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Alekanderu posted:No ancient civilization had the means to kill literally every member of a nation/ethnicity/race, but then again that's not the definition of genocide either. Sure they did? The Rwandan Genocide was mostly accomplished by machete.
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Sep 18, 2013 19:22
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brozozo posted:I've always heard that Augustus wanted the northern border of the empire to be the Elbe River because it was a better defensive line compared to the Rhine. How was it better? Were there any important natural resources between the Rhine and the Elbe that were worth snatching up? The German people. Conquered and assimilated people were a huge asset and not just as slaves. Most famously the Illyrian provinces provided a string of good general-emperors that pulled the Empire back from the brink in the late 3rd century. Germans were an asset and a problem for the Empire for centuries; imagine if they had been Roman Germans instead of foreign Germans, they could have been an asset without the liabilities that came with employing cultural outsiders.
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Oct 1, 2013 15:38
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I think fouling garum was an executable offense in Rome, can Grand Fromage confirm or deny?
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Oct 2, 2013 16:44
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Yeah same old same old really. Citizenship, voting rights, land rights, wealth inequality, class warfare, crazy foreigners threatening our freedoms... in many ways the Classical world is more familiar to us than the Medieval or Early Modern period.
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Oct 6, 2013 13:31
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Foreign slaves!  Roman slavery was an interesting institution with its own laws and quirks and even its own hotly debated ethical quandaries. By the golden age of the Pax Romana Roman slavery was actually a much nicer deal for the slaves than American chattel slavery. Claudius in fact took a lot of heat from the conservative establishment for employing so many talented freedmen in high positions. But yeah the two big huge fights in Roman Republican politics were citizenship which ended in an actual war, and unfair land distribution which was closely tied to slavery. I'm not sure but I think the Social War is the only example I know of in history of nations forcing their enemy to let them join an empire. The land thing is related to slavery because you need slaves to run your unfairly huge plantation, and then use the profits to force yeoman farmers off their land and buy more slaves. Then the common people are screaming for more land, so some politician-general goes and gets some for them and brings back a ton of slaves which boosts your profits so you buy more land and pretty soon Rome needs to get bigger again... Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 05:36
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In the 4th century the Roman army was reorganized from a standing army stationed along frontier forts (which would constantly rebel and come back and kick Rome's rear end) to a more limited rapid reaction force responding to incursions already deep within Roman territory and outnumbered by immobile garrison forces. This coincided with the change of Roman cities from open cities to walled cities. By this time the average legion was divided into dozens of smaller forces spread out all over the Empire because of the shift to smaller forces defending walled cities rather than long borders. The pressures of barbarian incursion were just much greater by the 4th century. So when somebody, I think it was Diocletian, officially reorganized the legions it was already a long time coming and reflected the situation of the day more than the 400-year-old legionary structure. It may have actually been Constantine, like most institutional changes different parts of what historians recognize as the late Empire were invented at different times. Oh for the second part of your question, it's definitely Diocletian's reforms when the classical world starts to transform into the Dark Age world. Diocletian came to power in an Empire that had been pulled back from the brink of total destruction and while it was no longer actively tearing itself apart it was in pretty rough shape. Fortunately Diocletian was a whirlwind of a man and spent most of his life reorganizing and fixing (or trying to) all the various broken institutions and structural problems that had accumulated while people like Aurelian were charging around the Mediterranean from crisis to crisis just trying to hold the whole thing together for another week. Unfortunately not all of his ideas were the best, but it's hard to blame an Emperor who got the Imperial institutions and rule of law functioning again after nearly a century of continual crisis and war for not understanding things like economics well enough to really fix everything. Anyway, his reforms. The whole Duke idea? That was him. Diocletian went around and divided up the Roman provinces into Duchies which could be ruled more efficiently. He appointed civilian equivalents but the military Dux rapidly became the real power. Tenant serfs? Also Diocletian. The Roman economy was crumbling, populations were moving around with all the attendant problems of displaced people, so Diocletian issued a whole new legal code concerning who was allowed to do what kind of job where. It worked for the time being but it established serfdom. The manorial tax system? Him too. Roman coinage had lost most of its value during the 3rd century, so Diocletian developed a stop-gap system of taxation by a complex table of material goods and their relative values, so that tax could be collected in whatever the region had. So many bricks equaled so much leather or so many pigs or so many swords etc. As long as you paid your abstract units of tax in whatever you produced, your taxes were settled. This actually improved tax revenues immensely, which gives you an idea of how broken the old tax system had become. To his credit Diocletian tried to reform the currency but didn't understand monetary policy well enough to fix the monumental coinage problem. So this temporary system stuck for 1000 years. He also invented the concept of having four Emperors, which the less said about that the better for poor Diocletian. He ended up dying poor and unheeded after a heartbreaking attempt to come back and fix everything again when his four Emperors system exploded like you would expect it to. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 10:23
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I want to clarify something I posted above about the legions. They weren't reorganized into a bunch of tiny units so much as they already were fragmented into a bunch of smaller units by the end of the 3rd century. If you think about the chaos of the 3rd century it's not surprising that the legions were split and posted every which-way around the country putting out fires. So you would have a Danube Frontier legion with three detachments suppressing slave revolts in Hispania, a couple building fortifications in Palmyra, a few in North Africa and less than half the total force spread across their nominal deployment area. By Diocletian's time the legions were no longer coherent units in anything but name. The local general would instead have an ad-hoc collection of elements from many different nominal legions. Diocletian wasn't really reorganizing the legions into smaller units, he simply rationalized what was already in place. He organized these smaller elements into their own Legions, which effectively ended what we know as the Roman Legions. A legion in the early Empire might have been from 8000 to 12000 men, while in the late Empire it was more like 1000 to 2000. Either that or the late emperors presided over a ridiculous expansion of the army, because we know Diocletian through Constantine founded hundreds of new legions. By Constantine's time the legions were outnumbered by the Limitanii, the immobile garrison militias that protected walled cities. Since the legions were now more of a reaction force than a field army (new conquest was unthinkable in the midst of the Germanic Migration) mounted auxiliaries and mercenaries became more and more attractive. Here again you can see Dark Age Europe begin to emerge from the late Empire. The basic unit of civilization is a walled city or town running on a barter economy, defended by a seasonal militia levy and a smaller but professional cavalry-heavy force, and ruled by a Duke with a sacred duty to protect the area that pays him taxes through goods-in-kind. The Duke is called a Dux, the sacred duty descends from a divine Emperor instead of God, and the Duke's army is still called a Roman Legion, but the underlying mechanics are all in place. And this is only like 320 AD! So that' what happened to the legions. They suffered the same fate as every other Imperial institution in the Crisis of the 3rd Century: they survived but came out the other end much diminished and changed.
