I have been doing some research on the end of the Bronze Age and early Iron Age for some of my own projects.
In my research, I came across this interesting video about the famous "Bronze Age Collapse".
His essential thesis is a mix of Natural Disaster and Warfare that leads to the collapse of the international trade routes that was the life lines of the Bronze Age Palace Economies. Lot's of great pictures too.
Just wrote an essay about this subject last month. It was on the continuity/discontinuity at Mycenaean palatial sites (focus being on Tiryns) after the LHIIIb collapse. Used Cline's publication on the Bronze Age collapse as a source.
It really is a fascinating period, with what appears to have been some sort of massive arms race and lots of conflict between different palaces (although precise ideas of what exactly caused the collapse of the palatial system continue to elude us).
Btw, if you are interested, I could recommend you some literature. Also, if you'd like, I could get you some PDFs from the university library. I have downloaded most of the little that was available in digital format (including Cline's treatise) to use in my essay, since usually I am too lazy to go to the library to actually borrow physical books (although for this essay, I really had to).
Orlanth wrote: Some vulcanologists are now theorizing that the Thera volcano was much larger than originally thought.
Volcanic eruptions was one thing. the other factors that often overlooked was that the Imperial Government systems of three mediterranean superpowers at that time... Egypt, Mycenean (Proto greeks? but it is said that classical greeks came from what's now Austria and Hungary and more or less related to either slavs or germans), and Hittites (Troy was within Hattusa sphere of influence) had strained their planned economy to its limits. (where peasants farm to feed the entirety of the Kingdom/Empire. Lowest in the society, while others in the society does not farm nor known how to do agriculture properly.. Not sure if the concepts of private property exists back then). Farmers were told to farm WITHIN a number of landmasses allocated by the Imperial government. and so irrigation belongs to the state .. What else could these peasants be motivated to farm other than they're bossed around by armed enforcers.
And The Jewish Exodus (out of Egypt). when did it likely to happen? Bronze Age or Iron Age?
I vaguely remember a month or so ago... didn't Wargames Illustrated have an article on this too? Someone was looking at running a form of campaign where you manage one of the many civilisations that went belly up with battles during year turns or something.
And after going to look, yes indeed issue 367 of May 2018 has an article on it.
I'm with DJones520 - I read the book as part of a failed Bronze Age gaming project, it's really excellent. Thanks for the video. Turns out that the Sea People "invaders" were often already known to, and employed by, the civilisations of the time.
The Osprey book on the Sea Peoples is only a year or two old and really good (actually, the Ospreys on the Palace System and Troy are also worth a read).
It's a fascinating period. Turns out the iron dagger from King Tut's tomb was meteoric, rather than smelted. There's a gap of a couple of hundred years between that dagger and the first evidence of smelting, so it was a bit of a mystery when I studied archaeology way back in the 80s.
If you ever get a chance, get out there to see the ruins on Crete. Knossos is amazing. Always wanted to visit Santorini/Thera
Just to throw something really weird into the mix (especially if you're a Westworld fan). The author of the bicameral mind theory (the idea that the right brain telling the left brain what to do was actually heard as the voices of gods and ancestors for a while) has the series of invasions and catastrophes in the 2nd Millennium BC as the main cause of the breakdown of that mental structure and the rise of true consciousness (or maybe that should be "true" "consciousness").
djones520 wrote: Check out "1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed."
A couple years ago I wrote on this topic in my Greek History class. I focused on the climate impacts that helped to drive this collapse.
It's a fascinating topic, that we're just starting to learn more and more on.
The linked video is a lecture the writer of the book provided.
Regarding the Volcano, he states at the end that the timeframe for the Theros(sp) volcanic explosion has been pushed back, making it less likely that the volcanic eruption had anything to do with the Bronze Age collapse.
djones520 wrote: Check out "1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed."
A couple years ago I wrote on this topic in my Greek History class. I focused on the climate impacts that helped to drive this collapse.
It's a fascinating topic, that we're just starting to learn more and more on.
The linked video is a lecture the writer of the book provided.
Regarding the Volcano, he states at the end that the timeframe for the Theros(sp) volcanic explosion has been pushed back, making it less likely that the volcanic eruption had anything to do with the Bronze Age collapse.
The Eruption itself probably didn't have a lot, but there is pretty widespread evidence across all of Europe of a cooling period. It's what likely caused the droughts that led to widespread famine in the run up to the collapse.
Eric's book is solid and he's a lovely guy to boot. I work on the Early and Middle Bronze, and then skip to the middle of the Iron Age so I'm not as expert on the Late Bronze collapse as I could be but I've taught a bit of it. Cyprian Broodbank's The Making of the Middle Sea is a great introduction to the Eastern Med Bronze Age as a whole and is worth a look and gives a longer scale view of the social changes that eventually ended in the collapse, as well as the rise of the classical states, if folks are interested.
And The Jewish Exodus (out of Egypt). when did it likely to happen? Bronze Age or Iron Age?
It almost certainly didn't*, but the biblical narrative would put it in the Bronze Age.
*some people used to think the Habiru mentioned in second millennium correspondence between Egypt and Canaan were a semitic group that could be associated with the Hebrews, but this has lost traction in the literature. There is no extra-biblical evidence of The Exodus.
nfe wrote: It almost certainly didn't*, but the biblical narrative would put it in the Bronze Age.
*some people used to think the Habiru mentioned in second millennium correspondence between Egypt and Canaan were a semitic group that could be associated with the Hebrews, but this has lost traction in the literature. There is no extra-biblical evidence of The Exodus.
To expand on this, a lot of Biblical Criticism today generally purports that the Exodus narrative was a national origin narrative built in the wake of the Babylonian Exile, which is basically the first point in time where Biblical history meets up and starts to roughly correspond to extra-Biblical History. The modern Bible/Talmud as we know it was all written in the Exilic era (the oral tradition is older, and there may have been extant texts at the time that do not remain with us) and this has led to a commonly held conclusion that the Egyptian Exile was actually about the Babylonian Captivity, but obvious the storytellers replaced the Babylonians with the Egyptians to avoid being punished for telling stories about how some random Jew and his god showed the Babylonians and Marduk who was boss et cetera.
nfe wrote: It almost certainly didn't*, but the biblical narrative would put it in the Bronze Age.
*some people used to think the Habiru mentioned in second millennium correspondence between Egypt and Canaan were a semitic group that could be associated with the Hebrews, but this has lost traction in the literature. There is no extra-biblical evidence of The Exodus.
To expand on this, a lot of Biblical Criticism today generally purports that the Exodus narrative was a national origin narrative built in the wake of the Babylonian Exile, which is basically the first point in time where Biblical history meets up and starts to roughly correspond to extra-Biblical History. The modern Bible/Talmud as we know it was all written in the Exilic era (the oral tradition is older, and there may have been extant texts at the time that do not remain with us) and this has led to a commonly held conclusion that the Egyptian Exile was actually about the Babylonian Captivity, but obvious the storytellers replaced the Babylonians with the Egyptians to avoid being punished for telling stories about how some random Jew and his god showed the Babylonians and
Marduk who was boss et cetera.
Actually, I disagree with quite a bit in here. The dominant interpretation is that the Exodus is a exilic narrative, yes, but there is a lot of historical material in Kings and Chronicles, for instance, albeit with heavy political and theological alteration. King lists, major building projects, and invasions are all attested beyond the biblical texts. I am the surveyor at Tel Azekah, which was sacked in Sennacherib’s invasion of the Shephelah in 701BCE and recorded in 2 Kings during the time of Hezekiah. Some will argue for earlier corroboration, usually pointing to the Tel Dan or Merneptah stelae due to mentions of Israel and a House of David, but this is not so well-accepted (and lots of us reject the idea of a King David entirely, but that’s not a majority view at the moment).
The minimalist position of the revisionists like Philip Davies that place the bulk of the creation of the Hebrew Bible in the exilic, post-exilic, or even Hellenistic periods are really a minority view, and most biblical historians and archaeologists agree that considerable portions were in place by the time of Josiah.
Actually, I disagree with quite a bit in here. The dominant interpretation is that the Exodus is a exilic narrative, yes, but there is a lot of historical material in Kings and Chronicles, for instance, albeit with heavy political and theological alteration. King lists, major building projects, and invasions are all attested beyond the biblical texts. I am the surveyor at Tel Azekah, for instance, which was sacked in Sennacherib’s invasion of the Shephelah in 701BCE and recorded in 2 Kings during the time of Hezekiah. Some will argue for earlier corroboration, usially pointing to the Tel Dan or Merneptah stelae (due to mentions of Israel and a House of David, but this is not so well-accepted (and lots of us reject the idea of a King David entirely, but that’s not a majority view at the moment).
The minimalist position of the revisionists like Philip Davies that place the bulk of the creation of the Hebrew Bible in the exilic, post-exilic, or even Hellenistic periods are really a minority view, and most biblical historians and archaeologists agree that considerable portions were in place by the time of Josiah.
I don't think the claim is that nothing before the Babylonian Exile happened, but rather that the Biblical version of events is extremely spotty prior to the Babylonian. The Bible spends a lot of time on the Exodus, conquest of Canaan, and the early periods of Israel (the Judges, David, and Solomon) and for a lot of the information there's either obvious embellishment of events or events that seem contradictory with outside sources. One of the big examples I know of is that there's no evidence for a kingdom as prosperous as the one ruled by David in the archeological record, but that's just stuff I'm aware of. You seem knowledgeable about the archeology (all I have is Biblical commentaries, which are usually literary focused with only occasional references to archeological finds) so I'd bet you definitely know more about the physical evidence than me. I did read about the Merneptah Stelae, and I agree that it's part of the spottiness but yeah. I'm willing to bet there was definitely a David at some point in time cause I don't think the big points of the history are simply made up, but the details of it I think can't really be accepted at face value.
Actually, I disagree with quite a bit in here. The dominant interpretation is that the Exodus is a exilic narrative, yes, but there is a lot of historical material in Kings and Chronicles, for instance, albeit with heavy political and theological alteration. King lists, major building projects, and invasions are all attested beyond the biblical texts. I am the surveyor at Tel Azekah, for instance, which was sacked in Sennacherib’s invasion of the Shephelah in 701BCE and recorded in 2 Kings during the time of Hezekiah. Some will argue for earlier corroboration, usially pointing to the Tel Dan or Merneptah stelae (due to mentions of Israel and a House of David, but this is not so well-accepted (and lots of us reject the idea of a King David entirely, but that’s not a majority view at the moment).
The minimalist position of the revisionists like Philip Davies that place the bulk of the creation of the Hebrew Bible in the exilic, post-exilic, or even Hellenistic periods are really a minority view, and most biblical historians and archaeologists agree that considerable portions were in place by the time of Josiah.
I don't think the claim is that nothing before the Babylonian Exile happened, but rather that the Biblical version of events is extremely spotty prior to the Babylonian. The Bible spends a lot of time on the Exodus, conquest of Canaan, and the early periods of Israel (the Judges, David, and Solomon) and for a lot of the information there's either obvious embellishment of events or events that seem contradictory with outside sources. One of the big examples I know of is that there's no evidence for a kingdom as prosperous as the one ruled by David in the archeological record, but that's just stuff I'm aware of. You seem knowledgeable about the archeology (all I have is Biblical commentaries, which are usually literary focused with only occasional references to archeological finds) so I'd bet you definitely know more about the physical evidence than me. I did read about the Merneptah Stelae, and I agree that it's part of the spottiness but yeah. I'm willing to bet there was definitely a David at some point in time cause I don't think the big points of the history are simply made up, but the details of it I think can't really be accepted at face value.
Interpretations vary. To pick the big names, they range from Dever and Garfinkel, who put considerable faith in the biblical authors, through Finkelstein, who pretty mich thinks David and Solomon are more akin to Romulus and King Arthur than real historical figures but that most of Kings onwards is useful, to Davies, who thinks the historical Israel is a complete invention.
Importantly, and nost pertinent to this thread, is that pretty much no one without confessional motivations believes in the pre-United Monarchy narratives, which cover the period during which the Eastern Med was undergoing massive social upheaval, but during which people are still writing plenty, and Canaan was a major player. Had the exodus and the annihilation of Canaan recorded in Joshua through Judges happened, it would be very surprising that we have no other evidence of it.
Reaching back to like Freshmen year when I actually heard about some of those names. I thought Davies came off as a bit of a loony right along with the guy who completely rearranged Egyptian history to try and make it conform with the Biblical history whose name I'm completely blanking on at the moment.
Finkelstein is the only one where I've read more than one of his books because I find his method and conclusions convincing.
LordofHats wrote: Reaching back to like Freshmen year when I actually heard about some of those names. I thought Davies came off as a bit of a loony right along with the guy who completely rearranged Egyptian history to try and make it conform with the Biblical history whose name I'm completely blanking on at the moment.
Ahmed Osman? Said that Akhenaten was Moses? Is bonkers?
Finkelstein is the only one where I've read more than one of his books because I find his method and conclusions convincing.
He’s a good egg is Israel, for sure. He’s also very funny.
Ahmed Osman? Said that Akhenaten was Moses? Is bonkers?
Not the guy I'm thinking of. The name is unfamiliar. I have heard that theory before but I've never been under the impression it was a very popular one and it does seem bonkers to me XD
I have problems agreeing to a date for the Bronze Age collapse. There was no modern network, failure took time to compound.
You can wreck the global economy quickly now, but less quickly then, economic collapse can only travel as fast as the trade ships do (or not) and likely this will take a long cycle.
While Bronze age powers were fairly wired everything was on the slowdiown and I do not believe the collapse could happen in as single year, a generation, yes, a decade, possibly, but not a year.
The only pivotal singular event will be the Thera eruption, which will effect the entire region immediately and with longer term consequences.
All the other problems, trade route collapse, hyperinflation, large scale crop failure, Sea Peoples incursions, civic unrest etc took their own time, and many are interdependent over time in sequence.
LordofHats wrote: Reaching back to like Freshmen year when I actually heard about some of those names. I thought Davies came off as a bit of a loony right along with the guy who completely rearranged Egyptian history to try and make it conform with the Biblical history whose name I'm completely blanking on at the moment.
Ahmed Osman? Said that Akhenaten was Moses? Is bonkers?
Akhenaten's religious reforms might have been an attempt to replicate Judaism within Egypt.
LordofHats wrote: Reaching back to like Freshmen year when I actually heard about some of those names. I thought Davies came off as a bit of a loony right along with the guy who completely rearranged Egyptian history to try and make it conform with the Biblical history whose name I'm completely blanking on at the moment.
Ahmed Osman? Said that Akhenaten was Moses? Is bonkers?
Akhenaten's religious reforms might have been an attempt to replicate Judaism within Egypt.
There is no evidence of this. Some scholars suggested that Moses may have been inspired by/exposed to Akenaten’s reforms in the mid-20th century but it has been thoroughly debunked (suggesting Akhenaten was inspired by Judaism is extremely anachronistic as Judaism didn’t exist yet). It is rooted in severe misunderstandings of both those reforms and of early Yahweh-worship. Mostly it was a conclusion made on the basis that both were monotheistic amidst universal polytheism, but neither were monotheistic.
Orlanth wrote: I have problems agreeing to a date for the Bronze Age collapse. There was no modern network, failure took time to compound.
You can wreck the global economy quickly now, but less quickly then, economic collapse can only travel as fast as the trade ships do (or not) and likely this will take a long cycle.
While Bronze age powers were fairly wired everything was on the slowdiown and I do not believe the collapse could happen in as single year, a generation, yes, a decade, possibly, but not a year.
The only pivotal singular event will be the Thera eruption, which will effect the entire region immediately and with longer term consequences.
All the other problems, trade route collapse, hyperinflation, large scale crop failure, Sea Peoples incursions, civic unrest etc took their own time, and many are interdependent over time in sequence.
The discussion in the initial video is in agreement with this, and uses the 1177BCE (or 1186 BCE) as more of a placeholder/sign-post for when you should be looking for things to be going bad. He uses the date we use for the End of Rome as an example. It is not a "true" date in any sense but more of a signpost on the road of history.
Okay, guys, I took some extra time and got the entire Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean. That is a lot of articles. Said handbook is meant to serve as an introduction to archaeologists looking to do work or improve their knowledge in this field. It contains a series of articles, written by the leading experts (including one of my teachers) on the Bronze Age Aegean (going to just call it Helladic Periods from now on). It covers a wide variety of subjects relating to the Helladic periods and the Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations, everything from chronology to burials to religion to trade with Egypt to events like the Trojan War and the Mycenaean collapse (It also has a few articles on areas outside of the Aegean). They are separate articles, so you can just read the ones about the subjects you are interested in, or you can read all of it and become super knowledgeable about the subject. It also serves as a good foundation if you are interested in the period and want to do more (scientific) reading. Be warned though, these articles were written for archaeologists, so it may take a bit of getting used to if you only read stuff written by historians and are not used to reading archaeological works. It is written quite clearly though, so there shouldn't be too much confusing terminology and such, and it contains a list of abbreviations and an article explaining the methodology and terminology used in the field for additional clarification.
I am just going to drop a link here, which I think is actually more handy than writing a bunch of PMs:
- Link removed - please don't post links to pirated material -.
You can read everything through this link (just double click on the Oxford Handbook folder, and then on the article you want to read). If you want to, you can also download everything (press download as zip in the upper right, then use your browser to download, unless you want to use the Mega app (it is handy!)).
There is also two additional articles I had left lying around from when I used them for my essay, and I plan to update the folder with some additional stuff over the next few weeks. Do check back!
Orlanth wrote: I have problems agreeing to a date for the Bronze Age collapse. There was no modern network, failure took time to compound.
You can wreck the global economy quickly now, but less quickly then, economic collapse can only travel as fast as the trade ships do (or not) and likely this will take a long cycle.
While Bronze age powers were fairly wired everything was on the slowdiown and I do not believe the collapse could happen in as single year, a generation, yes, a decade, possibly, but not a year.
The only pivotal singular event will be the Thera eruption, which will effect the entire region immediately and with longer term consequences.
All the other problems, trade route collapse, hyperinflation, large scale crop failure, Sea Peoples incursions, civic unrest etc took their own time, and many are interdependent over time in sequence.
The discussion in the initial video is in agreement with this, and uses the 1177BCE (or 1186 BCE) as more of a placeholder/sign-post for when you should be looking for things to be going bad. He uses the date we use for the End of Rome as an example. It is not a "true" date in any sense but more of a signpost on the road of history.
Exact dates in archaeology should usually be taken with a big pile of salt. Unless it is very recent archaeology establishing an exact date or year that something happened is difficult and sometimes impossible. Generally, archaeologists will give period ranges rather than exact dates. The farther back you go generally the larger these ranges get. For example, the Bronze Age collapse on mainland Greece happened in LHIIIB (Late Helladic period III, B), which is somewhere around 1300-1190 BC. Cline, when he uses the year 1177, is doing so for dramatic effect (it produces a nice headline for your writing to get noticed) rather than meaning to say: It happened in exactly this year. He just picked a nice sounding year that lies in the approximate range during which the collapse occured.
Exact dates in archaeology should usually be taken with a big pile of salt. Unless it is very recent archaeology establishing an exact date or year that something happened is difficult and sometimes impossible. Generally, archaeologists will give period ranges rather than exact dates. The farther back you go generally the larger these ranges get. For example, the Bronze Age collapse on mainland Greece happened in LHIIIB (Late Helladic period III, B), which is somewhere around 1300-1190 BC. Cline, when he uses the year 1177, is doing so for dramatic effect (it produces a nice headline for your writing to get noticed) rather than meaning to say: It happened in exactly this year. He just picked a nice sounding year that lies in the approximate range during which the collapse occured.
Not sure I agree here. Usually when we give precise dates we do so on solid evidence. In Middle Bronze Anatolia, for example, we can put exact years on loads of events. We can do the same thing in Iron Age Israel. Sure it requires the incorproration of historical texts and is not purely drawn from archaeological data, but any archaeologist who isn’t an interdisciplinary researcher is a bad archaeologist.
Sure, enquire as to where the date came from, but if someone is using an exact date in a peer-reviewed work, there’s probably a very good reason.
Exact dates in archaeology should usually be taken with a big pile of salt. Unless it is very recent archaeology establishing an exact date or year that something happened is difficult and sometimes impossible. Generally, archaeologists will give period ranges rather than exact dates. The farther back you go generally the larger these ranges get. For example, the Bronze Age collapse on mainland Greece happened in LHIIIB (Late Helladic period III, B), which is somewhere around 1300-1190 BC. Cline, when he uses the year 1177, is doing so for dramatic effect (it produces a nice headline for your writing to get noticed) rather than meaning to say: It happened in exactly this year. He just picked a nice sounding year that lies in the approximate range during which the collapse occured.
Not sure I agree here. Usually when we give precise dates we do so on solid evidence. In Middle Bronze Anatolia, for example, we can put exact years on loads of events. We can do the same thing in Iron Age Israel. Sure it requires the incorproration of historical texts and is not purely drawn from archaeological data, but any archaeologist who isn’t an interdisciplinary researcher is a bad archaeologist.
Sure, enquire as to where the date came from, but if someone is using an exact date in a peer-reviewed work, there’s probably a very good reason.
I disagree. The dating methods we use as archaeologists can not produce exact years (and as I was told in my very first lecture on dating, the obsession with wanting an exact year should be dropped anyway, since it is very trivial).
We can date using either historical records, which are inherently unreliable (due to issues such as lack of context, interpretation, potential biases etc.) and can not be independently verified. Therefore, dates derived in such a manner, while useful to provide a frame of reference, can not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Of course, we also have scientific dating methods, and they are incredibly important as they transformed archaeology from antiquarianism into a scientific discipline. But, scientific dating methods such as radiocarbon and dendrochronology also always have an inherent element of uncertainty, which is why they produce date ranges and not exact years.
Plenty of people use exact dates in their writing, but as I said, that should be taken with salt. It is virtually impossible to proof an exact year something happened in a rigorous, scientific manner. Sure, we can use dates based on historical records, but that is what historians do, but that is not a scientific discipline. Which does not mean that is not useful, but it does mean that there is no certainty. There is no such thing as 'solid evidence' for exact dates.
So, if someone uses an exact year in a peer-reviewed work, then he/she is probably doing so for a good reason, but he/she is either writing about more recent history or the reason is something else than "I know for certain it happened exactly in this year". Like Cline for example, who uses 1177BC despite the fact that the Bronze Age collapse did not happen in precisely that year, but rather as a general indicator of 'it happened roughly around this time'. An archaeologist who claims to know with certainty the exact date of any event in the Bronze Age is a bad archaeologist. Luckily, I have never met any who claimed such things. I'd say we are pretty well aware of the limitations of dates.
Exact dates in archaeology should usually be taken with a big pile of salt. Unless it is very recent archaeology establishing an exact date or year that something happened is difficult and sometimes impossible. Generally, archaeologists will give period ranges rather than exact dates. The farther back you go generally the larger these ranges get. For example, the Bronze Age collapse on mainland Greece happened in LHIIIB (Late Helladic period III, B), which is somewhere around 1300-1190 BC. Cline, when he uses the year 1177, is doing so for dramatic effect (it produces a nice headline for your writing to get noticed) rather than meaning to say: It happened in exactly this year. He just picked a nice sounding year that lies in the approximate range during which the collapse occured.
Not sure I agree here. Usually when we give precise dates we do so on solid evidence. In Middle Bronze Anatolia, for example, we can put exact years on loads of events. We can do the same thing in Iron Age Israel. Sure it requires the incorproration of historical texts and is not purely drawn from archaeological data, but any archaeologist who isn’t an interdisciplinary researcher is a bad archaeologist.
Sure, enquire as to where the date came from, but if someone is using an exact date in a peer-reviewed work, there’s probably a very good reason.
I disagree. The dating methods we use as archaeologists can not produce exact years (and as I was told in my very first lecture on dating, the obsession with wanting an exact year should be dropped anyway, since it is very trivial).
We can date using either historical records, which are inherently unreliable (due to issues such as lack of context, interpretation, potential biases etc.) and can not be independently verified. Therefore, dates derived in such a manner, while useful to provide a frame of reference, can not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Of course, we also have scientific dating methods, and they are incredibly important as they transformed archaeology from antiquarianism into a scientific discipline. But, scientific dating methods such as radiocarbon and dendrochronology also always have an inherent element of uncertainty, which is why they produce date ranges and not exact years.
Plenty of people use exact dates in their writing, but as I said, that should be taken with salt. It is virtually impossible to proof an exact year something happened in a rigorous, scientific manner. Sure, we can use dates based on historical records, but that is what historians do, but that is not a scientific discipline. Which does not mean that is not useful, but it does mean that there is no certainty. There is no such thing as 'solid evidence' for exact dates.
So, if someone uses an exact year in a peer-reviewed work, then he/she is probably doing so for a good reason, but he/she is either writing about more recent history or the reason is something else than "I know for certain it happened exactly in this year". Like Cline for example, who uses 1177BC despite the fact that the Bronze Age collapse did not happen in precisely that year, but rather as a general indicator of 'it happened roughly around this time'. An archaeologist who claims to know with certainty the exact date of any event in the Bronze Age is a bad archaeologist. Luckily, I have never met any who claimed such things. I'd say we are pretty well aware of the limitations of dates.
With all due respect, I don't think you're sufficiently expert in the periods I gave as examples. We are precise in Middle Bronze Age Anatolia because we can use the 24,000+ texts in association with the archaeological data to put extremely tight ranges (to the point of a few years at worst) to, for instance, the destructions of Kültepe Lower Town phases II and Ib in in early second millennium BCE. Similarly, we can date destruction layers of several of southern Israel's tells during Sennacherib's invasion of Shephelah to exactly 701 BCE through the corroboration of a range of historical accounts alongside the material sealed by the destruction horizons. You are entirely correct that C14 gives ranges and that dendro, whilst giving exact years for the cutting down of a tree (provided we're working in areas with sufficiently robust master sequences), does not give us a positive date for the use or reuse of its timber in a structure, but to say that there is no situation where archaeologists, with sufficient interdisciplinary evidentiary bases, can use precise is to be unfamiliar with the evidence. To be so bold as to claim that anyone who does is a bad archaeologist is to dismiss, for instance, every leading figure in Anatolian Bronze Age and Levantine Iron Age archaeology. Ask your lecturers if they think, for instance, that Fikri Kulakoğlu or Israel Finkelstein are bad archaeologists, or whether Nicholas Postgate and Mogens Trolle Larsen are bad Assyriologists.
EDIT: I should add the caveat that obviously should some paradigm shifting discovery appear, that exact dates posited with confidence are subject to change, but that does not undermine their use. That's just the nature of all scientific enquiry.
I think you are arguing at cross purposes. Iron Captain is clearly talking of the limits on Archaeology by itself, whilst you are talking about the cross discipline of that with History.
ingtaer wrote: I think you are arguing at cross purposes. Iron Captain is clearly talking of the limits on Archaeology by itself, whilst you are talking about the cross discipline of that with History.
I'm not sure that's the case. I stated explicitly that I believe archaeologists are obliged to be interdisciplinarians, and Iron Captain has disputed the ability of even interdisciplinary study to produce precision dating.
Exact dates in archaeology should usually be taken with a big pile of salt. Unless it is very recent archaeology establishing an exact date or year that something happened is difficult and sometimes impossible. Generally, archaeologists will give period ranges rather than exact dates. The farther back you go generally the larger these ranges get. For example, the Bronze Age collapse on mainland Greece happened in LHIIIB (Late Helladic period III, B), which is somewhere around 1300-1190 BC. Cline, when he uses the year 1177, is doing so for dramatic effect (it produces a nice headline for your writing to get noticed) rather than meaning to say: It happened in exactly this year. He just picked a nice sounding year that lies in the approximate range during which the collapse occured.
Not sure I agree here. Usually when we give precise dates we do so on solid evidence. In Middle Bronze Anatolia, for example, we can put exact years on loads of events. We can do the same thing in Iron Age Israel. Sure it requires the incorproration of historical texts and is not purely drawn from archaeological data, but any archaeologist who isn’t an interdisciplinary researcher is a bad archaeologist.
Sure, enquire as to where the date came from, but if someone is using an exact date in a peer-reviewed work, there’s probably a very good reason.
I disagree. The dating methods we use as archaeologists can not produce exact years (and as I was told in my very first lecture on dating, the obsession with wanting an exact year should be dropped anyway, since it is very trivial).
We can date using either historical records, which are inherently unreliable (due to issues such as lack of context, interpretation, potential biases etc.) and can not be independently verified. Therefore, dates derived in such a manner, while useful to provide a frame of reference, can not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Of course, we also have scientific dating methods, and they are incredibly important as they transformed archaeology from antiquarianism into a scientific discipline. But, scientific dating methods such as radiocarbon and dendrochronology also always have an inherent element of uncertainty, which is why they produce date ranges and not exact years.
