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homullus posted:The Greek historian Thucydides, heralded for his unusual-in-ancient-historiography insistence on not including fables as history and on trying to be as factual as possible, straight up admits that the speeches in his book are made up. They're either based on the general gist of what was said or reported to have been said, or what he thought the speaker should have said. "Facts" were definitely not looked at as we see them today. How would one go about this any other way with no recordings or stenographs?
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Sep 16, 2015 19:29
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homullus posted:Thucydides also could have written sentences like "He did X because Y" in place of the speeches. Why doesn't he? Caesar's commentaries ostensibly avoid quoted speeches most of the way and the author was actually there when Caesar did this or that. Why did he do that? Ancient historiography is really interesting. If you talk an hour, that's alot of transcription. As for interview techniques, it's perfectly legit to put down the main points and leave out the rest if it's not relevant to your subject and in absence of recordings. Obviously, there's a reason why he has people hold speeches, instead of assuming that they did X because Y.
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Sep 16, 2015 20:20
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There's a part in Herodotus work where he says that the Finns are the lowest human form of life. They dwell in holes in the ground. Wonder who his source might have been.
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Sep 17, 2015 17:36
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A Strange Aeon posted:I never heard this before but it's amazing: Frigus fabula, fratrem
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Sep 18, 2015 18:45
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I could write it on a wall until I get it?
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Sep 18, 2015 18:55
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Hogge Wild posted:which ancient culture invented buttsex The same that invented kissing and fisting.
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Oct 6, 2015 09:18
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One talent ballista I've seen siege engines like that and trebuchets a few times now. Apparently there's quite a number of people building them.
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Oct 10, 2015 09:16
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What's a BuK TEL?
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Oct 10, 2015 16:48
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I didn't write that this is a trebuchet, but stated that there's many people building siege engines and that I've seen lots of pics of all kinds of them lately.
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Oct 10, 2015 16:55
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Speaking of which, are there actually any laws prohibiting people from having siege engines in their backyards?
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Oct 10, 2015 17:10
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Halloween Jack posted:Why did it take so long for the manipular system and other infantry organizations to arise from the phalanx? Considering Greece is really hilly and forested, it seems like they ought to have literally stumbled into more diverse tactics. If we put aside that these archery heavy armies required highly organized and regular training, you can look at the material aspects of bowmaking. Bowmaking also undergoes an evolution of designs. A bow is not just a bow. High drawweight doesn't necessarily mean that a bow performs stellar, it's the material and the geometry that make an efficient shooter. Longbow and flatbow designs reach back into the stoneage, and the people back then knew perfectly well what works and what not. It's not an accident that Ötzi's bow was made of yew. They're very simple tools. Great bow woods like yew and elm aren't available everywhere, and it's only yew that makes for warbow weight bows (safe for exceptional staves of other types that are harder to find than an ok piece of yew). Warbow weight means above 70#. We want to shoot people who wear some sorts of armor and have shields, but we only have average wood, so what now? Composite designs. Before we talk about this, note that most of the research on this is quite dated or not there at all. Wood and other organic materials decay, so the longer you look back, the lesser artifacts you have that you can rely on. Horn as the most rare and hard to work materials in these bows dictates alot of what you can make of it. Horn has a tendency to spring back into it's original shape, and you can't agressively steam it like wood, lest you destroy it's properties. If you think about composite bowmaking, you need to start to think what you can do with the horn that you have available. If we reach way back, I had a list of cross-sections somewhere of old egypitian bows that shows that they experimented with how to arrange horn and wood and packing it with sinew and sinew backed selfbows (can't find it atm, sry). Why? If you have lovely wood, you need a composite construction to reach the upper ends of drawweights to hurt people that wear any sort of armor, or make any sort of working warbow at all. These are very likely not the first people to come up with this, but we found these bows relatively well preserved in their tombs. Tutankhamun had a number of them when he was found. The straight limbs suggest that they were made with Oryx horn, which works quite well for that task. Judging from depiction on reliefs, this type was also present in the middle east. A design that carried the day for a long time after that is the scythian one, everybody knows this "cupid" bow shape. These are small and horribly complicated to make, they sport somewhere around 22 pieces of steambent wood, and Ibex horn sandwiched in the middle, wrapped in sinew. They found some of them in the deserts of Xinjiang. This is the period of Thuky and Alexander. Typical scythian arrowheads are trilobed bronze casts, not tanged, not very good at piercing armor. They carry lots of these light arrows.  There's alot of bowmaking going on in the steppes, as time progresses, a new design spreads that is associated with the huns. It's simplified compared to the previous type. The ears are long and have reinforcements of bone on the sides, this indicates that the pieces were connected by scarf joints, which makes these plates necessary. These bows can also be seen on Sassanian silver plates.   