History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

[Susano]

Or, to put it another way -- 10 plot seeds for your Pulp Hero campaign

 

http://www.livescience.com/mysteries/top10_history_mysteries-1.html

 

1. Rongorongo
   
2. Lost City of Helike
   
3. The Bog Bodies
   
4. Fall of the Minoans
   
5. The Carnac Stones
   
6. Who Was Robin Hood?
   
7. The Lost Roman legion
   
8. The Voynich Manuscript
   
9. The Tarim Mummies
   
10. Disappearance of the Indus Valley Civilization
    

[JohnTaber]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

Cool! Great post! This will work great in my new campaign called Terra Incognita: Ancient Mysteries...http://www.usandacat.com/tiam/

 

[Captain Obvious]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

#4 has some erroneous information. Liqian is not Chinese for Rome. That would Luoma. Liqian is more likely a Sinicized version of Legion.

 

Although the Latin for legion is Legio, with a hard g, IIRC. A more likely Sinicization for Legio would be Leiguo.

[FenrisUlf]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

Or, to put it another way -- 10 plot seeds for your Pulp Hero campaign

 

http://www.livescience.com/mysteries/top10_history_mysteries-1.html

 

1. Rongorongo
   
2. Lost City of Helike
   
3. The Bog Bodies
   
4. Fall of the Minoans
   
5. The Carnac Stones
   
6. Who Was Robin Hood?
   
7. The Lost Roman legion
   
8. The Voynich Manuscript
   
9. The Tarim Mummies
   
10. Disappearance of the Indus Valley Civilization
    

 

Very cool ideas all.

 

Though I fail to see the "mystery" about the Tarim Mummies. It's fairly well-known among historians that Indo-Iranian nomads dominated Central Asia until the 6th-7th centuries AD, when the Turks and other Mongolian tribes rose to replace them. So finding people who once had red hair and blue eyes in the reaches of Western China shouldn't be all that much of a surprise.

[input.jack]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

What about the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce?

[BobGreenwade]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

I saw a special on History Channel some time ago that looked carefully at Robin Hood, trying to see if there was a single man by that name who formed the core of the myth. According to their research, there were probably several real bandits legitimately named Robin Hood between the Roman and Rennaissance Ages -- perhaps as many as a half-dozen -- and at least as many who used it as a nickname (a sort of nickname -- a "robbin' hood"). But there was one of the former, living during the time of King John, who had a friend named John Little and frequently butted heads with Eustace of Lowdham, the Sheriff of Nottingham. This particular Robin Hood was a nasty bandit, but came to be well-liked in the area because he kept getting away from Eustace, who was even nastier.

 

If enough folks are interested I'll see if I can't hunt down the title and other information on that special, and possibly post it in the FH forums on Tuesday.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

When this came out, I nearly posted that the original feature ought to have been called "World's Most Overrated Mysteries..."

But that would be biting the hand that feeds. What I ought to have said then, and want to say first of all now is....

Thank You, Susano for posting that and considerately keeping this forum alive. Thankythankyou.

That said, I'll take on the Tarim Mummies.

Way back in the day when the whole Indo-European thingie wasn't on life support (recently linguists have talked in terms of the "Indo-European Fallacy" that languages occur in large families or related tongues), one of the first things people noticed about the presumptive Indo-European families is how remarkably close Greek and Iranian are. Throw in a few presumptively similar languages along the road between Iran and Greece (Armenian and Phrygian), and there was a strong presumption that we could talk about a Greco-Iranian civilisation from, say, 1000BC to 500BC.

This, to put it mildly, did not sit well with the somewhat less than enlightened theorists of the 19th century, and they were very glad indeed to notice that they could group all "European" IE languages separately from all "Oriental" IElanguges by the way they pronounced a word ("centum" is Europe) ( "satem" is Asia)

Then, in the 1950s, researchers recovered a "lost" Indo-European language that had been spoken in two of the major Tarim Basin oases from a vast archive of documents accidentally preserved from the versos of Buddhist devoltional exercises, precisely dating them to the Mid-Tang. There was already plenty of evidence that the Tarim had been occupied by Indo-European speakers in the 600s/700s AD, with archives in both Iranian and Indian Indo-European languages. But these were Oriental as Oriental could be.

Tocharian was a centum language, hence European.

The discovery of Caucasian mummies dating to the millenium before from the area around Urumchi was therefore a great relief to the theorists, who even seized upon shroud-weaving styles to proclaim the Tocharians "Celts."

See, Urumchi isn't, exactly, in the Tarim Basin. It is the Dzungharian Basin, parallel and to the north of the Tarim. Dzhungaria is colder than the Tarim, but also wetter, making it possible for Stone Age peoples to live there and travel through it from the Middle East to China, as we already knew had been done. There's no real reason to think that the mummies spoke Tocharian, but there is no reason to think they didn't either, and the breed of archaeologist that does think that he can figure out what language dead bodies spoke by talking to their pots was already convinced that Mummies=Tocharians.

So there's the first point. The Tocharians carried wheat, barley, sheep, chariots from the Middle East to China.

Second point: it has also been argued that the Tocharians also brought bronze, writing and Middle Eastern religion to China. Certain linguists have been claiming to see signs that Early Chinese was an Indo-European language since the 1950s, and the theory is given pretty serious attention in the Cambridge History of Early China.

The Tocharians can be seen as China's culture bearers, and China's ancient civilisation as "derivative." This is a petty and stupid argument, but hey, if the Internet has proven anything, it is that people have a taste for such.

