The Time Machine

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The Historian

01:24

Q: Where can I learn about Knezovi and Vojvoda in 1903 Nis?

Their daily life, how they treat tenants, customs etc

15 hours later…

The Historian

16:32

Q: What was the nature of Yasir Arafat's difficulties in Arabic?

Shafiq al-Hout in his book My Life in the PLO says in relation to the Arafat's first speech in the UN: He also asked Mahmoud Darwish and me to include all the vowel marks in the text clearly in bright red ink. We did so, but despite our best efforts, he still managed to ride roughshod over the c...

egypt palestine

SPavel

16:45

Reading up on the historicity of Jesus and his crew, and it's very funny to me that "oh we have practically no evidence this guy existed" is immediately followed by "it's still far more evidence than about any other private citizen from 2000 years ago"

1 hour later…

T.E.D.

18:08

I wouldn't say "practically no", but yeah the evidence for damn near everything is far less than most folks realize.

I had an answer (that I'm probably unreasonably proud of) talking about issues of relative attestation for historical knowledge here, if you haven't seen it:

A: How to rebut Holocaust denial argument?

The right response is to laugh at it. I don't think this can or should be directly rebutted. Arguing details of a theory that is that far from the mainstream implicitly puts it on equal logical ground with every mainstream analysis. This is ceding it ground it has not earned. There are still so...

There are a lot of folks who want something to not be true (denialists of all stripes), and will seize on inconsistencies or paucity/quality of evidence for it to back themselves up, without acknowledging how that compares to, like everything else we say we know happened.

To pick an example that wasn't under discussion, its quite possible to accept that The Buddha actually existed as a person, as far as we can historically discern, without accepting that said person really was divine, or that all the supernatural elements of his story happened too.

The Historian

19:05

SPavel

19:42

@T.E.D. In comparison to other historical characters people are used to talking about: kings and emperors, much later figures such as medieval or even Early Modern people (I'm often surprised how people flatten "this happened long ago"), or extreme outliers such as Lucius Iucundus Caecilius or Ea-nāṣir

But yes, when judged by the standards of "an itinerant preacher from the backwater of the empire" the amount we know about historical Jesus and for example Paul or John the Baptist is remarkable

T.E.D.

I researched Alexander the Great a couple of years back. Most of the main sources we have for his life were actually written after the 4 Gospels, even though he died 300 years (a third of a millennium) before Jesus.

That being said, I think he's still better attested. But the talk could be had.

SPavel

Deveraux had a really good overview of the evolving scholarship on Alexander recently

acoup.blog/2024/05/17/…

It seems that "X wrote about Y a century later, and we only know about that because Z quotes him another 100 years later and Y's original text does not survive" is relatively common for sources regarding antiquity

T.E.D.

Yup.

SPavel

And for regions that are less well-attested, the problem persists much later - for example, we don't even have the original Primary Chronicle anymore

2 hours later…

The Historian

22:01

The Historian

22:22

Q: Did John Adams purge Freemasons from roles in government?

Bell 2024 ch. 7 claims that: The Skull and Bones Society also known as The Order of Death was founded at Yale University in 1832. The founding of this elite secret society came as a result of President John Quincy Adams purging freemasons from roles in government. Did John Adams purge Freemason...