What do you mean?

There's a few factors at play.

One is, like you mention, how long people have lived there. So for a thing like a temple, you usually get it to last a bit longer as most people will venerate it and typically will want to make sure it lasts, especially those who worship or recognise that deity (though people like Herostratus have existed). But as time passes, and that religion is replaced, or new people move in that don't respect or recognise that god they might not care for the temple at all, or might deliberately destroy it, or simply start to use the stones and other such things to build their own things. Or they might decide it's a great place to store gunpowder and the Venetians might decide to fire upon your gunpowder supplies to keep you from firing back at them, you know, hypothetically.

But also you need to look at the geography and geology of Greece. There's a lot of hills and mountains, this has a lot of benefits for living there, but it also means there's a lot of stuff constantly going down from higher points of elevation to the lower parts where you might find more settlements. This can be just basic runoff, to landslides, to complete shifts in the land itself from earthquakes and just general plate tectonics. Look for example at how much the area around Thermopylae has changed https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Thermopylae_shoreline_changes_map.png

You also get even more violent events like volcanoes. Which is why places like Pompeii got covered completely. Of course the people living there knew it was there, and their descendants would hear about it and learn it was there, but overtime that direct knowledge was lost and while we had texts they weren't maps, and still only a small population would have been reading and familiar with these stories. The volcano still would keep up its attack and burry it further and further and further down overtime, as well as just that general passage of time.

And that comes back to the first point, how many people have continued living there. New homes, new buildings, new structures, etc. are built over places eventually too. And while there certainly have been times where it's been decided "well, we need to tear down your home and excavate this area" it's generally not a method that's utilised a lot.

And of course this isn't even describing every way things get lost over time: there's a lot more to it, but hopefully it gives you a sense of it all. And this means that there's a lot of cool stuff out there to be discovered. Some most of it probably never will be found. We still have mentions of entire towns and cities that we just don't know where they are. It could be a simple thing as "well, this source calls this town that we already know about by this weird name that was rarely used, it's not lost" some others are "yeah this place is just missing entirely." and it could be under a bunch of houses right now.

Pretty common, there's a common joke at universities about how almost all historians are bad with maths and numbers (which I think there is something to).

Gets even worse when working on projects that spread between BCE and CE and you have to work with second century BCE and second century CE and having to work out how that works for both.

I mainly avoid using the terms when giving lectures and just stick to specific dates or say "around 200 BCE" etc. Much easier.

Getting paid until 2027 but not having to do any of the work after 2022? "How unfortunate for me" - Kliffleberry

Sava River, known as the Savus in Latin which was "Save" in the vocative.

Good book, his later edition with the added foreword is nice too but not enough to specifically search for if you have one of the earlier publishings already.

There are obviously still fresh wounds and current political implications at play with regards to the events discussed in this article. Our priority here at this subreddit is to focus on the things that happened at least 20 years ago, and not those reverberating effects still occurring now.

With an event so closely tied to more modern politics and a story that clearly has some modern political implications the line between acceptable and rule breaking can be very blurry.

So we just ask that you try your best to ensure that the main focus here is on the past events (i.e. whether France was actually complicit in the 1994 genocide) and less so on the present events (i.e. how politicians might currently be acting regarding it). If you are unsure or have any questions feel free to contact the mods via modmail.

sigh

locks

One day...

Rule 5.

Lol Neckbeards are big mad

The common era is the dating system we use now, we're in the year 2023 of the Common Era (CE). Before the year 1 CE there was the year 1 BCE (Before Common Era), and we count backwards from there.

It's the exact same system used with BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini). It's the year AD 2023, and the year 2023 CE.

Julius Caesar died in 44 BCE, and 44 BC.

Make sense now?

All discussions on the sub must be about events that happened at least 20 years ago (and of course follow the other rules too). But that one is non negotiable.

It matters because everything that happens is part of history, and thus historical. But to keep ourselves from being overwhelmed with modern events -- which the r/news r/politics r/worldnews etc subreddits cover perfectly, we ensure that there is a large gap between the present and the past to maintain something which sets us apart from other subreddits.

Can we please have one thread where people don't just focus on one small inconsequential part of the headline and instead discuss the actual article?

Yes, they thought them to be real events, and were passed to them in smaller Latin forms which were well known, but still mentioned other gods.

There's a couple of ways of looking at the gods themselves though, including just placing the Christian God into the story instead. The Greeks simply encountered him, but could only use their own mythologies to explain this, so these stories became muddied. Or at least that's the sort of thinking you might encounter.

