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Hypothetical question: You mentioned that the Romans set up an embassy in China in 166. Let's say that Imperial China and Rome somehow really hated each other and immediately tried to go to war, with the same sort of stubbornness Rome demonstrated when getting steamrolled by Hannibal. Who would you wager on? Or would it even be possible to fight a meaningful war across so long a distance? I know that both of them were great at logistics, but I'm not sure if they could close the gap...
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Jan 13, 2014 02:33
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I was figuring that the Mongols managed to conquer the area between the two empires in about sixty or seventy year. Seemed like that give a slight possibility that the excellent Roman and Han logisticians could manage to get their soldiers close enough to fight. Admittedly, Khan managed it with a better political environment, and after the invention of the stirrup. Without the silly alternate-history scenario, though, how did their militaries match up in terms of organization and equipment? I really don't know a lot about how China's armies operated.
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Jan 13, 2014 03:02
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Patrick Spens posted:I've been told that the biggest roman numeral is M, which would mean that the biggest number you could write in roman numerals is MMMCMXCIX, or 3999. So how did the romans deal with large numbers? Would they just write them out? Funny you should bring that up. Gelo II believed that the upper bound of numbers was smaller than the number of grains of sand in the world. Archimedes took offense at that.
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Feb 14, 2014 05:22
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Brawnfire posted:
Mostly because if you want to use a mathematically meaningful base, you'll be using radians.
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Feb 14, 2014 20:17
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Didn't they make the word 'peace' illegal?
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Feb 27, 2014 21:01
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Al Harrington posted:We don't know the romans recipe for concrete either, ours is quite inferior I thought we did; the secret ingredient being pozzolanic volcanic ash
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Mar 6, 2014 00:38
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Grand Fromage posted:I doubt the US Army has a specific literacy rule as true illiteracy is virtually unknown in a modern developed nation. Yeah, apparently the cutoff on the ASVAB is around 8th grade or so nowadays (used to be 6th back in the 60's). That said, apparently there's a specific "Basic Skills Education Program" that deals with remedial literacy for people who test as fifth grade or under. Oh, and to keep this kinda historical, here's the test they used in WWI.
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Apr 26, 2014 07:51
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Sapa consumption, perhaps?
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Apr 28, 2014 21:39
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Charlie Mopps posted:This is far more likely. Although, if you found yourself in Roman times, if you managed to learn Greek you might get away with a lot of weird ideas by claiming it's ancient eastern or Egyptian knowledge. They liked that kind of stuff. Just say it's unpublished stuff from Archimedes. He came really close to inventing place value notation and calculus single-handedly as it is - nobody would find it implausible. That said, inventing milk pasteurization and the compass are both super easy.
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Jun 27, 2014 03:20
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dinoputz posted:*Although if you must be proud of your peoples' genocide, I suppose it's better to be proud of the genocides that are three millennia old, whose victims are no longer around... Exactly. If you're going to pick an ancestral genocide to be proud of, you should only go for the ones with 100% completion.
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Jun 27, 2014 06:26
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PittTheElder posted:Right, I guess I should have said how well it cools when you do that, and whether the exposure of the bottom surface to a fairly hot metal effects the glass at all, or whether you have to keep the surface warm as well to try and keep the cooling even. The technical side of things. I think ancient Chinese blast furnaces could manage it.
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Jun 27, 2014 22:34
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Communist Zombie posted:On everyone saying if thrown back in time say your future math knowledge is from Aristotle or the Egyptians, what do you when they ask to see the relevant works? "I was shipwrecked, man. You expect me to have BOOKS?" Alternatively "loving Herostratus, that's what happened to them."
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Jun 28, 2014 07:14
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From what I understand, the current mining techniques used in Pakistan, Afghanistan, et cetera, are pretty close to the traditional ones they've been using for centuries. With the small addition of dynamite. Here's a couple trip reports which might be kinda interesting.
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Aug 4, 2014 20:49
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Well, considering that about 6-7% of all humans ever are currently alive today, it doesn't take too much luck to be in the modern era, at least.
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Aug 6, 2014 23:43
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Also, it's not like farmers had a ton of freedom practically speaking. The land is a tyrant of its own.
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Sep 11, 2014 13:53
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Plus weren't a ton of the mummies redheads?
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Sep 18, 2014 02:40
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Yeah we had to read a book in English class written by one of those guys. White people were made by a black mad scientist as pure evil supersoldiers or something.
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Sep 18, 2014 04:16
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As far as science fiction goes, how good is the history in Lest Darkness Fall?
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Oct 17, 2014 10:17
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Grand Fromage posted:I'm sure there was some sort of management but I don't think we have records from the water company or anything. We do, actually! First century. quote:With such an array of indispensable structures carrying so many waters, compare, if you will, the idle Pyramids or the useless, though famous, works of the Greeks! Full translation here.
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Oct 17, 2014 17:22
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Grand Fromage posted:I wouldn't be surprised if people were trying to steal water. You wouldn't be able to charge by usage with a meter or anything, I'd guess they just didn't want people breaking the thing. Maybe you had to pay a yearly tax to have running water? That would be doable. Yearly charge based on the radius of the pipe, it seems. It seems they tried to meter the overall water to find people stealing it, but they didn't really understand fluid dynamics.
