1421: The Year China Discovered...

[Desdichado]

The whole Fu Sang and Hui Shen scenario is similar to St. Brennan, the Piri Re'is map and other such crypto-history. I find it extremely fascinating, and tantalizing, but at the end of the day, I can't say that I find it necessarily convincing.

 

[gizmo33]

I cannot speak to privately funded ventures of unknown 'adventurers' (of which there were a great deal during that period of imperial history),

Were there a great deal of Chinese adventurers?! That would have cool implications for the threads of my Oriental Adventure campaign that never gets off the ground. The impression I get from Asian history books (and most recently one I read on the Silk Road) was that people in Imperial China didn't go anywhere without the permission of the emporer.

Vikings, British Islanders (Sinclairs and maybe Irish monks) reaching America ..... credible.

My impression was that Vikings was a closed case. They found settlements in Canada, dated and identified the artifacts. The one settlement they examined went as far as they knew how long the people were there (only a few years). Supposedly they knew that a Norse baby was even born at the settlement. I thought the Irish monks thing was more in the category of the Egyptians or Phoenicians, but the only question about the Vikings was how far into North America they got. (Minnesota?)

 

[fusangite]

Fusangite: "As was the case with Europeans and the Antilles and Brazil, North America's West Coast got its name from the Chinese centuries before they actually discovered it." Eh?

Antilla and Brazil were essentially made-up mythical land masses in the Atlantic that the Europeans started putting on charts in the Middle Ages. They were legendary places to which no European had ever been.

But when they actually did discover the New World, they hauled-out the old names and affixed them to some of the land masses they discovered literally centuries after they started putting the names on maps.

The whole Fu Sang and Hui Shen scenario is similar to St. Brennan, the Piri Re'is map and other such crypto-history. I find it extremely fascinating, and tantalizing, but at the end of the day, I can't say that I find it necessarily convincing.

If you enjoy this sort of thing and are in no danger of believing in the crypto-history it inspires, I highly recommend the pseudohistorical text by Geoffery Ashe Land to the West. It's a great read and can direct you to a lot of early primary sources that speculate about the land on the other side of the Atlantic, beginning with Homer.

 

[fusangite]

I thought the Irish monks thing was more in the category of the Egyptians or Phoenicians, but the only question about the Vikings was how far into North America they got. (Minnesota?)

I generally agree, at least when it comes to documentary sources. However, I understand there is some ambiguous data regarding mitocondrial DNA evidence that indicates the possibility of a pre-Viking crossing. Not being a geneticist, I have not really followed the debate here and am simply awaiting a more conclusive statement that can be parsed by a layman. If anyone knows about this debate and has the scientific knowledge to contribute something here, please post.

I think that Brendan and Mael Duinn have to be understood, first and foremost, in terms of literary genre. Celtic stories about sailing out into the Atlantic in a curragh were very much like an early medieval version of Dr. Who, possibly inspired by the Odyssey interacting with an indigenous tradition of tales of the Otherworld.

 

[gizmo33]

The whole Fu Sang and Hui Shen scenario is similar to St. Brennan, the Piri Re'is map and other such crypto-history. I find it extremely fascinating, and tantalizing, but at the end of the day, I can't say that I find it necessarily convincing.

Yea, I think it's one thing to say that you don't know what happened at some point in the past. It's another for people to talk about Atlanteans and space ships.

Mainstream historians have inherited some baggage that makes it hard for them to interface with the general public with unquestioned credibility. One is the popular belief (probably correct) that the winners write history. This causes people to scrutinize all history for political motive (as has been done on this thread). And in fact historians (especially long ago) have made all sorts of mistakes based on bias. Look at all the stuff about Aryans, or the fact (I think) that many historians could not give native peoples credit for the huge monuments that Europeans discovered. I imagine the pendulum will continue to swing in both directions for a while, but I think historians need to be humble.

Of course popular culture is probably going to far in the other direction (because Atlantis sells), and I worry (patronizingly, of course) that the degree to which students rely on the Internet now for information is going to be a serious problem. I think "they" really need to start teaching people how to analyze information - because at this point all it takes is some doofus with a knowledge of HTML and some free time to spread around information. If I were to teach a class on the topic, the first day would be a trip to snopes.com.

