【Article/Observer Network Columnist Guo Chun】
Some time ago, the news of Sanxingdui archaeology "shangxin" attracted the attention of the people of the whole country.
With the development of archaeological excavations, the media did a lot of reporting work at the first time, live broadcasting, professional interpretation, and even some different forms. Although individual methods have aroused controversy among netizens for a while, they have indeed made a breakthrough in the widespread dissemination.
In fact, with the help of the development of social media in recent years, the "unpopular niche" profession of archaeology has gradually "gone out of the circle". Of course, this is a good thing, but in the process, it is inevitable that the fish will be mixed, and even affect the popularization of archaeological science.
This is also reminiscent of the earlier lively "Egyptian pyramids are modern forgeries" - Professor Huang Heqing of the School of Archaeology and Art of Zhejiang University gave a lecture in the form of a live broadcast, entitled "Proving History with Pictures: Pursuing western fictional history from Greece".
From the title, it can be seen that Professor Huang is a popular supporter of "Western pseudohistory". I wanted to laugh it off, but seeing that there has been a lot of discussion about archaeology and ancient civilization recently, I wanted to use this art history professor with academic experience in France to try to argue about the "fictional history of the West" and briefly talk about how archaeological argumentation is done. The author has a lot of disagreements with Professor Huang's views, and I also discuss with Professor Huang here. Whether it is true or not, please let the readers distinguish between the kings.
Screenshot of Professor Huang Heqing's lecture video
The temple became a mosque, and the excavated documents are very real
The beginning of Professor Huang's lecture is indeed "refreshing", and in the process of proving that "the entire Part of the Parthenon is forged", the entire argument material is taken from English and French languages - at first glance, it simply makes the "pseudo-history school" like a tiger, and what can be more convincing than using Spanish materials to prove "Western pseudohistory"? But in fact, it is "to attack one's own shield with one's own spear": geographically, Greece is not a rare place, but is located at the crossroads of the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, adjacent to and communicated with a large number of eastern countries, in the oriental language materials, there are many examples of ancient Greek civilization, such as the following example:
Evliya Çelebi was a seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler, born in Istanbul in 1611 to a wealthy family of learned men who had long maintained good relations with the Ottoman court and the magnates, which enabled him to travel not only to and from major cities or military points within the Ottoman Empire as a public servant, but also to Vienna and other places in Europe as a parastatal attaché. From 1672 onwards, Evia settled in Cairo and wrote her life's leading events into a ten-volume Seyahatname (Travels), the 9th of which tells of his observations in Greece.
Evia arrived in Greece in 1669 and witnessed the end of Venetian colonial rule and the ottoman conquest of Crete. He was fortunate because he saw with his own eyes the Acropolis, which had not yet experienced the most severe damage, as well as the Parthenon. Above all, he left for posterity an extremely precious record of the true face of the Parthenon: "The Acropolis is located in the middle of a wide plain, on a steep ochre-colored hill, a very old building, with a long oval shape from east to west. ...... The hill is 100 feet above the ground. The fortress was built of polished white marble, each the size of an elephant or a bathroom dome. The great craftsmen of the past spent a great deal of effort to stack these stones together, without any mortar or lime as an adhesive in between. ...... There is no higher highland around it. ”
Evia Salebi
He also referred to the "mosque" that Professor Huang had questioned, and what he saw at the time was this: "There is a mosque in the Acropolis, which is a special, well-lit mosque located in the middle of the fortress and has a long reputation among travelers. It is 250 feet long and 80 feet wide, with 60 towering but perfectly proportioned white marble columns surrounding the mosque in two rows. ...... On the pillars is built a ring corridor... The surface has groove patterns... Each one is 25 wrist feet tall... None of them are carved from whole pieces of marble. But no matter how close you look at them, you can't see the seams of the stones, and you'll think they're carved from a single piece of marble. The reason is that the groove patterns were presented by ancient stonemasons in an extremely delicate way. ...... The 60 columns are arranged according to the way they are geometrically arranged. ...... Above these pillars, the eaves are also covered, and on top of the walls there are a large number of stunning sculptures of various shapes, carved from white marble. ...... It is true that the human mind cannot comprehend these images – this is white magic beyond human capacity... In short, these sculptures depict all the creatures created by the Creator, from adam, the first ancestor of mankind, to the advent of the Day of Resurrection..."
