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[Walpurgis]

I was just reading about the Mayans on Wikipedia and found it really interesting how similar their society was to the "old world" even though there was zero contact. They were an incredibly sophisticated society and developed the Maya hieroglyphic script, the only known fully developed writing system of the pre-Columbian Americas, which they started using by 300 BCE. I was very disappointed when I got to this part though.

In the 16th century, the Spanish Empire colonised the Mesoamerican region, and a lengthy series of campaigns saw the fall of the last Maya city in 1697.

The Maya elite were literate, and developed a complex system of hieroglyphic writing that was the most advanced in the pre-Columbian Americas. The Maya recorded their history and ritual knowledge in screenfold books, of which only three uncontested examples remain, the rest having been destroyed by the Spanish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization

This just made me incredibly angry. Today, we have ISIS destroying historical monuments but with the cameras and the internet, we have all the information we need from those. The Mayan history books were destroyed before anyone could even extract and record information from them. It's such a tragedy.This reminded me of another story that I read on neogaf a few weeks ago.


The Really Big One is an article about a huge earthquake that will destroy Vancouver and Seattle in the next 50 or so years. The article is really long so I'll try to summarise the relevant parts.

First here is some background info on the region.

Native Americans had lived in the Northwest for millennia, but they had no written language, and the many things to which the arriving Europeans subjected them did not include seismological inquiries. The newcomers took the land they encountered at face value, and at face value it was a find: vast, cheap, temperate, fertile, and, to all appearances, remarkably benign.

Before this "big one" was discovered, American geologists found a ghost forest on the coast in the late 1980s. A ghost forest is a forest of dead trees, leafless, branchless and barkless. They are a smooth silver-gray colour. It was previously assumed that these specific trees died by saltwater, as the sea levels rose and submerged their roots. After discovering evidence of land sinking, one of the scientists looked at growth-ring patterns on the trees and found that all of the trees died simultaneously. They dated the death of the final tree to summer 1699. From this, they were able to conclude an earthquake occurred in Vancouver between August 1699 and May 1700 (since trees don't grow in the winter). This time frame predates written history in this region by more than a hundred years.

5,000 miles west of this ghost forest is the north eastern cost of Japan. Japan gets earthquakes and tsunamis all the time so they kept track of them since at least 599 CE. During those 1400 years, one incident stood out for its strangeness.

On the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of the Genroku era, a six-hundred-mile-long wave struck the coast, levelling homes, breaching a castle moat, and causing an accident at sea. The Japanese understood that tsunamis were the result of earthquakes, yet no one felt the ground shake before the Genroku event. The wave had no discernible origin. When scientists began studying it, they called it an orphan tsunami.

In 1996, around ten years after the ghost forest trip, a Japanese scientists was able to put two and two together. Here's what actually happened.

At approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean, lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the Northwest coast. It took ten hours for the other half to cross the ocean. It reached Japan on January 27, 1700: by the local calendar, the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of Genroku.

Now what's the point in all this? The Aboriginal people already knew this for hundreds of years.

Once scientists had reconstructed the 1700 earthquake, certain previously overlooked accounts also came to seem like clues. In 1964, Chief Louis Nookmis, of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, in British Columbia, told a story, passed down through seven generations, about the eradication of Vancouver Island’s Pachena Bay people. “I think it was at nighttime that the land shook,” Nookmis recalled. According to another tribal history, “They sank at once, were all drowned; not one survived.” A hundred years earlier, Billy Balch, a leader of the Makah tribe, recounted a similar story. Before his own time, he said, all the water had receded from Washington State’s Neah Bay, then suddenly poured back in, inundating the entire region. Those who survived later found canoes hanging from the trees. In a 2005 study, Ruth Ludwin, then a seismologist at the University of Washington, together with nine colleagues, collected and analyzed Native American reports of earthquakes and saltwater floods. Some of those reports contained enough information to estimate a date range for the events they described. On average, the midpoint of that range was 1701.

Now this history wasn't exactly lost, but it may as well have been since it was completely ignored until after the fact. Most Aboriginal cultures relied on oral story telling. So there are the countless stories in the Americas that were actually lost due to cultural assimilation and genocide.

I find this subject very interesting. Does anyone have any other examples of lost history?

