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What is the history of soap in the Levant (Aleppo is located here)? I am gathering information with regards to Aleppo, and its soap.
strong bird fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 08:44
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I believe it was primarily used in hospitals and as a building material for roads and bridges. Soaps made from exotic fats - especially the fats of exotic animals - were considered quite valuable and even a mood-enhancer. Occasionally manufactured goods such as clothing and armor would menace with spikes of soap.
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Apr 1, 2014 11:22
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Just an FYI, but the best map of ancient Rome is apparently no longer out of print: http://www.aclclassics.org/store/map-of-rome-roma-urbs.html Let me know if you'd like a higher resolution scan, which I had done back in 2007 or so (it is minorly annotated with marker, though, but still legible).
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Apr 2, 2014 20:13
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I've been reading this thread on and off for awhile and there was a map (or kind of map) mentioned ages ago that I can't find the name of. Someone had posted it as an example that the Romans gave no shits about "as the crow flies" distance and it was all about travel time on the roads to a given village or city, and had little monopoly piece looking towns on it. Any ideas? Or if it is relatively easy to find, high resolution scans from a museum maybe? My mother is big into Roman everything and recently moved on from these odd murder mysteries in Rome to historical stuff and I wanted to make some prints as a gift. Or order them!
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Apr 3, 2014 21:51
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Sounds like the Tabula Peutingeriana to me. No idea where to find prints, though. It's 0.34m x 6.75m, which isn't exactly a common, or easy to print, format.
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Apr 3, 2014 22:47
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Yup that was it, cripes I didn't realize it was so big. Thank you though! Maybe I can find some other fancy maps from the era instead, I just really like the concept of that one.
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Apr 4, 2014 20:54
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Why, don't you have a long gallery in your home to put it up in?
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Apr 4, 2014 23:09
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Make it into a rug. You'll be treading the roads of Rome every time you go to the bathroom.
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Apr 4, 2014 23:10
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Come on, you don't have a room specifically dedicated to hanging obscure Roman maps? What a plebeian!
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Apr 4, 2014 23:12
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Obviously use it as wallpaper.
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Apr 5, 2014 04:16
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No, that would mean cutting it up. Use it as carpet.
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Apr 5, 2014 04:43
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Synnr posted:Someone had posted it as an example that the Romans gave no shits about "as the crow flies" distance and it was all about travel time on the roads to a given village or city, and had little monopoly piece looking towns on it.
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Apr 6, 2014 10:31
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Grand Fromage posted:Obviously use it as wallpaper. Well perhaps a tablet background wallpaper! That might be an idea. cheerfullydrab posted:They did care about "as the crow flies" distances very much but that map is basically a subway diagram for the entire Roman world. Well I meant in the vague memory of my reading the initial post and conversation it sounded like that. Like using a road map and then hiring local dudes to take them off the beaten path? Something like that, I'm not surprised I mis-remembered it. But I just liked the map when I saw it and she liked the idea of it as well when I had brought it up. If nothing else it is very interesting to read about!
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Apr 6, 2014 22:28
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Is anybody able help me puzzle out a little mystery? Doing some conservation on a manuscript from 1775 (commentary on Plato), and we found this slipped inside. Neither of us in the office can say with any certainty what the language is, but the author of the manuscript had a scholarly interest in ancient/classical writing, so it being a very old language is a possibility we're considering. 
communism bitch fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 10:38
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Looks a little bit like Georgian to me...
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Apr 8, 2014 11:24
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Kassad posted:Looks a little bit like Georgian to me... We both thought that, but Georgian is much more swirly and round (or, as my boss put it "more like elvish".)  Could just be odd handwriting though! communism bitch fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 11:39
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Oberleutnant posted:We both thought that, but Georgian is much more swirly and round (or, as my boss put it "more like elvish".) Have you looked at the older variations of the Georgian script? I can't find any good pics of, say, Nushkuri writing in practice, but it's worth a try. My first thought was something related to Aramaic, but the gently caress do I know. If you've no luck, r/linguistics over at Reddit could probably help.
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Apr 8, 2014 11:43
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Ethiopian script?
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Apr 8, 2014 11:44
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I'm no linguist, but if you flip the pages upside-down it looks very similar to this example of Samaritan script.
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Apr 8, 2014 11:59
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Mygna posted:I'm no linguist, but if you flip the pages upside-down it looks very similar to this example of Samaritan script. We both just huddled over my monitor and compared, and we think you're probably right, so thanks! Further digging lead us to wiki, where the article picture seems to be very similar to our own document: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritan_alphabet It seems possible that it's an extract from the Bible in the Samaritan language.
