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Ghost Leviathan posted:Maybe we need a Chinese history thread, because it seems underserved and fascinating. Feeling particularly interested in what the medieval Chinese army looked like, given there seems to be extensive literature on it. The odds that you would find another group of Chinese history experts or even enthusiastic amateurs that aren’t already posting in this thread are low. Put another way: 
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Sep 7, 2020 00:20
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Lawman 0 posted:So what was the most innovative/well run hellenism?
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Sep 7, 2020 00:50
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Maybe we need a Chinese history thread, because it seems underserved and fascinating. Feeling particularly interested in what the medieval Chinese army looked like, given there seems to be extensive literature on it. I'm no specialist that far back, but may I interest you in: https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Chinese-Warfare-300-900-History/dp/0415239559
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Sep 7, 2020 01:44
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Does anyone have good modern histories of any Chinese dynasties? Esp interested in Han, Tang and Song
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Sep 7, 2020 02:10
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There was a recent good six part series, Qin and Han book is The Early Chinese Empires, Tang book is China's Cosmopolitan Empire, and the Song are in The Age of Confucian Rule.
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Sep 7, 2020 02:37
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FWIW, I wouldn't rank Byzantium as 9.5/10 if we're using, say, Trajan as our 10/10. The administrative state just looked so vastly different by the time Constantine took over, and then again by the time of Heraclius (both at the start and then at the end). At best it'd be a 7.
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Sep 7, 2020 03:11
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Lawman 0 posted:So what was the most innovative/well run hellenistic state? Probably Troy, given that their descendants managed to found Rome.
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Sep 7, 2020 03:20
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Sep 7, 2020 03:25
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Lawman 0 posted:So what was the most innovative/well run hellenistic state? Hard to argue for anything other than Ptolemaic Egypt. Most of the rest either collapsed from internal problems or got owned. Egypt held out the longest, and there really wasn't anything wrong with the state at the time of its end, it just had the misfortune of being next to the Romans. Without them I imagine it would've lasted quite a bit longer. The Bactrians/Indo-Greeks did pretty well for themselves too.
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Sep 7, 2020 03:33
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Grand Fromage posted:Hard to argue for anything other than Ptolemaic Egypt. Most of the rest either collapsed from internal problems or got owned. Egypt held out the longest, and there really wasn't anything wrong with the state at the time of its end, it just had the misfortune of being next to the Romans. Without them I imagine it would've lasted quite a bit longer. The Bactrians/Indo-Greeks did pretty well for themselves too. Yeah, the advantage that the Ptolemies had over the Antigonids and Seleucids was that they cared more about internal administration and they weren't constantly trying to fight over Greece(this is what put the first two in conflict with the Romans and eventually allowed the Romans control over Greece).
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Sep 7, 2020 04:12
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Beamed posted:FWIW, I wouldn't rank Byzantium as 9.5/10 if we're using, say, Trajan as our 10/10. The administrative state just looked so vastly different by the time Constantine took over, and then again by the time of Heraclius (both at the start and then at the end). At best it'd be a 7. Well I was looking at it from a legal perspective, alongside how the world at large thought about them, and how they viewed themselves; if we're talking about culture and traditions, the Roman Republic pre-Marian reforms was drastically different from the Republic after it too; there's no neat dividing line that you can just draw neatly in the sand and go "Yeah, that's Roman, and anything that's different isn't very Roman". Even the transition from "Republic" to "Empire" is pretty hazy too, as the Roman Republic took on a lot of its later Imperial characteristics after the 2nd Punic War. We could apply the same concept to modern states too, as the USA of today has a pretty different culture and general administrative function (though of course preserving many similar facets at the same time) to the USA of the 1850s, and it hasn't even been 200 years yet. As for Ptolemaic Egypt, one could argue that they were blessed by geography (Egypt being a rich agricultural heartland and an already well developed area at the time, plus is easily defendable in general). I personally quite admire the Seleucids, as they ruled over a land with vastly different cultures and customs, had a really large expanse, and generally was a great power for most of its existence. Also the founding rulers get bonus points from me due to being the only married couple from the Susa weddings which didn't break up, and became the fusion of Greek/Persian culture that Alexander envisioned.
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Sep 7, 2020 05:25
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Cetea posted:Well I was looking at it from a legal perspective, alongside how the world at large thought about them, and how they viewed themselves; if we're talking about culture and traditions, the Roman Republic pre-Marian reforms was drastically different from the Republic after it too; there's no neat dividing line that you can just draw neatly in the sand and go "Yeah, that's Roman, and anything that's different isn't very Roman". Even the transition from "Republic" to "Empire" is pretty hazy too, as the Roman Republic took on a lot of its later Imperial characteristics after the 2nd Punic War. Yes, we're agreeing.
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Sep 7, 2020 06:13
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There never was a Rome. I made it all up. I put in all the textbooks because I lost a bet. Now can we please stop re-litigating this argument for the five hundredth time.
