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No ancient civilization had the means to kill literally every member of a nation/ethnicity/race, but then again that's not the definition of genocide either.
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Sep 17, 2013 00:30
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Alekanderu posted:No ancient civilization had the means to kill literally every member of a nation/ethnicity/race, but then again that's not the definition of genocide either. Uh yeah they did. Nations and ethnicities often were very very small population-wise and area of control-wise. It was quite easy to completely wipe them out if you were the Romans or another state with an excessive amount of military strength. As a matter of practice you'd tend to enslave them because they're more useful that way, but it was certainly within their means to kill em all.
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Sep 17, 2013 00:37
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Why is it that Latin based language didn't take hold in North Africa in the long run?
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Sep 17, 2013 02:30
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Muslim conquests, most likely. If that hadn't happened North Africa would probably have remained Latin (west of Egypt anyway) and closely culturally connected to Europe.
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Sep 17, 2013 02:33
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I don't know if you'd call it genocide, but there were plenty of city states that lost wars and had their entire populations killed/enslaved/deported/skinned alive.
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Sep 17, 2013 03:14
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Grand Fromage posted:Muslim conquests, most likely. If that hadn't happened North Africa would probably have remained Latin (west of Egypt anyway) and closely culturally connected to Europe.
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Sep 17, 2013 03:47
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Not that I'm aware of. In North Africa anyway, there are/were little Latin descended languages around Europe. Sardinia or Corsica had one until fairly recently that was very close to classical Latin, if I remember right.
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Sep 17, 2013 03:54
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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. The prehistoric British genocide sounds implausible, do you have a source? It's pretty hard say anything definite about a place and time that left no records. And yeah it's fun to imagine the Assyrians' subjects exacting an awful vengeance in return for their mistreatment, but as far as I know Assyrians still exist even today. Looking around wikipedia their religion survived to the christian period and their language, a dialect of Aramaic, is still spoken by some communities in modern Syria. Not that the Medes and Babylonians didn't wreck Assyria's poo poo but they didn't salt the earth or dismantle their cities brick-by-brick it gets described as in this thread.
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Sep 17, 2013 04:04
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The Assyrian people survived, but the Assyrian empire was thoroughly annihilated.
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Sep 17, 2013 04:08
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sullat posted:Ah, yes Hesiod was complaining about ”kids these days” with their hoplites and their Phoenician alphabet were bring Greece to hades in an amphora. Speaking of Amphora, why did such a seemingly dominate item that was produced on an industrial scale for centuries, fall out of fashion?
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Sep 17, 2013 07:54
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Wolfgang Pauli posted:There are still some descendent languages from Punic surviving among the Berbers (or maybe Tuaregs, I forget). Is there anything like that for Latin? Now that you mention this, it's wryly comic that Punic, a Semitic language, was supplanted by Latin first, then probably some Germanic language (what with the Vandals holding on to North Africa for the better part of the 5th and 6th century) and then again with a Semitic language (Arabic), and outlasted all of them. Anyway, as to how and why a language survives or not, there are a lot of factors that play into this. There might well have been a Romance language surviving in North Africa, and by all means the survival of Romanian is a very unlikely story, but the former didn't happen and the latter did.
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Sep 17, 2013 08:00
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I'd wager that by the time the Vandals made it to North Africa, the language they were speaking was Latin, at least among the upper classes, and likely common amongst the lower folks.
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Sep 17, 2013 08:13
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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They likely used Latin as a vernacular, yes, if only because what we call the 'Vandals' were anything but an ethnically homogenous group of people. Groups like the Vandals, Goths and Huns attracted people from all over the Empire, I'd wager mostly young men down on their luck or looking for adventure.
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Sep 17, 2013 09:38
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Wolfgang Pauli posted:There are still some descendent languages from Punic surviving among the Berbers (or maybe Tuaregs, I forget). What? As far as I know, Punic was dead by the 5th century.
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Sep 17, 2013 12:42
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I think there was some confusion. The Tuareg are mostly oral but have been known to occasionally use Punic script to this day for writing. The Punic language itself is dead and gone, though a few words survive. Gorilla is the only Punic word in English, as far as I remember.
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Sep 17, 2013 13:33
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I think tifinagh descends from the Phoenician alphabet, but that doesn't make it much more Punic than the Greek alphabet.
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Sep 17, 2013 14:10
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People (including me) get excited about the tifinagh-Carthage thing because there just isn't much Punic stuff left to play with period. But yeah, it's really weak. Like having a plastic dog-chewed arm from a Chewbacca action figure, and then pretending it's a whole Chewbacca because that's what you got to work with, and you do, because you really want some Chewbacca right now.
