As far as I know we have no Persian sources for the batte of Thermopylæ. Historians also agree that Xerxes couldnt possibly have had a million man strong army.
Does this mean the war is entirely fictional? Ancient sources tend to be strongly mythologized, but “entirely fictional” is a very strong claim.
One thing the author mentions in passing is the settlement which is "almost certainly the historical Troy". The "serious" opinion used to be that the city was fictional. The same with Ur. I think the Babylonian captivity used to be considered as fictional too.
Of course ancient written sources embellish things, but they don't generally make things up out of whole cloth. Especially not things which are kind of embarrassing (e.g. "we used to be enslaved by those guys over there").
The problem is, we don't just have an absence of evidence, we have evidence of absence. The area has been widely excavated, and there is a clear continuity of settlement with the same pottery, culture, and religion. There is simply no trace of any large-scale population movement. As far as we can tell, the same people continued living in the area in the same way, worshipping the same gods (still plural for way longer) with the only large change being the yoke of the nearby great powers going away with the collapse.
This of course doesn't mean that there cannot be a trace of truth in the story! It just has to have been morphed substantially over time. For example, it was common in the time to kidnap and move foreign nobility and artisans, while no-one much cared about the identity of the average farmer or goatsherd. It could well be that "the people of Israel" who were kidnapped meant the people who actually mattered, ie, a fairly small upper class group, who could move from the Nile valley to the levant without leaving much trace in either society.
I'm still personally partial to the observation that the story seems to originate during the Babylonian captivity, and the situation of the story greatly mirrors the conditions they were living under, but while complaining about their Babylonian overlords was probably not allowed, writing stories about the plucky underdogs outwitting the horrible Egyptian overlords with divine assistance was fine, even if it contained themes of returning home and of liberation from foreign rule. (Note that Egypt was the main rival of Babylon in this period, and the Kingdom of Judah was on-again off-again vassal of the Egyptians. The captivity was party imposed to prevent this relationship from continuing.)
Interestingly we have surviving Hittite letters complaining about the Achaeans causing some trouble in the vicinity of Troy along with a guy whose name sounds very similar to Priam (although he actually seems to have been on the Greek side). And we somewhat confidently know that Troy had a king named Alexander (Alakasandu) which happens to be the Greek name of Paris (of course there were probably many Trojan kings carrying that name over the years).
Of course that doesn't mean much, the Iliad is a mishmash of different historical events from different periods (based on the descriptions of weapons, armour, political systems, cities etc.). There is probably a massive accuracy gap between oral history like the Iliad and written one (including the Hebrew bible).
Very possibly a subset of the Sea Peoples were Greek. Egyptians reported the "Ekwesh" (which might be the Egyptian word for Achaeans) and the "Denyen" (which might be the Egyptian word for Danaans) among the Sea Peoples.
There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories. For example, the death of a large amount of the population along with the pharaohs son. The destruction of pharaoh's army. Records of ancient hebrew slaves.
Ancient Egyptians left behind a pretty large amount of history and documentation. They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation.
Given what we know about how the Egyptians recorded history, we would definitely not expect to find them writing about stuff that would have embarrassed them.
>Records of ancient hebrew slaves
Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.
>They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation
> Given what we know about how the Egyptians recorded history, we would definitely not expect to find them writing about stuff that would have embarrassed them.
That's exactly the sort of stuff they wrote about all the time. We know about the various wars and political conflicts throughout the second intermediate period precisely because that's what the Egyptians liked documenting.
And, in particular, during the supposed time of the exodus the Egyptian kingdom was fairly divided. Even if one kingdom was too proud to write about a defeat, the others would be sure to document it.
> Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.
Read up about the Canaanites. They were on the uprise during this period and they are also believed to be the actual origin of the Hebrews.
> Israel being one of them!
No even according to the bible. Israel didn't exist before the exodus. Definitely not for decades and even centuries afterwards. The oldest records of the exodus are nowhere near the event. The closest record we have is around 900BCE.
