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Alhazred posted:In Rome toilets were often placed near the kitchen. So probably..not? People put half baths next to their kitchen all the time. It's still a bad idea.
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Jan 16, 2016 21:51
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Ynglaur posted:People put half baths next to their kitchen all the time. It's still a bad idea. It's nice to have a half-bath near the kitchen if you convert it to a toiletless washroom/storage.
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Jan 16, 2016 21:56
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the JJ posted:But do they have kick rear end maps? And great appendixes. Appendices? Maps are especially important if you want to follow the military. Preferably ones with not just towns, but mountains and roads.
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Jan 17, 2016 04:05
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Alhazred posted:In Rome toilets were often placed near the kitchen. So probably..not? I'd speculate hard and with money down that the majority of the toilet-using population pooped publicly, so the discharge location of the 1% might be irrelevant statistically. Also of note: the authors of the study (at least according to the article) compare populations like the Vikings to the Romans, but don't seem to take population densities into consideration. Would the Romans have even more poop pertenant problems at their populations if they did not have toilets? Perhaps or probably? Pick and post.
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Jan 17, 2016 06:05
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I can't even imagine. Rome proper was what, three or four square miles with at least one million people? That is a whole lot of poo poo to take care of. Edo is the only city I can think of that had a mostly functional sanitation system on that scale without sewers and plumbing.
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Jan 17, 2016 06:08
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Did the Romans ever feature elephants on their coinage? I guess I'm wondering what role elephants played in the classical world, apart from that whole Hannibal thing.
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Jan 17, 2016 17:52
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My Imaginary GF posted:Did the Romans ever feature elephants on their coinage? Cicero watched a herd of them get slaughtered in the arena and said that he and the rest of the crowd just found it sad.
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Jan 17, 2016 18:39
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Universe Master posted:Cicero watched a herd of them get slaughtered in the arena and said that he and the rest of the crowd just found it sad. Elephants: halfway between slaves and giraffes.
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Jan 17, 2016 19:07
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Some Romans seemed to really like elephants: Pliny the Elder posted:The elephant is the largest of them all, and in intelligence approaches the nearest to man. It understands the language of its country, it obeys commands, and it remembers all the duties which it has been taught. It is sensible alike of the pleasures of love and glory, and, to a degree that is rare among men even, possesses notions of honesty, prudence, and equity; it has a religious respect also for the stars, and a veneration for the sun and the moon. Some later writers also describe the elephant match in the Colosseum that Universe Master mentioned as being particularly cruel and perverse due to how majestic elephants are.
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Jan 17, 2016 20:28
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That quote is loving amazing. Just... where do you get that?
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Jan 17, 2016 21:22
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Magnus Manfist posted:That quote is loving amazing. Just... where do you get that? Pliny the Elder's Natural History, Book 8.1 e: he discusses various aspects of elephants for around 10 sections fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Jan 18, 2016 |
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Jan 18, 2016 00:32
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Magnus Manfist posted:That quote is loving amazing. Just... where do you get that? It's not that uncommon for people to project human emotions and beliefs on animals, doubly so during any time before modern science gets into high gear. gently caress, it's still common enough today. With elephants its doubly believable as they really are pretty damned intelligent and have been shown to recognize individuals, do something that looks like mourning the deaths of herd members, etc.
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Jan 18, 2016 00:52
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My Imaginary GF posted:Did the Romans ever feature elephants on their coinage? Caesar put some elephants on the front of his coins before it was considered OK to put your own face on a coin, largely because his preferred version of where the name "Caesar" came from was that an ancestor of his had killed an elephant.  Philip I also used an elephant on the back of some of his coins.  Even in the republic era there were some Roman denarii with elephants on the back.  If you go to vcoins.com and type in Elephant (and scroll past a bunch of Selucid elephant coins) you'll see more.
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Jan 18, 2016 02:00
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Once again proving that ancient people were just like us - everybody loves elephants 
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Jan 18, 2016 03:47
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So what's up with everyone in Carthage being called either Hanno, Hamilcar, Hasdrubal or Hannibal?
