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Grand Fromage posted:I don't know of any evidence of any European influence in China until the post-Alexander period Well if you think the Indo-Europeans came from the black sea region instead of Central Asia, then chariots and horses are a clear example. skasion posted:Probably favorable if any, I don’t know much about Ottoman economic policy but you would expect it to be even more focused on Asian trade than the Byzantines. In the 16th century they were probably handling a larger volume of trade through India and the Aceh sultanate than all the European powers combined. Not sure when they get surpassed but I wouldn't be surprised if that was still true up until the 18th century. It helped that they were a lot closer, they mostly worked through smaller galleys. I don't think they made it past the straits of Malacca that often though, at least I haven't heard of them competing for trade in that region. Only tangentially related but I just saw this awesome portrait from a 17th century Japanese mission to Rome and had to share it:  His name was Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga and he was very popular with his hosts. That galleon behind him was supposedly built by his daimyo Date Masamune, who was trying to encourage European traders and missionaries to come to his domain. Hasekura publicly embraced Christianity and promised his lord would make Japan a christian kingdom, especially if he could rely on European support. However once Hasekura got back, uh something he said must have upset the lord, because he instantly changed direction. quote:"Two days after the return of Rokuemon to Sendai, a three-point edict against the Christian was promulgated: first, that all Christians were ordered to abandon their faith, in accordance with the rule of the shōgun, and for those who did not, they would be exiled if they were nobles, and killed if they were citizens, peasants or servants. Second, that a reward would be given for the denunciation of hidden Christians. Third that propagators of the Christian faith should leave the Sendai fief, or else, abandon their religion" (November 1620 letter of father Angelis, Japan-China archives of the Jesuits in Rome, quoted in Gonoi's "Hasekura Tsunenaga", p231) Interestly some of his retainers chose to stay in Spain and a number of their descendants still live there today. This goes to show how the ideology of racism was still nascent, there wasn't yet strong antipathy towards Asians.
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Jan 15, 2019 07:07
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Thanks for some of the China posts, my knowledge of Chinese History is pretty poor.
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Jan 15, 2019 07:21
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Squalid posted:I was thinking about this recently and trhying to break down all the ways pre-modern peoples raised armies. Some of the systems I could think of and basic characterizations: The levels of equipment, organization, and power projection potential aren't linked to the way the troops are raised. e: and then there's also the Swedish allotment system, which was a mix of some of those systems plus some other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_system Hogge Wild fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Jan 15, 2019 |
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Jan 15, 2019 09:08
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Koramei posted:There's some in Korea, and there have been (by Koreans) some arguments that they (or some of them) predate the Japanese ones, but I think the general consensus is that they were a Japanese import. Do you know where they are? My initial google search has been predictably full of dumb.
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Jan 15, 2019 16:27
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Vatican City is Roman territory and the Roman Empire lives today.
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Jan 15, 2019 17:47
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Grand Fromage posted:Do you know where they are? My initial google search has been predictably full of dumb. It's a bit hard to make out but they're mostly in the southwest here:  (kofuns are keyhole-shaped tombs, for those that don't know) There's also some suspiciously shaped hills (around Busan I think) that've been argued to be kofun, but I think most signs point to them just being hills. These kofun on the map have haniwa (little mortuary figurines also intimately associated with the Kofun Period) and everything though, but also Korean prestige goods. There's been all sorts of claims about the occupants but according to the book this map is from (Early Korea-Japan Interactions, which just came out a few months ago and is about as reputable as it gets for this kind of thing) asserts that they were probably the graves of Wa nobles working with Baekje to facilitate trade.
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Jan 16, 2019 01:08
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Hey have any of you Far East experts read Kenneth Swope’s “The Military Collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty” or can you recommend a good book on the same subject? It’s kind of costly so I’d like to know if it’s worthwhile before I buy.
