Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 September 11

= September 11 =

religions in which water deity is chief deity
Are there any culturs/religions in which the water god is the chief god? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Uncle dan is home (talk • contribs) 01:37, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * I should think your search would best focus on small islands, where water would mean life (fishing) or death (tsunamis). Cultures that survived by sailing might be another place to look, like the Phoenicians (I have no idea what their gods were myself).  But note that finding such beliefs today seems unlikely, at least in  major religions.  StuRat (talk) 01:59, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * You could feel free to peruse list of water deities. Someguy1221 (talk) 03:36, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Take a look at Varuna but there it's a bit more complicated. Varuna was later displaced as top god by Indra. Varuna is also the counterpart of Iranian Ahura Mazda who is top god in several Iranian religions but I don't know if that guy has any association to water or if the association to water is believed to date back to the Indo-Iranian period. Basemetal  08:46, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Celtic polytheism featured water gods (amongst others) to whom votive offerings were made, which consisted of throwing expensive items into rivers, ponds and bogs, notably the Battersea Shield that had been thrown into the Thames. See Deities of sacred waters. Alansplodge (talk) 08:58, 11 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Many of the big polythesist pantheons were originally formed by combining the religions of several cultures, so pick any water god and you can probably find a tribe who worshipped him/her primarily. Poseidon for example was the chief god in some parts of Greece in very ancient times - see his article for more details. Smurrayinchester 08:11, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
 * See also "Was Poseidon ever considered the chief deity instead of Zeus?" on Mythology SE. &#x2013; b_jonas 12:09, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

Napoleon and the Sûreté Nationale
From Eugène_François_Vidocq:

"On 17 December 1813, Napoleon Bonaparte signed a decree that made the brigade a state security police force. From this day on, it was called the Sûreté Nationale.

The Sûreté initially had eight, then twelve, and, in 1823, twenty employees. A year later, it expanded again, to 28 secret agents."

This doesn't sound right. If the Sûreté had 20 employees in 1823, then in 1813 it must have had equal or less than that. I find it hard to believe that >20 person unit would be made into a "state security police force". As an emperor, Napoleon probably didn't have time to deal with small units like the Sûreté either. Is the part about Napoleon's decree true? Pizza Margherita (talk) 02:11, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * I can't comment on that case specifically, but note that police forces in general are a modern concept. Traditionally any crimes would have been dealt with by more of what we might call a "citizen's arrest", basically a mob grabbing the suspect and delivering them to the authorities, if the suspect was lucky, or lynching the suspect, if they were not.  So, any first attempt at a police force was bound to be small, perhaps with just one officer in each major city to try to control the mobs, and ensure that the suspect was held for trial rather than dispatched immediately. StuRat (talk) 03:07, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * According to Police, police forces are in fact an ancient concept. Do you have sources to suggest otherwise?--Wikimedes (talk) 04:54, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Sure, just look at the next section: Police, which says "The first centrally organised police force was created by the government of King Louis XIV in 1667 to police the city of Paris, then the largest city in Europe". Later in the article we have "....the Metropolitan Police Service was established on September 29, 1829 in London as the first modern and professional police force in the world".  In the US it took even longer, and we had organizations like the Pinkerton detectives filling that role, instead, but doing the bidding of their employers, not the general public.  Sure, there were earlier attempts at a police force, but they always seemed to lack the numbers and/or organization to do what we expect of police today, for them to intervene in every serious conflict. StuRat (talk) 13:31, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Quite a few (but not all) books back it up, as do The Napoleonic Society, who you'd expect to know their onions RE: Napoleon. Note that signing a decree doesn't necessarily take much effort - it could well be that the head of Paris police simply brought him the decree and asked for his signature. Smurrayinchester 07:16, 11 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Pizza Margherita (talk) 09:06, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Moroccan–American Treaty of Friendship
Barbary Wars says:

"On 11 October 1784, Moroccan pirates seized the brigantine Betsey.[7] The Spanish government negotiated the freedom of the captured ship and crew; however, Spain offered advice to the United States on how to deal with the Barbary States. The advice was to offer tribute to prevent further attacks against merchant ships. The U.S. Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson, decided to send envoys to Morocco and Algeria to try to purchase treaties and the freedom of the captured sailors held by Algeria.[8] Morocco was the first Barbary Coast State to sign a treaty with the U.S., on 23 June 1786. This treaty formally ended all Moroccan piracy against American shipping interests."

Did Morocco manage to uphold the spirit of Moroccan–American_Treaty_of_Friendship?

Evidence For: "This treaty formally ended all Moroccan piracy against American shipping interests." from above, and "The Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship stands as the America's oldest non-broken friendship treaty with a foreign power" from Barbary Wars. And as recent as 1991, President Bush saying "longest unbroken treaty in our history".

