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The steppes are madness. All you can do out there is archaeology, so you can find material culture and say okay all of X tech is clearly from one culture and all of Y is a different one, but which cultures are those? You'd have to find an example of X in a settlement that is known from other sources to 100% for sure be Slavic at the time the soil layers indicate and X thing has to be the same as 300 years earlier when they lived on the steppes but material culture changes so 300 years it'll be different but not totally different so it looks like it's maybe X but could be Z also and argh
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Oct 20, 2018 19:24
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So how do Japanese ultra nationalists reconcile the fact that signs of civilization in Korea safely predate those in Japan?
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Oct 20, 2018 19:36
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Lies and slander from the finns
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Oct 20, 2018 19:36
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Ultranationalists in every time and every culture have never really cared all too much about inconvenient facts.
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Oct 20, 2018 19:37
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:So how do Japanese ultra nationalists reconcile the fact that signs of civilization in Korea safely predate those in Japan? Since when have nationalists of any stripe let facts get in the way of their ideals?
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Oct 20, 2018 19:47
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Jim Crow, japanese internment, recently-completed genocide of native americans era USA = filthy race mixers Japanese, finns, bulgarians = honorary aryans
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Oct 20, 2018 19:47
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Since when have nationalists of any stripe let facts get in the way of their ideals? I assume they have some specific lies that they tell themselves.
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Oct 20, 2018 19:53
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:I assume they have some specific lies that they tell themselves. Japanese civilization is 12,000 years old and actually Japanese invented Korea not the other way. In fairness, Japan actually has the least nationalist and insane museums I've seen in East Asia--the one in Ueno Park in Tokyo straight up has a display room in its timeline of Japanese history of Korean artifacts from when Koreans brought over writing/Buddhism/kingship/etc. The right wing is fringe. There's also the Yasukuni Museum if you want some comedy, but that's privately run and whatever, private museums can often be... less than honest. It's also fun seeing the right wingers contorting themselves into knots because the current emperor is very much not one of them and has done things like publicly acknowledging the imperial family has Korean ancestry, but being right wing in Japan means being crazy pro-emperor so they can't just dismiss him yet also can't accept these things. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Oct 20, 2018 |
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Oct 20, 2018 20:46
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Grand Fromage posted:Japanese civilization is 12,000 years old and actually Japanese invented Korea not the other way. Having just listened recently to the most recent Hardcore History, One can't help but be glad the Right wing has calmed down a bit from that whole government by assassination thing they had going on for a while there.
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Oct 20, 2018 22:03
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Jim Crow A poo poo ton of race mixing went on under Jim Crow (and earlier), dude. It just generally wasn't voluntary.
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Oct 21, 2018 00:33
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feedmegin posted:A poo poo ton of race mixing went on under Jim Crow (and earlier), dude. It just generally wasn't voluntary. That is absolutely true and something I should have thought about before my shitpost
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Oct 21, 2018 01:04
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I imagine something along these lines has been asked before, but I remember a good while back either in this thread or the milhist one that somebody was saying that the Romans were notable because they seem to have been willing to take on absolutely ridiculous amounts of losses and just generally put their society into as close as a pre-industrial civilization can get to a total war mode. More specifically that compared to surrounding states of similar size and ability the Romans had something about them where they never gave up and always saw things through to the bitter conclusion, almost always victorious on their end, when anywhere else like Carthage or the successor states of Alexander would have decided that enough's enough and gone to the negotiating table rather than continue to absorb the kind of insane casualties at battle like Cannae that the Romans just took on the chin. Is there any truth to this idea? I guess it ties into the idea that Rome was uniquely warlike and militarily fixated which is something I've seen floated before.
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Oct 21, 2018 01:23
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For certain periods of Roman history yeah. One of the contributing factors is that under the republic consuls had only a single year to win glory for themselves. Being the one consul who left the republic worse than they found it by ceding territory would be extremely shameful.
