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Not every culture began with the color wheel we commonly use today. The early Japanese used to say the sky and seas were green, albeit different shades of green than trees. It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that the Greeks called the sea red. Wikipedia source for blue/green linguistic distinctions here edit: Can't start out a new page without a question! What was the furthest, by distance, contact that was recorded and we know about between the Romans and another civilization? frogge fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 23:32
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Humans of today are physiologically the same as humans of 1,500 years ago are physiologically the same as humans of 150,000 years ago. Not every group perceives the world in entirely the same way, sure; in addition to the subjective/cardinal directions example, I've heard about a case with a forest-dwelling tribe that had basically no concept of distance (a dude was taken out onto an open plain for the first time and, when he saw a far away elephant, thought it was just a bug)- but when someone tells you that people in the past were smarter, or stupider, or could run faster, or fly, or had tails, or were all colourblind or whatever, they're making poo poo up. Homeric Greeks' eyes were no different from our own.bobthedinosaur posted:edit: Can't start out a new page without a question! China is the farthest recorded; it's maaaybe possible they made it as far as Korea or Japan since there have been some Roman trade goods found in those places, but more likely those were just moved on from China. A couple of months back people were talking about the Greeks (or was it Ptolemies?) possibly having circumnavigated Africa too though, for a different direction. But they didn't make it to the Americas if that's what you're asking (although it's possible some northern European fishermen or whatever made it there a while before Erik the Red and the Vikings). Koramei fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 23:45
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Yeah, it's always possible some fishermen made a longer trip, but there's no evidence for any of that, so it's probably Chinese contact.
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Sep 13, 2013 00:27
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Yep. Romans for sure made it at least to Luoyang. They most likely went by ship, so I don't know if Malacca would actually be physically further or what. There's a claim they first went to a Chinese commandery in Vietnam and then on to Luoyang, but I can't read the material so I have no idea.
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Sep 13, 2013 01:10
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Koramei posted:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/shnm/hd_shnm.htm
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Sep 13, 2013 06:11
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Koramei posted:...I've heard about a case with a forest-dwelling tribe that had basically no concept of distance (a dude was taken out onto an open plain for the first time and, when he saw a far away elephant, thought it was just a bug)... Link please, this is interesting in light of cross-cultural studies involving the arrow illusion.
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Sep 13, 2013 08:14
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I'm fairly sure that the forest people not perceiving perspective is one of those urban myths along with Captain Cook's ships being invisible to the Australian aborigines when he arrived there. The human visual system is pretty primitive (in the sense of being fairly tied to our physiology rather than how we develop through social interaction, pretty much all nature and little to no nurture) so it seems very unlikely that these cases would be true based on what (I'm aware of) we know. Of course there are some interesting examples of this sort of thing like the Piraha tribe in South America allegedly not having a concept of recursion (so are actually incapable of processing abstract numbers and can't count d 4-5, which we can easily visually perceive) but that seems quite different from the sort of differences we've been talking about. It's also kind of off-topic at this point beyond I think it's unlikely the Ancient Greeks were all colourblind though it seems quite likely they had very different colour associations than we do. It's also quite possible Greek poetry was using imagery in a very different, more metaphorical way than we usually think of it. Describing the sea as the colour of wine could conjure up all sorts of associations we no longer have and that seems far more likely an explanation than a whole group of people having a relatively severe form of a somewhat rare condition.
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Sep 13, 2013 08:38
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The forest thing sounds like a bastardized version of a study I recall from some psych class. Researchers gave some rural African tribe a bunch of images with a man standing next to an animal, with different perspective cues in the series of pictures. The tribesmen didn't differentiate the images at all and concluded that each animal was the same size. The finding was a result of the tribe having visual arts traditions that excluded perspective, so naturally they didn't get it after being presented with an abstract concept for the first time. Obviously, they had no trouble telling if an elephant was far away or not, they just didn't transpose that idea onto a 2D medium.
