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History Forum / General / Ancient History / January 2006Why so little info about Sumerians?
It seems we have tons of info on ancient Egypt. Why do we have so little on Sumer? Did climate prevent preservation of archeological artifacts more than in Egypt? Or did later civilizations wipe out Sumerian artifacts? Or did the Sumerians produce less preservable items in the 1st place? Or are we just culturally more interested in Egypt? Since the Sumerian civilization was older, and maybe the first significant civilization in history, it seems there should be greater academic interest. -- Joe There is a vast amount of information available about the Sumerians. And much of it is not difficult to find. (A one-word google search ("Sumerian") brings up 3,260,000 English pages.) That should keep you occupied for a lifetime or so. But of course ancient Sumer is modern Iran, which means that it has not been politically possible for archaeologists to have the same level of access to sites as in Egypt. > There is a vast amount of information available about the Sumerians. > And much of it is not difficult to find. (A one-word google search [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > been politically possible for archaeologists to have the same level of > access to sites as in Egypt. Try Iraq, but your point is still well taken. > Try Iraq, but your point is still well taken. Yes, you're correct of course--Ive got Iran and the Elamites on the brain at the moment. I could add another reason to those that Matt offered. Egyptian is damn difficult, but Sumerian even more so (which is why those tablets are taking so long to translate). This remains true although, as we know from so many TV programs, both languages have been deciphered. I would say it's because, while Egyptian has a well known and almost-surviving descendant (Coptic), and additionally is related to Semitic and other Afroasiatic languages, so that it's possible to use comparative information when trying to understand it, Sumerian has no descendant and no known relatives. Totally unlike any other language. Some Sumerian words were borrowed into Akkadian, or re-used in Akkadian script, but what about the words that weren't? > It seems we have tons of info on ancient Egypt. Why do we have so > little on Sumer? Did climate prevent preservation of archeological > artifacts more than in Egypt? Or did later civilizations wipe out > Sumerian artifacts? Or did the Sumerians produce less preservable > items in the 1st place? Or are we just culturally more interested in Egypt? > Since the Sumerian civilization was older, and maybe the first significant > civilization in history, it seems there should be greater academic interest. Reason number one is all the other ancient civilizations were measured in hundreds of years of dominance. A couple lasted over a thousand but were not dominant for that period. In the times when they were not dominant we find artifacts of the dominant empire of the time. In Egypt we are talking 3000 years of a dominant culture with and additional thousand or so years of upper and lower kingdoms of a similar culture. So we have a much greater accumulation of what we call Egyptian culture simply because there are so many more years of what we call Egyptian culture. But would a rational person group the early culture of upper Egypt with the last Greek period of Egypt? Calling all of it Egyptian is a convenient simplification. Granted we know more of Greek than of Upper Egypt simply because of distance in the past. But if you look at clearly definable periods within the region we call Egypt we likely do not have much more than of any place else. Simply with Egypt there are so many periods we lump together. And then there is the romantic factor of it being Egypt which lead to so many early digs. And the more than it known the more professors there are and because of the system it is clear how many more things there are to learn. So getting a doctorate in Egyptian archaeology is easier to get into and easier to carry out because of the available funding because of it popularity. So it is a positive feedback system for Egypt. And because of the west if you are interested in any thing related to the bible stories all kinds of christian groups are willing to contribute to financing digs -- the sojurn in Egypt and the Babylonian captivity for example. On top of that Egypt has an antiquities research bureaucracy staffed with well educated Oxford and Harvard types who have worked out a maximum return plan for digs for the next hundred years -- so I read they claim. So there are many reasons why we have this impression and even more as to why this is a fact. If the bible mentioned an Israelite captivity in Sumer the west would be all over it. If any of the other civilizations had ruled a region for more than a thousand years with a continuous dominant civilization would likely have a comparable fraction of artifacts in relation to years and size of the empire.  SignatureDid anyone ever notice Jews are insanely afraid that they will be treated the same as Christians and Muslimes are treated by Israel? -- The Iron Webmaster, 3535 nizkor http://www.giwersworld.org/nizkook/nizkook.phtml Blame Israel http://www.ussliberty.org a10 >... > Reason number one is all the other ancient civilizations were measured in [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > So there are many reasons why we have this impression and even more as to > why this is a fact.... Matt, thanks so much for your thoughtful and detailed reply. In bookstores and libraries when I see shelf after shelf of books about ancient Egypt and virtually nothing on Sumer, it puzzled me. I understand much better now. -- Joe Knew I forgot something. And why is this important? > On top of that Egypt has an antiquities research bureaucracy staffed > with well educated Oxford and Harvard types who have worked out a > maximum return plan for digs for the next hundred years -- so I read > they claim. Which means if there is a temple of some god scheduled for digging in ten years and it is assigned to Prof A and if you get him to take you on as a grad student, you can direct all your doctoral studies towards that dig and be almost guaranteed to have your name on important papers on the dig in fifteen years. Consider a man I went to college with. He went on for his PhD in a rather obscure branch of physics which did NOT become the next greatest thing in transistor fabrication (that long ago) and today he wastes away editting Analog SF. Yes, that Stan Schmidt and yes tongue in cheek as he was also a very good writer but in other fields one can make a best guess as to a PhD field but if that isn't the hottest thing in research when you are ready your chances of great papers and a jumpstarted career are diminished. SignatureOperation Enduring Freedom has become Operation Screw the Pooch. -- The Iron Webmaster, 3546 nizkor http://www.giwersworld.org/nizkook/nizkook.phtml flying saucers http://www.giwersworld.org/flyingsa.html a2 > > It seems we have tons of info on ancient Egypt. Why do we have so > > little on Sumer? Um, short answer: we don't. It's just harder to get at. > > Did climate prevent preservation of archeological artifacts more > > than in Egypt? Well, one issue is that even baked clay tablets are vulnerable to water. So to the extent that Iraq has better ground water than Egypt, this has been an issue. But the only site I've heard much about this problem for is Babylon, which is not a Sumerian site. Other than water, cuneiform tablets are *much* more durable than papyrus, and unsurprisingly we have vastly more cuneiform surviving than papyrus. Note the language issue another poster has pointed out: Akkadian is harder than Egyptian, not having a living descendant (speakers of Syriac disagree, but not the Assyriologists), and Sumerian, an isolate, is much harder than Akkadian. > > Or did later civilizations wipe out Sumerian artifacts? This isn't a widespread ancient Near Eastern practice. The Egyptians were prone to reusing materials, and Hatshepsut's son tried to erase her memory, and the Sasanids made a relatively determined effort to wipe out memory of the Arsacids. (Though this last is later than *extensive* Roman efforts to control historical memory, so could well be due to Western influence.) That's the whole list known to me of this sort of thing before Muhammad. Oh, also, there's a really weird religious schism within Zoroastrianism in the 5th century AD that gets erased. But by and large, and certainly way back in the Bronze Age, we don't see organised forgetfulness. > > Or did the Sumerians produce less preservable items in the 1st > > place? I get the impression that Mesopotamian art in general doesn't have the modern popularity Egyptian art does. > > Or are we just culturally more interested in Egypt? Massively. Extremely. Extravagantly. See, you're confusing the popular book market with the academic one. My vague, pure-opinion impression is that Egypt and Iraq have generated roughly equal amounts of academic publication in the past two centuries. Flipside, when I personally want to know something, I'm about equally likely to find out whether the thing in question is Sumerian or Old Kingdom, or more generally Mesopotamian or Egyptian. But if I walk into a bookstore, I'll be lucky to find one book on ancient Iraq (and most often in fact the book by that very title), as against anywhere from five to a hundred on ancient Egypt. Egypt sells. The two topics that were hot enough on Usenet when this group was proposed, to justify creating this group, were King Arthur and the Pyramids. After several years of this endless stupid flamewar over whether Christianity is -100% or +500% true, both topics seem to have fled elsewhere - but I'm sure they're still much discussed *somewhere* online. > > Since the Sumerian civilization was older, and maybe the first > > significant civilization in history, As to the "first civilisation" thing, NB that it's not at all clear Sumer beats Egypt, Harappa, or Bactria, far as I'm concerned. I'm in a serious minority on this, but all four seem to have followed reasonably similar social trajectories over the fourth millennium, with Egypt perhaps somewhat slower than Sumer and Harappa. It is, however, fairly clear that Sumer *wrote* first, so depending on your definition of "civilisation", you may have a different answer. I'm also out of date on this stuff. Even when I looked into it, there were sites in places like eastern Iran complicating the picture; nowadays, I couldn't guess at what else is out there. (Has anyone figured out what on earth Ebla was doing existing as early as it did?) I'm fairly confident "four early civs" is a truer picture than "one earliest civ", but "many early civs" may be truer than either. > > it seems there should be greater academic interest. There is, honest. It just doesn't have the press the Egyptian stuff has. That said, there *is*, as one way to point you toward the academic world of things Sumerian, a website where nearly all known Sumerian belles lettres are offered in translation. It's challenging reading - you might do better, first, to locate Thorkild Jacobsen's <The Harps That Once...