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Dalael posted:I mean he's pushing it by saying that I'm trying to evengelize Jim Allen or the subject. If you weren't trying to evangelize you would've given up by now.
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Dec 28, 2014 06:42
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PittTheElder posted:To take the thread in a different direction, does anyone know why Roman coins look so beat up and crappy? Minting coins doesn't seem all that complicated, and the Romans were smart dudes, but maybe metal casting is quite a bit more complicated than it looks. Or is this just the effects of soft metals and a long time? I know way more about this than I should! The short answer is how they were made. Your second example is made by mechanical pressing. The dies line up perfectly with the blank and you get basically the exact same thing every time. The first example is hand made. It's literally a guy with a hammer hitting the die onto the blank. That is what causes them to be off center. As to why the coin isn't round, there are several reasons. First off the original blanks were not perfectly round. Why not? They didn't need to be. They needed to be (about) the right weight, and even that was iffy because they'd measure a whole batch of a bunch of blanks to see if it was right and there would be variation in the batch. There was just no need to get it exactly round. It is interesting to note that some people (Ptolemaic Egypt I'm pretty sure) may have turned their coins on a lathe to make them round, but only the larger ones. The second reason is that when they were hammered the blank would deform. It's a guy with a hammer, so he's not going to hit it the same way every time. The third reason is that a LOT of coins were shaved or clipped by people trying to make a buck. And the final reason is that most of these coins were buried in bad conditions for a long time and have suffered corrosion damage. So yeah, that's why they look how they do. Some ancient coins look like they could have been minted yesterday other than the shape not being perfectly round, while most have some deformities either from being made, altered in ancient times or damaged by years of being buried.
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Dec 28, 2014 06:54
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:If you weren't trying to evangelize you would've given up by now. No, because the spectrum compels him.
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Dec 28, 2014 06:59
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Dalael posted:By that logic, we shouldn't have bothered to dig in Egypt or Rome, since it has been inhabited for just as long. Are you going to address any of the other logical problems I've raised, like the first paper you posted ignoring the question of whether Atlantis was fictional? Or the elephant in the room: why Allen treats Plato as authoritative enough to calculate geography to the nautical mile but not authoritative enough to know whether there were horses in Atlantis or a half dozen other details that don't match his theory? Are you going to address those maybe? Then maybe you'll see why talking about excavation is pointless: your only evidence for a city on this site is that some geographical features match a description in Plato, which is cherry picked to the point that it's laughable. (Which means that you actually don't have evidence from Plato.) Evidence of habitation in the area generally is easily explained by much later habitation. So without Plato what reason do you have to ask anyone to excavate? Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Dec 28, 2014 |
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Dec 28, 2014 07:07
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:I know way more about this than I should! I've seen modern day coins in circulation that were minted 40+ years ago that often look terrible. It's a wonder any coins from 2000 or so years ago have survived.
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Dec 28, 2014 07:28
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Octy posted:I've seen modern day coins in circulation that were minted 40+ years ago that often look terrible. It's a wonder any coins from 2000 or so years ago have survived. Many ancient coins were buried in jars before being circulated much, which is why many look really good.
