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Oh, definitely not for premodern history, I thought we were talking about modern times (and half in jest). In premodern Korea plant milks were more of a thing but cow milk was an expensive luxury, treated as a medicine. Just flipping through Michael J Pettid's Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History apparently it started taking off via foreign food aid after the Korean War, and then dairy in general shot up from government initiaties starting in the 1970s.
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Jun 30, 2023 21:53
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Unrelatedly, the ACOUP for today is probably gonna be of interest to a bunch of people in this thread: https://acoup.blog/2023/06/30/collections-the-marian-reforms-werent-a-thing/ As you can maybe sense from the title, he talks about how the Marian reforms (the alleged reforms of the late Republican Roman army from one based on landed conscripts to a state-supplied professional force) weren't a thing; many of the changes traditionally attributed to Marius never even happened, and those that did nearly all shouldn't be credited to Marius. Apparently this has been a known thing in Roman scholarship for absolutely ages now, but having grown up with Rome Total War I was definitely not aware of that.
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Jun 30, 2023 22:11
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In a certain sense, what’s the difference between a philosopher and a priest? If your worldview is centered around your religion as opposed to natural science, your philosophers will be focusing their efforts on that. Maybe it makes it less applicable to other cultures, but aren’t they fundamentally similar?
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Jul 13, 2023 18:53
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:I was thinking about the Library today, which while yes built during the Ptolemaic era probably had a decent portion of its 400,000 scrolls comprised of works by native Egyptian thinkers, I wouldn’t necessarily guarantee this, although I’d also assume it’s likely. Alexandria was very firmly a Greek polis in Egypt, not an Egyptian city, and the Ptolemies operated with an ethnic hierarchy with Greeks on top.
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Jul 22, 2023 01:18
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I remember reading (iirc in The Making of the Middle Sea) that modern humans and Neanderthals seem to have shared a fairly static border around the Levant for a very long time -- like, many tens of thousands of years. Then, when humans finally broke through that, we swept through Europe (with the North Africa -> Iberia crossing being notably unutilized) in a much shorter timespan. I think the theory went that we co-adapted with these particular populations of neanderthals in the Levant and they could compete with us, but after that border group things were a lot more lopsided.
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Aug 3, 2023 19:11
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Even with humans in early historic times wasn't it normally the latter? You don't usually get true "mixed" communities, it's either multiple discrete communities in close proximity, or occasional individuals exchanging.
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Aug 3, 2023 19:21
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There was definitely no implied agency on the part of the "breaking through" in the original passage from the book, although I can see how what I wrote reads that way. The area involved was still relatively vast, not a simple border, and so it would be difficult for any group of modern humans to walk through while competing for food sources with the resident neanderthals, who were much better adapted against modern humans. I'd have to find the passage to remember all the details.
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Aug 3, 2023 21:52
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We actually do know the origins of East Asian dragons, we have a continuous chain of artifacts portraying them throughout their artistic development. They straight up do come from portrayals of crocodiles, as it turns out.
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Aug 5, 2023 23:40
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I’d heard that of Japan, where the diversity is apparently because of the culture around the peasantry acquiring surnames all at once during modernization at local temples/magistrate’s offices, where a huge chunk would be unique occasionally bordering on somewhat insulting towards the peasant that didn’t know the meaning of what they were given. In Korea in contrast the peasants would often take on the surname of the local noble clan / lie and pretend descent from it, so you got just a small handful of surnames predominating.
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Aug 17, 2023 22:57
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There have been a number of examples of proposed theoretical constructions that were later verified via epigraphic sources and the like, so it's definitely not all bullshit. David Anthony in the much-loved-here work "The Horse, The Wheel, and Language" about proto Indo-European origins spends a bunch of time reinforcing the argument.
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Aug 19, 2023 13:32
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Big Willy Style posted:This was my first thought. A 19th century German anthropologist recorded indigenous oral traditions about how palm trees wound up in the Northern Territory which DNA evidence backs. I worry I'm too negative on this; I'll say it would definitely be cool as heck if turns out some oral traditions really are that old. But, while they don't show the actual original myth, which maybe helps elaborate on the claim, what they quote: quote:Professor Bowman read an Aboriginal legend recorded in 1894 by pioneering German anthropologist and missionary Carl Strehlow, which was only recently translated, describing the "gods from the north" bringing the seeds to Palm Valley. Just sounds... like a totally generic turn of phrase that could have come from any number of origin myths, and by pure coincidence can be interpreted as fitting genetic evidence. I know some indigenous Australian peoples have demonstrated remarkably stable oral traditions, but I feel like (because of that) a bunch of people have become very invested in turning what's an impressive aspect of those cultures into something just implausably enduring. There is so, so much evidence on the fallability of human memory and on how oral accounts change over time. The ice age -- let alone tens of thousands of years before the last one even ended -- is just too infathomably long ago.
