err hello?? I SHOT DOWN your outdated source, with mine updated one.
No. We were having "source wars" on two different questions:
1. Was slavery an essential prerequisite to Western technological advancement? Europe's technology began improving substantially starting from the 12th century, with a setback in the disastrous 14th century, but otherwise continuing through to the present day. By the 15th century, Europe was second only to the Islamic world, with the power to reach out around the globe and tackle any other civilization (except Ottoman Turkey) in the world. This was long before any European involvement in the African slave trade (at that time, still strictly the business of the native-Africans and Arabs). And I do not see why a Scotsman inventing the steam engine would have been impossible without Africans being mistreated in Jamaican sugar plantations; the two don't look connected, nor do I see anything in your sources that draws such a connection: rather, the steam engine was one more link in the chain of technical advances, one that turned out particularly profitable. Within the United States, it has been argued that New England textile mills would never have been as profitable as they were if Dixieland cotton had not been so cheap (because of the uncompensated labor)-- now here, we have an ongoing back-and-forth argument among the scholars, "Time on the Cross" saying slavery was immensely profitable, the first wave of critics saying it wasn't so, settling somewhere in the middle, and I see no reason to think that the most recent publications are going to be the last word. The overall historical pattern, still, is that New England DID NOT SEE the continuation of the Dixieland system as vital to their interests, quite the contrary: New Englanders were the ones who fought the hardest to kill it, and did quite well for themselves industrially, even better than before, once the Confederacy was defeated. None of these facts can be disputed, nor do your sources try to do so; therefore, while it may well be true that some New Englanders made a lot of "blood money" off of the existence of slavery, the notion that New England industry
could not have been profitable at all, and
would never have started, in slavery's absence just makes no sense.
2. How violent were the Sumerians? Keegan's basic point about the nature of "towns" from the beginning has not been "shot down" nor do I think it can be: there is no purpose whatsoever, except defense against violent raiders, for such features as walls, ditches, fences, or for that matter the clustering of houses all together in one place to begin with. Your notion that there was no violence at all is just completely untenable. What the "Ubaid vs. Uruk" papers do show is that the Ubaid period was not characterized by colonization, with obliteration of natives, as in the Uruk period; neighboring ethnicities were learning from each other rather than conquering each other, and so there must have been a lot of non-violent interaction. Therefore, my thesis that Ubaid was just as violent as Uruk is also untenable, and I admit that. But your zero-violence thesis is further refuted, quite aside from what Keegan has to say, by
one of your own sources indicating that these "elites" did no kind of long-range trading except in
weaponry.
First of all, the Ubaid period doesn't "start" at 4,000BCE
it ENDS at 4000 BCE !!
Ubaid period - Wikipedia
It starts in 5300BCE !!
Somebody has been changing terminologies around. The terminology I was raised on is that there was an "Eridu" period (first spread of agriculture from Syria/Anatolia into Mesopotamia, only in areas with high water-tables, starting a few centuries before 5000 BCE, ending with a shortlived "Eridu II" period where ditch irrigation was tried, and then rapidly failed, unable to cope with shifts in climate and watercourses) followed by the "Ubaid" period (starting a few centuries before 4000 BCE, ending with the onset of metallurgy; latter centuries from ~3800 BCE marked off as "Ubaid II" during which another climate-shift to dryer conditions was better coped with, by better irrigation systems than the "Eridu II" experiments). The Wiki article you cite renames "Eridu I" as "Ubaid 1", "Eridu II" or "Hadji Muhammad" as "Ubaid 2", "Ubaid I" as "Ubaid 3", and "Ubaid II" as "Ubaid 4"; I don't know who wants to change all the names around or why, but I wish established terminology was just left alone. At least I understand now why you have consistently had earlier dates for the onset of "Ubaid" than mine: MY usage of "Ubaid" (which was EVERYONE'S usage until quite recently) is what your article calls "Ubaid 3/4".
And my link was not bogus, either.
Oh yes it was; one more time, look at THIS:
the use of a specialized labor force, particularly along the waterway now known as the
Shatt al-Arab
I keep pointing out to you: NO SUCH THING AS THE SHATT AL-ARAB EXISTED UNTIL MEDIEVAL TIMES! The Persian Gulf used to reach much further to the northwest, and the Tigris and Euphrates emptied into it separately; it took thousands of years of silting before the Shatt al-Arab came to be. Page down in the article on
Eridu, until you get to the map: do you see that big area in the southeast of Iraq where Sumerian towns just
aren't there? That was all underwater (Eridu was
on the shoreline when it was founded); what the map shows as "the Gulf" is how it was in Assyrian/Babylonian times, already considerably retreated from where it was in Sumerian times, but still nowhere near to the stage where the Tigris and Euphrates started to come together.