 

[Rabbi_Vole]

I hear you, man. Atlantis is largely in the same boat.

 

[iidesuyo]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Library of Alexandria. So much knowledge was lost when it was destroyed.

 

[Walpurgis]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Library of Alexandria. So much knowledge was lost when it was destroyed.

Damn, this one is huge.

This library, with the largest holdings of the age, acquired its collection by laborious copying of originals. Galen spoke of how all ships visiting the city were obliged to surrender their books for immediate copying. The owners received a copy while the pharaohs kept the originals in the library within their museum.

This part is really cool. If only my country was this interested in the acquisition of knowledge.

As a research institution, the library filled its stacks with new works in mathematics, astronomy, physics, natural sciences and other subjects. Its empirical standards applied in one of the first and certainly strongest homes for serious textual criticism. As the same text often existed in several different versions, comparative textual criticism was crucial for ensuring their veracity. Once ascertained, canonical copies would then be made for scholars, royalty, and wealthy bibliophiles the world over, this commerce bringing income to the library.

This is part is interesting too. Alexandria seems to have been a very advanced society.

The library's index, Callimachus' Pinakes, was lost with the rest of the library, and it is not possible to know with certainty how large and how diverse the collection may have been. At its height, the library was said to possess nearly half a million scrolls, and, although historians debate the precise number, the highest estimates claim 400,000 scrolls while the most conservative estimates are as low as 40,000, which is still an enormous collection that required vast storage space.

I don't understand the motivation to destroy this. Wouldn't it make more sense to read these things first? Take what's useful from it or maybe sell it?

 

[genjiZERO]

I hear you, man. Atlantis is largely in the same boat.

Atlantis as in Thera/Santorini? I think it's unlikely Plato was trying to describe a real historical place, but I do think it's likely the legend developed from the Thera eruption. It's also possible it could be derived from the Sea People. Or perhaps a conflation of both of them.

 

[Walpurgis]

Atlantis as in Thera/Santorini? I think it's unlikely Plato was trying to describe a real historical place, but I do think it's likely the legend developed from the Thera eruption. It's also possible it could be derived from the Sea People. Or perhaps a conflation of both of them.

Or perhaps you just got trolled.

Bombasador
Atlantis resident expert troll.
(Today, 09:10 PM)

 

[BannedEpisode]

Pre-Columbus Mesoamerica is super interesting.

The Aztecs were astounding stoneworkers. Any culture that is able to build functional aqueducts independently is pretty damn impressive.

 

[iidesuyo]

I don't understand the motivation to destroy this. Wouldn't it make more sense to read these things first? Take what's useful from it or maybe sell it?

They were idiots, thugs, assholes, chose whatever insult you like.

 

[genjiZERO]

Or perhaps you just got trolled.

Bombasador
Atlantis resident expert troll.
(Today, 09:10 PM)

Lols

 

[Piecake]

I always found the collapse of the bronze age to be really interesting and have been looking for a book that gives a a more thorough treatment of it since my knowledge of it is very very basic.

I mean, it is rather crazy, basically all the governments of the Mediterranean and the Near East collapse at the same time and no one is really sure why it happened.

 

[BannedEpisode]

Oh and interesting fact about the conquest of the Aztecs; it wasn't just a bunch of Spaniards with guns. It was a bunch of Spaniards with guns, and around 80-200 thousand pissed off natives that loathed the Aztecs. Oh and Cortez showed up the same year that Quetzalcoatl was prophesied to return, so that didnt help with morale.

I really admire Aztec culture and history. They were an incredibly inventive and advanced society that was also entrenched in violence and truly nasty stuff. They didnt deserve what happened to them but they sure didnt do themselves many favors.

 

[Chairman Yang]

I always found the collapse of the bronze age to be really interesting and have been looking for a book that gives a a more thorough treatment of it since my knowledge of it is very very basic.

I mean, it is rather crazy, basically all the governments of the Mediterranean and the Near East collapse at the same time and no one is really sure why it happened.

You're in luck! Read this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691140898/?tag=neogaf0e-20

 

[Piecake]

You're in luck! Read this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691140898/?tag=neogaf0e-20

Ooo, thanks. That does seem quite fitting

 

[cashman]

Oh and interesting fact about the conquest of the Aztecs; it wasn't just a bunch of Spaniards with guns. It was a bunch of Spaniards with guns, and around 80-200 thousand pissed off natives that loathed the Aztecs. Oh and Cortez showed up the same year that Quetzalcoatl was prophesied to return, so that didnt help with morale.

