Bullshit history that turned out to be true

Great Debates
126

I also think we might want to differentiate between different kinds of bullshit.

  1. Willful Bullshit: Where we ignore evidence because it challenges our beliefs in some way. (Jefferson & Hemings being a good example.)

  2. Incomplete Bullshit: Records are often spotty and sometimes the discovery of new evidence requires a reinterpretation of the past.

  3. Historical Bullshit: Sometimes we start off with primary source documents that are full of bullshit. When you start out with a foundation of bullshit you tend to just pile more bullshit atop it.

I’m sure there are more types of bullshit.

127

I’m not sure where the “bullshit history that turned out to be true” is here. Was the eruption of Thera c. 1600 BC really considered a myth at one time? That’s not my understanding, but I’m not a subject matter expert, so I could very well be wrong.

As to the Thera = Atlantis hypothesis, it really doesn’t hold any water, if you’ll excuse the pun. Thera had a Minoan colony at Akrotiri that was obliterated by the eruption, but the Minoan “mainland” on Crete survived. As I understand it, there’s conflicting opinion among archaeologists and historians as to the extent of the damage inflicted on Minoan Crete and the impact on Minoan civilization. Minoan artifacts have been found above the ash layer from the eruption, from centuries later. It was around that time that archaeological evidence starts turning up of the Myceneans displacing, conquering, or absorbing the Minoans, so it seems quite plausible it was a significant, even precipitating, factor in Minoan Crete’s long-term decline, but it was hardly the destruction of a great island-continent and its empire in a single day and night.

Then there’s the problem that Minoan Crete only resembles Plato’s Atlantis if you tilt your head just right, squint really hard, and engage in liberal hand-waving.

And there’s the not exactly trivial problem that Plato explicitly places Atlantis “beyond the Pillars of Hercules”, which we know from copious contemporaneous evidence refers to the Straits of Gibralter - Plato’s Atlantis was in the Atlantic Ocean, not the Eastern Mediterranean. Plato also claims that the remnants of sunken Atlantis are still present as muddy shoals that make navigation difficult and dangerous. Not many Athenians of Plato’s day would have had any first hand, or even second-hand, knowledge of the Atlantic, so that detail probably wouldn’t have seemed implausible. On the other hand, the Athenians of Plato’s day had extensive first-hand experience with the Eastern Mediterranean, and its distinct lack of “muddy shoals”.

You can find some hand-waving among “Thera = Atlantis” supporters that the phrase “the Pillars of Hercules” was also used to describe some geographical feature of the Easter Mediterranean, but that supposed alternate use is otherwise completely unattested, and strikes me as pretty blatant special pleading.

You’ll also find claims that Plato took the basic facts of the Thera eruption and transplanted them to the Atlantic for story reasons. Which, ok, but then, to what extent is Thera even really Atlantis anymore? Plato almost certainly drew upon any number of folk-historical memories of past subsidences, catastrophic floods, volcanic eruptions, and other disasters, as well as folk-historical memories of the Minoans, Mycenaeans, and other foreign empires, as inspiration, and to lend some verisimilitude to his fable.

But I don’t think modern evidence of Thera’s eruption has had the effect of revealing any “bullshit history that turned out to be true.”

128

Afghanistan, too?

129

I agree with this one. I’ve been hearing the “Thera inspired the myth of Atlantis” thing since I was a kid, and I think it just survived because it was exotic. It’s not really a convincing explanation. I say a lot about it in my webpage on Atlantis – Atlantis — The Lost Continent – The Writings of Stephen R. Wilk

130

I remember the story. The dénouement didn’t involve disputed meteorites. Maybe they were mentioned in the discussion.

131

The cause is “horribly flawed” to you, and to a lesser extent to me. But for them it obviously wasn’t, in their point of view they were dying for a better future for all mankind.

132

As you say it was as futile as thousands (at least) of individual deaths in WWII, and in their eyes capitalism was an evil in the world.

133

The meteorites were mentioned by Henry towards the very end. He quotes a statement by (IIRC) Thomas Jefferson about meteorites as a hint that gave him an idea where to look for the solution to the puzzle. It’s not pivotal to the story, and the story isn’t about meteorites (even though it is, of course, possible that it was the Jefferson quote from which Asimov got his inspiration).

