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Comstar posted:What made them so bad, compared to every other empire that conquered all their neighbors? Their kings liked to have people skinned and flayed alive on the regular. It shows up in Assyrian art and writing. They also enjoyed slaughtering entire populations, building giant piles of skulls outside cities, that sort of fun stuff. “I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me [and] draped their skins over the pile[of corpses]; some I spread out within the pile, some I erected on stakes upon the pile ... I flayed many right through my land [and]draped their skins over the walls.” “I felled 50 of their fighting men with the sword, burnt 200 captives from them, [and]defeated in a battle on the plain 332 troops.... With their blood I dyed the mountain red like red wool, [and] the rest of them the ravines [and] torrents of the mountain swallowed. I carried off captives [and] possessions from them. I cut off the heads of their fighters [and] built [therewith] a tower before their city. I burnt their adolescent boys[and] girls.” “In strife and conflict I besieged [and] conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword ... I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms [and]hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears,[and] extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living [and] one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.” “I filled the wide plain with the corpses of his warriors.... These [rebels] I impaled on stakes....A pyramid(pillar) of heads I erected in front of the city.” “I cut their throats like lambs. I cut off their precious lives (as one cuts) a string. Like the many waters of a storm,I made (the contents of) their gullets and entrails run down upon the wide earth. My prancing steeds harnessed for my riding, plunged into the streams of their blood as (into) a river. The wheels of my war chariot, which brings low the wicked and the evil,were bespattered with blood and filth. With the bodies of their warriors I filled the plain, like grass. (Their) testicles I cut off, and tore out their privates like the seeds of cucumbers.” “Their dismembered bodies I fed to the dogs, swine, wolves, and eagles, to the birds of heaven and the fish in the deep.... What was left of the feast of the dogs and swine, of their members which blocked the streets and filled the squares, I ordered them to remove from Babylon, Kutha and Sippar, and to cast them upon heaps.” These were official records, in other words, what the kings wanted people to know about them.
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Jul 19, 2013 17:33
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Ancient Assyria is kinda like if there was an ongoing dynasty of Hitlers ruling over many occupied countries for centuries.
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Jul 19, 2013 17:51
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Install Gentoo posted:Ancient Assyria is kinda like if there was an ongoing dynasty of Hitlers ruling over many occupied countries for centuries. It's not an accident that in the book of Jonah, God sends Jonah to preach to the Assyrians. Instead of heading overland to the East to Assyria, he catches a boat and heads West. His reasoning is that he wants to see Assyria burn rather than help them repent. Everybody listening to the story would have nodded their heads in agreement with Jonah and said, "gently caress the Assyrians" in their own way.
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Jul 19, 2013 17:58
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That brings up another question. In modern times, we have Hitler as a standard of an evil ruler. Way back when, who were the Hitlers of their time?
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Jul 19, 2013 17:58
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Deteriorata posted:It's not an accident that in the book of Jonah, God sends Jonah to preach to the Assyrians. Instead of heading overland to the East to Assyria, he catches a boat and heads West. His reasoning is that he wants to see Assyria burn rather than help them repent. Everybody listening to the story would have nodded their heads in agreement with Jonah and said, "gently caress the Assyrians" in their own way. Aha, so that's why Jonah was swallowed by the whale, it was Gods little hint that Jonah was travelling in the wrong direction! (I always wondered about that.)
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Jul 19, 2013 18:13
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karl fungus posted:That brings up another question. In modern times, we have Hitler as a standard of an evil ruler. Way back when, who were the Hitlers of their time? Every other Roman emperor. The Holocaust has nothing on Vespasian's destruction of Israel at the end of the first Jewish revolt.
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Jul 19, 2013 18:15
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karl fungus posted:That brings up another question. In modern times, we have Hitler as a standard of an evil ruler. Way back when, who were the Hitlers of their time? I'm pretty sure it would just be "Assyrian Kings" to be honest. As previously mentioned, their sheer awfulness got the Medes, the Persians, the Elamites, the Scythians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans and the Cimmerians to all band together to destory the empire, and to almost completely wipe out the grand capital of Nineveh. And that city was likely the largest and most populated city at the time, and these are what partial reconstructions of its city gates look like (they would have been part of massive accompanying walls):  
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Jul 19, 2013 18:17
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Destroy and wipe out all memory. Around two centuries later, Xenophon writes about camping in the ruins of Nineveh (which are utterly incredible to him, beyond anything in Greece), and no one has any idea who used to live there or who built it. The Assyrians were just gone, beyond those few who managed to escape. If you're interested, the Judgement at Nineveh episode of Hardcore History is great.
