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Mr Enderby posted:I guess. But to me there's something a bit youtube sword channel about that sort of argument. Putting horns, wings, crests, spikes and all manner of other gaudy bullshit on helmets has been going on forever. Soldiers in the Liberian civil war fought in floor length wedding dresses, which seems pretty impractical. You can't reason out something as layered with symbolism and tradition as military equipment from first principles. Culture isn't always pragmatic. However the wedding dress guys were an exception, not the rule. Humans will always do dumbass poo poo, so a dude putting horns on is helmet and then getting wrenched to the ground by a guy just swinging a spear at him is totally possible. That guy also probably did not live as long as some of his less dumb buddies. When armor was designed, its pretty rare to find battlefield stuff with ornamentation that creates a weakness.
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Mar 9, 2018 15:04
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To amuse myself I imagine western european powers fighting a mainland war in 1820-30 when all the uniforms went maximum dandy. Entire companies of men dropping their muskets unable to pick them up because their coatees are too tight, light infantry tripping over because their tar bucket inverted style bell shako keep over balancing and sliding down over their eyes and unable to get up because their breeches cut off their circulation.
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Mar 9, 2018 15:12
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Humans will always do dumbass poo poo, so a dude putting horns on is helmet and then getting wrenched to the ground by a guy just swinging a spear at him is totally possible. That guy also probably did not live as long as some of his less dumb buddies. "Well, we did warn him not to go out in that ridiculous helmet, but he did insist." "Yeah, had it coming to him really." "Boss, what should we do with the helmet? It fell off and it's just lying out there." "Let it be taken in and given a prominent place in our feasting hall as a permanent warning to anyone else who might think of wearing something so idiotic into battle."
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Mar 9, 2018 15:26
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Mr Enderby posted:I guess. But to me there's something a bit youtube sword channel about that sort of argument. Putting horns, wings, crests, spikes and all manner of other gaudy bullshit on helmets has been going on forever. Soldiers in the Liberian civil war fought in floor length wedding dresses, which seems pretty impractical. You can't reason out something as layered with symbolism and tradition as military equipment from first principles. Culture isn't always pragmatic. Obviously I don't know much about this, but I feel like looking at, say, the armor knights and crusaders wore during the 11th and 12th centuries they're pretty no nonsense and pragmatic, and most armor is like that in general. With your stereotypical extravagant looking piece of kit like the Waterloo Helmet, or that Monstrosity built for Henry VIII historians always seem quick to point out that it wasn't used in any real combat capacity.
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Mar 9, 2018 15:28
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Weren't high ranking samurai stereotypically mounted archers? So maybe the awkwardness of those helmets are not usually that relevant for them? In contrast with your average viking who fights in the shield wall, and who needs to spend a lot of time in the cramped confines of a boat.
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Mar 9, 2018 15:37
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Remember these high ranking Samurai had big rear end parties of retainers always with them, if they needed to get stuck in I imagine they'd quickly toss the fearsome ceremonial helmet to one and be handed something a bit more practical.
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Mar 9, 2018 15:42
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Lot of basic bitches in this thread.
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Mar 9, 2018 15:47
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Fangz posted:Weren't high ranking samurai stereotypically mounted archers? So maybe the awkwardness of those helmets are not usually that relevant for them? In contrast with your average viking who fights in the shield wall, and who needs to spend a lot of time in the cramped confines of a boat. yes and no, samurai did all kinda of stuff. They were indeed primarily mounted in many periods but that changes. And as was said above, a lot of the more elaborate ones that were worn into battle were made of paper-mache that was lacquered, so a sword blow will just destroy it and then hit the solid steel helmet. in the Edo period you see really elaborate steel ones, but that is after the wars and during a time of peace.
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Mar 9, 2018 15:51
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Victor Hutchinson's POW Diary Friday 9th March, 1945 Much food consumed in a little time that was the order of the day and our mess responds nobly. Due to shortage of fuel most of the food & meat has to be eaten cold and all wood reserved for brews boiled on a chippy stove. The ‘goons’ are reluctant to issue a farther parcel before a week has elapsed and the G/C is agitating to get another immediate issue. We voluntarily contributed 20 cigs per man to the Norwegians who received the gift gracefully. Everyone has a great admiration & respect for these chaps. Many raids to the S.W in the night. Nattered to Graham up till Midnt. And heard fellows heaving their hearts up in the night about.
