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Disinterested posted:Yes, although curiously knowledge of the ancient Greek and Latin languages survived best in Ireland and England for the same reasons, which is why Charlemagne had to import monks from the British Isles to staff his clergy and kick off a new revolution in literacy. The closer you got to Rome the more likely you would have learned Latin from people around you. Britannia was on the rear end end so the common people had to be taught Latin by tutors for a long time. They ended up with a more grammatically pure Latin while the Romans in Rome had boatloads of slang in day to day speech.
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Feb 10, 2015 21:39
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YouTuber posted:The closer you got to Rome the more likely you would have learned Latin from people around you. Britannia was on the rear end end so the common people had to be taught Latin by tutors for a long time. They ended up with a more grammatically pure Latin while the Romans in Rome had boatloads of slang in day to day speech. Nothing I said is discrepant with that account, hence: quote:a form of Latin that would be of use in reading classical texts To which you could add from wiki: quote:the precursors to today's Romance languages, that were becoming mutually unintelligible and preventing scholars from one part of Europe being able to communicate with persons from another part of Europe. I didn't make any claims about this being anything other than an elite movement, but there's not really a debate to be had about the point of origin of the rebirth of classical Latin literacy in Europe (namely the Carolingian court, using monks from the British Isles). The fact that Britain was relatively isolate hindered the development even of the vernacular Latin leftovers away from classical Latin in Britain, iirc.
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Feb 10, 2015 22:19
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No mention of Visigothic Iberia? That was probably the place with the best preservation of late-classical, Latin, Western Roman culture in its time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reccopolis quote:is one of at least four cities founded in Hispania by the Visigoths,[1] the only new cities in Western Europe known to be founded between the fifth and eighth centuries. If the German warlords in the West had kept up a longer-lasting, more unified "Western Roman Empire" it would have looked like the Visigothic Kingdom writ large. In law, people, culture, language, politics, religion, urban life, etc.
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Feb 11, 2015 03:19
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cheerfullydrab posted:No mention of Visigothic Iberia? That was probably the place with the best preservation of late-classical, Latin, Western Roman culture in its time. You make a good point, which shows up that mine is being made in more or less the Carolingian context.
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Feb 11, 2015 12:58
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Not to be overly pedantic, but I think it's worth noting that the Carolingian "renaissance" (not a term scholars prefer anymore) was more about implementing a certain educated, Christian elite's vision of correct Christian belief and practice. The revival of classical Latin (at least, what these people saw as correct classical Latin) was a means to achieve this goal, not the goal itself.
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Feb 11, 2015 15:18
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deadking posted:Not to be overly pedantic, but I think it's worth noting that the Carolingian "renaissance" (not a term scholars prefer anymore) was more about implementing a certain educated, Christian elite's vision of correct Christian belief and practice. The revival of classical Latin (at least, what these people saw as correct classical Latin) was a means to achieve this goal, not the goal itself. I'm not at variance with this view.
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Feb 11, 2015 15:26
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Behold Europe at the time of the Western Roman Empire's fall, as faithfully and accurately recreated by earnest people in the Paradox forums: Political:  and cultural: 
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Feb 11, 2015 16:22
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Is that wrong?
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Feb 11, 2015 18:52
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You're missing the mighty Garamantes.
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Feb 11, 2015 19:45
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Is that the mod where the Garamantes have like 40 really wealthy counties that weren't in the base game and the Ostrogoth coat of arms has a Nazi eagle in it?
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Feb 11, 2015 20:02
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FreudianSlippers posted:Is that the mod where the Garamantes have like 40 really wealthy counties that weren't in the base game and the Ostrogoth coat of arms has a Nazi eagle in it? 
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Feb 11, 2015 20:07
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Didn't the Nazis steal that eagle from Rome, anyway?
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Feb 11, 2015 21:36
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They stole the eagle motif(although everyone else had been doing so for 1500 years by then). But the issue with that icon is that it is literally the Nazi emblem with the actual swastika edited out in paint. Emblem of the German Reich, 1935-45. Jaramin fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 11, 2015 21:43
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Arglebargle III posted:Is that wrong? Beamed posted:You're missing the mighty Garamantes.
