8 ms·

Workers discover ‘unprecedented’ Phoenician necropolis in southern Spain

138 points by diodorus 4y ago

janandonly 4y ago
What would our world today look like if the Romans had not won but lost the Punic [1] Wars? Christianity likely still had happend and so our current world might not be all that different… Any and all new information that can be gleaned from finds like these about the ancient Canaanites that once influenced our Celtic, Iberian, Germanic and Roman ancestors is interesting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars
- thriftwy 4y ago
  Maybe the ancient civilization will not collapse and we would have smartphones and satellites around year 1000 AD.
  - mr90210 4y ago
    That's a big if.
  - jl6 4y ago
    Uncollapsed civilizations aren’t necessarily sources of progress. Stability can lead to stagnation. A more reliable driver of innovation towards modernity is war. Perhaps if the ancient Roman state had had a strong persistent competitor in the form of a resilient Carthage, they would have spurred each other on to make more rapid progress.
  - wwtrv 4y ago
    Technological progress didn't really stop when 'ancient' civilizations collapsed. First of all it was hardly happening in the first place, most people were subsistence farmers and their lives hardly changed when the Library of Alexandria burnt down or Christian emperors stopped funding the Academy in Athens. Also the 'dark ages' weren't really as dark as some might think. Arguably most of the decline was a result of climate change and the plague, which lead to a collapse of urban populations, which were the centers of literacy and education. However technological progress didn't really stop, there were significant improvements in metallurgy and agriculture and by the high middle ages Europeans were much more 'advanced' in almost every area compared to ~400 AD. The one thing ancient empires were exceptionally good was concentrating resources, e.g. no state was able to field a standing army in the hundreds of thousands and no city even came close to the population Rome had until the 19th century but that was due to political reasons (shipping tons of grain half across the (known) world to fed a massive unproductive urban population just to shore up some political support simply wasn't viable anymore).
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      Certainly the economic contraction in the west was real and looked very much like a "collapse." But it was as much a product of frequence plagues with corresponding population loss as it was of some more systemic civilizational collapse. In the east, in Anatolia, the Roman civilization lived on with quite a bit more vibrancy and power than people often recognize. But in places like Britain it's pretty night and day: early 5th century still a predominantly Christian Roman province speaking Latin and Brythonic, by the end a predominantly Saxon speaking mostly non-Christian population with drastically reduced economic activity and wealth.
      - achillesheels 4y ago
        So the roads were not paved after the 4th century due to plague and not a failed civilized administration? Would you consider the Merovingians as civilized as the Phoenicians?
        wwtrv 4y ago
        We know remarkably little about the Phoenicians, though. So it's not really a fair comparison, based on what we do and by modern standards Merovingians would probably be considered to be more civilized.
        cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        I think the story is really one of the failure of the ability to raise taxes for the maintenance of armies and civil infrastructure rather than some inherent "civilized" or "uncivilized" character of any particular people. You can't raise taxes when half or more of the population is gone. As per WP: "Some historians believe the first plague pandemic was one of the deadliest pandemics in history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 15–100 million people during two centuries of recurrence, a death toll equivalent to 25–60% of Europe's population at the time of the first outbreak" And this is after a couple generations of political turmoil, other plagues, and invasions.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    I love alt historical thinking. What would have been the big shifts in the tech tree? Literacy to moveable type would have done wonders. And coal. And banking. I think that would have been enough. Monotheism was a disaster for intellectual development.
    - lettergram 4y ago
      > Monotheism was a disaster for intellectual development I don’t know if the facts actually back that up.
      - tomrod 4y ago
        China, a polytheistic/non-theistic culture in those times, being the progenitor of many fundamental technologies, even while ultimately failing to propagate many of those technologies, is a good example. If the intelligentsia are focused on climbing fruitless political ladders steeped in theology versus scientific endeavors, you have less progress overall.
      - stjohnswarts 4y ago
        Yeah that's seems silly, all religions tend to stunt scientific growth as they keep large swathes of people from being curious about why certain things happen and just "why?" in general.
        dr_dshiv 4y ago
        Yeah, but polytheistic approaches at least allow for diversity of thought. Like the hermetic philosophies that influenced alchemy. Monotheism (the enforced kind) really stunted philosophy.
        wwtrv 4y ago