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Mar 9, 2018 15:52
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Fangz posted:Weren't high ranking samurai stereotypically mounted archers? So maybe the awkwardness of those helmets are not usually that relevant for them? In contrast with your average viking who fights in the shield wall, and who needs to spend a lot of time in the cramped confines of a boat. Speaking in extremely general terms, the original bushi of the Heian period were predominantly mounted archers, a role that gradually became more like the Western concept of the cataphract. By the Sengoku jidai, the stereotypical samurai is usually heavy cavalry or heavy infantry - analogous to knights and huscarls in some ways. Once Oda Nobunaga began to really organize large units of matchlock armed troops, he was recruiting lower ranked samurai, at least initially. Especially during the Sengoku jidai and the wars of unification, any professional combatant was pretty much going to be identified as a samurai, regardless of the origin or battlefield role. Once you get into the Tokugawa shogunate, samurai really lose a lot of their military function. During the Meiji restoration samurai combat was typically between small groups of unarmored fencers, similar to the kind of street fights between rapier armed combatants in Renaissance Europe. The old armor and weapons get broken out occasionally, such as at Shiroyama, and there were always samurai families that worked to keep the old traditions and skills alive and kept the military role, but it had really become atypical.
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Mar 9, 2018 16:06
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Mr Enderby posted:Lot of basic bitches in this thread. Bring Back the Zouaves
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Mar 9, 2018 16:38
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When and why did the Samurai become so associated with being heavily armoured footsoldiers using a Katana? I always find it kind of interesting the way we associate certain periods with very specific types of soldier like the the plate armored mounted knight with a lance and sword or Roman Legionary with a Gladius, Scutum and Lorica segmentata.
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Mar 9, 2018 16:45
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khwarezm posted:When and why did the Samurai become so associated with being heavily armoured footsoldiers using a Katana? I always find it kind of interesting the way we associate certain periods with very specific types of soldier like the the plate armored mounted knight with a lance and sword or Roman Legionary with a Gladius, Scutum and Lorica segmentata. Probably the Imperial Japan era cultivating the myth of bushido and samurai spirit that never really existed.
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Mar 9, 2018 16:49
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khwarezm posted:When and why did the Samurai become so associated with being heavily armoured footsoldiers using a Katana? I always find it kind of interesting the way we associate certain periods with very specific types of soldier like the the plate armored mounted knight with a lance and sword or Roman Legionary with a Gladius, Scutum and Lorica segmentata. If I recall correctly, the katana bit specifically is because after the Sengoku Jidai, swords became the explicit symbol of the samurai class in that non-samurai were no longer permitted to wear swords, while samurai were expected to have their swords on them at all times (this was intended as a method of social control to prevent more civil wars from breaking out in the future). Since in peacetime there's not too much use for actual warfighting weapons like pikes and muskets, swords ended up becoming associated with the samurai class and went through the whole fetishization of bushido during the peacetime Edo period where samurai who were bureaucrats spent a lot of time trying to justify their special status as a warrior class when there were no wars to fight. I wouldn't have said that the heavily armored bit was explicitly fundamental to the popular image of a samurai, though - look at Kurosawa films, for instance. Armor is just what you wear if you expect serious fighting to be done, same as it is elsewhere.
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Mar 9, 2018 16:58
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I'm thinking about how to frame this question, but was Japanese warfare/tactics/military culture especially unique? Seems like we (and I don't mean the thread I mean like the internet in general) spend a lot of time talking about the military of a very small and isolated nation while ignoring military history from like China and sub-saharan Africa. Is that just weeaboo tunnel vision or did Japan's relative isolation and insularity lead to some kind of one-off military culture that doesn't really have analogues in other Eurasian cultures?Cythereal posted:Probably the Imperial Japan era cultivating the myth of bushido and samurai spirit that never really existed. Or is it this?
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Mar 9, 2018 17:01
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Cythereal posted:Probably the Imperial Japan era cultivating the myth of bushido and samurai spirit that never really existed. The other contributing factors are the Satsuma Rebellion and the Boshin War. The rebellious samurai in both conflicts often broke out the old heavy armor, both because it was still useful (same as the cuirassier in Europe) and as a political statement. By that time though many of those samurai would have had a lot more experience and comfort with a sword than any other weapon - which is not at all to say they were all masters, but having a couple fencing classes under your belt and maybe a youthful duel at least gives you a leg up compared to having not used a yari or naginata at all. So the most recent cultural experience of armored samurai would have involved them fighting on foot with swords just out of practical concerns. An experience reinforced by the fact photography had recently reached Japan, leaving a large collection of photographs of armored bushi prominently brandishing katana. The impact of seeing a living, breathing person captured on film that way can make a much bigger impression than rarer, centuries old paintings and sketches of historical battles. That cultural image then gets projected back onto the Sengoku jidai and reinforced with every new piece of media that returns to it.
