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VanSandman posted:Regarding beasts of burden, is the American bison difficult to domesticate or something? I always thought it strange they weren't used as beasts of burden in North America. Same for moose and elk I suppose. The Great Plains where Bison were so plentiful has fairly nutritious soil, but a very hard and thick sod capping the top of most of the soil. This sod was so tough that it wouldn't break under wooden plows and even iron plows too quickly to be practical. It wasn't until 1836 with the invention and promotion of the cast steel plow by John Deere that farming the Great Plains would really became attractive to American settlers. With that in mind pre-Colombian Native Americans didn't really have any realistic chance of farming on the Great Plains, which is even today still fairly difficult due to the highly variable weathers propensity to ruin crops. So Bison as draft or pack animals are out. Since the Plains Indians weren't going to be conducting agriculture, they were fairly nomadic. However, the nomadic option of domesticating and herding the Bison was also out because they had no horse to cover the ground required when herding large groups of such large animals. Instead they traveled very light, with most of their possessions on their backs or on sleds dragged by dogs. Hunting the vast herds of bison gave plenty of reliable food anyway, so there wasn't a ton of pressure to find a different way of living. I mean I don't think any given Bison can be domesticated anyway. If you think about the length of the process involved with domesticating other species, the Native Americans would have had to have started the process thousands of years ago to see any kind of real results now. The impetus just wasn't there.
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Oct 20, 2013 08:30
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Just saw your post cafel, that's exactly what I wanted to know, thanks.Berke Negri posted:Big plains, and an almost unheard amount of horses compared to previously. Plus by the times Americans are really settling out that way technology is starting to change so a lot of previous issues aren't a thing anymore. Being a rancher in the latter 19th century is a lot different than having cattle in Middle Ages Europe. I meant the natives, dude. C'mon now. Also regarding domesticating elk and such: pretty sure it's totally possible considering the reindeer, plus deer raised by humans do not have that fight of flight instinct, I've had one literally approach me looking for attention before.
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Oct 20, 2013 10:24
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Bison are totally domesticated now though. I used to drive by buffalo ranches on the way home. They're contaminated with cattle genes now though since they're close enough to interbreed and because of the population bottleneck when they almost extinctified.
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Oct 20, 2013 10:29
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Arglebargle III posted:Bison are totally domesticated now though. I used to drive by buffalo ranches on the way home. They're contaminated with cattle genes now though since they're close enough to interbreed and because of the population bottleneck when they almost extinctified. Well then there you go. I've only really learned about them from an ecological perspective, which are mainly historical issues and the current issues surrounding ranchers concerned about the possibility of wild bison spreading hoof and mouth disease. I guess if I had thought about it for half a second, the existence of commercially available ground bison is an obvious enough tip off that they've been domesticated.
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Oct 20, 2013 10:46
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Fun fact 1: There are buffalo at the Grand Canyon. (The north side which is more alpine meadow than desert hellscape.) Fun fact 2: They're actually beefalo, a cattle/bison hybrid. The bison traits are so dominant that it's almost impossible to tell the difference. Fun fact 3: The park service is trying to get rid of them because they're not native, they escaped from a ranch decades ago.
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Oct 20, 2013 11:15
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cheerfullydrab posted:Pretty much. The Romans didn't actually stop existing till the 15th century. Anyone who claimed a Roman "legacy" before then was simply wrong. There was a direct continuity. So does Australia not have a british legacy? I still feel like Charlemagne's empire had every right to call themselves "roman." Just because the original roman empire continued in the east doesn't change the fact that roman culture, laws, and institutions continued in the west and shape the present day. Does the fact that they had a direct political continuity and peasants that still called themselves "roman" mean so much? In both cases we have roman institutions changing and evolving to meet new circumstances. It's not like the ERE in terms of internal workings was significantly more like classical Rome than any western state was by 1000AD. To use China again, it looks to me like a lot of events in Byzantine history, the Macedonian Renaissance, the Komnenid Restoration, certainly, the post-1204 shenanigans, may have been considered dynastic breaks if they happened in chinese history. I think the self-identification thing could practically be considered a part of the post-empire european identity: we're all so enthralled by The Glory That Was Rome that despite fetishizing about returning it, no one ever entertained the idea that we could actually do it. Because Rome was Just So Special. I also am not sure that peasant self-identification was ever a big thing in Rome- other than when referring to state loyalty (I'm living in/am a citizen of the Roman Empire), didn't commoners continue to be gauls and illyrians and syrians and what have you? I just don't see a lot of radical difference other than semantically, the eastern empire continued to be called "Rome." In terms of actual development, the only difference I see is that western Rome never again reunified.
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Oct 20, 2013 13:44
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I would imagine one difference you could point to (bearing in mind my knowledge of this comes primarily from pop-history sources like podcasts, listening to relevant In Our Time, etc.) would be the loyalty structures in post-Rome West and the ERE. In the West we had pretty much moved into individual loyalty along broadly feudal lines. Charlemagne's empire was founded primarily on personal loyalty rather than an identification with being part of Neo-Roma or somesuch. Meanwhile in the East even when people turned against the current Emperor they would view themselves as still Roman people looking to get power within the existing structures. They could be reasonably sure that if they could take Constantinople and take out the Empire the machinery of state would largely keep on with a change of the body on the throne. In the West someone leading the charge against Charlemagne might have images of conquest and glory in their mind but they could rely on any kind of automatic loyalty from anyone left standing. Likewise I would imagine some sort of rebellion of that type would have resulted in central government collapsing and straight back to the Church being the only structure left governing most regions. Which is pretty much what happened and one reason you could argue the Roman Catholic church is the last remnant of Rome beyond the ERE that, while changed utterly, still retains an unbroken line of traditions and even language from the days of the Roman Republic.
