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Koramei posted:I have a question about island migration though, and while it doesn't really apply to The British Isles since I think on a good day you can see them from France, but how did stuff like the remote Pacific Islands get inhabited? Like Easter Island; it's literally the most remote inhabited island on the planet. I know Polynesians had sophisticated ocean current maps and good boats and stuff but there's no way they could have known about that, or even some of the less remote islands. Did someone just decide to sail a boat (with enough people to make a sustainable population) out on a transoceanic voyage with no idea where they were headed because they were feeling lucky? Many were likely discovered by fishermen blown off course in a storm. They were pretty good at stellar navigation so it's not unreasonable that they could figure out how to get home again. Clouds tend to form over land, so a cloud formation on the horizon will indicate an island long before you can see the land itself. No doubt there were deliberate voyages of exploration as well.
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Mar 3, 2013 18:31
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General Panic posted:Absolutely, the oldest known remains of homo sapiens in the British Isles a skeleton called the "Red Lady of Paviland" found in a cave in South Wales in 1823. It's 26,000 years old (and isn't actually a lady). However, there's quite a major break in the fossil record after that because of the Ice Age, which basically buried most of the country under glaciers, then humans returned about 12-13,000 years ago. Akhenaten was the Pharaoh, and could do whatever he wanted to. He had a vision of Aten being superior to and the source of all the other gods. It was better characterized as "monolatry", the worship of one god out of many, rather than actual monotheism. Anyway, as Pharaoh, his word was law and he set up his own centers of worship based on his own concepts. It's the same sort of vision that has prompted many others to found their own religions. From all accounts, he fervently believed it and wasn't just using it to jerk people around.
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Mar 4, 2013 21:24
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theories about his connection to various figures in the Old Testament and the origins of Judaism.
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Grand Fromage posted:True enough, but Christianity did adopt a ton of pagan stuff as it spread. It's usually explained as incorporating local gods in order to make conversion easier. I'm not sure how much truth there is to that reason but for whatever the reason, many of the festivals and the saints and such are straight up lifted from the various pre-Christian faiths around Europe. And there has always been debate on whether Christians actually worship a single god or two gods or a pantheon with one at the head or whatever the gently caress. At the beginning the debate was quite intense, presumably because Christianity was new and the idea of following multiple gods was familiar. The Babylonian captivity is what finally shook the Hebrews free from their polytheism. They never really figured it out beforehand, but were quite changed when they came back. Some exposure to Zoroastrianism probably helped.
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Mar 5, 2013 05:23
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Ras Het posted:Or, to put it in less inane terms, a monotheist faction within Israeli court took control of its religious policies during the Babylonian captivity. However you want to put it. The Judaism that came back from Babylon was quite different than the one that went.
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Mar 5, 2013 05:28
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The actual mathematical principles behind perspective drawing were figured out during the Renaissance. Earlier artists understood the concept, but didn't know how to render it accurately. A ninth grader would have been taught these things, so he would naturally have been better at it. It's not really a fair criticism. The other aspect of it is that stylistic preferences change over time. Realistic, photographic-quality art wasn't what ancient artists were after. They used their talent to emphasize other aspects of the objects, like their relationships to each other or their spiritual or symbolic meanings. Ancient artists were extremely talented and skilled, and generally painted exactly what they wanted to, in a style that was popular at the time. It's not their fault that their motifs and symbolism is lost on us.
