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Berke Negri posted:Content! how close are the romance languages we have now to vulgar latin and when can we see divergence? I was under the impression that the romance languages were already pretty under way (also: italian) long before what we consider the middle ages. Content, yes. Vulgar Latin pronunciation already differed from Classical Latin conventions (in both spelling and pronunciation) by the start of Roman literature, but the Latin we now recognise was basically moulded around the time of Cicero, Caesar et al. So throughout the Republic and Empire you already had two or more standards, and the gulfs became ever wider with the expansion of Roman rule and Latin speaking communities. The point of clear divergence between the modern Romance languages came later, and you can't really pinpoint a specific time period. Sardinian perhaps diverged first, and it's really peculiar at retaining the classical pronunciation of C as /k/ always, and also has some strange and antiquated grammar things. Then by Late Empire you already had these dialects moving further from each other, and by the beginning of the Middle Ages (say the 800s) you already had recognisable French, Italian and Spanish, but it wasn't written down much so we have very sparse evidence. One way to visualise the change is to look at the aforementioned palatalisation of C before E or I. It changed from /k/ to something like /ky/ (the English Y, like in "yes"), then to /ty/, then to /ts/ or /tsh/, as in Modern Italian. "Cecco", pronounced "checco". In Parisian French it changed further, into plain /s/. In Spanish... Well, it did all sorts of things, but today in European Spanish C and Z (different spellings for the same phoneme) have changed so much from Classical Latin /k/, that they're now pronounced like English "th". Latin American Spanish inherited the Andalusian pronunciation of it as /s/, like in French. So you had this stuff as basically distinct by the Middle Ages, but all of the languages have obviously changed further since then. That illustrates the differences in terms of geography well enough, I think. Then between my three examples you have languages like Occitan and Catalan, which sort of fall between all three... But yes, the process was well under way not just during the Empire, but Vulgar Latin was very different from Classical Latin already during the Republic.
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Oct 12, 2013 17:16
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Language diverged much more then since people were more isolated, also. Think of the range of accents in England, and consider there was a time when you'd travel 30 miles in any direction and it wasn't just a new accent, it was a different language. Possibly related enough you could kind of get what was going on, but it was absolutely not what people in your village spoke. Latin fragmented like that, and then things consolidated again later when larger states began to emerge and the dominant groups in them forced their language on everybody (France is a good example if you are interested). Also, there were large parts of the empire where it's likely there were local languages that remained among the population and weren't recorded, while Latin was the language everyone learned to function in society. It's hard to say since it doesn't make it into the histories, but I'd bet most Romans were multilingual. We know that anyone considered educated spoke Greek and Latin, and you have to split Latin into Vulgar Latin and Classical Latin for those people as well at a certain point. And if that educated Roman was from, say, Syria, he probably also knew whatever people in Syria spoke. Aramaic? I have no idea. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 17:25
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Grand Fromage posted:Language diverged much more then since people were more isolated, also. Think of the range of accents in England, and consider there was a time when you'd travel 30 miles in any direction and it wasn't just a new accent, it was a different language. Possibly related enough you could kind of get what was going on, but it was absolutely not what people in your village spoke. Latin fragmented like that, and then things consolidated again later when larger states began to emerge and the dominant groups in them forced their language on everybody (France is a good example if you are interested). Yeah, you used to have a dialect continuum stretching from Portugal to Croatia, where neighbouring communities' dialects never differed all that much, but the clear differences between larger dialect families only became clear at longer distances. That's pretty much gone now, since only Italy really retains a great amount of diverse dialects.
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Oct 12, 2013 17:31
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Arglebargle III posted:Actually killing all the construction workers was his fuckstick son's idea, according to Sima Qian. He also had a bunch of young women sacrificed to be his dead dad's concubines in the afterlife. The tomb wasn't sealed up until 9 months after Qin Shi Huang died, and parts were still under construction when they gave up and buried him. If I remember correctly, there are records of some of his semi-barbarian forefathers also being buried with their followers, though the practice had been abandoned several hundred years before the First Emperor
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Oct 12, 2013 18:24
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Hooray for Japanese phonetics!
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Oct 12, 2013 18:32
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So is it fair to assume that modern languages with the same name share almost nothing with their ancient counterparts? I know that modern Greek has very little to do with ancient Greek, and that there have been some consanant shifts in Japanese from the middle ages to now (it's why Japan is called Nihon about as often as Nippon IIRC), but does say, ancient Chinese have as much to do with modern Chinese as Latin does to Italian?
