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euphronius posted:Good thing the Great Pyramid of Giza has a secret void that is 100% full of riches and the real mummy Nah that's a granary 
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Feb 25, 2020 03:30
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Grand Fromage posted:They could also do poo poo you would not imagine working. We have skulls of people who had successful brain surgery and there's writing about cataract surgeries, though no way to verify those since there's no bone evidence. If you want to survive getting stabbed by a big ol sword anywhere in the premodern world, you probably want a Roman doctor. I believe that at the time what everyone (including the Romans) really wanted was an EGYPTIAN doctor
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Feb 25, 2020 03:32
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Tunicate posted:I believe that at the time what everyone (including the Romans) really wanted was an EGYPTIAN doctor The Roman province of Egypt had many good doctors. But for real the Greeks/Romans/Egyptians were all sharing knowledge and ethnically many Roman doctors were Greek. Egypt had a reputation because they were so ancient and perceived to have magical powers. I don't know of any evidence that their medicine was actually better, would be interested to see it if there is some. Certainly as far as injuries/wounds go, the Romans were the ones training doctors systematically with a whole lot of practical experience. I don't think you're going to find a better trained ancient surgeon than a Roman military one.
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Feb 25, 2020 03:36
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Your also missing the terrible teenage Emperor Basil II
Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 04:20
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Grand Fromage posted:The Roman province of Egypt had many good doctors. My understanding is that while the Egyptians are rightly considered the father's of medicine, the actual outcome of those poultices largely came down to "can the antibacterial properties of honey and wine overcome the 'essence of crocodile dung'"? This isn't to understate their accomplishments, since they certainly deserve their reputation for basically inventing medicine, but it was still only moderately effective. I'm sure their reputation for wizardry, mixed with higher than normal success rates, probably made for potent placebo effects, but from looking through their recipes it really seems like you could get into trouble trusting an Egyptian priest with internal medicine. By the time the Romans were around, I think a lot of the Egyptian medicine methods had been shared with Greek doctors, who were broadly considered to be the best at the time. Roman surgeons of course eventually outstripped them all in their field - they are rightly considered the founders of surgery. It's been mentioned already, but it's an amazing fact that wounded soldiers were better off in the hands of a legionary medicus than any doctor before the American Civil War and the foundation of the International Red Cross/American Red Cross. Of course, many societies have made their own lasting contribution to the medical field. Greece is broadly considered to have professionalized the role of the doctor - promoting a practical and theoretical framework that created the first true physicians. India founded psychology long before Freud was asking women about their penile envy. China was basically the inventor of therapy, and their contributions continue to revolutionize Western medicine. In a highly cosmopolitan society like imperial Rome, likely the most important aspect of a doctor was what their training was, rather than what their ethnicity was. Kaal fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 05:34
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Grand Fromage posted:They could also do poo poo you would not imagine working. We have skulls of people who had successful brain surgery and there's writing about cataract surgeries, though no way to verify those since there's no bone evidence. If you want to survive getting stabbed by a big ol sword anywhere in the premodern world, you probably want a Roman doctor. The whole dentistry stuff looks pretty gnarly too.
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Feb 25, 2020 10:58
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Grand Fromage posted:The Roman province of Egypt had many good doctors. I once watched an egypt documentary that was all about "Here's why slaves building the pyramids is wrong" and one of the things mentionned was that some of the people who had horriffic injuries had clearly been treated and survived. I'm guessing their surgery skills may have been on par with pretty much anything the ancient world had to offer up.
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Feb 25, 2020 14:56
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Jack2142 posted:Your also missing the terrible teenage Emperor Basil II Sure, but consider who he's being compared to? As they say, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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Feb 25, 2020 18:29
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Isn't Basil II the guy who managed to somewhat bring the ERE back from the brink through military conquest and died leaving no heir?
