Video from 2018. The theory that Maya civilization collapsed due to drought-related causes is widespread, but if this new research is correct the collapse may not have occurred for that reason after all.
"A new study casts doubt on drought as the driver of ancient Mayan civilization collapse. There is no dispute that a series of droughts occurred in the Yucatan Peninsula of southeastern Mexico and northern Central America at the end of the ninth century, when Maya cities mysteriously began to be depopulated. Believing the Maya were mostly dependent on drought-sensitive corn, beans, and squash, some scholars assume the droughts resulted in starvation." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"However, a new analysis by UC Riverside archaeologist Scott Fedick and plant physiologist Louis Santiago shows the Maya had nearly 500 edible plants available to them, many of which are highly drought resistant. The results of this analysis have now been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"'Even in the most extreme drought situation — and we have no clear evidence the most extreme situation ever occurred — 59 species of edible plants would still have persisted,' Santiago said."
"Administrators at the University of Reading in England recently cut several lines referring to domestic violence from a classic Greek poem to avoid offending students." Source: The College Fix.
"The 2,000-year-old poem, Types of Women, by Semonides of Amorgos, is taught to first-year classics students at the school and makes reference to silencing women through violence.
"Documents obtained by The UK Daily Mail include a statement by school administrators:
"'The portion of the poem now omitted involved a brief reference to domestic violence,' read the statement. 'That portion has subsequently been removed because, while the text as a whole is vitriolic, that part seemed unnecessarily unpleasant and (potentially) triggering.'"
Comment: I'm amazed that this woke university department teaches Semonides at all. According to Wikipedia, "The first 94 lines [of his poem] describe ten women, or types of women: seven are animals, two are elements, and the final woman is a bee. Of the ten types of women in the poem, nine are delineated as destructive: those who derive from the pig, fox, dog, earth, sea, donkey, ferret, mare, and monkey. Only the woman who comes from the bee is considered to make a good wife [who probably doesn't exist]." The destructive women, variously described as fat, loathsome, amoral, lazy, sex-crazed, etc., are almost impossible to control. They won't stop their "barking" even if you smack them around or knock out their teeth with a stone and can only be subdued with extreme violence.
Video from 2016. According to some theories, the massive Thera/Santorini eruption may have been responsible for the mysterious Bronze Age collapse which occurred between 1200 and 1150 BC.
"In a remarkable discovery, the first-ever in situ victims of one of the largest natural disasters witnessed in human history have been found some 3,500 years later." (Archaeology News Network)
"An articulated human and dog skeleton were discovered within tsunami debris along the Turkish coast. The remains date back to the Late Bronze Age Thera eruption (modern-day Santorini), according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
Note: The collapse of the Minoan civilization is often attributed to an explosive volcanic eruption that occurred on the island of Thera around 1600 BC. There's no question that the devastation caused by this eruption played a large role in the fall of Minoa, but it appears that the situation may have been more complex than that:
"Many archaeologists believe that the eruption triggered a crisis, making the Minoans vulnerable to conquest by the Mycenaeans. According to Sinclair Hood, the Minoans were most likely conquered by an invading force. Although the civilization's collapse was aided by the Thera eruption, its ultimate end came from conquest. Archaeological evidence suggests that the island was destroyed by fire, with the palace at Knossos receiving less damage than other sites on Crete. Since natural disasters are not selective, the uneven destruction was probably caused by invaders who would have seen the usefulness of preserving a palace like Knossos for their own use. Several authors have noted evidence that Minoan civilization had exceeded its environmental carrying capacity, with archaeological recovery at Knossos indicating deforestation in the region near the civilization's later stages." (Wikipedia)
This 2015 NASA Goddard video demonstrates how windblown dust from the Sahara Desert travels as far as the Amazon in South America. Presumably, dust from Asia travels in the same way, perhaps in an easterly direction -- I'm not sure.
"Historians and archaeologists debate what led to the decline of Polynesian society on Rapa Nui. Although one popular narrative holds that the creation of the famous Easter Island statues depleted resources and led to environmental collapse, more recent research indicates that collapse began when Europeans brought disease and conflict. Whatever the case, Polynesians on Rapa Nui never reached the levels of agricultural productivity seen on an archipelago settled around the same time: Hawai‘i." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"According to new research, small size and isolation might have set up Rapa Nui for failure from the beginning. Researchers knew that by the time Polynesians arrived, Rapa Nui’s soils were probably already less fertile than those on Hawai‘i. Now, analysis of soil samples has shown that an important fertilizer — dust blown over from Asia — doesn’t even reach the isolated island (now a part of Chile, more than 3,500 kilometers away on the South American mainland). This finding could help researchers better understand the environmental challenges faced by ancient Polynesians."