I really admire Aztec culture and history. They were an incredibly inventive and advanced society that was also entrenched in violence and truly nasty stuff. They didnt deserve what happened to them but they sure didnt do themselves many favors.

The guns back there were pretty shitty too. Didn't really do all that much except make them scared.

 

[Vigilant Walrus]

I'm fascinated about many of the things that has emerged about the viking society in recent years. It's becoming common knowledge that they pre-dated colombus in discovering America, and that the depictions of them as horn-helmet warriors is a construct of their 1800-ish renaissance in art.

A lot of what we know about the vikings is up for debate as besides the edda and the writings of snorri, we know little.
It's a recent revelation that women were fighting on the frontlines. It was believed that it might have been a real tactic in the past to dissuade men from retreating or surrendering if the women were in the heat of battle, but it seems that it might have been more pragmatic- Women were valued soldiers.

This makes sense. Vikings treated women better than many other socities- so much so, that a woman would be allowed to divorce her man if he hit her or humiliated her 3 times, or was unfaithful. If a womans husband died in battle, she would get to keep his house and land.
I'm not saying vikings were not misogynistic pieces of shit. After all- Women were not welcomed in Valhalla, so that tells you something. But I still find it interesting.
There are so many things we don't know. We know about the change to Christianity which surprisingly was very peaceful considering.

Iceland converted to Christianity in the year 1000, which is odd. And I love the rhetoric- The way they stopped a religious civil war was simply that they said- "Look- you have to worship Christianity publicly, but you can worship the old gods in your home" and apparently people must have been okay with that.

Another thing that is emerging about the culture is their cleanliness. Saturday is named the vikings washing day I've heard. One of the few societies at the time to do frequent washing, when in the middle ages many people believed that water was bad for you. Doctors and layman would do surgery without washing their hands using the argument that "a gentlemans hands are never unclean". Bonkers!

One thing I wish we knew more about was the theories surrounding the Berserkers - The idea that they would have consumed herbs that would made them go completely ape insane and go naked into battle. psychoactive compound? No sort of such things grow in scandinavia or near the vicinity.

Another thing I wish was not lost in history is the theories about black vikings. We know they were mercenaries, some going down far into the middle east. if they had brought slaves back, it's possible. it's an exciting prospect if there were actual african vikings who lived in the northern european region.

A thing I've heard recently is that, vikings being said to mostly fight with axes might have been a lie. Swords throughout history have always required a high level of skill and were expensive. It's more likely that most warriors in most castes were fighting with spear as the all-purpose dominating weapon.
It's not as cool as a sword, but it does make sort of sense. Spears are easier to use by an untrained peasant. And thats what vikings were mostly. they are famous for raping and pillaging, but mostly, they were just farmers. Great shipbuilders, but still farmers.

I wonder what their paganism must have been like. The orgies. and sexual religious ceremonies.

 

[Skelter]

The guns back there were pretty shitty too. Didn't really do all that much except make them scared.

But the armor helped the invading Conquistadors. Really, this is a fantastic read.

 

[UFO]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Library of Alexandria. So much knowledge was lost when it was destroyed.

I feel that. The memory card in my phone broke and I lost all the pictures I took.

 

[RustyNails]

Mongols are the villain of human history.

 

[Windam]

The Really Big One is an article about a huge earthquake that will destroy Vancouver and Seattle in the next 50 or so years.

Now maybe people will recognize that the east coast is the best coast.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

Oh and interesting fact about the conquest of the Aztecs; it wasn't just a bunch of Spaniards with guns. It was a bunch of Spaniards with guns, and around 80-200 thousand pissed off natives that loathed the Aztecs. Oh and Cortez showed up the same year that Quetzalcoatl was prophesied to return, so that didnt help with morale.

I really admire Aztec culture and history. They were an incredibly inventive and advanced society that was also entrenched in violence and truly nasty stuff. They didnt deserve what happened to them but they sure didnt do themselves many favors.