Although Evia did not use the words "Acropolis" and "Parthenon" to refer to the buildings he saw, based on his record of its topography, orientation, location, size, and even internal components, we can basically conclude that it is today's Acropolis and Parthenon.
In addition, Evia has clearly realized that this "mosque" is transformed from an ancient temple-church, and does not hesitate to praise the ideas and craftsmanship of the ancients, lamenting at the end of the chapter "Travels" that if he had not come to Athens and seen all this for himself, he could not imagine how splendid it would have been in ancient times. He had never seen so many monuments anywhere other than Athens, believing that Athens was far superior to many Christian cities, even surpassing rome, the "city of ten thousand cities".
It is not uncommon for a building to go from a Greco-Roman temple to a Christian church and then a mosque, not unusually found in countries along the Mediterranean coast, with Hagia Sophia in Istanbul being the most famous of these.
Ancient Greek civilization is not only the remains of architecture and sculpture, but also a large number of documents. Surprisingly, the Parthenon rarely appeared in the writings of famous ancient Greek writers, probably because it was so famous that many people took it for granted and ignored it. The famous Greek geographer and traveler Pausanius wrote only a few accounts of the Parthenon in his book Chronicle of Greece. But in these lines, he also writes down the theme of the temple's east and west gables—"the birth of Athena and her struggle with Poseidon for the guardianship of Athens"—and Stewart and Carre did not dare to take credit for it. The ancient Greek historian Plutarch wrote a biography of the Athenian statesman Pericles who presided over the construction of the temple in the "Biography of Greco-Roman Celebrities", which retains only a few words about the specific construction process of the temple - such as the types of workers who built the temple, the difficulties faced in raising funds for the construction of the temple, and so on.
The combination of documents and excavated objects is more convincing in proving historical authenticity, and from this point of view, the historical document that can really prove the existence of the Parthenon is the Inscriptiones Graecae, a common reference book for the study of ancient Greek history. To be precise, the Encyclopedia of Greek Inscriptions is an academic compilation project that began in 1815, initially under the supervision of the Prussian Academy of Humanities and Sciences, and from 1992 was undertaken by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, with the goal of collecting all ancient inscriptions found on the Greek mainland and its islands. Since 1924, 49 volumes have been published, and the Greek inscriptions in their collection span from 403 BC to the 2nd century AD, when the Roman Empire ruled Greece. Each inscription contains its chronology, place of discovery, material, nature, and inscription in original Greek, accompanied by notes and commentaries written in Latin. At present, some commonly used inscriptions have been translated into English, French and German, and entered into a database for easy reference by researchers. The Greek Epitaphs contain accounts for the construction of the Parthenon, and the number of them is so large that a timeline for the construction of the Parthenon can be generated:
From these account records, it is possible to know the name of the foreman involved in the construction of the temple, the origin, size, price of the building materials, the construction process, the steps and other information. Later generations may be able to rebuild temples and reshape statues, but these fragments, which once recorded the material life of ancient Greece, can never be reproduced.
How strange is "artificial stone", "concrete" has been around for a long time
After "destroying" ancient Greek civilization with a few unsourced illustrations, Professor Huang confidently fired at "ancient Egypt." He believes that ancient Egypt was newly built by the French after 1890. Here, unusually, he forcefully throws out a "scientific basis" to support his point of view: the concept of "geological polymer" first proposed by the French scientist Joseph Davidowitz, and then supported by the American scientist Bassom, believes that the raw material for building the pyramids should be the so-called "artificial" limestone concrete, and then Professor Huang deduced that because of the use of this material, the pyramids can be built in 10 years in only a few thousand people.