>, which is an easier introduction. But if that whets your appetite for any of what the Sumerians wrote, this website is where you can find most of the rest: <http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/> If you want introductory references on other Sumerian topics, I'll see what I can find. But a ten-year-old compilation of essays should be high on your list: <Civilizations of the Ancient Near East> edited by Jack Sasson. Four-volume set owned by many libraries. Most of the essays devoted to Mesopotamia (or Egypt) deal with the region over all periods, but there is one entire volume of specifically historical stuff whose essays are chronologically tighter, and there are occasional essays on the Sumerians in the other three volumes. Each essay has a bibliography, and many (but not all) of these are extremely helpful. OK, now on to Matt Giwer's reply: > Reason number one is all the other ancient civilizations were measured > in hundreds of years of dominance. A couple lasted over a thousand > but were not dominant for that period. In the times when they were > not dominant we find artifacts of the dominant empire of the time. Um, this is a pretty big simplification. The Hittite civilisation doesn't seem to have lasted a thousand. We find artifacts of Mesopotamia in every stage of Hittite civilisation, even though the Hittites were way more powerful than any Mesopotamian polity during their two peak periods. For example. I think your *core* point, however, is correct: > In Egypt we are talking 3000 years of a dominant culture with and > additional thousand or so years of upper and lower kingdoms of a > similar culture. So we have a much greater accumulation of what we > call Egyptian culture simply because there are so many more years of > what we call Egyptian culture. Or to put it another way, Egypt vs. Sumer isn't the right comparison; Egypt vs. Mesopotamia is. > Granted we know more of Greek than of Upper Egypt simply because of > distance in the past. But if you look at clearly definable periods > within the region we call Egypt we likely do not have much more than > of any place else. Simply with Egypt there are so many periods > we lump together. No, actually. Most periods of ancient Egypt are *inordinately* better documented than most other literate areas of their time (though usually worse documented than Babylonia at that time). Compare, for example: Old Kingdom Egypt (or Sumer or Ebla) with contemporary Assyria Middle Kingdom Egypt (or Babylonia or Mari or the Old Hittite Empire) with contemporary Assyria New Kingdom Egypt (or the New Hittite Empire or Ugarit) with contemporary Mitanni, or Cyprus, or Akhaia, or Babylonia The ringer is Late Period Egypt, which compares for documentation with contemporary Philistia/Judaea/Phoenicia, Urartu, Hellas, Carthage, Etruria, and Media, rather than with contemporary Assyria or Babylonia But once the Persians arrive, it's back to normal. Egypt is probably the single best-documented part of the Roman Empire, including Italy, and puts *any* other part of the successive Persian Empires into the shade, except Achaemenid Iraq. (By Arsacid times cuneiform is nearly dead and Iraq loses its advantage.) We probably have more raw info about Achaemenid Egypt than about the entire remainder of the Achaemenid Empire, excepting (again) Iraq. The key is writing in a survivable medium. Egypt's desert preserved papyri; the medium itself preserved cuneiform. And both societies wrote a lot more than (we guess) some of the others did. > And then there is the romantic factor of it being Egypt which > lead to so many early digs. And the more than it known the more [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > of the available funding because of it popularity. So it is a positive > feedback system for Egypt. All this is true, but is a relatively new thing. Earlier, it was more equal-opportunity with Iraq: > And because of the west if you are interested in any thing related > to the bible stories all kinds of christian groups are willing to > contribute to financing digs -- the sojurn in Egypt and the > Babylonian captivity for example. Yep. Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq are the places to dig if you're Bible-concerned. I suspect one reason Assyriologists today talk about their field as a dying one is that the Christian money is no longer enough. Between the political obstacles for decades, and the fact that the public no longer cares, it's hard to sustain the field. > On top of that Egypt has an antiquities research bureaucracy staffed > with well educated Oxford and Harvard types who have worked out a > maximum return plan for digs for the next hundred years -- so I > read they claim. Iraq probably used to have such a thing too. Bahrein has one right now - for years, Assyriologists unable to work in their primary area of interest worked there instead. ("Bahrein?!?" I hear you cry. "How did they find more than three square feet to dig up in *that* flyspeck of a place?" Yeah, well, beats me too, but they did.) Basically, all you have to have is a functioning nation-state and an interest in the pre-Islamic past, and you can have such a bureaucracy; Pakistan has had one for decades. The catch is whether you care about the pagan times - Tunisia, for example, officially doesn't much, at least the last I heard. Joe Bernstein SignatureJoe Bernstein, writer joe@sfbooks.com <http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason." <Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt > OK, now on to Matt Giwer's reply: >>Reason number one is all the other ancient civilizations were measured >>in hundreds of years of dominance. A couple lasted over a thousand >>but were not dominant for that period. In the times when they were >>not dominant we find artifacts of the dominant empire of the time. > Um, this is a pretty big simplification. Without reviewing my original I believe I begged off on an encyclopedic recitation. > The Hittite civilisation doesn't seem to have lasted a thousand. > We find artifacts of Mesopotamia in every stage of Hittite > civilisation, even though the Hittites were way more powerful > than any Mesopotamian polity during their two peak periods. > For example. > I think your *core* point, however, is correct: Of course it was a simplification but regardless of the number of exceptions nothing comes close to the 4000 years of varying dynasties we call Egypt. It stands out regardless of the degree or number of exceptions. >>In Egypt we are talking 3000 years of a dominant culture with and >>additional thousand or so years of upper and lower kingdoms of a >>similar culture. So we have a much greater accumulation of what we >>call Egyptian culture simply because there are so many more years of >>what we call Egyptian culture. > Or to put it another way, Egypt vs. Sumer isn't the right > comparison; Egypt vs. Mesopotamia is. Correct and if over time the different kingdoms in Mesopotamia instead of individually ascending and declining had unified we would likely call it by that single name. >>Granted we know more of Greek than of Upper Egypt simply because of >>distance in the past. But if you look at clearly definable periods >>within the region we call Egypt we likely do not have much more than >>of any place else. Simply with Egypt there are so many periods >>we lump together. > No, actually. I mentioned Greek period specifically. I did not mean the generic name for the most recent period. I am not an Egyptologist nor an arkie nor historian. Beyond a general curiosity, my interests are in ideas of people in other times and in our ideas of the past. This is right in with the latter. For many periods we often have to assume who built what because of when it is dated to. We know of things built in the Greek period and by who that no longer exist and without what was written about that period we would never know existed. > Most periods of ancient Egypt are *inordinately* better > documented than most other literate areas of their time (though usually > worse documented than Babylonia at that time). Compare, for example: > Old Kingdom Egypt (or Sumer or Ebla) with contemporary Assyria > Middle Kingdom Egypt (or Babylonia or Mari or the Old Hittite Empire) > with contemporary Assyria > New Kingdom Egypt (or the New Hittite Empire or Ugarit) with contemporary > Mitanni, or Cyprus, or Akhaia, or Babylonia Those three are also accumulations which are for simplification of addressing Egypt. Of course that things changed slowly in the old days makes it reasonable to categorize when most things remain the same. For example the recently discovered "massacre" around 2000BC in Mendes shows something clearly different from what we would expect from any Egyptian culture and may be related to the Ram-headed god (related to the Hebrew Shofar horn as it was the god who made man from mud and was before (in time, earlier than) the other gods.) So very un-Egyptian occured around the transition from the Old to Middle Kingdom. Or rather should this transition period have its own name? Maybe some day but for now we know very little about what went on during the transition. > The ringer is Late Period Egypt, which compares for documentation > with contemporary Philistia/Judaea/Phoenicia, Urartu, Hellas, Carthage, > Etruria, and Media, rather than with contemporary Assyria or Babylonia For example Philistia/Judea/Phoenicia. We know of the Palestine Syrians from Herodotus' writings of around 450BC. We know of Phoenicia as a culture in the NE Mediterranean. Judea only appears in history in the late 3rd c. BC and "Philisitia" only exists in the old testament the Judeans created about mid 3rd c. BC. Simply saying most of what we "know" about two of the three comes from the myths of the OT can should not be considered. > But once the Persians arrive, it's back to normal. Egypt is probably > the single best-documented part of the Roman Empire, including Italy, [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > Achaemenid Egypt than about the entire remainder of the Achaemenid > Empire, excepting (again) Iraq. Granted I arbitrarily cut off Egypt's history with the Greek period. But as we can see from the post Greek period there are so many different "periods" of its history that we cannot lump it all into simply Egypt. We do not connect any Roman or later period with the 3500 BC kingdom of Upper Egypt but we do with the Greek Period. > The key is writing in a survivable medium. Egypt's desert preserved > papyri; the medium itself preserved cuneiform. And both societies > wrote a lot more than (we guess) some of the others did. But if there is ever a substantial budget to dig around the cuniform writer's region we are likely to find a lot more about what they did and the extent of their constructions. Or all of Iraq if someone ever manages to analyze satellite photoes and find likely places for cities when the rivers had different routes. >>And then there is the romantic factor of it being Egypt which >>lead to so many early digs. And the more than it known the more [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] >>of the available funding because of it popularity. So it is a positive >>feedback system for Egypt. > All this is true, but is a relatively new thing. Earlier, it was > more equal-opportunity with Iraq: The idea of seriously studying the past started when Napolean took over Egypt and people started arriving to find the background for Genesis and Exodus. It was because of that failure modern archaeology was born by specifically rejecting the OT as a guide. Interest in Egypt is hardly a new thing. Interest in Iraq started with Babylon for a biblical connection, looking for signs of the mythical captivity. Again they found a civilization unlike anything indicated in the bible stories. >>And because of the west if you are interested in any thing related >>to the bible stories all kinds of christian groups are willing to >>contribute to financing digs -- the sojurn in Egypt and the >>Babylonian captivity for example. > Yep. Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq are the places to dig if you're > Bible-concerned. In fact because of the financing it is permitted in professional papers for the opening line to be "thought to be the biblical city of" as long as the rest of the paragraph indicates there is no good reason to think it is and it is never mentioned again. > I suspect one reason Assyriologists today talk about their field > as a dying one is that the Christian money is no longer enough. > Between the political obstacles for decades, and the fact that > the public no longer cares, it's hard to sustain the field. It would be best if those countries were to grow their own arkies who are satisfied with local Prof wages and living conditions and do the digging. >>On top of that Egypt has an antiquities research bureaucracy staffed >>with well educated Oxford and Harvard types who have worked out a >>maximum return plan for digs for the next hundred years -- so I >>read they claim. > Iraq probably used to have such a thing too. Bahrein has one right > now - for years, Assyriologists unable to work in their primary area > of interest worked there instead. ("Bahrein?!?" I hear you cry. > "How did they find more than three square feet to dig up in *that* > flyspeck of a place?" Yeah, well, beats me too, but they did.) I know they had their own profs and museums and quality curators. I have not heard they had a long term plan to recover the history within the borders of their country. Consider Saudi. There is little digging but from what little is reported several poorly dug new and separate civilizations have been discovered. Yet coastal Arabia was the oldest land route out of Africa for all kinds of apes including the human varieties to get to the Far East. The ex-jungles of the Arabian desert should have lots of Homo Erectus artifacts as well as Neanderthal and Sapiens and the coastal regions some of the earliest settlements. But archaeology on the peninsula is still in its infancy. > Basically, all you have to have is a functioning nation-state and an > interest in the pre-Islamic past, and you can have such a bureaucracy; > Pakistan has had one for decades. The catch is whether you care about > the pagan times - Tunisia, for example, officially doesn't much, at > least the last I heard. If they don't care, fine. The current policy is to leave part of a dig undisturbed so future arkies with better methods can work on something pristine. If they are not interested now it only means the digs will happen centuries in the future with better methods. In fact if ground penetrating radar can be seriously improved or a better method found the primitive practice of actually digging up sites may not longer be done. In a century people moaning over how much was lost because people actually dug up sites. SignatureThis emergency requires we do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it. That is the war on terrorism in a nutshell. -- The Iron Webmaster, 3524 nizkor http://www.giwersworld.org/nizkook/nizkook.phtml flying saucers http://www.giwersworld.org/flyingsa.html a2 Wow, this has gotten long. FWIW most of it isn't as argumentative as the first substantive chunk. > > OK, now on to Matt Giwer's reply: [snip what he said] > > Um, this is a pretty big simplification. > > Without reviewing my original I believe I begged off on an encyclopedic > recitation. Fair. Sorry if I was too harsh. > >>Granted we know more of Greek than of Upper Egypt simply because of > >>distance in the past. But if you look at clearly definable periods [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > ideas of people in other times and in our ideas of the past. This is > right in with the latter. OK, um, I don't understand what these last three sentences have to do with here. I was most specifically denying the truth of your second sentence in the previous quote: > >>But if you look at clearly definable periods > >>within the region we call Egypt we likely do not have much more than > >>of any place else. See, here's the thing. On my website you can find a document called "Half of Asia, for a Thousand Years", that took me *five years* to write, because I ran into so much trouble assessing what's actually known about different regions, or surviving in different languages. I'm not an Egyptologist, archaeologist, or historian either, and I didn't understand the sheer scale of the disparities, so there was *always* this niggling question "Couldn't there be more somewhere?". But those disparities are just *huge*. So this is a pet peeve of mine. It's like this. The entire body of surviving Middle Persian writings - the language of the Sasanids - is somewhat smaller than the surviving works of Aristotle. By himself. But then you take all surviving Greek, and you put it into a box big enough to hold all surviving Akkadian, and about 75% or more of the box is still empty. I'm sure Chinese and English have by now exceeded Akkadian's record for written stuff; I'm not sure what other languages have. Latin is much smaller than Greek until Byzantine times, and not just early Byzantine. Syriac dwarfs all other forms of Aramaic put together, even with the latter including the Talmuds. And Egyptian, while not really copious, is *vastly* bigger than most contemporary languages, while *Egypt* - documented not only in Egyptian but also, for the final ancient periods, in Greek and Latin and I suppose Persian and Aramaic and even Hebrew - just kicks all available ancient a.ses for quantity of historical documentation. Except for Iraq. This whole issue of what is and what isn't well documented is part of what the These Survive project I still hope to complete some day is all about. So I was reacting to your quite simply false assertion that Egypt's documentation is nothing special. If you meant something different by that assertion, fine, say so and we can move on. If you were referring narrowly to the Ptolemaic period (is that what you mean by "Greek period"?), then OK, that clarifies matters but you're still wrong. We know more about Egypt at that time than about, for example, Carthage, or Syria, or Pergamum, or Rhodes, or indeed I think Greece in general (but I concede I *may* be wrong about that); we know more about Egypt at that time than about all the areas the Seleucids ever governed, east of Syria, put together; I think, but admit I'm unsure, we know more about Egypt at that time than about Italy at that time; I'm quite sure that we know more about Egypt at that time than about everything west of Italy and Tunisia put together. Even though much of Spain, most of North Africa, and some of France at this time had writing, and most of the other areas I've listed had *had* writing for centuries. > For many periods we often have to assume who built what because of when > it is dated to. We know of things built in the Greek period and by who > that no longer exist and without what was written about that period we > would never know existed. A specialist in Urartu would be just *overjoyed* to have to deal with the sheer difficulties created by the paucity of documentation of Egypt's Late Period. Contemporary societies, these. Sure, there's a lot we don't know about ancient Egypt. Well, at the moment I'm reading about the Carolingian Low Countries, and it looks like there's a certain amount we don't know about *those*; a ton we don't know about any earlier periods. Ignorance is pretty much the norm in historical research, except for periods nowhere longer than about ten centuries back. > > Most periods of ancient Egypt are *inordinately* better > > documented than most other literate areas of their time (though usually [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > > New Kingdom Egypt (or the New Hittite Empire or Ugarit) with contemporary > > Mitanni, or Cyprus, or Akhaia, or Babylonia > Those three are also accumulations which are for simplification of > addressing Egypt. You're too kind; actually, they're me being sloppy. I was using standard names that have specific meanings in Egyptology to map entire half-millennia; what I *meant* was "late 3rd millennium, early 2nd millennium, late 2nd millennium, early 1st millennium, late 1st millennium, all BC". > For example the recently discovered "massacre" around 2000BC in > Mendes shows something clearly different from what we would expect [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > name? Maybe some day but for now we know very little about what went > on during the transition. Well, um, mebbe. It actually does have its own name, though, it's the First Intermediate Period. Something I glossed over. Last I heard it supposedly lasted about a century. > > The ringer is Late Period Egypt, which compares for documentation > > with contemporary Philistia/Judaea/Phoenicia, Urartu, Hellas, Carthage, > > Etruria, and Media, rather than with contemporary Assyria or Babylonia > For example Philistia/Judea/Phoenicia. We know of the Palestine Syrians > from Herodotus' writings of around 450BC. We know of Phoenicia as a [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > we "know" about two of the three comes from the myths of the OT can > should not be considered. Um. We disagree about when the OT was written, but I'm not interested in, and not referring to, that. I was referring not only to that source, but also to the inscriptions which for the first time are reasonably copious in the Levant in the first half of the first millennium BC. Really, the Levant is better documented for that period than Urartu or probably even Carthage or Etruria or Media, and Egypt is probably better documented than the Levant. (We have narratives of decent chunks of Egyptian history at that time, after all, in various royal and sub-royal testaments, if not as comprehensive also not as problematic as the OT or Herodotus.) That said, I think we're agreeing here on the main point, which is that none of this compares to the spotlight glare of the testimony on the last Assyrian emperors, the Neo-Babylonian setup, and the first Achaemenids. > > But once the Persians arrive, it's back to normal. Egypt is probably > > the single best-documented part of the Roman Empire, including Italy, [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > > Achaemenid Egypt than about the entire remainder of the Achaemenid > > Empire, excepting (again) Iraq. > Granted I arbitrarily cut off Egypt's history with the Greek period. > But as we can see from the post Greek period there are so many > different "periods" of its history that we cannot lump it all > into simply Egypt. We do not connect any Roman or later period with the > 3500 BC kingdom of Upper Egypt but we do with the Greek Period. Well, um. I personally would connect everything up to the Arab conquest, but then I personally consider the present governments of India and Pakistan to originate with the conquests of Babur; I tend to be a literalist when it comes to transitions of authority. The Egyptians thought of the Roman Emperors as pharaohs; who am I to contradict them? Linguistically, there's a clean clear link all the way even *past* the Muslim conquest, until Coptic runs out of steam (not sure when that happened). But I don't think I'm following your point here. If I may extend my point forward: I think Egypt remains a titan of documentation all the way to now. It is *today* where a quarter of all Arab speakers live, and the centre of Arab publishing. Thing is, other areas eventually surpassed it. I'm not sure when