AskHistorians 内の Emily_McEwan-Fujita によるリンク AMA: Scottish Gaelic language and culture in Scotland and Nova Scotia

[–]Daeres[M] 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Thank you for your time and effort in making this post, but in AMA threads in AskHistorians we only allow answers from the AMA person in question unless they explicitly give permission.

AskHistorians 内の Emily_McEwan-Fujita によるリンク AMA: Scottish Gaelic language and culture in Scotland and Nova Scotia

[–]Daeres[M] 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

Could I please ask that people use other venues for asking for useful Gaelic phrases? As much as there's nothing wrong with being enthusiastic and curious about Gaelic, there are specific subreddits already in existence which are aimed at such things, such as /r/gaidhlig.

Likewise, our usual rule on avoiding political soapboxing applies here- avoid using this thread as somewhere to argue about Scotland's electoral politics please, or indeed Canada's.

AskHistorians 内の Jamiepratt24 によるリンク After the Wall Street crash, why did German's vote for Hitler and not other extremist parties?

[–]Daeres[M] 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Hello there. Unfortunately we have had to remove your question as it looks like it may be a homework question. A couple of things to keep in mind about this: Our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself. Also: Sometimes flairs can be reluctant to answer a question that looks like homework, because they don't want to be involved in plagiarism (and sadly, yes, there are those who plagiarize reddit comments).

But, that all said, many of our users do enjoy helping out with suggestions for resources and further reading. Can you tell us what you've researched so far, what resources you've consulted, and what you've learned? If that doesn't work, you can also consider asking the helpful people at /r/HomeworkHelp. If you edit your post to be in compliance with our requirements for homework related questions, which are explored in more detail in this META Thread, we would be happy to restore it.

Additionally, we would highly suggest that you check out our six part series on 'Finding and Understanding Sources', which might prove to be useful in your research.

AskHistorians 内の caffarelli によるリンク Tuesday Trivia | Reading Other People’s Mail III

[–]Daeres 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

That's an entirely fair question. It is much harder to evaluate the ability to read without being able to write, because we have direct archaeological evidence to indicate the process of teaching cuneiform script and nothing, to my knowledge, that indicates the process of learning cuneiform without also learning how to reproduce it, i.e write it.

In my experience the evidence for reading without writing is fairly small; the majority of cuneiform tablets we're aware of involve priests, scholars (who are themselves often priests), and scribes as the writers of the letter, and many of those letters specifically refer to the process of that intermediary reading the letter on behalf of somebody else (there are many letters addressed to the Assyrian king, or someone at one of the royal palaces, that specifically acknowledge the scribe or royal secretary as an intermediary who is likely reading the contents of the letter out loud.

When it comes to cuneiform contracts and similar there's not much evidence either. They didn't generally have people sign their names on these contracts, and we're already trying to divide 'I can read' from 'I can read and write'. Instead the vast majorities of 'signatures' are fingernail impressions. This doesn't really answer your question much either way, unfortunately; you could easily interpret it as an indication that the contract was read aloud, or a formality, that almost none of the signatories or witnesses could have read later. On the other hand you can't prove, by any means, that any of the signatories specifically couldn't read, it isn't like something in later history where no signature likely means 'cannot read or write'.

One piece of evidence I would cite, however, in terms of attaching reading to writing in Assyria is the sheer length of time it would take. There is essentially no point in teaching somebody to 'stumble' through cuneiform because it takes years and years to learn the character inventory. It's one clear difference between a small alphabetic script and one like cuneiform with several hundred characters. Given the length of time it took to likely learn cuneiform it seems strange that you wouldn't also use that time to teach them how to write it, and perhaps even wasteful.

There's also a lack of cuneiform used on 'ordinary' objects of archaeology, it seems relatively confined to inscriptions, bureaucracy, scripture, and economic necessities like contracts and debt records. That to me indicates a relatively restrictive concept of who would use writing, even simply to read it. Likewise I've only ever seen debt records or similar in the houses of 'ordinary' Assyrians and Babylonians, and anything more complex has always been in the hands of scholars, officials, full archives, scribes, and other contexts where we can clearly identify people who can both read and write.

