|
Tomn posted:Eventually however I realized that starving my neighbor by raiding him all the time meant I wouldn't have anything to raid and would starve myself, so instead I learned to threaten to raid him and in exchange he'd give me part of his crop, but not enough to starve him. The great thing was that since I was only THREATENING to raid instead of ACTUALLY raiding, I had a lot more time and could threaten a lot more people and thus ensure a good income even without ever actually raiding while taking less per raid! Better yet, eventually I learned that I could claim to be working to protect him from OTHER people raiding him so he could even feel grateful! that's basically how it goes though, since history is full of exactly that happening. especially steppe societies threatening the Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Chinese with invasions and being paid off to go home.
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 17:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 03:56 |
|
|
The pro strat is to give your raid victims a choice between getting enslaved, or going raiding with you next summer. That way you can raid more guys and make friends along the way. Do this for a couple centuries and you will be able to “conquer by sitting” as the romans put it
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 17:36
|
|
|
WoodrowSkillson posted:that's basically how it goes though, since history is full of exactly that happening. especially steppe societies threatening the Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Chinese with invasions and being paid off to go home. This was what the vikings established with "danegeld" which literally means the "danish tax". The vikings made a deal with the british rulers that if they paid a set amount of silver each year the vikings wouldn't raid them.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 18:38
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:It took ages to make one Rome and now we have like five of the things. These days we could probably build it in a day.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 19:06
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:These days we could probably build it in a day. Yeah but you know it'd be made of drywall and fall over completely the first time the Gauls came in and gave it a kick. Splode posted:The only other thing to consider is there is a lot more people around now, so the chances that someone thinks of a good idea are higher even if everything else is equal. I think that's part of where this modern question of "why did it take people so long to think of this?" comes from - there are more people now, and more people who research full time, or try and come up with novel applications of existing ideas/technology full time. So of course things get discovered/invented/improved faster now. Yeah there's a lot of things going on. I think TBH a lot of it is that we currently have a culture that fetishizes novelty, especially about physical innovations. And part of that fetishization includes having to believe a narrative about the past that "those people" aka our ancestors were slow and sluggish and held back and conservative and "not like us." Which leads to people assuming the past was a lot more static than it actually was: people will somewhat frequently assume that everything that people were doing in the early modern period was a continuation of things going back to Uruk, and while sometimes things are (sometimes things that go back to Uruk go to today!), a lot of history happened in history. Heck had an argument recently where a person was very confident that demographic trends associated with changes in the 1700s were not a change at all but just a continuous pattern dating back to the neolithic revolution. Anyway I think its complicated and contingent because that's the nature of history. I can point to things that have shockingly long continuities - trial by water for witchcraft dates back to something like 2000BCE when people often think it was a uniquely late medieval/early modern invention. But also things change a lot, and sometimes it can be subtle (a Roman sword just...isn't a medieval sword, even though for 90% of purposes a sword is a sword).
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 20:08
|
|
|
Tulip posted:Yeah but you know it'd be made of drywall and fall over completely the first time the Gauls came in and gave it a kick. quote:§ 1. If a man weave a spell and put a ban upon a man, and has not justified himself, he that wove the spell upon him shall be put to death. IANABL but it sounds like the victim of the witch has to undergo the trial by water
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 20:23
|
|
|
so you're saying that if I cast a spell on a weak swimmer I get a free house?
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 20:29
|
|
|
What makes it justified sorcery?