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Jul 19, 2013 18:21
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Grand Fromage posted:That's a myth, the nose broke off long before Napoleon ever got there. Art was destroyed though, but you don't go out and stab people with a statue so it doesn't get used the same way.  I've referenced the French doing it at least a dozen times in uni papers and never have I been corrected. And Wikipedia even agrees with you!How was trade / shipping in the med affected by the collapse of the west?
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Jul 19, 2013 18:27
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Grand Fromage posted:Destroy and wipe out all memory. Around two centuries later, Xenophon writes about camping in the ruins of Nineveh (which are utterly incredible to him, beyond anything in Greece), and no one has any idea who used to live there or who built it. The Assyrians were just gone, beyond those few who managed to escape. If I remember correctly, Dan likened the destruction to the ancient equivalent of nuking a city. And also pointed out that many of the remaining farmers and shepherds in the area in Xenophon's time were likely Assyrians by ethnicity, and even they did not know.
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Jul 19, 2013 18:31
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karl fungus posted:How many ancient acts of war would be considered genocide in the modern sense of the term? I don't know but the answer is probably many, if you look at the Roman efforts to 'wipe out' cultures like the Cimbri. Given, the Cimbri showed up and they were massive scary motherfuckers from (probably) around Finland (that's the one on the South, right?) who got decimated by Roman tactics and strategy despite being apparently legendary in their fighting prowess individually. Later travelers would write that they were reduced to basically a broken minuscule gaggle of people huddling along the coast. E: Rome did a lot of the whole cultural sublimation thing even before they became an Empire. Oh, and they crucified every last Spartacus, which makes me feel kind of good about how Crassus died. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jul 19, 2013 |
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Jul 19, 2013 19:02
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euphronius posted:Every other Roman emperor. The Holocaust has nothing on Vespasian's destruction of Israel at the end of the first Jewish revolt.
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Jul 19, 2013 19:16
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You should stop using words like genocide to describe stuff that isn't comparable to the modern day definition. The amount of effort it took to "wipe out" a culture in ancient times wasn't a lot because the way we define culture wasn't the same. When the residents of one city-state differentiate themselves from another group that's maybe 50km away, and you sack their city, is the result a genocide when you've really gone through no effort to specifically target these people? Compare the sack of Corinth to the motherfucking holocaust. You could call both a genocide, but one involves the entire Jewish population of continental Europe being rounded up and routed through a bureaucracy dedicated to their murder, while the other was a brutal but totally expected action that happened to obliterate a cultural group. It's demeaning to refer to both as a genocide. With the annihilation of the Cimbri (Or any other tribe), it occurs again that you could totally call it genocide, but at the same time there wasn't any other way it was going to go. They were a migrating tribe that invaded Roman territory. If they lose a war, then everybody is getting killed when the camps are looted because that's pretty much where all the Cimbri are.
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Jul 19, 2013 19:37
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euphronius posted:Every other Roman emperor. The Holocaust has nothing on Vespasian's destruction of Israel at the end of the first Jewish revolt. Yeah, going to have to disagree. Sacking a city and selling the survivors into slavery was kind of a standard operating procedure for cities that resisted. The Assyrians and the Mongols took it to the next level in brutality, but the message was understood all across the ancient world: when we say give us tribute you do it. Whereas the Holocaust is just... Bizarrely and pointlessly cruel. Eliminating 12 million taxpayers and laborers because you don't like the cut of their jibs? Even the Assyrians would scratch their heads at that.
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Jul 19, 2013 20:55
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Litmus Test posted:How was trade / shipping in the med affected by the collapse of the west? It was hurt pretty badly, mostly after the Vandals moved into North Africa. After setting up their power base, the hobby they took up was piracy, sailing about the western med, and generally stirring poo poo up. Their raids on Italy meant that the Empire had to keep an army back in Italy, which was politically disastrous for Rome, since the minute the Emperor left to do stuff in Gaul, the Italian aristocracy would coerce the Italian garrison to revolt and promote it's own Emperor. So now you had these unending problems of Italian and Gaulish aristocracies trying to promote their own candidates.
