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“The Catastrophe” What the End of Bronze-Age Civilization Means for Modern Times
brusselsjournal.com ^ | Tue, 2009-09-15 09:20 | Thomas F. Bertonneau

Posted on 09/28/2009 9:26:36 AM PDT by Nikas777

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To: ApplegateRanch

Iron’s initial use was no benefit to the human. It was used to destroy what civilization existed. You are reading way too much into it’s later use and benefits and ignoring real history.

There were no great Stone Age civilizations equivalent to the Bronze Age ones for the Bronze users to destroy. No literacy, no great cities, no thriving economies only small localized societies on the edge of starvation.

There is also no question that there was a centuries old Dark Age which descended upon Greece after the Trojan War where most of the benefits of the prior civilization were lost to all. Iron initial result was that it allowed the arming of barbarians from the north precipitating a holocaust previously unknown to the civilized world.


61 posted on 09/28/2009 10:52:54 PM PDT by arrogantsob
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To: Noumenon
I loved reading Lee Harris when he used to post on Tech Central; I 've heard him on several talk radio shows promoting this book: smart guy.

The "civilizational will" that is evaporating is that residing in Europe.

I think that in the US we still have the essential factor for survival; that is a devotion to Faith and Freedom. Short of a revival of devotion to Christ in Europe, that civilization is, indeed, hurtling toward a horrendous denouement.

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge & shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

~Gerard Manley Hopkins

62 posted on 09/28/2009 11:32:52 PM PDT by happygrl (Hope and Change or Rope and Chains?)
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To: Fred Nerks
Thanks for that excerpt from Immanuel Velikovsky.

He was a man Waaaay ahead of his time.

63 posted on 09/28/2009 11:36:37 PM PDT by happygrl (Hope and Change or Rope and Chains?)
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To: happygrl

“...He was a man Waaaay ahead of his time.”

You may enjoy this essay:

http://www.thunderbolts.info/velikovsky-ghost.htm


64 posted on 09/28/2009 11:56:27 PM PDT by Fred Nerks (fair dinkum)
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To: ApplegateRanch; SunkenCiv
Calling the start of the Iron Age "The Catastrophe" beggars belief. Spoken like true Luddites, still worshipping at the feet of The Noble Savage, denouncinging that most evil of all evils, the Mother Gaea raping iron plow.

That is the most ignorant statement in regards to history I have ever read.

You don't get to make a judgement call on how people felt back then. You only can note that Hesiod's view was what it was and many people accepted it.

You make the - what I feel - is the disgusting mistake of judging history form your own perspective. because of people like you the Athenian democratic experiment is damned because women did not have the right to vote and the Athenians owned slaves.

65 posted on 09/29/2009 6:32:00 AM PDT by Nikas777 (En touto nika, "In this, be victorious")
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To: Fred Nerks

Thanks for the link.

More and more evidence is piling up that substantiates his theories.

Cataclysm!: Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C. by D.S. Allan and J.B. Delair (two secular British scientists) has twenty chapters with about 400 footnotes from academic journals for each chapter.

The evidence is overwhelming that, indeed, worlds were in collision about 11,000 years ago, and that what has been interpreted as the effect of ice age glacier scouring is actually the result of an overturning of the planet with the oceans washing over the land (the origin of the Flood stories ubiquitous in every culture).

This was precipitated by a supernova which knocked loose a moon from Jupiter, which hit the planet between Jupiter and Mars, and sent a meteor storm which scarred Mars and an aesteroid that came close enough to flip earth.

That is their interpretation of the myths, but the physical evidence they have of very differently configured land masses ( and the origin of the Atlantis myth) is compelling.

http://www.amazon.com/Cataclysm-Compelling-Evidence-Cosmic-Catastrophe/dp/1879181428/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254241932&sr=1-1


66 posted on 09/29/2009 9:49:05 AM PDT by happygrl (Hope and Change or Rope and Chains?)
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To: Nikas777

Uh, Nikas, we all make judgement calls on history all the time here. :’)


67 posted on 09/29/2009 2:29:02 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/__Since Jan 3, 2004__Profile updated Monday, January 12, 2009)
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To: brityank
Meanwhile the powers-that-be prepare to acquire more Bread & Circuses, and ignore the coming conflagrations.

I don't believe that they're ignoring it. In fact, I think that they're not only counting on it, but taht they're helping it along. They mean to rule, even if only from atop a stinking heap of rubble and corpses.

