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feedmegin posted:To be fair, isn't this like 'learn alphabet'? Sumerian is going to be a whole other thing for example. Yeah, also "the traditional route to learning Sumerian is to learn Akkadian first." 
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Jun 5, 2022 18:23
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quote:He who entered Elam -- his lips are sealed. Haha those Elamites, amirite?
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Jun 5, 2022 19:25
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sullat posted:Haha those Elamites, amirite?
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Jun 6, 2022 00:32
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Was Tenochtitlan a malaria hellhole? Seems like living in the middle of stagnant water would be a problem, although maybe the high altitude helped.
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Jun 6, 2022 15:45
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Grevling posted:Was Tenochtitlan a malaria hellhole? Seems like living in the middle of stagnant water would be a problem, although maybe the high altitude helped. It wasn’t a swamp. It had moving water and every inch was used in one way or another for farming between fish and axolotl raising.
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Jun 6, 2022 15:56
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Crab Dad posted:It wasn’t a swamp. It had moving water and every inch was used in one way or another for farming between fish and axolotl raising. Yeah, stagnant water is probably not the right thing to call a lake. Also apparently malaria may not have existed in the Americas before Columbus, I forgot about that.
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Jun 6, 2022 16:11
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malaria was worldwide pre contact iirc
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Jun 6, 2022 16:21
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Unsurprisingly, it seems complicated https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19554-0quote:...the most virulent human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, most likely entered the New World after European contact and was carried by Africans brought to the Americas between the mid-1500s and mid-1800s and settlers from the main colonizing nations, Portugal and Spain, where malaria was endemic at the time of conquest.
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Jun 6, 2022 16:41
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Isn't that the case with syphilis as well?
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Jun 6, 2022 16:49
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Lawman 0 posted:Isn't that the case with syphilis as well? I think it was the other way around - it was introduced to Europe from the Americas.
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Jun 6, 2022 17:01
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WoodrowSkillson posted:malaria was worldwide pre contact iirc We think about malaria as a tropical disease today but even Norway had a malaria epidemic in 1850.
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Jun 6, 2022 17:15
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Yeah, there was a period where syphilis was known as the "X disease" where X was whatever sailing nationality you didn't like. So the Spanish called it the French Disease, the French called it the Italian Disease, the Dutch called it the Spanish Disease etc as people brought it home from abroad.
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Jun 6, 2022 17:16
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Except GRANDGORE
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Jun 6, 2022 17:19
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As I dig a little deeper, the Colombian hypothesis for the origin of syphilis has people who doubt it, but there is little archeological evidence of syphilis in pre-contact Europe while there is an overabundance of evidence of the disease in pre-contact Americas. There was a small group of Europeans that had tell tell syphilis damage to bones, but radiocarbon dating of these was thrown off by a high seafood diet and they may actually be post-1492.
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Jun 6, 2022 17:24
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I actually just got to these chapters in Plagues Upon the Earth. Malaria is tricky but there are many kinds of malaria, and the real bad poo poo was definitely brought over from the Old World. There may or may not have been any in the New World, nobody knows. Current evidence is also strong that syphilis is Old World, but there are actually three or four different closely related diseases that leave syphilis-like bone damage and one of them existed in the New World. Same with TB, there was a form of it in the Americas but actual TB was brought over. There are a bunch of open questions since it seems like a lot of New World diseases went extinct in the first century or so after Columbus. Unless DNA turns up they may never be known.
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Jun 6, 2022 18:17
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Anyone here know Ancient Greek? I'm trying to understand, word by word, and the grammar, behind something written in Ancient Greek (whatever kind of Greek wealthy powerful Romans learned before 170CE I guess.) It's from Marcus Aurelius, "ὀρθὸν οὖν εἶναι χρή, οὐχὶ ὀρθούμενον" and should translate to "stand straight, not straightened" or something like that. If I got the right line at least, I know no Greek so I cant be sure. But google translate and all that seem to fail to translate it, I'm guessing because they're seeing it as modern Greek. So, I have no idea which word is what and stuff. Figured if anyone was familiar with 2000 year old Greek it'd be someone who reads this thread.
