BabylonianMathC2
The Tigris-Euphrates region has no few ‘interesting’ developments: the use of tiles, of brick…it would remain for Mohenjo-Daro over on the Indus to do ‘standardized brick,’ [they were about 2500 BC]—which makes their remains look astonishingly modern. The ancients of Mesopotamia had something like, using small stones and brick instead of the massive stones of Egypt, but not standardized, and they were using tar for mortar in areas—there’s abundant limestone for mortar in Egypt, but I don’t know the geology of the Indus/Tigris region that well. Anyway, it’s just an interesting sidelight on who-did-what-when. I’ll not be surprised if the Greeks didn’t borrow a lot from Egypt and Mesopotamia/Persia. Greek roots go back, via Knossos, who were connected with Egypt—and who knows what the Egyptians could have borrowed from the Cretans, etc. As much as we DO know about these civilizations, we don’t know it all.
I was always left with the impression that the Greeks picked up a lot from the various migrations from the east over the millennium. The Phoenicians seemed to do a good job of spreading a lot of the tools that were foundational to classic and pre-classical Greece – around the med. Certainly the Greeks had a lot of respect for Egypt especially for its age – but from a technology point of view, I’ve never seen very much that went from Egypt to Greece. But then what we do know is so tiny compared to what we do not -the Antikythera mechanism shows just how little we knew about so much.
And we know so little about Knossos and Thera. We do have the daggers from a Mycenaean tomb in Greece that have leopards and papyrus, but a Greek shape to the dagger; we have wall paintings in Crete and the octopus vases indicating, for instance, that the Minoans were observing sea life by diving, because sea life only looks that way underwater. There exist Asian lions, and motifs of lion hunts, and the paired sacred lions of the Earth Mother warding the pillar on the gate of Mycenae, but no archaeology has ever turned up lion bones in Greece, nor even in Asia Minor, where there is a geographic bridge. Lots of artistic connections. The building styles, however, are limited by geology: you cannot get big blocks of stone easily, as you can in Egypt. You get some BIG rocks—the tomb of Atreus tricks the eye it’s so big—and moving those into a dome-shape was interesting—but nothing on a massive scale. Actual Egyptian expertise brought to bear creating those tombs? Possibly: the artwork of the time shows Egyptian motifs, but—were they Greeks going to Egypt to learn how, or Egyptians coming to Mycenae to work? Or was Knossos the missing connection?
Lots of questions still unanswered.
Mycenae, Knossos, the Minoans, the Phaistos Disc, Linear A, Linear B, the Etruscan language just out of reach, the Basques…. And, for that matter, possibly factual but in dispute graffiti in the Americas from various ancient Middle Eastern and European cultures (Phoenicians, Celtic ogham, a few Germanic futhark runes…. It all says there is a huge amount we don’t know from early recorded history and very little we know from prehistory. Or the Harappans before the Indo-Europeans got to India. Or, for that matter, the Indo-Europeans themselves, ancestors of almost all modern and ancient historically known European languages, plus a few in Persia, India, and the Middle East.
Those people, some of whom were our ancestors, traded, warred, settled, intermarried, split, and invented Western (European and Middle Eastern) culture. Their art, their forms of writing, science and engineering, medicine, their ideas on law or gods (or God) or love or…. Whew.
Yet from when I’ve looked, there is not a lot for the average reader, or even the specialized student, to really dig into about whole cultures whom we know were crucially important.
Asians made it across island chains to Australia and even Hawaii and Easter Island, and into the Americas. Europeans and Africans and Asians all made it to parts of the Americas, whether they made it back or not. Europeans made it across parts of Asia, into the Middle East and over to India, and across the Caucasus into northern Asia. Asians made it from there back into Europe. — Could Native Americans have made it from North and South America over to Europe, Africa, or Asia? Why not, if others made it to them?
Basically, a lot happened but we don’t know about it.
When I, as someone interested in languages and the alphabet, dip into articles or books on such things, it seems just out of reach, but as though it ought to be reachable. We just have to find the right archeological spot where things were preserved, and bang, a Latin / Etruscan translation key, or a key into Linear A or some such, or something which explains about the Minoans, or gives a clue whether Atlantis was a real place like Troy, or an invention by a clever philosopher-storyteller or group.
Yet in my own recent family history, as recent as two generations and as far as one and two hundred years ago, there are now gaps, because family records were lost or destroyed, or an ancestor was an orphan who didn’t know his real relatives, or because, well, one doesn’t speak of such shady things as relatives who might have, willingly or not, had a child with someone who might not meet with community approval (one or the other or both communities). Ahem, and certain things might be so beyond the pale that they could not even be discussed. Ever. Whether that was to protect the person involved or the teller or the surrounding people, is, of course, a point of order. — And yet those people, my ancestors or their neighbors or friends or enemies or lovers, whoever they might be, did not imagine that, decades later, their descendants might *want* or *need* to know if they did X with Y or why they thought as they did, or if there was some physical thing we might want to know about. (Hereditary conditions, or artifacts, or ties of friendship or love, or enmities.) People can have short memories and shorter tempers. Some people can discount or not accept love, true or momentary or mere, ah, conjunction.