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Sep 13, 2013 09:17
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Koramei posted:Humans of today are physiologically the same as humans of 1,500 years ago are physiologically the same as humans of 150,000 years ago. Furthermore, one of the main theories about the evolution of the very essential brain basis of speech within linguistics (which AFAIK barley anybody outside of this school of linguistics subscribes to) assumes that the core of the language faculty spontaneously appeared only 70.000 years ago. Another school of linguistics investigates if and how presumably arbitrary and highly variably cultural categories such as color terminology influence basic, pre-reflective perception of colors (e.g., no single word for blue in contemporary greek so that the difference between light blue and dark blue is as big of a difference to a native speaker of greek as is the difference between green and blue for native speakers of english), or how differences in spatial terminology influence the perception of spatial and temporal relationships. Incidentally, the two schools are sworn enemies. I can go into any of that if anybody cares.
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Sep 13, 2013 09:37
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Cingulate posted:Well, there were some important changes in our genome, such as the development of lactose tolerance in some populations. I love the "scenery" aspect of linguistic development. Greece was heavily into sea commerce and as a result Greek likely developed numerous different terms for specific shades of blue because there was a practical need - describing the sea or the sky for example, or explaining which fish you want to keep and which you toss, etc. It's the basis of that old adage about how the Inuit have a couple dozen words for snow but probably none for cattle, or how maybe a linguistic group such as Germanic didn't have a word for the concept of a Savannah and had to borrow from a language that did once they started trading.
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Sep 13, 2013 12:48
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There are definitely different perceptions and language. I live in Korea, which like Japanese didn't have a word for green until relatively recently. There's a word that means both blue and green, and many green things still sometimes use the word blue. So for example, when there are traffic lights drawn in my students' books, they're often red, yellow, and blue. In reality the colors are exactly the same as in the west, but the green light is called blue in the language and so it's drawn blue. Also, the sun is always drawn red in the books and by students. Not like sunset orangey but flat out blood red at all times, which it clearly is not but the language calls the sun red, therefore it is drawn red despite not being red. I imagine the same thing is going on with Greek.
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Sep 13, 2013 14:19
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Plexiwatt posted:Link please, this is interesting in light of cross-cultural studies involving the arrow illusion. I'll see if I can find it again. I might be misremembering/ maybe the source is complete poo poo (I think I just read it in some psych magazine) but it wasn't just a difference in perception based on extrapolation from an abstraction like the photo example or anything. Cingulate posted:Well, there were some important changes in our genome, such as the development of lactose tolerance in some populations. Hrumph, yeah lactose tolerance and our digestive systems in general seem to be annoyingly malleable (which kinda makes sense really). I don't think there's any evidence the same is true for mental faculties though. And that theory doesn't make any sense to me; wasn't the first great migration well in progress 70,000 years ago? We'd spread through most of Africa at least by that point.
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Sep 13, 2013 15:35
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In a related vein, English had no word for the color orange until the fruit was discovered. The color took its name from the fruit, not the other way around. Prior to that, anything now described as orange was simply called red - a robin's red breast, red hair, etc. So any time you come across something labeled "red" when it's clearly orange, you know it was named before the fruit was discovered.
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Sep 13, 2013 15:36
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I wonder if the color overlapping is due to an earlier linguistic association with both, say, blue and green, with a single ubiquitous thing. We can say something is the color of the sky at sunset, or the color of the sky at midday, but mean two totally different colors when we reference the color of the sky. Perhaps the blue/green thing was a reference to something like river water or the sea near the shore (green) versus deep water (blue) and the context determines which is which.
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Sep 13, 2013 15:53
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Deteriorata posted:So any time you come across something labeled "red" when it's clearly orange, you know it was named before the fruit was discovered.