Evidence against: the info box of Barbary Wars and First Barbary War both list Morocco as a belligerent against US. Pizza Margherita (talk) 09:12, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Which historian said this:
"A civilisation falls when it loses trust in its creative elite"

I may have the phrasing a little out, it may have been "stops trusting" or something like that.

— PhilHibbs | talk 13:59, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * That sounds like Arnold Toynbee, whose A Study of History describes civilisations being led by the "creative minority". That said, I doubt he said those exact words - it's a bit less nuanced than his position, which was that creative minorities, since they can't teach the proletariat as intellectual equals, instead use "social drilling" (like drilling a military marching band) to inculcate morals in the proletariat (for instance, it's hard to explain why law is needed, but easy to say "God gave us these commandments"; it's hard to explain exactly what the complex relationship between sex, gender roles, society and biology is, but it's easy to say "Don't call women by these words"). This in turn causes the creative minority to morph into an uncreative dominant minority that uses force and power to get its way, which then loses the trust of the proletariat and causes civilisation to collapse. In his theory, it should be impossible for a genuine creative minority to lose trust. Smurrayinchester 15:13, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * He sounds like a member of the creative elite, so I wouldn't trust anything he said. :-) StuRat (talk) 16:05, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Is this the kind of thing? Muffled Pocketed  16:16, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Note that the premise is easily disproven, as the Cultural Revolution was a virtual war against the cultural elite of China, and yet Chinese civilization did not collapse. StuRat (talk) 20:28, 11 September 2016 (UTC)


 * It did a bit. -- Jayron 32 00:02, 12 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Kill a poet, get a famine. Bet they didn't see that one coming. Muffled Pocketed  06:05, 12 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Nope, not even a bit. The period of starvation was in 1959-1961, due largely to the misguided policies of the Great Leap Forward, while the misguided policies of the Cultural Revolution were in 1966-1976, and only caused the deaths of some of the cultural elite. StuRat (talk) 14:05, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
 * More than just "some of the cultural elite." Our article says, "Estimates of the death toll, including civilians and Red Guards, vary greatly. They range upwards to several millions, but an estimate of around 400,000 deaths is a widely accepted minimum figure." DOR (HK) (talk) 13:37, 13 September 2016 (UTC)


 * You could say that the whole world is a single civilisation, and has been ever since the middle of the nineteenth century. One localized famine for a couple of years in one part of a global civilisation is not a collapse. But this debate is a bit of a rabbit warren and this is not really the place for it. Back on topic, it could have been someone paraphrasing Toynbee, I think I either heard it on the radio or saw it on the TV some time in the '90s. — PhilHibbs | talk 14:04, 13 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Why would you put it back in the middle of the 19th century ? Back then there were still places fairly isolated from the rest of the world, to the point where the existence of their civilization had little to do with the outside world. StuRat (talk) 23:52, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
 * The 1850s are when quinine treatment for malaria became widespread, allowing European colonial powers to invade/trade with/evangelise the few remaining isolated areas in the tropics. That said, the study of world-systems theory actually traces the current "world-system" back much further to the mid-seventeenth century, when the world looked like this, and all major empires had contact with one another. Smurrayinchester 11:40, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

Help re-finding data set on party polarization
I’m currently looking for data sets on party polarization in the United States Congress since the late 1800s, specifically information on differences between party means. This webpage at one point in time provided this information as a downloadable excel sheet, but the sheet has since been lost to link rot. Does anyone have any idea of where I can look to find this information again? Spirit of Eagle (talk) 19:34, 11 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Are you sure the links are dead? I was able to download them, but they apparently need some sort of outside data. Is that what you're referring to when you say link rot? Best Regards, InsaneHacker (&#128490;) 21:02, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Asterix use of colour
I'm wondering why some frames in Asterix books use single colour to colour in a group of different things. See as an example http://www.gwthomas.org/Asterix%20-01-%20Asterix%20the%20Gaul%20-%2033.jpg - in the second row, first frame, all the soldiers are for some reason purple. In the very last frame, the Romans and their background (but not foreground) tents are Red. Other frames use yellow and blue and green in like ways. The same is true in other books. But most of the book is coloured in 'normally'. Is there a significance I'm missing? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Amisom (talk • contribs) 22:06, 11 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Here is a page mentioning a new collection where the colors from the 60s will be modified. They explain a little bit why a certain style of colorization was chosen back in the 60s. And this page at the same site. (Both in French). Basemetal  22:42, 11 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Those pages are also available in English:, . clpo13(talk) 17:38, 12 September 2016 (UTC)