Note: According to this research, Easter Island was doomed from the start because of a lack of nutrients in the soil:
Researchers "determined that by the time humans arrived on Rapa Nui, heavy rains had already leached many nutrients from the soil. The new soil analysis shows that Rapa Nui also lacks traces of mica, quartz, and rare earth minerals that don’t naturally occur in volcanic rock. Hawaiian soils contain these minerals thanks to continental dust blown in from Asia."
"French authorities have approved a proposal to revamp the interior of Notre-Dame Cathedral despite opposition from 100 cultural figures and criticisms saying the changes would 'Disneyify' the historic landmark." Source: Art Net News.
"The French National Heritage and Architecture Commission offered a favorable opinion to the proposal following a meeting on Thursday, December 9, giving the plan a green light to proceed.
"The proposals submitted by the diocese of Paris, which is responsible for the cathedral, would install contemporary artworks and mood lighting to give the 850-year-old gothic structure a new look when it is scheduled to reopen in 2024, just in time for the Paris Olympics."
Comment: This isn't just an abomination; it makes no sense. For instance, why does a Gothic cathedral with its fantastic open spaces, stained-glass windows and vaulted ceilings need "mood lighting?" Weren't these buildings designed to use natural light? And if the morons behind this renovation are determined to put up new pieces of art, wouldn't it be more appropriate to select, I don't know, something traditional with religious themes instead of "modern art" atrocities by painters like Anselm Kiefer and Louise Bourgeois, two of the "artists" being considered? Keifer produces dark, ugly Pollock-style paint splatters and sculptures that look like carbonized pieces of junk, and Bourgeois made giant spider sculptures and a lot of weird, sadomasochistic stuff that can only be described as psychotic.
The trendy, pretentious jackasses in the diocese of Paris apparently think that they need to include modern artists in order to make the cathedral "more accessible to contemporary audiences." They want to "appear modern" and so on, but they're basically turning Notre Dame into a kind of theme park which "completely distorts the decor and the liturgical space" of this beautiful old cathedral, according to critics. And why does the cathedral need a "new look" at all? What was wrong with the old look? Wasn't that it's main attraction in this first place? And what kind of religion has to update its message and image in order to appeal to the masses and keep up with the changing trends of the secular world? This is, after all, a church, right? Or is it? If the cathedral is primarily a tourist attraction these days, maybe they could install a McDonald's in the main sanctuary. That would make it "more accessible to modern audiences."
"Referred to as 'China's Venice of the Stone Age', the Liangzhu excavation site in eastern China is considered one of the most significant testimonies of early Chinese advanced civilization. More than 5000 years ago, the city already had an elaborate water management system. Until now, it has been controversial what led to the sudden collapse. Massive flooding triggered by anomalously intense monsoon rains [next video] caused the collapse, as geologists and climate researchers have now shown." Source: Science Daily.
Note: This discovery was made by analyzing cavern dripstones (stalactites, etc) that preserve a record of climate conditions in the past. According to the researchers, it looks like Liangzhu's water-management system was simply overwhelmed by heavy rainfall:
"The massive monsoon rains probably led to such severe flooding of the Yangtze [river] and its branches that even the sophisticated dams and canals could no longer withstand these masses of water, destroying Liangzhu City and forcing people to flee."
"Tattooing has been practiced across the globe since at least Neolithic times, as evidenced by mummified preserved skin, ancient art, and the archaeological record. Both ancient art and archaeological finds of possible tattoo tools suggest tattooing was practiced by the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe. However, direct evidence for tattooing on mummified human skin extends only to the 4th millennium BC." Source: Wikipedia.
"... tattooed mummies have been recovered from at least 49 archaeological sites including locations in Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, Mongolia, western China, Egypt, Sudan, the Philippines, and the Andes." In 2016, Nature reported the discovery of "[a] mummy from ancient Egypt ... heavily tattooed with sacred symbols, which may have served to advertise and enhance the religious powers of the woman who received them more than 3,000 years ago."
