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Fo3 posted:In UK, USA and Australia we have the saying "teach you grandma to suck eggs" which is lame. Some googling into it seems the Scots have a similar saying "teach your father to get bairns (children)" Which I think is better. Dunno about "the first", but they appear to have "introduced" iron working and horses to the Egyptians by conquering them, and then being their primary antagonist for a few centuries.
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Oct 19, 2018 17:52
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That was the Hyksos, who I don't believe are related to the Hittites, but I am not a historian. The Hittites were a Bronze Age empire. The Hittites were an Indo-European group who migrated to central Anatolia and slowly expanded. Early on their primary rivals were the Mitanni, a fairly unknown group in modern times who controlled the the area around the origins of the Tigris and Euphrates. The Hittites ultimately beat them and at their height their sphere of influence was most of Anatolia and down into Syria. I'm sure an actual historian can elaborate/tell me where I was wrong. Elyv fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Oct 19, 2018 |
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Oct 19, 2018 18:01
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The Hittites were ironwork pioneers, it’s not like people went around saying “oh it’s the Bronze Age better not use any of this iron we’ve got”. They probably couldn’t produce huge amounts of it but they knew how to smelt. The Hyksos were Bronze Age too, they come into frame a bit before the time the Hittite state was growing to be a regional power (17th/16th century). The Hittites were major geopolitical rivals of Egypt later in the 14/13th century, fighting a series of wars over the Levant before eventually settling into peace with them, but they never conquered Egypt. The Hyksos were the ones who came in and ended the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (whether this was in fact a conquest or something else is a matter of interpretation but they were never an independent state outside of Egypt, unlike the Hittites). They were a far less well-defined group with probably Semitic and Indo-Aryan elements (the Egyptian name basically means aspecifically “outlanders”) but they do seem to have been a horse culture in a way that Egypt was not, and they did introduce some technologies from the north to Egypt — the chariot and the composite bow are two major examples. For bonus confusion, there was another culture around the same place and time called the Hattians about whom we know gently caress all except the Hittites conquered them and preserved some of their language. skasion fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Oct 19, 2018 |
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Oct 19, 2018 18:44
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I didn't know the Hittites knew how to smelt iron, I did know they made iron weapons but I thought it was just meteoric iron. I feel like I read that the origin of the name Hittite came from Hatti, but I can't remember where. Do we know if they were called the Hittites before the finished conquering the Hatti?
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Oct 19, 2018 18:59
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The book I'm reading makes the claim that Hatti was their second capital and foreigners called them Hittites after that. Their first capital was Neshia and they called themselves Neshites after that. The reason we use the word Hittite is because it occurs in the bible, referring to culturally-hittite people in the holy land left over from when the empire reached there
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Oct 19, 2018 19:02
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Elyv posted:That was the Hyksos, who I don't believe are related to the Hittites, but I am not a historian. The Hittites were a Bronze Age empire. Hah, you could be right. Was trying to recall. The Hittites did fight the Egyptians over Canaan, though.
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Oct 19, 2018 20:30
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:How about something written within the last 20 years? Song of Wrath by J.E. Lendon is pretty good.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:09
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Fell Fire posted:Song of Wrath by J.E. Lendon is pretty good. It seems good but it only covers the first 10 years of the war.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:16
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Even more interesting to me are the Hittite-adjacent/dominated Luwians of Western Anatolia. Nothing about them is not up for debate. There are no settled facts. But they are very important!
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Oct 19, 2018 23:03
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I'm just glancing at some historical maps quickly, but it looks to me as if the Hittite Empire included Troy, during the period of Homeric Troy. I encourage a correction in this observation, because I'm sure it will also be very interesting.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:39
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It did, more or less; the Hittites were linked to the Trojans by treaty. They called the city Wilusa (compare Greek Ilios) and the region Taruisa. The Hittite monarchs had diplomatic contacts with leaders in Greece (they called it Ahhiyawa, that is to say Achaea). The impression one gets from their correspondence is that the Aegean coast of Anatolia was a borderland without strong governmental authority — a couple of letters for example concern an adventurer or brigand called Piyama-radu who raised hell there for several decades with some kind of support from Ahhiyawa.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:54
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There's indication that the Hittites and Mycenaean Greeks weren't getting along right around when the Trojan war would have happened. If it's based on a real event at all, that is.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:58
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cheetah7071 posted:There's indication that the Hittites and Mycenaean Greeks weren't getting along right around when the Trojan war would have happened. If it's based on a real event at all, that is. It would certainly be an explosive find to excavate the ruins of Troy. We will certainly be able to blow up many theories about what happened. It would be archeological dynamite!
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Oct 20, 2018 00:18
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Is there a good intro to the Sea People/some theories about what they were up to? I read a bit about them like 700 pages back in the thread but was curious to learn more. It seems crazy how so many civilizations just collapsed at the same time and we don’t know why.
