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Squalid posted:There's some colonial era art depicting boats that are probably descended from these pre-Columbian designs. This illustration is from the 18th century: I would argue island hopping for those distances, either Florida down or Tobago up and around though Haiti. Given what we know about the early colonizers the latter seems more likely? Thats something like 600 miles as a straight shot (if thats what you were getting at) and some of the island crossings leading to it are just right there (like the Yucatan channel). Im sure theres a table someone assembled somewhere that has the dates of each islands earliest archaeological site. Edit: The book sounds interesting though, if you end up remembering what it is let me know. Im always looking for more stuff to read. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 03:20
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Telsa Cola posted:I would argue island hopping for those distances, either Florida down or Tobago up and around though Haiti. Given what we know about the early colonizers the latter seems more likely? I lied I never had the book, I read 1/3 of it standing in the bookstore then i put it back on the shelf and left w/out buying it, so there's like zero chance of finding it again. A little digging though and I think this page covers a lot of the same info. In this story one William Smith founded the first permanent Afro-Caribbean community in Costa Rica after boating up the coast from Panama in 1828. I don't know why there was an English speaking Afro-Caribbean man named Will Smith living in Panama in the mid-19th century but there you go. I may have also conflated Miskito Indians w/ Jamaicans in my memory hole too, who also hunted sea turtles in small boats along the coast.
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Jul 19, 2019 04:25
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I am not actually a river engineer no New Orleans should have died long ago tho but for modern industry controlling the Mississippi.
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Jul 19, 2019 13:23
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Grand Fromage posted:I've read explorer accounts of there being settlement all along the Amazon, but nothing specific about a port at the mouth. I would assume no, I've never read anything about there being oceangoing trade in the Americas at all, only rivers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maraj%F3
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Jul 20, 2019 23:48
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I've been reading Thucydides and one thing that struck me is that Athens was much larger than I thought. It was less the city-state of Athens and more the country of Attica, containing multiple cities (with a tradition that they used to be independent in a half-remembered past). Was this normal in the classical Greek world? Were the city states all larger entities named after their capital city, or was Athens exceptionally large?
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Jul 21, 2019 19:56
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I've been reading through a book on the Comanche (that coincidentally was recommended in the thread after I had already gotten it out from the library), and it really shows the complexity of the history of native nations. It's basically a crime that they don't teach in school how the Comanche were directly the reason why Texas both got a flood of American immigrants and then went independent, from the Mexicans first wanting people to fortify the frontier against Comanche attack and then Santa Anna in trying to centralize Mexico cracking down on the independent militias that the Texans were using to protect themselves from Comanche raids. Not to mention the Comanche raids paving the way for future American annexation of much of the rest of Northern Mexico. It's also a bit of a look on the other side of the coin, where while normally we're all used to stories of Europeans wreaking havoc on natives, the Comanche were extremely thorough in constantly attacking to the point that it was basically an industry, and also had a negative effect on other native nations from either fighting wars against them directly or inspiring indiscriminate reprisals from Europeans. While the decline of many native nations is a tragedy, if the Comanche way of life in the early 19th century stuck around, they'd be rolling around with AK-47s stealing cars.
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Jul 21, 2019 20:04
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That’s a little rude to assume they would stay warlike. But considering white america no longer gives out diseased blankets and instead oxycontin everything old is new again.
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Jul 21, 2019 20:23
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SlothfulCobra posted:Comanche Stuff Do you have the title of that book? I recently read Kiva, Cross, and Crown, about the Pecos natives of New Mexico. The narrative tries to reach back before the Spanish arrived but they don't really seem to have much of anything to go on, so it focuses on the interaction between the settlers and the people of a specific pueblo, the Pecos. The feeling I got when reading it was "Wow, I didn't realize how much history happened oon America! These people, both natives and settlers, all had insanely complex lives and decisions!" which as a statement seems both idiotic and kind of profound. Distance and ignorance flattens a lot. I'm not really sure how up to date the book was, since it's 30 years old, but it was a fun read. Maybe I'll do an effortpost on it when I'm not on my phone.
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Jul 21, 2019 20:24
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cheetah7071 posted:I've been reading Thucydides and one thing that struck me is that Athens was much larger than I thought. It was less the city-state of Athens and more the country of Attica, containing multiple cities (with a tradition that they used to be independent in a half-remembered past). Was this normal in the classical Greek world? Were the city states all larger entities named after their capital city, or was Athens exceptionally large? Athens was exceptionally large. Though any major polis is going to have suburban areas and farming and whatnot around it, so it's more of what we'd call a metro area today. But yeah I'm with you, Athens at its height was way bigger than you imagine. I think part of it is we're always talking about citizens, and there were only maybe a max of 50,000 of those ever. But there were like 350,000 people total.
