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Big Willy Style posted:I don't know if this question is really stupid or what but when did gold and silver become so important and why is used for currency? How did this come about? They're inert metals that can be made pretty but aren't useful for anything practical and are somewhat rare (but where it does exist is easily recoverable) and are difficult to fake. In other words they are absolutely perfect as the basis of an intermediary good that nobody actually wants but everyone can accept the value of. e: oh seriously?
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Jan 28, 2013 19:03
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Yea the west wasn't poor, it's just in comparison to the east it was. And that's right. Gold and silver are rare and inert so they don't turn into rust or whatever the gently caress.
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Jan 28, 2013 19:08
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Big Willy Style posted:I don't know if this question is really stupid or what but when did gold and silver become so important and why is used for currency? How did this come about? Because it's really valuable. Gold in particular is extremely easy to craft for artistic purposes; it's malleable, flexible and can be hammered quite thin, and when polished it obviously has a very pretty shine far beyond other metals. It probably acquired some mystical properties in cultures since it was the first metal to be produced by humans, so that added some value to it. And most importantly, it is, and always has been, extremely rare; in all of human history we have mined about 160,000 tons of gold (most of which was mined industrially in the past century). By comparison, it would only take 2 years to mine that amount of iron at the height of the Roman Empire. Silver is similar but basically slightly less so in all those things.
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Jan 28, 2013 19:13
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Big Willy Style posted:I don't know if this question is really stupid or what but when did gold and silver become so important and why is used for currency? How did this come about? So people have used gold and silver as a medium of exchange for millenia. Silver was popular in Egypt and Sumeria, especially for long-distance trading, while gold was more ornamental. As people have said, they're inert, so they don't rust away, so you can store and transport wealth without losing it, unlike say, grain. Now currency is a more specific term, and according to legend, it was "invented" in 600 BC or so by Croesus (hence the term, "rich as Croesus"). What he did was mint coins, an alloy of gold and silver, that was of a guaranteed purity, and marked them with his royal seal as a promise that they were good. Naturally, this also required the horrible torture and execution of counterfeiters, which has been a tradition ever since. Now, as I mentioned a few pages ago, these metals were far too rare and valuable to be used to pay people with, so peasants tended to be paid in food and useful goods. The Sumerians also appear to have used "payroll" and "credit", and even primitive "checks", as in they had clay tablets marked with instructions to pay the bearer a certain amount.
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Jan 28, 2013 19:23
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Also check out the Mesoamericans economy, which I've read included Cacao beans as one currency. Chocolate = Gold.
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Jan 28, 2013 20:32
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That can make you understand one of the main reasons why the Spanish Imperial economy collapsed after the conquest of the new world. Kicking out all the bankers and financiers while also receiving record amount of gold and silver (and pissing most of your navy away in Scotland) was one of those hilarious blunders that turned Spain into a massive, but stagnant, empire.
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Jan 28, 2013 20:37
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The Spartans supposedly used iron as their currency, eschewing the weaker gold and silver and honoring their "true" source of strength. There were also various other precious things that we don't remember that much today, such as Lapis Lazuli.
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Jan 28, 2013 21:20
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Mans posted:That can make you understand one of the main reasons why the Spanish Imperial economy collapsed after the conquest of the new world. Kicking out all the bankers and financiers while also receiving record amount of gold and silver (and pissing most of your navy away in Scotland) was one of those hilarious blunders that turned Spain into a massive, but stagnant, empire. I don't think the influx of gold was really that important to the Spanish decline. The massive inflation it triggered hit just about everywhere in Europe, rather than Spain in particular. General mismanagement, emigration from the core Spanish areas, and overcommitment to foreign conflict is what brought them down. The influx of metals likely made that more tolerable for a time, but in the end it caught up to them.
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Jan 28, 2013 21:39
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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As everyone's been saying, the West certainly wasn't poor - the mineral wealth stripped from Western Europe by the Romans was immense. The unfortunate reality, though, was that it was rich in a different, much less sustainable way than the East. The East's wealth primarily came from renewable goods (food, crops, cloth, etc.) versus the West's unrenewable goods; obviously this is a simplification, as (for example) Gaul produced a great deal of wine. On the whole, though, the trade imbalance that the Romans worried about having with China due to the outflow of metals in exchange for silk was reproduced within the Empire as well - metal tending to flow to the East in exchange for its products. The mineral wealth also grew harder and harder to economically extract as the Romans moved away from the slave economy, so the East began to gain a significant advantage over the West as the Empire aged.
