Tonight was supposed to be about continuing physics inquiries, but this is worth a bit of diversion.
The first item on the agenda deals with the last slave ship to North America, the Clotilda, which may have been found due to the strong north winds which blew cold weather to the south and drained the Mobile river.
http://www.al.com/news/mobile/index.ssf/2018/01/alcom_reporter_may_have_found.html
The article is worth a long look, because it sets out many of the players of this strange pre-civil war opera, 55 years after the importation of slaves was criminalized, but while slavery was still in vogue in parts of the United States.
In the book, Three empires on the Nile (spoiler alert) it is pointed out that today (as I write this) in Sudan a child slave may be purchased for 35.00 so the inhumanity of man is affirmed. But even so this story at the end of slavery (the Cotilda was built in 1855, burned in 1860 and the civil war ended 1865, do the math) is worth knowing.
In short, scoundrels plotted to kidnap and smuggle africans into the United States, planning to sell them in Mobile. Having been discovered at the end of their undertaking, they unceremoniously dumped the human cargo in an area which would be become known as Africatown (at the foot of the bridge that crosses the Mobile river, burned the boat to conceal the evidence and then bragged of their undertaking to the point where everyone knew who did it and what the did although nothing was ever done about it.
Anyway, this isn't a done deal, proof wise, but well worth the read.
Now while I'd like to work a bit on that story (above); given the fact that a reporter is on it, I'll give him a chance to finish since I'm pretty busy with other things.
Oracles figure heavily in the book I'm currently writing (The Science of Nostradamus) and it is worth nothing that they appear often in the bible, something which I discovered in reading about the temple of Solomon in a book about Justinian (Justinian's Flea) also well worth the read. I originally thought and hoped the section I remembered was about Justinian's temple (church in modern parlance) but it turns out it is an old testament issue, but one of great import to my story none-the-less.
The "oracle" appears to be an area of the temple in these translations,
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1%20Kings%206:21
although other portions of the bible talk about speaking as an oracle
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Proverbs%2016:10
and indeed the Jews are referred in place of the oracle as a body in certain passages.
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Romans%203:2
Now you rightly ask, why do you, someone who claims to have ruined the concept of a faith based god, care about the bible. The reason is because the bible is one of the oldest historical documents known to man; not in itself, but in what it absorbs. Observe:
40,000 years ago the first anatomically modern humans came on the scene, roughly lining up with the ice age although fire had been used for 600,000 years before today. Neanderthals were around 400,000 years ago and were, for all intents and purposes modern humans and made tools and built shelters.
Sculputre dates from 38,000 years ago, at least.
There is evidence of burials almost immediate to the appearance of modern men and neadrathals (50,000 years ago), and by 9130 there were clear sites of religious usage (Bobekli Tepe)
Stonehenge was apparently finished in an early form in 3100 BCE.
While clearly stealing from the Sumarians, the historical record is nonetheless worth considering.
The Sumerians in 3500 BCE first left a religious record although there were certainly elements of religion that predate these records. 500 years before this there were, at a minimum "myths," in Egypt which were recorded and it is certain that for some period before these were written there was some record. The Sumerian's work made it into the modern Bible at least in parts and probably via works at least attributed to moses.https://www.biblica.com/resources/bible-faqs/when-was-the-bible-written/.
By 2635 Pyramids were being built and written Egyptian religions date from 2494.
The greek (Minoan) muti-god version arose around 2200.
Around 1450-1250 Moses came up with the 10 commandments, 800 years after the greek pantheon, setting the groundwork for modern monotheism (western version). King David, 1,000 BC, at least 250 years far down the line of descent, apparently left a few written fragments (10th century BC)https://www.livescience.com/8008-bible-possibly-written-centuries-earlier-text-suggests.html. This conceptually means that in addition to the original stone tables (circa 1400 BCE) there were records being preserved from 2100 years earlier in some oral/written form certainly possible by collectors in egypt who would have had the wealth and resources to acquire written knowledge and perhaps relied on sumarians to some extent as their clerks.