The story about Quetzalcoatl having a prophesied year of return is disputed. It's not clearly false, but the only evidence we have either way comes from Spanish sources post-conquest. It's actually not totally clear whether people believed he was a returning god in any capacity, at least from contemporary sources.

 

[Vigilant Walrus]

On the flipside Cortez had crazy angelic dreams and thought Jesus was with him. You had to feel for the Aztecs. They had never seen horses before. Probably thought they were some deer-human monster hybrid in mental.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

And they were reportedly very impressed/awed by cannon fire

 

[Cyan]

You're in luck! Read this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691140898/?tag=neogaf0e-20

Ooh awesome, thanks for the link.

 

[Forkball]

This part is really cool. If only my country was this interested in the acquisition of knowledge.

Yeah, if you think STEALING is cool.

I nominate the Amber Room.

The Nazis looted it, but no one found its remains after the war. You'd think it would be easy to find 13,000 pounds of amber but no.

I'm also a big fan of "where is..." history questions.

Where is Genghis Khan's grave?
Where is Yamatai?
Where is the Lost Dutchman's Goldmine (this one may be BS though)?

 

[Piecake]

Yeah, if you think STEALING is cool.

I nominate the Amber Room.

The Nazis looted it, but no one found its remains after the war. You'd think it would be easy to find 13,000 pounds of amber but no.

I'm also a big fan of "where is..." history questions.

Where is Genghis Khan's grave?
Where is Yamatai?
Where is the Lost Dutchman's Goldmine (this one may be BS though)?

I like this quote

Originally constructed in the 18th century in Prussia, the Amber Room disappeared during World War II and was recreated in 2003.

How the fuck do you lose a room? lol.

Yea, yea, I get it. it was looted, but taht quote is still pretty funny.

 

[beast786]

Mongols are the villain of human history.

Yet even from them some of our countries can learn something

Mongols were highly tolerant of most religions during the early Mongol Empire, and typically sponsored several at the same time. At the time of Genghis Khan in the 13th century, virtually every religion had found converts, from Buddhism to Christianity and Manichaeanism to Islam. To avoid strife, Genghis Khan set up an institution that ensured complete religious freedom, though he himself was a shamanis

 

[BannedEpisode]

The story about Quetzalcoatl having a prophesied year of return is disputed. It's not clearly false, but the only evidence we have either way comes from Spanish sources post-conquest. It's actually not totally clear whether people believed he was a returning god in any capacity, at least from contemporary sources.

True. I threw it in as an interesting factoid.

I remember my professor in college talking about it and directly saying that it very well might not be true.

Makes for an interesting addition if it is true though.

 

[RustyNails]

Yet even from them some of our countries can learn something

Mongols were highly tolerant of most religions during the early Mongol Empire, and typically sponsored several at the same time. At the time of Genghis Khan in the 13th century, virtually every religion had found converts, from Buddhism to Christianity and Manichaeanism to Islam. To avoid strife, Genghis Khan set up an institution that ensured complete religious freedom, though he himself was a shamanis

And then he chopped all their heads off and stacked their skulls in a tower, and burned the village to ashes.

 

[BannedEpisode]

Yet even from them some of our countries can learn something

I always liked how Carlin phrased it in hardcore history, being more of a spiritual insurance policy for the Khans than straight up tolerance.

 

[Piecake]

And then he chopped all their heads off and stacked their skulls in a tower, and burned the village to ashes.

But he killed them for enjoyment and booty, not religious persecution. That is the important thing.

 

[televator]

Yeah, the spanish came in and fucked all kinds of shit up. Thousands of years of history and knowledge gone to the wind all because of that white superiority complex.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

But he killed them for enjoyment and booty, not religious persecution. That is the important thing.

I bet the nations he conquered never even thought to challenge him to a public debate.

 

[Piecake]

Yeah, the spanish came in and fucked all kinds of shit up. Thousands of years of history and knowledge gone to the wind all because of that white superiority complex.

Was racism really the motivation at this point? I honestly don't know much about South American and Spanish Imperial history, but I always kinda assumed that it was mostly religion or just not giving a shit, and pure greed, martial glory, power, etc (At least in the very beginning).

I bet the nations he conquered never even thought to challenge him to a public debate.

Well, television or radio didnt exist, and no one could drop leaflets from planes back then, so clearly that is not a viable non-violent strategy.

