Posted on 12/08/2001 2:51:43 PM PST by blam
i am going to have to memorize this statement -- very powerful and true!
i suggest that climate had more to do with the sudden downfall of the egyptians than anything else. government spending problems are a lot like the frog in boiling water analogy. when the temperature increases slowly to the boiling point, the frog does not notice the problem until it is dead.
taking this to a different direction, climatic changes occur naturally and run in cycles. in fact, there are multiple cycles in play all the time. trying to keep the climate stable, like our environmentalist friends do, is futile. it is another example of gross government spending that causes civilizations to be less productive than they otherwise would. and with that, we need to go to the top and remind ourselves of your excellent quote about the pyramids!
That's pretty interesting. Would be fun to try it again, this time with rocks all the same size but different colors. Then try it again with rocks all the same size and same color but different weights. PhDs have been awarded for less than that!
I've had a lifelong interest in ancient civilizations, doesn't matter if it's "Chariots of the Gods" type pseudoscience or hard archaeology.
We swapped some posts the other day about what to call an archaeology bump list, was there a decision?
These were my suggestions, I don't know if their were others:
- Digging the Past
- Stones, Bones, Tomes and Thrones
- Gods, Graves, Glyphs and Myths
I think Ernest and callisto liked "Gods, Graves, Glyphs and Myths." Would dinosaur finds fit there or elsewhere?
It oesn't seem likely that the Lost Tribes are going to come into play in the period around 2200 BC, since this is even before Abraham went to Canaan. Weren't the Lost Tribes scattered around 800 BC to 600 BC by the Assyrians and the Chaldeans?
What this event tat the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom might relate to is the rise of the foreign (possibly Semitic) Hyksos kings over Egypt, who are believed by many to have been ruling when Joseph became advisor to Pharoah.
Here's an interesting link to a Ten Tribes article that I'd bookmarked:
Yes, they were captured and moved to the fertile crescent area in waves by the Assyrians over a few years time. The single date 722 BC is commonly used as a marker.
I believe the Hyksos link to be a valid one.
The Lost Tribes link you posted is an interesting and thought provoking one. But in my mind the sudden appearance of MILLIONS of Celts in history at the same place and same time the Isrealites go "over the hill" commands attention. The other isolated little splinter groups that claim to be from the Lost Tribes are miniscule in size compared to the Celts, and don't seem to match up in other ways.
No, 2000 BC is way too early.
What I think confuses many authors and scholars is that there were LOTS of different Hebrews roaming around that part of the world at that time. Abraham was just one, but his huge line of descendents gets virtually all the attention. Then, when some other group appears of historic interest authors try to relate those people to Abraham and his offspring. Makes for lots of misteaks IMHO.
For Example, many/most of the books on the CELTS are full of nice pictures of what is identified as Celtic art, but much of the narrative content is way off base. Fortunately, as result of good archeology in very recent years the Celts are being re-examined and re-defined quite differently. It is literally changing history.
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By Kenneth Chang ABCNEWS.com If it werent for a prolonged cool spell about 12,500 years ago, perhaps wed still be hanging out as hunter-gatherers and never bothered with civilization. At that time, a major source of food for people living in the Middle East was vast fields of einkorn, wheat, barley and rye. These plants, particularly sensitive to cool temperatures, suffered when the warmth since the last Ice Age was interrupted by a 1,000-year-long cool and dry period called the Younger Dryas. Necessity is the Mother of Farming The beginnings of farming appear to coincide with the Younger Dryas.
According to Ofer Bar-Yosef, an anthropologist at Harvard Universitys Peabody Museum, thats no coincidence. Instead of relying on what was growing naturally, he says, people started clearing land and planting seeds to insure they would have enough food. It caused people to initiate cultivation, he says. Bar-Yosefs findings also narrow the location of the first farmers to the western half of the Fertile Crescent an arcing swath of the Middle East, from the Persian Gulf north to Turkey and then back down through Syria, Lebanon and Israel toward Egypt. According to Bar-Yosef, the wild varieties of grains thrived in the western region and were transplanted elsewhere later. As people settled down and developed agriculture, towns and eventually civilization arose. Thats not the only time that climate may have shaped the course of humanity. Bar-Yosef and other researchers presented findings about climate and civilization last Saturday at the American Assocation for the Advancement of Science meeting in Anaheim, Calif. We are probably more affected more by weather and climate than we think we are, says Paul Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and another of the speakers at the Anaheim session. Not Always Like Today Until a few years ago, most scientists believed the climate of the past 11,000 years a period known as the Holocene that followed the Younger Dryas has been stable and uninteresting, and thus of little influence on the fortunes of civilization. However, climate records reconstructed from ice and sediment cores around the world paint a less benign weather history. While the temperature and rainfall swings havent been as wild as some periods in Earths history, they do appear enough to topple nations.
In 2280 B.C., a civilization called the Akkadians absorbed Tell Leilan. A century later, the town had emptied out and remained unpopulated for three centuries. The entire Akkadian civilization collapsed and disappeared. There is a depopulation, desertion of northern Mesopotamian region, says Harvey Weiss, professor of prehistorical archaeology at Yale University, who led excavations at Tell Leilan, and Tell Leilans abandonment is simply typical of that process. Long Drought Climate records show rainfall dried up in the Middle East around 2200 B.C., which would have deprived farmers of needed winter rains. In cores dug up in the Gulf of Oman to the south, sediments deposited during this time show very different minerals, indicating different wind patterns. Other archaeological sites show that cities to the south, surrounded by irrigated fields, swelled in population at the same time. When the climate connection to the Akkadian collapse was first presented a few years ago, some wondered whether farmers had inadvertantly caused their own ruin by overfarming. Data from other researchers gleaned from lake sediments around the world indicate the 2200 B.C. climate shift was a global event. This has now put a lot more details together for it, Weiss says.
Another major climate swing was the Little Ice Age, which froze Europe in the 1400s and killed off Viking settlements in Greenland. And perhaps also the one occurring today. Temperatures, nudged up by emissions of greenhouse gases, have risen sharply since the beginning of the century, but the wind patterns are largely unchanged, creating an unnatural combination of conditions. You put those two together, Mayewski says, you have potentially greater instability in climate. It could turn out it is more important that humans have changed the stability of climate than just the temperature. Those potential instabilities droughts, heat waves, fiercer storms could change the course of history yet to come.
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S U M M A R Y A cool shift in climate may have spurred the start of farming and civilization.
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I suggested elsewhere for the dinosaurs. I don't know what became of the effort for this list. Frankly, I don't even know how to use a 'bump-list.' I will put you on my 'hand written' list for these articles.
I know how to ping them, but haven't set one up.
Ernest is the bump-list semi-deity.
We can set up another list for prehistoric critters (I guess that's me!) called Dinos and Dragons or somethinb.
Not so fast...
Meteors are often called "falling stars."
And we know for a fact that Kenneth (what is the frequency?) Starr is an alien, and might be possessed of a longer than human lifespan.
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