Book & site list

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Re: Book & site list

Postby hvered » 9:06 pm

Boreades wrote:In the spirit of enjoying the hunt for the symbolism, I wonder if you have read "Uriel's Machine" by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas? They do a lovely job of portraying a Megalithic Master trying to explain some basic astronomy and science to Enoch (who's clearly a numpty). I'm not sure about their leap to the Orkneys, or their way of deriving the megalithic yard, but it's still a great story.

I've heard of Uriel's Machine but haven't read it, relying on the fact that anything remarkable soon gets out into the ether and Wiki provides excellent synopses.

Keimpe very kindly sent me Knight and Butler's latest book, Civilization One, and its sequel, Before The Pyramids. Christopher Knight is quite a heavyweight in ancient history by the sound of it but to my relief he explained the maths very clearly.
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Re: Book & site list

Postby Maribel » 9:43 pm

Boreades wrote: The island was just offshore of the Spanish kingdom of Tartessos. The Tartessans appear to have been on friendly terms with the Phoenicians at Gadir and traded heavily with them. Tartessos was rich with mines that produced lead, tin, silver, copper and gold. The most valuable of these minerals was tin. Tin is required for the manufacture of bronze, yet it is a very rare mineral. On the other hand, bronze was used to make almost everything in the ancient world, even after the introduction of iron.

Tartessos sounds like it could be SW England from this description.

Metallurgy is a highly skilled process (we tend to think of mining as low down on the scale of accomplishments). It was clearly cutting edge technology and lucrative to boot, especially when it came to developing bronze. Copper smelting was around for some time before this breakthrough, but copper is too soft a metal to be practical for tool-making.

The secret of how to manufacture bronze, a hard alloy produced when copper and another soft metal, tin, are smelted together, could only have been discovered in one of those very rare places where the two occurred together.
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Re: Book & site list

Postby Boreades » 11:07 pm

Maribel wrote:Tartessos sounds like it could be SW England from this description.

Metallurgy is a highly skilled process (we tend to think of mining as low down on the scale of accomplishments). It was clearly cutting edge technology and lucrative to boot, especially when it came to developing bronze. Copper smelting was around for some time before this breakthrough, but copper is too soft a metal to be practical for tool-making.

The secret of how to manufacture bronze, a hard alloy produced when copper and another soft metal, tin, are smelted together, could only have been discovered in one of those very rare places where the two occurred together.


Agreed metallurgy is a high-skill process, and bronze could well have been invented by the Tartessos.

If you see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartessos
and then here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turdetani
you'll see that the Tartessos are described as early Celts with a written language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartessos# ... n_language
and their writing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartessian ... ge#Writing

But the "experts" can't work out why the Tartessian language/writing seems to be older than other languages/scripts from which it supposed to be derived. Especially because they are still assuming that the Celts came from the east and moved west. (Hint: what if Celts started in the west and moved east?)

The same experts also avoid the issue of (if these are early Celts with a written language) why their ancestral Celts decided they didn't want a written language!
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Re: Book & site list

Postby Maribel » 12:48 am

Boreades wrote: Agreed metallurgy is a high-skill process, and bronze could well have been invented by the Tartessos.

I think it was generally thought that the first 'proto-Bronze-Age' emerged in Central Anatolia - the suffix proto indicating that they had yet to find a practical use for this tough alloy. If I remember rightly, small objects cast in bronze have been recovered from Catalhoyuk and dated to between 6,000 -8,000 BC, but I'm not so sure they really were the first. The Far East was very much an unknown quantity at the time (and still is) while India's contributions have been played down by academics with an interest in promoting our 'Western heritage'.

Having said that, it may be that bronze casting was developed in more than one place. If smelting began serendipitously, say when certain hearthstones were observed to leak a runny substance that became hard and shiny when cool, bronze could have been discovered in any, or all, of the places where copper and tin ores were present.
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Re: Book & site list

Postby Boreades » 11:41 am

Thanks for mentioning Central Anatolia.
e.g.
http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/zimmerman1/index.html
and
http://antiquity.ac.uk/antiquityNew/pro ... index.html

I see they say "The lavish expenditure of alloying agents in high demand such as tin also touches on the hotly debated question of its possible origin" i.e. they don't know where the tin came from.

I'm confused now on who was in the area at the time bronze appeared. The prehistory of Anatolia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory_of_Anatolia
suggest it was Hattians (not to be confused with Hittites who came later)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattians

Are these Celts or something else? If the Celts didn't invent bronze, presumably they acquired the technology and skills as they moved around. Just as the Romans did later.

Agreed that India doesn't get enough mention, especially as it has a big pre-Sumerian history. Where did India get copper from? It might have been Afghanistan. That has such huge reserves of copper, people are coming from China to get it right now.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/ancient-af ... ry/5308655
and
http://www.archinternational.org/mes_aynak.html
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Re: Book & site list

Postby Mick Harper » 1:40 am

Boreades wrote:it was Hattians (not to be confused with Hittites who came later)

Re our comments about mysterious gaps in the historical record, I would thoroughly recommend you confuse the Hatti with the Hittites.
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Re: Book & site list

Postby Iona » 1:57 pm

Rocky wrote:
Ajai wrote:Homer is named for Hermes. Probably.

I'd buy a book written by the god of eloquence!

Gladstone I think it was who noted that nowhere in Homer's epic is blue mentioned. This has been taken to mean that Homer and his successors and therefore all Greeks were colour-blind! To me it suggests that blue in a sailing lexicon has no meaning, the colouring of the sea is more subtle and important to be limited to one word perhaps similar to the relationship of Arctic peoples to snow.
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Re: Book & site list

Postby Boreades » 2:14 pm

I've just started on The Science Delusion

From the blurb:
Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative scientists, shows that science is being constricted by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The 'scientific worldview' has become a belief system. All reality is material or physical. The world is a machine, made up of dead matter. Nature is purposeless. Consciousness is nothing but the physical activity of the brain. Free will is an illusion. God exists only as an idea in human minds, imprisoned within our skulls. Sheldrake examines these dogmas scientifically, and shows persuasively that science would be better off without them: freer, more interesting, and more fun. In The God Delusion Richard Dawkins used science to bash God, but here Rupert Sheldrake shows that Dawkins' understanding of what science can do is old-fashioned and itself a delusion.

I'm much encouraged by the opening chapter, in which he sets out his stall of using Science to question "scientific" beliefs. Occam's Razor is mentioned, which might grab the attention of our friends over at the AE site.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/144472794X
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Re: Book & site list

Postby Mick Harper » 2:50 pm

Rupe was a fan of my The History of Britain Revealed but didn't respond when I sent him a copy of The Megalithc Empire.
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Re: Book & site list

Postby Penny » 5:14 pm

Boreades wrote: his version of a map of Britain, which exactly as he says gives a delightfully different perspective on what is "the right way up" for a map of Celtic Britain - and megalithia.

A number of maps put east at the top which means north is on the left, an interesting correlation between north (the direction of the moon goddess, devil, etc. etc.) and left, the 'bad' side.
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