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Old 12-15-2016, 10:51 AM   #1
xerxes
 
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Default [England] Historical knowledge

I'm hoping to tap the Hivemind with a historical question about historical questions...sort of.

I'm currently running a campaign using Weird Fantasy Role Playing / Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The setting is England in the early 1600's. The scenario in the most recent session took place in 1627.

What would scholars in England during that time period know about ancient history?

Would they know that the Sumerians were the first "true civilization" starting around 3500 BC?
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Old 12-15-2016, 11:32 AM   #2
ericthered
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Default Re: [England] Historical knowledge

you want metahistory?

In 1627 gallileo was under house arrest. The first civilization will be the ante-deluvian civilization, destroyed at about 2000 BC. The second will probably be Ur and/or Egypt, both having sprung up almost immediately after the flood. Ur is pretty much in Sumer.

There may be folks with inklings of Egypt or Sumer being older than that, but they won't be mainstream and they won't be noisy.
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Old 12-15-2016, 02:29 PM   #3
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Default Re: [England] Historical knowledge

Quote:
Originally Posted by xerxes View Post
Would they know that the Sumerians were the first "true civilization" starting around 3500 BC?
No. Europe knows next to nothing about Sumer until the 19th century, the "ancient" civilization in that part of the world is Persia. Sumer incidentally is an Akkadian name. It's *totally unknown* until the early 19th century, though modern scholars sometimes equate it with the biblical Shinar/Sennaar (others insist Shinar is an unrelated word).

In the 17th century the oldest civilizations there is any information on outside the Bible (and maybe a few Jewish sources, by this point there are a few Protestants willing to read those) is Greece from ca. 500 BC. And whatever Greek writers might have gotten right about the ancient" histories of Egypt and Persia, which is doubtless every bit as reliable as information on Atlantis and the Amazonian queendoms from the same sources. That Biblical and Jewish information about the fertile crescent is pretty much confined to a handful of names, and the later history of Assyria (several waves of rise and fall of civilizations later than Sumer) after it starts interacting with Israel and Judah. That didn't really change until 1820s (with the beginning of the decipherment of both Egyptian hieroglyphics and Old Persian cuneiform), though occasional flashes of illumination back to 800 or 1000 BC might have come through Aramaic or Hebrew paleographic work in prior century.

That's also the oldest period with anything like firm dates - the only 17th century markers for anything older that about 500 BC are biblical genealogies. Indeed really firm dates on anything before that don't exist until the mid 20th century and C-14 dating, though two different king list based chronologies (usually called respectively the Long and Short chronologies) were built in the 19th century. The Short one turned out to be closer to right.

Edit: Actually for this period, look for the chronology of James Ussher (the famous one in which the world was created in 4004 BC). That was cutting edge historical scholarship for it's time, which was 1650. Anything known in 1627 is *even less accurate*.
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Old 12-15-2016, 09:42 PM   #4
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Default Re: [England] Historical knowledge

In 1600, a few radicals might actually "know" china claims to be older than 2000 BC, as well... but those are treated as fables and grandiosity by the west. Actual direct Western Europe to China trade isn't established until the 1670's.

Likewise, in the lat 16th C, circa 1570, Portugul was establishing a presence in India, which has a history going back antedeluvian as well... but again, aside from a few fringe voices, most polite people quaintly laugh and chalk it up to Indian mythology being fables and grandiose claims, as well.
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Old 12-15-2016, 10:59 PM   #5
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Default Re: [England] Historical knowledge

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Originally Posted by ak_aramis View Post
In 1600, a few radicals might actually "know" china claims to be older than 2000 BC, as well... but those are treated as fables and grandiosity by the west. Actual direct Western Europe to China trade isn't established until the 1670's.

Likewise, in the lat 16th C, circa 1570, Portugul was establishing a presence in India, which has a history going back antedeluvian as well... but again, aside from a few fringe voices, most polite people quaintly laugh and chalk it up to Indian mythology being fables and grandiose claims, as well.
China does (2698 BC for the Yellow Emperor, but I think this was calculated by the French Jesuit mission in 1685, I don't believe the Chinese themselves know exactly how many centuries of history they are claiming in 1625). I don't think India has anything other than godly events dated anything like that far back. The modern "Indigenous Aryans" people sometimes try to make a few astronomical references fit an earlier period, but it's a modern conceit - they don't even have the textual support the Creationists using Ussher's numbers have, and serious scholarship doesn't seem to have ever claimed anything before 1800 BC for the Vedas. I think the earliest actual textual dates in Indian chronology are still about 500 BC - and those aren't all that solid, there's an *80 year* uncertainty on the dates for Buddha.

People don't realize just how *little* information historical dating for anything before the Middle Ages rests on even now. There's a darn good reason we date the distant past with C-14 and tree rings and not it's written records. They're way too patchy and unclear even now that we can read a lot of them. Madness Dossier isn't pulling 535 AD out of a hat, it's an obvious global event - reported as *days of darkness* - we still aren't sure the exact date of, even to the year.
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Old 12-18-2016, 09:54 AM   #6
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Default Re: [England] Historical knowledge

Cutting-edge scholars also had access to Greek chronology, with Olympiads beginning in the 8th century BCE and an even wider range of 'real dates for the Trojan War.' Today we suspect that almost all of that is the result of academic calculations by Greek writers who had little more evidence than we have, but it took a while to get there because if ancient people could just make things up, that might imply that the same was true of the Bible. Isaac Newton spent a lot of time studying ancient chronology.

You can find a summary of the kind of arguments which Baroque scholars were having here.
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Old 12-18-2016, 10:27 AM   #7
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Default Re: [England] Historical knowledge

Varro dated the founding of Rome to 753 BC and gave dates for a lot of events in Roman history. On the other hand, it had the year of the first consuls as 245 ab urbe condita, and since that was the expulsion of Rome's seventh king, it gives very long average reigns, 35 years each, so the chronology is open to question. But this would have been known to classical scholars as a chronological source.
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