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I also heard that triangular blades produce wounds that are difficult to suture in a museum in Philadelphia.
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Jul 2, 2014 08:13
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Arglebargle III posted:I also heard that triangular blades produce wounds that are difficult to suture in a museum in Philadelphia. I would hope that you're getting sutured in a more suitable place, such as a hospital in Philadelphia.
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Jul 2, 2014 08:27
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Odobenidae posted:I would hope that you're getting sutured in a more suitable place, such as a hospital in Philadelphia. I knew someone was going to say that, Dick!
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Jul 2, 2014 09:47
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Arglebargle III posted:I also heard that triangular blades produce wounds that are difficult to suture in a museum in Philadelphia.
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Jul 2, 2014 10:58
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Well in principle it's true. The further apart you stretch a gaping wound the more difficult recovery will be. Stabbing a steak isn't really comparable, because you don't get to see the microscopic damage the extra damage does to the 'tissue' when you compare a screwdriver stab to a scalpel stab. That said if you are getting stabbed on the battlefield you have far larger problems at hand than the somewhat more effective stab wound.
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Jul 2, 2014 12:28
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Arglebargle III posted:I also heard that triangular blades produce wounds that are difficult to suture in a museum in Philadelphia. Very well could be. I was only responding to the notion that the weapons were somehow more deadly for having removed a plug of flesh
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Jul 2, 2014 13:13
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cheerfullydrab posted:Ah, the Mutter Museum. Everybody go here
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Jul 2, 2014 16:32
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I wanted to get married there, but it's too far for my relatives to travel.
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Jul 2, 2014 18:08
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Skythian arrowheads are often triangular or 3-bladed  Those are pretty small and light. I think Jack Farrell has made an authentic replica of one of the bows and found that the draw is actually very short. Something like 26 or 27". I saw another dude from hungary who made 3 with +100# the same way. He wanted 6.000€ a piece. http://atarn.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2372 If you have read anything about the unusual design of these bows, making them the authentic way with +9 parts is a substantial feat. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 18:24
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I just want to say this is the absolute best thread on the forums. I love the Antiquity period, especially Roman stuff, so bravo for this. Going back to the discussion from a few pages ago, I think if I were to go back in time and attempt to introduce modern ideas to people of ancient times, I'd be tossed into a pit or executed. They would think I was crazy, a foreign saboteur bringing ideas against the Empire, or simply making poo poo up. Modern maps wouldn't make a lick of sense. The common person, at least in the US, is dumber than gently caress and wouldn't bring anything of note to the Romans. You could certainly introduce modern IDEAS, but practical application of things like advanced chemistry and industrial processes would probably be near impossible due to material limitations or the common person simply not knowing how to execute concepts. I can't imagine what kind of utter havoc would be caused by the equivalent of Kenny Powers being transported back in time and having to explain to Caesar that his namesake would become a poo poo pizza chain. Or even what pizza is. Then again, introducing sports could probably go real well. Smacking a leather ball with a stick is very simple to understand. You could form the first Roman Baseball League. Then you could debate saber-metrics with Hypatia or the importance of smallball with Cicero. Someone get me a loving time machine.
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Jul 3, 2014 14:47
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The biggest risk would be upsetting the status quo which yeah could easily get you killed. I would think as long as you ingratiated yourself to the biggest local warlord and impressed the nobility you would be safe.
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Jul 3, 2014 14:52
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euphronius posted:The biggest risk would be upsetting the status quo which yeah could easily get you killed. Definitely. You shouldn't try and explain the advantages of representational democracy during the late republic period, or the importance of historical preservation during the Chin empire. And blaming the black death on invisible creatures that live on fleas? That seems like a good way to get in trouble.
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Jul 3, 2014 15:34
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sullat posted:And blaming the black death on invisible creatures that live on fleas? That seems like a good way to get in trouble. Yes, quite like how us modern men consider atoms and nuclear science utter humbug, as we can't see that stuff. And what is electricity anyway?
