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Libluini posted:I'm thinking more about what the Roman glass which made it to East Asia means. Did the Roman empire stretch all the way to Japan?
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Feb 29, 2020 13:19
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Nessus posted:
Venice wasn't even founded when the Romans traded glass to China, but maybe Venice later joined the club? (A lot later. Like, a whole lot later) At least Wikipedia claims the earliest traces of Venice go back to ca. 540 CE, when Germanic tribes conquered most of Italy, but the settlements in what would later become the lagoon of Venice were left as the westernmost outpost of the Eastroman Empire. The trade with China however, goes at least back to the time of the Parthians, which means Roman glass was possible making its way to the Far East as early as ca. the 2nd century BCE. Nearly seven hundred years before Venice was a thing. Though another interesting fact! There was an ancient people called the "Veneter", who lived in the same region before Venice was founded. Would be funny if those guys also happened to be glass makers and involved in the trade with Asia. 
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Feb 29, 2020 14:25
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Yeah, the trade wasn't one continuous thing. You'd have merchants taking the items from Egypt or Syria to India, then other merchants to Central Asia or Southeast Asia, then onward to China and eventually Japan or Korea. Lots of middlemen.
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Feb 29, 2020 14:39
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HEY GUNS posted:My god, I do. Although, come to think of it, a Warring States is more of an interregnum kinda deal. That's more migration era-> Charlemange. You probably ly study a rebellion that gets a cool name. The White Mountain Rebellion or the Revolt of Broken Windows. In the Romance of the Seven Electors Wallenstien is a seven foot tall lord of battle, but according to the Records he was just a bit... big.
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Feb 29, 2020 18:17
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I was thinking you could make a decent comparison between the HRE/Pope and the Shogun/Japanese Emperor, since it's the religious figurehead conveying legitimacy to the temporal leader who acts as his protector. Only instead of the religious leader pretending to be a temporal leader, the religious leader actually has a significant amount of temporal power that he tries to pass off as just a side gig to the religious leadership. Maybe if a pope played his cards right, Risorgimento could've turned into the Meiji Restoration.
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Feb 29, 2020 19:50
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I recall reading that early translations from japanese tended to do the two positions as pope and king.
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Feb 29, 2020 20:44
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Kylaer posted:There was an article that got posted here not long ago about the remains of a Japanese woman being found in a 1st(?) century Roman tomb, so apparently at least one person traveled afar for a waifu. That's this one I assume: https://www.caitlingreen.org/2016/09/east-asian-people-roman-london.html#fn3 This is mostly just me splitting hairs but I'm a bit dubious about them actually having been specifically Japanese. I think with genetic markers like this in general Japan's just way more studied, so these kinds of tests have a habit of putting Koreans/Manchurians/some Chinese etc as Japanese just because the tests can't tell the difference. Genetic stuff is a subject I only understand in the absolute vaguest sense though so I might be wrong. From a historical standpoint however, it would be pretty loving incredible if someone actually from all the way over in the archipelago made it all the way out to Roman Britain. A Japanese kingdom at the time did send a handful of embassies to China, but the vast majority of Japan's interactions with the wider world were several baton passes down the chain; it was assumed for a while that some direct Japan-China shipping may have happened that early, but there was a recent study where a bunch of archaeologists reconstructed an ancient Japanese boat to try to sail across the East China Sea and came to the conclusion that there was no loving way that anyone actually made the trip in that era except by an extreme stroke of luck. Basically all of its international interactions in that period happened via the Korean peninsula. So, it would be super weird that there's a Japanese person buried there and not like, hundreds of Chinese people and dozens of Koreans that we've also found. Anyway I'm making a lot out of nothing here, but to me this represents an interesting case of how modern Japan's importance influences how people perceive it to have been going back to time immemorial too.
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Feb 29, 2020 20:51
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Koramei posted:I think with genetic markers like this in general Japan's just way more studied, so these kinds of tests have a habit of putting Koreans/Manchurians/some Chinese etc as Japanese just because the tests can't tell the difference. Is this something you know from like, an actual source, or are you just randomly speculating here?
