|
You mentioned how the Goths and Vandals were essentially Romanized when they were ruling over the conquered parts of the empire, but why is it that we have so little written sources from them? Is that one of the aspects of Roman culture they just didn't adopt?
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2012 16:18
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 20, 2024 14:16 |
|
|
danquixotic posted:rad as hell stuff about Ireland with a picture Are you 100% about this being purely an Irish creation? I ask because there's a pretty clear yin-yang symbol on the left - mind, it would seriously be the coolest thing in the entire world if Ireland was secretly Daoist in the post-Roman era, but.. 
|
|
#
¿
Dec 25, 2012 07:53
|
|
|
Besesoth posted:Interlocked sworls like that (and the trisworl above it) are a common part of Celtic art dating back at least 2500 years, and is unrelated to Taoism. (On the other hand, that symbol doesn't appear to have shown up in Chinese art until about 800 years ago, although the concept of yin and yang is roughly the same age as the Celtic whorls.) Disappointing but still good to know.EDIT: Actually, while I'm at it, what do we know about Roman contact with Greek Bactria? Beamed fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Dec 26, 2012 |
|
#
¿
Dec 26, 2012 03:49
|
|
|
General Panic posted:The Biblical account itself is to some extent internally inconsistent as to whether the Babylonians removed the aristocracy/officials, the population of Jerusalem or the whole population of the kingdom of Judah. Generally speaking, The Bible as a historical source is as problematic as hell. This is no exception. On the other hand, I know I sure as hell would kill for a historical source like the Bible in areas like Bactria.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2013 06:49
|
|
|
Tao Jones posted:I don't know if you'd call it nostalgia, particularly, but many Roman historians were from the Senatorial classes and felt marginalized by the imperial system. There's definite traces of "well, in the old days, men were men, society was better, there was dignity and respect, not like today... in fact, this whole rotten mess started somewhere around the reign of Augustus, I wonder why that could be..." in writers like Tacitus and Livy, even if they don't say "gently caress all this emperor poo poo" so directly. What about after the fall of the Western half?
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2013 01:14
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:The east was also rich as poo poo, which gave them an unbalanced amount of influence. Western areas were by no means uncivilized, despite what the Romans wrote--people like the Gauls were advanced civilizations. But fact is, they didn't compare to the fabulous wealth and development of the east. They were steamrolled and became Roman, while the east retained much of its original influence, power, and culture while still adopting the Roman system and becoming Romans. Just, Hellenized Romans. Or Romanized Hellenes, depending on your point of view. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd read in multiple places that the West wasn't that much poorer than the East - something like a 10% difference, ultimately, if the figures that I was shown were correct. Do your figures refute that?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 25, 2013 03:10
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:While reading, keep in mind that Gibbon is pretty out of date. Worth reading but it's as much a historical artifact itself as it is history. Yeah, I was always under the impression that you read Gibbon to understand 18th century British thought, not Rome.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2013 01:21
|
|
|
Noctis Horrendae posted:This is the reason why I sometimes wish I was born right around the time we come into contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. (provided we don't die off by then, and if they exist) Seeing how humans treat intelligent alien brethren would be interesting, to say the least. You still might? 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2014 09:03
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:He was aware, that's why he was doing it. It was a source of unrest and division in his empire and he wanted it to stop, now. It depends how cynical you are/you think Constantine was for deciding what his approach was, whether he had a dog in the fight or just wanted something that would shut everyone up; there are points to be made for either interpretation and no way to really know. Was the writing already on the wall, though? I was under the impression that it was well into the 4th century before Christianity truly took on a dominant role in society.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2014 21:12
|
|
|
Noctis Horrendae posted:Similarities is a bit of an understatement I'd say. I still stand by what I originally said - the Roman gods are near-identical to the early Greek gods. But this is factually wrong? Like, it's not even arguable.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2014 01:40
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:The other thing that will throw you is trying to use number systems with different bases (hexadecimal for instance). I was recently trying to explain exactly how it works to my brother, who for some computer science class was trying to figure out the decimal value of numbers in base 14. It took me much longer than I'm proud of to remember how easy it is: The Mayans used Base-5 IIRC.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2014 07:09
|
|
|
I'm wrapping up Mike Duncan's excellent History of Rome podcast, and I was wondering how receptive this thread was to the History of Byzantium podcast, since it's by a different person and at least 'looks' different?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2014 07:13
|
|
|