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Oct 12, 2013 18:51
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Don Gato posted:So is it fair to assume that modern languages with the same name share almost nothing with their ancient counterparts? I know that modern Greek has very little to do with ancient Greek, and that there have been some consanant shifts in Japanese from the middle ages to now (it's why Japan is called Nihon about as often as Nippon IIRC), but does say, ancient Chinese have as much to do with modern Chinese as Latin does to Italian? You'd have to start by working out which dialect is in use first. There's a fairly wide range of them, which sound as distinct as different languages, but which use the same basic writing system.
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Oct 12, 2013 19:05
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Hey yo, since we're on Chinese stuff now: Way earlier in the thread (I haven't really buckled down and read this thread in weeks, if not months) someone mentioned Romans briefly coming in contact with the Chinese. What was that all about?
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Oct 12, 2013 19:22
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Babe Magnet posted:Hey yo, since we're on Chinese stuff now: The ancient world was actually pretty interconnected. There were times when the Chinese dynasties would reach westward along this strip between Mongolia and Tibet, the Romans had their periods of expansion East. At one point you could go from China to Persia to Rome without any intervening polities.* Persian/Chinese and Roman/Persian contacts were not uncommon and individuals could trek the whole Silk Road. There were many Nestorian and Zoroastrian churches in the Tang capital, for instance. Anyway, one of the most famous contacts is Grand Fromage's favorite story, the monks smuggling mulberry and silkworms out of China and eventually into Rome. *This is a horrendous lie, because peripheral areas always have some aspect of regional rule/subsidiary but not integrated locals going on, but...
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Oct 12, 2013 23:10
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When I stopped reading, there was talking going on about telling that story someday. I missed it, apparently. Can I get a recap? That sounds hilarious.
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Oct 12, 2013 23:14
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Babe Magnet posted:When I stopped reading, there was talking going on about telling that story someday. I missed it, apparently. Can I get a recap? That sounds hilarious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire
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Oct 12, 2013 23:55
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Grand Fromage posted:Right now excavating a site irrevocably damages it, no matter how careful you are. We consider the information worth the damage in general, but some sites are thought to be too important to touch yet. The rest of Pompeii is left buried until there's better technology to preserve it and the Italian government can afford to actually do it properly, and Qin's tomb is also being left alone until the Chinese are confident it can be properly preserved. That doesn't really answer my question. Are they waiting until they can excavate in light-proof oxygen-proof positive pressure environment (can be done now for $$$)? Do they want the ability to x-ray artifacts and identify all structure and pigments so they don't have to remove surface matter from them (near future)? Do they want to make a holographic model accurate to individual atoms using some ground penetrating sensors so they don't have to excavate at all (far future)? What's the desired objective?
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Oct 13, 2013 01:50
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It doesn't really answer your question because there's not a group of OCD archaeologists with incredibly precise criteria for what constitutes acceptable recovery with a timeline to when they think they'll be able to do it. It can't be done correctly right now, so let's wait and see if it can be done correctly in the future. Eventually, either some really cool innovations will come down the pike and it can be done the right way, or else someone will get tired of waiting and it will be done the wrong way.
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Oct 13, 2013 02:42
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Don Gato posted:So is it fair to assume that modern languages with the same name share almost nothing with their ancient counterparts? I know that modern Greek has very little to do with ancient Greek, and that there have been some consanant shifts in Japanese from the middle ages to now (it's why Japan is called Nihon about as often as Nippon IIRC), but does say, ancient Chinese have as much to do with modern Chinese as Latin does to Italian? Not being a huge expert on any one area of the Chinese language, I'm not exactly qualified, but I can share some of the stuff I've heard. From Wiki, it seems there's a distinction between Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, and Modern Chinese. Modern Chinese is a clusterfuck of languages and "dialects", but several of the major ones would appear to come out of Middle Chinese. Middle Chinese has a lot in common with these, including restrictive syllable construction rules and four tones. Old Chinese is where things get interesting. It was actually toneless and syllable construction was a lot more similar to Western languages in that a hell of a lot more consonants could be used as both initial sounds and final sounds. Chinese operates on the assumption that one sound is one meaning, but this is basically impossible in modern Mandarin because of how limited the number of possible syllables is, even with tones. Several words are now polysyllabic. In Old Chinese, this wouldn't have been an issue. There were more consonants available in general and they could be used at both the beginning and the end of a syllable. Compare that to Modern Chinese where consonants like "L" can never finish a syllable like they could in English.