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Sep 13, 2013 16:25
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Koramei posted:And that theory doesn't make any sense to me; wasn't the first great migration well in progress 70,000 years ago? We'd spread through most of Africa at least by that point. Spontaneous appearance ~70.000 years ago is Noam Chomsky's idea. Most classical linguists, especially almost everyone who has a favourable opinion of Chomsky, are also vehemently opposed to the idea that the vast differences observed in vocabulary for color across time and space correspond to any interesting cognitive differences - meaning, people perceive color exactly the same way, regardless of their words for color. The opposite side, you've certainly heard the term Sapir-Whorf hypothesis before. A prominent contemporary researcher investigating such phenomena would be Steven Levinson, who also just published an article giving a number closer to 1.000.000 BC for the gradual emergence of language. The Entire Universe posted:I love the "scenery" aspect of linguistic development. Greece was heavily into sea commerce and as a result Greek likely developed numerous different terms for specific shades of blue because there was a practical need - describing the sea or the sky for example, or explaining which fish you want to keep and which you toss, etc. It's the basis of that old adage about how the Inuit have a couple dozen words for snow but probably none for cattle, or how maybe a linguistic group such as Germanic didn't have a word for the concept of a Savannah and had to borrow from a language that did once they started trading. The Sami have hundreds and hundreds of words for reindeer though. One problem for your idea wrt. Greece having two words for blue is that Russian, from a less seafaring history, also has two words for blue (or rather, it's better to say they have 0 words for blue, they do not integrate those two color tones into one concept as English does). Of course, it's quite interesting to speculate where such vocabulary might have come from, but it's all speculation. There are two fairly interesting stories here though: first, languages don't all share the same color, but almost all of them, with very few exceptions, follow a hierarchy of color terms. So there are some languages who only have 2 basic color terms. Languages that have 2 colors almost universally have the same 3: kinda-red, dark, white. When languages add a 4th color, they typically add a blue/greeny thing, subdividing the "dark" color; only very rarely is the 4th color a subdivision of kinda-red. Languages with 5th colors typically add yellow. And so on. When you go past 6, languages start doing whatever and it becomes hard to count, but up to that point, it's all very universal. So regardless of any environmental impact, it seems there is something very basal at the bottom of color perception. However, there is a lot of research happening currently showing that different words actually influence how color is perceived to begin with, to some degree. A more historical data point is that, very similar to the mirror image of your speculation, historical linguistics are sometimes used to inform long-range historical analysis. For example, the living circumstances of the proto-indoeuropean tribes were inferred for checking which words with common, shared roots are found in most proto-indoeuropean languages, and for which word various branches have developed their own terms. For example, from shared word roots, it has been hypothesised that the proto-indoeuropean tribes were a patrilinear society that knew animal husbandry and the solid, but not the spoked wheel and worshipped a sky god that later developed into Zeus. There are some absolutely fascinating parallels between nordic and indian myths: the proto-indoeuropeans who invaded india began to worship the Devas over their war-like Asuran brothers, the nordic tribes worshipped the proud Æsir over the treacherous Vanir. Similarly, Johanna Nichols has tried to investigate very ancient (100.000BC) migrations by comparing the spread of rare linguistic features. She's calculated how quickly languages diversify and change, and from that, has tried to explain for example the time course of the exploration of the Americas.  Here is a nice, if a bit outdated, summary: http://sciencenotes.ucsc.edu/9901/echoes/echoes.htm So that's my story, I hope the history thread liked it. Edit: here is a critical discussion of a study claiming that the Victorians had higher IQ than us: http://deevybee.blogspot.de/2013/05/have-we-become-slower-and-dumber.html Cingulate fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 17:37
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Koramei posted:I'll see if I can find it again. I might be misremembering/ maybe the source is complete poo poo (I think I just read it in some psych magazine) but it wasn't just a difference in perception based on extrapolation from an abstraction like the photo example or anything. It's not a myth, rather the story is from Colin Turnbill's ethnographic study of the Mbuti pygmies of Northeastern Congo. In his book "The Forest People," Turbill recounts how at the end of his fieldwork he went on a central African road-trip with a local friend/informant, during which his friend was extremely confused by pretty much everything. The passage in question: Colin Turnbill posted:Kenge could not believe they were the same mountains that we I don't think this passage suggests anything especially weird, for example there's no reason to assume Kenge literally believed the buffalo to be insects, but it is interesting nevertheless.
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Sep 13, 2013 17:40
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Cingulate posted:Before I say linguistic things about the color stuff: in some older Germanic verses, gold seemingly wasn't a color yet, and they'd call gold red, not yellow. So they'd say, she had hair as red as gold ... Well the color of gold can be highly affected by alloying it with silver and copper. Copper will give you a very copperish red gold, and given how crude ancient era smelting techniques were, it wouldn't be that surprising if most of their gold was roughly the same color as someone with copper red hair.
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Sep 13, 2013 21:18
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Sorry if it's been asked before, but are there any good, accessible biographies on Cicero worth reading? I've read Anthony Everitt's book on Augustus and am finishing off Tom Holland's Rubicon right now - both of these have been easy and engaging reads, so I'm hoping for a similar thing for old Cicero. Wanna read about his sick burns in court!