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Feb 12, 2015 04:05
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Ofaloaf posted:Behold Europe at the time of the Western Roman Empire's fall, as faithfully and accurately recreated by earnest people in the Paradox forums: I don't know if I'd characterize Odoacer as "mighty." "Lucky," certainly. e: I picked up A.M. Snodgrass' The Dark Age of Greece at the library the other day, which is pretty interesting. It's from 1971, so it's not exactly up to date on a lot of archeological findings, but it's the best account I've seen of what life must have been like at that time. I'm still unsatisfied with a lot of the hypothetical explanations I'm seeing for the disappearance of writing in the Aegean during that period, though - not just Snodgrass', but elsewhere too. I just find it hard to believe that writing was an art that only a few scribes in the palace centers possessed. It's one thing to acknowledge that most people in Mycenaean Greece probably didn't know how to read or write. But it's quite another to suggest that a few elites in the Late Bronze Age managed to keep anyone else in society from learning how to read and write throughout the five hundred or so years of Mycenaean civilization. So I don't buy that the disappearance of the palace centers can completely and directly explain it. Majorian fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Feb 12, 2015 |
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Feb 12, 2015 04:21
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Majorian posted:I don't know if I'd characterize Odoacer as "mighty." "Lucky," certainly. I think that one of the reasons was that the writing system was so esoteric and specialized that the elites wouldn't have needed to "keep" anyone else from learning it; why would your average dirt farmer or retainer want to be able to keep track of tax returns or temple offerings? As I understand it, the way Linear B worked was that you couldn't really use it to read or write poetry, for example; it was pretty much a way for scribes to manage administrative tasks. You would need to invent vowels and stuff for it to have more non-elite appeal.
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Feb 13, 2015 05:25
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Jaramin posted:They stole the eagle motif(although everyone else had been doing so for 1500 years by then). But the issue with that icon is that it is literally the Nazi emblem with the actual swastika edited out in paint. So like a goon MMO guild, yeah?
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Feb 13, 2015 06:55
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Smiling Knight posted:I think that one of the reasons was that the writing system was so esoteric and specialized that the elites wouldn't have needed to "keep" anyone else from learning it; why would your average dirt farmer or retainer want to be able to keep track of tax returns or temple offerings? As I understand it, the way Linear B worked was that you couldn't really use it to read or write poetry, for example; it was pretty much a way for scribes to manage administrative tasks. You would need to invent vowels and stuff for it to have more non-elite appeal. There are plenty of writing systems that have poetry but not vowels. There is the argument (which I find persuasive) that the Greek alphabet was invented in order to write down Homer, since vowel quantity is essential to Greek scansion, but this isn't the case with all languages, and of course you COULD write down Greek poetry without vowels . . . you would just need to have a good idea of what it said already when you were reading it out again.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:38
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Smiling Knight posted:I think that one of the reasons was that the writing system was so esoteric and specialized that the elites wouldn't have needed to "keep" anyone else from learning it; why would your average dirt farmer or retainer want to be able to keep track of tax returns or temple offerings? As I understand it, the way Linear B worked was that you couldn't really use it to read or write poetry, for example; it was pretty much a way for scribes to manage administrative tasks. You would need to invent vowels and stuff for it to have more non-elite appeal. Alphabets(abjads) without vowels survived just fine to the present day, along with full logographic systems, so that doesn't really make any sense
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Feb 13, 2015 18:51
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icantfindaname posted:Alphabets(abjads) without vowels survived just fine to the present day, along with full logographic systems, so that doesn't really make any sense Best exemplified by Arabic which as we know has never ever been used for poetry.
