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Koramei posted:a lot less jaguars though Not for a want of effort I'm sure. If romans knew about then they totally would've wanted them.
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Sep 15, 2018 00:07
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Rome was closer to The Holy Mountain than to Gladiator.
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Sep 15, 2018 00:12
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Building upwards is the most basic way to deal with the needs of a growing dense urban area. Without it, you get more sprawl. There's also tactical advantages to having all vantage points where you can see a good distance (or being seen from a distance). I don't particularly know the needs of historical Korean cities though. I think the biggest use of tall towers aside from cultural showing off, clocktowers, and lighthouses was to provide fortifications, often against the will of higher authorities. Like modern day apocalypse preppers, but more likely to actually be used.
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Sep 15, 2018 01:04
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As mountainous as Korea is, there weren't any ancient Korean cities that really needed to go vertical. Gyeongju was the largest of them and it still wasn't big enough to entirely fill the valley it's in. As far as defensive walls go, some Korean cities had them but the standard tactic was for people to retreat to fortifications on top of mountains and shoot arrows at anybody climbing up, plus guerrilla harassment of the enemy army. Eventually the invader would realize there's really nothing in Korea that's worth all the trouble and would then withdraw. There are a few notable exceptions like Eulji Mundeok clowning the Sui army so hard he triggered the collapse of the entire dynasty. In the Imjin War Korea was allied with the Ming, who did the lion's share of the fighting against the Japanese since Japan was actually theoretically there to conquer China, Korea was just the battlefield.
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Sep 15, 2018 01:11
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Gyeongju had been emptied out at this point, there would have only been something like 10-20,000 people there. It probably had multistory buildings at its height in Silla times though, there's evidence of a sewer system and stuff even. By Joseon times Korea was not very urbanized though yeah, another of Confucianism's big hangups is against merchants, so commerce was shunned and cities were mostly just used for whatever it is the literati were supposed to be doing, most of which was only done in the capital. Also I've never actually read it as a reason for the one story houses, but Koreans loved their underfloor heating and I think that only really works on the first floor, so that could have been another reason, not related to Confucianism for once. Grand Fromage posted:In the Imjin War Korea was allied with the Ming, who did the lion's share of the fighting against the Japanese since Japan was actually theoretically there to conquer China, Korea was just the battlefield. 1. is that shortly after beating them back at Pyongyang, the Ming realized that fighting the Japanese was actually way loving harder than they expected, after which most of the fighting fell back on Korean guerrillas while the Ming armies sat on their asses in the north.* 2. that after completely flattening the Korean army in the opening weeks of the conflict, Hideyoshi's generals got ridiculously overconfident and immediately overextended themselves past their breaking point, which the Korean guerrillas (and what was left of the royal army) capitalized on, managing to basically prevent the Japanese from having any hope of actually "winning" before the Ming had even arrived. I brought this up a while back somewhat tentatively (maybe in the milhist thread tho) because this stuff is always hard to untangle from the nationalism, but in the past couple of months I've seen a couple of the foremost Western scholars on Joseon Korea (including the dude who edited the most significant English language publication on the war) assert it so I'm inclined to give it a lot more weight. In any case the reality is almost certainly more complicated than "Ming runs in to save the day"; the Joseon army was pretty inept at the start of the Imjin War (although from the context they were working from, at least some of their choices made sense) and not much better decades later when fighting the Manchus, but Korea's military history isn't actually that bad. Especially before Joseon, when Confucian bias against everything military left that whole side of society to rot. *or the Ming might have never intended to push farther in the first place. Ming good will got inflated a bunch by Joseon scholars as a reaction against the new Manchu (i.e. barbarian, to them) Qing Dynasty, which as always Imperial Japan played on to emphasize Korea's heteronomy, but initially the Ming actually had very little interest in aiding Korea. It was only after news reached them of how quickly the Japanese were winning that they decided to intervene, since they wanted to keep the war out of their own territory.
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Sep 15, 2018 02:31
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The Ming definitely didn't just hang out in the north, the Siege of Ulsan took place where I lived in Korea and most of that army was Ming. That's just about as far south as you can go, the next city down is Busan. The Ming got mauled so hard that they avoided Ulsan castle the rest of the war and would swing wide around it when attacking Kato Kiyomasa's territory. Also when he got back to Kumamoto he had food planted inside his castle walls to try to avoid ever starving in a siege again, which is fun. Japan definitely overextended itself by rolling Korea so quickly though. And trying to take over China was crazy to begin with and going to Beijing via Korea was even dumber. Short of Hideyoshi getting insanely lucky that war was not going to end any other way. Korean military history isn't bad, they just never had the resources to stand up against their various superior neighbors, whether it be China, Japan, or whichever nomadic Khitan/Jurchen/Mongol/Manchu/whatever group was on their northern border at the time. So it's not a history of great army battles or Roman style logistics or whatever. They were very good at guerrilla warfare instead. Even with their navy, Yi Sunsin's fleet was basically a water guerrilla force of Mad Max ships with cannons strapped to them that pranced around owning the Japanese in asymmetrical engagements.
