|
a pipe smoking dog posted:Well they speak Bulgarian so basically they are just Bulgarians who through a quirk of history ended up in a State of Serbo-Croat speakers in a region the Ottomans called Macedonia because it was in vaguely the same area as Macedonia. The whole issue, in typical Balkans style, has been blown completely out of proportion. The Macedonians are a Slavic group who inhabit what was in antiquity Upper Macedonia, but which was called Macedonia by the Ottomans. They have called themselves and been known as Macedonians for centuries now. When the Slavs moved to this region, they intermixed with the various populations that had lived their previously in antiquity, and thus the population does have some indirect link to the ancient Macedonians, though if you wanted to identify the majority of the "true" descendents (whatever that means - genetic descendants?) of the ancient Macedonians, you'd have to look to what is now northern Greece. During the post-Ottoman period, the Greeks wanted to re-assert their links to the ancient past, and they began a campaign of, for instance, re-naming places according to what was believed to be their ancient names. This led to the ridiculous notion that there can only be one "historical" Macedonia in northern Greece - despite the fact that this was Lower Macedonia in antiquity and FYROM was Upper Macedonia. At this time, the Macedonians made little claim to Alexander or the ancient kingdom of Macedon. When archaeology really became prevalent in both countries, however, the antipathy intensified, and in the process the ethnic identities of the inhabitants of FYROM and Greece as we know them today were formed, then hardened. This whole conflict is especially ironic considering the constant fighting in antiquity over whether the Macedonians were Greek or not. (The concept of Greekness was constantly changing throughout antiquity, so it's a stupid point anyway!) It's kind of like the French claiming a "Gallic" identity, despite the fact that modern France comprised only one part of the area inhabited by Gallic peoples in antiquity, and that massive population movements since antiquity (including the invasion of the Franks, who gave the country its name) have brought various peoples into this region since. Basically, ethnicity is a flexible, political category that is constantly defined in opposition to other groups!  A politically-loaded pro-FYROM map of ancient Macedonia before its expansion under Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, claiming a "historical ethnic Macedonia" as if that was some concrete entity that was somehow invaded and occupied already in prehistory by non-Macedonian peoples.
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2013 14:48
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 04:23 |
|
|
Just one other point on Ashkenazichat...Shbobdb posted:If you put people next to each other, they're gonna bone. That's human nature. I imagine that is how the Ashkenazim came to be. Especially during that wild period from 70-~600AD. When you've got migrations all over the place, you grab what you can get. It's not just this. People often seem to miss the fact that during the 1st c. BC and the first few centuries AD (note that the idea of a Roman "exile" of the Jews after the first revolt of AD 66-73 is a myth - there were large numbers of Jews living in the diaspora before the first revolt in AD 66-73 and the Bar Kochba revolt in AD 132-6, and the Romans never had a policy of exiling entire peoples), many Jewish communities in Europe, and especially in Italy, were heavily proselytizing. There is good reason to think that many whole gentile families converted to Judaism.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2014 15:49
|
|
|
Numerical Anxiety posted:Who knows how effectively it was enforced, but Hadrian did at least forbid Jews from residing in the city of Jerusalem/Aelia Capitolina, no? The rest of Syria Palestina, yeah, they were almost certainly still around. Hadrian's banning the Jews from Jerusalem is doubted historically, primarily because there is no evidence for it in the detailed Roman accounts of the punishments meted out agains the Judaeans post-Bar Kochba revolt, and also because Rabbinic writings and historical evidence continues to attest to Jews living and worshiping in Jerusalem after the suppression of that rebellion. quote:And even if there was never an official policy of exiling entire peoples, one does have to acknowledge that the Jews disappear from the historical record in Egypt after the revolts in the second century - whether they were killed, exiled, sold into slavery or something else is an open question, but they do effectively vanish from the territory until new Jewish communities settle there in subsequent years. I've not heard this before, and it sounds highly unlikely. The Jewish community in Egypt was huge, and remained so still after the Bar Kochba revolt. I think it's probably an issue of sources. It's just too bad that "the Romans exiled the Jews after they revolted, and the Jews have lived ever since as a wandering people" is touted so often even by those generally well informed about Jewish history and the modern issues in the region - it makes it easy to argue that the Judaeans were forced out of Palestine, and that the Palestinians aren't the descendants of the huge Judaean population that continued to live in the region and practice Judaism until the Arab conquerors coerced most of them into converting to Islam. quote:There's a bunch of references to Jews in late republican/early imperial literature. Enough, that is, to make it clear that there was a large Jewish population in Rome itself. Ovid's Ars Amatoria is the only thing I can think of off the top of my head. He advises young men to take girls on dates on the Sabbath because the markets will be quieter and there won't be as many pushy merchants around. There are lots of references. Horace is one of the earliest authors to mention them, and he makes several references to proselytizing Jews trying to convert Romans in Rome itself, for instance.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2014 18:14