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Aug 20, 2023 03:27
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Crab Dad posted:I was on orders in Gaeta during 2020 and my visits to all the big sites was magically empty like some plague had wiped out all the tourists. Yeah i havent been since the 2000s but pompeii being hyper crowded wasn’t my experience at all. We stayed until sundown and my strongest memories are of it being nearly deserted late in the day. Shame if it changed this much.
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Aug 24, 2023 00:11
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EricBauman posted:And I think it's actually an open question to what extent haruspicy was 'fair' for lack of a better word. I’m not the least bit religious personally but I wonder if 80 years from now or whatever if there isn’t going to be some looking back at the former place of belief and ritual in human culture and more broadly just… sense of being, as a thing that’s actually important. The works of art of the devoted are pretty consistently the most impressive in so many periods of history. There’s a part of me that feels like we’re not wholly better off for not caring about entrails anymore.
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Sep 4, 2023 09:22
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Is it necessarily a bad thing? We see with folks that plunge into conspiracy and such, you can view yourself as fully detached from religious baggage while imo basically embracing the same attitudes. I'm fully talking out of my rear end here because I've not so much as read a word of actual research on this, but it feels like a human inclination. EricBauman posted:I recently talked to a lady who did catholic outreach and she told me that people with a Buddhist background are now getting more attracted to catholicism because they feel like too much of their own religion (let's not debate whether buddhism is a religion) is just about going through the motions in pointless rituals, and they were looking for something with a more fixed theology, and rituals that were enmeshed in that. Of course she may have been talking up her own shop a bit, but it made sense to me. Huh, that's unexpected and interesting. I wonder if there has been any formal study on this; on the flip side it seems like you get a notable number of people from Christian cultural backgrounds attracted to what basically seems to be 'the motions of pointless rituals' in Buddhism. I've only ever been to Buddhist temples in Korea so maybe it varies by denomination, but I will say while most of the practices are obviously vastly different, there's a general evocative-spiritualness about them with their hymns and incense and such that felt pretty familiar to Catholic/Anglican services. At least bridged the gap enough I could see hoppings faiths while not having it feel as completely alien as the geographic separation would imply.
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Sep 4, 2023 15:42
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Fantasy names based on actual words are so much better than when the authors just make up nonsense “alseus of navelium went with the flermod to narshargth” or the like, it drives me nuts because there’s almost never any logic to it and it ends up feeling super shallow. But then my stance on fantasy in general is that it mostly sucks and is shallow so SlothfulCobra posted:I imagine that places with less invasions where the people there now speak closer to the same language as people who were there a thousand years ago (or alternately, more newly-inhabited areas that weren't as eclectically explored and named as the US), names would seem even closer to normal-rear end words. Korea had a big renaming in the… 1500s I think, when formerly native place names all over the country got changed into sino-Korean words. But in that sense it probably makes them more intelligible today than had they been from archaic Korean words. Seoul is one of the exceptions, funnily enough though, maybe coming from the ancient native term for capital “Seorabeol.”
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Sep 5, 2023 22:23
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We Do Not Know the Population of Every Country in the World for the Past Two Thousand Years posted:Economists have reported results based on populations for every country in the world for the past two thousand years. The source, McEvedy and Jones’ Atlas of World Population History, includes many estimates that are little more than guesses and that do not reflect research since 1978. love the passive aggressiveness from maybe a bit of an insultingly amateur perspective, I've run into McEvedy and Jones a lot doing modding with Paradox games (map-based strategy games set in historical periods) and kind of had it in for it ever since, so I'm somewhat gleefull to see this takedown. Maddison also often seems like a lot of bullshit, but they're at least transparent where their guesswork came from. McEvedy and Jones is just constantly flagrantly wrong, but by dint of being easy to read with nice graphs and all in one place it's still the go to source among a lot of history nerd circles, it seems like.
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Sep 6, 2023 05:34
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Sui was a lot more impactful though. Jin dissolved back into competing states, whereas Sui was basically responsible for everything Tang gets credit for.