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Oct 8, 2013 06:16
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He's supposed to have written some well-regarded books on strategy which have been lost. Other than that someone else will have to answer though.
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Oct 8, 2013 17:51
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I think it's a general rule that the simpler and more coherent the historical narrative, the more likely it is to have holes in it. I'm not surprised to hear that there were contradictions to the general trend towards defense in depth, or that the trend wasn't uniform and wasn't concerted, or that the Limitanii were a more complicated organization than just a militia. I think what you're describing doesn't contradict the narrative of a general shift to defense in depth and a less professional army.
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Oct 9, 2013 03:34
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Berke Negri posted:Just how developed was monetary policy at the time? Like, was Diocletian just trying his best with macro-scale economic issues that people still didn't really grasp, or was there a third century Paul Krugman banging his head against a desk? Diocletian was trying his best with economic issues people didn't really yet understand. He inherited a huge currency problem and tried to fix it but failed. His fix focused on restoring the purity of the coinage, which we now understand is mostly irrelevant. He made a serious effort at it which is to his credit, and he even reformed the mint system effectively, but he failed to solve the inflation problem. From the perspective of the time his reforms were supposed to have worked; I imagine he was very frustrated when it didn't fix anything*. That's why I say it's hard to blame him for failing to revalue the currency. The currency problem was absolutely not Diocletian's fault. For decades before he came to power the petty Emperors of the 3rd century had been cutting silver out of the coins in order to mint more. Even at this time people knew that would end in trouble, but in the mid-late 3rd century nobody cared about what would happen 20 years down the road because that money often meant the difference between life and death for an emperor. When Diocletian ascends to the throne the silver denarius has lost most of its value which is not surprising since they minted gajillions of them with <5% silver. Diocletian did three things to combat this. First, he created a whole new tax system based on goods in kind which as I said before improved the Empire's tax situation immensely. Previously they had been paid in worthless "silver" coins and sometimes not even that since the tax system had accumulated loopholes big enough to sail Caligula's pleasure barge through. So that all went well. Second, he reformed the mints. The Imperial mints had been running on a contract basis, which meant that there was an awful lot of incentive for adulteration. Silver would go into the building, workers and owners would pocket a lot of the pure metal, and coins would come out below spec. Diocletian nationalized the mint and ended that scam. Again, so far so good. Third is the problem. Diocletian created a new series of silver coins, began minting them, and published exchange rates between the old and new coins. But critically, they didn't collect and destroy the old coinage. Why they didn't I don't know. Maybe they didn't understand the problem, maybe they did but decided they weren't able to carry out such a massive undertaking. The huge volume of debased coins in circulation would have made doing it the right way a long and expensive task. Personally I think they probably didn't understand that the underlying problem was the huge number of coins with now worthless face values, not the silver content. The result was that the attempt to revalue the silver denarius failed. Diocletian's coins were worth more in real terms than the old ones, but they did nothing to solve the real problem of inflation caused by reckless minting. Eventually the Empire switched over to the gold standard** and enjoyed a renaissance of the money economy, but the general trend towards barter transactions continued until money was no longer the dominant mode in the West. *This is the story of Diocletian's life really. **I think the switch to gold was a success not because of metal purity, but because it got everyone to stop using the old silver coins, which was the root of the inflation problem. I forget who switched to gold but I would bet he solved the problem more or less by accident. If Diocletian had minted new gold coins he might have succeeded and erroneously attributed that success to the higher metal purity of the coin, when it was the retirement of the silver coins which was the real fix.
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Oct 10, 2013 07:03
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I don't know. I know more (and history in general knows more) about Diocletian than the later emperors, and as I said I forget who introduced the gold standard. But it makes sense. I do want to point out that the currency problem wasn't necessarily driving people into poverty, it was driving people into a barter economy. The currency problem was one of the forces slowly pushing Europe towards self-sufficient manor communities and away from integration and trade. Trade without stable currency is very hard to do on a large scale.
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Oct 10, 2013 09:19
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Ironically I know so much about this sort of thing not because of Rome but because China, my real field, had its own share of serious problems with currency. You might be surprised at how much historical fortune and calamity can be traced to exchange rates.
