In cross-examining an apologist I find myself in need of historical review of pretty much the entire timeline from Adam to now. Summarizing these proffered claims follows from the statement that almost anything major that happened in history came from Israelites or from Noah's or Abraham's descendants including, at least, the founding of Rome, the founding of Egypt (Egyptus/Zeptah), to the heritage of Pythagoras and Socratese (and most of the Greeks for that matter), the heritage of the Spartans, and all that.

In addition to a white-washing of history this could be an Israelite-heritage-washing or repainting of history. Has anyone here come across evidence to support or weaken this hypothesis?

fwiw, there was Lots going on that was never written or recorded, is that what you're thinking about?

just because it wasn't written/recorded doesn't mean it wasn't important!!

First you need to recognize that history as we consider it today didn't exist more than 200 years ago. Myth, legend, stories, history, can all be in the same paragraph. That was there world view. Even English "histories" like the travels of Sir John Mandevil were a mix of history and myth. We used to think that all of the Greek mythology was just legends, until we started finding the cities and the battle cites, and realized that these stories were a form of history.

So what make your type of task difficult, if not down right impossible, is that ancient history is almost impossible to seperate actual facts from legend. But that is my perspective from someone with a degree in English Literature, I have to see that older "non-fictions," were also fictions on some pages, and they don't always say when.

Do you know of a book I can read or sources I can read that describe and illustrate how history was kept before modern scholarship?

https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/4381/4587

I go to how people read the travels of Sir John Mandeville because it is relatively recent. 5-6th century. Plus it was super popular, with 400+ manuscript copies. Compare Chaucer, who only has 40ish copies from a much more recent time.

So there are lots of sources, and lots of commentaries, and are a good lens on how ancient histories were recorded.

For example: "All these versions show to some degree—sometimes to a large degree!—adaptation and what one used to refer to as ‘contamination.’ Some of them address the special interests of a precise audience, and we should remember that our concepts of the integrity of a text, of an ideal version as it left the hand of the author, was not an idea of which anyone in the Middle Ages would have had much grasp. Paul Zumthor’s concept of mouvance (1972) is really helpful: a book is continually recreated in transmission, and each recreation in its turn engenders more, which reflect the needs of that writer and his projected public"

So not only would the original writer adapt their facts and stories for its audience, but each time it is adapted a century or two later these facts and stories change. And that is within the last 1500 years! Trying to go back a few thousand years more to Israelite time. Its a mess.

Modern historians try to find the best consistencies and "recreate" the most factual history. It is an extremely educated guess, but still a guess. But, it is still one of the strongest Geographical authority concerning the medieval age.

Those are works of literature, not history. Why do you discount Bede, from 700 AD, whose history was sound, and focus on literary creations as if they were attempted histories?

The travels of Sir John Mandevil was both literature, and history. It was, and remains, the chief source of Medevil geography. And take a look at the Bible, it as well is an attempted history. Some happened, a lot didn't. The Israelite history would have more paralleled a mixture of history and story. As for Bebe, I can't speak to it with any authority, I haven't studied it in depth enough to provide an answer.

What in the bible really happened?

some of the births and deaths of rules have been confirmed. Different chronology, of course, but many of these rulers did exist.

It's "Bede," not "Bebe."

And you still haven't answered the question.

Why do you treat Chaucer as a writer of history when he never made any claim to that status?

And why do you ignore serious ancient historians like Thucydides, Josephus, and Sima Qian? They contradict your assertion that rigorous history started around 1800.

Oh Chaucer was purely literature, not history mixed with story. I just used him as an example of how popular John Mandeville was, that he had 10 times more manuscrips survive to modern day. I did not intend to imply that Chaucer wrote history.

Got it. Thanks.

I think that you are using the word history differently than most. The job of historian is older than the written word, so how do you figure that the discipline of history is only 200 years old?

Second I find it fairly easy to separate much of the myth from the lexicon. Putting aside for a moment that the Exodus described in the Bible didn't happen. I can without hesitation tell you that every fantastical and supernatural thing in the story didn't happen. No parting of the red sea, no destroying angel, no manna from heaven, no water from a rock, no burning bush, no finger of god writing on stone. None of it happened.

