Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 May 17

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May 17

First federal reference to the term "Electoral College"

Hello, Im writing a paper on the electoral college. Im trying to find the first reference to the term "electoral college" as it isnt in the US constiution. Wikipedia on the article for the US electoral college says this

" It was not until the early 19th century that the name "Electoral College" came into general usage as the collective designation for the electors selected to cast votes for president and vice president. The phrase was first written into federal law in 1845, and today the term appears in 3 U.S.C. § 4, in the section heading and in the text as "college of electors".[42]"

But this doesnt help me, as it doesnt link to that first written reference. So can someone point me in the write direction, ive been going in circle trying to find it. - (talk) 03:09, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

EO dates the US term to 1808, and was used earlier by Germany.[1] --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:12, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Not by Germany but in reference to Germany. Here is such a use from 1653; there are even earlier uses in French of the term "College Electoral". These are a short translation of the German term Kurfürstenkollegium, literally "prince-electors college", now more commonly referred to as College of Electors.  --Lambiam 06:19, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Here is a use from 1808.  --Lambiam 06:25, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

The OED's first quotation is the 1772 publication of a letter written in 1658 to the scientist Robert Boyle: "The electoral college hath written to the king of Sweden, promising not to proceed to the imperial election." The reference is to the German election of Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor. This could reasonably be described as a federal election, if you consider the Holy Roman Empire to be a federal state at that point in time. Matt's talk 18:08, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Caves of Hands

Which areas of the world with cave paintings do not have stencils of hands? Does North America have any (stencils, specifically)? Also, there are stencils of the feet of large birds alongside human hands in both Australia and South America: are there any other sites featuring animal hands, so to speak?  Card Zero  (talk) 12:15, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Google "San rock art" or "San petroglyphs" (images). Hands do not seem to be common. I'm not saying stencils of hands are absent but I can't recall ever seeing any myself. 41.165.67.114 (talk) 12:58, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

My bad. https://www.imageprofessionals.com/en/images/71081063-San-rock-art-hand-prints-Cederberg-mountains-Western-Cape-South-Africa-Africa 41.165.67.114 (talk) 13:03, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Oh, but those are prints, not stencils, so I'm not counting those. I'm looking at stencils as a non-obvious artistic (?) idea, which seems culturally transmitted. Including animal hands makes it even less likely to be independently devised. It's interesting if San rock art, which might be the oldest, has no examples of this idea, which seems global. I found Saharan examples of hand stencils, complete with monitor lizards as the non-human sidekick.  Card Zero  (talk) 13:15, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Answering the first of your three questions: Within just one region, Europe, found this sourced statement that hand stencils are found in clusters, not uniformly distributed. The caves with these motifs are concentrated in two main areas, northern Spain and southern France. (Raw data from [2]).

On the other hand :) : simple hand stencils show up all over the world and hand stencils and prints are found globally in rock art. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 18:24, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

That article in Arts started out sounding hand-wavy, but it's turning out to be very comprehensive (and long). I may not have been thinking enough like a hunter-gatherer, which is to say, not imagining putting random stuff I find lying around in my mouth: one point I hadn't considered is that chewing on ochre is an obvious and convenient way to process it into paint, and spitting it out would naturally follow, perhaps accidentally over one's hand, so stencilling hands onto any suitable dry surface (a wall) might have been an idea that was independently discovered multiple times, just so long as the idea that ochre-bearing rock makes paint had been transmitted. Then the instances of making stencils from hand-like parts of animals, which I suppose are the chewier parts and tend to be discarded, may also have independently arisen in different hunting cultures, just by noticing the similarity to the human hand and having a whimsical notion.

... I really can't assess whether that's probable or not.  Card Zero  (talk) 20:36, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Is Egypt an African country??

