Critical Study on Chronology of the Ancient World

Discuss the world of the Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, and Egyptians.
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billd89
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Re: How Russia treats archaeological treasures of the Ancient World

Post by billd89 »

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

Animals.

https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-cultura ... 73111.html
crystallize
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Re: Critical Study on Chronology of the Ancient World

Post by crystallize »

Hey, thanks for the review! :)
DCHindley wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 8:32 am 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.
DCHindley wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 8:32 am 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.
DCHindley wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 8:32 am 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
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Re: Critical Study on Chronology of the Ancient World

Post by crystallize »

Anyone wants to say anything about Chapter 2?
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billd89
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Re: Almost Unspeakable

Post by 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...

crystallize
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Re: Critical Study on Chronology of the Ancient World

Post by crystallize »

DCHindley wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 8:32 am 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.
There is https://leidenuni.academia.edu/MartijnLinssen who recently published a paper about Chrestians becoming Christians. Can it possibly be the same person?
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DCHindley
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Re: Critical Study on Chronology of the Ancient World

Post by DCHindley »

crystallize wrote: Wed Mar 08, 2023 6:06 pm
DCHindley wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 8:32 am 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.
There is https://leidenuni.academia.edu/MartijnLinssen who recently published a paper about Chrestians becoming Christians. Can it possibly be the same person?
Martijn is a member here, yes.

I believe he does most of his work on the Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas.
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billd89
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Re: Russian Bots Support Fomenko

Post by billd89 »

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"Anatoly Fomenko, mathematician and ethnonationalist propagandist masquerading as a legitimate historian."

The connection to Qanon, "encouraged every step of the way by Russian disinformation campaigns online", informs us thus: PLEASE DONT FEED THE TROLLS. Read the Old News (April 2022), get a clue:
Just as Vladimir Putin today justifies his invasion of the Ukraine with falsehoods, claiming that it has always been a part of Russia and has no historical right to independence, his nationalist rhetoric is validated by, or perhaps inspired by, the pseudo-historian Anatoly Fomenko, who claims that Ukraine has no identity apart from Russia, for its people were always only part of his “Russian Horde.” This pseudo-history tacitly justifies war crimes. So what am I arguing? I suppose I am arguing what others before me have argued: that the Tartarian Empire conspiracy myth originates from Russian disinformation, spread online to the Western world by professional Russian propagandists, and transforming along the way, through a weird digital version of the telephone game, to something almost unrecognizable. This may itself sound like conspiracy speculation, but the fact that Russian propaganda programs are active in spreading disinformation through bots and puppet accounts run out of troll farms is well known. We also know that they are involved with the encouragement of the growth of conspiracy claims.

Oh, the Neo-Soviet history bungling, hacker sh*tbags' Disinformation is all over the internet:
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DCHindley
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Re: Critical Study on Chronology of the Ancient World

Post by DCHindley »

crystallize wrote: Thu Sep 08, 2022 10:57 am Hi there.

Chapter 2. Astronomical method in chronology (Eclipses)

§ 1. Basic facts about eclipses
§ 2. "History of the Peloponnesian War" by Thucydides
§ 3. Solar, Lunar eclipses and chronology
§ 4. Examples of astronomical dating (Titus Livy, Homer, Thakelot)
§ 5. Discussing the final list of Ginzel
§ 6. Herodotus and his "History"

https://mega.nz/file/YSYnUaRS#e2ZfSgxK9 ... yt5mexMl3I
I had been putting it off. Not sure how I feel about your eclipse arguments to date either the composition or revision of Thucydides & Livy to much later times than the works purport to be about.

Politicians routinely misstate facts they learn from their vetted sources, even from specialists. The politician or statesman lives in a different world than scientists, architects, chemists, analysts, et al.) so I do not necessarily expect to see 100% accuracy when compared to tables based on modern, much more precise, observations.

The style (as translated) is pretty good and the detail is more advanced than I could follow. I came away with a feeling that the presentation was not quite as good as the analysis of the calculations.

Unfortunately, I know nothing of astronomy, try as I might. I've read a couple of Otto Neugebauer's books and several of his journal articles. I also try to understand "rising times" and geographic and celestial physics, but again I am a mere human being.
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billd89
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Re: Putin's 'Neo-Soviet' Fascism

Post by billd89 »

Which came first, the Chicken or the Egg? Link.
Back in May last year, American historian Timothy Snyder invigorated the discussion around the fascist label in his New York Times op-ed “We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.”

A personalized totalitarian regime built around the cult of a leader. Countless pieces of evidence of systematic war crimes against civilians. The cult of the dead as a founding national myth. The conquering of foreign land with the open intent to destroy the nation living there. The weird but ominous symbol with which their war of aggression is branded.

Is a pseudo-historical ideology which supports fascism in fact birthed from fascism? The Z-bags merely (re-)constructed a cruel, twisted house-of-mirrors less than a decade after official 'Soviet Communism' collapsed. Was Pamyat really so very different? The RAND Corp. calls it a "Firehose of Falsehood" here.

Guardian Opinion, 5-8-23 "As the Ukraine war grinds on, Russia is becoming a cultural wasteland"
I recently spoke to Mikhail Shishkin, a renowned Russian novelist and dissident now living in Switzerland. During the late 90s and early 2000s, the Russian Federation worked to support and export its writers, Shishkin said. This was an official project of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Media (Роспечать or Rospechat), and an organisation called Institut Perevoda gave financial support to publishers so Russian books could be translated and read outside the country. The purpose was to create a dignified facade; a human face for what was then a crypto-authoritarian regime. “You have to understand that the new hybrid dictatorship pretended to be a free country, and worked with writers in a different way [to the Soviets],” said Shishkin.

Potemkin culture, a facade? It's actually worse. There are probably more RU writers in jail now than at any other time since Stalin. But let's all try to rationally discuss this perverse "theory" that (Modern) Civilization begins in Russia, therefore justifying war-crimes/genocide.

"Garbage in, garbage out!"

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billd89
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Re: On Fake Chronology, Maps of Europe & SOVIET LIES

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Did you all catch Putin's (late May 2023) 'history lesson' on what... Hubris? Delusion?

Ukraine does not, has never existed??! More (Neo-)Bolshevik Bullshit. That's the Chairman of Russia's Constitutional Court, w/ Putin, staring at a map that says otherwise, pretending "Ukraine Never Existed"!

Fomenko-ism in its purest political expression is a deliberate policy of genocide 'by the History Lesson':

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Mykhailo Podoliak, Advisor to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, nailed it (5/9/23):
"Putin today is a perfect embodiment of what psychoanalysis textbooks call ‘split consciousness’. He has invented his own imaginary world in which he sees himself as an important geopolitical strategist, with the ‘world’s second army’ to back him and the compulsory recourse to Lenin, Fomenko and Ilyin as creators of a ‘just universe’. [Vladimir Lenin, founding head of government of Soviet Russia, Anatoly Fomenko, author of the New Chronology conspiracy theory, and Ivan Ilyin, a conservative monarchist philosopher, are all seen as Putin’s ideological touchstones – ed.] He then started a large-scale war, and is now murdering civilians en masse, organising forced deportations, razing large and small cities to the ground – and whining about being treacherously attacked when he receives any pushback."

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