The same can be said for Achilles, he 100% was never dipped in the river Styx thereby making him invulnerable. Heracles wasn't a demigod. I could go on forever.

That doesn't mean that there wasn't a Moses, Achilles, or Heracles. It just means that were smart enough to know that they weren't wizards or superheros.

History books are written by authors paid by publishing houses, both of whom wish to please those in authority regarding how those in authority came to their positions. Thus the story of "history" puts the ancestors of those in authority in a good light and ignores much, if not all, the facts that don't involve said ancestors.

It's a rigged game.

roco-

are u suggesting there weren't any legit historical authors?

any who didn't want to be accurate, unbiased?

Accurate, fact based history is a modern phenomenon. It was not how people recorded history for thousands of Years. Myth, legend, stories, and facts were mixed together even by the most devoted of scholars. It comes from the discipline of history being oral, and people being primarily illiterate. Stories are easier for illiterate people to remember, so mix the accurate facts with legend the facts will, in some form, get passed down. Once literacy picked up in the 1800s then modern history disciplines became the name. Unfortunately before then, it really wasn't.

Guy3, you are going too far with this.

Literacy is important to history, but all that matters is the literacy of the scribes and historians. China was producing good history from 1000 BCE--Sima Qien's history from about 100 BCE was excellent--and there were good histories in the Middle East and elsewhere from that millennium as well. In Greece, Thucydides was excellent. In the Christian world, Josephus. . .

The use of poetry and epic, rhymes as well as rhythms, is critically important for the reasons you note. But those practices coexisted with formal history for centuries or millennia in different periods--Gregory Nagy studied popular epic performances in Europe in the middle of the 20th century--and the epic tradition ended in different places at different points. There was no sudden change from dark to light in historiography.

There was indeed a change around 1800 AD, when both evidence and social science had progressed sharply (coincident with the Industrial Revolution), but the change was not binary--and subsequent histories suffer from modern biases as well.

But is that true of Israelite histories? From what I have read Israelite histories are closer to the Travels of Sir John Mandevile then a hard history, that is why I use him as an example. History and geography of the Medievil age, but also stories. That seems pretty consistent with Israelite history, both fact and fiction.

Chinese, from what I can tell, was a less oral tradition than Israelite or Muslim. That is where a lot of this mixture came from, an attempt to pass on facts through non-literate masses. Again, John Mandevile was meant for the masses. Given Israelite religious history, it too was meant for the masses.

You are correct about the Hebrew histories, at least until the Josiah's reforms at about 620 BCE. From that point on there are good records and valuable, if tendentious (as all history) records.

My point was that your blanket statement about oral history being the rule until 1800 is inaccurate. Your narrower assertion about Hebrew history is probably--there is no evidence of Homeric-style poetic recitation in Palestine--correct, at least regarding the imprecise and changeable nature of the narrative. Indeed, the Bible itself contains evidence that Israel and Judah told different versions of the same events, each claiming vindication for its own cultural and religious superiority.

Do you know of an example of the disagreement between the Bible's descriptions of Israel and Judah?

Archeologically, Israel was richer and more powerful than Judah. They were both polytheistic and essentially different countries.

When the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests and exiles left Judah, after the return, stronger than Israel. The Josiah Reforms then transformed (at least the elite level of) Judean society into a monotheistic structure under the control of the YHWH cult.

In that reform, the Deuteronomists took the historical records of the two kingdoms--Chronicles and Kings--and rewrote them in a way that made Israel look like the lesser state. You'll note that it is the Israeli kings, disproportionately, who were backsliding polytheists while the Judaen kings were generally faithful monotheists.

That pattern--that both Israel and Judah were monotheistic from the time of Abraham but that Israel was far less valiant--is a form of historical revisionism that the surviving YHWH cult imposed on reality to the detriment of Israel.

This is very interesting. Do you have sources I can review to see for myself what seems to be most easily concluded? I haven't before heard of the YHWH cult.

