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This dude elaborates on that slightly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-TCIamyYCo Incidentally despite how our first thought these days at the sight of every large animal is "to sit on it", the transition from a pack animal to a war animal is not a smooth one anywhere. Chariotry wasn't some universal idea, it was invented only in a single place (Iranian nomads, I think?) and spread from there. Although oxen-drawn war wagons were utilized before horse chariots, but I think they sort of fit a different role.
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May 10, 2013 05:07
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It's been talked about a couple of times here that people in antiquity and the middle ages actually had a pretty good life expectancy- could I get a source for it? I was talking about it with a friend and they want numbers  .
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May 11, 2013 18:36
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Thanks for the answers regarding lifespan, everybody. I'm a bit silly to be trying to assert something without actually knowing the details myself.Space Monster posted:I've heard people say "We'd have had jet fighters by 1200 AD if Rome had never fallen/the library at Alexandria hadn't been burned." I'm sure someone else can give a proper answer, but I think it's important to note that the technology we have today is not here through the minds of inventors alone- societal factors that take thousands of years to overcome, not to mention trade networks that were just not present in antiquity, are absolutely essential too. These aren't things that snap overnight, and the innovations and changes in thought produced by millions of people over centuries are more important than the innovations produced by a handful of dudes in one city. You can't just say what if the library hadn't burned and what if Rome hadn't fallen- it's not like someone flipped a switch that doomed the empire overnight, it was a whole slew of factors that accumulated over centuries, with perhaps the most important among them- climate change- being completely out of human control. The world in which the Roman Empire did not fall when it did would be a radically different world from our own in more ways than there just being jet fighters during the crusades.
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May 12, 2013 22:50
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HELLO THREAD READERS one of my more mathematically inclined friends informed me that it is actually line algebra I was talking about; they did not have college-level mathematics in 2000BC that said they did still have algebra so it's not like my point is moot 
Koramei fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Aug 3, 2013 |
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May 13, 2013 02:13
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Well the Bactrian Kingdom only lasted a couple of centuries, mostly overlapping with the Han Dynasty, I thought? There can't have been that many rulers during that time. And according to Wikipedia the first proper Chinese contact with Central Asia was under Zhan Qian:quote:He was the first official diplomat to bring back reliable information about Central Asia to the Chinese imperial court, then under Emperor Wu of Han How long did Greco-Bactrian culture persist in Central Asia? I have a vague recollection that it didn't get overwritten until the Muslim conquests like a thousand years later but that sounds like far too long?
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May 16, 2013 02:09
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PittTheElder posted:Horse archers really weren't everything they are cracked up to be now due to video games, especially since they usually have a finite supply of arrows anyway. Roman armies beat them plenty of times. Finite supply of arrows? How'd that work out for Crassus  . It's not like they were some unbeatable super weapon, but they were a step ahead of other armies of the time, and under a good leader they were fairly unbeatable. Most of the times the Romans were curbstomping the Parthians were during succession disputes and so on when the Parthians were significantly weaker anyway, I thought.
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May 27, 2013 22:20
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PittTheElder posted:Uncommonly immense logistical effort for that exact purpose actually. And what would appear to this armchair general as pretty gross negligence on Crassus' part for not camping at water before the battle. Really he should have had enough cavalry to run off the Parthians, I'm not sure where they wound up. Yeah uh  ..not sure why you modified what I wrote. I just thought it was ironic for you to say that. And there were quite a lot of Roman cavalry, actually, they notably got wiped out by the Parthian cataphracts.
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May 28, 2013 02:48
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The Britons disagree with you, but yes, chariots were for the most part obsolete past the Bronze Age.
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May 29, 2013 02:42
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canuckanese posted:I thought most Britons who used chariots essentially used them to ride to the battle then hopped off to fight. A status symbol more than a weapon. Well wikipedia gives this quote from Caeser: quote:Their mode of fighting with their chariots is this: firstly, they drive about in all directions and throw their weapons and generally break the ranks of the enemy with the very dread of their horses and the noise of their wheels; and when they have worked themselves in between the troops of horse, leap from their chariots and engage on foot. The charioteers in the meantime withdraw some little distance from the battle, and so place themselves with the chariots that, if their masters are overpowered by the number of the enemy, they may have a ready retreat to their own troops. Thus they display in battle the speed of horse, [together with] the firmness of infantry; and by daily practice and exercise attain to such expertness that they are accustomed, even on a declining and steep place, to check their horses at full speed, and manage and turn them in an instant and run along the pole, and stand on the yoke, and thence betake themselves with the greatest celerity to their chariots again. Which is basically how they were used in the Ancient Near East too. I don't think chariots charging like cavalry were ever particularly common?