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Jan 18, 2016 09:09
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Octy posted:So what's up with everyone in Carthage being called either Hanno, Hamilcar, Hasdrubal or Hannibal? Names are hard. Just ask Septimus and his brother Octavian. Also because most of the Carthaginian names people know are from the Barca family. There's also Mago, Arabo, Admago, Salicar, Mintho, Tendao, Bomilcar etc...
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Jan 18, 2016 09:21
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And a lot of names from history are just phoenetic guesses made by non-native speakers (or non-speakers) of the names' original languages. Romans were notorious for this because of the extent of their interactions but that poo poo goes on even today.
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Jan 18, 2016 09:33
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Aureus posted:Names are hard. Just ask Septimus and his brother Octavian. I've come across Mago and Bomilcar, but honestly, I'm reading Carthage Must be Destroyed and it really seems like almost everyone of note has the four names I mentioned. The Carthaginians clearly weren't worrying about people like me 2000 years down the line getting confused.
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Jan 18, 2016 11:06
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I once heard the mongols had a servant class they more or less "produced", by burying people into the ground and constricting head development by wrapping wet (maybe?) horse leather around it. So you've had stupider people to do the chores. I tried googling it years ago, but found nothing. BS?
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Jan 18, 2016 11:42
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BS. The huns were into deformed heads. Just another thing that nobles do to appear to be apart from the rabble.
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Jan 18, 2016 11:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's not that uncommon for people to project human emotions and beliefs on animals, doubly so during any time before modern science gets into high gear. gently caress, it's still common enough today. The idea that we should not project "human" emotions and ideas on animals is uninspired scientific speciesism. Now, I don't know if elephants are actually religious, but I don't know why you couldn't call them honest. What if they are honest?
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Jan 18, 2016 12:55
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Ras Het posted:The idea that we should not project "human" emotions and ideas on animals is uninspired scientific speciesism. Now, I don't know if elephants are actually religious, but I don't know why you couldn't call them honest. What if they are honest? What evolutionary motivation would there be for elephants to develop the concept of honesty? A predator that steals their food reserves via MLM pyramid schemes?
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Jan 18, 2016 13:02
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mike12345 posted:What evolutionary motivation would there be for elephants to develop the concept of honesty? A predator that steals their food reserves via MLM pyramid schemes? I couldn't give you an answer, except the same sort of vague babble about social animals operating in groups that I could give re: humans, but I don't think that's very relevant either way.
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Jan 18, 2016 13:13
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FAUXTON posted:And a lot of names from history are just phoenetic guesses made by non-native speakers (or non-speakers) of the names' original languages. Romans were notorious for this because of the extent of their interactions but that poo poo goes on even today. Compare, for example, 19th century names for everything Chinese transliterated using Wade-Giles to the modern day with pinyin (Peking->Beijing, Canton->Guangdong, etc). Transliteration is hard.
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Jan 18, 2016 13:49
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feedmegin posted:Compare, for example, 19th century names for everything Chinese transliterated using Wade-Giles to the modern day with pinyin (Peking->Beijing, Canton->Guangdong, etc). Transliteration is hard. Peking at least is from the way "Beijing" was pronounced in some non-Beijingese dialect (cf. tea & chai).
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Jan 18, 2016 13:56
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Ras Het posted:The idea that we should not project "human" emotions and ideas on animals is uninspired scientific speciesism. Now, I don't know if elephants are actually religious, but I don't know why you couldn't call them honest. What if they are honest? The idea that we should is incredibly human-centric. Why should animals work the same as us? There might be an argument for great apes or maybe generally animals with certain social structures but beyond that you're just being lazy and projecting. Ras Het posted:I couldn't give you an answer, except the same sort of vague babble about social animals operating in groups that I could give re: humans, but I don't think that's very relevant either way. It's better to think of these things as something along the lines of communicating true or false information to other individuals for x reason because honesty/lying are loaded words for people.