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Oct 20, 2013 14:48
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thecolorpurple posted:So does Australia not have a british legacy?
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Oct 20, 2013 15:07
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thecolorpurple posted:So does Australia not have a british legacy? Sure, but you're not arguing legacy, you're claiming all the succesors are Roman states. They just aren't. Like here: thecolorpurple posted:I still feel like Charlemagne's empire had every right to call themselves "roman." They didn't call themselves Roman. Charlemagne himself claimed the imperial title, but that's it. Nobody was claiming that the Carolingian Empire was still the Roman Empire. There was absolutely cultural continuity, and there were leaders usurping Roman titles for the purposes of legitimacy, but no one other than the still extant Roman Empire was claiming to be the Roman Empire. If you wanted to see Europe being analogous to what was going in China, then what you'd need is Roman culture to be existing across a wide area, in which there are multiple states claiming to be Rome. Then one manages to conquer the rest and rules the Roman Empire for a while, until there's a breakup, and a hundred years later a different state conquers everyone and now there's the Roman Empire again, and on and on to the present day. The only time anything at all comparable occurs is during the Crisis of the Third Century, when the Empire breaks into multiple states for a while until Rome is able to reconquer all of them and reconstitute the full empire.
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Oct 20, 2013 15:16
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cafel posted:The Great Plains where Bison were so plentiful has fairly nutritious soil, but a very hard and thick sod capping the top of most of the soil. This sod was so tough that it wouldn't break under wooden plows and even iron plows too quickly to be practical. It wasn't until 1836 with the invention and promotion of the cast steel plow by John Deere that farming the Great Plains would really became attractive to American settlers. With that in mind pre-Colombian Native Americans didn't really have any realistic chance of farming on the Great Plains, which is even today still fairly difficult due to the highly variable weathers propensity to ruin crops. So Bison as draft or pack animals are out. Since the Plains Indians weren't going to be conducting agriculture, they were fairly nomadic. However, the nomadic option of domesticating and herding the Bison was also out because they had no horse to cover the ground required when herding large groups of such large animals. Instead they traveled very light, with most of their possessions on their backs or on sleds dragged by dogs. Hunting the vast herds of bison gave plenty of reliable food anyway, so there wasn't a ton of pressure to find a different way of living. Pre-Colombian Indians did farm on the Great Plains, they just did it in the river valleys rather than on the high plains. In any case historical Bison populations extended well into the eastern woodlands, including the territory of the fairly sedentary Mississippian culture, whose farmers could surely have used draft animals.
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Oct 20, 2013 17:15
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Grand Fromage posted:There's a difference in self-identification. The east was the only place where people still considered themselves Romans. The rulers of the western successor states took Roman titles and such to try to legitimize themselves, but the Roman culture died after a while. Also, the east is a continuous single Roman government, which doesn't exist anywhere else. Woo, this one again! Yeah, I think the self ID thing is kinda BS. The kings called themselves Romans but a peasant from bumfuck Greece was Greek and a peasant from bumfuck Syria was Syrian. Jesus was Jewish, Leo III the Isaurian was Syrian. "Roman culture" died in the west in as much as it turned into a bunch of Roman Catholics speaking Romantic languages while being ruled by Duxes in the godsdamned Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne was as Roman as the Tangs were Chinese. Or, since we're dealing with Turkish conquerors adopting local systems, it's better to say that the Tang were as Chinese as the Ottomans were Roman. You know, Sultanate of Rum and all that. And the East wasn't single and continuous. You had dynastic breaks, coups, and interregnums. If you want a solid break look at the Imperium Romaniae*, a true,* Latin restoration of power that broke the dynastic rule of the Doukas and the 'Byzantine' Empire was restored by an upjumped Duke, from one of many competing successor states. You're applying nationalist bullshit to a time period before nationalist bullshit was even a thing, (such that it is/was ever really a thing.) Yeah, Gibbons gave the ERE short shrift but you're not applying the logic of that forward at all. * And self-identified as such... **True here used ironically. e: Grand Fromage posted:They didn't call themselves Roman. Charlemagne himself claimed the imperial title, but that's it. Nobody was claiming that the Carolingian Empire was still the Roman Empire. There was absolutely cultural continuity, and there were leaders usurping Roman titles for the purposes of legitimacy, but no one other than the still extant Roman Empire was claiming to be the Roman Empire. Okay, Charlemagne called himself the Holy Roman Emperor, crowned in Rome by the bishop of Rome. He was claiming to be the Emperor of Rome. So were the Latins who sacked Constantinople in the 4th Crusade, so was the Sultanate of Rum and so were the Ottomans. The line between an "usurping Roman titles for the purposes of legitimacy" and legitimately using those titles seems to be a decision you've made yourself. If a general besieging Constantinople and taking the purple doesn't count as usurping, then I don't know what to tell you. As for other example is Rome, aside from the aftermath of the Crusade, there's the Triumvirate, Constantine's wars to reunify, Julian's wars to reunify, the schism between the churches, the competing claims of the HRE and the ERE, and the Habsburgs vs. the Ottomans. All wars or conflicts of competing claims to true Roman legacy. Like, the aftermath of the 4th Crusade is exactly what you describe up there. Also, your description of Chinese history doesn't really match. Qin wasn't kicking the poo poo out of people because they were the true successor to the Zhou. The true Zhou were still around, just weak and powerless. Ditto the start of the Three Kingdoms Era. And what you've described is nothing like the northern dynasties moving south (Sui, Tang) or the Manchu takeover. In China as in Rome having the ability to call yourself the ruler of a territory and the ability to enforce that rule suffices as 'legitimate succession.' the JJ fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Oct 20, 2013 |
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Oct 20, 2013 20:20
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the JJ posted:Woo, this one again! You are saying the Tang dynasty, founded by a noble family based out of the Yellow River heartland of Central China, was as foreign to China as the Turkic peoples to Roman-Greek Anatolia.
