One really interesting thing in preparing for my class this year. . .

[xiphias]

. . . which, incidentally, starts this Sunday -- I'm both really nervous and really excited -- is that I'm putting together a timeline to get all the events in Jewish history in order, and with a sense of how long they took and how far apart they were, and I'm including other events from around the world to put things in context.

And I've never seen a lot of them juxtaposed.

I mean, I guess most people are aware that Lao Tse came before Confucius, but that their lives overlapped -- but, for instance, were they both before or after Zoroaster? Or the Buddha?

Was the Babylonian exile of the Jews before or after the first Olympics, or the founding of Rome, or the Golden Age of Athens under Pericles? For that matter, obviously the first Olympics happened before the Golden Age of Athens, but was THAT before or after the founding of Rome?

The fact that the "discovery" of the Book of Deuteronomy, which allowed the Israelite people to have a formalized code of laws happened in the same year that Draco formulated HIS formalized code of laws . . . that's kind of neat.

Comments

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

Who is Draco?

Kiralee

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Son of Lucius

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

You're so helpful.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

The answer was, I submit, accurate.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Proving that "accuracy" and "usefulness" are entirely separate, and potentially unrelated, values.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Draco, or Dracon, was the first person in Athens to write down a code of laws, which were particularly harsh, which is where we get the word "draconic". Solon modified and moderated Draco's codex not too long after.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

And Solon was one of the tyrants (the first, I think), right? And Dracon's code was used as an example of why "dictators" were not such a good idea in the developement of Athenian Democracy.

...but I'd probably say "the first Athenian code of laws we have a historical record of..." OK, I might not make that distinction if I was talking to children, but then again, I might.

Kiralee

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

No, Dracon was an earlier tyrant, and Dracon's code was actually considered to be a pretty darned good step forward, in that it put everybody on an equal footing, and not just on the dictator's whim.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Tyrant is a Greek word and dictator a Latin one, and neither of them mean what they mean in English. "Tyrant" meant someone who had supreme power by means other than inheritance -- it didn't mean they'd grabbed power (though they often had) Solon was appointed tyrant for a year, for instance. Dictator was an actual office of state at Rome, it was an emergency one year appointment, it came with an assistant dictator appointment called "Master of the Horse" and was simply a way of over-ruling the two equal consuls in an emergency or appointing someone from the senate to a top position in time of war.

Neither of the words had any negative connotations in their original uses.

And as xiphias has pointed out, while Draco's law code was certainly draconian, as all penalties were death, it was a law code, applicable to everyone, and therefore the rule of law and not of whim and an advance on what was there before.

Solon's law code pleased nobody -- everyone said it was mostly fine but wanted an adjustment for themselves. Solon said that was a good thing, and went off on his travels so people couldn't constantly pester him to change it.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

I guess my punctuation wasn't clear enough. I meant tyrant in the specific Greek sense, appropriate to the context; and I meant dictator in the current English sense, which was not appropriate to context, so I placed it in quotes. If I'd been able to think of an appropriate English only synonym I would have used that; but I wasn't.

My other comment was not meant to imply that Draco's code wasn't an advance, but that a) history is not always progressive, and b) we don't know everything about the history of Athens.

For A: The European Middle Ages is not the only dark age (localized loss of knowledge / technology) in history. Another example is the Dorian* invasion of Greece, which happened at the end of the Mycenaean period and brought it to a close. One of the losses the area suffered was writing - the Mycenaeans had a script, unrelated to the Greek alphabet, called Linear B. Of course the dark age ended, and the "classical Greek alphabet originated from Miletus..." Unfortunately, the book I'm quoting** does not give a specific date, although it does place the time as near that of Solon of Athens. It may even be possible that we have no original source documentation for Draco's code, and that, like Sappho's poetry and the Iliad, it was memorized and recorded later.

For B: I don't know when the city of Athens was founded. I believe they have evidence of settlement in the Mycenaean period. But even if the best scientific guess is after the Dorian invasion, all that means is that we haven't found any evidence of an earlier settlement yet, not that the settlement didn't exist. (Archaeological evidence is known to be fragile over time.) Such a settlement might have had a code of laws; but we don't know, because we haven't found it.

Irregardless of that possibility, Draco and Solon lived very close to the beginning (or actually re-beginning) of recorded history. So we know very little about them, and even less about the people and rulers of Athens who preceded them. We don't know that Draco was the first person to institute a code of law in Athens. Imagine a ruler who successful instituted a code of laws only to have it thrown out by his successor. Just because we have no record, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Not that I'd go into all of that if I was teaching a class for children... especially a class on Jewish and not Greek history. It falls into the category of too much information.

