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.
One historical event that Cline focuses on is a severe centuries-long drought. It's something the ACOUP article seems to omit. Cline does not focus as much on destruction of bronze-age sites although there is one port city in particular which is linked to the international trade of the time. Exactly who destroyed it appears to be a mystery but it could be linked to the migration theory that ACOUP dismisses. The migration may have actually come as a result of the previously mentioned drought.
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 while playing Civ VI and CK III. it actually started the February before COVID, playing Plague while watching Contagion and reading whatever peer-reviewed shit i could find. total Chris Crawford with a brain-eating amoeba action
EDIT: in the blind i'm guessing the port city of which you speak is Ugarit, which i had never heard of. IIRC everything was weakened by drought and famine, and Ugarit's armies were pulled over to the Hittites who abandoned Ugarit to The Sea Peoples. and the Sea Peoples always came off like a "cosmological constant" fudge factor where constant advances in shipwreck archaeology should provide more clarity in its merry time
history is dope. it never repeats itself but it always rhymes :)
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.
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 in Civ VII
Firaxis -> the company that develops the Civilization series
Discord -> a chat app/service often used in gaming communities
ooh la la i call a car hole a garage -> a reference to a joke in The Simpsons, where a character complains someone else thinks they're fancy because they use the word "garage", and when challenged on an alternative, he calls it "car hole"
Old World -> a game similar to the Civilization series
CK III -> Crusader Kings III, another game similar to Civilization
Plague -> probably Plague Inc, a game where you play as a pathogen trying to infect and kill the entirety of humanity
Contagion -> a movie about the start of a pandemic
Rest of the references I can't help with. Also no idea why they would mention the playtest of Civ VII version 1.3.2.
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
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 social circles use forms of this speech routinely and linguistics is a funny thing like that where the brain can adopt and make up things to fit it. May also be more of a 'fedora' speech pattern that younger online generation uses ironically in a nerdy voice (general ex. "m'lady"), hence the addition of trivial details like the version number and having early access to a new build of the game
always hard to tell exactly whats influencing the speech of the chronically online folk, but the mention of discord and well everything else about the post seem to strongly indicate it. all this to say, i doubt they were looking to be understood as much as they were just talking to talk and sending some in-group signaling
> Caturday -> Saturday enjoyed with or similar to a cat
There's a well-known underground nightclub in Seattle which has a monthly event called "Caturday" - I had no idea there was another meaning for the portmanteau! Makes sense, though.
I don't think that's "another meaning" but rather assume their name is a reference. Caturday is a widespread and long standing online meme event (20+ years) to post pictures of cats on saturdays. I have no idea what community it originated in or even when.
the point is sort of both (i've been nerdy and signalling enough in these general and personal trying times, so why stop there)
- 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
The OP talks about the drought extensively. Quoting:
> there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.
One possibility I've wondered about is the emergence of a new crop pathogen. This might be addressed by looking at DNA of modern crop pathogens, and possibly looking if there was a change in the crops being grown before/after the LBAC.
It injects some really interesting color into the Tanakh/Old Testament - I'm not sure anyone has definitively lined up the Bronze Age Collapse with Biblical events, but it sure seems to have happened somewhere between the Exodus and King David.
One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt, and the period in Joshua and Judges describes a power vacuum: no centralized king over the area, lots of back-and-forth struggles for control; as the Philistines, sometimes referred to by historians as an actual group of the Sea Peoples, often impose their will with instruments of iron.
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 thousands - nowhere near the 600k in the Bible) real semitic slaves' escape from Egypt and migration to the area of Canaan, mixing with the local Canaanite population that were the precursors of the Jewish populations of later Israel and Judah.
I tried to word my original comment in a way that allows a broad range of opinions to make a narrow point; I don't think anything you've said here refutes anything I said. I'm not really here to kick off a serious apologetics fight, though if you want me to engage on your thoughts I could.
(And of the things I mentioned, the Exodus is less likely to line up with the Bronze Age Collapse's chronology anyways. But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.)
> One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt
I think that if I'm right that the events of Exodus simply never happened that would quite thoroughly refute any possible link to the historical bronze age collapse. It would be like saying that the events of the Epic of Gilgamesh being enabled by the weakening of Egypt.
I didn't mention it, but the events in the Book of Joshua are also very much non-historical - there are no signs whatsoever of a conquest of parts of Canaan by any other group at a time that would be consistent with the Biblical narrative. The historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence is most consistent with the ancient Israelites simply being a specific group of Canaanites that established a kingdom in the area in which they had lived for millennia.
> But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.
The Book of Judges is also regarded as mostly non-historical by modern day scholars.
I personally think that the conquest of Jericho depicts, allegorically, a conquest of the Moon itself. That there is more than one OT story that describes journeys to outer space (the highest heavens, of course). That the Promised Land really was an unfathomable location in outer space that was only reached by the most faithful and holiest of warriors.
But I like to start with Jericho because there's a lot of evidence that the actual city-state of Jericho was dedicated to a Moon god, and the Moon god was worshipped there. But if you think about how Jericho and its conquest is described...
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 wasn't really impressed: If a detail is wrong, that's proof that everything is suspect; if a detail is right, sometimes that means "if I wanted to invent a credible story, of course I'd say that" and sometimes that means "I think it's obviously credible", and there didn't seem to be any meaningful heuristic to distinguish.
And, when he talked about his journey away from faith, all of that had nothing to do with it - it was him getting hung up on the problem of evil. In other words, the underlying value changed, then his interpretation of historical claims changed as a result.
I can live with the idea that one might look at the body of evidence and draw a different conclusion than I do; I just don't like the conceit that one conclusion is somehow objectively correct, especially because of some broad appeal to authority. I can live with "Troy may have existed but we haven't found any archaeological evidence", but I greatly dislike "we haven't found any archaeological evidence, therefore Troy didn't exist", which is what a lot of the replies under my first comment seem to be speaking. (There's be a lot of "we would expect to find..." as well: even if that's true, sometimes we just haven't found it yet! And surely we'll never find everything!)
That's not to say that scholars can't know more or contribute more work: in a case like Jericho, scholarly work seems to have settled the question of whether or not a city named Jericho exists, having walls that were destroyed suddenly. Now, we dispute when exactly that might have happened and how that compares to Biblical chronology, but just because one person gives a date that aligns with my priors or your priors doesn't mean the matter is settled.
I've sat on this tab for too long haha, just gonna send it and step out for a bit.
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 hundreds of years after the events that they purport to describe - so they aren't very trustworthy sources to begin with, for those of us who don't presuppose divine authorship.
Note also that atheists, whether scholars or not, have no particular bias against the historicity of the non-miraculous elements of the Bible. The general narrative of the story of the Book of Exodus could be explained in naturalistic terms, so it isn't dismissed outright by atheists the way, say, the Book of Genesis is. Moses could well have been some historical semitic leader that led a group of semitic slaves from captivity in Egypt up into freedom in Canaan, perhaps in the midst of a series of calamities hitting Egypt that allowed for their escape in the first place. That's why many serious scholars have looked for signs of these events, in many forms of historical sources - they simply didn't find any.
Contrast this to the story from the Book of Kings. Again, atheists will generally dismiss the story of the fire from the sky and the other miracles out of hand - but when they went and looked for evidence of a King Ahab and a religious leader Elijah, they did actually find it, and so they have no problem in attesting that these were real people who really lived.
In relation to the Book of Joshua - while it's true that Jericho exists as a city, and seems to have indeed existed at the right times to match the accounts, other parts of the narrative do not fit. In particular, the city of Ai was abandoned much earlier than any possible time for the narrative of the conquest (it was abandoned in 2400 BCE) and it wasn't re-settled until much later when a village was founded there during the Iron Age. So Jericho - maybe; Ai - no. Beyond this, there is simply no evidence to suggest that early Jewish settlements were conquered from "the Philistines" - the evidence suggests much more so that they were simply peacefully founded by Jewish people (that is, people who spoke Hebrew, followed Jewish dietary practices, and worshiped Yahweh).
> 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.
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.
As far as I know we have no Persian sources for the batte of Thermopylæ. Historians also agree that Xerxes couldnt possibly have had a million man strong army.
Does this mean the war is entirely fictional? Ancient sources tend to be strongly mythologized, but “entirely fictional” is a very strong claim.
One thing the author mentions in passing is the settlement which is "almost certainly the historical Troy". The "serious" opinion used to be that the city was fictional. The same with Ur. I think the Babylonian captivity used to be considered as fictional too.
Of course ancient written sources embellish things, but they don't generally make things up out of whole cloth. Especially not things which are kind of embarrassing (e.g. "we used to be enslaved by those guys over there").
Interestingly we have surviving Hittite letters complaining about the Achaeans causing some trouble in the vicinity of Troy along with a guy whose name sounds very similar to Priam (although he actually seems to have been on the Greek side). And we somewhat confidently know that Troy had a king named Alexander (Alakasandu) which happens to be the Greek name of Paris (of course there were probably many Trojan kings carrying that name over the years).
Of course that doesn't mean much, the Iliad is a mishmash of different historical events from different periods (based on the descriptions of weapons, armour, political systems, cities etc.). There is probably a massive accuracy gap between oral history like the Iliad and written one (including the Hebrew bible).
The problem is, we don't just have an absence of evidence, we have evidence of absence. The area has been widely excavated, and there is a clear continuity of settlement with the same pottery, culture, and religion. There is simply no trace of any large-scale population movement. As far as we can tell, the same people continued living in the area in the same way, worshipping the same gods (still plural for way longer) with the only large change being the yoke of the nearby great powers going away with the collapse.
This of course doesn't mean that there cannot be a trace of truth in the story! It just has to have been morphed substantially over time. For example, it was common in the time to kidnap and move foreign nobility and artisans, while no-one much cared about the identity of the average farmer or goatsherd. It could well be that "the people of Israel" who were kidnapped meant the people who actually mattered, ie, a fairly small upper class group, who could move from the Nile valley to the levant without leaving much trace in either society.
I'm still personally partial to the observation that the story seems to originate during the Babylonian captivity, and the situation of the story greatly mirrors the conditions they were living under, but while complaining about their Babylonian overlords was probably not allowed, writing stories about the plucky underdogs outwitting the horrible Egyptian overlords with divine assistance was fine, even if it contained themes of returning home and of liberation from foreign rule. (Note that Egypt was the main rival of Babylon in this period, and the Kingdom of Judah was on-again off-again vassal of the Egyptians. The captivity was party imposed to prevent this relationship from continuing.)
I'll add that it would make a lot of sense for these kinds of stories to be fictional, because they come through a religious infrastructure whose legitimacy is boosted by the stories. They are just the kind of propaganda one would create to cement a power structure.
Respectfully, this is a stronger claim than I think anyone can make.
A more reasonable claim would be: "we cannot verify much of what's in Exodus using sources external to the Torah/Pentateuch." It's fair to also say something like "if X happened, it's surprising that we would not see physical evidence of it."
It starts with a survey of the academic field, an overview of relevant primary documents from surrounding cultures, and in-depth discussions of historical records and archaeological finds. There's meta-discussion about the role of comparative literature that I also found useful. I benefited from the author's perspective that there's a lot to learn from the Old Testament regardless of whether or not existing physical evidence satisfies our personal standard for determining whether something happened verbatim.
I like that it does so in a way that does not try to push an agenda. I interpret the author as trying to provide an entrypoint for anyone interested in the related academic fields, regardless of their background.
I've recommended the book to both religious and non-religious friends who enjoyed it. Take this recommendation as one made in good faith, and an opportunity to look at something from a new perspective. You're free to disregard it as you see fit.
I'd encourage you to re-read my comment and consider that you may have jumped to conclusions about what I'm trying to say.
> Nobody has a problem saying that "Romulus and Remus is an entirely fictional account it's not based on any real historical events."
I wouldn't go so far as to say this. We have artifacts and historical texts talking about them, so we at least know that Romulus and Remus are figures that ancient humans talked about.
If we had a time machine, could we go back in time and meet them? If there were two guys named that who generally did the things the Romans thought, were they actually raised by wolves? No idea with the former. The latter sounds unusual.
My point is that there are more interesting questions to ask than these. The book I recommended does a good job of this. It's a good read if you're interested in the cultural backdrop of the ancient near east.
> We have artifacts and historical texts talking about them, so we at least know that Romulus and Remus are figures that ancient humans talked about.
Well, yeah, but you seem to be confusing the authenticity of the writings as ancient artifacts with the historical accuracy of the contents of the writings. I don’t think anyone disputes that the Torah contains stories that had been widely spread and believed among the writers, compilers, and intended audience at the time.
Growing up, in popular media and my school textbooks, we learned certain foundational myths about the United States, the Founding Fathers, and other key figures around Colonial times and the American Revolution.
Come to find out that so many of these myths were not actually true: that they were legends built through the centuries to fluff up the importance and gravity of the United States in the eyes of naïve schoolchildren.
It was with some sadness that these myths were dispelled for me, but no less a sense of wonder to learn what had actually happened in this relatively recent history. There is still plenty of room for myth and legend in the popular imagination.
Recognizing that the exposure myth of Romulus and Remus is an analogue of the exposure myth of Moses, of Cyrus, and of a host of other famous figures gets one thinking that early Roman history and early Jewish history, among others, map common Eurasian stories onto particular agendas.
Or perhaps its because infanticide via exposure was a very common and widespread practice for most of human history.
Either way, there's a large gulf between "Romulus and Remus weren't real" and "Romulus and Remus weren't exposed as infants." You obviously don't believe Cyrus is fictional.
> 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 evidence?
2. Is there any reason to expect more evidence than what we have?
3. Did ancient historians with better sources believe it?
4. Is there anything inherently unlikely about the idea?
In this case there isn't any negative evidence, there's no reason to expect more evidence than what we have, ancient historians believed various versions of the same basic story, and there's absolutely nothing crazy about it - someone had to found the polity, and to declare them fictional results in there still existing a first king of Rome, just a guy with a different name for whom there is no evidence at all. You can certainly apply (4) to specific details of the different stories - for example, it seems much more likely Romulus was murdered by Senators than raptured by Jupiter, though perhaps something altogether different happened. There's even very weak archeological evidence - a chamber was found in an area where Romulus' (empty) tomb was supposed to be, although archeologists are debating over whether it really is that.