So I suppose it’s no wonder that after a few hundred or thousand years or tens of thousands, we know so little about people back then. But it’s still interesting.
(And yes, it matters to me whether I might have connections like those, but in a few cases, I have no way really to prove something or investigate further, because documents no longer (or never did) exist and there were only family stories, or because the evidence is too sketchy or contradictory for me to know for sure.)
Say, this soapbox is a lot taller than I thought it was. Didn’t really notice I’d climbed up here until I ran out of steam. :LOL: Didn’t quite notice I’d run so far afield, either, until the string ran out. — Should I avoid the strange old lady with the gingerbread, or the guy with the odd bull’s head, or did they just get a really bad rep with the neighbors? 😉
@BCS….as long as CJ doesn’t have a problem with it, I say go for it. I enjoy your riffs; they lead to such interesting places! 😉
Cutting edge pedagogy from 4000 years ago. I had to grin at that one.
Lol! I enjoy it too—and hey, there’s enough room on this site for mega-posts! No five-line rule operates here, as long as you keep it bizarre, esoteric, and sufficiently connected to the truly weird and wonderful.
*Blush* Thank you all.
There’s one amazing fact which shows the extent of communication between ancient cultures.
A seven-day week is found in very many ancient cultures, with a celestial object/deity assigned to each day. The assignment of celestial objects to days of the week is not merely similar, but precisely identical across the following cultures (and many more):
Ancient China and Japan, ancient India, ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Germany and Scandinavia.
Sunday – Sun
Monday – Moon
Tuesday – Mars
Wednesday – Mercury
Thursday – Jupiter
Friday – Venus
Saturday – Saturn
In many cases the earliest known references to this assignment is in the first few centuries AD, but it may go back very much earlier.
There is no known example of the days of the week going out of sync. i.e. to the extent of our knowledge, the day of the Sun in ancient China has always been on exactly the same day as the day of the Sun in ancient Germany, Rome, India, etc.
There is also a lot of correlation between deities corresponding to days/planets across cultures, e.g Tuesday is the day of the god of war in many cultures (Tiw in pre-Christian England, the day of Mars in Rome, the day of Skanda/Kartikeya/Murugan in ancient India). Friday is the day of the goddess of love, Thursday is the day of the god associated with thunder/lightening.
See (for a start) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week-day_names
There’s a strong connection, just as you say, but there are exceptions. Throughout Scandinavia we name (with local linguistic variations) Saturday “Lördag”; the day to bathe (löga > bathe; dag > day). Just to name one I’m very familiar with 😉
Anyway, our Western tradition supports it’s hegemony with a widespread set of assumptions, justifying our right to conquer the “barbarians” – we’re the bringers of civilisation, see? Among these assumptions are the idea that people didn’t travel outside their own villages, even if there’s a lot of evidence to the opposite.
In fact a lot of what we know about ancient times have been skewed by political spin so many times, on their journey throughout the millennia into our times, it’s a wonder it’s possible to find some grains worth having, at all.
As an example most of what we thought we knew about women in Byzantium comes from what quite recently have been identified as smear-lit, meaning whole theoretical houses has had to be torn down… which doesn’t happen lightly, when scholarly careers have been invested…
You can account for some common cultural items because of the extent of the Babylonian Empire and the cultural scope of the pre-Babylonians: Assyria (north to Asia Minor, south to the Egyptian frontier) and Sumer-Akkad, all of whom were very sky-worshipping: Inanna/Ishtar, identified both with the star Venus and the Moon; Shamash, the sun. There was contact between them and the Indus Valley/India. And then the Persians, who reached into Greece, and as far as India—Zoroastrians [light-dark], that lot, but still with a lot of early baggage.
The question next to that is the Indo-Europeans, earliest traceable to the Baltic, and sky-worshipping also, who spread from the Baltic into India, from 4000 BC and before.