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Sep 15, 2023 23:21
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I'd be curious if anyone's read about the topic in depth because I've only ever seen it brought up tangentially, but my impression is that notably, it's thought that China wasn't nearly so much of a sea power at this point. I've read in a few places that it wasn't until I want to say something like the 600s or 700s that ships could reliably navigate across the East China Sea to Japan; it's around that point that direct contact/trade between Japan and the Chinese court picks up, whereas before then it was largely via the Korean Peninsula. During Han times (and for a while later) ships would hug the coast, hopping from Lelang Commandery at Pyongyang -> the area around Busan -> Tsushima -> onward to Japan, when the trip was made. And it wasn't until the Ming that the geography was fully understood, with the Japanese Archipelago running eastward away from China rather than southward parallel to it. Not for total lack of trying. There's a famous legend that Qin Shi Huang, in search of immortality, had a ridiculously extravagant fleet outfitted to sail east into the unknown in search of the Islands of the Immortals. The fleet made a trip and was unsuccessful, then set out again and was never heard from again. Starting in the middle ages Japanese scholars took this to mean the second trip was a success, the fleet landed in prehistoric Japan, and its leader loved the place so much he settled there permanently -- to this day for reasons that kind of bewilder me you get some people claiming this, and it was for way too long considered a genuinely possible origin of the Yayoi -- but uh, since absolutely no trace of it has been uncovered it's far more likely the ships just disappeared at sea. Outside of the Chinese state, there was navigation from Taiwan (and maybe directly from the Yangtze, but probably stopping over at Taiwan) across the Ryukyu islands and to the archipelago done by Austronesian peoples, going back to Jomon times. Interestingly there's apparently some linguistic evidence this migration carried on (or resumed?) through Han times. The linguist Alexander Vovin in one of his final papers before he passed away theorizes the Hayato and Kumaso 'barbarians' of southern Kyushu might have been Austronesian. Koramei fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Sep 26, 2023 |
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Sep 26, 2023 01:10
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Tulip posted:The main thing I wanted to add to this is that its not just the Persian empires who would be loving about with this. They were definitely the most powerful of the independent countries between China and Rome, but there were others and each of them had an interest in preventing Rome and China from having direct context. Not as some part of like, grand political strategy, but because direct contact would interfere with their ability to collect merchant taxes if merchants, well, didn't go through them. On the other side of Han China too, Gojoseon was said to have prevented groups further down the Korean peninsula from directly contacting Han, trying to guard its role as middleman. Coulda been overstated — Han used it as pretext to launch an invasion — but it’s undeniable that trade with China was like, really important.
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Sep 27, 2023 00:15
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Oct 12, 2023 21:33
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Grand Fromage posted:I hope that is legit, I saw it earlier but the guy behind it is a tech weirdo whose first instinct was to tag in Elon Musk so I don't trust him. But if it really is a way to read them then sure whatever, let's see them scrolls. I dunno if he's actually a trained historian, but Gareth Harney is fairly well regarded as far as I know
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Oct 12, 2023 22:07
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There's an account iirc from the time of Southern Song where, after an invasion, the court had to turn to Goryeo to get copies of a whole bunch of classical Chinese texts because they couldn't find them anywhere within China itself. Books can be so fragile. It's honestly remarkable we have as many ancient texts as we do. That we have at least some idea in historical accounts of what was going on in so many places even 2000 years ago.
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Oct 13, 2023 04:00
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sleepy.eyes posted:So, when they aren't fighting, what did the Legions do? If you weren't on campaign, or marching to a new one, did the average legionary get to visit home, if close enough? Did they just have to sit around in camp doing busywork and drilling? From what I've read and recall (from this thread), they were mobile forces until the later empire, but you can't just have dudes marching and drilling for their entire careers, can you? I've been slowly working through Mary Beard's SPQR and she has a little bit on this -- the vindolanda tablets imply only like 50% of the legionaries were actually at their posts. Some were way off in London or elsewhere acting as bodyguards, some were sick, and the vast majority were iirc resting at a nearby camp rather than on duty. Also mentions that there's plenty of evidence for families at the bases, even if it's technically prohibited.
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Nov 5, 2023 07:05
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I’m just gonna keep using soft c’s unashamedly. Not like the language stayed the same between 300 BCE and 300 CE anyway, not to mention half the empire speaking Greek or retaining local languages. We transitioned to soft c for a reason (it sounds cooler) and it doesn’t need to be any other way.
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Jan 1, 2024 03:23
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bob dobbs is dead posted:some fucker wrote an entire novel in one sentence once for shits and giggles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducks,_Newburyport  gently caress
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Jan 29, 2024 14:23
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Also not sure a bunch of aristocratic bellends thinking of their peasants as worth less than horses is actually much of a rebuttal.
