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Tao Jones posted:"Duty" is overstating it. There was a societal motif that only a shithead would abuse his slaves to no purpose except his own pleasure, but there was nothing forcibly preventing a slaveowner from killing his slave just because he felt like it. I was under the impression laws existed to not so much prevent that kind of thing, but at least prosecute the slave owner after the fact? Ah, here's what I'm thinking of: Wikipedia posted:Several emperors began to grant more rights to slaves as the empire grew. Claudius announced that if a slave was abandoned by his master, he became free. Nero granted slaves the right to complain against their masters in a court. And under Antoninus Pius, a master who killed a slave without just cause could be tried for homicide. Legal protection of slaves continued to grow as the empire expanded. It became common throughout the mid to late 2nd century CE to allow slaves to complain of cruel or unfair treatment by their owners. I'd be interested to know how easily 'just cause' was established, though.
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May 22, 2014 05:09
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Yeah, that's true -- as time went on, slaves were given more protections under the law. I tend to use the Republic period as my frame of reference since I'm more familiar with it than the Imperial period.
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May 22, 2014 06:18
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Worth pointing out that by Antoninus' time the wars of conquest were pretty much over for good and the supply of new slaves was drying up, and by the end of his reign the Antonine Plague was beginning to rear its ugly head. Killing slaves went from immoral to downright wasteful as slaves became more of a non-replenishable resource.
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May 22, 2014 07:12
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Tao Jones posted:"Duty" is overstating it. There was a societal motif that only a shithead would abuse his slaves to no purpose except his own pleasure, but there was nothing forcibly preventing a slaveowner from killing his slave just because he felt like it. Until later. Slaves got a fair amount of rights over time. Partly because of slave revolts and wanting that to not happen anymore, but a lot of it was that there just weren't millions of slaves flooding in anymore after the empire stopped expanding.
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May 22, 2014 13:49
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Just got back from voting. Which one of you crazy bastards set up The Roman Party. Ave! ?
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May 22, 2014 20:38
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Sleep of Bronze posted:Just got back from voting. Which one of you crazy bastards set up The Roman Party. Ave! ? Haha That guy is still around? I remember hearing about him back in 2009.
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May 22, 2014 21:05
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Grand Fromage posted:Until later. Slaves got a fair amount of rights over time. Partly because of slave revolts and wanting that to not happen anymore, but a lot of it was that there just weren't millions of slaves flooding in anymore after the empire stopped expanding. Armacham posted:Haha That guy is still around? I remember hearing about him back in 2009. 
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May 22, 2014 21:12
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Not sure if this is the place to ask, but: Going to Greece for a 3 week vacation in August. I'm a big fan of Ancient Greek Culture and History so I was wondering if there are Ancient History related places there I should go out of my way to see there?
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May 22, 2014 22:31
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Sergiu64 posted:Not sure if this is the place to ask, but: Not really, nothing really happened there tbh.
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May 22, 2014 23:27
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I've always wanted to see Thermopylae. There's so much myth around those rocks I'd like to stand there and see it for myself. How many people could walk abreast, how many yards to the sea etc. Also the isthmus of Corinth. See the Aegean and the Ionean seas from one place. Sharing that spit of rock with so many armies tromping along its length. I wonder if there's any historical marker or museum for the portage road there. Also Constantinople even if it's technically not Greek any more. I hear large parts of the Theodosian walls and the sea walls are still standing and parts of it have been restored to their late medieval state. The pictures on Wikipedia give the impression that standing there you could see why so many armies just noped on out of there. Just don't get Erdoganed! Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 00:53 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 00:50
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Mycenae and Delphi were my favorite things to see when I went there a few years ago. Both have modern museums next to them along with the ancient sites.
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May 23, 2014 01:07
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I've not been to Greece so I don't know anything specifically to recommend. But you literally can't put a shovel in the ground in Greece without finding stuff so you shouldn't have any issues finding museums and ruins and stuff.Arglebargle III posted:I've always wanted to see Thermopylae. There's so much myth around those rocks I'd like to stand there and see it for myself. How many people could walk abreast, how many yards to the sea etc. Sadly it's not very impressive anymore. There's a highway going through it and the coastline has changed, so the ocean is like a mile away now.
