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ChubbyChecker posted:Yeah you have it right. I continued with the series for a while. He continued spouting nonsense, like hoplites using their shield to push the guy in front of them, and the Greeks using phalanxes because they had studied philosophy. When he started to drop Star Wars references I quit. The series is like a podcast version of clickbait sites' listicles. it's a little rough at first but you're being deeply uncharitable imo
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Oct 25, 2020 19:06
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Mike Duncan's work does get better, but he is definitely an amateur who's self teaching all of this stuff. If you want a good Rome podcast it should be Fall of Rome, the guy who does it is actually trained as a historian and understands what's he's talking about. I also hear good things about History of Byzantium though I have not listened to it personally. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 19:52
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Mike Duncan's work does get better, but he is definitely an amateur who's self teaching all of this stuff. Thanks, I'll check those out.
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Oct 25, 2020 19:57
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Grevling posted:Looks like a cheesy Vikings knock-off to be honest.
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Oct 25, 2020 20:54
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I'm two episodes in and it's much better than Vikings so far
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Oct 25, 2020 20:58
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Fly Molo posted:It's extremely good. The first few episodes are rough, but it improves quickly then maintains a high and consistent quality all the way up through 476. History of Byzantium picks up at that point, but IMO it's much weaker than Duncan's work. I wouldn't say History of Byzantium is weaker, quite the opposite. I feel like he goes into a lot more details, talks a lot more about his sources, points of views at the time and so much more. He has a lot of interviews with authors and great discussions.
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Oct 25, 2020 21:07
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The Last Kingdom is also good if you want vikings n poo poo.
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Oct 26, 2020 00:41
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Does anybody have suggestions for publicly available books or articles on early Roman camp followers for laypeople? Google isn't throwing up a ton of helpful hits. The hits I am finding are either targeted at what I think are probably other researchers (they have narrow scope and have absurd numbers of references), or hosted on JSTOR, which means they're definitely for researchers and also inaccessible to me, who doesn't have JSTOR access. The one that was public and I did try reading seemed to be 1/5 references by volume and dedicated a lot of time to referencing other works, which is a little much for me, who's never actually read any academic papers before. So if anybody knows of anything more digestible I'd appreciate a pointer - even if the book is a really expensive textbook I can probably get it through the inter-library loan system.
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Oct 26, 2020 01:59
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MORE TAXES WHEN posted:Does anybody have suggestions for publicly available books or articles on early Roman camp followers for laypeople? Google isn't throwing up a ton of helpful hits. The hits I am finding are either targeted at what I think are probably other researchers (they have narrow scope and have absurd numbers of references), or hosted on JSTOR, which means they're definitely for researchers and also inaccessible to me, who doesn't have JSTOR access. Take this with a grain of salt because I don't know that field well, but from my own experience I can say that what you're asking sounds fairly specialized, which means that you're probably not going to find any texts directed at non-academics. If you're lucky you might be able to find a chapter in a book more broadly describing lives of typical, non-famous Romans. My rule of thumb is to ask how many subsets of a subset your question is targeting. Lives of Romans? Lots of books. Lives of everyday people in Rome? Fewer. Lives of a particular profession of everyday people? Even fewer. You get the idea. As you drill further down you're far more likely to only find mentions in sections of books, or articles.
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Oct 26, 2020 02:30
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So I was curious about Germany because, I thought, Germany as we know it is a pretty modern invention but Germans and Germanic sates have been around forever. "Germany". came about in the late 1800s from what I know. As such I was gonna get his book called Iron Kingdom off Audible which is about Prussia and hopefully it would help explain Germany's creation. But then somebody told me that while Germany was politically created in the 1800s, "the Kingdom of Germany ha existed since the 9th/10th Century, like France." Are there any good books or videos on this? I'm lost.
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Oct 26, 2020 03:25
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First, get Iron Kingdom. It's a great book. Now, as for the Kingdom of Germany, it was another name for East Francia, and part of the Holy Roman Empire. I'm oversimplifying like anything here, but basically, "King of the Germans" was a subsidiary title of the Holy Roman Empire. There was also a whole political thing over the Investiture controversy and the titles "King of the Germans" and "King of the Romans", and sometimes "King of the Germans" would be used as an insult by the pro-Papal side, as a way to say, "You're just the king of the Germans, while the Pope is in charge of all of Christianity so he's superior." Basically, King of Germany was a title, the same way King of Italy and King of Burgundy were, but Germany, or Italy, or Burgundy didn't really exist as separate political entities...just as part of the Empire (although they did each have seperate arch-chancellors). Does that make sense?
