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MeatballDom t1_jbr1khj wrote

Reply to comment by p314159i in ‘Dates add nothing to our culture’: Everywhen explores Indigenous deep history, challenging linear, colonial narratives by B0ssc0

How often in Roman works are dates actually mentioned? There certainly are some Greek and Roman ones which give some comparative context, but there are others which are quite vague. We can only date them today because of the other works, or archaeological evidence, which do specify (or we do our best to guess, there's several major events which can't even pinpoint to a year, or even decade). And then there's some which do specify, and often, like Diodorus Sic., that we can look at now and say "well, actually, this dating is really off, these calendars don't sync up."

I find years and dating useful for organising things when first gaining an understanding, but that's because it was the system I grew up learning with. I think that's the point, it's the system I'm familiar with, versus a system they're familiar with, and how it's important to not assume one is superior. Even Romans would have found our modern dating methods odd.

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p314159i t1_jbr3kjj wrote

Dude I just want to compare different native groups to see if there were any interactions or butterfly effects between them. I can't do that right now unless I sift through a bunch of different oral histories and try to piece together an order and chain of causality.

For instance we still don't technically know if the Xiongnu and the Huns are the same thing but because of dates we know it is theoretically possible they were the same and that the start of a potential migration can be determined by a particular date in Chinese history when they started trying to move west away from China.

What potential questions are we not asking (such as if the Xiongnu and the Huns are same thing) simply because we don't know yet if the dates could line up?

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MeatballDom t1_jbr5ibj wrote

You said in your post

>We couldn't do that if the histories lacked dates.

My point was that the Roman histories often lacked dates.

And nowhere did I suggest that you couldn't try and see how these groups line up, just that you can understand that not everyone is going to do a comparison that way. I actually am wondering why you would need the exact date line up to do such a comparison in the first place? What evidence do you have for culture, linguistics, mythology, and other such things that can be more useful to compare their similarities?

But I'm not familiar with the Xiongnu and Huns historiography, which works are you using as the basis for your methodology which can give some background on why this is important?

>I can't do that right now unless I sift through a bunch of different oral histories and try to piece together an order and chain of causality.

You can sift through the oral histories and still find the dates then doesn't it prove that these dates in the works are not completely necessary to convert it into a more linear timeline?

If we don't know the important details about their culture, then the dates don't really do anything for us. Two cultures can exist at the same time. Compare this with the studies of the Greeks, Minoans, and Myceneans. They weren't leaving dates that we know of, but they did leave other archaeological evidence that we can compare and make arguments from. And again, see my first comment on how even those that leave dates, we can't always trust them, in fact, we often cannot for things from antiquity.

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p314159i t1_jbr63fe wrote

It isn't like the lack of dates complete frustrates attempts to understand but it would be significantly easier if they existed. Lack of dates is not the end of the world but it is something which is missing and you have to do a significant amount of work to just achieve the same level of understanding that would be available if it just had dates. When the dates don't exist the dates need to be created through meticulous work because dates are needed.

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MeatballDom t1_jbr6i17 wrote

As asked above: What/who are you basing this methodology on, how is the better than other evidence in culture, and how are you going to be certain of the dates in the evidence?

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p314159i t1_jbr6ryg wrote

Yes dates can be made up but so can literally everything else.

Basically this is just a question of if having an additional piece of information (a date) is good or not. I think having more information is a good thing.

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