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EFFORTPOST Local R-slur chimps out about "Pelasgians" again (he does this :marseydizzy:), 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.

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TLDR: Are you saying the Sea Peoples aren't real?

:marseyconfused2:

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Take the following with a huge grain of salt. I'm not an Egypt person. You gotta be an Egypt person to know Egypt. You can't just dabble in it. Most of my knowledge comes from this:

https://i.rdrama.net/images/17270749626481054.webp

This and reading the book of that guy who ran the Egyptian Army in the first couple days when they crossed the canal.

Obviously the "Sea Peoples" were real. They don't just make up this stuff out of nowhere. Even 20th Century totalitarian regimes, they will tell all kinds of lies about what happened, but they will tell when and where it happened. The debate about the "Sea Peoples" has always been about who they were. I think we can all agree that it was multiple nations united together and the Carians were one of them. Maybe the Greeks were involved.

Again I don't want to say much because this is way before my time and I'm not an Egypt guy. But I would say, from my (Strabo's) research they seem to be pretty much identical to the Pelasgians. A horde of multi-ethnic bandits rampaging around the region. Sometimes fighting as mercenaries for governments, sometimes just plundering. Strabo's conclusion to the Pelasgian question was that it's unknowable. We don't know what the word meant to who at what time. I love that guy so much.

The "Sea Peoples" I find a little bit ridiculous because there's a billion other more interesting questions out there where we can actually grasp at some hints of what happened. Like what is the origin of Edirne. I got theories where I think Herodotus proved it already existed in like 500 BC and later it must have been... anyway...

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The Sea Peoples built the pyramids. :marseypharaoh:

You might disagree. You might even have evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself, Is this really worth losing your job over? :marseysmughips:

The Sea Peoples built the pyramids. :marseykween:

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We've run into the worst diversity hire group of all time.

Look, you can't say "The Sea Peoples are a bunch of psychos". You have to say "An expert says that the Sea Peoples are a bunch of psychos."

!strayans If anyone can tell me the context of this quote I will be extremely impressed.

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Is it not based on a line from 'Front-line', perhaps the only show to correctly show just how actually scummy and unscrupulous news journos are?

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You're more incoherent than me?

:marseyconfused:

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Fair (I thought I was clearer than my usual ramblings).

But to reiterate, your line is paraphrased from the Aus tv show, Frontline which originally aired on ABC (in the 90s?).

It followed a current affairs news team who were often unethical and corrupt. The context of your line was in relation to one episode where the team wanted to report a specific angle for a story. But they were told by a producer that 'You can't just say that. Get an expert and get them to say that'. I think it was in relation to Greeks being crazy / angry. The point was the prestige of experts being used to push the view the news team wanted.

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I'm sorry I must have gotten so into fighting about Sea Peoples nonsense I forgot I made this bet. :marseyfacepalm:

Yeah, Mike Moore's boss explaining to him how life actually works. That's one of my favorite shows from all time and I'll never forget it. Thank God I got a copy of all the episodes before those peepeesuckers decided to remove it from the world and not let Americans see it because this was important to the "stakeholders" in the ABC.

Oh God please tell me nobody else got it because I went to bed right after thinking i was too obscure for anybody to get.

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It's been a while since I read about the sea people but if I remember correctly they used to be considered the cause of the Bronze Age collapse but that later turned out to be an over exaggerated tale of what they did.

Around the time in Europe and the Mediterranean there was a massive drought that caused a reduction in the farming abilities of all peoples. In fact we have some evidence of this from Greek plants becoming drought resistant.

The working theory that I last read was that the sea people would have been a low-medium threat at any other time but due to the entire set of civilizations having to handle a drought and civil unrest, they were a much worse problem.

We don't know who they were but a popular theory is that they were just a bunch of Euros rushing down south because they thought they thought those civilizations would be better prepared to handle the famine, and weren't really any one people.

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The last thing I read was a pretty conclusive case presented in some journal that the archaeological record for a "Bronze Age collapse" in Syria was total bullshit. No idea why I would have found or read that. Maybe I was looking for something about the Lebanese Civil War. :marseyshrug: Anyway, it was pretty decisive. If ordinary people ever read what real archaeologists today write...

I think the general theory of them being European invaders driven by climate is very plausible. Russia, for example, is a good place to farm most years but prone to horrible droughts. We've seen hordes coming off the steppe for this reason often in historical times. Herodotus tells us it happened with the Cimmerians or somebody.

Where I would a be a bit naughty is to suggest that if you actually follow these trends, you realize that Alexander was just another eurotrash barbarian, and the only reason he succeeded is that the king of Thrace before him had an untimely death.

because they thought they thought those civilizations would be better prepared to handle the famine

This kind of thinking is often found in classical studies but not represented in the world. This would require people in Europe knowing in detail how their life compared to the people in Egypt. (Totally impossible with writing technology of the time BTW). Then deciding to actually believe this and decide the Egyptian way is better. Then going a thousand miles to risk getting killed for this.

Has your experience with reddit made you believe that humans are like this?

a popular theory is that they were just a bunch of Euros rushing down south

This has been debated for literally 2000+ years and probably is a problem that can't be solved because they were too diverse for any name we try to put on them to even be relevant.

What I will say after wasting way too many hours of my life on it is:

In this era, people learned how to make and use sailing ships. They came from different countries: Phoenicia, Greece, Tyrrhennia, and something that I think would be called Caria. Much like the later Age of Discovery they had to hire people from all over. There's extreme piles of evidence of this from geography and just reading wtf they wrote. I mean it was known like 2000+ years ago that half of the Heracles stories are about Melqart, King of Tyre.

The ideas of "Greek colonization" and "Phonecian colonization" are obviously false to anyone who's plotted this stuff out in a modern GIS system. They did all of this stuff together.

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This kind of thinking is often found in classical studies but not represented in the world. This would require people in Europe knowing in detail how their life compared to the people in Egypt. (Totally impossible with writing technology of the time BTW). Then deciding to actually believe this and decide the Egyptian way is better. Then going a thousand miles to risk getting killed for this.

I can kinda believe people are like this since a bunch of people from my region are almost making the trip in reverse in the modern era. Most of them don't understand at all how life works in Europe but inherently believe it's better than MENA.

My initial guess as to why they came was largely people moved in various directions looking for quality land and eventually figured out civilizations were in the south and ended up there. How they figured it out could be by chance.

I had read that England had a large Tin mine that was known in the ancient world (how it was known I have no idea) and that merchants would make a once in a lifetime trip there to acquire tin. Information could have been driven by that but I would need to have a better trust in the theory that any Bronze Age civilization found out about a tin mine 1000s of miles away.

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I can kinda believe people are like this since a bunch of people from my region

Never forget who you who are. And don't outsiders know.

(In case anyone thinks this is a reference to a video game it/s actually a reference to the Shamnameh where Persians [I think I classfify]\ Jesus Fricking Christ to be honest I had some Shakepeare-lvevel thing that was suupposed to tie it up in the end.

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I've read that all the sites of destroyed cities were at first all blamed on the sea peoples, but upon further examination archaeologists think some of them fell to internal rebellion because the damage is mostly localized to the palaces and temple complexes.

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!historychads Discuss your thoughts on Sea Peokitty

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Nah they're real but this Rslur thinks they cracked the exact demographic of the sea peoples even doe all records say they were many groups and dismisses everything else as pop history.

I hate when conspitards are smug.

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