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Thanks for making this thread, last thread led to a marathon of Rome, I think this ones gonna make me get back into Spartacus (not accurate but gently caress it.) I remember someone in the last thread saying Rome was at about an 18th century level of technology before it declined, but they didnt elaborate on how. This is a really vague question, but could you tell me about Roman technology compared to the middle ages?
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May 26, 2012 06:21
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How come Rome became so powerful? What was it they had that no one else did? Like, what was the catalyst that took them from just another Italian city to unstoppable? I know all the obvious answers, technology, military strategy, etc. But why them and not any of the other places in Italy at the time?
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May 30, 2012 05:59
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I dont know enough about Roman culture, or that anyone does, but how much of that survived to the present? Sorry, another really vague question, but how much is my culture as an American Roman? Like, if we were comparing modern Korea to Qing China? Lets say, for example the traditional "individualist vs collectivist" society distinction. Did the European individualism come from Rome?
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May 30, 2012 13:45
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You can still get that in Asia. Just last week I paid about 10,000₩ for a nice shower in sea water followed by a hot water, very hot water and then cold water bath. It's pretty much a public thing here, every town has a few jimjillbangs.
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Jun 17, 2012 13:57
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Yeah thats what the Romans said, but we know the truth.
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Jun 19, 2012 00:25
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Grand Fromage come back from Japan the thread needs you! I'm anticipating his response. This is like meeting someone who identifies as an Epicurian.
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Aug 21, 2012 14:43
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As a philosophy or something no. Self identifying it as your religion is really smug though and reeks of grecophilia or whatever you would call that guy. To be honest I think I was thinking of Stoicism.
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Aug 21, 2012 15:29
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If it's ok, I actually have a question about Roman historians (and... Ancient historians? Or is that just what we call people now who study ancient history?) If it's best we just bury the topic I'm okay with that, but I'm wondering if they weren't going for accuracy what exactly were historians goals? What were they trying to accomplish if not accuracy? Do we even know? Were they just concerned with the general truth, preserving what people talked about for its own sake, just telling a good story or what? I just dont see much of the value to recording a history and filling it with bullshit, and what you guys have said has led me to believe that they knew a lot of it wasnt exactly true when they wrote it. Again I really dont want to push any buttons but I'm really curious. If GF or someone could weigh in on this and we could end the topic here and now I would appreciate it.
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Nov 6, 2012 15:16
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I'm not well read on this but are you guys saying that the historians were trying less to write history, but to write news instead? I guess that makes sense, never really thought of it but their news is our history. So a Roman history book would be less about history to them and more like, say, a book on contemporary US politics written for a contemporary audience that included some laymen background history about the US with popular half truths and stories?
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Nov 6, 2012 17:00
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Really, how often is your average Roman going to even see someone from all that far away and that different? I might not be giving them enough credit, but how often is a Roman farmer somewhere outside the city of Rome going to run into people from outside the general area? I imagine a lot of what we think of as racism today didn't exist because there wasnt much of an opportunity for it.
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Nov 26, 2012 07:14
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Grand Fromage posted:A farmer? Probably not often. Someone living in a city like Rome or Alexandria would encounter it all the time. It was regional. Even in a major city in say, Gaul, it wouldn't be very common because there wasn't anyone going through there. Germans are about all you'd run into, at most. If you're in a city in the east, it's a lot more common. People in Constantinople, Palmyra, Alexandria, Caesarea, Antioch, etc etc would regularly encounter lots of different cultures and people from both within and outside the empire. I guess I don't understand how urban Rome was. Your average Roman person, were they the farmers or were most people in the cities? I have more questions about this, but I'm sitting here and I cant seem to word it. So racism was different, but they were still prejudice. Is this because the modern concept of race wasn't a thing? I guess, why was it that way? I learned a bit about ancient Chinese racism, and it was pretty much "everyone outside of China are barbarian shitheads, they're barely human." I guess this was the case with Rome, but since so many different people from all over were citizens "Roman" is much less of a racial group than "Chinese"? I just cant imagine people not being racist, like a random person in Rome probably had some "all x people are y" thoughts but that wouldn't get necessarily written down or seen as important.. Maybe?
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Nov 26, 2012 15:42
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Getting away from, Rome, Greece and Europe Is there anyone here who knows a bit about Sumer? I want to know what writing we have from them (or that probably originated with them and got passed on by the Akkadians, etc.) besides the epic of Gilgamesh. I skimmed through a book of Sumerian proverbs in college, and I remember reading something about some short stories or poems that had a similar structure and story to the epic but were older. Can't remember the name though. Anyone know what I'm talking about or about anything else interesting that was preserved? I'm also pretty curious as to how their city state governments worked, but I just woke up and can't think of any specific questions at the moment.
