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Epicurius posted:Also, remember, the family wasn't entirely inbred. Cleopatra I (wife of Ptolemy V, mother of Ptolemy VI) was the daughter of Anitochus III of Syria and his wife, who was the daughter of the king of Pontus, and Ptolemy XII and maybe his wife Cleopatra V, were kids of Ptolemy X and a consort. This talk of royal inbreeding put me in mind of the genetic mess that was Europe's royalty for a long time, like with how a lot of them had hemophilia thanks to everybody keeping it in the family. And then there's the Hapsburg jaw.
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Mar 25, 2020 05:46
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Squalid posted:There's lots of issues with these numbers, but its pretty clear from this superficial look at things that video games are terrible at depicting the scale agriculture in the real world, and for obvious reasons: If they were to depict it accurately, it would take up 99% of the space when all the interesting stuff get's crammed into the remaining 1%. In ancient Greece almost all land that could possibly sustain agriculture would have been worked. It wouldn't have necessarily looked like the expansive square tracts of the modern USA, but instead would have been an irregular patchwork of olive groves, row crops, pasturage, small stands of trees, and grapevines with little household compounds and small villages interspersed throughout. To get a sense of this you can look at places on Google Earth where people still mostly live a subsistence lifestyle and work the land by hand. Ethiopia is a good example, at least in the Oromia and Amhara regions. Go outside of the cities and it's exactly this. (Well, maybe less olive and grape plantings.) FreudianSlippers posted:Then you have the Third Reich were they deliberately tried to build things that would make impressive looking ruins. Really? Like what? Aside from things like airfields and factories and V2 rockets and the odd bunker, I don't think I've heard of anything built by the Third Reich, let alone monumental.
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Mar 25, 2020 06:19
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The emphasis was on "tried".
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Mar 25, 2020 06:29
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Epicurius posted:Also, remember, the family wasn't entirely inbred. Cleopatra I (wife of Ptolemy V, mother of Ptolemy VI) was the daughter of Anitochus III of Syria and his wife, who was the daughter of the king of Pontus, and Ptolemy XII and maybe his wife Cleopatra V, were kids of Ptolemy X and a consort. Yeah. Also remember 'Married his sister and had kids with her' may be political cover for 'Knocked up a slave and presented the offspring as legitimate.'
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Mar 25, 2020 11:07
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Fuschia tude posted:Really? Like what? Aside from things like airfields and factories and V2 rockets and the odd bunker, I don't think I've heard of anything built by the Third Reich, let alone monumental. Hitler and Speer drew up grandiose plans for rebuilding Berlin after the war, with massive avenues (designed for military parades, not intended for use as actual roads...), a triumphal arch roughly twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe, and all centered around an immense dome based on Hadrian's Pantheon, but again scaled up to an idiotic degree. Some minor works were constructed, but after 1943, major work was halted until the war was over... which probably came as a relief to the German engineers would would otherwise have had to explain to Hitler that Berlin's soil wouldn't be able to support these gargantuan monuments... Speer talks about his theory of 'ruin value' in his memoirs; he claims to have given Hitler sketches of the Nuremberg rally grounds showing it in various states of decay, showing how even if the Reich collapsed, its monuments would still maintain enough integrity to inspire future generations of German people to greatness. There's planning for failure, and then there's just putting the cart before the horse.
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Mar 25, 2020 11:48
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Dalael posted:I don't know about you all but i think one of the things in life which peeked my interest in history, was Asterix et Obelix. Its definitely where i first learned of the Romans and Gauls. Me too, friend. RIP.
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Mar 25, 2020 11:59
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The giant concrete cylinder they built to see if the soil could have supported the future triumphal arch (spoilers: no) is probably going to stay there for centuries if no one blows it up.
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Mar 25, 2020 12:03
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VanSandman posted:Yeah. Also remember 'Married his sister and had kids with her' may be political cover for 'Knocked up a slave and presented the offspring as legitimate.' Guys, it's not what you think! I was banging my sister, I swear.