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Feb 29, 2020 21:00
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Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups get pretty granular. Not so much that you can always specify Japan itself, Japan isn't isolated enough from its neighbors. But Japanese people do have a distinct set of haplogroups and you can do probability. If the sample from that woman is D4i1 for example, she's almost certainly Japanese. D4e2, she's likely Japanese or Korean. But I can't find the actual data to see what group that body is. Still true that you can't say 100% for sure what specific place she's from, but saying she has this haplogroup and therefore is from northeast Asia is reasonable. The other most likely possibility is she's one of the wider distributed groups. There are some that are very concentrated in Japan/Korea, and others that are common in Japan/Korea but also in an assortment of Central Asian Turkic groups, which would certainly be an easier journey to end up in Italy. I don't know that strong genetic link between Japanese/Koreans and Central Asians is an ancient thing or something that arose after Mongol rule of Korea, though. Given the general waves of steppe people rolling into Korea throughout its history I would guess that's an old common ancestry link. It is also true that genetically distinguishing Japanese and Koreans is difficult, as much as that annoys them.
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Feb 29, 2020 21:07
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e^: oh cool thanks for the explanation. I should really try and learn at least the basics of how genetics works sometime.Libluini posted:Is this something you know from like, an actual source, or are you just randomly speculating here? I know it's a big problem for commercial genetic tests like 23 and me (here for instance). No clue how it works for the scientific tests! Beyond that though from a historical standpoint I just see it as way too loving convenient that one of the only known East Asians in ancient Europe happens to be a Japanese person. Koramei fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Feb 29, 2020 |
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Feb 29, 2020 21:09
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Koramei posted:I know it's a big problem for commercial genetic tests like 23 and me (here for instance). No clue how it works for the scientific tests! But from a historical standpoint I just see it as way too loving convenient that one of the only known East Asians in ancient Europe happens to be a Japanese person. It's just the one, though. There have been a bunch of other East Asian bodies found in Roman graves and they're mostly believed to be Chinese. China's real hard though because there are just so many genetic groups there compared to its neighbors, it ends up being sort of the catchall "well it's East Asia somewhere so probably Chinese". E: Bunch is overstating it, but there are a non-trivial number of others.
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Feb 29, 2020 21:11
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Koramei posted:e^: oh cool thanks for the explanation. I should really try and learn at least the basics of how genetics works sometime. it can definitely be a problem in real scientific studies. Like if you drill down into the data a lot of studies that looked at west African genetics actually used samples of African-Americans, since the USA is a much easier place to get data. There are obvious problems with that, most obviously it reduces your granularity. Fortunately the severity of this issue keeps decreasing as we get more and more information from harder to reach places. edit: although as people have pointed out mtDNA is probably the best way to estimate something like this. However its also worth keeping in mind its limitations. For example while someone with a rare Japanese mtDNA lineage likely had a recent ancestor from the islands, the sequence of events that brought it to Europe could have been quite complicated. Like maybe a Japanese woman went to southern China, had a daughter, and then she traveled to Europe. What would the nationality of this person be? Just looking at mtDNA we can't say if someone was 50% Japanese or 100%, its more like a binary thing. Either you have it, or you don't. If the main Japanese islands are pretty isolated in this period, what about the Ryukyu islands? I'm curious what they were like in the iron age. Squalid fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Feb 29, 2020 |
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Feb 29, 2020 21:39
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Oh cool, thanks for the explanations guys. Incidentally it's great this topic came up now, because a once in a decade sort of paper re: Japanese origins just happened to get published this past week: https://www.cambridge.org/core/serv...hesis_at_30.pdf Mark Hudson is one of the leading English-language scholars on the subject, and he and the co-authors basically go over the current state of how it's understood by scholars from archaeological, linguistic, and genetic standpoints as well as a bunch of historiography. It's only 9 pages so I'd recommend just reading it, but the cliff notes version is that the "Dual Structure Theory" proposed in the 90s, that modern Japanese are a mixture of indigenous Jomon peoples and continental Yayoi peoples (with the leading current assumption at something like 35% the former and 65% the latter, but apparently new technology will give us better estimates in the coming years), has basically gained universal acceptance over the past 3 decades. I thought that was the understanding for longer, really, but apparently even into the 80s the dominant assumption was that modern Japanese are basically entirely descended from the Jomon people, until genetic testing came along and invalidated that. Beyond that, the Jomon themselves likely came from Southeast Asia (via a land bridge during the last Ice Age), and the Yayoi from the Korean Peninsula, with the latter arriving starting from about 900 BCE, and slowly mixing with the Jomon/pushing them into hinterlands, but not just sweeping through the archipelago like used to sometimes get supposed. Finally, there's still some dissenting Japanese scholars with hilariously nationalist bends to their theories, but the Japanese language is pretty well accepted to have been