Third point: on the map it looks like the easiest route from west to east via Dzhungaria runs across the Kalmyck Steppe to the Volga and thence to the Middle East via the Caspian or across the Volga to Ukraine. Thus proof that the Centum languages really did keep clear of the Middle East and that the vigour of our Aryan ancestors was not polluted by inferior Semitic stock... Ur, what I mean to say in purely dispassionate, scientific terms is that this proves the "Kurgan hypothesis" about Indo-European origins, which is a purely scientific dispute that laypeople should not pay any attention too, and.. sorry if there are any typoes here, but my right arm tends to fly into the air of its own accord whenever I start writing about the Kurgan hypothesis.

(The foregoing is brought to you by the Committee of People Who Unfairly Parody the Views of Hard Working Historical Linguists, Thereby at least Skirting Godwin's Law.)

[Cancer]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

I might have put the Phaistos Disc on this list. As an undeciphered Bronze Age artifact that seems to be printing of some sort, it's a ticket for anything weird you might want.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

I might have put the Phaistos Disc on this list. As an undeciphered Bronze Age artifact that seems to be printing of some sort' date=' it's a ticket for anything weird you might want.[/quote']

 

Mind you, we haven't even begun to process all the readable ones, which might be a more reasonable starting point than sweating over the Phaistos Disc. That said, thanks to a great wad of speculation, there's a great deal of imagination invested in Cretan scripts. Fred Woudhuizen's reasonably cogent comments are all over the interwebs for a reason. Even if they are deflating.

Me, I'm hoping for an explanation of the second season of _Dark Angel_ at some point.

[pinecone]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

Or, to put it another way -- 10 plot seeds for your Pulp Hero campaign

 

http://www.livescience.com/mysteries/top10_history_mysteries-1.html

 

1. Rongorongo
   
2. Lost City of Helike
   
3. The Bog Bodies
   
4. Fall of the Minoans
   
5. The Carnac Stones
   
6. Who Was Robin Hood?
   
7. The Lost Roman legion
   
8. The Voynich Manuscript
   
9. The Tarim Mummies
   
10. Disappearance of the Indus Valley Civilization
    

 

I checked out Wikipedia, and there is a buncha stuff on #9...lots of ideas for pulp adventures , at least in my opinion....

[BoneDaddy]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

 

Wikipedia's entry on the Voynich Manuscript is the most bafflingly complicated and interesting piece I've read in a while. Wow that's neat.

 

Seriously - John Dee!

[FenrisUlf]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

 

Wikipedia's entry on the Voynich Manuscript is the most bafflingly complicated and interesting piece I've read in a while. Wow that's neat.

 

Seriously - John Dee!

 

Everything rocks on toast when you include John Dee. The original 007, ritual magician, genius mathematician and cartographer, tried to get American declared as 'the new Atlantis', the guy's career really was what most of us try to do with our characters in a game.

 

There's also quite a bit on the Voynich in the first Suppressed Transmissions book by Ken Hite.

[Derek Hiemforth]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

There's also quite a bit on the Voynich in the first Suppressed Transmissions book by Ken Hite.

To any GMs running games in any world that's even loosely based on "real-world" history:

 

If you don't have Ken's Suppressed Transmission books, you're cheating yourself out the some of the greatest adventure-idea-generation tools out there. Seriously. Run out and buy them now. We'll wait.

 

(And this goes double for GMs running games such as Pulp, Weird Conspiracy, Urban Fantasy, etc.)

[Susano]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

Are there more than just the two?

[Derek Hiemforth]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

No, AFAIK there's still just two.

[BoneDaddy]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

Everything rocks on toast when you include John Dee. The original 007, ritual magician, genius mathematician and cartographer, tried to get American declared as 'the new Atlantis', the guy's career really was what most of us try to do with our characters in a game.

 

There's also quite a bit on the Voynich in the first Suppressed Transmissions book by Ken Hite.

Not only that, he was Doctor Destiny before his trip to Arkham. During his brief escape, he fought Dream, aka the Sandman, and lost by winning.

[st barbara]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

What about Ponepei (or Pohnpei) Island , or Easter Island for that matter ? Or the "lost Templar fleet" which (according to Childress and others) discovered North America well before Columbus and was responsible for the creation of the Caribbean pirates ! If you want to go treasure hunting there are dozens of fun legends around. More "lost mines" in the southern U S A than you can shake the proverbial stick at (Thomas Penfield in "Dig Here" mentions 81 "lost" treasures) and Australia has a few quite unusual "lost treasure legends" including a ship with a keel of solid silver somewhere in the Murray river !

[st barbara]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

Darn it ! I left out "The Amber Room" as a possible "hook" for a Pulp Hero adventure ! Tut, tut !

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

 

The thing about all the high profile mysteries like the Voynich Manuscripts is that they tend to detract from the real ones.

The "Minoans" and their mysterious, undeciphered Linear A script are very exciting, but if the Minoans actually were an advanced, powerful civilisation, there are virtually guaranteed to be Linear A-Akkadian bilingual texts in the diplomatic archives of nearby powers. Many Bronze Age archives have been found in the last few years. If the premise is correct, the key to Linear A is lying underground somewhere.

It happens that the biggest power on the Anatolian coast was Arzawa, and its capital is very likely to have been Sardis. Sardis today is a greenfield site covered with picturesque ruins, easy to excavate and self-evidently worth it. Yet only a tiny fraction of of it has been dug. There's not the time, money and energy.