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Kaal posted:Totally understandable - history books make a big deal out of the American role in the slave industry, and don't really mention that only 5% of slaves were traded to the US. In fact, slavery in the US was such a booming market that the architects of the American Confederacy had hoped to settle a peace with the North and then expand down into Central and South America. If the Union had lost the war, it is likely that the Confederacy would have become a slave empire, the US would not have entered WWI, and Germany would have succeeded during the Spring Offensive. The entire geopolitical face of the world would be changed. But that's going a bit off topic. Predicting future is merely but educated guesses - and so is predicting how things would've turned out if things had worked out differently in the past. There are too many unknown factors we can't take into account and you're using the word 'would' way too liberally here.
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Apr 25, 2013 19:10
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Yep. The world where the CSA could actually have won is one quite different from our own. Turtledove's work took a huge artistic license there. The Spring Offensive had better odds, but still wasn't anywhere near a sure thing sans America.
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Apr 25, 2013 19:11
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Nerdfest X posted:I am interested in pre-Christian religions and if there was a same cycle with a new generation of citizens converting to new beliefs (Zeus, Hera, et al), and folding in the some of the older (now considered) pagan beliefs/traditions (Chronos, Rhea, Titans) and even from older non Olympian-connected deities (Orcus) in much the same way that Halloween traditions were accepted into the new Christian mainstream to bond with those that still support the "old ways" and allow them to continue to celebrate/observe and still be a part of the "new wave". A lot of the mythology of ancient civilizations reflects this sort of thing. A common way of thinking was that "heaven" or the "realm of the gods" (whatever term they used) represented actual reality, while what happened on Earth was a reflection of what went on up there. When two cities fought, the "real" battle was between the two cities' patron gods, while the actions of the warriors on Earth played out according to what the gods were doing. Thus, a battle was won because one god had defeated the other rather than due to superior military actions on the ground. It's rather alien to our way of thinking today. Anyway, a lot of mythological stories then sprang up to explain how one god had defeated another, or how their various antics had caused things to happen on Earth. Their mythology was a sort of encoded history. Over the centuries, these myths got exceedingly complicated, with many overlapping and contradictory stories leading to a rather confusing mish-mash of plots and relationships. Egyptian mythology is particularly obtuse, having had several millennia of history to weave into their stories. Ultimately, the priests were the only ones who could really keep track of it all, and most people stuck to a subset of myths that were locally popular or entertaining for most purposes. So to answer your question, yes - there were a lot of traditions that people did in honor of a deity that had its origins in some obscure myth that no one really remembered anymore. Religious rituals tend to be important social occasions, and most societies hang on to their rituals even as the meanings behind them change. Deteriorata fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Apr 25, 2013 |
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Apr 25, 2013 19:57
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Well, it's been a while since I visited this thread. Taking an interesting course this semester, though, which focuses on the wider Mediterranean in the context of the Roman Empire, circa 150-27ishBC. So we get a bit of what the Romans are doing during various periods like the Mithridatic Wars but then it also looks at how these things affected Rome's friends and allies and generally everyone else who inhabited the Med. at the time. Lot of new stuff for me.
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Apr 27, 2013 05:30
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I'm suddenly curious. I know the Geocentric model of the universe held sway in the west for millenia, and it took until Copernicus for the Heliocentric model for it to get back into the learned world. Makes sense, as a geocentric model is so much more intuitive to the average person. The question is, did any other civilisations develop some kind of heliocentric model, and how well were they established?
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Apr 28, 2013 02:25
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The wiki article on Heliocentrism looks pretty comprehensive. I know Greek and Indian philosophers both proposed it, there's debate on who did it first. Greek astronomy influenced the Indians by way of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, but nobody is sure how much went the other way. I don't think it was widely accepted, the celestial sphere model was the standard.
