|
euphronius posted:The Romans conquered Veii because of salt. But it was conquered in 386 BC or so, and while it was expensive then it definitely became cheaper as time went on and they put up more salt producing factories. Though I haven't taken any formal classes on Rome, so you should take what I said with a grain of salt (  ) since I'm just putting things together from what I've read.EDIT: Better start the new page with a question at least, but something that's been bugging me is that Iberia seems to fade out of relevancy sometime around the time Julius Caesar is marching on Rome, is there any reason for this? You'd think that with all the silver over there it would be pretty important for any general who fancied himself emperor to take so they could fund their legions, but as far as I can tell it doesn't seem to do much after all the tribes have been pacified and it is fully integrated into the empire. Don Gato fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Aug 23, 2013 |
#
¿
Aug 23, 2013 01:26
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 15:51 |
|
|
Jazerus posted:You've gotta check out the story of Justinian's agents stealing silkworms, it's Cold War-esque. I'm pretty sure Grand Fromage talked about it at some point in this thread. I thought that it was just a few random merchants who stole the silkworms, not an actual operation that Justinian ordered. Given what I know about Justinian though, I can totally see him as M, ordering agents around the globe to steal things that will make them even richer than they were.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2013 21:35
|
|
|
Britain also has some nasty tides and storms you had to sail through if you wanted to invade, and the rocky coastline isn't easy to land on during a clear day, let alone the foggy hell that usually covers the island. I'd think that it was the tides as much as anything that made coastal invasions so difficult. A navy you can beat, but the tides pulling your ships to shore, possibly smashing them against the rocks? That's a little bit harder to deal with, especially if you're from a culture that never really had a seafaring tradition and also sailed in the mostly non-tidal Mediterranean. Outside of Rome, just look at how many people the Mongols lost just from the storms sinking their fleet when they tried to invade Japan. Flat bottomed boats, rocky shores, storms and crews that aren't used to the previous two is a recipe for disaster. Naval invasions are haaaaaard.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 5, 2013 22:50
|
|
|
So is it fair to assume that modern languages with the same name share almost nothing with their ancient counterparts? I know that modern Greek has very little to do with ancient Greek, and that there have been some consanant shifts in Japanese from the middle ages to now (it's why Japan is called Nihon about as often as Nippon IIRC), but does say, ancient Chinese have as much to do with modern Chinese as Latin does to Italian?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2013 18:51
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:They had all sorts of winter vegetables and roots that would store, and the emperors at least were known to use the permanent snowcaps in the Alps as freezers. The Romans had sauerkraut and fermented turnips, those two are known from written material. I would bet other vegetables were also preserved this way. Man, I don't want to be the unlucky slave who has to get the food down from the mountain again. On a somewhat related note, did the Romans use cellars at all to store their food, or was all food stored aboveground in granaries and stuff? The temperature difference would make a huge difference in how long food lasts, and if they're dumping food in the Alps I'm guessing that the Romans also knew about that basic principle.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2013 19:48
|
|
|
Still better looking than Carlos II. Speaking (vaguely) of women, did many statues of actual women survive through the ages? We've got busts of all the emperors that I know of, and I know that we have a famous statue of Venus, but did any statues survive of what the royal/senatorial women looked like, or were they considered too low on the social totem pole to bother making depictions of anywhere other than money?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2013 06:38
|
|
|
the jizz taxi posted:Kind of his fault, especially because he was hell-bent on his son succeeding him. A colossal flaw for an otherwise very competent and wise emperor. It always sounded like a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of situation. Who knows if someone, jockeying for more power, decides that Commodus would be a great puppet to rule the empire with, and uses him as a claim to legitimacy to wear the purple. If anything, leaving the only son of the Emperor out in the cold sounds like an even worse idea than leaving him in power. Hindsight tells us that him being sent off to Britain would probably be best for the empire, but Marcus Aurelius couldn't have known that. Or he was willfully ignoring it because Commodus was still his son, for whatever that counted for.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2013 23:28
|
|
|
That Marcus Antonius seems like a cool dude, you hear that he's Julius's friend?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2014 01:30
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Some comedy after your child sacrifice reading. So wait, they are byzantine fanatics but they acknowledge it as a separate thing from Rome? Wouldn't the smart thing be to just claim direct descendence from Rome instead and claim all of Rome's former territory? I'm betting the answer is that the former byzantine territory they're claiming just has a lot of brown people in it so they think they would be able to control them easier.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 26, 2014 18:18
|
|
|
How was history taught in Rome anyway? I know that those who could afford it were tutored (read: Forced to memorize everything), but how did the common Roman learn about his country's history? Did they just dedicate days to reenacting historical battles in the coliseum like some kind of ancient history channel, or did everyone just memorize Virgil and other authors?
