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Message: <blockquote data-quote="briggart" data-source="post: 9428141" data-attributes="member: 6805135">[USER=6787503]@Hriston[/USER] Let me get this straight, your starting point is a sentence by JRRT in which he says that he posits the events of his book could have taken place around 6000-4000BC. In the same letter, which you quoted, he also add that those events are however difficult to reconcile with the archeological record:Based on this, you ask for passages from the book which prove** that the story could not be set before 4000BC, and when provided with them your rebuttal is that the text should not be taken literally? Let's try it the other way, can you provide any passage in which Tolkien says that his drawing of Bag's End is not meant as an actual reproduction of Bilbo's residence?I may be missing something, but your argument is basically a tautology, which makes it pointless to discuss it.* Given this passage, I was implicitly restricting the discussion to Europe. You are indeed correct that gold smelting in Mesopotamia started probably around 6000BC. Also copper smelting, given that for the purpose of this discussion, gold and copper have the same melting point. But those technologies are not attested in Europe until a couple thousand years later, which is why we say that Neolithic ended in Mesopotamia around 6000BC, but in Europe it ended around 4000BC. But yes, those technologies existed on Earth before 4000BC, and Tolkien quote does not exclude that other parts ofEDIT: In rearranging my post, I left out the last bit here: "[...] other parts of Middle-Earth mapped to Mesopotamia"**You make the point that our archeological record is incomplete, so we cannot rule out that things described in the book actually existed even though they are incompatible with available evidence. Which, sure, that's how archeology works: we can't prove that Neanderthals did not master quantum computing, we simply don't have any remotely credible indication that they did. It's basically the same principle as "innocent until proven guilty".</blockquote>

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