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).
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 decent bit of documentation.
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 decent bit of documentation
> 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.
That's exactly the sort of stuff they wrote about all the time. We know about the various wars and political conflicts throughout the second intermediate period precisely because that's what the Egyptians liked documenting.
And, in particular, during the supposed time of the exodus the Egyptian kingdom was fairly divided. Even if one kingdom was too proud to write about a defeat, the others would be sure to document it.
> Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.
Read up about the Canaanites. They were on the uprise during this period and they are also believed to be the actual origin of the Hebrews.
> Israel being one of them!
No even according to the bible. Israel didn't exist before the exodus. Definitely not for decades and even centuries afterwards. The oldest records of the exodus are nowhere near the event. The closest record we have is around 900BCE.
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.
Important to note, Canaanites have semitic names. So, someone with a semitic name isn't even an indicator that they were a Hebrew, only that they were possibly Hebrew. Which is unlikely. The evidence we have is that Hebrews were a splinter group from the Canaanites, rather than being a distinct group of people.
What we'd expect if the exodus was real is either proto-semitic writings about the event or even Egyptian writings. Because, fun fact, slaves tend to speak the language of their masters. The fact that the only document we have about it is written in Ancient Hebrew, a language that first debuted around 900 BCE, puts a lot of this into question.
The exodus was supposed to have happened anywhere from 1400BCE to 1200BCE (the bible gives at least 2 dates).
> There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories.
There's a lot of distance between having claims in the account not supported by evidence and it being an "entirely fictional account."
I wouldn't be surprised if truth is that it has a factual core with significant embellishment, to the point where the boundary is not discernible by history/archeology.
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 slaves escaped egypt and that was the actual origin of the exodus story which just kept growing and growing with retellings.
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 possibility that you could even fit enough animals on a boat of any kind to make that story work. If it did happen the immediate result would be complete genetic collapse and extinction. The idea is abject nonsense but the core story probably happened.
It is easy to imagine a large group of slaves escaping or being freed from Egypt. Maybe they or their ancestors were war captives. But wandering the desert for 40 years? Yeah right. Even if you want to grant miracles the idea that all of Egypt would even know about such events at that time is bananas. Information didn't travel that fast. Probably one group of people in one city. And the antagonist could easily have been a local lord. Over time it became the Pharaoh and the 18 months of wandering turned into 40 years. Only then it was written down.
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).
> So what we have is writings written hundreds of years later documenting an event with no earlier writings verifying that documentation.
Unfortunately, this is the case for much of ancient history. Doesn’t mean nothing happend, just that it can be difficult to figure out what is myth and what are actual events.
> Doesn’t mean nothing happend, just that it can be difficult to figure out what is myth and what are actual events.
Sure. Although I'd say that if you want to study history that's _all_ you can do - use different sources, corroborate, cross-check, link and, generally, try to make the different events and interpretation "fit" together. If you have no documentation for it or supporting evidence then you've got nothing to work with.
Otherwise one could just use a semi-apologetic argument: the Exodus story DID happen as outlined in OT but God hid all signs of it so it couldn't be confirmed.
Ktesias wrote of the battle using Persian sources. Though he's considered pretty unreliable.
While the sources are all from greek authors, we have 6 different sources about the battle with Herodotos, Diodoros, and Ktesias all writing within 100 years of the battle happening.
What we can deduce from these many sources and most of them in living memory of the battle is that the battle likely happened and was a real historic event.
We've got nothing like that with the exodus story. There's not a second author detailing the exodus or making even a vague reference to it.
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 happening.
We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.
This is similar to the reason we believe the stories in Genesis are not historical, e.g. the flood, - if they had been historical, we expect that they would have left behind certain marks; those marks haven't been found, so we have a reason to believe that they didn't happen.
>We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.
I feel like you haven't read Exodus because it describes in detail the early Israelites' predilection for idolatry.
The book of Joshua details the supposed conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, which archaeological evidence rather disfavors--there's no discontinuous horizon in cultural adaptation between the supposed Philistines and the Hebrews following Jewish dietary laws, for example, and the settlement sites just are not inhabited during the time period that they were supposedly conquested.
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).
> We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened
I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is. IIRC, that stuff is in the actual Bible. Like, a significant chunk of the Old Testament is about "Israelites [not] worship[ing] Yahweh alone as the only God."
This was not idolatry, as depicted in Exodus - this was full blown state religion, held in the same esteem as Yahweh, and co-existing with worship of him. So much so that El later became identified with Yahweh, and now most people reading the Bible (including Jewish people, Christians, and Muslims) believe El is just another one of Yahweh's names, or maybe the name of one of his angels.
> this was full blown state religion, held in the same esteem as Yahweh, and co-existing with worship of him.
IIRC, I'm pretty sure there's also a lot about that in the Bible too (e.g Israelites worshiping other gods like Baal, people up to and including kings).
Plus the "not" part is the weakest part of historical study and archaeology. From this time we have about 1 page of text for every 10 years for the entire continent.
But all of these are indeed historical. Y’all moderns have simply redefined the term to not include these types of history. That’s extremely problematic.
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 described in the actual Bible didn't happen.
> 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.
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, show me the scientific experiment that proved it.)
But people have built these presuppositions so deeply into their thinking that they don't even realize that they're making them. Within the silo of those presuppositions, of course miracles don't ever happen!
But, if that's you (not Brindinooo, but you the reader), try to step outside that for a moment, just as a thought experiment. For this experiment, let us hypothesize that God actually exists - not just the word or the idea, but that someone is actually there. And let us hypothesize that he can actually do things, things that change physical reality. (You could think of it as breakpointing a running program with a debugger, and changing the value of a variable, and then resuming. The value actually changes, with no antecedent that the program can see.) And let us hypothesize that God actually does this - he actually changes something.
(Digression: A typical way of thinking about the scientific method is four steps: Systematic observation, search for regularity among the observations, forming a hypothesis to explain the regularity, and testing the hypothesis.)
For our thought experiment, let us suppose that science observes God doing something at step 1 (systematic observation). Now, what is science going to do with it? It's going to throw it out at step 2 (search for a regularity), because there is no regularity - unless God does the same miracle repeatedly.
But if it makes it past that step, the next problem comes at step 3 (forming a hypothesis). Under current thinking, God will never be the hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God is actually the cause!
And even if God were to be the hypothesis, the next problem comes at step 4 (testing). How could you test the hypothesis? "Uh, God, could you do that again, and please sign it this time"? I don't see how you could do the experiment, even in principle.
So there is no direct scientific evidence that God exists, because science is not a tool that is capable of investigating that question.
But if God exists, and if he actually does something, even if we don't see it with science, we might see it with history. Somebody might have observed it and recorded it.
And when you read such a thing, how do you react? Do you say "That's impossible?" You're right; it is. But what is your next statement? "Therefore it didn't happen"? If that's your response, it indicates that you're in the silo of the material-universe-is-all-that-exists presupposition, and can't or won't think outside of it. Instead, I think you're reaction should be "That's impossible, but did it happen?" Because the impossible happening is exactly the signature that we would expect if God exists and actually did something.
So the fundamental question is not whether these events have a supernatural element or not. The fundamental question is whether they happened.
> For our thought experiment, let us suppose that science observes God doing something at step 1 (systematic observation). Now, what is science going to do with it? It's going to throw it out at step 2 (search for a regularity), because there is no regularity - unless God does the same miracle repeatedly.
> But if it makes it past that step, the next problem comes at step 3 (forming a hypothesis). Under current thinking, God will never be the hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God is actually the cause!
> And even if God were to be the hypothesis, the next problem comes at step 4 (testing). How could you test the hypothesis? "Uh, God, could you do that again, and please sign it this time"? I don't see how you could do the experiment, even in principle.
This sounds very convincing at first glance, but it completely disregards the actual history and practice of science.
In particular, for your insurmountable problems with steps 1 and 4, we actually have lots of scientific theories about singular events that we can't reproduce. Perhaps the most famous and well studied of these is the Big Bang.
If there were some god who could perform supernatural events, and presuming it didn't then explicitly try to obscure them from us, we could still study the consequences of these breaks in regular physics. If loaves multiplied for a feast, we may not be able to reproduce the event, but we could still use scientific means to confirm whether enough material had been present in the area to produce the total observed number of loaves of bread that was reported; and we could study the waste from the feast to corroborate eye witness testimonies with physical evidence (bread crumbs, stool samples, weight of the participants before and after, etc).
And historically, for step 3 - even though today gods or God are not commonly accepted hypothesis, they/he were for a long time in the history of science. However, every time something was thought to only possibly originate from supernatural causes, a natural physical/biological mechanism was later found. After this happened enough times, scientists started disfavoring this hypothesis, on the basis that it was not turning out to be useful or necessary.
Well, I guess that makes a certain philosophical sense, but if we allow for the existence of an extra-physical god (or gods) that we can't test for, there's no reason to believe that one particular story is more likely than others. Maybe it was alien gods that built Pyramids, and the Hebrews took forty years to reach Jericho because they had to first go through a couple of Stargates.
"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.
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 understand how profoundly unconvincing that argument is to people who don't already operate under the theistic model of reality that you do.
If you're trying to convert people with apologetics, this specific line of attack isn't going to be effective.
>Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that:
Yes, I am certain of these things because I am an adult with an education, and an awareness of the difference between mythology and reality.
If you believe in magic, and that the Bible describes reality more correctly than the entirety of science, and that archaeology and Biblical scholarship are all wrong, and that somehow out of all of the religions that humans have concocted only the Abrahamic God is the correct one, then the onus is on you to prove that.
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.
Not really. Sure, sometimes long established archaeological conclusions get overturned by new digs, new sources, or just new methods or new evidence of similar events in other places and so on.
But one very important thing to add here is that there is no bias against the naturalistic narratives of the Bible in mainstream archaeology / Bible scholarship / historiography. Huge swaths of the Bible are considered firmly historical, with many important Bible characters being well attested to and many events in the Bible being accepted as historical facts. For example, the prophet Elijah and King Ahab are widely considered to be real people. The events of the exile to Babylon are (now) considered as well to be real historical events.
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 that, there is absolutely no credible evidence of the supernatural at all.
On what basis do you believe the Bible and its supernatural claims could have happened?
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.
My epistemology admits that "the Universe sprang into existence last Thursday" could be true even if we might have no way of proving it; to me this is obviously far more correct than saying that it must not be true because we cannot prove it.
Doesn't mean I believe it's true, though: I think the point is more being willing to admit that humans might not be the pinnacle of existence, fully able to comprehend every mystery of the universe.
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.
To be willing to claim lineage back to any historical figure means you stipulate that historical figure existed. If you are claiming you can trace back to David back to Adam means you accept the validity of the Old Testament (or however your belief calls it).
Personally, this is the first time I've ever heard Norse mythology being tied into the ancient Hebrew text. I've heard a lot but clearly not everything, and I have no interest in all of the crazy. I'm tired of dealing with all of the crazy I've had to deal with up to now
It's in the beginning of the Prose Edda. It's part a genre one could call "universal history", which is tying your group's history into the narrative of the world. It was pretty common in medieval Christianity; I'm not sure if places like Japan or Vietnam tried to tie themselves into Chinese mythic history. It makes some things like the Book of Invasions (Irish) make more sense, because historically Ireland being invaded from Spain en route from somewhere in the Mediterranean seems really unlikely. But if you're going to tie yourself into the biblical narrative, you've got to somehow get yourselves from the Mediterranean to wherever you live. In the case of the Icelanders (the Eddas), the way this was accomplished was to say that Odin et al were not gods but came from Troy, with a stop somewhere in-between (if I recall correctly), and over time came to be worshipped as gods.
The writers of those genealogies indeed claimed that the god Odin did exist as a real historical person. But that doesn't mean that we have to accept their claim.
Similarly, anyone claiming descent from King David is indeed claiming that the he was a real historical figure, but we don't need to accept their claim.
As for tracing Odin's lineage back to the Hebrew patriarchs, that is of course a form of syncretism, where people who believe in multiple religions create a mix of them for various purposes.
The link from Odin to Noah and Adam is only made by explicitly Christian writers. From what we know, the Germanic gods far predate Christianity and even Judaism.
Oh, absolutely. I was merely pointing out that at least some early English kings claimed descent from Odin and from Noah - but this doesn't lend any special credence to the existence of Odin or Noah as real people/gods.
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 Ararat is easy to see how it could be created.
Of course it takes incredible levels of incompetence to be lost in sinay for 40 years. But apply exponential reduction for each generation of oral account and you may get to something resembling truth.
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 original claims.
Similarly, some kernel of the Exodus narrative is quite possibly related to real migration events that actually happened, though they would necessarily be much smaller in scope. They also couldn't be the sole origin of the Ancient Israelites, as there is overwhelming evidence that they are simply a subset of the native people of Canaan, which had continuously inhabited that region for a very long time. We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).
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.
>We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).
The Exodus narrative explicitly describes the early Israelites flocking to worship idols like that.
It describes it as a sectary offshoot relatively quickly corrected - while the historical evidence suggests that it was part of the main religion of these people for a long time. Note also that, while Baal became an adversary of Yahweh and/or a false god in later narratives, Asherah and El were ultimately identified with Yahweh - to the point that mentions of El in the Bible became identified as referring to the same being as Yahweh.
> archaeologist, taking off his glasses: well actually the physical evidence suggests the ancient Israelites worshiped multiple deities
> Jeremiah, weeping and sighing: yes I know
(That's a tweet that pops up from time to time when exchanges like this happen.)
