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drat they put you to death if you banned somebody unjustly? it was hard to be a mod back then i guess
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Mar 14, 2023 21:32
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 00:46 |
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can't have your dad getting beaten up by some smelly weirdo, he's gotta be a witty and charming villain to be able to do so well against the might of the empire
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Mar 31, 2023 20:37
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gonna start calling horses "mystery dogs" now
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Apr 8, 2023 21:15
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different kinds of humor age differently. the ancient equivalent of "how about that airline food?" or monica lewinsky jokes or whatever will always come across imperfectly. hell, the examples i picked are extremely 90s and don't have the same vibe now that they did 25 years ago. blowjob party cups and funny-looking dogs are the kinds of thing that transcend time and place
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Apr 9, 2023 19:57
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if i was pepi II i would have just hung out with my great-grandchildren more so they could learn to do pharaoh stuff too. not that hard!!
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Jun 6, 2023 23:20
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two fish posted:Oh, see, that's very interesting. I wonder how they managed to get through the Sahara once desertification wrapped up. the phoenicians circumnavigated africa from gibraltar to egypt once but had such a rough time doing it that as far as we know they didn't do it again
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Aug 3, 2023 03:51
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SlothfulCobra posted:Polynesians may have figured something out, but Europeans didn't have the ball-sense. thread title
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Aug 14, 2023 20:58
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the ten thousand year pan-indo-european warrior society was the little-known third participant in the finno-korean hyperwar
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Aug 19, 2023 19:19
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Woolie Wool posted:I think ancient crowds would have loved auto racing back when everything was ludicrously unsafe and the drivers were insane daredevils considering they went fuckin nuts for chariot races, yeah probably
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Aug 22, 2023 21:16
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red cross teaches a mixed technique in their first aid course, at least in my experience you start off with three back blows (not back slaps of the kind heimlich is talking about - you bend the person over to do it, because a standing back slap can do exactly what heimlich is talking about and pull the object down, making it worse - you want gravity on your side, not against you) and then three heimlich thrusts. you alternate until the situation is resolved or they fall unconscious anyway yeah choking is not an uncommon way to die historically
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Aug 30, 2023 22:43
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in the early period the israelites were straight up polytheists, and once you know that then you see it everywhere in the old testament. it's woven into the stories so tightly you couldn't excise it without cutting the narrative apart entirely. yahweh was their patron god, and he was a jealous god who preferred you to just worship him, but y'know...a lot of people didn't, and recognized the whole pantheon. there was a lot of religious violence over it, but no actual resolution until well after babylon had rolled in. by the time stuff starts getting written down in the form we know today, monotheism is the order of the day and everything is shifted to cast the other gods as spirits, angels, or demons, but it was an imperfect effort at best. and after that, well, you can't just change it
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Sep 3, 2023 22:19
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it isn't edited out because the books were ancient when the council of nicaea was convened. everybody (who matters) can find out what the original text was by consulting one of the thousands of extant copies of the tanakh and then what happens is that the bishop of alexandria gets very pissed off and leads half of christianity into revolt when your religion puts a really high value on a holy book that has already been around forever it's basically impossible to edit it and retain any legitimacy. it is what it is. similarly the climate around the writing of many of the books in question was not one where the ancient stories could simply be molded however you pleased. slanted toward a monotheistic view, yes, but the stories are the stories. king shithead of moab sacrificed his son and then we ran away, that's the story - why did the sacrifice work? no need to even say it because it's fairly theologically obvious under a polytheistic point of view, and inconvenient from a monotheistic view, so just let people interpret it how they're predisposed to interpret it.