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May 23, 2014 02:49
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Sergiu64 posted:Not sure if this is the place to ask, but: Thessaloniki is great, check out the museum there and also the walls in the old district up on the hills. If you walk up Aristotelous square towards the market, there's a small diner on the right hand side, just before the Modanio market. I forgot the name, it doesn't look like much. You need to have their grilled chicken and potatos. Really. You need to visit Pella too. The fingers of Chalkidiki are worth seeing too. The Xerxes Channel is on Athos, near Nea Roda, but there's not much to be seen anymore, and then Athos too ofc, but you can't just stroll up there. I liked Kassandra better (it's pretty quiet there), probably worth a stop for a few days there to check out the beach, and also because Potidea and :Thukydides: also, because of such a place near Kryopigi  On the countryside, check out the traffic signs. People like to shoot at them with guns of various calibers.
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May 23, 2014 09:22
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Trip report from Campania: Pompeii is really cool. So big. Walked around for half a day and still had more cool stuff to see. Herculaneum (Ercolano) is even better, but smaller. Paestum is difficult to get to (the station doesn't have anybody there nor any ticket machines, so don't forget to buy a return ticket). But so worth it. Most of it is in a pretty good state, the temples and tomb paintings are amazing. And it has a beautiful sunset too  Wish I had taken any pictures.
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May 23, 2014 10:24
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Gladi posted:Sumer's big thing is that before the archeological finds nobody knew about them. ( since then we dug out few more "forgotten" civilizations) The oldest civilizations known were Babylon and egypt, but then again they were not known like they are today. Romans did not have the roll of kings nor archives of written sources. The historical narrative went from myth to actual historical facts. As I understand it though, they did not have this idea of Progress. The ancestors of Romans were never hunter-gatherers. Gods made them and their civilisation wholesale. Wasn't there some Greek or Roman historian who accidentally stumbled upon the ruins of Ninive (last Assyrian capital) and was wondering what kind of people had lived there? Kind of chilling, if true. There are even a few civilizations we only know off by proxy, because the ancient Sumerians wrote a lot about them. But they had no writing system of their own, even if some of them were apparently quite powerful -there is a lot of talk on ancient clay tablets about some great empire in the south (or just south) of Mesopotamia, but we now next to nothing about them, except they existed.
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May 23, 2014 10:34
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Libluini posted:Wasn't there some Greek or Roman historian who accidentally stumbled upon the ruins of Ninive (last Assyrian capital) and was wondering what kind of people had lived there? Kind of chilling, if true. Xenophon?
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May 23, 2014 10:47
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Xenophon also asked the locals if they knew who built it, and no one knew because the Assyrians were so hated they were almost entirely wiped out of the historical record, IIRC.
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May 23, 2014 14:26
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JaucheCharly posted:On the countryside, check out the traffic signs. People like to shoot at them with guns of various calibers. People where I grew up in the Midwestern US used to shoot at traffic signs, too. And run over mailboxes. I think this may just be a "bored rural idiots with guns" phenomenon
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May 23, 2014 15:44
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Don Gato posted:Xenophon also asked the locals if they knew who built it, and no one knew because the Assyrians were so hated they were almost entirely wiped out of the historical record, IIRC. Yep, Xenophon. As far as anyone in the area was concerned, the Assyrians were just gone. Two centuries later and nobody living right at the ruins of Nineveh had any idea who they were. The Assyrian people survived, though, and are still around. They sometimes get scoffed at but I think it's the same people. Dan Carlin tells the story in his Assyrian episode, he met someone who identifies as Assyrian and his basic argument was "Nobody questions the history of the Jews, why couldn't we still exist too?" which is solid enough. Frankly, it's surprising how resilient cultural groups are and how long they can last. I was just reading about how the people of Çatalhöyük apparently had a strict taboo against eating pork, something which doesn't occur anywhere else until the Jews, and wondering if the Jews might've descended from them in some way.
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May 23, 2014 17:12
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Didn't Babylon refer to the Assyrian Kings as their own at least a few times, though? So it wasn't a complete eradication.. just close; Assur still stood tall for another millenia or so IIRC.
