Book Recommendation

[Trebuchet]

The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust by Heather Pringle

 

A "fascinating volume detailing the Nazis' crackpot theories about prehistory and the Indiana Jones–style lengths they went to prove them. Employing a team of researchers, Pringle investigates Heinrich Himmler's private think tank, the Ahnenerbe, which dispatched scholars to the most inhospitable and distant parts of the world to discover evidence of ancient Aryan conquests and the Germans' racial superiority." (Publisher's Weekly)

 

It's chock full of ideas for Nazi "Raiders of the Lost Ark"-type adventures; and shows how crazy some of Himmler's ideas really were. Hitler was surprisingly skeptical about much of Himmler's theories (which considering these literally involved magic and Atlantis is not particularly surprising). Himmler apparently believed Thor's legendary hammer was in actuality an ancient electicity weapon used by the proto-Aryans.

 

It covers the famous expedition to Tibet, but also less well known ones to Syria, Norway, Sweden, and the Crimea. Also covered are planned expeditions to Iceland and Peru which were stopped by the onset of war.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Master-Plan-Himmlers-Scholars-Holocaust/dp/0786887737/ref=ed_oe_p/103-4487125-5103852

[CorpCommander]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

I saw a documentary on that. Fascinating stuff. It is amazing how people will start with a conclusion and turn science on it's ear an a desperate attempt to prove it.

 

Great recommendation. I'm going to the link now.

[Barton]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

It will be on my XMAS wish list.

[Narratio]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

Well, Amazon delivered it to my place yesterday. I'll be home next week and it's number 2 on my must read list. I think Charles Stross was picking it over for some of his 'The Laundry' ideas.

[Midas]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust by Heather Pringle

 

Himmler apparently believed Thor's legendary hammer was in actuality an ancient electicity weapon used by the proto-Aryans.

 

 

http://www.amazon.com/Master-Plan-Himmlers-Scholars-Holocaust/dp/0786887737/ref=ed_oe_p/103-4487125-5103852

 

Nah, everybody knows that Mjollner was a pistol carried by a time traveler.

 

Will have to check this book out. Literally. I get most of my worthwhile reading through Inter Library Loan.

 

Midas

[Chris-M]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

Will have to check this book out. Literally. I get most of my worthwhile reading through Inter Library Loan.

 

Dude, ain't nothin' wrong with that. Inter-Library Loan is an incredibly under-utilized and awesome service. If there's something I really want to read and it's out of print and/or not cheap and easily available for purchase, ILL, here I come! You'd be amazed how much great stuff is available via ILL, and they generally get it to you quicker than you'd think.

[FenrisUlf]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

Thanks for listing this, Treb. Now I know what to get next through interlibrary loan.

[Susano]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

I just added that to my wish list.

[Blue]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

Cool. Available for my Kindle too.

[Basil]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

Got it from my library (King County [WA] Library Service). Interesting, though I would've liked more about the expeditions and less about "The Final Solution".

 

Possibly useful background for Pulp, but little in the way of "idea seeds".

[Trebuchet]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

Got it from my library (King County [WA] Library Service). Interesting, though I would've liked more about the expeditions and less about "The Final Solution".

 

Possibly useful background for Pulp, but little in the way of "idea seeds".

I'm sorry you didn't find it useful. Me, I was rubbing my hands together constantly as new evil pulp ideas appeared. Hell, our Pulp Hero campaign is set 30 years prior to the Nazis and I still found good ideas.

[st barbara]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

Got it from my library (King County [WA] Library Service). Interesting, though I would've liked more about the expeditions and less about "The Final Solution".

 

Possibly useful background for Pulp, but little in the way of "idea seeds".

Perhaps you would find "Himmler's Crusade" by Christopher Hale more useful ? (I'm sure that I mentioned this book at some time in the past on these boards)

[Guest Admiral C]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

I believe The Mummy Congress, a book I picked up in a used bookstore was by Heather Pringle too. That one was an excellent pulp resource as well and covered extensively some of the newer mummy research and outlined differences in paleopathology vs archeology, professional rivalries, the difficulties of sponsorship, and even the technological hurdles of storing and displaying mummies. It covered all the major mummy groups too, Egyptian, Andean, Tibetin as well as approaching Incorruptibles from a mummy researcher standpoint.

 

What stuck with me was, I believe it was called, the Chechin man or something similar. Basically mummified remains of humans found in China in a northern desert. The dated back to some of the earliest Chinese civilizations but the remains appear to be caucasion in that they were pretty tall and had red hair. The Chinese government so far has disallowed any significant testing or ID of these remains and most archeologists don't want to touch it it anyway for fear of producing evidence of early European influence in China, a touchy subject.

