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icantfindaname posted:The traditional view of this among Muslims is apparently the opposite of Khosrau, that Heraclius praised Muhammad as a wise man and saint and was generally a just and righteous ruler Yeah, there's this hilarious Islamic legend that Heraclius, after getting the letter from Muhammad, went to his court all "Hey, everybody, we're converting to Islam," and when his courtiers actually...reacted negatively to converting to a religion no one had ever heard of, Heraclius played it off as a joke and a test of everyone's faith.
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Jun 6, 2015 03:08
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Going back to the nighttime chat for a second, didn't somebody (Julius Caesar? Sulla maybe?) decree that because traffic was so bad during the day, merchants would only be allowed to move things around on the roads at night. So it became another reason why nobody went out at night - if a bandit didn't knife you in an alley, you were just as likely to be run over by an overladen wagon full of oysters or something?
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Jun 6, 2015 06:49
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Patter Song posted:Yeah, there's this hilarious Islamic legend that Heraclius, after getting the letter from Muhammad, went to his court all "Hey, everybody, we're converting to Islam," and when his courtiers actually...reacted negatively to converting to a religion no one had ever heard of, Heraclius played it off as a joke and a test of everyone's faith. Hey guys you know how we just fought a twenty year war to get back the true cross? Yeah turns out we were wrong this Arab dude said he is the prophet of god! Wait... don't kill me I was just joking guys jfc...
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Jun 6, 2015 07:14
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In fairness pretty much all those awesome stories about how people reacted to Islam come from Islamic historians. Not saying they're lying but most of them are writing a couple of hundred years after the fact with sources no one else ever had.
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Jun 6, 2015 14:30
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MrNemo posted:In fairness pretty much all those awesome stories about how people reacted to Islam come from Islamic historians. Not saying they're lying but most of them are writing a couple of hundred years after the fact with sources no one else ever had. It's not so much about lying as the usual method of history-writing back then - you're not telling history, you're telling a story that people believe to be history. It's still relevant in that it shows what they thought of Heraclius v. Khosrau, it just isn't as relevant as an empirical story about it.
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Jun 6, 2015 18:58
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MrNemo posted:In fairness pretty much all those awesome stories about how people reacted to Islam come from Islamic historians. Not saying they're lying but most of them are writing a couple of hundred years after the fact with sources no one else ever had. Yes, hence my use of the word "legend" in describing the Heraclius story. Doesn't stop it from being amazing, though.
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Jun 6, 2015 22:41
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In ancient Roman religion, what was the difference between a genius and a numen?
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Jun 8, 2015 02:31
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Wasn't numen the divine spirit of the Emperor (when they started being treated as living deities) while genius was the living embodiment of the spirit of any particular family? So basically they were both "Dads" - the Emperor as "Father" of the Empire, while the leading male figure in a family-line was the "Father" of that family? Edit: Or am I just thinking of the general principle of the pater familias?
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Jun 8, 2015 03:58
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Rome: Despots and Daddy Issues
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Jun 8, 2015 13:12
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Blue Star posted:In ancient Roman religion, what was the difference between a genius and a numen? Numen just means divinity or divine presence in general. Genius specifically is the divine presence associated with a family or city, sort of its personified god or spirit if that makes sense? The fancy general term for it is tutelary deity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutelary_deity Jerusalem posted:Wasn't numen the divine spirit of the Emperor (when they started being treated as living deities) while genius was the living embodiment of the spirit of any particular family? So basically they were both "Dads" - the Emperor as "Father" of the Empire, while the leading male figure in a family-line was the "Father" of that family? I think you're thinking of paterfamilias, although the system of genius deities along with everything else about the Roman religion was fit into the concept of paterfamilias
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Jun 8, 2015 23:14