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Jul 21, 2019 20:26
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cheetah7071 posted:I've been reading Thucydides and one thing that struck me is that Athens was much larger than I thought. It was less the city-state of Athens and more the country of Attica, containing multiple cities (with a tradition that they used to be independent in a half-remembered past). Was this normal in the classical Greek world? Were the city states all larger entities named after their capital city, or was Athens exceptionally large? Sparta's lands were often of a similar size in those times. Most other city states were too small to maintain such large holdings, but it wasn't too uncommon for a very small city to be incorporated into a larger one's lands - it works out to the people within the typical city state being 1000-4000 people. But many of those small time cities would be in loose regional alliances too - it can become debatable where the point is that a small city stops being its own thing and now part of a larger city state. Athens itself peaked at 40,000 or so "in the city" and another 160,000-300,000 people in the surrounding lands which were slightly larger than Luxembourg or slightly smaller than Rhode Island in terms of land area. For modern comparison, Luxembourg manages 602,000 people in its land area with a central city of 120,000. Rhode Island's 1.05 million and a central city of 180,000
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Jul 21, 2019 20:40
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cheetah7071 posted:I've been reading Thucydides and one thing that struck me is that Athens was much larger than I thought. It was less the city-state of Athens and more the country of Attica, containing multiple cities (with a tradition that they used to be independent in a half-remembered past). Was this normal in the classical Greek world? Were the city states all larger entities named after their capital city, or was Athens exceptionally large? I'm pretty sure Athens was exceptionally large, the only comparably large polity was Sparta. Sparta itself wasn't huge but all of Laconia put together meant it could rival Athens in population. In contrast to those two, even Thebes at its height had relatively weak rule over the surrounding area and struggled to keep neighboring towns under its domination.
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Jul 21, 2019 20:44
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MORE TAXES WHEN posted:Do you have the title of that book? If it's the book I recommended, it's Pekka Hamalainen "The Comanche Empire".
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Jul 21, 2019 21:22
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MORE TAXES WHEN posted:Do you have the title of that book? Like I said, it was coincidentally recommended in the thread a little earlier, although I'd disagree with what he mentioned about it being an underdog story, seeing as how they held local dominance for over a century. They really resemble steppe nomads a lot, in both their military tactics and economic benefit from trade. Epicurius posted:I know you wanted precolumbian America, but I can't think of any, so I have a recommendation for a book about postcolumbian.America...The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen
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Jul 21, 2019 21:23
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Wasn't Corinth also pretty big.
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Jul 21, 2019 21:52
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Epicurius posted:If it's the book I recommended, it's Pekka Hamalainen "The Comanche Empire". Do you happen to know how it compares to Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches by S. C. Gwynne? I bought and enjoyed it awhile back somehow thinking it was the other.
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Jul 21, 2019 21:55
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a kitten posted:Do you happen to know how it compares to Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches by S. C. Gwynne? I bought and enjoyed it awhile back somehow thinking it was the other. Don't know. Never read Summer Moon.
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Jul 22, 2019 01:05
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Grand Fromage posted:any major polis Why do you use "polis" here instead of city or city-state? Does it have some broader or narrower cultural meaning WRT hellenic Greek cities or is it just the word they used? Not trying to troll or nitpick here, I think the word's neat and want to make sure I'm getting the full meaning.
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Jul 22, 2019 02:27
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gently caress tha polis
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Jul 22, 2019 02:30
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Why do you use "polis" here instead of city or city-state? Does it have some broader or narrower cultural meaning WRT hellenic Greek cities or is it just the word they used? It's the specific Greek term for their political unit. City would refer to the actual physical place, while a polis is more the citizens themselves than the buildings. City-state has the implication of a single city, while a polis includes the original place (the metropolis) plus the colonies founded. The polis of Athens is often translated as the city of Athens or the city-state of Athens, but it would be better translated as meaning the Athenians. The city is a part of it but not the whole. So I prefer to use the ancient term since the modern ones don't have the same cultural implications. Looking back at the post you quoted the word city would've been more appropriate for what I was saying than polis, I'm just in the habit.
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Jul 22, 2019 02:43
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Why do you use "polis" here instead of city or city-state? Does it have some broader or narrower cultural meaning WRT hellenic Greek cities or is it just the word they used? If you've got 2 hours to spare: https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205/lecture-4 https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205/lecture-5
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Jul 22, 2019 07:52
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FreudianSlippers posted:gently caress tha polis New thread title please.