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Oct 21, 2018 01:46
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Rome’s system of alliances with the Italian Allies was also integral to Rome’s ability the wage war on a previously unheard of scale due to the massive reserves of manpower it provided. At the time of the Second Punic War Rome was capable of putting around 700,000 fighting men into the field across all of its fronts. It’s why even after Cannae the strategic situation was still weighted heavily in Rome’s favor, a fact that Hannibal was well aware of which is why he immediately attempted to turn Rome’s allies against them instead of trying to attack the city itself. Shimrra Jamaane fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 02:05
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The Punic Wars were an existential crisis to the Roman state, if not in fact, then at least in how the Romans themselves saw it. There are stories of the citizens of Rome (the city) reviving human sacrifice out of desperation when Hannibal was poised to march on them. So their tenacity in that respect is really motivated by self interest. During the imperial period they could just call it quits after a loss like Teutoberg, since it didn't really matter anyways, but after Cannae things were dicier. For what my non expert opinion is worth, I think the Romans really were an uniquely martial people. As in their military as an institution was more fully developed and their ability to train officers was unparalleled in the ancient world. Most of that came way after the era of the Punic Wars, however.
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Oct 21, 2018 02:17
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Only the Second Punic War could be seen an existential conflict for Rome. The first war was a border war between two powers over who would control the central Mediterranean and its islands; the Carthaginian side never seriously threatened Rome itself and had Rome been defeated they probably would have just remained the second power in the region. The third was an unmerciful annihilation by Rome of a state far too weak to effectively resist it and any claims by Romans that Rome was under any threat in the process should be recognized as cynical sloganizing.
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Oct 21, 2018 02:42
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khwarezm posted:Is there any truth to this idea? I guess it ties into the idea that Rome was uniquely warlike and militarily fixated which is something I've seen floated before. There is pushback against it, as with any idea in history. It's not something you can quantify with hard data, you have to use judgment. But is true that the Romans almost never negotiated when they were losing a war, they would keep fighting under any circumstances and would not entertain any sort of peace treaty unless they were winning. The Romans also had absolutely enormous manpower available compared to other Mediterranean states of the era, as mentioned above with the Italian allies, so they were able to keep fighting despite suffering losses that would've crippled other states. No other Mediterranean power could've suffered a loss like Cannae and continued fighting. Even if they wanted to, they wouldn't have been capable of raising another army. Much later the Romans lose this manpower advantage and battles like Adrianople are devastating to the empire in a way earlier losses weren't.
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Oct 21, 2018 02:54
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Mantis42 posted:The Punic Wars were an existential crisis to the Roman state, if not in fact, then at least in how the Romans themselves saw it. There are stories of the citizens of Rome (the city) reviving human sacrifice out of desperation when Hannibal was poised to march on them. So their tenacity in that respect is really motivated by self interest. During the imperial period they could just call it quits after a loss like Teutoberg, since it didn't really matter anyways, but after Cannae things were dicier. The question though of WHY the Romans saw the crisis as existential though is not trivial. There are lots of historical examples of states facing similar pressure and simply collapsing into infighting rather than fighting until the death. The Russian revolution is an obvious example, but we can also see how many Persian satraps simply surrendered to Alexander rather than fight, with Egypt being one of the most important examples. Even if Roman citizens did see the Punic wars as existential, that doesn't explain why the Italian allies never strayed. I'm not sure how relative it all is, but until the brothers Gracchi the Roman Republic was exceptionally stable politically, its really remarkable for the pre-modern world. Dynastic disputes and revolution are practically the norm in many societies, cyclically sapping the strength of the state. On that note the Spartans as far as I know had another remarkably stable polity. I don't know of anytime the city fell under foreign occupation from the archaic period until Rome occupied all of Greece. Contrast this with Athens which was constantly getting involved in stupid poo poo and getting burned by Persians or something, its weird politics were a constant liability.
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Oct 21, 2018 02:55
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Squalid posted:Even if Roman citizens did see the Punic wars as existential, that doesn't explain why the Italian allies never strayed. A lot of them did go over to Hannibal. Capua was the biggest one, and was why Campania was kind of treated like poo poo by the Romans after. The ones that didn't either felt some loyalty to Rome, were sufficiently paid off, or were (rightly) afraid of what the Romans would do to them if they picked the wrong side.
