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JaucheCharly posted:How would a roman upperclass man train the mind? Debate? Trigonometry? Rap battles in Greek
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Jan 23, 2015 18:28
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Checking out the puellae at the forum?
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Jan 23, 2015 18:42
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JaucheCharly posted:Checking out the puellae at the forum? You'd be amazed at how much Roman poetry boils down to that sentence
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Jan 23, 2015 19:31
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I have some questions about some really ancient history: where did states come from? And why did all the earliest civilizations seem to evolve into despotic monarchies, even when they were located on vastly different spots on the globe? How long did it take from people to go from hunter-gatherer tribes who just figured out farming to highly stratified societies where everyone obeyed the word of one man? I realize this is as much an anthropology question as it is an historical one, but I haven't really found any good sources. I would appreciate any book suggestions.
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Jan 23, 2015 20:49
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HalPhilipWalker posted:I have some questions about some really ancient history: where did states come from? And why did all the earliest civilizations seem to evolve into despotic monarchies, even when they were located on vastly different spots on the globe? How long did it take from people to go from hunter-gatherer tribes who just figured out farming to highly stratified societies where everyone obeyed the word of one man? Increased efficiency in food production due to agriculture lead to divisions of labour (not everybody needed to devote all their waking lives to foraging, because a smaller number of farmers could supply the needs of people beyond their immediate families). Division of labour leads to a growth of non-essential tasks and social roles such as priests and warriors becoming lifestyles as much as professions, and suddenly you've got a guy with a club or a spear telling you "oh man this sure is a nice farm, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it.... but I can protect your farm for a small amount of food every month!", and his buddy the priest is all "yeah the gods agree w/ this and favour ths noble warrior so pay him tribute (as long as we get some too)" and before you know it.... Actually I can't remember what its name was, but one of the really, really early cities (that one that had houses burrowed down into the ground, that one entered via trapdoors) apparently seemed to exhibit little social/economic stratification. I think the reasoning used to reach this conclusion was that all of the houses were basically the same size, had similar amounts of ornamentation, etc.
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Jan 23, 2015 21:47
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HalPhilipWalker posted:I have some questions about some really ancient history: where did states come from? And why did all the earliest civilizations seem to evolve into despotic monarchies, even when they were located on vastly different spots on the globe? How long did it take from people to go from hunter-gatherer tribes who just figured out farming to highly stratified societies where everyone obeyed the word of one man? A good start would be understanding that you're to some extent asking an ahistorical question, and also that you are asking more than one question. For one thing, you are asking (I think) when human beings, antropologically, first accepted organised forms of authority which we might begin to think of as 'political' in some sense. Secondly, you're asking a question about where the 'idea' of the state comes from. Thirdly, you're asking a question about when the modern version of the state - that is to say, something we recognise - came in to being. I can mostly help with question 2. It's important to realise at the outset that 'state' is not a word with a commonly accepted definition. We have Weber to thank for the fact that we use 'state' and 'government' today quite interchangeably, for example. At times the word has meant 'state - as opposed to kingdom', or has had a double meaning, as it does in Machiavelli. Machiavelli talks about being able 'mantanere lo stato', by which he means princes should be able to maintain their state both in terms of their position as prince (their status, as princes of a princely state), but also maintain the integrity of the state itself (protect its borders and citizens, prevent its destruction or annexation). This makes more sense of the expression coup d'etat which preceeded the widespread use of the word 'state' on its own - an act striking against the prince's state. This is only the beginning to the nuanced complexity of the word 'state' - abandon all hope that you can mean the word and mean one universally recognisable thing. So - the term 'state' as a concept in political philosophy is a relatively recent one; it doesn't appear much in the lexicon of political philosophy until the 16th or 17th century: [i posted:A Genealogy of the Modern State[/i] - Quentin Skinner] ]Within Anglophone legal and political theory, the earliest period in which we encounter widespread discussions about the state, statehood and the powers of the states is towards the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. This development was in large measure owed to the influence of scholastic discussions about summa potestas*, together with the growing availability of French treatises on sovereignty and Italian manuals on 'politics' and reason of state. With the confluence of these strands of thought, the term state began to be used with increasing confidence to refer to a specific type of union or civil association, that of a universitas** or community of people living subject to the sovereign authority of a recognised monarch or ruling group *'A Latin phrase meaning "sum or totality of power". It refers to the final authority of power in government. For example, power of the Sovereign.' **The Latin word for corporation, a concept invented by medieval lawyers, from which we take the word 'university', the first corporations (e.g. University of Bologna; Oxford; Paris). Skinner emphasises that the most common phraseology of that time was that of the 'body politic', which was an image that necessarily also involved a 'head', that is to say what is later called a 'head of state' but which is most often at that time called a sovereign.  