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Sep 4, 2023 03:09
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rome isn't going out and gunboating people but that doesn't make them not maritime. safe travel across the mediterranean was absolutely key to the empire's functioning and was something that a lot of time and effort was spent on even if that isn't reflected in our largely aristocratic sources except for pompey's big pirate hunt
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Sep 23, 2023 23:05
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CrypticFox posted:Also, even before the Greeks made it to the Western Mediterranean, the Phoenicians established several settlements on the Atlantic coast of Africa. There are three known Phoenician settlements on the Atlantic coast of modern day Morocco, with the furthest south being at what it now Rabat. It's almost certain that they would been sailing further south than that as well, since they probably wouldn't have a settlement in modern Rabat if that was the farthest point they ever reached. the phoenicians were once commissioned by a pharaoh to circumnavigate africa and as far as we can tell they genuinely did because the story contains details that indicate they made it deep into the southern hemisphere; stuff that nobody who lived in the northern hemisphere would have imagined being different if you went south, like the direction of the sun. however it took years and doesn't seem to have led to any kind of sustained exploration efforts or settlement
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Sep 25, 2023 21:13
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Owl at Home posted:Am I right in thinking that the Parthians/Sasanians also had a hand in keeping them apart? I seem to remember reading somewhere that they got wind that Rome and China were making diplomatic overtures toward each other and basically said "Holy poo poo, we can NOT let these two become friends" yes this is why the one official chinese diplomat who actually set foot in the roman empire had to do it by going thru the red sea
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Sep 27, 2023 00:18
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PittTheElder posted:In terms of underrepresented famous Romans in modern works, probably the Gracchi, Aurelian, or yea any of the post Gothic War magisters militum. this seems like a reasonable list but really anybody outside of the narrow caesar-jesus time period might as well not exist unless you're a rome nerd or catholic or both
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Nov 2, 2023 00:45
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it is somewhat hard to believe that cato had genuine moral objections to caesar's war crimes considering the depths of his personal hatred of caesar (because caesar had been carrying on an affair with cato's sister for years) but who knows maybe he did. like grand fromage said, it's essentially impossible to disentangle which of caesar's enemies were personal and which ones objected to his conduct on behalf of the roman state
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Nov 4, 2023 14:54
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there was no hard and fast rule for roman armies re: families and camp followers as far as i know. if the general wanted to march very fast he'd tell all of those folks to gently caress off but a wall garrison like vindolanda benefited more than not from forming a semi-stable community around itself basically the romans considered willingness to shed the non-combatants to be a mark of a good general but the dudes at hadrian's wall were not expected to deal with serious emergencies that would require that
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Nov 5, 2023 07:20
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FAUXTON posted:what if augustus had youtube Publius Quinctilius Varus Did WHAT With My Legions!?!? (part 54) 1,546,921 views
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Dec 8, 2023 19:24
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rome took a marked turn toward increased prejudice in late antiquity and it was a pretty big factor in the collapse of the western empire imo. the early empire would not have made the fatal mistakes that the late empire did in handling situations like the migration of the goths
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Jan 3, 2024 23:32
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"shaddai" also being able to refer to "mountains" is an interesting connection because that's a very common association with yahweh in the old testament, at least in some translations. would have to do some digging to have any textual support here but i swear i have heard some of those "el shaddai" passages translated not as "I am God Almighty", but as "I am the God of the mountain", although i think there are several other passages involving yahweh proclaiming himself god of the mountain that might not involve the "el shaddai" wording
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Jan 17, 2024 01:08
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Deteriorata posted:The Hebrews had a problem with language for their monotheism early on. They borrowed a lot of appellations and terms from other cultures until they could develop their own theology and unique terms. So their early writings are very similar to polytheists, because they didn't know how else to describe things. their early writings are not "like" polytheism or language issues, these things are remnants of a time when the hebrews were polytheists and the texts reflected that
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Jan 17, 2024 18:05
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Yea for sure, it's most definitely not a perfect 1:1 example, but if you look at a map of the ancient Egyptian kingdom, it's maybe around 1/2 of what modern Egypt is, plus much of modern day Israel, Syria, etc. It's a lot of land to rule. again most of this is desert. the banks of the nile and the levant are the only truly populated areas, and the levant fades in and out of their possession. ancient egypt was just not a very militarily capable state beyond the nile. they had no need to be. all of the rounds of conquering and re-conquering the levant were important for displaying the power of the pharaoh but there is little indication egypt actually cared very much about it beyond that - they let it slip out of their possession pretty frequently whenever some big mesopotamian or anatolian empire was on the march, rarely without a fight but you don't get the sense that anyone is willing to go onto a real war footing over it, either. the ancient egyptians had different priorities that rarely included fighting anything except the softest of targets