AskHistorians 内の caffarelli によるリンク Tuesday Trivia | Reading Other People’s Mail III

[–]Daeres 8ポイント9ポイント  (0子コメント)

I'm cheating a little bit, because I talked about this in my podcast episode many moons ago, but one of my favourites is this Assyrian letter. It comes from the Assyrian State Archives, and for a while people found it confusing- the direct interpretation of the cuneiform on the letter seemed to produce nonsense. Then a bright spark had the realisation that it was actually mispelled, and was able to translate the letter as follows-

To the king, my lord: your servant Sîn-na'di. Good health to the king, my lord! I have no scribe where the king sent me to. Let the king direct either the governor [o]f Arrapha or Aššur-belu-taqqin to send me a scribe.

There's something rather humanising about the idea of an official or governor being assigned an office, heading out, getting there and being all '... where are the scribes?!' It's also a little funny that as soon as you take away scribes these imperial officials start making spelling mistakes and the like. Not that I'm deriding non-standard English dialect, but the impact of a government minister's policies might be somewhat altered if they produced a report called 'This Report What I wrote'.

However, this letter was also legitimately important for indicating a more widespread literacy among the Assyrian imperial elite than we were aware of; even if he's making mistakes, Sin-na'di is still able to write in a fairly decent approximation of scribal cuneiform. There's a chance, therefore, that at least some of the Assyrian upper classes were taught to read and write to a certain standard, whereas we'd previously only had evidence to support dedicated scribal tutelage. The one prior exception to this rule, Ashurbanipal with his famous library, is also an unusual example because he was not originally intended to ever become king, and received a nonstandard education as a result.

AskHistorians 内の [deleted] によるリンク Why is there more extensive documentation of ancient Greek / Roman civilizations when compared to civilizations in Asia?

[–]Daeres 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

In my experience there actually isn't more extensive documentation of Greece and Rome, it's that our culture traditionally values those two cultures as 'classical' and focuses on them heavily.

With cultures like the Sumerians, it's not just that they were extensive record keepers, it's also that they primarily wrote on media that lasts for thousands of years, i.e clay tablets. It isn't just the Sumerians that this applies to, either, the same applies to the Mesopotamian cultures until writing with ink on papyrus and parchment grew more popular. The amount of material we have on 7th century BC Assyria alone is embarrassingly detailed.

Roman and Greek documentation that we have to hand is far more extensive than for many contemporaries, particularly in Europe, but we actually have far more available information in many areas on ancient Mesopotamia. It gets to the point with archives like that found at Amarna where we can read private diplomatic correspondence between states.

Neither would I agree that Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese history is particularly poorly documented compared to Roman and Greek. We are not quite as deep on any one Egyptian period as we are with, say, Classical Greece, but there is a visible literary record stretching three millenia involving ancient Egypt, and I think there's a far larger amount of Indian and Chinese historical material than you've been exposed to. The issue with Indian sources of any age is that they tend to have a degree of politicisation regarding South Asia's current cultural and political realities, and the historiography is an absolute mess.

To put things into some perspective, we only tend to have preserved literary sources from the Roman period dating back to the 2nd century BC, and we only begin to have a profusion of Roman literary sources from the 1st century BC onwards. These preserved sources are also generally biased towards composed literature such as poetry, plays, histories, biographies etc. By contrast, many of these other surviving bodies of literature are less dense on these sorts of compositions but provide far more evidence of ordinary undergoings and daily minutiae. Likewise, we only consistently have Greek sources in any number from the 6th century BC onwards.

So we have a combination of things; many cultures that did have extensive documentation have had most of those sources lost, because papyrus and parchment do not tend to survive without intervention. Egypt is a very strong exception to this rule, because of its low water table and arid conditions for papyrus to be preserved in. If you imagine that many cultures kept records as extensively as the Egyptians, and that many of them happened to be in places where their writing rarely survived... In addition to that, westerners tend also not to be familiar with the surviving body of sources available for cultures outside Rome and Greece, even those those bodies of sources are at times actually larger and more complete. You'd also expect a lot of records to vanish over time, as front line state archives have always only preserved those records still relevant to the current functioning- it doesn't benefit them to keep somebody's tax records from 200 years ago. So in general our source material, across all of these cultures, comes from a combination of things; those specific pieces of literature somebody valued enough to copy out, or those that happened to survive at the time that the relevant archive was destroyed/abandoned/stopped working.