Chinese documentation starts being really rich - whether Tang or later - but China is clearly a bigger field than Egypt for the entire second millennium AD. India, for periods starting I suspect with the Mughal conquests. First Europe as a whole, and then individual countries in Europe, surpassed Egypt. But as long as we're in the ancient world, I'm just saying Egypt should normally be considered a special case, a place where the documentation is so rich that, for example, one could actually feel cheated by not knowing who constructed a particular building, whereas for someplace like Urartu or Phoenician Morocco or Roman Belgium, we normally can't name a single person involved in *founding a city*. > > The key is writing in a survivable medium. Egypt's desert preserved > > papyri; the medium itself preserved cuneiform. And both societies > > wrote a lot more than (we guess) some of the others did. > But if there is ever a substantial budget to dig around the cuniform > writer's region we are likely to find a lot more about what they did > and the extent of their constructions. This is already happening. Bahrein isn't the only place all those archaeologists shut out first by Iran and then by Afghanistan and then by Iraq went. And the surprising stuff some of them found has, I think, made "explore the periphery!" a much more credible concern than decades ago. I just wish more of it were trickling down into non-academic stuff. There are recent textbooks, for example, on the archaeologies of Jordan, Syria, and Turkey; yay; but for less than textbook-level info, you're still stuck with Mellaart, far as I know. (Also, the textbook on Jordan really does the later BC periods wrong - three successive chapters with wacky emphases or approaches - for example, one is devoted primarily to cataloguing material remains by category, as an update to a previous catalogue the guy did. I haven't yet read the Syria and Turkey textbooks; the Syria one is new since the last time I looked into this sort of thing.) And for regions south or east, other than Yemen which is starting to be well-served, well, there's Potts on the Gulf coasts, there's the old book on Afghanistan, and there's the somewhat inadequate <History of Civilizations of Central Asia>. And this guy who's done a series on the archaeology of most of the peninsular states, but it's pretty much unreadable. (That same cataloguing material remains by category problem.) If there's more, I don't know of it. Even Ethiopia before Axum is pretty much impossible to get info about. (Though books on Nubia are now pretty comprehensive.) > Or all of Iraq if someone ever manages to analyze satellite photoes > and find likely places for cities when the rivers had different routes. Most of Mesopotamia has been surface-surveyed. The southern half of it by Robert McCormick Adams with various collaborators (one title is <The Land behind Baghdad> but there are more); the northern half, if you look at my website's "Half of Asia" stuff, in the "Some More Books" page there should be a reference to a book that refers to this. (That page also lists some of the books by the unreadable guy summarising Arabian Peninsular archaeology.) Satellite photos might help too, but I doubt there are very *many* cities we don't know about left, in that region. > > I suspect one reason Assyriologists today talk about their field > > as a dying one is that the Christian money is no longer enough. > > Between the political obstacles for decades, and the fact that > > the public no longer cares, it's hard to sustain the field. > It would be best if those countries were to grow their own arkies who > are satisfied with local Prof wages and living conditions and do the > digging. Well, yes and no. I mentioned Tunisia: the deal there is that since Tunisia is Muslim, they not unreasonably got pissed off after a while that all these Christian foreigners were fascinated with things ancient - Carthaginian, Roman, and Christian - but not with things mediaeval - Muslim. So they basically fired their French archaeology director and made an announcement to the effect that their department of archaeology would henceforth prefer work on Muslim era sites. I get the impression that this hasn't actually *stopped* digging at Carthage, for example. My *guess*, not based on any actual knowledge, is that what probably ended up happening was that the foreigners digging in places like Carthage are now expected to support Muslim-era archaeology, either by putting more into training the locals (which I'm sure they had already been doing) or by doing side digs on Muslim sites, or even by simple cash donations, I dunno. I would presume that the net effect is somewhat more work on mediaeval sites and somewhat less at (the more marginal) ancient sites. Basically, digging can be expensive, and so can publication and preservation of finds. I don't think there's anything *wrong* with foreigners who have money using it to finance work in those countries; I mean, if someone from India wanted to dig in Texas, why should I complain about that either, long as they could pay for not only the shovels but also the publication and museum? I do agree that we'll be better off in the long run as more countries take ownership of their pasts, even though the medium-term result in places like India and Yugoslavia has not been entirely benign. > Consider Saudi. There is little digging but from what little is > reported several poorly dug new and separate civilizations [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > the coastal regions some of the earliest settlements. But archaeology > on the peninsula is still in its infancy. Do tell. I'd be interested if you have any references you can point me at... Joe Bernstein SignatureJoe Bernstein, writer joe@sfbooks.com <http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason." <Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt This is getting to be very long and digressing from the points of interest. Let me try some judicious editting with no intention of distorting the exchange. Please feel free to reinsert or reply to if you think I have erred. > Wow, this has gotten long. FWIW most of it isn't as argumentative > as the first substantive chunk. >>>OK, now on to Matt Giwer's reply: > [snip what he said] >>>Um, this is a pretty big simplification. >>Without reviewing my original I believe I begged off on an encyclopedic >>recitation. > Fair. Sorry if I was too harsh. No problem. It was clear there was no intention. I was clarifying so I did not leave an impression of what I have been accused of, making it up as I go along. >>>>Granted we know more of Greek than of Upper Egypt simply because of >>>>distance in the past. But if you look at clearly definable periods >>>>within the region we call Egypt we likely do not have much more than >>>>of any place else. Simply with Egypt there are so many periods >>>>we lump together. >>>No, actually. >>I mentioned Greek period specifically. I did not mean the generic name >>for the most recent period. I am not an Egyptologist nor an arkie nor >>historian. Beyond a general curiosity, my interests are in >>ideas of people in other times and in our ideas of the past. This is >>right in with the latter. > OK, um, I don't understand what these last three sentences have to > do with here. Lets ignore it then and get on with your point of interest. > I was most specifically denying the truth of your second sentence in > the previous quote: >>>>But if you look at clearly definable periods >>>>within the region we call Egypt we likely do not have much more than >>>>of any place else. > See, here's the thing. On my website you can find a document called > "Half of Asia, for a Thousand Years", that took me *five years* to [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > *always* this niggling question "Couldn't there be more somewhere?". > But those disparities are just *huge*. Let me grant everything I am going to delete and address writing specifically. [snippeth with passion] > If you were referring narrowly to the Ptolemaic period (is that what > you mean by "Greek period"?), then OK, that clarifies matters but [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > Africa, and some of France at this time had writing, and most of > the other areas I've listed had *had* writing for centuries. I did specifically refer to the Greek period as different and now let me expand that the surviving or recopied papyrus period which is not that much longer. So let us review just what we have from _all_ of Egypt before papyrus of which the oldest is maybe 6th c. BC. Before that we have only stone inscription. They are in three broad categories. Funery, Monumental and Commemorative. That is burials, "this temple built by XXX, and "The official story of the war is as follows" sources. There are a few essentially fragments such as the "scropion king" stone but not much comes from them. One major exception to this is "The Book of the Dead" which happened to be preserved as painted writing inside one pyramid. And I think that is the longest sample of writing from all of Egypt. Funery inscriptions are otherwise for the rich and are as repetative as the tombstone inscriptions today. BUT taking them in the aggregate over millenia one can tell a story of evolving interests and gods and such but I would not bet more than even money on the story being correct. From the monumental we get little more than direct evidence of who built it and why IF that much. For the most part good with good dating we would know the who so the why is all that is added. And the why is most ofter mundane and of little external interest. Commemorative are the most interesting as they tell stories of major events in Egyptian history. While arkies can look at hundreds of other items from the period and tell a complex story the actual number of words is whatever could be fit on a large wall. If it were something like the US civil war the number of words is in fact less than the introduction to that book even though putting the ACW in a single book does not do it justice. But looking at all the sources for that war from both sides and going far beyond the written a major war can result in a think book. But the actual written material upon which it is based would cover a very few pages. So what I am getting at is exactly what you have found. Commemorative inscriptions we common for the kings but most did not have much to write about and most were not maintained and lots of minor kings that were once in the town square were replaced by things worth remembering. President Polk gave us the Mexican-American war and California but who remembers that compared to Washington and Lincoln? It was the same human nature back then. So the really interesting material comes from commemorative inscriptions. But those are also the markers of new directions which are what I say are grouped together for the sole reason the region goes by the Greek name for the kingdom. Now do a word count on everything that is from one of those commemorative periods and compare it to the word count for other civilizations and see if it is really that much more. Now go to Sumer which if I remember correctly had only one commemorative period. Compare the word count on commemorative inscriptions from any one commemorative period in Egypt. That is the kind of comparison I am talking about. ... >>For example the recently discovered "massacre" around 2000BC in >>Mendes shows something clearly different from what we would expect [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] >>name? Maybe some