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Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah, it really, really can't be overemphasized just what a game changer for human health germ theory was. If you get into military medicine the number of deaths from infection in the ACW is just nuts compared to what you see even twenth years later. Joseph Lister made the connection between germ theory and surgical tools (note that the surgeons grubby hands are a tool in this regard) in the late 1860s and it had become fairly widespread by the end of the 1870s. Needing surgery in 1865 was a very loving different proposition than in 1875. The saddest thing is cases like Ignaz Semmelweis. The dude had figured out through statistics and deduction that getting his students to wash their hands after dissecting cadavers and before assisting in delivering babies would drastically reduce maternal mortality rates from puerperal fever. Germ theory didn't quite exist yet, but he'd pretty much discovered aseptic technique. The entire European medical community dismissed him as a quack, he eventually went mad, was committed to a mental asylum, and then died from sepsis after being beaten by the guards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Work_on_cause_of_childbed_fever_mortality
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Oct 5, 2020 05:46
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Tunicate posted:that's basically a myth, in the same way that columbus discovering the earth was round is a myth - in both cases these are people who believed something that was obviously false, who in have been mythologized and assigned modern beliefs instead of the ones the actually held, then treated as matyrs. Thanks! I did not know all of that.
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Oct 5, 2020 09:22
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Almond Crunch posted:Han bureaucratic recruitment didn't use an exam for personnel. Making these sort of evaluations of people (and livestock) is the topic of several texts dating to the Han-Tang interregnum from which we have excerpts and citations (i don't think we have any excavated manuscripts, or transmitted texts in their entirety from this era). The Tang bureaucratic exams instituted under Empress Wu are generally considered to be the earliest incarnation of the examination system, but there's strong reason to believe that her intentions were more about creating a new class of bureaucrats loyal to her, than it was about finding the most qualified candidates. The trope of the luckless scholar, trying his luck at the metropolitan exam each chance he gets doesn't evolve until much later-- the earliest example I can remember is a Yuan dyansty drama involving one of these sorts of characters. I don't know a ton about the Tang Dynasty, but I do know that the Tang poet Li He was supposed to be a child prodigy, and went off to write the Imperial Examination aged 20, but was prevented from doing so at the last minute because his father's name was too similar to the name of the exam. He then went home, wrote tons of well-regarded but super angsty poetry (much of which his mom threw down a toilet), and died of tuberculosis at age 27. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_He#Political_career So he may be a bit of a prototype of the trope of the luckless scholar.
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Oct 19, 2020 07:07
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SlothfulCobra posted:Well the specific reasons why you're always gonna see US/Rome comparisons are: Yeah the country came of age during peak Neoclassicism. Just look at all the courthouses and capitol buildings. But also, there was a longstanding historiographical trend in the West of trying to trace a cultural lineage straight back to Ancient Rome. This coincided with much of US history, and has hung around in popular culture. Gaius Marius posted:Mussolini's Italy was also big on the Roman aesthetic. Unfortunately aesthetics mean jack poo poo. I don't think anyone's trying to argue that it's a particularly rigorous comparison. We're just trying to explain why the US keeps getting compared to Rome in politics and pop-history. That has everything to do with aesthetics and culture, and very little to do with any kind of critical or academic analysis.
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Oct 21, 2020 09:03
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Fuschia tude posted:Hmm, so if Siberia had been fertile enough to support larger settlements, the isolation of the Americas after the last glacial period might never have happened in the first place. Yeah it's kind of a geological coincidence that the series of islands connecting the two continents is almost in the Arctic. But yeah, a little while ago I was reading a bit into Georg Wilhelm Steller, the naturalist on the first Russian expedition to Alaska. That whole expedition was a shitshow. They only actually made it to an island off the coast of Alaska. A large chunk of the crew died of scurvy and a consequent shipwreck. This was in the 1700s, nearly 250 years after Columbus. Even then, the infrastructure to be able to launch an expedition from Kamchatka had only just been put in place through massive spending by the Russian government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Expedition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Steller Like, maybe Japan could have expanded up through the Kuril Island chain to establish a presence in Kamchatka and then somehow beaten the Europeans to the Americas. Except at the time the Ainu people were in the way. Edit: Mr. Nice! posted:I mean, people from what is now the Republic of China sailed all over the pacific including landing in the Americas. Do you have a reference for this? Edit 2: or do you mean the Polynesian peoples? Because they're not substantially more connected to China, either now or in 1492, than indigenous American peoples. Like at that point you may as well just say that the whole world was explored and colonised by people out of Africa. It's true, but not a useful statement in the context of modern history. Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Nov 21, 2020 |
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Nov 21, 2020 14:09
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cheetah7071 posted:There actually was metric time and a metric calendar but it didn't stick, even in France Yeah it's also worth noting that when the Sumerian base-60 system was in use, decimals didn't exist, so arithmetic was largely done using fractions. So the benefits of base 60 in terms of fraction operations were substantial. Also, 60 is a "superior highly composite number", ie one of the best bases to pick for this purpose. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_highly_composite_number IIRC one of the reasons for the failure of metric time was that they tried to institute a ten-day week. I think it had a three-day weekend or something, but people rebelled against working for seven or eight days straight.
