CoolCab posted:

why do so many of these look like those loving memes lol

Jazerus posted:

ancient peoples by and large were acutely aware of class, it just didn't bother them in the same way. kind of like the british

Crusader posted:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl9290

Speleothing posted:

It's certainly an interesting question as to why 260 days for a calendar, since it's not really connectable to any periodicity of the year.

But it's also an interesting question as to why we have weeks and months that don't line up with the year. Why is it that my birthday falls on Thursday, then Friday, then Saturday, then Tuesday?

Azathoth posted:

Divide the year up into 10 months of 6 weeks with 6 days a week, and then have a 5 day intercalendar period between years. Beep boop perfect system.

Speleothing posted:

You're overthinking it. Having the weeks not line up with the months is good, that way my birthday doesn't always fall on a Wednesday every year.

indigi posted:

is that really how they thought Japan was proportioned or is it stylistic

lollontee posted:

collected about two litres of snails from moms garden on the weekend, and thought about the english as i did the needful

lollontee posted:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianta_arbustorum

these motherfuckers. the local birds seemingly refuse to eat them

Inspector Hound posted:

To better understand stuff like this, I try to figure out what we have today that are analogous to it.

What the hell do we even have today like that. sports team mascots maybe?

e the cool S everyone drew in the third grade, but for monks

lollontee posted:

it is an old mansion that once belonged to the owner of nearby factory. you bet your rear end theres corpses down there

Some Guy TT posted:

https://twitter.com/EH_Stonehenge/status/1531168553990250496

oh so thats why ancient peoples built stonehenge

War and Pieces posted:

hmm this looks too complex for Europeans I think they may have had extraterrestrial help.

fermun posted:

I know it's a throwaway joke, but the difference in how they built boats is super interesting, i think. They both started with the outside of the boat and once that was complete built a frame inside. The Scandinavians made boats in the clinker style, each plank having significant overlap with the plank above it and the plank below it.

Each plank is secured with either a nail hammered through two overlapping planks and rivet or a nail that is hammered through is bent over and the tip hammered back in on the inside

The Greeks made their boats with the planks matching up end-to-end and latched together with mortise and tenon, small holes drilled into both adjacent planks then a wooden dowel hammered into one side and the next plank hammered flush onto the dowels, then held tight through additional holes cut down from near the end of a plank to the edge, then laced together over another dowel.


Scandinavian ships were much sturdier in harsh weather, and waves that came at the side of the boat, the design allowed slightly more shifting and frame flexibility without leakage.

Jazerus posted:

compared to the near-inexhaustible forests of sweden? yes, absolutely

fermun posted:

i have no idea why the Greeks went that way, but they did eventually switch to the Phoenician Joint method. Phoenicians built their ships using Lebanon cypress and then used rectangular oak tenons with holes in them and oak dowels to lock the tenons in place, then chiseled little tunnels about halfway through the planks to use vertical lacing to hold planks that much tighter together. The Greeks switched to this method incredibly suddenly at some point, and the Romans copied this method after conquering Greece. idk if they all used cypress from Lebanon though or if that was just the preferred lumber

i say swears online posted:

oops turns out the design is so dumb you can only afford six and are annihilated

i say swears online posted:

even by ~1600 closing within 30 yards for a grenade would have been deadly. i think with your intent you'd be looking at grapeshot. grenades wouldn't have been as viable in the black powder era either

i say swears online posted:

massed infantry does not shield each other from artillery with their protective limbs!!

Cerebral Bore posted:

they literally started doing this in the back half of the 1600s. basically they took the biggest and strongest dudes and put them in the front to hurl small grenades at the enemy, its where the term grenadier comes from

Weka posted:

Y'all are missing the point and thinking an empire needs to be a monarchy. Consider the phrase "the American empire". Whether or not you think it is an empire, it's a coherent concept. An empire is a collection of polities ruled by a central government, maybe with an element of unwillingness.

I do agree with people's claims that senate continued to exercise significant power under the emperors, which is the general historical rule for monarchies. I'm not overly familiar with the history of the french absolute monarchy but I'd put money on the nobility exercising significant power then and absolute monarchies are exceedingly rare.

