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Steal all the walls, take them home to fortify your own city to replace the walls your enemy stole from you.
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Feb 21, 2024 09:43
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Also keep in mind that with ancient technology and infrastructure, there's probably a hard limit to how much you can meaningfully conquer and actually administrate. Even Egypt ended up dividing the kingdom at one point.Elden Lord Godfrey posted:Well during the heyday of the Assyrians and Sumerians and Babylonians, Egypt was often mentioned in the same breath as yet another of the great regional powers of that era. Egypt could project power, but it could also be conquered by other powers and have its vast productive capacity be siphoned out in the form of tribute. Probably, yeah. I wonder if it wasn't helped by the Ptolemies spending more time making sure their subjects didn't rebel against rulers still considering themselves foreign conquerors, but at that point Egypt might have what we call the 'resource curse' with having incredible agricultural capacity that every major empire around would want, especially Rome with its huge urban population that needs feeding. They weren't ever again given the breathing room to organise themselves as an independent power, as technology and infrastructure developed that let other empires develop, all of which see Egypt as a great prize.
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Feb 24, 2024 03:30
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The Hanging Gardens if they did exist strike me as the kinda thing that would need constant maintenance and infrastructure to maintain, and probably would fall apart without that, and did at some point.
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Feb 24, 2024 16:44
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If your ruling class peers decide they're going to stab you to death personally with knives I feel like you're in a position where you're probably going to end up dead anyway, or the results are going to be a giga clusterfuck. It's a very different situation than most political assassinations where you got a lone nut with some plausible deniability, or even just stochastic acts. That said, I'm not too up on what happens to Caesar's assassins aside from vaguely remembering the latter half of the Shakespeare play. (I'm guessing it didn't end well for them!)
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Feb 26, 2024 04:46
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Yeah, that sounds about right. The way one of the Godfather movies ended.
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Feb 26, 2024 06:14
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FreudianSlippers posted:Imagine your grandpa having a weird nose and you still being insulted for it. A LOT about the Romans makes sense when you picture them like Mafiosos with the nicknames.
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Feb 28, 2024 06:18
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bob dobbs is dead posted:They had actual organized crime lords (clodius, milo, etc) and close links between the state and those crime lords. It's kind of a mindfuck that basically no depiction of the Romans gives them the Italian accent they deserve Kinda crazy given the Spyro Reignited Trilogy version of Sunny Villa had me going, this is literally the first time I've heard fantasy Romans (who are also talking cartoon bears iirc) who have Italian accents. Asterix also has those vibes sometimes, I suppose.
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Feb 28, 2024 07:05
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A shitload of medieval knight stories also make total sense if you picture them as mafioso. Ridiculous ideas of honour included.SlothfulCobra posted:Normally the excuse given for making Romans have British accents is because the range of accents can be used to represent the social stata of the time. But Britain does have a lot of specific crime person accents that they don't use either (although those crime accents can also sound very silly if you're an American and have no prior learned respect for them). Thing is you can absolutely do this with American accents. I hear one game does as much, with Romans instead of the usual British accents, being clear Americans to indicate that they are the dominant militaristic superpower of the time and everything that goes with it.
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Feb 28, 2024 12:22
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Geography affecting culture is one of those things that while it's easy to get way into the weeds and/or weird with, it DOES make sense. It's material conditions, after all. And we can see in our own present day how people who live in isolated rural areas often end up quite different from people living in cities even when they're in the same culture and civilization by every other metric. (even with some deliberate cultivation, you can see it, I've lived it) And in some cases I wonder if you do see some aspects of 'Well, they're different from us, but they're clearly doing what works for them' rather than the usual bafflement and bluster of cultural posturing. I suppose it tends to become the latter when there's active conflict between people rather than those people just being over there. And also sometimes clear like with the Mongols when they had to return to Mongolia to recruit new horsemen to replace losses, because you simply couldn't get people of the same level and type of skill who hadn't been brought up in the same environment and been trained all their lives in that way. (And of course, the Mongols famously valued wise men from other cultures and actively recruited them to make their skills and knowledge an asset) Tulip posted:Semi related Deveraux got around to talking about the record of the Macedonian phalanx and, to my relief, was unspairing about the myth that Macedonian and Greek phalanxes fall apart if they see a rock, which always seemed like an insane part of video game logic to me that the Greek fighting style would only work on extremely level, flat plains. Y'know, those wide expanses of level fields in Greece. Also come to think of it, related given level, flat plains are the kinda terrain where phalanxes would absolutely eat poo poo to more mobile forces even without the near cheat code that is horse archers. Like, the entire premise of The Three Hundred is that a small pass in mountainous territory is perfectly ideal for Greek phalanxes to hold ground with their signature shield wall against a much larger force.