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Feb 18, 2024 17:13
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Tulip posted:The cutting off way I have to read this; this whole subject is fascinating. The apparently ever relevant Bret Devereaux went into it a little in one of his earlier series: quote:The oldest way of war was what Native North Americans called – evocatively – the ‘cutting off’ way of war (a phrase I am borrowing from W. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America” in Empires and Indigines, ed. W. Lee (2011)), but which was common among non-state peoples everywhere in the world for the vast stretch of human history (and one may easily argue much of modern insurgency and terrorism is merely this same toolkit, updated with modern weapons). The goal of such warfare was not to subjugate a population but to drive them off, forcing them to vacate resource-rich land which could then be exploited by your group. To do this, you wanted to inflict maximum damage (casualties inflicted, animals rustled, goods stolen, people captured) at minimum risk, until the lopsided balance of pain you inflicted forced the enemy to simply move away from you to get out of your operational range. I remember reading recently (here??) that it's theorized many foraging societies had truly staggering per capita deaths from human-human violence. Like, 25-50%? It honestly all sounds kind of terrifying.
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Mar 9, 2024 12:12
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Dante posted:Going to abuse this thread again to ask for book recommendations that don't belong (apologies); What are the best books about japanese history pre-1900 that are available in english (or at least has a passable english translation)? Any pre-1900 period is fine. Japan Emerging e. Karl Friday is probably the most authoritative work out there at the moment, at least until the new version of the Cambridge History of Japan eventually comes out. For a less dense monograph, I quite like William Wayne Farris' Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History.
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Mar 15, 2024 15:37
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Can anyone do a summary of the current state of the field on the peopling of the americas? Listening to Tides of History lately and the very loosely informed impression I get from that is that while it's basically a certainty Clovis first isn't it, I guess you could say Clovis seems to have been the first actually monumental change? Groups almost certainly preceded them, very likely by a long long time, but there's very little evidence that any were even close to as successful. Clovis wasn't first, but they were the first that were meaningful?
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Mar 17, 2024 19:06
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"Horizon" is such a cool sounding way to remark cultural periods https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodization_of_pre-Columbian_Peru
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Mar 27, 2024 10:28
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Been listening to the prehistory season in Tides of History over the past month or so; on all the stuff about Indo-European migrations now. I've just been kind of in a weird state of horror and awe about prehistoric migrations in general? And how it seems like there is actually evidence a lot essentially were genocidal. I remember for a long time being under the impression that human population replacements essentially didn't happen, and movements even where languages changed were seldom more than a ruling elite; European immigration to the Americas spearheaded by disease being one of only a handful of exceptions where it was more total. In recent years I've been reading (although I wouldn't say comprehending) more journals talking about genetic evidence that seems more and more to contradict that and getting pretty confused about my preconception. The podcast's host brought up that this whole set of notions is just a shift in the academic consensus -- a long time back it was vogue to think of every archaeological cultural change as a movement of people. That was pushed against, with later archaeologists arguing material changes were mostly simply material, with people adopting new superficial goods and not being replaced with different people. In recent years a whole bunch of new genetic evidence has come to light* and it's becoming clearer that no, actually people really did move around, a lot, even if in a more complex way than archaeologists of the early 20th century would assume. And more than that, that a lot of these migrating groups had staggering impacts on the genetics of the regions. Farmers near the world over seem to have crowded out foraging peoples before them -- in that instance often not genocidally, but just by nature of being able to support such large populations in comparison that it was essentially genocide as a fait accompli in the end. But some later migrations also seem to be surprisingly destructive and leave staggering marks on genetics without having subsistence strategies that allowed for massively higher populations in the same way. As in, they really did go and kill a huge number of people? I know there was some disparaging of War Before Civilization here but Neolithic wars seem weirdly primordially terrifying. With states the victims are usually sold into slavery and such, and at least their descendants can hope for better someday. In societies without the capacity to take on captives that same way, they just outright murder... and so many groups of peoples seem to essentially die out entirely? I don't know, weird scrambled thoughts in the middle of the night. I'm just finding myself peculiarly shook by the implications of what all these migrations actually mean, and how newer evidence seems to support much more brutal conclusions than what I thought was the consensus in the past. *lots of mind blowing stuff here incidentally -- genetics has come leaps in the past like, 5 years, and a lot of old assumptions are getting overturned
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Apr 6, 2024 17:38
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I know this is a steaming turd of a take but hearing about warfare in the European Neolithic/early bronze age, I.e. societies without the capacity to really take captives, has me kind of viscerally terrified compared to just the general dull horror of state era warfare. Maybe it's just since it's new to me as a subject, but hearing about massacre sites where the entire clan is rounded up in their sleep and gets their heads bashed in (and how that seems to have been the norm in warfare??) I don't know that I wouldn't prefer enslavement. I mean, almost certainly not in the actual moment. More just expressing another holy poo poo at how violent that era seems to have been. David Anthony (of Indo-European fame) was talking in an interview about how demographically conflicts seem often to have had like a 30% fatality rate. It's as if every single conflict was initiated by the Mongols at their most brutal. I'm glad I didnt live back then.
