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cheetah7071 posted:ee: I think he talked about the bronze before the oracle bones because he was coming off of talking about the Xia, who we only have a material culture for, not written records There's no evidence for the Xia at all. There obviously were people living in China pre-Shang but nothing that in any way matches up with the stories, which given that the stories are obviously not true, isn't that surprising. The fairest thing you can say is there was also no evidence of the Shang before the discovery of the Oracle Bones either, so there may be something out there to find. I think it'd make a lot more sense if you read something specialized on it. "Bronze" is a huge category. In the Shang era they don't seem to have been using bronze for everyday items, any bronze was royal to one degree or another, ranging from what were presumably gifts to officials to things like the tripod cauldrons that were symbols of the authority of the universe itself. But this is where I think the nationalist narrative is coming in, because bronzemaking pre-dates the Shang by quite a bit, and the "accepted" version of events is bronzework was invented by the Xia. So the idea of it being a unified style spreading from one location is suggesting that this bronze is the Xia dynasty ruling over a unified heartland of China. But that requires accepting that area as China, the Xia as existing, and bronze as a natively developed technology. The first of those is much less widely accepted since the discovery of other major cultures in China, like the Sanxingdui, which suggests it was not simply civilization spreading out from the one central point of the Yellow River. The Xia being real depends on who you read; I don't think many legitimate scholars outside China accept its existence, but are open to being proven wrong if something is found. Bronze is first found in Europe, then the Middle East, then much later in China. It spreading east or being invented independently are both possible, nobody knows.
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Feb 28, 2020 06:10
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For an example of how squishy things get pre-Shang. You may have run across the "China has 5,000 years of history" meme that the Chinese government promotes. Ignoring the fact that history refers to writing and there is no Chinese writing older than about 3,600 years, you may wonder where that 5,000 comes from. That is dating from the first supposed ruler of China, the Yellow Emperor. The Yellow Emperor ruled from 2698 to 2598 BCE. He was conceived by a bolt of lightning, taught humans how to build houses, grow crops, make boats. He invented the calendar and music, soccer, writing. He used magic to fight armies of demons now and then. Much later, the first Xia emperor didn't do that level of stuff, but he did fight a nine headed monster once. This is a historical figure in the historiography allowed in China, where the Party dates its history to. There are some issues here. You're best not thinking of anything before the Shang as historical at all, just fun stories.
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Feb 28, 2020 06:23
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The first Xia emperor was Susano? Did that come up in WWII? I wish I was entirely kidding.
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Feb 28, 2020 06:26
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There was a relatively large scale urban culture with bronze working and fairly good reason to believe writing too (what’s written on the oracle bones is a fully developed script, not an early iteration like you’d expect if there wasn’t earlier writing). I think most of the time when scholars reject the Xia Dynasty it’s rejecting applying the particular name (and whole “dynasty” connotations, which are bullshit pre-Qin) more than that there was advanced culture at the time. (E: not 5000 years ago, but still considerably before Shang rose) The dynastic succession stuff is the really bad part though, as though it was a Xia->Shang->Zhou linear succession where each replaces the last. The dominant theory these days is that the three (or equivalent major Bronze Age Xia-like culture rather than “Xia”) actually coexisted. The historical texts actually establish that Zhou had been around during Shang times, too, which makes the insistence on the succession stuff all the weirder.