 

I wish I had the link as there were a few articles online. It was pretty curious. But the amount of trouble Ms. Pringle went to, traveling to Chile to attend a lesser known conference, to get her research together shows a thoroughness that might make The Master Plan and even more interesting read.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

 

What stuck with me was, I believe it was called, the Chechin man or something similar. Basically mummified remains of humans found in China in a northern desert. The dated back to some of the earliest Chinese civilizations but the remains appear to be caucasion in that they were pretty tall and had red hair. The Chinese government so far has disallowed any significant testing or ID of these remains and most archeologists don't want to touch it it anyway for fear of producing evidence of early European influence in China, a touchy subject.

So-called Urumchi Man was found just outside Urmchi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Before the construction of the qanat towns of the Tarim Basin, Urumchi lay on the main route from east to west via the Zhungarian Gates, so given the presence of undisputed signs of Middle Eastern --NOT European-- influences in China such as sheep, barley and chariots, it is hardly surprising to find an ancient Caucasoid there.

And given that the Uighur and Kalmyck populations of the area still include Caucasoid individuals today, it seems doubly unamazing.

Given all this, Chinese archaeology's "wake me when you find something interesting" attitude is the third unamazing thing here. There's an element of chauvinism, of course. But there's also an element of longstanding distaste for the excesses of the cryptohistory fanboys. A few red-headed mummies are a very limited and selective element of the available database, and much of the ancillary evidence adduced by the fanboys comes from historical linguistics, a true red-head of the historical sciences, in this case a red-headed stepchild.

[Kristopher]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

So-called Urumchi Man was found just outside Urmchi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Before the construction of the qanat towns of the Tarim Basin, Urumchi lay on the main route from east to west via the Zhungarian Gates, so given the presence of undisputed signs of Middle Eastern --NOT European-- influences in China such as sheep, barley and chariots, it is hardly surprising to find an ancient Caucasoid there.

And given that the Uighur and Kalmyck populations of the area still include Caucasoid individuals today, it seems doubly unamazing.

Given all this, Chinese archaeology's "wake me when you find something interesting" attitude is the third unamazing thing here. There's an element of chauvinism, of course. But there's also an element of longstanding distaste for the excesses of the cryptohistory fanboys. A few red-headed mummies are a very limited and selective element of the available database, and much of the ancillary evidence adduced by the fanboys comes from historical linguistics, a true red-head of the historical sciences, in this case a red-headed stepchild.

 

So, not a big fan of tracking cultures by their languages?

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

So' date=' not a big fan of tracking cultures by their languages? [/quote']

 

No. Now bear in mind that among the many things I'm not, is a linguist. I read introductions to modern linguistic theory now and then, and scratch me head a great deal. So it would probably suffice to quote from a random set of recent books and say that the idea of cultures being linked to languages, and of languages belonging to great big families that allow us to trace prehistoric migrations and what not is....

A great big giant fallacy. More accurately and more specifically, as theorists begin to deconstruct the fantastic web of language families put together by Sapir and his ilk, they are starting to look at it as "the Indo-European fallacy."

On the other hand, the last time I looked this notion up on the Internet, one of my contributions to this board appeared on the first page or so of the Google search, so perhaps this is not an idea the world at large is ready for just yet.

And, just to be as ornery as I can be (us Northwest coastal logging community types are culturally programmed by our Chinook dialect to be ornery; we can't help it!) I'm going to furthermore claim that the Indo-European language family is not the exception that proves the rule. On the contrary, it is no more an example of a language family spread by great prehistoric migrations than any other.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

Okay, now I've got two entries on "Indo-European fallacy," though fortunately on the second page of the search. Hold me: I'm scared.

[Eric, Omnirex]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

Wow! 3 books I gotta get.

 

Cool thread. Thanks to everyone named a book.

[Kristopher]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

No. Now bear in mind that among the many things I'm not, is a linguist. I read introductions to modern linguistic theory now and then, and scratch me head a great deal. So it would probably suffice to quote from a random set of recent books and say that the idea of cultures being linked to languages, and of languages belonging to great big families that allow us to trace prehistoric migrations and what not is....

A great big giant fallacy. More accurately and more specifically, as theorists begin to deconstruct the fantastic web of language families put together by Sapir and his ilk, they are starting to look at it as "the Indo-European fallacy."

On the other hand, the last time I looked this notion up on the Internet, one of my contributions to this board appeared on the first page or so of the Google search, so perhaps this is not an idea the world at large is ready for just yet.

And, just to be as ornery as I can be (us Northwest coastal logging community types are culturally programmed by our Chinook dialect to be ornery; we can't help it!) I'm going to furthermore claim that the Indo-European language family is not the exception that proves the rule. On the contrary, it is no more an example of a language family spread by great prehistoric migrations than any other.