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Apr 8, 2014 12:08
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Synnr posted:Yup that was it, cripes I didn't realize it was so big. Thank you though! Maybe I can find some other fancy maps from the era instead, I just really like the concept of that one. Are there any modern maps of the Roman roads? I'm in malaga now and I would like to hike along the old Roman roads up to Alameda or even further. However I can't find anything helpful online and I'm not sure who (or how) to ask in town. Has anyone got a (reasonably) accurate map of the remaining roads?
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Apr 8, 2014 12:51
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Dongsturm posted:Are there any modern maps of the Roman roads? I'm in malaga now and I would like to hike along the old Roman roads up to Alameda or even further. I'm not sure there is any major road remaining, because it has been built upon most of them, but there are several secondary roads available to hike, link to some of them: http://theromansknew.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/calzadas-romanas-en-hispania/ I don't know if that's what you're looking for, but hope it's helpful.
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Apr 8, 2014 14:01
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Angry Lobster posted:I'm not sure there is any major road remaining, because it has been built upon most of them, but there are several secondary roads available to hike, link to some of them: Thanks, that looks great. I know a lot of the old roads were used for modern highways, but I'm hoping there's a few nice ones remaining. I'll post some trip pics if I find anything nice. My first stop is the ruins in town, then onto the roads.
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Apr 8, 2014 18:05
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I'm looking for a few good recommendations on general texts on the areas east of the Rhine and north of the Danube during the classical era and early medieval period. Basically think Germania from about the first century BC through the 7th century or so. Roughly Caesar => Charlemagne. I'm already familiarizing myself with Tacitus' Germania just because and have already read the 2nd ed. of Malcom's The Early Germans. Ideally I'm looking for a good synthetic overview text that leans more on the history side of things than high level academic archeology. More discussion about any kind of consensus the field may have reached on culture and society and less painstaking discussion of specific archeological sites and findings if that makes any kind of sense.
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Apr 15, 2014 16:12
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This is so cool, proof of a 1,747-year old fixed wrestling match uncovered. It is always fun to get reminders that ancient humans were pretty much exactly the same as the modern day.
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Apr 19, 2014 01:16
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When was the last day the forum in Rome was used?
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Apr 19, 2014 02:21
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Bea Nanner posted:When was the last day the forum in Rome was used? Depends what you mean by used and which forum. The main imperial one did fall out of use at some point since it was underground, so obviously it had been abandoned. The Curia, however, was still in use as a church, so you could say it always being used in some fashion. We don't know. If I were to guess I'd say at minimum it was still in use to the late 600s, as the senate was still meeting so life in Rome seems to have been more or less intact up to that point. After the end of the senate we don't have any real information to go on. People were probably still using it a meeting/marketplace for a while after that, it is fairly central. Rome in general falls into disrepair as the population slowly shrank over time, from its peak at the one to 1.5 million range to the low of... thirty thousand, I think? Which would still have been a huge city if you were in northern Europe, but not so much in the south. Italy retained large cities (100K or more) throughout the Middle Ages, it wasn't like England where a city of 5,000 was a big deal.
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Apr 19, 2014 04:46
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Grand Fromage posted:Depends what you mean by used and which forum. The main imperial one did fall out of use at some point since it was underground This raises an interesting question: I know old things end up underground at some point, but how exactly does that happen when the city is in use? Like, how did the Imperial Forum end up underground, and when? Did people just track mud all over it until it was gone, like some sort of housewife's nightmare?
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Apr 19, 2014 05:38
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Arglebargle III posted:This raises an interesting question: I know old things end up underground at some point, but how exactly does that happen when the city is in use? Like, how did the Imperial Forum end up underground, and when? Did people just track mud all over it until it was gone, like some sort of housewife's nightmare? I imagine its something like what we see every day with old cracked pavement on abandoned sites that has weeds growing out of. The pavement lifts a bit, dirt/mud/dust accumulates around the cracks some more, the weeds grow a little bigger and over time the pavement gets lost. Go check out some abandoned factories and you'll probably see it happening. What I don't get is how an entire city gets abandoned short of a major natural disaster. Surely when the population drops someone must think "there's a shitload of houses/buildings/mills/silos/infrastructure that no-one wants and I can squat and take" Captain Postal fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Apr 19, 2014 |
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Apr 19, 2014 05:50
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Arglebargle III posted:This raises an interesting question: I know old things end up underground at some point, but how exactly does that happen when the city is in use? Like, how did the Imperial Forum end up underground, and when? Did people just track mud all over it until it was gone, like some sort of housewife's nightmare? Yep. There are a lot of different ways things get buried, depending on the circumstances. I'll go through them. A) The main one is that cities are built in a particular place for a reason. Access to water, good farmland, strategic location, whatever. This reason doesn't just go away, so the site remains inhabited over time. When your lovely mud brick house collapses, it doesn't get hauled away. It gets compacted down and then a new one built on top of it. Then the Assyrians roll in and burn the city and build a new one. Then the Medes burn that and build a new one. Over and over for thousands of years, and you get this:  That's a tell, which is a hill built of ruins. That was originally flat land or maybe a slight rise, but that hill is basically all made of trash and broken buildings that were continuously built upon over thousands of years. This happens in all cities that have been inhabited forever. Rome's original ground level is way lower than today. I'm not sure how deep it goes (I don't know if anyone is sure) but it's pretty far. They're building a third subway line and literally every part of it is taking forever because any time you dig, you're in a site that needs to be catalogued before it's destroyed. B) Detritus builds up over time and buries things. Erosion from hills, sand movements in the desert, Ostia gets buried because the Tiber fills it with silt, that sort of thing. That layer of mud and garbage that ends up on the streets through general living doesn't seem like much, but multiply that by thousands of years. C) Intentional destruction. The Domus Aurea is underground because Vespasian had it buried and built the Colosseum and other public entertainment complexes on top to send a message. D) Vesuvius type natural disasters that bury cities.
