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Wow, thank you for all of the replies everyone! I was not expecting such a response. That is all incredibly useful info! I wont get to go through it in fine detail until later after work but I'm excited to have so much to work with. Re: Greece and Anatolia also being mountainous - of course, but they received more focus and detail in the education I've received and the historical stuff I've read on those areas. Therefore I had a better idea about how to handle them when setting up their regions for the map I'm making. On the other hand, I knew pretty much nothing about Persia in comparison and I was having bad luck researching - like Tulip said the map I used as an example did a bad job showing me what I was looking for, while Tulip and Slim Jim Pickens' maps and info do a way better job showing me what I'm looking for.
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Jan 18, 2022 14:31
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Wow, thank you for all of the replies everyone! I was not expecting such a response. That is all incredibly useful info! I wont get to go through it in fine detail until later after work but I'm excited to have so much to work with. Something else to note (if this might at all be useful for your board game) is that historically speaking plateaus were excellent seats of empire as they are much easier to project power out of than in to. Ancient Iranian dynasties' preoccupation with Mesopotamia has already been discussed; see also (what is today) Afghanistan and South Asia.
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Jan 18, 2022 14:52
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Another element to consider is that both the overall climate and the Mesopotamian regional environment have changed significantly since the ancient era. The rich resources of the Fertile Crescent have been heavily depleted - the soil, water, forests, and wildlife have been adversely impacted by the centuries of human habitation, and particularly in the last 200 years. The empire of Darius the Great was built on trade and well-irrigated agriculture (wine, cereal, and livestock), but much of the environment that made that possible has been diminished in the intervening time. This is a great essay on Iran's cultural tradition of naturalism, particularly in poetry: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00210862.2016.1241563
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Jan 18, 2022 15:09
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Hey I got a question about the Greek and non-greek populations of Ptolemaic Egypt were they they the only ones that could be under arms before they started letting native Egyptians get recruited or were there like other special snowflake ethnic groups that got similar status to the Greek settlers?
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Jan 18, 2022 15:17
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Iraq was a lot greener 3000+ years ago
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Jan 18, 2022 15:18
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You can see Susa here is down out of the mountains a bit close to the gulf.
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Jan 18, 2022 15:21
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euphronius posted:You can see Susa here is down out of the mountains a bit close to the gulf. I'm the A in Parthians
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Jan 18, 2022 16:10
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Also to elaborate on a point that was made earlier, that area is a lot bigger than it looks on a map. Here's modern day Iraq and Iran imposed over a map of Europe and the United States, for comparison. Obviously Persia didn't match the borders of those two countries exactly, but you can get an idea of how vast the area is for civilizations/empires to emerge from. 
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Jan 18, 2022 16:39
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God I love map writing ＡＬＰＳ ＡＬＰＳ ＡＬＰＳ ＡＬＰＳ
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Jan 18, 2022 16:42
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skasion posted:God I love map writing Please don't doxx my drunken street labeling when I'm doing my GIS practice.
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Jan 18, 2022 16:46
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Also to elaborate on a point that was made earlier, that area is a lot bigger than it looks on a map. Here's modern day Iraq and Iran imposed over a map of Europe and the United States, for comparison. Obviously Persia didn't match the borders of those two countries exactly, but you can get an idea of how vast the area is for civilizations/empires to emerge from. This a fun overlay but we also need a version that just fills in to the land mass starting in a corner to see how many states it takes.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:01
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One thing to note about the Achaemenid Persians is that they were the first empire to occupy a territory of that size and they pioneered a bunch of institutions in order to do that successfully. They didn't really have a single capital like previous empires: there was no Assur or Babylon they projected power from. Instead, the Shah's court was mobile, with basically a tent city they could move throughout the year. They could visit their satrapies and bring the state apparatus with them, allowing them to renew ties with local leaders and show them how powerful they were with their obscenely luxurious mobile tent-palaces and the thousands of people who came with them.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:07
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big road guys as well
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Jan 18, 2022 18:21
