On 7/30/07, Meg Ireland megireland99@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