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Nov 25, 2020 14:32
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sebzilla posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar Not so neat for the poor schmucks whose birthday always falls on a Wednesday.
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Nov 26, 2020 07:19
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Fuschia tude posted:If you count in binary using the joints on both hands you can go all the way up to 65,535 This works with finger counting (up to 1024), since you can raise or lower fingers to set the bits, but how do you remember which bits are set on finger joints?
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Nov 26, 2020 08:32
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Elissimpark posted:Yes, well. Ideally all recipes would use weights, but they often don't. And if someone in Australia decides to make an American recipe that uses cups, they're likely going to be using the wrong cup unit. I mean, the variance in weight of a cup of flour due to differences in how packed down the flour is are probably greater than the 10g difference in cup measures. Like, ancient merchants invented scales pretty quickly.
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Nov 28, 2020 15:21
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Well, to bring this back on topic, are there any good books or resources on ancient systems of measurement? I remember reading somewhere that Ancient Sumerian merchants were using the same set of weights as the contemporaneous Indus Valley civilization.
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Nov 29, 2020 14:58
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Weka posted:quality of rave goods 
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Dec 5, 2020 06:00
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Kanine posted:What ancient culture would have had the best barbecues? I've been working from an ancient Roman/Greek cookbook, and one dish that was super simple but also tasty was coriander-crusted whitefish. Basically you coarsely grind up a couple of tablespoons of coriander seed, mix it with a bit of salt, and coat the fish with it. Then you bake the fish, ideally covered, until it's cooked. To serve, you mix wine vinegar 1:1 with fish sauce and sprinkle it over the fish. (The coriander can be a bit dry otherwise.) This is a fun blog to check out if you're interested in ancient Roman cookery: http://pass-the-garum.blogspot.com/search/label/Recipes This one is fun if you want to go even further back, to the earliest known recipe book: https://twitter.com/Moudhy/status/1261227596672630785
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Dec 10, 2020 13:38
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feedmegin posted:Or horseradish or mustard, I would assume. Yeah my money would definitely be on mustard. Brassicas are one of the most ancient and heavily-modified crop plants. The seeds of basically the entire family function as mustard, and they produce enormous quantities of seed (see canola).
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Dec 12, 2020 10:48
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And then there's silphium, a plant which the Romans loved so much in their cooking that they harvested it into extinction. We only have the vaguest idea what it looked like, and apparently it tasted a bit like asafoetida, which they used as a cheaper substitute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
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Dec 12, 2020 13:10
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feedmegin posted:I mean if you've eaten anywhere other than a very posh restaurant preferably in Japan horseradish dyed green is exactly what you got. Most people have never had the real thing. Ha -- I'm growing a little wasabi plant. I'm letting it get a bit bigger before thinking about harvesting it though. And yeah, I don't think silphium was spicy -- it was more just while we were on the topic of ancient food.
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Dec 12, 2020 14:05
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FreudianSlippers posted:The original word seems to have been ,,mýri" so swamp/marsh/bog. For gently caress's sake. If the translators wanted it to sound archaic, the could have just used "mire" instead of "mead" and it would've been more accurate, being as it's actually the same word.
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Dec 14, 2020 05:37
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:the king jacking off into the Nile and spending their leisure time getting drunk and drawing dicks all over everything Wait, what? I know about the homosexual strivings of Set and Horus, but 
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Dec 16, 2020 02:21
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aphid_licker posted:There are so many insanely cool lectures big boy university prof lectures on youtube, it's great. This one was great: Steven Garfinkle - Commerce, Communication, and State Formation: Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6l5Y8uRpGQ+ Thanks! Will give this a watch. Re: cuneiform, I don't know that it's much more complex than modern ideographical scripts like Chinese/Japanese.