|
|
|
Numerical Anxiety posted:Oh, the revolt at stake isn't Bar Kochba, it's this one. The article isn't all that great on the situation in Egypt, but from what documents we have, it seemed like the army was off dealing with the persians and the local government resorted to whipping up angry mobs of native Egyptians to help put it down (given relations between the two communities, it likely didn't require much effort). So not government policy per se, but there is a lapsus in documentation after the revolt. Whereas before one has the Greek-speaking Hellenized Jewish communities that we recognize from Philo, Aristeas and the like, after one has Aramaic speaking Jewish communities in Egypt. Whatever happened to the Greek-speaking community, they were decimated enough that they're not producing written documents anymore (at least none that have survived), while those that replace them probably settled from elsewhere. My mistake - I usually lump them together because they are so closely linked together (and really because we know so little about the Kitos revolt that it's often just presented as a prelude to the Bar Kochva revolt). As far as I'm aware from the literature on it, the extent of casualties during this and the Bar Kochva revolt are thought to have been exaggerated (as is so often the case with all ancient sources), and arguments for the disappearance of the community are made from silence. I'm also pretty certain that Greek persisted as an important language for Jewish communities insofar as we have evidence for them from papyri documents. quote:I agree with this more or less entirely, but that doesn't mean that the demographic upheavals, while not catastrophic in the way that the narrative you gesture to would have them, weren't important in their own right. There were absolutely demographic upheavals, and the references in the Rabbinic literature to depopulation in some areas make clear that religious practice was altered because of them. But again, as you state, the standard narrative doesn't acknowledge the survival of these communities.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2014 22:30
|
|
|
Mano posted:I think that blonde map has at least two errors: That blob in Xinjiang is referring to Uyghurs, who (like many Central Asian peoples, Mongolians includes) include the occasional blond and redhead.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2015 02:41
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:Us selling highly detailed maps to the soviets to make invasion maps with is probably the most Cold War thing possible. I took a class with a professor who did a lot of archaeological work in Peru and Bolivia involving landscape survey, and he said that it's still really difficult to get good topographical maps in much of South America because the militaries of many countries have retained the Cold War mentality of keeping cartographic detail secret as much as possible.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2015 06:48
|
|
|
What? The Canadian anthem has nothing to do with he flag. It even says right in the title that it's an address to the country. There's nothing in he lyrics to suggest that a flag is specifically being addressed or referenced. MeinPanzer fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Jul 3, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2016 05:30
|
|
|
Kurtofan posted:Did senators represent constituencies? No. The tribes were given equal representation (at least nominally) in one of three assemblies, though, the Comitia Tributa, which was used for voting on certain kinds of elections and motions. Lord Hydronium posted:Didn't Romans sometimes give unrelated and geographically distant tribes the same name because one reminded them of the other? Sometimes, yes. More often than not they just give us some Latinized variant of the emic name of a people.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2016 12:49
|
|
|
Antti posted:Is it at all possible it's a composition of Roman-era maps of coastlines? So Cyprus looks like the Romans had Cyprus down on their maps? Because that's the only way that map can be salvaged. Nope. I work on (among other things) geomorphology in the ancient world and this is just a lovely map.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2017 07:44
|
|
|
Count Roland posted:Any maps to share on the subject? Coastlines varying over time fascinates me, though I know almost nothing about the subject. I believe that the most recent edition of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (the standard atlas for Graeco-Roman antiquity) incorporates some work on geomorphology into its maps, but for the most part you need to go hunting around in various specialist journals for geomorphological reconstructions. I work in Greece, so most of my knowledge pertains to its coastline; are you interested in any regions and periods in particular?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2017 19:41
|
|
|