Some Jewish slaves in no way corroborates "all of Israel was enslaved". The latter is demonstrably false. Jewish immigrants were hired, paid, and in some cases promoted to positions of wealth and authority.
Important to note, Canaanites have semitic names. So, someone with a semitic name isn't even an indicator that they were a Hebrew, only that they were possibly Hebrew. Which is unlikely. The evidence we have is that Hebrews were a splinter group from the Canaanites, rather than being a distinct group of people.
What we'd expect if the exodus was real is either proto-semitic writings about the event or even Egyptian writings. Because, fun fact, slaves tend to speak the language of their masters. The fact that the only document we have about it is written in Ancient Hebrew, a language that first debuted around 900 BCE, puts a lot of this into question.
The exodus was supposed to have happened anywhere from 1400BCE to 1200BCE (the bible gives at least 2 dates).
> There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories.
There's a lot of distance between having claims in the account not supported by evidence and it being an "entirely fictional account."
I wouldn't be surprised if truth is that it has a factual core with significant embellishment, to the point where the boundary is not discernible by history/archeology.
People wandering in the desert for 40 years, or even 1 year, leave traces. Especially when it's thousands of people (at a minimum).
The Hebrew language came long after the exodus. We have no earlier records of it that aren't written in Hebrew.
So what we have is writings written hundreds of years later documenting an event with no earlier writings verifying that documentation.
It's possible that a small group of slaves escaped egypt and that was the actual origin of the exodus story which just kept growing and growing with retellings.
I liken it to the story of Noah. Whether that was the mediterranean re-joining the Atlantic and thus oral re-tellings from a much much earlier event or merely a localized flood you can certainly imagine someone preparing for a flood and surviving localized or wide-spread destruction. But two of every animal? That's not a stable genetic population. Hell there are 40,000 or more species of spiders! There is simply no possibility that you could even fit enough animals on a boat of any kind to make that story work. If it did happen the immediate result would be complete genetic collapse and extinction. The idea is abject nonsense but the core story probably happened.
It is easy to imagine a large group of slaves escaping or being freed from Egypt. Maybe they or their ancestors were war captives. But wandering the desert for 40 years? Yeah right. Even if you want to grant miracles the idea that all of Egypt would even know about such events at that time is bananas. Information didn't travel that fast. Probably one group of people in one city. And the antagonist could easily have been a local lord. Over time it became the Pharaoh and the 18 months of wandering turned into 40 years. Only then it was written down.
I would also note that there were things like the weird restrictions on fabric and clothing which make more sense when understood not as something an omniscient divine being cared about but rather as part of rabbinic politics where the central temple rabbis were saying that their political opponents in the villages dressed wrong. It’s very easy to imagine a trip through the desert being bad, losing people to lack of food or water, but then being magnified in the future to claim divine superiority or strengthen arguments that they had earned land occupied by someone else (similar to how American western settlement sometimes justified ignoring native claims by saying that the suffering and lives lost in some way meant the survives had earned the land they ended up on).
> So what we have is writings written hundreds of years later documenting an event with no earlier writings verifying that documentation.
Unfortunately, this is the case for much of ancient history. Doesn’t mean nothing happend, just that it can be difficult to figure out what is myth and what are actual events.
> Doesn’t mean nothing happend, just that it can be difficult to figure out what is myth and what are actual events.
Sure. Although I'd say that if you want to study history that's _all_ you can do - use different sources, corroborate, cross-check, link and, generally, try to make the different events and interpretation "fit" together. If you have no documentation for it or supporting evidence then you've got nothing to work with.
Otherwise one could just use a semi-apologetic argument: the Exodus story DID happen as outlined in OT but God hid all signs of it so it couldn't be confirmed.
>If you have no documentation for it or supporting evidence then you've got nothing to work with
Sure, but I think 1) a lot of objections in this thread come because people seem to conflate "nothing to work with" and "so obviously it didn't happen" and 2) there's not no documentation for anything people have argued about in here.