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Jun 11, 2022 05:37
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BrainDance posted:Anyone here know Ancient Greek? the religion thread may also help
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Jun 11, 2022 05:58
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I basically reads "for (one) ought to be straight; not straightened". χρή is an impersonal verb that takes the accusative. ὀρθούμενον is the passive form of the verb ὀρθόω, to straighten. Google Translate won't help even a little bit, it only knows Modern Greek unfortunately. If you want to look up individual words, this is a good dicitonary: https://logeion.uchicago.edu/λ&%23959;&%23947;&%23949;&%238150;&%23959;&%23957; Unfortunately you can't search for inflected forms there but if you start typing (you can use a regular keyboard set-up) for example o+r+q, ὀρθός will show up. Wiktionary.org has inflection tables so if you search for say ὀρθούμενον there you will find the dictionary form of that. Grevling fucked around with this message at 10:17 on Jun 11, 2022 |
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Jun 11, 2022 09:59
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Grand Fromage posted:I actually just got to these chapters in Plagues Upon the Earth. Malaria is tricky but there are many kinds of malaria, and the real bad poo poo was definitely brought over from the Old World. There may or may not have been any in the New World, nobody knows. Current evidence is also strong that syphilis is Old World, but there are actually three or four different closely related diseases that leave syphilis-like bone damage and one of them existed in the New World. Same with TB, there was a form of it in the Americas but actual TB was brought over. Outcompeted by similar but stronger Old World versions? Like how OG COVID isnt a thing now because Omicron displaced it.
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Jun 11, 2022 12:22
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feedmegin posted:Outcompeted by similar but stronger Old World versions? Like how OG COVID isnt a thing now because Omicron displaced it. They were probably diseases that don't have animal reservoirs, so when the Old World plagues ran through and killed off the majority of the population those diseases didn't have enough people to infect to remain viable and went extinct. I think that's more or less how Omicron took over except without all the killing, it just outcompeted the original strain. There are some parts that don't make sense--he starts the Americas section talking about how the plagues were overblown, but then gives lots of evidence of native populations being obliterated by new diseases so I'm not sure what point he's trying to make. I think he's just trying to attack people who pretend there was no real genocide and all the death was accidental because of disease, which I guess is a thing stupid people believe? One thing I didn't know was the unfortunate timing, apparently smallpox had been considered a fairly minor childhood disease for most of history (except possibly at the beginning, the Antonine Plague may have been the initial entry of smallpox into the human disease pool) but in the 1500s a vastly more dangerous strain took over, just in time to head over to the Americas. He also makes the point that smallpox gets the most press but there were tons of other introduced diseases that probably did as much or more killing, like measles and yellow fever.
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Jun 11, 2022 18:51
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Grand Fromage posted:They were probably diseases that don't have animal reservoirs, so when the Old World plagues ran through and killed off the majority of the population those diseases didn't have enough people to infect to remain viable and went extinct. I think that's more or less how Omicron took over except without all the killing, it just outcompeted the original strain. Small pox gets more press because of how brutal it manifests. Sore throat or jaundice? Yawn. Weeping boiling pustules? Yikes.
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Jun 11, 2022 19:11
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Yellow fever has you constantly vomiting black clotted blood, that's a pretty good one tbh.
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Jun 11, 2022 19:17
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Meh. You leave a desiccated corpse from dehydration but still not as bad death from small pox.