Professor Huang used the usual "pseudo-historical school" method of "deleting complexity and simplifying", trying to explain a very professional and complex scientific concept and its experimental methods in a few words, during which of course he would "miss" a lot of important information that was unfavorable to himself.
Davidowitz is a French materials chemist, and his most famous research result is indeed "geological polymers", and his "artificial stone" hypothesis is like this: natural limestone is collected from the quarry, crushed and soaked, sodium carbonate, lime, caustic soda, artificial mixing - note that here each link uses a lot of water, Davidowitz believes that the ancient Egyptians dug a canal to introduce the Nile water as a stirring - the mixture was put into a mold and pressed into the mold.
French scientist Joseph Davidowitz
It is worth noting that Professor Huang made two mistakes here, first, artificial stone is made of natural limestone as raw material, so it still needs to be collected from the quarry, but Davidowitz believes that this quarry is less than a kilometer away from the pyramid construction site, and the raw materials are easy to obtain, which is fundamentally different from the raw materials similar to sand mentioned by Professor Huang; second, Davidowitz believes that Egypt's natural limestone is rich in kaolin, which is the key to local "artificial stone". Apparently, this hypothesis could not explain the "fake stones" that Professor Huang later saw in Greece.
Bassom's 2006 paper did support Davidowitz's view, citing the fact that his group found compounds that natural limestone did not have when examining stone samples taken from pyramids. But his experiments also showed that no enrichment of alkalis and alumina was found in the stone samples, which were key components of Davidowitz's synthetic formulation of "geopolymers."
Moreover, Bassom acknowledges in the article that "a careful examination of the pyramid stones visible on the Giza Plateau proved that most of the stones– especially those located at the core of the pyramids, were excavated.". In this article, he does write that the stones of the pyramid are poured, but only a "small part of the bottom", and that the judgment is based on a photograph of the surface of the Pyramid of Khufu taken by the British Egyptologist Vyse during an expedition to Egypt in 1836-1838. At the end of the paper, he explains why the Egyptians only poured the bottom of the pyramids, because doing so was "very expensive, and in a primitive society, it was not easy to produce millions of tons of artificial stone, and it was not easy to crush millions of tons of limestone at the same time."
In 2007, Dipayan Jana, an Indian-American petrologist, conducted experiments and tests on two stone samples taken from the pyramids, natural limestone (collected from Gebel Tura, a quarry recognized as the quarry that supplied the pyramids) and Limestone concrete, a "geopolymer compound" provided by Davidowitz himself, to prove that the stones of the pyramid were highly similar in composition to natural limestone, and that there were no "geopolymer compounds" in them. Among the key bases and alumina components. He wrote his findings into a paper, published at the 29th International Concrete Microscopy Society (ICMA), publicly stating that "we do not think that the stones of the pyramid have the slightest possibility of 'artificial stone'", which represents the basic attitude of ICMA officials to the Davidowitz "artificial stone" hypothesis.
Davidowitz's "artificial stone theory" is essentially a scientific hypothesis, and he has never denied the ancient Egyptian civilization on the grounds of "artificial", on the contrary, he believes that the ancient Egyptians have a certain degree of chemical common sense, because the raw materials of "artificial stone" are very common around the pyramids, and the synthesis method is relatively simple, so he believes that his hypothesis is valid. Scientists who supported and opposed him rejected this hypothesis based on experimental data, and no one ever doubted the "authenticity" of the pyramid itself. Professor Huang's attempt to use this hypothesis to add a layer of "scientific" packaging to his "pseudohistory" can only be "lifting a stone and dropping it on his own feet."
In addition to artificial stones, Professor Huang also frequently mentions Spun's concept of "cast stone" in this section, arguing that "some Greek temples in southern Italy that were inexplicably 'discovered' in the 18th and 19th centuries, those huge stones of the Colosseum hanging high in mid-air ... You can easily pile them up with these 'cast stones' or 'cast stones', so they are all fake! This stone, which can easily "overturn the 'ancient buildings' of ancient Greece and Rome", can be called Professor Huang's argumentative weapon, and its lethality is extremely strong.