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Apr 28, 2013 02:47
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It's not really "heliocentrism", but Aristotle remarks about the weaknesses of other theories of the Earth's position and movement while he argues for his geocentric model;Aristotle, On the Heavens pt. 13 posted:I. As to its position there is some difference of opinion. Most people-all, in fact, who regard the whole heaven as finite-say it lies at the centre. But the Italian philosophers known as Pythagoreans take the contrary view. At the centre, they say, is fire, and the earth is one of the stars, creating night and day by its circular motion about the centre. They further construct another earth in opposition to ours to which they give the name counterearth. In all this they are not seeking for theories and causes to account for observed facts, but rather forcing their observations and trying to accommodate them to certain theories and opinions of their own. But there are many others who would agree that it is wrong to give the earth the central position, looking for confirmation rather to theory than to the facts of observation. Their view is that the most precious place befits the most precious thing: but fire, they say, is more precious than earth, and the limit than the intermediate, and the circumference and the centre are limits. Reasoning on this basis they take the view that it is not earth that lies at the centre of the sphere, but rather fire. The Pythagoreans have a further reason. They hold that the most important part of the world, which is the centre, should be most strictly guarded, and name it, or rather the fire which occupies that place, the 'Guardhouse of Zeus', as if the word 'centre' were quite unequivocal, and the centre of the mathematical figure were always the same with that of the thing or the natural centre. But it is better to conceive of the case of the whole heaven as analogous to that of animals, in which the centre of the animal and that of the body are different. For this reason they have no need to be so disturbed about the world, or to call in a guard for its centre: rather let them look for the centre in the other sense and tell us what it is like and where nature has set it. That centre will be something primary and precious; but to the mere position we should give the last place rather than the first. For the middle is what is defined, and what defines it is the limit, and that which contains or limits is more precious than that which is limited, seeing that the latter is the matter and the former the essence of the system.
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Apr 28, 2013 03:12
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What role did civilians play in the later civil wars? How did men like Caesar and Pompey make their case to the average citizen? If a legion came across a city loyal to another triumvir, would it be sacked?
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Apr 28, 2013 18:16
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Is it true that Alexander slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow every night? And would it be weird if I did that?
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Apr 29, 2013 02:33
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That's the story. No way to know if something like that is true. You would be weird but you wouldn't be the first person to copy Alexander.
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Apr 29, 2013 02:35
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Grand Fromage posted:That's the story. No way to know if something like that is true. But Twat shouldn't have his father assassinated at a wedding, though, because now he's established a motive in this thread.
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Apr 29, 2013 02:57
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Exploding Poptart posted:But Twat shouldn't have his father assassinated at a wedding, though, because now he's established a motive in this thread. Buy he can gently caress a bunch of people. Alternately, if he's fat and bald he can say he's imitating Franklin.
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Apr 29, 2013 03:29
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Do we think that Homer was aware that the Mediterranean opened into the Atlantic, or was the sea their "Ocean?" How long would it take to sail from the Hellespont to Gibraltar, anyway?
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Apr 29, 2013 06:46
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The Greeks called Gibraltar the Pillars of Hercules, and that was pretty much accepted as the westernmost edge of the inhabited world. There were a few colonies on the eastern Mediterranean coast of Iberia by the 6th century BC, and the Phoenicians had colonies further to the west on the peninsula, so there was probably stuff going on there in Homer's day.
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Apr 29, 2013 07:06
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They were aware. The Atlantic was Ocean, the giant river surrounding the world.
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Apr 29, 2013 07:19
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QCIC posted:Do we think that Homer was aware that the Mediterranean opened into the Atlantic, or was the sea their "Ocean?" How long would it take to sail from the Hellespont to Gibraltar, anyway? Tangential, but has any broad consensus been reached on the actual existence of Homer? Also, I was watching Troy on TV last night. It's generally agreed that movie hero-sword-fighting is nothing at all like real duels, what about movie hero-spear-fighting? Is that any more accurate to a spear duel? Captain Postal fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Apr 29, 2013 |
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Apr 29, 2013 08:02
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Tao Jones posted:The Greeks called Gibraltar the Pillars of Hercules, and that was pretty much accepted as the westernmost edge of the inhabited world. There were a few colonies on the eastern Mediterranean coast of Iberia by the 6th century BC, and the Phoenicians had colonies further to the west on the peninsula, so there was probably stuff going on there in Homer's day. I ask because the episode where Odysseus sails to the asphodel meadow is strangely concise. If it's supposed to be beyond the Ocean wouldn't it have taken him months to reach? (Here's me questioning the realism of loving Homer.)