Plenty of people use exact dates in their writing, but as I said, that should be taken with salt. It is virtually impossible to proof an exact year something happened in a rigorous, scientific manner. Sure, we can use dates based on historical records, but that is what historians do, but that is not a scientific discipline. Which does not mean that is not useful, but it does mean that there is no certainty. There is no such thing as 'solid evidence' for exact dates.
So, if someone uses an exact year in a peer-reviewed work, then he/she is probably doing so for a good reason, but he/she is either writing about more recent history or the reason is something else than "I know for certain it happened exactly in this year". Like Cline for example, who uses 1177BC despite the fact that the Bronze Age collapse did not happen in precisely that year, but rather as a general indicator of 'it happened roughly around this time'. An archaeologist who claims to know with certainty the exact date of any event in the Bronze Age is a bad archaeologist. Luckily, I have never met any who claimed such things. I'd say we are pretty well aware of the limitations of dates.
With all due respect, I don't think you're sufficiently expert in the periods I gave as examples. We are precise in Middle Bronze Age Anatolia because we can use the 24,000+ texts in association with the archaeological data to put extremely tight ranges (to the point of a few years at worst) to, for instance, the destructions of Kültepe Lower Town phases II and Ib in in early second millennium BCE. Similarly, we can date destruction layers of several of southern Israel's tells during Sennacherib's invasion of Shephelah to exactly 701 BCE through the corroboration of a range of historical accounts alongside the material sealed by the destruction horizons. You are entirely correct that C14 gives ranges and that dendro, whilst giving exact years for the cutting down of a tree (provided we're working in areas with sufficiently robust master sequences), does not give us a positive date for the use or reuse of its timber in a structure, but to say that there is no situation where archaeologists, with sufficient interdisciplinary evidentiary bases, can use precise is to be unfamiliar with the evidence. To be so bold as to claim that anyone who does is a bad archaeologist is to dismiss, for instance, every leading figure in Anatolian Bronze Age and Levantine Iron Age archaeology. Ask your lecturers if they think, for instance, that Fikri Kulakoğlu or Israel Finkelstein are bad archaeologists, or whether Nicholas Postgate and Mogens Trolle Larsen are bad Assyriologists.
EDIT: I should add the caveat that obviously should some paradigm shifting discovery appear, that exact dates posited with confidence are subject to change, but that does not undermine their use. That's just the nature of all scientific enquiry.
Wow, they have found that many written sources there? For the Bronze Age? Wow.! That is pretty cool. I kinda want to move to Leiden now. There they focus more on the Near East... Our institute is specialised in the Mediterranean and North-Western Europe, areas for which Bronze Age written records are... meagre, to say the least. We only rarely get (guest) lectures on other regions. Two of the profs do a lot of work in the Near East, but they are zoological and botanical experts respectively, so their lectures tend to focus on those aspects for the most part.
Anyways, I am very happy to be proven wrong in this. I did not know you could get dates with such a level of precision anywhere in the Bronze Age.
Still, there is the problem with written records that they are inherently unreliable and can not be tested (and are therefore unscientific), which is a problem for a lot of traditional dates in the Classical and early Medieval periods of Northern Europe, who are often based on just a single written record made centuries after the actual event (which then ends up not corresponding to the archaeological record). But if you have multiple written records that should reduce the margin of error and increase the reliability.
Exact dates in archaeology should usually be taken with a big pile of salt. Unless it is very recent archaeology establishing an exact date or year that something happened is difficult and sometimes impossible. Generally, archaeologists will give period ranges rather than exact dates. The farther back you go generally the larger these ranges get. For example, the Bronze Age collapse on mainland Greece happened in LHIIIB (Late Helladic period III, B), which is somewhere around 1300-1190 BC. Cline, when he uses the year 1177, is doing so for dramatic effect (it produces a nice headline for your writing to get noticed) rather than meaning to say: It happened in exactly this year. He just picked a nice sounding year that lies in the approximate range during which the collapse occured.
Not sure I agree here. Usually when we give precise dates we do so on solid evidence. In Middle Bronze Anatolia, for example, we can put exact years on loads of events. We can do the same thing in Iron Age Israel. Sure it requires the incorproration of historical texts and is not purely drawn from archaeological data, but any archaeologist who isn’t an interdisciplinary researcher is a bad archaeologist.
Sure, enquire as to where the date came from, but if someone is using an exact date in a peer-reviewed work, there’s probably a very good reason.
I disagree. The dating methods we use as archaeologists can not produce exact years (and as I was told in my very first lecture on dating, the obsession with wanting an exact year should be dropped anyway, since it is very trivial).
We can date using either historical records, which are inherently unreliable (due to issues such as lack of context, interpretation, potential biases etc.) and can not be independently verified. Therefore, dates derived in such a manner, while useful to provide a frame of reference, can not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Of course, we also have scientific dating methods, and they are incredibly important as they transformed archaeology from antiquarianism into a scientific discipline. But, scientific dating methods such as radiocarbon and dendrochronology also always have an inherent element of uncertainty, which is why they produce date ranges and not exact years.
Plenty of people use exact dates in their writing, but as I said, that should be taken with salt. It is virtually impossible to proof an exact year something happened in a rigorous, scientific manner. Sure, we can use dates based on historical records, but that is what historians do, but that is not a scientific discipline. Which does not mean that is not useful, but it does mean that there is no certainty. There is no such thing as 'solid evidence' for exact dates.
So, if someone uses an exact year in a peer-reviewed work, then he/she is probably doing so for a good reason, but he/she is either writing about more recent history or the reason is something else than "I know for certain it happened exactly in this year". Like Cline for example, who uses 1177BC despite the fact that the Bronze Age collapse did not happen in precisely that year, but rather as a general indicator of 'it happened roughly around this time'. An archaeologist who claims to know with certainty the exact date of any event in the Bronze Age is a bad archaeologist. Luckily, I have never met any who claimed such things. I'd say we are pretty well aware of the limitations of dates.
With all due respect, I don't think you're sufficiently expert in the periods I gave as examples. We are precise in Middle Bronze Age Anatolia because we can use the 24,000+ texts in association with the archaeological data to put extremely tight ranges (to the point of a few years at worst) to, for instance, the destructions of Kültepe Lower Town phases II and Ib in in early second millennium BCE. Similarly, we can date destruction layers of several of southern Israel's tells during Sennacherib's invasion of Shephelah to exactly 701 BCE through the corroboration of a range of historical accounts alongside the material sealed by the destruction horizons. You are entirely correct that C14 gives ranges and that dendro, whilst giving exact years for the cutting down of a tree (provided we're working in areas with sufficiently robust master sequences), does not give us a positive date for the use or reuse of its timber in a structure, but to say that there is no situation where archaeologists, with sufficient interdisciplinary evidentiary bases, can use precise is to be unfamiliar with the evidence. To be so bold as to claim that anyone who does is a bad archaeologist is to dismiss, for instance, every leading figure in Anatolian Bronze Age and Levantine Iron Age archaeology. Ask your lecturers if they think, for instance, that Fikri Kulakoğlu or Israel Finkelstein are bad archaeologists, or whether Nicholas Postgate and Mogens Trolle Larsen are bad Assyriologists.
EDIT: I should add the caveat that obviously should some paradigm shifting discovery appear, that exact dates posited with confidence are subject to change, but that does not undermine their use. That's just the nature of all scientific enquiry.
Wow, they have found that many written sources there? For the Bronze Age? Wow.! That is pretty cool. I kinda want to move to Leiden now. There they focus more on the Near East... Our institute is specialised in the Mediterranean and North-Western Europe, areas for which Bronze Age written records are... meagre, to say the least. We only rarely get (guest) lectures on other regions. Two of the profs do a lot of work in the Near East, but they are zoological and botanical experts respectively, so their lectures tend to focus on those aspects for the most part.
Anyways, I am very happy to be proven wrong in this. I did not know you could get dates with such a level of precision anywhere in the Bronze Age.
Still, there is the problem with written records that they are inherently unreliable and can not be tested (and are therefore unscientific), which is a problem for a lot of traditional dates in the Classical and early Medieval periods of Northern Europe, who are often based on just a single written record made centuries after the actual event (which then ends up not corresponding to the archaeological record). But if you have multiple written records that should reduce the margin of error and increase the reliability.
Yes, the textual corpus of the Bronze Age Near East is vast. Clearly it is variable - Central Anatolia in the Middle Bronze is brilliant, but Western Anatolia on the Aegean at the same time is rubbish. Yes, Northern Europe is poor when not occupied by Rome, basically. We have very secure dates for activity on Hadrian's and the Antonine walls, for instance, sometimes down to the month or week concerning troop and officer movements, but no one else was so keen on records in the region until much later. In the Bronze Age Near East people really loved to put eponym-list-derived dates on things, and we have those securely dated via cosmological events that they and other sources which we can synchronise reference. We have pretty solid guesses as to the months certain letters (usually husbands trying to justify why they haven't gotten something to their wife due to the snow or whatever - no seriously) in the 18-17th centuries BCE were sent.
Exact dates in archaeology should usually be taken with a big pile of salt. Unless it is very recent archaeology establishing an exact date or year that something happened is difficult and sometimes impossible. Generally, archaeologists will give period ranges rather than exact dates. The farther back you go generally the larger these ranges get. For example, the Bronze Age collapse on mainland Greece happened in LHIIIB (Late Helladic period III, B), which is somewhere around 1300-1190 BC. Cline, when he uses the year 1177, is doing so for dramatic effect (it produces a nice headline for your writing to get noticed) rather than meaning to say: It happened in exactly this year. He just picked a nice sounding year that lies in the approximate range during which the collapse occured.
Not sure I agree here. Usually when we give precise dates we do so on solid evidence. In Middle Bronze Anatolia, for example, we can put exact years on loads of events. We can do the same thing in Iron Age Israel. Sure it requires the incorproration of historical texts and is not purely drawn from archaeological data, but any archaeologist who isn’t an interdisciplinary researcher is a bad archaeologist.
Sure, enquire as to where the date came from, but if someone is using an exact date in a peer-reviewed work, there’s probably a very good reason.
I disagree. The dating methods we use as archaeologists can not produce exact years (and as I was told in my very first lecture on dating, the obsession with wanting an exact year should be dropped anyway, since it is very trivial).
We can date using either historical records, which are inherently unreliable (due to issues such as lack of context, interpretation, potential biases etc.) and can not be independently verified. Therefore, dates derived in such a manner, while useful to provide a frame of reference, can not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Of course, we also have scientific dating methods, and they are incredibly important as they transformed archaeology from antiquarianism into a scientific discipline. But, scientific dating methods such as radiocarbon and dendrochronology also always have an inherent element of uncertainty, which is why they produce date ranges and not exact years.
Plenty of people use exact dates in their writing, but as I said, that should be taken with salt. It is virtually impossible to proof an exact year something happened in a rigorous, scientific manner. Sure, we can use dates based on historical records, but that is what historians do, but that is not a scientific discipline. Which does not mean that is not useful, but it does mean that there is no certainty. There is no such thing as 'solid evidence' for exact dates.
So, if someone uses an exact year in a peer-reviewed work, then he/she is probably doing so for a good reason, but he/she is either writing about more recent history or the reason is something else than "I know for certain it happened exactly in this year". Like Cline for example, who uses 1177BC despite the fact that the Bronze Age collapse did not happen in precisely that year, but rather as a general indicator of 'it happened roughly around this time'. An archaeologist who claims to know with certainty the exact date of any event in the Bronze Age is a bad archaeologist. Luckily, I have never met any who claimed such things. I'd say we are pretty well aware of the limitations of dates.
With all due respect, I don't think you're sufficiently expert in the periods I gave as examples. We are precise in Middle Bronze Age Anatolia because we can use the 24,000+ texts in association with the archaeological data to put extremely tight ranges (to the point of a few years at worst) to, for instance, the destructions of Kültepe Lower Town phases II and Ib in in early second millennium BCE. Similarly, we can date destruction layers of several of southern Israel's tells during Sennacherib's invasion of Shephelah to exactly 701 BCE through the corroboration of a range of historical accounts alongside the material sealed by the destruction horizons. You are entirely correct that C14 gives ranges and that dendro, whilst giving exact years for the cutting down of a tree (provided we're working in areas with sufficiently robust master sequences), does not give us a positive date for the use or reuse of its timber in a structure, but to say that there is no situation where archaeologists, with sufficient interdisciplinary evidentiary bases, can use precise is to be unfamiliar with the evidence. To be so bold as to claim that anyone who does is a bad archaeologist is to dismiss, for instance, every leading figure in Anatolian Bronze Age and Levantine Iron Age archaeology. Ask your lecturers if they think, for instance, that Fikri Kulakoğlu or Israel Finkelstein are bad archaeologists, or whether Nicholas Postgate and Mogens Trolle Larsen are bad Assyriologists.
EDIT: I should add the caveat that obviously should some paradigm shifting discovery appear, that exact dates posited with confidence are subject to change, but that does not undermine their use. That's just the nature of all scientific enquiry.
Wow, they have found that many written sources there? For the Bronze Age? Wow.! That is pretty cool. I kinda want to move to Leiden now. There they focus more on the Near East... Our institute is specialised in the Mediterranean and North-Western Europe, areas for which Bronze Age written records are... meagre, to say the least. We only rarely get (guest) lectures on other regions. Two of the profs do a lot of work in the Near East, but they are zoological and botanical experts respectively, so their lectures tend to focus on those aspects for the most part.
Anyways, I am very happy to be proven wrong in this. I did not know you could get dates with such a level of precision anywhere in the Bronze Age.
Still, there is the problem with written records that they are inherently unreliable and can not be tested (and are therefore unscientific), which is a problem for a lot of traditional dates in the Classical and early Medieval periods of Northern Europe, who are often based on just a single written record made centuries after the actual event (which then ends up not corresponding to the archaeological record). But if you have multiple written records that should reduce the margin of error and increase the reliability.
Yes, the textual corpus of the Bronze Age Near East is vast. Clearly it is variable - Central Anatolia in the Middle Bronze is brilliant, but Western Anatolia on the Aegean at the same time is rubbish. Yes, Northern Europe is poor when not occupied by Rome, basically. We have very secure dates for activity on Hadrian's and the Antonine walls, for instance, sometimes down to the month or week concerning troop and officer movements, but no one else was so keen on records in the region until much later. In the Bronze Age Near East people really loved to put eponym-list-derived dates on things, and we have those securely dated via cosmological events that they and other sources which we can synchronise reference. We have pretty solid guesses as to the months certain letters (usually husbands trying to justify why they haven't gotten something to their wife due to the snow or whatever - no seriously) in the 18-17th centuries BCE were sent.
That is pretty awesome. Here I was thinking they just produced storage accounts and overly long flattery for their rulers over there. Pretty nifty to use cosmological phenomena for cross-referencing too.\
The Bronze Age Aegean by contrast is pretty poor in written records. It is not that the Mycenaeans or Minoans never wrote anything down, but the Mycenaeans liked to re-use old tablets, and so we only have records of the time just before the destruction of the palaces. And the Minoans... Well the Minoans wrote everything down in a language that is completely incomprehensible. Which is a shame since we have hundreds of Minoan tablets filled with undecipherable information. I am willing to bet it is just boring storage accounts though
So the paper back version is out in bookstores with a couple of added pages. I picked it up and read it.
Makes me want to dig into the period more and it has a extensive bibliography. However, I am not convinced that Bronze Age societies were so tightly linked that the end of trade ties would cause mass collapse over the course of a century. The idea it was many elements combining makes much more sense.
Perhaps this may be of interest, although it not likely to be as academically rigorous as Iron Captain's materials. One thing I did take away from that issue was that in a number of cases, it was just the Palace civilization that collapsed, not the rest of society. That argues against foreign invasion, as why would an external enemy spare the homes of the nobles and commoners while just burning the palace. That seems like the nobles and commoners united and overthrew the monarchy finding its demands too burdensome in the changed economic environment.
Easy E wrote: So the paper back version is out in bookstores with a couple of added pages. I picked it up and read it.
Makes me want to dig into the period more and it has a extensive bibliography. However, I am not convinced that Bronze Age societies were so tightly linked that the end of trade ties would cause mass collapse over the course of a century. The idea it was many elements combining makes much more sense.
One cause provokes or enables another.
A massive volcanic eruption reduces harvests leading to the possibility of famine, and reaction against governments, who were responsible for religion and the protection of the people from the wrath of the gods.
Desperate people are more likely to use violence to get what they need and go pirating.
Weaker central government leads to less protection against piracy and invasion.
The loss of trade hurts the overall generation of wealth, causing more poverty.
Yes we can be year accurate with ancient histotical dating, but we need a reference point we can rely on. thankfully history and astronomy combine to bring us some. Solar eclipses.
Solar eclipses are mjor spooky events that enter annals. The timeline of the Hellenic period can be accurately timestamped due to a solar eclipse that occured in Asia Minor as reported by Herodotus. Furthermore scholars of the time predicted the eclipse and its timing was used to provide a huge morale debuff scynchonised to take place with the eclipse.
Afterr all if you are a soldier and you are taunted by the enemy that Apollo and Zeus hate your tyrant and if you die for him you are going straight to Tartarus, and the victory is preordained by the gods so much that Helios will shut his eyes to your impending doom.
Thren the sun goes dark in the midle of the afternoon and the enemy charges. What would you do?.....
Events like this get recorded and much of the other timeline is extrapolated from these points.
We can calculate with high accuracy when solar eclipses occurred in the ancient Middle East, they occur with full intensity abut once a century per place. All we then need to do is look for portents of darkening skies in the written records of the time, which were extensive and cross reference this to which year of which ruler the event occured.
Not every one will be preduced like Thales of Miletus, though his was not necessarily the first calculation, its the first known.
But even unpredicted eclipses will be highly significant.
I think an eclipse search is something ancient historians should be on e lookout for.
I believe stone tablets should be laser scanned and digitised en masse to aid future scholars make pattern searches. We have the tech for this now, both for data storage and for pattern analysis.
If we did this the secrets of the Hittites and Babylonians would likely quickly open to us. A coherent chronology would be a good early goal.
Kilkrazy wrote: How many ancient languages have proved possible to decipher using decryption techniques, rather than comparison with known texts?
Not many. Linear B (the Mycenaean language) was deciphered without bilingual artifacts, which was possible because it proved to be closely related to Greek. For Linear A (the Minoan) language, the same techniques have yielded only gibberish. Breaking the code of an alphabet or any other writing system is possible with a lot of work. But when you don't know what kind of language has been 'encrypted' by this writing system it is impossible since you can't understand the results you are getting. It is basically a double encryption where the results you get out of deciphering the writing system are themselves encrypted. Which makes it impossible to know whether your decryption of the writing system was actually correct or not. So you get into a situation where you can not decipher the writing system until you decipher the language but you can not decipher the language because you have not deciphered the writing system.
Most of the evidence presented does paint a picture that the Palace economy was tightly linked, but it is not clear from what I read that this economy "trickled down" to other classes.
Also, it is important to note that the "palace" was the literary hub, and that went dark. As Ancestral Hamster points out the people keep going, but it looks like in some cases they were different cultural groups or possibly a hybridized version based on material goods left at the sites. Many cities in the Hittite kingdoms appear to simply be abandoned or like in Mycenean are rebuilt with much smaller populations.
Another interesting point is the absence of evidence for disease or plague. There is evidence for climate change, drought, natural disaster, warfare, and famine..... but not plague. That is interesting.
Plague is a product of an agricultural economy which ties together several different species, leading to noosis, combined with lack of hygiene in a high population density.
Kilkrazy wrote: Plague is a product of an agricultural economy which ties together several different species, leading to noosis, combined with lack of hygiene in a high population density.
Well, perhaps the population density was not high enough, or the agriculture economy was mostly human muscle powered? Therefore, little disease? Is that the thought process?
Kilkrazy wrote: Plague is a product of an agricultural economy which ties together several different species, leading to noosis, combined with lack of hygiene in a high population density.
Well, perhaps the population density was not high enough, or the agriculture economy was mostly human muscle powered? Therefore, little disease? Is that the thought process?
Plague also occurs in low density populations, though its transmission is obviously slower. And even good sanitation only does so much to prevent plague since it is spread by rats and fleas, which live everywhere regardless of how clean a place is, though bad hygiene conditions definitely make outbreaks more likely of course because of the increased number of vermin.
Anyways, there is no evidence yet that major plague outbreaks were a thing back then. The virulent form of y. pestis is a relatively recent evolution and the first major outbreak appears to have only been in the 6th century AD (although it has been found sporadically in individuals before that time, including from the Bronze Age).
Disease can be practically ruled out as a factor in the Bronze Age collapse, and I think in societal collapse in general. All diseases do is kill people, and killing people, even lots of people, is not enough on its own to make a society collapse. Case in point: The Black Death killed a whopping 30-60% of the entire population of Europe, yet societies weren't even close to collapsing.
Iron_Captain wrote: Plague also occurs in low density populations, though its transmission is obviously slower. And even good sanitation only does so much to prevent plague since it is spread by rats and fleas, which live everywhere regardless of how clean a place is, though bad hygiene conditions definitely make outbreaks more likely of course because of the increased number of vermin.
To elaborate on this, there are some regions where plagues would be cyclical, passing through low intensity outbreaks in small populations and then jumping to large populations who would face high intensity outbreaks. This occurred in North America during the Colonial period (it had a substantial effect on the outcome of Pontiac's War), and in the Middle East throughout most of the Caliphate era. People who survived either could become carriers and unleash the disease either way during routine contact, trading, special events, passing through etc.
We can calculate with high accuracy when solar eclipses occurred in the ancient Middle East, they occur with full intensity abut once a century per place. All we then need to do is look for portents of darkening skies in the written records of the time, which were extensive and cross reference this to which year of which ruler the event occured.
It's a bit more complex than this makes it seem. There are lots of points that we can nail down, but synchronising annals is more difficult, and various sources are more difficult to deal with than others. Middle Bronze Age Anatolia and North Mesopotamia is solid (albeit with three competing chronologies - high, middle, and low - most people support middle these days), for instance, but it falls apart with the rise of the Hittites who don't date texts with eponyms. The Iron age Levant, the most excavated place on the planet with the most heavily studied texts in history has four competing chronooogies even though we have events that we can place in time very accurately via an abundance of external texts.
I think an eclipse search is something ancient historians should be on e lookout for.
They are. Don't fear. People get very excited about references to eclipses for exactly this reason.
I believe stone tablets should be laser scanned and digitised en masse to aid future scholars make pattern searches. We have the tech for this now, both for data storage and for pattern analysis.
If we did this the secrets of the Hittites and Babylonians would likely quickly open to us. A coherent chronology would be a good early goal.
I presume you mean clay tablets. Hittites and Babylonians only really wrote victory stelae on stone. In fact Broze age annals are pretty much all on clay throughout the near east insofar as i'm aware (I don't deal a lot with the late bronze, but clay is the ubiquitous material for writing other than in monumental contexts. Laser scanning them doesn't achieve much that good photographs or RTI don't anyway unless they are very seriously degraded. They are systematically recorded and translated with commentary in any case. What exactly do you mean by pattern analysis?
Bran Dawri wrote: So a Rosetta stone for the Minoan language would be a priceless artifact, I imagine
Oh boy it would. That is the ultimate wet dream of any archaeologist in this field.
Pfft. I want a note telling me what the boot-vessels from Kültepe are!
And I must guess that they uses pictograms similar to Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Chinese.
Alphabets are much newer.
They cross over quite a lot. There are alphabetic systems in use in Egypt for centuries whilst Minoans were writing Linear A. Pictographic systems in the Levant carried on whilst everyone around them was using alphabetic systems or cuneiform and so on. Alphabets do rise later than pictographic writing systems but there's not a big difference in use.
Bran Dawri wrote: So a Rosetta stone for the Minoan language would be a priceless artifact, I imagine
Oh boy it would. That is the ultimate wet dream of any archaeologist in this field.
And I must guess that they uses pictograms similar to Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Chinese. Alphabets are much newer.
The Minoans did indeed also use a logographic script which has been termed "Cretan hieroglyphs". This writing system is also undeciphered and was used alongside Linear A for a long time until Linear A fully replaces the hieroglyphs. Linear A likely was a partially logographic writing system as well (it appears to have both syllabic and logographic signs, similar to Linear B), and because of the the fact that several Linear A marks appear to have hieroglyphic counterparts it is theorised that the Linear A writing system evolved from the Cretan hieroglyphic writing sytem. The first true alphabet did not come around until after the Dark Ages that followed the Bronze Age collapse, when the Greeks started started using a modified version of the Phoenician abjad (an abjad is an alphabet but without characters to represent vowels) by adding characters to represent vowels (which is important for being able to write the Greek language). However, alphabetic systems (in the form of abjads) were in use in the Near East and Egypt simultaneously with logographic scripts, so it is not as simple as "alphabets are newer than logographic writing systems". That really only holds true for Ancient Greece. In many other parts of the world logographic and alphabetic scripts were and continue to be used together.
Iron_Captain wrote: Plague also occurs in low density populations, though its transmission is obviously slower. And even good sanitation only does so much to prevent plague since it is spread by rats and fleas, which live everywhere regardless of how clean a place is, though bad hygiene conditions definitely make outbreaks more likely of course because of the increased number of vermin.
To elaborate on this, there are some regions where plagues would be cyclical, passing through low intensity outbreaks in small populations and then jumping to large populations who would face high intensity outbreaks. This occurred in North America during the Colonial period (it had a substantial effect on the outcome of Pontiac's War), and in the Middle East throughout most of the Caliphate era. People who survived either could become carriers and unleash the disease either way during routine contact, trading, special events, passing through etc.
IIRC correctly, prior to this period there is reference to plague hitting the Hittites population centers but that was pre-1177. It was suspected by the Hittites themselves that the disease came from Egyptian prisoners captured in battle.I believe this tidbit was captured in some letters from the Hittite kings to Urgat, but I may be mistaken.
Around 1177B.C. similar scraps of literary evidence of plague does not exist, and no other physical evidence (mass graves, corpses with disease signs, etc.) seem to exist.
Kilkrazy wrote: Plague is a product of an agricultural economy which ties together several different species, leading to noosis, combined with lack of hygiene in a high population density.
Well, perhaps the population density was not high enough, or the agriculture economy was mostly human muscle powered? Therefore, little disease? Is that the thought process?
Plague also occurs in low density populations, though its transmission is obviously slower. And even good sanitation only does so much to prevent plague since it is spread by rats and fleas, which live everywhere regardless of how clean a place is, though bad hygiene conditions definitely make outbreaks more likely of course because of the increased number of vermin.
Anyways, there is no evidence yet that major plague outbreaks were a thing back then. The virulent form of y. pestis is a relatively recent evolution and the first major outbreak appears to have only been in the 6th century AD (although it has been found sporadically in individuals before that time, including from the Bronze Age).
Disease can be practically ruled out as a factor in the Bronze Age collapse, and I think in societal collapse in general. All diseases do is kill people, and killing people, even lots of people, is not enough on its own to make a society collapse. Case in point: The Black Death killed a whopping 30-60% of the entire population of Europe, yet societies weren't even close to collapsing.
It's probably helpful when you have more people in general. If a country with 5 million people loses 50% of the population, you still have 2.5 million people and likely still have enough of each social/economic strata to function. If a town of 1000 people loses 50% of its population you have a higher chance of having lost a few vital social/economic strata. % of population lost as a tipping point depends on the actual numbers because the point of collapse is more tied to actual numbers and not a %. Its like how the population number required to maintain tech levels to create something as advanced as a Tank is estimated at the specific number of 1 million and not a %. If you still have a million people from a decent spread of society, you can maintain and sustain modern technology. Less and you regress, the actual % of people who died in the calamity was irrelevant.
We wouldn't be looking for plague specifically either. A currently unknown disease could still be a factor in weakening the civilization. It could be a disease that is now non-existent because everybody is immune to it, due to those that weren't being wiped out. Heck, it could even be something silly like the Common Cold. Trivial today, life threatening back then. Some foreigner brings in a new disease which kills a small, but vital, portion of the population(like the ruling class who inhabits cities on a permanent basis and thus is more vulnerable to disease) which causes larger government to collapse. The bulk of the population living in small villages carry on life as normal, they're just no longer are part of larger societies.
Medieval Europe also had more safeguards working to prevent the collapse of society. A shared and organized religion which had a shared textual language(Latin) that was independent of the different governments who were fastidious about saving and recording texts, thus preserving knowledge and history. If there wasn't such a large network of monasteries and churches which kept the ruling classes literate it is likely that the Middle Ages might well indeed have seen a total collapse of civilization like the Bronze Age. First the Roman Empire collapses, and then a series of plagues sweeps through.