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hmm. perhaps it is time for an Al-Ghazali Effortpost that was partially lost due to an unwise tab closure. Restoration in progress! look at this handsome devil So Al-Ghazali was a Persian theologian, lawyer and philosopher living in the 11th century middle east. He was p. rad. Before I start actually talking about him, though, there is a certain context that has to be established. Islam Everyone is, to some degree, familiar with Islam, the religion of Muhammad. It is a powerful monotheistic, Abrahamic belief system with a tradition of direct divine revelation of prophets, latter of which is Muhammad himself (some heretical branches of Islam claim later prophets, but those guys are poseurs, seriously). What is most special about Islam is the sheer extent of inspired texts in the religion, including a whole system of laws and explicit examples from the biography of the Prophet - Shariah, maligned as it often is, is considered the law of God by which God intends to order worldly affairs. Islamic religious authority is deeply ingrained in secular legal practice, and the study of God is implicitly also the study of the law of God. The tradition of hadith, i.e. anecdotes based on the life and actions of Muhammad, is similar - Islam doesn't gently caress around when it comes to the gravity of these things, and it was a big early strength of it. There is no pope in Islam - the closest equivalent is the Caliph, who was absolutely a secular ruler in addition to his religious authority. Islam is largely divided into two main blocs, based on succession politics in the generation of muslims immediately following Muhammad's death, the Sunni and Shia. Again, there's a bunch of smaller sects and weird heresies, but these remain the largest and most influental (and, arguably, most legitimate) branches of Islam - it can be crudely compared, I guess, to Catholicism and Orthodox Christendom before the reformation made a mess of everything. Of these two main lines, Sunni is and has always been the dominant, and so the Shia tendency has an inclination towards skullduggery and messianism, like the Hidden Imam of the Twelvers etc etc etc. This is not directly pertinent to al-Ghazali, but the intricacies of Islamic theology in general are, so I'm including it. Sunni theology is divided into four major schools of, basically, jurisprudence, which I honestly cannot do justice but which each has a long and illustrious intellectual tradition based on emphasising certain aspects of the nature of God and the Law (which is the word of God, remember). Another big facet of Islam is the rational monotheism of the religion. God is One, God is All. This lends itself rather naturally to neoplatonism, as we will see. Again, I'd appreciate someone with a finer understanding of these points giving a runthrough on Islamic theology, because it is really fascinating and I'm scratching the surface because I'm really uncomfortable doing more, due to my own ignorance. The last facet I want to emphasise is Islamic mysticism. Because of the importance of revelation in Islam and the unity and universality of the Divine, personal connections with God are a big deal (as in any sophisticated religion). God, however, is explicitly beyond human understanding and human comprehension, and so can only be grasped through intuition. Refining this intuition is a major part of the various rituals Islamic mystics such as Sufis do. Sufis are a kind of Islamic monk-hippie-variant and are almost universally chill as all hell, doing rad poo poo like meditative dance, religious music, drugs and contemplating the nature of God. Obviously, I'm oversimplifying, partially out of ignorance and partially because I'm trying to tell the story most relevant to al-Ghazali, who directly identified himself with one particular strand of Sunni Islam, here. There are other interpretations - always keep this in mind. The Islamic World When al-Ghazali is coming of age, Islam is both incredibly strong and collapsing on itself. Rapid expansion is a fact of life - in a few hundred years, the Faith has spread from a trading post in a desert peninsula to utterly dominating huge swathes of the world. Wonders are being produced, technology is emerging, translations of both Western and Eastern culture is being done and appropriated, and improved upon. This is the era where they invent algebra and alchemy and basically everything beginning with 'al'. Architecture and art are spreading like wildfire, mosaics are being set up, mosques decorated, enormous wealth is being generated and circulated. The expansion of Islam was halted What I'm trying to do here is to paint a picture of a society in which philosophy, theology, law and politics are all deeply intertwined. Intellectually emasticating your political enemies is a perfectly legitimate way to advance your policy interests and personal influence at court - if you can completely discredit your opponent, you're pretty much safe from more brute attacks as well, because the sultan/caliph/whoever will use your interpretations and keep you around and protected. This isn't really necessary to state, but I state it anyway, because it is very relevant indeed to understanding al-Ghazali's choice of rhetoric and style, as well as some of the substance of his arguments. Around al-Ghazali's lifetime, the Seljuk turks came seemingly from out of nowhere and rather shook things up a bit before completely breaking the romans at the battle of Manzikert and ensuring an Islamic Anatolia, as well as indirectly triggering the Crusades. Also, the twelver Shia Fatimids, claiming descent from Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad, took control over the mighty province of Egypt. So, on one hand, you have this intellectual and commercial golden age, and on the other the authority of the Caliphate is rapidly eroding in favour of basically tribal dynasties - this is very important, because