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nfe wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 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 think topic culture matters quite a bit too.

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.

nfe wrote:

 Ancestral Hamster wrote:

Spoiler:

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?

Thanks for the replies everyone. Good thread.

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.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/17/anglo-saxon-era-not-dark-ages-british-library-curator-says-exhibition/

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.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Spoiler:

nfe wrote:

 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.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/17/anglo-saxon-era-not-dark-ages-british-library-curator-says-exhibition/

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.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

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.

Well the plot of the series at this point is so convoluted it could easily be interpreted as the player character's acid trip

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.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

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.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:


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.

Yes, history is astonishing.

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?

It's a fascinating subject.

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.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

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.

 LordofHats wrote:


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).


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 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

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.

nfe wrote:

I presume you mean clay tablets.

I mean lumps of 'rock' with writing on, yes this is usually clay. But scan all media please. Let a computer sort it out.

Really found this fascinating...basically the Mediterranean Dark Ages

 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.

 Orlanth wrote:

nfe wrote:

I presume you mean clay tablets.

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.

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.

 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

Here's a very interesting story from the Black Sea...

Oldest Intact Shipwreck Found

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.

Still, it's a gret find.

How can it be the "oldest Shipwreck found" when they HAVE found Bronze Age shipwrecks?

Oh, I see the caveat..... intact.

Gotta say that looks pretty damn good.

nfe wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:

nfe wrote:

I presume you mean clay tablets.

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.

 Orlanth wrote:

nfe wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:

nfe wrote:

I presume you mean clay tablets.

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.

nfe wrote:

6. Again, what do you mean by pattern match?

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.