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Oct 13, 2013 02:50
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Captain Postal posted:That doesn't really answer my question. What? How does that not answer your question? He said exactly why they're not excavating it now- they will damage it. Qin Shi Huang's tomb is one of the most significant historical sites in the world, and an incredibly important part of Chinese history and culture. The information within it isn't going anywhere now- by leaving it, future generations will be able to get a more complete picture. It's wonderful that archaeologists have that kind of foresight now- if only it had been like that in the past. edit ^^ beaten Fornadan posted:If I remember correctly, there are records of some of his semi-barbarian forefathers also being buried with their followers, though the practice had been abandoned several hundred years before the First Emperor This actually happened all over the world- I guess being buried with people was a pretty sure sign of your own power, or something? The Egyptians used representative figures in tombs for most of their history, but their earliest kings had their actual servants and retainers buried with them- and for the over the top example, take a look at stories about Genghis Khan's tomb. 10,000 workers and soldiers were killed, and then all the guys that executed them were killed too, so that nobody would know where he was buried.
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Oct 13, 2013 02:50
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Fornadan posted:If I remember correctly, there are records of some of his semi-barbarian forefathers also being buried with their followers, though the practice had been abandoned several hundred years before the First Emperor Sorry I wasn't clearer about it but yes, the Shang dynasty practiced human sacrifice as part of burial rituals. You can tell who was dead when they went into the tomb and who was killed since the sacrifices all have a neat little rhomboid puncture wound in the side of their skull. They match up very nicely with the bronze halberd heads the Shang left everywhere. When I was at the museum at the site they had a diorama of a sacrificed guard. They think the sacrifices would actually climb into their little grave and kneel upright, and be instantly dispatched by a good whack in the head by a halberdier standing above and behind them. The graves aren't big enough lie down in. I'm not sure what articulation they found the bones in but I guess it convinced them that they were killed in situ and not killed elsewhere and then arranged for burial. To give you an idea of how a halberd could produce a clean wound, here's a bronze ge head. It would have a separate spear point on the pole. It's a piercing weapon so if you whacked somebody in the head it could produce a smallish wound while still being totally lethal. 
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Oct 13, 2013 |
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Oct 13, 2013 03:00
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Lewd Mangabey posted:It doesn't really answer your question because there's not a group of OCD archaeologists with incredibly precise criteria for what constitutes acceptable recovery with a timeline to when they think they'll be able to do it. It can't be done correctly right now, so let's wait and see if it can be done correctly in the future. Eventually, either some really cool innovations will come down the pike and it can be done the right way, or else someone will get tired of waiting and it will be done the wrong way. Yep. No one knows what the technology will bring, and there's also no single thought all archaeologists share. Some think the risk is worth it and want to dig now, others don't, and what would be considered an acceptable amount of damage would vary depending on who you're talking to and also what government authorities are involved. Right now there's a lot of love for ground penetrating radar and other related technologies since they let you get a good view of a site without digging at all. There are a number of archaeologists and scientists working in that direction, hoping to develop the technology to the point where sites can be scanned with such detail that there's no need to excavate. I get that but I also hope it doesn't totally go that way because I want to see it all for real, man.