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Apr 29, 2013 08:10
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Well, Circe does send Odysseus a magic wind that takes his ship right where he needs to go, so I think Homer's on the safe ground of "a sorceress did it". Going across Ocean is supposed to be impossible, anyway, so he'd need to have powerful magic to do it. Plus, the entire fantastic adventures part of the Odyssey is a story-within-a-story where a guy whose entire heroic repertoire is 'tricky liar' is telling a story about himself to people whose help and treasure he desperately wants. So sly old Homer has another out here on the realism angle if you don't like the "it's magic" explanation.
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Apr 29, 2013 08:39
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I would definitely use a time machine to meet Odysseus. In the Discworld books they meet the Odysseus analogue, and he's a right sly cowardly dog.
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Apr 29, 2013 11:29
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Tao Jones posted:The Greeks called Gibraltar the Pillars of Hercules, and that was pretty much accepted as the westernmost edge of the inhabited world. There were a few colonies on the eastern Mediterranean coast of Iberia by the 6th century BC, and the Phoenicians had colonies further to the west on the peninsula, so there was probably stuff going on there in Homer's day. In fact the pharaoh Neco II (ca. 600 BC) dug (or at least started) a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, and hired some Phoenician sailors to completely circumnavigate Africa, according to Herodotus. As with everything, some scholars dispute this.
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Apr 29, 2013 14:43
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Deteriorata posted:In fact the pharaoh Neco II (ca. 600 BC) dug (or at least started) a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, and hired some Phoenician sailors to completely circumnavigate Africa, according to Herodotus. As with everything, some scholars dispute this. Jesus christ, I can only imagine what a horrorshow rounding the Cape in those galleys would've been. I seem to recall reading or hearing somewhere in my Hum 110 class that the cultures of the ancient Med. thought the Straights of Gibraltar were the gates to the Underworld because if you sailed through them you probably were not coming back. But then again, the Phonecians and Greeks apparently sailed up to the British Isles, so I may be misremembering. Also, it's Herodotus so he probably grabbed some guy at random who fed him a total line. Uh, yeah, sure buddy. We got some dudes sailing around the continent right now. Also, keep it under your hat, but Helen? Never made it to Illium. poo poo you not, man. Pharaoh put his foot down, mm-hm. That being said, his eager credulity is the reason I love Herodotus a big ol' bunch. He gives the impression of being this really hyper stoked guy who really wants to tell people this cool stuff he learned, even if it is wholly bullshit. Dude no dude seriously I just got back from the headwaters of the Nile, well okay not THE headwaters because y'know cataracts and so forth, but man oh man I talked to this guy who swears on a stack of sacred dried cow phalluses that the headwaters were like right over the next hill and... paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Apr 29, 2013 |
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Apr 29, 2013 17:57
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Captain Postal posted:Also, I was watching Troy on TV last night. It's generally agreed that movie hero-sword-fighting is nothing at all like real duels, what about movie hero-spear-fighting? Is that any more accurate to a spear duel? The most accurate duel involving spears in that movie is the one in the very beginning where the Thessalian champion throws his spears at Achilles and then gets killed pretty quickly once they switch to swords. It's not necessarily accurate, but it's more realistic. The Achilles vs Hector duel is pure fantasy.
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Apr 29, 2013 18:30
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Yeah, I've seen the story about a circumnavigation attempt funded by Necho, but it's struck me as somewhat implausible too. I've read that it's really tough to sail much further south than say the Canaries; there's some land/sea current pattern that basically forces you to sail well out of sight of land to get around it, which the ancients weren't super keen on doing. Of course, the Phoenicians were basically Sea Gods, so maybe that didn't phase them. But it seems that most people who study such things believe they made it at least as far south as the Guineau-Bissua-Sierra Leone region.