Count Roland posted:I'm mostly interested in a geological/climatological context. Basically, today's climate is changing. Getting an idea of past changes would be most interesting. I work on integrating environmental and economic history in ancient Greece, and over the last few years I've actually been working specifically on the impact of climate change in the ancient Graeco-Roman world. There are plenty of places around the Mediterranean that were above sea level even as recently as the later 1st millennium CE that are now underwater. Unfortunately there is no straightforward explanation for such processes; eustatic changes (those due to shifts in the actual volume of water) and isostatic changes (vertical movements in the Earth's crust) combine to affect different regions differently. There are places around the Aegean where some ancient sites will be below sea level while others only a few kilometres away are several metres above. Palaeoclimatology in the ancient Mediterranean has been rapidly developing over the last couple of decades but historians have been slow to embrace it. It's clear that our understanding of the ancient Graeco-Roman world will be changing considerably over the next few decades as more and better climatic data continues to pile up. quote:And according to Wikipedia, while Hispania Ulterior can be translated as Further Spain, it's never referred to as Farther Spain. Many, including myself, use "farther" to refer to actual physical distance and "further" to refer to metaphorical distance (i.e. "he threw the ball farther," but "I took things even further"). I always translate Hispanic Ulterior as Farther Spain.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2017 23:11
|
|
|
Here's a little on coastline change in the ancient Graeco-Roman world. This process has occurred over the last 10000 years on account of isostatic rebound (the vertical movement of the Earth's crust) and eustatic change (a shift in the volume of water in the oceans). Because the former process varies by region, coastline change is a complex phenomenon. You can find ancient sites on the coast of Crete, for instance, that have been raised several metres above sea level, while contemporary ancient sites a few kilometres away are completely submerged. In most cases, however, major geomorphological shifts that occurred along coastlines in historical timeframes did so because of major erosion in river valleys causing the silting up of deltas downstream. Here's a good example from western Greece. The Acheloos river delta has gradually silted up over the last 8000 or so years, and the coastline even 1300 years ago was drastically different from that today.  (Ironically, this is actually a pretty bad map, but it's the best I could find; those darker patches are not, as seemingly indicated on the legend, lakes, but in fact raised ground.) The extent of coastal shift was first recognized when the remains of the city of Oiniadai (modern Oiniades) were discovered (it's that dark cluster of dots on raised ground to the right of the middle of the map). This city was known to be a major port and the base of fleets in the Classical Greek period, but its remains are far inland today. The geomorphological shift is most obvious from its huge rock-cut ship sheds likely dating to the 4th c. BC:  The tallest of those pillars are about 10 feet tall. These are now completely surrounded by dry land. This process has occurred throughout the Mediterranean over the millennia, being driven at times in different proportions by either climatic change (a whole other can of worms) or human activity. In the latter case, the most damaging factor was in fact not most of the time the intensive exploitation of the landscape through agriculture or deforestation, but rather the abandonment of landscape features like terraces, retaining walls, and irrigations systems. While these modifications were maintained they kept erosion to a minimum, but when they were abandoned the soil, denuded of vegetation holding it in place, was quickly swept away.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2017 04:57
|
|
|
Hambilderberglar posted:I have heard it advanced that Greece looks the way it does today (rocky, pretty tree-less) is because of intensive rearing of sheep/goats/cattle, who in their grazing of the commons become a self sufficient ecological disaster as they eat everything in sight? Or at least, that was the biggest blame factor. steinrokkan posted:AFAIK the hypothesis that Greece was once forested is controversial at the very least, or perhaps rather debunked. They were trying experiments with re-forestation of some areas, and natural forest fires and such always reverted the ecosystem to what it was prior to these efforts. We know from pollen recovered from core samples and some other sources that Greece absolutely was much more forested until about 6000 BC, but it's a controversial topic whether most deforestation occurred in the first couple of millennia that followed (the period that saw the expansion of agriculture into Greece in the Neolithic) or rather occurred gradually until the Medieval period. Rearing sheep and goats in large numbers doesn't cause deforestation, but it does prevent trees from regrowing once they're planted. Most of the Greek countryside today is covered with a type of vegetation known as maquis, which is comprised mainly of trees that have been stunted by grazing and so remain bushes. The problem is that widespread pastoralism has been practiced in Greece since the Neolithic, so it's not clear when the initial deforestation may have occurred. It should be noted that many regions of Greece, and the Mediterranean more broadly, experienced considerable reforestation at times, too, such as in the early Medieval period when land tenure systems changed drastically. In fact, many parts of Greece that today are forested we know were not forested at different points over the last three millennia. quote:Do you have any literature that you can recommend that talks about the changing land use patterns? Are you interested in the socio-economic conditions or rather the environmental impact, or both? Also, are you looking for something super scholarly or something more accessible? If you want good, relatively accessible overviews of land use changes in Greece and the broader Mediterranean from an environmental historical perspective, Grove and Rackham's The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History is a good book that's well-researched but still accessible (and, unusually for this kind of book, has lots of good pictures).
