# Fact and fiction as sources.



## Jd755 (Jan 5, 2023)

The problem we all face is one of knowing.

When we are born we know nothing of a past aka history. At some point after that we get told stories of pasts. Occasionally they are stories of family who are still alive but usually family long dead.
As we trust the family and family stories we, young as we are, transfer that trust to stories from beyond the family which are usually written stories of various pasts.
Likely we question family stories and the family story tellers but when it comes to written stories there is no teller to question.

Then comes an acceptance of the authority of the author of the writers without question and it is this position that endures through time in people who are genuinely interested in history as documented., history as present in the physical world they walk about in and the path through time that has been recorded on paper by people writing about other people.

On occasions people people shake the " do not question" shackle from their mind and once again find that child's urge to find out. A couple of thousand of such people end up here.

Trouble is for a decent amount of these people is as soon as a new plausible emerges in their research they put their don't question shackles on and lose themselves in their new plausible to them history.

Methodology for establishing the veracity of quite literally anything historical simply does not exist. There appears to be no work being done to establish and test one and frankly I am not surprised.
This entire system you and I were born into is one of a ruling hierarchical authority is the only thing that can keep the savage civilised. This system is based entirely in the control of the pasts.

I use the term pasts deliberately as there are a multitude of pasts in operation simultaneously. The system runs all of them. Studies, books, libraries, museums, physical artifacts, structures, processes, what is acceptable, are all under the control of people within the system who pay other people to keep the system as the authority on everything.

At some point prior to my birth I assume there was no written word. I assume this of course as I am not an immortal being and as most of my life is lived without the written word it seems obvious that the spoken word was the follower not the leader.
Therefore assuming that to be the case, prior to writing all history is oral. Stories told to others about a past some of whom in turn take that story and tell it to others in other places adding bits and forgetting bits. These stories endure through time but none of them stay true to the original as they move through time. They cannot unless the version that arrives at the ears of someone who is writing it down has passed from photographic memory to photographic memory and what are the odds for that?

There is no paper that lasts for thousands of years as far as I have been able to establish. It is consumed by many living things, fire obviously takes it out, water weakens and dissolves it, abrasion wears it away, even light degrades paper.
Then there is the inks, pencils, paints used on the paper. They too are subject to degradation by the same agents that degrade the paper.
In short there is no testing methodology to establish longevity of paper nor establish when the marks on the paper were put there. It is just as impossible to date words on clay, stone, wood, metal or any other medium that is claimed as being used as ancient writings.

Thus we end up in a loop of picking what we individually decide is acceptable to us as being most likely a true record of a past and upon that foundation we build our story. Over time our investment in the story becomes so great we go into defending it when someone else questions it, most often questions the veracity of the source.

"We have to start somewhere or we have nothing" and its variations being the most common defence employed.
Why not keep drilling down to find as I did academia holds opinion and speculation within permitted boundaries most high for example?
Don't take my word for it do it yourself.
This process showed me that discussing anything which is held within academia is a waste of effort.
As all history, all pasts appear to be held within academia (by extraction the hierarchical authority) it would appear researching any history sans academia is impossible.

It comes down to accepting that proving the veracity of any written evidence and placing the words in a chronology or time is currently impossible. All that can be said to be true is at some point in time someone wrote about a past.
If on reading the story one roots out the claim(s) within and puts them under scrutiny by using known facts it is one route one I have devised for myself to establish a likelihood of veracity.

There are always claims within the written story. The claim is why the story was written. The act of writing places it in an agreeable to hierarchical authority chronology and is used to craft endless speculation and opinion because the weight of such things is of importance when it comes to authority imposed upon others.

It is truly impossible to establish the veracity of the ancient world. Events and characters slide around on a sea of language changes, translations, word use, definition changes. The claims though remain consistent by comparison and they can be put under scrutiny.

So to round this off.
Perhaps its a good idea for people who add to the discussion on here to preface how they have arrived at the position they have before positing truths because some consensus of historians and archaeologists assume the written word is true.
Perhaps its a good idea to list the sources one used to figure out what they have. To name and post a link to the base document they have found and read and crucially accept as being the best source available.
Perhaps people could take a step back from attacking questions by defending what they believe and reexamine what they believe in light of the question posed.

If nothing else it should knock personality back into its box and once again this place could get back to putting content under scrutiny.


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## Silveryou (Jan 5, 2023)

Personally I don't have a problem with those who want to build their own reconstruction starting from sources they deem 'true'. My only problem is that I've seen how in multiple cases the authors don't mention them and/or don't give easily accessible links to verify them and/or don't explain where is the limit between the realm of opinions and that of quotations from sources and/or whether those sources are primary or secondary. This is how you build 'stories'.

When it comes to primary sources (the very most ancient book from which a narrative is derived) it would be great to have a sort of encyclopedia mentioning where and when they were found, if it is not implied that they were always at disposal. In any case I would suggest to go and read those books (the texts at disposal on the internet or the hard copy) in order to have an idea of how much the academia is interpreting and/or manipulating words. Believe me if I tell you there's a lot of surprises!

Another aspect not to underestimate is what the 'copysts' are actually reading from those sources. For example the word 'insula' could very well become 'Thule' (Latin never was the spoken language in Rome/Pompeii).

Another example I can give from a private conversation with a professional historian is the eventual removal or adding of text in the primary sources:


> My problem is the excess of good faith (and sometimes bias). The text spoke about Scythia. That word completely disappeared. My intuition (only that at the moment) tells me that the word was erased from the manuscript above. Am I biased? Could be.





> There is a sort of science to analysing the copies. If a scribe introduces a mistake, then other scribes tend to copy the mistake. Thus the mss group into families so you can make a very crude 'family tree' to ascertain reliability. Textual criticism - Wikipedia.
> 
> Why do you say the word 'Scythia' was erased? It is there in the Ms above. Or are you referring to the screenshot posted by the other person? But that is not a manuscript, rather an early printed.
> 
> Oh I see. Both the ms and the early printed have the name ‘Scythia’. But the online Pliny does not. Pliny the Elder: Natural History, Book IV Is that what you meant?





> I am talking about "unam abesse *a* *Scythia *diei cursu" becoming "unam abesse diei cursu".





> I understand. The Vatican ms has "unam abesse diei cursu", as does the online source you cite. By contrast, the early printed edition has "unam abesse *a* *Scythia *diei cursu".
> 
> So let's try to understand why the sources are different.
> 
> ...


The conversation went on with me pointing out to him how:
1. the correction came from Jean Hardouin - Wikipedia, whom he despised since he was a revisionist, which is a contradiction in itself.
2. the entire 'correction' came down to the opinion of one single guy: Jean Hardouin.

That said I don't agree with the perceived falsity of texts running wild on this forum. Oral traditions did exist and even if we imply those stories came down to us modified (but we don't that either), it's hard to tell they are false becuse we don't have the physical original but only copies of copies. It is legit to have doubts, but it's not very goos neither saying "it's all true" neither "it's all false" without even reading and inspecting.

By the way the previous historians said:


> And I'm sorry, the efforts of you and your friend really were hopeless. It took me about 20 minutes to uncover the fully story. You guys, by contrast, seize upon any suggestion that history has been stolen or deliberately tampered with, without checking the facts carefully. In other words, half-assed.


20 minutes to then cite the opinion of a guy who says 'that most texts from Antiquity were forgeries' (Jean Hardouin - Wikipedia).

Good job my historian friend, LOL!


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## TruthIsOnlyDelayed (Jan 5, 2023)

Silveryou said:


> Personally I don't have a problem with those who want to build their own reconstruction starting from sources they deem 'true'. My only problem is that I've seen how in multiple cases the authors don't mention them and/or don't give easily accessible links to verify them and/or don't explain where is the limit between the realm of opinions and that of quotations from sources and/or whether those sources are primary or secondary. This is how you build 'stories'.


This is a good point.

I use the following logic to accept this point:

1) Humans can lie, be confused, be wrong, and be misunderstood.
2) Humans in the past who wrote source material are not immune to point 1.
3) If you do not constantly remind yourself of number 2 you will find you can overweigh the value of past materials in understanding the present / future.

With that being said if the goal is to understand the past as it happened and you believe deception is at play you are now in a synthesizing pattern: source material is necessary to understand the past but a certain level of hypothesis of where it is wrong (here interjects intuition) is needed.

If one completely disregards historical sources at large (from a place of distrust) then I feel personally the only logical conclusion is to focus one’s thoughts on the present / future instead of things of the past as there can be no reconciliation without a time machine.

To do otherwise, as you said, is really just dabbling in fiction writing. It doesn’t mean the story you come up with in your head won’t be closer to the truth but you have entered into a path where your only verification is how it lines up with the here and now. Problem with that is the here and now is (arguably) under even more control from those that deceive so you don’t really get any closer to verification.

I argue to do what each one’s soul pulls them to and conscious agrees and let God handle the rest.


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## Silveryou (Jan 5, 2023)

By the way there was an adding third point I didn't tell to the previous historian I talked to:
3. you are "explaining" things to me entirely relying on the opinions of past scholars without a shred of doubt, which means you have been programmed to automatically repeat stories you learned at school through repetitions and in order to have good grades.


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## trismegistus (Jan 5, 2023)

There is an archived thread that makes for a good companion piece to this one:

SH Archive - The History of Rome has no Surviving Sources
https://stolenhistory.net/threads/the-history-of-rome-has-no-surviving-sources.2057/

I believe that the _only_ connection we have to the ancient world (whatever "ancient" means) are the structures they left behind, but even that is troublesome.  In many cases we have to take for granted the "historical documentation" of a particular building's history IE how many times was it destroyed and rebuilt, modified, added onto, etc.  It gets somewhat easier when you look towards the last hundred or so years, as in some cases it is possible to track down the receipts of work (contracting companies, invoices, etc) but in many cases we are just assuming that the written historical record is accurate.  In many cases this leads to confusion - like how is it that many of the amazing structures of the 18th and 19th century were designed in contests consistently won by savant-level teenagers with silver spoons and connections to universities that have shaped many of the issues we criticize on this site?  When we see something labeled a "construction photo" are we actually looking at a "remodel" or perhaps a renovation of a previously existing older structure?  If we see a construction photo labeled as having been taken in 1900 - how do we know this to be true?  It is quite difficult to date the age of a photo outside of what information is provided.  How many people can truly tell the difference between a photo taken in 1870 versus 1905?  

Moving to more impressive and "ancient" structures - these dating methods are even more spurious, often times being provided by the same universities that have shaped discourse for hundreds of years, by academics who have many different incentives to provide a "solution" to a historical question regardless of its true veracity.  For example - the pyramids (I hope JD doesn't mind that this is the second time I've brought them up in one of his threads):  one can take one of two approaches to how it was constructed.  Assuming that advanced building techniques were used unknown to other ancient cultures to construct them - either we are dealing with a historical inconsistency that academia has yet to satisfactorily answer, or "ancient advanced building techniques" are being confused (or purposefully obscured) for more modern 19th century technology employed by other civilizations like Napoleon and his merry band of Maltese jesuit scholars and freemasons.  Did the ancient builders of the pyramids have access to advanced machining techniques for stone - or are we just looking at 19th century graffiti on even older structures?  Currently there is no archeological technique available to tell the difference, we are only taking the word of previous "scholars" and researchers to make inferences.  