And insofar as the IE’s were parental to some steppes-riders of various sort, the horse-cultures did spread as far as China (whose unified First Emperor fortified the Great Wall to keep them out) but there are remains that go way back—Discovery has a very interesting program entitled the Desert Mummies, that covers a very early group of IE’s way east, that also has some other cultural items of interest, a shaman type with a high pointy hat the very spittin’ image of witches and wizards of legend in the West…
So there are ways for a day-system to travel, on these migrations: the IE’s are one of the most suspect in my mind, granted their huge travels, though the ancient Greeks, themselves IE’s-gone-farmer, also admitted (in legend) they had gotten such things as the mysterious Dactyl Priests (finger priests?) from across the Aegean or even from the Phoenicians (sitting in the Babylonian influence zone)…
It’s very old, at least, and I think likely from way back BC, though the week did not really figure in ancient timekeeping in these regions nearly as much as moon phases, the more obvious clock in the sky. The Egyptians, because of the Nile flood, were very into year-season-tracking, and they counted years meticulously. And as aforesaid, the Minoans and Greeks and such were very tapped into the Egyptians.
Not sure whether Greek roots go back via Knossos at all, since the Greeks were considerably later than the Bronze Age Minoan civilization on Crete. Minoan Crete artefacts tend to be quite different from ancient Greek ones. The Greeks probably had connections to Cyprus and and the Near East, and certainly absorbed influences from the east, e.g. see early Greek statues.
If you study the archaeology of the ancient Near East, you will note that there were links between the Egyptians and the Cretans, though the evidence is tenuous, since no graves have been discovered from Minoan Crete, and even the connection between this civilization and Thera has never been fully explained (despite the extensive work that has been carried out on Thera, and despite obvious similarities between the material evidence in both places).
The evidence for a connection between the Bronze Age civilizations comes mainly from discoveries about their trading connections. Probably the best-known shipwreck from this period is the Uluburun shipwreck, which contained goods from throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, e.g. Egyptian glass ingots, and Cypriot and Mycenaean Greek pottery, and even amber that must have come from the Baltic through down-the-line trade.
There isn’t much, though, in the way of evidence for what the relationship between the Bronze Age civilizations was; there are few written records that help in deciphering the mysteries of this period. Most of the texts that have been translated relate to self-praise by the rulers, lists of goods in store, etc.
We do know a fair bit about some aspects of Bronze Age civilizations (to about 3000 years BC), but there is still a great deal that we don’t know. The Sumerians and Hittites are particularly mysterious…
I’m pretty sure they do go back that far…or that they’re the same. For one small example the little museum at Thebes has some items you’d swear were from Knossos, except they’re subtly altered, the silliest or perhaps most practical being the insertion of an (ahem!) cold-weather panel on the Goddess; but the altar-forms are very, very close. My own favorite concentration of academic study, back in the day, was in the ethnology of Bronze Age Greece, using the oldest form of the myths, compared with the available digs and artifacts, the genealogies given in the myths, the blood-relationships given in the myths, and the evidences of migrations and movements…never conclusive, of course, until some enterprising soul finds enough attributable sources for DNA work, but it’s exciting to think that can be done. Remains from Crete are scarce, and one I’m thinking of is quite controversial—the modern Greeks really do not like the implication of human sacrifice, but if you recall there was a find of what some interpreted as a sacrifice in progress: this was back around 1975—I don’t recall what ever came of the remains. Most human remains at Greek or Minoan sites are closeted in the museum back rooms, and are not available for view.
I was taught that the possible remains of the human sacrifice on Crete were unusual, and that the sacrifice – if that is what it was – may have been an exceptional case undertaken at a time of great stress in the society. What other (relatively scant) evidence there is about the Minoans seems to indicate that they were perhaps reasonably peaceful. When you say the items from the museum at Thebes look as though they are from Knossos, do you mean Knossos at the time when the Minoan civilization flourished there? Minoan civilization existed from about 2700 to 1500BC (after which the palace sites were occupied for a short while by the Mycaeneans from mainland Greece), so well before the ancient Greek civilization (800 to c. 140BC). There was a long break between the Minoan and ancient Greek civilizations, and the two arose in different areas.
My area of study was the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean, and we were always told to avoid the Greek myths, which may have been like our Tolkien saga to the Greeks rather than based on any historical facts; we had to focus purely on the material evidence and were taught by archaeologists. (There is even debate about whether Homer was one person or a collective of writers of some sort.) I’m not very familiar with ancient Greece, which arose later than the cultures I studied, but did learn that early Greek statues from the Archaic period (kouros) evinced a strong resemblance to statues produced in the Near East, particularly Egypt. This was for a relatively short period before sculptures of the human form become more realistic.
It’s all fascinating stuff – mysterious because we will never get to the bottom of how things really worked in the prehistoric Bronze Age world (unless we can one day travel back in time!).
On a Christmassy theme, I would say that a good example of a living modern myth is Santa Claus. LOTR is just a story to us, not a myth.
Tolkien himself regarded Christianity as a myth (in the best sense of the word – he was a devout Catholic his whole life). In his essay “On Fairy Stories” he says,
‘LOTR is just a story to us, not a myth.’