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Oct 26, 2020 04:04
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Epicurius posted:First, get Iron Kingdom. It's a great book. It does, thank you. In fact, Italy is another one of those "it used to be a bunch of Italian states then it ended up being just Italy in the modern world." I got a book lined up to buy about the Renaissance Italian states but it's less about their history and more of an intellectual study of Renaissance thinkers because intellectual history is my main interest. I guess I should probably get a book on Italy, too... Anyway, thanks again.
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Oct 26, 2020 04:31
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NikkolasKing posted:It does, thank you. In fact, Italy is another one of those "it used to be a bunch of Italian states then it ended up being just Italy in the modern world." I got a book lined up to buy about the Renaissance Italian states but it's less about their history and more of an intellectual study of Renaissance thinkers because intellectual history is my main interest. I guess I should probably get a book on Italy, too... In some ways it's like an ethnicity rather than a nationality thing. There were a lot of people who considered themselves Italian or German without being members of a specific state of Italy or Germany. There were a bunch of loosely confederated principalities that shared a cultural identity but not a government.
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Oct 26, 2020 04:36
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NikkolasKing posted:So I was curious about Germany because, I thought, Germany as we know it is a pretty modern invention but Germans and Germanic sates have been around forever. "Germany". came about in the late 1800s from what I know. As such I was gonna get his book called Iron Kingdom off Audible which is about Prussia and hopefully it would help explain Germany's creation. Yeah Germanic ethnicity has been around for a long time, it first gets brought into a united state as part of the Carolingian Empire, and by the time of the Ottonians the Holy Roman Empire is something that will remain distinctly German for the next thousandish years. Iron Kingdom is a great book, but if you're looking for something covering the pre-Prussian period, check out the books of Peter H Wilson. The most recent one is The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe's History, and it's pretty much what it says on the cover. I've only just started it, but it's a promising start. As far as I understand it, the "Kingdom of Germany" wasn't really a thing in the same way The Kingdom Of France was though. The Emperor was also regarded as king of the Germans, but the Empire always included many non-Germans as well. If you want a quick intro, this video is pretty good, although a lot of the governance structures described are later Habsburg era developments: https://youtu.be/TpKmG7mDaDM PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Oct 26, 2020 |
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Oct 26, 2020 04:58
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NikkolasKing posted:So I was curious about Germany because, I thought, Germany as we know it is a pretty modern invention but Germans and Germanic sates have been around forever. "Germany". came about in the late 1800s from what I know. As such I was gonna get his book called Iron Kingdom off Audible which is about Prussia and hopefully it would help explain Germany's creation. As others have said, get Iron Kingdom. It's my go-to when someone asks for a single volume on post-Renaissance Germany. I mean, it's about Prussia, but due to how unification went down covering them gets you a solid 80% of the story even if indirectly. If you don't mind digging into something a bit more dense in style (although the book itself is fairly thin) on your specific question, check out Geary's Before France & Germany: The creation and transformation of the Merovingian world. It's pretty much what it says on the tin. Geary looks at roughly the period from the fall of the Roman Empire to Charlemagne and breaks down how we get from the Germania of Tacitus to the beginnings of what we can recognize as a German cultural sphere. The book as a whole is pretty solid, but the first chapter is one of the best quick run-downs of how Roman-Germanic interaction played out in the era of the late empire and how the exchanges there were a two way street that kind of rendered the whole notion of "German" and "Roman" worlds a bit problematic in the first place.
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Oct 26, 2020 13:02
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Wow that price is preposterous. Great book, but check if you can find it used somewhere first. It’s like 200 pages. Also nthing Iron Kingdom. Friedrich Wilhelm’s misspelled insulting marginalia on his own government are worth the price by themselves.
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Oct 26, 2020 13:22
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It's on libgen.
