Seeing that they were about to argue again, Guo Kang quickly interrupted.
"This matter is mainly due to the imperfect geographical knowledge of the ancients." He reminded: "Many times, our perceptual understanding of distance is actually somewhat problematic."
"For example, anyone who has read the Han Dynasty should know about Li Guangli's conquest of Dayuan. Dayuan is in what is now Fergana, and its capital, Guishan City, is about the same straight-line distance from Chang'an to our capital. .”
"We all know that Alexander was the one who marched the farthest to the east. But he basically passed through the rich hinterland of Persia, and there were still roads maintained by the Persians for generations. After leaving Yumen Pass, before arriving at Dawan , apart from the wasteland, there are only some city-states with ambiguous attitudes along the way. Considering the environmental differences along the way, the difficulty of Alexander is actually much smaller."
"But in fact, Li Guangli, whose single march exceeded Alexander's lifetime, could only be regarded as a second-rate general at that time. Except for this time, there are not many worthy deeds."
"So you see, everyone's understanding of distance is actually not the same thing at all. The Seris people think it is a war between 'neighbors'. Here, it is as far away as the end of the world."
"Moreover, this kind of thing happened far more than once. The Han, Tang, Liao, Yuan, and Ming dynasties could all launch expeditions across the desert and pursue them for thousands of miles."
"Except for a few exceptions, this is a common phenomenon. Even the Yuan Dynasty, which was governed by chaos and did not last long, was able to cross the Orkhon River to the north and climb Langjuxu Mountain; invade Central Asia to the west, and reach Talas River Valley, fighting back and forth with the Mongol rebel king in Mobei and the Western Region. So, this is actually not a rare thing, but a norm. "
Hearing his explanation, Zhu Wenkui and little Jeanne both nodded.
Guo Kang also breathed a sigh of relief.
The map of this world is still relatively rudimentary. It is indeed quite difficult to check the specific distance unless there are past cases that everyone is familiar with.
Of course, even in the era of maps, many impressions were actually very biased...
For example, everyone knows that Moscow is a very remote place compared to Europe. If a person started from the Reichstag in Berlin, he would have to walk nearly 1,800 kilometers to reach the Red Square in Moscow. Many Europeans spend their entire lives without ever getting anywhere.
Correspondingly, if you start from Chang'an City and walk 1,800 kilometers, you haven't even left Yumen Pass yet.
Therefore, there is no way to force this kind of thing.
"Looking at it this way, the core area of the Central Plains is really far away from the rest of the world." Zhu Wenkui also lamented: "If the sea routes were not much developed now, it would be really difficult to have any communication."
"Rather than saying that it's far away, it's better to say that the ones that are close are all gone." Guo Kang thought for a while and changed his expression: "There are actually many places that can be called 'civilization crossroads.' Isn't Henan also such a crossroads."
"But if you kill all the neighbors in a few streets, and then claim that you are a 'lonely civilization' and 'have no neighboring civilizations to communicate with,' then others will only think that you are too cruel..."
He said that the civilization of the Central Plains was actually a collective, and he was not just bragging. This place was a large-scale testing ground for various human social forms four to five thousand years ago.
To put it simply, the secular patriarchal clan society chosen by later Chinese people was not the only way, nor did it appear suddenly in various places. For a long time, this land had everything.
For more than a thousand years, secular patrilineal clans, matrilineal clans, religiously dominated small family societies, religiously dominated clan societies...a lot of different organizational methods coexisted, and conflicts and even wars occurred frequently.
For example, matrilineal clans, through more in-depth research in later generations, it has been determined that this system is not a necessary stage of human development. Like other organizational methods, it is one of the options and coexists with other systems.
Different from the traditional impression, this is not a "maternal society", but an "uncle society", or a society based on the inheritance system of uncles and nephews. Nor is it the “peaceful and gentle” world dominated by women as some people promote it to be. On the contrary, matrilineal clans were also quite fierce and often expanded outwards - in other words, clans that were not fierce could not survive in the Central Plains of that era.
In reality, some clans change from matrilineal to patrilineal, but there are also clans that change from matrilineal to matrilineal. Other clans, such as those in the Central Plains region, have never shown signs of matrilineal clans. The status of women there probably has nothing to do with the "matrilineal legacy". It may simply be that the war was going on too crazy and everyone had to be organized, so this phenomenon occurred.
In the end, the patrilineal clan, which valued the world and downplayed religion, became the absolute mainstream of civilization. In fact, it was for a very simple reason - in the end, he was the only one left. This method of universal experimentation and then finding a winner seems to have become a fixed routine since then and can be seen until modern times.
Civilizations throughout the ages were all ruthless people killed in a sea of blood, and they would not stop until there was only one left. Elsewhere there is little such drastic choice. However, he is not yet able to give concrete arguments on these topics.
The ancients actually also had "archaeology". For example, the famous Bamboo Chronicles were accidentally obtained by Jin people from ancient tombs of the Warring States Period and compiled.
The history of the Central Plains is too long, and it is not an exception for the ancients to archaeologically study their ancestors, and for their descendants to archaeologically study the ancients again. Counting the research and exegesis, there are even more - in order to verify the authenticity of "Shang Shu", this group of people fought from the Han Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty. It is equivalent to quarreling for another two thousand years over the classics from a thousand years ago. This is the only place in the world where you can find this kind of thing...
It is relatively simple for Guo Kang here to use Aristotle's name every day to make up reasons. Because most European researchers have seen at least third-hand works of Aristotle, they have long been unable to verify the original text.
Even in Greece itself, the remains are very limited. Because at that time, the center of studying Aristotle was Alexandria, Egypt. Therefore, Greek scholars were also helpless, because they knew that they only had part of the works of Yashen in their hands. Even though Guo Kang went through so much trouble, he never overturned.
But on the other hand, although there are now literati who study epigraphy and even ancient writings, the overall level there is still very primitive, and it is basically still a personal hobby. For the current Ming Dynasty to systematically excavate ancient ruins, the requirements are still too high.
At present, Guo Kang is just trying to find a way to send a group of down-and-out old nobles to Crete for archeology in the name of tracing the origin of civilization. Anyway, this place was excavated by Western Europeans in history, and those early "archaeologists" who were extremely destructive may not be as good as the scholars of the Song Dynasty...
Western Europeans have shown no mercy to Greece. In his previous life, Greece and Egypt were the countries that most actively condemned Britain and France for plundering cultural relics. Compared with them, Seris was the one who suffered less.
It is because he has seen so much that Guo Kang often wonders whether "Europeans claim to be the heirs of Greek culture" is the consensus of Western Europe, the views of some Western European scholars, or the views of Western Europeans believed by some Serisians themselves.
Now, when he goes to Athens, he can still see the complete Parthenon, and there are still things inside - because it was not empty originally, but the British Elgin later demolished all the good things inside. , the damaged parts were burned into lime and used to build new buildings.
Over this matter, the Greeks and the British have been fighting back and forth. Some British people do not admit that this is looting, but say that these cultural relics can be better protected in the UK, so it is reasonable. This may also be a general statement.
Others denounced the looting, saying "it seems fatal to our representatives to plunder those objects which are sacred to the Turks and other barbarians" - by other barbarians, of course, the Greeks.
No matter what you say, the old Greek nobles are relatively knowledgeable. At least it won't be worse than those Western Europeans in history.
(End of chapter)
