|
actually africa is mostly jungles full of a wide variety of animals and scattered tribes of cannibals
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2015 14:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 13:54 |
|
|
Ras Het posted:You do realise that there's quite a lot of people in Africa? In fact, there's so much people in Africa that it's in every way much simpler to try to have sex with one of them than with a gorilla. Hey, sometimes you come across a bunch of people who're unusually hairy, who are you to judge? Women is women!  Actually, serious question here - do we know anything at all about what was going on in Sub-Saharan Africa during Roman times?
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2015 14:48
|
|
|
No not really. Certain areas we know more about than others; the horn of Africa, for example, was an important trade stop between the Greco-Roman world and India, so we know a bit about what was going on there, and the people who lived there were organized enough to be a part of the trading system, write their own records, etc. The Romans also sailed along the western coast so they had an idea of how big Africa was, but they didn't really stick around long enough to write anything substantial. The Romans sent several expeditions into sub-saharan West Africa too, I believe they got as far south as modern day Chad before they ended up turning around. We know they made it to the river Niger at least. Still, like I said already, they didn't really stick around long enough to leave us any kind of record about what was going on there, and the people who did live there didn't leave much either. What the Roman accounts do say is that they didn't find many people, only ruins and animals.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2015 14:57
|
|
|
Tomn posted:If they actually got far south enough to see gorillas, I imagine that after months at sea anything that looked vaguely human and female would have been remarkably tempting. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2015 16:29
|
|
|
Ah yiss, look at that hot mermaid
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2015 16:41
|
|
|
Jamwad Hilder posted:No not really. Certain areas we know more about than others; the horn of Africa, for example, was an important trade stop between the Greco-Roman world and India, so we know a bit about what was going on there, and the people who lived there were organized enough to be a part of the trading system, write their own records, etc. East too, they went as far south on the coast as Zanzibar at least. Axum was the major empire of the horn of Africa area, they're pretty neat. Unfortunately sub-Saharan Africa didn't have writing back then so it is a history void like other areas without written records.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 03:45
|
|
|
Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Carthaginians claim to have skinned a couple of gorillas during their voyages South, but I'm puzzled by how they describe gorillas as furry, ill-tempered humans. Two things: first, what I've heard is they probably were describing chimpanzees and not what we today call gorillas, and second a lot of ancient people saw that many apes looked a lot like weird humans with deformities and just accepted them as therefore bizarre mutated tribes rather than just plain animals.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 04:07
|
|
|
Yea, when you think India has people who hop around on one giant foot an ape isn't that strange.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 04:59
|
|
|
How literally did people take their polytheistic religions and myths? According to Greek mythology, the gods lived on Mount Olympus. But there's a real Mount Olympus and obviously there were no actual gods on it, so what did ancient Greeks think? Same goes for the River Styx: it's supposed to separate our world from Hades but again, it's obviously just a plain ol' river. Also, did people really believe in hydras, cyclopses, satyrs, whatever?
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 06:18
|
|
|
Blue Star posted:How literally did people take their polytheistic religions and myths? According to Greek mythology, the gods lived on Mount Olympus. But there's a real Mount Olympus and obviously there were no actual gods on it, so what did ancient Greeks think? Same goes for the River Styx: it's supposed to separate our world from Hades but again, it's obviously just a plain ol' river. Also, did people really believe in hydras, cyclopses, satyrs, whatever? Interestingly enough, there's no record of successful attainment of the summits of Olympus until the 20th century. The Greeks were known to have climbed to the summit of a nearby mountain only slightly shorter, but a lot easier to get to the summit of, so they would have been able to see across, but they might have just taken it for granted that you have to get to the summit to see the god's buildings. They're magic after all.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 06:28
|
|
|
It was the same as today: you had the whole range of beliefs. The more educated seem to have tended to "It's probably not true, but we can't be sure," but there were also 100% true believers too. Think how many people were willing to sacrifice stuff that was very valuable to them.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 06:37
|
|
|
Modern people believe in all kinds of things they can't directly see with their own eyes.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 06:40
|
|
|
Blue Star posted:How literally did people take their polytheistic religions and myths? According to Greek mythology, the gods lived on Mount Olympus. But there's a real Mount Olympus and obviously there were no actual gods on it, so what did ancient Greeks think? Same goes for the River Styx: it's supposed to separate our world from Hades but again, it's obviously just a plain ol' river. Also, did people really believe in hydras, cyclopses, satyrs, whatever? I'm not very familiar with Greek religion in particular but you might consider asking these for a start: Why is it "obvious" to an ancient Greek that there are no gods on Mount Olympus? What's the difference between believing in stories of hydras and, say, giraffes if you've never seen one? (also, show me the Styx on a map of Greece )
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 06:49
|
|
|
Blue Star posted:How literally did people take their polytheistic religions and myths? According to Greek mythology, the gods lived on Mount Olympus. But there's a real Mount Olympus and obviously there were no actual gods on it, so what did ancient Greeks think? Same goes for the River Styx: it's supposed to separate our world from Hades but again, it's obviously just a plain ol' river. Also, did people really believe in hydras, cyclopses, satyrs, whatever? Not too seriously!