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Sep 15, 2018 02:42
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It's a counterfactual and all, but tbh if the Japanese invaded 50 years later they're probably could have rolled the Ming.
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Sep 15, 2018 02:49
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The Ming wouldn't have been as weak in that scenario though, the Imjin War was a huge drain on their resources. But I suspect if Japan could have gone straight over and attacked Beijing directly they would've won, and then it'd be the question of whether they could successfully set up a Japanese conquest dynasty. Would've been an interesting way for history to go. But yeah the Ming certainly weren't altruistically helping the plucky Koreans, they just wanted to keep the Japanese bottled up in Korea and loving up Korean land instead of causing damage in China. A strategy as old as warfare. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Sep 15, 2018 |
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Sep 15, 2018 03:02
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The Japanese didn't actually fare that well against the Ming, it wasn't anywhere near as one sided as it was against the Joseon army. Plus the Qing conquest relied more on internal support from Chinese groups than the actual invasion, and if his attitude in Korea demonstrated anything, our boy Hideyoshi probably had no chance in hell of getting that. The dude was legitimately insane, it's really worth reading about it on its own. We hear about China, but his ambition wasn't limited just to that, he wanted to conquer the entire loving world. Basically every interaction he had with foreign power was under the assumption they were swearing fealty to him, from sultans in India to the king of Spain.Grand Fromage posted:The Ming definitely didn't just hang out in the north, the Siege of Ulsan took place where I lived in Korea and most of that army was Ming. That's just about as far south as you can go, the next city down is Busan. The Ming got mauled so hard that they avoided Ulsan castle the rest of the war and would swing wide around it when attacking Kato Kiyomasa's territory. Also when he got back to Kumamoto he had food planted inside his castle walls to try to avoid ever starving in a siege again, which is fun. The Siege of Ulsan was after the second invasion, when Hideyoshi tried to break the stalemate that the Ming had been happy to maintain until then. The Ming did do more than just siege down Pyongyang; the argument is a bit more complex than I let on with my sentence (or, to be honest, can totally recall; this is not my period), but the older conception that they did most of the heavy lifting on land while Joseon did things on water has been getting challenged. In both directions, actually; the Ming navy probably had a bigger role than it generally gets given credit for, and while some battles like Myeongnyang are kind of hard to argue with, some historians have been looking at Yi Sun-shin a bit more critically lately. I don't know too much about that though. quote:Korean military history isn't bad, they just never had the resources to stand up against their various superior neighbors, whether it be China, Japan, or whichever nomadic Khitan/Jurchen/Mongol/Manchu/whatever group was on their northern border at the time. They did though; even after Goguryeo, Silla beat back Tang China, Goryeo several times defeated Khitan invasions, it took the Mongols decades to conquer them despite them being right next to their power base (and aside from the court at Ganghwa, not everyone was hiding the entire time), they made a whole lot of successful expeditions against the Jurchens, and aside from the invasions under the Mongols, in which the Korean armies actually performed pretty well, polities that can actually be called either Korea or Japan barely even had any conflict until the Imjin War. I assume you were mostly just exaggerating to make a joke in context, but until the invasions at the turn of the 17th century looted half the country and irreparably broke their economic system, Korea was really not poor at all (there's a reason the Japanese generals made a concerted effort to take back thousands of Korean artisans with them on their way out of the war) and it often took determined effort to drive out invaders. And while Korean demographic history is still undeveloped, modern estimates actually have Korean and Japanese populations being almost equivalent at the end of the 16th century* when the Imjin War happened. "A Shrimp Among Whales" has some truth for the 20th century but the fact we conceive of it as Korea's reality for its entire history is because of propaganda done under Imperial Japan far more than it is actual reality. *(somewhat by coincidence; it was a particular peak for Korea's population after a plateau in Japan because of...decades of constant warfare. But Korea usually wasn't dramatically outnumbered by its neighbors' populations, except for China.)
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Sep 15, 2018 04:31
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Got any book recommendations? A lot of this is different than what I learned, but English language books about pre-1945 Korean history are... uh, limited, so that doesn't mean much. I've probably read as much from Korea being mentioned in Chinese/Japanese histories as I have from books actually about Korea.
