Critical Study on Chronology of the Ancient World

[billd89]

Theft, looting: probably melted down for the Au content.

Animals.

https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-cultura ... 73111.html

[crystallize]

Hey, thanks for the review!

I finally gave this 300+ page "chapter" a quick read-over.

I would quibble that the English translation of the title. "Critical Study on Chronology of the Ancient World" makes it seem like we will be dealing with yet another fanciful recalibration of ancient dating (Bronze age an later).

Yeah, that 60Kb 1st paragraph of the first chapter is probably among 5 largest paragraphs of the whole study.

What kind of title would be more appropriate? I have little idea, I've learn that my naming conventions can sound funny for a western reader.

On the essay itself, there is a lot of "loaded" language which is not a good thing to see in a serious work, but the style (at least in your English translation) is colloquial and confident. I will have to invest some reading time to it.

Postnikov's writing style - quite frequently(this!) - doesn't (naturally) flow - and - (sometimes) you have to transpose it; on the fly: an interruptive writing style.
If you just read it, it's like a detective or a newspaper writing and it flows well, but in translation all these issues come up. So I was torn between easy to read and faithful text. I keep telling myself that this is race to the bottom and I better suit the text for broader audience but it's hard to actually be decisive to go this way.

As you may know, the subject of Tacitus has come up here in the not too distant past. The legendary member "spin" was interested in it as it related to whether these mss had originally spelled "Christus" as "Chrestus." However, I think he supported it authenticity, although the problems with the mss tradition were brought up by some posters.

My experience, entirely as an native English speaker with limited Latin exposure and no formal academic training on the subject, was that there were differences between the narrative in the Histories and the Annals. The passages that mention "christians" or "chrestus" in Tacitus & Suetonius, did not jive very well. It doesn't help that the almost universal opinion of modern critics is that these just HAVE to be references to Jesus Christ or to "Christians" (his followers) of the time, as if there can be no other explanation worth mentioning.

In the past I've suggested interpretations of these passages that do not always assume that they refer to "Christ" or to "Christians" (capital C), but instead to Jewish "messianists," their Jewish or gentile followers in general, and that "chreston" referred to, well, an actual substance "chreston," which was made of ground chicory seeds and was believed to help serious magicians get the elemental spirits to comply with their instructions. Flies to honey. Yes there is classical and archeological support for this. I supposed that political or religious agitators might think that it would also work on crowds as well.

No, I didn't know that.
Why would the name of this magical grain coincide with the Christ's name anyway?

[crystallize]

Anyone wants to say anything about Chapter 2?

[billd89]

Let us all pretend nothing is happening. That "Russian History" is just fine, thx.

Read up on the Neo-Soviet Information Warfare, to better "understand Fomenko".
https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/01/0 ... -pub-88644

No Free Press? Hmm ...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... s-00079718

Russians are reading Orwell's 1984 (again):
https://english.elpais.com/internationa ... ussia.html

Official Russian history is basically Propaganda:
https://www.ft.com/content/f1e86590-9bc ... 52fb4a3262

It was very heartening to read Gideon Rachman’s splendid article on the war in Ukraine “There is no path to lasting Russian victory” (Opinion, January 17). I thoroughly concur with that conclusion.

On one point, however, Rachman is surely mistaken, when he writes that Russia’s major wars in the past were defensive. Really? As Russians always do, he highlights the operations of Napoleon and Hitler in Russia, while passing over the far more numerous occasions when Russia was clearly the aggressor. One shouldn’t talk about 1812, for example, without mentioning preceding events. What exactly had General Suvorov been doing in Italy and Switzerland? Had the Swiss perhaps invaded Russia? Arguably, Napoleon was only retaliating in 1812 for many earlier Russian attacks on revolutionary France. In the first world war, it was the Russians who mobilised first in August 1914, before attacking Germany in East Prussia and Austro-Hungary in Galicia. The Central Powers only invaded and occupied parts of Russia, Poland and Ukraine after repelling repeated Russian offensives against them on the eastern front.

In the second world war, one shouldn’t talk about Operation Barbarossa in 1941 without explaining what Stalin’s Red Army had been up to in the preceding period. In fact, in 1939-41 during the Nazi-Soviet pact, Stalin was Hitler’s partner in crime, invading just six independent countries — Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania — compared to Hitler’s score of nine (or 10 if one counts the Channel Islands.)

Most interestingly, Russian propaganda has been so pervasive over the last 200 years that 21st-century commentators, even when highly critical of Russian actions, still use the Russian version of history as their starting point.

Norman Davies

Monstrous Russians rape History, looting UA: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/kh ... t-looting/

“But the ancient history exhibits – the Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians – almost everything was taken.”

Signs beside damaged display cases reveal what has been looted: bronze axes, ancient flint sickles, Sarmatian gold jewellery...