William Dever is a good place to start.

He did a book entitled Who Were The Early Israelites And Where Did They Come From?" That's a good solid book. He also did one on whether God had a wife. There was also an excellent book by Redford on Egypt, Canaan and Israel, though that is older.

GNPE Wrote:
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> roco-
>
> are u suggesting there weren't any legit
> historical authors?
>
> any who didn't want to be accurate, unbiased?


"Legitimacy" may be in the eye of the beholder. Writers want to earn a living; I use that as my benchmark.

If a writer understands his market, that pretty much prepares him with regard to what to include and what to leave out.

Show me someone who is truly unbiased and I'll someone who has learned to please you.

"anything major that happened in history came from Israelites or from Noah's or Abraham's descendants"

According to apologists, everyone is a descendant of Noah. So of course, everything in history would come from Noah's descendants.

And since when did the Greeks have anything to do with the Israelites or Abraham? Don't say bible, that won't work.

And what about the entire history and the contributions of, say, China? Paper, gunpowder, etc. No Israelite connection there.

Egyptus is a Greek name and had nothing to do with Egypt. Don't even start.

Seriously, your posts sound fishy. That's three so far and they all ask us to debunk mormon apologist claims. Frankly, you sound like the apologist trying to plant a seed that the church might be true after all.

I have yet to meet one apologist that believes in a Global flood. Nibley himself called that a childs story, and when you become a man you need to drop that childishness. The majority of apologists believe in a local flood around the Black sea. They dismiss Joseph Smiths statements on the Global flood as him responding to the general narrative of his time. A local flood was not even a consideration in the 1800s, so it makes sense that Joseph would speak about a global flood only.

James E. Talmage was a geologists and rejected the world wide flood, and says it was a local flood.

Plus, the hebrew word for "nation" and "earth" were the same. So if Noah saw a hug local flood, it would look like the whole earth/nation was flooded.

The fair mormon page is far too small on this topic, I only know their opinions when listening to individuals give talks on Genesis accounts. and not one put forward a global flood view. THe fair Mormon page on it simply says that the general authorities teach the global flood, but there are many believing members who believe in a local flood. Kind of implying, its not mandatory to believe in a global flood.

OP was remarking on talking to an apologist who talked about Noah's descendants. The whole purpose of Noah was to save the human race through the global flood. So even if apologists in general don't take the flood story seriously, OP's did.

And the church's official stated position is a literal global flood. The apologists and those members that disagree therefore stand in direct opposition to the church and its leaders.

They can dismiss' JS 1830-era beliefs as a product of his time, but can they so easily discount "modern prophets"?

Spencer W. Kimball, The Miracle of Forgiveness, p. 136:
"This ascendancy of the natural man, this rejection of God's call to repentance, has caused the destruction of entire civilizations. In the early generations it is true that those who were sufficiently righteous followed Enoch to a translated life; but only eight, Noah and sons and their four wives, were preserved later through the great flood, all others being drowned…"

Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, pp. 104-05:
"For nearly six thousand years, God has held you in reserve to make your appearance in the final days before the second coming of the Lord. Some individuals will fall away; but the kingdom of God will remain intact to welcome the return of its head — even Jesus Christ. While our generation will be comparable in wickedness to the days of Noah, when the Lord cleansed the earth by flood, there is a major difference this time. It is that God has saved for the final inning some of His strongest children, who will help bear off the kingdom triumphantly. That is where you come in, for you are the generation that must be prepared to meet your God."

The church has declared the flood as literal doctrine in the Ensign as late as February 2014. "Hi, I'm Noah!" with a "Fact Box."

https://www.lds.org/ensign/2014/02/noah?lang=eng

Oh I agree the churches stance as taught by General Authorities is a global flood and all descendants of Noah. But he said "According to apologists, everyone is a descendant of Noah." This is not the stance of the apologist, it is the stance of church leaders.

I believed in a limited flood as a believer for 5 years before I left. My TBM ex-wife geologist believes in a local flood too. We both know the general authorities teach different, we just believed they got that from the protestant tradition and didn't change it.

