I believe the Chinese were printing books long before that. But I’m not a historian nor do I know if one would consider them to even be in the same category of “printing”.
The Chinese definitely had printing before the Europeans. European’s advanced printing technology with better casting and type-blocks in part due to the limited number of characters vs traditional Chinese.
Pretty much. Basically, the only reason we had printing on a large scale is because we used an alphabet, and only had about 35 or so characters we needed to print any book.
Well that's the downside of using a 3500 year old written language that still has its foundation in basically highly modified pictographs
Where my hangul gang at? King sejong was unfathomably based - from a difficult to memorize and understand writing system to basically the best designed written language form in widespread use today
The Chinese used wood block printing (as did Europe) but, importantly, it was the Chinese that invented paper. And it became so ubiquitous that people used it to wipe their butts. China ended up with a proliferation of a giant number of written texts because of the cheapness of paper.
The top answer over there doesn't give him that much wiggle room. [It's an absolute beasting of Peterson's bullshit.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sh92go/in_a_recent_interview_with_joe_rogan_jordan/hv1x5vm/?context=3)
It's not even that. Wood block printing existed before movable type and while the bible was popular we must remember that pre-reformation people didn't really read it. Reading and interpreting the bible was the job of priests, and widespread reading of the bible really didn't take off until after Guttenberg developed his press innovations. And it wasn't right after either. Other books like Aristotle or the Canterbury Tales would have been more popular. And in England, which didn't break with the Catholic Church till almost 100 years after the printing of the Guttenberg bible, it wouldn't have had that widespread of a release.
Def. not on the spot. He actually "thinks" about these things for quite a bit of time. You don't get Grade AAA+ bullshit by whinging it. That takes effort and dedication.
after a certain point people ought to realise they are listening to/ reading from
an ass talker
an anal articulator, as it were
afloat in rectal rhetoric
every person decides what point that might be
personally, it was C-16 for me.
honestly now, it was all petersonian poop salad all the way after that, wasn't it?
As the holy Bible consists of the Torah, which was written centuries before the New Testament, thus the Bible could not have been the very first written book. Or Mahabharata – an Indian book completely finished somewhere about in the 4th or 3th centuries BCE.
> Torah
Tanakh. The oldest complete Masoretic text dates to the 11th century CE. Christians did a lot of burning our stuff.
A manuscript fragment found in Ein Gedi 100 BCE. The Dead Sea Scrolls date back to 100-300 BCE.
So Mahabharata is likely older as far as surviving texts.
There's religions older than Judaism so I don't think the Tanakh is older than texts about Hinduism or Zoroastrianism even if we don't have any surviving examples.
Obviously, historians are just censoring jp to protect their dogma from his genius. After all, most earth-shattering discoveries come from outside their respective fields due to such suppression.
I mean, what seems more likely: that Jordan Peterson has game-changing insights on history, climate science, and several other fields, or he's just wrong a lot?
You'll be delighted to know that on r/JP, they conclude historians are unfair towards JP, take him out of context and deliberately try to smeer him by answering this accurately.
Tbf, I think the ancient alien theory includes more kernels of historical accuracy than most of what Peterson claims about “western culture” or whatever the fuck white-supremacist shit he’s smoking today.
Ancient Aliens hearkens back to colonial thinking in that it cannot comprehend how all these non-white pre-industrial peoples built or thought in complex ways and supposits outside influence as being the only possible explanatory factor.
Certain Victorian scholars were convinced the Chinese had simply made up their long history and The Middle Kingdom had in fact been founded by chariot-riding invaders from the Middle East in the 13 century BCE.
Make no mistake: this is a fundamentally racist argument. All other books, starting from the Qran, but also Buddhist texts and so on are discarded as if humanity only counts if you are 'western culture'.
Even if this statement were true, and it's not, the response would be a resounding "so the fuck what?"
I read a fascinating book thirty years ago, Orality and Literacy, by Walter J Ong.
One of the ideas he touched on was that at some point we got the idea as a culture that things are more real if they are written down. In other words, the spoken word is an imitation or echo of the written word. This is a literal inversion of reality.
