History – Mesopotamia and Persia, preserved by Jews and European Archeology.

The Empires of Mesopotamia and Persia, which lasted for 3 thousand years, came to an end when a 22 year old Macedonian crossed the Aegean with a small army and proceeded to defeat Darius III. Syncretic Hellenic influences remained long after Alexander’s short life. However, the scribal tradition of three millenia was almost immediately lost in the near and middle east. The indigenous people forgot how to read and write cuneiform texts, and the unity of the people collapsed.

Not until the rise of Judaic Islam did the region once again unite. Unfortunately, Islam completed the annihilation of whatever remained of the intellectual heritage of civilization. The wisdom of Sumer, Assyria, Babylonia, the Hittites, and the Medes and Persians was burned and buried.

Fortuitously, the Hebrews (diaspora during the Babylonian epoch) and Greeks (during their brief Asiatic rule) managed to preserve some of the accumulated wisdom of the ancient civilizations. Indeed, the authenticity of the Jewish and Helenist accounts has been corroborated by the archeological discoveries made by Europeans since the 19th century. The digging has often been dangerous and always over the objections of the Islamic schools. The scholars living under the veils of Islam have been silenced for a thousand years.

The interesting point is that without Jews and Westerners, the Mullahs and Ayatollahs would have almost no information about the greatness of their own people. Islam systematically erased history in order to make it appear that “Islam” was some kind of improvement over the “primitive Arabs” and “fire worshiping pagans” of Persia. The fact is, those pre-Islamic Arabs and Persians built beautiful buildings and gardens, composed music, and wrote literature reflecting the highest sensibilities and soulfulness.

It is no wonder that the Arabs and Persians today are being taught by their religious oligarchs to hate the Jews and the West. Through the scholarship of Jews and Greeks, corroborated recently by European archeologists, the lost heritage of the ancient civilization is preserved. This pre-Islamic heritage contradicts most of the Quran. The spirituality of Mazda/ Zoroastrian teachings is not primitive paganism, but is superior in grace to the current crude hate-mongering of the Ayatollahs and Mullahs.

The ironic point is that the Jews preserved the wisdom of the Persians, which the Persians themselves have now lost in the devotions of their current version of "religion". Using the semitic alphabet on papyrus and parchment scrolls, the Jews kept remembering what the Persians themselves have now forgotten.

In their turn, the Arabs also now forget their history. Ironically, they forget that they are Jews. All Arabs, today, remain Jews both genetically and culturally. Their dialects, diet, sex laws, theocracy, angel-prophet-mediated monotheism, and their us/them community orientation, are identical. Of course, conversely, all Jews also remain Arabs. Nevertheless it is Islam which drives a unilateral wedge of predation between the tribes: Portions of the Quran which appear for the first time almost a century after the death of Mohammad expressly exhort the pillage and slaughter of Jews and Christians.

Islam is a syncretic belief system, cobbled together over several centuries after the death of Mohammad. The primary sources are Aramaic Christian teachings and Hebraic traditions. As Jews, the Arabs had been making the pilgrimage to the covered cubic Kaba in Mecca for centuries before Mohammad. As Christians, the Arabs taught children in schools, and acquired the skills required for building beautiful mosques. Those schools and skills, as well as the importance of humble prostration in daily prayers, are Manichaean contributions which Islam rewarded with annihilation. Now Islam credits the long-dead Mohammad for everything great the people have done. The credit is sadly misplaced.

Stones and Bones

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CAVE ART Blogged 2009 “Stones and Bones”

Anthropologists have confirmed that homo sapiens was thriving in communities in Africa 500,000 years ago. 30,000 years ago we were painting the walls and ceilings in underground caves. We lived without the physical culture we enjoy today, apparently enjoying each other and the natural wonders of this world...for hundreds of thousands of years. What changed?

Culture has clearly "advanced" -- the stones and bones show improvements and increased specialization coupled with organization. Tools become more efficient. The "fitness" is adjusted. Today we can physically see the changes we describe as neolithic revolutions which in turn led to "civilization" marching through its bronze, iron, and steel iterations.

