etalian posted:

Practical sets were amazing too bad they all got burned down in a fire.

Dalael posted:

Best place to ask would be the real ancient history thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3486446

dpf posted:

I did ages ago but got no reply. Cheers for the recommendation but I suppose I'll hit up the library or email an academic or something.

quote:

Richard J. A. Talbert examines the composition, procedure, and functions of the Roman senate during the Principate (30 B.C.-A.D. 238). Although it is of central importance to the period, this great council has not previously received such scholarly treatment. Offering a fresh approach to major ancient authors (Pliny and Tacitus in particular), the book also draws on inscriptions and legal writers never before fully exploited for the study of the senate.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Again, I return to the graffiti of Pompeii which was mostly dicks or comments about dicks.

Platystemon posted:

Carthage: uses boats

Rome: is bad at boats

Rome (internally): But what if we could turn sea battles into close‐quarters swordfights?

WoodrowSkillson posted:

Overall the reason Rome is so fun to learn about is there is just so much humanizing information about them because we just luckily have it. Certainly it was no different in other ancient cultures as well, but we just do not have the same depth of information for many of them. The vindolanda tablets alone are goddamn amazing in the window they give to what amounts to everyday life.

etalian posted:

The wrecks of the Terror and Erebus are surprising well preserved.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxyTZ3F7mkA

emfive posted:

Fergus Fleming's Barrow's Boys is a great read

quote:

A few of John Barrow’s expeditions:

1816: Barrow’s first mission sends a crew up the Congo in search of the mouth of the Niger River. Within 200 miles yellow fever wipes out most of the crew; when the survivors turn around their African guides flee into the bush, stealing most of their supplies. None of the officers survive and only a few crewmembers limp back to England. The mission is a total failure, setting an unfortunate precedent for the missions to follow.

1819-1822: The legendary John Franklin takes his first overland mission to map Canada’s northern coastline. They run out of food and are driven to eating lichen from rocks, mice, and even their shoes, which are roasted or boiled before being devoured. Some of the men resort to cannibalism.

1825: Gordon Laing, the indomitable African explorer and dreadful poet, crosses the Sahara in search of Timbuctoo, rumored to be a wondrous city of learning and commerce. Attacked by Tuareg tribesmen, he covers 400 miles strapped to the back of a camel with numerous saber cuts, a fractured jawbone, a musket ball in the hip, three broken fingers, and a slashed wrist. He eventually finds Timbuctoo, which turns out to be nothing more than a squalid huddle of mud houses. Laing is murdered by Tuaregs on his way back and his body is never discovered.

1830: Richard and John Lander take up the intrepid task of following the Niger to its mouth. Along the way they are forced to bribe tribal leaders to let them continue, abducted by pirates and delivered into slavery, bought by a drunken chief who sets them free to sail away with a foul-mouthed British captain who desperately needs healthy crewmembers. They return to England in 1831, having discovered the mouth of the Niger, only to receive the cold shoulder from Barrow, who had long argued that the Niger ended elsewhere and was displeased to have his beliefs disproven.

etalian posted:

lol

emfive posted:

the deal was that after the Napoleonic wars there were many, many thousands of officers out of jobs. Barrow was the lowest-ranking member of the Admiralty but he effectively had full executive discretion on how to carry out the vague intentions of a bunch of drunk idiots higher up in the bureaucracy.

It was all completely insane, the book is amazing, like sci-fi

Herodotus posted:

Other Indians dwell near the town of Caspatyrus and the Pactyic country, northward of the rest of India; these live like the Bactrians; they are of all Indians the most warlike, and it is they who are charged with the getting of the gold; for in these parts all is desert by reason of the sand. There are found in this sandy desert ants not so big as dogs but bigger than foxes; the Persian king has some of these, which have been caught there. These ants make their dwellings underground, digging out the sand in the same manner as do the ants in Greece, to which they are very like in shape, and the sand which they carry forth from the holes is full of gold. It is for this sand that the Indians set forth into the desert. They harness three camels apiece, a male led camel on either side to help in draught, and a female in the middle: the man himself rides on the female, careful that when harnessed she has been taken away from as young an offspring as may be. Their camels are as swift as horses, and much better able to bear burdens besides.

I do not describe the camel's appearance to Greeks, for they know it; but I will show them a thing which they do not know concerning it: the hindlegs of the camel have four thighbones and four knee-joints; its privy parts are turned towards the tail between the hindlegs.

Thus and with teams so harnessed the Indians ride after the gold, using all diligence that they shall be about the business of taking it when the heat is greatest; for the ants are then out of sight underground. Now in these parts the sun is hottest in the morning, not at midday as elsewhere, but from sunrise to the hour of market-closing. Through these hours it is hotter by much than in Hellas at noon, so that men are said to sprinkle themselves with water at this time. At midday the sun's heat is well nigh the same in India and elsewhere. As it grows to afternoon, the sun of India has the power of the morning sun in other lands; with its sinking the day becomes ever cooler, till at sunset it is exceeding cold.

So when the Indians come to the place with their sacks, they fill these with the sand and ride away back with all speed; for, as the Persians say, the ants forthwith scent them out and give chase, being, it would seem, so much swifter than all other creatures that if the Indians made not haste on their way while the ants are mustering, not one of them would escape. So they loose the male trace-camels that they lead, one at a time (these being slower than the females); the mares never tire, for they remember the young that they have left. Such is the tale. Most of the gold (say the Persians) is got in this way by the Indians; there is some besides that they dig from mines in their country, but it is less abundant.

quote:

They say the outsize furry 'ants', first described by Herodotus in the fifth century BC, are in fact big marmots. These creatures -Herodotus calls them 'bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog'- are still throwing up gold bearing soil from deep underground as they dig their burrows. Most important, the explorers say they have found indigenous people on the same high plateau who say that for generations they have collected gold dust from the marmots' work.

twoday posted:

Ali Alkali posted:

I like the History of Egypt and Fall of Rome podcasts because they are made by academics and not hobby enthusiasts, who, whatever subject they cover, sooner or later fall into the swamp that is military history.

