Lawman 0 posted:

YES: Your Emperor Sucks

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Since the man got named in the OP, time for my favorite Diogenes anecdote. Among his many other admirable traits, he would from time to time stand outside brothels and scream at the top of his lungs, "a beautiful whore is like poisoned fruit!" at patrons as they entered. Annoyed by this, and presumably his smell as well, said patrons would fling small coins at Diogenes to shut him up. Once he'd scrounged up enough money, he would of course go into the brothel himself.

twoday posted:

Welcome to the C-SPAM Ancient History thread!

This thread was born out of a massive derail in the Epstein thread that lead to pages of discussion about the ancient Roman pantheon, the Bronze Age Collapse, the Minoans, and a bunch of other stuff. C-SPAM seems to have a lot to say about this, so now you can do that here. Feel free to argue about the identity of the Sea Peoples or whatever other niche you have wondered into and want to talk about.

The western definition of "ancient history" is not universally applicable to the cultures of the world, and this is certainly not going to be a thread limited to the "classical world" of Eurasia-Africa, so the definition of 'ancient' will vary accordingly per culture and place. I won't define that, I just want to note that discussions about Pre-Columbian American history, for instance, or other societies from the distant past are also welcome and encouraged here.

Feel free to post documentaries and podcasts and links to articles, or just engage in pleasant friendly debate about minutia that nobody else knows or cares about anymore. The Mayans were right and the world is ending, but we still don't know how they built the pyramids, so here's your last chance to figure it out!

Real hurthling! posted:

the word barbarians, from greek barbaroi, is literally exactly the same kind of insult as if we called chinese people "ching chong" today.
the greeks felt that bar bar bar was what west asians sounded like

hemale in pain posted:

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Theban Wargay

Real hurthling! posted:

albania shares a indo european root with alps to mean mountainous

Lemniscate Blue posted:

No, on purpose.

Goast posted:

I was think more of mecca being hidden inside everyone's rear end but that works too

Chucat posted:

2) Prior to the Battle of Pydna, there was a lunar eclipse. The Macedonians proceed to freak the gently caress out and treat it like an ill omen. Meanwhile, the Roman commander tells all his soldiers beforehand "There's gonna be an eclipse, so don't panic, it'll last like 30 minutes" and all the soldiers think he's a loving badass. (You might want to take this one with a grain of salt though).

Chucat posted:

Yeah Livy has it.

Agean90 posted:

I remember hearing somewhere that Vlad the impaler mostly did the whole implaling thing on noblemen and that if you were just some peasant he actually rocked because he loving hated useless nobility so much that you got a fair say in trails and poo poo.

twoday posted:

shout out to all the forensics experts out there who are diligently working to create reconstructions of ancient people that don't look like they could possibly be accurate

Julius Caesar:

Squalid posted:

No, nobody's really certain of any of the bust reputed to represent Julius Caesar. That one with the weirdly shaped head is the most likely contemporary depiction but even that's disputed.

Everyone post the bust of your favorite emperor:



Elagabalus: the Rome's queerest Emperor. Murdered for being too much of a fuckboi

twoday posted:

I made this recipe for roman dill chicken once with rabbit when I found some cheap rabbit meat and it was great

also back in the old days the EU used to import cheap ostrich meat from South Africa sometimes (there is an embargo now) and I made some roman recipe from north africa with ostrich cooked in fig stew.

Roman food is very good and tasty, and very different from most cuisine I have ever tasted. Things like asafoetida and lovage leaves or lovage seeds can be found in Persian or Indian shops. Fish sauce from south east Asia is a substitute for Garum (there is even a theory that it originated with the Phoenicians and spread to Asia via Phoenician/Roman maritime trade). The hardest thing to replicate is the various reductions of wine which they used, especially since they rely on very specific styles of wine which are very rare now (usually very sweet, or aged with raisins in them or something).

The cookbook of Apicius is still available and filled with tons of recipes that anyone can try out.

I think the thing I took away most from Roman cooking has to do with parsnips. They used to use them the way modern europeans use potatoes - boil em, mash em etc. And it was found that the roots of parsley grew larger and larger the further north you went, so they were important to the conquest of northern Gaul and Britain. Parsnip mash is really great! Also half potato/half parsnip mash.