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May 30, 2013 01:26
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sbaldrick posted:Do you honestly think that Schliemann or Carter did archaeology or history any real favors? Schliemann used dynamite to clear Troy, the Chinese have had least had the good sense not to break into Qin Shi Huang tomb. Schliemann is an obvious outlier, but I hardly think you can say Carter did no favours to history. How about capturing the imagination of every child for a hundred years? If you're going to bring up destructive western archaeologists Carter is about the last person you should call out- he did more good for history in the public eye than anybody else ever has, and very possibly ever will again.
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Jun 6, 2013 03:54
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Jerusalem posted:I've been listening to the History of Rome podcast (thanks to those who recommended it, it's great) and I just got through Claudius' time in charge... holy crap what the hell was Messalina thinking? Sleeping around is one thing, but getting married to another man WHILE married to the Emperor? And not only NOT doing it in secret but making it a big lavish party with plenty of guests? How in the hell did they think they would get away with it? You should watch I, Claudius. Sure it's fictional but it's not like we can know her true motivations and I felt pretty sorry for her in that. Her death scene is also great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9PSmuKpAQY
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Jun 8, 2013 02:44
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I remember reading about a renovation on a church in England where they replaced 800 year old stone stairs that had finally started to wear out and the stuff they put in didn't even last 20. For housing projects and the like that we expect to demolish and reconstruct in half a century it's somewhat understandable, if annoying, but it's put in as a preservation effort... I can't even think of an explanation for it.
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Jun 10, 2013 01:54
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Obdicut posted:And Atilla backed down not because the pope persuaded him but for logistical reasons. I'm pretty sure that's still up for debate.
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Jun 14, 2013 14:49
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Would people that were traveling make sacrifices to/worship/whatever others' gods if they were in their land?
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Jun 16, 2013 04:01
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Sweet this is a subject I've been interested in hearing more about too, it's really fascinating. Steppe people have been demonized pretty universally for so much of our history so there is a considerable lack of accurate information.Grand Fromage posted:Kinda both. Culture/religion tends to rise out of the environment and a people's adaptation to it, so from what I know there are some similarities in those respects. I don't think there was any real contact, but there might've been. People got around in the ancient world. They didn't write anything, so it's hard to say. Also I thought the Hun/Xiongnu relation wasn't taken seriously anymore? Koramei fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Jun 25, 2013 |
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Jun 25, 2013 15:51
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The two principle issues were a lack of refinement in the iron and a lack of pumps to facilitate deeper mines, I'm pretty sure. Better refined metals (which wouldn't come for centuries after the fall of the west) make for more applications for them which creates more demand for them which means deeper mines are necessary along with like a billion other factors. You have to understand that while the Dark Age was a pretty big fall in a lot of ways there's still more than 1500 years of progress between Rome's height and industrialization.
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Jun 26, 2013 02:01
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karl fungus posted:What I meant was like, would the western half have resembled the eastern half culturally and religiously? Would there even have been a schism if the empire hadn't split into half, or did the schism begin prior to that? If the western empire survived, would we have seen caesaropapism there as well, with the western emperor holding great religious power? Or, is that solely an eastern thing? The western half didn't resemble the eastern half culturally or religiously at any point in their histories; they had always been distinct from each other. A schism would have been pretty inevitable with two distinct power centres, but it probably wouldn't have happened for the same reasons. And with a strong Rome in the west The Papacy would never have been able to take power like it did.
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Jun 29, 2013 20:43
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Nenonen posted:A fuckton of old stuff in Europe has been destroyed by succeeding cultures not caring about old monuments, there's nothing especially new about that. What's special about North America is that respect for extinct indigenous cultures there came much later. Europeans were still destroying ancient sites for various reasons, and would have dismantled the Great Pyramid and taken it home if they could, but at least from the rennaissance to mid-1800's they began recognizing the value of local monuments. Either because "the Ancients You just wait until a couple of centuries down the line when people are talking about our generation's savage deconstruction of all those priceless brutalist buildings.  The wealth of materials some of the ancient structures had on them shouldn't really be understated; stuff like marble is not cheap, and neither is marble that the Romans shipped halfway across the known world just because. Nobody's using that poo poo anymore, it'll save me a fortune, why should I have to mine out new materials?
