Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

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Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

WoodrowSkillson posted:

What's Morgan got to say about it?

I dunno, my issue's late and I can't log into the e-magazine site thing. Something about my email?

# ¿ Feb 23, 2020 00:44

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 01:25

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cheetah7071 posted:

Thinking about what historians would think about Trump was put me on the thought of how extremely unlikely events might have trouble being accepted even when they happen. From the perspective of a historian a thousand years from now, which is more likely: that he really is like this, or that it was all exaggeration by his political opponents? And I wonder how many historical events get dismissed along the same line of reasoning, even though they got recorded.

I thought, well, there's going to be a huge abundance of stored data, indeed a violent surfeit of it, but there is the question of how much of this is going to be archived in a reliable and accessible way. The gripping hand to this is that I think people may underestimate how easy it will be to store things like codecs and old operating systems.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2020 07:31

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Trephination's been pretty widely known, somehow.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2020 21:57

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Power Khan posted:

The whole dentistry stuff looks pretty gnarly too.

I took a look at the dentist's tray when I went in for an extraction yesterday... things were mostly smaller than those giant pieces of iron, but the general shapes were the same. I imagine the big differences are, first, you can actually numb the patient now (so you can take four or five swipes instead of having to crack the whole fucker off) and second, better metals and also things like power tools.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2020 23:10

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The first Xia emperor was Susano? Did that come up in WWII?

I wish I was entirely kidding.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2020 06:26

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Libluini posted:

I'm thinking more about what the Roman glass which made it to East Asia means. Did the Roman empire stretch all the way to Japan?

~~Greater Korean Hyperwar Autobahn~~ probably this is a case of the trade networks having an overlap point that would let items move in and out, and glass would be both a convenient way to carry certain high value things, and probably of some value in its own right. Was Venice making glass even that early?

# ¿ Feb 29, 2020 13:19

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The idea of religious exclusivity in that sense is -- well I can't say it's rare because Islam and Christianity have done well for themselves, but it certainly hasn't been the general consensus, let's put it that way.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2020 12:14

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Squalid posted:

what confuses me is how there were so many Jews scattered across the Mediterranean that an army of them was able to sack Alexandria and another basically take over Cyrenaica.

They liked to shtup, OP

# ¿ Mar 11, 2020 04:05

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The problem would be calculating the efficiency too. Yields? Income to the farmer after taxes? Yields in total or per unit of labor?

# ¿ Mar 14, 2020 05:33

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Grand Fromage posted:

For fun try to figure out how many important Phokases there were in the eastern empire.

Lotta Phokases are around even now!

# ¿ Mar 26, 2020 20:43

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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I've heard the "people fighting for their farms fight better" argument before and it's crap. People fight well if they're trained and motivated. If they're motivated by thoughts of home and hearth, fine, but that's not an innately better reason to fight than, say, a bunch of money.

I could see it discouraging betrayal, at least, even if it might not have much of an impact on fighting elan.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2020 21:25

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Wafflecopper posted:

I'm no expert on this stuff so correct me if I'm wrong, but conscripted farmers going off on campaign for years sounds like an offensive thing where they aren't actually fighting to defend their own land any more (except maybe in an abstract sense of "if we don't conquer these guys they're gonna keep coming at us"). I always understood the "fighting for hearth and home" thing to imply being on the defensive where if you don't win you face the immediate threat of your family being slaughtered or sold into slavery and your farm being razed to the ground.

I am having trouble thinking of any war off hand that got framed as "We're gonna go gently caress those guys up and take their poo poo!" Raids, presumably, yes, but everything else would at least get some defensive rhetorical exercise: "we're bombing Pearl Harbor because our best long-term goal here is to obtain control over these oilfields, and our strategy is to gently caress up the US Navy and then wear them out before they actually reach our war goals and/or have the decisive battle."

# ¿ Mar 29, 2020 22:54

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Stringent posted:

This is an anachronism, the only ppl who do this anymore belong to weird nationalist groups.

Are those names actually out of circulation now, like how you don't see many Adolfs or Benitos? Or are they just applied without concern to the birth orders etc.?

# ¿ Apr 4, 2020 22:45

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Jaded Burnout posted:

I have a question.

Great Britain is split up into England, Scotland, and Wales.

Something that has been curious to me for a while is that, devolution aside, Wales is much more closely tied to England than Scotland is. We share a lot of laws, and it's common that legal things in England have parity in Wales, for example I incorporated my company in England, but it's referred to as incorporated "in England and Wales".

My vague (and possibly incorrect) understanding is that the invasions that pushed the celts out of England into Wales are similar to the ones that did so in Scotland. Why is it that Scotland retains more legal and perhaps cultural independence to England today?

