Decade

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geejaytee
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Re: Decade

Post by geejaytee » Thu Dec 19, 2019 10:07 pm

greyspoke wrote:
Thu Dec 19, 2019 9:57 pm
2020 will be a cool year for cricketers and opticians anyway.
Test matches in this country are already sponsored by Specsavers, so I'm guessing they may well have a lot planned for the next cricket season.

EDIT: No, it was only for 2018 and 2019. Shame, as they've missed a trick not getting the 2020 season too.

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Tessa K
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Re: Decade

Post by Tessa K » Fri Dec 20, 2019 10:27 am

stańczyk wrote:
Thu Dec 19, 2019 9:02 pm

Can predictable astronomical events such as solar eclipses determine how ages relate? According to Wiki, Chinese astronomers have been recording solar and lunar eclipses since 750BCE and have 1600 records. Can we not now give these predictions absolute dates? In a similar way can we do that with the eclipse observations of other cultures? If this can be done, then we can understand the relation between events in unconnected histories.
Astronomical phenomena were one of the things I was thinking of under 'events', along with volcanoes, earthquakes etc that may have been recorded in more than one culture. There would have been years now and then when nothing much happened that was considered noteworthy in one country or another and sometimes anywhere in the world. The king didn't die, the weather was OK, no one starved, there was no plague, the gods were chilling so no natural disasters, no one invaded etc etc etc

Some history books and many websites have timelines that cover all major cultures and show how they overlap. There may be a few small gaps but the bigger picture is well known. There's a ton of them to choose from here .

P.J. Denyer
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Re: Decade

Post by P.J. Denyer » Sat Dec 21, 2019 8:10 pm

stańczyk wrote:
Thu Dec 19, 2019 9:02 pm
dyqik wrote:
Thu Dec 19, 2019 7:18 pm
My mental model of this is that we have the current dating system, and we have records of events from different cultures histories, sort of going back as a tree (and my mental model is pretty much based on dendrochronology, but that's a different kind of tree). We know what order things happened in in each history, but we don't necessarily know whether an event in one history happened before or after one in another history because of gaps in records, etc.

Obviously which histories are included depends on what question you are asking of it.

If I'd ever been given the option of studying history, I'd probably know why this is a stupid question.
Can predictable astronomical events such as solar eclipses determine how ages relate? According to Wiki, Chinese astronomers have been recording solar and lunar eclipses since 750BCE and have 1600 records. Can we not now give these predictions absolute dates? In a similar way can we do that with the eclipse observations of other cultures? If this can be done, then we can understand the relation between events in unconnected histories.
Yes and dendrocronology, ice core samples ect allow records of droughts, floods, volcanic eruptions and similar events to be synchronised we have a pretty good idea about the last couple of millenia. Of course "Year 0" is pretty arbitrary since the real world events mentioned in the myth didn't coincide.

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basementer
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Re: Decade

Post by basementer » Sat Dec 21, 2019 8:50 pm

Tessa K wrote:
Fri Dec 20, 2019 10:27 am
stańczyk wrote:
Thu Dec 19, 2019 9:02 pm

Can predictable astronomical events such as solar eclipses determine how ages relate? According to Wiki, Chinese astronomers have been recording solar and lunar eclipses since 750BCE and have 1600 records. Can we not now give these predictions absolute dates? In a similar way can we do that with the eclipse observations of other cultures? If this can be done, then we can understand the relation between events in unconnected histories.
Astronomical phenomena were one of the things I was thinking of under 'events', along with volcanoes, earthquakes etc that may have been recorded in more than one culture. There would have been years now and then when nothing much happened that was considered noteworthy in one country or another and sometimes anywhere in the world. The king didn't die, the weather was OK, no one starved, there was no plague, the gods were chilling so no natural disasters, no one invaded etc etc etc

Some history books and many websites have timelines that cover all major cultures and show how they overlap. There may be a few small gaps but the bigger picture is well known. There's a ton of them to choose from here .
Lunar eclipses are so common, at least two every year, that the mention of an odd one or two won't help very much with dating. Solar eclipses are another matter. The historical records were accurate enough for astronomers to spot that the earliest ones seemed to be in the wrong place, and deduce the Moon's orbit or the Earth's rate of rotation must have been changing within recorded history. (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1979QJRAS..20..243L)
Money is just a substitute for luck anyway. - Tom Siddell

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