Geographically yes, but culturally it's more Asian. (For anyone who wants to bring up the phrase "Middle East" please note that the Middle East is a division of Asia.) Any corrections to what I said?? Georgia guy (talk) 13:26, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

It's a member of the African Union.  Card Zero  (talk) 13:32, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

You are completely and utterly wrong, in everything you say. For a start, there is no such thing as 'Asian culture'. Asia is huge, tremendously culturally diverse, and encompassing the majority of the world's human population. Egyptian culture is the culture of the Egyptian people. Who are Africans, since they are from Africa. Their culture, like any other, is influenced by the outside world - unsurprisingly, given its long history, geographical position, etc. That doesn't make it 'Asian' (which is meaningless). It is Egyptian. End of story. AndyTheGrump (talk) 13:38, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

If there's no such thing, should we delete our article Culture of Asia?  Card Zero  (talk) 16:18, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Card_Zero -- Did you look at that article? It says that there are few "perceivable commonalities" across Asia as a whole, and then goes on to discuss the regional cultures of Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and West Asia. -- AnonMoos (talk) 19:20, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

I may have looked at the article a bit.  Card Zero  (talk) 19:33, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

And incidentally, you are wrong about the 'Middle East' too. While the term lacks exact definition, Egypt is definitely included. AndyTheGrump (talk) 13:50, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- It's somewhat distinct from sub-Saharan Africa, both historically and currently, so if that's your criterion, you can include it in another region (as Jared Diamond does for ecosystem reasons in "Guns, Germs, and Steel"), and of course the Sinai is not geographically African. But that doesn't make it Asian. The ancient Egyptian language actually had a semi-disparaging term for Canaaanites and such, which is usually translated into English as "Asiatics"... AnonMoos (talk) 14:05, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

A strange and multi-faceted question. Do you mean politcally, geographically, culturally, racially, or what? Technicalrestrictions01 (talk) 15:17, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

And I don't see what the question was or who left it. -- Preceding unsigned comment added by Technicalrestrictions01 (talk o contribs) 15:18, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

• Egypt (like many crossroads) can not be neatly defined as X or Y or Z. It's a mix ... and that mix is uniquely Egyptian. Blueboar (talk) 15:34, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

  Perhaps Egypt is simply Egypt. Technicalrestrictions01 (talk) 15:48, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

  I mean geographically it is African, but culturally it is Southwest Asian. (I don't deny the statement that there are several Asian cultures, but all of them are Asian, and this includes Southwest Asian.) Georgia guy (talk) 15:50, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

  See also Culture of Puerto Rico.  Card Zero  (talk) 16:00, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

  Card Zero, Puerto Rico is part of North America (non-continental North America, the same way Iceland is part of Europe.) Any continent it is sometimes considered part of?? Georgia guy (talk) 16:04, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

  Eh, I ninja edited it to Culture of Puerto Rico, which might have been while you were replying, but anyway I'm just thinking of other crossroads sort of places with confusingly complex culture.  Card Zero  (talk) 16:05, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

  The classic example from European history is Russia; which much of the rest of Europe, for much of history, considered decidedly "other" when thinking about how to deal with Russia; Russia has always straddled the cultural boundary between European culture, what with Peter the Great and the Hermitage and all of the Francophilia it certainly aspired to be European in culture, but Russia also has distinctly Asian cultural history; the role of people like the Tatars and the Cossacks and the like in shaping Russian history and cultural identity should not be discounted. Throw in a good dose of Vikings (Varangians) and you get a similar mix of disparate cultural influences to create a uniquely Russian culture. This is a constant discussion within Russian sociological and anthropological and cultural studies and the like, see [3] or [4] for modern takes, or as this article shows, even the great Russian cultural icons such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky thought deeply about this unique cultural position Russian people find themselves in. I'd argue, as I do below, however, that this kind of tension between overlapping and sometimes conflicting categorization is not unique to so-called crossroads nations; all cultures and ethnicities and nations are defined, to a large part, by the unique melange of categories they are placed in; to be XXXX is to not be exclusive of everything not XXXX, but to be inclusive of a number of cultural traditions that uniquely make one XXXX. That can be true of Russians and Egyptians and Puerto Ricans, but it is also true of Germans and Scottish and Kurds and lots of other people groups. --Jayron32 16:27, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

  As Kipling had it in 'The Man Who Was' - "Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of western peoples instead of the most westerly of easterns that he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle. The host never knows which side of his nature is going to turn up next" DuncanHill (talk) 03:14, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Like many of your questions Georgia_guy, there is a small nugget of reality buried under an entire wealth of misconception. As noted above, there are many ways to describe Egypt and the Egyptian people, and some of those definitions overlap and include "Egypt" and "Egyptian people" in multiple larger categories simultaneously; this is not a contradiction (as you seem to make it out to be), and it isn't a binary "either or" choice. Let's try to correct some major issues with your misconceived question, and recognize places where you have some inkling of reality in there as well.

