221–230 of 330 posts
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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?
Seems to be a popular topic. Historian Eric H. Cline has multiple books citing this time period, specifically 1117 BCE as the inflection point for the bronze age "collapse", defined by a deterioration of international shipping routes that weakened the nation-states of the era. I've learned about it recently because YouTube began recommending videos about it. For example: https://youtu.be/choxcHXhZhE?is=t5lDwQQpqPsE2k…
Cline does cover the evidence of destruction, which is also talked about in the other episodes. But the thing about drought is that we have written communications between different rules documenting that they were struggling with food supply.
An aside: For some reason I find Cline super annoying to listen to — his voice, drawl, and odd cadence triggers something visceral in me. But I admit he knows his stuff.
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/empire-world-history/i...
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hepped could also just be "hopped" as in "hopped up on X" which is a relatively common phrase for being on some drugs or medication, but using kawaii speak which often softens vowel sounds, turning the open "ah" sound of the 'o' in hopped into a pronunciation of 'eh'. They couldve taken it further and said "hipped up" for no change in meaning. this may not have all been consciously decided, as many chronically online…
> hepped could also just be "hopped" as in "hopped up on X" Another Simpsons reference.
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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!
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…
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> 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 ev…
These are almost always absurdly simplistic, when they're not simply projections of how modern peoples think and what motivates them. It's really not useful to speculate about motives because you feel events resemble patterns of myth.
> 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.
You could make precisely the same argument about Alexander founding Alexandria.
> There are written records from surrounding nations and people from 750BCE.
Very, very few, precious few. There are zero comprehensive timelines or histories of notable events of cities in the region at that time. Indeed this is transparently not true, because obviously if there were written records contradicting the early history of Rome we have, then we would be talking about those. Indeed most of what we do have we cannot understand, because it's in Etruscan, which we have a very limited understanding of...because a very limited amount of text survived. [Ed - in fact from a brief survey, and given what we can read of Etruscan, it appears there are no surviving Etruscan references to Rome at all. Maybe Rome didn't exist!]
> There's evidence that the first founders of Rome showed up around 1600BCE.
Cities were seldom founded in desert wastes. They were almost always founded on prior settlements where people were already living. There were settlements in the general area of Rome for many, many thousands of years, not just going back to 1600 BC.
> 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.
So who was the first king of Rome?
> That's why, for example, we are so certain Ramesses II existed.
Egypt famously has some of the best records and archeological evidence in the ancient world. (And there are nevertheless huge gaps and mysteries in ancient Egyptian history!) The amount of records and archeological evidence for this time period in southern Europe is comparatively scanty.
> And very influential leaders tend to leave pretty extensive records.
I see no reason to believe Romulus and Remus would have been "very influential" outside of central Italy, and even then, the phrase is probably a stretch.
> 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
And somehow magically convinced everyone else all the history they knew was wrong. And convinced all the people in the cities around them. Interesting hypothesis. It seems like a much more parsimonious explanation to say that there really was a Romulus that ruled Rome and founded or refounded the city, and that's why all the Romans thought there was. It also conveniently explains why there is an ancient temple under the Forum with an empty sarcophagus dated to the 500s BC that appears to be dedicated to Romulus.
https://apnews.com/general-news-8996e6a7d9983ce25290408d2146...
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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…
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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?
- Chris Crawford created Balance of Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)) and had some writings saying games are more important to / have a greater capacity to aid learning than the modern education system at large, citing the little games mother cats play with kittens to teach them how to survive (or something to that effect). that stuck with me but either way, without BoP and WarGames you don't have, say, Twilight Struggle
- Another thing later on that stuck with me are media theorist Marshall McLuhan's concept of hot versus cool media (perhaps more famous for the medium is the message / massage). I am not going to consult AI for this, but I contextualized it as how much work the "recipient" has to do. I.e. baseball or War of the Worlds on the radio is "cooler" than red-hot NFL football or Independence Day on the screen
So then Contagion is hot media, passages from David Quammen's Spillover are cool(er) media, and Plague Inc.'s porridge is just right. or play Augustus while I, Claudius is one while getting ripshit on Ovid and wine
if i had more time i would make it shorter
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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.
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Doesn't the English monarchy claim lineage back to David?
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.
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>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 t…
If you're referring to my post, that is not what I argued. I argued that a claim of supernatural events could not be dismissed as "cannot have happened", but must be evaluated on the quality of the evidence for that event.
I did not apply that to events in the Bible, but that is how claims of supernatural events in the Bible must be evaluated. Sure, they're eyewitness claims. All history from that era is eyewitness or derived from it, or archaeology or derived from it. The point is to not say "can't have happened", but rather to actually evaluate how good the evidence is for any claim.