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Feb 25, 2020 21:59
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The empire was doing well before him, but he was emperor through its peak and defeated all the remaining active military threats to the empire. His only real mistake was the garbage succession, which was a huge fuckup but not exactly unique to Basil. Also he had the paradoxical problem that he was emperor for too long. You don't want a too short period because of the chaos of constantly switching government, but an emperor ruling for too long tends to hollow out the political class and potential succession, leaving the state in trouble when the ruler is finally gone. Augustus was a notable exception to that tendency, but Augustus was an outlier in so many ways. Plus even in his case his succession was a mess, it just wasn't so much of one that it caused a problem. One of the great mysteries of medieval Roman scholarship is what the gently caress happened after Basil, since by all appearances 1025 was the strongest position the empire had been in since before the rise of Islam, and then it all goes to hell by the end of the century. There is a massive amount of debate what happened and no agreement I've ever seen, except that most scholars think it was self-inflicted by the Romans. The Turks weren't helping but Manzikert was not actually that bad of a defeat and certainly can't explain what happened after. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 22:12
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My current knowledge of ERE is sorely lacking and is mostly all from "History of Byzantium Podcast" and we're just past Manzikert so I can't wait to hear more about this period! C'mon Robyn! MOAR EPISODES!!!!!!
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Feb 25, 2020 22:38
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Power Khan posted:The whole dentistry stuff looks pretty gnarly too.
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Feb 25, 2020 23:10
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So is the Landmark Edition of Xenophon's Anabasis ever going to come out?
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Feb 26, 2020 01:52
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:So is the Landmark Edition of Xenophon's Anabasis ever going to come out? I hope so cause I wanna read it
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Feb 26, 2020 02:02
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For the uncultured like me, what's that?)
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Feb 26, 2020 02:04
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Dalael posted:For the uncultured like me, what's that?) Shortly after the Peloponnesian war ended, The king of Persia died and a civil war started over the succession. One of the rival princes had developed ties with the Spartan alliance in his time funding them during the war, and hired ten thousand Greek mercenaries. These Greeks, together with other troops from Persia proper, marched up to the capital and promptly lost the war. So now there were ten thousand Greek soldiers deep in Persian territory, who had until recently been members of a rebel army, and were considered enemies of the state. Anabasis ("The march up-country") is the memoir of the commander of the Greeks, describing their journey back to Greece.
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Feb 26, 2020 02:08
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And the landmark series is a project to provide new translations for ancient books, with extensive maps, footnotes, and appendices. They've been working on Anabasis for years now.
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Feb 26, 2020 02:13
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cheetah7071 posted:Shortly after the Peloponnesian war ended, The king of Persia died and a civil war started over the succession. One of the rival princes had developed ties with the Spartan alliance in his time funding them during the war, and hired ten thousand Greek mercenaries. These Greeks, together with other troops from Persia proper, marched up to the capital and promptly lost the war. So now there were ten thousand Greek soldiers deep in Persian territory, who had until recently been members of a rebel army, and were considered enemies of the state. Anabasis ("The march up-country") is the memoir of Xenophon wasn't 'the commander', the Greek commander and most of the high-ranking officers got murdered by the Persians after they played the ol' "invite them to a peace conference and murder them over dinner" card. The soldiers elected new officers, of which Xenophon was one, but certainly not the overall commander. Which was good for Xenophon, since after they reached relative safety, the soldiers started killing some of the new officers.
