Talk:Amber Road
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[edit] Old talk
Ummm small point here, but did the rest of the world call it the Bernsteinstrasse, or just that part of it that spoke German? I'm guessing that it was more like the Silk Road -- people referred to it by the same name, but in their own vernacular. That probably being the case, I'm going to take out the Bernsteinstrasse reference in a day or so, unless somebody objects here. JHK
This site shows the Amber Road running to Italy not the Black Sea. http://www.bernsteinstrasse.net/eng/startpage_eng.htm Further quote from site: "Like the Silk Road in Asia the Amber Road connected different cultures and nations between the Baltic and the Adriatic sea...The Amber Road had never been one single track, but a network of pathes and routes." Not a German road then?
A second site mentions the Black Sea route but says that the Italian route was more important: http://www.ancientroute.com/HeadrFtr/amberoad.htm --rmhermen
I have never seen Bernsteinstrassen plural in print, always Bernsteinstrasse singular. However there were many different directions taken . When you look at a map of Germany you will still today find it north to south , east to west all covered with waterways, rivers and connecting canals. Baltic amber is found all along the southern Baltic Sea from Jutland to Koenigsberg .I have never heard of countries next to Prussia,used to be Couronia, Livonia, Latvia ( today Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia) having amber finds also.
Amber had been found in the North Sea around Heligoland.
I have not seen any other language names for the route that amber was transported on , other than recent translations of Bernsteinstrasse to Amber Road, because until a few years ago there was no reference in english speaking countries to the ancient Germanic trade routes of eastern Germania , which lead further south, east and west connecting to countries around the Mediterranian Sea, Black Sea and to Middle East and Asia. If you find old ( pre- war) references in English called Amber Road , please list them. Thank you user:H.J.
- Hard to know where to start here...I'll look up references to the Amber Road, but here's an initial response. I think this is a really good example for discussing your methodology, Frau user:H.J.. You seem to be making 2 assumptions here, in order to "prove" that your interpretation of facts is the correct one. They are, as follows:
- Because German sources don't refer to more than one Amber Road, multiple Amber Roads didn't exist.
- Bernsteinstrasse is the terminology we should be using, because pre-war English studies don't (or may not) mention its existence.
For historians, this kind of thinking doesn't work. History is a constantly changing field. Today's historians tend to be much more holistic in their approach than historians of the last several centuries. We use many more primary sources and archaeological evidence. We must take into consideration all of the latest research, as well as what went before. Sometimes we find synthetic explanations, other times we have to absolutely reject older views based on new evidence.
In the case of the Amber Road, we are using the most current evidence available. That evidence suggests that there were several trade routes that made up the Amber Road. There is no reason to believe that these multiple routes were invented, just because German sources don't refer to them. Either the historians you've read didn't know about them at the time (perhaps because they only used German primary sources, perhaps because they couldn't read Russian, or Lithuanian, etc., perhaps because any archaeological evidence was unavailable because of the existence of the Eastern bloc...there are any number of perfectly good reasons), or they were writing at a time when it was acceptable to write history with a bias. At present, however, we need to include the newst evidence -- and that means we have to allow for several routes.
On the second point, 1) this is an English-language Wikipedia, hence we use Amber Road. If it were the German Wikipedia, we'd use Bernsteinstrasse. Just because the concept arises in one language doesn't mean it can't be translated.(However, there are often concepts that can't be translated -- like the Roman equites -- it translates to knights, but that isn't a valid substitute, so we keep the term in Latin) You have mentioned several times how US Americans don't know much about European, especially German, history. Until recently, most English-speaking European historians who studies the pre-modern eras focused on English, French, and occasionally Italian histories. German history was mostly done by Germans. However, over the past 50 or so years, more and more of us are studying the areas that make up present-day Germany. What we have found is that many of our secondary sources are based on a narrow, conventional approach. There is a sort of insularity in the German-language sources that can often be traced from one historian directly back to his (almost exclusively male) line of "Doctor fathers". The German academic system doesn't really encourage people to contradict their intellectual forebears. Not having that constraint in most English-speaking countries has resulted in huge changes in this area of study world-wide.