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Apr 29, 2013 18:36
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Seoinin posted:Jesus christ, I can only imagine what a horrorshow rounding the Cape in those galleys would've been. I seem to recall reading or hearing somewhere in my Hum 110 class that the cultures of the ancient Med. thought the Straights of Gibraltar were the gates to the Underworld because if you sailed through them you probably were not coming back. But then again, the Phonecians and Greeks apparently sailed up to the British Isles, so I may be misremembering. I seem to recall that some of Herodotus's stories have a ring of plausibility to them, especially the ones he doesn't believe. As I remember, Herodotus says something like, "The headwaters of the Nile are up in Nubia somewhere. People say that it snows there, but that's just crazy-talk." And at another point, he says, "The captain who sailed around Africa came back with crazy stories, saying that the seasons were reversed or something. Obviously nobody believed him and he was executed for lying". Unfortunately, my copy of the Histories are buried beneath a pile of crap, so I can't find the passages to source them. Much like Herodotus himself, I guess.
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Apr 29, 2013 19:00
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Captain Postal posted:Tangential, but has any broad consensus been reached on the actual existence of Homer? I'm pretty sure Brad Pitt trained in Chinese martial arts to prepare for Troy, which explains the exaggerated long stances, big motions, big arcing swings, and lots and lots of spinning movement in that (totally awesome) fight scene.
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Apr 29, 2013 19:15
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah, I've seen the story about a circumnavigation attempt funded by Necho, but it's struck me as somewhat implausible too. I've read that it's really tough to sail much further south than say the Canaries; there's some land/sea current pattern that basically forces you to sail well out of sight of land to get around it, which the ancients weren't super keen on doing. Of course, the Phoenicians were basically Sea Gods, so maybe that didn't phase them. But it seems that most people who study such things believe they made it at least as far south as the Guineau-Bissua-Sierra Leone region. In this case, they started from the Red Sea and went around clockwise. What makes it credible is that they reported sailing around the Cape of Good Hope westbound with the sun on their right. This is not likely to be something someone who had never been south of the equator would make up.
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Apr 29, 2013 19:41
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To be fair to Herodotus, it's not like most other historians were any better. Doesn't Thucydides have a part in the intro to his history where he says straight up "yeah I pretty much made up all the speeches I have people giving in this work, so as to best fit my narrative."
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Apr 29, 2013 19:56
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It does not seem that hard (relatively) to sail around Africa considering you can always stay within sight of land. They must have been able to land an find or trade for food and water. I suppose the weather around the bottom can get pretty bad.
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Apr 29, 2013 20:06
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We know that Hanno, a Carthaginian sea captain, made it from Carthage to the Bay of Corisco in the sixth century BC by sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar and down the western coast of Africa. He left an inscription detailing his voyage in Carthage, which was translated into Greek; Pliny the Elder also corroborates elements of the story. His report doesn't talk himself up as doing anything particularly heroic or impossible - he's just like "well, the bosses of Carthage asked me to go found cities there, so I did, also I found interesting people, saw a volcano, and fought gorillas; we would have kept going but our supplies were running low". I think it's plausible that there were other expeditions before him and one of those could have been the Necho expedition. I don't think Hanno would be so cavalier about it or that the Carthaginians would have wanted to establish cities beyond Gibraltar if it were seen as being some impossibly daring feat. So it seems likely that there were previous expeditions of some sort, and the circumnavigation story seems at least possible. It's a shame that we'll probably never get more evidence either way, since Carthage was obliterated.
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Apr 29, 2013 20:28
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sullat posted:I seem to recall that some of Herodotus's stories have a ring of plausibility to them, especially the ones he doesn't believe. As I remember, Herodotus says something like, "The headwaters of the Nile are up in Nubia somewhere. People say that it snows there, but that's just crazy-talk." And at another point, he says, "The captain who sailed around Africa came back with crazy stories, saying that the seasons were reversed or something. Obviously nobody believed him and he was executed for lying". Unfortunately, my copy of the Histories are buried beneath a pile of crap, so I can't find the passages to source them. Much like Herodotus himself, I guess. I agree that people give Herodotus too much aggro. Right from the start he lays out that he'll record whatever points of view he can get his hands on and he'll be wary of passing judgement. I don't think he cares so much that people might be feeding him lines of bullshit, because they're still talking to him and it still makes interesting stuff to put in his book just as 'I went here and this bloke told me a cool story'. He's not so credulous as is assumed. And of course it's also nice for us to get all this stuff even he thinks is unbelievable, because sometimes it really was the truth. Seoinin posted:Doesn't Thucydides have a part in the intro to his history where he says straight up "yeah I pretty much made up all the speeches I have people giving in this work, so as to best fit my narrative."