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Mar 25, 2020 12:30
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Grand Fromage posted:My understanding is inbreeding like that is bad, but it usually takes quite a while for anything to crop up unless you have a specific genetic disorder in your family that is latent if only one parent carries it but happens if they both do. Ptolemy IV through XII all had kids with their sisters. I think it's commonly believed that inbreeding issues appear really fast, but it's very unlikely for it to be a problem for the first couple of generations at least. They may have gotten lucky, or some of those kids may have not actually been with the sibling. Yeah it's worth noting that our good friend Carlos II  wasn't the result of consecutive sibling marriages, but from generational inbreeding of specific, already-inbred families like what we do to show dogs. VanSandman posted:Yeah. Also remember 'Married his sister and had kids with her' may be political cover for 'Knocked up a slave and presented the offspring as legitimate.' And it's been years since I took the class but my egyptology prof was pretty insistent on egyptian sibling marriages (which the Ptolemies adopted) being less inbreedy in practice than what they look like. Unlike during the height of european royalty, it wasn't really important that the king's heir come out of the queen's vagina (or that the king be a dude, or a lot of other things.) The sibling marriage was spiritually significant but being a bastard vs being legitimate isn't something they acknowledged or cared about. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Mar 25, 2020 |
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Mar 25, 2020 15:03
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Yeah it's worth noting that our good friend Carlos II lol the pug king
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Mar 25, 2020 15:06
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FAUXTON posted:lol the pug king there is an alternate timeline out there where we have a Universal Habsburg Emperor, and also really good universal wifi, because His Majesty can't survive an airplane cabin.
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Mar 25, 2020 15:32
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Pretty sure at least some of the mummies they've found have been hella inbred, since they did DNA tests on them.
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Mar 25, 2020 15:40
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SlothfulCobra posted:the player even gets the father of lies himself hanging around on his ship commenting on islands. I should play this game, never played an Assassins Creed game before but this sounds hilarious. I hope you get the option to tell him about the gold-digging ants you totally saw way out east.
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Mar 25, 2020 16:22
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Kylaer posted:I should play this game, never played an Assassins Creed game before but this sounds hilarious. I hope you get the option to tell him about the gold-digging ants you totally saw way out east. There's a theory that they were real, you know. Well, they weren't ants, but, in parts of Pakistani Kashmir, in the Deosai National Park, there's gold near the surface, and a lot of times the Himalayan Marmots who live there will bring up gold dust to the surface when they dig burrows. Given that the Persian word for "marmot" sounds a lot like the Persian word for "ant", his tales of large furry ants who live in Persian India who dig up gold sounds kind of plausible. Also, to be fair to Herodotus, whenever he relates stories like that, he does include the disclaimer, "I've never seen this myself, but I've heard stories that..."
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Mar 25, 2020 18:22
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Yeah everything I've heard suggests Herodotus is an extremely reliable relayer of the stories going around the classical eastern Mediterranean
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Mar 25, 2020 18:57
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Fuschia tude posted:Really? Like what? Aside from things like airfields and factories and V2 rockets and the odd bunker, I don't think I've heard of anything built by the Third Reich, let alone monumental. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora Also, like, the autobahns. They were in power in peacetime for half a decade before the war, of course they built stuff.
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Mar 25, 2020 19:07
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Herodotus somewhere wrote that the Finns are the lowest form of human life.
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Mar 25, 2020 19:27
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Proof he had first-hand knowledge of Finns.
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Mar 25, 2020 19:28
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:there is an alternate timeline out there where we have a Universal Habsburg Emperor, and also really good universal wifi, because His Majesty can't survive an airplane cabin. wherein the Habsburg emperor is just a brundlefly abomination of inbreeding that needs to be wheeled around in an ICU bed surrounded by a popemobile-esque apparatus for visibility
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Mar 25, 2020 19:36
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Here's another question: In the game, sails on your ship have like this grid pattern, like they've been sewn together. I haven't been able to find anything about ancient sails not being one complete piece, is that the case?cheetah7071 posted:Yeah everything I've heard suggests Herodotus is an extremely reliable relayer of the stories going around the classical eastern Mediterranean Normally I cut Herodotus a lot of slack because yeah, he was just writing down what he heard with no Snopes or anything, but seeing as how every Assassin's Creed game, regardless of how lovingly crafted or thoroughly researched it is, has a plot based around some very Bad History like conspiracies surrounding every important event and ancient aliens who created humanity as some kind of servant race, the whole father of lies things seems relevant.
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Mar 25, 2020 20:38
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SlothfulCobra posted:Here's another question: In the game, sails on your ship have like this grid pattern, like they've been sewn together. I haven't been able to find anything about ancient sails not being one complete piece, is that the case? There's no way people could have had looms big enough to make an entire sail from a single piece of cloth. Of course they were made in pieces and stitched together.