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Sep 14, 2013 20:14
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Koramei posted:I'll see if I can find it again. I might be misremembering/ maybe the source is complete poo poo (I think I just read it in some psych magazine) but it wasn't just a difference in perception based on extrapolation from an abstraction like the photo example or anything. DRD3 gene, which encodes a dopamine receptor and has been linked to attention among other behaviors, has the prevalence of the short allele heavily linked to how long youve been practicing agriculture. Hunter gatherer tribes are usually 90+% for long or repeating allele. East asians have nearly a 100% short allele.
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Sep 14, 2013 20:54
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Dr Scoofles posted:Sorry if it's been asked before, but are there any good, accessible biographies on Cicero worth reading? I've read Anthony Everitt's book on Augustus and am finishing off Tom Holland's Rubicon right now - both of these have been easy and engaging reads, so I'm hoping for a similar thing for old Cicero. Wanna read about his sick burns in court! Anthony Everitt has a biography of Cicero. I personally didn't like it -- a lot of popularizing history books play a little too fast and loose for my taste -- but if you liked his Augustus book, you might enjoy it.
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Sep 15, 2013 01:48
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This might be a silly question but when I was a kid I remember having large books about Rome and other ancient & classical cultures that I've since lost. I'm talking huge glossy pictures and broad subject matter. Does anyone have any recommendations for something like that I could purchase off Amazon?
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Sep 16, 2013 00:41
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The Romans loved Egypt, they loved its history and its religion and all that. But did the Romans consider the Ptolemies Egyptians, or Greeks? In fact did the Ptolemies cosider themslves Egyptians or as Greeks? 'Modern' historians certainly make great play about how the Ptolemies were Greek speakers, didn't at all integrate, but still, they were the ruling dynasty of Egypt for centuries. Whenever anyone at that time thought of the Egyptians they must have thought of the Ptolemies.
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Sep 16, 2013 01:04
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mediadave posted:The Romans loved Egypt, they loved its history and its religion and all that. But did the Romans consider the Ptolemies Egyptians, or Greeks? In fact did the Ptolemies consider themselves Egyptians or as Greeks? 'Modern' historians certainly make great play about how the Ptolemies were Greek speakers, didn't at all integrate, but still, they were the ruling dynasty of Egypt for centuries. Whenever anyone at that time thought of the Egyptians they must have thought of the Ptolemies. Greeks. Even though they adopted the stylings of Egyptian culture (even some of the more controversial ones, like marrying siblings), the Ptolemies never forgot their Greek heritage. In fact, they tended to favor Greeks over native Egyptians throughout society, most notably in the army where they only enlisted native Egyptian troops under a perceived need (like with the Battle of Raphia against the Seleucids). This is largely true of most of the Diadochi. A Greek core was a necessary feature of any Hellenistic army, because the core of the army was the sarissa-armed pike phalanx (thanks to Philip and Alexander), and they generally didn't trust the natives with such an important position. Consequently, attracting Greeks to settle in their lands was a sort of meta-conflict among the Successor Kingdoms. Quite a few Seleucid cities, including possibly Antioch, were founded as Greek colonies, which you can consider to be very roughly equivalent to a Roman colonia, at least in some purposes: exportation of the culture, and -- much more importantly -- introduction of a staple of recruits that can be raised as needed. The Ptolemies did the same, or expanded existing cities. Meanwhile, the official tongue was not Egyptian, it was Greek. Also, you can't forget that despite taking on the trappings of Egyptian culture, the Ptolemies were simultaneously introducing Greek elements into the religion (see: Serapis), restructuring the government, and integrating Greek culture into Egypt along the traditional Hellenistic model. They built theaters, gymnasiums, and all the other usual Greek additions. Basically, they talked the talk and walked the walk, but in the end they were still Greek, and they knew it. (So did the Romans. They referred to all the Successors as Greeks because they were.) Gonkish fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Sep 16, 2013 |
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Sep 16, 2013 02:31
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The Ptolemies very much considered themselves Greeks, beyond even the rest of the successor states. Cleopatra the 7th, i.e. the one we all know, was very famously the first of them to even speak Egyptian. And since she was the very last of the Ptolemies, well, yeah, that should give you an idea. Most occupying forces will over time slowly integrate into their new cultures, even if they're still the dominant force, but the Ptolemies did no such thing- like, just take a look at their family tree (ladder). Not sure I agree with Gonkish on what the Romans thought of them though- don't you have all these Romans gettin' down on Caeser and Marc Antony because of their relationship with this "woman from far to the east"?