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2017 19:40
|
|
|
Greeks collectively lose their minds when you start talking about FYROM. It's the one topic that I've basically accepted you can't talk about without triggering some deep-seated, reptilian response, even in intelligent people. People will with all sincerity tell you that today they want to claim the name and tomorrow they'll be rolling into Thessaloniki and seizing northern Greece, Crimea-style. I attended the huge rally in Athens a couple of weekends ago against Greece officially recognizing the use of some form of Macedonia in FYROM's name and it was really weird, like some kind of national independence day celebration only with lots of Neo-Nazis angrily yelling about how Macedonia has always been Greece and FYROM isn't a real country. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2018 14:20
|
|
|
Phlegmish posted:I admit I don't know the specifics without looking it up, I just assume Macedonians and Bulgarians were part of the same general population group until they were arbitrarily separated for historical reasons, like Romanians and Moldovans, or Flemings and Dutch people. Is that not the case? Yes, that is basically the case. Modern Macedonian ethnicity basically evolved in the 20th c. in parallel with developments in Yugoslavia; most of the claims that bother Greeks -- the use of the term Macedonian to describe their language, literature, broader culture, etc. -- only really emerged in the 1950s-1970s, as far as I'm aware. And, of course, the issue only really blew up when FYROM became an independent country in 1991. In a weird way the rhetoric used in the Greece-Macedonia dispute has a lot in common with that used in the Israel-Palestine dispute. On one side you have a considerably more powerful nation backed by Western powers that derives much of its legitimacy from its ancient past, even though it has (literally) re-imposed that past on much of its territory (both Israel and Greece engaged in ethnic cleansing in different ways and re-named "alien" toponyms according to ancient traditions), and denies the legitimacy of its opponent's ethnicity and statehood ("Macedonian are just Bulgarians"/"Palestinians are just Jordanians"). On the other side you have a much weaker nation that gets lip service from some nations but has largely been driven to extreme views because of the pressure imposed by its more powerful opponent (see Palestinians propagating the Protocol of the Elders of Zion and similar conspiracy theories or Macedonians claiming that ancient Macedonians were Slavic speakers and that modern Greeks are impostors). MeinPanzer fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Feb 13, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2018 17:50
|
|
|
steinrokkan posted:Do many modern Greeks get mad about Thrace / Smyrna / Anatolia? Yes, especially nationalists. The population exchange only occurred in 1922 and memories of Greek communities in Asia Minor remain strong (Athens is full of neighbourhoods named after Smyrna and other Greek communities in Asia Minor). This has been exacerbated lately because Erdogan has been openly antagonistic and when he visited in December he agitated strongly for greater independence for the small Muslim population that still lives in Greek Thrace. There has actually been an interesting amount of reflection in Greece recently on the similarities between the modern refugee crisis and the refugee crisis that followed 1922.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2018 18:10
|
|
|
Grevling posted:Looks like it can be any name a country has, so easy mode. To get back to this, the Greek name Ἑλλάς was originally applied to a small part of the region of Thessaly in central Greece, which neighboured Phthia, where Achilles was said to be from. We know very little about how their name came to be applied to all Greeks; by the time Homer was writing we confusingly already have the terms Hellenes and Panhellenes, the former referring to the inhabitants of the original region of Hellas and the latter all Greek speakers. Almost nothing reliable is recorded in later sources about this group. The Roman term for Hellas is Graecia, which is derived from the name of a tribe called Γραί or Γραικοί about which we equally know almost nothing; by the time history was being written they had also disappeared. It's logical that they were a Greek tribe located somewhere in proximity to Rome, but, through assimilation with the term Hellenes, later authors asserted that they were in fact from Thessaly. The name for Hellas in eastern countries derives from Ionia, since the Ionians were famously the Greeks longest subject to Persian rule, and thus the Persians referred to all Greeks as Yaunas, and most countries in the region of what was originally the Achaemenid Persian empire derived their name for the Greeks from the Persian name. So basically all three main naming conventions used to refer to Greece don't actually mean much when broken down. MeinPanzer fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Mar 22, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2018 18:37
|
|
|
Platystemon posted:You don’t consider ancestry to be the primary component? The primary component of ethnic identity is the individual's perception of their belonging to a community.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2018 10:38