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Sep 17, 2013 15:03
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the JJ posted: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. Oh, I understand that part, it's just that someone claiming the office of Consul in the Roman Republic would get a very real 'well I didn't vote for you' response from the citizenry. Even during the pre-Christian Empire age I imagine people would wonder what the hell you were doing usurping power if all you had was divine mandate. At the very least when someone overthrew the Emperor they could say "the last guy was a total weakling and didn't beat the poo poo out of the Goths enough" or whatever. By the time Christianity took over, though, it was probably more likely for an emperor to say he was God's favorite. Because who was anyone to say otherwise?
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Sep 17, 2013 20:33
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Spain still owns parts of North Africa, so I guess romance languages survive is some small form.
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Sep 17, 2013 20:39
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THS posted:Why is it that Latin based language didn't take hold in North Africa in the long run? Definitely a combination of the Muslim conquests and the resulting cultural drift. Regions tend to take on the language of the dominant culture. For a comparable example, you can look at Britain after Rome abandoned it. The Anglo-Saxon culture basically deletes the Romano-British culture that existed during the Roman occupation, and as a consequence Latin disappears as a common tongue in the British isles. Hence, English is based on Germanic roots, not Latin ones.
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Sep 17, 2013 21:18
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Latin didn't disappear as a common language at all and modern English is heavily influenced by it and even moreso influenced by French which is of course a romance language (with Germanic influence!). http://www.amazon.com/Latin-Alive-Survival-English-Languages/dp/0521734185 euphronius fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Sep 17, 2013 |
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Sep 17, 2013 21:25
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euphronius posted:Latin didn't disappear as a common language at all and modern English is heavily influenced by it and even moreso influenced by French which is of course a romance language (with Germanic influence!). Most of the Latin influence came from the use of Latin as a scholarly language through the medieval period. The Latin influence on pre-1066 English is negligible, but only afterwards becomes more prominent.
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Sep 17, 2013 22:40
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And it's mostly a matter of vocabulary, as well. English is still a resolutely Germanic language at its roots.
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Sep 17, 2013 23:38
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It was the language of the church too, which was a huge institution, don't forget.
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Sep 18, 2013 02:10
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euphronius posted:It was the language of the church too, which was a huge institution, don't forget. But that doesn't mean it was common among the people. It remained liturgical, artistic, scientific, and diplomatic, sure, but it wasn't really spoken as the common tongue. Latin's influence on English is primarily through those channels. That's not an uncommon thing, especially in Britain. Hell, the English court spoke French for hundreds of years after the Norman conquest, but that doesn't mean the common people did. Latin works the same way; sure, it was spoken, but it wasn't the common tongue, and thus wouldn't grow into a new vernacular the way the romance languages did.
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Sep 18, 2013 02:19
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Yep. English has a lot of Romance vocabulary, but the grammar is all Germanic. It's very obvious if you learn German in school like I did, it's very similar. Germanic based words also tend to be used more frequently than Romance ones. English is a mutt but at its roots it is German, and that goes back to the Latin influence in Britain being mostly eliminated after Rome abandons the province.
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Sep 18, 2013 02:26
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There's something that I've always been confused about regarding the Post-Marian Legions. During the late Republican period, especially during the Civil Wars, what did it mean to "raise a legion" for ones use? Meaning how did a general go about doing it? I can see how it worked in Pre-Marian days as you would basically recruit en-masse from the able-bodied population for the duration of a war and then let them return home once it was done. But after Marius this obviously all changed so I can't quite wrap my head around how in such a short span of years so many new legions were raised by all sides. Caesar personally raised a half dozen legions for his campaign in Gaul, Crassus raised a bunch for Parthia. And once Civil War broke out Augustus/Antony/Brutus were raising dozens of legions from all over the place. Did they hold huge recruiting drives from their own controlled territory each time they needed more troops? Was there always a huge pool of unused veterans just hanging around ready to rejoin whoever had the coin to hire them? Did the generals simply let standards slip in terms of training and deveotion just to get more men on their side? Since this was a 25 year commitment I can only imagine so many people being available to just join up at a moments notice. Does my confusion on this make sense? Where the hell did all these legions come from?! Thankfully once the Empire is solidified and the army is capped at 30 standing legions things make far more sense in terms of a standing professional army. Shimrra Jamaane fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Sep 18, 2013 |
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Sep 18, 2013 04:25
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The Entire Universe posted:Oh, I understand that part, it's just that someone claiming the office of Consul in the Roman Republic would get a very real 'well I didn't vote for you' response from the citizenry. Even during the pre-Christian Empire age I imagine people would wonder what the hell you were doing usurping power if all you had was divine mandate. At the very least when someone overthrew the Emperor they could say "the last guy was a total weakling and didn't beat the poo poo out of the Goths enough" or whatever. I... am not getting how this is any different than the Chinese case? It's not like anyone ever responded to 'God told me you should hand over power and I should be in charge' with anything other than 'prove it.' The Roman emperor's position in the religious sphere did matter at least a little bit, see also, Caesar as a god. Also, there's Constantine and the cross. "Look, the new God says he might support me. I'll put his symbol on my poo poo, and if we win, clearly he's the better god. Equally clearly, I'm the better god's chosen ruler."
