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I know the Parthians weren't ethnically Persian but were they culturally?
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Feb 10, 2018 04:34
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:I know the Parthians weren't ethnically Persian but were they culturally? Yes, but with a healthy dose of Hellenistic influence also. In general the later Parthian elites tended to stress their Iranian character more so than the earlier ones — having to deal with regular Roman border wars probably made philhellenism less attractive.
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Feb 10, 2018 04:44
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Did the Sassanids have any Hellenistic cultural traits or had that mostly worn off by that point?
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Feb 10, 2018 04:54
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Did the Sassanids have any Hellenistic cultural traits or had that mostly worn off by that point? The latter, they tended more to see themselves as heirs to the Achaemenids (though Parthian rulers kind of played that game as well). They weren’t totally hostile to Hellenic influence at least at first — early Sassanian royal inscriptions are in Greek and Parthian as well as Persian, but later on these other languages drop out.
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Feb 10, 2018 05:10
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the parthians were quite closely related to the persians, though; the persians simply left the steppe a few hundred years earlier. the parthians were a separate people, but not to the extent you might think just from reading that a steppe warrior culture invaded and took over. they are definitely a people who were part of the persian cultural sphere in the way that germanic tribes were often part of the roman cultural sphere, but more so because the two cultures knew they were related. also, not particularly numerous; the parthian empire was administered by a parthian emperor and a collection of noble families based in parthia, yes, but the empire as a whole doesn't seem to have been influenced by them culturally, especially since they assimilated almost entirely, very quickly.
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Feb 10, 2018 05:13
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How is it that we know so little about about the Parthians and the Sassanids? Were most of the records destroyed/lost during the Arab conquests?
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Feb 10, 2018 05:18
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:According to my biotech classes, sweet potatoes are the single most nutrient rich big crop if you are forced to rely on just one product. Smart polynesians. Unfortunately they are notably low in protein. Some anthropologists have speculated this deficiency may have contributed to the frequency of cannibalism in New Guinea.
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Feb 10, 2018 06:40
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:How is it that we know so little about about the Parthians and the Sassanids? Were most of the records destroyed/lost during the Arab conquests? I think the Sasanians destroyed a lot of the old Parthian records. They liked to portray themselves as liberators of Persia from foreign domination, and they tried to downplay Parthian connections and history.
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Feb 10, 2018 08:03
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:How is it that we know so little about about the Parthians and the Sassanids? Were most of the records destroyed/lost during the Arab conquests? Why sir, those societies were illiterate! *trundles off to gentlemen's club*
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Feb 10, 2018 08:38
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:How is it that we know so little about about the Parthians and the Sassanids? Were most of the records destroyed/lost during the Arab conquests? I can't speak to the Parthians, but I think we know quite a bit about the Sassanids. The empire was obviously a major player during its existence, and Islam and the Caliphate inherited a lot from them. Shimrra Jamaane posted:Did the Sassanids have any Hellenistic cultural traits or had that mostly worn off by that point? In the literal sense of Seleucid influence and hoplites and whatever, definitely not (although Alexandros Megas was an enduring figure in the Iranian and later Arabic folk imagination), but I think the legacy of the repeated Roman-Sassanid wars colors our perspective somewhat. Ctesiphon was based in wealthy and cosmopolitan mesopotamia, and the civil service that operated from it used large numbers of educated levantine christians who would certainly have spoken Greek. This was not taken well by conservative Zoroastrian priests and the aristocratic families of the Iranian plateau proper Fuligin fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 09:10
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Everyone who conquers Persia gets at least a bit Persianized. It happened to Alexander, it happened to the Parthians, it happened to the Seljuks, it happened to the Mongols, and it will happen to you if you do not cancel this silly invasion, Dwayne.
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Feb 10, 2018 16:07
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That seems to happen to a lot of groups that conquer big, huge, dense cultures. The groups that conquered China had a similar deal so far as I know, and I've been reading some about the Lombards, and they had the same sort of thing going on after they took Italy. I imagine that just in sheer numbers, the local culture can often overpower their new overlords' influence if there's enough of a disparity and the overlords don't go out of their way to fight it. England went the other way, although it fell to both Germans and Scandinavians via France, so it's real weird.
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Feb 10, 2018 18:34
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SlothfulCobra posted:That seems to happen to a lot of groups that conquer big, huge, dense cultures. The groups that conquered China had a similar deal so far as I know, and I've been reading some about the Lombards, and they had the same sort of thing going on after they took Italy. bunch of vikings got russianized
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Feb 10, 2018 19:43
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Does the Roman world gradually shifting to Greek count?
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Feb 10, 2018 20:16
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Does the Roman world gradually shifting to Greek count? Kinda depends on whether you count western Europe post-476 as part of the roman world, doesn't it? They kept speaking latin and claiming kinship with roman institutions. The east had been hellenized mostly before Rome showed up and just reverted back once they lost all the latin territories.
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Feb 10, 2018 20:24
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the east was never un-hellenized by the romans. the roman empire was bilingual from the moment they conquered their first greek city, and the east never really spoke latin even after hundreds of years under the romans.