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Oct 21, 2018 03:02
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Uniquely martial until a couple centuries of uncontested rule throughout the continent taught them the virtues of staying nice and safe in cities/estates and leaving the military service to provincials and Germans. They did manage to keep the state going for a long while after the fight had gone out of them, but it sure helped that it took a long, long while for any external force to be in a position to install a regime that was insufficiently Roman enough to say that contiguity of rule had ended over a significant portion of the empire. It took a long, long time for the persian empires to challenge Roman borders. Not really sure what forces kept civilizations northeast of the empire from mustering up enough to be a challenge for so long, maybe constant Roman interference?
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Oct 21, 2018 03:54
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How did Rome lose their manpower advantage anyway? Was it just a local disadvantage, as in their legions were in the wrong place but they would have had enough otherwise, or was it more general?
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Oct 21, 2018 03:58
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Plagues were a big part of it. The Antonine Plague probably reduced the population by a third, the Plague of Cyprian another third or more only a couple generations later, and the Plague of Justinian cut the population by half later on. The empire was no longer expanding, so it wasn't bringing in fresh new people to recruit. The pay and benefits were not as appealing as they had once been, which reduced recruitment. The rest and possibly most important part of the answer is: we don't know. We know the empire had serious trouble with recruitment in parts of late antiquity but there is no apparent reason why from the available evidence. It's frustrating.
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Oct 21, 2018 04:02
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How much was being “Sons of Mars” as opposed to sons of some lame deity important to Rome?
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Oct 21, 2018 04:11
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In many ways there were a number of centuries where you could very reasonably call it "the Italian empire" instead of the Roman empire because Italy was integrated in a way a province wasn't. The full resources of the peninsula were available to be used as primary resources, instead of as tribute/extracted resources.
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Oct 21, 2018 04:33
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Technically the size of the Roman Army was significantly larger in 400 AD than it was in 100 AD. On paper anyway. But most of it was locked down locally and couldn’t be mustered together to meet large external threats let along go campaigning.
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Oct 21, 2018 04:34
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cheetah7071 posted:In many ways there were a number of centuries where you could very reasonably call it "the Italian empire" instead of the Roman empire because Italy was integrated in a way a province wasn't. The full resources of the peninsula were available to be used as primary resources, instead of as tribute/extracted resources. This is something that still breaks my mind with premodern states. Even the ones we think of as super centralized like Rome and the Han Dynasty were practically held together by string and silly putty compared to modern nation states, let alone how most of their neighbors were set up.
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Oct 21, 2018 04:39
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Technically the size of the Roman Army was significantly larger in 400 AD than it was in 100 AD. On paper anyway. But most of it was locked down locally and couldn’t be mustered together to meet large external threats let along go campaigning. We don’t actually know for certain that it was larger even on paper. There were definitely many more military units in the 4th century, but we have very little idea of even the theoretical size of such units, let alone their (lower) actual strength.
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Oct 21, 2018 04:49
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Have you ever read the novel 'Julian' by Gore Vidal? I'm curious how much of it is based in fact or at least a good guess based on solid evidence because it reads like a well researched book to my layman eyes. If you haven't read it: it's an epistolary novel about the emperor Julian "the apostate" told through his diary entries and letters between his friends. It's especially fun to read if you have an antagonistic view of Christianity. Imagined fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 05:32
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remusclaw posted:poo poo, now that I think about it, all we have on the Vikings is pretty suspect too, or is that just their religious practices? Ahmad ibn Fadlan and Adam of Bremen is still considered to be reliable. Even the sagas are considered to have some historical value.
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Oct 21, 2018 11:03
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Oct 21, 2018 13:24
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I finally read Kulikowski's Late Roman Spain And Its Cities, and part of it speculates on the fate of Lusitania and Baetica after Majorian's reign, proposing that at least parts of the provinces were effectively independent from the 460s onward, possibly up until the reign of Leovigild. He follows that with a discussion of Spanish civitates and what elements of them still functioned in late antiquity and the early middle ages. Would it be right to draw any parallels between post-Majorian Spain and Sub-Roman Britain, insofar as that the absence of imperial government lead to the devolution of power to local governments in the form of the civitates, and, absent the imposition of new government by Anglo-Saxons or Visigoths, these civitates tended to be the basis of sub-Roman realms?
