Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace
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Re: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace
#2Slave trade kills cities and cultures.
Re: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace
#3This is the fifth of a fifty-part series Jack Shenker is doing for the Guardian. So far he's cranked out one-a-day.
Re: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace
#4I wonder whether there should be a word for the feeling you get when reading something like this and thinking "Please don't be the British again..."
Dammit :(
Re: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace
#5I wonder whether there should be a word for the feeling you get when reading something like this and thinking "Please don't be the British again..." Dammit :(
Read other sources on the history of the sack of Benin. This article romanticizes a city with human sacrifices and slave trade.
From Wikipedia's article on the Benin Massacre:
But the way Benin treated its slaves and the public display of large quantities of human remains hardened British attitudes towards Benin's rulers. The trader James Pinnock wrote that he saw 'a large number of men all handcuffed and chained' there, with 'their ears cut off with a razor'. T.B Auchterlonie described the approach to the capital through an avenue of trees hung with decomposing human remains. After the 'lane of horrors' came a grass common 'thickly stewn with the skulls and bones of sacrificed human beings.'
Re: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace
#6When I was a kid, I was frustrated by the absence of an RTS or city-building game set in sub-Saharan Africa. I continue to be annoyed by this.
Re: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace
#7This is the fifth of a fifty-part series Jack Shenker is doing for the Guardian. So far he's cranked out one-a-day.
Do you mean that he's overseeing the entire series? Each of the five installments that are up right now were written by different authors.
Re: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace
#8I wonder whether there should be a word for the feeling you get when reading something like this and thinking "Please don't be the British again..." Dammit :(
Read other sources on the history of the sack of Benin. This article romanticizes a city with human sacrifices and slave trade. From Wikipedia's article on the Benin Massacre: But the way Benin treated its slaves and the public display of large quantities of human remains hardened British attitudes towards Benin's rulers. The trader James Pinnock wrote that he saw 'a large number of men all handcuffed and chained' th…
Oh I know. There's always many sides to these stories. I don't feel bad about it other than in an abstract modern moral way, it's history.
But the number of times something from the 18th-20th centuries like this comes up and you find out it was our ancestors...
I sometimes wonder whether this'll be the same reaction Americans will have in 200 years time. Things always look better when justified in the moral context of their time.
Re: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace
#9Notice all the hand-waving in the article about mathematics. Mathematics proper, as in the derivation of theorems from axioms by means of proof, was discovered by the Greeks, and unless the residents of Benin City, or the Maya, or any other non-Western society that biased academics seek to rehabilitate were similarly deriving theorems from axioms by means of proof as did Euclid, speaking of their supposed mathematical prowess is extremely disingenuous and misleading.
Re: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace
#10Notice all the hand-waving in the article about mathematics. Mathematics proper, as in the derivation of theorems from axioms by means of proof, was discovered by the Greeks, and unless the residents of Benin City, or the Maya, or any other non-Western society that biased academics seek to rehabilitate were similarly deriving theorems from axioms by means of proof as did Euclid, speaking of their supposed mathematica…
Mathematics as far as it being a branch of logic was pretty much invented by the greeks as you say.
And the mathematics mentioned in this article are definitely 'tenuous' at best. I clicked on the 'African Fractals' and didn't really see anything that I would consider mathematics, although I did see some organizing principals I guess.
However the claim that mathematics is either 'theorems' or bust is not really valid standpoint in general... seeking one must by a practical definition of mathematics include at least Egyptians (at least in practical geometry), early South American (at least in practical geometry). Neither of which had any strong belief in the necessity or ideal of 'proving' theorems. Further one should include without doubt early Indian contributions which covered both practical and theoretical mathematics and early Chinese contributions although they seem grounded in theorem based approach