The legal independence seems to be rooted in an actual treaty from 1706 and was presumably part of the political dickering in that period. Geographically there do seem to be more obstacles to projecting power into Scotland vs. Wales relative to England.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2020 10:43

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Epicurius posted:

I knew somebody who's grandfather was a Jacobite. Always, at dinner, would drink to the King over the Water.

But, they're around. They aren't particularly popular or influential, but they're there. Here's their big society:

http://www.royalstuartsociety.com/

Do they have a like, goal with all of this? Like to insert this Bavarian dude into the lineup when QE perishes and throw Charles directly into the nearest trash can?

# ¿ Apr 17, 2020 00:32

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Dalael posted:

Out of curiosity which is the oldest, still inhabited city we know of?

How big does it have to be?
Does there need to be some continuity of structure or would habitation of a general metropolitan area be sufficient?
Does a partial abandonment or population crash break the continuity?

# ¿ Apr 21, 2020 23:41

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Sarrisan posted:

Wouldn't a roman in modern times just die almost instantly to a million viruses that his body's never seen before?

Pubius Maximus would benefit from the success of a mass vaccination campaign. :v:

Though there is one virus floating around lately...

# ¿ May 1, 2020 10:56

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military cervix posted:

While I enjoy Carlin to some extent, my impression is that he has gotten worse about actually teaching you anything over time. The information density in his latest series on the pacific theater of WW2 is particularly bad: It's all metaphors, "can you imagine" and talking about how cool Douglas MacArthur is.Still fun to listen to, but learning is incidental.

I thought MacArthur stank on ice in War War 2, and any good reputation he might get was from being an able administrator of Japan and the Incheon landings -- and of course from aggressive, relentless self-promotion.

# ¿ May 2, 2020 11:59

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Tunicate posted:

I notice a lot of people tend to kind of passively fail the Theory Of Mind, in that they assume that everyone really does deep down believe the same thing that they do, and if people seem to be on the other side of an issue, that's just lying out to promote [self interested goal] rather than legitimately having different beliefs.

Yeah, this is surprisingly common, and I think the emphasis on hypocrisy (rather than wickedness or whatever) tends to bring it out, and recreate it, or even step further to say "Nobody ACTUALLY believes that poo poo - or any of this poo poo! We're just doing it for an operational reason!" -- which is, of course, a common troll-rear end refrain.

I think you also get some slop-over. "This historical guy is really cool! However, he was probably something we would call a Roman Catholic nowadays. The RCC sucks and I don't like them. -- Obviously this historical guy didn't really buy what they were selling." Plus the impression of the historical church as having a totalizing influence instead of having large swaths where they didn't have an opinion.

# ¿ May 2, 2020 22:05

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Grand Fromage posted:

Roman field camps had a wall and a ditch around them, and they did indeed build one every night according to the sources. The remains of some have been found. Presumably they brought the stakes for the walls with them and it was all a prefab structure. The ditch would be about six feet deep and surround the entire camp outside the wall, it's just another barrier for attackers.

How long it would take, probably a couple hours? There's no way to be sure, but you can do a lot of work real fast with 6,000+ men who are well trained and practiced in it.

Did they do this in fixed locations in friendly territory?

# ¿ May 2, 2020 23:51

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Arglebargle III posted:

Still seeing zero actual information and a lot of bile.

Galileo was personally coached by the Pope over the matter, and decided to put the Pope's words into the mouth of a guy named "Dumbass."

# ¿ May 3, 2020 00:19

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Arglebargle III posted:

So to go back to what I originally said about Herodotus, and why ideas about erosion and deposition over tens of thousands of years seemed like settled fact to him, why did that disappear from settled fact when presumably Herodotus was still required reading? The silting up of estuaries was known, but in the early 19th century the building up of new land from the ocean was still contested by flood narrative theories.

As far as I can tell some people are saying young-earth creationism didn't exist until the 19th century, some people are saying that's not true.

And as far as astronomy, what's the counter-narrative here? Actually, the church didn't interfere in the debate and nobody was worried about it?

I think people are construing "young-earth creationism" differently than you. "Young-earth creationism" is a formal set of theory-like objects which boil down to a bunch of cases on how come the observed facts of geology are actually not incompatible with the facts of (a particular, literal reading of) the Bible, and are promulgated mostly as a sort of ideological argument against the Godless Science of Geology and Evolution, which furthers Evil Things in Society.

Prior to that, a lot of people who didn't have much cause to consider the matter would have probably just accepted the predominant religious narrative in the area. The exact age of the Earth is not a major impact on most activities of daily life. So people may well have believed "Yeah, the Earth was created by God a few thousand years ago, that sounds right" but it wasn't the formal pattern of "young-earth creationism."