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Sep 16, 2013 02:44
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It wasn't just the Ptolemies in Egypt; Alexandria was pretty much a Greek city. It sounds strange to modern ears, but at the time Greece wasn't a country or piece of geography, like it is today. It was a shared culture and language that stretched around the Med. Modern Egypt, Sicily, Italy, Turkey, France, Spain, and more all had Greek cities.
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Sep 16, 2013 02:49
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Koramei posted:Not sure I agree with Gonkish on what the Romans thought of them though- don't you have all these Romans gettin' down on Caeser and Marc Antony because of their relationship with this "woman from far to the east"? See, the Romans had this weird association with the word "Greek". On the one hand, they recalled the glories of Greece's Golden Age, as we still do. They keenly remembered, and sought to emulate, Alexander. Then, once Rome has settled it's issues with Carthage and begins expanding into the East, they come across these "degenerate" Greek kingdoms. The Greeks did things that these early-ish, austere Romans considered scandalous: eunuchs everywhere, claiming themselves as living gods (as the Ptolemies did), etc. To those Romans, these "Greeks" were a degenerate race that betrayed their own cultural achievements, and wallowed in excess. So, all at once, the Romans consider Greek culture, or, more specifically, CLASSICAL Greek culture to be worthy and admirable, but HELLENISTIC Greek culture to be much less so. The Romans believed that their own, simple, austere, Republican qualities were what lead them to success over the decadent, effeminate, "tyrannical" (for a Republican, any king is a tyrant), eunuch-laden Greek kingdoms of the East. It wasn't just a matter of beating the hell out of them on the battlefield, it was CULTURE SUPERIORITY. That's what the Romans wanted to believe, at least. Octavian's propaganda focused on this prejudice -- which still remained in the first century B.C. -- as an avenue with which to attack Antony in the minds of the people, and thereby weaken his political position. That propaganda barrage is one of the most successful in history, and one of the most effective. He turns Antony from a hero of the Republic, the avenger of Caesar and beloved friend of the people into Antony the debauched, wine-laden, bewitched fool who was guilty of one of the worst crimes any true Roman could be accused of: "going native". That Cleopatra was a wily, intelligent, and mesmerizing woman from a strange, animal-worshipping culture just aided the fact. Remember, Octavian's own adoptive father, Julius loving Caesar, got it on with Cleopatra and yet we remember his tryst much differently than Antony's. Why? Octavian. He wielded propaganda like Antony wielded armies, and he won. He won, and he wrote the histories. That Antony basically handed him this victory was all the better. With publicly abandoning his wife and child (Octavian's own sister, at that) for an eastern "witch", whom he dallied with in the East for years while ignoring Rome entirely Antony basically wrote the script for Octavian. Don't even get me started on the Donations of Alexandria. That Cleopatra was Greek is not really the crux of the issue: she was a foreign queen. A witch. Someone not to be trusted, and someone who was definitely NOT Roman. She seduced Antony and made him abandon his proper, Roman ways (even though, if Cicero's Philippics are to be believed, he was already plenty debauched). That was the crime. That was what Octavian used. No one cared that she was Greek. They just cared that she wasn't ROMAN, and now, neither was he. So, in short: Greek cultural achievements (think: Athens, Pericles, Alexander, all of that) were admirable, contemporary Greek societies (read: the perceived weak, effeminate nature of the Hellenistic kings) not so much. Rome won because she was culturally and morally superior, not just because she fought better. Romans loved to see themselves as righteous, even if that was just dressing (see: the siege of Saguntum and their entry into the Second Punic War). Gonkish fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Sep 16, 2013 |
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Sep 16, 2013 03:34
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BurningStone posted:It wasn't just the Ptolemies in Egypt; Alexandria was pretty much a Greek city. It sounds strange to modern ears, but at the time Greece wasn't a country or piece of geography, like it is today. It was a shared culture and language that stretched around the Med. Modern Egypt, Sicily, Italy, Turkey, France, Spain, and more all had Greek cities. All of the maritime Mediterranean cultures were more or less like this until the Romans came along and absorbed everybody, and it was even more common pre-Alexander. Carthage was a Phoenician city-state; you had Greek city-states all over the place, and so on. Land-centric dudes like the Romans and Macedonian Greeks were interested in having a contiguous state but the maritime cultures were more interested in plopping down cities wherever it would be profitable. This isn't to say that they didn't care about territory, but territory that wasn't coastal and wasn't worth anything just didn't matter a lot of the time. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Sep 16, 2013 |