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Feb 13, 2015 19:00
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Smiling Knight posted:I think that one of the reasons was that the writing system was so esoteric and specialized that the elites wouldn't have needed to "keep" anyone else from learning it; why would your average dirt farmer or retainer want to be able to keep track of tax returns or temple offerings? As I understand it, the way Linear B worked was that you couldn't really use it to read or write poetry, for example; it was pretty much a way for scribes to manage administrative tasks. You would need to invent vowels and stuff for it to have more non-elite appeal. Well, but here's the thing: the stuff we have in Linear B script is only the clerical/inventory stuff, but that may well be because that's all that survived. Even if Linear B couldn't be used to write poetry or prose, I have to believe that poets and writers in the cities used one script or another to write it down. You're right that your average dirt farmer wouldn't need to know Linear B to survive, but keep in mind, by the end of the Bronze Age, cities like Mycenae and Knossos had become fairly large and complex, at least by the standards of the day (e: and the Late Helladic cultures were also several hundred years old by the 12th century BC). A significant amount of the population lived in and around the palace centers, and probably didn't contribute directly to the economy - you instead had merchants and lawyers and doctors and whatever. I have to believe that these people were literate, wrote things down, and provided a market for a certain amount of poetry, literature, or even just written instruction. Whether or not they usually read or wrote things down with Linear B, or with some other script, the question still remains: what happened to these people? What happened to their literacy? Did they just all die out when the cataclysm hit their cities? Did they just decide not to pass their skills onto the next generation, when it became clear that there was so much less demand, with the palace economies gone? Was it something else altogether? We may never know, but boy, if it isn't the most interesting question to me in the whole greater mystery that is the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Majorian fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Feb 15, 2015 |
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Feb 15, 2015 10:36
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Majorian posted:palace economies Apologies.. What is a palace economy?
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Feb 15, 2015 10:45
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Dalael posted:Apologies.. What is a palace economy? Basically a system where all the money flows into the palace, and then is redistributed among the population. It's a particular flavor of command economy that was how most of the Bronze Age Aegean civilizations functioned.
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Feb 15, 2015 10:48
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Benny the Snake posted:I just had a thought-how damaged would an ancient Olympian's feet be from running in sandals so much? Humanity evolved to be long distance runners thousands of years before the invention of shoes. So I'm pretty sure an Olympians feet would be OK running around in well fitted sandals. Speaking personally, I hated wearing shoes as a kid, and used to run around the in the middle of summer on concrete and asphalt paved roads in 100+ degree heat without any shoes. It wasn't some iron man challenge, just something a dumb kid did. Human feet are evolved to be naturally tough, or at least as tough as any other animal out there. Evolution kind of skipped a step when it came to glass shards and loose Lego pieces, so it's still a really good idea to wear shoes . thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Feb 15, 2015 |
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Feb 15, 2015 12:08
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I know a dude who ran a ~100km mountain ultramarathon barefoot. Do not underestimate human feet.
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Feb 15, 2015 12:15
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my dad posted:I know a dude who ran a ~100km mountain ultramarathon barefoot. Do not underestimate human feet. Human beings are the most long-lasting of all land-based predators. They can chase anything until it collapses from exhaustion.
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Feb 15, 2015 12:25
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Running barefoot absolutely owns if your feet are used to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarahumara_people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abebe_Bikila I could list more, but phone posting sucks.
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Feb 15, 2015 12:50
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icantfindaname posted:Alphabets(abjads) without vowels survived just fine to the present day, along with full logographic systems, so that doesn't really make any sense that is an abjad stop using that you are persian you decline by vowel changes
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Feb 15, 2015 14:54
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Majorian posted:Well, but here's the thing: the stuff we have in Linear B script is only the clerical/inventory stuff, but that may well be because that's all that survived. Even if Linear B couldn't be used to write poetry or prose, I have to believe that poets and writers in the cities used one script or another to write it down. You're right that your average dirt farmer wouldn't need to know Linear B to survive, but keep in mind, by the end of the Bronze Age, cities like Mycenae and Knossos had become fairly large and complex, at least by the standards of the day (e: and the Late Helladic cultures were also several hundred years old by the 12th century BC). A significant amount of the population lived in and around the palace centers, and probably didn't contribute directly to the economy - you instead had merchants and lawyers and doctors and whatever. I have to believe that these people were literate, wrote things down, and provided a market for a certain amount of poetry, literature, or even just written instruction. Whether or not they usually read or wrote things down with Linear B, or with some other script, the question still remains: what happened to these people? What happened to their literacy? Did they just all die out when the cataclysm hit their cities? Did they just decide not to pass their skills onto the next generation, when it became clear that there was so much less demand, with the palace economies gone? Was it something else altogether? We may never know, but boy, if it isn't the most interesting question to me in the whole greater mystery that is the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Have you read Letters to the Kings of Mari? Just a ton of translated tablets. It's neat to see all the random miscellaneous stuff that's been recorded, like instructions on how to properly read a liver, a message to the king saying his dog just had puppies, or trade and military instructions.