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Sep 15, 2018 04:46
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The great Hwan Empire's strength was logistics. Who else could feed, arm, and field mighty armies across the breadth of Eurasia?
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Sep 15, 2018 05:03
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sullat posted:The great Hwan Empire's strength was logistics. Who else could feed, arm, and field mighty armies across the breadth of Eurasia? The Finns.
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Sep 15, 2018 05:29
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Since I've been going hard on how Korea was actually hot poo poo it's probably a good time to mention, the Hwan Empire is even more ridiculous than first appearance; even aside from not having...half the world, Korean civilization is not really especially old. For a long time the vast majority of our understandings of Korea in the west came from whatever the Imperial Japanese said, but there were still Korean diplomats that tried their damnedest to give an opposing perspective, and every now and then from them you do see stuff like ancient Korea from the times of "Dangun Joseon" pop up, as though it was a centralized full fledged state back in 2333 BC.* Whereas, in reality, the earliest "Korean" (and that's a bit debatable) states charitably start a few centuries before the Common Era, but developed states didn't exist throughout the peninsula until well into the first millennium. (although Japan is also not nearly as old as most people think) *I remember as a kid reading that in the Age of Empires manual, which then lists China's earliest date as the start of the Qin dynasty, and getting very confused. Grand Fromage posted:Got any book recommendations? A lot of this is different than what I learned, but English language books about pre-1945 Korean history are... uh, limited, so that doesn't mean much. I've probably read as much from Korea being mentioned in Chinese/Japanese histories as I have from books actually about Korea. It was the same for me until a few years ago, it kinda blew my mind once I started reading specifically about Korea. Imperial Japan+crazy nationalism really hosed our understanding of Korean history and it's only been getting challenged in the west over the past few decades; until then nearly everything was based on Japanese/Korean scholarship done in the prewar period which, to put it mildly, had an agenda. And for more general works it still hasn't really caught up so you still see the old stuff crop up all the time. And yeah lack of books is an issue...there's actually been a (relatively) huge amount of English-language scholarship on Korea over past decade or so, but there's still not many good overarching or general works. If there's a period you're interested in specifically (especially if it happens to be the first millennium, because that's what I'm interested in) I can give some better recommendations, but for a general overview I'd recommend Michael J Seth's A History of Korea: From Antiquity to Present. A lot of that will still be retreads for you though, the more interesting stuff comes out in the more specialized stuff. Did you know that the Central Asian nobles in the Yuan palaces demanded so many Goryeo women as concubines that Chinese court officials started bemoaning that the whole palace culture had gotten Koreanized, to the point that they had to learn Korean, and that late Yuan and early Ming women's dress, which I'd read a few times was the predecessor to Korean women's dress, was actually itself just Chinese-ified Korean dress those women had brought over? That during Goryeo times the Korean court would invent fake kings to present to the Song and Jin Dynasties, regularly making things up to tell one or the other of the dynasties (since they were sometimes simultaneously "sovereign" to Goryeo) to smooth relations over, to the point that the Song court started getting really suspicious and would try to seize Goryeo merchants to question them about what was actually happening inside their country? Or that basically every single thing I thought I knew about "Korea" and "Japan" in the first millennium was wrong? Anyway, alternatively the better bet would be to wait a year and a half for the Cambridge History of Korea to finally come out in 2020. Koramei fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Sep 15, 2018 |
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Sep 15, 2018 05:35
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Koramei posted:Anyway, alternatively the better bet would be to wait a year and a half for the Cambridge History of Korea to finally come out in 2020. Didn't know that was on the way. Their history of Japan is dry as a bone though, it's a struggle... also it triggers my sperg because they use a bizarre outdated romanization system for Korean in that series and an entire Korea series of that would drive me nuts. It's so off I can't even figure out what they're talking about half the time. Period would be anything pre-Imjin War. Silla's the only thing I feel like I have anything beyond a broad strokes grasp of.