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2014 07:13
|
|
|
Xenophon also asked the locals if they knew who built it, and no one knew because the Assyrians were so hated they were almost entirely wiped out of the historical record, IIRC.
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2014 14:26
|
|
|
Impressive how they managed to go from China to Turkey/the Middle east without influencing ANYTHING inbetween. Those steppe people must have been too barbaric to even consider teaching them about the glorious Korean culture. It reminds me of some of the things I've heard my oldest relatives claim, like how  invented things like the printing press, silk, tofu, shoes etc. Feels good to be the only people to ever invent anything 
|
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2014 04:32
|
|
|
the JJ posted:Japan had it big for horse archery too. Your original Glorious Nippon warrior caste did a lot of one on one horse back archery duels which I imagine would have been really cool, like ancient era dogfighting. It's pretty obvious when you look at Japanese bows that they were made for horse archery; you hold the bow extremely low compared to other longbows because they were meant to be used on horseback, and for whatever reason I don't think Japan ever really made composite bows so they needed to be that long to have any power behind them. To steer this back on topic, what is Korea doing during the Roman period? I know that China is being ruled by the Han dynasty and that Japan isn't doing much, unless you believe the traditional Imperial history because then Japan is busy establishing a census, a nationwide tax as well as beginning the proud Japanese tradition of invading Korea. I assume that in Korea there are no stories about how Empress Jingu invaded Korea while pregnant during the 3rd century. karl fungus posted:Does North Korea carry on that tradition too? Best Korea carries on all of Glorious Chosŏn traditions, and arrows don't need to be made by filthy imperialist factories like bullets do.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2014 17:32
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Yep, this happened. If you had a lot of prisoners to execute, one way to make it more fun was to make them dress up as some foreign army and have the noble Romans defeat them. Prisoner executions were typically held around lunchtime as an intermission--the games were an all-day affair. Animal hunts and races in the morning, prisoner execution at lunch, gladiators as the main event in the afternoon. Gotta ask, were chariot races also who day affairs? Because in my head chariot racing is pretty much ancient NASCAR, only with less guns and instead of being sponsored by Sprint, they're sponsored by True Roman Bread For True Romans. Please tell me that's pretty much exactly how it went, it would make me so happy.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2014 01:48
|
|
|
And to quote Koramei from a few pages back, they were also really loving good at working with gold. Koramei posted:they had pointy hats
|
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2014 03:32
|
|
|
fuzzy_logic posted:"post your favorite Bronze Age insanity theories" Just go back a few pages and see that map of the world where Korea either directly owned or indirectly influenced loving everything, to me that is the craziest conspiracy I've seen because I thing GF mentioned it's main source was a book of fairy tales. Mustang posted:For whatever reason they tended to be people from the smallest countries populationwise. Small countries seem to have this bizarre form of a superiority complex to make up for their lack of land. For example: Balkan nationalists on the Paradox game forums.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2014 07:20
|
|
|
Athens building a multi-million dollar exhibit for something they don't physically have reminds me of that time that Khosrau I sacked Antioch, took exact measurements and moved all the inhabitants into his newly built replica Weh Antiok Khusrau, or Better than Antioch, Khosrau Built This. Late antiquity  I've got an odd question, but does anyone know of any good books on the Roman Empire that are simple enough for a kid to read? My cousin hates reading and as a result reads way below her grade level since she never reads but she likes it when I tell her stories of Rome during car rides. My thinking is that if she gets a book of a subject she's actually interested vs something her school is forcing her to read, she'll actually read it and then get better at reading and save her a lot of headaches down the road.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2014 21:33
|
|
|