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Jan 18, 2016 14:45
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blowfish posted:It's better to think of these things as something along the lines of communicating true or false information to other individuals for x reason because honesty/lying are loaded words for people. And the idea that we should not apply these metaphors to animals is not "human-centric" because...? I mean, we are processing information as humans. We say "curiosity killed the cat" because we understand what that means. We do not say "the cat's animal instincts to observe and examine killed it".
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Jan 18, 2016 14:59
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Ras Het posted:Peking at least is from the way "Beijing" was pronounced in some non-Beijingese dialect (cf. tea & chai). Well, alternate dialect plus through the different phonetic way things were pronounced in the 1500s in a language that wasn't English. blowfish posted:It's better to think of these things as something along the lines of communicating true or false information to other individuals for x reason because honesty/lying are loaded words for people. If a species has language, which elephants might, why would it also not have lying? Unless they're such honest creatures as the Romans said, of course.
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Jan 18, 2016 16:25
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Ras Het posted:And the idea that we should not apply these metaphors to animals is not "human-centric" because...? I mean, we are processing information as humans. We say "curiosity killed the cat" because we understand what that means. We do not say "the cat's animal instincts to observe and examine killed it". Because we are not trying to draw conclusions about how we interpret the actions of animals, we're assigning meaning to those actions that is internal to the animal. Animals and humans process the world in completely different ways. gently caress, just think about senses. There is absolutely zero way that you are I can imagine how the world appears to a hound. When so much of the sensory input going into your brain comes from scents that we are completely blind to it is as futile as trying to make a blind person fully understand the aesthetics of abstract art. I have no loving clue what is going on in my cat's head beyond some obvious signs that i have to interpret. I scratch its ears and it purrs, and it keeps coming back for more of that. I'm pretty sure that means its happy, but frankly I don't know what "happiness" even means to a cat. Now push that out to more complex things like assuming elephants are honest. Honesty has a strong moral component that doesn't even translate perfectly between human cultures. gently caress, even WITHIN cultures - what is considered very dishonest and morally reprehensible to one person might seem perfectly reasonable to someone else from an identical cultural background. Concepts like "honesty" are abstract and very open to interpretation. Now try to impose that onto what is quite literally an alien mind. The other thing to keep in mind is that if we assume that the animals are self aware individuals* then this sort of generalization is even harder to defend. Turn it around and try to describe humans: We're intelligent, we're social, we communicate verbally, we're highly developed tool users, we have culture, etc. These are all things that can be said of other types of animals as well and quite a few of them can be said together of our nearest relatives. Where you get into the weeds is if you try to say that man is a naturally reverent being, or morally upright, or tends towards honesty, or has a natural appreciation for nature, etc. Even if we are 100% accurately interpreting the behaviors of animals and assigning the correct emotions that lie behind them, these broad generalities would be accurate for that single individual or maybe the immediate social group that it resides in. *for the record I do think that animals experience the world and that the more advanced ones (no I don't know the line - I'm going to go with possessing a brain more complex than a bug's) have an experience of self. They're not just fleshy robots. They aren't human, either, and to assume that their brains work the same as ours is just projecting how we process the world onto something that in all likelihood has entire senses that we either don't have or are really under-developed in us (or, conversely, that are less developed than ours - how does a cow see the world, for example?) edit: projecting human emotions onto animals is trying to extrapolate the inputs from visible outputs when the inputs are going to be necessarily completely different from how a human would perceive them. Hell, if you want to get philosophical I have no way of being sure that any HUMAN on the planet perceives the world exactly as I do. Assuming my cat does is just nuts.