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Jul 1, 2013 17:02
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" or because of rising nationalism. But until then ancient structures were destroyed for construction materials and old places of worship were desecrated by Christians.
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Install Gentoo posted:Uh, you do realize all of the pyramids have been heavily raided for building materials over the millenia right? I don't know about that- for some of the smaller pyramids that were just filled with dirt sure, but the massive ones from the height of the Old Kingdom were left mostly intact; for the Great Pyramid, aside from the metal cap which was obviously quick to go, it took an earthquake nearly four thousand years after it was built for even the casing stones on the very outer layer to be removed fully. It may at first glance seem like an obvious source of resources, but those bricks are loving huge; it took a period of unbelievable wealth and tens of thousands of people to put them into place. As well as the fact that unlike stuff like castles and roman bathhouses and whatever, the pyramids have pretty much always been considered important.
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Jul 2, 2013 15:44
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This episode of the Ancient World Podcast gives a pretty quick (comparatively) overview of the Bronze Age collapse for lazy people like me in case anybody is interested. Actually I'm curious as to what people here have to say about its veracity; it sounds good to me but then it's not a subject I know much about.
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Jul 4, 2013 18:57
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Can we argue about this in the anthropology thread instead? It was interesting at first but after 2 pages... I was trying to think of a good question to go with this but I got nothin'. Do we know much about ancient Korea?
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Jul 5, 2013 03:47
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Ras Het posted:Yes, but particularly earlier in their history. Herodotus starts The Histories with the story of how Scythian nomads took over much of Persia. And obviously eventually Islamic Persia was conquered by the Turks, and then the Mongols and so on, but that was just an unholy mess all over. They weren't affected by the Great Migrations in the same way that Rome was, as the Germanic groups were located north of the Black Sea, and the Huns steered that way too. And the Parthians were originally steppe nomads too- and even before the Scythian kingdom, didn't the Elamites or Manneans or someone get kicked in by proto-horse nomads? Domesticated horses originated from Central Asia after all. And regarding the Turks:  They get less exposure than the Mongols because nobody in Europe cares about incursions into Persia and Afghanistan but they're really up there.
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Jul 15, 2013 02:47
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For the longest time I thought they were two different houses, since I'd hear about the Hapsburgs in reference to their holdings in Spain and western Europe and Habsburgs when people were talking about farther east. Okay I still don't really understand it. Grand Prize Winner posted:How much power did the medieval Roman emperors have, anyway? Were they absolute monarchs or did the senatorial class (were they still called senators after the senate was abolished?) have some kind of check, formal or informal, on imperial authority? Another reason we should stop calling them the Byzantines: I thought you were talking about the HRE when I first read this. Byzantine-Roman Emperors had absolute power just like all the Roman emperors since Diocletian. At least in theory; the period is famous for backstabbing, treachery and insubordinate generals for a reason.
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Jul 21, 2013 18:36
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There's also 12 Byzantine Rulers for a ruler-centric much less comprehensive and considerably more biased take on Byzantine history. And go to page 111 when you finish, a few people (including me ) listed a whole bunch there
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Aug 3, 2013 04:22
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Deteriorata posted:That's because there really wasn't a lot going on elsewhere. Agriculture started spreading outward from the Middle East about 9000 BC, which allowed for some hamlets to form, but in most places the land wore out in a few years so they would be regularly packing up and moving to new land. This prevented much of any larger-scale organization from developing. There were some trade networks, but not much more. This isn't entirely true- there weren't civilizations on the same scale as in the Ancient Near East or China, but to say there wasn't a lot going on is a bit dismissive. The trade networks were extensive- Europe was connected even during the mid-Bronze Age.For instance- we all know Stonehenge, but at roughly the same time in Wales, this was made:  Made of sheet gold, bronze, and a lot of amber. And a bunch of these have been found:  all along with bronze weapons and jewelry and stuff. Presumably there are similar finds in Asia- I know Japan's neolithic Jomon period had quite intricate pottery. Also there was an extremely sophisticated Andean civilization that was contemporaneous with the early civilizations of the Ancient Near East but I forget its name.
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Aug 9, 2013 15:32
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That entire thing is so Edwardian but all I can pay attention to is that tiny sliver of Greater Serbia. Which I guess was deemed more important than the Aztecs.