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Mar 25, 2020 20:46
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feedmegin posted:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora I'm going to point this out because, while I'm sure you know it, there might be other people reading this thread who don't, and it's a pretty common myth, but the autobahn isn't a Nazi idea. They ended up building them out, but the idea started in the 1920s, and the first part of the Autobahn came into service, between Cologne and Bonn, in 1932. The Nazis picked up the idea when they came to power as a prestige project.
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Mar 25, 2020 21:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:Here's another question: In the game, sails on your ship have like this grid pattern, like they've been sewn together. I haven't been able to find anything about ancient sails not being one complete piece, is that the case? Even modern sails are composed of panels sewn together. Only expensive high performance sails are laminated or -and I just learned this- welded.
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Mar 25, 2020 21:07
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Deteriorata posted:There's no way people could have had looms big enough to make an entire sail from a single piece of cloth. Of course they were made in pieces and stitched together. Warp-weighted looms, the oldest style of loom and the one that was used in ancient Greece, isn't constrained by a vertical size--you can keep unrolling yarn on the warp-weights at the bottom as you go, and theoretically make a piece of cloth that goes on endlessly. Horizontally it's constrained by however long a stick you have to support the weft, but they did get to several-people-need-to-be-working-simultaneously lengths in antiquity. I agree it's more likely they just stitched them together (at least horizontally), but they did actually have the technology at the time do to it in one go too.
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Mar 25, 2020 21:11
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Re: Nazi ruins: look up the Flaktürme. Turns out the best way of surviving a WWII bombing attack is NOT actually digging a bunker as deep as you can, it's building a giant invulnerable concrete edifice full of guns and sheltering in that. A bunch of them are still around because it's just not practical to demolish them.
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Mar 25, 2020 21:12
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Koramei posted:Warp-weighted looms, the oldest style of loom and the one that was used in ancient Greece, isn't constrained by a vertical size--you can keep unrolling yarn on the warp-weights at the bottom as you go, and theoretically make a piece of cloth that goes on endlessly. Horizontally it's constrained by however long a stick you have to support the weft, but they did get to several-people-need-to-be-working-simultaneously lengths in antiquity. Sails would also tear periodically and have to be repaired. Even if they somehow managed to make a 30 foot wide piece of cloth for the sail, it would be spliced and patched repeatedly within a few years of use. There wouldn't really have been any advantage to making it from one piece in the first place.
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Mar 25, 2020 21:19
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Re: Nazi ruins: look up the Flaktürme. Turns out the best way of surviving a WWII bombing attack is NOT actually digging a bunker as deep as you can, it's building a giant invulnerable concrete edifice full of guns and sheltering in that. A bunch of them are still around because it's just not practical to demolish them. The city that I live in has six. There's also a bunch of large air raid bunkers hiding in plain sight. That stuff is worth taking a guided tour.
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Mar 25, 2020 21:57
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I didn't know Julius Caesar actually wrote stuff. I was just looking for audiobooks on Audible about him and found Commentaries and the Galic Wars and now I'm curious. Are they reliable? Or just interesting?
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Mar 26, 2020 02:57
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NikkolasKing posted:I didn't know Julius Caesar actually wrote stuff. I was just looking for audiobooks on Audible about him and found Commentaries and the Galic Wars and now I'm curious. They're extremely readable and entertaining. Caesar was well known in his day as a master of latin prose, and even in translation it comes through. You definitely won't be bored. As for reliability, there's probably no or few outright lies, but pretty much everything is spun to make Caesar look good.
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Mar 26, 2020 03:02
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NikkolasKing posted:I didn't know Julius Caesar actually wrote stuff. I was just looking for audiobooks on Audible about him and found Commentaries and the Galic Wars and now I'm curious. reasonably reliable as long as you remember they're letters sent from the front to be read to the average roman by criers, rather than a serious attempt at unbiased history he's a very good writer tho, and very direct - the sort of thing where a really good writer intentionally uses fairly simple language to target a broad audience
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Mar 26, 2020 03:02
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They are interesting and reliable in the sense that the events in them probably happened but they were written intentionally as propaganda to be read out in Rome and tell the public how great the people's champion Julius Caesar was. But as often happens, we have no other sources for much of what he talks about so we broadly accept what's in there as history. Just remember the context and keep your bullshit detector on.