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Oct 20, 2013 20:39
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:You are saying the Tang dynasty, founded by a noble family based out of the Yellow River heartland of Central China, was as foreign to China as the Turkic peoples to Roman-Greek Anatolia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Wei http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Liang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_and_Northern_Dynasties#The_Northern_Dynasties You're saying the Ottoman Empire, founded by a noble family from the Anatolian heartland of the Kingdom of Rome (sorry, 'Sultanate of Rum'), was as foreign to the Greco-Roman peoples as... the once nomadic, horse riding military aristocracy that had set itself up in the Yellow River after someone got a little to complacent with subcontracting out military jobs? Yes, yes I am. Yeah, the Tangs were pretty drat Turkish. Sinized, but the Ottomans were pretty Greco-Roman-Islamified by the time they rolled up to Constantinople as well.
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Oct 20, 2013 21:13
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the JJ posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Wei I don't see how you can compare the Ottoman state to the Roman empire without making a distinction between them. I agree that they had been administering Anatolia long enough that they drifted away from their cousins on the steppe, but it's hardly as if they adoped Roman customs. You act as if Orthodox Christianity and Islam weren't mutually exclusive cultural groups that prevented the Ottomans from truly adopting Roman ideas, something they did in conjunction with only a disproportionate balance from the rest of the Muslim world. Meanwhile the transition between Sui and Tang is more like a reshuffling of the known "Chinese" world. Steppe ancestry means nothing when you have happily accepted life within the works of the Chinese administrative government, and go on to found a state that continues on with that legacy with no questions asked.
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Oct 20, 2013 23:06
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cafel posted:However, the nomadic option of domesticating and herding the Bison was also out because they had no horse to cover the ground required when herding large groups of such large animals. Instead they traveled very light, with most of their possessions on their backs or on sleds dragged by dogs. Interestingly, the Lakota (Teton) Sioux word for dog is sunka, while horse is sunka wakan - literally "sacred/powerful dog." The Lakota didn't work metal and didn't have horses prior to European influence, which is weird to juxtapose with the image of the archetypal feather-headressed Plains Indian horseback warrior. Arglebargle III posted:Bison are totally domesticated now though. I used to drive by buffalo ranches on the way home. They're contaminated with cattle genes now though since they're close enough to interbreed and because of the population bottleneck when they almost extinctified. I wouldn't say this is entirely true. I grew up on a cattle ranch (on a Lakota reservation) and some of our neighbors had bison and beefalo. They're still generally less docile and more unpredictable than cattle, especially bulls. Keep in mind, too, that we haven't bred horns out of bison like we have out of many of the most popular cattle breeds. Park Rangers in Yellowstone will caution visitors that bison in the park are generally more of a danger concern than bears, and while that's a relatively wild population, even domesticated herds require much tougher fencing and handling caution than cattle.
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Oct 20, 2013 23:13
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I don't see how you can compare the Ottoman state to the Roman empire without making a distinction between them. I agree that they had been administering Anatolia long enough that they drifted away from their cousins on the steppe, but it's hardly as if they adoped Roman customs. You act as if Orthodox Christianity and Islam weren't mutually exclusive cultural groups that prevented the Ottomans from truly adopting Roman ideas, something they did in conjunction with only a disproportionate balance from the rest of the Muslim world. Because the Greek speaking Christians were so very like the TRUE ROMANS. And those Turks, man, they'd never so something like, oh, say, model their place of worship after... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_Ahmed_Mosque. Well drat. But come on, for how long could Byzantine cathedrals have been influencing... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ummayad_Great_Mosque. Yeah. Totally 'mutually exclusive culture groups.' The Tangs were Sinized to an extent, but the aristocracy remained very Turkish in character until mid-to-late Tang. The Tang shaped 'Chineseness' as much as it shaped them, it's not like there's this grand unchanging cultural entity anywhere (Roman or Chinese) that exists, crystallized, only to shine out upon the uncivilized heathens. That's a pretty nationalistic and ahistorical argument. Yeah, I think we ought to make a distinction between the Ottoman and ERE, but you really have to recognize how much historical narratives shape your view of events.
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Oct 20, 2013 23:56
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If the Byzantine Empire wasn't the Roman Empire, when did they stop being Romans?
