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Someone should add "if you can read this, you are dammed."
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Aug 12, 2022 17:40
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Grand Fromage posted:What the post decided to leave out is the Elbe was dammed decades ago and now that stone is visible for about a third of the year, every year.
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Aug 12, 2022 19:56
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Grand Fromage posted:What the post decided to leave out is the Elbe was dammed decades ago and now that stone is visible for about a third of the year, every year. Great context!
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Aug 12, 2022 23:24
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Nessus posted:So you're saying I shouldn't fry this tofu to buy off Tamano-no-mae to save Germany again? Eat the tofu. There's enough bad poo poo in the world that there's no reason to make stuff up, imo. Those pictures aren't even from this year, they're 2018. But I am not a powerful Twitter Poster.
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Aug 12, 2022 23:59
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Turning historical for a second, is that practice of pragmatic utility? Like have there been famines mitigated or evaded by the revelation of those stones? Where the carvings intended to be practical or just communal expressions of grief for hard times in the way that I might tweet "lmao"? Do we know or is it just a thing that shows up in certain places? And I only hear it in connection with central Europe, is it a culturally local practice or is it more widespread and I just haven't looked hard enough yet?
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Aug 13, 2022 00:10
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Tulip posted:Turning historical for a second, is that practice of pragmatic utility? Like have there been famines mitigated or evaded by the revelation of those stones? Where the carvings intended to be practical or just communal expressions of grief for hard times in the way that I might tweet "lmao"? Do we know or is it just a thing that shows up in certain places?
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Aug 13, 2022 03:18
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I went back and found Agesilaus posts from ~2013. It was worth it. 
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Aug 13, 2022 03:40
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Nessus posted:I have heard stories of there being big stones in Japan with messages to the effect of "the Town Destroying Tsunami got up to here, so build BEHIND this rock." There's like three different tsunami rocks in the town where I live marking the progress of past tsunamis. Virtually the whole town is built in front of them.
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Aug 15, 2022 00:34
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Otteration posted:There has to be some dedicated dudes involved in backfield logistics. Or were they just not considered military? Or did they just skip out of the fight when they got overrun (for good reasons)? I just back from vacation and was scrolling through the last week's posts, and I didn't see anyone mention the quaestorship, which I think is the dedicated logistics group that we know most about. Things like pay for soldiers, grain shipments to the front, and the sale of war captives into slavery might all fall under the responsibility of the quaestor. Every Roman provincial governor had a quaestor assigned to him, who oversaw finances and administrative tasks for the province and its army. Things like pay for soldiers, grain shipments to the front, and sale of war captives as slaves would all likely fall under the quaestor's responsibility. The quaestor often accompanied a governor on campaign, and so could be said to be a sort of a staff officer (although they could also take direct command of troops sometimes, and at other times act as a diplomat, the responsibilities varied). In practice a lot of quaestors didn't take a very active role in administration, since the post was only held for one year by young, ambitious men who were often more interested in doing things other than overseeing financial records. Cato the Younger is said to have shocked people by exercising direct management of financial records during his quaestorship, which suggests that most quaestors delegated a lot of their duties to their staffs. Another source of "staff officers" would have been the household (slaves and freedmen) of the general. Every Roman nobleman of note had a collection of enslaved and/or freedmen clerks/business agents, and many of these would have come along with their master when he went on assignment to the provinces. Roman magistrates were expected to provide a lot of their staff themselves through their personal households
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Aug 15, 2022 01:54
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Seems important to note that for the Romans particularly there wasn't nearly as much of a division between public and private assets and duties as we think of it today. Probably similar for much of the pre-modern world.
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Aug 15, 2022 05:06
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CrypticFox posted:Cato the Younger is said to have shocked people by exercising direct management of financial records during his quaestorship, which suggests that most quaestors delegated a lot of their duties to their staffs. i believe the shocking nature of this had more to do with him actually cracking down on bribery and embezzlement because he didn't view it as Properly Roman
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Aug 15, 2022 05:08
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Seems important to note that for the Romans particularly there wasn't nearly as much of a division between public and private assets and duties as we think of it today. Probably similar for much of the pre-modern world. Pre-modern is underselling it. One of those books that seems to get assigned about 2-3 times in for every history grad program in the states is Gay New York by George Chauncey, and it makes it pretty clear that into the 20th century, "private" was very much an under debate concept, given that most working-class people simply couldn't afford to have the kind of physical space where they could do stuff like "have sex without other people finding out." Which spirals out into all sorts of things, some of which are with us today (like certain trades expecting workers to provide their own tools, such as teachers and mechanics - an expectation pretty analogous to "you're expected to bring your own math nerd for calculating pay").