However, Professor Huang's definition of "cast stone" for Spun only quotes the first half of the sentence, so what is the second half of the sentence? "In fact, it is certain that this extremely hard cement has been widely used by ancient people, and we have realized through ancient ruins that the fire knife cannot penetrate it." （En effet，il est certain que le ciment ,dont les Anciens se servaient, était d’une extrême dureté ; ce qu’on reconnaît par les démolitions antiques, qui font presque impénétrables au fer & au feu. It turns out that Spont has always said the ancient "concrete"!
"Concrete" has an ancient history, and "Roman cement" is one of the most famous. The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius's Ten Books of Architecture contains this cement recipe: lime, volcanic ash and sand can be mixed with water. This kind of "Roman cement" was widely used in ancient Rome, and archaeological evidence shows that the structural interiors of many ancient buildings, the walls, and the subgrades of Roman avenues have traces of cement. Scientists have even discovered two sea-soaked anti-botises built of "Roman cement" in the 1st century AD in the Israeli city of Caesarea in the eastern Mediterranean. However, due to the high demands of "Roman cement" for raw materials, of which volcanic ash was produced in the Pulito region of southern Italy, and lacked plasticity (its outer layer was reinforced with masonry), the Roman Empire was not promoted on a larger scale after the fall of the Roman Empire.
The earliest remains of "concrete" in human history can even be traced back to the Neolithic age. In 1978, in Qin'an County, Tianshui City, Gansu Province, archaeologists discovered a hard, smooth ground covering an area of 130 square meters. According to expert identification, this gray-cyan ground not only contains the same "calcium silicate" composition as modern concrete, but also has an average compressive strength of about 120 kilograms per square centimeter, which is equivalent to today's No. 100 cement mortar ground. If Professor Huang suspects that the slightly flat surface of the ruins is newly built, then what do you think of this relic, which is 2500 years earlier than the Greek temple?
In 1978, archaeologists found a hard, smooth ground with an area of 130 square meters at the Site of Dadiwan in Qin'an County, Tianshui City, Gansu Province, the earliest concrete found in China so far. Pictured from Tianshui Online
Where does the "new" Persianpolis let the soul of the Persian nation return?
Professor Huang said in his lecture that Persepolis was designed by the French Frandan and built by the Americans, and the whole history added up to less than 100 years, and its main purpose of the new construction was to serve as "an important support for Alexander's crusade and the pseudo-history of Greek civilization to the east." He believes that Persepolis was originally a wasteland in the desert, an ancient city completely imagined by Westerners. Professor Huang's words are convincing, with only a few pictures and a few sentences to erase Iran's thousands of years of history, and also proved that Persepolis is a fake created by "Western imperialism", and I wonder what the Iranian people, who have always been known for their "nationalist" wave, will think?
Persepolis
As we all know, the ancient civilization of Iran did not stop at the Achaemenid dynasty represented by Persepolis, after its demise, it also experienced the Sassanid Dynasty, the Islamic period, the Mongol rule period and the Timurid Empire, and Persepolis, as a symbol of the glory of the Persian Empire, attracted countless princes, scholars, and poets to come here, leaving many important records.
Persepolis was destroyed during Alexander's Crusade in 330 BC and has since returned to silence, but it has not been popular. The Sassanid capital of the Achaemenid dynasty, Istakhr, just 5 kilometers from Persepolis, was no longer known to the Sassanid kings, who did not know the exact name of the ancient city, but referred to it as the "Sād-Sotūn" (Hundred Pillars) based on the still magnificent ruins of the area. Shabur II, one of the Sassanid "Three Wise Men", personally toured the ruins, even holding banquets and ceremonies here, and then ordered people to carve a Middle Persian inscription on the east pillar of the door of the Tachara, where he had rested. In this inscription, Shabur II was moved by the history of the "Hundred Pillars Palace" and expressed his desire to establish a spiritual connection with the ancient emperors who founded it.