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Oct 21, 2013 00:56
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I have to agree with the JJ. Like I said at the beginning of my China effortposting, the China is more like a cultural sphere than an empire. The various Chinese dynasties can be thought of as the various Hellenistic or post-Roman powers trying to claim Alexander and Rome's legacies. For example, the Han dynasty rulers (the Liu dynasty in the western sense of using the family name for the dynasty) were peasants (peasants!) from the half-barbarian Chu state who took over the half-barbarian state apparatus of Qin and renamed it. The TRUE CHINESE out east in Qi and Yan tending Confucius' mausoleum barely even get a mention in the history of the time. And the Han are now the paragon of what it means to be Chinese! I was trying to make a similar point with the Jin dynasty, which doesn't get included in the CHINA FOREVER narrative despite having a very similar arc to the Song, who do get included. It's all history which to some extent means its irrevocably shitted up. This conversation about turks and manchus can't really be resolved without talking about how the Han is a constructed ethnicity anyway. I think someone said it best in that Han is like White as an ethnic identity, i.e. mostly about cultural ingroups and outgroups than actual ethnicity. For example you never see people identify as Yue, despite that being a huge ethnic group that was absorbed and assimilated pretty peacefully. They're all Han now.
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Oct 21, 2013 00:56
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Rincewind posted:If the Byzantine Empire wasn't the Roman Empire, when did they stop being Romans? I think the crisis of the third century would be the first time you could say the Roman Empire stopped being the Roman Empire. But as you can see from this page it's up for a lot of debate. I also think it's a little dumb to say the HRE or Ottoman Empire are connected to the Roman Empire in the same way the Byzantines are, even if there were breaks; the HRE was established literally centuries after the dissolution of most of the Roman institutions in the west, and the Ottomans were still more foreign than just being rebellious dissidents or whatever. It's like the vandals Romanizing and then taking North Africa; would you call them Romans? It's all just a part of a greater European history. I'm not sure we should be calling the Byzantines Roman the same way we called their cousins from a thousand years before, but the term Byzantines is also far too detached for what they were and probably the worse of the two options. Also am I the only one that finds the China-Rome comparisons kinda silly? China is practically a continent unto its self the same way Europe is. Talk about Rome and the Han or the Byzantines and the Song or whatever. And nobody gives a poo poo about what peasants call themselves.
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Oct 21, 2013 01:24
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Rincewind posted:If the Byzantine Empire wasn't the Roman Empire, when did they stop being Romans? Never, really, that's the point I'm making. Its just that a lot of people went around calling themselves Roman in some fashion or another. Choosing this bunch of funny language speaking foreign godworshipping lot over that bunch of etc. etc. as THE ONE TRUE ROME/CHINA because of whatever definition of legitimacy you've decided best gets you the answer you want is silly. It's nationalistic dickwaving at worst and just dumb at best. We don't care -shouldn't care- about one group of dead people getting their 'just due.' We ought to be focusing on discussing what happens outside of that. I think that calling the Byzantine Empire 'not Roman' is a bad narrative, but it is equally bad narrative to deny that 1000 years of history happened between the fall of the West and the Ottoman conquests, history in which the ERE/Byzantium/One True Rome changed, evolved, and interacted with the world as much as it had the millennia before. It is also equally bad narrative to say that, despite the 'fall' of the polity of Rome in the West (Pope in Rome, Duxes and the like not withstanding) Rome had big ramification on the variety of states that sprang up in former Roman territory (east and west) and a lot of those people, quite rightly, claimed that 'legacy.' Culturally, politically, however you will. I think the bugaboo of 'continuity' is silly, seeing as what is and isn't continuous is very nebulous (Sulla, transition from Republic to Caesars, any number of coups or succession crises, Diocletian splitting things up, Constantine putting things together again, Constantine setting up a new capital, things splitting up after him, Julian putting it back together... ALL CONTINUOUS) and as for self identification, well such that it was a thing before nationalism, LOTS of people claimed the name of Rome. By the standards of self-identification, yeah, the Vatican is Rome, the Ottoman Empire is Rome, the Hapsburgs are Rome, the Kaisers and the Tsars are Rome, and every Duke in every country is putting a claim to that legacy. Koramei posted:I think the crisis of the third century would be the first time you could say the Roman Empire stopped being the Roman Empire. But as you can see from this page it's up for a lot of debate. I think the Chinese-Rome comparisons started as a musing 'well, why didn't China ever splinter like Rome?' and the answer was they both did and both didn't splinter, there's just this built up kruft of narratives around the whole issue. I think it's useful to continue exploring if we find ourselves applying different standards of what does and doesn't constitute 'Chineseness' or 'Romaness' by different standards simple because of the 'China' or 'Rome' rather than the 'ness,' if you follow. As for the 'little' breaks, why is Vandals going Roman less Roman than Romans going Greek? What makes Leo the Syrian's conquest that different than Mehmed's coup what makes the Great Schism 'rebellious dissident' and yet Islam 'foreign,' when it was Abrahamic monotheism that was foreign to the Arabs, and familiar to the 'Romans.' Or it was, but only after the Christian Romans had adopted it from Judea... that's, like, a pretty big break isn't it? What is it about Constantine's imposition of Christianity and foundation of a new capital that is so different than the Ottoman Turks bringing Islam to aforementioned new capital? Where, in the system