James E. Talmage didn't believe in the global flood either, and some say that Talmage convinced David O. McKay of a local flood.

I thought I might come across that way. In seeking truth rushing to conclusions seems to get me in trouble with myself and others and puts me out of balance so some of my questions will definitely include some phrasing that could be taken as apologist language. I admit I am not fully decided on what to believe at the moment. My current position is one of attempted neutrality and seeking information to discover whether the position of the Brighamite branch and some of its offshoots are valid or whether they require unreasonable or unjustifiable leaps of faith.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/2019 01:22AM by aegishonoris.

Ancient Egypt (the early Dynastic Period) is dated circa 3100 BCE to 2686 BCE....

....while the time of King David (which is a convenient way to say something like: "beginnings of ancient Israel"), is around 1000 BCE. (About two thousand years later.)

I know of no one who attributes the beginnings of ancient Egypt to Jews (even if it were true that Jews, as a people, HAD existed in Egypt's early Dynastic Period, which they did not).

Since you are beginning your timeline with "Adam," my question is: Which species, to YOU, is the dividing line between "non-human" and "human" [meaning: "US"]?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/2019 01:11AM by Tevai.

I haven't decided where the line is between non-human and human yet. It seems easy to conclude from the presence of megalithic structures arranged across the world in precise geometric locations indicates the presence of one or more high-technology civilizations long before our present civilization, so I am disposed to think that intelligent humans have been around for at least 13000 years. I haven't found any reliable evidence to back that claim up though.

"It seems easy to conclude from the presence of megalithic structures arranged across the world in precise geometric locations indicates the presence of one or more high-technology civilizations long before our present civilization, so I am disposed to think that intelligent humans have been around for at least 13000 years. I haven't found any reliable evidence to back that claim up though."

Be careful in making conclusions. The structures do not mean that diffusion of one people happened throughout the world. People were doing things all by themselves without any influence from somewhere else.

It is fairly accepted that biologically we are no different than humans from 2 million years ago. There has been an evolution of cognition but the brain of a human 2 million years ago vs a brain today is built, for the most part, the same way, just smaller.

Remember that knowledge is cumulative. Language has existed forever and writing would have existed almost simultaneous with tools. It is just the preservation of the writing that we can measure.

There is no line between human and non-human. You may reach back and draw an arbitrary line, but the evolution was gradual: evolution rather than revolution.

I Googled "at what date did humans begin?" and the answers were:

1) The earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans are from the Middle Paleolithic [geological] period, which was about 200,000 years ago.

2) The first modern humans began moving out of Africa about 70,000-100,000 years ago.

Increasingly the evidence suggests that Neanderthals were roughly as intelligent as humans; they made art, they buried their dead with grave goods, and they cooperated in groups. They also interbred with Homo Sapiens Sapiens. I doubt Neanderthals were intellectually inferior to modern humans, at least not by much.

There surely is no clear dividing line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gfd4kFPWjzU

I loved this documentary concerning the Israelite and Cannanite connections.

Guy3 Wrote:
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> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gfd4kFPWjzU
>
> I loved this documentary concerning the Israelite
> and Cannanite connections.

This is a super good documentary, Guy3.

The narrative is very well presented, the visuals (some of them surprising, I think, to most people here) are extremely well done....and hidden underneath is an unexpectedly good dramatic arc (which is definitely not always true with documentaries).

I strongly recommend this documentary to anyone who is interested in the subject matter (origin and development of the Jews, the ancient history of the Middle East as presented in the Old Testament, etc.).

Thank you for posting this link!!

Nobody disputes that their culture was present all around the Mediterranean, including Greece, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Northern Africa, etc...and with the heart of it all right there in the coastal areas of Lebanon/Syria/Israel. They had culture, wealth and influence. They had the best ships (cedars of Lebanon and all that). Did they ever really go away? Or did they transform and just keep going under different names in various different enclaves and locales, possibly splitting off from each other and developing into different cultures and polities over the centuries?