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Mar 11, 2013 19:29
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FourLeaf posted:Regrading the Babylonian captivity- why? What motivated ancient kingdoms and empires to transport thousands of captives miles and miles away instead of just killing them? I could understand it if they were enslaved, but the fact that the Jews were allowed to hold onto their shared identity and culture during their captivity, and eventually released makes it seem like they were held in higher regard than slaves. The Assyrians in particular moved large populations around in order to break their resistance and pacify them. This was a step up from the outright slaughter of previous empires, as they recognized that they still needed people working the land and paying taxes, so they forcibly moved people from their homeland to elsewhere in the Empire, leaving them as strangers in unfamiliar lands. This is what happened to the nine northern tribes after 721 BC. The people moved in to replace them are of unknown origin. They tried to adapt to the local customs and religion, but the southern Hebrews never accepted them - they became the hated Samaritans of the New Testament. There was a small region of the north that Solomon deeded over to Tyre in repayment for work done on the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This area was called Galilee (Aramaic for "the area"), and retained their cultural ties to the rest of the Hebrew nation - they just paid taxes to Tyre, instead of Jerusalem. Sennacherib left them alone when he conquered Samaria, which is why there remained an original population of Jews in Galilee after the Assyrians deported the bulk of the rest of the population of the north. The Babylonians, however, were not really interested in mass resettlements like the Assyrians. A Ras Het suggested, it was more like taking hostage the upper crust of society, leaving the burned out city of Jerusalem to the peasants. It's not clear just how many left, or if the Biblical record is accurate on how many returned. We do know that the Biblical version of the Edict of Cyrus is not accurate, as the actual edict has been found (I saw it myself at the British Museum). This is it:  In it, Cyrus makes a general declaration that all the people held captive by the Babylonians were free to return to their homelands and rebuild their cities and their temples to their gods. The Hebrews wrote it up as if it only applied to them, but in fact it applied to anybody and everybody. Religious tolerance was a big part of Zoroastrianism, and Cyrus took great pride in allowing them to worship their ancestral gods again. This also had the effect of creating an indebtedness to the Persian empire, leading to less internal dissention than they might have had otherwise. The Hebrews that returned were generally good little boys and girls, living peacefully in the province of Transjordan of the Persian empire for the next 150 years or so - until Alexander came along and blew everything up. Deteriorata fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Mar 14, 2013 |
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Mar 14, 2013 05:00
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toanoradian posted:I suppose there's no such thing as bilingualism or multilingualism in Ancient Greece? I suppose multilingualism varied by profession. Farmers and townsmen who rarely traveled 20 miles beyond where they were born could get by with one, but merchants and traders would have to be fluent in more than one language. There were regular trade routes cris-crossing the Mediterranean, Egypt to Phoenicia to Greece to Italy and thousands of harbors in between. Before Alexander, Aramaic was the lingua franca in the Eastern Med, while after him Greek took its place. So a businessman needed to be able to speak his local language, as well as at least the common business language. Knowing multiple languages made it easier to negotiate deals with more people, so the really big dealers would know many. There was also the diplomatic corps. International relations required many interpreters and document translators, just as now. Deteriorata fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Mar 18, 2013 |
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Mar 18, 2013 15:08
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Another big impetus was Xenophon's account of the 10000, which basically laid open the Persians as a paper tiger and eminently beatable. They'd been a boil on the Greeks' rear end for a long time, and the idea of destroying them became quite tantalizing. Alexander accomplished what a couple of generations of Greeks had believed was possible.
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Apr 3, 2013 04:50
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AdjectiveNoun posted:Isn't the Black Plague rather incidental to the Mongols? Wasn't it essentially the same as the Plague of Justinian, and likely to happen so long as Western and Eastern Eurasia were able to trade? What unified them was Philip conquering them. The Macedonians considered themselves Greek, while the Greeks considered the Macedonians to be barbarians. The only way the fractious Greek city-states were ever going to unite was via outside conquest, and Philip's action was basically, "How do you like me know?" Philip set himself up as the king of all of Greece, even hiring Aristotle to be Alexander's tutor. Philip was planning action against the Persians, and there is speculation that his sudden death was an assassination at their hands. Little did they know that his son would be an even more capable military leader than him. Part of Alexander's (and Philip's) motivation was buying their way into the family, so to speak, by taking on the Greeks' longtime foe.
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Apr 3, 2013 21:23
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AdjectiveNoun posted:I'm not entirely sure of the biology behind it, all I know was that in both cases, the plagues started in Eastern Eurasia and spread to Western Eurasia. Macedon was as fractious as the rest until Philip took over. What united them was Philip's military prowess and his vision of Macedonian greatness, and little more. It wasn't a matter of "cultural superiority" or anything. It was due to an exceptional personality. Philip was an expansionist and outstanding military commander in his own right. Philip of Macedon would be hailed as one of the great conquerors of history had he not been assassinated and then eclipsed by his even more remarkable son.