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Aug 15, 2022 05:45
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I meant more in the meaning of like, public as in state assets and private as in personal/corporate ones, but that also applies I suppose. Lots of connections there. Privacy has been a polite fiction for most of human history. Most obvious in the long history of armies being made up of people bringing whatever weapons and armour they could afford, which usually tends to also define their rank and role. Even standardised armies like the Legions can have a touch of that, and I think even nowadays some armies (maybe the French Foreign Legion?) have the cost of a new recruit's equipment taken out of their pay. Also more interesting how obvious it becomes in ancient history that the kind of specialisation we expect in administrative, financial and legal roles is a relatively new thing; back in the day, someone who could read and do math would basically already have a considerable skillset of their own and be expected to handle a number of duties. Then again, I imagine a Roman of prominence would be considered irresponsible or maybe a bit of a control freak if he didn't delegate his various roles to household members presumably qualified for such.
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Aug 15, 2022 07:22
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https://twitter.com/ZachMRubin/status/1561330943272665089
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Aug 22, 2022 15:44
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CrypticFox posted:I just back from vacation and was scrolling through the last week's posts, and I didn't see anyone mention the quaestorship, which I think is the dedicated logistics group that we know most about. Things like pay for soldiers, grain shipments to the front, and the sale of war captives into slavery might all fall under the responsibility of the quaestor. Every Roman provincial governor had a quaestor assigned to him, who oversaw finances and administrative tasks for the province and its army. Things like pay for soldiers, grain shipments to the front, and sale of war captives as slaves would all likely fall under the quaestor's responsibility. The quaestor often accompanied a governor on campaign, and so could be said to be a sort of a staff officer (although they could also take direct command of troops sometimes, and at other times act as a diplomat, the responsibilities varied). In practice a lot of quaestors didn't take a very active role in administration, since the post was only held for one year by young, ambitious men who were often more interested in doing things other than overseeing financial records. Cato the Younger is said to have shocked people by exercising direct management of financial records during his quaestorship, which suggests that most quaestors delegated a lot of their duties to their staffs. This was precisely what I was looking for! Thanks!
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Aug 22, 2022 15:48
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lmao
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Aug 22, 2022 15:54
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Fucketh around and findeth out.
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Aug 22, 2022 22:01
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Aug 26, 2022 06:37
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Looking to get a comprehensive academic leaning non-pop history overview of Egyptian History before I go in a few months. After doing my own research I see the most suggested books are 1) A history of Ancient Egypt by Nicolas Grimal (1998), The Oxford History of Anceint Egypt by Ian Shaw (2000), A History of Ancient Egypt by Van De Meiroop (2010). Anyone have any insight on these? Would be amazing if anyone has read more than one and could compare. If not, my inclination would be to go with Van De Meiroop since it's the most recent book.
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Aug 29, 2022 16:01
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Megasabin posted:Looking to get a comprehensive academic leaning non-pop history overview of Egyptian History before I go in a few months. After doing my own research I see the most suggested books are 1) A history of Ancient Egypt by Nicolas Grimal (1998), The Oxford History of Anceint Egypt by Ian Shaw (2000), A History of Ancient Egypt by Van De Meiroop (2010). Well...the nice thing about ancient history is that it doesn't change much as a rule. They're probably all fine.
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Aug 29, 2022 16:50
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That's not true at all, even more so for highly archaeologically-based subjects. Interpretations of the past have often changed pretty radically even in the past 20-30 years, and books from before then can be extremely out of date.