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Jul 22, 2019 16:07
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Ynglaur posted:New thread title please.
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Jul 23, 2019 05:35
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Grand Fromage posted:Athens was exceptionally large. Though any major polis is going to have suburban areas and farming and whatnot around it, so it's more of what we'd call a metro area today. How were those outlying settlements joined to the Athenian political system? Did they have their own votes about local issues? Did they send representatives to the votes in the capital? Were some of the vote eligible citizens living in those areas to act as representatives? Or did they just follow the orders sent from the capital and do their own thing otherwise?
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Jul 23, 2019 09:37
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FreudianSlippers posted:gently caress tha polis In Glasgow they call the police "the polis". This makes me very happy, because it's a sort of linguistic atavism, the word reverting back to its etymological root from thousands of years earlier.
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Jul 23, 2019 10:26
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I've always found it interesting that the Athenians are lauded for being the first democracy, and that's probably what they're best remembered for among the general population, but they were actually pretty terrible people even by contemporary standards.
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Jul 23, 2019 14:33
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Jamwad Hilder posted:I've always found it interesting that the Athenians are lauded for being the first democracy, and that's probably what they're best remembered for among the general population, but they were actually pretty terrible people even by contemporary standards. I mean, its gonna depend on which people we're discussing and when, we're talking about several centuries' worth of history. Also bear in mind contemporary standards were...not high.
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Jul 23, 2019 14:35
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Athenian democracy was also based on sortition rather than anything particularly characteristic of modern democracies.
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Jul 23, 2019 15:04
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If you got voted off the island in Athens, were you allowed into her colonies? I am wondering if my impression of that is wrong if Athens is often reference as the sum of it's nation.
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Jul 23, 2019 16:28
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Oo Koo posted:How were those outlying settlements joined to the Athenian political system? Did they have their own votes about local issues? Did they send representatives to the votes in the capital? Were some of the vote eligible citizens living in those areas to act as representatives? Or did they just follow the orders sent from the capital and do their own thing otherwise? They were full citizens. You had to come to the capital to vote which was probably a massive pain for the further settlements. Thucydides says that back in the days when Athens had kings (so that would make this an oral tradition of the bronze age?) one king abolished all the local governments of the other cities to promote unity and make everything revolve around the capital. I believe that by the classical era the Athenian population was divided into tribes that specifically cut across natural regional boundaries in an attempt to minimize regional factionalism.
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Jul 23, 2019 17:25
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Jamwad Hilder posted:I've always found it interesting that the Athenians are lauded for being the first democracy, and that's probably what they're best remembered for among the general population, but they were actually pretty terrible people even by contemporary standards. "Actually pretty terrible people even by contemporary standards" is pretty harsh when they had Sparta nearby. I don't want to excuse Athenian slavery, but it doesn't seem comparable to the totalitarianism the helots were subjected to. But they could definitely be awful to other countries, as powerful countries tend to be (the genocidal treatment of Melos being the most notorious example). And internally, women were oppressed even compared to some other Greek city-states. Plus, of course, they were an illiberal democracy where unpopular people could sometimes be executed for flimsy reasons, although it's hard to say how prevalent a problem that was.
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Jul 23, 2019 17:40
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Silver2195 posted:"Actually pretty terrible people even by contemporary standards" is pretty harsh when they had Sparta nearby. I don't want to excuse Athenian slavery, but it doesn't seem comparable to the totalitarianism the helots were subjected to. The stories of state-sanctioned massacre are mostly stories from authors writing several centuries after Sparta's decline into irrelevance. You get this description of the krypteia from Aristotle as well, but Plato contradicts him and describes it as an endurance test with no weapons. Everything else about the helots just makes them sound like serfs, which is not great, but not unusual either. The Athenians of course, had slaves instead of serfs. The Athenian and Spartan hegemonies, were both based on a bunch of unequal alliances relying on naked force to cow their unwilling allies to supply taxes or manpower. The Greek polises were pretty lovely imperialists in that regard, all their hegemonies collapsed with a light touch of meddling from Persia or later the Macedonians.
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Jul 23, 2019 17:52
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Silver2195 posted:"Actually pretty terrible people even by contemporary standards" is pretty harsh when they had Sparta nearby. I don't want to excuse Athenian slavery, but it doesn't seem comparable to the totalitarianism the helots were subjected to. The Spartans were definitely awful to the helots, but their status would be more like a serf than a chattel slave. They could be emancipated (supposedly fairly common actually) and be part of a sort of in-between status of a full Spartan citizen and helot. Some texts also list both slaves and helots which suggests they weren't considered the same thing. Helots were allowed to serve as hoplites even. But, on the extreme end, you also have the occasional culling of their population to prevent uprisings, so... While some Athenian slaves were undoubtedly treated fairly well, and there were varying degrees of slavery, there were also tons more of them and they were considered chattel. So, hard to say which is worse I guess.