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Jan 16, 2019 01:32
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I haven't but I've heard pretty mixed things about his scholarship in "Dragon's Head and Serpent's Tail," he gets some relatively important facts wrong and is pretty bad about treating Ming sources uncritically. It looks like this one is a newer work so maybe he's gotten better but if there is an alternative it might be good to look for.
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Jan 16, 2019 01:40
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Koramei posted:It's a bit hard to make out but they're mostly in the southwest here: That area would make sense if they are tombs of Japanese. Have any of them been excavated? I think a couple of Japanese ones were before the Imperial Household Agency freaked out that there might be Korean stuff in there and shut it down, but most aren't. Also why the gently caress is a book published in TYOOL 2018 writing Paekche and Koguryo instead of Baekje and Goguryeo 
Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 01:49
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Vatican City is Roman territory and the Roman Empire lives today. Did the Ottomans pass down the Caesar of Rome title after Mehmed II? ...if so, did Mustafa Kemal take the title upon becoming president?
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Jan 16, 2019 11:00
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Question : Did the alleged persecution of Christians by the Romans happen and if so, to what degree. Thank you I will hang up and listen.
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Jan 16, 2019 15:24
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FAUXTON posted:Did the Ottomans pass down the Caesar of Rome title after Mehmed II? Turkey is a pretty strict republic so I’d say not at all.
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Jan 16, 2019 15:26
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euphronius posted:Question : From what I could understand from The History of Rome and Byzantium, it did happen on and off depending on the emperors at the time. Sometimes the persecution was extremely brutal while at other times, it meant being barred from working for the imperial government and from any position of authority.
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Jan 16, 2019 16:02
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euphronius posted:Question : Yes, they were persecuted at least intermittently by some Roman leaders until the early 4th century. The degree of persecution varied and action against Christians was never constant but many Christians were killed for following Christian doctrine — there is no way to know how many, but consensus figures tend to be in the range of several thousands of dead (over a few centuries). That’s a lot of judicial murder especially by the standards of premodern societies, but another way to consider its scope is that probably more Roman Christians were killed by Gothic Christians in the Battle of Adrianople, and more Roman Christians killed by other Roman Christians in the Battle of the River Frigidus. Nero infamously had a number of Christians killed off in 64 as scapegoats for the fire that had devastated Rome. In the early 2nd century there are extant letters back and forth between Pliny and Trajan about how to persecute them (don’t bother going out looking for Christians to mess with, says Trajan; if somebody is actively denounced as Christian you should give them the opportunity to curse Christ and offer to the gods to prove they are not, but if they are anonymously accused or no proof of Christianity is provided, you should ignore the accusation). But it’s important to note that Pliny was a regional governor, not setting policy for the whole empire. Hadrian not long after responded to a similar question from a governor by saying that being a Christian was not a crime in itself. We do not see empire-wide persecution of Christians until Decius was emperor in 250. He made an edict that everyone but Jews had to sacrifice to the emperor and get certified by a magistrate for it. The practice was revived under Valerian, and in both cases some prominent Christians were put to death while others sucked it up and did it to save themselves. This became an issue of religious controversy down the road (is it really morally acceptable to take communion from a priest who has made pagan sacrifices to protect himself?) but in neither case do these persecutions seem to have eliminated Christians as a group from even the upper class of Roman society. Diocletian’s tetrarchy was the last imperial government to seriously persecute Christians as a group: Galerius and to a somewhat lesser extent Diocletian himself were committed to traditional religious revivalism and first expelled Christians from the army before eventually launching into a general proscription of Christians in 303-4. Under the western tetrarchs Maximian and particularly Constantius the proscription was not seriously enforced, but in the east it was: churches were destroyed and deprived of property, Christians were stripped of rank, clergy were imprisoned unless they sacrificed to the gods, and eventually everyone had to offer a sacrifice or die. Not long after this Diocletian resigned, and the subsequent civil war comprehensively broke Galerius’ power over the western empire. Galerius, on his deathbed a few years later, somewhat grudgingly retracted the policy and allowed Christians freedom of assembly and so forth. After that there were no more remotely comparable persecutions of Christianity under Rome. Julian attempted to reestablish paganism as the religion of the elite, but certainly did not succeed in his short reign, and his measures were hardly on the level of the blood-and-thunder of past emperors. He was more likely to be found banning Christian schools than throwing Christians to the lions. The failure of the tetrarchic persecution to break the church was, and is, generally believed to have been extremely important in the rise of Christians to power over the empire within a generation. Within the century Christianity became the state religion and persecuted pagans far more effectually, though generally not as bloodily.