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Mar 9, 2018 17:04
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zoux posted:Or is it this? This is speculation on my part more than anything backed by research, but if an entire modern state is carrying out massive, organized suicide attacks and claiming that by doing so they were upholding an unbroken centuries-old tradition, you probably end up wanting to find out more about this ancient-yet-modern tradition. Plus they just look visually interesting. Social history might have something to do with it, too - China has traditionally had a lingering cultural distaste for their military, and in the Communist period weren't terribly keen on glorifying the wars of ancient imperialists, preferring to focus instead on their heroic resistance against the Japanese and the Nationalists during WW2. Besides, as far as pop culture goes the Chinese prefer to focus much more on fancy wuxia kung fu heroes than the actual military...possibly because, again, it's more visually interesting.
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Mar 9, 2018 17:19
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13th KRRC War Diary, 8/9th Mar 1918 posted:The following is a copy of the Battle Diary :- This map is from the KRRC Chronicle 1918 (which I don't have a copy of, but now I'm eyeing a £40 copy on Abebooks...), apologies for the small size it's all that seems to be online. Original and annotated versions.   Trin has previously posted this link for a relevant trench map from December 1917 - http://maps.nls.uk/view/101464909. Here is a close up of squares 15, 16, 21 and 22, in the centre of square J at the bottom left of the full map.  Comparing the trench map and the map of the battle it's very obvious that the blue trenches under the word Polderhoek are the location of the battle, so for once we can pinpoint exactly where something was taking place. If we use the overlay transparency functionality of the site with the trench map we find out exactly where it is in the modern day, and this gives a better sense of the scale of the trench system than any of the maps we've seen so far.  And finally a vew of the battle ground in the present day. This is looking North from just South of where JERICHO STREET meets SMART STREET.  Have a bonus - the 10th Royal Fusiliers' diary entry - 10th RF War Diary, 8/9th Mar 1918 posted:A heavy bombardment of the JOPPA-JERICHO system of trenches was carried out by the enemy during the morning and at 2 p.m. the Battalion was ordered by the G.O.C. 111th Infantry Brigade to send up one Company into the JOPPA-JERICHO SYSTEM to reinforce the 13th K.R.R.C. who had sustained heavy casualties during the morning owing to the Enemy's bombardment. By coincidence, while looking for the diary of the 10th R.F. I found a reference to the V.C. being won by Charles Graham Robertson of 10th R.F. during this battle.
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Mar 9, 2018 17:31
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I love when Chinese movies have very serious historical and political drama then it gets to a battle scene and it reverts to ridiculous wire fu with weapons and armor from eight different centuries.
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Mar 9, 2018 17:33
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zoux posted:I'm thinking about how to frame this question, but was Japanese warfare/tactics/military culture especially unique? Seems like we (and I don't mean the thread I mean like the internet in general) spend a lot of time talking about the military of a very small and isolated nation while ignoring military history from like China and sub-saharan Africa. Is that just weeaboo tunnel vision or did Japan's relative isolation and insularity lead to some kind of one-off military culture that doesn't really have analogues in other Eurasian cultures? However, there are a couple legit reasons Japanese military history gets a lot of prominence. I keep referencing it, but the Sengoku jidai alone would ensure that. Like the Peloponnesian War, it's an extended period of intense conflict largely contained within a group of states with a shared culture and language, for which extensive records exist. In fact the participants on all sides of the conflicts kept records about almost everything, leaving few gaps. And even better, there was shockingly little post-conflict curation and revisionism of those records. On top of which it was a time of nearly unprecedented hot-house military development. A bushi contemporary with Oda Nobunaga would have seen the Japanese version of the heavy cavalry charge invented, refined, and rendered obsolete within his lifetime. The change was happening so fast it can literally be tracked from one major battle to the next in sequence. So even if there was nothing else increasing the prominence of Japanese culture, the Sengoku jidai was always going to attract disproportionate attention from military historians if only because there's so much there to see, and you can get at nearly all of it by learning one language and consulting a small set of archives and records. It's the academic version of looking for your keys under the streetlamp because that's where the light is. There's also that we're only just out of living memory of the Meiji restoration, during which samurai fought each other, in earnest, with blades and in armor, the way humans fought for millenia but went away in the last few centuries. That's unique. They were really the last to do so. You don't need to assign any special qualities to Japanese military culture for that to be true - someone had to be last and it happened to be them. But it does mean that by far the most recent first-hand accounts of that way of war are from Japan, and there still exist living people you can go talk to who were told about it by people who had actually done it. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Mar 9, 2018 |
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Mar 9, 2018 17:33
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zoux posted:Seems like we (and I don't mean the thread I mean like the internet in general) spend a lot of time talking about the military of a very small and isolated nation while ignoring military history from like China and sub-saharan Africa. I don't know about the military aspect of this question, but I'd question the idea that Edo Japan was small or isolated. Japan it that period had a massive population, and was by any standard extremely wealthy. After China and the Mughal Empire, Japan was the most populous country. And Europeans were very aware of Japan. Augustus the Strong built a palace to hold his collection of Japanese porcelain. In the third book of Gulliver's Travels, he visits the fantastical worlds of Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan, and it's clear the reader is expected to know about the practice of fumi-e. The Tokugawa Shogunate chose to greatly restrict Western access to Japan, but that restriction was entirely on their own terms. They were keen to learn as much Western science and medicine as they could. When Commadore Perry opened up Japan to unrestricted western trade in 1853 they were already working on building steam engines.