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Jan 28, 2013 23:41
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Traditionalist Romans (e.g., Pliny the Elder) admonished Roman elites (mostly women) for their consumption of luxury goods like silk from the East, but the debt incurred by trade with the East wasn't enormous. Even if we take Pliny at face value that silk and other goods drained 100 million sesterces out of the coffers of the Empire every year, the estimated GDP of the early Principate was around 10 billion sesterces--so luxury goods accounted for 1% of GDP. It's still a lot of money, and Roman silver and gold coins have been found all throughout India, but I'd urge caution before using a small selection of literary sources to interpret East-West trade. Romans did trade limited amounts of oil and wine to the East but most transactions were for Roman currency. I think it's useful to think of Roman currency as a good. Roman silver was in demand in India as silk was among elites in Rome. It was consistent, nearly 100% pure (until Nero) and accepted everywhere. It was an international standard, like U.S. dollars today (for now anyway). Indian rulers often re-issued the coins in their own kingdoms. On another note, Rome was the "west" side of the Empire, and Italy was fabulously wealthy for centuries. I'd also like to point out that bronze was the most common metal for coinage, and more common transactions were in bronze, like buying food and basic services.
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Jan 29, 2013 04:19
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There's a bunch of records of the Persian Empire that were preserved by the burning of Persepolis that chart the transition from the payment of laborers in kind (mostly grain and alcohol) to paying them by silver coins. Also interesting: women working at manual labor positions (at 66% the rate of men, so just like today!) but also women as scribes and in supervisory positions drawing equal wages to their male counterparts. Also an early form of maternity leave, stipends paid out to women (and not their husbands) when they gave birth, though having a son garnered double money.
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Jan 29, 2013 04:44
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As for why gold/silver, I think it's because there was a need for kings to have a prestige object. Speaking specifically of Greece, in Homeric times, how honorable/awesome a dude you were was linked to how much stuff you had and how generous you were about giving it away. Obviously, everyone couldn't be giving away their tripods or swords or armor or horses or slave girls all the time. Tripods, swords, and armor were cool gifts because they were permanent, but they were usually made of a useful metal and a king might be reluctant to give them away. Horses and slave girls were useful gifts (because who doesn't like riding things), but they're impermanent. So there was a need for something that was permanent but useless except as a thing you could give away. As for why currency - this is a little harder to answer. Here's one possibility -- eventually, there weren't very many kings anymore and the city-state became the dominant political form of organization. Gold piled up in temple storehouses, rather than in the vaults of kings. Now, honor can't really attach to a city in the same way it can to a person, so there was a kind of crisis. Cities got honor by taking care of their citizens - holding huge feasts, slaughtering some animals, and making sure everyone got a fair share of delicious meat. But even though these animals, like the gold of yesteryear, existed to be given away, they weren't prestige objects that could confer honor on individuals. (The guest from afar probably isn't going to think you're a great and generous dude because you gave him a cow.) So cities began mixing the recognized prestige object of yesteryear, gold/silver, with this newfangled idea of dividing a thing into equal shares. That is to say, coins. That's not to imply the gold coins were actually shared equally among the citizens like the beef, mind. The equality idea is more to reinforce that any given coin of type X was equal to any other given coin of type X, which is a far more revolutionary concept than it might appear at first. Consider that both the Trojan War and Achilles' fight with Agamemnon in the Iliad come about basically because (This is, of course, a speculative answer, and it's not like we have a document from a bunch of ancient dudes testifying that this was, in fact, the process. But I think it's a valid way of looking at what sort of problems currency might have been invented to address, and it describes what kinds of assumptions about the world people would have to make in order to arrive at it. This particular argument is described in a lot more detail in "Money and the Early Greek Mind" by Richard Seaford, a classicist at Exeter. I was originally just going to recommend the book in this post, but the book's style is rather opaque and he assumes a degree of familiarity with ancient Greece, so I thought it might be better to interpret. David Graeber has a section about this and the development of currency in other places in "Debt: The First 5,000 Years", which is much easier to read than Seaford.)