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Jul 19, 2013 21:09
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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sullat posted:Whereas the Holocaust is just... Bizarrely and pointlessly cruel. Eliminating 12 million taxpayers and laborers because you don't like the cut of their jibs? Even the Assyrians would scratch their heads at that. This is strictly speaking off-topic, but according to Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, by 1942 it had become obvious that there were not enough food available in the Axis-controlled territories to feed everyone, so it was decided to off the "undesirables" considered unfit for hard labour and work the rest to death in concentration camps. That is to say, it was certainly cruel, but there was also a certain callous logic to it - get rid of excess mouths to feed by offing the ones you don't want around anyway first.
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Jul 19, 2013 21:55
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sullat posted:Whereas the Holocaust is just... Bizarrely and pointlessly cruel. Eliminating 12 million taxpayers and laborers because you don't like the cut of their jibs? Even the Assyrians would scratch their heads at that. Or they would be awestruck at the efficiency of it all. The holocaust was an industrialized genocide, and it took some experimentation for the Nazis to get it really going - for instance, just shooting all the undesirables on the spot was turned down as inefficient and too expensive. A genocide of comparable scale and thoroughness couldn't have been accomplished during the bronze age without a large army rummaging over the country for decades. Better to just raze the occasional city to send a message to the others.
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Jul 19, 2013 22:24
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sullat posted:Eliminating 12 million taxpayers and laborers because you don't like the cut of their jibs? This is a beautiful circumcision reference.
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Jul 19, 2013 22:27
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Kopijeger posted:This is strictly speaking off-topic, but according to Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, by 1942 it had become obvious that there were not enough food available in the Axis-controlled territories to feed everyone, so it was decided to off the "undesirables" considered unfit for hard labour and work the rest to death in concentration camps. That is to say, it was certainly cruel, but there was also a certain callous logic to it - get rid of excess mouths to feed by offing the ones you don't want around anyway first. The Nazis had that fact deliberately incorporated into their plans for Barbarossa. They fully intended to starve the Russians to death from before the word go.
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Jul 20, 2013 01:35
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1.) Do we know what were common hobbies in the Roman Empire? Were there coin collectors and gardeners? Did you have rich Senators buying small pleasure boats and then instantly regretting it? 2.) Was tourism a thing? I understand travel would be restricted to the ultra-rich, but were there Romans who traveled around the Empire for fun? 3.) The Most Serene Republic of San Marino supposedly broke away from the Roman Empire in 301 CE. I understand Rome was in the midst of crisis around the time, but did no one think to quash what was essentially a small mountaintop village? Was it just not worth the trouble for anyone surrounding it? The whole story about their foundation sounds more tradition than fact. If so, what is the earliest recorded mention of them? QuoProQuid fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Jul 20, 2013 |
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Jul 20, 2013 05:25
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Kopijeger posted:This is strictly speaking off-topic, but according to Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, by 1942 it had become obvious that there were not enough food available in the Axis-controlled territories to feed everyone, so it was decided to off the "undesirables" considered unfit for hard labour and work the rest to death in concentration camps. That is to say, it was certainly cruel, but there was also a certain callous logic to it - get rid of excess mouths to feed by offing the ones you don't want around anyway first. That same logic to starve the population has a habit of creating partisans. Which in turn has a lot of villages getting wasted by the Germans for resisting. Which causes more partisans. Let's not derail into ww2 though.
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Jul 20, 2013 12:07
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What were some of these other ancient civilizations like in terms of character? Like, say, Babylon or Sumer. What was ancient Persia like from their own perspective, and what did they write about the Romans? How about these smaller groups like the Hittites or Elamites or Medes?
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Jul 21, 2013 06:20
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karl fungus posted:What were some of these other ancient civilizations like in terms of character? Like, say, Babylon or Sumer. What was ancient Persia like from their own perspective, and what did they write about the Romans? How about these smaller groups like the Hittites or Elamites or Medes? In terms of character? Uh... I dunno. Some records are missing. The Shahnameh is a medieval text but based off of a wealth of oral traditions. We've also got some of the Greek writers. You have to pick around his own agenda, but Xenophon's pretty good. He spent a while tramping around there. Mostly poking people with sharp sticks though, so it's probably best to be very careful about what he's saying. I think his description of Mania is pretty revealing as far as gender and the nature of the Persian ruling system goes.