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Dec 28, 2014 07:32
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Also consider the materials that the coins were made from and what would have happened in their life. Base copper brass etc (known as AE) coins are very susceptible to corrosion and mineralisation from the earth and soil and often turn up damaged. They were also the lowest denominations, just how much care do you take over a penny compared to a hypothetical coin that could buy you a house? Then you have silver coins, bread and butter of the economy. Early coins were actually silver, this does alright in the ground but is soft as gently caress and easy to damage. Then you get the bebased silver coins to the point where silver coins are literally little more than bronze dipped in a quick silver bath. Like 2-5%. Here if the thin silver gets damaged the ae materials under get revealed to the elements and the corrisve process often makes for ugly rear end coins. Gold coins however tend to do very well. They took more care making them, and made more artistic dies but if we keep that in mind, gold comes out of he ground after 2000 years much like it went in. Also people were more likely to stash a gold coin when they got it and its worth too much for most people to spend in their everyday lives. Some dude picking up a gold coin at any point between when it was first burried and now would likely figure out its a coin and its valuable. This means you get some awesome gold coins surviving that I think give a nice insight into what Roman coinage looked like at the time. Cast_No_Shadow fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Dec 28, 2014 |
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Dec 28, 2014 08:10
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All of that is true, but I wouldn't want to give the impression that ancient bronze coins don't commonly survive until today in very good condition. For bronze it's a bit of a numbers game; so many were minted that some percentage of that ended up in the right conditions to be preserved. Just like you said though, the more valuable a coin the more likely they were to be taken care of also. Compare your average $1 bill to your average $100 bill. I actually haven't seen a lot of gold coins with much wear on them, but I don't spend much time looking at gold since I can't afford it and they may have just been melted down at some point as the melt value met the collectors value. Here are a few examples of relatively well preserved coins that I have. Remember that these are just what me, a lay person with not a ton of money can afford, and there are even better examples out there in rich private collectors' hands and museums.  A silver Roman Macedonian Tetradrachm, minted at a Roman provincial or military mint between 148-80 BC. 30.4 mm, 16.667 g. Besides the modern made hole in the reverse (which is basically why I could afford it) this looks probably about how it did when it was used 2100 (!) years ago. It was a higher denomination so it probably saw little circulation.  A silver Roman Republic Denarius minted in Rome between 111-110 BC. 3.811 g, 17.6 mm. Again, this was minted over 2100 years ago, and while some of the features might be somewhat softened it's more or less what it was back then.  A Roman Bronze AE2 of Constantine I minted in Rome in 314 AD. 22 mm, 3.87 g. It's probably the bronze coin I have that is the closest looking to when it was circulated, despite the spot of discoloration on the reverse. Interestingly we don't know what the denomination system was bronze coins in the late empire, so we classify them by their diameter. It's surprising to me that how many of x coin make a y coin wasn't documented somewhere that survived to today. Also I'm pretty sure I actually bought this one from the thread in SAMart.
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Dec 28, 2014 08:59
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Grand Fromage posted:Fits, since there were no horses in the Americas before 1492. Plato was just confused by the Atlantians mighty war alpaca. Hannibal and his war elephants didn't have poo poo on the furious fury charge of those noble beasts.
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Dec 28, 2014 09:30
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Today I have learned that the Bolivian Altiplano and Salar de Uyuni are very beautiful places that I would like to visit. Also I learned that the ruins in the area have in fact been investigated by archeologists who believe they were created by a pre-Colombian civilization; either an unknown civilization that collapsed between 1400 and 1700 CE or a colony of the Incans that was abandoned. Accurate dating techniques are very difficult to impossible in the area since it is seasonally flooded every year and the locals engaged in a lot of earth-moving projects. So there it is: the canals and mounds of the Altiplano were probably built between 500 and 1000 years ago. They have nothing to do with Plato or his story about Atlantis. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Dec 28, 2014 |
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Dec 28, 2014 09:36
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Arglebargle III posted:Then maybe you'll see why talking about excavation is pointless: your only evidence for a city on this site is that some geographical features match a description in Plato, which is cherry picked to the point that it's laughable. (Which means that you actually don't have evidence from Plato.) Evidence of habitation in the area generally is easily explained by much later habitation. So without Plato what reason do you have to ask anyone to excavate? I've been without internet for couple of days, but I really wanted to talk about those "canals" on the altiplano that dalael's been trying to emphasize. According to geologist Simon Lamb, a man who's spent his entire life studying the Andes, the Altiplano is situated on vertically oriented rock layers. Previously, the layers were horizontally laid on top of each other, but the tectonic forces that created the Andes forced them upwards. Imagine breaking a bunch of spaghetti strands by squeezing them from the ends. Erosion acting on the exposed rock layers created criss-crossing patterns on the topology, and since each rock layer was fairly uniform, the patterns created were grid-like. Because they were regular depressions on the ground, they eroded striations naturally flooded, and eventually people living nearby used them as canals, because why look a gift horse in the mouth? Here's a paper by Lamb entitled "Origin of the high plateau in the central Andes, Bolivia, South America" http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/97TC00495/abstract The nutty thing is, I discovered Simon Lamb through the BoliviAtlantis site. They mention him as an ""expert"", like with air-quotes, quotes a book review that describes his explanation for the Altiplano grid and.... ignores him. quote:-Looking for evidence of a canals system on the Altiplano has been a key feature in the search for evidence. The presence of canals was denied for a long time by the "experts" such as Simon Lamb of Oxford University, according to geologist Simon Lamb, there are no canals on the Altiplano. Well, at least that's the impression this review of his book "Devil in the Mountain" tells us. He then posts bunch of pictures of water-filled channels captioned with descriptions of Atlantis. No other evidence is given besides quotations from Plato and photos of people's farms. So what exactly am I supposed to take away from that? I don't have an explanation for those channels, but my first choice wouldn't be "Atlantis". Simon Lamb is entirely convincing, but the BoliviAtlantis site treats him like he's the crazy person. Is it the fact he's referred to with air-quotes? This encapsulates Jim Allen's theory pretty well, in that's it's unmitigated bullshit. Arglebargle III posted:Today I have learned that the Bolivian Altiplano and Salar de Uyuni are very beautiful places that I would like to visit. The best part of investigating nutjob theories is how much these people ignore genuine knowledge in their quest to prove "Shangri-la in Mecca" or whatever. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 10:04 on Dec 28, 2014 |
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Dec 28, 2014 10:01
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:All of that is true, but I wouldn't want to give the impression that ancient bronze coins don't commonly survive until today in very good condition. For bronze it's a bit of a numbers game; so many were minted that some percentage of that ended up in the right conditions to be preserved. Just like you said though, the more valuable a coin the more likely they were to be taken care of also. Compare your average $1 bill to your average $100 bill. I actually haven't seen a lot of gold coins with much wear on them, but I don't spend much time looking at gold since I can't afford it and they may have just been melted down at some point as the melt value met the collectors value. What do these buy at their time?
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Dec 28, 2014 10:08
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Arglebargle III posted:Are you going to address any of the other logical problems I've raised, like the first paper you posted ignoring the question of whether Atlantis was fictional? Or the elephant in the room: why Allen treats Plato as authoritative enough to calculate geography to the nautical mile but not authoritative enough to know whether there were horses in Atlantis or a half dozen other details that don't match his theory? Are you going to address those maybe? It's exactly what I said: the concept of 'Atlantis' is stretched out so far that it's not Atlantis anymore.
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Dec 28, 2014 11:05
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JaucheCharly posted:What do these buy at their time? No idea on the bronze one, but best efforts at comparisons place the denarius at about a single day's pay at minimum wage, and the tetradrachm at about four days pay for a skilled laborer.
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Dec 28, 2014 12:14
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I'm also interested in economic history. Was this the denarius that was so devalued over the course of the 3rd century? Do we know whether prices were stable for a long time and only went into inflation in the 3rd century (like the early modern period of flat prices that ended suddenly in the early 19th century?) or whether inflation was a thing that they had more experience with long-term?
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Dec 28, 2014 13:39
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:Why did the Romans get lazy naming months halfway through? I know January and February were added later, and July and August were renamed later, but March-June were named after gods and festivals while September-December (and originally July and August) are just "month 7, month 8, etc." Do we have any idea why they only gave special names to the ones they did? I would like this question given some attention and not forgotten because now I've noticed this I can't stop thinking about it.
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Dec 28, 2014 13:48
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Alchenar posted:I would like this question given some attention and not forgotten because now I've noticed this I can't stop thinking about it. Does it also bug you that September, October, November, and December mean the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months, but they are actually the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th months because of the addition of January and February by Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome - and no one knows why the Romans did that?
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Dec 28, 2014 15:37
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Kaal posted:Does it also bug you that September, October, November, and December mean the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months, but they are actually the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th months because of the addition of January and February by Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome - and no one knows why the Romans did that? Prior to those months getting added there weren't any months during the winter. It was just a dateless period. So we don't know the specific thing that motivated the change but I can see why they would do it in general. Why they didn't rename the months at that point I have no idea though.
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Dec 28, 2014 18:09
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:Prior to those months getting added there weren't any months during the winter. It was just a dateless period. So we don't know the specific thing that motivated the change but I can see why they would do it in general. Why they didn't rename the months at that point I have no idea though. Probably the same reason we haven't renamed the months.
