Re: confession
- From: Joe Bernstein <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 06:00:58 +0000 (UTC)
In article <Xns97C35BD37EBD0johanlarsoncomcastne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Johan Larson <johan.larson@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mark L. Fergerson wrote:
[snip stuff about H.G. Wells]
Not to mention a multi-volume _Outline of History_. It gives a rather
different slant to What We Learned In School; he gives Greece, Rome, etc
the obligatory prominent places as Ancestors Of Our Culture, but reaches
farther back to explain the various Aryan/Semitic/etc migrations that
caused Greece and Rome to be what they were.
Has our understanding of pre-classical history changed so little that the
outline is still useful?
Um. Um.
I spent some time with this set as a kid, but not all that much,
as best I recall; recently I inherited that copy. So I was sorta
curious. I decided to look starting at his account of the Upper
Palaeolithic, that is, of true humans as opposed to Neanderthals
and such.
Exotically, his time-sense is *different* from the absolute dates
we've since acquired without being *shorter*, as I'd understood
used to be common. For example, he correctly dates the extinction
of the Neanderthals to sometime around 40,000 BC (OK, that's not
*necessarily* the correct date, but at least he isn't saying
15,000), although he's unaware that a major ice age came after that
(he thinks true humans have generally had it pretty easy all along).
I decided I was spending too much time so skipped ahead to "The
Early Empires", where I soon discovered that "The growing of wheat
had spread to the Atlantic and to the Pacific coast with the
distribution of the Neolithic culture by, perhaps, 15,000 or
10,000 B.C." Which is, um, not even slightly close; for starters,
there's no Neolithic anywhere before 12,000 B.C. (see aforementioned
ice age).
Later in the chapter we get actual empires or at least literate
peoples, so "pre-classical history" in the strict sense. I am
struck by the egregious wrongness of his information on early India:
he thinks there were Sumerians there, he thinks there are
significant Harappan remains in the Ganges valley (if I'm
understanding him at *all*, which is debatable), he asserts that
the Harappans (?) didn't have writing, and he believes in the Aryan
invasion as a conquest.
I was thinking that in his time Mesopotamia was better known, and
anyway I've studied it less, so I'd have trouble catching him out.
Oops. "From the time of Sargon I until the fourth and third
centuries B.C., a period of over two thousand years, the Semitic
peoples were in the ascendant throughout all the near east."
Um, even if "the near east" excludes Egypt, the Egyptians would
probably dispute this, as would the Hittites; more to the point,
the Persians, who have been known as rulers of the near east before
the fourth century B.C. for millennia, were not Semites, as indeed
he acknowledges a page or two later. (He can't be defended here
on the grounds that he means population not rulers; there was no
interruption of the population of the region around 300 B.C.)
"But though the Semites conquered and gave a king to the Sumerian
cities, it was the Sumerian civilization which prevailed over
the simpler Semitic culture. The newcomers learnt the Sumerian
writing (the 'cuneiform' writing) and the Sumerian language;
they set up no Semitic writing of their own. The Sumerian language
became for these barbarians the language of knowledge and power, as
Latin was the language of knowledge and power among the barbaric
peoples of the Middle Ages in Europe." He does, much much later,
contradict this astonishing (and utterly unjustifiable on grounds
of date of writing) nonsense: "When presently the Semites conquered
Sumeria, they adapted the syllabic system to their own speech"
(in my copy, 36 pages later) - but in doing so misdescribes the
actual nature of Akkadian writing.
"(There is, we may note, no connection whatever between the
words Assyrian and Syrian. It is an accidental similarity.)"
Um, no. While English Assyrian and English Syrian are not
directly related, their distant Greek source words are, and I
strongly suspect the words in various Semitic languages that
underlie those Greek forms are actually variations on the
same roots.
We are then told that Cheops ruled in "3,733 B.C.". Good Lord.
Here, he actually cites an authority (Wallis Budge); but I'm
having trouble imagining that a date this early was *ever*
taken seriously by Egyptologists after Champollion.
From this much wrong with his discussion of things I knowanything about, I'm forced to assume that when he talks about
prehistoric movements of "negroid" (as in Elamites, I kid you
not) and "Aryan" peoples, he's probably full of it.
The *idea* of the work is good. The execution is lacking even for
its time (first copyright date 1920, last in my copy 1940), and
certainly for today. I'd be interested to compare better-known
topics like Roman history or the Middle Ages, where I'd *like*
to believe the utter falsehoods would be fewer, but the examples
of sheer *carelessness* given above make it seem not worth doing,
like finding examples of stylistic infelicities in a story written
by an eight year old.
ObSFnally, for some reason the reference to mediaeval Latin reminded
me of the church in the Darwath books, which I've been toying lately
with re-reading. Well, we'll see.
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer joe@xxxxxxxxxxx
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt
.
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