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/NatGeo/status/1559968300473503744

War and Pieces posted:

The type of racist who loves Greeks but hates people from SWANA has obviously never read any of the hundreds of Greek stories about their founders and inventions all coming from Egypt, Anatolia Persia and Scythia

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/HaroldsBro/status/1561058613526810624

Grevling posted:

It's pretty astounding to think about how millions today could (mostly) descend from only a few hundred people who lived hundreds, not thousands of years ago.

I saw some population figures for medieval Finland and it was estimated to just 20,000–40,000 people. That's just a small town nowadays.
Granted, that figure is probably on the very low end.

Sherbert Hoover posted:

Was there any real difference between Flavius Aetius and Ricimer aside from their ethnicity? Seems like the whole nefarious barbarian general trope of late antiquity is more of an institutional problem than anything to do with the migration.

Some Guy TT posted:

mawarannahr posted:

Socrates: right or wrong?

Grevling posted:

People could just go by their own definitions of modern and premodern since most people interested will be reading both threads anyway. For example I draw the line at the accession of Fredrick III of Denmark in 1536 in accordance with the current Norwegian history textbook.

indigi posted:

except for a couple very lucky instances (including the study of reformation and pre-reformation anti-papal imagery) my degree was all history ~1715-present with a focus on America (lol) so I come to this thread to escape. I'd be very sad if I had to read poo poo about, fuckin, commodore Perry opening Japan or the constitutional Ottoman Empire

ma i married a tuna posted:

A few centuries earlier the Brits made the CofE for tax reasons, although it was more analogous to the catholic church with one big difference being its subjugation to the state, whereas the Catholic church in the late middle ages is more of a parallel state that exchanges legitimizing secular government for the right to hold lands and collect taxes.

In other words, Catholic moneygrabbing had already caused some stirrings at other former limits of the Roman empire.

War and Pieces posted:

That move where the general just pockets the pay of slain soldiers instead of reporting their death ensuring he gets rewarded for "winning" every battle and that the unit is under manned when the mongols come in force

CoolCab posted:

if it's south america i assume they are referring to obsidian, which when carefully mounted as a sword or blade actually is fairly easy to get sharper than surgical instruments iirc.

500excf type r posted:

I never understood the timeline for New world human populations arriving because if the mastodons and what not started crossing 200kya, the people hunting and eating them for food would have followed them. I think there's plenty of evidence in Siberia going back a long ways of neanderthal and homo sapien habitation contemporary with when those animals began crossing as well.

ikanreed posted:

I think the record was 40,000, and hundreds upon hundreds was not atypical

Some Guy TT posted:

this is what really irritates me about the tone of stuff like that article i quoted is that theres a strong moralist element at play that incels are just mad because women who are extremely smart and cool only choose objectively awesome partners and like have you ever met a guy whos had lots of sex partners theyre literally loving assholes

War and Pieces posted:

it is so funny how extremely online incels and feminists are incapable of accepting that straight women are attracted to attractive men

Agean90 posted:

ea-nasir had a room where he collected all his complaint letters, he definitely was on board with being a poo poo bag and he loved it. Exact opposite of a nice guy

bedpan posted:

In Britain, the mechanisms put in place to raise enough silver to pay danegeld was immediately converted into regular taxation once the danes took their money and departed

Azathoth posted:

Gonna speculate wildly here and say that they might have brought whatever was in the pot to a boil directly over the fire and then put it on the outer part to simmer? Could also just be that they didn't boil stuff and cooked it for longer at a lower temp. Doesn't work for everything of course but isn't that basically what sous vide is?

my dad posted:

Fun fact: One of my formative internet experiences was a friend showing me a... I forgot if it was a Paradox or Total War forums thread where there was a 'nationalist balkans slapfight' between 3 guys, and then following the accounts' history and demonstrating that all 3 of them were actually Finnish dudes pretending to be something else - not even in a coordinated manner since they didn't seem to have earlier interactions, they seemed to have all thought that the other two were the real deal.

Armadillo Tank posted:

Don't post your sissy hypno fetish in the history thread please (unless it's ancient Greece related idk)

AnimeIsTrash posted:

When I was a teenager I used to play a lot of maplestory. Some guy in my guild used to say all kinds of weird stuff I never understood about stuff from the balkans. Don't know what happened but one day he broke down and admitted he was just a teen from Michigan.

Lol