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Why are you comparing some fictional “medieval peasant” to I assume an average American The American hick is one of the dumbest and most ignorant persons in human history
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Jul 31, 2020 01:54
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Stringent posted:If I needed a chair fixed or a potato grown I know who I'd be asking and it isn't the american. there's like two sentences there, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask you to read both of them e: unless you are an illiterate medieval peasant, in which case you should really check out doritos
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Jul 31, 2020 01:54
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:there's like two sentences there, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask you to read both of them lol
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Jul 31, 2020 01:56
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Greece has never actually been very heavily populated. It's mountainous and hard to grow food. Western cultural traditions descend from there so it has an outsized perception. All the real action in the classical days was in places like Persia. It's relative unimportance was probably more the rest of the world catching up and surpassing them then them falling behind. Although I wouldn't put it past the Romans to try and marginalize them for a bit after having to fight that dick Mithradates three times
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Jul 31, 2020 01:57
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Did Greece suffer some sort of depopulation or have we just always given it outsized importance? The romans valued greek culture but by then it's all about Thrace, Sicily, the hellenized east, etc and they pretty much stomped the classical heartland as an afterthought. And by the time Constantinople is founded it seems like Greece is already a total backwater. It kinda seems like the actual classical greeks living in Greece were the only ones who really gave a poo poo about Greece proper.
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Jul 31, 2020 02:00
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Greeks weren’t just in what is now Greece . They were all over Asia Minor which was as rich a place as could be
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Jul 31, 2020 02:01
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He was talking about the geographical Greece I believe
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Jul 31, 2020 02:03
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PittTheElder posted:Muslims were big on the whole tolerance front as well, so that's where you will see large numbers of Christians and Muslims and older faiths living together. One thing to keep in mind with Islam is that a really tiny number of Arabs trounced Rome and Persia and took over an enormous territory populated entirely with non-Muslims. The Arabs then used the administrative apparatus of these states to govern them and extract taxes/troops/ships/etc. That means that they 100% needed the cooperation of the people living there to keep governing, there were too few of them to do the job themselves. It wasn't that they loved the idea of tolerance and wanted to buy the world a Coke, they just didn't have the strength to forcibly convert everyone and still keep their empire. Christians weren't living in Caliphate because it was such a happy, tolerant place. They were living there because they had been living there for centuries before the Caliphate existed and they just continued doing so. And they did so under varying levels of persecution depending on the time and place, everything from paying extra taxes to massacres and child slavery. The other thing to keep in mind is that pre-modern states just didn't have a lot of the tools to do things like forced conversion, there was no mass media, no printing press, no public education, no ministry of propaganda. Not to say it's impossible because obviously the majority of the population in areas controlled by Muslims did eventually convert, but that process took centuries.
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Jul 31, 2020 05:02
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Oh yeah all of that. Plus the Christians (or more properly just non-Muslims) paid extra bonus taxes, so really the state would probably prefer that they not convert. I've read that converting was actually made somewhat difficult to do as well; presumably they wanted to make sure conversions were genuine, rather than switching your paperwork for preferential treatment.
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Jul 31, 2020 05:58
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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"When ready, honey is poured over the placenta." -Cato the Elder
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Jul 31, 2020 06:43
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Stringent posted:If I needed a chair fixed or a potato grown I know who I'd be asking and it isn't the american. A medieval peasant isn't gonna know how to grow a potato, would take the American who can google it
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Jul 31, 2020 07:33
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We have tons of cultural stuff about potatoes in America. I literally learned about planting potato eyes in loving preschool.
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Jul 31, 2020 07:42
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big dyke energy posted:A medieval peasant isn't gonna know how to grow a potato, would take the American who can google it Didn't have chairs either, what's your point.