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 06:57
|
|
|
Kellsterik posted:I'm not very familiar with Greek religion in particular but you might consider asking these for a start: Why is it "obvious" to an ancient Greek that there are no gods on Mount Olympus? What's the difference between believing in stories of hydras and, say, giraffes if you've never seen one? (also, show me the Styx on a map of Greece Oops, I got the Styx confused with the Acheron. I guess to ancient people, exotic real animals (giraffes, elephants, tigers, etc.) weren't much different from fabled animals (dragons, unicorns, griffons). As for the gods and Mount Olympus, I guess it goes back to how literally they took their religious stories. Another poster pointed out that modern people believe in things they can't see, so I guess it was like that for ancient people. If they looked at Mount Olympus and saw only a mundane mountain, they probably figured the gods were using illusions or something.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 07:06
|
|
|
Blue Star posted:Oops, I got the Styx confused with the Acheron. Also I forgot to mention, the only way you could see the top clearly, where the gods were supposed to live, meant climbing the second highest mountain in the territory of the original Greek city-states. It's easier than getting to the top of Mount Olympus itself, but it's still pretty hard and a lot of the time weather would obscure Olympus' top if you get all the way from your home city state which could easily be hundreds of miles away. As an average Greek person, you'd never personally see it and likely never even met someone who summited the nearby and shorter mountain for the view. Even so we have archaelogical records of people apparently leaving all sorts of sacrificial item on the summit of that mountain, so being able to see the summitt as bare was apparently not enough to dissuade the people of the area.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 07:29
|
|
|
Jamwad Hilder posted:What the Roman accounts do say is that they didn't find many people, only ruins and animals. Whoa, so, do we have any idea of what those ruins were?
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 08:29
|
|
|
Did no one in ancient Greece question if the Oracle of Delphi was actually seeing the future or just tripping on fumes?
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 10:07
|
|
|
Blue Star posted:Oops, I got the Styx confused with the Acheron. As has been said, big range of beliefs, remember Epicurus was not infrequently attacked for atheism. Epicureans believed (with broad brush strokes and a healthy dose of interpretation) in gods as not physical beings that interfere with the world. On a strong tack this could be taken as the gods are little more than ephemera we've dreamed up that can provide moral guides, etc. on a weak reading it could be seen as the gods are simpy apart from the physical world, what we get are the 'echoes' of them (specifically the eidolon, it's founded on atomism so there has to be a physical causation for ideas to transfer). Ultimately though Epicureans believed that telling the gods to go gently caress themselves wouldn't change anything either cause they're not real or because they're not proper flesh and blood type beings we're used to. And so some people must have believed that or similar and other people wanted to put them to death or run them out of town for fear that that sort of talk could bring Zeus or Ares down on their heads. Even seeing Olympus as empty wouldn't really do much to dissuade people from believing in the gods if they're brought up in that belief system. Try explaining to a Nigerian bus driver how car batteries work and how it's perfectly fine to turn on your lights at night and see how far science and rational explanation will get you when you're facing something someone just believes and sees as obviously true. Hell try discussing the efficacy of vaccines with some hippy mom from Portland and see how far you get. People are fundamentally the same, which is how we can guess some Carthaginian sailor probably tried to have sex with a Chimpanzee at some point.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 12:35
|
|
|
Blue Star posted:Oops, I got the Styx confused with the Acheron. How many people think there was a little drummer boy at Jesus' nativity? How many repost the "footprints in the sand" thing (the one with "that was when I carried you") to their Facebook pages? When you say "drat it" are you actually making a sincere request of your god? Belief and myth are complicated and not a binary truth/fiction business now; in the ancient world, where it mattered far more what you did than what you thought, it's even more complicated. These religious acts that you performed were woven into the fabric of the state as you honored the city's tutelary deity: the Olympics and every Greek tragedy you've ever heard of were part of religious events. These religious acts were also at a "low" level -- desperate pleas to have this pregnancy go well, or curse tablets to afflict that jerk Aristippus with something that makes his bits fall off. The Eleusinian Mysteries promised a better afterlife as a result of something you saw, rather than something you thought. Even so, you never saw the gods, just the results of their whims. Regarding bizarre creatures, I work at a university and actually had a colleague tell me that he thinks maybe dragons aren't real.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 13:48
|
|
|
MrNemo posted:Try explaining to a Nigerian bus driver how car batteries work and how it's perfectly fine to turn on your lights at night and see how far science and rational explanation will get you when you're facing something someone just believes and sees as obviously true. Wait, what superstition does this refer to? I've never heard of it and it sounds interesting.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 14:26
|
|
|