AskHistorians 内の Patriots_Sixers によるリンク In the 1920s and 30s, how prevalent was schooling in soviet society? Was it only for the middle and upper class? Or just the ultra rich?

[–]Daeres[M] 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Is there anything you can do to expand on this answer? Currently this is not exactly what we'd call a comprehensive answer to the question, and you've taken a very... literalist interpretation of the question being asked. I also note that you've been warned for poor or short answers by other moderators twice before, so I need to point out that if I have to warn you for this again you may end up banned from posting in the subreddit. I would much rather you improved your answer than I had to do that.

SubredditDrama 内の toiracse によるリンク As the legal case against Jian Ghomeshi starts to fall apart, /r/Canada struggles to hold it together.

[–]Daeres 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

I think you've misunderstood my emphasis, my point is that it's utterly futile to try to stop people deciding guilt as private citizens, not that it's the right thing to do. There is no legal or societal mechanism by which you can prevent large numbers of people, or the majority of a country, prejudging a case.

The rejoinder from the people doing that to 'a private person still has a duty to do so' is probably 'where is that written down?'. I don't know enough US Constitutional Law to say for sure but would expression of an opinion on a trial by a private citizen be considered freedom of expression? (And yeah, I know 'it's not illegal for me to say it' is about the weakest justification for a statement there is)

You also can't prevent something different but related, which is people refusing to actually consider a Not Guilty verdict an actual indication of innocence. People are legally obliged to abide by the verdict but they aren't legally obliged to have faith in the jury system of that country, or that someone who actually is guilty will be found guilty.

SubredditDrama 内の toiracse によるリンク As the legal case against Jian Ghomeshi starts to fall apart, /r/Canada struggles to hold it together.

[–]Daeres 10ポイント11ポイント  (0子コメント)

Without meaning to sound rude, if you read almost any discussion about a trial, with someone being accused of a crime, or even listen to any such discussions out loud, you'll find thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people actively determining whether they believe the person to be guilty or not. You ever seen a trial that involved, say, a child murder where the public assumption wasn't that the charged suspect was likely responsible?

The law has an obligation to treat those charged with crimes as innocent until proven guilty, and depending on the country the media has an obligation to point out allegations vs an actual verdict, but private individuals are not obligated to assume someone is innocent until proven guilty, and you'll notice that not only do most people ignore that but many will shout people who bring up 'innocent until proven guilty' as a reason for them personally assuming the person is already guilty.

SubredditDrama 内の RIPGeorgeHarrison によるリンク User HILLARY_IS_A_NEOCON compares having Hillary Clinton in charge of wealth inequality to the KKK being in charge of race relations. Drama ensues.

[–]Daeres 15ポイント16ポイント  (0子コメント)

They aren't talking about the candidates, they're talking about the supporters. Reddit is quite a valuable tool to get insight into political support given their wish to talk about it all over easily viewable forums, and it's a known thing that at least with the reddit Ron Paul 'It's Happening' Crowd a lot of those individuals are going for Bernie this election cycle. My only argument with the original point is that there are also shifts in each new 'generation' of voters upon the time they become part of an electoral cycle for the first time, someone whose first general was 2004 is going to come from a very different place to someone in 2012. Nonetheless, the argument that a similar demographic is pushed towards the perceived monkey-wrench in the election each time is a cogent one in my opinion.

badhistory 内の Thoushaltbemocked によるリンク "Well afghanistan has been at war for literally 3000 years, since the time of Alexander the Great." AKA "I didn't pick up a history book, and am thoroughly ignorant."

[–]Daeres 20ポイント21ポイント  (0子コメント)

You really don't mean the word reactionary. Unless it's a generic intensifier, there is nothing reactionary about claiming that racism, as we understand it, has no full equivalent prior to about the late 18th or 19th centuries and is primarily a creation of western Imperial powers. Homosexuality, conceived of in the way it is today, is also a modern construct. There is no two ways about that, you have to actively contradict everyone working with gender and sexuality related history to claim anything other than that. However, that is totally different to claiming that nobody understood the idea of same-sex relationships or sexuality in the past, which no-one is doing.

The correct extension of the reasoning is this; nobody worth your time denies that gay people exist in all modern cultures, or people who form same-sex attractions, but the argument is that homosexuality as a specific identity construct doesn't exist in some modern cultures.

