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the sea peoples bit has my mind spinning still

• chubot 3y ago
  Yeah in general the existence of so many sophisticated peoples without surviving words or even names/identities -- peoples with the ability to wage warfare against established civilizations like Egypt -- is a bit haunting to me It reminds me of Graeber's Dawn of Humanity (good book, though I would also say there are parts you can skim, and still get the message. Also I don't take everything at face value, but it's worth thinking about) He reminds us that there were politically conscious groups of Homo Sapiens living for tens of thousands of years throughout history! They organized their societies in much different ways than ours. But many of them didn't leave a trace, either because they didn't write stuff down, or because their documents were destroyed by other people who were able to get on ships with weapons and diseases. (I actually didn't know that the Romans completely destroyed Carthage's documents and libraries before watching the podcast. They wiped them off the face of the Earth, so the only things we know about Carthage are what the Romans said. Also, "Carthage" isn't even what they called their city -- it's what the Romans called it.) History is really written by the winners of wars, but there are other ways to live