What is Roman, other than what non-romans have told us about them?  What is Atlantean?  Egyptian?  Phoenician?  Tartarian?  Where have the convenient little boxes people stick history into come from?  Cartography?  Scrolls?  Stone tablets?  Relative dating?  Dendrochronology?  How do we, as amateur researchers, confirm any of these things to be true?  

It is an overwhelming question and I can see where the logical conclusion is to say "its all fake" and "we know nothing."  Perhaps this is true, but logically it is more likely that it is somewhere in the middle between known and unknown.  The trick is figuring out which is which.


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## Silveryou (Jan 5, 2023)

trismegistus said:


> There is an archived thread that makes for a good companion piece to this one:
> 
> SH Archive - The History of Rome has no Surviving Sources
> https://stolenhistory.net/threads/the-history-of-rome-has-no-surviving-sources.2057/
> ...


The great problem I have with those links you have provided is that they infer something without telling WHAT.

The starting point, in my opinion, is once again Fomenko, whose books most of people have not read. Aside from the western critique of ancient texts (see Hardouin previously cited) it was Fomenko who inspired all the threads we now read on this forum. I'm not claiming he inspired EVERY thread but certainly most of them.
So it's important to understand what he thinks about those texts based on his mathematical methods based on statistics. He doesn't claim those authors are 'false' as most people believe or as the new narrative leads one to believe. He claims that the Vatican and in general all Western Europe with its kingdoms started manipulating the events of the past happening in the East to make it seem they were 'western'. Therefore the stories told by those authors DID HAPPEN, but in the East under different conditions and geography. He basically says that the structure is the same and the manipulation consisted in a sort of re-colouring.

Now unless one believes in everything Fomenko says or one is an expert mathematician and can prove him right, I'm going to say that despite his methods are mindblowing and revolutionary to some extent, his reconstruction is quite dubious.

So turning back to the sources it would be good to also read their contents because unless we have trained mathematicians who can prove Fomenko right and are so good to be able to explain it to us mere humans, the only possible thing to do is trying to read what is written an then try to compare it to physical reality, rather than assuming everything is false and then building up new narratives based on our modern view of things.


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## JimDuyer (Jan 5, 2023)

OP, when you added these parts, it caused some confusion in my understanding:
"It comes down to accepting that proving the veracity of any written evidence and placing the words in a chronology or time is currently impossible. All that can be said to be true is at some point in time someone wrote about a past."
"If on reading the story one roots out the claim(s) within and puts them under scrutiny by using known facts it is one route one I have devised for myself to establish a likelihood of veracity."

Because they seem to cancel each other out.  If we attempt to test something as being true or not, we often have to rely on supportive but perhaps circumstantial evidence.  For example, I can tell you what a tablet says, and I can give you a fairly good range of years - just based on the way the author formed his letters and placed his words in sentence order, and of course in his vocabulary. But I have to base my range upon others - an archaeologist who did radio-carbon dating on pottery made with vegetable matter that can be dated, and was found inside of a building that was destroyed by such and such group, which other evidence tells us was somewhat close to X period of time.  So we can't get 
positive results, and we have to depend upon the preponderance of evidence.

Then in your second statement above, you mention that your devised route is to use known facts. But how were these "known facts" themselves established.  Known to whom, established by whom - if you get my meaning.  Perhaps known facts are no more reliable than manufactured reports or facts.

Not trying to bust your chops, just pointing out that at some point we really need to attempt to 
explain certain writings and events based on the inter-connectivity of a preponderance or overwhelming amount of evidence.  It's the best we can do at this time. 

Would you agree with that to some extent?  Could you counter it, if you don't agree, with another theory that I can digest, test, refine, polish or discard?  Thanks.


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## Jd755 (Jan 5, 2023)

I dont see any confusion and it is not a theory!
Its simply a way I devised for myself to establish likely veracity for myself in the absence of proven methodology.
I examine the claim being made using known facts and my experience. Apologies for leaving the word experience out.
As for known facts I use things I know and by know I mean I have direct experience of or trust the experience of others. The logistics of a claim has become a reliable way of examining veracity for me.
This route of course is limiting to a degree as there is not a great deal known by me however some things are fundamental such as how far a human can walk in a day or how far a horse can go in a day. Such things don't vary and both human and horse travel at the speed of the slowest.
These facts alone disprove an awful lot of claims about armies, the distances they cover, the things they are said to have done.
Then logistics are a known. Horses crap and piss as do humans. These basic functions have to be dealt with. Coupled with how much food horses and humans need to move all day and maintain condition which is also known, then once again claims of wars, battles, fighting, discovery are often proved false by these fundamentals.

Discovery using ships is another claim that is rolled out time and again. The limitibg factor of any ship is the volume of fresh water it can carry. To set off on to an unknown yet suspected destination beyond the reach of the volume of fresh water that is carried is madness. However watering the ship by stopping off along coastlines does allow for exploration by ship.
Migration by ship is another. Ships can only carry a limited number of people depending on their size, the water they carry, the seaworthiness of the design, the age of the ship. These things show a lot of claims of migration by sea are on balance dubious.

Thats just two examples that spring to mind.
I am not saying its perfect but its better than reading academias take on things and better than taking old books at face value.
I have a copy of Voltaires King Charles XII of Sweden dated 1742 if memory serves and having read it it reads as a work of fiction. Using logistical scrutiny it becomes obvious its a work of fiction yet many people believe it is or want it to be an accurate history.
Truth is it is this book that got me into looking at claims using known facts.

I avoid things I have no experience of most of the time. Bible tales for example. As with all books written by a man or men yet attributed to a god. Not my forte at all.
Maps are another I avoid these days as I cannot for the life of me figure out the purpose of most of them. Universally they are useless for navigation by land or sea so they must have been drawn for other reasons but they are not known to me.

Physical things on the other hand intrigue me. Photographs also intrigue me. Paintings and drawings less so. Living with two artists one digital one pencil and ink/acrylic does show me art is an interpretation of imagination and what they see limited by their skill.

I have never seen an original book edition bar one. I subscribed to a local history book back in the late eighties and as a subscriber got a first edition. The only other books Ihave which could be first editions, just no way to tell, are the 14 volumes of The National Encylopedia dated 1897.
This seeming lack of access to first editions came up a fair bit on version one of stolenhistory and it seems to be universal or at least prevalent across many countries.


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## trismegistus (Jan 5, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> his route of course is limiting to a degree as there is not a great deal known by me however some things are fundamental such as how far a human can walk in a day or how far a horse can go in a day. Such things don't vary and both human and horse travel at the speed of the slowest.
> These facts alone disprove an awful lot of vlaims about armies, the distances they cover, the things they are said to have done.
> Then logistics are a known. Horses crap and piss as do humans. These basic functions have to be dealt with. Coupled with how much food horses and humans need to move all day and maintain condition which is also known, then once again claims of wars, battles, fighting, discovery are often proved false by these fundamentals.



Case in point:

SH Archive - 1812 French Invasion of Russia vs. Logistics


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## Silveryou (Jan 5, 2023)

trismegistus said:


> Case in point:
> 
> SH Archive - 1812 French Invasion of Russia vs. Logistics


Sorry for dissenting as usual, but it may serve well to know how that invasion ended to understand how it was entirely possible that it really happened.
Quote: "Napoleon's invasion of Russia is one of the best studied military campaigns in history and is listed among the most lethal military operations in world history. It is characterized by the massive toll on human life: in less than six months nearly a million soldiers and civilians died." (French invasion of Russia - Wikipedia)


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## Jd755 (Jan 5, 2023)

Silveryou said:


> Sorry for dissenting as usual, but it may serve well to know how that invasion ended to understand how it was entirely possible that it really happened.
> Quote: "Napoleon's invasion of Russia is one of the best studied military campaigns in history and is listed among the most lethal military operations in world history. It is characterized by the massive toll on human life: in less than six months nearly a million soldiers and civilians died." (French invasion of Russia - Wikipedia)


Not if you look into the logistics. They show the impossibility of the campaign being undertaken as recorded by historians.


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## Silveryou (Jan 5, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> Not if you look into the logistics. They show the impossibility of the campaign being undertaken as recorded by historians.


mmmh I don't know what you mean with 'logistics'. I'm not sure that thread by KD is on pair with the treaties on the war. Even the statistics he gives are suspicious, as if asking the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture how an army should fair with its horses, especially in an era where the only horses we see are in our cars.


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## Jd755 (Jan 5, 2023)

Silveryou said:


> mmmh I don't know what you mean with 'logistics'. I'm not sure that thread by KD is on pair with the treaties on the war. Even the statistics he gives are suspicious, as if asking the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture how an army should fair with its horses, especially in an era where the only horses we see are in our cars.


Read the archived replies.
https://stolenhistory.net/threads/1812-french-invasion-of-russia-vs-logistics.5108/


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## Silveryou (Jan 5, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> Read the archived replies.
> https://stolenhistory.net/threads/1812-french-invasion-of-russia-vs-logistics.5108/


ok, going to read it. Just know that I in fact read one of those treaties possibly 20 years ago or something and I guarantee you it was full of data and numbers, so I'm a bit skeptical at the possibility that all those papers mentioned were fake and all the people involved in the analysis were incompetent. But hey, it could be anything!

edit: btw I would like an answer by the boss @dreamtime.
What are these metadata, metalayers and metapatterns? And what objective methods do you apply to recognise them?
I couldn't find any mention of them with the search bar.
Thank you


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## ViniB (Jan 5, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> Not if you look into the logistics. They show the impossibility of the campaign being undertaken as recorded by historians.


That is totally correct once you know how much one horse eats, drink, piss and shit every day. And by personal experience i can guarantee that taking care of horses soles is equally critical.

That line of thinking already eliminates a goid chunk of "ancient" battles all together, and as an example the campaigns of alexander the great.

This will be a fantastic, and necessary discussion!!


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## feralimal (Jan 5, 2023)

I'll throw my thoughts in too.

Re the past, we know _something_ occurred, but we cannot say what.  We cannot say what occurred though for many reasons.  Eg the evidence may have been flawed from the start, may contain errors, may have been re-worked, some may be excluded, false elements can be added, etc.  We also have an industry of licensed history creation by authorised historians producing reams of data that concurs with whatever story we are meant to hold to.

There is also the fact that the context (our viewpoint) from which we ourselves understand this information is changed - the average man of today, is not the same man of 1920, nor the same as of 1800, or Ancient Greece or Rome, etc - ie what writings of the past meant to people in the past, is impossible to say.  So I think it is entirely fair to say we cannot know the past with certainty, and cannot even make good guesses in most cases.

I think you can approach this question in reverse - and that this approach makes more sense.  By understanding what it is to know something, we can then work out what is missing.  We then have a gauge of a sort, we can list our assumptions and see how comfortable we are in holding them.  Are we happy with these assumptions, etc?

