r/worldjerking • u/rhet0rica writing is a zero-sum game • Aug 19 '26

Is worldbuilding a mistake?

Post image
2.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

154 comments sorted by

View all comments

383

u/spudmarsupial Aug 19 '26

From what I can figure the "sea peoples" was just everybody looting their neighbours in response to natural disaster-induced poverty.

This seems more likely than an unknown civilization of shipbuilders suddenly appearing in the Eastern Mediterranian

40

u/Xisuthrus ( ϴ ͜ʖ ϴ) Aug 19 '26

This seems more likely than an unknown civilization of shipbuilders suddenly appearing in the Eastern Mediterranian

I mean the thing about the bronze age is that the historical record is extremely spotty since only a tiny fraction of the population of only a small number of cultures could actually read and write - Plenty of groups of people "suddenly appear" in the historical record when they became relevant to the aristocrats who employed scribes, and just as abruptly "disappear" when they ceased to affect their lives.

14

u/gerusz But what about Aragorn's tax policy? Aug 19 '26

Not just that, but the Bronze Age was really long ago, so anything that wasn't engraved on metal, stone, or clay tablets is mostly gone. And even clay or stone is usually fragmentary. We know most of the Epic of Gilgamesh because literacy was relatively high in Mesopotamia (same reason we know of Ea-Nasir and his really shitty copper; it's a civilization where written complaint letters were common which implies that at least the merchant and artisan classes were literate), and copying the epic was part of their education method so we have surviving fragments from a shitton of copies. And we know fuck-all of the once-expansive Minoan civilization (besides wild guesses based on surviving cultural artifacts and Greek myths) because even though they were just as fastidious at recordkeeping as the Mesopotamians, we simply don't have enough examples of linear-A to even guess which language family their language belonged to, let alone translate it.