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I had a question about ancient augury/religion/superstition. Is there any evidence on what they thought was happening when the oracles read the signs? I'm curious about the force behind what they thought was happening, whether a good omen was that this outcome is preordained, the gods will fight on our side, or something else entirely. Same with superstition, did they think knocking on way cause the effect they wanted to occur, or cause outside forces to intervene to try and make it so.
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Sep 27, 2019 17:30
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I could be wrong about this, but I believe Xenophon (who was a sacrificin' fool) writes about this, taking the angle that divinations show what is *possible* if we live up to our potential. Bad omens, You're fuxked; good omens, you've got a good chance, but no guarantees. Oh very interesting, so it's more like a weather report of your chances essentially, than taken to be a prophecy of this has to come to pass. (Babies with fire crowns excepted)
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Sep 27, 2019 22:44
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Squalid posted:I really don't know enough to have a strong opinion opinion about the status of the helots. However even in Athens around 300 BC there were probably twice as many slaves as citizens. As far as Greek cities went the slave:citizen ratio in Sparta was probably on the high end but it wasn't a radical departure from the Greek norm. And while writers like Thucydides describe the Spartans as preoccupied with the threat of helot revolt, again a comparison with other Greek cities is relevant. Both Thebes and Athens at the height of their power spent a ton of time and energy working to bully and dominate their respective junior league partners, and the greatest threat to their power was a revolt among subjected cities. I'd just finished that set of articles myself so it's definitely fresh in my mind, but according to the author Bret Deveraux there was a huge differences between the two states, there's this chart too which shows it:  Now I don't have the ability to judge how correct he is, but that seems like a radical departure.
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Jan 30, 2020 22:56
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SlothfulCobra posted:-The city of Sparta was is pretty small compared to what I expected. Is that accurate? Is there even enough written about Sparta's buildings to know how accurate that is? I get that it doesn't need walls because Laconia is surrounded by mountains with only a fairly narrow pass into the region, and maybe the whole power structure with the Helots might work better for more rural population distributions, but it feels like maybe cities just aren't depicted to scale with eachother. It's much smaller than Athens, but it even feels dinky compared to Corinth and Argos. On that front yeah Sparta was a polis without being one city. It was I think three main towns but there wasn't anything to compare it to the others city wise.
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Mar 24, 2020 18:57
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Technically this is post Rome but why didn't europeans make us of slaves in Europe after Rome fell? I know christians weren't allowed to be enslaved but surely the europeans could have raided muslims on the med just like the muslims did to them? My understanding is that they did, though I guess it depends on your timeframe. I believe there was also a trade out of Europe into other areas though as well.
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Jul 30, 2020 04:00
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Cetea posted:Imagine a world with no written word (which is most of human existence); knowledge was passed down orally, which is not conductive to scientific advances because all knowledge becomes part of a giant telephone game. With each generation, the words change slightly until the original story is lost entirely. Now if a written language existed, but the barrier to entry was extremely high, then the knowledge transfer becomes much harder because there's nobody to read it. This is pretty much what happened in Western Europe in the dark ages, as basically only monks and priests could read. Scientific advances did continue, but were much slower compared to the later eras. Imagine if you were a modern person who could not read; I doubt you could contribute in any meaningful way to scientific advances except for becoming a test subject. I'd push back here about your conception of the Dark Ages. For one, the conception of 'dark ages' isn't rooted in modern historical understanding of the period, but a way to frame the achievements of a later group as more worthy or closer to a 'classical' standard then what came before. It distorts our understanding of what did happen and leads to that silly chart of 'advancement' as if human civilization was just some sort of tech tree.
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Sep 9, 2020 19:28
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I hear what you're saying about the dark ages being a time before Charlemagne, but I still think it's not a descriptive or useful term when talking about the time period. For one it didn't originally just refer to say ~450-~750. It was a broader term I believe, that then has shrunk, or been retrofitted to different periods, after it's been found to no longer be applicable to the initial definition. Dark also requires light, which when has its own problems when viewing history through a lens of moral judgement. There's been some stuff I've read that argued for it more meaning dark as in a lack of written sources compared to other eras, but at the end of the day I feel the term has enough issues and doesn't really have a great descriptive value worth keeping it around, particularly because everyone seems to have their own definitions that can be wildly off.
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Sep 9, 2020 22:55
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Mr. Nice! posted:Hercules in New York is the best. I just watched it for the first time last weekend and it's something else that's for sure.
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Oct 30, 2020 06:49
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Roman/ancient history: Listen, if the warchief of the Huns wants you to call him daddy, you save our city and call him daddy.