SubredditDrama 内の michaelhe によるリンク /r/NFL mods forget to post second-half thread for conference championship, bans guy who posts an unofficial one

[–]Daeres 19ポイント20ポイント  (0子コメント)

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/u9bv5/both_historians_in_the_askhistorians_drama_were/

Here you go. It happened before I joined the mod team and relatively early in the sub's history, but I remember it well. Also, in reference to what roadbuzz said, this is pretty much the incident that birthed our relatively strict rules for AskHistorians, so you'd better believe we learned from it.

SubredditDrama 内の sdgoat によるリンク Users in ShitAmericansSay have a conversation about Black History Month

[–]Daeres 32ポイント33ポイント  (0子コメント)

There is no opportunity to reject a racial model if you are continually forced by others to engage with it. That's what I think you entirely fail to understand about the US, and countries in similar enough circumstances- you cannot 'defect' from racial politics, because even if you yourself don't think of yourself as black, 'brown', 'indian', etc, by god will other people constantly tell you that you are, or refer to you in such a way. I mean, you get that Segregation ended within living memory for more than 50 million Americans? That Jim Crow laws were in place for 90 years, far longer than the period of time during which segregation of black Americans has been treated as illegal? That it took until 1994 for a majority of Americans to approve of interracial relationships? Declaring black Americans who have lived through that, and continue to live in a country shaped by that legacy, 'obsessed with race' is deeply fucking ignorant, my friend.

Also we've can't pass this opportunity to bash America's minorities by without a barely relevant reference to that old favourite, 'Americans claim heritage from countries that are now very distant to them, my god aren't they stupid'. Yeah, it is pretty annoying. It also has nothing to do with the current topic beyond 'oh what else is bargain basement stuff that I can call Americans stupid for'.

AskHistorians 内の CaptainNapoleon によるリンク Who are some of your favorite, lesser known historical characters and why?

[–]Daeres[M] 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

This submission has been removed because it violates the rule on poll-type questions. These poll-type questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focussed discussion. “Most”, “least”, "best" and "worst" questions usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers.

For questions of these types, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.

AskHistorians 内の [deleted] によるリンク What were some of the greatest Supreme Court decisions in regards to civil rights and freedom?

[–]Daeres[M] 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Sorry, we don't allow "trivia seeking" questions. These tend to produce threads which are collections of disjointed, partial responses, and not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about an historical event, period, or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. For further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult this META thread.

AskHistorians 内の AutologicalUsername によるリンク How were religious was the average Ancient Greek/Roman citizen? Did they believe in the Gods or did they see them as myths like we do? Were temples and shrines like modern churches or were they more a superstition/traditional/cultural sort of thing?

[–]Daeres 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

This question, as asked, is a little difficult to answer, so if you don't mind I might unpack it a little first. An Ancient Greek citizen, by most definitions, could be anyone from about 800 BC to 32 BC, or arguably even later. This is quite a long time, and things relating to what we'd call religion did alter over this period. However, I will do my best to give you an answer relating to that.

Also, you'll find that comparing our notion of 'religious' to the concept of piety and religiosity in pre-Christian Greece (and pre-Christian Rome) is nearly impossible, and that might help to answer your question.

Belief is not the important element of Roman or Greek polytheistic spirituality. There are certainly specific Greek and Roman authors, usually philosophers, whose work displays something we'd call similar to non-belief, or certainly highly unorthodox notions of what Gods actually were. However, worth noting is that these authors would still often refer to the traditional Gods to describe certain universal forces, and would still have the traditional dedication to the Gods at the start of their works. Even if you didn't 'believe' in the Gods, the norm seems to have still been to view the world through that lens, and to still refer to them with respect.

Instead religion was integrated into daily life and culture, and what became most important was participation. Every Greek polis community would have its own festivals and sacrificial calendar, its own particular religious traditions, sanctuaries, shrines, and temples, and taking part in these was considered to be part of being a member of those communities. The most famous ancient Greek cultural events, like the four great Athletic games (Olympian, Isthmian etc.), and the Athenian Dionysia which developed the concept of drama, were explicitly religious, being dedicated to various Gods. You can argue that from a modern perspective this is simply lip service for a secular event, but there is no concept of the secular in ancient Greek society, or many other societies prior to the emergence of great evangelical faiths. Belief may not have been a large element of these great festivals and gatherings, but religiosity was, as they understood it. This might not be the same phenomenon as faith but it had a similar strength within their society. Attacks upon sacred structures attached to a community, such as the Hermes in Athens, were considered to be attacks on that community itself. Likewise, participation in religious activities considered to be Greek was, at least from the 5th century BC onwards, part of what was considered to make a person Greek.