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Jan 18, 2016 17:35
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I understand these points and don't disagree to any great extent, but I think on some level you can condense the argument to something similar to "do other people have minds?". We use ill-defined generalities in the way we deal with everything in our world. Humanizing animals is pretty instinctive and serves an important rhetorical and philosophical purpose ("they are not necessarily The Other"). I don't pretend to understand what the gently caress is going on in my parents' cats' heads, but I can pick out emotional qualities in all of them that I can relate to. I can imagine someone feeling that way about elephantine honesty. That's about it. (thoughts mainly plagiarised from this article: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/amazing-inner-lives-animals/) [GF should feel free to tell me to shut up]
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Jan 18, 2016 22:07
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Ras Het posted:I understand these points and don't disagree to any great extent, but I think on some level you can condense the argument to something similar to "do other people have minds?". We use ill-defined generalities in the way we deal with everything in our world. Humanizing animals is pretty instinctive and serves an important rhetorical and philosophical purpose ("they are not necessarily The Other"). I don't pretend to understand what the gently caress is going on in my parents' cats' heads, but I can pick out emotional qualities in all of them that I can relate to. I can imagine someone feeling that way about elephantine honesty. That's about it. That's all fine and good if you don't want to use technical language in everyday conversation but it's not helpful if you want to actually understand how animals see the world.
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Jan 18, 2016 23:12
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Let's agree cats are assholes, and move on.
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Jan 18, 2016 23:17
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mike12345 posted:Let's agree cats are assholes, and move on. Agreed, with full provocative implications.
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Jan 18, 2016 23:20
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So, I have a question about History, now that I've finally caught up on the thread. (Which took years!) The Sea Peoples have been discussed numerous times here, because they're fascinating and mysterious and all the rest. But what's the history of the idea "The Sea Peoples"? I first heard of them on some blog, in maybe 2007, 2009, and the whole premise of the Bronze Age Collapse was an incredible revelation. Because of that exposure, and a general lack of presentation elsewhere in common history-telling, the Sea Peoples have always seemed like an esoteric topic to me, as though their existence was known to all the Ancient Greeks, but only recognized again in, like, 1980. So what's the story?
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Jan 18, 2016 23:29
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"1177 BC" by Eric Cline has a decent overview of them, but the very short version is that there was on one group called the Sea Peoples, and the term is basically a catch-all for decent sized groups of people that became migratory in the Bronze Age for various reasons. Some of the groups we have a good idea of where they came from, some we don't.
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Jan 19, 2016 00:27
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Sea Peoples is a blanket term that 19th century (not 1980, by the way) European historians used to describe the various seafaring raiders/migratory peoples that the Egyptians referred to having conflicts with in a few surviving records we have. The reason the theory doesn't come up until the 19th century is that, like anything in history, things are forgotten over time if they aren't recorded or eventually re-discovered. Even if they are recorded, those records can be lost or destroyed. The Bronze Age collapse is noted for the sharp decline in literacy and destruction of cities, so it's not surprising that people "forgot" about the Sea Peoples. Think of it this way: you know the general life story of your father, your grand father, maybe your great-grandfather, but what about before him? Probably not much, and this is a time span of just a few generations. Anything before that might as well be mythology if you don't have it written down somewhere. Like I said, we do happen to have written records from the Egyptians and Hittites about these Sea Peoples, but in some cases they're over 3,000 years old. It's not really surprising that it took a long time for someone to notice these references and piece together a theory based on the scraps of information they had.
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Jan 19, 2016 00:36
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Almost none of the writing from the time the "Sea Peoples" were doing their thing was even deciphered until the 19th or 20th centuries. Ancient people inthe Levant and Greece also had the advantage of living contemporaneously with some of them, the most famous example being the Peleset(who were probably the Philistines).
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Jan 19, 2016 02:33
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Cross posting, but is this what an ancient Roman etc. mine would have looked like?AndreTheGiantBoned posted:Coming late to the mine/elevator chat, but this seems relevant to the thread. The Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado took these pictures in a Brazilian mine (in the second half of the 20th century!!!).
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Jan 19, 2016 02:54
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Captain Postal posted:Cross posting, but is this what an ancient Roman etc. mine would have looked like? Here's a Greek illustration of a silver mine. 
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Jan 19, 2016 03:00
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Vavrek posted:So, I have a question about History, now that I've finally caught up on the thread. (Which took years!) The Egyptians recorded a lot about the Sea Peoples. There's a wall in Rameses III's tomb dedicated to the war with them:  A good page with lots of quotes from Egyptian records here: Egypt: Who Were the Sea People
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