Posted on 12/01/2002 5:11:08 PM PST by blam
Are you sending Chinese or is that just static on the line?
Oh, and there you go again ! What's with the garbage, that Julius Caesar " discovered " Britain ?
Well, if you pick up a modern history of Britain, Chapter 1 starts off with, there were ignorant savages of unknown origins attempting to create a civilization, when in sailed Caesar and the Legions. Thousands of years of "pre-history" covered in two paragraphs. I just saw one at B&N the other day - one of those 700 page tomes - though I don't recall the title, while picking up "The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China" (I think that was the title - great book, Sun Tzu and six other lesser known lights of the east on "strategery" - you'd probably like it).
There are some excellent and bloody debates on the chronicles of Central Europe between the Germans and Poles and Czechs, each side aiming for promotion of its view of the matter, especially since there is little "history" per se prior to the "baptism of Poland" in AD 966. I like my German History atlas which transmorgrifies the Silingi tribed (Silesians) from Germanic to Slavic between Roman times and those of Charlamagne, then has the Germans resettling Silesia and intermarrying with the now supposedly Slavic Silingi. The Germans had the upper hand in this argument, claiming these tribes were really Germanic (the Chronicles are all Latin and German, as are early Polish governmental documents), until they made the dumb mistake of starting WWII.
Is there any real evidence that Brutus the Trojan and company did NOT exist as related and that Nennius' Chronicles are a complete fraud? Who did found the Briton civilization and London? Don't forget the example of Schliemann!
The whole " Britan was founded by Brutus " theory, was connieved, by the chronicolers, to make the Normans think that even though they took over, in 1066, the Anglo-Saxons had a better liniage.
Hmmm ... Nennius was a Briton ("Here begins the apology of Nennius, the historiographer of the Britons, of the race of the Britons."), not an Anglo-Saxon, and was writing against the Anglo-Saxons, not the Normans. I think you are transmorgrifying the parties here, or have I missed something?
Do read more than Waddell
Okay, does Flinders Petrie count and his work on Geoffrey of Monmouth's accounts?
I'm aware of the difficulties of linking Phoenicia and the Hittites. Waddell's attempt is interesting. Have you read it?
There are written sources from before Caesar, but they are discounted now. Like Geoffrey of Monmouth. And Nennius. Some people have various theories about this discounting being anti-Christian. I'll refrain from comment, not having an opinion formed one way or another.
I agree entirely with you about the skills of the Britons, and that they were not illiterate blue-skinned savages. This is merely what is put out in many popular histories - no writing, running around in animal skins and blue paint, etc. It is a bunch of nonesense, since there was western civilization, at least as I understand it, in western and central Europe before Rome.
Culture/Society News
Published: May 13, 2001 Author: John Nobile Wilford
Posted on 05/15/2001 17:54:31 PDT by carenot
In an unexpected benefit of the cold war's end, Russian and American archaeologists say they have discovered an ancient civilization that thrived in Central Asia more than 4,000 years ago, before being lost in the sweep of history.
The people of that area, the archaeologists say, built oasis settlements with imposing mud-brick buildings and fortifications. They herded sheep and goats and grew wheat and barley in irrigated fields. They had bronze axes, fine ceramics, alabaster and bone carvings and jewelry of gold and semiprecious stones. They left luxury goods in the graves of an elite class.
The accomplishments of those unknown people in what are now the republics of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan began to emerge over several decades of excavations by archaeologists of the Soviet Union, who worked diligently but in academic silence behind closed borders. The surprising scope of society suggested a stage of social and economic development generally regarded as civilization. All that seemed lacking was evidence of number or writing systems.
With the end of the cold war, American archaeologists have joined the Russians in exploring the region, and now they are reporting that they have found inscriptions showing that these people may have indeed had writing, or at least were experimenting with a form of proto- writing around 2300 B.C.
"We are rewriting all the history books about the ancient world because of the new political order in our own time," Dr. Fredrik T. Hiebert, a University of Pennsylvania archaeologist involved in the excavation, said in an interview last week.