Angry Lobster posted:I've always been curious about the origin of names, especially in Spain, and it struck me as odd that some names are really popular and others are never used, like Trajan as someone else mentioned early. It also helps that by some weird chance I ended up having a classical name in it's original latin form that, as far as I know, it's only commonly used in Romania and Denmark Another important note is that Romania very consciously tried to emphasize their possibly-Romantic roots, and I am more than willing to bet these Roman names were unpopular until fairly recently(the last 300 years or so), when this came underway.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2014 21:59
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Yeah the army gets reorganized and weird later on because the role changed. It became more of a rapid reaction force, split into two major groupings. One was cavalry (this is where cavalry becomes a major thing rather than a side thing for barbarian ally scum) to go out and harass anybody who penetrated the border. Then there were heavy infantry stationed further away from the border in permanent garrisons. The idea was the cavalry would destroy the invader if it wasn't very big, otherwise they would keep them occupied until the infantry arrived or herd them into the fortifications. Your classic hammer and anvil strategy. It worked reasonably well except when it didn't. This was effectively because of the shifting stance of the empire from an offensive role to a defensive one, correct?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2014 16:56
|
|
|
Gladi posted:Sumer's big thing is that before the archeological finds nobody knew about them. ( since then we dug out few more "forgotten" civilizations) The oldest civilizations known were Babylon and egypt, but then again they were not known like they are today. Romans did not have the roll of kings nor archives of written sources. The historical narrative went from myth to actual historical facts. As I understand it though, they did not have this idea of Progress. The ancestors of Romans were never hunter-gatherers. Gods made them and their civilisation wholesale. They certainly knew quite a bit about Egypt, wouldn't surprise me if they had access to more historical records from Egypt than we do today; Rome always seemed captivated by its ancientness.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2014 21:33
|
|
|
Gladi posted:While there most likely was more information of certain type and some few hobbyist even went looking for them, there is one thing. There is less time difference between me and Augustus, than between Augustus and the builders of the pyramids. The interested romans and greeks would most likely ask egyptians about the pyramid and got a stock narrative. I do not think that the idea of digging looking records and breaking into tombs to look at writing would even occur to them. Sure, but as you said, Egypt is incredibly old; there's still quite a bit we don't know about the Middle Kingdom, New Kingdom, etc. that I'd be willing to put money on at least the Ptolemies having an idea about; the pyramids were entirely an Old Kingdom construction and not really relevant to Egypt's long history.
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2014 15:58
|
|
|
Didn't Babylon refer to the Assyrian Kings as their own at least a few times, though? So it wasn't a complete eradication.. just close; Assur still stood tall for another millenia or so IIRC.
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2014 17:51
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:The last Neo-Babylonian king was ethnically Assyrian. The fact that the Assyrian people survived means it wasn't total, but nobody cared anymore and their empire was dust. Normally when states fall there's a legacy. Assyria's enemies did their best to make sure there was none. Short of ethnically cleansing every single person it was never going to be a complete eradication, but they did a very thorough job of it. Oh, no, I love the mysticism around the people in Nineveh too much to have called out the story; I was just commenting on how thorough the Assyrian eradication may have been.
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2014 04:16
|
|
|
Tao Jones posted:I think modern mathematical ideas would have a hard time being accepted in antiquity. Relatively few people know how to give a proof of basic calculus theorems, and I imagine even fewer people would know how to do it without using tools like Arabic numerals or mathematical induction. Statistics would be another huge innovation, but I don't see how you'd prove it to mathematicians without the tools that Pascal, Huygens, etc had. EDIT: Ah, you probably included that in Arabic numerals; ignore me.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 26, 2014 21:50
|
|
|
And so the cycle continues.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2014 05:03
|
|
|
Fo3 posted:But they aren't Portuguese speaking as an official language is my point, even after 450 years of occupation. Even though it was the official language during the occupation, as soon as the Portuguese left, bam, the language is dead. Yeah, the Portuguese occupation of Goa shares a lot of parallels, such as length of occupation, and
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2014 19:53
|
|
|
You know who else got laughed out of the room for his crazy ideas?? Albert Einstein. Checkmate.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2014 23:20
|
|
|
You're missing the mighty Garamantes.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2015 19:45
|
|
|
Spiderfist Island posted:My Early Middle Ages professor structured his class as a critique of Gibbon's thesis (Rome fell because of Christian moral degradation and barbarism) and later Henri Pirenne's* (Islam's domination of the Mediterranean and trade therein forced western civilization's "center" to move north and develop into autarkic I was re-reading the thread and saw this; did you go to UMich by chance? My Early Medieval Era course was structured the same. I find it interesting how he took to task even the notion that Islam was what destroyed the Mediterranean trade routes.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2015 15:41