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Jan 29, 2013 07:35
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As a science nerd I find it sort of fascinating that all the currency metals are closely related in the periodic table, indicating that their similar properties are important to their use and the perception of their value. Gold, silver, and copper make up one column, and nickel and zinc (commonly used in debased coins) are next to copper, while palladium and platinum are in the same column as nickel, next to silver and gold respectively. (Zinc's column has cadmium and mercury which aren't really convenient for coins.) One interesting idea I heard about gold is that, until modern industrial uses in electronics, its pretty useless except for decorative purposes. So, not only does it not get consumed by use, its possession clearly indicates an excess of economic power above and beyond crude material needs. It is unambiguously wealth for wealth's sake.
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Jan 29, 2013 09:47
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Thanks for all the great responses. Very interesting.
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Jan 29, 2013 14:56
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I'm sorry if this is a horribly stupid question, but I was wondering, what did Roman women do all day? I imagine some probably worked as cooks and washerwomen, but what about the high class ones, such as empresses? If they had slaves for manual labor, how did they fill their hours? Do we have any Roman women's writings?
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Jan 29, 2013 18:13
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Pinball posted:Do we have any Roman women's writings? I think there are some letters, but not literary writing that I can think of. Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, I remember reading an article in a history magazine that argued that one of the great limitations of feminist history for this period was exactly that we see women through the eyes of men, and often men who weren't just giving a neutral description of what they did. One of the examples used by that writer was a story by a Roman writer (sorry, I've forgotten who) describing how a Roman divorced his wife for drinking after smelling wine on her breath. The point is that the writer in question was penning anecdotes to be used in speeches by orators, like a joke book for after-dinner speakers, and the fact that he said this was done (by one of those noble ancestors the Romans used to love going on about) doesn't really allow you to conclude that Roman men actually did this on a regular basis and that women weren't allowed to drink.
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Jan 29, 2013 20:37
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General Panic posted:Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, I remember reading an article in a history magazine that argued that one of the great limitations of feminist history for this period was exactly that we see women through the eyes of men, and often men who weren't just giving a neutral description of what they did.
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Jan 29, 2013 21:05
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Halloween Jack posted:I think that's a limitation on feminist history up to about 1990. I'd say that it's a limitation that we carry with us to this day.
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Jan 29, 2013 21:17
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I think Japan ended up being unusual for that for a couple centuries because one of the ways for writing the language was treated as "women's writing" for a while so there was a lot of women's writing available from that time period where you see barely any from the rest of the world.
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Jan 29, 2013 21:28
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Pinball posted:I'm sorry if this is a horribly stupid question, but I was wondering, what did Roman women do all day? I imagine some probably worked as cooks and washerwomen, but what about the high class ones, such as empresses? If they had slaves for manual labor, how did they fill their hours? Do we have any Roman women's writings? Probably managing the household, occasionally tending to children, and hanging out and relaxing with their friends, and taking in local entertainment? I don't know if there's any authoritative answer.
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Jan 29, 2013 22:00
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Pinball posted:I'm sorry if this is a horribly stupid question, but I was wondering, what did Roman women do all day? I imagine some probably worked as cooks and washerwomen, but what about the high class ones, such as empresses? If they had slaves for manual labor, how did they fill their hours? Do we have any Roman women's writings? Lady Fight Club.
