I'll put it on my list - but I'm getting through that very slowly these days and there are quite a few books on it unfortunately. You'll have probably had time for it before I get that far.
The History Thread
- Thread starter SteveJ
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Just getting back to this topic, I'm most familiar with the famous Arab medieval travelers Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta. Ibn Jubayr spent around two years in the 1180s on his pilgrimage from al-Andalus to Mecca and back, via Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Sicily. Much of it by sea. His account of 12th century Norman Sicily is especially interesting I think, a relatively rich portrait of Sicily at a time when it still had a mixed Christian-Muslim population.
Ibn Battuta traveled much further for much longer, all the way from Tangier to India, south-east Asia, and China. But he tended to stop in places along the way for extended periods of time, and his account is unreliable at certain points, including with regard to dates. But, to give an example of a fraction of his travels, he is believed to have left New Saray on the Volga north of Astrakhan in December and reached the Indus the following September (the exact years are in doubt, but early 1330s). So about 8 months, via modern-day Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
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Such a different world, isn't! In that Silk Road book, there are various examples of monks and merchants travelling between China and India, either over land, along deserts and through the mountains, or over sea - where instead the hold-up can sometimes be adverse winds or no boat, getting people stuck for weeks or even months in some seaport halfway through.
Of course, my post was a little naive: writers will generally have been relatively well off (otherwise you don't become a writer in the first place), and a geographical account often takes just one trip through the area described. It's not like these are poor farmers is hitchhiking thousands of kilometers without a clue of where he is and nothing of value on his body. Also, these roads were well travelled given the steady stream of trade heading in both directions. (Although that's primarily short-distance trade in multiple stages; not single merchants crossing large distances.) So it's not quite a journey of discovery through unknown country either. And people's sense of time, or what constitutes a 'long' journey, would have been very different from ours.
All the same, the commitment to start a trip knowing you might be gone for a year or more - it's quite something.
I read Ibn Battuta back when I was at uni writing about the Mongols, how the empire(s) set up structures to facilitate long distance trade and travel etc. Fascinating stuff, one of those books I keep coming back to thumb through once in a while
It’s so good, I’m pretty sure we briefly discussed it in this thread way back. The entire seven or eight year interval spent in India is especially interesting and at times so farcical.
This is pretty good - The Travels of Ibn Battuta
State vandalism:
I suppose this is the right thread for this:
Scientific article: A weakly structured stem for human origins in Africa | Nature
Picture of a vine covering a tree:
Overview article: Human-evolution story rewritten by new data and computing power (nature.com)Nature Briefing said:
Scientific article: A weakly structured stem for human origins in Africa | Nature
Picture of a vine covering a tree:
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Also: scientists are considering to (finally) confirm officially that Canada is the centre of humankind.
Full article: The Washington Post | 11 min readNature Briefing said:
Unfortunate coincidence the article is written entirely by women from the same garbage university.
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Sorry, is this serious? If so, could you expand on that a little? I'm not sure how this is valid criticism of the contents of the article.
I'm not criticising the article. I haven't even read the article.
Interesting fact for you. If you look at how humans hunted larger prey, it was by long distance running with the animal eventually collapsing/them catching it due to exhaustion. With that in mind, it makes sense women hinted with men because ultramarathons are one of the few sports there is no discernible difference in performance between male and female competitors (in fact women might actually be better).
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But then I'm really confused at what you're saying. Are you pre-empting the elitist argument others might raise against this? Or are you really raising this as an issue?
Ha, I didn't know that!
@Cheimoon in case you’re still interested in this stuff, I’ve been reading through a classic work called A Mediterranean Society (vol. 1) by S. D. Gotein, a really rich account of life in medieval North Africa and the Levant based on the famous Cairo Geniza. He gives some details of the schedules of the overland caravans that connected Cairo with the Maghrib (North-West Africa) in the 11th and 12th centuries:
Also I found this section on a particular problem faced by Jewish travelers interesting:
There’s so much more to share from this work, rare to have a place and time in pre-modern, non-Western history so thoroughly portrayed.
Also I found this section on a particular problem faced by Jewish travelers interesting:
There’s so much more to share from this work, rare to have a place and time in pre-modern, non-Western history so thoroughly portrayed.
They were some fairly detailed accounts of the proceedings in various cities in that book on the Silk Road that I read as well. Interesting stuff - it's fascinating to get this kind of insight into what daily life really looked like in practice, rather than another mile-high overview. Thanks!@Cheimoon in case you’re still interested in this stuff, I’ve been reading through a classic work called A Mediterranean Society (vol. 1) by S. D. Gotein, a really rich account of life in medieval North Africa and the Levant based on the famous Cairo Geniza. He gives some details of the schedules of the overland caravans that connected Cairo with the Maghrib (North-West Africa) in the 11th and 12th centuries:
Also I found this section on a particular problem faced by Jewish travelers interesting:
There’s so much more to share from this work, rare to have a place and time in pre-modern, non-Western history so thoroughly portrayed.
Video tour of Karahan Tepe by an archaeologist released a couple of days ago.
It's a site that's about 60km from Gobekli Tepe but supposedly even older. So as far as we can tell, this is the oldest surviving monument in the history of humanity.
That's fascinating! I looked it up on Wikipedia, and also found this article that gives a lot of context and discusses Göbekli Tepe as well. Super interesting stuff: Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey? | The Spectator
I really like that guy's stuff, as well as anything related to Gobekli Tepe.
Ah brilliant, I need to watch this. I've spent ages arguing with a friend that Bimini Road is just differentially eroded limestone beds.