A big disagreement that's probably been unsaid in this thread has more to do what counts as corroboration. Speaking abstractly, I think that if a group of people from 500 years ago strongly attest to something that happened 1000 years ago, that is not definitive proof in and of itself, but it is absolutely a form of supporting evidence.
Ktesias wrote of the battle using Persian sources. Though he's considered pretty unreliable.
While the sources are all from greek authors, we have 6 different sources about the battle with Herodotos, Diodoros, and Ktesias all writing within 100 years of the battle happening.
What we can deduce from these many sources and most of them in living memory of the battle is that the battle likely happened and was a real historic event.
We've got nothing like that with the exodus story. There's not a second author detailing the exodus or making even a vague reference to it.
The point of art (like music and litterature) is the art itself. Code is a craft, it is means to an end. It can still be beautiful and impressive and creative, but it is a different thing.
It is not a value judgement. Art can be bad or bland and code can be a work of genius. But the moon lander or a handmade watch are beautiful because they actually work. It can’t really be compared to music.
But it can, demonstrably because sometimes code is music. The C64 demoscene is art and code and music and graphics, all in one. And it doesn't really do anything, unlike that handmade watch.
Now, is the demoscene "high art"? For the most part, perhaps not. But some of it definitely is.
Thank you for understanding my comment. Code is a craft and could maybe be more compared to pottery, which usually has a use, and is primarily judged by well it fulfills its purpose. I'm not saying that there isn't "beautiful" code, and certainly not denying clever code. But the goalpost that code is just as expressive as literature or music is just too much. Show me the code that is inspired by the reflection of a sunset on a pond on a windy day.
Best solution: Learn SQL and understand the relational model. Learn data modelling and normalization. Then choose a good ORM which does not get in the way, but saves a bunch of boilerplate code.
An ORM only saves you boilerplate if you’re mapping relationships to objects. And if you’re doing that, you haven’t learned good data modelling and normalisation.
There's a middle ground between ORMs and raw SQL, especially if you're using a strongly typed language. My library Zapatos[1] is one example among several.
That does look like a compelling tool specifically because it isn't really an ORM. It seems more like an ergonomics layer for SQL within that particular language. It looks decent because the database schema remains the source of truth, and the code adapts to it — not the other way around.
I think ORMs mostly exist because most programming languages tend to lack an elegant way to write SQL and interact with results. Somewhat ironically, the much-maligned CFML (aka ColdFusion) got this right decades ago. It made SQL string building trivial, and it provided a native data type for tabular query results.
No other language I'm aware of has this, and it's the missing piece in many modern ecosystems. They do not need an ORM. They need better ergonomics for interacting with databases: a clean way to compose queries, execute them, and work with the result as structured relational data rather than shoehorning it into application objects.
What you do need is some kind of boundary mapping layer so that your application isn't tightly coupled to the database. That might be a an RRM instead, but if you are going to all the trouble of adding an RRM, why not an ORM? What's the difference, really?
The article refers to the astronomical calendar, which is differnent from the gregorian by having a year 0, which makes calculations simpler. After year 1 the years have the same numbers, but before 1 they are off-by-one.
Years before 0 is indicated with negative numbers, e.g -50 corresponds to 51 b.c.
This was the issue with the early agile-developed systems.
Not that they didn’t write no code, obviously, but they didn’t understand the domain and so YAGNI’d everyone to death. As a result there wasn’t enough code for the system would do what it needed to do.
The code was simple and highly testable, but didn’t actually do the job.
The original Agile poster child, Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3) was never very successful as a project. It achieved only a fraction of its goals and was ultimately cancelled.
YAGNI in that context is hilarious, because they were replacing an existing COBOL based payroll system. They literally needed pretty much everything the old system did to be successful. Part of the failure is because the devs did not understand what they were replacing.
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