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Jan 1, 2021 12:42
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Grand Fromage posted:It describes kana, hanzi, and kanji. Individual characters can be complete words or, more commonly, syllables in a larger word. Prefix: I'm just an enthusiastic amateur, please correct me if I have this totally wrong. I get the impression that 1000-1500 number is all the characters ever found, and that there were never more than 900 characters in use at any one time. Also, many of those characters are already derived by compounding of simpler characters. Just going by the cuneiform unicode set, which has around 900 characters, there are examples like "LAGAB" 𒆸, meaning "block", which has 49 derivative characters. For example, "LAGAB times SUM" 𒇡 = 𒆸 + 𒋧. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#Unicode https://escholarship.org/content/qt2w23q9c1/qt2w23q9c1.pdf?t=q4rj1c There's also generally a logic in how they're compounded. According to ePSD, the compound 𒇡 is one form of "sur", meaning "to press". As mentioned above, 𒆸 means "block", while 𒋧 means "to flatten". So the character for "pressing" is the combination of "flatten" and "block", presumably describing a wine press. But yeah, it also sounds like they got rid of most of the ideograms as soon as they started using it for languages other than Sumerian (for basically everyone except for scholars/mystics/priests).
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Jan 2, 2021 09:32
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Fuschia tude posted:That doesn't sound right to me. I haven't studied them in great detail, but my understanding is cuneiform was much more of a writing method, like "cursive" or "binary encoding", than it is any specific alphabet or character set. It was used to write over a dozen different (often utterly dissimilar) languages in a huge swath of territory over a period of about three thousand years, sometimes used by half a dozen or more languages simultaneously. My understanding is that cuneiform arose as an ideographical representation of Sumerian. Then Sargon of Akkad conquered all of Sumeria, but made a major effort to adopt and assimilate Sumerian culture. He even went so far as to appoint his daughter the head priestess of Inanna, and gave her the task of harmonizing the Akkadian and Sumerian religions. In the process, he created a bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian society, and there was a need to represent Akkadian using cuneiform. But Akkadian is a Semitic language, while Sumerian was a language isolate. So the scribes instead created a syllabary out of the Sumerian cuneiform, and used that to represent Akkadian phonetically. (Some ideograms were kept). Later on, this syllabic cuneiform spread to other languages in the region, most of which were also Semitic. Meanwhile, Sumerian actually died out as a spoken language, but continued to be used by scholars (much like Latin). Those scholars continued to use the ideographical cuneiform. It's also worth bearing in mind that as a writing system, it was around for about 3,500 years.
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Jan 2, 2021 12:41
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Sanskrit for sure. Hebrew was around in more or less modern form for 2.2K years, but if you draw a line with Aramaic and Phoenician, you could argue that it goes back further. Also I'm not sure how long the Mesoamerican scripts were around, but possibly those too?
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Jan 2, 2021 13:03
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Zopotantor posted:No. Japanese has an additional layer of “readings” (onyomi/kunyomi etc.) on top of the basic characters. The other thing is that the article specifies Akkadian cuneiform, ie Sumerian script being used to represent a completely different language. So in that way it's analogous to Kanji, which is Chinese script adapted to represent a completely unrelated language (Japanese). Scarodactyl posted:The first phonetic alphabet apparently developed from using Egyptian heiroglyphs to phonetically represent a semitic language (likely because the Egyptians had semitic-language speaking workers in their turquoise mines). It is likely the direct, distant ancestor of the Latin alphabet and all its cousins. Ancient Egyptian was also a Semitic language, for what it's worth. Grand Fromage posted:My level of cuneiform knowledge is I looked it up on wikipedia and found references to what looked to be analogous to Chinese radicals. I would defer to anyone who actually knows cuneiform. I get the impression (from ePSD) that there are a lot of words made up of multiple characters, so in a way they're like radicals. But I also get the impression that most of the compound words correspond to actual compound words in spoken Sumerian, whereas the compound characters correspond to simpler, monosyllabic words. Sometimes the compound characters are written in sequence, like the words, though, so I believe there's some academic debate as to which are which.
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Jan 3, 2021 00:10
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CrypticFox posted:Reconstructing Sumerian phonology is a lot harder then Mycenean Greek though, since Mycenean Greek can be compared to Attic and Modern Greek. There is no modern language that is even all that similar to Sumerian, so figuring out how that language would have been spoken requires a great deal of guesswork. Egyptian is actually somewhat easier (in some ways, the lack of vowels are still a major issue), even though its about the same age as Sumerian. A direct line can be drawn from Ancient Egyptian to the Coptic language, which is still (barely) in use today. My understanding was that with Sumerian, the long period of Sumerian-Akkadian bilingualism helps a lot. I believe there are even surviving examples of Sumerian pronunciation guides for the discerning Akkadian-speaker. So working back through the Semitic languages, we can at least get some idea.