The Fayum portraits are truly fascinating: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayum_mummy_portraits
See also the brief article in Nature and the scientific paper.Nature Briefing said:
It's kinda wild if true, but I suppose it just isn't...
Proof read by Graham Hancock...
Yeah, the whole thing seems to be built on wishful thinking first and foremost...Proof read by Graham Hancock...
fecking love this guy. He's also in some more casual fun "expert reviews" type videos where he looks at battle scenes in film and TV (I think for Insider? They do loads of those). Oh yeah, and he's also a flaired user (basically someone who answers questions a lot) on the AskHistorians subreddit, which when I found out I can tell you made me feel pretty inadequate about the fact that I also used to be one.
History Hit has loads of good history videos, on many different topics and for different levels of interest or knowledge, incidentally.
History Hit has loads of good history videos, on many different topics and for different levels of interest or knowledge, incidentally.
Just to appropriately follow up that hour long video with a professional historian discussing the details of Spartan life, here's a twitter thread about what Nixon would say if he got transported to the past:
They (History Hit) came to a site I supervised on during HS2. Disappointed they didn't add the part in where they asked me while I was digging a skeleton how I felt about it and I answered that it was pretty gucci.
That's it, I'm unsubbing. If they can't recognize content gold like that, they're not worth my time.
From Nature Briefing:
Fascinating stuff. There was so much more in the Americas, and especially in the Amazon, than we are aware of - and as a result, that entire area is hugely underestimated historically. I love reading about this.
Obligatory image (of the LIDAR map):
There is a general-public article in The Independent: Valley of lost cities found hidden in the Amazon | The Independent. And also a scientific paper in Science: Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon | Science.
Fascinating stuff. There was so much more in the Americas, and especially in the Amazon, than we are aware of - and as a result, that entire area is hugely underestimated historically. I love reading about this.
Obligatory image (of the LIDAR map):
It looks like Graham Hancock's theory's are being proved correct time and time again.From Nature Briefing:
There is a general-public article in The Independent: Valley of lost cities found hidden in the Amazon | The Independent. And also a scientific paper in Science: Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon | Science.
Fascinating stuff. There was so much more in the Americas, and especially in the Amazon, than we are aware of - and as a result, that entire area is hugely underestimated historically. I love reading about this.
Obligatory image (of the LIDAR map):
when we will unearth stevej?
What theory was that? Sorry, I don't know this person.
he's a proponent of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, that the earth cooling drastically in that period was caused by a huge meteor impact.. he talks a lot about there being lost civilisations because of this (caused by floods etc..)
although, I don't think there being lost civilisations in the Amazon really falls very neatly into that theory.. I think that is more likely explained by the europeans bringing smallpox and wotnot which wiped out the amazon tribes, and then the forest just grew over everything in the next century or so
Ooohhh.... one of those fantasy authors.
He did ring a distant bell as a pseudo-scientist, but I didn't have time to look it up and didn't want to immediately adopt a negative angle. I suppose it was a joke by @fergies coat though, since this Younger Dryas stuff is many millennia before these new finds in Ecuador.Other than that, this really is fascinating stuff. I read Charles C. Mann's 1491 two years ago, which is all about the Americas pre-Columbus. He really opened my eyes to much we know about all the amazing societies and states that existed, and their accomplishments. The Amazon is interesting in particular, cause it's usually considered as this age-old, pristine forest where only very primitive tribes have ever lived; but it now seems more likely that pretty advanced societies with significant populations were living and trading and everything else at least along its main rivers - it's just that they are very hard to identify now because of the jungle that has appeared there since their disappearance (probably indeed due to smallpox and other factors brought about by early colonial times). LIDAR is a great way to gain non-intrusively gain insights into that - as this new study shows.
I can't wait to see what else may be discovered in the near future.
But the Younger Dryas Impact is supposed to of happened around 13kya, whereas these new Amazonian "cities" (they're large, long lived, planned settlements - would need to see more evidence before I was comfortable calling them cities) date to around 500BCE-c.600CE - almost ten thousand years after the supposed Younger Dryas Impact.
But Europeans didn't arrive in that region of S.America until the 16th century, these proto-cities (for want of a better term) had been abandoned for around a thousand years by then - so can't be linked to European diseases. If I had to guess, I'd suggest the failure of these settlements might be linked to climate change, but there's no evidence of that at this point and my guess would only be because drought/aridification has been linked to the failure of an awful lot of agricultural societies in the last 6000 years
Cities come and go all the time though. This is just one place if I remember correctly. Maybe it lost a war, or it was by an outbreak, or there was some natural event. There are so many realistic possibilities. The interesting part, to me, is rather the identification of these kinds of places and the evidence they bring that complex societies existed in what's now dense Amazonian forest.
Don't get me wrong, it's a really exciting piece of research - adding to a growing corpus of evidence for long lived and widespread complex societal settlement in the Amazonian basin. Just saying that the abandonment of these settled landscapes has nothing to do with European diseases like smallpox.
Also, while cities are relatively commonly abandoned/fail, they're also frequently incredibly long lived (whether continuously or in waves of resettlement and rebuilding), so when a previously (relatively) densely populated landscapes is pretty much completely abandoned (as is the case here, or as seen in the southern Maya Lowlands) it's actually quite unusual - which just adds to how interesting this all is!
Yeah, I agree on all counts. Also, if it's a really good spot for a city, people are bound to go back there eventually.
It's just a pity there are not more written sources (or maybe: not more understanding of unusual writing systems!) for South and Central America. Purely archaeological sources can only get you so far in understanding historical chains of events - and of course when all you have is LIDAR imagery, you really have next to no idea.
Is this a subject you've studied more? I'm really an absolutely layman in this.