According to Smithsonian Magazine (2007), "... the earliest known examples [of tattoos] were for a long time Egyptian and were present on several female mummies dated to c. 2000 B.C. But following the more recent discovery of [Otzi the Iceman] from the area of the Italian-Austrian border in 1991 and his tattoo patterns, this date has been pushed back a further thousand years when he was carbon-dated at around 5,200 years old."
Otzi had 61 tattoos, apparently. Whether these are still the oldest known tattoos remains to be seen:
"Although Ötzi is the oldest tattooed human ... this will likely change: Ötzi’s tattoos are indicative of social and/or therapeutic practices that predate him, and future archaeological finds and new techniques should someday lead to even older evidence of tattooed mummies." Source: Smithsonian (2015).
"Some tribal cultures traditionally created tattoos by cutting designs into the skin and rubbing the resulting wound with ink, ashes or other agents; some cultures continue this practice, which may be an adjunct to scarification. Some cultures create tattooed marks by hand-tapping the ink into the skin [next video] using sharpened sticks or animal bones (made like needles) with clay formed disks or, in modern times, needles." Source: Wikipedia.
Otzi the Iceman's tattoos may have been a form of acupuncture. According to the International Business Times (2015), "eighty per cent of [Otzi's] tattoos had been found along acupuncture meridians used to treat back pain and abdominal problems, which Otzi suffered from ... If correct, the tattoos would predate the first recorded use of acupuncture in China by 2,000 years."
"Pre-Christian Germanic, Celtic and other central and northern European tribes were often heavily tattooed, according to surviving accounts, but it may also have been normal paint. The Picts may have been tattooed (or scarified) with elaborate, war-inspired black or dark blue woad (or possibly copper for the blue tone) designs. Julius Caesar described these tattoos in Book V of his Gallic Wars (54 BC). Nevertheless, these may have been painted markings rather than tattoos." Source: Wikipedia.
Note: According to Caesar, "All the Britons dye their body with woad, which produces a blue color, and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and upper lip." (The Conquest of Gaul, Book V.14)
In Greece and Rome, tattoos were mostly used for identification purposes -- much like brands on cattle -- but this changed over the centuries, at least among certain classes of society:
"... amongst the Greeks and Romans, the use of tattoos or 'stigmata' as they were then called, seems to have been largely used as a means to mark someone as 'belonging' either to a religious sect or to an owner in the case of slaves or even as a punitive measure to mark them as criminals. It is therefore quite intriguing that during Ptolemaic times when a dynasty of Macedonian Greek monarchs ruled Egypt, the pharaoh himself, Ptolemy IV (221-205 B.C.), was said to have been tattooed with ivy leaves to symbolize his devotion to Dionysus, Greek god of wine and the patron deity of the royal house at that time. The fashion was also adopted by Roman soldiers and spread across the Roman Empire until the emergence of Christianity, when tattoos were felt to 'disfigure that made in God's image' and so were banned by the Emperor Constantine (A.D. 306-373)." Source: Smithsonian Magazine.
Closed-captions helpful.
Comment: Tattoos, piercings and scarification are usually associated with barbarian tribes and the lower orders of society. In the classical world, tattooing as a decorative art seems to have been practiced mostly by the more primitive cultures of Europe, Asia and the Orient. In a way, the popularity of tattoos in any given culture could be seen as an indicator of that culture's social development. The more barbaric the culture, the more tattoos. There also seems to have been an inverse relationship between tattoos and social status. In Greece and Rome, for instance, soldiers, slaves, criminals and some priests and acolytes were frequently tattooed, but I'd be amazed to find out that someone like Tacitus had a tramp stamp.
Tattooing seems to become more widespread in civilizations on their way down. For instance, "the decline of the Ptolemaic dynasty began under the reign of Ptolemy IV," the tattooed Egyptian pharaoh, according to Wikipedia. This is just a theory, but I'd say that the rising popularity of tattoos is a symptom of cultural decay. For example, I don't think it's an accident that the use of tattoos "spread across the Roman Empire until the emergence of Christianity" or that tattoos are becoming a cultural norm in modern Europe and the United States. I guess you could call this the Tattoo Theory of Social Collapse. As a civilization declines into the Third World, more and more people start to cover themselves with body art. I have no idea why this would happen, but maybe the masses are responding in an unconscious way to the barbarism that is slowly engulfing them.