of Duxes and lords and kaisers and tsars did the west become barbaric? As for what the peasants call themselves, I quite agree that it's mostly irrelevant to the issue. Which is why by the logic of claiming of top level titles... of look, Rum, HRE, Bishop of Rome, Romania etc. etc. etc. e. As for Byzantium as a moniker, well, it's not great. It's linked to a bad historiography (Gibbons, grr...) But it is, basically neutral aside from that. It's a simple geographic descriptor as in its new capital was the city of Byzantium before Constantine renamed it New Rome. I think calling it just 'the Roman Empire' is bad, because that isn't what they called it, they called it Basileia Rhōmaiōn, and so by that standard we'd be doing things like calling the Sultanate of Rum 'the Roman Empire,' and calling the Latin Empire 'the Roman Empire' and then you get Latins under instructions from the Bishop of Rome establishing the Roman Empire in the middle of Rome but after a while Rome conquered the Roman Empire and established the Roman Empire until it was overthrown by an offshoot of the Roman Empire. No, not that Roman Empire, the other Roman Empire. Then it fought the Roman Empire for a good long while, until that Roman Empire was dissolved by that funny short Emperor (he got crowned by the Pope) and what was left of it ended up allying with the Roman Empire and that Empire run by a Caesar, but meanwhile the Roman Empire was fighting with that other Caesar in that other Rome. Then they got shot by Young Turks, they got shot by commies, and it was all over. Then Mussolini said, 'hey guys, I think we should bring this Rome thing back!' the JJ fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Oct 21, 2013 |
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Oct 21, 2013 01:34
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Han Wudi's Reign - 141-87 BC Prince Liu Che took the throne at age 15 in a Han state that was largely the same as his grandfather Han Gaozu had left it. It was an imperial state in the west ruled by the emperor, with a collection of eastern vassal states loosely ruled by the Liu clan and dominated by conservative nobility. His first orders, a series of minor reforms, were immediately cancelled and his grandmother began looking for a replacement emperor when it appeared that the young Emperor actually wanted to rule. Han Wudi's 54 year reign almost didn't happen. To avoid being quietly deposed (over the technical matter of his lack of issue, a bit unfair at 16) he pretended to be a dissipated and uncaring emperor, going on extravagant hunting trips and avoiding all policy. Meanwhile, he hit on the classic strategy of recruiting talented young men of the minor nobility to his aid. They would meet in secret and discuss his plans for reform. Han Wudi appointed his friends to mid-level posts that dealt with the day-to-day administration of the Empire and military. In this way he quietly created a power base without tipping off the high nobility or his grandmother's clan as to what he was doing. With his grandmother growing older and weaker and Han Wudi growing bolder, an opportunity presented itself in a war between two southern vassal states. Han Wudi gave orders to dispatch the army to intervene, and when one general refused on account of the order not being ratified by the Empress Dowager, he was executed by Wudi's officers on the spot. The army went off to put down the vassal but that was hardly the point. Han Wudi had demonstrated, suddenly and with great demonstrative power, that the army was under his control. He had a son shortly after. In only 3 years the young emperor had gone from a tenuous position of little real power to a legally and physically incontestable ruler. Han Wudi immediately began laying plans for military expansion. He expanded and modernized the army. He (and the talented military advisers in his former clique, now in his inner court) expanded the army and bought a tremendous number of horses to expand the cavalry particularly. The end result was a more mobile force less reliant on inflexible chariot tactics that dominated on the North China Plain and more able to fight in rough terrain outside the Chinese heartland. Han Wudi marched into the troublesome southern vassals, not annexing them outright, and reorganized their governments to Han's benefit. Specifically, he enfiefed two kings in the most powerful southern vassal Nan Yue, ensuring that country would be disunited. He also attacked Korea, a favorite pastime for future martial emperors, but made few gains there besides gaining vassal states. These conquests, however, were just a prelude to the real fight of Han Wudi's reign. The Xiongnu had been a nuisance on the western border for centuries, and despite tribute and an established generations-long marriage alliance, they continued to raid deep into western Han territory. Unlike his predecessors, Han Wudi felt strong enough to do something about the situation. With his southern conquests over and his Korean expedition wrapping up, he began hatching plots for how to deal with the mobile Xiongnu steppe people. His first idea was to assassinate the Xiongnu high chief and mop up the resulting chaos; a good idea but the murder fell through. His second plan was to pick a minor fight and then lure the Xiongnu army into a trap. This almost worked but the Xiongnu commander saw through it at the last moment and retreated. At this point the jig was up though, so Han Wudi resorted to Plan C: overwhelming force. Over the next 10 years the Han armies struck directly at the Xiongnu everywhere they could find them. The Xiongnu who had previously seemed untouchable with their lightning raids were apparently unprepared for direct assaults on their homes and were defeated and driven back consistently. The Xiongnu even retreated out of China proper but the Han armies followed them with ever-more-massive campaigns that eventually saw armies of 200,000 deployed 400 miles from Chinese territory in the western deserts where the Xiongnu made their final stand. The campaigns were extremely expensive but the Xiongnu were decisively crushed, and pushed back nearly to the Siberian taiga. This happens to bring about 1/3 the total length of the silk road under China's direct control. After this enormous military effort, as a sort of digestif, Han Wudi went back and conquered the southern vassals for good, adding Guangdong, Guangxi, and north Vietnam to the empire as directly administered commanderies. He tried to continue military expansion but the Han state