Image of the sovereign as head of state on the fronticepiece of Hobbes's Leviatian. I won't continue further in this vain, just leave you the link to the paper I cite - http://time.xutu.net/chinese/attachments/article/302/8Quentin_Skinner_A_Genealogy_of_the_Modern_State_.pdf A much abridged video lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-bcyHYNxyk Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that people didn't have a concept of state that just wasn't been articulated in the vocabulary of 'state' - that idea is very strongly fought by historians and theorists of the state. But it is worth underlining that people aren't always talking about the same thing when they talk or think about the state, and therefore the many assumptions your questions are making. Also, on purer history - medieval political relations were highly individuated and personal in a way that is alien to us today. Political relationships were much closer to taking the form of contracts between lord and vassal. That is obvious just from studying the language and behaviour of feudality. It is even obvious when you look at the legal theory of the government of Italian states in the fourteenth century; a legal manner in which one tries to describe something like a prototypical idea of the state is civitas sibi princeps, or 'city as state unto itself' - e.g. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3679373?sid=21105142505821&uid=3738032&uid=4&uid=2 Likewise, ancient Greeks are principally concerned in political theory with the 'Good City', a naturally developed organic community of a certain size and character. Lastly, it is worth mentioning that political philosophers have views themselves as to how the development of the 'state' took place, the most famous of which spring from the contractarian tradition - the idea of the state as the embodiment of a social contract. This is most notably expressed in English by Hobbes who believed the state was a necessary surrendering of rights to an absolute power of sovereignty for the protection of people from the basic situation of nature: men in nature are born in to a war of all against all. You see variations of this argument in Rousseau, Kant, Locke. Bentham meanwhile thinks all of this poo poo is ridiculous. It also appears in Greek and Roman philosophy, for example in Cicero, who claims (unsurprisingly) that polities were first created by rhetoricians - the Ciceronian definition of the republic (commonwealth is the best translation) is literal, res publica: the property of a people. Cicero then argues that the definition of a people is a group of individuals who share an agreement as to what is right - this agreement must have been generated, therefore, by persuasive individuals. I'm sure I haven't answered your mostly anthropological question, but there you are. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 21:50
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Oberleutnant posted:Increased efficiency in food production due to agriculture lead to divisions of labour (not everybody needed to devote all their waking lives to foraging, because a smaller number of farmers could supply the needs of people beyond their immediate families). Division of labour leads to a growth of non-essential tasks and social roles such as priests and warriors becoming lifestyles as much as professions, and suddenly you've got a guy with a club or a spear telling you "oh man this sure is a nice farm, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it.... but I can protect your farm for a small amount of food every month!", and his buddy the priest is all "yeah the gods agree w/ this and favour ths noble warrior so pay him tribute (as long as we get some too)" and before you know it.... Imo, the religious component you noted was less pernicious than you made it out to be. In Mesopotamia, the gods were capricious, so they needed constant attention to keep rain coming. Sure, there was some materialistic aspects to it, but you cannot understate how much people bought into the religious system they were a part of. For books, the stone cold classics in this question are Marx's Das Kapital and Service's Origins of States and Civilizations.
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Jan 23, 2015 21:53
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Smoking Crow posted:For books, the stone cold classics in this question are Marx's Das Kapital and Service's Origins of States and Civilizations. I think it's extremely questionable to offer up Das Kapital on this topic, firstly because the book is primarily not about this question, and secondly because every anthropological observation made in it has more or less been debunked, as well as most of the historical ones. I say that as an admirer of Marx, and would suggest the book in a lot of other contexts.
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Jan 23, 2015 21:56
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Disinterested posted:I think it's extremely questionable to offer up Das Kapital on this topic, firstly because the book is primarily not about this question, and secondly because every anthropological observation made in it has more or less been debunked, as well as most of the historical ones. You can't deny that it is a classic of sociology and hugely influential. If I was forced to read it in my "archeological theory" class so should he
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Jan 23, 2015 21:58
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Smoking Crow posted:You can't deny that it is a classic of sociology and hugely influential. If I was forced to read it in my "archeological theory" class so should he As long as you accept that it's interesting as an analytical framework and as a historical moment in those sciences, not as a definitive text on the actual subject matter. A reader coming to the subject for the first time might be tempted to accept the actual content of Marx's arguments more or less at face value, which would be a mistake. It's best to make that clear ahead of time or people will have knots to untie later. But yeah, from that perspective (and many others), Capital is good. Although you will get caught eventually by the need to understand the state in Hegel, which is a rocky road.