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Nov 5, 2020 18:37
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I know the blues and the greens are the famous demes, but that there were other colors as well. Did they still exist with supporters at the time of the Nika riots? Or had they been absorbed by the two major teams? Or was it the hipster choice, oh yeah I'm into the Reds, you wouldn't know their charioteers.
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Nov 19, 2020 02:12
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How does Tom Holland's (not spiderman) work stack up? His book about Islam seems to check a lot of weird boxes but don't know if that's just me reading poo poo where it doesn't belong.
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Dec 30, 2020 12:04
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Grand Fromage posted:Rubicon's great, especially for introducing people to the material. I've liked everything I've read of his, though I don't know Islamic or Persian history enough to judge those books like I did Rubicon. Strategic Tea posted:Holland's book on the near East after ~400AD takes the stance that the Qur'an was fudged together by scholars decades or centuries after the fact, with particular howlers such as Mecca not being the original holy city and Muhammad's first followers being wealthy fixers from the Roman frontier. Thanks, I came across his book on Islam from someone I'd say is Islamophobic adjacent, so raised my concern.
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Dec 31, 2020 07:53
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Given all the alphabet talk I was curious about number systems as well. I know a lot of the world has adapted the so called arabic numerals, but how many other approaches are still commonly used and are there any other common ones not based 10? Also were the roman numerals as bad as they seem? Or was it equivalent/easier one you were used to it?
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Jan 3, 2021 08:10
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Cessna posted:I think that the school forcing me to try to write in cursive in 2nd/3rd grade absolutely ruined my attitude towards school for at least a decade. It's funny I had an somewhat opposite experience, to this day I can't print well to save my live and it takes forever, but can write cursive a lot better and more legibly. I was pumped when the letters could just flow together rather than me having to figure out the kerning (not that I knew what that was) on the fly.
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Jan 5, 2021 21:19
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Grand Fromage posted:
I know it's my own English centric view point but it's always crazy to my that there are systems that don't include vowels. Is there a reason for that?
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Jan 6, 2021 06:06
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For iron/steel work check out the 6-part series that talks about iron/steel, but does also address some of the differences between the approaches and I think talks a bit about what you're interested in. Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Tbh I think the last one would be most relevant to you as it directly talks about Chinese cast iron making.
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Jan 17, 2021 23:39
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What were interior doors like in say Rome of the late republic? Were they common enough that apartment buildings might have them?
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Feb 6, 2021 09:07
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Grand Fromage posted:Interesting question. I do not know if a regular apartment would have had interior doors. As far as I know there are no surviving upper stories of insulae to study, we just have ground floors and very rarely a second floor. The ground floors were for businesses and/or richer people, they do have doorways. I would guess the cheap apartments at the top were single room situations. They may have had doors dividing apartments from one another but probably not inside. The middle ones... ??? Really cool, thanks. Were the latching mechanisms pretty basic? Did they have any complex fasteners or openings?
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Feb 6, 2021 21:05
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I mean it's clear that economics is a dead-end, that's why Hari Seldon had to come up with psychohistory. Have any economists accurately predicted the end of a giant empire? Check and mate Krugman.
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Mar 2, 2021 02:58
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Big Willy Style posted:how does it go for making parchment? The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Roman/ancient history: How does human skin go for making parchment?
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Mar 8, 2021 10:32
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In terms of what they did have, were rutabagas and turnips essentially the potatoes of the early european world? Like did they fill the same niche more or less, or were they considered differently.
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Mar 10, 2021 03:01
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I listen to a few, some with more relish than others. Patrick Wyman is great, though now he's doing pre-history. The one I struggle with is the British History Podcast. On one hand Jamie Jeffers seems to really care about the topic, and tries to both have a narrative but also do some analysis and focus away from merely talking about nobles doing noble stuff to actually looking at the peasantry. So that's good! But there's little to no talk of anything but primary sources, so it's never clear if this is his own narrative, or if it's a synthesis of the state of the field? Plus there's a lot of random speculation about why so and so did this in a way that isn't always clear how grounded it is in the record.
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Mar 24, 2021 04:31
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So this might be a silly question, but why weren't any pyramids built bigger than Khufu's at Giza? It seems relatively early in the chronology of the buildings, so it doesn't seem to be the end point of a period where they are getting bigger and bigger, until that was the largest one. Was it built during a period where the economic, cultural and climate conditions made it special? Was it just that Pharoah's decided other things were more important than heigh? I'm far from an Egyptologist, so sorry if this is a dumb question.
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May 3, 2021 01:02
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Gaius Marius posted:poo poo fam, you gave me something to dig on, in return I 'll recommend the crusade against the Cathars season of the history of the Crusades, a step up from the previous series with a real in depth history of the Players, one of the most underrated podcasts I've seen. But she calls all catapults catapult machines every time!! I'm kidding, it's really good and she does a great job in bringing the narrative out in interesting ways.