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May 23, 2014 17:51
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Beamed posted:Didn't Babylon refer to the Assyrian Kings as their own at least a few times, though? So it wasn't a complete eradication.. just close; Assur still stood tall for another millenia or so IIRC. The last Neo-Babylonian king was ethnically Assyrian. The fact that the Assyrian people survived means it wasn't total, but nobody cared anymore and their empire was dust. Normally when states fall there's a legacy. Assyria's enemies did their best to make sure there was none. Short of ethnically cleansing every single person it was never going to be a complete eradication, but they did a very thorough job of it. E: Though, Assyria is a subject that's been getting revision and a lot of interest in studying it further. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out things were not as cut and dry as they've long been believed to be. Still, Xenophon did say they camped in a huge, impressive, mystery city (which we know was the ruins of Nineveh) and nobody knew what the city was called or who built it. So clearly there was something. Keep in mind people didn't move around much. It's entirely possible those people Xenophon questioned were Assyrians who didn't even know anymore. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 18:29 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 18:26
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Sumer was pretty well forgotten, too, even if its legacy survived to the present day. Wasn't until they started translating all those tablets that they realized it.
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May 23, 2014 22:01
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sullat posted:Sumer was pretty well forgotten, too, even if its legacy survived to the present day. Wasn't until they started translating all those tablets that they realized it. It's even sadder to think about about the people who came before the Sumerians. The Sumerians didn't even talk about them, we only know they existed because very recent linguistical analysis of the Sumerian language family showed that it was actually a mishmash of several different languages. The people who spoke those proto-languages of course didn't exist anymore at the time since they already had become what we call the Sumerians and they had no writing of their own, so they will presumably stay a mistery forever.
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May 23, 2014 22:09
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Grand Fromage posted:The last Neo-Babylonian king was ethnically Assyrian. The fact that the Assyrian people survived means it wasn't total, but nobody cared anymore and their empire was dust. Normally when states fall there's a legacy. Assyria's enemies did their best to make sure there was none. Short of ethnically cleansing every single person it was never going to be a complete eradication, but they did a very thorough job of it. Oh, no, I love the mysticism around the people in Nineveh too much to have called out the story; I was just commenting on how thorough the Assyrian eradication may have been.
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May 24, 2014 04:16
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Libluini posted:It's even sadder to think about about the people who came before the Sumerians. The Sumerians didn't even talk about them, we only know they existed because very recent linguistical analysis of the Sumerian language family showed that it was actually a mishmash of several different languages. The people who spoke those proto-languages of course didn't exist anymore at the time since they already had become what we call the Sumerians and they had no writing of their own, so they will presumably stay a mistery forever. When did this happen? I've never heard of this.
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May 24, 2014 21:58
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I've got an old book from the 60s that talks about Sumerian having lots of load words. Including a lot of farming related ones.
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May 25, 2014 03:51
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Babylon, by Paul Kriwaczek, is a great book covering the Near East from prehistory through the Persian era. 1177 The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline is also a great book on the trade collapse around that time.
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May 25, 2014 16:40
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Grand Fromage posted:The last Neo-Babylonian king was ethnically Assyrian. The fact that the Assyrian people survived means it wasn't total, but nobody cared anymore and their empire was dust. Normally when states fall there's a legacy. Assyria's enemies did their best to make sure there was none. Short of ethnically cleansing every single person it was never going to be a complete eradication, but they did a very thorough job of it. At the same time though Herodotus was perfectly aware of the the Assyrians and even wrote about the Median conquest of Nineveh, so clearly not everything was suppressed. If Xenophon never got the right details, well, he might have been a bit preoccupied with other concerns.
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May 26, 2014 00:31
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New China post finally ready but I'm having some trouble with Firefox on my work computer. It's a 2 year old netbook full of viruses and I'm about ready to junk it. So the post will have to wait until someone tells me how to copy/paste from my computer to my phone.
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May 26, 2014 06:27
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Arglebargle III posted:New China post finally ready but I'm having some trouble with Firefox on my work computer. It's a 2 year old netbook full of viruses and I'm about ready to junk it. So the post will have to wait until someone tells me how to copy/paste from my computer to my phone. Just use dropbox to transfer a text file over, or put it up on pastebin. then copy the link over to your phone.
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May 26, 2014 06:29
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Or just plug your phone into the laptop, copy the file onto the phone, then off on to any other device.