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Jul 23, 2019 18:06
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Jamwad Hilder posted:The Spartans were definitely awful to the helots, but their status would be more like a serf than a chattel slave. They could be emancipated (supposedly fairly common actually) and be part of a sort of in-between status of a full Spartan citizen and helot. Some texts also list both slaves and helots which suggests they weren't considered the same thing. Helots were allowed to serve as hoplites even. But, on the extreme end, you also have the occasional culling of their population to prevent uprisings, so... Youre assuming the Spartans didn't also have chattel slaves. They'd be unusual in the ancient world if they didn't.
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Jul 23, 2019 18:25
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The stories of state-sanctioned massacre are mostly stories from authors writing several centuries after Sparta's decline into irrelevance. You get this description of the krypteia from Aristotle as well, but Plato contradicts him and describes it as an endurance test with no weapons. Are there any historians who take this view of the helots and krypteia? I must admit that a lot of what I "know" about Sparta is either remembered from high school or something that came up in passing in an article or book about Ancient Greece more generally.
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Jul 23, 2019 18:38
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cheetah7071 posted:They were full citizens. You had to come to the capital to vote which was probably a massive pain for the further settlements. Thucydides says that back in the days when Athens had kings (so that would make this an oral tradition of the bronze age?) one king abolished all the local governments of the other cities to promote unity and make everything revolve around the capital. The Athenian tribes are interesting for being a completely artificial institution, credited to Cleisthenes who designed them explicitly to reduce conflict. That contrasts them with the Roman tribes, which to my understanding reflected much more the autochthonic Latin tribal society. Of course Roman tribes also went through a lot of weird reforms and changes over the centuries, but it was much less organized and intentional a process with a much more sketchy historical record
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Jul 23, 2019 20:24
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Silver2195 posted:Are there any historians who take this view of the helots and krypteia? I must admit that a lot of what I "know" about Sparta is either remembered from high school or something that came up in passing in an article or book about Ancient Greece more generally. The idea that they were more serfs than chattel slaves is not disputed. They were rural people that were bound the land, legally forbidden from being broken up or resettled, and entitled to cultivate it for themselves while paying a tax to their overlords. They had rights within the Spartan system, but any attempts to systemically overturn their servititude were immediately crushed by the Spartiates. On the other hand, the two groups mostly lived apart, and helots were mostly self-governing when not in direct conflict with the Spartiates. The krypteia is more of a historical sidenote without a lot of sources describing it. afaik its Aristotle, Plato, and Plutarch that do, and Plutarch is the one writing after Sparta was turned into a Roman-era theme park. The animosity between the helots and Spartans is more attested to, and the way the Spartiates maintained their power was pretty much like a police state. But honestly, the Greeks didn't know any other way of maintaining their power. The Delian League was a big Athenian protection racket, the Athenians solicited gold and soldiers and created a massive navy that would pillage their "allies" if they wanted to stop paying tribute. The Peloponnesian League was slightly less exploitative, but the Spartans were ofc subjugating the helots in their home turf all the time.
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Jul 23, 2019 20:42
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Didn't athenian women lack a bunch of rights even compared to their contemporaries?
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Jul 23, 2019 21:34
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Didn't athenian women lack a bunch of rights even compared to their contemporaries? i thought it was that spartan women had it comparatively good
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Jul 23, 2019 21:54
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HEY GUNS posted:i thought it was that spartan women had it comparatively good Spartans law allowed wives to inherit. This meant that a Spartan woman could marry young, inherit her husband's wealth when he died in war, remarry (she was desirable because she was wealthy), and inherit again. Those "lucky" enough to be widows several times over would be quite rich and apparently dominated politics. I don't remember if daughters would ever inherit so I don't know if female wealth would transfer between generations or not.
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Jul 23, 2019 22:17
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cheetah7071 posted:Spartans law allowed wives to inherit. This meant that a Spartan woman could marry young, inherit her husband's wealth when he died in war, remarry (she was desirable because she was wealthy), and inherit again. Those "lucky" enough to be widows several times over would be quite rich and apparently dominated politics. I don't remember if daughters would ever inherit so I don't know if female wealth would transfer between generations or not.
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Jul 23, 2019 22:18
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