As for Galileo the counternarrative is mostly "it wasn't a clear-cut case where Strong, Wise Galileo spit in the eye of the bad old Church of Rome." It was a complex chain of events.

# ¿ May 3, 2020 00:43

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Kemper Boyd posted:

Re: Theory of the Mind got mentioned so it's worth noting that a lot of people (and a lot of pop science) basically make the "medieval" (i.e. also the Early Modern) Catholic Church a standin for the current-day American religious right.

Yeah this is really common especially here in America. Religious (with a somewhat uncomfortable carve out for certain subsidiary identities) = basically just the religious right with minor set dressing changes.

# ¿ May 3, 2020 23:09

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HEY GUNS posted:

was caesar or alexander history's greatest chad

Do chads bottom? I guess if they want to.

# ¿ May 21, 2020 00:36

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I'm imagining cowfuckers being the Assyrian equivalent of libertarians who always pop up about the age of consent.

# ¿ May 21, 2020 02:22

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Deteriorata posted:

I'm guessing it's a representative of a god and killing it while naming a person is a form of curse.

I parsed it as a like, well known ritual or something.

# ¿ May 21, 2020 08:04

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Cast_No_Shadow posted:

Seems like he couldn't win at that point.

Mercy = "look at him doling out the mercy, he thinks himself a king"

Murder them all = "See we told you, he's a brutal tyrant looking to make himself king"

Osores amet odio

# ¿ May 23, 2020 21:45

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HELLO LADIES posted:

No idea about either the sweetness thing, but I do know that apart from a lot of religious and general medicinal uses, the ancient Egyptians specifically used onions for birth control, often in the form of a vaginal pessary mixed with other ingredients. What makes it useful is an abortifacient in it's raw form is that it's a diuretic and can stimulate contractions, I think largely by the same mechanism that causes crying, and it might have been that they bred for that so it was better at making uterii spit out pregnancies. Even if they didn't deliberately breed for bitterness, the super sweet ones might have just been another case like silphium, which kind of seems like a bog standard case of "monoculture is bad, also really loving hard to maintain even with modern technology and Monsanto bullshit".

Where do our modern cultivars for onions typically come from? It might be a case where, and this is entirely speculative, they encouraged pungency and such for centuries (because there was little else available for seasoning but onions are not hard to grow) and then those were the cultivars that came to modernity.

It isn't as though sweet onions are impossible to farm or find either, though, they're just not the main commodity onion.

# ¿ May 25, 2020 19:16

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FreudianSlippers posted:

Estonia is just mini Finland so they don't count.

Minland, clearly.

# ¿ May 29, 2020 11:27

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Dante posted:

I don't know what you mean by threat in this context, but analyzing debt relief in an ancient barter economy won't tell you anything about the consequences of defaulting on treasury bonds in a modern economy because they're entirely different systems. Economic history on ancient societies is interesting by itself, but it's sort of like analyzing how the content of precious metal in ancient coins declined due to currency debasement. It's interesting by itself to understand the economic forces of the era, but it's not applicable to how monetary systems in the contemporary period work in terms of inflation.

I think you can get the evidence that debt relief schemes, even on a large scale, do not cause massive disruption and suffering or collapse. One probable issue is that you could extrapolate outwards, do math, do pilot trials in specific areas, look at recent natural experiments, and so on, and reach some kind of model that looks something like "public defrayment scheme will cost only a hundred billion a year and will increase economic growth by substantially more than that, making it a no-brainer, wow!"

But that program isn't "just forgive all debts. just forgive them. they're made up. (optional: lol/lmao)"

Plus you have to build a consensus around what debts to forgive and so on now, and I imagine this is harder now than it would have been if you could have said it for "all townies" or "all peasants in hock"

# ¿ May 30, 2020 01:38

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Phobophilia posted:

Fascists have been fantasizing about using cars to run over protestors for a while. Sounds like the conumdrum of cavalry charges into infantry. Alas pikes aren't very portable. Is there any good way disabling cars that attempt to drive into crowds, or immobilizing them when they are stopped? Is throwing something into the spokes in a car's wheel able to slow it down?

Those pilums aren't looking so silly now, are they? A dozen of those aimed at the operator of the Fordicus CCL would no doubt put the driver out of commission, despite his Venetian glazed armor.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2020 06:55

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Though these are important questions I am unsure if we should be putting them in the ancient history thread or that we should be planning exact methods of violent action even in a hypothetical sense, on these forums, given past history.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2020 12:42

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HEY GUNS posted:

The word "morning star" / "morgenstern" shows up in 17th century texts, like Monro's autobiography. But what it refers to is probably a pike with explosives on the end. An example of one is preserved in the Stralsund mass grave. I haven't seen a ball of spikes on a chain.