|
|
|
A Buttery Pastry posted:Incidentally, this means that if you post enough on SA, you might be a goon in an ethnic sense. Brace for the inevitable ethnic cleansing of SA. reignonyourparade posted:Eh, a lot of the time 'ethnic x' is used to denote at least SOME ancestry in x. You're Greek if you speak Greek, but you're an ethnic Greek if your grandparents spoke Greek too, so to say. This is I think a different meaning of ethnicity than is usually used in more academic terms, and is basically a synonym for "ancestry." If a person is of Greek ancestry but lives in the US and doesn't claim to be Greek-American, for instance, they have no ethnic connection to Greece or Greeks. Ethnicity can be related to skin colour and other genetic markers; language; religion; cuisine; etc., or any combination of such features, but no one determines ethnicity. The only thing that ultimately lies at the core of ethnic identity is whether a person declares him or herself to be a member of a certain group. Which is why the claim that an ethnicity is "made up" is ridiculous; all ethnic identities are constantly being created and re-created.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2018 12:36
|
|
|
Xwytsau posted:It always was. At it's height it only ever had the population of a medium-largish city-state. It was never anything but a minor regional power and could barely control the Peloponnese. Sparta is only remembered so well because it was Ancient Greece's version of Singapore. It was the place where the oligarchs of the day had the most power over the other classes, so it got fetishized by oligarchs in other cities. It was never an important center of commerce or industry. By this logic, if Sparta was "never anything but a minor regional power," then no Greek city-state ever was. The town of Sparta itself was unusually rudimentary, but it was, in the scheme of the Mediterranean, a major power from about 412 to 371 BC, able to project its power as well as Athens.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2018 18:19
|
|
|
My mom is a Dutch person, from Drenthe, who emigrated to Canada and she talks all the time about how cheap Dutch people are, often when she returns to the Netherlands every year or so. There's definitely something to the stereotype, in particular when it comes to getting nickled and dimed for petty poo poo (like having to pay to use public bathrooms everywhere).
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2018 11:40
|
|
|
Projection slapfights go way back apparently: A passage from the astronomer Geminos (16.3-5), writing in the 2nd c. BC: quote:Our inhabited world is divided into three parts: Asia, Europe, and Libya [Africa]. The length of the inhabited world is approximately double the width. For this reason, those who draw world maps in proportion draw them on oblong panels so that the length is double the width. Those who draw circular world maps have wandered far from the truth, for the length [of a circular map] is equal to the width, which is not the case in nature. Of necessity, the proportions of the distances are not preserved in the circular world maps, for the inhabited part of the Earth is a certain segment of a sphere having the length the double of the width, which cannot be bounded by a circle. Also found this quote interesting, and surprising considering the early date of this author: Geminos 16.19-20: quote:When we speak of the southern hemisphere and of those dwelling it is, as well as the so-called antipodes in it, we should be understood in this way: that we have received no account of the southern hemisphere nor whether people live in it, but rather that, because of the whole spherical shape of the Earth and the path of the Sun between the tropics, there exists a certain other zone, lying toward the south and having the same temperate character as the northern zone in which we live.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2018 11:39
|
|
|
The same basic principle applies to the Dark Ages that you hear expressed about the American Civil War: those who know only a little about it say it was a period of stagnation and regression; those who know a bit say actually it was a complex period in which there was considerable development in different aspects of life; and those who know a lot about it say that it was basically a period of stagnation and regression. Both in the case of the Greek Dark Age (between the collapse of the Bronze Age palace kingdoms in the 12th c. BC and the emergence of the city-states in the 8th c. BC, now commonly called the Greek Iron Age) and the Medieval Dark Age (5th-10th c. AD, now commonly called the Early Medieval Period), while our understanding of the complexity of these periods has improved considerably, when you take a step back it's hard to deny that these were periods of major depopulation, loss of trade connections, technological knowhow, etc. This is a good example: a chart of all known Mediterranean shipwrecks from 1500 BC to AD 1500. Some of the reduction between AD 100 and 1500 is due to improvements in technology, but it's actually a surprisingly minimal factor.  [From Andrew Wilson, "Developments in Mediterranean shipping and maritime trade from the Hellenistic period to AD 1000," in Maritime Archaeology and Ancient Trade in the Mediterranean (2011), 33-60.]