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FishFood posted:One thing to note about the Achaemenid Persians is that they were the first empire to occupy a territory of that size and they pioneered a bunch of institutions in order to do that successfully. They didn't really have a single capital like previous empires: there was no Assur or Babylon they projected power from. Instead, the Shah's court was mobile, with basically a tent city they could move throughout the year. They could visit their satrapies and bring the state apparatus with them, allowing them to renew ties with local leaders and show them how powerful they were with their obscenely luxurious mobile tent-palaces and the thousands of people who came with them. Interestingly, a similar system shows up later again in the early Holy Roman Empire, where the Kings/Emperors adopted Charlemagne's system of simply moving around with their Hofstaat to where they were needed the most. Charlemagne preferred Aachen, which is the most famous of the "Pfalzen", the places build and maintained to house the wandering emperors. Here's a long list (in German) of the many, many Königspfalzen build over time. The one in Goslar I even visited myself, it's up in the Harzer Mountains (Northern Germany). King/Emperor Heinrich IV, from the House of Salier was born in Goslar and spend a lot of time there. He lived from 1050 to 1106 and his reign was plagued with Saxon uprisings, multiple counter-kings cropping up and a lengthy fight with the pope. Which ended in tears for him.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:25
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It's even present (to a lesser extend) in Tudor England. Elizabeth I made a habit of having a moving court, and obliging her unwilling noble hosts to take on the cost of hosting them - which was an effective way of both cementing her rule kingdom-wide and putting financial pressure on her opponents
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Jan 18, 2022 18:30
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Somehow it was always Lord Edmund Blackadder who ended up paying.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:37
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Itinerant kingship is a pretty common pattern from Rome on down. You can see it as an outgrowth of the proconsular system, once you got the big dignity you aren’t supposed to just sit around town, but go out and wreck someone else’s poo poo. Emperors who stayed in the city for too long like Nero or Commodus risked pissing off its elites and losing their connection with the frontier military, which predictably swooped in after both those guys got bumped off. Basically, in a certain kind of society, the highest authority HAS to be itinerant or it will lose its high authority to johnny on the spot. The tetrarchic government took a crack at this problem by making “frontier capitals” like Trier, Milan etc where the emperors can live permanently without needing to devolve military authority over the frontier armies, but both before and after this it’s pretty much all emperors wandering around trying to take charge of whatever is on fire at the moment, until the emperors eventually give up, go back to their cities, and let generalissimos take on the business of reeling from crisis to crisis in the provinces. Then theres a 50/50 chance of state collapse
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Jan 18, 2022 18:46
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Yeah, the Royal Progress of constantly moving the king and his court was a big part of medieval government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itinerant_court It had a whole bunch of uses: 1) You could park your court in an area where you suspected loyalties were a little thin to keep an eye on people 2) Moving the court around means you don't exhaust all the food and timber and game in a region 3) You get to dump the cost of maintaining your court onto your subjects (and it's a good way to pauperize a disloyal, ungrateful, or disliked noble) 4) You get to follow seasonal trends for maximum enjoyment and comfort (move south in the winter to avoid the cold, move north in the summer to avoid the heat, arrive at hunting forests at the exact right moment for hunting the prey that you want, etc.) 5) If there's a crisis (like an invasion or an uprising) you can move to near where the crisis is occurring to manage it more closely (or if something is really threatening, you can move away from it) 6) Every time you move to a new place, the locals have to put on a big ceremony welcoming you and you get to progress through the city or town in all your finery while crowds cheer. It's a good way to get out to see and be seen by your subjects. And on and on.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:46
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Old Kingdom Egypt would send the king up and down the Nile during tax collection season, so it's about as old a tradition as it gets
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Jan 18, 2022 19:05
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It's also interesting that this was happening as late as the 1880s in Ethiopia. I haven't studied the imperial history of the country much, but Addis Ababa is basically the capital because it's the last place Emperor Menelik II's court settled down. The royal family enjoyed the hot springs there, and he expanded his empress's house into the imperial palace, which is still the seat of government to this day.
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Jan 18, 2022 19:18
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What's interesting (IMHO) is the transition away from itinerant courts and towards permanent settled courts, most famously Louis XIV and Versailles (and all its imitators), because it turns all the virtues and characteristics of the traveling on their head. Instead of going out and keeping an eye on your magnates, you force them to come to your palace (where you can keep an eye on them), etc. Eventually, all the big shots in Europe end up constructing multiple giant luxury palaces (often in the form of deluxe 'hunting lodges') and they'd travel between them on a seasonal basis, dragging their courts with them. (I just finished reading Blanning's The Pursuit of Glory, which goes into this quite a bit).