continental in origin, probably via Korea*--apparently there's a growing consensus that it and Korean actually are related after all, but maybe I misunderstood that (linguistics is not my thing either). *They don't go into it in depth here, but I've read a few times elsewhere that the leading theory is that it came originally from around Shandong in China, coming along with agriculture to Korea. About a thousand years later, Yayoi migrants brought it over to Japan. Grand Fromage posted:It's just the one, though. There have been a bunch of other East Asian bodies found in Roman graves and they're mostly believed to be Chinese. China's real hard though because there are just so many genetic groups there compared to its neighbors, it ends up being sort of the catchall "well it's East Asia somewhere so probably Chinese". Anywhere to read about that you'd recommend? I'm curious to know some more. Squalid posted:If the main Japanese islands are pretty isolated in this period, what about the Ryukyu islands? I'm curious what they were like in the iron age. Me too! Sorry, I don't know much either. The study I just linked mentions it's thought they're descended (like the Ainu) from the pre-Yayoi Jomon populations; those populations in Japan would often maintain fishing/gathering lifestyles rather than agriculture, but I'm not sure if that was different in the Ryukyus. One thing I can give a fairly educated guess on though is that they wouldn't have actually been iron age; all iron in Japan was imported from the southern Korean peninsula until the 5th century, when they figured out how to extract it from iron sands. It was precious enough in Japan, so I doubt much made its way to the Ryukyus. Also I didn't mean to imply the Japanese islands were actually isolated, just that all of their interactions went through the Korean peninsula first, or actually, the Ryukyus; the waters that bridge Kyushu->Ryukyus->China are actually navigable in this period, unlike the East China sea, although I don't think there's much archaeological evidence for widespread transit from the southern route in that way. I should probably spend some time actually reading about Ryukyu before I make too many more blanket assumptions though. Koramei fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Feb 29, 2020 |
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Feb 29, 2020 22:06
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Come to think of it, if China has had long-term unification with free movement within very large borders, that'd probably ruin the process of pinning down bits of DNA to geographical areas. I can't even imagine how you'd track nomadic peoples who settled down after spreading far and wide. I've heard that there's also issues with some DNA tracing services having worse methodology and datasets than others. And with China specifically, there was that one news story where China was using American research on DNA to assist them with their ongoing uighur genocide so some academics are specifically refusing to deal with China in order to not be complicit.
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Feb 29, 2020 22:10
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the JJ posted:Although, come to think of it, a Warring States is more of an interregnum kinda deal. That's more migration era-> Charlemange. You probably ly study a rebellion that gets a cool name. The White Mountain Rebellion or the Revolt of Broken Windows.
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Feb 29, 2020 22:54
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the JJ posted:Although, come to think of it, a Warring States is more of an interregnum kinda deal. That's more migration era-> Charlemange. You probably ly study a rebellion that gets a cool name. The White Mountain Rebellion or the Revolt of Broken Windows.
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Feb 29, 2020 22:57
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SlothfulCobra posted:Come to think of it, if China has had long-term unification with free movement within very large borders, that'd probably ruin the process of pinning down bits of DNA to geographical areas. I can't even imagine how you'd track nomadic peoples who settled down after spreading far and wide. we can extend this logic even further: when multiple people are literally crossing all of Eurasia 1500 years ago, how do we relate any dna to any particular place? After all the three East Asians from this study presumably lived relatively normal lives and had families and kids of their own, shouldn't their DNA now be in the DNA of modern Europeans? Well, the answer is with great difficulty and much uncertainty. However the extent to which regional DNA variation is conservative (ie, unchanging regardless of circumstance) can be very surprising. For example one idea is that coastal populations of Eurasia (and maybe much of the rest of the world?) are today more diverse than in land regions, and that this is the result of the first humans out of Africa following the coast on their great migration across the world, and then subsequently back-filling the continental interior. I think there may still be controversy around this idea, but it is something worth studying. The reason more genetic diversity is evidence of a coastal migration route is that places where people have lived longer will tend to be more genetically diverse. So Africa is more diverse than South America, for example.
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Mar 1, 2020 00:11
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Are the theatrical hand gestures that show up in depictions of roman speaking a real thing? Like the town crier fellow from HBO's Rome. It looks like he's using some kind of formalized Italian Hand Talking.
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Mar 1, 2020 02:12
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Are the theatrical hand gestures that show up in depictions of roman speaking a real thing? Yes. It's a tool of oration. There were a whole library of gestures, each of which meant something and each of which you were supposed to use ar certain times and for certain reasons.
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Mar 1, 2020 02:19
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOnViAcHffA
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Mar 1, 2020 02:24
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Solemn and officious Roman twerking.
