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I think the key on something like that is to correct it while immediately offering follow-up examples so that it's clear that you're not spouting some kind of "Black people are incapable of civilization" crap.
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Oct 12, 2016 16:46
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Because the best way to impress the leaders of Egypt and Syracuse is to build two ships on a lake far away from Syracuse and Egypt.
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Nov 7, 2016 03:16
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The biggest problem is his "This is the only way it could have worked ever!" attitude. I think his "poke and pull" tight formation idea is ok, but the good thing about something like a halberd is its versitility. If you need a phalanxy thing, great you have pointy bits on your weapons. If you need a choppy gang, awesome, you have choppy bits too. Its quite likely, given the pointy bits, that there were fights that used formations as he imagines them. It's also quite likely that there were fights entirely unlike those he imagines. e. just to clarify, he's not claiming that halberds were only for stabbing - he saying that they're primarily a poking weapon, but that the axe head has the added benefit of hooking and pulling to disrupt formations. CommonShore fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Nov 18, 2016 |
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Nov 18, 2016 00:37
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Yeah what I started to post earlier about Lindybeige is more or less that idea of single-explanation blinders, but I cut myself off. I don't think his view of halberds' use in dense formations is unreasonable, and I really feel as if the thread is being unfair to him on that point, but that tactic would be completely useless for sentries and guards, who also carried halberds, and his explanation's inability to admit other uses of the weapon in contexts beyond dense formation fighting is its failure.
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Nov 18, 2016 16:24
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I know it's not Greco-Roman, but re the "language for addiction" bit, Pepys certainly doesn't have the term "addiction" but in his contemporaries he certainly records a whole host of modern indicators for alcoholism, and he is able to categorize this behaviour as a problem in specific individuals (eg. Sir William Battens). I can compare this to something like Symposium, which also represents heavy consumption but doesn't really take a "wine messes people up" angle at all, even when getting into how much Socrates drinks. Of course there are a ton of other factors that prevent any easy comparison, not least of all that Pepys is privately recording his criticisms of his contemporaries. Can anyone think of any classical examples of people who mess themselves up with too much wine? I don't know my Juvenal that well, but it seems like something he'd note if it had ever crossed his mind.
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Dec 6, 2016 16:57
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The Sausages posted:There's bunch of stoned trippers are religiously convinced that the Kykeon (a drink for initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries) was an ergot-derived psychedelic and they annoy the hell out of me, particularly as no drug nerd has outlined how one could be synthesized and isolated safely and reliably (i.e. without being disfigured or killed by ergotism) with the chemistry knowledge and tools available at the time. Then again there's people (often the same ones) who will heartily avow that Jesus was actually a mushroom. I'm all for speculation just not for asserting it as fact. Eeeh I've heard less plausible assertions, even if it's not strictly possible. I don't know the processes for making ergot safe, but there are examples enough of pre-scientific societies figuring out complex things through trial and error and letting a ton of people get poisoned - look at ayathusca cultures for example. Or just yesterday a friend of mine was pondering "how many people had to die before they figured out which part of the fugu was lethal?" Knowing the Greeks though, it's probable that they were just drinking shitloads of wine.
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Dec 12, 2016 16:08
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The bread-beer-porridge-pasta thing is all quite fascinating to me. So many variables on what becomes the easist and most convenient thing to do with your starchy stuff.
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Dec 15, 2016 23:32
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Counterpoint - couldn't the stated difficulty of moving something like beer actually serve as a pressure for shifting from a nomadic to a settled lifestyle?
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Dec 16, 2016 16:58
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Guildencrantz posted:The printing press is probably the one big invention you could easily transfer via time travel since it's so conceptual. All you need is half-decent metallurgy, ink and hinges. The metallurgy isn't that basic. It has to be unbelievably consistent to make the moveable type which allows the Gutenberg-era industrial scale of printing. There's a reason that the Romans had both stamps and (I think) screw presses but no printing press. You also need paper because vellum/parchment are too expensive for the basic drudge work that makes a press worthwhile, and papyrus is poo poo. I'd say that something like germ theory and vaccination is more easily transferable on that "conceptual" level than the printing press.