Baudolino posted:Did no one in ancient Greece question if the Oracle of Delphi was actually seeing the future or just tripping on fumes? How would they know the difference? People see what they expect to see. A person tripping on fumes would look exactly like what they would expect someone with visions of the future to look like. It was a massive case of confirmation bias. The Oracle said weird things, people would try to make sense of it expecting it to be deep and meaningful. Coincidentally, some event would happen that would relate back to what the Oracle had said (which wasn't hard - the Oracle said a lot of ambiguous stuff that could mean anything). Too bad few people seemed to be smart enough to decode the Oracle's prophecy before it happened.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 14:29
|
|
|
Guildencrantz posted:Wait, what superstition does this refer to? I've never heard of it and it sounds interesting. I'm going to guess this is the same reason lots of people in Korea/China refuse to use their headlights. They think it runs down the battery even while the engine is running and have no idea what an alternator is.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 14:36
|
|
|
Baudolino posted:Did no one in ancient Greece question if the Oracle of Delphi was actually seeing the future or just tripping on fumes? The tripping on fumes idea has been discarded by most historians anyway. But on the subject of ancient Mediterranean hallucinogens, dream fish are kinda neat. Tunicate fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Apr 18, 2015 |
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 15:28
|
|
|
Yeah, even the "rational" Athenians had a quasi-high priesthood, the Archons, who were both high priests and high judges. They had a number of people tried and convicted for various sacrileges, obviously Socrates being the most famous, but certainly not the only one.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 15:54
|
|
|
I think there's a lot of "the past is a foreign country" going on here where Something Awful Forums Posters in 2014 are assuming that Greeks in 400 BC had similar enough life experiences and were exposed to similar enough ideas that "didn't they realize it was all smoke and mirrors?" is a reasonable thing to say.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 17:59
|
|
|
Kellsterik posted:I think there's a lot of "the past is a foreign country" going on here where Something Awful Forums Posters in 2014 are assuming that Greeks in 400 BC had similar enough life experiences and were exposed to similar enough ideas that "didn't they realize it was all smoke and mirrors?" is a reasonable thing to say. You know that atheists did exist then, right?
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 19:10
|
|
|
Deteriorata posted:(which wasn't hard - the Oracle said a lot of ambiguous stuff that could mean anything). Case in point, before Croesus went to war he went to the Oracle who said "If Croesus goes to war he will destroy a great empire." After he lost he complained to the priests who said that the Oracle had been right, a great empire had been destroyed, Croesus' 
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 19:17
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:Working in a castle day-to-day I can confirm that it is loving freezing all winter even with central heating (installed in a Victorian refit and not especially good). Over the winter we have the radiators (3 in our office), 3 plug-in electric heaters (1 at each desk) and we're all wearing 5 or 6 layers and still completely frozen 24/7. Then July comes around and we all die of heat stroke even up on the fifth floor with all the windows and a side door out on a rampart wall open to get a breeze through. Having worked at a factory/office with only *cold air* ventilation during winter up in Sweden I feel for you, but it did remind me of a little factoid from the old mathbooks at school: quote:René Descartes French philosopher, mathematician and scientist 1650-02-11 Died from pneumonia contracted in Stockholm, where Descartes was required to teach Queen Christina of Sweden philosophy in the early hours of the morning during the harsh winter. How far we've come 
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 20:24
|
|
|
Captain Mediocre posted:You know that atheists did exist then, right? Of course, especially among the intellectual elite whose writings we have access to. I worded that really poorly, the point I was trying to articulate in response to the initial post is that while it might be "obvious" to a modern (or, say, Diagoras of Melos) that the gods of Olympus aren't real and there is no physical substance to Greek religions, a given person in that world would not necessarily use the same criteria as we do to decide whether participating in religion is effective.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 20:30
|
|
|
I think we discussed it in this thread but supposedly dinosaur and mega beast bones helped verify local legends and myths. When locals accidentally dug up a gigantic femur they concluded that people must have been really big back in the day. Also never put it past the human mind to hold contradicting ideas simultaneously. The ancient Egyptians held numerous contradicting ideas about the sun but it never bothered them. The sun was Ra, but it was also Ra's boat. The sun was also a disc and an eye. It also was a ball of dung that was pushed up a hill by a dung beetle everyday. All of these contradictions never bothered them apparently because these ideas still showed up in texts without any commentary trying to explain how this all could be.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 23:05
|
|
|
The primitive peoples of the 20th century were known to hold many contradictory beliefs, for example, that life is simultaneously a highway, a box of chocolates, and a garden. All of these contradictions never bothered them and these ideas all showed up in various texts without any commentary trying to explain how this all could be!