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Oct 17, 2014 18:00
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I think it got burned down several times.
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Oct 18, 2014 06:19
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They were bigoted assholes, just in a different way.
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Oct 21, 2014 17:14
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I know being a roman citizen was a pretty big deal in terms of rights, et cetera. What type of proof did people have to verify it? It seems like ID cards would be too modern. Did they just have a big set of files in some central Roman bureaucracy listing every citizen?
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Nov 21, 2014 04:44
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karl fungus posted:Did Rome even have modern-style serial killers? It depends which historians you believe.
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Nov 21, 2014 07:25
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:That's odd I mean if you can make a good slashing sword or dagger you can make a razor. Swords don't have to be razor sharp.
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Nov 21, 2014 22:01
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Made me think of this bit from Frontinusquote:. The highest is New Anio; next comes Claudia; the third place is taken by Julia; the fourth by Tepula; the last by Marcia, although at its intake this mounts even to the level of Claudia. But the ancients laid the lines of their aqueducts at a lower elevation, either because they had not yet nicely worked out the art of levelling, or because they purposely sunk their aqueducts in the ground, in order that they might not easily be cut by the enemy, since frequent wars were still waged with the Italians. But now, whenever a conduit has succumbed to old age, it is the practice to carry it in certain parts on substructures or on arches, in order to save length, abandoning the subterranean loops in the valleys.
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Dec 19, 2014 18:54
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From Homer, we know that the Greeks preferred blue-green wine.
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Dec 26, 2014 07:21
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Grand Fromage posted:Poetic license doesn't get enough credit. But it is just true that not every culture uses the same terms for colors as we do. It's entirely possible ancient Greek simply didn't have the language to distinguish those colors. English has that in its history--orange is a newish concept, it was just called red before the fruit was brought over from Asia and they adopted the name for the color as well. Orange is definitely not red to us but if you read something from like the 12th century, when they say red it could be red or orange. I'm pretty sure they said 'gold-red' (or whatever the middle/old english equivalent is), and not just red.
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Dec 26, 2014 17:48
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my dad posted:About Rome? "Hannibal Ante Portas" (1960) by Slavomir Nastasijevi I might be an idiot, but I can't find a version that's in English. Only one on amazon seems to be in Serbian? Is there some other title I should be looking under?
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Jan 3, 2015 09:14
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Agean90 posted:He literally wrote it on a dare to cross pokemon with the lost legion how the hell can you be literate and think its meant to be a historical peace Best book to come out of an internet flamewar.
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Jan 7, 2015 00:08
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What were Roman prisons like? I assume that there was a huge difference between accomodations based on wealth and importance, but did the Romans have things like drunk tanks?
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Jan 11, 2015 15:12
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Tao Jones posted:They didn't really have them. Crimes that we would imprison people for were handled with corporal punishment or if you were someone important, exile, loss of property, or house arrest. Wasn't taking PoWs for ransom also a pretty big thing back then?
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Jan 12, 2015 04:47
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How about pre-trial jails? Was it the type of thing where they'd give you a rough and ready spot judgement if you weren't a citizen, and only bother to lock you up to await a full trial if you were a citizen with actual rights? Also, I vaguely recall that immunity to debt slavery was one of the perks of citizenship. What other types of judgment did they get immunity for?
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Jan 13, 2015 06:16
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Smoking Crow posted:Who's leading the Romans because Valens would get his rear end kicked by Sauron Let's be honest, Sauron would become Emperor in under a month.
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Jan 19, 2015 03:29
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JaucheCharly posted:There are many people shooting +100# warbows that could do the test. What you'd need is a substatial budget to finance sets of quality armor with authentic HRC, quilted jackets and proper arrowheads that were made with old methods and authentic HRC, crashtest dummies that measure the force of blunt trauma of the shot, lots of balistic gel, lots of different shots that are taken with different angles and distances towards the armor. That means lots of arrows too. Maybe a highspeed camera too. Whatever comes out might then apply to longbows and proper arrows. You'd need to redo the whole test for a set of composite bows shot with a thumbring and the different types of arrows and heads that were used. Sounds like something Mythbusters might try
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Jan 19, 2015 22:21
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Besides, Vikings are so much more interesting as a samurai opponent.
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Jan 20, 2015 01:59
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Octy posted:I'm curious to know just how many scrolls were destroyed in an effort to read their contents. Oh well, I look forward to the publication of some of these scrolls in the next decade or so, because if we're going to be realistic that's probably the minimum timeframe here. Minimum timeframe is a scroll per couple of decades. After all, why publish it all at once when you can make your entire career out of dribbling the info out?
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Jan 20, 2015 23:04
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sbaldrick posted:If we ever find Famous Whores it's going to be such a disappointment. It has a single entry, one line long: "Your mom".
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Jan 21, 2015 21:13
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Looks like they're also pulling texts out of papyrus mummy masks
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Jan 22, 2015 13:26
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Halloween Jack posted:If Elagabalus were alive today he'd just be a really annoying kid on tumblr. I can only imagine Cato's blog.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:46
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