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Benagain posted:I was reading a book about early church history and it asserted that we know that early Christianity was popular among the downtrodden because early Christians used Greek, the language of the lower classes in AD 50-250 Rome. I was under the impression that Greek was like an educated language? Most of "Rome" was the Greek speaking eastern Mediterranean
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Jan 24, 2018 18:16
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:The local magistrate has been alerted that there's a band of bagaudae posting in this thread. Hope you bribed him too or he's not doing a drat thing
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Jan 24, 2018 18:25
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Benagain posted:I was reading a book about early church history and it asserted that we know that early Christianity was popular among the downtrodden because early Christians used Greek, the language of the lower classes in AD 50-250 Rome. I was under the impression that Greek was like an educated language? Not the version of Greek the New Testament used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek
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Jan 24, 2018 18:28
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I think the point was the Jews who were the apostles knew Greek (koine) and that let it spread easily across the important parts of the Roman Empire since there was a lingua franca
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Jan 24, 2018 18:34
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euphronius posted:Most of "Rome" was the Greek speaking eastern Mediterranean Yeah I'm still going with the assertion that from the reign of Augustus onward Greek speakers outnumbered Latin speakers inside the boundaries of the Empire.
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Jan 24, 2018 18:37
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Benagain posted:I was reading a book about early church history and it asserted that we know that early Christianity was popular among the downtrodden because early Christians used Greek, the language of the lower classes in AD 50-250 Rome. I was under the impression that Greek was like an educated language? English is an educated language. Lots and lots of scholarship is written in it. Many people worldwide have heard of Shakespeare as this super awesome literature dude just as they did Homer. It's the language of a now-vanished Empire that once bestrode the known world. Certain dialects of it are widely perceived as very classy even today, especially those from the homeland of said Empire. It's also the language spoken by Bubba in a truckstop in Arizona, though.
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Jan 24, 2018 19:00
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Ras Het posted:a traditional Marxist model is going to look like total nonsense when applied to pre-modern societies i mean this is a society where at least one of them probably ennobled himself--or there's a guy who got the very odd name of "von Bauer" ("von Peasant") at birth, which is weirder. I mean who's gonna tell him no? Do you have as many men/guns/windows?
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Jan 24, 2018 19:49
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HEY GUNS posted:My subjects have no concept of class You can talk about loving pikemen for pages and pages in the ancient history thread but people can’t discuss things you don’t like huh?
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Jan 24, 2018 20:33
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nobody needs to have a sense of class solidarity or anything of the sort for a broad conflict of interests between segments of society to occur. the economic processes at work ensured that people who derived income primarily from private enterprise were on a collision course with the people who derived income primarily from land rents and sovereign-granted perogatives, and the accumulating nature of capitalism allowed the former to eventually outweigh the latter in influence on most public and private affairs.
Jazerus fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 20:48
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I would argue a concept of class war goes way back. Definitely to the 17th century but 'When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman' goes right back to the Peasants' Revolt. The Levellers and other people who believed in the Norman yoke absolutely believed in one class of oppressed Anglo-Saxon yeomen and another over them of Norman nobles. Aristocracy versus not-aristocrats is still a class conflict even before industrialisation.
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Jan 24, 2018 21:29
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Aristotle's Politics is essentially a long discussion of class warfare.
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Jan 24, 2018 21:34
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The romans had strikes and class consciousness way back in like 500bce.
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Jan 24, 2018 21:35
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Senor Dog posted:You can talk about loving pikemen for pages and pages in the ancient history thread but people can’t discuss things you don’t like huh?