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Oct 10, 2013 |
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Oct 10, 2013 12:26
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Knockknees posted:Has there ever been a China thread? I know this is thread is supposed to be all ancient history now but I'd love to see a China thread. There is just so much China history and it is so often glossed over in the West. There's a few China threads around the forums but not about ancient history. You'd need someone else to do the OP since I'm not a historian. I just took a bunch of Chinese history and culture classes as part of a related major, and a lot of that was modern history. Ancient economic history just happens to be an area of interest for me since I studied economics and history as part of two majors, neither of which was economics or history. I actually found this thread from the east Asia threads since GF and I both live in East Asia. If this thread is really all ancient history I guess you could ask about it but I've only seen Roman history. GF gets to decide since he mods this subforum anyway. For now maybe limit questions to the impact of Rome on China and vice versa. They had very little diplomatic contact but the two economic giants of the ancient world had an influence on each other that ironically only modern people can fully appreciate. Grand Fromage I was wondering if you could weigh in on the economic decline of the late Empire and how it did or didn't progress in the east. I think the narrative I've given is valid for the west but it doesn't seem to jibe with the continued prosperity of the Mediterranean region until the 7th century that you mentioned before or the continued prosperity of the east. What did the medieval Roman economy look like? Oh and I also think the turn this thread is taking towards the Germans is interesting. I'd like to hear more about their failed integration. I seem to recall a German King saying something about previously wanting to conquer Rome but changing his mind and wanting to rule it instead. Anyone have that quote? Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 00:24
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Okay ask away about So about tradewith the east, what were they using as a medium of exchange? There are a lot of reasons why large scale trade is difficult to impossible without money but this isn't an econ thread. Sufficed to say they had to be using something for money. Was it all gold solidi or did they adopt Parthian coins or what? Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 04:39
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Actually I think the jury's still out on the Xia Dynasty. Sima Qian's account of the formation of the Xia state is uncannily similar to hydraulic theory*, so elements of it are certainly plausible. It's just uncorroborated and not likely to ever be corroborated. The history is too vague to ever confirm with archeology. Then again they said the same thing about the Shang and I've visited their capital city and seen the grave goods and oracle bones in person. So it could very well be 4000 years.  There's something at the Erlitou site that looks for all the world like proto-Chinese writing but the sample is so small that we can't know. They found what looks like three characters. *Ok really it is hydraulic theory. Finding conclusive evidence of the Xia would be a hydraulic theorist's dream. According to Sima Qian the Yellow River tribes were like "UGH this river sucks so bad somebody deal with it already!" and some guy named Yu was all "okay but I get to be king and you have to do what I say" and then China happened. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 05:09
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veekie posted:Any rough timeline for ancient China? It's a bit hard to sort out when various things happened relative to western history, particularly with nationalist noise in the way. Chinese history is usual told in terms of "dynasties" each of which are by rights their own state which share more or less features with the previous state depending. The idea of China as a However, since literally all historical overviews tell things in terms of dynasties, I'm going to do it too. Just be aware that dynasty is such a broad word in Chinese history that it means little more than the name of the state that was supposedly dominant for most of the time period. 1700-1000 BC - The Shang Dynasty Although our earliest written records begin around 1200 BC, our  history record-holder is the Shang dynasty, who wrote divinations on turtle bones. They lived in the Yellow River valley in an area roughly described by modern Henan and Shaanxi provinces. The Shang were a warrior-aristocrat culture who rode around on chariots being mean to people when they weren't poking turtle bones with hot sticks. They began the Chinese tradition of elaborate tomb construction that continues all the way up through to 19th century. We know a lot about how Shang chariots work because they helpfully buried them for us. Along with ritually sacrificed horses. And ritually sacrificed charioteers.  The Shang were not very nice and have some aspects that seem very un-Chinese to later people.Note: Those turtle bones were a super-coup for Chinese historians because they were contemporary records of the names and reign-dates of a whole bunch of Shang dynasty kings. When they compared the Shang's own records with Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian (written 1200 years later!) they matched almost exactly. Everyone who had dismissed Sima Qian as unreliable had to eat a lot of crow that day. This is a big reason I'm still waiting for more evidence on the Xia dynasty, Sima Qian may end up having found a nugget of truth amid the obvious legends. 1000-250 BC - The Zhou Dynasty The Zhou lead a rebellion against the Shang for being even bigger dicks than usual, and won. The Zhou (independently) invented being nice to people, and used this newfound power to form a coalition of tribes and petty states that were fed up with the Shang and overthrew them. They also invented the literati-aristocrat ruling class, which remained a core part of Chinese culture. I'm sure life was more sedate for the peasants with the high and mighty sitting around in their pagodas drinking tea and writing poetry rather than riding around shanking people with halberds. The coalition-building strength of the Zhou is why they have such a long technical reign; everyone wanted to be associated with them long after their power was gone. That's why the Zhou technically continues until 250 even though another period starts around 700... 