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 20:31
|
|
|
drat they put you to death if you banned somebody unjustly? it was hard to be a mod back then i guess
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 21:32
|
|
|
Jazerus posted:drat they put you to death if you banned somebody unjustly? it was hard to be a mod back then i guess Mods knew (sorcery)
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 21:36
|
|
|
Neo-Babylon fell because Cyrus had a particularly fierce meltdown over a sixer
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 21:45
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Never mind crops, try the horse collar. Efficient ploughing is important. Rye bread is not bitter though; in fact it is very tasty. I'll take it over your weak rear end white sponge stuff any day.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 21:54
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:so you're saying that if I cast a spell on a weak swimmer I get a free house? Yeah but if you get it wrong and they survive you get executed
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 23:22
|
|
|
Nessus posted:What makes it justified sorcery? Look, she knows what she did.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2023 23:55
|
|
|
I'm not sure that argument will... hold water!!! Bahahahahaha
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 00:14
|
|
|
sullat posted:
I swear I thought this was some kind of elaborate Grover joke instead of actual Hammurabi code quotes 
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 00:39
|
|
|
sullat posted:IANABL but it sounds like the victim of the witch has to undergo the trial by water Yeah the question of who gets chucked into water changed and the logic under it got changed but like it is striking that "water is so pure it will tell us about who did witchcraft" stuck around like that. Kylaer posted:I swear I thought this was some kind of elaborate Grover joke instead of actual Hammurabi code quotes lmao
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 00:53
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:Neo-Babylon fell because Cyrus had a particularly fierce meltdown over a sixer Cyrus, Belshazzar, whatever.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 01:22
|
|
|
It's worth noting that the Ancient Mesopotamian River Ordeal was quite different from later Medieval versions of the idea. Letters from Mari, which are contemporary with the life of Hammurabi, detail how the river ordeal worked at this time. The task in the River Ordeal was to swim a set distance while handicapped in some way, possibly by carrying a millstone. If you successfully swam the fixed distance with the millstone (or whatever other handicap had been determined the judge), you were considered to have shown divine favor for yourself and your legal case, if you failed to swim the necessary distance then you lost the case. You could also designate a substitute to swim for you. The River Ordeal largely dropped out of use in Babylonia the 1st millennium BC, but it seems to have been reasonably common in the 2nd millennium BC, when Hammurabi was around.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 01:27
|
|
|
CrypticFox posted:You could also designate a substitute to swim for you. Edit: imagining The Slap with paid subs for both of them.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 01:33
|
|
|
Remulak posted:Rich people am I right? One might expect this, but in the 4 examples from Mari of a substitute being used, that's not really what is seen. The 4 examples we have of this phenomenon are: three "townspeople," 2 women and one old man, swimming for their prince (it's unclear why there were three swimmers, this case seems to have been complicated), and also three cases with a one-to-one replacement, a lady-in-waiting swimming for a queen, a wife swimming for her husband, and a mother swimming for her daughter. Interestingly, 5 of the 6 attested substitute swimmers are women, and the one man recorded as a substitute swimmer is described as being old, so they don't seem to have been picking strong young men for this job.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 01:48
|
|
|
CrypticFox posted:One might expect this, but in the 4 examples from Mari of a substitute being used, that's not really what is seen. The 4 examples we have of this phenomenon are: three "townspeople," 2 women and one old man, swimming for their prince (it's unclear why there were three swimmers, this case seems to have been complicated), and also three cases with a one-to-one replacement, a lady-in-waiting swimming for a queen, a wife swimming for her husband, and a mother swimming for her daughter. Interestingly, 5 of the 6 attested substitute swimmers are women, and the one man recorded as a substitute swimmer is described as being old, so they don't seem to have been picking strong young men for this job. Are they picking people they think will fail or think they will succeed?