Kilkrazy wrote: Plague is a product of an agricultural economy which ties together several different species, leading to noosis, combined with lack of hygiene in a high population density.
Well, perhaps the population density was not high enough, or the agriculture economy was mostly human muscle powered? Therefore, little disease? Is that the thought process?
Plague also occurs in low density populations, though its transmission is obviously slower. And even good sanitation only does so much to prevent plague since it is spread by rats and fleas, which live everywhere regardless of how clean a place is, though bad hygiene conditions definitely make outbreaks more likely of course because of the increased number of vermin.
Anyways, there is no evidence yet that major plague outbreaks were a thing back then. The virulent form of y. pestis is a relatively recent evolution and the first major outbreak appears to have only been in the 6th century AD (although it has been found sporadically in individuals before that time, including from the Bronze Age).
Disease can be practically ruled out as a factor in the Bronze Age collapse, and I think in societal collapse in general. All diseases do is kill people, and killing people, even lots of people, is not enough on its own to make a society collapse. Case in point: The Black Death killed a whopping 30-60% of the entire population of Europe, yet societies weren't even close to collapsing.
It's probably helpful when you have more people in general. If a country with 5 million people loses 50% of the population, you still have 2.5 million people and likely still have enough of each social/economic strata to function. If a town of 1000 people loses 50% of its population you have a higher chance of having lost a few vital social/economic strata. % of population lost as a tipping point depends on the actual numbers because the point of collapse is more tied to actual numbers and not a %. Its like how the population number required to maintain tech levels to create something as advanced as a Tank is estimated at the specific number of 1 million and not a %. If you still have a million people from a decent spread of society, you can maintain and sustain modern technology. Less and you regress, the actual % of people who died in the calamity was irrelevant.
A town of 1000 people doesn't require the same kind of resources as a country of 5 million people though. For example, they don't need those tanks. And more importantly, towns are always part of a larger society which can keep the town running. So let's say your town just lost its last blacksmith, you can bet a blacksmith from a neighbouring town will be moving in soon. In Russia, there are plenty of towns that have lost up to 80% or even more of their population in and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they still keep going even though sometimes there is just only a handful of people left.
But yeah, having more people is definitely helpful for the resilience of any society. Like a small society of Inuit hunter-gatherers of a few hundred people can be wiped out entirely by a big plague, but a society like the Minoan civilisation which likely had a population in the tens of thousands will always have enough people left to continue even if a plague wipes out the majority of the population. Percentages are still more important than bare numbers though. Let's say society A loses 5 million people in a plague, but society B loses 10 million, you would say that society B has been hit harder until you realise that society A lost 90% of its population and society B just 10%. Numbers on their own are meaningless, you need to put them in relative context for them to make sense.
Grey Templar wrote: We wouldn't be looking for plague specifically either. A currently unknown disease could still be a factor in weakening the civilization. It could be a disease that is now non-existent because everybody is immune to it, due to those that weren't being wiped out. Heck, it could even be something silly like the Common Cold. Trivial today, life threatening back then. Some foreigner brings in a new disease which kills a small, but vital, portion of the population(like the ruling class who inhabits cities on a permanent basis and thus is more vulnerable to disease) which causes larger government to collapse. The bulk of the population living in small villages carry on life as normal, they're just no longer are part of larger societies.
Pathologies in some cases leave traces on an individual's body however, which archaeologists can discern. Also, big deadly epidemics also leave other clear traces in the archaeological record such as mass graves.
Finally, the common cold wasn't any more life-threatening in the past than it is today. There is just as little cure for the virus today as there was back then. Luckily, it has and always had very low lethality. The average person survives 2-3 colds per year, and there is no evidence to assume it was any different back then (in fact, some of the oldest known medical texts from Ancient Egypt are about the cold). The flu is generally slightly more lethal (it depends on the strain, some are very mild, others are highly lethal), but again that is little different today than it was back then, considering the really lethal varieties are rare and usually quickly die out.
Foreigners bringing in new diseases is something that only happens with completely isolated societies (such as in the Americas). Societies in Europe however have always had widespread contacts with other societies across the continent and beyond and therefore have always been exposed to and developed resistance to a massive variety of pathogens. Which is also why there wasn't mass death among Europeans after they were exposed to New World pathogens (like what happened to Native Americans after being exposed to Old World pathogens). European immune systems were and are just incredibly robust due to that long history of travel and trade.
It is not true that people living in cities are necessarily more vulnerable to diseases. Many diseases are transmitted by farm animals for example, so rural populations are more at risk of contracting those. It is also impossible to make a society collapse by just killing one single part of it (like the rulers). Societies are very adaptable. If the ruling class were to somehow all suddenly die they'd simply be replaced by other people fighting over the now vacant positions of authority. I mean, I guess it could cause a civil war that spirals out of control, with the fighting causing trade to dry up which then combines with widespread droughts and crop failures and an ambitious foreign power that decides to make use of the situation and invade.That could make a society collapse, but even in this highly unlikely scenario that is a lot more than just a disease. Societies don't collapse from diseases, they seem to be at most a contributing factor in the collapse of smaller communities.
Grey Templar wrote: Medieval Europe also had more safeguards working to prevent the collapse of society. A shared and organized religion which had a shared textual language(Latin) that was independent of the different governments who were fastidious about saving and recording texts, thus preserving knowledge and history. If there wasn't such a large network of monasteries and churches which kept the ruling classes literate it is likely that the Middle Ages might well indeed have seen a total collapse of civilization like the Bronze Age. First the Roman Empire collapses, and then a series of plagues sweeps through.
You just really angered the Romans. Whose empire did not collapse until the end of the Middle Ages and who by the early Middle Ages had started to use Greek rather than Latin as the primary language of church and government and who might get really offended if you'd say they share a religion with those barbarian pope-worshiping heretics in the West (at least after the 4th Crusade disaster). Medieval Europe did not have a shared religion, Christianity was divided and there were also still pagans kicking around. Latin was just used by a very small group of people, which did not even include some rulers, who were often illiterate themselves and just employed a scribe.
It is extremely doubtful that medieval Europe would collapsed if there had been no monasteries. Medieval Europe was largely an illiterate society (at least in the West, in the Eastern Roman Empire and Eastern Europe literacy was more common, along with other Roman ideas such as bathhouses and proper sewers). Most knowledge wasn't kept in libraries, but in the heads of people, transmitted orally from father to son or from master to apprentice. Books were rare in the Middle Ages, and books that weren't Bibles, Psalters, hagiographies, works of theological philosophy or other religious literature even more so. They did not play a significant role in the transmission of knowledge (apart from theological knowledge of course) for the vast majority of the population until the invention of the printing press made widespread distribution of written material possible.
And for the record, many parts of Western Europe did see a total collapse during the Migration Period. We see that people abandon cities and specialisations to revert to a more "simple" (for lack of a better word) way of life as semi-sedentary subsistence farmers. Which is pretty much the same thing that happens in the Bronze Age collapse. The Black Death and other epidemics however did not cause a social collapse or regression (quite the contrary, it may have driven social change and innovation), but literacy played little role in that since information was transmitted orally rather than through literature. Not to mention that literacy did nothing to prevent the collapse of the Migration Period or the Bronze Age collapse, both periods for which literacy was arguably higher than for 14th-century Europe.
A friend who is a doctor has told me that the majority of human diseases originally came from animals. Thus domestication of animals by humans resulted in an increase in disease. An infamous example is smallpox, derived from cowpox. As the New World had few suitable animal subjects for domestication, the New World had fewer diseases, and so the New World peoples had less developed immune systems as Iron Captain has already noted. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond covers the Germ aspect in greater detail. Overall, the book is a fascinating read.
Something I'd like to ask of Iron Captain and nfe. Not sure how to sum it up, as a question so ... In my college days, a medieval history monograph whose author and title I no longer remember was published. It caused a small stir as the author argued that literacy was far more widespread in medieval Europe than conventional academic thinking would have it. It came down to how medieval Europeans understood the term "literacy", and how modern Western European educated historians understand the term. Modern understanding of "literacy" is of the lowest common denominator; often as little as being able to sign a check or other legally binding document. Medieval European used the term only for the best educated scholars: a rough modern equivalent would be having a Doctorate of Divinity (for the theological aspects) and Doctorate of Classics (for the surviving Classical Latin texts) with a high degree of fluency in Latin. If we use the former standard, there are very few "literate" people in our current society. Conversely, there were probably many more "functionally literate" people in medieval Europe than is normally credited. This seems credible, as while a merchant would not need to discourse on St. Augustine, being able to keep books and write a bill of lading would put him up on a non-literate competitor.
I guess it comes down to, "Are there words/terms that the ancient written sources use that we might be interpreting in a modern fashion that the ancients understood differently, and so distorting scholarship on the subject?
Ancestral Hamster wrote: Something I'd like to ask of Iron Captain and nfe. Not sure how to sum it up, as a question so ... In my college days, a medieval history monograph whose author and title I no longer remember was published. It caused a small stir as the author argued that literacy was far more widespread in medieval Europe than conventional academic thinking would have it. It came down to how medieval Europeans understood the term "literacy", and how modern Western European educated historians understand the term.
That actually sounds really familiar to me, but I can't remember the title or author either. Read so many dang articles in school its impossible to remember them all.
Modern understanding of "literacy" is of the lowest common denominator; often as little as being able to sign a check or other legally binding document. Medieval European used the term only for the best educated scholars: a rough modern equivalent would be having a Doctorate of Divinity (for the theological aspects) and Doctorate of Classics (for the surviving Classical Latin texts) with a high degree of fluency in Latin. If we use the former standard, there are very few "literate" people in our current society. Conversely, there were probably many more "functionally literate" people in medieval Europe than is normally credited. This seems credible, as while a merchant would not need to discourse on St. Augustine, being able to keep books and write a bill of lading would put him up on a non-literate competitor.
And this is in part why I remember this article, because I thought this argument was backwards. Modern definitions of literacy are comprehensive. Being able to sign a check is not sufficient to qualify as literate in the modern world by almost any standard (and there are a lot of them, but only third world countries generally make their definition so basic), but the author argued it was which baffled me.
I think his basic argument otherwise made sense. Common peasants probably did know how to read basic signage, numbers, and names and probably functioned better with written words and symbols than they're generally credited.
I guess it comes down to, "Are there words/terms that the ancient written sources use that we might be interpreting in a modern fashion that the ancients understood differently, and so distorting scholarship on the subject?
This certainly. Surprising amounts of historical breakthroughs have come from better understanding words that meant something different then than now. You can see it in even basic things like "gay," "bully," or "liberal" whose meanings in common usage have radically changed just in the last 100 years. Meme has completely changed meaning in a mere 25 years.
It gets even more complicated when you consider how words move between languages. Assassin is derived from Hashishin, which literally means "hashish eater" i.e. druggie. It's amazing how conceptions of the same thing or group of people can be radically different between groups that speak a different language or have a different perspective.
I think his basic argument otherwise made sense. Common peasants probably did know how to read basic signage, numbers, and names and probably functioned better with written words and symbols than they're generally credited.
I think the basic concept of seeing a symbol and being able to understand what it means is fairly fundamental - however I would likely suspect that the higher price of things like books and paper might mean that your average serf/farmer/peasant might well understand some basic symbols, but couldn't read a book or write much more than simplistic notations - which might even be down to basic lines for numbers and a cross for their signature.
Even today there are farmers who are very illiterate in developed countries who still get by (these days they often rely on another family member to read for them).
That said the general idea of grading or defining what literacy actually means is quite fundamental to any deeper discussion on historical literacy. Baring in mind most who don't study the subject in depth will have a terribly casual view of the concept (often as not most treat whole ages as a single period in time - the Roman era was many hundreds of years long, yet most don't really see it as a long period but rather a single "roman era" label). Of course these general understandings often filter into the new generations growing up who want to learn things to a deeper level. It's one big reason I dislike how a lot of more advanced academic texts can not only be hard to actually find, but can be quite to very expensive once found.
Afriend who is a doctor has told me that the majority of human diseases originally came from animals. Thus domestication of animals by humans resulted in an increase in disease. An infamous example is smallpox, derived from cowpox. As the New World had few suitable animal subjects for domestication, the New World had fewer diseases, and so the New World peoples had less developed immune systems as Iron Captain has already noted. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond covers the Germ aspect in greater detail. Overall, the book is a fascinating read.
Something I'd like to ask of Iron Captain and nfe. Not sure how to sum it up, as a question so ... In my college days, a medieval history monograph whose author and title I no longer remember was published. It caused a small stir as the author argued that literacy was far more widespread in medieval Europe than conventional academic thinking would have it. It came down to how medieval Europeans understood the term "literacy", and how modern Western European educated historians understand the term. Modern understanding of "literacy" is of the lowest common denominator; often as little as being able to sign a check or other legally binding document. Medieval European used the term only for the best educated scholars: a rough modern equivalent would be having a Doctorate of Divinity (for the theological aspects) and Doctorate of Classics (for the surviving Classical Latin texts) with a high degree of fluency in Latin. If we use the former standard, there are very few "literate" people in our current society. Conversely, there were probably many more "functionally literate" people in medieval Europe than is normally credited. This seems credible, as while a merchant would not need to discourse on St. Augustine, being able to keep books and write a bill of lading would put him up on a non-literate competitor.
I guess it comes down to, "Are there words/terms that the ancient written sources use that we might be interpreting in a modern fashion that the ancients understood differently, and so distorting scholarship on the subject?
My expertise stops in the mid-first millennium BC so I'm no expert in medieval literacy, but that does sound entirely believeable. I'm an advocate of abandoning academic titles anywhere other than on a CV as they exist for no reason except othering those who don't hold them steming from medieval interests in separating the elite from their peers and so I find if easy enough to accept that their percieving 'literate' to mean 'expert' or 'familiar with the classics' or something similar as part of the same tradition of marking certain groups out as special.
As a general issue though, yes, LOTS. Some are very understandable: you don't often bother to explain everyday terminology. Lots of everyday products are difficult to identify with precision, for instance, and some things we translate using the same terms as modern things were very different.
For example, in MBA Anatolia, wool and textiles were massively lucrative products and we have a wealth of texts detailing a whole swathe of different qualities of wool but we don't actually know what the authors mean by their qualitative categories. Traditionally they were interpreted as refering to finery of weave in textiles' case - thread count, basically - or to forms of wool fibres but this is really only us projecting modern conceptions of what constitutes fine wool into the past. Every chance it refers to colour, weight, dyes, treatments etc. We see a similar situation around Mesopotamian beer. We translate it as beer and it is a fermented grain drink, but it is also full of bread and not at all similar to the things we've been calling beer for the last few thousand years.
A more immediate, and controverial example is the biblical 'Son of Man'. Theologians spent millennia reading it interchangeably with 'Son of God' but in some modern exegeses scholars have suggested it essentially means 'stand up guy'. 'That Jesus, you can trust him, he's a real son of man!'
The better known, and so tediously trodden over, biblical example is of course the famous ancient misreading of Isaiah where the Hebrew almah was read by the translators of the Septuagint as 'virgin' rather than 'woman who has not had a child'. This led to Isaiah's prophecy becoming that the messiah would be born of a virgin rather than simply being a first born son - and then we got two gospels all about his miracle birth...
Of course, it's sometimes hard to blame folk for these uncritical readings of ancient terms. We're still bad at it with contemporary translation. Not many news sources take the time to contextualise and define kafr before blithely translating it as 'infidel'. Some folks still love to point to biblical verses labelling certain actions as 'abominations' even though shekets would be more appropriately read as 'infrigement' or 'forbidden' without nearly the same weighty connotations of revulsion. Hell, in the modern day we're even still terrible for misreading texts that the authors themselves explained to us. How many people wuote Animal Farm in critiques of communism? You know, that book written by a communist who went to Spain to fight for the communist party and wrote Animal Farmas a critique of noble communism being twisted by Stalin?
So I try to be pretty forgiving when we misread the material left to us from the past dependent on our modern perceptions. So long as we're aware that all interpretations are subjective and innately and unavoidably coloured by our modern cultural contexts then I think it's ok to make errors.
Overread wrote: That said the general idea of grading or defining what literacy actually means is quite fundamental to any deeper discussion on historical literacy. Baring in mind most who don't study the subject in depth will have a terribly casual view of the concept (often as not most treat whole ages as a single period in time - the Roman era was many hundreds of years long, yet most don't really see it as a long period but rather a single "roman era" label). Of course these general understandings often filter into the new generations growing up who want to learn things to a deeper level. It's one big reason I dislike how a lot of more advanced academic texts can not only be hard to actually find, but can be quite to very expensive once found.
Yeah. I think that's true of most things, and kind of unavoidable. Anyone who isn't a subject matter expert is going to be somewhere between "wildly ignorant" or "I get the idea well enough."
Overread wrote: That said the general idea of grading or defining what literacy actually means is quite fundamental to any deeper discussion on historical literacy. Baring in mind most who don't study the subject in depth will have a terribly casual view of the concept (often as not most treat whole ages as a single period in time - the Roman era was many hundreds of years long, yet most don't really see it as a long period but rather a single "roman era" label). Of course these general understandings often filter into the new generations growing up who want to learn things to a deeper level. It's one big reason I dislike how a lot of more advanced academic texts can not only be hard to actually find, but can be quite to very expensive once found.
Yeah. I think that's true of most things, and kind of unavoidable. Anyone who isn't a subject matter expert is going to be somewhere between "wildly ignorant" or "I get the idea well enough."
Nah. Those people are the experts. Most of the process of becoming an expert is learning that having a decent grasp of the idea is about as far as you're going to get. Anyone who thinks they're beyond that is a long way from even a decent grasp.
Guess it depends on how we define get the idea well enough XD To me someone who knows then the Roman Empire was and has a basic concept of where they fit in western history gets the idea well enough. Anything beyond that is probably more than you need in your daily life.
Overread wrote: That said the general idea of grading or defining what literacy actually means is quite fundamental to any deeper discussion on historical literacy. Baring in mind most who don't study the subject in depth will have a terribly casual view of the concept (often as not most treat whole ages as a single period in time - the Roman era was many hundreds of years long, yet most don't really see it as a long period but rather a single "roman era" label). Of course these general understandings often filter into the new generations growing up who want to learn things to a deeper level. It's one big reason I dislike how a lot of more advanced academic texts can not only be hard to actually find, but can be quite to very expensive once found.
Yeah. I think that's true of most things, and kind of unavoidable. Anyone who isn't a subject matter expert is going to be somewhere between "wildly ignorant" or "I get the idea well enough."
Nah. Those people are the experts. Most of the process of becoming an expert is learning that having a decent grasp of the idea is about as far as you're going to get. Anyone who thinks they're beyond that is a long way from even a decent grasp.
The other part is accepting that there's probably several sound theories on most topics and which ones sound practical might rely on theories of other topics and concepts (of which there might, again, be more than one standing theory). So you either pick a line and stick to it or try to accept and appreciate the multitude.
Heck even in current times there are variations, there's something like 4 or 5 different Latin based classifications for birds in Europe alone. So even a subject where one might think there would be some uniformity, there is still variation.
Of course it doesn't help that pride (personal, institutional, national) can also play a complicating factor.
I've noticed there's a lot more competing conceptions concerning the Crusades (example I'm aware of) than American Colonial History. I had an entire course that was "read 20 books about the American Civil War" and every single one of them posited a variation of what happened.
LordofHats wrote: It gets even more complicated when you consider how words move between languages. Assassin is derived from Hashishin, which literally means "hashish eater" i.e. druggie. It's amazing how conceptions of the same thing or group of people can be radically different between groups that speak a different language or have a different perspective.
Huh. That is so obvious, yet I never realised it. So I am basically playing "Drug Addict's Creed" now. Sure gives a new meaning to that game.
Afriend who is a doctor has told me that the majority of human diseases originally came from animals. Thus domestication of animals by humans resulted in an increase in disease. An infamous example is smallpox, derived from cowpox. As the New World had few suitable animal subjects for domestication, the New World had fewer diseases, and so the New World peoples had less developed immune systems as Iron Captain has already noted. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond covers the Germ aspect in greater detail. Overall, the book is a fascinating read.
Something I'd like to ask of Iron Captain and nfe. Not sure how to sum it up, as a question so ... In my college days, a medieval history monograph whose author and title I no longer remember was published. It caused a small stir as the author argued that literacy was far more widespread in medieval Europe than conventional academic thinking would have it. It came down to how medieval Europeans understood the term "literacy", and how modern Western European educated historians understand the term. Modern understanding of "literacy" is of the lowest common denominator; often as little as being able to sign a check or other legally binding document. Medieval European used the term only for the best educated scholars: a rough modern equivalent would be having a Doctorate of Divinity (for the theological aspects) and Doctorate of Classics (for the surviving Classical Latin texts) with a high degree of fluency in Latin. If we use the former standard, there are very few "literate" people in our current society. Conversely, there were probably many more "functionally literate" people in medieval Europe than is normally credited. This seems credible, as while a merchant would not need to discourse on St. Augustine, being able to keep books and write a bill of lading would put him up on a non-literate competitor.
I guess it comes down to, "Are there words/terms that the ancient written sources use that we might be interpreting in a modern fashion that the ancients understood differently, and so distorting scholarship on the subject?
My expertise stops in the mid-first millennium BC so I'm no expert in medieval literacy, but that does sound entirely believeable. I'm an advocate of abandoning academic titles anywhere other than on a CV as they exist for no reason except othering those who don't hold them steming from medieval interests in separating the elite from their peers and so I find if easy enough to accept that their percieving 'literate' to mean 'expert' or 'familiar with the classics' or something similar as part of the same tradition of marking certain groups out as special.
As a general issue though, yes, LOTS. Some are very understandable: you don't often bother to explain everyday terminology. Lots of everyday products are difficult to identify with precision, for instance, and some things we translate using the same terms as modern things were very different.
For example, in MBA Anatolia, wool and textiles were massively lucrative products and we have a wealth of texts detailing a whole swathe of different qualities of wool but we don't actually know what the authors mean by their qualitative categories. Traditionally they were interpreted as refering to finery of weave in textiles' case - thread count, basically - or to forms of wool fibres but this is really only us projecting modern conceptions of what constitutes fine wool into the past. Every chance it refers to colour, weight, dyes, treatments etc. We see a similar situation around Mesopotamian beer. We translate it as beer and it is a fermented grain drink, but it is also full of bread and not at all similar to the things we've been calling beer for the last few thousand years.
That is so painfully true. Bronze Age Aegean archaeology and historiography is also rife with this. Take for example those really large Minoan and Mycenaean building complexes that are so famous. They are called 'palaces', but we don't even know if they actually were the residence of any sort of king or royal family. We don't even know whether the Minoans had kings or royal dynasties in the modern sense at all (for all we know they might have been egalitarian autonomous collectives ). The Mycenaeans do appear to have had some form of central authority figure called a "wanax", which is usually translated to 'king', but we don't actually know enough about Mycenaean political organisation to be able to say whether this 'wanax' was actually similar to our concept of 'king'. It is basically projecting present-day concepts on the past, and the wanax may well have been some sort of religious head, tribal elder or chief landowner (or any combination of those roles, or something completely different) rather than a king. A lot of words that get used to describe archaeological finds are basically just interpretations. Like the Minoan 'snake goddess', which may or may not represent a goddess or religiously significant image. We don't really know, yet we continue to call it a 'goddess' nonetheless.
And returning to the subject of Medieval literacy, that is true as well. Medieval people generally did not write in the vernacular (at least not in a way that gets preserved), but in formal, religious languages such as Classical Latin, Byzantine Greek or Church Slavonic. All of which are highly complicated, languages filled with archaic words and stiff ritual hocus pocus that were never actually spoken outside of religious and political rituals. So considering that virtually all literature was written in these arcane dead languages, and that most of it dealt with complicated religious matters, so it makes sense that to be considered literate by Medieval standards you would have to pass much higher standards (have a firm grasp of a difficult ancient language and advanced theology and philosophy) than to be considered literate in the present day (be able to read basic short texts in your own language). Basically, a Medieval literacy test would require you to be able to read and understand "Civitas Dei", while a modern literacy test is satisfied when you can read and understand "Goodbye Moon". In this simple modern sense, it is known that Medieval people at least in Russia, were a lot more literate than is often assumed of Medieval townsfolk. It is just that they wrote short messages on perishable materials that are not normally preserved in the archaeological record or in libraries. Stuff like shopping lists, short notes, kid's homework etc. In that sense it often difficult to estimate the literacy of past populations since it doesn't get preserved and the high literature of a society that does get preserved doesn't normally bother mentioning ordinary details about the life of common people such as whether they can write grocery lists or not. In the town of Great Novgorod however, which once used to be a major trading city, archaeologists found some old birch bark that had been preserved in the wet clay soils of the city, which turned out to be all covered in everyday writing and drawing. Since then, similar documents have been found in other medieval Russian cities, supporting the hypothesis that literacy was very common and widespread in medieval Russia, at least among the urban population.
Pictured: a fragment of a young boy's spelling exercise complete with doodles, from the 13th century. No matter the difference in time and culture, kids never change, do they?
Re: No matter the difference in time and culture, kids never change, do they?
In the details yes, but overall no. Since WWII was far in the future, that boy could not have drawn planes and tanks on his schoolwork like I did, but the doodling impulse came from the same place.
And speaking of how human nature does not change. When I took Egyptology the professor mentioned a text from the Old Kingdom (3rd millenum BC) that has a modern ring to it. The translation is rather loose.
"Ah, for the days of my youth,
when men were honorable and their word good,
when women were chaste and obedient,
and children well mannered and well behaved."
Apparently some things do not change and will not!
Interestingly, the British Library is about open a new exhibition of literature from the Dark Ages, arguing that they weren't as dark as popular imagination has it.
I don't know if this this supports the idea that literacy was widespread. It's more about Dark Age society not being a sort of huge human pigsty.
It seems reasonable that people who needed to be able to read would be able to read and write. In modern society we expect that ideally 100% of our population should be literate. (Of course there are degrees of literacy.)
In the Dark Ages perhaps it was 20% (made up number.) Perhaps only church plus government officials, plus clerks at merchants and so on, needed to be literate.
Ancestral Hamster wrote: Afriend who is a doctor has told me that the majority of human diseases originally came from animals. Thus domestication of animals by humans resulted in an increase in disease. An infamous example is smallpox, derived from cowpox. As the New World had few suitable animal subjects for domestication, the New World had fewer diseases, and so the New World peoples had less developed immune systems as Iron Captain has already noted. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond covers the Germ aspect in greater detail. Overall, the book is a fascinating read.
Something I'd like to ask of Iron Captain and nfe. Not sure how to sum it up, as a question so ... In my college days, a medieval history monograph whose author and title I no longer remember was published. It caused a small stir as the author argued that literacy was far more widespread in medieval Europe than conventional academic thinking would have it. It came down to how medieval Europeans understood the term "literacy", and how modern Western European educated historians understand the term. Modern understanding of "literacy" is of the lowest common denominator; often as little as being able to sign a check or other legally binding document. Medieval European used the term only for the best educated scholars: a rough modern equivalent would be having a Doctorate of Divinity (for the theological aspects) and Doctorate of Classics (for the surviving Classical Latin texts) with a high degree of fluency in Latin. If we use the former standard, there are very few "literate" people in our current society. Conversely, there were probably many more "functionally literate" people in medieval Europe than is normally credited. This seems credible, as while a merchant would not need to discourse on St. Augustine, being able to keep books and write a bill of lading would put him up on a non-literate competitor.
I guess it comes down to, "Are there words/terms that the ancient written sources use that we might be interpreting in a modern fashion that the ancients understood differently, and so distorting scholarship on the subject?
My expertise stops in the mid-first millennium BC so I'm no expert in medieval literacy, but that does sound entirely believeable. I'm an advocate of abandoning academic titles anywhere other than on a CV as they exist for no reason except othering those who don't hold them steming from medieval interests in separating the elite from their peers and so I find if easy enough to accept that their percieving 'literate' to mean 'expert' or 'familiar with the classics' or something similar as part of the same tradition of marking certain groups out as special.
As a general issue though, yes, LOTS. Some are very understandable: you don't often bother to explain everyday terminology. Lots of everyday products are difficult to identify with precision, for instance, and some things we translate using the same terms as modern things were very different.
For example, in MBA Anatolia, wool and textiles were massively lucrative products and we have a wealth of texts detailing a whole swathe of different qualities of wool but we don't actually know what the authors mean by their qualitative categories. Traditionally they were interpreted as refering to finery of weave in textiles' case - thread count, basically - or to forms of wool fibres but this is really only us projecting modern conceptions of what constitutes fine wool into the past. Every chance it refers to colour, weight, dyes, treatments etc. We see a similar situation around Mesopotamian beer. We translate it as beer and it is a fermented grain drink, but it is also full of bread and not at all similar to the things we've been calling beer for the last few thousand years.
