|
Re: writing, laws and signatures. I'm pretty certain that the Assyrian law codes from around ?2000B.C. Stated that if any man took, bought, or borrowed anything from any other man or slave without a written contract he was a thief and should be put to death. That doesn't directly say that the average dude was literate or would have had a signature to sign such documents with, but it's a possibility.
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 11:41
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 23:10 |
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:Re: writing, laws and signatures. I'm pretty certain that the Assyrian law codes from around ?2000B.C. Stated that if any man took, bought, or borrowed anything from any other man or slave without a written contract he was a thief and should be put to death. Ah yes, the Assyrian law system, build on death like their entire goddamn empire. My personal favorite is still: Breaking and entering being punished by being killed and getting buried under the threshold of the house you broke in. I guess in Assyria, rich people's houses started resembling cemeteries after a while. 
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 11:51
|
|
|
I love the Assyrians. Their brutality is so extreme that it's almost comical. The implications are interesting though. The simple transfer of ownership of physical objects must have been extremely common, as it is in any place were people live. That implies to me that there must have been a pretty large literate class to produce and regulate so much documentation. Of course, the other alternative is that the laws were there for the show of it and ignored in practice. I wonder if we'll ever know?
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 12:02
|
|
|
I feel like Assyria was basically a centuries-long hybrid of the Great Purge and the Reign of Terror only without any of the anti-upper class elements.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 12:15
|
|
|
Assyria was a brutal place, on the other hand I'm sure there was more to the society that we don't see. You could easily pare down many societies to make them look like nothing but murdering psychopaths.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 12:19
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Assyria was a brutal place, on the other hand I'm sure there was more to the society that we don't see. You could easily pare down many societies to make them look like nothing but murdering psychopaths. If you'd only have the formal laws, 17th century Sweden would look like the most brutal place ever because Carl IX made Mosaic law part of the Swedish criminal code, so you could pretty much be put to death for anything. In practice, courts never punished anyone to the full extent of the law though.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 12:36
|
|
|
I was listening to an adaptation of The Aeneid on BBC Radio 4 the other day and got thinking about  love in ancient Rome. From what I understand it was not all that desirable when planning a marriage and was seen as unnecessary and a bit of a joke. Didn't Pompey get the piss ripped out of him constantly because he was greatly in love with his wife? Was there any room in Roman society for love, romance and wooing of the ladies? We hear so much about Roman sex but I never hear much about love and romance. Was love seen as a positive thing or a weakness? Going back to the Aeneid, how would the audience of the time taken the romance between Dido and Aeneas? Would they have read it as a cautionary tale, not to fall in love and be distracted from poo poo that really matters (like war and plunder and quests!) or would they have been outraged by the way Aeneas stone cold dumped her rear end? I know when I heard it I marked Aeneas as a total dick, but imagined Roman readers were cheering him on to get the hell out of that soppy place.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 12:41
|
|
|
My take is that Roman readers would have felt that Dido has some grounds for believing herself wronged, but had terribly over-reacted and misread everything. She takes the consummation of their affair as something binding which requires Aeneas to act as a husband, while he protests that it all should have been formalised. He further argues that it was his destiny and what was commanded of him by the gods; great charges laid upon him which cannot refuse. You do imagine that the bias of Romans who think their race being settled in Italy was rather nice might perhaps incline them towards Aeneas' position of 'This is something I must do'.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 14:00
|
|
|
I don't know very much about archaeology but I'm having a hard time visualizing how continuously inhabited cities can have ruins far enough under the ground that they're discovered when digging subway tunnels and whatnot. I don't get how dirt can just accumulate enough to bury the city or maybe the entire horizon. Does that just occur in certain areas or because of certain events? Do people do it on purpose? Are the reasons for them becoming subterranean linked to why they were abandoned or neglected in the first place? Or is it just something you can count on happening as long as enough time passes?