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Jan 23, 2015 21:59
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HalPhilipWalker posted:I have some questions about some really ancient history: where did states come from? And why did all the earliest civilizations seem to evolve into despotic monarchies, even when they were located on vastly different spots on the globe? How long did it take from people to go from hunter-gatherer tribes who just figured out farming to highly stratified societies where everyone obeyed the word of one man? One good thing to keep in mind is evolutionary theory. Not in like that eugenics kill all the Jews way, but it can be a useful analogy. Most societies probably didn't come out as despotic monarchies, just the ones which persisted long enough to give us records (even then, there's some pretty huge variations) One man one rule was pretty common but not the only option and it often had to wrangle it out with other alternatives. Not only that, what we have as records is not necessarily totally accurate. Until literacy starts to trickle down it is basically, by definition, only ever propaganda of the highest order. How well that reflects reality... we're not sure. But hey, if some dude has to convince everyone that he's a living god and get all the priests to back him up and write these big tablets about how cool he is, doesn't that mean he's having to make that argument? I know it's not quite what you're asking for but this comes up a lot with the Columbian contact, esp. Meso-America to the Spanish Empire. You basically have these two systems, each with millennia of history behind them meeting each other and attempting to work out their own analogous structures and fit to each other. Of course it's distended by the eventual difference in power but there's been a lot of good work done on the interaction of political, social, and religious structures.
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Jan 23, 2015 22:00
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You have to remember that you are primarily asking a theoretical question; from the way you worded your question, you seem like a Neo-Evolutionist. You have to remember that there are several different ways to go about looking at this question. What I'm saying is that you're coming in at a Lewis Binford and you need to step back and get some Ian Hodder in your life
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Jan 23, 2015 22:03
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The other question you'll get in to is - who is the state governing? Our concept of state is quite intrinsic to nationalism in some ways, so you may be helped by works like Imagined Communities by Anderson in this respect. For more on the political theory of the state, see this mess of a reading list I once had to gently caress around with (I wish I knew a way to compress this):
V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution. * B. Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, 4th edn (Aldershot, 1993). M. Horkheimer, ‘The Authoritarian State’. * M. Weber, ‘The Nation-State and Economic Policy’, in M. Weber, Political Writings, R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford, 1984). * Q. Skinner, ‘The State’, in T. Ball et al. (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, 1989). * Q. Skinner and B. Stråth (eds.), States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects (Cambridge, 2003), * R. Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge, 2001), ch. 1. P. Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (Penguin, 2002), Book I. * J. Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge 2001) P. Steinberger, The Idea of the State (Cambridge, 2005). R. Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Princeton, 2001), ch.1 ‘The State’, pp. 14-68. P. Singer, Democracy and Disobedience (Oxford, 1973). John Dunn, Political Obligation in its Historical Context (Cambridge, 1980). R.P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York, 1970). * C. Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation (Chichester, 1979). H.Pitkin, ‘Obligation and Consent,’ Philosophy, Politics and Society (4th series), P. Laslett and W. G. Runciman (eds.) (Oxford, 1972). STAR J. Rawls, ‘Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play’ in Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA, 1999). STAR J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. edition (Cambridge/Mass., 1999), ch. 6 ‘Duty and Obligation’, secs. 55–9. J. L. Cohen, Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism (Cambridge, 2012) T. Fazal, State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Annexation, and Occupation (Princeton, 2007)30 * J. Raz, ‘The Obligation to Obey: Revision and Tradition’ and ‘Government by Consent’ in Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford, 1994). * W. Edmundson, Three Anarchical Fallacies (Cambridge, 1998). T. R. Tyler, Why People Obey the Law, 2nd edn (Princeton, 2006).