> the historical evidence suggests that it was part of the main religion of these people for a long time
I mean...yes, this is thoroughly documented throughout all of Judges/Kings/Chronicles/etc. Elijah is the one who stands against 450 prophets of Baal, and when he feels totally alone later on, God tells him that 7,000 haven't bent the knee - big enough to be reassuring, but certainly not a huge percentage of the northern kingdom's population.
Elijah (who, unlike Moses, is probably a real historical figure) lived long after the events depicted in Exodus. And Exodus ends with the all of the Israelites faithfully following Yahweh's commandments, after narrowly avoiding death for their worship of the golden bull idol. The book of Kings presents a time long after that, when the people of the now divided Israel have lost their way and started worshiping Baal - as opposed to their ancestors who only worshiped Yahweh.
The god Baal, or his more complete name Baal Hadad, Lord Hadad, is attested in one of the longest pieces of literature we have from the ancient middle east - the Baal cycle, written circa 1100-1300 BCE in Ugaritic, a different semitic language - which is in fact older than the oldest attestation we have of the Hebrew language; but you're right that Baal meant "Lord/Master/Owner" in various Canaanite languages. Calling gods "(The) Lord" is a very common tradition in many languages and cultures, certainly in that area (see Adonai as well). Elijah and king Ahab lived in ~830 BCE, for reference.
Thanks! I found it quite interesting the first time I read about the current scholarly consensus around this, as I had before only ever heard of the mainstream religious (Christian, in my case) view of these events. Even after becoming an atheist, I had for a long time assumed that, while of course the parting of the Red Sea and similar miraculous events were not historical, the overall narrative was, and that Moses had existed and been some kind of spiritual leader, similar to the historical Jesus.
I think it's quite extraordinary how little the scholarly and historical consensus on these narratives has penetrated mainstream culture, even among a secular audience, so I like to bring it up whenever it is mentioned.
It could be just that almost all ancient civilizations were near water bodies that could flood. Any big flood would seem apocalyptic for the population size of the time.
> The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean and probably was not entirely unpeaceful.
I thought that was a story from when the Sumerians were driven up to Mesopotamia as the water level in the Persian Gulf rose when the glaciers of the last ice age melted.
> ... it takes incredible levels of incompetence to be lost in sinay for 40 years.
That 40 years wandering in the wilderness was "lost" only in a poetic or opportunity cost sense. More literally, it was divinely-assigned Punishment Detail:
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).
For the rest of HN, while that video is from someone who takes the Bible seriously, you can also view it as an interesting examination of the historical time period, even if with a particular lens and slant. Who doesn't have a particular lens and slant anyhow?
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 its neighbors of Aram-Damascus and the Sidonians, it didn't really amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Judah may as well have not even existed. When Israel was turned into Samaria, it was right back to being a footnote.
Painting the kingdoms as LARPing pastoralists who belonged to an older time is basically exactly what it would have looked like to the Tzorim, who had apparently bad relations with Israel from the mid-iron age onwards. Reinvoking that imagery is basically stoking a 2500 year old brotherly inferiority complex, if a highly esoteric one.
> 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.
One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing. It was a systems collapse. The societies of the time were likely resilient enough to deal with "just a drought", "just a war", "just a big earthquake", or just some "international trade hiccups". What happened during the collapse was all of these things at once. It was the combination that proved so difficult to handle.
To be fair to Devereaux, this is just one blog post vs multiple books by Cline, who is one of the preeminent specialists on the topic. You're going to get a lot more detail with Cline.
Cline's followup to 1117, "After 1177 B.C.", goes into the resilience of societies and how they made it through the collapse and recovered (or didn't). If you enjoyed 1117, it's worth checking out.
The drought explanation seems particularly plausible for the Hittites, IMO. They had grain storage, but ~3 years of drought would exhaust that. So if the climate becomes just a bit drier the chance of such a three year run increases enough to likely crash their society.
Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. In a crisis it could be diverted as human food, with some effort. Large geographic range from global shipping also smooths out blips. Still, a Toba-like eruption would be bad news.
The standard counter-argument is that the corn grown for animal feed and for ethanol production is not suited for human consumption.
But that's only partially true. We wouldn't eat it directly -- it could still be turned into masa or sugar or some other processed food and then eaten.
The corn grown that’s not for human consumption is only because it’s earmarked for feed or biofuels. Corn is corn. Where I live, 1 in 4 fields is “for human consumption”
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.
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.
Yeah, we're pretty good at making pretty damn anything "fit for human consumption", including quite a few things that are outright poisonous if consumed unprocessed.
(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).
While Bush Jr was definitely doing it to give yet another handout to corn growers, it solved a real problem.
After we phased out TetraEthyl Lead from gas, we still needed an octane booster, because for gas to be cheap, it uses low octane components. So we used something called MTBE. The problem is that your average corner gas store has terrible infrastructure, and their gas tank leaks a lot. MTBE kept getting into water sources and hurting people.
Ethanol is a good octane booster, and it doesn't poison anyone or the environment. It also slightly reduced dependence on foreign oil at a time when that was still an issue.
So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
It's not at all a jobs program. Corn growing is extremely mechanized. It's done entirely by megacorp megafarms. They are very wealthy companies owned by very wealthy people who continue to vote for republicans exclusively for lower taxes on wealthy people. They don't do it for better policy, as Trump alone has cost that industry over $30 billion in lost sales during his two terms, from poorly run trade wars.
> So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content.
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 feedlots so the sugars are either going to the cows or the biofuels.
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!
> 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.
Actually, the first thing we tried generally WAS ethanol. The company that made TEL discarded it as a fuel additive because they couldn't patent and control it.
We poisoned the world with lead because it was more profitable for a single company.
Everyone, or at least almost everyone, acts according to personal interests. There's a whole branch of political science, Public Choice Theory, that deals with this. Where did you get this idea that altruism was common?
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.
Public Choice theory is "a whole branch of political science" the same way "historic materialism" is though, with Buchanan instead of Marx, as it was created with the same kind of ideological motivations, with “state bad” instead of “capitalism bad” as the alpha and omega of the discipline. Interestingly enough, both shared the same contempt of democracy.
> is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?
It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).
It's unlikely that rich countries would experience famine as severely as poor ones and consequently they would probably still demand meat. Grain that could feed people would still feed livestock.
A draw down of animal stocks increases meat supply in the short term. As grain gets more expensive, farmers sell animals for meat rather than keeping them to reproduce.
But “As grain gets more expensive” middle eastern countries (that rely almost entirely on import for their grain source) would start facing grain shortage (due to balance of payment issues) or at least severe deprivation of the poorer part of their population.
The Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian and Libyan revolutions didn't occur at the same moment out of coincidence…
I'm being pedantic here, of course, but "nation-states" is perhaps not the right expression to use for that era. Nation states are primarily a thing of the nineteenth century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state). The article seems to talk about "imperial states" and "palace states", and I'm not sure I've ever seen the expression "palace state" before.
He's also recently been on Empire [1], the Goalhanger podcast — and sister show to the great The Rest is History (which I hope will cover this period someday, though they tend not to go back that far in time) — in a series of episodes on the late Bronze Age collapse, which had Stephen Fry as a guest as well.
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.
I don't think Bret (the author of ACOUP) omits drought - he leads his section on plausible theories with "period of drying and consistent crop failures". While Bret dismisses the out to in migration/invasion theory, he does support the idea of intra-region migration/warfare (perhaps induced by drought/crop failures).
I'm really annoyed that Patrick gave up on that. I mean, I know he's been doing it a decade, and I can't chain him to a desk, and I'm being entitled, but...
I listened to a couple. The first (current?) run on Past Lives was about slavery, and was a bit too "misery porn" for me. The historical fiction component of the show was always my least favourite bit.
Patrick Wyman—of the Tides of History podcast—just put out a new book, Lost Worlds, which is worth a read if this is your bag. The basic premise is that the way ancient history is typically taught, "that we moved linearly from foraging to farming, and then from country farmers to city-dwelling, tax-paying subjects of kings and emperors," is essentially wrong. He goes on:
>All of those developments occurred in an orderly sequence: First farming and village life arrived; then surpluses born of human achievement that created social inequality; then hierarchies with priests and chieftains at the top; then massive monuments, cities, states, and writing to keep track of it all. Geographically, the old story of those developments centered on the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, and to a lesser extent the Nile Valley of Egypt....
>That story is wrong in some respects and incomplete in far more.
It's a constant rise and fall, with innovations and cities/civilizations that both did and didn't succeed often equally valid and appropriate paths to take. Sounds kind of bog-standard, I guess, but it's rife with examples of "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
It's important that we learn about this so we don't repeat it. Sadly, we are repeating it. Perhaps it's impossible to prevent the cycle because it can only be prevented by those who benefit from it.
> 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.
What is your evidence to support that? there is no 1:1 comparison here. The groups that likely survived these collapses were largely nomadic or at the fringes of society, used to sustaining themselves without the support of the existing power structures.
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 apparently.
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.
> "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
pull it in a bit and you have Ugarit :)
i am convinced if / when AI leads to the collapse of civilization it will be akin to the Late Bronze Age collapse; i.e., not with a bang but a whimper. it was a very delicate economic ecosystem complete with circular dealing; but 3500 years ago people were fighting over Cypriot copper and today we're doing the same only in Lobito (along with Cobalt and Lanthanides) in praise of the almighty god Compute
just to flog the analogy like a Mycenean slave, Compute runs out (with a humorous sidebar where someone tries to put a modern equivalent of arsenic into the chips to perpetuate the self-dealing; hilarity ensues). society collapses (but Musk makes it because like Egypt he has all the gold) and like the Iron Age a Quantum Age comes along out of desperation and the will to survive after yet another Dark Age. if we're lucky.
I think the same, we are headed for the tech version of the Dark Ages, all with feudalism. The corporations will be the feudal lords, because they have more capital than most of the countries in the world.
I'm just wondering how will conflict and fighting for resources play out during this time. Will the corporations simply hire military groups with their infinite money?
Are you familiar with the term techo-feudalism coined by economist and former minister of finance of Greece Yanis Varoufakis?
The dark ages were fine. Feudalism replaced a violent slavery based empire and evolved towards greater human rights and democracy. We now risk a real step backwards.
The study of the LBAC is compelling these days because of the similarities to our present day situation. Other commenters have noted the the possibility of AI driven collapse, but another possibility is our dependence on oil.
Bronze is the combination copper+tin. Copper is common in earths composition, but tin is much more scarce. The scarcity of tin necessitated the expansive trade networks to acquire the resource. To my way of thinking this correlates to our dependency on oil which while not exactly scarce, is not evenly distributed across the world. Our global supply chain for oil is fragile in the same way that the supply chain for tin was to the bronze age empires.
As for the article: I found the authors use of dating systems inconsistent and confusing. Some references are listed with the BC/AD nomenclature while others omit it entirely leaving the reader confused as which era he is referring to. Also, the use of the BC/AD has been supplanted by the use of the BCE/CE nomenclature in scientific references for 20+ years. This could simply be due to the fact that the author is a historian, but one would think a PhD would know better. All of this made me wonder if perhaps the author relies too heavily on AI.
The author has been an established blogger since well before the modern AI boom. It is of course not impossible that their writing technique has changed, and they now use AI heavily, but preferring BC/AD over the alternative/not always clarifying which strikes me as incredibly weak evidence.
The lack of consistency in the usage is also telling. Also, perhaps the author simply a christian apologist. I am an archaeologist with 10+ years of experience, so now you know my bias.
Lack of consistency seems entirely normal to me for a blog post.
At a certain point the information is simply redundant. The meaning of the naked number can and will easily be inferred from context. You don’t even notice it. Both while writing and also while reading. A proper proof reading will catch that (maybe, though I myself am actually hilariously bad at proof reading and miss obvious stuff all the time, so being able to properly proof read and catch things always seemed like a super power to me) but I don’t think this blog author does that (and I don’t really expect it? It’s fine …)
It totally get that there are people who will be endlessly annoyed by that – I’m also annoyed by people using quotation marks the wrong way. But it doesn’t really impact readability of the context is clear enough (as it obviously is in this case).
Consistency: the only case where he used BCE is in an image caption. The description on Wikimedia Commons uses BCE, so my guess is that he defaults to writing BC but reading that subconsciously put him in the frame of mind to write BCE. From a skim, he never uses CE or AD in this article.
Omission: this confused me at first, but really the entire article is set 3000 years ago, so it's not particularly ambiguous. If you think in the context of "lecture on the bronze age" you wouldn't expect him to specify every time.
I'd call him a little bit sloppy, in need of proofreading. Certainly not an overuser of AI. He writes at least one of these monster posts a week on top of (IIRC) teaching in college, so it's understandable if he's in a rush.
And yeah, it's not the best, but it's really not worth discounting his writing more than he himself already does at the end. Lots of smart people have imperfect language skills.
I would describe it as entirely normal. My experience working in a research organization where the majority of my colleagues hold Phds is that education level has a strong inverse correlation with ability/willingness to care about such mundane chores as spelling, grammar and arithmetic.
I'm very curious what part of the article you're drawing on to suggest that their reliance on copper and tin was the cause of the collapse. The article that I read seemed to suggest it was climate related.
I have no idea where you're from, but oil is not what it once was, especially in the United States. In fact, we have a very recent case study substantiating this claim: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait sees 20% of the entire world's supply transit through when under normal conditions. Yet after being completely closed (then slightly reopened, and now almost completely closed again), the world is functioning relatively normally and is much less impacted than it would have likely been even 20 years ago.
My conclusion from the article is entirely different: collapse doesn't necessarily occur all at once. And given that, maybe to someone living through this collapse, they wouldn't have even recognized it.
As mentioned by the other commenter,it is called the _bronze age_, so the components of the bronze alloy are part of the discussion. My point is that extended supply chains are vulnerable. And yes, in my view climate was a proximate trigger. However, once triggered, the collapse became more impactful because of the extended supply chains.
> I have no idea where you're from
I'm from the US and looking out my window to the street below I notice that that more than 90% of the vehicles are still running on petroleum. The impact of high petroleum prices seems obvious to me.
