On 7/30/07, Meg Ireland <megireland99(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I can see your point KP.
In the Guitar article, a more correct historical wording in the
context of 1500BC would be the "Elamite capital of Susa", yet the
article explicitly uses the term Iran (an analogy would be like
claiming ancient Troy was the capital of Turkey or that classical
Athens was the capital of Greece).
Meg,
Thanks for actually looking--doesn't take much effort to catch, once
one looks for it. Unfortunately the dearth of knowledge on the
related topics in the English-speaking 21st century, makes it hard to
see for folks who don't know much about the ancient to modern history
of the various empires in the area; but those with some knowledge of
the area, and a lack of biases, are rather surprised by what Wikipedia
has.
I've only studied some of the middle empires and, of course, modern
Pashtun history, and that mostly through family histories, rather than
written ones, so I don't have the background and sources for
correcting it, although I will one day have the sources, the time, and
the patience. There's a lot of Pashtun history that is directly
intertwined with Iranian history, and it can be told that way, but
when Wikipedia editors create neologisms to invent empires to
Persianize all of Afghanistan, it's really absurd. ANd there's no
scholarship anywhere outside of Wikipedia that supports it.
Even trying to write the geology of the area editors come in and make
up geomorphology and orogenies to nationalize the geology--and I only
write about the Iranian geology, which I've studied, not the Afghan,
which I've only incidently studied via the tectonic relationships with
Iran. So I give up, because there's not a single geological article
anywhere supporting the nationalization of Iranian geology, even in
the articles written by Iranians, which most of the articles are. Oh,
and the Iranians are some of the best and most respected geologists in
the world, but their work can't stand on Wikipedia as resources
without the uber-nationalization of it--although it stands everywhere
else as the well-done resources on a geologically well-studied and
important part of the world. It's absurd.
Thanks for looking, Meg.
KP