Deeper Roots
- Thread starter zhao
- Start date
luka
Well-known member
one of the curious things about dissensus for me is that i only clash with people i agree with. like droid, i agree with everything he says, i even love the same music he loves, but he keeps winding me up and i am forced to insult him.
you too zhao, most of that hippy shit you spout, i beleive that too.
but mr tea, i despise everything he stands for, i loathe everything he likes, but he's amiable enough spouting his bad puns, and i never want to fight with him.
craner is diffrent. he is what we professionals call a scitzoid personality. he doesn't beleive anyrthing he says, his social self is completly divorced from his true self and the two are not even on speaking terms anymore. eh craner!
you too zhao, most of that hippy shit you spout, i beleive that too.
but mr tea, i despise everything he stands for, i loathe everything he likes, but he's amiable enough spouting his bad puns, and i never want to fight with him.
craner is diffrent. he is what we professionals call a scitzoid personality. he doesn't beleive anyrthing he says, his social self is completly divorced from his true self and the two are not even on speaking terms anymore. eh craner!
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
You haven't met my mother yet, then.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Durr, spaz.
well thread has gone all meta in a sarcastically self reflective, casual confessional, warm and fuzzy but sprinkled with sublimated spite kinda way, so i'm not sure if the point is worth making anymore but it might be
that the massive influence the Egyptian and Semitic civilizations had on Greece, their relationship being akin to that of parents to child, is "commonly accepted mainstream text book stuff".
which i disgree with.
that the massive influence the Egyptian and Semitic civilizations had on Greece, their relationship being akin to that of parents to child, is "commonly accepted mainstream text book stuff".
which i disgree with.
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luka
Well-known member
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
To switch position a bit and back Zhao up, I think the common myth about the classical greeks isn't that they drew on previous European civilizations rather than previous african civilizations so much as that they sat down in a world of uncivilized savages and created art, architecture, drama, science, philosophy, government etc etc etc pretty much from the ground up. The Egyptians were ancient people who left monuments, the greeks were modern people who left plays.
Obviously the extent to which this is true is rather debatable, although given that we can barely decide whether Funky is doing anything new or just rehashing older stuff despite the fact that it's happening under our noses, a consensus seems unlikely. Pretty much any 'child culture' can be seen as an obvious continuation of the parent if you look at it from one angle and a radical rupture from another angle and trying to quantify which angle is being comparatively overstated is pretty hairy.
Also, I thought the above had been under fire pretty much since Nietzsche anyway...
Obviously the extent to which this is true is rather debatable, although given that we can barely decide whether Funky is doing anything new or just rehashing older stuff despite the fact that it's happening under our noses, a consensus seems unlikely. Pretty much any 'child culture' can be seen as an obvious continuation of the parent if you look at it from one angle and a radical rupture from another angle and trying to quantify which angle is being comparatively overstated is pretty hairy.
Also, I thought the above had been under fire pretty much since Nietzsche anyway...
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quite right. the greeks being originators who built the foundation of "western civilization" by themselves is probably the main false belief. which also propagates the fictional deivide of "east" and "west", being separate entities, having intrinsic, fundamental, and irreconcilable differences.
i think this is bordering dangerously to the kind of historical relativism that i absolutely do not endorse -- "no one can be sure what happened so there is no such thing as truth and it's a waste of time worrying about it".
1: sure there are different versions of any story, some of which become dominant, and others are suppressed. it is of course important to examine the competition of these narratives, and the causes for their rise/fall.
2. as Bernal says, with ancient history there is (almost) no such thing as "proof". but convincing models of truth can be constructed from substantial plausibility. the biggest one in this case is the birth of european culture not taking place in Germany or the Alps, but in the southern and eastern most part of europe, a place closest to Africa and Asia. so it is very much likely that the older civilizations played crucial roles in the birth of the younger one. (and of course the linguistic roots, religious history, technology trading hands, the dissemination of philosophical thought -- all of these things can be examined, and together they can form a pretty damn good picture)
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Slothrop
Tight but Polite
It's more that concepts like "the birth of european culture" are horribly fuzzily defined. You can trace certain continuities and identify particular innovations (and the tracing of continuities seems like it was heavily underrepresented for quite a long time) but debating whether there were "more innovations than continuities" or vice versa and hence whether they "invented european culture" or "adapted egyptian culture" seems unlikely to get anywhere.
those continuities between Egypt and Greece were very well documented by Greek historians, and very well represented all through out history -- until the 19th century, when a rupture in this representation occured; when scholars, acting in accordance to the "racial science" of the time, denied this continuity, the massive influence of ancient blacks and jews on European culture, and installed their own eurocentric version of the birth of Greece.
this debate in this case, and certainly the work of scholars like Bernal in examining this area, have been very much fruitful. Bernal makes an excellent case in showing the names of many central Greek gods and cities having been directly borrowed from Egyptian; etymological evidence which establishes something like 30% of Greek vocabulary having come from Egypt, 30% from Semitic Culture; accounts of Plato traveling to Egypt to study in its libraries and the continuity of philosophical inquiry; and continuities in other fields such as astronomy, science, medicine, etc, etc, etc.
and from all this a very good model of ancient history is constructed, what Bernal calls the "revised Ancient Model", which should replace the Aryan model (invented in the 1800s). and most in the academic world have been against his claims.
Earlier still ...
Besides the ancient 'Venus' news posted a few pages bk,
here's another case of timelines being examined, possibly to be rolled back -
or in this case -a place found in the gamut of 'names' and 'boxes' of present day humankind ... :slanted:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/science/16fossil.html?_r=1&ref=science
Besides the ancient 'Venus' news posted a few pages bk,
here's another case of timelines being examined, possibly to be rolled back -
or in this case -a place found in the gamut of 'names' and 'boxes' of present day humankind ... :slanted:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/science/16fossil.html?_r=1&ref=science
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
But this is just crazy - the bit I've highlighted, I mean. Such a notion (viz. that European culture began north of the Alps) may have been prevalent in the 19th century, but I've never heard of it outside of discussions of the dubious (in fact downright fabricated) historiography of romantic nationalism. Mainly in this thread, come to think of it. It was certainly consigned to the dustbin by the time I was in school, anyway, and probably a good generation or two before that. If anything, the impressions I remember of history lessons or textbooks on 'the cradle of civilisation' are at pains to place it in the regions where agriculture, metalwork, pottery and writing began (at least, as far as the Old World is concerned), namely in the valleys of the Nile and the Indus and above all Mesopotamia. Not even in Greece, in other words - let alone Germany!
Edit: the crux of the matter is that no-one is substantially disagreeing with your claim that scholarly Euro-American views that were once prevalent on this subject were a load of old racially-motivated rubbish: it's just that such views have been considered obsolete for a long time now so to a large extent you're attacking a straw man. Slothrop has been saying this for most of the thread (ed: and luka) but you've studiously ignored him.
Edit edit: that's not to say that the peoples native to the north and west of ancient Europe didn't have rich and fascinating cultures themselves, just that they (obviously) didn't contribute much, if anything, to classical Helenic culture.
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