Or that they simply added in the gods because they believed them to be helping them, just as a soldier in the Middle Ages might pray to god before battle as well and find him "there" even if never literally seeing or speaking to him.

It would be a few more hundred years before people started to be a bit more skeptical of the events of the Trojan War as passed down by bards and later written down in the form we know it as (well, the two main surviving accounts of many that are now lost). But there were still people who considered them authentic accounts of a war well into the modern age, with Schliemann having been made many efforts to "prove" these stories true, to the point of fabrication or mishandling of archeological finds to try and fit the narrative into it. Today we are fairly certain that Troy existed, and we're fairly certain the site as identified by Calvert (and later more famously, by Schliemann) is indeed the true Troy, and we know that it went through many wars, including one that would match up chronologically to around when we could place such a Trojan War, but we don't believe that the details laid out in the Iliad are historical (though whoever Homer was/were he/she/they were clearly inspired by elements, including some similarly named individuals that didn't have the exact roles detailed in the book but were popular in the region that Troy was in. So there are elements there.

Do you mean regarding the gods being present, or just that it was written by pagans?

All history books from before the common era were written by pagans, but they didn't doubt the historicity of say the battles at Thermopylae or Actium. Early Christian historians, such as Clement of Alexandria, actually dealt with this "problem" early on by still recognising important historical gains made by pagans. So there was no outright dismissal of everything pagan, just some cultural elements -- but even that was a very slow process and mostly occurred later.

There's a reference in Polybius (I believe, can check in the morning), that discusses Romans bringing in captured Carthaginian mercenaries in the First Punic War. In this, the Romans were said to have made note of physical attributes that the individuals had and put them in different roles depending on that. We do have to be careful about taking this as gospel for a couple of reasons, but it does at least tell us that Polybius didn't view this as an abnormal practice or out of the realm of possibility (or even his imagination). We have some Roman infantry specialists around here so hopefully someone can comment on the possible practice further.

So this is a good question, and I think there is some room for some discussion on this here.

I think mainly you need to look at how teachers approach this subject. At the early levels we do need to stick a bit to narratives. This does create some issues as it does simplify "history" to the point where a lot of people think that just telling the stories is what historians do, when in reality we just call that class "history" for simplicity's sake. Because what historians do is far more complex, and we try purposefully to avoid narratives and story-telling.

But this method is effective for younger kids for a few reasons. 1) It's simple. To compare it with science, it's a popular meme, but there's a reason people still remember things like "mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell"; that's effective teaching. Some kids are going to want to go "okay, but what does that actually mean, what's actually happening?" and learn more, but for the average person with no real desire to learn more about cells beyond the requirements this is ensuring that kids have a basic basic basic understanding.

So in comparison to history, we might say "Ostracism was a practice in Ancient Athens created by Cleisthenes in the late 6th century that allowed the people to remove politicians that they saw as dangerous which began in the early 5th century."

Anyone familiar with ostracism at an academic level would immediately go on about the weaponisation of ostracism, how it did pretty much nothing to help the Demos, and that its origins (while still more firmly in the Cleisthenic origin/Hipparchos camp) are murky when we take into account the problems of the fragmented statement of Androtion compared with that of Aristotle and the whole τοτε πρωτον debate.

But you've lost most kids, and most undergrads, at that point. That's point 2 about why narratives are good, they're a bit more accessible for everyone. If a student shows they're really keen on ostracism and really interested in ancient Greek and historiography and want to learn these things it's easy enough to open up and start going "well, it does get a bit complicated, but..." and scale up the lessons. But if kids walk away at the end of the term knowing "Cleisthenes. Ostracism. Athens. Politicians sent away" then that's a win.

And this is visible throughout most podcasts, most youtube videos, and Popular Histories. People tend to want the story told to them, and then allow themselves to branch out if something in particular piques their interest.

And after a long winding rant which ironically boils down to "get to the point, you'll keep people more interested in that way" I'll do so. The point being that you can still teach your kids the truth, and not hide the dark parts of history from them. But also you want them to be engaged, and you want them to learn early to start exploring, to start questioning. If you tell them a bit and they just respond "okay" then leave it at that. But ask them if they have any questions, ask them what they think, get them talking and if they show interest in developing a wider understanding then you can guide them towards that. And don't be afraid to say "You know, I don't know, but let's find out" and teach them how to find information, how to check out books from the library, etc. Hell, do that even if you do know the answer sometimes.