I know many practiced gift giving to the Glorious Khan to stop his many raids, but sadly, that did not seem to work. Apparently, he did not understand those noble intentions since he just came back for more and more.

 

[Krejlooc]

Was racism really the motivation at this point? I honestly don't know much about South American and Spanish Imperial history, but I always kinda assumed that it was mostly religion or just not giving a shit, and pure greed, martial glory, power, etc (At least in the very beginning).



Well, television or radio didnt exist, and no one could drop leaflets from planes back then, so clearly that is not a viable non-violent strategy.

I know many practiced gift giving to the Glorious Khan to stop his many raids, but sadly, that did not seem to work. Apparently, he did not understand those noble intentions since he just came back for more and more.

Did they try marching unarmed and naked into the heart of the mongol empire?

 

[PantherLotus]

Thread is a great read already.

 

[Elfforkusu]

What we've recently (last few decades) learned/started to confirm about South America pre-Columbus is astonishing. One of the reasons I can't recommend 1491 enough.

Below us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province's northern rivers, which are sub-subtributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright-green vastness turns into something that resembles a desert.

[...]

Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is Erickson's belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.

Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618—all ravaged the remains of Incan culture. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed his findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already working on a second, related question: If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with?

To Elizabeth Fenn, the smallpox historian, the squabble over numbers obscures a central fact. Whether one million or 10 million or 100 million died, she believes, the pall of sorrow that engulfed the hemisphere was immeasurable. Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams—entire ways of life hissed away like steam. The Spanish and the Portuguese lacked the germ theory of disease and could not explain what was happening (let alone stop it). Nor can we explain it; the ruin was too long ago and too all-encompassing. In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding is not that many people died but that many people once lived. The Americas were filled with a stunningly diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia. "You have to wonder," Fenn says. "What were all those people up to in all that time?"

(the article that turned into the book)
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/

 

[SodiumBenzoate]

We went from a history discussion to modern politics/social issues circlejerk in less than 1 page?


I think the fact that the term 'Discovered' is so attached to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas is a fascinating and depressing indication of how much history and culture has been lost on this Continent.

 

[PeskyToaster]

It's kind of interesting to see who gets respect in history and who is vilified. I think Dan Carlin was right when he said we'll see a "Benefits of the Nazis" book that will start some crazy debates. I'm re-listening to Wrath of the Khans right now.

 

[jambo]

This is kind of the opposite of what this thread is asking for, but I remeber reading a couple of articles a few years back about a theory that an emperor or leader had his scribes write up hundreds of years of fake history.

Something along the lines of one of the big Age periods never really happened.

Not sure if anyone has heard of this or has more information.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

This is kind of the opposite of what this thread is asking for, but I remeber reading a couple of articles a few years back about a theory that an emperor or leader had his scribes write up hundreds of years of fake history.

Something along the lines of one of the big Age periods never really happened.

Not sure if anyone has heard of this or has more information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

lols

 

[jambo]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

lols

Opened the link

The phantom time hypothesis is a historical conspiracy theory

Aww yiss.

Tell me your secrets Mr. Illig

 

[Anjelus_]

Some of my ancestors were the ones that helped burn those Mesoamerican libraries.

It was an absolutely horrible crime against humanity to do that. Now, lo' and behold, we have an actual scholarly interest in the people of the Americas, Europeans want to know more about who these people were, what languages they spoke, what their histories and legends were, what relations they had to the other peoples of the Americas and how their languages may have shared common heritages with the peoples of North and South America...

But oh, we can't know that shit because a few ignorant, moronic, brain dead Spaniards burned everything, fucking over the natives and their own descendants in the process. Way to go assholes.

OP, this is a subject I'm pretty raw about. But this might make you feel better, we may be on the cusp of rediscovering thousands of pieces of lost Latinate literature:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/2...ts-of-herculaneum-scrolls.html?referrer=&_r=0

 

[Anjelus_]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

lols

True or not (not), the idea is amazing.

 

[Allforce]

I'm fascinated about many of the things that has emerged about the viking society in recent years. It's becoming common knowledge that they pre-dated colombus in discovering America, and that the depictions of them as horn-helmet warriors is a construct of their 1800-ish renaissance in art.

