Posted on 01/30/2005 3:49:26 PM PST by blam
Researchers find rare letters from fifth century Gaza Strip
Mon Jan 24, 3:48 PM ET Mideast - AFP
GENEVA (AFP) - Swiss researchers have uncovered a rare exchange of letters written in ancient Greek during the fifth century in what is now the Gaza Strip , the University of Fribourg said.
The discovery offers proof of a rich intellectual society in a region that is better known today for a bitter and bloody standoff between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, said one of the researchers, Professor Jacques Schamp.
Located amid mounds of manuscripts stored at the Marciana National Library in Venice and the French National Library in Paris, the unpublished texts from an ancient school of philosophy in Gaza were identified after a one-year search, he told AFP.
"They have helped us to learn about people that we knew nothing about until now," said Schamp, who conducted the work with his assistant doctor Eugenio Amato.
The oldest discovery is an exchange of letters between a philosopher called Procopius of Gaza who lived around the years 465 to 529 and a young, and until now unknown, lawyer called Megethios.
"The discovery is important because it is practically impossible today to get your hands on material dated from the fifth century," Fribourg University, which helped to fund the research, said in a statement.
Such correspondence was unprecedented, said Schamp, noting that researchers sometimes found letters from a Mr X addressed to a Mr Y but never the response.
"Here, we really have an exchange with a letter from Mr X and a response from Mr Y. It is extremely rare. For me, it is the only case that I know of," he said.
The documents also offer fresh information on life in ancient Gaza.
"We see that there was an extremely rich intellectual life and that people knew Greek literature to an admirable level," said Schamp.
Researchers spend years hunting for unknown texts hidden amongst thousands of ancient manuscripts stored, sometimes without any records being made, at national libraries in major cities across Europe.
Yeah, but if you want to have any sense in claiming a "Dark Age" affecting the Empire, you need to go to the 7th century, not the 6th: the 6th as I pointed out saw the reestablishment of direct Imperial control over coastal Spain and Western North Africa and all of Italy, the construction of the Hagia Sophia with its original iconography, the completion of magnificent churches in Ravenna, where the icons escaped the iconoclasts.
And this in spite of bad harvests and a plague ravaging the Empire.
I mention the iconoclasts to point out that your claim of no significant works of art is ill founded: there is ample evidence that the art, particularly significant public art, from the period was destroyed rather than never made. The iconography in Ravenna, and the encaustic icon of Christ at the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai with its magnificent pictorial presentation of dyophysite Christology are some of the most significant works of art ever produced in all of Eastern Christendom, and both are 6th century, and survived the iconoclasts because they were outside regions under their influence.
The sparse period in the Empire was the 7th century when external conflicts with the Persians, the Muslims, the Slavs and the Avars are quite sufficient to explain troubles without any reference to astronomic events. But even it produced the literary figures I mentioned in my last post.
Serious troubles and pressures on the border, but hardly the overthrow of the old order or the loss of learning the catastrophists are talking about, and a century off from when it should have been according to the theory.
I am not an expert on China, but I have a passing interest in the silk road due to a fondness for Central Asian cuisine. The sixth century saw the collapse of demand in the Empire for imported silk with the establishment of an indigenous industry. The seventh with the external pressures on the Empire was hardly a time when monies would have been spent on luxuries from far away. By the eighth, Islam had expanded into Central Asia, bringing wars which disrupted trade. And then trade relations were supposed to reopen after an haitus of two centuries? It took unified government (moreover by a power which didn't have an antipathy toward either Christians or adherents of the various religions of China) along the entire route under the Mongols to reestablish trade.
The next year saw the beginning of the Dark Ages as the Northern hemisphere was struck by a vast climactic disaster that precipitated the Dark Ages.
So?
There was ample opportunity for a lot of stuff to happen from 501 to 538, and it did. Amazingly we have pretty good records for some of it. Then, of course, we have few records about anything anywhere after that date for a long time.
It was a Dark Age by all agreement. Some places came out of it earlier than others. China, for example, only took 300 years or so. France has yet to find it's way, and the Germans keep lapsing back into the worst parts about every 35 years or so. There's even a question about the Italians ~ do they drink too much and is pasta consumption giving them all beer bellies, or what?!
There is no doubt that the Irish gave a manful try at reviving Europe, and they may well have to do it again in the near future, then there are those Irishmen transplanted to Roman Brittain who went on to become Eastern Roman Emperors, so even Greece has not been without it's need for the Irish.
Truly our own hold on civilization is tenuous even as we speak.
Things were different during this period.
"A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock's impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity. "
Yup. I believe I posted that article on FR but, I can't locate it. Maybe our expert SunkenCiv can.
And San Vitale in Ravenna, completed in 547, with its magnificent mosaics of Justinian and his court--obviously commissioned and executed after Belisarius's seizure of the city from the Ostrogoths in 540? Or also in Ravenna, San Apollinaire in Classe, begun in 535 and completed in 549?
Sorry, it doesn't cut it. There was a plague, bad harvest, external troubles, but there wasn't a "Dark Age" with loss of classical learning or a collapse of social structures in the Empire. And yes, everything did revolve around Constantinople, "The City": it was the Imperial capital from 330 on, and its European environs, together with Asia Minor has most of the population and wealth of the Empire.