You could probably do this with a kusarigama but it would probably make it really dangerous for the user.

Thinking about it, were there weapons like the kusarigama outside of Japan?

# ¿ Jun 2, 2020 11:36

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Kylaer posted:

There were tons of variations on the concept of the mace, with round heads, or flanged, or spiked, but yeah, the "mace on a chain" is probably fantasy. Threshing flails were a real peasant tool and undoubtedly got used to bash heads in once in a while, much like you can chop someone with an axe meant for cutting trees, but that's different than a dedicated weapon design.

Was the kusarigama something that actually saw use, or is it another likely fantasy creation? The way I've heard it described is that the weight and chain were light and the chain was much longer than what is ascribed to a flail, and the intention was to entangle an opponent's arm or weapon so you could stab them, rather than to be a killing tool in it's own right. But I have no idea if they were real.

The kusarigama actually saw military use, apparently, although I assume it was probably a skirmisher kind of weapon. You're accurate that it's more like a weighted chain attached to a sickle, with the general idea being that you tangle up the guy and then you kill him with the sickle (or I guess he could surrender). I imagine your biggest obstacle is that once you get one guy you have to untangle the chain from his carcass, so it would be a reasonably efficient "gently caress up one drunk samurai" weapon but would be hard to scale.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2020 21:49

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The Lone Badger posted:

If you have successfully killed one opponent... good! You've done your job and are already batting above average.

I imagine the kusarigama was also not easy to learn how to use. You could put an eye out with that thing.

e: watching these videos and assuming it's not totally ritualized, it seems you also get the issue of, you have invented an awesome 1v1 weapon against swords... but can it do anything else?

Nessus fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Jun 3, 2020

# ¿ Jun 3, 2020 09:37

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Phobophilia posted:

Putting someone off-balance with a thrown weapon right before you lunge in for the kill isn't so far removed from the role of a pilum or a throwing axe, I'm more surprised more people haven't tried using thrown nets and chains as a fighting doctrine. I suppose it's only really useful in impromptu skirmishes, not useful for large formations.

Nets and chains were probably pretty hard to make for something that would be ultimately disposable (cuz you'd probably lose it). They were also unwieldy for formations, just looking at them. Weren't retarius gladiators supposed to be based on something or other, though? Maybe it was one of those things where they'd have some skirmishers with that kind of gear but it was never like, core.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2020 06:12

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LingcodKilla posted:

Spear puncture wounds probably more dangerous than slash wounds.

The entire logistics of injuries vs. killing seems like it would be different back then. I imagine mild casualties would just walk it off, and your clever poo poo-smeared blow dart that's going to kill Paterfamilias Gaius in three days won't do you much good if he can pull it out, maybe tie a cloth over it, and come over to stab you in the head XVII times.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2020 09:21

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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:

Welcome to the YouTube algorithm curse. Everyone who watches anything on history gets it eventually.

Like come on YouTube AI, I was watching videos on medieval cooking. You're supposed to recommend me wholesome Townsends videos after that, not "HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THE MERITS OF WHITE SUPREMACY?!?"

Isn't this what the YouTube algorithm does on every topic?

# ¿ Jun 5, 2020 20:28

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Grand Fromage posted:

I can see ironworking arising without bronze, since bronze requires access to both tin and copper and tin is relatively hard to find. Bronze almost requires long distance trade unless you're real lucky in your location. Iron is way more abundant than either metal, which was why it replaces bronze when you have the ability to work with it. It's inferior (until you figure out steel), but it's way cheaper and easier to get.

I do wonder how you make the leap to understanding metalworking at all though, since it's so much harder to get the heat required to make iron. Maybe if you're using high temperature furnaces for something else? Glassmaking? I dunno.

I think it is generally held that cheese was probably invented by a guy storing his milk in a cow bladder and having the 2001 music come on as he considered the resulting curds and whey, so a similar process might have occurred with ore bearing stones? I think tin and lead melt at temperatures you could hit in a campfire, and while neither would be super useful, they might illustrate the process.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 20:34

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 01:25

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Lawman 0 posted:

What about copper nuggets?

Copper wouldn't melt at campfire temperatures. It does seem possible that they would encounter some elemental silver or gold just laying around - obviously at this point we've picked most of that clean but in 6500 BC you may well be the first human in a particular area.

Is tin naturally shiny? Maybe tin was made for ornaments and the same technology later got applied to bronze working.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 21:02

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

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