Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"VI. The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men." -- Westminster Confession of Faith "But how, it was asked, had such knowledge [of spiritual matters] come to her? It came, [Hutchinson] said, just as the word had come to Daniel, that is, "by an immediate revelation"... Dudley challenged [John] Cotton to condemn her talk of miracles and revelations. Cotton equivocated, distinguishing between God's deliverance by the Word (reasonable, scriptural) and outright miracles (delusive and sinful)." -- Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years , p. 454 The above two passages highlight a fundamental problem in the doctrine of sola scriptura : of course, most of the major figures...

I wrote a post recently wondering about Indians' geographical knowledge. It turns out that not even the experts know for sure: In effect, through its lateral linkages, [the Indian path network] extended from Canada to Florida and west into the Mississippi Valley. How wide in the end the extent of the coastal Indians' geographical awareness was, what sense they had of ultimate spatial magnitudes, is difficult to discover. (Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years , pp. 15-16) I have been wondering about questions like, did the eastern woodland Indians have an inkling that, say, the Aztecs existed? I guess no one knows, but they did have widespread contacts: The sources of Ontario's most exotic trade goods were particularly far-flung: slaves and marine shells from Florida and the lower Mississippi, copper from Lake Superior, volcanic glass and pipestone from the Dakotas and Wyoming. ( ibid. p. 17)

I'm reviewing the book with the above title by Bernard Bailyn. I'm in the "flipping through randomly to get a sense of the book" stage right now. One thing I ran across was Bailyn's account of the Virginia massacre of 1622. If you want to dispel yourself of any notion that colonial American history consists entirely of peaceful Indians being exterminated by ruthless colonists, then you need only read an account of that event. Acting on Chief Opechancanough's plan, which had been years in the making, the Indians wandered unarmed into English settlements, and offered trades, or even sat down to breakfast with their English hosts. (For the the Indians to share meals with the English, or even sleep over at their houses, was apparently very common before the massacre.) At a certain moment (it is not clear from Bailyn's account if there was a signal), the Indians grabbed whatever weapon was at hand -- "axes, hammers, shovels, tools, and knives" (p....

If any one cultural source lay behind the republican revolutions of the eighteenth century, it was ancient Rome -- republican Rome -- and the values that flowed from its history. It was ancient Rome's legacy that helped to make the late eighteenth century's apparently sudden transition to republicanism possible... If the Enlightenment was to discover the sources of a flourishing society and human happiness, it was important to learn what lay behind the ascendency of republican Rome and its eventual decline and fall. The French and American revolutionaries' view of the past was therefore very selective, focusing on the moral and social basis of politics and on social degeneracy and corruption. Since the eighteenth century believed "similar causes will forever operate like effects in the political, moral, and physical world," the history of the ancient world inevitably became a kind of laboratory in which autopsies of the dead republics, especially Rome, would l...