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Jan 23, 2015 22:14
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HalPhilipWalker posted:I have some questions about some really ancient history: where did states come from? And why did all the earliest civilizations seem to evolve into despotic monarchies, even when they were located on vastly different spots on the globe? How long did it take from people to go from hunter-gatherer tribes who just figured out farming to highly stratified societies where everyone obeyed the word of one man? You're going to have to ask this in a much more concrete way because what you asked is extremely vague and there's no dogma that says societies have to go A -> B-> C (etc.). I think the best way to answer this is just to state that military might is a great way to get people to do what you want and that sometimes societies have problems and that they become destabilized enough that a warlord or strong-man can seize power. Once that happens the guy who seizes power next might try to claim some legitimacy by claiming that he's just a continuation of the last guy and so on and so forth. Also, states as you think of them weren't really a thing until like the 15th or 16th century at the earliest and really more like the 19th. There might some exceptions, but it's complicated and defining a 'state' is difficult as others have already stated better than I ever could. Plus, it's not like Persia, Egypt, or China were less advanced just because they didn't have nation-states on their own. Despotic monarchies aren't as common as you think either and most of the power was in the hands of the top 5-10%. Managing their bullshit was the monarch's biggest concern most of the time. Especially the ones with lots of soldiers.
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Jan 23, 2015 22:41
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I do apologize for how badly I worded my post. I realize how badly I used the word "state" as I didn't really mean to unleash a can of worms talking about political theory. I actually have read Marx's Capital and I'm mostly familiar with Marxist explanations of history and the theory of the social contract. I think what I really want is a history of the Neolithic Era, or recommendations for books that have information about that era.
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Jan 23, 2015 23:48
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Oberleutnant posted:Actually I can't remember what its name was, but one of the really, really early cities (that one that had houses burrowed down into the ground, that one entered via trapdoors) apparently seemed to exhibit little social/economic stratification. I think the reasoning used to reach this conclusion was that all of the houses were basically the same size, had similar amounts of ornamentation, etc. Çatalhöyük?
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Jan 24, 2015 00:03
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If you're up for a Marxist read, John Haldon's The State and the Tributary Mode of Production deals with pre-capitalist states. If I'm remembering correctly he touches in part on state formation. It's not about the ancient world or Europe, but James Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed also partially deals with this question for South-East Asia. In particular, Scott points out that there isn't really a linear and irreversible move from non-state to state. Instead, he finds a pattern of small, regional states forming and breaking up over time in the regions he looks at. Especially in the pre-modern world, states (as other posters have pointed out) are pretty precarious and limited in scope. For example, an ancient historian, Brent Shaw I think, argues that the Roman state has only a fraction of the organization and reach that modern states have.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:13
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Wheat and iron ruined man. That's all you need to know really.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:20
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deadking posted:For example, an ancient historian, Brent Shaw I think, argues that the Roman state has only a fraction of the organization and reach that modern states have. That's true, but it took a desperately long time to get away from Roman concepts for trying to think about and organise states (in fact, we haven't abandoned them at all, particularly with respect to both legal codes and theories of international relations between states). You can't get anywhere at international law even now without the concept of Jus gentium and jus inter gentes. Rome had a tremendously advanced way of thinking about politics, even if the practical reach in practice was bounded by limited technology.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:23
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deadking posted:If you're up for a Marxist read, John Haldon's The State and the Tributary Mode of Production deals with pre-capitalist states. If I'm remembering correctly he touches in part on state formation. Disinterested posted:The other question you'll get in to is - who is the state governing? Our concept of state is quite intrinsic to nationalism in some ways, so you may be helped by works like Imagined Communities by Anderson in this respect. I'm going to try to delve into some of these. I know what I asked was an overly broad and poorly worded question. I actually was inspired by a post in the Atlantis debacle about extremely early civilizations, where they started, and what they accomplished. Most of the discussion in this thread tends to focus on Rome, the Greek city-states, and maybe China and Egypt. With the exceptions of the Roman Republic and Athens, those areas all were ruled by kings, emperors, pharaohs, ie one man with almost total power invested in him. Yet hunter-gatherer groups tend to have little in the way of central authority and inequality. I know once farming started, then came property rights, priests, generals, cities, etc. I started wondering how so many different societies ended up with one guy (or even a small group of people) running everything. Obviously it didn't happen overnight. I realize these weren't nation-states as we currently conceive them. Most of them had far less power than any modern government. I know I'm asking about an era where we have no real historical record, even for a later city like Rome.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:59
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I remember that from my high school textbook, it sounds like a pretty cool place to live in.
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Jan 24, 2015 01:00
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THat's it, thanks!
