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Late Bronze Age Collapse

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Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#311

Post by cogman10 »

pqtyw wrote: post #289
cogman10 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The conversion of the Romans to Christianity happened because of real events Yeah, and in the process of converting to Christianity, Romans began rewriting their history and erasing their past. Which is exactly what we are talking about right now. You claimed "The idea that some random historian or politician simply convinced everyone his fiction story was true and central to their identity - and it worked time aft…

> Romans began rewriting their history and erasing their past. Which is exactly what we are talking about right now. I'm not sure that's true. Of course some some details might have been purposefully (or not) ignored or twisted. While obviously Christian scholars were quite picky on which pagan texts to preserve or not (due to various reasons) there is not a lot reason to believe that generally they did their best to…

> Much more likely that the legend evolved over many generations and became a mishmash of fact and fiction over hundreds of years before someone actually wrote it down.

I don't really dispute that this is the likely case. I more dispute that there was actually a person named Romulus who was in almost any way related to the stories told about him or the founding of Rome.

The name and the stories come a very long time after Romulus supposedly existed.

> but it's hard to imagine he could have actually invented it because there were plenty of people and other historians who could have called him out on it.

I disagree that they'd be called out, especially if this was something commissioned by the political powers of the time. These sorts of fanciful stories about the great founding of a powerful nation were commonplace. The Greeks and the Romans also enjoyed telling stories and integrating them in with their mythology. There wasn't the modern notion of history or historical accuracy at play. If someone wanted to say, for example, the founder of Rome was raised by a she wolf, then it makes for an interesting story and imagination so it gets passed off.

Similar to how Athens was supposedly named because Athena gave them an olive tree beating Poseidon in a competition.

You won't find a greek historian calling that story out as a fake or dubious.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#312

Post by Amezarak »

cogman10 wrote: post #310
Amezarak wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quite similar to Romulus. Yes, Joseph Smith played a similar role to Romulus in the founding of Rome: the leader and lawgiver. It's the Joseph Smith of Rome you are wishing away, not Moroni. It also seems highly unlikely that Smith simply "made up" everything as some cynical ploy for power, as you describe the motivation of the ancient Romans and Jews. It seems much more likely he was a true-believing wacko. > Like…

> Yes, Joseph Smith played a similar role to Romulus in the founding of Rome: the leader and lawgiver No he didn't. You obviously know nothing about what his role was. > It also seems highly unlikely that Smith simply "made up" everything as some cynical ploy for power Literally exactly what he did, and it's well documented that's exactly the sort of person he was. You are very uninformed on this topic. > but there a…

The Talmud is not contemporary.

Not only that the identification with that figure as the Jesus is highly contested.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#313

Post by acdha »

xenadu02 wrote: post #133
cogman10 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 slav…

I liken it to the story of Noah. Whether that was the mediterranean re-joining the Atlantic and thus oral re-tellings from a much much earlier event or merely a localized flood you can certainly imagine someone preparing for a flood and surviving localized or wide-spread destruction. But two of every animal? That's not a stable genetic population. Hell there are 40,000 or more species of spiders! There is simply no p…

I would also note that there were things like the weird restrictions on fabric and clothing which make more sense when understood not as something an omniscient divine being cared about but rather as part of rabbinic politics where the central temple rabbis were saying that their political opponents in the villages dressed wrong. It’s very easy to imagine a trip through the desert being bad, losing people to lack of food or water, but then being magnified in the future to claim divine superiority or strengthen arguments that they had earned land occupied by someone else (similar to how American western settlement sometimes justified ignoring native claims by saying that the suffering and lives lost in some way meant the survives had earned the land they ended up on).

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#314

Post by pqtyw »

cogman10 wrote: post #311
pqtyw wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Romans began rewriting their history and erasing their past. Which is exactly what we are talking about right now. I'm not sure that's true. Of course some some details might have been purposefully (or not) ignored or twisted. While obviously Christian scholars were quite picky on which pagan texts to preserve or not (due to various reasons) there is not a lot reason to believe that generally they did their best to…

> Much more likely that the legend evolved over many generations and became a mishmash of fact and fiction over hundreds of years before someone actually wrote it down. I don't really dispute that this is the likely case. I more dispute that there was actually a person named Romulus who was in almost any way related to the stories told about him or the founding of Rome. The name and the stories come a very long time…

> . I more dispute that there was actually a person named Romulus who was in almost any way related to the stories told about him or the founding of Rome.

You and many Romans. I mean we have Cicero's letters where he's saying that all the legends about Rome's founding are probably nonsense because nobody has any real records.

> There wasn't the modern notion of history or historical accuracy at play

Polybius and Thucydides might feel sad about you saying that.

They happen to have created the whole concept of analytical history. It's like saying that engineers in ~1800 didn't have a notion of how steam engines worked. I mean the invented the whole concept in the first place (however primitive their early methods were.