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Apr 29, 2013 20:57
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Tao Jones posted:We know that Hanno, a Carthaginian sea captain, made it from Carthage to the Bay of Corisco in the sixth century BC by sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar and down the western coast of Africa. He left an inscription detailing his voyage in Carthage, which was translated into Greek; Pliny the Elder also corroborates elements of the story. His report doesn't talk himself up as doing anything particularly heroic or impossible - he's just like "well, the bosses of Carthage asked me to go found cities there, so I did, also I found interesting people, saw a volcano, and fought gorillas; we would have kept going but our supplies were running low". I think it's plausible that there were other expeditions before him and one of those could have been the Necho expedition. I don't think Hanno would be so cavalier about it or that the Carthaginians would have wanted to establish cities beyond Gibraltar if it were seen as being some impossibly daring feat. So it seems likely that there were previous expeditions of some sort, and the circumnavigation story seems at least possible. It's a shame that we'll probably never get more evidence either way, since Carthage was obliterated. This might have been answered before, but how did the Romans salt the land? That seems like a prohibitively expensive task.
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Apr 29, 2013 21:02
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:This might have been answered before, but how did the Romans salt the land? That seems like a prohibitively expensive task. They didn't. It was a made up story from later in history.
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Apr 29, 2013 21:05
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:This might have been answered before, but how did the Romans salt the land? That seems like a prohibitively expensive task. Indeed, there's no reason to think that they actually did that. Nor would you want to anyway; the land around Carthage (the part that would be worth salting I guess) was super useful for growing grain that Rome always needed. No reason to throw that away, and I'm sure plenty of adventurous folks wanted to set up farms there.
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Apr 29, 2013 21:33
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Yeah don't get me wrong, I love me some Herodotus. He's actually fun to read, especially when compared to a stodgy old sermonizer like Thucydides. I just find the image of some enthusiastic Greek dude showing up in random places to badger people until they finally get sick of him really funny. "Yessir, Lord Xerxes literally had the Sea of Marmara whipped for destroying his ship bridge. Literally. Now gently caress off, I have work to do."
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Apr 29, 2013 22:05
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PittTheElder posted:Nor would you want to anyway; the land around Carthage (the part that would be worth salting I guess) was super useful for growing grain that Rome always needed. No reason to throw that away, and I'm sure plenty of adventurous folks wanted to set up farms there. Of course this turned out to be the worst thing ever because a combination of paranoia and general assholeishness ensured that Rome would attack them again for almost literally no reason, despite 50 years of Carthage being a completely dependable and pliant subject-nation.
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Apr 29, 2013 23:30
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It was brought up a few days ago, but does anyone have good sources on what Romans ate, especially the lower classes? There was a good video on YouTube which I wanted to use in class (I think it had Terry Jones in it) but I can't seem to find it.
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Apr 30, 2013 00:22
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Slantedfloors posted:words. Quite so. Have you read Carthage Must Be Destroyed as well, out of curiousity?
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Apr 30, 2013 00:26
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Fell Fire posted:It was brought up a few days ago, but does anyone have good sources on what Romans ate, especially the lower classes? There was a good video on YouTube which I wanted to use in class (I think it had Terry Jones in it) but I can't seem to find it. This may be helpful: http://phys.org/news/2011-06-ancient-sewer-excavation-roman-diet.html BBC did a special on it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21996125
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Apr 30, 2013 01:08
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So I've just finished up The History of Rome podcast and need something else to keep me sane at work. I've got the Byzantine History podcast on tap, but it's only like 20~ episodes at the moment and I'll clear it out in a week tops. As for Hardcore History, I've tried it but I just can't take it seriously because the guy's got this voice that makes him sound like he's about to start trying to tell me about chemtrails or bitcoins any second now. Anyone got any history podcasts they can recommend?
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Apr 30, 2013 01:35
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Just listen to the Rome podcast again.
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Apr 30, 2013 01:38
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