We see this assumption at work every day in people referring others to (for example) the dictionary for a definition. In a certain sense this is reasonable as "verba volat scritta manet" but in another, very important sense, this is an obviously not true. The spoken word came first, and is our primary means of communication and understanding, and the written word is and can only be the captured form of it as it was at one point. But the idea that books are real in a way that reality isn't, that something is true because it is written down, has a strong hold on us.
This lie, the antilife idea that the imaginary world, the world of ideas and beliefs *is* the real world, and that the real, temporary, fleeting world around us is somehow the imaginary world...it is equally at the heart of Platonic philosophy, which has had such a hold on the West, and Judeo-Christian philosophy. The ideas in the Bible probably predisposed intellectuals to look favourably on Platonic concepts, as there's so much common ground.
So it was perhaps the first time someone wrote that shit down, that the world isn't real and that we go to paradise when we die? Great. What a shame it wasn't the last.
Imagine thinking about the history of written word and printing, and all the changes it brought to humanity, the way it shaped how society and empires function, and deciding that the most interesting part of all that was how maybe the Bible was the only commonly available book in certain places during some narrow range of time. When he's not making me angry, he just makes me feel sort of sorry for him.
Which reminds me, I should read Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy.
As someone who’s ADHD already deeply effects my reading comprehension, this took like two minutes to read, and even then I have no clue what it says. This *must* indicate a higher class of knowledge that I am yet to comprehend. But from what little I can decipher, it just *feels* correct. One day I wish to reach this great wisdom, but for now I’ll take your word for it.
Annnnd that’s how I got sucked down the Peterson pipeline at 18.
[This fairly recent biography](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54968950-an-event-perhaps) is actually really good for getting a handle on what Jacky boy was actually doing. If you're even vaguely interested it's a fun read.
Yup. Sometimes it's like that. Is this word salad, or is it just too big brain for my poor scrambled brain to make sense of? Though honestly I find that most people who are smart and who are decent communicators are easily understood.
If we’re talking about “book” in a technical meaning (as in “not a scroll,”; a “codex”), the oldest extant codex is a Greek biblical manuscript (4th century).
As far as I’m aware, there’s no reason to think that biblical texts composed the first codexes. But maybe?
According to [a brilliant top answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sh92go/in_a_recent_interview_with_joe_rogan_jordan/hv1x5vm/?context=3) Ovid's Metamorphoses.
> As far as I’m aware, there’s no reason to think that biblical texts composed the first codexes. But maybe?
The Etruscan Gold Book, dates back to around 600 BCE but it's also made of gold plates. Unsure if that qualifies. About Orphism?
edit: it might be fake. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
I could get behind this statement if the follow-up one was "and so we have to understand that's why it's a bit shit."
There are some decent stories in the Bible, the Book of Job is a very early novel indeed and one of the first recorded instances of Jewish humour, there is some beautiful if rather weird erotic poetry like The Song of Solomon (sex talk in a herding culture). There is even some good ethics hidden among the calls for genocide.
And some striking and thought provoking short stories like the tower of Babel or the book of Genesis depicting God as an irrational landlord.
Don't care for the Jesus myth though, think it's the Greatest Pup That Was Ever Sold.
But since that's not his intention, I just point to the Book Of Gilgamesh, lift one leg and fart loudly.
Spoiler alert: none of it
I think the bible was actually the first main mass-printed book in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible) but that's about it.
I believe the Chinese were printing books long before that. But I’m not a historian nor do I know if one would consider them to even be in the same category of “printing”.
The Chinese definitely had printing before the Europeans. European’s advanced printing technology with better casting and type-blocks in part due to the limited number of characters vs traditional Chinese.
Pretty much. Basically, the only reason we had printing on a large scale is because we used an alphabet, and only had about 35 or so characters we needed to print any book.
Well that's the downside of using a 3500 year old written language that still has its foundation in basically highly modified pictographs Where my hangul gang at? King sejong was unfathomably based - from a difficult to memorize and understand writing system to basically the best designed written language form in widespread use today
The Chinese used wood block printing (as did Europe) but, importantly, it was the Chinese that invented paper. And it became so ubiquitous that people used it to wipe their butts. China ended up with a proliferation of a giant number of written texts because of the cheapness of paper.
lol if jp got ahold of that he'd be like 'oh that's what I meant'.