That is so painfully true. Bronze Age Aegean archaeology and historiography is also rife with this. Take for example those really large Minoan and Mycenaean building complexes that are so famous. They are called 'palaces', but we don't even know if they actually were the residence of any sort of king or royal family. We don't even know whether the Minoans had kings or royal dynasties in the modern sense at all (for all we know they might have been egalitarian autonomous collectives ). The Mycenaeans do appear to have had some form of central authority figure called a "wanax", which is usually translated to 'king', but we don't actually know enough about Mycenaean political organisation to be able to say whether this 'wanax' was actually similar to our concept of 'king'. It is basically projecting present-day concepts on the past, and the wanax may well have been some sort of religious head, tribal elder or chief landowner (or any combination of those roles, or something completely different) rather than a king.
A lot of words that get used to describe archaeological finds are basically just interpretations. Like the Minoan 'snake goddess', which may or may not represent a goddess or religiously significant image. We don't really know, yet we continue to call it a 'goddess' nonetheless.
To be fair. The palaces of the BA Aegean do seem to fit in to the palace umbrella term across the ANE. I don't think it's a big problem to use that term in that context but no it doesn't align with modern conceptions. I'm not sure that it's fair to imply they might have been situated within egalitarian collectives either. Sure, we need to be conscious of contextualising the material record within culture-specifical idiosyncracies but there's plenty of evidence of what we recognise as hierarchy elsewhere!
Wanax is a good one. Alongside many equivalent (or seemingly equivalent) labels actoss the region. Much of the literature has taken to simply translating these as 'ruler' and footnoting the problem. I think ruler that's a pretty fair solution.
The Karu of Assyrian Anatolia are another good example and have really impacted interpretation not just of the cities where they are present, but of the entirety of Assyrian society. Since the early 20th century karu were generally interpreted and translated as 'Assyrian trading colonies' attached to major Anatolian settlements. It is likely no coincidence that this was being done by scholars from countries that still had empires and/or colonies. By consequence, Assyrian presence in Anatolia was read as a narrative of imperial domination and exploitation where Assyrian rulers inposed authority on local Anatolians via these colonies.
The largest and most important karum, at Kültepe (ancient Kaneš) has been heavily excavated, has generated more texts than anywhere else in the period, and has given us vast data concerning trade and its organisation as well as many insights into MBA society both in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Alas, as time has passed, it has become abundantly clear that we don't know precisely what karu are. They're certainly both physical places and institutions but what people have called Karum Kaneš is likely to simply be a lower town around the main Kaneš mound within which a karum was situatted. Assyria had a significant trading presence in Central Anatolia but did not exert authority over it. However, outside of the academic literature tackling Kaneš or Assyrian trading specifically you'll still almost always read that Karum Kaneš was the colonial seat of Assyrian power in Anatolia.
Kilkrazy wrote: Interestingly, the British Library is about open a new exhibition of literature from the Dark Ages, arguing that they weren't as dark as popular imagination has it.
I don't know if this this supports the idea that literacy was widespread. It's more about Dark Age society not being a sort of huge human pigsty.
It seems reasonable that people who needed to be able to read would be able to read and write. In modern society we expect that ideally 100% of our population should be literate. (Of course there are degrees of literacy.)
In the Dark Ages perhaps it was 20% (made up number.) Perhaps only church plus government officials, plus clerks at merchants and so on, needed to be literate.
This is something that's generally widely accepted among historians (who almost never use the term "Dark Age" anymore because it's so misleading). The idea of the Dark Ages as some backwash on human history comes from Renaissance Europe and hit "it must be true" status by the Age of Enlightenment, who saw the Romans as this great period of super duper awesomeness, and thought of the immediate aftermath as everything going backwards until they themselves showed up to remedy the situation. If the term gets used at all it's usually in reference to historiography concerning the 5th-9th/10th centuries. Compared to the era of Rome, the aftermath of the Western Empire has a fewer written records (generally taken as evidence of reduced literacy), and there's a lot more debate over all kinds of details. But consensus has generally shifted away from the idea that the period saw a reversal in civilization. Throughout the "Dark Ages" western Europeans would build, write, and develop all kinds of cultural wonders, but the cultural bias of viewing Rome as a high point in European history that stands over other periods until relatively modern times is still widely held culturally today so exhibits like this get put together to better educate the public.
Which isn't to say the "Dark Ages" were all bright and hunky dory, but the term encompasses a lot of ideas that don't hold up.
Don't forget the "Dark Ages" also got a lot of hollywood and film attention which I think also cements the idea (at least in the lay person) of how dark and terrible and undereducated it is.
I would also say that because of the way many people learn history its actually possible that many think the Roman era came after the Dark Ages - as you say LordofHats the Roman era is seen as a shining beacon of order, building, civilization and advance of technology. And it covers a huge swathe of time and continues even long into the Middle ages in some form; just not as the huge united Roman Empire it was before.
So its easy for people get turned around when they only casually study or when that study is itself broken into these distinct ages, when in reality many ages bled one into the next and the dividing line isn't always a sold sudden change (though sometimes it is).
It's always interested me that, at least in the UK, the Dark Ages is always seen as a time of strife, poor building, gloomy cold dark castles, evil lords, tyrants and general lack of education in the peasants. And yet right alongside you've got the Arthurian tales where you've got also the total opposite of all that and yet they are suppose to happen at the same time. Even if we accept that the Arthurian tales are fantasy (or largely so) its still curious to see two vastly opposite casual viewpoints that manage to exist at the same period in history.
Overread wrote: I would also say that because of the way many people learn history its actually possible that many think the Roman era came after the Dark Ages - as you say LordofHats the Roman era is seen as a shining beacon of order, building, civilization and advance of technology. And it covers a huge swathe of time and continues even long into the Middle ages in some form; just not as the huge united Roman Empire it was before.
That big disconnect in human memory between the Eastern Empire and Byzantines doesn't help. There was a really good book on the Byzantines and cultural memory (David Gutas I think?) that basically reached the conclusion that Western Europeans convinced themselves that the Eastern Empire wasn't really Roman. Through a mix of the Catholic Church's propaganda, bias against contemporary Greeco-Roman culture, and the rapid decline in the Byzantine Empire from the 11th century onwards, people in the Catholic sphere completely disconnected the memory of Rome from that of the Byzantines. Even today people need to have it explained to them that the Byzantine Empire is the Eastern Roman Empire. It kind of reinforces that idea of history as distinct periods with no bleed through, especially in this case since most people think of Rome as ending in the 4th/5th century when it really went on in one form or another for nearly 1000 more years until the Ottomans came calling.
How people think of things in the "now" is a powerful thing. So powerful that we can still feel the effects of it hundreds of years later in how we think of that thing.
LordofHats wrote:
It gets even more complicated when you consider how words move between languages. Assassin is derived from Hashishin, which literally means "hashish eater" i.e. druggie. It's amazing how conceptions of the same thing or group of people can be radically different between groups that speak a different language or have a different perspective.
Huh. That is so obvious, yet I never realised it. So I am basically playing "Drug Addict's Creed" now.
Sure gives a new meaning to that game.
So, I've got a book on the Assassins by Bernard Lewis (damn near everywhere I look, he's almost universally regarded for his expertise on middle eastern history and ME affairs). . . Wherein he outlines that the term Assassin, yes, is derived from Hashishin, but doesn't actually refer to drug addicts/drug taking. . . At its most basic root, according to Lewis, it translates to "grass eater" and was much more of a dismissive term, or an insulting type term. I guess one way to compare it would be, for us Americans, the term Hippie. It semi-accurately identifies a group of people while at the same time deriding their beliefs and systems.
But as for Assassins Creed games, if you're playing the latest game, you're undoubtedly seeing a lot of related subjects to this thread, or how things are viewed in a historical sense.
So, I've got a book on the Assassins by Bernard Lewis (damn near everywhere I look, he's almost universally regarded for his expertise on middle eastern history and ME affairs). . . Wherein he outlines that the term Assassin, yes, is derived from Hashishin, but doesn't actually refer to drug addicts/drug taking. . . At its most basic root, according to Lewis, it translates to "grass eater" and was much more of a dismissive term, or an insulting type term. I guess one way to compare it would be, for us Americans, the term Hippie. It semi-accurately identifies a group of people while at the same time deriding their beliefs and systems.
But as for Assassins Creed games, if you're playing the latest game, you're undoubtedly seeing a lot of related subjects to this thread, or how things are viewed in a historical sense.
Which also feeds into how messy it can be translating words from one language to another. It's almost never a 1 to 1 thing. The Japanese word Kami is sometimes translated as god or spirit, but the Japanese conception of Kami has distinct connotations with almost no English words being a perfect match.
Part of the Assassin bit is, more specifically, the actual order from which the name is derived. They were part Naziris (Shi'a sect) who took social justice very seriously. The Order of Assassins were basically the Middle Ages version of a social justice activist, and the followers of Hassan-I Sabbah took the title "Asasyin" which basically means "principled." Problem is that when pronounced aloud Asasyin sounds almost identical to Hashishin (Middle Age Arabic had almost silent h's), and since the order did make frequent use of hash (it was pretty common back then among holy orders) so everyone just started calling them Hashishins, likely in part to dismiss them cause they were seen as kind of crazy. In the west Marco Polo popularized the idea of the "Assassins" as trained secretive killers. It's not the actual tactic the order used when killing people usually, but it was certainly more romantic to write about.
EDIT: Oh, and while Bernard Lewis is generally considered to have "written the book" on big picture Ottoman History, his overall work has come under increasing assault since the 1970s for a number of things, namely misrepresentation of Islamic beliefs, racism, and imperialism. There is an ongoing debate ever since Edward Said (who debated and called Lewis out a lot in his academic career) published his book on Oriental Studies (Orientalism) about the veracity and validity of Lewis' entire framework. History being a field about stuff that happened a long time ago, you can image how messy it is when a debate stretches on for nearly 50 years (and as of May this year continues well after the two more prominent men involved are dead)
I didn't think I knew anything about this, although as shown in a video I just watched of Eric Cline, I know more than I was aware.
I think its interesting about the Sea Peoples, because I see those events playing out within the next 100 years. I guess some thought the Sea Peoples invaded Egypt due to calamity back home (drought, etc), and that could very well be the case. An alternative would be that things were going so well at home, there just wasn't any room so they went off seeking a place to settle. Certainly groups like the Vikings and Christians during the crusades did the same thing. Meaning you have an excess of manpower, and rather than having them cause problems at home, you send them off to bother someone else. But I think environment issues probably caused the migrations, and rather than go into the unknown (to the vast amounts of land in the north in Europe), they went to where there would have known to be established resources. It seems odd that all of the islands/lands in question would all deteriorate at once though. Relatively speaking.
Of course the Egyptians aren't going to have any of this, as they are going to be competing for the same resources.
If we say the Sea People's migration was based on deteriorating environmental issues... well, look at what is happening around the world today. As global warming causes changes on earth, there will be places that go through some major changes, everything from droughts causing failure of crops or even lack of water like in South Africa. But some places just wont be able to be livable, like Kuwait. This will cause mass populations to move, and move to areas where there will be limited resources for those already living there, and the newbies will not be welcomed. So I expect all sorts of conflict. And all you have to do is look at history to see that this has happened many times before. Man settles on fertile land, something happens to the land and man moves to another area. I am sure this has caused a lot of wars in the past. But now we have countries and borders and the walls are going up. So if you think this is a hot topic now, wait another 50 years.
Naval historians still haven't nailed down the Battle of Jutland (1916) which involved hundreds of trained observers on both sides making detailed minute by minute logs of what happened.
What hope have we got of things which occurred thousands of years ago?
And for Iron Captain as a native Greek speaker your wanax sounds surprisingly like αναξ classical antiquity greek for king.
i guess it helps to speak a continuation of an ancient language.
But as for Assassins Creed games, if you're playing the latest game, you're undoubtedly seeing a lot of related subjects to this thread, or how things are viewed in a historical sense.
Being an archaeologist when playing games like this really is a double-edged sword. On one hand you can really appreciate the massive challenge and the great attention to detail the developers had in reconstructing Classical Greece, and you notice all the cool archaeological finds they put as objects into the game, but on the other hand you also notice all the glaring inaccuracies. This has seriously impacted my enjoyment of some historical tv series as well (like Vikings. Don't get me started on it).
LordofHats wrote: Which also feeds into how messy it can be translating words from one language to another. It's almost never a 1 to 1 thing. The Japanese word Kami is sometimes translated as god or spirit, but the Japanese conception of Kami has distinct connotations with almost no English words being a perfect match.
Yeah, that is exactly the same problem, and as a someone who speaks and writes in three different languages on a daily basis it is something I run into all the time. Languages just never translate perfectly, you always lose a lot of meaning in translation. And in archaeology and history the problem is obviously complicated by the fact that you have only limited ways (or no way at all) of finding out what a certain word really meant to a past culture.
konst80hummel wrote: And for Iron Captain as a native Greek speaker your wanax sounds surprisingly like αναξ classical antiquity greek for king. i guess it helps to speak a continuation of an ancient language.
It does! The Mycenaeans spoke a Hellenic language of which Ancient and Modern Greek are direct descendants. "Wanax" is an earlier form of the Classical Greek word "anax", from a period before the initial digamma became silent in pronunciation. In fact, if I recall correctly, I read somewhere that in the language of Corinth the word was still pronounced wanax (ϝαναξ) in Classical times. Being able to speak Greek is a great advantage for anyone doing research into the Bronze Age Aegean. I'd love to learn it, but it is a rather complex language that is pretty difficult to learn. It is a beautiful language though.
But it is doubtful whether "anax" as used by the Classical Greeks really translates to "king". Greek rulers of the time were usually referred to as "basileus" (translated usually to king or emperor), with the only ones being referred to as "anax" being the gods (especially Zeus), and Agamemnon, the Greek king from the Troyan War. And reading through Mycenaean documents, it appears as that the person referred to as "wanax" is ranked higher than the person referred to as "gwasileus". Both titles are normally translated as 'king', but unless the Mycenaean had some sort of double kingship structure it seems doubtful that both titles had the sort of position and tasks in society that is normally associated with that of a king. It is possible that the wanax was some sort of high king or king of kings who ruled over other kings, but it is difficult to say for certain based on the limited information we have. Translating wanax as king at least isn't very helpful, since it subconsciously colours the perception people have of what a wanax is, and what his position in society was when all we really know is that a wanax appears to have been at the top of Mycenaean society, above a gwasileus. But he might just as well have been a religious , tribal or military head of some kind rather than a political head. If Homer's story of the Troyan War (which is the legend of an event that took place in Mycenaean times) is any indication, it certainly appears that the authority of a wanax/anax wasn't anywhere near as absolute as that of a king, since we have the basileus Achilles getting rather mad when his anax Agamemnon tries to boss him around as one of the major plot points.
This talk of the Dark Age Europe after Rome is interesting as many people consider the time after 1177 BCE to have a similar "Dark Age", in this case referencing the lack of written records and assuming literacy also dried up through this period. I am also aware of a Greek "Dark Age" the came before the rise of the Polis.
In 1177, someone argues that the Late Bronze Age collapse was not a collapse at all but a change from centralized 'Palace Economies" into more independent ruler and entrepreneurial spirit in the form of City-states in the early Iron Age.
EDIT: Oh, and while Bernard Lewis is generally considered to have "written the book" on big picture Ottoman History, his overall work has come under increasing assault since the 1970s for a number of things, namely misrepresentation of Islamic beliefs, racism, and imperialism. There is an ongoing debate ever since Edward Said (who debated and called Lewis out a lot in his academic career) published his book on Oriental Studies (Orientalism) about the veracity and validity of Lewis' entire framework. History being a field about stuff that happened a long time ago, you can image how messy it is when a debate stretches on for nearly 50 years (and as of May this year continues well after the two more prominent men involved are dead)
I did not know of this rivalry/debate. . . yet am not surprised. . . . Academia is quite the catty field (I've been told some rather humorous/intense rivalry stories by various of my history professors over the years).
But as for Assassins Creed games, if you're playing the latest game, you're undoubtedly seeing a lot of related subjects to this thread, or how things are viewed in a historical sense.
Being an archaeologist when playing games like this really is a double-edged sword. On one hand you can really appreciate the massive challenge and the great attention to detail the developers had in reconstructing Classical Greece, and you notice all the cool archaeological finds they put as objects into the game, but on the other hand you also notice all the glaring inaccuracies. This has seriously impacted my enjoyment of some historical tv series as well (like Vikings. Don't get me started on it).
Agreed. . . its a fun game, so long as I turn off my brain for a while. . . It's chock full of "free Greece" myths, on top of "spartan warrior" myths (I mean, feth, the entire game is built on the premise that Leonidas carried out a noble suicide mission to save "free" greece)
The one good thing about the games, as someone with a history degree, and generally a fan of the subject, I *always* go through a phase playing the games where I buy a book or few related to the time/subject of the game. . . The Bernard Lewis book I mention earlier is a direct result of playing AC games.
Tengri wrote: Really found this fascinating...basically the Mediterranean Dark Ages
It is fascinating. One of the most exciting things about it is that one single archaeological discovery could reveal so much about what really happened (like a single clay tablet or stone inscription). I imagine it gives people in the field the shakes when they find something at a dig.
I mean lumps of 'rock' with writing on, yes this is usually clay. But scan all media please. Let a computer sort it out.
Ok. Like I asked above, what do you want a computer to sort out? What is scanning hundreds of thousands of tablets going to accomplish (other than eradicating most institutions archaeology and philology budgets for decades)? Photographs are almost always perfectly adequate for reading these things.
Kilkrazy wrote: Can analysis of ancient texts be done using AI?
Maybe a machine learning system could be used to develop knowledge of an ancient language.
It's a bit of a vague idea, I know.
I don't think we have the AI capabilities yet. Google translate is still mediocre even between comprehensively understood languages which are a priority for such algorithms ie. English/Spanish. I'm sure we'll get there but it has a long, long way to go and we're still arguing about grammar in ancient languages. Additionally, photographs would be perfectly adequate. Laser scanning stone objects does often reveal detail including text that is not decipherable otherwise but only because of the amounts of wear they are frequently subject to. Clay tablets simply don't survive that and any that did would often be missed during excavation and never make it so far as photographs. Can't scan something you didn't identify and you probably wont identify any tablet damaged enough that the text can't be read by eye.
Kilkrazy wrote: Can analysis of ancient texts be done using AI?
Maybe a machine learning system could be used to develop knowledge of an ancient language.
It's a bit of a vague idea, I know.
I don't think there are so many ancient texts that we'd need an AI to go through them. Also, it would be very expensive for the relatively small budgets that archaeologists and historians get. If you are talking about a machine that could somehow decipher unknown ancient languages, no that would be impossible. An AI wouldn't be able to do anything there that a human can't (nothing basically until we find a translation).
And as nfe says, AIs aren't very good with language anyways, let alone with languages of which the grammar, spelling rules (if any) and idioms aren't certainly known. Idioms of living languages already drive AIs nuts, let alone the idioms of dead ones
It's an ancient Greek ship dating from 400BC or earlier. Obviously this postdates the Bronze Age collapse by a long time. In fact we're in the Iron Age by the time of this ship.
I mean lumps of 'rock' with writing on, yes this is usually clay. But scan all media please. Let a computer sort it out.
Ok. Like I asked above, what do you want a computer to sort out? What is scanning hundreds of thousands of tablets going to accomplish (other than eradicating most institutions archaeology and philology budgets for decades)? Photographs are almost always perfectly adequate for reading these things.
That sounds more like, "help we are going to be replaced", so lets smear the idea.
Yes all stone and clay tablets should be laser scanned and digitised.
1. It means you can bring up a tablet on your computer and rotate it and study it. This means artifacts have to be handled less
2. Once digitised and you only need a decent computer system and database access, it also means the same object can be studied by multiple people at once.
3. People can annotate and scribble on a digital folder, highlight things.
4. Photographs are 2d an accurate laser scanned copy will show the difference between worn tablet, cracks and text.
5. With a little work you can begin to autotranslate.
6. You can also pattern match between documents to find similarities.
7. Should artifacts be destroyed, not unlikely with groups like ISIS, or the send-in-the-clowns Egyptian Bureau of Antiquities and groups similar to either, any digisculpts already processed would remain.
Jobs in the industry would not be compromised.
1. There are way more tablets than people looking at them
2. Someone has to dig up store catalogue and archive the tablets.
3. Important tablets will need direct examination sometimes.
4. A faster moving field of discovery will heighten interest in archeological study.
I mean lumps of 'rock' with writing on, yes this is usually clay. But scan all media please. Let a computer sort it out.
Ok. Like I asked above, what do you want a computer to sort out? What is scanning hundreds of thousands of tablets going to accomplish (other than eradicating most institutions archaeology and philology budgets for decades)? Photographs are almost always perfectly adequate for reading these things.
That sounds more like, "help we are going to be replaced", so lets smear the idea.
Yes all stone and clay tablets should be laser scanned and digitised.
1. It means you can bring up a tablet on your computer and rotate it and study it. This means artifacts have to be handled less
2. Once digitised and you only need a decent computer system and database access, it also means the same object can be studied by multiple people at once.
3. People can annotate and scribble on a digital folder, highlight things.
4. Photographs are 2d an accurate laser scanned copy will show the difference between worn tablet, cracks and text.
5. With a little work you can begin to autotranslate.
6. You can also pattern match between documents to find similarities.
7. Should artifacts be destroyed, not unlikely with groups like ISIS, or the send-in-the-clowns Egyptian Bureau of Antiquities and groups similar to either, any digisculpts already processed would remain.
Jobs in the industry would not be compromised.
I'm not worried about jobs. I'm not a philologist and they'd all keep their jobs to interpret and write commentaries anyway. If I thought it was going to help get more done I'd be all for it. I don't think laser scanning artefacts gains us anything. At least not at the present cost and time involved.
1. I can do this with RTI and photogrammetry.
2. See 1.
3. See 1.
4. RTI and photogrammetry isn't 2d.
5. Not without vast, vast amounts of work.
6. Again, what do you mean by pattern match?
7. See 1.
My guess here is, you take tablets/artifacts from a given civilization that we have not deciphered their language yet, pattern matching algorithms would be able to much more quickly scan an entire catalogue of artifacts than any individual person is. Finding a pattern may give a clue to syntax or grammar of the given culture which may point researchers to that "aha!" moment where they are then able to decipher it.
My guess here is, you take tablets/artifacts from a given civilization that we have not deciphered their language yet, pattern matching algorithms would be able to much more quickly scan an entire catalogue of artifacts than any individual person is. Finding a pattern may give a clue to syntax or grammar of the given culture which may point researchers to that "aha!" moment where they are then able to decipher it.
That is not how it works I am afraid. Certainly, we can pick out patterns like "this character occurs very often in certain positions, it may represent a vowel". However, the patterns do not tell us anything about the meaning. We still do not know what vowel the character represents. Furthermore, the catalogue of texts from most undeciphered languages is not that big, so a human can easily do the same work at a lower cost.
As I understand it, there is only one artefact with Linear A on it, which has already been intensively studied and not yielded the secrets of the language.
Leaving aside the argument about laser scanning versus photography, what are the most important ancient languages to try and translate with new methods?
I think the Harappan script deserves a lot of study.
Kilkrazy wrote: As I understand it, there is only one artefact with Linear A on it, which has already been intensively studied and not yielded the secrets of the language.
Leaving aside the argument about laser scanning versus photography, what are the most important ancient languages to try and translate with new methods?
I think the Harappan script deserves a lot of study.
I am not sure as of how many artefacts with Linear A on them are there, but it is definitely more than 1. As of 2000, there were 1427. However, most of the inscriptions are very short so the total extent of all Linear A text known in 2000 was only 7,362 to 7,396 characters (which would fit on two sheets of paper).
To flip the argument and look at the reverse, suppose an alien archaeology team came to Earth after a major collapse and had to decipher the meaning of the Latin alphabet.
Would it help or hinder the project, that there are millions of pages of Latin script but they are in dozens of different languages?
Let's assume all the pages which have a German-Russian-Japanese translation (the Rosetta Stone of this scenario) have vanished for some reason.
If we expand this idea of digitizing artifacts a bit, and pattern recognition and whatnot a bit, I think it really is something of an idea that has merit, not least of which because of donkey caves like ISIS and others who would intentionally (or not) destroy artifacts, thus losing that knowledge forever.
But, there's also something to be said for the numerous studies that show how your native current language affects how you think. . . By digitizing, researchers who otherwise have no other means/opportunities to study a piece would be able to, and just the difference in thought processes may unlock some new insights.
Further, in the realm of pattern recognition, lets say we apply it to known languages and known bodies of work that may (or may not) show some slight differences in works wherein we may gain further insight into common people's lives in terms of vernacular or slang used vs. governmental "official" language. Obviously with no time machines, we cannot say for certain that slang is being used or vernacular changes mean that a tablet that we think is an order for a shipment of fish from the market, is really a 1 star yelp review (maybe a bit extreme, but I hope you get what I'm trying to say).
Kilkrazy wrote: To flip the argument and look at the reverse, suppose an alien archaeology team came to Earth after a major collapse and had to decipher the meaning of the Latin alphabet.
Would it help or hinder the project, that there are millions of pages of Latin script but they are in dozens of different languages?
Let's assume all the pages which have a German-Russian-Japanese translation (the Rosetta Stone of this scenario) have vanished for some reason.
That would indeed be an insanely impossible task because the aliens would, rightfully so, assume that each text was the same language. Though it is unlikely that the bronze age had a similar dilemma since even if two wildly different languages had shared characters for their written language that the written languages would follow wildly different rules for the writing. Especially if its a pictographical writing vs our modern phonetic writing. Pictographs directly represent an idea or object. Phonetic writings represent sounds, and those sounds then represent an idea or object. Its a higher degree of separation for people trying to translate the text.
Well, there are variations of Latin alphabets, for example Norwegian and French contain characters or accents which are not found in each other or in English.
However, Linear A and Linear B contain a lot of similar characters, but while Linear B has been deciphered it did not lead to decipherment of Linear A because the actual language of Linear A is completely different to Linear B.
It's like if you use the Latin alphabet to express Japanese, which is mostly possible (Romaji.) There's no relation of structure and grammar between Japanese and Lithuanian.
That said, most European languages are related to each other and have some similar words and structures, so perhaps it would be possible for our imaginary alien archaeologists to get somewhere.
Indeed. Especially since many words are shared, even if their spelling might vary.
You'd probably be able to translate French, Spanish, and Italian fairly easily since they share words and most rules of grammer. English would be more of a stretch, but doable since there are still shared words. Aliens might conclude that all of the Romance languages are a single language with some regional variation in spelling, and that English was a different language that split off from the Romance language. Not exactly what happened, but close enough.
Of course if they found sound recordings on any functional machines that might muddy the waters.
Grey Templar wrote: Indeed. Especially since many words are shared, even if their spelling might vary.
You'd probably be able to translate French, Spanish, and Italian fairly easily since they share words and most rules of grammer. English would be more of a stretch, but doable since there are still shared words. Aliens might conclude that all of the Romance languages are a single language with some regional variation in spelling, and that English was a different language that split off from the Romance language. Not exactly what happened, but close enough.
Of course if they found sound recordings on any functional machines that might muddy the waters.
How would they be able to translate French or Spanish in the first place though? All they would see is a bunch of incomprehensible characters, and while they might be able to recognise patterns, without a reference point (a translation into a language they do know) they will never be able to figure out the meaning of those patterns. Here, try to tell me what this means without using an intermediary translation (so no Google Translate):
நீ இதை முயற்சி செய்கிறாய் என்று எனக்கு தெரியும்
Or for another challenge, try figure out the meaning of this short phrase. It is in the Latin alphabet, but it is in a made-up language (based on a variety of European languages with unique grammar and syntax) so you won't find a translation even if you secretly try :
Maj jucha tivoj kajara jamitäl.
The first one would be the challenge faced by alien archaeologists and linguists trying to decipher Earth languages. Unknown characters, an unknown language, and they can't look up a translation into a language they do know. The second one is like the challenge faced by people trying to translate Linear A. We know the writing system, just not the language it records. And Linear A is actually more difficult because unlike my fictional language here it does not appear related to any other known language.
That is based on having read the Stainless Steel Rat books, in which it's used, and having started to study it about 25 years and got distrracted and learned Japanese instead.
Yup, without context you have nothing to go off of. You'd be reliant on finding an artifact labeled with its name or something to do with it. Like maybe a store catalogue with labeled pictures, thus allowing you to translate some specific key words which you could use to build up some contextual links. Like translating Axe because you found tons of pictures of Axes with that word next to them. You then look for Axe in other samples of text, which maybe leads you to the word Wood or Tree. Which then leads to other words.
