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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Specifically, portraying loose and folded clothing in statuary was a Greek innovation. I thought portraying a religious figure at all was a Greek custom, and that before Alexander it was forbidden, like it still is today in Islam.
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Jan 22, 2017 06:40
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A few pages back, but:Jamwad Hilder posted:Maybe not around the empire as a whole, but the city of Rome itself absolutely did have a police force. The vigiles were tasked with patrolling the streets (especially at night) and keeping the peace in general/apprehending petty criminals, as well as serving as firefighters. There were also the urban cohorts founded by Augustus that would do more of the heavy duty police work like stopping riots or going after gangs and violent criminals. You'd also occasionally have the Praetorian guard called in, but that was pretty rare I think. Huh, so Augustan Rome developed the first riot police and SWAT teams?
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Feb 23, 2017 16:57
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Here's a cool finding in Ethiopia.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:13
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Guildencrantz posted:
Where did they locate the one true cross, holy prepuce, and breast milk of Mary?
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Oct 7, 2017 02:36
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Grevling posted:Their Greek is so good that there aren't any particularly meaningful differences between their Greek and that of native speakers at the time, apart from certain Semiticisms that do stand out. What are these, if you know offhand? I love weird linguistic tangents like this.
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Nov 18, 2017 03:02
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Freudian posted:Which is why it's called Indo-European. ...no, the hypothesized Indo-European cultures spread (likely from Central Asia) many centuries and even millennia before Alexander. Turkish, Finnish, and Basque are three European language isolates, notable for not being related to all their Indo-European neighbors.
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Aug 14, 2018 06:06
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"Byzantines" first came up in elementary school art class because they were famous for their mosaics, apparently. But I never learned who they were or where they came from, just that they were apparently separate from Greeks and Romans (who were basically the same since the Romans copied all the Greek art, doncha know). History classes were mostly limited to American history with some British/European Medieval-through-Industrial Revolution history thrown in, even into high school.
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Nov 19, 2018 09:30
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skasion posted:Yes, proletarii, everyone who doesn’t hold land and its accompanying significant income. Huh. So, going by Wikipedia, Patricians were kind of like Medieval European nobility, a special heritable class that wasn't necessarily tied to wealth, supposedly tracing ancestry back to the founding 100 families of Rome. And the division between Plebians and Proletarians was monetary: Plebes owned property, Proles owned little to nothing, to the point that in the census the lines for their property usually only listed their children's names. Basically, their only value to the state was their ability to have children and populate the colonies. Meanwhile Plebes had a duty to perform military service and had certain roles available only for them relative to the Patricians, like one of the two consuls, but over the centuries they also gradually picked up all the rights of Patricians, and most of the Patrician families died out. Then the reforms of Marius in 107 BC did away with the military ban on Proletarii (because the farm-owning families had lost so much manpower in the recent wars, risking the food production of the Republic), making them the backbone of the legions thereafter. Is that about right?
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Dec 28, 2018 07:26
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Why did the HRE constantly have such absurd snaking borders, each with tons of enclaves and exclaves, for all its internal political divisions over its entire lifespan? Just  what in the gently caress
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Feb 4, 2019 02:20
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Jazerus posted:and the colors don't all represent a single polity - some are categories. for example there are many ecclesiastical states that are all represented as dark blue/grey on the map, but which were in no way actually united Where can I read more about these ecclesiastical states? So, these were big properties owned by various religious orders and each one managed by a church ruler answering to a church superior, basically like any other feudal structure, and by "not united" you mean they were held in bits and pieces by several different organizations none of which coordinated? How does autonomous church territory work anyway, how did the Teutonic order manage to take over all this land and also get the imperial OK to conquer Lithuania and Russia HEY GUNS posted:apartments in early modern paris were the same way but worse, like you'd rent a bed next to the fireplace on the second floor and then a room up the staircase and around the corner but they didn't touch. the idea of "an apartment" as a single thing that's on one floor was 18th c not 17th. (then as now, everyone in paris rents) I assume there were still some of those divided rental situations though even through the 1700s, right? Especially at the low end of the market?
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Feb 4, 2019 06:15
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Ah, this guy retweeted someone today who went into more detail about how an independent ecclesiastical state worked. https://twitter.com/EmpireRomanHoly/status/1092780263665487872
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Feb 6, 2019 05:09
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:This would be wonderful. Prosthetic noses are so photogenic. 