An unrelated question, but why do you think petroleum prices are not correlating with with the straight closure. If, as you opine, the world has changed then why did prices rise in the first place? Was it market speculation based on an outdated worldview, or was it something else? I do not know.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing. I am saying the prime mover was probably climate change and you’re saying the disruption of supply chains exacerbated the collapse. Both can be true. I was focused on the cause.
To follow the red herring about crude oil, you’re making my point for me: you’re looking down at a busy road full of petroleum-fueled automobiles when 20% of the world’s oil supply has been completely eliminated.
To be more specific, the difference between now and 20 years ago is the United States is a net exporter of oil. Horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other nearly unbelievable technological leaps have turned the United States into an oil superpower within less than 2 decades. Aside from all of that, I truly believe that in 10 years everyone with a home (rented or owned) and a daily commute will be driving an EV. Consumer demand is far less than transportation/travel/industrial demand for oil, but it is the tail that wags the dog.
We are definitely disagreeing. How much more completely can I express that without being disagreeable. I have no further use for this conversation. Go to sleep.
The article mentions bronze production (thus indirectly mentioning copper and tin) not as a root cause, but rather a factor that spread the crisis from one region to another:
> What is clear is that once the collapse started, it was contagious, likely for two reasons: first that collapsing areas produced invading forces and refugee flows that destabilized their neighbors and second because as you will recall above, these states are interlinked and their rulers rely on trade to furnish the key military resource (bronze) as well as to acquire key prestige goods necessary to maintain the loyalty of the aristocracy.
Yep, agree. I was mostly focused on the cause, but supply chain disruption certainly seems to have exacerbated the collapse.
I think the supply chain was probably disrupted mostly because as the empires contracted inwards, there may have been a lack of policing throughout the hinterlands. So, getting from state to state would have been more dangerous.
In today’s terms, this might have implications for the policing of the world’s physical trade corridors: the oceans. What might happen if the world’s global oceanic police force (the United States) decides to no longer spend the trillions of dollars required to police these vast stretches of ocean?
The people of that era would have thought so. The Iliad and the Odyssey (if they have any basis in reality) might be examples of that period seen through a lens of mythology.
Very possibly a subset of the Sea Peoples were Greek. Egyptians reported the "Ekwesh" (which might be the Egyptian word for Achaeans) and the "Denyen" (which might be the Egyptian word for Danaans) among the Sea Peoples.
On an unrelated note: I found this map where you can view the changes in political geography over time via scroll at the bottom. It's my goto with historical posts.
As a Greek I feel proud that we passed through all history tides during our high times: multiple cycles of thriving and decline, the last one being the Classical century of 5th BC, then the Hellenistic period of Alexander until we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans.
This lasted for a full thousand years until a little before Jesus birth and it continued in Europe and the rest of the world in the same way for two more until today.
It seems the reasons of decline were most often the boring ones: variable scale fightings and climate change. Any resemblance to modern times is not coincidental.
"we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans"
As a tongue-in-the-cheek retort, if the Greeks were really doing that (i.e. only playing ball in the grand building up of civilization), then the Roman Empire wouldn't ended up speaking Greek and looking so different in the period in which it is nowadays being called "Byzantine". Romans revered various Greek aspects, and somehow that privileged status that (everything) Greek enjoyed inside the empire played a role into the movement of the empire's capital to the Greek city of Byzantium (renamed Constantinople). It surely feels more like taking (the reigns, and not doing much afterwards, other than holding out for as long as possible).
My pet hypothesis is : That trade networks, in times of collapse- become sort of superspreader networks of downfall. Think about that city state who runs out of food by the sea! It still has all the trading vessels- whats more logic then to go - and take over somebody elses city and ships! Piracy of the damned! Stealing the food from the starving, just to give there families one more day! Following the coast- until you run out of city- and the civilization is gone!It should also not affect the country interior cities - who then would murder the upstart pirates who took over the old capital near the sea..
I saw a slghtly odd youtube video by a small creator who thinks it was at least partly because the gods stopped talking to people.
No, hear me out.
Obviously they weren't real, but the Youtuber said (based on sources) people used to talk to the gods, like you might talk to a cat. And the gods spoke back (and we all know cat owners who insist the cat is replying).
As societies became more sophisticated, this stopped. Around the time of the collapse, rulers complained that the gods were silent. The usual interpretation is that the gods did not help, but what if they literally stopped "hearing" the god's replies?
You couldn't have a conversation with Zeus in the town square anymore without people saying you were nuts, unless you were a ruler. But the sophisticated, skeptical societies also became fractured and disloyal (especially when only their rulers were arguing with Zeus over why the peasants weren't taking them seriously), and social institutions (which were stuck in the past) couldn't keep up.
That's Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory[0]. Personally I don't buy it because we haven't seen convincing evidence of it in pre-civilization populations that still existed in isolated places on earth until recently.
Is this the old "breakdown of the bicameral mind" theory? I don't know. I think that tin trade routes breaking down + rise of iron-wielding civilisations are more plausible.
Yes. Civilizations relying on tin were basically quite vulnerable because tin is uncommon [1]. The coincidence between late bronze age collapse and the transition to iron age seems to be explained by the fact that once the disorganization no longer allows tin trade, makers turn to the second choice, iron.
Iron making was known during bronze age, but it was technically more challenging that tin+copper because it requires higher temperatures.
It's amusing to note that it lead to the development of the iron/steel making techniques, so much so that once the tin "was back", steel was cheaper, more reliable (from the logistics perspective) and better.
It looks very much like it: Julian James, 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' (see [1]), which influenced Neal Stephenson's writing of Snow Crash.
Scott Alexander wrote a critique of it beginning "Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact..." [2]. A response (which I have not yet read) can be found here [3].
I am mobile and not at my main system with my HN login, so I made this temp, but I think I cracked the primary cause and have been slowly working on a paper to submit to the journals...
I was doing geological research trying to show how crustal displacement theory is incorrect, and stumbled upon a paper that elucidated the insight:
There was a localized weakening of the geomagnetic field in the Levant and in the Med (3 actual areas) starting at roughly 1200 and ongoing until about 600! Im pretty sure Im the first person to posit this theory, but the more I steelman against it the more I think I'm onto something, and the implications are huge... because it has more to do with other subjects such as the evolution of religion in the region too. My theories on that are harder to prove but will be the follow up paper, at first Im just trying to focus on the geological proof.
Essentially a localized reduction in geomagnetic shielding allowing increased cosmic ray flux and solar radiation caused destruction, migration, religious interpretations of what was being seen in the sky, and all the war and tumolt that would come along with those...
>There was a localized weakening of the geomagnetic field
> geological proof
This is an interesting theory. My question is: What methods are you using to test the change in magnetic fields? Put another way, what is your middle range theory from an archaeological perspective? How are you dating your samples? etc.
Robert J. Sawyer wrote a series of sf books called The Neanderthal Parallax which proposes that human sentience (and Neanderthal sentience) originated, and ended, with changes in the Earth's magnetic field. It explored some very interesting social and anthropological ideas.
I think "Collapse" is a strange word because
we talk here about several hundred, if not thousand
of years. A good example is the old roman empire -
it expanded, it grew - until it no longer did and
then it whittled away or lost out to e. g. northern
tribes. Collapse as a word is just weird here really.
Even the old roman empire did not "collapse" per se,
if we ignore big single final battles such as 1453:
The real reason for dark ages was not the fall of the western roman empire, but the arabian conquests, which turned the international trade highway (the Mediterranean sea) into a highway by which pirates and slave traders had easy access to their prey.
I'm a bit puzzled by one thing. Author writes that the Greek alphabet is based on Linear B script, and also that it is based on Phoenician alphabet. So was it a mix of both?
> The Mycenaean palaces had developed a syllabic script, which we call Linear B, to represent their spoken Greek. This form of writing is entirely lost. In the 8th century, the Greeks will adopt an entirely new script – borrowing the one the Phoenicians are using – to represent their language
You've misread something. Linear B encoded Greek, but is not related to the Phoenician-based script.
Curious, in Spanish we have the same saying, but always in the negative version ("no hay moros en la costa") which is something you say when you're doing something secret and there is no one around who could see, hear or cause trouble.
In the UK we say 'the coast is clear' when telling someone that 'there is no-one around to see any misdeeds you're about to do'. Nothing about Moors, nor even Spaniards!
In an alternate timeline, The Sea Peoples are Romans sailing to England, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans. Things became fuzzy when the English themselves became other civilization's Sea Peoples.
I wish the author would go into detail about the sea peoples. From what I read, one theory is that they were subject allies of the Hittites; once the Hittites collapsed they went in search of better farmland with their entire families.
The Iron Age can be researched at your Town Center, but the Post-Iron Age isn't a real age, it's just an extra setting on the map settings menu that starts you in the Iron Age with everything already researched.
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.
Financial Imperialism is the reason why US is rich in terms of resources and because of material richness, lot of raw brainpower is attacted to America. Read the book "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire" by Michael Hudson.
Our favorite pedant should have a new post up today, I think he posts in the afternoon though. At least, checking in the morning and saying “ah, dang, the acoup post hasn’t come out yet, maybe I’ll reread an old one…” is a Friday morning ritual for me.
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=t5lDwQQpqPsE2k5M
One historical event that Cline focuses on is a severe centuries-long drought. It's something the ACOUP article seems to omit. Cline does not focus as much on destruction of bronze-age sites although there is one port city in particular which is linked to the international trade of the time. Exactly who destroyed it appears to be a mystery but it could be linked to the migration theory that ACOUP dismisses. The migration may have actually come as a result of the previously mentioned drought.
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 while playing Civ VI and CK III. it actually started the February before COVID, playing Plague while watching Contagion and reading whatever peer-reviewed shit i could find. total Chris Crawford with a brain-eating amoeba action
EDIT: in the blind i'm guessing the port city of which you speak is Ugarit, which i had never heard of. IIRC everything was weakened by drought and famine, and Ugarit's armies were pulled over to the Hittites who abandoned Ugarit to The Sea Peoples. and the Sea Peoples always came off like a "cosmological constant" fudge factor where constant advances in shipwreck archaeology should provide more clarity in its merry time
history is dope. it never repeats itself but it always rhymes :)
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 in Civ VII
Firaxis -> the company that develops the Civilization series
Discord -> a chat app/service often used in gaming communities
ooh la la i call a car hole a garage -> a reference to a joke in The Simpsons, where a character complains someone else thinks they're fancy because they use the word "garage", and when challenged on an alternative, he calls it "car hole"
Old World -> a game similar to the Civilization series
CK III -> Crusader Kings III, another game similar to Civilization
Plague -> probably Plague Inc, a game where you play as a pathogen trying to infect and kill the entirety of humanity
Contagion -> a movie about the start of a pandemic
Rest of the references I can't help with. Also no idea why they would mention the playtest of Civ VII version 1.3.2.
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
“Caturday hepped up on goofballs [after dental work] -> I was high on opiates on Saturday
Caturday -> Saturday
Hepped -> Novel synonym for “high” likely influenced by the jazz slang word ‘hep’ which means ‘hip’ or ‘cool’
Goofballs -> 5/500 hydrocodone/APAP, aka Vicodin. The gold standard tooth pain prescription drug, an opioid. In this context.
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 social circles use forms of this speech routinely and linguistics is a funny thing like that where the brain can adopt and make up things to fit it. May also be more of a 'fedora' speech pattern that younger online generation uses ironically in a nerdy voice (general ex. "m'lady"), hence the addition of trivial details like the version number and having early access to a new build of the game
always hard to tell exactly whats influencing the speech of the chronically online folk, but the mention of discord and well everything else about the post seem to strongly indicate it. all this to say, i doubt they were looking to be understood as much as they were just talking to talk and sending some in-group signaling
> hepped could also just be "hopped" as in "hopped up on X"
Another Simpsons reference.
yes! involving Flanders and Chief Wiggum, then Moe, in an ep from s5 i.e the golden age
> Caturday -> Saturday enjoyed with or similar to a cat
There's a well-known underground nightclub in Seattle which has a monthly event called "Caturday" - I had no idea there was another meaning for the portmanteau! Makes sense, though.
I don't think that's "another meaning" but rather assume their name is a reference. Caturday is a widespread and long standing online meme event (20+ years) to post pictures of cats on saturdays. I have no idea what community it originated in or even when.
And "hepped up on goofballs" is a Police Chief Wiggum quote, about Ned Flanders.
merry time -> maritime
Reminds of Burgess' Nadsat (which deserves its own hn post):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat
Do you find yourself more lost in the history parts or the gaming parts?
the point is sort of both (i've been nerdy and signalling enough in these general and personal trying times, so why stop there)
- 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
> its been a while since ive read a comment somewhere that I am so completely bewildered by.
I think you need to be on goofballs yourself to understand it.
my mother is a fish
Is this how you normally write because it is very hard to understand.
The OP talks about the drought extensively. Quoting:
> there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.
One possibility I've wondered about is the emergence of a new crop pathogen. This might be addressed by looking at DNA of modern crop pathogens, and possibly looking if there was a change in the crops being grown before/after the LBAC.
It injects some really interesting color into the Tanakh/Old Testament - I'm not sure anyone has definitively lined up the Bronze Age Collapse with Biblical events, but it sure seems to have happened somewhere between the Exodus and King David.
One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt, and the period in Joshua and Judges describes a power vacuum: no centralized king over the area, lots of back-and-forth struggles for control; as the Philistines, sometimes referred to by historians as an actual group of the Sea Peoples, often impose their will with instruments of iron.
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 thousands - nowhere near the 600k in the Bible) real semitic slaves' escape from Egypt and migration to the area of Canaan, mixing with the local Canaanite population that were the precursors of the Jewish populations of later Israel and Judah.
I tried to word my original comment in a way that allows a broad range of opinions to make a narrow point; I don't think anything you've said here refutes anything I said. I'm not really here to kick off a serious apologetics fight, though if you want me to engage on your thoughts I could.