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Apr 4, 2013 01:14
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The Sumerians are credited by many with having invented the chariot. Theirs were 4-wheeled and pulled by donkeys, manned by a driver and a javelin thrower: Depictions of their soldiers show them wearing bronze helmets and holding big shields while armed with bronze short swords or spears. Their military tactics are not well understood. They seem to have engaged in a lot of siege warfare.
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Apr 8, 2013 03:52
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Twat McTwatterson posted:Hmm, I always just assumed that since they drank it so often, they cut it with water in order to prolong the drinking and not get hosed up too quick. People drank beer and wine primarily because it was so much safer than water. The alcohol killed the microorganisms that caused a lot of disease. I suspect most people developed a pretty strong tolerance to it, and the average BAC of an ancient person would stagger most people today.
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Apr 10, 2013 14:28
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Nerdfest X posted:I am interested in pre-Christian religions and if there was a same cycle with a new generation of citizens converting to new beliefs (Zeus, Hera, et al), and folding in the some of the older (now considered) pagan beliefs/traditions (Chronos, Rhea, Titans) and even from older non Olympian-connected deities (Orcus) in much the same way that Halloween traditions were accepted into the new Christian mainstream to bond with those that still support the "old ways" and allow them to continue to celebrate/observe and still be a part of the "new wave". A lot of the mythology of ancient civilizations reflects this sort of thing. A common way of thinking was that "heaven" or the "realm of the gods" (whatever term they used) represented actual reality, while what happened on Earth was a reflection of what went on up there. When two cities fought, the "real" battle was between the two cities' patron gods, while the actions of the warriors on Earth played out according to what the gods were doing. Thus, a battle was won because one god had defeated the other rather than due to superior military actions on the ground. It's rather alien to our way of thinking today. Anyway, a lot of mythological stories then sprang up to explain how one god had defeated another, or how their various antics had caused things to happen on Earth. Their mythology was a sort of encoded history. Over the centuries, these myths got exceedingly complicated, with many overlapping and contradictory stories leading to a rather confusing mish-mash of plots and relationships. Egyptian mythology is particularly obtuse, having had several millennia of history to weave into their stories. Ultimately, the priests were the only ones who could really keep track of it all, and most people stuck to a subset of myths that were locally popular or entertaining for most purposes. So to answer your question, yes - there were a lot of traditions that people did in honor of a deity that had its origins in some obscure myth that no one really remembered anymore. Religious rituals tend to be important social occasions, and most societies hang on to their rituals even as the meanings behind them change. Deteriorata fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Apr 25, 2013 |
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Apr 25, 2013 19:57
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Tao Jones posted:The Greeks called Gibraltar the Pillars of Hercules, and that was pretty much accepted as the westernmost edge of the inhabited world. There were a few colonies on the eastern Mediterranean coast of Iberia by the 6th century BC, and the Phoenicians had colonies further to the west on the peninsula, so there was probably stuff going on there in Homer's day. In fact the pharaoh Neco II (ca. 600 BC) dug (or at least started) a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, and hired some Phoenician sailors to completely circumnavigate Africa, according to Herodotus. As with everything, some scholars dispute this.
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Apr 29, 2013 14:43
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah, I've seen the story about a circumnavigation attempt funded by Necho, but it's struck me as somewhat implausible too. I've read that it's really tough to sail much further south than say the Canaries; there's some land/sea current pattern that basically forces you to sail well out of sight of land to get around it, which the ancients weren't super keen on doing. Of course, the Phoenicians were basically Sea Gods, so maybe that didn't phase them. But it seems that most people who study such things believe they made it at least as far south as the Guineau-Bissua-Sierra Leone region. In this case, they started from the Red Sea and went around clockwise. What makes it credible is that they reported sailing around the Cape of Good Hope westbound with the sun on their right. This is not likely to be something someone who had never been south of the equator would make up.