If you have writing and nothing else to put it in context you are basically screwed.
Or for another challenge, try figure out the meaning of this short phrase. It is in the Latin alphabet, but it is in a made-up language (based on a variety of European languages with unique grammar and syntax) so you won't find a translation even if you secretly try :
I'm not worried about jobs. I'm not a philologist and they'd all keep their jobs to interpret and write commentaries anyway. If I thought it was going to help get more done I'd be all for it. I don't think laser scanning artefacts gains us anything. At least not at the present cost and time involved.
1. I can do this with RTI and photogrammetry.
2. See 1.
3. See 1.
4. RTI and photogrammetry isn't 2d.
5. Not without vast, vast amounts of work.
6. Again, what do you mean by pattern match?
7. See 1.
No you cant, not to the same level of precision. Laser scanners make a 3d image down to a minute level. You can only do analysis from the photograph, with photogrammetry with multiple photographs you can have a rough indication but that is all.
You can also work a lot faster from a digital 3d sculpt, zoom freely rotate etc. Photogrammetery allows very limited image rotation and positioning. Ironically you need more specialist equipment for photogrammetery than for accessing 3d images, for which you only need a powerful enough graphics card.
By the way you said photographs initially, which even more rigid.
It is, more or less, you can extrapolate 3d from it to a limited extent, however a laser scanned image from multiple directions recreated into a digisculpt is true 3d.
Photogrammetry is broadly 3d in the same way (though somewhat better) as 3d movies with special goggles are 3d.
Photogrammetery is useful, its a technology born of aerial reconnaissance, and fiurst used widely with good results from the first world war. Normally its quite hands on, and you need access to precise photographs and a bioptics. Which is a mess compared to a 3d sculpt.
Nope. Feed it into a codebreaker. Let a supercomputer do the pattern matching. As its a 3d digital image to start with and not some backward hands-on photogrammetry its works as fast as you can load data.
You will need to outsource this, but if the project can buy the hardware various security agencies can provide the software, and cleared ex-employees handle the data processing. Archeologists handle the tablets and provide the feed of 3d laser scan data. Unlikely they will be given access to the codebreaker itself, for obvious reasons, but the filtered output file is all yours.
The way most codebreaking computers work, look for patterns in the data, literally. In this case look for patterns of combinations of symbols. It helps if you have an idea where a tablet comes from. A a digital process human operators can add guesses. So for a pattern in a code you might be looking for the letter E. With tablets you might see if you get a match if you assume a certain set of symbols in a batch of tax records means 'grain' if this doesnt make sense you an try against with 'cows'. etc etc. It works by assigning values to pattern matches until groups of values make sense, which the codebreaker does for you.
Interesting how both of us are looking at using proliferated military technology to remote analyse clay tablets. Yet from opposite ends of the twentieth century.
It never ceases to amaze me how often people on the internet turn out to be experts in absolutely any subject field which they care to turn their hand to. Truly we live in an age of wonders.
Orlanth so your whole idea hinges on super codebreaking computers used at government/military level. So that's the first massive barrier against getting any kind of access to that kind of sensitive software - not to mention even if you can get access the costs would be big. Archeaology is not swimming with money - it doesn't generate huge profits from huge investments. It's money invested into knowledge and relies heavily on donations, government legislation, institutional budgets and such.
Also you are seriously overlooking the fact that codebreakers are working within known languages; dead languages are, well, dead. If there's no common known base (like latin) then the code breaker has nothing or very little to work with. Not to mention the fact that language is not just a straight case of translating one word into another word.
Often many languages have words, concepts and meanings that are totally missing from other languages and it takes time to work out the subtle meanings (esp as those are often not detailed in written records).
Just look at how Google Translate mangles current languages when it translates. Yes it can sort of get the gist of things sometimes, but it really mangles things most of the time and fails on more complex or subtle use of language.
You seem to want to argue about this. I'm not sure why. I'm all for laser scanning everything. Why not? The more forms of record the better. However, it is not currently viable, nor is it the most efficient approach.
No you cant, not to the same level of precision. Laser scanners make a 3d image down to a minute level. You can only do analysis from the photograph, with photogrammetry with multiple photographs you can have a rough indication but that is all.
You can also work a lot faster from a digital 3d sculpt, zoom freely rotate etc. Photogrammetery allows very limited image rotation and positioning. Ironically you need more specialist equipment for photogrammetery than for accessing 3d images, for which you only need a powerful enough graphics card.
By the way you said photographs initially, which even more rigid.
No, not with the same level of precision, but with ample precision for the task. Especially with RTI. This is what we are actively doing with tablets now. It's what our philologists want us to do if they even want anything more than simple photographs. The latter is plenty in most circumstances. I also have complete rotation with both.
It is, more or less, you can extrapolate 3d from it to a limited extent, however a laser scanned image from multiple directions recreated into a digisculpt is true 3d.
Photogrammetry is broadly 3d in the same way (though somewhat better) as 3d movies with special goggles are 3d.
Again, no, it is not as accurate as laser scanning. The images created from both RTI and photogrammetry are 3D, however, and RTI is becoming the preferred approach even by people who can afford to laser scan (there are a couple PhDs being written currently, supervised by leaders in the fields both from the archaeological and imaging sides, by people working on Pictish stones specifically dealing with RTI as an ideal (at current levels of technology) approach. I can put you onto them. We share an office.
Photogrammetery is useful, its a technology born of aerial reconnaissance, and fiurst used widely with good results from the first world war. Normally its quite hands on, and you need access to precise photographs and a bioptics
You need a lot of mediocre photos and a computer running Agisoft photoscan. You drag and drop the images into photoscan, run a batch process to align, build a dense cloud, build a mesh, and texture it, then let it do its thing. That's it. I do actually do this for major archaeological projects.
Nope. Feed it into a codebreaker. Let a supercomputer do the pattern matching. As its a 3d digital image to start with and not some backward hands-on photogrammetry its works as fast as you can load data.
That's not the work I mean. I mean the philological work to provide the basis for everything else.
You will need to outsource this, but if the project can buy the hardware various security agencies can provide the software, and cleared ex-employees handle the data processing. Archeologists handle the tablets and provide the feed of 3d laser scan data. Unlikely they will be given access to the codebreaker itself, for obvious reasons, but the filtered output file is all yours.
No one has the money for this. I think you night be overestimating the budgets projects run on. One of the ones I'm on is one of the largest (might actually be THE largest) project in the Near East and we run on c.35k a year. That's the project, not anyone's individual salary. Another I work on is funded by an Ivy League university, a Russell Group university, and has a serious grant from the UK government and runs on a fraction of that.
The way most codebreaking computers work, look for patterns in the data, literally. In this case look for patterns of combinations of symbols. It helps if you have an idea where a tablet comes from. A a digital process human operators can add guesses. So for a pattern in a code you might be looking for the letter E. With tablets you might see if you get a match if you assume a certain set of symbols in a batch of tax records means 'grain' if this doesnt make sense you an try against with 'cows'. etc etc. It works by assigning values to pattern matches until groups of values make sense, which the codebreaker does for you
So what humans have already done. This could be useful if we unearth a vast corpus of an entirely new language (which would be a big enough deal tht you might actually manage to get a grant to scan it all!), but little use in usual circumstances when texts are found in very small numbers over decades. With the nature of excavation in modernity, no one is about to find another Kültepe with several thousand tablets in a season.
Again, as I've said, I'm all for recording everything in as many ways as possible. I'm one of very few surveyors left who still make plans with handheld and drone photogrammetry, total stations and CAD, and handdrawings. My problem is with the practicality, economic viability, and relative efficiency of a technology.
You will need to outsource this, but if the project can buy the hardware various security agencies can provide the software, and cleared ex-employees handle the data processing. Archeologists handle the tablets and provide the feed of 3d laser scan data. Unlikely they will be given access to the codebreaker itself, for obvious reasons, but the filtered output file is all yours.
No one has the money for this. I think you night be overestimating the budgets projects run on. One of the ones I'm on is one of the largest (might actually be THE largest) project in the Near East and we run on c.35k a year. That's the project, not anyone's individual salary. Another I work on is funded by an Ivy League university, a Russell Group university, and has a serious grant from the UK government and runs on a fraction of that.
Oh wow. 35k? A year? Compared to the projects they let me go to you guys are as rich as Kroesus... The last project I went to we did not even have enough money for an excavator and we had to do all the trench digging by hand. Through clay. And all we got for our effort was two measly pot shards (it is at moments like this that I start to doubt my career choice ). They weren't even nice pot shards.
Also, Orlanth, what would you want with a codebreaker? Either a text is already known and the only thing left is for linguists to argue over the interpretation and precise translation, or a language is untranslatable because there is no point of reference that a human or computer could use to start deciphering it. There is very little code to break either way.
Easy E wrote:So, I read 1177, if I wanted to learn more about the Late Bronze Age as a layman, where should I go next?
Any particular region or the general Mediterranean? Cyrian Broodbank's Making of the Middle Sea is a great one for the latter. Not exclusively LBA but does a great overview pf the entire international age. There's also a Met Museum book you can download free from their website called Beyond Babylon. It's actually an exhibition book but it has lots of decent short articles.
Iron_Captain wrote:
Oh wow. 35k? A year? Compared to the projects they let me go to you guys are as rich as Kroesus...
The last project I went to we did not even have enough money for an excavator and we had to do all the trench digging by hand. Through clay. And all we got for our effort was two measly pot shards (it is at moments like this that I start to doubt my career choice ). They weren't even nice pot shards.
We're the traditional site of David and Goliath's battle and mentioned in Sennacherib's invasion of the Shephela so well placed for donations. We don't hire workers anyway.
Who cares about 'nice' sherds? Read them for chronology then throw them away. I'm not really a ceramics guy
Ketara wrote: It never ceases to amaze me how often people on the internet turn out to be experts in absolutely any subject field which they care to turn their hand to. Truly we live in an age of wonders.
Just doing what I actually do.
Thanks for the veiled patronising remarks.
If you cant argue with it, denigrate it.
Overread wrote: Orlanth so your whole idea hinges on super codebreaking computers used at government/military level. So that's the first massive barrier against getting any kind of access to that kind of sensitive software - not to mention even if you can get access the costs would be big. Archeaology is not swimming with money - it doesn't generate huge profits from huge investments. It's money invested into knowledge and relies heavily on donations, government legislation, institutional budgets and such.
You would be surprised but this sort of thing makes security agencies look good.
It would not be the first time government agencies have done odd work for charity/scientific concerns.
And this is isnt even going that far. What you need but cant have direct access to is the codebreaker software.
Building the supercomputer isn't actually as expensive as it sounds, you can make a decent data cruncher with a rack of high end graphics cards, Titan X or better. Cost is about £25k rather than the millions it used to be.
As for the expertise, yes it can be garnered, the archeological project would have to be government backed, and the same government can clear the staffing.
Also you are seriously overlooking the fact that codebreakers are working within known languages; dead languages are, well, dead. If there's no common known base (like latin) then the code breaker has nothing or very little to work with. Not to mention the fact that language is not just a straight case of translating one word into another word.
Not overlooking that at all, codebreakers have to work with raw pattern as you aren't looking to translate into neat sentences all the time. Also there is an advantage, the ancient Hittites aren't trying to hide things, people who double encrypt are.
Also codebreaking is made easier with a larger dataset. The more info in the dataset the easier it is to find a pattern. This is why codes are changed often even if double encrypted.
Point is there are professional agencies who work with decoding encrypted data. Current encryption technologies are so advanced now, even in the public domain that the process of decrypting is near impossible, yet cyrptoanalysis departments are a big factor in current intelligence.
You and I don't know exactly what government agencies have available, but if its set up to handled PGP or equivalent, its will find clay tablets a doddle. Hittites didn't have double encryption, in fact it isn't encrypted at all, so the pattern analysis is more straightforward.
There is a staff turnover in places like Langley and GCHQ, and not many places to go onto with the skills people accumulate there. Yes I do think it would be a reasonable suggestion to approach the UK or US government with a plan such as this.
Just look at how Google Translate mangles current languages when it translates. Yes it can sort of get the gist of things sometimes, but it really mangles things most of the time and fails on more complex or subtle use of language.
Google translate is actually a good example, yes it 'mangles' things, but a half mangled message is still a half clear message, a human operator can see that as progress. It isn't a case of input data press button, you will need to analyse the data too.
nfe wrote: You seem to want to argue about this. I'm not sure why. I'm all for laser scanning everything. Why not? The more forms of record the better. However, it is not currently viable, nor is it the most efficient approach..
Why do you say that. How do you store your photographs. Filing cabinet, even if you make an image database it will be less data efficient than a 3d digital image, you need binocular photphraphy to make 3d images yes?
No, not with the same level of precision, but with ample precision for the task. Especially with RTI. This is what we are actively doing with tablets now. It's what our philologists want us to do if they even want anything more than simple photographs. The latter is plenty in most circumstances. I also have complete rotation with both.
Again, no, it is not as accurate as laser scanning. The images created from both RTI and photogrammetry are 3D, however, and RTI is becoming the preferred approach even by people who can afford to laser scan (there are a couple PhDs being written currently, supervised by leaders in the fields both from the archaeological and imaging sides, by people working on Pictish stones specifically dealing with RTI as an ideal (at current levels of technology) approach. I can put you onto them. We share an office.
I would love to meet these people.
But again from your work its still mostly analogue. The main advantage of fully digitising the images to high quality (laser) is to allow a computer to directly analyse them. Now computer can analyse photographs, but its far less fluid, you get background contamination, lighting etc.
You need a lot of mediocre photos and a computer running Agisoft photoscan. You drag and drop the images into photoscan, run a batch process to align, build a dense cloud, build a mesh, and texture it, then let it do its thing. That's it. I do actually do this for major archaeological projects.
The database of compiled images, how easy is it to cross reference. Can that be automated with your available technology?
Just because it what you actually do on your admitted shoestring doesn't mean its not crude, you take your lot of medicore images and you en up with a 'google map' effect, its not actual 3d, you can rotate from certain points of view, a 3d sculpt has true rotation, and with images you need to pick out what you can pick out. If you miss a symbol amongst cracks a computer wont necessarily do the same if given an accurate enough dataset.
Nope. Feed it into a codebreaker. Let a supercomputer do the pattern matching. As its a 3d digital image to start with and not some backward hands-on photogrammetry its works as fast as you can load data.
That's not the work I mean. I mean the philological work to provide the basis for everything else.
Actually the computer will help there also. You categorise the launguages based on two factors, where the artifact was found and what was written on it. The data on the tablet can be categorised by the computer depending on what patterns it detects, location data is on the file.
No one has the money for this. I think you night be overestimating the budgets projects run on. One of the ones I'm on is one of the largest (might actually be THE largest) project in the Near East and we run on c.35k a year. That's the project, not anyone's individual salary. Another I work on is funded by an Ivy League university, a Russell Group university, and has a serious grant from the UK government and runs on a fraction of that.
That's the way the minds are channelled. The ideology of tweedy nerds in a back office or a camper van with a shoe string. It need not be that way.
Have you even thought about approaching a codebreaking organisation for help, does it even occur to you. It would be a blessing in PR for somewhere like GCHQ to provide expertise to make a breakthrough on ancient languages, more than worth their money.
So what humans have already done. This could be useful if we unearth a vast corpus of an entirely new language (which would be a big enough deal tht you might actually manage to get a grant to scan it all!), but little use in usual circumstances when texts are found in very small numbers over decades. With the nature of excavation in modernity, no one is about to find another Kültepe with several thousand tablets in a season.
At a tiny fraction of the speed and efficiency. Also humans cant cross reference 10000+ clay tablets AT THE SAME TIME, looking for pattern matches.
no wonder you dont make much headway.
As for finds, from what I heard the majority of Hittite era tablets haven't even been catalogued yet.
Again, as I've said, I'm all for recording everything in as many ways as possible. I'm one of very few surveyors left who still make plans with handheld and drone photogrammetry, total stations and CAD, and handdrawings. My problem is with the practicality, economic viability, and relative efficiency of a technology.
You think, but do you think outside the box?
Getting funding could be as easy as convincing government that unlocking history of the Bronze Age collapse might give useful datasets about societal collapse itself and how it works. There is the possibility we are due one. Plus the ancillary benefits of asking for help with a problem that becomes a feather in the cap if solved. 'Langley/GCHQ decrypted an ancient language causing a leap forward in understanding' helps offset 'Langley/GCHQ is reading peoples emails'.
Let me give you an example. There are forestry projects on West Falkland set up as a model as to how to revitalise a 'wasteland'. How do you get funding to plant trees. Either you think in the box get a tiny pittance of a grant and slow on painfully slowly. Or you don't, you ask the army because they have soldiers on station that can do that for you in a tiny faction of their ample spare time, and seed can be brought in through normal shipment on your miniscule budget, or you can have it send though with some fresh strawberries and a bottle of brandy on the next Hercules to arrive at Mt Pleasant. What is a theoretical ecological project becomes realised by outside the box thinking and approaching a completely unrelated government department.
You have nothing to lose by trying and in case the closed minds prevail, archeology has already in the past had assistance from military codebreakers. You would not be the first one to ask.
Google translate is actually a good example, yes it 'mangles' things, but a half mangled message is still a half clear message, a human operator can see that as progress. It isn't a case of input data press button, you will need to analyse the data too.
Well yes, except that Google translate is mangling a result from two known languages with huge bodies of data from both languages as well as bodies of data of translation from both languages. With a dead language you've got a pittance of information in comparison, plus no actual translation structure. You don't even know fully how the language is built up at the ground level to know how they are forming thoughts, objects and actions into symbols.
So if Google is a good example then the computer tech has a long long way to go before it can be ready to collate and event attempt to translate vast bodies. It can certainly speed things up, certain areas can be sped up, but it would seem that the use of a human operator is still critical to the actual translation at this stage.
Also a lot of research groups and such do think outside the box, but sometimes the box itself can have restrictions on what they can and cannot do. Plus there's a big difference between convincing the army to plant trees on their day off through to gaining access to military grade computing. Not saying its not possible, its just not an easy approach considering that there's already a system in place that does work.
Also, Orlanth, what would you want with a codebreaker? Either a text is already known and the only thing left is for linguists to argue over the interpretation and precise translation, or a language is untranslatable because there is no point of reference that a human or computer could use to start deciphering it. There is very little code to break either way.
Fair question.
People think codebreakers work exclusively with text. They do not. Its just the modal function. Codes can be symbols, and clay tablets are covered in symbols.
Most codebreaking (or at least most of what we know of codebreaking that isn't heavily classified) involved pattern recognition. there is a lot more to that, but because clay tablets are not computer encrypted, or in fact encrypted at all, we only need to deal with the more elementary elements of codebreaking (and thus within my amateur set of knowledge on the subject).
What you need to break an elementary pattern code is a good guess. So for example if the clay tablets are likely tax records you will want to highlight symbols that refer to possible numbers, and then tally accompanying symbols to see if any could mean various products. There was no coinage then but taxes might have been paid in grain or cows or something else. By having the dataset of many thousand digitised clay tablets to hand in the database a decent computer could categorise all occurances of any particular symbol, where they appear on which tablet and what symbols they appear next to. Rare symbols can be isolated from common ones. If there is a symbol that appears exactly once on every tablet of a sequence of tables, its likely some sort of header or title, or the name of the recipient or scribing office.
The volume of data helps here, the more tablets there are digitised the more the patterns will come through. one clay tablet will tell you zip, but 10000 or more could tell you quite a bit. You then need to make intelligent guesses as to meaning, see above, but hold them lightly. Thankfully with a computer you can hold onto all your guesses in a separate accompanying file. If I guess right a decent cryptoanalysis software package now does some of this for you, but that is a guess on my part. In any event you can database the assumptions of likely symbol meaning based on the study of a large volume of tablets, and cross reference the assumptions to look for pattern matches on a higher level, pattern matches of assumed meaning. If you have what you think are numbers interspaced by what you think are nouns you likely have an inventory of some description.
These are languages, so there will be patterns, eve something as elementary as determining whether you are looking at a tablet with a inventory, tax or otherwise, or a poem from the arrangement of the yet untranslated symbols is useful.
The bad news is that to make a breakthrough by pattern analysis you have to make several breakthroughs at once, because you cant necessarily determine any specific symbol. But you can make intelligent guesses due to patterning, The computer holds those for you and does the second level of pattern matching to look for groups of symbols together than now make sense. As soon as you get even one symbol guessed with a loose degree of accuracy (it can still be wrong - in which case you start again and notify the assumption as likely incorrect) you can look for a larger pattern.
Numbers/numerical data are likely the first things to be looked for, and should be very common in some types of document, and largely absent from others.
Remember to have this study to be of any use at all you will need a large data seed, as many clay tablets as you can get your hands on from the same period and culture, all digitised by the same methodology so the computer can assess catalogue and cross reference them automatically.
Google translate is actually a good example, yes it 'mangles' things, but a half mangled message is still a half clear message, a human operator can see that as progress. It isn't a case of input data press button, you will need to analyse the data too.
Well yes, except that Google translate is mangling a result from two known languages with huge bodies of data from both languages as well as bodies of data of translation from both languages. With a dead language you've got a pittance of information in comparison, plus no actual translation structure. You don't even know fully how the language is built up at the ground level to know how they are forming thoughts, objects and actions into symbols.
Now you are dealing with a non alphabetical code, because that is what you re describing. To a codebreaker thats the work of any day ending in 'y'.
This is why I suggest looking at codebreaking, not translation.
So if Google is a good example then the computer tech has a long long way to go before it can be ready to collate and event attempt to translate vast bodies. It can certainly speed things up, certain areas can be sped up, but it would seem that the use of a human operator is still critical to the actual translation at this stage.
Google translate is a good laymans example of what a computer is trying to do. one that readers can experiment with themselves.
Dont assume that the complexity levels or are comparable.
Also a lot of research groups and such do think outside the box, but sometimes the box itself can have restrictions on what they can and cannot do. Plus there's a big difference between convincing the army to plant trees on their day off through to gaining access to military grade computing. Not saying its not possible, its just not an easy approach considering that there's already a system in place that does work.
Good then you will have no problems with the idea that there is no harm in asking. Places like GCHQ are very busy, and wont want to help directly, but they might put you in contact with ex staff through the proper intermediary. Its not the sort of thing you ask at the front desk, unless you want a boatload of CSR denyspeak. I think the best way forward would be to find an amateur archeology buff who is serving in the UK or US armed forces. Such a person could speak to someone from military intelligence by open contact without controversy. Work a way in from there.
Point in our favour is that there is not a lot of work someone who is ex-Langley or GCHQ codebreaker can do, its a very esoteric skill. Running a clay tablet codebreaker computer is work for some guy who needs it. Yes I can see agency staff being very positive to projects like this.
Ketara wrote: It never ceases to amaze me how often people on the internet turn out to be experts in absolutely any subject field which they care to turn their hand to. Truly we live in an age of wonders.
Just doing what I actually do.
Thanks for the veiled patronising remarks.
If you cant argue with it, denigrate it.
I've seen you argue as if you were an expert on everything from historical military affairs, to obscure religions, to contemporary politics, to the cultural makeup of ethnic groups, to convoluted international diplomatic problems, to aquatic biology, to legal minutae.
And now it would seem, we can add the finer points of decrypting archaeological remains to extract lost languages to your skillset. Hell, you're so very confident about your knowledge on this one in fact, that you seem to be arguing with someone who literally makes a living off it. And now you've started telling us how easy it is to build supercomputers as well in your most recent posts!
Truly, there would seem to be no field of which you are not a master.
I'll respnd fully later, but in the interest of polite conversation, it might be worth thinking about whether you think heads of departments and directors of institutes at world-leading universities with decades of successful funding applications behind them in fields that are built almost entirely on thinking outside the box to get fieldwork done are really people you want to blithley and patronisingly call closed minded when it comes to finding ways of carrying out research.
Also, Orlanth, what would you want with a codebreaker? Either a text is already known and the only thing left is for linguists to argue over the interpretation and precise translation, or a language is untranslatable because there is no point of reference that a human or computer could use to start deciphering it. There is very little code to break either way.
Fair question.
People think codebreakers work exclusively with text. They do not. Its just the modal function. Codes can be symbols, and clay tablets are covered in symbols. Most codebreaking (or at least most of what we know of codebreaking that isn't heavily classified) involved pattern recognition. there is a lot more to that, but because clay tablets are not computer encrypted, or in fact encrypted at all, we only need to deal with the more elementary elements of codebreaking (and thus within my amateur set of knowledge on the subject).
What you need to break an elementary pattern code is a good guess. So for example if the clay tablets are likely tax records you will want to highlight symbols that refer to possible numbers, and then tally accompanying symbols to see if any could mean various products. There was no coinage then but taxes might have been paid in grain or cows or something else. By having the dataset of many thousand digitised clay tablets to hand in the database a decent computer could categorise all occurances of any particular symbol, where they appear on which tablet and what symbols they appear next to. Rare symbols can be isolated from common ones. If there is a symbol that appears exactly once on every tablet of a sequence of tables, its likely some sort of header or title, or the name of the recipient or scribing office.
The volume of data helps here, the more tablets there are digitised the more the patterns will come through. one clay tablet will tell you zip, but 10000 or more could tell you quite a bit. You then need to make intelligent guesses as to meaning, see above, but hold them lightly. Thankfully with a computer you can hold onto all your guesses in a separate accompanying file. If I guess right a decent cryptoanalysis software package now does some of this for you, but that is a guess on my part. In any event you can database the assumptions of likely symbol meaning based on the study of a large volume of tablets, and cross reference the assumptions to look for pattern matches on a higher level, pattern matches of assumed meaning. If you have what you think are numbers interspaced by what you think are nouns you likely have an inventory of some description.
These are languages, so there will be patterns, eve something as elementary as determining whether you are looking at a tablet with a inventory, tax or otherwise, or a poem from the arrangement of the yet untranslated symbols is useful.
The bad news is that to make a breakthrough by pattern analysis you have to make several breakthroughs at once, because you cant necessarily determine any specific symbol. But you can make intelligent guesses due to patterning, The computer holds those for you and does the second level of pattern matching to look for groups of symbols together than now make sense. As soon as you get even one symbol guessed with a loose degree of accuracy (it can still be wrong - in which case you start again and notify the assumption as likely incorrect) you can look for a larger pattern. Numbers/numerical data are likely the first things to be looked for, and should be very common in some types of document, and largely absent from others.
Remember to have this study to be of any use at all you will need a large data seed, as many clay tablets as you can get your hands on from the same period and culture, all digitised by the same methodology so the computer can assess catalogue and cross reference them automatically.
I see. But the thing is, all of this has already been done. By hand. Because we do not have a ten thousand clay tablets. The entire corpus of known Linear A texts for example fits on a few sheets of paper. And for many other undeciphered languages we have even less to go on. We can tell whether some character is a number or a vowel (especially with Linear A, since Linear B which uses the same characters has been deciphered) with a fair degree of accuracy. For Linear A we can even spell out entire words and texts. Problem is those words are unintelligible because they are in an unknown language not closely related to any known language (Minoan is basically the Basque or the Hungarian of the Bronze Age I guess). The only thing we can somewhat guess at is place names (which are presumably derived from the Minoan language and therefore related). For example it may be that the Linear A word "Keniso" is the Minoan name for Knossos. But that is as far as we have gotten in the past 50 years, and as far as we are going to get until we find some bilingual text that could give us a starting point at finding out the meaning behind Linear A words. We can also guess which words are meant to be numbers and which are meant to be commodities, but the precise meaning still eludes us.
On a sidenote, I often do exercises like this where you get a text in an unknown language and then have to answer questions about it based on patterns (I even won a prize once in a competition). Sometimes you can even use patterns to translate an entire text even though it is an incredibly obscure language spoken only by some tribe deep in the Amazon forests. That is pretty cool. Thing is, you always need a starting point. To solve the equation you always need at least one known variable. With dead languages like Linear A, there is none. All variables are unknown which makes them completely impossible to solve or 'break'.
Let's take my phrase again for example:
Maj jucha tivoj kajara jamäl.
And add a few more simple ones:
Maj jucha tivoj kajara obitsjimäl. Jucha tivoj kajara jamita. Maj jucha ja isakamäl jamidj. Jucha ja obitsjimu. Jucha tivoj kajara alisö obitsjimita.
Just from this small sample, you should be able to figure out which words are verbs, nouns and pronouns, and even what the word order of the language is (whether it is subject-object-verb or subject-verb-object etc.). However, what you will not be able to figure out is what the sentences actually mean. Pattern recognition can only bring you understanding of the structure of a language. To understand what it really means, you need to have at least some translations.