The history of the Sassanid Dynasty is called the "Second Persian Empire", and its kings have always aimed to "restore the glory of the Persian Empire", while trying to compare themselves with the great kings of the Achaemenid era: on the walls of the stone pillar palace in Persepolis, which has not yet collapsed, we can find reliefs of the Sassanid royal family on horseback; at Naqsh-e Rustam, 15 kilometers from Persepolis, the royal cemetery of the Achaemenid dynasty, The Sassanid kings stoned their images and exploits alongside the inscriptions of the former on a cliff.
The princes engraved inscriptions on ancient ruins in an attempt to establish a spiritual inheritance with the ancient ming emperors who founded the site, a practice that was not uncommon in later Islamic times. The Baiyi king Azd-od-Dowleh left an Arabic inscription in Persepolis in 344 AH (955 AD) that mentions how the translator explained to him how the inscription left by Shabur II had previously been left. It is worth noting that it was from this Adullai Daulay that the kings of the Baiyi dynasty began to use the title of "King of Kings" (Shahanshah), and the influence of Darius I on him can be seen.
After entering the Middle Ages, the account of Persepolis also underwent some changes. First, it was scholars and poets who also began to join the ranks of recorders, and the Muslim scholar Tabari, in his Tafsīr-al-Tabarī (completed in the 10th century), compared Solomon's palace with the ruins of Persepolis. Tabari's palaces were magnificent and magnificent, and hundreds of years later, early European explorers were drawn to Persepolis precisely because of his descriptions.
Second, it was the recorders who formally fixed the ancient relic's Persian name, Takht-e Jamshid, where "Tahit" means "throne" and "Jamshid" is the legendary heroic king of ancient Iran. The Persian poet Ferdosi used this name in the epic poem Sahnnameh. The more famous Omar Khayyam wrote in the Rubai Collection: "The palace where Jamhid feasted and drank, now wild lions and lizards are rampant. ”
Third, there were some geographical works of this period that described "Taht-Jamshid" in more detail. Of course, these works generally attribute this "miracle" to the legendary king "Jamshid". Farsnameh, which appeared in the 12th century, describes Persepolis this way: "He [Jamshid] saw a palace at the foot of the mountain that is unparalleled in the world. At the foot of the mountain, he built a platform out of hard stone... The platform has four sides, one side close to the foot of the mountain, the other three sides facing the plain, the whole platform is about 30 wrist feet high, its front end is built with two steps, the slope is gentle, and the cavalry can also easily ride on horseback. On this platform, he erected many white pillars with hard stones, which were very delicate... There are two pillar trees at the entrance, square in shape, made of a stone that looks like white marble. No such stones could be found anywhere in Fas, and no one knew where the large stones were transported here. The historian Ghazvini copied this passage almost verbatim in his work on the local history of Shiraz written in the first half of the 14th century.
Of course, there are also people who feel that the buildings on this monument are "miraculous" and beyond the reach of human beings, such as the Book of Miracles, written in the 590th year of the Islamic calendar (1194 AD), which reads: "In Jamshid's palace, it is said that thousands of pillars once stood, each 48 wrists high, and four people could not hold a pillar together with their arms extended. Obviously this is the work of magic. ...... An unimaginable miracle, with only a little gap of hair between each pillar,...... There are also statues of two bulls, whose hooves are cattle, but they have a human-like beard, and their height and width are 12 wrists wide, and God knows how heavy these stones are... If it is said that this is built by some immortal elf, it is somewhat credible. ”
In 1971, Iran celebrated the 2,500th anniversary of the persian empire in Persepolis.
From the 14th century onwards, Persepolis welcomed travelers from Europe. Like all Near Eastern civilizations, these Europeans fell for this exotic ancient city, and the Dutch, Germans, and French, a group of explorers, geographers, architects, and painters came here, they "surveyed", "recorded" and "excavated", and transported boxes of cultural relics and treasures back to their own countries, and the Iranians gradually lost the right to introduce their country's history.