Intriguingly the ancient people who set up trading posts in the Japanese islands to which the natives brought silkworm bolls (circa 100BC to 300BC) appear to have been the same people who are buried in their tartans along the Silk Road in West Central China.
So maybe the silkworm business went both ways up and down that road (as far as the technology was concerned), with local insects of various species doing the hardpart.
Ah, and the Slav penetration into the Empire can't have been due to lack of strategic vision by Justin II and Tiberius II or the spend-thrift 'butter before swords' policies of Tiberius II which so depleted the treasury that even when a tactical genius, Maurice I succeeded to the throne the tide couldn't be stemmed.
Must have been a "Dark Age" with a complete collapse of the old order and loss of learning.
I think we need a radiocarbon date here, but notice that what we have is an indefinite "end time". Might I suggest 538 was a good day to die, so to speak, and it's not excluded by the San Vitale documentation. I'd suggest radiocarbon dating for many of the other references you give.
Part of the difficulty is in finding independent documentation for any of the items you cite. For the most part, since this was a Dark Age, records simply do not exist, and those which do leave questions, particularly regarding dating.
We also have a problem with people who wish to believe that "barbarian invasions" brought about the Dark Ages.
Given the climatic devastation in Europe, it's more likely the "invasions" were simply groups of refugees.
You do, of course, realize that whether the account of Justinian commissioning two Persian monks to smuggle silkworms back is mere legend and the European silkworms are different from the Chinese is quite irrelevant to my point: the Empire began an indigenous silk industry, c. 550, 1. During Justinian's reign, and 2. after the 'fateful' year 538, which industry grew and flourished, despite the hard times of the next century.
You ignore the incontrovertible point that the magnificent mosaics of Justinian and his court which grace the interior of San Vitale are undoubtedly from the period between 540 with the reconquest of the city and 547 when the building was completed. Good records of Beliarius's campaigns certainly exist, and Ravenna was taken from the Ostrogoths in 540.
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I think you already know what my 'take' is on that. I've been unable to make an air-tight connection though. Maybe if we found some mummified European silk-worm coccoons in Japan.
BTW, I just completed reading Stephen Oppenheimer's book, Out Of Eden, I was suprised when he stated that the oldest (undisputed) Mongoloid skeleton ever found is only 10k years old. I'm beginning to think that most of China was covered with the Jomon - Ainu type. James Chatters (of Kennewick Man fame) says that he thinks today's Asians and Europeans both split from this group. Oppenheimer explains the 'X' gene (European) found in only European and American Indians as having been from a 'branch' that was split by the Toba (super-volcano) explosion 74,000 years ago. Everyone in between was killed...breaking the link.
See my post #25. Can you find that article?
At the same time we managed to lose track of the years in this period when "Dennis the Short" invented the "Anno Domini" dating system. He was the Scythian abbot of a monastery near Rome. The system did not become common for several centuries.
Unfortunately he's the guy who messed stuff up in 532 AD when he under-estimated the time between Christ's birth and that particular year by anywhere from 4 to 6 years.
If we give the Byzantines an extra couple of years to survive in comfort while the world fell to ruins and Europe was depopulated first by starvation and then Justinian's Plague, and then add in Dennis' error, it's easy enough to find "records" that seem to reflect great activity in Byzantium.
The clue is to find some records showing great activity in other places at that time, and, alas, those records seem to have disappeared, if they existed at all. This is how we know there was a Dark Age out and about, the few jottings of Byzantine courtiers and monks notwithstanding.
They did note that the days were short, the sky was red, and it'd turned a tad colder. Unbeknownst to them, though, they no longer knew when they lived!
Although the present population of most of China is pretty clearly of Mongolian origin, the place didn't turn from barren Arctic wilderness immediately with the collapse of the North American glaciation. Consequently Mongolian type folks lived to the North and West of today's China, and Mongolian type skeletons are found there, along with Jomon type, and European type.
There was a tremendous display of Mongol heads placed in the Natural History Museum on the Mall several years back. I think it's still there. Some of them were tens of thousands of years old, and just as round as a bowling ball. (NOTE: some Caucasions have heads equally round. We can tell "who" they are by the proportions of their long bones.)
The claim that folks inside the Empire lost track of what year it was because Denys got the date of the Incarnation off by 4 or 6 years simply isn't credible: the dating system in the Empire based on the 15 year cycle of 'indictions' on 1 September each year, dating to Diocletians reforms, continued uninterrupted (Anna Comnena uses it in her Alexiad)--the tax system depended on it, and one thing Romans, whether pagan or Christian did well was tax--indeed it's still used in the Orthodox Church for some purposes. Our Anno Domini dates for events in the Empire are based on a retrospective matching of the indictions with events dates on the A.D. system, so the 4 to 6 year discrepency is built into them, including the dates for the supposed cataclysm in 538 and the completion dates for all the edifices and iconography I've refereed to and would have been unknown in the Empire.
By every account I can find on the net, including those that report on the efforts to correlate the tax cycles with Dennis' system, the error is there.
I know you want to believe that the city of Byzantium was not subject to the cateclysm that destroyed most of civilization in 538 AD, but I'll tell you they sure must have missed out on the taxes they used to collect from the hinterlands.
Just saw a piece on the Colosus of Rhodes, and it was noted that the Arabs stopped and collected up the leftover bronze to make coins during their conquest.
Hmmmm. Such a thriving economy, eh?
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