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2018 22:13
|
|
|
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2018 22:43
|
|
|
System Metternich posted:Depopulation and loss of knowhow doesn't necessarily equal "stagnation", though, much less "regression". Regression to what? There has been nothing like early medieval Europe before, so saying that people "regressed" to it doesn't really make sense, while I would very much doubt the claim of stagnation. The early middle ages were a time of enormous cultural and political changes, not much stagnation to be seen here imo. The merging of Roman ideas of state and Germanic ideas of kingdom alone would prove to be enormously important for all of later Western history and was coined just during that time. "Progress" doesn't need to be merely technological. Stagnation and regression in terms of quantifiable factors, like population, agricultural productivity, amount of luxury goods produced, degree of economic integration, etc. This is not a value judgment related to artistic styles or religious practices; it is a statement about metrics that can be compared between pre-modern societies. quote:Re: that chart: This is a really cool chart, thank you for that! I would contend however that the high number of wrecks during antiquity are more connected to all of the Mediterranean being under the control of the Roman empire (or before that Greek colonies sprouting like mushrooms everywhere) than loss of technological knowhow. Political stability and a lack of customs go a long way in letting trade thrive, while the existence of a bunch of Christian states on the north side of the sea facing an Islamic south and east led to Mediterranean trade taking a nosedive. These are one and the same thing. The prosperity that spread under the Roman Empire produced intensive integration of economic markets and facilitated the emergence of specialized networks of knowledge and expertise. This meant that communities could specialize in the production of high quality products, whether they were luxury textiles, glass vessels, ships, or manuscripts. The Dark Age disrupted the integration of those markets and broke down those networks, and as a result over time there was less sharing of knowledge and expertise. This is how, for instance, so much knowledge of Greek scientific writing was lost throughout much of Europe from the 5th c. AD onwards. quote:I'm sure that on the other hand a graph charting river-based trade along e.g. the Rhine would show that there was much more of that than during Roman times. Trade didn't necessarily stop (though of course the total trade volume probably declined during the 5th to 7th centuries or so), but it moved north- and eastwards instead. I don't have quite the same data on northern Europe during the Early Middle Ages, but the trend of a decrease in market integration and trade is comparable along, for instance, the Rhine river valley. After the 5th c. AD, there just appears to be a massive decrease in the quantity and variety of most kind of things throughout most of Europe and the Mediterranean that lasts for centuries., whether we're talking drinking vessels, ships, or stone structures. Here's another example from the same article:  By far the easiest and cheapest way to transport heavy objects in the ancient world was by sea. The massive increase in trade meant that high quality stone could be moved around to build specialized structures. Once those trade networks disappeared, it meant that it would have become much more expensive and difficult in many cases to build sizeable or complex stone structures. MeinPanzer fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Nov 8, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2018 23:40
|
|
|
One more example before I head off to bed. A study of palaeobotanical evidence from Central European sites revealed that in the course of the 1st c. AD, numerous exotic food products that were previously unknown north of the Mediterranean began to appear in Roman military sites in Central Europe, quickly spreading to local villages, and eventually in the following century becoming ubiquitous. These included, in addition to staples like olives and grapes, rice, chickpea, bottle gourd, black pepper, almond, pistachio, date, pomegranate, fig, garlic, peach, cherry, dill, and fennel, among many others. The Roman military in particular seems to have been a huge driver of the movement of many specialized goods around the empire, and in the course of the 3rd c. AD, as the empire suffered increasingly frequent military crises, those food products that had to be imported (most of the above list) disappeared. Most were not reintroduced for centuries. Here's another chart illustrating this trajectory:  [From Corrie Bakels and Stefanie Jacomet, "Access to luxury foods in Central Europe during the Roman period: the archaeobotanical evidence," World Archaeology 34, 3 (2003): 542-57.]
