Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

It's pretty good. Cao cao is really just a villain because convention portrays Liu Bei as the real hero and they spend their lives fighting each other.

Speaking of which, I'm still waiting on Arglebargle's "Liu Bei's adventures in treachery part II".

# ¿ Mar 15, 2015 21:19

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 01:28

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Given how many words first appear in Shakespeare, he probably just made up words to fit the meter, like Dr. Seuss did for his rhymes. The difference is people kept using Shakespeare's made up words. So they transformed into "real" words.

Making up new words is not uncommon. You just need to be famous/popular enough for people to keep using the new nizzards and hakken-kraks until people who haven't read the books understand what schloppity-schlopp means.

EDIT: Guess not. But I still think we should incorporate more of Dr. Seuss' new words into the English language.

golden bubble fucked around with this message at 02:39 on May 3, 2015

# ¿ May 3, 2015 02:34

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

xthetenth posted:

Why wouldn't Marcus Aurelius be able to adopt a guy to be emperor? It seems like there's plenty of precedent, what with it being the way things were done for nearly 100 years and Commodus being the sort of guy you could believe died in a tragic forgetting to breathe accident.

The previous emperors had the good/bad fortune to outlive all their biological male children, and some of them even outlived some adopted heirs. But Commodus just refused to die young like his more generous brothers.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2015 04:25

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

icantfindaname posted:

Yeah I mean prior to the Zhou

Traditional Chinese histories* from the Spring and Autumn period and Han dynasty have a narrative for the Shang and Xia dynasties. I think people are inclined to trust the narrative for the Shang, because they found the oracle bones, and the names of the kings on the oracle bones mostly match up to the lists of Shang kings in the Spring and Autumn period and Han dynasty histories. There's certainly evidence there was some sort of organized society before the Shang, but Xia are basically pure mythology.

* The Classic of Histories, The Sayings of Mencius, The Commentary of Zuo, Records of the Grand Historian, etc

# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 22:21

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

cheerfullydrab posted:

Someone who did exactly that last thing, literally: Pertinax.

This doesn't even end with the Western Roman Empire. Take Autokrator/Imperator Flavius Mauricius Tiberius Augustus

Dr. Charles William Previt�-Orton posted:

His fault was too much faith in his own excellent judgment without regard to the disagreement and unpopularity which he provoked by decisions in themselves right and wise. He was a better judge of policy than of men. [...] So after resounding successes he came to his fall - one of the worst disasters of the Empire.

Turns out that sending the army outside of the country to save on room and board isn't that popular with the soldiers.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2016 05:43

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

If you want a more chronological presentation, the History of China podcast is good and goes on chronological order. Though that does mean the first few episodes are pure mythology (Three Sovereigns + Five Emperors and arguably the Xia dynasty). Then again, Duncan's great the History of Rome podcast also begins with pure mythology that transitions over to history as it progresses to time periods with actual records.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2016 15:18

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Grand Fromage posted:

I am very much generalizing and there are exceptions, but in general if you compare the imperial conquests and foreign military excursions of Chinese states to those in a lot of other parts of the world, there's big difference. The biggest exception I can think of is the Qin, who were quite good at conquest and bad at staying in charge.

I think the big issue here is the modern boarders of China. The early dynasties are nowhere near as large as the modern ones are, and almost all of that expansion came from military victory. But, since China has an "5000 year unbroken tradition of dynastic rule", the battles between Former Qin and Eastern Jin are considered a civil war, and the battles between the Ostrogoths and Lombards are a proper war. By these standards, Imperial France was disappointing based upon its foreign military excursions outside of Western Europe (Invasion of Russia, Haiti, Egypt).

As for why the Chinese dynasties never pushed past the modern boarders, I think the situation is roughly analogues to Rome and Germania. At times, the Chinese were humiliated by the nomads of the steppe (Battle of Baideng), and at times they smashed the steppe warriors (the eventual conclusion of the Han-Xiongnu war), but there's just no point to holding these distant, grassy wastelands for the empire.

golden bubble fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Jun 14, 2016

# ¿ Jun 14, 2016 15:20

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Cyrano4747 posted:

Yeah. Pretty much this.