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Apr 8, 2024 12:56
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Horrible things always happen for sure. Just by nature of there being so many more people, I'm sure that in an absolute sense far more horrific things happened with far more regularity in later eras. But per capita I think it sounds like it was a very different story; prehistoric conflict seems like it was demographically devastating, actively genocidal, in a way that later conflicts near always just couldn't be. I would definitely pick a later era. Or earlier. Early farming was the worst of all worlds.
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Apr 8, 2024 13:51
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https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691213026/1177-bc#preview Not a release I was expecting but I am intrigued
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Apr 14, 2024 17:21
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Kaal posted:Apparently in geology they’re a fan of BP or Before Present. It’s not really standardized (and 74 After Present doesn’t make any sense) but they like setting the origin point at 1950 because that’s when atomic testing started changing the ambient radiation levels that get used for dating prehistoric rock samples and objects. There’s certainly worse time scales. I've noticed this a lot in newer archaeological papers too, I suppose since that's related to geology but I feel like it's been catching on in recent years as some scholars want to move away from BC/AD but don't like BCE/CE either.
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Apr 17, 2024 14:57
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Has there been any progress on Linear A / the Harappan script? It feels wild to me there's all this text we still can't actually read even with all the technological headway these days.
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May 1, 2024 04:19
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Listening to the Tides of History stuff on Shang China and dang this sounds like some of the most systematically entrenched human sacrifice I've ever heard of, it sounds as bad as the Aztecs. I knew it was a thing to an extent; you get ceramic depictions of humans as grave goods in mid-Zhou (the terracotta warriors being the "ultimate" version of that I guess) that I remember are thought to have been used as a replacement for what was previously a tradition of real human sacrifice. But the way Patrick Wyman's talking about it in this episode, it's like Shang ritual practically revolved around it. Hundreds of people sacrificed at a time in often horrible ways.
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May 4, 2024 12:15
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skasion posted:Thanks for that first link there, it’s good explanation of the issue. I’m not much closer to understanding what exactly Li Shuo means, but I did find a copy of Early Chinese Religion, Part One which is a super interesting collection. The chapter “Rituals for the Earth” by Kominami is particularly wild, the author argues that the Shang state (or “state”) was more like a nomadic army/itinerant court that repeatedly relocated a magic clod of dirt (botu) from their homeland to form the center of a new military base centered around a victory temple (boshe) on someone else’s land, ritually watering it with the blood of the former landowners to revivify the earth for Shang agriculture, like Gun and Yu spreading God’s self-reproducing dirt on the nine abysses of waters to save China from the flood. Seems kind of cranky but what an idea! Dang, that's nuts. I'm struck by how little we seem to know about Shang despite all the oracle bone inscriptions; or maybe it's just a separation between pop history and academic. You get some accounts treating it as just earlier Zhou, and then others where it's totally different.
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May 7, 2024 21:00
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Grand Fromage posted:Was the meat eaten afterwards? Generally, yeah. In all situations I'm aware of it was a free feast for all attending, not just the priests. Not super confident on this but my vague impression is the food used for ancestral rites, at least in Joseon, was in fact left there traditionally.
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May 9, 2024 04:50
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Huh, so I'm probably just wrong but I heard there used to be a problem with pests eating the ancestral food, so people started just eating it. Maybe it was just that people left it out for less time than they used to before eating it rather than there not being any eating at all.FishFood posted:I think there is a nugget of truth in the comparison of Shang or Aztec-style mass sacrifice and violent public executions or auto da fe. They're both public violence enacted for spiritual reasons, to strengthen in-group and out-group boundaries, and to reaffirm the rightful hierarchy of society. I think it's an interesting mental exercise that encourages us to reevaluate our priors about both subjects. I don't think it holds up all the way to the end of the line of argument though, yeah.
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May 9, 2024 06:01
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