Still, we look at the Cave Paintings and their absences -- no God, no King, no weapons, no hierarchies of men -- and the predominance of gravidity, of color and wonder. We really have to reconsider the direction we have come. In the recent blink of 10,000 years we seem to have wandered into an obsession with personality cults, superstition and weaponry. Have we wandered into a dead end? What is the real vector? What is going on now, and why is it so difficult to comprehend our actual History? Surely what we did for 100,000 years is significant compared to a few centuries of risings and fallings and futile prayers to pantheons of gods.

The point is, looking at Cave Art (which is only 30,000 years old but which was already "advanced" in the caves ((there is no evidence of slow beginnings which probably began "outside")), we had Art. We had the sciencia of the minerals and pigments. This is what makes the ABSENCES so startling. Cave Art depicts no gods, no weapons, no armies, no hierarchies. But we had Community and we had Art and yes, Science -- for hundreds of thousands of years.

The recent 10,000 year old obsession with superstition and vengeful slaughter of "others" is all very new and unnecessary. No, it was not as if evil did not happen, or Mankind did not suffer. The Ice Age extinguished the Cave culture. But there in our Past, it was still Eden compared with the mass suffering to which we have lately become accustomed at the hands of Kings and Priests.

Tolerance

Collection of materials on a core "Belief": TOLERANCE.

1. Amy Chua, a Yale law professor, has developed the idea of tolerance as the key to the rise of civilization as drawn from selected and curious historical examples. In DAY OF EMPIRE (2008), she describes the superpowers, and concludes that they arise by "attracting the best and the brightest from all over the world". Purges and exclusions have always triggered backlash and decline. She details the examples of Rome, the Tang Dynasty, the Dutch Republic, and even Genghis Khan (declared religious tolerance). And come to think of it she is exactly right -- the U.S. won the race for the atomic bomb by becoming a haven for persecuted scientists from Nazi Europe.

Historiography - the balancing between academic work and popular audience

The Purpose of the Past; Reflections on the Uses of History, (2008)
by Gordon S. Wood

At last, a recognized authority calls for hostilities to cease between the pompous academics (deliberately writing for other professors bulked up with quantitative social science data and theory) and the trendy popularizers. For our generation, Wood is the prize-winning dean of American historiography. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969) won the Bancroft Prize. The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991) won the Pulitzer.

Collection of long-form praise and criticism of works by American historians published by Wood in NY Review of Books and New Republic, to each of which Wood has added an afterword, analyzing the significance of the subjects in hindsight, and reviewing his own reviews.

Wood seems to admire: Charles Royster, “The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company”; David Hackett Fischer, “Albion’s Seed”. He champions historians who have not earned advanced degrees but who communicate the story, such as David McCullough, Stacy Schiff, and Barbara W. Tuchman.

Wood is critical of those whose modern political views infect their work: Simon Schama, John Patrick Diggins, Richard K. Matthews. He is not as dismissive as other academics are of the “popularizers” such as Ron Chernow, Walter Isaacson and again, David McCullough.

Wood decries the academic “hyper-specialization” which turns off the public and deprives them of what would be a “sense of where we have come from and how we have become what we are”. The social science trend, for example, his brought historians closer to the sciences, but while enrollment in higher education was booming from 1970 through the 1980's, history majors declined by almost two-thirds.

As academic historians embraced theories of “deconstruction”, “textuality”, and “essentialism”, and incorporated compilations of quantitative data and technological tools of analysis, they communicated only to other tenured faculty. The university presses became obsessed with Derrida techniques and the structuralism of Michel Foucault. The academics lost the Story.

Ironically perhaps in light of the title and subtitle, Wood is critical of the attempt, especially by popularizers (Tuchman, McCullough), to make history “useful”. The Story is not for spinning. He seems to be an umpire of political shifts, calling ideologues out, but doing all he can to bring more people to the game.