Posted on 09/24/2002 11:18:33 AM PDT by blam
To bring it to current focus, the battle at Karbela that settled the matter of Mohammed's sucessr occured in 681 ( I think). The Ali tomb in Najaf the subject of much dissention between the 3rd Div and the locals and the great Mosque at Karbella recall the battle at Karbella pass as well.
The Kaaba dates from very ancient times. Some (Peter Tompkins) think it was originally a geodetic marker, a Navel. Others exist, Delphi is also a possible Navel.
The folks in Arabia have always considered the Kaaba sacred but apparently forgot why.
The second is the Dome of the rock in Jerusalem. Abraham was there ....1800 BC.
Abraham's home town of Ur was a coastal city when he lived there. It is presently almost 100 miles from the water.
I'm sure it had something to do with the internal combustion engine and the Bush administration.
(From an old thread I was reading.. )
Well, here's a lot of FREE reading material....
http://www.gutenberg.net/
This is all "public domain" stuff, including many of the classics, etc., stuff whose copyrights are expired..
You might find some stuff you like there, and it's free..
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
bookmark bump
January 2005 bump.
Since folks are linking this and bumping it again today, I thought I'd point out (as I did on another thread about this theory back when it was new) that this is an example of historical ignorance.
". . .the Roman Empire was finished. . ." sums it all up. .
Sure, right: it was just about this time that Justinian reestablished direct Roman Imperial control of Italy and costal Spain and North Africa. His successors weren't so astute militarily and managed to loose the West again, except for the area around Ravenna. He's bought into Gibbon's lie that there was something called the Byzantine Empire. There was no such Empire: the Roman Empire fell in 1453 after having dwindled to a city-state in part thanks to the 'help' of the Crusaders.
The "Fall of Rome" in 476 is a fiction made up by Gibbon who hated the Christian Roman Empire and love the pagan. 476 was a non-event: the last Western Augustus was retired to a villa in Naples because the Emperor Zeno decided that having a separate administration for the Empire in Italy, parallel with the barbarians running their own affairs was redundant. He gave Odovacar the title "Patrician of the Romans" and entrusted him with the administration of Italy on behalf of the Empire.
When Odovacar tried to set up on his own, the Emperor got another barbarian tribe to replace him in running the place.
The "Dark Ages" was a localized event in Western Europe, precipitated by the military influence of illiterate barbarians. Explanations in terms of global catastrophes make sense only to those who don't know history outside of the all-Western-Europe plus disjointed politically correct 'multicultural' window dressing version taught in American schools.
How do you explain the affect on the tree-rings worldwide at the same time?
"Explanations in terms of global catastrophes make sense only to those who don't know history outside of the all-Western-Europe plus disjointed politically correct 'multicultural' window dressing version taught in American schools."
Does that apply to Professor Mike Baillie too? (It's his ideas)
And if you don't care about the Roman Empire, then you are ignoring the counter-example which shows the analysis which links the tree-rings and accounts of portents in the sky and bad harvests to civilizational failure to be false.
Civilization collapsed in Western Europe, but did not in the Roman Empire--indeed the article cites Procopius, the court historian to Justinian, who wrote both the official histories and the scandal-ridden "Secret History". Neither bad harvests nor plagues nor cold summers collapsed the civilization whose center had shifted from Rome to New Rome (a.k.a. Constantinople) with the removal of the capital there by Constantine in the 4th century.
You may not care about the Empire, but the author of the article and Baillie (whose name seems misspelled at one point) evently do:
In their book "The Origin Of Comets", Bailey, Clube, and Napier write : "the destruction and chaos accompanying the fate of the Roman empire [midway through the First Millennium] was all but total, the almost complete breakdown of the old order leading to a loss of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of antiquity which was far from temporary."
The old order hardly broke down, except in the areas which had been subjected to barbarian invasion, and accumulated knowledge and wisdom were not lost, except in those areas. Classical knowledge was continuously available in the Empire--it is from the conquered monophysite provinces that the Muslims acquired Greek learning, and notable works of literature containing classical allusions were written throughout the life of the Empire (St. Photius in the 9th century was a notable humanist; Anna Comnena's 11th century biography of her father is rife with references to Homer.) Nor did Roman engineering suffer during the period: one of the great architectural masterpieces of the world and a triumph of engineering with its soaring semidomes supporting the central dome, with numerous windows surrounding the dome and piercing the semidomes, the Hagia Sophia, was build during the very period in question (and its engineers wrote treatises on solid geometry), the walls of Constantinople, which until the gunpowder era only fell to treachery at the time of the 4th Crusade were also built in the 'Dark Ages'.
I am criticizing the link between the claimed global catastrophe and the local conditions in Western Europe. Bad harvests or no, comets and meteors in the sky or no, skinny tree rings or no, the Western provinces had been detached from Imperial rule by the barbarian invasions in practice, though at first not in theory. The barbarians were not assimilated fast enough, and thus brough illiteracy (and indeed an attitude which held that literacy was not a fit pursuit for 'noble' warriors) with them.
Where Imperial rule was maintained, the dire civilizational effects Baillie et al. attribute to planetary bombardment simply didn't happen.
"The barbarians were not assimilated fast enough, and thus brough illiteracy (and indeed an attitude which held that literacy was not a fit pursuit for 'noble' warriors) with them."
The barbarians were probably streaming south to get away from the increasing cold in the north due to the dust veil around the earth that was blocking the sunlight.
And, the Bailey mentioned in the article is an astronomer and a different person than Mike Baillie.
No, the dating is wrong. The claim of is a dust veil c. 540. The barbarians had already detached the Western provinces by the end of the 5th century--hence the 'Fall of Rome' with the decision by Zeno to let Odovacar administer Italy in his name rather than having a Western Augustus.
The book I have, Exodus To Arthur, by Mike Baillie has a chart that shows a downward curve that begins before 540AD. 540AD is just the bottom of the curve. Something was going on prior to that date. Maybe a yearly pounding of Tunguska type events for a number of years before the earth moved out of the comet dust/boulder path?
No trace of that around 540AD in the The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/Anglo/part1.html
I believe a large number of people died and most 'history' was forgotten for probably hundreds of years.
My apologies, I intended to post a link to this thread, click on it, thanks.
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