a lot of al-Ghazali's most important work is made in a context in which he has to curry favour with these rulers. Just like Descartes' arguably greatest achievement is not being branded a heretic and the Meditations must be read in light of him trying very hard not to be murdered by the Church, our guys here have their own political issues to deal with. Ibn Sina Best known in the West as "Avicenna", this guy was Smarter Than You. He was really good at everything he did, and one of those things was philosophy, in which he completely dominated the middle east during his lifetime. The following is a brief summary of his views (trigger warning: neoplatonism): [STUFF TO BE ADDED] So, Avicenna constructs a huge and intricate ethical, spiritual and above all metaphysical edifice, based on the great Greeks (i.e. Plato and Aristotle with a sprinkle of Plotinus and that ilk) which . One curious attribute of Avicenna's philosophy is how distinctly Islamic it is in its adaptation of Plato - it adapts the rigid idealism of neoplatonic thought to a sort of overarching spiritual. Obviously, I'm not doing him justice - I don't know if I'm spiritually capable of that. He's a Ali G in da house: [THIS SPOT WILL BE EDITED IN OVER THE DAY] Probably al-Ghazali's most famous work is the Incoherence of the Philosophers, wherein he refutes twenty philosophical theses popular in his day, naming them "incoherent", i.e. inconsistent with themselves, observable reality and the Divine. This is often seen as a fundamentalist text, a rejection of philosophy in favour of religious mysticism, but I wholeheartedly disagree with this interpretation. What al-Ghazali does is not so much refute philosophy as define its limits in an islamic context - he's not arguing against logic, nor against rational exposition of the world and the nature of thought and emotion. He is simply saying, to borrow a phrase, "whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent". This is probably the most amazing passage for it, from the online stanford encyclopedia of philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/al-ghazali/#17tDisInc posted:The connection (iqtirân) between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary (darûrî), according to us. But [with] any two things [that are not identical and that do not imply one another] (…) it is not necessary that the existence or the nonexistence of one follows necessarily (min darûra) from the existence or the nonexistence of the other (…). Their connection is due to the prior decision (taqdîr) of God, who creates them side by side (‘alâ al-tasâwuq), not to its being necessary by itself, incapable of separation. (al-Ghazâlî 2000a, 166) hmmmmmm where have we seen this before oh wait it's hume. al-ghazali just summarised hume's critique of metaphysics and the concept of logical necessity seven hundred years before it was even formulated I cannot overstate how significant this is. Modern metaphysics is still to a large degree stuck on Hume. Hume's critique provides the philosophical basis for all modern ontological examination. Some of the most unquestioned philosophical geniuses of our time, Wittgenstein and Kripke, are directly and seriously indebted to Hume. And al-Ghazali anticipated Hume by seven. hundred. years. Al-Ghazali is also really important in Islamic legal thought, being the main standard bearer of a kind of intentionalism wherein the manifestation of the Law as passed to Muhammad was simply an incarnation of God's intent at the time, and interpretation and even reformation of the Law may be carried out, based on a theological understanding of God's purpose with the Law as it applied to Muhammad's society - apparently lots of modern Islamic progressives use al-Ghazali's reasoning, but this is not something with which I'm overly familiar. Perhaps the most directly relevant part of legacy in the West is that Ibn Rushd, Averroes, the Great Commentator and the dude whose translations and comments on Aristotle laid the foundation for basically all medieval European philosophy spent quite some effort explicitly trying to rescue Aristotelianism directly from al-Ghazali's critique. I'm much less familiar with him, though, and this post is getting really long as it is, so I'm going to leave it at this. The tl;dr is: Islam is a very important and often understated contributor to the history of philosophy, and al-Ghazali was a really cool+smart dude!!! there's an english translation of the Incoherence here if you're interested: https://archive.org/details/TheIncoherenceOfThePhilosophers-EnglishTranslationOfImamGhazalis
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Jun 11, 2015 12:11
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I thought this article in the NYT yesterday was pretty neat regarding the genetic makeup of Europeans and where they all came from. Sounds a lot like we've added more concrete facts to the Kurgan Hypothesis http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/science/dna-deciphers-roots-of-modern-europeans.html?_r=0
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Jun 11, 2015 20:32
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Wait, is Al-Ghazali the dude who was buddies with Omar Khayyam and the old man of the mountain?
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Jun 11, 2015 20:39
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V. Illych L. posted:hmm. perhaps it is time for an Al-Ghazali Effortpost that was partially lost due to an unwise tab closure. Restoration in progress! If you closed the tab, drafts should be autosaved. Look between the window where you type and the 'check message length' button.