(Gizmo gets off soapbox)

 

[Desdichado]

If you enjoy this sort of thing and are in no danger of believing in the crypto-history it inspires, I highly recommend the pseudohistorical text by Geoffery Ashe Land to the West. It's a great read and can direct you to a lot of early primary sources that speculate about the land on the other side of the Atlantic, beginning with Homer.

Thanks for the heads-up! I do very much enjoy that sort of thing, and I've already read too many outrageous --yet tantalizingly possible, if highly improbable-- theories to be easily suckered in by this type of speculation. Plus I can usually recognize speculation when I see it and separate it from conclusions based on hard evidence. And although my local public library does not have it, the Michigan Library Exchange Coop does, so I've already submitted my ILL request.

 

[Celebrim]

Mainstream historians have inherited some baggage that makes it hard for them to interface with the general public with unquestioned credibility.

One of the first things I learned from my history professor is that you can't trust anyone. Everyone is biased. You must approach every text with the assumption of bias, and you must rely on multiple sources from differing points of view precisely because everyone is biased. You must be able to sift facts from mere interpretations, and you must be able to watch for prejudicing language in the text. In fact, the most creditable historians are the ones that reveal thier biases to the reader openly, and who because they are aware that they are biased do their best to argue for both sides, before presenting what they feel in thier opinion is the compelling evidence for one side or the other. The bias may remain, but at least you can see it for what it is.

A historian that can't present both sides of the argument and who doesn't ground thier history in primary sources is not in my opinion much of a historian. Any historian that seems to me to be too much of an evangelist is suspect. I wonder whether they are trying to sell a product to a niche market, whether they are just trying to generate publicity by being 'contriversial', or whether they are actually on someone's payroll. This goes double for anyone that is openly dismissive of people who sell products, generate publicity, and people on other people's payroll.

TV is a laugh, and I rarely watch anything but PBS (Speaking of, did anyone catch American Experience last night. Now that was good history.), but one afternoon I flipped past 'Jack and Bobby'. It caught my attention long enough to catch a scene where this professor was lecturing, and she says to the class, essentially, "Why can you trust me?" And someone in the class raises thier hand and says something like, "Because there is an assumption of impartiality in the classroom environment."

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!! Any Professor that says something like that, just tune them out completely. The Professor's that you can trust are the ones that one day do thier best to convince you that Marx was right, and the next day do thier absolute best to show you that Marx was an idiot and that Hayek was right. (And if you know who Marx is and not Hayek, or vica versa, then you don't have an education IMO.) The best professor's are the ones that you never find out just what they believe personally, because they aren't trying to teach you what they believe but what other people believe and they aren't cherry picking the people that they happen to agree with. The classroom setting works because there is an assumption of impartiality, and instruction actually happens because the teacher respects the material - the literature and the history - more than they respect thier own opinion. If you go into a classroom without the assumption that the professor's are idiots and you aren't going to believe anything they say until they force you to do so, then you arent' going to learn anything. Of course, that requires actually reading the primary sources...

 

[Desdichado]

The Professor's that you can trust are the ones that one day do thier best to convince you that Marx was right, and the next day do thier absolute best to show you that Marx was an idiot and that Hayek was right.

I didn't know Salma Hayek had that much of an opinion on Marx...

 

[Celebrim]

I didn't know Salma Hayek had that much of an opinion on Marx...

Would you believe that I had no idea who you were talking about and had to google the name before I got the joke.

 

[Shemeska]

At some point in the past fifteen years, I think when I was around ten or so, I read something in some book somewhere about either roman or phoenecian amphora that had been dredged up from the bottom of a harbor in Brazil somewhere. It was very speculative but it suggested that one of those two groups could have either been blown off course on Africa's west coast and sunk in South America, or had a small amount of exploration/trade. Has anyone heard anything about this?

I've never heard more of it, so I'm tempted to put it into the same catagory of 'history' as the UFO's abducting the Anasazi, lost tribes of Israel building the cities of the maya, and all the american indians being jewish before a massive battle in upstate newyork that destroyed their civilization but left no trace anyone has ever found.