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 17:28
|
|
|
Without earth moving machinery, getting rid of a building was a pain in the rear end. Typically it would be demolished, leveled, and a new thing built on top. Do this over thousands of years and you have yourself a tell. You also have things intentionally buried and built on, like the Domus Aurea. Other times a natural disaster or something will bury a city, like Pompeii. Or slow natural processes, like Tiber silt gradually burying Ostia.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 17:31
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Without earth moving machinery, getting rid of a building was a pain in the rear end. Typically it would be demolished, leveled, and a new thing built on top. Do this over thousands of years and you have yourself a tell. You also have things intentionally buried and built on, like the Domus Aurea. Other times a natural disaster or something will bury a city, like Pompeii. Or slow natural processes, like Tiber silt gradually burying Ostia. I'm still amazed by the Roman baths at Bath where modern street level and ancient street level can be clearly viewed at the same time. It's pretty great you can walk along, look down this big rear end hole in the ground and see this amazingly preserved bath complex. I want to go back to Bath now, it's one of my favourite city breaks! 
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 18:03
|
|
|
Libluini posted:Ah yes, the Assyrian law system, build on death like their entire goddamn empire. My personal favorite is still: Breaking and entering being punished by being killed and getting buried under the threshold of the house you broke in. I guess in Assyria, rich people's houses started resembling cemeteries after a while. That's also in Hammurabi's code. In addition, if they had pretty ruthless product liability laws... If you built a house and it collapsed and killed a free man, you would be killed. If it killed his son, your son would be killed. Death was the official punishments for most crimes even up to the 1700's, even if it wasn't enforced evenly.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 18:15
|
|
|
sullat posted:That's also in Hammurabi's code. In addition, if they had pretty ruthless product liability laws... If you built a house and it collapsed and killed a free man, you would be killed. If it killed his son, your son would be killed. I think I might have gotten confused there, sorry about that. Honestly, the more I think about it the more I'm convinced it's not even an Assyrian law (but it could be, Wikipedia describes Assyrian law as a lot like Sumerian/Babylonian law, just more brutal. Anyway, after my blunder here a few real Assyrian laws: The Code of the Assura (Excerpts) Boy, living in Assyria as a woman must have been like living in hell. At least they killed rapists, I guess. (Also homosexuals are dead men walking and there is a disturbing amount of mutilation in this short excerpt. And Assyria used lead as a currency? How utterly bizarre.)
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2013 19:42
|
|
|
The Code of the Assura posted:I.37. If a man divorce his wife, if he wish, he may give her something; if he does not wish, he need not give her anything. Empty shall she go out. It just keeps going and going. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 02:24
|
|
|
Yeah. Being a woman in pre-modern times sucked rear end 99% of the time. There were a few cultures that appear to have treated women as equals or even superiors, but emphasis on few. As much as women are mistreated today, there's just no comparison to how bad it used to be.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 02:30
|
|
|
Were there early attempts at feminism?
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 02:50
|
|
|
karl fungus posted:Were there early attempts at feminism? Lysystrata, maybe? Even though it was written by a dude.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 03:09
|
|
|
Women possibly had great status in Crete. No one knows for sure.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 03:25
|
|
|
karl fungus posted:Were there early attempts at feminism? Sappho of Lesbos is a pretty prominent female poet, though kinda adopted more by the LBGT side of things than is is seen as strictly feminist because, well... she's where we get the terms Sapphic and Lesbian so that's a big deal. Sarah Pomeroy's probably the go to for that, and has written a lot of books about it. We have a few cases of rich women being educated by their fathers/husbands and writing note about how absolutely pissed they are about how little respect they earn. The Persepolis tablets are a bunch of administrative records that have the Persian empire paying women laborers at 66% the rate of their male counterparts (as I've jokingly said before, about on par with modern America then) as well as women serving as scribes and overseers, and in those positions they earned on par with men, which is really interesting. There was also a sort of proto-paid maternity leave paid out to the mothers and not the fathers, though having a son was 'rewarded' (compensated?) at twice the rate of pay than girls. Sparta was surprisingly matriarchal. Aristotle bitches at some point that the Spartans have allowed their (weak irrational etc. etc.) women own something like 66% of the land because a. they could own land in the first place and b. their husbands and fathers kept dying so...