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2018 00:06
|
|
|
Regarde Aduck posted:Weatherspoons used to do a rarebit Burger here. Was right good it was. Then they got rid of all regional menu items. gently caress you weatherspoons you brexit shits. I went into my first Wetherspoon's a few months ago because of the super cheap booze and was taken aback by all the blatant pro-Brexit propaganda everywhere. If you actually read it the arguments it makes are really disingenuous, too.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2018 22:20
|
|
|
TinTower posted:He's claiming that free trade with the world will lower prices by lowering non-EU tariffs, whilst, a) he's replacing all European drinks (like champagne) with English-produced versions (that legally can't be called champagne), and b) raising prices anyway. What I don’t understand is all the rhetoric about how “finally we’ll be able to sell all British products! This is why Brexit is a good thing.” What’s stopping them from doing that while the UK is in the EU? So you can’t serve English sparkling wine and call it “champagne.” Fine; call it sparkling wine and be done with it.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2018 14:29
|
|
|
Toplowtech posted:Those are generally poo poo local products that can't compete with cheaper better quality foreign products. The only way to sell them is outside the European market. Yeah but if you're the owner of Wetherspoon's you can just choose to serve them. The literature they scatter around every pub talks about Brexit like it's finally untying their hands and letting them serve wholesome British products, not that British products will finally be able to compete. (At least this is what I was confused by the last time some friends elected to go there and I went along.) BTW, for everyone who hasn't been to one recently, pretty much every Wetherspoon's has, in addition to pamphlets all over the place loudly proclaiming that Brexit will save Britain, actual poster boards set up in conspicuous places with (what seems to be) constantly updated pro-Brexit propaganda. I think the last one I saw featured a big photo of Theresa May with something to the effect of "WHY WON'T YOU GIVE THE BRITISH PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT, THERESA?" above it and a 10-point-font essay on why Europeans are smelly beside it. quote:Jaffa cakes and brown sauce And Marmite.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2018 16:39
|
|
|
Carbon dioxide posted:The funny (and with funny I mean horrible) thing is that it's apparently not uncommon for American doctors to tell falsehoods to parents about circumcision, like it supposedly helping with hygiene (you have to wash it regularly whether you have a foreskin or not) or it preventing disease transmission or whatever. I'm anti-circumcision, but there are some medical benefits to circumcision. If you want a good, balanced overview of the pros and cons from a medical perspective, there's a great episode of the podcast Science VS on this topic. Also see: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/130/3/e756.full.pdf quote:Evaluation of current evidence indicates that the health benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks; furthermore, the benefits of newborn male circumcision justify access to this procedure for families who choose it. Specific benefits from male circumcision were identified for the prevention of urinary tract infections, acquisition of HIV, transmission of some sexually transmitted infections, and penile cancer. Male circumcision does not appear to adversely affect penile sexual function/ sensitivity or sexual satisfaction... Significant acute complications are rare. Again, the benefits seem pretty minor overall and aren't worth it in my opinion, but medically speaking those aren't falsehoods.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 26, 2019 12:53
|
|
|
Phlegmish posted:Yeah. Obviously it's not even close to being on the same level as FGM, but it's still wrong to cut up a baby. There's been talk of making it illegal in countries like Iceland, which seems a little extreme, but I can agree that it should be discouraged as much as possible unless the parents can invoke a valid religious or medical reason. My wife and I got into a really awkward debate with a close friend who is a totally secular American Jew but who felt very strongly that attempts to restrict circumcision were anti-Semitic. It's definitely a touchy subject, and I've found that it's a topic that a lot of people don't really want to evaluate their feelings on.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 26, 2019 13:23
|
|
|
Maxwells Demon posted:New Zealand is only the Land of the Long White Cloud if it's the Maori name Aeoteroa The author has worked with the etymology in the endonym for each country so far as I can tell, which means an indigenous name if one is preserved but a colonial one if it isn’t (I.e. Venezuela).
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2019 15:43
|
|
|
Peanut President posted:also wanna meet and not be able to conversate with the <5% of the UK who can't speak english They're probably older immigrants. Where I grew up near Vancouver in Canada every once in a while I would encounter an elderly Punjabi or Chinese person who spoke effectively no English but who would be out doing their thing on the bus or in a shop or whatever.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 26, 2019 21:13
|
|
|
steinrokkan posted:Lagers are god's only chosen beer. Ale of any sort is pig beer. As a foreigner living in the UK, this is the absolute truth. Ales, especially the room temperature pints you get as a default throughout Britain, are garbage. That being said, the "craft beer" culture here is weird. When I lived in Canada and the US craft beer featured a lot of IPAs, but it was more about exploring varied types, so that craft beer bars would have probably 1/3 IPAs and 2/3 other types (wheat beers, stouts, sours, etc.); here it's majority IPAs with maybe a handful of other types of non-Ale beer on the side. I went to a craft beer festival in Nottingham a month ago and pretty much every stall was 2-3 types of IPA and 1, maybe 2 types of other beer. MeinPanzer fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Jul 5, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2019 11:50
