Waifu Radia posted:

yeah it’s usually barely a step removed from straight up “death to Islam” poo poo, byzaboo to hate pipeline is real

Kylaer posted:

I think the French made up their own very specific definition of restaurant so that they can lay claim to inventing the concept. Much like champagne

Agean90 posted:

really the idea of having other people cook your food is not a great leap. Get an urban population big enough and enough abundance that you can buy ingredients without a lot of trouble and eventually someone will sell food from a stall.

cheetah7071 posted:

one sort of surprising datapoint on indoor fires is that the chimney was invented in the 12th century, and weren't common/universal for another 500 years after that

Halloween Jack posted:

Grand Fromage posted:

Buildings don't last forever and get demolished. Some of the materials are reusable, some aren't. Now imagine how much work it would be to remove all the unusable building debris before trucks existed. Nobody's doing that poo poo. Instead you just kinda level it out and bury it then build on top of that.

Now do this for thousands of years and you end up with tells.

skasion posted:

Yes, literally they were mounded up on top of the remains of hundreds or thousands of years of past habitation. Some cities would have been built around a high place to begin with since that’s a good way to defend your settlement. Mounds like this are quite common in some places in the near east, the archaeological term for such a mound is “tell”.

Impression of what Troy looked like when Schliemann first got to tearing it up:

skasion posted:

Christianity is extremely post-stoic and one could argue that Christian asceticism and monasticism is a form of stoic practice.

a fatguy baldspot posted:

They found a Roman dildo in England

CrypticFox posted:

Barbarians is pretty good, its set in Germany during the reign of Augustus.

Glah posted:

If filmmakers can't decide between church Latin and upper class English when making Roman media, they should compromise and just hire Romanian speakers!

Whorelord posted:

I love reading academic history books for the bits when the author starts absolutely savaging someone else's scholarship and basically accuses them of failing to do the most basic of research. Reading a history of Parthia, Reign of Arrows right now and the author routinely just starts savaging this one author for uncritically considering ancient historian's biases against Eastern peoples, it's great.

Tulip posted:

Triremes are pretty purpose built coastal warships, like you may notice if you look at a diagram that they don't carry supplies. Their operational range is functionally "one day."

Which is not to say that the Romans/Greeks would be incapable of making a boat that could operate further afield, but triremes were pretty built specifically to "deliver a giant metal ram right into another boat right next to you as quickly as possible." Not troop transportation or commerce or even colonial naval patrols.

Tulip posted:

As for why the tech didn't get to where it hypothetically could have earlier: I have no idea. I can say that there's a huge interruption where ships of the size that romans made were not made for centuries because there were just so many economic obstacles to shipping in the way the romans did during the middle ages, but i can't speak to like what sort of specific techniques lead to x y or z, cuz tbh I just don't know very much about shipbuilding and it seems like kind of a tough question.

cheetah7071 posted:

didn't renters in urban apartments exist? Was there a word for the kind of business Crassus did?

skasion posted:

For example of the former, here’s an account of bishop Liutprand of Cremona’s embassy from Otto I and II, Saxon emperors of the Romans, to Nikephoros Phokas, Greek emperor of the Romans, in 963.

quote:

On the seventh day before the Ides (June 7), moreover, on the sacred day of Pentecost itself, in the palace which is called the crown hall, I was led before Nicephorus—a monstrosity of a man, a pygmy, fat-headed and like a mole as to the smallness of his eyes; disgusting with his short, broad, thick, and half hoary beard; disgraced by a neck an inch long; very bristly through the length and thickness of his hair; in colour an Ethiopian; one whom it would not be pleasant to meet in the middle of the night; with extensive belly, lean of loin, very long of hip considering his short stature, small of shank, proportionate as to his heels and feet; clad in a garment costly but too old, and foul-smelling and faded through age; shod with Sicyonian shoes; bold of tongue, a fox by nature, in perjury and lying a Ulysses. Always my lords and august emperors ye seemed to me shapely, how much more shapely after this! Always magnificent, how much more magnificent after this! Always powerful, how much more powerful after this! Always gentle, how much more gentle henceforth! Always full of virtues, how much fuller henceforth. At his left, not in a line but far below, sat two ​petty emperors, once his masters, now his subjects. His discourse began as follows:

Freudian posted:

Both, I think. Everyone knows they hate it, but they're Greek *really*.

Jazerus posted:

can't have your dad getting beaten up by some smelly weirdo, he's gotta be a witty and charming villain to be able to do so well against the might of the empire