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Late Bronze Age Collapse

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Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#171

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#172

Post by brainlessdev »

Although it's not its main topic, I enjoyed Ian Morris' Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, which goes over this in a way that really fascinated me. The book's ideas seem contested but as a layman it was a great tour of many years of humanity.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#173

Post by Brendinooo »

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)

Yeah.

> witness something that defies all natural explanation

> write about it

> people say it cannot have happened because it was a supernatural element

You see this too with stuff like "anything that predicted the destruction of the temple must have been written after because no one can predict the future."

Like, the whole point of huge chunks of the Bible is that world-altering supernatural events actually happened, and the authors want people to know about them.

I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to stake out a position of "supernatural elements cannot happen" and there are absolutely cogent responses to what I just did rhetorically, I just don't like that people who think that way try to assume the center; it's worth pointing out that it's the tail that wags the dog in big chunks of historicity debates.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#174

Post by gamblor956 »

simiones wrote: post #58
BurningFrog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying we have no evidence that Exodus happened, or that we have real evidence that it did NOT happen?

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…

The absence of any such evidence, while not conclusive proof of course, constitutes evidence against this event happening.

There is documentation in Egypt of slaves around this time, and of the subsequent departure of some unstated number of slaves. There is evidence of pig bones disappearing from trash sites on the path of the migration, and there is evidence of a shift in religious practices along the migration path. So there is some evidence of an event similar to the Exodus occurring.

We're talking about something that occurred over 3000 years ago. Most events back then weren't recorded, and even then it was still so difficult and time consuming that Egypt and Ancient Greece generally left out the embarrassing parts, most of which we only know about because their contemporaries wrote about it to disgrace them (and most historians now suspect that the vast majority of negative accounts of other civilizations were wholly made up, especially those written by the Ancient Greeks).

Very few nomadic migrations left evidence on the way. There is more evidence of the some sort of exodus having occurred than of the human migration from Asia into South America (note: an increasing number of historians claim the first migration was by sea from Africa, not over land from Asia).

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#175

Post by stymaar »

akiselev wrote: post #120
stymaar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture. They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use. The alternative is to just use slightly less of that land, because the animals are going to have to replace that feed from somewhere. Distillers grains are valuable because the fat and protein are used for finishing cattle for human consumption in…

> The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture.

I have no idea about the US, but in Europe it's absolutely not the case. We've replaced huge quantities of land that was twenty/thirty years ago dedicated to other crops.

Also, we could actually convert them to pastures, that have a much better ecosystemic value (or even let them grow into unexploited forests, for even better environmental effect).

> They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use.

Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.

In fact, in Europe the most fertile soils have long been destroyed by urbanization (because they were where the population density was the highest in agrarian times and where the megalopolis arose).

> The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!

We only got there because it was promoted by denying scientific evidences for many decades. Diesel engines have their own issues but they don't require these additives and you cannot pretend they don't exist.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#176

Post by Brendinooo »

ux266478 wrote: post #169
cratermoon wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> 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.

Not sure if you mean it this way but: I don't think the Tanakh itself claims otherwise. Its portrayal is basically an ~80-year run of David and Solomon accumulating a ton of land, wealth, and prestige; then the kingdom splits, and it's a directionally downward spiral from there, with near-constant pressure and incursion from greater powers.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#177

Post by IAmBroom »

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…

Some Jewish slaves in no way corroborates "all of Israel was enslaved". The latter is demonstrably false. Jewish immigrants were hired, paid, and in some cases promoted to positions of wealth and authority.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#178

Post by tsimionescu »

dylan604 wrote: post #129
simiones wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they don't. But they do claim lineage to Alfred the Great, whose lineage is traced by legendary sources to Woden/Odin, and from there to Noah and Adam. In some versions, Beowulf is also part of that lineage.

Okay, so maybe the family doesn't but others do. There's the Davidic throne concept people believe that does claim that lineage exists. These are usually religious types though.

If you're trying to say that this constitutes evidence of a historical king David, I point you back to the lineage that the real king Alfred (or some of his descendants, I didn't check the dates that clearly) claimed from Odin - who I presume few people today consider to be a historical character. Not to mention Odin's lineage being traced back to Adam.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#179

Post by akiselev »

stymaar wrote: post #175
akiselev wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture. They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use. The alternative is to just use slightly less of that land, because the animals are going to have to replace that feed from somewhere. Distillers grains are valuable because the fat and protein are used for finishing cattle for human consumption in…

> The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture. I have no idea about the US, but in Europe it's absolutely not the case. We've replaced huge quantities of land that was twenty/thirty years ago dedicated to other crops. Also, we could actually convert them to pastures, that have a much better ecosystemic value (or even let them grow into unexploited forests, for even better environmental effect). >…

That's my fault, I should have prefaced that I'm just talking about the US. I have no idea what the situation is like in Europe (for some reason I assumed biofuels weren't big there). Due to US density and geography, most marginal land here wouldn't be returned to little more than pasture. It depends on the state but most of that land was never forest to begin with.

> Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.

What do you mean by engineered? The most fertile places in the US (i.e. the southwest) run on multi-million year old alluvial plains where micronutrients are deposited from mountain runoff. NPK and some micronutrients are supplemented but the most fertile regions tend to be the least "engineered". The engineering goes into the massive irrigation projects, not the soil, precisely because engineering the latter is so much harder.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#180

Post by satvikpendem »

Amorymeltzer wrote: post #108
satvikpendem wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reading Proto which is about the Proto-Indo-European language family and it discusses exactly this, where the hunter gatherer nomads of PIE moved from the Caucuses to more farming oriented areas like plains they settled down and also interbred with the local farmers. But, when droughts happened and food got more scarce from farming, many of the farmers in turn became nomads again. The DNA shows this change appare…

Excellent! That's been on my TBR list for a while. There's a bit about PIE in Lost Worlds , mostly as supporting evidence for movements and connections between ancient (pardon the pun) lost worlds.

Looks like I'll have to read Lost Worlds too then, on my list.
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