Post by simiones »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #77
simiones wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Troy existed - we know that because we found it. If we found evidence of a mass migration of slaves from Egypt to Canaan, we'd also know that certain aspects of the Exodus narrative are true - but no such evidence has ever been found. The biblical flood has been connected to various possible historical floods, but any such connection is highly speculative and tenuous, because the details simply can't match the o…

[flagged]

Thanks! I found it quite interesting the first time I read about the current scholarly consensus around this, as I had before only ever heard of the mainstream religious (Christian, in my case) view of these events. Even after becoming an atheist, I had for a long time assumed that, while of course the parting of the Red Sea and similar miraculous events were not historical, the overall narrative was, and that Moses had existed and been some kind of spiritual leader, similar to the historical Jesus.

I think it's quite extraordinary how little the scholarly and historical consensus on these narratives has penetrated mainstream culture, even among a secular audience, so I like to bring it up whenever it is mentioned.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#92

Post by jcranmer »

logicchains wrote: post #74
simiones wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there had been a massive migration of hundreds of thousands of people, and even more so hundreds of thousands of slaves, from late bronze age Egypt (a powerful, old, highly literate kingdom), we would expect to find significant evidence of this (inscriptions, local stories, migration sites, etc). The absence of any such evidence, while not conclusive proof of course, constitutes evidence against this event happeni…

>We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the…

The book of Joshua details the supposed conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, which archaeological evidence rather disfavors--there's no discontinuous horizon in cultural adaptation between the supposed Philistines and the Hebrews following Jewish dietary laws, for example, and the settlement sites just are not inhabited during the time period that they were supposedly conquested.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#93

Post by cogman10 »

Brendinooo wrote: post #71
cogman10 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually do. There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories. For example, the death of a large amount of the population along with the pharaohs son. The destruction of pharaoh's army. Records of ancient hebrew slaves. Ancient Egyptians left behind a pretty large amount of history and documentation. They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a d…

>The destruction of pharaoh's army Given what we know about how the Egyptians recorded history, we would definitely not expect to find them writing about stuff that would have embarrassed them. >Records of ancient hebrew slaves Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period. >They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a dec…

> Given what we know about how the Egyptians recorded history, we would definitely not expect to find them writing about stuff that would have embarrassed them.

That's exactly the sort of stuff they wrote about all the time. We know about the various wars and political conflicts throughout the second intermediate period precisely because that's what the Egyptians liked documenting.

And, in particular, during the supposed time of the exodus the Egyptian kingdom was fairly divided. Even if one kingdom was too proud to write about a defeat, the others would be sure to document it.

> Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.

Read up about the Canaanites. They were on the uprise during this period and they are also believed to be the actual origin of the Hebrews.

> Israel being one of them!

No even according to the bible. Israel didn't exist before the exodus. Definitely not for decades and even centuries afterwards. The oldest records of the exodus are nowhere near the event. The closest record we have is around 900BCE.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#94

Post by simtel20 »

nchmy wrote: post #76
The_Blade wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eric Cline is great - when i had a tooth removed in a somewhat nasty procedure i spent a Caturday hepped up on goofballs watching his videos on LBA while playing Hatshepsut on Diety in Civ VII 1.4 (i got to play test 1.3.2 via Firaxis via discord, ooh la la i call a car hole a garage) in my personal "immersive learning" period starting 2021, i discovered acoup.blog when Old World came out and extended into reading wh…

its been a while since ive read a comment somewhere that I am so completely bewildered by. I understand about half the words, and none of the references, that you wrote. Hope your teeth are doing better now!

Do you find yourself more lost in the history parts or the gaming parts?

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#95

Post by bjourne »

simiones wrote: post #63
ReptileMan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iliad is fictional yet Troy existed. The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean and probably was not entirely unpeaceful. I have absolutely backed by nothing theory that ancient Armenians and Jews are the same people that got separated. For some tribe living on the shores of east black sea - a myth about massive flood and some saving boat that stopped on…

Yes, Troy existed - we know that because we found it. If we found evidence of a mass migration of slaves from Egypt to Canaan, we'd also know that certain aspects of the Exodus narrative are true - but no such evidence has ever been found. The biblical flood has been connected to various possible historical floods, but any such connection is highly speculative and tenuous, because the details simply can't match the o…

Noah's Ark may well be derived from the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In both stories the God(s) assert that the flood is a one-time event and promise to never repeat it. Many of the stories are probably amalgamations of different myths and legends of the near east.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#96

Post by stymaar »

brazzy wrote: post #80
bryanlarsen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard counter-argument is that the corn grown for animal feed and for ethanol production is not suited for human consumption. But that's only partially true. We wouldn't eat it directly -- it could still be turned into masa or sugar or some other processed food and then eaten.

Yeah, we're pretty good at making pretty damn anything "fit for human consumption", including quite a few things that are outright poisonous if consumed unprocessed.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#97

Post by stymaar »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #44
stymaar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. This, plus the gigantic amount of agricultural land being used for biofuel production (almost as much as cattle food).

Who ever thought the idea of biofuel was a good one? Is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?

> is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?

It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#98

Post by simiones »

Brendinooo wrote: post #90
simiones wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It describes it as a sectary offshoot relatively quickly corrected - while the historical evidence suggests that it was part of the main religion of these people for a long time. Note also that, while Baal became an adversary of Yahweh and/or a false god in later narratives, Asherah and El were ultimately identified with Yahweh - to the point that mentions of El in the Bible became identified as referring to the same…

> archaeologist, taking off his glasses: well actually the physical evidence suggests the ancient Israelites worshiped multiple deities > Jeremiah, weeping and sighing: yes I know (That's a tweet that pops up from time to time when exchanges like this happen.) > the historical evidence suggests that it was part of the main religion of these people for a long time I mean...yes, this is thoroughly documented throughout…

Elijah (who, unlike Moses, is probably a real historical figure) lived long after the events depicted in Exodus. And Exodus ends with the all of the Israelites faithfully following Yahweh's commandments, after narrowly avoiding death for their worship of the golden bull idol. The book of Kings presents a time long after that, when the people of the now divided Israel have lost their way and started worshiping Baal - as opposed to their ancestors who only worshiped Yahweh.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#99

Post by stymaar »

akiselev wrote: post #78
mrguyorama wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Bush Jr was definitely doing it to give yet another handout to corn growers, it solved a real problem. After we phased out TetraEthyl Lead from gas, we still needed an octane booster, because for gas to be cheap, it uses low octane components. So we used something called MTBE. The problem is that your average corner gas store has terrible infrastructure, and their gas tank leaks a lot. MTBE kept getting into wa…

> So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people? I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains

It's wasteful in the sense that we are exploiting lots of land for the limited value it brings.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#100

Post by cogman10 »

palmotea wrote: post #69
cogman10 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually do. There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories. For example, the death of a large amount of the population along with the pharaohs son. The destruction of pharaoh's army. Records of ancient hebrew slaves. Ancient Egyptians left behind a pretty large amount of history and documentation. They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a d…

> There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories. There's a lot of distance between having claims in the account not supported by evidence and it being an "entirely fictional account." I wouldn't be surprised if truth is that it has a factual core with significant embellishment, to the point where the boundary is not discernible by history/archeology.

People wandering in the desert for 40 years, or even 1 year, leave traces. Especially when it's thousands of people (at a minimum).

The Hebrew language came long after the exodus. We have no earlier records of it that aren't written in Hebrew.

So what we have is writings written hundreds of years later documenting an event with no earlier writings verifying that documentation.

It's possible that a small group of slaves escaped egypt and that was the actual origin of the exodus story which just kept growing and growing with retellings.

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