(And of the things I mentioned, the Exodus is less likely to line up with the Bronze Age Collapse's chronology anyways. But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.)
You wrote:
> One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt
I think that if I'm right that the events of Exodus simply never happened that would quite thoroughly refute any possible link to the historical bronze age collapse. It would be like saying that the events of the Epic of Gilgamesh being enabled by the weakening of Egypt.
I didn't mention it, but the events in the Book of Joshua are also very much non-historical - there are no signs whatsoever of a conquest of parts of Canaan by any other group at a time that would be consistent with the Biblical narrative. The historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence is most consistent with the ancient Israelites simply being a specific group of Canaanites that established a kingdom in the area in which they had lived for millennia.
> But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.
The Book of Judges is also regarded as mostly non-historical by modern day scholars.
I personally think that the conquest of Jericho depicts, allegorically, a conquest of the Moon itself. That there is more than one OT story that describes journeys to outer space (the highest heavens, of course). That the Promised Land really was an unfathomable location in outer space that was only reached by the most faithful and holiest of warriors.
But I like to start with Jericho because there's a lot of evidence that the actual city-state of Jericho was dedicated to a Moon god, and the Moon god was worshipped there. But if you think about how Jericho and its conquest is described...
> 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 wasn't really impressed: If a detail is wrong, that's proof that everything is suspect; if a detail is right, sometimes that means "if I wanted to invent a credible story, of course I'd say that" and sometimes that means "I think it's obviously credible", and there didn't seem to be any meaningful heuristic to distinguish.
And, when he talked about his journey away from faith, all of that had nothing to do with it - it was him getting hung up on the problem of evil. In other words, the underlying value changed, then his interpretation of historical claims changed as a result.
I can live with the idea that one might look at the body of evidence and draw a different conclusion than I do; I just don't like the conceit that one conclusion is somehow objectively correct, especially because of some broad appeal to authority. I can live with "Troy may have existed but we haven't found any archaeological evidence", but I greatly dislike "we haven't found any archaeological evidence, therefore Troy didn't exist", which is what a lot of the replies under my first comment seem to be speaking. (There's be a lot of "we would expect to find..." as well: even if that's true, sometimes we just haven't found it yet! And surely we'll never find everything!)
That's not to say that scholars can't know more or contribute more work: in a case like Jericho, scholarly work seems to have settled the question of whether or not a city named Jericho exists, having walls that were destroyed suddenly. Now, we dispute when exactly that might have happened and how that compares to Biblical chronology, but just because one person gives a date that aligns with my priors or your priors doesn't mean the matter is settled.
I've sat on this tab for too long haha, just gonna send it and step out for a bit.
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 hundreds of years after the events that they purport to describe - so they aren't very trustworthy sources to begin with, for those of us who don't presuppose divine authorship.
Note also that atheists, whether scholars or not, have no particular bias against the historicity of the non-miraculous elements of the Bible. The general narrative of the story of the Book of Exodus could be explained in naturalistic terms, so it isn't dismissed outright by atheists the way, say, the Book of Genesis is. Moses could well have been some historical semitic leader that led a group of semitic slaves from captivity in Egypt up into freedom in Canaan, perhaps in the midst of a series of calamities hitting Egypt that allowed for their escape in the first place. That's why many serious scholars have looked for signs of these events, in many forms of historical sources - they simply didn't find any.
Contrast this to the story from the Book of Kings. Again, atheists will generally dismiss the story of the fire from the sky and the other miracles out of hand - but when they went and looked for evidence of a King Ahab and a religious leader Elijah, they did actually find it, and so they have no problem in attesting that these were real people who really lived.
In relation to the Book of Joshua - while it's true that Jericho exists as a city, and seems to have indeed existed at the right times to match the accounts, other parts of the narrative do not fit. In particular, the city of Ai was abandoned much earlier than any possible time for the narrative of the conquest (it was abandoned in 2400 BCE) and it wasn't re-settled until much later when a village was founded there during the Iron Age. So Jericho - maybe; Ai - no. Beyond this, there is simply no evidence to suggest that early Jewish settlements were conquered from "the Philistines" - the evidence suggests much more so that they were simply peacefully founded by Jewish people (that is, people who spoke Hebrew, followed Jewish dietary practices, and worshiped Yahweh).
> 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.
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.
Not presupposing something is not itself a presupposition
As far as I know we have no Persian sources for the batte of Thermopylæ. Historians also agree that Xerxes couldnt possibly have had a million man strong army.
Does this mean the war is entirely fictional? Ancient sources tend to be strongly mythologized, but “entirely fictional” is a very strong claim.
One thing the author mentions in passing is the settlement which is "almost certainly the historical Troy". The "serious" opinion used to be that the city was fictional. The same with Ur. I think the Babylonian captivity used to be considered as fictional too. Of course ancient written sources embellish things, but they don't generally make things up out of whole cloth. Especially not things which are kind of embarrassing (e.g. "we used to be enslaved by those guys over there").
Interestingly we have surviving Hittite letters complaining about the Achaeans causing some trouble in the vicinity of Troy along with a guy whose name sounds very similar to Priam (although he actually seems to have been on the Greek side). And we somewhat confidently know that Troy had a king named Alexander (Alakasandu) which happens to be the Greek name of Paris (of course there were probably many Trojan kings carrying that name over the years).
Of course that doesn't mean much, the Iliad is a mishmash of different historical events from different periods (based on the descriptions of weapons, armour, political systems, cities etc.). There is probably a massive accuracy gap between oral history like the Iliad and written one (including the Hebrew bible).
The problem is, we don't just have an absence of evidence, we have evidence of absence. The area has been widely excavated, and there is a clear continuity of settlement with the same pottery, culture, and religion. There is simply no trace of any large-scale population movement. As far as we can tell, the same people continued living in the area in the same way, worshipping the same gods (still plural for way longer) with the only large change being the yoke of the nearby great powers going away with the collapse.
This of course doesn't mean that there cannot be a trace of truth in the story! It just has to have been morphed substantially over time. For example, it was common in the time to kidnap and move foreign nobility and artisans, while no-one much cared about the identity of the average farmer or goatsherd. It could well be that "the people of Israel" who were kidnapped meant the people who actually mattered, ie, a fairly small upper class group, who could move from the Nile valley to the levant without leaving much trace in either society.
I'm still personally partial to the observation that the story seems to originate during the Babylonian captivity, and the situation of the story greatly mirrors the conditions they were living under, but while complaining about their Babylonian overlords was probably not allowed, writing stories about the plucky underdogs outwitting the horrible Egyptian overlords with divine assistance was fine, even if it contained themes of returning home and of liberation from foreign rule. (Note that Egypt was the main rival of Babylon in this period, and the Kingdom of Judah was on-again off-again vassal of the Egyptians. The captivity was party imposed to prevent this relationship from continuing.)
I'll add that it would make a lot of sense for these kinds of stories to be fictional, because they come through a religious infrastructure whose legitimacy is boosted by the stories. They are just the kind of propaganda one would create to cement a power structure.
Respectfully, this is a stronger claim than I think anyone can make.
A more reasonable claim would be: "we cannot verify much of what's in Exodus using sources external to the Torah/Pentateuch." It's fair to also say something like "if X happened, it's surprising that we would not see physical evidence of it."
If you're interested in the topic of the Old Testament in general, I highly recommend [Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540960214_anci...).
It starts with a survey of the academic field, an overview of relevant primary documents from surrounding cultures, and in-depth discussions of historical records and archaeological finds. There's meta-discussion about the role of comparative literature that I also found useful. I benefited from the author's perspective that there's a lot to learn from the Old Testament regardless of whether or not existing physical evidence satisfies our personal standard for determining whether something happened verbatim.
I like that it does so in a way that does not try to push an agenda. I interpret the author as trying to provide an entrypoint for anyone interested in the related academic fields, regardless of their background.
I've recommended the book to both religious and non-religious friends who enjoyed it. Take this recommendation as one made in good faith, and an opportunity to look at something from a new perspective. You're free to disregard it as you see fit.
> Respectfully, this is a stronger claim than I think anyone can make.
The only reason to treat this with kid gloves is because a large portion of the population believes in it.
Nobody has a problem saying that "Romulus and Remus is an entirely fictional account it's not based on any real historical events."
The stronger claim is a valid one to make because the primary source doesn't have any corroboration.
I'd encourage you to re-read my comment and consider that you may have jumped to conclusions about what I'm trying to say.
> Nobody has a problem saying that "Romulus and Remus is an entirely fictional account it's not based on any real historical events."
I wouldn't go so far as to say this. We have artifacts and historical texts talking about them, so we at least know that Romulus and Remus are figures that ancient humans talked about.
If we had a time machine, could we go back in time and meet them? If there were two guys named that who generally did the things the Romans thought, were they actually raised by wolves? No idea with the former. The latter sounds unusual.
My point is that there are more interesting questions to ask than these. The book I recommended does a good job of this. It's a good read if you're interested in the cultural backdrop of the ancient near east.
> We have artifacts and historical texts talking about them, so we at least know that Romulus and Remus are figures that ancient humans talked about.
Well, yeah, but you seem to be confusing the authenticity of the writings as ancient artifacts with the historical accuracy of the contents of the writings. I don’t think anyone disputes that the Torah contains stories that had been widely spread and believed among the writers, compilers, and intended audience at the time.
Growing up, in popular media and my school textbooks, we learned certain foundational myths about the United States, the Founding Fathers, and other key figures around Colonial times and the American Revolution.
Come to find out that so many of these myths were not actually true: that they were legends built through the centuries to fluff up the importance and gravity of the United States in the eyes of naïve schoolchildren.
It was with some sadness that these myths were dispelled for me, but no less a sense of wonder to learn what had actually happened in this relatively recent history. There is still plenty of room for myth and legend in the popular imagination.
What, specifically, are you talking about?
Denying the possible, even likely, historicity of Romulus and Remus is silly, yes.
Recognizing that the exposure myth of Romulus and Remus is an analogue of the exposure myth of Moses, of Cyrus, and of a host of other famous figures gets one thinking that early Roman history and early Jewish history, among others, map common Eurasian stories onto particular agendas.
Or perhaps its because infanticide via exposure was a very common and widespread practice for most of human history.
Either way, there's a large gulf between "Romulus and Remus weren't real" and "Romulus and Remus weren't exposed as infants." You obviously don't believe Cyrus is fictional.
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 evidence? 2. Is there any reason to expect more evidence than what we have? 3. Did ancient historians with better sources believe it? 4. Is there anything inherently unlikely about the idea?
In this case there isn't any negative evidence, there's no reason to expect more evidence than what we have, ancient historians believed various versions of the same basic story, and there's absolutely nothing crazy about it - someone had to found the polity, and to declare them fictional results in there still existing a first king of Rome, just a guy with a different name for whom there is no evidence at all. You can certainly apply (4) to specific details of the different stories - for example, it seems much more likely Romulus was murdered by Senators than raptured by Jupiter, though perhaps something altogether different happened. There's even very weak archeological evidence - a chamber was found in an area where Romulus' (empty) tomb was supposed to be, although archeologists are debating over whether it really is that.
> 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).
We dont know that.
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 decent bit of documentation.
>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 decent bit of documentation
Israel being one of them!
> 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.
That's exactly the sort of stuff they wrote about all the time. We know about the various wars and political conflicts throughout the second intermediate period precisely because that's what the Egyptians liked documenting.
And, in particular, during the supposed time of the exodus the Egyptian kingdom was fairly divided. Even if one kingdom was too proud to write about a defeat, the others would be sure to document it.
> Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.
Read up about the Canaanites. They were on the uprise during this period and they are also believed to be the actual origin of the Hebrews.
> Israel being one of them!
No even according to the bible. Israel didn't exist before the exodus. Definitely not for decades and even centuries afterwards. The oldest records of the exodus are nowhere near the event. The closest record we have is around 900BCE.
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.
Important to note, Canaanites have semitic names. So, someone with a semitic name isn't even an indicator that they were a Hebrew, only that they were possibly Hebrew. Which is unlikely. The evidence we have is that Hebrews were a splinter group from the Canaanites, rather than being a distinct group of people.
What we'd expect if the exodus was real is either proto-semitic writings about the event or even Egyptian writings. Because, fun fact, slaves tend to speak the language of their masters. The fact that the only document we have about it is written in Ancient Hebrew, a language that first debuted around 900 BCE, puts a lot of this into question.
The exodus was supposed to have happened anywhere from 1400BCE to 1200BCE (the bible gives at least 2 dates).
> There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories.
There's a lot of distance between having claims in the account not supported by evidence and it being an "entirely fictional account."
I wouldn't be surprised if truth is that it has a factual core with significant embellishment, to the point where the boundary is not discernible by history/archeology.
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 slaves escaped egypt and that was the actual origin of the exodus story which just kept growing and growing with retellings.
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 possibility that you could even fit enough animals on a boat of any kind to make that story work. If it did happen the immediate result would be complete genetic collapse and extinction. The idea is abject nonsense but the core story probably happened.
It is easy to imagine a large group of slaves escaping or being freed from Egypt. Maybe they or their ancestors were war captives. But wandering the desert for 40 years? Yeah right. Even if you want to grant miracles the idea that all of Egypt would even know about such events at that time is bananas. Information didn't travel that fast. Probably one group of people in one city. And the antagonist could easily have been a local lord. Over time it became the Pharaoh and the 18 months of wandering turned into 40 years. Only then it was written down.
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).
It could also be that saying "wondering the desert" sounds better to a farming population then "they lived as nomads."
> So what we have is writings written hundreds of years later documenting an event with no earlier writings verifying that documentation.
Unfortunately, this is the case for much of ancient history. Doesn’t mean nothing happend, just that it can be difficult to figure out what is myth and what are actual events.
> Doesn’t mean nothing happend, just that it can be difficult to figure out what is myth and what are actual events.