Another way to approach it in reverse, is to try to break whatever story or chain of reasoning that we are provided.  This is effective, because although it is extremely unlikely to be able to prove the truth, it is possible to prove a lie.  The truth, what actually happened, cannot be incoherent.  However, a lie must be - so can we find any incoherent facts in the story?  The idea of working through the logistics as @Jd755 suggests, is a great example of a way one can find inconsistencies.  If we cannot satisfy ourselves about the logistics of a claim, eg how they were able to talk to the president by phone from the moon, then it is fair to dismiss the claim/story entirely.

The reason you can dismiss the claim, is that it contains elements which cannot be.  If these elements will not be reconsidered by those making the claim - this tells you that those making the claim are not working in good faith.  If there is bad faith, it is correct to take a defensive position and assume you are dealing with liars and/or useful idiots.  Having disabused yourself of false notions, you are then free to consider how the claim was made to _appear_ as true - eg with the moon landing, you might conclude that it was easiest to achieve by filming in a studio, ie something that creates the _illusion_ of truth.

For me, it seems that the best way to proceed towards truth is by first attempting to destroy whatever hypothesis you are able to come up with.  If the hypothesis is valid (ie accurately reflects the reality), these 'attacks' will do nothing as the truth is always coherent - it is what actually happened after all!

Re the best sorts of evidence.  I agree that architecture and geographical features are the best, as a big effort is required to falsify it.  Of course, even this evidence can be mis-framed, and we need to take care or we can be given the wrong explanations.

Re the lesser sorts of evidence.  Changing records, planting false evidence, removing evidence (esp books) in previous times, is far easier.  Where possible, we should attempt to trace back the artefact back to as contemporary source as possible - eg we should trace books back.  I have done this, and been sorely disappointed many times - the sources run dry after about 150 years, or the documents were missing then re-discovered (eg dead sea scrolls).  Perhaps, in the internet age, this is even easier to do - false information can be seeded and distributed (or removed) very quickly.

As I have never managed get close to the claimed sources (esp ancient ones), and it's impossible to verify the proclaimed sources for myself, what should I conclude?  After all of the lies that have already been revealed, I tend to also see most of the historical record as a sort fabrication.  I find it far more useful to think of history as providing a malleable backdrop to our present circumstances - ie that history is whatever is expedient for the masses to believe in order to facilitate better control of those masses.  Obviously the changes are made quite carefully - a long-held story is not turned around instantly.  Making the incremental changes is the job of licensed historians.


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## JimDuyer (Jan 5, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> I dont see any confusion and it is not a theory!
> Its simply a way I devised for myself to establish likely veracity for myself in the absence of proven methodology.
> I examine the claim being made using known facts and my experience. Apologies for leaving the word experience out.
> As for known facts I use things I know and by know I mean I have direct experience of or trust the experience of others. The logistics of a claim has become a reliable way of examining veracity for me.
> ...


At the risk of offending some of our members, I will qualify this with medieval or earlier authors. But if it was written by a Frenchman, I automatically distrust it to some extent.
And I agree with the walking distance reported by armies.  The Romans had small feet, as did the Greeks in comparison with others.  So their furlong or pace or rapid march etc was different from that of the Scandinavians, and thus their distance measures were as well.
After Caesar bragged of slaughtering men, women and children in Gaul, and by his own reports it was a genocide of nearly a million souls, I don't care much for anything written by Romans. 
This was repeated by later Romans, of the Catholic kind, with their genocides, so not much
improved over 1400 years. 
I tend to believe the Scandinavian reports, as well as the Welsh and Britains of old, and almost nothing of the Norman influenced later occupants of England, sorry to say.  
But that's just me.
I also believe the Sumerians and almost nothing from the Akkadians or Babylonians, for
similar reasons.


feralimal said:


> I'll throw my thoughts in too.
> 
> Re the past, we know _something_ occurred, but we cannot say what.  We cannot say what occurred though for many reasons.  Eg the evidence may have been flawed from the start, may contain errors, may have been re-worked, some may be excluded, false elements can be added, etc.  We also have an industry of licensed history creation by authorised historians producing reams of data that concurs with whatever story we are meant to hold to.
> 
> ...


I agree that the approach of @Jd755 is much better than what we see from modern scholars, and is a good start.  Almost nothing that we know or think we know of history today is correct.  Yes, it's just that sad.  Nothing will stand up to careful scrutiny, nothing makes sense when you look at it with common sense.  Some is designed for that purpose - to intentionally deceive, other parts are designed to throw researchers off the track.  Some is just "innocent" stupidity. But most is agenda driven and used to control us, or attempt to.
I just laugh.  That's the best response I could arrive at.  
Translations that we do ourselves make it very obvious.  And sometimes I see an element
of humor on their part - as if they need to make it ridiculous for some reason - but whether this is due to some law of the universe or just their own ego at work I do not know. But it makes it easier for us because we just find the obviously silly parts and that's a good place to start.


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## ViniB (Jan 5, 2023)

My toughts here, when approaching a certain story is vital to look for the perspective of those that could be potential witnesses of what happened, not only of those involved. This could corroborate or disprove the story, but within the frame of all forgeries/manipulations how could this be done?

Sidenote: As a practical example of how oral traditions are totally ignored by academic historians, pretty much every native tribe from South to north america have a legend of how a giant redhaired man brought to them the knowledge of the gods shortly before a massive cataclysm destroyed the world! But none of that is even mentioned on a footnote of "historical" textbooks.....


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## Silveryou (Jan 5, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> Read the archived replies.
> https://stolenhistory.net/threads/1812-french-invasion-of-russia-vs-logistics.5108/


Ok I've read as much as possible. I've found for you some good articles about that war. As I said I already read a book about it years ago and I can confirm this couple of articles are just the tip of an iceberg. I'm sure in the billion things at disposal there's going to be something about horses' shit too.

https://psource.sitehost.iu.edu/PDF/Archive Articles/Spring2011/LynchBennettArticle.pdf
Section V - Insects, Disease, and Histroy | Montana State University
Faq#10: Why did Napoleon Fail in Russia in 1812?


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## Jd755 (Jan 6, 2023)

Thank you.
I am doing this on the fly as I am reading.

Robert Burnhams article, the last one on your list. Talks of Napoleon and Russia.
He makes the statement.



> In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with about 600,000 men and over 50,000 horses.



Then says this.



> while a soldier could march 15 - 20 miles a day, a supply wagon was generally limited to about 10 - 12 miles a day. To avoid being slowed down by the trains, Napoleon insisted that his troops live as much as possible off the land



And then this



> His plan was to bring the war to a conclusion within twenty days by forcing the Russians to fight a major battle. Just in case his plans were off, he had his supply wagons carry 30 days of food.



So a supply train carrying 30 days supply of food for 600,000 men an unknown number of camp followers, and 50,000 horses sets off.

This tells me there is no resupply coming from France or any part of the continent controlled by the French.
After 10 days travel the soldiers on foot would be fifty miles ahead of their supplies.
Why ten days?
Well that is half way through the claimed estimate of Napoleons 20 day campaign plan.

By day 15 both men and horses having being travelled over these respective distances.
Soldiers on foot 225 miles.
The supply train horses and people 150 miles.
With their supplies half gone. The last day they could turn round and get back to France under their own steam so too speak.

Losing condition each day and at least for those in the column well aware of the supply trains 30 day supply limit the increasing knowing that they are eating up supplies with no prospect of resupply then fears and worries must have taken hold and humans being humans the dwindling supplies would have been noticed by ever increasing numbers of men.

And of course by day 15 it would take the supply train 8 days to catch up if the soldiers stayed still where they were. So do the soldiers just sit hungry and thirsty?

Of course not so they go looking for food and water in the local vicinity of where they find themselves. Knowing nothing of the land, the people, the terrain, where Russian soldiers may be and losing discipline as the need to eat and drink overrides any payment to fight or any belief in a man god Emperor.

I'll read the other articles later but I just took the opportunity to show what I am on about.


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## Goddo.F (Jan 6, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> Thank you.
> I am doing this on the fly as I am reading.
> 
> Robert Burnhams article, the last one on your list. Talks of Napoleon and Russia.
> ...


Please check my maths here !!  If the French border is approx 3850 miles from the Russian border, and the troops can march at a maximum of 20miles per day ... then ???  The French army would have needed to have been within 400miles to achieve Napoleon's goal of 'finishing off the Russians' in 20 days.  So unless the French army was somewhere in eastern Germany or Poland, and the Russians were similarly in 'Ukraine' (hahaha) ... no wonder the campaign proved such a disaster !!  Correct me where i am wrong.  regards  goddo


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## Silveryou (Jan 6, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> Thank you.
> I am doing this on the fly as I am reading.
> 
> Robert Burnhams article, the last one on your list. Talks of Napoleon and Russia.
> ...


You're missing the point here though. There's tons of material sources about the war, so I posted just a few authors who interpret data to build up a story. We may say that story is not 100% correct, it's maybe let's say 70% correct worst case scenario, but how is it possible to say it never happenned? It's a leap of faith way bigger than saying it is incorrectly described.


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## Jd755 (Jan 6, 2023)

Apparently the French controlled all land between the French border and the Russian border.
From this article middle one on the list, Section V - Insects, Disease, and Histroy | Montana State University


> By spring 1812, Napoleon controlled most of Europe, from Spain to Russia. England, however, controlled the seas.


I don't know how far it was from the Russian or Prussian or Bavarian borders with Russia.

Then there is this.


> Russia was violating Napoleon's Continental System by trading with England. Napoleon used this as an excuse to invade the "Colossus" and began gathering his huge army in cantonments that reached from northern Germany to Italy. In June 1812, the entire army of 500,000 men congregated in eastern Germany. (Although estimates vary because precise records were not kept, Napoleon's central French army contained about 265,000 soldiers. French reinforcements and allied forces constituted an additional 235,000 soldiers.) With breathtaking fanfare, Napoleon reviewed his troops on the west bank of the Niemen River on 22 June 1812.



Turns out this river rises in what wasRussia, today is Belarus, and flows west through Poland, Lithuania and Kaliningrad.

From the supply and distance logistics quoted above the maximum distance the men could have marched in 20 days is 400 miles. The supply train a mere 240.

As it isn't clear where the French army actually gatherred on the west bank of the Neiman river other than the eastern border of Gerrmany was assumed or recognised to be the course of the river.
How far it is from Moscow according to this site is 669 miles.

So no way could a French army moving at the limits of man and horse get to Moscow in 20 days let alone be in any condition to fight.


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## Silveryou (Jan 6, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> Apparently the French controlled all land between the French border and the Russian border.
> From this article middle one on the list, Section V - Insects, Disease, and Histroy | Montana State University
> 
> I don't know how far it was from the Russian or Prussian or Bavarian borders with Russia.
> ...


ok, so there was no French invasion of Russia. ok


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## Jd755 (Jan 6, 2023)

Silveryou said:


> There's tons of material sources about the war, so I posted just a few authors who interpret data to build up a story. We may say that story is not 100% correct, it's maybe let's say 70% correct worst case scenario, but how is it possible to say it never happenned?