The thing you have to understand about the teaching of history is that it's basically two separate but complementary goals.

1) the imparting of knowledge about past events.

2) the development of critical thinking and analysis skills.

Pop history, like any pop version of an academic subject, is heavy on the first for entertainment purposes and light on the second. The second requires the active engagement of the person studying it, while the first can be done really passively. Bill Nye, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Carl Sagen, all of them did basically the same thing for science. You get a bunch of basic knowledge on an interesting subject in an entertaining way, but you don't have the tools to really engage on your own critical thinking about the subject or question them in any meaningful way. It's 100% received wisdom as a result, which can annoy the piss out of anyone who knows enough to spot the areas where they have simplified complex ideas to make them digestible to the layman.

I'm only about 30 episodes into it, but the British history podcast is pretty good at the second point. Since so much of early British history is poorly documented, the author will often go over several theories about what happened and his opinions upon those theories. In addition, the author's pro-British bias is easy to spot and digest.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2016 20:20

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Ynglaur posted:

The century fluctuated between 80 and 120 men, differing over time and by troop type, iirc

That's still better than the Strategikon of late antiquity. That author specifically recommends making every unit a slightly different size to screw with enemy scouts.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2017 20:50

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

cheetah7071 posted:

That particular saint's life is apparently full of instances of "and then he didn't act like complete scum of the earth, as would be expected of someone of his birth"

Now I'm curious about which saint this is.

# ¿ May 26, 2017 20:09

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

peer posted:

Be aware that History of Rome is a little rough early on in terms of sound quality and Duncan's delivery. Gets better quickly.

Most of the good history podcasts have some teething issues in the early episodes, while the podcaster is learning to podcast well. I'd still listen to them anyway. The History of Byzantium is strange, because I think it is Robin Pierson's first real podcast, but it does not have obvious teething issues.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2017 19:19

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Jack2142 posted:

Thats what I gathered too, the arrival of what sounds to be essentially the black death is the thing that ruins everything, especially since in the podcast it gets noted it wasn't one massive wave that killed everyone... it kept poping up every 20-30 years for a century or more killing huge swathes of the population. The Empire seems to recover in the late 800's partially just because the plagues stop ravaging everything.

Justinian the Second, and that was because the guy who took over from him wanted to be merciful, usually they just killed the person before then. After Justinian came back... then they started doing the blinding of potential usurpers. Haven't got to them starting castrating people instead yet though.

Its pretty insane that she pulled off becoming Roman Empress, but she still was not a good person.

See Wu Zetian for another example of a cool, but amoral Empress. I'd argue that blinding/mutilating a political loser, then sending them to a distant wealthy monastery is still better than "suggesting" they commit suicide.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 20:50

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

fishmech posted:

You can hardly call cats an invasive species in the vast majority of Europe, Western-Central Asia, and Africa, where wildcats were endemic for hundreds of thousands of years and where the common domestic cats of today are from (particularly from the Northern Africa/Western Asia subspecies, but there's also a lot of intermixture of the European subspecies.)

They are in the Americas. Coincidentally, most of those articles about murderous cats, and the pie graph from FAUXTON's post all come from US institutions.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2017 17:57

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Mantis42 posted:

On the other hand, depending on how you count it, China has spent more of its history divided than united. It took centuries for a stable empire to emerge from the wreckage of the Han dynasty, for instance. If you wanted, you could call in to question the continuity between any of the empires. Think of how many empires in the west have tried to claim the heritage of Rome - how would our perception of them change if they actually succeeded in uniting Europe?

I don't know why the Western Jin aren't considered one the of official dynasties. I admit the Jin never got most of Bingzhou to submit, but they had pretty much every other Han province under their thumb a little over a century after the official end of the Han. Is it because of their silly War of Eight Princes?