Sure. Although I'd say that if you want to study history that's _all_ you can do - use different sources, corroborate, cross-check, link and, generally, try to make the different events and interpretation "fit" together. If you have no documentation for it or supporting evidence then you've got nothing to work with.
Otherwise one could just use a semi-apologetic argument: the Exodus story DID happen as outlined in OT but God hid all signs of it so it couldn't be confirmed.
Try applying the same criteria to say the battle of Thermopylae. What does the Persian sources say?
Ktesias wrote of the battle using Persian sources. Though he's considered pretty unreliable.
While the sources are all from greek authors, we have 6 different sources about the battle with Herodotos, Diodoros, and Ktesias all writing within 100 years of the battle happening.
What we can deduce from these many sources and most of them in living memory of the battle is that the battle likely happened and was a real historic event.
We've got nothing like that with the exodus story. There's not a second author detailing the exodus or making even a vague reference to it.
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 happening.
We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.
This is similar to the reason we believe the stories in Genesis are not historical, e.g. the flood, - if they had been historical, we expect that they would have left behind certain marks; those marks haven't been found, so we have a reason to believe that they didn't happen.
>We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.
I feel like you haven't read Exodus because it describes in detail the early Israelites' predilection for idolatry.
The book of Joshua details the supposed conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, which archaeological evidence rather disfavors--there's no discontinuous horizon in cultural adaptation between the supposed Philistines and the Hebrews following Jewish dietary laws, for example, and the settlement sites just are not inhabited during the time period that they were supposedly conquested.
Philistines were Greek/IE, not Canaanite I thought.
Calling it idolatry is ahistorical though. Worshipping yhwh alone came much later.
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).
> There is documentation in Egypt of slaves around this time, and of the subsequent departure of some unstated number of slaves
No one claimed the Egyptians didn't own slaves.
> There is evidence of pig bones disappearing from trash sites on the path of the migration
There are also many Jewish sites that had pig bones in their trash. That mandate had not yet solidified.
> We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened
I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is. IIRC, that stuff is in the actual Bible. Like, a significant chunk of the Old Testament is about "Israelites [not] worship[ing] Yahweh alone as the only God."
This was not idolatry, as depicted in Exodus - this was full blown state religion, held in the same esteem as Yahweh, and co-existing with worship of him. So much so that El later became identified with Yahweh, and now most people reading the Bible (including Jewish people, Christians, and Muslims) believe El is just another one of Yahweh's names, or maybe the name of one of his angels.
> this was full blown state religion, held in the same esteem as Yahweh, and co-existing with worship of him.
IIRC, I'm pretty sure there's also a lot about that in the Bible too (e.g Israelites worshiping other gods like Baal, people up to and including kings).
Not in the Book of Exodus that I was talking about, no (if for no other reasons that there are no Hebrew kings in it).
Plus the "not" part is the weakest part of historical study and archaeology. From this time we have about 1 page of text for every 10 years for the entire continent.
Imagine just how much is not recorded.
Flood legends are very common among ancient Eurasian cultures.
As the last Ice Age melted away (20k–8k years ago), there were very likely several major floods in the region.
But all of these are indeed historical. Y’all moderns have simply redefined the term to not include these types of history. That’s extremely problematic.
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 described in the actual Bible didn't happen.
> 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.
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, show me the scientific experiment that proved it.)
But people have built these presuppositions so deeply into their thinking that they don't even realize that they're making them. Within the silo of those presuppositions, of course miracles don't ever happen!
But, if that's you (not Brindinooo, but you the reader), try to step outside that for a moment, just as a thought experiment. For this experiment, let us hypothesize that God actually exists - not just the word or the idea, but that someone is actually there. And let us hypothesize that he can actually do things, things that change physical reality. (You could think of it as breakpointing a running program with a debugger, and changing the value of a variable, and then resuming. The value actually changes, with no antecedent that the program can see.) And let us hypothesize that God actually does this - he actually changes something.
(Digression: A typical way of thinking about the scientific method is four steps: Systematic observation, search for regularity among the observations, forming a hypothesis to explain the regularity, and testing the hypothesis.)
For our thought experiment, let us suppose that science observes God doing something at step 1 (systematic observation). Now, what is science going to do with it? It's going to throw it out at step 2 (search for a regularity), because there is no regularity - unless God does the same miracle repeatedly.
But if it makes it past that step, the next problem comes at step 3 (forming a hypothesis). Under current thinking, God will never be the hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God is actually the cause!
And even if God were to be the hypothesis, the next problem comes at step 4 (testing). How could you test the hypothesis? "Uh, God, could you do that again, and please sign it this time"? I don't see how you could do the experiment, even in principle.
So there is no direct scientific evidence that God exists, because science is not a tool that is capable of investigating that question.
But if God exists, and if he actually does something, even if we don't see it with science, we might see it with history. Somebody might have observed it and recorded it.
And when you read such a thing, how do you react? Do you say "That's impossible?" You're right; it is. But what is your next statement? "Therefore it didn't happen"? If that's your response, it indicates that you're in the silo of the material-universe-is-all-that-exists presupposition, and can't or won't think outside of it. Instead, I think you're reaction should be "That's impossible, but did it happen?" Because the impossible happening is exactly the signature that we would expect if God exists and actually did something.
So the fundamental question is not whether these events have a supernatural element or not. The fundamental question is whether they happened.
> For our thought experiment, let us suppose that science observes God doing something at step 1 (systematic observation). Now, what is science going to do with it? It's going to throw it out at step 2 (search for a regularity), because there is no regularity - unless God does the same miracle repeatedly.
> But if it makes it past that step, the next problem comes at step 3 (forming a hypothesis). Under current thinking, God will never be the hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God is actually the cause!
> And even if God were to be the hypothesis, the next problem comes at step 4 (testing). How could you test the hypothesis? "Uh, God, could you do that again, and please sign it this time"? I don't see how you could do the experiment, even in principle.
This sounds very convincing at first glance, but it completely disregards the actual history and practice of science.
In particular, for your insurmountable problems with steps 1 and 4, we actually have lots of scientific theories about singular events that we can't reproduce. Perhaps the most famous and well studied of these is the Big Bang.
If there were some god who could perform supernatural events, and presuming it didn't then explicitly try to obscure them from us, we could still study the consequences of these breaks in regular physics. If loaves multiplied for a feast, we may not be able to reproduce the event, but we could still use scientific means to confirm whether enough material had been present in the area to produce the total observed number of loaves of bread that was reported; and we could study the waste from the feast to corroborate eye witness testimonies with physical evidence (bread crumbs, stool samples, weight of the participants before and after, etc).
And historically, for step 3 - even though today gods or God are not commonly accepted hypothesis, they/he were for a long time in the history of science. However, every time something was thought to only possibly originate from supernatural causes, a natural physical/biological mechanism was later found. After this happened enough times, scientists started disfavoring this hypothesis, on the basis that it was not turning out to be useful or necessary.
Well, I guess that makes a certain philosophical sense, but if we allow for the existence of an extra-physical god (or gods) that we can't test for, there's no reason to believe that one particular story is more likely than others. Maybe it was alien gods that built Pyramids, and the Hebrews took forty years to reach Jericho because they had to first go through a couple of Stargates.
"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.
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 understand how profoundly unconvincing that argument is to people who don't already operate under the theistic model of reality that you do.
If you're trying to convert people with apologetics, this specific line of attack isn't going to be effective.
This is articulating some of my thoughts in a far more cogent way than I could do on my own. Thank you.
>Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that:
Yes, I am certain of these things because I am an adult with an education, and an awareness of the difference between mythology and reality.
If you believe in magic, and that the Bible describes reality more correctly than the entirety of science, and that archaeology and Biblical scholarship are all wrong, and that somehow out of all of the religions that humans have concocted only the Abrahamic God is the correct one, then the onus is on you to prove that.
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.
Not really. Sure, sometimes long established archaeological conclusions get overturned by new digs, new sources, or just new methods or new evidence of similar events in other places and so on.
But one very important thing to add here is that there is no bias against the naturalistic narratives of the Bible in mainstream archaeology / Bible scholarship / historiography. Huge swaths of the Bible are considered firmly historical, with many important Bible characters being well attested to and many events in the Bible being accepted as historical facts. For example, the prophet Elijah and King Ahab are widely considered to be real people. The events of the exile to Babylon are (now) considered as well to be real historical events.
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 that, there is absolutely no credible evidence of the supernatural at all.
On what basis do you believe the Bible and its supernatural claims could have happened?
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.
My epistemology admits that "the Universe sprang into existence last Thursday" could be true even if we might have no way of proving it; to me this is obviously far more correct than saying that it must not be true because we cannot prove it.
Doesn't mean I believe it's true, though: I think the point is more being willing to admit that humans might not be the pinnacle of existence, fully able to comprehend every mystery of the universe.
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.
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.
To be willing to claim lineage back to any historical figure means you stipulate that historical figure existed. If you are claiming you can trace back to David back to Adam means you accept the validity of the Old Testament (or however your belief calls it).
Personally, this is the first time I've ever heard Norse mythology being tied into the ancient Hebrew text. I've heard a lot but clearly not everything, and I have no interest in all of the crazy. I'm tired of dealing with all of the crazy I've had to deal with up to now
It's in the beginning of the Prose Edda. It's part a genre one could call "universal history", which is tying your group's history into the narrative of the world. It was pretty common in medieval Christianity; I'm not sure if places like Japan or Vietnam tried to tie themselves into Chinese mythic history. It makes some things like the Book of Invasions (Irish) make more sense, because historically Ireland being invaded from Spain en route from somewhere in the Mediterranean seems really unlikely. But if you're going to tie yourself into the biblical narrative, you've got to somehow get yourselves from the Mediterranean to wherever you live. In the case of the Icelanders (the Eddas), the way this was accomplished was to say that Odin et al were not gods but came from Troy, with a stop somewhere in-between (if I recall correctly), and over time came to be worshipped as gods.
The writers of those genealogies indeed claimed that the god Odin did exist as a real historical person. But that doesn't mean that we have to accept their claim.
Similarly, anyone claiming descent from King David is indeed claiming that the he was a real historical figure, but we don't need to accept their claim.
As for tracing Odin's lineage back to the Hebrew patriarchs, that is of course a form of syncretism, where people who believe in multiple religions create a mix of them for various purposes.
The link from Odin to Noah and Adam is only made by explicitly Christian writers. From what we know, the Germanic gods far predate Christianity and even Judaism.
Oh, absolutely. I was merely pointing out that at least some early English kings claimed descent from Odin and from Noah - but this doesn't lend any special credence to the existence of Odin or Noah as real people/gods.
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 Ararat is easy to see how it could be created.
Of course it takes incredible levels of incompetence to be lost in sinay for 40 years. But apply exponential reduction for each generation of oral account and you may get to something resembling truth.
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 original claims.
Similarly, some kernel of the Exodus narrative is quite possibly related to real migration events that actually happened, though they would necessarily be much smaller in scope. They also couldn't be the sole origin of the Ancient Israelites, as there is overwhelming evidence that they are simply a subset of the native people of Canaan, which had continuously inhabited that region for a very long time. We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).
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.
There are flood myths across the entire world.
>We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).
The Exodus narrative explicitly describes the early Israelites flocking to worship idols like that.
It describes it as a sectary offshoot relatively quickly corrected - while the historical evidence suggests that it was part of the main religion of these people for a long time. Note also that, while Baal became an adversary of Yahweh and/or a false god in later narratives, Asherah and El were ultimately identified with Yahweh - to the point that mentions of El in the Bible became identified as referring to the same being as Yahweh.
> archaeologist, taking off his glasses: well actually the physical evidence suggests the ancient Israelites worshiped multiple deities
> Jeremiah, weeping and sighing: yes I know
(That's a tweet that pops up from time to time when exchanges like this happen.)
> the historical evidence suggests that it was part of the main religion of these people for a long time
I mean...yes, this is thoroughly documented throughout all of Judges/Kings/Chronicles/etc. Elijah is the one who stands against 450 prophets of Baal, and when he feels totally alone later on, God tells him that 7,000 haven't bent the knee - big enough to be reassuring, but certainly not a huge percentage of the northern kingdom's population.
Elijah (who, unlike Moses, is probably a real historical figure) lived long after the events depicted in Exodus. And Exodus ends with the all of the Israelites faithfully following Yahweh's commandments, after narrowly avoiding death for their worship of the golden bull idol. The book of Kings presents a time long after that, when the people of the now divided Israel have lost their way and started worshiping Baal - as opposed to their ancestors who only worshiped Yahweh.
FYI, "Baal" is a much later invention. In ancient Hebrew, the word "Ba'al" means lord/master/husband and is often used as a honorific.
Baal was an Ugaritic god. Ugarit is one of the cities that was famously destroyed in the LBAC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit
The god Baal, or his more complete name Baal Hadad, Lord Hadad, is attested in one of the longest pieces of literature we have from the ancient middle east - the Baal cycle, written circa 1100-1300 BCE in Ugaritic, a different semitic language - which is in fact older than the oldest attestation we have of the Hebrew language; but you're right that Baal meant "Lord/Master/Owner" in various Canaanite languages. Calling gods "(The) Lord" is a very common tradition in many languages and cultures, certainly in that area (see Adonai as well). Elijah and king Ahab lived in ~830 BCE, for reference.
> Yes, Troy existed - we know that because we found it.
We knew Troy existed long before that because it remained as a city at least into the 3rd century CE. We just didn't know which ruins it was.
It was widely believed to be fictional. The discoverer of Troy's ruins astounded the world because it showed a fable had a serious basis in fact.
But until we dig up a boat in "the Holy Land" with biological samples from South America, Australia, and Siberia...
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Thanks! I found it quite interesting the first time I read about the current scholarly consensus around this, as I had before only ever heard of the mainstream religious (Christian, in my case) view of these events. Even after becoming an atheist, I had for a long time assumed that, while of course the parting of the Red Sea and similar miraculous events were not historical, the overall narrative was, and that Moses had existed and been some kind of spiritual leader, similar to the historical Jesus.