        Religion provided a rules based framework on how the world works, it might have been absurd (from a modern viewpoint) and has largely outgrown it's purpose but humanity had to start somewhere and it's hard to imagine modern scientific method could had been developed without the foundation by built medieval theologians.
  - qiskit 4y ago
    Civilizations have to collapse for progress. Civilizations always stagnate. Otherwise, the mesopotamians, ancient egyptians, ancient chinese, ancient indians, etc would have given us smartphones. If it is civilizations' nature to continually progress, the aztecs or incas or mayans in the americas would have had space ships by the time columbus arrived to exterminate them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  > Christianity likely still had happend and so our current world might not be all that different… I don‘t know about Christianity. I think that without the conversion of Constantine, Christianity would have at best been something like Baháʼí is today, a relatively small, persecuted religion. It was Constantine’s conversion and the subsequent adoption of Christianity by the Roman Emperors that made Christianity what it is.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Yes, and the thing is that many of the trappings of at least the Catholic church reflect a strong "Romanization" of the religion and the fusion of various "pagan" elements (stylistic and ritualistic) of Roman or Mithraic pagainism into the practice. Vestal virgins to nuns, etc. Christianity without a powerful pan-Roman culture may have stayed as a kind of messaniac Jewish sect, confined to Jewish communities around the mediteranean.
    - ithkuil 4y ago
      Perhaps the appeal of Christianity was just happenstance or perhaps it hit a sweet spot that would have worked well even a large empire (with a large number of slaves etc) that would have originated from a Punic civilization and its religion, myths, culture. It would have likely looked very different from this Christianity, possibly to the point that we'd barely recognize any similarity.
      - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        It probably would have looked a lot like Islam.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      No dog in this fight, having left Christianity in leaving behind a tumultuous youth -- but question. Why aren't Coptic christian sects more representative of what would have happened without Christianity usurping/inheriting Roman authority?
- legutierr 4y ago
  If Rome had lost the Punic Wars, it likely would not have colonized the Levant. Not only would Christianity have spread differently, but the story of Christ would also have been very different. For instance, there would have been no census to bring Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, there would have been no Pontius Pilate. Crucifixion itself was a favored means of execution in the Roman Empire, and may not have been employed by whatever political entity that would have been dominant in Judea in its stead.
  - mongol 4y ago
    Yes all circumstanced would be different. Impossible to tell how it would have played out. My opinion is that the historical Jesus would not have been born. Christians may think otherwise.
    - gatlin 4y ago
      Non-christians and Christians alike seem to think the existence of multiple stories about a particular person written down after all first parties were dead means a historical Jesus is a certainty. I actually like Christianity and many of the teachings, but for some reason people will accept the worst evidence for this one specific claim.
      - vehemenz 4y ago
        What's the alternative? This is true of many historical facts we take for granted. The earliest accounts of Jesus were written only one generation after Jesus's death. Plenty of first-hand accounts were still available. There are many of corroborative accounts of Jesus and other historical accounts of this period. Christianity had spread to Greece in 50 AD, only 20 years after Jesus's supposed death. In an age where information moved so slowly, it's remarkable that Christianity had spread so quickly. It's fair to dispute the details of the canonical/apocryphal stories—surely those are contrived—but the idea of Jesus had to come from somewhere. No one else was interested in taking the credit, which should tell us something.
        4y ago
narag 4y ago
Phoenicians wouldn't have gone so far inland. Carthaginians were their descendants, but at the time of Second Punic War, centuries had passed since original colonies like Tarsis or Malaka (Cádiz, Málaga) were founded. Carthage was a Phoenician colony itself so it makes (some) sense to drop Phoenicians' name in the mix, but I'd never seen "Phoenician-Carthaginian", simply "Carthaginian" for that era. A nice finding anyway.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  Phoenicians had massive involvement in Spanish metal trade, with the mining taking place inland. Of all places this is the one where you can expect them to be inland.
ricardobayes 4y ago
What makes me a bit sad is how little we know of people who lived mere 3.000 years before us. Even in human history that's just a flash. Capture the day and don't worry about what others think. No one will know about it 100 years anyway.
otikik 4y ago
I spent my childhood and teenage years in Cordoba. This is Tuesday there. The only reason they don’t unearth Phoenician ruins there is because of the Arabic ruins they find first. And the Roman ones they would find if they kept digging. It’s a bit of a problem for new constructions.