"Over the past year, debate about ancestry estimation has exploded in U.S. forensic anthropology, with a flurry of papers examining its accuracy, interrogating its methods, and questioning its assumptions. A committee of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences’s standards board is now hammering out a new standard that would, if adopted, direct professionals away from racial categories and toward more specific social and biological populations, such as Japanese or Hmong instead of Asian." Source: Science (Oct. 2021)
Comment: "Ancestry Estimation" is just a euphemism for "race estimation." Forensic anthropologists, medical examiners, etc., can determine a person's race and sex from their bones -- this happens all the time in archaeology -- to a high degree of certainty. That's not in dispute. The question here isn't whether they can do this but whether they should do it because it might lead to "discrimination against marginalized groups."
This applies more to modern forensics -- the identification of crime victims, etc. -- than it does to fields like archaeology, but if these standards are adopted we can expect to see a change in the terminology used to describe ancient fossils as well. Basically, all mention of race and sex will either be suppressed outright or disguised using a series of ideologically correct euphemisms.
The fact that this debate is even going on is very revealing about the present state of anthropology. It's kind of mind-boggling, though not very surprising at the same time, that a field that likes to present itself as a science based on evidence would even consider suppressing a whole category of evidence in the name of "social justice."
Comment: This is an interesting lecture. I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but there's no doubt that "coin debasement and inflation helped lead to the demise of the western Roman empire," to quote from The Money Project. Rome's economic problems led to the debasement of its currency and the resulting inflation led to shortages, decreased trade, increased taxation, widespread poverty and the depopulation of once productive parts of the empire in the west. These problems, in turn, seriously weakened the frontier which was eventually overrun by Germanic tribes.
If nothing else, the history of inflation in ancient Rome proves that any unit of exchange can be debased. These days, a lot of people think we could solve our monetary problems by switching to a gold or silver based currency. According to this view, precious metals have "intrinsic value" which makes them immune or at least resistant to inflation. Unfortunately, the idea that gold and silver currencies hold their value as opposed to fiat currencies is flat-out wrong. You can see this by looking at historical gold and silver prices, then comparing them to a chart of the historical value of the dollar. The "value" of gold and silver varies over time just like the value of our fiat currency, so where is the "intrinsic value" in these metals?
The main problem with the Roman monetary system is that it was controlled by the emperors themselves. Faced with finite gold and silver reserves, they turned to "clipping" or reducing the metal content of their coins in order to pay the army and fund all their other projects:
"By decreasing the purity of their coinage, [emperors] were able to make more 'silver' coins with the same face value. With more coins in circulation, the government could spend more. And so, the content of silver dropped over the years." -- "Currency and the Collapse of the Roman Empire," The Money Project.
The Money Project has an interesting series of graphics illustrating the correlation between the deaths of Roman emperors and the debasement of the coinage. The record shows a steady decline in the silver content of Roman coins over the centuries until there wasn't much left except "a negligible coating of silver" by around 300 AD. This correlation doesn't imply that the debasement of the coinage had any direct bearing on the deaths of all these emperors or vice versa, but it does show the steady economic decline of the empire as its leaders desperately tried to cope with the problem:
"By the time of Marcus Aurelius, the denarius was only about 75% silver. Caracalla tried a different method of debasement. He introduced the 'double denarius', which was worth 2x the denarius in face value. However, it had only the weight of 1.5 denarii. By the time of Gallienus, the coins had barely 5% silver. Each coin was a bronze core with a thin coating of silver. The shine quickly wore off to reveal the poor quality underneath."
Gallienus (218-268 AD) ruled during The Crisis of the Third Century, "a period in which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressures of invasion, civil war, plague, and economic depression," according to Wikipedia. Rome never developed a stable political system or a stable economic system and the shine was wearing off the empire as well as the denarius.
The Tattoo Theory Of Social Collapse
"Tattooing has been practiced across the globe since at least Neolithic times, as evidenced by mummified preserved skin, ancient art, and the archaeological record. Both ancient art and archaeological finds of possible tattoo tools suggest tattooing was practiced by the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe. However, direct evidence for tattooing on mummified human skin extends only to the 4th millennium BC." Source: Wikipedia.
"... tattooed mummies have been recovered from at least 49 archaeological sites including locations in Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, Mongolia, western China, Egypt, Sudan, the Philippines, and the Andes." In 2016, Nature reported the discovery of "[a] mummy from ancient Egypt ... heavily tattooed with sacred symbols, which may have served to advertise and enhance the religious powers of the woman who received them more than 3,000 years ago."
