EFFORTPOST Local R-slur chimps out about "Pelasgians" again (he does this ), goes completely off the rails, spouts about 45 historical conspiracy theories at once

the Sea Peoples

You're saying you want historical accuracy and you bring this up.

We know about the "Sea Peoples" from like 4 sentences on one Egyptian stele and lots of conjecture about the "Bronze Age Collapse" hypothesis which I think has been pretty conclusively proven to be bullshit. Ancient historians had written a million words by 200 AD about who the Pelasgians might have been. This is probably the number one question they had, at least in the Greek-speaking world. But you never hear about them in pop history, do you? You know why? Because there's a lot of contradictory information that doesn't make sense. Strabo struggled with it and couldn't figure it out and gave us our best answer, that he doesn't know. He doesn't even know if they were a nation or if it was just a word that described a certain category of people. You might refer to them in English as "Sea Peoples".

But you've never heard of the Pelasgians, have you? (If anyone actually has please call me out.) Why? Because it's way easier to write up imaginary stories about Bronze Ages and collapses if you're basing it on 4 sentences about one event at one time. The Pelasgians don't make for good pop history because there's too much goddarn evidence. They pop up all over the place for several centuries even into the beginnings of historical time. Herodotus said that the population of Athens were descendants of Pelasgians who had learned Greek. (BTW I think there's a kernel of truth here but basically I don't buy it.) And we've all been taught that Athens was the epitome of Hellenism, which we know because they fought the war against the Persians to save European democracy. Which we only know about because of Herodotus. There ain't a heck of a lot archaeological evidence. (In fact the parts of Herodotus we can actually prove are the stuff that happened in Persia.) So how do we solve this conundrum if we're the 1800s English p-dophiles who invented "classical studies"?

Just don't talk about things. Like most stuff, just never mention it.

• The Pelasgians ever existing.

• The Etruscans being universally recognized by everyone immigrating from Asia and still having part of the population there in Asia.

• All of the ethnic minorities that existed in Greece that we are explicitly told by Thucydides were not Hellenes.

• Most of these Greek authors considering Cyrus to be the greatest thing that ever happened to the world. (Everyone writing in the Greek language must have always agreed with the ideology of the 1800s Greek nation state.)

• Almost all of Greek history is about a bunch of rural shitholes where they had like 400 people who raised goats in the mountains and were a "city" because they had a wall. You've heard about all these guys who supposedly lived together in Athens at the same time but have you heard of Phocis, Locris, Acarnania? Half you r-slurs couldn't find Thessaly on a map.

• Xenophon obviously didn't write any of those works. You know because the author of one book assigned to him explicitly says "read this book by [other guy]" if you want to know about Xenophon. If we believe in anything assigned to Xenophon it is the Cyropaedia(*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyropaedia). Basically the gospels except about Cyrus being the messiah. Extreme efforts have been made to say this is all just historical fiction by Xenophon, a Greek, who really was trying to express Greek ideas about... how the Persian emperor should act... And they totally correspond with Jewish accounts of him (that whole bible thing) and lots of archaeological evidence.

• Metadata on books from back then might not be totally accurate. If you look at the Suda, the Greeks a thousand years ago were debating the provenance of a lot of these and who people were.

• There's no evidence that Euclid was actually supposed to be a person. We know literally nothing about them except they're Egyptian.

• The "Pythagorean Theorem" has nothing to do with Pythagoras and never did until tards started printing math textbooks. That's an easy one.

• Pythagoras is sometimes written about as an avatar of Apollo. Either that discredits everything we've heard about Pythagoras or we have have to start taking every mythological character seriously. Remember that time when Dionysus invaded India?

• Definitions of words. You can claim that words like "polis" and "hoplite" are uniquely about Greeks if you just never mention that they called cities and heavy infantry from the Middle East the exact same thing.

• Western Civilization survived because the Persians never defeated Greece, who were in a war of civilizations and Greeks never liked them. The anti-Persian side won a couple times but later they did unconditionally surrender to the Empire. Western Civilization survived because the Persians didn't give a shit about jannying distant provinces' cultures and they were probably half-Greek already.

• Ancient Greeks explicitly said that the Phoenicians taught them how to stop being illiterate savages.

• The "Minoan Empire", which a British archeologist convenientally "discovered", right before Britain annexed Crete was half-Arab. Just read the story, half the family is from Tyre.

• Thucydides actually gives us real plausible about a lot of things. I mean he gives out like a hundred numbers at least if you read through it and I only recall one that sus and he himself pointed out he didn't trust it. IIRC he said that the population of Attica in his time was about 200,000 and 90% of them lived outside the city. Kinda blows away the whole "city state" thing. He also gives a figure for paying sailors which, if you can do 3rd grade math (I know it's hard for humanities folx), adds up to 50 men per ship. So the whole "trireme" thing, at least as we imagine it, is obviously bullshit. Also Athens from all its activites pulled in about 400 talents/yr. The King of Odrysia did the same. They were equals.

• The obvious turning point in the Peloponesian War if you believe Thucydides [oh yeah, we kind of have to because that's the only reason we know about it] was that the Thracian [Bulgarian] King of Odrysia went up the Danube to fight the Triballi (a very obscure nation but everyone says they're buttholes) and was killed in that battle. It's likely the army was destroyed too because you don't go that far, let your king get killed, and walk home in peace. Odrysia falls into civil war. As soon as Thracians hear the news that the Athens-Odrysia alliance is broken they rise up and take over Amphipolis. Athens is fricked now.

I unironically just consume any post-Roman historical content because they're not even asking the real question.