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Aug 14, 2013 02:18
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah, I don't like Eastern Roman Empire for that same reason. But I still think calling them Byzantine has all sorts of connotations that involve them not being Roman at all. I'd rather just leave it at Roman Empire and call it a day. I think this whole discussion is a pretty illustrative example of why we shouldn't be calling them the Byzantines. They were not successors like the HRE, Papacy, and Ottomans, they were a continuation.
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Aug 15, 2013 02:04
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Isn't that also the time mesoamerican civilizations were first taking off? it's a massive jump though, it was probably a few simultaneous growth booms around the world.
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Aug 28, 2013 19:44
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physeter posted:I think my personal favorite part of the whole "get morally outraged about 2,000 year old genocides" thing is no one ever mentions the rape. poo poo, the Legio XXI Rapax can be (very, very) loosely translated as the 21st Rapists. You'll get 10 pages of people yelling about how Julius Caesar was Hitler, but no one ever mentions that there probably wasn't a serious Classical Age commander who wasn't directly or indirectly responsible for raping at least thousands of people. If you grew up saying "I want to command legions!" it was tantamount to saying "I want to rape loving everything in sight". Marius probably raped like half of North Africa trying to take out Jugurtha. I think that extended way beyond the classical age; maybe to like, present day. Actually I think it was like Koramei fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Aug 30, 2013 |
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Aug 30, 2013 16:23
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Namarrgon posted:It was more a matter of style. Not all of our media and art is photorealistic either. They were still much better sculptors than they were painters. Sculpting was basically mastered back in classical times, painting wouldn't be until the Renaissance. a part of it may have been due to lack of availability of materials- cheap paper, with which you can study all the techniques that got mastered in the Renaissance, wasn't available in Europe until it was spread from the Middle East, well into the Middle Ages -but it wasn't just that. There were some concepts they just didn't understand back in Antiquity. Koramei fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Sep 8, 2013 |
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Sep 8, 2013 15:41
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the JJ posted:A heads up to anyone in the thread, if this Persian stuff interests you, you should read the Shahnama (or Shahnameh). It's an Islamic era collection of pre-Islamic oral traditions relating to Persia. Sort of a Plutarch meets the Odyssey sort of thing, but you get to read, for instance, a mostly accurate description of Ardashir's rise to power followed by his cunning defeat of the Worm of Haftvad. Plus, Persian take on Iskander. (aka, Alexander.) edit: turns out I own it already 
Koramei fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 19:16
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Humans of today are physiologically the same as humans of 1,500 years ago are physiologically the same as humans of 150,000 years ago. Not every group perceives the world in entirely the same way, sure; in addition to the subjective/cardinal directions example, I've heard about a case with a forest-dwelling tribe that had basically no concept of distance (a dude was taken out onto an open plain for the first time and, when he saw a far away elephant, thought it was just a bug)- but when someone tells you that people in the past were smarter, or stupider, or could run faster, or fly, or had tails, or were all colourblind or whatever, they're making poo poo up. Homeric Greeks' eyes were no different from our own.bobthedinosaur posted:edit: Can't start out a new page without a question! China is the farthest recorded; it's maaaybe possible they made it as far as Korea or Japan since there have been some Roman trade goods found in those places, but more likely those were just moved on from China. A couple of months back people were talking about the Greeks (or was it Ptolemies?) possibly having circumnavigated Africa too though, for a different direction. But they didn't make it to the Americas if that's what you're asking (although it's possible some northern European fishermen or whatever made it there a while before Erik the Red and the Vikings). Koramei fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 23:45
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Plexiwatt posted:Link please, this is interesting in light of cross-cultural studies involving the arrow illusion. I'll see if I can find it again. I might be misremembering/ maybe the source is complete poo poo (I think I just read it in some psych magazine) but it wasn't just a difference in perception based on extrapolation from an abstraction like the photo example or anything. Cingulate posted:Well, there were some important changes in our genome, such as the development of lactose tolerance in some populations. Hrumph, yeah lactose tolerance and our digestive systems in general seem to be annoyingly malleable (which kinda makes sense really). I don't think there's any evidence the same is true for mental faculties though. And that theory doesn't make any sense to me; wasn't the first great migration well in progress 70,000 years ago? We'd spread through most of Africa at least by that point.