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Mar 9, 2018 17:54
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Best thing about late Tokugawa/early Meiji era Japanese military? the head gear. Would you like a christmas elf dunce cap, a Japanese version of a artificial fashion wig or a paper turtle shell on your head?
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Mar 9, 2018 17:57
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SeanBeansShako posted:Best thing about late Tokugawa/early Meiji era Japanese military? the head gear. Would you like a christmas elf dunce cap, a Japanese version of a artificial fashion wig or a paper turtle shell on your head?
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Mar 9, 2018 17:58
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If you were balding at the crown that the best time to be a Japanese dude.
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Mar 9, 2018 17:59
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feedmegin posted:Hey Guns is Orthodox IIRC so even weirder and older than Catholicism 
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Mar 9, 2018 18:59
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zoux posted:Bring Back the Zouaves Rico Zouave
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Mar 9, 2018 20:27
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zoux posted:I'm thinking about how to frame this question, but was Japanese warfare/tactics/military culture especially unique? Seems like we (and I don't mean the thread I mean like the internet in general) spend a lot of time talking about the military of a very small and isolated nation while ignoring military history from like China and sub-saharan Africa. Is that just weeaboo tunnel vision or did Japan's relative isolation and insularity lead to some kind of one-off military culture that doesn't really have analogues in other Eurasian cultures? Personally I think it's just because it's one of the few non-European cultures that we can actually study in English combined with one of the few non-European cultures to challenge the West in the 20th century. There's shtiloads of amazing history in the places you mentioned, but there's significantly less interest in those places or political issues that get involved with studying their history. Lack of literature on India is the one that really throws me, the place was basically Thunderdome for two thousand years, but despite a significant English language presence I've only found scraps.
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Mar 9, 2018 20:44
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I remember reading some accounts of British officers during things like the conquest of Bengal and a thing that really caught me off guard was that they said that Indian warriors tended not to be very good at responding to thrusting attacks from British swords which was a big advantage for them, as if thrusting wasn't as common a part of sword fighting in India as it was in the west. It got me thinking, an awful lot of western swords seem to be well built for thrusting, and European culture tends to exaggerate and orientalise other cultures arms by making everything really curvy (think generic depictions of Arab or Indian warriors using nothing but Scimitars and Talwars, or the Katana being associated with pretty much all of East Asia somehow). Meanwhile Fencing is probably the most robust western martial art active these days. Again I don't really know anything about sword history or techniques so tell me if I have everything entirely wrong, and I know there's plenty of things like Falchions and such in European history and that most swords, regardless of where they originate, can do many things at once, but is there anything to the idea that thrusting techniques and weapons were given unusual emphasis in European society over the past millennia or so?
khwarezm fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Mar 9, 2018 |
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Mar 9, 2018 21:12
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Japan is super interesting but the level of attention relished on it relative to other non-European cultures is super disproportionate and I think has spread a weird conception of it having been incredibly important--given an equal place relative to China in terms of attention in nearly every history/art history etc book--where for most of history it was a backwater. For instance: Mr Enderby posted:Augustus the Strong built a palace to hold his collection of Japanese porcelain. Also things like this: Mr Enderby posted:After China and the Mughal Empire, Japan was the most populous country. Honestly the worst part isn't really related to Japan at all, but the way we conceive of China as a country all through history is pretty stupid, when its level of disunity, cultural variation and so on was so much more on par with Europe as a whole. But in a textbook about say, the Middle Ages, since China is a country, and England is a country, let's give them the same amount of attention. Koramei fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Mar 9, 2018 |
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Mar 9, 2018 21:17
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I mean we also have Roman culture stuff in the same museums with the Greek culture that it all is appropriated from...