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 23:26
|
|
|
hailthefish posted:The primitive peoples of the 20th century were known to hold many contradictory beliefs, for example, that life is simultaneously a highway, a box of chocolates, and a garden. All of these contradictions never bothered them and these ideas all showed up in various texts without any commentary trying to explain how this all could be! But didn't people back then realize that life is actually a chronological set of experiences from birth until death?
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 00:33
|
|
|
I think if you want a good idea of how polytheism could work it's instructive to look at Herodotus and his analysis of different Egyptian traditions. There's a lot of "well, they knew about Dionysus before we did and they call him blah" or "in this temple they have records saying that blah, and blah, therefore Helen never went to Troy and Homer made it all up." Not that he's representative, of course, but you do get the idea.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 01:44
|
|
|
Religion, like all social narratives, is malleable. It's fascinating, but not that complicated, and we go through the same merry-go-round of observations in this thread possibly a bit too often.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 01:55
|
|
|
MrNemo posted:People are fundamentally the same, which is how we can guess some Carthaginian sailor probably tried to have sex with a Chimpanzee at some point. Oh sure. Can't argue believe. loving a chimpanzee is the last thing that you'll do. They're not flowers and hugs like gorillas and they're at least twice as strong as a grown man. Google images of chimpanzee attacks.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 08:42
|
|
|
Speaking of religious life I find Pythagoreans just absolutely fascinating. On one hand these are the brightest minds of antiquity and we still use their innovations in mathematics. On the other, they were weird mysticians who wouldn't eat beans:quote:The Pythagorean code further restricted the diet of its followers, prohibiting the consumption or even touching of any sort of bean. Most stories of Pythagoras' murder revolve around his aversion to beans. According to legend, enemies of the Pythagoreans set fire to Pythagoras' house, sending the elderly man running toward a bean field, where he halted, declaring that he would rather die than enter the field – whereupon his pursuers slit his throat.[10] It has been suggested that the prohibition of beans was to avoid favism; susceptible people may develop hemolytic anemia as a result of eating beans, or even of walking through a field where bean plants are in flower.[11] It is more likely to have been for magico-religious reasons,[12] perhaps because beans obviously demonstrate the potential for life, perhaps because they resemble the kidneys and genitalia.[13] There was a belief that beans and human beings were created from the same material.[14] It is thought that the fava bean was particularly sacred to the Pythagoreans; this is because fava beans have hollow stems, and it was believed that souls of the deceased would travel through the ground, up the hollow stems, into the beans where they would reside.[15] Some, for example Cicero, refer to the flatulence caused by beans as a disturbance of the mind. Since the Ancient Greek word for "beans", kuamoi, was used as a euphemism for "testicles", it is most likely that what Pythagoras actually railed against was a preoccupation with sex.[16] I'm moderately amused by the idea that the followers of Pythagoras would have avoided even touching beans when the man was telling them to stop rubbing their genitals all the time.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 14:25
|
|
|
So... were Archimedes' last words about his balls?
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 14:43
|
|
|
Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Carthaginians claim to have skinned a couple of gorillas during their voyages South, but I'm puzzled by how they describe gorillas as furry, ill-tempered humans. You've never heard of (man-sized) monkeys; something more or less man-shaped but kind of hairy shakes its fists at you from the shoreline and looks threatening. Maybe you land and say 'hi' and one punches you in the face so you get back in your boat and leave rather than stick around to do a detailed anthropological survey. It doesn't seem unreasonable, really.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 15:33
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 13:54 |
|
|
feedmegin posted:You've never heard of (man-sized) monkeys; something more or less man-shaped but kind of hairy shakes its fists at you from the shoreline and looks threatening. Maybe you land and say 'hi' and one punches you in the face so you get back in your boat and leave rather than stick around to do a detailed anthropological survey. It doesn't seem unreasonable, really. In the text, they claim to have kidnapped and skinned 3 "women", of the "gorillae" tribe. It may be just a translation goof, because upon first sighting of a gorilla or a chimp, it seems a bit of a jump to start referring to them in human terms.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 19:05
|
|