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Jun 14, 2015 14:34
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Crap article about a bronzeage arrowhead embedded into somebody's spine, but the linked journal article is ok if you have access. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2015/06/08/bronze-arrowhead-embedded-in-spine-shows-elite-iron-age-warrior-survived-battle/
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Jun 17, 2015 09:41
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How long did it take after the fall of the western empire for the whole Roman civilization nostalgia thing to happen?
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Jun 22, 2015 00:07
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Nostalgia for the good ol' days started before there was much of an empire. After the Second Punic War, you start getting Roman elite pining for the values of the old Romans. People have repeating the same stuff about how modern men don't measure up to their forefathers throughout all time. It's not a new phenomena at all.
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Jun 22, 2015 00:36
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Romans worried from the start about whether expansion, cosmopolitanism and decadence would erode and destroy historic Roman virtues, since they knew about other empires that had collapsed.
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Jun 22, 2015 01:04
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goose fleet posted:How long did it take after the fall of the western empire for the whole Roman civilization nostalgia thing to happen? Does it count as Roman nostalgia if they haven't yet realized it fell?  silver denarius issued by Imperator Carolus Magnus
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Jun 22, 2015 01:55
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There was a serious attempt at bringing back the Republic in 12th century Rome. You can probably guess who foiled it.
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Jun 22, 2015 06:48
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Charlemagne's Empire was Rome fan-fiction LARP club.
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Jun 22, 2015 06:50
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goose fleet posted:How long did it take after the fall of the western empire for the whole Roman civilization nostalgia thing to happen? As soon as the second punic war veterans were codgers
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Jun 22, 2015 13:42
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Arglebargle III posted:Charlemagne's Empire was Rome fan-fiction LARP club. To be fair it's not clear that translatio imperii was his idea.
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Jun 22, 2015 14:21
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How much did the quality of life change from ancient Rome to middle ages, in terms of life expectancy? Would you be better of as an average person in Rome 100 BC or in Rome 1000 AD?
Doctor Malaver fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 15:13
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It greatly depends on exactly which dates your comparing. As previously mentioned, if you survive childhood in the late-Republic, early-imperial era, you could reasonably expect to live into old age (60s). If you could afford a Greek-trained doctor, maybe even older. 100 BC is the time of Marius and Sulla so you have to contend with civil wars all the way until Augustus ushers in the Pax Romana. Living in the Medieval Roman world (Byzantine-era Rome), you could still get excellent health care from Greek doctors but there still wasn't anything in the way of germ-theory to advance medicine. There was also regular outbreaks of plague from the 6th century onward as well as the general instability of the Medieval Roman world at the time.
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Jun 23, 2015 17:45
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Life expectancy stats are always enormously swayed by infant mortality.
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Jun 23, 2015 17:47
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So did any advances happen in those thousand years to reduce infant mortality or provide better health care for adults?
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Jun 23, 2015 19:53
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Doctor Malaver posted:So did any advances happen in those thousand years to reduce infant mortality or provide better health care for adults? To be honest not really, one area the Romans truly did excel at was heathcare. They did not have germ theory, but they figured out rudimentary sterilization (oh hey if we clean these things the dudes die less often wow) and were experts at wound care and surgery to repair damage. they also had very clean cities that emphasized sanitation. (you still had roads filled with horse poo poo and not everyone was close enough to a bath to properly dispose of their waste but it was better then like a random 1000 AD city). Also the Tiber downstream of Rome was probably horrific. If you had a decent supply of food and survived childhood, your only true threat was disease, cancer, heart attack, etc. if you broke a bone it could be set, if you cut yourself it could be stitched, you could even get brain surgery to relieve pressure on the brain from a head injury.
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Jun 23, 2015 20:04
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WoodrowSkillson posted:To be honest not really, one area the Romans truly did excel at was heathcare. They did not have germ theory, but they figured out rudimentary sterilization (oh hey if we clean these things the dudes die less often wow) and were experts at wound care and surgery to repair damage. they also had very clean cities that emphasized sanitation. (you still had roads filled with horse poo poo and not everyone was close enough to a bath to properly dispose of their waste but it was better then like a random 1000 AD city). Also the Tiber downstream of Rome was probably horrific. Although this doesn't factor in the situation of slaves (including slaves who mined who died awfully quickly) and other contributing factors like extensive military conflict and the exposure of disabled or deformed children etc.
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Jun 23, 2015 20:07
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Interesting, thanks. So medicine didn't progress... did it deteriorate? I have this image of medieval doctors being superstitious and somehow worse than those of ancient Rome/Greece. And what was the situation like in other cultures? Would you rather be sick in Rome, Damascus, or Peking?