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Jan 16, 2019 16:39
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Was that persecution of Christians congruent with persecution of other religious sects? What made Christians special in the eyes of the Romans, here? Also, what made Decius give that exception to the Jews? Were they simply the only sufficiently big monotheistic group?
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Jan 16, 2019 17:14
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Thank you for the response
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Jan 16, 2019 17:16
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tonberrytoby posted:Was that persecution of Christians congruent with persecution of other religious sects? What made Christians special in the eyes of the Romans, here? The Jews unlike Christians weren't actively proselytizing and trying to grow their numbers outside of Judea. The Romans didn't only target the Christians, for example Druids in Gaul were supposedly hunted down and mostly wiped out within a century of Julius Caeser conquering Gaul.
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Jan 16, 2019 17:30
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tonberrytoby posted:Was that persecution of Christians congruent with persecution of other religious sects? What made Christians special in the eyes of the Romans, here? By the mid to late third century Christians were extremely numerous. Again it’s hard to say how many exactly there were, but it was clearly a lot, especially in the big cities of the east. Most other religious sects did not get the same poo poo as Christians because they did not deny the existence of the Roman gods. Mithraists for example weren’t blaspheming against the divinity of Jupiter or the imperial cult, they just had their own mysteries on top of that. This was a long-established and totally acceptable practice throughout the Greco-Roman world. What was NOT acceptable was claiming that these objects of worship were just false idols, as Christians did. Odd as it sounds, Romans thought of Christians as being basically atheists: they denied the existence of the gods and the right of the civic religious establishment to power, which was as bad as rejecting the authority of the emperor himself. Pliny, when writing to Trajan, says that he has been offering Christians three chances to recant their beliefs, and if they don’t take the hint he kills them because, regardless of what they actually believe, they are clearly stubborn enough to be a public nuisance that should be gotten rid of. But the Christians were not the only sect that pagan Roman governments tried to crush; around the time the tetrarchs began persecuting Christians, they also acted violently against Manichaeans, who had similarly weird beliefs and had the additional black mark against them of being Persian, and therefore creepy and foreign. Ironically the Sassanids were busily stamping out Manichaeans in Persia right around the same time. There were also a lot of widely held beliefs about the shadiness of Christian rites: because they were generally conducted in private homes at first, they were thought of as secretive and possibly nefarious. They were supposed to commit cannibalism (“take, eat; this is my body”) and incest (possibly deriving from their habit of referring to one another as brothers and sisters in Christ) and generally associated with poverty and criminality. They seemed like a bad lot and these perceptions took a while to shift. But they did shift, for eventually their religion became publicly acceptable (despite some governments’ disapprobation) and people could see that they were not in fact a bunch of low class scumbags eating one another. tonberrytoby posted:Also, what made Decius give that exception to the Jews? Were they simply the only sufficiently big monotheistic group? The Jews were a relatively known quantity and their religion was old, ancestral, and non-proselytizing. So the Romans thought of it somewhat more favorably in general than the newer, weirder, and more conversion-focused Christians. Not to say that they didn’t persecute Jews occasionally as well though, sometimes pretty severely.
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Jan 16, 2019 17:35
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The Romans obliterated the Jewish state. That’s I guess a prosecution.