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Feb 26, 2020 02:27
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See, I'd know that if the landmark anabasis was out!!! e: in Hellenika, he mentions himself in third person several times during Agesilaos' campaign in Anatolia. He doesn't name himself, but refers to the commander of the Greeks who marched up-country. Maybe he meant the commander of the ones who joined Agesilaos' army instead of going home? cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Feb 26, 2020 |
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Feb 26, 2020 02:30
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The annoying thing is that the Landmark Editions of Xenophon's Hellenika and Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander both *are* out, so it's hard as hell to google anything about Landmark Xenophon's Anabasis
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Feb 26, 2020 02:41
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Grand Fromage posted:The empire was doing well before him, but he was emperor through its peak and defeated all the remaining active military threats to the empire. His only real mistake was the garbage succession, which was a huge fuckup but not exactly unique to Basil. Also he had the paradoxical problem that he was emperor for too long. You don't want a too short period because of the chaos of constantly switching government, but an emperor ruling for too long tends to hollow out the political class and potential succession, leaving the state in trouble when the ruler is finally gone. Augustus was a notable exception to that tendency, but Augustus was an outlier in so many ways. Plus even in his case his succession was a mess, it just wasn't so much of one that it caused a problem. Manzikert was a bad defeat, not because of troop losses, but because Romanos Diogenes was the first Emperor to be captured alive since Valerian. That was a disaster politically as suddenly the Romans instead of being united against the Turks were now fighting one another for control of the throne. If Romanos just lost the battle, he probably would have ended up murdered quietly and someone would have taken his place. Instead you had an incredibly messy situation where everyone was focusing on the prize of Constantinople rather than the East being hosed. The other problem after 1025 is there were enemies on all sides for the Empire. The Turks showed up in the East, The Pechenegs were in the North and the Normans were in the West. I don't really blame Basil II because two of the three weren't around until decades after he died. The Normans he was aware of the situation and was mobilizing the army to visit Southern Italy with the Emperor at its head for the first time in centuries. Unfortunately for the Empire he got sick and died before the army marched. Then when they actually sent someone competent in George Maniakes, he rebelled because he was paranoid he was going to be recalled and executed by the Emperor. Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Feb 26, 2020 |
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Feb 26, 2020 03:41
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Just a little quote i found about men from two distant cultures, bonding across the barriers of language and religion over their mutual love of classical history. Also about cutting off ears and noses, but that's secondary. Immediately after this incident the Portuguese burned the guy's house down, along with the rest of the city it was in. This is taken from a summary of Afonso de Alboquerque's voyages in the Indian ocean. He got around the Indian ocean a lot in the first couple decades of the 16th century. There is a lot of mutilation and burning people alive in his story. Also this stuff was mostly written by his son based off De Alboquerque's own accounts and letters, so this is the version of the story meant to make him look good.
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Feb 26, 2020 04:24
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Grand Fromage posted:No, it really looks like he died unexpectedly young and they just threw together what they had for the tomb. And we really have no idea how, though there isn't much evidence of physical trauma nor any skeletal or soft tissue indications of disease. My bet is on a water-borne infection, but without the gastrointestinal system it'll never be testable.
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Feb 26, 2020 05:16
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I was going to say that we have his canopic jars, but Wikipedia suggests they weren't necessarily used to actually store the organs. Also, it seems he had malaria, which is the oldest generic evidence of the disease, which is pretty cool.
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Feb 26, 2020 10:44
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Yeah, he probably died from malaria, or one of the other endemic diseases of the Nile, of which there were many. Didn't get attacked by a hippo, can say that much (a hypothesis based on the missing chest wall of the mummy, which was removed by Carter to get the necklaces off for display, initial pictures of the mummy show the chest wall very much intact). Certainly doesn't seem to be anything as "interesting" as assassination. Now, Rameses III...
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Feb 26, 2020 15:20
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in what context would "the traditional" coat of arms of satan be seen in? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributed_arms
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Feb 26, 2020 23:31
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Baron Porkface posted:in what context would "the traditional" coat of arms of satan be seen in? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributed_arms In illustrations of the battles from the Book of Revelation, IIRC. By the way, note that Satan shamelessly violates the rule of tincture! Edit: Technically, according to the more formalistic interpretation of the rule, the green-on-red is OK here if you refer to the frogs as “proper” rather than “Vert.” Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Feb 27, 2020 |
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Feb 27, 2020 00:57
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Violating the rules while not technically violating them is pretty on brand for the Biblical Satan.