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Jan 5, 2017 16:37
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Guildencrantz posted:Alright, I'll concede that. What about at least woodblock printing though? It's not amazing but still a step above handwriting. I think that the Romans actually did do woodblock printing - stamps and seals and such. Maybe not mechanically. I can't tell you how far off the Romans were from doing paper. What was their linen production like? What kind of textile culture were they? If they were using lots of linen and cotton, it's actually conceivable that they could have pulled off paper quite easily, provided that there was enough around to produce a scrap surplus. But if they were a wool-heavy culture, with stuff like linen and cotton only being available to the very rich, then it's probable that they'd look at paper as a novelty and shrug. e. I'm reading the history of paper article on wikipedia right now and there's quite a bit of stuff required for mass-scale paper production that the Romans didn't have, notably the trip hammer. They could have done hand-made paper, but that's no better than parchment cost-wise. CommonShore fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Jan 5, 2017 |
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Jan 5, 2017 18:07
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Mr Enderby posted:I wouldn't say "unbelievably" consistent. Part of the problem with surveying the print industry in the years after Gutenberg is that the most-produced and most-popular materials (textbooks and pamphlets and lottery tickets) were basically used to destruction, so we have few surviving witnesses. Yes, there were printed books on vellum, but they were far from the norm. Even only a minority of Gutenberg's bibles were printed on vellum, and the bibles aren't even really representative of Gutenberg's production. They were his magnum opus, not his bread and butter. He made lots of other cheap crap before that. Consider too that if we're using larger bronze moveable type, we're getting fewer characters per page at greater cost per character (bronze vs lead alloy), and using substantially more paper/vellum, which is already the most expensive bookmaking material. Whether bronze is more or less durable than lead is probably irrelevant, as an advantage of the lead-antimony alloy and Gutenberg's process is that it's a trivial amount of effort if you have the hand moulds and print matrices to just melt down the beat-up type and fresh cast it. IIRC bronze casting requires more heat and equipment. Your point about prestige objects is valid, but for the most part print is really bad at competing with manuscript for producing prestige objects. Someone who is looking at producing a really nice edition of an early book will look at the costs of producing in print - the capital investment especially - and say "why don't I just hire a bunch of scribes to do it instead?" It's only once the press is able to produce lots of cheap poo poo for profit that it's able to make a go of those vanity copies. I can't think of many examples of commercial prestige printing in England before the subscription model of the early eighteenth century (Pope's Iliad etc.). That scriptora were still viable all the way to the end of the seventeenth century (and I don't know enough about the eighteenth century ms culture to say when it ended) underscores that point. So unless printing came to Rome in some form that allowed the press to threaten the well-established scribal industry with all of its skill capital, it probably would be a wet fart. I'm having so much fun even thinking about this stuff 
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Jan 6, 2017 19:04
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Mr Enderby posted:
Good catch. The Spenser folio really stands out as a prestige volume to me. Even there, they weren't printed on vellum, though (not that Pope was, either.) Mr Enderby posted:Probably true. But that was probably true in early modern Europe without Gutenberg. The man was a bona-fide visionary. His printing press is one of those very rare examples of an invention coming out of the gates fully formed. The technology didn't change that much from 1550 to the mid-nineteenth century. Bear in mind that as far as we know, he either developed or oversaw the development of type-metal, improved printing ink, and paper suitable for printing. So it wasn't a case of an invention springing from earlier developments. As far as we can tell Gutenberg imagined an entirely new branch of technology, and set about making it reality. I don't believe that a similarly monomaniac Roman couldn't have done the same. One other point which I'm not sure how to integrate into this whole line of thought is that Gutenberg basically died bankrupt. I've read interesting discussion of how Gutenberg's engineering was crucial, but that the real credit for figuring out how print works as a medium should go to other fifteenth-century printers, particularly those working in Venice and Italy. Gutenberg's work often looks like he's trying to mechanically reproduce manuscripts, and doing bad reproductions of things that manuscript does well (rubrication, for example), whereas these others actually figured out better methods for developing printed books. (and I have none of these essays anywhere near to at hand anymore, I'm sad to say - it's from brilliant chaps like David Carlson and Randall McLeod) Mr Enderby posted:I realise none of this is really on topic, but drat I like talking about early modern printing. It's the best.