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Mar 9, 2018 21:34
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khwarezm posted:Obviously I don't know much about this, but I feel like looking at, say, the armor knights and crusaders wore during the 11th and 12th centuries they're pretty no nonsense and pragmatic, and most armor is like that in general. With your stereotypical extravagant looking piece of kit like the Waterloo Helmet you missed the best part of that page 
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Mar 9, 2018 21:50
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Nenonen posted:I mean we also have Roman culture stuff in the same museums with the Greek culture that it all is appropriated from... Yeah but you don't then get people going "wow those Greeks sure weren't original, look at how much their art copies the Romans". Honestly from my limited understanding Roman/Greek history has the opposite problem, of people thinking about things like e.g. the Roman pantheon as way more derived from Greek than they actually were. To be sure Japan does have a very unique and interesting cultural/military etc history, and it was clearly distinct from the mainland in lots of ways--and even things like that Japanese porcelain did quickly evolve* to become its own thing--but the way for pretty much everything in the west we go "okay so here's the French, German, British, oh yeah and Japanese styles" as a way to not be Eurocentric or something while totally neglecting everywhere else in the world is pretty stupid. To answer the first question, no Japan was not that special. *the way it evolved is actually pretty interesting; a lot of the Japanese porcelain that would have been sent on to European markets at the time was actually explicitly designed and made to appeal to European tastes, since the porcelain makers worked out that would sell better, rather than being more representative of what was actually popular in Japan at the time.
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Mar 9, 2018 21:51
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tbh I have never witnessed what you are describing. Japanese culture is more available in the west, for a number of reasons, but I only ever remember learning of Japan as a quick learning backwater.
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Mar 9, 2018 22:00
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Koramei posted:You're talking about the Edo period but this line of thinking goes right down history in most people's minds so you get Japan = China for attention we give to it in every book. Even in periods when China was split into a dozen different states, each of which was an order of magnitude more powerful than Japan and much wealthier too. Even Korea had a comparable population to Japan's right until the Edo period, and in earlier times an even higher (and wealthier) one. But because of what went down in the 19th and 20th centuries, China was always Japan's peer and Korea its doormat. You say that, but from my experience Japanese history prior to the year 1000 might as well not exist in something like a pop history book and interest seems to almost entirely based on events starting with the failure of the Mongol invasions. In comparison China's unification, Han dynasty, Warring States, Tang Dynasty and it's own Mongol surprise get a lot more coverage, albeit probably not as much as they should get considering the country's importance.
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Mar 9, 2018 22:01
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Nenonen posted:tbh I have never witnessed what you are describing. Japanese culture is more available in the west, for a number of reasons, but I only ever remember learning of Japan as a quick learning backwater. Yeah, just to be clear, the received wisdom I was reacting to is the story in Western art history where Japanese art is discovered by the French in the second half of the 19th century, which is demonstrably untrue. Early modern Europeans were highly aware of Japan and wanted to get their greasy little mitts all over it is my point. I'm definitely on-board with the idea that we overlook Chinese history, although if we're going down that route lets talk about Africa.
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Mar 9, 2018 22:14
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I really feel like India should get a lot more notoriety given the size and importance of the drat place, as it is I'd say it's more difficult to find out about the history of India looking at it from the west than it is for somewhere like the Middle East or China, and that's a great shame. My Knowledge is like, there were those Indus valley guys, the Mauryan empire was a thing, after that I don't really know anything, there were these Cholas guys in the South I guess? Then you get to the Delhi Sultanate, and the Mughals and the Marathas and the Brits. That's about all I know, I could tell you way more about, like, China, or Iran or what is now Turkey than I could about the whole of India in it's thousands and thousands of years.