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Feb 27, 2020 01:11
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Baron Porkface posted:in what context would "the traditional" coat of arms of satan be seen in? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributed_arms following the wikilink it took me two more clicks to find this amazing image: 
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Feb 27, 2020 05:02
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So if Roman Emperors all had several names, many of which were used at different times in their life, when did English just start using just one of those names for the common translation? Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus becomes Nero, which makes sense when Nero is first. But Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus is Claudius. Is this naming convention just from some monk a thousand years ago and the inertia became too much to change?
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Feb 27, 2020 09:10
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Most of the names are just political ornaments. In Claudius' case, his family would have called him by the praenomen, Tiberius, and outsiders by the nomen, Cladius. So the choice is obvious. There might be some edge cases where it's not clear why one name became the one in common use, but for the most part it's a part or a combination of their birth names, or a nickname or a title (Caligula, Augustus, Germanicus, Scipio Africanus). But the names are common to all European languages afaik because they come from Latin tradition
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Feb 27, 2020 09:58
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GoutPatrol posted:So if Roman Emperors all had several names, many of which were used at different times in their life, when did English just start using just one of those names for the common translation? Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus becomes Nero, which makes sense when Nero is first. But Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus is Claudius. Is this naming convention just from some monk a thousand years ago and the inertia became too much to change? I mean by the time you get to Claudius there's already been really famous guys with all the other names.
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Feb 27, 2020 20:00
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I've just started reading an overview of Chinese history, and while I'm still at the very beginning in the bronze age, there was one brief passage that struck me In discussing the bronze age cultures of the northern Yellow River area, the author says that archaeologists have tentatively made a correspondence between this culture and the Shang dynasty from the textual record. The logic goes as follows: in the early bronze age, only a subsection of the region had bronzeworking. By the middle bronze age, bronzeworking had spread over the entire region, but the bronze artwork being produced was in a very uniform state, suggesting some sort of cultural or political domination by the earliest bronzeworking subregion. Then, in the late bronze age, each subregion has its own distinctive art style, suggesting a breakup of the unification. The fact that the "unification" and "disunification" dates don't match the textual records for the Shang dynasty is mentioned as a challenge for this interpretation, and it's left at that--no more than a paragraph is spent on trying to correlate the textual and archaeological traditions. While this is of course a broad overview history primarily intended to be a decent starting point for English speakers so the author is almost certainly skipping over a whole lot of debate, does the basic outline even pass the smell test? It seems to me that a unification of bronze art isn't really evidence for anything. If your neighbors are producing beautiful bronze vases, and you go learn how to make them, of course you're going to make them similarly when you take the knowledge back home--not only is it a complicated process with a lot that could go wrong if you deviate too much, but the whole point of you learning bronzeworking in the first place was to make the kinds of art pieces you so admired from the next region over. Is unification of art styles, especially in a medium that your region has only just recently become wealthy enough to pursue (the author emphasizes how crucial a specialist, stratified society would be required to make these incredibly expensive works), really plausible evidence for any form of cultural unification? I assume I'm missing something because I'm just some random guy instead of being an archaeological expert.
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Feb 27, 2020 20:41
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Chinese historiography has a very serious problem with needing to present a unified, unchanging China that stretches into prehistory. You literally cannot publish anything different in China, and it's caused negative influence on scholars who are not operating under censorship as well. Modern scholarship is very much into the idea that there is no such thing as a unified ancient Chinese culture, and what became recognizable as "China" was a merger of many different regional cultures. The idea of China springing fully formed into existence in the Yellow River basin is not accepted by anyone serious anymore. This point of view does exist in China as well, but is... let's say massaged into certain shapes so it doesn't violate the Party's position on Chinese history. There's also the fact that when you're talking Shang era, the written records are extremely limited. The narrative histories were written literally thousands of years later and have all the problems you'd imagine from that. There wasn't even any evidence the Shang were real until the 20th century.
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Feb 27, 2020 20:54
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Those bronze artifacts were also restricted to the ruling class. Even if they did share one culture, that doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the rest of the population in the area.