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Feb 24, 2024 07:07
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SlothfulCobra posted:That "mostly desert" empire contains roughly 10% of all humanity at the time. The levant is a loving big place to project your power out to, and likewise going that far down the Nile is nothing to sneeze at. It's a long way to go. Literally every big ancient empire contains a lot of uninhabited space within their dominion, but it doesn't make distances travelled unreal. i was responding to the assertion that the egyptian empire was the size of central europe, and the question of why egypt didn't go beat everyone up like in a paradox game. i do not think anything i said was meaningless in that context. but if you would like to assume i'm trying to minimize the prominence of ancient egypt and post like you're trying to start a slapfight, well, have fun. you're fighting against positions i didn't actually take. obviously, they got into real fights once in a while but it was very rare for egypt to pick a fight against another powerful empire. egyptian governance of the levant was generally extremely light-handed. and, well, obviously the egyptian empire was a hugely important state for millennia which is not really something anybody else on the planet can claim, but i didn't say they weren't, so i don't know what you're getting at here. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Feb 24, 2024 |
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Feb 24, 2024 08:15
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you don't need a strong grasp of inflation's relationship to money supply to know that debasement will lead to inflation, something which the Romans and most other pre-modern coiners were in fact well aware of. there is an inflationary mechanism built into debasement that has nothing to do with the money supply as an abstract concept: people discovering the debasement. unlike fiat money, only part of the perceived value of a pre-modern coin comes from the legitimate backing of a state, and that part of the value wasn't necessarily anything that they would have had much understanding of. the other part of the value, and the part that is obvious, is from its precious metal content. if too much of the money is perceived as heavily debased, prices will rise simply because merchants and shop owners don't think the coins are as valuable as they were previously. if it gets really bad, there can be a reversion to pre-coinage value methods entirely - continuing to use coins, but only for their precious metal content rather than their face value. the money supply effects are also occurring invisibly, but nobody needed to be aware of them to draw the connection between inflation and debasement in a society where value rested in the metal rather than the symbol
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Feb 25, 2024 20:19
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Tulip posted:I'm going to push back here again because economists, today, are able to marshal contradictory evidence to basically every going theory of inflation. There's a raging, completely unresolved debate between "does inflation happen because of push or pull," or in this case did inflation go up in Rome because the coins were debased, or did people start debasing coins because inflation was going up already? And even if debasement increases inflation, is a 10% debasement going to lead to 10% inflation, or 20%, or 1%? In the case of hyperinflation the evidence that inflation hits hundreds and thousands of percents and then the government has to increase issuing in order to catch up with the already existing hyperinflation seems pretty compelling to me (just based on like, accounts of government workers in Zimbabwe and Venezuela). The strongest relationship I've ever seen in anybody's understanding of inflation is that anybody who says that inflation is "well-understood" is about to very confidently step on a rake. "people" don't debase coins, the state does. debased coinage decreases trust in the coins - this is something we know not from speculation but from people writing "caracalla debased the currency which was bad because it made the coins worth less" and so on over and over about every documented instance of significant debasement. does that mean the debasement was in fact the primary driver of the inflation? not necessarily! but it means that they perceived it that way, which is what is relevant when someone asks "why does debasing happen? what are the pros and cons?". roman coins may well have hung in there at a reasonable value longer than they "should have" because of the solid legitimacy of the empire and the debt system and so on, but eventually the perceived value of most of their coins became so low that the state issued new types of coins. the premise of releasing a new type of coin to fill the same niche - as if the US government released the "new quarter" because the quarter's purchasing power had declined - is that people do not trust the current coinage due to debasement and a new coin that is distinctively different can be trusted to have enough precious metal content to make it reasonable to trust the face value again. and it worked! people started using the new coins at reasonable prices because they perceived them as non-debased. so yeah the pros and cons of debasement as perceived by the people making the decision to debase were quite simple - more money now, but difficulty with inflation and loss of trust later. whether this is a true relationship is something worth debating but also not something i'm particularly qualified to argue one way or the other about
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Feb 25, 2024 23:44
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Tulip posted:Over in cspam the dividing line for modern vs pre modern is 1789, which I realize is so that people who want to bite each other over spanish civil war minutia are quarantined, but always leaves me with "what the hell do we do with the 16th 17th and 18th centuries? Do we just memory hole them or are we saying the 7 Years War was medieval?" for the purposes of thread delineation in cspam we are saying that the "early modern" period is "pre-modern" in the sense of "before the modern period". i would say it's not unusual to consider the "early modern" as a separate era from "modern" practically speaking even though "early modern" seems to imply that it's part of "modern". you are welcome to talk about the seven years war in the pre-modern thread to your heart's content.