We may say is 50% or 90% correct no way to prove any of it.
The fact there is so much written about this campaign in contrast to all the other campaign claims attributed to Napoleon is a sign something is off.
The same modus operandi is run today to obfuscate false flags into the historical record.

From the diaries/journal entries the story is universal. The French soldiers who were just as likely to be Prussian or Italian as French were clean and honourable but the Polish people, the Russian people were lice infested people riddled with disease and lived in absolute poverty in shithole houses.

Yet it is precisely these poor excuses four humanity were the people the invaders pillaged to get food for themselves and their horses.
On what level does that make any sense?


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## Silveryou (Jan 6, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> We may say is 50% or 90% correct no way to prove any of it.
> The fact there is so much written about this campaign in contrast to all the other campaign claims attributed to Napoleon is a sign something is off.
> The same modus operandi is run today to obfuscate false flags into the historical record.
> 
> ...


You have probably more interest than me in that conflict. I'm sure you can find a mountain of mistakes in the common narrative. I myself have doubts after seeing the medallion depicting Napoleon and Tzar together as friends, or when talking about that sudden fire/explosion happening in Moscow and described by one of Napoleon's generals. But in order to have that description Napoleon had to enter Moscow. And there's tons of documents like that.
So I'm not going to debate the logistics, which were a failure in any case since French died in great numbers, but I'm once again underlining how much of a leap of faith is to consider that war non existent.


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## Jd755 (Jan 6, 2023)

Silveryou said:


> ok, so there was no French invasion of Russia. ok


Instead of sulking present your evidence that shows these men and horses could cover the ground within the 20 day campaign estimate.
The journey is the base of the story. The distance covered if you will is the base of the story.
I have shown repeatedly using the known limits of horse and man using my own sources and the ones you provided that it was impossible for hundreds of thousands of men, their horses, their carts, their supply train to get to Moscow in any sort of order to fight within the planned timescale.
I have also shown the maximum supply they carried was 30 days. This is irrespective of how far they travelled in a day.

But I could be totally off beam.


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## Silveryou (Jan 6, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> Instead of sulking present your evidence that shows these men and horses could cover the ground within the 20 day campaign estimate.
> The journey is the base of the story. The distance covered if you will is the base of the story.
> I have shown repeatedly using the known limits of horse and man using my own sources and the ones you provided that it was impossible for hundreds of thousands of men, their horses, their carts, their supply train to get to Moscow in any sort of order to fight within the planned timescale.
> I have also shown the maximum supply they carried was 30 days. This is irrespective of how far they travelled in a day.
> ...


I'm not discussing what you did. I don't even know where the data were taken from. The event was such an enormous thing that reading that thread of few lines by KD immediately raised my eyebrow. I am taking your analysis into consideration but I'm not going to deduce there was no war. At the same time, and I'm sorry for it, I'm not very interested in this time period therefore I'm not ready in a confrontation on it. What I'm saying is that I clearly remember the tons of notes and quotations from the book I read years ago and I remember them because they were too much! So I'm totally sure different interpretations are possible but I can't reject everything on the basis of what you're saying. It's not about what you're saying is wrong (I repeat that I don't know and am not interested right now), it's just about the conclusions you are deducing. That's it. Sorry if I gave the impression I wanted to open a debate.


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## Jd755 (Jan 6, 2023)

No need to apologise for anything.
All I am about is finding a way to establish veracity in the abscence of demonstrable repeatable methodology.

War whatever it is is not what official historical documents tell us it is. I've recalled this experience before but it bears repetition.
One of my journeymen in my apprenticeship was a man called Ernie Jackson. He told me he was in at the very start of the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa in WW2. He was a driver and along with the other crew members he roamed far and wide behind enemy lines. Using a four wheel drive light truck moving by night holing up under camouflage netting, in old buildings, amongst scrapped/abandoned vehicles during the day to avoid detection primarily by aircraft and secondly to keep out of view from the wandering Arabs.

The purpose was to identify and map enemy positions, supplies strengths etc and wherever possible put them beyond use.
The truck he drove had to carry four men sometimes six, all their supplies inc water, ammunition and fuel plus spares. There was no supply column.

So logistically they were on their own, sometimes in concert with another truck but most often four men one truck.
If they ran across abandoned vehicles of any side they topped their truck up with as much as they could because it put the supplies beyond enemy use and maximised their own chances of getting back alive.

He told me that during his entire time in North Africa he never saw a German soldier. He saw German pilots often close enough to wave at and at the surrender he saw a small number of German officers.
All the soldiers he encountered were either Italians or Algerians.

He contrasted that with his crossing into Italy which he said was full of Germans. Tough buggers as well he remarked.

Point is the logistics of night and day are known limits and the need to remain undetected means they are observed to ensure survival.
The Afrika Korps was according to historical record composed of mainly German soldiers yet this man who probably covered much more of the physical area than many never saw one.

Does this means the German soldiers weren't there?
No of course not but it does point to the probability they were far fewer in number than we are taught.

Point is both the official and the life experience could both be true. The thing that gets to decide is me what do I trust?

Ernie retelling his stories or an academic paid by an institution to read and pronounce on data sourced from the offices of state?

Were I a general or admiral or even a leader/emperor/king/bishop/sultan or whatever tasked with defending my charges from an aggressor or indeed one being sent as an aggressor to take something from some other people I would seek out the opponents weak link and utterly destroy it as quickly and effectively as possible to stop the opponent in their tracks and render them impotent.

More often than not its the supply train or supply line that is the weakest link. In the case of the Russians defendfing French aggression I let the French into Russia falling away in front of them and at the same time sending my soldiers the long way round to hit the French supply lines so massively they are beyond use.
Once thats accomplished all that's left is harrasment of a French army that cannot supply itself.
No need for pitched battles, thousands of deaths protracted conflict.

Today the UK has two large aircraft carriers. It has one solid supply ship and three tankers.
To defeat the carriers or confine them to friendly ports all that is required is to sink the unarmed solid support ship and the tankers.
This was just as doable in all steel hulled wars yet the historical record has us believing battles between warships is the way its done.

As for Formenko I have never read any of his books. I tried once but found it turgid. Neither have I read Velikovsky. I have no idea what recentism is nor do I know what is meant by meta.

As for seeing an embossed image of two men on a medallion and accepting they must have been good buddies so would be unlikely to fight each other well that sits firmly in the realm of belief.

Its said Napoleon wanted India. Its also said Russia was trading with England in direct contravention of either a treaty or an agreement (jury is still out even after all this time) established between France and Russia.
Its also said the Royal Navy controlled the seas.
Its said Russia, presumably in the form of the Czar, was annoyed at France, presumably in the form of Napoleon, for restoring Poland, presumably in the form of a monarchy.

To achieve the prize of India. Napoleons grand plan was to invade Russia. Remove the Czar from power. Force an end to Russian trade with the English and use the Russian resources as a springboard to invade India by land.

Call me thick by all means but how daft is all that?
Russia is an enormous country so all the Russian Czar had to do was keep moving East away from the invaders. Moscow may be lost but but the Czar, the court the multitude of land, people and resources east of Moscow would remain under the Czars control so he could easily prevent the French from taking Napoleons prize of India and it would further cement the trading position with England. Englands rulers could also be persuaded to use the Royal Navy to prevent further French expansion and exploitation by going after soft and easy French possessions wherever they may be.

Or did the Russians not really exist as a unified country or people and it was Muscovites that were the problem by ignoring the Czar and trading with the English?


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## Jef Demolder (Jan 6, 2023)

I would like to add three things to this interesting discussion.

1. When someone tells me nonsense about Malawi, I can always travel to Malawi. When someone tells me nonsense about Julius Caesar, it is not possible to take a camera crew and travel back to Alexandria for an interview with Cleopatra. Empirical verification of pretended historical truths is impossible. And that it is the simple reason why it is so easy to create false history. Nobody will ever be able to verify. Moreover, the more you expect history books to contain historical truths, the easier it is to cheat you. For you are using the modern concept of truth, believing that truth is a property of statements, and that history books contain such statements. The whole falsification of history is modern, because the falsification is built on the modern concept of truth.

2. Fourty years ago, when I was young, I worked on a doctoral thesis about De Civitate Dei (The City of God), a big work of Augustine of Hippo, written by him between 412 and 427, according to official history. I discovered that "Augustine" was a conglomerate of different authors, that sources created by this authors were invented by them, that the historical circumstances of the work were inconsistent, and that the supposed historical background (the Theodosian Roman empire with Christianity as state religion) referred to concepts of politics and religion that only existed from the 16th century on. Of course this kind of results were not acceptable at my respectable University and finally I abandoned. Now the curious thing is that some academics clearly KNEW that Augustine is modern. Someone congratulated me for discovering it all on my own. Someone else pointed to Jean Hardouin (already mentioned above) who became completely sceptical on all ancient writings while studying the writings of Saint Augustine. I spoke to a very learned man who even had published on medieval falsifications of Augustine, and he was full comprehension, but said that I could not make it to write such things about De Civitate Dei. Since the beginning of modern times, there has always existed an academic subculture and tradition of people who knew. But on the stage, there is the play.

3. Nevertheless, ancient writings give ample opportunity to discover the truth. Not the "historical truth" different from what is told in the history books, but the truth ABOUT THE MAKERS of history. Once you discover that history is perpetrated, the perspective changes and you become a detective doing policy work. This ancient manuscripts /  early prints EXIST. One or more persons have perpetrated this acts. Who did it? Did they leave traces? (There are ALWAYS traces). What is the scope and coherence of the acts? What were the ciricumstances? What were the motives? And finally, what is the qualification of this acts (as such, writing fiction is not a crime). MANY things can be discovered this way, beyond usual history, and even beyond usual physics.


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## trismegistus (Jan 6, 2023)

Jd755 said:


> We may say is 50% or 90% correct no way to prove any of it.
> The fact there is so much written about this campaign in contrast to all the other campaign claims attributed to Napoleon is a sign something is off.
> The same modus operandi is run today to obfuscate false flags into the historical record.
> 
> From the diaries/journal entries the story is universal. The French soldiers who were just as likely to be Prussian or Italian as French were clean and honourable but the Polish people, the Russian people were lice infested people riddled with disease and lived in absolute poverty in shithole houses.



This is something I picked up on when reading one of the sources @Silveryou posted in an earlier comment (https://psource.sitehost.iu.edu/PDF/Archive Articles/Spring2011/LynchBennettArticle.pdf)

While I understand that logistically it would have been nothing short of a nightmare to cross Russia in the winter with half a million people - some of those stories reeked of propaganda.  Eating horse blood popsicles and ripping flesh off of horses who were too cold to notice and eating it raw, all of these grotesque war stories are reminiscent of "killing babies in incubators" and "throwing babies up in the air and catching them on bayonets" that ended up being shown to have been fabricated war propaganda.  Of course warfare is one of the most depraved and disturbing events one can witness in the course of human history, but who knows how many of them are merely stories to paint a picture in the readers head versus what truly happened in those conflicts.


