Late Bronze Age Collapse of the 12th century? Pretty much every major civilization in the Mediterranean and Near East fell apart.
How would you design Maya?
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Boris Gudenuf
Deity
Book: Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers by Amir D. Aczel, available in electronic download or paperback.
He tracks the spread of the 'zero' notation back through the middle east to the Indian writings that the Arabs first accessed and then another few hundred years back to some obscure inscriptions in Cambodia in the 7th century CE. He also does a general history of numerical notation in the 'Old World' since the Babylonians, but doesn't touch on the Mesoamerican achievements of the Maya and others there.
Yudhisthira
Chieftain
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ny...nding-zero-a-long-journey-for-naught.amp.html
https://time.com/3845786/my-quest-to-find-the-first-zero/?amp=true
Pardon me I can't go thru the book right now but Is this claim supported by other scholars.
I went through some articles about the same & I couldnt find the claim for Cambodian origin of zero, rather it looks like to me that it's more about finding inscriptions related to zero especially the Cambodian one dated 683 CE & why eastern mind could conceived the concept of Zero.
Tbh it looks more probable that it was Indians who brought the concept of Zero to cambodia . Infact If I m not wrong the inscription has Saka calender & dated to Saka 605,which ofcourse is an Indian calender.
https://time.com/3845786/my-quest-to-find-the-first-zero/?amp=true
Pardon me I can't go thru the book right now but Is this claim supported by other scholars.
I went through some articles about the same & I couldnt find the claim for Cambodian origin of zero, rather it looks like to me that it's more about finding inscriptions related to zero especially the Cambodian one dated 683 CE & why eastern mind could conceived the concept of Zero.
Tbh it looks more probable that it was Indians who brought the concept of Zero to cambodia . Infact If I m not wrong the inscription has Saka calender & dated to Saka 605,which ofcourse is an Indian calender.
But wasn't it because of Sea Peoples invasions/migrations? It wasn't exactly hardcore ecology - climate stuff like Maya and Khmer, especially as it happened in the same time in very different environments
Also, Egypt, Elam and Mesopotamia (esp Assyria) didn't fell apart, just Mycenae, Hittites and Canaan did
I believe that hypothesis has been mostly rejected or at least criticized, though to my knowledge there is no consensus on whether environmental factors, changes in warfare due to ironworking, or a combination of social and environmental factors were responsible.
Egypt and Mesopotamia didn't collapse, no, but they did experience recession, particularly Egypt and Babylon.
Boris Gudenuf
Deity
There is also the question of whether the 'invention' of Zero means Zero as a number, a concept, or a device required by a place notation system of arithmetic.
A "zero" or No Value marker in a place notation system dates back to Babylonian mathematics and the Mayans and so was a separate discovery for both, but neither appear to have actually used their 'place-holder' zero notation in calculations, so it wasn't "zero as a number" in either system. Since there was trade contact between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization before 2000 BCE and between the Indian states through the Persian Empire to the Middle East before Alexander arrived, then while there is no direct evidence that I know of, the Indian 'zero' as a place-holder may have been originally a diffusion from early Mesopotamia. Since there is a resounding gap in any written record due to the untranslatable Indus Valley language, we probably will never know for sure (which doesn't stop academics from arguing about it at length).
The new concept that the Indians apparently developed with or without Cambodian input was Zero as a Number, and one scholar at least dates it back to 458 CE and has argued that the Sanskrit word for 'zero' originally meant 'empty' or 'void' and so the concept developed out of native Buddhist doctrine. The Gwalior Temple inscription that was considered the earliest Indian recorded evidence for Zero has now been superseded by radiocarbon dating of the Bhakshali manuscript, a scroll originally thought to be from the 9th century CE which is now dated to the 3rd or 4th century, pushing the Indian 'Zero' back by about 500 years.
But given that there are academic groups in both Indian and western Universities studying the origins of 'Zero' and at least two other books on it in print besides the one I cited, everything we think we know about it might be revised later this week - our knowledge is really in a state of flux and has been for the past 20 years.
What is still pretty solid is that wherever and whenever it started, the zero place notation system and decimal arithmetic was transmitted by translation of Brahmagupta's and other Indian texts into Arabic in the 9th century and then the translation of al-Khwarizmi's derivative work into Latin in the 13th century which got it to Europe.
Boris Gudenuf
Deity
The latest arguments that I've seen concerning the Sea Peoples are starting to "look behind" the effect of their 'migrations', which were almost uniformly catastrophic for settled states from Anatolia to Egypt, and look at why they started moving in the first place. The current emphasis seems to be to try to find climactic or environmental changes that forced them to look for (literally) greener pastures, but I haven't seen any definitive physical evidence yet. Stay tuned.
As to whether it was entirely the Sea People that kicked in the Bronze Age civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean, that isn't likely. Some of the 'Sea Peoples' had already been working as mercenaries and hired soldiers in Egypt and other Civs for over 200 years before the 'migrations' and others were trading partners, so there was apparently lots of contact with many of the Sea Peoples' component groups - which is one of the arguments for some kind of sudden environmental cause that changed all the relationships seemingly all at once.
mitsho
Deity
Fascinating, that stuff on zero. And yeah, I agree, the Maya can be scientific.
The Maya for me should belong to a group of civs that play differently compared to other civs: „The City State Collectionists“. As opposed to generic civs, these would have stronger cities, but the player has less control over them. So the gameplay challenge is whether you can weather a war you are dragged into or channel all the other cities into a f.e. Scientific victory. Other civs like this would be the Greeks, the Sumerians, the Phoenicians, the Italians, the Swiss (apparently not deserving of a place, but serving as an example), maybe the Vikings, the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois, and many more.
(Other non-generic groups would be „Horse-based nomads“, „Naval“ and maybe „Colonialists“, the generic group would then be the „Empire“)
The Maya for me should belong to a group of civs that play differently compared to other civs: „The City State Collectionists“. As opposed to generic civs, these would have stronger cities, but the player has less control over them. So the gameplay challenge is whether you can weather a war you are dragged into or channel all the other cities into a f.e. Scientific victory. Other civs like this would be the Greeks, the Sumerians, the Phoenicians, the Italians, the Swiss (apparently not deserving of a place, but serving as an example), maybe the Vikings, the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois, and many more.
(Other non-generic groups would be „Horse-based nomads“, „Naval“ and maybe „Colonialists“, the generic group would then be the „Empire“)
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