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Feb 28, 2020 06:33
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Oh yeah for sure. There was cool stuff going on in the area, it's just not the neatly framed narrative Chinese historiography claims. I am hoping some earlier writing is uncovered in particular. The oracle bones script is to the point where even I can read bits of it just knowing modern Chinese characters, there's probably centuries of older precursor writing. I just tend more towards the side that "probably" isn't going to cut it. Until someone finds older writing, the oracle bones are where I'm considering Chinese history to begin. When people lean hard on the idea that these pre-Shang finds must be the Xia, so look, Chinese history goes further, my thought is where do we end? There were humans in China for tens of thousands of years, is that all Chinese history? Does Meadowcroft Rockshelter mean the US gets to claim to be 19,000 years old? The history = writing standard is a good one for me. Prehistory is cool too, there's no judgment. E: To be clear I know we're basically agreeing here, I'm arguing at the bad scholarship. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Feb 28, 2020 |
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Feb 28, 2020 06:41
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Really "Dynasty" itself is a problematic term. In the West it refers to different families ruling if not outright the same state, then at least some degree of national continuity. The Julio-Claudians and the Nerva-Antonines were separate dynasties, but no one seriously thinks they weren't part of the same state/empire. Meanwhile the various Chinese Dynasties were essentially completely different empires, sometimes even multiple at a time. Could someone here who knows about Chinese etymology and stuff explain if the word used in Chinese languages we translate as "Dynasty" in English mean the same thing. Is it an inaccuracy introduced by western translators? Or is it something stemming from the trend of Chinese Historiography where every Empire since the Qin tried to legitimize itself as kinda being the same Empire.
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Feb 28, 2020 07:30
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galagazombie posted:The Julio-Claudians and the Nerva-Antonines were separate dynasties, but no one seriously thinks they weren't part of the same state/empire. But that's because the Roman state existed first as a city-state and then grew into what we call the Roman Empire. The Chinese dynasties were all monarchies from the start.
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Feb 28, 2020 09:39
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galagazombie posted:Really "Dynasty" itself is a problematic term. In the West it refers to different families ruling if not outright the same state, then at least some degree of national continuity. The Julio-Claudians and the Nerva-Antonines were separate dynasties, but no one seriously thinks they weren't part of the same state/empire. Meanwhile the various Chinese Dynasties were essentially completely different empires, sometimes even multiple at a time. Could someone here who knows about Chinese etymology and stuff explain if the word used in Chinese languages we translate as "Dynasty" in English mean the same thing. Is it an inaccuracy introduced by western translators? Or is it something stemming from the trend of Chinese Historiography where every Empire since the Qin tried to legitimize itself as kinda being the same Empire. In Chinese, the word for dynasty is 朝代 (cháo dài), and the first word has a few meanings. It can mean royal court, but mostly it does mean dynasty, as in regnant royal family, and it's used after the name of the dynasty the way you'd use it in English. So the way you'd read the names would be 唐朝 (táng cháo, Tang Dynasty) or 清朝 (qīng cháo, Qing Dynasty). You have to remember that there can be hundreds of years between dynasties, while all dynasties claim their legitimacy comes from heaven sometimes that means they had to beat down all their rivals so no one else can challenge them Also it can refer to North Korea because Chinese is fun that way. Don Gato fucked around with this message at 09:53 on Feb 28, 2020 |
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Feb 28, 2020 09:49
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Koramei posted:This kind of thing is endemic to East Asian scholarship; you get Korean historians claiming Gojoseon stretched most of the way to Beijing because of one style of bronze dagger that’s traditionally associated with it that spreads that far.
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Feb 28, 2020 14:00
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HEY GUNS posted:what does this imply about the transylvanian katana in the dresden schatzkammer... 
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Feb 28, 2020 14:53
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Don Gato posted:In Chinese, the word for dynasty is 朝代 (cháo dài), and the first word has a few meanings. It can mean royal court, but mostly it does mean dynasty, as in regnant royal family, and it's used after the name of the dynasty the way you'd use it in English. So the way you'd read the names would be 唐朝 (táng cháo, Tang Dynasty) or 清朝 (qīng cháo, Qing Dynasty). You have to remember that there can be hundreds of years between dynasties, while all dynasties claim their legitimacy comes from heaven sometimes that means they had to beat down all their rivals so no one else can challenge them Sometimes it sounds less like China is weird and more that Europe was one or two battles away from 5000 years of Roman History
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Feb 28, 2020 15:03
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Sometimes it sounds less like China is weird and more that Europe was one or two battles away from 5000 years of Roman History I'm sure this has been covered many times here, but it is an interesting question why Chinese history centralised the way it did compared to Europe. I read something once about how rice farming requires more manpower and thus promotes centralised bureaucratic administration, and the Jared Diamond stuff about European geography is pretty obvious I guess, but idk
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Feb 28, 2020 15:23
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Sometimes it sounds less like China is weird and more that Europe was one or two battles away from 5000 years of Roman History Or to have its history written as such. Hey guns studies the 30 Years Warring States period of the Habsburg Dynasty of Rome.