I think it's quite extraordinary how little the scholarly and historical consensus on these narratives has penetrated mainstream culture, even among a secular audience, so I like to bring it up whenever it is mentioned.
> The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago
Pretty much every ancient religion/group has a "biblical" flood story. Even those from different continents. Haven't you seen Ancient Aliens?
It could be just that almost all ancient civilizations were near water bodies that could flood. Any big flood would seem apocalyptic for the population size of the time.
The how/why of the flood is irrelevant. The fact that they all have them makes it not special/unique in the way that religion makes it out to be.
> The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean and probably was not entirely unpeaceful.
I thought that was a story from when the Sumerians were driven up to Mesopotamia as the water level in the Persian Gulf rose when the glaciers of the last ice age melted.
> ... it takes incredible levels of incompetence to be lost in sinay for 40 years.
That 40 years wandering in the wilderness was "lost" only in a poetic or opportunity cost sense. More literally, it was divinely-assigned Punishment Detail:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Spies
Also note that the story is in Numbers and Deuteronomy, not in Exodus.
even if black sea deluge happened sufficiently rapidly, you're several thousands years off. Current theories date it to about 8 thousand years ago.
> The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean
8,000 years ago.
> But apply exponential reduction for each generation of oral account and you may get to something resembling truth.
Unfalsifiable claims are not truth.
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).
You'd probably find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy2Ic_j0SnA interesting.
For the rest of HN, while that video is from someone who takes the Bible seriously, you can also view it as an interesting examination of the historical time period, even if with a particular lens and slant. Who doesn't have a particular lens and slant anyhow?
I heard that the story of the Exodus and Moses was to unite the northern and southern kingdoms of Judea behind a single figure.
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 its neighbors of Aram-Damascus and the Sidonians, it didn't really amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Judah may as well have not even existed. When Israel was turned into Samaria, it was right back to being a footnote.
Painting the kingdoms as LARPing pastoralists who belonged to an older time is basically exactly what it would have looked like to the Tzorim, who had apparently bad relations with Israel from the mid-iron age onwards. Reinvoking that imagery is basically stoking a 2500 year old brotherly inferiority complex, if a highly esoteric one.
> 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.
No, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I'm contextualizing for why that framing of the book is eyebrow raising.
One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing. It was a systems collapse. The societies of the time were likely resilient enough to deal with "just a drought", "just a war", "just a big earthquake", or just some "international trade hiccups". What happened during the collapse was all of these things at once. It was the combination that proved so difficult to handle.
To be fair to Devereaux, this is just one blog post vs multiple books by Cline, who is one of the preeminent specialists on the topic. You're going to get a lot more detail with Cline.
Cline's followup to 1117, "After 1177 B.C.", goes into the resilience of societies and how they made it through the collapse and recovered (or didn't). If you enjoyed 1117, it's worth checking out.
> One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing.
I don't think he establishes that. It could be one root cause, and complexity in how things then fell apart.
The drought explanation seems particularly plausible for the Hittites, IMO. They had grain storage, but ~3 years of drought would exhaust that. So if the climate becomes just a bit drier the chance of such a three year run increases enough to likely crash their society.
Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. In a crisis it could be diverted as human food, with some effort. Large geographic range from global shipping also smooths out blips. Still, a Toba-like eruption would be bad news.
> Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals.
This, plus the gigantic amount of agricultural land being used for biofuel production (almost as much as cattle food).
The standard counter-argument is that the corn grown for animal feed and for ethanol production is not suited for human consumption.
But that's only partially true. We wouldn't eat it directly -- it could still be turned into masa or sugar or some other processed food and then eaten.
The corn grown that’s not for human consumption is only because it’s earmarked for feed or biofuels. Corn is corn. Where I live, 1 in 4 fields is “for human consumption”
Filed corn is harvested at a different time resulting in a dryer product.
But yes if people get hungry enough, field corn easily qualifies as actual food.
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 shapes and sizes but significantly lower yield.
Popcorn: A tiny slice of the market but pops when heated.
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.
Aren't there different varieties of corn?
Yes, and they are all edible. But not all are palatable.
Yeah, we're pretty good at making pretty damn anything "fit for human consumption", including quite a few things that are outright poisonous if consumed unprocessed.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).
Who ever thought the idea of biofuel was a good one? Is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?
While Bush Jr was definitely doing it to give yet another handout to corn growers, it solved a real problem.
After we phased out TetraEthyl Lead from gas, we still needed an octane booster, because for gas to be cheap, it uses low octane components. So we used something called MTBE. The problem is that your average corner gas store has terrible infrastructure, and their gas tank leaks a lot. MTBE kept getting into water sources and hurting people.
Ethanol is a good octane booster, and it doesn't poison anyone or the environment. It also slightly reduced dependence on foreign oil at a time when that was still an issue.
So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
It's not at all a jobs program. Corn growing is extremely mechanized. It's done entirely by megacorp megafarms. They are very wealthy companies owned by very wealthy people who continue to vote for republicans exclusively for lower taxes on wealthy people. They don't do it for better policy, as Trump alone has cost that industry over $30 billion in lost sales during his two terms, from poorly run trade wars.
> So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains
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 feedlots so the sugars are either going to the cows or the biofuels.
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!
> 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.
Actually, the first thing we tried generally WAS ethanol. The company that made TEL discarded it as a fuel additive because they couldn't patent and control it.
We poisoned the world with lead because it was more profitable for a single company.
Of course, it also destroys the topsoil without careful management
It's the result of politics, and that's not always pretty.
What isn't the result of politics? This is a bad explanation—how is there so little will to act in rational self interest?
Everyone, or at least almost everyone, acts according to personal interests. There's a whole branch of political science, Public Choice Theory, that deals with this. Where did you get this idea that altruism was common?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
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.
Public Choice theory is "a whole branch of political science" the same way "historic materialism" is though, with Buchanan instead of Marx, as it was created with the same kind of ideological motivations, with “state bad” instead of “capitalism bad” as the alpha and omega of the discipline. Interestingly enough, both shared the same contempt of democracy.
> is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?
It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).
It's unlikely that rich countries would experience famine as severely as poor ones and consequently they would probably still demand meat. Grain that could feed people would still feed livestock.
A draw down of animal stocks increases meat supply in the short term. As grain gets more expensive, farmers sell animals for meat rather than keeping them to reproduce.
But “As grain gets more expensive” middle eastern countries (that rely almost entirely on import for their grain source) would start facing grain shortage (due to balance of payment issues) or at least severe deprivation of the poorer part of their population.
The Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian and Libyan revolutions didn't occur at the same moment out of coincidence…
Shameless plug for my favourite YouTuber of all time https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI?si=GviYcvEtOAJ1mln7
The man who singlehandedly got me to think about Rome on a weekly basis.
Historia Civilis somehow distills subjects down to squares in a great way. Entertaining and informative. Fantastic channel.
I'm being pedantic here, of course, but "nation-states" is perhaps not the right expression to use for that era. Nation states are primarily a thing of the nineteenth century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state). The article seems to talk about "imperial states" and "palace states", and I'm not sure I've ever seen the expression "palace state" before.
The fantastic Fall of Civilizations podcast also had an episode about it: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/01/21/episode-2-...
Here is a youtube video he did on it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B965f8AcNbw
The whole channel is top quality if you want to ruminate on other civilisations that came and went.
Ha, beat me too it. FoC is a great channel.
He's also recently been on Empire [1], the Goalhanger podcast — and sister show to the great The Rest is History (which I hope will cover this period someday, though they tend not to go back that far in time) — in a series of episodes on the late Bronze Age collapse, which had Stephen Fry as a guest as well.
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...
I don't think Bret (the author of ACOUP) omits drought - he leads his section on plausible theories with "period of drying and consistent crop failures". While Bret dismisses the out to in migration/invasion theory, he does support the idea of intra-region migration/warfare (perhaps induced by drought/crop failures).
Eric Cline has an interview on "Tides of History" podcast.
I'm really annoyed that Patrick gave up on that. I mean, I know he's been doing it a decade, and I can't chain him to a desk, and I'm being entitled, but...
It was cancelled by Amazon when they purchased Wondery, IIUC. He's got "Past Lives" podcast now!
Well that sucks. Thanks for the update.
I listened to a couple. The first (current?) run on Past Lives was about slavery, and was a bit too "misery porn" for me. The historical fiction component of the show was always my least favourite bit.
I think it's a popular topic because so many people are wondering when our civilization will fall.
> deterioration of international shipping routes
like a closing of a certain straight that was essential for a large percentage of a necessary resource?
Probably more in general, as in: fighting between states disrupts trade between them.
Enough of that & hardly any inter-state trading is left.
Patrick Wyman—of the Tides of History podcast—just put out a new book, Lost Worlds, which is worth a read if this is your bag. The basic premise is that the way ancient history is typically taught, "that we moved linearly from foraging to farming, and then from country farmers to city-dwelling, tax-paying subjects of kings and emperors," is essentially wrong. He goes on:
>All of those developments occurred in an orderly sequence: First farming and village life arrived; then surpluses born of human achievement that created social inequality; then hierarchies with priests and chieftains at the top; then massive monuments, cities, states, and writing to keep track of it all. Geographically, the old story of those developments centered on the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, and to a lesser extent the Nile Valley of Egypt....
>That story is wrong in some respects and incomplete in far more.
It's a constant rise and fall, with innovations and cities/civilizations that both did and didn't succeed often equally valid and appropriate paths to take. Sounds kind of bog-standard, I guess, but it's rife with examples of "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
It's important that we learn about this so we don't repeat it. Sadly, we are repeating it. Perhaps it's impossible to prevent the cycle because it can only be prevented by those who benefit from it.
The elites and ones in power were the ones most decimated by the bronze age collapse, so this reasoning feels flawed.
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...
What is your evidence to support that? there is no 1:1 comparison here. The groups that likely survived these collapses were largely nomadic or at the fringes of society, used to sustaining themselves without the support of the existing power structures.
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 apparently.
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.
> "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
pull it in a bit and you have Ugarit :)
i am convinced if / when AI leads to the collapse of civilization it will be akin to the Late Bronze Age collapse; i.e., not with a bang but a whimper. it was a very delicate economic ecosystem complete with circular dealing; but 3500 years ago people were fighting over Cypriot copper and today we're doing the same only in Lobito (along with Cobalt and Lanthanides) in praise of the almighty god Compute
just to flog the analogy like a Mycenean slave, Compute runs out (with a humorous sidebar where someone tries to put a modern equivalent of arsenic into the chips to perpetuate the self-dealing; hilarity ensues). society collapses (but Musk makes it because like Egypt he has all the gold) and like the Iron Age a Quantum Age comes along out of desperation and the will to survive after yet another Dark Age. if we're lucky.
i'll see myself out
I think the same, we are headed for the tech version of the Dark Ages, all with feudalism. The corporations will be the feudal lords, because they have more capital than most of the countries in the world.
I'm just wondering how will conflict and fighting for resources play out during this time. Will the corporations simply hire military groups with their infinite money?
Are you familiar with the term techo-feudalism coined by economist and former minister of finance of Greece Yanis Varoufakis?
The dark ages were fine. Feudalism replaced a violent slavery based empire and evolved towards greater human rights and democracy. We now risk a real step backwards.
Why would you blame AI when there are dozens of other crises with far more evident impact already?
The study of the LBAC is compelling these days because of the similarities to our present day situation. Other commenters have noted the the possibility of AI driven collapse, but another possibility is our dependence on oil.
Bronze is the combination copper+tin. Copper is common in earths composition, but tin is much more scarce. The scarcity of tin necessitated the expansive trade networks to acquire the resource. To my way of thinking this correlates to our dependency on oil which while not exactly scarce, is not evenly distributed across the world. Our global supply chain for oil is fragile in the same way that the supply chain for tin was to the bronze age empires.
As for the article: I found the authors use of dating systems inconsistent and confusing. Some references are listed with the BC/AD nomenclature while others omit it entirely leaving the reader confused as which era he is referring to. Also, the use of the BC/AD has been supplanted by the use of the BCE/CE nomenclature in scientific references for 20+ years. This could simply be due to the fact that the author is a historian, but one would think a PhD would know better. All of this made me wonder if perhaps the author relies too heavily on AI.
The author has been an established blogger since well before the modern AI boom. It is of course not impossible that their writing technique has changed, and they now use AI heavily, but preferring BC/AD over the alternative/not always clarifying which strikes me as incredibly weak evidence.
The lack of consistency in the usage is also telling. Also, perhaps the author simply a christian apologist. I am an archaeologist with 10+ years of experience, so now you know my bias.
Lack of consistency seems entirely normal to me for a blog post.
At a certain point the information is simply redundant. The meaning of the naked number can and will easily be inferred from context. You don’t even notice it. Both while writing and also while reading. A proper proof reading will catch that (maybe, though I myself am actually hilariously bad at proof reading and miss obvious stuff all the time, so being able to properly proof read and catch things always seemed like a super power to me) but I don’t think this blog author does that (and I don’t really expect it? It’s fine …)
It totally get that there are people who will be endlessly annoyed by that – I’m also annoyed by people using quotation marks the wrong way. But it doesn’t really impact readability of the context is clear enough (as it obviously is in this case).
Consistency: the only case where he used BCE is in an image caption. The description on Wikimedia Commons uses BCE, so my guess is that he defaults to writing BC but reading that subconsciously put him in the frame of mind to write BCE. From a skim, he never uses CE or AD in this article.
Omission: this confused me at first, but really the entire article is set 3000 years ago, so it's not particularly ambiguous. If you think in the context of "lecture on the bronze age" you wouldn't expect him to specify every time.
Typos are frequent (including in this blog post), and have been for a while. Bret is not an AI bot.
A PhD that did not use a spell checker? How would you describe that?
I'd call him a little bit sloppy, in need of proofreading. Certainly not an overuser of AI. He writes at least one of these monster posts a week on top of (IIRC) teaching in college, so it's understandable if he's in a rush.