A lot of what we know about the vikings is up for debate as besides the edda and the writings of snorri, we know little.
It's a recent revelation that women were fighting on the frontlines. It was believed that it might have been a real tactic in the past to dissuade men from retreating or surrendering if the women were in the heat of battle, but it seems that it might have been more pragmatic- Women were valued soldiers.

This makes sense. Vikings treated women better than many other socities- so much so, that a woman would be allowed to divorce her man if he hit her or humiliated her 3 times, or was unfaithful. If a womans husband died in battle, she would get to keep his house and land.
I'm not saying vikings were not misogynistic pieces of shit. After all- Women were not welcomed in Valhalla, so that tells you something. But I still find it interesting.
There are so many things we don't know. We know about the change to Christianity which surprisingly was very peaceful considering.

Iceland converted to Christianity in the year 1000, which is odd. And I love the rhetoric- The way they stopped a religious civil war was simply that they said- "Look- you have to worship Christianity publicly, but you can worship the old gods in your home" and apparently people must have been okay with that.

Another thing that is emerging about the culture is their cleanliness. Saturday is named the vikings washing day I've heard. One of the few societies at the time to do frequent washing, when in the middle ages many people believed that water was bad for you. Doctors and layman would do surgery without washing their hands using the argument that "a gentlemans hands are never unclean". Bonkers!

One thing I wish we knew more about was the theories surrounding the Berserkers - The idea that they would have consumed herbs that would made them go completely ape insane and go naked into battle. psychoactive compound? No sort of such things grow in scandinavia or near the vicinity.

Another thing I wish was not lost in history is the theories about black vikings. We know they were mercenaries, some going down far into the middle east. if they had brought slaves back, it's possible. it's an exciting prospect if there were actual african vikings who lived in the northern european region.

A thing I've heard recently is that, vikings being said to mostly fight with axes might have been a lie. Swords throughout history have always required a high level of skill and were expensive. It's more likely that most warriors in most castes were fighting with spear as the all-purpose dominating weapon.
It's not as cool as a sword, but it does make sort of sense. Spears are easier to use by an untrained peasant. And thats what vikings were mostly. they are famous for raping and pillaging, but mostly, they were just farmers. Great shipbuilders, but still farmers.

I wonder what their paganism must have been like. The orgies. and sexual religious ceremonies.

On the flipside Cortez had crazy angelic dreams and thought Jesus was with him. You had to feel for the Aztecs. They had never seen horses before. Probably thought they were some deer-human monster hybrid in mental.

I want a copy of your Bookmark'd folder.

 

[televator]

Was racism really the motivation at this point? I honestly don't know much about South American and Spanish Imperial history, but I always kinda assumed that it was mostly religion or just not giving a shit, and pure greed, martial glory, power, etc (At least in the very beginning).

First, Mexico is part of North America. Moving along, religion doesn't preclude racism. It is often combined. Since the arrival of columbus, the natives were seen as ignorant ungodly savages or suitable slaves if converted.

 

[iidesuyo]

True or not (not), the idea is amazing.

Herbert Illig

He looks like someone to invite for a few beers and have crazy discussions.

 

[Piecake]

First, Mexico is part of North America. Moving along, religion doesn't preclude racism. It is often combined. Since the arrival of columbus, the natives were seen as ignorant ungodly savages or suitable slaves if converted.

But that doesnt necessarily mean that it is racism. I guess I was hoping for some evidence. Some clear quotes that make it quite specific that they thought this race of new people (to them obviously) were inferior. Certainly they thought their religion superior and the people all ungodly heathens, and it wouldnt surprise me if they thought all of them ignorant savages as well (no idea, again, don't know much about the period, but Europeans certainly were an arrogant bunch about their civilization), but I don't think those views necessarily mean that they are racist.

I think racism means that they think that people of that 'race' are ignorant, ungodly savages and will always be inferior, etc, while thinking that a civilization is inferior and full of ignorant, savage heathens could mean that you think the civilization and by extension its people are inferior, not the entire race of people.

 

[viciouskillersquirrel]

Was racism really the motivation at this point? I honestly don't know much about South American and Spanish Imperial history, but I always kinda assumed that it was mostly religion or just not giving a shit, and pure greed, martial glory, power, etc (At least in the very beginning)..