But if our civilization fell, and if three or four thousand years hence humans tried to interpret LOTR with a comparable amount of material evidence that we have for the ancient prehistoric world, what would their conclusions be? How much would they try to interpret the work as based on historical facts?
They would learn that there were (idyllic!) communities living in hamlets, that there were kings and kingdoms, and wars. They would learn a fair amount about material culture (pottery, painting, clothing, fabrics, etc), and about landscapes. But they would learn nothing about our history in the last two thousand years, e.g. actual relationships between cultures and countries. If the reason why Tolkien wrote LOTR was not in the written records, they would not guess that a humble English professor wrote it primarily as a vehicle for the creation of a language (Elvish).
No doubt many imaginative theories would abound about Elves, Dwarves and Orcs…
One of the things Tolkien did set out to create with LOTR was create a mythic structure for the English as so much of theirs had been lost. I certainly find that some parts of it resonate very strongly to me (and to others that I know) in a way that feels similar to the ways that the Greeks talked about the Illiad.
It’s true that Tolkien did set out to create a mythic structure – which is far more apparent in the Silmarillion and other such works than in LOTR itself. LOTR makes only a few passing references to the real myths of Middle Earth which are set out elsewhere.
The difference is that Tolkien’s myths are not a living part our culture as the myths of the Greeks and Romans were to them.
The closest example in the modern world to the Greek and Roman religions is Hinduism. There are a lot of similarities to Greece and Rome in way Hindu deities and religion work. No central authority or fixed doctrine, many deities, many statues and temples and images everywhere, etc. Every Hindu child grows up surrounded by stories of Krishna and Rama and knows hundreds of stories about the myths, which are a living part of the culture.
It was much the same in ancient Greece and Rome. The Iliad and the Odyssey were to them like the Ramayana and Mahabharata are in India today – great epics built on a background of living mythology which pervaded the whole of life.
LOTR is widely known in our society, especially from those horrible movies. In that sense it’s part of the background culture, in the way that all high profile movies and books are, but it’s not on the level of myth.
It may be inspiring and moving, the way that any great work of literature may be inspiring and moving, but that’s not the same as myth.
Santa Claus is a true, though minor, myth. ‘Everyone knows’, in the USA and UK at any rate, that he is an old man in red with a white beard, that he lives at the North Pole, drives a sleigh drawn by reindeer through the sky, etc. etc. All those details are genuinely a part of our culture which everyone grows up knowing about, even non-Christians. There are living rituals and standard conventions about Santa Claus, not much different from any ancient Graeco-Roman deity or modern Hindu deity. Yes, there is a Santa Claus, Virginia.
Iluvatar and Elbereth and Manwe are certainly not on that level – much less Frodo and Gandalf, who are just well-known characters like Superman, or Scrooge.
Tolkien created a very profound and moving mythological framework in the Silmarillion, and created in LOTR a great work of literature having that framework as a background. For him personally it was indeed on the level of true myth. But it certainly doesn’t reach that level in our society, or even for the vast majority of LOTR fans.
See Tolkien’s very interesting views on myth, folk-tales, etc. in his essay “On Fairy Stories”, which I quoted from above.
Indeed – it is true that the myths of the Greeks and Romans were far more a part of their culture, linked to their beliefs in their own pantheon, than Tolkien is to Western civilization. This is apparent even from the way the heros of the Iliad and Odyssey were depicted on vases and other everyday objects.
Early excavators like the very wealthy Schliemann, who bulldozed his way into Mycenae and claimed to have located (in eleven weeks of excavation) the tomb of Agamemnon (now refuted), did regard the Iliad and Odyssey as depicting historical facts, and desperately tried to prove this. But as far as I know (and I am not up to date on Mycenaean archaeology) there is no actual evidence that the events described in these two works ever took place. One wonders why they were written, and who wrote them. Perhaps they were created at the behest of a ruler of Mycenae, or those involved in temple culture? Did they serve a similar function to the Bible in Western civilization, as well as the Ramayana and Mahabharata in India? Did the epics originate even earlier than the Mycenaean period? Were they even part of an oral tradition before the advent of writing? Many questions remain unanswered.
I still don’t know what our hypothetical descendants in the distant future would make of LOTR, and how far they would try to interpret it in the way we have tried to interpret the Homerian epics (if they had as relatively little in the way of additional material evidence and literature as we have for the Mycenaeans).
Is there a way to correct one’s posts on this site? I’ve just noticed a horrible error in the last para of the above post (‘ancestors’ should read ‘descendants’). Too much of the old vino…
[Fixed that for you: we have Preview, but only the Admin (that’s me) can edit once the comment is up. I always can, when it’s a case of statement clarity or serious OMG! 😉 ]
Thank you very much. Pedantic of me, I know, but didn’t want to look like a complete idiot!