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Feb 18, 2019 07:31
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From a few pages back, butCessna posted:Most of my 17th c. military history knowledge comes from the English Civil War - yeah, I know, bad cavalry island - but even though I'm not a 30 Years' War type I get the fact that things didn't work like, say, the Napoleonic Wars. Wait, I haven't heard this before. Why was English cavalry bad? Bad horse source? Lack of training riders from birth ala nomadic tribes like the Mongols/Huns?
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Feb 27, 2019 08:09
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King of False Promises posted:It's been a while since my Herodotus course that was particularly focused on navies, but I believe the difference is that ships of this time were generally constructed using mortise and tenon joints between the planks making up the hull, whereas baris ships used long ribs that were attached to the planks of the hull with pegs. I know it's been a few pages since the Nero reconstructed face, but your avatar reminded me of this image I ran into recently. An artist painted over this bust of Caracalla with their idea of what the colors would have looked like. 
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Mar 22, 2019 03:47
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FAUXTON posted:Fyi the cathedral looks to have weathered it better than anyone dared hope. It's still heavily damaged, the roof is gone, the spire is gone, the stained glass is gone, but they managed to get all the irreplaceable movable stuff out (relics, artwork etc), the altar is intact, it even looks like pews survived without getting charred. Yeah, it looks like most of the vaulted stone ceiling survived and protected the insides from the burning roof timbers. https://twitter.com/NBDPress/status/1117954342529593344
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Apr 16, 2019 06:17
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Grand Fromage posted:Hard to say. There are primary sources that say going out at night in Rome was very dangerous and nobody in their right minds did it. We know theft was common. I would guess doing a hit in broad daylight would be effective if you were trying to send a message. So just like Russia today. Standard mob tactics, basically saying "Look how powerful we are, we can do this in broad daylight and nobody lifts a finger." New Jersey Roman jokes aside, I had the vague idea that that was how Italian/Sicilian mafia got started, an outgrowth from Roman practices. But apparently it was in fact a response to the island's transition from feudalism to capitalism in the early 1800s, with a sudden tenfold increase in property ownership and correspondingly much higher number of disputes, officials inexperienced in managing the new system, and only a few hundred police for the entire island leading to use of private armies and clans to resolve disputes in the governmental power vacuum.
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Jul 3, 2019 19:11
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Don Gato posted:(Apocryphally), they had laws about what would happen if you pick up an apple in your lawn that came from a tree on your neighbor's property. I think the only people more litigious are early modern Germans. Well what would happen?
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Jul 4, 2019 08:00
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Kaal posted:diets for expecting mothers (I hope you enjoy eggs and rice), etc. It's interesting stuff. Wait eggs and what? How did ancient Romans get rice? Were they buying in bulk from the South Asian trade routes? Surely they couldn't cultivate the stuff themselves in any part of their territory? 
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Dec 12, 2019 06:12
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I just got this ad on the forum.  From the title I was wondering why someone made an  tabletop RPG, but the more I read of the PDF the more confused I get...
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Feb 11, 2020 08:08
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Lewd Mangabey posted:One thing to remember, which you may perhaps already know, is that there aren't nearly as many sources for early Rome as there are for the late Republic and Empire. That's part of the reason why general surveys of Rome tend to focus on those later eras. The Romans of the late republican era themselves acknowledged that they had lost many of their own sources for their early history, much of which had already become essentially legendary in their time. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the period was always legendary? There was no real attempt at an official state history until the Second Punic War. Then, to commemorate the defeat of Hannibal, the Romans looked to the well-established Greek example to develop their own historiograpical tradition and create a narrative of that war. Up to that point, I believe the closest thing that existed were private family lore books, which were necessarily limited in scope and access to sources, not authored by professionals devoted to the subject, and I assume mainly focused on dynastic family trees and petty squabbles/vendettas with other clans. No one attempted an overarching, Roman-wide survey of any historical period until centuries into the Republic; they just weren't interested in the idea yet as a society.
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Feb 12, 2020 17:08
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Squalid posted:There's lots of issues with these numbers, but its pretty clear from this superficial look at things that video games are terrible at depicting the scale agriculture in the real world, and for obvious reasons: If they were to depict it accurately, it would take up 99% of the space when all the interesting stuff get's crammed into the remaining 1%. In ancient Greece almost all land that could possibly sustain agriculture would have been worked. It wouldn't have necessarily looked like the expansive square tracts of the modern USA, but instead would have been an irregular patchwork of olive groves, row crops, pasturage, small stands of trees, and grapevines with little household compounds and small villages interspersed throughout. To get a sense of this you can look at places on Google Earth where people still mostly live a subsistence lifestyle and work the land by hand. Ethiopia is a good example, at least in the Oromia and Amhara regions. Go outside of the cities and it's exactly this. (Well, maybe less olive and grape plantings.) FreudianSlippers posted:Then you have the Third Reich were they deliberately tried to build things that would make impressive looking ruins. Really? Like what? Aside from things like airfields and factories and V2 rockets and the odd bunker, I don't think I've heard of anything built by the Third Reich, let alone monumental.
