Which ancient civilizations are you most interested in?

[Hornbein]

Well damn, that's reaally interesting. And you just whipped it off. Golly.

 

[Astronuc]

Well damn, that's reaally interesting. And you just whipped it off. Golly.

I knew about Hannibal and the Punic Wars probably when I was grade 6 or 7 (age 11-12). I also studied World War II campaigns, battles and weapons systems.

I enjoyed reading about and studying ancient history, but the primary school textbooks give a fairly sanitized version of history. They certainly don't cover the gory parts about the slaughter of soldiers and civilians, or the political/social motivations for war, which seems often to be about covetous, narcissistic, egoistic leaders (kings, emperors, . . . . ) and/or limited resources, e.g., copper, bronze, iron, silver, gold, arable land and agricultural products, forests/timber, fresh water resources, . . . .

 

[Hornbein]

I knew about Hannibal and the Punic Wars probably when I was grade 6 or 7 (age 11-12). I also studied World War II campaigns, battles and weapons systems.

I've read a lot of history but missed Phoenicia. Specialized in the Russian front of WWII, which comes in mighty handy these days.

I enjoyed reading about and studying ancient history, but the primary school textbooks give a fairly sanitized version of history. They certainly don't cover the gory parts about the slaughter of soldiers and civilians, or the political/social motivations for war, which seems often to be about covetous, narcissistic, egoistic leaders (kings, emperors, . . . . ) and/or limited resources, e.g., copper, bronze, iron, silver, gold, arable land and agricultural products, forests/timber, fresh water resources, . . . .

Yep. I needn't explain why. They also exclude anything having to do with sex or mysticism. Corruption is de-emphasized. Parties outside of the duopoly are always referred to slightingly. The Native American Party is the No Nothings. Unflattering sobriquet, that. The Progressive Party is always Bull Moose. I never could find anything about the big political movement that gave all white men the vote. (Before only white male property owners were allowed to vote.) The highly democratic Constitution-resistant state of Rhode Island is written off as malcontents and criminals. Some say it was blockaded, some say troops marched in, I wasn't able to find out. The German mutiny that ended The Great War is swept under the rug.

However I'm somewhat in sympathy with teaching an idealistic view to children. It seems better than rubbing their nose in the reality of things, which could breed a nation of cynics. Maybe it is better for them to be led to good ideals. Real life may disillusion them later, but why rush into that?

Once I was discussing politics with my sister Marnie. She wasn't interested. Marnie turned to me and said, "it's all about money." It was a moment of enlightenment.

 

[BWV]

I find the lurid tales of elite politics and great battle narratives boring now and am more interested in things like climate history, trade patterns and migrations. So much is unknown due to a lack of written records - The Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age Collapse, the various forgotten bronze-age European cultures , the 10,000 year old Gobleki Teki temple in Turkey, or trade links between Rome and the Han Empire.

 

[Hornbein]

I find the lurid tales of elite politics and great battle narratives boring now and am more interested in things like climate history, trade patterns and migrations. So much is unknown due to a lack of written records - The Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age Collapse, the various forgotten bronze-age European cultures , the 10,000 year old Gobleki Teki temple in Turkey, or trade links between Rome and the Han Empire.

Some tyrant is overthrown by another tyrant. Who cares? It didn't really change anything.

Linguistics and DNA studies give us insight into the mass movements that went on outside of historical records.

 

[Astronuc]

Interesting history of proto-Hellenic people and Mycenae. Apparently, they may have originated in the Central Asian steppe.


The Mycenaen civilization disappeared more or less around the time of the Bronze Age collapse in the early 12th century BCE along with many other Mediterranean and Levant civilizations.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenae
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/941/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece

It seems though, there was periodic invasions or conflicts among various civilizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece#Initial_decline_and_revival
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorian_invasion


Edit/update. After listening to Kevin MacLean's (Fortress of Lugh) video about Mycenae, I found another video that reaches further back to the Proto-Indo-Europeans, who preceded the classic ancient civilizations. MacLean presents an interesting perspective on the origins of the peoples of central Eurasia.



A person of whom I did not know.
Mikhail Lomonosov - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Lomonosov

Lomonosov determined that Latin, Greek, German and Russian must have had some common link in the ancient past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans (Some archaeologists would extend the time depth of PIE to the Middle Neolithic period (5500 to 4500 BC) or even the Early Neolithic period (7500 to 5500 BC) and suggest alternative origin hypotheses.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Steppe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontic–Caspian_steppe

Edit/update: Kevin MacLean cites the following paper: Lazaridis, I., Mittnik, A., Patterson, N. et al. Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans. Nature 548, 214–218 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature23310

Abstract: The origins of the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean cultures have puzzled archaeologists for more than a century. We have assembled genome-wide data from 19 ancient individuals, including Minoans from Crete, Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, and their eastern neighbours from southwestern Anatolia. Here we show that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar, having at least three-quarters of their ancestry from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean1,2, and most of the remainder from ancient populations related to those of the Caucasus3 and Iran4,5. However, the Mycenaeans differed from Minoans in deriving additional ancestry from an ultimate source related to the hunter–gatherers of eastern Europe and Siberia6,7,8, introduced via a proximal source related to the inhabitants of either the Eurasian steppe1,6,9 or Armenia4,9. Modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the Early Neolithic ancestry. Our results support the idea of continuity but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations.