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Jul 21, 2013 11:25
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I was thinking a lot about the whole idea in scholarship and popular opinion of the "Roman Empire" ending and the "Byzantine" empire beginning, and I was thinking that the whole thing hinges on an imaginary immediate transition from a majority Latin-speaking polity centered on Rome to a very much "non-Roman" Greek-speaking state centered on Constantinople. I've made many posts in this thread about how I believe the Roman Empire ended in 1453, not 476, most of which were made in anger and not particularly well phrased. Here's a list I came up with of possible immediate transition points between a "Roman" state and a "non-Roman" entity. In chronological order. 1. Creation of the Principate/majority population of "Rome" being non-native speakers of Latin 2. First non-Italian Emperor 3. First official capital that is not Rome 4. Institution of the dominate 5. First official designation of Constantinople as the Roman capital 6. Increasing reliance on foederati 7. Final division of the Empire into "Eastern" and "Western" halves 8. Last Western Emperor 9. Last Latin-speaking Roman Emperor 10. Abolition of Latin as a language of government 11. Institution of the title of Basileus in an official context 12. Institution of the theme system 13. Direct control over the city of Rome lost for the last time 14. Abolition of the Senate 15. Abolition of the title of Consul Teriyaki Hairpiece fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Mar 31, 2015 |
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Jul 21, 2013 12:28
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I don't think "give the lie" means what you think it does. "Provide an alternative", perhaps. You're also being disingenuous, because there was an immediate transition point in 476 AD: Odoacer deposed the Emperor of Rome and became King of Italy. (In fact, you listed this in your list of alternatives to 476! It's #9.) Given that the Empire based in Constantinople had evolved significantly from the classical Empire based in Rome, it's convenient for scholars to have a way to distinguish the two, and the "Roman Empire" no longer actually having control of Rome is as good a time as any to draw the distinction. I don't think anyone is actually positing that the citizens and administration of the Empire looked at Odoacer and said "welp, I guess we're Byzantines now!" and started speaking Greek. You can challenge the existing orthodoxy (such as it is) about the transition between Roman and Byzantine Empires all you like, but the way you're going about it just makes it sound like you really, really hate the number 476.
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Jul 21, 2013 13:40
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I do think calling it the Byzantine Empire is actively harmful to people's learning and scholarship on the subject. I don't think it's a coincidence that people know dick about the last thousand years of Roman history. Hell, even I don't really know much of anything about it. Also it's just cool that there are still Romans around in the middle ages, come on. Roman armies with flamethrowers!
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Jul 21, 2013 15:22
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All hail Osman Bayezid III, 44th Head of the House of Osman and true Caesar of Rome.
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Jul 21, 2013 15:33
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I do think we can make a break at the Ottomans, since there is no real continuity after that. The imperial title continues but the rest is gone. I had no idea the House of Osman was still around though. I guess it's not that weird since the Ottomans only fell in 1922.
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Jul 21, 2013 15:39
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My friend makes the claim that the Osman conquest of Constantinople does not mean the legitimate transfer of the Roman Imperial title because of cultural differences. Similarly to how Roman emperors claiming the title of 'Sultun of X' ever conquering X doesn't make any sense. Or if Russia conquered the US right now that does not automatically make the Russian president also the POTUS. Anyway, it has been told before that the Ottomans took the Imperial title very seriously, my question; what did their competition say? On the one hand I can imagine the obvious dismissal of heathens taking a 'Christian title' but on the other hand I can see people seeing no reason to piss off that very powerful neighbour and might as well humour them.
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Jul 21, 2013 15:40
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Besesoth posted:I don't think "give the lie" means what you think it does. "Provide an alternative", perhaps.
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Jul 21, 2013 15:53
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The holders of the title in the west were the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, which I believe were the Hapsburgs by then. They of course said the Ottoman claim was bullshit and they were the rightful emperors, as one does in these situations. I don't think anyone in Europe acknowledged it since the Turks were the heathen Islamic horde poised to wash over Europe and eliminate Christendom, as far as anyone in Europe was concerned.