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## Jd755 (Jan 6, 2023)

Still none the bloody wiser what meta means. Nor recentism. Hey ho. Adds to the ever growing pile of stuff I don't know.
Is it right to seek the source?
Is it right to seek the commissioning agent of documents, maps, images, buildings?
Is it right to follow other peoples ideas because they fit within my individual comfort zone of what I find acceptable to me?
Is it right to examine any claim made especially when the claimant makes no effort to explain how they arrived at the claim?

Jef makes an excellent point from his experience. St Augustine being a conglomerate of sources. Lao Tsu from the Chinese sphere of influence is another along the same lines. Alan Watts and some bugger whose name escapes me both detail how the stories are a collection not the work of one man. Save of course the man who wrote the Tao De Ching.

For what its worth I don't see how its possible to point the finger at any specific time or character and state hand on heart when history was corrupted from what was there before.
Scaliger gets mentioned, a lot, John Dee comes into the frame, the Jesuit silveryou names is one I have never heard of. Bede is in the mix as well and I'm sure there are a multitude of names.
Germans for example who are claimed to have invented Russian history back 'in the day'. Brought in by Peter the Great I think to create a 'Russian identity'. But then what about Rus?
Where did the history of Rus go.

Locking oneself into a timeframe as suggested above is blind alley if ever there was one.
Surely the key that has to be found is two part.
When did the printed word as opposed to the written word usurp the latter?
Writing by hand is slow. The paper wordage produced is slow to disseminate even if it is copied, again by hand. The original work wouldn't likely go beyond the person who commissioned it and their circle.

The printed word by comparison takes on a life of its own and easily travels to places the author never knew existed. Whether it can then be read at the destination is another matter and let's be honest here many written and printed languages cannot be read unless the reader can actually comprehend what the words mean.
This means translations done by hand. I know of no pair of languages where words in one match the exact meaning in another so translations are by their nature corruption's at the hand of the translator.

Which begs the question just how did all the perople moving around through time come to communicate with each other?
Of course translators and interpretors are posited as the answer to that conundrum.

I feel that if the printing press could be tracked down to a likely place either by detective work going back from today or at an oblique by looking at what materials, processes, method made the printing press possible. Or by the even more oblique looking for names who profited be it in financial wealth, land, claims or notoriety then it should be able to construct a recognisable pattern out from that point to show how it spread and on the back of that show how it drove this academic authority being construed to implement control of people using a historical record crafted in a specific way.


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## trismegistus (Saturday at 3:49 AM)

Jd755 said:


> I feel that if the printing press could be tracked down to a likely place either by detective work going back from today or at an oblique by looking at what materials, processes, method made the printing press possible. Or by the even more oblique looking for names who profited be it in financial wealth, land, claims or notoriety then it should be able to construct a recognisable pattern out from that point to show how it spread and on the back of that show how it drove this academic authority being construed to implement control of people using a historical record crafted in a specific way.



Since this is your thread, feel free to let me know if this particular subject should get its own thread instead, but in any case:

The world's two oldest printing presses | Museum Plantin-Moretus






So there is the claimed "oldest" we have still kicking around.  They certainly look old - and the museum does little to fill in the gaps on where they found them, who built them, if they were bespoke or actually created by a local business, etc. 

Science and Civilisation in China, Part 1, Paper and Printing

This author (who apparently feels their opinion important enough on the matter to charge almost $400 for a copy of their book) seems to put forward the theory that China had presses using ceramics "sometime around AD1040".  However, not surprisingly, I can't seem to find any examples of physical presses, only its mention in articles discussing the invention of chinese ceramic presses.  Wiki also refers to this book as its sole proof of its existence, so I suppose we'll just have to _take their word for it_ 

Traditional Chinese movable type printing



> In the 1980s, archaeologists found Buddhist scriptures and amanuensis in wooden movable type printing in Xixia period in Gansu province. It indicates that 100 years after published movable type printing, this technique has spread to the remote minority area. At the end of the 14th century, movable type printing was transmitted to Korea, as well as to Japan and Southeast Asian countries, and then to the Middle East and Europe through the Silk Road.


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## Udjat (Saturday at 3:09 PM)

As far as I am concerned the information that we read as "sources" are all in the view of the person that wrote the thoughts down.  You can have two people see the same event or happening and get two different stories of the same account.  I find that "sources" are just a guide line if that, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

That is why there are so many different religions, languages, ways of dress, etc..  Humans are a funny creature and they are always looking for a concrete answer to things, especially history.

I have been on this site and have been asked for "sources" but what does that mean.  You would believe what I had to say because I got a source that someone else believed was the "true" source?

It is evident that the written word, or word that could be reproduced on a mass scale seems to direct the masses on which way to go or what to believe.  It is almost scary!!


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## Jd755 (Saturday at 3:53 PM)

Trismigistus, do carry on. This detective work must be done as devoid of personality/ego/belief as possible to get closer to the most likely time before print.

I went to that site and looked for evidence of age. By evidence I mean a dated nameplate on one of the machines, a component of the machines that could lead to an invented process or a paper trail.
As you discovered so did I.
If there is dating evidence in the museum its not available anywhere in digital form.

The component and construction materials appeared to be a dead end. Wood, malleable iron, possibly bronze are the materials used to produce the machines. They are likely to have been repaired if they are anywhere near as old as claimed and if the source of age is a paper trail then there will be paper detailing repairs. Once again not digitised.
In the repair it is feasible steel components replaced malleable iron and possibly bronze. Speculation obviously.

Looking at the machines, ignoring the names most pointedly, I could not see where to go next so began looking for the 'Chinese connection'.
Turns out that porcelain was apparently used to produce the Chinese type. Porcelain is a high fired conglomerate of China clay with additions so its safe to suggest the Chinese type cutters either cut a mould for each character and pushed the China clay mixture into it to get the characterr impression in reverse or cut the clay whilst still wet.
Either way when fired the resultant porcelain would be hard enough to take ink and the pressure of a roller and paper to create a printed page. Readable and likely crisp.

The problem porcelain has it is brittle and given the nature of the Chinese character alphabets intricacy I would suggest failure was common place.

As an aside here is an article from Korea which reveals how little if anything  the official historians and academics actually know.
Report finds oldest movable type to be fake

I came back to the claim of the oldest presses and just sat looking at them. It dawned that I should be looking for the fundamental that the machines are built on.
I realised its the type itself.
The rest of the machine is a simple press. Presses are used for all sorts of things and they seem to have been in existence for along time. The basis of a press is a means of applying a pushing pressure onto something to get a result that could not be achieved without the pressure.
At its most basic its a lever attached to a spindle, secured in a strong frame, which when pulled forces the spindle and whatever its connected to down onto something.
A cam or inclined plane at the base allows for fast controllable effective repetive use.
One such use would be a brick press or a ceramic plate press, another could be a juice press although instead of a lever there would be a wheel and there would be a screw thread cut into the spindle and its stock to keep increasing the pressure.
Paper is produced using a press to achieve a usable, durable surface. Paper production does not require pressure from a press but the press does speed the process up and standardises the paper thickness.

The Chinese type was not movable apparently. It is claimed the Chinese typesetter carved an entire page or two page spread at a time and printed from it until it broke then they had no choice but to carve a new version of the same page.

This led to a Chinese inventor creating movable type where each character is an indfividual type and they are compiled together in trays to create the page to be printed.
Movable Type — the very first printer and a brief look at its history

So the movable type is claimed to have been invented thousands of miles away from any other culture in one single culture for its own use.
This led me to look at what is the gain from printing over hand written or oral recitation.
The most obvious gain is repetition of the same text. It is carved/compiled once and any number can be printed off as long as there is sufficient ink, paper and crispness in the printed page.
This leads to a speed if dissemination of these printed pages that neither oral or hand writing could match.
It also makes indoctrination by the written word more widespread.
It increases the number of people who are taught to read.
It allows whoever is creating the source document to change it with ease.
It allows an easy faking of texts.
It allows eassy manipulation of attribution and dating.
It locks new words into the written and then spoken language via dictionaries than hand writing does.
It also allows the degradation of words.
Finally it allows definitions to be quickly and easily altered.
I'm sure it does other things not least of which is fixing a history in place.

This got me to thinking about what the type is made of as it alone is what makes the press a printing press.

According to this site its a specific alloy that has been around for 550 years. It is alloy of lead, tin and antimony.

Movable type - Wikipedia

Lead, tin and antimony is also known as solder. I used this formulation to solder copper, brass, bonze pipes in my shipyard days. I used a lead, tin solder to solder lead as it is lower melting and can be wiped with moleskin.

The addition of antimony and a change in the ratio of the lead and tin makes the solder harder.
Both can be flattened and knocked very thin with a steel hammer on an anvil but that is the only similarity they have in terms of hardness.


Ignoring the attribution given to Gutenberg who apparently was the man who brought a press to Europe, though where from I have yet to look for,  the fundamental remains the metal alloy for the type.
How was it discovered, by what trade, how was it established that this specific alloy performed better than the alternatives?
Secondary to that is what trade was the printing press adopted from?
Which people or tradesmen are candidates for developing the alloy,  developing the mechanism of the press to make the most of the alloy and who is most likely to have the know how or desire to bring he various disciplines together to develop the new machine to the point it is reliable and effective.

Its seems the press predates the use of a press for printing.
It also seems the solder of lead, tin and antimony and its use predates the invention of metal movable type.
With that alloy it is easier to carve a master mould then cast any number of identical copies from it.
I say this as I was taught to easily melt soft solder from old joints in a small steel ladle and pour it out into channels in sand or angle iron to get useable flat lengths. I did the same for recovered hard solder though I used angle iron not sand to cast it.

From the Belghian museum page the claim is the type for the presses was carved in France by the French type carvers. Carving such things by hand and getting a consistency across carvers must have been a nightmare whereas if the carver simply produced a master mould the type casters would be trained to produce identical copies of the master.

The latter makes much more sense on every level but then again truth be told I am here looking back so could be off beam.

Other sites I read through.
World’s First Metal Type | Explore DPRK
Movable Type – History of the Book


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## Jd755 (Saturday at 4:02 PM)

Udjat said:


> I have been on this site and have been asked for "sources" but what does that mean


It simply means where you got your thinking from.
If its your own head fine.
If its reading something fine.
If its from an inspiration, a eureka moment, something you did equally fine.
If there is a link to something fine.

Problem is when stuff gets posted and written about in terms of fact and folks are not keen on showing where and how they arrived at where they are.

Its not a question of invalidating or validating. If its your opinion, thought, eureka moment say so.
If there are other sources/resources that helped list the links to them so others can go read and see what they come up with.
If its memory, say so.


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## trismegistus (Saturday at 6:44 PM)

_View: https://youtu.be/ViQpix70pwg_

Some more research on presses brings the following:

The Patent Columbian Printing Press. [A Prospectus, with Testimonials. With a Plate.]