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Aug 1, 2021 07:47
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Gold's iirc actually good for utensils and food storage since it's sterile and easy to clean. I've read that's a main reason behind the crown jewels being important, they provided a source of value for a monarch to pawn.
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Aug 7, 2021 06:41
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To what degree were the Pauline Epistles shaping Christian thought and to what degree were they showing us the major undercurrents that were already in existence?
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Aug 15, 2021 19:05
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Isn't the ideas of a sea's-people invasion pretty unsettled at this point? Or an I behind the times.
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Sep 17, 2021 05:04
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Also too isn't the evidence for most early alcohol or beer like 3-4% not exactly distillation levels. So it's let's getting blitzed and more of a lie level thing.
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Jan 1, 2022 08:40
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ulmont posted:I have bad news about how you’re probably living your life right now. 
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Apr 22, 2022 17:35
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Parmenides posted:those who know will recognise me by the quality of my thought Ain't that the truth.
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Jun 23, 2022 22:39
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Why do reactionary assholes always think their ideas on the inferiority of other people are new? Yeah dude I've heard it before, you think some people are subhuman and desire to own them. I've heard it before, it's not novel.
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Jun 26, 2022 01:11
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CommonShore posted:she filled up every square inch of both sides with badly-spelled miscelleaneous notes Not like calling you out or anything, but how fair is it to say they were badly-spelled? Doesn't that require a whole bunch of language standardization, cultural change to acknowledge only one proper way to write, etc etc to get there? How much on writing is it fair to say "if you're a speaker, native or not, and choose to write it that way, it's a valid approach to writing"?
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Jan 25, 2023 19:52
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And here I thought we had it on good authority that the first language was Phrygian!
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Jan 26, 2023 08:59
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Tulip posted:
Were milling restrictions a big drag on the roman economy? My limited understanding is that adding windmills to it wouldn't have bootstrapped into much more economic activity than it already had.
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Mar 11, 2023 01:46
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Ancient form of voir dire, makes sense.
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Mar 15, 2023 03:30
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Alhazred posted:It's weird how it took so long before people realized that that is a terrible idea. To have your leader exposed like that, fully knowing that your army will collapse if he's killed and leaving your country without someone in charge. I mean I don't think it was a terrible idea? People were making these choices in the context of the political society they were operating in, and I don't think it would have persisted for as long as it did were it a bad idea. There's value in a lot of these political systems for the leader to be seen leading. Alexander didn't just change in because he alone was able to identify the point of weakness, it was also very important for Macedonian kings to be seen leading from the front. Your army might collapse if you die, but if it will definitely collapse if the aristos and kings aren't performing their role, it's a sensible risk to take.
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Jun 6, 2023 07:49
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I just bought her book so haven't read it yet, bu this article is relevant and talks about the modern nature of a lot of food culture, and how what we think of as ancient food traditions, aren't.Libluini posted:I showed that fresco to one of my colleagues, who is Italian. He confirmed it's a pizza, case closed Hot can you trust the Italians on food? They don't even put peas in their carbonara!!
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Jul 1, 2023 20:14
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Tulip posted:Let me put it another way: I like to cook. I like to learn recipes from a lot of different cuisines. Very few of those cuisines use melted cheese. Chinese (and yes I know there are several, I am thinking of Shanghainese, Hunan, Sichuan and Xi'an since those are the ones I've got more familiarity with), Japanese, Korean, Philippine, and Indonesian cuisines rarely if ever use any dairy at all. I'm certainly not saying you're wrong over time, but by your own assertion food culture changes over time, so that cuisines now DON'T use cheese, doesn't mean they didn't. Do you have any evidence that these cuisines which don't use cheese now, didn't in the past?
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Jul 6, 2023 08:26
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Another point is there was a degradation in the quality of phalanxes between the time of Alexander and then the successor states and their eventual losses to Rome. They fought each other for a century and over that time the overall amount of training and such afforded to their soldiers was drastically reduced, and to compensate for that, they made their phalanxes deeper and their sarissas longer, going from ~17 feet to as much as ~23 feet long. My understanding is that this isn't the case, it's just that the successor states had to get really good at fighting each other, not that their quality declined per se. It was because they had to fight against a copy of themselves that changed the tactics, but individually we don't have evidence that they were worse by any stretch.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:48
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:
I'm not a scholar of anything, but I was always surprised at the vehemency towards Diamond, because I was assigned Ecological Imperialism in college. It's not like a perfect 1-1 or anything, but from what I remember Crosby has a lot of similar arguments at times.
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Mar 10, 2024 10:18
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