Being a kid is kinda like an internship. You want them to understand how to do the basics and get them to the point where they can take out the rubbish without accidentally starting a fire, but a lot of interns lead to great employees, and some even to bosses. But it's not going to happen all at once. Build that foundational knowledge, and let them add to it, guide them as you see fit, but don't pile things on if they're not keen. So discuss Columbus, discuss transatlantic trade, and even slaves, but let them start to connect the pieces and just facilitate their learning instead of just megaphoning knowledge at them. Eventually you could get to a point where a kid wants that, and wants to have in depth, lengthy, difficult conversations about the dark parts of history, but it won't be on day one.

Hope this helps and I've actually answered your question instead of just ranting away.

It's an incredible discovery.

They're not going to not report about it because some people might be upset by it.

This thread would be going very differently if it was "Proof of Spartan King deciphered on ancient rock inscription"

And people need to ask themselves why that is.

People that get upset every time anything remotely tied to religion is mentioned need to find a new hobby, because history cannot be separated from it.

100% write him off, at least any time he diverges into his alt-history.

People like Hancock rely on people not knowing anything and trusting that he must know what he's talking about because look at how confidently he says stuff. But anyone who actually studies history, archaeology, and is even vaguely familiar with the evidence he uses can see right through it. He knows this, and that's why he targets amateurs and why he pretends there's some grand conspiracy against him from academia, that way when people call him out he can go "see, I told you, the academics are just out to get me!" it's very convenient for him.

https://theconversation.com/with-netflixs-ancient-apocalypse-graham-hancock-has-declared-war-on-archaeologists-194881

This bit in particular highlights the problems with him well

>From my perspective as an archaeologist, the show is surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) lacking in evidence to support Hancock’s theory of an advanced, global ice age civilisation. The only site Hancock visits that actually dates to near the end of the ice age is Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey.

>Instead, Hancock visits several North American mound sites, pyramids in Mexico, and sites stretching from Malta to Indonesia, which Hancock is convinced all help prove his theory. However, all of these sites have been published on in detail by archaeologists, and a plethora of evidence indicates they date thousands of years after the ice age.

Most people won't know when those sites date to, academics studying them do, but most people listening to Netflix won't, so when Graham uses them all to try and prove his point only those educated will go "hey, wait a second, that dating doesn't even match up with what you're arguing"

Upon which Hancock just pulls out the trustworthy "archaeologists don't know what they're talking about, but you can trust ME" Nothing you can really do about those types of people, they refuse to actually engage in debate or prove their points.

His whole premise is flawed, and he makes up evidence whenever he doesn't have any, and whenever there's any evidence that dismisses his points he just says that that evidence is made up by academics trying to cover things up.

It's the laziest hypothesis in the world, anything inconvenient to it is dismissed. There's not a single serious academic that thinks he knows what he's talking about, he's been a laughing stock for decades now but has gotten famous again due to the ease of spreading misinformation online, and him having a son working at Netflix who can give him a show.

Take him as seriously as you would the P.E. Teacher from Ancient Aliens.

Egypt is both Mediterranean and African though, and Egypt had long been influenced by other cultures, commuities, and networks and trades long before the Ptolemies. These communities never existed in vacuums. And while yes, Cleopatra's family was Greek/Macedonian in origin, you have to also consider the scope of the time. We're talking three hundred of year between Alexander becoming pharaoh and Cleopatra dying. At this point the family was also Egyptian. Even though Europeans forcefully took control of the Americas we wouldn't say that Tom Englishman who's family came to the Americas 300 years ago is English, not American.

And as Bentresh has already pointed out, you cannot judge by the appearances in the art as to whether those people had Greek origins or not. These things, as is often the case, are more complicated than they appear.

> there’s a long history of trying to make Egypt an extension of the Mediterranean

What do you mean by this?

The Ptolemaic Period is still very much considered ancient. Yes, Egyptian history goes back much further, but modern history goes ahead much longer. It was recognised during the time that the history was already so old though. There's the famous tidbit about Cleopatra (VII) living closer to the age of computers than the building of the Great Pyramid, which is true, but she still died (and effectively ended the Ptolemaic dynasty) ~2,050 years ago which was a time very much considered ancient.

Also considering the importance of the Ptolemies in Greek and Roman history, they are brought within those timeframes as well. The Ptolemies pre-date the Roman Empire and their downfall is part of the empire's rise.

They would drop them in isolated areas. Here's a map of all the sites. https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/test-sites/testing-map.html

Lots of them were in deserts, tundras, and a lot in isolated places in the middle of the ocean.

They also would conduct them underground to limit any radioactive fallout.

/u/bentresh