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Jan 24, 2018 21:38
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the Gracchi brothers being beaten to death in the street for suggesting the aristocracy redistribute their massive land holdings among the urban poor and returning veterans is definitely not an example of class warfare
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Jan 24, 2018 21:40
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HEY GUNS posted:they can't present one heuristic among many as objective fact, no. it wasn't my intention to narrow the period down to a simple summary of "it's a class struggle! hey wanna come to the campus trot meeting after class?" the discussion beforehand was focused on the specific "rise of the merchants" that is discussed as a unique feature of the early modern despite many merchant classes "rising" in the past, and how it was different from most previous instances of commercial interests gaining power. this particular aspect of the period was different; it was a slow-burn long-term conflict between classes that ultimately led to not just the "rise of the merchants" but the "near-global domination of the merchants" in the modern period but this is of course not at all the only thing going on in the early modern period that reshaped society, just an (important) piece of it
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Jan 24, 2018 21:50
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Benagain posted:I was reading a book about early church history and it asserted that we know that early Christianity was popular among the downtrodden because early Christians used Greek, the language of the lower classes in AD 50-250 Rome. I was under the impression that Greek was like an educated language? Historic Israel and Judah were surrounded and at some times conquered by Greek speaking people for quite a bit before any of those Greek speakers would later become part of the Roman Empire. There was a ton of history of people knowing Greek, especially people living next to the Jewish people (who at that point were mostly speaking Aramaic anyway) were living, so as Christianity was getting going from a small band of followers around 30 AD to a regionally known thing as of the first century, it was going to be for a lot of Greek speakers, and involving messages and books being sent between primarily Greek speaking cities and towns and remaining Christians within Judea. Let's take a look at the general region in 200 BC, before the Romans really started pushing in (The area of Israel itself first comes under Roman dominance while remaining independent around 70 BC, eventually being wholly taken into the empire around 4 AD):  The Jews of what once was Israel and Judah, and which would become Judea under the Roman Empire, are living within the Greek-dominated Ptolomaic Kingdom. That's bordered by the Arab/Aramaic speaking Nabatean Kingdom to the South and the other border is with the Seleucid Kingdom which was Greek-led and heavily Greek and Aramaic speaking where it borders where the Jews were living. Then of course, Anatolia and Greece itself is all speaking Greek. Even as the ownership of these places change a lot over the time period leading to nearly all of this being conquered by Romans, they still maintain very long histories of the local people speaking Greek and sometimes Aramaic. And on top of this, you have stuff like the biggest Jewish communities mostly being spread out into various Greek speaking areas, particularly the "Egyptian" parts of Ptolemaic Egypt. All of this combines to make Christianity, a religion that's building itself up from largely Jewish believers at first, very reliant on Greek and a little bit of Aramaic from here to there. And it would absolutely be expected that a lot of the common people of these areas near where it starts know Greek and even when they don't ordinarily speak the particular form of Greek that the Bible we have today was written in, they would be reasonably able to understand it. In essence the Greek of the bible used pretty much the common Greek speaker's Greek, but in a more formal way than you might speak it day to day. But it's not too much more so than the way if you read a popular book of today, the English used will be a bit more formal and serious than how you'd speak to your friends about something that happened to you.
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Jan 24, 2018 22:01
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There are many societies and periods where there is rigid, legal distinction between classes, but then there are periods where it's much more muddled and at most you have a bunch of unspoken understandings, and I'm terrible at those. Did the Germanic tribes have much in the way of a class system before they came in and became the ruling class over west Roman territory?
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Jan 24, 2018 22:06
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HEY GUNS posted:they can't present one heuristic among many as objective fact, no. This is an odd statement because heuristics by definition are not objective facts.
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Jan 24, 2018 22:06
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Squalid posted:This is an odd statement because heuristics by definition are not objective facts. edit: (I'm similarly harsh on, for example, the Military Revolution Thesis.) HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 22:29
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HEY GUNS posted:This is my exact point Yeah except no one was doing that and you’re just grinding your axe on random surfaces
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Jan 24, 2018 22:59
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SlothfulCobra posted:There are many societies and periods where there is rigid, legal distinction between classes, but then there are periods where it's much more muddled and at most you have a bunch of unspoken understandings, and I'm terrible at those. It's clear that by late antiquity and the tribal migrations the answer is "yes," but what's less clear is how much of that is produced by contact with Romans (the Gothic nobility is often described as "sub-Roman," not in a sense of being lesser but in the sense of being inspired by and emulating) and wealthy steppe confederations like the Huns or whatever.
