Hapiru: were they the Hebrews?

Discussion in 'History' started by S.A.M., Sep 26, 2008.

  1. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    I know it requires spoked wheels, which is why I pointed to the Rig Veda verse which mentions 360 spokes [ one for every degree]
     
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  3. otheadp Banned Banned

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    I'm dismissing you because of your deliberately offensive, wild and extremist rhetoric. What else is there left to do?
     
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  5. Photizo Ambassador/Envoy Valued Senior Member

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    http://www.messiahtruth.com/exp5.html

    http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48969466.html

    http://www.biblearchaeology.org/category/Exodus-Conquest.aspx

    http://ohr.edu/ask_db/ask_main.php/158/Q1/
     
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  7. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Excuse me but that is not correct. I'm not talking about your characterization of Sam, which may or may not be correct. But your implication that only people who hate Jews and the state of Israel doubt the historical credibility of the Exodus is completely wrong. This assertion has received a lot of attention lately and the scholarship behind it is persuasive. I support Sam's point and I don't hate Jews. A disproportionate number of my friends and a large number of my family members are Jewish, and I'm going to a bar mitzvah in a couple of weeks. Although I confess that I'm not a big supporter of Israel these days.
    The Scythians were a Persian people in the 1st millennium BCE. The Hyksos era was about a thousand years before that. The consensus of scholars is that the Hyksos were Semitic in origin, but only because most of them migrated from Semitic regions in Asia. They were not a community defined by ethnicity so much as a collection of disparate immigrants looking for work. I would regard them as similar to the current waves of migration into the United States from all over Latin America, from all over Africa, and from all over the former Soviet Union. Within each of these groups there is certainly some commonality of DNA, but what identifies them more strongly is their desire to earn an honest living in a place with (by their standards) a healthy economy and a functional and benign government.
    The wheel was invented first in Mesopotamia in the 5th millennium BCE. It was originally the potter's wheel, so naturally it was invented in one of the locations where the technology of pottery had already been invented.

    It reached Europe in the 4th millennium, India in the 3rd, and China in the 2nd.

    It took about a thousand years to apply the concept of the wheel to the building of a vehicle, which required much more than a flash of inspiration. One wheel isn't much use; in fact no one bothered to invent the wheelbarrow until around 400BCE. You need:
    • Two very round and well-matched wheels
    • One axle
    • Two axle hubs
    • Material sturdy enough to serve as a bearing surface as the wheel rubs against the hub
    • Lubrication
    • All of these components must be made with at least as much precision as an arrow shaft, but on a much larger scale.
    • The wheel cannot be cut from a cross section of a tree, because wood is not strong in that direction.
    The wheel required measurement, craftsmanship, and materials technology considerably superior to the standards of the Neolithic Era, even those of the Stone Age cities of the late Neolithic. The division of labor that civilization makes possible gave rise to a plethora of new full-time occupations, and all of these professionals working in collaboration made vast improvements in the Neolithic technologies of the agricultural villages. The hot fires necessary to smelt metal from ore came soon afterward, and the Stone Age finally gave way to the Bronze Age.

    (The potter's wheel was eventually invented by the Olmecs and the Incas, but they apparently never considered using it for transport. The Olmecs of course had no draft animals, and the Incas can be forgiven for not considering training their small, cranky llamas to pull carts.)

    The spoked wheel was invented much later, around 2000BCE, in the region north of the Black and Caspian Seas: the Indo-European homeland. These were the same tribes that domesticated the horse. The technology of horse-drawn wagons spread rapidly and was a factor in the rise of Greece and the fall of Minoan culture. The Celts invented the iron rim around 1000BCE, and this mature technology remained in use in this form until the late 19th century CE when the pneumatic tire was invented.

    The wheel stands as one of our species' key inventions, being the basis for the water wheel, the spinning wheel, the gear, the astrolabe, the flyweel, the propeller and the turbine.
     
  8. otheadp Banned Banned

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    My comment was directed strictly at SAM. There is nothing wrong with this discussion in and of itself, but just as it is with everything else, it depends who makes such propositions.

    It's sort of how black people can say "n---er" but others can't, or at least shouldn't... even in the context of condemning racism. People can get offended very quickly.

    And just as with the example above, even if the people discussing this are only Jews, even then people can get offended and it can even lead to fights and yelling... so to hear someone like SAM bring this up... forget about it.
     
    Last edited: Mar 5, 2010
  9. noodler Banned Banned

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    I know, you could sit around and moan about how Israel has royally fucked up, say.
     
  10. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Sam is a member in good standing. Well she is today anyway. Her ideas are as welcome on SciForums as those of any other member.

    I am an American atheist whom Hitler would have executed as Jewish because of an accident of ancestry, but I still generally agree with Sam's observations of the Israel-Palestine conflict, as do many of our other members who are non-Muslim Westerners.

    I find nothing in Sam's posts on this thread that can reasonably be categorized as offensive. You seem to be suggesting that Sam should never be allowed to post in a discussion that brings up controversial topics because her mere presence offends you. If that is indeed the case, well then in my official capacity as a Moderator, not to mention an elder in this virtual community, my considered advice to you is, as you kids say these days, "Suck it up, dude."
     