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Jul 3, 2014 15:38
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sullat posted:Definitely. You shouldn't try and explain the advantages of representational democracy during the late republic period, or the importance of historical preservation during the Chin empire. And blaming the black death on invisible creatures that live on fleas? That seems like a good way to get in trouble.  : No Gods, no Kings, no Masters... gently caress you, got mine. Ha, slaves?! Check out this free market and what not. :  Really, though. I have to wonder how introducing new ideas to warfare would have changed things. Romans were already on the bleeding edge of warfare in Antiquity and masters of siege. Introducing forms of crude dynamite would probably have us speaking Latin to this day. Edit: I'm going to actually ask a question since this is what the thread is for. What's the farthest that Roman artifacts have been discovered? I'm curious as to the actual limitations of their influence. I know earlier in the thread someone mentioned Japan through trade. It boggles my mind that a civilization at its height during those times could have spanned so far. Were it not for rudimentary sailing technology and theory, just think what could have been. TheHoosier fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 15:43
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The Romans in China / Chinans in Roma thing keeps popping up here, but really, the Old World has been sort of unified for thousands of years. There's never been anything truly preventing trade on the axis extending from Portugal to Japan - nothing like the Sahara desert, for example. And if you look at a map with that in mind, it's no surprise that before the colonial era the balance of power in the Old World often hung on the Central Asian steppe tribes. They controlled the centre of the whole Eurasian continent and expanded from there in bursts, repeatedly radically altering what was happening in Europe, India and China. It wasn't really a Roman achievement that some of their trade goods or coins ended up in Japan or Korea or whatever, it's a consequence of geographical features.
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Jul 3, 2014 16:03
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Ras Het posted:The Romans in China / Chinans in Roma thing keeps popping up here, but really, the Old World has been sort of unified for thousands of years. There's never been anything truly preventing trade on the axis extending from Portugal to Japan - nothing like the Sahara desert, for example. And if you look at a map with that in mind, it's no surprise that before the colonial era the balance of power in the Old World often hung on the Central Asian steppe tribes. They controlled the centre of the whole Eurasian continent and expanded from there in bursts, repeatedly radically altering what was happening in Europe, India and China. It wasn't really a Roman achievement that some of their trade goods or coins ended up in Japan or Korea or whatever, it's a consequence of geographical features. In my mind, it's hard to perceive distance the way people in ancient times would have. To me, the length of the United States takes a day to traverse with modern technology; Less through the air. Walking would take forever, but no one does that. Trying to put myself in the shoes of an ancient general or explorer having to reach another part of the world is difficult to imagine. I know Romans were aware of the Chinese dynasties and vice versa. Obviously trade happened, especially silk. I guess it's just hard for me to grasp the Romans physically being in the far corners of the world. Thinking about how far Hadrian's Wall is from the southern tip of the Empire paints an awe-inspiring mental picture.
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Jul 3, 2014 16:09
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TheHoosier posted:Edit: I'm going to actually ask a question since this is what the thread is for. What's the farthest that Roman artifacts have been discovered? I'm curious as to the actual limitations of their influence. I know earlier in the thread someone mentioned Japan through trade. It boggles my mind that a civilization at its height during those times could have spanned so far. Were it not for rudimentary sailing technology and theory, just think what could have been. Korea I believe, and if it got that far, its pretty safe to assume Roman products and traders probably reached to most areas of the world in any way connected to the trade networks. Rome held tremendous influence outside its borders in Germania as well. Those areas may not have bee explicitly Roman, but Rome dominated their political landscape, and Roman goods would have been everywhere. Buddhist artifacts were also found in Pompeii. The world of antiquity was far more connected then we sometimes think. Obviously the average farmer outside Londinium did not know jack poo poo about Indian or Chinese goods, but at least one or two of the merchants in the city proper did.
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Jul 3, 2014 16:10
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Korea I believe, and if it got that far, its pretty safe to assume Roman products and traders probably reached to most areas of the world in any way connected to the trade networks. Korea was the furthest, but a year or two ago some Roman glass was found in Japan. Since there's nothing east of that they could've reached, that's going to be the end of the line. South, they reached at least Zanzibar but we're not sure if they went any further. I'd assume so since you get to Zanzibar and see there's still more Africa south of that but there's no evidence I'm aware of. As far as actual Roman people, the extreme points as far as we know are the Canary Islands to the west, Zanzibar in the south, Vietnam in the southeast, and Luoyang in the east. The most remote area Romans lived permanently was Muziris on the southwest coast of India. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 16:17
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TheHoosier posted:In my mind, it's hard to perceive distance the way people in ancient times would have. To me, the length of the United States takes a day to traverse with modern technology; Less through the air. Walking would take forever, but no one does that. Trying to put myself in the shoes of an ancient general or explorer having to reach another part of the world is difficult to imagine. I know Romans were aware of the Chinese dynasties and vice versa. Obviously trade happened, especially silk. I guess it's just hard for me to grasp the Romans physically being in the far corners of the world. Thinking about how far Hadrian's Wall is from the southern tip of the Empire paints an awe-inspiring mental picture. There were Roman trade outposts in India, manned by legionaries and staffed with people who spoke Greek and Latin. What fires the imagination about Rome is knowing that people in India and Scotland were interacting with the same entity, in 150 AD. People could and almost certainly did spend January in India and May in Britian.