Thanks for the suggestions people, looks like someone is not getting the toys she wanted for Christmas this year 'cause Santa Gato has the gift of ROMA INVICTUS  .Tao Jones posted:How young is young? She's 11 right now, but my guess is that she reads at a 4th grade level at best since I have literally never seen her with anything more complicated than the manual to The Sims. cheerfullydrab posted:The best children's book about Roman history would be a folded piece of paper that says The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon on the outside and when you open it up it just says "gently caress Christianity PS Eastern Empire never happened" You have no idea how tempted I am to just do this.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2014 06:26
|
|
|
I've got a really dumb question for dorky reasons, but how is triarii supposed to be pronounced? Closer to Rome Total War's pronunciation (A long e sound followed by a long i sound) or Rome 2's pronunciation (Two long e sounds)? To add onto the food talk, there was someone in this thread who was recreating Roman food. It was a while back and none of it involved garum but it's interesting to look at.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2014 17:52
|
|
|
WoodrowSkillson posted:Plucking. Literally. Nero's neckbeard almost makes sense now 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2014 19:18
|
|
|
the JJ posted:
China does actually claim that the Yuan dynasty is a legitimate Chinese dynasty, despite being, you know, Mongol invaders. I've heard some things where they claim that Ghengis Khan was also Chinese because what is and what isn't Chinese changes based on what makes China look good.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2014 22:45
|
|
|
Does llama poop cure smallpox? Find out at 11  RE: Schoolchat, I had one really good teacher in high school who spent the entire semester teaching us about the Middle East using news broadcasts he recorded over the years and his own materials, from the causes of the Second Intifada to the Iranian Revolution and why the Iranians hated our guts, interspersed with current events and why the conflict in Iraq wasn't going to end anytime soon and how blowing up people and flaunting our military might wouldn't provide a long term solution to very old problems (this was 2006 so it was just before the surge began in earnest, he had a field day with that announcement). Unfortunately I only had him for a semester but I won't lie when I say he was probably the best teacher I've ever had, he managed to make a roomfull of apathetic teenagers care about current events and wonder why things are happening beyond the immediate causes.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2015 03:30
|
|
|
It blew my mind that the Eastern Roman Empire lasted until 1453, I always assumed in high school they just kind of faded away a few decades after western Rome fell.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 03:39
|
|
|
What is an error of 500 years compared to the glory of the Eternal City
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2016 03:42
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Also remember our source bias. We're getting government documents and the odd thing written by the elite for the elites. Even saying there was one "Latin" or one "greek" is highly problematic. I'm willing to bet a walk from the po valley to the top of the boot would involve a lot of regional dialects. Is it possible to know how big the regional variation could potentially be, and how far off that would be from what was written down? My only experience with this is I'm decently fluent in Mandarin Chinese, but if I were to speak to a local, my actual ability to understand them would vary a lot depending on where they're from since despite the best efforts of the communist party and the KMT there are still a lot of regional dialects, and some of those are practically a different language compared to "standard" Mandarin that only share basic grammar and the writing system, while some are basically just a funny accent.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 3, 2016 23:11
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:I think distillation is attested in China as far back as 5,000 years ago? And yet every bottle of baijiu I've ever had tasted like paint thinner. Edit: Just so this isnt completely devoid of content, most modern Chinese Baijiu is distilled from grains; a small number are distilled from fruits but I have not tried them yet. I'd assume that their earliest attempts at distillation would be similar. Don Gato fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Dec 13, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 07:01
|
|
|
Personally, I would hate to be been a peasant in Southern China around the mid 19th century. Plagues, floods, Europeans and anywhere between 20 million to 100 million people killed directly or indirectly by the Taiping rebellion, let alone the other concurrent rebellions and the other bandits taking advantage of the chaos. Back to Rome, is there a good source on how Roman camps worked back during late antiquity? I know that during the principate their camps were fortresses that they would put up overnight, which that in and of itself blows my mind, but did they keep doing that even as the empire was collapsing?