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Feb 15, 2015 17:06
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Tunicate posted:Have you read Letters to the Kings of Mari? Those are the letters between an Assyrian king and his two sons/governors, right? They're a really good look at how things were in the 1800s BC. In some of the letters they're talking about their sweet chariot rides. Although, IIRC, they think the king and the princes were illiterate and relied on scribes for the reading and writing. sullat fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Feb 15, 2015 |
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Feb 15, 2015 17:16
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Tunicate posted:Have you read Letters to the Kings of Mari? I haven't actually! That sounds awesome, though. I love ancient letters like that. One of my favorites about the whole Bronze Age Collapse is that chilling final letter sent from the last king of Ugarit, Ammurapi, to the king of Alashiya (Cyprus), begging for help as the Sea People attacked his city: quote:“My father, behold, the enemy ships came (here); my cities (?) were burned, and they did evil things to my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots (?) are in the Hittite country, and all my ships are in the land of Lycia?...Thus the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us”
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Feb 15, 2015 18:26
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My personal favorite are the (i think) Egyptian obelisks that tell how the brave king defeated the Sea peoples... except they progress towards the capital as time goes on.
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Feb 15, 2015 18:41
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Agean90 posted:My personal favorite are the (i think) Egyptian obelisks that tell how the brave king defeated the Sea peoples... except they progress towards the capital as time goes on. Yeah, I've been listening to the Great Courses history of Egypt series, and I like how the guy describes Egyptian records of battles. To paraphrase him, "If you believe the Egyptian records, they never lost a battle! They just kept having to fight battles further and further into their heartland..."
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Feb 15, 2015 18:50
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Xander77 posted:3. Semi-related: What did the Romans know about India? Trade, diplomatic embassies, reading up on furry ants in Herodotus? Did they think of it as the place where Alexander stopped, and thus the end-goal of any utopian/theoretical attempt to outdo him? Probably a lot. They had regular trade, there were three Roman towns in India on the Tabula Peutingeriana (one of which has a temple so was probably permanently inhabited, the others may have just been trading outposts), there's Roman poo poo all over India and Indian poo poo in Rome. India was the furthest east you could consider part of the Roman world, I'd say. Romans traded further east and traveled at least as far as China, but India seems to be the eastern edge of where you wouldn't be surprised to find Romans around. There was no single "India" at the time though. Trajan apparently had the conquest of India as his end goal in his eastern adventures, but he died and Hadrian thought further expansion was foolish. Majorian posted:Well, but here's the thing: the stuff we have in Linear B script is only the clerical/inventory stuff, but that may well be because that's all that survived. Or it's all they wrote down. Like the way cuneiform tablets seem to all be the most boring poo poo on Earth about tax records and whatnot. I suspect early writing cultures saw writing as a way to record things that were hard to remember/easy to dispute, like business arrangements, and the tradition of oral storytelling was still very strong. Thus the idea of writing down a story or poem didn't make any sense at the time, and was a later invention. And that's why some of these oldest writing systems don't record literature.