|
|
|
Jerry Cotton posted:Why Athens? Because Aragon controlled the Duchy of Athens from 1312 until 1388, having effectively inherited it from the rogue Catalan mercenary army that conquered much of southern Greece in 1311. This is part of the little-known phase of Iberian control of large parts of Greece prior to Venetian conquest in the late 14th c.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2019 09:10
|
|
|
Kurtofan posted:it's the Mani peninsula apparently The Mani is a beautiful area that's great to visit. It's basically always been isolated from the rest of the Peloponnese and is effectively an island. Fun fact: its southern tip is the southernmost point of mainland Europe.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2019 19:48
|
|
|
Cat Mattress posted:Then on the opposite side you have Corsica where they eventually saw the Moor's Head as a sort of mascot representing them, instead of representing a defeated enemy, so they've messed around between two versions: This reminds me of an ancient analogue. Aegina, an island off the coast of Athens, was a major trading centre and incipient naval power in Greece during the 6th-5th c. BC. This naturally led to a rivalry between the two city-states, and Athens increasingly came to dominate Aegina from the mid-5th c. BC onwards, eventually occupying the island. While Aegina still had a major naval presence as an independent power, the emblem on its coinage was a sea turtle:  After it was subjugated and had its navy removed, however, it changed the emblem to a tortoise:  These coins, by the way, were colloquially called "turtles," just as the coins of Alexander the Great were called "Alexanders." MeinPanzer fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Aug 8, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2019 18:46
|
|
|
Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I've been to Aegina, they grow lots of pistachios and are pretty aggressive about selling bags of them to tourists. Today Aegina is definitely the pistachio centre of Greece, and the pistachio festival they hold in mid-September is pretty great if you're a fan. However, like a lot of Old World food products that we assume were ubiquitous in the ancient world, pistachios were known to the Greeks and probably occasionally consumed but were in fact not widely cultivated west of the Near East until the medieval period. The same is true of both rice and chickens, for instance. Incidentally, the same reason pistachios are so associated with Aegina today, its poor soils, is the reason that the ancient Greeks believed it became a trading power: quote:Strabo 8.6.16: quote:That's a great story. (And a really excellent carving of a tortoise. How big is that coin...?) Only 2cm in diameter. Greek coins can be small works of art, and the engravers who produced the dies for them were often itinerant master craftsmen. Here's another good example of the insane detail that could be achieved, a 5th c. BC tetradrachma of Syracuse:  This coin is about 2.4cm in diameter.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 10, 2019 11:44
|
|
|
Bloodnose posted:Just a sudden random thought: if people have been stamping coins with dies since the first millennium BC why did it take two thousand years to get to movable type printing? That seems like a pretty easy jump to me. A good question, which is all the more confounding because various peoples around the Mediterranean had been using inscribed stamps to label mass-produced ceramic objects from the mid-1st millennium BC onwards and the Romans were using the screw press to press cloth already in the 1st c. AD. Like so many technological innovations of the ancient Mediterranean world that ultimately went no where -- steam power and wind mills, for instance -- it was probably a matter of cheap labour and path dependence hindering their widespread exploitation. When you can hire a cheap, well-educated slave to copy out a complex work for you relatively quickly, why would you develop some clunky contraption to do the same work in a far longer amount of time and at greater expense?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 10, 2019 23:11
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 04:23 |
|
|
Technocrat posted:I've always wondered about old coins - they're always a bit squashed or mashed compared to modern coins, and I don't know if they were like that too begin with because of imperfect manufacturing, or just thousands of years passing by. Mostly the former, but also wear and clipping over the centuries often causes them to look deformed. Much of this also depends on how they were produced -- were the blanks cast or forged? Were they struck hot or cold? Were they produced by a single itinerant moneyer with a simple workshop, or a huge, well-established mint? Ancient mints would also oftentimes simply strike new dies onto existing coins, so that the images and legends might look deformed or blurred. quote:Personally I think #37 and #39 look basically on par with modern coinage, or at least 19th century coinage, and #41 is just barely off. Compare them to this 1890 UK silver coin which has had some wear on it before it went into someone's collection The finest examples of ancient coins look on par with examples of the modern period, but the average production quality of even the finest ancient gold specimens is far lower. When you study ancient coins you can find out a lot about how they were produced, and most of the time even prestigious imperial issues were minted rather carelessly by modern standards. A good indication of this is the alignment of the obverse and reverse dies: the most careful mints would maintain a standard of 12', meaning that the top of the image on the obverse was aligned with the top of the image on the reverse, but this is pretty rare across the entire output of a coinage since it required a lot of effort. Keep in mind that in the ancient world minting coinage often occurred in short bursts whenever necessary, especially in anticipation of military activity. When we are informed about how long it took to produce certain issues, oftentimes hundreds of thousands or even millions of coins might be produced in a few months.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 11, 2019 10:34
|
|