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Feb 10, 2018 20:30
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Wasn't Greek always a language of the upper-classes in Rome? Like everyone with any money and status had a Greek slave teaching their kids Greek so they could be proper aristocrats.
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Feb 10, 2018 20:36
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FreudianSlippers posted:Wasn't Greek always a language of the upper-classes in Rome? Any Roman education would involve being taught Latin and Greek from nine years of age, if not before, and these were the languages of most literature so have been passed down to us. This isn't just limited to aristos, probably anyone with money would have had at least a little of both these languages. Provincials would also have had the local vernacular, probably -- Punic, Gaulish, Aramaic, Coptic were all widely spoken late into the empire.
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Feb 10, 2018 21:10
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Wasn't the Latin spoken by the Upper Classes incredibly archaic by comparison to the way the language had evolved under the Lower Classes?
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Feb 11, 2018 02:03
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Jerusalem posted:Wasn't the Latin spoken by the Upper Classes incredibly archaic by comparison to the way the language had evolved under the Lower Classes? Not exactly. There was proper classical Latin, which was standardized and prestigious, and there were a lot of poorly documented, presumably regionalized forms of vernacular Latin. In a certain sense you could call classical Latin archaic, because its standards remained pretty much the same for a good long time, but it was never so archaic that it became mutually unintelligible with the vernacular -- it really dropped out of use, and the various vernaculars had begun to diverge into Romance languages, before that happened. There were very old forms of Latin that were difficult or unintelligible to later speakers, but that is not the same as what Roman elites in the late republic or empire were speaking.
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Feb 11, 2018 02:37
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Jerusalem posted:Wasn't the Latin spoken by the Upper Classes incredibly archaic by comparison to the way the language had evolved under the Lower Classes? Linguistically speaking calling one "evolved" and one "archaic" isn't really accurate. The split probably goes back as far as Latin speakers go, or close to it. Think of how different British high-class and low-class accents are. Class-based dialects are really common.
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Feb 11, 2018 02:38
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cheetah7071 posted:Think of how different British high-class and low-class accents are. Class-based dialects are really common. That makes a lot more sense, thanks (and to skasion too!)
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Feb 11, 2018 03:11
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Jerusalem posted:That makes a lot more sense, thanks (and to skasion too!) We also don't think the upper classes actually spoke that very formal Latin that they wrote in, either. It is very much analogous to classical Chinese in the various East Asian cultures, though not quite that extreme since the formal Latin and vernacular would've been mostly mutually intelligible while classical Chinese is just a whole other language you have to learn. Might be more like reading Shakespeare to a modern English speaker is a better comparison. It's recognizably the same language but if you're not well educated there will be a lot of vocabulary and weird grammatical constructions that will be difficult.
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Feb 11, 2018 06:15
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skasion posted:Not exactly. There was proper classical Latin, which was standardized and prestigious, and there were a lot of poorly documented, presumably regionalized forms of vernacular Latin. In a certain sense you could call classical Latin archaic, because its standards remained pretty much the same for a good long time, but it was never so archaic that it became mutually unintelligible with the vernacular -- it really dropped out of use, and the various vernaculars had begun to diverge into Romance languages, before that happened. There were very old forms of Latin that were difficult or unintelligible to later speakers, but that is not the same as what Roman elites in the late republic or empire were speaking. I'd heard somewhere, possibly in a dream, TV show, or hallucination, that some Roman religious rites were carried out in a dead liturgical language, maybe Etruscan or something. True/false/other?
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Feb 11, 2018 06:25
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I'd heard somewhere, possibly in a dream, TV show, or hallucination, that some Roman religious rites were carried out in a dead liturgical language, maybe Etruscan or something. True/false/other? Roman divination rites were originally Etruscan rites, so it wouldn't surprise me if there were elements of that language involved with those practices.
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Feb 11, 2018 06:54
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I'd heard somewhere, possibly in a dream, TV show, or hallucination, that some Roman religious rites were carried out in a dead liturgical language, maybe Etruscan or something. True/false/other? Etruscan did survive as a religious language, the last recorded instance of Etruscan priests was offering to summon lightning to drive off Alaric's siege of Rome. Their religious rituals were written and like Roman ones, had to be performed precisely so that would've included speaking the words as-is.
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Feb 11, 2018 06:56
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Grand Fromage posted:Might be more like reading Shakespeare to a modern English speaker is a better comparison. It's recognizably the same language but if you're not well educated there will be a lot of vocabulary and weird grammatical constructions that will be difficult. Honestly Shakespeare, at least in my experience, makes way more sense when it's spoken aloud than when you're reading it on the page.
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Feb 11, 2018 07:36
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I'd heard somewhere, possibly in a dream, TV show, or hallucination, that some Roman religious rites were carried out in a dead liturgical language, maybe Etruscan or something. True/false/other? I don't know about Etruscan. You may be thinking of some rites whose Latin was, in Cicero's day, so archaic as to be unintelligible. The most famous example is the Carmen Saliare.
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Feb 11, 2018 12:45
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Honestly Shakespeare, at least in my experience, makes way more sense when it's spoken aloud than when you're reading it on the page. Yeah, like a lot of people I really disliked Shakespeare until I actually saw it performed and realized just how good it could be when it's not been read by alternating bored kids in a classroom.