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Oct 13, 2013 03:03
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This is where, if you're primarily interested in Rome in its prime, things are going to get interesting, because China's golden years of the classical era, the Han dynasty, coincide with Rome's greatest years as well. Happenings in China will impact Rome in subtle but important ways, like the reign of The Martial Emperor of Han opening up the silk road from a trickle to a flood. I'll probably stop the history updates at the end of the Han, since there's so much to get through here and, like Roman history, when it all comes apart in the 3rd century things are going to get confusing and lead off in a lot of directions and not come back together for a very long time. The Early Han Dynasty: 206 BC-156BC The Han dynasty picks up almost where the Qin dynasty leaves off, but it's far more prosperous and stable and lasts 400 years rather than 12. This is another theme we'll see repeated in Chinese history; it takes an uncompromising conqueror to unite a divided China but a compromising statesman to rule it. The Han is the origin of the identity of Imperial China, and though it's built on the foundations the Qin laid it's the Han legacy that remains. China and Han become synonyms in this time and have remained so to the present day. In the chaos of the Qin collapse, a charismatic army lieutenant Liu Bang came out on top of the rebellion dogpile and set himself up as the new Emperor Gaozu of Han. Gaozu deftly appropriated the mechanism of the Qin Empire while making himself look like a liberator with a little diplomatic finesse. The early Han state is essentially the same old Qin, but Gaozu relaxed central control and threw out Legalism, the two things that had made the Qin rule so unbearable for the rest of China. He divided up the country into Imperial Commanderies (the former Qin territory) ruled directly by the crown and 17 Protectorates (the subjugated states) vassal kingdoms with nominal autonomy. He set up rivals for power as his vassal kings, which almost immediately becomes a problem. The early decades of the Han see a gradual re-tightening of state control, until the Imperial family occupies all the vassal positions and the vassal kingships themselves have had most of their power stripped and returned to the Imperial court. Still, this arrangement was far more palatable to the common people and revolts were limited to the upper classes, allowing society in most of China to settle down for some much-needed peace and quiet after the Warring States and its bloody climax in the Qin empire. Like the political situation, the economy of the Han saw a new status quo forming after the shock and novelty of the Qin unification and the massive economic disruption of war, mass conscription and forced labor. The more conservative Han incarnation of the imperial government kept all the Qin institutions, but without their reckless consumption of manpower, and the economy improved. Standardization of writing, coinage, weights & measures and roads especially allowed an expansion of trade and urbanization as internal borders were eliminated. Use of money became ubiquitous and easy where before it had been fraught with the difficulties of international exchange and local paucity of coinage. In fact the Han minted coins so aggressively that they soon found themselves with an inflation problem on their hands. In the early 2nd century BC life settled down and apart from some minor skirmishes with the Xiongnu to the west and a nascent inflation problem, China was doing better than it had done for hundreds of years. The Han was still in early days but it was going well. Then one of those lucky breaks came along and China got an emperor who was ambitious, competent, and intelligent -- and most importantly they got him for 54 years. The golden age of classical China is about to begin. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 04:59
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We're obviously years away from the Tang, but I was always under the impression that they were the real golden era of Chinese history. Are you making a distinction between eras or do you think the Han actually were more prosperous than the Tang?
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Oct 14, 2013 05:41
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Arglebargle III posted:Sorry I wasn't clearer about it but yes, the Shang dynasty practiced human sacrifice as part of burial rituals. You can tell who was dead when they went into the tomb and who was killed since the sacrifices all have a neat little rhomboid puncture wound in the side of their skull. They match up very nicely with the bronze halberd heads the Shang left everywhere. When I was at the museum at the site they had a diorama of a sacrificed guard. They think the sacrifices would actually climb into their little grave and kneel upright, and be instantly dispatched by a good whack in the head by a halberdier standing above and behind them. The graves aren't big enough lie down in. I'm not sure what articulation they found the bones in but I guess it convinced them that they were killed in situ and not killed elsewhere and then arranged for burial. It's kind of confusing since the Chinese halberd, or ge or dagger-axe, evolved a lot over time, but the Shang halberd didn't generally (ever?) have spear extensions. They more closely resemble stone-age axes than they do medieval European pole-arms. I don't think ges with spear points appear until the Spring and Autumn period. Below: Shang pictograms and illustrations of ge. cropped from here: http://www.grandhistorian.com/kennethblair/Ancient_Chinese_Halberds.pdf  Below: Penguin history book illustration. The rightmost warrior holds an early bronze ge.  Chinese halberds appear in prehistory as one of the first weapons designed specifically to kill other humans. Ceremonial ge used in the Tang Dynasty retain features associated with stone weapons dated to before 1.500 BC! The Warring State's period produced some incredibly wicked looking ge, designed to decapitate foes so as to earn bounties from murderous legalist bureaucrats. Here's a cool example: 
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Oct 14, 2013 06:28
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Yeah, the Tang are 400 years after the Han collapses, so I'm making a distinction. The modern Chinese will call themselves Tang sometimes in certain contexts but it didn't enter the language as a synonym for China like Han did. They're the first Imperial China that took hold. Han is the Chinese version of Rome -- everyone after them is claiming the mantle. The Tang were more prosperous in real terms; assuming that both empires peaked somewhere near their theoretical maximum, population growth alone makes that a certainty. 600-900 AD really has no business being called classical anyway. edit: Neat stuff about 戈! I know they had spear points but I never heard that the Shang versions didn't. I just accepted that the spear point were separate. Yes, they're called halberds just for ease of explanation. You can call it a dagger-axe but then nobody knows what you're talking about. Maybe the best term would be chariot pick. That illustration doesn't show that the 戈 was a charioteer's weapon, which is why they're so strongly associated with Shang burials. The Shang upper class were warriors who fought from chariots. I guess it makes sense you wouldn't need a spear point on it for that. The Chinese do invent the halberd from the 戈 though, and pretty quickly. There's a bunch of different shapes ranging from weird ones to ones that look just like a European crescent-bladed or cleaver-bladed halberd. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 06:28
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Arglebargle III posted:Then one of those lucky breaks came along and China got an emperor who was ambitious, competent, and intelligent -- and most importantly they got him for 54 years. Interesting how big an impact the combination of long lived and competent ruler seems to have.