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Jul 3, 2014 16:19
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WoodrowSkillson posted:There were Roman trade outposts in India, manned by legionaries and staffed with people who spoke Greek and Latin. What fires the imagination about Rome is knowing that people in India and Scotland were interacting with the same entity, in 150 AD. People could and almost certainly did spend January in India and May in Britian. This is what I mean. Absolutely fascinating. Imagine the story swapping that went on in ancient times. Tales of legions stomping through the forests of Gaul all the way to Britannia. Must have scared the piss out of people in India. Or not, I'm not too learned about antiquity Asia.
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Jul 3, 2014 16:24
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I imagine if India (of course India was dozens of kingdoms but simplicity here) thought anything it was smug, since that was where Alexander finally ground to a halt. No one would've cared that it was an internal army issue rather than India just being awesome.
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Jul 3, 2014 16:27
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After that nice little time-travelling derail of mine (you've still not suggested anything to make me rich, goons  ), I have another question. At around the time of the big Bronze Age empires, what's happening in sub-Saharan Africa? From what I gather not an awful lot, which is strange because sub-Saharan Africa has all the resources everywhere else has, and had about as equal a chronological start (as opposed to say the Americas that our species took some time to get to). Has anyone posited a convincing theory for the lack of a sub-Saharan Egypt or Rome?
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Jul 3, 2014 16:28
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TheHoosier posted:This is what I mean. Absolutely fascinating. Imagine the story swapping that went on in ancient times. Tales of legions stomping through the forests of Gaul all the way to Britannia. Must have scared the piss out of people in India. Or not, I'm not too learned about antiquity Asia. Asia was far more concerned about China, and China was just as impressive, if not as far flung. India was also its own advanced entity and far from a backwater. It would have been really interesting to see what they thought of legionaries though.
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Jul 3, 2014 16:28
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Exioce posted:After that nice little time-travelling derail of mine (you've still not suggested anything to make me rich, goons Subsaharan Egypt made me think Nubia. I don't know if that's far enough south for you, but they sorta took over Egypt themselves so that's certainly an example. We know that the Bantu language group had some pretty extensive conquests without really forming a state per say. But I'd be a bit hesitant to think of that as a failure. You did get some states in Subsaharan Africa later but I can't remember what that situation looked like before ~1000 or so.
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Jul 3, 2014 18:33
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With all this talk of travel, I have a question that I've wanted to know for a while. How far could a person travel in a day in antiquity, either on land or at sea? Say an explorer or diplomat or trader or wealthy person travelling for pleasure?
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Jul 3, 2014 18:53
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Azathoth posted:With all this talk of travel, I have a question that I've wanted to know for a while. How far could a person travel in a day in antiquity, either on land or at sea? Say an explorer or diplomat or trader or wealthy person travelling for pleasure? And the thread goes 100% full circle, to the website that started it all. http://orbis.stanford.edu/ enjoy
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Jul 3, 2014 18:56
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WoodrowSkillson posted:And the thread goes 100% full circle, to the website that started it all. Gah! I can't believe I forgot about that site. I've always heard how awesome Rome's road network was for the time, but did it lower travel time or just make things safer for individual travellers?