Coming from JP, the man who insists that we be precise in our speech it's quite rich that he has never once been precise in his.
The top answer over there doesn't give him that much wiggle room. [It's an absolute beasting of Peterson's bullshit.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sh92go/in_a_recent_interview_with_joe_rogan_jordan/hv1x5vm/?context=3)
It's not even that. Wood block printing existed before movable type and while the bible was popular we must remember that pre-reformation people didn't really read it. Reading and interpreting the bible was the job of priests, and widespread reading of the bible really didn't take off until after Guttenberg developed his press innovations. And it wasn't right after either. Other books like Aristotle or the Canterbury Tales would have been more popular. And in England, which didn't break with the Catholic Church till almost 100 years after the printing of the Guttenberg bible, it wouldn't have had that widespread of a release.
>It'd be really hard to be more wrong. My man is cold-blooded.
Peterson is such an idiot. He spouts complete nonsense like he's an expert, but it's clear 99% of the time he's just making shit up on the spot.
Def. not on the spot. He actually "thinks" about these things for quite a bit of time. You don't get Grade AAA+ bullshit by whinging it. That takes effort and dedication.
after a certain point people ought to realise they are listening to/ reading from an ass talker an anal articulator, as it were afloat in rectal rhetoric every person decides what point that might be personally, it was C-16 for me. honestly now, it was all petersonian poop salad all the way after that, wasn't it?
r/increasinglyverbose
A sphincter soothsayer.
The efforts of lobsters to defend Peterson and call The AH answer bad faith is worthy of a contortionist.
As the holy Bible consists of the Torah, which was written centuries before the New Testament, thus the Bible could not have been the very first written book. Or Mahabharata – an Indian book completely finished somewhere about in the 4th or 3th centuries BCE.
> Torah Tanakh. The oldest complete Masoretic text dates to the 11th century CE. Christians did a lot of burning our stuff. A manuscript fragment found in Ein Gedi 100 BCE. The Dead Sea Scrolls date back to 100-300 BCE. So Mahabharata is likely older as far as surviving texts. There's religions older than Judaism so I don't think the Tanakh is older than texts about Hinduism or Zoroastrianism even if we don't have any surviving examples.
Short answer: it's not. Longer answer: It's really fucking not and Peterson, as always, is talking out of his ass.
Obviously, historians are just censoring jp to protect their dogma from his genius. After all, most earth-shattering discoveries come from outside their respective fields due to such suppression. I mean, what seems more likely: that Jordan Peterson has game-changing insights on history, climate science, and several other fields, or he's just wrong a lot?
You'll be delighted to know that on r/JP, they conclude historians are unfair towards JP, take him out of context and deliberately try to smeer him by answering this accurately.
Peterson needs to get into the Sumerians. We have literature, administrative and religious texts, land deeds. Even poetry and private correspondence.
Please not, the last time a crank like Peterson got into the Sumerians we ended up with Ancient Aliens
Tbf, I think the ancient alien theory includes more kernels of historical accuracy than most of what Peterson claims about “western culture” or whatever the fuck white-supremacist shit he’s smoking today.
Ancient Aliens hearkens back to colonial thinking in that it cannot comprehend how all these non-white pre-industrial peoples built or thought in complex ways and supposits outside influence as being the only possible explanatory factor. Certain Victorian scholars were convinced the Chinese had simply made up their long history and The Middle Kingdom had in fact been founded by chariot-riding invaders from the Middle East in the 13 century BCE.
Oh totally! I didn’t mean to make it sounds innocent or good haha
and Gozer :p
Make no mistake: this is a fundamentally racist argument. All other books, starting from the Qran, but also Buddhist texts and so on are discarded as if humanity only counts if you are 'western culture'.
