Re: SV: Mitanni, Hurrians, etc.

Subject: [cybalist] Re: SV: Mitanni, Hurrians, etc.

> > === Dating is a very vexed issue. Feynmann, the scientist, once

commented

> *** Actually while historical dating isn't really firm before the oldest
> Assyrian limmu-lists (911 BCE) geophysical dating within the Holocene is
> rather tightly constrained by C14-dating, dendrochronology and rhytmite
> (varved clay) dating. These three quite independent dating methods agree
> that the Holocene began slightly over 11,000 calendar years ago, with an
> uncertainty of a few centuries at the most. Since the Cultural sequence
> (and initial neolithization) in the Near East can be stratigraphically and
> climatologically tied to the immediately preceding Younger Dryas stadial
> the starting point of Near East farming cultures (Pre Pottery Neolithic A)
> is pretty well tied down to approx. 10,000 BCE.
> Admittedly there are areas that have not been too well surveyed
> archaeologically yet, but it seems to me that the chances of finding a
> major center of neolithization older than the Near East one somewhere else
> are very slim. For one thing there doesn't seem to be any important
> cultivars left whose origin hasn't been at least approximately determined.

Hi Tommy, being one trusting fellow, refuse to call myself a sceptic, for
obvious reasons, I did some looking into C14 Dating. It is VERY error prone,
mainly because it assumes uniformity, and science has just thrown out the
ultimate constant, the speed of light. If one reads what the pundits tell
each other it makes a different story, but one hidden rule of specialisation
is "No poaching in other's territory" thus one cites the authority in the
field who is seldom agreed with by his peers. They went into counting tree
rings and ice cores to rectify this and only found more anomalies. One
happening right now for the solar system.

The Russians reported several villages, dated between 13 - 18,000 BC, with
factories and an organised layout. A more recent report found, in building,
under 12 foot of clay, date some 120,000, more signs of vivilisation, we'll
have to wait for more detail, of course. Next there are some six centres of
civilisation I stand told, covered by sheets of tectites, which, I stand
told, can have only come about from nuclear stuff, redolent of the
Mahabharata, quoted
by Oppenheimer at the Wite Sands test :"Brighter than A 1000 suns". Read
Charles Fort, for one example. Our history is actually the most untidy mess
ever, taking all into consideration, but if one reads the books it's
somewhat orderly.

Next, I tend to poach abroad and outside what English scholars keep on
re-assurring one another about and that turns up several kinds of anomaly
and misfits. Besides, antiquity did date by astrological planetary
conjunctions, if one can recognise the signs. Next to take ONLY as evidence
what's written down I find a somewhat objectionable procedure, for many
tedious reasons. I agree on the sparsity of the evidence, but to then
confine oneself to ONLY that and exclude the rest, hhhmmm., enough said.
I've done a reconstruction from myths,, epics and 'evidence" which in the
altogether, hangs together in a consistent patterrn, the sine qua non of
acceptability to call it logical. What happens, one is contradicted by the
already known, mainly as constituted by some or other authority, if not
simply propounded from a lectern. I say soemthing, get flattened by a given
'meme" to which academics seem more virus prone than common folk, a joke.
Next as for science r any thoery, knock over one assumption and the whole
cardboard construction collapses. But that is taboo, the theory is taken for
granted and the facts thereby produced are quoted. Yes, I know what I am
saying, a fact IS a product of a theory which packs it together as a pattern
to filter data with and NOT the other way around. The red Shift makes a good
example, I can provide dozens more.

Next one gets apodictic utterances in reply, no quotes from authority,
reasoned argument, use of logic or any such thing. Nor, for that matter
much understanding of whatever is poached from outside a given speciality
that makes one's podium. Cavil, quibble, question, put up more data and
replies fail, hhmmm. We're supposed to be scholars not quoters from books
, researchers not armchair philosophers. I did my degree in the early
sixties, I get here what" Exactly the same stuff I left behind as if time
has not passed, knowledge not changed, the METHOD has not changed and if the
method fails, drop it, no dice one is shown.