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Mar 8, 2024 08:55
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Carillon 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. I always got the vibe that, basically, Diamond is like the one successful pop historian who isn't complete garbage, with something resembling an understanding of material conditions and setting out to actively refute the blatantly racist ideas of history, but he's still a pop historian.
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Mar 10, 2024 16:58
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There's a reason Rome's most bitter rivalry and brutal wars were with the rival naval power on the other side of the Mediterranean. Long after Greece's golden age of course, iirc Rome didn't even directly conquer Greece, they beat the power that currently was Greece's overlord and took over the holdings.
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Mar 16, 2024 16:14
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More mediaeval history, but I remembered from The Last Duel there's a bit of a deal made about how when the wife is left alone in the castle there's only one door that her stalker can use to get in. Wondering if that has any basis in reality. It's easy to see feudal castles as protection from unhappy peasants, as well as thieves and such, as much as against full on sieges. Was it a thing to practice security and lock the place up in relative peacetime?
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Mar 18, 2024 07:53
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cheetah7071 posted:Eagerly await the "map of the United States at its height" which colors all of NATO as American, in a few hundred years Wouldn't be wrong.
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Mar 21, 2024 08:34
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I was just about to bring up Asterix, which makes a point of contrasting the Gauls' preferred cultural dress with the Romans, among others. It's even something the Romans themselves pointed out iirc; that statue of Vercingetorix (I cannot believe I actually spelled that right the first time while flat out guessing) having a mustache that's almost unheard of otherwise on Roman sculpture, but presumably it'd be ridiculous to sculpt a famous Gaul without it. Also kinda funny since it comes the other way around; clean-shaven, neatly cut Romans contrast with the long-haired, bearded barbarians (and yet you can also see both of them having all kinds of levels of vanity, style and preferences even within those stereotypes). Vikings are probably the usual mainstream exceptions there.
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Mar 23, 2024 13:02
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May or may not be related that Norse sagas have even the tea kettle of the gods given a name. Apparently, to cast magical enchantments on an object requires it to have a name you can address it by. Makes sense to me! Also Night Boat strikes me as possibly one of those things where it has a name, but rarely spoken of because it's considered dangerous to speak of it. Hades was apparently rarely directly referred to by name.
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Mar 27, 2024 05:30
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Brawnfire posted:I'm intrigued by this, mostly because it introduced me to the idea that parts of other stone rings and "henges" were moved to create new ones. Such as the postulated movement of stones from Waun Mawn stone circle in Wales to Stonehenge. I wonder how often stones were moved, and if it was an act of conquest, religious revivalism, or something else. Merlin's orders.
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Mar 28, 2024 08:19
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Tulip posted:A thought experiment that I always think is funny: if the only evidence you had was the spread of La Tene material culture, you could conclude that the Romans were conquered and replaced by the Gauls. Asterix was playing the long game.
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Apr 7, 2024 07:52
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I dunno, with all the sun worship going on I imagine you had a lot of people who were very interested in what the sun was up to pretty much all the time.
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Apr 17, 2024 04:18
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sullat posted:Yeah didn't a bunch of Chinese astrologers get executed for failing to predict an eclipse back in Zhou dynasty? The Fire Nation never lived that one down.
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Apr 18, 2024 06:36
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Hey, one of those might have been that Japanese doomsday cult.
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Apr 21, 2024 07:34
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:The Wikipedia article about the last of the Shang kings suggests that the later Shang had heavily backed off on human sacrifices and the Zhou reintroduced the practice. The paragraph on this specific claim has a huge amount of citations, but they're all in Chinese so I couldn't tell you if they're accurate or not. I'm guessing this is one of those things where we have a mere glimpse into a historian flame war that's been going on longer than several countries and religions have existed.
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May 5, 2024 05:52
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Human sacrifice does seem like one of those things that rarely lasts very long as a tradition. The Aztecs were iirc relatively very new as a civilization at their height, and the Romans only saved it for very dire occasions. Even the story of Isaac is iirc sometimes seen as an explicit rejection of human sacrifice, like 'Okay that's enough, you don't need to do that anymore, ever'. Still kinda lol to picture entire traditions specifically introduced as a 'Here's a way to divine the future/make sure our rulers have servants in the afterlife without having to kill anybody for it, so don't do that!' I wonder if they thought the terracotta soldiers were a lot more interesting and fun than just having corpses in tombs too, as future people certainly agree.