It is worth nothing that a civilization arose in 5000 bc in theTigrisEuphrates valley, they invented writing in 3600 and within 100 years had left evidence of religious writing. By 3000 bce they were using gold in manufacturing (jewelry at least), literature existed at least by 2500 bce, the written predecessor of the bible as laws existed by 2350 bce, the 2500 to 2800 sumerian king Gilgamesh was written up in the first great literary work between2150 adn 1400 (quite a spread that); the first version of the 10 commandments, the code of hammurabi appears in 1772 bce; roughly 300 years before it is adopted by Moses. It is worth nothing that 1120 the creation story is written while moses has a version 300 - 100 years earlier and these largely appear to be overlapping conceptually. https://www.ancient.eu/timeline/sumer/.
Given the way the records were subsequently reduced to writing, either may be the chicken or the egg although the Sumarians (many of whom probably ended up as jews) and the sumarians probably have a leg up.
Now if you get out your map, the egyptians were, of course, in egypt and the Sumarians were far across the now desert in Iraq. Not a long trek in a car 21 hours and 1800 kilometers from the center of Sumarian civilization to the Nile, but an insane distance back then. However, there are several factors at work 5000 years ago. First, there was probably a lot more water, the euphrates (sumarian's water) was probably in rough contact with the nile (which had several ancient canals communicating by way of the persian gulf to the red sea.
You are correctly thinking (if you are very good in geography or looking at google maps) that this is a much longer distance around Saudi Arabian peninsula but while that was probably the ancient equivalent of sailing across the atlantic, given the number of possible stops along the coastline (presumably a more fertile coastline), the calm waters, it seems unlikely that both the overland route and the coastal route were not regular trading routes. The Egyptians had sailing ships by 3400 (probably the first) and to think they were not sailing around to Sumaria given the favorably sailing conditions is to limit the scope of their imagination and courage to a degree which makes little sense. Indeed, rowing craft were undoubtedly making the trip at an even earlier date.
In addition, due to the improved conditions of arable (plow ready) land at that time, the two civilizations probably touched one way or another.
One can well imagine Moses studying writing with Sumarian Tutors or having sumarians who were accountants for the people who accompanied him by way of escape (the jewish version) or by being chased out of town (the egyptian version). Indeed, sumarians escaping poverty or war almost certainly ended up in the slums of egypt and vice versa for the sumarian slums and those places were where the purges occurred.
But to get back on the subject at hand,
Parmenides was born in 515 BC and his ideas are both Jewish and non-religious in the senses that he saw a beginning from a single item, whether influenced by monotheism or not, it rings true to quantum issues. He clearly wrestled with existence and pre-existence (which he could not grasp and perhaps rightly so because what happens at ct0 and before still has some existence, despite being independent of linear existence as we experience it. Clearly Zeno (490 BCE (25 years the junior of Parmenides)) and he took P's work and came to the conclusion that the many are one, clearly an AuT concept as the Muse pointed out to at the beginning of my inquiries; appropriately "proof by contradiction." AuT, absurd as it appears on its face, is rendered logical once thermodynamics is defined in terms of a result and not a force; finally removing the contradictions by showing our observation of the universe is that of actors in a film and not the actors themselves who in this case are in the underlying super-symmetry.
Both the arrow and the Achilles/Tortoise paradoxes force the examination not only of quantum nature of things but also require that we view both time, velocity and history a little differently although knowing that velocity is merely a subset of time allows the substitution of distance in the way we observe it.
The idea that you have to split distance continually is ruined when distance is quantum and beyond that distance reflects no dimension at all except for the reflection of information in various stages of compression or decompression allowing for the reality which is inconsistent with true dimension meaning that for all intents and purposes, Zeno and probably Parmenides had figured out that some feature like AuT governed the universe below the level of observation (thermodynamics) but they did not have the mathematical observations to zero in on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes
It wasn't until 283-246 (200 years after P and Z) that King Ptolemy brought together rabbis to generate a Greek version (language) of the bible which we rely upon today in large part; converting a largely oral tradition to one in writing. The idea was that 72 rabbis were gathered together for this process (the idea that they were in separate rooms and came up with identical versions is widely circulated, but its much more likely that their works were edited together meaning some stories almost certainly originated from a single source. But the access to the unitary god in the unitary concepts of Parmenides are of interest.
Anyway, that is a subject for another night, this is merely to entertain you and draw things from the muse together in a way that is both enlightening and perhaps entertaining.
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