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Sep 16, 2013 05:19
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Gonkish posted:So, in short: Greek cultural achievements (think: Athens, Pericles, Alexander, all of that) were admirable, contemporary Greek societies (read: the perceived weak, effeminate nature of the Hellenistic kings) not so much. Rome won because she was culturally and morally superior, not just because she fought better. Romans loved to see themselves as righteous, even if that was just dressing (see: the siege of Saguntum and their entry into the Second Punic War). Nice post. The interesting thing is that the way the Romans saw the Greeks was replicated in the way the Greeks saw the Persians and Egyptians: their past achievements were worthy of note (the life of Cyrus the Great or the monumental feats of architecture, respectively) but their contemporary Persiand and Egyptians were a craven, decadent lot.
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Sep 16, 2013 08:59
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Would that mandate/superiority claimed by various cultures be something related to the mandate of heaven where a ruler extrapolates that into their culture being the right and true way to live over the god(s)less ways of <whoever>, as opposed to just their rule being divinely favored over the next guy? Or were gods and morals separated back then and the whole idea of cultural superiority fairly unique to Mediterranean cultures?
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Sep 16, 2013 13:19
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It's dangerous applying such a specific concept as the Mandate of Heaven to other cultures where it didn't exist. They definitely saw there being a mortal-divine connection, and the gods were active players in the universe. But I think largely it's the human tendency to look back at a golden age and lament how much worse everything is now. You find that in basically every culture forever. There are records of people lamenting the popularization of writing and how it's going to turn everyone's brains to mush in practically the same language people use about the internet today. There's a Greek complaining about kids these days in indistinguishable language from a modern grump, 2500 years ago. It's just our nature for some reason.
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Sep 16, 2013 13:26
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Ah, yes Hesiod was complaining about ”kids these days” with their hoplites and their Phoenician alphabet were bring Greece to hades in an amphora.
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Sep 16, 2013 18:02
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Grand Fromage posted:It's dangerous applying such a specific concept as the Mandate of Heaven to other cultures where it didn't exist. They definitely saw there being a mortal-divine connection, and the gods were active players in the universe. But I think largely it's the human tendency to look back at a golden age and lament how much worse everything is now. You find that in basically every culture forever. There are records of people lamenting the popularization of writing and how it's going to turn everyone's brains to mush in practically the same language people use about the internet today. There's a Greek complaining about kids these days in indistinguishable language from a modern grump, 2500 years ago. It's just our nature for some reason. Good point. It probably isn't really feasible to assign heavenly mandate to something like Rome or Greece where people knew their rulers were there because of largely human action. Also the idea of Cato the Younger lamenting those young whippersnappers is hilarious, with their unkempt togas and their dirty populist ambitions - whippersnappers not much younger than he was because Cato probably came out of the womb with a list of overblown societal ills to complain about given his lineage.
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Sep 16, 2013 19:20
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I heard that bronze and pre-bronze age cultures often did not consider human life inherently valuable, so they had no qualms about committing mass genocide when it suited their needs. How true is that? And if its actually true, when did that begin to change? Also, this is a fantastic thread, thanks to everyone involved!