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Feb 28, 2024 21:54
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then, as i prepare the sheep with words of prayer, my diviner watches in amazement like an idiot. everyone stands up and claps
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Mar 4, 2024 03:57
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the romans were also simply insanely militaristic by the standards of the ancient world. as a society they could muster an army, have that army completely eat poo poo, muster another one, have that one eat poo poo, and still have the capability to raise a third - and that was before they extended their reach and population all that far away from italy. most ancient states of rome's size during the middle republic were not able to do that - the army they had was the army they had, and bouncing back from a devastating loss was often just not possible. regardless of any tactical advantages, persistence was the main thing that let them take down the successor states
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Mar 8, 2024 18:17
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what's not to love? these freaks that love to go to war handle all of the business of defending your poo poo for you and even have the courtesy to set up reliable supply lines so they aren't constantly devastating friendly territory just by walking through it. you're connected into a trade network that might as well be globalized by the standards of the ancient world. you don't get hassled about religion* or culture or anything really. sucks that your great-grandparents had to live through a nasty conquest and all that it entails but it's done, might as well enjoy the upsides. that's not to say that roman rule didn't suck tremendously for some people, sometimes, or that the lovely parts of roman society like slavery weren't lovely. but the durability of the empire depended on making it not suck for most people most of the time and the imperial elite were generally aware that that was the implicit social contract everything rested on *monotheism not included
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Mar 22, 2024 02:29
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zoux posted:I see my stele is raising a lot of questions answered by my stele thread title
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Mar 26, 2024 23:39
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idk what else would happen to the sun other than a total eclipse that you would really ever notice or describe as "twisted". based on personal experience from the recent eclipse the light level doesn't even noticeably change until you hit like 85% occlusion! nobody's writing down lovely partials as major events, it would be safe to say the majority of partials in history were not even noticed even without factors like "it literally happened after sunset"
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Apr 17, 2024 03:40
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it is a very obvious joke
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May 1, 2024 11:33
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one of the things that strikes you if you go down the king list for the shang is that often the only thing we know about any given king is that he moved his capital somewhere else. it was pretty rare for the shang capital to remain in one place for more than a couple of kings in a row even once they built the capital complex that pretty much the whole corpus of oracle bones was found at. it is true that the physical mark of kingship for the shang (and the zhou!) was their collection of giant bronze sacrificial cauldrons, too. having nine of those bad boys was what made you the king, spiritually. they go missing after the zhou are toppled and you have to wonder what connection that might have with human sacrifice and popular reactions to it
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May 7, 2024 21:07
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the romans did not do human sacrifice except in the most absolutely dire circumstances and as they became more and more divorced from "scrappy city-state" into "giant empire" it became progressively even more taboo. they recognized that it had spiritual power, lots of spiritual power, but were fundamentally opposed to using that power when goats and pigeons and such worked just fine. however i don't think moral opposition to human sacrifice had anything to do with why carthage must be destroyed that being said christian revulsion toward human sacrifice isn't like, something picked up from the romans only. ancient judaism had exactly the same stance of "yes human sacrifice works, but we don't do it", if you read between the lines a little. christianity gets it honestly from all of its formative influences.
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May 9, 2024 03:31
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Crab Dad posted:Ritual sacrifice of animals was just a way for priests to get free meat. the gods don't give a gently caress about the meat they want the spiritual energy of the animal. also average romans sacrificed all the time it was not something restricted to a certain class of people. in the roman worldview sacrifice is not done as worship, it is done as payment. you want a god to view you favorably in the future, or you've asked them for help and they followed through, or you feel like you've noticed that a god is helping without being asked - those are occasions that call for sacrifice. the life energy empowers them, it is the only payment that can be made for the many implicit and explicit contracts between the divine and the mortal that come into being every day. a priest is there to be a god-knower, like oh yeah this god likes things to be done in this way, when we do it that way it's successful more often. not to gatekeep the religion in any way because that's not the kind of religion it was. if you project anything even vaguely abrahamic onto the other ancient mediterranean religions you will misunderstand them completely.
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May 9, 2024 04:24
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 00:46 |
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while i agree that believing roman propaganda without any reservations is foolish, it is not outlandish to think that carthage probably did have a culture of human sacrifice. it was a phoenician colony and the phoenicians were canaanite. the old testament slams the canaanites an awful lot for, wouldn't you know it, human sacrifice. yes this is also an enemy perspective and quite divorced in time from carthage itself, but i find the correlation between the two a lot more convincing than either account is by itself
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May 10, 2024 03:18
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