Pro-tip: when a recipe asks for chopped leeks to be sprinkled on top at the end, it refers to wild leeks which were much smaller back in those days; use green onions as a substitute.

Nebakenezzer posted:

I politely demand you post this

fabergay egg posted:

the central economic sphere of production and distribution in bronze age mesopotamia were the temple complexes. they made things, they employed people, and they sold things, and were the main economic entities that the majority of people would deal with. merchants would trade between cities and thus between temple economies, and the system of interlocking trade and tribute routes stretched across the entire mediterranean basin and at least as far as what is now iran. trade in copper (and tin), as ea-nasir and nanni are involved in, was essential to the whole economic system, which stayed pretty similar all the way up until it violently collapsed around 1200 bce.

these merchants were involved in trade for profit, but they were not capitalists, and the system was not capitalism. there was little or no practice of wage labor, and the means of production of goods were concentrated in the temples and not in the hands of the merchant class who carried out intercity and interstate trade. money in this system was a means of exchange and denomination of debts, the classic commodity-money-commodity cycle that marx described as distinct from the money-commodity-money system of capitalism.

e: michael hudson describes this system here, including how it was the origin of money itself.

fabergay egg posted:

it's part of capital, vol 1, chapter 4.

fabergay egg posted:

it's part of capital, vol 1, chapter 4.

HookedOnChthonics posted:

however hard it is for us to believe): alone among people known to einhard, charlemagne could read silently, in his head, without pronouncing the words as he went

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/curtainsdc/status/1374406667287158786

im the four non touching districts of massachusetts

the gerrymanders on that thing would be epic

Tulip posted:

If reading random broadsheets from the 18th century taught me anything it's that early America was basically a heavily armed frat house scaled up to the size of a country, so they'd probably just be pissed at the price of beer.

Some Guy TT posted:

i have some horrifying news about caligula

https://mobile.twitter.com/ArtifactsHub/status/1377866670966902788

he may not have been gay

Drunkboxer posted:

Yeah I thought people were just criticizing the specific risk map. And Risk is a great game because you can make your friends so pissed off at you, it owns

Crusader posted:

https://twitter.com/evrythingcounts/status/1423133250415910920?s=21

Drunkboxer posted:

Rustius Barbarus sounds like a pain in the rear end.

Real hurthling! posted:

a scrappy dude named titus manlius "necklace guy" has your answer

per wiki: In 361 BC, Titus Manlius fought in the army of Titus Quinctius Poenus Capitolinus Crispinus against the Gauls during the Battle of the Anio River. When a Gaul of enormous size and strength challenged the Romans to single combat, Manlius accepted the challenge with the approval of Poenus after the rest of the army had held back from responding for a long period of time. Despite being physically inferior, he killed the Gaul with blows to the belly and groin, after which he stripped the corpse of a torc and placed it around his own neck. From this, he gained the agnomen Torquatus, a title that was passed down also to his descendants.[4]

Fish of hemp posted:

How did slavery became a major economic model in Americas? Because as I understand it, direct slavery had "fell out of fashion" in Europe in favor of serfdom and guilds and church didn't find it very christian. So how did it happen again in the new world?

Some Guy TT posted:

FizFashizzle posted:

https://twitter.com/lorybae_/status/1492233250558861317?s=21

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/USEmbassyKyiv/status/1496115593149358081

Slavvy posted:

Resurrected 12th century Persian goes on a mission to fight cloned neanderthal cyborgs

Antonymous posted:

I use 90% rubbing alcohol on a Brillo pad to remove every last drop of disgusting oil from my skin each night before tucking in

Agean90 posted:

wow an engineer knows jack poo poo outside his specialty who could have seen this coming

Ornamental Dingbat posted:

Diogenes was the FYAD to Plato's D&D

fabergay egg posted:

mathematics is just applied schizophrenia

indigi posted:

doing research can be a pain in the rear end now, I can't even imagine digging through centuries of sources in multiple languages to figure out that 300 years ago they calculated that the solstice would be on June 22 this year

Tulip posted:

New entry in "making up a guy to get mad at:"

Guy so committed to monarchism that he insists Rome fell in 509BCE.