134

The meteorites came up (as I recall) earlier in the conversation as I recall (as typical, Asimov has an earlier discussion before the main mystery, with some aspect of the earlier conversation proving to be the linchpin of the solution to the main mystery).

135

Here’s the passage from the end of the story:

Click to show

"In 1807, Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale reported seeing the fall of a meteorite at a time when the existence of meteorites was not accepted by scientists. Thomas Jefferson, a rationalist of enormous talent and intelligence, on hearing the report, said, ‘I would sooner believe that a Yankee professor would lie than that a stone would fall from heaven.’ "

“Yes,” said Avalon at once, “but Jefferson was wrong. Silliman did not lie and stones did fall from heaven.”

“Quite so, Mr. Avalon,” said Henry, unruffled. “That is why the quotation is remembered. But considering the great number of times that impossibilities have been reported, and the small number of times they have been proven possible after all, I felt the odds were with me.”

However, Asimov was exaggerating Jefferson’s reaction.

What Jefferson actually said about the 1807 shower of meteorites in Connecticut was:

We certainly are not to deny whatever we cannot account for. A thousand phenomena present themselves daily which we cannot explain, but where facts are suggested, bearing no analogy with the laws of nature as yet known to us, their verity needs proofs proportioned to their difficulty. A cautious mind will weigh well the opposition of the phenomenon to everything hitherto observed, the strength of the testimony by which it is supported, and the errors and misconceptions to which even our senses are liable. It may be very difficult to explain how the stone you possess came into the position in which it was found. But is it easier to explain how it got into the clouds from whence it is supposed to have fallen? The actual fact however is the thing to be established, and this I hope will be done by those whose situations and qualifications enable them to do it. I salute you with respect.

 
There were well-documented meteorites from medieval times onward, such as the Ensisheim meteorite of 1492:

The fall of the meteorite through the Earth’s atmosphere was observed as a fireball at a distance of up to 150 kilometers from where it eventually landed. Residents of the walled town and nearby farms and villages gathered at the location to raise the meteorite from its impact hole and began removing pieces of it. A local magistrate interfered with the destruction of the stone, in order to preserve the object for King Maximilian, the son of the reigning Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III. A piece of the meteorite was sent to Cardinal Piccolomini (later Pope Pius III) at the Vatican along with a number of related verses written by Brant.

Nobody knowledgeable doubted the existence of meteorites, but their origin was assumed to be from elsewhere on earth, thrown up by a distant volcano or something.

In 1794 the German physicist, Ernst Florens Chladni published a paper attributing their origin to outer space. That was initially ridiculed, but it was accepted by other scientists within only 10 years, after analysis showed that meteorites contained alloys not known on earth.

136

Thanks. I guess I was wrong about it coming up earlier in the story (Asimov often used that trick, but not always, apparently)

137

Herotodus’ histories are the classic example of this. They were for a long time considered all but myth. But actually a lot of them have been borne out by subsequent archeology (e.g. the discovery of the city of Gelonus).

138

Richard the Third’s “humpback”, which was considered anti-yorkist Tudor propaganda (propagated by William Shakespeare), in an era when physical deformity was considered caused by moral failings.

But when his body was discovered it did indeed suffer from spinal curvature.

139

I’m reading Herodotus just now: he claims at one point that Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa (he uses “Libya”):

Libya is washed on all sides by the sea except where it joins Asia, as was first demonstrated, so far as our knowledge goes, by the Egyptian king Necho, who, after calling off the construction of the canal between the Nile and the Arabian Gulf, sent out a fleet manned by a Phoenician crew with orders to sail west about and return to Egypt and the Mediterranean by way of the Straits of Gibraltar. The Phoenicians sailed from the Arabian Gulf into the southern ocean, and every autumn put in at some convenient spot on the Libyan coast, sowed a patch of ground, and waited for next year’s harvest. Then, having got in their grain, they put to sea again, and after two full years rounded the Pillars of Heracles in the course of the third, and returned to Egypt. These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right - to northward of them. This is how Libya was first discovered by sea.