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Dec 28, 2014 18:14
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homullus posted:Probably the same reason we haven't renamed the months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar Think how that must have hosed with people's perception of time. Suddenly an hour has 100 minutes and the day 10 hours. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Dec 28, 2014 |
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Dec 28, 2014 18:39
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JaucheCharly posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar Honestly I doubt that many people would really notice such a minor thing. They weren't nearly as clock-oriented as we are today.
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Dec 28, 2014 18:51
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Dalael posted:
A subject that was crap and an author who is at best deluded. Somehow we're supposed to agree with you over it.
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Dec 28, 2014 19:20
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Kaal posted:Does it also bug you that September, October, November, and December mean the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months, but they are actually the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th months because of the addition of January and February by Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome - and no one knows why the Romans did that? Not really, because like you say, January and February didn't exist in the original Roman calendar, while the new year began in March. Thus December was the tenth month.
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Dec 28, 2014 19:34
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Comstar posted:Is that anything close to Roman armour and battledress? If so, what era? The turbaned cavalry commander is yelling Allah! before charging,so maybe very, very (very) late Antiquity? Mr Havafap fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Dec 28, 2014 |
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Dec 28, 2014 21:43
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Alchenar posted:I would like this question given some attention and not forgotten because now I've noticed this I can't stop thinking about it. Roman names like Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, Decimus, etc, are also obviously derived from numbers.\ The pre-Julian calendar was all kinds of screwy, anyway. Some days were nefastus or wrong in the sight of the gods, some days were fastus or proper in the sight of god, and some fastus days were also comitialis which meant that the tribal assemblies could meet. If a day was nefastus there couldn't be any public business conducted, while the comitialis days were routinely limited by outside factors -- for instance, the 8th day of each Roman week was market day and so people from the countryside outside Rome would come into the city on those days to do market things. Even if those days were comitialis, the powers that be in Rome manipulated things so that no political activity occurred on those days, in an effort to prevent the country people from having a say in them. The same was true during times of ritual ceremonies, gladiatorial games, etc, and during any religious ceremony there were plenty of opportunities for the officiating priest to attempt to manipulate the political calendar by accidentally/"accidentally" dropping the knife or flubbing an invocation or some other thing and cause the ritual to become polluted. If the ritual was polluted, the games or ceremony would have to be repeated the following day, which at first caused a question of whether we treat those days as never having happened - so if Idiot Quintus drops the knife on March 1, do we pretend it's still March 1 tomorrow -- or do we continue to count days. This led to an irregular calendar, and eventually the priests gained the power to "correct" the calendar by inserting a bonus month in February -- or not inserting that bonus month, as they saw fit. Since the Senate had a lot of interest in how long or short a year was and also in blocking tribal committees, this resulted in a lot of political manipulation of the calendar. It's a weird circumstance (I'd hesitate to say irony) of history that one of Julius Caesar's populare reforms was to standardize the calendar and remove all of these political games because the people were upset that their ability to participate in their tribal committees and centuriata was routinely interfered with. Within a few years of the reform, those institutions lost all of their political meaning because there wasn't a Republic any more.
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Dec 28, 2014 22:46
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Also, the length of the year wasn't standardized, IIRC. It was determined by the Pontifex Maximus. So if he didn't like the consul, that year would be really short, < 240 days. If he did like you, that year would be a lot longer. When Julius Caesar was Pontifex he made one of his consul years 440 days long, so it is amusing that he was the one to standardize the calender.
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Dec 29, 2014 02:38
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I'm vaguely familiar with the tribes of Rome in regards to how Roman elections were structured, but how did people identify with those tribes/did that tribal identification persist at all once the Republic de facto ceased to be a thing? Or even really, how did it all work once citizenship is granted to all the Italians?
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Dec 29, 2014 03:09
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Tao Jones posted:Roman names like Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, Decimus, etc, are also obviously derived from numbers.\  I don't think it was mentioned in this thread at all before, so thanks for posting this. Of all the things this thread has taught me about the Romans though this has to be one of the best examples of how past people could have mindsets that are completely alien to modern people, that they'd straight up shorten or lengthen years or declare redos of actual calendar days for political manipulation.
