: It's not a historical story, Sili. Nor is the Iliad or
: the Odyssey. Besides, a great number of Romans
: obviously accepted it as much as the tale of Romulus
: and Remus, otherwise Gaius Iulius Cæsar wouldn't have
: claimed himself decendent of Venus.
No, it's not a historical story--and it's even less of one than the Iliad and the Odyssey, given the known circumstances of its creation--and therefore it can't be used as strong evidence for historical theories.
The Julian gens was hardly unique in claiming divine descent--every patrician family in Rome had its own personal lineage traced back through various minor heroes to a god or two. These stories were often contradictory, but that didn't stop anybody. By the late Republic, it's unlikely that many people actually believed in any of them, or in Romulus--any more than modern Americans believe in Johnny Appleseed. Rome had a strict division between public and private religion, and you could believe pretty much whatever the hell you wanted as long as you observed the state-mandated holidays and made the appropriate sacrifices.
: The story is very similar, actually. The Valmikian story
: is taken from ancient Saskrit and Dravidian writings
: and tales. It's most likely this is what Homer heard,
: if he indeed exist, if he indeed had written the Iliad
: as early as some claim. In any case, this story is not
: unique to Homeric times. It is the same story that is
: described by Plato in his writings on Atlantis, the
: same as the Egyptian tales and beliefs in Punt, the
: same as the Lanka in the Ramayana, the Atala of the
: Hindus, just as the Aztlan of the Maya as recorded in
: their Troano, Oera Linda of the Frisians speaking of
: the "Atland" which sank beneath the
: waves…the list goes on and on. There some incredible
: connection between the most distant parts of the
: world, to be sure.
I haven't read enough of most of those stories to comment, but Plato's Atlantis is definitely nothing like Troy. Its location is hundreds of miles away (and thousands of miles from the South Pacific, for that matter); its physical structure and economic and political roles are completely different, as is its ultimate end. And Plato should certainly not be viewed as a historical source. :-)
Stories of mass destruction by flood are certainly common, but this is hardly surprising when most known myths are handed down from cultures heavily dependent on river valleys. And the "Oera Linda" was written in 1876 and has been repeatedly proven to be a hoax, on the basis of its many known historical inaccuracies (as well as the simple nonexistence of any document of which it it was supposed to be a "translation").
: Actually, it's the opposite. The water level of the world
: has been slowly rising, even after the cataclysmic
: flooding of the world all at once for a millenium
: after the Pleistocene Ice Age. The rising water
: actually puts Hissarlik at a much further distance
: from the ocean, discounting it as being the site of
: Troy in any time, except maybe the recent present.
The sea level hasn't risen all *that* fast--it's averaged about a meter every 150 years over the last 20 millennia, and has slowed even beyond that in the last 5. The silting process in the Scamander's mouth took place on a much more rapid time scale than did sea level changes. Hissarlik would have been much closer to the ocean circa 1500 B.C. Not that it would need to be--a few miles is hardly an excessive distance between Troy and the coast, given the accounts of travel from the Greek camp to the city and back again in the Iliad.
: That's right; there are mountains in the area where this
: "plain" would have existed. This is more
: disproof that Hissarlik can be the site of Troy, for
: Troy requires a plain straight to the ocean.
The mountains near Hissarlik (more like hills, to an American) are principally to the east and south, as they were described in the Iliad. On the north and west sides, there's a nice flat plain stretching to the coast
And I'd point out that if inappropriately placed mountains disqualify Hissarlik to be Troy, and the location of Thera inside rather than outside the pillars of Hercules disqualifies it to be Atlantis, then a location in the South Pacific--thousands of miles from where Plato *or* Homer situated their cities, and thousands of years earlier--can hardly be more acceptable. :-)
: That strata was Troy III, I believe, and was
: post-Homeric, discounting it as being chronologically
: accurate. Besides, many cities were burned and
: destroyed in such a manner. It's not a particularly
: unique thing.
Actually, Homer was contemporaneous with Troy VIIb or Troy VIII. The prime candidate for Homer's Troy is Troy VIIa, which was destroyed by fire and war in the mid-thirteenth century, precisely when Mycenaean Greece was flourishing. Earlier Troys were destroyed by fire, earthquakes, or armed invasion. No, this is hardly unique--but it also isn't what is said to have happened to Atlantis.
: You mean that bronze is more primitive than iron, and
: that why would a good metal like iron be used for
: mundain tasks? That's pretty simple; bronze is
: stronger than iron. Iron is only used in the Iron Age
: because copper and, especially, tin are far less
: abundant than iron. The reason it's a more advanced
: age, coming after the, supposédly, more primitive
: Bronze Age, derives from the more advanced mining
: techniques required to get iron.
Iron is considerably stronger than bronze. True, it required increasing expense of copper and tin for Mediterranean people to switch from bronze to iron, but that's not because bronze is better; it's because the necessary mining, refining and metalworking industries to produce and work bronze were mature and reliable, and it simply wasn't worth it yet to try and figure out how to mass-produce iron artifacts. Where iron *was* available--as from meteors--it was prized for its strength.
: Well, they were :-). At least the tried to be…Romans
: didn't believe in the homosexuality thing, nothing
: like the "I can't love anyone but my equal, and
: women are inferior, and therefore, I can only love a
: man" ancient Greek attitude.
The "feminine Easterner" stereotype is in fact of Greek (especially Athenian) origin. My classics professor showed me a pot where an Athenian and a Persian were...ah...reenacting goatse.cx. The Persian was the Receiver.
The difference in the views of Troy is that the Greeks thought of Troy as a good manly Greek city, while the Romans classed it as an Asian town, filled with gelled-hair sissies surrounding poor virile misfit Aeneas.
: Aye, but perhaps some insight into more cultures will
: show us what truly did exist.
Indeed.
--SiliconDream