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Oct 20, 2018 01:13
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Sea People follow up question. Are they the latest people we know of that we know nothing about?
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Oct 20, 2018 01:15
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My understanding is that the most plausible theory is that the sea peoples were a loosely-structured army of refugees rather than the state military of some unknown culture. As in, famine brought about by climate change causes societal collapse somewhere, and the survivors then set out to steal food from their slightly-better-off neighbors, who then either join the refugee army or make their own, and so on in a chain reaction that brought down all the major civilizations of the day other than Egypt. Notably, Egypt is insulated from droughts in the Mediterranean because they get their water from the Nile, which is fed by rains much further south.
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Oct 20, 2018 01:35
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Someone already recommended it but all these late Bronze Age questions should really go to 1177 BC by Eric Cline. It’s a great book, very accessible and written by genuine expert in the field. If you want to know why a bunch of civilizations collapsed in the early 12th century it will let you know some reasons. tl;dr on the Sea Peoples is that they were displaced people trying to carve out a position for themselves in an eastern Mediterranean world that was undergoing serious and systemic economic and political collapse for complicated and poorly understood reasons. There were multiple groupings of them, the Egyptians understood them to be a confederation of ethnic groups, they didn’t all come from any one place and they probably didn’t have any one plan. They were people trying to make it in a world that was in trouble.
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Oct 20, 2018 01:45
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Yeah, the Sea People weren't a "people" in the sense of being a nationality or ethnicity, they were "these people that came from the sea." That they were refugees of other calamities is about all we know. The only things we know about them were written by survivors of their onslaught. Most scenarios about them are simply plausible guesses that are consistent with the scanty evidence we have about them. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that iron-working technology seems to have come with them, but how they're related isn't at all clear.
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Oct 20, 2018 01:45
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OK, edited question in the wake of "The Sea People" weren't really a specific culture; Is the Classical period the last time we become aware of cultures that existed, but know nothing else about them? Who are the most recent Historical mystery people? I will actually answer my question from earlier about the Sea People being the last by saying no, I can think of the Etruscan's from later, though I suppose we know a little more about them, if not much. Edit: Then again, I suppose there are a lot of people from the Roman period we know of only through how the Romans describe them. Anything we know about the culture of the various Galic tribes for instance is pretty much all questionable considering the sources we have, no? poo poo, now that I think about it, all we have on the Vikings is pretty suspect too, or is that just their religious practices? remusclaw fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Oct 20, 2018 |
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Oct 20, 2018 01:49
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There's actually quite a bit known of Etruscans. For most recent unknown cultures, other than still-uncontacted tribes like the Andaman islanders, there are tons from the Americas since only a few cultures there have any written records. Old world... I suspect there are some in Africa, I don't know enough. Our knowledge of the Xiongnu is pretty minimal and entirely from Chinese sources. There are a few of those steppe tribe types of peoples who are just considered interchangeable because we don't know anything from their point of view, like Xiongnu or Jurchen or Khitans or whatever. All we have are writings from settled societies bordering them who they upset.
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Oct 20, 2018 01:58
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I think I might have conflated the loss of Claudius's History with not knowing anything about them rather than with not knowing more about them.
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Oct 20, 2018 02:02
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If your barometer for a culture being unknown is because what we know about it is questionable, that applies to like half of all cultures on the old world until probably well after the year 1000.
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Oct 20, 2018 02:06
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Koramei posted:If your barometer for a culture being unknown is because what we know about it is questionable, that applies to like half of all cultures on the old world until probably well after the year 1000. Yeah, I kinda started thinking something along those lines as I was typing. The Hittite talk, and the mention therein of a people only known by name got me into thinking about this, and the Sea People question made me want to ask, but I let my own definition widen a bit much to be answerable in any sort non broad way. Aside then probably from the Uncontacted tribes I suppose it would have to be those Native American groups GF mentioned that were done in through various means?
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Oct 20, 2018 02:11
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Just by sheer numbers we know practically nothing about the vast majority of human cultures that have ever existed. Even once we start knowing things, it's typically only in specific parts of the world rather than everywhere equally
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Oct 20, 2018 02:19
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I know for recent "unknown" cultures the formation and spreading of the Slavs is pretty mysterious. Eastern Europe once had jillions of languages, German, Baltic, Dacian, Thracian, the various relatives of Greek, etc. Then at some point in late antiquity/early middle ages this other Indo-European language pops up and spreads like wildfire with only a few references to it before. I think the Romans called early slavs "sclaveni" but there's very little known about them. If anyone has any reading about the subject I would be super interested in it, I'm starting to get really into the early middle ages.
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Oct 20, 2018 03:30
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sullat posted:It would certainly be an explosive find to excavate the ruins of Troy. We will certainly be able to blow up many theories about what happened. It would be archeological dynamite! Think of the treasure we could find! digs trench through hill with dynamite e:  
Zopotantor fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Oct 20, 2018 |
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Oct 20, 2018 07:54
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They'll be saying similar things about 21st century archaeologists some day.