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Dec 29, 2014 03:15
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Pornographic Memory posted:
Wouldn't the modern equivalent of this be gerrymandering? EDIT: Did Rome have gerrymandering in a similar fashion as what happens today? Dalael fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Dec 29, 2014 |
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Dec 29, 2014 03:31
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Gerrymandering would be like monkeying with the wealth definitions for the various classes (which they also did with gusto), the closest modern equivalent I can think of is if when the Republicans took over Congress in '95 they changed the calendars for 1999 and 2000 such that the presidential election would happen a couple hundred days earlier.
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Dec 29, 2014 03:36
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Pornographic Memory posted:
Consider that the real spur for the creation of the metric system was the fact that for a long time, different towns and kingdoms would have completely different measures, such that say a "pound" of bread always cost the same in national currency but you were getting a lot less in your "pound" depending on your local lord's decree. You have to think in a context like that, to understand why things like varying years weren't as much an issue in general to people further back.
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Dec 29, 2014 03:38
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bean_shadow posted:What are people's opinions on the Didius Falco books by Lindsey Davis? I re-read Silver Pigs for the first time in ten years and really enjoyed it and am now on to the second book. They're fun, but if Davis had to decide between authenticity and hard-boiled crime story she chose the latter. Meaning it's not perfect at recreating Rome during Vespasian. Also her Domitian is more on the monster of history side than modern research suggests. But for a good story... I really enjoy the books. I recommend Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa for a more authentic feeling crime story series in Rome (also, I prefer the end of the Roman Republic to the Imperial setting, but that's me). sullat posted:Also, the length of the year wasn't standardized, IIRC. It was determined by the Pontifex Maximus. So if he didn't like the consul, that year would be really short, < 240 days. If he did like you, that year would be a lot longer. When Julius Caesar was Pontifex he made one of his consul years 440 days long, so it is amusing that he was the one to standardize the calender. Even the length of a hour wasn't standardized. The day had 12 hours of light, summer and winter, meaning a summer-hour was about 50 % longer than a winter-hour. Making any appointment back then was probably a very fuzzy thing (let's meet in the afternoon"). Decius fucked around with this message at 08:20 on Dec 29, 2014 |
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Dec 29, 2014 08:13
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On the subject of the calendar, while it's on my mind: Cicero was appointed as the magistrate of Cilicia in 51 BC because of a quirk in the laws which required that there be a particular span of time between someone's term as a consul/praetor and that person holding a post in a province and he was one of the few people who was appropriately qualified and met that requirement. Cicero hated being away from Rome and wrote letters to his friend Atticus imploring him to make sure that the priests didn't declare a bonus month in February so that he could return home faster.Dalael posted:Wouldn't the modern equivalent of this be gerrymandering? In my reading I've never come across any description of Romans manipulating geographical boundaries for political purposes; probably because there weren't really electoral districts like in the USA. Senators were elected by institutions known as tribes (further divided into "classes" in a way that's still somewhat mysterious other than somehow all of the nobles ended up in a few tribes and if those tribes voted unanimously their vote counted for more than the entirety of the rest of Rome). If these tribes were geographic in origin, they were limited to the boundaries of Rome, so far as I know. Citizens who resided outside of Rome were members of some tribe or another, and one of the reasons for manipulating comitia days was to try to discourage those country people from attending political events. I also think gerrymandering is a function of the two-party system in the US, because both parties have an interest in protecting their districts. A perfectly ("perfectly") gerrymandered map would benefit both parties by clumping all of the majority party in a state into N districts and all of the minority party into N-1 districts, so the majority party would never lose control of the state and the minority party would never be completely obliterated in a state. The Romans didn't have a party system like the US one, or even like modern European ones, so I don't think the incentives would have been there to do modern style gerrymandering even if there were districts. (Roman elections were pretty complex and opaque affairs -- they seem more like how, before the modern primary system really took hold, members of the Republican or Democratic parties had to jockey for influence within their own party to be nominated at the convention. Each state sends delegates to the convention, delegates are chosen by some mysterious process and have differing importance, there's all kinds of machinations, deal-making, and favor-currying. I think a Roman would really be puzzled by how straightforward our elections are, Electoral College aside.)
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Dec 29, 2014 10:03
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I am extremely bored at work during a night shift and watching the new H2 show called Ancient Impossible. (NOT to be confused with Ancient Aliens or anything like that) From the History site: "Ancient Impossible, the new H2 series, picks up where HISTORY’s long running Ancient Discoveries left off. In this next generation of storytelling, Ancient Impossible reveals how many of today’s technological achievements were actually developed centuries ago. Colossal monuments, impossible feats of engineering and technologies so precise they defy reinvention–the ancient world was far more advanced than we ever imagined. We’ll travel through history to reveal a radically different picture of the past, with innovations so far ahead of their time, they’re still in use today. New science uncovers a lost world more like our own than we ever suspected, and reveals how modern technology has its blueprint in the ancient world." Very interesting. It shows ancient tools, building techniques and other things like that. Worth it for anyone interested. Edit: Some of it seems to be speculation tho.
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Dec 29, 2014 10:18
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PittTheElder posted:To take the thread in a different direction, does anyone know why Roman coins look so beat up and crappy? Minting coins doesn't seem all that complicated, and the Romans were smart dudes, but maybe metal casting is quite a bit more complicated than it looks. Or is this just the effects of soft metals and a long time? Didn't they drastically reduce the silver content of their coins, leading to at least one bewildered and furious Emperor trying to understand why people thought old coins were worth more than new coins of the same denomination? It also created coins that fell apart very quickly with the passage of time, while older coins held their shape far better? Edit: Oh hey there was another page here all this time 
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Dec 29, 2014 12:09
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Jerusalem posted:Edit: Oh hey there was another page here all this time That's okay, talking about old poo poo is kind of our thing.
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Dec 29, 2014 12:30
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Octy posted:I know nothing about minting coins, but I'm guessing there was a lot more manual handwork involved back then than there is now. Also, time degrades all. Oberleutnant posted:I assume they were being clipped deliberately by counterfeiters, or by some industrious individual who could meltvthe clippings into ingots? Both very much true. Additionally to what the others already said, don't forget it took loving Isaac Newton taking over the British Royal Mint to move coin minting into a modern age, with security features that show if and how much a coin has been shaved, edge reliefs that make it very hard to fake without using the Mint's special machines and basically moving all minting to machines in the first place to actually get coins that don't get deliberately damaged by people using them. He took the mint over because counterfeit coins basically nearly destroyed the British economy, and the innovations he introduced were then copied by basically every country. The Romans did the best they could, but using handiwork will introduce inperfect coins and inperfect coins lead to shaving and cutting of said coins, making them look like crap very quickly. And up until the 17th century basically all of Europe made their coins just like the Romans did 2000 years ago. Decius fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Dec 29, 2014 |
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Dec 29, 2014 12:32
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This is back a page but Carthage was a major state and empire that almost strangled Rome in its cradle. responding mostly to this post Elyv posted:The Phoenicians were a small collection of important city-states, but unlike Greece they were in between the regional superpowers of the time in Mesopotamia and Egypt, so they had to deal with sieges and appeasing the local dominant powers and other such things. NO. Carthage was the Phoenician Empire. euphronius fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Dec 29, 2014 |
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Dec 29, 2014 15:44
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Decius posted:Both very much true. Additionally to what the others already said, don't forget it took loving Isaac Newton taking over the British Royal Mint to move coin minting into a modern age, with security features that show if and how much a coin has been shaved, edge reliefs that make it very hard to fake without using the Mint's special machines and basically moving all minting to machines in the first place to actually get coins that don't get deliberately damaged by people using them. He took the mint over because counterfeit coins basically nearly destroyed the British economy, and the innovations he introduced were then copied by basically every country. The Romans did the best they could, but using handiwork will introduce inperfect coins and inperfect coins lead to shaving and cutting of said coins, making them look like crap very quickly. And up until the 17th century basically all of Europe made their coins just like the Romans did 2000 years ago. He wan't perfect, I believe he screwed up the exchange rates between silver and gold and drove all the silver out of England. Neal Stephenson would have you believe that this was a sophisticated plot to scour the world for King Solomon's gold, but it could easily have also been carelessness.
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Dec 29, 2014 18:55
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euphronius posted:This is back a page but Carthage was a major state and empire that almost strangled Rome in its cradle. I tend to separate the Phoenicians and Carthaginians in my mind.
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Dec 29, 2014 19:40
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