Some names to potentially look into regarding 19th century commerical printing:

​A Dictionary of Printers and Printing, with the Progress of Literature, Ancient and Modern; Bibliographical Illustrations





Translation: "If you notice that there are contradictory or incorrect dates throughout this book, its not my fault I just do this in my spare time" Hell of a way to preface a book on history, if you ask me.

Skimming through this book, its not a surprise the author does not go into the Chinese origins, at least as far as I can see.


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## Jd755 (Saturday at 7:49 PM)

dreamtime said:


> Imho, Gutenberg is the key person in the history narrative to dissect. Pfister thinks Gutenberg need to be put into the 18th Century, and mentions that Fomenko already mentioned that the oldest printed books were backdated:


I could not give a monkeys what this Pfister name has to say about what he thinks.
Neither do I give a monkeys what Formenko mentions about backdated books.
This direction down specific authors routes irks me as it is managing a narrative and seeks to subdue investigation by defering to the opinion of famous names.
Note I said a narrative not the narrative.




dreamtime said:


> Gutenberg could be a metaphor or symbol for a group that worked tirelessly to turn the well-known process of "printing" into industrial and automated book-production, by inventing a printing press that has a high output.


Equally it could be the name of a butchers dog!
You make some giant leaps in thought without stopping to test that thought. As you state on more than one occasion you are not interested in detail but prefer the overview. Fine each to their own but the blue sky overview like it or not is built on and contains details.
I see these details as markers that cannot be ignored or swept up in the writings of famous authors. They are physical things, processes, materials, skills that are the precursor to printed words on paper being produced. Each on their own is not capable of producing a printed word but put them altogether with someone a human being or two humans who figured out how to do it and thus the printed word appears.

I fully accept the people building and working the press may not be the sponsors of the build. In that I agree with your statement back up the thread about the importance of the commissioners of the work.
Just because it is dfifficult to find out who they were doesn't mean giving up and turning them into a hidden hand or mason/Jew/Jesuit/secret society whatever and as such beyond scrutiny.




dreamtime said:


> We know (according to the official narrative, as always) that normal printing was in use for hundreds of years. What "Gutenberg" did was that he perfected the process so the semi-automated process of producing and copying large amounts of books were made possible.


Cobblers. We know nothing of the sort. Its an assumption.
We have no idea if the name Gutenberg has anything to do with printed books, the first books ever printed using a press don't forget. A man who invented and perfected metal moveable type and yet he left nothing in paper form that showed how proud he was of his inventions, his creations. As far as I know he never commissioned an artist to draw his machines, his type or anything else.

When the vague " hundreds of years" is used to cover the fact we don't know and have no method of establishing veracity figured out it comes across as desperation.


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## dreamtime (Saturday at 8:19 PM)

Jd755 said:


> Cobblers. We know nothing of the sort. Its an assumption.
> We have no idea if the name Gutenberg has anything to do with printed books, the first books ever printed using a press don't forget. A man who invented and perfected metal moveable type and yet he left nothing in paper form that showed how proud he was of his inventions, his creations. As far as I know he never commissioned an artist to draw his machines, his type or anything else.



That's true, but it's even worse. We will likely never know. That's the issue with history, and one way out of this problem is what I outlined.

That's why I view Gutenberg as one part of a matrix of a narrative, not as a real human. He is relevant (to me) because he exists in the official narrative as a key character. I don't care at all whether he lived or not, because I will never know.

That's why I said that we "know" printing was used before. It was used before in the official version of history, and in a self-referential system, all you can do is looking for internal inconsistencies.

The only way to discover what really happened in the past is if we would be able to find some kind of outside reference - "Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.".

Having said that, I don't want to prevent anyone from detective work and solving historical riddles. The approach by Fomenko and Pfister and others makes it easier to solve them, actually. You don't really need to ask yourself whether something was real, you just work with the events and figures that are deemed most important by academia.


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## Jd755 (Saturday at 8:25 PM)

trismegistus said:


> _View: https://youtu.be/ViQpix70pwg_
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Excellent stuff.
I strtuggle reading Google books  not sure why just find it annoying.
Tomorrow I'll pull the National Encylopedia out dated 1897 and see what that has to say about printing.

What makes the Chinese question a possibility for being true is China is in reality a land of tribes. If my memory is recalling correctly there are presently fifty-two of them and none can communicate with each other orally but they all can using the written Chinese Alphabet.
This is as good an incentive as I can think of for one tribe seeking dominance over others to find a way to produce printed paper works to extend influence and bring other tribes under control.
Speculation obviously but sensible nonetheless.

The routes out of China of old were overrland to the west, south and north of China and east to the Americas and everywherre else by ship.
Overland it would be fair to suggest the printing press would travel organically outwards from China to any states seeking to control people. I don't see how it would travel overland to European countries where the clever Europeans then invent metal type without being introduced along any overland route from China.
Metalworking in the subcontinent of India not to mention China itself is very well developed and as knowledge of smelting metal from ore is easy to carry in the mind it could cross border after border so arise simultanerously in many places at once long before the printing press was invented.
Knowledge of alloys would follow a similar pattern I would argue.

The ship route overr the sea would mean it could easily travel down the length of the Americas and around to the east coasts of the Americas.
It could concievably cross the American land mass from west to east.
Africa could get the knowledge of the press via the land route through India and into Anatolia and the middle east. By sea across the Indian ocean or into the med or Atlantic coasts.

As it is the tale is a group of western Europeans invented the press and its key component the metal alloy and the movable type its made from and it disseminated from there.

Of the two 'points if origin' the China point has at least a plausible identifiable reason for inventing a printing press. The Western European point has no apparent good reason for doing so.


dreamtime said:


> That's true, but it's even worse. We will likely never know. That's the issue with history, and one way out of this problem is what I outlined.
> 
> That's why I view Gutenberg as one part of a matrix of a narrative, not as a real human. He is relevant (to me) because he exists in the official narrative as a key character. I don't care at all whether he lived or not, because I will never know.
> 
> ...


I'm not as defeatist as you appear to be.
You are keen on managing the way things need to be done. You might not view it like that but you're choice of words suggests otherwise.
How about we both crack on in our own ways and each leave the other alone.


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## yashcherlizhchov (Saturday at 9:05 PM)

You can only trust the totality and synthesis of certain data (this data is collected by various highly specialised amateurs or professionals) that are the hardest to falsify. For me, it is primarily rivers (river basins and waterlines), architecture and etymology (for you, it may be something else ubiquitous that is close to you). All of the above, I see as parts of a whole rather than as independent and separate fragmented elements.

Translating into plain language. I see in South America (for example) a definite river basin pattern, classical ancient architecture (both buildings and logistics systems) and the Latin language (which, our contemporaries most often attribute to European culture). Each of these elements can be inconspicuously forged (if desired and appropriately equipped). Each of these elements is the result of highly productive intellectual forces (laser beam or rotor technology for building rivers; knowledge in geometry, physics, chemistry, logistics, mathematics, ergonomics, design for architecture; complex matrix mathematics and understanding of basic rhetoric, laws of consonance and rhythmics for creating complex language). But it is simply impossible to fake all three (or more; word to botanists, gardeners, florists, zoologists, etc.) elements unnoticed (assuming that our world was not created 200-300 years ago from scratch, and we were only prescribed the necessary history and legends).

Following. We see a similar pattern in Europe, residential North and Central America, Asia (and many other places). Where we do not see this, we most often see a scorched or bombed field.

 A logical conclusion follows, about a single developed civilization. I rely on this foundation (each person has his own unique life experience, so for you, these may be other fundamental prerequisites that are closer to your soul; when many independent people conduct a lot of research, it will be possible to identify common fundamental signs that  future independent researchers can rely on; in order for them to find inconsistencies at a deeper level; for example, my critical approach to considering history and energy is based on articles by Alexei Anpilogov, wakeuphuman, the tart-aria website and interest in stadiums, architecture, rivers, etymology and family history).

But for some reason, "someone" needs us not to see this unity. Where this unity cannot be overlooked, this unity is presented solely under the guise of colonisation (I do not deny the fact of colonisation; while I am sure that much of what is attributed to the colonisers was not built from scratch by the colonisers) or unverifiable "ancient" civilisations.

What is the point of this passage? In my opinion, it is necessary to create/identify conditional "credibility criteria" that will determine the truth of the information (without any dating, so that the method is as pure as possible; having created such a method, it will be possible to test it on the history that we know well enough from 1930; modern history will be used as one of the experimental research samples to test the credibility of the method). Later, on the basis of these "criteria", it will be possible to construct a system which includes chronology, real dynastic and other sequences, real scientific, architectural and other schools (traces of these schools all over the world), etymology and ethnography, real cartographic data (I am very curious about the percentage of real old maps), real archaeological data, etc.

I see with my own eyes, from personal experience, how deception is produced, how inaccurate information is massively and centrally spread (in my opinion, the picture is similar for Russia, USA, Europe and China; we live in a world where politicians' word and signature are worthless; Merkel and Hollande, have stated it outright; but I am sure that the words "politician" and "honest" cannot be put together in the same sentence; the only thing a politician can do honestly is to deceive honestly; and it is politicians and political/corporate institutions that use science as a tool to achieve their goals) how psychological operations are conducted. And all this relates to the events of our time (I'm not talking about the fact that there are people in the world who trust official population information). One wonders, willy-nilly, whether the older data can be trusted. 

Considering that in the past it was often not possible for ordinary people to get relatively independent information (now, one can watch a video of walks from any city, visit small city social media groups etc. to know a more or less realistic picture in relatively developed countries). Plus, the common people, more often than not, do not understand (and do not even want to understand) the information that is presented to them (events are considered in the moment, not in a broader context). Because of that, the media (and the groups that control it) can plant false narratives in the mass consciousness (in the same way credible information can be planted in the mass perception; it creates the right foundation for the moment when fake information has to be planted).

All of this is built on the foundation of educational systems that aim to develop only short-term (at best tactical) thinking. When you see something irrational (so it seems to you), it is worth wondering about the purposefulness of the person from whom the "irrationality" comes (surely you have met situations in life when one person started slowly, but gradually he picked up speed and he subsequently overtook those who started more briskly). It is quite possible that a person with inoculated short-term thinking is not even capable of explaining the "irrational" in a logical way. That is why he puts certain labels on everything incomprehensible. Of course, it is important to be able to identify and distinguish people who are capable of long-term goal-setting. There is no need to see hidden meaning in every element of a simple person's behaviour (unless, of course, they are part of a larger collective system).


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## Referent (Saturday at 10:14 PM)

Jd755 said:


> As far as I know he never commissioned an artist to draw his machines, his type or anything else.


Allegedly, the earliest extant depiction of a printing press is from the 1499 Lyons "Danse Macabre":





One article [0, 1] says that


> The danse macabre illustration that includes the earliest surviving depiction of a printing press in fact consists of two scenes associated with bookmaking.



As described by the source [2],


> The Lyons Danse macabre, one of two surviving copies, contains the earliest depiction of a printing shop: one skeleton of death seizes the surprised compositor, another the pressman, and another, in adjacent scene, a dismayed bookseller standing at his counter. Only the young apprentice, wielding his ink balls, escapes. The picture book known as the Danse macabre, whose verses emphasize that death comes to all, from popes and emperors to plowmen, was first printed in Paris in 1486. The scenes derive from a lost sequence of Dance of Death murals painted in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris. The many Paris editions of Danse macabre do not include the printing shop. It is one of three new scenes, with corresponding verses, added to this Lyons version.