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Mar 26, 2020 03:03
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NikkolasKing posted:I didn't know Julius Caesar actually wrote stuff. I was just looking for audiobooks on Audible about him and found Commentaries and the Galic Wars and now I'm curious. Obviously Caesar was trying to present himself in the best possible light. It's reasonable to assume he wouldn't have lied too blatantly about events at which many other people were present who might contradict him, though. Commentaries on the Gallic Wars is used a lot in Latin classes because it has a straightforward prose style.
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Mar 26, 2020 03:06
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One of the reasons it gets taken more seriously is that it also isn't 100% propaganda. There are multiple occasions where Caesar fucks up really badly and once where he almost loses his whole army by being a huge dumbass, and he reports that in the book. If he were full on bullshitting he probably would've left those out.
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Mar 26, 2020 03:10
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It’s extremely legible to the point where as a native Spanish speaker I could understand a lot of the latin in it. It’s more understandable to me than some old Castellan and Olde Timey English texts that were written over 1,000 years later. Or even trying to read modern Portuguese and Italian without understanding those languages. It blows my mind how concise it is, it might as well be written today. My favorite part is when he’s like “I’m going to the Danube to crush the dirty Germans and put them in their place” and then he kind of skips what happened there and shortly after he’s writing “Riding into Gaul with my awesome friends the German cavalry by my side we ride or die”. It’s clear that Caesar wasn’t going out there fighting battles nilly willy, if he could reach an opponent and realize that they could work together he always took that chance and then he took them in as friends. Which is how he divided and conquered the region.
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Mar 26, 2020 03:29
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Caesar understood that heroes should also seem mortal, making them easier to relate to.
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Mar 26, 2020 03:30
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NikkolasKing posted:I didn't know Julius Caesar actually wrote stuff. If you've seen HBO's Rome, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo are very loosely based on actual legionaries he mentioned in his writing
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Mar 26, 2020 03:38
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Wafflecopper posted:If you've seen HBO's Rome, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo are very loosely based on actual legionaries he mentioned in his writing By loosely based, their names were mentioned. One of the things interesting in the Gallic wars though was through all his lieutenants and officers in the campaign just how many of them sided against him with Pompey, or the Liberators.
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Mar 26, 2020 03:53
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Jack2142 posted:By loosely based, their names were mentioned. Labienus plays a huge role in his writings of the campaign, more so than Anthony.
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Mar 26, 2020 03:54
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Here's the relevant passage, since we're talking about it.quote:In that legion there were two very brave men, centurions, who were now approaching the first ranks, T. Pulfio, and L. Varenus. These used to have continual disputes between them which of them should be preferred, and every year used to contend for promotion with the utmost animosity. When the fight was going on most vigorously before the fortifications, Pulfio, one of them, says, "Why do you hesitate, Varenus? or what [better] opportunity of signalizing your valor do you seek? This very day shall decide our disputes." When he had uttered these words, he proceeds beyond the fortifications, and rushes on that part of the enemy which appeared the thickest. Nor does Varenus remain within the rampart, but respecting the high opinion of all, follows close after. Then, when an inconsiderable space intervened, Pulfio throws his javelin at the enemy, and pierces one of the multitude who was running up, and while the latter was wounded and slain, the enemy cover him with their shields, and all throw their weapons at the other and afford him no opportunity of retreating. The shield of Pulfio is pierced and a javelin is fastened in his belt. This circumstance turns aside his scabbard and obstructs his right hand when attempting to draw his sword: the enemy crowd around him when [thus] embarrassed. His rival runs up to him and succors him in this emergency. Immediately the whole host turn from Pulfio to him, supposing the other to be pierced through by the javelin. Varenus rushes on briskly with his sword and carries on the combat hand to hand, and having slain one man, for a short time drove back the rest: while he urges on too eagerly, slipping into a hollow, he fell. To him, in his turn, when surrounded, Pulfio brings relief; and both having slain a great number, retreat into the fortifications amid the highest applause. Fortune so dealt with both in this rivalry and conflict, that the one competitor was a succor and a safeguard to the other, nor could it be determined which of the two appeared worthy of being preferred to the other. Weird spelling is it being a translation from 1869.
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Mar 26, 2020 03:58
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Yeah it's a bit more than just a mention of their names, and I think the scene Caesar describes is the inspiration for the opening scene of the TV show, where Pullo charges the enemy and Vorenus bails him out, even if the context is different with only Vorenus being a centurion and Pullo being one of his men and getting in poo poo for breaking ranks. It's a tenuous connection I'll readily admit, I just thought it was a fun tidbit since we were talking about Caesar's writings.
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Mar 26, 2020 04:25
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