Iron_Captain wrote: Oh wow. 35k? A year? Compared to the projects they let me go to you guys are as rich as Kroesus... The last project I went to we did not even have enough money for an excavator and we had to do all the trench digging by hand. Through clay. And all we got for our effort was two measly pot shards (it is at moments like this that I start to doubt my career choice ). They weren't even nice pot shards.
We're the traditional site of David and Goliath's battle and mentioned in Sennacherib's invasion of the Shephela so well placed for donations. We don't hire workers anyway.
I read about that somewhere! so cool.
nfe wrote: Who cares about 'nice' sherds? Read them for chronology then throw them away. I'm not really a ceramics guy
Ceramics here in Northern Europe are rare enough that they generally get preserved (as long as they are still determinable), although they normally end up in some storage collecting dust since once you have determined them and plotted their location on the map there isn't much you can do with them anymore. It is not like a museum is interested in some small ugly brown-greyish shards. They probably get thrown out at some point, I hope.
Ketara wrote: It never ceases to amaze me how often people on the internet turn out to be experts in absolutely any subject field which they care to turn their hand to. Truly we live in an age of wonders.
Just doing what I actually do.
Thanks for the veiled patronising remarks.
If you cant argue with it, denigrate it.
I've seen you argue as if you were an expert on everything from historical military affairs, to obscure religions, to contemporary politics, to the cultural makeup of ethnic groups, to convoluted international diplomatic problems, to aquatic biology, to legal minutae.
I have commented on most of those things, though I don't recall talking about aquatic biology. But then so do you, so do others on Dakka. You dont lay this at them. I have had conversations with the same people on many of the above subjects. Iron Captain included.
Interesting that Iron Captain appears to have some sort of experience on the field of ancient history. I don't doubt him if he claims he has. Yet I also talk with him on subjects as far afield as WW2 history, the politics of the Crimea and other things. I don't see you biting him on the arse for being knowledgeable in multiple fields. Nor should you for the record.
And now it would seem, we can add the finer points of decrypting archaeological remains to extract lost languages to your skillset. Hell, you're so very confident about your knowledge on this one in fact, that you seem to be arguing with someone who literally makes a living off it. And now you've started telling us how easy it is to build supercomputers as well in your most recent posts!
Yet despite this there are many many topic on Dakka to which I do not respond at all. Fancy that. I thought you assumed I claim to be an expert in everything.
As for arguing with others on a subject. Again this is Dakka.
For the record I have made headway into historical research, with particular note towards medieval weaponry. How did I do this. By being the grand master of medieval knowledge, no, by seeing things others missed. Such as combining facts in a new way. For example recognising that the massed graves at Towton contained longbowmen and men at arms who had evidence of longbow wounds on them that had healed. Wheras historical accounts of the French indicated that a longbow wound was a death sentence. I draw some conclusions from that and hypothesised a theory from those two pieces of data. The theory was shown to have merit for further study by experts in the field.
On an unrelated field I hypothesises how to limit accumulative radiation damage on inhabited space modules. I did this by theorising that is a capillary system of liquid metal was pumped around the outer layers of a space habitat it would absorb radiation before it became embedded deeper in the habitat hull. Accumulative radiation was one of the unfixed problems of long term space habitation. I came up with that not as a noted astrophysicist, I am not, but simply because I think outside the box. That being said I didn't have the skills in chemistry to determine which liquid metal to use. My initial hypothesis involved mercury, but mercury was a poor choice, for purposes of intercepting radiation and cost. NaK on the other hand was ideal and was a cheap material.
Now this has not to my knowledge been implemented anywhere yet, but its one of the problems for long term space habitation that now has a plausible solution. I did that, and I did that as an amateur free thinker.
You will be surprised how much is achieved by outside the box thinking by outside elements. And those who can do this often end up with minor contributions in many fields. It is not particularly rare either, most inventors end up making inventions in several different fields, they just think outside the box in a practical way.
You see I don't need to be an expert in any subject to have insight. But I do have a speciality, what I do is troubleshoot problems with indirect solutions, most notably as a political theorist, but the skillset translates into other fields. Yes I do know a little bit about cryptography, yes I do know a little bit about ancient middle eastern history. Maybe less than others in either field. However I put the two together to hypothesise solutions.
I did this with sufficient reputation for quality that when transcripts of my hypotheses on political matters were presented to Civil Service chiefs they asked for it to be unedited and unsummarised so that the recipients had access to the full nuanced data. From what I hear that is not usual.
nfe wrote: I'll respnd fully later, but in the interest of polite conversation, it might be worth thinking about whether you think heads of departments and directors of institutes at world-leading universities with decades of successful funding applications behind them in fields that are built almost entirely on thinking outside the box to get fieldwork done are really people you want to blithley and patronisingly call closed minded when it comes to finding ways of carrying out research.
I am not being blithe or patronising. Perhaps you were however.
I respect that you work in the field, I even commented as such. But you on the other hand have come up with the handwave of 'I am the expert, you are not, so off with you'. Blinkers don't suit you
I don't claim to know everything, but when a new idea comes along have you really got the omniscient certainty to write it off. To be honest we see this in academia all the time, its a clash of egos. The 'how dare an outsider think they come up with an valid idea' mindset which causes so many new methods or theories to fail to make traction.
No I am not an expert in your field, but then I don't need to be. I wasn't an expert in medieval weaponry or space structures either, or in the other roles I have contributed to outside of political science. Technically I am not an expert on political science either, I worked some theories which were proven right and went on from there.
Yes directors of institutes at world leading universities tend to know what they are talking about, but the best of them will listen to ideas from the outside. Also sometimes their very expertise may work against them. Acedemicians normally work on direct in field solutions, not indirect out of field solutions, and are often blind to them. Ironically mental structure in formal people groups is one of my actual fields of study, being heavily linked to political theory. Understanding why formal academics and amateur contributors often have completely different ideas for the same field is very similar to why left wing thinkers and right wing thinkers will not draw the same conclusions from the same political data.
Anyway back to the main point. Am I sure that codebreaking will produce results? No I am not. Am I sure that one could approach a codebreaking organisation? That I am more sure of. Could codebreaking produce results? Very possibly, I cannot say for certain because the topic gets classified in a hurry, but codebreaking what-nots can achieve some incredibly impressive results. Doing stuff that is not commonly thought possible. There is nothing I have heard from this thread to guarantee than ancient languages are definitively beyond them.
I see. But the thing is, all of this has already been done. By hand. Because we do not have a ten thousand clay tablets. The entire corpus of known Linear A texts for example fits on a few sheets of paper. And for many other undeciphered languages we have even less to go on..
If its done by hand it isnt done. People cannot cross reference every symbol and categorise it in relation to other surrounding symbols, it needs a computer.
The British Museum claims to have 130,000 texts. So I don't know where you get the idea of a few sheets of paper.
Looking at the breakdown there are tens of thousands of fragments from some cultures. These are perhaps large enough sample groups for a volume pattern test. Though you will need to know some seed information about where the tablets were found so that you can begin to guess as to the contents of the documentation.
We can tell whether some character is a number or a vowel (especially with Linear A, since Linear B which uses the same characters has been deciphered) with a fair degree of accuracy. For Linear A we can even spell out entire words and texts. Problem is those words are unintelligible because they are in an unknown language not closely related to any known language (Minoan is basically the Basque or the Hungarian of the Bronze Age I guess). The only thing we can somewhat guess at is place names (which are presumably derived from the Minoan language and therefore related). For example it may be that the Linear A word "Keniso" is the Minoan name for Knossos. But that is as far as we have gotten in the past 50 years, and as far as we are going to get until we find some bilingual text that could give us a starting point at finding out the meaning behind Linear A words. We can also guess which words are meant to be numbers and which are meant to be commodities, but the precise meaning still eludes us.
This makes it a pictoral code without a key, in codebreaking terms. Nothing especially unusual, except for the complete lack of double encryption. Agencies DO break codes like this. I am sure the Russians have a dab hand in it too.
On a sidenote, I often do exercises like this where you get a text in an unknown language and then have to answer questions about it based on patterns (I even won a prize once in a competition). Sometimes you can even use patterns to translate an entire text even though it is an incredibly obscure language spoken only by some tribe deep in the Amazon forests. That is pretty cool. Thing is, you always need a starting point. To solve the equation you always need at least one known variable. With dead languages like Linear A, there is none. All variables are unknown which makes them completely impossible to solve or 'break'.
So you do this. Cool.
However maybe Ketara will come after you too.
I explained the dilemma earlier. You do need a starting point, your are correct, and to get one you need to make simultaneous breakthroughs because you have no starting point and have a cross match. Examples of how this was done was given in the previous comment.
Now your problem here is with the word impossible. The above problem is far less of an issue than double encryption, which should result in totally random code. But that is NOT unbreakable, just nearly unbreakable.
One advantage you have is with isolating where the tablets come from, similar to adding HumInt to the SigInt in the pattern. So for example if you have something that might be a trade document from a coastal city in asia minor you might look for references for the word for 'tin', because that is where this crucial import material will be arriving. Rural communities might not have that resource on their trade list. If the Egyptians, who we can read report of a saying of the hittites or a phrase they used in their documentation we could ook for that systematically and see if the same symbols in unrelated texts make sense.
A lot of this is translating the impossible into the possible via looking for the plausible. If you want an open unclassified example of this look at the history of Bletchley Park. While the early computers are the stars of the show, a lot of the codebreaking involved guessing words based on. So the first code of the day from St Nazaire was likely to be a weather report, because it gave an indicator of weather for central Europe all day. This was not always so, but it was often enough. So cross reference assuming codewords meant 'sunny' or 'storms' etc.
Maj jucha tivoj kajara obitsjimäl.
Jucha tivoj kajara jamita.
Maj jucha ja isakamäl jamidj.
Jucha ja obitsjimu.
Jucha tivoj kajara alisö obitsjimita.
Just from this small sample, you should be able to figure out which words are verbs, nouns and pronouns, and even what the word order of the language is (whether it is subject-object-verb or subject-verb-object etc.).
I personally cant tell one word from another. I am not a linguist. But I take your word for it.
However, what you will not be able to figure out is what the sentences actually mean. Pattern recognition can only bring you understanding of the structure of a language. To understand what it really means, you need to have at least some translations.
Ok. looking at the above. Assuming it was part of a larger database of text fragments in a lost language. You could try and pattern match likely words depending on context of the document. It is appears to be a stack of poetry from a house. You also have a stack of what appears to be tax records from another part of the dig site. Say you hypothesis one word may mean cows, another may mean soldiers from your analysis of the tax documents. When reading the poetry as cross reference you hypotheses the sentence to say 'the cow owns five soldiers', this doesn't fit, there is a mistake somewhere, 'the soldier owns five cows' however makes sense.
You cant hope to cross reference this, but a computer can, and the larger the dataset the more cross references it can make.
Yes you will need to get a lucky break but when you do it can begin to unravel. Ideally you only need one tablet (preferably double sourced though) to have a list of things in numbered order, on the first year this happened, on the second that happened etc, and a computer might pick up the numerical sequence and thus decode a basic numbers system. You can work out a lot from even rough numbers. If a number is very large it might mean sheep or soldiers or bushels of grain, if a smaller number it might mean chariots or ships.
I see. But the thing is, all of this has already been done. By hand. Because we do not have a ten thousand clay tablets. The entire corpus of known Linear A texts for example fits on a few sheets of paper. And for many other undeciphered languages we have even less to go on..
If its done by hand it isnt done. People cannot cross reference every symbol and categorise it in relation to other surrounding symbols, it needs a computer.
EDIT:- You know, I won't waste any more of anybody's time by continuing this discussion. Carry on gents. Feel free to delete this post, any regular mods.
I have commented on most of those things, though I don't recall talking about aquatic biology. But then so do you, so do others on Dakka. You dont lay this at them. I have had conversations with the same people on many of the above subjects. Iron Captain included.
The difference between yourself and virtually every other poster on this board from my observation; is the level of absolute certainty with which you venture reasonably definitive statements and opinions on subjects with comparatively little knowledge.
This is how a theorist works, I dont use certainties, just possibilities with confidence. Where certainty come into it is refusing for an idea to be handwaved away, rather than insisting it is correct. Similar but subtly different.
If you want a specific example, I'd indicate back to the thread on Edwardian naval wargaming. Where you accused me of being 'blind' to the fact that wargames 'were considered relevant to real strategic thinking' before proceeding to vacillate into how they were 'linked to staff colleges'. But you knew none of the major writers/researchers in the field of Edwardian British naval strategy when named, and were genuinely clueless that there was no naval general staff at that point. In other words, you took something you'd vaguely read somewhere at some point and packaged it up with your 'amateur free thinker' skills to speculate far beyond your knowledge or competence in a mildly offensive fashion.
Actually your blindness was in the assumption that the Edwardian Naval wargame was the de facto oldest. And when I challenged that by looking at Sebatain De Vauban's models of siegecraft, it was challenged by comments on whether or not I knew of any particular obscure Edwarding naval theorist.
What you said was, 'if you dont know the buzzwords like I do, you are not educated in the field like I am'.
I didnt know the buzzwords, but then I didn't need to, it wasn't relevant to the validity of my commentary, because the topic was about the oldest wargame, not the oldest wargame Ketara found, and I referred back to De Vauban's models on siegecraft from several centuries earlier. It was a logical non-sequitor to dismiss evidence of a possible older game by checking my knowledge on an unrelated subject.
Did you check up on De Vauban like I recommended, or were you satisfied that you had found the words oldest wargame and decided not to look any further?
Given that you proudly state ' I don't need to be an expert in any subject to have insight' though, I'm not hopeful of any improved quality in your post content as a result of self-awareness.
Your error here is in assuming that quality comes from accreditation and not from input.
Its the same bugbear, the assumption that if you are not from our club you have nothing important to add to the discussion.
Interesting that you didn't even attempt to challenge me on my amateur historical or science contributions. You see I passed on my theories to experts in the field who are far better suited than I do handling them. It's not the Orlanth show, and I am not deluded enough to think it is; but I cant be of no value if universities choose to follow up my concepts.
Edit : Ketara removed his previous post while I was typing this. So OK we have a truce, and I toned it down a bit.
Actually, given the above, I wont bother comihg back to deal with the previous reply to me fully. The Dunning-Kruger levels and needless hostility are just too farcical.
A final statement on this silly argument Orlanth has insisted on having, then. My position throughout has been 'this would be great but is not currently feasible because of limited resources'. I haven't even renotely suggested that an opinion be disregarded, but have simply stated, politely until now, why laser scanning every inscribed artefact is not realistic, and why current approaches are sufficient for our purposes and appropriate to our available levels of technology.
Eventually it might become financially viable, or military technologies may become both available and affordable - as has happened several times in archaeology's history. I work directly with two of the leaders in utilising declassified CORONA imagery, for instance. Some out the box thinking, I suppose. A friend managed to get a prototype Mars Rover for geophysics. As it happens, some projects have had intelligence experts from some of the most respected national security agencies on the planet in on things. Some people laser scan tablets. Amazingly, you're not the first person to suggest we do it to everything with text on it. As I've said repeatedly, however, most of what can be done with textual artefacts with laser scanning at current levels of technology can be done with photography-based techniques. It would be great to do it anyway to have them on hand for the future, but you need to get funding, and nobody in the humanities funds a project on the basis that one day it will be useful. So whilst a lovely idea, it is not viable at the moment.
The arrogance of assuming that you have potentially paradigm-shifting insights that no one in a massive discipline has had is quite remarkable when you display absolutely no familiarity with how academic research or funding works. We're not simply failing to do things because no one has thought to or because no one has thought of framing a funding application as relevant to other issues - literally every funding application guide specifically demands a lengthy explanation of why and how the project will contribute to research beyond the field, provide value to and engage the public, and allow for extensive outreach. You're not suggesting something ingenuous, you're positing something every lowly-research student has to do to get onto a programme.
So, to shift the topic back to the Late Bronze Age..... I am interested in learning more about the supposed "Sea Peoples" of the period to see what has been put together about them as a group. Any books on this topic you would recommend for a layman?
nfe wrote: Actually, given the above, I wont bother comihg back to deal with the previous reply to me fully. The Dunning-Kruger levels and needless hostility are just too farcical.
I haven't even renotely suggested that an opinion be disregarded,
Yes you have. Its either viable idea you don't think the time is right for, or its Dunning-Kruger. Choose.
You cant accuse people of scaling Mt Stupid if you consider the idea is not to be disregarded.
but have simply stated, politely until now, why laser scanning every inscribed artefact is not realistic, and why current approaches are sufficient for our purposes and appropriate to our available levels of technology.
Actually you haven't. You gave a preference against laser scanning, but didn't explain why, other than its not what you are used to, which is strictly for hands on analogue work. You even admitted that it has superior quality. You have now admitted it has its proponents.
Eventually it might become financially viable, or military technologies may become both available and affordable - as has happened several times in archaeology's history. I work directly with two of the leaders in utilising declassified CORONA imagery, for instance. Some out the box thinking, I suppose. A friend managed to get a prototype Mars Rover for geophysics. As it happens, some projects have had intelligence experts from some of the most respected national security agencies on the planet in on things.
Good so you can accept that there are roads of access for military technology into academic study. Bet that Mars Rover is worth more than 35K.
A fast computer for codebreaking isn't so stupid then isn't it. * Neither is getting access to codebreakers. Government access might have results, unless the Mars Rovers are now available in ASDA.
Some people laser scan tablets. Amazingly, you're not the first person to suggest we do it to everything with text on it. As I've said repeatedly, however, most of what can be done with textual artefacts with laser scanning at current levels of technology can be done with photography-based techniques.
So I am onto the right idea, from the point of view of some of your colleagues. Perhaps I am not far off after all.
It would be great to do it anyway to have them on hand for the future, but you need to get funding, and nobody in the humanities funds a project on the basis that one day it will be useful. So whilst a lovely idea, it is not viable at the moment.
It's a lovely idea right. How patronising, oh whata lovely idea, but so Dunning-Kruger.
As laser scanning viable and is being done now, how about positing its advantages. Instead of working with analogue by hand if you move to laser scanning you can work entirely digitally and also disseminate the information between researchers more easily.
Its not just the future its now. What you are saying is indistinguishable from refusing to move to disk because tape is what you are used to. Sooner or later the change will come, make it sooner and not have to do the work twice.
Is all this a struggle to prevent obsolescence of your personal skillset? You described to some length your analogue photogrammetry skills, and the work you do with them. It could explain why you lashed out when digitising was propositioned.
The arrogance of assuming that you have potentially paradigm-shifting insights that no one in a massive discipline has had is quite remarkable when you display absolutely no familiarity with how academic research or funding works.
You contradict yourself. I already knew that one could get rare and expensive things from the government with the right excuse. You proved that by admitting what colleagues of yours have managed to get which includes SigInt gear.
Yet somehow that translates into a lack of understanding of academic funding. I have been consistent in my logical flow, I suggest you do the same.
There is no funding, no funding, no funding, but a Mars rover, but no funding, no funding, no funding, but cutting edge military imaging hardware/software.
We're not simply failing to do things because no one has thought to or because no one has thought of framing a funding application as relevant to other issues - literally every funding application guide specifically demands a lengthy explanation of why and how the project will contribute to research beyond the field, provide value to and engage the public, and allow for extensive outreach.
I do understand funding applications. I worked for a homeless charity that got successful lottery funding. Same principles apply. I wasn't the one who made the application, that was a former banker who volunteered on the same project, but I learned from him. He spent a lot of time on it getting it just right, very serious work went into that, over three months for a 20 page document, and yes he had past expertise on this, from the other side I think, which he used with care, we were lucky to have him on the team.
You're not suggesting something ingenuous, you're positing something every lowly-research student has to do to get onto a programme.
So that's not Mt Stupid either, if I am positing what those in your field also do, but on my own and without prompting; how the feth is that Dunning-Kruger?
You could have said something on the lines of: several people in the field have posited this idea before Orlanth but I don't like it for these reasons.... rather than try and convince everyone that it is just a fringe whackjob idea.
Also for the record Dunning-Kruger doesn't easily apply to cross field analytics, a broad shallow knowledge base can reveal out of the box solutions. Insight can be gleaned from people with popular science levels of involvement and a bit of imagination. Seen this pay off many times. Good common examples of this are well written hard science fiction, you don't need to be a physics god to write plausible hard SF and in doing so provide deep insight into future trends in avenues where formal experience is more limited. Arthur C Clarke was not a cutting edge rocket scientist, but he inspired many who were.
* Computer technology is still growing exponentially. This means that hardware is being replaced as certain agencies like/need to have the latest generation of tech. Usually the old stuff is destroyed, but there are perhaps options for a worth academic cause. Remember also that while advanced computers are expensive the common way to make a data cruncher is by linking GPU's as converted CPU's. This requires normal commercial computer architecture rather than more expensive server architecture. This will still be expensive, but not necessarily beyond what academicians could get from a wealthy donor or corporate sponsor. That is assuming you don't get hands off access to last years model of codebreaker for free from the spooks.
You tell people not to troll, and then you go quote a bunch of single sentences in a giant wall and respond to each of them with the same mix brand of red-herrings, goal post moving, and straw men that you always use.
I stopped keeping track of how many sharks you managed to jump ages ago, but I'm glad to see there's some consistency in the world.
Uh... guys? Shall we keep this civil and academic? This was a great thread until you started to fight. You have both made your respective points.
Shall we go back to talking about the Bronze Age and related topics?
I see. But the thing is, all of this has already been done. By hand. Because we do not have a ten thousand clay tablets. The entire corpus of known Linear A texts for example fits on a few sheets of paper. And for many other undeciphered languages we have even less to go on..
If its done by hand it isnt done. People cannot cross reference every symbol and categorise it in relation to other surrounding symbols, it needs a computer.
The British Museum claims to have 130,000 texts. So I don't know where you get the idea of a few sheets of paper.
Looking at the breakdown there are tens of thousands of fragments from some cultures. These are perhaps large enough sample groups for a volume pattern test. Though you will need to know some seed information about where the tablets were found so that you can begin to guess as to the contents of the documentation.
That is not Linear A though. The languages for which we have large collections are also the ones which we have been able to translate already.
We can tell whether some character is a number or a vowel (especially with Linear A, since Linear B which uses the same characters has been deciphered) with a fair degree of accuracy. For Linear A we can even spell out entire words and texts. Problem is those words are unintelligible because they are in an unknown language not closely related to any known language (Minoan is basically the Basque or the Hungarian of the Bronze Age I guess). The only thing we can somewhat guess at is place names (which are presumably derived from the Minoan language and therefore related). For example it may be that the Linear A word "Keniso" is the Minoan name for Knossos. But that is as far as we have gotten in the past 50 years, and as far as we are going to get until we find some bilingual text that could give us a starting point at finding out the meaning behind Linear A words. We can also guess which words are meant to be numbers and which are meant to be commodities, but the precise meaning still eludes us.
This makes it a pictoral code without a key, in codebreaking terms. Nothing especially unusual, except for the complete lack of double encryption. Agencies DO break codes like this. I am sure the Russians have a dab hand in it too.
I don't know anything about military code breaking but I assume the difference is that the codes that agencies break are all encode living (and known) languages. I highly doubt the Russian military uses anything but Russian for its messages for example. Using an unknown language in fact does appear to be a highly effective way of making a (nearly) unbreakable code. I googled a bit and the US used obscure Native American languages for its messages for this reason.
A language is a very different sort of code from a military code. A military code or cipher is a substitution. It substitutes the characters or sounds of its message (the plaintext, in codebreaking terms) with different characters or sounds. This means that if you can figure out the logic or the algorithm behind the code or cipher, you can restore the message back to its initial form. A language on the other hand encodes complicated ideas into sounds at different levels (which can then be further encoded into characters). There is no plaintext. There is no logic. There is no algorithm. You can not decode the sounds to the ideas they represent because there exists no way of finding out how a specific sound is related to any idea. Languages are much more complicated than any code or cipher that has ever been broken.
As excited as I get when thinking about using codebreaking techniques for deciphering languages, I just don't see how you can solve an equation with no known variables.
On a sidenote, I often do exercises like this where you get a text in an unknown language and then have to answer questions about it based on patterns (I even won a prize once in a competition). Sometimes you can even use patterns to translate an entire text even though it is an incredibly obscure language spoken only by some tribe deep in the Amazon forests. That is pretty cool. Thing is, you always need a starting point. To solve the equation you always need at least one known variable. With dead languages like Linear A, there is none. All variables are unknown which makes them completely impossible to solve or 'break'.
So you do this. Cool.
However maybe Ketara will come after you too.
Yeah. It is cool. The university of Leiden organises olympiads for it. I participated in it when I was a school kid since I loved puzzling with languages. I seriously contemplated studying linguistics, but figured that job prospects in that field are even worse than in archaeology. Ketara can come after me any time he wants linguistic puzzles
Orlanth wrote: I explained the dilemma earlier. You do need a starting point, your are correct, and to get one you need to make simultaneous breakthroughs because you have no starting point and have a cross match. Examples of how this was done was given in the previous comment.
Now your problem here is with the word impossible. The above problem is far less of an issue than double encryption, which should result in totally random code. But that is NOT unbreakable, just nearly unbreakable.
One advantage you have is with isolating where the tablets come from, similar to adding HumInt to the SigInt in the pattern. So for example if you have something that might be a trade document from a coastal city in asia minor you might look for references for the word for 'tin', because that is where this crucial import material will be arriving. Rural communities might not have that resource on their trade list. If the Egyptians, who we can read report of a saying of the hittites or a phrase they used in their documentation we could ook for that systematically and see if the same symbols in unrelated texts make sense.
Yeah, the starting point is that you need at least a partial translation. You need to have an idea of what at least some of the words mean. Because otherwise you can't look for references to the word tin, since you do not know which of the ~30 words on your trade manifest means tin. Any of them could mean tin, so how you are going to say which one it is? What if it is a port that also frequently gets shipments of copper, grain and wood? How are you going to tell apart the word for tin from the word for grain? Or the words for dog and soup (which is what my example sentences were about)?
Orlanth wrote: A lot of this is translating the impossible into the possible via looking for the plausible. If you want an open unclassified example of this look at the history of Bletchley Park. While the early computers are the stars of the show, a lot of the codebreaking involved guessing words based on. So the first code of the day from St Nazaire was likely to be a weather report, because it gave an indicator of weather for central Europe all day. This was not always so, but it was often enough. So cross reference assuming codewords meant 'sunny' or 'storms' etc.
That worked because they knew what the German words for "sunny" or "stormy" are.
Maj jucha tivoj kajara obitsjimäl.
Jucha tivoj kajara jamita.
Maj jucha ja isakamäl jamidj.
Jucha ja obitsjimu.
Jucha tivoj kajara alisö obitsjimita.
Just from this small sample, you should be able to figure out which words are verbs, nouns and pronouns, and even what the word order of the language is (whether it is subject-object-verb or subject-verb-object etc.).
I personally cant tell one word from another. I am not a linguist. But I take your word for it.
Try it! It is huge fun! You don't need to be a linguist, I am not a linguist either. To give a starting point, "jucha" is a noun and means "soup" (bonus internet points for the person who guesses from which language this word is derived).
However, what you will not be able to figure out is what the sentences actually mean. Pattern recognition can only bring you understanding of the structure of a language. To understand what it really means, you need to have at least some translations.
Ok. looking at the above. Assuming it was part of a larger database of text fragments in a lost language. You could try and pattern match likely words depending on context of the document. It is appears to be a stack of poetry from a house. You also have a stack of what appears to be tax records from another part of the dig site. Say you hypothesis one word may mean cows, another may mean soldiers from your analysis of the tax documents. When reading the poetry as cross reference you hypotheses the sentence to say 'the cow owns five soldiers', this doesn't fit, there is a mistake somewhere, 'the soldier owns five cows' however makes sense.
You cant hope to cross reference this, but a computer can, and the larger the dataset the more cross references it can make.
For that you'd (or the computer) first need to already know the words "the", "to own" and "five" though. Do you see the difficulty? You need a starting point somewhere. If absolutely no variable is known, there is no possible starting point.
Orlanth wrote: Yes you will need to get a lucky break but when you do it can begin to unravel. Ideally you only need one tablet (preferably double sourced though) to have a list of things in numbered order, on the first year this happened, on the second that happened etc, and a computer might pick up the numerical sequence and thus decode a basic numbers system. You can work out a lot from even rough numbers. If a number is very large it might mean sheep or soldiers or bushels of grain, if a smaller number it might mean chariots or ships.
From the structure you could figure out which words indicate numbers, but how would you ever know which numbers? How do you know that the word "chetirye'' in Russian means 4, and not 5?
I don't know anything about military code breaking but I assume the difference is that the codes that agencies break are all encode living (and known) languages. I highly doubt the Russian military uses anything but Russian for its messages for example. Using an unknown language in fact does appear to be a highly effective way of making a (nearly) unbreakable code. I googled a bit and the US used obscure Native American languages for its messages for this reason.