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Aug 30, 2022 02:05
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Yeah Egyptology is a rapidly changing field, because new discoveries can radically change views on certain issues. A lot of ideas in Ancient History are uncertain and based on incomplete evidence, if the evidence becomes more complete, the ideas can change a lot. That said, a survey of Egyptian history from 1998 is going to still be fine, but newer is generally better, especially for books pulling from a wide variety of areas.
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Aug 30, 2022 03:38
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I saw the Ramses exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco this weekend. Really well done, and it's always mind blowing to me to stand face to face with a 3,000 year old object on which I can clearly see the detailed evidence of another person's hands - tiny chisel marks, etc. In this case I didn't realize how detailed the tiniest details of the famous jewelry were, and how ornate each individual heiroglyph could be.
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Aug 30, 2022 05:37
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 Actually I didn't see this was a three year old study that is controversial and covered in the wikipedia article so I'll ask y'all, do you think the plague was or was not a big deal zoux fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Sep 1, 2022 |
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Sep 1, 2022 21:54
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It was probably a big deal. The available evidence for it is much less than the Black Death for obvious reasons, but pretty much the entire history of Black Death study is the estimates of death and destruction rising and rising as the data gets better. I suspect we'd see the same pattern if we had more ancient evidence. Also like the Black Death it wasn't a single plague, there were waves for a couple centuries.
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Sep 1, 2022 22:02
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Bryan Ward Perkins and Kyle Harper both argue in favor of population collapse in the Mediterranean in the 6th century. Ward Perkins in particular takes a pretty hard line about it, based on archaeological settlement patterns—he thinks the collapse of political stability in the Mediterranean in the 5th century was the real culprit, and plague and climate disaster simply worsened the problem. His book “The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization” is a good read if you want to be convinced that the sub-Roman period was generally a lot worse than the Roman period in at least some places. He does caveat his arguments with the point that we may have fewer archaeological remains to find for 6th century Italy (for example) because other factors confound with an actual loss of population—in other words, whether there were fewer people or not, we find evidence of a smaller percentage of them because they were using more perishable materials than fancy Roman stone or pottery. Harper broadly agrees though he stresses the environmental factors more. The last chapter of Harper’s book “The Fate of Rome” does a convincing job arguing for, at least, a mood of crisis about the degree of mortality during the plague. None of the above make an uncomplicated argument that it killed half the population, at least that I have seen. skasion fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Sep 1, 2022 |
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Sep 1, 2022 22:51
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Working on a report of a fairly big (500 room) pueblo thats part of the Homol'ovi complex here in Arizona and one of the reference reports had a printer error (I think) so the first 15 pages or so of the book is a childrens story in Lingala. Not super relevant but hey I thought it was neat.
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Sep 1, 2022 23:17
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is there evidence for any huge, region-wide demographic collapse level plagues before late antiquity? I've heard the hypothesis that the maximum severity of plagues have gotten worse and worse even over recorded history with no need to go into archaeological time but idk if that's an accepted or well-supported hypothesis
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Sep 1, 2022 23:22
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cheetah7071 posted:is there evidence for any huge, region-wide demographic collapse level plagues before late antiquity? I've heard the hypothesis that the maximum severity of plagues have gotten worse and worse even over recorded history with no need to go into archaeological time but idk if that's an accepted or well-supported hypothesis It's difficult to know for certain but we know plague was around in neolithic times and it's plausible there could have been serious epidemics back that far https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116722119
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Sep 1, 2022 23:42
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cheetah7071 posted:is there evidence for any huge, region-wide demographic collapse level plagues before late antiquity? I've heard the hypothesis that the maximum severity of plagues have gotten worse and worse even over recorded history with no need to go into archaeological time but idk if that's an accepted or well-supported hypothesis It may be an artifact of our sources, but generally the Antonine Plague is considered the first pandemic. There were pretty brutal disease outbreaks before that which we have good evidence for but they were much more localized. Some killer combo of the strain of disease and the relative ease/speed of travel in the Roman world combined for the Antonine to make a new, fun thing. There's also evidence that many of our worst, most fun diseases like tuberculosis, smallpox, and bubonic plague only emerged in the past couple thousand years and aren't killers from time immemorial or anything.
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Sep 1, 2022 23:45
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What about waterborne/gut diseases like cholera and typhoid that are some of the more killer diseases these days?