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Sep 15, 2018 05:40
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Oh, you just sorta gotta get used to McCune-Reischauer, it's the standard in every academic text that doesn't come from a Korean publisher. It is kind of a pain since some works end up getting lazy and dropping the diacritic marks, which completely changes the pronunciation, but scholars like to stick to their ways I guess. The main things that make reading hard at first glance are: the apostrophes are for aspirated consonants (Kim 김 K'im 킴) or separating syllables (Pangi 방이 Pan'gi 반기), the..thing on the o and u is for differentiating 어 (ŏ) and 오 (o), and 우 (u) and 으 (ŭ). It annoyed me too at first but it didn't take that long to get the hang of it. Thinking about it they are all kind of dry as hell. Maybe try Sam Vermeersch's A Chinese Traveler in Medieval Korea, it's a document from a Song envoy when he visited Goryeo. It's a combination of very dry and by the numbers descriptions of Goryeo military formations and how many flags their warships fly on formation but then interspersed with an aloof Chinese official self-righteously judging everything and how much worse it all is than what the Chinese do. Also, David M. Robinson's Empire's Twilight, which is sort of about Yuan in Northeast Asia but in large part is about Goryeo; this was the period the two were pretty intertwined in some ways. (this one is also on JSTOR and I may have downloaded it and uploaded the entire thing to google drive  )
Koramei fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Sep 15, 2018 |
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Sep 15, 2018 06:09
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Unfortunately after many years living in Korea and being enraged at people who refused to learn how to romanize correctly (or just type in hangeul) I am incapable of getting used to it. If you write Pusan or Kyŏngju in TYOOL 2018 I want you and your entire family dead. Anyway on books, I am not finished with it yet but The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper is very good so far. It is all about the newest research into climate changes and disease from just before the Antonine Plague up through the Plague of Justinian.
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Sep 15, 2018 06:16
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Koramei posted:We hear about China, but [Hideyoshi's] ambition wasn't limited just to that, he wanted to conquer the entire loving world. Basically every interaction he had with foreign power was under the assumption they were swearing fealty to him, from sultans in India to the king of Spain.
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Sep 15, 2018 06:23
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I don't think it was like he was putting on a show, records are that he was livid when he found out the Koreans hadn't welcomed his plan with open arms and were actually opposing him, and from what I remember I think his interactions with Spain gave off the impression he genuinely thought they were swearing fealty, and it took some diplomatic finagling on the part of the Spanish envoy in the Philippines and Hideyoshi's own intermediaries to smooth over not sending a token force to contribute; in general his diplomats were working overtime to smooth over his ego. But yeah it would have all been under a tributary-like system, even for Korea right next door he was happy to basically leave them alone as long as they let him pass through and joined in the invasion.
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Sep 15, 2018 06:40
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Why did he wany to march through Korea, anyways, instead of landing straight on the Chinese coast at Shandong or something?
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Sep 15, 2018 08:36
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Why did he wany to march through Korea, anyways, instead of landing straight on the Chinese coast at Shandong or something? It took about a day for the ships to go from Tsushima to Busan in the first place, and they're right next to each other. Going further would have meant perhaps days and maybe even longer on the sea. The horses would have found it intolerable, and provisioning everyone would have been a nightmare.
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Sep 15, 2018 09:13
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Korea could have jumped into the war anyway and started messing with the Japanese supply lines as well, right?
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Sep 15, 2018 09:32
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Kassad posted:Korea could have jumped into the war anyway and started messing with the Japanese supply lines as well, right? The ol' Manila problem strikes again.
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Sep 15, 2018 16:52
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I'm guessing the answer is "we have no way of knowing," but was there a time when the vulgar latin in say Lutetia and Lusitania was mutually-intelligible, or was it more local language-vulgar latin-french/portuguese with no period of mutual intelligibility? E: or at least little mutual intelligibility, since romance languages usually let you at least read a decent amount of each other to this day.
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Sep 16, 2018 22:18
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The high degree of regionalization that led to the development of Romance languages was an artifact of the post-imperial period in the west. I don’t have any specific text to support this but I’d be very surprised if Vulgar Latin wasn’t similar enough to understand in all the western provinces into the sixth century or even later.
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Sep 16, 2018 23:02
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The various vulgates are just not well preserved enough to say with that sort of detail. I would agree that you could probably go from one end of the former empire to the other speaking only Latin up to 600 or so and be understood. You'd probably actually have trouble in the east before you did in the west, outside of Britain virtually all the invaders were bilingual and you have Romeaboos like the Visigoths in Spain who abandoned their language entirely and only spoke Latin, at least among the elites.
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Sep 16, 2018 23:29
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Grand Fromage posted:outside of Britain virtually all the invaders were bilingual and you have Romeaboos like the Visigoths in Spain who abandoned their language entirely and only spoke Latin, at least among the elites. Are we sure about this? Wasn't Ulfas's Gothic bible used in Iberia until the Islamic conquest?