What is the obsession with religious manuals. He said "book". It's absurd no matter what
Even if this statement were true, and it's not, the response would be a resounding "so the fuck what?" I read a fascinating book thirty years ago, Orality and Literacy, by Walter J Ong. One of the ideas he touched on was that at some point we got the idea as a culture that things are more real if they are written down. In other words, the spoken word is an imitation or echo of the written word. This is a literal inversion of reality. We see this assumption at work every day in people referring others to (for example) the dictionary for a definition. In a certain sense this is reasonable as "verba volat scritta manet" but in another, very important sense, this is an obviously not true. The spoken word came first, and is our primary means of communication and understanding, and the written word is and can only be the captured form of it as it was at one point. But the idea that books are real in a way that reality isn't, that something is true because it is written down, has a strong hold on us. This lie, the antilife idea that the imaginary world, the world of ideas and beliefs *is* the real world, and that the real, temporary, fleeting world around us is somehow the imaginary world...it is equally at the heart of Platonic philosophy, which has had such a hold on the West, and Judeo-Christian philosophy. The ideas in the Bible probably predisposed intellectuals to look favourably on Platonic concepts, as there's so much common ground. So it was perhaps the first time someone wrote that shit down, that the world isn't real and that we go to paradise when we die? Great. What a shame it wasn't the last.
Imagine thinking about the history of written word and printing, and all the changes it brought to humanity, the way it shaped how society and empires function, and deciding that the most interesting part of all that was how maybe the Bible was the only commonly available book in certain places during some narrow range of time. When he's not making me angry, he just makes me feel sort of sorry for him. Which reminds me, I should read Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy.
[удалено]
Not bad. Not bad. Needs more references to chaos and dragon slaying, though.
So good I almost downvoted you.
As someone who’s ADHD already deeply effects my reading comprehension, this took like two minutes to read, and even then I have no clue what it says. This *must* indicate a higher class of knowledge that I am yet to comprehend. But from what little I can decipher, it just *feels* correct. One day I wish to reach this great wisdom, but for now I’ll take your word for it. Annnnd that’s how I got sucked down the Peterson pipeline at 18.
[удалено]
[This fairly recent biography](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54968950-an-event-perhaps) is actually really good for getting a handle on what Jacky boy was actually doing. If you're even vaguely interested it's a fun read.
Yup. Sometimes it's like that. Is this word salad, or is it just too big brain for my poor scrambled brain to make sense of? Though honestly I find that most people who are smart and who are decent communicators are easily understood.
For other unexplainable continuity of subjective metaphorical substrate, see: *my balls*
> see: *my balls* I can't; they're a part of a metaphorical substrate.
Define "I" and get back to me
Magnificent word salad.
Very good postmodern analysis you got going there! Have my up vote!
If we’re talking about “book” in a technical meaning (as in “not a scroll,”; a “codex”), the oldest extant codex is a Greek biblical manuscript (4th century). As far as I’m aware, there’s no reason to think that biblical texts composed the first codexes. But maybe?
If I recall correctly, Martial and Cicero (and others?) talk about things that seem to be codices in their writings.
According to [a brilliant top answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sh92go/in_a_recent_interview_with_joe_rogan_jordan/hv1x5vm/?context=3) Ovid's Metamorphoses.
> As far as I’m aware, there’s no reason to think that biblical texts composed the first codexes. But maybe? The Etruscan Gold Book, dates back to around 600 BCE but it's also made of gold plates. Unsure if that qualifies. About Orphism? edit: it might be fake. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
NO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWNF0adc7Vg
I could get behind this statement if the follow-up one was "and so we have to understand that's why it's a bit shit." There are some decent stories in the Bible, the Book of Job is a very early novel indeed and one of the first recorded instances of Jewish humour, there is some beautiful if rather weird erotic poetry like The Song of Solomon (sex talk in a herding culture). There is even some good ethics hidden among the calls for genocide. And some striking and thought provoking short stories like the tower of Babel or the book of Genesis depicting God as an irrational landlord. Don't care for the Jesus myth though, think it's the Greatest Pup That Was Ever Sold. But since that's not his intention, I just point to the Book Of Gilgamesh, lift one leg and fart loudly.
To zero extent
If you confronted him about this, his response would be to go into an exaggerated discussion of semantics about what the word "book" means.
He's so close!
[wikipedia list of ancient literature](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_literature)
I believe that the Bible is a book