could no longer bear the expense, and economic problems broke out. At this point, around 105 BC after 30 years of campaigning the empire was reaching war exhaustion. Farmers were fleeing to avoid conscription into the armies and tax evasion was becoming a serious problem. Han Wudi needed to get his hands on more revenue. He nationalized the salt, iron and liquor industries to get that revenue. The salt and iron monopolies would continue for a long time but, as you might expect, the liquor monopoly was abandoned just a decade later for being unenforceable. The government also established price controls of basic commodities, a sure sign of economic problems. Revolts broke out, and a poorly-thought-out decree that made local commanders responsible for rebellions just encouraged local army units to revolt as well. Wudi spent several years stamping out major revolts, one lead by the crown prince, and became paranoid. He purged re-purged the imperial court on charges of disloyalty and witchcraft and sentenced entire clans to death. A reign of terror descended for five years until Wudi realized he had gone too far. He actually issued public apologies for his injustices. Within a few years he was dead, leaving a regency for his 6-year-old son and designated heir. Han Wudi is sort of a mixed bag. He exhausted the state with 30 years of warfare, but that proves temporary. He added huge tracts of territory to the Chinese state, which will last another 300 years. He also started the state monopolies, the imperial examinations, and the national mint. He broke the power of the aristocrat clans and gathered power to the imperial throne. He established the tradition of promoting the young and talented ahead of the wealthy and connected, although these groups tend to overlap some. In many ways the Han state is his state; on his accession it was a relaxed copy of the Qin with the extended Liu clan ruling vassal states and the emperor ruling his commanderies. After Han Wudi the Emperor has commanderies all over the place, not just in former Qin, and rules through a number of novel state institutions to which the nobility has no access. After Han Wudi's reforms the commandery-vassal state distinction will wither away because the emperor and the central state have all the real power. I probably shouldn't have gone into so much detail; I'll definitely get through the Western Han much faster, probably say a few things about Wang Mang and his interregnum, and then get through the Eastern Han pretty fast as decline and decay is usually less interesting (to me at least) that the state-builders. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Oct 21, 2013 |
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Oct 21, 2013 04:19
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Koramei posted:And nobody gives a poo poo about what peasants call themselves. But what the local elites call themselves really is of fundamental importance. That's how empires are built. Personally I'm firmly in the "Byzantium as The One True Rome" camp. They were pretty obviously the same Roman state that had been operating for centuries. Yes there had been tons of internal upheaval and coups and dynasty changeover, but that had happened really often in the time we would all agree as "clearly the Roman Empire". Which is not to say that the Roman Empire of 1500AD, or 1000AD, or 500AD was the same as the Roman Empire from 1AD. Certainly there were differences, and important differences. Nor does that mean that the kingdoms in the west didn't have important Roman cultural legacies from their time in the Empire. But I still think there's merit in remembering that the ERE/Byzantium/One True Rome really was the same Empire as the one that we all imagine.
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Oct 21, 2013 04:24
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Apologies if this question's already been covered in detail (it's a big thread; I'm working through from the beginning but it takes time!), but how devoted were the Romans to their (pre-Christian) religion exactly? Looking back from 2013, with the gift of literacy, historical research, wikipedia, etc, the Roman pantheon seems objectively ridiculous; they just copied the Greek gods and renamed them. It seems hard to believe that anyone could look at it and say "oh, yeah, that's the one true faith, that one right there, yep." But of course the Romans didn't have wikipedia. Did they not know that their religion was plagiarized, or did they not care? Or am I oversimplifying the Roman faith? It just seems, at a glance, like a hard religion to take seriously, and I'm wondering how many Romans really did.
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Oct 21, 2013 04:31
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Ainsley McTree posted:Or am I oversimplifying the Roman faith? Yes, a lot. The Romans were very religious people and while the highest gods may be sort of interchangeable with the Greek pantheon everyday religiosity was not. The Romans believed in a world that was just as populated with gods and spirits as it was with animals and people. In this light syncretism doesn't look ridiculous, it just looks practical. A Roman perspective might be: We have our gods and they're real, and when foreigners show up and tell us about their gods, those gods are also real. The Greeks worship the same gods as us but they're degenerate Greeks with some wrongheaded ideas. The Egyptians have weird gods but they've been around forever and drat look at those pyramids, so clearly their gods are powerful. The Jews have a jealous god but he's real too, etc. etc. They didn't think about the spiritual world in terms of self-contained belief systems. All the gods were real, Jupiter was merely the king of our gods. The Romans "imported" gods they liked all the time, especially from the exotic and exciting east. But they didn't think of it as creating a new thing, those foreign gods had always existed and deciding to worship one or more of them didn't change what anyone believed about the world. Disbelief is an Abrahamic commandment; the concept of mutually exclusive gods didn't become part of Roman culture until the late 3rd century and even then Christians were still a minority. To answer the question about the Greek gods specifically, why would the Romans assume that the Greeks predated them? The Romans claimed descent from Troy, so clearly they're part of the same ancient tradition as the modern Hellenistic Greeks, only better because they're not corrupted.
