Greatest Civilization in History (Tie breakers)

[Will9]

In the 2 polls there were 2 ties so please vote for one of Italy and Vikings and one of Hebrews and Ottomans/Turks.

My votes are:
Italy
Hebrews

[LordShiva]

My votes are:
-
Banana

[Hueij]

Hebrews?? A small nomadic tribe that wandered around in the Middle-East some 2500 years ago and just happened to write this one book?

[Will9]

Hebrews?? A small nomadic tribe that wandered around in the Middle-East some 2500 years ago and just happened to write this one book...

...in the first alphabet ever and was able to continuely keep their culture alive despite being constantly bullied around by major power after major power.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Will9
...in the first alphabet ever and was able to continuely keep their culture alive despite being constantly bullied around by major power after major power.

Huh? The hebrew Alphabet is not the "first ever."

Both choices stink to high heaven, but I had to go banana/Ottomans.

Though neither is even close to the greatest civ in history.

[Will9]

Originally posted by GePap


Huh? The hebrew Alphabet is not the "first ever."

Than which is?

Both choices stink to high heaven, but I had to go banana/Ottomans.

Though neither is even close to the greatest civ in history.

This is for the top 23, not the greatest. I put in the banana for if think neither have any greatness or deserve to be in the top 23. If banana gets the most votes, both will be thrown out.

[Hueij]

Regarding the alphabet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet#History

The history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.[3]

However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech.[4] In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BCE for or by Semitic workers, but only one of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation.[5] Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.[5]

This script eventually developed into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, which in turn was refined into the Phoenician alphabet.[6] Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels. These early vowelless alphabets are called abjads, and still exist in scripts such as the Arabic and Hebrew scripts.

Phoenician was the first major phonemic script.[7][8] In contrast to two other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, each of which contained thousands of different characters, it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage to Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonetically.

The script was spread by the Phoenicians, whose Thalassocracy allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean.[7] In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek, and changed them to represent the vowels. This marks the creation of a "true" alphabet, with the presence of both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused so many different alphabets to evolve from it.

[lord of the mark]

Does it make sense to seperate Hebrews from Phoenicians? In terms of language, systems of government, pottery styles, etc they are almost identical. The major architectural feats of the Hebrews, the first temple and palace of David, if we had them, would probably look phoenician, as the bible tells us (probably reliably) they were built by Phoenician craftsman. Hebrews, Phoenicans, Canaanites, were, religion apart, the same civ. And of course the Hebrews only gradually adopted monotheism, and their returns to polytheism were usually to the Canaanite/Phoenician pantheon.

Putting forth the Hebrews AFTER they seperated from the Phoenician-Canaanites, is basically a tribute to their influence on Christianity and Islam. They certainly wrote far more than one book, even if we limit it to pre-Talmudic writings (when Aramaic briefly surpasses Hebrew as the language of Judaic law and scholarship) but the only ancient Hebrew book most of you goyim care about is the bible.

The value of Christianity and Islam, esp the former, esp those aspects of Christianity which were adaptions of Judaism, rather than rebellions against it, is one of the most controversial debates around, and its a debate that tends to do violence to Judaism for reasons largely unrelated to the career of J or of Hebrew civ. Id rather we could move on, or at least try to keep cool.

oh, and Italians over vikings for sure.

[Nikolai]

I see the vote between the Hebrews and the Ottomans are a tie. I failed to see this thread before now, but I'd like to give a vote to the Hebrews if my late vote is accepted.

[Will9]

So we are done here.