700-500 BC - The Spring and Autumn Period Around 700 BC, people from the north and west move in and toss the Zhou out of their capital in Xi'an. (This is going to become a theme in Chinese history.) The Zhou court is re-established at Luoyang, near the old Shang capital, but the Zhou state is all but destroyed. China degenerates into hundreds of petty kingdoms. Remember China at this point is just the North China Plain, so they were really were very petty kingdoms. On the other hand, this period sees the first great flowering of Chinese philosophy. Scholars and strategists would kick around from kingdom to kingdom seeking employment from the warring kings. This is how Sun Tzu and Confucius got their jobs. Sometimes you would have kings go look for wise men; with so many kings there was probably not enough wisdom to go around. Most importantly Confucianism Daoism and Legalism (the lost Chinese -ism) originate here. Confucius is actually the one who named this period; he wrote a very long book about how much better people were during the Zhou and how modern China was suffering moral collapse. Common themes. One more important thing to note is that the Chinese cultural sphere starts to grow pretty rapidly even during these internally divided times, or even because of them, as Chinese people flee south towards the Yangtze and east to more sparsely populated areas. By 500 BC all of the Yellow River basin and the lower Yangtze valley is part of the Chinese world. Barbarians from the northwest (in the old capital region ) and southeast in the Yangtze Delta are starting to adopt Chinese culture as well.500-221 BC - The Warring States Period Eventually one king after another gobbled up his neighbor until there were 7 states of reasonable size left, and this somewhat arbitrary distinction kicks off the Warring States period. Before we get into the big wars, I want to mention that this period was a continuation of the Spring and Autumn intellectual flowering. Especially in political science, which the Chinese formalized long before the West. This period was when you saw Confucianism and Legalism (and more nebulously Daoism) studied by people with real power and implemented in statecraft. Confucianism which you probably know is all about moral correctness and the idea that harmony arises from behavior proper to one's station. Legalism is about implementing the proper laws (as opposed to inculcating the proper morals) and coming down like the fist of an angry loving god when anybody so much as shuffles a toe over their line. Think of it as Ancient Chinese Judge Dredd and you honestly won't be far off. The idea is to make punishment so reliable, so swift and so shocking that it appears otherworldly and almost divine, so that the law becomes The Law and the people obey without need for direction or, ironically, punishment. The punishment for a lot of crimes was immediate execution. People visiting Legalist regimes often remarked on how orderly they were. Confucianism and Legalism became the dominant political philosophies and duked it out in a literal way. I mentioned that Legalism is the lost Chinese -ism so you know who won. So anyway: the wars. As you would expect from the name, these 7 states spend over a hundred years kicking the absolute poo poo out of each other, with the occasional barbarian thrown in for good measure. The ones to remember are: - Qin, the westernmost barbarian-ish kingdom which may be the same people that defeated the Zhou. Bootstrapped itself from tiny backwater to major player. Legalist state; incredibly strict laws. I actually live in the Qin breadbasket region right now.They win the wars. - Zhao, northern state and Qin's arch-rival. Chinese people consciously imitating northern barbarians, to great success. - Chu, southernmost and largest state. Also semi-barbarian. Recurrent problems with corruption. Also Qin's arch-rival. You have to picture China divided into these three large kindoms in the north, west, and south, a couple more good-sized states on the east coast, and a sort of thunderdome area of small kingdoms in the center. That thunderdome was a state that had been broken up in a peace agreement, and became the fulcrum of balance of power struggles for 150 years. Fortunes waxed and waned for a long time so you can't say one state was definitely the best. Ultimately, Qin broke the balance of power by annihilating (i.e. killing) the entire army of Zhao in a strategic  . The Annihilation of Zhao is still remembered as a horrifying atrocity over 2000 years later, although it would be only the first of many Qin atrocities. After that no individual state could resist them, and with Chu already diminished there was no one left to stop Qin from conquering everything. aand that leads into the Imperial period, which I'm not going to write today. Anyway, I hope that's a light overview of pre-Imperial China. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 12:27 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 12:05
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SniperWoreConverse posted:How are Chinese words pronounced? I guess I can figure out some like Zhou and Shang, but how do you say something like Xi'an? What's "Xi?" For that matter, what's "Tzu?" "Qin?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin#Rules_given_in_terms_of_English_pronunciation The hard groups (by groups I mean sounds with similar tongue positions) for English speakers are j/x/q and zh/ch/r and z/s. The j/x/q group is a front-of-mouth hiss with the tongue braced on the alveolar ridge but with the tip tucked behind the lower front teeth. You barely open your teeth and the hiss is produced by the sound flowing over the tongue and through the teeth. That's x. Q is almost the same but makes a stronger consonant sound by pressing your tongue harder against the alveolar ridge and then relaxing. J is a voiced q. Zh ch and r are the retroflex sounds, which are called that because your tongue is curled back to the middle of the hard palate. You can produce a decent approximation of ch by saying the English hard ch and then moving your tongue back to the middle of the hard palate and trying again. Zh is like that but voiced, like the English hard J. r is similar to English r but again further back and with your tongue tighter against the hard palate. You can get away with saying a really strong English CH or J to fake these. A lot of Chinese accents delete these in favor of... Z and s, which are front of mouth sounds again. They're like the English equivalents but with your tongue further forward, overlapping the alveolar ridge with the tip floating just behind your front teeth. They're also much more stressed than in English, which is why the older romanization would render pinyin s as ts or sz. SniperWoreConverse posted:' signifies a break between syllables right? I think it's there because non-native speakers might not naturally put a break there, so Xi'an would be like like Ch-an? Xi'an is a hissed "She-an" with the ' representing a glottal stop in Chinese just like it does in English. You don't normally see that in pinyin (just like in English) but xian is a possible one-syllable word, and because when you romanize you leave out spaces between compound words, you need to be clear that it's a two syllable word and not the one-syllable xian. In Chinese of course the two characters instead of one make it a non-issue. Qin is like "chin" but with the ch pronounced just behind the teeth. Tzu is an older romanization called Wade-Giles which isn't bad if you know what you're saying but is much more likely to lead naive English speakers astray. You're not actually supposed to pronounce tzu like it looks. The pinyin of tzu is zi. Sun-Tzu for example is supposed to be pronounced like "soon-tzi" and if you know how to read Wade-Giles you'll get it right, but if you don't you'll produce "sun-zoo".  There is no hard "a" in Chinese. Every "a" you see is a long "a", so Wang is pronounced Wahng and fang is fahng and so on. This is probably the biggest pet peeve of Chinese-speakers talking to English-speakers, not least because the most common Chinese family name is rendered a homonym for penis if mispronounced in this way.edit: In real life pinyin very rarely includes any tone markers. Deleting the spaces between compound words usually leaves little room for ambiguity. For example: "Zhong guo zheng zai jing li cheng shi hua," is a bit puzzling without tone markers, but "Zhongguo zhengzai jingli chengshihua," is unambiguously "China is now experiencing urbanization." It's only a real problem with place names, where there's no context to inform you what word this is. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 03:11
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Grand Fromage posted:I thought Tzu was Pinyin. Wade-Giles is exactly the same, you have to learn it. The reason it's so hated is because it looks pronounceable and has lead to decades of mangled pronunciations from English speakers.