GokuGoesSSJ3 posted:

Funny you use that story in particular because the gold digging ants are real, except due to probably a mistranslation by Herodotus they're not ants they're marmots:

https://www.livius.org/sources/content/herodotus/the-gold-digging-ants/

twoday posted:

I personally consider history to be more of an art than a science because no matter what they dig up, it ultimately ends up with someone weaving together a historical narrative out of it and that it how it is remembered by everyone else. So while I personally place a lot of value on archaeology and scientific data about the past, I place even more value on people who are able to compress all of this into a cohesive story, however incomplete it may be.

Squalid posted:

Also while I have not myself found gold in their spoils, I did find several Cretaceous conodont molar cusps in the spoils of a prairie dog burrow, and at another burrow found some limestone marine snail shells which must have been brought up from pretty deep because the surface was all bentonite shale. As I recall the early paleontologist Othniel Marsh loved searching anthills for the same sort of microfossils. So there's a lot of cool stuff animals can excavate for lazy humans!


I think if you're going to take this attitude to history, its going to inevitably lead you into making some mistakes. History HAS to be treated as a science, because unlike the quality of a painting or song, it is not subjective. We can't treat it like it is, and if we do, we liable to end up believing the things we want to believe. History must be falsifiable and empirical, and if it's not those things it's just fiction. Obviously when Plutarch says Tiberius was a baby fucker we can't go back in time and literally catch the Emperor in the act, we can't test history that way. What we can do is test if Plutarch actually existed in the time he says he does, we can check his reliability in other respects, and we can look to see if his statements are consistent with everything else we know. Ultimately for a lot of historical stories we just have to shrug and accept we don't know what really happened or who had sex with what. Acknowledging the extent of uncertainty might be the most important job of a good scientist, even if it's not very flashy, and even if it means we can't trust the saucy sex gossip of antiquity.

twoday posted:

Reminds me of the caves of the Gran Canaria, the underground cave cities of Anatolia, and the caves of the Cobra Valley in Nepal, but the vegetation seems wrong for all of those places. Where is it?

twoday posted:

History cannot be treated as a science because it is inherently subjective! It is based upon countless layers of presumption which are not founded in science but rather upon hearsay, and those secondary sources make up a great deal of our understanding of history, especially when dealing with ancient times. Every history that has been written was colored by the understanding of the past which was popular in its time, and the multitude of inaccuracies has only accumulated. There is no objective way to interpret the past. We analyze artifacts and determine what they mean (while we ourselves are influenced by previous false interpretations), and make massive assumptions about entire societies based upon those conclusions. But we have no idea what they mean in actuality, it's all just an educated guess. Pretending that history or archaeology are in any way objective is a delusion. Though there are material remnants which are unquestionably a representation of the past, our entire understanding of the culture which surrounded those objects is based on little more than an accumulation of subjective interpretations. That is the basis of all historical interpretation, that is its bread and butter, sorry.

Read this and get back to me:

http://sultanaeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Motel-of-the-Mysteries-Macaulay.pdf

Squalid posted:

Also while I have not myself found gold in their spoils, I did find several Cretaceous conodont molar cusps in the spoils of a prairie dog burrow, and at another burrow found some limestone marine snail shells which must have been brought up from pretty deep because the surface was all bentonite shale. As I recall the early paleontologist Othniel Marsh loved searching anthills for the same sort of microfossils. So there's a lot of cool stuff animals can excavate for lazy humans!


I think if you're going to take this attitude to history, its going to inevitably lead you into making some mistakes. History HAS to be treated as a science, because unlike the quality of a painting or song, it is not subjective. We can't treat it like it is, and if we do, we liable to end up believing the things we want to believe. History must be falsifiable and empirical, and if it's not those things it's just fiction. Obviously when Plutarch says Tiberius was a baby fucker we can't go back in time and literally catch the Emperor in the act, we can't test history that way. What we can do is test if Plutarch actually existed in the time he says he does, we can check his reliability in other respects, and we can look to see if his statements are consistent with everything else we know. Ultimately for a lot of historical stories we just have to shrug and accept we don't know what really happened or who had sex with what. Acknowledging the extent of uncertainty might be the most important job of a good scientist, even if it's not very flashy, and even if it means we can't trust the saucy sex gossip of antiquity.

Dalael posted:

I'm gonna have to both agree and disagree with you on this subject. What you say isn't wrong, but I think it's also important to understand that when it comes to history, evidence is highly subject to interpretation because we lack so much of it. if it was so clear cut, there wouldn't be so much arguing amongst academics

Flavius Aetass posted:

My thesis was a bit of a comparative analysis on race relations in German vs Anglo settlements in Texas.

Science: statistics based on census data, estimated net worth from career type and land holdings, comparisons on numbers of lynchings reported, etc.

Not science: everything else, including the main idea of whether things were "better" for minorities in certain areas and how that compares to the modern idea of traditional German-American tolerance

Flavius Aetass posted:

Most historians aren't doing research as to whether or not a ship sunk.

Bernstrike posted:

what about the White Ship?