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Jan 6, 2017 20:02
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Mr Enderby posted:Honestly, when you look at the type used in early printed books, which is very fiddly and designed to look like it was drawn with a pen, and compare it to how clear Roman stone engraving is, i think that you could make bronze Roman type which was as legible as type-metal blackletter, without having to make it any bigger. That is a good point - and one of the things that these "other" printers figured out early on (as I mentioned in my other post). They actually modeled their typefaces on Roman sculptural faces, whereas Gutenberg's blackletter was modeled on manuscript conventions. It turns out that the best practices for print are closer to sculpture than they are to manuscript. Mind that Gutenberg's work was trying to "be" manuscript rather than to "replace" it, which is part of this whole ambiguity.
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Jan 6, 2017 20:06
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Arglebargle III posted:This is a boring answer but improved hull design. There's nothing stopping the Romans from building a 15th century caravel in terms of materials technology. I can't refute it or challenge it at first reflection. That's a good answer. Triremes and galleys suck rear end.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:53
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Hey don't be making fun of Josh.
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Jan 26, 2017 05:22
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Round-bottom vessels are also more durable than flat ones, especially using the ceramic techniques (hand coil building and lighter wheels) that they used.
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Feb 21, 2017 20:43
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Jazerus posted:Yes. We have comparable sayings in the modern idiom - eg "beer money."
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Feb 23, 2017 00:20
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Modern people also call money "bread," which is as abstract as calling it "salt." Maybe the Romans called it "salt" precisely because it was so pedestrian - here's your default staple, you know, that thing that you deserve and you shan't be without. That actually makes more sense to me than "they called it salt because salt was valuable." I don't think this really needs any kind of deep explanation.
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Feb 23, 2017 00:38
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Ynglaur posted:Someone should write a graduate thesis on this hypothesis. I'm too busy for the next three weeks
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Feb 23, 2017 14:45
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Canemacar posted:So if we open the list of Historical Rich Persons to include heads of state, at least in monarchical governments, who would be the richest? Probably Victoria.
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Feb 24, 2017 20:49
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:I think it becomes even less well-defined than it currently is, because even absolute monarchs don't own the stuff they notionally have in the same way that a regular rich person owns their fortune. Mansa Munsa may have "owned" a ton of stuff but there were also political constraints on what he could do with it that wouldn't apply to a bank account. Well yeah. I just picked the monarch nominally atop the empire which controlled the greatest share of the world's economy. I'm not wrong within the constraints of the question, but she's certainly not in any practical sense the richest person in history
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Feb 24, 2017 22:00
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So we need to pick a metric to account for these variables. On one hand we could index the GDP, national debt, and non-liquid assets, vs a percentage of government control and individual autonomy in the head of state to produce an adjusted wealth score. Or we could ignore all of that and do it via swagger score, in which case it goes to Charles II of England: 
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Feb 24, 2017 23:12
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Canemacar posted:I'll counter that with the pimp of Versailles himself, Louis the XIV. Louis had the swag, but not the swagger.
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Feb 25, 2017 02:44
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Squalid posted:I find it interesting both those portraits seem to deemphasize symbols of royal power, with crowns and thrones shunted into the shadows. I like how both portraits of Charles II feature him with the baton. And that's a fun story.
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Feb 25, 2017 04:00
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I'll take 21st century quality of life with 17th century fashion.
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Mar 31, 2017 20:07
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post more about ancient loads please.
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Mar 31, 2017 20:44
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Grand Fromage posted:There is strong evidence for most, perhaps all, emperors having jizz. We don't have any direct evidence, such as samples of the imperial loads, but since the majority of emperors had children we can infer the presence of jizz. It is possible some of these children were illegitimate and had other fathers. Plenty of stories circulated about the sex lives of the imperial women, for example the tales about Messalina's competitive orgies, but I think the more extreme of these can be largely dismissed as rumors based on the general Roman misogyny. Much better.
