Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 00:18:37 -0400
To: athena-discuss@info.harpercollins.com
Subject: Re: Diop

Bernard R Ortiz-de-Montellano wrote:
> 
> Writes regarding Diop's crediting Eduard Meyer with figuring out the
> Egyptian use of the Sothic cycle:
> 
> >As to the first point, my copy of Diop shows him crediting Meyer on p.
> >281. Diop has therefore not engaged in the practice he accuses Archimedes
> >and other Greeks of having engaged in...
> ******
> 
> Diop (1991 [1981] has the word (Meyer) thrown in the middle of a paragraph
> with no explanation. It is not footnoted, or cited, no mention is made of
> Meyer being first to figure out the use of the Sothic calendar.
> *****

You accused him of plagiarism, not of sloppy citation.  He is certainly
innocent of the former, even if arguably guilty of the latter.
Plagiarists do not cite, however sloppily, those from whom they are 
supposedly plagiarising.
 
> >As to the second point, Diop considers and rejects the arguments in favor
> >of the "short chronology", thus: (Diop, 1991, p. 281).
> ****
> In fact, Diop does not. The main argument against a date of 4236 B.C. is as
> I said previously, "Nobody in the world was using numbers or writing in
> 4200 B.C. The earliest use of writing and numbers is about 3100 B.C. (see
> Denise Schmandt-Besserat,1992). This is why, since about 1940, due to
> papers by Otto Neugebauer and A. Scharf, the date of 4241 B.C. has been
> discarded by experts who work with the primary sources." 

This argumentum ab auctoritate does not impress me very much I am afraid.
There is no way that DS-B can *know* there was no writing in 4200 BC,
whatever her book may say.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.


> This is all speculation, I don't have time to count pharaohs, so I will let
> the /Egyptologists on the list to deal with that. I do not think that there
> were that many. There is also no reason why this is relevant.The putative
> date of the inception of the calendar according to Diop precedes dynastic
> Egypt by 1000 years.      The key point is that the burden of proof is on
> proponents of 4236 because there is no evidence that anyone, much less
> Egyptians had writing  and calendars at that time. People then were living
> in small farming villages and there were no states, or astronomers.

You argue for the short chronology because you *know* no one had
writing or calendars before 3100 BC?  Surely you are not serious.


Pardon me if I do not take up some of your other points.  They are tangential
at best, in any case repetitive, and do not in my opinion advance the dialogue.

> Bernard Ortiz de Montellano
> bortiz@cms.cc.wayne.edu

Regards,

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