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Sep 2, 2022 00:13
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Cholera is definitely modern, it used to be just a catch-all term for a type of disease but actual cholera cholera emerged in like the 1700s. Typhoid is a really hard disease to pin down but may also only have been around for a couple hundred years. Kyle Harper's Plagues Upon the Earth is really good and where I learned most of this stuff, it's the first history of diseases I've read. This is another field which is changing rapidly because we have genetic testing methods now instead of trying to puzzle out what disease was happening where based on text descriptions from people who believed in humors.
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Sep 2, 2022 00:39
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300 years from now (assuming humanity survives that long) someone is going to write a historical novel set in 2003 where a character gets Covid because that's what everyone was sick from in the early 21st century.
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Sep 2, 2022 01:24
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Worth noting in this discussion that there are also lots of strains of diseases that existed in the past, but no longer do, which adds further complication for trying to study this stuff.
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Sep 2, 2022 04:33
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Scott's Against The Grain makes the argument that disease is a very recent invention that was almost entirely unknown before the transition from hunter-gatherer to settle agriculturist. Most human diseases actually originate from animals and that wasn't something that happened until humans decided to settle down and live cheek-to-jowl with their chickens and cows and pigs (and the rats and insects that settled life with animals brings) and most especially all their poop. He's a non-specialist who was intentionally writing a provocative book, so take it with as many grains of salt as you like.
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Sep 2, 2022 05:06
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Switching topics a bit, the paper on the decipherment of Linear Elamite was published last month. I think some people in this thread posted about this a bit a while back when the authors of this paper announced they'd figured out Linear Elamite, but the full details are now out. They're super technical, but a really interesting thing that I read in the conclusion to the paper is the claim that with Linear Elamite having been figured out, Proto-Elamite should be a lot easier to figure out now. Writing in the Proto-Elamite script dates between 3300 BC and 2700 BC, which is roughly contemporary to (probably ever so slightly later than) the earliest cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia, so figuring out how to read that would be pretty cool. There's a short summary of the Linear Elamite decipherment here: https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2022/09/irans-linear-elamite-deciphered
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Sep 2, 2022 05:42
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FMguru posted:Scott's Against The Grain makes the argument that disease is a very recent invention that was almost entirely unknown before the transition from hunter-gatherer to settle agriculturist. Most human diseases actually originate from animals and that wasn't something that happened until humans decided to settle down and live cheek-to-jowl with their chickens and cows and pigs (and the rats and insects that settled life with animals brings) and most especially all their poop.
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Sep 2, 2022 05:53
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Nessus posted:What about settled gatherers and pastoralist nomads? That is inconvenient to his ideas so it will be ignored.
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Sep 2, 2022 05:55
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FMguru posted:Scott's Against The Grain makes the argument that disease is a very recent invention that was almost entirely unknown before the transition from hunter-gatherer to settle agriculturist. Most human diseases actually originate from animals and that wasn't something that happened until humans decided to settle down and live cheek-to-jowl with their chickens and cows and pigs (and the rats and insects that settled life with animals brings) and most especially all their poop. Harper's book goes into some detail about how this is a popular belief that is wrong. The vast majority of zoonotic human diseases (which is still a minority of all human disease) come from wild animals, not domesticated. What did change was creating agriculture changed the environment around humans and made it more amenable to human disease, as well as introducing major disease vectors like houseflies that aren't really around much without people. There's also a connection here to the belief that the Americas had fewer diseases due to having fewer domesticated animals, which doesn't hold up to the research.
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Sep 2, 2022 06:00
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CrypticFox posted:Switching topics a bit, the paper on the decipherment of Linear Elamite was published last month. I think some people in this thread posted about this a bit a while back when the authors of this paper announced they'd figured out Linear Elamite, but the full details are now out. They're super technical, but a really interesting thing that I read in the conclusion to the paper is the claim that with Linear Elamite having been figured out, Proto-Elamite should be a lot easier to figure out now. Writing in the Proto-Elamite script dates between 3300 BC and 2700 BC, which is roughly contemporary to (probably ever so slightly later than) the earliest cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia, so figuring out how to read that would be pretty cool. This is very cool
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Sep 2, 2022 06:10
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