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Jul 21, 2013 15:53
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The Russian Tsar Ivan III had married a Paleologue woman, and so after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, when there weren't any male Palelogues around anymore, Ivan pressed the claim that the title was his. That was a notion that was supported by some Orthodox clergymen. At the same time, the Hapsburgs claimed the Holy Roman Empire was the heir of Rome, through descent from the Carolingians. It was mostly an academic question, though, since the Ottomans held Constantinople and never lost it. Ottoman diplomacy was fairly complex - the Venetians jumped on the bandwagon first and sent an ambassador in 1454, practically before the dust had settled from the conquest of Constantinople. The French came about a century later, and then the English and others as people realized that the Ottomans were loaded with cash and wanted a piece of the action.
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Jul 21, 2013 16:21
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Yeah, the countries that weren't directly threatened by the Ottomans had different policies. The French-Ottoman alliance lasted for like centuries, England didn't give a poo poo, the Venetians just wanted their trade routes. Whereas their neighbors like the Hapsburgs and Russia went at it with the Ottomans constantly.
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Jul 21, 2013 16:31
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cheerfullydrab posted:Took out "gives the lie" because you were right about that. My list isn't supposed to be list of alternatives to 476, it's supposed to ask people when exactly would they decide a transition point. It's supposed to show that #9 isn't as clean a break as is imagined. As for the idea of historians no longer using the name "Roman Empire" because the state centered in Constantinople had no control over Rome, well when exactly would you say that happened? There was definitely a space of centuries where the Roman Emperor in Constantinople ruled over the city of Rome with the Bishop of Rome as his governor and the Exarch in Ravenna holding the military power in the area. Emperor Constans II arrested Pope Martin I in Rome, in 653, and had him carted off to exile in Cherson in the Crimea. He certainly did have control of Rome. A "Byzantine" Emperor. I apologize; I think was unclear. I think that your major point is correct - that it's wrong to not continue to call the empire out of Constantinople the Roman Empire, especially since that's literally what they called themselves. But I think you're going about it the wrong way; the "when did the transition happen?" question is a red herring if what you mean is "there wasn't an actual transition". Offering alternative transitive points isn't going to convince anyone of anything other than that you believe there was a transition! My point in the post above was that if, for the purpose of cultural study, we're going to talk about a transition from Roman to Byzantine, then 476 AD, with the deposition of Romulus Augustus and Odoacer's installation as King of Italy, is a reasonable point at which to do it. If you believe - and, again, I think you're right to do so - that the "Byzantine Empire" was a continuation of the Roman Empire, then 476 AD is just a step in the evolution of the empire, and it should be framed as such rather than one in a multitude of options for a tipping point.
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Jul 21, 2013 16:43
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Is there a reason why some people ITT spell Habsburgs with a p? Not that it bothers me, but it always makes me wonder if it's a pun or if it's spelled differently in some countries...
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Jul 21, 2013 17:44
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Nenonen posted:Is there a reason why some people ITT spell Habsburgs with a p? Not that it bothers me, but it always makes me wonder if it's a pun or if it's spelled differently in some countries... I've seen it spelled both ways in print. I don't know if it's an American English/British English thing or what.
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Jul 21, 2013 17:55
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Nenonen posted:Is there a reason why some people ITT spell Habsburgs with a p? The first b is devoiced to a p in German pronunciation. That's why the other spelling exists.
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Jul 21, 2013 17:55
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Nenonen posted:Is there a reason why some people ITT spell Habsburgs with a p? Not that it bothers me, but it always makes me wonder if it's a pun or if it's spelled differently in some countries... I think "Hapsburg" is the Anglicized version. It's easier for speakers of English to make the "b" voiceless and convert it to a "p".
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Jul 21, 2013 18:00
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How much power did the medieval Roman emperors have, anyway? Were they absolute monarchs or did the senatorial class (were they still called senators after the senate was abolished?) have some kind of check, formal or informal, on imperial authority?
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Jul 21, 2013 18:10
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Deteriorata posted:I think "Hapsburg" is the Anglicized version. It's easier for speakers of English to make the "b" voiceless and convert it to a "p". Everytime I saw "Hapsburg" I honestly thought it was written wrong. Most likely because "Hapsburg" sounds like a dynasty of biters to me, which is ridiculous. ("Happen" is German for "bite" and "Happ!" can be read as onomatopoeia for a bite.) Also the "p" is far to strong for the pronunciation, even in English, so English speakers should just write it the right way and learn the correct pronunciation to avoid confusion. (This is just my personal opinion, by the way.) Sorry, but in short: "Hapsburg" reads and looks terrible, dear English speakers, please stop it.
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Jul 21, 2013 18:15
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