In the and, it doesn't matter if they're wrong or that their 'victory' if you could call it that is a Phyrric one. As a result, most of us will die and the living will envy the dead.

68 posted on 09/30/2009 2:54:11 PM PDT by Noumenon (Work that AQT - turn ammunition into skill. No tyrant can maintain a 300 yard perimeter forever.)
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To: Noumenon
... There is no debate that there are those among us who relish the work of destruction. This author renews my contention that what's at stake here is nothing less than our own civilization. We either rise up and rid ourselves of the monsters who mean to destroy our Republic and rule what's left of us in a flame-shot hell of slaughter and atrocity or face a thousand years of darkness and cruelty.
22 posted on Monday, September 28, 2009 1:23:48 PM by Noumenon
**********
That's precisely what the Bolshevik barbarians did to Russia, at that time the largest Christian empire in the world. Their hatred for everything that had molded Russian history for a thousand years led them to try to destroy the entire civilization.
69 posted on 09/30/2009 7:41:30 PM PDT by wildandcrazyrussian
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To: arrogantsob
Iron initial result was that it allowed the arming of barbarians from the north precipitating a holocaust previously unknown to the civilized world.

Reminds me of those scenes in the Lord of the Rings where the orc army is being outfitted with crude weapons from the underground ironworks.

70 posted on 09/30/2009 8:17:01 PM PDT by Yardstick
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To: Nikas777

bfl


71 posted on 10/09/2009 11:53:16 AM PDT by Lurker (The avalanche has begun. The pebbles no longer have a vote.)
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To: Lurker

Does BFL = Bookmark For Later?


72 posted on 10/09/2009 11:56:27 AM PDT by Nikas777 (En touto nika, "In this, be victorious")
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To: Nikas777

Yes it does. Thanks for the post.


73 posted on 10/09/2009 11:59:09 AM PDT by Lurker (The avalanche has begun. The pebbles no longer have a vote.)
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To: AnAmericanMother
But the first premise, that the catastrophe was "Neither geological nor climatological but rather sociological in character," may be open to challenge.

My thought, too. You have to have a high level of communication and interdependence (such as we have today) for a sociological change to create such havoc (like the mass exterminations of the 20th century) and what Obama and others mean to do through carbon taxes.
74 posted on 10/09/2009 12:01:01 PM PDT by aruanan
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To: Yardstick; arrogantsob; SunkenCiv
There was a great episode of some show hosted by Gunny Sgt Ermey - the sarge from Full Metall Jacket where they were comparing different compositions of swords and they compares bronze to iron and it looked like iron was superior but not by much.

So it reminded me of something I half remember. Iron was not a superior material at that time - not yet. Bronze was corrosion resistant and easier to make.

Bronze's problem was it was expensive - you needed rare tin and thus you could not outfit large armies.

Iron allowed almost every male of a tribe to be armed cheaply. You could not defend against that horde unless you were Egypt and they barely survived.

75 posted on 10/09/2009 12:02:40 PM PDT by Nikas777 (En touto nika, "In this, be victorious")
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To: Nikas777

I think the melting point had something to do with it as well, along with lack of sufficient energy sources and ore supplies. Copper and iron (meteoritic iron; analogous to the bottle in “The Gods Must Be Crazy”) were used side by side back to the edge of the so-called Stone Age, but bronze is more complicated, that is, it was difficult to discover just how to do it.


76 posted on 10/09/2009 2:31:55 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/__Since Jan 3, 2004__Profile updated Monday, January 12, 2009)
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To: SunkenCiv

Here’s a ‘civilizational will’ bump back to the top.

Live it and defend it or lose it.


77 posted on 12/04/2009 4:54:54 PM PST by Noumenon (Work that AQT - turn ammunition into skill. No tyrant can maintain a 300 yard perimeter forever.)
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To: Noumenon

A “suicide of reason” bump to the top...


78 posted on 04/07/2011 9:05:23 AM PDT by Noumenon ("How do we know when the Government is like that guy with the van and the handcuffs?" --Henry Bowman)
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To: Nikas777
Neither geological nor climatological but rather sociological in character,

I wouldn't be too sure about that. The big swings of civilization map pretty well onto climatological/geological/astronomical changes.
79 posted on 04/07/2011 9:08:45 AM PDT by aruanan
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To: Lurker; DuncanWaring

Cheerful Monday morning civilizational collapse bump.


80 posted on 12/12/2011 8:14:24 AM PST by Noumenon (The only 'NO' a liberal understands is the one that arrives at muzzle velocity.)
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