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Taro with stuff attached to the front is not uncommon for firstborns (Joutarou, Soutarou, Rentarou) but I don't think I've ever met a Jiro who wasn't retired. There are some names that incorporate numbers but aren't literally ''first son.'' I know a Shinichi who is not the oldest son, his parents just thought it sounded good.
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Apr 5, 2020 13:50
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NikkolasKing posted:What do you all think of Emperor Julian? I've mentioned the book before, but James O'Donnell's book "Pagans" mentions him, in the chapter "The First Christian", which says that he was basically trying to recreate paganism along Christian lines and with a Christian aesthetic.
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Apr 5, 2020 16:28
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:It took me a minute to figure out the punchline and there's a litany of ways that this joke doesn't work. Yeah, he should be swearing by Jove (maybe Juno I guess), good point.
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Apr 5, 2020 16:44
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Schadenboner posted:Yeah, he should be swearing by Jove (maybe Juno I guess), good point. Only if you assume a pre-Constantine setting.
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Apr 5, 2020 16:46
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Silver2195 posted:Only if you assume a pre-Constantine setting. 
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Apr 5, 2020 16:50
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Silver2195 posted:Only if you assume a pre-Constantine setting. So what you're saying is, the joke is kinda byzantine
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Apr 5, 2020 18:19
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:So what you're saying is, the joke is kinda byzantine 
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Apr 5, 2020 20:35
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Epicurius posted:I've mentioned the book before, but James O'Donnell's book "Pagans" mentions him, in the chapter "The First Christian", which says that he was basically trying to recreate paganism along Christian lines and with a Christian aesthetic. I'll look into that book, thank you. But yeah, I had already read about how Julian and others took some inspiration from Christianity in a variety of ways. There's the organizational structures you mentioned but also there's how Porphyry, the student of Plotinus the great founder of what we call Neoplatonism, adopted a doctrine of universal salvation just like Christians did. Only, being a good Platonist, his idea was hierarchical with worship being the lowest means of salvation and philosophy the highest. For its day, Christianity was quite humane and egalitarian compared to some other faiths. A more Christianized Paganism could have been a really wondrous thing.
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Apr 5, 2020 21:51
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NikkolasKing posted:I'll look into that book, thank you. alternatively, If Julian had ruled for 40 years maybe we'd have got a more Paganized Christianity instead. So in this scenario his reforms fail to stem the spread of Christianity, but pressure from him forces the Church to become more institutionally tolerant of local cults and superstitions. So in that world the spread of christianity looks more like that of Buddhism in Asia, where the new theology was able coexist besides rather than completely replace the old religion. edit: really I just wish it was still normal for everyone to leave out old bread or a cup of milk by the hearth or family shrine for the lares  actually I guess that's basically the cookies you put out for Santa, I just wish the traditions had survived as more explicitly pagan.
Squalid fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Apr 5, 2020 |
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Apr 5, 2020 23:37
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Rochallor posted:Taro with stuff attached to the front is not uncommon for firstborns (Joutarou, Soutarou, Rentarou) but I don't think I've ever met a Jiro who wasn't retired. Ichiro (一郎) is literally first son and p common still, plus lots of variants (Jun+, Shin+). Was a bit of a mindfuck when I found out The Ichiro has an older brother. Different character (郎 vs 朗), but still a bit odd
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Apr 5, 2020 23:44
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I'd say Christianity definitely wouldn't be a thing (at least like it is now) without Imperial patronage, you can't really enforce monolithic religious belief without state power. Depending on how successful a hypothetical long-reigning Julian is combined with how widespread the religion was at that point I can see it either being either absorbed by Paganism to greater or lesser degrees like how Buddhism was in east Asia, or essentially replacing Judaism as "that weird minority religion" in the social hierarchy.
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Apr 6, 2020 01:07
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Squalid posted:I just wish the traditions had survived as more explicitly pagan. In order for the traditions to survive within Christianity, they must become not explicitly pagan.
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Apr 6, 2020 01:40
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Rochallor posted:There are some names that incorporate numbers but aren't literally ''first son.'' I know a Shinichi who is not the oldest son, his parents just thought it sounded good. A lot of the firstborns in my family are named x-ichi, with the x being some kind of Japanese-ified form of the father or mother's name, until I was born and my mom got lazy and just gave me a normal English name and a normal Japanese name.