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Sep 16, 2013 19:40
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Given that I don't think there's any real evidence of any sort of mass genocide in the bronze or pre-bronze age, that seems like a peculiar statement. The one thing that comes to mind was stamping out the memory of the Assyrian empires, but that was much more of a cultural genocide than a 'kill all Assyrians' genocide. On the face of it, the whole thing seems kind of ridiculous, akin to saying the Greeks were all colorblind (see above). Even in cultures that were somewhat obsessed with killing people for whatever reason (Triple Alliance, I'm looking in your direction), human life still had value, it was just value for a completely different purpose. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Sep 16, 2013 |
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Sep 16, 2013 19:58
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As far as I remember it, the argument involved the genocide references in the old testament and also something about modern nomadic tribes in papua new guinea not having a taboo on killing humans that are not part of the tribe. Also something about a prehistoric genocide of the stonehenge people in Britain. Pretty vague.
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Sep 16, 2013 20:31
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And given that modern civs carpet bomb cities and stuff, I can see the same argument being made by future historians, as they huddle amongst the shattered ruins of our great works.
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Sep 16, 2013 20:40
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The Entire Universe posted:Good point. It probably isn't really feasible to assign heavenly mandate to something like Rome or Greece where people knew their rulers were there because of largely human action. Eh, the Mandate of Heaven sprang up after the Zhou kicked out the Shang and felt the need to put some ideological dressing on it so they didn't have to dismantle the Shang system and start over from scratch. The whole point of the idea is that it could be won or lost by human action, and it's got an ex-post facto thing going. If I take power in a coup, Heaven mandated it. If I catch my vizier plotting a coup and have him arrested, he was trying to rebel against the true Emperor, so Heaven ensured he was caught and punished. Likewise, "the people in charge are in charge because the gods want them to be so sit down and shut up" or variants thereof has been a favorite of conservative upper classes for a good long while. Xenophon, for instance is big on everyone playing their assigned part, which means that the gods want kings to rule and reward their followers, but also those followers were obliged to obey.
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Sep 16, 2013 20:50
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Gonkish posted:That Cleopatra was Greek is not really the crux of the issue: she was a foreign queen. A witch. Someone not to be trusted, and someone who was definitely NOT Roman. She seduced Antony and made him abandon his proper, Roman ways (even though, if Cicero's Philippics are to be believed, he was already plenty debauched). That was the crime. That was what Octavian used. No one cared that she was Greek. They just cared that she wasn't ROMAN, and now, neither was he.
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Sep 16, 2013 22:35
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waitwhatno posted:As far as I remember it, the argument involved the genocide references in the old testament and also something about modern nomadic tribes in papua new guinea not having a taboo on killing humans that are not part of the tribe. Also something about a prehistoric genocide of the stonehenge people in Britain. Pretty vague. Obviously, it is impossible to get anything resembling an accurate statistic for infant and child mortality in the ancient world, but I've heard estimates that 20-30% of infants and children would die before reaching their 25th birthday, and those estimates ring true for me. Between war, famine, and disease, I think that the cultural perspective on death was much different than it is today, where that same mortality rate would be potentially less than 1%. We just see death much less than someone in the ancient world, so I would say that we are just far less inured to it than they were. As for the statements about pre-modern genocide, I think you have to be careful about differentiating between the so-called "cultural genocide"and the genocide of the people who had that culture. The former occurred occasionally throughout history (the Assyrians being a well-known example) but I would argue that genocide as we define it today was not possible in the ancient world. First, our modern concept of a culture is far more rigid than the concept the ancient peoples had. Culture was very fluid in the ancient world. When X conquered Y, the people of Y would adopt the laws and customs of X, often under threat of violence. The people who continued to keep the customs of Y were liable to be killed, enslaved, or exiled because to keep those customs was a rebellious act. X was concerned far more with keeping order and gaining whatever benefit they wanted from Y than in stamping out the Y culture. Only in extreme examples do we see the kind of damnatio memoriae imposed on the Assyrians, and they were assholes of the highest order for centuries. Even then, the Assyrians continued to be a distinct people for quite a while after the Assyrian Empire fell. This brings me to the second reason why I don't think there can be genocide in the ancient world. The technology just was not present to pull it off. Even if a king with an army wanted to eradicate an entire group, armies were much smaller and their armaments less advanced comparatively to those of the people they would be trying to eradicate. If said genocidal king truly wanted to kill them instead of just taking their land and possessions, it would be extraordinarily difficult to prevent the group being killed from just fleeing for their lives to the nearest friendly area. It is only with the advent of modern industry that such abominable undertakings become possible.
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Sep 16, 2013 22:49
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