Mantis42 posted:

As well as 1421, which I'm sure you will find very interesting.

twoday posted:

Be sure to read 1493 as well, it’s just as good

Ghostlight posted:

Here's the thing.

Why would he do that?

What's the actual connection between the reported colour of a god and early explorers? The Hindu have gods with blue, yellow, and green skins but strangely enough there's no concerted effort to use those to argue that people of these colours once existed within India - they are recognised to merely be symbolic of the character or domain of those deities. What impulse is it that gives rise to the seemingly uniquely European impulse to connect the whiteness of mythical characters to their own likeness?
It seems that wherever there is whiteness, there must have been Europeans; yet wherever there is blackness it is merely a manifestation of the primordial fear of all men from before our mastery of fire.

That's before you even get into the fact that all accounts of Viracocha's whiteness are written by the conquering Spaniards or post-colonial.

Dalael posted:

*edit: Like, don't get me wrong, maybe he was a racist guy. Maybe he did think of the superiority of white guys or some other bullshit. I don't know enough (ie never read his book) but in everything i've read about him, nothing ever left me the impression that he was the intense racist you make him out to be.

*edit2: Also I don't know why the gently caress you make such a big deal about it. I wasn't praising the guy, I only mentioned that his expedition proved that ancient boats could cross oceans and his views on races doesn't change that fact regardless of how much you bitch about it.

*edit: One more thing, i am not claiming that his expedition proved they did cross oceans. Only that it was possible.

Dalael posted:

My understanding is, there are accounts from the 18th hundred from european explorers which claimed to have encountered island tribes of people with beard and whiter (not white) skin than those around and he thought they might have been the people from those legends.

Wheter those claims are true or not, i dont know. Im really only starting to learn about south america because thats a subject that wasnt taught at all back when i was in school.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Dalael posted:

My understanding is, there are accounts from the 18th hundred from european explorers which claimed to have encountered island tribes of people with beard and whiter (not white) skin than those around and he thought they might have been the people from those legends.

Wheter those claims are true or not, i dont know. Im really only starting to learn about south america because thats a subject that wasnt taught at all back when i was in school.

Squalid posted:

Contemporary anthropolists had front row seats to the death, misery, and senselessness of these cruel policies and were basically yelling "for the love of god STOP" with all their breath. This produced a concerted effort to push back against the then common characterization of these minorities as primitive, violent and backwards. In some cases they went too far. However they also made a lot of good points.

SEX HAVER 40000 posted:

so aside from 1491 and 1493 what books should i read?

Ghostlight posted:

Sure, but there is no documentation of those legends existing before the Spanish, which is somewhat notable because the Inca were not a preliterate society

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Has there been some new discoveries on Incan writing I'm not aware of? Last I looked into it, they had sophisticated numerical and recording system but no actual written language.

cheetah7071 posted:

It remains unclear exactly what quipu are. They were definitely some form of recording device, but were they writing? The distinction I'm making here is that writing maps 1 to 1 to spoken language. You can translate directly between speech and the symbols on the page. Something like mathematical notation, while a useful recording system, isn't writing in that sense.

For those who haven't heard of it, here's what Quipu looks like:



There's an elaborate system of knots on those strings. Spanish accounts leave us in no doubt that they record information in some way. Most of the content of most of the surviving Quipu have been deciphered and conclusively shown to be recording numbers--possibly tax or other financial information. However, most Quipu have some undeciphered content on them, and some of them are entirely undeciphered. Whatever they're recording, it isn't the same notation used in the bits we understand. There's a number of hints that the undeciphered bits might be words--that is, writing as I defined it above--but almost all the evidence is unclear.

If Quipu are indeed not writing then the Incans would probably be the most sophisticated nonliterate empire we're aware of

cheetah7071 posted:

What are you interested in

One of my favorite history books is Rubicon by Tom Holland. It doesn't really do any original scholarship but it's an entertaining, well-written narrative of the end of the Roman republic.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Has there been some new discoveries on Incan writing I'm not aware of? Last I looked into it, they had sophisticated numerical and recording system but no actual written language.

SEX HAVER 40000 posted:

so aside from 1491 and 1493 what books should i read?

SEX HAVER 40000 posted:

so aside from 1491 and 1493 what books should i read?

Alhazred posted:

1177 B.C.

Big Dick Cheney posted:

Do we know how the Polynesians found all those tiny islands? I feel like the chances are slim that they would just find them randomly. Maybe I just don't know how boats work.

quote:

Signs of land include drifting land vegetation; clouds piled up over islands; the loom above an island created by sunlight or moonlight reflecting up from the white sand and smooth water of a lagoon; distinctive patterns of swells created by swells refracting around and / or reflecting off islands; and seabirds such as the manu-o-Ku (fairy tern) and the noio (noddy tern), which go out to sea in the morning to feed on fish and return to land at night to rest.

The diurnal flights of such birds are the most useful signs for expanding landfall, since their flights to and from an island gives a fairly specific direction to the wayfinder. As the birds leave an island in the morning, the wayfinder can sail in the direction the birds are coming from to find land; as the birds return to an island in the late afternoon, the wayfinder can follow the birds to land.

quote:

Responding to a visitor who questioned why they put their fields in the hands of the helots rather than cultivate them themselves, Anaxandridas explained, "It was by not taking care of the fields, but of ourselves, that we acquired those fields

After the Greeks ended the threat of the second Persian invasion with their victory at Plataea, the Spartan commander Pausanias ordered that a sumptuous banquet the Persians had prepared be served to him and his officers. "The Persians must be greedy," he remarked, "when, having all this, yet they come to take our barleycakes.