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Mar 25, 2020 06:19
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PittTheElder posted:I mean the Emperors in Constantinople certainly had pretensions of reconquering the west for centuries after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, it's just that there were always bigger fish to fry in the east. It was actually a big deal that Justinian promoted his western expeditions as reconquests; a great many people weren't really aware they had ever really stopped living within the Empire at that point. I'm having trouble parsing this. Do you mean Westerners never realized they had stopped being Roman, or Easterners hadn't realized they had lost the West?
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Apr 21, 2020 09:30
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Whoops I thought I posed this before. Uh, enjoy a three-week-old reply I guess:Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Are there any video games of any genre for any platform that are set either during the reign of Alexander the Great or during the immediate aftermath of his death? The first campaign in Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots has you retracing Alexander's steps in his military campaign. Or take an alternate path, if you think you can conquer the (Mediterranean) world more efficiently. It's an early 00s RTS, so the missions are kinda light on plot, but the gameplay is fun.
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May 17, 2020 23:19
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I remember listening to Charlton Heston's commentary track for Ben-Hur and he described how the set decorator wanted some red foodstuff as a decoration in a scene when Judah and his family sit down to a meal and it turned into a bit of a difficulty because obviously they couldn't use tomatoes or red peppers. I forget what they ended up with. ...why not apples? Arglebargle III posted:I have long wondered this: apparently the term "Greek" which is so different from the word "Hellene" comes from Latin, who named all the Greeks Graeci after the Graekoi, a Greek tribe who settled southern Italy. In turn they named themselves after the hero Graecus, which seemed to be a common way to choose a tribe name. For example the Ionians named themselves after the hero Ion. Some people think (according to wiki) that the name might have originated from the word Graia, which was an archaic Greek word for "old". I'm inclined to believe the hero story since Herodotus mentions many tribes naming and re-naming themselves after heroes. Yeah, the Graekoi were the first Greek-speakers they ran into, which makes sense since they were so close to them on the peninsula. Then they called everybody they ran into after that who spoke the same language "Greeks" too, even though the Graekoi were the only ones who called themselves that. Rome seems to do this constantly to tons of cultures over the centuries. It's kind of their shtick.
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May 26, 2020 03:28
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tokenbrownguy posted:Ahhhh yes, thank you. Did anyone ever actually craft an axe-blade-at-the-end-of-a-chain weapon? I'm not a weapon-whacker but that seems like a plausible way to hurt people. Kusarigama isn't what I'm thinking of.
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Jun 2, 2020 08:20
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Yeah, the mayor asked protesters to leave the monument for 24 hours while they made preparations and then they would take it down. And they did.
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Jun 3, 2020 08:10
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Kevin DuBrow posted:
Phimosis is real, friend
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Jun 6, 2020 07:11
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Arglebargle III posted:
Is this something that was cast and mass-produced? IIRC Romans had factories churning out certain generic items.
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Jun 17, 2020 01:03
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Yeah, they're all completely flat and 100% saturated, as if the reconstructors were just squirting unmixed paint straight from the tube. We know ancient painters used shading and gradients; do the modern painters only know for certain the undercoat that was used, and can't tell what was layered above, so they don't try? Or is it some sort of stylistic choice?
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Jun 23, 2020 09:01
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Oberndorf posted:Frankenmuth is pretty cool, actually. Half-decent pseudo-Bavarian food, a good place to get all your Christmas decorations bought (like a giant, indoor, Christkindlmarkt all year long), and as a bonus nobody screws up when spelling or saying my name. Are they still better known for this than GVF?
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Jun 30, 2020 08:08
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Lawman 0 posted:Oh my God dude Pretty sure GF is describing their beliefs, not professing his own Don Gato posted:As a native spanish speaker, it's somewhat difficult for me to understand someone speaking Italian but if it's written down I have very little trouble understanding it. I also can understand Brazilian Portuguese due to a combination of similarity and exposure, but continental Portuguese is like some kind of weird cipher that is almost, but not quite, impossible for me to understand. Are you American or European, out of curiosity?