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Jan 16, 2019 17:37
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tonberrytoby posted:
Jews were pretty much always exempt from sacrifice edicts because the Jewish religion forbade them from sacrificing to gods other than the Jewish one, or to the emperor. Also, Christians didnt really have a god the way that Jews had a god. Jews were a nation who worshiped their historical god according to their traditional rites and practices, the same way the Dacians or the Greeks or the Arabs or who ever had their gods who they worshiped according to their ancestral rites. Christians were a sect that got together in secret, violating the laws on unauthorized secret gatherings to worship a man who had been executed for sedition and formenting religious unrest two hundred years ago. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 17:39
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The Jews also had a number of uprisings, some moderately successful, I believe mostly over this very point and it seems likely to me (an idiot) it was easier to just give in and allow them to not worship the emperor etc.
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Jan 16, 2019 23:45
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Vaginal Vagrant posted:The Jews also had a number of uprisings, some moderately successful, I believe mostly over this very point and it seems likely to me (an idiot) it was easier to just give in and allow them to not worship the emperor etc. Hadrian had actually made the practice of Judaism illegal after the Bar Kokhba rebellion, renamed Jerusalem after himself and dedicated it to Jupiter, And banned Jews from the city , but all that was lifted after his death. In Judaism, Hadrian is still seen as the model of the evil king, and every time he's referred to in the Talmud, his name is followed with the curse, "crush his bones". (There's a Jewish tradition that says that the dead will be resurrected, but if their bones are destroyed, they won't).
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Jan 17, 2019 00:11
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I remember reading somewhere that Hadrian is more or less directly responsible for the current Jewish diaspora
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Jan 17, 2019 00:27
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the common denominator is monotheism the imperial-era romans took religious unity, for a very broad definition of unity, very seriously. someone who refused to perform religion-appropriate rites to support the emperor when asked to do so was committing treason. someone who did that, and also preached that everyone else's gods are fake? that's a genuine national security threat, because the whole empire hinged on everyone getting along despite their differences. judaism, christianity, manichaeism, zoroastrianism, etc. were too subversive, to this line of thinking, because anyone whose religion explicitly denounces everyone else's religion is guaranteed to start a fight over religious differences, either as the instigator or the victim. i'm sure it's completely coincidental that the empire which had gotten along without widespread religious conflict other than the jewish uprisings, despite ruling over peoples with hundreds of different religions, descended into paroxysms of religious violence over heresy after christianity became the state religion
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Jan 17, 2019 00:36
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to be clear i'm not endorsing the measures the romans took to stamp out monotheism. if anything, giving it an air of subversive edginess bolstered the formation of a sustainable movement in christianity, which took advantage of every failing of the roman system to spread itself as the religion of choice for folks who felt the established authorities had never done them any favors. i just don't think that they were wrong to believe that monotheism was an existential threat to the roman empire as they understood it
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Jan 17, 2019 00:48
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Grand Fromage posted:That area would make sense if they are tombs of Japanese. Have any of them been excavated? I think a couple of Japanese ones were before the Imperial Household Agency freaked out that there might be Korean stuff in there and shut it down, but most aren't. I looked it up and apparently half of them have been excavated so far. It's still strange to me that there's these obviously important finds that are just sitting there waiting for people to actually study them. We go crazy over a possible secret chamber in Tutankhamen's tomb, but there's things like the imperial kofuns, Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum, and (while less important, still) these kofuns in Korea. I can appreciate waiting for preservation's sake but sometimes (probably incorrectly) I feel like we're scraping the barrel with archaeology so often, and yet there's these things we know about that will be absolutely monumental. And yeah, McCune-Reischauer romanization is (sadly) the standard for academic texts in the west. Normally I don't mind it much but it sucks when they drop the diacritic marks, like they did here. If you want to re-Hangeulize the words there's no way of knowing how some of them go; not so much of an issue for a word for a kingdom like Goguryeo (or here, Goguryo) but the opposite page lists out all the individual names of tombs and so on and most of them are specific and obscure as hell so it presents some real issues if I want to look them up.