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Jun 23, 2015 23:04
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Doctor Malaver posted:Interesting, thanks. So medicine didn't progress... did it deteriorate? I have this image of medieval doctors being superstitious and somehow worse than those of ancient Rome/Greece. Well considering that literacy became the sole purview of priests after the fall of Rome, yeah you could say that medical knowledge among everything else deteriorated.
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Jun 23, 2015 23:12
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What was daily life in the west after the fall of Rome like?
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Jun 23, 2015 23:14
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Friendly Tumour posted:Well considering that literacy became the sole purview of priests after the fall of Rome, yeah you could say that medical knowledge among everything else deteriorated. Not metallurgy! If I remember correctly from the last time this conversation happened, progress was made around europe in metallurgy quite consistently throughout the 400-1400 AD period, and nowhere did it regress.
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Jun 23, 2015 23:20
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Friendly Tumour posted:Well considering that literacy became the sole purview of priests after the fall of Rome, yeah you could say that medical knowledge among everything else deteriorated. In Europe maybe, but the areas under Islam soldiered on. I don't know if you're better off there than in 100 BCE Rome but I suspect you would be.
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Jun 23, 2015 23:22
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The perception i always had was that medical practice particularly didn't deteriorate significantly until the reformation. This being the case in britain especially because medical care was generally provided by Catholic monastic orders, who lost most or all of their land and resources, and their knowledge died out with the dissolution of their orders. I'm not sure how true this was of continental Europe.
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Jun 23, 2015 23:30
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nothing to seehere posted:Not metallurgy! If I remember correctly from the last time this conversation happened, progress was made around europe in metallurgy quite consistently throughout the 400-1400 AD period, and nowhere did it regress. I know! It's quite impressive too, even if the techniques to make alloy steel didn't quite catch on until reneissance times despite the dozen odd times somebody in Europe came up with it. Damascus steel... Motherfucker, vikings were making that poo poo around 300 years before those chumps. Fork of Unknown Origins posted:In Europe maybe, but the areas under Islam soldiered on. I don't know if you're better off there than in 100 BCE Rome but I suspect you would be. This is very much true, and in many ways the Caliphates were as much the inheritors of Rome as the Byzantines in terms of culture and literature preserved and expanded upon. Europe was a toilet. Oberleutnant posted:The perception i always had was that medical practice particularly didn't deteriorate significantly until the reformation. This being the case in britain especially because medical care was generally provided by Catholic monastic orders, who lost most or all of their land and resources, and their knowledge died out with the dissolution of their orders. What? How the hell does the Reformation figure into this? Anyway, medical knowledge among other things the West forgot made a real and this time lasting return to Europe with the Conquest of Toledo and the Fall of Constantinopolis in the 14th century. Obviously it took time to spread and be integrated and to get improved on, but it's really the reintroduction of literacy that's the key point in when doctors stopped using cow dung on stab wounds.
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Jun 23, 2015 23:57
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Doctor Malaver posted:Interesting, thanks. So medicine didn't progress... did it deteriorate? I have this image of medieval doctors being superstitious and somehow worse than those of ancient Rome/Greece. The idea of everything deteriorating after Rome is untrue, but there are a few areas where it is and medicine is one. The best case scenario was nothing got worse. As far as I know there were no advancements of medicine beyond what the Romans had until Renaissance people started figuring out anatomy properly. That helped surgeons quite a bit, as you'd imagine. However there was no real revolutionary change over Roman medicine until the discovery of antiseptics. Basically if you need a doctor in history, a Roman doctor in like 150 AD is your best choice until literally like the late 1800s. Especially if it's a physical injury. The legions provided a whole lot of hands on training for surgeons.
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Jun 24, 2015 00:46
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Why did nobody bother trying to figure out human anatomy in ancient civilizations?
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Jun 24, 2015 00:52
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The idea of science didn't exist yet. Studying anatomy requires you cut up a lot of dead people, which everyone found objectionable. In the Renaissance you finally get a strong enough ideology to send med students out to dig up graveyards and steal corpses to study.
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Jun 24, 2015 00:55
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I believe it was simply a matter of it being considered desecration to cut up a human body like that - Galen was considered the authority on anatomy for centuries because he dissected monkeys and basically assumed humans were probably the same under the skin (he was mostly right, I guess!).
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Jun 24, 2015 00:57
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