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Jul 5, 2020 09:59
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This is clearly the most important discovery in the history of Egyptology https://twitter.com/MrGordian/status/1282844583777509377
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Jul 15, 2020 19:30
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Dalael posted:Is there a good podcast revolving around the greeks pre Alexander? To be fair, the term "Hellenistic" refers specifically to the period after Alexander conquered and Greekified Asia Minor, and the effects thereof.
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Jul 24, 2020 07:55
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Kaal posted:As far as "Byzantine" goes, I generally think about it the same way I do about "Octavian" or "Caligula". The words weren't typically used historically, but they're a very convenient way for modern historians to avoid calling everyone "Gaius Julius Caesar". There's some similarities there to how modern historians are fairly comfortable with defining the end of the Roman Republic with the rise of Augustus, even though this was actively disputed throughout the Principate. This is absolutely not true. (OK Octavian is an anglicization of "Octavianus" but no one seriously balks at "Mark Antony".) The nicknames were actively in use to refer to these people during their lifetimes for the same reason they are today: people needed ways to differentiate between others when every Roman had one of the same few dozen praenomina (and then by the Principate, the same dozen) and everyone in a family shared the same nomen.
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Aug 3, 2020 18:42
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Nessus posted:Yeah Columbus's galaxy brain was "There's poo poo to the east of China, right? What if we go WEST? According to my calculations we'll surely hit China, or at least the stuff to the east of it." Yeah, he heard that Al-Farghani's estimate of the width of a degree of latitude was 56.7 miles, but didn't realize this was in Arabic miles rather than the Roman miles he was familiar with, so he underestimated the circumference of the earth by about 25%. All the royal courts he visited refused to fund him, because they correctly calculated no ships available could carry enough food and water to last the whole way. He just lucked out that the Americas happened to be roughly halfway in between. Someone suggested the huge number of political divisions of Europe helped Columbus get this funding, because he was able to bounce among them making his case until one of them finally agreed. (I think that may have even been Diamond, but it's been more than a decade since I read it.) Even Ferdinand and Isabella rejected him twice, convinced by their sailor and astronomer advisors that his calculations were ludicrously short. But then other advisors convinced them to give him a shot, because they'd lose almost nothing if he failed, but stood to gain a ton if he succeeded. And that did turn out to be true, although not in the way anyone expected.
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Aug 23, 2020 08:14
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SlothfulCobra posted:Wasn't Portugal developing some crazy new sailing technology for its own fishing fleets as well as circumventing Moroccan traders? I remember reading that was the only reason why it started to be feasible to make such a long journey into the open sea. I know one reason Portugal suddenly lost interest in Columbus when he was petitioning them too was because Bartolomeu Dias returned from rounding the Cape of Good Hope, proving there was a navigable southern passage to India around Africa using current technology.
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Aug 23, 2020 19:12
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Alhazred posted:And also for not turning away the guy who tries to sell you a big cannon. I thought the ERE did keep him on a salary living in Constantinople for a few months? They were just so impoverished at that point that they couldn't maintain him in the manner to which he was accustomed indefinitely, or provide the materials he would need to make the giant cannons, so he quickly decided to pack up and move on.
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Sep 6, 2020 09:40
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Grand Fromage posted:Hangeul is all you need for modern Korean. North Korea also does not use hanja at all. Interesting, I would think their stronger ties with China would reverse that. Is it just that they're too nationalistic to use Chinese characters?
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Sep 9, 2020 03:33
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There's an interesting linguistic theory* that people are born with grammatical constructions basically hardwired into our brains, and in the absence of structured language, we invent our own. Some of the most dramatic examples of this actually originate in the Caribbean slave system, where slaves were ripped from their home environment and into a deadly one often with others who spoke unrelated languages, and masters and drivers and slaves needed to communicate despite sharing no language in common. Hence, pidgin develops; very basic grammar, mostly just nouns and verbs, rarely any kind of conjugation or modification of words, and mostly drawing on words from the various mother tongues of the speakers. But then the slaves have children, and with this second generation comes a new creole language, using those same words but generally in all new ways. One of the most interesting features of a creole (which is a true language) is that it is very often more complex than either or any of the superstrate languages from which its vocabulary derives; more complex grammatical constructions, more tenses and moods, more conjugations; or, if not more complex, then it has different features than are present in the older native languages. *It looks like Bickerton was the writer I first read this from.
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Sep 12, 2020 07:14
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think comparisons between Rome and America can be useful just as comparisons with any other state can be useful. Also we were there in the 1850s, and it very much did lead to a further breakdown on a national level.
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Oct 20, 2020 08:40
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