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Jun 11, 2022 19:36
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BrainDance posted:Anyone here know Ancient Greek? I don't know if my last reply was clear and what you wanted, so I figured I could go word by word instead of what I wrote earlier. I've seen you in other threads so I know you speak more than one language but I realized you still might not know what I'm talking about when I use grammatical terms, and you said you wanted to understand the grammar. I have a bachelor's degree in Ancient Greek so I'm not an authority but I know the basics. ὀρθὸν - "right" in the accusative case, which is normally for direct objects, i.e. I see him, but in this case it's because of a construction involving χρή which I'll explain in more detail below. οὖν - roughly "for", "indeed", Ancient Greek uses words like these a lot, which subtly alter the meaning of the sentence but are often left untranslated. εἶναι - "to be" χρή - "ought to", "should". This verb is impersonal and works differently than other verbs, because the person or thing that "ought" takes requires the accusative case. That's the simplest way of putting it. ὀρθὸν has to be subject of that verb, it's an adjective and it's masculine singular so it's a generic guy, "one" or "you". οὐχὶ - not ὀρθούμενον - "be straightened", also with other meanings like "be placed upright" and more. It's a participle in the passive voice, and it's in the present tense so it's not "having been straightened" but "straightened" as an ongoing process. So I guess the subtle distinction is that you should be upright, independently, instead of continuously being put upright. It's in the accusative like ὀρθὸν so you can tell that adjective and this verb are supposed to be taken together. So if we translate completely word by word it will be: ὀρθὸν οὖν εἶναι χρή, οὐχὶ ὀρθούμενον straight - therefore - to be - one ought to - not - be straightened Grevling fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Jun 11, 2022 |
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Jun 11, 2022 20:27
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Grand Fromage posted:apparently smallpox had been considered a fairly minor childhood disease for most of history (except possibly at the beginning, the Antonine Plague may have been the initial entry of smallpox into the human disease pool) Maybe just in the Mediterranean region? Waves of smallpox were devastating to Korea and especially Japan from ~800-1100, there's quite a lot about it in period historical accounts. More recent historical demographic studies of Japan actually theorize there was population decline during that period (especially the first half), with smallpox being one of the leading causes. As I recall part of the argument for its severity was the semi-isolation of the two communities at the tail end of Eurasia though, so maybe it is atypical of smallpox at the time? A wave of smallpox would ravage a generation, but then due to lack of population density die out, and immunity would fade over some decades, in time for another wave to get picked up from the continent and be devastating all over again.
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Jun 11, 2022 21:18
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Possible. DNA/RNA analysis of ancient disease is a very new field so everything is in flux at the moment. What you're saying isn't that far off though--the initial smallpox outbreak in Europe was devastating, then it became an endemic and not terribly bad disease until the new variety emerged in the 1500s. The best documentation for smallpox being less of a problem is from the Middle Ages, if the Antonine Plague was smallpox it's unclear how long it took to go from major threat to minor. If smallpox didn't make it to East Asia until later maybe that's just the initial wave showing up in the records, and it not being a big deal after 1100 is it calming down like it did in the west. Also given the relatively low amount of travel across all of Eurasia they might have had different strains and the East Asian one was worse.
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Jun 11, 2022 21:39
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Smallpox kept hitting too, IIRC there were really bad smallpox outbreaks in the 1680s and again in like 1800. The infamous "smallpox blankets" incident took place in like 1765 or so
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Jun 11, 2022 22:29
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are paleovirologists (I really hope that's the real name of their field because it sounds badass) assuming that the smallpox-like marks that have been found on bronze age egyptian mummies are from something else then?
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Jun 12, 2022 00:55
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cheetah7071 posted:are paleovirologists (I really hope that's the real name of their field because it sounds badass) assuming that the smallpox-like marks that have been found on bronze age egyptian mummies are from something else then? It's a subject of a lot of debate. There is no unambiguous written account of smallpox until late antiquity. It's also very possible it was around now and then as something that came from animals occasionally (there are a lot of different ____pox diseases) but it didn't emerge as a human pandemic disease in the form we think of until the Antonine Plague. Sort of like the SARS-type coronaviruses. They've been around for a while, people have been getting them from bats and such, but it wasn't until covid that one properly jumped the species barrier and became a true human disease. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Jun 12, 2022 |
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Jun 12, 2022 01:16
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Grand Fromage posted:It's a subject of a lot of debate. There is no unambiguous written account of smallpox until late antiquity. It's also very possible it was around now and then as something that came from animals occasionally (there are a lot of different ____pox diseases) but it didn't emerge as a human pandemic disease in the form we think of until the Antonine Plague. Sars classic jumped pretty well, it just got contained
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Jun 12, 2022 01:23
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I would say a disease that only lasted a couple years, infecting fewer than 10,000 people before going extinct was a failure at entering the human disease pool. Unlike covid. Which is fortunate since SARS 1 was a lot deadlier, if it was as transmissible as omicron... yikes.