Looking through De Vinne's 1876 _The Invention of Printing_ [3, 4], there are some good stories about John Gensfliesch (Gutenberg) and printing (indulgences, feuds, secrets), but, as discussed at length above, they are at this point stories to me, so I refrain from relaying even a thing more now.

*Sources*
[0]  "Early depictions of the printing press: a model source.." The Free Library. 2015 The American Printing History Association
[1] Perry, T. P. J. (2015). Early depictions of the printing press: a model source. Printing History, (18), 27+.
[2] LA GRANT DANSE MACABRE. [Lyons: Mathias Huss], 18 February 1499 (1500), The Scheide Library, Princeton University
[3] De Vinne, 1876, The Invention of Printing, Internet Archive
[4] De Vinne, 1876, The Invention of Printing, Project Gutenberg


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## yashcherlizhchov (Saturday at 11:18 PM)

You can only trust photos reliably if you have a large number of photos of the same place from different angles. It is advisable to have as many photo sources as possible. Many of you are probably aware that many old photographs that are in the public domain have been retouched. It is possible that the retouching of the original photo was done on a chemical level. If so, by identifying the retouching methods, it may be possible to identify who did the retouching and when.

Plus, with today's technical capabilities, it is possible to create fake "old" photos and videos which are dumped on the Internet to discredit the critical history movement (or to steer them in the direction the beneficiaries of a possible centralized historical deception want).


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## trismegistus (Sunday at 2:54 AM)

More on the Chinese, or in this case Korean connection:

200 years before Gutenberg: The master printers of Koryo


> The first set of woodblocks, completed in 1013, was destroyed two centuries later when the Mongols invaded Korea in 1232. The invaders ravaged the entire country except for the island of Kanghwa off the west coast, where the king and the court took refuge. It was here that the government-in-exile began the mammoth task of restoring the destroyed Buddhist books. The work went on for sixteen years and resulted in over 80,000 woodcut blocks which are today preserved in the Haein-sa Temple. A precious source for the study of Buddhism, the Tripitaka has a strong claim to be considered Koryo's finest product in the arts.
> 
> 
> Whatever the truth of this claim, it is indisputable that the invention of movable metal type was Koryo's overwhelming contribution to science and technology. The technological capability existed by the early thirteenth century in the form of suitable papers and inks and in the availability of sufficient metalworking knowledge. The need for books to be produced in a number of copies was driven home when the royal palace of Koryo, along with tens of thousands of books in the royal library, was twice destroyed by fire, in 1126 and 1170. At the same time China, a major source of book supply, was preoccupied with wars which caused a decline in book output. Further stimuli included a growing scarcity of wood suitable for making printing blocks, an abundance of bronze, and the prospect of reduced costs from using a type font on many occasions.
> ...



It should be pointed out this Professor of ancient Korean printing methods didn't feel it important enough to leave a bibilography or supporting documents when these claims were made, though I'd imagine it would take someone who knows Chinese to track it down.  





Obviously these aren't swap-able blocks, but if some of these are preserved and made of wood it would at least be _plausible_ to date it with some accuracy.  Do they look 1000 years old?  No, but apparently these were preserved with extreme prejudice.  I've seen shelves of 100 year old books that look in much worse shape than this.  

Russia and China/Korea are neighbors so from a logistical standpoint wouldn't it stand to reason that if printing presses came out of Asia that one of the first places it went to was Russia?

The ‘Russian Gutenberg’: Who started book printing in Russia and when


> At the invitation of the Russian Tsar, Hans Messingheim, a Dane, arrived in Moscow. Ivan Fyodorov, a deacon in one of the Kremlin churches (no longer in existence) was assigned to him as an apprentice, along with Pyotr Mstislavets and engraver Vasyuk Nikiforov as assistants. (Nikiforov probably executed the letters and made the engravings.) *A printing press was ordered from Poland*, where Russian books had already been published before.



Why did it take 500 years for Russia to get a printing press if they were China's first stop in overland trade?  Not to mention they purchased their press from Poland, not from China.  

Where the first Russian books were printed


> Located only 500 meters from Red Square, the Moscow Print Yard is considered to be one of most extraordinary buildings in Moscow, as well as one of the earliest secular constructions in the city. Russia Beyond has descended into its dungeons to show you a secret glimpse of ancient Russia.
> The building was established at the behest of Ivan the Terrible in 1553 and became the birthplace of Russian publishing. The first publication ever printed in Russia, with a known date, was _The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles_ (also known as _Apostle_). It was completed in 1564 and printed at the State Print Yard by Ivan Fyodorov (the father of Eastern Slavonic printing) and Pyotr Mstislavets (a Belorussian printer).



Unsurprisingly the Russians used their press for exclusively liturgical material, and did it right in the heart of Red Square.  Regarding the connection to the control scheme, this fits just about every marker.  And if I may: brief offtopic but still deliciously stolenhistory moment discovery about this Moscow Print Yard -



> Here, we have reached the ruins of the very first Print Yard, now about 15 meters under ground.
> 
> A little further down, we could see a blocked passageway that the archeologists obviously haven’t reached yet. We carefully climbed over the pit, filled with broken bricks and trash. It appears to be a pathway to the oldest wall of Moscow.


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## Jd755 (Sunday at 1:50 PM)

As promised I am reading the 1897 Encyclopedia and have copied some out for scrutiny of those interested. There is more to follow on the type itself and the press but takes me a while to read and type it out.

-----------------------------

Printing is one of the arts which have done most for the prosperity of the human race. It lies at the bottom of the refined and comprehensive civilization of the Western races.

It may seem strange that any doubt should prevail as to who was the inventor of printing, but with most great inventions a similar difficulty exists.
Gutenburg invented printing; that is, he carried out the cruder ingenuity of Laurens Coster and others.
The invention of printing took place in the fifteenth century; but the principle on which it was founded were known to the fathers of civilization the ancient Assyrians.
Among the ruins of Babylon have been discovered entire bricks stamped with symbolic figures and hieroglyphic characters.

Printing letterpress from engraved blocks of wood, though not movable type, has been practised in China for 2000 years. A similar mode of printing playing-cards and rude scriptural illustrations was in vogue in Europe in about the middle of the fourteenth century.
The great discovery in printing, which rendered it so important an agency in the work of civilization, was that of ,_movable types_; of forming each alphabetical character separately, so that it could be used in countless combinations, the same types being involved in the "setting up" of successive pages. It was the discovery which rendered _cheap books_ possible.
Previously their enormous cost had entirely confined them to the libraries of the wealthy. In 1272 the pay of a labourer was 1 and 1/2d per day. At that time the price of a Bible, fairly written, was 50 marks, or £33, a sum equal to £660 at the present value of money.

About 1423 one Laurens Janszoon Coster, of Haralem, printed with blocks a book of images and letters called "Speculum Humnae Salvationis", for which he employed an ink more tenacious and more viscous than common ink. The leaves of this book were printed on one side only, and afterwards pasted together. A few years afterwards John Gutenberg, of Mainz, entered into a partnership with an opulent Goldsmith named John Faust or Fust and after numerous experiments, printed the first book from _cut_ or movable metal types -- namely, an edition of the Vulgate Bible, which was begun about 1450 and completed in 1460.

In 1452 Peter Schöffer, son-in-law of Faust, cast the first metal types in matrices and was therefore the actual  inventor of complete printing. Cast-metal types, according to some authorities, were first used for a second edition of the Mainz Bible.
These were the principa italics the beginnings of the art. The partnership between Gutenberg and Faust was soon dissolved; and the former being unable to repay part of the capital advanced by the latter, the whole of the printing apparatus fell into the hands of Faust, who printed off a considerable number of copies of the Bible, to imitate those commonly sold as MS, and undertook the sale off them at Paris. It was his interests to conceal the discovery and to pass of his printed copies for MS. " But," says D'Israeli, "enabled to sell his Bibles at 60 crowns, while the other scribes demanded 500, this raised universal astonishment when he produced copies as fast as they were wanted and even lowered his price. The uniformity of the copies increased the wonder.
He was denounced as a magician. The peculiarly brilliant red ink which embellished his work was said to be his blood; and it was seriously asserted that he head sold himself to the Evil One. Faust, to save himself from a bonfire, was compelled to reveal his art to the parlement of Paris, by whom he was discharged from further prosecution, in consideration of the wonderful nature of his invention.


Faust now took into partnership his son-in-law Schöffer, and the two commenced printing from cast-metal types.
In 1457 they issued an edition of the Psalter; and in this says Hallam the invention was announced to the world in a boasting colophon, though certainly not unreasonably bold.
In 1465 they published an edition of Cicero's "De Officiis", the first tribute to the new art of polite literature.
Two pupils of their school, Sweynheym and Paunartz, migrated the same year to Italy, and printed Donatus' grammar and the works of Lactantius at the monastery of Subiaca in the neighbourhood of Rome.
Venice had the honour of bestowing her patronage on John of Spiral, the first who applied the art on an extensive scale to the publication of the classical authors.
Several Latin authors came forth to his press in 1470; and during the next ten years a multitude of editions were published in various parts of Italy, Germany, and France.
The art reached Paris in 1469, England in 1474, and Spain in 1475. Its introduction was coeval with a remarkable intellectual movement in Europe. The days of feudalism had passed.


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## RedNeckGoober (Sunday at 3:07 PM)

Jd755 said:


> As promised I am reading the 1897 Encyclopedia and have copied some out for scrutiny of those interested. There is more to follow on the type itself and the press but takes me a while to read and type it out.
> 
> -----------------------------
> 
> ...



This reads like a novel, not an encyclopedia. All that's missing is 'two guys walk into a bar'


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## trismegistus (Sunday at 3:23 PM)

Jd755 said:


> As promised I am reading the 1897 Encyclopedia and have copied some out for scrutiny of those interested. There is more to follow on the type itself and the press but takes me a while to read and type it out.
> 
> -----------------------------
> 
> ...



Interesting how in a short 60 years the origin of the printing press goes from "hell if we know where it started" to this "historically settled" version.  At the very least, this version manages to make the Chinese connection which is saying more than the sources I came across from the early 1800s.


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## ViniB (Sunday at 3:46 PM)

trismegistus said:


> Interesting how in a short 60 years the origin of the printing press goes from "hell if we know where it started" to this "historically settled" version.


Replying to you as well because i believe you'll like the screenshot i mentioned to dreamtime. Unfortunally idk the book's name....


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## Jd755 (Sunday at 3:53 PM)

Referent said:


> Allegedly, the earliest extant depiction of a printing press is from the 1499 Lyons "Danse Macabre":
> 
> View attachment 27049​
> One article [0, 1] says that
> ...


Referent. Do the stories in your book tally at all with the ones in the Encyclopedia?