|
|
|
MrNemo posted:In fairness pretty much all those awesome stories about how people reacted to Islam come from Islamic historians. Not saying they're lying but most of them are writing a couple of hundred years after the fact with sources no one else ever had. It's not so much about lying as the usual method of history-writing back then - you're not telling history, you're telling a story that people believe to be history. It's still relevant in that it shows what they thought of Heraclius v. Khosrau, it just isn't as relevant as an empirical story about it.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2015 18:58
|
|
|
cheerfullydrab posted:Lots of use of the "B" word on this page. I thought at least some posters called those people by their right name. Yeah all this use of the word buttsex is really bumming me out.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2015 00:15
|
|
|
V. Illych L. posted:imo the "CE" nomenclature is weird and sort of dumb would you return a book and leave a scathing review if it used CE nomenclature
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2015 01:54
|
|
|
Cnidario posted:What about Zoroastrians? What did pre-Constantinian Romans think of them and their cool fire temples?  EDIT: To clarify I'm no expert.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2017 01:17
|
|
|
sullat posted:Byzantium/ERE was mostly dustbinned by history in the US. I think it gets mentioned like three times in my history classes. Once for Justinian, once for 1204, and once as an aside for 1453. But mostly because it meant that the spice trade was cutoff after the fall! Well, not cut off, but controlled by Muslims, which is no doubt infinitely worse. That's because when Hollywood was getting started, the Ottoman Empire was still cool, and strong*, and our friend**. **no
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2018 05:43
|
|
|
Disinterested posted:That is highly controversial and subjective. The Macedonians definitely thought they were, and so did Herodotus, and either way he was part of the cultural milleu that at least philosophically believed it was bad to be a drunk. Might wanna pull that fish hook outta your mouth my dude.
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2018 20:55
|
|
|
this thread is really bad at reading red textSlothfulCobra posted:Wasn't that a thing that happened in other ways as well? Christian saints getting conflated with polytheistic practices and stories? Not exactly the same as the old religion surviving on its own. This always seemed a little overblown to me. I know there's..two? off the top of my head, but that's not a huge cultural interchange, is it? Am I missing large swathes of it happening? (Quite possible)
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2018 05:44
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:There were people calling themselves "rhomaioi" into the 20th century. Grand Fromage posted:with pockets retaining Romanoi identity into the 20th century, Is this actually true? Isn't there just one relatively biased source which claims that?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2018 01:50
|
|
|
Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I will never stop being upset about the fact that a state that was around for ~80 years and then died away gets to embody "the fall of the Roman Empire". Seriously the Western Empire was a weak as poo poo state that was mostly puppets of German mercenaries and somehow it gets to embody all of the Rome which was around 1000 years old at that point. The Empire is constantly divided and reuinted throughout its history and for some reason this division, this one that lasts less than 100 years, this is the most important one. No one really thinks those 80 years is the most important of the Roman empire though? What should make you upset is the idea that the Roman empire stopped existing in 1204 and restarted in 1263, and then stopped again in 1453. Those are some mental gymnastics.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2018 07:08
|
|
|
Senor Dog posted:your analogy made no sense to me either. Yeah, if anything, there's toooons of fans of the Byzantines who romanticize Byzantium as a bulwark against the despotic east.. to put it charitably.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2018 06:54
|
|
|
Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:China was more Roman than the HRE, none of this elective monarchy nonsense. i mean, rome never had a set system of succession anyway, that just sounds like a solid reform
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2018 00:33
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:Rome fell in 1204. I will stand behind this. Or 1921. Fight me.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2019 01:38
|
|
|
Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:What do you mean "reassemble the Empire"? After Justinian the Empire was still around and still had all the important bits. 6th century Britain and Gaul and the hinterland of Hispania were about as wealthy and important and populous compared to places like Egypt and Syria and Anatolia as Alaska is to the continental US. This is more of a cart and horse problem, isn't it? Britain was always less populous, but Gaul, Hispania and Italia were certainly rich in the 4th century, on the same scale of the east. How could they get invaded and become that much poorer, given that case?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2019 04:38
|
|
|
Mister Olympus posted:vaping at genghis khan to own the nomads Been awhile since we changed thread titles.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2019 02:45
|
|
|
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 |
|
#
¿
Feb 29, 2020 04:16
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 20, 2024 14:16 |
|
|
Jeb Bush 2012 posted:pictured: the incredibly convoluted ritual that summons rome once you learn its true name b..byzantium?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2020 03:28
|
|
