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i would hit myself in the face and then die
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Nov 16, 2018 21:31
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/11/dozens-of-cat-mummies-found-in-6000-year-old-tombs-in-egyptquote:Dozens of cat mummies found in 6,000-year-old tombs in Egypt   Found a bunch more pictures, really cool unfortunately they're on facebook and i'd rather not link facebook if I can avoid it. Anyone interested can go check GlobalXplorer' post. My Egyptian history is really bad, do we even know who reigned that long ago?
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Nov 16, 2018 22:04
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Dalael posted:My Egyptian history is really bad, do we even know who reigned that long ago? We have names for the 5th Dynasty kings, and Pyramids. As to how much we actually know about them, eh...
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Nov 16, 2018 22:18
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Tree Bucket posted:How many slingers can you have in a formation? I'm picturing a few hundred dudes swinging large rocks around on long ropes, and the potential for accidental brainings seems really really high. I mean, if the guy behind you gets it the slightest bit wrong, say goodbye to the back of your head. skirmisher formations were typically quite loose and staggered, but you're also probably picturing bigger rocks and longer ropes than a war-sling would have used. the romans and greeks in particular favored lead bullets only slightly larger than musket balls and rather short ropes. sure, if someone's shot goes way too low you're still possibly in trouble from friendly fire, but it's not like you were going to brain the guy next to you during the swing or anything.
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Nov 16, 2018 22:38
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I got some cannon ball weights at home I can toss. Won’t be too hard to make a shorter sling.
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Nov 16, 2018 22:41
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HEY GUNS posted:i would hit myself in the face and then die Jazerus posted:skirmisher formations were typically quite loose and staggered, but you're also probably picturing bigger rocks and longer ropes than a war-sling would have used. the romans and greeks in particular favored lead bullets only slightly larger than musket balls and rather short ropes. sure, if someone's shot goes way too low you're still possibly in trouble from friendly fire, but it's not like you were going to brain the guy next to you during the swing or anything. It's also more of a lifestyle thing, you wouldn't be asked to start slinging rocks if you hadn't done it before. afaik classical armies didn't really bother trying to train slingers, and preferred to just recruit shepherds or merecenaries that already practiced the trade. Once you have a hang of it the chances of wild brainings is pretty low. Terrible Opinions posted:If you make every city car friendly you end up with Texas. You don't want Texas. Almost every city in America, except for a few of the very largest, are composed of 20-ish blocks of dense mixed-use midrise buildings, surrounded by gigantic blobs of suburbia and strip malls, plus a freeway or two that vomits out car commuters at rush hour. Texas is nothing special, your country is just hosed up.
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Nov 17, 2018 02:17
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Almost every city in America, except for a few of the very largest, are composed of 20-ish blocks of dense mixed-use midrise buildings, surrounded by gigantic blobs of suburbia and strip malls, plus a freeway or two that vomits out car commuters at rush hour. Texas is nothing special, your country is just hosed up.
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Nov 17, 2018 02:46
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All right, driving in Texas talk can sit in traffic on the way to threads about roads.
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Nov 17, 2018 02:51
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LingcodKilla posted:I got some cannon ball weights at home I can toss. Won’t be too hard to make a shorter sling. We're going to have a whole sling auxiliary available at this rate. They really are quite fun to mess with though!
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Nov 17, 2018 03:13
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physeter posted:These Trajan-era settlements are one of many reasons why I go Yeah, this is the poo poo i really wish we had surviving records of. More than anything that loss of engineering knowledge drives me nuts.
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Nov 17, 2018 04:02
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when trying to understand the Roman educational system. I mean, it's just loving impossible to pull this off without a large group of people that had today's equivalent of college educations. There's evidence that the colonization of Dacia around the same time was a pro operation from the start. Roads that were surveyed and built before the towns they would connect had even been settled. Heavy institutional knowledge, lots of preliminary scouting and good mapping, logistics out the nose. We go looking for the people in the historical record and it's like "oh yeah, there was library". Then the product rivals 20th century US Army Corps of Engineers level stuff. Drives me crazy.
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Knowing what we do about how the Romans were I am convinced there were training manuals and field manuals for officers, and it's a tragedy none survived. The closest thing I can think of is Maurice's Strategikon, which is a practical guidebook but about campaign level strategy for generals. Centurions had to be literate and I would bet you they had to study military manuals as part of their training. I'm also sure legions carried blueprints and instruction books on how to construct fortifications, siege engines, etc.
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Nov 17, 2018 04:38
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Grand Fromage posted:Knowing what we do about how the Romans were I am convinced there were training manuals and field manuals for officers, and it's a tragedy none survived. The closest thing I can think of is Maurice's Strategikon, which is a practical guidebook but about campaign level strategy for generals. Centurions had to be literate and I would bet you they had to study military manuals as part of their training. I'm also sure legions carried blueprints and instruction books on how to construct fortifications, siege engines, etc. There's also Vegetius's De re militari, which describes how to recruit and train men, how legions are organized, how to draw up men for battle, and so on. Since there's been a lot of sling talk in thread, here's what he says about training in the sling. quote:Recruits are to be taught the art of throwing stones both with the hand and sling. The inhabitants of the Balearic Islands are said to have been the inventors of slings, and to have managed them with surprising dexterity, owing to the manner of bringing up their children. The children were not allowed to have their food by their mothers till they had first struck it with their sling. Soldiers, notwithstanding their defensive armor, are often more annoyed by the round stones from the sling than by all the arrows of the enemy. Stones kill without mangling the body, and the contusion is mortal without loss of blood. It is universally known the ancients employed slingers in all their engagements. There is the greater reason for instructing all troops, without exception, in this exercise, as the sling cannot be reckoned any incumbrance, and often is of the greatest service, especially when they are obliged to engage in stony places, to defend a mountain or an eminence, or to repulse an enemy at the attack of a castle or city.
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Nov 17, 2018 04:44
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Epicurius posted:There's also Vegetius's De re militari, which describes how to recruit and train men, how legions are organized, how to draw up men for battle, and so on. Since there's been a lot of sling talk in thread, here's what he says about training in the sling. Aha, I thought it was Vitruvius and when I didn't find anything other than his architecture I figured I misremembered.
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Nov 17, 2018 04:46
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Grand Fromage posted:Aha, I thought it was Vitruvius and when I didn't find anything other than his architecture I figured I misremembered. Oh, actually, also, De velitatione bellica/Peri Paradromēs (on skirmishing), which is a 10th century work written by either Nikephoros Phokas or some officer in his army about how to defend against Arab raiders (where to put watchtowers, using merchants as spies, making sure you control water sources, how to lure enemies into ambushes and set traps, etc). There's actually a lot of Eastern Roman/Byzantine military manuals surviving, although some just in fragments. There's even a wikipedia page listing them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_military_manuals Epicurius fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Nov 17, 2018 |
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Nov 17, 2018 04:57
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euphronius posted:It’s amazing how young American cities are. I think the oldest one founded by European colonizers is ... San Juan? Look up how old Australia and New Zealand are
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Nov 17, 2018 04:58
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LingcodKilla posted:Have you ever driven in DC or Manhattan? It’s a loving disaster of epic proportions. Widen every street by three and keep one portion for rail and cover it with a green way. lol at driving to or in New York for any reason at all
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Nov 17, 2018 05:58
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HEY GUNS posted:i have been in a part of Dresden that's beneath the part of Dresden just on the water and HOLY poo poo was it difficult to get into, by design. There's a switchback and then a tiny path right next to the city walls, which would have been manned at the time. That little path could not have been used as an offensive route, is the point I think the British found a way around this.
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Nov 17, 2018 06:01
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I will never stop being upset about the fact that a state that was around for ~80 years and then died away gets to embody "the fall of the Roman Empire". Seriously the Western Empire was a weak as poo poo state that was mostly puppets of German mercenaries and somehow it gets to embody all of the Rome which was around 1000 years old at that point. The Empire is constantly divided and reuinted throughout its history and for some reason this division, this one that lasts less than 100 years, this is the most important one.
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Nov 17, 2018 06:39
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People don't like the idea of a bunch of dirty Greek speaking Orthodox Christians being the Roman Empire, even though they never considered themselves anything but. Also for cities, the best city to travel in that I've been to was Sapporo. Turns out urban planning is super easy when everything is Ash and you can start from scratch.
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Nov 17, 2018 06:53
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I will never stop being upset about the fact that a state that was around for ~80 years and then died away gets to embody "the fall of the Roman Empire". Seriously the Western Empire was a weak as poo poo state that was mostly puppets of German mercenaries and somehow it gets to embody all of the Rome which was around 1000 years old at that point. The Empire is constantly divided and reuinted throughout its history and for some reason this division, this one that lasts less than 100 years, this is the most important one. No one really thinks those 80 years is the most important of the Roman empire though? What should make you upset is the idea that the Roman empire stopped existing in 1204 and restarted in 1263, and then stopped again in 1453. Those are some mental gymnastics.
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Nov 17, 2018 07:08
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Beamed posted:No one really thinks those 80 years is the most important of the Roman empire though? What should make you upset is the idea that the Roman empire stopped existing in 1204 and restarted in 1263, and then stopped again in 1453. Those are some mental gymnastics. No, that's definitely a tough one.
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Nov 17, 2018 07:29
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It's a fifteen hundred years of history with wild differences throughout. It feels reasonable to draw lines and differentiation at some point. It also feels like a weird double standard to go and say Rome is some kind of eternal unchanging state when you compare it to Persia next door? When those guys over there get a big period of turmoil where a new regime is installed focused around a new capital, maybe with a new religion or a new language, it's a new state with a new name, but since Rome has a tradition of new regimes with little to no contiguity with the last, there's nothing that can happen to represent a break with the previous. It starts to sound like a tautology with no real verifiable standards for being true. It also sounds a lot like China's "mandate of heaven" rhetoric where every new state that pops up and topples the old one, it's heir to an unbroken million year old tradition and the last failed state was just some irrelevant pigfuckers. But hey, why not duke out an argument over some abstract concept of legitimacy to claim lineage to a dead ancient state in honor of a beef between two dead medieval empires. That's a thing that's worth doing.
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Nov 17, 2018 07:49
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's a fifteen hundred years of history with wild differences throughout. It feels reasonable to draw lines and differentiation at some point. It's just that it's not so murky when it comes to the 5th century Roman Empire, it's pretty cut and dried. The lovely parts are literally only from after the fact commentators. The Western Empire never considered itself the True Rome or the Only Rome, and it was an awful horrible dysfunctional state that lasted a single human lifetime. It's absolutely insane that the end of it gets to be considered the great and terrible Fall of Rome.
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Nov 17, 2018 07:58
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Colchester is the true capital of Britain, London is just some irrelevant financial service business park   
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Nov 17, 2018 09:54
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It's not really even the only date people give for the fall of Rome though? There were rump states kicking around afterwards and there are landmarks people give beforehand as the final straw. Rome had a long decline with a lot of milestones between civil wars, decentralizing authority, hemorrhaging territory, and groups of people outside the traditional hierarchy gaining power. Not like it's a non-event though, it's still historically significant. It is what it is. And from the perspective of the eastern empire, the western empire never fell? When the Ostrogoths took over, they had the support of Zeno, who claimed some kind of nebulous dominion over the kingdom of Italy through Ostrogothic rule somehow. You could even make an argument that the Lombards were sufficiently Roman since they were heavily latinized towards the end. Depending on how you adjust your definitions, it kinda starts turning into a Pluto situation, there's either less Romes than previously thought or there's far more Romes. That's not even getting into how the 1453 date for the fall ignores how the Ottomans had a very legitimate claim of their own to the imperial title. Ultimately the question dissolves into parsing out titles, aristocratic claims to legitimacy, and supporting propaganda, and uniformly accepting either the narrative of all of western Europe as irrelevant pigfuckers and germans or the east as a bunch of greeks who never really assimilated into the imperial system is to play into the hand of long dead propagandists for long dead states about a prestige title.
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Nov 17, 2018 18:04
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Beamed posted:No one really thinks those 80 years is the most important of the Roman empire though? What should make you upset is the idea that the Roman empire stopped existing in 1204 and restarted in 1263, and then stopped again in 1453. Those are some mental gymnastics. I know nothing at all about the later period, what was left of the empire after Constantinople fell to the Ottomans? underage at the vape shop fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Nov 17, 2018 |
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Nov 17, 2018 18:06
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underage at the vape shop posted:I know nothing at all about the later period, what was left of the empire after Constantinople fell to the Ottomans? The Holy Roman Empire persisted until Napoleon and the Ottoman monarchs claimed the Roman imperial title until the end of the First World War
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Nov 17, 2018 18:10
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underage at the vape shop posted:I know nothing at all about the later period, what was left of the empire after Constantinople fell to the Ottomans? Morea in the Peloponnese lasted to 1460. Trebizond held out until 1461. The absolute last part of the former empire to be taken was the Principality of Theodoro, on the southern coast of Crimea, which fell to the Ottomans in 1475.
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Nov 17, 2018 18:12
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Grand Fromage posted:Morea in the Peloponnese lasted to 1460. Trebizond held out until 1461. The absolute last part of the former empire to be taken was the Principality of Theodoro, on the southern coast of Crimea, which fell to the Ottomans in 1475. I'll look into those thanks. I'm still reading that Mary Beard book you recommended by the way, it's really interesting. skasion posted:The Holy Roman Empire persisted until Napoleon and the Ottoman monarchs claimed the Roman imperial title until the end of the First World War How is this different to the CCP's "claim" of 5000 years of unbroken China? E: I don't mean this to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious. underage at the vape shop fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Nov 17, 2018 |
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Nov 17, 2018 18:19
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underage at the vape shop posted:How is this different to the CCP's "claim" of 5000 years of unbroken China? The CCP is a communist state and therefore can't claim anything, that's only for monarchies. (  )
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Nov 17, 2018 18:33
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underage at the vape shop posted:How is this different to the CCP's "claim" of 5000 years of unbroken China? E: I don't mean this to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious. It isn’t, and neither is the claim of the Byzantine rulers to be heirs of Rome, nor that of the post-Diocletian empire to be heirs of the principate. There was some continuity, augmented by an enormous dose of self-promotion.