The depth psychology beneath it all is that man tends to want to be
understood and is not very good in under=standing others. One should take
in a WHOLE pattern, thema, topoi, theory, ideas, not cavill at the bits.
Does not happen. Dating is not just not very firm it's exceedingly sloppy.
And to add Newton's retort, I've read upon it, have you? Our calendar does
not even fit in with actual solar events, which is why antiquity dated major
events by that lot, and I find rather few academics even familiar with it
enough to recognise it when one reads an allusion of it. Sanscrit, for
example, is a very punny, ambiguous language but one is given in translation
only the Kosher meaning resident in the mind of translator. One Vedic
example, "From Between her legs" came whatever. Translated without the
sexual allusion. I for instance would love to jump in feet first in this
stream about salt and salt the conversation with a few other details but
heroically refrain, too busy.

Next to this the association of artefactual material to culturally
traditional material is also rather sloppy. Gilgamesh goes north in search
of the secret of Antiquity, dated 3,000 BCE, BUT IFF it actually happened,
which it did, then the event would have occurred nearer 11,000 BCE, date
uncertain. The attendant geographical details fit the trip. BUT because we
cannot trace evidential written records, should I put this in a student's
essay, I'd get worse than a D. Something funny going on here. IMHO Too
many naive assumptions.

Adrian.

>
> ***Tommy Tyrberg
> >
> > > The demotic Egyptian script later still.
> > >
> > > >in the conversion from Harappan script - stone age glyphs, I believe
> > >
> > > -- Bronze Age, actually; 3rd-2nd millenium BCE.
> >
> > === That's OUR dating and specialist confined as well, Indian scholars
> date
> > otherwise, now who's right? They were orally transmitted long before, so
> now
> > what? Take the Sepher Yetsirah, published 1613 AD Mantua, Spain,
> Elsevir,
> > I think.. Rabbinic scholarship, on the basis of phrases and words in
> common
> > with the Talmud, dates at 200 BC, and as a geometric contrivance its
> > conventions are much older. So it just depends as to which "unique
> Feature"
> > one elects and names as to how it comes up. Whoever 'composed' it date
> > unknown, was assuredly not thinking in or with words, so now how old is
> it?
> > I could "teach" it in ten minutes with a tray of sand, so what now about
> > communicable? IN words it's nearly incomprehensible unless one already
> knows
> > its conventions which were not that of word language.
> >
> > > The Harappan script vanished with the civilization and when literacy
> > returned to India, it was using scripts derived from further west;
> > ultimately from the Semitic alphabets.
> >
> > === And because conceivably mildly misnamed and possibly somewhat
> mislocated
> > the whole argument falls flat? I've known the odd case of several
> sequences
> > in changes of mind on several matters.
> >
> > > >whereas Western conventions date that as around 1500 BC, as the
> emergence
> > of
> > > the Vedas in written form.
> > >
> > > -- no, the Vedas were not written down until much later and in a

script

> > > ultimately derived from Aramaic. They were probably _composed_ some
> time
> > in the 1000's BCE. Transmission was oral.
> >
> > === Again, opinions differ and depends on whom one reads.
>
> *** Indic alphabetic scripts can't be much older since they couldn't very
> well be older than the script they were derived from.
>
> ***Tommy Tyrberg
> >
> > > >Hmm, and by what means did such a vocab grow?
> > >
> > > -- people invent words as needed.
> > === Really, I've invented the odd words and OED editors say of 1000s
> > invented barely a 100 er annum make it. Are all words so invented, and
> > there's no odd wrinkly uncertainties about it? I've got a private label
> for
> > this but won't use it.
> >
> >
> > > >Which languages?
> > >
> > > -- all languages are of roughly equivalent semantic efficiency.
> > Vocabulary
> > > aside, there's nothing that can be said in one that can't be said in
> > another.
> >
> > === Now quite by what means and basis and method was that conclusion
> arrived
> > at? And as to 'roughly" how roughly or merely by apodictic utterance?
> > Haven't used that word for about 45 years but it seems to fit.
> >
> > > >Thus one has to read the entire textus and decide from context which
> is
> > > meant.
> > >
> > > -- you're confusing the script and the language. The first writing
> > systems
> > > were less efficient than alphabetic scripts; but that does not apply

to

> > the
> > > languages themselves.
> >
> > === I'm sorry but that's mind reading of a kind. Or, more mildly,
> replaces
> > one opinion with another. I've seen a Chinese Mandarin scholar DO it,
> Took
> > him ten minutes and I asked why. It does not really do to pick a

sentence

> > from a paragraph and context to "refute" it. Quite explicate, pleae,
> what
> > is intended to be converyed by "does not apply to the languages
> thmselves,
> > is that relevant to reading a language and if so, in quite what way?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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