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Feb 28, 2020 15:40
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Sometimes it sounds less like China is weird and more that Europe was one or two battles away from 5000 years of Roman History I wonder what the world would look like if the Arabs had not risen just as the Romans and Sassanids had weakened themselves so much.
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Feb 28, 2020 15:51
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HEY GUNS posted:what does this imply about the transylvanian katana in the dresden schatzkammer... Simon Belmont sighed as he unsheathed his zweihander...
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Feb 28, 2020 16:28
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Sometimes it sounds less like China is weird and more that Europe was one or two battles away from 5000 years of Roman History Yeah, one of those big questions to ponder is why Europe only ever had a single major imperial unification (that lasted more than a few years, anyway), versus the various regions where there have been waves of unification and breaking apart. Europe was like China in one respect, that being Roman was always seen as conferring continental imperial authority, like the concepts the Qin came up that all subsequent conquerors used. Basically every European power who tried to conquer Europe either outright claimed to be Roman or used Roman imperial symbols, all the way up to the last attempt in WW2. The big difference is nobody in Europe ever succeeded.
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Feb 28, 2020 17:54
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Rome broke apart and reunified a couple times, and did have multiple successor states proclaiming to be its legacy. It gets weirder when you consider things like Greece having been the center of a massive empire that was ultimately unrelated to the massive empire that later came about to encompass Greece. And then what do you call the giant empire after that which also contained Greece in relation to the others? And of the claimed successors, there's the one that one time had Germany and Spain, the Charlie Magnet one, and Rome 3: The Romaning. I think it's really one of those things that probably is only true of China because people want it to be true (both historians crafting their narratives and contemporaneous rulers trying to beef up their resumes), and so it becomes true. You probably could write a skewed history of Europe or western Asia to fit into the same mold as China, but since the modern era landed on a bunch of people having identities that rely on the disunity of Europe, it doesn't serve anyone's purposes to do so. Persia's probably in a more similar mold to China, although sometimes the big state existing in that area wasn't called Persia for whatever reason, and there's a whole confusing mess about the nature of the label Persia not even being used locally by most of the Persians.
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Feb 28, 2020 18:32
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I wouldn't be surprised if the church was a big factor post-Rome, the pope already fills the spot of "emperor everyone mostly acknowledges but don't necessarily obey".
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Feb 28, 2020 18:42
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SlothfulCobra posted:You probably could write a skewed history of Europe or western Asia to fit into the same mold as China, but since the modern era landed on a bunch of people having identities that rely on the disunity of Europe, it doesn't serve anyone's purposes to do so. This exact topic just came up in the Dune thread in GBS — twenty thousand years from now, historians looking back on pre-spaceflight history think of it in terms of a series of inter-provincial struggles about where the Roman imperial seat will be located (in their estimation, Rome, then Byzantium, then Spain, then England, then America).
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Feb 28, 2020 18:43
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mossyfisk posted:I wouldn't be surprised if the church was a big factor post-Rome, the pope already fills the spot of "emperor everyone mostly acknowledges but don't necessarily obey". even the church's authority rested on roman roots, it's why the bishop of rome is the pope not the bishop of jerusalem
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Feb 28, 2020 18:43
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evilweasel posted:even the church's authority rested on roman roots, it's why the bishop of rome is the pope not the bishop of jerusalem The use of “pope” as specific to the bishop of Rome was a medieval and local development — I don’t think it was ever (at least in a modern sense) regularly applied to the bishop of Jerusalem, but it certainly was to the bishop of Alexandria, and still is today.
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Feb 28, 2020 18:47
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SlothfulCobra posted:Rome 3: The Romaning "The Romanoving" 
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Feb 28, 2020 19:17
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I mean if you look at the territory the Roman Empire Controlled it was centered on the Mediterranean, especially the East. So even after the ERE declines you have the Arab Caliphate and later the Ottomans controlling this stuff into the 1800's.