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 03:54
|
|
|
Not to get into 300 again but Artemisia I who led Persian naval ships seems like a good thing to look into? Granted she was obviously an exception to the rule and the sequel is probably gonna make her look like Persian Cersei
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 04:17
|
|
|
the JJ posted:Sparta was surprisingly matriarchal. Aristotle bitches at some point that the Spartans have allowed their (weak irrational etc. etc.) women own something like 66% of the land because a. they could own land in the first place and b. their husbands and fathers kept dying so... If I'm understanding you right: Women could own land, wealth, etc. in Sparta - though it's well known Spartans/Spartiates couldn't own (or at least it was heavily discouraged) land / wealth, c/d? If that's right, it makes a fair bit of sense as the dudes are always out 
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 04:18
|
|
|
Yeah, women had a decent amount of rights in Sparta for obvious practical reasons. Athens was the real rear end in a top hat city for Greek misogyny. And there are always exceptions and, especially at the upper classes, special cases. For example, in Rome women were literally property, but if a household's senior men are all dead then the matriarch is legally allowed to run the place and own property and function as a man. That sort of thing happens everywhere.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 04:19
|
|
|
Alan Smithee posted:Not to get into 300 again but Artemisia I who led Persian naval ships seems like a good thing to look into? Granted she was obviously an exception to the rule and the sequel is probably gonna make her look like Persian Cersei Well, she was a subject ruler of Halicarnassus (herodotus's hometown) who led the naval contingent from her city. The only reason she stands out is her clever retreating techniques.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 04:22
|
|
|
Sparta is kind of a bad example since 99 % of women were oppressed helots with little to no rights.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 04:29
|
|
|
Well, most everyone was a Helot and equally hosed male or female.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 04:52
|
|
|
Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:If I'm understanding you right: Well, no, you had to own a certain amount of land to qualify as a Spartan citizen. You hardly ever saw it,your helots worked it, you used all the wealth from it to pay your barrack fees so you could live in the barracks, but you had to have it. This is as close as Aristotle comes to a good point in his spiel, the concentration of land in the hands of women left less full Spartan males going all Though, again, that's a bit chicken and egg because all the Spartan's going also leads to less Spartans in the barracks, or, you know, upright and breathing.As for wealth, well... yeah. Expressed as shiny things or sharp clothes and creature comforts, yeah, not a lot of that around. Expressed as sharp things and shiny clothes,* as well as the free time to get familiar with these things, the Spartans were very wealthy. One of the best ways to measure 'wealth' in pre-modern times is simply square acreage of arable land, and the Spartans had quite a bit of that, especially compared to their neighbors. *er, armor, for those of you not trying to keep up with me trying to be clever. Grand Fromage posted:
Yeah, it's just that it's not a gendered thing.* I'm not, like  ing all over Sparta here.*well, gender was a big deal in Sparta, splitting between warrior/not warrior and all, but economically...
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 05:15
|
|
|
karl fungus posted:Were there early attempts at feminism? How much has the gender breakdown of classicists/historians had to do with our understanding of gender relations in the past? Before I dropped out I noticed that undergrad classes were basically sausage-fests. Do things even out at the postgrad level? the JJ posted:I'm not, like 
Grand Prize Winner fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Sep 1, 2013 |
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 06:51
|
|
|
Libluini posted:And Assyria used lead as a currency? How utterly bizarre. Why would they use lead? Is there some ceremonial relevance to this metal for the Assyrians? I'd understand if they'd use copper or tin, but why lead?
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 08:08
|
|
|
Grand Prize Winner posted:How much has the gender breakdown of classicists/historians had to do with our understanding of gender relations in the past? Before I dropped out I noticed that undergrad classes were basically sausage-fests. Do things even out at the postgrad level? Really? Lots of ladies right now. But yeah, I guess when Pommeroy first came in as a woman and did women in classical stuff, it was a big deal. InspectorBloor posted:Why would they use lead? Is there some ceremonial relevance to this metal for the Assyrians? I'd understand if they'd use copper or tin, but why lead? I mean, it's sorta a fiat currency. Relatively malleable so you can chunk it out, kinda shiny, has some uses...