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Jan 7, 2021 14:02
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Just wanted to say, this related tweet is extremely my poo poo: https://mobile.twitter.com/Moudhy/status/1352949087767818240
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Jan 27, 2021 07:12
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Dalael posted:Within a 100 years, most would fail due to no structural maintenance. Some even earlier. Yeah the structural strength comes from steel, which is not known for lasting in the weather. That said, in a collapse scenario, there's a good chance that the skyscrapers would be systematically demolished to scavenge the steel. We've already mined all the easy-to-extract iron ore on the planet, so it's quite possible that a hypothetical lower-tech society's best bet for getting iron would be from the remains of modern society.
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Jan 28, 2021 17:54
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Ghost Leviathan posted:They probably had a baggage train for carrying polearms and other unwieldy supplies long distance as most armies do. Yeah I found this passage in the Anabasis: quote:The first thing which I recommend is to burn the wagons we have got, so that we may be free to march wherever the army needs, and not, practically, make our baggage train our general. And, next, we should throw our tents into the bonfire also: for these again are only a trouble to carry, and do not contribute one grain of good either for fighting or getting provisions. Further, let us get rid of all superfluous baggage, save only what we require for the sake of war, or meat and drink, so that as many of us as possible may be under arms, and as few as possible doing porterage. They definitely had more stuff than they could carry just on the backs of the soldiers.
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Feb 10, 2021 07:49
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Always gotta keep in mind that you can't really have much in the way of warfare without logistics, and while certainly a lot of armies would pillage and loot their way through sometimes even friendly territory to stay fed, it's not sustainable in the long run. That passage is significant I'd imagine since it's specifically the army abandoning their logistics train to take to guerrilla warfare, since in hostile territory it'll rapidly become a liability as they can't expect a peaceful resupply. Yeah exactly, that was the "oh poo poo, they've executed our generals. OK we're Greeks and we have democracy so we just elected new ones, but it is time to get the gently caress out of Persia" moment. The Anabasis is full of cool details about the logistics of keeping the army going.
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Feb 12, 2021 09:34
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Somethingawful is preserved at the library of Congress. This is actually pretty interesting, in that the sites they're archiving are really the more influential sites from the 2000-2010 era of the internet, but are largely moribund or marginalised now. I don't really know that there's an equivalent for the 2010s or 2020s. Social media (and Reddit) are more platforms than communities. And while the FAANGs may be recording vast amounts of behavioral data on nearly every human on the planet, but I suspect that'll have about the same likelihood of survival and future historical usefulness as Sumerian accounting tablets.
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Mar 25, 2021 21:13
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Alhazred posted:Yeah, when the library of Ashurbanipal was burned down by the babylonians, scythians and medes it actually helped preserve the clay tablets it contained. Also, you really know how important you are when three different ethnic groups band together to destroy you. Yeah after what he did to the Elamites, it's surprising it didn't happen sooner. quote:"Susa, the great holy city, abode of their gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered. I entered its palaces, I opened their treasuries where silver and gold, goods and wealth were amassed... I destroyed the ziggurat of Susa. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to naught; their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds. The tombs of their ancient and recent kings I devastated, I exposed to the sun, and I carried away their bones toward the land of Ashur. I devastated the provinces of Elam and on their lands I sowed salt." quote:For a distance of a month and twenty-five days' journey I devastated the provinces of Elam. Salt and sihlu I scattered over them... The dust of Susa, Madaktu, Haltemash and the rest of the cities I gathered together and took to Assyria... The noise of people, the tread of cattle and sheep, the glad shouts of rejoicing, I banished from its fields. Wild asses, gazelles and all kinds of beasts of the plain I caused to lie down among them, as if at home. There's a relief depicting this, which has what's believed to be captured Elamite nobles being forced to grind the bones of their ancestors to dust.
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Mar 26, 2021 21:58
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Is the implication that the "Kaškan enemy" were the Israelites? Ḫatti was basically the middle of Anatolia, so seems pretty far afield. Also it sounds like the concept of the twelve tribes didn't come about until at least 500 years later.
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Apr 5, 2021 07:11
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Grevling posted:I haven't read that book but I saw the author had posted this on Twitter and judging by the comments all I could think was is it possible they weren't reacting to the swearing because they were prudes but because it was distracting and annoying? I just read through the first ten pages or so of the Amazon preview, and the closest thing I could find to swearing was the phrase "senators took to stabbing the hell out of each other". I had to ctrl-F to find the word "gently caress" which is used twice in the entire chapter, which is one-ninth of the book. (Although apparently I'm looking at the Bowdlerised-for-Americans version): https://twitter.com/NuclearTeeth/status/1382715723441668107 But still, I'd fall heavily on "they were prudes" with an extra sprinkling of misogyny. Also, the replies I see to that tweet you posted are all pretty positive and supportive. But you do know that Twitter tunes what you see based on what it thinks it knows about your personality and leanings?