In the most recent and provocative discovery, Dr. Hiebert uncovered a small stone object engraved with four or five red-colored symbols or letters that apparently bear no resemblance to any other writing system of the time. Other scholars agreed that the symbols seemed to be unlike contemporary scripts in Mesopotamia, Iran or the Indus River valley.
Dr. Hiebert made the discovery last summer in ruins at Annau, a site near the border with Iran and only eight miles from the Turkmenistan capital, Ashgabat. He described the findings a week ago at a symposium at Penn and yesterday at a conference on language and archaeology at Harvard.
"You can say we have discovered a new ancient civilization," Dr. Hiebert said. At the same time, the pyramids of Egypt had been standing for three centuries, power in the Tigris and Euphrates valley was shifting from Sumer to Babylon and the Chinese had yet to develop writing.
Dr. Victor H. Mair, a specialist in ancient Asian languages and cultures at Penn, who was not on the research team, said of the inscription, "I definitely think that's writing."
Dr. Mair added that the discovery of ruins of an advanced culture in a region "where there was thought to be just space and emptiness fills an enormous gap" in terms of trade and cultural exchange across Asia in antiquity. It suggested that people in Asia more than 4,000 years ago were not as isolated as once supposed, he said, but probably had continentwide connections.
The dozens of settlement ruins of the newfound civilization stretch east from Annau across the Kara- Kum desert into Uzbekistan and perhaps the northern part of Afghanistan. It is an area 300 to 400 miles long and 50 miles wide. Since no one knows who the people were or what they called themselves, archaeologists have given the culture the prosaic name of the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex, or BMAC (pronounced BEE-mack), after the ancient Greek names of two regions it encompasses.
Long after the ruins were buried in sand, the area was traversed by the legendary Silk Road, the caravan route linking China and the Mediterranean lands from the second century B.C. to the 16th century A.D. The oases that served as way stations for rest and resupply on the Silk Road also supported the BMAC civilization, which presumably was trading far and wide over some kind of ancestral Bronze Age Silk Road.
Dr. Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, a Harvard archaeologist, questioned whether the symbols on the artifact represented true writing. But he said that Dr. Hiebert's discovery "falls into place with other research showing that this culture was working out some sort of communication system, though it never reached the level of complexity in writing as its neighbors did."
Until the waning days of the Soviet Union, foreign scholars knew almost nothing of the nature and extent of the BMAC culture. Reports of findings were confined to Soviet journals.
In the post-cold-war openness, Russian archaeologists are eagerly sharing their knowledge and inviting collaboration with Westerners. Dr. Hiebert plans to return to Annau, possibly next month, for further excavations to be financed in part by the National Geographic Society.
Dr. Victor Sarianidi of the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow found a distinctive architectural pattern in many of the ruins. The buildings at each site appeared to be erected in one burst of construction according to the design of a single architect. The largest buildings were like huge apartment complexes, each bigger than a football field and divided into dozens and dozens of rooms. They were surrounded by multiple mud- brick walls, some as much as 10 feet thick. Beyond lay traces of agricultural fields.
In the 1990's, Dr. Hiebert began digging slowly to deeper, and therefore earlier, levels of occupation. He was rewarded last June while excavating beneath a room in what appeared to be an administrative building at Annau. That was where he found the carved symbols on a piece of shiny black jet stone, a type of coal, less than one inch to a side.
Archaeologists believe that it was a stamp seal, commonly used in ancient commerce to mark containers by their contents and ownership. The site also contained many lumps of clay that were used to seal vessels or parcels.
Scientists analyzing charcoal found with the artifacts dated the material at 2300 B.C., before the larger settlements were built. American radiocarbon dates have established that the BMAC culture was present in Central Asia from 2200 B.C. to 1800 or 1700 B.C. Russian research generally underestimated the culture's antiquity by about 500 years.
Have you happened to have read CS Lewis' science fiction trilogy? He makes mention of the differences between Roman Briton and what he calls Logres.
Xi-an, in central China, had been their capital...