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 08:34
|
|
|
the JJ posted:I mean, it's sorta a fiat currency. Relatively malleable so you can chunk it out, kinda shiny, has some uses... Also, it poisons you. Oh, I get it now! Yeah, it really is the ideal Assyrian currency, even better than iron (Sparta, remember?)!
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 08:47
|
|
|
The Assyrians were basically the Evil Empire in somebody's really bad fantasy novel. Has anyone ever read Nicholas Guild's two books about an Assyrian prince? Some very not-good historical fiction, that.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 12:15
|
|
|
My point was this statementGrand Fromage posted:Yeah, women had a decent amount of rights in Sparta for obvious practical reasons. Should be heavily qualified. Also Athens is interesting because lower class women had more practical rights than the upper class ones. Kind of an inversion on Sparta.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 13:52
|
|
|
euphronius posted:Also Athens is interesting because lower class women had more practical rights than the upper class ones Did contemporary writers ever comment on that?
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 14:04
|
|
|
Cingulate posted:Can you expand on this a bit? I'm guessing that, if you are lower class than all able bodied humans carry value, if for work than anything else. If you are upper class you can get away with treating women as property. Not saying this is how it worked exactly, but I suspect that is the basis for it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 15:16
|
|
|
Namarrgon posted:I'm guessing that, if you are lower class than all able bodied humans carry value, if for work than anything else. If you are upper class you can get away with treating women as property. Not saying this is how it worked exactly, but I suspect that is the basis for it. Basically, yeah. The more you have to fight for survival, the less you can do stupid poo poo like make half the available workforce useless.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 15:29
|
|
|
Dr Scoofles posted:I was listening to an adaptation of The Aeneid on BBC Radio 4 the other day and got thinking about Catullus wrote a lot of romantic poems, and he was a really respected and well known person in his lifetime. http://rudy.negenborn.net/catullus/text2/e5.htm
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 17:04
|
|
|
Namarrgon posted:I'm guessing that, if you are lower class than all able bodied humans carry value, if for work than anything else. If you are upper class you can get away with treating women as property. Not saying this is how it worked exactly, but I suspect that is the basis for it. Also you get weird things like true Athenian citizen wives being locked up inside to preserve how awesome they were while freedwoman and slaves and resident alien women hung around the philosophers and politicians actually talking about things.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 18:35
|
|
|
One specific subset of women, who were a type of prostitute, did something like that. I suspect that came about because some men thought it would be sexy or amusing to talk about Important Things with a woman, not out of any forward-thinking notions of equality or desire to relax the patriarchy. e: To clarify, I think the notion that allowed for the hetaera was more related to the notion that makes people want to teach parrots to say obscene or absurd things. It's a creature with no intellect saying something it couldn't possibly understand, isn't that hilarious? fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Sep 1, 2013 |
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 18:47
|
|
|
Tao Jones posted:One specific subset of women, who were a type of prostitute, did something like that. I suspect that came about because some men thought it would be sexy or amusing to talk about Important Things with a woman, not out of any forward-thinking notions of equality or desire to relax the patriarchy. Ancient Athenians weren't Startroopers characters, you know? It isn't inconceivable for dude in 400 BC to enjoy talking with women, you know?
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 19:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 23:10 |
|
|
Ras Het posted:Ancient Athenians weren't Startroopers characters, you know? It isn't inconceivable for dude in 400 BC to enjoy talking with women, you know? Yeah, Aspasia seems to have been genuinely intelligent and know for it. Xenophon's got a whole bit in the Hellenika about a woman who takes over for her husband's satrapy and serves very loyally. Her son-in-law offs her (in part because his friends convinced him it was degrading to serve under a woman) and both her Greek mercs and her Persian overlord get pissed and Xenophon's merry band treat the son-in-law very harshly even though he defects to them. (Basically, thanks for this nice city, but since you stole it from your mother-in-law, who was our enemy, it's our poo poo now. Run off to your father's manor since that's all you actually deserve to have.)
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2013 19:44
|
|