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Feb 27, 2020 21:46
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cheetah7071 posted:If your neighbors are producing beautiful bronze vases, and you go learn how to make them, of course you're going to make them similarly when you take the knowledge back home--not only is it a complicated process with a lot that could go wrong if you deviate too much, but the whole point of you learning bronzeworking in the first place was to make the kinds of art pieces you so admired from the next region over. Is unification of art styles, especially in a medium that your region has only just recently become wealthy enough to pursue (the author emphasizes how crucial a specialist, stratified society would be required to make these incredibly expensive works), really plausible evidence for any form of cultural unification? I assume I'm missing something because I'm just some random guy instead of being an archaeological expert. Ignoring China and just speaking in the abstract, if there were two distinct neighboring cultures and a new technology diffused from one to the other, what you're saying would be true of the earliest examples but over time their styles would drift apart. On the other hand if they were the same unified culture, or tightly integrated, they would still drift over time but more or less together. I don't know anything about Shang bronzes but that's how I would expect it to work based on other cultures. I mean, that's sort of definitional to the idea of a 'material culture'. What sounds suspicious to me is identifying a material culture and then projecting an identity on it, especially when politics is involved.
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Feb 27, 2020 21:59
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It’s exactly the same as the “Germanic graves look like this, and Slav graves look like this” bullshit that was super hot before WW2
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Feb 27, 2020 22:03
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cheetah7071 posted:Is unification of art styles, especially in a medium that your region has only just recently become wealthy enough to pursue (the author emphasizes how crucial a specialist, stratified society would be required to make these incredibly expensive works), really plausible evidence for any form of cultural unification? This kind of thing is endemic to East Asian scholarship; you get Korean historians claiming Gojoseon stretched most of the way to Beijing because of one style of bronze dagger that’s traditionally associated with it that spreads that far. OTOH, it matters a lot what kind of art it is, and in Shang’s case this is actually a big part of the reason why it’s assumed there was some degree of political unification (and this is the mainstream theory, and among non-Chinese scholars too, although huge emphasis on the “some degree”)—these aren’t just pretty bronze trinkets made for art’s sake. Bronze in China at this time is very much associated with authority, and so possession of a Shang article like that would have a very clear connotation. People weren’t just copying their neighbors. Also I’m curious about when that book was written because you’re making Shang at large sound much sketchier than it’s generally taken to be. There’s actually a relative assload of written documentation for it as far as civilizations this ancient go, the oracle bones are really absurdly abundant, they used the drat things all the time. There’s really no doubt whatsoever that it existed and the corresponding material cultures are likewise pretty well established.
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Feb 28, 2020 05:36
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Koramei posted:Also I’m curious about when that book was written because you’re making Shang at large sound much sketchier than it’s generally taken to be. There’s actually a relative assload of written documentation for it as far as civilizations this ancient go, the oracle bones are really absurdly abundant, they used the drat things all the time. There’s really no doubt whatsoever that it existed and the corresponding material cultures are likewise pretty well established. It's written in 2015 and starting on like, the very next page he goes into all of that. I just posted immediately after reading that paragraph because it struck me e: The book is A history of China by John Keay ee: I think he talked about the bronze before the oracle bones because he was coming off of talking about the Xia, who we only have a material culture for, not written records cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Feb 28, 2020 |
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Feb 28, 2020 05:42
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Oh hah yeah so the Xia are another whole can of worms. So the other big endemic issue re: this stuff in East Asian scholarship is that the ancient Chinese gave us names for a whole lot of ancient groups, and more modern East Asian scholars have really, really loved to slap those names onto archaeological finds that kind of maybe are in the area they could have been talking about in those ancient texts. So we have all sorts of associations between historical name and archaeological culture that have become very entrenched over the past 100 years that more prudent scholars have been calling into question a bit in recent years. Like the Gojoseon example above, or, also—the Xia “dynasty”. There was definitely a pretty impressive culture in China at the time, and reason to believe they even had early writing, but the connection of the Erlitou culture to an actual Xia dynasty is still very much a topic of debate. Outside of China, where it’s basically consensus, that is.
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Feb 28, 2020 06:05
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