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Apr 6, 2020 01:56
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Christianity definitely would've survived for a long while, but it would be different without the imperial structures that created catholicism and the patriarchates of orthodoxy. I remember that the empires had a hard time keeping christianity under imperial control, what with things like arianism and the sects that rejected the ecumenical councils. I don't know if there would've ever been ecumenical councils without imperial rule though, so that means no bible, and probably the sects drift apart faster. I don't know if the various pagan faiths would stay much the same without governmental support for christianity though. I think towards the end there it was imperial support keeping the old ways going. I think a lot would get lost in the shuffle over the next couple thousand years either way.
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Apr 6, 2020 02:11
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Remember, Julian wasn't interested in preserving traditional paganism. He wanted to create a new paganism on the Christian model.
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Apr 6, 2020 02:16
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It made huge inroads without official support, so I have no doubt Christianity would've still been a thing, but it would have been very different without becoming part of the Roman power structure. There were pagan communities in Europe until the 1600s and that was with organized Christianity actively wiping out pagans. Without that I suspect parts of Europe never would have converted, maybe large parts.
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Apr 6, 2020 02:18
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Epicurius posted:Remember, Julian wasn't interested in preserving traditional paganism. He wanted to create a new paganism on the Christian model. I think its hard to say what exactly he was trying to do, other than promote traditional cults at the expense of Christianity. He had so little time to actually implement his ideas that I think its difficult to infer where he really wanted things to go, or what practical constraints he would have faced in his efforts. He was apparently also popular with the jews and wanted to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem so its not like he was just promoting old school Roman religion.
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Apr 6, 2020 02:33
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I'm working on a little something now related to Qin Shi Huang's sorceror Xu Fu (called Jofuku in Japan) and realized I have no real sense of how reliable records of Chinese history is (and only the basest understanding of Chinese history itself). How accurate is say, the reign of Qin Shin Huang considered to be? For example, are his birth and death dates considered to be factual, or are historians relying on traditional dates? He has a really famous tomb so that obviously helps in establishing the emperor as actually having existed at a time. But Japanese history, for comparison, is largely founded on explicitly fictional stuff until the 500s or so, so I'm wondering how far back historians are willing to go with China.
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Apr 6, 2020 06:34
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One also needs to remember that probably the biggest factor in Non-Mediterranean Europe adopting Christianity were Kings/Chiefs using it as a means to plug themselves into the Imperial system or the remnants of it. Complete with a pre-made bureaucracy to take advantage of in the Church. If the Church isn't a means into that (if "The Church" as an organized entity even still exists) or indeed being Christian is a disadvantage to plugging into that system, then all these Germans and Slavs and whoever else aren't going to be converted at sword-point by their ruler.
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Apr 6, 2020 08:53
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Rochallor posted:I'm working on a little something now related to Qin Shi Huang's sorceror Xu Fu (called Jofuku in Japan) and realized I have no real sense of how reliable records of Chinese history is (and only the basest understanding of Chinese history itself). How accurate is say, the reign of Qin Shin Huang considered to be? For example, are his birth and death dates considered to be factual, or are historians relying on traditional dates? He has a really famous tomb so that obviously helps in establishing the emperor as actually having existed at a time. But Japanese history, for comparison, is largely founded on explicitly fictional stuff until the 500s or so, so I'm wondering how far back historians are willing to go with China. By 220 BC Chinese history is very reliable. 1200 BC is I think when the earliest writing is from. But you have some extant history from about 900 BC and by the mid 1st millennium BC chronology is well established. For example the names and biographies of every King of Qin down to Ying Zheng are recorded and there doesn't seem to be any reason to dispute them. The first King of Qin may have invented his legitimacy as a vassal of Zhou but it's hard to say. The reason people dispute that written record is that the archeology suggests early Qin was not friendly with Zhou, the legitimate overlord at the time. So not only do we know Ying Zheng existed, we know 300 years of the history of his nation and family leading up to him. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Apr 6, 2020 |
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Apr 6, 2020 14:26
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 Pericles, who died in 429 BC of the great plague of Athens, is hosed down.
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Apr 7, 2020 17:15
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Grevling posted:
seems a little late
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Apr 7, 2020 17:20
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A neat development was that Thucydides’ account of the plague, which he claimed to have contracted himself, was uncorroborated until a mass grave thought to have held over 200 people, almost half of them children, was discovered in Athens in the 90’s. The bodies were placed haphazardly and all within two days, and artifacts in the grave were dated to the time period. Tragically, the archeological dig was rushed because the city was building a subway system. The grave, along with 1,000 tombs from 400-500 BCE, were destroyed to make way for it. The subway route was later cancelled and they built a parking lot on top of the hole  .Also interesting from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is he writes that when the Peloponnesians marched up to lay siege to the city, they saw the mass funerals and received accounts from Athenian deserters about the plague, went “nope not touching that”, and withdrew to attack the countryside for the summer. Kevin DuBrow fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Apr 7, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 19:08
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Grevling posted:
I like how the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park has aged harder in the last ~200 years than it did in the previous 2000.