1. In terms of physical location on Earth, Egypt bridges both the continent of Africa and the continent of Asia. The boundary between Africa and Asia is often (not always, but often) taken to be the Suez Canal, which places the Sinai Peninsula within Asia. Defining a natural physical boundary between the two continents has always been problematic as (like Europe and Asia) there is no obvious place to draw the line. Prior to the construction of the Canal (a man-made waterway), it was somewhat logical that the boundary should be on one side or the other of the Sinai, as the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba made natural boundaries; however there was nothing else to base such a line on until the Canal was built. Today, it is generally considered that the boundary runs through the Suez Canal, making Egypt a bi-continental country. It also falls within the geopolitical region known as the Middle East, and similarly is also often included in North Africa.
2. In terms of cultural connections, Egypt and the Egyptian people (like their physical location) tends to bridge many cultural groups. It is part of the Arab world (indeed it is the most populous Arabic country in the world) and is also part of the Muslim world (though it is not similarly the most populous such country, many non-Arabic, Muslim majority countries have a higher population). Egypt has long been a major proponent of Pan-Arabism, having been part of the United Arab Republic and the shorter-lived United Arab States, which were Egyptian-led efforts to grow a unified Arabic nation. Egypt is also unambiguously African as well, participating in many Pan-African organizations, such as the Organization of African Unity (of which it was a founding member and host of the second OAU Summit), and its successor the African Union. It is not a Sub-Saharan African country, a term used to distinguish the cultures of Africa known for darker skin tones from the those of North Africa, historically this makes a little bit of sense as North Africa was often more connected to the Mediterranean culture than to Sub-Saharan cultures, being part of the Roman world in classical antiquity, but not exclusively so. Egypt, like all of North Africa, has millenia of cultural mixing with Sub-Saharan Africa via the Sahel region; it was once ruled by Nubians (Sudanese) as well.

This kind of overlapping definition is not unique to Egypt. Nearly all nations, cultures, people groups etc. are uniquely defined by the overlapping categories they can be placed in; to be Egyptian means to be simultaneously any number of things, and taking any one away ultimately changes what it means to be Egyptian. This is also true of being French or Malay or Navajo or any of a number of other cultural/national/ethnic groups. It's not that they can be only one thing; it is that they are many things and the unique mix of those many things makes them what they are. For example, it isn't right to say Egypt is better thought of as "African" or better thought of as "Asian"; it is uniquely the only country that exists on both Continents. It isn't right to say that Egypt is more Arabic or more African in its cultural outlook, it clearly is simultaneously both in a way that other countries may not be.

Ultimately, these categories we have created (whether they are geographic or cultural) are all artificial and man made; they aren't created by natural processes nor locked in by the immutable laws of physics. We have created these categories semi-arbitrarily, and where the categories serve us, fine, but don't try to make them more restrictive or confining than they need to be. --Jayron32 16:06, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Excellent response, Jayron. In your last paragraph you touch on a long-standing bugbear (alarming image!) of mine, the erroneous human tendency to look at a complex system, try to systematise it with (over-)simplistic categorizations, and then insist that everything must conform to those categories. Is there an academic term and argument that names and addresses this logical fallacy, anyone? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.208.88.97 (talk) 16:21, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

I suppose the opposite attitude, in the extreme, is mereological nihilism, which says that there aren't any things, because all things are arbitrary categorizations and thus imaginary.  Card Zero  (talk) 16:31, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