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May 26, 2014 06:48
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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I know these have been absent for a long time, but I've been on a job search and had more to do at work. Today is going to cover the Eastern Han period, which I admit I wasn't looking forward to because it's mostly palace politics and retrenchment of the existing system until the Han dynasty fails for the last time when Cao Pi proclaims himself Emperor of the Wei dynasty. China might have just kept on chugging if there weren't two kings controlling everything south of the Yangtze River that disagreed with Cao Pi's emperorship. The Eastern Han 23-220 AD The Eastern Han dynasty follows the same general trajectory of the Western Han dynasty: a few strong emperors, followed by disintegration of Imperial authority as family members and court officials take over real power from young or incompetent emperors. While these non-Imperial rulers may be competent at first, the Imperial system falls apart as power is concentrated in lower posts or in ad-hoc ways by leaders outside the nominal structure. By the end of the Eastern Han, just as the end of the Western Han, rulers finally give up the pretense of loyalty to a failing Imperial house and proclaim their own states. Only this time, there's no Liu Xiu to pull it all back together. So let's start with him getting the Han back together after the Wang Mang interregnum. Liu Xiu was one of these distant scions of the Liu family, the ruling family of the Han, who formed one of the nuclei for the several rebellions against Wang Mang. I say one of because there are a lot of these Liu scions, and Liu Xiu was a younger brother of leading rebel Liu Yan. In fact, he wasn't even the brother of the leading rebel, because his brother was sidelined for being too ambitious by the other rebels. Liu Xiu was recognized as a good general and leader from the rebellion days though, so when Emperor Genghshi of Han was declared he got sent off to pacify the area around Beijing which is still in rebellion. And a good thing too, because that “still in rebellion” issue is a problem for a lot of areas that haven't got the memo that one of the rebel groups has declared the war over. Gengshi was chosen precisely because he was weak by the victorious rebels, and he comprehensively fails to deal with the other rebellions while his court (rebels just months ago) descend into vicious infighting that kills Liu Yan. The Red Eyebrow peasant rebellion, which doesn't give a hoot whether the Liu or Wang family are in power, eventually reaches Chang'an and that's the end of Gengshi. Leaving Liu Xiu, having been quietly expanding his control from the area around Beijing to a big chunk of northern China while pointedly sitting out of Emperor Gengshi's wars, to mop up. Liu Xiu becomes Emperor Guangwu, and with his (now loyal) lands he was sent to pacify sweeps down on the warring rebel generals and does the standard pacification thing. He offers generous terms to warlords amenable to becoming part of his government, and crushes those who resist with his core of loyal forces and the forces of pacified warlords. The Red Eyebrows in Chang'an were even less competent than Emperor Gengshi and by 30 (8 years after Wang Mang's death) Guangwu has mostly completed his pacification campaign, excepting some more powerful holdouts that are hoping to become independent states. By 42 the last of these is conquered and the Han Empire is fully restored after 20 years of sporadic but violent warfare. (As a side note, part of Vietnam's national mythos is the Truang sisters who led a revolt and threw off the Han overlordship of Dai Nam. This coincides exactly with the chaos during and after Wang Mang's reign and when the Guangwu emperor sends a general down there to sort things out the rebellion is stamped out and both sisters are executed in short order. The whole national myth merits barely more than a footnote in Chinese history.) Guangwu is generally remembered as a good military leader and an able administrator, and he had to be, but he's probably lucky that nobody in the south was competent enough to resist him either. When this whole thing happens again in 200, Cao Cao will be an equally competent general and administrator but he's going to run into Liu Bei and Sun Quan in the south who will be barely competent enough to stop a competent leader from reforming the Han Empire for a third time. For once we have an orderly transition and Guangwu will be succeeded by Han Mingdi, his second son. But this is where the Imperial system starts to recede from prominence in the history, even though Han Mingdi is a perfectly competent ruler. Mingdi actually strengthens and restores the Imperial Bureaucracy, which is quite a complicated system and I'm not going to go into it. It's pretty humdrum unless you're really into that sort of thing, because it's got a prime minister and various important departments and minster-level officials and various positions under them and an internal auditing department that tries to keep everyone loyal and it's all very nice, but it would be its own post and I'm not going to go into it. It's Pretty Good when it works right. Anyway, the Imperial system starts to retreat from history again because the Emperors stop doing nearly as much as they used to. This isn't really a bad thing, and Ming and Zhang, his son, not doing a whole lot to rock the boat wouldn't be a problem if Zhang had been able to keep a check on increasing court factionalism. The state rolls on during the reigns of Ming and Zhang, and has some minor military campaigns where the Han state reasserts itself on its western and southern frontiers, but it doesn't do a whole lot. Times are good; not much happening means taxes can be lowered, which they did, the population can grow, technology can advance and generally people can be happy. Ming got the bureaucracy in order again and things are humming along smoothly. Trade with the West is secured again with the Western expedition, but again it's really just re-establishing the Han's old boundaries. There are some technological advances in this period, most notably paper, but unfortunately China's literati-elite historians weren't particularly interested in writing about what craftsmen and merchants were doing. We know that in this period of peace and good rule in the latter half of the 1st century the economy and population expanded again and technology advanced, but aside from some pictures and passing references there's not as much evidence as you'd like. I think it should suffice to say that while the Han didn't have the technology or maybe inclination for monumental stoneworks, their agriculture and manufacturing was about in the same place as Roman technology with heavier plows, crop rotation and fertilization and organized intensive planting methods allowing expansion of agriculture. They made extensive use of simple gearing systems and water power for both agricultural and manufacturing work like the western classical world. In metallurgy they were probably less advanced; there's no evidence of even crude steel manufacturing. In terms of writing the Chinese certainly weren't behind though, because that's what the literati-elite were interested in. Astronomy, geometry, mathematics, medicine and more intellectual pursuits were all subjects of intense interest and scholarly writing. When every Confucian gentlemen was supposed to cultivate intellectual interests, quite a few turned from poetry and the classics to the “harder” pursuits and spent their hobby time writing about them instead of more four-line poems. Cosmology was a principal interest and astronomy was probably the most popular of these scholarly pursuits, with lessons from astronomy applied everywhere from the appropriate -geometry- to the wildly inappropriate- human anatomy. Emperor Zhang's reign is when Buddhism arrives in China, by the way, and while it won't be important politically until the Tang dynasty all the way off in the 7th century it's an important footnote. But you can't do footnotes on SA. Paper comes along at right about 100 CE, and as I mentioned long ago it's at first more useful as toilet paper and a rough substrate for all sorts of things before its refined enough to replace silk and wood as the preferred writing substrate. Paper really comes into its own as a vehicle for the propagation of cheap writing just as the Han dynasty is going downhill politically. And with that not at all forced transition, let's go back to politics after Ming and Zhang, known to later Han people as the good emperors who ruled before all this bullshit that's happening now. The main innovation in Eastern Han court politics are the introduction of the Eunuch class at court, an innovation made by Emperor Zhang to counterbalance the intrigues of the lesser families and the Empress's family in particular. If you've been paying attention though, the problem with the Eastern Han is not a lack of factions at court, however loyal to the Emperor, it's the problem of dissipation of power from the person of the Emperor to unofficial court factions so the Eunuchs while initially a neat idea just become yet another problem as an institution. And the institution of the Imperial court has so many problems that it will collapse. Again. Let's try to get there as fast as possible. Emperor Zhang left the throne to a teenaged Emperor He with a powerful Dowager Empress, who He will eventually enlist the help of the eunuchs to overthrow and restore Imperial rule. But He's numerous male offspring don't survive to adulthood, and an infant Emperor Ai ends up on the throne yet again, with a powerful Dowager Empress yet again. I'm going to fast-forward through the court intrigue that will eventually bring down the Han. As I said before, the bureaucracy and government aren't going to deteriorate nearly as fast as court politics, but there's only so long you can have competent people running things in the background while the Imperial system rots before they seize power for themselves. After He you get the baby Shang, and after Shang another drunk womanizer, An, who came of age in his teens and dies in his 30s. He didn't do anything of note other than let Dowager Empress Dou continue running things, but let me just stop here for a note. Like Mike Duncan observed in his History of Rome podcast, it seems like teenage boys who come to power with a functioning, thriving government and a life of wealth and power are usually doomed to ignominy. It's a pattern we still see in the wealthy and powerful families of today. Growing up and coming of age in an environment in which everyone has to cater to your whim seems poisonous to the human spirit, and the Chinese emperors are no exception. Only the rare Prince Liu Che (Han Wudi) comes into the throne at 14 and has a long and prosperous reign, and often they face difficulties that set them apart from their softer counterparts. After An dies at 31 in 125, the polite fiction of children and drunks being in charge really starts to break down. There are accusations and executions in the palace, the Dowager Empress Yan places yet another baby on the throne, and the Eunuch faction, established to prevent this sort of thing less than a century ago, overthrow the Dowager Empress's government, and install the puppet Emperor Shun. The Eunuchs quickly use their puppet to establish the head of their faction as head of the military, while military governerships are allowed to revert back to hereditary positions (groan), and corruption becomes rampant enough to see peasant rebellions again for the first time in two generations. This eunuch's puppet rules for only 10 years before another child emperor, Chong, takes the throne and the Dowager Empress is back in power, but the kid dies two years later and his child successor is poisoned by the Dowager Empress's brother, who then slaps a 14 year old on the throne. Meanwhile, rebellions loom. Basically, you have to imagine 125-170 as a series of weak, often child emperors on the throne while real power ping-pongs back and forth between the various clans of the Empress Dowagers and the Eunuchs. When an emperor lives long enough to become active in politics he typically sides with the eunuchs just to survive grandma's inevitable assassination attempt and purges the government, and when a child emperor is on the throne the Dowager Empress faction is in power and the eunuchs are running scared. This while the government grinds on, increasingly encumbered by corruption, and provincial rulers expand their power at the expense of a distracted court. In 182 the Yellow River will have a major flood, again, and the peasants displaced by the economic hardship will get out their torches and pitchforks, again, and this time the collapsing Imperial system will be unable to deal with it. This is called the Yellow Turban rebellion, a rebellion basically economic in cause but co-opted by a charismatic Daoist leader who, naturally, wanted to found a new dynasty. But he didn't. To cut a long story short, those hereditary military governors put down the rebellions for the Emperor Ling. Ling is a posthumous name that literally means “inattentive.” You have to do something bad to get yourself named like that – something like presiding over the collapse of a dynasty. The hereditary military governors who put down the Yellow Turban rebellion, military governors with names like Cao Cao and Dong Zhuo among them, aren't just going to go home and call it a day afterward. The Imperial Court is so obviously weak and corrupt, and power so obviously rests in the hands of the general/governors, that only the dullest man of politics isn't getting ready for a new political order after the Yellow Turban Rebellion. Ling's rule was so bad that the Yellow Turban rebellion was hardly the only one, and when he died the power ping-pong match between the eunuchs and the Empress continued as if nothing had changed. But everything had changed; the Imperial court was becoming more and more irrelevant as hereditary titles arrogated more power for themselves and consolidated power over their local branches of the Imperial bureaucracy. The emperors and company stay busy murdering their relatives and coworkers right up until 196 when Cao Cao, by now de facto ruler of northern China, steps in and quietly lets everyone know that they might as well not bother because he's in charge, if you hadn't noticed. I know I'm kind of coming to a lurching halt here, but this history of the Han dynasty trails off with a whimper as the nascent Three Kingdoms rulers are the real movers by the 180s anyway. To explain what they were all doing would take another post entirely, and I'm not going to do that today. Sufficed to say, the Han dynasty story doesn't really come to an end here at all. It keeps going, full tilt, into the early battles of the Three Kingdoms period. So if this seems like an arbitrary place to stop, it is. I haven't actually gone all the way to the official Han end date of 220 CE, just because the Han Emperor is so irrelevant by that point it makes more sense to talk about it in the context of the Three Kingdoms. Emperor Xian may have officially abdicated in 220 but the Han court was in Cao Cao's pocket from 196. I think I've covered the themes of the imperial politics of the period pretty well, so I don't have any lengthy note at the end this time. The Eastern Han was just a retrenchment of the Western Han and fell into almost exactly the same end, except nobody's going to be able to glue all the pieces back together this time. Not until the Sui Dynasty, over 300 years later, will China really be reunited, although the Jin Dynasty is going to make an awfully close run at the title after the dust settles from the wars of the Three Kingdoms. Oh Christ I forgot to say why they're called Western Han and Eastern Han: The Western Han capital was at Chang'an, on the site of modern Xi'an. This isn't the Chang'an that will leave foreign visitors' jaws on the floor, that's Tang Dynasty Chang'an. But it's in the same place. Remember when Liu Xiu was sitting in Beijing (it had a different name then) to wait for somebody to take out Emperor Gengshi so he didn't have to? The Red Eyebrow Rebellion eventually did that, reached Chang'an, and sacked it. When Liu Xiu was putting Han China back together again he wasn't interested in going back to rebuild Chang'an for his capital, probably because he had 20 years of reunification wars still to worry about. So Liu Xiu -- Emperor Guangwu -- set up his capital in Luoyang, just a few kilometers from the site of the ancient (even in 25 CE) Shang Dynasty capital. Luoyang is in Henan province on the Eastern end of the North China Plain, before the plain gives way to the low mountains of the Shandong peninsula. Xi'an/Chang'an is on the west end of the North China Plain. (In fact the xi in Xi'an means west.) So Western Han/Eastern Han. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 13:08 on May 27, 2014 |
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May 26, 2014 07:10
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:When did this happen? I've never heard of this. It's mentioned in archaeologist Hans J. Nissen's book Geschichte Altvorderasiens. His book collects the current state of Mesopotamian research. (Updated edition 2012 and no, an English translation apparently doesn't exist. So this may explain why you never heard of this.)
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May 26, 2014 12:48
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I'm sorry Argle but I really want that Chinese bureaucracy post.
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May 27, 2014 06:25
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Honestly, the wikipedia article on this is excellent and will provide way more than I ever could. Like I said the Eastern Han was not my professor's specialty, we spent way more time on 700-1200 CE. The tl;dr version is that there are three top-level government post:
And then there are nine minister-level positions who do just about what you'd expect. There's an equivalent to the US Secretary of Transportation who's in charge of all the Imperial horses, a captain of guards, a minister in charge of communications, a minister in charge of ceremonies who also oversees the Imperial Examinations, a minister for noble houses who keeps an eye on everything, minister of justice who does what you'd think, a minister of finance who also does what you'd think, and a Lesser Treasurer who's like the Minister of Finance but for the Emperor's personal fortune... just read the wiki article okay? It's a really good article. The only thing I would disagree with are some of the title translations. One thing that should leap out at you is that the Empress Dowager is in charge of choosing a new Emperor if the old one dies without naming a successor holy poo poo no wonder they kept assassinating Emperors.
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May 27, 2014 12:55
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Thanks Argle, I really love these posts.
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May 27, 2014 14:24
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Really liking the China posts, thanks ArgleBargle. I just finished reading From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome From 133 BC to AD 68 and I'm looking for a similar book on the later Roman Empire and maybe also the rise of Islam because that seems sort of important too (but I guess outside the confines of this thread?). Any recommendations that are similar to that? I've been trying to find some on my own, but it's hard to sift through the results and find something that's modern and also credible. Especially on the rise of Islam.
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May 28, 2014 20:37
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Does anyone have recommendations on good online news resources for contemporary study in archaeology and stuff? I have a devoted amateur interest in the ancient world and I'm pretty proficient in Greek and Latin but my reading is generally limited to whatever pop-history and university press books get on my radar. Even some somewhat more "serious" podcasts would be appreciated.
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May 28, 2014 20:41
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Ithle01 posted:Really liking the China posts, thanks ArgleBargle. Peter Brown is probably the most eminent scholar of late antiquity, much in the same way Scullard once was for the Republic. I've only read bits and pieces, but The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 is pretty good. If you want to go further, his stuff on Christianity is also very good and very readable.
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May 29, 2014 06:54
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I'm reading a translation of Catullus poems at the moment by Guy Lee and there are occasional touches that put me off, colloquialisms like 'clever dick' and what I assume are artifacts of a post Christian dominated world inserted back into the text for instance mentions of a God or Gods eternally capitalised and an anachronistic 'Thy' when referring to the presence of a deity, things that are not present in the Latin presented opposite the text. These, to lack a better phrase, pull me out of the poems, so what translation, bearing in mind that I still would like readability as opposed to a straight Google translate job, would be more faithful to the original text (I do not however mind if it lacks a rhyming structure in English).
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May 29, 2014 13:15
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