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Jul 3, 2014 19:08
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Azathoth posted:With all this talk of travel, I have a question that I've wanted to know for a while. How far could a person travel in a day in antiquity, either on land or at sea? Say an explorer or diplomat or trader or wealthy person travelling for pleasure? ORBIS is definitely very cool to play with, and is a great resource for anyone interested in this sort of thing. To respond a bit more voluminously, there's two main sources to look at here: Pliny the Elder's discussion about the speed of trading vessels, and Procopius' description of the cursus publicus, or the Roman post. Pliny records a pair of exemplary trading runs, which indicate that a fast vessel with a good wind could make 6 knots, or about 165 nautical miles per day (for comparison, the modern ocean-liner Queen Mary 2 cruises at 30 knots) Pliny was very well-traveled, having worked in far-western Germania, and perhaps as far East as India, and so he knew quite well that the speed of vessels was very variable, and depended heavily on the weather conditions. And it is much quicker to travel East to West, following the trade winds, meaning that 2/3 of a round trip West would be spent on the return leg. Plus it's important to remember that travelling was seasonal as well - meaning that you could get trapped in a port and have to wait out the winter. But still, if you planned your travel well then you could get around fairly quickly - you could get from Ostia (Rome) to Gibraltar in a week. Land travel would depend more on how much cargo you wanted to carry, and that sort of thing. A team of oxen won't travel as quickly as a man on a horse, after all. But if we look at the average speed of a courier on the cursus publicus, then we'd see that messengers could travel perhaps 60 miles in a day (by using remounts and that sort of thing). That's not the full picture of course, and a trader or diplomat might travel at less than a quarter that speed, but it provides a ballpark for a top speed. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/TAPA/82/Speed_under_Sail_of_Ancient_Ships*.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_publicus#Speed_of_the_Post
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Jul 3, 2014 19:27
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Exioce posted:After that nice little time-travelling derail of mine (you've still not suggested anything to make me rich, goons There was tons of poo poo going on in Sub-Saharan Africa during roughly the same period as ancient Greece and Rome were doing their things. It's been years and years and years since I took a class as an undergrad on pre-colonial Africa, so if anyone knows anyone who actually studies this stuff please correct me, but I definitely remember that we spent a lot of time looking at pre-medieval monumental architecture in Southern Africa and discussing why the hell there isn't more popular knowledge about it. The architecture that we have found is pretty amazing. Along the eastern coast of Africa you've got a lot of indications of some pretty decent sized states, mostly organized for agrarian and trading economies that were closely tied into the Indian Ocean networks. I also remember there being some pretty significant signs of some big empires further north and west, on the edges of where the rain forests are today. As for why we don't talk about them much today, well. . . that's where poo poo gets political. Two centuries of colonialism really doesn't help here. "Hey, look at all these fascinating and culturally rich ancient peoples that inhabited this land at the same time the Romans and Greeks who we hold in such high esteem were doing their own things" doesn't quite play into the 19th Century Anglo-French-Belgian-German rhetoric of a "civilizing mission" to bring the light of organized society to the benighted masses of the dark continent. The notion that the ancestors of American slaves came from places with just as much of a rich historical tradition as Greece or Rome is also a tad problematic for everyone in the US when slavery was legal, and after emancipation it wasn't much better. It also doesn't help that a lot of these places appear to have used a combination of wood and stone for their really big building projects. A tumbled-down temple that you can easily look at and stack the blocks back on top of each other to make a building again (Greece, Rome, etc) is a lot more convenient to deal with than something where you are missing some major wooden components of the structure. Then there's also the whole issue of them not really leaving behind any written records, at least not in any form that's survived. One of the big reasons we know so much about ancient Rome, China, Greece, etc. is that we have tons of writings describing life back then. Not so much for those areas. Maybe they had it and it was just lost. I'm not an Africanist and I'm running on fumes here, so buy a book and answer that one for yourself. Then there's also the whole issue of how we privilege certain types of government organization over others in the ancient world and assume that some are better or worse than others. It's loving AMAZING how many of the prejudices of Ancient Rome we're still running around with. Just think about the peoples that lived north and east of the Rhine from ~ the Julio-Claudian era through ~ the 2nd century AD. We're almost wholly dependent on Tacitus's Germania for information on who was up there, and for centuries historians have basically adopted a very Roman viewpoint of who those people were and what the gently caress they were doing. Of course modern archeology has helped us very significantly with some of these issues, but it only goes so far when you're talking about people who lived in buildings that rotted away, spoke languages that linguists have to reconstruct working backwards, and who didn't leave behind their own literary tradition in a form that's come down to us. A couple tens of pages ago I was asking around for a good book on pre-middle ages Germany and didn't get any responses. That's because the literature is apparently really loving thin. The best I've come across so far is Patrick Geary's Before France & Germany: The creation and transformation of the Merovingian World. It's an excellent book that you all should read. He goes into some pretty good detail on this issue of how you deal with civilizations like these and how much more complex the picture really is than what you get reading the perspective of a senatorial Roman. tl;dr: Yeah, there was poo poo happening in Africa. Lots of it, and really cool stuff to boot, and if you get the chance you should take a class on it from someone who's an expert in that field. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 19:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:tl;dr: Yeah, there was poo poo happening in Africa. Lots of it, and really cool stuff to boot, and if you get the chance you should take a class on it from someone who's an expert in that field. God I just want to go back to undergrad in a place with good Africa/South and SE Asian profs. Like I got top notch pre-Columbian, Atlantic world, MENA, and East Asian stuff but daaaaaamn there's so much poo poo I don't know. Or just, you know, a real hardcore central Eurasian deal.