# ¿ Sep 21, 2017 23:18

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Jazerus posted:

nah i understand all of this, it has never felt like a full picture of augustus's options to me though. had he wanted to, his estate and offices could have been broken up into a new balance of power in the hands of many different individuals, a sort of reset of the wealth and power accumulation that killed the republic. i guess by the time tiberius was the last remaining heir it was too late to change course to a radical revamp of the republic's constitution with the intention of creating an ultimately stable republic instead of the easily-compromised one that had existed previously even had augustus wanted to - and being rather conservative when it comes to taking risks, that might have simply been off the table as too uncertain regardless.

I feel like it would end up being a more violent version of the Ma Bell Story. A majority of the people who would get shares of his inheritance would immediately try to reassemble the full inheritance and regain the power held by Augustus. Unless it was done perfectly, the new republic would probably create another principate after a few bloody purges or civil wars.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2017 03:00

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

nothing to seehere posted:

Yea, until the late industrial revolution crop yield is the big factor in stability and wellbeing. Gotta eat to live. Until we get industrial fertilisers and mechanised labour, crop yields will still plummet in down years: Potatoes are probably the best choice for that reason, even if expanding the food supply just means population grows bigger before they all die next famine.

I love the irony that Thomas Robert Malthus published his theory just after industrial agriculture started to invalidate it.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2017 21:54

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

But they also didn't take the sheep and horses. What kind of self-respecting marauder refuses a looted horse? It's wealth that provides it's own getaway method.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2018 20:09

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

spoon daddy posted:

In addition to bureaucracy helping keep the republic moving along, I think there is merit to the idea that succession in the ERE had strong elements of republicanism to it. That helped(though not always) to keep things getting too radically different.

That's the Constantinople hypothesis, right? That Constantinople is so important to the ERE, and so hard to take by force that any claimant to the imperial throne had to have some sort of support among the various factions in the City.

As for China, it's interesting how the first person to usurp a dynasty using court intrigue instead of raw military force set up the precedent for how to properly replace a Chinese emperor in the form of the Nine Bestowments, a set of nine "gifts" that only exist to signal to everyone that the shadow emperor is about to become the formal emperor:

quote:

1. Gift of a wagon and horses: when the official is appropriate in his modesty and walking in an appropriate manner, so that he does not need to walk any more.
2. Gift of clothes: when the official writes well and appropriately, to show his good deeds.
3. Gift of armed guards: when the official is brave and willing to speak the truth, so that he can be protected.
4. Gift of written music: when the official has love in his heart, so that he can teach the music to his people.
5. Gift of a ramp: when the official is appropriate in his acts, so that he can walk on the ramp and maintain his strength.
6. Gift of a red door: when the official maintains his household well, so that his household can be shown to be different.
7. Gift of arms, bow, and arrows: when the official has good conscience and follows what is right, so that he can represent the central government to stamp out treason.
8. Gift of an axe: when the official is strong, wise, and loyal to the imperial household, so that he can execute the wicked.
9. Gift of wine: when the official is filially pious, so that he can sacrifice the wine to his ancestors.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2019 18:10

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

From the whining about students thread, we can see an exceptionally poor understanding of Roman history

quote:

The new book What Can We Learn From the Fall of the Roman Empire? describes a new view of Rome's fall that sees a more prosaic, less exciting approach.

This book is an attempt to restore Rome's historical stature.

While Rome itself was at its height, its empire was in decline. The Romans could no longer carry out the task of protecting the peoples who lived across their borders, and their empire was increasingly being threatened by barbarian invasions.

This new approach sees Rome's fall in terms of four stages:

First, Rome as a military power collapsed under internal instability. By the time of the emperor Nero, the Roman army was being disbanded as legions were being lost to the barbarian invasions.

Second, internal crisis in Rome's society undermined Rome's political leaders and weakened Rome's army. The emperors Nero, Caligula, and Vitellius were no longer trusted by the people, and soon, all three were removed from office.

Third, once internal anarchy spread to the empire's politics, the military leaders that came afterwards were unable to protect Rome against the barbarian invasions of the East.

Fourth, the fall of Rome as a military power was a sign that the Roman city itself was failing as it was not built to be capable of controlling large populations. The decline of Rome as a military power meant that by the time of the death of Augustus, the Roman Empire was no longer able to control its vast borders.

