Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

achillesforever6: Apr 23, 2012; psst you wanna do a communism?

Jerusalem posted:

The History of the Decline and Fall of Rome's Secret Robot Army.

Look I played Age of Mythology Titans Expansion, I know that the ancients had access to building automaton armies. :colbert:

bean_shadow posted:

What was the best time to be a woman in the ancient world? I know it was never GREAT but didn't Egyptian and Roman women have it better than Greek?

Wasn't the Persian Empire (which ironically gets pretty vilified because of you "THIS IS SPARTA") actually pretty progressive when it came to multiculturalism and gender relations? Like I remember during the Persian wars, one of the better commanders of the Persian army was a woman and I'm blanking on a name.

# ? Jan 4, 2015 22:57

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# ? May 16, 2024 01:34

Ras Het: May 23, 2007; when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child - but now I am a man.

Majorian posted:

...there really aren't any historical facts that are accessible to us.

[...]

But I also think it's important for historians to not lose sight of the fact that for the people living in this period, life was pretty awful.

These don't necessarily square (the declined population, loss of literacy and disappearance of trade connections relate to a certain kind of civilisation, and history struggles with illiterate societies), and while it'd be silly to argue about whether the Bronze Age Collapse was, well, a collapse, it's worth pointing out that the phrase "dark ages" tends to refer to the lack of historical record rather than to some overall era of endless gloom.

achillesforever6 posted:

Wasn't the Persian Empire (which ironically gets pretty vilified because of you "THIS IS SPARTA") actually pretty progressive when it came to multiculturalism and gender relations? Like I remember during the Persian wars, one of the better commanders of the Persian army was a woman and I'm blanking on a name.

Artemisia I of Caria. She was Greek, but yes, on the Persian side.

# ? Jan 4, 2015 23:07

ThatBasqueGuy: Feb 14, 2013; someone introduce jojo to lazyb

She was actually one of the main characters in the most recent 300 movie

# ? Jan 4, 2015 23:11

BrainDance: May 8, 2007; Disco all night long!

PittTheElder posted:

That said, whether there might have been some Polynesian-South American contact is an open question in academia yes?

I've got some vague memories of watching a documentary about a decade ago. From what I remember, the point of the documentary was that some people from the pacific ending up on the west coast somewhere in the Americas before anyone had crossed into America through the Bering Strait. Then that, through some cave painting magic the thought the people who crossed over through the Bering Strait came down and slaughtered all of them, chasing them south.

Through DNA testing or something they said that some of the people living in Tierra Del Fuego at the very southern tip of South America are ancestors of these original people blended with the Bering Strait people.

Am I remembering wrong? Is this whole thing nonsense? Exaggerated?

# ? Jan 5, 2015 06:18

Nintendo Kid: Aug 4, 2011; by Smythe

It's certainly plausible that any dudes who managed to stumble into the Americas from the Polynesian island groups would be pushed out of their living areas by the much larger groups of people who crossed the Bering land bridge. But I'm not sure how plausible it is that a significant enough amount of a mixed population managed to get over from Polynesia that you could have people enough to sustain ongoing communities.

# ? Jan 5, 2015 06:26

Squalid: Nov 4, 2008

BrainDance and Nintendo Kid, you guys are mixing up multiple unrelated debates.

One is about the migration route by which people first entered the Americas. There is on ongoing debate over whether the first settlers rode in boats along the along the pacific coast, or followed an ice free corridor from Beringia. The land corridor theory is widely accepted, and most debate is over whether there was also a coastal migration, which is hard to prove because the shoreline, where these guys supposedly lived, is now 100 meters higher than it was 20,000 years ago.

The second argument is over whether there is evidence of pre-Colombian contact between South Americans and Polynesians. Obviously this is supposed to have happened much more recently, like within the last 1000 years. The theory of trans Pacific contact stems largely from evidence that the Sweet Potato, and chicken, a new world crop and old world domestic animal, appeared in both the Pacific and South America before European contact. There is also much less significant debate over stuff like similarities in pottery, etc but its not taken very seriously.

I'm not really up-to-date on the topic, but I read a paper on the subject a few years back looking at genetic evidence, and I remember it failed to find evidence of a pre-Colombian transfer. There were a lot of poorly documented early European voyages that could have moved the Sweet potato before anyone taking records bothered to document the agriculture on some backwater little atoll, and once they got into the Pacific local trade networks could have rapidly disseminated the vegetable ahead of European observers. There is still room for debate, however.

# ? Jan 5, 2015 07:18

Majorian: Jul 1, 2009; Inverted Offensive Battle: Acupuncture Attacks Convert To 3D Penetration Tactics Taking Advantage of Deep Battle Opportunities

Ras Het posted:

These don't necessarily square (the declined population, loss of literacy and disappearance of trade connections relate to a certain kind of civilisation, and history struggles with illiterate societies), and while it'd be silly to argue about whether the Bronze Age Collapse was, well, a collapse, it's worth pointing out that the phrase "dark ages" tends to refer to the lack of historical record rather than to some overall era of endless gloom.

I think I might be misunderstanding you here, because I don't see how those issues don't necessarily square. All the evidence that we have about the collapse of the Bronze Age does seem to suggest that there was an unusual convergence of really nasty occurrences in the Eastern Mediterranean, including the population collapse, widespread famine and drought, political instability, etc. You're certainly correct that "Dark Ages" do tend to refer to eras where we lack a lot of the historical record, but it also often connotes a period in which overall standard of living dramatically declines from previous eras. I think that's a factor that could stand to be underlined more in historical writings on the Greek Dark Age and the broader Bronze Age collapse: that there were probably people who grew up in the Hittite Empire or Mycenaean Greece, and lived to see these regions reduced to groups of fragmented, impoverished, illiterate hamlets. People had to realize that some sort of cataclysm had happened.

And then the fact that this state of affairs could go on for over three hundred years? That's a long time for a once-literate, once-globalized (in the limited context of the Eastern Mediterranean world, obviously) society to go without being able to read or write. That, to me, is the most interesting question in all of this: why did this period of cultural desolation last for so long? Why did it take three whole centuries for people to start writing and venturing out further than their tiny villages again?

Obviously, the answers aren't obvious at the moment, because archeologists haven't found all that much from the period. But I wish historians who write about stuff like the Greek Dark Age would focus a bit more of their energy on trying to answer that question anyway, because hell - it's a really loving cool thing to study.

# ? Jan 5, 2015 10:43

9-Volt Assault: Jan 27, 2007; Beter twee tetten in de hand dan tien op de vlucht.