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Jun 12, 2022 01:29
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Grand Fromage posted:I would say a disease that only lasted a couple years, infecting fewer than 10,000 people before going extinct was a failure at entering the human disease pool. Unlike covid. I mean it entered the pool just fine, it got evicted from the pool the same way smallpox did, through concerted medical and political effort
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Jun 12, 2022 01:35
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Did the original SARS have Covid's long asymptomatic period? I had the impression that was its real advantage, as far as disease dynamics go. I think it also was not that true for a lot of the other diseases we have managed to eliminate.
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Jun 12, 2022 01:46
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No, orginal SARS was only transmissible when symptomatic, and also presented much stronger symptoms (basically all cases had strong fevers)
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Jun 12, 2022 02:29
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sullat posted:Smallpox kept hitting too, IIRC there were really bad smallpox outbreaks in the 1680s and again in like 1800. The infamous "smallpox blankets" incident took place in like 1765 or so There's multiple smallpox blanket incidents. It was a thing colonial militaries just loving did in North America. The specific one that's now famous is famous because self-loathing north american white people think google and reading half of Capital Volume 1 makes them One Of The Good Ones and picked it up from twitter leftists. It was ongoing until at least the late 19th century and probably longer in Canada, but talking to indigenous people who know about it is way harder than reposting some dude from Park Slope who's plastered their social media in red flags as they live off their trust fund. No I'm not bitter.
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Jun 12, 2022 12:00
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Grevling posted:I don't know if my last reply was clear and what you wanted, so I figured I could go word by word instead of what I wrote earlier. I've seen you in other threads so I know you speak more than one language but I realized you still might not know what I'm talking about when I use grammatical terms, and you said you wanted to understand the grammar. I have a bachelor's degree in Ancient Greek so I'm not an authority but I know the basics. Thanks! This makes a lot of sense. It's going to get etched on a thing I'm getting made, but it felt a little stupid to get it on something without at least somewhat understanding it in the language it was written in. It was a line that stuck with me from Meditations, and I had always wondered how much of its impact was from the translator or from the original text, now that I'm seeing how the Greek works it seems just as impactful as the translations.
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Jun 12, 2022 14:22
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TipTow posted:Wasn't implying Indian history started with the Mughals (who come 500 years after the arrival of Islam), but it's factual that most records that we do have date from the arrival of Islam to the subcontinent and later. is there a dearth of records compared to other regions or just ordinary rigor of time stuff.
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Jun 12, 2022 23:20
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Stairmaster posted:is there a dearth of records compared to other regions or just ordinary rigor of time stuff. Fewer records survive from the Indo-Gangetic plain compared to other civilizational cradles (Huang He, Fertile Crescent etc.) but, again, hard to tell if less was written down or if it's more rigor of time stuff. The Vedas were codified mid-first millennium BCE, but they come from an oral tradition that really emphasizes Not loving Them Up so they're more likely to be insulated from material decay.
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Jun 13, 2022 14:29
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TipTow posted:Fewer records survive from the Indo-Gangetic plain compared to other civilizational cradles (Huang He, Fertile Crescent etc.) but, again, hard to tell if less was written down or if it's more rigor of time stuff. The Vedas were codified mid-first millennium BCE, but they come from an oral tradition that really emphasizes Not loving Them Up so they're more likely to be insulated from material decay.
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Jun 13, 2022 17:40
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kaschei posted:The emphatic proscription against loving them up actually should raise a lot of questions about why they needed a specific proscription against loving them up. ...is "we want this to be durable across repeated copying" insufficient?
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Jun 13, 2022 18:00
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