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Jan 18, 2022 19:33
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FMguru posted:What's interesting (IMHO) is the transition away from itinerant courts and towards permanent settled courts, most famously Louis XIV and Versailles (and all its imitators), because it turns all the virtues and characteristics of the traveling on their head. Instead of going out and keeping an eye on your magnates, you force them to come to your palace (where you can keep an eye on them), etc. The shogunate did this version of it too.
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Jan 18, 2022 20:16
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ChubbyChecker posted:The shogunate did this version of it too. Honestly the Shogunate made alot of these tricks into a high artform.
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Jan 18, 2022 20:19
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I guess Beijing as Chinese capital is also a result of the emperors needing to keep an eye on the northern frontier?
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Jan 18, 2022 22:23
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Drakhoran posted:I guess Beijing as Chinese capital is also a result of the emperors needing to keep an eye on the northern frontier? It looks the first Ming emperor gave his sons large fiefs and when the inevitable succession crisis hit, the one based in Beijing won and just moved the capital there since all his stuff was already there. I hate moving so I can see that being a good reason to do it.
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Jan 18, 2022 23:00
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There have been a lot of different Chinese capitals over China's history, a big hint should be that "Beijing" means "northern capital" and "Nanjing" means "southern capital." Nanjing was the main Chinese capital at several points in the 20th century. AFAIK Beijing first became nation-wide capital under Kublai Khan, for whom it was a midpoint to exert power over both the Mongol heartland and the north China plain.
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Jan 18, 2022 23:22
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Yep. Itinerant courts are a pretty successful model. The Persians were the first to use it to project power over a big multi-ethnic empire and are kind of unique in that they don't even really have a nominal capital. The Achaemenid "capitals" at Persepolis and Pasargadae weren't really cities, more like giant estates that acted as ritual centers and had huge tracts of land you could park your tents at. The Greeks couldn't really comprehend the Persian system and so they wrote stuff about the Persians having multiple capitals that they moved from throughout the year, but it didn't really work like that, based on recent archaeology. This system also makes some of the Greek accounts of Persian wealth make sense: Alexander and the earlier victors at Plataea were dumbstruck by the wealth on display in Persian camps, comparing them to palaces, but that's because they were palaces. The Shah would spend much of the year living in these things and they had to be swag; he's the wealthiest, most powerful man in the world and to not show that off would be stupid.
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Jan 18, 2022 23:23
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This does have the disadvantage of not having nice high walls to have your wealth behind.
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Jan 18, 2022 23:35
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a city is basically just what happens when you leave ritual and administrative institutions in a single place for long enough, anyways
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Jan 18, 2022 23:37
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Walls are just force multipliers for your bowmen. No bowmen, walls are useless. Alot of bowmen, walls aren't necessary. The persian kings thought they had enough bowmen.
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Jan 18, 2022 23:59
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Phobophilia posted:Walls are just force multipliers for your bowmen. No bowmen, walls are useless. Alot of bowmen, walls aren't necessary. Where did you pick this up from?
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Jan 19, 2022 00:01
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Tulip posted:Where did you pick this up from?  I think he's being sarcastic
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Jan 19, 2022 00:12
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Tulip posted:Where did you pick this up from? Cyrus the Great 
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Jan 19, 2022 00:40
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I was talking to someone the other day and they said Cicero correctly and I almost fainted I was so happy
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Jan 19, 2022 00:41
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euphronius posted:I was talking to someone the other day and they said Cicero correctly and I almost fainted I was so happy Church Latin supremacy. not Kurk Latin
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Jan 19, 2022 00:45
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euphronius posted:I was talking to someone the other day and they said Cicero correctly and I almost fainted I was so happy "Cheechero"?
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Jan 19, 2022 00:50
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Xixero
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Jan 19, 2022 00:51
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no one tell the romans that you can't both move around and have walls. it would make them very sad
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Jan 19, 2022 00:57
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Walls are really just the friends you find along the way.
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Jan 19, 2022 01:04
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Love how we've come full round to setting up quick standardized encampments in modern warfare in an very similar fashion to Roman card camps.
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Jan 19, 2022 01:08
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