Castilian/Aragonese conceptions of just what Spain was were fluid to say the least. You have to remember that Castile and Aragon had only just finished the Reconquista - the native Spanish and, more importantly, Catholic Christian reconquest of the last parts of the Hispanic Pennisula that remained under Muslim rule.

Spain at the time, and the southern parts in particular had been the battleground for a centuries-long holy war that had touched every aspect of life and culture. What remained after the last Emir was cast out from Granada was a fusion of the Roman/Vandal/Gothic past and the Muslim colonists who had occupied much of the area for the better part of 800 years. Even the language spoken by the Christian conquerors had picked up hundreds of Arabic loan words.

Now, when it comes to racial questions, you'll need to keep in mind that the Muslim conquerors intermingled with the locals to the extent that some of the later Emirs were blonde men with blue or green eyes. Intermarriage between the Muslim ruling minority and the Catholic Christian majority was exceedingly common and not all the Muslim overlords were necessarily Arabs. Depending on which period, you may be talking about Berbers, who would be seen as black by our modern eyes. Interracial marriages were exceedingly common and barely raised an eyebrow. If you were a devout Catholic, spoke a Spanish dialect and were culturally European, you were considered "Spanish" (the term didn't have much meaning until later). After conquering the Aztec, Maya and Inca empires, intermarriage between the conquerors and the conquered simply continued in this pattern. Even today, only an exceedingly tiny minority of people in the Americas claim themselves to be of pure Spanish blood and in many cases those claims are dubious.

So, it's complicated. At first, the Pope's remit to Castile and Aragon was that they would be allowed to conquer the New World at will, provided that they took steps to ensure the conversion and protection of its inhabitants. If they thought of themselves as superior to the locals, it wasn't because they were white, per se, but on account of being soldiers of Christ and crusaders for the one true faith. Remember too, that the majority of the Conquistadors were of Andalusian extraction, one of the regions that had seen the longest period of Arab / Moorish rule and had the longest history of interracial and interfaith marriage. When the Spanish got to the New World, intermarriage and intermingling started happening almost immediately and never stopped.

Then again, later governments instituted racial classification systems that were arcane and complicated. I suppose it could be that at the time of the initial conquest, ideas about race weren't fully developed in the European mind, but that these later became important. The ruling governors in what would become Latin America consisted almost exclusively of appointments made by the Spanish crown in Europe. These rulers saw themselves as sitting above the native-born (but ethnically Spanish) creoles and the rest of the population, who were varying admixtures of Amerindian, African and European heritage. This meant that social status was conferred upon you based on how culturally Spanish you were, and this was closely (but not perfectly) correlated with your racial background.

To wit, there were almost certainly racist ideas swirling around in the heads of the Conquistadors, but to describe their attitude simply as a "white" superiority complex is misleading. These guys were adventurers and holy warriors, so their burning of books and desecration of history have to be taken in the same context as the same acts perpetrated by crusaders in the Middle East. It's part of the same tradition of holy war, and, had the Muslim world not been able to match the crusaders technologically, the same patterns of conquest would have occurred in the Middle East as in the New World. Their attitude toward the culture they were trampling was bigoted and unconscionable, sure, but it wasn't necessarily racist in the bloodline-based way the English-speaking world understands it today.

 

[Walpurgis]

There are some very interesting posts in this thread.

Some of my ancestors were the ones that helped burn those Mesoamerican libraries.

That makes me wonder about what kinds of screwed up shit my ancestors were up to....and what my descendants will think of me and the people of our time long after we're gone.

OP, this is a subject I'm pretty raw about. But this might make you feel better, we may be on the cusp of rediscovering thousands of pieces of lost Latinate literature:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/2...ts-of-herculaneum-scrolls.html?referrer=&_r=0

This is incredible. However, the process of using x-rays to see the writing inside charred scrolls and matching the letters and words sounds like a nightmare. I wonder what they'll find in Caesar's dad's villa.

 

[Piecake]

Castilian/Aragonese conceptions of just what Spain was were fluid to say the least. You have to remember that Castile and Aragon had only just finished the Reconquista - the native Spanish and, more importantly, Catholic Christian reconquest of the last parts of the Hispanic Pennisula that remained under Muslim rule.