Usually but not necessarily. Codebreakers can work with anything, including pictograms. Most work is text based, but it doesnt end there.
A language is a very different sort of code from a military code. A military code or cipher is a substitution. It substitutes the characters or sounds of its message (the plaintext, in codebreaking terms) with different characters or sounds. This means that if you can figure out the logic or the algorithm behind the code or cipher, you can restore the message back to its initial form. A language on the other hand encodes complicated ideas into sounds at different levels (which can then be further encoded into characters). There is no plaintext. There is no logic. There is no algorithm. You can not decode the sounds to the ideas they represent because there exists no way of finding out how a specific sound is related to any idea. Languages are much more complicated than any code or cipher that has ever been broken.
As excited as I get when thinking about using codebreaking techniques for deciphering languages, I just don't see how you can solve an equation with no known variables.
Brute force. For example codebreaker computers have to work with double encryption so the resulting pattern doesn't look like language either. Even a simple double encrypted code looks like a solid block of text. There are no words to grasp onto and transfer, you need a holistic approach.
Yeah. It is cool. The university of Leiden organises olympiads for it. I participated in it when I was a school kid since I loved puzzling with languages. I seriously contemplated studying linguistics, but figured that job prospects in that field are even worse than in archaeology. Ketara can come after me any time he wants linguistic puzzles
Yeah, the starting point is that you need at least a partial translation. You need to have an idea of what at least some of the words mean.
You can work without a partial translation. Its harder but not impossible. As said earlier you cannot make a breakthrough without a seed, and you cant get a seed without cross reference. But you can hold to memory several candidate seeds and then test them to see if a pattern match occurs. This is one of the reasons you need a powerful computer and not do this by hand. It is brute force data crunching. Make or hold several assumptions at once so a text makes sense and pattern match all other known instances of those symbols, if they also make sense you have a match, if they do not you dont. Try again. It has to be an automated process because its a case of testing potential patterns in sequence.
With crude data crunching it might be possible to find patterns on their own by finding relatable symbols. Then you can attempt to work it backwards, for this to work you will need to have clues on the documents original function from where it was found and with what.
To make smart guesses you need instead to have an idea what a text is about, look for commonly recurring patterns in different types of texts. what sort of symbols would occur on a tablet found in a store of tax records. how would it differ from a store found in the remains of what looks like a temple, or someones house.
Because otherwise you can't look for references to the word tin, since you do not know which of the ~30 words on your trade manifest means tin. Any of them could mean tin, so how you are going to say which one it is? What if it is a port that also frequently gets shipments of copper, grain and wood? How are you going to tell apart the word for tin from the word for grain? Or the words for dog and soup (which is what my example sentences were about)?
Ok.
Tin. No you dont know which word it tin, but tin would come up as a manifest in certain areas more often than others. Tin was a very important commodity as it made high quality bronze, the primary metal of the era. Tin came from only a few places, England and central Asia. The fact that the ancient Levant was mining tin in Cornwall is amazing enough.
We now a bit about tin so we can start a pattern search for symbols repeatedly found in some sources. Its not needed in most texts because people normally work with copper or bronze, tin is a component. It would be of great important around coastal ports which likely traded across the Mediterranean than inland. It would be of heightened importance in other specific locations too.
Searches between sets of documents from different locations might highlight which symbols are candidates to mean tin.
Grain. One of the first things you will want to look for are possible number systems, this is relatively easy because pictographic and other early number systems had some form of tally. If one is one line, two might be two lines. Numbers are one of the first patterns to search for.
Grain will be fairly ubiquitous in records, one could expect it to be very common but not immediately identifiable. It might be enough to identify numbers and a batch of which symbols mean products. If however you work out a number system you can begin to allocate guess names to products based on relative values. We know from wrecks what sorts of products were being traded at the time, and can give some guesses as to how many amphorae or pigs of various products are likely.
Grain may have higher numbers attached to it in most documents, its something you want to store a lot of.
Yes these examples are longshots, they all are. But you only need to make one breakthrough before you have a toe into the language. A computer gives you a good chance based cross referencing and analysis gives you a good chance.
I would love to know if any shipwreck tablets are readable. Good chance one is a stock inventory/bill of lading. You could get clues to potential cross matches by what was found on the wreck.
The Black Sea is offering up a lot of ancient wrecks in good condition.
That worked because they knew what the German words for "sunny" or "stormy" are.
True but that only helps with one level of encryption. You only translate into the German for sunny if you break both halves of the code.
Iron_Captain wrote: For that you'd (or the computer) first need to already know the words "the", "to own" and "five" though. Do you see the difficulty? You need a starting point somewhere. If absolutely no variable is known, there is no possible starting point.
Hold that thought, because this is what I have been saying to you all along. You need to have several partial theories that together pattern match.
You make pointers to certain symbols meaning certain words or numbers, you can also have a category rather than a specific value. So you could have the [person] owns [number] [products] as a match without even being sure of the value of 'soldier', 'cows' and 'five'. You don't even have to have 'owns'.
The point is that you can place possible markers of meaning to symbols and then cross reference via the computer to see if it makes unrelated documents make sense. You need to batch your breakthroughs.
From the structure you could figure out which words indicate numbers, but how would you ever know which numbers? How do you know that the word "chetirye'' in Russian means 4, and not 5?
Symbolic language normally holds a clue as to numerical values. Let us assume this is not so and you don't know the order, you only need to fine one source with items in number order to have a pattern match. Maybe no such source exists, but then again it might. Its another variable for the computer to check.
I am sorry that I am not clearer, this is rather hard to describe. Look at a video on codebreaking to understand more. It essentially boils down to a combination of guesswork based on information clues and brute data crunching to look for patterns that work based on the guesses offered. I think the skills are likely transferable.
That is not Linear A though. The languages for which we have large collections are also the ones which we have been able to translate already.
Mentioned this earlier. I dont specify. there are more translation jobs than this.
Yeah, but most of it has either already been translated or so far has eluded translation. And those languages that are not translated yet generally have very small corpuses of known text.
I don't know anything about military code breaking but I assume the difference is that the codes that agencies break are all encode living (and known) languages. I highly doubt the Russian military uses anything but Russian for its messages for example. Using an unknown language in fact does appear to be a highly effective way of making a (nearly) unbreakable code. I googled a bit and the US used obscure Native American languages for its messages for this reason.
Usually but not necessarily. Codebreakers can work with anything, including pictograms. Most work is text based, but it doesnt end there.
Yeah, but all of it is language-based. All codes rely on the assumption that the underlying language is known. Afaik from my quick reading about, never has a code been cracked of which the underlying language was not known.
A language is a very different sort of code from a military code. A military code or cipher is a substitution. It substitutes the characters or sounds of its message (the plaintext, in codebreaking terms) with different characters or sounds. This means that if you can figure out the logic or the algorithm behind the code or cipher, you can restore the message back to its initial form. A language on the other hand encodes complicated ideas into sounds at different levels (which can then be further encoded into characters). There is no plaintext. There is no logic. There is no algorithm. You can not decode the sounds to the ideas they represent because there exists no way of finding out how a specific sound is related to any idea. Languages are much more complicated than any code or cipher that has ever been broken.
As excited as I get when thinking about using codebreaking techniques for deciphering languages, I just don't see how you can solve an equation with no known variables.
Brute force. For example codebreaker computers have to work with double encryption so the resulting pattern doesn't look like language either. Even a simple double encrypted code looks like a solid block of text. There are no words to grasp onto and transfer, you need a holistic approach.
Brute force? So do you mean you would try to match every known word in Linear A with every known word in English? But that'd be trillions and trillions of possible outcomes! And there'd be thousands of possible outcomes that would all make perfect sense? I mean "u menya chetyrye rublya" can translate to "I like dogs", "Menya paid ten talents of grain", "Rub owes me five cows", "I have four rubles" or something else entirely. Each of these translations makes sense. How are you going to find out which one is right using brute force techniques?
Yeah, the starting point is that you need at least a partial translation. You need to have an idea of what at least some of the words mean.
You can work without a partial translation. Its harder but not impossible. As said earlier you cannot make a breakthrough without a seed, and you cant get a seed without cross reference. But you can hold to memory several candidate seeds and then test them to see if a pattern match occurs. This is one of the reasons you need a powerful computer and not do this by hand. It is brute force data crunching. Make or hold several assumptions at once so a text makes sense and pattern match all other known instances of those symbols, if they also make sense you have a match, if they do not you dont. Try again. It has to be an automated process because its a case of testing potential patterns in sequence.
With crude data crunching it might be possible to find patterns on their own by finding relatable symbols. Then you can attempt to work it backwards, for this to work you will need to have clues on the documents original function from where it was found and with what.
To make smart guesses you need instead to have an idea what a text is about, look for commonly recurring patterns in different types of texts. what sort of symbols would occur on a tablet found in a store of tax records. how would it differ from a store found in the remains of what looks like a temple, or someones house.
What practically would a "seed" mean in terms of attempting to translate a language? Would it be an idea of what an inscription could possibly mean? Because then there'd be a myriad seeds that't all fit perfectly but you'd still have no way of telling which one is right. And what if you simply can't tell the function of the inscription (because, well, you can't read it and given its location it could have had a hundred different functions)?
And let's say I have symbol Ш, which pattern matches with symbols А, О, И, У, Р, Я and a large amount of other symbols from the known corpus consisting of a total of 33 symbols? How would that help me understand the phonetic value of of Ш or the semantic value of the words in which it occurs? Or if I discover that the word "kajara" often occurs in inscriptions found in domestic settings, especially at the entrance to residences? It would not tell me anything about its meaning. Even with an ideal outcome, where I find out exactly which words are found in which settings at which frequency and in combination with what other words in what frequencies, I'd still not be any closer to translating anything. Because it would all still be meaningless patterns. I can only start giving meaning to these patterns when I find out what they are about.
Because otherwise you can't look for references to the word tin, since you do not know which of the ~30 words on your trade manifest means tin. Any of them could mean tin, so how you are going to say which one it is? What if it is a port that also frequently gets shipments of copper, grain and wood? How are you going to tell apart the word for tin from the word for grain? Or the words for dog and soup (which is what my example sentences were about)?
Ok.
Tin. No you dont know which word it tin, but tin would come up as a manifest in certain areas more often than others. Tin was a very important commodity as it made high quality bronze, the primary metal of the era. Tin came from only a few places, England and central Asia. The fact that the ancient Levant was mining tin in Cornwall is amazing enough.
We now a bit about tin so we can start a pattern search for symbols repeatedly found in some sources. Its not needed in most texts because people normally work with copper or bronze, tin is a component. It would be of great important around coastal ports which likely traded across the Mediterranean than inland. It would be of heightened importance in other specific locations too.
Searches between sets of documents from different locations might highlight which symbols are candidates to mean tin.
Grain. One of the first things you will want to look for are possible number systems, this is relatively easy because pictographic and other early number systems had some form of tally. If one is one line, two might be two lines. Numbers are one of the first patterns to search for.
Grain will be fairly ubiquitous in records, one could expect it to be very common but not immediately identifiable. It might be enough to identify numbers and a batch of which symbols mean products. If however you work out a number system you can begin to allocate guess names to products based on relative values. We know from wrecks what sorts of products were being traded at the time, and can give some guesses as to how many amphorae or pigs of various products are likely.
Grain may have higher numbers attached to it in most documents, its something you want to store a lot of.
Yes these examples are longshots, they all are. But you only need to make one breakthrough before you have a toe into the language. A computer gives you a good chance based cross referencing and analysis gives you a good chance.
I would love to know if any shipwreck tablets are readable. Good chance one is a stock inventory/bill of lading. You could get clues to potential cross matches by what was found on the wreck.
The Black Sea is offering up a lot of ancient wrecks in good condition.
But... how do you which numbers are high and which are low? You don't know any of their numbers! A few scripts use a tallying system, but many others don't (and even tallying marks can be highly ambiguous without context). And how do you tell grain apart from other commodities traded in bulk such as timber or wine? Or tin from other valuable commodities shipped over long distances such as amber or gold?
And yeah, you might get a document from a shipwreck that conveniently tells you what the ship carried. But how big is the chance that is document will be in Linear A or whatever unknown language you want to translate? And even then, with a single ship manifest you aren't going to be able to do much.
I really like your enthusiasm, but I don't think there is a big chance you are ever going to decipher a language this way. Sure, you can discover lots of useful patterns, especially if a writing system is logographic rather than syllabic or alphabetic. But getting at the actual meaning of texts? Patterns aren't going to be enough for that, so better hope some bilingual text shows up.
Iron_Captain wrote: For that you'd (or the computer) first need to already know the words "the", "to own" and "five" though. Do you see the difficulty? You need a starting point somewhere. If absolutely no variable is known, there is no possible starting point.
Hold that thought, because this is what I have been saying to you all along. You need to have several partial theories that together pattern match.
You make pointers to certain symbols meaning certain words or numbers, you can also have a category rather than a specific value. So you could have the [person] owns [number] [products] as a match without even being sure of the value of 'soldier', 'cows' and 'five'. You don't even have to have 'owns'.
The point is that you can place possible markers of meaning to symbols and then cross reference via the computer to see if it makes unrelated documents make sense. You need to batch your breakthroughs.
So at most I'd be able to identify basic elements of sentence structure like [object or subject][verb][number][object or subject]. Which we can already do without computers. How would that make unrelated documents make sense? At most we'd be able to confirm that they indeed appear to have the same sentence structure, or instead that this language appears to have variation in its sentence structures. We'd not get any closer to the meaning of the inscriptions.
From the structure you could figure out which words indicate numbers, but how would you ever know which numbers? How do you know that the word "chetirye'' in Russian means 4, and not 5?
Symbolic language normally holds a clue as to numerical values. Let us assume this is not so and you don't know the order, you only need to fine one source with items in number order to have a pattern match. Maybe no such source exists, but then again it might. Its another variable for the computer to check.
I am sorry that I am not clearer, this is rather hard to describe. Look at a video on codebreaking to understand more. It essentially boils down to a combination of guesswork based on information clues and brute data crunching to look for patterns that work based on the guesses offered. I think the skills are likely transferable.
But... Orlanth, how will you know whether the numbers are in order if you don't know what the numbers are? If you find a list of words you can identify as numbers, how do you know they go 1, 2, 3, etc. and not 3, 1, 17 for example? And what if this language used a duodecimal, vigesimal or *shudders* a sexagesimal counting system rather than a decimal one?
Also if you find ship with cargo on board how do you know that the tablet you find on board has anything to do with that cargo? It might relate to the cargo, or be a missive for someone, or be related to how to control the ship, be a series of instructions - heck it could be someone's expensive shopping list.
Comparing patterns to something physical only works if you already know that there IS a relation between the text and items. Even then you won't know what they are or are not saying (it could be listing how much there is, or noting ownership, condition, intended destination, insurance status, what kind of shipping its under, etc...).
You'd need massive bodies of information for this kind of approach to translation. You'd need countless tablets from warehouses, ships, homes, business and more to even attempt to match such patterns to physical items. Even then it likely wouldn't be certain unless you could find some, even one, translated item translated from or into another known (or partly known) language.
LordofHats wrote: You tell people not to troll, and then you go quote a bunch of single sentences in a giant wall and respond to each of them with the same mix brand of red-herrings, goal post moving, and straw men that you always use.
Keep telling yourself that.
If you cannot handle the agrument attack the person.
Yeah, but all of it is language-based. All codes rely on the assumption that the underlying language is known. Afaik from my quick reading about, never has a code been cracked of which the underlying language was not known.
I don't see how you keep missing this point. The 'code' is the language. The documents are not expected to be actually encrypted.
Brute force? So do you mean you would try to match every known word in Linear A with every known word in English? But that'd be trillions and trillions of possible outcomes!
And there I thought i wasn't wasting my time explain, again and again how codebreaking works.
First you apply hypotheses, then you apply brute force calculations. One, two.
You don't try to brute force calculate a whole lexicon at the same time without suppositions.
Its been this was since Bletchley Park, only the computers have got more powerful.
And there'd be thousands of possible outcomes that would all make perfect sense? I mean "u menya chetyrye rublya" can translate to "I like dogs", "Menya paid ten talents of grain", "Rub owes me five cows", "I have four rubles" or something else entirely. Each of these translations makes sense. How are you going to find out which one is right using brute force techniques?
The larger the dataset the larger area for pattern matching, It could be expected that you get potential hits between two documents, but between ten? twenty?
Note that for this to work you need a larger dataset, the bigger the better. I cannot expect results for a language for which we only have scattered fragments..
What practically would a "seed" mean in terms of attempting to translate a language? Would it be an idea of what an inscription could possibly mean? Because then there'd be a myriad seeds that't all fit perfectly but you'd still have no way of telling which one is right.
That's where you use PATTERN MATCHING. You make a guess at the seed to fit a document, or more accurately the computer does based on the parameters you set it, then it pattern matches all other documents, or even parts of the same document. That has been codebreaking 101 since inception.
To explain pattern matching: Take a letter substitution code, something very simple as our example, if you determine that words EAT mean DOG other instances of E A and T would make sense in relation to other letters if they do not EAT doesnt mean DOG, but might mean CAT.
And what if you simply can't tell the function of the inscription (because, well, you can't read it and given its location it could have had a hundred different functions)?
Yes it can, but it works.
The people at Bletchley Park (keep mentioning this because you can look it up and see how it works yourself) could have said. We cant guess what this code is about , it could have a hundred thousand applications. They would be right, except it would likely be more. All Enigma traffic essentially looks the same. But if it comes from a specified time and place it might have a specified function. You can GUESS that. This is where you get a possible toe into the code.
Note that I never said anything about certainties, there is a lot of trial and error.
The point to grasp is this. All the 'you'll never work that out', or 'you cant do this', is exactly what people have said about codes for exactly the same reasons. But the codes can be broken, that is a fact.
Double encryption makes things way harder, and that can be broken too.
And let's say I have symbol Ш, which pattern matches with symbols А, О, И, У, Р, Я and a large amount of other symbols from the known corpus consisting of a total of 33 symbols? How would that help me understand the phonetic value of of Ш or the semantic value of the words in which it occurs? Or if I discover that the word "kajara" often occurs in inscriptions found in domestic settings, especially at the entrance to residences? It would not tell me anything about its meaning. Even with an ideal outcome, where I find out exactly which words are found in which settings at which frequency and in combination with what other words in what frequencies, I'd still not be any closer to translating anything. Because it would all still be meaningless patterns. I can only start giving meaning to these patterns when I find out what they are about.
Follow that thought through.
You can only start giving meaning to those patterns when you summise what they may be about. you dont need to start with a fact. You start with a supposition that you put to test. One, two.
There are many possible reasons for a word on a door, but we can guess as to what they are. This is still not of use unless you can pattern match the word in larger bodies of texts.
But... how do you which numbers are high and which are low? You don't know any of their numbers!
Same proposition applies. One, two.
Whenever you ask the question, how do you know, you re asking the same question codebreakers ask themselves, and more interestingly those who think their task impossible.
'How do you know' is replaced with, 'we make a good guess' because on what we see in front of us.
Then you apply pattern matching. One, two.
A few scripts use a tallying system, but many others don't (and even tallying marks can be highly ambiguous without context). And how do you tell grain apart from other commodities traded in bulk such as timber or wine? Or tin from other valuable commodities shipped over long distances such as amber or gold?
Still the same principle. To break the unbreakable code, which was what people thought Enigma was, first you apply your guesses. Tin comes from certain directions, gold from another. We have clues to this from surrounding evidence. We know where tin came from, gold is slightly trickier, and once in the system it might cycle round.
And yeah, you might get a document from a shipwreck that conveniently tells you what the ship carried. But how big is the chance that is document will be in Linear A or whatever unknown language you want to translate? And even then, with a single ship manifest you aren't going to be able to do much.
I really like your enthusiasm, but I don't think there is a big chance you are ever going to decipher a language this way. Sure, you can discover lots of useful patterns, especially if a writing system is logographic rather than syllabic or alphabetic. But getting at the actual meaning of texts? Patterns aren't going to be enough for that, so better hope some bilingual text shows up.
On the contrary, even a few likely matches might open up the dataset. Lets go back to the simpler example of a letter substitution code in English. You are searching for likely matches for the letter E, and choose accordingly from commonly occuring letters. You might have ongoing guesses for E but leave it and move on to S and T. You don't discard the partial working you did with E.
Imagine that but on a much much larger scale. Back to Bletchley Park, the codebreaking was mostly done by hand, some extra high level cyphers used the first computers. A supposition was made, and it was tested, if the supposition was passed you had the code for the rest of the day, until it reset, as it did daily. If you failed you tried the next supposition.
What computer support there was was of a huge machine with a power of a tiny fraction of a pocket calculator.
So at most I'd be able to identify basic elements of sentence structure like [object or subject][verb][number][object or subject]. Which we can already do without computers. How would that make unrelated documents make sense? At most we'd be able to confirm that they indeed appear to have the same sentence structure, or instead that this language appears to have variation in its sentence structures. We'd not get any closer to the meaning of the inscriptions.
Now look at what you can do with supposition and pattern matching today:
First scan in all the documents you can find by the same method, so the computer can analyse every symbol on every document. This should be preferably done via a very precise process so the computer can analyse for itseld what symbols are and even take partial pattern matches from partial symbols on the edges of or destroyed parts of documents.
Second the computer can tally all symbols, with a grand total of numbers of symbols of each type, cross referenced with what symbols they are adjacent to and other relational data.
The computer or users can add guesses for pattern match based on symbol frequency and it relation to other symbols.
Third each document has a subfile saying where it is from and a text box for those in the field to summise likely purposes of the document based on surrounding evidence of its location.
Users add values to this as guesses to start a pattern match.
All this is kept on file simultaneously, every partial guess is matched with the next partial guess. This is where a powerful computer is essential.
So back to tin as an example. You can try and guess which word is tin, but it is enough to have a tally of which documents came from ports likely to handle tin and were likely either manifests or tax/trade records dependant on location. Tin is a word more likely to occur there and less likely to appear elsewhere or in other document types. From this you might have a list of candidate words for tin. The computer holds onto that as a subfile annotation for each candidate symbol. A symbol might be a candidate for many different words, and some words might have several meanings.Gold and sun might be the same symbol.
Certain different documents can be expected to include the word grain, or specific types of produce, but said words should appear in documents everywhere.
The point is a modern computer can hold a large database of symbols and annotations of each one, and pattern match them ALL in all likely permutations. As the guesses grow a likelihood can be applied to a supposition. We might not have the luxury of knowing whether a supposition is ever wrong, as we are translating from an unknown language, our rules might not apply. But probabilities likely will, common things are common words. Some items will need to be recorded, such as items to be taxed. If we can guess that list, or better yet get a travellers report in a language we already know that further adds quality guesses.
Nothing is lost, the database is amended with possible matches. You might add a probability to a guess via the computer or manually. If you really think a symbol means gold, you can apply a priority to that, but it doesn't discard an earlier theory that the same symbol means iron.
If you are getting close to a breakthrough guesses will begin to match up across different documents, This could happen potentially at any time once you have sufficient number of suppositions.
It is an iterative process.
Now I am NOT saying that this process will work, what I am saying is that you should not assume that it WONT work. This process in much a simpler form has already achieved the 'impossible', codebreaking has moved on a long way from then. I honestly do think this is a worthy challenge, and not one to be handwaved away.
There are a lot of advantages even with translating a dead language from a limited dataset. First there is no time pressure, the 'code' doesn't reset every 24 hours or such, second it is not double encrypted, and third there is no reason to obfuscate your efforts so theories about document origins and purposes can be shared openly. A raw code might not appear in any recognisable linguistic form, in fact it may often appear as a solid binary stream with no annotation as to how to break it down, yet it is still a code, and in many cases can be broken. The computers can be trusted to do sterling work if we can trust ourselves to make worthy suppositions to test. A dead language is still a language, it has purpose in being understood directly, which gives us an advantage.
But... Orlanth, how will you know whether the numbers are in order if you don't know what the numbers are? If you find a list of words you can identify as numbers, how do you know they go 1, 2, 3, etc. and not 3, 1, 17 for example? And what if this language used a duodecimal, vigesimal or *shudders* a sexagesimal counting system rather than a decimal one?
Every 'how do you know?' question is answered by, we don't, we guess and our guesses go in the database of suppositions and are annotations to each document or symbol. You process the entire datastack sequentially and repeatedly by a powerful computer and look for patterns. One build the supposition, two pattern match. Repeat with the next supposition, intelligent guesses welcome.
Non decimal counting systems are possible. In fact we now know that some ancient cultures used base 60 as a numerical system for engineering so that ugly fractions do not occur so often. Why not look for that too.
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Overread wrote: Also if you find ship with cargo on board how do you know that the tablet you find on board has anything to do with that cargo? It might relate to the cargo, or be a missive for someone, or be related to how to control the ship, be a series of instructions - heck it could be someone's expensive shopping list.
Comparing patterns to something physical only works if you already know that there IS a relation between the text and items. Even then you won't know what they are or are not saying (it could be listing how much there is, or noting ownership, condition, intended destination, insurance status, what kind of shipping its under, etc...).
Go through the process of supposition and pattern match enough times and there is a reason to hope for a breakthrough.
You'd need massive bodies of information for this kind of approach to translation. You'd need countless tablets from warehouses, ships, homes, business and more to even attempt to match such patterns to physical items.
This is very true and I made this point early. The larger the dataset the better the chances of success. If surviving datasets of a particular language are very small there is little chance the dataset will be large enough to apply a meaningful process. To statistically process potential words you need a large volume preferably with a holistic view to the culture. How large, I cannot say. Several thousands tablets sounds good, half a dozen scraps does not.
Even then it likely wouldn't be certain unless you could find some, even one, translated item translated from or into another known (or partly known) language.
Even now we don't know what all the symbols mean in the languages we do know.
We might not be blessed with finding another Rosetta stone, but we might finds travellers reports in a known language telling us of other cultures. The ancient Levant was well connected, there was a lot of international correspondence. Even without direct translations we might get useful inroads if we know what items were regularly taxed, as those commodities would likely be recorded and appear together in lists.
I think I'll get a link to this thread sent out on the Agade mailing list. The world's Near Easternists really need to read it. It'll change philology, history, and archaeology forever.
nfe wrote: I think I'll get a link to this thread sent out on the Agade mailing list. The world's Near Easternists really need to read it. It'll change philology, history, and archaeology forever.
Just make sure I get full credit for my contributions!
nfe wrote: I think I'll get a link to this thread sent out on the Agade mailing list. The world's Near Easternists really need to read it. It'll change philology, history, and archaeology forever.
Just make sure I get full credit for my contributions!
And pay I should get pay too!!
Sorry mate there's a paradigm-shifting polymath that's gonna soak up all the attention.
Well not a report, but the summary suggests that its not the original ones, but those being bought and traded on the open market that are fakes; which is no shock in that wherever there is big money there are more fakes. With the science of faking getting better and better its no shock that they might well have been duped.
That said a lot of museums put on display copies of items, even some pretty famous finds have museums where most if not all the on display collection is a recreation. I believe most of the gold on display at the Sutton Hoo site in the UK is all copied (the originals being housed somewhere in the British Museum )
Kilkrazy wrote: To get back on topic, did anyone read the recent report about a number of Dead Sea Scroll fragments being found to be fakes?
I did.
Kind of brought it on themselves imo. Fake Dead Sea Scrolls are really damn common. Given Green's habit of stealing (EDIT: oh and by stealing, I mean buying from people who stole them, and given the state of the part of the Middle East he's been buying from I'm amazed no one's accused the guy of funding ISIS yet) historical artifacts from conflict nations and smuggling them into his private hands, you'd think he'd be able to stock his vanity project in the real deal but apparently not.
I have little problem with the fake antiquity trade, it makes the whole underground antiquity trade more dodgy and thus less attractive to those who want to try and sell real artifacts taken quietly from dig sites.
Kilkrazy wrote: To get back on topic, did anyone read the recent report about a number of Dead Sea Scroll fragments being found to be fakes?
I did.
Kind of brought it on themselves imo. Fake Dead Sea Scrolls are really damn common. Given Green's habit of stealing (EDIT: oh and by stealing, I mean buying from people who stole them, and given the state of the part of the Middle East he's been buying from I'm amazed no one's accused the guy of funding ISIS yet) historical artifacts from conflict nations and smuggling them into his private hands, you'd think he'd be able to stock his vanity project in the real deal but apparently not.
IIRC, he has been accused of funding ISIS. . . just not by anyone that actually matters.
Orlanth wrote: I have little problem with the fake antiquity trade, it makes the whole underground antiquity trade more dodgy and thus less attractive to those who want to try and sell real artifacts taken quietly from dig sites.