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Apr 1, 2017 04:22
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Grand Fromage posted:If you're into ancient jizz Egyptian religion is full of it. I'm not really into ancient jizz so much as I was tired of the previous page's slapfight.
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Apr 1, 2017 15:15
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Mantis42 posted:Thats pretty absurd. Xia might be semi legendary but they're the predecessor state of actual existing Chinese dynasties, and there's no reason to think they migrated halfway across the globe. Typical Ivory Tower academic doesn't want to acknowledge my world-changing discoveries because they'll all look like idiots and they don't want to rewrite all of the textbooks that they're making mad bank from. Fat cat historians.
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Apr 7, 2017 01:46
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Koramei posted:Bright colors have only been the cheapest to produce very recently, and for that matter our perception of them being tacky and more muted colors looking fancier is probably not something they'd have shared. And the preference for understated colours and form in Western art probably owes more than a little to the unpainted marble of ancient Greco-Roman statues
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Apr 12, 2017 03:48
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There was some belief that tomatoes were poisonous because of their similarity to deadly nightshade, but iirc it wasn't a general or widespread belief.
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Apr 14, 2017 23:48
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Grand Fromage posted:The wine thing is a constant bone of contention because we don't know. The main theories I see advanced: E) They were cheapskates. 
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Apr 19, 2017 13:29
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Jamwad Hilder posted:The reason we have recipes for dormice and bird tongues and not "regular" stuff is because they're delicacies/complicated to make. You wouldn't write down a sandwich recipe, would you? I assume you just know that you put some meat, cheese, lettuce, etc between bread. There's no reason to write it down because basically everyone in the world knows how to make a sandwich or something like it. I realize that there's probably a recipe for everything, even sandwiches, on the internet now, but I think the example still gets the point across. My favourite implication of the assumption that these were common dishes is the gigantic heaps of discarded, tongueless larks.
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Apr 19, 2017 13:51
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fishmech posted:The most useful thing you could go back and introduce for the purposes of modern historians, would surely be either voice recording or photography. Sure most of the output would be broken, lost, or copied too many times so you can barely make things out, but it's better than not having either to document how things really were until the 19th century. Know what would be super loving rad and make a big difference for modern historians? To introduce the methodologies and practices of of modern historians, archivists, librarians, and archaeologists.
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Apr 20, 2017 20:07
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There are even things in my area (Prairie Canada) from 50, 100, 150 years back which already puzzle local historians who have to piece things together from a few poorly-archived pictures. When the style of the commonplace changes, the old commonplace gets very quickly forgotten. (I have a much better illustrative example near the top of my memory but It's not coming to the surface - I'll post later if I can think of it  )-There was a synagogue in my town at one point. People argue about the exact location because the records aren't there, and it just dwindled and disappeared rather unceremoniously, to be replaced with housing somewhere along the way. I've never seen a picture. -The exact locations of several WW1/WW2 training grounds in the area are now matters of dispute.
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May 26, 2017 14:02
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Kemper Boyd posted:Dick Harrison points out in his work about the 30YW that using first-hand sources from any era has this problem in general. We remember the uncommon, but not the common. So a guy who gets mugged or wins the lottery will mention it in his autobiography or write about it in his journal, but he probably won't mention what he has for breakfast every morning. Pepys owns.
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May 26, 2017 18:54
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Koramei posted:the entire point of the argument is that there's room for all three Seems to me that plagues and people are often at odds.
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Jun 9, 2017 04:10
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Jack B Nimble posted:I'd heard about all classical readers supposedly reading out loud and this makes a lot more sense; I've started reading rhyming poetry and don't really enjoy it unless I read it out loud, maybe other people can "hear" the rhymes in their head but I can't. I subvocalize when reading extremely metrical poetry, though I don't need to for reading rhyme..
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Jun 11, 2017 14:52
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I thought this was the Doctor who thread for a second
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Jun 13, 2017 17:59
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 17:18 |
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I would have killed for a 17th-century equivalent of D&D for my dissertation. In fact, that was largely what my work was trying to reconstruct.
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Jun 21, 2017 21:49
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