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Mar 1, 2020 05:12
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this man is my favourite nerd of all time.
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Mar 3, 2020 18:11
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Which one of you is this?
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Mar 3, 2020 18:53
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Power Khan posted:Which one of you is this? not me--unless he's self-consciously trying to look like a greek, shave the loving beard off
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Mar 3, 2020 21:12
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HEY GUNS posted:not me--unless he's self-consciously trying to look like a greek, shave the loving beard off I mean if it was good enough for Hadrian
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Mar 3, 2020 21:22
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So, in the post-Roman world (an indeterminate point by which time people were no longer were running around Western Europe in lorica segmentata and red leather miniskirts) how does a guy living in Rome refer to the ruler of the Empire-We-Used-To-Call-Byzantine-But-Now-We-All-Seem-To-Call-Them-Roman-Too-Even-Though-That's-Hella-Confusing? By what term does he refer to this political entity?
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Mar 4, 2020 23:09
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"Empire of the Greeks"
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Mar 4, 2020 23:22
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If you were trying to be insulting/supportive of the HRE, that was a common formulation. Or people who didn't know different. Otherwise they were referred to as Romans until Germans managed to get the term Byzantine into popular use in like... the early 1800s I think. Around the same time the nationalists in the region started reviving the term Hellene to replace Rhomaioi.
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Mar 4, 2020 23:23
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When did the toga fall out of fashion?
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Mar 4, 2020 23:25
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Schadenboner posted:So, in the post-Roman world (an indeterminate point by which time people were no longer were running around Western Europe in lorica segmentata and red leather miniskirts) how does a guy living in Rome refer to the ruler of the Empire-We-Used-To-Call-Byzantine-But-Now-We-All-Seem-To-Call-Them-Roman-Too-Even-Though-That's-Hella-Confusing? By what term does he refer to this political entity? Roman emperor, august emperor, prince of the Romans, most holy/Christian emperor if he really wants to butter him up. Later in the first millennium AD, some Frankish and other western sources start to get snooty about this and talk about the Imperator/Imperium Graecorum instead
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Mar 4, 2020 23:27
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:When did the toga fall out of fashion? Surprisingly early. By the end of the 4th century it was considered totally obsolete and had probably been out of fashion for a very long time before that.
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Mar 4, 2020 23:37
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:When did the toga fall out of fashion? It did? I wore one in high school at a jazz band conference after party and it was liiiiit.
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Mar 4, 2020 23:41
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skasion posted:Surprisingly early. By the end of the 4th century it was considered totally obsolete and had probably been out of fashion for a very long time before that. this makes me wonder how much of our stock image of rome would've been known to later romans. like, would an educated 5th century roman have something like our lorica segmantata + togas + marble stereotype of the principate, or something more/less accurate? e: thinking of those medieval depictions of ancient rome where everyone wears contemporary clothes and armor
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Mar 4, 2020 23:41
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:When did the toga fall out of fashion? Togas were never really popular because they're a pain in the rear end to wear, but by the 400s they were basically gone. Juvenal said hardly anyone was wearing togas in his time, though it's Juvenal so you shouldn't take it as strictly accurate. Hadrian required the upper classes to wear togas, which may imply most weren't doing so. And the toga never took off Italy unless you were an ethnic Roman making a statement of your Roman-ness, so the majority of the empire wasn't wearing togas even when they were more common.
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Mar 4, 2020 23:43
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Wasn't the whole point of a toga that it was such a pain in the rear end that it basically advertised you had slaves to deal with it for you?
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Mar 4, 2020 23:44
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:this makes me wonder how much of our stock image of rome would've been known to later romans. like, would an educated 5th century roman have something like our lorica segmantata + togas + marble stereotype of the principate, or something more/less accurate? An educated Roman of the fifth century would have known a lot more about the principate than we do—or at least, he would have had much better sources.
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Mar 4, 2020 23:45
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Did educated slaves ever try making a run for it just out of pure arbitrary lust for freedom?
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Mar 5, 2020 04:42
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So what did people wear instead of togas?
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Mar 5, 2020 05:45
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Safety Biscuits posted:So what did people wear instead of togas? Tunics. Think of a tunic as sort of a long, open shirt that goes down to the knees or ankles. You generally wore them belted at the waist.
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Mar 5, 2020 06:00
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One thing to note is by the time of Justinian lots of Romans were dressing up like Huns & Khazars at least for military campaigns.
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Mar 5, 2020 08:10
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