In 1921, some highly educated Iranian nationalists founded the Society for National Heritage (SNH) in the hope of escaping Western control of Iran in the cultural sphere and regaining the right to interpret their own history.
This idea was supported by the newly formed Pahlavi dynasty, and in 1927 the Iranian government withdrew France's monopoly on the excavation of Iranian archaeology, in which the French did not have the right to "cover the sky with one hand", as Professor Huang said. The Iranian government's idea is to use a more diverse team of foreign experts to rebuild its own cultural industry. From 1925 onwards, the German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld was employed by the Iranian government to receive a fund from SHN to plan the archaeological and architectural part of the National Heritage List, as well as to reformulate plans and programmes for archaeological excavations in Persepolis. That same year, Arthur Upham Pope, an American orientalist who visited Iran for the first time, was received by King Pahlavi and allowed to enter major mosques to take photographs to "build and revive Persian architecture." It was also during this period that the University of Chicago was involved in archaeological excavations in Persepolis.
From October 12 to 16, 1971, Iranian officials held a celebration in Persepolis to celebrate the 2,500 years of the founding of the Persian Empire, on the one hand, showing The ambition of King Pahlavi: to lead Iran into a world power beyond the Arab states, a 20th-century "Persian Empire", like Cyrus the Great; on the other hand, it also showed the place of Persepolis in Iran's official national narrative.
If such an ancient city is declared "forged", have the feelings of the Iranian people been taken into account?
Cuneiform was tragically denied, and the Hittite civilization innocently lay guns
Frankly speaking, Professor Huang's lecture was "quite disappointing" after it entered the "Hittite Iron Civilization": his argument in this part follows the usual logic of "pseudohistory" - "irrational is non-existent", which is completely different from the "history of illustrations" he talked about in the Greek Egyptian part.
In order to prove that "the Hittite iron civilization is illusory", Professor Huang first threw out a view that "cuneiform scripts are forged", and the relevant arguments are three points: first, there can be no mud plates that have not been transformed for thousands of years; second, clay plates are not practical; third, cuneiform scripts are not decipherable.
Let's look at the first one, as we all know, cuneiform script uses clay plates as a carrier, and if the clay tablets cannot be preserved, this kind of writing is of course impossible to preserve. But are the clay tablets of cuneiform really as fragile and unsavory as Professor Huang said?
Suzanne Paulus, assistant professor of Assyrian studies at the University of Chicago, has a wonderful comment on this: "Clay tablets are the hardest written materials you can imagine, and if cities are burned, they are preserved by baking by fire; if buildings collapse, they can survive; they can remain in damp mud or intact in desert climates." ”
Suzanne Paulus
Most of the cuneiform clay tablets unearthed are made of silt, which has a large water content, which makes the clay plates highly malleable, but also means that the texture is not strong enough. In order to preserve the clay plates, the ancients of the Two Rivers Valley made many attempts: some of the clay plates belonging to the Neo-Babylonian Kingdom era (626-539 BC) were baked, because "fire holes" were found on them that had been pre-planted to prevent high-temperature explosions. However, the number of mud plates that have been treated in this way is very small, and more is slowly dried, which can last for several days.
In the era of cuneiform, writing was a highly specialized task, usually undertaken by scriveners. The professionalization of writing work also means that the ancients handled clay plates with a high degree of professionalism, purifying raw materials, trying to remove organic matter from them, and increasing the number of times the mud balls were kneaded to eliminate bubbles. Part of the British Museum's collection shows that the surface and core of some clay plates are composed separately, and the clay on the surface covers the core like a dough, which also strengthens the toughness of the clay plate to some extent.
Good toughness allows a large number of clay plates to survive thousands of years of wind and frost. According to incomplete statistics, there are millions of cuneiform clay tablets currently unearthed in the Near East and across Egypt – imagine how big a project it would be if they were all forgeries!