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Sep 7, 2020 07:38
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What was life like in Roman territories, Greece and Egypt in particular? I'm aware that the idea of the Emperor's divinity was created/played up to get legitimacy with Egyptian subjects who were used to that kind of thing.
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Sep 7, 2020 07:43
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Panzeh posted:Yeah, the advantage that the Ptolemies had over the Antigonids and Seleucids was that they cared more about internal administration and they weren't constantly trying to fight over Greece(this is what put the first two in conflict with the Romans and eventually allowed the Romans control over Greece). Right my feeling was that they just were constantly slapfighting and that drained the states of their vigor.
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Sep 7, 2020 13:32
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Ghost Leviathan posted:What was life like in Roman territories, Greece and Egypt in particular? I'm aware that the idea of the Emperor's divinity was created/played up to get legitimacy with Egyptian subjects who were used to that kind of thing. While the primary sources don't really talk about daily life for the average person (given that they were all about the important people at the time, and basically at the highest classes, everyone had a similar cultural background and upbringing), recent archaeology in those regions tells us a lot. For example, the average rural town in North Africa did have access to sophisticated goods like perfume and exotic spices, showing that the benefits of globalization (as these goods often required ingredients sourced from a faraway place like India) at the time did reach into local areas. We also see that around the turn of the millennium, many farmers in the province of Judea switched from sustenance farming to farming grapes for wine (represented in the archaeological record via a large increase in grape pips in the local rubbish dumps), showing that the economies in the region did become more sophisticated following Roman rule. As for Egypt, it was the breadbasket of the Roman State, and so the administration of the area was generally passed onto the most competent (or at least the ones who were best at political maneuvering). Vespasian famously said that securing Egypt was the key to securing the Empire before he became Emperor. The Romans would generally leave the locals to their own traditions and customs (so long as they didn't directly contradict state policy), as we do have records from the time that were still written in a variant of the Egyptian language in Roman times; however the local elites probably all spoke Greek and could recite lines from Homer's plays, much like how it was in the rest of the Empire. In Britain, we found a grave of a Roman citizen who had clear East Asian features (he was determined to be a citizen because of the way he was buried), so clearly we know that people from the far ends of the empire often moved around a lot; probably because they were former legionaries who settled down in the areas where they were stationed. Another example from Britain is a grave of a local woman who was named "Regina" (a slave name at the time, probably translated as Queenie today), who was the wife of a soldier from Palmyra, so clearly she was freed by the soldier when he married her. The gravestone had Latin and Palmyrine text inscribed on it, so from that we infer that there were a ton of daily languages in use at the time, with Latin being the common language for the lower classes, and Greek as the common language for the upper classes. Usually the best primary sources for daily life is found in graffiti, and you'll find a lot of it in the ruins of the theaters dotted around the Empire. There was an interesting find a little while back where they found Aramaic script carved into seats, mostly saying things like "XXX was here" and "This seat is reserved for XXX", along with the usual drawings of penises of course. The interesting part comes from the fact that this text was dated to after the Jews were exiled from Jerusalem following their failed rebellion, showing that while they were pushed out of their homeland, at least the Jews in that area were clearly able to mix with other citizens as per normal, and had integrated well into Roman state.
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Sep 7, 2020 14:30
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Can you track the Jewish population distribution by the details of the penis graffiti?
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Sep 7, 2020 15:04
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CommunityEdition posted:Can you track the Jewish population distribution by the details of the penis graffiti? Everyone loved penis graffiti, but Aramaic script was mainly used by Jews at the time, and nobody else really used it much.
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Sep 7, 2020 15:15
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Cetea posted:Everyone loved penis graffiti, but Aramaic script was mainly used by Jews at the time, and nobody else really used it much. It's a circumcision joke  
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Sep 7, 2020 15:48
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Cetea posted:Everyone loved penis graffiti, but Aramaic script was mainly used by Jews at the time, and nobody else really used it much. really? Was it not also used by Arab related peoples and Assyrians?
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Sep 8, 2020 01:38
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I've tried to come up with modern cities analogous to the cosmopolitan towns of the classical Eastern Mediterranean, and the place that keeps coming to mind is Singapore. Imagine Singapore without any public education, but the government is all in one language, the people speak another, and the country folk and farmers just outside the walls speak another language that is completely different.
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Sep 8, 2020 01:44
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As much as we like to bemoan the loss of so many languages over the millennia, and more importantly the horrible things done that often eliminated them, I'll honestly say I think the modern trend toward linguistic singularity is good. The benefits of being able to walk to the next town over and not need to learn a new language cannot be understated.
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Sep 8, 2020 02:23
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You hardly need to be able to speak the same language to communicate. More languages us far more interesting
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Sep 8, 2020 02:31
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It’s a waste of time in science to have to translate stuff over and back. It may be “interesting” but it’s not conducive to progress.
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Sep 8, 2020 07:39
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Widespread bilingualism > everyone speaking one language
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Sep 8, 2020 08:13
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LingcodKilla posted:It’s a waste of time in science to have to translate stuff over and back. It may be “interesting” but it’s not conducive to progress.