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Apr 29, 2013 19:41
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Fell Fire posted:It was brought up a few days ago, but does anyone have good sources on what Romans ate, especially the lower classes? There was a good video on YouTube which I wanted to use in class (I think it had Terry Jones in it) but I can't seem to find it. This may be helpful: http://phys.org/news/2011-06-ancient-sewer-excavation-roman-diet.html BBC did a special on it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21996125
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Apr 30, 2013 01:08
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SlothfulCobra posted:This may be a bit off-topic, but what spurred the interest in the Roman empire and "Roman" aesthetics during the renaissance? Did they have to wait until the last vestiges of Rome proper died, or did Byzantine refugees have more Roman tastes? One reason, anyway, was a sense of finally out-doing the Romans. Europe had spent close to a millennium living with reminders of how great things had been in the distant past, which made their current misery all the worse. Up through the Middle Ages, Rome had represented the epitome of all that was civilized - in art, science, technology, engineering, law, and everything else. Part of the ethos of the Renaissance was shaking that backward-looking worship of the past, once and for all. They at last felt they were the equals, if not the betters, of the Romans. Thus a big driving force in their aesthetics was showing that they could do "Rome" better than the Romans themselves did. That forward-thinking, "the future is going to be even better!" attitude drove much of the Renaissance and continues as a basis for our society today. I'm sure there were other factors in play but that was one.
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May 1, 2013 00:10
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Silver2195 posted:Is that really the case? Wasn't the Renaissance more about re-creating Rome than surpassing it? I always assumed that no one believed in "progress" in an ideological sense until the Enlightenment. I guess it depends on what period you're focusing on. The early Renaissance was certainly all about rediscovering the learning of the ancient world, but eventually they figured out they could go beyond the Ancients and create their own learning and culture. Thus "doing 'Rome' better than the Romans themselves did." They wanted to recreate the Roman age, but a better version of it in their own image. The transition from Romanesque to Gothic architecture illustrates this. The Romans knew of the semicircular arch, but not the pointed arch - that was an innovation picked up from the Moors. A large part of the impetus in building the huge cathedrals was just to show what they could do - feats of architecture and engineering beyond anything even the Romans had been capable of.
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May 1, 2013 02:09
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DirkGently posted:How embarrassing -- let's just pretend I had a tiny seizure while writing the post and suffered some very specific brain damage! We'll just chalk it up to mercury poisoning!
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May 7, 2013 01:30
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Grand Fromage posted:We don't know why no one was interested in developing it further. It just doesn't appear to have occurred to anyone that it had the potential for bigger things. I think it's more that the related underlying technologies hadn't been developed yet. A functional steam engine requires a level of sophistication in metallurgy and fabrication that simply didn't exist in Roman times, and had no reason to exist for another millennium. It's easy to miss the huge number of interrelated and overlapping technologies needed to make even fairly primitive machinery operate reliably. A big factor in kicking off the industrial revolution in England was the amount of wood they were consuming. By the 18th century, they were genuinely starting to worry about running out. Then they found coal as a substitute. However, coal had to be dug out of the ground and transported, and thus the whole steam era grew out of that. That sort of pressure didn't exist for the Romans, and steam technology was the solution to a problem they never had.
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May 13, 2013 03:45
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Install Gentoo posted:Well the thing is that if you try to develop a steam engine further if your materials aren't good enough, you get a face full of steam and shredded wood/metal/etc. And that's a pretty big disincentive to keep mucking about with your steam engines. Iron technology, in particular, was never a priority for the Romans. They stuck with stone because it's what they knew. Iron was difficult to obtain, refine, cast, mill, and all the rest needed for using iron as a structural material, so they never bothered. If someone had developed, say, the Bessemer process in 100 AD, it might have become a useful metal for them. But again, the Bessemer process itself developed to solve a problem, one the Romans never encountered - making cannons, which you mentioned earlier. It gets back to technology developing as a way of solving problems. Societies that never face certain problems never have a need to develop a particular technology. The growth of technology is not some externally-driven imperative: it is haphazard and random, with a lot of happy accidents and mistakes. It's rather like evolution, actually.