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Oct 12, 2013 03:28
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Haha yeah. If you're interested check out the Chinese Language Thread "revering everything foreign and pandering to overseas" in TAS. It's a pretty slow thread but chances are your question will be answered or you'll be at least directed to an explanation. My high school teacher's given name was Xiaoyu, and I don't blame him for giving up on getting Americans to pronounce it right. I think the recent u/v split in pinyin might render his name Xiaoyv, which would be even more confusing for Americans. (The new "v" vowel is just the French u, it's not actually complicated.) Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 03:42
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veekie posted:That makes sense then. Lots of small wars with cooling off periods rather than armed camps facing off? Yes. Lots of small local wars. The kingdoms were petty and so were their conflicts, especially at the beginning of the period. Two states would often have wars while their neighbors were at peace, then end that war but then the loser would get jumped by a third aggressor, and sort of daisy-chain on through. The point is, there could be constant warfare even as most of the states were at peace for any one time. Just like if Pisa and Milan are at war, we wouldn't assume that Florence or Genoa were also at war, but might say that in general it was a period of warfare for Italy. As we go towards the Warring States period and their final conflicts the wars get bigger as states get bigger and consolidate territory. I really with the Let's Play: Kung Fu thread wasn't archived because I based a lot of what I wrote there on real anecdotes from primary sources in this time period and I would like to be able to remember what I was thinking at the time -- although everything I actually posted was invention and parody. I really would like to hear more discussions of the other lesser-known Chinese philosophies from the Spring and Autumn period like the Mohists or the Vertical and Horizontal Alliances because they're not going to get included in an overview but they're still really interesting. This period also wasn't my professor's focus so I know less about it than other times.
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Oct 12, 2013 04:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:The thing I find weirdest about Chinese is the way in which it's written down in the western alphabet. Who the hell ever decided to write down the "ch" sound in Qin as a Q of all things? Convenience for English speakers was not high on the list of priorities when pinyin was being developed. That's really the only answer you need. More specifically, Chinese has a ch sound, they needed a different grapheme for q because it's a different sound. They had to pick some way to write it and they didn't need the letter q for anything else. Be grateful the Communists won the war, if the Nationalists had won instead of discussing the tiny learning curve of pinyin we'd be discussing how to read ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ.
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Oct 12, 2013 04:40
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Okay, too much talking about language. Old Chinese sounds almost nothing like Mandarin anyway so we can talk about how to give these things their modern names but be aware that the people we are talking about wouldn't recognize any of them. Let's get back into the historical overview. Things are getting closer together in time so now I have to check my dates or I'll get something wrong.  221 BC-206 BC The Qin Dynasty From 230 to 221 BC the state of Qin, lead by the young and forceful King Zheng and his Machiavellian counselor/regent/SECRET DAD??? Lv Buwei, went on an epic rampage and conquered the other 6 Warring States, which had already been severely weakened by Qin's ascent over the last 50 years. Zheng was ruthless in conquest and in consolidating his power, and made few friends as the Qin armies stormed through state after state. Zheng wasted no time in pronouncing himself First Emperor of Qin, which is how history mostly remembers him as Qin Shi Huangdi. Qin Shi Huangdi followed up his literal epic rampage with a metaphorical epic rampage of state-building, taking the Qin apparatus of state and imposing it on China. He standardized roads, vehicles, weights and measures, currency, writing, etc. He collected and destroyed weapons from the defeated states' armories, burned their history books  , conscripted many of their people into the army or forced labor, and everywhere imposed the Qin Legalist philosophy of zero tolerance. You often hear that the Qin "unified" China but that's the wrong word. Qin conquered China, eradicated much of what came before, and the centralized, bureaucratic Qin state left its mark forever.Qin Shi Huang wasn't satisfied with metaphorical rampaging though, and after a few years lead the now even bigger Qin armies on campaigns into the sub-tropical forest and rugged hills of south China all the way down to the Mekong Valley. The Yue peoples, who had been a formidable barbarian culture on the Chinese southern border for centuries, were broken and south China firmly brought into the Chinese political sphere. He also attacked the Xiongnu to the north, but as you'd expect his attempts to dominate and settle the steppe don't take. Our rampaging First Emperor accumulated a lot of enemies and no new friends over the decades. In fact he even had his lifelong mentor Lv Buwei put to death for boning the Imperial Mom, which is where the SECRET DAD??? rumor comes from. His building projects were heedless of human life and many forced laborers died in monumental construction projects like the Great Wall. In one famous exchange he ordered a whole forest chopped down just to prove a point. He burned books of philosophy that disagreed with Legalism, and when scholars hid their libraries he ordered them buried alive. He escaped numerous assassination attempts and put down almost a dozen rebellions, almost one for every year of his reign. Summation: he was not a popular guy. Qin Shi Huangdi eventually died in 210 BC, and while his tomb is a noteworthy point I'll have to come back to it, because the Qin super-state immediately went to poo poo without King Zheng's formidable foot on China's throat. The Prime Minister, the Imperial princes, and the court advisers turned on each other literally before the death was officially announced, and before you know it heads were rolling in the palace. The new government was too incompetent to rule and far too incompetent to contain the hatred of the Chinese people for the Qin oppressors. By 209 the entire country was in revolt and the Qin state had virtually collapsed. King Zheng managed to conquer China for a total of 12 years. A young army lieutenant from a humble peasant family will reunite and transform the state in just a few years, but that's where I'll stop for now. That's a lot to talk about in a very short time, and I doubt I will ever spend so much  on one person's accomplishments again but Ying Zheng (or Zhang