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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally."

--John Dominic Crossan

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I sometime wonder if in the 25th century people will be searching for the exact location of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.

To be fair, Troy was also mostly thought to be mystical before Heinrich Schliemann went on a quest to find it (and subsequently destroyed most of it as he used explosives to perform archeological digs).

The funny thing is this has already happened. They erected a platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross. The only problem being that a) it doesn’t even vaguely correspond to the description in the book and b) in fact, from the description it’s likely they were actually talking about old St Pancras station.

Well they couldn't put it in St. Pancras because that was already in use by former Norse gods waiting to get into Valhalla.

https://www.scld.org/st-pancras-station-sparks-imaginations/

Life imitates art.

There's no reason to believe that what Evans found was the mythological Troy (note the "mythological"). Maybe it was the city called Wilusa by the Hittites, or maybe it wasn't, and maybe Wilusa was Troy ("Ilion") or maybe it wasn't. There's no way to know for sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Iliad#Hitti...

Homer certainly didn't give a super detailed description of Troy's location. The Iliad is an epic poem not a historical account. The Homeric Question is a debate almost as ancient as the Iliad, after all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question

As to Schleimann, he was certainly all too ready to "discover" elements of the Homeric epics. For example, "the mask of Agamemnon":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon

Or "The Jewels of Helen":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure#/media/File...

The one i like is imagining some poor schnook of a grad student in 500 years writing a dissertation on “american pie” and the complex interrelationship of food culture and religion, and if the Jester in the song is the same as the joker that batman killed (or didn’t), and if so was he talking to the thief in the watchtower — and what really does that have to do with band camp?!

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2017/10/12/bye-bye...

Evidence supports that it is, in fact, located just outside of Orlando, FL.

"We know that they generally had good diplomatic relationships and there was a great deal of cross-border trade, but the historical record is still unclear about the exact relationship between the United States of America and the Magic Kingdom."

The way things are going, history may see you as the Nostradamus of this century.

I'll take it.

Over drinks one night, Cardozo shared with Brosnan a short, somewhat cheeky passage in DeMille's 1959 autobiography in which the director cryptically confirmed the burial. The book's section reads: "If, 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilisation... extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America… The sphinxes they will find were buried there when we had finished with them."

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230212-a-city-under-the...

Or on the banks of Loch Shiel in Scotland?

[NB This is based on me recognising the landscape in some of the movies, apparently the books say it is near Dufftown - which is on the other side of Scotland].

I had also assumed it was the school on Lauriston Place in Edinburgh, but apparently that's definitely not true...

Definitely is true. She also sent her own kids there.

Apparently Rowling thought of Hogwarts before moving to Edinburgh - but it seems a bit of a coincidence that Heriots school is right next to the graveyard with Tom Riddle's grave:

https://www.pottertour.co.uk/blog/george-heriots-school-harr...

Mind you - I'm not really that big a Harry Potter fan but I did live in that part of Edinburgh for many years and my son went to Heriots after adventures at other schools...

i.e. George Heriots

Unfortunately it was mostly demolished by the explosives used to dig it up

FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGIST: "We've found what we believe to be the ruins of Platform 9 3/4." [gestures at ruins of Slough railway station]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/221B_Baker_Street

Humans model their world on stories.

The scene opens on a world that appears totally primitive. People are naked, people are orgiastic, people are nomadic. But when they close their eyes there are menus hanging in space. Culture has been internalized. Culture is supposed to be internalized. All this talk about virtual reality - people don't seem to notice - this is a virtual reality. These are all ideas - ideas that have been forced into matter so that we could live in a reconstruction of our imagination. And de-constructing these virtual realities in which we live is the only way to get back to some sort of baseline of what it is to be human. - Terence McKenna

And yet in Plato's Timaeus, you find statements like this:

> On the side toward the sea, and in the center of the whole island, there was a plain which is said to have been the fairest of all plains, and very fertile. Near the plain again, and also in the center of the island, at a distance of about fifty stadia (one stadia=606 feet), there was a mountain, not very high on any side.

> And, beginning from the sea, they dug a canal three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth, and fifty stadia in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone, making a passage from the sea up to this,

> Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from the sea was three stadia in breadth, and the zone of land which came next of equal breadth; but the next two, as well the zone of water as of land, were two stadia, and the one which surrounded the central island was a stadium only in width. The island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five stadia.

These are features of a geographical account.

> It was built on seven levels, each delved into the hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate. But the gates were not set in a line: the Great Gate in the City Wall was at the east point of the circuit, but the next faced half south, and the third half north, and so to and fro upwards; so that the paved way that climbed towards the Citadel turned first this way and then that across the face of the hill.

> And each time that it passed the line of the Great Gate it went through an arched tunnel, piercing a vast pier of rock whose huge out-thrust bulk divided in two all the circles of the City save the first. For partly in the primeval shaping of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and labour of old, there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind the Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel facing east. Up it rose, even to the level of the topmost circle, and there was crowned by a battlement; so that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate seven hundred feet below.