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Jan 30, 2013 03:18
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Pinball posted:I'm sorry if this is a horribly stupid question, but I was wondering, what did Roman women do all day? I imagine some probably worked as cooks and washerwomen, but what about the high class ones, such as empresses? If they had slaves for manual labor, how did they fill their hours? Do we have any Roman women's writings? Free women in Rome had quite a lot of opportunity, especially by ancient standards. Aristocratic women often managed the household - but keep in mind that an aristocratic household was often a sprawling estate or series of estates staffed by hundreds of slaves, so managing it was more like being a business owner than a housewife. Women were allowed to own and inherit property, so there were some women who became business owners, particularly in industries like shipping. (I'm not sure why shipping was a popular choice for Roman women.) Less privileged women might take up an occupation that would support their husband's trade, or might have managed his shop. Women who were impoverished often became wet nurses, dancers, prostitutes or other sorts of menial tasks that slaves weren't used for. The main doors that were closed to women as a rule were political office and the military. (Lest the picture that I'm suggesting be too rosy or give the wrong impression -- because of how the Roman family structure worked, a Roman woman was almost always under the authority of her father. In practical terms, how absolute this authority was varied from time to time and person to person. Once a woman was an adult and not in her father's house any longer, it probably became a case of "out of sight, out of mind" -- but at least theoretically, the father still had power over life and death.) This is in pretty stark contrast to how women were treated in much of Greece. For all we might think of ancient Athens as being the birthplace of philosophy, an early experiment in democratic freedom, a cradle of western civilization, etc etc, as far as treatment of women goes, Athens was comparable to modern Saudi Arabia. We don't have any major works by ancient Roman women, unfortunately, so there's no record of an ancient Roman woman speaking in her own voice.
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Jan 30, 2013 06:42
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It is a bit of a disconnect between how incredibly misogynist the Romans were and the laws. Women were allowed to inherit and be the full heads of a family if there were no eligible males, so there are periods where a woman has huge amounts of power in the nobility. But women were also considered to essentially be property, either of their father or their husband. It's a little hard to wrap your mind around. The only known, confirmed writing by a Roman woman is one of the Vindolanda tablets. A piece of a letter to her sister I believe, I am too lazy to look it up. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Jan 30, 2013 |
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Jan 30, 2013 07:01
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Why are French, Spanish and Italian not Germanic languages if the Franks and Goths were German tribes?
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Jan 30, 2013 07:44
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The Germanic tribes that moved into those areas Romanized within a generation or two and started speaking Latin instead of their native languages. Remember, they invaded not because they wanted to conquer and destroy Rome, but they wanted to be Romans themselves and the Romans shut them out. It's unlikely any of those Germanic invasions would have happened if the later Romans hadn't turned insular and racist, and had instead incorporated them as Rome had done with so many other nations they conquered over the centuries. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Jan 30, 2013 |
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Jan 30, 2013 07:48
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Grand Fromage posted:The Germanic tribes that moved into those areas Romanized within a generation or two and started speaking Latin instead of their native languages. This may have been touched upon before, but why did they stop incorporating nations? Was it social and political stagnation, like when the Roman state stopped expanding the ruling classes preferred maintaining the status quo, or some kind of cultural shift where "roman-ness" came to be viewed as something barbarians cannot acquire, or perhaps other reasons? Kopijeger fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Jan 30, 2013 |
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Jan 30, 2013 09:31
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One reason is that the empire had become too big to govern properly, and so Hadrian put up his wall. The empire then became too difficult to manage and defend at the same time, and so the need for two augusti, one in the east and one in the west.
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Jan 30, 2013 10:27
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Another reason is Christianity. 
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Jan 30, 2013 19:07
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Grand Fromage posted:The Germanic tribes that moved into those areas Romanized within a generation or two and started speaking Latin instead of their native languages. I've seen this in the thread before, but where does the idea of late Roman racism come from? By the late empire, everyone was "Roman," so it was far different from a time when anyone not from the city itself was sub-human. Valens accepted the Goths into the empire, but he didn't break them up into smaller bands to be settled around the empire, instead leaving their social structure intact. Was that because Valens and his ministers didn't want to accept the Goths as Roman? It seems the Goths were simply too powerful at the time to force terms upon them. Adrianople showed what the Goths could do against the Roman army. Theodosius allowed the Goths to remain intact, and he didn't appear to have any other choice. This also appears best for the Goths, since they get to live inside Roman borders, away from the Huns, have aqueducts and roads and other infrastructure, keep their culture, and Gothic kings remain powerful individuals. The kings certainly wouldn't have wanted their people to be broken up and settled around the empire. In the last days of the West, there were tons of Germanic generals as de facto emperors, so I suppose there was something keeping them from legitimacy in their own right. For a while, the Theodosian dynasty controlled both halves of the empire, and the East wouldn't have liked seeing anyone, German or no, toppling their Western cousins. While the emperors at the time were jokes, they had the name and political legitimacy. By the end of the dynasty and the time of Leo, the damage was already done and much of the west as controlled by independent German peoples. I don't see how the problem was Leo failing to make Ricimer the western emperor. Failing to integrate the Germans into the empire was a massive mistake. Each step, however, appears rational on its own and necessary at the time.