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Oct 14, 2013 08:42
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veekie posted:Interesting how big an impact the combination of long lived and competent ruler seems to have. I took a class on revolution back in university and one of the major themes was that any country that can be classified as "developing" benefits just as well from a dictator as it does from democracy, if not better.
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Oct 14, 2013 08:47
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Well, it does make some sense, in that democracy requires an informed voting population to make useful policy decisions. If most of the country has no idea how things work, it's just formalized mob rule.
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Oct 14, 2013 08:54
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One of my high school history teachers explained the amplified effect of long reigns with, "Imagine 30 years of George W. Bush," back in the day. I think that sums it up.Atlas Hugged posted:I took a class on revolution back in university and one of the major themes was that any country that can be classified as "developing" benefits just as well from a dictator as it does from democracy, if not better. Interested to know who had the balls to say that, seeing as my poli sci degree focused on revolutions. Especially considering what happened to a lot of the developing world's functioning democracies in the Cold War. It's not a fair contest when you're considering is like a race over one 60 year period and two huge muscle-monster dudes keep tackling the runners. Democracy at least guarantees you don't get 30 or 40 years of one idiot. So no Ceausescu, no Kim Jong Il, no Nyerere... no Mao.
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Oct 14, 2013 09:03
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True, though it does mean you're left spinning your wheels, since it's pretty hard to effect change with short reigns, and long reigns are hard to achieve with well intentioned leaders.
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Oct 14, 2013 09:19
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Do you believe Troy actually existed? Has there been any evidence?
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Oct 14, 2013 09:33
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If you're asking if the events of the Iliad were true, then we don't know (It's not very likely) The actual city known as Troy though, is very real and has been researched for a couple of centuries now. It may not be "the" Troy, Schliemann was something of a bad archaeologist, but it is a site of comparable age, size, and location to the Troy of legend. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy
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Oct 14, 2013 09:45
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Arglebargle III posted:Interested to know who had the balls to say that, seeing as my poli sci degree focused on revolutions. Especially considering what happened to a lot of the developing world's functioning democracies in the Cold War. It's not a fair contest when you're considering is like a race over one 60 year period and two huge muscle-monster dudes keep tackling the runners. It's been years since I took the class, so I can't remember exactly what the reading list consisted of. The professor was a pretty interesting dude and our university's resident China expert. We actually had to turn in our final papers a week in advance if we wanted a grade because he was scheduled to depart for China right away and didn't want to bring a stack of papers discussing the causes and results of revolution while doing research in China. For what it's worth, I'm a political science and philosophy double major, so a lot of my classes were political theory classes that counted towards both majors.
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Oct 14, 2013 09:58
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VeggieSmuggler posted:Do you believe Troy actually existed? Has there been any evidence? Yes and its absolutely tiny e: well, tiny for the events of the Illiad ColtMcAsskick fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 10:12
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To get away from the rocky shoals of 20th century politics, let's talk about Chinese Imperial naming conventions. Just as Augustus or Caesar or Caligula were not birth names, the names you'll see in Chinese history are not birth names. Chinese Emperors invariably have at least three names: their personal name which is what everyone else has, consisting of a family name and given name, in the early Imperial period a courtesy name which they would get at adulthood, at least one reign name which they take on accession like a pope, in the later empires a temple name, an era name which they got to make up whenever it felt right (in some dynasties) and the posthumous name which official historians give them after death. We mostly know Chinese emperors by their posthumous names, which unfortunately are often shared with other emperors from other dynasties. For example our emperor coming up, Han Wudi, is his posthumous name and is more of a title that just means The Martial Emperor of Han. This is okay for now but by the end of the Imperial period in 1911 there will have been more Martial Emperors than you can shake a stick at and they get hard to keep track of. Sort of like all the emperors named Gaius in Rome. Han Wudi was born Liu Che but would have been referred to as the Prince of Jiaodong by all but his immediate family even as an infant. They were really into titles. When he reached adulthood he added the courtesy name Tong, but that hardly matters because at 13 he became Emperor Jianyuan and nobody could refer to him by his given name anymore, not even his mother. He would go on to have 11 separate era names. So in all, Han Wudi has 15 different names/titles, and is mercifully without a temple name to remember. To make matters somewhat easier, nobody ever referred to the Emperor by any of his names at all. The Emperor was always mentioned as His Imperial Majesty, The Current Emperor, or more poetically The Lord of 10,000 Years, Son of Heaven, or The Dragon if you want to be in a metal band. In person you would just refer to him as Imperial Highness or Imperial Majesty. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 11:10 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 10:55
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Can anyone explain how Yahweh-worship evolved into Judaism? How did they come to abandon other Ugaritic deities?
MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 15:20
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All you would want to know about Troy in podcast form http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01j6srl
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Oct 14, 2013 16:50
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MothraAttack posted:Can anyone explain how Yahweh-worship evolved into Judaism? How did they come to abandon other Ugaritic deities? God told Moses how to worship and gave him some tablets on how to do so. The End.
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Oct 14, 2013 16:54
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Arglebargle III posted:Chinese Emperors invariably have at least three names: their personal name which is what everyone else has, consisting of a family name and given name, in the early Imperial period a courtesy name which they would get at adulthood, at least one reign name which they take on accession like a pope, in the later empires a temple name, an era name which they got to make up whenever it felt right (in some dynasties) and the posthumous name which official historians give them after death. We mostly know Chinese emperors by their posthumous names, which unfortunately are often shared with other emperors from other dynasties. Did the names have any particular tendencies? Like taking the name of a past emperor or ancestor, or some great deed they accomplished(or at least, was credited with being the source).
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Oct 14, 2013 17:11
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ColtMcAsskick posted:Yes and its absolutely tiny The citadel is about half an acre in size which would indeed make it tiny. However, the city itself extended much farther. Relatively recent magnetic prospecting and excavation put the whole city within its outer walls at something closer to 75 acres. Population estimates for the Trojan War period (Troy VIi-j) top out at ~7500 to 10000. Neither of these are huge but they're pretty sizeable for a quasi-independent Bronze Age city state.
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Oct 14, 2013 19:59
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MothraAttack posted:Can anyone explain how Yahweh-worship evolved into Judaism? How did they come to abandon other Ugaritic deities? There's a wonderful biblical history thread for questions like that! I'm pretty sure that is a particularly contentious topic though, but a couple of the kings slaughtering everybody that had slightly different beliefs would be the short answer.
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Oct 14, 2013 20:12
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MothraAttack posted:Can anyone explain how Yahweh-worship evolved into Judaism? How did they come to abandon other Ugaritic deities? Wikipedia explains a lot better than I can with the mess I had written here first, but the gist of it is that Yahweh may have been worshiped as a national god in the south of Canaan and as more of them, Edomites, migrated north, they brought that worship with them and you begin to see a lot more interchangeability between El, the chief of all gods, and Yahweh. When the Assyrians destroyed the kingdom of Israel the ancient Hebrews had this idea that it wasn't the strength of Assyria's national god that brought destruction over the weaker Yahweh. They begin to elevate Yahweh even higher to the exclusion of other gods, and it was Yahweh using Assyria as a tool to rain punishment over Israel. That's kind of the quick and dirty, I'm outta time since works over but that's the gist of it. Better explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh and if you're truly interested in what was going through the minds of the ancient biblical authors then this lecture series from Yale is absolutely fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo-YL-lv3RY
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Oct 14, 2013 23:00
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I know I'm supposed to be posting about the Han dynasty but I started watching Rome yesterday and did Octavian really get captured by Gauls when he was 13?
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Oct 17, 2013 04:09
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No, Augustus was only 13 when the Gallic War ended. Something similar happened in 46 BC when he was travelling to Hispania to meet with Caesar and his army but he was shipwrecked and then crossed hostile territory to get to Caesar. I Believe Caesar was fighting Pompey's sons there. So he did travel through hostile territory to meet Caesar while on campaign but not in Gaul, he wasn't captured, and Caesar had already defeated Pompey.
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Oct 17, 2013 06:15
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