 

And yet, various languages are more related or less related to each other. And that relates to when people lived where and next to whom, and who moved where, and...

 

I'm not sure how one would argue, for example, that the Romence group of languages was related to the Roman conquest of Europe and the spread of Latin.

 

On the other hand, many of the different groups who conquered the chinese region routinely took on some variant of Chinese.

 

Language, like culture, isn't exclusively and irrevocably linked to single genetic lineages, obviously. But it strikes me as wasting a lot of useful data to ignore the evidence provided by looking at current and old languages to help track the movements of people and ideas.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

And yet, various languages are more related or less related to each other. And that relates to when people lived where and next to whom, and who moved where, and...

 

I'm not sure how one would argue, for example, that the Romence group of languages was related to the Roman conquest of Europe and the spread of Latin.

 

On the other hand, many of the different groups who conquered the chinese region routinely took on some variant of Chinese.

 

Language, like culture, isn't exclusively and irrevocably linked to single genetic lineages, obviously. But it strikes me as wasting a lot of useful data to ignore the evidence provided by looking at current and old languages to help track the movements of people and ideas.

 

Maybe. Or maybe we're now taking a more conservative view of what the data actually tells us. The Roman case isn't mysterious. We know why the modern Romance languages are so similar to each other in vocabulary and grammar, have texts that allow us to trace those similarities back a long way, and a fairly full grasp of the history of the area back to the period before the spread of the Romance languages.

Compare that with the somewhat similar case of the Indo-European languages. Hindi and Irish have similarities in vocabulary and grammar to each other, and to a number of other languages, such as Tocharian, the proposed (on very weak grounds) language of the Urumchi mummies, and to Pulleyblank's proposed Pre-Early Chinese.

How did those similarities arise? We say the languages are "related," and the metaphor leads us to propose an "ancestor language," just as we take Latin to be the ancestor of Romance languages, including Quebecois French and Brazilian Portuguese.

Was there an Indo-European Empire that spread from Xinjiang to Ireland? Well, there is a modern Indo-European okumene that spreads that far, but it is clearly not the origins of the similarities, as we have Irish texts going back to 800AD or so, and while Hindi is much later, we propose a "relationship" (look --our metaphor has begun to run amok!) with the Old Persian of the Behistun inscriptions of c. 500BC. More relations point us to Hittite, written down about 1200BC, although Akkadian texts reference Hittite names going back to 1750BC or so.

(The most conservative conclusion from the facts, I'll now point out parenthetically, is something like that the Hitite Empire spread Indo-European. But that's not the conclusion.)

Now we have put the "historical" event that we sought to explain firmly back into prehistory. The linguistic evidence has become our only useful evidence. From this, can we deduce migrating "Indo-Europeans" imposing their language from Ireland to Xinjiang? No: we can put it forward as a hypothesis. But we must also consider it along other theses of language change.

A grab-bag of opposing theories of language change hold that no "relatedness" is required. This is clear in some cases. English adopts vocabulary from Chinese, Chinese from English. In other cases, it is much more complex. Proponents of "relatedness" as a useful and easily discoverable mechanism for language similarities hold that some linguistic phenomena, such as grammar, are not borrowed. This is clearly not the case. To get anywhere, we have to construct liklihoods of borrowing. Grammar is less likely to be borrowed than vocabulary, this phonetic change more likely than the next; and so on.

At this point, we get to sketchy data, problematic statistics, the problems of comparing written to unwritten languages, and so on.

Now, it happens that Indo-European linguistic relatedness is one of, if not the earliest of these constructs. We knew far less about the way that languages interact when the theory was put forward then we do now. And, what's worse, the crucial stages in which this relatedness was constructed in whatever way it was constructed, occurred in an undocumented period of which we know nothing about the history.

What it looks like, here, is that we are building the history to support the thesis of language relatedness, not using the clear facts of relatedness to construct history.

This is a nuanced case for Indo-European, where language similarities are clear. The real, preliminary target (IMHO, we'll demolish the "Aryans," too, before we're done) are the many theories of prehistory put forward on the model of the Indo-European relatedness theory. "The Munda spread rice and the Austroasiatic family tree; Natufah culture is related to the spread of Norstritic..." and so on.

Oops --gotta go to work.

[gewing]

Re: Book Recommendation

 

Nah, everybody knows that Mjollner was a pistol carried by a time traveler.

 

Will have to check this book out. Literally. I get most of my worthwhile reading through Inter Library Loan.

 

Midas

 

 

 

Where was that short story??? I remember reading it, but...

 

 

I liked it a lot.

 

Though I did NOT name my .45 mjolner...