For this reason, the study of the fall of Rome has become the subject of a variety of theories. The author examines two key theories.

The first is the Classical theory (known as the 'conquest' theory), which sees the collapse of the empire in its last days as a consequence of a civil war between Rome's two 'brides'.

Contemporary commentators have often confused this theory in their scholarship. The second theory is the 'persecuting' theory, which sees the decline of Rome as the work of the Roman Senate, which had become more autocratic than ever under the fall of Emperor Tiberius.

The author shows that both 'conquest' and 'persecuting' theories can be useful if one accepts that the empire's fall occurred because of two competing political processes within the empire.

The book concludes by analysing the effects these two processes had on Rome. The author argues that the rise of the Senate under Nero was an essential ingredient to Rome's recovery.

Written by the GPT-2 neural network, which was trained by Reddit.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2019 19:32

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

They absolutely did have to deal with some acne. There's evidence that King Tut and Cleopatra both suffered from acne during their lives. But there's also evidence that it wasn't as common or as bad as modern acne.

EDIT:
The Age Old Problem of Acne
Acne vulgaris is one of the top three most commonly encountered dermatological problems worldwide in both primary and secondary care. Acne diagnosis and treatment date back to ancient Greek and Egyptian times. This article explores acne through the ages and discusses past theories on etiology and treatment with particular focus on the discovery of retinoids and their impact on women�s health.

Acne Vulgaris: A Disease of Western Civilization
In westernized societies, acne vulgaris is a nearly universal skin disease afflicting 79% to 95% of the adolescent population. In men and women older than 25 years, 40% to 54% have some degree of facial acne, and clinical facial acne persists into middle age in 12% of women and 3% of men. Herein we report the prevalence of acne in 2 nonwesternized populations: the Kitavan Islanders of Papua New Guinea and the Ach� hunter-gatherers of Paraguay. � Of 1200 Kitavan subjects examined (including 300 aged 15-25 years), no case of acne (grade 1 with multiple comedones or grades 2-4) was observed. Of 115 Ach� subjects examined (including 15 aged 15-25 years) over 843 days, no case of active acne (grades 1-4) was observed.

The authors of this paper blame high acme rates on westernized societies on the high glycemic loads common in westernized diets.

golden bubble fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Jun 25, 2019

# ¿ Jun 25, 2019 16:16

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

HEY GUNS posted:

17th century military personell and gout

although rates of gout are way UP, watch your diets goons

Wasn't that the period when doctors believed red meat was the healthiest thing ever, and vegetables were bad for your health? I suspect some of this may be related to the rise of the Atkins/Paleo fad, and the increase in "extra protein" marketing for food.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2019 22:01

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

In light of the new DLC for Total War, how good are the history books for the War of Eight Princes and the resulting Uprising of the Five Barbarians during the Jin dynasty?

# ¿ Jul 16, 2019 18:13

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

That's a really interesting question. It also makes me wonder why Bucharest is located just north of the Danube. If Bucharest was like 50 miles further south, it would serve that role. But it doesn't, and I have no idea why.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2019 21:19

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Epicurius posted:

Something people forget is that the Roman government itself was pretty small compared to a modern government, and exercised a lot less control over its people...it wasn't big enough to do so, record keeping and communications technology wasn't advanced enough to do so, and expectations about what a government was "supposed" to do were different.

Even more recent pre-industrial empires had relatively small numbers of officials. I believe the Qing dynasty only had a few hundred of thousand officials at it's peak to govern an empire of hundreds of millions. By contrast, even if you don't count teachers, the US government has millions of non-military employees.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2019 19:11

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

euphronius posted:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT

Approx 14% of all workers

You can see the two big dips named Ronald Regan and beginning of semi-regular govt. shutdowns. I bet the number has also been influenced by the desire for outsourced contractors over direct hires.