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Apr 20, 2021 08:10
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Ola posted:Private illicit collection of items valuable to science seem to me as incredibly irrational and anachronistic. It made sense for a 1700s guy to keep a dino skull, it wasn't illegal and he could brag about it openly. Some Cayman Islands dirtbag who does it can only brag to his fellow criminals. Same for stolen art. I mean, most of the naturalist collecting (and archaeological looting) kind of stuff happened more in the 1800s. And I don't think there's a huge difference between the average Victorian capitalist/aristocratic dirtbag and the average current-day Cayman Islands dirtbag. Gaius Marius posted:They need to sell them. I want a cool bug rock, stick 'em in the gift shop. You can, in fact, buy stuff made of black marble with ammonite fossils in it. eg: https://welldonegoods.com/search?q=orthoceras I have no idea what the ethics of that are, but it's probably at least not as bad as the late 1800s, when they were digging up entire fossil beds to use as fertiliser.
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May 9, 2021 04:16
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The distinction between blue and grey doesn't show up in old English until the AD 700's or so. Before that they're the same color. Huh. I was just reading that the word "blue" comes from the word for woad dye. My experience of dyeing with indigo (same dye compound as woad) is that lighter shades look more grey then blue. So conflating the two kinda makes sense.
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Jun 15, 2021 08:46
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Weka posted:What's your source on that? Etymonline suggests it come from "PIE *bhle-was "light-colored, blue, blond, yellow," " This paper: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/200783371.pdf But they don't provide a source for that claim, so  Edit: quote:1 In fact, in the Old English period (c. 600–1150), the word blæwen, Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Jun 15, 2021 |
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Jun 15, 2021 16:39
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Weka posted:It seems like the term for woad came from the term for blue, not the other way around. Well, from the word for "the blue-grey colour of the sea", going by that etymology link, but yeah.
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Jun 15, 2021 21:20
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feedmegin posted:Worth pointing out that the Roman state was a mediaeval state of course, as was the Ottoman Empire. It's not western european feudalism all the way down when it comes to organising armies. Is this a "when did the Roman Empire really end" quip? Or do you have a different definition of "mediaeval"? I thought the end of the Western Roman Empire was literally the definitional starting point of the middle ages?
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Jul 1, 2021 22:26
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cheetah7071 posted:The word "western" is carrying a lot of weight in your post Lol obviously, and the whole concept of "the middle ages" has little meaning outside of Europe, North Africa and Levant. It just felt like, in a conversation contrasting the logistics of the ancient Roman Empire at its peak to the average European mediaeval state, it doesn't make much sense to be grouping the Eastern/Byzantine Roman Empire with the ancient one. I'd be curious to know to what extent Byzantium retained the same level of logistics as ancient Rome. That shipwreck chart with the huge trough during the heyday of Byzantium might suggest not.
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Jul 2, 2021 01:47
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This got posted in another thread recently, and is pretty relevant:Platystemon posted:They hosed up the environment quite a lot.
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Jul 2, 2021 21:10
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euphronius posted:The entire state of Pennsylvania was clear cut. Literally every tree was cut down and burned for coke or sent down the the Susquehanna to Baltimore This, but the whole North American continent. BC is covered in trees, and still actively exporting them, but it's all artificial, and there is hardly any old growth left. And the current practice of clear cutting, sending in some crusty hippies to replant a monoculture, then clear cutting again 50 years later is probably not going to be sustainable for too much longer.
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Jul 4, 2021 05:03
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So I get a genomics news service roundup in my inbox for work, and this article came up: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(21)00645-8 They found and characterised Yersinia pestis (plague) from a dude buried 5,000 years ago. Apparently his corpse was riddled with it, but they argue he probably got it from a beaver bite. They were also responding to a 2019 study: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31464-8 That one dug into other people's sequence data from ancient bones, detected Yersinia pestis, and mapped out the spread of the strains. They even proposed that plague may have been a factor in the Neolithic decline. But the more recent study argued that the strain they found lacked the genes necessary for transmission via fleas, and that there wasn't enough archaeological evidence for pneumonic plague, so they're kinda sceptical that there was an actual major plague event, vs just a bunch of animal reservoirs with people occasionally getting it from animal bites. Anyway, both articles are open access, and interesting reads. Archaeological molecular epidemiology. Cool poo poo.
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Jul 5, 2021 22:09
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