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 03:01
|
|
|
Maybe one side picks their choices, the other gets to veto some and replace them with their own choices. So you have to load the deck with like withered old man (secretly a clam diver) and pregnant woman (who carries millstones for a living) It's chess
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 03:21
|
|
|
Ancient form of voir dire, makes sense.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 03:30
|
|
|
As the opposite end of "they were just as smart as us" you have "sorry man i know you say you saw him steal your cart's wheels but his mom swam with a rock so he's innocent"
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 04:17
|
|
|
WoodrowSkillson posted:As the opposite end of "they were just as smart as us" you have "sorry man i know you say you saw him steal your cart's wheels but his mom swam with a rock so he's innocent" Oh we aren't that much better. With this there's a sort of feats-of-strength logic to it, like would a liar go *that* far? In front of God and Everybody? Meanwhile, "qualified immunity" and "felony murder" co-exist as simultaneously valid doctrines in our system, we try fifteen year olds as adults . . . Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Mar 15, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 04:30
|
|
|
oh for sure, its in the "they are just as dumb as us" category
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 04:55
|
|
|
GoutPatrol posted:Are they picking people they think will fail or think they will succeed? Hieronymous Alloy posted:Oh we aren't that much better. With this there's a sort of feats-of-strength logic to it, like would a liar go *that* far? In front of God and Everybody? There's a pretty cool article on the economic argument for trials by ordeal as a logical system that relies on the psychological intuition of the priest and social pressure on the accused, that guarantees the matter basically sorts itself out with everything around the ordeal itself.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 08:28
|
|
|
Mister Olympus posted:There's a pretty cool article on the economic argument for trials by ordeal as a logical system that relies on the psychological intuition of the priest and social pressure on the accused, that guarantees the matter basically sorts itself out with everything around the ordeal itself. I can only read the preview, but it appears that part of the argument here is that “ordeals are horrible, so only a truly innocent person would agree to one and the judge would take note and rig the ordeal in their favor.” I can’t help but note, though, that if legal humor blogs have taught me anything it’s that delusional and obviously guilty idiots are perfectly willing to jump through the craziest hoops to argue their non-existent innocence. I guess the argument is that when judges are allowed to use their own discretion they can probably pick up on when someone is trying to go full sovereign citizen and react appropriately?
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 11:32
|
|
|
To a degree the test of success in a trial is less 'is this a just outcome' and more 'at least none of the parties are going to start a blood feud over this anymore'
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 15:06
|
|
|
Strategic Tea posted:To a degree the test of success in a trial is less 'is this a just outcome' and more 'at least none of the parties are going to start a blood feud over this anymore' Ada Palmer, University of Chicago posted:In my period (Renaissance) for example, law is mainly supposed to provide an Earthly portrait of divine judgment & mercy, and everyone is supposed to break laws all the time but then get the penalties waived, so the process of transgressing, being condemned, and being pardoned or let off with a lesser sentence gives the soul an ethically therapeutic preview of the universality of sin and the hope for being let off with just Purgatory instead of Hell, and the idea of law actually binding or protecting anybody maybe goal #24 in the lawmakers’ minds, with a lot of really weird-to-us-modern ones higher on the list.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 15:18
|
|
|
Mister Olympus posted:There's a pretty cool article on the economic argument for trials by ordeal as a logical system that relies on the psychological intuition of the priest and social pressure on the accused, that guarantees the matter basically sorts itself out with everything around the ordeal itself. Yeah I guess insight is a class skill of priests and their primary stat is wisdom so they're more adept at reading people.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 15:27
|
|
|
It is really important to remember that people in the past (or people in other places, or other people in general) are not necessarily trying to do what we are trying to do and what we think is important is not necessarily what they thought was important. Therefore when they do something that seems odd or counterproductive to us it may not be because they knew less or don't have the benefit of hindsight but because their goals were actually different from our goals and in that context what they were doing actually makes perfect sense.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 15:28
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:These days we could probably build it in a day. quote:let’s suppose that we could assemble the entire world’s population [*] and that we could solve all the training, coordination, and traffic problems—considering only labor. How quickly could we build Rome? https://xkcd.com/what-if-2/
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 18:32
|
|
|