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Jul 3, 2014 19:55
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I just get the sense that modern archeology is really loving slow and the hey days of digging up Crete in 2 seasons is not going to happen anymore. Lots of stuff is still being discovered everywhere.
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Jul 3, 2014 19:57
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TheHoosier posted:I can't imagine what kind of utter havoc would be caused by the equivalent of Kenny Powers being transported back in time and having to explain to Caesar that his namesake would become a poo poo pizza chain. Or even what pizza is. I seem to recall focaccia was already a thing that far back. Explaining what a tomato is would be a bit more of a problem, I suspect...
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Jul 3, 2014 19:58
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TheHoosier posted:Then again, introducing sports could probably go real well. Smacking a leather ball with a stick is very simple to understand. You could form the first Roman Baseball League. Then you could debate saber-metrics with Hypatia or the importance of smallball with Cicero. The Romans played a shitton of sports. I wouldn't be surprised if even one of the civil wars was started from one of the games they were obsessed with. I mostly study their military more than culture but a common way of celebrating their conquest was extending preplanned sporting games by as much as ten times the original time length. Baseball would probably blow their minds though anyways, their sports were pretty basic compared to the complexity of Baseball.
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Jul 3, 2014 20:31
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This thread never ceases to amaze. Thanks for the detailed explanation.
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Jul 3, 2014 20:32
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Imapanda posted:The Romans played a shitton of sports. I wouldn't be surprised if even one of the civil wars was started from one of the games they were obsessed with. One of the most popular spectator sports was chariot racing. The spectators formed fan clubs (named after the team colors: blue, green, red, and white), who would attack each other pretty frequently. In sixth-century Constantinople, a riot (the Nika Riots) started by these circus factions nearly burned the city to the ground and, according to some estimates, killed thousands of people.
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Jul 3, 2014 21:00
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TheHoosier posted:I can't imagine what kind of utter havoc would be caused by the equivalent of Kenny Powers being transported back in time and having to explain to Caesar that his namesake would become a poo poo pizza chain. Or even what pizza is. Except for tomatos, everything you need to make pizza already existed in the ancient world. What's so difficult about "it is a dish consisting of a flat piece of bread dough with some combination of vegetables, cheese and meat on it, baked in an oven until the cheese has melted and the dough is baked."? Hell, something like that might actually have existed back then. Kopijeger fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 21:04
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I think this has been talked about in this thread before, but materials science and chemistry, I guess, would be the most mind-blowing and impactful thing you could bring back 2000 years, along with - of course - modern disease theory. Imagine stopping the plagues and giving the legions modern armor.
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Jul 3, 2014 21:04
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Imapanda posted:The Romans played a shitton of sports. I wouldn't be surprised if even one of the civil wars was started from one of the games they were obsessed with. Yeah I knew they had sports of their own. I misspoke; I meant "modern" sports like basketball or baseball. Soccer has been around in various forms for a long rear end time so I'm sure kicking a ball is something they've done already. I know the complexity of the tactics in soccer and the stats in baseball would be a real eye-opener, but the basics of the game would be easy to introduce. The chariot-racing faction stuff is interesting. Ancient hooliganism. Some things truly never change.
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Jul 3, 2014 21:13
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deadking posted:One of the most popular spectator sports was chariot racing. The spectators formed fan clubs (named after the team colors: blue, green, red, and white), who would attack each other pretty frequently. In sixth-century Constantinople, a riot (the Nika Riots) started by these circus factions nearly burned the city to the ground and, according to some estimates, killed thousands of people. Not only that, the rioters put up a couple of claimants to the throne (not an uncommon way of displaying displeasure) even though one of the rioting factions was the Emperor's favorite. E: basically a couple of rioters from rival factions arrested during a previous incident were due to be executed but escaped and sought sanctuary in a temple. Their mutual plight united the two factions and led to a dangerously powerful insurrection.
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Jul 3, 2014 21:26
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euphronius posted:I think this has been talked about in this thread before, but materials science and chemistry, I guess, would be the most mind-blowing and impactful thing you could bring back 2000 years, along with - of course - modern disease theory. What sort of modern armor are we talking about? I sincerely doubt anyone would want to go through the effort of designing ceramic ballistic vests given that they need to be serviced any time they take a hit, and also there's no bullets that need to be stopped.
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Jul 3, 2014 21:36
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.