  11. salsaga Registered Member

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    Maybe you meant 4000 BCE here.

    Yes, I had moreless the same information, except cos of the Greece an Minoan reference (I thought the fall of Minoan culture happened till the advent of iron age and the sea people around 1300-1100 BCE).

    However it's true that spoked wheel is associated with indoeuropeans, and maybe its invention is associated with indoeuropeans homeland. They might have been invented in russian steppes, though I'm not sure if there's general consensus about that (cos the fact the oldest traces of spoked wheels have been found there, doesn't necessarily mean they were invented there or somewher near and then the technology spread rapidly towards regions where it could be specially useful, like russian steppes)

    But if we speak specifically about war-chariot, we need to mention the hittites. Hittites were an indoeuropean people that entered Capadocia around 1800 BC, and the oldest references to the use of chariots for war come from them. Maybe they invented it somewhen in the xviii century BCE, and that's what gave them the great power they achieved few time later.

    The first hittite kingdom began in the xviii century BCE, and few time later we find the first references about hiksos, war-chariot people, in Egypt.
    So, again, it's maybe a personnal interpretation, but I don't find unblelievable that hiksos are related with hittites and/or indoeuropeans
     
    Last edited: Mar 7, 2010
  12. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    72,825
    Is that right? The Scythians were Persians? That seems really strange to me. I thought Scythia was further north/east, near Russia or the Ukraine. There used to be settlements of horse riding tribes in those steppes, that were considered as "aliens" due to their coloring [red hair] and were treated as subhumans and slaves. I assumed for some reason that it was the Scythians. I thought they might have moved or been moved to Syria along with the Hai-Hittites who also came from the same region. There is evidence of such bands of horse riders in Assyrian and Egyptian armies as well, which I think were possibly enslaved Hittites who were known all over for their prowess with horse riding

    In fact if you think about it, power at that point in time was very much regulated by horse riding warriors :Aryans,Hittites, Scythians, Bulgars, Turks, Khazars, Mongols, Xiong-Nu, Avars, Toba, Seljuks, and Mughals
     
    Last edited: Mar 7, 2010
  13. salsaga Registered Member

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    again Sam, horses were not always ridden, Hittites, for instnce used them only to pull chariots. On the other hand, persians are also an indoeuropean people, so maybe it's not weird if scythians and persians are related, (it would be much harder a connection with hiksos).
    Well, at least, what I can say with certainty is that the mounted cavalry for war needed to wait for the iron technology
     
    Last edited: Mar 7, 2010
  14. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    72,825
    I don't think that can be right. The land of the Hittites or Anatolia is steep and uneven, and I believe the Hittites acquired chariots much later, probably during the course of their expansion towards Canaan.

    Still, their origin is steeped in mystery, they had the look of Mediterranean peoples, so its possible that they either moved to Anatolia or were moved there by the Assyrians, who were well known for either killing/impaling the people they had defeated or driving them off their lands.

    If what the Rig Veda says is correct and the Yavanas invented the horse drawn chariot [or vimanas] then its also likely that the Hittites may be the Yavanas. According to very old Indian records, horses were trained by Mittanians and it is this training that was adopted by the Hittites for their chariots.

    See Kikkuli
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikkuli

    I wonder how we'd know after all this time.
     
    Last edited: Mar 7, 2010
  15. salsaga Registered Member

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    Well, I'm not the one who says hittites are indoeuropeans; liguists do.

    Again, what I can say with certainty is
    1. the oldest reference about war-chariot comes from hittites
    2. Mounted cavalry appeared untill iron age

    Not all Anatolia is so uneven.
    Again I don't know how fair is it to use indian sources to discuss about western Middle-East
     
  16. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    72,825
    Are the Hittite references older than the Rig Veda?

    One problem with linguistic definitions of peoples is that we have to base our inferences on written languages and survival of evidence of such languages. Biodegradable written materials may not survive. Oral languages would be lost if not transmitted

    Its quite possible that Indo Aryan languages were brought to the Hittites who did not record their own language
     
  17. salsaga Registered Member

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    The answere to the question is: it's very probable

    On the other hand, your interpretation is also perfectly possible, that's why I speak about "personal interpretation".
    Maybe we'll need a professional to get out of the question.
     
  18. salsaga Registered Member

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    by the way, here a very interesting article, concerning jewish genetics
    www . freerepublic . com/focus/news/1626606/posts
    (without spaces)
     
  19. otheadp Banned Banned

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    Not at all. I mean, I wish she wouldn't post certain things, or derail discussions as she does sometimes, but "shouldn't be allowed"? People don't get banned here for intentions or innuendos... only when they explicitly say something "bad". And as I've mentioned, the discussion in and of itself isn't necessarily hateful, so on the face of things she hasn't violated any SciForums rules.

    I'll call her on it as much as I want to (not nearly as much as she posts though). And by the way, elder, you joined Sci only 6 months before I did

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