When it comes to the idea of the Gods as myths, there is a crucial difference between the Greeks/Romans and ourselves; we have access only to whatever preserved material exists that tells stories about particular gods and events of the legendary past, whereas they would have been immersed in a much more complete literary tradition, not to mention even more deep rooted oral ones. Even those preserved myths we do have often exist in contrary interpretations, or present radically different views of a given god. On the one hand Ancient Greek religion as a whole did not possess dogma, and set scripture, and this gives a lot of room for very different interpretations of Gods, but on the other hand there was a general orthodoxy, an idea of religious practices which were not Greek, and there were arguments about which authors and stories presented Gods accurately. As time went on, for example, the very stroppy and cruel portrayals of Gods as presented in the earliest Greek authors were often criticised by contemporary Greeks as false.

Your question about other religions, and about temples and shrines, are very big questions in their own right and I don't feel I can answer those properly here, but one thing I would caution is that past churches were not like modern churches, but you also wouldn't characterise those solely as superstition/tradition/culture. Temples absolutely were about tradition and culture, as are modern churches, but they were not places where things equivalent to sermons took place. They were centres of ritual, and guardians of sacred objects, and large societal institutions, but they were not places for preaching. But they were absolutely sacred spaces, and not the same thing as just being a large, old, and pretty building.

AskHistorians 内の astrologue によるリンク Is the term "syncretism" out of fashion?

[–]Daeres 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

This hasn't been my personal experience, as the authors discussing Hellenistic Bactria, or the wider area known as the 'Hellenistic Far East', were very happy to use the word syncretic and syncretism to refer to fusional cultural practices and mutualistic cultural alterations. Now, this comes with an enormous caveat; there is no methodology and terminology tsar ruling over history, or even ancient history, so it is entirely possible for one university department, or subfield, or community of scholars to come to such a conclusion and for the rest of the historical community to not cotton on for a long time afterwards.

Out of interest, was this discussion in a book/collected volume, or elsewhere? Do you happen to remember who the author was?

AskHistorians 内の KingOfTheNorthPole によるリンク To what extent was Spain colonized by Carthage?

[–]Daeres 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

Absolutely, and I think even if they hadn't been founded on old Imperial areas they'd still have been structurally different due to the nature of an imperial project.

AskHistorians 内の KingOfTheNorthPole によるリンク To what extent was Spain colonized by Carthage?

[–]Daeres 25ポイント26ポイント  (0子コメント)

Though, in fairness, the Hellenistic city building, particularly that of the Seleucids, is not what you'd call undeliberate- they were founded at royal direction and in specific locations, which often had high value for the Seleucids/Hellenistic kingdom in question.

SubredditDrama 内の shannondoah によるリンク A young stud in /r/India argues with everyone else about the Persianate origins of a patriotic salute

[–]Daeres 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

it's like English deciding to use Chinese words to refer to themselves.

So you mean like how 'Blighty', derived from Urdu, is a word used predominantly by the English to refer to their own country in affectionate contexts?*

For all your dancing around this point you are still arguing that, essentially, loanwords are like an embassy- a little territory of a foreign language not actually integrated into its host language. By this standard many English words are not, in fact, English.

Even excluding the Latinate terms derived from Anglo-Norman you're essentially arguing that armadillo, chocolate, marzipan, orange, pajama, television, cosmos, and taboo are not English words. They are English words, they are words that a native English speaker would be aware of, find in an English dictionary, apply English grammar to. They do not originate as English words. This does not affect the fact that they are now part of the Modern English language.

By your logic Αθήνα, Άπόλλων, and Κόρινθος are not Greek. (Athens, Apollo, and Corinth if you're unfamiliar). The reason for that is that all three have no identifiable Indo-European etymology and are believed to derive from languages spoken in Greece prior to/at the time of the first Greek speakers' settlement there.