According to Smithsonian Magazine (2007), "... the earliest known examples [of tattoos] were for a long time Egyptian and were present on several female mummies dated to c. 2000 B.C. But following the more recent discovery of [Otzi the Iceman] from the area of the Italian-Austrian border in 1991 and his tattoo patterns, this date has been pushed back a further thousand years when he was carbon-dated at around 5,200 years old."
Otzi had 61 tattoos, apparently. Whether these are still the oldest known tattoos remains to be seen:
"Although Ötzi is the oldest tattooed human ... this will likely change: Ötzi’s tattoos are indicative of social and/or therapeutic practices that predate him, and future archaeological finds and new techniques should someday lead to even older evidence of tattooed mummies." Source: Smithsonian (2015).
"Some tribal cultures traditionally created tattoos by cutting designs into the skin and rubbing the resulting wound with ink, ashes or other agents; some cultures continue this practice, which may be an adjunct to scarification. Some cultures create tattooed marks by hand-tapping the ink into the skin [next video] using sharpened sticks or animal bones (made like needles) with clay formed disks or, in modern times, needles." Source: Wikipedia.
Otzi the Iceman's tattoos may have been a form of acupuncture. According to the International Business Times (2015), "eighty per cent of [Otzi's] tattoos had been found along acupuncture meridians used to treat back pain and abdominal problems, which Otzi suffered from ... If correct, the tattoos would predate the first recorded use of acupuncture in China by 2,000 years."
"Pre-Christian Germanic, Celtic and other central and northern European tribes were often heavily tattooed, according to surviving accounts, but it may also have been normal paint. The Picts may have been tattooed (or scarified) with elaborate, war-inspired black or dark blue woad (or possibly copper for the blue tone) designs. Julius Caesar described these tattoos in Book V of his Gallic Wars (54 BC). Nevertheless, these may have been painted markings rather than tattoos." Source: Wikipedia.
Note: According to Caesar, "All the Britons dye their body with woad, which produces a blue color, and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and upper lip." (The Conquest of Gaul, Book V.14)
In Greece and Rome, tattoos were mostly used for identification purposes -- much like brands on cattle -- but this changed over the centuries, at least among certain classes of society:
"... amongst the Greeks and Romans, the use of tattoos or 'stigmata' as they were then called, seems to have been largely used as a means to mark someone as 'belonging' either to a religious sect or to an owner in the case of slaves or even as a punitive measure to mark them as criminals. It is therefore quite intriguing that during Ptolemaic times when a dynasty of Macedonian Greek monarchs ruled Egypt, the pharaoh himself, Ptolemy IV (221-205 B.C.), was said to have been tattooed with ivy leaves to symbolize his devotion to Dionysus, Greek god of wine and the patron deity of the royal house at that time. The fashion was also adopted by Roman soldiers and spread across the Roman Empire until the emergence of Christianity, when tattoos were felt to 'disfigure that made in God's image' and so were banned by the Emperor Constantine (A.D. 306-373)." Source: Smithsonian Magazine.
Closed-captions helpful.
Comment: Tattoos, piercings and scarification are usually associated with barbarian tribes and the lower orders of society. In the classical world, tattooing as a decorative art seems to have been practiced mostly by the more primitive cultures of Europe, Asia and the Orient. In a way, the popularity of tattoos in any given culture could be seen as an indicator of that culture's social development. The more barbaric the culture, the more tattoos. There also seems to have been an inverse relationship between tattoos and social status. In Greece and Rome, for instance, soldiers, slaves, criminals and some priests and acolytes were frequently tattooed, but I'd be amazed to find out that someone like Tacitus had a tramp stamp.
Tattooing seems to become more widespread in civilizations on their way down. For instance, "the decline of the Ptolemaic dynasty began under the reign of Ptolemy IV," the tattooed Egyptian pharaoh, according to Wikipedia. This is just a theory, but I'd say that the rising popularity of tattoos is a symptom of cultural decay. For example, I don't think it's an accident that the use of tattoos "spread across the Roman Empire until the emergence of Christianity" or that tattoos are becoming a cultural norm in modern Europe and the United States. I guess you could call this the Tattoo Theory of Social Collapse. As a civilization declines into the Third World, more and more people start to cover themselves with body art. I have no idea why this would happen, but maybe the masses are responding in an unconscious way to the barbarism that is slowly engulfing them.
Or maybe it's just a form of masochism.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Art, Barbarians, Collapse, Commentary, Culture, Greece, Rome, Videos | Permalink