Georeactor Blog

RSS Feed

Reading Mysteries from Antiquity



Tags: bookshistoryseries

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Eric Cline, 2014; 2021 edition)

This unexpected hit book by a professor investigates the Late Bronze Age Collapse, often blamed on a mysterious Sea Peoples. Last year Cline released a graphic novel and a sequel, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations.

For a short book, I was a little disappointed how the first half or more is spent on people discovering artifacts, then trade and revolts associated with it in the centuries before 1177 BC. This might be helpful to humanize ancient people, and I did consider how Minoans got through major natural disasters before the Sea People. But I ended up skipping ahead looking for some meatier content. There's brief discussion of a drought and reduction of international trade being more proximate of a cause than Sea Peoples looking for refuge.

Creating the Qur'an: A Historical-Critical Study (Stephen J. Shoemaker, 2022)

I read a Shoemaker book two years ago, and it was a good intro to outsider perspectives on early Islamic history. I had my own misconceptions, so it was interesting to follow the traditional history, this research, and YouTube videos side-by-side.

Uthman ibn Affan, the third Sunni caliph, is said to have compiled the canonical Qur'an within 20 years of the prophet's death. This was disputed by early Shia leaders, but has become the prevailing belief in Islam and in Western academia.
A "revisionist school" emerged in the 1970s, particularly with the book Hagarism. To summarize their points: Mohammed led followers to Jerusalem expecting an imminent apocalypse, considerably later Abd al-Malik (the fifth caliph) would re-root Islam with a written Qur'an and greater emphasis on Mohammed, Mecca, and Arabic language.
Moving dates from Uthman to al-Malik is 50 years - not super long in the company of Christian Gospels and apocrypha. Not enough for carbon dating to be all that relevant?

The mainstream belief is that al-Malik and his viceroy oversaw a handful of letter changes, added the dots distinguishing letters (such as ن vs. ت), and introduced diacritics. I found Shoemaker's interpretation of these agreed-on changes, and other supposed discrepancies, to be misleading. For example Wikipedia treats a theory of Mecca and Bakkah as separate places as fringe, and describes a Dome of the Rock issue as "mainly changes from the first to the third person".

The revisionist movement generally believes that sections of the Qur'an were written outside of the Hijaz (Mecca and Medina). Mohammed can be placed in the region through the Constitution of Medina. Mecca has been portrayed as a center of trade routes, possibly for mining or leatherwork, but this is not supported. Moving the writing to Syria could explain descriptions of fishing and familiarity with Christian figures.

There are also chapters on eyewitness memory (psych 101) and 20th-century studies of oral recitation in Yugoslavia and Ghana (new to me).

Some Tangents

Two academic presentations challenging the al-Malik theory:

Online communities talk about mysteries of the Qur'an, such as muqattaʿat (letters which appear at the start of some surahs), the identity of the Sabians, and hapax (words which appear once in the text and sometimes nowhere else in Arabic lexicon, such as kalāla).

Mohammad's uncle Abu Lahab and his wife are condemned in the Qur'an for reasons not fully detailed. It doesn't make the Wikipedia article, but there's also a story that Abu Lahab's son got eaten by a lion?

A 1941 short story included in I, Robot features a robot uprising reciting the Islamic statement of faith. A few years later Asimov introduced 'the Mule', a mind-controlling conqueror who the old prophets failed to foresee, to the Foundation series. This isn't a unique observation.
Reddit posts about Mohammed, Napoleon, and others have found lore that the Mule was suggested by an editor, or that Asimov said he was based on the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane in the classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His planet (Kalgan) was the Mongolian name of a city in present-day China. So maybe I don't know anything!

Diacritics were added to the Torah in about the same century as al-Malik's work.

Previous Reads / Notes