138 points by diodorus 4y ago

What would our world today look like if the Romans had not won but lost the Punic [1] Wars? Christianity likely still had happend and so our current world might not be all that different… Any and all new information that can be gleaned from finds like these about the ancient Canaanites that once influenced our Celtic, Iberian, Germanic and Roman ancestors is interesting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars

thriftwy 4y ago
Maybe the ancient civilization will not collapse and we would have smartphones and satellites around year 1000 AD.
- mr90210 4y ago
  That's a big if.
- jl6 4y ago
  Uncollapsed civilizations aren’t necessarily sources of progress. Stability can lead to stagnation. A more reliable driver of innovation towards modernity is war. Perhaps if the ancient Roman state had had a strong persistent competitor in the form of a resilient Carthage, they would have spurred each other on to make more rapid progress.
- wwtrv 4y ago
  Technological progress didn't really stop when 'ancient' civilizations collapsed. First of all it was hardly happening in the first place, most people were subsistence farmers and their lives hardly changed when the Library of Alexandria burnt down or Christian emperors stopped funding the Academy in Athens. Also the 'dark ages' weren't really as dark as some might think. Arguably most of the decline was a result of climate change and the plague, which lead to a collapse of urban populations, which were the centers of literacy and education. However technological progress didn't really stop, there were significant improvements in metallurgy and agriculture and by the high middle ages Europeans were much more 'advanced' in almost every area compared to ~400 AD. The one thing ancient empires were exceptionally good was concentrating resources, e.g. no state was able to field a standing army in the hundreds of thousands and no city even came close to the population Rome had until the 19th century but that was due to political reasons (shipping tons of grain half across the (known) world to fed a massive unproductive urban population just to shore up some political support simply wasn't viable anymore).
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Certainly the economic contraction in the west was real and looked very much like a "collapse." But it was as much a product of frequence plagues with corresponding population loss as it was of some more systemic civilizational collapse. In the east, in Anatolia, the Roman civilization lived on with quite a bit more vibrancy and power than people often recognize. But in places like Britain it's pretty night and day: early 5th century still a predominantly Christian Roman province speaking Latin and Brythonic, by the end a predominantly Saxon speaking mostly non-Christian population with drastically reduced economic activity and wealth.
    - achillesheels 4y ago
      So the roads were not paved after the 4th century due to plague and not a failed civilized administration? Would you consider the Merovingians as civilized as the Phoenicians?
      - wwtrv 4y ago
        We know remarkably little about the Phoenicians, though. So it's not really a fair comparison, based on what we do and by modern standards Merovingians would probably be considered to be more civilized.
      - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        I think the story is really one of the failure of the ability to raise taxes for the maintenance of armies and civil infrastructure rather than some inherent "civilized" or "uncivilized" character of any particular people. You can't raise taxes when half or more of the population is gone. As per WP: "Some historians believe the first plague pandemic was one of the deadliest pandemics in history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 15–100 million people during two centuries of recurrence, a death toll equivalent to 25–60% of Europe's population at the time of the first outbreak" And this is after a couple generations of political turmoil, other plagues, and invasions.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  I love alt historical thinking. What would have been the big shifts in the tech tree? Literacy to moveable type would have done wonders. And coal. And banking. I think that would have been enough. Monotheism was a disaster for intellectual development.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    > Monotheism was a disaster for intellectual development I don’t know if the facts actually back that up.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      China, a polytheistic/non-theistic culture in those times, being the progenitor of many fundamental technologies, even while ultimately failing to propagate many of those technologies, is a good example. If the intelligentsia are focused on climbing fruitless political ladders steeped in theology versus scientific endeavors, you have less progress overall.
    - stjohnswarts 4y ago
      Yeah that's seems silly, all religions tend to stunt scientific growth as they keep large swathes of people from being curious about why certain things happen and just "why?" in general.
      - dr_dshiv 4y ago
        Yeah, but polytheistic approaches at least allow for diversity of thought. Like the hermetic philosophies that influenced alchemy. Monotheism (the enforced kind) really stunted philosophy.
      - wwtrv 4y ago