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Feb 11, 2018 13:02
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Zombie Dachshund posted:I don't know about Etruscan. You may be thinking of some rites whose Latin was, in Cicero's day, so archaic as to be unintelligible. The most famous example is the Carmen Saliare. There were a whole lot of religious rituals the Romans did without any understanding of why they were doing them, too. It was just How It Had Always Been Done and were you going to be the first one to question it and risk the wrath of the gods?
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Feb 11, 2018 13:19
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Honestly Shakespeare, at least in my experience, makes way more sense when it's spoken aloud than when you're reading it on the page. Learning early modern (or middle) English is kind of like learning a semi-language of sorts. I remember being baffled by it, but after spending as long immersed in it as I have, I barely notice it, which brings a whole new challenge when teaching... Jerusalem posted:Yeah, like a lot of people I really disliked Shakespeare until I actually saw it performed and realized just how good it could be when it's not been read by alternating bored kids in a classroom. I'm teaching an early modern drama course right now and about once per class I tell a student to reread a line as if they mean it. On Monday we're reading a play where two audience members add their own character to the action and he's a Quixotic knight who smacks his enemies with a poxed phallus 
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Feb 11, 2018 15:25
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Does the Roman world gradually shifting to Greek count? Does it count if the Greeks just stayed about as Greek as ever, no matter how many Romans were shoveled in? Dunno if their influence ever overpowered Rome beyond the borders of the eastern empire. And then they hit the point where modern historians like to say that they're the only true Romans left instead of these dudes ruled by Germans or papists, although previous generations of historians went out of their way to say the opposite. I'm not really sure how you'd go about defining the borders between one culture or another, or even say at what point an ancient culture dissolves into a more recent one.
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Feb 11, 2018 16:32
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Grand Fromage posted:There were a whole lot of religious rituals the Romans did without any understanding of why they were doing them, too. It was just How It Had Always Been Done and were you going to be the first one to question it and risk the wrath of the gods? That's basically what Cicero says, yeah. Though by the late Republic, the Salian priests were less about "warding off the gods' wrath" and more about "an excuse to hold a massive day-long party."
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Feb 11, 2018 16:34
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Grand Fromage posted:Etruscan did survive as a religious language, the last recorded instance of Etruscan priests was offering to summon lightning to drive off Alaric's siege of Rome. Their religious rituals were written and like Roman ones, had to be performed precisely so that would've included speaking the words as-is. Did it work?
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Feb 11, 2018 16:46
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sullat posted:Did it work? Probably not, since in the end they just paid him to leave
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Feb 11, 2018 17:24
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Here's a video describing another extremely weird Roman tradition, Lupercalia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_ZGSpQaw3A I assume that these extremely specific, extremely weird holidays/rituals/traditions were all over the place in the past, and started gradually dying out as religious homogeneity and improved communication slowly strangled them e: that whole channel is a pro click, incidentally
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Feb 11, 2018 19:41
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Were non-roman soldiers taught commands in Latin or did officers use a local language? For that matter, how common in general would it be for someone like a governor learn a local language? I'm sure traders and farmers would use whatever they needed to get by but did aristocrats bother?
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Feb 11, 2018 22:33
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cheetah7071 posted:Here's a video describing another extremely weird Roman tradition, Lupercalia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_ZGSpQaw3A pfft I do that all the time
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Feb 11, 2018 22:39
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cheetah7071 posted:I assume that these extremely specific, extremely weird holidays/rituals/traditions were all over the place in the past, and started gradually dying out as religious homogeneity and improved communication slowly strangled them Well, the Lupercalia, as the video pointed out, lasted a really long time. There's also, speaking of specific traditions, the spooky story of the Potitii and the Pinarii, the hereditary priests of Hercules. The story goes that back before the Trojan War, Hercules showed up in Italy, and the Potitii and the Pinarii gave him hospitality, so Hercules made both families his priests. Then, when Appius Claudius was consul, he says to each family, "Hey, I want the worship of Hercules to become part of the public cult. Will you teach the rituals to slaves so that we can do that? I'll pay you, of course." The Pinarii say, "Hey, sorry, but we can't.. It's a family tradition and all, and Hercules made us promise to keep it a secret.", but the Pontitii say, "Sure, why not? We like money.". Just after that, a plague comes to the city and wipes out the entire gense Pontitii. Meanwhile, Appius Claudius is struck blind.
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Feb 12, 2018 01:16
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Were non-roman soldiers taught commands in Latin or did officers use a local language? Auxilliaries were commanded in Latin. quote:For that matter, how common in general would it be for someone like a governor learn a local language? I'm sure traders and farmers would use whatever they needed to get by but did aristocrats bother? The Roman governor generally would have spoken Latin and probably Greek. and most of the people they dealt with would have spoken either Latin or Greek. Roman governors didn't tend to talk a lot to the average resident of the province, but instead to a small group of local aristocrats and urban leaders who they would have relied on to keep the peace and control the province's population, and those would have been, in the West, Latin speakers, and in the East, Greek speakers.
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Feb 12, 2018 01:36
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