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Jan 24, 2015 01:07
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HalPhilipWalker posted:I'm going to try to delve into some of these. Couple things. I would put a looooooooooooooooooooooooot of distance between Rome/Greek city-states and actual, real, barely post-hunter gatherer stuff. There's a huge gap there. Second, I would check some of your assumptions. Power always exists in a dialogue. For instance, we know a lot about some of the more ancient societies mostly through official propaganda, in which often a ruler is shown as nigh unto divine. Now, isn't it interesting that a ruler is having to put out this propaganda? That can be as revealing as the world as depicted in the propaganda. A lot of 'Greece and Rome were special, all these oriental despots were the same' comes out at a time when we (parliamentary Great Britain, revolutionary France, 'Murica) were the inheritors of that special wossname, in contrast to the unfortunate souls in [insert colony here]. That kruft is still very much around.* So I would look at exploring that base assumption first. * Also applies to Marx. "Here's my universal theory of the whole course of history and humanity. The model doesn't work when we apply it to China for... well, reasons. Shut up. China doesn't count. Nor anywhere not France, Germany, or Great Britain but... shut up okay."** ** It's been refined since, and it's still pretty foundational but, yeah.
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Jan 24, 2015 03:26
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Most of what I wanted to say on the subject of despotism in early agricultural societies has been said but I wanted to add something. You shouldn’t forget that before the advent of agriculture, even a village chieftain could only gather so much wealth to set himself apart from the other tribesmen. What is he going to hoard, deer meat? Shiny rocks? With agriculture and the advent of pottery and grains, you could actually TAX and store wealth for a decent period of time. Not only that, but settled societies have economies that can support gold or precious rocks being a currency. Some say that writing developed as a way to keep track of whoever owned what, leading to some of the earliest scribes and bureaucrats. Back then, almost everybody had the same social function of being hunter-gatherers. As someone already said, agriculture allowed some people to specialize in different things which led to social stratification and social classes and whatnot. My background is sociology and I can't even remember if this is exactly what Marx said in the Kapital. I read it too long ago. I remember a key part of the transition from hunting-gathering to settled societies with strong hierarchies to be linked to the new possibilities of amassment of capital though.
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Jan 24, 2015 03:59
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Writing was given to us by Innana to better demand tribute from our neighbors, and I won't hear anything different.
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Jan 24, 2015 04:23
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the JJ posted:Couple things. I would put a looooooooooooooooooooooooot of distance between Rome/Greek city-states and actual, real, barely post-hunter gatherer stuff. There's a huge gap there. I didn't mean to imply that I thought Rome/Greek city-states happened any time close to start of farming, and I'm not sure how you thought I was saying that. Am I really making that many assumptions? I haven't read too much about the really ancient societies, and what I have tends to breeze through when people first settled in the area, started farming, and (since most of it is about one empire or another) when the local population was united and started conquering people. I'm merely trying to fill in the gaps of what I don't know. I actually mentioned in a previous post that I thought trying to become a sole ruler over people who weren't used to such a thing would cause a lot of resistance. Propaganda could definitely be a sign that there was a discontented population that needed to be pacified. Or it could be that the ruler is a braggart. Is there any other evidence common in ancient civilizations that people didn't take the stratifying of society laying down? A lot of ruling elites produce propaganda even when there isn't a large degree of unrest. I also don't get how you think I am somehow assuming some kind of Greco-Roman exceptionalism in the ancient world. All I meant was that Rome and Athens (not even all of Greece!) both went through long periods where they were a republic and a democracy, respectively. Both also went through times where they under one person's thumb (actually most of their antiquity was spent like this).
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Jan 24, 2015 04:44
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Arglebargle III posted:Wheat and iron ruined man. That's all you need to know really. The first man who, after he fenced off a piece of the earth, thought to say "This is mine," and found that other people were naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.
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Jan 24, 2015 06:09
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Archaeological evidence in Peru suggests it might have been the priesthood that developed there first and then spawned civilization. There was a main cultic centre and then farming and stuff sprang up to support it which goes against what we've learned about other places. Also a fun thing we learned about Mesopotamia. The Sumer word for king was Lugal which literally means 'big man'. This has lead to some speculation as to whether the original Lugals were big in social status or whether they were actually taller than everybody and therefore able to physically impose their will on people. I'm going to go with the former but it's funny imagining civilization firing off because of what every younger sibling has heard since time immemorial: I'm bigger than you, that's why.
