Actually he calculated it wrong.
Oh, can’t agree more, then. Just pointing out that, as always, it’s ‘more complicated than it looks.’ Columbus, to borrow a concept from The Science of Discworld, is a lie-to-children.
It’s accurate enough, and it’s not entirely untrue, for a first approximation of a story.
As a matter of fact, plenty of historians do use ‘discover’ in precisely that way. Some of the best recent work on the early stages of European colonisation of North America has been about how this involved the native Americans ‘discovering Europe’. So much so that this is now almost a cliché. Other historians have written about Africa and Japan in the same way. Mostly doing so, at least in terms of their booktitles, in self-conscious imitation of Bernard Lewis.
Exactly.
Except those pesky Eskimos. A new continent from their perspective is not only absurd but completely nonsensical. If you’re going to credit Columbus for discovering something that he did not recognize for a new continent and mistook for something else, you might as well give even more credit to Far East Siberians for “discovering” something (that their culture had known about for thousands of years), because while they also, like Columbus did, did not realize the significance of their knowledge, at least they never mistakenly thought they had discovered a secret passage to England!
…which, according to Dave Barry, is the world’s best tourist attraction ever.
They…really call it Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump? …really? REALLY!?
Sorry, but this is completely erroneous. The Islamic empires of the medieval period, for example, fostered a tremendous range of activity in cartography, geography, and study of different peoples, languages, flora and fauna. Check out this discussion of Islamic botany or google Islamic cartography, for instance.
Yes, many cultures throughout history have been comparatively inactive or uninterested in large-scale exploration of foreign lands and cultures, but you’re wrong in thinking that the Europeans of the early modern and modern periods constitute the only exceptions.
??? Food is cheaper now than it has ever been.
So you are saying that Native American civilizations were similar to Europe?
Yep. Got to love truth in advertising. Awesome, innit?
Been there.
It’s the best NAME, sure. It’s an *attraction *only if you’re really really interested in buffalo, or Plains Indian lore, or for something to see as you’re crossing Alberta.
The other thing to remember is that even as late as the 1600s, Europeans were poorer than the Ottomans, the Indians, and the Chinese. Remember the fabled riches of the Orient? That was the impression Europeans got when they traveled to the Ottoman Empire–wealth, industry, prosperity, peace, and learning. Europeans wanted to trade with the East because Europe was poor relative to the East.
And most of the silver and gold the Spaniards looted from the New World went east to the Ottoman Empire, to pay for high-quality imported goods that couldn’t be matched in Europe. The Spaniards made the classic mistake of confusing gold and money.
If their culture had known about it for thousands of years then they didn’t discover it.
Jesus, how many times am I going to have to keep repeating that discovering something means that it is new to YOU. If YOU didn’t know about it before, and then you found it, then you discovered it. It doesn’t matter if you thought it was something else; you still discovered it.
My post was in response to a claim that the discovery of the americas was new to everyone on the entire Eurasianafrican land mass, which is not true for the trans-pacific group of cultures that, while I’m not sure if they engaged in regular trade with each other or not, spoke related languages and knew enough about each other that when Russian explorers in the area came around they casually told them about Alaska (and how could they not know, they were seafaring cultures less than a couple days journey away.)
The discovery of America was indeed an important event in the history of European culture. However, Columbus’s discovery was not. We rightly (ha!) give the Wright Brothers major credit for making exponential strides in air flight even if they were not exactly the first to do most things, while I can’t really name any of their predecessors. Columbus should be relegated to a similarly obscure slot as an explorer whose voyages help others then fully realize and understand what he came upon.
It seems to me that “Right of Conquest” is a very old tradition dating back to the first communities, and possibly common to most civilisations and cultures.
Competition for hunting grounds, fresh water, and so on predate a lot of written records.
If their culture had known about it for thousands of years that suggests they discovered it thousands of years previously. Either that or they heard about it from someone else, and I’m not sure who that “someone else” could be in this case.
It is somewhat ironic, but it was the fall of Constantinople and the rise of the powerful Ottoman empire blocking the overland Asian trade that spurred the Portuguese and then the Spanish and finally the northern Europeans to explore and exploit around the cape towards the east and westward.
Yet the primary interest of Islamic trade and geography based knowledge was limited to the Mediteranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. It certainly wasn’t global. The Europeans were exploiting everywhere, and their people developed the global knowledge that we all share today. Ever heard of a geographic society in an Islamic country?
They used it for 5500 YEARS? And it STILL WORKED? Jebus, bison are dumb.
Yeah, you’d think that after the first hundred or so smashed in heads, they’d learn.
Well, the Europeans’ interests didn’t become global either, as you yourself have just conceded, until they were forced by geopolitical changes to look for new routes to the Indies. Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus didn’t set sail out of some idealistic dedication to the mission of European intellectual curiosity in the abstract: they were looking for faster and cheaper ways to get pepper.
Meanwhile, the Islamic empires were all over the place from southern Europe to China, India and Africa, and everywhere they went, their scholars and administrators collected information and documents on the geography, languages, peoples, cultures, climates, animals and plants in the newly encountered regions. Yes, their interests often had various practical motivations, but so did the interests of Europeans, as you’ve just admitted.
:rolleyes: Now you’re really grasping at straws. You might as well say that Islamic societies were devoid of all technological genius because they never invented automobiles.
Geographical societies and the type of recreational/national/imperial explorations that they helped sponsor are a very recent development in the history of the modern nation-state, and they say much less about any hypothetical uniquely European thirst for global knowledge than about the incentives of international politics and commercial enterprise in the industrial nineteenth century.
Sure, even before the nineteenth century there were state-sponsored special expeditions for scientific research projects like observing eclipses and transits of Venus, but other societies besides Europeans had such expeditions as well. Ever heard of the Caliph al-Ma’mun’s sending out a commissioned group of scholars in the 9th century to get an accurate distance measurement of one degree of terrestrial latitude, for example?
You’re not doing European culture any favors by disparaging other cultures in ignorance of their history. It just makes you (and by association, the rest of us European/Western people) look like a self-satisfied provincial hick boosting his hometown. His loyalty and enthusiasm may be admirable, but the ignorance and narrowness he displays in his boasting don’t inspire a lot of confidence in his critical judgement.