But, rules of evidence - like "just because we have no record, doesn't mean it doesn't exist" - are also important. Even if I wasn't giving a lecture on rules of evidence, I'd want to speak in a way that was consistent with following them, because it encourages the people around me to think in that way too. And I'm more likely to be aware of, and pay attention to, that affect when I'm talking to children - whose good behavior I want to encourage - than to adults.

So, I might make the distinction between "The first Athenian code of laws we know of," and, "The first Athenian code of laws." Or I might avoid the issue by explaining the importance of Draco's code (if it came up) in terms of what came out of it. Just as the Magna Carta is considered the beginning of English democracy (and, for that matter, law to some extent), Draco's code is clearly tied to the beginning of classical democracy.

Kiralee

*I may have the wrong name here, as I'm working from memories of my high school textbook 20+ years ago.

**The Sappho Companion by Margaret Reynolds. She places the Greek Alphabet "not long after" Sappho's death, and Solon of Athens as a "near contemporary" of Sappho's.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

If you're putting this timeline together in any electronic form, might you share it? I'd love to see it.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

It's not. It's on a fifteen-foot roll of butcher paper on my downstairs table. I cut the roll in half the long way (while it was still rolled up, of course), to have two fifteen-foot lengths, for thirty feet, to cover three thousand years. So a foot for a century.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Oh, and were you the person who had that game where you had two cards with two historic events, and then you drew a third card, and had to put it before, between, or after? I mean, sometimes you got easy things like "creation of agriculture," "moon launch", and "Reign of Elizabeth I of England", but sometimes you'd draw much more difficult ones.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

No, I'm not the one who has that. But, damn, that's a neat game concept, and I'd be terrible at it.

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia has a decent list of timeline websites. This one looks pretty good.

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I believe the order of the events you listed is:

1. The first olympics (around 776 BCE).

2. The founding of Rome (in mythology, 753 BCE; in reality, sometime in the 8th or 9th Centuries BCE, but nobody's exactly sure when, so this may have happened before the first olympics).

3. The Babylonian exile of the Jews (around 600 BCE).

4. The Golden Age of Athens (5th Century BCE).

Unless... What exactly do you mean by "the founding of Rome?" I'm referring to when the city was probably originally settled.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The archeological evidence doesn't rule out 753, and I'm just writing the things down about where they look good on the butcher paper, so I put it somewhere around 750, 'cause 753 is as good a date as any. It's not significant to the class I'm teaching, anyway -- it's just there for context, and the mythological date works fine for my purposes. And, heck -- the mythological date could be accurate.

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

Oh, and as far as the religous figures:

Gautama Buddha: usually listed as 563 BCE - 483 BCE.

Lao Tse may never actually have existed, and, if he did, he may have lived anywhere from the 6th Century BCE to the 4th Century BCE.

Confucius: usually listed as 551 BCE - 479 BCE.

Zoroaster may have lived anywhere from the 18th (!) Century BCE to the 6th Century BCE. Zoroastrian texts date him to 558 BCE, but most scholars put him around 1200 BCE.

So, to sum up: Confucius and the Buddha were definitely contemporaries. If he existed, Lao Tse may or may not have been their contemporary. Zoroaster was almost certainly well before any of them.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I stuck Zoroaster at 558 -- for our purposes, the importance of him is the influence of Zoroastrianism on Darius and the Persian Empire -- so, even if he actually lived six, or twelve centuries earlier, the religion became dominant right around the mythological date.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

But Rome happens in 753, even though it doesn't become important until after the golden age of Greece? Your standards don't seem to be consistent.

Then again, you seem to be fine with using dates that are mythological rather than accurate... not that I have a problem with that in general, but I think it's weird that you specifically would be OK with doing it.

Kiralee

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Because the other dates for Zoroaster are also speculative. The 558 date is also plausible.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

I always thought that, when dealing with speculative historical dates, it was most appropriate / accurate to go with "most scholars..." unless of course you are a historical scholar, and that's your specialty.

Not that it's all that important in this case... it's just that you are usually very careful about accuracy, and seem to treat me as if I am not careful about accuracy, so it's weird when our positions are reversed.

In other words, I'm not complaining about the dates. I'm mentioning the possibility that you may be implementing a sort of double standard (for lack of a better term). Although, since I don't have a whole lot of emotional investment in avoiding this treatment (at least not in this particular instance), that's not too big a deal either.

Kiralee

[sproutntad.livejournal.com]

I took a "history of the Jews" class that used Potak's "Wanderings" as a text. The class was a semester entirely of important dates in Jewish history (and "pre" history) and dates in historical contet to them. I gave all my notes to mom, I think they are in the dining room top or second to top shelf above all the bibles. My hand written notes are in a purple folder. Feel free to use what you need. They will probably be helpful.