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Jan 24, 2015 08:15
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Tao Jones posted:The first man who, after he fenced off a piece of the earth, thought to say "This is mine," and found that other people were naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. that was me sorry
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Jan 24, 2015 08:24
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Testikles posted:Archaeological evidence in Peru suggests it might have been the priesthood that developed there first and then spawned civilization. There was a main cultic centre and then farming and stuff sprang up to support it which goes against what we've learned about other places. A ton of the cities in Mesopotamia were actually built around cultic centers which retained their use as locations of worship until those sites were abandoned. One of the largest such cities is Uruk, which is actually formed from two cult centers devoted to different gods that merged into a single polity at some point. The word "Lugal" also likely didn't always mean "king" as we know it. It likely conforms similarly to the Greek word "Basileus," which in the Mycenaean era was just one of the terms for an administrator under the Wanax(This is the term Linear B tablet use for king"). Both words were used as the term for "king/emperor" at different times, but "basileus" eventually became the dominant term.
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Jan 24, 2015 08:36
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Arglebargle III posted:Wheat and iron ruined man. That's all you need to know really. I would argue more that it ruined the environment by giving humans the ability to gently caress everything up. People are pretty much the same as always
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Jan 24, 2015 09:25
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HalPhilipWalker posted:I'm going to try to delve into some of these. If you're just wandering around living off the land you don't need to define ownership rights beyond the most trivial level. Agriculture requires infrastructure like irrigation systems, grain storage, trading, record keeping, transportation, etc, and those need to be run by some sort of complex organizational structure. That's basically it icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 09:30
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Jaramin posted:A ton of the cities in Mesopotamia were actually built around cultic centers which retained their use as locations of worship until those sites were abandoned. One of the largest such cities is Uruk, which is actually formed from two cult centers devoted to different gods that merged into a single polity at some point. The word "Lugal" also likely didn't always mean "king" as we know it. It likely conforms similarly to the Greek word "Basileus," which in the Mycenaean era was just one of the terms for an administrator under the Wanax(This is the term Linear B tablet use for king"). Both words were used as the term for "king/emperor" at different times, but "basileus" eventually became the dominant term. Loosely speaking, I think "ensi" is translated as a ruler or governor of a city, while lugal is reserved for guys who have conquered more than one city. Lugal Zaggesi supposedly had 50 ensis with him when he got beaten by Sargon. Who knows what the etymology of it is, though? The last Kaiser was deposed just over 2000 years after the first Caeser.
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Jan 24, 2015 14:12
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Oberleutnant posted:THat's it, thanks! Mohenjodaro and other Indus Valley Civilization sites also have a limited sense of stratification from archaeological evidence- no obvious temples, no obvious palaces, the largest buildings are bathhouses, granaries, and apartment complexes, everyone had running water and sewer access. People did have stratification in personal ornaments and some buildings are nicer than others, though.
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Jan 24, 2015 17:23
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Jaramin posted:A ton of the cities in Mesopotamia were actually built around cultic centers which retained their use as locations of worship until those sites were abandoned. One of the largest such cities is Uruk, which is actually formed from two cult centers devoted to different gods that merged into a single polity at some point. The word "Lugal" also likely didn't always mean "king" as we know it. It likely conforms similarly to the Greek word "Basileus," which in the Mycenaean era was just one of the terms for an administrator under the Wanax(This is the term Linear B tablet use for king"). Both words were used as the term for "king/emperor" at different times, but "basileus" eventually became the dominant term. There's something I am not remembering then but I recall it being important that in Peru the city came first and then farming. Also I didn't mean to open up a can of worms about what a Lugal does - I just needed a pithy definition so there would be some context about a possible etymology. I yield to your better knowledge on the subject.
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Jan 24, 2015 19:59
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icantfindaname posted:I would argue more that it ruined the environment by giving humans the ability to gently caress everything up. People are pretty much the same as always Take it up with Jean-Jacques man not me.
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Jan 24, 2015 21:04
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icantfindaname posted:I would argue more that it ruined the environment by giving humans the ability to gently caress everything up. People are pretty much the same as always Imo, industrialization hosed up the environment more than agriculture did
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Jan 24, 2015 21:08
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You want to know what completely fucks up a place? Sheep.
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Jan 24, 2015 21:30
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JaucheCharly posted:You want to know what completely fucks up a place? Sheep. http://youtu.be/NJvVEt6F_Xw
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Jan 24, 2015 21:57
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loving algae ruined our environment with their unregulated emission of carcinogenic O2.
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Jan 24, 2015 22:05
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