Xi-an is the location of the famous terra cotta soldiers -- buried by the first emperor of China. (I think that was the case. It was 1983 when I visited there, and memory dims...) In any case, it is simply remarkable to look at the faces and uniforms of this underground regiment. Every soldier is different, and it is said that they were sculpted from the emperor's real life guard. This emperor was considered very modern and very kind because he buried a regiment of clay soldiers, instead of sacrificing real people to populate his tomb -- as had been the custom of previous rulers.
Several of the soldiers clay looked very Caucasion. I recognized Turks and Indians. I also recognized the faces of Chinese friends I had gone to school with in California -- the statues were so realistic. Only a small part of the excavation had been opened in 1983. I imagine that there are many more visible to the public now. Although the statues a just clay color in situ, they had originally been painted in realistic and lavish colors. A few have been repainted to show the visitor what they looked like when first buried.
I think the soldiers are from a later time than the mummies in this article, but that just shows that there was Western influence in China much later.
I'm familiar with those statues, amazing. They just found another group of these things. I think they are a little younger that the period we have been discussing though.
We now know, through archiological findings and a massive amount of research , that no such Brutus ( supposed grandson of Aeneas ) never existed. As for Belinus, no such Briton ever sacked ancient Rome ( there would have been written and archiological proof of that; there isn't ! ), so that's two , so far, that Geoffry's gotten wrong. AS to Arthur, Geoffrey's bio, is far closer to the Arthurian Legends, that were around, at that time, than Nennius's more factual ( nonromatisized , nonfiction ! ) slim pickings on that topic. Don't forget, that Geoffrey gives exact numbers of troops and Arthur's speech to the troops, for the battle between Arthur and Lucius Tiberius. This would make one wonder just how he got this info, if it weren't for the fact that NO SUCH BATTLE EVER TOOK PLACE ! Sooooooooo, three down, re Geoffrey's top three, and three fictions.
Who " founded " LOndon ? What ... you don't read anything about that and the myriad of digs and that have been done , and ask me WHO , as though anyone knows for certain ? Okay, I'll indulge you a wee bit. London, prior to Roman occupation, was a backwater, little, swampy region. The Romans " founded " Londinium, as a " city " . If that isn't a good enough answer, then reword the query. :-)
If you need a book list, you can start off with " PRE-ROMAN AND ROMAN BRITON ", by G.D. Barri Jones, " ROMAN BRITION AND EARLY ENGLAND ", by Peter Hunter Blair, " THE FORMATION OF ENGLAND ", by H.P.R. Finberg, " FROM ALFRED TO HENERY III ", by Christopher Brooke, " THE QUEST FOR MERLIN ", by Nikolai Tolstoy, " THE CELTS ", by Nora Chadwick, " THE CELTS ", by Gerhard Herm, "THE CELTS " , by T.G.E. Powell, THE DRUIDS ", by Stuart Piggott, and " THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A DRUID PRINCE ", by Ann Ross & Don Robins. There are many other books, that I would highly recommend and you've already cited Nennius. Oh, and add " THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES " ( new translation ) to that list.
Yep, Flinders Petrie counts; as do those , like Acton Griscom, who were inspired by Petrie's address to the British Acadamy, on Nov. 7, 1917, and wrote about their own investigations and theories. :-)
Just because you scanned up one book, at B&N, doesn't mean that ALL books ( and there are 100s of 1,000s of them ) about England / Briton , started off with Julius Caesar, doesn't mean that they all do.
Virgil " AENEID ", after all, states that Rome, was founded by Aeneas, a fleeing Trojan, when other , older tradition has it, that Rommulous and Remus, founded Rome. Romantic, fictionalized, revisonistic history, to glorify one's anticedents, goes back father than Geoffrey's stab at it all.
The Hitties ( from their statuary, illumined writings, and representational art of them, by the ancient Egyptians ) don't look anything whatsoever, like those of Germanic tribes. Whether or not there is a connection bewteen Hitties and Phonecians, I can't say. No representaive art forms exist, nor written descriptions ( that I know of ) of Phonecians, which would prove or disprove this claim. About the ONLY known artifact, that the Phonecians left for posterity, is the " Phrygian Cap " and that has been handed down and down and down, through the ages, until it wound up adorning the heads of the French Revolutionaries. LOL
I remember that thread; I just don't do links.
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