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Sep 13, 2013 15:35
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The Ptolemies very much considered themselves Greeks, beyond even the rest of the successor states. Cleopatra the 7th, i.e. the one we all know, was very famously the first of them to even speak Egyptian. And since she was the very last of the Ptolemies, well, yeah, that should give you an idea. Most occupying forces will over time slowly integrate into their new cultures, even if they're still the dominant force, but the Ptolemies did no such thing- like, just take a look at their family tree (ladder). Not sure I agree with Gonkish on what the Romans thought of them though- don't you have all these Romans gettin' down on Caeser and Marc Antony because of their relationship with this "woman from far to the east"?
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Sep 16, 2013 02:44
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Cultural genocide is a form of genocide, and there are also groups that were entirely wiped out. That's not hard when entire groups can consist of just a few villages though. Also I think we had this discussion practically verbatim just a couple of weeks ago.
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Sep 18, 2013 20:19
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Yeah you can get all of those on iTunes in America. BBC4 does a few good history programs- look up A History of the World in 100 Objects too.
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Sep 25, 2013 17:19
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Not that much; most of the big advances a major civilization would provide that would be lost were things like sewers, or roads, or large scale irrigation; stuff that could only be constructed and maintained when somewhere had unbelievable manpower. General inventions (that aren't hell to make) would spread incredibly quickly and only be forgotten if they were completely useless (e.g. that steam engine and goblet)- like, despite the fall of Roman infrastructure and technology in the west, stuff like farming equipment and techniques, and metalworking, which had relevance to everybody, would never be forgotten and only improve. Only things that states made a special effort to keep secret would stay secret, and even then they'd usually get out somehow- the Chinese were big on this, so you might actually get a few random innovations that were lost from them, but you're not gonna find much of anything from anybody else, other than like, their local foods and weaving styles and whatever. People didn't pine for colour-changing goblets and cool steam toys in later ages, if that's what you're asking; and while there are lots of cool little inventions from the ancient world that you can find, stuff that was "lost" isn't gonna be any more interesting than stuff that wasn't. edit: if you just want cool invention chat though then this is one I like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQhSXA3AKh4&t=80s Koramei fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Sep 28, 2013 |
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Sep 28, 2013 15:34
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Captain Postal posted:That doesn't really answer my question. What? How does that not answer your question? He said exactly why they're not excavating it now- they will damage it. Qin Shi Huang's tomb is one of the most significant historical sites in the world, and an incredibly important part of Chinese history and culture. The information within it isn't going anywhere now- by leaving it, future generations will be able to get a more complete picture. It's wonderful that archaeologists have that kind of foresight now- if only it had been like that in the past. edit ^^ beaten Fornadan posted:If I remember correctly, there are records of some of his semi-barbarian forefathers also being buried with their followers, though the practice had been abandoned several hundred years before the First Emperor This actually happened all over the world- I guess being buried with people was a pretty sure sign of your own power, or something? The Egyptians used representative figures in tombs for most of their history, but their earliest kings had their actual servants and retainers buried with them- and for the over the top example, take a look at stories about Genghis Khan's tomb. 10,000 workers and soldiers were killed, and then all the guys that executed them were killed too, so that nobody would know where he was buried.
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Oct 13, 2013 02:50
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MothraAttack posted:Can anyone explain how Yahweh-worship evolved into Judaism? How did they come to abandon other Ugaritic deities? There's a wonderful biblical history thread for questions like that! I'm pretty sure that is a particularly contentious topic though, but a couple of the kings slaughtering everybody that had slightly different beliefs would be the short answer.
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Oct 14, 2013 20:12
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Rincewind posted:If the Byzantine Empire wasn't the Roman Empire, when did they stop being Romans? I think the crisis of the third century would be the first time you could say the Roman Empire stopped being the Roman Empire. But as you can see from this page it's up for a lot of debate. I also think it's a little dumb to say the HRE or Ottoman Empire are connected to the Roman Empire in the same way the Byzantines are, even if there were breaks; the HRE was established literally centuries after the dissolution of most of the Roman institutions in the west, and the Ottomans were still more foreign than just being rebellious dissidents or whatever. It's like the vandals Romanizing and then taking North Africa; would you call them Romans? It's all just a part of a greater European history. I'm not sure we should be calling the Byzantines Roman the same way we called their cousins from a thousand years before, but the term Byzantines is also far too detached for what they were and probably the worse of the two options. Also am I the only one that finds the China-Rome comparisons kinda silly? China is practically a continent unto its self the same way Europe is. Talk about Rome and the Han or the Byzantines and the Song or whatever. And nobody gives a poo poo about what peasants call themselves.
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Oct 21, 2013 01:24
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