Seeing that the two of them were about to fight again, Guo Kang hurriedly interjected.

"This incident is mainly due to the imperfect geographical knowledge of the ancients." "A lot of times, our perceptual understanding of distance is a bit problematic," he reminded. ”

"For example, anyone who has read Hanshu should know about Li Guangli's expedition to Dawan. Dawan is in the current Ferghana, and its capital Guishan City, to Chang'an and to our capital, the straight-line distance is about the same. ”

"We all know that Alexander was the one who went furthest to the East. But what he passed through was basically the rich Persian hinterland, and there were still avenues maintained by the Persians for generations to use. And from the time of leaving the Yumen Pass and before arriving in Dawan, in addition to the wasteland, there were only some city-states with ambiguous attitudes along the way. Considering the environmental differences on the way, Alexander's difficulty is actually much less. ”

But in fact, Li Guangli, who surpassed Alexander's life in a single march, could only be regarded as a second-rate general in that era. Except for this time, there are not many deeds to say. ”

"So you see, everyone's understanding of distance is not the same thing at all. The Seris consider it a war between 'neighbors', and here it is far away from the end of the world. ”

"And it's been much more than once. The Han, Tang, Liao, Yuan, and Ming dynasties were all able to launch expeditions across the desert and pursue thousands of miles at every turn. ”

"With a few exceptions, this is a common phenomenon. Even the Yuan Dynasty, which was chaotic and did not last long, was able to cross the Orkhon River to the north and climb the Wolf Juxu Mountain; Attacking Central Asia to the west, the army reached the valley of the Talas River, and fought the Mongol rebel kings back and forth between Mobei and the Western Regions. So, it's not a rare thing, it's a norm. ”

Hearing him explain, Zhu Wenkui and Jeanna both nodded.

Guo Kang also breathed a sigh of relief.

The map of this world is still relatively simple, and it is indeed quite difficult to inquire about the specific distance unless there are past cases that everyone is familiar with.

Of course, even in the era of maps, many impressions were actually very strong......

For example, everyone knows that Moscow is a very remote place compared to Europe. If a person starts from the Reichstag in Berlin in later times, he has to walk almost 1,800 kilometers to get to Moscow's Red Square. Many Europeans spend their entire lives without being able to get there.

Correspondingly, if you start from Chang'an City and walk 1,800 kilometers, you haven't actually left Yumen Pass.

Therefore, this kind of thing cannot be forced.

"Looking at it this way, the core area of the Central Plains is really far away from the rest of the world." Zhu Wenkui also sighed: "If it weren't for the fact that the sea route is much more developed now, I'm afraid it would be really difficult to have any contacts." ”

"It's not so much far away as it's that there's nothing close to it." Guo Kang thought for a while and put it another way: "There are actually many places that can be called 'crossroads of civilization', and isn't Henan also such a crossroads." ”

"But if you hack all the neighbors down the street to death, and then declare yourself a 'lonely civilization' and 'no neighboring civilization to communicate with', then others will only think that you are too cruel......"

He said that the Central Plains civilization is actually a collective, and it is not a blind boast. Four or five thousand years ago, this place was a large-scale testing ground for various forms of human society.

To put it simply, the form of secularized patrilineal clan society chosen by the Chinese people in later generations was not the only way, nor did it suddenly appear in various places. For quite some time, there was everything on this land.

For more than a thousand years, secularized patrilineal clans, matrilineal clans, religiously dominated small family societies, and religiously dominated clan societies...... There are a lot of different ways of organizing, and there are frequent conflicts and even wars.

For example, the matrilineal clan, through more in-depth research in later generations, has been able to establish that this system is not a necessary stage of human development. It is one of the options, like other organizational methods, and coexists with other systems.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, this is not a "matriarchal society", but a "maternal society", or a society of maternal and nephew succession. It is also not the "peaceful and moderate" world dominated by women as some propaganda suggests. On the contrary, matrilineal clans were also quite fierce and often expanded outward - or, rather, clans that were not fierce could not survive at all in the Central Plains of that era.

In reality, some clans change from matrilineal to paternal, but there are also paternal and then matrilineal. Other clans, such as the Central Plains, have never shown signs of matrilineal clans. The status of women on their side is probably not related to the "matriarchal legacy", it may be simply that the war is too crazy and must be organized by all members, so this phenomenon has arisen.

And in the end, the patriarchal clan that attaches importance to the present world and downplays religion has become the absolute mainstream of civilization, in fact, for a very simple reason - in the end, he is left. This common way of experimenting and then winning seems to have become a fixture ever since, and has been seen until modern times.

The civilizations of the past generations are all ruthless people killed in the sea of blood, and they will not stop until there is only one left. Nowhere else is there such a drastic way of choosing. However, he can't give people specific arguments on these topics for the time being.

In fact, the ancients also had "archaeology". For example, the famous Bamboo Book Chronicle was accidentally obtained by the Jin people from the ancient tombs of the Warring States Period and sorted out.

The history of the Central Plains is too long, and this kind of thing of the ancients archaeology ancestors and later generations archaeology of the ancients is not an exception. Counting the examination and exegesis, there is even more - in order to verify the authenticity of the "Book of Shang", these people fought from the Han Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty. It is equivalent to arguing for another 2,000 years for the sake of the classics of a thousand years ago. That's where you can find this kind of thing all over the world......

Guo Kang is here, pretending to be Aristotle every day to make up reasons, which is relatively simple. Because the vast majority of European researchers have seen at least three Aristotelian works, they have long been unable to verify the original texts.

Even in Greece itself, the remains are very limited. Because at that time, the center of Aristotle research was in Alexandria, Egypt. Therefore, the Greek scholars were also helpless, because they knew that they only had a part of the writings of Yasz. Even if Guo Kang is so tossed, he has never overturned.

On the other hand, although there are literati who study epigraphy and even ancient writing, the overall level is still very primitive, and it is basically a personal hobby. For the current Ming Dynasty to systematically excavate ancient ruins, the requirements are still too high.

At present, Guo Kang is just trying to find a way, in the name of tracing the origin of civilization, to send a group of down-and-out old nobles to Crete and let them go to archaeology. Anyway, this place was dug up by Western Europeans in history, and those early "archaeologists" who were extremely destructive may not be as good as the literati of the Song Dynasty......

The Western Europeans showed no mercy to the Greeks. In his previous life, Greece and Egypt were the most vocal countries in condemning the looting of antiquities by Britain and France, and Seris was the least affected group compared to them.

It is precisely because he has seen a lot that Guo Kang often doubts whether "Europeans claim to be the heirs of Greek culture" is the consensus of Western Europe, or the opinion of some Western European scholars, or the view of Western Europeans in the opinion of some Seris themselves.

At this time, when he went to Athens, he could still see the complete Parthenon, and there was still something in it—because it was not originally empty, but the Englishman Ergin later demolished the good things in it, and burned the damaged part to lime and used it to build a new building.

For this, the Greeks and the British have been fighting back and forth. Some Britons did not admit that it was looting, but said that it was reasonable that the antiquities would be better protected in the UK. This is probably a generic term as well.

Others condemned the looting, arguing that "the plundering of objects sacred by the Turks and other barbarians by our representatives seems fatal" - the other barbarians, of course, the Greeks.

No matter what the old Greek aristocracy said, they were relatively knowledgeable. At least it won't be worse than the Western Europeans in the original history.

(End of chapter)