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Oct 21, 2018 14:50
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cheetah7071 posted:The book I'm reading makes the claim that Hatti was their second capital and foreigners called them Hittites after that. Their first capital was Neshia and they called themselves Neshites after that. Didn't the Aztecs call themselves Mexica and Aztecs was what their neighbours and subordinated tribes, the ones that worked with the Spaniards worked with, called them? I think I read that somewhere FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 16:16
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FreudianSlippers posted:Didn't the Aztecs call themselves Mexica and Aztecs was what their neighbours and subordinated tribes, the ones that worked with the Spaniards worked with, called them? It was Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian geographer, naturalist, explorer, who named the Mexica - the Aztecs. He put together the name “Aztlan” and “tec(atl)” where Aztlan “('Place of the Herons') was the mythical homeland of the Mexica, and -teca(h) literally means ‘people of’. Today the name 'Aztec' refers to not only the Mexica but also to the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the Valley of Mexico and its surroundings.
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Oct 21, 2018 16:23
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According to my knowledge (gained from reading his books in our school's library), it's Polybios. Also my knowledge of how many of Polybios' books are lost to time makes it impossible for me to take this meme seriously.
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Oct 21, 2018 16:56
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Libluini posted:According to my knowledge (gained from reading his books in our school's library), it's Polybios. Polybius is the Latinization of the Greek Polybios.
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Oct 21, 2018 16:58
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Wasn't the Roman gubernatorial system basically just the senate/emperor installing dictators with term limits in every province? Not hard to see the local governments eroding when there's a guy who can countermand/reorganize them whenever he wants.
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Oct 21, 2018 17:02
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Epicurius posted:Polybius is the Latinization of the Greek Polybios. Likewise, Latinization is the Americanisation of the British Latinisation 
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Oct 21, 2018 17:22
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The main issue as an amateur for why the Empire fell apart I think is that demographic collapse. Europe was in a warm period for most of Rome's "Golden Age" which allowed for more agricultural production despite less advanced agriculture techniques that would actually be developed in the Medieval Era. This meant there was less food to go around especially in the North which pushed Germans into the Empire, couple that with the Plagues of Antonine & Cyprian killing off huge swathes of the population that the Empire depended on for taxes and soldiers. Roman civilization as a whole didn't collapse, buts its ability to support massive urban centers, and a somewhat centralized government did collapse. Diocletian sort of realized this with his reforms by breaking the Empire into much more manageable chunks and trying to codify society into almost castes to deal with the massive manpower shortages in certain industries. This didn't work obviously, because economics and also no one wanted to rule 1/4th of the Empire for 20 years, they wanted it all. Without big cities with lots of un/underemployed young men, you didn't have a large pool of urban poor to recruit into the armies. With the Roman world becoming more rural, any big recruiting drive would be taking field hands off the farms and estates of big magnates. Which obviously isn't always the best idea if the food supply is already constricting significantly. In modern terms it is like there was a massive economic recession and everyone decided Austerity is the best policy. Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 17:23
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feedmegin posted:Likewise, Latinization is the Americanisation of the British Latinisation Actually, it's a Gallicization of the English "Latinization" backended into British English for purposes of ease of spelling. It's off the topic of ancient history, but it's interesting, so, eh... English used to spell words like "organize" and "recognize"...we've got 15th -17th century spellings like that in England. It comes from the Greek "izein" and "izo". English also has a bunch of words that, because of their roots, have always been spelled with an "ise", like "advise", "exercise", "promise", etc. Probably in an attempt at standardization (standardisation) and simplification, in 18th century Britain, "organise", "recognise" and so on also became acceptable spellings, and became more common. In America, that never happened, and so only the older spellings are used. Here's Oxford Dictonary's explanation. https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/03/28/ize-or-ise/
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Oct 21, 2018 17:37
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Grand Fromage posted:Plagues were a big part of it. The Antonine Plague probably reduced the population by a third, the Plague of Cyprian another third or more only a couple generations later, and the Plague of Justinian cut the population by half later on. The empire was no longer expanding, so it wasn't bringing in fresh new people to recruit. The pay and benefits were not as appealing as they had once been, which reduced recruitment. I just finished the crisis of the 3rd century in the History of Rome podcast and I would say that nearly 6 decades of constant civil wars and roman armies fighting each other while leaving the borders undefended probably did not help.
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Oct 21, 2018 17:46
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