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Sep 17, 2018 01:15
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Epicurius posted:Are we sure about this? Wasn't Ulfas's Gothic bible used in Iberia until the Islamic conquest? Not that late, Gothic had remained as a church language into the 500s but was replaced by Latin when they switched from Arianism to the Roman Catholic church. Pretty much everything surviving that the Visigoths wrote was in Latin. The Visigoths are very tough to pick out in the archaeology because they Romanized so thoroughly, but they did keep Gothic names at least which provides one way of distinguishing them. Now, it is possible that they continued speaking Gothic and just didn't write in it. No way to know for sure. But the fact that Spanish is the language we're left with from that region is rather strong evidence Latin was never wiped out, so if they did speak Gothic still they were likely bilingual.
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Sep 17, 2018 01:34
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At one point there were Germanic peoples who spoke a mutually intelligible language living from York to Pavia and Cadiz to the Dnieper.
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Sep 17, 2018 05:53
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:At one point there were Germanic peoples who spoke a mutually intelligible language living from York to Pavia and Cadiz to the Dnieper. Is the punchline that that language was Latin?
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Sep 17, 2018 16:14
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What led to the decline of communal bathing in Europe? Was it just the preferences of the Vikings and Germans that took over the bulk of Europe? Was it the growing stratification of life in the late Roman Empire leaving nobody to keep public utilities going? Was it just the old bathing complexes becoming logistically too difficult to maintain?
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Sep 20, 2018 01:03
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https://www.mikkelaaland.com/bathing-in-medieval-europe.html http://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/did-people-in-the-middle-ages-take-baths/ Good summaries in these links. Nothing I can really add to 'em.
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Sep 20, 2018 01:08
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SlothfulCobra posted:What led to the decline of communal bathing in Europe? Was it just the preferences of the Vikings and Germans that took over the bulk of Europe? Was it the growing stratification of life in the late Roman Empire leaving nobody to keep public utilities going? Was it just the old bathing complexes becoming logistically too difficult to maintain? Have you seen the heating bills for the Baths of Caracalla?
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Sep 20, 2018 01:09
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SlothfulCobra posted:What led to the decline of communal bathing in Europe? Was it just the preferences of the Vikings and Germans that took over the bulk of Europe? Was it the growing stratification of life in the late Roman Empire leaving nobody to keep public utilities going? Was it just the old bathing complexes becoming logistically too difficult to maintain?
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Sep 20, 2018 01:18
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The not-entirely-unfounded belief that water baths were unhealthy contributed as well. The dry linen scrubbing they used instead worked quite well at keeping the stink down.
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Sep 20, 2018 02:05
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Public bathing is still common so I don’t understand really.
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Sep 20, 2018 02:16
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HEY GUNS posted:protestantism. the middle ages and renaissance were comparatively well-bathed according to the first link Grand Fromage posted, the Catholic church also became anti-bath in the 15th century: quote:In its medieval heyday the bath house could be likened to a combination of today’s cinema, amusement park, pool hall, and popular street corner-one of the few places available for public recreation. Understandably, this led to some bawdy problems. In Dijon and the Valois Dukes of Burgundy, William Tyler describes the four étuves of fourteenth-century Dijon. Two were hot-water baths, and all four lacked privacy, thereby inviting all manner of disorder. In an effort to achieve a s semblance of public decency, separate baths were designated for men and women. Those who broke the rule (such as a monk from St. Benigne, who was caught in the company of two married women) were fined. However, with affluent and influential people lounging on couches, drinking hot spiced wine and enjoying the pleasures of gender, authorities were only half-hearted in their attempts to thwart prostitution and debauchery. This applied not only to Dijon, but to all of Europe. Soon the bawdy reputation of the baths eclipsed their primary function of bathing. The words étuve, badstübe and bordello took on new meanings. In one of Tyler’s accounts, “there was such a noise of yelling, quarreling, and jumping up and down it was amazing the neighbors should be able to stand it, justice ignore it, and the earth tolerate it.” Although the article doesn't elaborate, the article also suggests public paths declined in southeast Europe as Ottoman rule was rolled back, with Ottoman stye baths disappearing as the Turks left an area.
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Sep 20, 2018 02:46
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Given that the Romans did most of their actual cleaning with oil and a strigil, is it fair to guess that the baths got quite a bit filthier when those fell out of use?
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Sep 20, 2018 02:57
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Still boggles the mind they ran out of wood.
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Sep 20, 2018 03:14
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Molten Boron posted:Given that the Romans did most of their actual cleaning with oil and a strigil, is it fair to guess that the baths got quite a bit filthier when those fell out of use? I remember someone trying the dry linen scurb method in modern times, has anyone tried to see how clean you could get with a strigil?
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Sep 20, 2018 03:30
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LingcodKilla posted:Still boggles the mind they ran out of wood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_forest_in_Central_Europe#Forest_development_in_the_Middle_Ages
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Sep 20, 2018 07:25
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