It has no discernable impact on this at all, unfortunately. One of the two directors of my project in Iraq leads the Dartmouth-based, CIA-backed satellite-monitoring project, the other is involved in cross-discplinary stuff with people tackling smuggling in the law department here at glasgow, and a large part of one of our grants (from the UK government) in iraq is to train local archaeologists to monitor looting practices so it comes up quite a lot whilst we're there. Most of it is local people looking for precious metals or other instrinsically valueble materials, or objects that would be difficult and awkward to fake for the little financial gain. My collegaue writing her PhD on looting practices in the Near East says this is pretty consistent with looting patterns worldwide.
It might have some impact on how viable art-faking is but on the other hand, once they've sold it, and you only need to sell it once, who cares? Plus the buyers are never in a position to investigate provenance and veracity well, and often don't care.
Orlanth wrote: We might not be blessed with finding another Rosetta stone, but we might finds travellers reports in a known language telling us of other cultures. The ancient Levant was well connected, there was a lot of international correspondence. Even without direct translations we might get useful inroads if we know what items were regularly taxed, as those commodities would likely be recorded and appear together in lists.
If one could find something like that, yes. I remember seeing a Youtube video where a curator from the British Museum went over some trader family clay tablets where daddy gave advice (to his son, the caravan master) on how to avoid customs and which wares to hide the best if caught and inspected.
Orlanth wrote: We might not be blessed with finding another Rosetta stone, but we might finds travellers reports in a known language telling us of other cultures. The ancient Levant was well connected, there was a lot of international correspondence. Even without direct translations we might get useful inroads if we know what items were regularly taxed, as those commodities would likely be recorded and appear together in lists.
If one could find something like that, yes. I remember seeing a Youtube video where a curator from the British Museum went over some trader family clay tablets where daddy gave advice (to his son, the caravan master) on how to avoid customs and which wares to hide the best if caught and inspected.
Lots of these from Kültepe (all from Lower Town levels II and Ib (first three centuries of the 2nd millennium) , but almost nowhere else until a long time later. There are also lots of travel itineraries but these are largely lists of cities visited on a given trade journey. Additionally, the bulk of the people interacted with (textually, at least, which essentially means private, elite businesspeople and palace institutions) are all part of the same cultural milieu and largely using the same writing systems. The handful of (known) languages we have left to decipher are earlier or far removed. The only example you would expect to find something like this to shed light on (that I'm aware of) is Ogham*, which was in use alongside a Latin but which no Latin text appears to even acknolwedge. Headway is being made on it, though, but is largely restricted to identifying proper nouns insofar as I understand it.
*interestingly, Ogham is one of the few writing systems that does benefit from laser scanning at current levels of technology (though RTI is still often preferred), because it is exclusively written on stone (or I suppose on organics that don't survive) which degrades under weathering to a level that makes it impossible to read by eye (unlike clay tablets, which, as I mentioned above, basically survive competely readable in bad mobile phone images or are destroyed totally).
Orlanth wrote: I have little problem with the fake antiquity trade, it makes the whole underground antiquity trade more dodgy and thus less attractive to those who want to try and sell real artifacts taken quietly from dig sites.
It has no discernable impact on this at all, unfortunately. One of the two directors of my project in Iraq leads the Dartmouth-based, CIA-backed satellite-monitoring project, the other is involved in cross-discplinary stuff with people tackling smuggling in the law department here at glasgow, and a large part of one of our grants (from the UK government) in iraq is to train local archaeologists to monitor looting practices so it comes up quite a lot whilst we're there. Most of it is local people looking for precious metals or other instrinsically valueble materials, or objects that would be difficult and awkward to fake for the little financial gain. My collegaue writing her PhD on looting practices in the Near East says this is pretty consistent with looting patterns worldwide.
It might have some impact on how viable art-faking is but on the other hand, once they've sold it, and you only need to sell it once, who cares? Plus the buyers are never in a position to investigate provenance and veracity well, and often don't care.
Is it that prevalent? Sounds like you have a large setup, however it might just be an excuse for population monitoring by another name, it's an 'independent' Iraq after all.
I could imagine a lot of artifacts going missing in wartime, after all it happened in Europe too, but what about outside Iraq/other war zones, does a lot go missing from sites. From what I remember the Greeks were fairly clued up to this and had competent antiquities policing, though my connexions in this are now way outdated, (third hand, early 80's).
I prefer stolen to destroyed by ISIS as happened a lot in Syria and on occasion in Egypt.
As for fakes, the idea is to flood the market with fakes. This might not apply here but there was an idea to package human toenail clippings as rhino horn and ship it to China as oriental medicine. It didn't need to be done on any scale, just enough to destroy confidence in the rhino horn market. If a customer in a health shop doesn't know what the medical powder is, and its rumoured it might be toenail clippings from random Africans, yum, they might think twice about buying the product. Destroying confidence in the product might help limit inducements to poach rhinos.
For reference rhino horn and nails are made from keratin, the difference is not easy to distinguish especially when processed as a powder.
For reference rhino horn and nails are made from keratin, the difference is not easy to distinguish especially when processed as a powder.
Considering that rhino horn doesn't even cure anything it would be hard to tell the difference based on performance.
The risk with market flooding though is that you might destroy the high profits, but you don't destroy the market demand, if anything you can run the risk of increasing market demand. So whilst the profits might be lower the whole poacher smuggling ring will still be active; plus the higher paying clients will still likely use that network to buy "Authentic" horn.
The best way to tackle it is a combination of education and government legislation. The issue now is that China has invested heavily into African countries so they have a tighter bond to them; plus the profits are so large that it drives itself forward on the high profitability.
Right now the main weapon is that they are darting and then cutting the horns off wild rhinos in a bid to make them pointless to hunt by poachers.
Orlanth wrote: I have little problem with the fake antiquity trade, it makes the whole underground antiquity trade more dodgy and thus less attractive to those who want to try and sell real artifacts taken quietly from dig sites.
It has no discernable impact on this at all, unfortunately. One of the two directors of my project in Iraq leads the Dartmouth-based, CIA-backed satellite-monitoring project, the other is involved in cross-discplinary stuff with people tackling smuggling in the law department here at glasgow, and a large part of one of our grants (from the UK government) in iraq is to train local archaeologists to monitor looting practices so it comes up quite a lot whilst we're there. Most of it is local people looking for precious metals or other instrinsically valueble materials, or objects that would be difficult and awkward to fake for the little financial gain. My collegaue writing her PhD on looting practices in the Near East says this is pretty consistent with looting patterns worldwide.
It might have some impact on how viable art-faking is but on the other hand, once they've sold it, and you only need to sell it once, who cares? Plus the buyers are never in a position to investigate provenance and veracity well, and often don't care.
Is it that prevalent?
Depends how you define it, I auppose, but it is common.
Sounds like you have a large setup, however it might just be an excuse for population monitoring by another name, it's an 'independent' Iraq after all.
What do you mean?
I could imagine a lot of artifacts going missing in wartime, after all it happened in Europe too, but what about outside Iraq/other war zones, does a lot go missing from sites.
Iraq isn't currently a warzone and much of the coubtry wasn't even at the height if ISIS and during the last Iraq War. Artefact theft and nighthawking is oretty common the world over. It's worst in rural West Asia but it's a problem everywhere.
From what I remember the Greeks were fairly clued up to this and had competent antiquities policing, though my connexions in this are now way outdated, (third hand, early 80's).
Greece is actually historically quite bad at that. Scandinavia and France have amongst the toughest laws with the most effort put into enforcing them.
I prefer stolen to destroyed by ISIS as happened a lot in Syria and on occasion in Egypt.
They weren't ever really destroying portable antiquities. The focus was on monuments meaningful to local identity. They did steal a lot of material to sell, however.
As for fakes, the idea is to flood the market with fakes. This might not apply here but there was an idea to package human toenail clippings as rhino horn and ship it to China as oriental medicine. It didn't need to be done on any scale, just enough to destroy confidence in the rhino horn market. If a customer in a health shop doesn't know what the medical powder is, and its rumoured it might be toenail clippings from random Africans, yum, they might think twice about buying the product. Destroying confidence in the product might help limit inducements to poach rhinos.
For reference rhino horn and nails are made from keratin, the difference is not easy to distinguish especially when processed as a powder.
Yeah. As I say, it would be awfully expensive to fake the stuff that is regularly looted relative to its cost. Not to mention the sheer quantity you'd need to produce to even put something statistically significant into the market. Then there's the ethical issue of contributing to a black market, even with fakes.
Sounds like you have a large setup, however it might just be an excuse for population monitoring by another name, it's an 'independent' Iraq after all.
What do you mean?
Iraq won't ever gets its self determination back, that was the whole point of going in to begin with. However excuses are needed to monitor people. I wonder if that is part of what is happening.
I could imagine a lot of artifacts going missing in wartime, after all it happened in Europe too, but what about outside Iraq/other war zones, does a lot go missing from sites.
Iraq isn't currently a warzone and much of the coubtry wasn't even at the height if ISIS and during the last Iraq War. Artefact theft and nighthawking is oretty common the world over. It's worst in rural West Asia but it's a problem everywhere.
Close enough, walking around parts of Iraq is especially unhealthy.
From what I remember the Greeks were fairly clued up to this and had competent antiquities policing, though my connexions in this are now way outdated, (third hand, early 80's).
Greece is actually historically quite bad at that. Scandinavia and France have amongst the toughest laws with the most effort put into enforcing them.
Sad to hear that. My father was involved in security in SBA Cyprus, and at the time the locals were very clued up on antiquities monitoring, and had a lot of help from Greece also. Maybe it was just Cyprus, and maybe it was because of SBA assist.
I prefer stolen to destroyed by ISIS as happened a lot in Syria and on occasion in Egypt.
They weren't ever really destroying portable antiquities. The focus was on monuments meaningful to local identity. They did steal a lot of material to sell, however.
Makes 'sense' I suppose, its only unholy and must be destroyed if you cant make a profit from it.
nfe wrote: Then there's the ethical issue of contributing to a black market, even with fakes.
I would call it more like attempts at sabotaging the black market than contributing to it.
Sounds like you have a large setup, however it might just be an excuse for population monitoring by another name, it's an 'independent' Iraq after all.
What do you mean?
Iraq won't ever gets its self determination back, that was the whole point of going in to begin with. However excuses are needed to monitor people. I wonder if that is part of what is happening.
Can you be a bit more clear about what you think is happening with a looting monitoring project, please?
I could imagine a lot of artifacts going missing in wartime, after all it happened in Europe too, but what about outside Iraq/other war zones, does a lot go missing from sites.
Iraq isn't currently a warzone and much of the coubtry wasn't even at the height if ISIS and during the last Iraq War. Artefact theft and nighthawking is oretty common the world over. It's worst in rural West Asia but it's a problem everywhere.
Close enough, walking around parts of Iraq is especially unhealthy.
How much time do you spend there? There are parts that are sketchy, especially in the south, but the country is pretty stable and I happily walk around by myself. As do my female collegues.
nfe wrote: Then there's the ethical issue of contributing to a black market, even with fakes.
I would call it more like attempts at sabotaging the black market than contributing to it.
If you're putting material in, you're contributing.
Incidentally, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary sent around a press release today stating that they believe some of their Dead Sea Scrolls are also fake.
If you're buying them now, and not from Israel (who will never sell them) they're in all chance either stolen or fake. Very few scroll pieces are held elsewhere and the places that have them won't give them up. It's a really classic case of "damn your that gullible" in this.
LordofHats wrote: If you're buying them now, and not from Israel (who will never sell them) they're in all chance either stolen or fake. Very few scroll pieces are held elsewhere and the places that have them won't give them up. It's a really classic case of "damn your that gullible" in this.
I guess "piece of the Dead Sea scrolls" is the modern version of a nail from the true Cross.
Also, in regards to archaeological looting in Greece, from what I know the issue is not so much with laws (Greece has pretty though laws) or unwillingness (the government and most people are very eager to stop looting), but rather that they lack the funds to do combat looting effectively. Because you know, Greece and money...
There's also a "fad" of sorts when it comes to ancient relics and the people with the money to buy/steal/smuggle them. The fakes show up where the market is and all that. In the 18th century it was Pre-Columbian artifacts. In the Victorian era it was Egypt. Now it's Fertile Crescent and the Levant that seems to be all the rage.
There's also a "fad" of sorts when it comes to ancient relics and the people with the money to buy/steal/smuggle them. The fakes show up where the market is and all that. In the 18th century it was Pre-Columbian artifacts. In the Victorian era it was Egypt. Now it's Fertile Crescent and the Levant that seems to be all the rage.
and an undercurrent through all that, I think is ancient chinese stuff. Though perhaps it's "easier" to spot the fake porcelain and all that??
LordofHats wrote: If you're buying them now, and not from Israel (who will never sell them) they're in all chance either stolen or fake. Very few scroll pieces are held elsewhere and the places that have them won't give them up. It's a really classic case of "damn your that gullible" in this.
There's a reasonable chance that there are still some out there without provenance. People didn't stop visiting Qumran between its abandonment and excavation. Bedouines and other groups were using the cave complex for shelter and like many places may have removed much material prior to antiquities laws. You would expact most of it to have been sold by now, yes, but you never know.
Most antiquities violations that I heard about revolved around construction sites. After all it is when people start digging they find stuff underground.
Dodgy builders will often try and cover up any finds because it causes site delays so the Greek Cypriot government brought in measures to counter that, modest finders fees plus pay for archeological stoppages. This made it is builders interests to report finding when laying new foundations. This is not good news for developers though, however on the occasion that developers quietly build over a site and it got found out the penalties were draconian, demolition without compensation, loss of land and the developer had to pay for the dig, with no land return afterwards. It became a case of just, don't.
This was Cyprus in the 80's, things might have changed a lot, the island is covered in Russian money now.
Yep, Cyprus is not mainland Greece, not Greece at all, but you try telling them that. Cyprus was very laid back but had some core competencies on conservation, again the SBA might have something to do with it. The SBA was certainly involved and supportive but it was managed by the Cypriot government itself.
I mentioned in another thread about the turtle sanctuary (cant find it!) and how Cyprus were trend setters in conservation in the early 80's. Wildlife conservation and archeological site integrity share common principles which these people were clued up on and actively protective about
Harking back to the 'laser scan everything' conversation, and my position that currently it is more efficient to use photogrammetry and RTI, and that there is more to be gained from those technologies, there's a public lecture this week at Glasgow uni tackling the use of photgrammetry and RTI in the documentation and scanning of early mesieval carved stones. Unless there is something sensative that can't be made widely available, we stream these lectures. I haven't spoken to the presenters about it yet, I only just got an email to put it on the separtmenta aocial media accounts, but I'd be surprised if it could be streamed. The link hasn't been generated yet but I can put it up if anyone wants to see it (or you can follow University of Glasgow Archaeology on Facebook).
I will hopefully be coming up to London next week and will be meeting a friend who was a cryptoanalyst. We have discussed my theory before, it's been in my head a while, but not with input from archeological researchers.
From what I can tell it is considerably easier and faster and more memory efficient to get a program to read a digital file than a photograph, but the latter technology certainly does exist. It might be better off to try a translation/codebreak from RTI is there is too much resistance to digitisation and compensate with a more robust computer. I will ask.
Is there a standardised format for the RTIs, if so it might be viable to digitise those.
nfe wrote: No. Nobody expressed an interest and it's live only.
Not surprising, the only point of contact had a hostile position,
There is also a vested interest in maintaining existing skillsets.
You're the only person who read anything I said on the subject as hostile. Let's not drag this off down another one of your forced arguments.
Actually you have that backwards. I proposed an opinion without denigrating those of opposed thinking. You claimed to wanted to link this thread externally for the stated purpose of ridicule.
I agree on not dragging this off, but the solution to that is for you to tone down your condescending arrogance.
nfe wrote: No. Nobody expressed an interest and it's live only.
Not surprising, the only point of contact had a hostile position, There is also a vested interest in maintaining existing skillsets.
You're the only person who read anything I said on the subject as hostile. Let's not drag this off down another one of your forced arguments.
Actually you have that backwards. I proposed an opinion without denigrating those of opposed thinking. You claimed to wanted to link this thread externally for the stated purpose of ridicule. I agree on not dragging this off, but the solution to that is for you to tone down your condescending arrogance.
You are both being arrogant. Now stop it.
Let's go back to talking about the Bronze Age Aegean (or the Bronze Age and archaeology in general). Anyone have any questions, stuff you want to know or cool things you want to share? Like the fun fact that the Mycenaeans used heavy metal plate armour, something which would not become common again in European warfare until the late Middle Ages: Image spoilered for size
Spoiler:
Reproduction: These heavily armoured warriors rode in chariots. They also carried massive shields. Pretty terrifying.
What might be neat is if we could compile some fairly easy access reference book lists covering such interesting topics as warfare, weapons, etc....
I recall being singularly rather dispassionate when I got round to reading The Art of War as it was, I felt, very light on actual detail - though it made sense when I later read that it was designed to be an advisory document to an Emperor. What was more interesting were some of the points put across that might seem like common sense to a modern western view, but which were clearly pitched for an Eastern Emperors viewpoint (that of being a divine leader).
That aside as many of us are brought here by our love of wargames it would be great to know some detailed material on the subject. I often find that good accessible material, esp that which covers what I'd consider an intermediate level (ergo covers the basics, goes into detail, but doesn't require 3 years of study to understand) to be a most difficult level to find good material on in nearly any subject (esp since such material is often not high listed on sites like Amazon and requires you to "know" the book exists to go find it)
Edit - my first two thoughts on that heavy armour is that it looks very tanky, but also lacking in mobility; but secondly that it seems to leave the thigh rather exposed on the side when lunging. At least in that demo photo - it might be other uniform or gear was worn to protect that area?
Let's go back to talking about the Bronze Age Aegean (or the Bronze Age and archaeology in general). Anyone have any questions, stuff you want to know or cool things you want to share?
Like the fun fact that the Mycenaeans used heavy metal plate armour, something which would not become common again in European warfare until the late Middle Ages:
I dont think it was common all that then, armour like that was the the elite of elite of chariot warriors.
Persians had full plate armour, but again it was for the rich. Herodotus records a Persian captain brought off his horse in the retreat at Marathon or Plataea, cant remember which, who was so well armoured with plate he could immobilised, but only be dispatched by being stabbed through the eyes.
Plate armour technology is nothing new, late medieval full plate armour wasn't common either, but the infrastructure was much more advanced and a sizable cadre of full plate knights was possible.
Nice to see replicas of Mycenean armour though, very cool images.
Let's go back to talking about the Bronze Age Aegean (or the Bronze Age and archaeology in general). Anyone have any questions, stuff you want to know or cool things you want to share?
Like the fun fact that the Mycenaeans used heavy metal plate armour, something which would not become common again in European warfare until the late Middle Ages:
I dont think it was common all that then, armour like that was the the elite of elite of chariot warriors.
Persians had full plate armour, but again it was for the rich. Herodotus records a Persian captain brought off his horse in the retreat at Marathon or Plataea, cant remember which, who was so well armoured with plate he could immobilised, but only be dispatched by being stabbed through the eyes.
Plate armour technology is nothing new, late medieval full plate armour wasn't common either, but the infrastructure was much more advanced and a sizable cadre of full plate knights was possible.
Nice to see replicas of Mycenean armour though, very cool images.
I find that period's plate armor very interesting. Its also what the real life heroes of the events which would be known today as the Trojan war would have likely worn.
While effective, it would have been quite hot and uncomfortable, and unlike later European Plate armor it would have severely hampered your mobility and range of motion.
nfe wrote: No. Nobody expressed an interest and it's live only.
Not surprising, the only point of contact had a hostile position,
There is also a vested interest in maintaining existing skillsets.
You're the only person who read anything I said on the subject as hostile. Let's not drag this off down another one of your forced arguments.
Actually you have that backwards. I proposed an opinion without denigrating those of opposed thinking. You claimed to wanted to link this thread externally for the stated purpose of ridicule.
I agree on not dragging this off, but the solution to that is for you to tone down your condescending arrogance.
You presented an idea that I acknowledged was worthwhile but completely unrealistic and you then spent several pages telling me that everyone in the field was closed-minded for not scrambling to find ways of getting it done and that because you think outside the box you had transformative ideas that no one else had clicked onto yet (despite every one of them having been done in some capacity). According to other posters, you make a havit of professing to have paradigm-shifting ideas on a wealth of subjects, and indeed have claimed to in this thread. I'm the arrogant one because I can talk confidently about the approaches that have been tried and found to be effective in the field I work in (politely for quite a while in the face of pretty stark presumptuousness)? Sure.
and that because you think outside the box you had transformative ideas that no one else had clicked onto yet (despite every one of them having been done in some capacity).
Indication that the ideas should not be met with ridicule, but at best polite disagreement.
If a complete outsider can come up with ideas that your peers have considered worthy enough to do it shows that the thinking behind them have some merit amongst them, if not you.
According to other posters, you make a havit of professing to have paradigm-shifting ideas on a wealth of subjects, and indeed have claimed to in this thread.
This is true. Why should you assume it cannot be so?
I have a reputation for this outside of Dakka also which is healthier than the one I have on it. Mostly because it's directly demonstrable unlike my comments here.
All this is outweighed by the vast number of subjects posted here on which I do not comment, or only ask questions, and on which I admit I know, or care to know, nothing.
I'm the arrogant one because I can talk confidently about the approaches that have been tried and found to be effective in the field I work in (politely for quite a while in the face of pretty stark presumptuousness)? Sure.
This gets to the crux of closed mindedness. Its a case of saying: 'I am the professional, you are the amateur, so I know and you do not. Leave the thinking to us.'
Fresh input can come from anywhere, and you already admitted that others much deeper in the field had/have similar ideas, which distinguishes them from random lunacy.
The functionality for the above is provided. Thank you for proving my point so clearly.
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Grey Templar wrote: I find that period's plate armor very interesting. Its also what the real life heroes of the events which would be known today as the Trojan war would have likely worn.
While effective, it would have been quite hot and uncomfortable, and unlike later European Plate armor it would have severely hampered your mobility and range of motion.
One of the things Iike about armour like this, and certain wargear, particularly powerful bows is that it can give rise to heroes.
A medieval knight with full german style plate armour, as good as it can get, can be dealt with by much of the soldiery of the time. The pike, longbow, halberd with bill hook, arbalest and any black powder weaponry can lay him low. He is also rather anonymous amongst others of his kind.
However give a man overlapping bands of plate armour and a chariot and face him off against an warband from three thousand years ago and he can make short shrift of many people. If well armed he would be dangerous on foot also. Give him a powerful compound bow such as those carried by Odysseus or Arjuna and he can rack up a body count as quickly as a servants can pass him arrows from a quiver.
Individual heroes are plausible, men so much better equipped that the rank of file, many of whom would be half naked and have little in terms of metal weaponry. If the hero is big and well fed and well informed he could be worth many conscripts.
And of course heroes duelled each other, and those duels would be epic to those lesser men who witness them.
Makes sense to me.
I wonder if this disparity also gave foundation to the legends of heroes of ancient India and later in China.
You both loose as you keep disrupting the thread to try to get int he last word. Please stop.
As a layman, I would love to see a list of good books to read on the topic of the ancient Late Bronze Age. I am interested in the Myceneans and Minoans, Hittites, and Bronze Age Assyrians myself.
I also wouldn't mind learning more about the role of Cyprus as it seems to be a big supplier of Tin and was occupied by the Hittites for a while, but also had a period being a power in its own right.
Easy E wrote: You both loose as you keep disrupting the thread to try to get int he last word. Please stop.
As a layman, I would love to see a list of good books to read on the topic of the ancient Late Bronze Age. I am interested in the Myceneans and Minoans, Hittites, and Bronze Age Assyrians myself.
I also wouldn't mind learning more about the role of Cyprus as it seems to be a big supplier of Tin and was occupied by the Hittites for a while, but also had a period being a power in its own right.
I've got him (I presume) on ignore. I'm out.
Do you lean more towards archaeology or history? Most literature on the Bronze Age eastern Med leans heavily towards one or the other. It's disappointingly unintegrated.
That said, most stuff aimed at the layman is almost exclusively drawn from texts (from Anatolia and the Levant eastwards, at least) because the fields have been dominated by textual scholars, so that narrows your options a bit. I'd always start with major overviews then narrow down on the things that spark your interest.
Here's a reading list on introductions to the region in the Bronze Age I give to second year undergrads. Those more geared for a popular audience bolded.
Akkermans, P.M.M.G. and Schwartz, G. 2003. The Archaeology of Syria. From Complex Hunter-Gatherers to Early Urban Societies (ca. 16,000-300 BC). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cohen, R. and Westbrook, R. (eds.). 2000. Amarna Diplomacy. The Beginnings of International Relations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cullen, T. (ed.). 2001 Aegean Prehistory: A Review. Boston: Archaeological Institute of America.
Flannery, K. V. and Marcus, J. 2012. The Creation of Inequality. How our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [especially discussions of ancient
Near Eastern examples].
Hamilakis, Y. (ed.). 2002. Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking 'Minoan' Archaeology. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Matthews, R. 2003. The Archaeology of Mesopotamia. Theories and Approaches. London: Routledge
Pollock, S. 1999. Ancient Mesopotamia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Postgate, J.N. 1992. The Land of Assur and the Yoke of Assur. World Archaeology 23(3): 247-263.
Roaf, M. 1990. Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East. Oxford: Facts on File. Pp. 158-198.
Sagona, A. and Zimansky, P. 2009. Ancient Turkey. London: Routledge. Wengrow, D. 2006. The Archaeology of Early Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Liverani, M. 2014. The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy. London: Routledge.
For the Hittites, any of Bryce's books would be a good start. Pretty old fashioned and very archaeology-phobic, but the grasp of texts is certainly conprehensive (for the time of writing).
And here are the books my teacher made us read for her class:
C. Shelmerdine (ed.) 2008. The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age. E.H. Cline (ed.) 2010. Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean.
They are aimed towards archaeologists, but seeing as that they are meant to provide an introduction and overview of the period to students, they are quite readable even for someone with zero background in archaeology. Both of them cover a vast variety of subjects relating to the Aegean Bronze Age. I found the Oxford Handbook especially handy since it is almost like an encyclopedia.
The Cambridge Companion is quite affordable, the Oxford Handbook a bit less so (though not nearly as expensive as some academic books are). If you have access to a university library you can probably get them for free though (or you could have gotten it through the link I put earlier in the thread that has since been removed).
Don't buy them! Well, not unless you really wantvthem for reference in the future. You'll almost certainly be able to find every chapter of major edited books. Always start with the authors' academia.edu pages.
nfe wrote: Don't buy them! Well, not unless you really wantvthem for reference in the future. You'll almost certainly be able to find every chapter of major edited books. Always start with the authors' academia.edu pages.
Yeah, that is a great place to get stuff as well!
My teacher often puts interesting readings on her page: http://rug.academia.edu/svoutsaki It is really academic stuff though, so maybe not that interesting if you don't have a background in archaeology.
It pertains to an earlier period, but A Year of Vengeance by Edward Stratford has just appeared on my desk. It's an analysis of a single year (1890BCE) in the life of an Assyrian trading family built from a group of archives from Kültepe. I've not read it yet, but I'm familiar with the PhD dissertation that it began as, and that was a solid demonstration of the levels of nuance that can be gleaned from 4000 year old texts with sufficient context.
nfe wrote: It pertains to an earlier period, but A Year of Vengeance by Edward Stratford has just appeared on my desk. It's an analysis of a single year (1890BCE) in the life of an Assyrian trading family built from a group of archives from Kültepe. I've not read it yet, but I'm familiar with the PhD dissertation that it began as, and that was a solid demonstration of the levels of nuance that can be gleaned from 4000 year old texts with sufficient context.
Another text on material from another period, but bery relevant to earlier conversations Re: digitisation and analysis of inscriptions.
New open source paper on the use of RTI on runic incriptions at Maeshowe. Full disclosure: I know two of the authors, but I didn't know about their involvement prior to getting the intarch link in a mailshot - not just promoting my friends!
There's a University of Toronto project seeking to use machine-translation to tackle cuneiform administrative texts. They need to be transliterated first by humans, and it's only suited to simple texts, but it's happening.
It is interesting that the databasing and cataloguing for cross reference described in the article is pretty much identical to what was described in this thread.
Scan them all, let a computer sort them out, and cross reference artifacts even if they are physically stored in different locations.
). The Mycenaeans do appear to have had some form of central authority figure called a "wanax", which is usually translated to 'king', but we don't actually know enough about Mycenaean political organisation to be able to say whether this 'wanax' was actually similar to our concept of 'king'. It is basically projecting present-day concepts on the past, and the wanax may well have been some sort of religious head, tribal elder or chief landowner (or any combination of those roles, or something completely different) rather than a king.