Even Herodotus often goes to great effort trying to separate fact from fiction even if understandably now always succeeding) although that would indicate what sort of poor sources historians had to work with when researching the earlier periods. It's a bit like if modern 19th century historians had to work without having any access to books and newspapers or other extended written material with their main source being the great-grandchildren of the people who actually lived then and the memories they passed down in addition to maybe some legal contracts, obscure religious texts and chronological lists (and if they wanted to go 5-10 generations further its even much worse). That doesn't mean they (largely) weren't doing their best.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#315

Post by pqtyw »

Amezarak wrote: post #307
pqtyw wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that Muslim accounts of the same events are sometimes very different to those of (Nicaean)Christians. Also we do know there were many competing narratives describing the life of Christ just a few hundred years after he died. After the Church become more established scholars spent a lot of time and effort trying to determine which ones were "accurate" or not and suppressing the other narratives. I…

> Also we do know there were many competing narratives describing the life of Christ just a few hundred years after he died. There were meaningful competing theologies , there were not meaningfully different competing narratives of the historical events.

Well in Islam the story is different and they consider the canonical New Testament gospels not very accurate.

Then you have all the ancient texts here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Non-canonical_(apocryph... which were likely written very early and often conflict quite strongly with then New Testament narratives. We can assume that this is just an only very small sample of all the stories floating around.

Even the official gospels don't all match on all the details despite retelling the same story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source) since they are all included that would indicate a few hundred years later nobody really knew which story was true or not.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#316

Post by Amezarak »

pqtyw wrote: post #315
Amezarak wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also we do know there were many competing narratives describing the life of Christ just a few hundred years after he died. There were meaningful competing theologies , there were not meaningfully different competing narratives of the historical events.

Well in Islam the story is different and they consider the canonical New Testament gospels not very accurate. Then you have all the ancient texts here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Non-canonical_(apocryph... which were likely written very early and often conflict quite strongly with then New Testament narratives. We can assume that this is just an only very small sample of all the stories floating around. Even…

> which were likely written very early and often conflict quite strongly with then New Testament narratives.

They were not likely written very early in almost all of those cases (your own link dates every single one to well after the canonical gospels), and almost none of them have meaningful narrative differences (once again, as opposed to theological differences.)

> Even the official gospels don't all match on all the details despite retelling the same story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source) since they are all included that would indicate a few hundred years later nobody really knew which story was true or not.

The canonical gospels were all likely written within decades, not "hundreds of years"; and while you can argue canonization did not officially happen until much later, de facto canonization occurred very, very early. The others floated around, yes, but they were never mainstream in any sense.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#317

Post by coffeecat »

tshaddox wrote: post #249
coffeecat wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

If you’re not a realist, just say so. Then we’ll know that there’s no point in engaging with your epistemology, because your epistemology also admits claims like “the Universe sprang into existence last Thursday,” or “I am the only entity that exists,” or “Jupiter doesn’t actually exists, it merely appears to exist.”

While I do reject realism, I disagree with all three claims.

> “the Universe sprang into existence last Thursday”

I have memories from before last Thursday; therefore, this claim would contradict what currently seems to be true. That's the best I can do. If you're a physicalist, you cannot deny this claim with certainty either: if electrical activity in the brain is truly the substrate of consciousness, then you have to admit to the possibility that you could be a brain in a vat, hooked up to some kind of world simulator.

> “I am the only entity that exists”

That would imply that I'm God. And I'm pretty sure I'm not God. Therefore, other conscious entities must exist.

> “Jupiter doesn’t actually exists, it merely appears to exist.”

To be is to be perceived, in my view. I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between the two.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#318

Post by yubblegum »

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!

Reminds of Burgess' Nadsat (which deserves its own hn post):

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

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#319

Post by lazyasciiart »

pfdietz wrote: post #156
lazyasciiart wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you get the idea they think anyone is being altruistic? Usually the complaint that people won’t vote in rational self interest is suggesting that people are voting based on irrational evaluations of their self interest: for the benefit of their unlikely future selves.

Public choice theory explains why irrational collective results obtain from individual rational behavior. To get rational collective results requires that people act altruistically, favoring the collective over themselves.

And they are asking why it is so hard to get rational collective results, aka in your wording why is it so hard to get people to act altruistically. So the answer to your question “why do you think altruism is common* is still “what are you talking about”.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#320

Post by 4gotunameagain »

alex0015 wrote: post #306
pocksuppet wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The descendants of bronze-age kings are surely more likely to be today's elite politicians than today's homeless people.

At that time distance from now, we're essentially all related to anyone who reproduced back then. http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/Nature...

   > Chang established the basis of this research in a previous publication with an intentionally simplified model that ignored such complexities as geography and migration
This seems like a very impactful simplification. Especially given the relative limited mobility of peoples up until very recently.
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