And yeah, it's not the best, but it's really not worth discounting his writing more than he himself already does at the end. Lots of smart people have imperfect language skills.
I would describe it as entirely normal. My experience working in a research organization where the majority of my colleagues hold Phds is that education level has a strong inverse correlation with ability/willingness to care about such mundane chores as spelling, grammar and arithmetic.
A blogger.
I'm very curious what part of the article you're drawing on to suggest that their reliance on copper and tin was the cause of the collapse. The article that I read seemed to suggest it was climate related.
I have no idea where you're from, but oil is not what it once was, especially in the United States. In fact, we have a very recent case study substantiating this claim: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait sees 20% of the entire world's supply transit through when under normal conditions. Yet after being completely closed (then slightly reopened, and now almost completely closed again), the world is functioning relatively normally and is much less impacted than it would have likely been even 20 years ago.
My conclusion from the article is entirely different: collapse doesn't necessarily occur all at once. And given that, maybe to someone living through this collapse, they wouldn't have even recognized it.
As mentioned by the other commenter,it is called the _bronze age_, so the components of the bronze alloy are part of the discussion. My point is that extended supply chains are vulnerable. And yes, in my view climate was a proximate trigger. However, once triggered, the collapse became more impactful because of the extended supply chains.
> I have no idea where you're from
I'm from the US and looking out my window to the street below I notice that that more than 90% of the vehicles are still running on petroleum. The impact of high petroleum prices seems obvious to me.
An unrelated question, but why do you think petroleum prices are not correlating with with the straight closure. If, as you opine, the world has changed then why did prices rise in the first place? Was it market speculation based on an outdated worldview, or was it something else? I do not know.
[edit:corrected my formatting error]
I don’t think we’re disagreeing. I am saying the prime mover was probably climate change and you’re saying the disruption of supply chains exacerbated the collapse. Both can be true. I was focused on the cause.
To follow the red herring about crude oil, you’re making my point for me: you’re looking down at a busy road full of petroleum-fueled automobiles when 20% of the world’s oil supply has been completely eliminated.
To be more specific, the difference between now and 20 years ago is the United States is a net exporter of oil. Horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other nearly unbelievable technological leaps have turned the United States into an oil superpower within less than 2 decades. Aside from all of that, I truly believe that in 10 years everyone with a home (rented or owned) and a daily commute will be driving an EV. Consumer demand is far less than transportation/travel/industrial demand for oil, but it is the tail that wags the dog.
We are definitely disagreeing. How much more completely can I express that without being disagreeable. I have no further use for this conversation. Go to sleep.
The article mentions bronze production (thus indirectly mentioning copper and tin) not as a root cause, but rather a factor that spread the crisis from one region to another:
> What is clear is that once the collapse started, it was contagious, likely for two reasons: first that collapsing areas produced invading forces and refugee flows that destabilized their neighbors and second because as you will recall above, these states are interlinked and their rulers rely on trade to furnish the key military resource (bronze) as well as to acquire key prestige goods necessary to maintain the loyalty of the aristocracy.
Yep, agree. I was mostly focused on the cause, but supply chain disruption certainly seems to have exacerbated the collapse.
I think the supply chain was probably disrupted mostly because as the empires contracted inwards, there may have been a lack of policing throughout the hinterlands. So, getting from state to state would have been more dangerous.
In today’s terms, this might have implications for the policing of the world’s physical trade corridors: the oceans. What might happen if the world’s global oceanic police force (the United States) decides to no longer spend the trillions of dollars required to police these vast stretches of ocean?
There's nothing wrong with using AD/BC instead of CE/BCE. They're identical and one even saves a character!
Given the era, it seems likely that the collapse was the work of multiple angry gods. The author doesn't cover this possibility.
Given my extensive study of civilization, the collapse was caused by Gandhi launching nukes.
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?
Great video on the theory: https://youtu.be/Ado90kMT_FM
I think it's a great read, but make sure to take it with a huge grain of salt.
People have always downplayed the number of things their gods can get angry about, while it often escalates beyond sustainability.
>Late Bronze Age Collapse
It was a little late but it had to happen sooner or later.
For those in power there may not be many other opportunities to set the standard for archaic leadership, so better get it while they can.
As we have seen :\
The people of that era would have thought so. The Iliad and the Odyssey (if they have any basis in reality) might be examples of that period seen through a lens of mythology.
How so? Are the Greek the sea people then?
> Are the Greek the sea people then?
Very possibly a subset of the Sea Peoples were Greek. Egyptians reported the "Ekwesh" (which might be the Egyptian word for Achaeans) and the "Denyen" (which might be the Egyptian word for Danaans) among the Sea Peoples.
Myths don’t have natural or human causes. Instead you have wars caused by divine rivalry (e.g. the Judgement of Paris).
Maybe Troy was actually destroyed by the Sea Peoples, but that probably wouldn’t make as much at the box office.
And angry gods stopped rain
> in Spanish, there wasn’t an English version, but it will do
I've just uploaded an English translation to: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moyen_Orient_13e_si%...
If someone can proofread my translations that would be great.
Thank you.
On an unrelated note: I found this map where you can view the changes in political geography over time via scroll at the bottom. It's my goto with historical posts.
https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/regions#position=5/...
As a Greek I feel proud that we passed through all history tides during our high times: multiple cycles of thriving and decline, the last one being the Classical century of 5th BC, then the Hellenistic period of Alexander until we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans.
This lasted for a full thousand years until a little before Jesus birth and it continued in Europe and the rest of the world in the same way for two more until today.
It seems the reasons of decline were most often the boring ones: variable scale fightings and climate change. Any resemblance to modern times is not coincidental.
"we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans"
As a tongue-in-the-cheek retort, if the Greeks were really doing that (i.e. only playing ball in the grand building up of civilization), then the Roman Empire wouldn't ended up speaking Greek and looking so different in the period in which it is nowadays being called "Byzantine". Romans revered various Greek aspects, and somehow that privileged status that (everything) Greek enjoyed inside the empire played a role into the movement of the empire's capital to the Greek city of Byzantium (renamed Constantinople). It surely feels more like taking (the reigns, and not doing much afterwards, other than holding out for as long as possible).
It's why I love visiting Greece so much, you can feel the history slapping you in the face and it's an awesome feeling. It's a wonderful place.
My pet hypothesis is : That trade networks, in times of collapse- become sort of superspreader networks of downfall. Think about that city state who runs out of food by the sea! It still has all the trading vessels- whats more logic then to go - and take over somebody elses city and ships! Piracy of the damned! Stealing the food from the starving, just to give there families one more day! Following the coast- until you run out of city- and the civilization is gone!It should also not affect the country interior cities - who then would murder the upstart pirates who took over the old capital near the sea..
The Ottoman embargo of Western Europe leading to the collapse of the Aztecs supports your hypothesis. The other sea people.
That's just the Sea Peoples hypothesis
We should sea other people?
I saw a slghtly odd youtube video by a small creator who thinks it was at least partly because the gods stopped talking to people.
No, hear me out.
Obviously they weren't real, but the Youtuber said (based on sources) people used to talk to the gods, like you might talk to a cat. And the gods spoke back (and we all know cat owners who insist the cat is replying).
As societies became more sophisticated, this stopped. Around the time of the collapse, rulers complained that the gods were silent. The usual interpretation is that the gods did not help, but what if they literally stopped "hearing" the god's replies?
You couldn't have a conversation with Zeus in the town square anymore without people saying you were nuts, unless you were a ruler. But the sophisticated, skeptical societies also became fractured and disloyal (especially when only their rulers were arguing with Zeus over why the peasants weren't taking them seriously), and social institutions (which were stuck in the past) couldn't keep up.
That's Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory[0]. Personally I don't buy it because we haven't seen convincing evidence of it in pre-civilization populations that still existed in isolated places on earth until recently.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
Is this the old "breakdown of the bicameral mind" theory? I don't know. I think that tin trade routes breaking down + rise of iron-wielding civilisations are more plausible.
Yes. Civilizations relying on tin were basically quite vulnerable because tin is uncommon [1]. The coincidence between late bronze age collapse and the transition to iron age seems to be explained by the fact that once the disorganization no longer allows tin trade, makers turn to the second choice, iron.
Iron making was known during bronze age, but it was technically more challenging that tin+copper because it requires higher temperatures.
It's amusing to note that it lead to the development of the iron/steel making techniques, so much so that once the tin "was back", steel was cheaper, more reliable (from the logistics perspective) and better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_during_a...
It looks very much like it: Julian James, 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' (see [1]), which influenced Neal Stephenson's writing of Snow Crash.
Scott Alexander wrote a critique of it beginning "Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact..." [2]. A response (which I have not yet read) can be found here [3].
[1] https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overv...
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
[3] https://www.julianjaynes.org/2023/09/04/fact-checking-scott-...
I am mobile and not at my main system with my HN login, so I made this temp, but I think I cracked the primary cause and have been slowly working on a paper to submit to the journals...
I was doing geological research trying to show how crustal displacement theory is incorrect, and stumbled upon a paper that elucidated the insight:
There was a localized weakening of the geomagnetic field in the Levant and in the Med (3 actual areas) starting at roughly 1200 and ongoing until about 600! Im pretty sure Im the first person to posit this theory, but the more I steelman against it the more I think I'm onto something, and the implications are huge... because it has more to do with other subjects such as the evolution of religion in the region too. My theories on that are harder to prove but will be the follow up paper, at first Im just trying to focus on the geological proof.
Essentially a localized reduction in geomagnetic shielding allowing increased cosmic ray flux and solar radiation caused destruction, migration, religious interpretations of what was being seen in the sky, and all the war and tumolt that would come along with those...
>There was a localized weakening of the geomagnetic field > geological proof
This is an interesting theory. My question is: What methods are you using to test the change in magnetic fields? Put another way, what is your middle range theory from an archaeological perspective? How are you dating your samples? etc.
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Robert J. Sawyer wrote a series of sf books called The Neanderthal Parallax which proposes that human sentience (and Neanderthal sentience) originated, and ended, with changes in the Earth's magnetic field. It explored some very interesting social and anthropological ideas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neanderthal_Parallax
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Mhmm. Take your meds.
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I think "Collapse" is a strange word because we talk here about several hundred, if not thousand of years. A good example is the old roman empire - it expanded, it grew - until it no longer did and then it whittled away or lost out to e. g. northern tribes. Collapse as a word is just weird here really. Even the old roman empire did not "collapse" per se, if we ignore big single final battles such as 1453:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople
The real reason for dark ages was not the fall of the western roman empire, but the arabian conquests, which turned the international trade highway (the Mediterranean sea) into a highway by which pirates and slave traders had easy access to their prey.
A very interesting read.
I'm a bit puzzled by one thing. Author writes that the Greek alphabet is based on Linear B script, and also that it is based on Phoenician alphabet. So was it a mix of both?
> The Mycenaean palaces had developed a syllabic script, which we call Linear B, to represent their spoken Greek. This form of writing is entirely lost. In the 8th century, the Greeks will adopt an entirely new script – borrowing the one the Phoenicians are using – to represent their language
You've misread something. Linear B encoded Greek, but is not related to the Phoenician-based script.
The Greeks lost writing as a technology during the collapse, so the two alphabets aren't related. They just represent the same language.
Beware the Sea Peoples
There's a Portuguese saying "há mouro na costa" which is literally "there are moor at the coast" and means that there is something fishy going on.
Curious, in Spanish we have the same saying, but always in the negative version ("no hay moros en la costa") which is something you say when you're doing something secret and there is no one around who could see, hear or cause trouble.
In the UK we say 'the coast is clear' when telling someone that 'there is no-one around to see any misdeeds you're about to do'. Nothing about Moors, nor even Spaniards!
The Moors existed about 1900 years after the Sea People of the Bronze Age.
I don’t think they’re implying the moors are responsible for the Bronze Age collapse, merely drawing parallels.
In an alternate timeline, The Sea Peoples are Romans sailing to England, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans. Things became fuzzy when the English themselves became other civilization's Sea Peoples.
I would wager that almost every civilization has been some other civilization’s sea people at some point in it’s history.
If invaders appear out of ‘nowhere’, it’s usually by boat or on horseback.
Well, at least not civilizations where dreams dry up.
And don't forget the Vikings, who may provide the best analogy to the Sea Peoples.
I wish the author would go into detail about the sea peoples. From what I read, one theory is that they were subject allies of the Hittites; once the Hittites collapsed they went in search of better farmland with their entire families.
The actual historical evidence is super thin outside of a stele in Egypt.
Population estimates for that era (2,000 BC to 1,000 BC) are anywhere from about 25M to 150M [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...
The Bronze Age was the third best age.
The Iron Age can be researched at your Town Center, but the Post-Iron Age isn't a real age, it's just an extra setting on the map settings menu that starts you in the Iron Age with everything already researched.
It was a Gold, Silver, Bronze joke. :(
I got it. It is a good one :)
After the one where humans first harnessed water power, the Dam Age, and when we started wearing clothes, the Garb Age.
And carrying stuff, the Lug Age.
As well as dating in the Old Age.
At least it medaled. The same can't be said for the information age.
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.
Financial Imperialism is the reason why US is rich in terms of resources and because of material richness, lot of raw brainpower is attacted to America. Read the book "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire" by Michael Hudson.
Our favorite pedant should have a new post up today, I think he posts in the afternoon though. At least, checking in the morning and saying “ah, dang, the acoup post hasn’t come out yet, maybe I’ll reread an old one…” is a Friday morning ritual for me.
A very pleasant and informative read. The hypothesis that climate change was the primary cause of what came after seems plausible.
As the author mentions the Trojan War in the Illias could be reflections of this event
ITT: Gen Z argues with Millennials about the Bible.
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Have to mention this talk by Jonathan Blow, which maps the LBAC onto software development:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
yep, that's my first thought came to my mind as well. it's a great talk fueled with the passion of engineer, especially relevant in the era of LLM.