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Feb 1, 2013 03:53
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sullat posted:Like how Gilgamesh meets Sumerian-Noah and learns about the secret of immortality. Spoiler alert: He loses it while taking a nap God, I love that story. So much of that really old writing is interesting but hard to relate to because the culture is so foreign, usually so many chunks are lost (I read a translation of the epic before that basically has Gilgamesh and Enkidu go into the forest to kill that monster, then next page they're back and everything is done... Whole plot arc just missing) and I guess the authors and people who lived then are relatively unknown. We have enough trouble getting good translations of things written in Chinese, and theres plenty of them still around. As significant as the stories are sometimes it's just strange for me as a modern reader and I have to stop and think "wait... Why is he throwing a huge chunk of meat around? What does this have to do with anything?" But I found the story of Gilgamesh trying and failing to find immortality, along with him trying to cope with the death of Enkidu incredibly deep and relatable. One of those universal human things I guess.
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Feb 1, 2013 10:43
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For anyone like me into Sumerian stuff I stumbled across this http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/ It's a whole bunch of translated Sumerian writing. Lots of cool random poo poo like a debate between a hoe and a plough. "the Hoe, the Hoe, the Hoe, tied together with thongs"
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Feb 3, 2013 07:04
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This is a holiday weekend in Korea and it got me thinking what were some important Roman holidays and what were they like? Here most of the big holidays seem to be really heavy on paying respects to your grandparents and ancestors. What about Rome? Were they all centered around Roman gods? The Roman state? And what did Roman people do to celebrate?
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Feb 8, 2013 13:09
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Paxicon posted:The short version is, they saved a sick child and demanded the father would organize these games. The games were celebrated with sacrifices, feasts and gladiatorial combat as well as theatre and hunting animals in the arenas. Torches, sulphur and asphalt was burnt to honor the Gods below.. I can only imagine being the father of the kid. On one hand I'm sure, as a Roman citizen, he believed his kid was saved by whatever Roman medicine and prayer etc. On the other hand... Was probably a case of "ehhhh, let's not use that wine but maybe the (Roman) Franzia..."
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Feb 8, 2013 15:16
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Question about Latin, so many of these translations of people poo poo talking or graffiti use the word "gently caress." Does Latin actually have a word like gently caress? An extremely vulgar way to say "have sex"? Or are they just saying "soandso had sex with soandso" and it gets translated to gently caress because of the context? Does Latin have swear words? How vulgar were they, what did they mean and what made them swear words opposed to just rude language?
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Apr 2, 2013 15:51
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Can anyone tell me about Faustina the Younger? (Marcus Aurelius' wife, I don't know if there are any more Faustina the Youngers out there.) Basically, was she really a giant bitch? Or is it debated? What? My girlfriend and I are trying to knock the Confucius out of her head, so we're reading Meditations together. She is saying how she understands his point, but she's having trouble trusting his judgement since he talks highly about his wife but according to the forward in her book (which I haven't read, I'm reading it in English and she is not, we're comparing as we go along but of course the forwards are different) Faustina was a horrible wife and a horrible person. So was she really awful? If yes, did Aurelius know during his life? Did he care or did he not because of some Roman/Stoic thing? Do we not know?
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Feb 9, 2014 15:33
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I don't know if this is the best place to ask but it seemed as good as any. Can anyone recommend a translation of The Republic for me? Same deal as When I was reading Meditations a while back, girlfriend reading it in English, English is her second language, gotta find a translation that's easy to read even if it's sacrificing accuracy and stuff. She's reading it in her native language too, but she wants to read it in English to compare too (Korean translations of the Republic loving suckkkk) So, that means we don't need like a kids translation or something, but something in clear and common English. With Meditations it was easy, Gregory Hays translation was clearly what we needed. With Plato it's kinda more confusing.
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Oct 31, 2014 14:49
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I might go with the Bloom one, I think that's the one I originally read years ago in college. I'll have to look up the Waterfield one. I'm also looking at the Tom Griffith translation in the "Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought" edition, and it seems nice. I've been comparing excerpts from a bunch of modern translations and it looks like a lot of them are at about the same English level. There really aren't any big differences to be honest (for a casual reader) that I'm seeing, just a little bit of difference in structure and word choice.
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Nov 1, 2014 02:29
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I got a stupidly vague question that will hopefully lead to some less vague questions. What happened to the Phoenicians? It looks like they were everywhere, setting up colonies all over the Mediterranean. I guess Carthage was a colony of theirs and I know how that worked out but what about the rest? And why does there seem to be no substantial writing by them that I can find at all? Their alphabet is pretty famous but I cant find much of anything actually written in it. I'm trying to get a sense of how they lived and stuff with some basic googling and I feel like I just can't find much of anything, every other empire or culture has quite a bit but the Phoenicians just existed, I think everyone hated them (??) and then they stopped existing.