day but for now we know very little about what went >>on during the transition. > Well, um, mebbe. It actually does have its own name, though, it's > the First Intermediate Period. Something I glossed over. Last I > heard it supposedly lasted about a century. And that is another gimmick, give it a name and it implies we know enough about it to give it a name even though the name is arbitrary. I have read its duration as between 1 and 2 centuries and those are sort of embracing the uncertainties. But if anything were known about what was going on it would have a descriptive name, like Cult War Period, which might be what happened. >>>The ringer is Late Period Egypt, which compares for documentation >>>with contemporary Philistia/Judaea/Phoenicia, Urartu, Hellas, Carthage, >>>Etruria, and Media, rather than with contemporary Assyria or Babylonia >>For example Philistia/Judea/Phoenicia. We know of the Palestine Syrians >>from Herodotus' writings of around 450BC. We know of Phoenicia as a [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] >>we "know" about two of the three comes from the myths of the OT can >>should not be considered. > Um. We disagree about when the OT was written, After decades of finding no single explanation could cover all the problems (while there were dozens of mutually exclusive ad hoc explanations for each problem) I fell back to a purely evidentiary based approach. My position is based solely upon the evidence. > but I'm not interested > in, and not referring to, that. I was referring not only to that > source, but also to the inscriptions which for the first time are > reasonably copious in the Levant in the first half of the first > millennium BC. The Levant covers a multitude of sins and describes the holding of Egypt in the New Kingdom period all the way to the Euphrates and really nothing more. To say there is a lot from that region does not do justice to the near total absense of physical evidence from biblical Palestine that does other than show the OT is total myth. When Egyptian seals are found in Palestine that means Egypt ruled the region just as it would mean if found any place outside of bibleland. If we did not have a religious interest in the region and the OT books were known only to obscure scholars the finds in bibleland would be confirmation OT books were an early form of the Book of Mormon. > Really, the Levant is better documented Syria including Lebanon, Assyria, western Mespotamia, no one is questioning that but exactly how many words of inscriptions are we talking about? Of course there were Persian records which might still exist to be discovered and then there were Greeks working from them to produce surviving records but this is nearly talking a Papyrus Period. > for that > period than Urartu or probably even Carthage or Etruria or Media, > and Egypt is probably better documented than the Levant. (We have > narratives of decent chunks of Egyptian history at that time, after > all, in various royal and sub-royal testaments, if not as comprehensive > also not as problematic as the OT or Herodotus.) I am unaware Herodotus is considered problematical. He appears to have no ax to grind perhaps other than disliking Persians. He is writing of what is in their empire as because of it a single person can travel it without paying tribute to each petty fiefdomm he has to pass through. What problem is there? > That said, I think we're agreeing here on the main point, which is > that none of this compares to the spotlight glare of the testimony > on the last Assyrian emperors, the Neo-Babylonian setup, and the > first Achaemenids. >>Granted I arbitrarily cut off Egypt's history with the Greek period. >>But as we can see from the post Greek period there are so many >>different "periods" of its history that we cannot lump it all >>into simply Egypt. We do not connect any Roman or later period with the >>3500 BC kingdom of Upper Egypt but we do with the Greek Period. > Well, um. I personally would connect everything up to the Arab > conquest, Which would ignore Christianity entirely. Not saying that is wrong but upon what basis is Islam different? The actual adoption of Arabic by the people took centuries. There was no "arabic" culture to import but rather grew after the religion spread and Egyptians were as likely a part of creating it as anyone else. Even the language we call Arabic is related to African languages like Egyptian and Egypt ruled the region where Islam was born for about a thousand years at one point. What we call Arabic may have no relation to the language of Arabia at the time Islam spread but is a long divergent variation upon ancient Egyptian which spread with the religion through Arabia as it did in so many other places. I know I have strange ideas. > but then I personally consider the present governments of > India and Pakistan to originate with the conquests of Babur; I tend > to be a literalist when it comes to transitions of authority. The > Egyptians thought of the Roman Emperors as pharaohs; who am I to > contradict them? Pharaoh is the name of an adminstrative complex and it was not until about 600 BC that it became a word which would today be the equivalent of White House or 10 Downing Street. Thus Pharaoh said is the same as The White House said. But that leads to an interesting possibility. That the Roman emperors after conquering Egypt HAD TO make claims to divinity else risk revolt in Egypt, the breadbasket of the empire. That would explain why for the first century or so they were willing to risk the "bad press" in Rome to secure Egypt. ... >>>The key is writing in a survivable medium. Egypt's desert preserved >>>papyri; the medium itself preserved cuneiform. And both societies >>>wrote a lot more than (we guess) some of the others did. >>But if there is ever a substantial budget to dig around the cuniform >>writer's region we are likely to find a lot more about what they did >>and the extent of their constructions. > This is already happening. Bahrein isn't the only place all those > archaeologists shut out first by Iran and then by Afghanistan and > then by Iraq went. And the surprising stuff some of them found has, > I think, made "explore the periphery!" a much more credible concern > than decades ago. I know it is happening and I expect the map of the ancient world to drastically change in the next few decades -- as long as we can force sat TV and the internet on them. > I just wish more of it were trickling down into non-academic stuff. Actually it is just not given much play. Over on Libertyforum.org kudzu has been regularly posting finds. I never did ask her sources but I get the impression it is search engines not specific news sources. Warning. That is a political newsgroup and the zionist contingent attacks all her posts with sand nigger style epithets. > There are recent textbooks, for example, on the archaeologies of > Jordan, Syria, and Turkey; yay; but for less than textbook-level [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > haven't yet read the Syria and Turkey textbooks; the Syria one is > new since the last time I looked into this sort of thing.) One needs to expect the birth of arkie interest in a country to be accompanies by the same European style original assumptions that the original language of humans was Hebrew and polytheism was a corruption of the original human religion. The Europeans were far whackier than any of those folks today. ... >>Or all of Iraq if someone ever manages to analyze satellite photoes >>and find likely places for cities when the rivers had different routes. > Most of Mesopotamia has been surface-surveyed. The southern half > of it by Robert McCormick Adams with various collaborators (one [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > to this. (That page also lists some of the books by the unreadable > guy summarising Arabian Peninsular archaeology.) Maybe I missed it but I do not remember every having seen a clean URL to your website. Mine is www.giwersworld.org as you would gather from the sig and is wide ranging. > Satellite photos might help too, but I doubt there are very *many* > cities we don't know about left, in that region. Sat images have found Mayan cities in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest. Trust results not doubts. In fact a complex of cities built on astrological directions without regard to local topography -- which I admit is pretty much the same in all directions. >>>I suspect one reason Assyriologists today talk about their field >>>as a dying one is that the Christian money is no longer enough. >>>Between the political obstacles for decades, and the fact that >>>the public no longer cares, it's hard to sustain the field. >>It would be best if those countries were to grow their own arkies who >>are satisfied with local Prof wages and living conditions and do the >>digging. > Well, yes and no. I mentioned Tunisia: the deal there is that > since Tunisia is Muslim, they not unreasonably got pissed off after [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > their department of archaeology would henceforth prefer work on > Muslim era sites. Like I said, GREAT! When they do come around better methods will be available. But this is a direct imitation of Christian interest in bible related stories so it is clearly the first step in creating a real interest in archaeology as early 19th c. christian interest. They are on the right track. Encourage them. > I get the impression that this hasn't actually *stopped* digging > at Carthage, for example. My *guess*, not based on any actual [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > or by doing side digs on Muslim sites, or even by simple cash > donations, I dunno. Very Christian of them. And if we look at the money Israel wasted looking for the 40 years in the desert when it controlled the Sinai it is to be expected from all primitive peoples with a religious stake in findings. religious stake == primitive > I would presume that the net effect is somewhat more work on > mediaeval sites and somewhat less at (the more marginal) ancient > sites. We are in s.h.ANCIENT. There is a s.h.MEDIAVAL who are cheering them on. I am not getting into a pissing match with them and they are most all not Muslims. > Basically, digging can be expensive, and so can publication and > preservation of finds. Pub costs are in the noise compared to any of the other costs. ... >>Consider Saudi. There is little digging but from what little is >>reported several poorly dug new and separate civilizations [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] >>the coastal regions some of the earliest settlements. But archaeology >>on the peninsula is still in its infancy. > Do tell. I'd be interested if you have any references you can > point me at... I am speculating from geological fact. I know of no one pursuing it at the moment or ever for that matter. I wish there were. But I can see the problems with even starting to pursue it. SignatureThe only question about Iran is what staged event will cause the war to start. -- The Iron Webmaster, 3525 nizkor http://www.giwersworld.org/nizkook/nizkook.phtml Larry Shiff http://www.giwersworld.org/computers/newsagent.phtml a8 This is a long-delayed reply. I think I need to post one in the Homer thread too but am not yet sure where. > > If you were referring narrowly to the Ptolemaic period (is that what > > you mean by "Greek period"?), then OK, that clarifies matters but [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > > Africa, and some of France at this time had writing, and most of > > the other areas