why are all the famous Mesopotamians and Persians post-Islamic?
the ancient and classical dynasties never left any evidence of records of famous people (priests / philosophers / scientists / inventors)?
stuff like baghdad battery is pretty cool.
records from the Greeks indicate a rich academic culture in the east.
so what's the deal?
Did the babylonians and persians just not care enough to make records of who did what before completely uncultured peninsula arabs overran them? That seems incredibly suspicious.
Were all the records kept in one place, never replicated (seems a pretty foolish mistake), and incidentally destroyed?
>>386379
>allahu akbars invade
>burn everything in the name of allah
>s-see guys, we're supperior! There was nothing here before! :))))
It's not like it's happening again now
>>386379
>why are all the famous Mesopotamians and Persians post-Islamic?
I can't name any famous post-Islamic Persians and Mesopotamians
Gilgamesh, Sargon, Xerxes, Darius, Abraham, Yeshua, all pre-Islamic.
>>386437
This. Most records that did exist were probably destroyed hundreds of years ago either through malicious intent or benign neglect while Islam was in control.
>>386379
>baghdad battery
It wasn't a fucking battery.
>>386475
How do you know?
>>386479
Most modern academic agrees it's most likely a storage container for sacred scrolls that left an acidic residue after the scrolls have rotted away.
>>386479
The burden of proof is not on me. First off, you're making the claim, and second, you're going against mainstream agreement, so you're gonna need some hard evidence.
>>386501
There's no evidence to prove it wasn't a battery.
>>386509
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>burden of proof
>>386379
For Zoroastrian faith, the priests Mani and Mazdak are pretty famous.
Mani for Manichaeism, seeing the world as a struggle between good and evil.
Mazdak for his proto-communistic religious revolt which in the end helped reform the Sassanid empire and strengthen the position of the king.
>>386447
>I can't name any famous post-Islamic Persians and Mesopotamians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Persian_scientists_and_scholars
pretty much all post-islamic
>>386481
>Most modern academic agrees it's most likely a storage container for sacred scrolls that left an acidic residue after the scrolls have rotted away.
which academics?
the finding wasn't a jar with acidic residue anyway
>In 1936, while excavating ruins of a 2000-year-old village near Baghdad, workers discovered mysterious small vase. A 6-inch-high pot of bright yellow clay dating back two millennia contained a cylinder of sheet-copper 5 inches by 1.5 inches. The edge of the copper cylinder was soldered with a 60-40 lead-tin alloy comparable to today's solder. The bottom of the cylinder was capped with a crimped-in copper disk and sealed with bitumen or asphalt. Another insulating layer of asphalt sealed the top and also held in place an iron rod suspended into the center of the copper cylinder. The rod showed evidence of having been corroded with an acidic agent.
so let's see... it has an electrolytic fluid inside an insulating vessel, an anode surface, and a cathode inserted into the electrolyte.
what purpose is the inserted iron rod and copper cylinder suspended in the center?
what else would you assume it was?
>>386437
>>386448
This treads into WE WUZ KINGS territory, the idea that of course there were lots and lots of records, but all such proof burned up because whitey/arabs/whoever.
Much more likely is that everything not literally carved into solid rock was lost to time without periodic recopying of papyrus scrolls or time capsule storage, and it wasn't until vellum and paper that we finally had a medium that was easy to proliferate and long-lasting, which happens to coincide with the early Medieval period.
>>386581
Arab muslims do have a history of burning everything non-islamic though.
They do it to this day.
>>386588
This history of burning cannot be substantiated with physical evidence, like every other destruction event can. What they are now is irrelevant to what they were in the 7th and 8th centuries.
What they have is a mythological reputation taken at face value.
>>386379
We were just talking about this in a different thread:
>>385403
Bascially:
But when compared to all the plays, folklore, histories, songs, oral traditions and poems that were eventually transcribed, illustrated pottery, paintings, sculptures, etc. etc. we have from ancient Greece, you'd think we'd have more from ancient Persia, when its borders expanded an area literally larger than the Roman Empire. Why is there so little left? Did they really get that WREKT by the Greeks...and the Arabs?...and the Mongols? and the Turks?
Answer:
>Why is there so little left?
>Greeks & Macedonians
Most probable cause is that Alexander's conquest of Achaemenid Persia if not even intentionally on Alexander's own part but his men and commanders likely looted other repositories of Persian archives before Persepolis and administrative centers where they kept records of transactions, daily affairs, decrees, laws, orders, and so forth.
>Arabs
While the looting of Ctesiphon is over-exaggerated by lovers of Persia, it is known that in the centuries that immediately followed the downfall of the Sassanid Persian Empire, later Islamic/Arab forces would raze Persian libraries all over the country as al-Tabri tells us.
>Mongols
Yes. Mongols were well known to have caused a great amount of havoc, psychological and physical trauma to Iranian peoples in Central Asia and Western Asia not just Iran proper, and razed entire cities under Genghis.
>Turks
Yes, Timer the Lane/Tamerlane is also well known to have destroyed great Persian and Iranian cities, butchering of intellectuals, artists, writers, and scholars. So in short: Persia never stopped having its fair share of great writers and sources of information, the issue is that its such a crossroads and nexus for trade, politics, and culture geographically speaking that it tends to get hit heavy and thus sources of pre-Islamic Persia tend be rarer.
>>386621
To be specific, I meant that as a repository of all their stuff outside of Persia.
>>386617
>you'd think we'd have more from ancient Persia
Only if one assumes Persian literary culture is exactly like Greece. Another way of thinking about it is that Greek writing tradition was unique in its scale and breadth, and perhaps choice in parchment over papyrus.
Not so coincidentally, the majority of Western Eurasian historical texts that survive into the modern age happen to be either Greek or from a Hellenized culture.
>>386621
Baghdad didn't exist until the Abbasids built it, and Alexandria lost its library to Caesar.
>>386654
Well yeah, that's what I mean. They were the biggest repositories of knowledge outside Persia (and Alexandria was Hellenic to boot). Their destruction pretty much wiped out whatever the outsiders knew and whatever had escaped destruction in Persia.
>>386379
The Achaemenids werent known for keeping historical records since they believed in the tradition of "oral histography" which lead to everything we know about them coming second hand from the Greeks or even ancient Egyptian historians like Manetho.
And whatever they actually had documented was probably lost when Persepolis was burnt down by a certain eccentric conqueror.