(anono this week)
Well Rome was supposedly founded by Romulous and his brother and it gets tied in with the Sabine group of people. What's important to remember is that anciently tribes of people set up city states. Which had their own governments, politicians, armies, economies. Closely related to the Romans were the Trojans which settled the islands of Greece. They were the dominant race of people. From the pottery they left and paintings, evidently they were interested in the attractive male form with strong shoulders, and had dark hair cut short, with very light skin. They left us most of the great classical architectural styles that we still use today. They left us forms of democracy and of republican government where there are appointed leaders from the nobility that serve for a time, without pay.

None of these groups from Rome or Greece had anything to do with Abraham, or were related to Jews at all. Yet they left us more of our Western culture of art, freedom, government (and our 1st amendment).

I would like to know more about how the Greeks and Romans gave us the First Amendment. Can you flesh that argument out?

yeah, id learned that it went the other way that the Fathers looked to their (idealized perhaps unto fiction) version of Rome rather than a literal train of thought and development from Rome on down.

There was no Freedom of Speech in ancient Greece and Rome. In both countries, people were routinely jailed or executed for criticizing the government. Freedom of Speech extended no farther than the power of the faction to which one began.

Freedom of Speech emerged from English history during the early stages of parliamentary development, when it was used to protect the nobility and then the Commons from the power of the monarch. Greece and Rome, by contrast, had no independent legislature: the elite were simultaneously the legislature and the executive.

Nor do I like the racial history here. Trojans in fact did not settle the Greek islands. "Trojans" were residents of a city on the coast of Turkey. Nor were they any more closely related to Romans than, say, other Indo-European peoples in Anatolia or southern Russia. And the notion that Greeks valued "light skin?" That's evident in pottery? By the pottery standard, Greeks valued red skin--or terra cotta, depending on the color of the ceramics.

Beat me by this much.

Yup. We are on the same page.

Important to note is that the form of government is unrelated to the principals of the government. There could be a democratic government that imposes a state religion. There could be a communist government that encourages freedom of speech.

Also the Trojans were Greek and the Romans were Latin/Sabine but it is pretty hard to separate the Etruscans, Umbrians, and Latins since they all lived in pretty much the same space. It is like saying that Athens and Corinth were two different races.

I would quibble over the Etruscans. They were probably not Indo-European (their language is still impenetrable), so they were less closely related to the other peoples you describe.

"In cross-examining an apologist I find myself in need of historical review of pretty much the entire timeline from Adam to now."

Have you prayed about finding it? Perhaps it is buried in a cement box somewhere and an angel could guide you to it?

Your task is too broad.

There are good academic books say, challenging David's kingdom, or the Flood, or the Exodus. But no single author is going to cover the history of the world to Socrates. Or do so well. Or do so with any level of detail.

Pick a number of topics, like the above, and between Google, Amazon or your local library you will find some interesting works.

Finally, my I suggest that you look into them because you are interested, not just to Bible bash with someone.

If you will take the time to read Sitchen's translation of The Lost Book of Enki most of your questions will be answered

aegishonoris Wrote:
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> ...from Adam to now.


Well, first off, there was no Adam, which makes the rest of the apologist's claims rather irrelevant.

Yes, there is that.

I saw these three posts from "aegishonoris"appearing so suddenly together and he'd never posted before. I haven't read all through all of them so if somebody else did this already, apologies, but I looked him up.

Ordo "Aegis Honoris" means Barony of Three Mountains: Given in recognition of exceptional courtesy and chivalric behavior.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/2019 05:50PM by mel.

I picked the name because I liked the etymological roots of shield and honor, so I thought shield of honor. Thanks for looking that up for me though, kind of cool.

OK, I'm late to the party on this thread, but I see all manner of things here that cause me to roll my eyes. Oy vey.

The history of mathematics is kind of a hobby of mine. It is a pretty decent proxy for the history of civilization in general.

Humans have been working with integers since well before recorded history. However, we did not have a rigorous definition of the integers until the mid-1800s. That does not mean that we were not able to correctly prove quite a lot about integers before the mid-1800s. There were some vexing questions we didn't know how to handle before then, but the vast majority of questions could be handled just fine with our informal understanding of integers.