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May 13, 2013 05:30
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Libluini posted:Oh, well I can see that. But what about the temple? That sounded pretty strong to me, moving massive doors and poo poo. The temple doors didn't use steam. Heat from an altar fire expanded air in a sealed container, forcing water out. The water forced out was collected in a bucket, and the weight of the water then opened the doors.  quote:The construction of a small temple whose doors shall open by when a fire is lighted and close again when it is extinguished. Let the proposed temple stand on a pedestal A B C D, on which sits a small altar e d. Through the altar insert a tube h i, one of the openings of which (i) is the altar, and the other (h) opens in a sphere t, reaching nearly to its center. The tube must be soldered into the sphere, into which a bent siphon k l n is also placed. Let the hinges of the doors be extended downwards and turn pivots within the base A B C D and from the hinges let two interconnected be attached through a pulley to a hollow vessel v z, which is suspended from them. Two other interconnected chains, wound around the hinges in an opposite direction from the first pair, are attached through a pulley to a lead weight which shuts the doors when it descends. Let the outer portion of the siphon k l n lead into the suspended vessel, and through a hole P, which must be carefully closed afterwards, pour enough water into the sphere to fill half of it. Certainly intricate and clever (and a form of a heat engine), but not steam powered in any sense. It uses pneumatics. Ed: It also appears to be merely a design project from Hero. There does not seem to be any evidence it was ever actually built. Deteriorata fucked around with this message at 02:37 on May 19, 2013 |
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May 19, 2013 02:17
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Odobenidae posted:I found this thread the day I registered and have been glued to it since, by far my favourite in all of SA. Something like this, maybe? He makes and sells many CDs of ancient lyre music, some of it (he claims) is ancient, while some is his own composition in ancient style.
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May 28, 2013 14:17
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Nobody asked about this, but I spotted this on the BBC and thought it would be interesting here. 'Hairdo archaeologist' solves ancient fashion mystery quote:Janet Stephens earns a living trimming, straightening and dyeing the hair of customers seeking the latest look. There's a video at the link (don't see any way to embed the video here) regarding how hair was styled in ancient times.
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Jun 3, 2013 04:01
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Spiderfist Island posted:From what little I know, it was a (relatively) major city in the Levant that was established in the Classical period, and became important enough in the development of Christianity that it was one of the Pentarchy cities. It was a major focal point of the Byzantine-Caliphate wars and later the Crusades, but then kind of dwindled into obscurity afterwards, probably due to how the city was repeatedly sacked and then soon after the Mongols hosed up the greater Middle East. It lasted a loooooong time though. Antioch was the capital of the Alexandrian Seleucids, so it had status to the Romans as a symbol of their ascendance in the East. They built it up (repeatedly, as the location was prone to bad earthquakes) in the first few centuries AD and was effectively their eastern capital prior to the establishment of Constantinople. It suffered yet another devastating earthquake in the 6th century, and the Romans focused most of their efforts on Constantinople from then on so Antioch went into decline. As you stated, it was symbolically important for later religious wars, but it did not have much commercial or military value. Being one of the major cities in the eastern Mediterranean at the time, it was an important Christian center, as well. There is still an Antiochan Orthodox Church, directly descended from its early days as a major metropolitan center. Deteriorata fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Jun 8, 2013 |
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Jun 8, 2013 16:00
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Are earthquakes frequent in the Mediterranean? I get the impression, possibly erroneous, that they're pretty rare. They might just have had no need to compensate for tectonic activity. The Mediterranean is a collision zone between the African and European plates. Italy is actually a piece of the African plate that broke off and got rammed into southern Europe, plowing up the Alps ahead of it. The entire area from Sicily to Turkey is very seismically active, with large earthquakes occurring fairly regularly. The island of Thera, off the coast of Greece, blew itself up completely in a volcanic eruption similar to Krakatoa around 1500 BC. In fact, the Jordan River valley and Dead Sea are actually a part of a chain of rift valleys extending down through the Red Sea into the Horn of Africa, as the African plate is now pulling away from the Asian plate. I don't think the western end, towards Spain, is as active though.
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Jun 10, 2013 16:00
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Koramei posted:The two principle issues were a lack of refinement in the iron and a lack of pumps to facilitate deeper mines, I'm pretty sure. Better refined metals (which wouldn't come for centuries after the fall of the west) make for more applications for them which creates more demand for them which means deeper mines are necessary along with like a billion other factors. You have to understand that while the Dark Age was a pretty big fall in a lot of ways there's still more than 1500 years of progress between Rome's height and industrialization. Even then, Britain wouldn't have moved to steam had they not been close to stripping the island bare of trees in the 18th century. The shift to coal as a heating fuel necessitated the mines and then the transportation and delivery system that overwhelmed pack animals and drove the innovations needed for steam power.