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Feb 28, 2020 19:21
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Schadenboner posted:Simon Belmont sighed as he unsheathed his zweihander... in video game terms 1997 is ancient history so it's on topic to tell you that it's Alucard, who uses a zweihander, and while some historians believe that Simon Belmont might use a sword it is attested in recovered texts that he vastly favored the whip
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Feb 28, 2020 20:33
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Ras Het posted:I'm sure this has been covered many times here, but it is an interesting question why Chinese history centralised the way it did compared to Europe. I read something once about how rice farming requires more manpower and thus promotes centralised bureaucratic administration, and the Jared Diamond stuff about European geography is pretty obvious I guess, but idk Qin was definitely not a rice farming culture, and most of the Chinese population in its early history lived in the North China plain, which isn't a rice farming area. galagazombie posted:Really "Dynasty" itself is a problematic term. In the West it refers to different families ruling if not outright the same state, then at least some degree of national continuity. The Julio-Claudians and the Nerva-Antonines were separate dynasties, but no one seriously thinks they weren't part of the same state/empire. Meanwhile the various Chinese Dynasties were essentially completely different empires, sometimes even multiple at a time. Could someone here who knows about Chinese etymology and stuff explain if the word used in Chinese languages we translate as "Dynasty" in English mean the same thing. Is it an inaccuracy introduced by western translators? Or is it something stemming from the trend of Chinese Historiography where every Empire since the Qin tried to legitimize itself as kinda being the same Empire. That's not really true either. Several of the transitions between dynasties were basically one family seizing the throne from another. When you take a look at some of the collapses of a Chinese dynasty, it's more that the central government loses all authority and the regional governors just expand on their previous powers. Oftentimes, even when the chaos persists there is some sort of loyalist rump state with a clear continuity to the previous dynasty. The most distinctive "break" in continuity is probably the Yuan dynasty, and then the transition from Yuan to Ming, and even then it's not like every layer of government was replaced wholesale. Grand Fromage posted:Yeah, one of those big questions to ponder is why Europe only ever had a single major imperial unification (that lasted more than a few years, anyway), versus the various regions where there have been waves of unification and breaking apart. Europe was like China in one respect, that being Roman was always seen as conferring continental imperial authority, like the concepts the Qin came up that all subsequent conquerors used. Basically every European power who tried to conquer Europe either outright claimed to be Roman or used Roman imperial symbols, all the way up to the last attempt in WW2. The big difference is nobody in Europe ever succeeded. China is a pretty self-contained geographic area. The big central plain and main agriculture area is about the size of France. To the North is arid land that's filled with steppe nomads, to the West is pretty marginal land and the Himalayas, and to the East is ocean. A lot of the Yangtze-based dynasties contented themselves to slowly expand settlement and agriculture in the South, but this wasn't dramatic. Then there's some outlying agricultural land like the Wei River Valley and Sichuan, but they are similarly self-contained and also easily accessed by the main riverways. A Chinese state doesn't have much to do besides try to reform China. The Roman Empire was more broken up by geography into chunks of separate territories, or separated by ocean. It's a lot harder to reform your empire if you have to build a navy to do it. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Feb 28, 2020 |
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Feb 28, 2020 20:46
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Did the Romans even bother “reforming” Egypt or just put a non threatening politician at the top of it and say send us food
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Feb 28, 2020 20:48
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Any attempt at reforming the Roman Empire would have had to contend with monumental religious disunity, which doesn't seem to be as important in China.
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Feb 28, 2020 21:10
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The EU could attempt to lay claim to the legacy of Rome--and has done so in minor ways. I remember hearing them bragging about how the last time you could go from Spain to Greece without being stopped at a border or changing currencies was the Roman empire
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Feb 28, 2020 21:58
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Dalael posted:I wonder what the world would look like if the Arabs had not risen just as the Romans and Sassanids had weakened themselves so much. Tbh a much more interesting question is what the world would look like if the Germano-Roman kingdoms had managed not to butterfinger their way out of an effective tax system.
