Sunday, October 07, 2012
3 comments:
- dymphna said...
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I was looking for something else about Emmet Scott, the author, and your page popped up...
...that book exemplifies what "paradigm shift" entails. I had a great deal of difficulty getting my head 'round the knowledge that Egypt was once "the breadbasket" for the Med. And that its cheap papyrus aided widespread literacy - on which commerce depended, of course.
One fact has stayed with me, for pondering: the marauders were never able to get a foothold in the higher reaches of Spain because the locals fought back so ferociously. It appears to have been a significantly stellar failure. I mean that yes, they were stalled in some places, and pushed back, but in the northern area of Spain they couldn't even begin.
A lot of questions come to mind re the people and the culture. Were they Visigoths or an even earlier group?
If you have any idea as to how one would even begin to find answers, please let me know.
Thanks. - October 19, 2012 at 9:08 PM
- Hesperado said...
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dymphna,
I'm a bit rusty on that period of history. My educated guess is that the Visigoths controlled the same part of Iberia which the Muslims were able to conquer, the south. The north may have been tougher because that was where the main concentration of (proto-)European allies were, helping out the nascent Spaniards. Those same salvaged Spaniards, in turn, continued to attack the south for centuries, finally paving the way for the complete Reconquista. It's kind of a mirror-image of what happened to Byzantium, in every respect: With Byzantium, the Muslims fought for centuries, pushing northward, and fighting offensively in their supremacist expansionism; while in Spain, the non-Muslims fought for centuries, pushing southward, and thoroughly defensively to win back what had been unjustly and violent taken. - October 21, 2012 at 3:11 PM
- Hesperado said...
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P.S.: And each side was successful in its goal.
- October 21, 2012 at 3:12 PM
An anti-Islam reader in a comments thread at Jihad Watch recently reflexively blurted out one of many Givens of our Age:
The History of a Controversy
by Emmet Scott
New English Review Press · 2012 · 270 pages
$19.95 · Kindle version $9.95