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Jul 31, 2020 07:43
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Did Greece suffer some sort of depopulation or have we just always given it outsized importance? The romans valued greek culture but by then it's all about Thrace, Sicily, the hellenized east, etc and they pretty much stomped the classical heartland as an afterthought. And by the time Constantinople is founded it seems like Greece is already a total backwater. It kinda seems like the actual classical greeks living in Greece were the only ones who really gave a poo poo about Greece proper. Influence as a factor of population density is always relative. iirc Classical Greece was quite densely populated for its time, something about greater trading activity and agricultural developments contributed to this and put the Greeks on a more even footing vis-a-vis the Achaemenid Empire. This was not true for most of the Archaic period that preceded it. During the Hellenistic period, there was a lot of emigration from Greece out towards the various successor kingdoms of Alexander, as well as a prolongued period of fairly bloody warfare between the successor kingdoms and various city-state leagues. When Rome came around to Greece, they had united the entire Italian peninsula under a pretty cohesive state, and were capable of raising 100,000 man armies on the regular. These were exorbitantly large armies for the Hellenistic kingdoms. afaik, Athens was still a major city when Constantinople was founded, but basically over a thousand years people gravitated towards the bustling capital, while nobody really stuck around in Athens. Also, the Greeks viewed Syracuse as one of the largest and greatest Greek cities in the world, they were just fairly far away and didn't get absorbed in Aegean politics often.
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Jul 31, 2020 07:53
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Stringent posted:Didn't have chairs either, what's your point. To be fair, if you're an American, you're proving your own point
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Jul 31, 2020 08:47
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Gaius Marius posted:This is a poor argument. The volume of information for the modern person is vastly larger, and of much less comparative value. It also ignores that it's very possible to teach the illiterate. The average American is probably just as well versed in the knowledge pertaining to their own lives of the medieval man. It's just a different set of useful knowledge All great points. If anyone here got time travelled back to an 11th century village all their Wikipedia factoids would be worthless and their weak computer arms and lack of farm boy know-how would put them at the bottom of society. "But but...we should mechanize! Let's use electricity or something! It's supposed to come out of your wall...hmmm "
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Jul 31, 2020 08:53
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Could always invent distilled spirits. Being the dude who makes moonshine has to be a decent way to make money.
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Jul 31, 2020 09:47
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Libluini posted:To be fair, if you're an American, you're proving your own point I am!
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Jul 31, 2020 09:59
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:"When ready, honey is poured over the placenta." Does this qualify as a sandwich, a soup, or a pizza?
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Jul 31, 2020 10:03
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SerialKilldeer posted:Does this qualify as a sandwich, a soup, or a pizza? A cake. "Placenta" means a flatbread (the placenta organ was named after it), it's a kind of multilayered cake with cheese and honey in it.
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Jul 31, 2020 10:21
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PittTheElder posted:Oh yeah all of that. Plus the Christians (or more properly just non-Muslims) paid extra bonus taxes Even more properly, 'people of the book', so Christians and Jews (and Sabians, whoever they were). Pagans got to convert or die.
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Jul 31, 2020 11:27
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Rockopolis posted:Could always invent distilled spirits. Being the dude who makes moonshine has to be a decent way to make money. At least it's better to be beheaded by the local lord for dodging import duties than being burnt for the sorcery of methanol poisoning.
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Jul 31, 2020 11:38
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feedmegin posted:Even more properly, 'people of the book', so Christians and Jews (and Sabians, whoever they were). Pagans got to convert or die. Unless they didn't, see the Hindus in India. Note I'm not calling Hindus "Pagans" dismissively, just pointing out that they fit the Islamic definition until it was too inconvenient for the Mughals to pull the ol' "convert or die" on them.
