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Yup, you're totally right, I misspoke—I meant to say that the furthest you can trace back Western history is 2500 years [total] back to the Greek "golden age" ~

Yup, you're totally right, I misspoke—I meant to say that the furthest you can trace back Western history is 2500 years [total] back to the Greek "golden age" ~500BC. > Something I found charming from the wikipedia article on Sargon the Great is that the Babylonian king Nabonidus (6th century BC, "ancient" by any modern standard) sponsored archaeological research into his life. Wow, never knew about this. I really want a term to come into the vernacular to describe history before ~800BC, because things really were completely different across Eurasia. In the Mediterranean and Middle East it was the revival of civilization after the Bronze Age collapse, in India it was the beginning of the Upanishadic era, and in China it was the beginning of the Spring and Autumn period. This [1] is sort of relevant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age

thaumasiotes 6y ago
One of the things I find really interesting about Chinese history is that Sima Qian, writing in the second and early first century BC, recorded a number of Shang kings reigning almost a thousand years before his time. For quite a while they were considered legendary, lacking any other corroborating sources -- but the Shang oracle bones eventually confirmed that kings matching the names Sima Qian gave reigned in the order in which he listed them. (The Shang kings' names are actually ordinal markers -- something like Shang Fifth, Shang Second, etc -- but they did not reign in the order suggested by their names.) Sima Qian, like Herodotus, receives a lot of credit for establishing history as a thing people kept track of. But he must have been working from some now-totally-lost fairly faithful sources. And speaking of the coincidence between the recovery from the Bronze Age collapse and the Spring and Autumn period, I'm intrigued by the rough coincidence between the beginning of the Bronze Age collapse and the fall of the Shang dynasty. In that case, the coincidence is much rougher, though -- the Shang dynasty appears to fall about 100 years after the collapse.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

One of the things I find really interesting about Chinese history is that Sima Qian, writing in the second and early first century BC, recorded a number of Shang kings reigning almost a thousand years before his time. For quite a while they were considered legendary, lacking any other corroborating sources -- but the Shang oracle bones eventually confirmed that kings matching the names Sima Qian gave reigned in the order in which he listed them. (The Shang kings' names are actually ordinal markers -- something like Shang Fifth, Shang Second, etc -- but they did not reign in the order suggested by their names.) Sima Qian, like Herodotus, receives a lot of credit for establishing history as a thing people kept track of. But he must have been working from some now-totally-lost fairly faithful sources. And speaking of the coincidence between the recovery from the Bronze Age collapse and the Spring and Autumn period, I'm intrigued by the rough coincidence between the beginning of the Bronze Age collapse and the fall of the Shang dynasty. In that case, the coincidence is much rougher, though -- the Shang dynasty appears to fall about 100 years after the collapse.