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Feb 15, 2015 19:03
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Grand Fromage posted:Or it's all they wrote down. It's possible, but here's why I'm skeptical of that answer: even if they only used Linear B to write down boring clerical stuff, you've still got a city population that are about as globalized as a pre-modern society can be. Archeological discoveries like the Uluburun shipwreck show that there were a lot of different peoples and cultures coming in and out of the big cities of Mycenaean Greece, all of them bringing in their own languages and systems of writing. Many of those languages and writing systems had literary traditions of their own - Egyptian, Hittite, etc (hell, even Cuneiform was used for poetry and prose occasionally). I could believe that none of these writing systems would permeate any of the Mycenaean populace if they were only a trading power for a couple generations. But we're talking about several centuries here. In all that time, did the Mycenaeans really not see that the rest of the eastern Mediterranean world was putting its poetry and literature down in writing? It's possible, but I doubt it. So I have to believe that there was some sort of Mycenaean literary/poetic tradition that was written down somewhere, and if I'm right on that, then there's still that important and alluring missing puzzle piece, ie: what happened to literacy after the collapse of the Bronze Age empires? Anyway, I fully admit that I could be wrong. I'm no archeologist or even a proper historian - just an enthusiast. Majorian fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Feb 15, 2015 |
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Feb 15, 2015 19:34
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Majorian posted:It's possible, but here's why I'm skeptical of that answer: even if they only used Linear B to write down boring clerical stuff, you've still got a city population that are about as globalized as a pre-modern society can be. Archeological discoveries like the Uluburun shipwreck show that there were a lot of different peoples and cultures coming in and out of the big cities of Mycenaean Greece, all of them bringing in their own languages and systems of writing. Many of those languages and writing systems had literary traditions of their own - Egyptian, Hittite, etc (hell, even Cuneiform was used for poetry and prose occasionally). I could believe that none of these writing systems would permeate any of the Mycenaean populace if they were only a trading power for a couple generations. But we're talking about several centuries here. In all that time, did the Mycenaeans really not see that the rest of the eastern Mediterranean world was putting its poetry and literature down in writing? It's possible, but I doubt it. So I have to believe that there was some sort of Mycenaean literary/poetic tradition that was written down somewhere, and if I'm right on that, then there's still that important and alluring missing puzzle piece, ie: what happened to literacy after the collapse of the Bronze Age empires? On the other hand, why would you need to (or even think to) write something down that is composed extemporaneously (as many believe Homeric epic was)? Writing down your poetry is not automatically "better."
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Feb 15, 2015 21:11
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Majorian posted:Yeah, I've been listening to the Great Courses history of Egypt series, and I like how the guy describes Egyptian records of battles. To paraphrase him, "If you believe the Egyptian records, they never lost a battle! They just kept having to fight battles further and further into their heartland..." That could be literally true though. Look at the Cimbri War or the Chinese battles with the Xiongnu.
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Feb 15, 2015 22:40
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Tunicate posted:Have you read Letters to the Kings of Mari? I choose to interpret this as the message being from some random dude who was super-excited that his dog had just had puppies, and wanted to let the King know 
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Feb 15, 2015 23:33
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Majorian posted:Anyway, I fully admit that I could be wrong. I'm no archeologist or even a proper historian - just an enthusiast. It's just speculation anyway. I have seen people claim that like the Sumerians were robots who had no art because they didn't write down literature in the tax tablets we've found, which is absurd. I figure that writing is an invention for a specific purpose, and the most likely reason you'd want it would be to record poo poo that's hard to remember, like increasingly complex business/legal systems. I dunno if this idea is entirely out of my own rear end or from someone else's rear end that I read about or what, but I dunno. It seems more reasonable than "they didn't write down their art therefore they had none".
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Feb 16, 2015 00:00
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Grand Fromage posted:It's just speculation anyway. I have seen people claim that like the Sumerians were robots who had no art because they didn't write down literature in the tax tablets we've found, which is absurd. I figure that writing is an invention for a specific purpose, and the most likely reason you'd want it would be to record poo poo that's hard to remember, like increasingly complex business/legal systems. Best explanation I've seen is that since their epic poetry was largely improvised at each performance based on a set of standard plot points, there was no definitive version to set down in writing and nobody even thought about writing it down at the time. What did get written down was often hundreds of years later based on memories of elders for various reasons.
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