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Late Bronze Age Collapse

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Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#211

Post by Brendinooo »

tsimionescu wrote: post #192
Brendinooo wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> modern day scholars Everyone, including you, me, and the most expert of scholars, brings their own biases, assumptions, evidentiary standards that will allow us to accept something as truth. I actually got more dialed into this while listening to Bart Ehrman on a NYT podcast recently. I was interested in him: an atheist who ascribes historicity to certain bits of the Bible, Jesus in particular. But ultimately I was…

Absolutely, of course we all have our biases and evidentiary standards. But there is much we know about who and when wrote the various books of the Bible, and we have lots of archaeological evidence about what was happening in the area of north Egypt and Canaan for that entire duration. And for example we know with high confidence that the Book of Exodus, the Book of Joshua, and the Book of Judges were written hundre…

> for those of us who don't presuppose divine authorship.

There's a lot I could say in response to your comment (most notably, I think we literates underrate the ability of oral cultures to transmit information) but I just want to highlight that merely acknowledging your presupposition as a presupposition removes one of the biggest things that riles me up when I get into discussions like this. It's very much appreciated.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#212

Post by Brendinooo »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #189
Brendinooo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happene…

I think that this arises from one of two presuppositions: Either 1) the physical universe is all that exists, or 2) science is the only way to learn truth. (These two presuppositions are not strictly independent of each other.) These are presuppositions . They are assumptions that you make at the start of the game, that you build your interpretation of the world on. They are not empirically proven in any way. (For #2…

This is articulating some of my thoughts in a far more cogent way than I could do on my own. Thank you.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#213

Post by senderista »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #189
Brendinooo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happene…

I think that this arises from one of two presuppositions: Either 1) the physical universe is all that exists, or 2) science is the only way to learn truth. (These two presuppositions are not strictly independent of each other.) These are presuppositions . They are assumptions that you make at the start of the game, that you build your interpretation of the world on. They are not empirically proven in any way. (For #2…

"Whether they happened" is impossible to separate from your metaphysical priors on supernatural agency. You cannot evaluate the evidence for an ostensibly supernatural event in a philosophical vacuum.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#214

Post by senderista »

krapp wrote: post #196
coffeecat wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During Albright's time, the archaeological evidence was generally interpreted as being in support of Old Testament narratives. Later generations of archaeologists mostly took the opposite view. The bottom line is, there's very little to go by, and the little archaeological evidence that exists can be interpreted either way, depending on one's preferred conclusion.

Could it be that later generations of archeologists took the opposite view because the preponderance of evidence uncovered in that time pointed in that direction (and because the cultural and political stigma against contradicting the Bible diminished over time,) or are you implying that the interpretation of archaeological evidence either way is simply a matter of arbitrary personal preference? And notwithstanding t…

Archeology has certainly been affected by unscientific intellectual fashions: take the post-WW2 marginalization of mass migration hypotheses, which happened as a reaction to Nazism, not on the basis of any scientific evidence. It took the ancient DNA revolution (i.e. being embarrassed by outsiders who could prove the archeology consensus was wrong) to correct this purely political scientific bias. (Note that historical linguists generally continued believing in mass migration all along though.)

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#215

Post by senderista »

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…

Uh, we know who the ancient Armenians were, from both linguistic and genetic evidence. They were Indo-European, not Semitic (unless you actually mean the Urartians or something).

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#216

Post by krapp »

Brendinooo wrote: post #209
krapp wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't happen. Impossible things by definition didn't happen. People observe and record all sorts of crazy things all the time, including for all of the religions you don't believe in, but that doesn't mean anything. You're just asking people to assume what the Bible says about the supernatural is real, and offering the lack of scientific evidence as supporting evidence for the Bible. I don't think you understan…

>Impossible things by definition didn't happen. Can things happen that are possible via mechanisms you don't understand, or are incapable of grasping because of your sensory/intellectual limitations? >You're just asking people to assume what the Bible says about the supernatural is real I don't think that's what happened there. >offering the lack of scientific evidence as supporting evidence for the Bible No, the poi…

>Can things happen that are possible via mechanisms you don't understand, or are incapable of grasping because of your sensory/intellectual limitations?

Possibly, but I fully believe science is capable of explaining these mechanisms, because thus far science has been able to explain everything that theists claimed was supernatural in nature, while no evidence has been found to justify belief in the supernatural.

So this is, at best, an argument that scientific models are incomplete (which no one would disagree with) but not that scientific models are invalid, or that the supernatural is real.

>I don't think that's what happened there.

Their claim was that science cannot prove the supernatural, but the only possible evidence would be personal testimonials - and we're in a subthread litigating the supernatural claims surrounding the Exodus story - which only exist in the Bible. So I respectfully disagree. They were literally arguing that the fact that these claims were written in the Bible was evidence of their veracity.

Also, science should be able to prove the supernatural, as every claim about the supernatural is that it manifests in some physical, tangible form in our universe, which means it must leave some kind of evidence.

>No, the point is that the scientific method is not the only way to prove that things in the past happened.

It is, though. Claims alone don't prove anything. We prove that things happened in the past by discovering evidence of it, through artifacts or documents, and finding corroborating evidence, which is science.

>How would you explain yourself to a two-dimensional person, and reveal yourself to its world?