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Oct 20, 2018 08:00
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Prolly but the main thing beaten into our heads is dont loving dig unless you need to because its an extremely destructive process.
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Oct 20, 2018 08:02
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The Lone Badger posted:They'll be saying similar things about 21st century archaeologists some day. There's a reason why the Japanese government won't let anyone open the oldest imperial kofun, or why the PRC doesn't let anyone open up the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang. Once they're open it becomes a race against time to save everything without destroying it, and as the terracotta army shows it doesn't take much for the environment to annihilated things like pigments.
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Oct 20, 2018 09:42
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You can do some really interesting imaging poo poo to figure out pigments even when they fade away, to the point of figuring out layer sequences and if poo poo gets repainted over. Its been used a little in the Southwest dealing with rock art but I havent ever seen it applied else where.
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Oct 20, 2018 09:45
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Just look at what they did to determine some precambrian fossils were indeed animals. It amazes me what traces can be teased out now.
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Oct 20, 2018 09:56
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The Lone Badger posted:They'll be saying similar things about 21st century archaeologists some day. That's why SOP is to leave large portions of dig sites intact
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Oct 20, 2018 10:06
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What sort of stuff do archaeologists do to try and leave rich finds of our current era for archaeologists of the year 2500?
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Oct 20, 2018 10:44
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The Lone Badger posted:What sort of stuff do archaeologists do to try and leave rich finds of our current era for archaeologists of the year 2500? Not really our wheelhouse. The only thing I know slightly related that we do is mark on maps where we do experimental flintknapping so people know its modern.
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Oct 20, 2018 10:59
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CommonShore posted:I'm just glancing at some historical maps quickly, but it looks to me as if the Hittite Empire included Troy, during the period of Homeric Troy. I encourage a correction in this observation, because I'm sure it will also be very interesting. As a point of order, there probably wasn't a Hittite "Empire", as modern research suggests the Hittites were banded together in a network of tribal alliances, and therefore even more loosely connected with each other then other ancient "states". The Luwians for example, might have been related to them and it was a Luwian tribal alliance which fought a tribal alliance of Greek tribes at Troy. Probably! Ancient history is full of caveats like that.  Interestingly though, there are a lot of Luwian artifacts either in Turkey or Germany, looked over by a very tiny group of specialists. So if you want to know more about Luwians, it looks like you have to either learn Turkish or German. In Germany, the entire thematic was until very recently extremely controversial, just to add more confusion. If you can get it in a language you can understand, I can only suggest reading Eberhard Zangger's "Die Luwier und der Trojanische Krieg", since he gives an overview of the controversy in it. What I took away from it was that historians and archaeologists can be incredibly petty.
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Oct 20, 2018 11:15
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I'm always impressed by how few definitive statements anyone can make about the Hephthalites.
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Oct 20, 2018 11:43
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The Lone Badger posted:What sort of stuff do archaeologists do to try and leave rich finds of our current era for archaeologists of the year 2500? These suckers are going to be so confused when they come across this guy's little projects.
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Oct 20, 2018 12:06
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The Lone Badger posted:What sort of stuff do archaeologists do to try and leave rich finds of our current era for archaeologists of the year 2500? It's often more of a funding issue, but a lot of sites have portions that are unexcavated. A decent chunk of Pompeii, for example, is still buried. I think there are a few places where parts were specifically left until they could be explored without destroying anything, but I can't name any. I don't think any of this happens with the aim to give future generations something to do however. We've explored a tiny fraction of our history pretty much anywhere on the planet. There's always more to find.
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Oct 20, 2018 12:43
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Don Gato posted:There's a reason why the Japanese government won't let anyone open the oldest imperial kofun This also has the bonus factor of the Imperial Household Agency being insane and right wing and thoroughly restricting any archaeology on the imperial family in case it turns up, horror of horror, firm connections to Korea.
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Oct 20, 2018 17:01
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FishFood posted:I know for recent "unknown" cultures the formation and spreading of the Slavs is pretty mysterious. Eastern Europe once had jillions of languages, German, Baltic, Dacian, Thracian, the various relatives of Greek, etc. Then at some point in late antiquity/early middle ages this other Indo-European language pops up and spreads like wildfire with only a few references to it before. I think the Romans called early slavs "sclaveni" but there's very little known about them. If anyone has any reading about the subject I would be super interested in it, I'm starting to get really into the early middle ages. One theory I heard is that the Slavs survived out there near the edge of the steppes because of the Pripyat/Pinsk marshes. Like the forests and steppes around the joint were dangerous as heck because of other groups going to and fro, but the Slavs hunkered down in the one terrain area that was easy for hiding and surviving independently. And eventually they spread out from that area. No idea how credible a theory it is though.
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Oct 20, 2018 17:20
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