The Babylonians knew how to calculate the square root of two to roughly 5 decimal places in 2,000 BCE. We have a written record of the base 60 fraction they used, and it dates to when they were just beginning to figure out how to write at all, so they already knew how to calculate SQRT(2) back then. They probably suspected that the number was irrational, since the algorithm they used gave a never ending series of better approximations. It wasn't until Pythagoras in 600 BCE that we have a recorded proof that the number was indeed irrational. This upset the Pythagoreans so much, that the word "irrational", which literally means lacking a ratio (between the side and diagonal of a square), to this day is the word used to mean "this makes no sense".

BTW, the question the Pythagoreans were trying to answer was this: if you took a perfectly accurately measured diagonal of a square, and started with the end of the diagonal exactly on one of the corners of the square, and then "walked" the diagonal around the square, flipping it end over end until the end of the diagonal ended exactly on a corner again, how many flips would it take before that happened?

The answer in the Pythagorean proof of the irrationality of the square root of two, is that the end of this hypothetically perfect diagonal would never land perfectly on a corner of the square again, once you started walking it around the square. There is no ratio of diagonals to sides of a square. The proof is actually very simple. One year of HS algebra is more than enough to follow it. But the conclusion, that once you start walking the diagonal around the square, the end of the diagonal will never ever ever land exactly on a corner again, makes no intuitive sense. How is it possible to draw a conclusion about what is essentially an infinite process?

Back to Babylon. They knew how to calculate the square root of 2 four thousand years ago. How many of you would know how to do it today if you had to, and didn't have a calculator or calculus book handy? Yet it wasn't until the mid to late 1800s that we had a rigorous definition of irrational numbers. In fact, we were quite bad at understanding infinite processes in general until the 1600s, when Newton and Leibniz and the gang developed calculus, at which point, things like Zeno's Paradox were solvable (yes, indeed, you can walk across the room, even if it can theoretically be subdivided into an infinite number of subtasks).

My very long-winded point in all of this is that even though precise mathematical definitions of much of very basic mathematics didn't exist until the 1800s, a great deal of mathematics was correctly developed before that. Euclid's Elements was written around 300 BCE. It is still in print. It is about a 4 inch thick paperback book. Calculus unleashed an ocean of mathematics. It dates to the 1600s, and made the Industrial Revolution possible.

We got a lot better at a lot of things in the 1800s, but that hardly means that what was done before then was worthless. I think that also applies to history. It is silly to say that history was unreliable before then. We have ways of corroborating or debunking claims. There is a great deal of information we can gather separate from written accounts.

Yes, the history of Utah, 1700 to the present would sound different if written by the Utes instead of the Mormon settlers. I don't think they would be so different as to be mutually incomprehensible. There is an objective reality out there, even if our description of it is colored by our point of view.

OK, beat that to death. I have a second point, but I'll do a separate post. You can take a break for a while. <whew>

You make some great points here to help clarify what my true position was. It isn't that everything is pointless before the 1800s, but that the discipline is different. That is why I provided the link.

Because story is often mixed with facts you often had to find many, many different historys to crack down what was fact and what was fiction. The more the fact was consistent, the more like it wasn't part of the fictional narrative. But then again, the fictions would also get repeated a lot.

My point is it is super tricky, but there are lots of people who dedicate their lives trying to sort it out.

Its kind of like science before 1800s. Even amazing scientists were also alcamists, and astromers were also strong astrologers. The fact and the supernatural was still seen as one in many eyes, and a non-supernatural science is difficult to find before 1800. But does that mean all this supernatural mixed with science is worthless? No, because they had some great stuff, solid science stuff mixed in.

Same with the history, its there but written with a different paradigm.

You want a book to distinguish fact from fiction about Israelite History? Read Finkelstein and Silberman . "The Bible Unearthed". Written by archaeologists.

hgc2 Wrote:
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> Read Finkelstein and Silberman . "The Bible Unearthed". Written by archaeologists.