Please accept that we are trying to present an accurate view given ALL the information we can get, and presenting it in an acceptable scholarly form. JHK
I have recently been told , that people who wanted to take chemistry or other related fields in California appr. 50 years ago, had to learn German language first, because material and classes were only available in German.
I am all for trying to present an accurate view , therefore my request above, to please list other sources.
user:H.J.
- to get a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry that was accredited by the professional organization of chemists one had to have 3 years (I think) of German and 1 year (I think) of French. Part of that requirement was mere academic elitism - settin high standards so that the students would be good. Part of that requirement was that a preponderance of the research papers were published in German. --MichaelTinkler
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- user:H.J., what's your point? I mentioned that most of the older scholarship in the areas you discuss is in German. So what? Anyone who studies the ancient and medieval topics that form the basis of your mostly spurious arguments needs to be able to read Latin, German, and French, as well as English. I simply don't understand what sources you want us to cite. The fact that most of the historians who initially researched the Amber Road wrote in German means nothing, inasmuch as WE are writing in English, so we use the English translation.
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- If you can't understand the explanations you have already been given, I'm sorry -- although it certainly weakens your complaint that we English-speakers are somehow writing inferior articles because we don't speak perfect German. Every argument you place on the 'pedia comes down to one simple theory:
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- Germans referred to it first, so Germans/Germany has some sort of proprietary right to decide on terminology. This is the same as your insupportable theories of why most of central Europe (and a large part of eastern Europe, as far as I can tell) was inhabited by Germanic (note NOT GERMAN) peoples when the first histories were written, so the Germans (modern sense) have some sort of inalienable rights to those territories.JHK
The first sentence implies that the Amber Road was not used after the time of Christ --is there some reason to think so? i was under the impression that thie Amber and Silk roads remained viable trade routes into the middle ages. JHK
Thanks rmherman, for fixing the article and getting the point. JHK
The name: "Elblag" was not invented in 1945! What nonsense! It was in use even by the polish language speaking community of the Teutonic Order state. Not to mention the three centuries of those lands being part of the Polish Crown. Can we, please, eliminate the unnecessary ethnic propaganda from WIKI? If History is different, than what you would like it to be, then please refrain from writing.
Of course history is different from what I'd like it to be: is there anyone who can look at, say, the last 100 years and *not* think that. That doesn't mean I can't be accurate: the historian's job is to find and tell the truth, even if some of it makes her weep in anguish. That's what NPOV is about here: not that you have to be neutral and disinterested, but that you have to put your biases aside. --Vicki Rosenzweig
Amber used to be called "burn"-stones for its inflammable properties.
The name amber may be derived from the Latin verb: amburo - ambussi - ambustum and not from an Arabian source.
By listing all town-names with "burner" - properties we may derive a map of the trading roads for amber:
For further details on amber roads see (1 MByte pdf-file): [[1]]
If you think the map is usefull, we can transfer this to Wikipedia.
Johannes.Richter 07:38, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- Sure, the map is useful. If you can translate it into English, we can certainly use it here. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 11:09, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Translation into English completed Johannes.Richter 15:05, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Time?
Can we have some info on WHEN Amber road existed? Centuries/eras?--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 01:38, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
One of the French routes runs by the La Tene Celtic region and may be an old Celtic trade route a few centuries before Christ. Another German route from the Baltic region passes the Celtic Halstatt region and may equally be dated a few centuries before Christ.
Another route from the Baltic region leading to the Pripjet valley and to the river Dnjepr may be the "Argonaut" route (to be located one century before the Trojan war, -> 1300 before Christ). In a famous map Herodot 440 before Christ named the Dnjepr river "Borysthenes", which (in local languages) is clearly to be interpreted as "Burn-stones" = "amber".
For more details: see the manuscript in: http://www.joannesrichter.homepage.t-online.de/Androgyn/SpellingTUI.pdf
And the maps in: http://www.joannesrichter.homepage.t-online.de/Androgyn/Graphics.pdf
Johannes.Richter 18:28, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Bern / Bernstein
The German word for amber is Bernstein. However, I have delete this remark in parenthesis, as it suggest that the etymology of the Swiss capital Bern has something to do with Bernstein, which is not true. The German translation of amber itself is redundant.
[edit] link to silk and incense road
i see silk road and incese road articles are linked. why not linking to them this one too? 85.18.96.198 13:48, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