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2017 23:46
|
|
|
Chinese lesson time! In modern Chinese, the way to refer to Rome is 罗马, which is just a transliteration of Rome, pronounced close to Luo Ma. The word for Empire is 帝国，so the Roman Empire is referred to as the 罗马帝国. In ancient Chinese sources, Rome is referred to as 大秦, pronounced Da Qin, or literally Great Qin (as in the Qin Dynasty). The fact that Han dynasty scholars would equate Rome with the famous Qin dynasty says a lot about how they didn't actually view them as barbarians. This is on top of the very... optimistic picture they painted of the Roman consulate. To the best of my knowledge, during the Han Dynasty Korea's name (高句丽, gao gou li) was a transliteration of the Goguryeo Kingdom*, and Japan was known as 倭(Chinese Wo, Japanese Wa), which depending on the source either means dwarf or was just a transliteration of how the Japanese said I or myself. Given what China's always been like, I'm leaning towards them being intentionally condescending when transliterating the name. The Tang Dynasty called the Roman Empire 拂菻, pronounced Fu Lin, which is based on the Persian pronunciation of what they called the Eastern Roman Empire. Nowadays, the second character is basically only used to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire. I am very sleep deprived and just got back from work so my Chinese and English skills are probably not all there, but basically I'm saying that since the Roman Empire was almost never referred to using a transliteration, like China did with basically everyone else, it shows that it was definitely not just a barbarian country in the West. Not even the Parthian get to avoid the scourge of transliteration, which I bet they loved. It's actually interesting to see in modern times how countries are named: either a Chinese reading of their characters (Japan and both Koreas, lemme tell you this makes figuring out cities and provinces in these countries a pain in the rear end) or a transliteration of their name (basically every other country and place except for  AMERICA and possibly Vietnam, depending on who you ask)The more you know *There are actually a lot of names for Korea, and most of them are transliterations of a Korean word. There is actually a lot of politics involved in which name is "correct", but that is not a topic for an ancient history thread. If this is too incomprehensible, just ask me for clarification. Currently I am browsing history threads instead of sleeping like I should, so this might make less sense in the real world than it does in my head.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2017 09:02
|
|
|
sullat posted:Isn't the Chinese word for America "Mei Guo"? Guo for country, mei for America. Seems like a transliteration to me. America is kind of odd in that the original transliteration was 亞美利加 (ya mei li jia), and then over time they dropped everything but the mei, and outside of Qing sources amd geography magazines I've never seen all 4 characters used. Like, most people would recognize it but it is a really formal thing. So its an abbreviation of a transliteration Edit: P-Mack posted:Let's not forget the category of transliterations that make sense in Cantonese but aren't even close in Mandarin. The bane of my existence when I started to study Chinese. Actually the fun thing is that like all languages, Chinese has gone through a bit of a language drift and if you go far enough back we really don't have a great idea how it's supposed to be pronounced, since it's not like they wrote down a pronunciation guide. And this isn't accounting for dialect, which in China is a bit more than just a stronger accent. Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka and Min are all basically mutually unintelligible, and Wu, which is spoken in and around Shanghai, is really hard for a mandarin speaker to understand if they haven't had a lot of exposure beforehand. They're more like a bunch of related languages that use the same writing system with minor variations than just a regional accent. I imagine that during the late Roman empire there were similar levels of linguistic drift. Don Gato fucked around with this message at 18:05 on May 19, 2017 |
|
#
¿
May 19, 2017 17:44
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:No. Korean does it sometimes but I have never seen spaced Chinese text. They have adopted some punctuation from European languages, so when you see a novel there's formatting but usually everything is just written in a block. Punctuation is optional and used inconsistently. Punctuation is for decadent, immoral capitalist filth  Honestly once I got the hang of it, the lack of spaces in Chinese wasn't a big deal, but the first year was hell. Japanese, on the other hand, is a nightmare for me to read because of the hiragana/katakana not using spaces, and I think it is a cruel joke my family has been playing on me for years. I don't know why saying you should use spaces to separate words when they are spelled out is controversial but my aunt called me stupid for wanting that so 
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2017 05:07
|
|
|
The Vindolanda tablets were discovered in 1973 and are my favorite piece of writing from that era just because of how banal it is. Literally a collection of random trash writings people threw out but provides an invaluable look at how the average literate person lived in that part of the empire. Also it even includes one of the earliest examples of writing from a woman; the same tablet is probably also the oldest birthday invitation ever, which is kind of cute
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2017 10:56
|
|
|
Mantis42 posted:It depends on how much you believe the negative histories written about him. One story has him beating dwarfs and amputees to death while pretending to be a giant. I want to believe
|
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2017 02:50
|
|
|
Dalael posted:Saw this today. Thought some of you may be interested to read about it and who knows, maybe one of you has the required expertise/knowledge to assist. poo poo, the one time studying ancient Chinese would have gotten me more money than studying modern Chinese. Surprised they got so much translated, even common characters are extremely different from the oracle bone script. Kind of interested in how the process works, these are old enough the radicals might not have been standardized yet and in modern Chinese, you typically use two characters when writing words down, and the meaning of a character changed dramatically based on context.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2017 06:41
|
|
|
fantastic in plastic posted:It's too bad the Romans didn't have Bitcoin. I'm just imagining an Emperor forcing slaves to solve math problems in order to get a few fractions of a Bitcoin, and it actually seems like something Caligula would do on a whim.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2017 06:05
|
|
|
Jack2142 posted:That Byzantine History Podcast is quite entertaining, Robin Pearson is pretty engaging and seems to go off alot less on vague and kind of silly metaphors (WWI is a boxing match ad naseum) like the Hardcore History guy. That's about when I realized that Crusader Kings 2 is actually accurate, because before then I assumed that there wasn't anyone in the empire who actually blinded their own children. Of course as far as I can tell, no Roman emperor became immortal or killed Cthulhu with a rowboat, unless you believe the secret history of Justinian.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2017 10:12
|
|
|
Jack2142 posted:The Macedonian Dynasty is legitimately the weirdest thing I have ever read/heard about in Roman History, I have read stuff from latter on the Alexiads and early for Heraclius, but this period is truly bizzare with how they rose to power, how they weren't deposed despite having ~3 regents/military dictators, and also how it ended in a squabble between sisters. Is there a good source about this? All I know about Macedon is Alexander and Phillip II, and when they got conquered by rome.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 21, 2017 05:58
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:
All those tomes and not one word dedicated to building roads or legionnaire camps? What good is philosophy if we can not use it to conquer the Earth itself? This is why we do not see a Pax Graecia
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2017 10:06
|
|
|
Grand Prize Winner posted:
Guaran-loving-tee multiple people have done this already. Part of me hopes that future historians will recognize that people are just assholes and disregard obvious plants like that but part of me hopes that they'll think that ancient Rome was part of the Han Dynasty due to the amount of Chinese graffiti on ancient ruins.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2017 09:50
|
|
|
Squalid posted:Japan used it traditionally, unless anime has lied to me. And anime would never lie! When I was growing up, grandma told me that if I didn't have salt under my bed I would be murdered by ghosts in my sleep, so it was a thing as of her generation.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2017 06:15
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 15:51 |
|
|
HEY GAIL posted:who is the worst doge As this is the Roman thread, the only answer is Enrico Dandolo. Sacking the Queen of Cities herself obviously outweighs any good he did 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2017 23:53
|
|