This is a very basic error, and not the only one: compare the rest of what it has to say about the Sumerians, with what the Ubaid article you linked to above has to say about the chronology, and you see that it is claiming that "by 5000 BCE" (that is, at the very beginning of "Eridu I" / "Ubaid 1"), all the developments were already in place which, in fact, would not be present until "Ubaid II" / "Ubaid 4", fifteen centuries later. I don't know for sure if they're making the same mistakes about Egypt, India, and China, but I would not be surprised to find that they are back-projecting everything that
ever happened in the prehistories of those places to the
earliest date for any agriculture at all (when all that had yet happened was "somebody had noticed the idea of planting seeds"). Developments like the Agricultural Revolution did not take place in one eye-blink.
I know what I was arguing,
you are the one who is clearly clueless here.
Then, TELL me what you are trying to argue. If the words you were saying before did not convey the point you wanted to make, try some different words, instead of fighting about whose fault it was, transmitter or receiver, that the message got garbled along the way.
I don't even know what to say to you. You are still supporting my point and you don't even realize it.
Try saying to me what your point IS. I thought your point was: Pakistanis would be just as well off (or just as badly off!) if we erased all this "technological" advancement all the way back to "Eridu I" initial-stage agriculture. Well first off, about 99% of Pakistanis would have to die, immediately, since initial-stage agriculture couldn't feed them: you are not allowed to grow wheat or barley, just the wild grass strains they were bred from, and you may not grow them anywhere you need to bring in water from elsewhere, nor may you have any animals. The remaining people have to be stripped, of anything cloth or metal or carved-wood among their possessions; you are allowed to have stone and clay only. THEN you would be running Pakistan like "Mesopotamia 8000 years ago"-- and you think there would be no difference?
The Late stone age ended 10,000 years ago.
No, the Late Stone Age ("Neolithic") STARTED ~10,000 years ago. The Stone Age ENDED with the use of metals ("Bronze Age"; there is an ambiguous transitional period often called "Chacolithic", that is, Copper-Stone Age, when people had found copper but didn't quite know how to work with it yet). What ended 10,000 years ago was the MIDDLE Stone Age ("Mesolithic").
Who are you to make this claim?
That
ukht is not known to be used, ever, by anybody, to mean "distant descendant"?
Anybody has a perfect right to say that, until you show otherwise.
Are you an expert in Arabic?
I'm not ignorant about Semitic languages, or how they work in general; but that's hardly the point here. THIS is the point:
Show me any expert in Arabic, or even a non-expert, who can demonstrate any usage, any time, by anybody, of
ukht, or any other word with primary meaning "sister" from any language, from any period of history, to mean "distant descendant". I don't think you can. You show an expert saying that
ukht could mean somebody who is related not by blood, but rather by ties of friendship or community: so? It does not make that passage in the Qur'an any better if it means: Mary was a non-blood-related friend of Aaron; or, Mary was a member of the same community with Aaron; it would still be saying that Mary and Aaron lived at the same time. What you need, if you are going to make that passage in the Qur'an true, is a usage of the word for people widely separated in time: none of your experts claim that any such usage has ever existed.
It was ridiculous, is what it was.
The analogy between the English and Arabic verbal roots for "to stick"? It was an EXACT analogy: the Arabic root
alif-lam-qof means "to stick together", just like the English "to stick", and it has a lot of derivatives, with varying meaning, just as the English root does. That doesn't imply that every one of those derivatives has "as part of its meaning" the meanings of every other derivative from the root. The specific derivative
alaqa, according to the EXPERTS from the time right after Muhammad, when the language was still much the same as Muhammad's own speech, meant a "clot" of blood or a "clump" of mud or a "leech" (from the common belief, shared by Greeks and later Europeans as well, in "spontaneous generation" of verminous creatures: here, the leech is thought of as a congealing of pestilential mud).
Now, I've seen Muslim apologists who say, OK, the traditional translation "blood-clot" is no good (
even though that's what the people who listened to Muhammad would have taken him to be saying!), but let's translate it as "leech", either because the embryo looks like a leech at that point (meh, no more than it looks like any other little vermin), or because it is acting like a blood-sucking parasite (rather an insulting way to describe it, but, I guess so). I don't think "leech" is a great translation (in the context of the beliefs of that time, even "leech" would imply something that formed by a
congealing process, which is what you need to avoid); however, at least it is using an early-attested meaning
for the specific derivative alaqa. But this isn't what the embryological paper you cited wants to do: they say, let's go back to its
root, and therefore claim that it could mean
anything that clings or adheres to anything else (anything that in English we might describe by
some derivative of "to stick"). So, it's a reference to how the embryo implants itself in the uterine wall: isn't that a marvelous anticipation of modern science! This is the same kind of thing that (as I thought you agreed) is so maddening in posts like Abdullah's opener: make the words as vague as possible, and then pick out one precise interpretation that just happens to fit modern science, and start oohing and aahing about how wonderfully exact the Qur'an is.
I would give you a piece of my mind on what I think your opinions imply about you... but i just don't care enuff about it.
Is Islam in accordance with rationality? If you want to convince anybody that it is, you need to dispense with all this emotional pouting. Argue against me as fiercely as you like: but don't you understand that when you say you're just too angry to talk anymore, you undermine the concept that Islam can be defended
rationally?