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Oct 26, 2020 13:24
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skasion posted:Wow that price is preposterous. Great book, but check if you can find it used somewhere first. It’s like 200 pages. Yeah click the used links and you can get it or under 20
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Oct 26, 2020 13:28
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Is there a good overview of the economy of ancient Egypt? I know, that's 8000 years of history, but I had a random thought that reminded me I know much less about it than I do the Roman economy, and what little I know is just summing it all up as "palace economy." I was thinking of that silly line from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat that says Potiphar made his riches buying shares in pyramids. Modern finance capitalism didn't exist in Egypt or Rome, but I can more or less understand the dealings of a wealthy Roman who owned cash crop plantations, imported goods, backed a racing team, and so on. As for a wealthy Egyptian living under Ramesses II, or even the Ptolemys, I have no idea. Was there even wealth accumulation to be had outside the government bureaucracy?
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Oct 26, 2020 17:30
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah Germanic ethnicity has been around for a long time, it first gets brought into a united state as part of the Carolingian Empire, and by the time of the Ottonians the Holy Roman Empire is something that will remain distinctly German for the next thousandish years. First of all, Germania was an exonym placed upon a vast region and peoples by Romans. Secondly, they(people living in Germania) probably rarely used that exonym (if at all), and used Regnum Teutonicorum which we translated to Kingdom of Germany. The latter is also an exonym. Various emperors used that exonym, but it was mainly for purposes of legitimacy and prestige and revealed little about their identities. Thirdly, almost certainly, people used local identities to refer to themselves, and this would continue and evolve (as territorialization emerges). These identities were likely very complex and evolve as the political/territorial situation changes. No one called themselves "Germans" (they might've called themselves teutonicus later on). They might've referred to themselves as "deutsch" or more accurately "theodiscus" (not related to teutons!) around the Carolingian/Ottonian/Salian timeframe, but this is probably more shallow than you suspect. The word basically means "language that the people spoke". This is basically an identifier for people that spoke this language. This language was also extremely complex and atomicized and definitely not a coherent thing like it is today. This is in parallel with what happened in the Kingdom of France. People talked about those "Frank" or "Franci", and pretty much all rulers in the Carolingian Empire preferred to be identified as such (including those in Germania). The important thing here is "rulers", because we really don't have too many clues as to what common people identified themselves specifically as. It's clear that people clung onto the Frankish identity because it was socially and politically important (especially for regional rulers under the the Carolingian administration). But at the same time, they had regional and local identities that did not necessarily contradict with the Frankish one. How important these regional/local identities is hard to determine in the Merovingian/Carolingian empires because there was still a strange fusion of the local Roman cultures present in Gaul (distinctly not "gallic" at this point). For example, they still used Roman administrative positions such as milites, and dux, and princeps. We do know that after the fracture of the Carolingian Empire, rulers continued to refer to themselves as Franks, but after the Carolingians completely disappear, there seems to have been some atomization of identity as new territorial markers started being thrown around/cemented. You had Burgundians, Bretons, Poitevins, Normans, Angevins and so on. It was called the "Kingdom of France", but it was probably something closer to a loose coalition of regional rulers whereby the King was used as the ultimate negotiator for conflict resolution. A coalesced "French" identity would slowly take time to build and emerge. For example, even as late as the 18th century, regional languages would be so distinct from each other that Parisians would outright not be able to communicate with someone from rural Gascony or something. Jrenster fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Oct 26, 2020 |
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Oct 26, 2020 18:01
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In the case of southern France, occitain is a completely distinct language that's closer to catalan than parisian french, and was mostly (literally) beaten out of children post-Revolution. I've got no idea if german dialects were that distinct or how much of the standardization was voluntary vs enforced.
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Oct 26, 2020 18:19
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:In the case of southern France, occitain is a completely distinct language that's closer to catalan than parisian french, and was mostly (literally) beaten out of children post-Revolution. I've got no idea if german dialects were that distinct or how much of the standardization was voluntary vs enforced. This is true. I should probably replace Gascony with something like rural "Burgundy" (around where Lyon is) or something to drive home the distinction of differences within even the same "language". I remember reading an anecdote of this dude was trying to map France, and how people living 40 miles apart could barely even understand each other despite them both supposedly speaking French (not Occitan).