Spain at the time, and the southern parts in particular had been the battleground for a centuries-long holy war that had touched every aspect of life and culture. What remained after the last Emir was cast out from Granada was a fusion of the Roman/Vandal/Gothic past and the Muslim colonists who had occupied much of the area for the better part of 800 years. Even the language spoken by the Christian conquerors had picked up hundreds of Arabic loan words.

Now, when it comes to racial questions, you'll need to keep in mind that the Muslim conquerors intermingled with the locals to the extent that some of the later Emirs were blonde men with blue or green eyes. Intermarriage between the Muslim ruling minority and the Catholic Christian majority was exceedingly common and not all the Muslim overlords were necessarily Arabs. Depending on which period, you may be talking about Berbers, who would be seen as black by our modern eyes. Interracial marriages were exceedingly common and barely raised an eyebrow. If you were a devout Catholic, spoke a Spanish dialect and were culturally European, you were considered "Spanish" (the term didn't have much meaning until later). After conquering the Aztec, Maya and Inca empires, intermarriage between the conquerors and the conquered simply continued in this pattern. Even today, only an exceedingly tiny minority of people in the Americas claim themselves to be of pure Spanish blood and in many cases those claims are dubious.

So, it's complicated. At first, the Pope's remit to Castile and Aragon was that they would be allowed to conquer the New World at will, provided that they took steps to ensure the conversion and protection of its inhabitants. If they thought of themselves as superior to the locals, it wasn't because they were white, per se, but on account of being soldiers of Christ and crusaders for the one true faith. Remember too, that the majority of the Conquistadors were of Andalusian extraction, one of the regions that had seen the longest period of Arab / Moorish rule and had the longest history of interracial and interfaith marriage. When the Spanish got to the New World, intermarriage and intermingling started happening almost immediately and never stopped.

Then again, later governments instituted racial classification systems that were arcane and complicated. I suppose it could be that at the time of the initial conquest, ideas about race weren't fully developed in the European mind, but that these later became important. The ruling governors in what would become Latin America consisted almost exclusively of appointments made by the Spanish crown in Europe. These rulers saw themselves as sitting above the native-born (but ethnically Spanish) creoles and the rest of the population, who were varying admixtures of Amerindian, African and European heritage. This meant that social status was conferred upon you based on how culturally Spanish you were, and this was closely (but not perfectly) correlated with your racial background.

To wit, there were almost certainly racist ideas swirling around in the heads of the Conquistadors, but to describe their attitude simply as a "white" superiority complex is misleading. These guys were adventurers and holy warriors, so their burning of books and desecration of history have to be taken in the same context as the same acts perpetrated by crusaders in the Middle East. It's part of the same tradition of holy war, and, had the Muslim world not been able to match the crusaders technologically, the same patterns of conquest would have occurred in the Middle East as in the New World. Their attitude toward the culture they were trampling was bigoted and unconscionable, sure, but it wasn't necessarily racist in the bloodline-based way the English-speaking world understands it today.

Thanks for the post. I dont know, a lot of that sounds like ethnocentrism to me. Violent, brutal, and full of crusader zeal ethnocentrism, but, at least in the beginning, ethnocentrism nonetheless.

I found this quote on wikipedia that I think explains what I am trying to get at rather well

Racism rests on two basic assumptions: that a correlation exists between physical characteristics and moral qualities; that mankind is divisible into superior and inferior stocks. Racism, thus defined, is a modern conception, for prior to the XVIth century there was virtually nothing in the life and thought of the West that can be described as racist. To prevent misunderstanding a clear distinction must be made between racism and ethnocentrism ... The Ancient Hebrews, in referring to all who were not Hebrews as Gentiles, were indulging in ethnocentrism, not in racism. ... So it was with the Hellenes who denominated all non-Hellenes——whether the wild Scythians or the Egyptians whom they acknowledged as their mentors in the arts if civilization——Barbarians, the term denoting that which was strange or foreign.

I actually do remember listening to one of the great courses on late medieval Europe that discussed how Spain actually developed a blood purity idea in the 16th century though, which is certainly racist. I'll try to find it...

Actually, I just went ahead and found the wikipedia article to make things easier for everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpieza_de_sangre

So yea, there certainly were racist ideas floating around in Spain at the time, but I don't really think that is proof that the conquistadors were racists or that they did all of that shit because of greed and racism.