A_Bluenoser posted:It is really important to remember that people in the past (or people in other places, or other people in general) are not necessarily trying to do what we are trying to do and what we think is important is not necessarily what they thought was important. Therefore when they do something that seems odd or counterproductive to us it may not be because they knew less or don't have the benefit of hindsight but because their goals were actually different from our goals and in that context what they were doing actually makes perfect sense. yeah this is a big central thing in the article, that if you understand that all parties involved do believe in their core that hell is real and god will literally be watching them do the ordeal, they're going to have a way harder time convincing themselves that they can fool the system Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Mar 15, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 19:10
|
|
|
Mister Olympus posted:yeah this is a big central thing in the article, that if you understand that all parties involved do believe in their core that hell is real and god will literally be watching them do the ordeal, they're going to have a way harder time convincing themselves that they can fool the system You see this with Oaths in Mesopotamia too. Mesopotamian took oaths extremely seriously, and this is reflected in how they were used in a legal context. Generally, a Mesopotamian court never made both parties take an oath (since that would mean one side was taking a false oath if they both swore different things). Instead of our modern system where we begin the court proceedings by promising to tell the truth, in Mesopotamia, oaths came near the end. After the judge had gone through all the witness statements, written evidence, etc, only then would he ask for an oath, and he'd only ask one of the two parties to take an oath. The oath involved swearing by the local city god, and it promised divine retribution if you were lying. The form that the oath took was entirely up to the judge, and this issue was frequently litigated by the parties in the pre-oath part of the trial. The oath was totally decisive, and once it was taken the case was over. Tablets recording legal cases often simply end with the statement of who took an oath, since it was clear to everyone what that meant. Despite this, when people were asked to take an oath, they sometimes refused, preferring instead to lose the case rather than risk divine retribution. Also, it was fairly common for the parties to come to a settlement agreement right before the judge announced who the oath would be imposed on. No doubt some people still were willing to make false oaths, but it is clear that overall, they took divine oaths far more seriously than we do.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 19:47
|
|
|
This kickstarter (for a tabletop skirmish miniatures game set among street gangs in ancient Rome) might be of interest to this thread's readers: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/footsore-miniatures/gangs-of-rome-a-28mm-gang-fight-skirmish-game
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 21:04
|
|
|
Tomn posted:One of the key bits about England and the British Isles in particular is that the majority of its farmland has relatively easy access to the sea, either directly or through rivers running nearby, in contrast to countries like France or Spain. It's a lot easier to move bulk goods like grain around by sea than by land, which means that for a lot of English farmers the market for their produce isn't "The local town I can huck things to via oxcart" but rather "As far as a boat can reach," which is pretty drat far. This means that English farmers (near water access anyways) have more incentive to produce surplus grain than the average inland French farmer - there's no point busting your back to create a massive surplus when the local town can only buy so much grain before it's not willing to buy more and you can't realistically shift your grain anywhere else, but if you can dispose of your surplus grain in London or some hungry Dutch city across the way even when your local township has said "No thanks, we're full," you can sell as much as you can make as long as there are big coastal urban centers somewhere nearby consuming more than their locality can feed. It also means that the average English farmer is considerably savvier about international trade and sophisticated financial markets and instruments than the average French farmer which has some interesting implications as the Industrial Revolution starts rolling around and there's a lot of projects offering big returns on investment if only they could get some capital to get off the ground... In medieval times England was a very big exporter of wool to the continent, with what is now Belgium being a massive importer of English wool. These involved very sophisticated (for England at the time) networks of wool merchants taking small to large amounts of wool and selling it to the Low Countries to be turned into cloth by the weavers. It may be apocryphal but it was almost as quick for a wool merchant in Norfolk or Suffolk to get their goods to Ghent or Amsterdam than to London and allowed them to cut out a layer of middlemen. It was very much a cash crop and you can see the wealth in wool towns like Long Melford and Lavenham in Suffolk. The connection between East Anglia and the Low Countries carried on even after the wool trade slowed as large numbers of weavers from what is now Belgium and the Netherlands settled in Norfolk and Suffolk due to the wars and the counter reformation, with Norwich's Strangers Hall being named after Dutch, Flemish and Walloon immigrants in the 16th century. This trade in wool could also explain at least some of the discrepancy with the amount of medieval workers not engaged in agriculture. Raising sheep is not manpower intensive like crops are and the wool trade needs plenty of other professions to help it run, professions like spinners, weavers, and merchants
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2023 22:36
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/InternetHippo/status/1635996454983548931
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2023 18:19
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 03:56 |
|
|
Not as good as the tweet about the mummy. https://twitter.com/USSRdad/status/1282554937746980865 Yes I know it's edited don't be a killjoy.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2023 18:33
|
|