That said, some old problems are new again. The current college admissions issues with meritocracy and standardized exams are basically the same reasons why the Chinese aristocracy dominated the imperial examinations system.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2019 20:38

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

JesustheDarkLord posted:

Unironically, what evidence outside the Bible points to it being true? Is there more or less than for the Garden of Eden?

It's in one of the Bible books that reads as mythic history instead of being pure mythology. I don't see any reason to treat it as more historically valid than Homer's works. But I also don't understand why some people think it's less historically valid than Homer's works.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2019 15:34

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

The British History podcast also covers the same event, except that the moral in this case is that you should never cross a bold anglo-saxon archbishop. The powerful, politically connected archbishops always seem to come on top in the end.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2019 22:12

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Don Gato posted:

I think he is referring just in the general cultural sphere, I've met a ton of people who take 300 for fact.

Since 99% of 300 is a story told by the Spartan Dilios to other greeks, I like to believe that 300 is an accurate representation of Spartan propaganda. That when the Spartans went around building their reputation, the stories they told were ancient versions of 300.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2020 16:06

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Grand Fromage posted:

Assyrian content:

https://twitter.com/cwjones89/status/1275412504219435008

Assyrian content part two:
https://twitter.com/cwjones89/status/1275789885882937344

# ¿ Jun 24, 2020 17:11

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 01:28

golden bubble: Jun 3, 2011; yospos

Tulip posted:

This question is so big that I had an out of body experience trying to think about it. I can't think of any particular summary because its just...so massive.

There are two questions that I like that highlight the importance of pottery and the difference between life in the prepottery neolithic and the rest of history. The first is: what are you storing things in and how are you transporting them without pottery? There are viable answers here: woven baskets being a good answer, animal skin bags being another. But those have very limited durability, which limits both the duration of storage and by extension the distances you can transport things. And importantly those things don't meaningfully extend the shelf life of anything you store in them, which is the vast majority of things you'd want to store anyway. You have some answers like "holes" for longer term but for I hope obvious reasons you can't carry a hole full of nuts to the next town over. Pottery opens up a lot of options here, in terms of storing things, moving things, pickling things.

The one that was a little more mind breaking to me is: how do you cook? Like what cooking techniques do you have pre-pottery? Remember that pre-pottery also means pre-metal. There is a technique for making soup without pottery that is very clever and also loving sucks from a convenience standpoint that I'll leave as an exercise to the imagination, but cooking prepottery is a real pain in the rear end. You can roast on a skewer over open flame, and you can wrap things in leaves and put them in coals or an oven, Its a really limited set of options, and these techniques are generally not super efficient and are definitely a lot harder to control.

The invention of pottery is not going to have any clean summary. Pottery was likely invented in many places independently but not simultaneously, so the question of the invention of pottery in Japan vs Iraq vs Germany vs Mexico is going to get you different answers. And of course this is thoroughly prehistoric* so we don't exactly have any written sources where we have an inventor going "yo dude check out this crazy poo poo I just figured out." What we do see is that red clay mixed with some sand and coiled can be fired in a bonfire and AFAIK that's the most common start point. Entirely likely that people independently noticed that if you get clay hot enough you can create a hard shaped object, which opens up all kinds of poo poo because without this your options for creating hard objects are basically wood stone and bone, which have limited shaping options. But any more detail than that is going to get incredibly chaotic and its also not settled, since we have ceramic works that well predate the neolithic and a whole half of the history of agriculture is generally considered "prepottery neolithic" and of course Japan just flat out started into paleothic pottery and it's all very confusing/exciting.

Anyway this was my attempt to organize my thoughts/knowledge on this question, I hope it was at least a little edifying and hopefully there's another goon who's smarter than me about the neolithic b/c I don't know nearly as much as I'd like.

*Remember that well-established clay industries were a precondition of the first place to develop writing since they were writing on clay

It's actually possible to boil water in perishable containers. So a soup container only needs to be waterproof, it does not need to be metal or ceramic. A waterproof animal skin could work if you don't mind doing it just once.

https://paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20150054.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpjLcLa7rkU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9gKzea3Cno

# ¿ Dec 7, 2022 21:41

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists