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Koramei posted:Some is, but no, a trained artist today would utterly revolutionize things, the advances over the past six hundred years have been absolutely monumental. I think you are grossly underestimating how many stupid little things a trained artist today takes for granted. Take the best painter you can imagine -- where will he or she get paints? Will his or her techniques still work with the more crude materials? Something like a consistent vanishing point might well turn some heads, but Impressionism might be a "meh" or a "yuck." We're not just talking about blowing minds, but about actually making a living outside our own culture, and a lot of the innovations you are imagining are predicated on a series of other innovations (often from engineering or chemistry) that simply don't exist in one given person's head.
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Jun 26, 2014 20:59
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Ynglaur posted:After years of reading military history, I remain unconvinced that gunpowder was the game-changer its commonly thought. I think the rise of the organized nation-state had a far more profound impact on society, politics, warfare, and science. That is, had gunpowder never found a modern application in warfare, I think the 1400s to 1700s would have gone largely the same. Can you elaborate? This may be better suited to the medieval thread, but this one has been quiet as of late anyway. Cannon drastically changed siege warfare, and firearms completely changed how battles worked. And within the topic of the alt-history conversation, only 1 state, the Romans, having guns would be a gigantic advantage.
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Jun 26, 2014 21:06
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 : Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach, and produce a data probe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken.Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang "Looking God in the Eye" Koramei posted:And on the whole I think you guys are grossly underestimating just how many stupid little things we take for granted and have had drilled into us these days that would markedly improve life for people in history. I don't know about getting rich, or building planes or internal combustion engines or guns or being able to improve metallurgy enough to actually assemble whatever mechanical poo poo some of us have sperged into our brains, but there definitely are things we know, can do, can make, that would blow 2000 year old people's minds. A moderately intelligent and charismatic person could definitely change things, and probably spin it to get rich if they were determined/ manipulative enough. Hell, fairly mundane mathematical stuff could cause major changes. Imagine what ancient engineers could have done with the help of modern integral and differential calculus.
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Jun 26, 2014 21:15
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That sounds like a topic for the Military History thread since it's basically an Early Modern period history thread anyway.homullus posted:I think you are grossly underestimating how many stupid little things a trained artist today takes for granted. Take the best painter you can imagine -- where will he or she get paints? Will his or her techniques still work with the more crude materials? Something like a consistent vanishing point might well turn some heads, but Impressionism might be a "meh" or a "yuck." We're not just talking about blowing minds, but about actually making a living outside our own culture, and a lot of the innovations you are imagining are predicated on a series of other innovations (often from engineering or chemistry) that simply don't exist in one given person's head. Uh no, are you kidding? Most trained painters both know how to make a variety of paints with natural materials and have experience using tempera, which was what was used in antiquity. I can do both to some degree and my discipline is almost entirely digital; making use of crude and simple materials as well as improvising is an essential part of any art education. And vanishing points and modern perspective alone would revolutionize, and there is an order of magnitude more than that in knowledge that separates artists of today from artists of 2000 years ago. And no, they aren't, did you read my post? I specifically mentioned things that would be impossible to replicate, but there are plenty of things that would not be at all. As you're saying, many innovations are dependent on the society rather than just the knowledge of how to utilize them- but we've several of the societies, so we do know how to utilize them in ways people in antiquity couldn't.
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Jun 26, 2014 21:19
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I think I may have it! An unused tract of land planted with poppies would produce a considerable harvest of opium, which as everyone now knows can of course be quite physically and psychologically addictive. In Rome addiction would have been considered as mere moral weakness only, not a disease, so no legal repercussions. Give away the first few hits and you've got repeat customers. Start charging, buy a few field slaves and decent farmland, and hire a few bodyguards. Then charge increasingly more and keeping moving up the ladder, but never enough to be considered a threat by the elites. Yes, I've been watching Breaking Bad.
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Jun 26, 2014 21:23
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my dad posted:Hell, fairly mundane mathematical stuff could cause major changes. Imagine what ancient engineers could have done with the help of modern integral and differential calculus. I think modern mathematical ideas would have a hard time being accepted in antiquity. Relatively few people know how to give a proof of basic calculus theorems, and I imagine even fewer people would know how to do it without using tools like Arabic numerals or mathematical induction. Statistics would be another huge innovation, but I don't see how you'd prove it to mathematicians without the tools that Pascal, Huygens, etc had. The printing press seems like it might be potentially successful as foreknowledge, since it replaces skilled rather than unskilled labor (so the "we have slaves for this" kind of objection is lessened because few slaves know how to write) and even if you invent it on your own, you can use it to produce and distribute your own books, or as a fast way to copy things so that you can establish your own library, and so on. If you could persuade the powers that be that a lottery is a good idea to raise money for the state, you could make a lot of money as the director of it.
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Jun 26, 2014 21:35
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homullus posted:Slave labor means that your steam engine goes nowhere despite its novelty and potential impact No that's because no one knew how to reliably and cheaply build strong enough pressure containment for steam engines in that time, which particularly would need some pretty significant advances in metallurgy to get the right kinds of metal. Any powerful enough steam engine to start seriously replacing manual labor also tends to be enough of a pressure source that it can blow up easily if your containment isn't strong enough.
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Jun 26, 2014 21:40
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Exioce posted:I think I may have it! An unused tract of land planted with poppies would produce a considerable harvest of opium, which as everyone now knows can of course be quite physically and psychologically addictive. In Rome addiction would have been considered as mere moral weakness only, not a disease, so no legal repercussions. Give away the first few hits and you've got repeat customers. Start charging, buy a few field slaves and decent farmland, and hire a few bodyguards. Then charge increasingly more and keeping moving up the ladder, but never enough to be considered a threat by the elites. Opium was actually pretty widely available in classical times, but they ate it rather than smoked it. Heroin, on the other hand ...
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Jun 26, 2014 21:42
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Tao Jones posted:I think modern mathematical ideas would have a hard time being accepted in antiquity. Relatively few people know how to give a proof of basic calculus theorems, and I imagine even fewer people would know how to do it without using tools like Arabic numerals or mathematical induction. Statistics would be another huge innovation, but I don't see how you'd prove it to mathematicians without the tools that Pascal, Huygens, etc had. EDIT: Ah, you probably included that in Arabic numerals; ignore me.
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Jun 26, 2014 21:50
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Koramei posted:That sounds like a topic for the Military History thread since it's basically an Early Modern period history thread anyway. I lack your confidence that modern perspective would have revolutionized. It might have. It might not have. Egyptian art doesn't look the way it does because they didn't understand what people or animals looked like, or were unable to do better; it looks that way because that's how they chose to represent people and animals. Modern perspective (especially trompe-l'œil) would likely have been a big hit in some kinds of Roman wall-painting, but just as much wall-painting was fanciful or monumental in its aspirations. I don't see how you can be so certain that so much is the way it was because they just couldn't do better, despite having modern human brains and the creativity that comes with them. As an easy example, compare the height of ancient sculpture with the height of (what we have of) ancient painting. It might just be our bad luck with the painting, but there's definitely a gulf between them. We go from this:  to this:  across cultures and possibly a couple hundred years. How much of what we might do differently in that painting is choice/culture, and how much is ability? Edit: regarding the printing press, Romans already had the press (for grapes and olives). What they didn't have was movable type or widespread use of the codex for books.
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Jun 26, 2014 21:52
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I don't know, bicycles? I like bikes. Though I dread trying to ride an ancient bicycle with no suspension. The importance of conserving and cultivating Silphium? The secret of silk, or at least that "China totally exists, the Parthians are full of poo poo."?
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Jun 26, 2014 22:04
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Heyooo! (It's me, I'm the poo poo poster.) I think one big early advantage, depending on how and where you land, would be knowledge of the unchanged future. Sure, eventually you'll butterfly the timeline to shreds, but knowing that, say, Constantine goes Christian or that Caesar comes out on top of the power struggles could be a pretty big edge. That could range from attaching yourself to someone as a prophet or oracle, betting big in investments, poo poo like that.
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Jun 26, 2014 22:08
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How would this time-traveler not succumb to diseases that their bodies weren't used to, and/or bring contemporary diseases along with them?
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Jun 26, 2014 22:12
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Rockopolis posted:I don't know, bicycles? I like bikes. Though I dread trying to ride an ancient bicycle with no suspension. I never want to ride a bike without rubber tires. Although the topic of geography is an interesting one. I imagine one of the first things I'd do when I found writing materials is draw out a huge map of the Earth, mercator style. "Yes, this is what the world looks like, given a few assumptions about projection. Yes I realize this is not super-useful for navigating the road network. Yes, those massive continents to the west definitely exist." Although my favorite part of the whole time traveller thing is the language barrier. Sure I know a few Latin words here and there, but could I really learn it fast enough to demonstrate I might be useful to people? Would I have to find the ancestors of the East Frisians to really be able to have a conversation?
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Jun 26, 2014 22:29
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Kaal posted:One area of advancement that I think often gets missed in these types of discussions is art and culture. A contemporary educated person has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to things like art, music, or drama. Citizens of ancient civilizations would definitely appreciate the novelty of realist art, a six-string guitar, or costumed soap opera. And while our hobbies may not be big moneymakers in our contemporary economy, there's plenty of people out there with casual experience in things like glassblowing, woodworking, or pottery, that could have significant impacts on the ancient world. Yeah that's the things I've always wondered about if you took some ancient person and brought them forward in time or vice versa. Would they dig things like modern music? Would modern beauty standards translate to someone from that time period? Things like that.
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Jun 27, 2014 00:33
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Suben posted:Yeah that's the things I've always wondered about if you took some ancient person and brought them forward in time or vice versa. Would they dig things like modern music? Would modern beauty standards translate to someone from that time period? Things like that. Modern music and beauty standards are so varied it'd be hard for them to not like some of it.
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Jun 27, 2014 00:39
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Kopijeger posted:Then again, you might simply wind up like the protagonist in Poul Anderson's short story "The man who came early". This sounds really good. I remember reading some terrible story about an urban teenager (like 16 years old or something) who was transported to a primitive culture (I can't remember if it was time travel or another world) and after quickly being accepted by the tribe he decides to teach them about irrigation. I remember thinking,"What kind of 16 year old city kid knows how to irrigate a field?"
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Jun 27, 2014 01:21
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Jerusalem posted:I remember thinking,"What kind of 16 year old city kid knows how to irrigate a field?" It was in our social studies textbooks in middle school and it doesn't exactly need a lot of hands-on experience.
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Jun 27, 2014 02:00
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Hedera Helix posted:How would this time-traveler not succumb to diseases that their bodies weren't used to, and/or bring contemporary diseases along with them? This is what I always wonder. Wouldn't you basically have a good shot of just making GBS threads yourself to death after a couple of days back in ancient Rome?
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Jun 27, 2014 02:55
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Berke Negri posted:This is what I always wonder. Wouldn't you basically have a good shot of just making GBS threads yourself to death after a couple of days back in ancient Rome? Probably no more or less so than if a Westerner were to go travelling to Africa, the Pacific Rim, or the Middle East. You'd have initial gastrointestinal issues but they would probably subside. During the plagues you'd even have something of an advantage, as there's a good chance that you would be immunized. Similarly, the chance that you're going to change history by spreading a futuristic plague to the Roman world is rather overstated. It happens during first contact, particularly if there's large populations involved (and if one of the populations has been extremely isolated, like the Native Americans or the free tribes in Brazil), but a single healthy person probably isn't going to become Typhoid Mary. Kaal fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 03:13
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Berke Negri posted:This is what I always wonder. Wouldn't you basically have a good shot of just making GBS threads yourself to death after a couple of days back in ancient Rome? No not really. Most of us are descended from people with a long history of building up resistance to the kinda stuff floating around ancient and medieval Europe. Also we all know that boiling water kills bacteria pretty good.
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Jun 27, 2014 03:14
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PittTheElder posted:I never want to ride a bike without rubber tires. Even if you did find some North Sea Germanic(Ingvaeonic) speakers you still wouldn't understand a word they said nor would they be able to understand you. Here's Old English several hundred years later which is equally unintelligible. Skip to about 30 seconds in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y13cES7MMd8 Old English sounded awesome, those drat Normans ruined our language.