I've listed had *had* writing for centuries. > I did specifically refer to the Greek period as different and now let > me expand that the surviving or recopied papyrus period which is not > that much longer. > > So let us review just what we have from _all_ of Egypt before papyrus > of which the oldest is maybe 6th c. BC. Um. I just don't know what to say to this at *all*. It's just completely outside my comprehension. Taken literally, it's plain false. We have papyri going back to the second millennium, and outside the exclusions you mention. In particular, given my own focus on literary history, I would mention the papyri that carry most of the surviving Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom belles lettres. See for example Miriam Lichtheim, <Ancient Egyptian Literature>, volume I: <The Old and Middle Kingdoms>, pp. 59, 61, 97, 115, 136, 139, 150, 163, 169, 184-185, 194, 198, 201, 205, 211, 215, 222. Were I to consult Pritchard's <Ancient Near East> or Parkinson's newish book on Middle Kingdom literature, I would expect similar results, but I don't have those handy and will not postpone posting this to check them - if you try to tell me Lichtheim is lying that'll be soon enough. I looked at a couple of books claiming to be about papyri trying to find out whether *non*-literary papyri this old are common, but I didn't get much out of them. > One major exception to this is "The Book of the Dead" which happened to > be preserved as painted writing inside one pyramid. And I think that is > the longest sample of writing from all of Egypt. Being allergic to all things pyramidal, I've generally avoided the Book of the Dead and its predecessors (of which it sounds like you're referring to the Pyramid Texts, but I'm not sure). But this violently conflicts with what Lichtheim says on pp. 119-120 of volume II, <The New Kingdom>. Except the part about "longest sample", which I would guess might be true. > Now do a word count on everything that is from one of those > commemorative periods and compare it to the word count for other > civilizations and see if it is really that much more. Urartu lasted roughly from the 9th to the 7th centuries BC, if I remember right (I might not). I'd happily compare word counts between Urartu and Egypt for those centuries; even with the exceptional poverty of Egyptian remains of the time, I'm confident Egypt would come out ahead. Comparing the Hittites with the Second Intermediate Period or the New Kingdom, would be even less of a contest; and most civilisations of such times - e.g., the Minoan and Mycenaean ones - are even worse documented than the Hittites. I suspect Ugarit, by virtue of its use of cuneiform, is a legitimate counter-argument: not *all* the areas better documented than Egypt were in Mesopotamia. I'm not sure whether Ebla was in Mesopotamia, geographically speaking. Are there any other examples of Syrian cuneiform? > Now go to Sumer which if I remember correctly had only one > commemorative period. Compare the word count on commemorative > inscriptions from any one commemorative period in Egypt. That is > the kind of comparison I am talking about. I honestly don't know who'd win that comparison. First off, we have Sumerian inscriptions down to about 1800 BC, I *think*. Sargon didn't just suddenly extinguish the entire population; there are certainly inscriptions from the Third House of Ur, circa 2100 BC, and I *thought* I'd seen something about there being a Sumerian dynasty as late as Hammurabi's time. So this is a fairly long stretch to compare against Egypt, and it *may* include the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, which helps Egypt a lot. *Further* more, Egypt benefits from all its tombs being inscribed - that's a *massive* baseline for inscriptions that Sumer doesn't have. So if you're excluding cuneiform, I don't know that Sumer wins. But it might. A lot of the tomb inscriptions are apparently pretty stereotyped; it isn't obvious to me that something like "[Your Name Here] Was a Good Servant of the Gods" should count as 8 words each time it's encountered, for example. And I do know that Sumer *had* inscriptions - the Cylinders of Gudea, one of the longest and most tedious of all Sumerian writings, are an example. Anyway, though, as I recall, the comparisons *I* was talking about were complete. Not just Sumerian inscriptions vs. contemporary Egyptian ones, but Sumerian *everything* vs. contemporary Egyptian (or whoever's) *everything*. And even though I don't know how much papyrus survives from the Old Kingdom (looks like essentially none of whatever there is, is literary), I'd happily bet lots of money on Sumer winning *that* comparison. Which is what I was originally talking about. > >>>The ringer is Late Period Egypt, which compares for documentation > >>>with contemporary Philistia/Judaea/Phoenicia, Urartu, Hellas, Carthage, [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > >>we "know" about two of the three comes from the myths of the OT can > >>should not be considered. > > Um. We disagree about when the OT was written, > After decades of finding no single explanation could cover all the > problems (while there were dozens of mutually exclusive ad hoc > explanations for each problem) I fell back to a purely evidentiary > based approach. My position is based solely upon the evidence. I'm not sure why you're trying to troll me into starting the 8,493rd new iteration of that particular flamewar on sha, but I'm just not biting. Sorry. > > I was referring not only to that > > source, but also to the inscriptions which for the first time are > > reasonably copious in the Levant in the first half of the first > > millennium BC. > The Levant covers a multitude of sins and describes the holding of > Egypt in the New Kingdom period all the way to the Euphrates and [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > the region just as it would mean if found any place outside of > bibleland. Whatever are you talking about the New Kingdom period for? I referred explicitly to the first half of the first millennium BC, which is hundreds of years later. And I don't know why you think that the only thing the Mesha Stone, for example, does is "show the OT is total myth". It certainly does puncture some of what the Old Testament says, but it also tells us a fair amount about what was actually happening in Jordan in the century in question. > If we did not have a religious interest in the region and > the OT books were known only to obscure scholars the finds in > bibleland would be confirmation OT books were an early form of the Book > of Mormon. If this isn't another attempt to troll me into iteration 8493, what do you mean? (If it is another such attempt, don't bother.) > > Really, the Levant is better documented > Syria including Lebanon, Assyria, western Mespotamia, no one is > questioning that but exactly how many words of inscriptions are we > talking about? Of course there were Persian records which might > still exist to be discovered and then there were Greeks working from > them to produce surviving records but this is nearly talking a > Papyrus Period. How did we get from the New Kingdom to the Persians? That's something like a five or six century leap. No, I'm talking about things like the Mesha Stone, and further north the autobiographies of people like Kilamuwa. Pre-Persian, post- New Kingdom. > > for that > > period than Urartu or probably even Carthage or Etruria or Media, > > and Egypt is probably better documented than the Levant. (We have > > narratives of decent chunks of Egyptian history at that time, after > > all, in various royal and sub-royal testaments, if not as comprehensive > > also not as problematic as the OT or Herodotus.) > I am unaware Herodotus is considered problematical. He appears to have > no ax to grind perhaps other than disliking Persians. He is writing > of what is in their empire as because of it a single person can travel > it without paying tribute to each petty fiefdomm he has to pass through. > What problem is there? Non-contemporaneity. Herodotus is not as unreliable as some; but he does, for example, tell us that Cyrus defeated Queen Nitocris's son, and that Queen Semiramis preceded Queen Nitocris on the Babylonian throne by five generations, and that all these folks were Assyrians. I have a very hard time finding anything reliable about this minimal account of the history of Babylon in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. Again, I'm not talking about the New Kingdom or the Persian period here, I'm talking about the first half of the first millennium BC. For most of which, Herodotus has no very reliable sources, and for most of which, indeed, he seems careful not to say very much. > >>Granted I arbitrarily cut off Egypt's history with the Greek period. > >>But as we can see from the post Greek period there are so many > >>different "periods" of its history that we cannot lump it all > >>into simply Egypt. We do not connect any Roman or later period with the > >>3500 BC kingdom of Upper Egypt but we do with the Greek Period. > > Well, um. I personally would connect everything up to the Arab > > conquest, > Which would ignore Christianity entirely. Not saying that is wrong but > upon what basis is Islam different? The actual adoption of Arabic by > the people took centuries. There was no "arabic" culture to import > but rather grew after the religion spread and Egyptians were as likely > a part of creating it as anyone else. I don't actually disagree, but you divided this statement from its context. Egypt had governmental continuity, in at least fig-leaf form, down to the Arab conquest; up to that time, everyone who ruled Egypt was officially Pharaoh. (OK, I'm not sure Khusrau II qualifies, so maybe I'm a few decades off, but anyway.) That's the only sense in which I meant what you quoted. > Even the language we call Arabic is related to African languages like > Egyptian and Egypt ruled the region where Islam was born for about a [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > > I know I have strange ideas. Well, this is one of them. I'm not a linguist myself and have not personally submitted this idea for linguists' consideration, but I'd be absolutely shocked if they took it seriously. It certainly would make hay out of their talk of Arabic dialects such as Nabataean and so forth... > > but then I personally consider the present governments of > > India and Pakistan to originate with the conquests of Babur; I tend > > to be a literalist when it comes to transitions of authority. The > > Egyptians thought of the Roman Emperors as pharaohs; who am I to > > contradict them? This is the context in which I meant the line you quoted above. > Pharaoh is the name of an adminstrative complex and it was not until > about 600 BC that it became a word which would today be the equivalent > of White House or 10 Downing Street. Thus Pharaoh said is the same as > The White House said. Y'know, this sounds interesting, but your reliability record so far in this post has been so low that I'm not inclined to take your word for it. Got any references? > But that leads to an interesting possibility. That the Roman emperors > after conquering Egypt HAD TO make claims to divinity else risk revolt > in Egypt, the breadbasket of the empire. That would explain why for > the first century or so they were willing to risk the "bad press" in > Rome to secure Egypt. Sounds plausible to me. > > There are recent textbooks, for example, on the archaeologies of > > Jordan, Syria, and Turkey; yay; but for less than textbook-level [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > > haven't yet read the Syria and Turkey textbooks; the Syria one is > > new since the last time I looked into this sort of thing.) > One needs to expect the birth of arkie interest in a country to be > accompanies by the same European style original assumptions that the > original language of humans was Hebrew and polytheism was a > corruption of the original human religion. The Europeans were far > whackier than any of those folks today. Oh, sorry, I didn't mean these were locally produced textbooks. I'm referring to two *separate* phenomena here: 1) Archaeologists branching out because a) it's easier to find a new [dissertation] topic outside Iraq/Egypt a') it's easier to find a career-making spectacular dig outside Iraq/Egypt b) it's dangerous to dig in Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan/X/Y/Z. 2) Countries taking ownership of their pasts. Since the countries in question are generally not anglophone, or even European-language-phone, 2) would not result in textbooks I could read. The English-language textbooks on Jordan, Syria, and Turkey are expressions of 1) instead. So the clumsy treatment of the Bronze Age in the Jordan book isn't a result of chapters being written by local newbies; it's a result of poor editing abetting stupid writerly decisions. In contrast, the bad books about the archaeology of the Arabian Peninsula countries that I mentioned in an earlier post, *are* by a local guy. I've actually looked at another example of 2), in the form of a multi-volume history of Morocco edited by Larbi Essakali and written mostly by people apparently from Morocco, though it's in French. (At a guess, it's actually Moroccans trying to assert ownership of their past to *Europeans*, not to each other.) It's not all that wacky, though Essakali himself uses an appendix to advocate Moroccan discovery of the New World. Frankly, I don't see why locals *would* be as wacky as 19th century Europeans were. I mean, they're our contemporaries; they may not all have access to all the knowledge we do, but some must, and the ones who write *do* all have access to *some* knowledge. Most of the Indians working in Indian archaeology, a tradition now about a century old, are substantially less kooky about it than 19th- century Europeans were, even though some of them are quite kooky by 21st-century standards. > >>Or all of Iraq if someone ever manages to analyze satellite photoes > >>and find likely places for cities when the rivers had different routes. > > if you look at my website's "Half of Asia" stuff, in the "Some > > More Books" page there should be a reference > Maybe I missed it but I do not remember every having seen a clean URL > to your website. Mine is www.giwersworld.org as you would gather from > the sig and is wide ranging. Try looking at my .sig again; it's there. <http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> The actual URL for "Half of Asia" is pretty long; it's easier to go to my home page and click on the link. That takes you to a start page for "Half of Asia", from which you can go to (in this case) the "Some More Books" page. Warning, I don't think I've ever gotten around to doing the Unicode version of "Some More Books", so there's probably a dead link there - use the ISO version instead. > > Satellite photos might help too, but I doubt there are very *many* > > cities we don't know about left, in that region. > Sat images have found Mayan cities in the middle of the Brazilian rain > forest. Trust results not doubts. Um. First off, this is yet another assertion I find profoundly dubious. You do mean "Brazilian"? Not "Belizean"? That said, look, I'm not making funding decisions for archaeologists. If someone who does make such decisions wants to fund archaeologists to look in satellite photos of Iraq for cities, fine. This strikes me as a weird choice - I mean, most of Iraq is *not* rain forest! - but whatever. I still say that until such time, my personal opinion worth every penny you pay for it is that such a search will not find very *many* cities in Iraq that we haven't already found by other means. [Tunisian archaeological policy changes] > > I would presume that the net effect is somewhat more work on > > mediaeval sites and somewhat less at (the more marginal) ancient > > sites. > We are in s.h.ANCIENT. There is a s.h.MEDIAVAL who are cheering them > on. I am not getting into a pissing match with them and they are > most all not Muslims. Um, no idea what you're talking about, but fwiw I often see Yusuf Gursey on shm. Not that I'm sure he's Muslim. Joe Bernstein SignatureJoe Bernstein, writer joe@sfbooks.com <http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason." <Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt > This is a long-delayed reply. I think I need to post one in the Homer > thread too but am not yet sure where. As in "so long delayed that I cannot accurately remember the context of the thread" I will try to respond. >>>If you were referring narrowly to the Ptolemaic period (is that what >>>you mean by "Greek period"?), then OK, that clarifies matters but [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] >>>Africa, and some of France at this time had writing, and most of >>>the other areas I've listed had *had* writing for centuries. >>I did specifically refer to the Greek period as different and now let >>me expand that the surviving or recopied papyrus period which is not >>that much longer. >>So let us review just what we have from _all_ of Egypt before papyrus >>of which the oldest is maybe 6th c. BC. > Um. I just don't know what to say to this at *all*. It's just > completely outside my comprehension. I thought I meant there are none and going from there. But I may not remember correctly. > Taken literally, it's plain false. We have papyri going back to > the second millennium, and outside the exclusions you mention. In > particular, given my own focus on literary history, I would mention > the papyri that carry most of the surviving Middle Kingdom and New > Kingdom belles lettres. Where were these discovered and who possesses them at this time? > See for example Miriam Lichtheim, <Ancient Egyptian Literature>, > volume I: <The Old and Middle Kingdoms>, pp. 59, 61, 97, 115, 136, [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > this to check them - if you try to tell me Lichtheim is lying that'll > be soon enough. Not in the least. I simply do not find reference to the contents of this material from that time frame. I assume you have better sources because you say so. I am sort of amazed I missed discussions of the recovery methods of 4000 year old organic material in all my readings. It was my scientific side that got me interested in much of this. I grant 4000+ year old mummies of course and their linen wrappings. I am always willing to learn something new. But seriously 4000 yo papyrii does strain the imagination absent other mention of it. Yours is the first suggested I have come across. It should be obvious I have no formal education in the field. I came at it from another direction. Actually I am quite surprised that the Old Kingdom using papyrus at all. That is one impressive early invention. Are you sure? > I looked at a couple of books claiming to be about papyri trying to > find out whether *non*-literary papyri this old are common, but I > didn't get much out of them. You tell me. I do not have an available library. >>One major exception to this is "The Book of the Dead" which happened to >>be preserved as painted writing inside one pyramid. And I think that is >>the longest sample of writing from all of Egypt. > Being allergic to all things pyramidal, I've generally avoided the > Book of the Dead and its predecessors (of which it sounds like > you're referring to the Pyramid Texts, but I'm not sure). But > this violently conflicts with what Lichtheim says on pp. 119-120 > of volume II, <The New Kingdom>. Except the part about "longest > sample", which I would guess might be true. I have no idea what is in that book. Every reference I have found to it gives the pyramid as the original source. That does not exclude a later finding of an older and similar source but those are always in fragment form and such, making them questionable. I have the same rules for fragments for Egyptian sources as I have for Christian and Jewish sources. >>Now do a word count on everything that is from one of those >>commemorative periods and compare it to the word count for other >>civilizations and see if it is really that much more. > Urartu lasted roughly from the 9th to the 7th centuries BC, if > I remember right (I might not). I'd happily compare word counts > between Urartu and Egypt for those centuries; even with the > exceptional poverty of Egyptian remains of the time, I'm confident > Egypt would come out ahead. > Comparing the Hittites with the Second Intermediate Period or > the New Kingdom, would be even less of a contest; and most > civilisations of such times - e.g., the Minoan and Mycenaean > ones - are even worse documented than the Hittites. > I suspect Ugarit, by virtue of its use of cuneiform, is a legitimate > counter-argument: not *all* the areas better documented than Egypt > were in Mesopotamia. I'm not sure whether Ebla was in Mesopotamia, > geographically speaking. Are there any other examples of Syrian > cuneiform? That was not the point of the the thread as I remember it. The point was rather that everything for all time on the Nile is considered as a whole of Egypt (the Greek name) while other places are considered separately even though they were most certainly related in real time. One place just announced found in western Iraq shows an "advanced" city existed before the current idea of the origins of civilization went that far upriver. The major problem is arkie digs outside of a few narrow areas of Iraq are almost nonexistent. Every time someone trenches in the middle east outside of Iraq something very new is found. (Israel is so extensively dug they have precluded the existence of biblical Israel.) Archaeology in most all of the middle east is nearly nonexistent yet from Orangutans and Homo Erectus onwards it was the route out of Africa to the Far East. There has to be a lot to find in the ex ancient jungles and savanahs of Arabia. >>Now go to Sumer which if I remember correctly had only one >>commemorative period. Compare the word count on commemorative >>inscriptions from any one commemorative period in Egypt. That is >>the kind of comparison I am talking about. > I honestly don't know who'd win that comparison. > First off, we have Sumerian inscriptions down to about 1800 BC, I > *think*. Sargon didn't just suddenly extinguish the entire population; [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > more, Egypt benefits from all its tombs being inscribed - that's a > *massive* baseline for inscriptions that Sumer doesn't have. > So if you're excluding cuneiform, I don't know that Sumer wins. > But it might. A lot of the tomb inscriptions are apparently pretty > stereotyped; it isn't obvious to me that something like "[Your Name > Here] Was a Good Servant of the Gods" should count as 8 words each > time it's encountered, for example. And I do know that Sumer *had* > inscriptions - the Cylinders of Gudea, one of the longest and most > tedious of all Sumerian writings, are an example. > Anyway, though, as I recall, the comparisons *I* was talking about > were complete. Not just Sumerian inscriptions vs. contemporary [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > on Sumer winning *that* comparison. Which