 

[sbrothy]

Thank you Greg for starting this!

News to me too, but yes, that's an anthropological / etnographical treasure trove right there!

 

[DennisN]

To me the Egyptians were the perfect mix of sophistication and mystery. However, that is an easy pick. I would also add in the Mongols for their music and Ancient Japan for their Samurai. Which are your favorites?

A late reply to the original question , but here I go... hmm, difficult choice for me.

When I was younger I probably would have said the Romans, the Greek or the Egyptians.
They were very interesting and impactful civilizations.

But if I think deeply about it I have a special thing for (1) the Phoenicians because I think they were pretty cool, and (2) Sumer because it's so darn old.

 

[Astronuc]

Why do Amazonian people have some Australasian DNA?




This is interesting since it had to have happened long ago - before Sumer.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025739118
https://www.science.org/content/art...n-migrants-had-australian-melanesian-ancestry

For the first time, scientists identified the Y signal in groups living outside the Amazon—in the Xavánte, who live on the Brazilian plateau in the country's center, and in Peru's Chotuna people, who descend from the Mochica civilization that occupied that country's coast from about 100 C.E. to 800 C.E.

Next, the researchers used software to test different scenarios that might have led to the current DNA dispersal. The best fit scenario involves some of the very earliest—possibly even the earliest—South American migrants carrying the Y signal with them, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Those migrants likely followed a coastal route, Hünemeier says, then split off into the central plateau and Amazon sometime between 15,000 and 8000 years ago. "[The data] match exactly what you'd predict if that were the case," Raff agrees.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18029
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/american-history-201

 

[ohwilleke]

Why do Amazonian people have some Australasian DNA?




This is interesting since it had to have happened long ago - before Sumer.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025739118
https://www.science.org/content/art...n-migrants-had-australian-melanesian-ancestry



https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18029
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/american-history-201

I've argued strenuously that the claim that this is that ancient has to be wrong.

The big problem with that theory is that the frequency of the ancient Asian DNA varies greatly between villages and within villages, despite not being associated with an obvious phenotype that could be the object of mating selection.

If it were really thousands of years old, it would have reached fixation at an average level in almost everyone in these highly endogamous Amazonian societies (i.e. everyone would have the same percentage of it from hundreds of generations of random mixing). Instead, the variation seen is consistent with dispersal into the gene pool within the last thousand years or less.

Another narrative could be that this DNA was tied up in a small endogamous community for many thousands of years and just recently dispersed more broadly. But if you had that many thousands of years of gene pool isolation, you'd get an extremely distinctive mixture in tribes near the epicenter of this dispersal similar to the Kalish people of South-Central Asia. This isn't present either.

A much more plausible theory is that these genes arose from small scale introgression of people who arrived by boat on the Pacific Coast, probably in the general vicinity of Panama-Columbia, probably from 800 CE to 1400 CE, give or take, and then followed rivers to their sources until they crossed over a continental divide from the Gulf of Mexico basin to the Amazon basin. There are multiple instances corroborating this kind of contact with South America. And, while the ancient Asian DNA doesn't look Polynesian, Polynesians do have Melanesian admixture which, if it was the only component that by random chance survived for a few hundred years, could look like it does. Melanesian ancestry also would have been more clumpy and less evenly distributed in the Polynesian genome that many centuries ago, relative to what it is now.

Some of the key data is in Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva, et al., "Deep genetic affinity between coastal Pacific and Amazonian natives evidenced by Australasian ancestry" 118 (14) PNAS e2025739118 (April 6, 2021) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025739118

I've discussed it in a blog post that links to other blog posts and sources, for anyone interested in exploring the question further. https://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com/2021/03/paleo-asian-ancestry-in-amazon-is.html

 

[haushofer]

For people who like the ancient near East: check out the Digital Hammurabi channel of Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis (Lewis' podcast with Bart Ehrman is also excellent by the way). They also give courses on languages like Akkadian.

One of those channels which make me doubt my career choice as a physicist

 

[ohwilleke]

They also give courses on languages like Akkadian.

Terribly useful if you are a Middle Eastern time traveler, ancient historian, or a linguist specializing in Semitic languages.

 

[Hornbein]

Terribly useful if you are a Middle Eastern time traveler, ancient historian, or a linguist specializing in Semitic languages.

I may neither confirm or deny such.