Zheng) was such a transformative figure in Chinese history it's hard to gloss him more than this. Chinese history is literally divided into pre-Zheng and post-Zheng since he's the first Emperor of the Imperial Period.I should talk about Qin Shi Huangdi's tomb complex since it's now recognized as one of the wonders of the ancient world. It was so well-hidden and so deeply buried that it was only rediscovered in the 1970s, and therefore is a wealth of material that can be secured and excavated properly. Ironically it owes its preservation to contemporary looters, who so hated the Emperor of Qin that they burned his tomb complex after looting it. The huge wood and earth structure collapsed into the ground and became an unremarkable-looking hill, where it sat unnoticed for 2000 years. The tomb complex is enormous, covering a diameter of about 3 kilometers. It includes an 600-meter-wide miniature copy of the Imperial City for the Emperor and his household in the center, three burial pits for the Terracotta Army in the east, and a mass grave for the construction workers in the west. Yes, they actually did kill all the people who built it so that it wouldn't be found. Rebels burned it down the year after it was finished. Great plan, guys!  The army complex is the only part that has been excavated. It includes three separate chambers. The largest chamber containing the infantry force has been mostly excavated. The discoveries there will probably take decades more for archeologists and historians to analyze and interpret fully. We have true-to-life models of an entire army regiment, horses, vehicles, and equipment which appears to be the real thing. The Qin state was kind enough to date-stamp a lot of its weaponry, and the dates indicate that these are actual weapons that the Qin army had lying around and then buried. Some of them are so well-preserved that with a new grip and a bit of polishing you could take them out to war again. The other chambers have not yet been opened but have been examined with ground-penetrating radar and magnetometers, which is how we know the general layout of the site. The Imperial burial complex itself is currently off-limits, since one of the centerpieces of the tomb was supposed to be a carved relief map of China with mercury for rivers and lakes. The soil above the complex does indeed have high levels of mercury and so excavation is on hold indefinitely. Whew! That was a lot. Next time I'll try to get through more than 50 years! Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 06:45
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That's certainly a theory and given the Chinese alchemical obsession with mercury it's a plausible one. We won't know until someone digs up the imperial corpse. Alternate answer: Ying Zheng was already so  how would you tell if he went insane?
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Oct 12, 2013 06:59
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The Terracotta Army excavation is under a steel aircraft hanger sort of deal, but they have visitors so it can't be totally climate controlled. The visitors walk on an elevated deck around the excavation so the archeologists can work and tourists can visit without interrupting them. Maybe they keep the building under constant positive pressure or something but I kind of doubt it. Better than leaving it out in the rain at least! They absolutely made the right call going slow on the tomb, though. In 1976 China's academic community was in no shape to conduct world-class study of a world-class site. When they excavated the Terracotta Army they broke a lot more than they needed to and destroyed the paint by exposing it to air. To be fair they didn't even know about the paint and the figures are already crushed in the earth, so it's hard to excavate them without breaking them more or even realize whether you broke something or whether it has been broken for 2000 years. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 08:02
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veekie posted:Man, the guy thinks big for sure. He kind of reminds me of a Civ player rushing Wonders at horrendous costs. Actually killing all the construction workers was his fuckstick son's idea, according to Sima Qian. He also had a bunch of young women sacrificed to be his dead dad's concubines in the afterlife. The tomb wasn't sealed up until 9 months after Qin Shi Huang died, and parts were still under construction when they gave up and buried him.
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Oct 12, 2013 10:12
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Ras Het posted:just makes me wish everyone knew IPA. You could just say, "there's no /æ/ in Chinese, now let's move on", and everyone would understand. "Why doesn't everyone just memorize these 159 graphemes so that this occasional difficulty never happens?!"  IPA is good to know but if I'd used it I would be giving one obscure writing system to explain another obscure writing system. I don't even know how to type æ and I most people don't know how to pronounce it. And this is the Roman thread! I think Latin uses æ for a different vowel than IPA. So... ever read that comic about how trying to rationalize 2 competing standards invariably results in 3 competing standards?
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Oct 12, 2013 16:37
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Okay dude next time I'll just find the IPA for the sound I need, then link the wikipedia IPA page, then link the page for that sound and people can click and listen to the sound wherever they may be reading. What was I thinking? A comparison is so much harder. In fact, how about I just run everything by you before I post? 
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Oct 12, 2013 16:53
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Fornadan posted:If I remember correctly, there are records of some of his semi-barbarian forefathers also being buried with their followers, though the practice had been abandoned several hundred years before the First Emperor Sorry I wasn't clearer about it but yes, the Shang dynasty practiced human sacrifice as part of burial rituals. You can tell who was dead when they went into the tomb and who was killed since the sacrifices all have a neat little rhomboid puncture wound in the side of their skull. They match up very nicely with the bronze halberd heads the Shang left everywhere. When I was at the museum at the site they had a diorama of a sacrificed guard. They think the sacrifices would actually climb into their little grave and kneel upright, and be instantly dispatched by a good whack in the head by a halberdier standing above and behind them. The graves aren't big enough lie down in. I'm not sure what articulation they found the bones in but I guess it convinced them that they were killed in situ and not killed elsewhere and then arranged for burial. To give you an idea of how a halberd could produce a clean wound, here's a bronze ge head. It would have a separate spear point on the pole. It's a piercing weapon so if you whacked somebody in the head it could produce a smallish wound while still being totally lethal. 