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Mar 9, 2018 22:22
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Yeah maybe I'm overstating it on history, especially for the early stuff (pre-Nara there weren't any surviving written records) there's almost literally nothing to go on so it definitely skews more Chinese. But once you get into Feudal Japan and beyond I don't think that's the case so much, and for art/cultural history it's not at all. Random art history textbook for instance: 30 pages for early Chinese and Korean art, 20 for early Japanese art. There's as much on Japanese pre-recorded as there is on China through to the Han dynasty. This is also the period when Korean art owned & was the progenitor of a ton of that Japanese art. For post-1279 they both (China+Korea / Japan) get an exactly equal number of pages. Maybe there are a handful out there that treat it differently, but at least in English-language stuff I bet you could look at nearly any other textbook out there and it'd look the same. Nenonen posted:tbh I have never witnessed what you are describing. Japanese culture is more available in the west, for a number of reasons, but I only ever remember learning of Japan as a quick learning backwater. That's my experience when we learn about the Meiji restoration--we think of Japan as a backwater relative to the west. It's never framed that way compared to China though. Also aren't you Finnish? Everything I hear about your country's education system indicates that it knocks everyone else's out of the water. Mr Enderby posted:Yeah, just to be clear, the received wisdom I was reacting to is the story in Western art history where Japanese art is discovered by the French in the second half of the 19th century, which is demonstrably untrue. Early modern Europeans were highly aware of Japan and wanted to get their greasy little mitts all over it is my point. Oh for sure, people way overstate Japanese isolationism in general; on the Japanese side European stuff made tons of inroads too. My favorite example is Hokusai's Great Wave, i.e. one of the most iconically Japanese images of all time, made at the height of isolationism, which uses newly imported Prussian blue ink for most of its composition. For that matter, not that most people have much of a conception of Korean isolationism, but it wasn't nearly as cut off from outside ideas as people might think either. Around the early 19th century, there were a significant number of Korean Catholics, (enough for the government to decide to persecute them) but Korea hadn't had a single foreign missionary in centuries. These Catholics were actually self converts--a Korean scholar had got his hands on a bible during a tribute mission to China, and a bunch of people ended up converting just from that. khwarezm posted:I really feel like India should get a lot more notoriety given the size and importance of the drat place, as it is I'd say it's more difficult to find out about the history of India looking at it from the west than it is for somewhere like the Middle East or China, and that's a great shame. Southeast Asia too; absolutely tons of people lived there and there were empires and massive trading networks and stuff, but people (myself included) know barely anything about it. This is what's so odd about Japan; everything is still so Eurocentric even in academic circles, but Japan is often the weird exception, I guess because they westernized. I notice an odd number of very Eurocentric, borderline white-supremacist people who turn out to be weebs too, it's very strange. There's one in particular on the Paradox forums I've been observing lately who is super into Japanese history and seems to consider it on a higher plane relative to the rest of Asia, but when it comes time to compare it to Europe of course the Japanese don't compare. Koramei fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Mar 9, 2018 |
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Mar 9, 2018 22:26
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I think part of that is coming from the perspective of art history, where Japan is absolutely over-represented. In part because it happened to get hooked into European artistic movements earlier, and mainstream art history is still shockingly euro-centric. In historical subfields, Korea remains woefully under-served, but the China/Japan balance tends not to be nearly as out of whack. Coming from anthropology and particularly with a focus on the origins of complex societies, it's actually Japan's early development that doesn't get as much coverage as it probably should. China is meanwhile an increasingly important topic of its own, and in relation to everything else. The subcontinent, on the other hand, is a massive and embarrassing blind spot for most historical fields outside of India.
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Mar 9, 2018 22:38
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You might be right. Art history really is horrifically Eurocentric; taking emphasis away from the Renaissance and mathematical perspective etc as the be all and end all of art (which used to sideline northern Europe too) is itself pretty new. I'm definitely part of the problem for the Indian sub continent. Echoing Khwarezm, Indus -> ?? -> Maurya -> ???? -> whatever shows up in EU4, for which I know basically none of the actual historical context behind.
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Mar 9, 2018 22:46
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Koramei posted:
"Honorary Whites." The Indian thing feels so strange since I try to be more widely informed these days, reading up on things like Ethiopian history and I think its interesting to look at Eurasian history in Generalized terms where you can see the importance of wide ranging groups of people like the Turks and the nomadic empires and how they relate to events in places like Europe and China at the time, but when you get to India, it's almost like it doesn't become part of the same Eurasian 'Unit' until the Muslim conquests in northern India, but that cannot really be the case considering how much importance trade through India had and it's cultural connections with places like Southeast Asia, as well as the fact that it appears to be well known far outside of India in Europe going way back. It's like it's an entirely disconnected continent except when it's not. That doesn't really make any sense but its hard for me to put my thoughts into words. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Mar 9, 2018 |
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Mar 9, 2018 22:48
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