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Jan 17, 2019 00:50
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So what I’m gathering is Christian persecution happened sporadically and while it did not result in many people dying, there was probably broad general oppression of free exercise:
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Jan 17, 2019 00:57
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Jazerus posted:to be clear i'm not endorsing the measures the romans took to stamp out monotheism. if anything, giving it an air of subversive edginess bolstered the formation of a sustainable movement in christianity, which took advantage of every failing of the roman system to spread itself as the religion of choice for folks who felt the established authorities had never done them any favors. The rise of Christianity certainly was a threat as it was a parallel power structure and identity to that of the Roman State and Roman citizenship. In the Imperial order the only thing really uniting a Syrian in Antioch and a Briton in Londinium was their relationship and status within the Roman State Framework. With the emergence of Christianity you suddenly had a strong competitor to draw together disparate backgrounds present in the Empire. To his credit I think Constantine realized this and instead of trying to stamp it out like Galerius etc. he worked to kind of awkwardly fuse the systems together. This fusion didn't really work in the West, or at least it wasn't enough to keep the Empire together. However in the East this union creating a strong religious and cultural identity is probably the only reason the Eastern Empire survived for so long and managed to weather disasters that destroyed so many of its contemporaries.
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Jan 17, 2019 01:06
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cheetah7071 posted:I remember reading somewhere that Hadrian is more or less directly responsible for the current Jewish diaspora Jews were living all over the Mediterranean world, but especially Egypt and Greece, long before Hadrian was even born.
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Jan 17, 2019 01:09
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Destroying the Roman Empire is the best thing Christianity has ever done imo.
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Jan 17, 2019 01:15
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Getting real Gibbony in here.
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Jan 17, 2019 01:15
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Jazerus posted:the common denominator is monotheism Judaism did perform religion-appropriate rites to support the Emperor, though. In fact, one of the steps of mutual provocations that led to the First Jewish War was when Temple authorities, to protest the failure of Roman authorities to stop Greek merchants from sacrificing in front of a synagogue, stopped sacrificing on behalf of the Emperor. If people are curious, here's a little timeline of the events immediately leading to the Jewish revolt. 1. Nero appoints Gessius Florus, who's wife is a friend of Nero's wife, procurator of Judea. Florus is known to be pro-Greek 2. A bunch of provocations and conflicts happen between Jews and Greeks. It culminates in an incident where a Greek merchant sacrifices chickens to Zeus in front of a synagogue in Caesarea and then puts the sacrificed chickens on a pot at the entrance to the synagogue. That makes the synagogue ritually unclean as far as the Jews are concerned, and the synagogue sends a delegation to Florus to ask that the merchant be prosecuted. Florus makes the Jewish delegation pay a bribe and then throws them in prison anyway. 3. In response, the authorities at the Temple in Jerusalem order the daily sacrifices on behalf of Nero stopped. 4. Florus goes to Jerusalem, claiming the province is delinquent in taxes, and then sends troops into the temple, who take 15 talents of gold out of the Temple 5. Mobs start gathering on the street protesting Florus. He's mocked as the "beggar procurator", so poor he has to steal from temples, and the crowd takes up a collection for him. 6. Worried about the mob and upset he's being mocked, Florus sends in the army, who break up the protests and arrest the ringleaders. Florus announces they'll be flogged and crucified, even though some are Roman citizens. 7. Agrippa II and his sister, Berenice of Cilicia, who are in Jerusalem, go to see Florus, where she begs him not to execute the ringleaders, and reminds him it's illegal to sentence Romans without trial, and to flog and crucify them, but he doesn't listen and do it anyway. 8. Protesting this, a Jewish crowd barricades the tunnels leading from the Roman fort to the Temple Mount. Agrippa comes to them and makes a speech urging them to calm down, return to their homes, and trust Nero and Roman law to deal with Florus, but he's attacked and forced to flee. 9 Jerusalem breaks out in revolt. The Temple is siezed. The current high priest is overthrown, and two previous high priests, known to be pro-Roman, are murdered. Florus flees. The war is on.