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Jun 27, 2014 03:19
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Charlie Mopps posted:This is far more likely. Although, if you found yourself in Roman times, if you managed to learn Greek you might get away with a lot of weird ideas by claiming it's ancient eastern or Egyptian knowledge. They liked that kind of stuff. Just say it's unpublished stuff from Archimedes. He came really close to inventing place value notation and calculus single-handedly as it is - nobody would find it implausible. That said, inventing milk pasteurization and the compass are both super easy.
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Jun 27, 2014 03:20
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Kaal posted:It happens during first contact, particularly if there's large populations involved (and if one of the populations has been extremely isolated, like the Native Americans or the free tribes in Brazil), but a single healthy person probably isn't going to become Typhoid Mary. A big contributing factor to the holocaust in post Columbian America is that we brought so many of our animals along, who I think often are carriers of such things.
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Jun 27, 2014 03:29
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Tao Jones posted:I think modern mathematical ideas would have a hard time being accepted in antiquity. Relatively few people know how to give a proof of basic calculus theorems, and I imagine even fewer people would know how to do it without using tools like Arabic numerals or mathematical induction. Statistics would be another huge innovation, but I don't see how you'd prove it to mathematicians without the tools that Pascal, Huygens, etc had. I think that anyone who's done well in calculus recently can prove a decent number of theorems, or at least the number of people who can do so is non-negligible. And it's unclear how receptive ancient mathematicians would be to such things, because we don't have great records for what all they thought about; consider the discovery a few years back of a reference to the actual infinite in the Archimedes palimpsest. I suspect that if you could prove surprising results, and then use those results to perform some kind of mechanical task or measurement, you could generate interest pretty easily. The mathematics required in my AP physics class in high school is beyond anything the ancients had, and are directly connected to plenty of practical matters. One thing that often leaps out at students of the history of maths & sciences is how roundabout a lot of early proofs of mathematical results are; most of the results Descartes is praised for can now be proven much more straightforwardly than Descartes imagined, and his actual proofs are surprisingly hard to follow at times. A big part of this is the algebraization of math; even Descartes still regards mathematics as essentially geometrical, with his algebraic work as a tool for the construction of Euclidean figures (or for reasoning about idealized versions of geometrical figures, when the constructions are too difficult or tedious, as with a chiliagon). It turns out that once you get away from thinking of numbers geometrically (as essentially measures of units on lines), the real number line becomes a lot easier to get a grip on, since it lets you represent negative numbers etc. on a par with our familiar counting numbers. And then you can get a lot of math developed fairly rapidly once people are willing to be liberal with their Euclideanism, as happened in the 19th century. I suspect that if you could just get them asking a few different questions, you could make ancient mathematics look radically different than it actually was.
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Jun 27, 2014 03:40
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Nintendo Kid posted:It was in our social studies textbooks in middle school and it doesn't exactly need a lot of hands-on experience. I guess my school just sucked then (it did), I knew irrigation was a thing but I had no idea how it worked and if you clunked me down somewhere in history I'd probably die within a couple of days at most. At least they let us see letters before asking us to try and write them though.
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Jun 27, 2014 03:43
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homullus posted:I lack your confidence that modern perspective would have revolutionized. It might have. It might not have. Egyptian art doesn't look the way it does because they didn't understand what people or animals looked like, or were unable to do better; it looks that way because that's how they chose to represent people and animals. Modern perspective (especially trompe-l'œil) would likely have been a big hit in some kinds of Roman wall-painting, but just as much wall-painting was fanciful or monumental in its aspirations. I don't see how you can be so certain that so much is the way it was because they just couldn't do better, despite having modern human brains and the creativity that comes with them. As an easy example, compare the height of ancient sculpture with the height of (what we have of) ancient painting. It might just be our bad luck with the painting, but there's definitely a gulf between them. There are examples of non-stylized Egyptian art and while it is considerably more realistic than I think most people'd expect, it still looks like something produced based on knowledge from thousands of years ago. I'm not really sure what you're trying to say with the rest of this. You think art from thousands of years ago must be equal to art of today because people back then think the same way we do now? Is this why people thousands of years ago had automobiles and rockets? Plenty of the differences are stylistic, yes, but even more is simply because of a change in understanding. Art is not only about creativity, it's also basically a science that has been rigorously studied for centuries in a way that was simply not possible back then. Ancient sculpture was better than ancient painting because sculpting was a practical skill and is also fundamentally less complex. This ties in nicely to the perspective example you brought up actually: you don't need to learn how to trick people into seeing something as three dimensional when the thing is already three dimensional. Feel free to not believe me/ disagree with me, I'm tired of arguing about this again. PittTheElder posted:Although my favorite part of the whole time traveller thing is the language barrier. Sure I know a few Latin words here and there, but could I really learn it fast enough to demonstrate I might be useful to people? Would I have to find the ancestors of the East Frisians to really be able to have a conversation? Haven't there been lots of cases of shipwrecked sailors getting stranded in a land completely alien to them and learning the language? I don't really think you'd have to demonstrate your usefulness, it's not like you're going to get executed for being unintelligible.
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Jun 27, 2014 03:47
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Koramei posted:Haven't there been lots of cases of shipwrecked sailors getting stranded in a land completely alien to them and learning the language? I don't really think you'd have to demonstrate your usefulness, it's not like you're going to get executed for being unintelligible. I dunno lots but I can think of two off hand, William Adams in Japan and the crew of the Sparrowhawk who wrecked in Korea.
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Jun 27, 2014 03:51
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Tunicate posted:Just say it's unpublished stuff from Archimedes. He came really close to inventing place value notation and calculus single-handedly as it is - nobody would find it implausible. How useful is a compass on its own, though? We mainly use them to get our bearings when using maps, which would be seriously inadequate at the time. If all you want is to establish the cardinal directions, the sun is pretty good at letting your orientate yourself. (It's where the word comes from: to "orientate" is to find the east, i.e. the place where the sun rises.) Longitude is the real problem for navigation, and I don't know of an easy way to find that without considerable reference material and something like a mechanical clock. I'm not optimistic about the chances of the germ theory catching on in ancient times; I suspect it would remind a lot of doctors of the Methodic school of medicine, which was not renowned for its success or popularity among practitioners. (Much of what we know about them we know only because Galen hated them so much.) I suspect that any practical results from penicillin grown on bread or pasteurization would get explained via something like the miasma theory or homeopathy. So penicillin would probably catch on as a treatment for fevers, but wouldn't lead to any kind of revolution in medical science.
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Jun 27, 2014 03:59
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Mustang posted:Even if you did find some North Sea Germanic(Ingvaeonic) speakers you still wouldn't understand a word they said nor would they be able to understand you. That was goood kerning!
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Jun 27, 2014 04:05
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Koramei posted:There are examples of non-stylized Egyptian art and while it is considerably more realistic than I think most people'd expect, it still looks like something produced based on knowledge from thousands of years ago. I can see how it would be tiring to argue this when you're making up stuff on both sides of the argument. That's, like, twice the effort. I agree that art today is more advanced in literally every way. The stuff you weren't sure of was a reiteration of the idea that a given innovation in art from the past couple thousand years is not a surefire smash-hit (or any kind of impact at all) in the ancient world because their tastes, expectations, and (as you pointed out) ability to understand/appreciate were different. An extreme example: an early homo sapiens may notice, but not care at all, that you painted the bison and horses on the cave wall with a consistent vanishing point, because the point of that particular thing is ritualistic rather than representational -- all that matters is whether the image improves the hunt or whatever. Art in the ancient world -- of what we have today, anyway -- is highly functional in nature. That's all. Art has a technical piece and a cultural piece, and a technical innovation (perspective! special effects in theater! rhyme schemes!) is not guaranteed a cultural value. This makes artistic advances more particular than ones in engineering. It's not an amazing insight, and I'm puzzled that anyone finds the idea argument-worthy.
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Jun 27, 2014 04:22
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homullus posted:Art in the ancient world -- of what we have today, anyway -- is highly functional in nature. Okay this statement explains the problem here. I want you to think about it for a while every time you feel like talking about art in the future.
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Jun 27, 2014 05:01
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Mustang posted:Even if you did find some North Sea Germanic(Ingvaeonic) speakers you still wouldn't understand a word they said nor would they be able to understand you. True enough. I was mostly just thinking of this video featuring Eddie Izzard talking to a Frisian farmer and in my mind he was speaking regular English, but he's not, it's definitely Old English, and the differences are stark. Koramei posted:Haven't there been lots of cases of shipwrecked sailors getting stranded in a land completely alien to them and learning the language? I don't really think you'd have to demonstrate your usefulness, it's not like you're going to get executed for being unintelligible. There might be; really I think it must be pretty easy to pick up a new language if you're hearing it all day everyday, it just seems super hard sitting here at my desk. As for the danger element, I'm mostly thinking about the first day you'd spend there. I'd be pretty worried about other people's impression to the strange foreigner who doesn't speak any known language and seems confused by everything. I'd say 8 times out of 10 you'd be fine, but I could see there being issues if you met the wrong people. Suenteus Po posted:How useful is a compass on its own, though? We mainly use them to get our bearings when using maps, which would be seriously inadequate at the time. If all you want is to establish the cardinal directions, the sun is pretty good at letting your orientate yourself. (It's where the word comes from: to "orientate" is to find the east, i.e. the place where the sun rises.) Longitude is the real problem for navigation, and I don't know of an easy way to find that without considerable reference material and something like a mechanical clock. Come to think of it, there's another thing just about anybody understands, is the planetary model of the solar system. I perhaps more than most folks have a good handle on Keplerian orbits and the ways it's handy to describe them, with a little time to sit down and work through the math, I could probably get a good predictive model going, although there were parts of the ancient world that had that already I think. I think I know enough about optics to start building telescopes too, assuming the local culture could make sufficiently high quality glass, which I think is harder than it sounds. Jerusalem posted:This sounds really good. I remember reading some terrible story about an urban teenager (like 16 years old or something) who was transported to a primitive culture (I can't remember if it was time travel or another world) and after quickly being accepted by the tribe he decides to teach them about irrigation. I remember thinking,"What kind of 16 year old city kid knows how to irrigate a field?" How primitive was this tribe? Because irrigation as an idea is as old as civilization itself, the Sumerians did it, and I'm sure the Egyptians understood that the Nile floods were helping their fields. The tricky part is in the labour required to keep an irrigation system working.
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Jun 27, 2014 05:15
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PittTheElder posted:Come to think of it, there's another thing just about anybody understands, is the planetary model of the solar system. I perhaps more than most folks have a good handle on Keplerian orbits and the ways it's handy to describe them, with a little time to sit down and work through the math, I could probably get a good predictive model going, although there were parts of the ancient world that had that already I think. I think I know enough about optics to start building telescopes too, assuming the local culture could make sufficiently high quality glass, which I think is harder than it sounds. Ptolemy's "Almagest" is already really good at prediction (which is explicitly his goal: he wants to save the phenomena). You're not going to do better than Ptolemy if that's the goal and you're stuck with dead-eye observation. The only thing Copernicus could claim was a slight reduction in some parts of the complexity of his models (at the expense of raising lots of dynamical and physical questions he had no answer to); Tycho was able to claim he had a more dynamically/physically viable model, but the predictions were the same for his model, the Copernican, the Ptolemaic, and for many other rival models. Kepler's predictions are the same as Tycho's, but the model is dramatically simpler. Kuhn's "The Copernican Revolution" is still really good on this stuff. I don't think anyone in the ancient world could make telescope lenses; barely anyone in the early modern period could. Cutting glass that accurately is really hard.
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Jun 27, 2014 05:35
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That video with the Frizian is really cool, I love seeing people try to understand each other in related languages.Suenteus Po posted:I don't think anyone in the ancient world could make telescope lenses; barely anyone in the early modern period could. Cutting glass that accurately is really hard. Didn't they only (relatively) recently start spinning the lenses when they're molten to get the parabola rather than cut them?