From your post and the encycvlopedia its looking like Gutenburg is at beset a  'bit player' not the founder of the printing press.


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## trismegistus (Sunday at 4:08 PM)

ViniB said:


> Replying to you as well because i believe you'll like the screenshot i mentioned to dreamtime. Unfortunally idk the book's name....
> View attachment 27056



I'm fairly positive this is from Fomenko's History: Fiction or Science (Chronology 1)


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## Referent (Sunday at 6:33 PM)

Jd755 said:


> Referent. Do the stories in your book tally at all with the ones in the Encyclopedia?
> 
> From your post and the encycvlopedia its looking like Gutenburg is at beset a  'bit player' not the founder of the printing press.


_The Invention of Printing_ (De Vinne, 1876) *ought* to tally with some encyclopedia versions, since *I found it in the bibliography of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica* article on "printing".  (Apologies for omitting the reverse attribution originally--after skimming the article, I wanted more in-depth sources to look at, particularly whatever the 1911 author [who happens to be Charles T. Jacobi of Cheswick Press] pointed to.)

While I hope to take a look at the changes in the story over time, I will not be able to look in any depth for at least a couple of days (I haven't yet gotten to compare De Vinne to the kindly typed out National Encyclopedia text).
In the meantime, while on the topic of reviewing the development of official/encyclopedic versions of the story over time, for anyone interested: one resource that may aid in doing so is the following website, with links to various volumes by letter over time: OldEncyc.com.


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## dreamtime (Monday at 11:42 AM)

Jd755 said:


> You are keen on managing the way things need to be done. You might not view it like that but you're choice of words suggests otherwise.
> How about we both crack on in our own ways and each leave the other alone.



Ok, I've split the discussion and created a new thread: Concepts for making sense of history


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## usselo (Wednesday at 2:01 PM)

Referent said:


> Allegedly, the earliest extant depiction of a printing press is from the 1499 Lyons "Danse Macabre":


​


Referent said:


> [2] LA GRANT DANSE MACABRE. [Lyons: Mathias Huss], 18 February 1499 (1500), The Scheide Library, Princeton University





> The Lyons Danse macabre, one of two surviving copies, contains the earliest depiction of a printing shop: one skeleton of death seizes the surprised compositor, another the pressman, and another, in adjacent scene, a dismayed bookseller standing at his counter. Only the young apprentice, wielding his ink balls, escapes. The picture book known as the Danse macabre, whose verses emphasize that death comes to all, from popes and emperors to plowmen, was first printed in Paris in 1486. The scenes derive from a lost sequence of Dance of Death murals painted in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris.


1486...

Just adding to the sequence of dates:


Jd755 said:


> The great discovery in printing, which rendered it so important an agency in the work of civilization, was that of ,_movable types_; of forming each alphabetical character separately, so that it could be used in countless combinations, the same types being involved in the "setting up" of successive pages. It was the discovery which rendered _cheap books_ possible.
> Previously their enormous cost had entirely confined them to the libraries of the wealthy.
> 
> About 1423 one Laurens Janszoon Coster, of Haralem, printed with blocks a book of images and letters called "Speculum Humnae Salvationis",





Jd755 said:


> A few years afterwards John Gutenberg, of Mainz, entered into a partnership with an opulent Goldsmith named John Faust or Fust and after numerous experiments, printed the first book from _cut_ or movable metal types -- namely, an edition of the Vulgate Bible, which was begun about 1450 and completed in 1460.
> 
> In 1452 Peter Schöffer, son-in-law of Faust, cast the first metal types in matrices and was therefore the actual  inventor of complete printing. Cast-metal types, according to some authorities, were first used for a second edition of the Mainz Bible.
> Faust now took into partnership his son-in-law Schöffer, and the two commenced printing from cast-metal types.
> ...





Jd755 said:


> Several Latin authors came forth to his press in 1470; and during the next ten years a multitude of editions were published in various parts of Italy, Germany, and France.
> 
> The art reached Paris in 1469, England in 1474, and Spain in 1475. Its introduction was coeval with a remarkable intellectual movement in Europe. The days of feudalism had passed.



From _Parchment and Glove Making in Havant_, Ralph Cousins, 2017, p7, describing the parchment makers of Havant, Hampshire, supplying Oxford University:


> The next century witnessed a considerable falling off in a trade which had evidently flourished in the thirteenth century. During 1556 and 1594 only five names occur of men engaged in the industry.





> But by the seventeenth century it is probable that white paper for books was well known, though Macpherson would place the date of its introduction at the end rather than the beginning of that period.



In other words: books were made from skin into the century before 1700. Then paper completed its take-over.

From Tentering Tower, Ramsbottom, Bury:


> Local author Richard Peace in his book _Lancashire Curiosities_ writes that in later days Stubbins Vale Mill moved away from woollen manufacturing and began to produce textiles for the printing industry. They produced items such as filter fabrics, printing blankets and felt. Filter fabrics allow water to pass through them but prevent solids from going through. Printing blankets are textile that act like a printing block. They take ink from a roller and transfer it on to paper, and in this way they can be a disposable template that can used many times to mass produce leaflets. Felts are used in the production of hand made paper to absorbs any excess water produced.



My point is that demand for raw materials by the publishing industry shifted away from skin products towards wool and cellulose products. As seems to have also occurred in the clothing industry with wool and then cotton. Britain's materials production seems to have switched from butchery side-products (skins) to annually harvestable products: sheep fleeces and cellulose.

Followed shortly afterwards by mechanised production.

Why? And why then?

Perhaps 'natural' selection began to do a lot more selecting:


_Ice Age fashionistas went wool for leather. Source: __Little Ice Age_​
Perhaps sources of skins became much rarer as the 16th century unfolded. Perhaps only cold-resistant, hairy flocks could be reliably farmed.

Climate change may not have been the only factor:


RedNeckGoober said:


> All that's missing is 'two guys walk into a bar'







Your browser is not able to display this video.



_Two gods walk into a bar... Source: __Westworld_

First god says:


> Your hominids-as-feedstock business is giving all of us a bad name.


Second god gets up to leave, saying:


> The Gilds will agree with me.



Love the Latin decor in that scene.

I wonder if the origin of metal type is related to a possible evolution from leather industry tool and buckle-making into coin minting. For example, parchment-makers use a 'lunar' to scrape hair from skin:


​
It's kinda funny that Erasmus Darwin created the Lunar Society in 1765. With buckle-maker turned coin-caster Matthew Boulton. Then in 1778 went on to invent 'a copying machine'.


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## Udjat (Wednesday at 2:58 PM)

I just wanted to say that some may take "print" to be a wonderful invention, and yes it is helpful sometimes, but reading something and writing something doesn't always send the exact message that is wanted.  The basis of this thread is to establish the first printing I guess, and I think that is great, I just see sometimes that print or the written word  creates chaos more so than it being helpful.  I don't mean to turn this into  a philosophical conversation, but what if this is where the human went wrong.  What if we were duped in to this form of communication?


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## Jd755 (Wednesday at 3:23 PM)

usselo said:


> View attachment 27080​
> 
> 1486...
> 
> ...


The reason why paper replaced parchment is down to the differences in preparation time. Parchment goes through many processes reliant on the skill of the individual processor to produce parchment of sufficient quality to write on. Also the time intervals between these processes are what they are. In short it is a lengthy process all done by hand to take a skin and refine it into parchment.
It seems obvious this alone limits the production and the supply. Add in the reality the same skins can be used for leather goods then it is beyond doubt parchment has always been of limited use as a medium of record.

Paper production is by contrast a quick process. First there is the manufacture of the pulp and then there is the manufacture of the paper. Much of the work can be done by unskilled labour with the skilled labour being used at key points only.
The volume of parchment in comparison to the volume of paper produced in the exact same time frame is so marked the production of paper quickly rendered the production of parchment obsolete once the paper manufacturing process was invented or introduced.

According to the 1897 Encyclopedia it is again uncertain as to when the pulp and paper process arose in England but it says paper used for writing purposes can be shown to known as early as 1309.
Sadly it doesn't mention where or what form this 1309 example takes.

A person of the name of Tate is said to have had a paper mill at Hertford early in the sixteenth century and another is said to have been established in Kent by a German who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
Again sadly it doesn't name this German and of course we are in John Dee territory and it is claimed he had hundreds, or thousands of books in his library at one point.
They could have all been parchment bound with vellum but I for one doubt all of them were. As the dating is wooly at best its odds on paper books were replacing parchment if there were paper mills in existence.

The fact paper was required for the printing press and its method of operation and we cannot ignore the relative ease and speed by which it is bound into book form its production must have been well enough developed to be providing a quality product at some volume assuming the claims made for Faust and his son in law plus students of the pair are true or even just near the mark.


Udjat said:


> What if we were duped in to this form of communication?


How would anyone know?


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## Jd755 (Yesterday at 10:07 AM)

usselo said:


> I wonder if the origin of metal type is related to a possible evolution from leather industry tool and buckle-making into coin minting. For example, parchment-makers use a 'lunar' to scrape hair from skin:


Many old looking coins were stamped as far as I can tell from looking at them. They seem to be of metal discs of sufficient softness to be stamped by a stamp made of a harder material which has been inverse carved with the design. By what means this harder material was carved I know not.
And of sufficient hardness to hold the design once stamped.
Perhaps the blank disc was heated, stamped, cooled to set the design in place in which case the stamp need not be much harder than the metal disc.
No way to tell if the disc was placed on the stamp which was held fast and then struck with a hammer or a press was involved. Equally the stamp could have been the thing struck with a hammer or held fast in a press and the hot metal disc could go in a disc shaped holder to keep it in place as its stamped.

To my mind such individual stamping of metal discs is as slow to produce copies of anything let alone coinage.
As for it being a source of the route to the creation of metal type it could be. We would need to find a route for coin manufacturers to become involved with the wooden press importer/ creator. I haven't found one. Faust being a goldsmith shows a knowledge of metallurgy in relation to alloys. That makes sense on a practical level as he would have experience of both casting and stamping.
I'm sure coin manufacturers would have similar knowledge of alloys, stamping and I would argue casting.
Casting of coins can be done in multiples in one pour in one mould and would seem to me something that would be recognised as a faster more effective process involving much less effort than stamping.


This is the sort of journey I go on when mentioning the logistics of things. I suppose its a case of "how is it practical to do this?" 
At least its a base common to every avenue of investigation.
It requires some assumption not least that which assumes us humans alive today are in essence body and soul, mind, brain, imagination abilities our practical nature the same as our predecessors.
The best clue for me this is so is the amount of built infrastructure all of which is built to the level and plumb.


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## UncleVito (Today at 3:16 AM)

It is often said that history is written by the winners.

A quick web search shows that history has recorded over 10,000 battles, and 4,000 wars.  Today, a mere 10 cultures have subsumed every other culture that has preceded it.

If we assume that half of the history of these prior cultures have been deliberately distorted or destroyed, how much of our current history is accurate?

.5 ^10 = <0.1%

Because less than 1% of our history is likely to be accurate, I no longer believe anything 100%.  Today, I remain skeptical of all things.


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