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Jul 31, 2020 13:34
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I remember when I lived in France all my apartment-dwelling neighbors knew how to run subsistence farms and build all their own equipment, unlike idiot americans
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Jul 31, 2020 13:37
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euphronius posted:I mean .. there wasn’t any books until mid 15th century Not as widely available as the post-printing era, but books were more common in the 14th and early 15th century than people think. The growth of university education led to an equally growing demand for textbooks, reference books, and other non-religious texts. A system developed for stationers to be hired to create copies of a text, which they then farmed out to scribes and illuminators (who were not necessarily employed by a monastery at this point) to create the pages. They would hire multiple men of each profession and give each a segment of the book to speed up production, with the worker putting a marking of some sort to indicate their work and where it should be in the book. Then it all went back to the stationer for binding. Parchment and paper (made from linen rags) were likewise produced in great amounts and paper was typically used for less prestigious texts. The printing press wasn't an invention that popped up out of nowhere. Movable type and other copying methods were being experimented with around Europe for a long time before Gutenberg because there was already a desire to speed up the process. Gutenberg was just the first to perfect the idea to the point where it worked efficiently.
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Jul 31, 2020 13:40
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I remember when I lived in France all my apartment-dwelling neighbors knew how to run subsistence farms and build all their own equipment, unlike idiot americans I know a few French people and I reckon you met some outliars.
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Jul 31, 2020 13:43
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Potatoes are pretty easy. Threw a bunch of moldy potatoes on my compost heap and now I have a dozen potato plants in the backyard.
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Jul 31, 2020 15:39
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If I went back in time with all the knowledge I currently have, I would die better and faster than any of them peasants.
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Jul 31, 2020 17:21
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Being able to do math and economics would probably get you good work come to think of it. And timing big known events. "Very well Monsieur, you will certainly crush the English when you encounter them, maybe near Agincourt or something. Just wear your extra heavy armor and dismount. By the way, before you go, can I borrow a gazillion francs? I'll pay you back when you're back from the battle."
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Jul 31, 2020 17:37
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Ola posted:Being able to do math and economics would probably get you good work come to think of it. And timing big known events. "Very well Monsieur, you will certainly crush the English when you encounter them, maybe near Agincourt or something. Just wear your extra heavy armor and dismount. By the way, before you go, can I borrow a gazillion francs? I'll pay you back when you're back from the battle." having anything to do with royal finance is an excellent way to die fast
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Jul 31, 2020 17:57
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I will thrive by knowing not to poop or let my animals poop into my drinking water and by my superior knowledge of how compost works.
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Jul 31, 2020 18:05
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Can anybody recommend me a good companion book/book about the New Testament, or if possible, the Book of Acts itself? I guess I'm almost looking for comparative literature, something secular that brings in some more historical/philosophical viewpoints. I was recommended Yale's Anchor Series on the Book of Acts, but it's 50 bux and the Internet Archive scan of it is a little hosed up. Plus, it's a little too dense and Bible Study-ish. I don't know, a shot in the dark!
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Jul 31, 2020 18:06
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20 Blunts posted:Can anybody recommend me a good companion book/book about the New Testament, or if possible, the Book of Acts itself? I guess I'm almost looking for comparative literature, something secular that brings in some more historical/philosophical viewpoints. I was recommended Yale's Anchor Series on the Book of Acts, but it's 50 bux and the Internet Archive scan of it is a little hosed up. Plus, it's a little too dense and Bible Study-ish. I don't know, a shot in the dark! Might try asking here too: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3866331&perpage=40&noseen=1
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Jul 31, 2020 18:26
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What's the Terminus Ad Quem for this thread in terms of no longer ancient?
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Jul 31, 2020 18:52
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:What's the Terminus Ad Quem for this thread in terms of no longer ancient? the fall of the roman empire, so 1922
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Jul 31, 2020 18:53
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The fall of the Roman empire, so 1204
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Jul 31, 2020 19:05
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:What's the Terminus Ad Quem for this thread in terms of no longer ancient? 
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Jul 31, 2020 19:11
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27 BC 
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Jul 31, 2020 19:11
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The fall of Rome, so 390 BC.
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Jul 31, 2020 19:11
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some vague hard-to-pin-down time in the 3rd century
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Jul 31, 2020 19:12
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