In addition, nothing about your exception for English makes any sense with the original logic you were utilising. Unless you have a very limited understanding of English you realise that most commonly used French/Latin derived words in English have some kind of Germanic synonym or counterpart. Not only that but the 60% Latin/French derived figure is 60% of English's total vocabulary, including academic and scientific terminology, 60% of the words in an average English speaker's sentences, or an English writer's books, will not turn out to be Latinate or French in origin. It feels like English is such an obvious counter for your assertion that exonyms or foreign loanwords are not integrated into the languages they are borrowed into that you had to find a way to exclude it.

*Whilst this is not by any means the normal word used to refer to the UK or England, there are several countries or peoples who use a name for themselves derived from a non-native etymology. Scotland is such an example, with Scot deriving from the Latin word Scoti, as is Spain given that the Latin Hispania is borrowed from Greek, which is probably derived from a Phoenician word. Italy too, as Italia was originally a Greek word used to refer to the Greek colonies in the South of Italy, they called the Greek settlers of Italy Italiotes. Croatia as well, as Croat does not derive from a Slavic root. Rus, asin Russia, probably derives from an Old Norse word meaning 'rowers'. Wales is derived from a Germanic root referring to Celtic/Romance speakers, and if you think that doesn't count as it isn't a Welsh word then I assure you that a great deal of the Welsh speak English as their native language.

SubredditDrama 内の stardustanddinos によるリンク A discussion on monogamy and open relationships in /r/askgaybros leads to a skirmish

[–]Daeres 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

In case it's not clear, nobody worth your time would have an objection to you, personally, desiring monogamous relationships and disliking polyamorous ones. The part where people have a problem, including myself, is where you've leapt past that;

In real life polygamy is asking to end in unhappiness.

That's a judgement on all polyamorous relationships that currently exist, and all people who are polyamorous by preference. That's well beyond thinking that people are taking risks with their behaviour, which you mentioned earlier, worrying about people's health as a result of unwise sex, or about pressure to conform to a culture based on notions of liberation through sex. This is an extreme clumsy value judgement on the entire notion of polyamorous relationships regardless of who is attempting them and how successful their relationship is, you're proudly advertising that you think they're all doomed to failure anyway. That's projecting your preferences as a general truth on other people's relationships, which I understand is tempting but... just no.

And you later followed that up with this.

At least you're in a committed relationship.

Again, if you're trying to portray yourself as concerned with a specific trend about younger gay men and risky behaviour then why are you also treating having a committed relationship as a standard that you're judging other people by automatically? You didn't have any qualifications to that statement in the slightest.

You've been arguing for one thing and yet indicating another by how you've actually talked, which is that you're extending your concerns into being actively judgemental over the sexual and romantic lifestyles of others regardless of whether they are safe, happy, and well suited to that individual and their partner/s. That's not homophobic in my view but it is deeply, unpleasantly judgemental, and frankly does edge into a kind of bigotry whether you're aware of that or not.

People are getting pissed off because you're judging other people's relationships, not because you personally desire monogamy. Simple as.

AskHistorians 内の Zooicide85 によるリンク In Greek mythology, did the titans and primordial deities have any religious basis in the real world? Did people worship Titans before the Olympian gods, then the Olympians overthrew them in battle but also in popular culture?

[–]Daeres 209ポイント210ポイント  (0子コメント)

I'm a little confused; you mention that the Titans as rulers of Olympos and the cosmos had been overthrown before the creation of humans, which in some stories is clearly the case, but you did also fail to mention that Prometheus is himself usually called a Titan in Greek mythology. That's quite a major thing when discussing what the Titans were said to have done in the history of the world, and their relationship to some Greek idea of human history. You also didn't mention anything about the primordial deities that the original question asked about, and their worship, which seems to leave the answer a little short as this leaves out Gaia, Nyx, Eros, Ophion, and the Moirai. I'm also surprised you didn't mention the most famous of all the Olympian-allied Titans who was worshipped by Greeks and later others, which is to say Hekate the goddess of sorcery.