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Oct 26, 2020 18:34
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Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah click the used links and you can get it or under 20 I'm gonna shill https://www.bookfinder.com for this, you can dig up some rando textbook site selling it used for under fifteen bucks https://www.campusbookrentals.com/C...35002af0a24060f
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Oct 26, 2020 18:38
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Jrenster posted:This is both wrong and correct and probably requires more nuance. A lot of people are talking about ethnicities, which is true: there were "ethnicities" in the sense that people variously identified themselves. But this concept of identification was extremely complex, and is totally different from what modern day nation-states are. Yeah this is also super important to keep in mind. It's not really related to the peoples in modern Germany, but Guy Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West is an extremely good book, and the sections on ethnogenesis in the fragmenting Roman world were pretty eye opening.
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Oct 26, 2020 19:45
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah this is also super important to keep in mind. Additionally, since Geary was thrown around earlier, I think people should read his short article Ethnic identity as a situational construct in the early middle ages before thinking about ancient ethnicities.
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Oct 26, 2020 19:59
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I quite like this quote I'm going to poach from the summary:quote:One concludes that ethnicity did not exist as an objective category but rather as a subjective and malleable category by which various preexisting likenesses could be manipulated symbolically to mold an identity and a community. It really exposes the modern lie that anyone is of one singular ethnicity, and might be the most important thing to understand when you start getting into this stuff.
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Oct 26, 2020 20:08
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Molentik posted:German. Which one.
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Oct 27, 2020 00:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:Take this with a grain of salt because I don't know that field well, but from my own experience I can say that what you're asking sounds fairly specialized, which means that you're probably not going to find any texts directed at non-academics. If you're lucky you might be able to find a chapter in a book more broadly describing lives of typical, non-famous Romans. Oh it's definitely extremely specialized. There's actually a reasonable amount of publicly available stuff out there that I've found, but it tends towards extremely specific. Like "here are five early imperial forts and what the excavations tells us about the families of the soldiers" level, nothing that's been really pulled together and laid out. Amusingly one of the articles I found said it was an understudied field. Welp I guess I'm gonna have to learn how to properly read these things then.
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Oct 27, 2020 02:56
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Man this Barbarians show was going strong, but the last episode is not good, they almost go out of their way to make a crappy generic battle.
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Oct 27, 2020 06:28
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Re: Barbarians, as a native german speaker, it's EXTREMELY irritating that they are speaking modern german. It's like watching something about the english civil war with a bunch of actors with californian accents.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:05
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Power Khan posted:It's like watching something about the english civil war with a bunch of actors with californian accents. If there were such a show, I'd watch it just for that, frankly.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:07
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Bongo Bill posted:If there were such a show, I'd watch it just for that, frankly. *surfs up to you, cromwellishly*
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Oct 27, 2020 20:27
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I've felt for a while that I want to see more period pieces or fantasy stories done with American accents because I get tired of everything going through british filters.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:35
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That Rupert guy's a dick, brah.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:35
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iIimagine having the german characters speak proto-germanic would be cool but would require a lot of coaching (and money. Does german have some sort of language convention for historical epics? As a norwegian I sort of expect works in the middle ages and viking period to have a certain style which is not old norse at all but "feels" authentic in a way modern norwegian doesn't.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:36
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Same with Conan the Babarian in english. Schwarzenegger has a laughable styrian accent that makes him sound like a barking yokel. Unsurprisingly they completely overdubbed him in the german version, greatly improving the film.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:38
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Grevling posted:As a norwegian I sort of expect works in the middle ages and viking period to have a certain style which is not old norse at all but "feels" authentic in a way modern norwegian doesn't.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:38
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Power Khan posted:Same with Conan the Babarian in english. Schwarzenegger has a laughable styrian accent that makes him sound like a barking yokel. Unsurprisingly they completely overdubbed him in the german version, greatly improving the film. Well now I want to visit Styria so I can experience an entire region of people who talk like Arnold.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:40
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PittTheElder posted:Is that what gives us the Norsemen accent? That is as far as I know just a normal Norwegian accent.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:43
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regardless of the language, after 5 episodes in i feel like this show is more researched than most
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Oct 27, 2020 20:59
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