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Oct 13, 2013 |
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Oct 13, 2013 03:00
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This is where, if you're primarily interested in Rome in its prime, things are going to get interesting, because China's golden years of the classical era, the Han dynasty, coincide with Rome's greatest years as well. Happenings in China will impact Rome in subtle but important ways, like the reign of The Martial Emperor of Han opening up the silk road from a trickle to a flood. I'll probably stop the history updates at the end of the Han, since there's so much to get through here and, like Roman history, when it all comes apart in the 3rd century things are going to get confusing and lead off in a lot of directions and not come back together for a very long time. The Early Han Dynasty: 206 BC-156BC The Han dynasty picks up almost where the Qin dynasty leaves off, but it's far more prosperous and stable and lasts 400 years rather than 12. This is another theme we'll see repeated in Chinese history; it takes an uncompromising conqueror to unite a divided China but a compromising statesman to rule it. The Han is the origin of the identity of Imperial China, and though it's built on the foundations the Qin laid it's the Han legacy that remains. China and Han become synonyms in this time and have remained so to the present day. In the chaos of the Qin collapse, a charismatic army lieutenant Liu Bang came out on top of the rebellion dogpile and set himself up as the new Emperor Gaozu of Han. Gaozu deftly appropriated the mechanism of the Qin Empire while making himself look like a liberator with a little diplomatic finesse. The early Han state is essentially the same old Qin, but Gaozu relaxed central control and threw out Legalism, the two things that had made the Qin rule so unbearable for the rest of China. He divided up the country into Imperial Commanderies (the former Qin territory) ruled directly by the crown and 17 Protectorates (the subjugated states) vassal kingdoms with nominal autonomy. He set up rivals for power as his vassal kings, which almost immediately becomes a problem. The early decades of the Han see a gradual re-tightening of state control, until the Imperial family occupies all the vassal positions and the vassal kingships themselves have had most of their power stripped and returned to the Imperial court. Still, this arrangement was far more palatable to the common people and revolts were limited to the upper classes, allowing society in most of China to settle down for some much-needed peace and quiet after the Warring States and its bloody climax in the Qin empire. Like the political situation, the economy of the Han saw a new status quo forming after the shock and novelty of the Qin unification and the massive economic disruption of war, mass conscription and forced labor. The more conservative Han incarnation of the imperial government kept all the Qin institutions, but without their reckless consumption of manpower, and the economy improved. Standardization of writing, coinage, weights & measures and roads especially allowed an expansion of trade and urbanization as internal borders were eliminated. Use of money became ubiquitous and easy where before it had been fraught with the difficulties of international exchange and local paucity of coinage. In fact the Han minted coins so aggressively that they soon found themselves with an inflation problem on their hands. In the early 2nd century BC life settled down and apart from some minor skirmishes with the Xiongnu to the west and a nascent inflation problem, China was doing better than it had done for hundreds of years. The Han was still in early days but it was going well. Then one of those lucky breaks came along and China got an emperor who was ambitious, competent, and intelligent -- and most importantly they got him for 54 years. The golden age of classical China is about to begin. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 04:59
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Yeah, the Tang are 400 years after the Han collapses, so I'm making a distinction. The modern Chinese will call themselves Tang sometimes in certain contexts but it didn't enter the language as a synonym for China like Han did. They're the first Imperial China that took hold. Han is the Chinese version of Rome -- everyone after them is claiming the mantle. The Tang were more prosperous in real terms; assuming that both empires peaked somewhere near their theoretical maximum, population growth alone makes that a certainty. 600-900 AD really has no business being called classical anyway. edit: Neat stuff about 戈! I know they had spear points but I never heard that the Shang versions didn't. I just accepted that the spear point were separate. Yes, they're called halberds just for ease of explanation. You can call it a dagger-axe but then nobody knows what you're talking about. Maybe the best term would be chariot pick. That illustration doesn't show that the 戈 was a charioteer's weapon, which is why they're so strongly associated with Shang burials. The Shang upper class were warriors who fought from chariots. I guess it makes sense you wouldn't need a spear point on it for that. The Chinese do invent the halberd from the 戈 though, and pretty quickly. There's a bunch of different shapes ranging from weird ones to ones that look just like a European crescent-bladed or cleaver-bladed halberd. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 06:28
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One of my high school history teachers explained the amplified effect of long reigns with, "Imagine 30 years of George W. Bush," back in the day. I think that sums it up.Atlas Hugged posted:I took a class on revolution back in university and one of the major themes was that any country that can be classified as "developing" benefits just as well from a dictator as it does from democracy, if not better. Interested to know who had the balls to say that, seeing as my poli sci degree focused on revolutions. Especially considering what happened to a lot of the developing world's functioning democracies in the Cold War. It's not a fair contest when you're considering is like a race over one 60 year period and two huge muscle-monster dudes keep tackling the runners. Democracy at least guarantees you don't get 30 or 40 years of one idiot. So no Ceausescu, no Kim Jong Il, no Nyerere... no Mao.