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Feb 29, 2020 00:06
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:That's not really true either. Several of the transitions between dynasties were basically one family seizing the throne from another. It’s probably worth mentioning, because I’m not sure this is actually common knowledge—East Asian dynasties were all ruled by a single family (or dynasty if you will). Authority wasn’t vested in the state, it was vested in the emperor’s family, and a break in that family succession universally meant a break in dynasty. Now sometimes the family connection was extremely dubious but it was still always there at least in name. The term does make sense really.
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Feb 29, 2020 00:09
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What I’ve read re Catholicism and Rome is “It is perhaps an important remark generally that we should never forget that the Roman church is Roman, the development of this church is not only influenced by Christianity but also by the Empire which was Rome, by the greatness that was Rome, by the idea of law that was Rome. All this is embodied also in the Roman church, after it took over the heritage of the Roman Empire. We should never forget this situation; and we should ask ourselves; if we are tempted to evaluate the Roman church more highly than we should: how much Roman elements are there in it, and how much are they valid for us in our culture?”
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Feb 29, 2020 02:13
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Dalael posted:I wonder what the world would look like if the Arabs had not risen just as the Romans and Sassanids had weakened themselves so much. You'd have to get rid of the factors which led to the Rise of Islam and the Islamic Golden Age to begin with, which more or less means the Sassanids and Byzantines, so it's kind of a wash in terms of "hmm what if these bloated rickety old empires stumbled on even longer". Beamed fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Feb 29, 2020 |
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Feb 29, 2020 04:16
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the JJ posted:Or to have its history written as such. Hey guns studies the 30 Years Warring States period of the Habsburg Dynasty of Rome. Eastern Hapsburg Romans. The Western Hapsburg Romans were dealing with the rebellion of coastal bandits at the time.
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Feb 29, 2020 10:55
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the JJ posted:Or to have its history written as such. Hey guns studies the 30 Years Warring States period of the Habsburg Dynasty of Rome. drat it, don't encourage him. Do you want a Hapsburg domination of central Europe? Because this is how you get a Hapsburg domination of Central Europe.
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Feb 29, 2020 11:39
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cheetah7071 posted:The EU could attempt to lay claim to the legacy of Rome--and has done so in minor ways. I remember hearing them bragging about how the last time you could go from Spain to Greece without being stopped at a border or changing currencies was the Roman empire Civis Europeus sum (well...eram  )
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Feb 29, 2020 11:50
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euphronius posted:Did the Romans even bother “reforming” Egypt or just put a non threatening politician at the top of it and say send us food Reform how? What was wrong with it from their point of view? Bearing in mind the posh bits had already been hellenised, there's a reason Alexandria is called that and that was the capital.
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Feb 29, 2020 11:50
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feedmegin posted:Reform how? What was wrong with it from their point of view? Bearing in mind the posh bits had already been hellenised, there's a reason Alexandria is called that and that was the capital. Cleopatra in charge of Egypt was a Reformation that Rome would accept. Just so happened she picked the wrong side of a civil war but before that point she was doing super well for her self
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Feb 29, 2020 12:02
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HEY GUNS posted:what does this imply about the transylvanian katana in the dresden schatzkammer... I'm thinking more about what the Roman glass which made it to East Asia means. Did the Roman empire stretch all the way to Japan?  cheetah7071 posted:The EU could attempt to lay claim to the legacy of Rome--and has done so in minor ways. I remember hearing them bragging about how the last time you could go from Spain to Greece without being stopped at a border or changing currencies was the Roman empire It's funny to imagine what happens if the EU survives and shambles along for a couple more centuries. We could arrive at a point where European historians are forced by a central authority to publish dumb bullshit about "10000 years of totally legit unified European Imperial history!!!", like in China 
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Feb 29, 2020 12:44
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Libluini posted:I'm thinking more about what the Roman glass which made it to East Asia means. Did the Roman empire stretch all the way to Japan? I like the modern equivalent: turns out that we all live in the PRC 
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Feb 29, 2020 12:55
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Libluini posted:I'm thinking more about what the Roman glass which made it to East Asia means. Did the Roman empire stretch all the way to Japan? There was an article that got posted here not long ago about the remains of a Japanese woman being found in a 1st(?) century Roman tomb, so apparently at least one person traveled afar for a waifu.
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Feb 29, 2020 12:57
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