I’ve italicised the statement that makes people’s ears prick up. If you were sailing west around southern Africa, the sun would be on your right and to the North. Herodotus’ doesn’t believe this can be true, but of course we do.

I don’t know if this is bullshit history or not, because regardless of the accuracy of observations of the sun, it’s a hell of a claim. Does anyone know what the balance of opinion is on this?

140

I don’t see any reason to doubt it. There’s nothing implausible about it.

141

Well, the bits that make me skeptical are:

  1. The Cape of Good Hope has wrecked a lot of ships, well into modern times. Getting round it in basic, oar-powered vessel on the very first try seems like a big stroke of luck.
  2. They stopped twice to plant crops. Which means they landed somewhere fertile and stayed there for several months. How likely is it this fertile land was uninhabited? Or if they did meet people, did they really establish peaceful co-existence with no shared language? Humans aren’t usually very good at that.
  3. Generally, there’s a lot of ways to not survive a voyage like that so how lucky did they have to be?

I’m not saying it didn’t or couldn’t happen - I don’t know, hence asking! But the Ancient Med civilisations were not regularly sailing round Africa so if it is true it is pretty amazing. And the more amazing it is, the more you have to question it.

142

The first one was indeed thought to be a fake, but to my knowledge, no-one has ever brought a live platypus to Europe. Churchill attempted to have one imported to Britain in 1943, but it didn’t make it.

The Australian government is never keen on allowing exports of their native fauna, and platypus are tricky enough to keep alive now. None have lived very long after leaving- I think the current pair in San Diego zoo (the only ones outside Australia at present) are the record holders.

The fact that they laid eggs was considered a myth for a long time after their existence was confirmed as well.

143

Ah, yes, I remember it now.

Obviously, he’s talking about Doggerland, a large inhabited area that was submerged in a cataclysm circa 6150 B.C. leaving muddy seas with shallow shoals that are difficult to navigate.

or, maybe he just made it up

144

If they were really staying long enough to harvest crops, they’d have to have come into contact with locals. And then we must posit that, on the one hand, they were able to remain peaceful enough with the locals that they didn’t ruin their crops, but on the other hand, that they didn’t find it easier to trade with them for food (a matter that could be concluded in an afternoon) than to grow it themselves (taking many months).

OK, so the story as presented has some holes in it. But what, then, is the true explanation? They correctly reported that the Sun was north of them (and Herodotus, to his credit, though he disbelieves the claim itself, accurately recounts that they made the claim). That could mean that they at least had empirical experience of travel to the Southern Hemisphere (though that doesn’t necessarily imply that they went all the way around the Cape)… or it could just mean that they had people sufficiently skilled in geometry to make the extrapolation from what was known about the shape of the Earth and the position of the Sun from various locations.

That a great sea voyage like this might be falsely claimed for bragging rights is plausible enough, but why describe the voyage being undertaken in such an odd way? It would not be implausible to store enough food on board to make the full journey, nor would it be implausible to trade with natives, or to gather wild fruit, to refresh onboard stores. My guess would be that they actually established semi-permanent colonies at various points along the shore, further each time, until eventually there were enough Phoenician colonies that an expedition was able to resupply exclusively at those colonies, and make the whole trip.

145

1. Storms are only a problem at certain times of the year.

They presumably used sails as well as oars. They certainly sailed close to coast, probably never out of sight of land. They could land at any time if they didn’t like the look of the weather.

2. There are plenty of long uninhabited stretches of coastline, even today. Africa is big. Presumably they landed and scouted around for some distance. If they found people, or there wasn’t suitable land for their crops, they moved further along the coast and tried again.

3. Not that lucky at all, in my opinion. Don’t underestimate ancient sailing skills.

In Roman times, where we have more detailed knowledge and evidence, there was a lot of trade between Egypt and India, and Roman trading posts all along the Indian coast. There was also trade down the African coast. There is even evidence of Roman trading in Vietnam.

See the wiki on Indo-Roman trade relations, mostly by sea.

See also Sino-Roman relations. The Roman delegation to the Chinese Emperor Huan in 166 AD is said (in Chinese records) to have come from the south via south-east Asia, and therefore presumably by sea.