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Oct 14, 2013 09:03
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To get away from the rocky shoals of 20th century politics, let's talk about Chinese Imperial naming conventions. Just as Augustus or Caesar or Caligula were not birth names, the names you'll see in Chinese history are not birth names. Chinese Emperors invariably have at least three names: their personal name which is what everyone else has, consisting of a family name and given name, in the early Imperial period a courtesy name which they would get at adulthood, at least one reign name which they take on accession like a pope, in the later empires a temple name, an era name which they got to make up whenever it felt right (in some dynasties) and the posthumous name which official historians give them after death. We mostly know Chinese emperors by their posthumous names, which unfortunately are often shared with other emperors from other dynasties. For example our emperor coming up, Han Wudi, is his posthumous name and is more of a title that just means The Martial Emperor of Han. This is okay for now but by the end of the Imperial period in 1911 there will have been more Martial Emperors than you can shake a stick at and they get hard to keep track of. Sort of like all the emperors named Gaius in Rome. Han Wudi was born Liu Che but would have been referred to as the Prince of Jiaodong by all but his immediate family even as an infant. They were really into titles. When he reached adulthood he added the courtesy name Tong, but that hardly matters because at 13 he became Emperor Jianyuan and nobody could refer to him by his given name anymore, not even his mother. He would go on to have 11 separate era names. So in all, Han Wudi has 15 different names/titles, and is mercifully without a temple name to remember. To make matters somewhat easier, nobody ever referred to the Emperor by any of his names at all. The Emperor was always mentioned as His Imperial Majesty, The Current Emperor, or more poetically The Lord of 10,000 Years, Son of Heaven, or The Dragon if you want to be in a metal band. In person you would just refer to him as Imperial Highness or Imperial Majesty. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 11:10 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 10:55
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I know I'm supposed to be posting about the Han dynasty but I started watching Rome yesterday and did Octavian really get captured by Gauls when he was 13?
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Oct 17, 2013 04:09
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There's the Cambridge history of China. It's 13 volumes and the one covering the question you mentioned has been delayed for what seems like forever.
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Oct 17, 2013 07:46
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China never collapsed completely the way that the western Roman Empire did. They went from three kingdoms, to one big kingdom and some little kingdoms, to two big kingdoms, to a different two big kingdoms, and then were unified by the Sui. And this was over 400 years. It wasn't exactly peaceful and quiet but it's hardly the total breakdown into warring tribes that you saw in the West. The Sui followed the pattern established by the Qin and Han; one big push to conquer the whole country followed by that force exhausting itself and a more moderate group picking up the pieces and getting everything working together. As I said there are some dynasties that nearly made it into the canon but didn't. The Jin dynasty between the Han and Sui is one of those. They didn't last particularly long but they did unify the country from about 250 to 315 AD. Then they lost their northern territories and their shot at inclusion in the canon of dynasties despite continuing to exist for another hundred years. Traditional Chinese historiography is full of questionable and problematic stuff like this. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Oct 17, 2013 |
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Oct 17, 2013 07:59
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You can see here just from Wikipedia: China is divided after the Three Kingdoms..? Eh, I guess they didn't grab the western half of the North China Plain so the Sui and Tang imperial historians didn't include them. Well, surely the Jin will get their due if they just hang on for oh say, another 100 years.  100 years later and they're still kicking, but what's this? They lost the Yellow River? Well, into the dustbin of history with you! We'll just tell everyone that China was in chaos for 400 years. On a related note, China doesn't really have a concept of "official history" because history has traditionally been the province of official historians. China has a word, "wild history" for history written by anyone not officially appointed as a court historian. Which gives you some idea as to how skewed and problematic historiography gets canonized. Not to say that the Western tradition is necessarily better, but it's certainly freer to express unsanctioned views. The Jin go through a very similar territorial history to the Song, who are a canonical dynasty, but they aren't allowed in. Just shows how unfair and misleading history can be. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Oct 17, 2013 |
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Oct 17, 2013 08:22
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Except the mongols who were quite oppressive. they were probably the most disruptive rulers until the Republican era.
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Oct 17, 2013 11:31
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So I'm still watching Rome and there's some sort of lesbian relationship going on between Sevilla(?) and Octavia. Do we know anything about how this sort of relationship was treated in Roman life? All I've ever heard is about dudes.
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Oct 17, 2013 12:30
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Aargh beaten. Yeah the mongol rule was really disruptive in China, the whole light hand thing is really a myth when it comes to the mongols. Like hard to even see where it came from. Maybe Russian scholars trying to downplay the scope of their subjugation? They slaughtered and looted and took slaves away to Mongolia never to be seen again. The hard line faction wanted to exterminate all of the inhabitants of Northwest China and let it return to steppe. Ogedai was a moderate ruler and thankfully nixed that idea. Moderate for a mongol is not letting your dudes kill the 30-50 million people they wanted to and that says something. The mongols reorganized Han society and there's a big gap in the historical record under their rule. Intellectualism was violently suppressed in general and political thought in particular. Scholars became the "old stinking 9th" under the mongols, the lowest social class. Theater poetry and literature all have a big gap in the yuan dynasty. I think the myth of a moderate yuan Dynasty comes almost entirely from Kubulai, who was a true sinophile and wanted everything done in the Chinese way. He was considered a bit of an aberration by his Mongol contemporaries but I guess they were to busy fighting each other out west and his state was too powerful for them to start poo poo over it. This is medieval history though anyway. I'm phone posting so no Han Wudi for now but I'll try to do it today.
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Oct 18, 2013 04:50
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I really like Lucius Varenus trying to be a local politician and doing these really strained ORATORY poses and hand gestures. Is that a real thing? And goddamn Pullo did you have to kill your crush's boyfriend?  I guess he won't be prosecuted for that unless Lucius takes him to court right? Killing a slave was a crime but someone has to bring charges first right?
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Oct 18, 2013 05:16
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