> The entrance to the Citadel also looked eastward, but was delved in the heart of the rock; thence a long lamp-lit slope ran up to the seventh gate. Thus men reached at last the High Court, and the place of the Fountain before the feet of the White Tower: tall and shapely, fifty fathoms from its base to the pinnacle, where the banner of the Stewards floated a thousand feet above the plain.

This is also a geographical account, by Tolkien of Minas Tirith.

There are actually striking similarities in style, which is unsurprising given that Tolkien was a scholar who patterned his works on ancient epics. The main difference is that the ancient text has more numbers, which, given the timescales a historical Atlantis would have to have occurred on, were certainly not literal measurements recorded by Plato or a contemporary.

Isn't Tolkien's Atlantis reference Númenor? Like, he didn't change a comma :-P

No measurements though

There is one—"a thousand feet"—but also you can't use the existence of measurements as evidence of authenticity.

For one, those measurements can't possibly have been recorded by Plato or a contemporary, because if there were a historical Atlantis all claims point to it being centuries older than Plato. Any numbers he's using are either completely fictitious or passed down and distorted through generations. Either way, Plato clearly didn't care that they were accurate.

Second, ancient literature is kind of obsessed with giving precise measurements for things that can't possibly be accurate. The numbers are inserted to give a sense of grandeur, and are just a part of the style of this kind of work. Where they seem odd and out of place to us, they were common at the time. See the Bible, Herodotus, and many others.

Tolkien's writing is accurate and descriptive enough to not only produce an atlas [5], and a legendarium of plants [24356] but for said atlas to not only describe the routes, but the types of land/mountains traversed, and how they would have come to be.

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Middle-Earth-Revised-Karen-Fons...

[24356] https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Flora_of_Middle-Earth

But, how do we know the atlas etc are accurate? There's no real places or objects to compare them with.

They're accurate to the text, and "how things are on earth" which is all we can compare them to.

The point being you can have a description of an entirely fantastical area with no inherent contradictions.

Any major event must last 40 days and 40 nights, for example.

Plato frequently gave detailed descriptions of utterly fanciful situations. He wasn't a historian and wasn't particularly interested in details of the physical world. He wrote dialogues about philosophy and was interested in the world of forms, and any story he told that was seemingly grounded reality was in service of making a larger point. In fact, even the dialogues themselves purported to be actual conversations between real people and almost certainly were not in most cases, no matter how much detail he provided about the event.

The “physical details” of the new jerusalem are given in exhausting detail in Revelations, but this is well understood by scholars to be rife with symbolic and numerological intent and was not likely to have been intended by john of patmos to be understood as representing any material place.

Plato, fond of such rhetorical devices himself, is more than likely to be following a similar game.

Yeah, a fictional geographical account. What about that description suggests it's real to you? If it's the specific measurements used, then I don't think you've read very much ancient literature, because that's not at all an uncommon way of describing fictional things.

"Ancient people where to stupid to imagine measurements in a fictional account, therefore the presence of measurements is evidence of the story being factional" is a quite arrogant take, don't you think?

Crossan’s work as a scholar and pop-history author involved a particular sceptical interpretation of very early Christianity that is not shared by most of the sceptical historians of early Christianity. So, his scepticism is particularly extreme.

There are plenty of Mediterranean historical fiction-like tales where an original grain of truth does seem promising. Besides popular cases like Atlantis, and Troy as a site, there’s e.g. Aeneas coming from Troy to Rome as a possible reflection of an Bronze Age-collapse era migration from western Anatolia to Italy bringing the Etruscan language.

Crossan always seems to be well respected whenever I’ve heard him mentioned by other academics that study historical Christianity. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have some heterodox views, but they at least seem to exist within the broader academic consensus.

There's no way to figure out which lost event/place is symbolical and which is real other than looking for the real thing long enough.

I dislike this quote since it basically discourages further research.

I basically just says, if you think this might be real, you are dumb, for no reason, which is itself dumb.

In Atlantis's case, Plato's story is based on quoting someone who lived 150 years before him, also includes Poseidon as a historical figure, and Aristotle called it symbolical in his own writing[0].

[0] not sure where, have only seen other people mention this

An island caving into the sea is not more far fetched than a city being covered with rock flowing like water.

Similar story with Oregon's Crater Lake.

counterexamples

city of troy

niebelungenlied

noah's ark

The city of Troy is not positively identified actually.

The Song of the Nibelungs has many purely fictional parts.

Noah's Ark and the Flood are mere myths with 0 proof of any kind of historical reality, and 0 chance of there ever being one.

the city of troy was found

what is fictional about the niebelungen?

the ark is about the creation of the black sea

there are stories that might be 100000 years old https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom...

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