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Jun 26, 2013 03:45
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Install Gentoo posted:Uh, you do realize all of the pyramids have been heavily raided for building materials over the millenia right? There are some new ideas running around that the limestone wasn't actually stripped - it fell off of its own accord and builders then scavenged the blocks from the sand. Some guy has shown that thermal expansion and contraction was enough to make the casing blocks gradually move to where they would just fall off. Rocks heat up during the day, expand and push apart. They contract at night leaving small gaps between them. Sand blows into the cracks, filling the gap so when they start expanding again the next day they push out more. Over hundreds or thousands of years it's enough to move the blocks a long way, possibly leading to them losing support and falling off. It's possible that one of the reasons the Egyptians stopped building the huge pyramids is that they actually saw some of the blocks go tumbling off, which they took as a sign from the gods that it was a bad idea. It's largely conjecture, but plausible.
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Jul 2, 2013 18:21
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haakman posted:In the span of 50 to 60 years you see the collapse of all of the major civilisations surrounding the Mediterranean. We still don't know the exact cause. You have the Sea Peoples (a bunch of different people, not affiliated with each other - such as the Phillistines)) wrecking poo poo, as well as Doric Greeks coming down from the mountains to plunge Greece into a 400 year Dark Age, but I always consider these tribes an effect, rather than a cause, of the collapse. What caused all these various tribes to start running amok? Drought? Ironworking? Vulcanism? The theory I've seen most often is that there was a disruption on the Russian steppes (probably related to the discovery of iron smelting) that caused a cascading series of displacements. The flood of refugees South overwhelmed Greece and the Aegean, which then produced more refugees East (wiping out the Hittites and almost the Assyrians), while others took to the seas and headed for Egypt. They almost overran Egypt, but were held off and the Pharaoh granted them land in exchange for leaving him alone. They then became the Philistines. Given that iron-working seemed to accompany the arrival of the Sea Peoples, the theory that iron weapons made their wielders almost invincible against their bronze-clad opponents and thus produced the cascading population disruptions is certainly plausible. No one really seems to know.
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Jul 4, 2013 17:10
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Libluini posted:Back to the collapse-thing, apparently human civilization went through one great collapse after another. My search found some great cataclysm around 2200 BCE, for example. I hadn't had the time to read the sparse wikipedia-entries yet, though. Does anyone knows what happened then? Egypt's Old Kingdom came unglued about then, but I have never seen it tied to any larger general collapse of civilization.
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Jul 4, 2013 22:56
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Install Gentoo posted:You know what Catholic Church dioceses are right? All of them originate in Roman civil dioceses, and often retain the same borders as the Roman civil ones of 1500 years ago or so. And once the Church inherited all that power in all those civil institutions, it got rather comfortable with it and was loathe to give it up. Hence the various squabbles between the Church and new secular institutions that characterize the last 500 years or so of history.
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Jul 5, 2013 05:14
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karl fungus posted:What did Romans think of prehistoric sites or fossils that they accidentally came across? I recall the Greeks coming up with an elaborate theory of a fish that swims through rocks to explain a fossil they had come across. Edit: Also, there's this: http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/fossil-ancient-greeks-mammal-110331.htm Deteriorata fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Jul 6, 2013 |
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Jul 6, 2013 22:16
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Install Gentoo posted:Ancient Assyria is kinda like if there was an ongoing dynasty of Hitlers ruling over many occupied countries for centuries. It's not an accident that in the book of Jonah, God sends Jonah to preach to the Assyrians. Instead of heading overland to the East to Assyria, he catches a boat and heads West. His reasoning is that he wants to see Assyria burn rather than help them repent. Everybody listening to the story would have nodded their heads in agreement with Jonah and said, "gently caress the Assyrians" in their own way.
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Jul 19, 2013 17:58
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Nenonen posted:Is there a reason why some people ITT spell Habsburgs with a p? Not that it bothers me, but it always makes me wonder if it's a pun or if it's spelled differently in some countries... I think "Hapsburg" is the Anglicized version. It's easier for speakers of English to make the "b" voiceless and convert it to a "p".
