ladyfalcon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ladyfalcon) wrote2008-07-22 01:10 am
ladyfalcon) wrote2008-07-22 01:10 am
Incidentally this is not actually why the Greeks matter.
So this was kind of a big weekend. I spent it down at St. Mary's as is becoming usual, hanging out with my friends, seeing Batman along with the rest of the modern world, etc. It was pretty awesome.
Less awesome is the fact that I left the book I'm currently reading at Krystle's, but I guess now she can read it, and in any case it's not as though I don't have plenty of other books to get on with.
If only they didn't raise my blood pressure quite so much.
I decided firstly to get started on Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill. I was fully expecting to enjoy it, as I, too, think that Greek thought is still important and influential, and I like cultural histories. The title even references The Iliad! It was sure, I thought, to be good.
God, though. It's the sort of revisionist history book that gives revisionism, history, and books a bad name. I'm only on page 60, and already the glaring problems are making me consider putting the book down without finishing, something that I never do.
For example, on page 57, there is this footnote:
"The oldest examples of an alphabet-in-the-making were found in the Sinai at Serabit el-Khadim, a honeycomb of ancient copper and turquoise mines, once worked by Semitic slaves and their Egyptian overseers. Though there is no reason to suppose that the idea of the alphabet first arose at this particular site (just that it offers our oldest extant evidence), there is good reason to think that the Sinai lies on the route of cultural transmission that takes us from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the fully articulated Semitic alphabet. Is it only coincidence that Moses, the greatest of all Hebrew figures and the one to whom the earliest Hebrew writings are credited, was known to have had an upper-class Egyptian education (and therefore to have been literate in hieroglyphs) and to have led Semitic slaves through the Sinai sometime toward the middle of the millennium? Is it possible that the legend of Moses's authorship of the ancient Torah possesses a kernel of historical truth - that he invented alphabetic writing, or, more likely, that he found the first truly literary use for this invention by committing the Commandments of the Hebrew god to stone tablets?"
To answer the authors questions, yes, it is a coincidence, and not a particularly compelling one, and no, it is not possible. I mean, I haven't heard anybody even suggest the possibility of Moses as an historical rather than literary figure. The real question as far as I can see is why the hell the discovery of texts in the same general region of the mountain included in a myth would ever lead anybody to suppose that the central figure of that myth invented the Hebrew alphabet or was the first person ever on earth to use the new writing system for anything more than basic accounting.
I should have known before this particular bit of dreck, however, how bad the book would be. Another irritation that I was willing to overlook before it became too much taken with everything else, is that the author treats Homer as an historical reality, without even bringing up the fact that lots of people have speculated on this question and no one has ever come up with anything conclusive to prove it. Cahill even admits that we have no biographical information on Homer other than his name. In my own career as a Classics major, I was taught that Homer was as much a character as Ajax or Achilles. Meanwhile, Cahill ignores this area altogether in order to focus on the far more important question of whether Homer was literate or not, or blind or not. The answers are yes and no. He couldn't be illiterate, of course, because the poems attributed to him are just too good. He describes them as "stories so leanly structured that nothing is repeated without purpose, few strings remain untied, and so much is left unsaid," that there is no way they could have been written by an illiterate person (just, god, think about it. OF COURSE they couldn't be written by an illiterate person, which in no way proves that the person who wrote them down was the person who was responsible for the major shape of the work or that they went by the name of Homer.
The coup de grace, however, is this.
"A type of literacy that can be grasped easily by almost anyone will tend to spread some kind of proto-democratic consciousness far and wide, even if this is accomplished only in small steps over a very long period of time. (In contrast, if our laws had been written in cuneiform instead of the alphabet, isn't it almost inevitable that slavery would still be legal?)"
NO NO IT IS NOT.
To be fair, the book I left at Krystle's was a crappy pulpy fantasy novel with the de rigueur exotic assassin etc., but at least it's not this crap. God.
Erin
Less awesome is the fact that I left the book I'm currently reading at Krystle's, but I guess now she can read it, and in any case it's not as though I don't have plenty of other books to get on with.
If only they didn't raise my blood pressure quite so much.
I decided firstly to get started on Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill. I was fully expecting to enjoy it, as I, too, think that Greek thought is still important and influential, and I like cultural histories. The title even references The Iliad! It was sure, I thought, to be good.
God, though. It's the sort of revisionist history book that gives revisionism, history, and books a bad name. I'm only on page 60, and already the glaring problems are making me consider putting the book down without finishing, something that I never do.
For example, on page 57, there is this footnote:
"The oldest examples of an alphabet-in-the-making were found in the Sinai at Serabit el-Khadim, a honeycomb of ancient copper and turquoise mines, once worked by Semitic slaves and their Egyptian overseers. Though there is no reason to suppose that the idea of the alphabet first arose at this particular site (just that it offers our oldest extant evidence), there is good reason to think that the Sinai lies on the route of cultural transmission that takes us from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the fully articulated Semitic alphabet. Is it only coincidence that Moses, the greatest of all Hebrew figures and the one to whom the earliest Hebrew writings are credited, was known to have had an upper-class Egyptian education (and therefore to have been literate in hieroglyphs) and to have led Semitic slaves through the Sinai sometime toward the middle of the millennium? Is it possible that the legend of Moses's authorship of the ancient Torah possesses a kernel of historical truth - that he invented alphabetic writing, or, more likely, that he found the first truly literary use for this invention by committing the Commandments of the Hebrew god to stone tablets?"
To answer the authors questions, yes, it is a coincidence, and not a particularly compelling one, and no, it is not possible. I mean, I haven't heard anybody even suggest the possibility of Moses as an historical rather than literary figure. The real question as far as I can see is why the hell the discovery of texts in the same general region of the mountain included in a myth would ever lead anybody to suppose that the central figure of that myth invented the Hebrew alphabet or was the first person ever on earth to use the new writing system for anything more than basic accounting.
I should have known before this particular bit of dreck, however, how bad the book would be. Another irritation that I was willing to overlook before it became too much taken with everything else, is that the author treats Homer as an historical reality, without even bringing up the fact that lots of people have speculated on this question and no one has ever come up with anything conclusive to prove it. Cahill even admits that we have no biographical information on Homer other than his name. In my own career as a Classics major, I was taught that Homer was as much a character as Ajax or Achilles. Meanwhile, Cahill ignores this area altogether in order to focus on the far more important question of whether Homer was literate or not, or blind or not. The answers are yes and no. He couldn't be illiterate, of course, because the poems attributed to him are just too good. He describes them as "stories so leanly structured that nothing is repeated without purpose, few strings remain untied, and so much is left unsaid," that there is no way they could have been written by an illiterate person (just, god, think about it. OF COURSE they couldn't be written by an illiterate person, which in no way proves that the person who wrote them down was the person who was responsible for the major shape of the work or that they went by the name of Homer.
The coup de grace, however, is this.
"A type of literacy that can be grasped easily by almost anyone will tend to spread some kind of proto-democratic consciousness far and wide, even if this is accomplished only in small steps over a very long period of time. (In contrast, if our laws had been written in cuneiform instead of the alphabet, isn't it almost inevitable that slavery would still be legal?)"
NO NO IT IS NOT.
To be fair, the book I left at Krystle's was a crappy pulpy fantasy novel with the de rigueur exotic assassin etc., but at least it's not this crap. God.
Erin
no subject