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Dec 28, 2014 03:59
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That all makes sense. So there never really was some Phoenician empire except for I guess Carthage, and they weren't really some big collection of important city states like Greece but just a small generic culture that got a little bit lucky at one point? Did they share anything with or were they culturally related/descended from any other people that we do have more from? Their alphabet survived though right? I think that's why, in my mind, I thought they were bigger and more important than they actually were. How did that happen if they were just a minor whatever place? Arglebargle III posted:This is funny: the Atlantis story closely parallels some Greek legends about conflict with the Persians and Phoenicians. This is evidence that the South American Atlantians allied with the Persians and may even have given them some tips on how to build their fortifications. I'm sorry though, what? South America? Atlanians' horsemanship? What three papers?
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Dec 28, 2014 04:19
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euphronius posted:Fine call it the Western Phoenician Empire. Empire or not, thanks everyone for the stuff about the Phoenicians. I always come into this thread wondering about stuff, but I don't know enough to know what questions to ask. Like right now, I'm curious about the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia, but I can't think of a good question to start it off. I'm just trying to get a sense for how these people lived and what's left of them. I hear they had sailing and villages and trading and stuff, farming but no irrigation. Did they have any kind of government? Religion? I guess of course they had religion but do/can we know anything about it? What were these villages like? I can't think of a way to be less vague.
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Dec 30, 2014 11:33
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PittTheElder posted:That said, whether there might have been some Polynesian-South American contact is an open question in academia yes? I've got some vague memories of watching a documentary about a decade ago. From what I remember, the point of the documentary was that some people from the pacific ending up on the west coast somewhere in the Americas before anyone had crossed into America through the Bering Strait. Then that, through some cave painting magic the thought the people who crossed over through the Bering Strait came down and slaughtered all of them, chasing them south. Through DNA testing or something they said that some of the people living in Tierra Del Fuego at the very southern tip of South America are ancestors of these original people blended with the Bering Strait people. Am I remembering wrong? Is this whole thing nonsense? Exaggerated?
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Jan 5, 2015 06:18
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Just checking in real quick. Came up in my life these days. Sea people, still a mystery right?
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Mar 3, 2015 12:22
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Hey history thread, I'm in the early stages of planning a high school class on Roman history. Anyone got any good recommendations for books that sorta go through a good overview of.... The whole thing? Not looking for a textbook, looking for something to read through myself and probably use as a basis for the syllabus. Otherwise the class is going to be 10 classes in a row of stuff I find cool then 5 minute lessons on the stuff I don't care about.
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Jun 2, 2020 14:06
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Kaal posted:Check out Mary Beard's "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome". It's intended to be fairly "People's History"-ish. Thanks! This looks like it will do the job and this evilweasel posted:this is quite good but it's both a book about roman history and about history itself - i.e. how we know what we know and what we know vs. what we don't (which i found very interesting, but someone just interested in rome itself may not) might actually be a plus. The class needs to be structured in a way that gets them talking about history, and "how do we know what we know" has been my approach so far.
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Jun 2, 2020 15:05
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This is probably a dumb question, and maybe the answer is the reconstruction is probably wrong. But, with the curve in the center (where they walk through it, the almost arch) and guy carved into it they obviously could chop up some blocks and do a good job at it. So, why is the outside part on the left still lumpy mismatched stones? They didn't think to smooth them out or make them square and look nice? Or were they probably squared, nice stones that got worn out into weird shapes over time and the artist just didn't think through that when drawing what it might have looked like? Or did the Hittites have a thing for lumpy stones?
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Jun 5, 2020 01:28
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I think you can find a case like that in every country, I dunno if anyone actually remembers this scandal because I never anyone talk about it but https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/24/magazine/into-the-mouths-of-babes.html was a big deal. I'm kind of amazed that company even still exists.
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Jun 14, 2020 05:18
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Anyone here know Ancient Greek? I'm trying to understand, word by word, and the grammar, behind something written in Ancient Greek (whatever kind of Greek wealthy powerful Romans learned before 170CE I guess.) It's from Marcus Aurelius, "ὀρθὸν οὖν εἶναι χρή, οὐχὶ ὀρθούμενον" and should translate to "stand straight, not straightened" or something like that. If I got the right line at least, I know no Greek so I cant be sure. But google translate and all that seem to fail to translate it, I'm guessing because they're seeing it as modern Greek. So, I have no idea which word is what and stuff. Figured if anyone was familiar with 2000 year old Greek it'd be someone who reads this thread.