In late antiquity, this related type seems to be in circulation around the mediterranean. Note how the limbs aren't spliced, but scarf joints. The lower pic is a find from El-Behnasa in Egypt. These pieces are on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.   These plates are frequent finds, this type of construction evolves once more and carries on into the 11th century. The bows get smaller, and the Magyars leave very disctinct plates in their graves. This design has more acute angles, performs alot better than the previous ones. This type is a non-contact siyah bow (the string doesn't contact the base of the siyah). These are shot with a rawhide string, so there's another possible reason for their appearance. The horn needed to make this is again relatively short at around 40cm, which could mean that they were made with long horned sheep imo. This type was in use all around the baltic and russia, one find was even in sweden. We're lucky to have a complete bow from that time, the Moshcheveya Balka bow, which is currently on display in the Hermitage, see lower pic.   Meanwhile in China, Tang dynasty artists depict this type without the boneplates, indicating that somebody in the steppe found a new way of joining the grip, limbs and ears. There is another almost complete find from a turkic grave from the 9th century I think that suggests that the splice was invented around that time, but I don't want to go into detail in this post. This is the dawn of splices limbs, which opens the way to more agressive designs. There are several complete finds from graves in Mongolia, so we know how they looked and how they were constructed.  At the time of the mongol conquest a few hundred years later, people were shooting this: The Shiluustei Suum bow  The famous bow from Cagaan Chaad.  Those were strung the whole time, hence they're twisted. I've left out lots, but this post already got too long. There's lots of other finds inbetween, lots of dead ends that people tried out. General trends are simplified and more efficient designs. If you don't have access to a good source of horn, you can go gently caress yourself. Long and flawless horn over 60cm is rare. Goat horn is a nightmare to work with, first it's really annoyingly hard to cut it up, second, you need to straigthen it. There's lots to know about the metallurgy of arrowheads, but there's barely research on this subject afaik. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Nov 17, 2015 |
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Nov 17, 2015 11:12
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A while ago I managed to get "Bill, Joseph Howland, “Notes on Arrow Wounds,” American Journal of Medical Sciences, 154, 1892, p. 366", according to his data, 100% of the hits to the abdomen were lethal to the patient. Upper torso comes after that, with a fatal rate of about 50%. Heads getting lost in the wound or stuck in bone, that's when things get really messy.
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Nov 17, 2015 17:12
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Phobophilia posted:How did Greek and Phoenician colonies work? It's not like the places were uninhabited. Did they simply march in and build a fortified town, or did they trade with the locals, or cut a deal with the nearest kingdom? Or some combination of the above? Less densely populated that one might expect. The establishment of greek colonies had a deep and energizing impact on the celtic hinterland in mediterranean france and spain. Unsurprisingly, it's the thirst for wine and luxury goods that fires up trade and gives some interesting impulses to celtic cultural life. There's a chapter on that in Barry Cunliffe's book "The ancient Celts".
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Jan 3, 2016 16:44
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The old thread recommended it. Totally worth having.
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Jan 3, 2016 20:23
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What's the curriculum of the master in Irish studies? 
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Jan 10, 2016 20:14
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Thesis defense is a bareknuckle fight over 5 rounds with the traveller guest lector.
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Jan 10, 2016 21:00
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Mary Beard's SPQR was good. Got some more good book titles that you could throw at me?
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Jan 12, 2016 18:00
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Can you give me an exact title? Search is just turning up lots of landmarks in Rome or travelling guides.
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Jan 16, 2016 08:40
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HEY GAL posted:it's a series of certain editions/english translations of classical works ...and I already have all these works.
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Jan 16, 2016 10:15
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I know exactly what you are planning: I don't need more books in rambling 19th century german.
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Jan 16, 2016 10:46
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BS. The huns were into deformed heads. Just another thing that nobles do to appear to be apart from the rabble.
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Jan 18, 2016 11:49
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Framing ancient discourses in modern terms and ideas is bound to produce garbage.
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Jan 22, 2016 08:53
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Hey, sure. Let's ask what the romans thought about electricity and steam powered engines.
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Jan 22, 2016 16:34
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:I thought everyone understood dong language? At least your mom's oral skills are great.
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Jan 30, 2016 16:47
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my dad posted:It's solved by nuance. You just need a logic system that isn't limited to "completely true" and "completely false" You forgot to mention the turks.
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Mar 18, 2016 15:37
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Hogge Wild posted:Speaking of genetics, I really like this map: What's "K" doing in Serbia? Hey Hogge, where did you get that one from?
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Mar 18, 2016 17:02
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my dad posted:
First I suspected that "K" stands for "Kebap", but here you go: http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_K_mtDNA.shtml
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Mar 18, 2016 18:01
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Each time there's a number of new posts in this thread, it fills me with hope that they finally found "Lives of famous whores".
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Mar 26, 2016 22:38
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Grand Fromage posted:Just get your mom to publish her diary already. That was absolutely inevitable, eh?
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Mar 27, 2016 13:38
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Ithle01 posted:Slave as in property of the state much like janissaries or mamelukes. Who were of course soldiers. It gets even better, a janissary was by all means a civil servant with salary and benefits. Not just soldiers, but craftsmen and engineers too.
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Apr 19, 2016 07:16
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They're property of the state, can't leave or marry, or join the normal economy (they're part of a parallel state-run economy). They also need to reside in the barracks and can't own property outside until they retire. They can't inherit being a janissary. At first they only recruited in what's Albania today and had restrictions on who could join (no gypsies and no anatolians). All of the above gets abolished by time.
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Apr 19, 2016 08:27
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my dad posted:Also, the whole thingie where they're literally kidnapped and brainwashed boys, and if unlucky enough to be particularly good looking, raped somewhere along the way, too. And I'm pretty sure the recruit-in-Albania thing got dropped as soon as they captured places that weren't Albania. Triggered? They preferred Albanians, because they were considered badasses. As a 3rd or 4th son who doesn't inherit land, your carreer choices vary between slow starvation and banditry, so all that doesn't look so bad.
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Apr 19, 2016 09:31
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Octy posted:Ugh, I wish I lived in Europe just for the slim chance of finds like this on my property. Maybe they'll find a copy of Suetonius' Lives of Famous Whores? Just a 5min walk from where my parents live, there was an excavation of one of the limes's towers.
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Apr 19, 2016 12:07
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Hogge Wild posted:How about you go to some other place to post about JFK and Atlantis. Words of wisdom.
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Apr 22, 2016 08:32
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Deteriorata posted:The most common theory I've seen was that it was first worked out in a significant way somewhere in the southern steppes of central Asia around 1300 BC. Why there and then, I don't know. The iron overall wasn't very good, but bits of it would randomly end up as high-carbon steel, excellent for arrow points. That's quite odd, I've only ever seen scythian bronze arrowheads. Speaking of which, I had the chance to see and examine one of the few complete scythian bows that were found in the deserts of Xinjiang little more than a month ago. Quite memorable. A well known collector of archery equipment died recently and they auctioned his stuff in Munich. Apparently he bought it and a few other quite rare items from a museum in china. Now it's going back.
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Jun 17, 2016 11:50
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I was there for only a few hours to pick up things, so no meeting. Didn't know if they would allow me to take photos, so I snagged a few when nobody looked. They fetched the boss, because I was asking questions about my stuff and he was quite delighted to show the rare artefacts. Touching was forbidden as it was extremely brittle, but they opened the case and let me stick my head inside. The light was bad and no flash allowed, so only a few turned out to be sharp enough to make out details, aaand when they opened it, I was so excited to look at it that I forgot to to take pics and look at all the other stuff, like the arrows down there and the quiver fragments.  They also had a hunish bow there, which I also took pics of. Don't recall ever hearing of a complete find of these either, so that was pretty drat nice to look at. What's odd is, that these rare items didn't really fetch extraordinary prices, but kinda low. Chinese really love their jades, they paid almost twice the sum that the scythian bow cost for a couple of Qing thumbrings. 26k 
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Jun 17, 2016 12:42
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Smell? Kinda like old library, nothing really strong. I'd guess that it's the smell of the place that they were stored in. There's also a number of high profile of grave finds from mongolia from the 12th century and earlier that have some well preserved items, but apparently a good number of them ends up being looted and is sold to collectors.
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Jun 17, 2016 13:19
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How much is 6 solidi at that time?
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Jun 25, 2016 18:24
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Swan Curry posted:to this day scotland proudly celebrates holding off the mighty korean imperial army Too lovely to occupy. Sorry.
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Jul 22, 2016 06:18
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Jerusalem posted:Speaking of which I've been reading SPQR and it's a really good read - though I get the sense she's simultaneously frustrated and fascinated by the fact that so much of Roman history is one-sided propaganda distorted by decades or centuries of oral storytelling before it was written down, and it's so difficult to actually just get hold of accounts of regular people as opposed to the major political and military figures of the day. Just passed the same spot 2 days ago. It's a good book.
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Aug 29, 2016 11:06
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