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Oct 21, 2013 04:46
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Ainsley McTree posted:It just seems, at a glance, like a hard religion to take seriously, and I'm wondering how many Romans really did. It has been, but briefly: The Romans took their religion quite seriously. There were doubters but it was not common. In the Roman worldview there were gods and spirits suffusing everything, it was a daily interaction. They did not copy the Greek gods and rename them. Roman gods and Greek gods most likely come from a common source in an older Mediterranean religion that we have a bit of archaeology for, but very little detail. The Roman and Greek pantheons are quite distinct, Roman religion comes directly from their Etruscan cultural background and the Greek beliefs are not integrated until much later. However, Roman religion was not exclusive, and the Roman pantheon accepted additions from the Greeks, Egyptians, and various other religions they encountered. You are oversimplifying, but in a way that is common in the modern era where we look at these ancient religions and conflate them. There's nothing more ridiculous about Roman beliefs than there is about any modern religion. If you're interested, the best place (I think) to see the difference is to compare Ares and Mars, who are both gods of war that are often conflated by us but were not at all the same thing to the Greeks and Romans. Then read up on syncretism.
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Oct 21, 2013 04:47
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Ah, I see. I guess I just kind of assumed that the Greek gods came first, and the Roman ones came second but now that I think about it a little harder, I don't know why I think that! Maybe I learned it in grade school or something, they've lied to me before. Or maybe I just made it up. I'll keep an eye out for the more detailed discussion this thread's already had when I catch up to it, but thanks for the overview, that's an interesting place to start.
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Oct 21, 2013 05:03
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Ainsley McTree posted:Ah, I see. I guess I just kind of assumed that the Greek gods came first, and the Roman ones came second but now that I think about it a little harder, I don't know why I think that! Maybe I learned it in grade school or something, they've lied to me before. Or maybe I just made it up. No, it's a pretty commonly repeated and believed idea. I was taught it when I was young. It stems from an ignorance of ancient religions, a long standing prejudice against Roman intellectual/cultural life, and it's also nice and simple so people like that.
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Oct 21, 2013 05:09
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Anyone have any idea what the Japanese were doing when the Chinese were empire building? I'm kind of under the impression that the Imperial Japanese court didn't really do much or exercise much power. I don't really have any idea what ancient Japan was like. Also, there was a great line in Rome by the public announcer guy that I can't remember exactly from when Herod was visiting. Something like, "Don't make fun of the Jews for having just a single god."
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Oct 21, 2013 05:24
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I know even less about ancient Japan than China, but from what I've read Japan was basically a bunch of pirates and petty kingdoms until Buddhism and ideas of large-scale administration came to them via Korean traders in the 500s AD.
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Oct 21, 2013 05:28
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It was better. "Mockery of Jews and their one god is to be kept to an appropriate minimum!" Writing doesn't begin in Japan until the 4th or 5th century AD. In the time period we've been talking about, the BCs, the Japanese aren't doing anything. They get a (very) brief mention in a late Han dynasty record as a collection of tribes.
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Oct 21, 2013 05:34
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Re: Japan. There's obviously some sort of conflict between the indigenous Ainu and the Yamato* enshrined in a few myths here and there. Eventually you get a reasonably powerful empire allied with some Korean states.** The elites adopt a lot of Chinese ways, as was fashionable at the time, though our view is skewed. (all writing is derived from Chinese sources, ergo, by definition from Sinophile or heavily sinified sources...) The Emperor (~400-500 CE I think, a little fuzzy here) sets up along mostly Chinese models, but real military power remains with a warrior class that is split into tribes and societies. Power will vacillate between imperial and military power for a while, mostly in the hands of the military class, but within that class power vacillates between centralize and decentralized power. As far as I know the whole piracy thing came later. I definitely remember stories of the Chinese emperor sending some peeved notes to the shogun about keeping the riffraff under control. The wakou/wako/wokou (lit., in the most amusing way "midget pirates," though 'dwarf pirates' might be better) didn't really represent all of Japan, more the periphery that the shogun couldn't control. It is sort of the basis for the current dumbfuckery over some of the more insignificant rocks in between Japan and mainland Asia, in so far as 'you used to raid us from there' 'oh yeah, well that means we own it!' 'nuh uh, we put troops on it to kill the pirates so it's ours' sort of nonsense. There was also a later trend of piracy in that area I like to call the weeaboo wako, since there weren't actually many Japanese involved. *A later invention. ** Something nationalist writers on both sides are quick to ignore, save when they can take credit for doing something first before spreading it to the other.
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Oct 21, 2013 06:01
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To the Chinese the Japanese were just some more random barbarians no more worthy of comment than any of the other tribes and minor states on their periphery. The first time China pays attention to Japan in a serious way is in when the Mongol Empire tries to invade Japan. Piracy from Japan didn't become a problem until well into the medieval period. Japan is an interesting case study because they went from backwater nowhere to major power so rapidly. It's not classical history though.
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Oct 21, 2013 07:03
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Grand Fromage posted:They did not copy the Greek gods and rename them. Roman gods and Greek gods most likely come from a common source in an older Mediterranean religion that we have a bit of archaeology for, but very little detail. The Roman and Greek pantheons are quite distinct, Roman religion comes directly from their Etruscan cultural background and the Greek beliefs are not integrated until much later. However, Roman religion was not exclusive, and the Roman pantheon accepted additions from the Greeks, Egyptians, and various other religions they encountered. It's not so much a Mediterranean religion as it is a Proto-Indo-European religion that also influenced the Etruscans. The most obvious example of this is the PIE Dyēus ph2ter, aka "Sky-father", aka Zeus, aka Jupiter, aka Tinia, who figures into even non-IE pantheons and languages. So when Julius Caesar claimed that the chief deity of Gauls was Dispater, he was probably mangling the name of the Gaulish version of Dyēus ph2ter. Interpretatio romana wasn't an exact art.