Wow, thanks, sounds good!

OK, part 2. Upthread a ways, OP (aegishonoris) opines:
"I haven't decided where the line is between non-human and human yet.

COMMENT: That is a hotly debated topic among anthropologists/archeologists or whatever form of "ologists" worries about that particular question. But the general consensus among scientists with the possible exception of young earth apologists is that it is well before 13,000 years ago. In fact, the trend has been that as new information is uncovered, the date keeps moving earlier. I think it is widely accepted that if you took a baby from 50,000 years ago, and raised it in our culture, it would be indistinguishable from a baby born today.

"It seems easy to conclude from the presence of megalithic structures arranged across the world in precise geometric locations indicates the presence of one or more high-technology civilizations long before our present civilization,....

COMMENT: No, it is not easy to conclude that. It there were high tech civilizations, where are their garbage dumps. Or did they take all their gold plates back to heaven when they left?

Edit To Add: If you meant that the Babylonians themselves were a high tech civilization, I would agree with that. If you meant Erik von Daniken type aliens, I do not agree.

Megaliths are not all that mysterious. You can crack rock with fire, and cut it with rope coated with wet sand, or, if you have iron, you can make chisels. But it can be done with stone age tools if you're willing to spend a lot of time. You can move large rocks on tree trunk rollers, and lift them upright by digging a hole at each end of the pillar rock, wedge it up a bit with a tree trunk, fill in the resulting wedge shaped air space with dirt, raise the fulcrum rock a bit, rinse and repeat. Eventually, the pillar is vertical enough that it slides into the hole you dug on the low end. You wedge it around, or use ropes to get it vertical, and pack dirt and rock around the base. Stone age tools suffice.

To get the cross piece on top of two pillars, bury them in dirt, building out a long dirt slope. Roll the cross piece on tree trunk rollers to the top of the dirt hill, and place it on top of the pillars. Remove the large pile of dirt. Again, huge amount of work, but stone age tools would suffice.

As for orienting the megaliths to astronomical points like solstices and equinoxes, we know that the Babylonians and Egyptians both had sophisticated mathematics 3 to 4 thousand years ago, because we have records. Presumably, their math skills go back farther than the records do. They had a lot of time to watch the sun and the moon, and their geometry skills were pretty good. Egyptians in particular had to regularly resurvey all their lands after the annual Nile floods. If Caucasus invaders populated late Ice Age Europe, they may well have brought Babylonian math and astronomy skills with them. The Caucasus are not that far from Babylon.

However the megaliths were designed and built, there is no need to resort to high tech aliens.


"so I am disposed to think that intelligent humans have been around for at least 13000 years. I haven't found any reliable evidence to back that claim up though.

COMMENT: Well, it is true that marks of civilization such as cities don't show up until the establishment of agriculture, but agriculture depended on a stable climate with regular seasons, and that didn't happen until the last ice cap had receded from Europe and North America. There is plenty of evidence of small villages, tools, and group hunting in preceding millennia. There are people here who pay considerably more attention to the precise dates and current research than I do, but I think it safe to say there is overwhelming evidence that humans were essentially of the same intelligence 13,000 years ago as now, and substantial evidence that that was true 50,000 or more years ago. As I mentioned earlier, if anything, additional research keeps moving the date earlier.

Hopefully others can clean up my sloppy dates, and add more detail.

For those of you who like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, there is a similar work I'd like to pass along - Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress. It was the 2004 Massey Lecture series, broadcast on CBC. It is a 5 hour series of lectures that I found fascinating when I heard them back in 2004. They can be listened to for free from CBC, or purchased.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-2004-cbc-massey-lectures-a-short-history-of-progress-1.2946872



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/2019 07:30PM by Brother Of Jerry.

First I would suggest that you read Zecharia Sitchen's translation of "The Lost Book Of Enki"
Then read Michael Tellinger's Book "The Slave Species of the Gods".
In these two tomes are the logical answers to your Question.
These books, Particularly Enki can be disturbing to someone not possing an open mind.
I foun themn to be enlightening.

Also I recomend The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish.