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Broaden the criteria a little and it's worth looking at the recovered Egyptian papyri from the Classical period. Lots of low-level administration and tax records, letters from normal people that were never going to get collected and preserved like those of the Great and Powerful, incantations to cure those daily irritations like headaches ... They're so often scrappy and broken up, but as a whole the papyri are an incredibly valuable resource to ancient scholarship.
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Jul 20, 2014 01:35
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Grand Fromage posted:I want to change the thread title again now that we're almost to 10,000 posts, give me some suggestions. The current one is Pompeii graffiti meaning "He who buggers a fire burns his penis". I'd like the new title to be equally classy.
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Jul 20, 2014 14:07
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What are poo poo poster, thread and Something Awful in Latin?
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Jul 20, 2014 14:16
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To go way back, what is actually known about the "Aryans"? Wikipedia doesn't have much, nor any history source I can find. The gist I've gotten so far is there were a people from the Caucus region who either invented the chariot, or were one of the first peoples to use them. For unknown reasons they migrated in two general directions - one group headed towards Northern Syria/Anatolia, and the other entered India. The Indian Aryans became the Hindus. The Syrian Aryans seemed to merge into the general population. Sound about right? Am I missing anything? I love the idea of the god Indra being conceived in Russia, of all places.
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Jul 20, 2014 14:21
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I thought the Aryans were responsible for ending written records in northwest India for some time.
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Jul 20, 2014 14:27
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Arglebargle III posted:I thought the Aryans were responsible for ending written records in northwest India for some time. They arrived about the same time as the collapse of Harrapan culture which seems awfully co-incidental, but I've read it might just be that, as the Harrapans were undergoing a long decline cause by climate change.
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Jul 20, 2014 14:33
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Hogge Wild posted:What are poo poo poster, thread and Something Awful in Latin? 
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Jul 20, 2014 15:02
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Always good 
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Jul 20, 2014 15:05
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Ad eum qui postes stercore, pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.
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Jul 20, 2014 15:09
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Arglebargle III posted:Ad eum qui postes stercore, pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.  Not bad, not bad.
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Jul 20, 2014 15:13
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Some Democritus adaptation? By convention gold, by convention poo poo. In reality posts. I'm not sure what that adaptation would be in the original Greek.
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Jul 20, 2014 17:40
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Habesne scalaria in domo tuo?
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Jul 20, 2014 18:30
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redshirt posted:To go way back, what is actually known about the "Aryans"? I don't think they just merged or disappeared after heading to the middle east, more like headed further west. I'm listening to "The history of English" podcast right now. His theory is that Aryan were the proto indo-europeans IIRC, and their language is the root language of germanic, latin, sanskrit and english/romance languages. So the theory is these people definitely had a influence in the west as well as India basing it on the commonality of certain words. E: No idea how valid this is, (wikipedia) but pretty pictures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis Fo3 fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jul 20, 2014 |
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Jul 20, 2014 18:57
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redshirt posted:To go way back, what is actually known about the "Aryans"? It's thought the Aryans emerged from somewhere in Central Asia or the Caucasus. They did migrate in two different directions, and their cultural influences are today seen in India (religion and language) and Iran and neighboring countries (language, principally). Iranian and Indo-Aryan (e.g., Sanskrit, Hindi and Urdu) languages are part of the same branch (Indo-Iranian) within the Indo-European family. Most historians believe that some of the core concepts and, notably, scriptures (the Vedas) of Hinduism were brought to India by the Aryans. After their arrival they assimilated into (or assimilated?) the other local cultures of northern India between about 1000-500 B.C., during which time what we now call Hinduism continued to develop amongst the increasingly syncretic population. One of the big problems in studying ancient South Asia is that there are very few written records of any kind. Not that they don't exist at all, but they are significantly more scarce than compared to other cultural hearths (like Mesopotamia/Greece/Egypt and China). Further a lot of what we have is religious in nature--notably the Vedas, which are problematic sources as 1) they're religious, not historical, in nature, and 2) they were only codified in the 3rd-5th centuries AD after existing as a purely oral tradition since at least 1000 B.C. if not earlier. A lot of our knowledge of South Asia before the arrival of Islam is relatively patchy. It depends a lot more proportionally on archaeology because of the dearth of written records. Judgy Fucker fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 05:42
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I was reading up on the Sibylline Books and man did poo poo escalate quickly there. "There was a disaster, what should we do?" "The books say let's just have a big ol' feast!" "Okay!  ""There was another disaster, what should we do?" "The books say.... let's throw some celebratory games!" "Okay!  ""There was another disaster, what should we do?" "Bury two Greeks and two Gauls alive in the marketplace  ""Oka... wait, what?"
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Jul 21, 2014 08:41
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Jerusalem posted:I was reading up on the Sibylline Books and man did poo poo escalate quickly there. Yeah, I think the practice of burying two Greeks and two Gauls alive was common up until the fourth or the third century BC. Works like a charm for appeasing the gods.
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Jul 21, 2014 09:24
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I asked this in the MilHist thread, and it wasn't answered, maybe this thread can help?my dad posted:I've been watching the Three Kingdoms series, (And watched the Red Cliff movie) and I have to ask: Was fire really such a powerful influence on the battlefields of China at the time, or is it more a case of fire attacks being remembered and recorded because they look spectacular?
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Jul 21, 2014 10:58
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Red Cliffs is famous for its use of fire. I'm not sure it was usual in other circumstances except as a means of creating smoke. Red Cliffs was a naval battle really. Cao Cao is the villain in RotTK for political reasons and his portrayal as a villain has I think just accumulated cultural momentum as the centuries (only a few since the novel was published) go on. It doesn't help that this novel based on a period of civil war draws on sources that are politically biased and has become a major source of historical fact in people's "head canon" over the centuries. Anyway, Cao Cao doesn't appear particularly villainous in his real actions. He was probably China's best hope for a quick return to unity and normalcy. He certainly was good at governing and organizing. In fact he ended up being too lenient in some circumstances, since Liu Bei managed to betray him and then come crawling back two or three times before he finally made it out of the north. It makes for a way better story to have Cao Cao be the villain, because Red Cliffs is essentially the story of an inscrutable general who has kicked everybody's rear end up until now and the back-stabbing, knee-biting band of fractious allies of convenience who somehow manage to pull off a win with 4-to-1 odds. The story is a lot more interesting when your protagonists are in the back-stabbing camp that has little hope of victory even if it manages not to collapse before the battle begins. If Cao Cao was our hero it would be the story of how a bunch of treasonous assholes managed to cheat the rightful victors and doom China to 200 years of civil war. No I don't think Cao Cao really threw a baby. There are competing anecdotes that describe him as having a huge boner for order and the rule of law,* and since everyone agrees he had the biggest kingdom and the biggest army and was steamrolling everyone else up until that point I'm more inclined to believe the anecdotes that agree with him being the best ruler and not a baby-throwing nutjob. If you read a cursory account of the progress of the civil war up to that point, there's a steady litany of Cao Cao defeating warlords and incorporating their army/territory into his own and a steady litany of Liu Bei allying with people and then promptly turning on them. I don't think I have to tell you which one sounds like a better guy. *Specifically, the time he sentenced himself to death. I think that's probably fake too but there are his agriculture and education programs which are hardly the mark of an evil warlord. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 13:13 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 13:00
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Commander Adama was known for drowning babies, so baby throwing seems like a similar category and therefore he was awesome for it.
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Jul 21, 2014 13:13
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Arglebargle III posted:No I don't think Cao Cao really threw a baby. It's Liu Bei who threw the baby in the show. I probably should have clarified that. The 2010 series seems to paint Cao Cao in somewhat sympathetic light, although it could be because the actor pulled a Johnny Depp with the role. Are there any books you'd recommend to get a more objective view of the period?
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Jul 21, 2014 13:18
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I've actually never managed to sit through Red Cliffs (I think it's trying to pack too much into three hours and has almost zero characterization) so I'm curious about the depiction of Zhuge Liang. You tend to see him portrayed as an old man but he was actually 20 years younger than Liu Bei. He was only 37 when Liu Bei died. I don't know about Liu Bei, maybe he would throw a baby. He sounds like an rear end in a top hat. There's a story about him saving a corrupt official from a beating and then resigning in Romance but the Record of the Three Kingdoms makes it sound an awful lot like Liu Bei beat the poo poo out of the guy and then skipped town, and that he may have been the corrupt one too.
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Jul 21, 2014 13:31
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Arglebargle III posted:I've actually never managed to sit through Red Cliffs (I think it's trying to pack too much into three hours and has almost zero characterization) so I'm curious about the depiction of Zhuge Liang. You tend to see him portrayed as an old man but he was actually 20 years younger than Liu Bei. He was only 37 when Liu Bei died. In the movie, Liu Bei is portrayed as a paragon of morality. Zhuge Liang is portrayed as clever, fairly young, unable to connect to people when he's not engaging in a strategy against them, and a bit of an rear end in a top hat. It's pretty much good vs evil in its portrayal of characters - Cao Cao is a Batman villain, Liu Bei is Commissioner Gordon, and Zhuge Liang is Batman. The 2010 series shows the same story, but with a lot more ambiguity. Liu Bei comes off as a hypocrite more and more as the series goes on, for example.
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Jul 21, 2014 13:39
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Zopotantor posted:Habesne scalaria in domo tuo? Tutus sum
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Jul 22, 2014 01:23
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Mr Havafap posted:Tutus sum Ridete alta voce I apologize in advance for probably mangling the sentence structure.
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Jul 22, 2014 07:15
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Jerusalem posted:I was reading up on the Sibylline Books and man did poo poo escalate quickly there. The Books are totally weird, I wish we had a surviving copy. They were like the Romans' Elder Scrolls, except they did not work and eventually all of Rome was like "hey, these don't work at all, what the hell".
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Jul 22, 2014 14:20
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Lewd Mangabey posted:The North African elephants, though extinct, were probably a lot smaller than what we think of as "African elephants" today. The African ones you typically see are the bush elephants, which live in open scrubland and are quite big (10+ feet tall). There's a second race/species/subspecies called African forest elephants, which are significantly smaller (7-8 ft tall). If the northern elephants were that size, then Indian elephants might very well be bigger. North Africa was more then likely closer to scrubland which means you could have had bigger Elephants.
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Jul 22, 2014 17:46
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physeter posted:The Books are totally weird, I wish we had a surviving copy. They were like the Romans' Elder Scrolls, except they did not work and eventually all of Rome was like "hey, these don't work at all, what the hell". I like that the "books" available outside the Empire pretty much boiled down to,"Man gently caress the Romans  "Either that or very early rape fan-fiction: "Not foreign invaders, Italy, but your own sons will rape you, a brutal, interminable gang-rape, punishing you, famous country, for all your many depravities, leaving you prostrated, stretched out among the burning ashes."
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Jul 23, 2014 01:43
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Hi, I have posted a music thread about old music, which includes Greek and Roman music. Please join in the discussion! http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3652643#post432562012
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Jul 23, 2014 01:49
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Anyone with more knowledge care to speculate about yin yang symbols outside Taoism? I've been reading up on the Notitia Dignitatum (as you do) and I was surprised to find there's a symbol in the book which is remarkably similar to the classic yin yang symbol we all know today. And that something vaguely similar crops up in Celtic and Etruscan art too. These symbols are all recorded several hundred years before their first representation in China, but no link has been found between them. Still, makes for interesting 'what ifs'.
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Jul 23, 2014 08:53
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I don't think there's any connection, it's just kind of an obvious pattern that pops up. Swastikas show up all over the world too and don't seem to have any connection.
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Jul 23, 2014 10:19
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Hey speak for yourself. A triskelion is really hard to draw right.
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Jul 23, 2014 11:29
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't think there's any connection, it's just kind of an obvious pattern that pops up. Swastikas show up all over the world too and don't seem to have any connection.
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Jul 23, 2014 12:00
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Ofaloaf posted:Look, some of the ancient Oscan peoples of Italy may have used the swastika, but theirs were pointing in the other direction. When Hitler reversed the direction for the Nazi's design, he was just being an anti-Samnite.
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Jul 23, 2014 12:05
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Arglebargle III posted:Hey speak for yourself. A triskelion is really hard to draw right. I'm just not a very artistic person.  But I don't know. It seems vaguely plausible that it originated in Celtic art and was passed on to the Etruscans and Romans and somehow popped up in China 700 years after the ND. I'm not backing any of this up academically, by the way. Just midweek boredom. 
Octy fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 12:12
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It's possible, there was travel and cultural exchange. But much like science, usually in history you want to go for the most parsimonious explanation, which is that these patterns and symbols are somewhat obvious and everyone's brains work the same way, so you'd expect them to pop up in multiple places. Unless you find evidence to the contrary, that's what people are going to go with. E: Pics! Celtic one:  Roman one from a book of unit shield patterns. This is the one Octy saw.  Note the Roman infantry units that apparently were nuclear armed. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 12:17
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Grand Fromage posted:Note the Roman infantry units that apparently were nuclear armed.
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Jul 23, 2014 14:12
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Falukorv posted:This makes me wonder, how did the alexandrian succesors (seleucids, macedons and prolemies) feel about stepwise loosing to, becoming dominated by and ultimately defeated by the new upstart Rome? Considering their proud legacy and fighting old enemies they knew. Was it a big shock for them that Rome became so formidable? REMOVE PASTA remove pasta you are worst roman. you are the roman idiot you are the roman smell. return to tuscany. to our etruscan cousins you may come our contry. you may live in the zoo….ahahahaha ,rome we will never forgeve you. Sila rascal gently caress but gently caress rear end in a top hat roman stink latium spqr spqr..roman genocide best day of my life. take a bath of dead legions..ahahahahahROME WE WILL GET YOU!! do not forget Battle of Corinth .rome we kill the ceasar , rome return to your precious africa….hahahahaha idiot etruscans and latins smell so bad..wow i can smell it. REMOVE PASTA FROM THE PREMISES. you will get caught. Ptolemy+Achaea+Pergamon+Athens+Macedon=kill rome…you will ww2/ Alexanrde alive in macedon, alexade making army of city states . fast army Pyrrhus hellas. we are rich and ave silver talents now hahahaha ha because of Ptolemy… you are ppoor stink roman… you live in a hovel hahahaha, you live in a hut. Demetrius Poliorcetes alive numbr one #1 in Corinthian League ….gently caress the rome ,..FUCKk ashol latium no good i spit? in the mouth eye of ur eagle banner and contry. alexander aliv and real strong wizard kill all the roman farm aminal with magic now we the greeka rule .ape of the zoo Senate fukc the great satan and lay egg this egg hatch and Imperial Rome wa;s born. stupid baby form the eggn give bak our clay we will crush u lik a skull of pig. greece greattst countrey
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Jul 23, 2014 16:26
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my dad posted:The 2010 series seems to paint Cao Cao in somewhat sympathetic light, although it could be because the actor pulled a Johnny Depp with the role. I watched the series first (it's one of the best tv shows I've ever seen) and then I tried to watch Red Cliff and couldn't make it through it for the sole reason that their version of Cao Cao was lame, pathetic and mad boring compared to the tv series Cao Cao, who was absolutely awesome. Zhuge Liang was also way cooler in the series.
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Jul 23, 2014 16:33
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3peat posted:I watched the series first (it's one of the best tv shows I've ever seen) and then I tried to watch Red Cliff and couldn't make it through it for the sole reason that their version of Cao Cao was lame, pathetic and mad boring compared to the tv series Cao Cao, who was absolutely awesome. Zhuge Liang was also way cooler in the series. My main complaint about the series is that if I had to take a drink every time someone says "Imperial Uncle  " I'd die from alcohol poisoning.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:50
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Grand Fromage posted:
The XIII "Bullseyes" Legion had a very high turnover rate until they realized what the problem was
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Jul 23, 2014 19:31
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