I also don't think you've quite understood what is being asked, I get the feeling that the original questioner is mostly looking for 'did, in real life, Greeks or their ancestors reject the older Primordial and Titan Gods in favour of Olympians'. In other words, regardless of the mythology, did this reflect a real religious change in attitudes from the Greeks, which would be more similar to certain things in the development of Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs. The answer, by the way, to this question is no, Linear B tablets written in what we call Mycenaean Greek clearly indicate that most of the Olympian deities were already worshipped by 1500 BCE or so, or at least deities with those same names were worshipped, half a millennium before the Iliad and the Odyssey were first composed and over a millennium before the period we call Classical Greece. The Greeks likely already inherited a form of mythology about a split in the heavens, a war between the gods, before they were even Greeks, or had developed it so early on in their cultural history that we already see Olympian deities being prominently mentioned by 1500 BCE. For reference, the date of arrival of 'proto-Greeks' in Greece is usually dated as occurring between 2500-2000 BCE.

I feel like this answer is maybe not as comprehensive as it could or should be, nor am I really getting an impression of your knowledge of ancient Greek mythology that surpasses that of an internet search. If you know the subject in more depth than I apologise but I don't really feel this is an actually a high quality answer to the original question, nor a comment that really answers it in the first place.

AskHistorians 内の [deleted] によるリンク "Operator, get me the police!" - In North America, what was the role of the telephone operator and how did it change between 1945 and 1991?

[–]Daeres 11ポイント12ポイント  (0子コメント)

Apologies, this was reported to us as a potential homework question and it looked a little similar to such questions we've had in the past. This was a false positive, and I've restored your question.

AskHistorians 内の [deleted] によるリンク "Operator, get me the police!" - In North America, what was the role of the telephone operator and how did it change between 1945 and 1991?

[–]Daeres[M] 12ポイント13ポイント  (0子コメント)

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SubredditDrama 内の [deleted] によるリンク Are Egyptians white? Sand and drama billows in /r/movies

[–]Daeres 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

Yes. The short version of this long-winded post is that there were people we'd consider Arabs that were contemporaries of Kushite Egypt at the very least.

The term 'Arab' for people of the Arabian Peninsula is very old. The first example I'm aware of is when it's used by the Assyrians, Arabu, which is I think used earliest in the 8th century BC? In this they were referring to peoples across their southern frontier who had a tendency to raid these border settlements. Their southern frontier was drawn across a part of what we now consider the Arabian Peninsula. The word has no meaning, so far as I'm aware, in the Assyrian or Babylonian languages, and considering its consistent use by those encountering the Arabs it is usually theorised to be something people of the Northern Arabian Peninsula used to refer to themselves in some capacity.

The Arabian Peninsula from that time to the 7th century AD was not quite as it is now. What is now Yemen was home to many urban populations, concentrated along irrigation networks built by the careful use of dams, which had relationships with the opposite coast of the Red Sea. These peoples spoke what we call South Arabian languages, related to but not ancestral to modern Arabic. East Arabia also had an old history of urban cultures but more sparsely distributed. What is now Oman had an on-off relationship with the big Near Eastern Empires, at various times being technically part of big Empires like the Achaemenid Persian Empire and the Sassanid Empire. Bahrain and the nearby coast was traditionally more of a part of that big Imperial world, and had been associated with Mesopotamia since it was first conquered by the Akkadians, if their records are to be trusted this first happened in the 23rd century BC. The North and Centre of the peninsula was as it is now, though the climate was a little moister than in our current times. It is here that the ancient forms of what we call the Arabic language is first evidenced in rock inscriptions by local peoples, they were generally non-urban groups in that area but they still left writings that we can read. Eventually North-Western Arabia, what is now part of the Sinai Peninsula and NW Saudia Arabia, also developed a strong urban culture under a people we call the Nabataeans in the 4th century BC. They also spoke an Arabic language but they utilised Aramaic script to write it, and their version of the Aramaic script is the ultimate source of the earliest versions of the Arabic script. They were a casual member of the Hellenistic era cool kids club, and like all the other members of that club on the Mediterranean it was eventually annexed by Rome, but they are more than just a historical footnote. In case you're curious it was the Nabataeans who built and lived in Petra, it was one of their capitals.

We believe, from contextual evidence, that the rest of the Arabian Peninsula was 'Arabised' starting from the 3rd/4th centuries AD, when we find that a version of Classical Arabic is now in use throughout the peninsula and where the cities of South Arabia are continuously complaining about incursions from tribes towards the centre of peninsula. It's the rise of Islam that sees the majority of the peninsula begin to associate with a common Arabic identity, but it is not the birth of 'Arabs'.