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Apr 8, 2020 06:40
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Talking about early Christianity, I vaguely remember reading something about the early church being early adopters of the codex format (ie what we'd call a book) as a bunch of scrolls wouldn't be super practical for cladestine meetings. Would anyone know anything about this?
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Apr 8, 2020 09:35
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Elissimpark posted:Talking about early Christianity, I vaguely remember reading something about the early church being early adopters of the codex format (ie what we'd call a book) as a bunch of scrolls wouldn't be super practical for cladestine meetings. Would anyone know anything about this? I've never heard of this specifically. The codex replaced the scroll very rapidly once it was refined late in the Roman period, as it made storage and reading of long texts and the copying of text into a new book infinitely more practical.
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Apr 8, 2020 18:45
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I like how the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park has aged harder in the last ~200 years than it did in the previous 2000. Weathering is a bitch.
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Apr 8, 2020 19:05
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In a philology course I took I actually was taught that the Christians were early adopters of the codex format. From what I can remember there is no consensus on why though.
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Apr 8, 2020 19:08
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can you make books with papyrus? I can't think of any reason you couldn't but then again it's not as if I have a lot of experience with the material.
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Apr 8, 2020 20:07
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Squalid posted:can you make books with papyrus? I can't think of any reason you couldn't but then again it's not as if I have a lot of experience with the material. You can, and that's how early codices were made.
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Apr 8, 2020 20:09
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chitoryu12 posted:I've never heard of this specifically. The codex replaced the scroll very rapidly once it was refined late in the Roman period, as it made storage and reading of long texts and the copying of text into a new book infinitely more practical. Reading the wiki article is making me wonder why it wasn't developed earlier. Reading a scroll lengthways seems annoying and reading one written sideways seems only a little less so. It makes me wonder if there are lost words in ancient languages meaning "rear end in a top hat who always leaves the scroll rolled up the wrong way". Grevling posted:In a philology course I took I actually was taught that the Christians were early adopters of the codex format. From what I can remember there is no consensus on why though. Interestingly, converting to codex meant you had to worry about the order of the biblical books. From memory, Jack Miles' "God: a biography" deals with that a bit in its introduction.
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Apr 9, 2020 01:44
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Elissimpark posted:It makes me wonder if there are lost words in ancient languages meaning "rear end in a top hat who always leaves the scroll rolled up the wrong way". How do you say, "Be kind, rewind.", in Latin?
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Apr 9, 2020 03:25
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https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/probable-roman-shipwrecks-unearthed-at-a-serbian-coal-mine/quote:Coal miners in Serbia recently dug up an unexpected surprise: three probable Roman-era ships, buried in the mud of an ancient riverbed for at least 1,300 years. The largest is a flat-bottomed river vessel 15 meters (49 feet) long, which seems to have been built with Roman techniques. Two smaller boats, each carved out from a single tree trunk, match ancient descriptions of dugout boats used by Slavic groups to row across the Danube River and attack the Roman frontier.
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Apr 9, 2020 04:18
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 read this as miners in Siberia digging up three Romulan ships
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Apr 9, 2020 04:25
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Minors in Syria dug up Romanian ships.
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Apr 9, 2020 05:05
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rad.
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Apr 9, 2020 05:09
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Epicurius posted:How do you say, "Be kind, rewind.", in Latin? Not sure but... Tu imitari noluisti ascensorem. (That's probably horribly incorrect, but I'll live with the stupid joke.)
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Apr 9, 2020 05:52
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Were scroll rods a standard size to fit nicely in lecterns, or did every one vary?
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Apr 9, 2020 07:02
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I have a question. Great Britain is split up into England, Scotland, and Wales. Something that has been curious to me for a while is that, devolution aside, Wales is much more closely tied to England than Scotland is. We share a lot of laws, and it's common that legal things in England have parity in Wales, for example I incorporated my company in England, but it's referred to as incorporated "in England and Wales". My vague (and possibly incorrect) understanding is that the invasions that pushed the celts out of England into Wales are similar to the ones that did so in Scotland. Why is it that Scotland retains more legal and perhaps cultural independence to England today?
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Apr 9, 2020 10:33
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Jaded Burnout posted:I have a question.
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Apr 9, 2020 10:43
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