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Jun 27, 2014 05:37
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PittTheElder posted:How primitive was this tribe? Because irrigation as an idea is as old as civilization itself, the Sumerians did it, and I'm sure the Egyptians understood that the Nile floods were helping their fields. The tricky part is in the labour required to keep an irrigation system working. I could just be misremembering it as it was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure that the author's "research" consisted of,"Back in the day people didn't know poo poo, right?" and he went from there. I remember the story was terrible, something about a rock climbing teen (with attitude!) from a broken home who travels back in time somehow, teaches the tribe irrigation, cops a feel of the headman's daughter and then goes back to the present in time for his final exams. There weren't even any pictures of elephants on the pages 
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Jun 27, 2014 05:39
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Exioce posted:Awesome thread, finally finished it and time to add my own questions! I know the Assyrians are still around (although not if a certain insurgency in Iraq has anything to say about it...) and I think are largely Syriac Christian nowadays, but are there any takes from a modern-day Assyrian on their contentious past? I know they have greater things to worry about now, like being targeted minorities in their own countries, so "Hey we weren't too nice 3000 years ago" is probably the least of their concerns, but are there any Assyrian scholars that dispute the narrative that back in the day they were the baddest dudes on the planet? Is it even seen by certain Assyrians as something, dare I say, positive? Not in a genocidal way*, since just about all war was genocide in the ancient world, but more in a "We were the toughest kids in the roughest neighborhood, lost our empire eventually, but we're so resilient we're still around after all this time" sorta way? *Although if you must be proud of your peoples' genocide, I suppose it's better to be proud of the genocides that are three millennia old, whose victims are no longer around...
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Jun 27, 2014 06:03
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Exioce posted:Awesome thread, finally finished it and time to add my own questions! Related to your Assyrian thing, and I probably got it in this thread, but this link is pretty fun: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/1075assyriancode.asp Excerpts from the Code of the Assyrians.  I.8. If a woman in a quarrel injure the testicle of a man, one of her fingers they shall cut off. And if a physician bind it up and the other testicle which is beside it be infected thereby, or take harm; or in a quarrel she injure the other testicle, they shall destroy both of her eyes. I.9. If a man bring his hand against the wife of a man, treating her like a little child, and they prove it against him, and convict him, one of his fingers they shall cut off. If he kiss her, his lower lip with the blade of an axe they shall draw down and they shall cut off. I.13. If the wife of a man go out from her house and visit a man where he lives, and he have intercourse with her, knowing that she is a man's wife, the man and also the woman they shall put to death. I.15. If a man catch a man with his wife, both of them shall they put to death. If the husband of the woman put his wife to death, he shall also put the man to death. If he cut off the nose of his wife, he shall turn the man into a eunuch, and they shall disfigure the whole of his face. I.37. If a man divorce his wife, if he wish, he may give her something; if he does not wish, he need not give her anything. Empty shall she go out. I.40. If the wives of a man, or the daughters of a man go out into the street, their heads are to be veiled. The prostitute is not to be veiled. Maidservants are not to veil themselves. Veiled harlots and maidservants shall have their garments seized and 50 blows inflicted on them and bitumen poured on their heads. I.57. In the case of every crime for which there is the penalty of the cutting-off of ear or nose or ruining or reputation or condition, as it is written it shall be carried out. I.58. Unless it is forbidden in the tablets, a man may strike his wife, pull her hair, her ear he may bruise or pierce. He commits no misdeed thereby. etcetcetcetc These guys were assholes, no doubt.
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Jun 27, 2014 06:08
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dinoputz posted:*Although if you must be proud of your peoples' genocide, I suppose it's better to be proud of the genocides that are three millennia old, whose victims are no longer around... Exactly. If you're going to pick an ancestral genocide to be proud of, you should only go for the ones with 100% completion.
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Jun 27, 2014 06:26
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Suenteus Po posted:I don't think anyone in the ancient world could make telescope lenses; barely anyone in the early modern period could. Cutting glass that accurately is really hard. Yeah, that's my big unknown. I know glass making was a big loving deal in early modern Europe, to the point where it was a tightly controlled state industry. Koramei posted:Didn't they only (relatively) recently start spinning the lenses when they're molten to get the parabola rather than cut them? I'm not actually sure how they do it. I think you can spin it, but that would make it rise around the edges into a meniscus sort of shape. I suspect it wouldn't be good enough for cutting edge telescopes. I think you just have to try and make a really homogenous piece of glass, then machine it extremely precisely. I can't remember how much the Hubble lense was deformed by, but I think it was sub millimeter. I've heard the way to get really, really flat glass is to poor molten glass onto a sheet of molten metal, but I'm not sure how the glass cools in that case. Not that you'd need that for a Roman era telescope of course. I guess I'd just stick to numeracy and geography as my strengths. And building toy gyroscopes. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 06:31
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