First, demonstrate that two dimensional people exist, otherwise it's a nonsense question.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#217

Post by reactordev »

Retric wrote: post #208
reactordev wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 4 types of corn. Dimple/dent corn, pop corn, sweet corn, and flint corn. Each variety can be eaten. Prepared differently of course as they have different starches and flavors but the vast majority of corn fields in the United States grow dent corn for feed and biofuels.

Fair point, there’s many types of corn but for anyone interested. Sweet Corn: For Fresh Eating and therefore harvested with a high moisture content which hurts preservation without freezing and total yield. Dimple is a Field corn, harvested later resulting in a dryer product, lasts longer and has a higher yield. Flint Corn: Mostly decorative as it looks cool, but again still edible after grinding. Heirloom: lots of s…

Heirloom is just corn passed down from your pop-pop ;) (though the category now stands for rare varieties of corn that came from family farms or from the years long since passed).

Corn is amazing. My favorite use of it is for alcohol though.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#218

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

Brendinooo wrote: post #211
tsimionescu wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, of course we all have our biases and evidentiary standards. But there is much we know about who and when wrote the various books of the Bible, and we have lots of archaeological evidence about what was happening in the area of north Egypt and Canaan for that entire duration. And for example we know with high confidence that the Book of Exodus, the Book of Joshua, and the Book of Judges were written hundre…

> for those of us who don't presuppose divine authorship. There's a lot I could say in response to your comment (most notably, I think we literates underrate the ability of oral cultures to transmit information) but I just want to highlight that merely acknowledging your presupposition as a presupposition removes one of the biggest things that riles me up when I get into discussions like this. It's very much apprecia…

the problem with oral societies isn't that they unable to transmit information (in the Shannon sense) it's that they're really bad at transmitting information through time while separating true facts about history from fables, revisionism, bias, she intermixing with pure fiction.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#219

Post by cogman10 »

Amezarak wrote: post #205
cogman10 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> What's the corroborating evidence from ~750BC documenting their existence? Heck, where's that evidence from 650BC? This is a totally unfruitful line of inquiry, unless you are an academic historian doomed to publish-or-perish; in that case, it's perfectly understandable that you have to make these arguments as part of your career. Better questions, when it comes to ancient history are: 1. Is there any negative evid…

> This is a totally unfruitful line of inquiry

It's really not. This is the line of inquiry that leads you to understand the founding myth of Rome and what the motivations might have been to create such a myth. It also helps to place in time when the myth was concocted.

> Is there any negative evidence?

Is there any negative evidence against unicorns?

Things that don't exist don't leave evidence.

But yes, there is evidence. The lack of corroboration and the fact that the earliest mention of Romulus was ~300BCE is a pretty strong indicator that he didn't actually exist. Further, the fact that his story is a mishmash of common tropes and that his very name is a derivative of Rome is a pretty strong indicator that he was simply a product of myth making. There are written records from surrounding nations and people from 750BCE.

But further, we also have evidence that Rome itself is a lot older than Romulus is supposed to be. There's evidence that the first founders of Rome showed up around 1600BCE.

The fact that the first records of Romulus trace the lineage of the rule of the city directly back to him is a very good indicator that the author was myth making.

> Is there any reason to expect more evidence than what we have?

Yes. People write about their leaders. It's quite common. And very influential leaders tend to leave pretty extensive records.

That's why, for example, we are so certain Ramesses II existed.

> Did ancient historians with better sources believe it?

You'd expect passing references to Romulus if they did. That doesn't exist.

> Is there anything inherently unlikely about the idea?

Yes, we have evidence Rome is a lot older than the Romulus myth. Seems pretty unlikely that Romulus founded Rome in 753BCE unless he was some sort of time traveler.

> ancient historians believed various versions of the same basic story, and there's absolutely nothing crazy about it

Ancient historians who wrote over 1000 years after the actual founding of Rome.

Imagine if I dubbed myself a historian and started writing about how China was founded by Jackie Chinamus in 1000AD, who also just so happen to have an army of pandas and consumed only bamboo. That is the problem with the Romulus founding myth. The historian placed the foundation WAY later than it actually was and wrote a fantasy story about Romulus where the only thing that could possibly be true is his name (Unless you want to claim it's possible Mars was his father).

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#220

Post by The_Blade »

mrDmrTmrJ wrote: post #138
tsimionescu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caturday -> Saturday enjoyed with or similar to a cat LBA -> probably supposed to be LBAC, Late Bronze Age collapse Civ -> Civilization, a series of historically inspired strategy games, where you play as the historical leader of a civilization through the ages of human development Hatshepsut -> an Egyptian Pharaoh who is one of the leaders you can play as in Civ VII Deity -> the name of the highest difficulty level…

I think the funniest part is the username. The_Blade, which I can only assume is a reference to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5cll43/while_you_wer...

That is actually a reference to the underrated Mark Belanger, who has the second highest dWAR ever behind Ozzie Smith, and a few percentage points ahead of teammate Brooks Robinson: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/belanma01.shtml

that he has a .228 lifetime batting average makes him more endearing, although shortstops couldn't really hit then

also i thought there was an LBA before an LBAC, but the more important thing is literacy regarding the entire concept

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