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Jun 11, 2022 05:37
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Grevling posted:I don't know if my last reply was clear and what you wanted, so I figured I could go word by word instead of what I wrote earlier. I've seen you in other threads so I know you speak more than one language but I realized you still might not know what I'm talking about when I use grammatical terms, and you said you wanted to understand the grammar. I have a bachelor's degree in Ancient Greek so I'm not an authority but I know the basics. Thanks! This makes a lot of sense. It's going to get etched on a thing I'm getting made, but it felt a little stupid to get it on something without at least somewhat understanding it in the language it was written in. It was a line that stuck with me from Meditations, and I had always wondered how much of its impact was from the translator or from the original text, now that I'm seeing how the Greek works it seems just as impactful as the translations.
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Jun 12, 2022 14:22
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I don't know how this thread is on the ethics of ancient coins, so maybe I'll get poo poo on for this. But my logic is, I wouldn't buy most artifacts that have any actual value, they should be in a museum, but when it comes to Roman coins from everything I've heard they're loving everywhere because the Roman empire was massive. Most have almost no real value and if they end up in a museum they're just kept with the thousands of others in a box somewhere in storage unless there's something special about one. So when it comes to Roman coins, ehh whatever I don't feel too bad about getting one. So I got one, which was really hard to get shipped to China and I honestly expected customs to steal it, because that's a thing here and I thought they'd be like "drat, silver, this is getting 'seized'" but I really wanted it for sentimental reasons (obviously, since it's Marcus Aurelius, this is all about Stoicism to me.) So, my denarius, ~171CE Marcus Aurelius on the front, Roma on the back holding Victory and a spear.   Just thought I'd share here maybe someone would think it's cool.
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Jun 29, 2022 03:32
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galagazombie posted:So much of the worlds religious taboos and proscriptions are so very obviously the pet peeve or traumatic memory of the individual writer. How do I get in on this? Cuz I got one. "It was loving Sumer not Sumeria, Sumerian is the adjective for Sumer. For if he says Sumeria he shall be surely and instantly put to death." I don't get why that's so common but it instantly makes me write off whatever I'm reading, such a basic thing to get constantly wrong and also my stupidest and most trivial pet peeve. I feel like, of all historical places, ancient Mesopotamia is probably the most full of people talking out their rear end, maybe 2nd to Egypt but either way they're close.
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Jul 17, 2022 03:09
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Tulip posted:Sumeria  My school sucked and we only got French or Spanish. I really like the idea of learning Latin but it's pretty hard to motivate yourself to learn a language with no practical use. I tried with Sumerian back in college and that didn't go very far. Though there wasn't a "learn the basics wiki" back then like this so I was trying to learn everything from very academic sources.
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Jul 30, 2022 02:28
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I'm gonna describe Army of Darkness as an isekai from now on
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Aug 1, 2022 04:52
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Telsa Cola posted:I'm not sure this is entirely fair. My understanding as a POC is a lot of Chinese racism against Africans is mostly home grown. It's definitely something I've been hearing about for awhile. That's maybe true for a lot of it, but the weird thing to me is that a lot of the language of it now is definitely not. Stereotypes and racist arguments that are explicitly American are pretty much the entirety of the Chinese racist discourse now but, obviously, translated into Chinese.
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Aug 2, 2022 12:37
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I don't understand cats at all, I got a bengal so she's a cross (and a few generations) between a domestic cat and an Asian leopard cat. But those are two different species? Which, ok, different species can sometimes breed. But then they say they're two different genera. How the gently caress does that make sense? How can you be simultaneously that close and that far apart? And I bet you could breed all sorts of weird cat breeds if you tried, so what even are cats? I think the African wildcat seems a hell of a lot closer to the domestic cat than dogs are to wolves too, Im not entirely convinced there even is a difference between them. So I'll believe that dingos are dogs.
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Sep 4, 2022 14:07
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FishFood posted:I love that avocados evolved alongside giant sloths and were entirely dependent on giant sloths pooping out their giant seeds until humans figured out they could eat them at the same time they exctincted the sloths. I wish the sloths were still around, I bet we could be friends I read that sloths basically let themselves get insanely filthy and maybe even grow junk on them as a defense mechanism to make them smell so horrible they're unpalatable to predators. If giant sloths do the same thing I dunno if you'd really wanna be their friend. If they did and they still lived maybe the world would be a completely different place as we'd all have to deal with the giant stank animal walking around, too slow to get it away from you fast enough.
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Sep 5, 2022 02:54
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Tunicate posted:if they're giant they don't need to stink to be not worth the effort of killing Well maybe they should have. Maybe if they smelled godawful this wouldn't have happened https://www.science.org/content/article/humans-drove-giant-sloths-extinction
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Sep 5, 2022 03:53
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he's eating the track but then there's also a track under him so at some point obscured by the train that track becomes two tracks with one stacked on the other and I just don't see the practical purpose for a design like that?
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Sep 26, 2022 12:45
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