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Jan 17, 2019 01:16
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Koramei posted:I looked it up and apparently half of them have been excavated so far. It's still strange to me that there's these obviously important finds that are just sitting there waiting for people to actually study them. We go crazy over a possible secret chamber in Tutankhamen's tomb, but there's things like the imperial kofuns, Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum, and (while less important, still) these kofuns in Korea. I can appreciate waiting for preservation's sake but sometimes (probably incorrectly) I feel like we're scraping the barrel with archaeology so often, and yet there's these things we know about that will be absolutely monumental. I went to see the great kofun in Sakai, the largest tomb in the entire world, and it was neat but also really disappointing because it's just a tree covered hill that has never been excavated. There's a tiny museum saying "yep this is definitely (extremely mythical emperor)'s tomb" and some models of what the kofun looks like without dirt on it, which... I guess maybe ground penetrating radar got that? Or it's just bullshit, who knows. There are so many kofun in Japan there is no preservation argument for not excavating at least some of them, it's just the IHA being dickshits like they always are. Koramei posted:And yeah, McCune-Reischauer romanization is (sadly) the standard for academic texts in the west. Normally I don't mind it much but it sucks when they drop the diacritic marks, like they did here. If you want to re-Hangeulize the words there's no way of knowing how some of them go; not so much of an issue for a word for a kingdom like Goguryeo (or here, Goguryo) but the opposite page lists out all the individual names of tombs and so on and most of them are specific and obscure as hell so it presents some real issues if I want to look them up. I have serious autism about bad romanization after living there and trying to get directions from idiots who don't know/care how to romanize and won't just write in hangeul so I have some clue what the gently caress they're talking about. I feel like someone is jamming a knife in my eye every time I read McCune-Reischauer. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Jan 17, 2019 |
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Jan 17, 2019 01:19
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yeah the romans were willing to give judaism a pass at first for previously posted reasons - a national, non-proselytizing religion that's willing to go along with praying for the emperor isn't particularly threatening. the julio-claudian era empire was also much less paranoid about religion, more like the republic in that way. it was the jewish uprisings that cemented the idea of monotheists as dangerous, fairly or not, and so christianity had a target painted on its back from the start as an offshoot of judaism
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Jan 17, 2019 01:23
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The usual reason stuff doesn’t get excavated is it’s expensive. There’s a lot of sites and not much money, so often you save the money you have for stuff that’s about to be destroyed by construction or something. Not that weird political stuff doesn’t get in the way, but places like Korea probably have a long list of poo poo they just haven’t had time to get to yet.
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Jan 17, 2019 01:42
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Squalid posted:Not that weird political stuff doesn’t get in the way, but places like Korea probably have a long list of poo poo they just haven’t had time to get to yet. Especially since they have to excavate all the way to england 
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Jan 17, 2019 01:53
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Did any gentile Romans ever get into worshipping YHWH the way they got into worshipping Isis or whoever? (And before someone jumps in let’s say Christianity doesn’t count).
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Jan 17, 2019 02:04
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Omnomnomnivore posted:Did any gentile Romans ever get into worshipping YHWH the way they got into worshipping Isis or whoever? Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God-fearer
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Jan 17, 2019 02:10
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Grand Fromage posted:
At least I'm not the only person who hates the IHA. There are so many cool things we could find, as well as confirmation to tons of theories of ancient Asia that are all being suppressed because dumb nationalism.
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Jan 17, 2019 02:46
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Jazerus posted:yeah the romans were willing to give judaism a pass at first for previously posted reasons - a national, non-proselytizing religion that's willing to go along with praying for the emperor isn't particularly threatening. the julio-claudian era empire was also much less paranoid about religion, more like the republic in that way. it was the jewish uprisings that cemented the idea of monotheists as dangerous, fairly or not, and so christianity had a target painted on its back from the start as an offshoot of judaism I don't know how much of that you see, really. There's not much Roman writing that condemns monotheism itself. Both Judaism and Christianity are criticized by Roman writers for a bunch of reasons, but not that one.
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Jan 17, 2019 02:57
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