When someone from Argos pointed out that Spartans were susceptible to being corrupted by foreign travel, Eudamidas replied, "But you, when you come to Sparta, do not become worse, but better.

Polycratidas was one of several Spartans sent on a diplomatic mission to some Persian generals, and being asked whether they came in a private or a public capacity, answered, "If we succeed, public; if not, private.

Following the disastrous sea battle of Cyzicus, the admiral Mindarus' first mate dispatched a succinct distress signal to Sparta. The message was intercepted by the Athenians and was recorded by Xenophon in his Hellenica: "Ships gone; Mindarus dead; the men starving; at our wits' end what to do"

twoday posted:

That's the crux of his grift. He has some interesting ideas, and presents them in a way that will seem interesting to anyone, regardless of how much they know. Then he devotes a lot of time to railing against established academia, to the point that that some of his readers stop trusting all other sources.

In summary, what he's saying is, "look at this, pretty neat, huh? well, actually this is the truth and everyone else is stupid and/or lying." And that's not how knowledge develops. I think it's fine to question things and come up with new ideas. Just yesterday in this thread I was trying to argue that there was a possible trade route of chili peppers between Central America and Scandinavia before Columbus. Why not think up such elaborate theories? Sometimes that's the only way to get to the truth, because the truth is often unbelievable, so it's worth doing it, just as a thought exercise. But as I was doing this, KiteAuraan presented me with some interesting points about ancient trade networks that made my hypothesis seem unlikely, and that shut me up pretty quickly, because I realized he had a valid argument worth considering.

The way people like Graham Hancock work is just the opposite. They question things too, but they also come up with an all-encompassing theory that explains why they are right and everyone else is wrong. If you end up trapped in that sort of logical fallacy, you can never learn from others, you can never contribute to a collective understanding.

Here's an example that is often brought up by the Graham Hancock/Ancient Aliens crew, the Piri Reis map:



This is an Ottoman map compiled in 1513, based upon other maps and written accounts of voyages undertaken by explorers from Spain and Portugal. Unlike every other map of South America made in that era, it shows that land extends eastwards from the bottom tip of South America. Now, some people use this map to argue that it's proof that Antarctica was a populated and habitable place just 500 years ago. and go on from there to argue all kinds of insane theories about why that is the case, and come up with explanations such as, the world has spun around in the meantime, and Antarctica used to be closer to the equator.

The general consensus is that the "antarctica" part actually closely matches with the remaining coast of South America, and the map maker just decided to wrap it around the bottom of the vellum for whatever practical reason.

And I say, ok, it's fine to make up theories to explain things, as long as you consider all the evidence. But they do not. They have tons of other maps from the same time that portray South America normally, but they discard all of that data when making their considerations, because it doesn't fit with the conclusion they already arrived upon. That's bad!

Graham Hancock operates in a similar way (albeit with slightly more sophisticated arguments), as do many other pseudo-scholars that you see a lot on TV and online these days. The prevalence of these peudo-historical theories in mainstream culture, and the amount of attention paid to them, has led to a countless number of communities appearing which believe this poo poo and ignore everything else. These people end up in a bubble and re-enforce each other's beliefs until they end up totally detached from reality. This is why we have people today who legitimately believe that the earth is flat, or that every monumental structure outside of Europe was built by Aliens.


This has a lot of appeal, for sure. We all want to be punk rock, deep in our hearts. I support it when people question the status quo, in terms of history. I think that a lot of things were overlooked, that the picture is incomplete, that some ideas were based upon ephemeral evidence and ended up becoming entrenched in scholarship, that certain historical narratives became overly dominant, and that we need to rethink some things. And I think that idea is common, that a lot of things about our understanding of history don't make sense, or are incomplete. Doubting and rethinking the status quo is really what all historians should be doing all the time. But you need to have some sort of system for deciding what is likely or not. You need to be able to discard ideas, but you also need to be careful about the way in which you accumulate new ones, and you need to develop tools for processing that info.

So like I said before, I'm open to the idea Graham Hancock is obsessed with, that there was a civilization during the Ice Age or beforehand. Why not? The other thing is I realize that there is no definitive evidence of this. We haven't even solved the Bronze Age Collapse of civilization which happened 3,000 years ago, and in my eyes we are nowhere near close to being capable of having ideas about the collapse of civilization 11,000 years ago. If Hancock's theory was correct, and there was a civilization before the glaciers melted and the sea level rose, most of the evidence would be destroyed or underwater by now, and I don't think we have enough data to either confirm this or rule it out. Most of the data we do have seems to suggest that this was not the case, so I think it's an interesting idea, but I have plenty of doubts.

But Hancock has no doubts. He is convinced that he is the only person alive who knows the truth of what human society was like 11,000 years ago, and he is happy to tell you all about it, and that is why you shouldn't trust him.

SEX HAVER 40000 posted:

so aside from 1491 and 1493 what books should i read?

Real hurthling! posted:

sparta practiced "marriage by capture" which is fancy talk for ritualized rape.
they also enslaved felllow greeks (as if it matters who they enslaved morally, but their contemporaries saw it as especially monstrous) and treated them to the most inhumane conditions possible.
yet somehow, they still the good guys vs democratic athens and their imperial delian league protection racket

kinda like how china has a million muslims in concentration camps but it would be a big bonus for life on earth if they decapitated america, head of nato.