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Jul 21, 2013 18:00
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Jack B Nimble posted:What prevented metallurgy from developing faster than it did? Wikipedia tells me the Romans had a kind of steel they could produce in a bloomery, but the Chinese were making steel in blast furnaces in 200 BC, right? Did the Chinese keep this a secret like the silk, and if so did the Romans not care or did they try to steal the secrets as they did with silk worms? Technological advancement generally develops as solutions to problems. The Romans never encountered the sort of problems that led them to developing any kind of steel processing industry. They could build everything they needed out of stone or wood, powered by slaves or water. It never dawned on them that iron could be useful as a construction material. They were good enough at ironworking for armaments. That's about all they cared about.
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Jul 29, 2013 23:01
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Dwarf posted:I've got a question about Roman architecture. How did they prevent buildings from sinking into the ground? How huge were Roman foundations? From what I've read, they would lay foundations of stone blocks up to ten feet below ground level. Some buildings had more stone in the foundations than in the rest of the building. In damp areas they would elevate the floor above the foundation to create a ventilation space. They would have clay pipes embedded in the walls to vent the dampness to the roof. Apparently some wealthy homes even had central heating, with pipes moving heated air to each room. I'm assuming it was by convection, as I don't know how they would force it. Anyway, if you had money you could get some pretty sophisticated stuff. The standard of living of a wealthy Roman wouldn't be all that different from the average person today, sans all the electronic stuff.
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Aug 8, 2013 05:52
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Medieval Medic posted:What do we know about tribal Europe and Asia from the period between the original settlements coming from Africa and the Middle East, and the rise of the first 'great' civilizations of their continents? That's because there really wasn't a lot going on elsewhere. Agriculture started spreading outward from the Middle East about 9000 BC, which allowed for some hamlets to form, but in most places the land wore out in a few years so they would be regularly packing up and moving to new land. This prevented much of any larger-scale organization from developing. There were some trade networks, but not much more. It took the regular annual flooding in Egypt and Mesopotamia to keep the ground fertile for extended periods and allow civilizations to grow. Large grain surpluses meant that a significant fraction of the population was freed from the land, allowing specialization of skills and trade. This led to government, laws, taxes, and all the rest.
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Aug 9, 2013 06:15
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Third Murderer posted:This is pretty interesting, since I recall hearing the same thing about Mesoamerican civilization. There was evidence that the cities formed before large-scale agriculture had developed, and one theory is that they formed for religious reasons. I could see that. A particular holy site would be a common link for scattered tribes. A few priests and a small retinue could be supported by hunting and gathering for a while. It would then provide an impetus for the tribesmen to want to stay near that site, which would lead to agriculture. You couldn't have much of a city without agriculture, but such a sequence would explain why agriculture was attractive in the first place.
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Aug 9, 2013 16:00
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Jazerus posted:It's the school kid part. Caesar became a story as well known to the educated as George Washington is to an American child, as many of the common Latin texts which are read during education are from the fall of the Republic era. It's easy to forget that Latin was a standard part of American education at least into the '50s, later in some places. My Dad went to high school in the '40s and read Caesar as standard curriculum. I believe he said the Gallic Wars amounted to most of his Latin II class - and this was at a little high school in rural southern Michigan.
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Aug 17, 2013 20:26
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Tao Jones posted:Scholars believe we have an example of Cleopatra's handwriting on a document. She wrote γινεσθοι (ginesthoi), which means "do it", on an order to give a tax exemption to one of Mark Antony's cronies. The order is written in a different hand, so it's speculated that a scribe wrote the order and she "signed" it. Granted, that's not exactly a signature in the sense that she wasn't writing her name, but it seems to have been the style in Egypt -- another document from about sixty years earlier is one of the only other examples of what we think to be a ruler's personal handwriting on a document (from Ptolemy X) and it was in a similarly imperative style. Most rulers were illiterate from what I have read. Reading and writing smacked of manual labor and was thus beneath royalty. Hence most ancient literature prominently mentions scribes as in courts with influential positions - they were the ones who actually read and wrote everything. Many prominent people also seem to have employed scribes to do their reading and writing for them. There was apparently a fairly narrow class of merchants who did their own reading and writing, as those lower than them couldn't afford to learn and those above hired someone to do it for them.
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Aug 29, 2013 15:27
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