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Jan 25, 2018 04:18
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Senor Dog posted:Yeah except no one was doing that and you’re just grinding your axe on random surfaces How else do you sharpen your axes, huh 
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Jan 25, 2018 11:29
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I'm glad that little class war sidebar didn't start fighting over the bronze age collapse.
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Jan 25, 2018 17:23
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FAUXTON posted:I'm glad that little class war sidebar didn't start fighting over the bronze age collapse. ACTUALLY it wasn't so much a collapse as
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Jan 25, 2018 17:26
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My favourite figure from ancient history is Gustavus Adolphus
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Jan 25, 2018 17:32
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Wilfred Owen is my favorite 19th century poet
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Jan 25, 2018 17:36
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What if it was Rommel instead of Varus at the Teutoburg Forest
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Jan 25, 2018 17:49
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Which is the longest century ever? 1450-1640?
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Jan 25, 2018 17:57
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As a serious post: what did people use to "sign" documents in antiquity? I don't mean a signature so much as whether people used similar stuff to seals/sigil rings/stamps to validate the source or the secrecy of a message.
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Jan 25, 2018 18:04
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Relevant : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_bull
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Jan 25, 2018 18:07
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sebzilla posted:Which is the longest century ever? 1450-1640? 1492 is definitely a century break, sorry
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Jan 25, 2018 18:12
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FAUXTON posted:What if it was Rommel instead of Varus at the Teutoburg Forest same result except it's because his horses starved
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Jan 25, 2018 18:21
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FAUXTON posted:What if it was Rommel instead of Varus at the Teutoburg Forest
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Jan 25, 2018 18:31
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FAUXTON posted:What if it was Rommel instead of Varus at the Teutoburg Forest Depends. How many Panzers does he have?
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Jan 25, 2018 19:07
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Deptfordx posted:Depends. How many Panzers does he have? idk how many do you think would fit in those woods
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Jan 25, 2018 19:36
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FAUXTON posted:As a serious post: what did people use to "sign" documents in antiquity? I don't mean a signature so much as whether people used similar stuff to seals/sigil rings/stamps to validate the source or the secrecy of a message. Witnesses for civil documents' authenticity, often. Wax seals for secret messages I suppose. Early Roman commerce happened at the forum romanum in public because you could always holler over some people to be witnesses to important purchases, and selling a slave/adopting someone into your family was often concluded by a public official tapping a coin against a scale in the presence of witnesses. I know in the late antiquity that pilgrims to the Holy Land had a passport system where stamps or seals were added to prove a right of passage by the sovereign of an area. Naturally they still needed bribe money to not get hassled at checks, because contacting the owner of the seal to come explain the guards that you're holding a valid passport was a massive pain.
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Jan 25, 2018 19:40
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Deptfordx posted:Depends. How many Panzers does he have? It doesn't matter because he'll drive them in circles so the barbarians count the treadmarks, and think he has more than he actually does and they never attack.
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Jan 25, 2018 22:06
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FAUXTON posted:As a serious post: what did people use to "sign" documents in antiquity? I don't mean a signature so much as whether people used similar stuff to seals/sigil rings/stamps to validate the source or the secrecy of a message. Sumerians used carved cylinders to "sign" official tablets.
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Jan 26, 2018 05:47
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Witnessing was a big deal. Any legit Roman could get witnesses, either people you knew or clients. I am also 90% sure that signet ring wax seals were a thing but that's from memory and could be talking out of my rear end.
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Jan 26, 2018 05:52
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sullat posted:Sumerians used carved cylinders to "sign" official tablets. Japan still does. https://www.nippon.com/en/features/jg00077/
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Jan 26, 2018 09:49
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