Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Late Bronze Age Collapse

acoup.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 330 posts

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#161

Post by krapp »

coffeecat wrote: post #146
krapp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know the Exodus didn't happen because the supernatural elements described cannot have happened, and there is no evidence of any such mass migration in the archeological record, nor any non-Biblical references to such an event taking place. It may be the case that the Exodus tale is a recontexualization of various historical memories of nomadic resettlement combined with political narrative, but the actual story as…

> We know the Exodus didn't happen because the supernatural elements described cannot have happened, ... Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that: - matter exists (i.e., physicalism or dualism is the correct metaphysical worldview) - the universe is strictly a physics simulation - there's no God who's capable of fiddling with human affairs (or interested in doing so)

>Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that:

Yes, I am certain of these things because I am an adult with an education, and an awareness of the difference between mythology and reality.

If you believe in magic, and that the Bible describes reality more correctly than the entirety of science, and that archaeology and Biblical scholarship are all wrong, and that somehow out of all of the religions that humans have concocted only the Abrahamic God is the correct one, then the onus is on you to prove that.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#162

Post by andrewflnr »

marking-time wrote: post #150
131012 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typos are frequent (including in this blog post), and have been for a while. Bret is not an AI bot.

A PhD that did not use a spell checker? How would you describe that?

I'd call him a little bit sloppy, in need of proofreading. Certainly not an overuser of AI. He writes at least one of these monster posts a week on top of (IIRC) teaching in college, so it's understandable if he's in a rush.

And yeah, it's not the best, but it's really not worth discounting his writing more than he himself already does at the end. Lots of smart people have imperfect language skills.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#164

Post by scared_together »

whall6 wrote: post #152
marking-time wrote: post #134

The study of the LBAC is compelling these days because of the similarities to our present day situation. Other commenters have noted the the possibility of AI driven collapse, but another possibility is our dependence on oil. Bronze is the combination copper+tin. Copper is common in earths composition, but tin is much more scarce. The scarcity of tin necessitated the expansive trade networks to acquire the resource.…

I'm very curious what part of the article you're drawing on to suggest that their reliance on copper and tin was the cause of the collapse. The article that I read seemed to suggest it was climate related. I have no idea where you're from, but oil is not what it once was, especially in the United States. In fact, we have a very recent case study substantiating this claim: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Stra…

The article mentions bronze production (thus indirectly mentioning copper and tin) not as a root cause, but rather a factor that spread the crisis from one region to another:

> What is clear is that once the collapse started, it was contagious, likely for two reasons: first that collapsing areas produced invading forces and refugee flows that destabilized their neighbors and second because as you will recall above, these states are interlinked and their rulers rely on trade to furnish the key military resource (bronze) as well as to acquire key prestige goods necessary to maintain the loyalty of the aristocracy.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#165

Post by spwa4 »

simiones wrote: post #85
palmotea wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is. IIRC, that stuff is in the actual Bible. Like…

This was not idolatry, as depicted in Exodus - this was full blown state religion, held in the same esteem as Yahweh, and co-existing with worship of him. So much so that El later became identified with Yahweh, and now most people reading the Bible (including Jewish people, Christians, and Muslims) believe El is just another one of Yahweh's names, or maybe the name of one of his angels.

Plus the "not" part is the weakest part of historical study and archaeology. From this time we have about 1 page of text for every 10 years for the entire continent.

Imagine just how much is not recorded.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#166

Post by Nicholas_C »

lokar wrote: post #45
timbits98 wrote: post #18

Given the era, it seems likely that the collapse was the work of multiple angry gods. The author doesn't cover this possibility.

The closest to that would be the ideas in “ the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind”

This idea of this book fascinates me but I haven’t had a chance to read it. Worth it?

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#167

Post by bell-cot »

ReptileMan wrote: post #51
simiones wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Exodus is an entirely fictional account though, it's not based on any real historical events. Even King David seems to be mostly mythical, though there is some vague evidence of a "House of David" being something some real kings claimed descent from. Edit: I should say "almost entirely fictional". The main scholarly agreement is that it may record some stories of some small numbers (hundreds, at most some thousan…

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…

> ... it takes incredible levels of incompetence to be lost in sinay for 40 years.

That 40 years wandering in the wilderness was "lost" only in a poetic or opportunity cost sense. More literally, it was divinely-assigned Punishment Detail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Spies

Also note that the story is in Numbers and Deuteronomy, not in Exodus.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#168

Post by cogman10 »

Amezarak wrote: post #157
cogman10 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Respectfully, this is a stronger claim than I think anyone can make. The only reason to treat this with kid gloves is because a large portion of the population believes in it. Nobody has a problem saying that "Romulus and Remus is an entirely fictional account it's not based on any real historical events." The stronger claim is a valid one to make because the primary source doesn't have any corroboration.

Denying the possible, even likely, historicity of Romulus and Remus is silly, yes.

Likely? That's wild.

What's the corroborating evidence from ~750BC documenting their existence? Heck, where's that evidence from 650BC?

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#169

Post by ux266478 »

cratermoon wrote: post #130
Brendinooo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It injects some really interesting color into the Tanakh/Old Testament - I'm not sure anyone has definitively lined up the Bronze Age Collapse with Biblical events, but it sure seems to have happened somewhere between the Exodus and King David. One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt, and the period in Joshua and Judges descri…

It's worth noting that historically, Israel and Judah are iron age settlements. This makes references to the authors of the tanakh "bronze age sheepherders" wildly inaccurate at best and mostly offensively reductionist.

Taken as an intentional insult though, it could be very historically literate. The south of Canaan seems to have peaked in prestige in the Neolithic and early bronze age. Afterwards, other than a handful of Canaanite sentinel cities, it was kind of an irrelevant rural backwater, and those cities fell off drastically in the iron age. The kingdom of Israel was a regional player with a lot of manpower, but compared to its neighbors of Aram-Damascus and the Sidonians, it didn't really amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Judah may as well have not even existed. When Israel was turned into Samaria, it was right back to being a footnote.

Painting the kingdoms as LARPing pastoralists who belonged to an older time is basically exactly what it would have looked like to the Tzorim, who had apparently bad relations with Israel from the mid-iron age onwards. Reinvoking that imagery is basically stoking a 2500 year old brotherly inferiority complex, if a highly esoteric one.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#170

Post by gbear605 »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #166
lokar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closest to that would be the ideas in “ the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind”

This idea of this book fascinates me but I haven’t had a chance to read it. Worth it?

I think it's a great read, but make sure to take it with a huge grain of salt.
Post reply on HN