is what I was originally > talking about. Again the entire point was that Egypt is considered as a whole while Mesopotamia is considered disparate and unconnected. Partly because no one has dug Iraq anything like Egypt which I read their planning group has scheduled the next century of digs. Nothing like that ever existed in Iraq. But the changes in Egypt over the millenia, were we not to assume it was unified empire were as great or greater than what we refuse to aggregate in Iraq. Around 2000 BC there was a major change in the official gods but because it was in Egypt as we name it. it was all Egypt as they knew it. >>>>>The ringer is Late Period Egypt, which compares for documentation >>>>>with contemporary Philistia/Judaea/Phoenicia, Urartu, Hellas, Carthage, >>>>>Etruria, and Media, rather than with contemporary Assyria or Babylonia >>>>For example Philistia/Judea/Phoenicia. We know of the Palestine Syrians >>> [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] >>>>we "know" about two of the three comes from the myths of the OT can >>>>should not be considered. >>>Um. We disagree about when the OT was written, >>After decades of finding no single explanation could cover all the >>problems (while there were dozens of mutually exclusive ad hoc >>explanations for each problem) I fell back to a purely evidentiary >>based approach. My position is based solely upon the evidence. > I'm not sure why you're trying to troll me into starting the 8,493rd > new iteration of that particular flamewar on sha, but I'm just not > biting. Sorry. I have no idea what you are talking about either. If the issue is simply Phillisita, we have Herodotus making many mentions of the Palestine Syrians. The earliest contemporary mention of the OT and any material in it is after the Septuagint. I cannot change that. Israeli archaeology has excluded the possibility of the exitence of biblical Israel. I do not see what you consider to be a troll. >>>I was referring not only to that >>>source, but also to the inscriptions which for the first time are >>>reasonably copious in the Levant in the first half of the first >>>millennium BC. >>The Levant covers a multitude of sins and describes the holding of >>Egypt in the New Kingdom period all the way to the Euphrates and [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] >>the region just as it would mean if found any place outside of >>bibleland. > Whatever are you talking about the New Kingdom period for? I > referred explicitly to the first half of the first millennium BC, > which is hundreds of years later. The "levant" is a modern construction based upon the real New Kingdom and the imaginary Solomon. There is no other excuse to create this region and give it a name. We are all subject to the sins of our 19th c. christian pseudo-arkies. > And I don't know why you think that the only thing the Mesha Stone, > for example, does is "show the OT is total myth". It certainly > does puncture some of what the Old Testament says, but it also > tells us a fair amount about what was actually happening in Jordan > in the century in question. The fact that today's Israel is the most dug place in the world by professionals, by amateurs, by housing developers, by road builders and by highrise developers and the total failure to find any evidence of a biblical Israel in any form shoots the sh.t out of any such claim. Today's Israel has done the world a favor by showing it is the first real Israel beyond the mythical Israel of the OT. >>If we did not have a religious interest in the region and >>the OT books were known only to obscure scholars the finds in >>bibleland would be confirmation OT books were an early form of the Book >>of Mormon. > If this isn't another attempt to troll me into iteration 8493, > what do you mean? (If it is another such attempt, don't bother.) In s.h.a that is not a troll but a statement of fact as believers must present their evidence here. If there are believers here they came to be trolled and there are no apologies for it. They are clearly stupid people and should stick to judaic newsgroups. I have been here for over a decade and you are new so please to not tell me what is a troll here. Christians and Jews appear here as true believers and claim they are being trolled but they are clearly idiots. Of interest is Muslims do not appear here so they are the least stupid of the belivers. Clearly there is no reason to suspect there as on OT prior to the Greek Septuagint and Israeli arkies have given the lie to it. QED >>>Really, the Levant is better documented >>Syria including Lebanon, Assyria, western Mespotamia, no one is >>questioning that but exactly how many words of inscriptions are we >>talking about? Of course there were Persian records which might >>still exist to be discovered and then there were Greeks working from >>them to produce surviving records but this is nearly talking a >>Papyrus Period. > How did we get from the New Kingdom to the Persians? If I remember correctly in context it was a long digression into reliability and consistency of sources. It has scrolled of my local newsspool. > That's > something like a five or six century leap. No, I'm talking > about things like the Mesha Stone, and further north the > autobiographies of people like Kilamuwa. Pre-Persian, post- > New Kingdom. The Mesha stone shows in its opening lines the OT has to be corrected. Read it and compare to the OT connection. Presuming you mean what is also called the Moabite stone. Please give a URL to what you mean by it. >>>for that >>>period than Urartu or probably even Carthage or Etruria or Media, >>>and Egypt is probably better documented than the Levant. (We have >>>narratives of decent chunks of Egyptian history at that time, after >>>all, in various royal and sub-royal testaments, if not as comprehensive >>>also not as problematic as the OT or Herodotus.) >>I am unaware Herodotus is considered problematical. He appears to have >>no ax to grind perhaps other than disliking Persians. He is writing >>of what is in their empire as because of it a single person can travel >>it without paying tribute to each petty fiefdomm he has to pass through. >>What problem is there? > Non-contemporaneity. Herodotus is not as unreliable as some; but he > does, for example, tell us that Cyrus defeated Queen Nitocris's son, [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > of which, Herodotus has no very reliable sources, and for most of which, > indeed, he seems careful not to say very much. Excuse but my point of mentioning Herodotus has always been for me his many mentions of the Palestine Syrians based upon his travels to the newly conquered lands of the Persians. This supports the Septuagint mentions of the Palestinians. The Phillistine name is a later corruption of no meaning whatsoever as it is preceded by real, unbiased mention by centuries. It gives the lie to the Zionist troll of Palestinians not being real and all that kind of idiot crap. >>>>Granted I arbitrarily cut off Egypt's history with the Greek period. >>>>But as we can see from the post Greek period there are so many >>>>different "periods" of its history that we cannot lump it all >>>>into simply Egypt. We do not connect any Roman or later period with the >>>>3500 BC kingdom of Upper Egypt but we do with the Greek Period. >>>Well, um. I personally would connect everything up to the Arab >>>conquest, >>Which would ignore Christianity entirely. Not saying that is wrong but >>upon what basis is Islam different? The actual adoption of Arabic by >>the people took centuries. There was no "arabic" culture to import >>but rather grew after the religion spread and Egyptians were as likely >>a part of creating it as anyone else. > I don't actually disagree, but you divided this statement from its > context. Egypt had governmental continuity, in at least fig-leaf > form, down to the Arab conquest; up to that time, everyone who ruled > Egypt was officially Pharaoh. (OK, I'm not sure Khusrau II qualifies, > so maybe I'm a few decades off, but anyway.) That's the only sense in > which I meant what you quoted. I miss the point. >>Even the language we call Arabic is related to African languages like >>Egyptian and Egypt ruled the region where Islam was born for about a >>thousand years at one point. What we call Arabic may have no >>relation to the language of Arabia at the time Islam spread but is a >>long divergent variation upon ancient Egyptian which spread with the >>religion through Arabia as it did in so many other places. >>I know I have strange ideas. > Well, this is one of them. I'm not a linguist myself and have not > personally submitted this idea for linguists' consideration, but I'd > be absolutely shocked if they took it seriously. It certainly would > make hay out of their talk of Arabic dialects such as Nabataean and > so forth... I found the African connection of Arabic on a linguist website. Generally three consonants which "mean" nothing but are given meaning by the vowels around and among them. In the good old days before the ice age ended there was no need to part the Red Sea as it did not exist. And before it was open to the sea it was in inland freshwater lake which grew until it opened to the sea. We do not know exactly when these events occured nor why the first kingdom was the only one to unify with the other side of the Red sea despite many attempts up through the 1st c. AD to do so. >>>but then I personally consider the present governments of >>>India and Pakistan to originate with the conquests of Babur; I tend >>>to be a literalist when it comes to transitions of authority. The >>>Egyptians thought of the Roman Emperors as pharaohs; who am I to >>>contradict them? > This is the context in which I meant the line you quoted above. >>Pharaoh is the name of an adminstrative complex and it was not until >>about 600 BC that it became a word which would today be the equivalent >>of White House or 10 Downing Street. Thus Pharaoh said is the same as >>The White House said. > Y'know, this sounds interesting, but your reliability record so far > in this post has been so low that I'm not inclined to take your word > for it. Got any references? You can look that up for yourself as it is so well known outside of believer circles. If you want someone to specifically say it, consider it said. If you can produce non-biblical sources prior to that date using the term Pharaho you can show the observation is false. You claim detailed knowledge of such material. Why not simply produce a reference to other than king significantly before that time frame? >>But that leads to an interesting possibility. That the Roman emperors >>after conquering Egypt HAD TO make claims to divinity else risk revolt >>in Egypt, the breadbasket of the empire. That would explain why for >>the first century or so they were willing to risk the "bad press" in >>Rome to secure Egypt. > Sounds plausible to me. >>>There are recent textbooks, for example, on the archaeologies of >>>Jordan, Syria, and Turkey; yay; but for less than textbook-level [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] >>>haven't yet read the Syria and Turkey textbooks; the Syria one is >>>new since the last time I looked into this sort of thing.) >>One needs to expect the birth of arkie interest in a country to be >>accompanies by the same European style original assumptions that the >>original language of humans was Hebrew and polytheism was a >>corruption of the original human religion. The Europeans were far >>whackier than any of those folks today. |
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