        Religion provided a rules based framework on how the world works, it might have been absurd (from a modern viewpoint) and has largely outgrown it's purpose but humanity had to start somewhere and it's hard to imagine modern scientific method could had been developed without the foundation by built medieval theologians.
- qiskit 4y ago
  Civilizations have to collapse for progress. Civilizations always stagnate. Otherwise, the mesopotamians, ancient egyptians, ancient chinese, ancient indians, etc would have given us smartphones. If it is civilizations' nature to continually progress, the aztecs or incas or mayans in the americas would have had space ships by the time columbus arrived to exterminate them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> Christianity likely still had happend and so our current world might not be all that different… I don‘t know about Christianity. I think that without the conversion of Constantine, Christianity would have at best been something like Baháʼí is today, a relatively small, persecuted religion. It was Constantine’s conversion and the subsequent adoption of Christianity by the Roman Emperors that made Christianity what it is.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Yes, and the thing is that many of the trappings of at least the Catholic church reflect a strong "Romanization" of the religion and the fusion of various "pagan" elements (stylistic and ritualistic) of Roman or Mithraic pagainism into the practice. Vestal virgins to nuns, etc. Christianity without a powerful pan-Roman culture may have stayed as a kind of messaniac Jewish sect, confined to Jewish communities around the mediteranean.
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    Perhaps the appeal of Christianity was just happenstance or perhaps it hit a sweet spot that would have worked well even a large empire (with a large number of slaves etc) that would have originated from a Punic civilization and its religion, myths, culture. It would have likely looked very different from this Christianity, possibly to the point that we'd barely recognize any similarity.
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      It probably would have looked a lot like Islam.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    No dog in this fight, having left Christianity in leaving behind a tumultuous youth -- but question. Why aren't Coptic christian sects more representative of what would have happened without Christianity usurping/inheriting Roman authority?
legutierr 4y ago
If Rome had lost the Punic Wars, it likely would not have colonized the Levant. Not only would Christianity have spread differently, but the story of Christ would also have been very different. For instance, there would have been no census to bring Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, there would have been no Pontius Pilate. Crucifixion itself was a favored means of execution in the Roman Empire, and may not have been employed by whatever political entity that would have been dominant in Judea in its stead.
- mongol 4y ago
  Yes all circumstanced would be different. Impossible to tell how it would have played out. My opinion is that the historical Jesus would not have been born. Christians may think otherwise.
  - gatlin 4y ago
    Non-christians and Christians alike seem to think the existence of multiple stories about a particular person written down after all first parties were dead means a historical Jesus is a certainty. I actually like Christianity and many of the teachings, but for some reason people will accept the worst evidence for this one specific claim.
    - vehemenz 4y ago
      What's the alternative? This is true of many historical facts we take for granted. The earliest accounts of Jesus were written only one generation after Jesus's death. Plenty of first-hand accounts were still available. There are many of corroborative accounts of Jesus and other historical accounts of this period. Christianity had spread to Greece in 50 AD, only 20 years after Jesus's supposed death. In an age where information moved so slowly, it's remarkable that Christianity had spread so quickly. It's fair to dispute the details of the canonical/apocryphal stories—surely those are contrived—but the idea of Jesus had to come from somewhere. No one else was interested in taking the credit, which should tell us something.
      - 4y ago

narag 4y ago

Phoenicians wouldn't have gone so far inland. Carthaginians were their descendants, but at the time of Second Punic War, centuries had passed since original colonies like Tarsis or Malaka (Cádiz, Málaga) were founded. Carthage was a Phoenician colony itself so it makes (some) sense to drop Phoenicians' name in the mix, but I'd never seen "Phoenician-Carthaginian", simply "Carthaginian" for that era. A nice finding anyway.

thriftwy 4y ago
Phoenicians had massive involvement in Spanish metal trade, with the mining taking place inland. Of all places this is the one where you can expect them to be inland.

ricardobayes 4y ago

What makes me a bit sad is how little we know of people who lived mere 3.000 years before us. Even in human history that's just a flash. Capture the day and don't worry about what others think. No one will know about it 100 years anyway.

otikik 4y ago

I spent my childhood and teenage years in Cordoba. This is Tuesday there. The only reason they don’t unearth Phoenician ruins there is because of the Arabic ruins they find first. And the Roman ones they would find if they kept digging. It’s a bit of a problem for new constructions.