At 9:49 PM -0400 06/11/2000, Damon Agretto wrote:
>There were a few scholarly book published a few years ago challenging the
>timeline. However their thesis is that the dates are too OLD, and adjusts
>them about 150-200 years forward. One of the more significant ramifications
>of this is that it means that the Greek "Dark Ages" did not exist!
>
>If anyone is interested I'll get the titles. Only one is currently in
>print, and available from Amazon UK.
Damon, I'm interested in that "missing" Greek Dark Ages thing. Titles?
I appreciate the use of those terms, "civilization" vs. "culture", but it
seems to me problematic in some ways -- not the least being that it has
been used to put certain cultures on a pedestal and relegate others as
inferior. Not sure I want to get into it, as I know this is not your
intention, but the strength of the distinction is significant. Further, I
realize that writing for example is a useful technology in lots of ways and
significant too, but I wouldn't make Ong-ian type arguments that it was
teleologically inevitable and that it has some kind of salvation-like
significance to humankind. One question, how widespread must writing and
literacy be for a society to be a civilization? Widespread literacy is
fairly new among human beings. And as for sophisticated legal systems,
well, those have only applied to certain defendants for ages and ages,
right? This begs the question whether "civilization" as you define it
really generally has only existed as small, sometimes-temporary, elite
pockets within a wider and continuous landscape of ubiquitous "culture".
