The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(04-24-2020, 03:39 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-23-2020, 10:45 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Interesting connection. I've never seen that, but it makes some sense.

Arnold Toynbee tells us that when the Sahara was green, the Nile Valley was practically uninhabited. It was simply too difficult for people to exploit because it was thick in reeds when much of the rest of North Africa was highly habitable. But as the Sahara desiccated people got desperate and found their way to the Nile Valley, chopped the reeds and channeled the river into small plots of land, and survived. Others went south into African savannas and would be lost to history or north to the Mediterranean zone of climate in the Maghreb and some coastal zones of Libya. People who failed to move starved.

The first settlers of the Nile Valley probably remembered the verdant Sahara. The Egyptians are not known for fantasy except in their religion.   But the Egyptians developed irrigation, large-scale building, and sailing... As Toynbee said, the optimum for human settlement is the environment that requires much sophistication to allow people to adapt, but not so much as to waste most such effort. The savannas of central Africa are fine for hunter-gatherers, and the desert is livable only for people who keep moving from one place of forage to the next -- if not completely barren.

I have been curious about the Bronze Age fall for a while.  1177 B.C.: the Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline is one pretty much official account.  Less official is an internet armchair historian theory that claims ‘The Eye of the Sahara’ land pretty well matches the only description we have of Atlantis.  If the water level was shifting about that time, it is about plausible.  For example, the Eye has the same circular structure, the dimensions are the same, and the proposed site of Atlantis is near the Atlas mountains.  Atlantis may be one of the ancient civilizations that went away when the Sahara dried up.

I’m not committed to it, but find it interesting.

Interesting discussion on antiquity... could be taken to some other thread, as it has little to do with the contemporary polarization on American politics. "Atlantis" has been applied in theory to

(1) the remarkable civilization of the Minoans that died off due to the effects of the eruption of the Santorini volcano

(2) South America, which such ancient seafarers as the Phoenicians  reached but later people forgot about

(3) Central America, which has pyramids somewhat similar to those of Egypt

(4) now-submerged lands in what is now the Persian-Arabian Gulf which might have been pleasant-enough places for advanced civilization by standards of the time, lands watered by the successor of the Tigris and Euphrates that got more melt-water from the Zagros Mountains of what is now western Iran and the highlands of eastern Turkey when winters in those areas were colder and snowier.

The Green Sahara is a new one to me. The irony is that the civilization that may have existed there had more connections to sub-Saharan Africa, which except for Ethiopia has been quite unimpressive for most of human history. The people of the Green Sahara were black -- not white. The styles of basket-weaving are typical of sub-Saharan Africa, and not of ancient Europe. The people depicted in the art are clearly Negroid.