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Oct 21, 2013 09:44
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Arglebargle III posted:It was better. "Mockery of Jews and their one god is to be kept to an appropriate minimum!" They're mentioned in the Records of the Three Kingdoms by Chen Shou as being ruled by a shaman queen named Himiko who took control of Wa (Japan) after decades of civil warfare. There was at least one group of emissaries sent to Cao Rui (the ruler of Wei) in 238 consisting of some slaves and cloth. Himiko died in 248, there was a brief period of civil unrest, then a girl named Iyo (or maybe Toyo) was made queen and that's the last time Wa is mentioned. Who exactly Himiko really was historically or even where her kingdom (Yamatai) was located aren't really known though. Unless that's the record you were talking about.
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Oct 21, 2013 09:53
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:It's not so much a Mediterranean religion as it is a Proto-Indo-European religion that also influenced the Etruscans. The most obvious example of this is the PIE Dyēus ph2ter, aka "Sky-father", aka Zeus, aka Jupiter, aka Tinia, who figures into even non-IE pantheons and languages. Care to give more of a write-up about this? Greco-Roman religion is something I'm only vaguely knowledgeable about and its origins I'm even less aware of.
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Oct 21, 2013 10:36
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Arglebargle III posted:The Chinese states fought a lot of who were the inheritors of that legacy. Rome and Roman are different, just like China and Chinese are different. Except in modern Chinese they're not, which is infuriating for a native speaker of an inflected language. I just want to say that the China-lessons are rad. I'm studying (basic) Mandarin at the moment and while my professor does some basic cultural lessons, they're mostly pop music and tourist videos. I'm still trying to figure out the lack of the "-ese" suffix. Isn't that what the ren2 accomplishes in Zhong1guo2ren2? Does China-person not equate to Chinese?
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Oct 21, 2013 10:46
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Arglebargle III posted:To avoid being quietly deposed (over the technical matter of his lack of issue, a bit unfair at 16) he pretended to be a dissipated and uncaring emperor, going on extravagant hunting trips and avoiding all policy. Meanwhile, he hit on the classic strategy of recruiting talented young men of the minor nobility to his aid. They would meet in secret and discuss his plans for reform. Han Wudi appointed his friends to mid-level posts that dealt with the day-to-day administration of the Empire and military. In this way he quietly created a power base without tipping off the high nobility or his grandmother's clan as to what he was doing. Didn't realize he started that young and with so little power. Quite a clever move to subvert the administration from the bottom up though. Nobles and commanders can't do anything if their administrators and field commanders all hold a stronger loyalty to the emperor than to them.
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Oct 21, 2013 10:53
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Verr posted:I just want to say that the China-lessons are rad. I'm studying (basic) Mandarin at the moment and while my professor does some basic cultural lessons, they're mostly pop music and tourist videos. Chinese doesn't have suffixes, so when we add them to English it's happening on our end of the translation so to speak. Usually it's clear but there are situations when the intent is unclear and then you're stuck, because the Chinese has no hints as to the correct English grammar. For example the recent propaganda slogan 中国梦 could be China Dream or Chinese Dream. Without more information about the writer's intent we can only guess at how to render it in English. That's just Chinese though; it's terser than the indo-european languages at the cost of some accuracy. Suben posted:They're mentioned in the Records of the Three Kingdoms by Chen Shou as being ruled by a shaman queen named Himiko who took control of Wa (Japan) after decades of civil warfare. There was at least one group of emissaries sent to Cao Rui (the ruler of Wei) in 238 consisting of some slaves and cloth. Himiko died in 248, there was a brief period of civil unrest, then a girl named Iyo (or maybe Toyo) was made queen and that's the last time Wa is mentioned. Who exactly Himiko really was historically or even where her kingdom (Yamatai) was located aren't really known though. No, I meant in 67 AD they get a one-line mention that's just "a thing happened and some Japanese people were there" 
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Oct 21, 2013 12:29
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VanSandman posted:On a related note, how was political and social power distributed in Etruscan society in terms of gender? I've always heard the Etruscans had very modern views about women but I don't know any specifics. Something for you to look at here. Basically an Etruscan grave had two skeletons side by side. One is on a slightly larger platform and had a spear; another on a smaller one with a jewellery box. Subsequent bone analysis has confirmed the skeleton with more prominence and the spear to be female and her companion to be male. Debate is now on as to whether the switching of their accoutrements from what the archaeologists first expected is symbolic of their union, or whether they had sufficiently little gender connotations that a men might have taken his jewellery to his grave and a woman her spear.
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Oct 21, 2013 13:20
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Here's a Japan history podcast: http://frug.podbean.com/ I've not listened to it yet, it was recommended to me. The early shows cover ancient Japan. The China History Podcast also goes into ancient China (though not frequently enough for my tastes, stop talking about Hong Kong businessmen  ) and is awesome so you should be listening to that if you have an interest in China. http://chinahistorypodcast.com/And to round out East Asia, Korean history: http://www.topicsinkoreanhistory.com/
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Oct 21, 2013 17:11
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