I believe it is part of the broad set of informal fallacies known as False dilemmas. In this case, we can think of it as the "fallacy of the excluded middle" or something like that; the idea that something can be only one thing or only another, but never a mixture of the two. --Jayron32 16:33, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Oversimplification redirects to Fallacy of the single cause, with a link to Essentialism. Concentrating on the bit about Popper (because I'm a fan), I think essentialism can describe the act of defining a limited range of categories first before shoehorning things into them, rather than describing things and then asking what category to put them in. (Overcategorization was less relevant than I hoped, and Category:Categories was just disappointing.) Perhaps lumping?  Card Zero  (talk) 17:10, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Jayron32 -- I think that even without the Suez canal, the Gulf of Suez would be preferred to the Gulf of Aqaba, since the Gulf of Suez conveniently points toward the Mediterranean, while the Gulf of Aqaba points toward the Dead Sea, which is awkward (the west shore of the Dead Sea isn't usually considered part of Africa) and then to the Jordan and Sea of Galilee (which is even more awkward). The ancient Israelites basically considered the border between Canaan and the Egyptian sphere of influence to be the Wadi al-Arish (which apparently doesn't have a Wikipedia article)... AnonMoos (talk) 19:38, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

". . . the west shore of the Dead Sea isn't usually considered part of Africa." As it happens, I have seen a lecture on Paleoanthropology in which the lecturer pointed out that the Jordan Rift Valley is essentially an extension of the East African Rift, and the concept of early humans "leaving Africa" via the Levant is an illusory modern construct that would have been invisible and irrelevant to those actually doing it. (And of course, "leaving" refers to gradual expansions of species ranges, not long-distance treks by individuals or groups.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.208.88.97 (talk) 23:14, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

@AnonMoos: See Brook of Egypt and Rhinocorura. DuncanHill (talk) 13:55, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

The typical continents and the like are social constructs. The correct answer to "Is Egypt part of Africa" is, "Do people consider it part of Africa"? A distinction is often made between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, because of the presence of, well, the Sahara, which serves as a major barrier to land travel and hence in the Holocene has separated North Africa off geographically, which has meant N. Africa has been part of the "Mediterranean world". The only objective delineations, that would exist even if humans weren't around, are water-and-not-water and tectonic plates. If we want "objective" continents, we should refer to Afro-Eurasia, The Americas, etc. --47.147.118.55 (talk) 22:38, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

"Do people consider it part of Africa?" - That should perhaps be modified to "Do educated people consider it part of Africa?". People chosen at random are notoriously unreliable about geography and geopolitics. It's become almost a rite of passage for Australians to holiday in Bali, but many of them deny having ever visited Indonesia. Americans are infamous for confusing Australia with Austria. Go figure.-- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 09:22, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

As every properly properly educated Englishman knows, Egypt is not part of Africa or Asia, it's part of the "Arab world". Martinevans123 (talk) 14:08, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

JackofOz -- Bali is the one Hindu-majority area, and so in some respects could be considered to belong to a somewhat different cultural zone than the rest of Indonesia. AnonMoos (talk) 22:02, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Certainly. But the fact remains, anyone who's visited Bali has entered Indonesia; likewise for Hawaii and the USA; Corsica and France; the Isle of Wight and the UK; and Egypt and Africa. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:15, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

This is a question that goes all the way back to Ancient Greece. Although note that to the Greeks, the continental boundaries were waterways, with the Nile forming the boundary between Asia and Africa, so Egypt was variously argued to be African, Asian, both, or neither. I know Herodotus commented on this, I think to disparage certain takes, although I can't remember what his preferred answer was. Iapetus (talk) 08:40, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

See T and O map. To the ancients, the continents were divided by the Mediterranean, the Nile, and the Don (Tanais). --Jayron32 11:40, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

I can't believe nobody's mentioned C. E. M. Joad. DuncanHill (talk) 14:03, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Felled by "a scandal over an unpaid train fare". Truth really is stranger than fiction. 199.208.172.35 (talk) 16:50, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Years ago, talking to some racist (Southern US) relatives, I mentioned that the "Ancient Egyptians" who built the pyramids, were Africans, (obviously!!) because they inhabited this large, well-defined continent. The relatives were respectful and amazed by Ancient Egypt. But, they were baffled and dismayed by my statement...they didn't realize that Egypt was located on the African continent, (which they associated with being "Black"). A geography lesson ensued. I was annoyed because "they" thought that "Africans" were a lesser people, because "they" prejudged people on the basis of skin color. (Apologies for venting, here.) Some of the world's continents encompass a variety of races/ethnicities/skin colors/facial features. Both Africa and Asia are areas of much variety, as was North/South America, even before the European invasion. Tribe of Tiger ^{Let's Purrfect!} 03:03, 21 May 2022 (UTC)