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Apr 19, 2014 05:55
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Captain Postal posted:What I don't get is how an entire city gets abandoned short of a major natural disaster. Surely when the population drops someone must think "there's a shitload of houses/buildings/mills/silos/infrastructure that no-one wants and I can squat and take" A better city nearish with better infrastructure. You might want to explain what cities in particular you're thinking of though. I mean it's all well and good to squat a steel factory, but when they become abandoned the owner usually strips everything valuable and movable first, and those tend to be the kind of parts both vital to function and not exactly cheap!
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Apr 19, 2014 05:56
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As for how the trash builds up, think about the pre-modern world. You're producing plenty of trash with broken pottery, oyster shells, that kind of thing. Where do you put it? There's nobody hauling that 50 miles out of the city to a landfill, it just gets dumped in place. That's how you get poo poo like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_Mound
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Apr 19, 2014 06:00
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With roads decaying during natural use and tons of animal poo poo piling up, authorities used to just stick a new layer of paving over the top rather than clean it all up and put in patches. This led to street level rising over time. That's one of the phenomena at least, I don't really know and can't explain how that interacted with people's daily business.
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Apr 19, 2014 06:00
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The sticking stuff on top phenomenon is simply because hauling it away is a pain in the rear end with no benefit. Without modern machinery it would be an enormous amount of effort, versus just building anew on top of it. And thank Jupiter people were too lazy and cheap to do it because gently caress that would suck for archaeology if ancient cities hauled away their garbage. Ancient cities being a layer cake of refuse is absolutely vital for our understanding of them.
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Apr 19, 2014 06:03
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Many small cities and towns in the United States have downtown areas that are elevated over the natural ground level, usually due to a now covered stream or other body of water that originally drew people to settle there. Here's an example of one of them http://www.vtunderground.com/other/cf.htm Things like that are how modern places are going to start getting buried.
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Apr 19, 2014 06:05
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Captain Postal posted:What I don't get is how an entire city gets abandoned short of a major natural disaster. Surely when the population drops someone must think "there's a shitload of houses/buildings/mills/silos/infrastructure that no-one wants and I can squat and take" ...then they probably think "Man, I hope there's some good local take-out, cuz I am staaaaaaaaaarving!"
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Apr 19, 2014 15:48
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Install Windows posted:Many small cities and towns in the United States have downtown areas that are elevated over the natural ground level, usually due to a now covered stream or other body of water that originally drew people to settle there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground (I only know about this because Terry Pratchett mentioned it in a footnote somewhere.)
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Apr 19, 2014 16:07
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Zopotantor posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground Yeah, it is astonishing how quickly it can happen. Also, didn't Mussolini come close to demolishing most of the Imperial forums? There's a whopping great big road that goes through the middle, at least, providing a very convenient place to survey the area.
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Apr 19, 2014 22:36
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Octy posted:Also, didn't Mussolini come close to demolishing most of the Imperial forums? There's a whopping great big road that goes through the middle, at least, providing a very convenient place to survey the area. Mussolini actually removed a number of medieval and renaissance-era buildings from the forum so that the remains of the ancient buildings would be exposed. Like this:  This is what remains of the temple of Mars Ultor. On the rear wall you can see the groove where the roof of a monastery that used to be there fit. But it is true that there are unexcavated remains under the Via del Fori imperiali, apparently there is a proposal to tear it up and conduct a proper dig underneath.
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Apr 19, 2014 23:48
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It always boggles my mind that London (Londinium at the time, I think) was abandoned for something like 300 years after Roman rule in Britain collapsed. The city was still there, but I guess a lack of trade/ships coming in etc meant that people just wandered away to live in other places and that big city just sat empty for centuries.
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Apr 20, 2014 02:02
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