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Sep 18, 2013 08:04
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Does my confusion on this make sense? Where the hell did all these legions come from?! I don't know that we have any records of the details, but there are a lot of urban poor all over the empire by this point and those are your main source of manpower for the legions. You go into poor neighborhoods and offer people steady work for steady pay and benefits--it probably wasn't that hard to get people to sign up. Plus with auxiliaries you had the offer of citizenship to sweeten the deal, and at this point in history citizenship is still limited to a fairly small percentage of the overall population. Again, I don't know if we have documentary evidence of this but it makes sense to me, going by everything else I know. There are also always going to be veterans around, and a percentage of those would be willing to sign on for another tour. That gives you a ready made group of NCOs to get your new recruits trained. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 08:36 on Sep 18, 2013 |
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Sep 18, 2013 08:33
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:There's something that I've always been confused about regarding the Post-Marian Legions. During the late Republican period, especially during the Civil Wars, what did it mean to "raise a legion" for ones use? Meaning how did a general go about doing it? I can see how it worked in Pre-Marian days as you would basically recruit en-masse from the able-bodied population for the duration of a war and then let them return home once it was done. But after Marius this obviously all changed so I can't quite wrap my head around how in such a short span of years so many new legions were raised by all sides. Caesar personally raised a half dozen legions for his campaign in Gaul, Crassus raised a bunch for Parthia. And once Civil War broke out Augustus/Antony/Brutus were raising dozens of legions from all over the place. Did they hold huge recruiting drives from their own controlled territory each time they needed more troops? Was there always a huge pool of unused veterans just hanging around ready to rejoin whoever had the coin to hire them? Did the generals simply let standards slip in terms of training and deveotion just to get more men on their side? Since this was a 25 year commitment I can only imagine so many people being available to just join up at a moments notice. They just stamped their feet and the legions sprung out of the ground all over Italy.
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Sep 18, 2013 16:55
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Alekanderu posted:No ancient civilization had the means to kill literally every member of a nation/ethnicity/race, but then again that's not the definition of genocide either. Sure they did? The Rwandan Genocide was mostly accomplished by machete.
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Sep 18, 2013 19:22
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Jazerus posted:They just stamped their feet and the legions sprung out of the ground all over Italy. That's as plausible an explanation as I can imagine. Arglebargle III posted:Sure they did? The Rwandan Genocide was mostly accomplished by machete. To be fair it was pretty highly coordinated by radio.
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Sep 18, 2013 19:36
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Alekanderu posted:No ancient civilization had the means to kill literally every member of a nation/ethnicity/race, but then again that's not the definition of genocide either. So how many Iberian celts have you met? Or gaulish celts? Or Etruscans? Or sabines? or....
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Sep 18, 2013 19:46
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Just a side note to everyone who has been following this thread for a while, The History of Rome's follow up podcast, Revolutions, is finally up and running everywhere good podcasts are downloaded. It's done exactly like THOR (in tone at least, the format has changed).
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Sep 18, 2013 19:55
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Agean90 posted:So how many Iberian celts have you met? Or gaulish celts? Or Etruscans? Or sabines? or.... Cultural assimilation is a lot different than killing everyone. To be fair, murdering is part of the process, but th ose cultures became Roman rather than becoming dead.
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Sep 18, 2013 20:08
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Cultural genocide is a form of genocide, and there are also groups that were entirely wiped out. That's not hard when entire groups can consist of just a few villages though. Also I think we had this discussion practically verbatim just a couple of weeks ago.
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Sep 18, 2013 20:19
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Thwomp posted:Just a side note to everyone who has been following this thread for a while, The History of Rome's follow up podcast, Revolutions, is finally up and running everywhere good podcasts are downloaded. It's done exactly like THOR (in tone at least, the format has changed).
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Sep 18, 2013 20:27
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Someone needs to make one of those timeline graphs for the thread, with recurring sections for discussion re how gay/genocidal the Romans were.
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Sep 18, 2013 20:28
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physeter posted:Someone needs to make one of those timeline graphs for the thread, with recurring sections for discussion re how gay/genocidal the Romans were. Genocidal gays? Sign me up 
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Sep 18, 2013 21:03
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Thwomp posted:Genocidal gays? Sign me up Spartans? 
my dad fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Sep 18, 2013 |
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Sep 18, 2013 21:07
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