When it comes to the practicality of clay tablets, the first thing we want to make clear is that most clay tablets are only the size of adult palms, and of course, some are smaller or larger. In the British Museum's collection, for example, the smallest clay tablet is about 2 square centimeters and only a few millimeters thick; the largest can reach 30-40 square centimeters and 4-8 centimeters thick. This size means that it is not difficult to move them, and archaeological excavations have confirmed that most of the clay tablets that record official documents are equipped with an "envelope" of the same clay to wrap them up to prevent the destruction of the text inscribed on the clay tablets. It can be seen that the long-distance transmission of the "Amarna Document" is not a fantasy.
As for how cuneiform characters are interpreted, the famous writer Ceram has a very detailed description in his famous work "Gods, Tombs and Legends", which will not be repeated here. It should be pointed out that Professor Huang mentioned two scholars, GroteFonder in Germany and Rollinson in britain, believing that the two were only "hairy boys" in their early twenties at that time, and it was impossible to interpret this dead text that had been interrupted for thousands of years. According to the popular saying on time, this is considered "age discrimination". Without the collection, collation, and analysis of the various extant Indo-European languages by European scholars, especially German Chinese dialectists since the 19th century, it is indeed impossible for the two young men to make such a rapid breakthrough in the interpretation of cuneiform scripts. By the way, as an aside, Ji Xianlin, a chinese and Chinese dialectologist, relied on the indo-European language foundation accumulated when he studied at the University of Göttingen in Germany to crack the Tocharian language, which shows that Germany's accumulation of linguistics not only benefits its own country, but also benefits the East.
Cuneiform scripts have contributed greatly to the preservation of the civilization of the Two Rivers Valley, and the hittites are often associated with iron because there are a large number of cuneiform scripts to prove that in the Hittite documents, there is a term specifically representing iron "AN. BAR" and the adjective suffix about iron. A document from the Old Kingdom period (1650-1500 BC) indicates the connection between blacksmiths and religious rituals; the most famous of these is a letter from the Hittite king Hattušili III to the Assyrian king in the 13th century BC, in which he agreed to export Hittite refined iron to Assyria.
In the past, Western academic circles did think that the Hittites were a monopoly on the manufacture of iron tools along the Mediterranean coast, but this view has changed with the deepening of archaeological research: researchers believe that iron tools were mainly born in the eastern Mediterranean region, including the Levant (present-day Palestine), the island of Cyprus, the Anatolian Plateau (present-day Turkey) and the northern Mesopotamian plain, as well as the Caucasus Mountains. The oldest iron artifacts unearthed in the area date back to 3000 BC, but in small numbers; some well-made iron weapons are located from 2000 BC to 1200 BC, including the famous Alaca-Hüyük iron dgger. However, there is no conclusive jury as to whether these irons were made of meteoric iron or artificially made of iron.
Given that some important iron-making remains (mainly iron ore) were not fully formed until after 1200 BC, the academic summary is that the Hittites were an important participant in iron production in the Mediterranean region, probably producing more than some of its southern neighbors, but not yet reaching a monopoly.
I have always been curious as to why Professor Huang singled out the "Hittites" in so many ancient countries in near east and West Asia to prove his "Western pseudo-history" theory, until the lecture finally threw out the argument that "steel is China's fifth largest invention", and then suddenly realized: Professor Huang applied his statement at the beginning of the lecture that "judging the 'pseudo-history of the West' is to make the Chinese produce cultural self-confidence", which is really echoing and admiring.
From this point of view, Professor Huang's so-called "cultural self-confidence" seems to be to compete for a "first" or "earliest" - according to his logic, the Great Wall is a relic of ancient civilization, no, it must be the earliest relic! So the pyramids are definitely newly built. Oracle bones are ancient scripts, how to do this, must be the only ancient script! So cuneiform scripts must be fake.
In fact, there is really no need, think of the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids and the Sumerians who carved cuneiform scripts have disappeared, and then think about us, be confident!
Moreover, if another point of view is falsified by a set of views, evidence, or some kind of "conspiracy theory" that is inherently flawed— not to mention that there is little disagreement in the professional field, the confidence gained is not what we want, and it goes against our original intentions.
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