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Nov 17, 2018 18:57
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underage at the vape shop posted:How is this different to the CCP's "claim" of 5000 years of unbroken China? E: I don't mean this to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious. The Holy Roman Empire got its claim from God through the Pope. You can contest the legitimacy of the Pope in that respect, but the Pope for a long while was the source of most legitimacy of western Europe. What I'm not sure about is how exactly Otto got the title a century after Charlemagne, but the Pope crowned him and many later Holy Roman Emperors, so it still mostly counts. The Ottomans get the claim from ruling all the territory that was part of the previous empire, which is good enough for most states. The founder of the Ottoman dynasty even came from the Sultanate of Rum. You can argue that as a Turk, that overrides the Roman-ness since the Turks were newcomers to the area, but there's some interesting numbers you can look at there: The Sultanate of Rum was established 300 years before the Ottomans came around. As far as I can tell, the province of Illyria had been incorporated for at most 400 years before it started putting out emperors.
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Nov 17, 2018 19:19
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SlothfulCobra posted:The Holy Roman Empire got its claim from God through the Pope. You can contest the legitimacy of the Pope in that respect, but the Pope for a long while was the source of most legitimacy of western Europe. What I'm not sure about is how exactly Otto got the title a century after Charlemagne, but the Pope crowned him and many later Holy Roman Emperors, so it still mostly counts. Illyria was a province of the empire though, not a contemporary state at war with the empire when they started putting out emperors surely?
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Nov 17, 2018 19:32
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SlothfulCobra posted:What I'm not sure about is how exactly Otto got the title a century after Charlemagne, but the Pope crowned him and many later Holy Roman Emperors, so it still mostly counts. Briefly: there was a crisis of legitimacy in Carolingian Europe which led to its breakup into more local powers; Henry I was duke of Saxony which meant he had a more active and powerful fighting force than many other local rulers (because he was on the border of the Carolingian world and had plenty of opportunity to get wealth and experience fighting and enslaving Slavs); Henry conquered much of the region around Charlemagne’s old capital at Aachen and took the royal lands there for himself. This gave him sufficient status that his successor Otto I was a prominent figure throughout East Francia, and Otto grew more prominent than his father had been by successively getting rid of the other East Frankish dukes and giving his relatives their offices. This culminated in his dominance of West Francia (through the regents of the 950s, his siblings Brun and Gerberga) and his conquest of Italy in 962, which made it definitely politic for the pope to anoint him emperor.
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Nov 17, 2018 19:33
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I've been waiting years to have the proper setup for a Holy Broham Empire joke.
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Nov 17, 2018 20:08
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underage at the vape shop posted:I know nothing at all about the later period, what was left of the empire after Constantinople fell to the Ottomans? The Vatican
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Nov 17, 2018 20:33
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:It's just that it's not so murky when it comes to the 5th century Roman Empire, it's pretty cut and dried. The lovely parts are literally only from after the fact commentators. The Western Empire never considered itself the True Rome or the Only Rome, and it was an awful horrible dysfunctional state that lasted a single human lifetime. It's absolutely insane that the end of it gets to be considered the great and terrible Fall of Rome. I'll settle this Rome fell in 27 BC
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Nov 17, 2018 20:46
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skasion posted:It isn’t, and neither is the claim of the Byzantine rulers to be heirs of Rome, nor that of the post-Diocletian empire to be heirs of the principate. There was some continuity, augmented by an enormous dose of self-promotion. Well, the CCP also uses demonstrably non-existent emperors and fake history as part of its 5000 years narrative, and then tacks another several centuries on just to make the number round. It's fun reading Chinese stuff from the era of Sun Yat-Sen, since back then China claimed 4000 years of history. The CCP just added an extra thousand years out of absolutely nowhere for no reason. And then Korea also added years to make it slightly over 5000 because nationalism, and on and on it goes...
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Nov 17, 2018 21:13
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I'll settle this and her trve name is.. Seoul
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Nov 17, 2018 21:15
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Tias posted:and her trve name is.. Seoul Funny way of spelling Heksinki
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Nov 17, 2018 21:44
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