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May 7, 2024 08:32
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I'm pretty sure the Egyptians did this during the height of the Old Kingdom. The Great Pyramids are surrounded by tombs of retainers and servants and officials who clearly didn't die at the same time as their pharaohs. I was wondering about that, and it'd make sense. Probably not a bad deal to get a burial otherwise far more lavish than you could afford on your own. Angry Salami posted:Gotta respect the first guy who was willing to go up to a king and try and convince him "So, you're not getting your favorite advisers and courtesans in the afterlife like your father did - but we whipped up mannequins that are just as good! They come to life in the afterlife, trust me." Indeed. Funny how it's an idea that comes up seemingly independently with people a lot too, like burned effigies as offerings to relatives in the afterlife, which also comes off as an excuse to show off your arts and crafts. I bet they had contests as to whose statues and models would be deemed worthy for the king's tomb. Also reminded of a webcomic that had a robot burning a paper effigy of itself to serve its late owner in the afterlife... figuring that even if robots don't have souls, it's a totally valid loophole for them to enter the afterlife anyway.
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May 7, 2024 11:43
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CrypticFox posted:I know nothing about Shang China, but the idea of a clod of dirt possessing magical properties based on its connection to where it was dug up has parallels elsewhere. It was common in Mesopotamia to use a clod of dirt from a specific place as part of divination rituals when you wanted to know something about that specific place. Heh, that's kinda classic sympathetic magic, like using a cutting of hair or a toenail from someone in order to cast spells upon them. Or Dracula shipping coffins with dirt from his homeland as a loophole around his needs for his resting place. Heck, that was even more or less what Harry Dresden did, making a miniature magical diagram of a city with fragments from buildings and landmarks arranged on the map. Squizzle posted:do young ghosts have to first work as a diagram apprentice and then journeyghost of diagrams before they get to fully enjoy the divination-resistant foul dreams trade From my understanding of Chinese mythology this seems almost a given, and sounds like a fun plot hook.
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May 8, 2024 06:44
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Plenty of forms of execution are elaborately ritualised. Crucifixion became iconic, famously, and witch burnings so much so people forget Salem's 'witches' were hanged. And it continues in modern day. Not a huge stretch to draw comparisons. That said, yeah, the idea of sacrifice being someone who is clearly innocent and even valued or honoured is a significant thing, even if both are often used to get rid of inconvenient people, and/or clearly motivated by bigotry and certain classes of people being devalued in practice. State execution can be seen as having a relative honesty of intent in comparison to explicit ritual. Not surprising it tends to end messily when people become more scared of being sacrificed than whatever it is the sacrifice is supposed to protect them from.
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May 9, 2024 02:36
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Any expansion on the idea that Romans considered human sacrifice to be a thing they did to appease cthonic gods, not heavenly ones? Because that does seem like an interesting nuance given Greco-Roman religion iirc tended more towards treating Hades and co. as facts of life but not beings to be invoked casually, to the point where they would very rarely call them directly by name because a living mortal rarely has any good reason to invoke the attention of the god of the dead. Kinda funny given I absolutely get the comparisons given how many examples past and present we have of states executing people for effectively symbolic and superstitious reasons, but I think there definitely is a difference from flat out religious human sacrifice as practiced- as with the Shang dynasty example above, the difference is that a human sacrifice assigns value to the life of the victim, typically, and involves an elaborate process of selecting and obtaining the captive, even in cases like the Aztecs where they're captives of war, wars waged specifically to obtain them no less. I don't know if you see many 'any body will do' human sacrifices where a criminal already condemned by the state authority is used for a sacrifice, though I'm sure it's happened. (the Discworld joke of how failing to volunteer for sacrifice is a capital offense comes to mind) And I can also see how, like in that example, it becomes very unsustainable to do regularly, because people might accept it as a response to dire times- hell, you might even get volunteers- but if it's every year then it makes more and more enemies every time, and they'll look for any excuse to get rid of the people who insist on doing it. Christianity is a fun one given the crucifixion is seen as an importantly unique example of the Son of God effectively offering himself as a sacrifice in the name of men, flipping the script in a game-changing act, and creating new symbolic rituals to practice that evoke sacrifice. Effectively co-opting a state execution in one of those fun metaphor-mixing ways. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 14:31 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 14:28
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bob dobbs is dead posted:are you gonna go off about i/p or sudan or xinjiang or something now Hey now, there's The Jakarta Method.
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May 9, 2024 14:32
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A lot of the common attitudes towards history also come from the self-proclaimed Enlightenment where there was a big deal about how people in ancient times obviously were savage and brutal and did terrible things all the time because of course they did, not like us modern enlightened people.
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May 11, 2024 04:51
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