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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
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Posted on 10/06/2012 6:42:28 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
...The discovery, together with all other discoveries made in recent years, reaffirm that the city was the most advanced settlement in Europe in political and military terms during the Bronze Age (ca. 4,200 years ago -2,200 BCE-), and is comparable only to the Minoan civilisation of Crete...
The fortification consisted of a wall measuring two to three metres thick, built with large stones and lime mortar and supported by thick pyramid-based towers located at short distances of some four metres. The original height of the defensive wall was approximately 6 or 7 metres. Until now six towers have been discovered along a length of 70 metres, although the full perimeter of the fortification measured up to 300 metres. The entrance to the enclosure was a passageway constructed with strong walls and large doors at the end, held shut with thick wooden beams.
One of the most relevant architectural elements discovered is the ogival arched postern gate, or secondary door, located near the main entrance. The arch is in very good conditions and is the first one to be found in Prehistoric Europe. Precedents can be found in the second city of Troy (Turkey) and in the urban world of the Middle East (Palestine, Israel and Jordan), influenced by the civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. This indicates that people from the East participated in the construction of the fortification. These people would have reached La Bastida after the crisis which devastated their region 4,300 years ago. It was not until some 400 to 800 years later that civilisations like the Hittites and Mycenaeans, or city-states such as Ugarit, incorporated these innovative methods into their military architecture.
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
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Ante-diluvian bump!
This is the sort of flawed thinking that grates at me. The logic goes thus:
That last one is a joke but it illustrates that the prior assumptions were based on equally flawed logic.
Four hectares is a little under 10 acres. A perimeter of 300 meters makes it a little under two modern city blocks. A nice fortress, but not a huge city, even 4 thousand years ago. Babylonian Ur was 54 acres.
Looking up the location on google maps has me scratching my head. It's not near a river or sea, as most cities tend to be.
I remember a while back when various australopithecine fossils were being found all over East and Southern Africa and each finding was always presented as a bit older than the previous oldest. The competition to find the original “missing link” almost had early hominids riding dinosaurs...but then modern academia has been so corrupted by the Leftist agenda it now resembles the "Shadow Science" of the former Soviet Union and thus all theories and discoveries must be taken with a grain of salt big enough to sink the Titanic if it were floating in the North Atlantic.
So, what was the quarry? Pretty big investment in fortress stuff for the time ~ so they must have been piling up trade goods to move East to more urban markets, and, at the same time, keeping the hunters and farmers out of their storehouses ~ maybe doing slaves as well. Blond buxomy huntress types~! In an age of very high maternal death rates brought about by particularly abominable indoor housing conditions, they'd been a serious item.
This?
Thanks visualops.
:’)
The site is the largest heavily fortified site in Europe known from that time; it’s a reasonable guess that it didn’t get built so sissy inhabitants could cower down behind the walls when their more powerful neighbors came in. As with the somewhat later Mycenaean sites in Greece and at Troy, the high-walled citadel was the stronghold from which a city-state was ruled, and that most of the habitation was outside the walls, iow, not yet identified and excavated.
IMHO, it’s also reasonable to guess that it’s the first one found, but nowhere near the last one of its kind in Europe.
Early cities were on trade routes and near a water supply. There was a lot of overland trade, then as now. The great civilizations we know most about arose in major river basins, where irrigation was simple to implement and agricultural surplus was consistent, leading to large standing armies, recordkeeping for tracking of food production and property boundaries — recordkeeping in its turn led to writing systems — and a larger population in better health that had to occupy itself with other business (or in the case of Egypt and Mesopotamia, in large cultic building projects).
One of the “Atlantis was really here” groups have found a coastal civilization in Iberia which may have been wiped by a tsunami, an event that is bound to have happened more than once.
Fortification goes hand-in-hand with agriculture. You need someplace secure to store the harvested grain, and other wealth of the area, so wandering bands of barbarians cant just raid you and carry off your food supply.
Preppers, who knew!
Zillions of digs have been going on for hundreds of years now—is there a limit to welfare government hand-outs to the many superfluous archeology and anthropology grads who hope the Marxist in Chief forgives their student debt so that they may never have to work or think for a living and so can pleasantly zone out with benighted speculative theorizing sans objectivity currently appallingly fashionable to modern Leftist scientific dogma today.
That was idiotic.
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