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Sep 8, 2020 08:30
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LingcodKilla posted:It’s a waste of time in science to have to translate stuff over and back. It may be “interesting” but it’s not conducive to progress. This poo poo sucks and is honestly a small step from outright racism
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Sep 8, 2020 09:08
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It's almost always monolingual anglos making that point.
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Sep 8, 2020 10:02
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Anglos gonna Anglo.
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Sep 8, 2020 10:37
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Ras Het posted:This poo poo sucks and is honestly a small step from outright racism I’d insult you in Latin but it’s a dead language.
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Sep 8, 2020 10:40
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LingcodKilla posted:I’d insult you in Latin but it’s a dead language.
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Sep 8, 2020 10:52
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Nessus posted:A descendant of Latin is the second most common native language in the world. Why don't we all agree to learn and use that one? Honestly I’d switch to metric too at the same time. We don’t need another rover plowing into Mars.
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Sep 8, 2020 10:54
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Ras Het posted:This poo poo sucks and is honestly a small step from outright racism No it isn't, don't be hyperbolic.
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Sep 8, 2020 11:23
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LingcodKilla posted:Honestly I’d switch to metric too at the same time. We don’t need another rover plowing into Mars. The scientific argument against switching over to a single universal (or rather planet wide) language is that people with different languages think about problems in a different way. It's common knowledge that people who speak multiple different languages also think differently depending on the language they're using at that time, and have different personalities based on the language they are speaking (i.e Chinese is much easier to do simple arithmetic in, while Latin is one of the best languages for poetry and classification). If everyone switched to a single language, this perspective could be lost and we might miss out on scientific breakthroughs and the like. A completely homogeneous society also tends to lose creativity over time; it's why Europe during the Renaissance was such a boiling cauldron of innovation and different ideologies. America was, and continues to be a giant mixing pot of cultures, which also tends to benefit it in terms of creativity and long term GDP growth. Squalid posted:really? Was it not also used by Arab related peoples and Assyrians? To my understanding, the Jews used a slightly different dialect of Aramaic; it's kinda like the difference between Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Russian today; they all use the Cyrillic alphabet, and they can more or less read each other's writing, but there are some small differences that you can use to figure out where the writer of the text was from.
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Sep 8, 2020 11:25
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Here's a possibly little weird question: Roughly how nocturnal were ancient cities and people? I recently read a thing about how artificial lightning in the middle ages (e.g. candles, lanterns, etc.), while decently available, was kind of a pain in the rear end in terms of soot, brightness, and smell. Now I wonder what that situation would have been like in ancient times and how it influenced their societies. Basically, was there much at all going on at night, particularly in the larger cities? Were there any activities (or perhaps even industries) that commonly took place at nighttime, or perhaps even a genuine night life for that matter?
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Sep 8, 2020 11:38
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:No it isn't, don't be hyperbolic. It clearly is. "If we didn't have different races there wouldn't be any conflicts between them" is racist.
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Sep 8, 2020 11:38
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Ras Het posted:It clearly is. "If we didn't have different races there wouldn't be any conflicts between them" is racist. If you can't comprehend how "scientists all using the same language to communicate would be easier than translating many different languages", which is what LingcodKilla meant (and implies nothing about the existence of other languages or even scientists being able to speak multiple languages), isn't even close to what you think he said, then I can't help you.
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Sep 8, 2020 11:42
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Cetea posted:The scientific argument against switching over to a single universal (or rather planet wide) language is that people with different languages think about problems in a different way. It's common knowledge that people who speak multiple different languages also think differently depending on the language they're using at that time, and have different personalities based on the language they are speaking (i.e Chinese is much easier to do simple arithmetic in, while Latin is one of the best languages for poetry and classification). If everyone switched to a single language, this perspective could be lost and we might miss out on scientific breakthroughs and the like. A completely homogeneous society also tends to lose creativity over time; it's why Europe during the Renaissance was such a boiling cauldron of innovation and different ideologies. America was, and continues to be a giant mixing pot of cultures, which also tends to benefit it in terms of creativity and long term GDP growth. Pretty decent argument I suppose. However the countries most widely known for the renaissance all had very similar languages no? Italian, French, Spanish with Latin bridging the gap?
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Sep 8, 2020 11:46
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:If you can't comprehend how "scientists all using the same language to communicate would be easier than translating many different languages", which is what LingcodKilla meant (and implies nothing about the existence of other languages or even scientists being able to speak multiple languages), isn't even close to what you think he said, then I can't help you. Actively restricting the sphere of use of languages is from of cultural repression, and ideas like "translation hinders progress" ideologically support that repression
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Sep 8, 2020 11:47
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Ras Het posted:Actively restricting the sphere of use of languages is from of cultural repression, and ideas like "translation hinders progress" ideologically support that repression At this point I can only conclude you're willfully misinterpreting people so you can make this argument.
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Sep 8, 2020 11:49
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