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Jan 30, 2013 20:21
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If the Normans had overthrown the French King instead of taking a nominally subservient Dukedom, French would probably be a much more Germanic language today. It is kind of artificial distinction as English has plenty of latin influence.
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Jan 30, 2013 20:25
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Tewdrig posted:Failing to integrate the Germans into the empire was a massive mistake. Each step, however, appears rational on its own and necessary at the time. I think part of the idea of "late Roman racism" comes from when they massacred all the assimilated Goths after Adrianople. You know, the ones that didn't revolt and were part of the Roman armies.
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Jan 30, 2013 20:28
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sullat posted:I think part of the idea of "late Roman racism" comes from when they massacred all the assimilated Goths after Adrianople. You know, the ones that didn't revolt and were part of the Roman armies. They did something similar in the West when Stilicho was killed. The reason people say they were racists is because well, they were. Maybe not in the more modern sense, but still it was pretty bad.
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Jan 31, 2013 02:38
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Pinball posted:I'm sorry if this is a horribly stupid question, but I was wondering, what did Roman women do all day? I imagine some probably worked as cooks and washerwomen, but what about the high class ones, such as empresses? If they had slaves for manual labor, how did they fill their hours?
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Jan 31, 2013 16:41
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It seems reasonable to lean towards women holding such power occasionally. The fact that we have nay evidence of it at all is a good indication considering how sexist the Romans were. No one was going out of their way to write down poo poo women were doing, especially not one they might have owed favors too. No one can make a positive statement regarding it, but I see no reason why its not quite likely there were a significant minority of women in the client system. There were also the royal families who often had women in positions of near absolute power, albeit through their sons. There was at least enough acceptance of the concept that women can be able to hold power that a lot of people were willing to follow the Severan women for many years.
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Jan 31, 2013 17:25
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WoodrowSkillson posted:There were also the royal families who often had women in positions of near absolute power, albeit through their sons. and husbands  One of history's ultimate power couples. I like to think the story of Justinian about to flee from the royal dock during the Nika riots and Theodora stopping him by saying "Purple is a good color to be buried in" or whatever is true for the simple fact at that point forward I'm pretty sure Theodora would be wearing the pants in that relationship. It's kind of hard to say no to your wife after she just stopped you from going down in history as a disgraced and deposed coward.
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Jan 31, 2013 17:48
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Amused to Death posted:and husbands Another story is that, during the riots, the mob grabbed some old Senator and hailed him as emperor. Justinian was gonna pardon him, but Theodora was like "only one person alive can wear the purple." And so they executed him.
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Jan 31, 2013 18:16
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sullat posted:Another story is that, during the riots, the mob grabbed some old Senator and hailed him as emperor. Justinian was gonna pardon him, but Theodora was like "only one person alive can wear the purple." And so they executed him. Along with a hippodrome full of people supposedly. Theodora, Belisarius and Narses take no poo poo, Justinian, may or may not take some poo poo, at least up to that point. Amused to Death fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Jan 31, 2013 |
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Jan 31, 2013 18:25
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Byzantine mosaics are so awful. So awful.
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Feb 1, 2013 02:53
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Getting away from, Rome, Greece and Europe Is there anyone here who knows a bit about Sumer? I want to know what writing we have from them (or that probably originated with them and got passed on by the Akkadians, etc.) besides the epic of Gilgamesh. I skimmed through a book of Sumerian proverbs in college, and I remember reading something about some short stories or poems that had a similar structure and story to the epic but were older. Can't remember the name though. Anyone know what I'm talking about or about anything else interesting that was preserved? I'm also pretty curious as to how their city state governments worked, but I just woke up and can't think of any specific questions at the moment.
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Feb 1, 2013 03:53
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Komet posted:Byzantine mosaics are so awful. So awful.
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